2: PSYCHEDELICS, COMPUTERS, AND VISUAL MATHEMATICS

Ralph: One day I was sitting in my office with my secretary, Nina, when there was a knock on the door. Nina said, "This is a friend of a friend of mine, who wants to interview you." I was very busy with the telephone and the correspondence, so he came inside and I answered his questions without thinking. After a month or so, when a photographer arrived, I began to realize that I had given an interview for Gentleman's Quarterly (GQ) magazine. I called my children and asked them what was GQ magazine. They live in Hollywood and know about such things. I was in Italy when the magazine finally arrived on the stands. I was very proud, in spite of my style of dress, that I had been the first one in our circle of family and friends to actually be photographed for GQ. But I was shocked in Firenze to open the first page of the magazine, and see my picture occupying a large part of the first page, with the table of contents, with the heading: "Abraham sells drugs to mathematicians." There were some other insulting things in the interview, that as far as I can remember, was largely fiction. I didn't mention it to anybody when I came back to California, and was very pleased that nobody mentioned it. Nobody had noticed. There were one or two phone calls, and I realized that nobody after all reads GQ. If they do look at the pictures, they overlooked mine. I was safe after all at this dangerous pass.

	Suddenly, my peace was disturbed once again by 100 phone calls in a single day asking what did I think of the article about me in the San Francisco Examiner, or the San Jose Mercury News, and so on. All the embers in the fire left by GQ had flamed up again in the pen of a journalist. A woman who writes a computer column for the San Francisco Examiner had received in her mail box a copy of the Gentleman's Quarterly article, in which Timothy Leary was quoted as saying, "The Japanese go to Burma for teak, and they go to California for novelty and creativity. Everybody knows that California has this resource thanks to psychedelics." Then the article quoted me as the supplier for the scientific renaissance in the 1960s. This columnist didn't believe what was asserted by Timothy Leary and others in the GQ article, that the computer revolution and the computer graphic innovations of California had been built upon a psychedelic foundation. She set out to prove this story false. She went to Siggraph, the largest gathering of computer graphic professionals in the world, where annually somewhere in the United States 30,000 who are vitally involved in the computer revolution gather. She thought she would set this heresy to rest by conducting a sample survey, beginning her interviews at the airport the minute she stepped off the plane. By the time she got back to her desk in San Francisco she'd talked to 180 important professionals of the computer graphic field, all of whom answered yes to the question, "Do you take psychedelics, and is this important in your work?" Her column, finally syndicated in a number of newspapers again, unfortunately, or kindly, remembered me. 

Shortly after this second incident in my story, I was in Hollyhock, the Esalen of the far north, on Cortes Island in British Columbia, with Rupert and other friends, and I had a kind of psychotic break in the night. I couldn't sleep and was consumed with a paranoid fantasy about this outage and what it would mean in my future career, the police at my door and so on. I knew that my fears had blown up unnecessarily, but I needed someone to talk to. The person I knew best there was Rupert. And he was very busy in counsel with various friends, but eventually I took Rupert aside and confided to him this secret, and all my fears. His response, within a day or two, was to repeat the story to everybody in Canada, assuring me that it's good to be outed. I tried thinking positively about this episode, but when I came home still felt nervous about it and said "no" to many interviews from ABC News, and the United Nations, and other people who called to check out this significant story. I did not then rise to the occasion, and so I've decided today, by popular request, to tell the truth. 

