Terence McKenna: 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 think it’s not, in principle, mysterious. It may be fleeting, like the situation that follows upon the splitting of the atom. It may be remote. But it is in principle describable. It’s a domain to be explored. It’s simply a matter of paying attention, gaining inspiration, and gaining skill of technical execution.
RA: Any models that we can build, verbal, visual, or mathematical, are feeble compared to the experience itself. On the other hand, this experience is within all, and without all, and we are immersed in the spiritual world, so the tiniest resonance from the feeblest model may suffice to excite, as poetry excites emotion, spirit. The essence of communication is to have a compact representation of an experience that’s infinitely complex. The representations have to be really simple. Representation restricted to verbal mode alone might be too feeble to excite by resonance, the similar state. Not every person is going to become a cephalopod. Not every person has the time to become a shaman. We need, however, a certain number of shamans in our culture to help to reconnect human society and the play in the sky. We need some kind of amplifying and communicating device between the few people who are our real shamans, let’s say sacred artists of the future, and the mass society watching MTV. The question is, can these means be of use to the clarion call that you’ve given in your book?
TM: I think that what makes it confusing is when you go into these domains, the encounter is so emotionally powerful. The situation is so novel that the experient tends to assume that this emotional power is coming from the input. It’s not. It’s coming from the encounter with the input. It’s like posing the question, “Can you make a stirring record of the Grand Canyon?” Yes, you can with a helicopter-mounted camera. But the emotion you have watching it, you bring to it. The psychedelic dimension is objective, but it’s also so awesome and so different from what we know that it encourages and promotes and triggers awe in us. We bring something to it, which we can never image, or reduce to a verbal description or a piece of film. The thing itself is just more of reality, like the heart of the cell, or radar maps of the Venusian surface or the center of the atom.
RA: Do we need more reality? We’ve already got so much.
TM: We need more of this mental Logos world. It’s a world that we’ve lost the connection with. These computer programs, psychedelic drugs, dynamic modeling schemes are the equivalent of probes, like Voyager. They’re sent not to an alien planet, but to an alien phase—space of some sort, one that we need connection to.
Rupert Sheldrake: I agree. The problem is that the emotional intensity of a psychedelic experience is totally different from seeing a computer graphic display. It’s possible to get something a bit like that just by shaking a kaleidoscope and looking into it. In these expensive novelty shops that dot California, you can find fancy, beautifully made kaleidoscopes. You look through them, and you can see a dazzling display of pattern and color, but within a few seconds you’re just bored. Nobody ever really looks at them for very long. Somehow they lose meaning. It’s no longer engaging.
I think the difference between representation of the state and being in the state itself is this sense of finding meaning, engagement and intensity. I for one, as a botanist, am very drawn to flowers. I love looking at flowers. Sometimes you can look at a whole garden full of flowers like here in Esalen, and it’s quite meaningless. At other times you can look at a single flower for a long time, you can go into it. It’s like a mandala. You enter into that realm, and it takes on incredible meaning, beauty and significance. The same with butterflies and many other natural creations. It seems to me the problem is how to enter into that engagement, intensity and sense of meaning, rather than the representation of the pattern itself. There are plenty of patterns around in the natural world.
RA: These are space/time patterns. Although we say the words space/time pattern, we have no language for individual space/time patterns. As experienced by us, there is a kind of a resonance between patterns that somehow makes a resonance with different patterns of neurotransmitters in the visual cortex. Some aspects are perceived and other aspects are not, remaining invisible to our perception.
You’ve been speaking of flowers in the garden, or the images in the kaleidoscope. These are static patterns, and we have an extensive verbal language for that. What I’m suggesting is an expansion of our visual/linguistic capability in the direction of a universal language for space/time pattern, such that we could truly speak of our experiences and give them names. At the mere drop of a word or a code, an I-75, Highway 1, Highway 0, we would transmit a clear image of space/time pattern along with whatever emotion we remember from the experience. If we can awaken these feelings in the mind of the listener, we can intellectualize, understand, reconnect and converse with the space/time pattern of the spiritual world.
Let’s face it, we have the most extensive experience of this world through visual metaphors of, well, movies. We experience the Logos as movies. We don’t experience it as words, although there are sounds, and there is sometimes writing on the wall like graffiti. Basically reality is an infinite field of consciousness, of vibration, of waves moving, of intelligence. When we travel in this realm, we go somewhere we’ve been before and we recognize it, and that excites in us memory, which is reinforced and extended, and upon this experience we base further experiment. We three have had our many experiences, which I have great faith, are similar, even universal experiences, and yet we are absolutely speechless in verbalizing them to each other. Words fail us.
