Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the
 psychedelic salon. Well I'm finally getting this week's podcast out at mid
 week which is always my target but not one that I hit very regularly, at least
 not lately. But here we are nonetheless and today we're going to hear the last
 of the trilogues for a bit. In fact I've got a little surprise for you next week
 and I'll tell you about that after we hear today's program. But first I want to
 thank John S and Terry L both of whom sent generous donations to the salon
 recently. So thank you John and Terry I appreciate your support in helping to
 keep these podcasts going. And for today's podcast we're going to hear the
 recording of a private conversation Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham and
 Rupert Sheldrake had back in September of 1991. Their topic that day was
 psychedelics and the computer revolution. And we begin with Ralph Abraham
 introducing the topic but as you listen try to keep in mind that this
 conversation was held in 1991 and a lot has taken place since then, particularly
 in the arrival of the Internet and significantly faster and more powerful
 personal computers then were available back then. So let's join Ralph now.
 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 newspapers speculating on 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 interviewed on the subject, my usual
 subject of complex dynamical models for history or social economic political
 systems and their potential for aiding jumpstart on the future. When the
 interview finally appeared in 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
 who 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
 trilogues are 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 psychedelic 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 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 and we can dig it up in the wreckage in the basement of the local
 church and so on. The computer revolution began in World War II. Or it could put
 the beginning anywhere but what we 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 Norton bomb site, then there's the Enigma machine and so on.
 I was in grade school at that time. Then the psychedelic revolution, let's say,
 started in the middle 60s. What's going on in the computer revolution in the
 middle 60s? We had the beginnings of a field now called scientific
 computation. At first computers weren't used for scientific computation except
 as a special-purpose analog computers like the Norton bomb site, 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, anyway, 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 and Sutherland and so on. The usage of computer graphic hardware
 required software that was developed later by various people whose names are
 not well known. Whether they used psychedelics or not we couldn't 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 a major
 change in the direction of the computer revolution in the emphasis, 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 also we found other innovations in
 computer graphic software such as the first paint program and the PostScript
 method of doing typographics.
 More recently in the the 80s we had the decline of hardcore psychedelics of the
 onset of the, what do 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 of chronology and this suggests some
 conjectures, only chronological conjectures, not necessarily making much
 sense such as a 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 its 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 and 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 you go down a little corridor, you come to you can choose between this
 door or lifting that rock and then you go up vertically and it's a computer graphic
 alternate reality is the substance of the game and 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 evolution, I mean the cultural history and the evolution of this game
 milieu were co-evolutionary processes. And finally a causal relationship between
 ecstasy and the emphasis on virtual reality which is now being developed
 with great enthusiasm by governments for purpose of driving tanks, weapon systems
 and making love, operating business, telecommuting 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
 Park, this place where some of the very important software concepts developed
 and it's in it's in Palo Alto, centrally located in the Silicon Valley and in
 the midst of the central marketplace of the psychedelic culture. What do you think?
 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
 drugs 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 in its mouth and
 these two concerns are seen to be simply different approaches to the completion
 of the same program of knowledge. Well that's very nice, it's a little less than
 I wanted. This is a kind of a theory of convergent evolution or something. So I'm
 thinking of the machines have evolved in a certain way they could have evolved
 some other way. Why would they do this way? Because the interest of 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 an illustration in them, we'll have an
 encyclopedia, a 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 is quite orthogonal from the preceding direction and vector of
 cultural history? Well print had a series of sensory biases and intellectual
 biases built into it that print culture was always extraordinarily naive 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.
 A whole new approach would be to say yes we had the repression of fantasy thanks to the print medium dominating
 because 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.
 Well it's all of a piece. I mean television, yes, I mean television is
 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 shaped 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 what it 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 print head
 style of thinking that... The visual representations for example have been
 relegated to the unconscious through the restrictions of the media. Well they've
 always been the medium by which the... They are released from the unconscious and
 enter as if all people had suddenly become surrealist artists. 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. Outing the unconscious. And this is computers are a
 wonderful tool for this as are psychedelic drugs. 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 our
 selves and conscious purpose in our society on one hand and the cultural
 morphogenetic field on the other hand. The species mind is being made explicit
 by entering into the visual awareness of individuals. And through these means when
 connection between the group mind and business practice and so on is amplified
 then we get commercial manifestation of creativity of products like the personal
 computer. 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? Well, I like the idea of the
 re-emergence of the unconscious and it reminds me of the, presumably the
 prototypic image of the realization of archetypal images in some kind of
 shared space. It is the cave art of the Paleolithic where you go deep into a
 cave and there by the flittering light of candles after a scary initiatory
 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
 flittering 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, is in some sense the precursor of television.
