Abraham
Our talks frequently range over different periods of history. We love to extract peculiar details from the historical record and speculate on their relationship to major movements in cultural history. So today we get to do this with modern history, with cultural history in our own lifetime, for our subject is Psychedelics and the Computer Revolution.
There have been several articles in the journals recently and in newspapers speculating on the connections between the onset of the psychedelic period and discoveries in the computer revolution. But it only came to my attention very recently through an article in GQ. For this article I was interviewing on the subject, my usual subject, of complex dynamical models for history, for social, economic, political systems, and their potential for aiding our jump start on the future. When the interview finally appeared in the magazine, however, it wasn’t about that at all. It was a speculation on psychedelics and the computer revolution. And this article somehow had evolved, I think, from my connection with Mondo 2000. So this is a magazine that we all know. We know the editors. We met them here, in fact, at Esalen. And this magazine had evolved through stages with different names—High Frontiers, Reality Hackers, Mondo 2000—as if we are working on high frontiers, we are hacking reality, we are creating the future, and we are aimed at Mondo 2000. And, as a matter of fact, we do. Our trialogues have been very much in this spirit. And the magazine apparently owes its existence to a market of fans of psychedelics who work in the computer revolution. But the idea of the causal connection between psychedelics and the computer revolution, this was new.
The article in GQ begins with an excellent quote from Timothy Leary, who says: “There are various natural resources in the world. Creativity is one of them. And, understanding this, the Japanese will go to Borneo to collect teak and go to California to collect creativity.” So this is the conjecture that we can consider this morning. And, to begin with, to see about the plausibility of the causal role, let’s look at the comparative chronologies of these two developments.
All happened in our lifetimes, and largely here in California. So this is the location. If we are going to find a connection, then we can dig it up in the records in the basement of the local church and so on. The computer revolution began in World War II—or it could be beginning anywhere, but what we do call the computer revolution began in World War II, among people who probably did not take psychedelics. In fact, the psychedelic revolution started later. To begin with, the early computers were war machines. One was called the Norden bombsight. Then there’s the [???] machine, and so on. I was in grade school at that time.
Then the psychedelic revolution, let’s say, started in the middle sixties. What’s going on in the computer revolution in the middle sixties? We had the beginnings of a field now called scientific computation. The first computers weren’t used for scientific computation, except as special purpose analog computers like the Norden bombsight, all designed around a single mathematical problem. General purpose scientific computation required, first, the invention of floating point numbers by Wilkinson in 1961. So there is a conjunction in these two chronologies between, let’s say, the first popular usage of marijuana and the arrival of LSD on university campuses and so on—not to say that Wilkinson was an acid head, but this is, when we’re looking for causal links, we have to pay attention to the comparative chronologies.
Then, just a couple years later, when LSD hit the college campuses, computer graphics began its major growth from seeds planted in Salt Lake City, with Evans & Sutherland and so on. And the usage of computer graphic hardware required software that was developed later by various people whose names are not well known. And whether they used psychedelics is not [???] say, but certainly a lot of their friends did because that was the cultural historical milieu of the time.
A later development in the 1970s, then: psychedelic mushrooms became popular on university campuses. And at this time there was major change in the direction of the computer revolution in the shift of emphasis from mainframe computers to personal computers. Of course, this was a corporate decision in IBM as the historians see it, but actually it was the Macintosh that more penetrated homes and became the first successful personal computer. And that was because of the Macintosh operating system, which was stolen from Smalltalk, one of the many very creative projects at Xerox PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center, in the 1970s. There are also, we thought, other innovations in computer graphic software, such as the first paint program and the PostScript method of doing typographics.
More recently, in the eighties, we had the decline of hardcore psychedelics and the onset of—what you call it?—empathogens, like ecstasy. And then we find a new turn in the computer graphic revolution toward virtual reality and other software developments which would replace the ordinary reality with an alternative reality, if not psychedelic, at least equally distant from ordinary reality. So there’s a parallel chronology. And this suggests some conjectures—only chronological conjectures, not necessarily making much sense—such as the causal relation between LSD and the first computer graphic software. Likewise, between the popularity of psychedelic mushrooms and the personal computer revolution, or at least this empowerment, the GUI, the graphical user interface, such as Smalltalk.
Also at that time there was, at least in university campuses, a massive growth in interest by children in computer games. The first ones were in the Dungeons & Dragons category, which is still popular, circulating computer networks worldwide. More and more and more developments of sophisticated computer games like Dungeons and Dragons, Adventure, and so on, where you go down a little corridor, you can choose between this door or lifting that rock, and [???] computer graphic alternate reality is the substance of the game. A lot of important evolution in computer software concepts took place in the milieu of these computer games. Also, the source code was available on the large networks, so children could learn computer programming and modify the games. And so the cultural history and the evolution of this game, you know, were a co-evolutionary process.
And finally, a causal relationship between ecstasy and the emphasis on virtual reality, which is now being developed with great enthusiasm by governments for the purpose and driving tanks, weapons systems, and they love operating business telecommunication and so on, could be viewed as a quantum leap in the interconnectivity between the machine and the human user.
So here are just some possibilities for causal relation between psychedelics and creativity in the computer industry. And I think, just to fasten on one possible nucleus of all this, is Xerox PARC: this place where some of the very important software concepts developed. And it’s in Palo Alto, centrally located in Silicon Valley, and in the midst of the central marketplace of the psychedelic culture. What do you think?
McKenna
Well, I mean, I gather that the causal connection between all this is the idea that both the evolution of the computer and the evolution or rediscovery and assimilation of psychedelic drugs has to do with consciousness expansion. I mean, in one case we’re expanding memory retrieval speed, machine–human interfacing. In the other frontier, the pharmacological frontier, we’re expanding our exploration of our own wetware. And that probably the end result of this is to see these two superficially distinct fields as actually two facets of a single set of concerns that are migrating toward each other. I mean, I suspect—I assume—that the drugs of the future will be much more like computers, and the computers of the future will be much more like drugs, and that, in fact, the values and the areas that each seeks to maximize are similar to the areas of concern of the other.
