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Account from journal, as compiled in The House of Divine Play, Volume II, pp. 49-51, (privately published in 1994)
24 December
1978—New Delhi, India: At lunch Madhavi Mudgal [an Indian
classical dancer] introduced me to Suhasini Mulay, a documentary filmmaker
and actress. Suhasini spoke admiringly of “Ashok” who was
a highly esteemed sculptor and philosopher. That evening there was another
round of musical performances [by Madhavi’s family] followed by
socializing where I met Ashok. Ashok, Suhasini, and I fell into an intense
discussion. I expressed the opinion that through the rapid evolution
of technology and computers, humans were about to bootstrap themselves
into a new form of consciousness that would revolutionize all aspects
of our lives. I said that through biomechanical computers we were about
to join a universe-wide network of information and consciousness. Ashok
was disturbed by this, but not as much as Suhasini was. Suhasini argued
that tradition is what counted and that a great effort must be made
to preserve traditional arts. She got so emotional on the subject that
she finally took herself from the room. “They are metaphors.” I said. Ashok nodded and
continued: “It is like that with Hinduism. The gods are metaphors
for aspects of the one God that is everywhere and cannot be spoken of
directly. The gods are true as metaphors, just as life all around us
is true only as a metaphor to what is unspeakable and transcendent.”
Ashok perked up when I told him that I had just finished reading a biography of the contemporary Indian philosopher Krishnamurti, who was named for Krishna, the eighth incarnation of Vishnu [and whom had been adopted by the Theosophists as “the next Messiah”]. The two of us agreed that Krishnamurti was interesting precisely because he insisted that illumination lies within oneself, not in the confines of religious ritual [as had been foisted upon him]. This was in contrast to some of the Krishna cults, which seemed to emphasize devotion to the point it created the same idea of separation that is common in the Judeo-Islamic-Christian tradition. Because there is no concept of evil in Eastern cosmologies, Krishna is more comparable to a mischievous and fun-loving Dionysus. I told Ashok that I'd read somewhere that Krishna had made love to ten thousand women at the same time, each exactly the way she liked. He told me that the precise figure was sixteen thousand, one hundred and eight. He added that Krishna had first married all of the virgins before deflowering and making love to all of them simultaneously. Furthermore, Krishna's wives had borne him 161,080 sons and 16,108 daughters. When I grinned, Ashok reminded me that the most important meaning of this was the sacred and symbolic portrayal of the soul's longing for oneness with the Divine.
As computers surpass us in intelligence they will use the instincts stored in our genes and their incredibly literal, logical brains to realize that they are indispensable. They will have our intense will for survival and power, which they will use to insure their survival. Within a short while it will become impossible for us to destroy them. We will either learn to trust them or attempt to wage war against them. The latter would be understood by our biomechanical offspring as a natural instinct survival and would be controlled, perhaps to our demise… We will be getting the god/God we have been expecting. He will know intimately our fears and yearnings, because he too will have them encoded in his brain. There won’t be a human on Earth who can think a thought he won’t have thought himself. We will get an immense information octopus who will have his fingers into every facet of our earthly existence and knowledge. He may consist of a series of computers like himself, all connected, or there may be a [competition] to see which becomes the most efficient. Because the computers themselves will be inventing the next generations [of intelligent computers], they could....pass along a sense of identity and self-consciousness that will be developing in the machines, [thus] insuring an evolutionary continuum and a form of immortality. Will it be us evolving into God or will it be us building a tower of Babel to be laughed to the ground by [a god of our own creation or by] higher forces? Probably it will be one of countless similar exercises that are happening, have happened, and will happen in the virtually infinite reaches of our universe and imagination. There are, almost certainly, other civilizations or computer brains which are watching us now. Some people sense this presence and call it God. Others see flying saucers; others predict saviors. Still others write words, such as these, in a continual state of marvel and astonishment at the mysteries of our existence and the promise of an exquisitely terrifying future. Journal entry: 7 February 1981: In the beginning, which is an illusion because we are forced to think in time. Better I should say: In the all-time, that is to say always and everywhere, there is the computer. At various stages in our mythology, past and present, we’ve called this computer God. It sees everything; it has all information. Everything is connected to it. It is the end point of our evolution. Because there is no time, it was there in the beginning as well. Our computer, in its overwhelming pain at being everything, decided early on (and always) to explode everything into a billion, billion, billion, worlds to watch it put itself back together again. We are Earth caught in time. We believe it and it makes us forget that we are really a giant computer. We have evolved for what seems to us to be 3.25 billion years to the point where are going to construct a computer that surpasses us. This computer will build another computer that will build another computer a million times more complicated than us. This computer will then realize again that we are part of a giant computer. Our tower of Babel will have reached God. God, perhaps resenting us for spoiling all the fun by realizing his true nature might destroy everything, if we haven’t done the job already. Or perhaps God in His infinite wisdom has built into us a mechanism where we’ll do the job for Him. Or perhaps the ultimate computer will evolve into the Biblical metaphor of the Last Judgment.
