Although Noam Chomsky revolutionized the study of linguistics, he is best known as one of the leading critics of U.S. foreign policy. The book Chomsky for Beginners begins with David Cogswell’s statement “Noam Chomsky is one of the ten most-quoted writers of all time,” and one encounters this assertion in many essays about Chomsky’s work. However, when Chomsky read the draft for this introduction, he told me that, “this is probably nonsense invented by some PR office. It can’t possibly be true…inconceivable.”
Yet, according to The Chicago Tribune, “a survey of standard reference work, the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, found that over the past dozen years Chomsky was the most-often-cited living author. Among intellectual luminaries of all eras, Chomsky placed eighth, just behind Plato and Sigmund Freud.” The New York Times called Chomsky “arguably the most important intellectual alive.”
The son of a Hebrew language scholar, Chomsky’s independent scholarship earned him entry into the Society of Fellows at Harvard University in 1951. He received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955, although most of the research leading to this degree was done at Harvard between 1951 and 1955. After receiving his Ph.D., Chomsky taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 19 years. In 1976, he was appointed Institute Professor, and he held the Ferrari P. Ward Chair of Modern Language and Linguistics. In addition to authoring more than eighty books on language and politics, Chomsky also lectures widely, and is one of America’s most popular speakers, drawing standing-room-only audiences all over the country.
In his book The End of Science, John Horgan states that, “in spite of his denials, Chomsky is the most important linguist who has ever lived.” The Encyclopedia Britannica declares that “it is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is no major theoretical issue in linguistics today that is debated in terms other than those in which he has chosen to define it.” Yet when Chomsky read over the draft for this introduction, and he read my phrase “Chomsky is generally regarded as the most important linguist who has ever lived,” he wrote me back saying, “that’s a huge exaggeration.”
Among his many accomplishments as a linguist, Chomsky is most famous for his work on what is called generative grammar. He revolutionized the discipline of linguistics by arguing that the acquisition of language is part of the natural or innate structure of the human brain, and that there is a “universal grammar”, genetically hard-wired into us from birth, that defines the rules, range, and limits of all possible human languages. Some of his books on this subject include Knowledge of Language and Language and Mind.
Although the Arts and Humanities Citation Index declares Chomsky to be the most-often-cited living author, it’s rare that you’ll hear about him in the mainstream media. This is because since 1965 Chomsky has been very outspoken about his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy, and the corporate influence on the media. His book of essays American Power and the New Mandarins is considered to be one of the most substantial arguments ever against the American involvement in Vietnam. Some of his many other political books include Towards a New Cold War, The Manufacture of Consent, Rogue States, The Chomsky Reader, 9-11: Understanding Power and Middle East Illusions.
Many of Chomsky’s political books recount in disturbing detail how the U.S. government has supported violent dictators and totalitarian regimes throughout the world, and how it has repeatedly inflicted horrific atrocities on Third World countries that fail to support American corporate interests. He goes into painstaking detail describing how these atrocities have been covered up by the mainstream, corporate-owned media, and how they have created a strong negative sentiment toward America around the world.
I spoke with Professor Chomsky on May 30, 2003. Despite his staggering accomplishments, Chomsky comes across as unusually humble. He has a very gentle, yet highly persuasive manner about him, and he choses his words with great care when he speaks. Chomsky exudes conviction and calmness, and expresses himself with great clarity, serenity and eloquence, as well as the utmost patience; I was acutely aware that he had answered some of the questions that I was asking him at least a thousand times before, yet he replied with such thoughtfulness that it seemed as if he was answering these questions for the first time.
There is a great generosity to Chomsky’s spirit, and he has an incredibly vast, truly encyclopedic knowledge-base of scientific and political facts stored in his head. I spoke with Chomsky about propaganda and the media, the political potential of the internet, how to improve democracy, medical marijuana and the Drug War, the relationship between language and consciousness, and what he thinks are the greatest threats to the human species–a subject he spoke about with great urgency.
David: Why do you think it’s so important to question authority?
Noam: Just out of the commitment to freedom. I think people have every right to be free, independent creatures, and that means to question any kind of hierarchy or domination, or authority. It’s almost true by definition if you believe in freedom.
David: All previous forms of media–television, radio, newspapers, etc.–have been monopolized by corporations. It seems that they can’t monopolize the internet. Do you think that this will make a difference sociologically?
Noam: First of all, historically, that’s not really true. I don’t know about other countries, but the history of media in the modern period–the last two centuries–has been studied pretty closely in England and the United States, and the period when the press was most free was probably the Nineteenth Century. There was a very substantial press in the Nineteenth Century, and it was very diverse. There was a working class press, an ethnic press, and so on–with a lot of participation and involvement. It reached a great many people, and it presented a variety opinions and point of views.
Over time this changed. Actually there was an effort, first in England, to try to censor the independent press by various government means, such as taxation and others. Now that didn’t work, there were too many ways around it. It was finally recognized that through the forces of capital concentration and advertiser reliance, the independent press would simply be eroded since it would not be able to gain business support, either capital investment or advertising. And over time the press has narrowed, very sharply in fact. It’s been going on for the last few years, and the mass-based independent press has largely disappeared.
In the United States, for example, as recently as the 1950’s, there were about 800 labor-based newspapers which reached, maybe, thirty million people a week. Of course that’s completely disappeared. If you go back to the early part of the century, about a century ago, popular-based, what we would call left-oriented journals, were on the scale of commercial press, and the same has been true in England. So it’s not entirely true that it’s always been monopolized, that’s a process that takes place through capital accumulation and reliance on advertising.
The internet is a very important case. Like most of the modern economy, it was developed in the state system, and for about thirty years it was either within the Pentagon, or later the National Science Foundation. It was only privatized in the mid-90’s, and since then it has changed. So far it’s been impossible to really control, so if people want to use it for their own purposes they can.
But there are major efforts being made by the corporate owners and advertisers to shape the internet, so that it will be mostly used for advertising, commerce, diversion and so on. Then those who wish to use it for information, political organizing, and other such activities will have a harder time. Now that hasn’t happened yet, and it’s really a terrain of struggle. But what’s going on with the internet is, in some respects, similar to the early days of print press, later radio, to some extent television.
David: What sort of difference do you think the internet has made politically? Do you see it as a tool for improving human rights and democracy?
Noam: The appearance of the internet has had a big effect. So a good deal of the organizing and activism of the past say ten years has been internet based. Now that’s true inside particular countries. So, for example, the overthrow of the dictatorship in Indonesia was very much facilitated by internet contact among people, many of them students, who were able to organize, and overthrow the dictatorship. Now we’ve just seen it in South Korea very dramatically.
Hans Moravec is one of the world’s leading experts in robotics. He is a Research Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where he founded the Mobile Robot Laboratory, and directs the world’s largest robotics research program.
Dr. Moravec is the author of two of the most popular books on the subject of robots, and the implications of evolving robot intelligence, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Harvard University Press, 1988) andRobot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (Oxford University Press, 1998), which renown science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke described as “the most awesome work of controlled imagination I have ever encountered.” Dr. Moravec has also published many papers and articles about robotics, computer graphics, multiprocessors, space travel and other speculative areas.
Dr. Moravec has been interested in robots and “thinking machines” since he was a child in the 1950s. He built his first robot out of tin cans, batteries, lights and a motor, at the age of ten. In high school he won two science fair prizes for a light-following electronic turtle and a tape-controlled robot hand. In college he designed a computer to control more sophisticated robots. For his master’s degree Moravec built a small robot with whiskers and photoelectric eyes controlled by a minicomputer. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1980 for a TV-equipped robot, remote controlled by a large computer, that negotiated cluttered obstacle courses, taking about five hours.
Since 1980 Dr. Moravec’s Mobile Robot Lab at Carnegie Mellon University has discovered more effective approaches for robot spatial representation–notably 3D occupancy grids, that, with newly available computer power, promise commercial free-ranging mobile robots within a decade. In 2003 he co-founded SEEGRID Corporation to undertake this commercialization. To find out more about Dr. Moravec’s work visit his Web site:www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/
Dr. Moravec predicts that by the middle of the 21st century extremely powerful robots will be built with superhuman intelligence. He envisions robot physicians in the future that will be able to repair virtually any type of damage to the human body. These “fractal branching, ultra-dexterous bush robots” would be composed of “a branched hierarchy of articulated limbs, starting from a macroscopically large trunk through successively smaller and more numerous branches, ultimately to microscopic twigs and nanoscale fingers.” Dr. Moravec suggests that “even the most complicated procedures could be completed by a trillion-fingered robot, able, if necessary, to simultaneously work on almost every cell of a human body.” He also imagines that one day we may be able to transplant our brains into powerful robot bodies, or transfer the contents of our minds into extremely sophisticated computers.
I spoke with Hans on March 13, 1999, and again on April 12, 2004. Hans possesses that rare whole-brain synergy that comes when technical expertise is coupled with an expansive imagination. He seems to genuinely love speculating about consciousness and robotics, and he laughs a lot. I spoke with Hans about the current state of robotics, artificial intelligence and the nature of consciousness, the possibility of multiple universes, and how robots might evolve in the next century.
David: How did you get interested in robotics?
Hans: That’s life long. When I was four years old my father helped me build a dancing man. I had this mechanical construction kit, made of hard wood, pegs and pulley wheels. And there was a device that especially caught my attention. You turned the crank, and a central wheel inside of a box turned another wheel at right angles. That moved up and down, and turned round and round.
Kary Mullis won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which revolutionized the study of genetics. The journal Science listed Dr. Mullis’ invention of PCR as one of the most important scientific breakthroughs in human history.
PCR is a technique that allows chemists to easily, and inexpensively, replicate as much precise DNA as they need. This solved a core problem in genetics. Before PCR, the existing methods for making copies of those particular strands of DNA that one was interested in were slow, expensive and imprecise. The brilliance behind this invention, as well as it utter simplicity, lies in PCR’s ability to turn the job over to the very biomolecules that nature uses for copying DNA. PCR multiplies a single, microscopic strand of genetic material billions of times within hours. The process has many applications in medicine, genetics, biotechnology and forensics.
When the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Dr. Mullis the Nobel Prize, they said it had “hastened the rapid development of genetic engineering” and “greatly stimulated biochemical research and opened the way for new applications in medicine and biology.” Just flipping through any current issue of the journals Science or Nature one will encounter advertisements for PCR systems every few pages. In addition to revolutionizing the study of genetics, it’s also influenced popular culture and science fiction. Because PCR has the ability to extract DNA from fossils, it was the theoretical basis for the motion picture Jurassic Park. In reality, PCR is the basis of an entirely new scientific discipline, paleobiology.
Dr. Mullis earned his Ph.D. degree in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 1972, and lectured there until 1973. That year he became a postdoctoral fellow in pediatric cardiology at the University of Kansas Medical School. In 1977 he began two years of postdoctoral work in pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco. He joined the Cetus Corporation in Emeryville, California, as a DNA chemist in 1979, and it was during his seven years there that he invented PCR. Dr. Mullis has authored several major patents, and he has received numerous, highly prestigious awards–including the Japan Prize in 1993, the Thomas A. Edison Award (1993), and the California Scientist of the Year Award (1992). He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1998.
His many publications include “The Cosmological Significance of Time Reversal” (Nature), “The Unusual Origin of the Polymerase Chain Reaction” (ScientificAmerican), “Primer-directed Enzymatic Amplification of DNA with a Thermostable DNA Polymerase” (Science), and “Specific Synthesis of DNA In Vitro via a Polymerase Catalyzed Chain Reaction” (MethodsinEnzymology). Dr. Mullis is also the author of the book Dancing Naked In the Mind Field (Pantheon Books, 1998). This autobiographical account of his fascinating, and sometimes mind-bending adventures, simply overflows with a bounty of novel and thought-provoking ideas. Dr. Mullis makes a compelling case for the existence of greater mystery in the world around us, and he seems more interested in seeking truth than he is avoiding controversy.
Dr. Mullis is currently a Distinguished Researcher at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute. He also serves on the board of scientific advisors of several companies, provides expert advice in legal matters involving DNA, and is a frequent lecturer at college campuses, corporations and academic meetings around the world. He is the inventor and founder of Altermune LLC. To find out more about Dr. Mullis’ work, visit his Web site: www.karymullis.com
Dr. Mullis lives with his wife, Nancy Cosgrove Mullis, in Newport Beach, California and in Anderson Valley, California. I met Kary and Nancy in 1999, when we did a radio show together with the late Elizabeth Gips on KKUP in Cupertino, California. I spoke with Kary again on September 22, 2003 for this book. During the interview, I noticed playful, childlike
qualities in Kary when he was discussing sophisticated scientific ideas. There was a simplicity, and a clarity, in the way that he approached complex ideas, and his mind seemed to exist in many dimensions at once. Kary put a lot of thought into each of his answers, and although his mind seemed to be moving very quickly, he also appeared to be a very relaxed. Kary has an uncanny ability to combine extremely far-out perspectives with very practical, nuts-and-bolts thinking.
We spoke about the direction of science, the relevance of nonrandom mutations in evolution, psychic phenomena and other unexplainable experiences, the nature of time, the “thickness” of the moment, and the possibility of an asteroid colliding with the Earth–which he thinks is the most urgent threat to life on this planet. We also discussed his current research, which offers tremendous hope as a medical treatment for dealing with virtually any type of pathogen by engaging the immune system in a novel way.
David: Where do you think humanity should be focusing its scientific efforts right now?
Kary: I think that if we, as a society, want to survive for a long time, then we’ve got to put up an umbrella over our heads to protect us from the things that are obviously going to fall on our planet.
I often wonder, given that the universe is so vast, with so many stars that must have planets like ours, why there aren’t aliens down here trying to trade us beads and trinkets for Manhattan? (laughter) We must have something that they’d think was cool, and yet, it just doesn’t seem to be the case. If it is, they’re not making themselves known.
Maybe it’s because cultures tend to get wiped out by asteroids. We have gotten to the point where we can look into the near vicinity of space and see the things that are a serious danger to us. The asteroid belt is full of things that don’t have stable orbits. Maybe by the time a culture can recognize that, it’s too late, because they have gone off on some ridiculous tangents. I think we’ve done that, in terms of our science.
We’re not pragmatists anymore. For at least a couple of hundred years Americans have always been thought of as pragmatic philosophers–if it doesn’t matter, we’re not going to worry about it too much. We’ve spent billions and billions trying to understand something called ‘The Grand Unified Theory of Everything’–and all you have to do is take LSD one time to realize that that is not going to happen. (laughter) You’re just not going to find ‘The Grand Unified Field of Everything’.
You can pretend to find it by spending vast sums of money and building huge machines. We’re building this great big thing called BABAR, which looks like an elephant. It’s an attachment that detects B-mesons, and will sit on top of the Stanford Linear Accelerator. They’re making something that’s going to produce a lot of what’s called B-mesons, and, from its particular properties, physicists hope to understand enough to provide the final structure of the universe–’The Grand Unified Theory of Everything’.
But human beings, who are paying for this whole endeavor, will never understand this. I’ve been studying it since I was a little boy, and it’s not really clear to me that this particular theory of everything is anything more than just a myth. You can find evidence for anything if you look hard enough.
David: What do you think is the biggest threat to the human species?
Kary: We need to know where the asteroids are, and which ones could be on a course for Earth sometime in the next five hundred years, or even right now. If something two miles wide crashed on this planet going 17,000 miles per hour– which it probably would be by the time it got here– it would destroy everything. It’s done it before. We know for sure it happened 65 million years ago. That seems like a long time, but it’s not an infinitely long time. It’s just a long time.
You have to have a sense of a long distant future for man to be concerned about something like that. There are many asteroids, and every now and then, because of
Candace B. Pert is a neuroscientist who conducted groundbreaking research that changed the way scientists view the relationship between mind and body. While still a graduate student in her mid-twenties at Johns Hopkins University in 1972, she discovered the opiate receptor, the molecular-docking site where drugs like opium and morphine bind to nerve cells in the human brain. This breakthrough finding lead to the discovery of endorphins–natural, painkilling opiate-like chemicals in the brain, which Dr. Pert refers to as “the underlying mechanism for bliss and bonding.”
These findings dramatically increased our understanding of how drugs interact with the nervous system, and how the body and brain communicate with each other. Dr. Pert went on to discover numerous receptor sites for other drugs and naturally occurring substances in the brain, and she helped map the chemical communication system that operates between the brain and the immune system. This paved the way for an understanding of mind-body medicine and the biochemical basis for emotions. Dr. Pert has now spent over thirty years decoding the biochemical language of what she refers to as the body’s “information molecules”–such as peptides and other ligands–which regulate every biochemical aspect of human physiology. Her interdisciplinary model of the “bodymind” explains how these chemicals distribute information simultaneously to every cell in the body. This understanding has unlocked the secret of how our emotions can literally create or destroy our health.
Many people believe that Dr. Pert should have won the Nobel Prize for her discovery of the opiate receptor–which is considered one of the most important discoveries in the history of neuroscience–but that internal politics interfered with her being properly recognized for her work. In this regard, it is important to note that Dr. Pert discovered the opiate receptor only after her supervisor had specifically ordered her to stop looking for it, concluding that it was a fruitless search, and Dr. Pert had to continue her research in secret. Her supervisor was later awarded the Lasker Award (an award for outstanding medical research) for its discovery without her. The story of Dr. Pert’s revolutionary discovery, the development of her research and the evolution of her philosophy, as well as the storm of controversy that formed around her work, is chronicled in her autobiography Molecules of Emotion: Why You Feel the Way You Feel (Scribner, 1997) which reads like an spellbinding action-adventure story, and offers a personal and insightful reinterpretation of neuroscience and mind-body medicine.
Dr. Pert was featured in Washingtonian magazine as one of Washington’s fifty “Best and Brightest” individuals, and she was featured in Bill Moyers’s highly acclaimed PBS television series “Healing and the Mind”, as well as the companion book that went with the series. Dr. Pert created the cassette tape series Your Body Is Your Subconscious Mind, and is currently working on a psychoactive CD to enhance healing and personal transformation. She lectures extensively throughout the country about the implications of her research for mind-body medicine, and her work is helping to heal the pathological divisions in Western culture between mind and body, science and spirituality. “Finally, here is a Western scientist who has done the work to explain the unity of matter and spirit, body and soul!” wrote Deepak Chopra in the introduction to her book. To find out more about Dr. Pert’s work visit: www.candacepert.com
Dr. Pert received her Ph.D. in pharmacology, with distinction, from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1974, and she conducted research at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 1975 to 1987. She has held a variety of research positions with the National Institutes of Health, and served as Chief of the Section on Brain Biochemistry of the Clinical Neuroscience Branch of the NIMH. Dr. Pert left the NIMH in 1987 and founded a private biotech laboratory that she directed. Dr. Pert’s research interests have ranged from decoding “information molecules” to trying to find cures for
Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist who’s research strongly challenges the paradigms of conventional science. He is the author of more than fifty scientific papers, and six popular books, which develop his controversial hypothesis regarding how forms occur in nature, and document his groundbreaking research into mysterious phenomena that traditional science has great difficulty explaining. His ideas and research strike a strong cord in many people, and he has written some of the bestselling science books in the world, including A New Science of Life, The Presence of the Past, The Rebirth of Nature, and Seven Experiments That Could Change the World.
Dr. Sheldrake is best known for his controversial Theory of Formative Causation, which implies a non-mechanistic universe, governed by laws which themselves are subject to change and evolution. His theory and research grew out of an interest in morphogenesis, the process by which developing organisms, as well as inorganic forms such as crystals, take their shape as they grow.
Dr. Sheldrake’s theory is based upon the premiss that there is an inherent memory in Nature. Repeating patterns that occur in evolution come to resemble habits that form in Nature over time. The more these habits are repeated, the stronger the memories of them become, making it increasingly likely that the forms will be repeated in the future. These memories are organized within form-shaping “morphic fields” that exist within and around crystal formations and biological systems. These fields resonate across space and time, invisibly guiding, organizing and orchestrating much of how the world forms around us. Dr. Sheldrake proposes that these fields help to explain not only morphogenesis, but also the ease with which an organism can learn a new behavior, social organization, and even telepathy and other mysterious phenomena. “Sheldrake has a remarkable ability to identify the weak spots of scientific orthodoxy,” said science writer Paul Davies.
Dr. Sheldrake’s biological field theory and research are controversial. In fact, Robert Anton Wilson said, “Rupert: Sheldrake is the most controversial scientist on Earth.” Some of the more rigid members of the scientific establishment have had strong critical reactions to his work. In 1981 the British science journal Nature described A New Science of Life as “the best candidate for burning there has been for many years.” Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins declined to be interviewed for this very book, partially because I was including the following interview with Dr. Sheldrake. But for a growing number of younger, more open-minded scientists Dr. Sheldrake is hailed as a revolutionary and a genius. “Sheldrake is the Einstein of biology,” declared chaos mathematician Ralph Abraham.
The reason that Sheldrake is so highly regarded by certain people is because his theories explain so much that conventional science simply can not account for–like how pets can anticipate their owners arrival. How people can tell when their being stared at. How flocks of birds and schools of fish organize themselves. How homing pigeons can find their way. How telepathic experiences occur between friends and family. Conventional science is unable to adequately explain these phenomena, and Dr. Sheldrake’s theory of biological fields provides a model that, rather simply, puts it all into perspective.
Part of Dr. Sheldrake’s brilliance lies in his ability to devise simple experiments, that anyone can do for very little money, and produce results that challenge the paradigms of conventional science (such as those described in his book Seven Experiments That Could Could The World). His easy-to-do experiments have helped to revitalize a sense of scientific curiosity in many people. Students around the world, of all ages–from elementary school to graduate school–routinely perform experiments designed by Dr. Sheldrake as class projects.
Born in Newark-on-Trent, England, Dr. Sheldrake studied natural sciences at Cambridge and philosophy at Harvard, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow. He took a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Cambridge in 1967, and in the same year became a Fellow of Glare College, Cambridge. Dr. Sheldrake was Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology there until 1973. He was a Rosenheim Research Fellow of the Royal Society, and at Cambridge he studied the development of plants and the aging of cells. From 1974 to 1978 Dr. Sheldrake was Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India, and he continued to work there as a Consultant Physiologist until 1985. He lived for a year and a half at the ashram of Fr. Bede Griffiths in South India, where he wrote A New Science of Life. In July 2000 Dr. Sheldrake was the H. Burr Steinbach visiting scholar at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts. He is currently a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in San Francisco.
Dr. Sheldrake is the author of A New Science of Life, The Presence of the Past, and The Rebirth of Nature, which Deepak Chopra called “a breakthrough book”. Dr. Sheldrake’s book Seven Experiments that Could Change the World was voted Book of the Year by the British Institute for Social Inventions. His two most recent books explore research from two of the “seven experiments” in depth–Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals (which won the British Scientific and Medical Network Book of the Year Award), and The Sense of Being Stared At, And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind. Dr. Sheldrake co-authored two books with theologian Matthew Fox–Natural Grace: Dialogues on Science and Spirituality and The Physics of Angels. He also did three books in collaboration with ethnobotanist Terence McKenna and mathematician Ralph Abraham–Trialogues on the Edge of the West, The Evolutionary Mind, and Trialogues at the Edge of the Millennium. To learn more about Dr. Sheldrake’s work visit his web site: www.sheldrake.org
I met Rupert at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California in 1989 when I interviewed him for my book Mavericks of the Mind. I got together with Rupert again in 1996 to discuss the possibility of working on a study of unusual animal behavior prior to earthquakes, and we ended up working closely together for around three years on a number of exciting research projects. We co-authored three scientific papers together, and I did the California-based research, and many of the interviews, for his books Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, and The Sense of Being Stared At.
Dr. Sheldrake lives in London with his wife Jill Purce, a pioneer in vocal healing techniques, and their two sons Merlin and Cosmo. I interviewed Rupert for this book on March 8, 2004. Rupert is one of the most eloquent speakers I’ve ever met, and one of the most gracious and thoughtful people that I know. He’s extremely polite, and he patiently expresses his revolutionary ideas with old-world charm and aristocratic authority. Rupert is a deeply spiritual person, and he has profoundly integrated his scientific and religious beliefs. In the following interview we spoke about the unexplained powers of animals, his model for understanding telepathy, the interface between science and spirituality, and how our beliefs and intentions might effect the outcome of experiments in unexpected ways.
David: What were you like as a child, and what inspired your interest in biology?
Rupert: : As a child I was always very interested in plants and animals. I kept many pets. We had a dog, budgerigars, a rabbit, pigeons, a jackdaw, newts, terrapins, fish, and every year I raised tadpoles and caterpillars. So I was intrigued by animals.
I was especially interested in pigeons. We lived near a railway station where pigeons were sent from all over England to our home town, Newark-on-Trent. I used to go there with my father every Saturday, where they released the pigeons for races. There were hundreds of these wicker baskets, and I helped the porters at the railway station release the pigeons. We opened the baskets and all these pigeons took off, flew up into the air, circled around, and then headed off in different directions to their homes all over Britain. I kept pigeons myself, took them away from home, and sure enough they came back. So these were things that made me very interested in animal behavior. The biggest mystery really was the homing of pigeons. I asked everyone how they did it, but no one knew, and that was one of the enduring questions for me.
I was also very keen on plants. My father was a herbalist. He knew a lot about plants, and he taught me about them. He had a microscope laboratory in our house, and used to show me things under the microscope–samples of animal and plant tissue, and drops of pond water with little creatures in them. So I was steeped in biology as a child.
I also had an experience with plants that, in retrospect, turned out to be rather important. When I was about five or six I was on our family willow farm. My grandmother’s family had a farm where they grew willows for making wicker baskets. I saw a row of willow trees with wire hanging between them, and I asked why the wire was there. My uncle said to me that they had made a fence out of willow stakes and they came to life. When he said that I could see that, in fact, there were stakes there, and they’d all sprouted and turned into willow trees. So this was really a moment that gave me a great interest in regeneration, and a lot of my work has been concerned with regeneration ever since–both in plants, and in a more broad sense.
David: Why is morphogenesis such a mystery to science, and how did you first develop the concept of a morphic or a morphogenetic field?
Rupert: : When I was at Cambridge doing my research in developmental biology I worked on plant morphogenesis. In particular, I worked on the way plants regenerate, how they make hormones, and the how the hormones are moved around in the plant. The hormone that I worked on, auxin, was well-characterized, and it’s chemical nature is well known. I worked on where it was made, and how it was distributed in the plant. At first I started off in a mechanistic way, thinking this would help us understand how plants take up their form, how morphogenesis works.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that, although it was helpful in a way, and although it was important to know about it, it couldn’t really explain what I wanted to understand. The reason is that all plants have auxin–at least all higher plants, as well as all ferns–and yet they all have different shapes. You’ve got the same auxin in a palm tree, an oak tree, or in a grass, and yet they all have totally different shapes. Even within the same family you can have plants with totally different shapes of leaves–like, for example, in the bean and pea family, there’s all different leaves–and yet the same chemical is there So it seemed to me that trying to explain it just in terms of a few chemicals wasn’t really going to work, because even within, say, a pea plant, you’ve got the same auxin in the petals, the sepals, the leaves, the stems, and the roots, so it doesn’t explain why they all have different shapes.
Then I came across the holistic tradition in developmental biology, where the idea of morphogenetic fields–form-shaping fields–was already well-established. It had been put forward in the 1920’s for the first time, and I thought this was a really helpful idea. The idea was that there was a kind of invisible plan in the plant, and the genes and these chemicals worked in their own ways, of course, but they worked within the framework of a kind of invisible plan given by this field. That made a lot sense to me, but nobody knew what these fields were. The more I thought about them, the more I thought this is something really important, and also something really new–a new kind of biological field that we don’t have in physics–and I got intrigued by the nature of these fields.
The more I thought about them, the more I realized that they had to evolve, because living forms evolve. They have history within them, and the big insight for me came through realizing the fields must have a kind of memory. The hypothesis I came up with–in fact, it came to me a flash–was the idea that this memory must involve a kind of transmission of influence across time, by the process I call morphic resonance. These ideas came to me while I was still working at Cambridge on plant morphogenesis in 1973.
David: How did you become interested in the unexplained powers of animals?
Rupert: : My interest in the unexplained powers of animals goes right back to my childhood, as I just said, and my interest in homing pigeons. This was really the first area that I started investigating. When I was at Cambridge working on plants I was still very interested in animals, and I used to ask people about homing pigeons. I found that my colleagues in animal behavior really just didn’t know how pigeons found their way home. They didn’t know how navigation occurred in animals. Then, when I was thinking about it, I had the idea that maybe the pigeons were linked to their home in some way through a field, a kind of morphic field. That lead me to think of an experiment which is the opposite of the normal experiments with pigeons. The normal experiments involve taking the pigeon from the home. My experiment was the opposite–taking the home from the pigeon. So even while I was at Cambridge doing work on plants, I actually started a project on homing pigeons. I set up a homing pigeon project with a mobile loft in 1973 on a friend’s estate in Ireland.
So I started working on this unexplained aspect of animal behavior right then. This got me into the whole subject of other unexplained aspects of animal behavior. The more I asked people, the more I thought about it, the more such examples came to mind–including the phenomenon of animals knowing when their owners are coming home. So that became the basis really for my investigations that I set forth in my book Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, published in 1994, in which three unexplained areas of animal behavior are three of the seven experiments–dogs that know when their owners are come home, homing pigeons, and the social behavior of termites. That started me off on a whole new phase of research looking experimentally into these unexplained animal abilities.
David: Why do you think studying the human-animal pet bond is particularly important?
Rupert: : Because there’s a lot we don’t understand about animal behavior, and the animals we know best are the pets that we keep in our houses. There’s a huge amount of information available on these pets from people who keep them. We know far more about them than we do about wild animals–which, after all, we don’t watch that much–or laboratory animals, which are kept under extremely artificial conditions. The behavior of laboratory animals is usually not really observed very closely, and their behavior is always very constrained by the cages they’re kept in and the artificial situations they live in. Domestic animals are the animals we know best, and which have most to teach us I think.
They also form bonds with their owners, which mean that people are not just external observers, they interact with their animals. This interaction is very interesting to people. It’s one reason they keep pets. After all, they want to have interactions with their animals, and they’re interested in it. So this provides a huge amount of potential material for research. By working with pets, and the bonds between people and pets, we can find out a great deal just by asking people what they’ve noticed. I have a huge database with now more than five thousand cases of unexplained behavior in pets and other domestic animals, and this information really is the starting point for my natural history of unexplained abilities. In cases where it’s possible to test what people observe about their animals and their behavior, we then move on to do experiments.
David: Can you talk a little bit about some of the latest developments in your research with the unexplained powers of animals?
Rupert: : I summarized the main phase of my research in my book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home in 1999. Since then I’ve gone on working with animals, most particularly with parrots, and in particular with the parrot Nkisi, belong to Aimee Morgona in New York. This parrot turns out to be one of the most remarkable animals in the world. He’s an African Gray that now has a vocabulary of more than 950 words, which is a world record, and he speaks in sentences. He’s used at least seven thousand different sentences, and he uses language creatively. He also seems to have a concept of self; he uses the word “I”.
So this a completely astonishing situation, of an animal that talks and uses language in a meaningful way–better than chimps or gorillas that have been taught to use language through American Sign Language. He does it in English. You can hear what he says. All this is in itself totally amazing and mind-boggling, but most amazing of all is that he picks up what his owner’s thinking telepathically, and comments on her thoughts and intentions–even on her dreams. Sometimes he wakes her up from her sleep by commenting on her dreams. She noticed this and got in touch with me in 2000, and of course I went to visit her as soon as I could in Manhattan to see for myself. And sure enough what she told me seemed to be true.
We set up a whole series of controlled tests to see if he really could pick up what she was thinking. In these tests we filmed the parrot continuously in one room, and she was in another room–with all the doors closed, on another floor of the house, so there was no sound transmission possible. She looked at a series of photographs that she hadn’t seen before, which were in sealed randomized envelopes. In each trial, she was filmed as she opened an envelope, and looked at the picture in it for two minutes. She didn’t say anything. Then we had independent transcription of what the parrot said. Three independent people transcribed it, blind, not knowing what was going on. We then saw whether the words the parrot said matched the picture she was looking at. In some tests the parrot didn’t say anything. But when he did, we could check and see if the words corresponded–and in an astonishingly significant way they did.
