Ruslan Holovko is the Ukrainian artist behind iwhiteplant. In this interview, recorded in 2019–2020 and first published in Russian by the Telegram channel SURREAL 2.0.1, he talks about art as a state of flow, the years of meditation that led him to a transpersonal experience, the thinkers and books that shaped him, the internet, and what he would wish his readers. The English translation is ours; the Russian original is linked at the end.
What is art to you?
If I answer from practice rather than theory, art for me is a state of flow in which I completely forget about everyday chores and begin to observe visual images inside my psyche, and I feel an energy that pushes me to represent all of these subconscious processes on canvas.
Any object or process can be perceived as art. You can imagine that you are walking through a post-internet gallery while you walk the streets. It lets you be less caught up in worldly fuss and find beauty even while standing in a supermarket queue, instead of getting irritated. So, thinking subjectively, art for me is everything visible and invisible that exists in the universe.
Art has interested me all my life, so I will try to open it up from several sides. Art is directly tied to human consciousness and to how we perceive the world. It is worth understanding that the world is not the way our senses represent it: the subjective world is illusory by nature. The most sensible way to perceive the world, as I see it right now, is to reduce any event to the level of interactions between fundamental particles. I have no trouble finding beauty both in a flower and in the death of a flower. University courses in nonlinear physics and chaos theory helped me accept the fact of entropy in the universe and see in it the same beauty as in ordered systems. I think that to see beauty even in such frightening phenomena as death or chaos, you at least have to shed the anthropocentric view of the world, in which everything revolves around people and exists for people. That false belief still haunts people today.
If we step away from the subjective and look at art as a phenomenon, then art is a social construct, one of the manifestations of human labour and of the categories of human consciousness that emerged over the course of social evolution. One property of the human brain is the cyclical copying and reproduction of information. You can see it clearly in children, who repeat the sounds they hear. At the earliest stage of art's appearance in our population, it took the form of symbolic, crude copying of images from the environment.
Looking deeper still, human art is based on recombination. Recombination is one of the properties of our universe, expressed in systems from the micro to the macro level.
Recombination in biology, for example, is the redistribution of genetic information through the physical exchange of chromosome segments. Recombination also happens in the behaviour of a more complex system called the human being. Here Dawkins comes to mind at once, with his theory of memes, which to my mind is the most accurate description of such processes: no intellectualising, just a clear picture grounded in physiological processes.
I also have to mention that in the days of archaic humans, art was strongly influenced by the phenomenon of mystical, or transpersonal, experience. Under the influence of the endogenous psychedelic DMT, observing various geometric and fractal patterns inside their own psyche, people were enchanted by the complexity and beauty of the images and wanted to share the experience with everyone else. (Endogenous substances are ones the brain can synthesise itself; DMT is also found in certain plants.)
This gave the impetus for the patterns being reproduced to grow more complex, which shows up in many of the world's cultures. It is enough to look at the ornaments in Islamic mosques, or at African tribal patterns and fractals, to understand how the psychedelic experience was reflected in their cultural architecture. There are, by the way, several excellent lectures on the subject: the TED talk on African fractals, and Graham Hancock's lecture Psychedelics and Civilisation.
Look at these structures: this really is a representation of the DMT experience. Almost all ancient civilisations placed psychedelic experience at the centre of their culture. And that is no accident; it is a regularity that follows from human neurophysiology. Chemistry determines culture.
Have you had a transcendental or transpersonal experience, and if so, how did you reach it?
Yes, I have had a transpersonal experience. To do the question justice I need to treat the subject as a whole and touch on the story of my life, so this will be a lot of text. To begin with, the terms need defining, so that we don't get lost.
“Transpersonal”, or beyond the personal, is a term used in transpersonal psychology to describe the experience of an altered state of consciousness. The word denotes the expansion or extension of consciousness beyond the habitual “I” or “ego” and beyond the bounds of time and space, at which point it becomes possible to reach what are called the brain's peak capacities. (Some kinds of meditation lower activity in the parietal lobes, which are responsible for orientation in time and space, and that makes it possible to step out of the usual perception of reality.)
Different methods are used to reach this state: holotropic breathwork, for example, pranayama, the use of certain psychoactive substances, and some techniques of prolonged meditation. I chose the last one, since it seemed to me the best for keeping the psyche healthy, which matters a great deal to me. A depressive, suicidal stretch in my teenage years was enough to teach me how important it is to work on the health of body and mind :).