The final goal of reductionist pharmacology, if it’s able to make good on its belief that the basis of thought is ultimately molecular, should be the designing of a drug which causes you to whistle the first eight bars of Dixie and nothing else. Similarly, the goal of computers—given the nanotechnological thrust, the human interfacing thrust, and so forth and so on—is a computer that you can run its programs only by placing it under your tongue. So that, you know, these two concerns—one: the concern of a kind of magical, shamanistic, emotion-based, we could almost say feminine psychology. The drug is a countervailing force to the material engineering, hardwired, scientific, straight engineering approach. But, in fact, it seems that the ouroboros is taking its tail and its mouth, and these two concerns are seen to be simply different approaches to the completion of the same program of knowledge.
Abraham
Well, that’s very nice. It’s a little less than I wanted. This is the kind of theory of converging devolution or something. See, I’m thinking of the machines that evolved in a certain way, they could have evolved some other way. Why would they do this way? Because the interesting people making the innovations. Now, if those are people who specifically are having visual hallucinations on a regular basis, then it’s possible that they would be more inclined to have a GUI, a graphical user interface; icons on the screen. I mean, we have all these books. There’s hardly no illustration in them. We have an encyclopedia dictionary. Here’s the definition of the word “tree”—there’s no picture of a tree there. Now we look at them at the Macintosh or at Smalltalk or the Sun operating system: here are icons all over the place. Every concept is represented by a picture. There’s very few words in sight. Could that be because the people making the creation are strongly influenced by an alternate reality in their own life, and therefore computers are evolving in a direction that’s quite orthogonal from the preceding direction and vector of cultural history?
McKenna
Well, print had a series of sensory biases and intellectual biases built into it that print culture was always extraordinarily naïve about. I mean, because of print we have the concept of interchangeable parts, which gives permission for the concept of democracy—that’s an interchangeable parts theory: the citizen is an interchangeable part in the body politic. Because of print we have the glorification of Cartesian logic and the emphasis on the here and now aspects of reality. I mean, I think that what’s happening now was very presciently anticipated by Marshall McLuhan, who felt that the electronic media would return us to an eye-oriented culture, and that the biases that have shaped the Western mind since the adoption of the phonetic alphabet, essentially—and that were then tremendously intensified by movable type—is all being exploded. The Gutenberg galaxy of cultural effects is being left far behind as we move out into a space that we could call psychedelic, visual, cybernetic, or all three.
Abraham
The whole approach would be to say: yes, we had the repression of fantasy thanks to the print medium dominating the technology of the Gutenberg press and so on for a time, and then we had a liberation through the revival of visual representations thanks to electronic innovations in the medium world—for example: television. And the main influence behind the graphical explosion in the computer revolution is not psychedelic visual hallucinations at all, but just the rise of popularity of television in the American home.
McKenna
Well, it’s all of a piece. I mean, television—yes, I mean, television certainly has a tremendous influence on the mass mind, but on the creative cutting edge of the civilization it’s psychedelics. Television influences culture. But if you watch television, it’s psychedelics that shape the agenda of television—the styles of cutting, and rapid fire imagery, and macro-physical and micro-physical perspective shift, and all of these things one could lay at the feet of psychedelics.
Now, what an orthodox cultural historian would claim is: it’s not psychedelics, it’s surrealism. Surrealism is always dragged in here as the godfather of modern advertising. But, in fact, the concern of surrealism is nothing less than the pictorial representation of the contents of the unconscious as described by Freud and Jung. So, in a way, what we’re talking about here is not so much the culture-shaping power of psychedelics or television or surrealism, but of the emergence as a cultural artifact of the unconscious itself, which was being suppressed by this linear printhead style of thinking that—
Abraham
Yes. Visual representations, for example, had been relegated to the unconscious through the restrictions of the media.
McKenna
Well, they’ve always been the medium by which the—
Abraham
—psychedelics. They are released from the unconscious and enter as if all people had suddenly become surrealist artists.
McKenna
The databases of the unconscious are visually dedicated databases. They’re not print databases. And now they are being liberated into consciousness. Really, I mean, as a global society possessing, you know, DNA sequencers and thermonuclear delivery systems and so forth and so on, we cannot have the luxury of an unconscious mind. That’s something that may or may not have some appropriateness if you’re hunting woolly mastodons and that sort of thing. But an integrated global culture cannot have the luxury of a large portion of its mind inaccessible to itself and somehow occluded. And apparently this is being eliminated. Technology, the evolution of languages, and so forth have taken a turn toward outing the unconscious. And computers are a wonderful tool for this—as are psychedelic drugs.
Abraham
Yes. And so they are in cooperation in the crash program to out the unconscious. In other words: to increase the strength of the coupling and the effect of resonance between ourselves and conscious purpose in our society on one hand, and the cultural morphogenetic field on the other hand.
McKenna
The species mind is being made explicit by entering into the visual awareness of individuals.
Abraham
And through these means—with the connection between the group mind and business practice and so on is amplified—then we get commercial manifestation of creativity: products like a personal computer.
McKenna
Well, but in a sense, I think that’s simply that the culture is building on the foundation already in place. Money, as understood by moderns, is almost entirely a print-created phenomenon. Before the invention of the printing press, money was something that you hid under your mattress. Now, money is this completely abstract medium that is moved around by electronic banking transfer and investment capitalism and this sort of thing. And it has become, like the concept of the citizen, a way to uniformize all the complex spectrum of phenomena down to a single variable: money. And so the world of print is the world based on money.
Now, the computer is very able to insinuate itself into that environment and build on it. But that isn’t, I think, the natural milieu of the computer. The natural milieu of the computer is information, which is very different from money. Money is a downloading of complexity into a kind of medium of exquisite simplicity. Information is an exploding of the apparent here and now into a much more multi-dimensional domain that is, therefore, it can only be grokked intuitively. It can only be grokked through feeling.
So the abandonment of money and the substitution of information as a medium of exchange is having a feminizing, psychedelicizing, and visually enhancing effect on the values and direction that society is going. And this is all happening without planning. I think this is just built in. These are the hidden agendas of the technologies that we imagine we can manipulate and appropriate without being reinfected by the hidden effects that they carry. But, of course, this is not true at all. We are completely, now, infected by these hidden assumptions.