	It all began in 1967 when I was a professor of mathematics at Princeton, and one of my students turned me on to LSD. That led to my moving to California a year later, and meeting at UC Santa Cruz a chemistry graduate student who was doing his Ph.D. thesis on the synthesis of DMT. He and I smoked up a large bottle of DMT in 1969, and that resulted in a kind of secret resolve, which swerved my career toward a search for the connections between mathematics and the experience of the logos, or what Terence calls "the transcendent other." This is a hyperdimensional space full of meaning and wisdom and beauty, which feels more real than ordinary reality, and to which we have returned many times over the years, for instruction and pleasure. In the course of the next 20 years there were various steps I took to explore the connection between mathematics and the logos. About the time that chaos theory was discovered by the scientific community, and the chaos revolution began in 1978, I apprenticed myself to a neurophysiologist and tried to construct brain models made out of the basic objects of chaos theory. I built a vibrating fluid machine to visualize vibrations in transparent media, because I felt on the basis of direct experience that the Hindu metaphor of vibrations was important and valuable. I felt that we could learn more about consciousness, communication, resonance, and the emergence of form and pattern in the physical, biological, social and intellectual worlds, through actually watching vibrations in transparent media ordinarily invisible, and making them visible. I was inspired by Hans Jenny,1 an amateur scientist in Switzerland, a follower of Rudolf Steiner, who had built an ingenious gadget for rendering patterns in transparent fluids visible.

	About this time we discovered computer graphics in Santa Cruz, when the first affordable computer graphic terminals had appeared on the market. I started a project of teaching mathematics with computer graphics, and eventually tried to simulate the mathematical models for neurophysiology and for vibrating fluids, in computer programs with computer graphic displays. In this way evolved a new class of mathematical models called CDs, cellular dynamata. They are an especially appropriate mathematical object for modeling and trying to understand the brain, the mind, the visionary experience and so on. At the same time other mathematicians, some of whom may have been recipients of my gifts in the 1960s, began their own experiments with computer graphics in different places, and began to make films.

	Eventually, we were able to construct machines in Santa Cruz which could simulate these mathematical models I call CDs at a reasonable speed, first slowly, and then faster and faster. And in 1989, I had a fantastic experience at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where I was given access to, at that time, the world's fastest super computer, the MPP, the Massively Parallel Processor. My CD model for the visual cortex had been programmed into this machine by the only person able to program it, and I was invited to come and view the result. Looking at the color screen of this super computer was like looking through the window at the future, and seeing an excellent memory of a DMT vision, not only proceeding apace on the screen, but also going about 100 times faster than a human experience. Under the control of knobs which I could turn at the terminal, we immediately recorded a video, which lasts for 10 minutes. It was in 1989 that I took my first look through this window. 

	To sum up my story, there is first of all, a 20-year evolution from my first DMT vision in 1969, to my experience with the Massively Parallel Processor vision in 1989. Following this 20-year evolution, and the recording of the video, came the story with GQ and the interviews at Siggraph in the San Francisco Examiner that essentially pose the question, "Have psychedelics had an influence in the evolution of science, mathematics, the computer revolution, computer graphics, and so on?" Another event, in 1990, followed the publication of a paper in the International Journal of Bifurcations and Chaos, when an interesting article appeared in the monthly notices of the American Mathematical Society, the largest union of research mathematicians in the world. The article totally redefined mathematics, dropping numbers and geometrical spaces as relics of history, and adopting a new definition of mathematics as the study of space/time patterns. Mathematics has been reborn, and this rebirth is an outcome of both the computer revolution and the psychedelic revolution which took place concurrently, concomitantly, cooperatively, in the 1960s.

	Redefining this material as an art medium, I gave a concert, played in real time with a genuine super computer, in October, 1992, in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, in New York City.

	We come to our subject. I want to pose one or two questions, and read here one or two excerpts from some favorite books. We have to accept, I think, mathematics either in the new definition, or the old one. In the Renaissance cosmology of John Dee, mathematics is seen as the joint therapist of Father Sky and Mother Earth, or a kind of an intellectual, spiritual, elastic medium connecting up the heavenly realms and Gaia herself. That puts mathematics on the same level as the logos, or the holy spirit. Let's consider that for the sake of discussion. Having seen mathematics as a language of space/time pattern, let me ask you this, Terence and Rupert: To what extent could the psychedelic vision of the logos be externalized, either by verbal descriptions or by computer simulations, or by drawings of inspired visionary artists? On the other hand, in what ways could mathematical vision serve the spirit, and extend the mind? Is there a role, in other words, for this kind of thing in our main concerns? To give you a fast-forward toward the answer, let me read a couple of things from your writings. 