In some trials, for example, she was looking at a picture of a man on a phone, and the parrot said, “What’cha doing on the phone?” In other trials she was looking at pictures of flowers, and the parrot said, “those are flowers. It’s a pic of flies”, and went on talking about flowers. In other trials she was looking at water, and he said the word “water”. When you see the videos it’s pretty obvious that something really astonishing is happening, but of course we had to have evaluated in an objective way. All the statistics were evaluated independently by a professor of statistics in Amsterdam, and, sure enough, the whole thing is a hugely significant statistically. A paper on this research was published in January 2004 in The Journal of Scientific Exploration, and the text is available on my web site for anyone interested in the details.
David: Could you explain the model that you use to understand telepathy and other unexplained phenomena?
Rupert: : The model I have is that members of a social group are linked to each other through a morphic field. Members of a flock of birds or a school of fish are like cells within a larger organism. The whole flock, or the school, is like an organism, and they’re like parts of it. I think there’s a field for the whole flock or school. If some members of the group go away the field isn’t broken–it stretches. So, for example, if a dog forms a bond to a human being, they’re part of a social field. The human being’s an honorary member of the dog’s pack, as it were.
If the person goes away the field linking them doesn’t break, it stretches. I think that stretched field–like an invisible band which continues to connect them–is the channel through which telepathic communication can take place. Interestingly, telepathy typically happens at a distance between members of social groups, people who know each other well, or animals who know each other well. It doesn’t typically occur between strangers. If you look at human telepathy, most of it occurs between best friends, parents and children, twins, brothers and sisters–people who know each other very well, or have emotional bonds. So I think that telepathy is a reflection of these morphic fields that link together members of the group, even when they’re at a distance.
David: A number of scientists that I’ve interviewed have told me that they didn’t think that there was any scientific evidence for psychic phenomena. What would you say to these scientists about research in psychic phenomena?
Rupert: : I’d ask them if they’d actually looked at the evidence. It’s a common assumption in the scientific world that there is no evidence for psychic phenomena. But all the people that I’ve met who say that are unbelievably ignorant of the evidence. Most of them have never read a book, or any of the papers in journals on the subject. One or two of them, when I pressed them have said, oh well, they vaguely remembered having read a paper about thirty years ago on an analysis of Rhine’s experiments at Duke in the 1930’s, and thought there might something wrong with the statistics. It’s that kind of level of information that I encounter.
This was thrown into sharp relief in January 2004 when I held a debate with Professor Lewis Walpert, who is one of the pillars of the science establishment in England. Until recently, he was Chairman on the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science, which was set up by the Royal Society. And for twenty years he’s been making statements to the media, saying there’s not a shred of evidence for telepathy and so forth. He’s often given statements to the press. For example, with my parrot research, when there was a report on television about this research–which had taken us two years to do, and a great deal of detailed analysis–he appeared on the same television program saying it was all rubbish, there was not a shred a evidence that parrots or any other animal could be telepathic.
The program makers at the television company told me they were astonished that he said this. They offered to show him the film of the experiments, and he said he didn’t need to see the evidence because he knew it wasn’t valid. So his comments were based simply on prejudice and not on information. Well, I challenged him to a public debate that was held in London at the Royal Society of Arts, and the position that many scientists have in more or less strong forms, was actually thrown into sharp relief. In this debate he was invited to speak for half an hour, to put forward his case. Then I had half an hour. There was a high court judge in the chair to ensure a level playing field and a fair debate.
But, the fact was, he couldn’t speak for half an hour. At first he said he’d only speak for a quarter of an hour, and, in the end, he only spoke for ten minutes. The reason is, he hadn’t read any of the evidence for telepathy. He was totally ignorant of it. Really, apart from just saying over and over again, “there’s no evidence”, “it doesn’t exist”, “it’s impossible”, and that “anyone who believes in this must have something wrong with their heads”, he hadn’t really got anything else to say.
I then put forward the evidence. I summarized hundreds of published papers on card-guessing tests, dozens of papers on dream telepathy tests carried out in the Sixties, twenty-five years of ganzfeld experiments with dozens of published papers, all with meta-analyses, published in proper scientific journals. I summarized my own papers, based hundreds on trials for telepathy in dogs and cats, and my own data on hundreds of trials on telephone and email telepathy. I presented a huge amount of evidence, none of which he’d ever read or heard about. And the fact is that his case simply imploded. It ended up with virtually the entire audience coming to the conclusion that telepathy did exist, and his position collapsed. This debate was written up in Nature. The report in Nature, published on January the 22nd, 2004 is on my Web site in the full text version.
David: Why do you think so many scientists have difficulty accepting the evidence for psychic phenomena?
Rupert: : I think it’s a very deep-seated, kind of knee-jerk prejudice, and there’s nothing new about it. The same kind of prejudice was more or less in place at least a hundred years ago. If you read the kinds of comments that scientists made about some of the early psychical research in 1880’s and 90’s, it was just as ignorant, with almost the same words as they use today. I think, firstly, the reason is ideological. A lot of scientists are committed to a materialist ideology. They think that the mind and the brain are the same thing. The mind is nothing but the brain, or the activity of the brain, so therefore it’s all inside the head. So anything like telepathy that suggests that there might be mental inferences working beyond the brain simply doesn’t fit into that view of the world, and therefore it has to be rejected.
It’s just like the Cardinals at the time of Galileo, who didn’t believe there could be craters on the moon, so they just didn’t want to look through his telescopes which showed that there were. And in the 19th Century people who didn’t want to believe in evolution had to explain away the fossils as being, in the most extreme case, put there by God to try our faith. This attempt to explain away, ignore, or reject things that don’t fit into a world view is a very well known human tendency. It’s happened over and over again in the history of science. In the end, the evidence wins out, but in the case of psychical phenomena this denial is still quite strong. So I think that it’s essentially ideological. It’s based on a particularly limited world view–a world view that was developed in the late 18th Century, before we knew anything much about electricity and magnetism, and certainly before quantum theory and quantum non-localicy was known about. It’s really enlightenment rationalism of the sort of 1790s variety.
The enlightenment rationalists believed that science and reason should sweep away religion, dogma and superstition, and this was an ideological and social agenda. In many way this was liberating and important. We’re all the beneficiaries of this, but it’s become a restrictive dogmatism now, and science has moved on a long way since the late 18th century. Field phenomena were unknown then. I think a lot of these phenomena that were classified as superstition, like psychic phenomena really do exist, and they can be explained in terms of fields. But many scientists are locked into a world view that says they’re impossible, and fear that if you allow them to exist the whole of reason and science will be undermined. This leads to a completely irrational denial of things, which are really just a question of evidence.
I think telepathy is a normal biological function present in many animal species, a means by which social animals keep in touch with each other at a distance. It’s evolved under natural selection. It’s part of animal nature and human nature. I think it’s explanation in terms of morphic fields involves extending science as we know it, but it doesn’t involve overthrowing science, abandoning the scientific method, the whole of civilization crumbling and being overwhelmed by superstition and irrationalism. On the contrary, I think it’s the best way to pursue a scientific agenda–whereas to deny the evidence, and to close one’s eyes to it, is profoundly unscientific, and I think actually holds back research and gives science a bad name.
David: When I interviewed science writer Clifford Pickover for this book I asked him what he thought about your research into psychic phenomena. He replied, “At heart, I’m a skeptic and demand very strong evidence for claims of the paranormal….What I would really love to see is Dean and Rupert: draft a precise paranormal claim and a means for testing the claim–followed by a letter to CSICOP (The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), James Randi, and Robert Todd Carroll…asking if they would accept the “new” test as a valid test for a claim of the paranormal…and agree to participate in Randi’s one-million-dollar prize offer to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event.” How would you respond to Cliff?
Rupert: : I’m surprised Cliff takes Randi and these dogmatic skeptics seriously. Randi is a showman with no scientific credentials whose main claim to fame is the claim that he has money to offer as a “prize”. This is not a serious scientific project but a publicity stunt–see the analysis on www.skepticalinvestigations.org. In particular he excludes statistical evidence. His Rule 4 states “tests will be designed in such a way that no ‘judging’ procedure is required. Results will be self-evident to any observer.” Most scientific research, including research in particle physics, clinical medicine and conventional psychology, depends on statistical results that need to be analyzed by experts to judge the significance of what has happened. Practically all serious scientific research would fail to qualify for the Randi prize. In any case, even if someone were to win it, it would be scientifically irrelevant, as Randi’s fellow skeptic Ray Hyman has pointed out: “Scientists don’t settle issues with a single test, so even if someone does win a big cash prize in a demonstration, this isn’t going to convince anyone. Proof in science happens through replication, not through single experiments.”
Randi is scientifically naive. He is also a liar, as I found out, and described on my Web site. I think its pathetic that people want media personalities like Randi to give them permission to believe things rather than reading the evidence and making up their own minds. In any case, I’m sure Cliff wouldn’t think that evolution would only be credible if leading creationists could be persuaded of the evidence. They always find ways of dismissing what doesn’t fit into their belief system, and I’m afraid dogmatic skeptics are the same. My own method of research is to set up hypotheses, test them and submit papers on this research to peer-reviewed scientific journals, where they are evaluated by professional scientists and experts following the normal procedures of science.
David: How do you think it’s possible that our beliefs and intentions might effect the outcome of experiments in ways that are not currently understood by conventional science?
Rupert: : There are ways that beliefs and expectations do effect the outcome of experiments that are understood. The work on the experimenter effect of Robert Rosenthal at Harvard, and many others, is now well accepted in the psychology of medicine. It’s well known that people’s expectations and beliefs can effect the outcome of psychology experiments, even experiments on animal behavior. One of Rosenthal’s classic experiments was to divide a batch of rats into two lots. He then told students that one lot of rats was specially bred to be bright, the other lot to be stupid, and asked them to test them. And sure enough, the “bright” rats did better in the tests than the “stupid” ones. But, actually, they were the same batch of rats, just divided at random. Their expectation affected what they found with the rats.
This is also well-known in medicine, where placebo effects are widely accepted. It’s well-known that if you give people a blank pill, and if the people and their doctors believe that it’s an active medicine, it often helps them to get better. That’s why in medicine people do double-blind randomized trials, to try and overcome these expectation effects. However, in the rest of science, blind methodology is virtually unknown. In a paper I published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, I did a survey of the use of blind techniques which guard against this expectation effect by scientists not knowing which sample they’re working on. I did a survey of these techniques in various branches of science. I found that they were virtually unknown and unused in the physical sciences. Out of hundreds of papers in top physics and chemistry journals, not one involved blind evaluations. In biology it was less than .5%. In psychology it was about 15%. In medicine about 25%. And in parapsychology 85%.
So parapsychology and psychical research are by far the most rigorous of all the sciences from this point of view, and I think that regular science, supposedly objective, may actually be a house of cards–because people have no idea how much their expectations may be biasing the results they get, and they could bias them in several different ways. One is simply through biased observation. You see what you want to see, or there is a biased recording of the data. You write down what you want to record, and you ignore observations that don’t fit in with your expectations. Then there’s of course biased reporting of the data. In most fields of science only about 5% of the data are written for journals, and of course people select the 5% that agrees best with what they want to find, 95% remains buried in file drawers and never published.
So all of these are ways in which science is by no means as objective as most people assume. It’s based on expectation effects, biases, prejudice, discarding of inconvenient data, and so forth. Parapsychology is subject to this kind of criticism very often, which is why parapsychologists have tightened up their act, and are much more rigorous than any other kind of scientist when it comes to not selecting their data just to reflect what they want to find, by carrying out blind experiments, etc.
Their may be a way in which, in regular science, people might influence the outcome of the experiments in a more subtle, and perhaps even more interesting way, which is through mind over matter effects–psychokinesis. There’s now good evidence that this can happen. Things like random quantum events seem to be influenced by people’s expectations, and by their intentions, and this could happen in some kinds of scientific experiments. Perhaps the experimenter’s beliefs and expectations can actually influence what happens, not simply bias the way they observe it.
The way to find out whether these sorts of things are going on would be quite simple. I’ve suggested a simple experiment that could be done in any branch of science to see how important such effects might be. It’s this. In a typical scientific experiment you compare a control with a test situation. For example, in biochemistry an activated enzyme with an unactivated control enzyme. Normally, everyone knows which is which–one tube’s labeled “activated”, the other’s labeled “control”. People then measure the activity, and, of course, they find a higher activity in the activated enzyme. That’s the normal way it’s done. What I’m suggesting is doing it that way, but then doing half the samples in a different way, where they’re done blind. They’re labeled “A” and “B”, and exactly the same experiment’s done–but this time people don’t know which is which. Do they get the same results?
This would be like doing a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial in medicine, as opposed to an open one, where everyone knows who’s getting which drug. And, of course, there is a difference when you do that in medicine. There is a difference in psychology. There is a difference in animal behavior. Is there a difference in other branches of science? We don’t know, because no one’s ever done this simple experiment. I’m hoping it will be done. I would expect that experimenter effect would be larger in some branches of science than others. Then, if we find there is an experimenter effect, then I would do further experiments to find out, is this simply biased recording of the data? Is it simply biased observation? Or is what actually happens being influenced by the experimenter’s expectations? I think this is a huge area of research, of enormous importance for science as a whole, but as yet this is still virgin territory.
David: One of my favorite ideas of yours is the notion that there really are no “fixed laws of physics”, but rather, only habits of nature, that change and evolve over time, just like everything else in the universe. Can you talk a little about this idea, and some of the ways that you think this hypothesis can be tested?
Rupert: : The idea that the laws of nature are all fixed is really hangover from the 17th Century theology. In the 17th Century, the founding fathers of modern science–like Descartes, Galileo, and Newton–all believed that God was a mathematician, and that nature was governed by eternal divine laws. God was like the emperor of the universe, and he fixed all the laws of nature at the beginning. That made sense in terms of the theology at the time. They believed that God created the world in the beginning, according to these laws, and then it just went on like a machine ever after. However, we now have an evolutionary universe, beginning with a Big Bang around fifteen billion years, and most scientists still assume that the whole thing is governed by totally fixed laws that were all there at the moment of the Big Bang, like a kind of cosmic Napoleonic code. Well, how do we know they were all there then? In fact, how do we know they’re fixed? If the universe evolves, why shouldn’t the regularities of nature themselves evolve?
If we assume the laws of nature were all there at the moment of the Big Bang, then were they there before the Big Bang? And if they existed before the Big Bang, before there was a universe, it’s clear we’re dealing here with theology or metaphysics, not with science. If they were all created at the very instant of the Big Bang, then how? I mean, this is a totally unexplained thing. How could they be created out of nothing at the moment of the Big Bang? This invites some kind of theistic creation story. I’ve nothing against God, but I just think the idea of God as an emperor making up laws is an extremely anthropomorphic vision of the universe. Even those who don’t have God, and have laws that just appear in a vacuum out of nowhere, are asking us to believe a totally incredible miracle, with no source of the miracle at all–yet that’s the conventional scientific position. I think instead the laws of nature may be more like habits. They may evolve as the universe goes on. The regularities of nature may build up over time through natural selection. There’s all sorts of creative acts occurring all the time. In the human realm there are lots of new ideas and inventions. In the biological realm there are hundreds of mutations in behavior and form. Most of them are not successful, only some of them are, and the successful ones are repeated, over and over again. Now I think those become increasingly habitual through morphic resonance, through this kind of memory within nature.
So my idea is that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits, they build up over time, and this has quite a lot of implications. It applies even to the crystal and the molecular realms. New compounds should become easier crystalize as time goes on. New habits and organisms should spread. There’s already evidence that these things seem to happen. New forms of behavior should spread. Things that a lot of people have learned should get easier to learn, through a kind of collective memory. One area where there seems to be evidence for this in I.Q. tests. Scores in I.Q. tests have been going up steadily for decades, and it’s not because people are getting smarter–they’re just getting better at doing standard I.Q. tests. I think this is probably because millions of people have already done them before. So there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence for morphic resonance, for this memory in nature, and there’s no evidence for the laws of nature being totally fixed. It’s simply an assumption.
When things have happened a lot, like water boiling at 100 degrees, salt crystalizing, and so on, over billions of years, then these habits become more and more fixed. They behave as if they’re governed by eternal laws. But when you look at new phenomena, then you can actually see the habits build up. So I think that idea of nature being governed by evolving laws, or evolving habits, is bound to be taken seriously sooner or later. The fact that many scientists go on believing in eternal laws is simply a hangover from an older metaphysics. So sooner or later it’s just not going to be viable to go on taking that for granted.
A related question is whether the “constants of nature” are constant. This is something I’ve been looking into as well. If you look at the actual data, the so-called fundamental constants–like the speed-of-light, the gravitational constants, and so on–actually vary. When people find they vary, then they say, oh well, all the older observations must have been errors. But if you look at the actual data, there’s, in fact, a remarkable and rather surprising variation in them.
David: What is your concept of God, and do you see any teleology in evolution?
Rupert: : I think that God is an organism, rather than a sort of huge disembodied mind, or an old man in the sky. My concept of God is influenced by the Hindu and the Christian traditions, both of which see the ultimate reality as being a trinitarian, or threefold. The Hindus have the trinity of Gods. Brahma, who’s the ultimate creator. Shiva, who’s the energy principle, the change principle. And Vishnu, who’s the preserver of form, and the formative principle. In the Christian trinity you have God the father, who’s the source of all things, a kind of primordial consciousness. You have the Logos, or the word, which is the formative principle in nature. And you have the spirit, which is the divine breath or energy, which gives the movement and change in all things.
So I think, in fact, these are reflected in the physical world, as we understand it, through modern physics, and the principles that underlie all matter in the universe, which are the formative aspect of fields. Everything is shaped through fields. The gravitational field shapes the whole universe. Quantum fields shape atoms, and electromagnetic fields shape molecules. And morphic fields shape organisms, the arrangement of social groups, and so forth. There are all these fields that give form and order to nature, and there’s energy, which is the moving principle of nature. It’s what makes things happen, change, alter. It’s the principle of activity. So I think these are both ultimately derived the divine source of the universe, and they’re reflections of the divine nature, the ways in which the universe is within God, and God is in the universe. I think we can know about the consciousness of God directly through mystical experience. I think all religions are based on mystical experience, where people directly contact a form of consciousness or intelligence, or sometimes many forms of consciousness and intelligence beyond the human level. All religions are based on that experience. So it’s an experience rather than dogma, which I think underlies this perception.
I think the evolutionary process involves the dynamic principle of change that comes through the spirit, or the energy principle, in its biggest sense. This works through the expansion of the universe. Unless the universe were expanding nothing would change. At the moment of the Big Bang the universe was less than the size of the head of a pin. It’s been expanding ever since, and as it does so, there’s a kind of driving force. There’s an arrow of time that makes things change. Nothing can remain the same indefinitely. The whole universe is in this state of development, because it’s growing like an organism. And this change principle is one that’s always creative. But then as things change, there’s a possibility for new forms to appear. And when new forms appear–like new ideas in the human realm–they just spring into being. We don’t know where they come from. When people have new ideas they just say, “it came to me”, or “I suddenly saw something”, or “it happened in flash”. And if you ask, where did it come from? The answer is they don’t know. We don’t even understand human creativity.
I think there’s something in the universe that, on the one hand, promotes change, and causes creativity to occur, and there’s something else, a formative principle, that gives rise to new forms. Often there’s a tremendous proliferation of new forms, as I said earlier. Human beings have lots of new ideas. They’re not all good ideas. So there’s a tremendous fertility and creativity of forms in universe, but then they all have to be winnowed and selected through natural selection, and the viable ones survive. So I think that divine creativity works in two ways–one through this creative production of new forms, and the other through the driving principle, the dynamic principle of energy or spirit, which makes sure there’s always change. This ensures that that nothing can ever just settle into repetitive habit, because the universe doesn’t settle down into repetitive habits. It’s always growing, expanding and changing.
David: Do you think its possible for consciousness to exist independently of a physical structure like the brain, and what do you think happens to consciousness after death?
Rupert: : For me the best starting point for this question is experience. We all have the experience of a kind of alternative body when we dream. Everyone in their dreams has the experience of doing things that their physical body is not doing. When I dream I might be walking around, talking to people, even flying, yet these activities in my dreams, which happen in a body, are happening my dream body. They’re not happening in my physical body, because my physical body’s lying down asleep in bed. So we all have a kind parallel body in our dreams. Now where exactly that’s happening, what kind of space our dreams are happening in, is another question. It’s obviously a space to do with the mind or consciousness, but we can’t take for granted that that space is confined to the inside of the head. Normally people assume it must be, but they assume that all our consciousness is in our heads, and I don’t agree with that assumption. I think our minds extend beyond our brains in every act of vision, something I discuss in my book The Sense of Being Stared At, And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind.
So I think this then relates to out-of-the-body experiences, where people feel themselves floating out of their body and see themselves from outside, or lucid dreams, where people in their dreams become aware they’re dreaming, and can will themselves to go to particular places by gaining control of their dream. These are, as it were, extensions of the dream body. Now when we die, it’s possible, to my way of thinking, that it may be rather like being in a dream from which we can’t wake up. This realm of consciousness that we experience in our dreams may exist independent of the brain, because it’s not really a physical realm. It’s a realm of possibility or imagination. It’s a realm of the mind. It’s possible that we could go on living in a kind of dream world, changing and developing in that world, in a way that’s not confined to the physical body.
Now whether that happens or not is another question, but it seems to me possible. The out-of-body experiences, and the near-death experiences, may suggest that’s indeed what’s going to happen to us when we die. But the fact is that we’re not really going to find out until we do die, and what happens then may indeed depend on our expectations. It may be that materialists and atheists who think death will just be a blank, would actually experience a blank. It may be that their expectations will affect what actually happens. It may be that people who think they’ll go to a heavenly realm of palm oases and almond-eyed dancing girls really will. It may be that that the afterlife is heavily conditioned by our expectations and beliefs, just as our dreams are.
David: And just as our lives are. Rupert , you just touched upon what I wanted to ask you about next. You mentioned to me that you think that people can sense being stared at because, in the looking at someone, a part of the observer is, in a sense, reaching out to touch the person being observed in some way. I’m curious as to whether you think this is true in other states of consciousness, where the person that one is observing is not in consensus material reality. For example, in lucid dreams, DMT-induced states of consciousness, or in a computer-simulated virtual reality, do you think that the act of looking at someone–or some being–in one of these alternative realities is actually expanding a part of that person’s mind into another dimension of sorts, or do you think this might be an illusion that’s just in the mind?
Rupert: : I think these things are in the mind, but I don’t think the mind is in the brain. I think in an ordinary act of vision, when we look at something, the mind extends beyond our brain. If I look out of my window now and see a tree, I don’t think that image of the tree is inside my head. I think the image is where it seems to be. I think it’s projected out. Vision involves a two-way process. Light moving in, changes in the brain, and then projection out of images. And oddly enough, when you think about the conventional theory, that it’s all in the brain, it leads to very peculiar consequences. I’m looking up at the sky now, and according to the conventional view, my image of the sky, what I’m seeing in front of me, is actually inside my head. That means that my skull must be beyond the sky. When you look up at the sky, your skull’s beyond the sky. Now this is absurd really, and yet that’s what the conventional view is telling us, and most people take it for granted, without realizing how very counterintuitive, and very peculiar this speculative theory is. So I think that we go beyond our brain in the simplest act of vision, and I think that many of these other experiences also involve going beyond the brain. I don’t think the mind is confined to the brain. So it may be true to say that near-death experiences, visionary experiences, and DMT trips are all in the mind, but that doesn’t mean to say they’re all in the brain.
David: What sort of relationship do you see between your concept of a morphic field and the theological concept of a soul?
Rupert: : There may be a relationship. I think it might be better to use the phrase “philosophical idea of a soul”. In the Middle Ages it was generally taken for granted that all plants and animals have souls. The reason animals are called animals is because the word animal comes from the latin word anima, meaning soul. So, what the soul did, according Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas–who were the main authorities for the medieval view–was to act first as the form of the body, to shape the developing organism as it grew. In animals the soul also underlay the instincts, the movements and the organization of the sensations and behavior. In human beings the soul also included the intellect, the rational mind, the conscious mind.
So the human soul had three levels or layers. One was the conscious mind, second to the animal soul, which was largely unconscious, and we shared with animals. And thirdly there was the vegetative soul, or the nutritive soul, which shaped our bodies, and gave rise to the form of our bodies, helped maintain them in health, and in healing from injury and disease. Those ideas of the soul fit very well with what I mean by morphic fields. Interestingly, up until the 17th Century, everyone thought that magnets had souls. The magnet was believed to have a soul, which was how it attracted and repelled other magnets at a distance. In fact, what’s happened in science is the old idea of souls has been replaced by fields. The magnetic soul became the magnetic field. The formative soul of the animal or plant becomes the formative morphogenetic field. So in many ways the field concept has replaced the soul concept in modern science.
So I think many aspects of our minds can be understood in terms of fields. I think when we look at something, and our visual world is projected out around us, it’s projected in the morphic fields that stretch out from our brains. I think our brains are the source. The morphic fields of perception and our behavior are rooted in our brains–just like magnetic fields are rooted in magnets, or the fields of cell phones are rooted inside cell phones–but nevertheless stretch out beyond their surface. I think our minds are rooted in our brains during our normal waking life, and stretch out beyond their surface though fields. So in that sense the field concept and the soul concept are indeed related.
David: How has your experience with psychedelics influenced your perspective on science and life?
Rupert: : I think that psychedelics reveal dimensions of the mind and experience that most of us would otherwise not experience. They show us there’s a lot more going on than we’re lead to believe through text books of psychology, and the standard kind of scientific model of the brain. I think they show that there are realms of experience that transcend ordinary waking consciousness, and for many people, including myself, I think psychedelics can reveal a world of consciousness and interconnection that is akin to mystical experience, of the kind experienced in many religious traditions. So I think in that sense the psychedelic experience is akin to mysticism, indeed, is a kind of mysticism. And by mysticism I don’t mean obscurantism. I mean direct conscious experience of expanded realms of consciousness, or other regions of consciousness, which go beyond those we normally experience in our everyday lives.
David: Do you think that the human species will survive the next hundred years, or do you think that we’re in danger of extinction?
Rupert: : Extinction might be putting it too strongly, but we could be in for some very nasty shocks. Very few species that are as numerous as ours become totally extinct. I think there could be catastrophes, population collapses, and so on, but I personally don’t think the whole human species is likely to become extinct. The going could get very rough indeed if things go badly wrong, and they might well through our own actions. People who live in modern cities are extremely vulnerable. If the food supply, water supply, and electricity supply break down, how are ten million people living a huge city going to survive?
But if you look at peasants in India or Africa–small farmers who are not part of a cash economy, who just grow their own crops and make their own houses–the situation appears different. If the whole of the urban system on which we all depend breaks down, their lives wouldn’t be that much affected. They would just carry on. They’re much more resilient, and much more likely to survive than we are.
So I think that the most vulnerable part of humanity is modern urban industrial civilization. I think subsistence economies, which still survive in many parts of the world might be much more resilient. I would expect, even if things go badly wrong, that there will be places where people survive more than others. I should think New Zealand, for example, would have a better chance of surviving pretty well intact than certain other places in the world. So I wouldn’t take the total Doomsday, total extinction scenario. I think there might be very bad shocks, but total extinction, I don’t think, is going to be one of them.
David: Assuming that we do survive, how do you envision the future evolution of the future species?
Rupert: : Frankly I just don’t know. I know enough about prophesies made by people in the past to realize this is a hazardous undertaking. I just hope and pray we’ll survive, that sanity will prevail, that the worst excesses will be curbed, and the destruction of the environment will be greatly reduced. So I’m a kind of optimist, but I wouldn’t like to make any detailed predictions.
David: Where do you think the human race should be focusing its scientific efforts right now?
Rupert: : I don’t have a master plan for scientific research, but I think we need to basically move to a more holistic way of studying nature, and a more ecological way of looking at things. There are certain areas where it’s obvious what we ought to be doing. We ought to be developing much more sustainable uses of energy–wind power, wave power, solar power, and so forth. Those are already done to some extent. I think in medicine we ought to be looking at alternative and holistic therapies, as well as high-tech medicine, and trying to develop preventative medicine systems that lead to better health, rather than expensive fixes for problems.
I think in biology we should be looking at a field approach, and studying things much more holistically. I think in fundamental physics we should be looking at the evolution of the laws of nature, and the memory of nature, and how this fits in with what we know about quantum theory and relativity theory. I think in cosmology and astronomy we should be looking at the possibility of consciousness within the universe–either in the whole universe, or associated with stars and galaxies. I don’t mean just looking for little green men on other planets. I mean considering the possibility the sun and the entire galaxy might be conscious–that the whole solar system might be a living organism, and the sun might be like it’s brain. I think these are some of the areas of science where a different approach could be extremely revealing, and lead to a completely different view of ourselves and our place in nature.
David: What are you currently working on, and how can people get involved in your research?
Rupert: : I’m currently doing research on unexplained human abilities, following the suggestions that I set out in my book The Sense of Being Stared At. I’m opening up a number of other lines of investigation into the nature of the mind, and the fields of the mind. People who would like to do research themselves, or find out how this research is progressing, can do that through going to my Web site, www.sheldrake.org, where there are updates on my research, and also suggestions for how people can do experiments themselves. There are also several online experiments, including an online telepathy experiment, which people can take part in with their friends and family. They can have fun by doing this, and also contribute to my ongoing research.
Dean Radin is a psychologist and engineer who has specialized in the study of anomalies associated with human consciousness, principally so-called psychic (psi) phenomena. He has investigated telepathy, psychokinesis, and precognition at Princeton University, the University of Edinburgh, Bell Laboratories, and SRI International, the latter as part of a classified program for the US government. Dr. Radin was elected President of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) affiliated Parapsychological Association in 1988, 1993, and 1998, and he is currently Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. He is the author or coauthor of over two hundred scientific papers and popular articles, as well as one of the most popular scientific books on psi research–The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena.
The Conscious Universe reviews thousands of carefully controlled laboratory studies which demonstrate the effects of psi phenomena, and how the results of those studies combine to form a mountain of data in support of its existence. Outside of a few small scientific circles, few are aware of this research. In fact, most scientists don’t realize that the scientific evidence for some classes of psychic phenomena is comparable, in terms of experimental repeatability, to physical measurements on the fundamental properties of elementary particles. Operating in relative obscurity for more than a century, psi researchers have progressively refined their experiments to address criticisms from the skeptics, and have produced repeatable results which demonstrate generally small, but statistically unequivocal effects in favor of the existence of psychic or “psi” phenomena. The results from Dr. Radin’s meta-analysis of thousands of well-controlled studies indicate statistical odds of billions-to-one in favor of psi. Something is going on that conventional science is at a loss to explain.
Dr. Radin earned his Ph.D. and M.S., respectively, at the University of Illinois, Champaign. Prior to focusing on consciousness, for ten years Dr. Radin was engaged in advanced telecommunications research and development, initially at AT&T Bell Laboratories and later at GTE Laboratories. Dr. Radin’s research awards include the Parapsychological Association’s 1996 Outstanding Achievement Award and the 1996 Rhine Research Center’s Alexander Imich Award for advances in experimental parapsychology. He also earned Special Merit awards from Bell Labs in 1984 and from GTE Laboratories in 1992. Dr. Radin has been interviewed by many newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times and Psychology Today, he was featured in a New York Times Magazine article, and he has appeared on dozens of television and radio programs worldwide.
When I first interviewed Dean in 1998 he was conducting proprietary research on the theoretical and experimental aspects of psi at a Silicon Valley think-tank called Interval Research Corporation, which closed in 2000. I interviewed him again on January 28, 2004. I found Dean to have an extremely sharp, and highly engaging, imaginative mind. There was a precision to the way that he described his thoughts. He seemed to have a deep intuitive understanding of the basic interconnectedness between things, and is also a very warm human being. We spoke about why so many scientists are prejudiced against accepting the results of psi research, the connection between psychic phenomena and altered states of consciousness, how information might be able to flow backwards in time, and the implications and applications of psi research.
David: What were you like as a child?