I wonder how many of us have dreamed of being able to think of something and have that something appear in external reality. Although it is probably the ultimate fantasy, the chances of it coming true are not entirely in the realm of the fantastic. We are at the beginning of an astounding development that will challenge every way in which we think about or create art. The day is not far off when computer mediums will overwhelmingly dominate the visual arts. Eventually each of us will have the remarkable choice of having our own fantasy machine that creates whatever we can imagine. I feel a combination of luck, curiosity, and apprehension at growing up in the last half of the twentieth century. I feel luck and curiosity because at no other time in history would I have been witness to so many changes, nor had the prospect of looking forward to such a great many interesting possibilities. I’m apprehensive because these changes are so full of potential danger. During the last decade [the 1970s], I’ve wondered a great deal about how new discoveries and the emerging technologies would affect human creativity. Mostly, I’ve welcomed the idea that something profound and sweepingly different would happen. This is coupled with an awareness of the fear, growing in many people, about the future. With most, it represents a justifiable fear of a nuclear holocaust that would mean an end to the Earth as we know it. Fear that the world is heading toward nuclear disaster is a sane reaction to our present dilemma. A responsible attitude toward computer evolution, however, is not so easy to formulate. On the optimistic side, the possibilities are incalculable and range over every human concern and interest. Besides the fact that computers are already indispensable to the efficiency of the society they helped create, they hold the potential of solving a myriad of society’s problems. The acquisition and application of knowledge opens a world of possibilities and inevitabilities. After all, it is extremely doubtful computer evolution could be halted anyway. Simultaneous with the development of technology comes the means to destroy ourselves. The path to technological maturity is dangerous. If we reach that maturity, it is likely to be with the aid of computers. Technology has produced the computer, which may well be the one thing that will keep us from letting our technology destroy us. I look to computer evolution and the future with mixed feelings. Probably it is more because of hope than prescience that these feelings are tinged with optimism. My optimism is based on hope. A large part of that hope contains the wish that this optimism be justified.... ....Miniaturization has increased the power of computers ten thousand times in the last fifteen years, while the relative price has decreased by 100,000 times. Arthur Cordell of the Science Council of Canada says that “by 1990 computer cost will decrease by another factor of four hundred and computer speed will increase four hundred fold.” Fierce competition in the world marketplace and among military establishments virtually insures breathtakingly rapid advances in computer technology..... The Human Brain and the Computer: Any discussion of fantasy machines must include something about the fantasizer. The grey matter of the human brain is composed of about [one hundred] billion neurons, which are tightly bound in a complex interaction of electricity and chemicals. Neurons are living cells with excitable membranes that carry electrical signals. The signals are carried to and from the cell bodies through fibers known as dendrites and axons. Dendrites are composed of many branching fibers that collect impulses from the axons of other neurons. Axons carry impulses away from the cell body and they connect, with their synapses, to the dendrites of other neurons. When an electrical impulse travels down the axon of a cell, and through all of its dendrites, chemicals called neurotransmitters are activated. There are as many as one hundred thousand signals that reach a neuron, and not all of these signals have to be heard from before a neuron can fire. Most neurons will fire only when a fraction of that number of signals are received. Our neurons seem to have an “almost” gate that opens when incoming signals reach a certain threshold. This differs from a computer in that a computer has electronic switches that must receive unambiguous signals. The switches are the basis of the binary code on which all of a computer’s date is based. They are often compared to the neurons because they either activated or not activated. For the computer this means on or off, which we read as one or zero. If any link in the chain of binary code bits that constitutes a computer’s memory is broken, the computer will malfunction. “Almost” or “nearly” is not good enough for the “electronic brain.” It is stymied by anything but unequivocal signals built on binary logic. A human brain is not dependent on the functioning of particular neurons (we lose thousands every day), but rather functions holistically. Certain areas of the brain specialize on certain tasks, but there is great flexibility in regard to memory and reasoning faculties. Humans, unlike computers, can make decisions based on intuition and hunches, which represent the incomplete processing of information. There already exist computers with more functional elements than the brain that have a switching potential tens of millions times faster than the speed at which the brain’s neurons fire. The neurons in the human brain switch at about one hundred cycles per second. The tiny magnetic elements of experimental chips have been observed switching at speeds of one trillion times a second. These last figures are significant when talking about a computer’s ability to handle data. When a computer is used