Episode Transcript
[00:00:13] [Intro]: Welcome to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna.
[00:00:21] Dennis McKenna: Welcome to this next episode of the Brainforest Café. It's very much my pleasure to welcome Dr. Harry Shirley.
He has a PhD in organic chemistry and research experience at the University of Oxford. His research focused on the synthesis of biologically active chemicals of marine origin.
Having left academia some years ago, he now holds a deep passion for Jungian thought.
He recently published his paper, the Buddhabrat of the Yunus Mundus in the International Journal of Jungian Studies, which explores the role of the Mandelbrot sect in mind and matter.
And as you can tell from the bio, Dr. Shirley is a polymath. He's interested in many subjects.
We are not going to talk about his interest in biochemistry at all, although that may be a future podcast. We're going to talk about his exploration of the Mandelbrot set and the Buddhabrot Sept. Dr. Shirley, welcome to the Brainforest Café.
[00:01:36] Dr. Harry Shirley: Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be here with you today.
[00:01:41] Dennis McKenna: It's a real pleasure.
I have to tell you, I have reviewed the material that you sent. I think the animation that you furnished is very useful and maybe I found it useful because it kind of, you know, appeals. It's. I mean, it kind of appeals to my level of understanding. But what I am gleaning, I've read your paper and read the very long interview that you did on the other podcast.
So I have a few questions just to clarify where we're at here.
Much of what you're talking about is how the world is made of numbers.
And this is common, this goes back to Pythagoras. And if you look at the natural world, clearly, you know, you cannot separate numbers.
To me, one of the remarkable things about mathematics, maybe not, maybe remarkable is not the word, but one of the things about mathematics that make it interesting is that mathematics can be applied to the natural world and can identify, describe processes that intuitively you wouldn't necessarily think would use, yield to mathematical exploration.
And yet, because it does, because there is a correspondence between the quantitative and the physical and you're also saying the internal states, mathematics then becomes the most powerful method we have for understanding these processes and also unifying them.
Am I on the right track so far?
[00:03:44] Dr. Harry Shirley: Yeah, absolutely.
I think for me, one kind of big pivotal point in my development of understanding my own work was the realization really that numbers aren't something that we invented.
We're all probably taught in school the kind of false story that numbers maybe are something we Invented to understand reality logically.
And therefore we use numbers in a way to understand things rationally and logically. But that's not really true.
The idea that science and maths are one and the same or go hand in hand is actually not a valid belief. Yes, science uses mathematics. It's used really well.
It's helped us understand how to create life saving drugs, how to send shuttles off to the moon. So it's been very successful.
But it's a misinterpretation to feel, to think that.
But maths is purely scientific, purely because maths is something that we discovered.
And that's self evident for me.
Just as a real simple example, think of the number PI. We didn't invent PI as a way to understand circles or systems. We discovered it.
Or we can look to nature and see how plants grow.
And throughout nature we see fractal mathematics everywhere.
And this is what Benoit Mandelbrot was trying to tell us in some of his books, how reality seems to be fractal.
So nature knew about mathematics long before we discovered it.
And I also think, I think an analogy, a useful analogy is language.
Language is something that we invented and it's very regional, specific. So if aliens flew down from another planet, chances are they wouldn't speak our language.
So that's evidence there that language is something invented with numbers.
We probably wouldn't expect that they would come down, and their system for numbers may be different. They would use a different symbol for the number two. Or they make maybe other differences that they probably still would have come across. PI, they may call it something different, but they would still use this constant to explain reality.
And. Yeah, so the first hurdle we need to make is that one, that numbers seem to be discovered, not invented.
[00:06:50] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, exactly.
And I get that. So PI is a perfect example.
We didn't discover it, it just is. I mean, PI describes the properties of the circle, and it doesn't matter where in the universe that circle is, it's the same property. Would you say that other physical constants, like the Planck constant or the cosmological constant, these are not really mathematical functions. Exactly. But perhaps the same kind of.
I mean, the Planck constant is the Planck constant, whether you're an alien measuring it or a human on Earth, It's a quantitative property built into the very nature of reality. I mean, yeah, absolutely accurate thing to say.
Aliens are going to come up with the same value for the Planck constant that we will. Or the cosmological constant. Well, a cosmological constant is probably a bad Example, because nobody can quite agree on what that is.
