Future Highs
In 1997, I proposed to Playboy an article on the future of consciousness. They said they would assign the article if I made it about future highs. The scientist called "G" in this article is the late great Sasha Shulgin, who became a friend for many years.
FUTURE HIGHS (originally published in Playboy, 1977)
"4 IX 2039. I finally learned how to come into possession of an encyclopedia. I already own one now Ñ the whole thing contained in three glass vials. Bought them in a science psychedeli. Books are no longer read but eaten, not made of paper but of some informational substance, fully digestible, sugar-coated. I also did a little browsing in a psychem supermarket. Self-service. Arranged on the shelves are beautifully packaged low-calorie opinionates, gullibloons -- credibility beans? -- abstract extract in antique gallon jugs, and iffies, argumunchies, puritands and dysecstasy chips...At first I was skeptical, but accepted this innovation when after taking four algebrine capsules I suddenly found myself perfectly at home in higher mathematics...Friends are not an indispensable source of information; you can take a drug called duetine which doubles your consciousness in such a way that you can hold discussions with yourself on any topic..."
-- Stanislas Lem, The Futurological Congress
By the year 2001, the man and woman above town might select their states of consciousness from moment to moment and commute between mental levels as easily as we now commute between continents. To Stanislas Lem, the author of the passage quoted above, the "cryptochemocracy" of the future was a science fiction plot. And so were moon rockets, to Jules Verne. The foundations of that weird new world of tomorrow are being constructed today, by scientists, not science-fiction writers: While drug designers modernize the ancient art of intoxication, social scientists are sketching scenarios about the future of our mental state. Note that I'm not talking about drug abuse. The difference between drug abuse and psychochemical exploration is akin to the difference between
Some seeker of inner knowledge may be risking life, limb and brain damage while you read this, just to bring you a better way to alter your consciousness. At this moment, anthropologists in the Amazon are searching for telepathy- inducing vines and chemists in New Jersey are hallucinating the shapes of their next molecular euphoriants. Transpersonal psychotherapists are known to be floating in tanks of salt water and psychophysiologists have been seen tuning their nervous systems to new resonant frequencies. Because so many different leading-edge research fields now are closing in on the biological, electrochemical, psychological origins of human consciousness, every branch of science seems to be going into the mindchanging business.
The more sensational protagonists of the psychedelic era -- the Learys and the Keseys, the alchemists and the occultists -- long ago left the orbit of orthodox science. But the study of consciousness expansion has remained very much alive. The inner-space experts of the eighties are wary of publicity. But turned-on scientists do exist: John Lilly, the former dolphin researcher and inventor of the flotation tank, Michael Harner, the Anthropologist-Shaman, Masters and Houston, the "how-to" gurus of the neo-psychedelic revolution, and others. Then there's G., who might be the dignified gentleman in front of you in the supermarket line, who has devoted his career to the chemical pursuit of higher planes of mind.
Somewhere in America dwells a quiet man who is the very image of the eminent scientist. He is respected in his field, but due to the taboos surrounding his specialty, he wishes to remain anonymous. He doesn't even want to disclose what part of the country in lives in. Dr. G., as I agreed to call him, synthesizes substances that have never before existed on this planet, mind-benders of such complexity that an evolved consciousness is required to even imagine their structures.
Like any technology, the first products of psychochemistry have been crude "uppers" or "downers" or "tranquillizers." Eventually, more subtle effects will be possible; MDMA was a milestone along that path. Will we still eschew chemical mood-changers when they help us think better, or inspire us to create and invent? That is one of the answers G. seeks. It was he who told me about Lem's Futurological Congress, a fictional depiction of a future psychochemical civilization where hypothetical "benignimizers" like Hedonidil, Euphoril, Inebrium, Felecitine, Empathan, and, yes, Ecstasine, induced states of undirected joy and beatitude. And, as G. quoted to me toward the beginning of our first talk "...by replacing an amino group with a hydroxyl you obtained, instead, Furiol, Antagonil, Rabiditine, Sadistizine...and many other polyparanoidal stimulants..."
