Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others… (26 page)

All of a sudden, an Andy Warhol is worth a million, and nobody knows how that happened. Then it's somebody else the next year. Picasso never paid for anything in the last twenty years of his life. He just wrote checks which never came back to his bank. People saved them because they knew that the signature was worth more than the sum of the check. They knew it would be worth even more in twenty years, and so on.

Somebody asked a Zen master, "What's the most valuable thing in the world?" and he said, "The head of a dead cat." The querent asked "Why?" and the Zen master said, "Tell me it's exact value." That's a good exercise if you're into creative writing. Write a short story where the hero's life is saved by the fact that he could find the value of the head of a dead cat. It could happen. Everything has a fluctuating value.

In capitalism, everything gets reduced to it's immediate cash value. Citizen Kane, to take one egregious example, is generally considered one of the best films ever made. It lost money in it's first year, so Orson Welles had extreme difficulty for the rest of his life getting enough money to make other movies. Yet Citizen Kane made more money than any other movie made in 1941, if you count up to the present, because it gets revived more than any other movie. But the bankers who own the studios aren't interested in profit in twenty years, they want profit next June. They want Indiana Jones not Citizen Kane.

RMN: So, if the areas of science and art are merging it indicates a move away from the capitalist perspective.

ROBERT: Yes. I think information theory has probably done a great deal to bring science and art back together again. Norbert Weiner invented the basic equation for information at the same time Claude Shannon did. That's another example of things happening when they're ready to happen. Weiner explained information by saying that a great poem carries more information than a political speech. Information is the unpredictable. As we come to realize the value of the unpredictable, the value of art has become clearer.

You go through a museum and you look at a Leonardo, a Botticelli, a Rembrandt, a Van Gogh, a Cezanne, a Picasso, a Klee, a Jackson Pollock, and it's obvious the value of each of them is that they weren't copying one another. If Van Gogh were copying Rembrandt nobody would give a damn for Van Gogh. He had the chutzpah to paint his own vision. Somebody having their own vision instead of just repeating an earlier one in a different style--that's information. Information is the new and unpredictable, and information theory led to the computers which fascinate artists. Computers have opened up whole new areas of art.

DJB: Information is the unpredictability of a signal, but it's not quite chaos or randomness. It carries a message.

ROBERT: Yeah. When unpredictability gets too high, information turns into noise. That part of Shannon's theory involves very complicated mathematics and I'm not sure I fully understand it; I just more or less intuitively follow it. There has to be an information redundancy ratio where the highest grade of information is diluted with repetition.

DJB: Because it's so unpredictable one can't relate it to anything.

ROBERT: Yeah. Originality frequently looks like chaos until we learn how to deal with it, until we find the redundancy in it.

DJB: Have you had any experiences with lucid or conscious dreaming?

ROBERT: I've had a lot of lucid dreams, but I can't think of anything that's particularly worth discussing. I'd like to learn more about it. It happens spontaneously sometimes. I have a very rich hypnagogic and hypnopompic life, like Philip K. Dick. William Burroughs told me that his characters all manifest as voices in hypnopompic reverie before they have bodies, or names, or anything else. Robert Shea, an old friend of mine who's a scientific materialist of the most rigid sort, really blew my mind by admitting he hears his characters talking. I suspect all writers do. I think the difference between a writer and a channeler is that the channeler has found a way to make more money out of it than most writers ever do.

DJB: Synchronicity is a major theme that runs through most, if not all, of your books. What model do you use at present for interpreting this mysterious phenomenon?

ROBERT: I never have one model. I always have at least seven models for anything.

DJB: Which one is your favorite?

ROBERT: Bell's Theorem combined with an idea I got from Barbara Honegger, a parapsychologist who worked for Reagan. She wrote a book denouncing Reagan, Ollie North and the whole crowd, giving inside dirt about what she discovered while she was at the White House. Long before Barbara became a controversial political figure, she gave me the idea that the right brain is constantly trying to communicate with the left. If you don't listen to what it's trying to say, it gives you more and more vivid dreams and if you still won't listen, it leads to Freudian slips. If you still don't pay attention, the right brain will get you to the place in space-time where synchronicity will occur. Then the left brain has to pay attention. "Whaaaat!?"

DJB: What do you think happens to consciousness after physical death?

ROBERT: Somebody asked a Zen master, "What happens after death?" He replied, "I don't know." And the querent said, "But you're a Zen master!" He said, "Yes, but I'm not a dead Zen master." Somebody asked Master Eckart, the great German mystic, "Where do you think you'il go after death?" He said, "I don't plan to go anywhere." Those are the best answers I've heard so far. My hunch is that consciousness is a non-local function of the universe as a whole, and our brains are only local transceivers. As a matter of fact, it's a very strong hunch, but I'm not going to dogmatize about it.

DJB: Could you share with us any experiences you might have had communicating with what you thought to be extraterrestrial or non-human entities?

ROBERT: I've had a lot of experiences with what could be interpreted as extraterrestrial communications. They could also be interpreted as ESP, or as accessing parts of my brain that are normally not available, or as contacting a non-local consciousness that permeates everything. There are a lot of different models for this type of experience. I got fascinated by the extraterrestrial model at one stage in the early seventies, and still, every now and then, it makes more sense to me than any of the others.