	First, from Terence's Food of the Gods2:

The archaic revival is a clarion call to recover our birthright, however uncomfortable that may make us. It is a call to realize that life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience, upon which primordial shamanism is based, is life trivialized, life denied! Life enslaved to the ego and its fear of dissolution in the mysterious matrix of feeling that is all around us. It is in the archaic revival that our transcendence of the historical dilemma actually lies. There is something more. It is now clear that new developments in many areas, including mind machine interfacing, pharmacology of the synthetic variety, and data storage imaging and retrieval techniques; it is now clear that new developments in these areas are coalescing into the potential for a truly demonic, or an angelic self-imaging of our culture. 

	Our second passage is from Rupert's The Rebirth of Nature3: 

As soon as we allow ourselves to think of the world as alive, we recognize that a part of us knew this all along. It is like emerging from winter into spring. We can begin to reconnect our mental life with our own direct, intuitive experiences of nature. We can participate in the spirits of sacred places and times. We can see that we have much to learn from traditional societies who have never lost their sense of connection with the living world around them. We can acknowledge the animistic traditions of our ancestors, and we can begin to develop a richer understanding of human nature, shaped by a tradition and collective memory, linked to the earth and the heavens, related to all forms of life, and consciously open to the creative power expressed in all evolution. We are reborn into a living world. 

Terence: The nuts and bolts question posed in all of that, is "Can the psychedelic state be visualized with technologies ranging from paint and brush to super computers?" I think it can. I think it is not, in principle, mysterious. It may be fleeting, like the situation that follows upon the splitting of the atom. It may be remote. But it is in principle describable. It's a domain to be explored. It's simply a matter of paying attention, gaining inspiration, and gaining skill of technical execution. 

Ralph: Any models that we can build, verbal, visual, or mathematical, are feeble compared to the experience itself. On the other hand, this experience is within all, and without all, and we are immersed in the spiritual world, so the tiniest resonance from the most feeble model may suffice to excite, as poetry excites emotion, spirit. The essence of communication is to have a compact representation of an experience that's infinitely complex. The representations have to be really simple. Representation restricted to verbal mode alone, might be too feeble to excite by resonance, the similar state. Not every person is going to become a cephalopod.4 Not every person has the time to become a shaman. We need, however, a certain number of shamans in our culture to help to reconnect human society and the play in the sky. We need some kind of amplifying and communicating device between the few people who are our real shamans, let's say sacred artists of the future, and the mass society watching MTV. The question is, can these means be of use to the clarion call that you've given in your book?

Terence: I think that what makes it confusing is when you go into these domains, the encounter is an emotionally powerful one. The situation is so novel that the experient tends to assume that this emotional power is coming from the input. It's not. It's coming from the encounter with the input. I mean it's like posing the question, "Can you make a stirring record of the Grand Canyon?" Yes, you can, with helicopter-mounted cameras and this sort of thing. But the emotion you have watching that, you bring to it. The psychedelic dimension is objective, but it's also so awesome and so different from what we know that it encourages and promotes and triggers awe in us. We bring something to it, which we can never image, or reduce to a verbal description or a piece of film. The thing itself is just more of reality, like the heart of the cell, or radar maps of the Venusian surface, or the center of the atom. 

Ralph: Do we need more reality? We've already got so much.

Terence: We need more of this mental logos world. It's the logos world that we've lost the connection with. These computer programs, psychedelic drugs, dynamic modeling schemes, are the equivalent of probes, like Voyager. They're sent not to an alien planet, but to an alien phase-space of some sort, one that we need connection to.