Dr. G. was inventing mind-altering drugs decades ago, when everyone still thought LSD was a kind of landing craft. We aren't talking about some kind of bootlegger here, but a genuine, legitimate, pharmaceutical chemist. And if you don't think pharmaceutical chemistry is an important part of our society, consider the fact that over 5 billion tranquillizers are consumed this year in the USA alone. The big drug manufacturers have staffs of pharmaceutical chemists who think up new ways to send us up, down, or sideways. G., however, has his sights on tranquillity, insight, joy, inspiration -- all those states of mind we traditionally request in prayers to gods or invocations of muses.
It is Dr. G.'s custom and scientific protocol to ingest his own compounds and commune with the geometry of his transformed perceptions, sometimes finding clues to his next creation in the pattern of his hallucinations. Bizarre as this research method might seem, there is historical precedent for hallucinatory theorizing: The science of organic chemistry was born when a chemist named Kekule dreamed of a snake that swallowed its own tail and awoke to draw the first diagram of the tail-swallowing benzene ring.
Dr. G. is an independent researcher. He is employed by no single university, pharmaceutical firm, or government agency, but more than welcome at many of them. Our first meeting was in the lounge outside the pharm-chem lab of one of the nation's leading medical schools. Whenever he shows up, he has the run of the place. G. is thoroughly respectable in the eyes of the law and the opinion of the scientific community; indeed, he is admired by his peers. His private laboratory is supported by the royalties from patents he holds for pharmaceuticals that are commercially marketed. He defends his self-dosage procedures as "the epitome of informed consent." If he is going to bring these substances into our world, G. wants to take the responsibility and risk of finding out what they do to a human nervous system. The most important skill, the one that can't be taught, but only learned, is how to recognize a molecules psychoactive effect by imagining its shape.
"Mood-changing drugs can be organized into chemical families," he says, "each with its own qualitative aura. The psychological effect of any drug, including the sense of being high, can be changed by systematically altering its chemical arrangement, especially in those areas we have identified as active sites. A carbon atom here, a free electron there, and you have the difference between insight and anxiety. Some drugs induce fear or a feeling of well- being, others evoke pleasure, distorted or heightened perception, paranoia or awe. I look for those connections between chemistry and consciousness.
"Many of the drugs we create in laboratories are analogs, or synthetic reconstructions, of compounds that exist in nature. Other psychopharmaceutical creations never existed until they were synthesized. Both categories hold virtually endless possibilities for exploration. It all depends on how their shapes resemble the shapes of the chemicals in our own brains. Maybe Lem was joking about all the possible states of mind we might find in a pill some day. Maybe he was prophesying."
Dr. G. is in touch with the post-Castaneda generation of anthropologists, who have turned up a psychoactive cornucopia of ritual substances: "The potions of Native American shamans contain many powerful psychoactive drugs that have not been studied under laboratory conditions until recently," G. explains. "There are so many active compounds in each of those snuffs and infusions that it will take years to study them one at a time. We already have a few highly specific derivatives of natural compounds, drugs that are primarily visual, or auditory, or conceptual in their effects...but there are usually unpleasant side effects. In the next 20 years, we'll see drugs with every conceivable specific desirable effect, without the undesirable side effects."
Considering the impact of alcohol, heroin and cocaine, there isn't much doubt that psychoactive drugs have a powerful influence on every aspect of our society. But the feeling of benumbed well-being associated with the most commonly abused drugs isn't the only possible drug-induced state. Perhaps MDMA's successor actually does produce a prodound state of empathy with all humankind. Is that so harmful? In a world that's armed to the teeth and more, perhaps "benigmatizers" is just what planet Earth needs.
