Timothy Leary's Eight Circuits of Consciousness
From Robert Anton Wilson's
Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati
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 pyschedelics.
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.
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-dimesionally. 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 Aristolelian 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
larynegeal-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 contellgence 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 Nietzche.
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 contellignence 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 techonological 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 SMIČLE
formula.
Space Migration plus Increased Intelligence plus Life Extension means expansion of
humanity into all space-time. SM + IČ + 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 fith 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, IČ.
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-dimesionality.
By Robert Anton Wilson
