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

  DJB: But you can take an active role in it.

  Stephen: That’s right, the question is: what do you do with this state? Do you direct it in a way where you seek for what you’re looking for inside yourself? So it can be used in the same way.

  DJB: Have you noticed any correlation between people who use psychedelics and a propensity towards lucid dreaming? Every time I’ve done a psychedelic, within a couple of days I’ll amost always have a lucid dream.

  Stephen: Yes, that is probably due to biochemical changes. Taking psychedelics will produce changes of neurochemical levels which will intensify REM sleep. Basically what you’ve done is you’ve altered the regulation of the system and so you’ve pushed it away from the equilibrium and it’s going to come back and perhaps oscillate for a while until it gets back into it’s new equilibrium. So it’s not surprising that in the next couple of nights you’re going to have variations in REM sleep.

  RMN: What is known about the chemicals given off by the brain in REM sleep?

  Stephen: Relatively low levels of norepinephrene and serotonin, high levels of acetylcholine.

  DJB: How in the world did they figure that out?

  Stephen: Cat brains.

  DJB: How about out-of-the-body-experiences. Do you think they’re related to lucid dreaming?

  Stephen: It’s a complicated topic and I devoted an entire chapter to it in Lucid Dreaming because it’s something you have to deal with carefully. I think they’re not what people naively think they are; which is literally that you’re leaving your physical body in some ghost body in the physical world. Let’s take what happens in an out-of-the-body experience. Typically a person is lying in bed, awake - at least they think they are. Next thing they know, they feel themselves separating from that body as if they have a second body that floats out of the first one, and then they may look back down and see what they take to be their physical body. So let’s just examine that idea for consistency. Now, I’m floating up here, and then I look around at the bedroom and I notice that there’s a window where there shouldn’t be or there’s no window where’s there should be.

  So I say, "Oh, I guess that wall there is not exactly a physical wall, maybe it’s an "astral" wall, and of course then that’s an astral floor, an astral bed - and what’s that down on the astral bed that a moment ago I thought was my physical body?" It’s an astral-body or a dream-body. Therefore, what happened to the assumption that I’m moving in physical space? It’s suddenly evaporated. The reason people find it so compelling is that it feels like you leave your body, and since it feels like it, that’s what you believe is happening. In our experiments in the laboratory, out of about 100 lucid dreams that were recorded, about 10% of those had out-of-body phenomenologies.

  So we analyzed the physiology associated with the out-of-the-body experience type lucid dream compared to the other lucid dreams to see if there’s some characteristic that predicts that a person is likely to have a dream in which they think they’re out of their body. And what we found was that there was much more likeliness of a brief awakening before the experience. Now, I think the way the OBE takes place - in the typical form, which is in association with sleep - is, you’re lying in bed, you wake up, you’re awake. It’s from REM sleep, so you’re now in the context of going back into REM sleep and what happens is that you fall asleep without knowing it. Suddenly the sensory input is cut off and you’ve got now the memory of the body instead of the sensory perception of the body.

  A moment ago your body had weight but now that gravitational force has been cut off; there’s not sensory input for it, so it suddenly disappears and, I propose, that the same thing happens as when you pick up an empty carton of milk. Suddenly your body flies upwards and you feel as if as there’s a force going up that compensates for your mental model of your body-weight. When you perceive that the weight is less than expected by your mental model you explain that as an upward force.

  DJB: What do you think about near-death experiences, when people feel they’re leaving their body?

  Stephen: Another factor that can produce an OBE is the capacity tp dissociate. There are some people who can much more readily than others detach themselves from their current experience. Once you detach it’s possible then to reconstruct a view of reality that involves you outside the situation somehow. For most people, for that to happen, they either need the context of REM sleep, or they’re falling off a mountain, or they’ve just been declared dead, or something. That’s quite an emotional shock and it’s enough to produce dissociation which then allows you to reorganize the experience.

  Now you hear stories about people in near-death experiences seeing things that they shouldn’t be able to see and that sort of thing. Well, I don’t deny them that, there may be some paranormal information transfer occasionally in these experiences, but I think we underestimate how much knowledge we have about our surroundings through other senses. I don’t buy the account that we leave in some second body. That second body, does it have a brain in there? What are the fingers for? If you pulled an eye out, would it look like an eye or is it just a mental model of an eye? (nervous laughter) It seems clear that that’s what it is. It’s one of those ideas that people are very attached to for some reason and I think it’s a misplaced sense of the value of individual survival. They think "this proves that I survive death because I was there!" Yet I don’t think that’s what we want to survive death. Why would we want these funky monkey forms to persist forever?

  DJB: What do you think happens after biological death and has your experience with lucid dreaming influenced your thoughts in this area and about the nature of God?

