Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others… (21 page)

A lot of things are known through mythology that are traced back to Crete. One thing that's known from paintings is the dance with bulls. There were the Bacchic mysteries, derived from the Orphic, the Dionysian and so on. Following this backwards, like tracing roots or Ariadne's thread, you come to a certain mythic kernel which would be associated with Minoan Crete. I wouldn't say these are expressions of chaos. They might be, but there are so many differences between our culture and the Cretan culture. We know something about Dionysian ritual: the importance of music in ritual, the dichotomy of religious ritual into two types, outdoors on the open plain and indoors in a cave. The mystic revelation that came with Gaia sees the planet as an organism, and the plain as its surface. Gaia is very chaotic, so if you reject chaos, you reject Gaia. It goes together: the orphic trinity of Chaos, Gaia, and Eros.

That's what I suggest to you to think about: Gaia as the Earth, the love of the planet, the integrity of life-forms; Chaos as the essence of life: more chaos is healthier; Eros as human behavior in resonance with Chaos and Gaia. It's rumored that the Minoans had a very high degree of bisexual activity, licentious behavior and wild parties. This may be the quality of the genders in a partnership society as described by Riane Eisler.

RMN: Why do you think it was that later Western Culture tended to view chaos as an undesirable quality in nature?

RALPH: Well, that's a very big question, and speculation can't be taken too seriously, but I think that this has to do primarily with the patriarchal takeover. The repression of Chaos, Gaia and Eros is characteristic of the patriarchal paradigm, which turned out to be the dominant one in our recent history. And it could be that sexual repression is somehow its key.

Human society is an evolving system--including its psyche, its mythology, its cultural structure. This evolution is punctuated by bifurcations, mutations caused by the planetary equivalent of lightning: comets. Comets were probably very important in the history of consciousness; they still are. There are some mutations where changes are made in the memes, the cultural genetic structure. Then there's a kind of natural selection which goes on when two societies are in conflict over a common goal, due to seasonal inundations and so on, and in this conflict one would be selected not just by military strength, but perhaps through the stability of its social structure.

And in the long run, in evolutionary history, there are dead ends. A lot of species become extinct without the necessity of a comet or of global catastrophe, but just because they're the wrong idea to begin with. It seems likely that the human species is the wrong idea to begin with and may not succeed in having a stable long-lived civilization on this planet. We know that Egyptian society lasted for three thousand years and that's a fine record for a society. Since the Renaissance we're up to one thousand years now, and we'll see how long this goes on. I'm not placing any bets. It may turn out that there are some structural flaws that are endangering the future of human habitation on this planet. The planet is in symbiosis with the human infection. This could be a very good symbiosis; it could mediate some sort of divine plan on a cosmic scale with the actual material of planet Earth, and that includes the consciousness of the human species. There is a certain promise there, I don't deny it.

However, archaeologists coming from another star system in the future may say that a structural flaw in our society resulted in the advantage of patriarchy over the partnership model. It could be that the basis for the stability of our violent society is the nuclear family, so that the repression of Eros, Gaia and Chaos--the repression of the Bacchic, the Orphic, the Dionysian--by the patriarchy was chosen by people who had grown up in a nuclear family. And when two civilizations came into contact, the one that had the nuclear family won. This is just one possibility among many, in answer to your question why chaos was rejected.

The chaos societies had moon festivals such as we had in the sixties. This is no coincidence, because the sixties, the Italian Renaissance, the Renaissance of the troubadours in the twelfth century, the early Christianity, the Pythagorcan Academy in Croton--all these have the common aspect of temporary resurgence of Orphic ideals, followed by massive and violent repression by the conservative society. All these have been foci in history for burning people at the stake. Of all the forms of terrorism, burning people at the stake seemed to be the most appropriate for the patriarchal society, in repressing revivals of the preceding form involving the Goddess. In the sixties, which was one of these Orphic revivals, we got to experience what life was like in Minoan Crete, in the Garden of Eden. We had moon festivals, and people abandoned themselves to their feelings, to Chaos, to Gaia, to Eros. Many of these groups, which experienced the Garden of Eden, eventually broke up. The sixties came to an end. A number of breakups were caused by patriarchal, sexual jealousy.

RMN: The trend of science towards reductionism led quantum physicists to the realization that the whole does not equal the sum of its parts. Now chaos theory seems to clarify this statement by saying that this is because we cannot know the sum of all the parts. What do you think are the implications of this idea in how we may arrange and organize information in the future?

RALPH: This is exactly the reason why I said that chaos theory isn't very important, except as a kind of double negative, while on the other hand, dynamical systems theory does offer something very important. We need to understand whole systems, and whole systems cannot be understood by reduction. The terrific gains in understanding made by the reductionist scientist will, I'm sure, be used in the future to understand whole systems by means of some process of synthesis. The reduced understanding of the biochemistry of the adrenal cortex, for example, will be synthesized into models of whole systems, such as the stress response and the immune system. The technology for modeling whole systems is on the frontier of science at the moment; it is the crucial frontier for the solution of our global, planetary problems.