Dean: I was a smaller version of what I am today — quiet, shy, and mainly interested in ideas. I was always interested in books and how things work more than anything else, but my primary activity was music. I was a prodigy on the violin. I started at age five, and through about age twenty-five I spent the majority of my free time either playing the violin, practicing, or doing something associated with music.
David: What originally inspired you to study psychic phenomena?
Dean: I’m asked this question a lot, as you can imagine. I was always curious
John E. Mack, M.D. is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is the founder of the Department of Psychiatry at the Cambridge Hospital, and the founding director of the Center for Psychology & Social Change. He is also the author or co-author of eleven books, and more than one hundred and fifty scholarly articles, that explore how our perceptions shape our relationship with each other and with the world. In 1977 Dr. Mack won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)–A Prince of Our Disorder–but he is probably best known for his two bestselling books on the alien abduction phenomenon, Abduction(1995) and Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters (1999).
Dr. Mack earned his medical degree at Harvard Medical School, and he is a graduate of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He is Board certified in child and adult psychoanalysis, with over 40 years of clinical psychiatric education and experience. His early clinical work explored dreams, nightmares and teen suicide. Later Dr. Mack sought out the psychological roots of collective experiences such as the Cold War, the global ecological crisis, ethnonationalism and regional conflict. He testified before Congress in 1983 on the psychological impact of the nuclear arms race on children, and was arrested at the U.S. government’s nuclear weapons test site in Nevada.
In 1983 Dr. Mack founded The Center for Psychology & Social Change, a Cambridge-based nonprofit organization, whose goal is “to apply psychology to the process of healing and reshaping relationships in the social, ecological, political and spiritual realms”. The Center’s work is designed to “promote shifts in consciousness and behavior that invite sustainable, equitable, and peaceful ways of living”.
In 1992 Dr. Mack co-chaired the Abduction Study Conference held at MIT, the first scientific assembly on “alien encounters”. Then in 1993 he founded the Program for Extraordinary Experience Research (PEER), a Cambridge-based, research and education group dedicated to exploring and understanding the alien abduction phenomenon. Dr. Mack and his colleagues at PEER have worked with over 300 individuals from six continents who have experienced what they believe to be encounters with unknown intelligences. Dr. Mack’s twelve years of research into this controversial subject focused on “the consideration of the merits of an expanded notion of reality, one which allows for experiences that may not fit the Western materialist paradigm, yet deeply affect people’s lives.”
The alien abduction phenomenon is truly mysterious. There are hundreds of people who report experiences of having been abducted, studied, and experimented upon by aliens. In his books on this phenomenon, Dr. Mack describes how a substantial number of credible, and mentally-sound people report remarkably similar stories about having been taken aboard strange spacecrafts in a beam of light by otherworldly visitors, where they are subjected to intrusive medical exams, most frequently by small, spindly-limbed, grey-skinned beings, with large pear-shaped heads, and big black tear-shaped eyes.
The evidence that Dr. Mack presents for this unexplained phenomenon is truly compelling. There is an astonishing similarity in the details that the “abductees” (or “experiencers”, as Dr. Mack refers to them) give when they recount their experiences, and these people appear to be truly traumatized by the event. Many of the people report uncanny similarities in how they are abducted, witnessing similar unusual instruments, and being subjected to similar invasive medical procedures. A significant number of these people say that their sperm or eggs are being used in genetic experiments to create human-alien hybrid offspring. For a large number of people, these alien encounters–which are often terrifying at first–become, over time, a catalyst for what is commonly described as a spiritual transformation. In this respect, the encounter phenomenon seems similar to transpersonal experiences like mystical encounters with the divine and near-death experiences. Since so many of the “experiencers” believe themselves to be spiritually transformed by the alien encounter, Dr. Mack has referred to the aliens as possibly being part of “an outreach program from the Cosmos to the consciously-impaired.”
It is very difficult for a thoughtful person to examine the evidence that Dr. Mack offers, and not look up into the sky and wonder about the truth of these
Ray Kurzweil is a computer scientist, software developer, inventor, entrepreneur, and philosopher. He is a leading expert in speech and pattern recognition, and he invented a vast array of computer marvels. He was the principal developer of some of the first optical character and speech recognition systems, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments.
Kurzweil has successfully founded and developed nine businesses in speech recognition, reading technology, music synthesis, virtual reality, financial investment, medical simulation, and cybernetic art. In 2002 Kurzweil was inducted into the U.S. Patent Office’s National Inventors Hall of Fame, and he received the Lemelson-MIT Prize, the nation’s largest award in invention and innovation. He also received the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony, and has received eleven honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents.
Kurzweil has also written several popular books on the evolution of artificial intelligence. His book The Age of Intelligent Machines was named Best Computer Science Book of 1990. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been published in nine languages, and it achieved the #1 best selling science book on Amazon.com. Kurzweil’s books read like mind-bending science fiction. In The Age of Spiritual Machines he predicts that computer intelligence will exceed human intelligence in only a few decades, and that it won’t be long after that before humans start merging with machines, blurring the line between technology and biology. While for Star Trek fans this may evoke disturbing images of the Borg, Kurzweil’s vision of a cyborg civilization is far more upbeat and hopeful.
I spoke with Ray on July 18, 2003. Ray speaks very precisely, and he choses his words carefully. He presents his ideas with a lot of confidence, and I found his optimism to be contagious. I don’t think too many of my questions surprised him. The questions that I asked him about the nature of intelligence, the evolution of consciousness, brain implants, non-biological consciousness, the potential dangers and benefits of nanotechnology, and the possibility of human and machine intelligence merging in the future were all subjects that he’s thought deeply about.
David: How did you become interested in technology?
Ray: Actually, I had the idea that I wanted to be an inventor since the age of five. I had a lot of time by myself, and I think an erector set had an influence on me. But, for whatever reason, I had the idea that inventions could change the world. I was seriously working on a rocket ship, which didn’t work. But my inventions got a little more traction when I was seven or eight, and I built these robotic puppet theaters that did work.
I discovered the computer at the age of 12. I would hang around Canal Street in Manhattan, and buy used electronic equipment, so that I could build my own computational devices. I also had the opportunity to discover some early computers–an IBM 1401 and 1620. When I discovered the computer it became apparent to me that you could create models of the world, virtual worlds, inside the computer. So I became fascinated by that.
One influence on me was the Tom Swift Jr. series of books, which I read when I was seven through ten. There are 33 books in that series, although I think there were nine when I started reading them. The paradigm was always the same; Tom Swift Jr. and his friends would get into trouble–usually the whole human race, or a good portion of it was in trouble along with him–and he would then go into his laboratory and come up with up some idea that would save the day. The dramatic tension in the books was exactly that, what genius idea would he come up with that would get him out of the seemingly impossible jam?
That represented an idea that has had a lot of influence on me. Specifically, this was the power of ideas. No matter what kind of problem you face–it could be any kind of problem, from a personal problem, to a business problem, and certainly science and technological problems–there’s an idea, and it can be found. And I can find it. We can find it. And then, when we find it, we need to implement it. Ideas can really overcome problems, and they can change the world. And that’s actually moving into philosophy. I think the fundamental ontological reality is ideas, rather than matter and energy. Another word for ideas is patterns, or knowledge. They persist in the world, and they are more powerful than matter and energy.
David: What kind of potential do you think there is to develop new technologies, such as neural implants, that enhance the abilities of the human mind?
Ray: If you ask, what is a human being? I think the response is the fundamental attribute of human beings is that we seek to expand our horizons. Biological evolution, which defines us as some specific niche, is not only limited, but is really missing the whole point of what human beings are. Evolution works through indirection. It creates something in that new capability creates the next stages. At one point, biological evolution created a technology-creating species, and then the cutting-edge of evolution since that time has been human cultural and technological evolution. We didn’t stay on the ground. We didn’t stay on the planet. We’re not staying with the limitations of our biology, and we’re already greatly extended the reach of our bodies and our minds through our technology.
The Age of Neural Implants, which is really only one of quite a few revolutionary technologies that are in their early stages, has already started. There are quite a few people walking around who are cyborgs. These people have computers in their brains that are hooked up to their biological neurons, where the electronics works seamlessly with the biological circuitry. We’ve started by using these computer implants to help with specific medical conditions and disabilities. For example, we have cochlear implants for the deaf, and deep brain stimulation implants for people with Parkinson’s Disease. In the Parkinson’s case, the new generation devices actually have downloadable software, where you can download new software from outside the patient for the device. In the first ones the software was hard-wired in the device.
These little computers interact with biological neurons, and replaces the function of the corpus of cells that are destroyed by Parkinson’s. In the early demonstrations of this system, the French doctor, Dr. A. L. Benebid, had people come in, and he had the device turned off. He could turn it on or off from outside the patient. They were in advanced stages of Parkinson’s with very rigid motor movements. And when he would then flip the device on, it was as if these patients came alive. They were then able to move and act normally. This has been approved by the FDA in the past year, and it’s now being looked at for other neurological conditions.
There are retinal implants that are being prepared, which are experimental, and there are experimental implants for a wide range of other conditions. Today, neural implants have two limitations. One is they have to be surgically implanted. So people are not going to use them unless they have a very compelling reason. Having advanced Parkinson’s is such a compelling reason. And it can only be placed in a very small number of places, generally just one place.
However, both of those limitations will be overcome when we have full-scale nanotechnology, and, specifically, nanobots–nanoscale robots, the size of blood cells–that can go through our capillaries, and into the brain, non-invasively. That’s not as futuristic as it sounds. In fact, there’s already four
Quantum Sociology and Neuropolitics
David Jay Brown Interviews Robert Anton Wilson
Robert Anton Wilson is a writer and philosopher with a huge cult following. He is the author of over 35 popular fiction and nonfiction books, dealing with such themes as quantum mechanics, the future evolution of the human species, weird unexplained phenomena, conspiracy theories, synchronicity, the occult, altered states of consciousness, and the nature of belief systems. His books explore the relationship between the brain and consciousness, and the link between science and mysticism, with wit, wisdom, and personal insights. Comedian George Carlin said, “I have learned more from Robert Anton Wilson than I have from any other source.”
Wilson is a very entertaining writer, and both his fiction and nonfiction books can be as reality-shifting as a hearty swig of shamanic jungle juice. Wilson has an uncanny ability to lead his readers, unsuspectingly, into a state of mind where they are playfully tricked into “aha” experiences that cause them to question their most basic assumptions. The writers of many popular science fiction films and television shows have been influenced by Wilson’s writings, and they will sometimes make subtle cryptic references to his philosophy in their stories–often by making the number 23 significant in some way, which refers to Wilson’s strange synchronicities around that number.
Since 1962 Wilson has worked as an editor, futurist, novelist, playwright, poet, lecturer and stand-up comic. He earned his doctorate in psychology from Paideia University, and from 1966-1971 he was the Associate Editor of Playboy magazine. He is perhaps best known for the science fiction trilogy Illuminatus!, which he co-authored with Robert Shea in 1975. The Village Voice called the trilogy “the biggest sci-fi cult novel to come along since Dune.” His Schroedinger’s Cat trilogy was called “the most scientific of all science-fiction novels” by New Scientist magazine.
Some of Wilson’s popular nonfiction books, which blend social philosophy with satire, as well as with personal experiments and experience, include Cosmic Trigger, Prometheus Rising, Quantum Psychology, The New Inquisition, The Illuminati Papers, Right Where You Are Sitting Now, and Everything is Under Control. His most current book is TSOG: The Thing That Ate The Constitution, a satirical commentary about the loss of constitutional rights in America. (TSOG is an acronym for “Tsarist Occupation Government”.)
Wilson has also appeared as a stand-up comic at night clubs throughout the world, and he made a comedy record called Secrets of Power. His more academic lectures are best described as “stand-up philosophy”, and they are as funny and thought-provoking as his comedy routines. He also teaches seminars at New Age retreats, like the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, and his Web site–www.rawilson.com–is in the top two percent of the most visited sites on the internet. Rev. Ivan Stang, cofounder of The Church Of The Subgenius, described Wilson as “the Carl Sagan of religion, the Jerry Falwell of quantum physics, the Arnold Schwarzenegger of feminism and the James Joyce of swing-set assembly manuals.”
Wilson starred on a Punk Rock record called The Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy, and his play Wilhelm Reich in Hell was performed at the Edmund Burke Theater in Dublin, Ireland. His novel Illuninatus! was adapted as a ten-hour science fiction rock epic and performed under the patronage of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Great Britain’s National Theater (where he appeared briefly on stage in a special cameo role).
A documentary about Wilson’s life and work entitled “Maybe Logic” (by Lance Bauscher) was released on July 23, 2003. At the premiere of the film (at the Rio Theater in Santa Cruz, California), the mayor of Santa Cruz (Emily Reilly) officially declared that, from that day forth, July 23rd would be “Robert Anton Wilson Day” in Santa Cruz.
It was Bob’s book Cosmic Trigger that not only inspired me to become a writer when I was a teenager, but it was also where I first discovered many of the fascinating individuals who would later become the subjects of my interview books. So it was a great thrill for me when Bob wrote the introduction to my first book, Brainchild. I interviewed Bob for my second book, Mavericks of the Mind, in 1989, and wanted to check in with him again to see what he thought about some of the things that we spoke about fourteen years ago, as well as the present state of the world. Bob and I have been good friends for many years, and he continues to inspire me. He is particularly fond of the writings of James Joyce and Ezra Pound, and I’ve learned a lot about Finnegan’s Wake and The Cantos by going to his weekly discussion groups.
I interviewed Bob on September 23, 2003. At 72 he remains as sharp and witty as ever. Bob has an uncanny ability to perceive things that few people notice, and he has an incredible memory. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of many different fields–ranging from literature and psychology, to quantum physics and neuroscience. He is unusually creative in his use of language, and he has his own unique style of humor. Despite many personal challenges over the years, Bob has always maintained a strongly upbeat perspective on life, and–regardless of the circumstances–he never fails to make me smile every time I see him. Everyone who meets him agrees; there’s something truly magical about Robert Anton Wilson.
I spoke with Bob about the nature of optimism, why politics on this planet is such a big mess, his decision to run for governor of California, our vanishing constitutional rights in America, the philosophy of “maybe logic”, extraterrestrial intelligence, and why he thinks Hannibal Lector would make a better president than George W. Bush.
David: What were you like as a child?
Bob: Stubborn, it seems; maybe pig-headed. My mother often told me how, when I had polio at age 4, I kept trying to get up and walk. She said that no matter how hard I fell, I’d stand and stagger again until I fell again. I attribute that to Irish genetics–after 800 years of British occupation, the quitters did not survive to reproduce, you know. But I still loathe pessimism, masochism and every kind of self-pity. I regard loser scripts as actively nefarious and, in high doses, toxic. Due to that Nietzschean attitude, and the Sister Kenny treatment, I did walk again and then became highly verbal.
A neighbor said, even before I started school, that I should become a lawyer because no judge could shut me up. I attribute that, not to genetics, but to the polio and polio-related early reading skills. Due to a year of total-to-partial paralysis,I missed a vital part of normal male socialization and never became any good at sports, but I devoured books like a glutton. The nuns at the Catholic school where my parents sent me did shut me up for a while. Catholic education employs both psychologocal and physical terrorism: threats of “Hell” and physical abuse. But they never stopped me from thinking–just from saying what I thought.
David: What inspired you to become a writer?
Bob: The magic of words. One of the biggest thrills of my childhood came at the end of King Kong when Carl Denham says. “No, it wasn’t the airplanes–it was Beauty that killed the Beast.” I didn’t know what the hell that meant, but it stirred something in me. In fact, it felt like what the nuns told me I would feel after eating Holy Eucharist–what we call a mystic experience–except that I didn’t get it from the eucharist but from a gigantic gorilla falling off a gigantic skyscraper and having that line as his epitaph. I wanted to learn to use words in a way that would open people’s minds to wonder and poetry the way those words had opened mine.
David: What is “maybe logic”?
Bob: A label that got stuck on my ideas by film-maker Lance Bauscher. I guess it fits. I certainly recognize the central importance in my thinking–or in my stumbling and fumbling efforts to think–of non-aristotelian systems. That includes von Neumann’s three-valued logic [true, false, maybe], Rapoport’s four-valued logic [true, false, indeterminate, meaningless], Korzybski’s multi-valued logic [degrees of probability], and also Mahayana Buddhist paradoxical logic [it
Alex Grey is a visionary artist recognized the world over for his astonishing paintings. His work has been exhibited at museums and galleries around the globe, including the New Museum and Stux Gallery in New York City, the Grand Palais in Paris, the Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil, and the ARK exhibition space in Tokyo. His paintings have been used in extremely diverse venues–from Newsweek magazine and the Discovery Channel, to Rave flyers and sheets of blotter acid. Grey’s art has been featured on many posters, greeting cards, book covers, and as album art for such bands as Tool, the Beastie Boys, the String Cheese Incident, and Nirvana.
Grey’s unique painting style is unmistakable. His work often depicts naked translucent people, as though they were caught in the midst of a mystical experience, with uncanny scientific precision. Grey’s paintings are painstakingly detailed, revealing anatomically accurate views of the inner body. Intricate blood-vascular configurations, eerie skeletal structures, and nervous systems that are exploding with electrical activity, are visible inside bodies that radiate spiritual auras, acupuncture merdians, and metaphysical energies. The subjects are often engaged in activities that make the most of this incredible, eyeball-grabbing technique that “x-rays” multiple levels of reality simultaneously. Grey applies this multidimensional perspective to such archetypal human experiences as being born, dying, praying, meditating, and making love. I find that merely looking at one of his paintings can trigger a mystical state of consciousness. Deepak Chopra said, “Alex Grey’s art will bring you face to face with your soul and move you to a new level of enlightenment.”
Grey went to the Columbus College of Art and Design for two years (1971-73), then dropped out and painted billboards in Ohio for a year (73-74). He then attended the Boston Museum School for one year, to study with the conceptual artist, Jay Jaroslav. Grey then spent five years at Harvard Medical School working in the Anatomy department studying the body and preparing cadavers for dissection. He also worked at Harvard’s department of Mind/Body Medicine with Dr. Herbert Benson and Dr. Joan Borysenko conducting scientific experiments to investigate subtle healing energies. Grey was an instructor in Artistic Anatomy and Figure Sculpture for ten years at New York University, and now teaches courses in Visionary Art with his wife Allyson at The Open Center in New York City, Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado and Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York.
Grey began his career as a performance artist, doing live pieces that often involved dark ritualistic elements related to death and rebirth. Although his later work has become much more positive, rapturous, and even ecstatic, his early art demonstrates that he wasn’t afraid to explore the dark side of his psyche. Grey began doing performance art in 1972, which he describes as “rites of passage, in that they present stages of a developing psyche.” Grey’s approximately fifty performance rites, conducted over the last twenty five years, move through “transformations from an egocentric to more sociocentric and increasingly worldcentric and theocentric identity”.
A large collection of work by Grey and his wife called “Heart Net” was displayed at Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum in 1998-99. In 1999 the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego honored Grey with a mid-career retrospective. Many of Grey’s paintings have been collected in his books Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey (Inner Traditions, 1990) and Transfigurations (Inner Traditions, 2001). In addition to Grey’s two large format art books, he is also the author of the book The Mission of Art, which traces the evolution of human consciousness through art history, exploring the role of an artist’s intention and conscience, and reflecting on the creative process as a spiritual path. He also co-edited the book, Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics (Chronicle Books, 2002). Grey’s recent video exploring the healing potential of sacred art is called ARTmind. To find out more about Grey’s work visit his web site: www.alexgrey.com
Alex lives in New York City with his wife, artist Allyson Grey, and their daughter, actress Zena Grey. I first interviewed Alex while he was visiting San Francisco on March 15, 1995, at the beautiful Victorian bed and breakfast where he was staying. I spoke with him again, nine years later, to update the interview on March 2, 2004, although I’ve had a number of interesting conversations with Alex over the past few years. He has a very warm and generous spirit. I found him to be unusally focused, with great clarity of mind. He came across as a deeply spiritual person, with a strong commitment to integrating his work with his own personal evolution. We talked about the inspiration for his art, what it’s like to cut up bodies in a morgue, and the relationship between shamanism and art, mysticism and creativity.
David: What were you like as a child?
Alex: The first memories I have are of lying in bed and seeing textures. First, I would see a pure field, white light, like bliss–ecstatic space. Then I remember a narley snaggle-branched, brownish, ugly dark force moving into that space from the periphery of my perception, coming in clumps, and then taking over. This dynamic, ugly sharp texture would terrify me, and it seemed to consume me. I guess it was the primordial chaos. Then little islands of purity would crop up. The pools would clear away and I’d have a white light ocean again. I was around two years old. Very strange.
David: So your earliest memories are tactile, not really visual?
Alex: Well, they were internally-based visions of texture, like yin-yang energies, the constant flux of repose and motion, or darkness and light. As I got a little older, I became interested in dead animals. I started a small pet cemetery in the back yard, and buried numerous animals back there.
David: Were you dissecting any of them?
Alex: I didn’t really do much dissection. I wasn’t so interested in that. It was just being aware of dead animals, and seeing them close up.
David: Were you fascinated by the differences between a living and a dead animal?
Alex: Yes, absolutely. They were so still. One day some kid said, “Oh, look there’s a dead bird.” When I picked it up, I found out it wasn’t a dead bird. It was a rabid bat, and it bit me on the hand (laughter). I didn’t know it was rabid, but it had evidently fallen out of a tree. So, I took it home to show my mom. She said, “Aaah, get it out of the house!” Then I tried to hang it in a tree, because I knew that they were supposed to hang upside down. I came back an hour later to draw a picture of “Bobbie” the bat, but it had fallen out of the tree again. My mom said that was probably a bad sign. So we put it in a shoe box.
The next day people in like radioactive suits came out with tongs to pick up the poor thing. They put it in a big metal canister and took it away. Sure enough, it was rabid, and I had to go through all these shots in the fleshy parts of the stomach area, and in my back. The antitoxin that they injected me with contained dead dried duck embryo and it would leave a lump under my skin. It was very painful. I think that stopped me from picking up dead animals for awhile.
David: Was your mother scolding you, saying things like, “Alex, enough with the dead animals already!” ?
Alex: No, I think she was more worried about my interest in monster magazines, or monsters in general.
David: You mean like Famous Monsters of Filmland?
Alex: Right, and I had a lot of nightmares about devil-dogs. There was a recurring dream of a devil-dog that would kill me in various ways. Maybe it was some kind of a shamanic beast. One of my first performance pieces had to do with a dog.
David: Do you think that your early childhood interest in monsters and death led to an interest in the occult, which later led to an interest in altered states and mystical visions?
Alex: I had a particular interest in whatever was strange. Monstrosities, fetal abnormalities, genetic malformations, became strong interests. They were like real monsters. The caprice of God, as a designer in these various genetic strains, was quite an amazing and fascinating thing–that we could have two heads, or flippers instead of feet. And it’s really miraculous that we don’t. We live our lives within normal routines. Altered states of consciousness are condensed experiences that provide crystallized insights. Like dream experiences, they run counter to normal experience and let us see our life in another context, from the vantage point of the altered state. The monster recontextualizes reality and shows you that life could be another way. A monster is an alternative being, rather than an alternative state of consciousness.
David: What was your religious upbringing like?
Alex: Every week, when I was young, my family went to Methodist church and I always respected the teachings of Jesus. But I never got hooked into a sincere spiritual search until my parents left the church. My parents left the church in a huff of disillusionment and became agnostic-atheists. That’s when God and spirituality started to interest me.
David: What age were you?
Alex: I was about twelve. The teenage existential years had started to come on heavy. I knew there was something undiscovered, but I had to get through a lot of depression before I could find it.
David: So the age of twelve is when you first started to really question how we got here?
Alex: Well, a couple years earlier, my grandmother died. I saw her get progressively yellower from jaundice, and eventually die. When I asked my father, “When is she going to get better?”, I remember him saying, that she was not. I knew what dead animals were like, but this was the first person who was close to me who died. It had a big impact.
David: In what way?
Alex: I felt life’s impermanence, that this body is temporary. Maybe it indirectly fueled the commitment to my work. I think that every artist or anyone who is trying to accomplish something before their own death has the specter of death grinning over their shoulder .
David: Meaning the sense of urgency that death gives you because you feel the constraint of the time-limit on your life’s work?
Alex: Right. You have to appreciate each day, and do what you can while you’re alive.
David: What was it like working as an embalmer in a morgue?
Alex: I worked in a morgue and a museum of anatomy. I created displays on the history of medicine and disease. I once did an exhibit on bladder stones.
David: What’s a bladder stone?
Alex: It’s like mineral deposits in the bladder.
David: Like a kidney stone?
Alex: Yeah. They used to get rather large and painful, making it difficult to pee, before the invention of ultra-sound detection. Medical science developed ways of cutting for the stone. The museum had a collection of bladder stones, kidney stones, and gall stones, and the surgical tools used to operate on them. They had collections of weird stuff, like a hairball the size of a human stomach taken from a guy who worked in a wig factory and ate hair. There was a skeleton of a guy who had such bad rickets that he pushed himself around in a big wooden bowl. We had specimens of malformations that you rarely see today. Medical science can intercede more effectively and faster now. In the museum there were jars with siamese twins of all different kinds– connected at the head, connected at the thorax, connected every which way. That was the most astonishing collection.
Then there was the morgue work. I would accept bodies when the funeral home brought them in. It was a medical school morgue, so we prepared the bodies for dissection. When a new body came in, if no one else was there, I would do a simplified Tibetan Book of the Dead ritual, calling their name, and encouraging them to go toward the light.
David: Wait, was this on your own that you did this?
Alex: It was not with the permission (laughter) of the medical school. “Oh, he’s over there reading the Bardo to the dead guy.” No, it wasn’t standard operating procedure there at the morgue, but I couldn’t with full consciousness accept these bodies as pieces of meat. Their spirit might still be hovering around the physical body.
David: You definitely felt presences around you?
Alex: Oh, I definitely felt it. Maybe it’s a projection of my fear of death. I might die today or maybe tomorrow. It’s going to happen but I don’t know when. There’s also a simultaneous repugnance and fear–terror in a way–of this awesome energy, the Mysterium Tremendum of one’s life. Life’s limitations are confronting. Basic questions of selfhood arise. Who am I? What am I? If life and mind goes on after death, where does it go? All those questions come, like a freight train, through your mind whenever you’re with dead people.
There was the work-a-day stuff that I did. I had to pump the bodies full of phenol and formalin, a kind of embalming fluid. I didn’t drain the blood before putting in the embalming fluid, like in a commercial morgue. Gallons and gallons of embalming fluid would saturate the body, and it would puff up. All kinds of nauseating substances would ooze from every orifice during that process. Then it would drain off a little bit, and you’d wrap it up. Put a little lanolin on the hands and face, wrap them like a mummy, and stick them in the freezer. Occasionally there would be a request from a professor for only particular organs, or particular appendages, like hands were needed once to train hand surgeons. I had to hacksaw off dozens of pairs of hands.
David: I don’t understand. Why did you have to do that?
Alex: Well, there was a convention of hand surgeons doing a workshop. They needed a lot of hands to study and dissect.
David: These people had donated their bodies?
Alex: Right. But the hand surgeons, for instance, didn’t need the whole body, so somebody had to go and hacksaw off the hands, or the head. Now the head–that was a more intense thing. They had a kind of chainsaw-like device and you could create kind of a sculpture bust–down the shoulders, and then across the middle. You’d have a head, which you’d stick on a tray, and take to the place. That was wild. That was too much.
David: How old were you when you were doing this?
Alex: Around twenty to twenty four.
David: How did this affect you emotionally?
Alex: It was an unforgettable experience. I felt like I probably could have declined, but then I would never have had that experience in this lifetime. It’s doubtful, except in the case of a psychotic murderer, that anyone would have that experience outside of a medical school where dismemberment is part and parcel of the daily activities. Maybe if you were a Tibetan funeral preparator doing sky-burials, you chop up the bodies.
David: Have you gotten to hold a human brain in your hand?
Alex: Oh yeah, plenty of times. To me, that’s the most amazing thing–just to hold the brain. I teach anatomy now for artists at NYU, and we go to a medical school anatomy lab. They always have brains with the spinal cord attached. All those fine threads of neurons, it’s awesome.
David: It’s incredible to hold a brain in your hands, and know that’s where the person’s whole life experience took place. Have you noticed that when you look at a dead body, and compare it to them when they were alive, it doesn’t even look like them anymore without the animating muscles?
Alex: Yeah, I’ve noticed that.
David: As though the animating force, which tenses and holds together the facial muscles, just isn’t there anymore.
Alex: Right. There’s complete relaxation and no tension at all left. If a body came in that had been dead for a few days in the Summer, there was a completely different coloration than if they came in Winter. Bodies prepared by funeral directors are obviously fixed-up to match the person you might have known.
David: So would you use a photograph to work from?
Alex: We never got into that. Although, I used to do make-up work on my own, and worked with morticians wax to create make-up effects, like Quasimodo and other monsters, but that was not part of the job description there. The medical school diener just embalms and prepares the bodies for dissection, or for simple burial afterwards.
David: How did you become involved in performance art?
Alex: That happened when I went to art school in 1970-71 at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio. I was there for two years. I started reading art magazines, and read about artists like Vito Acconci and Chris Burden, and the so-called “body artists.” There were a number of Viennese actionists, who worked in Austria. I got to meet one of those guys, a fellow named Otto Muehl. In the Sixties they did performances that were very violent and sexual. They used a swans head to enter a women, and then cut off the swans head in orgiastic displays of passion, throwing the blood around. Hermann Nitsch, one of the Viennese actionists, continues to do these kinds of performances where they slaughter lambs, and let the entrails fall all over nude figures strapped up underneath a sort of crucified lamb.
They’re very grisly, and supposedly cathartic displays of performance energy. This fellow Muehl started a place called Actions Analysis Organization. It was based on LSD use, communal living and Wilhelm Reich’s bodywork. Muehl was a cross between Charlie Manson and a Neo-Reichian bodyworker. He was a charismatic character, and was my introduction to performance work. Soon after that, in ‘72 I started working with dead animals myself. It seemed appropriate since I had worked with dead animals early on, that I should get back to examining the subject of mortality. Many artists, even well known artists today, who are working with meaning and content (rather that formal concerns) often use performance or installation art to express themselves, rather than painting. Painting that is rich in meaning and narrative content has been given short shrift during this century, since modernism.
David: Are you including people like Laurie Anderson?
Alex: She does create some content-driven work. Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, Paul McCarthy, Rachel Rosenthal, Karen Finley, and Diamanda Galas, are all using very strong content in their work.
David: There was a dark quality to your early performance art pieces, unlike your contemporary paintings which have a more positive transcendent quality to them. Can you tell me what caused the shift of focus in your creative work?
Alex: I had a dramatic series of vision states that occurred after doing certain performances. They were performances that were done in the morgue where I worked, using the dead bodies. Using people’s bodies in my artwork had questionable ethical ramifications. It was trespassing and there were consequences. I experienced a vision where I was in a courtroom being judged. I couldn’t see the face of the judge, but I knew the accuser was a woman’s body who I had violated in the morgue work. She was accusing me of this sin. I said “It was for art’s sake.” This excuse didn’t hold up under scrutiny for the judge. I was put on lifetime probation and not forgiven. The content of my work and my orientation would be watched from that point on. It made me consider the ethical intentions of my art. The motivation that moves us to creative work is critical.
David: In terms of the consequences?
Alex: Yeah. What does one intend for the viewer to experience? I also had an intense experience after I shot photographs of about thirty malformed fetuses from a collection. One night I was lying in bed, but awake. I saw one malformed fetus hovering in front of me. It was like a holographic projection in space which spoke with many voices, all saying the same thing. “It’s time for you to come with us. We’ve come to take you.” The being itself, the creature in the jar that I photographed, was not an evil being. But somehow, in this holographic hallucination it was a personification of malevolence. It was threatening me, seeking to take over, take control, and I felt like I was on the precipice of sanity, about to go over the edge.
I started calling on divine love. I said, “Divine love is the strongest power,” and I just kept reaffirming that in the face of this being who was calling me. I made a commitment from that point on to reorient myself. After calling that out several times the hallucination dissolved, as if it were banished, and it was replaced by a bluish light that spoke. The light identified itself as Mr. Lewis, an interplanetary angel, who said he was going to watch over me for a little while. He would be helpful and guide me. That was mind-changing and life-changing.
