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

  Rebecca: Now that we’re all aware of what we can’t talk about, let’s get down to something that, hopefully, we can. I’d like to ask a question about technology and consciousness. You can easily make the argument that technology has made us better off, but has it made us better as human beings? Has technology contributed to making us smarter, more spiritually aware, or in any way superior to the way we used to be? Carolyn, I’d like to start by asking you this question.

  Carolyn: I’m probably the least technical one in the group. One of my latest theories is that we are what I call ‘macros of the micro’. This means that we externalize what is within our bodies, and we express our inner biology in all our functions—in what we do, and our particular enzyme combinations, you could say. So we’re running around carrying out what the insides of our bodies are doing all the time. We’re like our immune systems externalized, for instance. And the thirty-five wars that we have going on right now could be examples of the battlefields within our systems—like the viruses that come in, and the nurses that run out, and everything that’s going on outside of us is like what’s going on inside of us. So I’m talking about that in relationship to technology because I feel that what is happening on that level is so much larger. In other words, we’re born with certain functions, and the technology is a manifestation of a certain part of our machine, you could say, or our inner organisms, externalized.

  Rebecca: So it’s a microcosm of the macrocosm?

  Carolyn: Yes, so technology is really reflecting what’s happening with us evolutionary-wise. It’s a manifestation of the technological part of us, of our nervous systems, you could say. We are already our own technology. Our nervous systems are already probably the highest technology that there is.

  Rebecca: Do you think that we’ve actually improved as human beings as technology gets more advanced?

  Carolyn: I think that what will happen is, as we advance, technology will become more refined and more subtle, more complete, and more holistic. And when that starts happening, we’re definitely going to learn from it—because we’ll be able to see our own inner technology externalized, and then it becomes another translation of our existence. But, at this point, I think it’s rather fragmented, although some people know how to manage those computers.

  Rebecca: Stephen, what do you think about this? Do you think technology is improving us as a species?

  Stephen: I think it certainly has that potential, but I think this is like the donkey bearing the load of books is not improved thereby. There is initial potential—and I’m including books as part of technology. You could even look at culture in this way, with these other than natural ways—meaning, what we started out with, visions of human behavior—and tool use certainly has the potential to allow people more time to discover their human potential. I think it has that capacity. I’ll see at the end of the day whether it’s any good. LSD is a good example of something that you can view as technology that probably has opened up many people to potentials of understanding who they might become or discover themselves to be.

  Rebecca: Ralph, do you think that technology is making us better as human beings?

  Ralph: Well, understanding this as a ‘yes/no’ question—I’ll just say a flat no.

  Rebecca: Could you expand on that just a bit?

  Ralph: Without troubling to define technology, or even pretend I know what it is, I think we all have an intuition of what we’re talking about. At least there’s a consensus about that. But we have to say that it’s a great disappointment. It’s basically a bad trip. It seems that all the successes of technology are simply antidotes to the problems created by the preceding technology, and we’d be much better off without it. Our worst problem somehow is the population explosion. This maybe seems a little cold- hearted, but basically technology is at fault for the population explosion.

  Rebecca: Have you experienced any benefits from modern technology?

  Ralph: I myself have had my life saved by medical science several times, so I can’t personally think that’s bad. But against this flat no, let me just hedge like Stephen did and say that I do have some hope. I love computers and I think that somehow they may help. It’s said that poison in small doses is medicine, so if we could somehow get these balanced up in a certain scale, it may in the long run turn out to be useful—but I don’t think we really have this long run.

  David: Bob, please tell us what you think.

  Robert: Well, I disagree. I’m almost 180 degrees at the opposite pole. Take the question of the population explosion to begin with. In Bucky Fuller’s Critical Path he has graphs to demonstrate pretty clearly that as technology advances the birth rate declines. Where the birth rate has risen has been in pre-technological societies, the so-called “third world” and the advanced, industrial societies where people had ten to twenty children in the 18th century, they now tend to have one or two children. Fuller doesn’t attempt to offer a theory, he just presents the data. My wife has suggested technology requires that people learn to read, and when women learn to read they start thinking ‘I don’t want twenty children!’ No pre-technological society has ever attempted to teach everybody to learn to read.

  I think technology does need people who can read and so therefore you end up with women’s liberation, and the falling birth rate. And, by-and- large, to the extent that when people get sick, we don’t hit them with whips to drive the devils out—medical technology has made people kinder to each other. To the extent that slavery tends to be abolished in technological societies, technology has made us more humanitarian. So, by and large, I think pre-technological societies are a cross between a madhouse and a slaughterhouse, and in technological societies you begin to see the dawning appearance of decency and rationality.