So you talk about the Mandelbrot set and you make the point which I think is one of these points that one can make that once it's articulated, it's kind of, of course, how could it be otherwise? You know, this idea of the universe as a fractal system. I mean, fractals are everywhere and particularly in biological systems. But also it's not limited to that, it's limit. You know, you find it in geological systems, the structures of galaxies and this sort of thing. So the universe, this reality, physical reality, is based on these iterative processes like the Mandelbrot set.
And you see them again and again in the way that the growth, the morphology of plants, the morphology of coastlines.
Fractals are everywhere.
In fact, I guess you could make the case that everything is fractal in a certain way. Is that.
Yeah.
[00:09:11] Dr. Harry Shirley: So you're saying fractals are everywhere. You've come to that conclusion by yourself. Now, from the Jungian perspective, a Jungian would say the next line to that would be, well then fractals appear to be archetypal. They appear to emerge in reality around us, they seem to emerge in culture, they seem to be embedded into the very fragile fabric of matter, but also for me, mind as well. So that's a leap. That's a leap that people haven't really made much before.
And like you say, it does seem to be, it's an obvious thing when you say it, that everything else appears to be fractal. Everything around us, plants, the galaxies, everything.
So why is it such, why, why has it taken us so much time to, to realize that obviously our mind is likely to be fractal as well. We're, we've emerged from, from, from nature just like a plant has.
So it's likely that our inner world, our thoughts, our behaviors are, are also governed by, by fractal mathematics.
[00:10:30] Dennis McKenna: So let me ask you this. So you mentioned Jung's model of reality and the archetypes. Are you saying that fractals are archetypes?
[00:10:40] Dr. Harry Shirley: More than that, the Mandelbrot set appears to be related to the ordering of the psyche.
So you would actually go a step further and say fractal mathematics appears to be the ordering principle behind the archetypes.
And we can see that in how that would be the case in matter.
You can easily see a fern. You can see, okay, fractal mathematics is kind of the ordering principle. But what my work is on the BuddhaBrot in particular, the Buddhabrot very simply seems to be the fractal ordering principle of, of the entire psyche.
And therefore it's related to what Jung called the self.
The self is really just the entire psyche and its ordering principle.
And the thing is, with Jungian psychology, Jung died in 1961 and he was grappling with mathematics quite a lot with Wolfgang Pauli. But unfortunately, fractal mathematics wasn't really formalized until the mid-70s, 80s.
But if fractal mathematics had been around, it fits perfectly into lots of the things that he discusses. In particular, as I say, the idea of the self, which is everything, everything in the mind and its ordering principle. And Jung felt, felt that the ordering of the psyche was somehow related to numbers.
He felt that the key to the mystery was numbers. But as I say, he didn't have fractal mathematics yet.
But now we have these really simple iterative formulas that make these amazing fractal patterns that appear to predict and model fractal behavior in the world around us that my work is emphasizing, but also our inner world.
[00:12:58] Dennis McKenna: So is there something right, you see fractals everywhere in biology, everywhere in the world. And you're suggesting that fractals also understand, underlie experience, effectively the structure of the psyche is also.
So let's talk about this Mandelbrot set a little bit. The Mandelbrot set, is there something primary or fundamental about it? I mean, there are many kinds of equations that will create fractals. Right.
Does the Mandelbrot set stand alone in some way from any other fractal I might generate?
[00:13:47] Dr. Harry Shirley: Yeah, it's a really important question.
Well, a few things stand out. Firstly, it sounds silly, but firstly that it's humanoid and it is a particularly striking fractal that contains lots of constants. So actually, within the Mandelbrot set we do have PI, I think, E. So the exponential E and Fibonacci sequences, also something from a Jungian perspective that's intriguing about the Mandelbrot set, is at the border. You've got an infinite galaxy of mandalas.
And Jung felt that mandalas were actually a representation of the ordering of the psyche. So these mandalas are very intriguing.
But yeah, before my work, which is related more precisely to the Buddhabrot. You're right in kind of questioning why is the Mandelbrot set special?
And I kind of agree. I think the conventional Mandelbrot set, before we get to the Buddhabrot, it doesn't necessarily stand out as excessively special, but it's the Buddhabrot for me, which is the game changer and what really changes our view of what the Mandelbrot set is.
[00:15:14] Dennis McKenna: Right.
So here you've come right up against some of my confusion here that you can explain to me. So the Mandelbrot set can be generated by this iterative equation. You put the value in, and then you get a result. Then you put that in the next and so forth. But the solutions to those equations don't go to infinity. And you make the point that when they do, then it generates this Buddhabrot set.
Explain to me how the. That works. I. I'm quite unclear how.