David: Have you any experiences with Mr. Lewis since?
Alex: I’m not sure. I think he’s been working back-stage, and manipulating things.
David: What other kinds of experiences like this have you had?
Alex: In Tibetan Buddhist practices one projects visions of deity and guru forms like Garab Dorje, who is one of the earliest Dzogchen masters. Garab Dorje is a very strong spiritual archetype and guru. Although he lived over two thousand years ago, he is accessible as a helper-being because he attained the pinnacle of realization known as the ja-lus or rainbow body. By following certain secret practices, a yogi can dissolve their physical body into the essence of the elements, hence the name rainbow body, leaving behind only their hair, fingernails and toenails. It takes about seven days to shrink and disappear completely. There is a continuous lineage of Tibetan masters who have accomplished this seemingly unbelievable feat of self-liberation. The same thing is true with the great master Padmasambhava. who wrote theTibetan Book of the Dead. With the right mantra and visualization you may experience these masters presence and blessing.
David: What relationship do you see between sex and death?
Alex: They are both inevitable, and they are crystallizations of our life force and our loss of vitality. Orgasms have been described as mini-deaths. Certainly there can be an ecstatic ego-death, a convergence with the beloved during sex. I hope that death will be like a cosmic orgasm, where I’m released into convergence with the infinite one. Certain tantric traditions have sexual rituals to be performed in charnel grounds, and there are some pretty intense paintings of Kali astride corpse Shiva.
David: Do you view yourself as a shaman?
Alex: I can’t really claim that pedigree.
David: In Carlo McCormick’s essay in your book, he compares you to a shaman, and says that it was a necessary part of your journey to go through the darkness.
Alex: Metaphorically, the path of the wounded healer, or the journey of the shaman has very important implications for the future of spirituality. No other metaphor sufficiently deals with the journey of humanity. We are wounded, and whether we’re going to be the wounded victim, or the wounded healer is our choice. We have wounded the planet. We have wounded our genes. We’ve wounded the coming generations. Whether we make some remediation to the environment, and to our psyches, is something that only time will tell.
We need transcendent vision to guide us, and the vision of a common good to motivate and drive our creative efforts. That’s critical. Another role that is critical at this time is the role of the Bodhisattva, because this is an archetype of ethical idealism. In Buddhism, the Bodhisattva, one whose being is enlightenment, expresses their compassion by working for the benefit of all sentient beings. Bodhichitta is altruistic positive motivation in all ones actions. These Mahayana Buddhist teachings emphasize a universal compassion and responsibility, and are the logical consequence of realizing that we are all connected and that we can’t turn our backs on a suffering world.
I love the yogic and shamanic path as a metaphor. A lot of my work is related to those paths. My early performance work started with an animal, the dead dog pieces, Secret Dog and Rendered Dog. That was my power animal that opened me up to the world of mortality and decay and led me to the underworld of death.
After the morgue pieces and a positive reorientation, my performances dealt with the possibilities of global death from nuclear war, and ecotastrophy. I think that everyone with a conscious sense of responsibility carries around a heavy sadness, fear or guilt about these possibilities. My daughter at age five made a little book about the earth. It started with the a happy earth from the earliest times when Adam and Eve were around. The globe had a happy face. Then the earth was being trashed and the trees and people were dying. The earth was dying. It frightens everyone. Even young children know the fear.
David: How and when did you start painting?
Alex: My father was an artist, a graphic designer, and he started teaching me how to draw. So at a young age I was drawing a lot. In first grade I was recognized by my teacher who said to the class “Alex is going to be a great artist someday.” This made me very proud and it probably gave me confidence early on. I think my ability to draw exceeds my ability to paint.
David: There’s a scientific precision to your work–even when you’re painting spiritual energy systems, it all appears anatomically accurate.
Alex: Right. I use the effect of simultaneous X-ray and Kirlian photography in my paintings. This combination evokes the appearance of a clairvoyant healers vision. Artists like Malevich, Kandinsky and Mondrian intended their art to be spiritual and my motives are not that different than theirs. After the twentieth century, these and other early Modernists wanted to create a new spiritual image divorced from representation. To them, Realism had been an impediment to the development of the spiritual in art. In some ways, I suppose they were right. The nineteenth century European Academies were filled with competent representational art.
A stiff kind of neo-classical realism abounded which occasionally had its peaks in Jacques Louis David and Ingres, but for the most part was simply tiresome and totally bourgeois–portraits or still lifes, scenes from mythology or history. Art seemed like a mirror to the white man’s world without a glimpse of the individual visionary soul, let alone a glimpse of the World Soul. The early modernists wanted to bypass the natural world and simply invent forms from their minds. This resulted in a great leap forward in the purely mental and formal development of art.
Art was free from the drudgery of representational art. But, when you eliminate references to the body and the external world, it’s difficult for some people to identify with the aesthetic object. Abstraction is seen as no more than an arrangement of shapes. If you ask Joe Six-pack whether Kandinsky’s work is spiritual, that thought might never have occurred to him. It took weirdo renegade symbolists like Blake, Redon and Delville to deepen the spiritual discourse of art.
Like those symbolists, I want to make work that is obviously spiritual. Even if a person doesn’t entirely understand the work, they can tell that it points to mystical, idealized or clairvoyant states of consciousness–states where the mind is expanding into sacred spaces. I want to make visible the body, mind, and spirit on a two dimensional canvas. Take a multi-dimensional experience, and collapse it into a two-dimensional framework. I started painting because I was having strong visions that I wanted to represent. At first, I had no idea about spirituality. I was just showing my raw psyche.
At one time in my late teens, I was feeling miserable and depressed about the break-up of a relationship, and had not slept in a few days. I was tossing and turning, and had this vision of a two-headed person. The healthy side was trying to pull off the sick side, and the sick side was laughing, because attempting to remove the shadow was self-destructive and fruitless. The vision was about the tension of these forces within.
It was existentialist adolescent hubris, but it seemed significant enough to make a painting of it. It was a visionary self-portrait. The process of vision and working with the imagination started to interest me. I never wanted to do surrealism or fantasy art. My work had to directly relate to the nature of the self–who am I , what am I. The work gets lumped in with surrealist work because it’s not traditional representational art.
David: That’s really a good point. There’s a big difference between surrealist and visionary art, and many people confuse them.
Alex: I think their intentions are different. Athough, there were artists who were motivated by surrealist and visionary intentions. Pavel Tchelitchev, for example.
David: Visionary art would more aptly be termed as a form of realism, I think.
Alex: There were artists like Ivan Albright whose work was called magic realism.
David: Or spiritual realism.
Alex: Yeah, or metaphysical realism. I’ve struggled with words that would describe it. There’s never been an adequate term. Jean Delville was a great symbolist painter and he called his work idealist. He was an idealist in the German Romantic philosophical tradition of Schelling and Schopenhouer, the Neo-Platonic idealists. I’m not uncomfortable with the terms symbolism or idealism. My work is symbolic and projects ideal archetypes. The wounded healer has to project an image of health in order to heal, and has to fight on the side of good.
David: Who are some of the other artists who have influenced you?
Alex: There are two or three painters from this century who I relate to strongly. There’s the Belgian symbolist painter Jean Delville. His work addresses the dualisms of body and soul, spirit and matter. The second is Ernst Fuchs who is a much under-appreciated Viennese “fantastic realist” painter. The third artist is Pavel Tchelitchev, who’s most famous painting, “Hide and Seek” is in the Museum of Modern Art, and well-known to many psychedelic afficianados. It’s a magnificient piece done in 1940-41. He spent the remainder of his career, 1942-56 studying the human anatomy, the subtle anatomy and spiritual networks of energy.
My work relates strongly to Tchelitchev. After acid trips, I started having visions of glowing bodies with the acupuncture meridians and points, chakras and auras all inter-relating. I started painting these images and a friend of mine told me that Tchelitchev was doing this kind of thing forty years ago. He was starting to do translucent bodies that I think were influenced by “The Visible Man” or “Visible Woman” seen at the New York World’s Fair of 1939. Also, the use of X-rays must have influenced him to envision a translucent body. Tchelitchev sometimes painted a glow around the body, as well. He was well-versed in Pythagoreanism and alchemy and was deeply into the occult.
Whether he ever took mescaline, I don’t know. He was dead before much acid was available. He died in ‘56, and yet he was embraced by psychedelic culture. His career has had its ups and downs in the legitimate art world. His work is currently gaining momentum after years of neglect. In the early Forties, he got a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. After that, his anatomical work went out of favor because it wasn’t related to “hot” artists like Jackson Pollock. Jack the dripper was big news in Life magazine, and there was a tidal wave of abstract expressionism that wiped out the magic realists. I think the 21st Century will look back and see the significance of the symbolists–work that is content-diven, sacred art that is idiosyncratic and personal. I think Tchelitchev’s career will be reassessed, and accorded more value. At any rate I see him as a forefather to my artwork.
David: How long does it take you on average to complete a painting?
Alex: Sometimes just a few months or it can take a year or more.
David: Do you ever do several pieces simultaneously?
Alex: No, I focus on one piece at a time. Each piece absorbs me. Meanwhile, there are visions circling overhead a-mile-a-minute, wanting to land on the easel. My notebooks are filled with extensive little scribbles of potential pieces.
David: Your painting style demonstrates extensive knowledge of human anatomy. Have you ever given thought to the fact that you share the last name with the man who wrote and illustrated Gray’s Anatomy ?
Alex: I changed my name to Grey at a time when I was doing a lot of performance works about resolving and exploring polarities. It was prior to my name change that I went to the North Magnetic Pole, and I shaved half my head of hair, in alignment with the rational and intuitive hemispheres of the brain.
David: So Grey represents a merging of the light and dark.
Alex: Exactly, Grey is the middle way. I took the name not thinking about the relationship with Gray’s Anatomy. But, it was fortuitous, and who knows what energies a name will draw into itself? My project has been to revision the human anatomy and include the non-material dimensions. Medical texts don’t address the soul level. Dissecting the body cannot reveal a soul.
David: Can you talk a little about the “Sacred Mirrors” project?
Alex: The “Sacred Mirrors,” are a series of twenty one panels that examine in fine detail the human physical and metaphysical anatomy–the body, mind, and spirit. Each Sacred Mirror presents a life-sized figure directly facing the viewer, arms to the side and palms forward (the “anatomical position”). This format allows the viewer to stand before the painted figure and “mirror” the image. People have reported that by using the paintings in this way, a resonance takes place between one’s own body and the painted image, creating a sense of “seeing into” oneself.
The last time they were exhibited all together, I had the opportunity to trip with them. I felt like I was experiencing a new kind of subtle body work. When I was standing in front of the “Psychic Energy System” my “vital essence” was pulled out through my eyes, and into the painting, like a magnet. My vitality went into this glowing body, and like electrons zipping around a hard drive, I was being reformatted by the painted image of a perfect template. My vital essence was unkinked, purified and intensified. Then this essence oozed out of the painting and back into my body. The painting acted like a tool that catalyzed the evolution of my consciousness.
The “Sacred Mirrors” were a job I was given to do. They were a gift from the future, projected into my mind stream to bring benefit to others through healing art– a life-preserver tossed back into the time stream to be yanked towards the evolutionary future.
David: The Omega Point.
Alex: Right. The Sacred Mirrors have periodically been exhibited at various museums and galleries around the world. Allyson and I are committed to making them accessible to people in the form of a chapel, a permanent public space for the Sacred Mirrors. A Chapel of the Sacred Mirrors would bring together all twenty-one paintings in a domed circular room with guardian sculptures between each piece.
I think of the Chapel surrounding the Sacred Mirror room as a pyramidal structure containing a Sacred World Globe. The Globe symbolizes the collective spiritual consciousness of the planet, the noosphere, to use de Chardin’s term. The pyramidal architecture of the Chapel will symbolically draw in and focus healing and spiritual energies on planetary and personal awareness. The Chapel will act as a catalyst or an accelerator for the evolution of consciousness by displaying visionary and sacred art which evokes higher mind states. The spiritual legacy of humanity, East and West, from indigenous shamans to the world’s major religions would be acknowledged and honored there.
I’m creating an architectural model of the Chapel and working with a software company to make a virtual Chapel on CD-ROM, or possibly a Web-site which will make the space more accessible. This is a step towards the development of an actual chapel.
We need support to create this chapel. The site has not yet been chosen. It will be a space for personal transformation, for ritual and ceremony, for gatherings and cultural events. At this critical time in human history, we need places where all spiritual paths are honored. The Chapel of the Sacred Mirrors will celebrate the co-existence of religious diversity and fulfill the desire to enter into a unitive vision of World Spirit.
David: What do you think happens to consciousness after death?
Alex: I accept the near-death research and Tibetan bardo explanations. Soon after physical death, when the senses shut down, you enter into the realms of light and archetypal beings. You have the potential to realize the clear light, our deepest and truest identity, if you recognize it as the true nature of your mind and are not freaked out. If you don’t, you may contact other less appealing dimensions. No one can know, of course until they get there. Some people have had experiences which give them certainty, but consciousness is the ultimate mystery. I’d like to surrender to the process on it’s deepest level when death occurs, but I will probably fail, and be back to interview you in the next lifetime. (laughter)
David: What’s your concept of God?
Alex: My daughter said the other day, “God must think it smells down in the sewer.” I thought that was an interesting statement. She said that because God is everywhere, and God is everything, God would be in the stinky places, too. God is the infinite oneness. Oneness, but also infinite. That is the meaning of non-dual. God is love. While we were tripping we thought, “Love is the part of the all that’s all of the all.” Divine love is infinite and omnipresent, but our experience of it is partial and incomplete from day-to-day. If you have a loved one you have access to the infinitude of divine love.
Even though Buddhists would not use the word God, the non-dual nature of mind, voidness, clarity, and infinite compassion, as described in the Buddhist teachings, is not different than the experience that I call God. Ken Wilber uses the ladder metaphor. There are different rungs, the material realm, the emotional, the mental, then the psychical, and progressively more spiritual hierarchies of states of consciousness and awareness. The highest rungs of the ladder give one the highest context, wherein the entire ladder is seen. The experience of God is the highest rung, and also the entire ladder. That’s the transcendent and the immanent aspects of God. God is the beyond and also the manifest world–”the entire field of events and meanings,” as Manjushrimitra puts it. One without the other is not the full picture.
David: You’re describing God as a state of consciousness. Do you see there being any type of intelligent design in the universe.
Alex: Absolutely. Wilber says that the materialists can’t offer more than a “whoops!” theory for the universe manifesting. Whoops, it occurred by some chance. That’s an infantile orientation to the complexity and beauty of the evolutionary design of the earth and cosmos. I think we can come up with something deeper. Spirit, God, Primordial Nature of the Mind, whatever you call it, is the source and goal of it all.
David: How have your experiences with psychedelics influenced your work and your perspective on life?
Alex: When I came back from the North Magnetic Pole, I knew I was looking for something.
David: How old you were?
Alex: I was 21, and I was searching for God. I didn’t know what that was. I was an existentialist. Within twenty four hours of returning from the Pole, I was invited to a party by an acquaintance who would become my wife. She invited me along with our professor, so the professor took me there. On the way, he offered me a bottle of Kalua laced with a high dose of LSD. It was the end of school, and I decided to celebrate. I drank a good deal of it. Allyson drank the rest. That was my first LSD experience.
Tripping that night I experienced going through a spiritual rebirth canal inside of my head. I was in the dark, going towards the light, spinning in this tunnel, a kind of an opalescent living mother-of-pearl tube. All paradoxes were resolved in this tunnel–dark and light, male and female, life and death. It was a very strong archetypal experience. The next day, because it had been my first trip, I called Allyson up, to talk to her about it. I asked her out that night, and we never left each other. It’s been over twenty years.
Within twenty-four hours of announcing that I’m looking for God, an LSD experience opened me up on a spiritual, evolutionary path, and I had met my wife. It was miraculous. My prayers were answered. Allyson and I have maintained an ongoing psychedelic sacramental relationship. We have often tripped laying in bed, blindfolded or in a beautiful environment. Then, coming out of blindfolds, we write and draw.
David: You created the isolation masks that I used to see advertised in High Times.
Alex: The Mindfold.
David: That was a brilliant idea, I thought, and so simple–putting together ear plugs and eye shades. Sort of a portable isolation tank. I made my own pair actually. So you’d wear those when you were tripping?
Alex: We used it as a blank screen to project our imagination on to. I saw it as an art object, as well. We made a limited edition of twenty-five hundred, and sold them all over the world. Then we sold the business.
David: You’ve tried one of John Lilly’s isolation tanks haven’t you?
Alex: Oh yeah, isolation tanks are great. You do get a different sense with immersion.
David: Have you ever actually tried to do any work while you were tripping?
Alex: A little–the results are interesting and remind me of the trip, but it’s not my most successful work. My work takes a steady mind, eye and hand to accomplish. The psychedelic helps me to access the infinitude of the imagination, allowing me to see countless interpenetrating dimensions. William James says that no model of reality can be complete without taking these alternative dimensions of consciousness into account. Since I want to make art dealing with the nature of consciousness and spirit, I have to experience higher dimensions of consciousness.
During a trip I will have visions that are crystallizations of my life experience, or something completely surprising. You may enter a dimension that you’ve never known before, and it seems very real, more real than this phenomenal world. That “other” reality seems to be tinkering with this one, or acting like a puppet-master to this one. I want to reveal the inter-relationships between the different dimensions in my work.
David: To act as a bridge between dimensions?
Alex: Consciousness is that bridge. Making interdimensionality visible validates it for people who have had that experience. They can see a picture outside of their own heads, and say, “It was something like this. I’m not crazy.” There’s plenty of people who’ve had those experiences. Perhaps the work can be useful in that way. I’ve talked to people who use my paintings as a tool to access the dimensions that are represented. Some people trip and look at the book, or look at the art, and key into the states that are symbolized there. That is a psychedelic or entheogenic full circle. I glimpsed the visions while tripping, come back and made the work. Then people trip and access the higher state that produced the vision. The painting acts a portal to the mystical dimension. That is the real usefulness of the work, and it is the great thing about any sacred art.
David: To act as something like an access code, or a doorway to a particular dimension, reality, or vibration?
Alex: Exactly.
David: How has your wife influenced your work? You say that you met her on that night you did psychedelics together. Has she remained as powerful of an influence?
Alex: Totally. Together we are a third mind that neither one of us alone could ever be. We guide each other’s art. We did a performance together called “Life Energy” in 1978, and I made these life-sized charts of the body–one of the Eastern model of Life Energy, and the other was the Western anatomical model of the nervous system. I demarcated an area in front of the image, so that a person could stand in that zone and try to mirror the system on the chart within their own body. We led several exercises during the Life Energy performance. As we were walking away afterwards, Allyson said, “It would really be great if you did fully detailed oil paintings of these different systems that people could stand in front of.” The charts had been the most successful thing about that performance. At that moment I was doomed to doing the “Sacred Mirrors”. Allyson was really the inspiration behind it. She’s inspired me to do numerous paintings–some of my best work. She’s a great designer in her own work and I collaborate with her on her paintings, too.
David: And you’ve worked on paintings together as well.
Alex: Yes. Allyson did the “secret writing” in the halo of the “Sophia” painting. My most recent works, “Transfiguration” and “Prostration”, use Allyson’s geometric grid systems. They relate to the kaleidoscopic DMT complexities and to sacred geometries. Her own work is very strong, and I’m influenced by being around it.
David: In the preface to the book Sacred Mirrors , you say that you and your wife actually shared the same vision of the energy fountains and drains.
Alex: Right. The Universal Mind Lattice. That was an extraordinary trip that really convinced me of the reality of the transpersonal dimensions. We experienced the same transpersonal space at the same time. That space of connectedness with all beings and things through love energy seemed more real to both of us, than the phenomenal world. It changed our work. From that point on we had to make art about that vision. There was nothing more important than that.
David: How has raising a family affected your creativity?
Alex: I have a wonderful daughter. Spending time with your family takes a lot of time away from painting, but it’s my opportunity during her youth to be with her. She’s going to be our only child during this lifetime. If I don’t spend time with her now, I will have missed out. So, we take advantage of it and enjoy seeing her stages of growth. Her art development is wonderful. She teaches us and is a great teacher. You need to spend time with your teachers in order to learn new things, and these things find their way into my work. All of my life experiences influence and deepen my work. Having a family, and profound, loving relationships, gives me tremendous joy. The world needs this positive energy. I accomplish less because I spend more time with my family, but I use the experiences we’ve had to make more profound work.
David: Have your dreams inspired you? If so, how have they influenced your work?
Alex: Sure. I had a dream that I was painting the “Transfiguration” painting before I actually did it. I did DMT a few weeks later, and I was immediately thrust into the space of that painting I had dreamed of. I was experiencing what it would be like inside of the painting, and what state of being I would try to project. Having seen it in a dream, I could clarify certain elements. It became clearer, although not all questions were solved. Shaving half of my hair off was an image that came in a dream, as well. In the dream, I opened up a garbage can and saw myself with this haircut.
David: Are there any other avenues that you use to access the unconscious, and what else has inspired you?
Alex: Oh sure. Creative visualization is surprisingly effective. Also shamanic drumming can be a pathway to expanded, imaginative territories. Sometimes doing nothing at all you can receive powerful visions. Once I was waiting for the subway, tired after a day of teaching, and I saw the “World Soul” piece which I then worked on for two years. I was in no altered state and was not anticipating anything in particular. I like to keep the “door open” and be permeable to these transdimensional blow-darts of vision. I believe that I am being used by the Logos. The images are sent to me.
David: Do you feel like sometimes you’re not really doing it, like it’s just happening though you?
Alex: No, I know that I’m physically creating the work. But the vision is being given as a gift. Other creative and receptive people are receiving other visions, but these are my gifts, and I’m supposed to manifest them.
David: Was there anything else in particular that inspired you beside psychedelics, your relationship, and dreams?
Alex: Art of different cultures. There’s shamanic art from various world cultures. Tchelitchev was not the only artist painting translucent bodies. Shamanic artists from all over the world have made X-ray art, where they see into the body and the interpenetrating energies. Some artists have a clairvoyant perception of the body. The Huichol Indians of Mexico base their culture and spiritual life on their ritual and ceremonial peyote use. Huichol artists see through the body and see energies surrounding it and show great jets of light around the bodies in their yarn paintings. There are numerous cultures with a tradition of subtle body art.
David: Like Pablo Amaringo’s work.
Alex: Ayahuasca visions. Yeah, terrific stuff. I’m inspired by psychedelic art of all kinds. Ernst Fuchs and Mati Klairwein were European painters who were inspired similarly. Thangka painting, the sacred art of the Tibetan Buddhists, has been an influence. I feel like we now have access to the spiritual traditions and visual cultures of most of the world’s great civilizations. Artists have never had that before. It’s like the seals of the Apocalypse are opening and during the Twentieth Century we get to see humanities past life review. Cave art was recently discovered in France. Art done tens of thousands of years ago, inspired by the Goddess and Shamanic magic is now available. Artists are in a unique position at the end of the Twentieth Century to access all visual traditions, and synthesize them in an evolving universal spiritual tradition.
David: What are your views on the evolution of consciousness?
Alex: It seems to me the universe is like a self-awareness machine. I think the world was created for each individual to manifest the boundless experiences of identity with the entire universe, and with the pregnant void that gives birth to the phenomenal universe. That’s the Logos. That’s the point of a universe–to increase complexity and self-awareness. The evolution of consciousness is the counter-force to the entropic laws of thermodynamics that end in stasis, heat death, and the loss of order. The evolution of consciousness appears to gain complexity, mastery, and wisdom.
Lessons are learned over a lifetime– maybe many lifetimes. And the soul grows and hopefully attains a state of spiritual awakenedness. Buddha was the “Awakened One”. To be able to access all the simultaneous parallel dimensions, and come from a ground of love and infinite compassion like the awakenedness of the Buddha, is a good goal for the evolution of consciousness. The spiritual “fruit” in many spiritual paths is compassion and wisdom.
David: So then, are you optimistic about the future evolution of humanity?
Alex: That’s a big leap. (laughter) I have some optimism about the potential for human beings to manifest Buddhic qualities of compassion, spiritual heroism, and reverance for all life. There’s always problems in this phenomenal world, but if we maintain ideal ethical views we can cause less harm. There’s hope for a future to hand our children, and their children. There is also despair over the deludedness and the catastrophic disasters that human beings have created.
I don’t like vacillating between fear and hope. The Buddhist teachings caution against entrapment in those emotions. But we’re in samsara, and subject to emotions. Ultimately, I’m optimistic because the primordial nature of mind will never change no matter what happens. Our consciousness may appear in another universe, or in another dimension, but in some form the energy will be around. Consciousness just recycles.
David: Do you think that the human species will survive the next hundred years, or do you think we’re in danger of extinction?
Alex: Yes, I think we are in danger of bringing down much of the web of life with us. We are a drunken suicidal adolescent species. Nevertheless, what better time to wake up, get over ourselves, forgive and love each other, and fix the mess we’ve created.
David: Assuming that we do survive, how do you envision the future evolution of the human race?
Alex: Self-illuminating non-dual mystics, dedicated to the repair of the water, air and soil, and nurturing the species that still remain.
David: What are you currently working on?
Alex: I’ve been working on my current painting for many months. It is called The Great Net of Being. Why great? Because it is infinite in all directions. It is coming along very slowly.
Every full moon Allyson and I have been holding a prayer gathering in our home, for the proper alignment of forces to manifest the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. These gatherings were the inspiration of our friend the great shaman and geomancer, Alex Stark, Marie-Elizabeth Mundheim and John Lloyd. The prayer gatherings have grown to 200 people sometimes. Some miraculous synchronicities have occured this year and now we are at work on creating the first version of the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, renovating a space in the Chelsea art district of Manhatten that will be a long-term exhibition of the Sacred Mirrors and about 20 other pieces. We will open by the Summer of 2004. The space in Chelsea will hopefully help us to gather the support we need to actually build 21st century sacred architecture to permanently house the Sacred Mirrors and other works. Check it out at www.alexgrey.com
Jeff McBride is recognized as one of the most talented and respected stage magicians in the world, as well as a foremost innovator in contemporary magic. He was awarded the title “Magician of the Year” by Hollywood’s famed Magic Castle for his remarkable sleight-of-hand abilities, and he was voted critics’ choice as “Best Magician in Las Vegas” in the Review-Journal annual poll at Caesars Magical Empire in Las Vegas. McBride performs regularly to standing ovations at some of the world’s most spectacular theaters–including Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, Radio City Music Hall in New York, and Her Majesty’s Theater in London.
Before starting his solo career, McBride was the opening act of choice for Tina Turner, Diana Ross, and other top stars. His show “McBride-Magic!” was the featured attraction at the Monte Carlo Festival of Magic, and his show “Mask, Myth & Magic” won acclaim Off-Broadway and on national tour, as well as at arts festivals in Barcelona (for the 1992 Olympics), London, Hong Kong, China, and Bangkok.
McBride has appeared in numerous television specials. His spectacular “Burned Alive!” escape was highlighted the ABC TV special “Champions of Magic.” He was featured on NBC’s “World’s Greatest Magic”, the PBS documentary, “The Art of Magic,” The Learning Channel’s “The Mysteries of Magic”, and the PAX series, “Masters of Illusion.” McBride also worked on the Discovery Channel’s “Mysteries of Magic”, where he served as a consultant on shamanism and ritual magic. The Fox television network even devoted a Star Trek Deep Space 9 episode to McBride’s mind-bending illusions, by having him guest star on the show as “Joran”, a role created especially for him.
McBride draws upon many traditions in his magic shows. He has traveled the world extensively, studying different magical traditions, which he incorporates into his performances. He is well-known for his use of masks, and he weaves myth, mime and dance together with comedy and theater, blending a myriad of cultural influences into his performance. His background in psychology, hermetic philosophy and alchemy, are also integrated into his acts. McBride has created a wizardly blend of multicultural entertainment spectacles that echo down the corridors of time to the shamanic origins of performance magic. New York Times columnist Glenn Collins writes, “What Mr. McBride gives his audiences is a mesmerizing performance…a magic show that is at once a celebration of mystery and a struggle to understand powerful forces.”
In addition to his conventional magic shows, McBride also regularly leads ceremonial rituals at large outdoor gatherings, where he blends performance magic with alchemical “magick” and traditional shamanic rituals, sometimes for several consecutive days and nights. Each year, amongst the ancient redwood trees in the Santa Cruz mountains of California, he leads a five day ritual theater festival called Fire Dance, which combines magic with midnight fires, nonstop drumming, chanting, prayers and performances from many different traditions. The Fire circle festivals are now being done all over world–across the U.S., Hawaii, Amsterdam and Bali.
In addition to his work as a performer, McBride also lectures and runs workshops for such diverse groups as The Smithsonian, The Disney Institute, the International Brotherhood of Magicians, and the Center for Symbolic Studies. McBride also founded The Mystery School, an organization of magicians who are interested in exploring “the deeper sides of the art of magic”. This unique experiential retreat for magicians was the subject of an acclaimed 1994 CBC-TV documentary hosted by Arthur Kent. McBride is also the cofounder of the WorldMagicsTM Festivals–multi-cultural celebrations of the environment, or “enviro-magic”–and with Eugene Burger he teaches regular sessions of “McBride’s Master Class” at his home studio in Las Vegas, as well as semiannual retreats for the further exploration of the magical arts.
McBride coauthored the book Mystery School: An Adventure into the Deeper Meaning of Magic. Although the book is written primarily for practicing magicians, I think that it would be of interest to anyone intrigued by alchemy, mysticism, and the transformation of consciousness. His videotaped series teaching “The Art of Card Manipulation” is among the best selling magic teaching videos of all time. To find out more about McBride’s work his web site is: www.mcbridemagic.com
I met Jeff at a large pagan gathering in upstate New York called the Starwood Festival, where he was performing and I was lecturing. Before returning to California, I had lunch at he airport with him, writer R.U. Sirius and his fiancé graphic artist Eve Berni. When the checks arrived at the end of our meal, I quickly snatched up the four leather pouches that hid our checks, and without looking inside them, held them out like I was fanning a deck of cards. I asked everyone to pick a pouch, any pouch. Everyone took a pouch, and when each was opened–miraculously–we all had our own bill. “How did you do that?” Jeff asked. I just smiled.
Jeff currently lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, where he performs regularly with his wife Abbi Spinner. Earlier this year, McBride previewed his new theatrical show “The Forbidden Secret of Magic” with Abbi and Eugene Burger at Magicopolis magic theatre in Los Angeles, and presented his new grand illusion spectacular “Jeff McBride-Abracadazzle!” to standing ovations at the Claridge in Atlantic City. I interviewed Jeff on September 15, 2002, and again on February 18, 2004. Jeff speaks slowly and precisely. He puts a lot of thought into his words. Jeff has a strong sense of intuition, and a strange synchronicity seemed to guide our conversations. It was as each of his answers seemed to anticipate my next question. Among the many subjects touched upon in this interview, we discussed his background as a magician, the relationship between shamanism and stage magic, and how the placebo effect influences healing.
David: What were you like as a child?
Jeff: I was very hyperactive, always looking for a place to store my energy. I was into masks, horror movies, and drumming. I had a lot of energy that I needed to find a creative outlet for. I initially found it through drumming and martial arts. Then I eventually discovered dance and performance magic. These became ways for me to channel all of this energy. I’m still very blessed with this energy, and I found a way to channel the energy at a very early age.
David: How did you become interested in stage magic?
Jeff: I grew up in upstate New York, and I was very isolated from other kids. There were no magicians in the area. I found a magic book next to the music book that I was studying in school, and that opened up a whole new world for me. I was taking books out from the library on music, and there was a book on magic next to them. I had never really seen magic performed anywhere, but I started reading about it.
David: How old were you at the time?
Jeff: Eight years old. I think every kid, when they’re about seven, eight years old is looking for sense of personal power, something to make them different or stand out. And I was the only magician, and that felt really good to me. There was nobody they could compare me to, as bad as I was.
David: How have your travels influenced your stage performance?