 Televisions 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 principle used 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 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. So cinema, television, psychedelics as another form of
 darkened space and flickering images and visual 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 psychedelic vision. These seem to be
 related kinds of phenomena. So if we see this as 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. The real roots 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 imagination and of 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. It's part of an archaic revival. The print thing is very
 artificial and we live completely within it. The verbal thing is very artificial. 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. It's just a matter of scale. We have a million years of consciousness and then we have only 50 or 100 thousand years of speech.
 Speech is a newcomer on the scene. The morphic field barely recognizes words.
 But words are still an incredibly deeply established creed compared with written
 words or print. Yes. 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. But it isn't a
 clearly, 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. No E looks like every other E. So you must look at
 manuscript. 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, of 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.
 Compression, informational content of media, 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. 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. Well, as a matter of degree, as with high-definition
 television, the resolution of video is increasing due to the over usage of
 silver and organic pigment and so on, the resolution of film is
 decreasing, sometime they'll meet. Computer graphics has 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 television. Think of computer
 graphics. Well, television is related to the psychedelics. As interactive cinema, not as
 interactive video. I think that's appropriate. 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. 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. More like a dream, in fact. More like a dream, in fact. 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 scenes 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 iPhones on like this. It's
 temporary. Because they don't understand that if 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. You say, "Oh, that's right, I don't have to stare at it."
 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, Salome or something, and
 put them on the walls around you. So, well, interactivity is the primary, I mean,
 this is the area where the computer revolution and psychedelics are in
 convergent evolution. They are 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 cultural evolution beyond what was
 accomplished by hippies in the 1960s with psychedelics. Larger groups spread
 over space and time can come into morphic resonance with the same image.
 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, and for many mathematicians a particular realm of
 visual imagination, this is Ralph's chosen field of course, that 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
 a late-cycle symphony. And the secret which good mathematicians seem to have
 inherited or picked up almost by accident is that these symbols relate to
 what Francis Galton called mathematical landscapes, an inner 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 as little balls that were running 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 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, fractal
 imagery on printed fabrics and so on. So through computer graphics there's this
 opening up or democratizing of 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? 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 line 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, to 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 an audience of people trying to
 understand, then you always see these visual dynapics, 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 Giornano Bruno and so on.
 Here's a space, this corner, and this is where this goes, and this, and
 everything is coordinated with space. The dance of the performer, the waving of the
 hands, the drawing on the blackboard, 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 with 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, you know, in the memory field, a
 little icon, that's fine, but for somebody to learn mathematics from scratch in
 this way, it's impossible. So after this limitation on 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 is 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. 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. Yes, the current, the 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, dancings, moving colored
 pictures, dramas, you know, a coordinated multimedia display created by expert
 best understanders of the subject, let us say how to repair a car or how this tree
 grew from a seed and the morphogenetic field, the geometry of the soul, wherever
 you double-click you're going to get this multimedia show which is actually
 interactive, which will help me see that again, go back, slow down. Well it's the
 species mind and it's nothing is happening except that what was
 previously wetware and driven by intuition is being made explicit as
 hardware and driven by a 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. You know, children's
 books, since I was reading to Cosmo yesterday and there's this book which is,
 it's got pictures, they're 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, you open the clock, there's a bird in there and these are children's books in
 which children actually gain their initiation to a certain level of
 initiation of, yes, 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 are used to teach
 mathematics to advanced engineering students in universities. They're like
 crude DMT hallucinations. Yes. So the best of the books, like children's books, and the computer
 revolution is now advancing to a point where they're sort of getting to 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, I mean they'll never get there,
 the richness of experience of a psychedelic trip either alone in a dark
 room or with a group of people exploring a flower. A long way to go.
 Well, coming back to the connection between psychedelics and the computer
 revolution, there are several ways one might look at it. One is, well, first the
 sociological fact, as revealed both on the basis of anecdotal stories and on the
 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, of the
 sort of television type visual space, by the printed word in a more humanescent form.
