Thinker-

are you, by any chance, a mathematician?

If so, then how would you respond to Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem? as well as Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege's dream of a rigorous philosophy based on mathematics and their colossal failure?

If not, then by default you ought be committed in pursuing your preconceptions to their logical end. My thought on this matter is since i do not think there are any absolutes, mathematics included; each and every one of us owes it to ourselves to pursue subjectivity as aggresively as possible. (where am i? in the nietzschean abyss grasping at deferred meanings, no thanks to Derrida- give me a few months)

Call me a neo-nihilist, if you will i'd like to engage you in a series of existential questions, that is after i complete finals week.

I applaud your recent post, for i have been partly lurking and partly poppin' in with inane remarks here and there, nothing substantial. Your intriguing posts over at the philosophy board caught my fancy, which helps the case that not everybody here is a half-assed skeptic who gets off by posting.

Correct me if i'm wrong- you're not 'true thinker' over at metacrock's theology board.

I may have confused you two at times.
~WiGGiN~

No I am a software engineer, specialising in simulation and AI.

As I said before - I have never officially studied philosophy, and what I know about these people I have learned since I have been hanging around this place. The incompleteness theorem is not a problem. Just because mathematics is infinite, and like any other system is not provable from within itself, does not mean that the fundamentals are subject to change. The incompleteness theorem does not prevent 1 + 1 always equalling 2. It does not state that the mandelbrot set would be any different in another Universe. It just means that it is incomplete. Maybe one day the physicists and mathematicians will find a mathematical structure that corresponds directly to the quantum reality that underlies this Universe. That is still perfectly possible.

As it stands philosophy has succeeded in proving it can't prove anything. Not much use that. So I start from a situation where science can't answer the big question about life, the universre and everything, and philosophy can't prove anything about anything. I still have to start from somewhere. So I start from "I think therefore I am." and "0 = 1 + -1". Those are about as rock solid foundations as will ever be available. It's them or nothing (Well one of them is nothing!)

Mathematics is my only absolute. It is the only point where I have faith.

I'd like to hear your questions.

HA! No, I'm not TT. He posts here as well.



[This message has been edited by thinker (edited May 22, 2001).]

Well, since the Mormons believe that Am. Indians are descendents of a lost tribe
of Israel, I guess it's not too much to
extraploate to Mayans who know Aramaic
(if you're a brainwashed Mormon).

:-)

The Celestine Prophecy also refers to the observation that we are often subject to a string of occurences that seemingly have no relation to one another till after the fact, and that these are not mere coincidences but evidence of purpose in our lives and the universe.

But many people don't have the chance to experience these "synchronicities," for instance an infant who dies in its first 8 weeks of life: a very common occurence throughout the world.

Why does this "synchronicity" happen for some but not for them? Or does it happen for them in someother way?

Also, the example of synchronicity often used is: "you're thinking of a friend and he/she suddenly calls." This has happened to me, but there are many more times I have thought of someone and they did not call; so how do we know the former is not just coincidence: impropable in one single instance but likely over the course of many?

Rick

I don't know. Presumably an individual that is only 8 weeks old has not achieved a level of conscious awareness such that synchronicities (or anything else) can have any meaning. If the question is why does it happen for some people and not for others then the answer is still that I don't know, but I think it is possible that it only happens when certain higher 'circuits' in the brain are activated. I recently read a book called 'Prometheus rising' by a psychologist/philosopher called Robert Anton Wilson which refers to Timothy Learys 8-circuit model of consciousness. Most people operate in a linear fashion in circuits 1 to 4. A minority acheive something he calls 'holisitic somatic consciousness' (circuit 5), which is a kind of melding together of the 4 'hard-wired' circuits - an awareness of all of them at the same time - consciousness moving out into another dimension. Only when one has acheived this state is the door open to the three higher circuits, and then only for short periods of time. One attracts synchronicities when one is processing on circuit 6. It is not easy to summarise these ideas. The reason most of the skeptics here do not experience these things is that they are what Wilson would describe as 'circuit-3 robots' - circuit-3 being responsible for things like logic and linear rational thinking. I remember coming across a description of a circuit-3 robot in the book, and being astonished to find it was description of the way I had thought for most of my life. I was extremely insulted that Wilson should say there was something deficient about my mode of thinking. I considered rationality and logic to be the highest form of thinking - unsurpassable - to be told I had only reached level 3 on an 8 circuit model was not very nice. I would now say it was a case of the blind men and the elephant. If you are going to be a robot on one of the 4 hardwired circuits then circuit 3 is probably where you want to be, but in fact circuit 3 can act as a trap. Getting to circuit 5 opens the door. Getting there requires the circuit 3 robot to suspend his incredulity for a while and try to understand reality from another perpective.....