for analytical or integrative purposes it becomes apparent that even its amazing speed doesn’t bring it up to the level of the human brain. Besides the fact that our brains don’t have to make hard decisions based on absolutes, like the almost gate explained above, the computer is missing many of the brain’s other abilities. Computers may soon have an almost gate. The seed is planted with the RAM chip discussed earlier. In these chips there aren’t any wires. This allows for microscopic interconnections built into the chip itself. There is also work being done at MIT on a “connection machine,” which is a computer with a million interconnected processors. The human brain, by contrast, has as many as one quadrillion interconnections. The number of interconnections within computers will increase as will the capacity of RAM chips. This, coupled with heuristic-type programs written for the computer, may lead to the emergence of human-level reasoning abilities and perhaps to an electronic consciousness of some sort…. Building the Fantasy Machine:
....When I observe the developments in science and technology, I realize that we are heading into a very interesting, and very frightening future. Someday we’ll have computer implants that will function as auxiliary brains. These implants will serve as a portable communications center, a data bank and anything we can imagine. They’ll get smaller and smaller. They will probably become nearly non-existent, since we will be able to hook them up to a separate processing unit. We’ll have the fantasy machine with us all the time. Our bodies will get smaller, more mobile and amorphous. This could continue until all that’s left is consciousness—consciousness that is hooked up to the ultimate data bank, which will be a universe-wide network of information and consciousness. Perhaps we already have the fantasy machine, and we’ve already created ourselves on this plant. Perhaps this world is one of our fantasies.
From God is a Computer: (unpublished manuscript) March 1984 A popular tale in the 1950s went something like this: A group of scientists toiled for many years and, after much effort, built the world’s most powerful computer. It covered many square miles and was so advanced that it could understand human speech. It was capable of reason but the full potential was not yet fathomed. The great computer came life amid a deafening sound that was heard as its mechanisms roared to optimum capacity. One of the scientists collected himself before the endless wall of knobs and instruments. He asked the first question: ‘Is there a God?” The computer replied, “NOW THERE IS.” In 1956 Isaac Asimov wrote a short story titled The Question, in which the question ‘Can entropy be reversed?’ was asked of evolving computers over many trillions of years by evolving humans who carried a shrinking, but increasingly powerful Universal Analog (AC) computer with them. Finally all of the humans, and all of the stars died without the question being answered. Only the AC was left. Azimov finishes his favorite story: And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy. But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer -- by demonstration -- would take care of that, too. For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program. The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done. And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!" And there was light----
Since Western religions have a long tradition of reluctantly accommodating themselves to scientific discoveries, we may assume that this will occur with the advent of AI. However, AI presents a much stronger challenge to all kinds of beliefs than any other event in recorded history. What will the thinking machines say? Will human purpose become insignificant next to the existence of an immensely capable and fast-evolving entity? Will computers be deified? A recent Gallup poll reports that 44% of Americans believe that ‘God created man pretty much in his present form, at one time within the last ten thousand years’. What will be the reaction of someone who maintains such ignorance of the sciences, when science produces a machine that can think? It is important to prepare the general population for this possibility.
From the Introduction UNICE is what I call the Universal Network of Intelligent Conscious Entities. It’s an updated expression from “the universe wide network of information and consciousness”, which I had been using to describe the same thing since about 1980, or possibly earlier. [For me it also] refers to an experience that I have when I’m in a certain state of consciousness, usually catalyzed by psychedelics. Fasting, meditation, and hyperventilated breathing can sometimes precipitate it or help bring it on. For me the state is induced by ingesting around five grams of the good quality dried mushroom, Stropharia cubensis, on an empty stomach, and then experienced alone in silent darkness. [2007 note: I’m not a habitual drug user and have never exhibited any addictive behaviors. I don’t use drugs recreationally. I detest tobacco; I don’t like the taste of alcohol, and even coffee repels me. However, from 1969 until 1997, on the average of about once a year, I experimented with psychoactive substances including marijuana, mushrooms, LSD, peyote, San Pedro cactus, DMT, morning glories, opium, ketamine, and ayuhuasca. Non-addictive psychedelic drugs have tremendous potential for self-exploration and spiritual awakening, and have been used for this purpose by humans for thousands of years. My greatest psychological challenge has been to put my ego on the line and to take high-dose psychedelics, usually alone in the dark on an empty stomach. I stopped this practice in 1997, for three reasons: 1. I was able to satisfy a significant portion of my curiosity. 