  Stephen: Let’s suppose I’m having a lucid dream. The first thing I think is, "Oh this is a dream, here I am." Now the "I" here is who I think Stephen is. Now what’s happening in fact is that Stephen is asleep in bed somewhere, not in this world at all, and he’s having a dream that he’s in this room talking to you. With a little bit of lucidity I’d say, "this is a dream, and you’re all in my dream." A little more lucidity and I’d know you’re a dream figure and this is a dream-table, and this must be a dream-shirt and a dream-watch and what’s this? It’s got to be a dream-hand and well, so what’s this? It’s a dream-Stephen! So a moment ago I thought this is who I am and now I know that it’s just a mental model of who I am.

  So reasoning along those lines, I thought, I’d like to have a sense of what my deepest identity is, what’s my highest potential, which level is the realest in a sense? With that in mind at the beginning of a lucid dream, I was driving in my sports car down through the green, Spring countryside. I see an attractive hitchhiker at the side of the road, thought of picking her up but said, "No, I’ve already had that dream, I want this to be a representation of my highest potential. So the moment I had that thought and decided to forgo the immediate pleasure, the car started to fly into the air and the car disappeared and my body, also. There were symbols of traditional religions in the clouds, the Star of David and the cross and the steeple and near-eastern symbols.

  As I passed through that realm, higher beyond the clouds, I entered into a vast emptiness of space that was infinite and it was filled with potential and love. And the feeling I had was-- this is home! This is where I’m from and I’d forgotten that it was here. I was overwhelmed with joy about the fact that this source of being was immediately present, that it was always here, and I had not been seeing it because of what was in my way. So I started singing for joy with a voice that spanned three or four octaves and resonated with the cosmos with words like, "I Praise Thee, O Lord!" There wasn’t any I, there was no thee, no Lord, no duality somehow but sort of, ‘Praise Be’ was the feeling of it.

  My belief is that the experience I had of this void, that’s what you get if you take away the brain. When I thought about the meaning of that, I recognized that the deepest identity I had there was the source of being, the all and nothing that was here right now, that was what I was too, in addition to being Stephen. So t
he analogy that I use for understanding this is that we have these separate snowflake identities. Every snowflake is different in the same sense that each one of us is, in fact, distinct. So here is death, and here’s the snowflake and we’re falling into the infinite ocean. So what do we fear? We fear that we’re going to lose our identity, we’ll be melted, dissolved in that ocean and we’ll be gone; but what may happen is that the snowflake hits the ocean and feels an infinite expansion of identity and realizes, what I was in essence, was water!

  So we’re each one of these little frozen droplets and we feel only our individuality, but not our substance, but our essential substance is common to everything in that sense, so now God is the ocean. So we’re each a little droplet of that ocean, identifying only with the form of the droplet and not with the majesty and the unity.

  RMN: Do you believe that the soul then reincarnates into another form?

  Stephen: There may be intermediate states where "to press the metaphor" the seed crystal is recycled and makes another snowflake in a similar form or something like that, but that’s not my concern. My concern is with the ocean, that’s what I care about. So whether or not Stephen, or some deeper identity of Stephen survives, well that’d be nice if that were so, but how can one not be satisfied with being the ocean?

  DJB: If I was able to, through nanotechnology, completely replicate every atom in your brain, identical down to every little trace-- would that be you?

  Stephen: That would be "Stephen", if that’s what you mean. I don’t see a reason why we couldn’t transfer the information in our brain to some other structure. It may be, for example, if you had something like you just described with nanotechnology, or a digital computer that was sufficiently complex, you’d still need some kind of substrate to sustain the different informational states. For all we know the vacuum of space itself may have an infinite amount of structure in it that could easily sustain a mind.

  DJB: We interviewed Nick Herbert, the quantum physicist, and he described how there are mathematical models that leave a lot of latitude for things like parallel universes and other dimensions. Have you ever entertained this as a model for lucid dreaming, that there actually really are other dimensions or places that are not just mental simulations or constructs?

  Stephen: I think of those as skew, not parallel, universes. (extra-dimensional laughter) Seriously, I’ve never liked that model, it seems tremendously inelegant to require every time you make a quantum decision the thing you didn’t decide is still there in some way. It seems like a reductio ad absurdum of quantum theory. People think quantum theory is about the world but it’s not, it’s about descriptions of the world. What’s the world really like if you don’t make a measurement? Well, making the measurement is making the world - the world is interaction. In other words, as a thought experiment, let’s think about an object. Here it is right here on the table. I just pointed as if the space encloses it. Well, let’s say, not only is it invisible as you can see but it doesn’t interact in any way with any other thing in the world - is it a part of the world? No. What is the universe? The universe is a collection of objects that interact in some form with the other objects of the world.