 So, in that area, people who develop new word processor things, or
 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 this 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 the other 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, it's a kind of ongoing usage during this
 kind of creative process? What do you think, Ralph? Well, I think in the creation of a
 new program, let us say the first spreadsheet, the first text editor or
 something, there are all kind 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, what's important, how do you
 treat it, how do you display it on the screen. All of this, an enormous amount 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 creations, and even in the aspect of
 computer revolution 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 personal experience
 with my students that there are among the most interesting students attracted
 to study computer graphics are those with psychedelic and other unusual
 experiences like traveling and 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 congenial, more compatible. You know, but what they're doing is of value.
 Simultaneously, it's probable that they are trained to succeed better in it.
 There are 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, drawing-oriented kind of thing.
 So I think all of these things I created is a sort of a resonance between
 psychedelic experience and computer graphics. And I don't know which causes
 the other. You see, it could be that while working on a computer graphic program,
 you see the same picture over and over again. Finally, you get a kind of boredom
 sets in where you don't feel it. It's like we can't sit at 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.
 Well, I mean, finding out is more than a matter of curiosity, because as the ABC
 television network implied when they contacted you about this, this has
 enormous implications. If the US leads the world in computer graphics, and if
 the principal competitor is Japan, if the Japanese corporations haven't yet got
 programmers working in them who are onto psychedelics, then there are two possible
 consequences. One, the revelation of psychedelic usage in the US computer
 fraternity will allow the drug enforcement agencies in the United States
 to try and clean up Silicon Valley to the possible detriment and loss of world
 lead in this important aspect of US high 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
 and Terence to hire you as consultants for this process to try and unleash more
 creativity in Japan, assuming that the psychedelics hadn't hit Japanese
 computer, corporate computer culture very much yet. 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. 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 operations and so on, I'm pretty sure that they do have drug testing as they have at ABC News and so many other...
 To make sure that their programmers are taking sufficient psychedelics to stay on the cutting edge.
 Well, no, not. Oh, no?
 [laughter]
 Come, come now, you're slacking off here.
 No, but they're not that rational here as I think 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 very clear goals and so on,
 they may 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,
 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 a shift of leadership
 in the intellectual, scientific and technical things away from the United States
 as the 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.
 So the conclusion is that civilization which welcomes psychedelics
 is the civilization that will lead and rule the planet.
 Yes, that's the conclusion.
 There you have it.
 I think we need to go a little further.
 Go for it.
 Well, one thing that I still haven't heard from Mark is, since I don't have a mathematical landscape,
 having never been told about such things when I was studying mathematics,
 having found the manipulation of these symbols quite meaningless and unsatisfying,
 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 this mathematical landscape works,
 what your particular landscapes are like.
 Secondly, under 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
 and form a kind of continuity between those and the visions produced by substances such as DMT and ISD?
 Yes. Well, you know, between mathematics and physics there's a big difference.
 And there's a certain personality of person that would choose to be a physicist
 and a 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 this universe by historians of mathematics has three continents.
 They are algebra, thus the oldest one,
 and geometry and topology that comes later about the same time or maybe 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 do, I don't really, I'm not active in algebra.
 And I haven't been to that many talks by algebraists.
 I think that they make, 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,
 where they're not delightfully rich visual representations
 that are very direct representations of what they're studying.
 They're like auxiliary things.
 The geometry, of course, is an extrapolation of ordinary experience in space and time.
 In space anyway, let's say.
 So there are figures of triangles, spheres, a torii and so on.
 These cannot be really brought 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
 has evolved little by little primarily through the development of cognitive tricks
 based on 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 14th century when this trick was discovered by somebody
 and communicated to somebody else and became a major innovation in the history of painting.
 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 power
 is the 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.
 I've worked in geometry, topology and in analysis,
 a kind of classical analysis which has symbolic representations of very great complexity and magnitude.
 For example, there are books where there's a formula F= on page 1
 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 like this, like Ricci's "Mimric Palace."
 And there are people who are trained to do that,
 who the slightest comma out of place and so on.
 That's another kind of visual trick which is indirect, like the Algebra is.
 And then...
 Yes, by the time I started using psychedelics,
 I had already passed through this development and had published papers on dynamics,
 I mean geometry and motion in very high dimensions,
 which required an 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, take them out, combine them in new forms,
 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 moment,
 was it 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 hadn'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,
 probably it was spring, the spring of 1966,
 the path between the dormitory and my home, which was on the campus,
 passed Eno Hall, 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 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.
 Tell me the omega stability conjecture."