Such events would not have been enough to convince me. The synchronicites to which I refer were more striking than this, and directly related to self-discovery and the gaining of insights about the way the Universe works (from my perspective).

A good example was the day I was sitting around a friends house waiting for her to finish a phone call. I spotted a book on her shelf entitled 'encyclopedia of Mind'. It was quite a fat book. I grabbed it and, not having anything specific to look up I just let it open somwewhere in the middle. The book opened up bang on the entry for Jung.

I tried to find a suitable link to more information on this but failed to find anything I was happy with. I suggest anybody reading this who is interested might consider reading Prometheus Rising. Everybody I know who has read this book was blown away by it. Attempting to summarise it here would do it no justice.

http://www.newfalcon.com/books/prometheus_rising.htm

I have always had a strong interest in metaphysics and parapsychology but have never acted on it--thanks for the information. Is synchroneity a form of the old saying "things happen for a reason" ? Is astrology a form of synchroneity ? Can events be "willed" to occur when you get beyond the 3rd circuit ?

[This message has been edited by lookingforinfo (edited May 23, 2001).]

[This message has been edited by lookingforinfo (edited May 23, 2001).]

Maybe, but it sounds more like you are talking about 'fate' here, which is a slightly different topic, though arguably related.
As far as I am concerned astrology is 99% bullshit, and I'll probably get admonished for being open-minded about the remaining 1%.

How can everyone born at the same time have the same horoscope? It doesn't make sense. Synchronicity was popularised (first described?) by Carl Gustav Jung, and he did not make a connection with astrology AFAIK.

Interesting question. Aleister Crowley would have answered that they could, at least to a certain extent. Actually it is circuit 5 where stuff starts getting strange. Circuit 4 is just another one of the linear, 'hard-wired' circuits, usually labelled 'moral-parental', or something like that. I would say that it is conceivable that persons adept at operating on the higher circuits are able to influence things in ways that people on the lower circuits are not. Maybe just as an extension of the power of positive thought.

I do not have any firm answers to these questions. Many of these ideas are relatively new to me. However - I honestly believe that we are capable of changing our worlds in ways the more skeptical among us would reject outright.

I'll see if I can find a link that describes the 8 circuits in more detail.

http://www.deoxy.org/8circuit.htm#c8

Tunnel-Realities and Imprints

Let's try Dr. Leary's perspective on these mysteries.
To understand neurological space, Dr. Leary assumes that the nervous system consists of eight potential circuits, or "gears," or mini-brains. Four of these brains are in the usually active left lobe and are concerned with our terrestrial survival; four are extraterrestrial, reside in the "silent" or inactive right lobe, and are for use in our future evolution. This explains why the right lobe is usually inactive at this stage of our development, and why it becomes active when the person ingests psychedelics.

We will explain each of the eight "brains" briefly.

I. THE BIO-SURVIVAL CIRCUIT
This invertebrate brain was the first to evolve (2 to 3 million years ago) and is the first activated when a human infant is born. It programs perception onto an either-or grid divided into nurturing-helpful Things (which it approaches) and noxious-dangerous Things (which it flees, or attacks). The imprinting of this circuit sets up the basic attitude of trust or suspicion which will ever after trigger approach or avoidance.