I want to make clear why this subject interests me. Questions about how consciousness and the psyche work are among the most important there are, because they come directly from the need to know the world. And without understanding the mechanism of knowing, a person can easily get lost in the thickets of subjective illusions.
If you use an integral method to study the human psyche, you cannot leave out a phenomenon like altered states of consciousness. By limiting ourselves to studies of the ordinary state of consciousness and to behaviourism, we fail to cover the whole spectrum of states the brain can work in. An altered state of consciousness lets you experience and see the workings of the unconscious and the collective unconscious, which make up a large layer of the psyche, while conscious processes make up only a small part of it. Supplementing that kind of experience with observation from the outside, using fMRI, can significantly expand our knowledge of how the brain works.
On the whole, my desire to live through a transpersonal experience goes back to childhood, since I was formed in a religious environment. From birth my brain was conditioned with concepts of the transcendent. (Transcendence here means the view that the divine lies beyond humanity and the world, and is regarded as distinct from both. The extreme of transcendence is the notion of the divine as a person, or as a divine essence in itself.) The way these ideas were expressed in that doctrine was anthropocentric, which led me to nihilism towards the whole subject in my teens. But over time my interest in it returned, simply because that was how the neuroplasticity of my brain had been conditioned.
At present I approach the question of the divine, the transcendent, not as an adept of spiritual seeking but from the standpoint of phenomenology, anthropology, religious studies and neuroscience. That is, I look at the phenomenon as if from the outside, from the observer's side. I am interested in how different peoples of the world formed their concepts of God, and in what caused those concepts to appear. At some point I understood that religion arose as a consequence of lived transcendental experience in one form or another. It was after that realisation that I felt an irresistible desire not just to study the phenomenon with my intellect but to feel it through my own experience. Transcendental experience itself does not happen in the domain of the intellect, the mind, or thoughts; that is why it is transcendental: it goes beyond habitual thinking and human notions. I understood that simply taking psychoactive substances would not do, since there was no guarantee my psyche would withstand it, and I wanted certainty. That is exactly why I chose the long but more complete path of studying meditation techniques.
I came to meditation when I stumbled on the book Mindfulness by Mark Williams, a professor of psychology at Oxford University. The book was the push I needed to put meditation into practice; before that I had only been swimming in theory. It describes the simplest technique, the one that is so hyped in the West right now: “mindfulness”. It is used at Google and at various top universities around the world. The essence of it is that you learn to train your attention and concentration, and the object of concentration can be anything. Usually the breath is used as the object.
At first my attention kept switching to anything at all: to external stimuli, to thoughts and plans, but gradually, month by month, my skills of awareness and concentration improved. Besides the book, the blog урокимедитации.рф helped me a great deal; I went through it in full, while cutting away some of the author's irrational beliefs.
Andrew Newberg, the author of books on neurotheology, deserves a mention too. Using MRI studies, he showed how the meditations of the Buddhist schools increase activity in the frontal lobes of the brain. These areas are linked to heightened focus and attention.
From practice I understood that the skills of focus and concentration are absolutely vital for reaching transpersonal states. But to develop those skills properly takes years of regular practice.
Time passed, and I gradually expanded my theoretical and practical knowledge of meditation methods, concentrating on different ideas and reflecting on them. The idea of oneness, for example, or quantum processes, or the feeling of love for everything. I drew motivation from people I knew who had experienced it, and from the literature on the subject. There is such a thing as ideasthesia, defined as a phenomenon in which concentrating on concepts triggers sensory experiences. Very much like synaesthesia, except that here it is information that plays the role.
I spent hundreds of hours in those states; they were pleasant, wide, joyful, inspiring, and they expanded my perception of myself and the world. I could describe at length all the beautiful things I was able to experience by going deeper into meditative practice, but I will only say that these were necessary steps on the way to the main goal. I felt a need for the greatest possible expansion, for cleansing myself of human ideas and concepts, a temporary step beyond those bounds.
At some point I learned of a school of Eastern philosophy called Advaita Vedanta. The core idea of Advaita is “non-duality”, as in many other Eastern traditions, only here the way of meditating differed from everything I had tried.
