Now, of course, the citizenry, finding out that they’re being spied upon by the police, will get more sly, which means that the police have to hire more manpower, or womanpower, etc. And pretty soon you have wiretaps, mail covers, ways of looking through mail without opening it—which the post office now has—and eventually you have the whole apparatus of Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany just because we’re trying to control private behavior. I would abolish all those laws immediately! The police could then concentrate their efforts on protecting us from the people who want to hit us over the head and steal our property.
Rebecca: Nina, how you do feel about this? What laws would you abolish?
Nina: I think that I’ve given myself away enough for everyone to understand what I would abolish. I would abolish the stupid ‘war against drugs’. It is very dangerous—money-wise, and for its morality—because the young kids who keep hearing, “grass is evil” will no longer believe authorities. When they smoke it, and they find out it’s not really evil, then they’re not going to believe the authorities anymore about anything, once they get wise to that kind of a lie. I’m not in favor in making drugs available all over the place. I do think a certain amount of discretion has to be used, and as someone who loves psychedelics, I really don’t like the hard drugs. That’s my prejudice. But I don’t think that they should be illegal. Maybe they should be available, because we’ve certainly seen what happens with prohibition when you
make a law against something. Down with those laws!
Rebecca: I’m interested in what the panel thinks about laws against assisted suicide. Nick, you’re smiling.
Nick: Well, should there be laws against suicide? Is suicide a victimless crime?
Rebecca: Assisted suicide.
Nick: Actually, what I’m smiling about is this. I was talking to my woodcutter the other day, and he said that he thought he was going to write a letter to the IRS and tell them he didn’t think he needed their services anymore.
Rebecca: So we should have laws that work for us, and, like Bob was saying, laws that we feel are actually helping us. If we want to cry wolf, we can have someone help us—otherwise we should not be intruded upon. Is that what you’re saying?
Nick: About the IRS? I like being left alone. I think that a man’s home is his castle and English common law is a good one. People should be left alone as much as possible.
Robert: I think that the laws against prostitution are just as ridiculous as the laws against drugs. As the great philosopher George Carlin has pointed out, “Fucking is legal. Selling is legal. So why should selling fucking be illegal?” I would like to hear a logical answer to that. You go to Amsterdam, where prostitution is legal, and you find that the street cars run and the streets are clean. They’re among the richest people in the world, and civilization hasn’t collapsed. We don’t need any of these damn fool laws saying you can’t sell this to that person. People should be allowed in the free market to buy and sell as they choose.
Carolyn: Lately, I’ve been thinking, with some of the things that have been going on, that the police and the authorities themselves are actually creating at least half of the crime—and maybe all of the crime—by their attitudes.
David: Chaos has gotten a really bad rap over the years. I’m curious, Ralph, what is chaos and what purpose does it serve in our lives?
Ralph: Well, everybody knows already too much about chaos, and its purpose in our lives. I think that maybe we have something to learn about dis-chaos.
David: How would you define chaos?
Ralph: I’d rather define dis-chaos—because everybody knows how to define chaos. It’s just an ordinary English word for a common experience. You don’t find so much chaos in science and, in fact, our society, for six or eight thousand years, has developed an obsession with order—that I call dis-chaos. This is a large part of our problem, and how we work around it is an important subject of discussion nowadays, I would say. So, just as examples of what’s dis-chaos, I would look at monogamy, monotheism, marriage, the nuclear family—things like that. These are symptoms of dis-chaos on a massive scale; a psychological, social, political, spiritual dis- chaos, an obsession with order, which is actually a fatal error.
Rebecca: So why do you feel these things interfere with our lives? What’s wrong with this dis-chaos?
Ralph: Nature is very multiple. In order to understand it at all, be in sympathy or harmony with nature, it’s necessary to be very multiple. So, let’s look at monotheism, for example. It doesn’t assert the existence of something; it asserts the nonexistence of everything else. This leads to an inability to understand either personal relationships, one’s own experience, one’s own life, our history, our future, and so on. We have to find little work around trips for this bug in the software. Eight thousand years is a really long period for deepening a bad habit.
Rebecca: I’m interested in what happens when we repress chaos to the unconscious,
and I want to ask Carolyn this question.
Carolyn: The first thought that comes to me is of nature, and of trying to dam in the natural energies, like a dam with water. Of course, you could build up the energies. You could build them up until they are ready to explode, and then you could compress them into some kind of a distillation. There are certain ways of doing that that could actually be constructive, like cultivating a hermetic viewpoint, where you would be containing the so-called chaos or the energies that be.
Rebecca: So that it doesn’t get out of control?
