DJB: I’m curious about how your experiences with psychedelics affected your writing and your life in general.
Allen: Well, I wrote a couple of good poems on them - with mescaline, acid, nitrous oxide, marijuana and amphetamines. So those are direct influences on my writing. But aside from 60 or so pages, the spiritual effect of drugs was not extensive in creation of texts.
DJB: What kind of relationship do you see between madness and creativity?
Allen: I don’t really know, it’s an old stereotype. When we talk about certain states of madness, what are we talking about exactly? Somebody on a roll, who’s very active and talking to himself, dominating his space and people working around him, like Picasso? Or someone in a manic phase of manic depression, which is often very creative? Or how about full-blown schizophrenia? In a lot of those states, you’re cut off from the surrounding environment so it would be impossible to produce anything concrete.
DJB: Have you ever experienced the fear of going mad?
Allen: A couple of times, on psychedelics. I remember in 1948 I had a hell of an experience; an ominous, threatening universe. I’m sure that madness, paranoia or megalomania came in then.
RMN: I read something you once said in reference to language which was, ‘man’s power of abstraction dooms us to lose touch with detail.’ What did you mean by this? Isn’t that what poets do?
Allen: Well, when did I say it and under what circumstances? How do I know what I said? (laughter) That’s a very common, almost trite, stereotypical thought. I’m sure it’s, in general true, but I probably never said it in those words. I probably said some general thing like that, but ‘man’s power of abstraction’ - bullshit!
RMN: I take it you don’t agree with the statement.
Allen: Well, I’m struck just now by the vulgarity of the expression, the phrasing.
RMN: (laughter) I have a problem with the first word, actually.
Allen: Well, so do I. "Woman’s power of abstraction?..." Actually, I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s a temptation to think that. I think it’s civilization’s power of abstraction, or the development of abstracted power that could lead to a loss of contact with detail. Hypertechnology so to speak.
RMN: And language, in that context, plays a part in the process?
Allen: No. That’s the semiotic, deconstructionist, Burroughsian view. That’s not my view at all. It’s the opposite, in fact. I think it’s a fascist statement, frankly. It attacks language and it attacks people talking. It’s an attack on communication, actually. I would say that language joins heaven and earth and joins mind with body. It synchronizes them through speech, poetry, language and words which connect abstraction with the ground. It is also obvious that continuous generalization and abstraction lead to mixed judgment and manipulation of phenomena in an inappropriate way; but to make a general statement as blanket as that discourages the attempt at sincere communication, or description of what you are experiencing.
By using that kind of generalization like ‘man’s power of abstraction’, the Marxists had to convince writers that they are not worthy of writing because they don’t really represent the proletariat - only the abstract interests of the upper-middle-class or the bourgeoisie. The Catholics have convinced people to burn books and burn people because they or their work doesn’t represent the true word of God. And deconstructionist, semiotic poets have used it as a way of avoiding interacting with phenomena, of interacting on a heart-felt level with their own experience of living. That generalization has always been an excuse to hard-nosed students of their own perceptions to be cool, you know, to play it cool. That is to say, that words don’t count, that this is abstract, therefore I don’t want to make any comment. It’s been a way of diminishing expression. In Blake’s description of the Urizen quality - "boundedness" arises. Your-Reason, the figurative reason of the symbolic description, creates a hyper-abstraction, a hyper-rationalization.
RMN: What do you think was so special about Blake as a poet?
Allen: He had a good mind. From Blake’s point of view, hyper-rationality, hyper-abstraction leads to the nuclear bomb, from the point of view of reason, trying to assert power over feeling, imagination and the body. If any one of them tries to take over, then it disrupts the whole balance of nature.
DJB: What do you think happens to human consciousness after biological death?
Allen: I don’t know. The Tibetans say that some kind of aetheric electricity or some kind of impulse moves on. I think it’s a good idea to cultivate an openness to the possibilities that might occur. When you’re drowning, once you’ve stopped breathing, there’s still about eight minutes of consciousness before brain death, and there have been people who have been resuscitated, so something is there. In that eight minutes, what should you prepare for? My meditation practices are on the breath, so then what happens after I stop breathing? (laughter) I asked my guru this question and he started laughing. He said that was the purpose of the advanced meditation practices, the visualization, the mantra, the mandala, all that stuff. He said, "If I were you, I wouldn’t pretend this or that, openness or emptiness, I would go along with whatever made the process more comfortable."