II. THE EMOTIONAL CIRCUIT
This second, more advanced bio-computer formed when vertebrates appeared and began to compete for territory (perhaps 500,000,000 B.C.). In the individual, this bigger tunnel-reality is activated when the DNA master-tape triggers the metamorphosis from crawling to walking. As every parent knows, the toddler is no longer a passive (bio-survival) infant but a mammalian politician, full of physical (and psychic) territorial demands, quick to meddle in family business and decision-making. Again the first imprint on this circuit remains constant for life (unless brainwashed) and identifies the stimuli which will automatically trigger dominant, aggressive behavior or submissive, cooperative behavior. When we say that a person is behaving emotionally, egotistically or 'like a two-year-old,' we mean that s/he is blindly following one of the tunnel-realities imprinted on this circuit.

III. THE DEXTERITY-SYMBOLISM CIRCUIT
This third brain was formed when hominid types began to differentiate from other primate stock (circa 4-5 million B.C.) and is activated for the linear left-lobe functions of the brain, determines our normal modes of artifact-manufacture and conceptual thought, i.e., third circuit 'mind.'
It is no accident, then, that our logic (and our computer-design) follows either-or, binary structure of these circuits. Nor is it an accident that our geometry, until the last century, has been Euclidean. Euclid's geometry, Aristotle's logic and Newton's physics are meta-programs synthesizing and generalizing first brain forward-back, second brain up-down and third brain right-left programs.

IV. THE SOCIAL-SEXUAL CIRCUIT
The fourth brain, dealing with the transmission of tribal or ethnic culture across generations, introduces the fourth dimension, time.
Since each of these tunnel-realities consists of biochemical imprints or matrices in the nervous system, each of them is specifically triggered by neuro-transmitters and other drugs.

NOTICE how drugs that stimulate the first four circuits, which are already activated, tend to be dangerously addictive, roughly ordered ascending from the first circuit. -deoxy



To activate the first brain take an opiate. Mother Opium and Sister Morphine bring you down to cellular intelligence, bio-survival passivity, the floating consciousness of the newborn. (This is why Freudians identify opiate addiction with the desire to return to infancy.)
To activate the second tunnel-reality, take an abundant quantity of alcohol. Vertebrate territorial patterns and mammalian emotional politics immediately appear when the booze flows, as Thomas Nashe intuitively realized when he characterized the various alcohol states by animal labels: "ass drunk," "goat drunk," "swine drunk," "bear drunk," etc.

To activate the third circuit, try coffee or tea, a high-protein diet, speed or cocaine.

The specific neurotransmitter for circuit four has not been synthesized yet, but it is generated by the glands after pubescence and flows volcanically through the bloodstreams of adolescents.

NONE OF THESE TERRESTRIAL DRUGS CHANGE BASIC BIOCHEMICAL IMPRINTS. The behaviors which they trigger are those which were wired into the nervous system during the first stages of imprint vulnerability. The circuit II drunk exhibits the emotional games or cons learned from parents in infancy. The circuit III "mind" never gets beyond the permutations and combinations of those tunnel-realities originally imprinted, or abstractions associated with the imprints through later conditioning. And so forth.

But all this Pavlovian-Skinnerian robotism changes drastically and dramatically when we turn to the right lobe, the future circuits and extraterrestrial chemicals.


The four evolving future 'brains' are:

V. THE NEUROSOMATIC CIRCUIT
When this fifth "body-brain" is activated, flat Euclidean figure-ground configurations explode multi-dimensionally. Gestalts shift, in McLuhan's terms, from linear VISUAL SPACE to all-encompassing SENSORY SPACE. A hedonic turn-on occurs, a rapturous amusement, a detachment from the previously compulsive mechanism of the first four circuits. I turned this circuit on with pot and Tantra.
This fifth brain began to appear about 4,000 years ago in the first leisure-class civilizations and has been increasing statistically in recent centuries (even before the Drug Revolution), a fact demonstrated by the hedonic art of India, China, Rome and other affluent societies. More recently, Ornstein and his school have demonstrated with electroencephalograms that this circuit represents the first jump from the linear left lobe of the brain to the analogical right lobe.

The opening and imprinting of this circuit has been the preoccupation of "technicians of the occult"--Tantric shamans and hatha yogis. While the fifth tunnel-reality can be achieved by sensory deprivation, social isolation, physiological stress or severe shock (ceremonial terror tactics, as practiced by such rascal-gurus as Don Juan Matus or Aleister Crowley), it has traditionally been reserved to the educated aristocracy of leisure societies who have solved the four terrestrial survival problems.