[00:15:55] Dr. Harry Shirley: So, yeah, it's just. It's just about how we. We visualize the Mandelbrot set. So the. The Mandelbrot set that we're really used to seeing was. Has this black center and the black head, and it's only the borders that. That gets interesting.
[00:16:13] Dennis McKenna: Right.
[00:16:14] Dr. Harry Shirley: But, yeah, the normal Mandelbrot set really plots those bound sequences, so as you say, sequences that don't go to infinity. But what Melinda Green did in the 90s, she was, I think, just playing around with the Mandelbrot set, and she just wondered, these sequences actually that don't remain bound, these paths that fly off to infinity, she decided to track their trajectories. So just making up numbers, imagine five goes to 25, 25 goes to a thousand, and something goes to two trillion. And she's plotting them, plotting these pathways. And then at some point, she stops plotting because it's too much computational power. But essentially, the Buddhabrot is just a really, really simple visualization of the Mandelbrot set, which plots these trajectories to infinity.
But that's all she does. There's no artistic stylization.
[00:17:16] Dennis McKenna: So it plots the trajectories of certain resolutions of the Mandelbrot set to infinity and filters out the ones that don't go to infinity that give you the.
[00:17:28] Dr. Harry Shirley: Yeah, it's ignoring those bound pathways, but you could create a visualization where you have all of the bound and all of the unbound as well. It's just down to how we visualize it.
But it's really important to kind of just know that it is still all. It's just the Mandelbrot set. There's not anything kind of crazy going on. There's no stylization. It's just a way of visualizing the pathways.
[00:17:59] Dennis McKenna: Right. Right.
Yeah.
So when you do this iteration with the.
With the values that go to infinity, then this, the Buddha emerges Am I on the right track so far? If you.
[00:18:19] Dr. Harry Shirley: Yeah, yeah. Just like magic. Out of nowhere, a meditating figure emerges that looks like a meditating Buddha. And it strikingly resembles immediately.
It immediately evokes archetypal imagery of Buddha or maybe Ganesh, or it might remind lots of people immediately of the chakra system.
And. And one. One. One important thing I think, really to highlight here is some. Some people have thrown the word period.
I think that's how you say it, period at me. Oh, it's just period. And if you go onto the Wikipedia page, you'll say, due to periodlia, it appears to look like a meditating Buddha. That's complete. That's complete baloney. Period is where.
So imagine I'm sat in a park and I look up at a cloud and I see a cloud, and I say to A group of 100 people, I say, that looks like a giraffe. And I turn around and tell that to other people. And let's say a very small number of them agree with me. But most of them say, harry, what are you talking about? There is no giraffe.
[00:19:34] Dennis McKenna: Right.
[00:19:34] Dr. Harry Shirley: That's periodlia. Because it's subjective. It's subjective. That is not the case with the Buddhabrot, at all. Because everybody sees a Buddha. Because objectively, clearly, the Buddha imagery is. Is there. As. Is. As. Is kind of for chakra, with the third eye, etc.
So, yes, it's quite striking that theBuddhabrot.
Just emerged out of nowhere and appeared to be a meditating Buddha. Yeah.
[00:20:05] Dennis McKenna: And so in the material that you presented in your animation and lecture and so on, you show that how this fundamental pattern can be overlaid over all sorts of sacred geometry, sacred depictions, pictures of the Buddha and psychedelic art and many, many other things.
So it seems to be something fundamental to what? To the way that the mind constructs reality.
Is that what we're talking about here?
[00:20:46] Dr. Harry Shirley: Well, so the Buddhabrot. Appears to be archetypal, meaning the fractal appears to emerge spontaneously across different cultures and time periods in a similar way to mandalas have. So mandalas are very similar to the Buddhabrot. So a mandala is something archetypal. All cultures have mandalas, and Jung felt that they were, as I said earlier, representations of the ordering of the psyche and before fractal mathematics, of course. But if you look at a mandala now, many of them you'll recognize as fractals, or they may remind you of the Mandelbrot set.
So, yes, now, the connection between mathematics and Jungian psychology hasn't been well established because this came later on in Jung's life, the idea that numbers play a psychic role. But as I said earlier, he felt that numbers were the primordial ordering principles of the psyche, but he just didn't know how.
But what we've got here is a massive hint because the Buddhabrot is kind of just like a mandala. It seems to spontaneously emerge in cultures, as I said earlier, across time and everything like that.
