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be of use to the clarion call that you've given in your book?
Terence: I think that what makes it confusing is when you go into these domains, the encounter is an emotionally powerful one. The situation
is so novel that the experient tends to assume that this emotional power is coming from the input. It's not. It's coming from the encounter with
the input. I mean it's like posing the question, "Can you make a stirring record of the Grand Canyon?" Yes, you can, with helicopter-mounted
cameras and this sort of thing. But the emotion you have watching that, you bring to it. The psychedelic dimension is objective, but it's also
so awesome and so different from what we know that it encourages and promotes and triggers awe in us. We bring something to it, which we
can never image, or reduce to a verbal description or a piece of film. The thing itself is just more of reality, like the heart of the cell, or radar
maps of the Venustian surface, or the center of the atom.
Ralph: Do we need more reality? We've already got so much.
Terence: We need more of this mental logos world. It's the logos world that we've lost the connection with. These computer programs,
psychedelic drugs, dynamic modeling schemes, are the equivalent of probes, like Voyager. They're sent not to an alien planet, but to an alien
phase-space of some sort, one that we need connection to.
Rupert: I agree with Terence. The problem is that the emotional intensity of a psychedelic experience is totally different
from seeing a computer graphic display. It's possible to get something a bit like that just by shaking a kaleidoscope and looking into it. In
these expensive novelty shops that dot California, you can find fancy kaleidoscopes beautifully made. You look through them, and you can
see a dazzling display of pattern and color, but within a few seconds you're just bored. Nobody ever really looks at them for very long.
Somehow they have no meaning, and don't engage one. I think the difference between representation of the state and being in the state itself
is this sense of meaning, engagement and intensity. I for one, being a botanist, am very drawn to flowers. I love looking at flowers.
Sometimes you can look at a whole garden full of flowers like here in Esalen, and it's quite meaningless. At other times you can look at a
single flower for a long time, you can go into it, it's like a mandala. You enter into that realm, and it takes on incredible meaning, beauty and
significance. The same with butterflies and many other natural creations. It seems to me the problem is how to enter into that engagement,
intensity and sense of meaning, rather than the representation of the pattern itself. There are plenty of patterns around in the natural world.
Ralph: These are space/time patterns. Although we say the words "space/time pattern," we have no language for individual space/time
patterns. As experienced by us, there is a kind of a resonance between patterns that somehow makes a resonance with different patterns of
neurotransmitters in the visual cortex. Some aspects are perceived, and other aspects are not, remaining invisible to our perception. You've
been speaking of flowers in the garden, or the images in the kaleidoscope. These are static patterns, and we have an extensive verbal language
for that. What I'm suggesting is an expansion of our visual/linguistic capability in the direction of a universal language for space/time pattern,
such that we could truly speak of our experiences, giving them names. At the mere drop of a word or a code, an I-75, Highway 1, Highway 0,
we would transmit a clear image of space/time pattern along with whatever emotion
we remember from the experience. If we can awaken these feelings in the mind of the listener, we can converse, intellec-tualize, understand
and reconnect with the space/time pattern of the spiritual world. Let's face it, we have the most extensive experience of this world through
visual metaphors of, well, movies. We experience the logos as movies. We don't experience it as words, although there are sounds, and there
is sometimes writing on the wall like graffiti. Basically reality is an infinite field of consciousness, of vibration, of waves moving, of
intelligence. When we travel in this realm, we go somewhere we've been before and we recognize it, and that excites in us memory, which is
reinforced and extended, and upon this experience we base further experiment. We three have had our many experiences, which I have great
faith, are similar, even universal experiences, and yet we are absolutely speechless in verbalizing them to each other. Words fail me.
Terence: It seems to me that mind responds with an affinity for itself. If an expression is universal, then it has an affinity for the universal
mind. What's interesting about the example of the kaleidoscope is that it's boring after a few minutes. If you analyze how it works, and take it
apart, the base units in most kaleidoscopes are pieces of broken glass, pebbles, detritus, junk. Somehow splitting this into six sections with a
mirror and putting it in heavy oil is supposed to bring you into the realm of something endlessly watchable and interesting. But it isn't. The
brain machines being produced in Germany are the same way. All pattern seems to quickly lose its charm unless it's pattern that has been put
through the sieve of mind. We enjoy looking at the ruins and artifacts of vanished civilizations a lot more than random arrangements of
natural objects. It seems to me what we're looking for when we say the MPP [Massively Parallel Processor] data on chaos is like a DMT
[Dimethyl tryptamine] trip, what we're saying is, "Here in this pattern is the footprint of meaning." It's as though an architect passed through.
We're always looking for the betraying presence of an order that is more than an order of economy and pure function.
We look for an aesthetic order, and when we find that, then we have this reciprocal sense of recognition and transcendence, and this is what
the psychedelic experience provides in spades. A critic of the psychedelic experience would object, "Of course it's made of mind. It's made of
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