About 20,000 years ago, the specific fifth brain neurotransmitter was discovered by shamans in the Caspian Sea area of Asia and quickly spread to other wizards throughout Eurasia and Africa. It is, of course, cannabis. Weed. Mother Mary Jane.

It is no accident that the pot-head generally refers to his neural state as "high" or "spaced-out." The transcendence of gravitational, digital, linear, either-or, Aristotelian, Newtonian, Euclidean, planetary orientations (circuits I-IV) is, in evolutionary perspective, part of our neurological preparation for the inevitable migration off our home planet, now beginning. This is why so many pot-heads are STAR TREK freaks and science fiction adepts. (Berkeley, California, certainly the Cannabis Capital of the U.S., has a Federation Trading Post on Telegraph Avenue, where the well-heeled can easily spend $500 or more in a single day, buying STAR TREK novels, magazines, newsletters, bumper stickers, photographs, posters, tapes, etc., including even complete blueprints for the starship ENTERPRISE.)

The extraterrestrial meaning of being "high" is confirmed by astronauts themselves; 85% of those who have entered the free-fall zero gravity describe "mystic experiences" or rapture states typical of the neurosomatic circuit. "No photo can show how beautiful Earth looked," raves Captain Ed Mitchell, describing his Illumination in free-fall. He sounds like any successful yogi or pot-head. No camera can show this experience because it is inside the nervous system.

FREE-FALL, AT THE PROPER EVOLUTIONARY TIME, TRIGGERS THE NEUROSOMATIC MUTATION, Leary believes. Previously this mutation has been achieved "artificially" by yogic or shamanic training or by the fifth circuit stimulant, cannabis. Surfing, skiing, skin-diving and the new sexual culture (sensuous massage, vibrators, imported Tantric arts, etc.) have evolved at the same time as part of the hedonic conquest of gravity. The Turn-On state is always described as "floating," or, in the Zen metaphor, "one foot above the ground."


VI. THE NEUROELECTRIC CIRCUIT
The sixth brain consists of the nervous system becoming aware of itself apart from imprinted gravitational reality-maps (circuits I-IV) and even apart from body-rapture (circuit V). Count Korzybski, the semanticist, called this state "consciousness of abstracting." Dr. John Lilly calls it "metaprogramming," i.e., awareness of programming one's programming. This Einsteinian, relativistic contelligence (consciousness-intelligence) recognizes, for instance, that the Euclidean, Newtonian and Aristotelian reality-maps are just three among billions of possible programs or models for experience. I turned this circuit on with Peyote, LSD and Crowley's "magick" metaprograms.
This level of brain-functioning seems to have been reported first around 500 B.C. among various "occult" groups connected by the Silk Route (Rome-North India). It is so far beyond the terrestrial tunnel-realities that those who have achieved it can barely communicate about it to ordinary humanity (circuits I-IV) and can hardly be understood even by fifth circuit Rapture Engineers.

The characteristics of the neuroelectric circuit are high velocity, multiple choice, relativity, and the fission-fusion of all perceptions into parallel science-fiction universes of alternate possibilities.

The mammalian politics which monitor power struggles among terrestrial humanity are here transcended, i.e., seen as static, artificial, an elaborate charade. One is neither coercively manipulated into another's territorial reality nor forced to struggle against it with reciprocal emotional game-playing (the usual soap-opera dramatics). One simply elects, consciously, whether or not to share the other's reality-model.

Tactics for opening and imprinting the sixth circuit are described and rarely experienced in advanced rajah yoga, and in the hermetic (coded) manuals of the medieval-Renaissance alchemists and Illuminati.

No specific sixth circuit chemical is yet available, but strong psychedelics like mescaline (from my 1962-63 "sacred cactus," peyotl) and psilocybin (from the Mexican "magic mushroom," teonactl) open the nervous system to a mixed-media series of circuit V and circuit VI channels. This is appropriately called "tripping," as distinguished from straight-forward fifth circuit "turning on" or "getting high."