So we have a hint there, perhaps that the Buddhabrot is related to the ordering of the psyche. And what's most intriguing is that we already know within Jungian thought, that the ordering of the psyche is related to the archetype of the self. The self manifests throughout time and cultures as Buddha, as Ganesh, maybe as Christ, perhaps as Egyptian pharaoh kings, perhaps could be self archetypes emerging.
So the Buddhabrot not only looks like the self, it looks like the self ought to look. It does look like a Buddha, but perhaps it represents the.
Perhaps it's the mathematical ordering principle of the psyche. Because we've never come across an archetype like this before.
Archetypes are supposed to emerge in culture, in art.
This is the first archetype to emerge from pure mathematics.
And the exciting thing there is.
Well, for me, I like to think of the Buddhabrot as the.
Is potentially the first archetypal form emerging from the void.
It. Most archetypes are interconnected. They, you know, the, the, the hero and the mother and the villain. It's all interconnected.
[00:24:05] Dennis McKenna: Right.
[00:24:06] Dr. Harry Shirley: The Buddhabrot comes from nowhere.
[00:24:08] Dennis McKenna: This is primal. It's primal, you're saying?
[00:24:11] Dr. Harry Shirley: Yeah, and that again.
And, and that's what we expect from the self. The self is, if you like, the first archetypal form.
It's Shiva. It's the first thing to emerge from Brahman.
So, yeah, there's a million things that we can draw towards the Buddhabrot that tell us it's potentially related to the ordering of the psyche. But what's exciting is it's not a mandala. This is precise and mathematical. So there's the potential, um, the, the, the Buddhabrot is the precise mathematical ordering principle for the entire psyche.
[00:24:57] Dennis McKenna: But does it apply only to that? Or does it, I mean, does it bring, you know, the, the, the classic division, you know, the Cartesian duality between the world out here and the world in here.
And those terms, you have to be careful, those are loaded terms. But does the Buddhabrot set describe.
Basically what I'm hearing is that you think it describes something fundamental about the structure of the psyche, whatever we want to call that consciousness or the mind or whatever, which is interesting because it implies that the mind has a structure, that there is a primal underlying organizing principle in the spirit. The mind, whatever we want to call it, that is not dissimilar to the fractal patterns that you find in nature, which are describing physical reality ultimately, but in a numerical way.
You have to help me here, Harry. Yeah.
[00:26:14] Dr. Harry Shirley: So, well, is the Buddhabrot. Related to the concept of the unas mundus, where psyche and matter are one and the same?
But another word for unas mundus might be Brahman, or within Chinese philosophy, it might be Tao.
Well, the Buddhabrot, isn't the unas mundas because it has manifest.
We can see it.
And I think the unas mundus, the void, Brahman, is always out of touch. I don't think we can ever see it.
But I do think that, as I said, I think the Buddhabrot is the first, seems to be the first archetypal form emerging from Brahman.
So I think the Buddhabrot might be mostly tied to consciousness, tied to psyche.
So I guess you're thinking where does, yeah, where, where is the matter?
Well, for me, perhaps matter is the other half is, is the normal Mandelbrot set. So the normal Mandelbrot set we know contains constants already, like I said, PI, Fibonacci sequences.
And the normal Mandelbrot set is downed. It's, it's, it's, it's here, it's, it's, it's got predictable behavior, if you will.
Perhaps the normal bound Mandelbrot set is related to matter. Then those paths flying away from the normal Mandelbrot set to infinity. So the Buddhabrot. Perhaps they're related to psyche. So somehow the Mandelbrot set, is holding psyche and, and matter together in the same mathematical framework.
So, yeah, we're getting very abstract here. But I don't think you can ever see. Yeah, as I say, I don't even ever see the unus mundus itself. But I think what, what we could potentially be seeing in the Buddhabrot is the first thing that comes out of the void, which I think tell us something about the unus mundus.
Perhaps that it, that it.
For me, maybe the unus mundus is number, but it's number with no order.
It's pure consciousness, it's pure number.
But there's no equation yet. There's no iteration. It's just, it just is. You know, we could perhaps call it random, and that's perhaps what the Unas mundus would look like. But yeah, we're, I think, pushing the limits of human cognition here, trying to understand the unas mundus.
[00:29:06] Dennis McKenna: So does this mean that the.
I mean, if the Buddhabrot set, this is like the most primal description of the psyche, of the structure of the psyche, in this unified psyche, this unus mundus, the implication is that just like aliens who were mathematically inclined, they could discover the Mandelbrot set with the right set of equations. Would they discover the Buddhabrot set and what it looked like, it looks like to us. I mean, one of the things that's remarkable about the Buddhabrot is it looks like Buddha. I mean, it's got all of those characters that we find again and again in sacred iconography and geometry.
