Authors: David Jay Brown,Rebecca McClen Novick
DJB: You mean like in the movie industry?
ROBERT: Yeah, and in television, in computers, in banking, all over the place.
DJB: Really, in banking?
ROBERT: Yeah. I've met a couple of bankers who are really very hip people.
DJB: Timothy Leary and Aleister Crowley both played similar roles in history and both had a significant influence on your evolving belief systems. Tell us about the effect these two people have had on your understanding of consciousness.
ROBERT: Well Crowley was such a complicated individual that everybody who reads Crowley has a different Crowley in his head. There's a million Aleister Crowleys depending on what part of him people are able to understand and integrate. Crowley, as the leader of the Illuminati and the Argentum Astrum the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), was continuing the project of overthrowing Christianity and added his own twist of reviving Paganism (which goes back to Giordano Bruno who wanted to do the same thing). Crowley is an interesting figure and has had a bigger historical impact than most people realize. The NeoPagan movement is bigger than anybody knows, except the Fundamentalists, who think it's a Satanic movement -- which from their point of view, I guess it is.
The Crowley who interests me is the scientific Crowley. He traveled all over the world, got initiated into every secret society he could, studied every occult system, studied Sufism in North Africa, Taoism in China, Buddhism in Ceylon and he tried to understand them all in terms of organic chemistry and physiology. He laid the groundwork for the scientific study of mysticism and altered consciousness. That's the Crowley I'm fascinated by--Crowley the scientist, who co-existed with Crowley the mystic, Crowley the poet, Crowley the adventurer and Crowley the Great Beast.
RMN: The Golden Dawn from which Crowley got much of his inspiration was a mystical school which is still lively today. Have you found this system able to remain flexible enough to adapt to the cultural and psychological revisions that have occurred since the Order was first established?
ROBERT: There are several Golden Dawns around, like there are several OTO's and several Illuminatis and so on. All of these things are fractionated, and of course, everybody with a power drive involved in these things claims to be the leader of the real and authentic Secret Chiefs. The Golden Dawn which I find most interesting is the one of which Christopher Hyatt is the Outer Head. He's a fully qualified clinical psychologist with a good background in Jungian and Reichian therapy and a great deal of theoretical knowledge of general psychology.
He was trained in the Golden Dawn system by Israel Regardie who was also a psychologist as well as a mystic. I think Hyatt knows what he's doing; I think he's got his head on right. He doesn't have delusions of grandeur. He's not a prima donna and he's free of most of the deviant and aberrant behavior that's chronic in the occult world. What are the goals of the Golden Dawn? Unleashing the full positive potential of human beings.
RMN: What are the methods involved?
ROBERT: The original Golden Dawn in the 1880's used Kabbalistic magic. Crowley revised it to include Kabbalistic magic and yoga and a bit of Sufism. Regardie revised it to include a great deal of Reichian bodywork, and an insistence that anybody who enters the Order should go through psychotherapy first. He became aware that people who get into Kabbalistic-type work, especially in the Golden Dawn tradition, who haven't had psychotherapy, are likely to flip out or scare themselves silly. Regardie also insisted that they should know General Semantics, which is interesting since it was General Semantics which got me interested in the study of alternative consciousness.
RMN: Why did Regardie want this to be included?
ROBERT: General Semantics is a system that is very useful in clarifying your thinking. If you understand the rules of General Semantics, you're more or less immune to most of the errors that are chronic at this stage of civilization. One of the rules of General Semantics is avoid the is of identity, which is a rule I just broke when I said "General Semantics is..." It's very hard to avoid the is of identity in speech. We all use it all the time. I'm getting pretty good at avoiding it in my writing. Whenever you're trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with my thinking? Why can't I get to the bottom of this? Why am I confused about this problem? Write it down and take out every "is" and reformulate it in some other way. You'll find that your thinking has been tremendously clarified.
It's like the celebrated problem in quantum physics in the 1920's. The electron is a wave. The electron is a particle. Those two things contradict each other totally, which led to a lot of physicists saying that the universe doesn't make sense, the universe is irrational and so on. If you reformulate it without the "is" of identity, there's no paradox at all. The electron appears as a wave when we measure it in certain ways. The electron appears as a particle when we measure it in other ways. There's no contradiction. There are a lot of other ideas in general semantics that are equally useful in clarifying thought.
DJB: That's one of the claims of the recent technology of brain machines. What experiences have you had with them, which ones do you find the most promising and what kind of potential do you think they hold for the future?
ROBERT: The most outstanding experience I've had with a brain machine was with the first one, the Pulstar. I had an out-of-body experience which registered as flat brain waves on the EEG, and that fascinated me. That was the first objective sign I had ever seen that something was going on in out-of-body experiences besides heightened imagination. I don't see much difference between a lot of the brain machines around. Some are demonstrably inferior, and out of charity I won't mention their names. Some claim to be very superior to all the others, but as far as I can see, most of them function pretty much the same.
At present, I'm more interested in the light and sound machines than I am in the electro-magnetic machines, because there is some legitimate cause for concern that sending electro-magnetism into your brain too often may not be good for you. The whole field is growing very fast. There's a bunch of tapes put out by Acoustic Brain Research in North Carolina. They use only sound, but they combine it with subliminals and Ericksonian hypnosis in a way that I find very effective. They're using sound at the same frequencies that you find in the electro-magnetic machines, or the light and sound machines.
