The Evolutionary Mind

by Rupert Sheldrake

  RS: But the problem with the Emergence Theory is that it’s still very earthbound. There has obviously been a major emergence of complexity in human conscious. There’s also been a huge emergence of complexity in the Amazon and the Malaysian rain forests, arguably far greater than anything we’ve achieved through technology—millions of species of beetles, plants and so forth. But it seems to me that, long before all these things happened on earth, there is the possibility of much higher levels of consciousness outside the earth. As you know, I like the idea that the sun and stars are conscious. When we’re talking about the emergence of higher consciousness in human beings, it’s not as if for the first time in the universe some higher level of consciousness emerged. It could be that for the first time in the history of the solar system the biologically-based minds have contacted a source of much greater intelligence which exists out there. Because the sun, stars, and galaxies may be conscious, you don’t need to go straight beyond the universe to the divine mind.

  Of course, traditional views of spirits and angels tell us that there are innumerable levels of intelligence beyond our own. So we don’t necessarily have to have the idea that it all happened and emerged on earth through a complexification. We may have reached a point where a spark passed between a higher consciousness and a human one, perhaps in the throes of a mind-boggling mushroom trip. But whatever happens, somehow a connection was established. It seems to me that this hypothesis has a great advantage in actually accounting for what’s believed all around the world, namely that there is some connection between human intelligence and intelligences in the sky.

  TM: I’m friendlier to this idea of non-biologically based forms of consciousness than I was the last time we talked. I now think that wherever there is a sufficiently complex informational environment, the functions of life—self-replication, mutation, adaptation,—can go on. But, obviously, most of the intelligence in the universe would be utterly incomprehensible to us because it is so different.

  We’re virtually converting the entire hologram of possible intelligence in the universe, but the reason our fantasies of angels and aliens give us hominids with binocular vision who use acoustical speech—in other words, creatures very similar to ourselves—is because we can only recognize what is familiar in this universal information field. So we sail right past the star mind, the galaxy mind, to communicate with a race of winged hominids around Delta Cephei, simply because they are enough like us that we can grok our possibility of a relationship.

  RA: It seems to me that this is just begging the question in the traditional cheap fashion. I’m all in favor of celestial intelligence. In fact, I could even entertain a conversation with a Pleiad. I don’t mind. But we started with the problem of the evolution of consciousness. The question of the evolution of progress is our ultimate question. Now if our view is local to planet Earth, we can say that bolts from the blue are teaching us, and meddling celestial intelligences are reaching down to us. They pretend to be Bell and tell us Bell’s Theorem. They give us mushrooms. They pretend to be sent from the solar wind or whatever. But where do they come from? The evolutionary origin is transferred onto another, more remote place. Now, as I understand Rupert’s idea of the morphic fields, these other places are also in evolution and the whole system is in co-evolution. That is an attempt—I think one of the first ones in the history of intelligent discourse on this subject—to get rid of the hypothesis of timeless truth.

  TM: But if you get rid of that hypothesis you have a whole bunch of weird problems. For example, then you have to talk about the speed of propagation of novelty or morphic fields. Then you’re slammed to the wall because you have to either come up with a number, which you fit into a mathematical architecture, or you say that it’s instantaneous, which returns you to this holistic, more metaphysical thing. You have a whole bunch of these kinds of problems, which I think, intuitively, make it too complicated.

  RA: Let it be instantaneous. I think the whole question of time is, in fact, behind this problem. We have this idea about time, and then we’re trying to talk about “timelessness.” One way to eliminate this cognitive dissonance is to say there is no timelessness. It’s all in co-evolution, and we’re a little bit behind the evolution of the Pleiads. Then where does that come from? We’re stuck with the problem. I think the attractor at the end of time that you talk about is, more or less, as beyond time as the intelligence that it informs. That nourishes the accumulation of complexity as we go along, apparently in time.

  TM: I think the attractor is complete, in and of itself, in another dimension. The process of history and biological evolution is the process of growing complex enough to grow toward the thing and understand it.

  RA: So then, is our process of growth nourished or not nourished by some flow of something that comes from this attractor at the end of time in another dimension?

  TM: It contributes the trajectory of our approach. It defines the domain we are moving toward. What is given is that there shall be ever greater complexity. What is not given is how this complexity shall arrange itself, or what the final end state will be. It’s a story that’s being told as it unfolds. It’s a game, one of the rules of which is that the rules can change.

  RA: So the attractor at the end of the time then only has in it the simple rule of a board game: that the complexity is going to increase. How it’s evolving, and stuff we can make up as we go along, all come later. Whatever natural selection approves of will then come to pass. Complexity will increase, that’s the only rule. So, in fact, you agree that time is slowing down.

  TM: Time is slowing down as the event potentially contained within any given moment exponentially expands. In other words, we’re sort of in a situation of a spaceship falling into a black hole. From the point of view of a distant observer, the spaceship falls into the black hole. There’s a flash of hard radiation, and the story is over. From the point of view of the people on the spaceship, the relativistic stretching of the time line means you fall forever and you never reach the conclusion. Time is not a tyranny. It is a relativistic medium subject to all kinds of plasticity. There are many ways out of any assumed corner we may paint ourselves into.