What do you make of this, Rupe?
Sheldrake
Well, I like the idea of the re-emergence of the unconscious. And it reminds me of the prototypic image of the realization of archetype images in some kind of shared space: the cave art of the Paleolithic, where you go deep into a cave and there—by the flickering light of candles, after a scary initial literary journey, accompanied by chanting and so on—you see these images of animals and so on. A vision actually somehow made concrete within a shared space through a flickering light in the darkness.
Well, I understand that, of the Native Americans who went into this kind of thing, the Chumash were particularly well known for their polychrome cave paintings. They occupied the area now known as Hollywood. Well, the flickering light, the polychrome cave paintings, of course, give one an early version of the cinema. And the cinema—where you go into a darkened space and then, by flickering light, see incredible fantasies and patterns unfolding on the wall—here is in some sense the precursor of television. Television is like the cinema writ small and brought into every home. And certainly, in countries where television is introduced for the first time, like India, the principal use people make of it nowadays is videos of films. You can have all these films at home. So it’s like a miniaturized cinema. So I think if we’re looking at the history of this sort of revival of the collective visual imagination, the cinema is the precursor we have to look at rather than television. And of course California again plays a crucial role in this revolution.
Well, the cinema, television, psychedelics as another form of darkened space and flickering images and visceral content. And the computer graphic revolution—which, in a sense, is like a transformed television or the cinema, to be able to represent more abstract kinds of imagery or pattern of the kind that may appear in the psychedelic vision—these seem to be related kinds of phenomena.
So if we see this all as some kind of reawakening of the visual imagination and the representation of the unconscious phenomena—the prototype for all of which is of course the world of dreams, which occur in darkness, in sleep, indoors usually, and in a flickering and incomprehensible way—then the real root is the world of dreams, and its actualization or externalization through cave arts and then through these variety of other transforms. You know, fairy tales told around campfires—again, the flickering light associated with the play of the imagination and imagery conjured up, in that case, by words. But then the visual representation of all these things shows indeed some kind of connection. So I think you’re right that we can see this as part of a larger process of reawakening of a collective imagination.
McKenna
It’s part of an archaic revival. The print thing is very artificial, and we live completely within it.
Abraham
The verbal thing is very artificial.
McKenna
Well, I don’t see that so clearly. I mean, the print thing is a technological artifact less than 500 years old, and yet dominating the sensory ratios and psychologies of virtually every person on Earth.
Abraham
A million years of consciousness, and then we have only 50,000 or 100,000 years of speech. Speech is a newcomer on the scene. The morphic field barely recognizes words.
Sheldrake
But words are still an incredibly deeply established creode compared with written words or print. And if you look at non-literate cultures, then of course the oral tradition is very important. But I suppose also there’s a much higher developed visual imagination. When you go to a Hindu temple or a Gothic cathedral primarily designed to be appreciated by non-literate people, then you see a riot of psychedelic type imagery: demons and snakes wriggling everywhere in Hindu temples, psychedelic stained glass windows in Gothic cathedrals, amazing vegetational forms and structures and shapes.
McKenna
But it isn’t a smooth, unbroken development. It’s that, even between manuscript culture and print, there is an enormous leap that takes place. Because the psychology of manuscript culture is that you must look in order to understand. That’s the essence of manuscript. Because no font is ever repeated.
Abraham
Writing matters.
McKenna
No E looks like every other E. So you must look at manuscript. Reading—reading of print—is a very different psychological function, because in the first few minutes of reading any text you assimilate the font. From then on you don’t look at E’s and F’s and L’s. You automatically assimilate them. It’s always the same. There’s no decipherment of the visual surface in the act of reading print in the way that there is reading manuscript. This is what McLuhan is talking about: this linear, uniform, high-speed thing which sets up democracy and modern science and reproducible data, and all these things that we take for granted or that we fail to examine deeply are an aspect not only of the linearity of print—that’s been pretty well talked to death—but the uniformity of print, and the curious way in which you don’t have to actually look at it, sets us up for psychological blind spots that have closed us off to the reality of the visual world.
Abraham
A bit of a compression of informational content of medium. But then, since cinema, video, computers, and computer graphics, there’s now going… an expansion is in progress, which may expand well beyond any richness of media that history has seen before.
McKenna
Generally speaking, yes. The only caveat is that, for the people who give their lives to this stuff, cinema is in no way seen as a precursor of television. Cinema is related to photography and related to the reconstruction of ordinary visual space. Television is a pixelated medium very much like manuscript, and not at all like photography. Because with photography the eye is not asked to work. The eye beholds a photograph. The eye decodes the television screen. The fragmentation of the image makes it into an entirely different medium.
Abraham
Well, it’s a matter of degree, as with the high-definition television, the resolution of the deal is increasing due to the overusage of silver and organic pigment and so on. The resolution of film is decreasing. Sometime they’ll meet. Computer graphics have the potential of resolution on the level of cinema. So let’s think of a sequence, then, of manuscript printed book cinema. Okay, we’ll skip the television. Then we’ll think of computer graphics—
McKenna
Well, television is related to the psychedelics.
Abraham
—as interactive cinema, not as interactive video. I think that’s appropriate.
McKenna
See, if these people are actually right in their analysis of the effects of these media, then high-definition television is not television at all and will not have the same effect that television has been having. In fact, high-definition TV may give a surprising shot in the arm to the (at this point) on-the-ropes linear uniformitarians. Because it’s going to be much more like cinema and photography, and it’s not going to have to be deciphered. It can be looked at. And this will have unexpected consequences on the sense ratios and assumptions operating within the society.
Abraham
Video is doomed not because of a resolution limitation, but because it’s not interactive. An interactive computer graphic game where you can watch the soap opera, but also play with it, change the script, and so on, is bound to be much more interesting just because of interaction than video or cinema.
Sheldrake
More like a dream, in fact.
Abraham
More like a dream, in fact.
McKenna
Well, one of the things they’ve discovered that’s very frustrating to the engineers of virtual reality is: they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars getting fast enough computers so that, when you turn your head, the scene is reconstructed in the way that normal space is. But what’s fascinating is: they discover in virtual reality people rarely turn their head. People know that they are in a television-created space, and they immediately lock into their long-ingrained habits of watching television, and people sit with the eye-phones on like this.