Rupert: I agree with Terence. The problem is that the emotional intensity of a psychedelic experience is totally different from seeing a computer graphic display. It's possible to get something a bit like that just by shaking a kaleidoscope and looking into it. In these expensive novelty shops that dot California, you can find fancy kaleidoscopes beautifully made. You look through them, and you can see a dazzling display of pattern and color, but within a few seconds you're just bored. Nobody ever really looks at them for very long. Somehow they have no meaning, and don't engage one. I think the difference between representation of the state and being in the state itself is this sense of meaning, engagement and intensity. I for one, being a botanist, am very drawn to flowers. I love looking at flowers. Sometimes you can look at a whole garden full of flowers like here in Esalen, and it's quite meaningless. At other times you can look at a single flower for a long time, you can go into it, it's like a mandala. You enter into that realm, and it takes on incredible meaning, beauty and significance. The same with butterflies and many other natural creations. It seems to me the problem is how to enter into that engagement, intensity and sense of meaning, rather than the representation of the pattern itself. There are plenty of patterns around in the natural world.

Ralph: These are space/time patterns. Although we say the words "space/time pattern," we have no language for individual space/time patterns. As experienced by us, there is a kind of a resonance between patterns that somehow makes a resonance with different patterns of neurotransmitters in the visual cortex. Some aspects are perceived, and other aspects are not, remaining invisible to our perception. You've been speaking of flowers in the garden, or the images in the kaleidoscope. These are static patterns, and we have an extensive verbal language for that. What I'm suggesting is an expansion of our visual/linguistic capability in the direction of a universal language for space/time pattern, such that we could truly speak of our experiences, giving them names. At the mere drop of a word or a code, an I-75, Highway 1, Highway 0, we would transmit a clear image of space/time pattern along with whatever emotion we remember from the experience. If we can awaken these feelings in the mind of the listener, we can converse, intellectualize, understand and reconnect with the space/time pattern of the spiritual world. Let's face it, we have the most extensive experience of this world through visual metaphors of, well, movies. We experience the logos as movies. We don't experience it as words, although there are sounds, and there is sometimes writing on the wall like graffiti. Basically reality is an infinite field of consciousness, of vibration, of waves moving, of intelligence. When we travel in this realm, we go somewhere we've been before and we recognize it, and that excites in us memory, which is reinforced and extended, and upon this experience we base further experiment. We three have had our many experiences, which I have great faith, are similar, even universal experiences, and yet we are absolutely speechless in verbalizing them to each other. Words fail me.

Terence: It seems to me that mind responds with an affinity for itself. If an expression is universal, then it has an affinity for the universal mind. What's interesting about the example of the kaleidoscope is that it's boring after a few minutes. If you analyze how it works, and take it apart, the base units in most kaleidoscopes are pieces of broken glass, pebbles, detritus, junk. Somehow splitting this into six sections with a mirror and putting it in heavy oil is supposed to bring you into the realm of something endlessly watchable and interesting. But it isn't. The brain machines being produced in Germany are the same way. All pattern seems to quickly lose its charm unless it's pattern that has been put through the sieve of mind. We enjoy looking at the ruins and artifacts of vanished civilizations a lot more than random arrangements of natural objects. It seems to me what we're looking for when we say the MPP [Massively Parallel Processor] data on chaos is like a DMT [Dimethyl tryptamine] trip, what we're saying is, "Here in this pattern is the footprint of meaning." It's as though an architect passed through. We're always looking for the betraying presence of an order that is more than an order of economy and pure function. We look for an aesthetic order, and when we find that, then we have this reciprocal sense of recognition and transcendence, and this is what the psychedelic experience provides in spades. A critic of the psychedelic experience would object, "Of course it's made of mind. It's made of your mind." For the psychedelic voyager, the intuition is, it's made of mind, but not made of my mind. Either there's an identity problem, or a real frontier of communication is being crossed. When we look for living pattern, or aesthetically satisfying order, what we really look for is a sign that mind has somehow touched the stochastic processes of nature.

