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

  There must be no back swing into total materialism. This, you see, is the really interesting and exciting thing that's happening. We've got to stop thinking in terms of possibly going back. Whatever happens now, we must go forward. I think that we have now reached a point in human evolution where we could go forward and permanently get up to the next step on which we would stay.

  DJB: Do you know of any techniques to maintain what Maslow has termed "peak experiences" in our day-to-day lives?

  COLIN: No, except as I say, knowing this; you see, the business about techniques, once again, means trying to do it the easy way. Obviously psychedelics would be one technique, and alcohol is another technique. Various yogic meditation exercises are another technique. But what's so important is to have the precise knowledge of what you want to achieve, and then to calculate how to get there. Now you must know what you want to achieve. So I keep emphasizing you have got to know in advance. This is what I am after.

  It seems to me that what we are all aiming at is what Jean Gebser called "integral consciousness," these levels of consciousness in which you find yourself perfectly contented with the present moment. So if everytime we experience that feeling of tiredness, that feeling of, oh god what the hell, and so on, what we must do is to recognize clearly that this is telling us lies. Whereas, of course, what we very often tend to do is not only to accept it, but let ourselves therefore get into a state of discouragement, and then suddenly into negative feedback, where as it were, you're rolling down hill. This is the real danger--to go into depression.

  DJB: You have stressed the importance of people having a strong sense of certainty about things in their lives. But we know from quantum physics that we can never really be certain of anything, because everything that exists, exists as vibrating waves of probable possibilities. What are you certain of?

  COLIN: Now, as I say, that is not true in quantum physics. That is the Copenhagen Interpretation. All that Heisenberg stated is you can not know both the position and the speed of an electron. And Einstein said, well yeah, maybe that's true simply because we are dealing with sub-atomic events. In order to observe a sub-atomic event, you would need some way, as it were, of getting inside the atom or the electron, which is not possible without affecting it. So, in point of fact, it just appears to be a simple consequence of the fact that you are observing something so small.

  On the other hand, Einstein did not believe there is any fundamental uncertainty about this. He went on to say, if you could devise an experiment in which you could somehow bombard something so that two particles shot off in opposite directions, you could in theory, measure the speed of one and the position of the other. And if they're identical particles shooting off in opposite directions, you would in fact have this double measurement. Of course this whole Bell's Theorem business seems to recognize that this is so. As far as I'm concerned, like Einstein, I do not believe in Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation.

  DJB: Do you see the non-local effect postulated by Bell's Theorem as being an explanation for such unexplained psychic phenomena as telepathy?

  COLIN: No, I just don't know. I don't think that the two electrons are telepathic. But on the other hand, I have noted in my book Beyond the Occult cases of identical twins, where you get absolutely absurd similarities in their lives, even though they have been separated from birth. They have married people of the same name, on the same day. They go to the same place for holidays, and all kinds of other preposterous things like this. They fell down and broke their leg on the same day. I do not know how you explain this. It does seem to me that there is something very weird going on.

  DJB: What kind of relationship do you see--if you do-between sexuality and creativity?

  COLIN: Well, I don't know. It seems to me tremendously important because sexuality is one of these examples where we experience ambiguity so often. This sudden feeling of-oh my god, is this really what I want? You know the old Latin tag about after sex one feels sad, because you suddenly feel--oh it's gone. There never was anything there in the first place. It's what I call the Ecclesiastes effect. There is nothing new under the sun--vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Which is the state we get into, when we get something we badly want, as Schopenhauer says. But on the other hand, you don't let it depress you that when you have eaten your dinner, you no longer want to eat another dinner. You just accept it and take it for granted, and it seems to me the same thing applies in this case. That the pessimism that Schopenhauer and Ecclesiastes believed is simply a sort of logical howler.

  It seems to me that obviously sexuality can play an important part in creativity. But not simply because one feels that the essence of sexuality is so immensely important, like D.H. Lawrence. You see, William Barrett, writing about existentialism, used this phrase about return to the sense of power, meaning, and purpose inside us. We all recognize that somehow that's what it's all about--to get back to that sense of power, meaning, and purpose inside us. Now sex does tend to do that for us. It will jar us instantly, for example, into a sense of meaning.

  If a man is feeling rather bored, and then suddenly catches a glimpse of a girl pulling up her stocking, instantly he's wide awake. You can learn from this to see your way, for example, through the kind of pessimism we have been speaking about. But on the other hand, what I have been saying today about this romantic revolution is the fact that I feel that human evolution can be explained, to a very large extent, in terms of woman and man's romanticism about woman. That may well explain the brain explosion. I feel that the romantic revolution, Goethe's eternal woman, draws us upward and on. This is really related to the creative process.

  DJB: You have just begun to touch upon what 1 was going to ask you in the next question. What role do you think having a sense of purpose--or a lack thereof-plays in our lives?

