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

Laura: If being smarter means having more information, well then certainly we have more information. But the amount of distraction that we have is unavoidable, and I don’t think that so much distraction makes for more intelligence or more happiness. Naturally, the whole thing is always a choice. We always have the last word. It’s always what we choose for distraction or for everything. So the answer is always, either you can be a victim or you can be a beneficiary of these wonderful inventions. Of course, I must say that maybe my remarks are a bit tinted by envy because I don’t know how to use a computer. So you have to keep my remarks under that consideration.

  Rebecca: Does anyone want to venture an answer to this question? In general, obviously, we have to talk about generalizations. It’s impossible to talk about every single little detail about everything, and to define everything.

  Oz: When we can invent a machine that will make us more compassionate, make us more virtuous, make us more truthful—then I think that technology will get my vote. Until then, it seems to me that the jury is still out on it, as far as I’m concerned.

  Timothy: How about the telephone? It’s terrible that people can stay at home and talk to people without leaving the house, without any real human communication. We should stop it! Particularly teenagers, who are going to want to use the telephone, and then they’re never going to want to go out and fuck a boy or a girl. I mean, really, come on. When Gutenberg invented the printing press, and books came out, people said, oh no, kids are just going to want to stay home and read books. But we now know that reading books stimulates the mind, and the faster that your mind goes the more you learn. The brain can handle twenty-five million signals a second!

  Nina: Well, thanks to this man (she looks at Timothy), I was once in an altered state. You know, what can I say? In that altered state I had a vision where some enormous book of history was being opened up for me, page by page. I saw some very interesting scenes, and I always saw the same Adam and Eve—but differently. Maybe there was a different color scheme, or historical setting, but it was always the same Adam and Eve going through history. Then came the page that showed the Gutenberg Bible, and suddenly, behind that big, old book, up popped a clown. He was laughing and saying, Ha, ha, ha. Took a wrong turn there, didn’t you!

  David: John, I’m curious what you think about this. Do you think that high technology has improved our lives?

  John: Let’s see, what has technology done? Speed up communication, that’s for sure. It’s allowed individuals to access all other individuals on the planet, through the use of satellites. You can watch CNN anywhere in the world and find out what the news is, as long as it’s censored by CNN. It seems to me like a lot of the communication that’s taking place today is trivial. As a wave of peace is spreading over the planet, and wars are getting smaller and smaller, there’s a lot of bullshit that’s filling in the space. We don’t see any significant discussions on television about the mind or the brain, or intimate social relations.

  Sex is cut out from practically everything but white H.B.O. shows. Seems to me like everyone should have an isolation tank and get free of all this! This is my addition to technology, the isolation tank. In addition to this, ParkDavis is giving us a technical advance by marketing ketamine, and this is creating a whole new subculture known as “ketamaniacs”—of which there are some on this panel. I won’t name them. (John looks at David) Anyway, if you get in the isolation tank for an hour a day you’re going to obliterate everything that CNN has taught you.

  Rebecca: Sounds good to me. One of the things that’s coming up a lot here here is communication and information. But what kind of information are we getting, where is it coming from, and who is controlling it? Does anyone want to respond to the points that the members of the panel have brought up?

  John: In the isolation tank you control it.

  Rebecca: Yes, well that’s another thing we were talking about earlier. It’s another aspect of how we’re trying to control nature. But I’d like to discuss something that Timothy brought up—global language. Timothy, is this something that we really want? A global language, where everybody speaks the same language, and everybody dresses the same. It sounds very homogenous and kind of dull. Isn’t one of the wonderful things about this Earth that there are so many different cultures interacting, that there are so many different communications merging, and so many different experiences going around? Isn’t a massive communication system likely to speed up an Americanization of the world—seeing as American corporations control the communication technologies? What do you think about that?

  Timothy: Not much.

  Rebecca: Does anybody else have something to say about that?

  Timothy: Just wait and watch what’s going to happen in the next ten years. As a matter of fact, it’s just the opposite of what you’re saying. You feel that if we developed a new language it would have to be a very homogenous language. Why do you say that?

  Rebecca: Well, you said a “global language.”

  Timothy: “Global language” doesn’t mean that. It means taking the richness out of every language and dialect, and allowing this to merge. That’s how DNA works, by the way.

  Rebecca: But it’s still everybody talking the same language.

  Timothy: Yeah.

  Oz: Let me tell you about that. A little English-speaking boy was reading a book, and it was in French. So a little girl asked him, “How can you read that book? It’s in French.” The little boy answered, “But the pictures are in English.”

  Timothy: Yeah, all right!

