Authors: David Jay Brown,Rebecca McClen Novick
Charles Tart, a psychologist at UC Davis, has pointed out that the ways in which scientists theorize about the complex interplay between the brain and consciousness is highly flavored by the prevailing technology of a particular time in history. For instance, in the beginning of the century Freud built his model of consciousness in accordance with the technology that was popular in his day - the technology of the steam engine and the science of hydraulics. We can see this clearly in many of his concepts. There is reference to the idea of how drives build up pressure, which needs to be released, and how fluid-like energies such as the libido need to flow. The symbolic release of libidinal tension in a dream then, is seen as functioning like a safety valve for libidinal build-up-so the system doesn't explode--like the safety valve on the boiler of a steam engine. The safety valve is there so if the pressure reaches a certain threshold, it just bleeds steam off in a harmless hissing. When the biological drives of the id become too strong, then dreams bleed off that excess drive in the form of hallucinatory gratification.
Then when the telephone came along, with it came the switchboard operator models of consciousness. My first undergraduate psychology textbook had a full-page illustration of how the brain functions like a giant switchboard with telephone-like connections to all parts of the body. John Lilly was the first to apply the computer as a metaphor for understanding the brain in his book Programming and Metaprogramming the Human Biocomputer. When I was an undergraduate studying psychology, the computer metaphor was just beginning to be entertained on the fringes of academia. Our brains could be seen as the hardware, and our culturally conditioned BS, language, and other memes would be the software. Since then cognitive psychology and cognitive science have adopted the model of the computer as a metaphor for how the brain functions, and this has now become the standard and accepted model.
All of these models help to shed some light on how the mysteries of the brain and mind interact, but they are also quite limited, and can be dangerously misleading. The brain is not a hydraulic system, a telephone switchboard, or a computer. But, as models, these metaphors give us a partial grasp of something that is otherwise too complex to comprehend. When we interviewed John Lilly he told us that he thought a human brain can never fully understand itself, because a simulation that modeled and mapped the entire brain would take up all the space in the brain, filling it to capacity. It would take a larger brain to understand our brain, and then that brain couldn't fully understand itself.
The newest technology to act as a metaphor for the brain and consciousness is Virtual Reality technology. VR allows us to control the sensory input that channels into our nervous system and to determine what our experience of reality is. People like Timothy Leary, who prefers the term "Electronic Reality," and Charles Tart have begun to see VR technology as a metaphor for the brain. Computer-generated simulations in Virtual Reality become acceptable to the brain as reality. This leads to the understanding that all we ever really experience of reality are simulations created by our brain out of the influx of sensory signals that we receive from our senses. We already live in fabricated realities. We each live inside a reality-generating apparatus called the nervous system. Timothy Leary dubbed this understanding "neuro-electric awareness'-the understanding that we are creating reality out of the sensory signals that we perceive. Buddha called this understanding "enlightenment."
But to fully understand this concept we must actually experience it. We almost always forget that our perception of what we call the physical world is a simulation and not "reality itself." William Blake understood the concept that we create our own reality when he stated, "That which appears without, is within." When I had my first LSD trip at the age of 16, among other things I realized that the brain entirely creates what we experience as reality. I realized it by experiencing it. Everything that we think is the external world is actually a neurological simulation fabricated out of complex chains of sensory signals by the human brain. On that psychedelic experience it appeared to me as though all of reality was composed of points or monads, and that our perception of reality is like those connect-the-dots games that we play as children. The possible ways of connecting the dots are far more varied than I had thought, and can be done in countless different ways.
Carl Jung coined a term that helps to explain this called "Constellating Power," based on how we create constellations in the sky out of the massive tangle of stars. Once a pattern has organized itself in our mind's "I," it becomes hard then not to see it that way. Since the Virtual Reality created by the perceptual simulation process is one's "reality experience," it is difficult to not completely identify with the Virtual Reality as the "real" reality. Part of the motivation for putting this book together stemmed from our understanding that since we are responsible for creating reality-individually and jointly--what then are the most fabulous and interesting realities that we can experience?
Reality is defined as that which is real, and it is created through a blend of belief and experience. Several years ago, Virtual Reality pioneer Jaron Lanier told me that he thought that there were three levels at which one can change or create "reality": (1) at the neurological level of the brain through neurochemistry; (2) at the sensory level through Virtual Reality simulation; or (3) in the external world through the atomic reconstructional possibilities of nanotechnology. But we can also change our perception and interpretation of the world through intention and will. Intentionally changing one's attitude can dramatically shift one's perspective and social relationships. Dreams also open up a frontier for exploring the possibilities of reality fabrication. When we asked Stephen LaBerge, lucid dream researcher at Stanford University, about using VR as a metaphor for lucid dreaming, he said that lucid dreaming was like "high-resolution VR."
A basic premise that we had for this book was that--through cosmological time, biological evolution, personal development, and cultural transformations-consciousness evolves. From atoms to galaxies, amoebas to neurons, the evolution of consciousness seems an endless adventure. Terence McKenna told us that he thought the ultimate goal of human evolution was a "good party." One thing is for sure. It is on the expanding edge of the horizon, where reality intersects the imagination, that we will forever find our new beginnings.