The brain is built so that it constantly creates abstractions out of the surrounding world, the senses, memory, associations and interpretations. These abstractions fill the emptiness and create a subjective vision of the world. The essence of Advaita is to direct yourself at what was there before these abstractions: before sensations, before thoughts, before associations, before memories. Instead of choosing some object of concentration, you do the diametrical opposite.
In that state there is not a single concept, your mind falls silent, there are no desires, no attachment to your conditioned personality, no emotions; all of it dissolves in the boundless emptiness of self-awareness. The notions of emptiness and self-awareness are absent in that state too. You as a “person, an observer”, and the “external world” as you knew it, disappear. There is not even fear of death there. Entering this state is a fairly energy-intensive process and requires long preparation. Unfortunately I have no data on which regions of the brain are active and which are not while one is in that state. I can only say that it does not come anywhere near any experience I had had before. Even when I thought at length about what the world really is, through the lens of what I know of quantum physics, it did not give me what the transpersonal experience gave me.
To avoid “category collapse”, you have to distinguish clearly between the absolute truth of emptiness and the relative truths of form. All categories and scientific models, even the ones that work and are verified in practice, belong to the relative truth of form. None of it is absolute truth. Only the formless awareness of emptiness makes it possible to touch the sphere of the transcendental.
After living through such a phenomenon, back in the ordinary state of consciousness, things like fear of death and the other things that can cause “suffering in the Buddhist sense” largely subside. Calm and peace come. It is as if you discover the phenomenal world anew. As if you had died and then been given the chance to live again.
You might ask how experiencing this state differs from deep sleep. I can say that it hardly differs at all, except that in deep sleep awareness disappears, whereas here it is still present.
There is a series called “What Is Before 'I Am'” in which Stephen Wolinsky, a doctor of philosophy and practitioner of Advaita, deconstructs the spiritual and psychological spheres as “philosophical traps”, discarding what is perceived, the products of the brain and nervous system, and then goes further, deconstructing deconstruction itself. The lecture has practical moments that can help you touch this state, if you are even a little ready for it. By ready I mean understanding that your thoughts, your beliefs and you are not the same thing. Many people are so strongly identified with their beliefs that any criticism of those beliefs is taken as an attack on themselves. To give you the chance to touch this state right now, I will quote a series of questions which, ideally, should be read out to you by someone else.
Slow your reading down. If you can, close your eyes. Without using your thoughts, memory, emotions, associations or perception, answer: are you worthless? worthy? or neither? If you are not using your thoughts, memory, emotions, associations or perception, what are worthlessness and worth at all?
Without using your thoughts, memory, emotions, associations or perception: are you perfect, or imperfect? or neither? If you are not using your thoughts, memory, emotions, associations or perception, what are perfection and imperfection at all?
If you are not using your thoughts, memory, emotions, associations or perception: are you limited? are you unlimited? or neither?
Notice the state of the non-verbal “I am”. Notice the infinite emptiness. Notice how that empty space spreads out into eternity.
How do you feel about psychoactive substances?
“Drugs”, for me, is an outdated legal term. I approach psychoactive substances from the standpoint of pharmacology and chemistry. Back in the Middle Ages Paracelsus put forward the position: “Everything is poison, everything is medicine; the dose decides which.”
In neurology, psychiatry and medicine, psychoactive substances have long been used to correct the brain's functioning, for anaesthesia and for other processes that restore homeostasis. The only difference is who uses them, how, and with what approach. Used competently, in medicine, they restore health; used incompetently they destroy.
Ordinary people (non-specialists) often unconsciously try to use “drugs” as medicine. With a neurosis, for example, or a schizoaffective disorder, alcohol acts quite well as a neuroleptic and reduces the symptoms of the illness. It's just that alcohol has a heap of side effects, and the problem has to be solved comprehensively, with quality, tested medication and the recommendations of specialists.
There is another category of people who use psychoactive substances as entertainment: to “trip”, to see something, to feel unusual things, to have fun. Most often this says that some of the person's needs are unmet and they are looking for compensation. In developed countries we see the laws gradually loosening and people being given the chance to do with their body and consciousness what they like. So-called recreational use.
And the last category is researchers, who use some kind of methodology and treat the use of substances carefully and seriously. I am more a supporter of the third approach. Psychoactive substances have to be approached responsibly; fortunately there is a psychedelic renaissance going on in Europe and the USA now, research has resumed, and you can find literature and lectures on the subject.
Here, for example: Psychedelic therapy from the standpoint of evidence-based medicine (Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden).