[00:30:02] Dr. Harry Shirley: Yeah, you're touching on something really, really deep there, because we can see that the Buddhabrot is humanoid. We can see that the Buddhabrot has a head and it has kind of eyes and it has a heart and a, maybe a chest region. And so, I mean, one conclusion to draw from the Brittabrot is the, the humanoid shape is.
Is the humanoid shape that we see in our. In our bodies is as a result of the Mandelbrot set, dictating both matter and mind.
So an alien race.
An alien race perhaps would also have to be humanoid. If the Buddhabrot. Is the first archetypal form emerging from the fabric of the universe, and we are sharing the same universe with them, then we perhaps would conclude that consciousness is itself this humanoid shape, and they would perhaps come to the same conclusions as us.
But, yeah, I hadn't thought of that yet. It's an interesting thought.
[00:31:23] Dennis McKenna: I mean, that. Yeah, it is an interesting thought, and it's very difficult to test that.
But if it's true, if the Buddhabrot set is this kind of fundamental manifestation of psyche, then effectively anywhere in the universe that you encounter intelligence, or at least intelligence like ours, might look like us.
If through the interaction of inner and outer forces, what we have come to look like and what we come to, how we've come to, you know, how our brains operate, how our spirit operates, you would. It would imply that there really aren't aliens in a certain. Or if we were to encounter aliens, they would seem familiar to us.
[00:32:21] Dr. Harry Shirley: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, you could take it back to plants as well, to make the idea easier to grasp.
So plants growing on another Earth like planet, do we expect them to follow fractal forms, or do we expect them to not now? I think we expect them to follow fractal mathematics because that's related to efficiency, to, To. To Darwinism, to. To survival.
So perhaps the same then is true for, For. For more advanced life forms that they develop.
Perhaps the reason, the very reason we are humanoid is because of the Buddhabrot. And what I've said, what I've said in a couple of other. It might have been an interview or a comment, someone said, why is the Buddhabrot humanoid? And I said, no, no, no, you've got it all wrong.
We are Buddhabrot oid.
So, yes, that's a way to think about it. Yeah.
[00:33:19] Dennis McKenna: We are Buddhabrot oid.
[00:33:22] Dr. Harry Shirley: So the Buddhabrot is.
Yes, yeah. The Buddhabrot isn't humanoid. We are Buddhabrot oid.
[00:33:30] Dennis McKenna: Right, yeah, exactly. We are Buddhabrot oid. And any intelligence in some iteration is going to be also Buddhabrot.
Maybe this transcends time and space.
This is a fundamental property of reality itself. Just like PI is built in.
[00:33:52] Dr. Harry Shirley: Just like PI, yeah. Just like we expect other life forms to come across PI and use PI, we expect nature to use the Mandelbrot set and to use the Buddhabrot for consciousness to evolve and grow as it interrelates, to matter. We expect the Buddhabrot and the Mandelbrot set to be involved in those pathways. But that may again be related to efficiency, that may again be related to stability, et cetera.
[00:34:24] Dennis McKenna: So does that imply that if this Buddhabrot set kind of sets the framework for the unity of mind and matter in a certain way, or that's kind of the foundation for these two things to come together? So does that imply that.
I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here, that effectively it is as built into the structure of reality as the nature of PI. So you're going to find it everywhere.
[00:35:04] Dr. Harry Shirley: Absolutely everywhere.
And I think now, I think, well, I'm hoping after my work becomes more and more well known, we will begin to realize that the Buddha has been hidden. They're lying without realizing it in many cultural outputs that humans have made unintentionally emerging. Like mandalas. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:35:31] Dennis McKenna: Yeah. I mean, it's very. On one hand, I'm sort of like, this is like a fundamental insight into the nature of reality and the qualities that unify mind and matter and all that.
I mean, it's a fundamental insight. And then on the other hand, you could back up and say, well, of course, how could it be otherwise?
I mean, you look closely at it and then you say it had to be this way, it couldn't be any other way.
[00:36:07] Dr. Harry Shirley: And that's, that's, that's, you know, obviously during the journey, I've been working on this for a number of years now and I've gone through different stages of confidence and, and, yeah, with such a profound insight, I couldn't just believe it straight away, but obviously I've grown to have to believe in my own work.
I have confidence, yeah, but I can't see it any other way now. Now, now that I've. Now that I've accepted the Buddhabrot appears to be the ordering of the psyche.