  David: So you’re saying that maybe the visual images are actually a universal or global language.

  Oz: The pictures are in English.

  Timothy: The thing about a global language, I’d like to point out, is that it’s going to be online. Everyone in the world under the age of thirty is going to be on it, and the language is changing all the time. It’s going to be iconographic. Instead of words, you’re going to use clips—five second clips from movies, or two minute clips from last night’s news, with George Bush’s head and Mickey Mouse’s body. Far from being homogenous, it empowers individuals to inter-react on screens, to give us the vocabulary stored on digital discs. We can literally flash millions and billions of ideas to each other, and change and change, and change and add. William Gibson talked about the global atmosphere. You can tap into it and still be as personal and intimate as you want with those that you want to communicate with that way.

  Rebecca: So it’s still going to be changing and evolving as it goes along? Nina, would you have anything to say about this?

  Nina: Well, also thanks to the influence this man has exerted on my life (she gestures to Timothy), I’ve made certain discoveries that prompted me to follow a certain way of life that would eliminate noise and chatter as much as I could from my mental presence. It’s called “the chattering monkey” by the Hindus, who know what they’re talking about. It seems to me that all this commotion, and all this information, is just adding to the chatter. I feel that the atmosphere is now full of chatter, maybe five percent of which has some meaning. I don’t know, maybe I’m being too charitable.

  Timothy: Tell that to a ten year old kid! That he or she should just quiet down and not think. Kids want action. They want a thousand options and possibilities.

  Laura: But action is different.

  Carolyn: To go on from what you both have said, I think that we’re all made very differently. There are people that tune in on an electric level, to digital things or whatever. Other people are like me, and I’m rather like a dinosaur. I’ll put a fax machine in a room all by itself so I don’t have to hear it. I’d rather hear music. I’m just tuned in technically in a different way. My medium is pens, paper, paints, and washes. I personally think that there’s a necessity for each one of us and the way that we relate to technology. Technology is such a broad word; it takes in everything we do. Whether it’s electronic, or it’s paint, or it’s driving a car, everything is technology. So, obviousl
y, technology is taking us to a greater understanding of ourselves, even though along the way someone may realize that they’re getting distracted

  too much, and they can’t control it. Nobody has to be a victim of anything that’s going on. As somebody here said, there’s a choice involved, and here’s to the difference. Viva la difference! With all of us, as we’re not the same.

  Rebecca: Yes, the choice factor is something that’s very important. I think that a lot of people feel like they don’t have a choice over the way that technology is moving; it’s kind of like this mysterious thing that’s happening beyond and above them. So maybe it’s important to have forums for people to discuss the way technology is affecting their lives. Nina made a point about background noise, and I’m sure that everyone on this panel has experienced the contrast between being where there is background noise from a technology, and being somewhere out in the wilderness—and realizing that all that chatter that’s going on is not really just our own thoughts, but is like an electric network of static around us.

  Oz: Roof chatter, we call it.

  Laura: Yes, part of the problem is that we have to suffer from it, and it’s not really completely our choice. We can of course go in the desert and not have any noise, but there is still something in the atmosphere, unless you go very far. We are electrical beings, therefore we respond to electricity. So it’s not totally free. It’s not totally our choice whether we want to have a little or much—and, of course, most people take so much of this. I think it’s quite disastrous for the young people. This amount of distraction. I don’t know how they can remain with some free brain, because most of it is captured by this fascinating thing. It’s very easy to get taken in because sometimes it’s so beautiful, so novel, and so exciting.

  Rebecca: Do you think there might be a genetic difference too? Maybe the next generation is just programmed to respond differently to the technology.

  Laura: I don’t know, but it’s certainly a possibility. Maybe it’s part of evolution. We’ve become capable of taking in so much more information and using it, but we are also used by information. And that is what upsets me. We don’t only use information; information also uses us. If we utilize the best psychological teaching techniques in advertising, and we complain about the school system, then why don’t we just take the best advertisers and put them in charge of teaching our children? Then everything will be solved! They are so capable of what they are doing.

  David: Timothy, do you think that different generations are actually born with their brains wired so that they are more receptive to new technologies? Perhaps that might explain why there’s a difference in opinion here tonight. Different generations may actually come to this planet wired differently.

  Timothy: It’s miraculous that you said that word “generation,” because everything depends upon the generation that you belong to. In the last seventy years of this country there has been about four or five generations determined by the media. I belong to the ‘radio generation.’ For the first time ever, in our own homes, we were able to hear events at a distance in real time. I heard Hitler talking and my mother crying. I heard Roosevelt. My generation had rhythm and blues, and that did a lot for us. Then the electronic generation came along, the television generation and consumer generation. All this about ‘turn on, tune in’—where do you think that came from? It came from kids that had grown up in the television generation. My mother used to call the refrigerator the icebox. My grandmother used to call the automobile the horse-less carriage. I don’t think anyone over the age of thirty can really understand the idea that you can change what’s on a screen.