The suppression of scientific research in this area has had the unfortunate result of turning the outlaw drug culture back toward fifth circuit hedonics and pre-scientific tunnel-realities (the occult revival, solipsism, Pop Orientalism). Without scientific discipline and methodology, few can successfully decode the often-frightening (but philosophically crucial) sixth circuit metaprogramming signals. Such scientists as do continue to study this subject dare not publish their results (which are illegal) and record ever-wider tunnel-realities only in private conversations--like the scholars of the Inquisitorial era. (Voltaire announced the Age of Reason two centuries too soon. We are still in the Dark Ages.) Most underground alchemists have given up on such challenging and risky self-work and restrict their trips to fifth circuit erotic tunnels.

The evolutionary function of the sixth circuit is to enable us to communicate at Einsteinian relativities and neuro-electric accelerations, not using third circuit laryngeal-manual symbols but directly via feedback, telepathy and computer link-up. Neuro-electric signals will increasingly replace "speech" (hominid grunts) after space migration.

When humans have climbed out of the atmosphere-gravity well of planetary life, accelerated sixth circuit contelligence will make possible high-energy communication with "Higher Intelligences," i.e., ourselves-in-the-future and other post-terrestrial races.

It is charmingly simple and obvious, once we realize that the spaced-out neural experiences really are extraterrestrial, that getting high and spacing out are accurate metaphors. Circuit V neurosomatic rapture is preparation for the next step in our evolution, migration off the planet. Circuit VI is preparation for the step after that, interspecies communication with advanced entities possessing electronic (post-verbal) tunnel-realities.

Circuit VI is the "universal translator" often imagined by science-fiction writers, already built into our brains by the DNA tape. Just as the circuits of the future butterfly are already built into the caterpillar.

VII. THE NEUROGENETIC CIRCUIT
The seventh brain kicks into action when the nervous system begins to receive signals from WITHIN THE INDIVIDUAL NEURON, from the DNA-RNA dialogue. The first to achieve this mutation spoke of "memories of past lives," "reincarnation," "immortality," etc. That these adepts were recording something real is indicated by the fact that many of them (especially Hindu and Sufis) gave marvelously accurately poetic vistas of evolution 1,000 or 2,000 years before Darwin, and foresaw Superhumanity before Nietzsche.
The "akashic records" of Theosophy, the "collective unconscious" of Jung, the "phylogenetic unconscious" of Grof and Ring, are three modern metaphors for this circuit. The visions of past and future evolution described by those who have had "out-of-body" experiences during close-to-death episodes also describes the trans-time circuit VII tunnel-reality.

Specific exercises to trigger circuit VII are not to be found in yogic teaching; it usually happens, if at all, after several years of the kind of advanced rajah yoga that develops circuit VI facility.

The specific circuit VII neurotransmitter is, of course LSD. (Peyote and psilocybin produce some circuit VII experiences also.)

Circuit VII is best considered, in terms of 1977 science, as the genetic archives, activated by anti-histone proteins. The DNA memory coiling back to the dawn of life. A sense of the inevitability of immortality and interspecies symbiosis comes to all circuit VII mutants; we now see that this, also, is an evolutionary forecast, since WE STAND RIGHT NOW ON THE DOOR-STEP OF EXTENDED LONGEVITY LEADING TO IMMORTALITY.

The exact role of the right-lobe circuits and the reason for their activation in the 1960s cultural revolution now becomes clear. As sociologist F.M. Esfandiary writes in UPWINGERS, "Today when we speak of immortality and of going to another world we no longer mean these in a theological or metaphysical sense. People are now traveling to other worlds. People are now striving for immortality. Transcendence is no longer a metaphysical concept. It has become reality."

The evolutionary function of the seventh circuit and its evolutionary, aeon-spanning tunnel-reality is to prepare us for conscious immortality and interspecies symbiosis.


VIII. THE NEURO-ATOMIC CIRCUIT
Hold on to your hats and breathe deeply--this is the farthest-out that human intelligence has yet ventured.
Consciousness probably precedes the biological unit or DNA tape-loop. "Out-of-body experiences," "astral projection," contact with alien (extraterrestrial?) "entities" or with a galactic Overmind, etc., such as I've experienced, have all been reported for thousands of years, not merely by the ignorant, the superstitious, the gullible, but often by the finest minds among us (Socrates, Giordano Bruno, Edison, Buckminster Fuller, etc.). Such experiences are reported daily to parapsychologists and have been experienced by such scientists as Dr. John Lilly and Carlos Castaneda. Dr. Kenneth Ring has attributed these phenomena to what he calls, very appropriately, "the extraterrestrial unconscious."

