For G Pascal Zachary's seminar in science & technology policy I was reading Thomas P. Hughes on the emergence of counterculture influence of science & technology in the US post WWII, along with excerpts from Walter Isaacson's recently published biography on Steve Jobs. We got into the specifics: Jobs and Wozniak's early experience with phone hacking, Steve's ten-day retreats in Himalayan caves, and the tendency of elites to combine left and right to move the center. Gregg Zachary's lecture biography of Jobs gave prominence to LSD use among pioneers most instrumental in shifting counterculture attitudes in favor of liberation through technology. Zachary made excursions into Jobs' version of Buddhism and Kevin Kelley's Christian conversion experience.
I was reminded of Ralph Abraham, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at UC Santa Cruz. As GP Zachary's son is enrolled there, I mentioned Abraham to Gregg after the lecture. GPZ asked me to send him Abraham's personal essay on psychedelics in the computer graphics and mathematics revolutions of the 1960s.
Ralph Abraham was claimed by GQ Magazine, the San Francisco Examiner, the San Jose Mercury News, and other publications to be the man responsible for supplying LSD and DMT to California's mathematics and computer graphics revolutionaries. "Abraham Sells Drugs to Mathematicins" was the headline benath Ralph's photo in GQ Magazine's feature. While charmingly hyperbolic, the statement mischaracterizes the market for psychedelics in the 60s. As G Pascal Zachary noted this afternoon, the classified community decided to introduce scientists to LSD already in the late 50s. By the late 60s plenty of talented professional chemists had tried it and were eager to create lots more of the highest quality.
The link with Buddhism in all this is intriguing. Ralph Abraham, Steve Jobs, and so many others studied Buddhism idiosyncratically, but with great ferocity. I wonder what Steve Jobs' Buddhism consists of.
Where's the Ja'lus? Something has gone wrong historically. The mathematical and computer revolutionaries built new socio-technical systems but left the Big News in the lurch! I just can't get over this. Every day I am just baffled how close they came.
And I can't help but think this is what there is to do. The urgent work of getting the India trip just right. Returning with the Promethean flame. Dig that!
Nomad Lab
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Rise Ye, Yeast of the Sun!
I stayed inside for a few days and so got very little sunlight. Honestly I was getting a little grumpy. I walked outside finally, and was absolutely blasted with hard-core Arizona winter sunlight, in a crystal clear sky. So I stood there beside my pickup, absorbing these swarms of molecules, when I noticed some bright ideas, kind of rising into consciousness. Almost like bread will rise in an oven if there is yeast, these days of indoor, bacterial brooding bore fruit in a matter of minutes. What a pleasant surprise!
So I got to thinking about what's up with that spontaneous reaction. Is it just like a recipe? If the ingredients are there, up pop some personalized mental gems?
I think that's a pretty good description of the problem, the affect, the exudance.
I also think the invocation of my biographical time/ solar system interaction is important to consider. I mean, I have a longstanding relationship with that object! The warmth of the sun, when filtered by the earth's atmosphere, can often stand in place of a mother's caress. As a child I recall climbing trees in a forest, absorbing the sunlight. A whole body workout! The sun certainly impinges on the body.
Do we know the word 'cathexis'? Something like internal projections of holistic body energies onto important objects in the world. The mother is primary. But what about the sun? I don't think most people focus on the sun like that, as if this were a longstanding object of cathexis.
I was sleeping in a tent late at night, somewhere near Big Sur, California along Highway 5. There I was, eyes closed in the tent having drifted to sleep for several hours, probably on the tail end of a REM period. Slowly and meditatively, I was kind of scanning the surrounding space -- this kind of routine scanning happens, which is why I think content from the immediate environment does get translated by the REM-state dreamer. So, as I was doing this in the tent, and I found myself effortlessly triangulating the position of the moon, receiving the feel of it's simple presence as an object in consciousness between waking and dreaming. At that very moment, however, there was a shift, a local shift: at the break of dawn, the moon passed the baton of consciousness to the sun. I felt the coming of the dawn with my own biological clock! It was absolutely breathtakingly poignant and the most natural, uncluttered experience of my last 6 years on planet earth.
So I got to thinking about what's up with that spontaneous reaction. Is it just like a recipe? If the ingredients are there, up pop some personalized mental gems?
I think that's a pretty good description of the problem, the affect, the exudance.
I also think the invocation of my biographical time/ solar system interaction is important to consider. I mean, I have a longstanding relationship with that object! The warmth of the sun, when filtered by the earth's atmosphere, can often stand in place of a mother's caress. As a child I recall climbing trees in a forest, absorbing the sunlight. A whole body workout! The sun certainly impinges on the body.
Do we know the word 'cathexis'? Something like internal projections of holistic body energies onto important objects in the world. The mother is primary. But what about the sun? I don't think most people focus on the sun like that, as if this were a longstanding object of cathexis.
I was sleeping in a tent late at night, somewhere near Big Sur, California along Highway 5. There I was, eyes closed in the tent having drifted to sleep for several hours, probably on the tail end of a REM period. Slowly and meditatively, I was kind of scanning the surrounding space -- this kind of routine scanning happens, which is why I think content from the immediate environment does get translated by the REM-state dreamer. So, as I was doing this in the tent, and I found myself effortlessly triangulating the position of the moon, receiving the feel of it's simple presence as an object in consciousness between waking and dreaming. At that very moment, however, there was a shift, a local shift: at the break of dawn, the moon passed the baton of consciousness to the sun. I felt the coming of the dawn with my own biological clock! It was absolutely breathtakingly poignant and the most natural, uncluttered experience of my last 6 years on planet earth.
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