TM: It seems that mind responds with an affinity for itself. If an expression is universal, then it has an affinity for the universal mind. What’s interesting about the example of the kaleidoscope is that the kaleidoscope gets boring after a few minutes. If you analyze how it works, and take it apart, the base units in most kaleidoscopes are pieces of broken glass, pebbles, detritus, junk. Somehow splitting this into six sections with a mirror and putting it in heavy oil is supposed to bring you into the realm of something endlessly watchable and interesting. But it doesn’t.
The brain machines being produced in Germany are the same way. All pattern seems to quickly lose its charm unless it’s pattern that has been put through the sieve of the mind. We enjoy looking at the ruins and artifacts of vanished civilizations a lot more than random arrangements of natural objects. It seems to me what we’re looking for when we say the MPP (Massively Parallel Processor) data on chaos is like a DMT trip, what we’re saying is, “Here in this pattern is the footprint of meaning.” It’s as though an architect passed through. We’re always looking for the betraying presence of an order that is more than an order of economy and pure function. We look for an aesthetic order, and when we find that, then we have this reciprocal sense of recognition and transcendence, and this is what the psychedelic experience provides in spades.
A critic of the psychedelic experience would object saying, “Of course it’s made of mind. It’s made of your mind.” For the psychedelic voyager, the intuition is made of mind, but not made of my mind. Either there’s an identity problem, or a real frontier of communication is being crossed. When we look for living pattern, or aesthetically satisfying order, what we really look for is a sign that mind has somehow touched the random processes of nature.
RS: The limiting factor seems to be neither the richness of display that we find in nature, nor the language that we communicate with, but rather the ability to go into something with intensity of vision. I don’t think language is a limiting problem. For example, music can be written down in a language. I can read music, but for me it doesn’t come to life from this language. I have to hear it for it to come to life. Presumably mathematical notation is a way of notating things in the mathematical landscape, which comes alive for mathematicians.
Take the realm of plants again. If you look at the incredible rich
ness of botany, of flower forms, there is a language for this, used by botanists and florists, describing the species of plants in technical jargon. Even so, it doesn’t mean that most botanists spend most of their time contemplating the beauty of flowers. They’re rushing to the next committee meeting or getting their next paper ready for publication in a technical journal. Somehow there isn’t much time to actually enter into these realms, even for people whose profession it is to be concerned with them. We’re neither short of images nor of languages in many realms, but rather of the time, the space, and the inclination to enter.
RA: Music is a good metaphor. Let’s just think of this for a minute. I don’t propose that a mathematical model of a brain or a plant would be as wonderful as a brain or a plant. Life will not be replaced by language. Nevertheless, the evolution of music has been enormously facilitated by having a graphic language that to some extent recalls the actual musical experience. This is the role that I’m proposing for mathematics, not to replace the Earth or the heavenly realms, but to facilitate their understanding through an analog on the same level as musical staff notation, pertaining to the visual experience of space/time patterns.
What I’m suggesting is an increase in our encyclopedia of models, extending language, so that we can name, store, retrieve, and recreate not the experience itself, but the data, for the sake of communication. This is exactly what musical staff notation did for music. It pertains not only to the spiritual experience, but also to fundamental questions on the future of human society. Can we understand the space/time nature of the planet well enough, since it’s so complex, to be sensitive enough to cooperate with it? If we can’t even understand what we’re seeing when we look, there’s not much we can do to cooperate. Biogeography, for example, is a botanical field that could be revolutionized by a staff notation for space/time pattern.
RS: Surely what we’re looking for is meaning in terms of significance. In terms of information, even patterns, we’ve got libraries full of informational models. Go into any bookshop, and you’re overwhelmed by the quantity of stuff there. The idea of having even more models on the shelf somehow doesn’t seem very exciting to me. What would be exciting would be to see some deep meaning in all of this. Maybe mathematics is one way to find the deep meaning in things. If so, I’m not quite sure how.
RA: The taxonomy of plants is not full of meaning, nevertheless a vocabulary has evolved so that when a word like exfoliate is put on a page, another botanist can read it and actually tell what kind of plant it is. A further development in the evolution of language is the generation of meaning. Meaning is not given in the data. We have to grok things. We have to struggle and evolve understanding by some hermeneutical process. People said when printing began, that it would be the end of memory, and when writing began, it would be the end of history.
TM: In both cases they were correct.
RA: Yes, when language began we lost our connection with the natural world.
TM: Maybe it was the kind of language.
RA: Spoken language.
TM: Language processed acoustically. It’s not in the generation of it that you want to put your attention, but in the reception and decoding of it. When language became something acoustically processed, it became the willing servant of abstraction. Whereas language processed visually is here-and-now stuff of great density; acoustical language permits a level of abstraction that creates a higher inclusiveness, achieved by a necessary dropping out of detail.