Abraham
It’s temporary.
McKenna
Because they don’t understand that they’re not watching TV, and you have to tell them: turn your head, keep turning your head, stop sitting still. You do not have to stare at this. They say: oh, that’s right. I don’t have to stare at it.
Abraham
Yeah, but that’s temporary. Because video and cinema are on their way out. I think the future of cinema is that all the films ever made will be digitized and stored in a gigantic library where, in the context of a computer graphic VR parlor game, you can call up at will images from very—here’s Cleopatra’s family or something—and put them on the walls around you. So interactivity is the primary… I mean, this is the area where the computer revolution and psychedelics are in conversion to evolution. They’re coming together in the interactivity. But the extent to which the computer medium could be shared by a large number of people gives an idea of a further advance in ultimate evolution beyond what was accomplished by hippies in the 1960s with psychedelics. Larger groups spread over space and time can come into morphic residence with this.
Sheldrake
But this takes us to another key point in the whole thing, which is that if, in relation to mathematics—since mathematics represents a particular realm of imagination, for many mathematicians a particular realm of visual imagination. This is Ralph’s chosen field, of course. But the normal way of communicating mathematical ideas is through a kind of symbolic structure as unrelated to the visions, as musical notation as to the sounds you hear in Mozart’s symphony. And the secret which good mathematicians seem to have inherited, or picked up, or it’s by accident, is that these symbols relate to what Francis Galton called mathematical landscapes. And in our imaginary space, which creative mathematicians have, they see forms. He described how great mathematicians of his acquaintance reluctantly admitted, when he questioned them closely, to seeing landscapes with little balls rolling down and shapes changing before their very eye. This was how they did their mathematics. They then later translated and expressed it through symbols. Other mathematicians with this gift could somehow pick it up by a kind of resonance; the symbols acting as some medium that helped tune them to it. And this is actually how at least many branches of mathematics have been carried out. It’s still true today that good mathematicians have mathematical landscapes and mathematical imaginations. But this is a secret kept from most of us while studying mathematics in school, or even in university, where these symbols seem quite impenetrable, the manipulations you do with them seem quite arbitrary.
And it seems to me that one of Ralph’s points is that the computer graphics revolution now makes these rather abstract mathematical systems previously only visualizable by mathematics—and even then to a limited extent by mathematicians—like fractals and so on immediately accessible to everybody. So suddenly these abstract mathematical concepts or mathematical spaces now become common cultural artifacts, and now have fractal sweatshirts and fractal imagery on printed fabrics and so on. So through computer graphics there’s this opening up or democratizing with the mathematical imagination. And I imagine that, when mathematicians take psychedelics, that their already developed mathematical landscape undergoes an expansion, intensification, or some other interesting development, since mathematicians have this peculiar and unusual kind of visual imagination to start with. Is that the case?
Abraham
Yes, I think that we could put this in the category of outing the unconscious. That, for peculiar reasons, evolutionary mistakes, mathematics had actually gotten relegated to the unconscious, you see. And it does have to do with printed books, I’m sure. When mathematicians speak to each other, they wave their hands, they draw pictures one at a time on the board, or with their hands in space, and they speak simultaneously, and in coordination, coordinated like dance is to music, the picture and words. So it requires the cooperation and coordination of multiple modes of representation in order to communicate a mathematical idea from one trained mathematician to another.
So when you see colloquium talks, which are public performances of mathematical creativity in the act, performed live to millions of people trying to understand, then you always see these visual data pics, I call them: moving pictures with lyrics that are coordinated, done in a very artful way, using the room as like the memory palace of Giordano Bruno and so on. And here’s a space, this corner, and this is where this goes, and everything is coordinated with space—the dance of the performer, the waving of the hands, the going on the platform, and the singing of the words succeeds by a telepathic miracle in communicating the idea.
Then you have books, textbooks, for teachers to use in schools who aren’t trained on this level or something. So you send in the book to a publisher, put the drawings in the margin. Publisher writes back: we can only have 100 line drawings in this book. That’s the limit for financial reasons. So then you get a book which fails in the communication of the idea, even to a trained mathematician. And out of this tradition comes this heavy reliance on symbols—which, for a person already trained in the mathematical dance hall, actually do reawake; they blow up the entire image, they recall it from practice in the memory field, a little icon. That’s fine, but for somebody to learn mathematics from scratch in his way, it’s impossible.
So after this limitation of books—the transition from manuscripts to printed books—it was at that time that mathematics became arcane, was relegated to the unconscious. Along comes computer graphics. Suddenly mathematics becomes visible. Suddenly we have visual mathematics, visible mathematics for the first time in a long while on a public scale—on t-shirts and so on as Rupert said. So I think that it’s true that mathematics is one key area which is saved from oblivion by the computer revolution, making visual mathematics possible, and part of the daily experience of anyone with a personal computer.
McKenna
Well, don’t you think it’s just part of a larger program of language generally becoming visible through the medium of the computer? That what’s happening is that language is about to conquer the visual dimension, and the mathematical shock troops have somehow gone over the top first, but ordinary language can hardly be far behind.
Abraham
Yes, the current hot frontier of the computer revolution today is multimedia. That means you’ll have a CD, and when you double click on the icon you get songs, dancing, moving colored pictures, dramas—you know, a coordinated multimedia display created by expert best understanders of the subject, let me say, how to repair a car, or how this tree grew from the seed, and the morphogenetic field of the geometry of the soul. Wherever you double click, you’re going to get this multimedia show which is actually interactive. You can say: let me see that again, go back, slow down.
McKenna
Well, it’s the species mind. And nothing is happening, except that what was previously wetware and driven by intuition is being made explicit as hardware and driven by machine interface. We’re downloading or uploading the unconscious into a cultural artifact, and it’s gaining presence in the domain of culture through this process.