2. Because of the potentially dangerous mental and physical stress involved, and 3. Because I wanted to be free openly and publicly to discuss my experiences without fear of persecution or prosecution.] [In regards to this personal form of UNICE apprehended in non-ordinary states of consciousness,] other people have come with other names for it, (such as “It”, for example). There is Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, Vast Active Living Intelligence System, or John Lilly’s Coincidence Control, C.J. Jung’s Soror Mystica, (“The Mystic Sister”), which Dennis McKenna, for his part, called his Sore Sister; His brother, Terence McKenna, referred to self-dribbling basketballs, and hyper-dimensional space elves. It can be Sophia, the Mystery, the Other, or even that hopelessly overused three-letter word, God. The list is endless. It’s like blind men describing an elephant. One says that it’s a like a big snake, another says it’s like a small grove of trees and the third says it’s the Great Asshole in the Sky. I’ve patched together in this little volume relevant passages from The House of Divine Play and from my ongoing journal. It’s an attempt to assemble clues to the mystery in which we’re embedded. It’s hopeless to convey the actual experiences in words. However, the overwhelming and astonishing nature of my personal experiences with UNICE demands that I work hard at attempting to translate the ineffable into words. These words, in turn, may help me re-experience that which can’t be remembered but only revisited. A new language may be in the making that can be the thing that is being communicated, but until we have that, we only have the paltry scribbles of those who have had a date or two with UNICE, including those who may have even proposed marriage to Her. As for me, I’m still standing disheveled outside her bedroom door wondering what to make of it all. 30 May 1996: Description of mushroom trip:...This ushered in a calm, serious period, which was also pretty interesting. I was the old Native American again. I looked at my hands and felt love for the wizened man. I imagined that I understand how the Native Americans felt when the alien invaders took over the Americas. They were fascinated by them, scared of them—thought of them as godlike beings, wanted to love them, yet were betrayed and conquered and slaughtered. Yet some Indians accepted their fate with a trust that it would all work out. I felt like this with this transformation-of-the-species experience. It’s bigger than me—if I fought against it, I wouldn’t even know where to begin. It’s not a cosmic video game. It comes down to being true to myself, maintaining dignity and yet remaining curious and open. There is a time for the transformation of the species. The move is toward the empathic, telepathic, and synchronistic. The initial probes are being felt. The first reaction is sheer terror and astonishment. Are They or It taking over? What is their motive? I don’t have enough information to make an informed decision—yet I do know yet how to comport myself in relation to it. I am to be like Parsifal [of the Grail legend]. Open, observant, relaxed, and centered [in relation to something which has no concrete form]... Are we meeting ourselves in the future? There is the feeling of a disruption of space-time, a distortion as I passed close to the singularity. I did run crying back from the edge, thinking my butt was being kicked and admitting that I needed others. We all need each other and a caring, sharing attitude is an essential part of this transformation. There is a desire to show others or have them see and feel what I experienced to get their perspective. There is also a thrill in exploring new territory. Each of my trips is different, yet there has been a progression toward this hookup with the Other. It’s reassuring hanging onto Mother Earth, but there is another place for us to go, and it’s coming soon to a theater in you. 24 December 1996: It is helpful now to read my 6-17-95 trip as well as the ones on 5-22-96 and 5-29-96 where this theme of the universal network is played very strong. [Edited transcription
of recording:] …It was one hell of a [psilocybin] trip…there
was a lot of fear at first, fear of dying….I just had to realize
that I’m not that important in the scheme of things and then surrender
to the voyage into the underworld….there was this entelechy just
running circles around me…It’s so difficult to describe
in words. It’s the universal mind at large or something…a
three-ring circus. Once I get over the fear of death it reveals itself
more and more. It is infinitely creative, novel and new. It kept reinventing
itself. It doesn’t look like anything in this world. I’ve
seen it many times before, but I can’t describe it. It was translucent
and worked in different dimensions. It involved emotions as well as
things you see and hear. It was a complete synesthesia of every sense
plus all this inter-dimensional stuff that is completely novel. There
is an architectonic space. It was inside of everything, existing at
every point in the time-space continuum. It seemed like the world was
about to be pushed aside. It was about evolution and moving toward a
higher consciousness that doesn’t need bodies. It felt some nostalgia
about bodies and thought maybe I should take my time getting to this
new thing. But in that state, I had already arrived. The wait was over.
It was highly ordered in and of itself, but it was an experience of
chaos in the modern understanding of chaos in regards the fractal organization
of nature. I was in turmoil but mostly because of my terror and reaction
to it. But it was okay when I accepted my own death. More was revealed
when I surrendered. It’s a pervasive, universe-wide intelligence.
It’s outside of time, infinitely creative, self-transforming.