Other times the non-local model makes more sense, which is a development of Bell's Theorem. This was stated most clearly by Edwin Harris Walker in a paper called The Complete Quantum Anthropologist. He developed a mathematical theory of a non-local mind, to which we can gain access at times. It's a complete quantum mechanical, mathematical model to explain everything that happens in mystical and occult experience. That makes a great deal of sense to me, especially when I found that Joyce was using the same model in
Finnigan 's Wake
. I think it also underlies the I Ching. I explain this at length in my book
Coincidance
.

DJB: How do you see consciousness evolving into the twenty-first century?

ROBERT: It staggers my imagination. I get about as far as 2012 in my future projections, then I can't imagine beyond that. So much is going to change by then.

DJB: What do you see coming along up to 2012?

ROBERT: In Leary's terms, I think about one-third of the West now understands the neuro-somatic circuit, and some techniques for activating it. I think that's going to reach fifty to fifty-one percent pretty soon--and that will be a major cultural change. I think more and more understanding of the neuro-genetic and meta-programming circuits are coming along.

It's very obvious that quantum physics, parapsychology and all the work they're doing attaching brain scanners to Yogis and Zen masters means we're going to learn a great deal about the non-local quantum circuit. I think the history of mysticism has been sort of like a bunch of firecrackers with two or three going off every century. With the LSD revolution it became two or three every month and now it's moving up to two or three every week. I see a real acceleration in consciousness, just like in technology.

DJB: Soon it'll be fireworks every day. One final question, Bob. Tell us about any current projects on which you're presently working.

ROBERT: I've just finished a book called
Quantum Psychology
subtitled: How Brain Software Programs Your Self and Your World. I'm working on a movie, tentatively titled
The Curtain
, which may or may not ever get produced. I've been paid enough so that I'm not wasting my time, which is a good thing to know in Hollywood. There are all sorts of people around Hollywood who'll get you involved in projects without ever paying you a penny, if you're dumb enough to do that.

If the movie does get produced it'll have a tremendous impact. I'm also working on two possible television shows and I'm continuing my historical novels. I'm doing more lectures in more places than ever before, with workshops here and there, which involves a lot of traveling. Altogether, I'm very excited about what the next ten years will bring into my life.

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Cybernautics & Neuro-antics

with Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary has been a public icon of extreme controversy for several decades. Because of all the sensationalized publicity he has received from the media, much of this man’s real accomplishments have been obscured and his image distorted in many people’s minds. Timothy was a highly successful research psychologist long before he had his first encounter with psychedelic drugs. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, was on the distinguished faculty at Harvard, and his book Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality-- called "the best work in psychotherapy " in 1957 by the Annual Review of Psychology-- remains a standard text in its field to this day.

When his research with psychedelic drugs began to have an impact on the general public, and Leary refused to discontinue his research, he was dismissed from Harvard. Leary metamorphosizeed from academic professor to counterculture folk hero. He continued his research in Mexico and the Millbrook estate in N. Y., working with many influential writers, artists, scientific researchers, and philosophers. Timothy 's highly influential books and lectures made him extremely popular among young people and intensely feared by the establishment. He was sentenced to ten years in prison for less than a half an ounce of marijuana in 1970.

He escaped from prison with the help of the Weather Underground, and lived the wild life of a fugititive in North Africa and Europe. He was kidnapped by DEA agents in Afghanistan, brought back to American prison, and was finally paroled in 1976. Through all this Leary never lost his sense of optimism, nor his sense of humor, which are trademarks of his charisma. Leary is the author of more than twenty-five books and computer software programs. He continues to lecture, write, perform, and design educational computer software. We interviewed Timothy on the patio at his home in Beverly Hills on June the 20th in 1989, and again on February 26, 1996. Both interviews follow.

Even in the hot, sticky heat of that afternoon, Timothy was buzzing with lively electrical energy, and his good-humored optimism was contagious. Timothy spoke with us about his eight-circuit model of consciousness, the sociobiological implications of the cyberpunk movement, information theory, computers, cyber-space, and his plans for cryonic suspension. Timothy has a wonderful ability to make people around him feel good about themselves. He looks you directly in the eye, listens carefully, and gives you full attention when you speak. Most of all, he made us laugh.

DJB

DJB: What was it that originally inspired your interest in psychology? Was there an early event that sparked the interest?

TIMOTHY: From my earliest years of thinking about careers and futures, I always assumed I was going to be a philosopher. As early as ten, fifteen years old, !just assumed I was doing this. I've always been fascinated with communication. I was the editor of my school paper in high school, where I performed experiments in fissioning and collaging ideas. I edited this paper so that I filled it with works of writers who did not go to that high school, but whose works were necessary to fill it out.

I cite this as an example of my interest in communication, and new modes of communication. To me the philosophy of the twenty-first century, which is quantum philosophy, is the philosophy of information. We see this in the linguists, the seniticions, Kojipsky, Wittgenstein, and then the enormous breakthrough provided by the thought-digitizing appliance known as the computer. The history of the roaring twentieth century is the history of our becoming an information species, and you could hardly be a philosopher, or for that matter a scientist, in the twentieth century, if you're not working in this wave.