Abraham
You know, children’s books—since I was reading Cosmo yesterday—and there’s this book which has got pictures that are interactive. You can open the door, look inside, you see the crocodile, you close it, then you open this box, there’s a snake in there, close it, open the clock, there’s bird in there. And these children’s books from which children actually gain their initiation to a certain level of initiation of awareness of the environment and so on, the language, the cognitive strategies for understanding all this. These books are much more successful, sophisticated, and rich than the books which I used to teach mathematics to advanced engineering students in universities.
McKenna
They’re like crude DMT hallucinations.
Abraham
Yes. So the best of the books, I’ve heard, are children’s books. And the computer revolution is now advancing to a point where they sort of get into the level of children’s books as far as richness of medium is concerned. But there’s a long way to go before they can approach—they’ll never get there—the richness of a psychedelic trip either alone in the dark room or with a group of people exploring a flower. A long way to go.
Sheldrake
Well, coming back to the connection between psychedelics and computer revolution, there are several ways on that. Look at it. One is, well, first the sociological fact has revealed both on best anecdotal stories and on survey carried out by the San Francisco Examiner. Out of 118 people questioned at the recent computer graphics convention in Nevada, 118 said that they had taken psychedelics. There was a hundred percent psychedelic usage among leading figures in this field. Now, there’s a sense in which other branches of the computer world are part of the linear language-based print type thing. The word processor, the commonest use of the computer in everyday life, is an updated version of the typewriter, and so on. It’s not something that breaks radically with this tradition. It’s in fact the colonizing of the visual space, the sort of television-type visual space by the printed word [???].
So, in that area, people who develop new word processors or things called spreadsheets, the suggestion is that psychedelic usage is quite low, perhaps maybe a little higher than the rest of the population. But computer graphics is the area where there’s an exceptionally high incidence—in fact, maximum incidence of psychedelic use. Now, I wonder whether it’s because people who take psychedelics then want to find a career where somehow this incredible visual revelation can be followed through in some kind of technology and shared with others, a bit like some people who have amazing experiences with drugs, then try and find ways of doing it through meditation or ways they can teach it to others without the drugs. Is that one of the reasons? Is it that people with visual imaginations are particularly drawn or influenced or amazed by psychedelics, and they’re the kind of people who go into computer graphics anyway? What kind of causal link do we have here? Is it that when actually thinking about some realization of some program, that the psychedelics can actually help the creative process as a kind of ongoing usage during this kind of creative process? What do you think, Ralph?
Abraham
Well, I think in the creation of a new program—was is the first spreadsheet, the first text editor or something?—there are all kinds of concepts that have to be invented from scratch, just about the sort of the geometry of the space of information, the view of the filter, what information will be stored, where, and what’s important, how do you treat it, how do you display it on the screen, all of this. You notice a lot of creativity is required because we are constructing a new space using tools that have never been touched before. So I think that all of these innovations, and even the aspect of computer evolution totally dominated by print, that these have been enormously aided by visual imagination, by visual skills, by cognitive strategies involving geometric spaces and motion within them. So there could be expected incidents of psychedelic usage among pioneers in those fields as well. But when it comes to computer graphics, I do think that all of these different possibilities you listed operate in parallel. I know from professional experience with my students that they’re [???]. Among the most interesting students attracted to study computer graphics are those with psychedelic and other unusual experiences, like traveling in foreign cultures. And they are looking for jobs where they can just feel more comfortable and have a chance for success and maintain their integrity. And they’ve chosen the computer graphic industry because it’s more communal or compatible, you know? But what they’re doing is of value. Simultaneously, it’s probable that they are trained to succeed better in it than other people who would be better off as engineers creating new hybrid devices, like high-density memory or something, faster processors and the like, which is very linear engineering- and drawing-oriented kind of thing.
So I think all of these things are created as a sort of a resonance between the psychedelic experience and computer graphics, and I don’t know which causes the other. You see, it could be that, while looking at a computer graphic program, you see the same picture over and over again. If I knew you’d get a kind of boredom [???] it’s like we can’t see that the typewriter sometimes, because we don’t want to stare at the page anymore. And print on the computer monitor does get really boring, and pictures do also. And it may be that people who don’t have psychedelic recreation are not able to continue in the job. You see, after a year or two they have to retire, whereas others have more longevity in that kind of work. I don’t know. And I don’t know how we can find out.
Sheldrake
No. I mean, one: finding out that it’s more than an [???] as the agency television network replied, and they contacted you about this. This has enormous implications. If the US needs to provide computer graphics, if the principal competitor is Japan, if the Japanese corporations haven’t yet got programmers working who are on the psychedelics, then there are two possible consequences. One, the revelation of psychedelic usage and the US [???] will alert the driving force in agencies in the United States to try and clean up Silicon Valley to the possible detriment of loss of world lead in this important aspect of US technology. Second, the Fujitsu Corporation and others in Japan may send their employees on crash courses in psychedelics, in which case they may well be getting in touch pretty soon with you in turn to hire you as consultants for this process, to try and unleash more creativity in Japan, assuming that the psychedelics haven’t hit Japanese corporate computer culture very much yet.
McKenna
Well, it’s likely that rather than suppress psychedelics in the United States, they will simply have to accept them, or accept second-rate status in one of the few fields where we still hold some advantage.
Abraham
Well, that’s a possibility. I’m not sure if we even still hold an advantage as far as the creative edge is concerned. In most of the large software companies, such as Borland, Microsoft, Santa Cruz Operation, and so on, I’m pretty sure that they do have drug testing, as they have at ABC News and so many other programs.
McKenna
To make sure that their programmers are taking sufficient psychedelics to stay on the cutting edge!
Abraham
Well, no. Not.
McKenna
Oh no? Come now, you’re slacking off here!
Abraham
No, but they’re not that rational out here. I think that they may be in Japan. The hysteria against drug usage in this country is not a rational program and probably will continue, even though it means that the United States has lost its place as a primary industrial nation. Well, in Japan, where the large corporations have very enlightened leadership, it seems, with their clear goals and so on, they very well study the data coming in from the grassroots science groups all over the world and decide that they need to encourage certain teams working on the frontier of the computer revolution there, where they are very keen to lead the world; encourage these teams to begin experiments with psychedelics, and monitor the results carefully in a controlled way. I think that’s very likely. And I have always anticipated the shift of leadership in intellectual, scientific, and technical things away from the United States as a wave of European immigrants that came during World War II die out. The American educational system has no way to replace them. It’s a very poor educational system. So I think we’ve already seen this; that the leadership in technical innovation has moved away from the United States, even in terms of computer software, computer graphics, and so on. Europe and Japan are on the rise, and the United States is in decline.