  The nuts and bolts question posed in all of this is, “Can the psychedelic state be visualized with technologies ranging from paint and brush to super computers?” I think it can.

  I feel that part of our difficulty is our culture’s rejection of mathematics. Mathematics is essentially the marriage of Father Sky and Mother Earth. I’ve given my life work to understand this relationship between the psychedelic and the mathematical vision.

  CHAPTER 2

  PSYCHEDELICS, COMPUTERS, AND VISUAL MATHEMATICS

  Ralph Abraham: One day I was sitting in my office with my secretary, Nina, when there was a knock on the door. Nina introduced us; “This is a friend of a friend of mine, who wants to interview you.” I was very busy with the telephone and the correspondence, so he came inside and I answered his questions without thinking. After a month or so, when a photographer arrived, I began to realize that I had given an interview for Gentleman’s Quarterly (GQ) magazine. I called my children and asked them what was GQ—since they live in Hollywood and know about such things.

  I was in Firenze, Italy when the magazine finally arrived on the stands. I was very proud that in spite of my style of dress, I had been the first one in our circle of family and friends to actually be photographed for GQ. But I was shocked to open the first page of the magazine, and see my picture occupying a large part of the first page in of the table of contents with the heading: “Abraham Sells Drugs to Mathematicians.” There were some other insulting things in the interview that as far as I can remember, was largely fiction. I didn’t mention it to anybody when I came back to California, and I was very pleased that nobody mentioned it. Nobody had noticed. There were one or two phone calls, and I realized that nobody after all reads GQ. If they do look at the pictures, they overlooked mine. I was safe after all at this dangerous pass.<
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  Suddenly, my initial peace was disturbed by 100 phone calls in a single day asking what I thought of the article about me in the San Francisco Examiner, or the San Jose Mercury News. All the embers in the fire left by GQ had flamed up again in the pen of a journalist. A woman who writes a computer column for the San Francisco Examiner had received in her mailbox a copy of the Gentleman’s Quarterly article, in which Timothy Leary was quoted as saying, “The Japanese go to Burma for teak, and they go to California for novelty and creativity. Everybody knows that California has this resource thanks to psychedelics.” Then the article quoted me as the supplier for the scientific renaissance in the 1960s.

  This columnist didn’t believe what was asserted by Timothy Leary and others in the GQ article, that the computer revolution and the computer graphic innovations of California had been built upon a psychedelic foundation. She set out to prove this story false. She went to Siggraph, the largest gathering of computer graphic professionals in the world, where annually gather some 30,000 people who are vitally involved in the computer revolution. She thought she would set this heresy to rest by conducting a sample survey by beginning her interviews at the airport the minute she stepped off the plane. By the time she got back to her desk in San Francisco she’d talked to 180 important professionals in the computer graphic field, all of whom answered yes to the question, “Do you take psychedelics, and is this important in your work?” Her column, finally syndicated in a number of newspapers again, unfortunately, or kindly, remembered me.

  Shortly after this second incident in my story, I was in Hollyhock, the Esalen of the far north, on Cortes Island in British Columbia, with Rupert and other friends. I had a kind of psychotic break in the night. I couldn’t sleep and was consumed with a paranoid fantasy about this outing and what it would mean in my future career—the police at my door, whatever. I knew that my fears had blown up unnecessarily, but I needed someone to talk to. The person I knew best there was Rupert. He was very busy in counsel with various friends, but eventually I took Rupert aside and confided to him this secret and all my fears. His response, within a day or two, was to repeat the story to everybody in Canada, assuring me that it’s good to be outed. I tried thinking positively about this episode, but when I came home I still felt nervous about it and said no to interviews from ABC News, the United Nations, and other people who called to check out this widely covered story. I did not then rise to the occasion, and so I’ve decided today, by popular request, to tell the truth.

  It all began in 1967 when I was a professor of mathematics at Princeton, and one of my students turned me on to LSD. That led to my moving to California a year later, and meeting at UC Santa Cruz a chemistry graduate student who was doing his Ph.D. thesis on the synthesis of DMT (dimethyl tryptamine). He and I smoked up a large bottle of DMT in 1969, and that resulted in a kind of secret resolve, which swerved my career toward a search for the connections between mathematics and the experience of the Logos, or what Terence calls “the transcendent other.” This is a hyperdimensional space full of meaning and wisdom and beauty, which feels more real than ordinary reality, and to which we have returned many times over the years, for instruction and pleasure. In the course of the next 20 years there were various steps I took to explore the connection between mathematics and the Logos.

