Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others…

by Brown, David Jay

  Remember, every atom of our consciousness is being involuntarily mirrored throughout space. That's why each individual is so important; if they are living from their highest potential, it is automatically transmitted, radiated. Today we must replace the "arms race" with a "race to hold hands." Atomically speaking, we are anyway, even though our defenses block the natural harmony of really holding hands.

  DJB: What do you foresee happening to the evolution of human consciousness in the future? Where is the human race going in terms of how it's evolving in say ten years or fifty years?

  CAROLYN: I saw a small waterfall of sand sifting down from a huge sand dune at the beach the other day. I thought about the fact that it took all of time for that one movement to happen just the way it did.

  If we can move out of our "survival mode" and put our resources, imagination and money into medical science and technology, we could hold immortal life sooner than we might think. Nature already does it, and through nanotechnology we can.

  DJB: What effect do you think immortal physical bodies would have on the evolution of consciousness?

  CAROLYN: We could evolve beyond our constant preparation for death. This could liberate people from many of the exploitative emotions. In the prose book I'm writing, that's what I write about--the dimension that doesn't have to have death for life to exist.

  DJB: So your latest book is about going beyond physical limitations?

  CAROLYN: Yes, it's architecture for a new philosophy, a new way of thinking: a spiritual technology which, hopefully, will manifest in our scientific advancements.

  DJB: Spirituality. What does the word spiritual mean to you?

  CAROLYN: It means to go beyond the limited, physical conception of oneself, one's personality, to unify with the greater order. This requires shedding the many superficial needs, desires and myriad other ego-enslavements. It also means having a reverence for life, a passion that takes you beyond the limits of self-imposed "willpower" into a space that is effortless and yet animated by the greater forces that be, that are within each of us.

  It takes giving oneself the time and space to recreate one's life and self. It requires much restructuring to eventually regain the essential simplicity. When you are living in your unconditioned being, in the rhythms of your Tao, life becomes a surfing of reality, of the waves and cycles of the infinite seasons. It is action through non-action. The circles of our cycles bring us back to a beginning that makes everything possible, where again imagination may ride the crest of our highest potential.

  Carolyn Mary Klefeld’s Artist statement

  Art, like music, offers a language beyond words. To be innovative, it must be created from an inner wilderness, free of stale and redundant concepts.

  If art arises from an inner necessity to express rather than from a preconceived idea of beauty or style, then art can reflect, in symbolic imagery, our primal nature and oneness with all things.

  Through the instrument of my being, I let intuitive experiment choose color and form, an invention comparable to musical improvisation.

  For me art is a spontaneous journey on the crest of the Tao’s wave, an exploration born of passion, spawned by the Mystery. Initially, I am the maiden falling in love – then later, the ruthless editor-analyst.

  Ultimately art is an innocent interactive mirror of my innermost process, whisking me out of time into the Timeless. My life’s passion is to live and create art from this unconditioned well of being and to inspire such a journey in others.

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  Outside the Outsider

  with Colin Wilson

  Colin Wilson was born in Leicester, England, in 1931, the son of a boot and shoe worker. He left school at the age of sixteen, spent some time working in taxes and the Royal Air Force, then became a tramp and did various laboring jobs for several years while writing his first novel Ritual in the Dark and then his first book The Outsider. Living on almost no money, he would sleep outside at night in London, and spend his days writing in the British Museum. After his first book became a best-seller in 1956, he took to writing full-time and moved to Cornwall, where he lives to this day. In the mid-1960s, he was commissioned to write a book about the "paranormal, " became fascinated by the subject, and has written a number of hooks on paranormal phenomena. He has also written several works on criminology, psychology, and numerous novels with science fiction and fantasy themes.

  Colin is incredibly prolific, and has produced over sixty books to date. Some of his well-known titles include The Occult, Mysteries, The Mind Parasites, and The Philosopher's Stone. His favorite recreation is listening to music and at his home he has a large collection of opera recordings. Except for occasional lecturing trips abroad he lives near Mevagissey in Cornwall with his wife and two sons. I interviewed Colin, while Rebecca was abroad, outside the cafeteria at the Esalen Institute on the afternoon of September 16, 1990. There is a laser-beam-like intensity to Colin, and he has an extremely focused and well-disciplined mind. Colin spoke eloquently about his interest in the paranormal, the relationship between sex and creativity, certainty and ambiguity, life after death, and the new emerging species that he believes is evolving out of humanity.

  DJB

  DJB: Colin, what was it that originally inspired your interest in the occult and the paranormal?