Carolyn: Yes, it’s like a distillation, where you could refine them into some order by experiencing them. There are obviously different things that could happen that would be both constructive and explosive.
Rebecca: What are some of the negative aspects of repressing them?
Carolyn: Well, something simple—like building up a lot of anger and then all of a sudden you explode.
Rebecca: What do you think about this Nick? What do you think happens when society represses chaos?
Carolyn: Revolution. Finally, you break out.
Robert: Can I explain the Discordian doctrine? The Discordian teachings state that all of our problems started with the original snub, when the gods refused to invite Eris to a party on Mount Olympus. So, Eris—the goddess of chaos, discord, confusion, bureaucracy, and international relations—made a golden apple and wrote on it “For the most beautiful one.”Whether this was metallic gold or Acapulco gold, the legend sayeth not—but she threw it into the party. All the goddesses started fighting over which one had the right to it, which one was the prettiest one. Hermes claimed it too—you know about Hermes. So they appointed a mortal to decide. That was Paris. They all tried to bribe him, and Aphrodite offered him Helen, the wife of Menelaus. So he said Aphrodite was the prettiest one, and he got Helen. But then Menelaus got pissed off, and the Greeks made war on Troy for ten years. So we’ve reached the fifth stage of chaos, international relations. Because of the original snub, we’ve been repeating this five stage cycle over and over again. Chaos, discord, confusion, bureaucracy, and international relations—and this will go one three thousand, one hundred and twenty five times—that’s five to the fifth power.
Right now all the chaos in the world is contained and emanates out of the Pentagon, which is the symbol of discord. And you can see that the Pentagon is the high temple of chaos because it’s trying to police the whole world, which is the most chaotic thing you can do. There was a story about a general who kept moving his desk. He got it out of his office and moved it into the hall, and then he kept moving it down the hall. Finally, he moved into the men’s room. They appointed a committee to investigate, who appointed a psychiatric committee, who appointed a psychiatrist to go in and ask him, “Why did you move your desk into the men’s room?” He said, “It’s the only place in the whole building where people seem to know what they came for, and they do it, and they get the hell out.” So that’s why the Pentagon is the sacred shrine for the joint chiefs of staff of t
he Discordian saints, or the holy order of chaos. The knights of the five-sided castle. I can explain more about the Discordian religion, or anyone who wants to know more can get my book Illuminatus! off the table.
Rebecca: Okay, here’s another easy question. What does the panel think might happen to consciousness after biological death. Nick, what’s going to happen to you?
Nick: My consciousness or consciousness in general? I think that we’re ripe for a consciousness revolution. That is, the sides finally have something smart to say about consciousness. I personally think that quantum mechanics is the key, that somehow nature has shown us how weird just dead matter can be. Quantum mechanics is really almost beyond our capacity to understand, and this is just dead matter—stuff. So I think it’s almost a kindergarten class in trying to stretch our minds to understand what mentality or sentience is all about, by learning what matter is about. I suspect that in the next couple of years—and I hope that I’m part of this— we’ll make some definite breakthroughs in finding out more about what it is to be self-aware from the outside.
Rebecca: What role do you think that quantum physics is going to play in this coming to awareness?
Nick: Quantum physics is rather strange; it doesn’t describe the world one way. Newton said that it was all just one way. It was just this. It was just stuff moving around in response to forces, and it was that way whether you looked at it or not. Quantum physicists describe the world differently, when you look at it and when you don’t. When you look at it, it’s kind of like little stuff, little ordinary particles. But when you don’t look, it’s described as ‘possibility waves.’ It’s described as a possibilities when you don’t look, and when you do look its actual little particles. So that’s strange, and this way of looking at things has been going on for almost a hundred years—that, as if out of nowhere, stuff appears when you look at it. And not only have we been able to explain more and more things with this, it’s not being refuted by new knowledge. On the contrary, it’s been supported by new knowledge.
So there seems to be an inkling here of something that sounds a lot like consciousness, because it has observation in it. It has possibility before you look, and when you look, there’s actuality. It sounds a little bit like what’s going on in some of our brains. I think that a lot of our brain is Newtonian; it’s like a machine. It just goes on chattering along, just stuff making more stuff. But some of our brain is not like that. It seems, or feels like this unspeakable void, out of which speakable things come. That sounds a lot like quantum mechanics. Now, whether that’s a metaphor or something stronger, I don’t know—but I think that it’s a clue to a way to approach consciousness.
Rebecca: It sounds a lot like some religions too.
Nick: Ah, yes, the religion of the quantum void.
David: Stephen, what do think happens after biological death?
