Toward the end of the visit, I showed Tim my equation
Bn = B0 + Pn + MS
where Bn is new behavior, B0 is old behavior, Pn is a deliberate new program for self-change and MS is a metaprogramming substance such as LSD.
Leary approved of the equation warmly. “You could write another one,” he added, “with Cn and C0.”
“For consciousness?” I asked.
“Exactly. And another one for In and I0.”
I thought of ideology and decided he couldn’t mean that; he is aware that ideology and morality are the two chief causes of human suffering. “Intensity?” I hazarded.
Tim folded his hands in prayer and looked upward with exaggerated worship. “Intelligence,” he said, naming his God.
The prospects of immortality
Some people want to achieve immortality through their works or their descendants. I prefer to achieve immortality by not dying.
– Woody Allen in the Immortalist magazine
As soon as my first interview with Dr. Leary appeared in the San Francisco Phoenix, I was deluged with information about that group which Carl Spann calls “the Immortalist Underground.” These are scientists, mostly young and mostly in the field of molecular biology or gerontology, who were turned on by Professor R.C.W. Ettinger’s The Prospects of Immortality, published way back in 1964. This group believes, quite firmly, that the discovery of the DNA structure (the double helix) by Crick and Watson has opened the possibility of reprogramming biological processes and achieving literal immortality.
How close is immortality? We call a few witnesses:
“A decade or two from now,” Hubert Humphrey has said, “we may look back to present-day attitudes toward death as ‘primitive’ and ‘medieval’ in the way we now look back upon a once-dreaded killer like tuberculosis.” Senator Humphrey said this after visiting Russia and learning of their research on immortality.53
“No less than three separate branches of science are doing research in prolonging life,” says the Abolish Death Committee of Berkeley, “namely the sciences of cryobiology, biology and cybernetics . . . Which one will be successful? No one knows. But because more than one science is hard at work on this problem, an early solution is forecast.”
“Immortalism,” says Carl Spann, an Immortalist activist, “is a tremendous step in the evolution of man. It’s the development of an immortal state of consciousness . . . stoned people in a stoned world, high on life . . . Mortal man, like Nixon, is still committed to nation-states and power-bloc thinking which is ultimately globally destructive. Mortal man pollutes the planet because he won’t be around to suffer the consequences.
“Getting stoned on dope,” Spann adds thoughtfully, “is a defense-mechanism against global insanity. And yet, marijuana, hashish, acid and the consciousness-expanding drugs have opened the way to the Immortal state of consciousness: Samadhi, satori, alpha and theta states, the whole enlightenment trip that provides an escape from Mortal man’s tight little illusions of himself.”54
Way back in the Dark Ages, on September 24, 1964, the Abolish Death Committee from Berkeley staged a demonstration in front of a funeral parlor, carrying such signs as “Death is a disease and can be cured,” “Don’t buy the lie,” “Millions Now Living May Never Die” (an old slogan of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who probably never expected either scientific types or hippies to take them up on it), “Immortality NOW!” and “Why die? You Can Be Immortal.”
Presumably, most of the 1964 audience who saw this on the TV news figured the demonstrators were all crazy.
In The Immortality Factor, by Osborn Segerberg, Jr., an amusing chapter called “Prognosis” deals with recent guesstimates by knowledgeable scientists about when extended life will become available. Arthur Clarke (who in 1947 correctly predicted the first unmanned moon-landing for 1959, but was too conservative about the first manned moon-landing and predicted it for 1978) guessed in 1962 that actual immortality would be achieved near the end of the 21st Century. Three years later, in 1964, with more research accomplished, a group of 82 scientific experts was polled, and the majority of them were willing to predict “chemical control of the aging process” by the early part of the 21st Century.
In 1969, two similar polls of expert opinion found “significant extension of life span” predicted by various scientists as occurring between 1993 (the low estimate) and 2017 (the high estimate). By 1971, Dr. Bernard Stehler predicted that we would understand aging within 5 to 10 years and be able to reverse it in 10 to 30 years.55
As Leary points out in Terra II, the greatest bulk of scientific work on this subject, with the most optimistic conclusion emerging, has been done since Dr. Stehler made that guess in 1971.
The Foundation for Research on Immortality, in Sacramento, California, declared in a press release: “It is becoming increasingly clear that we stand literally before an unprecedented shift in our evolutionary direction and potential . . . The pursuit of immortality as a personal goal is no longer just a religious aspiration but has become an actual possibility.”