  About the time that the scientific community discovered chaos theory, and the chaos revolution began in 1978, I apprenticed myself to a neurophysiologist and tried to construct brain models made out of the basic objects of chaos theory. I built a vibrating fluid machine to visualize vibrations in transparent media, because I felt on the basis of direct experience that the Hindu metaphor of vibrations was important and valuable. I felt that we could learn more about consciousness, communication, resonance, and the emergence of form and pattern in the physical, biological, social and intellectual worlds, through actually watching vibrations in transparent media ordinarily invisible, and making them visible. I was inspired by Hans Jenny, an amateur scientist in Switzerland, a follower of Rudolf Steiner, who had built an ingenious gadget for visibly rendering patterns in transparent fluids.

  About this time we discovered computer graphics in Santa Cruz, when the first affordable computer graphic terminals had appeared on the market. I started a project of teaching mathematics with computer graphics, and eventually tried to simulate the mathematical models for neurophysiology and for vibrating fluids, in computer programs with computer graphic displays. In this way evolved a new class of mathematical models called CDs, cellular dynamata. CDs are an especially appropriate mathematical object for modeling and trying to understand the brain, the mind, or the visionary experience. At the same time other mathematicians, some of whom may have been recipients of my gifts in the 1960s, began their own experiments with computer graphics in different places and began to make films.

  Eventually, we were able to construct machines in Santa Cruz which could simulate these mathematical models I call CDs at a reasonable speed, first slowly, and then faster and faster. And in 1989, I had a fantastic experience at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where I was given access to at that time, the world’s fastest super computer, the MPP, the Massively Parallel Processor. My CD model for the visual cortex had been programmed into this machine by the only person able to program it, and I was invited to come and view the result. Looking at the color screen of this super computer was like looking through the window at the future and seeing an excellent memory of a DMT vision, not only proceeding apace on the screen, but also going about 100 times faster than a human experience. Under the control of knobs, which I could turn at the terminal, we immediately recorded a video, which lasts for 10 minutes.To sum up my story, there is first of all, a twenty-year evolution from my first DMT vision in 1969, to my experience with the Massively Parallel Processor vision in 1989. Following this twenty-year evolution, and the recording of the video, the story with GQ and the interviews at Siggraph in the San Francisco Examiner appeared that essentially posed the question, “Have psychedelics had an influence in the evolution of science, mathematics, the computer revolution, computer graphics, and so on?”

  Another event, in 1990, followed the publication of a paper in the International Journal of Bifurcations and Chaos, when an interesting article appeared in the monthly notices of the American Mathematical Society, the largest union of research mathematicians in the world. The article totally redefined mathematics, dropping numbers and geometrical spaces as relics of history, and adopting a new definition of mathematics as the study of space/time patterns. Mathematics has been reborn, and this rebirth is an outcome of both the computer revolution and the psychedelic revolution that took place concurrently, concomitantly, cooperatively, in the 1960s.

  Redefining this material as an art medium, I gave a concert, played in real-time with a genuine super computer, in October 1992, in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, in New York City.

  We now come to our subject. I want to pose one or two questions, and read here one or two excerpts from some favorite books. We have to accept, I think, mathematics either in the new definition, or the old one. In the Renaissance cosmology of John Dee, mathematics is seen as the joint therapist of Father Sky and Mother Earth, or a kind of an intellectual, spiritual, elastic medium connecting up the heavenly realms and Gaia herself. That puts mathematics on the same level as the Logos, or the Holy Spirit. Let’s consider that for the sake of discussion. Having seen mathematics as a language of space/time pattern, let me ask you this, Terence and Rupert: To what extent could the psychedelic vision of the Logos be externalized, either by verbal descriptions or by computer simulations, or by drawings of inspired visionary artists? On the other hand, in what ways could mathematical vision serve the spirit, and extend the mind? Is there a role, in other words, for this kind of thing in our main concerns? To give you a fast-forward toward the answer, let me read a couple of things from your writings.

  First,
from Terence’s Food of the Gods: The archaic revival is a clarion call to recover our birthright, however uncomfortable that may make us. It is a call to realize that life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience, upon which primordial shamanism is based, is life trivialized, life denied! Life enslaved to the ego and its fear of dissolution in the mysterious matrix of feeling that is all around us. It is in the archaic revival that our transcendence of the historical dilemma actually lies. There is something more. It is now clear that the new developments in many areas including mind machine interfacing, pharmacology of the synthetic variety, and data storage imaging and retrieval techniques are coalescing into the potential for a truly demonic, or an angelic self-imaging of our culture.

  Our second passage is from Rupert’s The Rebirth of Nature : As soon as we allow ourselves to think of the world as alive, we recognize that a part of us knew this all along. It is like emerging from winter into spring. We can begin to reconnect our mental life with our own direct, intuitive experiences of nature. We can participate in the spirits of sacred places and times. We can see that we have much to learn from traditional societies who have never lost their sense of connection with the living world around them. We can acknowledge the animistic traditions of our ancestors, and we can begin to develop a richer understanding of human nature, shaped by a tradition and collective memory, linked to the earth and the heavens, related to all forms of life and consciously open to the creative power expressed in all evolution. We are reborn into a living world.