Back in 1981, when the American pop artist James Rosenquist created a series of seven prints titled High Technology and Mysticism: A Meeting Point (Seven Works), the Internet was still birthing from ARPANET, and rare digital art was far in the future. Distributed thinking was in the air, for sure, though blockchain and its seeds were not yet in evidence. Rosenquist was celebrated for startling, oddly joyous images of handguns on candy-colored backgrounds, massive canvases assaulted with vividly colored lipsticks, fighter jets, spaghetti in sauce, and John F. Kennedy. The images were overlapped and fragmented and compelling enough that as a teenager I stared at his canvas F-111 for more than twenty minutes the first time I saw it.

In contrast to the urbane political nature of these canvases, the High Technology and Mysticism lithographs are deep meditations about technology and humanity. Distributed systems of various sorts, represented in soft lines and hard numbers and circles, like nodes, are layered over distorted images of people and animals. At the time, computers were just beginning to become usable for nonexperts, and it seems Rosenquist sensed the impending digital age, as well as the connection of mystics to distributed systems.

Mystics have always investigated nonhierarchical worlds, seeking wisdom and connection to God. Some Sufis cross dimensions in meditation to communicate with the beyond—though to them, this mysterious beyond is just “right here, always.” The communication between spirit, ancestor, self, and neighbor is immediate and always present. Christian saints and martyrs, such as Teresa of Avila, have expressed a similar connection with “nodes” in other places.

I remember once traveling to the Ecuadorian Amazon with a highland shaman named Ernesto, to join other shamans gathering to heal a Shuar wise man who had taken ill in his village. It was an epic trek by small plane, canoe, and foot to reach the village, and the esteemed shaman seemed near death, lying on his side on the ground, a small fire warming him.

Several of the lowland shamans had gathered the vines and other materials needed to prepare their sacred ayahuasca, a powerful potion they were going to take in order to travel into another dimension to seek help and wisdom to heal their sick brother. As night came down, the shamans gathered in a circle and chanted, a few playing drums, each wearing the traditional clothing of his group. They were all men. The ayahuasca, dark and bitter, was served in small gourds. The shamans drank. (I declined.) Time passed and some of them vomited in the forest at the edge of the clearing. The only light was from the fire and a lantern hanging from a pole.

An hour or two passed—I do not know—as I watched these shamans chant, pray, and sing around their sick colleague, who still lay on his side.

Suddenly, a fluorescent green line appeared along the bodies of several of the men. It was radiant with periodic dots—nodes—like the lines of a Keith Haring painting, traveling geometrically in the darkness, a marching dotted outline of the shamans’ bodies. I, who had not taken any drugs, was absorbed by the light, the movement, of the vibrating lines, constantly replenished.

Looking at the James Rosenquist lithographs I see these lines again. These distributed systems are the same systems that the artist used in his series. They are the same patterns we see in the distributed systems of blockchain. The patterns we see in groves of redwoods and aspens, connected and communicating through underground roots. The huge starling flocks that make startling patterns in the evening sky—one moves, touches a wing to the next pod, and the geometry of the entire murmuration changes, pod by pod.