David Jay Brown,
Topanga, California
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Mushrooms, Elves and Magic
with Terence K. McKenna
Terence McKenna is one of the leading authorities on the ontologicaI foundations of shamanism and the ethno-pharmacology of spiritual transformation. After graduating from UC Berkeley with a major in Ecology, Resource Conservation and Shamanism, he traveled through the Asian and New World Tropics and became specialized in the shamanism and ethno-medicine of the Amazon Basin. What he learned in these explorations is documented in
The Invisible Landscape
, which he wrote with his brother Dennis.
Born in 1946, Terence is the father of two children, a girl of eleven and a boy of fourteen. He is the founder of Botanical Dimensions-a tax-exempt, nonprofit research botanical garden based in Hawaii. This project is devoted to collecting and propagating plants of ethno-pharmacological interest and preserving the shamanic lore which accompanies their use.
Living in California, Terence divides his time between writing and lecturing and he has developed a software program called Timewave Zero. His hypnotic multi-syllabic drawl is captured on the audio-tape adventure series True Hallucinations--soon to be published in book form--which tells of his adventures in far-flung lands in various exotic states of consciousness. Terence is also the author of
Food of the Gods
, which is a unique study of the impact of psychotropic plants on human culture and evolution and The Archaic Revival, in which this interview appears. His latest book
Trialogues at the Edge of the West
, is a collection of "discursive chats " with mathematician Ralph Abraham and biologist Rupert Sheldrake
.
This was our first interview It took place on November 30th, 1988 in the dramatic setting of Big Sur. Overlooking the Pacific Ocean we sat on the top floor of the Big House at the Esalen Institute, where Terence was giving a weekend seminar. He needed little provocation to enchant us with the pyrotechnic wordplay which is his trademark, spinning together the cognitive destinies of Gaia, machines, and language and offering a highly unorthodox description of our own evolution.
RMN
DJB: It's a pleasure to be here with you again, Terence. We'd like to begin by asking you to tell us how you became interested in shamanism and the exploration of consciousness.
Terence: I discovered shamanism through an interest in Tibetan folk religion. Bon, the pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet is a kind of shamanism. In going from the particular to the general with that concern, I studied shamanism as a general phenomenon. It all started out as an art historical interest in the pre-Buddhist iconography of thankas.
DJB: This was how long ago?
Terence: This was in '67 when I was a sophomore in college. The interest in altered states of consciousness came simply from, I don't know whether I was a precocious kid or what, but I was very early into the New York literary scene, and even though I lived in a small town in Colorado, I subscribed to the Village Voice, and there I encountered propaganda about LSD, mescaline, and all these experiments that the late beatniks were involved in. Then I read The
Doors of Perception
and
Heaven and Hell
, and it just rolled from there. That was what really put me over. I respected Huxley as a novelist, and I was slowly reading everything he'd ever written, and when I got to
The Doors of Perception
I said to myself, "There's something going on here for sure."
DJB: To what do you attribute your increasing popularity, and what role do you see yourself playing in the social sphere?
Terence: Well, without being cynical, the main thing I attribute to my increasing popularity is better public relations. As far as what role I'll play, I don't know, I mean I assume that anyone who has anything constructive to say about our relationship to chemical substances, natural and synthetic, is going to have a social role to play, because this drug issue is just going to loom larger and larger on the social agenda until we get some resolution of it, and by resolution I don't mean suppression orjust saying no. I anticipate a new open-mindedness born of desperation on the part of the Establishment. Drugs are part of the human experience, and we have got to create a more sophisticated way of dealing with them than exhortations to abstinence, because that has failed.
RMN: You have said that the term "New Age" trivializes the significance of the next phase in human evolution and have referred instead to the emergence of an archaic revival. How do you differentiate between these two expressions?
Terence: The New Age is essentially humanistic psychology, eighties style, with the addition of neo-shamanism, channeling, crystal and herbal healing, and this sort of thing. The archaic revival is a much larger, more global phenomenon that assumes that we are recovering the social forms of the late Neolithic. It reaches far back in the twentieth century to Freud, to surrealism, to abstract expressionism, even to a phenomenon like National Socialism which is a negative force. But the stress on ritual, on organized activity, on race/ancestor consciousness these are themes that have been worked out throughout the entire twentieth century, and the archaic revival is an expression of that.
RMN: In the book you wrote with your brother Dennis, The Invisible Landscape, and in recent lectures and workshops, you've spoken of a new model of time and your efforts to model the evolution of novelty based on the ancient oriental system of divination, the I-Ching. Can you briefly explain how you developed this model, and how an individual can utilize this system to modulate their own perspective on the nature of time?
Terence: Ah, no. I think I'd rather send you a reprint of a recent paper in Revision than to try and cover that. It's not easily explained. If I were to give an extremely brief resume of it, I would say that the new view of time is that time is holographic, fractal, and moves toward a definitive conclusion, rather than the historical model of time which is open-ended, trendlessly fluctuating, and in practical terms endless. What's being proposed is a spiral model of history, that sees history as a process actually leading toward a conclusion. But the details of it are fairly complex.