Stephen: I thought that Nick was actually answering a different question. If the question is what do I think will happen to Stephen after this Stephen dies—if that’s what you mean—I have some sort of a view on that. It’s more the result of a dream really. This was a lucid dream that I had in which I, in the dream, I knew I was dreaming, and I wanted to experience whatever was beyond what I knew myself to be. I wanted to see the highest potential in me, and I assumed that this is not it. That this, my conscious understanding of the world, is limited to what knowledge there is. I had an experience of something like a return to an origin; a void state is what it was like, filled with infinite potential and love—a homecoming.
So it was not at all what I expected. What somehow came as a realization from this was there are different levels of being. There is a level of form, which is commonly described as mere illusion, and there’s another level, of substance, you might say. But I think that both of these levels have reality of a certain kind, and they’re both meaningful. The way that I relate the two is if we think of the level of form, on that level each one of the people in this room are distinct and separate, as labeled by different names, for example. I’d like to use the metaphor of a snowflake, a frozen droplet of water, as each of us is a unique form. And you’ve all heard that myth that every snowflake is unique?
Well, then let’s just suppose that we are. Now, what happens at death? Here’s the snowflake falling into the ocean, and that’s the image of death. What’s going to happen to you? Well, clearly you’re going to be annihilated, disappear, and stop being. But, maybe, what you actually experience instead is an infinite expansion of being, because then you realize what you are on a deeper level, in that particular drop of frozen water—that you are water. It’s all water And this is a level of unity, which is substance in this metaphor, and these are just words—but you see the two different levels.
So, in answering the question about what happens after death, the form of Stephen ceases to be, but I go back to being what I was before I was. That is what is right here and right now. You see, these brains that we’ve got, are designed by a long process of evolution to see what changes. Obviously danger is something that changes. Danger can’t be something that has always been present. If so, then it’s not a real danger. If danger is going to kill you, it has to change. Our senses have been designed by long survival to see what changes. You could say that I think there is something that doesn’t change, that’s always the same, that’s always here—that seems somehow realer to me than the things that change and are gone in the moment. That’s what persists, and that’s what remains after death. What more I can say about what that is, don’t ask me.
Ralph: Well Stephen, that’s exactly what Nick said. (laughter)
Nina: I don’t know, I’m a realist. I figure this way. Either we are gone, and there is nothing left, and then who is there to be upset about it? Or else we are, as I seem to feel, eternal spirits. I think eventually we all become that snowdrop that reunites with the water, with the rest of the water. But I think that evolution, as I perceive it, is a spiral; an ever ascending, never-ending spiral. I think that once we leave this form there is reincarnation. If we leave it after many, many times of being in this form, each time with a different name and different personality, we’re still the same self. I think that we then go through an endless number of permutations. An endless, endless spiral, constantly ascending. If it’s constantly ascending and endless, then there is no end.
Rebecca: Does anyone in the panel believe that once you die that’s it, there’s nothing? Does anyone here believe that?
Nick: A few nights ago, I dreamt I was at an airport and I was concerned about my baggage. My baggage was lost, and I was really concerned. My whole being was really concerned. Maybe someone had stolen it, or they had lost it somewhere. Where was my baggage? Then all of a sudden I woke up, and you know, I didn’t really care about my baggage anymore!
Robert: There’s an old Sufi story. A river comes up to the desert and says, “Oh my, how am I going to cross the desert?” Then the sky says, “It’s very easy. You just wait a while, and bit by bit, your molecules will drift up into the sky, and there they’ll become clouds. Then they’ll travel over the desert. Once they’re on the other side, they’ll come down as rain and form another river.” The river said, “I don’t think I like that. I don’t want to stop being a river. How do I know I’ll get to be a river again once I get up there and I’m a cloud? I’ll be something entirely different and it frightens me. I don’t want to go through that.” So the desert says, “It doesn’t matter whether you like it or not, that’s what’s going to happen.” (laughter)
David: Carolyn, how do you approach this great mystery?
Carolyn: First of all, I don’t believe in the word “death.” I’m not into that word. I feel it’s just a change of form, as Nina was saying, and I think that when you look at nature you can see that there is a continuum there. There is a changing of form, a switching into something else. David, do you remember seeing that horse that we saw in the Big Sur mountains that had died? David and I saw a horse that had died up
in the mountains in Big Sur. All around it we saw this green grass sprouting around the so-called dead creature. Although it was on a basic physical level, that speaks to me about the fact that even in so-called death there is a continual life process of birth happening in new forms. The grass, and probably all the little insects and stuff that is going on. There’s always birth happening simultaneously with so-called death. Maybe they are just different faces of each other. That says to me that we are in a continual change of form.
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 45