Dr. Leary suggests that circuit VIII is literally neuro-atomic--infra, supra and meta-physiological--a quantum model of consciousness and/or a conscious model of quantum mechanics by the turned-on physicists discussed previously (Prof. John Archibald Wheeler, Saul-Paul Sirag, Dr. Fritjof Capra, Dr. Jack Sarfatti, etc.) indicates strongly that the "atomic consciousness" first suggested by Leary in "The Seven Tongues of God" (1962) is the explanatory link which will unite parapsychology and paraphysics into the first scientific empirical experimental theology in history.

When the nervous system is turned on to this quantum-level circuit, space-time is obliterated. Einstein's speed-of-light barrier is transcended; in Dr. Sarfatti's metaphor, we escape "electromagnetic chauvinism." The contelligence within the quantum projection booth IS the entire cosmic "brain," just as the micro-miniaturized DNA helix IS the local brain guiding planetary evolution. As Lao-tse said from his own Circuit VIII perspective, "The greatest is within the smallest."

Circuit VIII is triggered by Ketamine, a neuro-chemical researched by Dr. John Lilly, which is also (according to a wide-spread but unconfirmed rumor) given to astronauts to prepare them for space. High doses of LSD also produce some circuit VIII quantum awareness.

This neuro-atomic contelligence is four mutations beyond terrestrial domesticity. (The current ideological struggle is between circuit IV tribal moralists-or-collectivists and circuit V hedonic individualists.) When our need for higher intelligence, richer involvement in the cosmic script, further transcendence, will no longer be satisfied by physical bodies, not even by immortal bodies hopping across space-time at Warp 9, circuit VIII will open a further frontier. New universes and realities. "Beyond theology: the science and art of Godmanship," as Alan Watts once wrote.

It is therefore possible that the mysterious "entities" (angels and extraterrestrials) monotonously reported by circuit VIII visionaries are members or races already evolved to this level. But it is also possible, as Leary and Sarfatti more recently suggest, that They are ourselves-in-the-future.

The left-lobe terrestrial circuits contain the learned lessons of our evolutionary past (and present). The right-lobe extraterrestrial circuits are the evolutionary script for out future.

Thus far, there have been two alternative explanations of why the Drug Revolution happened. The first is presented in a sophisticated way by anthropologist Weston LaBarre, and in an ignorant, moralistic way by most anti-drug propaganda in the schools and mass media. This explanation says, in essence, that millions have turned away from the legal DOWN drugs to illegal HIGH drugs because we are living in troubled times and many are seeking escape into fantasy.

This theory, at its best, only partially explains the ugliest and most publicized aspect of the revolution--the reckless drug abuse characteristic of the immature. It says nothing about the millions of respectable doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc., who have turned away from second circuit intoxication with booze to fifth circuit rapture with weed.

Nor does it account at all for the thoughtful, philosophical sixth circuit investigations of persons of high intelligence and deep sensibility, such as Aldous Huxley, Dr. Stanley Grof, Masters-Houston, Alan W. Watts, Carlos Castaneda, Dr. John Lilly and thousands of scientific and lay researchers on consciousness.

A more plausible theory, devised by psychiatrist Norman Zinberg out of the work of Marshall McLuhan, holds that modern electronic media have so shifted the nervous system's parameters that young people no longer enjoy "linear" drugs like alcohol and find meaning only in "non-linear" weed and psychedelics.

This is certainly part of the truth, but it is too narrow and overstresses TV and computers without sufficiently stressing the general technological picture--the ongoing Science-Fiction Revolution of which the most significant aspects are Space Migration, Increased Intelligence and Life Extension, which Leary has condensed into his SMI²LE formula.

Space Migration plus Increased Intelligence plus Life Extension means expansion of humanity into all space-time. SM + I² + LE = infinity.