The psychic powers attributed to sorcerers or supernatural beings in nearly every culture in the world, to cite a different kind of example, might become available through modern relatives of the more exotic psychoactive chemicals such as the beta-carbolines and the tryptamines. Time distortion, rebirth experiences, flight of the astral body, extraordinary healings, have been attributed to various visionary chemicals that were unknown to Western science until recently. Harmaline, for example, was long known as "telepathine," and Dr. G.'s time-distorter is related to the snuff Columbus saw native Caribs snorting in 1492.
One of the major tasks of medical anthropologists in the closing decades of the twentieth century is to find and preserve the pharmaceutical knowledge, quickly disappearing, that is in the possession of the kinds of people we used to call "witch doctors," who live in the endangered kinds of societies we used to call "primitive." The next decades will bring a few of these rare shamanistic compounds to light, and eventually they will be recreated in the laboratory. Tragically, many more cultures, and the knowledge they possess, will be extinct by the time we fully appreciate their psychopharmaceutical achievements. Perhaps one of the shamanistic cultures we have been able to study to some degree will show us how to preserve that natural world before it is bulldozed.
But exotic chemistry isn't the only pathway to a scientifically stoned tomorrow. One promising neo-American mind-altering technique that wasn't borrowed from the natives is the electronic high. Direct electrical stimulation of the pleasure centers has long been suggested by the extremist brain-abuse fringe as a possible future intoxicant, but until the decadence factor in our society increases to the saturation point, few people are likely to drill holes in their heads just to get high. More subtle and less invasive are electronic techniques, now in their infancy, that might someday enable us to steer our highs, without or without chemicals working on our brains.
My friend John Criglar, for example, works with solid- state circuitry rather than with glassware and chemicals, but he is also one of the new cartographers of interior geography. Criglar started out designing radio-telescopes, invented voice-modulated synthesizers for rock groups and experimental telephones for A.T. & T., and was formerly a biomedical engineer at St. Joseph's hospital in San Francisco. His hospital work involved designing and testing a device that monitors muscle relaxation and feeds it back to the patient in the form of audible tones.
When the target muscle is tense, the patient hears one kind of sound; when the muscle relaxes, the pitch of the sound changes. A few electrodes that resemble half-dollar sized bandaids are taped to the arms, lower back, or neck. A stereo headphone plays back the sounds that are produced by the changes in the muscle's state of relaxation.
"Biofeedback, in effect, is like a mirror, because all the hardware does is make you aware of something that is going on all the time in your body," is what Criglar told his patients. I first met him when I was a graduate assistant in psychology, studying biofeedback as a potential tool for mapping states of consciousness.
In the late 1960s, psychologists who had been looking for some way to quantify and describe states of consciousness heard that investigators in Japan had applied EEG electrodes to the scalps of Zen monks. The Japanese investigators had found the meditation experts to emit a larger than normal amount of a certain brainwave -- the relatively mundane though much discussed "alpha frequency." Shortly thereafter, investigators in India came up with similar, and even more provocative findings when they attached their thin wires to the scalps and chests of yogic meditators. Put that together with Joe Kamiya's discovery at the University of Chicago -- that people can learn to increase or decrease the amount of alpha frequency in their brainwave output -- and you have the foundations of biofeedback research.
Yogis have been claiming for a long time that people can learn to control our unconscious bodily processes and get a "permanent high," if that is one's desire. We know now that our brain, heart, and muscles generate faint electrical signals as a result of natural processes. We can observe these signals and gain valuable diagnostic information; the electrocardiogram, for example, can tell a heart specialist a great deal about the patient's health. But when the patients themselves, rather than the doctors, begin to look at those signals, and do it at the same time they are detected, you have biofeedback. It isn't instant enlightenment, any more than a book is an instant education -- you still have to work for the benefits.
