Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others… (44 page)

DJB: Bringing information back from my ketamine experiences is a real struggle for me.

JOHN: You've got to be more passive. If you struggle, then all you'll see is your struggle. It's like trying to do something instead of doing it.

DJB: Let me ask you John, how do you, or do you, distinguish between mind and body, spirit and matter'!

JOHN: Those are all explanatory principles.

DJB: How about in terms of descriptive principles. How would you describe the difference between them?

JOHN: Naming such things is a dichotomy. The only dichotomies are in language and in the eye of the observer. Until you can describe the system of mathematical continuous process, or stepless process, then you aren't really saying anything. As I keep saying in every workshop I give, "For the rest of this week you are going to hear a lot of stuff and all of it is bullshit." You know why? Because language itself is bullshit. It's a way of spending your time without experience or experiment.

DJB: But what other alternative do we have besides language for communication?

JOHN: Well, if you don't know, I can't explain it to you. No, I told you about it; on the ketamine experiences you're going through reality experiencer; and they're experimenting on you and you're experimenting and there's no way that language has anything to do with this. So what's happening is so fast and continuous that you don't have a chance of describing it.

DJB: But don't you think it's important that people write books and map out the territory?

JOHN: Only if they tell you, "There's a territory over there. Go see it." That's all.

DJB: What do you think of the notion that Terence McKenna talks about a lot, that language actually creates reality?

JOHN: No, it doesn't. Language creates reality? That doesn't make any sense at all.

RMN: Maybe he means that language creates our experience of reality, because it programs us to think in certain ways.

JOHN: The experience in the tank, for example, is: a continuous paragraphic process and that's true of life in general. You can’t describe me, for instance, you can't even remember me in your video memory, right?

RMN: I can't remember you? I haven't forgotten you yet.

JOHN: No, no. That's a simulation. You haven't forgotten your simulation of this, whatever ii is. See, I can't describe me and I can't describe you.

RMN: Right, I see that. But if somebody were to ask me about you later on, the language I used to recall and describe you then would effect how I re-experienced you.

JOHN: My book
The Simulations of God: The Science of Belief,
explains all of this.

DJB: Explains? Isn't that the notorious explanatory principle creeping in again?

JOHN: All we do is construct simulations. I construct the simulation of you, for instance, and I turn this into words. But that simulation is nowhere near who you really are. Then I tell you what my simulation of you is and you correct it, and on and on. You cannot substitute words for the action of the brain, the action of thought or the action of mind. When I say mind I'm talking about the whole universe of stuff, see? It's not that simple.

RMN: Why do you think we have this desire for meaning, this compulsion to explain things all the time?

JOHN: Childishness. The circle. The explanatory principle will save you from the fear of the unknown; I prefer the unknown, I'm a student of the unexpected. Margaret Howe taught me something. I went over to St. Thomas one time and she said, "Dr. Lilly, you're always trying to make something happen. This time you're not going to make something happen, you're going to just sit and watch." You know what I'm saying?

DJB: Yeah, I get caught in that one a lot.

JOHN: So, if I can't make something happen I get bored sometimes. But if I don't get bored and I just relax and let it happen, you show up. Now I can afford to do this, I don't have to earn a living, but if you know how to do it you can earn a living and be passive as hell.

DJB: What's the trick to doing that?

JOHN: You become an administrator who doesn't know anything, so people are always explaining to you what's happening. My father was the head of a big banking system; he taught me something about passivity. He said, "You must learn to be
as if
you're angry, and then you'll always be ahead of the guy who really gets angry." And I said, "Well, what about love?" And he said the same thing. All those powerful emotions--you can act as if you're experiencing them, but you're not involved, you see, you haven't lost your intellectual load.

DJB: You think that if people get overwhelmed by emotion they lose their ability to think clearly?

JOHN: Well, I had a lesson in that. I got really angry at my older brother, and I threw one of those cans that have calcium carbide in them and spark, because he was teasing me so much. He teased me an awful lot. So I threw this can at him and it missed his head by about two inches. And suddenly I stopped and thought, "My God, I could have killed him! I'll never get angry again."

RMN: What do you think about America's involvement in the Gulf War and what are your thoughts about the causes of war in general?

JOHN: Well, the Gulf War happened because Russia and the United States made peace. So the United States Defense Department had to have something to do, because they have this huge budget. Luckily the Russians didn't have that huge budget as their economy is falling apart. If our economy was falling apart then there wouldn't be any war. As Eisenhower said, industrial establishment and the Defense Department are in control of this country.

RMN: Why do you think it is that politicians and national leaders so often reflect the darker side of human nature?

JOHN: It isn't the darker side. It's the busy side. They get bored so they have to do these things. I started a book called,
Don’t Bore God or He Will Destroy Your Universe
. Nobody knows they're doing this to avoid boredom; they make other excuses for it. You've never been bored?

RMN: I've been bored but I don't feel like going out and bombing somebody because of it.