McKenna
So the conclusion is: that civilization which welcomes psychedelics is the civilization that will lead and rule the planet.
Abraham
Yes. Yes, that’s the conclusion.
McKenna
There you have it.
Sheldrake
I think we need to go a little further.
McKenna
Go for it.
Sheldrake
Well, one thing that I still haven’t heard from you all is, since I don’t have a mathematical landscape, having never been told about such things, when I was studying mathematics, having found manipulation of these things was quite meaningless. I was unsatisfied, having never been able to find out why you did these things, and therefore having abandoned mathematics like millions of others in despair, or just out of boredom or lack of engagement. I’m curious to know from Ralph’s experience, firstly, when he’s doing mathematical creative work, how the visual imagination works, how the mathematical landscape works, what your particular landscape is like. And secondly, out of the influence of psychedelic drugs back over seven years ago, did you find yourself in the presence of amazing, totally astonishing visions, which were nothing much to do with your usual mathematical landscapes? Or could you start from your habitual and well-known areas of mathematical landscape, and then almost consciously and interactively develop them in new ways to form the kind of continuity between those and the visions produced by such as the subject of DMT and LSD?
Abraham
Yes. Well, between mathematics and physics there’s a big difference. And there’s a certain personality, a person that would choose to be a physicist, and kind of an opposite type of person that would want to be a mathematician. Likewise, within mathematics there are completely different continents, as it were, in the mathematical universe, and the usual map of these [???] historians in mathematics has three continents. They are: algebra is the oldest one. And geometry and topology—that comes later—this is about the same time, it may be a little earlier. And then very recently a new one, which is analysis, dynamics, and so on. These three continents in the mathematical universe have totally different cognitive styles. And algebra, I’m not active in algebra, and I haven’t been to that many talks by algebraists, but I think that they have pictures that are more like tables—not tables of data, but classifications of things or something—and they use visual representations that you don’t find in the book, but they’re not delightfully rich visual representations that are very direct representations of what they’re studying. They’re like auxiliary things. Geometry of course is extrapolation of ordinary experience in space and time. In space, anyway, let’s say. So there are figures of triangles, spheres, tori, and so on. These cannot be really grokked in any way without visual representation.
Mathematicians, geometers, learn tricks for visualizing higher dimensions. That’s one of the main things. You could say the mathematical skills, the geometrical skills for our culture, have evolved little by little primarily through the development of cognitive tricks; these kind of visual representations of higher dimensions. Higher dimensions, well, three dimensions is represented in two by perspective. That’s some kind of trick. And there was a day in the fourteenth century when this trick was discovered by somebody, and communicated to somebody else, and became a major innovation in the history of painting.
And the third continent in the mathematical universe of analysis and dynamics, it has some kind of history from classical Greek times through the Middle Ages and so on, but primarily it’s associated with a recent beginning with Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and so on. This is geometry with motion. So the visual strategies necessary to think and work in this area of geometry is geometry with motion. So it’s a more complex visual cognitive strategy than had ever been attempted before. Of course, it’s relating to dance, to running through the woods, to catching a ball and so on. There’s dynamics in human experience, and every child is a dynamicist in learning to master the functions of the body, locomotion, and so on.
So that’s the background that I had worked in geometry, topology, and in analysis, or kind of analysis, classical analysis, which has symbolic representations of very great complexity and magnitude. For example, there are books where there’s a formula F equals on page one, and it goes on for over 300 pages of a single formula. To understand what it says, you have to assemble all these pages in your head and be able to scan it to like this, like Ritchie’s Midway Palace. And there are people who are trained to do that. The sliders come out of place and so on. That’s another kind of visual trick which is indirect with the [???].
And then… yes, by the time I started using psychedelics, I had already passed through this development, and had published papers on dynamics on in geometry and motion in very high dimensions which required actual visualization of four, six, or eight dimensions, down to the level of being able to remove the carburetor, replace something inside, and put it back on. So then what happened to me with psychedelic visualizations is that I saw, first of all, I saw the visual reality that’s revealed in that way from the perspective of a kind of a trained observer of higher dimensions. So I could recognize a lot of phenomena. I could remember them from taking out, combining them [???], and so on, just because of this training. I guess I specialized in the enjoyment of the physical realms revealed.
And also, what I perceived did seem to be elaboration of an extension of the maximum visual capability I ever had before was then—even with marijuana, I would say—the first one was extended enormously. Although when I first smoked marijuana, I didn’t have an extensive visual hallucination. Still, what I did observe—details of relationship between two people, for example—I then imaged these in a way using visual representative tricks which were beyond those that I’d used before. So the resonance, the connection—you know how it is that you can rove over—the connection between mathematical visualization extended and the perception of ordinary reality. This was fused in a very interesting fashion. I can tell this story, I guess, that I haven’t really made this connection before.
The one that I mentioned in invention is a counterexample of a conjecture of Smale in 1966, I think, called the Omega Stability Conjecture. And here’s what happened. I was introduced to marijuana by some students at Princeton, where I was teaching mathematics. I had gone to the dormitories, which is where they sat smoking, and smoked a joint. Then I had to walk home. While walking home—maybe this was in the summer—anyway I remember it was warm. No, probably it was spring of 1966. The path between the dormitory and my home, which was on the campus, passed, you know, where my office was on the first floor and close to the path. And in passing it, I heard that the telephone was ringing. So being a, you know, compulsive good boy, I ran and took my key, opened the door, and picked up the phone. It was Steve Smale calling from Berkeley. He said, “I have this new idea about Omega stability, and I wanted to check it out with you and see if you think it’s plausible or not.” I told him, the Omega stability conjecture, had never heard anything like it before. But these sets, the Omega [???] sets, if they have hyperbolic structure and then perturbations and so on. I said: “Oh, that’s very interesting, Steve.” I said, “It’s wrong.” Instantly there flashed in my mind the picture, which I described to him on the telephone. I was stoned. This may be one of the first examples of stoned mathematics, and it’s still one of my best remembered publications, I would say. “Oh no, Steve, that’s wrong. Because if you had in four dimensions the following configuration with the two dimensions out here, and the one dimension in there, with the intersection of this transverse one and so on,” I described this picture in four dimensions. Well, he has—maybe it’s in six dimensions. I can’t remember right now. It is something that there’s hardly anyone in the world that could visualize unless they were, although here’s the guy who could do it. Steve Smale: “My God, you’re right!” He said, “Oh, shit!” So then that was a short telephone call. I went on home, I went to bed. And in the subsequent two, three days, we talked on the telephone a couple of times, and we wrote a joint paper, which was published in 1968 in the plenary volume of this Global Analysis Conference, which was really the [???] of 1960s mathematics.