Why do you think the laws on psychoactive substances haven't changed in the CIS?
Because the laws are not written by scientists, and they are not even passed on the basis of scientific research. Laws are passed simply by people who want to make money. For the law on psychoactive substances to change in the CIS, you need the corresponding culture. Historically, it so happens that ours is an alcohol culture, and for most of the population of the CIS cannabis and other psychedelics are not in much demand. So in this respect politicians have no need to adapt to the wishes of the majority. A change like that is a gradual, multi-factor, lengthy process.
Then what, in your view, is the best form of government?
I think there is no universally best form of government. Perhaps general AI will help us with that. Well, I am more for the market than for state regulation. Purely subjectively, I am against authoritarianism; I would not want to live under such a system. So on the political compass I am in the bottom right, but that is a convention.
On the other hand, if some society were to implement, say, true communism on Marx's model, and in some unimaginable way everything worked superbly and people lived happily, then why not. It would be interesting to watch.
Which people helped you become who you are now?
The first person I want to start with is Immanuel Kant. He was able to prove and show rationally that “your thoughts are yours, but you are not those thoughts; your emotions are yours, but you are not those emotions”. And, as a consequence, that emotions and thoughts are subject to critical analysis and can be checked for correctness. That is the foundation of psychiatry and of mental health. The people who pointed me to Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason helped me gain the ability to be aware of my thoughts and my reactions to external stimuli without identifying with them. It helps me detect destructive automatisms in my thinking, stay calm even in stressful situations, and choose healthier, more adaptive ways of solving problems. I became interested in Kant after watching the lectures of the psychiatrist Andris Saulitis. In the early stages of getting acquainted with psychiatry, his lectures helped me understand mental disorders and how to withstand them.
My parents and the people close to me influenced me greatly, of course, but I think I had better point to the people whose works anyone can read for themselves.
On nonlinear physics and chaos theory:
James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science.
Robert Sapolsky's lectures on reductionism, chaos and emergence. A translation can be found on YouTube; no special knowledge of the exact sciences is required. His Stanford course “Human Behavioral Biology” as a whole had a big influence on me.
The lectures of the neurophysiologist Vyacheslav Dubynin, for example the course “Chemistry of the Brain” on PostNauka.
Eliezer Yudkowsky and his Methods of Rationality.
S. I. Hayakawa, Language in Action: A Guide to Accurate Thinking, Reading and Writing.
Robert Frager and James Fadiman, Personality and Personal Growth: a big book that describes all the existing psychological models and psychotherapies, from cognitive-behavioural therapy to the models of consciousness in Hinduism.
Ken Wilber and his theory of integral psychology.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge.
Next in degree of influence come various “spiritual” works, from Buddhist treatises to the Bible.
More modern ones: Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha;
Stephen Wolinsky, Quantum Consciousness and his other works;
William James (the scholar of religion), The Varieties of Religious Experience, and Evgeny Torchinov, Religions of the World: The Experience of the Beyond.
I would also single out people like Albert Hofmann and Stanislav Grof, the psychiatrist who, starting in the sixties, studied the effect of psychedelic experience on people in the context of psychotherapeutic practice. All of these books can be found in my Telegram channel.
I am very fond of Ben Goertzel, who has been working on artificial intelligence for 20 years. For him the question is not whether general AI will appear in the next 5 to 20 years. The question is what it will be like, and how to endow it with moral values and empathy towards people and animals. He talks about this in some detail in his interview with Joe Rogan: The Singularity Is Knocking at Our Door.
And a great many people in the arts: musicians, artists, performers. I can give a link to my Kinopoisk and my VK audio.
What do you do in life?
I do graphic design, and right now, by the way, I am actively looking for new clients. I make covers, art for clothing, posters, all that sort of thing. You can see my work on my Instagram. In my spare time I do visionary art and customise clothing:
Last year I graduated from the physics faculty, and I integrate knowledge from nonlinear physics into my art. Beyond that, in general I try to satisfy my needs and to share sources of quality information with people.
What is the internet to you?