  COLIN: Obviously people are simply going to mark time. I mentioned yesterday, one of the things that struck me a long time ago, is that if you look at writers, the ones who produced something interesting and significant have been, in fact, the writers who have been forced to struggle like mad from difficult beginnings. So there's no question of them suddenly saying, oh what the hell, and letting go. They have a very powerful sense of purpose.

  Proust is an example of a writer who started off from a pleasant middle-class beginning, and although he is a great novelist, A la recherche du temps perdu, is basically a vast pessimistic cathedral that I personally have never succeeded in reading all the way through, particularly the Albertine disparue volume, which really gets me down. What I am saying is that if you've gone through extremely difficult experiences that have forced you, whether you like it or not, to make efforts, then from then on, you never fall back into this facile pessimism.

  DJB: Could you tell us about any projects on which you are currently working?

  COLIN: I have just finished a book on serial killers. I intend to do two more equally big parts to my Spider World--the first four volumes of which are out in America, and which in a sense is complete in itself already. That, as it were, is the first part. So that when it is finished it will be a twelve volume work, about twice as long as The Lord of the Rings. This sort of fantasy novel, which I started a long time ago, strikes me as one of the most interesting things I have ever done. I have a feeling that one day all kids will know my Spider World. They will know me as the author of Spider World, in the way that they know Lewis Carroll as the author of Alice in Wonderland. Apart from that, I want to write a book called New Pathways in Human Evolution, to summarize all the kinds of things I have been saying this weekend, and I'm intending to write a study of the Female Outsider.

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  Psychiatric Alchemy

  with Oscar Janiger

  Oscar Janiger was born on February 8, 1918, in New York City. He received his MA. in cell physiology from Columbia, and his M.D. from the UC Irvine School of Medicine, where he served on the
faculty in their Psychiatry Department for over twenty years. His research interests have been wide, and he describes himself as a "tinkerer. " He established the relationship between hormonal cycling and pre-menstrual depression in women, and he discovered blood proteins that are specific to male homosexuality. His studies of the Huichol Indians in Mexico revealed that centuries of peyote use do not cause any type of chromosomal damage. He is perhaps best known for establishing the relationship between LSD and creativity in a study of hundreds of artists. In addition to his research interests he has also maintained a long-standing private psychiatric practice, which he continues to this day.

  Back in the late fifties and early sixties when LSD was still legal, Oscar incorporated LSD into some of his therapy, and is responsible for "turning on " many well-known literary figures and Hollywood celebrities, including Anais Nin and Cary Grant. More recently Oscar has been involved in studying dolphins in their natural environment, and is the founder of the Albert Hofman Foundation--an organization whose purpose is to establish a library and world information center dedicated to the scientific study of human consciousness. He has also just completed a book entitled A Different Kind of Healing, about how doctors treat themselves. Jeanne St. Peter and I interviewed Oscar in the living room of his home in Santa Monica on January 3, 1990. Surrounding virtually every wall in his house is the largest and most interesting library I’ve ever encountered. Oscar spoke to us about his scientific research, creativity and psychopathology, the problems he sees with psychiatry, and his discovery of the psycho-active effects of isolated DMT. Oscar is an extremely warm, highly energetic man. There is a deep sincerity to his manner. He chuckles a lot, and one feels instantly comfortable around him.

  DJB

  DJB: Could you begin by telling us what it was that originally inspired your interest in psychiatry and the exploration of consciousness?

  OSCAR: I was about seven years old and I was living on a farm in upstate New York. The nearest neighbor was a mile away. I would go for a walk, visit them, play, and then come home in the evening. This was a wild kind of country setting, and I had to get home before dark. Some evenings I would be coming home and the scene around me on the path was filled with menacing figures; pirates and all kinds of cut-throats ready to grab me and do me in. There was a place I called the sunken mine, where people had supposedly drowned and there was a frayed rope hanging from a tree. All of these menacing things gave the evening a very sinister cast, and I’d finally run to get home. Certain evenings I’d make the trip, and everything was just light and airy. Things around me were filled with joy and pleasure. The birds were singing, rabbits, squirrels and other animals were having a wonderful Disneyland time. So one day I was thinking, My God, that’s a magic road! One time it’s this way, another time it’s that way.

  So I puzzled over that. I finally came to the conclusion that, if it wasn’t a magic road, then I was doing something to these surround- ings and if I was doing it then I could change it. So the next time I came back from my neighbour’s place, and everything got murky, strange and sinister, I said, "No! If I’m doing this then bring back the rabbits, bring back the squirrels, bring back the fairies and let’s lighten this thing up." Sure enough, it changed. That was the beginning of my interest in consciousness. It was all crystallized into a marvelous saying from the Talmud - "things are not the way they are, they’re the way we are." From then on, when I’d get into situations, I’d determine what aspect that was within me was being projected outward, and what was a reflection of the world that others can validate along with me.