McKenna
Let me ask you a question, Ralph. Do you think that the psychedelics propel you into the realm of mathematical truth in the ordinary sense that that’s imagined, or that all we can ever perceive is the workings of our own minds? And so the mathematical landscape is the neurological landscape, and that it’s the structure of the brain defines the limit set of possible mathematical objects. This goes to the question of whether mathematics is a species-bound, specialized, localized human activity, or whether it’s discovering God’s truth in the universe.
Abraham
Well, this may be one of those unanswerable questions. You could ask the same question about ordinary reality. I mean, here it is. Is this a neurological construct with a history of other neurological constructs? Here, is there actual grass there, and here’s a tree, and that’s a bird.
McKenna
Well, what are you saying?
Abraham
So what I think is that the ordinary reality is really there, and is there even if everyone in our species should become extinct, and we’re all dead, and a lot of these things die. And so there’s still, I think, ordinary reality is really ordinary and really real. And I think the same about the mathematical landscape: that it’s been there, it’s evolving, it’s there with and without us, and as we travel there, we have these Cristoforo Colombo and Vasco da Gama and so on of the mathematical landscape. They go out there, they find the footprints of some other explorer, they follow them, they find where that person turned around and came back, they camp out, they pitch their tent there, they hang out for a while, they go a little further out and come back, they write a report, they send it back. These different reports are integrated into our cultural map of this other actual reality, which is much richer than this one, and much more complex and hard to grok. So we haven’t really got much of it yet. It’s vast. And for me, one of the most exciting aspects of psychedelic traveling has been to go miles.
McKenna
Where no man has gone before! Well, do you think, then, that a hypothetical civilization of extraterrestrials on the other side of the galaxy doing mathematics will discover and describe the same objects that you and your colleagues discovered and described?
Abraham
Yes. Absolutely. It would be a fantastic coincidence if there’s this enormous landscape, and they travel a lot and then we travel a lot, there might not be any intersection at all. There could be planets where there was a mathematics which had the same reality and so on, and yet there was no overlap. But since, you know, one, two, three—I mean, numbers; some things are so natural to the early discoveries in the mathematical landscape that I would think that there would be an overlap of between the mathematics of this planet and the mathematics of any other.
McKenna
So if we were to then encounter this extraterrestrial civilization, any mathematical discoveries that it had made, if we could get in communication with them, would be rationally apprehendable to us. We wouldn’t just say, well, that’s a Zell construct, and we humans can’t grok the Zell construct. Our brains are organized differently.
Abraham
Well, it might take a while. It might take a few generations. I think that our exploration of the mathematical landscape has been slow, and made slow of necessity. There is this idea that the discovery of a mathematical structure requires a certain neural net connectivity development, and that there is a co-development, co-evolution, between mathematical discovery and the neural net connectivity, actually; that structures within the mind, mimicking, empowering the representation of structures that are discovered in the mathematical landscape. So they come to us with a mathematical structure that we could not grok, although in principle it was explainable. The development of the language, the development of the capabilities to understand it, might take several generations, just as we now see ourselves, our children, and so on, struggling to understand the shapes in the reality of the computer revolution.
McKenna
So you’re more—it would be fair to call you as a mathematical Platonist, rather than a mathematical relativist.
Abraham
Yes.
Sheldrake
But in our previous conversations on this topic you denied—
McKenna
Yes, I was trying to point out. Well—
Sheldrake
—insisted on the applied, usually adopted by mathematicians on the defensive, but these are merely provisional models produced by the human mind, and as long as they suit us, we drop them [???]. And if there’s any objective existence at all, this is an evolving structure rather than an eternally fixed Platonic one, that somehow is co-evolving along with our imaginations. Just as the position I’ve heard you adopt.
Abraham
Yes, so this is a little confused. I’m afraid accept your idea of the evolution and the role of creativity in the mathematical landscape, and that this creativity is interactive with human activities on the mathematical frontier. So I accept that. This is kind of a modified Platonism. About the relativity of the models: we have to distinguish between mathematical structures, mathematical objects—such as chaotic attractors and so on—on the one hand, and a model built out of them for something in laboratory situation or ordinary reality, on the other hand, have said that scientists, especially physical scientists, tend to identify the model with the target system. They have Maxwell’s equations for the electromagnetic field with the E and the D and so on, and then they think that the E and the D are actually physically existing fields. And I reject that. But the E and the D in their relationship as expressed in the formula is an important kind of mathematical object which has its own real existence in the mathematical landscape. And the modeling function is applied mathematics, is [???], is the way in which mathematics can serve us as a cognitive strategy for understanding the world around us that is possible to take these mathematical objects, to use them as tinker toys, to put them together in the model, which in some way is something like the experience of our culture, our laboratory, our test tube, our ozone layer, or whatever, and through this relationship between one particular, carefully constructed mathematical model and our experimental scientific observation of nature around us to gain understanding and to see relationships in a clearer way. But the models are not real in the sense they’re identified with ordinary reality. But the models are real in the sense that they are actual existing objects constructed in the mathematical landscape.