As for what happens after death, I’ve always been a little skeptical about anything persevering. I think the process of dying takes over, whatever you think, and goes on automatic. What you think may be harmonious with what happens, but what happens is going to happen in any case. Sometimes I think that you enter open space and become open space. In the last moment you don’t want to be pissed off, even if there’s no re-birth. So it’s a good idea to get into the frequency of some kind of meditative practice, in case there’s no after-life. In case there is, it’s also a good idea. It prepare you for whatever situation. "Do not go gently into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light." You know that poem? It seems the worst advice possible.
RMN: Do you see death as an adventure, or are you afraid?
Allen: I’m a little scared, yeah, but I’m not afraid to admit it.
DJB: What do you think it is about death that you’re afraid of?
Allen: How about entering a realm where there’s twenty-nine devils sticking red hot pokers up my behind and into my feet. (laughter) Maybe I’ll turn into a big prick with this little tiny asshole.
DJB: Do you think that the fear of death could be the fear of non-existence?
Allen: Well, no, that wouldn’t be so bad. It would be the fear of existing again, in another life. Popping up again, like pop goes the weasel, and being stuck with whatever hard-on you started out with. You could have an obsession and think, oh, I should have cut that out long ago! I should have stopped lusting after pretty boys long ago! (laughter) You’re born into a universe with nothing but pretty boys and you get stuck there for another 100 years until you realize, uh oh, you’re going to die. Something like that. I’m not quite up to the adventure yet (laughter) but on the other hand.......
DJB: Do you have a personal understanding of God?
Allen: Yes. There is no God.
DJB: There’s no question about it?
Allen: No. It’s a big mistake. It means "6,000 years of sleep" as Blake said. It means a Judeo-Christian-Islamic control system. It means war and centralization.
DJB: What about the concept of God as a state of consciousness?
Allen: Too easy. Why do you need a concept of God when you’ve already got a concept of a state of consciousness? Why do you have to add God onto it? It’s sneaking in a centralized state of consciousness, it’s sneaking in a metaphysical CIA. In an open universe, nothing is closed in, no judgment of beliefs, just infinite possibilities of roles to role-play. If God made everything the way it is, then it’s already done and it’s pre-ordained all the way, so there’s no movement. God means stasis, as Burroughs points out. When you consider the whole notion of God, that’s what it comes to, unless you redefine God so that it doesn’t mean God anymore.
DJB: Well, what if you d
efine God as being the notion of a greater organism of which we’re all tiny cells or parts?
Allen: You still have this one greater organism that started everything and knows where it’s all going.
DJB: Not necessarily. It could be evolving itself, just as we are.
Allen: Then it ain’t God, the omniscient, omnipotent etc...
RMN: If you don’t believe in God, do you believe in love?
Allen: Perhaps it’s a uselessly out-worn four letter word that substitutes for awareness to cover all cruel facts. But you have to first agree with people how you want to use the word. You know, a word doesn’t mean anything by itself, there’s no built-in intrinsic meaning, it’s just how you want to use it. It’s an abstraction like, "What is the truth?" It’s a semantic blind-alley. It doesn’t have a meaning except that which you assign to it, and if people don’t agree on the meaning then you’re going to have endless feuds over nothing, which is what happens all the time. A student and I spent time with Burroughs in 1944.
We got into an argument about what is art? If we carved a walking-stick and put in on the moon, where nobody saw it, is that art? Or does art have to be social? So we took the argument to Burroughs and he said, "Art is a three-letter word. If you guys will agree on what you mean and how you want to use it, then you can use it. But to say that it has an absolute inherent meaning one way or an absolute inherent meaning the other way, that’s a semantic problem and ‘tis too too starved an argument for my sword." You ask a large question using a large word which can mean anything, and then expect somebody to give you a sensible answer. Now, if you had said, what do you think of love? or how do you see using the word "love" for the experience of wonder at the sight of a sunset? Then I might be able to find an instance where it was used well, or I might not and I’d have to invent one. If I couldn’t invent an instance and I couldn’t remember any instance where the word was used will, I would say it’s probably not the right word.
RMN: Well, I’m glad I disappointed you and got such an answer! (laughter) Talking about the nature of wordplay, I read in a lecture you gave that you believe it’s possible to teach inspiration. How do you do this?
Allen: Inspiration means breathing in. The process of breathing is or course, central to meditation practice, but it’s also central to poetry. You have thoughts which are mental and impalpable, like heaven and then you have body, which is ground or earth. So when you speak, the breath comes out as a physiological body thing but it’s also a vehicle for the impalpable thoughts of the mind. So, you could say that speech joins heaven and earth, or synchronizes mind and body. Exhalation or expiration - as in "he expired" - is the vehicle on which poetry comes out whereas inhalation or inspiration, takes in. So, you can say that certain kinds of poetry like Shelley’s famous romantic poem, "Ode to the West Wind" has a certain elevated unobstructed breath about it; unobstructed intelligence, unobstructed production of images, unobstructed self-confidence, unobstructed majestic proclamation.