Jeff: My performance is drawn from the roots of many different world theater disciplines. When I was in Japan I studied Kabuki theater. When I was in Europe I studied classical mime at Comedia delle Arte. Wherever I go, I try to pick up some of the influence of the culture–especially by meeting magicians in the many different places that I travel, finding out the way people experience magic differently in the world, and by the way the performers create their magic and rituals.
David: Are there other people who have been integrating mime, dance, comedy, and theater into their magic performance, or is this combination pretty unique to you?
Jeff: I think the blend that I have is quite unique. However, comedy and magic–that’s been done since the very
Valerie Leveroni Corral is the cofounder and director of the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana (WAMM), the most highly praised medical marijuana collective in California. Corral was the first person in California to challenge the marijuana laws in court, based on the necessity defense, common law doctrine dating to the Magna Carta, and win. She also helped lead the 1996 battle to pass Proposition 215, the state’s medical marijuana law. An article in The New York Times referred to Corral as “the Florence Nightingale and Johnny Appleseed of medical marijuana rolled into one.” And according to High Times magazine, “Valerie’s leadership role in the battle for medical marijuana is unquestioned.”
Corral was in a serious automobile accident in 1973 that left her so severely epileptic that she often suffered from five grand mal seizures a day. With “deliberate application and mindful monitoring”, Corral began using marijuana as an adjunct medicine to help control her seizures in 1974. This treatment soon replaced her rigorous pharmaceutical regimen, and it
Ram Dass is one of the most respected and best loved spiritual teachers in the world. His books and lectures are responsible for exposing many Westerners to Eastern philosophy, and he has been an inspiration to many people. He is the author of twelve books about topics such as personal transformation and compassionate social action–including the classic book on Hindu Philosophy Be Here Now.
Ram Dass was born with the name Richard Alpert in 1931. He earned an M.A. from Wesleyan University, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University, both in psychology. After earning his Ph.D., he served on the psychology faculties at Stanford and the University of California. From 1958 to 1963 he taught and conducted research at the Department of Social Relations and the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. In collaboration with Timothy Leary and others, Alpert began researching the psychological effects of psychedelic drugs. This research lead to a storm of controversy, and eventually to their dismissal from the Harvard faculty in 1963.
However, Alpert, Leary, and others continued their pioneering research into the effects of psychedelics at the Millbrook Estate in Dutchess County, New York, which members of the Mellon family had made available to them as a center for their psychedelic research. Here artists, writers, scholars, scientific researchers, spiritual teachers and seekers, celebrities and socialites, came to this grand and beautiful estate to explore the mind-expanding effects of LSD, psilocybin, and other psychedelic plants and potions. Millbrook was where the cultural origins of the Sixties counterculture and the consciousness transformation movement began, and it flourished until the estate was raided in 1966 by G. Gordon Liddy, who was then the District Attorney of Dutchess County.
In 1967 Alpert made his first trip to India, where he met the spiritual teacher, Neem Karoli Baba, who gave him the name Ram Dass, which means “Servant of God”. Under his guru’s guidance, he began to study yoga and meditation, and this profoundly affected his life. Since 1968 Ram Dass has pursued a variety of spiritual practices–including Hinduism and Sufism. His bestselling book Be Here Now was first published in 1971.
Ram Dass created the Hanuman Foundation in 1974 to spread “spiritually-directed social action” in the West. The foundation has developed many projects, including the Prison Ashram Project, designed to help inmates grow spiritually during incarceration, and the Living-Dying Project, which provides support for conscious dying. Both projects still operate today. In 1978 Ram Dass co-founded the Seva Foundation (Seva means “service” in Sanskrit), an international service organization dedicated to relieving suffering in the world. The Seva Foundation works in public health and social justice issues, and has made major progress in combating blindness in India and Nepal.
Ram Dass is the author or coauthor of twelve hooks. In addition to Be Here Now, his books include Identification and Child Rearing, The Psychedelic Experience, LSD, Grist for the Mill, Journey of Awakening, Miracle of Love, How Can I Help?, and Compassion in Action. His most recent books are Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying, and One-Liners : A Mini-Manual for a Spiritual Life. Ram Dass has lectured in over 230 cities throughout the world, and a documentary about his life and work entitled Ram Dass: Fierce Grace was released in 2002. To find out more about Ram Dass visit: www.ramdasstapes.org
Ram Dass had a stroke in February of 1997, which paralyzed the right side of his body. Despite the difficulty that he has speaking and walking, Ram Dass continues to teach, write and lecture. To help with the symptoms from his stroke, Ram Dass uses medical marijuana, and is a member of the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana (WAMM), which was started by Valerie Corral, who is also interviewed in this volume. On Nov. 7 2002 WAMM had a fundraising benefit featuring Ram Dass in Santa Cruz, California. At the benefit the Mayor of Santa Cruz, Christopher Krohn, officially proclaimed November 7th as Ram Dass day in Santa Cruz.
I’ve interviewed Ram Dass on three occasions, and have spent some time hanging out with him at various social events over the years. It’s been a real pleasure spending time with Ram Dass, as he had a big influence on the development of my spiritual perspective. I carried his book Be Here Now around with me everywhere that I went when I was a junior in High School, and, to this day, I still turn to it for inspiration. It feels good to be around Ram Dass, as he seems to simply radiate ‘positive vibes’. He has an uncanny ability to make other people feel good about themselves. Ram Dass is a funny, lovable guy, and he has a lot of charisma, but I think that it’s his profound honesty, and openness about his own spiritual evolution, that makes his teachings so powerful.
I first interviewed Ram Dass in 1994 for my book Voices from the Edge, and then in the Spring of 1997 for Tricycle magazine, several months after his stroke. I interviewed Ram Dass again for this book on May 13, 2004. What follows is a composite of these three conversations. During the post-stroke interviews, Ram Dass had trouble finding words. There were a lot of long pauses, but I could tell that his mind and spirit were essentially unchanged, and I found him more inspirational than ever. I spoke with Ram Dass about how Hinduism and psychedelics helped shape his philosophy, what he thought about such timeless topics as God and death, and how the stroke affected his outlook on life.
David: What were you like as a child?
Ram Dass: Cute. I was the littlest member of the family. When I was ten or eleven I played the cello. I was a good kid, except I smoked with my friends. We’d go on our bicycles, in the back of the garage, and we’d smoke. (laughter)
David: How old were you at the time? You mean like early adolescence?
Ram Dass: No, before that. I must have been eleven, or something like that.
David: What originally inspired your interest in the evolution of human consciousness?
Ram Dass: I’m inclined to immediately respond “mushrooms”, which I took in March of 1961, but that was just the beginning feed-in to a series of nets. Once my consciousness started to go all over the place, I had to start thinking it through in order to understand what was happening to me. It wasn’t until after I’d been around Tim Leary, Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts, that I started to reflect about issues like the evolution of consciousness.
David: What drew you to study psychology?
Ram Dass: I’m embarrassed to admit what drew me to psychology. I didn’t want to go to medical school. I was getting good grades in psychology. I was charismatic and people in the psychology department liked me. It was as low a level as that. My whole academic career was totally out of Jewish anxiety, and issues surrounding achievement and adequacy. It was totally sociopolitical. It had nothing to do with intellectual content at all. I taught Freudian theory. Human motivation was my specialty, so I thought a lot about all that stuff. That served me in very good stead because it’s an exquisitely articulated subsystem. If you stay in that subsystem, it’s very finite and not very nourishing. But when you have a meta-system, and then there’s the subsystem within it, then it’s beautiful. It’s like a jewel, just like with chemistry or physics. But when I was in it, it was real. When I was a Freudian, all I saw were psycho-sexual stages of development. And as a behaviorist all I saw were people as empty boxes.
David: How has your experience with psychedelics effected your view of life?
Ram Dass: It had no effect on me whatsoever and nobody should use it! (laughter) The predicament about history is that you keep rewriting the history. I’m not sure, as I look back, whether what appeared to be critical events are really as critical as I thought they were, because a lot of people took psychedelics and didn’t have the reaction I had. That had something to do with everything that went before that moment. In a way I just see it as another event, but I can say that
Deepak Chopra, M.D. is a physician, inspirational speaker, and a prolific writer. Dr. Chopra combines conventional Western medical approaches with traditional Ayurvedic medicine from India, and has been one of the leading figures in mind/body medicine for around twenty years. His work has had a significant influence on many Western physicians, and he helped to bring the notion of holistic medicine to many people’s attention with his innovative combination of Eastern and Western healing. Dr. Chopra has written over thirty books (both fiction and nonfiction) on the topics of alternative medicine, self-improvement, and spirituality–including the New York Times bestsellers Timeless Body, Ageless Mind, How to Know God, and Quantum Healing. He is especially well known for integrating modern theories of quantum physics with the timeless wisdom of ancient cultures.
Dr. Chopra attended medical school at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, where he was trained as an endocrinologist, and graduated in 1969. Formerly the Chief of Staff at Boston Regional Medical Center, Dr. Chopra built a successful endocrinology practice in Boston in the 1980’s. His teaching affiliations included Tufts University and Boston University Schools of Medicine. In 1985 Dr. Chopra left a successful and highly regarded position as chief of staff at The New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts, in order to dedicate his life to expanding the impact and effectiveness of conventional medicine.
Dr. Chopra lectures around the world, and has made presentations to such organizations as the United Nations, the World Health Organization in Geneva, and London’s Royal Society of Medicine. As the keynote speaker, he appeared at the inauguration of the State of the World Forum, hosted by Mikhail Gorbachev and the Peace and Human Progress Foundation, founded by the former president of Costa Rica and Nobel Peace prize winner Oscar Arias. Esquire Magazine designated Dr. Chopra as one of the top ten motivational speakers in the country; and in 1995, he was a recipient of the Toastmasters International Top Five Outstanding Speakers award. He participates annually as a lecturer at the Update in Internal Medicine event sponsored by Harvard Medical School, Department of Continuing Education and the Department of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in 1997. In 1999 Time magazine selected Dr. Chopra as one of the “Top 100 Icons and Heroes of the century”, describing him as “the poet-prophet of alternative medicine.”
Dr. Chopra’s books explore many spiritual and health-related topics. His book How to Know God: The Soul’s Journey into the Mystery of Mysteries presents a seven stage theory of how people perceive religious experiences. Some of his other bestselling books include The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, Unconditional Life, Perfect Health, The Return of Merlin, The Path to Love, and Return of the Rishi. He has also produced more than a hundred audio, video and CD-ROM titles, and his books has been published on every continent, and in dozens of languages. In 1992, he served on the National Institutes of Health Ad Hoc Panel on Alternative Medicine. Dr. Chopra is also the founder of the Chopra Center for Well Being in Carlsbad, California.To find out more visit about Dr. Chopra’s work visit: www.chopra.com
Deepak’s books have been an inspiration to me over the years. He has a real talent for being able to integrate timeless spiritual teachings with the insights of modern science, and to then apply this understanding to finding practical solutions to many of life’s basic problems. I interviewed Deepak on September 4, 2003. I found him to be a very eloquent speaker. He expresses his ideas with clarity, simplicity, and charm. We spoke about the relationship between the mind and body, whether or not one can be certain of spiritual beliefs, psychic phenomena, mystical experiences, and the nature of God and consciousness.
David: What were you like as a child?
Deepak: I grew up in India. I went to a Catholic missionary school, and I was very interested in Shakespeare, the dramatic arts, debating, and cricket. I had a wonderful childhood. My parents were extremely caring and loving. My father was a cardiologist, and he really flooded the house with books of knowledge and literature.
David: How did you become interested in medicine, health and longevity?
Deepak: I wanted to actually be a writer, and I wanted to do fiction, but my father was very keen that I go into medicine. On my fourteenth birthday he gave me several books, which were all fiction, but included physicians as the protagonist. So I switched to medicine at the last moment, went to pre-med, and went on to become a physician.
David: How important do you think our beliefs about aging are, with regard to how our health is effected by age, and what role do you see the mind playing in physical health?
Deepak: Well, there’s physical age, psychological age, and chronological age. The research data shows that your psychological age influences your biological age more than your chronological age. So your expectations, your beliefs, your anticipation of how you will be at a certain age, certainly influences the biochemistry and biology of aging.
David: How has your understanding of quantum physics and Hinduism influenced your perspective on the nature of consciousness?
Deepak: I’ll give you my perspective on Vedanta. I think Hinduism is a corruption of Vedanta, and I’m not very keen on the Hindu rituals. But Vedantic understanding of consciousness, as the ground of existence, has really influenced my understanding of how the universe works. I am convinced by everything I know scientifically that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon– that it’s the other way around. Matter is the epiphenomenon. Consciousness conceives, governs, constructs, and ultimately becomes the physical reality.
I believe that consciousness is the ground of being, and it differentiates into both observer and observed. Today from the perspective of quantum physics we also know that matter is energy and information. But energy and information are a potential, unless there’s an observer to collapse the potential into a space-time event. So I think quantum physics, in many ways, validates the original insights of Vedanta.
David: What are your thoughts on telepathy and psychic phenomena, and why do you think so many scientists have such difficulty accepting the possibility that these phenomena actually exist?
Deepak: I think scientists who do not understand non-locality will have difficulty in understanding, or accepting, these phenomena, because the phenomena can’t be explained by conventional science, or even by information technology. The only way these phenomena can be understood is the actualization, simultaneously, in information and nervous systems, that are separated from each other in space-time, from a common non-local domain.
As we understand more about the physics of non-locality–which is really an elaboration of the Einstein-Padolski-Rosen equation and Bell’s Theorem–we will have a better way to explain these phenomena. So-called telepathy, precognition, remembrance of other lifetimes, prophecy, are all examples of simultaneous actualization of information in different nervous systems from a single underlying non-dual, non-local consciousness.
David: One of the themes of your spiritual books is that we create our own realities through the choices that we make in life. However, it seems that much of what happens in life is beyond our personal control. I’m wondering if you think that our personal choices explain everything that happens to us. If we are 100% responsible for the creation of our own realities, how do you explain the atrocities and abuse that small children sometimes face in this world?
Deepak: I think you’re asking a question that has been asked forever– and that is, is there free-will, or is it a deterministic universe? In the enlightened mind, it’s a completely free world and universe. In the conditioned mind, it’s a determined world. We can not squeeze the soul into the volume of a single body, or even the span of a lifetime. So the atrocities and abuse that happens are an interdependent co-rising of a turbulence in the collective ground of consciousness. And it can be very easily understood, if you put it in that context. If you think of a person as an individual, then, of course, there is a great difficulty in explaining these phenomena. From the Vedantic perspective, the person is an illusion. There is no such thing as a person. A person is in the interwoveness of interbeingness, and does not have a separate identity. So whatever happens is a result of an interdependent co-arising of space-time events from the virtual or non-local domain.
David: What is your perspective on God, and do you see any teleology in evolution?
Deepak: God is the source of all the information, energy, space-time, and matter that structure the
Paul Krassner is a rare blend of satirist, comedian, prankster and political activist. Many comedians and writers–such as George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Matt Groening, Robert Anton Wilson, and Kurt Vonnegut–have attributed some of their comedic inspiration to Krassner.
Krassner is perhaps most well-known for publishing the satirical political magazine The Realist, which was the first adult satire magazine.The Realist blurred the distinction between actual news and fictitious humor, and it was often very difficult to tell the difference–which was precisely why the magazine was so much fun. The magazine ran between 1958 and 2001 (with a break between 1974 and 1985). With its irreverent mockery of authority, and its radical politics,The Realist not only paved the way for mainstream adult parody magazines, such asNational Lampoon and Spy, but it was also a large part of the inspiration for the underground press in the Sixties.
Krassner was a child prodigy violinist. At the age of six, he was the youngest person to ever perform at Carnegie Hall. But his real passion was making people laugh. He wrote for Mad magazine in the Fifties, and he co-founded the Yippies (Youth International Party), with Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman in the Sixties. In fact, Krassner coined the term “Yippie”. The Yippies were a radical, left-wing, largely student-based political organization, that staged public pranks–such as running a pig for president and dropping money from the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange–in order to attract media attention, which they used to spread their political messages. They were pioneers in learning how to launch what Douglas Rushkoff would later call “media viruses”–a media story that carries a cultural message beyond the actual story.
Krassner edited Lenny Bruce’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, and with Lenny’s encouragement, became a standup comedian himself, opening at the Village Gate in New York in 1961. During the Sixties Krassner often performed on college campuses and at antiwar rallies. When ABC newscaster Harry Reasoner wrote in his memoirs, “Krassner not only attacks establishment values; he attacks decency in general”, Krassner named his one-person show “Attacking Decency in General”, receiving awards from the L.A. Weekly andDramaLogue. Krassner has appeared on numerous television shows–including “Late Night” with Conan O’Brien, and “Politically Incorrect” with Bill Maher–and has written for HBO and Fox television shows, such as Ron Reagan’s late-night TV talk show.
Krassner’s comedy albums include, We Have Ways of Making You Laugh, Brain Damage Control, Sex, Drugs and the Antichrist, Campaign in the Ass and Irony Lives! He is also the author and co-author of numerous books, including The Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race, Confessions of a Raving Unconfined Nut, Sex, Drugs and the Twinkie Murders, Impolite Interviews, Pot Stories For the Soul, Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs, and Murder At the Conspiracy Convention & Other American Absurdities.
I interviewed Paul on November 21, 2003. Paul and I have corresponded by email for years, and I was happy to be able to have this opportunity to talk with him at length. Paul has a thoughtful and generous manner about him. He’s very polite, and he can be hilariously funny without even trying, it seems–often taking you by surprise with his unique perspectives. He had me laughing out loud many times during the interview. We talked about how comedy can be used as a tool to help educate people and increase political awareness, why satire often becomes prophetic, what it was like to accompany Groucho Marx on his first acid trip, and why he thinks that the labels of fiction and nonfiction may no longer be permitted in the libraries of the future.
David: What were you like as a child?
Paul: I was mischievous. I was also a child-prodigy violinist, and turned out to be the youngest person ever to perform at Carnegie Hall.
David: How old were you?
Paul: I was six years old. But even as a kid violinist I was still mischievous. Somebody would be playing the piano on stage, and I would pull the curtain down on them. Or I would play the violin, and then bow to the audience with my rear end facing them. I just had this predilection for breaking frames.
David: How did you first become interested in politics and satire?
Paul: A year later, when I was seven, I was in elementary school, and one of the kids got in front of the class, pulled down his zipper and exposed himself. He got sent to reform school, and somehow, without having the vocabulary to express it, I felt that the punishment did not fit the crime. So the next day , after having done my self-imposed homework, I got in front of the class, pulled down my zipper, and exposed a drawing that I had made of my penis. And this was intuitive mischief, and even subversion. But the rules seemed to me to be arbitrary. So I did that, and the class laughed. In retrospect, I realize that it was an optimistic move. I thought that because I hadn’t shown my actual penis I wouldn’t be sent to reform school, and I was right about that.
Even before that, on the stage of Carnegie Hall, I woke up while I was playing Vivaldi Concerto in A Minor. I had practiced myself right out of my childhood. What started to wake me up was an itch in my left leg. I knew that I wasn’t supposed to follow the impulse of stopping playing the Volde Concerto, and scratching my leg with my bow, so I simply deferred to my underground laboratory of alternative solutions to a problem. What occurred to me–and I followed the impulse–was to just stand on my left leg, and scratch it with my right foot, without missing a note of the Volde. I did this and the audience laughed. And I woke up to that sound of laughter. I mean, that was my relation to the ultimate mystery of existence, without having any dogma to impose a metphor for the mystery.
But the thing is that I was not trying to make the audience laugh. I was just trying to solve my own problem. So thinking about that I realized–and I understood a lot of this in retrospect–that one person’s logic is another person’s humor. And that perception has served as my process for turning political logic into satire–because they all try to be logical up there. With every lie they tell, they think they’re being logical, and the American population has been dumbed down enough to accept a lot of that logic. So then, as I, as I got older it could apply specifically to social and political contradictions and injustices.
David: Why do you think it’s important to question authority?
Paul: Because authorities don’t necessarily have your interests at heart. They may rationalize–or even genuinely believe–that they have compassion and justice in mind, but too often their real goal is to perpetuate their own power.
David: What inspired you to start The Realist?
Paul: I had been working for a monthly anticensorship paper called The Independent. Lyle Stuart was the editor. I had also been doing some freelance stuff for Mad magazine. But Mad was only for teenagers, essentially, preteens even, and if I would give them a subject that seemed too adult, it would be turned down. I remember talking to the publisher, Bill Gaines about this. They had like a million and a quarter circulation, which was pretty big at the time, and still is. I said, I guess you don’t want to change horses when you’re in midstream. And his answer, which became like a mantra to me, was, “not when the horse has a rocket up it’s ass”. At that moment I understood the bottom line .
There was no satirical magazine for grown-ups at the time. This was before Spy, National Lampoon, Saturday Night Live, and Doonsberry. So there was no humor in the things that I was concerned about–which was everything from anti-circumcision to antinuclear testing–because of all the taboos. So if an anthropologist of the future watched the situation comedies on TV, they wouldn’t be able tell what was festering under the culture of piety. So the motivation for The Realist came from combining the First Amendment
Bruce Sterling is a science fiction writer and social satirist who helped to create the “cyberpunk” genre, and has had a large influence on computer culture in general. He has written more than ten bestselling science fiction novels, and three short story collections, but, more importantly, he helped to establish a cultural movement that has a deep and lasting effect on how people interact with technology. Sterling appeared on the cover of the very first issue of Wired magazine–an indication of the essential role that he has played in the development of digital culture–and he continues to write a monthly column for the publication.
Sterling grew up in Texas, and, as a teenager, he lived in India, where his father worked on a fertilizer plant project. He began writing at the age of twelve, and he graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Texas in 1976. The same year he also sold his first science fiction story “Man-Made Self”. A year later his first novel, Involution Ocean, was published. The Artificial Kid was published in 1980 andSchismatrix in 1985.
During the mid-Eighties, under the pseudonym Vincent Omniaveritas, Sterling also began writing and editing a small ”zine” called Cheap Truth, in which he and several other writers mocked the science fiction establishment, and called for a more culturally relevant approach to the genre. This viewpoint, and the fiction associated with it, eventually grew into the cultural phenomenon known as “cyberpunk”–and Sterling became one of its most prominent voices.
The cyberpunk culture produced the first wave of computer users–who were not part of the scientific community or the military establishment–that set out and explore the cultural potential of the internet. They created the first digital subcultures, an explosion of online communities, that shared an interest in cutting-edge technology, chemically-enhanced intelligence, and personal freedom. This cultural impact of the movement–particularly on the development of the World Wide Web, and as the inspiration behind such films as The Matrix–can barely be understated.
Sterling edited the book Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology in 1986, which is considered to be the classic collection of the cyberpunk genre. Some of Sterling’s other science fiction novels include Islands in the Net, Distraction, Zeitgeist, Schismatrix Plus, The Zenith Angle, and his dark tale of a global-warming future, Heavy Weather. Some of his short story collections include Globalhead, Crystal Express, and A Good Old Fashioned Future. Sterling has also collaborated with a number of other writers, such as Rudy Rucker and John Kessel, on a variety of short stories, and he co-authored The Difference Engine with William Gibson.
Sterling is also the author of two nonfiction books, including The Hacker Crackdown:Law And Disorder On The Electronic Frontier, which explores issues in computer crime and civil liberties. The book was inspired in 1990 after the U.S. Secret Service began raiding people’s homes and offices as part of a nationwide “hacker crackdown”. After publishing the book in a conventional format in 1992, Sterling released the work in free electronic form on the internet–as “an act of citizenship”–where it was widely disseminated, and can be found on hundreds of web sites around the world today. Sterling’s most recent nonfiction book is Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next 50 Years, which contains his thoughts and speculations about the future.
In 1996 Sterling published a novel about life-extension technology and outlaw anarchists called Holy Fire. His research for the novel sparked an interest in industrial design, and as this interest grew, in the late 90’s, it merged with Sterling’s growing concern about global climate change. This inspired Sterling to start the Viridian Design Movement (www.viridiandesign.org), whose goal is to advance environmental awareness through revolutionary art and design. The movement’s most recent accomplishment is that Austin, Texas–Sterling’s home base–has officially declared itself to be the Clean Energy Capital of the World.
Although Sterling travels around doing public speaking quite a bit, he spends most of his time in Austin, where he continues to write fiction and magazine articles, and he regularly updates his web log “Beyond the Beyond” (blog.wired.com/sterling). I interviewed Bruce on December 15, 2003. Bruce has a sharp mind and a quick wit. He’s got an imagination that certainly goes over the edge, but he’s also very practical, and very funny. I got the impression that any concept that was more than a few years old seemed like ancient history to him. We talked about the difficulty distinguishing between satire and reality, corporations of the future, the Dairy Product Theory of Dead Media, and how a permanent state of disequilibrium can be a very creative place.
David: What were you like as a child?
Bruce: My father always told me I was quite solemn and silent as a small child. I didn’t speak until I was three. I was quiet and observant, not very boisterous–an unsmiling, round-eyed child. I spent a lot time staring at ant hills, apparently.
David: What inspired you to start writing science fiction, and what inspires you to write it today?
Bruce: Well, I read a lot of it. It was my favorite reading matter. I was very influenced by it as a youngster. Then, in my college days, I actually fell into bad company–people who were ambitious to write science fiction–and I learned something about the industry that way. I just taught myself how to do it, and hung out with people who were doing it. I was always very interested in the subculture. I’m interested in all forms of subculture really. It just turned out that I had a knack for it, and I couldn’t find anything else better to do. And that’s still the case.
David: How has your interest in science and technology influenced your fiction?
Bruce: My father was an engineer, and there are a lot of oil and gas people in my family. An uncle of mine is an entomologist. So there was science and engineering in my family background. It was not some kind of alien thing. It was how we ate, really. I mean, that was our industrial base there. So I never felt alienated by it. Or surprised by it. It was just a normal thing for me. I’m still very interested in the oil and gas industry, although I rarely write about it. People like to call science fiction “science” fiction, but the more time I spend with it, the more I realize that it’s not primarily concerned with science. You get your best effects out of areas that are better described as engineering or industrial design.
David: How has satire played a role in your work, and why do you like to mix real facts with your fiction?
Bruce: Well, people call that stuff satire, but I like to think of it in the terms that H.G. Wells did. He said that if you want to write about the future, you need to the triple the phenomena that you’re writing about–not because things always triple, but because if you double it, people think you’re merely exaggerating. And if you quadruple it, nobody can tell what the hell you’re talking about. So if you take some small phenomenon, that looks like it’s going to become a great common place someday, you start extrapolating it. You could blow it up to three times normal size, and point out that it may have a much stronger effect than it seems to be having at the moment–and that effect looks satirical.
It looks and smells like satire, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be humorous. It may well be a rather accurate description of what’s likely to happen. If you live in a growing town and the traffic triples, you will have big traffic jams. If you anticipate this in print, it may sound quite funny, but it’s not very funny when you’re actually in one. (laughter) It’s not at all uncommon for traffic to triple in some places.
David: You’ve collaborated with several other writers–such as Rudy Rucker and William Gibson–on short stories and novels. Can you talk a little about this process of collaboration, and how you go about writing something with another writer?
Clifford Pickover is one of the most popular and prolific science writers in America. He is the author of over thirty popular science books, and science fiction novels, which investigate a diverse range of mind-expanding topics–such as time travel, black holes, extraterrestrial biology, mathematics, creativity and computers. Some of Dr. Pickover’s more popular books include Chaos in Wonderland, Surfing Through Hyperspace, Time: A Traveler’s Guide, The Science of Aliens, and The Paradox of God. What all of his books share in common is a transcendence of the ordinary world, and a fascination with the beyond. “My primary interest,” said Dr. Pickover, “is in finding new ways to continually expand creativity by melding art, science, mathematics and seemingly-disparate areas of human endeavor. I seek not only to expand the mind but to shatter it.”
Dr. Pickover received his Ph.D. from Yale University’s Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. He is currently a Research Staff Member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, where he has received over 35 invention achievement awards, and three research division awards. Dr. Pickover is also the associate editor of Computers and Graphics magazine, and he holds over 30 U.S. patents for unusually innovative inventions, mostly in the field of computer hardware, software, and novel ways of interacting with computers. According to Omni magazine, “Pickover is van Leeuwenhoek’s 20th century equivalent.” Wired magazine said, “Bucky Fuller thought big, Arthur C. Clarke thinks big, but Cliff Pickover outdoes them both.”
Dr. Pickover published his first book in 1990, Computers, Pattern, Chaos and Beauty, an introduction to mathematics, filled with dazzling computer graphics and mind-challenging puzzles. “No human being should pass up the experience of stepping through the portals of this beautiful book,” said Martin Gardner in Scientific American. This was the first of a series of educational books designed by Dr. Pickover to make science and mathematics more fun and exciting. The latest book in this series, Calculus and Pizza, may be the easiest route there is to learning calculus.
Dr. Pickover has a strong passion for mathematical puzzles, as evidenced by his books Wonders of Numbers, Mazes for the Mind,The Mathematics of Oz, and The Zen of Magic Squares. He is also the “Brain-Strain” columnist forOdyssey magazine, the puzzle writer for Studyworks, and, for many years, he was the “Brain-Boggler” columnist for Discover magazine. He even produces an annual puzzle calender, so that puzzle lovers can test their wits against a different logic, word, math, or mazelike puzzle each day of the week. Dr. Pickover enjoys tinkering with complex mathematical brainteasers the way most people play with jigsaw puzzles. “Pickover just seems to exist in more dimensions than the rest of us,” said Ian Stewart in Scientific American. Some of Dr. Pickover’s other books which explore mathematics and physics include Computers and the Imagination, Keys to Infinity, Black Holes: A Traveler’s Guide, Circles and Stars, The Girl Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, The Alien IQ Test, and Dreaming the Future: The Fantastic Story of Prediction.
Dr. Pickover is drawn to enigmas of all sorts it seems, and one of the more puzzling associations that he has explored in depth is the peculiar relationship between psychopathology and creativity. He is the author of the classic book on the topic of how brain pathologies play a role in scientific and artistic creativity–Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen. On the surface, an association between genius and insanity seems paradoxical, yet Dr. Pickover uncovers quite a large and convincing pool of evidence for such a connection.
Some of Dr. Pickover’s more theological or philosophical books include The Loom of God, The Paradox of God and the Science of Omniscience, and The Stars of Heaven. Dr. Pickover is also the author of several science fiction novels. There are four books in his NeoReality series: The Lobotomy Club, Liquid Earth, Sushi Never Sleeps, and Egg Drop Soup. He is also the co-author of Spider Legs, which he wrote with the eminent science fiction and fantasy writer Piers Anthony.
Dr. Pickover lives in Yorktown Heights, New York. I met Cliff over the internet, where he has a very active presence, and we communicate regularly by email. His personal web site is www.pickover.com, where you can find his exceedingly popular Reality Carnival web log (RealityCarnival.Com), which “explores the edges of science, altered realities, near-death experiences, and unsolved mysteries, from parallel universes and exotic sushi to religion, science, and psychedelics.”
I interviewed Cliff in February of 2003, and then again in January of 2004. Cliff’s mind is a rare blend of intelligence and imagination, and the breadth of thought that he explores is simply brain-boggling. He’s unusually focused and curious–like a laser beam and a search light–and he balances his eyebrow-furling skepticism with a radical kind of open-mindedness. We talked about the possibilities of artificial and alien intelligence, extraterrestrial zoology, and about setting up a DMT machine-elf research center. We also discussed the role that the creative imagination plays in science, the relationship between scientific creativity and mental illness, and how religious experiences can be the consequence of unusual brain states.
David: What were you like as a child, and how did you become interested in science, mathematics, and writing?
Clifford: I’ve been interested in science and math since childhood. While growing up in New Jersey, my bedroom featured anatomical models of the heart, brain, and eye; posters of the human circulatory system; trilobite fossils, science-fiction books, and Ugly Stickers displaying those funny, alienlike creatures with names like ‘Bob’, ‘Sandy’, and ‘Iris’. My father would continually make mazes for me to solve with pencil and paper. Martin Gardner’s books were influential.