Biofeedback got a bit of a bad name when that perfectly legitimate but no more than promising finding about Buddhist monks and alpha frequencies was adopted as a new kind of technological gospel by some human potential faddists of the 1970s. The "alpha state" was peddled along with mood-rings and expensive mantras. The popular mythology was of some kind of "electric satori" -- a "plug-in" high. The fad disappeared when people realized that the alpha state is a useful and pleasant frame of mind that all people drift in and out of thousands of times every day. It can be used to help people relax, but it doesn't compare to a few sips of alcohol or puffs of marijuana as an intoxicant. The real promise of the technique is not what it does to the patient or practitioner, but what people can use it to achieve on their own initiative. Alpha isn't nearly as interesting as the ability to turn it on and off at will -- like taking the wheel of your own brain.
"Biofeedback is mostly a mental exercise on the part of the patient," is the way Criglar sees it: "It's a kind of calesthenics for your consciousness. Electronic amplifiers don't do anything but help us sense those processes, bring them to our attention. Like a mirror, biofeedback shows us a part of ourselves we don't normally see. When you use what you can now sense in order to learn how to control those processes, it becomes more significant than a matter of feeling good."
The future of biofeedback devices depends on developments in two separate, but related areas -- fundamental research into the meaning of those electronic signals (the relationship between brainwave patterns and different kinds of thoughts or other mental activities, for example), is necessarily the first development. The next step is therapeutic application of that knowledge to show people how to control their own body-mind processes by making those processes visible via sophisticated display devices. Until now, fundamental research hasn't yielded much more than very rough correlations between biosignals and states of mind, but experiments have determined that biofeedback is capable of facilitating very powerful learning -- people can learn to control the firing of individual muscle fibers, for example.
The display device in Criglar's laboratory was a tone generator. But what if his patients could learn to relax specific muscles or muscle groups by watching an animated, colored, high-resolution image on a large television screen? Today's video displays, even on the most expensive computers, are only beginning to approach the necessary degree of sophistication (scientist's call it bandwidth) necessary to truly capture people's attention. Neither did television, when it first got started. The first, primitive prototypes of tomorrow's "mindware" are beginning to surface: Biofeedback relaxation games for home computers now include video games in which the players can win only by learning to relax. Inner Pong, anyone?
When I set out in search of a futurologist to put all these speculations in the proper perspective, all roads led to Menlo Park, California, the Houston and Canaveral of the inner-space program. Indeed, when Captain Ed Mitchell returned from the moon, his life transformed toward a new, interior mission by a mystical extravehicular experience, Menlo Park was where he set up the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Captain Ed's gallant and surprisingly effective little organization has moved north a few miles to Sausalito. But something much larger remains, down at the end of a tree-shaded lane straight out of a pre-war Frank Capra film: SRI.
The sprawling research city that started out in the fifties as the Stanford Research Institute and is now known officially as "SRI International," conducts everything from heavy-duty basic research into lasers, weapons systems, computer science to social science programs that study values and lifestyles -- for a fee. SRI clients are the Fortune 100 companies and major governmental agencies, both domestic and foreign. If you need some hard-nosed agronomic forecasts, backed up with remote-sensed satellite data, for the Amazon basin, or want to lay out a a five-year budget for a medium-sized nation, SRI is where you find the goods.
Although various SRI projects had dealt with research related to human consciousness and social transformation, public attention was attracted for the first time by the revelations in popular media concerning research conducted by physicists Dr. Russell Targ and Dr. Harold Puthoff into the nature of telekinesis, remote viewing (also known as "astral travel") and other psychic phenomena. One of their more provocative published findings was that many ordinary people could learn to become as adept as the so-called "gifted" psychics like Uri Geller, the most notorious of the psychics studied at SRI. Their discovery certainly hints at strong connections between what people believe and what they perceive: A certain percentage of randomly selected normal subjects, when summoned to a high-security research institution and informed by certified scientists that they are about to exhibit psychic abilities -- start to describe the details of top-secret outposts in the Indian Ocean, Antarctica, and other independently verifiable locations.