 Never heard anything like it before, that these sets, the omega limit 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, they flashed in my mind the picture, which I described to him on the telephone.
 I was stoned.
 This is maybe 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 that's transversal 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.
 But it's something that there's hardly anyone in the world who could visualize unless they were--
 I'm like, 'Here's the guy who could do it, Steve Smale. My God, you're right.'"
 He said, "Oh, shit."
 So then that was it, a short telephone call.
 I went 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 climax of 1960s mathematics.
 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 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.
 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,
 or is there actual grass there, and here's a tree, and that's a bird?
 Well, what do you think?
 So what I think is that 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 they're 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 or without us,
 and as we travel there, we have these Cristoforo Colombo and Vasco de 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 farther.
 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 discover and describe?
 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 wasn't 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,
 there's some things that are so natural to be early discoveries in the mathematical landscape
 that I would think that there would be an overlap
 between the mathematics of this planet and the mathematics of any other.
 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 don't,
 we can't grok the Zell construct, our brains are organized differently."
 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 maybe 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 the mathematical discovery and the connectivity, actually,
 the structures within the mind mimicking, empowering the representation
 of structures that are discovered in the mathematical landscape.
 So they could 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 evolution.
 So you're more, it would be fair to call you as a mathematical Platonist,
 rather than a mathematical relativist.
 Yes.
 But in our previous conversations on this topic, we have been denied...
 Yes, I was going to point that.
 ...and you have insisted on the ploy usually adopted by mathematicians on the defensive,
 that these are merely provisional models produced by the human mind,
 we use as long as they suit us, we drop when they are not so,
 and that if there is 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.
 This is the position I have heard you adopt.
 Yes, so this is a little confused.
 I'm a Platonist, I 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 a kind of 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 a laboratory situation
 or ordinary reality, on the other hand,
 I've said that scientists, especially physical scientists,
 tend to identify the model with the target system.
 They have Maxwell's equations for the electric and magnetic field with the E and the B and so on,
 and then they think that the E and the B are actually physically existing fields.
 And I reject that.
 But the E and the B and 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 the thesis, is the way in which mathematics can serve us
 as a cognitive strategy for understanding the world around us,
 that it is possible to take these mathematical objects,
 to use them as tinker toys, to put them together into a 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 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 that the sense they are identified with ordinary reality,
 but the models are real in the sense that they are actual existing objects
 constructed in the mathematical landscape.
 Well, their nature and their kind of reality would be of 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 objects.
 So if our minds are basically made up of mental fields,
 the mathematical landscapes have as their underlying substrate a mental field,
 that would be the kind of basis of a 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 external world or the physical world
 is also one which science reveals to us is made up of organizing fields,
 then 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 quality as the things being modeled.
 Namely, they'd be field structures, in other words,
 structures extended into relationship or patterns in space-time.
 Yes, space-time. Mathematics has been defined recently in the monthly notices
 of the American Mathematical Society as the study of patterns in space and time.
 Interesting. So then, the field, and 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 terms,
 the epigenetic landscape, relates us automatically again to this whole field concept.
 Yes. The mathematical objects, so-called, I guess, are creoles in this field.
 And so then, psychedelics would enable the exploration of different regions of these fields to be explored.
 Just the metaphor of exploring would be quite appropriate.
 I mean, if we're exploring the countryside, then we go through fields and ecosystems and things
 which can also be thought of as fields. So there's an exploration process.
 Yes, it seems to be an amplifier for resonance, something like putting helium in a violin.
 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.
 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.
 Who was both a Platonist and a mathematician.
 The word "apperception" I think comes from Leibniz during his period when he was writing in French.
 And so we have to think of him also proposing monads as fundamental units of the intellectual medium.
 Patterns, atomic creodes from which to construct more complicated space-time patterns suitable for modeling everything.
 Yes, monads are the atoms of the mathematical universe.
 So we've arrived here from psychedelics and the computer revolution to psychedelics as amplifiers
 in the monadological method of understanding.
 That by showing us pattern as such...
 And computer graphics, is it not...
 Makes it explicit.
 ...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 certain real experience,
 or perhaps it is the real experience depending on...
 Well, it makes the pattern explicit rather than...
 It still has the same kind of reductive capacity as the photograph.
 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 Mantelbrot set
 and camp there for several weeks exploring around...
 In 3D with goggles.
 Yes.
 Still, if mathematical imaginations exist in higher dimensions, it's still bringing it down.