The internet for me is one of the stages of cultural and anthropological evolution in modern times, one that changes the mental type of the human being. The internet has given people the chance to reach a new level of consciousness: metacultural, cross-paradigmatic. Before the internet it was much harder for people to step outside the cultural and geographical bubble they were born in. The availability and speed of information exchange have grown unimaginably. The internet is one of the steps in the transition to an anthropological revolution whose scale and consequences are comparable to humanity's very exit from the natural kingdom, and to its immersion into simulation. I think you and I will live to see the time when it becomes possible to supply the body autonomously with the resources it needs to live, without physically doing anything, while being entirely in virtual reality, creating your own worlds.
If you think we will live to see that period, are you ready for it, and do you agree with events developing that way?
Sometimes I dream of how I will be able to connect my brain to a general artificial intelligence. So I think I am intuitively ready; I am interested in experiencing it. In any case, full immersion will not appear in every country at the same moment, so if you want a traditional life you will be able to move somewhere out in the provinces. Most likely there will be movements for “real” life, against immersion in the virtual world.
I don't think agreeing or disagreeing with that course of events has much effect on the direction technology develops in. This sequential process cannot be stopped; it flows naturally from the human brain's need to make life easier and to create the most liveable and comfortable environment possible. And where, if not in virtual reality, can that be done in its ideal form?
I think the reaction to these sentiments will delay that time considerably; even now, many things that would let us study human beings better are banned as inhumane. I'm not entirely sure, but I think there are alternative options too, with the development of human cybernetics, DNA modification, like in some utopias, or like in Futurama with the flying brains or clumps of energy.
Yes, those options exist too, but then consciousness would still be perceiving this reality, which has a great many limitations. They can be fixed much faster in a virtual simulation than physically, here.
What projects do you have, online and in life?
There are many projects; I will tell you about the main ones:
The project I have put the most energy, emotion and experience into is the Telegram channel SURREAL. It is at once a personal blog where I can write down my observations and reflections, and a media platform where rare material from all over the internet gets published: releases of experimental music, art, exhibitions with sources, treatises, books. Over three years about 5,000 images and files have accumulated, many of which are not even indexed by Google Images. Surreal started as a VK community, but that is now half-abandoned: s u r r e a l.
The next project is also a Telegram channel, “Books I'm Going to Read”.
It holds the files and descriptions of books I have already read or plan to read. Some of them strongly shaped my paradigm. The books' subjects: the history of philosophy, books about the brain, effectiveness, rationality, personal development. Books on psychedelic experience, religious studies, culture, transpersonal psychology, the integral approach and much more.
The channel “Oriental World”: an archive of authentic music from the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
The channel “iwhiteplant”: an archive of art generated with the Artbreeder neural network.
The VK community “1一D̑ͬ”: from time to time I post and repost audio there, my own and by people whose work inspires me. There are no genre limits, from archaic music to post-industrial.
And the last one is my gallery and portfolio on Instagram: iwhiteplant
Who do you consider yourself to be?
I partly answered this question when describing the transpersonal experience. If I answer concisely, it can only be done apophatically: “I am nothing that can be thought or defined.”
When you consider yourself someone or something, “an artist, a marketer, a talentless nobody, a consciousness, an enlightened being”, you are simply identifying for a while with a conventional role. It is an illusion. A role is always conditioned by the interaction of genes with the environment, with the surrounding information, with the conditions your body and your brain were in. Even if you define “I am the one who observes”, that is a role too, one that on the path of self-knowledge must ultimately be discarded. The human capacity for knowing is extremely limited.
“Anything you think you are, you are not.”
In words all this may look complicated and paradoxical, but in fact there is nothing complicated about it: you simply, in a certain state, drop every belief you hold and step beyond the mind.
Tell us about the most memorable moment from your childhood.
Once, when I was ten, I was in Yalta, on a wild beach, and I had a diving mask with me. I put it on and swam far out from the shore. It was very beautiful there: I saw dozens of species of colourful fish, things like moray eels, and lots of underwater plants. It made a strong impression on me and I fell in love with that place. I think it is the place I have remembered most often. For sheer vividness of sensation it was superb!
What matters most to you in life right now?
To find my ikigai.
To close the interview, what would you wish future readers?
I wish you to measure soberly, and more often, where you invest your time and energy. To choose the actions that will bring more return, health and happiness. It sounds banal, but the main problem is that many people invest their strength in things that make them less healthy and simply drain them. That applies to any activity, even simple thinking.
Читать по-русски — the Russian original
Interview by SURREAL 2.0.1 (Telegram), 2019–2020, first published on telegra.ph. Translated from the Russian by iwhiteplant.