  COLIN: I was simply asked to write a book about the paranormal by a publisher in 1968. At first I was not very interested, although I'd always been mildly interested in the occult. I would buy books in American airports about ghosts, weird coincidences, or whatever. Never the less I took it on as rather a lighthearted thing, and I would not have been the least upset to discover that the whole thing was just a tissue of nonsense and wishful thinking.

  However, when I had agreed to write the book for the sake of money, and I began to go into the subject, I became increasingly fascinated as I saw that there's as much evidence for the paranormal as there is for atoms and electrons. Moreover, what excited me so much was that my work had all been about this recognition that we possess powers that we do not normally know about or use. This appeared to be the perfect example of all kinds of powers we don't know about or use. So that it was a direct extension of my work in The Outsider, as it were. I stumbled upon it at just the right moment.

  DJB: Aha, or it stumbled upon you. Why do you think that magic is the science of the future?

  COLIN: In a way this supplements the last question that you asked. Because what I was saying is that we possess all kinds of unknown powers, and the science of the future will be an exploration of these powers. But at the present science does not accept the unknown powers, and it's still putting up a terrific struggle against the paranormal. You know this Society for the Investigation of the Claims of the Paranormal, and so on. It seems to me that this is old-fashioned science, of the most narrow and materialistic kind. You have just got to be tolerant, and open up to this other possibility of unknown powers, which at the moment, we do not fully recognize.

  DJB: I believe that you have said that if your first book made millions, you may have stopped writing at that point, implying that a lack of money motivated you to write more. Now I have always thought just the opposite--that a lack of financial freedom actually inhibits many people from creative expression. Are you saying then that it was money that motivated you to write your first book, and if not, what was it?

  COLIN: Oh no, of course not. The first book, in any case, The Outsider, was written simply out of this compulsion that I have been speaking about all weekend. It was this basic fascination obviously that motivated me, not money. Neither have I said that if I had become a millionaire I would have stopped writing. I most certainly would not have. What I have said is, that if my first novel Ritual in the Dark had been turned into a movie, as it almost was in 1960, all of my subsequent novels would probably have been filmed and I would have been very comfortably off. But certainly I
would not have been driven in the way that I have been driven, and I can not help feeling when I look back on this that the way that I have been driven is not necessarily a bad thing.

  Once, Fritz Peters turned to Gurdjieff in a state of depression, and Gurdjieff was forced to make a terrific effort to get him out of this depression. Then at this moment crowds of people arrived, and Gurdjieff, from looking exhausted, suddenly looked absolutely, magnificently full of vitality. He said to Peters, you have forced me to make a terrific effort, but this has been very good for both of us. Thank you for reminding me. Now, very often the very efforts we do not want to make prove to be the very best that we could make. So, in a sense, being too successful would simply remove some of that inner pressure. You would slip into what I have been calling ambiguity.

  DJB: What similarities and differences do you see between pathological or criminal minds and the creative process?

  COLIN: Shaw said that we judge the criminal by his lowest moments, and the creator by his highest moments. So obviously, in a sense, they are absolute opposites, and that is what's so interesting about them. And yet you can also see very often that the criminal maybe, particularly nowadays, a quite interesting intellectual creative sort of person. And that when he explodes, as let's say Bundy did, into crime, he's choosing a path just as much as let's say a painter, like Picasso, or more Van Gogh, chooses to create this kind of thing.

  The explosive sort of force behind Van Gogh's painting is obviously a force based upon a sort of frustration, and it's the same frustration that you would find in a criminal. The only difference is, of course, that Van Gogh deliberately makes the effort to transmute that to a much higher level. The criminal merely says, oh the hell with it, lets go, and invariably destroys himself in doing so, destroys something essential in himself.

  There's a play by Pushkin called Mozart and Salieri in which he explores this myth that Salieri murdered Mozart. One of the main points of the play is discussion in which they state that a man who is a criminal cannot also be a great creator. When Salieri has poisoned Mozart, it suddenly strikes him that he's poisoned Mozart because he considers him his chief musical rival. But, in a sense, by poisoning him, he's proved that he himself is no Mozart. He's a second-rater.

  DJB: You said this weekend that it is mathematically provable that "head consciousness is the answer." Do you think that the intellectual mind is superior to the emotional circuit in regard to solving the problems of human existence, as you seemed to imply here this weekend at Esalen? Don't you agree that one should integrate many ways of "Knowing," as you say, besides the intellectual mode of interpretation? For instance--sensory, emotional, phermonal, intuitive, perhaps telepathic, etc.