Rupert: The limiting factor seems to be neither the richness of display we find in nature, nor the language that we communicate with, but rather the ability to go into something with intensity of vision. I don't think language is a limiting problem. For example, music can be written down in a language. I can read music, but for me it doesn't come to life from this language. I have to hear it for it to come to life. Presumably mathematical notation is a way of notating things in the mathematical landscape, which comes alive for mathematicians. Take the realm of plants again. If you look at the incredible richness of botany, of flower forms, there is a language for this, used by botanists and florists, describing the species of plants in technical jargon. Even so, it doesn't mean that most botanists spend most of their time contemplating the beauty of flowers. They're rushing to the next committee meeting or getting their next paper ready for publication in a technical journal. Somehow there isn't much time to actually enter into these realms, even for people whose profession it is to be concerned with them. We're neither short of images nor of languages in many realms, but rather of the time, the space, and the inclination to enter.

Ralph: Music is a good metaphor. Let's just think of this for a minute. I don't propose that a mathematical model of a brain or a plant would be as wonderful as a brain or a plant. Life will not be replaced by language. Nevertheless, the evolution of music has been enormously facilitated by having a graphic language that to some extent recalls the actual musical experience. This is the role that I'm proposing for mathematics, not to replace the Earth or the heavenly realms, but to facilitate their understanding through an analog on the same level as musical staff notation, pertaining to the visual experience of space/time patterns. 
What I'm suggesting is an increase in our encyclopedia of models, extending language, so that we can name, store, retrieve, and recreate not the experience itself, but the data, for the sake of communication. This is exactly what musical staff notation did for music. It pertains not only to the spiritual experience, but also to fundamental questions on the future of human society. Can we understand the space/time nature of the planet well enough, since it's so complex, to be sensitive enough to cooperate with it? If we can't even understand what we're seeing when we look, there's not much we can do to cooperate. Biogeography, for example, is a botanical field that could be revolutionized by a staff notation for space/time pattern.

Rupert: Surely what we're looking for is meaning in terms of significance. In terms of information, even patterns, we've got libraries full. Go into any book shop, and you're overwhelmed by the quantity of stuff there. The idea of having even more models on the shelf, somehow doesn't seem very exciting to me. What would be exciting would be to see some deep meaning in all of this. Maybe mathematics is one way to find the deep meaning in things. If so, I'm not quite sure how.

Ralph: The taxonomy of plants is not full of meaning, nevertheless a vocabulary has evolved so that when words like exfoliate are put on a page, another botanist can read it and actually tell what kind of plant this is. A further development in the evolution of language is the generation of meaning. Meaning is not given in the data. We have to grok things. We have to struggle and evolve understanding by some hermeneutical process. People said when printing began, that it would be the end of memory, and when writing began, it would be the end of history.

Terence: In both cases they were correct.

Ralph: Yes, when language began we lost our connection with the natural world.

Terence: Maybe it was the kind of language.

Ralph: Spoken language.

Terence: Language processed acoustically. It's not in the generation of it that you want to put your attention, but in the reception/decoding of it. When language became something acoustically processed it became the willing servant of abstraction. Whereas language processed visually is here and now stuff of great density, acoustical language permits a level of abstraction that creates a higher inclusiveness, achieved by a necessary dropping out of detail.

Ralph: I'm glad to hear you say so, since it always sounds like you think the logos itself is speech. 

Terence: Speech beheld.

Ralph: I'm astonished at the resistance I'm getting here to the idea of visual language. When I travel in France, I'm riding in the train or something, and I'm really bothered by all the gossip going around, because I understand French. I realize that this couple is having trouble, and the train is not stopping in the station that I expected, and so on. When I travel in Japan, I don't understand anything, so it seems to me really very quiet there. I just don't hear anything. Where we have an oral language for certain phenomena, we then perceive it. It's like a moving van comes along and transports this stuff from the unconscious system to the conscious system, where we can deal with it. These space/time patterns for which we have no visual language, are essentially unconscious to us. Therefore we can't interact with them, and this might be a fundamental reason that the planet is dying. Either we shouldn't have verbal language, or we should have verbal language and visual language as well. Verbal language is poorly adapted to space/time patterns. For example, we describe music with staff notation, a visual rather than verbal language. I think that our intellectual relationship to the sky and to the earth would be vastly improved by developing a larger closet of models for visual processing. 

