While it seems so unlikely to the modern mind that psychedelics could contribute to real progress in mathematics and science, cyberians, for the most part, take this connection for granted. ''In the sixties,'' Abraham explains, "a lot of people on the frontiers of math experimented with psychedelic substances. There was a brief and extremely creative kiss between the community of hippies and top mathematicians. I know this because I was a purveyor of psychedelics to the mathematical community. To be creative in mathematics, you have to start from a point of total oblivion. Basically, math is revealed in a totally unconscious process in which one is completely ignorant of the social climate. And mathematical advance has always been the motor behind the advancement of consciousness. What's going on now is at least as big a thing as the invention of the wheel.''
The brief kiss Abraham witnessed was the marriage of two powerful intellectual communities, both of which had touched Cyberia – one theoretically and the other experientially. And as cyberian mathematicians like Abraham tripped out further, they saw how this kiss was itself a fractal event, marking a point in human history from which the underlying shape or order of existence – the very "roughness'' of reality – could be inferred. They had conceived and birthed their own renaissance.
Abraham has since dedicated himself to the implications of this rebirth. He sees the most important, seemingly sudden, and non sequitur events in human history – of which the kiss above is one – as part of an overall fractal curve. ''It's happened before. The Renaissance was one. Christianity is one. The troubadors in the south of France; agriculture; the new concept of time that came along with the Old Testament – they are all actually revivals. But they are more than revivals. It's sort of a spiral model where there's a quantum leap to a new level of organization and complexity.''
Today, Abraham is in his Santa Cruz office, wearing a sweatshirt, drawstring pants, and Birkenstocks. He does not sport a slide rule or pocket protector. He is Cyberia's Village Mathematician, and his words are reassuring to those who are living in a world that has already taken this quantum leap. Just as the fractal enabled Mandelbrot to comfort IBM executives about the ultimately orderly nature of their line interference, Abraham uses fractals to show how this uncharted island in history on which we have found ourselves fits into a larger picture.
''There is this fractal structure of discontinuity. If you look at the biggest discontinuities in human history, you will see they all seem to have very similar structures, suggesting a mathematical model behind the evolution of civilization.''
Abraham argues that cyberian interest in the pagan, psychedelic, spiritual, and tribal is not in the least contradictory to the advances in computer technology and mathematics. Historically, he points out, renaissance periods have always involved a resurgence of archaic elements along with the invention of new technologies and mathematical systems. The success of Cyberia, according to the bearded technosage, will depend on our ability to put these disparate elements together. ''We have emphasized integration and synthesis, trying to put everything together in one understanding, using mathematical models only as one tool. We are also open to various pagan elements like astrology, telepathy, the paranormal, and so on. We're an interesting network.''
For younger cyberians, Abraham's network provides an invaluable template by which they can direct their own activities. As Ralph would say, he ''groks'' their experience; he understands how these kids feel responsible for reshaping not only their own reality but the course of human history.
''We have to consciously interact with the creation of the future in order for it to be other than it was.'' In past renaissances, each creative birth, each intimation of what we can call "fractal reality,'' was buried by a tremendous counterrevolutionary force. ''What happened with the Renaissance? Within 200 or 250 years, it was dead again.'' Society refused to cope with Cyberia then. But the invention of the computer coupled with the undeniable usefulness and profound beauty of the fractal has made today's renaissance impossible to resist.
Valley of the Nerds
Two men are staring into a computer screen at Apple's research and development branch. While the first, a computer nerd straight out of Central Casting, mans the keyboard, beside him sits the other, John Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, psychedelics explorer, and Wyoming rancher. They watch the colorful paisley patterns representing fractal equations swirl like the aftervisions of a psychedelic hallucination. Tiny Martian colonies forming on an eerie continental coastline. The computer operator magnifies one tiny piece of the pattern, and the detail expands to occupy the entire screen. Dancing microorganisms cling to a blue coral reef. The new patterns reflect the shape of the original picture. He zooms in again and the shapes are seen again and again. A supernova explodes into weather system, then spirals back down to the pods on the leaf of a fern plant. The two men witness the creation and recreation of universes.
Barlow scratches his whiskers and tips his cowboy hat. ''It's like looking at the mind of God.''
The nerd corrects him: ''It is the mind of God.''
And as the latest kiss between the worlds of science and spirituality continues, the fractal finds its way into the new American psychedelic folklore – as evidenced by that fractal-enhanced Grateful Dead ticket.
It's the morning after a Dead show, in fact, when the young man who designed that famous concert ticket unveils his latest invention for a small group of friends gathered at his Palo Alto home. Dan Kottke, who was one of the original Apple engineers, left the company and sold off his stock to launch his career as an independent computer graphic designer. He has just finished the prototype for his first effort: a small light-up LED device that flashes words and pictures. He plugs it in and the group watches it go through its paces. It's not as trippy as a fractal, but it's pretty mesmerizing all the same. So is Kottke, who approaches the psychedelic-spiritual search with the same patience and discipline he'd use to assemble an intricate circuit board.
''When I was a freshman in college,'' he carefully removes the wires from the back of his invention, "I would take psychedelics and sit by myself for a whole day. What I arrived at was that cosmic consciousness was a completely normal thing that one day everyone would arrive at, if they would just sit and think clearly.''
Kottke, like many of the brilliant people at his home today, sees Cyberia as a logical result of psychedelics and rationality. ''That's how I became friends with Steve Jobbs. We used to take psychedelics together and talk about Buddhist philosophy. I had no idea he was connected with Woz [Steve Wozniak] or selling blue boxes [telephone dialers that allow you to make free calls] at the time. We just talked about transcendentalism and Buddhism and listened to Bob Dylan. It must have been his alter ego.''
Until Jobbs and Wozniak created the Apple personal computer, cyberian computer exploration was limited to the clunky and essentially unusable Altair brand. ''It appealed to the soldering iron kinds of hackers,'' explains Dan, "but not the spiritual kind.'' So the very invention of the personal computer, then, was in some ways psychedelics-influenced. Maybe that's why they called it Apple: the fruit of forbidden knowledge brought down to the hands of the consumer through the garage of a Reid College acid head? In any case, the Apple gave computing power and any associated spiritual insights to the public and, most important, to their children.