  David: What is it that we’ve lost by using technology?

  Ralph: We’ve lost the connection. We’ve lost the connection to the sky above and the Earth below.

  David: Nina, what are your feelings about this?

  Nina: Technology is like everything else; it has its good sides and bad sides. But you [speaking to Robert] connected technology in a way with reading, and it reminded me of an experience I once had where I saw what seemed saw our evolution from the cave days to later times. Then, suddenly, behind the book the joker popped up! He said, “Ha ha ha, took a wrong turn didn’t you?” The picture that I saw in the book was the invention of the Gutenberg Bible. Now that’s quite interesting. (Nina laughs, smiles at Robert, and points at him with her index finger.)

  David: How about you Nick? What are your thoughts on this?

  Nick: I tend to agree with Paul Goodman, the sociologist, who said, “Three or four hundred years ago only kings could live like kings, and now everyone can live like kings.” And there are some problems with that—everyone living like kings. But some advantages too. I mean, I’d like to live like a king. I’d like to have forty or fifty servants running around my electrical sockets, doing my bidding. It’s much more reliable having servants, believe me. So, personally speaking, I like it. Whether we’ve lost our connection with the sky or not—or whether that’s just some nostalgic myth, I’m not sure. You know, it’s always better in the old days.

  Robert: I think that’s a fictitious ‘we’. What ‘we’ has lost the connection? Who? I’d like you to give me their names and their addresses.

  Carolyn: I think when you realize that the word “technology” comes from the Greek word “art,” which means ‘to make’, that we’re really talking about an endless subject. I’d rather approach what’s happened, what we don’t like about technology, by saying that that is a reflection of the state of our evolution as a species at this point—and that, hopefully, it’s going to move up the spiral. But I don’t look at it the other way around, that technology is the problem. I say it’s within the creatures that developed it, and I have confidence that it’s going to move on. It will have to. For the survival of our system, we have to move on—so it will happen. Nature will make it happen.<
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  Nick: By the way, talking about connections with the sky, I was really impressed with what I recently saw in National Geographic. It was one of the most impressive pictures that I’ve ever seen, and it was a photo made by the technology of mankind. It was a picture of Saturn from the other side. I think that picture was an expression of the human spirit.

  David: From the other side?

  Nick: From the back side, so that you see the shadow of the sun’s rays across Saturn. No one has ever seen that before, as far as I know. It was awesome.

  David: Nina, how have psychedelics affected your life?

  Nina: Before I answer that, I’d like to add something about technology—I like vacuum cleaners!

  Ah, psychedelics—they’ve certainly changed my life! They made me experience things that I had read about with great longing, great yearning. I had read about the mystical experience, and to me that seemed more desirable than anything else—even though I was told, at that point, not to have any more desires. But the mystical experience is what I longed for, and psychedelics allowed me to catch a glimpse of something that is generally hidden from us. The way that psychedelics changed my life was they made me feel certain that I am more than my body—that we are all more than our bodies, and that we are not here one day and then gone tomorrow. Rather, we are eternal spirits. This experience changed my life.

  Rebecca: What about you, Bob?

  Robert: Psychedelics just accentuated what I was beginning to develop out of mathematics and physics—a sense of the order. I’ll use a metaphor from a friend that Nick and I both know, a weird character, named Jack Sarfatti— the rogue elephant of modern physics. Jack described the universe as a gigantic computer with many smaller computers in it, and one of them is our galaxy. And in that is our solar system, and in that is our biosphere, and in that is my body, and in that is my brain. And inside that is an even smaller computer that’s known as the cells of my brain, and inside them are various molecular computers, and so on, down to the quarks, which are mini, mini, mini, mini computers. And inside the quarks there are probably other mini, mini, mini, mini computers, and all the hardware is located in space-time.

  It’s all here and not there, now and not then. But the software is absolutely nonlocal. All the software is distributed throughout the whole system. And that is what I got out of psychedelics. I got psychedelics and then it took a long time to find the metaphor.

