Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others… (61 page)

So it was not at all what I expected. What somehow came as a realization from this was there are different levels of being. There is a level of form, which is commonly described as mere illusion, and there’s another level, of substance, you might say. But I think that both of these levels have reality of a certain kind, and they’re both meaningful. The way that I relate the two is if we think of the level of form, on that level each one of the people in this room are distinct and separate, as labeled by different names, for example. I’d like to use the metaphor of a snowflake, a frozen droplet of water, as each of us is a unique form. And you’ve all heard that myth that every snowflake is unique?

Well, then let’s just suppose that we are. Now, what happens at death? Here’s the snowflake falling into the ocean, and that’s the image of death. What’s going to happen to you? Well, clearly you’re going to be annihilated, disappear, and stop being. But, maybe, what you actually experience instead is an infinite expansion of being, because then you realize what you are on a deeper level, in that particular drop of frozen water—that you are water. It’s all water And this is a level of unity, which is substance in this metaphor, and these are just words—but you see the two different levels.

So, in answering the question about what happens after death, the form of Stephen ceases to be, but I go back to being what I was before I was. That is what is right here and right now. You see, these brains that we’ve got, are designed by a long process of evolution to see what changes. Obviously danger is something that changes. Danger can’t be something that has always been present. If so, then it’s not a real danger. If danger is going to kill you, it has to change. Our senses have been designed by long survival to see what changes. You could say that I think there is something that doesn’t change, that’s always the same, that’s always here—that seems somehow realer to me than the things that change and are gone in the moment. That’s what persists, and that’s what remains after death. What more I can say about what that is, don’t ask me.

Ralph: Well Stephen, that’s exactly what Nick said. (laughter)

Nina: I don’t know, I’m a realist. I figure this way. Either we are gone, and there is nothing left, and then who is there to be upset about it? Or else we are, as I seem to feel, eternal spirits. I think eventually we all become that snowdrop that reunites with the water, with the rest of the water. But I think that evolution, as I perceive it, is a spiral; an ever ascending, never-ending spiral. I think that once we leave this form there is reincarnation. If we leave it after many, many times of being in this form, each time with a different name and different personality, we’re still the same self. I think that we then go through an endless number of permutations. An endless, endless spiral, constantly ascending. If it’s constantly ascending and endless, then there is no end.

Rebecca: Does anyone in the panel believe that once you die that’s it, there’s nothing? Does anyone here believe that?

Nick: A few nights ago, I dreamt I was at an airport and I was concerned about my baggage. My baggage was lost, and I was really concerned. My whole being was really concerned. Maybe someone had stolen it, or they had lost it somewhere. Where was my baggage? Then all of a sudden I woke up, and you know, I didn’t really care about my baggage anymore!

Robert: There’s an old Sufi story. A river comes up to the desert and says, “Oh my, how am I going to cross the desert?” Then the sky says, “It’s very easy. You just wait a while, and bit by bit, your molecules will drift up into the sky, and there they’ll become clouds. Then they’ll travel over the desert. Once they’re on the other side, they’ll come down as rain and form another river.” The river said, “I don’t think I like that. I don’t want to stop being a river. How do I know I’ll get to be a river again once I get up there and I’m a cloud? I’ll be something entirely different and it frightens me. I don’t want to go through that.” So the desert says, “It doesn’t matter whether you like it or not, that’s what’s going to happen.” (laughter)

David: Carolyn, how do you approach this great mystery?

Carolyn: First of all, I don’t believe in the word “death.” I’m not into that word. I feel it’s just a change of form, as Nina was saying, and I think that when you look at nature you can see that there is a continuum there. There is a changing of form, a switching into something else. David, do you remember seeing that horse that we saw in the Big Sur mountains that had died? David and I saw a horse that had died up in the mountains in Big Sur. All around it we saw this green grass sprouting around the so-called dead creature. Although it was on a basic physical level, that speaks to me about the fact that even in so-called death there is a continual life process of birth happening in new forms. The grass, and probably all the little insects and stuff that is going on. There’s always birth happening simultaneously with so-called death. Maybe they are just different faces of each other. That says to me that we are in a continual change of form.

David: Yes, I remember that day very well! We saw a horse corpse lying in the valley, as we were hiking over a hill. All of the hills were covered with brown grass, except for the bright green ring around the remains of the horse. So you see death as only transformation?

Carolyn: Continuous transformation into different forms. Nature’s technology, or the forces that be. We are really the tools of evolution, you could say. We are the instruments of something that we can’t even possibly conceive of, that makes everything keep moving. In that happening, the next form would just be another form of life.

Rebecca: So if death is just another part of the life cycle, why is there so much fear of death? I think that it’s like Stephen was saying, it’s not that we’re going to loose ourselves, we’re going to realize who we truly are—and it’s just part of this evolving beautiful cycle. Why is there so much fear?

Nina: I think that it’s because we identify with our body.

Nick: It also has to do with science I think. The nature of science demands a repeatable experiment and this is doomed. (laughter) •

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Techno & Psyche: Mavericks of the Mind Live! 2

Rebecca: I’d like to start by going around and asking the panelists what they consider the purpose of technology to be. Let’s begin with Timothy.