Without totally endorsing Charles Fort's technological mysticism ("It steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time"), it is obvious that the DNA metaprogram for planetary evolution is far wiser than any of our individual nervous systems--which are, in a sense, giant robots or sensors for DNA. Early science-fiction of brilliant writers like Stapledon, Clarke, Heinlein; Kubrick's 2001--all were increasingly clear DNA signals transmitted through the intuitive right lobe of sensitive artists, preparing us for the extraterrestrial mutation.

It is scarcely coincidental that mainstream "literary" intellectuals--the heir of the Platonic-aristocratic tradition that a gentleman never uses his hands, monkeys with tools or learns a manual craft--despise both science-fiction and the dope culture. Nor is it coincidental that the WHOLE EARTH CATALOGS - created by Stewart Brand, a graduate of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters--are the New Testament of the rural drop-out culture, each issue bulging with tons of eco-technological information about all the manual, dextrous, gadgety know-how that Plato and his heirs consider fit only for slaves. Not surprisingly, Brand's latest publication, CO-EVOLUTION QUATERLY, has been devoted to publicizing Prof. Gerard O'Neill's space-habitat, L5.

Nor is it an accident that dopers seem to prefer science-fiction to any other reading, even including the extraterrestrial-flavored Hindu scriptures and occult-shamanic circuit VI-VIII trip-poets like Crowley and Hesse.

The circuit VI drugs may have contributed much to the metaprogramming consciousness that has led to sudden awareness of "male chauvinism" (women's liberationists), "species chauvinism" (ecology, Lilly's dolphin studies), "type-G star chauvinism" (Carl Sagan), even "oxygen chauvinism" (the CETI conference), etc. The imprinted tunnel-realities which identify one as "white-male-American-earthian" etc. or "black-female-Cuban" etc. are no longer big enough to enclose our exploding contelligence.

As TIME magazine said on November 26, 1973, "Within ten years, according to pharmacologists, they will have perfected pills and cranial electrodes of providing life-long bliss for everyone on Earth." The 1960s hysteria about weed and acid was just the overture to this fifth circuit break-through. Nathan S. Kline, M.D., predicts real aphrodisiacs, drugs to speed up learning, drugs to foster or terminate any behavior. ... Those who were jailed or beaten by cops in the 1960s were forerunners of the Revolution of Inner Technology.

STAR TREK is a better guide to the emerging reality than anything in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS. The life-support and defense-system engineer, Scotty (circuit I), the emotional-sentimental Dr. McCoy (circuit II), the logical science officer Mr. Spock (circuit III) and the alternately paternalistic and romantic Captain Kirk (circuit IV) are perpetually voyaging through our future neurological history and encountering circuit V, VI, VII, and VIII intelligences, however crudely presented.

In short, the various levels of consciousness and circuits we have been discussing, and illustrating, are all biochemical imprints in the evolution of the nervous system. Each imprint creates a bigger tunnel-reality. In the Sufi metaphor, the donkey on the which we ride becomes a different donkey after each imprint. The metaprogrammer continually learns more and is increasingly able to be aware of itself operating. We are thus evolving to intelligence-studying-intelligence (the nervous system studying the nervous system) and are more and more capable of accelerating our own evolution.

Leary now symbolizes intelligence-studying-intelligence by the mark, I². On the lower levels, you see with one "I", so to speak. On the higher levels, you see with many "I"s, and space-time shifts from three Euclidean dimensions to non-Euclidean multi-dimensionality.

NB : I am convinced of the existence of circuit 1 to 5, and that I have briefly experienced circuit 6 on one or two occasions. It is these experiences that I was refering to earlier. This is entirely subjective and I would not even try to convince anyone of it who did not show an interest. I would again refer them to Wilsons book, mentioned in a previous post, which serves as a practical guide for getting to circuit 5. This defies belief until you read the book.

Circuit 7 remains elusive, but I can hope.

Circuit 8, or 'cosmic fusion', refers to the ultimate mystical experience that even only a minority of Buddhists experience, and none will discuss.


..... Okay. I'll wait for the artillery to start coming in.....

Not from me; I wish to thank you for your posts and references. I am going through them now and will order the book you recommend (though I do hope it is a little better founded than "The Celestine Prophecy," which was thought provoking but unconvincing).

Rick