Despite the lurid accounts and scary extrapolations, SRI scientists continued their exploration of psychic pheomena and altered states of consciousness for years. The negative publicity made SRI personnel even more cautious than usual about speaking to outsiders, most especially journalists. But one futurist, Dr. Oliver Markley, finally agreed over the telephone to sign me through SRI's security system and sit down for a talk. He ended our initial phone call with the words: "Since you are determined to write about this, you might as well find out that you're strolling through a mine field."
"We are entering an area more revolutionary than any traditional political theory," he warned when we shook hands and went through all the security-badge-signing formalities out in the reception lobby at SRI. Later, in his paper-and- floppy-disk littered cubicle, he expanded his cautionary introduction: "In some fundamental ways, getting high is really what makes the world go round. We're talking about changing the nature of our beliefs about reality when we talk about "getting high." The funny thing about it all is that modern research is beginning to turn up connections between consciousness and reality that were first noted, in exhaustive detail, thousands of years ago."
Markley pointed out that doctrines regarding mind and matter, such as those at the core of Buddhism and Hinduism, hold that the world we experience is an illusion, created by our learned interpretations of our perceptions. We are literally hypnotized by our culture, our education, our parents and playmates and teachers, to see the world in a certain way. Enlightenment, said these Arhats, Roshis, and Lamas, is what happens when you see through all the illusions. The modern research that Markley referred to include findings from psychotherapy, anthropology, and cognitive psychology which demonstrate ways that our beliefs, conscious and unconscious, shape our perception of reality -- and that our perception of reality can be reshaped by modifying those beliefs through drugs, hypnosis, or psychotherapy techniques.
Dr. Markley likes to phrase his theories in the form of questions: "These new drugs and old techniques -- why are they surfacing now? They have been known to a handful of Western scholars and orientalists for centuries, but they have disseminated into the wider population only recently. The keys to higher consciousness are becoming available at a crucial point in human history. In every traditional culture, there were specialists known as fools, shamans, or gurus, who were supposed to get high for the benefit of their society. Now everybody wants to travel on inner planes and the secrets of the ages are out in paperback editions.
"Drug abuse is one thing -- essentially, that is the act of substituting one illusion for another one -- but true dehypnotization of more and more people might be good for society in the long run. Right here, right now, "getting high" has negative connotations. But all these explorations of alternative states of mind is a symptom of a much deeper, possibly more positive system-wide transformation. Before a society or a civilization can change in a profound way, there has to be a profound change in the way people think about themselves. Experimentation with alternate states of consciousness might be an early symptom of such a change."
Markley was referring to a study, sponsored by the prestigious Kettering Foundation, in which he and other colleagues at SRI and elsewhere had participated, on the subject of "The Changing Images of Man." That was where he found the basis for his statement about changing the state of tomorrow when we change our state of mind. The group of researchers looked at the large-scale social transformations of civilizations around the world, throughout history, and noted a close connection between the cultural images of what humankind ought to be, and the rise and fall of social insitutions.
Throughout history, the great external events have been linked with and triggered by changes in the way people thought, by popular notions about what people are, where we originated, what we are capable of becoming. Our images of ourselves seem to change. Institutions like slavery were abandoned, after thousands of years of acceptance, only after a large population changed their mind about its legitimacy as a human institution. Before the age of exploration and the renaissance began, the population of Europe underwent a change of consciousness from a Church- centered, other-worldly perspective centered on the afterlife to a secular, here-and-now image of life on earth.
Now we face ecological suicide and the threat of thermonuclear war. Obstacles to the continuing existence of our civilization seem to be piling up faster than solutions can be found. Our civilization certainly could use some kind of rapid, widespread change in the way we think. The systematic alteration of the state of one's consciousness is going to be one of the greatest problems and greatest promises of coming decades precisely because the technological means for expanding, distorting, and transforming our mental states will surely grow more powerful at the same time that the pressures for new ways of thinking grow heavier.