Dynamical systems theory, specifically the branch called complex dynamics offers a strategy for the re-synthesis of fractionalized scientific knowledge, and an understanding of complex whole systems. Complex systems theory has replaced chaos theory on the fashion pages of the science newspapers of our day. And I think the fascination of intellectuals with complex systems theory is not going to be a short-lived flash in the pan. This is somehow the real thing. Our challenge now is the reintegration of the sciences after their dissolution in the Renaissance into an understanding of whole systems, particularly planetary systems, that is to say the hydrosphere, the lithosphere, the atmosphere, the biosphere and the noosphere.

Within the lower spheres, a new direction called global modeling is already under way. Global modeling tries to put together reductionist models people have made for the oceans, for atmospheric phenomena, and for solar radiation. Individual models made by reductionist scientists of these different areas--the oceanographers, the atmospheric chemists, the solar physicist--are being synthesized into one global model. This global synthesis requires two things. First of all it needs models for the separate components or organs of the planetary system to be made in a common strategy so that they can relate to each other. Secondly, it requires a wiring diagram to put them together. In the field of global modeling a tremendous synthesis is now taking place, including conferences on the wiring diagram, which will provide a global model of the geosphere.

For the sociosphere, we must start from scratch. We don't yet have many specialists producing mathematical models for society, although there are a few outstanding pioneering first steps. There are for example the archaeologists and anthropologists worrying about the demise of the Mayan civilization in Central America in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, because it was so complex and there are so many hypotheses, and it was such a controversial question, they tried to resolve it by building mathematical models. There are now a number of competing complex dynamical models for the Mayan society, taking into account the food chain, the weather, the population, and the distance between ceremonial centers.

All these factors are built into different competing models. Then they run them and try to see which one wins the best relationship to the archaeological data. And thus a model system can be created, because Mayan civilization was relatively small. This pioneering first step might lead to similar models for larger societies--for ancient Greece, for example, or for the downfall of Rome, where many more factors and more people were involved. Navigation, naval trade, the effect of inventions like better clocks for navigating: all these things might be included in the model.

So in the future then, as global planet models become more successful, global social modeling will begin. Then individual components have to be modeled, such as the political and economic systems of individual nations, their interactions, and so on. They have to be made into a common strategy, so they can be connected together. And then one has to extrapolate from the Mayan models and gain wiring diagrams for these different component parts, including psychological and medical factors. In the reductionist physical sciences, we wilt only have to connect existing components together, following a diagram, to get global models. For the social sciences we'll have to start from scratch.

We're going to have to make models for the organs, do experiments in simulation with various wiring diagrams, compare with data, improve the component models, the global models, the data, and so on. After many circuits of this hermeneutical circle we might create a global social model. Then the global planet model and the global social model have to be connected together. There's also the mythological and the spiritual dimension and the understanding of the world of the unconscious. In other words, the whole thing has to take place once again in the noosphere, and then that has to be connected up. Eventually, we hope to get some kind of model for understanding what--if any--are the effects of choices we could make upon our long-range future. This may never happen, but if it did, mathematics would be of use to Gaia in creating the future, through the direct, conscious interaction with the evolutionary process. This seems to be our challenge.

DAVID: Could you tell us how your travels in India and the experiences you had in a cave there have influenced your outlook on life and mathematics?

RALPH: What I had done that was respected by mathematicians in the way of frontier research work was ancient history by the time I went to India and lived in a cave. So, to answer your question, I should first of all identify what I've done since then that could be regarded as mathematical. I would say that the computer revolution has presented enormous opportunities to mathematics, to the profession and to the individual mathematicians, which have not yet been seized. Many mathematicians have rejected the significance of computers, so far. But if we could say that experiments with computers represent mathematical research, you could see the evidence of my stay in India in the cave on my outlook on mathematics.

My computer experiments involve the concepts of vibration, harmony, resonance and mathematical models for these phenomena. We would like to understand how a person is in morphic resonance with a field, if these metaphors have any function from a perspective of pattern modeling, which is what I think mathematics is all about. The processes where this kind of metaphor is proposed--whether in the Indian Samkya philosophy or in Rupert Sheldrake's theory--are always in a living, biological, mental sphere. So the data, if there are any data, would necessarily be chaotic.

So first of all we would have to extend or map the notion of resonance from the circular sphere where the concepts first evolved in the context of chaos. When you have two strings of a guitar, you pluck one and the other one vibrates by so-called sympathetic vibration. This vibration is understood as a non-chaotic phenomenon; it is just oscillation. Each point on the string vibrates, left, right, left, right, left, right. So from this, which I'11 call the circular or periodic domain, the concepts have to be extended to the chaotic. If the two strings were chaotic instead of periodic, which means they would sound raspy and noisy instead of harmonious and sweet, then could there still be a sympathetic vibration of one caused by the nearby chaotic vibration of the other?

I came back from India in January 1973. By January 1974 I was already involved in experiments with chaotic resonance, and this has dominated my research to the present day. For example, one discovery we made is that the Rossler attractor, which is one of the simplest of chaotic forms, does have sympathetic vibration as one of its characteristics. So after India I concentrated more on vibration and resonance, whereas before, we were involved with the general, skeletal structures of chaos. And they're related in that the theory of chaotic resonance is based upon an understanding of the skeleton, the so-called homoclinic tangles, as I've tried to explain in my picture books.

RMN: Could you tell us about your experience with John Lilly's dolphins?