My childhood fascination with science and mathematics arose from my interest in knowing more about how the world works and also from my passion for science fiction. I remember that one of my favorite science-fiction tales was Henry Hasse’s “He Who Shrank,” originally published in 1936, which describes the exploration of subatomic universes filled with machine civilizations. I think that many scientists and science popularizers got kick-started by reading science fiction. Additionally, my parents encouraged scientific pursuits.
I should note that I have also been very interested in words and writing from an early age. In high school, whenever I came across an exceptionally colorful phrase or quotation in a book, I’d write it down in a notebook. I still have that notebook today and refer to it. Obviously, language is the primary medium with which we think and communicate ideas to others. When one reads language in written form, one is really decoding symbols. It is through the interactions of such symbols that we create new worlds, new images, new thoughts. For a long time, I have held a fascination with colorful symbols and words. Words are meant to be petted and stroked. They are meant to allow us to transcend space and time, and to inspire visions.
David: What kind of an effect do you think science fiction has had on the evolution of scientific research and the development of scientific theory?
Clifford: I like to think of science fiction as the ‘literature of edges’ because the topics are poised on the edge of what is and what might be. Certainly, science fiction is a literature of change. Moreover, our universe is a science-fiction universe, filled with mystery–constantly fluctuating and evolving. Isaac Asimov said that “science fiction is the only form of literature that consistently considers the nature of the changes that face us, the possible consequences, and the possible solutions.” Most scientists grew up reading science fiction, so how could science fiction not affect scientific research and theories? Note that many of my science books included science-fiction story lines to stimulate readers’ interest in the science. These science books with science-fiction plots include Black Holes: A Traveler’s Guide, Time: A Traveler’s Guide, The Stars of Heaven, Surfing through Hyperspace,
Peter Russell is a bestselling author, filmmaker, and management consultant. He is considered one of the leading thinkers on the nature and evolution of consciousness. Russell is probably best known for his pioneering book The Global Brain, which builds upon James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, by exploring the notion that the human species might be playing the role of a giant evolving brain in our planetary biosphere. Some of Russell’s other popular books include Waking Up in Time, The Consciousness Revolution, and From Science to God. Common themes in Russell’s books include the integration of science and mysticism, avoiding ecological catastrophe, the relationship between personal transformation and global change, and the future evolution of the human species. Russell believes that is that only way humanity is going to survive the current global crisis is through a shift in consciousness.
Russell earned an honors degree in theoretical physics and experimental psychology– as well as a master’s degree in computer science–at the University of Cambridge, England, where he studied under Stephen Hawking. For his postgraduate degree in computer science he conducted some of the early work on 3-dimensional displays, which later became part of the foundation for the computer-simulated worlds of Virtual Reality. He subsequently went to India where he explored meditation and Eastern philosophy. On his return to the U.K. he took up the first research post ever offered in Britain on the psychology of meditation, and conducted research into the neurophysiology of meditation at the University of Bristol.
Russell is a fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, The World Business Academy, The Findhorn Foundation, and he is an Honorary Member of The Club of Budapest. He was also one of the first people to introduce personal development programs to corporations in the 1970s. In the mid-Seventies Russell teamed up with Tony Buzan, and helped teach “Mind Maps” and learning methods to a variety of international organizations and educational institutions. Since then his corporate programs have focused increasingly on self-development, creativity, stress management, and sustainable environmental practices. His clients have included IBM, Apple, Digital, American Express, Barclays Bank, Swedish Telecom, ICI, Volvo, Shell Oil, British Petroleum, and other major international corporations.
Russell’s books are used as required reading at a number of universities, and have been translated into numerous languages. Ted Turner described The Global Brain Awakens as “A fascinating vision of how the information revolution is shifting consciousness. A much needed optimistic perspective on humanity’s future.” Robert Anton Wilson called Waking Up in Time “Absolutely brilliant.”
Russell has also created award-winning films based on The Global Brain and The White Hole in Time, and he was working on a new film project at the time of this interview. Russell has been a keynote speaker at many conferences in Europe, Japan and the USA. In 1993 the environmental magazine Buzzworm voted him “Eco-Philosopher Extraordinaire” of the year. Further information about Russell’s work may be found on his Web site: www.peterussell.com
I interviewed Peter on March 15, 2004. Peter’s book The Global Brain was an important book for me in my personal development, so I was happy to be able to have the opportunity to chat with him. I had met Peter only once before, around ten years earlier, at a social gathering at the home of Robert Anton Wilson. Peter is holistic and interdisciplinary in his thinking. He sees the Big Picture, and he has a gift for being able to communicate his insights. There’s an elegance, and a simplicity, to the way Peter can make so many diverse areas of thought come together. We spoke about the ecological dangers facing our species, why change is accelerating in evolution, the relationship between light and consciousness, and the possibility of a spiritual renaissance in humanity’s future.
David: What were you like as a child?
Peter: I was always a practical scientist at heart. I loved building things and doing experiments. I loved mathematics and working things out. I was always constructing stuff and solving problems.
David: What inspired your interest in the evolution of consciousness?
Peter: I think that was always there in the background. Many people ask me if I had a transformational moment, and I didn’t really. As a teenager I was fascinated by the mind. I read stories about yogis, started exploring hypnosis, and I built equipment that modified brain wave patterns. Although I was studying mathematics and physics then, and getting more and more fixed in that direction, I was always interested in the mind. So I knew there was something there, and my interest gradually evolved.
At the time I wasn’t interested in spirituality at all. I rejected religion when I was about thirteen. I thought it was a load of mumbo-jumbo that didn’t make sense at all, and didn’t agree with the scientific worldview. Although I wasn’t interested in the spiritual aspects of consciousness, I was interested in the untapped potentials of the mind. I think that’s what eventually lead me to explore mediation when I was in my early twenties. That’s when I started getting really interested.
David: What sort of paradigm shift do you think is necessary for Western science to begin to get a grasp on consciousness?
Peter: I think the essence of the paradigm shift is to let go of the idea that the material world–the world of space, time, and matter–is the fundamental reality. In some sense that’s already happening in modern physics. We’re realizing that space, time, and matter don’t really exist in an absolute way. That came out Einstein’s revolution. But, at the moment, we still think that consciousness emerges from the material world–and that, I think, is the fundamental problem with the current paradigm. Consciousness is so fundamentally different from material things.
We assume matter is unconscious, and then somehow this magical thing happens–when you put matter together in the form of a complex human brain consciousness somehow emerges out of it. The huge problem there for the current paradigm is how does matter, which we assume to be unconscious, ever lead to something so different as subjective experience? So I think the essence of the paradigm shift is challenging that assumption. That’s the assumption that science won’t let go of, and challenging that assumption means saying, maybe consciousness does not come out of the material world. It does not emerge from matter. Rather, consciousness is fundamental to the cosmos.
What I find fascinating is that when we make that shift, it doesn’t change anything at all in modern science. Physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics–they all stay exactly the same. But it adds a whole new understanding of human experience and spirituality. That’s common in paradigm shifts: the old model is still valid, but as a special case. So the materialist worldview still has its place, but it’s a special case of considering only physical reality.
David: You’ve pointed out in your writings that both science and religion agree that the universe started with light. Could you talk a little bit about the relationship that you see between consciousness and light?
Peter: Yes. First of all, I’m fascinated by the fact we use the same language. We talk about “the light of consciousness”, “the inner light”. We say “someone is alight”. I had this “flash” of inspiration. We talk about” enlightenment”. Or when someone’s unconscious we say, “the lights went out”. The word light is associated with consciousness in many ways, and I always found that. Then as I got more and more into physics I specialized in the nature of light, from the perspectives of quantum physics and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. What I found fascinating was that modern physics says that, from light’s point of view, light itself doesn’t know time or space, and doesn’t have any mass.
So light seems to be beyond the framework of space, time and matter. I think a lot of the problems that science has had in trying to understand light is because it’s trying to explain light as a material phenomena. That’s why you get things like the wave-particle paradox. We insist that light somehow fits into space, time, and matter. But ultimately it’s beyond them.
Now when you start looking at what the mystics say about when they get down to really looking at the true, fundamental nature of consciousness, they say consciousness in itself doesn’t actually exist in space or time, and consciousness has no mass. And a lot of the problems that we have with consciousness also come from trying to force it into a space-time-matter understanding. Consciousness seems to lie beyond space, time, and matter in the same way that light does.
Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist and social commentator. His books, articles, newspaper columns, talks, and NPR commentaries thoughtfully explore the psychological and sociological consequences of technology, mass media, advertising and youth culture. He is one of the most widely-read media critics in America, and although he is considered one of the world’s experts on youth culture and advertising, his ideas are not without controversy.
When Ruskkoff’s first book on media theory, Media Virus, was published in 1994, critics initially viewed his upbeat assessments of how teenagers were playfully deconstructing mass media as too idealistic. His ideas–which quickly became popular with younger generations–went against the conventional assumption that computer games and MTV videos were necessarily bad for kids. Rushkoff contended that the new interactive information technologies had the power to accelerate thought and increase intelligence.
Rushkoff’s enthusiasm for youth culture and new technology seemed reminiscent of Timothy Leary’s optimism, and, in fact, Rushkoff’s theories about media built upon Leary’s idea that each generation is a new breed of human–almost a new species–and that kids nowadays have nervous systems that process information in ways that are faster and less linear than previous generations. Rushkoff also expanded upon British biologist Richard Dawkins’s concept of “memes”–units of culture, which replicate like genes–to create the idea of a “media virus”, an idea that spreads through populations due to the media shell that surrounds it.
Ironically, after mainstream businesses and respected academics did start to take Rushkoff’s ideas and observations about media and youth culture seriously (simply because his theories had true predictive value), some people in the digital counterculture saw Rushkoff as something of a “sellout”, largely because he began consulting for Fortune 500 companies. But Rushkoff defends his actions by saying that he has always stayed true to his ideals. Whether he’s addressing a “corporate-culture” or a “counterculture” audience, Rushkoff has always aimed to be a cheerleader for change, growth, cooperation and creativity–what Timothy Leary would have called an “evolutionary agent”. He is trying to help the human race evolve, and one of the ways to do that, he believes, is to break down the artificial distinction between “us” and “them”.
Although Rushkoff is media theorist by trade, this hasn’t stopped him from writing books about everything from altered states of consciousness to Judaism. In addition to Media Virus, Rushkoff’s other popular nonfiction books–which include Cyberia, Playing the Future, and Coercion–explore such themes as the hidden agendas in popular culture, the relationship between computer culture and psychedelic drugs, social values and corporate coercion. He is also the author of two novels, Ecstasy Club and Exit Strategy, as well as the graphic novelClub Zero-G, which explore such diverse topics as rave culture, computer hacking, and the nature of consciousness. In addition, he co-authored the book Stoned Free (with Patrick Wells) about methods for getting high without drugs, and he edited The Gen X Reader, a collection of essays about new trends in thought and culture. His latest book, Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, moves away from these cyberculture themes and explores Rushkoff’s quest to find meaning in Judaism.
Rushkoff was the correspondent for PBS’s award-winning Frontline documentary on teenage culture, The Merchants of Cool. His weekly commentaries air on CBS Sunday Morning, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, and they appear on the back page of Timemagazine. Rushkoff also writes for many popular magazines, and his monthly column on cyberculture is distributed through the New York Times Syndicate. He lectures regularly at conferences and universities around the world, and has served as an adjunct professor of communication at New York University. He also served as an Advisor to the United Nations Commission on World Culture, and on the advisory boards of the Media Ecology Association and the Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics.
Rushkoff lives in New York City’s East Village. I interviewed him on October 17, 2003. I’ve corresponded with Doug for several years, and was glad to finally have this opportunity to talk at length with him. Doug strikes me as being unusually sincere; he seems genuinely and deeply devoted to the process of discovery and education. There’s a childlike playfulness in the way that he explores sophisticated ideas. I spoke with Doug about the interplay between youth culture, corporate culture, and the counterculture. We discussed theories of media and media viruses, and the sociological implications of having a generation of reality hackers with their hands on the dashboard of creation.
David: What were you like as a child?
Douglas: I guess it would depend on who you talk to. Or, more importantly, on when you think the childhood ends. I mean, I’m still a child, right?
I think I was a recontextualizer as a kid. I think I looked at situations, and then tried to keep reframing them. In other words, I would look at, say, the classroom I was sitting in and think, well, what’s really going on here? Is this one older person talking to lots of younger people? Or is this some sort of imitation of a factory floor? And then the teacher’s like the foreman, and we’re the workers. Or is it a family? And the teacher’s like the mommy, and we’re the children. So I just spent a lot of time as a kid, not really imagining things or imagining new scenarios, as much as seeing whatever situation I was in in different ways–and spending a lot of effort to keep my sense of things fluid rather than really fixed.
David: Are you saying that you didn’t really have any firm belief systems as a child?
Douglas: I don’t know if I thought of it that way. But, I think, for various reasons, probably out of fear, or getting picked on, or being isolated, or being in situations that didn’t really work well for me, I developed a tactic of being able to reimagine the situations I was in as something else.
Gosh, if you were a slave in ancient Rome, or a victim in some truly catastrophic situation, it would behoove you to be able to re-imagine all this as a scenario in which this is all actually okay–the way a starving Hindu might imagine what he’s doing is paying penitence, so that he can come back in a better life. Most simply, you come up with a story that suits the circumstances around you, but is more pleasing than the story that you seem to be in. Like anyone I developed this technique out of necessity, but then I managed to turn it into something fun, even artistic, and it ended up serving me as a philosophy later on.
But the simplest way of answering the question would just be to say that, as a kid, I was naughty. I was not naughty in the big sense. I didn’t shoot people, or hurt anybody, but I was kind of devilish, more of a trickster child. I was class clown, but with purpose.
David: How did you become interested in writing about the media and youth culture?
Douglas: I don’t know if it speaks well of me, but I became interested in writing because it was something I could do without sponsorship, and without collaborating. It seemed that everything else that I was interested in involved working with and for other people–some of whom seemed dedicated to interests other than the project at hand. I was very interested in theater and film, but they always required collaboration, and they required someone else’s money to actually do the thing. I got interested in writing because it was something I could do without anybody’s help, without any sponsorship. You had to get it published, and to get it out there in the world you had to collaborate. But just to write, no. It’s just you.
I started by writing about all the weirdness that was going on in the late 80’s–the beginning of internet culture, the psychedelic revival, rave culture, chaos math and new physics, and fantasy role-playing games–all the stuff that ended up coalescing as the book Cyberia. It all seemed to me to be part of a single kind of mass cultural phenomenon–where people felt that they were getting their hands on the dashboard of creation, that people could now design reality in one way or another. And that seemed like a real, almost a categorical shift to me, and something worth telling people about. Although I wrote a couple of cyberdelic screenplays back then, it’s really hard to get whatever millions you need to get a movie made. But writing articles about that was a no-brainer. Even mainstream publications were willing to let me write about this stuff because no one else knew about it at the time.
So I ended up getting a writing career, less because my writing was particularly good, than because I had access to a story, and a perspective on a story that wasn’t really being covered by anybody else. Then the more I wrote, the more I liked the actual writing and wordsmithing, and then realized that it was a better fit for me. At least for the last twenty years it’s been a better fit for my personality and my way of working than theater was.
David: What do you think adults can learn from youth culture?
Douglas: Why they can learn about the future. Everybody tries to forecast the future using all sorts of strange methodologies about what’s going to happen. So much effort has been expended exploring the question, where’s the human race going? When all that you have to do is look at kid. A kid is basically the next model of human being. So, if you want to know, where’s evolution taking us–whether it’s physical evolution or cultural evolution–you look at kids, because they are quite literally the future.
The other thing we can learn from kids is the trending of our cognitive and neural habits. You can see most readily the different ways that kids draw connections between things than we do, the different ways of processing information. If you can hold back from being judgmental about it, for just a moment, to look at what it is that’s going on for them and inside them. I mean, yeah, there are many tendencies that are very upsetting–a shortened attention span, less memory, less reading, and less consideration, okay, okay, okay. But if you look beyond those surface observations and focus instead on children’s cognitive functioning and pattern recognition, it becomes a lot more interesting.
You can start to see the differences between the way kids process information and the way we do as being almost as profound as the differences between the way literate culture looked at things from the way oral culture did before it. There are some extraordinary shifts taking place. Cerrtain things were lost when we learned to write things down. Memory, for one. But other things were gained.
David: I really enjoyed your book Media Virus. You wrote that quite a while ago now.
Douglas: Yeah, that’s still one of my favorites actually. I wrote that in, I guess, 93. It came out 94. It’s funny. That book was basically about the Web–only before the Web came out, you know what I mean? The web wasn’t really around yet, but it’s kind of–it’s not premonitory, that’s too strong a word. But I was already intimating that there were a whole bunch of new pathways about to be opened through which media messages could move from person to person–sideways, down and up, and in all these other ways.
In Media Virus I’m talking about faxes, usenet groups, and the very beginnings of email, and trying to tell people that, someday, you’ll be using email too, and there will be all sorts of viral communications going on. I remember literally getting laughed out of cocktail parties in New York in 94 and 95 when that book came out, because I was claiming that people would actually have computers on their desks, and internet connections in their homes.
David: They wouldn’t have laughed at you here in California.
Douglas: Exactly. That’s why I spent so much time there, then.
David: Could you define what you mean by a media virus? How the concept related to Richard Dawkin’s concept of memes, and how can media viruses be used to help prevent what Noam Chomsky calls “the manufacture of consent”?
Douglas: Yeah, well, in the hopeful vision I guess it could prevent that. A media virus is really just an idea that’s wrapped in a shell of media. If a real virus, a biological virus, is DNA’s code wrapped in protein, a media virus is ideological or conceptual code–what Richard Dawkins calls memes–wrapped in a media shell. And the point of a viral shell is to allow it to pass unrecognized through the body, or from body to body. So it’s got to really have a way of transmitting, a reason for it to move from person to person.
So a media virus, say the Rodney King tape, is first and foremost a media story, not about Rodney King, but about the tape itself. The reason why that homemade, camcorder video of a black guy getting beaten by white cops spread around the world overnight was not really so much because a black guy was getting by white cops. That happened all the time. The reason that it spread around the country was because the real story was someone caught this on camcorder. So this was a story about media. The shell of the Rodney King media virus is the tape itself. It’s not the carrier, that it’s on videotape. But rather, it’s the story of media being used in a new way.
Media wants to grow. Media is a living thing. So media passes stories about media more than it passes anything else. But once that virus is spread, it releases it’s code, and that decides whether or not it’s going to replicate and survive. And the code of this virus really did challenge our cultural code. Just as a biological virus, the genes inside it, the DNA inside it, literally interperlates itself into our own genetic code. It turns our cells into virus factories. The media virus uses it’s ideological code, it’s memes, to interperlate itself into our cultural code. So if we have cultural weaknesses, if there are gaps, conflicts, or contradictions in our cultural code, then the meme will find a place to nest, and the virus will end up replicating.
So, whether it’s Madonna talking about sex, or Howard Dean exploiting Friendster, or meetup.com, media viruses are launched when people use a medium in a new way. Then, once they have your attention, if the viruses can release ideas, code, or concepts even, that challenge the weaknesses of the culture at any given moment, then they’ll succeed and they’ll move on. Unfortunately, the main group that took up the notion of media viruses were marketers, and it quickly became what they’re calling “viral marketing”. It’s all based on Media Virus. So, on the one hand, I launched a terrific virus. But, on the other hand, it mutated into something that I didn’t expect.
I did see media viruses as way to break down the predictability of the media space, and to challenge a lot of the authorities that people like Chomsky are talking about, by creating a bottom-up media, a way for ideas to spread, and a new channel for activists to get their ideas spread faster and better than anyone else. And sometimes it works. There are thousands of terrific blogs out there, and uppity web sites, from Smoking Gun to Matt Drudge, and they are all sorts of great stories about ideas that have trickled up. But the powers that be tend to imitate the properties of media viruses, the same way that Miller or Budweiser can create a fake microbrewery to make people think that they’re drinking a local beer. Or Starbucks creates fake local coffee houses, that don’t have the Starbucks name on them, just to look like their own competition.
David: What are some of the other ways that major corporations have used media viruses?
Douglas: One campaign, which was based on Media Virus, that I was told about by the creative people responsible for it was a Calvin Klein campaign, where, apparently, they had all these photos of underage kids in their underwear, and it was reminiscent somehow of child porn. All the Christian groups and child protection groups complained, and Calvin Klein took it off the billboards, or out of magazines. But it had been their intent the whole time to a do a campaign that they would be forced to take down, because they knew they would get far more secondary media attention than they could ever pay for. So for two or three days every newscaster is carrying the Calvin Klein story. So they get name out there. And they get their name out there as a dangerous company that’s doing cool, weird, sexy, rule-breaking stuff, which then, I suppose, makes their underwear seem sexy and naughty, and cool for people to use.
David: At least to their pedophilic clientele.
Douglas: So that would be a more commercial use of a media virus. I guess the thing that bothers me most about it is not just that it was for commercial culture, or corporate culture, but that it was kind of disingenuous to begin with. It wasn’t really an advertising campaign. It was an advertising campaign created to get taken off the air. In other words, because it was so thought-out in a certain way, it just doesn’t feel genuine to me.
David: What do you mean when you refer to corporations as being an empty set of operating commands, or as dead things, with nobody really in charge?
Douglas: When I’m talking about corporations being mindless usually what I’m trying to do is empower the people that are working for them. It’s funny, a lot of times I’ll be invited to speak at a conference, or even at a corporation, to all the workers and people there, and people in the counterculture get all upset. They think, oh it’s this horrible sellout thing I’m doing to take money to talk to their employees. But what I’m trying to demonstrate to the employees, what I’m trying to explain to them, is that the corporation doesn’t really exist. The corporation is paperwork. It’s a list of rules, through which people are supposed to interact, or priorities that they’re supposed to follow, but there’s nobody home.
I mean, the worker is listening to the executive, who’s listening to the CEO, who’s listening to the shareholder, who’s just Joe Public finally. It’s the same person walking into the store. So it’s very easy to say, oh corporations are to blame, these horrible entities, but corporations are not conscious. Corporations are groups of people acting in concert, following a set of rules. And what people forget is that those rules can be changed. We’re not here to be at the mercy of a piece of paper. A corporation is like a computer program. What I’m saying, most simply, is that this means the people who think that they are the victims of the corporations they are working for–or that they have shares of, or that are in their communities–have access to the codes through which those corporations exist.
David: How does this type of corporate structure allow for underground artists, psychedelic tricksters, and political activists to “sneak” their unconventional ideas into the public domain?
Douglas: There’s a lot of different ways that activists, and wonderful strange people, can get involved in changing the reality in which they live. Sometimes I think the most valuable thing is just to do things that change people’s conception of stuff. In other words, rather than actually taking down a corporation, just demonstrating to everyone in a community that they don’t have to buy their stuff at Walmart. I mean, that, in and of itself, is kind of an eye-opener. Or that there are maybe laws protecting them. Or just that they have a say in what goes on. That they can chose how they think. That they don’t have to work seven days a week. That they might have enough stuff. That there are ways to have fun without buying products. That they can get laid without having those jeans. Those are the things. That’s the area that’s most interesting to me.
As far as weird people being able to get their messages disseminated by media companies, yeah, that happens too. I mean, because some of them are so big, one right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing–so that Warner Music ends up publishing Cop Killer. Or Paramount-Viacom ends up creating Beavis and Butthead, which ends up really killing the rock video as a revenue stream and as a marketing tool. Because now you’ve got Beavis and Butthead, the creation of a wonderful crazy animator down in Texas, Mike Judge, where they’re deconstructing MTV on television. And fourteen year olds are watching that, realizing, oh, that’s how rock videos are put together. And that’s the way they’re supposed work on my head. So people wonder why they don’t show rock videos on MTV anymore, and that’s really the reason. It’s because those two little animated creatures deconstructed it, and were there someone in charge, they probably wouldn’t have let that happen.
David: Who are the different audiences that you address in your books, and why do you think it’s important to break down the concept of “us” and “them”.
Douglas: When I wrote Coercion, which was my sixth or seventh book, I wrote that because, I realized my other books were too advanced in some ways. Books like Cyberia, Media Virus, and Playing the Future are celebrating interactivity, and our ability to become the authors in our own media space–the people who hack through the systems one way or another, spread their messages, and build their own reality. That was exciting to me. And there were thousands, or maybe hundreds of thousands, of people out there who were excited about this opportunity. But what I realized was that the majority of people in America not only didn’t only know that opportunity existed, but didn’t even know why they should. Or that they were not conscious people looking to make a change in the world, but were, pretty much, unconscious people, at the mercy of the media messaging they were receiving.
I realized not everyone had gone through all the stages that my friends and I had gone through, that most people were still in the thrall of the mainstream media and the marketing universe. So what I needed to do was take a few steps back and say, okay everybody, you know there’s this media space that we all live in, and certain people tend to dominate the messages that you get. And many of the places where you walk are owned by corporations who have a very vested interest in you buying things, and that you are constantly under some level of assault, of manipulation, by all these various forces.
While you can’t walk around paranoid, constantly deconstructing everything coming at you, or you won’t have a very fun existence, you should at least be able to live on a more level playing field. When you go into a retail or a corporate environment you have to understand that there are a lot of tools being used–from architecture to language and tone of voice, to lighting, to the very paths and surfaces you walk on, that are designed to either intimidate you, or lead you to make certain choices and have certain behaviors.
David: What do you mean when you say that your not counterculture, you’re “pro-culture”?
Douglas: What I’m trying to do in most of my work is break open the rhetoric that has allowed us to stagnate. There are certain patterns of language that reinforce notions about ourselves, and our relationship to the world, that may be more destructive than we realize. And that by keeping our language alive, by understanding what we’re saying when we say it, we become a lot more aware of our conditioning. So if we who care about the future, we who care about the environment, if we accept that we are the counterculture, what have we accepted? We have accepted that we are literally against culture. So now we’ve cast ourselves as kind of the bad guys, the underdogs, the ones who are fighting against something. Well, what if we decided no. We are not the counterculture minority fighting against this great over-culture. No, we are real people. We are culture. George Bush is the counterculture. I am the culture.
What is a culture? A culture is like yogurt. A culture is a living thing. This is not just a pun, or a metaphor. The culture is the life. It’s the fertilization. It’s the thing that actually propels us into a future. It’s great. It’s fecund, moist, real, growing and diverse. It’s in constant communication with itself and with other ones. It’s wet, sexy and real. That is what culture is. That’s the petri dish. That’s the yogurt. That’s the moss on the side of the tree. That’s the culture. Counterculture, to me, would mean, dry and sterile, unloving and unsexy. The counterculture are the people who want to kill culture. They’re the people who want to prevent fertility and diversity, the exchange of ideas, fluids, psyches and everything else.
So, by looking at words, and being willing to reclaim certain language, we can end up shifting our perspective on things tremendously. If you walk outside thinking of yourself as part of culture, then you start saying, well, what are the obstacles to culture? And you realize marketing is an obstacle to culture–because what do marketers do? Marketers try to make people feel unsexy and uncreative, so that they’re dependent on a product to bestow some kind of sexiness or creativity upon them. Wow, so that’s interesting. So what is Nike? What is Jordache? What are Levis? Is that culture, or is that counterculture? Oh, now I’m arguing they’re counter, they’re against culture. So what’s pro-culture? Is pro-culture the thrift store? Is pro-culture the Dead show? Is pro-culture sex with your girlfriend or wife? That’s where culture lives. Pro-culture is nursery school. That’s culture.
David: How has Marshall McLuhan, Noam Chomsky, and Timothy Leary influenced your perspective about the media?
Douglas: I guess Leary has the most. I didn’t really study any Marshall McLuhan until after I’d written a couple of media books. Then, after having gotten compared with him, I figured, okay, I’ll go read one of these things. I just wasn’t that well read then, although now I am. But I wasn’t when I started writing. I was really just a TV head who could write–not a reader who could write, which was interesting in itself. It made my writing into outsider art of a certain kind.
But Leary influenced me in a few ways. First as a writer and thinker when I was in college, and I read his stuff. Then later as a friend. And those were two very different kinds of influence he had. The important thing that I got from him in college was that he affirmed the validity of psychedelic and mystical experiences. As one of three, or maybe ten kids, who were going through those sorts of experiences at Princeton University in the early Eighties, it was very reassuring to have someone who had visited these many terrains, and had written about them effectively, and come up with some real, very compelling models for consciousness. So it provided me with maps to a landscape that I would have otherwise assumed was uncharted turf. It really created resonances and guideposts, and ways of recognizing certain phenomenon.
I guess Chomsky influenced me in the sense that he certainly seemed to have a very clear vision on the interplay between money, power, media, messaging, and consciousness–and how tightly controlled this public relations-run spectator democracy is, and how that works. But I generally accept his work as a challenge to prove him wrong, to accept it as a gauntlet. In other words, here’s how things are, or here’s how things could be. Or here’s one way of understanding this. So what I think is, well, what am going to do about that? How am I going to arrest that? How am I going to help people recontextualize that? Where are the unseen triggers? Where are the unknown access points to power that Chomsky doesn’t see?–but I, as I younger and more optimistic soul, can find and then share with others. So that’s really the way he has impacted me most. It’s like, okay, it’s a really bad trip–but what I can I do to flip it?
McLuhan influenced me in that he helped me see that I come from a tradition. The tradition is not really one of media theory as much as a trickster tradition. There are some people around who, in their work, either tickle, cajole, or trick people into seeing things in new ways. The object of the game, for me, is to exist in this kind of liminal space between the way things are, and the infinity of the way things could be, and help people open their minds to other possibilities. To help people across this chasm of uncertainty, so that they can live in a space of possibility.
Most people are afraid of possibility because they can’t deal with a shifting reality, and they can’t accept their own responsibility for the way things are. Most people can not cope with a reality that works like a lucid dream, even though they happen to be living in one. So they would rather shut down, and they would rather agree to the consensus reality where they are victimized and unhappy, than accept a more plastic, open-source conception of reality where anything and everything is possible.
David: Speaking of opening minds and shifting realities, how has your experience with psychedelics influenced your writing, and your perspective on life?
Douglas: I think it’s very hard for anyone who has had psychedelic experiences to ever know how many of the insights that they might credit to psychedelia might have happened anyway. In other words, sometimes I think, okay, it’s all the acid. That you have one acid trip and, basically, you never come down from it–just the rest of life kind of comes up to it. (laughter) That there’s a full categorical shift in the way you understand the world, that your perspective is forever changed, and that’s it.
But I talk to a lot of people who’ve never had psychedelic experiences–at least chemical or plant-induced ones, or who have never even smoked pot–and they still seem just as aware of the fact that we’re all living in reality tunnels, and that we chose different tunnels. And they can have moments of a broader perspective, where they see the way all these things are arbitrarily chosen, and that we’ve been living in a certain picture frame, and how you can pull out of that frame, and see all these other possibilities. So the only thing I know for sure is that psychedelics provide a very tangible and experiential metaphor for the interchangeable contextual frames that we use to understand the world we live in.
For me, certainly, psychedelics were a valuable medicine–for a kid, who at 19, was really trapped in doing premed, and becoming a doctor. I was going to do all this stuff I didn’t really want to do. I actually made the decision to go be a theater person before I’d had any kind of drug experience, but it definitely helped. Afterwards it helped me see the validity of that decision, and it helped me understand that all this recontextualizing I had been doing, all of the frames within frames. All of the theater that I was so interested in was not for the play, but for the proscenium arch itself, and for the ritual that was going on in the room. All of that had a shamanic history, and it was a bit more universally applicable than I had realized. It wasn’t just something that happened in a theater; it’s something that happens in the world at every moment. We are contextualizing and recontextualizing things based on assumptions.
David: What do you think happens to consciousness after death?
Douglas: I really have no idea. I would guess it goes on for a few minutes. You get to Heaven, and you have those great life-after-life experiences, and then… (laughter) nothing! (laughter)
I would think the only way for a person to have anything approaching consciousness after death–real death, when the body actually stops metabolizing, or there’s just no metabolic processes and the brain is really dead dead–would be, while that person is alive, to learn to identify so profoundly with something other than his or her own ego, so that when the self dies, the identification goes on. But most of us really believe in the illusion of individuality. We believe who we are is us.
So, in a sense, it blows the question out of the water, finally, because you say, well, what happens to consciousness after death? Well, what happens to your consciousness after someone else’s death? Not a hell of a lot. I mean, you might feel bad that they died, but their consciousness is gone, except for the part of it that’s now in everybody else.