It seems to make perfect sense. And for me, being passionate about Jungian psychology now, every time I read Jung, I'm relating it to my work and how almost everything he said really fits into my framework really well.
And lots of the things he didn't quite get can be explained using my framework.
So I can't see it being any other way now.
[00:37:06] Dennis McKenna: So what do we do with this insight? I mean, how does it help us understand or. What does it help us understand? Or is it just.
I mean, it helps us to understand a lot of things? Do we apply this in some practical way? Does.
[00:37:24] Dr. Harry Shirley: It's a very important finding for humanity.
One thing to know is that the chakra system itself for Jung was a projection of individuation onto the human spine.
And we see also that kind of the ascent of human consciousness. In many other spiritual systems, Kabbalah, Kundalini, there's often the idea of an ascent towards unity with, with God maybe, or in yoga, it may be reaching Nirvana. There's often this stage of unity.
And for me, the Buddha also appears to have this imagery of an ascent, which for me echoes the chakra system with precision.
What we've got in the Buddhabrot, is yes, now we have a mathematical framework for individuation.
So psychological growth, or, you know, some people might call it the expansion of consciousness, or some people might call it the movement to supra consciousness, whatever wording you want to use.
But we have a mathematically precise chakra system, if you will, so we can now map out individual psychological growth up. The Buddha brought spine.
But what's striking to me is, is, is that individuation is never just an individual. We all, we always have a collective as well. And Eric Newman wrote about this a lot about collective individuation, that humanity, humanity's consciousness, if, if you like, evolves over time and we're in a current state at the minute. We've been in previous stages in the past, the Egyptian mind was very different to our own.
But what the Buddhabrot now tells us with mathematical precision is where we are heading.
[00:39:46] Dennis McKenna: And if I may interject just for my own clarity, not only does it bring mathematical precision to it, but I think it also implies that this iconography that you see in alchemy, for example, or some of these other representations, it's not that they understood the Buddhabrot set and were applying this, they did not have this mathematical understanding of it.
They had an intuition about these organizing principles, organizing structures which at the end turn out to have a mathematical basis. I don't think they worked with that perception. Or did they? Did they really understand this was fundamentally, this was about a mathematical construct, they.
[00:40:41] Dr. Harry Shirley: Wouldn'T have used the word mathematics. I think what we can say is intuited an ordering of consciousness in a hierarchical structure.
But with the chakra system, the level of similarity to the Buddhabrot is mind blowing.
And what it really teaches me is the power of the unconscious and also how the unconscious clearly is governed by a number because it seems to work with number really well.
And whilst you've raised that point, it's interesting to think about how mathematics relates to intuition.
And your brother actually talks about this in a number of talks, how I touched upon it earlier, how we've kind of thought that mathematics is just related to logic. But no, it's an intuitive exercise and that's what we see in mathematicians. So one of the world's most famous mathematicians, an Indian mathematician called Ramanujan, he was well known for coming up with lots of his intuitive leaps in his theories, through his dreams, through his own visions.
So maths has always been related to intuition in a way.
So I dare to think how, you know, the ancient yogis, the ancient mystics, whoever masters of meditation, I just wonder how deep they could go into this layer of the psyche that seems to be governed by numbers. Something really interesting to think about.
[00:42:23] Dennis McKenna: Absolutely.
So that brings up something I was thinking about.
What is the most ancient manifestation of this Buddhabrot like pattern that you're aware of?
[00:42:41] Dr. Harry Shirley: I think maybe the oldest is King Tutankhamun's necklace is quite a nice example of it appearing to be echoed in that piece of jewelry.
But also the coffinet statue of Tutankhamun seems to echo the ratios and symmetries of the Buddhabrot quite strikingly.
So I think that's 2500 BC, unless I'm completely wrong.
But yeah, I think that's one of the oldest examples.
So we Go from all the way from around 2 to 3000 BC all the way up to modern psychedelic art. So the Buddhabrot is, for me, always there. Yeah.
[00:43:24] Dennis McKenna: So is there any instance that you know of where the Buddhabrot pattern shows up in, like, cave paintings and that sort of thing, like Paleolithic? Does it go that far?
[00:43:38] Dr. Harry Shirley: Yeah, it's obviously a danger to lots of my work that I can. But I can start to see it lots of places where. Actually, that one's a bit of a stretch and. But, yeah, I can see some aboriginal art, but, you know, I could try and see it there. But I haven't ever included those examples because I know that the criticism will be quite strong because it's a humanoid shape.