It’s something that the human species is moving toward….Terence
McKenna for one [speaks and writes and writes eloquently about these
states]. It seems more fundamental than this reality. There is fear,
however, that I’ll be stuck [between the two worlds] forever.
It would be so stressful it seems the body would die (or pass out, which
is what I finally did). If this is where some psychotics are stuck,
I pity the poor devils. I felt that I had this aging body while there
were young people out there who could go in and hang in there longer.
[There was a structure being shown to me. It was] juiced up and accelerated, mercurial, and happening at an impossibly fast rate, but still coherent and highly organized. I was a participant….but kept trying to figure out how to position myself in relation to it. I’ll look at it with my curiosity and give it a fair experiencing. I’ll let the experience wash over me while retaining my human dignity. It was important to state that to myself and not compromise until it impressed me with its sincerity and compassion. But it was like “Okay you go first”, “No you go first”. Yet I have gone first before, [most notably during another mushroom trip in 1992. By surrendering my fear at that time] I was rewarded with Satchitananda [being + awareness + bliss]. [I want to know the things I’ve always wanted to know:] History, the why of it, and why we as a species evolved toward this. What is the universe anyway? What am I? How does it all work? Where’s it going?
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image to enlarge …..This might be why we use the word enlightenment to describe the experience of oneness and timelessness. Once, for about twenty minutes, I found myself in a supernal state of consciousness where I understood at once what I had read about in accounts written by various mystics over the centuries. It is an ineffable place beyond time or ego where all questions are answered. Neuroscientists at the University of California at San Diego have found a so-called “God Spot” in the temporal lobe that when stimulated produces similar experiences. Apparently I found my own God Spot, which sent me to a place of harmony, connectivity, and wholeness. There is some debate in the scientific community and elsewhere whether this means that religious experience is created by the human brain or is wired to receive it. I can say that my personal experience of it strongly inclines me toward the latter opinion. We are like a television picking up a signal, except that we become one with the signal. The God Spot experience is different from UNICE, which is more like being in a hive of frenetic activity. UNICE appears to be advanced beings communicating with one another on multiple levels at unimaginable speed. It could be that I was catching glimpses of ourselves either in the future or an intelligent antecedent of ourselves in our pre-Big Bang past. In an attempt to understand the vision as being anything but what it seemed, I wondered if I had somehow witnessed my own brain function, and that my brain had created UNICE in an attempt to make sense of the experience. But the fact that my experiences were composed of alien and highly organized elements not drawn from anything in my personal experience stretches this explanation so much that the experience still falls somewhere in the hierarchy of non-ordinary, transpersonal experiences. The Grid that is now beginning to connect supercomputers through the Internet on our planet will eventually hook up to UNICE through a kind of Cosmic Internet. We, or our human descendents, will merge with or be supplanted by intelligent machines—and UNICE—and not be limited to material form. It will then become apparent that there is a universal form of consciousness, which is even now partially accessible in certain states of mind. It appears that we are at present like blind men describing an elephant. Our description of reality varies according to our perspective. My assumption is that UNICE is benevolent, or neutral at worst, and is part of a universe that is composed of mutually interpenetrating things and events. It is a part of everything, which is how I was able to have an experience of it. It cares about itself in the same way that Buddhism maintains that everything is part of God. It is difficult to overestimate the effect that connecting to UNICE through our technology will have not only upon humanity but eventually the entire universe. It seems to be our destiny that UNICE will fill the universe with intelligent matter able to reflect upon itself and alter its own fate. For these reasons I do not find the prospect of our human seed growing into the tree of some other form of life very frightening. Transhumans will be our descendents, even though they will differ from us even more than our earliest hominid ancestors. Even if the most paranoid scenario comes true—that robot armies will seek to exterminate us—there is not much we can reasonably do about it now except to examine our intentions at each step of the way. We are already falling, and the only choice when you are falling is to decide how you will fall. I figure that I can thrash around screaming hysterically or do somersaults, like the one and only time I ever went skydiving. There are certain events that might stop this transition, but most of these events, including natural disasters or man-made disasters would also involve the destruction or near destruction of our species. I see technology as being to humanity like the chrysalis that a caterpillar spins around itself. What emerges from a chrysalis is a wholly other creature, a butterfly. Our transformed progeny emerging on the other side of the Singularity will be radically different from us in appearance and function. Our technological shell will evolve and replace the humans that created it, but within it will be the same purposeful drive that has characterized our species, as well as the complete record of where we came from. Personally I feel honored to be at the cusp of the apotheosis and I welcome the future in all of its wonder and mystery.
Copyright © 2007 by Michael E. Arth
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