RA: I’m glad to hear you say so, since it always sounds like you think the Logos itself is speech.
TM: Speech beheld.
RA: I’m astonished at the resistance I’m getting here to the idea of visual language. When I travel in France, maybe riding in the train, I’m really bothered by all the gossip going around because I understand French. I realize that this couple is having trouble, and the train is not stopping in the station that I expected, and so on. When I travel in Japan, I don’t understand anything, so it seems to me really very quiet there. I just don’t hear anything. Where we have an oral language for certain phenomena, we then perceive it. It’s like a moving van comes along and transports this stuff from the unconscious system to the conscious system, where we can deal with it.
These space/time patterns for which we have no visual language, are essentially unconscious to us. Therefore we can’t interact with them, and this might be a fundamental reason that the planet is dying. Either we shouldn’t have verbal language, or we should have verbal language and visual language as well. Verbal language is poorly adapted to space/ time patterns. For example, we describe music with staff notation, a visual rather than verbal language. I think that our intellectual relationship to the sky and to the earth would be vastly improved by developing a larger closet of models for visual processing.
TM: I think you’re right. I regard language as some kind of project that’s uncompleted as we sit here. The whole world is held together by small mouth noises, and it’s only barely held together by small mouth noises. If we could have a tighter network of communication, we would in a sense be a less diffuse species. Communication, or the lack of it, is what’s shoving us toward the brink of possible planetary catastrophe.
If we buy into the idea that psychedelics are somehow showing us an evolutionary path yet to be followed, then it seems obvious this entails a further completion of the project of language. Maybe what all this technology is about is a more explicit condensation of the word. Modernity is characterized by an evermore explicit evocation of the image. We just have to go back 100 years, and the best anyone could do was to produce an albumin tint photograph. Now we have color lithography.
RA: High Definition TV.
TM: HDTV. Highspeed printing. Virtual reality. The worldwide web. It’s as though language is becoming flesh. Meaning condensing into the visual realm would be a kind of telepathy compared to the kind of linguistic reality we’re living in now.
RA: Glad to hear it.
RS: One final point I want to make. The model you are suggesting takes us further into the artificial manmade world of technology, and we’ve still got an incredible diversity in the natural world that hardly anyone’s interested in anymore. There are herbaria collections, plants and butterfly collections, geological museums with rocks and crystals of every kind, and they’re deserted. There’s an incredible diversity of form in the natural world, and we are becoming more and more plugged into the entirely human world of technologies and man-made patterns. How does this relate to giving us a greater sense of connection with the bigger world?
RA: I believe that our connection to the natural world will be enormously enhanced by the new media, in spite of the fact that most people will relate to it as a new form of drug. I think that planetariums, for example, which are artificial models of the sky, brighter and simpler and easier to understand, can have an enormous potential to turn people on to the real sky, which is after all the ultimate source of our mind, our intellect, our mathematics and language. Although the construction of planetariums in big cities around the world is an expansion of the synthetic world at the expense of the natural one, the whole idea of them is to try to turn on a switch in some few people, making them aware of what was there all the time. I think a HyperCard stack with high-speed, high-quality color pictures and sound, giving all the beetles in the Amazon jungle, would enormously help me personally to understand what I’m seeing when I actually go there.
TM: I’d like to defend Ralph. I don’t think that it’s really a journey deeper into artificiality. Science has been dependent on instrumentality for a long, long time. The natural world that Ralph’s program would reveal is the natural world of syntax. In other words, language would become a much more accessible object for study if it were visually explicit. And I expect that this is happening. It seems to me that we have reached a new frontier in the natural history of this most complex and least understood of all behaviors: language. While the instruments may be computers or high-speed imagin
g, and so forth, it’s no different from using the Hubble telescope to tease data out of a very distant part of the universe, and then making it explicit. If we could understand language, we would understand something about our own place in nature that eludes us. It’s clearly the most complex thing we do, and we’re the most complex thing we know. The feedback from language is culture, the most anomalous phenomenon in the natural world.
RA: I want to end by saying this: Mathematics is part of the natural world. It’s a landscape that can be explored, simply and directly, and with incredible pleasure, delight and advancement, just like the psychedelic Logos, or any other aspect of the world. The mathematical landscape does not belong to the human species. It belongs not even to the earth, but to the sky. It’s part of the infinite universe we live in. Whatever microscopes, telescopes, kaleidoscopes, or computer graphic tools we can devise to enhance our vision of the mathematical universe is definitely advantageous. How this will fit into society, however, is a problem. We are in an evolutionary challenge from which the human species may not survive. 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. So I’ll leave it there.
The Evolutionary Mind Page 4