 But usually it's 2D. I mean, these fractal pictures...
 In 3D we are really trying to visualize something in much higher dimensions.
 So, these are attempts to represent something which is experienced in a higher dimension.
 It's said that the human EEG has a dimension around 6.5.
 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 phenomenon are basically 6, 7 or 8 dimensional.
 Then certainly, whether it's 2D or 3D where we're representing them, it doesn't matter much.
 You're hardly at the front door of understanding what's going on.
 But then, what about...
 Well, there's one point just to follow up this other thing of the mathematics and understanding.
 There's this whole range of possible fields or 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...
 To something that we can recognize.
 Yes. There's a lot that don't correspond to anything we know about, at least on this planet.
 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.
 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?
 Well, as far as I can remember, in my group's 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 and waving your hands,
 is enormously enhanced in the 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.
 Just 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, just in some telepathic way,
 there is an apparent resonance, a merging of minds, as it were.
 You can even visualize these minds floating up to the ceiling, and somehow docking with each other, and then becoming one thing.
 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 Ellis, 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 stoned 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?"
 Well, it sounds to me like group ayahuasca taking among research mathematicians is a tremendous frontier for grassroots science.
 Yes, exactly.
 You're listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
 Well, since I'm not a mathematician, I'm afraid that that's one grassroots science project that I won't be participating in.
 But something Ralph said about high-definition television got me thinking about a grassroots science project that I could do.
 I was intrigued by what Ralph said about the ways in which the deeper pixelation of high-definition television had the potential of changing our cognitive processing.
 So I did a little experiment to test his idea.
 And thanks to some friends, I now have access to a big-screen high-definition television to use for my experiment.
 Now, in the past, the programs that I watched in high-def were mainly those spectacular nature shows that included a lot of aerial views and other sites that are pretty far from our everyday reality.
 But I didn't think that they were the best way to check out Ralph's hypothesis.
 So instead, I selected a program that was about as everyday boring as life can often be, namely a golf tournament, which is about as exciting as watching the grass grow.
 But it can be an immersive experience if you look at it that way.
 Now, here in our area, some of the stations broadcast in both standard format and in high-def.
 So I watched for about a half an hour in the standard format and then switched to high-definition.
 Of course, it's an instantaneous sensation of "wow" when the high-definition kicks in.
 But this time, it was a smaller "wow" because there was no spectacular scenery flying by, just a bunch of guys strolling around a big lawn and hitting tiny white balls around.
 But in high-def, something else seemed to be going on.
 I still can't say what it is, but it was more than just a better picture that captured my attention.
 In some mysterious way, the shift to a higher number of pixels on the screen actually somehow pulled me into that scene in a way that I hadn't experienced before.
 Of course, I was paying attention to the experience in a more focused way because I was thinking about what Ralph had said, and perhaps I just let my fanciful imagination run away with me.
 But it got me to thinking that maybe some of our fellow Saloners who are looking for a graduate thesis topic might want to look into this phenomena to see if there's actually something physical that happens to a person's brain who is watching a television program in high-def.
 And here's where I'm going with this.
 For at least a decade now, there have been various teams working on the technical problem of delivering a psychedelic experience via digital technology.
 The mysterious digital drugs that you hear about from time to time.
 Now, word on the street is that some of these attempts have been very successful in tricking the brain into thinking it's on LSD or a similar hallucinogen.
 But all of the projects I've heard about involve using some cumbersome and expensive headgear, which is always going to be a difficult thing to sell.
 But if most households eventually have a high-definition television, and if some of our great young visionary artists transport their work into the world of online gaming, particularly the online multiple player games that are acted out in high def, well, the age of digital drugs may well be upon us.
 So, how about it, you game designers and university researchers?
 Let's get busy and see how long it takes before the screwheads in Washington discover that now they also have to start a war against digital drugs if they want to continue fighting the evolution of human consciousness that's already taking place in the psychedelic community.
 And contrary to what Star Trek fans like to think, it isn't space that's the final frontier, it's cyberspace.
 Or, more specifically, cyberdelic space.
 At least, that's my current fantasy.
 So, if anyone has the opportunity and time to investigate the effects of high def TV on the brain and wants to share their findings, I'd love to hear about it.