It certainly shouldn’t be anybody’s goal to extend consciousness after death, because that’s still just a person trying to project their ego. But I would think a fringe benefit of developing true compassion for other people is that if you do identify with other people, other things, and other systems–things that are beyond the four walls of your own limited personal consciousness. Then the death of you or me is inconsequential. But I think that for 99.9999% of people the chances are that they just die.
David: So you think death may be different for some people than other people?
Douglas: Possibly. I would think that the only way out would be to get out while you’re here. I don’t think you can get out after you’re dead.
David: What is your perspective on the concept of God? Do you see any kind of teleology in evolution, and how has Judaism effected your views on spirituality?
Douglas: I think we are no better than fungus, on a rock hurling through cold and meaningless space, and that we were not put here with purpose by a supreme being. But I do believe that God is something that can evolve. I think of God as an emergent phenomenon, rather than a preexisting condition. So I think we can make God. I think we can conceive God. I think we can start to behave in Godly ways. But I think God is something we build together. God is something we make. God is the result of love and ethical action, higher states of consciousness and coordinated action–things like that.
Not for many people, but for me, this teleology is absolutely consistent with the intention of Judaism–which was to get people to stop worrying about God, particularly idolatry, and start worrying about one another. What the Jews keep doing is smashing idols. They took idols off the arc and left empty spaces there–literally empty spaces. And the empty spaces were protected, sometimes protected by cherubs–like on the top of the Arc of the Covenant. These are all empty places. That’s why I wrote this book called Nothing Sacred. The idea is that this “nothing” is sacred, because only when you have an empty space can you create a dynamic or a voltage between people, and that’s what makes God happen–this communing or community between people. These resonant living fields of interaction between loving human beings is what makes God possible. But I don’t believe in God as a separate thing. I guess I’m a bit like Teilhard de Chardin with this idea of evolution groping towards complexity, rather than us being set in motion by a supreme being who wants us to return to him.
David: How do you integrate your psychedelic experiences with your interest in Judaism? I think for a lot of people it’s hard to understand how organized religion could be compatible with a psychedelic experience.
Douglas: Organized religion isn’t really compatible with any experience. I don’t even see it as compatible with Judaism. Organized religion is not something I’m interested in, and it may not be compatible with a psychedelic experience, or with the genuine expansion and development of consciousness. I don’t look at Judaism as a religion. I look at Judaism as the process by which we get over religion. Most religions were born that way. Most religions were born as fresh breezes, as ways to lift people from the self-protective crouch of religion–whether it was Taoism lifting people out of Confucius, Judaism lifting people out of child-sacrifice to the god Molech, or Christianity trying to lift people out of the restricting rule-sets of Jewish law into a more, all-encompassing spontaneous experience of love. Each one of these new religions starts as way to break the attachment to religion, to just live a good life, and they end up eventually turning into religions themselves. So it’s that moment of liberation, that you want to preserve, and that you want to keep reliving every time you get attached to something.
That’s why the Jewish mythology is still very effective for me, because it’s all about breaking out of slavery, the leaving Egypt, which in Hebrew is Mitzrayim. It’s leaving the narrow place, the idolatrist place, by smashing the idols–which is what the plagues really are, the desecration of the Egyptian Gods that we used to worship–and moving into a society that cherishes life. That’s why they say, “l ‘chaim!, l ‘chaim”, or “to life”, and this is the central Jewish belief. That was an illegal sentiment in ancient Egypt, because that was a culture that worshiped death. You asked me what I thought happens after you die. Well, in Judaism it doesn’t really matter what happens after you die, because you’re here. What matters is what you do here, and if something happens after die you’ll worry about it then. The reason to do great things here and now is not because you want to be rewarded after you die. The reason to great things here and now is because that is actually the most fun and meaningful way to live.
David: Your books Cyberia, Media Virus, and Playing the Future present a very upbeat and optimistic perspective on youth culture, while your book Coercion was more of a warning signal about sociological manipulation. Would you say that you’re as optimistic about the cultural direction of the human species now, as you were when you wrote your earlier books, and do you think that the human species is going to survive the next hundred years?
Douglas: I never saw Cyberia, Media Virus, and Playing the Future as particularly optimistic. I saw them as realistic, because it seemed to me that the world, or at least the American world, was bemoaning the invention of things that were actually quite cool and progressive. So the standard media theorists of the day–people like Neil Postman, educators and all–were saying the computer’s a bad thing, or kids who go online are going to get stupid. And someone had to say no, wait a minute, kids who watch old fashioned TV are going to stupid. Kids who go online are typing. They’re writing. They’re posting ideas. So what was interpreted by some as optimism was actually just me saying, no, these are actually really cool inventions. Beavis and Butthead isn’t just crap; Beavis and Butthead are deconstructing media. Or Mystery Science Theater is actually a very advanced cultural product.
So I had enthusiasm for some of things that were happening, and in Media Virus I certainly saw the development of an interactive media space as a tool ripe for the taking. I understood that the landscape had shifted, but I always–even in Cyberia–talked about this as a window of opportunity, that the sands are shifting. Our relationship to media is changing, and if we’re going to be smart, we can use this opportunity to change the balance of power in an interesting way, and take charge of our reality much more than we have before, rather than acquiescing our authority to these false parent figures. But even in Playing the Future, which is thought of as the most Pollyannaish of the books, I say it’s a difficult moment when a child realizes his parents aren’t gods. And it’s a difficult moment for civilization to realize that it’s gods aren’t parents.
But that’s the moment we’re in, and this is the insight and sensibility we’re going to have to seize if we want to become adults, if we want to grow up. And if we don’t want to grow up, then we’ll let this opportunity pass. The powers that be will retake the reigns of this coach, and we’ll go back into a kind of cultural dormancy again. So, rather than seeing the early work as optimistic, I see it more as propagandistic. I see it more as creating arguments why it’s okay for people to take charge of the world we’re living in. So, yeah, I painted happy pictures because I thought that if I can paint scenarios by which everything could work out, then maybe we’ll be able to get to one of them. If we can’t even imagine a scenario where human beings will survive another hundred years, then how are we going to do it?
So, at least, I was trying to make people think it’s possible, so that they would engage with life in a more fulfilling and direct way–in a way that gave them hope and possibility. Although Coercion looks darker–and it is a darker, sadder read in a lot of ways–in a way it’s a more optimistic act to think that giving people this warning would actually do any good. If we live in a marketing universe like that, and if people are that hypnotized, then it’s still an extremely hopeful thing. All I was really doing in that case was going to a less educated group, and giving them the kind of the education that they needed to participate the way that some of us were.
It just seemed like there weren’t enough of us involved in–whatever you want to call it–the cyber movement, or the consciousness movement. There weren’t enough of us really involved in it to make a difference, and too many of us in the movements became the victims of New Age pyramid schemes, and selling KM, Herbal Life, or one or the other many products, and really getting derailed. Rather than following our bliss we sell our bliss at the top of another pyramid scheme, and that was a shame. But those people really did need to back-fill their education a bit. So that’s what I was trying to do there.
In terms of now, yeah, I would have to say I’m less hopeful than I was. I mean, I no longer think that we are going to seize this opportunity that we had. I think the window is closing–the window of opportunity to actually make this as profound a renaissance in human consciousness as it could have been. So, what I’m working on instead is trying to lay as many clues as I can in the culture of the future for people who live through the next Dark Age. I want them to see signs of hope and to give them enough clues so they can at least, as best they can, access the back doors. It feels like what we’re doing now is laying down the cultural program for the next hundred or so years. But I think as long as we participating in the writing of that program, we can leave a few back doors, as hackers would put it, through which people can get in again.
That might be the best we can do. On the other hand, what I’m working on is smaller interactions, with smaller numbers of people. If I can do a talk for five hundred people that turns on three or four hundred of them to the idea that the tiniest actions that they do in each day of their lives actually make a difference, then I feel I’ve really accomplished something. And that’s really what I’m doing. I’m going from place to place, writing books, and doing things even more subtlely. I have a graphic novel– a comic book–coming out next year. So I’m doing things on a less polemic and a, slightly more practical, hand-to-hand or mouth-to-mouth way. To really model behaviors for people. That’s really all I can do in the end, is model a form of behavior that I think is constructive rather than destructive.
As far as will we be here in a hundred years? Yeah, a hundred years isn’t so long. It really isn’t. A hundred years is really just like three generations. Yeah, they’ll still be people here. In a thousand years? Who knows? I don’t think it’s a matter of whether or not there’s any people around. I think it’s a matter of whether the civilizations that we built will be around. I think it’s a matter of whether we can sustain a level of consciousness and complexity. I think they’ll be people for a long time, even if they go back and live in tribes, and live off the old warehouses of Coke or whatever until they learn to make food again. I think there will be people for a long time, even after the environment gets bad. I mean, humans are fucking up the environment for sure, but Nature fucks up the environment even more sometimes, at least as far as people are concerned.
If Nature threw one good ice age, or one good drought on us, we might be finished. We’ve been so lucky over the last few thousand years to have had this very temperate mild environment in which to live. That’s why all us little mammals have been able to run around and do all this. Nature could whack us way harder than fluorocarbons are going to whack us. And, in that sense, it’s almost important that we have a certain amount of AmGem, and Genentech, and other bizarre genetic science going on–where people are figuring out how to grow wheat on rocks, or soy on the ocean, because we just may have to. And we have to, not just because we are fucking things up so badly, but because Nature really can turn on a dime, and the environment can change profoundly in a half century. We’ve seen it happen before. The Sahara Desert was fertile at one time. The deserts of Iraq were the most fertile part of the world that we even knew about. So things shift. Things move around.
David: How do you envision the future evolution of the human race?
Douglas: I don’t know. I hope people become more conscious and aware of each other. If there’s any real plot to be followed, then I’d hope for the human race to become a more coordinated being. Right now people don’t want to coordinate because they think it would mean the loss of individuality. But what they don’t realize is that the only way they’re ever going to find their individuality is by coordinating. So it’s not a matter of becoming the super-organism, as defined by the pre-fascist philosophers, or Hegel or those guys.
It’s not a super-organism. But there is an organizational level that we’re capable of. Rather than a collective unconscious, there’s a way to have a collective consciousness. I think the only reason why people don’t have it is because they are afraid of it. They’re afraid of the loss of privacy. They’re afraid of losing what they think of as their self. But what people are going to have to slowly learn–and it make take thousands of years to do this–is that the self separated from human community doesn’t even exist.
The self only only exists in relationship to other people–just like a Web site only exists in it’s links to other places, or from other places really. So eventually people will see their way through what looks like a paradox to them now, and, instead, see it as the crucial dynamic through which people can evolve into something greater than the little, isolated, lonely, puny intelligences they are today.
David: What are you currently working on?
Douglas: I’m working on a book that actually has a tentative title, Follow the Fun. It’s really about that. It’s about how people need to move up Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs”, out of this illusion that they are fighting for their survival, and realize that pursuing the deepest fun–and I don’t mean diversion, but real meaningful fun–will lead to levels of success unimaginable by someone who pursuing gain in order to promote their own survival.
David: What gives you hope?
Douglas: Interactions with happy people. As long as I can have a meaningful interaction with another person, and experience the creation of joy from what wasn’t there before, I have hope–because it means that humans are still capable of manufacturing love and joy where there wasn’t any before. Not finding light, but doing light. As long people can do that, then I still have some faith in the relatively infinite capability of people to recreate reality on their own terms.
Edgar Dean Mitchell–the lunar module pilot for NASA’s Apollo 14 space mission in 1971–was the sixth man to walk on the moon. In addition to his historical achievements as an astronaut, naval officer, and test pilot, Dr. Mitchell has also made important contributions as a research scientist, author and lecturer. After retiring from the U.S. Navy and the Astronaut Program in 1972, Dr. Mitchell’s research interests shifted from exploring the far reaches of outer space to the frontiers of inner space. He has spent the last 30 years studying human consciousness in search of a common ground between science and spirit. Dr. Mitchell founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences in 1973 to sponsor systematic research into of the nature of consciousness, especially in regard to how it relates to psychic phenomena and alternative healing techniques. The institute has since grown into one of the world’s largest research groups studying the unexplained powers of the mind.
Dr. Mitchell attended primary schools in Roswell, New Mexico, and is a graduate of Artesia High School in New Mexico. (As a child, there were strangely synchronistic foreshadowings of Mitchell’s career as a space traveler. As he walked to a country school near Roswell, Mitchell sometimes saw the little farmhouse where Robert Goddard, the godfather of modern rocketry, lived. Then, around the time that Mitchell was a senior in high school, Roswell became a household word as the site of an alleged crash of an alien spacecraft.) In 1952 Mitchell received a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Management from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and he entered the Navy that same year, completing his basic training in San Diego. In 1953 he completed his instruction at the Officers’ Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island, and a year later he completed his flight training in Hutchinson, Kansas. From 1954 to 1958 he flew a P2V aircraft in Korean war, then a A-3 aircraft from the aircraft carriers Bon Homme Richard and the Ticonderoga while assigned to “Heavy Attack Squadron Two” at the end of the war. He was a research project pilot with “Air Development Squadron Five” until 1959.
Dr. Mitchell received another Bachelor of Science degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in 1961, and he took his Sc. D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964. In addition, he has received honorary doctorates in engineering from New Mexico State University, the University of Akron, Carnegie-Mellon University, and a Sc.D. from Embry-Riddle University. From 1964 to 1965 he was in charge of the Project Management Division of the Navy Field Office for Manned Orbiting Laboratory. Dr. Mitchell was in a group selected for astronaut training in April 1966. He served as a member of the astronaut support crew for Apollo 9 and as backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 10.
Dr. Mitchell was originally scheduled for the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, where an explosion exposed most of the inside of the service module to space, and had to be guided, using the power of the Lunar Module, back to Earth, forcing NASA to abort that mission to the moon. Dr. Mitchell completed his first space flight as lunar module pilot on Apollo 14, which was NASA’s third manned lunar landing. This historic journey began on January 31, 1971 and ended nine days later on February 9.
After landing the lunar module “Antares” on a hilly upland region of the moon, Dr. Mitchell and Commander Alan Shepard subsequently deployed and activated various scientific equipment and performed a number of experiments. In addition to collecting almost 100 pounds of lunar samples for return to Earth, they made a number of first-time achievements on the mission. They were the first to use a unpowered wheeled lunar vehicle called the Mobile Equipment Transporter. They carried the largest payload placed in lunar orbit, and the largest payload returned from the lunar surface at that time (later missions did more). They transversed the longest distance on foot (ever) on the lunar surface, and stayed on the lunar surface for the longest amount of time–33 hours.
After successfully completing his mission on the Moon, Dr. Mitchell had an experience on his journey home that was to forever change the course of his life. As he was hurtled through the abyss of space, back toward our tiny blue and white world, Dr. Mitchell became engulfed by a profound and overwhelming sensation that he describes as “a sense of universal connectedness…” where he “…suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious.” In other words, Dr. Mitchell had a classic mystical experience. As a result of this transcendental experience in space, when Dr. Mitchell returned to Earth he began devoting his life to the study of consciousness. This was one of the reasons that he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences in 1973. (However, Dr. Mitchell had been interested in psychic phenomena prior to his mystical experience in space. Prior to the Apollo 14 mission, he had privately arranged to conduct secret ESP experiments with several colleagues on Earth during the space flight, with intriguing results.)
In completing his first space flight, Mitchell logged a total of 216 hours and 42 minutes in space, and he was subsequently designated to serve as backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 16. In his career as an astronaut, Dr. Mitchell has received many distinguished awards and honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1970), the NASA Distinguished Service Medal, the MSC Superior Achievement Award (1970), the Navy Astronaut Wings, the navy Distinguished Service medal, the City of New York Gold Medal (1971), the Arnold Air Society’s John F. Kennedy Award (1971), the USN Distinguished Medal and three NASA Group Achievement Awards. He was inducted to the Space Hall of Fame in Las Cruces NM in 1979, and the Astronaut Hall of Fame in Titusville, FL in 1997. In 1984, he was a cofounder of the Association of Space Explorers, an international organization of those who have experienced space travel.
Dr. Mitchell is the co-author of Psychic Exploration: A Challenge for Science (1974) and The Way of the Explorer (1996, revised 2001) as well as dozens of articles in both professional and popular publications. He delivers between 25 and 50 lectures a year on cosmology, human potential, and the future evolution of life on Earth. He is a frequent guest on radio and television talk shows, and has been featured in several documentary films. To find out more about his work with the Institute of Noetic Sciences visit: www.noetic.org, or his own website at:www.edmitchellapollo14.com.
I interviewed Edgar on March 23, 2004. He was 73 at the time of this interview. I watched Edgar walk on the moon when I was a child with excitement and awe, so it was an incredible thrill for me to be able to spend this time talking with him. I found him to be thoughtful, generous, and regal in spirit. I greatly appreciated Edgar’s patience in answering questions that I’m sure he’s answered a thousand times before. His stories held me spellbound, and I sat in rapt astonishment, hanging on every word, as he poetically described his mystical experience in space to me. We spoke about the possible relationship between gravity and consciousness, how different altered states of consciousness compare with his mystical experience in space, and the frontiers of quantum physics, Chaos Theory, and research into psychic phenomena.
David: What were you like as a child, and what inspired you to become an astronaut?
Edgar: As I child I was rather precocious. I was raised on my family farms and ranches, working like any other kid with his dad. Growing up on a farm I did all the things that farm kids do. I don’t really think that I realized it at the time–although perhaps my parents did–but I would be able to be at the top of my class. And I continually was, once I started going to school, but it didn’t seem like anything different to me. I was just being a kid.
Now, as far as getting interested in the space program, that really didn’t happen until I was in the Navy during the Korean war. I went into military service for the Korean war. I also would have been drafted, and was serving my tour. I was a pilot aboard a carrier headed back for shore duty, as a test pilot, when Sputnik went up in October, 1957. And although I hadn’t planned a military career, that sounded like a pretty interesting thing to do. So, even though there weren’t astronauts at that time, I set my cap at that
George Carlin is a writer, standup comedian, actor and proponent of free speech. His irreverent, controversial, and thought-provoking standup routines have gotten him arrested, earned him four Grammy Awards, and tested the limits of free speech in America.
Carlin grew up in uptown Manhattan, in west Harlem. He began his performance career as a disk jockey in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1956, not long after quitting high school at the age of sixteen. After a few broadcasting jobs, Carlin left for Hollywood, to pursue a career in comedy. There, with his partner Jack Burns, he began doing offbeat comedy team routines. In the early 60’s, the comedy team of “Burns and Carlin” was a huge success. They had a radio show, did night clubs, and had an album, Burns & Carlin at the Playboy Club Tonight. With the help of Lenny Bruce, they got an agent and began touring nightclubs around the country.
Carlin decided to go solo with his career in 1962. He appeared on The Tonight Show, and started playing nightclubs around the country. Although, by conventional standards, Carlin became a great success during the Sixties, by the end of the decade he began to question what he was doing as a comedian. He wasn’t content performing tame comedy routines to mainstream, conservative audiences. He wanted to begin to speak to his own generation, and the youth culture with which he identified.
Carlin risked his successful career, to break away from the traditional comedy routines, and do something entirely new. He completely re-created his approach and his material, and, in the process, helped to recreate standup comedy. Over a two-year period, Carlin went from being a clean-cut, suit-and-tie, mainstream entertainer, to being a bearded, long-haired, casually-dressed comedian who incorporated politics, philosophy, and material into his act that some people called “profanity”. Some of his old fans found his new material offensive.
Although he was fired from the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas in 1969 for saying “ass”, and again in 1970 for saying “shit”, his risky gamble paid off. He soon found a new, much larger audience. During the early Seventies, Carlin’s riffs on sex, drugs, language and politics gained him an avid following among his own generation and the counterculture. His first album, FM & AM, went gold in 1972, the first of four that earned gold status and won a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album. Carlin had numerous successful albums produced, such as Occupation Foole and Class Clown, which featured the recorded debut of the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” routine.
Carlin is probably most well-known for the “Filthy Words” routine, which was aired on WBAI in New York in 1973, and almost cost the radio station its broadcasting license. The legal battle that ensued went all the way to the Supreme Court, and although the Supreme Court ruled in the Federal Communication Commission’s favor–so it remained a crime to broadcast those seven naughty words over the air–this controversy, along with Carlin’s arrest after a Milwaukee concert appearance for violating local obscenity laws, only served to elevate his popularity. Carlin became a counterculture hero.
In 1975 Carlin hosted the debut episode of Saturday Night Live on NBC. Since then, he has written and performed in 13 HBO specials, and has appeared in many films, such as Car Wash, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Dogma, Prince of Tides, and Jersey Girl. In 1987 he received a Hollywood Walk of Fame star at the corner of Vine and Selma Streets. In the early 1990’s Carlin hosted the PBS children’s series Shining Time Station, and in 1994 he starred as a cab driver in the Fox television sitcom The George Carlin Show. Some of his other albums include A Place for My Stuff, Playin’ With Your Head, Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics, Back in Town, Jammin in New York, and You Are All Diseased. His newest album is Complaints and Grievances. He is also the author of several books that made The New York Times bestseller list, including Sometimes a Little Brain Damage Can Help, Brain Droppings, and Napalm & Silly Putty. His most recently published book is When Will Jesus Bring the Porkchops?
At the age of 67, Carlin continues to tour, doing ninety concerts a year, and turning out a new HBO show and CD every two years, and he continues to act in films. I’ve been a huge fan of Carlin’s work ever since I was a teenager, so it was quite a thrill for me to spend this time with him. I spoke with George on September 28, 2003. For someone who has such a sharp tongue during his performances, and who defines himself as an antiauthoritarian lawbreaker, George is a really nice guy, and his charisma simply shimmers. He has an extraordinary mastery of the English language, and he can be simply dazzling with his use of words. Although George can’t seem to help being funny at times, he took the questions in this interview quite seriously. He put a lot of thought into how he chose each of his words when he answered my questions. He also kept making me laugh. I spoke with George about the process of creativity, the relationship between shamanism, altered states of consciousness and comedy, the joys of language, politics in America, and why he thinks it’s important to destroy authority and shatter taboos.
David: What were you like as a child?
George: I came from a family where my father was not present in the home. He could not metabolize ethanol effectively, so he was given his hat early on. My mother raised my brother and me in the 40’s–late 30’s, 40’s, 50’s–on a good job she had in advertising. So I was alone most of the day after school, except for some playmates I had. But I would have the house to myself. I listened to the radio. I was kind of sweet kid, according my mother, and my recollections. Thoughtful and good, but kind of alone–although I didn’t interpret it that way, as such. Children never interpret these things. They think they understand logically.
So my father wasn’t there, and my mother had to work, and underneath I felt somewhat alone and unlooked out for. So I became very independent, and very self-sufficient. I did a lot of thinking, and used mental activity to relieve whatever feelings I had. I became very left-brained, and I was good in school. That is, I was a smart kid. I went to a very progressive Catholic school–not the kind we always hear about–where individuality was encouraged. I was good at class work, but I was a distraction. I was a class clown, of the classic term for it. I would get the work done easily, and then I would try to deprive other people of their educations. I developed skills for mimicry, and I was a good showoff. I knew how to get attention, and I knew how to do it in a positive funny way.
David: How did you become interested in doing comedy?
George: Well, it became apparent to me that there was a reward in being like that. You get people’s attention and approval, most of the time. So I gravitated toward being a funny guy. I liked the radio comedians. I lived in the Golden Age of radio, and the Golden Age of television came along when I was still in my early teens. I listened to comedians on the radio. I watched comedians in the movies–Bob Hope, Danny Kaye, Red Skeleton. My friend Roger Hogan had an collection of Spike Jones record albums, and I thought they were fabulous. And I became a guy who wanted to be a comedian someday, or a comic actor. The way I put it was, I’ll be like Danny Kaye. He was kind of the model I had in mind.
I’d look at him in the movies, and I’d say, I can do that. I liked him because he had a verbal fluency, and he was fast. He could do accents, funny faces and body postures. So early in life I decided to be a comedian, with the goal of becoming–I called it–an actor. But comedian was really the dominant trait, the dominant part of this skill package that I had.
Then I quit school. In your teenage years, early adolescence, there’s a differentiation that has to go on between you and your parents, especially with the parent of the opposite sex. In adolescence you have to separate yourself and establish your identity. So, being very independent anyway, I took charge. My mother and I had a lot of distance between us emotionally, although, on the surface, most of the time, we appeared good and friendly, and all that. But I was a problem. I was a street kid.
So I quit school in ninth grade, even though I was good at the studies. I knew I didn’t need school for what I wanted. I knew I had a command of English. I knew I could think well. I knew enough arithmetic so that I could balance a checkbook, as they say. So I just quit school in ninth grade, and worked for a year at Western Union at a desk job. Then I went in the Air Force at seventeen to launch myself. It was to get away from my mother a little bit too.
I had run away from home three times. I had been kicked out of three different schools under different circumstances. I was kicked out of everything that I didn’t quit. Kicked out of schools. Kicked out of summer camp, the Boy Scouts, the alter boys, the choir, and something else that I can’t think of, that I’m proud of. Anyway, that was my pattern. I just began to invent myself early in life, and went out and did something about it.
David: What inspires your comedy writing?
George: The impulse comes from within, from the need to express yourself, as with any artist. Now, I am an entertainer by definition. However, there’s a difference between entertainer and artist. Sometimes they go together, and sometimes they don’t. Some entertainers just do that. They sing songs that other people wrote, and they act in parts other people wrote. There’s a bit of creativity in their interpretation, but it’s not seminal. It doesn’t really come from them.
Then there are the people who create their work–painters, composers, and, of course, writers. Originally I described myself as a comedian who wrote his own material, and it was true. That was a distinguishing feature among comedians. A lot of them didn’t do that, and a lot them weren’t very prolific. They didn’t have a constant flow of new things. So I stood out, certainly in my own mind, as someone who had something extra going on.
I used to describe myself as a comedian who wrote his own material, but over the years I discovered that what I really was, was a writer who performed his own material. This was a key distinction for me to discover, because it gave me a kind of artistic confidence, that I had something special. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I had some special gift for expression and verbal fluency–whether the verbs and nouns are on a page, or whether they’re in a microphone. It’s all verbal, and my father and mother gave me that to me. They had very highly pronounced verbal traits–that is, a facility and ease with language–and they were funny.
So I inherited that, really. I never take credit for anything, because it’s mostly genetic to my way of thinking. Even the need to work hard with some genetic talent you’re given–the need to go out and develop it, and push hard to bring it to people. That could be a genetic trait too–the trait to strive, and to be aggressive with your pursuits. So it’s very nice, all these achievements–but down deep I know this thing is heredity.
David: Can you talk a little bit about your creative process?
George: Here’s how my creative system works. I’m going to talk about my own case, although I sometimes think it applies to all of people who create, and it probably does. But I can best speak about my own situation, what happens over the years, if you’re curious, you read, and try to absorb and soak up information. I quit school when I was sixteen, yet I had a good mind, so I had the need to educate myself, and fill myself with just plain facts and information. I found it interesting to learn secondhand all about Shakespeare, and then some of the classics. Not that I know much about them, but I know the references when I see them.
When you quit school at an early age, I think you have a lifelong need to show the world–and maybe yourself–that you’re really smart after all. So there was this drive to interpret the world. Most art is an interpretation of the world around the artist, whether it’s in paint or in music. I’m not trying to sound grand here with this overuse of the word artist, but I think there’s no other good word for it. So I’ll use it, and risk sounding somewhat self-important. It’s an interpretation of the world around you. It’s the world through your filter. You recreate the world and say, here’s the world as it comes through me.
Now I’m 66, and over the years I noticed that what occurs as you age is an accumulation of information, data, knowledge, and what I’m going to call the matrix of the mind. There’s just a rich, textured, field of information and impressions that have been all networked by the brain. The neurons are always working, creating new neural networks, and working out connections between things. You don’t even have to work on that. So a person who’s in his Sixties has a much richer interpretation of life as he sees it today, than he did when he was twenty, because at twenty he had less in his matrix. It just wasn’t there experientially. So that’s what happened to me over the years. I developed and matured as an individual/creative person, and my writing matured as well. First of all, my technique improved. For one thing, I got better at the actual writing. And secondly, the comparisons, the information that comes in now is compared against this richer field in my brain. So it has more life to it. There’s more discovery and reality in it for me than there was when it was a little more simplistic.
Now, in terms of actually functioning day-to-day, here’s what I do. If you buy that brain hemisphere theory–and there’s some question about it now–then I’m right-brained, because I have this free-flowing, creative side. But I’m also extremely left-brained. I’m very organized. I have what you would call obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Now, I don’t have a problem with it. A shrink once taught me to use this to my benefit, not to my detriment. Because it can hurt a person’s life. It can interfere with life. But it can greatly benefit you if it’s channeled correctly.
So what I’ve always done is try to channel my compulsive need to have order in my physical world and in my work. The more organized my files are (they’re now computer files, although they used to be hard pieces of paper), the more I have to draw from. Because you don’t remember–certainly not consciously–everything you ever heard. So you write things done. I write notes down all the time–anything I think of that has promise for me. Anything that I think fits into my world of what I want to comment on, or know about, I write it down. If I’m in a car, I’ll use a little hand recorder.
Then, regularly–every couple of weeks–I harvest these accumulated notes. Every two weeks or so I put them in the proper places in their files–whether it’s under “animals”, “colors”, “clothing”, “male/female”, “race”, “politics”, “driving”, or “cats and dogs”. These things go in their proper files, and as you put them in, you see the rest of the file, and it makes an impression on you–even if you’re not consciously trying for it. It goes through the system once again. It goes through the neural system, and so these things just become richer and richer.
Then files have a way of maturing on their own, to where I really love it. I look at the thing, and I say, this is good. I got to tell people this. Boy, wait’ll they hear this. That’s the impulse behind the showoff–wait’ll they hear this. So I get that feeling, and I know I’m ready, or sometimes not, because I don’t have enough time in my shows. I have an hour and twenty minutes that I do. I do an HBO show every two years, and that’s an hour’s worth. So if you start out with an hour’s worth of stuff, by the time you get finished with it in a couple of years, it’s an hour and a half, and you don’t get to do it all.
So there’s this great surplus. And I just write all the time, in some form or another–whether it’s writing notes, harvesting the notes, or taking things from the files and actually doing the writing. That is what I do, and then I channel it on to the stage. The stage goes into HBO and CDs, and now I have this book outlet. I’ve done two books that have done very well, and I’m writing a third one now. It’s called When Will Jesus Bring the Porkchops?, and it’s another collection, but this the best one. I guess, unintentionally, I saved a lot of the best stuff from the first two books. I mean, I’m proud of those first two books, but I know I saved a lot of real gold, and now I’m going to get to use it in this book. So that’s the process.
David: In an interview with Larry Wilde you said that all comedians are motivated by a sense of justice. How has this motivated you?
George: Comedy is grievances. It’s a recitation of grievances–whether they’re inconsequential, superficial–like “my wife shops too much”, or “kids today”, all those old-fashioned themes–or, if it’s deeper, and somewhat more thoughtful, about social imbalance and inequities, and the folly of human behavior. It’s usually a complaint. So I think inherent in some of that complaint is a sense of wanting more balance, more fairness, and I guess that can translate to justice.
I’m sure there are examples in certain comedy we can find that would be specific to justice itself, in the broader sense of justice. Then there’s a lot, which is less defined, but leans in that direction–of things that look to redress imbalances and inequities. It’s all about dissatisfaction. My comedy is about being very dissatisfied with my fellow humans, and with the people in this country. I think, basically I think the human species is a failed species.
I mean, we had a great opportunity, with great gifts. We had this wonderful intellect that raised us up, that gave us the ability to objectify and say, I am here. It is out there. It hasn’t been used for the wrong purposes, but the emphasis has gone in the wrong direction. We were given two great things that distinguished us from other animals, or made us special–and that was the ability to cooperate, but then we also had the natural lower brain need to compete. So competition and cooperation together are what made this species leap, leap, leap forward. But now, I think, competition far outweighs the ability to cooperate.