There are some examples where I'm thinking, yeah, that could be it. Yeah, yeah.
[00:44:11] Dennis McKenna: You don't want to be stigmatized as a complete nut case, just not a complete one. I understand, I understand. When you start speculating about the ancient mind, you're into some pretty.
Pretty dangerous territory.
But then you're also in a place where you're free to speculate because no one really knows. And that kind of brings us. I have to talk about psychedelics in this regard because clearly they're part of the picture of trying to develop this understanding of the Buddhabrot set.
And the Buddhabrot set probably represents something fundamental about the structure of consciousness. So one would think that some of the.
Well, and you talk about psychedelic art and you cite several instances of psychedelic art where you can dissect out different elements of the Buddhabrot set. So there are definitely similarities.
I think an important distinction, though. I mean, psychedelic art is not psychedelic experience, you know, psychedelic experience.
Psychedelic art is something that people who have psychedelic experiences, then they try to remember what they saw.
My question is, and you may have to get experimental about this, Harry, you may not have the answers, but if you took a psychedelic or if one takes a psychedelic in the right circumstances, does this pattern emerge? In other words, is it part of the processing gestalt of a brain that is activated by psychedelics?
[00:46:24] Dr. Harry Shirley: Yeah, that's a really interesting question because my work's explored the Buddhabrot as an external image a lot, hasn't it?
And, yeah, the next chapter, I think, for my work is exploring whether the Buddhabrot, is an inner image.
But I have since kind of communicating my work more and more. I have had some anecdotal reports of people saying.
A couple of people saying they actually dreamt that the Buddhabrot.
And then a couple of reports saying that, yeah, they had kind of experienced Buddhabrot type entities during a trip.
But yeah, I don't know. I don't know this at all. If, if I can get like more, more support for my work, maybe one day I would, I would, I would get scientific about it and I would talk to people during a trip or after a trip and ask them what kind of fractal forms they were seeing. Now I, I wouldn't show them the Buddhabrot before obviously, because they're more likely to see it. Right? I don't know. I've never, I have to say I've never taken a psychedelic, but I've spoken to people who have and I think the Mandelbrot set has been associated with psychedelics in the past. Right?
[00:47:46] Dennis McKenna: Sure, yeah, absolutely, yeah. Fractal things.
Well, I don't know, Harry, you may have to cross the line and test for yourself what goes up and it's okay. You know, it would be.
But also it's so tricky to approach this because anybody who's heard this conversation or is aware of your work is immediately contaminated. In other words, they would not be able to have the pure experience of the Buddhabrot because they know of your work. And naturally that's going to come up people.
So it may be tricky, but there may be.
Actually, you know, there's a lot of the uk. You're based in the uk, right?
[00:48:39] Dr. Harry Shirley: Yeah.
[00:48:39] Dennis McKenna: Well, there's a lot of psychedelic research going on at different parts of the UK and there are some people pushing some very interesting boundaries there. You might be able to have a structured experience with them that would be basically focused on seeing.
I mean, the naive question, do you take a psychedelic, do you see this Hudebrand set or something like it? And is that a reflection of brain structures, neural activity, the way the mind is processing information? Probably all of the above, right?
[00:49:26] Dr. Harry Shirley: Yeah. Well, something I. Something I hope that happens is that, you know, materialist scientists, so neuroscientists, I hope they come across my work and at least think it over for a short while because there could be, it could, it could relate to neuroscience somehow. It could be somehow that the mind can create these fractal forms that are organizing principles that are somehow related to how consciousness emerges or how consciousness is related to quantum systems.
I haven't gone down that rabbit hole much myself, but I think there's stuff to be explored there. Definitely.
[00:50:11] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, I think it is too.
There's an interesting author named Simon Powell and he's written about psychedelics, particularly psilocybin.
And he makes the point that Psychedelics can be used as a lens. Basically they can be viewed as a scientific instrument, a lens through which you can view reality. And he's referring to external reality, you know, from a perspective. That shift in framework gives one the ability to notice processes in nature that normally we're programmed to filter out.
And psychedelics can do temporarily is they disable these filters. So they open you up, they open up the sensorium to a wider range.
[00:51:07] Dr. Harry Shirley: I have no doubt that there would be value there because I already have complete faith in how dreams can be so useful to scientists.
There's millions of examples out there. Some of my background's chemistry. The structure for benzene. Kikule dreamt that he couldn't work out how benzene is structured. It came to him in a dream.