 Another thing I'm wondering is, where do you come down on the question that Rupert raised about halfway into their trilogue when he wondered whether, in the field of computer graphics, and today that, of course, would definitely include everyone in the gaming world,
 are those people working in that field because of their psychedelic experiences that drew them into it, or did computer graphics and gaming grow out of the psychedelic community?
 I guess that's sort of a modern-day chicken and egg problem.
 But there is no doubt in my mind, based on my own personal experience, that the computer industry, at least in regards to the personal computer and internet developers, well, that part of the industry is awash in psychedelics.
 It's a widely known fact, yet it's very seldom discussed in the mainstream media.
 Several books that do touch on this fact of life, however, are Technosis by Eric Davis, What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff, and Counterculture Through the Ages by R.U. Sirius.
 And there are a few others that I'll also add to the program notes for this podcast, if I can remember it.
 And if I forget to add those links, well, hopefully one of our fellow Saloners will do it for me in the comments section, like our friend Lewis did for Podcast 115.
 Thanks, Lewis, I appreciate your help.
 Also, I was taken by what Ralph said about the students with backgrounds involving psychedelics and/or travel who seem to be more drawn to working in the computer graphics field because that field also provided a better sense of personal integrity that some other professions didn't seem to have.
 And now that over a decade has passed since Ralph made that statement, I find that his observation is even more accurate today than it was back in 1991.
 And to me, the fascinating aspect of this migration of some of our best minds to the world of computer graphics is that that world now encompasses the game development industry.
 And if you know much about that tech, you know that it is the true leading edge of computing and the true leading edge of social evolution on this planet, at least in my humble opinion.
 And what do I base this on, you ask?
 Well, mainly on having met hundreds of people, both young and old, who are both psychedelic and are computer developers of one kind or another.
 At least from where I stand, these people have some of the sharpest and most well-rounded minds I've ever encountered.
 Now that I've said that, I wonder if something can be both well-rounded and sharp at the same time.
 Well, I think you know what I mean, and you probably know some people like that yourself.
 In fact, maybe you are one.
 Why else would you be listening to podcast lectures about psychedelics?
 So I guess I'm preaching to the choir here.
 By the way, one of the magazines that Ralph spoke about at the beginning of this plylog was Mondo 2000, which for me was my main source of information about the psychedelic community during the dark ages when I was living in the swamps of Florida and working for a corporate beast.
 And in fact, I still have all but the first two issues.
 I really should get rid of them, but I can't find it in my heart to throw them out.
 It was a really great magazine and was where I first learned about a guy named Terrence McKenna.
 Now, the reason I'm mentioning this right now is that the man behind Mondo 2000 and many other highly creative ventures was none other than Are You Serious, whose podcast you really should check out sometime.
 And you can find a link to it on our matrixmasters.com/podcast page.
 In the future, I'm going to try to get these podcasts back down to a one hour format, but I've still got a couple of things left to say before I go today.
 And I do appreciate you sticking with us for these longer programs.
 And so I'll try to be brief here.
 But I want to be sure to point you to the MySpace page of Pladovark, that's P-L-A-D-A-V-A-R-K, whose music fits in the trip hop, trance, psychedelic genre and uses a few sound bites from the salon on several tracks.
 During the past couple of years, several other groups have also honored the salon by using sound bites from various programs.
 And I really enjoy listening to them.
 So thanks to all of you musicians who are including sound bites from the salon in your work.
 And please feel free to use any clips you want from these podcasts.
 It's truly an honor to be included in your art.
 Now, almost every week I receive a comment or two about how much you appreciate the mind of Terrence McKenna.
 And since I've been playing so many of Terrence's talks, I guess I don't say much anymore about the brilliance of his thought.
 But I recently received an email from Zachary M., who is a longtime salon regular.
 And I want to read part of what he had to say because I think it expresses what a lot of us are thinking.
 Here's what Zachary has to say about Terrence.
 Terrence McKenna is somehow a timeless commentator.
 I don't know what it is, but this guy just doesn't seem to get old, but young.
 Every time you play one of his things, I'm just shocked at how old the talk is and yet how not only presently affirming, but futuristically pointing.
 The guy really seems to have become an immortal that does not age whatsoever.
 It's something in his voice. It's something in his consciousness that allows that to happen.
 It's not so much what he says as how he says it that is so powerful.
 Perhaps his magical bard-like powers have broken the bounds of time's borders and escaped into the dream beyond the eschaton.
 When you play another's talks from earlier times, it seems and feels very old.