If expanded consciousness, enhanced perception, amplified intelligence, boosted creativity, even psychic talents can be induced on a large scale, as some cognitive technologists believe, what are some reasonable projections for future highs? One distinct possibility is that biofeedback and other self-regulation techniques could evolve into a mental steering device suitable for exploring deep inner space. When today's biofeedback tones and lights evolve into full-spectrum synthesized sounds and high- resolution animated color video displays, then we'll be able to lift those mystical geometries out of our skulls and examine them in the light of day.
When we learn to steer our states of consciousness, we're bound to drift into unknown zones of human relations. When you learn to drive, you'll want somewhere to go. We are a social species: Sitting alone with your mind is only fun part of the time. Once other people are added to the experience, and once the group can share sybolic indicators of their internal states of awareness, all sorts of interpersonal hoopla will break loose. Theater pieces, and real-time synthesized or animated projections could be shaped as they happen by the collective physiological reactions of the audience.
Mutual biofeedback, for example, might have more powerful effects than any chemical aphrodisiac. Sex is a mingling of nerve ends, and orgasms are more neural than genital. The age-old rituals of physical conjunction, the ten thousand well-known ways to rub bodies together, are the physical manifestations of mental events. When the state of your mate's nervous system can be read on a display screen, sexual experience might gain a dimension or two. If good lovers are people who try to be sensitive to their partner's desires, it follows that any way of increasing mutual awareness will expand the pleasure potential of sex. And the market for new sex devices will reward the entrepreneur- inventor with a sensual turn of mind.
Ascending from the carnal level of consciousness to the realms of the cognitive and conceptual, the subfield of memory enhancement is a future high that could blow our minds in ways we can't presently recall. Sooner or later, a version of a "memory pill" will be created, and it might turn out to be the most potent high of all time. Passing tests and remembering telephone numbers would be handy, but how would it feel to have a greatly amplified power to remember? What changes would occur in a person's consciousness if his or her memory was to be augmented? According to psychologists, altering the memory would have profound effects on other parts of the psyche, for memory serves to define the present, order reality, and anchor us in the time stream. Something will happen to the meaning of pleasure and pain when we are able to erase or recall any experience in full sensory detail.
Memory enhancement could improve the way our attentiaonal mechanisms and senses encode experience in our brains (storage), or it could improve the way we find stored information and bring it to the surface (retrieval), or both. Think about the tens of thousands of impressions streaming into your brain-filters from your eyes and ears and kinesthetic sense as you drive an automobile on a freeway, and think about the automatic censor that blocks out from your awareness all but the most immediate and relevant impressions. What do we miss when we let the world go by this way? What if you could replay your day or your year like a film, at any speed, any time you wanted? Have you ever suddenly remembered a dream you had ten years ago? Or experienced deja vu?
To some degree, everything we ever experience is recorded somewhere in our brains. If the degree of "reality" in experience is influenced by the amount of information a sentient being can keep track of, then the world might become a thousandfold more real to those who could store the entire stream of sensations and retrieve them selectively. Would the experience of total memory be ecstatic or hellish? What prodigies of art or and invention might result?
In a sense, the will to get high is now one of the most powerful moving forces behind the thrust of human evolution. If by some prodigious leap of mind a single human being were to gain complete control over all the biochemical processes in his own body for a fraction of a second, the information blast might have as much power as a supernova.
Whether they are considered sacred or rendered taboo, awareness-expanding techniques will always be available. They will always be vulnerable to abuse. With so many volunteers for self-experimentation on the consciousness- alteration front, we can expect both breakthroughs and casualties. There will always be true explorers hidden among the daredevils, the curious, and just plain fools who are willing to get high on a rumor. Some of them will burn their fuses and wander the street with their alcoholized or tranquillized brethren. But one of them might just stumble through the door to the next world -- and come back to show us all how to get there.