  You’re thinking about a passive world that gives us 500 things to punch, and we just sit here like that. Go down to the video arcade gallery and you’ll see ten, twelve year old kids that are moving images around, destroying ninety five comets with three billion pixels a second. But they’ll get older, and they’ll discover boys and girls after a while. When I tell you that if you’re over the age of thirty, you just simply do not understand what’s going on with the ability to change what’s on the screen—which every ten year old kid now understands—don’t be upset. Just realize that in the future, old people have got to learn from the young. It’s the native language.

  Everything that I know about computers I’ve learned from my children or my grandchildren. It’s ironic. It’s reversing the tradition of history, where the old folks like us think that they know it all. It’s very easy. Just find any twelve year old kid and watch the way they can move things on the screen. They don’t passively sit back.

  Rebecca: But Timothy, really? Kids in video arcades blowing things up. Is this really saying that that’s a good use of technology? I don’t understand why kids playing video arcade games, and perhaps improving their hand-eye coordination, is really a sign that technology is helping them in any way.

  Timothy: The video arcade games of the first generation were like the soldiers—kill, kill, kill, kill, kill. I have an interesting profession. I go around to colleges. The first thing I do when I get to a college is I go to the Student Union to see what’s hot in the entertainment field. I was very thrilled in the last month or two of going around to colleges. In every Student Union

  now—check me out UCLA—there’s an enormous room filled with video games. They also have ice hockey and pinball as well, and they even have pool. The thing that interested me was that about half of the games are still shoot-em-up space invaders, but they also had games of intelligence, trivial pursuits. They had games of geography. They had games of simulating building a city. In other words, as the kids get older the Nintendo kid that was chasing Donkey Kongs around is going to be designing new societies. And, by the way, this is how all the teaching will take place. You can’t teach Einstein from a book. The teaching will be using this ability to move particles around on screens.

  Rebecca: So you’re saying that it’s going to get more creative?

  Timothy: Evolution hasn’t brought us all this way to listen to NBC and CNN. Evolution has more in store for us than that.

  Oz: We took a stab at this problem of who’s going to evolve, and here’s what we did. At the university we made a ‘sensory saturation chamber’, with all due respect to my friend John. It was a half-dome, and it was a carpeted. It had a flat area that you lay down in and from the ground, the way you were lying, there were port holes of light that were shot up onto the ceiling, and we played a kind of fragmented motion picture. So, by these port holes, you were surrounded. You were in the middle of this motion picture. On the inside of this dome, it was studded with little speakers, and next to you there were controls, where you could make the sound or the light as loud as you wanted. There were also controls for pulsating the light. Everybody went in to take a hand at this and some of them—let’s say the more macho people—began to turn the dials up.

  Well, I can tell you it was catastrophic. After a few moments, some of these kids came out and their eyeballs were rolling. We found a very interesting thing. At full-bore nobody could stay in that thing for more than about eight minutes, or ten minutes at the most. That is, we had it calculated that way. But, I was thinking as you were talking, that maybe the survivors

  of that could be the people that you’re talking about. So we have an evolving machine. We can just separate them, and the ones who can go all the way up on this deal are going to be the next generation. I couldn’t last much more than a second in that thing; about a minute was my capacity. For an antidote, I had to go into John’s isolation chamber. I’ll tell you something, the university made us close the project down. How short sighted they were!

  Rebecca: Oscar, I’d like to address the next question to you. A dominant idea in our society is that the west, with its technology, represents some zenith of evolution, and that native societies are at a less evolved state. Do you think that native societies have any advantage over us, as a result of they’re having less technology?

  Oscar: A lot of words in ther
e I can’t handle. I don’t know what the word “advantage” means in that case. Advantage in what sense?

  Rebecca: Well, in your sense, in your view of what the term would mean. Do you see that native societies have anything that we are perhaps lacking and could do with?

  Oscar: There is a kind of conventional wisdom that feels that natives, under these conditions, are more mellow, that they are more in contact with God and divinity, and they seem to have a great sense of equanimity and peace about them. My experience with them is they have just as many problems, neuroses, and difficulties about them as we have. So, given the notion that they’re not as technologically improved as we, I don’t think that made much difference as far as their personal comfort and stability was concerned. I don’t see any particular advantage as to the native’s way of life that would be enviable to me in that respect.