 But McKenna's talk seems new, not only new, but cutting edge.
 Well, I'm in total agreement with you, Zachary.
 At least for now, it looks like Terrence is headed for that posthumous glory that he laughed about back in '99.
 But maybe that transcendental object at the end of time is actually the spirit of Terrence McKenna laughing at the cosmic giggle.
 Now that would be a nice surprise, don't you think?
 And the last thing I want to bring up here is an interesting message I received from Joel G.
 And here's part of what he had to say.
 "Hi, Lorenzo. I started listening to the Psychedelic Salon podcast a few weeks ago and I'm hooked.
 In one of the podcasts I heard the topic of Hopi prophecy briefly discussed,
 so I thought I'd tell you about a strange bit of coincidence I stumbled upon back in 2001.
 Here's a little background.
 The Hopi consider four mountain peaks in their geographic area as sacred.
 One of these is the San Francisco Peaks, just a few miles northwest of Flagstaff, Arizona.
 The Hopi believe that spirits or supernatural beings called kachinas live on the San Francisco Peaks.
 The kachinas are responsible for bringing good weather and bountiful crops, among other things.
 Here's the coincidence.
 I'm an avid mushroom hunter and in 2000 I had just relocated from Washington State to Arizona.
 I wasn't expecting much in the way of mushroom hunting in Arizona due to the arid climate.
 In August of 2001, quite by accident, I discovered a mushroom species new to science on the SF Peaks,
 home of the kachina spirits.
 You guessed it, the mushroom is psychoactive, containing psilocybin.
 This is the first known psychoactive mushroom native to Arizona.
 It has a habitat unlike any other psilocybin mushroom that I know of, aspen forest at about 9,000 feet.
 The majority of these types of mushrooms, which I assume he's meaning psilocybin,
 are associated with areas of human disturbance, such as landscaped areas and fields with livestock.
 So to find a species in a relatively undisturbed aspen forest is quite rare.
 As far as we know, it only occurs on the San Francisco Peaks and sightings are usually few and far between.
 I'm in no way suggesting that the Hopi knew of this mushroom, but I think the kachina mythology
 and the discovery of this new species is a fun and spirit-filled coincidence.
 Hope all is well with you and keep up the great work, Lorenzo. Kind regards, Joel.
 Well, Joel, thank you not only for the kind words, but also for that fascinating information.
 Stories like that really get my imagination going, and maybe that will be true for some of our fellow slaughters
 who might be able to shed some more light on what you so rightly call a fun and spirit-filled coincidence.
 Now, as I mentioned at the beginning of today's program, I've got something a little different for you next week.
 As so many of our fellow slaughters have pointed out to me, I've now done over 120 podcasts from the psychedelic salon,
 and yet there hasn't been a single one that has a talk by a fellow by the name of Dr. Timothy Leary.
 I think I've mentioned this before, but that isn't just an oversight on my part.
 Due to my close friendship with Myron Soloroff and Gary Fisher, both of whom who had very close working relationships with Dr. Leary in the '60s,
 well, I have a highly negative opinion of Tim Leary, and in deference to my two friends,
 I haven't done anything to add to the Leary legend.
 But the fates have decided that my stand can no longer be tolerated.
 At least that's the way I read the fact that a data drive arrived in my mailbox last week
 that had almost 100 gigabytes of audio and video recordings of the good Dr. Leary.
 And so it seems that I can no longer ignore this part of modern psychedelic history.
 Heck, even Ralph Abraham quoted him in today's trial log, so I guess that should be a sign for me to loosen up a bit.
 I'm not going to promise how much of this Leary archive I'll be playing here in the salon,
 but for next week I thought it would be interesting to hear the talk that Tim Leary gave at Cooper Union in 1965,
 which for some reason I seem to remember as having been of some consequence at the time.
 I haven't listened to it yet myself, but we can do that together next week
 and see how well his lectures stand up to the high quality of the McKenna material
 we've been listening to for the past couple of years here in the salon.
 It should provide an interesting comparison, don't you think?
 At least I hope it's going to be an interesting talk, and if it isn't, I'll come up with something else for next week.
 But as of right now, my plan is to begin trickling a little Tim Leary into the mix just to keep things interesting.
 And before I go, I want to mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
 are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-A-Like 3.0 license.
 And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
 which you can find at www.psychedelicsalon.org.
 And that's also where you'll find the program notes for these podcasts.
 And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
 Be well, my friends.
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