Terence: I think you're right. I regard language as some kind of project that's uncompleted as we sit here. The whole world is held together by small mouth noises, and it's only barely held together by small mouth noises. If we could have a tighter network of communication, we would in a sense be a less diffuse species. Communication, or the lack of it, is what's shoving us toward the brink of possible planetary catastrophe.
	If we buy into the idea that psychedelics are somehow showing us an evolutionary path yet to be followed, then it seems obvious this entails a further completion of the project of language. Maybe what all this technology is about is a more explicit condensation of the word. Modernity is characterized by an ever-more explicit evocation of the image. We just have to go back 100 years, and the best anyone could do was an albumin tint photograph. Now we have color lithography.

Ralph: High Definition TV.

Terence: HDTV. High-speed printing. Virtual reality. The world wide web. It's as though language is becoming flesh. Meaning condensing into the visual realm would be a kind of telepathy compared to the kind of linguistic reality we're living in now. 

Ralph: Glad to hear it.

Rupert: One final point I want to make. The model you are suggesting takes us further into the artificial manmade world of technology, and we've still got an incredible diversity in the natural world that hardly anyone's interested in anymore. There are herbaria collections, plants and butterfly collections, geological museums with rocks and crystals of every kind, and they're deserted. There's an incredible diversity of form in the natural world, and we are becoming more and more plugged into the entirely human world of technologies and manmade patterns. How does this relate to giving us a greater sense of connection with the bigger world?

Ralph: I believe that our connection to the natural world will be enormously enhanced by the new media, in spite of the fact that most people will relate to it as a new form of drug. I think that planetaria, for example, which are artificial models of the sky, brighter and simpler and easier to understand, along with special programs that show only certain motions at one time, can have an enormous potential to turn people on to the real sky, which is after all the ultimate source of our mind, our intellect, our mathematics and language. Although the construction of planetaria in big cities around the world is an expansion of the synthetic world at the expense of the natural one, the whole idea of it is to try to turn a switch in some few people, making them aware of what was there all the time. I think a Hypercard stack with high-speed, high-quality color pictures and sound, giving all the beetles in the Amazon jungle, would enormously help me personally to understand what I'm seeing when I actually go there. 

Terence: I'd like to defend Ralph. I don't think that it's really a journey deeper into artificiality. Science has been dependent on instrumentality for a long, long time. The natural world that Ralph's program would reveal is the natural world of syntax. In other words, language would become a much more accessible object for study if it were visually explicit. And I expect that this is happening. It seems to me we have reached a new frontier in the natural history of this most complex and least understood of all behaviors; language. While the instrumentalities may be computers, high-speed imaging, and so forth, it's no different from using the Hubble telescope to tease data out of a very distant part of the universe, and then making it explicit. If we could understand language, we would understand something about our own place in nature that eludes us. It's clearly the most complex thing we do, and we're the most complex thing we know. The feedback from language is culture, the most anomalous phenomenon in the natural world. 

Ralph: I want to end by saying this: Mathematics is part of the natural world. It's a landscape which can be explored, simply and directly, and with incredible pleasure, delight and advancement, just like the psychedelic logos, or any other aspect of the world. The mathematical landscape does not belong to the human species. It belongs not even to the earth, but to the sky. It's part of the infinite universe we live in. Whatever microscopes, telescopes, kaleidoscopes, or computer graphic tools we can devise to enhance our vision of the mathematical universe is definitely advantageous. How this will fit into society, however, is a problem. We are in an evolutionary challenge from which the human species may not survive. I feel that part of our difficulty is our culture's rejection of mathematics. Mathematics is essentially the marriage of Father Sky and Mother Earth. I've given my life work to understand this relationship between the psychedelic and the mathematical vision. So I'll leave it there.


Notes

1	Hans Jenny, Kymatic (Basel: Basileus Press, 1967)
2	Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods (New York: Bantam, 1992)
3	Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature (New York: Bantam, 1990)
4	Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival (San Francisco: Harper, 1992)
5	Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962) and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Toronto: McGraw Hill Book Co., 1965).