I Have America Surrounded. John Higgs

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ model of the world, and it is this that we inhabit. This model differs from ‘true’ reality in many ways. We may look at a car and see that it is red, for example, but the car itself has no intrinsic colour. Our notion of ‘red’ comes from the way our visual system interprets the way some photons of light are reflected from the car while others are not. We may see a chair and believe that it is solid, yet science assures us that this churning soup of particles and energy is mostly empty space. It only appears to support our weight because what particles are there repel us. We also know that there is a lot of information ‘out there’ that we do not perceive, such as television signals, or the fluctuations in the magnetic fields that certain animals can use to navigate. However, we generally assume that while our model of reality is not perfect, it is at least reasonably accurate and consistent with the real world. We certainly believe that we are passively observing the world we live in, rather than participating selectively in its construction.

      Increasingly, it seems that this is not the case. Research done in areas such as assessing the validity of eye-witness reports has shown that individuals are prone to see only what they expect to see, and can ignore anything that seems anomalous or contradictory to their beliefs. In a famous experiment at Harvard University, Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris showed volunteers a recording of a basketball game and asked them to count the number of passes made. Around 40 per cent of volunteers completely failed to register that, early in the footage, a man in a gorilla suit walked slowly across the court, remaining clearly visible for about 45 seconds. This concept was used by Douglas Adams in his novel Life, the Universe and Everything to create a spaceship that could land on the pitch of a busy sporting event and not be seen by the crowd. The brains of the observers, the spaceship’s owner knew, would reject the visual information that their eyes reported, regard it as ‘somebody else’s problem’, and refuse to acknowledge its existence.

      Over time, we create a mental model of the real world that is strongly influenced by our beliefs, prejudices and experience, and our model will differ from that of other people in far greater ways than is usually accepted. The world that we consciously inhabit increasingly resembles our own ‘world view’. Should an optimistic person walk down a street, for example, they would be inclined to register happy couples, pleasant weather or playing children. A cynical person walking down exactly the same street might completely miss those details, and see instead the homeless population and the graffiti. Of course, the street itself hasn’t changed between the two observations, but this is almost irrelevant, as no one is aware of the ‘true’ street in its entirety¹⁶ The same principal applies to every aspect of life, from the mechanism that decides which news stories grab your attention, to the personal qualities in others that you respond to or overlook. The result of this is that the ‘world’ in which we live is not an objective, distinct environment, but a model constructed in our own image. In the words of Alan Watts, the influential writer on Eastern religions, ‘Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot’. Or as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote back in 1860, ‘People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.’

      Leary called these personal mental models ‘reality tunnels’.¹⁷Each person lives in a different reality tunnel from everyone else, and is personally responsible for constructing their own existential reality. To be truly ‘free’ it is necessary to recognise this for, in the words of the Discordians, ‘Whatever you believe imprisons you. Convictions create convicts.’¹⁸ This is a difficult concept to grasp, but it is profoundly important in understanding both Leary and his influence. It is the concept that explains the post-modern move away from the rational beliefs of the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment, which viewed reality as an absolute that could be understood through rational inquiry Enlightenment thinkers assumed that everyone operates in the same reality, but that, Leary believed, was just not true on a practical level. Concepts, relationships and events were now relative, and could only really be understood when analysed alongside the reality tunnels that created them. Our understanding of the physical world had been fundamentally changed when Albert Einstein recognised the importance of relativity, and now, Leary thought, it was time for the mental world to undergo a similar revolution.

      Most people, however, go through life without ever questioning the validity of the world they inhabit, for these personal realities are convincing, seductive and consistently coherent. It is difficult to recognise their limitations, although the practice of meditation is useful for ‘switching off’ the brain’s participation in what is perceived. Not everyone would want to do this, of course. The realisation that what you believe to be ‘reality’ is in fact a flawed, personal construction can be a frightening idea, which can leave you feeling groundless, lost or alone. This explains the importance of religious, social and political movements, such as Christianity, environmentalism or communism. Movements like these attempt to ‘synchronise’ the individual realities of a large mass of people around accepted priorities and attitudes—a process that can be personally comforting.¹⁹

      The idea that the world we are aware of is just an abstract of ‘true’ reality is fundamental to Leary’s later ideas, his behaviour and his sense of humour. The concept, however, existed for a long time before Tim.

      It existed in the fifth century BC, in Plato’s claims that the world we are aware of is like the ‘shadows on the wall of a cave’. It is also a fundamental concept in Hinduism and Buddhism, where it is known as Maya, the world of illusions. But Leary was one of the first to approach the concept from an empirical, scientific viewpoint, and one of the first to use a synthetic chemical to see through the veils of Maya. As a result, he could make others experience this awareness without them undergoing years of religious training and practice. And unlike earlier mystics, who went to extraordinary lengths to achieve even a glimpse of the larger reality, he was also able to achieve this state whenever the mood took him. Indeed, he got into the habit of achieving it at least once a week.

      Tim believed that LSD allowed you to reject a personal reality and imprint a different one. He argued that it was crazy to live in a reality that was negative and unrewarding because there were an infinite number of other ‘realities’ that the brain could use instead. This is the idea that underpins the majority of Leary’s philosophy. It is made explicit in the titles of some of his work, such as the LP You Can Be Anyone This Time Around or the book Changing My Mind, Among Others, and in remarks such as ‘You’re only as young as the last time you changed your mind’. By understanding how to reprogram your brain, you could step out of one reality and into another. It was a theory that Leary would repeatedly put into practice. His personal reality and his associated persona had changed before, but slowly, under the natural evolution of time. He had been a choirboy, a soldier, a sophisticated professional and an academic, and his version of reality had been shaped differently in each of these guises. From now on, however, Tim would be changing his version of reality every few years, or even every few months. Ideas and beliefs that had been intrinsic and crucial to him would be casually swept away by changing circumstances. Should his present reality prove to be inadequate, he would simply adopt a new one. But this was not a technique that would be easy on those around him.

      People who met Tim now could tell almost instantly that there was something different about him. Some found him cold and slightly sinister, even almost inhuman. The majority, though, were spellbound. ‘I knew, the day he walked in, I’d never met anyone like him,’ recalled one of his students.²⁰ ‘For a few years, I believed that he was the most creative human being that I had ever imagined,’ recalled his colleague and friend Richard Alpert, ‘He was head and shoulders above anybody else at Harvard or anyone else I’d ever met.’²¹ He seemed to have developed a knack of not imposing himself on people, but rather allowed those he met to project their own interpretation onto him. In this way he could be all things to all people—friend, scientist, charlatan, genius or СКАЧАТЬ