Sheldrake
Well, their nature and their kind of reality would be the nature of field structures, I should imagine, since I think of the mind as being a system of fields—fields being spatio-temporal patterned regions. So if our minds are basically made out of mental fields, the mathematical landscapes have as their underlying structure in the mental field, that would be the kind of basis of the mathematical landscape or of its objective existence. I’d go further and think of them as morphic fields transmissible by morphic resonance. Then, since our view of the nature of the so-called the external world or the physical world is also one which science reveals to us as made up of organizing fields, modeling fields by means of fields would indeed be rather a good way of going about it, because the models would have the same kind of qualities as things being modeled. Namely, they’d be field structures, in other words, structures of extended interrelationship or patterns in spacetime.
Abraham
Yes, spacetime mathematics has been defined recently in the monthly notices of the American Mathematical Society as the study of patterns in space and time.
Sheldrake
Interesting. So then the fields, indeed, since fields—the principal metaphor from which fields are derived is agricultural fields, which are structures in landscapes—then the very metaphor of the mathematical landscape, or in Waddington’s [???] the epigenetic landscape, relate us automatically again to this whole field concept.
Abraham
Yes. Mathematical objects so-called, I guess, are creodes in this field.
Sheldrake
And so then psychedelics would enable the exploration of different regions of this field, these fields, to be explored. Just the metaphor of exploring would be quite appropriate. I mean, if we’re exploring the countryside, we’re going through fields and ecosystems and things which can also be thought as fields. So it’s an exploration process.
Abraham
Yes, it seems to be an [???] for resonance, something like [???] a violin.
McKenna
Well, Whitehead defined understanding as the apperception of patterns as such. And that means, then, that what you’re saying that mathematics is understanding—if mathematics is the study of patterns and understanding is the apperception of patterns as such—then mathematics and understanding are suddenly seen to be two names for the same program of mental activity.
Abraham
That’s one way. I guess you could say that. Then, of course, that’s Whitehead who would see understanding as primarily a mathematical function.
McKenna
Who was both a Platonist and a mathematician.
Abraham
The word “apperception,” I think, comes from Leibniz during his period [???] in French. And so we have to think of him also, proposing monads as fundamental units—
McKenna
Of the intellectual medium.
Abraham
—patterns, Platonic creodes from which to construct more complicated spacetime patterns suitable for modeling everything.
McKenna
Yes, monads are the atoms of the mathematical universe.
Abraham
So we’ve arrived here from psychedelics in the computer revolution to psychedelics as amplifiers in the monadological method of understanding.
McKenna
That by showing us pattern as such.
Abraham
And computer graphics, is it not—
McKenna
Makes it explicit.
Abraham
—a tool for doing monadology, where we have this CD full of fundamental monads which can then be combined in a kind of virtual reality, which is then the model for a certain real experience. Or perhaps it is the real experience depending on—
McKenna
Well, it makes the pattern explicit, rather than—
Sheldrake
But [???] mentions it still has the same kind of reductive capacity as the photograph. It—
McKenna
Well, but not, for instance, in virtual reality. I mean, they’re talking about virtual realities where you will go into Seahorse Valley of the Mantlebrot Set and camp there for several weeks exploring around.
Sheldrake
In 3D with goggles. But still, if mathematical imaginations exist in higher dimensions, still bringing it down. But usually it’s 2D. I mean these tactile pictures.
Abraham
In 3D I really tried to visualize something in much higher dimensions.
Sheldrake
So these are attempts to represent something which is experienced in a higher dimension.
Abraham
You said that the human EEG has the dimension around six and a half. So probably this isn’t exactly right, but it is believed that if dimension is too high, you can’t understand. If it’s too low, you can’t represent anything. Let’s just imagine that a lot of natural phenomena are basically six-, seven-, or eight-dimensional. Then certainly, whether it’s 2D or 3D where we’re representing them, it doesn’t matter much. You’re hardly, you know, at the front door of understanding what’s going on.
Sheldrake
But what about—well, there’s one point just to follow up. It’s something of the mathematics and understanding. There’s this whole range of possible fields, field structures that can be explored through mathematics. But of course, the realm of mathematics is perhaps vastly greater than the realm of physical reality we encounter. So there are far more mathematical structures around than there are things that we can map them onto, and we find ones which correspond more or less.
McKenna
To something that we can recognize.
Sheldrake
Yes. There’s lot that don’t correspond to anything we know about, at least on this planet.
McKenna
However, then aesthetics comes in here. Beauty itself becomes a criteria for the selection of mathematical objects. And, in fact, this has been historically true.
Sheldrake
Yes. But then there’s a further point, which is that just as mathematicians communicate with each other through a kind of resonance where they can transfer the picture, the intuition, the Gestalt from one to the other by means of symbols, dances, halting phrases, somehow it can just be transferred. Has anyone ever tried doing this in a psychedelic state? Say you had a room of mathematicians and they were taking a substance like ayahuasca, which produces on the one hand a kind of empathetic group mind, and on the other hand the visionary state. Would it be possible greatly to enhance this possibility of communication that happens in the colloquium room by means of this dance? Has that ever been, in your experience, tried?
Abraham
Well, I think, as far as I can remember in my group psychedelic experiences, there was never another major mathematician. But still, any person (to some extent) is a mathematician, and has these modes of perception, and uses them as cognitive strategies and so on. I found that the ability to evoke these images in someone else through just saying something in waving the hands is enormously enhanced in a shared psychedelic atmosphere. It is. Amazingly, resonance is definitely amplified. And therefore you can have success in communication that you have never dreamed, which is kind of a spoiler, really. A gesture—like the guru in the jungle, you know, some little signs and the person really has the whole idea, and then they respond, and the communication is very rapid. And even without some telepathic way there is apparent resonance emerging of minds, as it were. You can even visualize these minds like floating up to the ceiling and somehow docking with each other and then becoming one thing. And I have in this way created what appears to be what you could describe as a telepathic union with a person in such a two- or three-person psychedelic trip. I remember one with Kenny and Alice, where the three souls merged, and a telepathic bond was connected which was never broken. It didn’t end with the psychedelic trip. After, I think that we took various things and were still together for three days. After this, we always knew when something was happening with the other one; we could call up and say, “What’s going on?”
McKenna
Well, it sounds to me like group ayahuasca-taking among research mathematicians is a tremendous frontier for grassroots science.
Abraham
Yes!
Sheldrake
Exactly.