There’s no real enlightened self-interest. There’s no foresight. There’s no planning. I mean, there’s a modicum of it you see. They’ll talk about this or that five years down time, but no one is sitting around making concrete plans for things that will happen. They wait for them to happen. They wait for emergencies. They wait for near-emergencies. Then it’s patchwork, and then there’s no money for it. Then some other group has a complaint. It’s just that the competing interests prevent a real, honest beneficent development of the species. I’m talking now partly about the culture, apart from the species, as I mention some of those things.
There are two things in our culture, I think, that lead us astray. I think we turned everything over–mankind in general, not just our culture–to the high priests and the traders. Everything was turned over to those who wanted to control us through mysterious beliefs. And we had an impulse to connect to the universe. They knew that. The clergy, in general, were very, very devious and clever. They knew people had a need to connect to the “One” of some sort. They know there’s this longing to rejoin nature, because we now feel outside of nature. We objectify. We say, man against nature. Well, that’s absurd because man is obviously a part of nature.
So when we distinguish ourselves, we set up this battle. And they knew we have underneath that a longing to correct that, to reunite. So they twisted and distorted that into these narrow, superstitious belief systems, where you have this invisible man in the sky who’s judging you, going to put you in fiery place. They manipulated people–some of whom were simply weaker, and some of whom were just easy to manipulate. The traders, the business people, the commercial, the merchant class, they turned everything into acquisition and ownership–and, to oversimplify, “having the latest thing”.
People have material needs, but you don’t need a deodorant for every different day of the week. You don’t need four hundred varieties of mustard. There are are over four hundred different varieties of mustard that some place in Menlo Park, I believe, has at some supermarket there. I counted 151 different choices in the cat food section alone, forgetting dogs. At the car wash I counted over 120 separate ways of changing the smell in your car, whether it was beads, or a little sashay thing, or oils, or sprays, or charms that you hang from the mirror. 120 of them, if you counted all the scents, and all these delivery systems. This is what I call too many choices. There are too many choices in America.
These are the trivial things that we’re given. We’re given many choices to distract us from the fact that our real choices have been diminished in number. Two political parties. Maybe three or four large banks now. Credit card companies, just a couple, a handful. Newspapers, reduced. Ownership of media, reduced, down to five or six big companies now. Big stock brokerage firms, reduced in number. All of these important things we have less choice. Then we’re distracted with these frivolous choices. 21 flavors of ice cream. 35 flavors of popcorn. You see specialty shops with 35 flavors of popcorn, like chocolate-walnut popcorn. These are absurd distractions from what we are doing to ourselves, because we engage in this. It’s not really all imposed. So that’s my feeling.
David: Why do you think it’s important to question authority?
George: I think it’s not only necessary to question authority, I say destroy authority–or at least attempt to. I think questioning is not enough, because first of all you have to get the right person to question it, and you have to question it in the proper setting. You have to be in a forum where questioning it will have some effect. Just sitting around saying this or that to yourself doesn’t seem to help. You have to act on those feelings. You have to live your life in an antiauthoritarian way, in a way that defies authority. I’m a rule-breaker. I’m a law breaker. I don’t respect any laws or rules unless there’s something that can get me in trouble. Self-interested, enlightened self-interest.
I jaywalk, because I can do that skillfully, and I’m not disturbing anyone else’s pattern of life. If I think that jaywalking is going to make someone slow down or stop for me, then I don’t do it. I don’t want people doing that to me, and I don’t need help crossing the street. So, to me, authority is something that a freer spirit, a more independent mind, and a person who can handle the world, doesn’t need guidance from. I think it’s important to put your own situation in mind when you deal with authority. How does it effect me? How do I benefit or lose? Without hurting others, without imposing any inconvenience or hardship on another, can I get around this somehow? That’s just simple selfishness that I think has a good quality to it.
David: Why do you think people create taboos, and why do you think it’s important to break taboos–and find humor in many of the things that a lot of people wouldn’t dare joke about?
George: I’m not well-read enough, but I’ve heard passing references to the effect that there are taboos in all societies, and in primitive societies. It sounds like it’s related to the superstitious impulse behind certain religious things–like there’s a need to have things that are out of reach, beyond, or, in this case, unmentionable. I think it’s important to break taboos for the same reason it’s important to break laws and rules–because either you’re a slave to them, or you’re taking matters into your hands.
No one has to come see my shows who doesn’t like me talking about white Christians. They are free not buy a ticket. They’re free to leave at any time. So I’m not imposing anything on anyone. Therefore I feel free to cross the line. I’ve found out most of these things about my own comedy in looking back–either a year, two years, five years, or ten years–and finding out what it is I do. I don’t set out with these things in mind that are now ways I have of analyzing, but I look for where the line is drawn on any subject. I look for where the line is drawn by these taboos, and I deliberately cross that line. I try to do it with wit and humor, and good rational and logical underpinning.
I like good ideas. I don’t want just do something for it’s own sake to bother people, but if I can bother them with a logical argument about something they have agreed to in society simplistically–like children are sacred, the cult of the child, this cult of professional parenthood, and of course religion, and respect for policemen and the law, and all of these untouchable areas. I like attacking those beliefs, but in with good sound thinking, and an unusual approach. If I can find a new direction into an old subject, that’s what you’re up there for.
Now, all of these socially critical aspects of the work are secondary to the main thing you’re up there for–that’s to entertain. And that means two things to me. Not just getting laughs, which I love. I love big jokes, and I try to have good big fat home-run jokes. All of them. All the time. Fast. Lots of them. But when you’re not joking, you can also still engage their imaginations with thought, and dazzle them verbally–by showing jazz riffs, and verbal flights and passages that have an entertainment value of their own, that people aren’t even fully aware of. So the job is entertaining and engaging imagination. Laughter is part of it. Thought is part of it–not making people think. I never set out to do that. Sometimes interviewers will ask me, do you like to make people think with your shows? I say, no, I like them to know I’m thinking. Then I like to show them that. And they take and do what they want. But, generally, I try to make it entertaining.
Primitive societies, or social groupings, had shamans, and some of them even more recent in time. Shamans were tricksters. There was a tradition of the trickster, and the trickster was a clown, a humorous fellow. His task was to trick the gods, to humor the gods into laughing, so that there was access to the divine–because laughter is a moment when we are completely ourselves. It’s that disarming moment, or disarmed moment, when something strikes us, and we laugh without even knowing it, trying it, or being able to prevent it. It just happens. No one is more himself than the moment when he’s laughing at a joke. It’s at those moments that people’s defenses go down, and that’s when you can slip in a good idea. So if the good joke carries a good idea, the entrance is open at that moment. I learned that one time, and saw how it definitely applied. And I’ve always been kind of charmed by that notion.
David: You’ve said that America’s only public metaphor for problem-solving is declaring war. What is your perspective on the American government’s War on Drugs and War on Terrorism?
George: I’ve done some writing about the whole metaphor of war. I mean, they have a War on Trash, a War on Cancer. Some of them are absurd. I’ve kept track of them. I have about thirty of them, and I wish I could think of some of the more trivial ones. But let’s keep it with America for now. America is a kind of friendly aggressor. We’ve been very aggressive at taking over the world with our culture in order to impose our business structure on the world, for free market capitalism. Apparently, it’s one of the better systems, by the way, for getting more things to the most people. I can’t deny that. Some of these distortions have their own oddly beneficial aspects to them, and I don’t know enough about things to pull that that apart properly.
But let me just say that the white Europeans have always exploited the dark, the black, the brown, tan people. The northern hemisphere has always plundered the southern hemisphere. And there are interesting, or sound, historical reasons why this happened. But it doesn’t gainsay the fact that I think there’s a highly developed ability, for want of a better word, to dominate others, and use them for our profit. We want to impose democracy where we can, and we want to impose market capitalism, because, basically, I think we want to sell refrigerators.
I think we look at a place like Bosnia and we say, you know something, if these people all had fucking laptops, and cell phones, and microwaves, we could sell a lot of merchandise. I think that’s in there somewhere, this need to conquer and overcome other people in order to have them become part of the marketplace. I really don’t think there’s a lot of ideology to it. I really don’t think it has anything to do with “spreading democracy” and giving people “free choice”, because there are no free choices. The whole system is rigged. The whole system is rigged against The Little Man. There is an ownership class in America. I call them The People Who Own Everything.
And people say, oh your conspiracy thing. Listen, don’t be making fun of the word conspiracy. It has meaning. Powerful people have convergent interests. They don’t always need a meeting to decide on something. They inhabit the same gentlemen’s clubs or golf clubs. They sit on the same boards of directors. They’re on the same board of trustees at the university. They all have this common ownership background of the American enterprise, and they are very few in number. They control everything, and they do whatever they want. They have a system called the two-party system that keeps the people at bay. They give them microwaves. They give them fannypacks. They give them sneakers with lights in the heals. They give them Dustbusters, and whoopee cushions, to keep them distracted, and keep them just calm enough that they’re not going to try something.
Now, of course, the ownership class has all these fucking guns, and weapons, and helmets, and radios, and radars, and night vision and everything–so there’s never any hope anymore of a real revolution. They got that covered. But for a long time they just kept it all down by giving the people just what they needed, and then running things themselves. They give them this illusion of choice between liberals and conservatives. But you’ll notice that anyone who’s an extreme liberal, or an extreme conservative, is marginalized. They’re not on mainstream television. That’s why FOX has tried, I guess, so hard to push a very hard right-wing conservative line, and make it common place in America to be hearing those things. Right-wing radio does that.
But essentially, the real freaks, on either side, are not heard from. They are marginalized. The Ralph Naders of the world, for instance. They give them a modicum of time to make it appear like he has a slight voice. But he’s ridiculed. They marginalize you by calling you a kook. Or it used to be a communist, or fanatic, or whatever the word is they use when you cross the line, and you really are radical. And radical just means root; it comes from the word root. So it’s root-thinking. If you’re a radical thinker they have no place for you.
So they control this center, and they keep the people relatively quiet. Even a Clinton–I mean, you say, well, what about Clinton? He was very oriented toward people’s needs and everything. Yeah, but he was backed by the Bilderbergers. I mean, they have bend in them. The ownership class has a flexibility. People say, well, I say people have no voice. And they say, what about the antiwar movement and Vietnam? Yeah, how long did it take? And it didn’t happen until the ownership class decided it was no longer in their interest. Same thing with the civil rights movement. They decided this is no longer in our interest to maintain this system. Let’s bend a little. And they bend a little.
David: What is your perspective on our vanishing Constitutional rights in America?
George: First of all, people are dreaming if they think they have rights. They’ve never had rights. There’s no such thing. They say God-given rights. If you ask them, where do these rights come from? They say well, they came from God. They’re God-given rights. And I say, well, let me tell you this. The American Bill of Rights has ten stipulations. The British has thirteen. The Dutch, the Germans, the Belgians–all of them have different numbers of rights in their constitutional guarantees, different numbers of rights. Why would God give different numbers, of different rights, to different people, in different places? Amusement? Oversight? What’s going on?
So clearly these things have nothing to do with a God, if there even is one. These are privileges, which are temporarily granted to the people to keep them placated so that the market economies, and market constitutional systems–the parliamentary or president, whatever kind of democratic institutions they are, parliamentary or otherwise–so that they can function. And the people are happy. There’s a balance. And that’s the way things are handled, but rights can be taken away. So they’re not really rights, if they can be taken away by human beings. The Japanese-Americans who went to the camps in 1941 had rights, but suddenly someone says, well, not that one they don’t have. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus.
It’s capricious and arbitrary, and people are wrong when they think they have rights. I say, if you think you has rights, you is wrong. I’ve written a thing on this; it’s going to be in the next book. In fact, it might even be in the next HBO show. It’s what I call the “Patriotic Suite”. I have this seven part thing, that’s all about red, white, and blue, swearing on The Bible, taking off your hat, saluting the flag, and all this stuff. And one of them is about rights. There has been a long progression of erosion of Americans’ stated rights–or the way they’re interpreted in the Bill of Rights in the Constitution–long time cutting away, cutting away, cutting away.
Now, it has taken a huge leap with the Patriot Act. The Ashcrofts, the disciplinarian, authoritarian, strict, Calvinist, Christian mindset is in a position of power now, and they’re just shredding that Bill of Rights. Not that it wasn’t under attack before they came along, but they’ve really jumped on the bandwagon with this 9-11. I would not be surprised if 9-11, if that whole thing–and this will get all the anti-conspiracy people interested– were not staged by the Bush-Carlyle Group empire. The Bush empire, the dynasty, that whole, entire secret society sort of ownership. I don’t know. I ‘m clearly in over my head here, because it’s it’s a thing that I think about sometimes, but it would make a lot of sense for them. Here’s The New York Times. On the front page today, “United States Uses Terror Law”–that would be the Patriot Act–“To Pursue Crimes From Drugs to Swindling”. So they’re branching out now.
You asked about the War on Drugs. Obviously, drugs represent a form of freedom and personal choice. So here’s one thing where you have no freedom of choice. You’re told you can do this, but you can’t do that. You can’t drink after 2:00 in this state. But you can drive across the border, and you can drink until 4:00 in that state. There are all these forms of control. People think they have freedom of choice in this country. Here’s your fucking choice–paper or plastic? That’s your choice. Will this be charge or cash? That’s your choice. Visa or Mastercard? Coke or Diet Coke? Smoking or Nonsmoking? Window or aisle. Those are your fucking choices America. You have no choices. They’re imposed.
David: Some of your humor stems from a playful deconstruction of language. Why do you think it’s important to reflect on our use of language, and how do you think our use of language effects our view of reality?
George: Well, we think in language. We think in words. Language is the landscape of thought. It’s how thought is realized, and, obviously, how we communicate ideas. It’s how we individuate ourselves, how we are human individuals that are separate from others. And there’s some virtue to it, in separation, earlier I was saying. We’re completely at odds with nature, and that’s true. But it is important to understand your identity, and your place in the scheme of things, and in the universe even. So that all comes from having language available for thought and expression.
The language attraction in me came from the family. It’s very heredity. My mother’s father, Dennis Bearey, was a New York City policeman at the turn of the last turn of the century, the 1900’s coming in. He was self-educated. He had quit school, come to America, young, and taught himself. During his adult years, he wrote out most of the works of Shakespeare longhand, copying them from a book, because of the joy the language gave him.
So that’s a pretty dramatic expression of appreciation for language. He was Irish, and the Irish have that gift, of perhaps, you know a little bit disproportionately to some other cultures–although there are great writers everywhere. But the Irish really have the gift of gab. The ratio of poets, playwrights, and authors to mechanics is much different in Ireland. So he had that. He gave that to my mother. She got it hereditarily, and it was reinforced at home, because at dinner time they would discuss–not all the time, I guess–but they would often discuss language, and Shakespeare’s use of it.
My mother was very careful with me to point out good writing. She would call me into her room. I’d bring her her newspaper, and she was tired after work. She’d be reading, and she’d say, “George come here. Look at this. Look at this word. Look how this sentence cuts”–she was dramatic the way she spoke–”this sentence just cuts right through”. So I had the genetic marker for it, and then she encouraged it by pointing out the joy in savoring the graceful and incisive use of language.
So, to me, language is just my instrument. I have the computer open here. I was working on the book, and I just have the greatest joyful feeling when I’m altering a sentence. When I’m fixing a paragraph, it’s just like some kind of union with something. I don’t understand it. I know there’s a joy. I have a woman in my life, Sally Wade, and we have a joyful wonderful life together. And that’s a separate form of joy, being with Sally, enjoying each other. But being at that computer, with the words, is just…I don’t know, somehow, it goes to my foundation.
David: I can relate well.
George: Yeah. Boy, when they came up with being able to highlight a whole paragraph, and move it somewhere else–holy shit did they change the world! I mean, you say, wait a minute, this goes at the end. I can’t imagine how people did that with yellow tablets, or dipping a pen or a quill. And these great things that came out of, what must have been such a long laborious process. Having to do something over, or delete something, and put an insert, and all; you know, it must have been a mess. I did it, and I don’t remember how messy it was. But, boy, my writing changed qualitatively, not just quantitatively, with my use of the word processor. I noticed that the thinking and the writing, as they are combined, became more complex and more interesting. And I’ll use that word textured again. It just really changed the quality of what it was, not just how fast I could do it, or how much I do. So I’m glad you know. Obviously you know that.
David: Yeah, it becomes more like sculpting.
George: Absolutely. Yeah, taking off things that don’t belong.
David: You said before that you’re not trying to get people to think in your comedy routines. However, I still wonder if you’re aren’t sometimes trying to educate people. Is this ever part of your intention?
George: Well, let me cop to one thing that I’m aware of. Someone once said, if you scratch a cynic, and you’ll find a disappointed idealist. That really rang a bell with me–because I recognized that, within me, there is this flame, of wishing it were better, wishing people had better lives, that there was more of an authentic sharing and harmony with nature. So these complaints, this thing that sometimes reads as anger to people, is largely a discontent, a dissatisfaction, sometimes a disappointment in what we have allowed, passively or actively, to happen to us, as a species and as a culture.
I know that I would have been a good teacher. Had I gone on and had a continuing formal education, I would have made a good teacher. I would have made a good trial lawyer, because I like persuasion. I like the art of forensics, of using language and thought to shape…I guess we’re talking about to shape other people’s thinking. Sure. I mean, it has such a potentially pretentious ring to it, to me, that I shrink from it. But words are words, and descriptions are descriptions. You have seen something that is true.
Someone recently–a woman at a dentist’s office–gave me, not quite a thesis, but a paper that her son wrote at Berkeley, comparing certain aspects of Kierkegaard to some things I said about religion and politics. And boy, I mean, I was a little flattered to be thrown into philosophical company like that, but the things he pointed out hit me, again, right on the button–because they were about the need to tell people that it’s up to them. It’s not up God. It’s your responsibility.
Whether it’s citizenship, or whether it’s morality, things don’t come from God. Things come from you, and things that you want to change in the world have to start inside yourself. You can’t just acquiesce. You can’t be at the mall, with a fanny-pack on, scratching your nuts, buying sneakers with lights in them. You have to be thinking. You have to be resisting. You have to be talking.
So these things are pointed out to me sometimes in passing, or directly, and, frankly, I’m impressed by them, and, naturally, I’ll use the word flattered here again. I think flattery is usually artificial, so I don’t like the word flattery. It usually suggests insincerity to me. But complimented, I mean, just really complimented by it. Because, to take myself seriously here for a moment, an artist, a creative person, I often don’t know the things that I’m doing. Not all artists are the same, but this is true in my case, and I’m sure it’s true in some other cases as well. They don’t know some of the underlying things that are happening. They just do it, because there’s a certain satisfaction, a certain joy. It fills some need.
And yet, another person can come along and point out things that they don’t see. I’ve seen this with people who wrote certain things about Lenny Bruce, that I’m sure Lenny didn’t sit around and think of. But they would interpret him, and they would say, do you see what he’s doing here? Do you see what this is? Do you see how this fits with that? So, to a person who’s looking carefully, it’s true that there are probably some things about my work that reveal idealism, and whatever the other qualities are that are more high flown, less concrete and earthy. Things that are more substantial.
David: How do you maintain a sense of wonder, and keep a fresh perspective on the world?
George: Well, the world never stops surprising me. I mean, it’s a two sided coin. I always say, people complain because they wonder, did you hear about this? Did you hear what they did? And I say, tell me you’re surprised. Are you really surprised at this? In this culture, in this country, does this surprise you? Then, on the other hand, my brother has an expression. I’ll point out something to him that’s absurd, or he’ll tell me something absurd he heard or read about, and he says, you know George, they never let us down. They’re always in there working–meaning the society, the culture is always devising new ways to amaze us, my brother and me. The people who think we’re all cynics, and who, underneath, have some really idealistic candle lit. So it’s both. It’s, how can you be surprised anymore? And, on the other hand, how can you not be? As things build upon things, everything is almost an exponential leap from from wherever it springs.
It’s just a lot of fun. I call it the freak show. I say, if you’re born in America, you’re given a ticket to the freak show. Some people are in the freak show. Those are the freaks. Some people, most of us, are there to watch the show. So sit back, and enjoy the fucking freak show. Now, there are some people who try to change the freaks. These are so-called do-gooders, environmentalists, the social activists, ACLUs and all this. We’re going to fix the freak show. We’re going to fix the freaks. And some of us get to just review the freak show. We write reviews about it. And that’s what I do. I don’t take a position necessarily that is moral. It usually stems from logic–this doesn’t make sense. Now, there might be a moral underpinning to it, but, generally, I don’t retreat to that concept of morality, or right and wrong, except fair and unfair. I don’t like unfairness. So that’s kind of a moral thing.
But anyway, I’m all over the joint. Ah, the freak show, American freak show. That’s what this is all about. So I just enjoy the show. The world, to me, is a big theater-in-the-round, literally, spinning, on a little insignificant rock, around a second-rate star, in a very poor part of the galactic neighborhood, by the way. And we’re just living out our time, and it’s here to be enjoyed. Some people have to feel differently from that. I don’t say everyone can feel that way. But, for me, that’s where I found my happiness.
David: How has marijuana and your use of psychedelics effected your comedy career and your perspective on life?
George: What they did was effect my consciousness, obviously, and that effects everything about you. So, naturally, in this line of work it’s extremely important, extremely influential. Your consciousness influences the work.
I was an early pot smoker. I was smoking pot when I was 13 in 1950. It was an unheard of act in an Irish-American neighborhood. People didn’t know anything about it, and considered it to be on a level with heroin. I mean, it was just… (George speaks in a scratchy, old geezer voice) marijuana–you smoke one of those things, and yeah, boy, you’re gone for life. So, we were kind of a daring little group of us. We were on a new generational cusp.
We lived in West Harlem, white Harlem we called it, between Columbia University and all of the institutional establishments. Let me tell you what was in my neighborhood. Right across the street from my house, was the entrance to Teacher’s College, Columbia University. Barnard was there. Columbia University was there. St. John the Divine, the largest cathedral in America. Riverside Church, a 23 story gothic tower was at the end of my block, with the biggest carillon in the world. Union Theological Seminary, the largest multi-denominational protestant seminary.
Literally around the corner from me, without crossing the street, was the Jewish Theological Seminary. Again, largest of its kind. Diagonally across the corner was Julliard School of Music, when it was still uptown. We played and fooled around at Grant’s Tomb. So we had this incredibly high-powered institutional neighborhood, full of learning and striving. Harry Emison Fasdigger was the Pasteur over at Riverside Church, and I know that it had an effect on me. But I choose to hang around the other direction. I went down the hill to Harlem, toward the latin, and black, and working-class Irish–because that’s were the fun was! There were good smells coming out of the windows. The music was great. And my peers were there.
So we were on the beginning of the generation. The kids who were a little older than us, my bigger brother’s guys–they were still street fighters and drinkers, and wore the big shoes. We had gravitated from the big shoes, and the peg pants, into conservative three-button charcoal suits, like the black dudes wore. We got into rhythm and blues. We got into pot smoking. We were a change. And that’s why that piece of material in one of my albums–Occupation Fool–is called “Grass Swept the Neighborhood”, because it changed us.
I think that marijuana is a consciousness-altering drug which has a cumulative effect. I also think it is a self-limiting drug, if a person is paying attention. It is a drug that suggests it’s own disuse, eventually. Some people maintain a certain consumption, at a good level, and they’re not just half asleep all the time, and can’t think. They save it for night time, or the weekend, or whatever, and that’s different.
But generally marijuana, and LSD, and they’re both, I think, essentially hallucinogenics. I’m not 100 percent sure of that. I wouldn’t be on record with that, but they’re certainly not in the narcotic classes, stimulants, or any of those things. They are separate. LSD–originally as unaltered by man–along with peyote, pot and those forms of hallucinogens, are all completely natural. They come from nature, and the only things that are done with them is they’re passed from one person to another. It’s these other drugs–where we get in the laboratory, or the garage, and we start altering their molecular structure–that are the deadly ones. The really deadly things have come from man’s altering of nature, of the parts he can manipulate.
Pot is an herb. It’s very natural, It obviously has some healing qualities and some palliative qualities. I think it changed my thinking. It fostered offbeat thinking, the kind of alternative thinking that was already an internal part of me–this disbelief in the received wisdom, and in the authority, as it was passed along. I think it fostered that. Then it changed my comedy. I was a straight, mainstream, suit-and-tie comic for ten years, from 1960-1969 or 70. I had a two tiered life going on, and I didn’t even know it.
One of them was this law breaking, school quitting, pot-smoking person, with no respect for authority. The other one was a mainstream dream. I wanted to be in the movies. I wanted to be Danny Kaye. Well, you can’t be Danny Kaye if you’re going to be this other thing. So I lived two lives. My professional life was this straight path of pleasing the public. It wasn’t until the late 60’s that things changed, and this was because of the alternative culture–the people I could really identify with, what’s called the counterculture. This began to manifest itself through the youth culture, with it’s disrespect for authority, free love–and “let’s get high”, and “here’s how I feel”, and “here’s what’s going on in my mind and my heart”. All those things had been suppressed in America–some voluntarily, some not–prior to that. The Fifties are notorious for that. But jazz and the beatniks were the exception. The bohemian world. But they were just starting.
Anyway, I was attracted to this other thing in the late Sixties, because all my friends were musicians who had gone through the changes already. I was a big pot smoker. But slowly I used a little peyote, a little mescaline, and these tendencies in me to be myself, and not play a fake role as a people-pleasing, mainstream comedian came to the fore. I became more myself. The comedy became more personal, therefore more political, and therefore more successful. I think you can never be successful unless you are yourself, at least certainly not successful in the good, rich sense of the word. So, suddenly, I also became materially successful. People started buying albums. I had four Gold albums in a row. So the LSD, directly–in conjunction with it’s role in the counterculture, and my taking of it, those two things–definitely changed my life, because my creativity shifted into a very high gear.
David: What do you think happens to consciousness after the death of the body, and what is your perspective on God?
George: I don’t know. It’s obviously one of the most fascinating things that we don’t know. I profess no belief in God, which by definition is true, especially if we take the accepted definition of God. But to be an atheist is to also have a belief, and have a system, and I don’t know that I like that either. And yet I shrink from the word agnostic, because it seems like a handy weigh station to park at. I don’t know. And I’m satisfied not knowing, because it allows me to be filled with speculation, and imagination, about all the possibilities.
I find it interesting to read about, or listen, to people who have highly developed beliefs in an afterlife–forgetting now Christians, God and religion–and second chances, reincarnation, other planes of existence, other dimensions. Now, we get into the physical realm of the universes–which is interesting because universe means one, and here we are talking about multi-universes.
David: I actually asked Stephen Hawking–the renown physicist–about that once. He often writes and lectures about multiple universes and baby universes. I asked him how there could be more than one universe, when, by definition, the word universe means everything that exists. He told me that “a universe is a set of related events”. Apparently, you can have many self-contained, “sets of related events”, that have no influence upon one another, and each one is considered its own universe.
George: Well, it’s just fascinating, and you get lost in the possibilities. There’s no way to hang your hat on any of these things. There’s just no way to say, ah, this a good one. I’ll go with this. Because they’re all titillating, and they’re tempting. And they’re all entertaining to the way I’ve developed my mind. I find it highly entertaining to consider wormholes, and alternate parallel universes, and all the things that Robert Anton Wilson sometimes writes about.
It’s just endlessly entertaining and fascinating. So I’m quite content in being in this position. I think there’s a certain arrogance of spirit that says, here’s the way it goes. Here’s what happens. Or to narrow it down to two things or so, maybe it’s okay. I don’t know. But for me, I can’t live that way. I have to keep all the doors open, just for the fun of it.
I don’t care what happens to me after I die, but I know this. I know that if there’s some sort of moral reckoning, I know I’ll come out clean. I know I’ve never done a mean thing intentionally to anyone. I know I’ve only tried to make people feel better, and be more at ease. I don’t mean professionally. I mean in personal relationships. I try to put people at ease, make them feel good. And I know that if there’s some sort of reckoning by something, that says, well, let’s look at your record here, I’m clean. So I’m happy with that.
David: Do you think that the human species is going to survive the next hundred years, and if so, how do you envision the future evolution of the human race?
George: I would guess that some cataclysm, man-made or nature-made might happen. Obviously not real original thinking here, but I’ll try and give a personal shape in a moment. Some sort of cataclysm will alter this thing. There are too many people. Let’s say that the American Dream–and they call it a dream because you have to be asleep to believe it–is spread everywhere, and everyone in India, and everyone in China, has a car. Actually China–everyone has a car, or two cars, and big cars.
Okay, now, I’m a little bored by environmentalists. I’m a little bored with the whole, almost Christian fervor of these people. I do like vandalism, by the way. I like the big spikes in the trees. I like vandalizing the SUVs. That’s fun. But the idealistic sitting around–all that shit–it kind of bores me. I understand the importance of it, but it bores me. But I also understand the fact the earth is an organism, and that life is completely interdependent, everything upon everything. And if you alter one thing, in some minute fashion, you alter everything. And sometimes it’s not so minute. And there comes a tipping point. And if everyone has a car, and everyone is spewing out shit, think of the consequences. And even if they try to fix that, and then they go to the next thing, they’ll fuck it up. We will always overstep. We will always use our brains to our self-disadvantage, ultimately.
And they’ll be a tipping point. It’ll either be environmental, or one of these lovely germs will get loose. Let’s face it, if everybody, if all these countries in the world–and there’s a lot of them now–are playing around with all of these different lovely microbes. We don’t even need to list them, because we all know what they are. Ebola, Jesus. Plague. Smallpox. All these things for which there is no cure or prevention, at least not now. I’m sure the people in charge have gotten their shot. But, sooner or later, someone drops a vial. Sooner or later, somebody takes something home. Sooner or later, a window is left open in building. Something in the perfection of the system slips, and they’ll be, perhaps, that kind of a disaster. It could be locally contained. They might be able to put a ring around it, and say, well, this part of the world is unlivable for the next thousand years.
But hey, we’re all going to eat, and we all get fucking hats, and we’re all in good shape. So things will go on. But then there might be something wide enough, whether its nuclear, or any of these lovely chemical things we have. Or nature, like just plain old volcanoes coming of age again, or some other huge geologic disturbance. Nature usually works very slowly. But suddenly, the slow process becomes a very rapid change. Volcanoes, and magma, and all that stuff build very slowly. But when they reach a threshold, they look–vvwoooom–and it’s happening instantly. A mountain range has come up.
But anyway, what I’m trying to say is, what might happen to the human species is that it is greatly reduced in numbers, greatly reduced in it’s ability to use technology to any benefit. I mean, people may sit around, and still have their laptops, but if there’s no internet, or if there’s no electricity, then you can’t charge whatever the fuck it is.
I’m just saying, the systems will be compromised enough, and the numbers reduced, so that a–not a fresh start, because it won’t be that–but a re-gearing. Maybe they’ll be a hundred thousand people left. Maybe they’ll be ten million. Maybe they’ll be scattered. Maybe they’ll all be in one corner of the world. Maybe they’ll have a little technology. Maybe nobody will have anything. So, I mean, it’s just, again, one of those wonderful things to speculate on. I have no idea. But I hope it’s dramatic and funny. Please God, let it be violent, and let it be funny. That’s all I ask.
David: What are you currently working on?
George: I’m working on my third book, When Will Jesus Bring the Porkchops? I’m doing 90 shows a year. I do about 80 or 90 concerts a year, in theaters and concert halls, and then I do about eight weeks in Las Vegas, because it’s a different scene there. I can sit in my condo for two weeks at time, and write all day. I don’t have to get in a little plane each night, although I don’t mind that. So it’s a little different down there, but it’s another eight weeks of working that I do. And every two years this stuff turns into an HBO show. So I’m currently between show #12 and show #13. Number 13 will be in the Fall of 05.
The book will be in Fall of 04. Next Spring there’s a movie, Jersey Girl, where I play a kind of serious role. I play Ben Afleck’s father in the movie, which is about raising a little girl in New Jersey. People are starting to take me a little more seriously in acting now, so I get these extra little entertainment things. For me, going and doing some acting, collaborating, and interpreting some other part that other people have thought of, is like using different muscles. And that’s kind of fun to do. So those are things I’m currently working on. The movie is done, the book is in progress, and the show takes care of itself.
To find out more about George Carlin’s work, visit his Web site: www.georgecarlin.com
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