RMN: So you’re saying that if people can learn to first breathe properly, they can then stimulate their imaginations?
Allen: To be a good example of what they call ‘poetic inspiration’, is to be alive with this physiological (exhales breath) attitude. A sense of a proclamation echoing to the outside space with no difference between the outside space and the inside space. So you teach inspiration by teaching people both meditation and spontaneous improvisation, a sense of self-confidence, the notion of unobstructed breath and also how to allow their minds to speak out loud without thinking in advance. That’s the way poetry is taught at the Naropa Institute. You can also cultivate or point out the notion of the space in the room so that somebody can talk loud enough so that the furthest person in the room can hear.
You need a panoramic awareness of the space around you, rather than looking inward and mumbling. So, it’s maybe hyperbole to say you could teach inspiration. You can teach the physiological posture of it, but that’s only half the battle. One of the teachings is about proclamation - to mouth the syllables in an interesting way. If you listen to Dylan records or Kerouac’s recordings, you’ll hear an intelligence in the actual pronunciation which is the difference between a mumbling poet and a poet who actually enjoys the language in his own mouth. If you listen to the recordings of Ezra Pound you’ll hear that sense of elegant imperial mouth.
RMN: William Blake actually sang a lot of his poetry.
Allen: Yeah, he actually sang "Songs of Innocence."
RMN: You put that to music didn’t you?
Allen: Yeah. There was a record in 1969 called, "Songs of Innocence and Of Experience." It’s out of print now, but it’s going to be re-issued next year.
DJB: Cool. What else have you been doing?
Allen: Well I collaborated with Philip Glass on an opera, Hydrogen Jukebox, putting together poetry and music. I’m working on a record with Hal Wilner and with Fransesco Clemente on a series of books. I’m teaching at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado and at Brooklyn College, and I’m writing a lot of poems. I’ve just about got another book ready and am also coalescing my journals from the ‘50’s. Another project called History of the Beat Generation drawn from my lectures over the years. I’m also trying to raise money for the Naropa Institute, the Buddhist school formed by Chogyam Trungpa in 1974. Within it is the school of poetry. We asked Trungpa if we could call it the Jack Kerouac School of Poetry, but it sounded a little boring. So then June Waldman said, well, he’s dead, so he’s disembodied. So now it’s The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. And then will people misunderstand? Yes, well, that’s permissible. (laughter) They’ll just have to ask what it means.
DJB: Do you still feel guilty about not doing enough?
Allen: Always. It’s a workaholic problem. (laughter)
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Waking the Dreamer
with Stephen LaBerge
Stephen LaBerge is the first scientist to empirically prove the existence of the phenomena of lucid dreaming. His work has developed this technique into a powerful tool for studying mind-body relationships in the dream state and he has demonstrated the considerable potential for lucid dreaming in the fields of psychotherapy and psychosomatic medicine. His book on the subject, Lucid Dreaming, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming and his more academic Conscious Mind, Sleeping Brain have received enormous popular interest
Born in 1947, he obtained a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Arizona. At the age of 19 he began graduate studies in chemistry at Stanford University, but in 1968 took a leave of absence to pursue his research interest in psychopharmacology. In 1977 he returned to Stanford to begin studies on dreaming, consciousness and sleep, and received his Ph.D. in Psychophysiology from Stanford's Graduate Special Program in 1980.
He has taught courses on sleep and dreaming, psychobiology and altered states of consciousness at Stanford University, the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, and San Francisco State University. Currently, Stephen is a Research Associate in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, and Director of Research at the Lucidity Institute; a center he founded to further explore the potential of lucid dreaming. Here he is developing user-friendly technologies such as the DreamLight® to help people to learn the art of lucid dreaming and disseminating information on the conscious dream-state through a quarterly newsletter.
Stephen 's energy and enthusiasm for his work is highly contagious and he has a way of dissecting information so as to always speak to the heart of the matter. His large eyes and animated features reveal an impish, child-like spirit and at the same time, an extremely sharp and analytical mind.
This interview began at the Lucidity Institute on July 8, 1992, and was completed on the evening of the same day, in the impressive grounds of Stanford University. In the evening after-sunset glow, Stephen addressed the questions of why we sleep, where we really
are when we think we 're out of our body, and the spiritual implications of taking responsibility for our dreams.
Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others… Page 40