  DJB: Can you tell us about the Lucidity Institute and any current projects you’re working on?

  Stephen: The purpose of the Lucidity Institute is to sponsor and support research on human consciousness and what we’re focusing on now is primarily lucid dreaming because that is one capacity of the mind that we feel is useful. If we knew more about the physiology of lucid dreaming we will be able to make it happen more readily. We could find other mental techniques or physiological interventions, perhaps some drug effects that could make the state much more accessible and stable. The idea is to help people make more viable decisions about what they’re going to do in life, to get more experience out of the world, but basically to understand that life can have many more possibilities than we ordinarily think of. In the lucid dream you look around and realize that the whole world that you’re seeing all something that your mind is creating. It tells you that you have much more power than you’d ever believed before - or dreamt - for changing the world, starting with yourself.

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  The Roundtable Discussions

  at UC Santa Cruz and UCLA

  After the first edition of Mavericks of the Mind was published, Rebecca McClen Novick and I hosted a series of public panel debates, where we brought together a number of people from the book, and encouraged them to debate and discuss philosophical questions on stage, in front of an audience.

  We discussed such topics as how technology is affecting our species, what happens to consciousness after death, psychedelic research, and the concept of God. These roundtables discussions were a great success, and lots of fascinating ideas were exchanged. To follow are excerpts from two of these events. (DVDs of these two events are available from Sound Photosynthesis in Mill Valley, California.) I think that these historical conversations are absolutely priceless, and being onstage with all my heroes was truly a thrill.

  Mavericks of the Mind Live! occurred at the University of California, Santa Cruz on May 20, 1993. Rebecca and I hosted the event, with Robert Anton Wilson, Stephen LaBerge, Nick Herbert, Nina Graboi, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, and Ralph Abraham. Techno & Psyche took placed in the Grand Horizon Ballroom at the University of California, Los Angeles on February 24, 1994. Rebecca and I hosted the event, with Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Laura Huxley, Oscar Janiger, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, and Nina Graboi.

  –David Jay Brown

  Mavericks of the Mind Live!

  David: Why don’t you start us off Stephen? What is your concept of God?

  Stephen: Starting with the easy questions first? All right, well what is God? (Silence) Now let me explain my answer. I think that God is better explained by silence than by words. The words that limit my concept of God derive from the idea that God is what there would be if we took away all of this, and all of the words. What we would be left with is what was always here and what is here. So, in another way, you could say that God is truth or reality. You can also think about God in mathematical or physics metaphors, but those are all words.

  Rebecca: So wait—what do you mean by “truth” or” reality”?

  Stephen: Well, this is real truth. Real reality. Not the stuff we’re talking about. Not this.

  Rebecca: What about you, Bob? How do you go about defining even the idea of God?

  Robert: I remember back in 1959, Gerald Heard had an article in Scientific American in which he said, “I try to avoid making sentences with the word “God” in them.” I thought that that was a very good discipline, and I’ve been practicing it ever since. You’d be very hard pressed to find a sentence I have written with the word “God” in it. Wittgenstein demonstrated that there are some expressions that you just can’t use in meaningful sentences. Professor Watkin of Trinity College pointed out that the phrase ‘too much Mozart’ can’t be used in a meaningful sentence. And I don’t think you can use the word “God” in a meaningful sentence.

  Rebecca: Nick, in your explorations of quantum physics have you come across an answer to this terrible question?

  Nick: It seems to me that there are two directions one could search for God. One way is inside—the inner God—and the other way is outward, toward this kind of transcendent God that is bigger than you. Lately, I’ve been looking at the inner God rather than the outer one, and I think that the most profound question one can ask oneself is ‘what are you going to do in the next moment?’ I think that the kind of God that is involved in that question has to do with passion. What is it that drives us from one moment to the next? What are we looking for? Somehow God is a part of that passion inside each of us, and the deeper that we go into our own passions and desires, the closer we touch this kind of internal God. And about the external God, I don’t know. There are books now on ‘the ph
ysics of God’, though I’ve never read any of them so I don’t know what they say.

  David: Carolyn, how about you? What does the concept of God mean to you?

  Carolyn: Well, I’ve listened to all this, and I’ve come up with a few thoughts. One of which is that the inner experience that each one has with God will be different with everyone. It’s a very individual experience. So, for each person, what they feel as God—or the infinite, the indescribable, the ineffable—will be different. And to try and say something funny about God, which is really impossible, I’d say that when you spell God backwards it’s “dog,” which is kind of like saying ‘forget it.’ I think that this is because God doesn’t like to be fenced in, and the minute that you try to get to God with an explanatory principle, or any kind of concept—concept, meaning to grasp—you miss the point. God is not meant to be grasped any more than a butterfly is.