  That, of course, has been the theme of my work in therapy and as a scientist. The important distinctions regarding projection are among the fundamental things that one has to solve to understand how people behave and the contradictions in their behaviour. Other inspirations are simply those of curiosity. I was enormously curious about how things worked. I was always asking why? why? why? Then I got to medical school and the why extended to the brain and the activities of the nervous system, which seemed to me to be the largest why of all. Aslo, I had personal experiences with people who had become, I guesss you’d say, psychotic, or who acted bizzarrely or strangely. These matters have been of great interest to me.

  DJB: How do you define consciousness?

  OSCAR: Well, I was afraid you were going to ask me that. When you say define something, I’m caught between what I recognize as the accepted definition - the sources that come out of dictionaries, legal definitions and all that stuff that belongs in the pragmatic world - and the definitions that come from my intuition. The Oxford English Dictionary offers at least six or seven varieties of definition for consciousness, and several have entirely different connotations. When you get down to contradictions like being conscious of one’s unconscious, it get’s pretty strange and labyrinthine.

  I would say the conventional definition contains the idea of being aware of one’s self - a sort of self-reflection. Or you can describe it operationally as being the end product of a complex nervous system that eventually produces a state that allows us to be in some way congnizant of ourselves and the enviroment. It allows us to extrap- olate into future events, into past events, and allow us to take a position in one’s imagination so we can examine realities that are not responsive to the ordinary, daily context of the world around us. Many of these things require qualifications, but let me then stay with the word as something that gives us a feeling that distinguishes us as individuals, that gives us a sense of self, and sense of self-reflection and awareness.

  JEANNE: Many years ago, while you were studying at Columbia, you had some problems with your high school teaching job. What happened?

  OSCAR: Well, I was practice teaching at the same high school that I had attended, Erasmus Hall in New York, the second oldest high school in the country. I was teaching general science with the lady who taught me, Miss Thompson. I took over her class, and she would sit in the back of the room. So, I was teaching astronomy to these sophomore or junior students. I borrowed a ladder from the custodian and I bought a bunch of gold stars. I spent the entire night pasting them on the ceiling in the form of the constellations. When I wound up it was getting light outside, and I thought I had done this incredible job. So the next day when we had the class, I said with a grand gesture, "We’re studying the stars - look up." All the kids looked up, everyone was fired up and we had a good time learning about all the stars. That evening, as I was going home, I discovered a note stuck in my letter-box from Mr McNeal, the principal of the school. It said, "See me."

  So the next day I went to see him. He said, "The custodian told me that you pasted things on the ceiling." He shook his head and said, "I’m afraid you’re going to have to remove those, that’s defacing school property," and he just waved me aside. I spent all the next night scraping the stars off the ceiling, thinking about the errors of my ways. A week later, I decided that we would study eclipses. I said to the kids in the first row, "You bring in the lemons." To the second row I said, "You bring oranges." The third row I told, "You bring in grapefruits." To the fourth row I said, "You bring in knitting needles." So they were all very eager and they came back with these required things. I said, okay, the grapefruits are the suns, the oranges are the planets, the lemons are the moons, and the knitting needles go through the planets to make them tilted and spin around accordingly. So we had a ball, but a big commotion ensued.

  During this general upheaval, the door opens and McNeal puts his head in and pulls back again. So sure enough, in my little box, there’s a note that says, "See me immediately". So I see him, and this time he’s very unhappy. I said, "Dr McNeal let me explain about the sun and the moon and the oranges and the lemons," but I couldn’t explain it. He said, "Did you know that the teachers on the floor were complaining about you? You were making a lot of noise." I said, "Yeah, well, you know it’s very difficult to get the spatial relationships right." (laughter) He said, "I don’t understand. You come from Teacher’s College, t
hat’s the finest college in the country for teachers, it’s the cradle of American education. It was Dewey’s shrine. Don’t they teach you about discipline in the classroom?" I said, "Gee, yeah, I guess so." He says, "Well, your classroom was in chaos!" I said, "Gee, I....but let me tell you about the oranges and the lemons." He said, "What are you talking about?!" The guy was ready to explode, he just couldn’t handle it.

  He said, "I don’t under- stand this, Mr Janiger, but I’m sure that we can work it out. Now please understand we’re here to keep discipline in our classrooms." I said, "Okay." So I continued teaching and one day we had to study fermentation. That was my undoing. I brought into class that day, a loaf of bread which was covered with penicillin mold, a flask of vinegar, a few pieces of blue cheese and a little flask of wine. I put them out on the laboratory table and I said, "These are the useful and harmful results of fermentation. Then after class I said, "If any of you want to come up, you can sample a little bit, you can see how the cheese tastes, and so on. So one kid came up and nothing would please him, but he had to have a slug of the wine. Then I get the note, "See me immediately!"