  Carolyn: I was just thinking that since one of the problems that we all know about, that the human species has, is that it’s too involved with fragmentary, conceptual kinds of thinking—which then separates the importance and the essentiality, the integration, of the actual thing. What I’m trying to say is that psychedelics are taken out of their context, and not looked at as mind- it’s in chemical form or if you’re looking at a tree moving in the breeze. If you are studying nature, and the laws of the universe, as Bob was talking about, and many of us have experienced—that’s mind-manifesting and that’s psychedelic. So it takes it out of that context when you say that it’s a chemical happening, and that’s it. It’s everything. The chemical part is one translation of how you could go into these other experiences with the laws that be, the forces of nature, or whatever you want to call it.

  Rebecca: That’s actually something that I was just wondering about the other day. When we say that something is really “psychedelic,” it’s almost like we have this common definition of what that means—but do we? Are there some inherent qualities within the psychedelic experience? Perhaps nonviolence, a holistic vision, or something? Or is it really just something about the nature of a person who would be interested in exploring something like that? Nick, what do you think about that? Is there some inherent quality in the psychedelic experience?

  Nick: I think not. I think that if the substance is “mind-manifesting” then it depends on the mind that is made manifest. To me, the biggest thing about psychedelics was how large the universe became under their influence. Before I ever took a psychedelic, I thought that we were ignorant about consciousness—but after taking psychedelics I knew we were really ignorant about consciousness.

  Carolyn: You could say that it offers a kaleidoscopic overview of the multifaceted realities that we are able to perceive or experience. It gives you an expansive view, rather than a localized perspective.

  Stephen: Yes, my experience is very much like that. At the time when I was nineteen, and a very superficial scientist, I thought that all there was to know could be known by science. It was the stuff that was out there—the laws of physics, and all that stuff. And that was it. The rest was something in between superstition and something else—but it didn’t seem to matter somehow. The experience with psychedelics showed me that there was an infinity inside that called out for explanation, understanding, and manifesting much more than the superficial outside somehow. But the direct, multiple, experiences of reality that you mentioned, Carolyn—that was an important insight.

  When I first took LSD I had the experience of, “Oh, so this is what it’s really like!’ There’s all this extra stuff there where there wouldn’t otherwise be. I’d look down at the floor and it would be covered with meaningful sentences, and information just pouring out of everything that seemed alive. Well, the next day I had the insight that no, that’s not the way it is and this isn’t the way it is either. Both of these experiences are constructions, and what we experience and see right now are mental constructions. It’s not reality; it’s a model of reality, as it were. Some people think that maybe there is no reality. I believe that there is—somehow, something beyond all that must be. I don’t know how we could be here or anywhere if that weren’t so. But it very directly shows you the relativity of your experience, and that there must be more—that there’s something else. And that opens people up, I think, to the path, to exploring, and getting deeper into life.

  Rebecca: David and I just asked this question to Jerry Garcia two days ago in an interview. He said that the main thing that he got from psychedelics was that it helped him to realize the illusory nature of reality. He was so untouched by his fame and fortune. It was obvious to him that every day he was aware that he was creating his reality.

  David: And he stressed the importance of not taking things too seriously.

  Rebecca: Yes, that’s definitely a big one.

  Carolyn: Yes, Rebecca, I think that reality is as you perceive it. You find that out through these experiences. It’s a question of perception.

  Rebecca: I am wondering if we can transport this auditorium into a temporary autonomous zone. Let’s imagine that we can rewrite the laws of America. Robert, what laws would you change if you were able to change them tonight?

  Robert: If you would have asked me that question thirty years ago, I’d say abolish all of them. I was an anarchist at that time, but I had to quit— because the anarchists had too many damn rules for me. In the first place, I would abolish all victimless crime laws. Now some people claim that the victimless crimes have victims, and they get very sophisticated about it—but, to me, a victimless crime is when nobody makes a complaint. If I’m getting hit over the head while my wallet is being stolen, I’m going to complain! I’m going to go to the police, and say some motherfucker took my wallet, and this is what he looked like. People complain when they’ve been hurt physically and even emotionally. I think you’re getting into a tricky area there, about emotional hurt, but there is such a thing, and that’s a crime too, if it’s defined carefully enough and you have a fair court.

  When nobody is complaining that they’re being hurt—that’s what I consider being a victimless crime. And the difference is, not only can’t I see any reason why a victimless crime should be against the law, but the only way you can enforce laws against victimless crimes is setting up a totalitarian state. This is because, to return to my example, if I’m getting hit over the head, I’m going to go complain. But if three people are smoking pot in the next room and listening to New Age music, nobody is going t
o complain about that—because we don’t even know about it. So there’s no victim. The only way you can find out how many people in Santa Cruz are smoking pot and listening to New Age music tonight is by spying on the citizenry.