And for me a dream is very similar to a psychedelic. That might sound like a crazy thing to say, but they're both about the dissolution of the ego.
Ego softens, hides away, goes somewhere. And from that the unconscious content, the contents that we, that we're not allowed to see emerge in a dream. It's much more subtle than a psychedelic, but it's me. For me it's a similar principle.
And through breaking down those ego boundaries you can glimpse into reality as it is.
So, yeah, that sounds really interesting and I'm sure there is value in that.
[00:52:14] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, I think it's worth looking into.
Well, your insights are so profound and you have to pay attention to fully grok what you're talking about. But I think that you're onto something here. Definitely you're aware, you say, of my brother's work a bit and you're probably aware of the time wave that he constructed, the so called time wave zero.
This mathematical construction based on I Ching.
[00:52:56] Dr. Harry Shirley: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:52:57] Dennis McKenna: Supposedly a map of time.
Very naively conceived.
And in my opinion, even though I'm his brother, I was always skeptical about the time wave. But in this context, I think I don't believe it describes the structure of time.
I don't think you could prove that it does.
Or more importantly, one of the main conceptual problems with the time wave was you could not disprove it. You couldn't specify what would disprove it. I think it's been thoroughly disproven. But that said, I think it's a very interesting mathematical or quasi mathematical structure that came from my brother's very fertile mind. He was by no means a mathematician or a statistician, which would have been a skill that would have been useful to construct the time wave. And yet he Came up with this idea about cycles, and that grew out of his psychedelic experiences. And then he tried to put structure around that, related to the structure of the I Ching and so forth.
Now, I Ching relate to any of this?
[00:54:26] Dr. Harry Shirley: Yeah, A.B. absolutely. The I Ching is based on. On number and. And. And pattern. It's based on archetypal patterns within the psyche and the fact that it relates to. To number and synchronicity. Well, it's divination, which is related to synchronicity. Yeah, definitely connected.
And my feeling is that time is also related to my work, but I just haven't had the psychic energy to even go there yet because the things that I've been uncovering have taken a lot to work it out.
And time must be somehow related here because, as I said, that the ascent up the Buddhabrot appears to be related to psychological growth, and somehow that is related to time. Because the only way that we grow psychologically, the only way that consciousness does grow is through moving through time and matter.
So there's a connection there.
So we do have a connection to time that we've never had before.
But I don't know what to make of it.
But, yeah, there could be something really profound there, definitely. But, yeah, the I Ching definitely relates to Jung, to archetype, to number, to synchronicity, which is all of the stuff that my work's been exploring.
[00:56:06] Dennis McKenna: Right, right. Of course, Jung was fascinated by the I Ching and various people from Leibniz, too. I think Leibniz was one of the first. But, for example, in the 20th century, the relationships of the I Ching to the structure of DNA have been described. They're both the same, basically.
I forget what the exponential is, but they're based on iterations of powers of two. And it's a 64 element system.
So again, maybe it's another effort to kind of fundamentally discern the patterns in nature that intuitively and by inclination we try to relate to quantified systems. I guess that's what I'm trying to say, that I Ching is a sense of a way to quantify and put a mathematical basis behind what is effectively a process of intuition as a divination instrument. Right?
[00:57:24] Dr. Harry Shirley: Yeah, absolutely. And it's a way to harness synchronicity as well. Synchronicity, we often think of something that happens to us, but I Ching appears to be a way to tap into the numerical ordering of reality and therefore kind of detect these tides of reality to kind of work out what fractal tide we are in and therefore what the future could potentially hold. So again, these archetypal patterns of meaning that are related to number. So, yeah, it's all interconnected, it's all very complex, but yeah, there's something there.
[00:58:15] Dennis McKenna: Right.
Well, I tell you, you've stretched my mind a lot here.
I take weeks to recover from this. But it's very interesting what you're exploring for. Sure.
[00:58:30] Dr. Harry Shirley: Yeah. Thanks so much for inviting me. It's been a real honor to speak to you.
Maybe after you've digested, we can have a round two at some point again this year.
[00:58:42] Dennis McKenna: I would love to do that. That would be. Yeah, after we have had a chance. That would be great. I'd love to have you back and certainly if you have any further insights, feel free to let us know. And I just very much admire what you're doing, if not totally understand it, but it's all going somewhere.
So thank you very much for coming on and we'll revisit this a few months down the line.
[00:59:14] Dr. Harry Shirley: Brilliant. Thank you so much.
[00:59:16] Dennis McKenna: Thanks so much.
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