JOHN: No, no. You're not one of those people. If you took PCP you wouldn't kill anybody. Sidney Cohen, who died last year, was the head of the committee of the Mental Health Institute for Drug Abuse. He said, "How is it that PCP and ketamine have similar molecules. Have you ever seen any violence with ketamine?" I said, "No." He said, "Well, with PCP we sec it all the time." I said, "Look Sidney, you've forgotten that there's a selection of people who take PCP and a selection of people who take ketamine. All the people that I know who take ketamine are professionals who have respect for their own minds and brains. They’re knowledgeable and educated and they’re not violent. But the people who take PCP are violent in the first place; peaceful people who take PCP don't get violent.

RMN: What do you think needs to happen before war becomes an obsolete activity?

JOHN: It won't happen. Something must make people busy together and war does that.

RMN: Does busy have to mean war? Are there no alternatives?

JOHN: Now Kennedy tried to make a space program. I think if we started a colony on the moon, and then on Mars and we got sufficiently involved we could redirect all our boredom.

RMN: Do you think that aggression is inherent in the human psyche?

JOHN: No. I once wrote a chapter called, "Where do Armies Come From?" Do you know where: they come from? Tradition. Kids learn that history is war, so they're all pre-programmed. If you read some of the history books, it's all about war, it's incredible! In my Latin class I learned about the wars of Caesar, when I took French I learned about the wars of Napoleon and on and on and on. What did we learn from Caesar? That you don't divide Gaul into three parts. What did we learn from Cleopatra? The you may have to kill yourself with an asp. If you start reading Italian history and you come across Leonardo Da Vinci or Galileo then the whole thing falls apart. They're individuals doing their thing and it's magnificent. And that's the only part of history that's interesting.

RMN: What do you think about the current theories of evolution?

JOHN: I looked into the paleontology of humans. Paleontology is the only science that could take an observation here, and a million years later another one here and draw a straight line between the two. Every time I read Leaky or Gordon Danier or any of those other people I look at it and say, well those are good observations but are they necessarily connected at all? Maybe a spaceship came and put a colony in at this point. But they don't think of the obvious, you see.

I have a concept called "alternity." From here to alternity. I came back from Chile and sat in Elizabeth Campbell's living-room on acid and started evoking ECCO. Suddenly the energy came out from above and went straight down my spine and on all sides of me were these divisions like a pie. And I could look down this one and see a certain future and then right over here another future and on and on. So this was alternity that I was sitting in. Now actually, unconsciously, we sit in alternity all the time, we have to or you wouldn't know how to get anywhere, right? But you don't know it.

DJB: You mean sitting in a place where you see all the infinite possibilities and pathways that can emerge from a particular point in space-time?

JOHN: I don't know if it's infinite. It's sure 360 degrees and each alternative reality was every two degrees or something like that. There were a hell of a lot of them and some that I couldn't ever imagine.

RMN: If you were conscious of that do you think you would be able to make any decisions to go anywhere?

JOHN: Well, I get conscious of all of them or none of them. So when I get out of my body I don't try to program anything because there are so many alternates possible.

DJB: What are you thoughts about the future?

JOHN: What's the future?

DJB: That which hasn't happened yet. The next micro-second, the next year, the next century and so on.

JOHN: We act as if there's going to be a year out there, but we haven't got there yet, right? And we think the sun is going to come up every morning and we count on that, we expect it. What's going to happen when it doesn't? One alternity is enough so why talk about the future?

DJB: John, on a different note, do you think there is a qualitative difference between organic and synthesized compounds?

JOHN: I don't know what qualitative means; I never was able to grasp that word. It's one of the first things that they teach you in grade school and it never made any sense. My bullshit filter said it was bullshit.

We take something that a plant or animal did and we call it pure sugar or whatever. That's chemistry, the science of separating out components which you can't reduce any further without destroying them. So what does the plant do:, The plant picks up carbon dioxide and stuff from the ground and starts combining these compounds in certain ways and synthesizes them. Plants are chemists just like us. A lot of people call something natural or organic hut they don't know their organic chemistry, because anything that has a carbon atom in it is organic, okay?

RMN: How do you define addiction and how do you avoid falling into the trap of misusing the chemicals you take?

JOHN: Let's see. There's drug use, drug over-use, drug abuse, drug hypo-use and on and on. There is a set of chemicals that if you take them and you don't exercise and you don't cat right, you go downhill. When you go downhill you have to take more of that chemical to substitute for the food and stuff. But if you are taken off that chemical without the proper stimulus you get grand mal seizures or something. That's the old-fashioned description of addiction.

What I say is, you take certain chemicals and change the chemical con~iguration in your brain and body. This is a very interesting process and if you slay interested and look after yourself then you can take cocaine or heroin or any of those things. Physical exercise is absolutely essential to get good changes of conscious states. If you're in good physical condition you can experience a hell of a lot. If you lose interest then you go downhill and wind up in Harlem or something.