The Graham Potentializer does seem a little more powerful than any of the other machines, but I wouldn't guarantee it because I haven't had enough experience with it yet. What T want to see is more controlled, double-blind studies of these machines, because everybody has their own anecdotal impressions, but we don't really know yet which are the best. Which wave forms are the best? We don't know that yet. Why do some people respond better to one than to others? We don't know why. There's a lot mure to be learned and I'm very eager to see more research.
RMN: Do you think that the use of brain machines requires an accompanying discipline?
ROBERT: I suspect so. One manufacturer told me that the return rate is about fifteen percent. I think these machines are much easier than the biofeedback machines, but they still require some discipline. I think they require some previous experience with Yoga, or Zen, or some consciousness-altering work. You need some kind of previous experience or you just won't know how to use the machine. I don't think the machine really works as an entrainer unless you practice between sessions, trying to revive the state without the machine. A lot of people can't do that, they just assume that the machine will do all the work for them, which is kind of like thinking that you just get in the car and it'll take you where you want to go.
DJB: The potential of nanotechnology seems far more vast. How do you think it's development will affect human consciousness in the future?
ROBERT: I haven't thought much about that. That's an interesting question. It's going to change everything. Nanotechnology is a much bigger jump than anything else on the horizon. It's bigger than space colonization, bigger than longevity. It's a million times bigger than the industrial revolution. It's going to change things so much that I can't begin to conceive how much; but everything's going to get dirt cheap. The ozone layer will get repaired rapidly. We could create redwoods as fast and as many as we want, and then there's star-flight. I don't know; it's just a whole new ballgame, and it leads directly into immortalism.
DJB: How about new ways to alter the brain?
ROBERT: Oh, of course. Eric Drexler, in his book on the subject, talks about constructing micro-replicators that, if you let them loose in the body, they run all over the place, inspecting every cell. If it's not functioning properly they go back, get information from the main computer and repair it. You can obviously do the same thing with brain circuits. It'll probably replace psychiatry. Nanotechnology is so staggering, we can't think about it without hyperbole, and it's coming along rapidly. The Japanese are spending fantastic amounts on that kind of research.
RMN: What do you think about the idea than many inventions are actually rediscoveries of technologies that have already existed in the past?
ROBERT: That's always seemed very implausible to me. There are some cases--the steam engine was discovered in Greece and forgotten until Watt rediscovered it--but I doubt that there are many. Most things weren't discovered until they could be discovered, until there was the time-binding heritage, or until the information accumulation had reached the necessary level. This is why you have so many cases of parallel discovery in science, where in five years three people patent the same thing in different countries. As Charles Fort said, "It's steam engines when it comes steam engine time."
RMN: What if there were times when the information had accumulated but not the political or social climate necessary to appreciate it? Libraries have been burned and knowledge chased underground by authoritarian forces.
ROBERT: Well, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should remain silent."
RMN: A lot of people feel that technology is at odds with their ecological thinking. What do you think is the evolving role of the science of Ecology.
ROBERT: The first book I ever read on ecology was way back in the forties. It was called The Road to Survival. I've always been fascinated by ecology because I'm fascinated by whole systems. That's why Bucky Fuller fascinates me. He always starts with the biggest whole system and works his way down. I've written a lot of satirical things about pop ecology because I think a lot of people have got on the ecology bandwagon who don't know their ass from their elbow about science, and it's turned into a kind of late Christian heresy like Marxism. It's become a new blame game, where people go around laying guilt trips on other people. Guilt is very fashionable in Western civilization.
Albert Ellis said the most popular game in Western civilization is finding and denouncing no-good shits. I found that so impressive I've incorporated it into a couple of my own books. Every generation picks out a group of no-good shits. In the Victorian age it was adolescent boys who masturbated, and now it's cigarette smokers. There's always got to be some no-good shits for people to denounce and persecute, and to the extent that ecology has degenerated into that, it arouses my satirical instinct. But of course the science of Ecology itself is tremendously important, and the more people who know about it, the better.
RMN: The methods of science and art are beginning to achieve some wonderful things together. What do you think created such a chasm between the two disciplines in the first place, and why do you think they are now merging?
ROBERT: Science and art. Now what created such a chasm between them? Why the hell did that happen? I think I'm going to go back and blame the Inquisition. Science had to fight an uphill battle against the Inquisition and this created a historical hangover in which scientists had acute hostility to every form of mysticism, not just to the Catholic church which had been persecuting them. I think that rubs off onto art, because there's something mystical about art no matter how much you try to rationalize it. If you get a bunch of artists together talking about where they got their creativity from, they sound like a bunch of mystics.
Then there was the rise of capitalism. I'm inclined to agree with Karl Marx about that, that every previous form of society has had different values, a hierarchy of values. Capitalism does tend to reduce everything to just one value--what can you sell it for? And as Oscar Wilde said, "All art is quite useless." The value of art depends on who's manipulating the marketplace at the time. It's spooky. Art is the Schrodinger's cat of economics.