Timothy: There is, of course, the problem of definition here. There is technology like the bow and arrow, which uses natural substances. There is metal technology, and technology that uses fire, coal, and oil. There’s the thermodynamic industrial society, and then, gloriously, in the last hundred years, a new kind of technology—electric. You can actually send thoughts at the speed of light around the world, and package your ideas to be received. First there was the telegraph, when Great Western dropped that across the Atlantic in 1886. And then we had radio! Messages could be sent around the world. And in the ‘20’s we had film. Soon every household in the technological world had access to television. So, there’s industrial technology, electronic technology, and now we have digital technology. I think that the digital technologies, and the electric technologies, are very related to the psychedelics, because the brain lives on light. The food of the brain is electricity. That’s why television is so popular. I’m interested not in the old fuel, material technologies, but in the clean, pure, fast, light technologies.

Rebecca: Do you think that there is a common purpose with all this technology? I hear communication being mentioned a lot. Does that seem like something you would see as a common purpose, to communicate with each other, faster and more efficiently?

David: You mentioned bows and arrows first, as a weapon.

Rebecca: Do you think that it developed to protect us from the environment, or is there no common purpose that you can see behind all this technology?

Timothy: You’re talking about material technology. Bows and arrows are made of wood to strike flesh and bone, and cause blood. But light, waves, strobes, digital screens, and radio waves—bombarding your ears and eye balls—can’t break your bones. However, they can certainly scramble your head—and that’s where we’re developing. I’m sorry that my partners aren’t here tonight, but we’re developing techniques to use video and virtual reality to jumble up minds. We tell an audience like this, “We’re going to put you in a mild trance. If you don’t like it you should leave right now. Here are the products we’re going to advertise—your brain, chaos, and complexity.” Yes, it’s the electric technology that is psychedelic, and it’s the material technology that we hated back in the ‘60’s.

David: What about you Nina, do you think that there is a common purpose behind technology?

Nina: Well, I disagree with Timothy. What I can’t quite agree with is your (looking at Timothy) emphasis on the brain, because my concept is that the brain is but an instrument, like a telephone receiver, and that true communication comes from the mind. I know that sounds very dualistic, but that’s how I see it. In my concept, when there is something wrong with somebody’s brain that doesn’t mean there is something wrong with his mind; it’s just that there’s something happening physiologically in his brain. I like your distinction of regarding today’s technology as electrical—something insubstantial, and not heavy metal. I can agree that that is certainly a step forward from the bow and arrow kind of technology. However, it seems to me like the purpose of technology has been to control and master nature. And that’s developed to a point now that I find very hard to handle. I’d like to see less mastery and control, and more compassion for the Earth.

David: How about you Carolyn, do you see a common purpose in technology?

Carolyn: I happen to agree with Timothy and Nina, even though I’m a maverick, and that’s not usual for me. I’d like to go from there and say that when you think of technology, on a totally basic level, we are the highest technology that exists. Our very beings are the highest technology around. If we start with our cells, then one could say, “What is the purpose of our

cells?”, rather than seeing them as a manifestation of themselves. Maybe we could say that everything that is made visible was before, either invisible, or simple primitive movements. We’re putting the higher design into a material form. So we’re putting our cells, basically—as well as our bodies, our consciousness, and our minds—into a manifestation in the visible world, which hitherto would have been invisible. So you could say that once you see something, and you start to interact with it, you are capable then of expanding your consciousness and your knowledge. This is because you’re dealing with it as a physical object. When you interact with it on the physical level your knowledge grows and your understanding of the universe expands.

David: So, basically, you’re saying that our bodies are a form of technology, and that what we develop as technology is just an extension of our bodies—in order to make what is invisible visible?

Carolyn: Yes, what we create is part of us. Everything that we see out there that’s mechanical is a reflection of our inner selves. Being a painter, what I create is through another media—of paints, for instance, inks, or whatever. What I’m doing there is expressing my own consciousness through that media, which is also a form of technology.

David: John, how about you? What purpose do you see?

John: First of all, let’s define what science is and then what technology is. Science is the attempt on the part of the most intelligent human beings to find out what God does, and technology is how he does it. Then, from that point on, the purpose is to turn the knowledge we get from science and technology back into our own minds. I wrote a book called
Programming and MetaProgramming the Human BioComputer
. This seems to me to solve most of the problems, the technical problems at least, of how the mind operates and where it operates. I did extensive studies on the brain, in addition to the mind. I did a lot of psychoanalytic work and so on.

The whole thing is so vast that I have to go back to Franklin Merrell-Wolff’s study called
The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object
. This precedes the creation of the universe, and it precedes the creation of all our life. Out of the void came the consciousness which then developed material matter, biological matter, and so forth. So, the purpose that we have has to be looked at against that background. This is the background for our further studies. The psychedelics reveal a good deal of this, and I personally have seen the evolution of the universe in the isolation tank, for example, on LSD and ketamine. This is the ketamine molecule (John points to a chemical model on his hat), a technological development. Technological development suggests that you learn to appreciate all of these things. Get some Ketamine from a veterinarian, or an anesthesiologist. Get into an isolation tank, do a hundred milligrams of Ketamine, and then you’ll see the universe as it really is.