  COLIN: What I have said basically is that up to now, the twentieth century culture has tended to emphasize these other modes you mention. So that, for example, someone like D. H. Lawrence said, what we have to do is so back to the solar plexus, to sexuality, and mistrust the intellect. Henry Miller would have said the same kind of thing. Walt Whitman also was saying in a way, trust the body. Now, all of this is perfectly correct in its way, but if Walt Whitman had said trust only the body, or D.H. Lawrence had said trust only the solar plexus, then they would have been totally wrong.

  Now what I'm trying to say is that the body, the solar plexus, and all of the rest of them, play their part in this synthesis. You know the old Latin tag, men same encalporsano, a sane mind in a sane body. But, at the same time we have to recognize that the ultimate arbiter is the mind, and that when you see something to be true, as it were, you can see that it is true intellectually, Now it is this intellectual recognition of truth that must be the foundation of all these other things. No good having this D.H. Lawrence attitude that you should not trust the intellect because it will always tell you lies. This is the reason that Lawrence's novels, particularly ones like Women in Love and so on, always end with a strange feeling of bitterness, defeat, and futility.

  DJB: What do you think happens to human consciousness after physical death?

  COLIN: As a result of writing the book Afterlife, and studying this, I came almost reluctantly to the conclusion that it does survive, that there is survival after death. It would not worry me terribly if there weren't, because it seems to me logical that when I fall asleep, I disappear. I could not really complain if that happened to me after I died. It would seem natural to say that the solution to the problem of human existence lies elsewhere than in the notion that we have got to continue to exist. And yet the evidence is that we do continue to exist. And I don't think that there's any possible doubt about it.

  DJB: Why do you think there's such a fear of death then?

  COLIN: For the obvious reason that most people are not aware of this. I'm not even sure that it would be terribly good for them to be aware of it. As it is, people who have near-death experiences say that it's so exquisite that they are often resentful about being pulled back. It would be too bad if death became, as it were, the outlet for everybody in the way that drugs or alcohol can be.

  DJB: That sounds like a good design for the universe. Have you ever had any experiences communicating with beings that you felt were extraterrestrial in origin, or not from this world?

  COLIN: No.

  DJB: You have said that evidence for free will stems not from recognizing that we robotically fulfill desires like hunger and sleep, but from the recognition that we can think what we want. But how do you know that you can think what you want--especially in light of the knowledge that by changing neurochemistry we change consciousness?

  COLIN: I said that William James' proof that he was not just a machine, that he possesses free will, was this recognition that you can think one thing rather than another. And there's no doubt whatever that we can do that. You may feel that everything else is mechanically determined, that what I do next can be explained in completely mechanical terms. I am going to dinner because I am hungry, and so on and so forth. But there is that one thing that makes it absolutely certain that we do possess free will, and that is the fact that you can think one thing rather than another. You can change in mid-stride, so to speak, and think something else.

  DJB: Why do you view the psychedelic experience as a step backwards in evolution--to our instincts, as you say--when so many people seem to claim just the opposite?

  COLIN: If Tim Leary's claim was that you could, use the psychedelic experience to find your way into new realms of subjectivity, and then use it to find your way back there without the psychedelic, I would agree, it would be extremely valuable. What tends to happen is that when people get into these realms they find that there are no words to express what they are seeing, and so in a sense the experience is useless. They can just say, well it was wonderful. And what's more, of course, this kind of experience of--it was wonderful, but I can't express it--tends, I think, to cause a kind of pessimism, a feeling that the only way I can get the experience is by taking the psychedelic again. Which is the reason, you see, that, as I say, after taking it once myself, I would not dream of taking it again.

  DJB: But if people were able to integrate it into their lives in a meaningful way?

  COLIN: Yup. If they were able to integrate it, I would entirely agree.

  DJB: How do you see human consciousness evolving in the future, and what do you think the next stage in human evolution will be?

  COLIN: That is something that I've been trying to explain all weekend. At the moment we have passed through centuries in which the pendulum has swung backwards and forwards between total materialism and a curious desire of human beings to explore their own potentialities, a weird feeling that you know there's far more than the material world. Succeeding movements from the platonic movement in ancient Greece, right down to Romanticism in the nineteenth century, and this present consciousness explosion that you're now getting in America--all of these are back swings.

  You see, when I wrote The Outsider most people were determinedly sort of Left-Wing. Any sort of intellectual yo
u would talk to was almost certainly a Marxist or a Left-Winger. And they thought the only sensible question to ask was, how can we get a fairer, more balanced political system. In the sixties all that disappeared, and you suddenly began to get the consciousness explosion, which is still continuing. Now the swing is towards the recognition that the consciousness explosion is the answer. We have got to keep moving in that direction.