Pauwels and Bergier, who blew the mind of Europe and America with their incredible Morning of the Magicians, prophesy in their newest book, The Eternal Man, “Perhaps we are even now in the process of building a culture that will know immortality on earth and in heaven . . . 56
Robert Prehoda, M.D., says in his Extended Youth, “It is possible that we may be able to slow down biological aging, doubling or tripling the average life-span. . . . If every case of aging can be corrected and prevented, we might all be potential Methuselahs, living 1,000 years or more.”57
Dr. Bernard Strehler, who has devoted most of his life to longevity research and predicts that we will have life extension in this generation, says also that his ultimate goal is immortality. “Man,” he states flatly, “will never be contented until he conquers death.”58
Novelist Alan Harrington has been calling for a national commitment to death-elimination since 1969, when he published his brilliant polemic The Immortalist (called “the book of the century” by Gore Vidal). “Mobilize the scientists,” Harrington implores us, “spend the money, and hunt down death like an outlaw.”59
Dean F. Jumper, in Man Against Mortality, suggests that humanity may have been specially designed to conquer death. In the war between life and death, Jumper says, “man may be life’s ultimate weapon. He may be designed to make himself and life immortal, the necessary skills and motivations having been built into him.”60 [Italics added.] Achieving immortality not just for ourselves but for all living species is a staggering thought, but it would be the achievement of the Buddhist vow to deliver “all sentient beings” from suffering.
Dr. Alex Comfort, generally regarded as the world’s leading gerontologist by his peers (but better known to the general public for his lubricious The Joy of Sex), said in 1972, “I am confident techniques for slowing and reversing the aging process are close at hand.”61 In 1973, with the synergetic product of another year’s worth of life-extension research achieved in laboratories around the world, Dr. Comfort was willing to be more specific than merely saying “close at hand.” He said, in fact, “If the scientific and medical resources of the United States alone were mobilized, aging would be conquered within a decade.” 62 [Italics added.]
Of course, for every 10 or 20 scientists who will admit they believe in possible longevity, there is only one who will go so far as to speak of physical immortality. Nonetheless, every breakthrough in life extension means that some of us will live long enough to be around for the next breakthrough, and the next, until immortality is actually achieved.
Dr. Leary points out in this connection that most of the life-extension talk in scientific circles these days is earth-bound, terracentric, a hangover of what Leary calls “closet Ptolemaicism.”
The Lorentz and Einstein equations of space-time relativity leave no doubt that a cruise around the galaxy, such as is projected by Leary and Benner in Terra II, might occupy 400 years elapsed t
ime aboard ship and return to earth circa A.D. 4,500,000,000, Earth-time. Space travel is time travel. If the crew members have life-extension to several hundred years when they blast off early in the next century, they may encounter Higher Intelligences with more advanced life-extension techniques. If not, they will return to an Earth-science four-and-one-half billion years in advance of ours, and reap whatever techniques of life-extension, inhibition of aging, cryonics, rejuvenation, etc. that human ingenuity can devise in four thousand million years.
Current research on inhibition of aging or potential immortality includes:
• The cryologists whose slogan “freeze-wait-reanimate” has gained some notoriety in recent years. (This is only the tip of the iceberg.)
• Dr. John Bjorksten, working on proteins in his own lab in Madison, Wisconsin. In 1973, Dr. Bjorksten spoke of finding a drug that would extend human lifespan to 140 years; in 1976, while this chapter was being written, Bjorksten said, in a San Francisco Chronicle interview, that he hoped human life could be extended to 800 years.
• A group at the University of Michigan who are already testing a drug that might expand life to 200 years or longer.
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is researching BHT, a chemical that might increase longevity 50%.
• All the organ-transplant people.
• The cyberneticists, who may find a way to “code a total personality, keep it on file in an electronic circuit, and reanimate it at any time.”
• Microwave Instrument Co. in Del Mar, California. They are researching anti-aging drugs, and might have some on the market in three years.
• The parapsychologists, who are collecting data which challenges the bedrock of physics, indicate that all science may be revolutionized at any time, and thus open possibilities that have previously been unthinkable.
• And, finally, nobody knows how much work the Russians are doing in this field, but we have evidence that they are probably ahead of us.
The quantum jump from “life extension” to “immortality” is the space-time leap across galaxies. The above illustration shows time-relativity on a 60-year cruise. Terra II plans to travel for 400 years and return to Earth 4 billion years later.
During another visit to Vacaville, I told Dr. Leary that some of the people who were most enthusiastic about his drug research in the early ’60s are most hostile to his current neurogenetic and cosmic projects.
“I can’t help that,” he said. “The drugs were tools to me, microscopes. I used them to change focus in various ways, to learn the full potentials of the human nervous system. Those who imprinted my first transmissions may have stopped growing at, say, the Fifth Circuit, Body Rapture. They have become Hedonic Engineers, and no more.
“But the Turn On is just the first step. The message now is that the message keeps changing. Intelligence must increase as consciousness expands, or we get burned-out. I’m just beginning, in the last year. I’ve just wised up . . .”
“Yes,” he added, “I got rid of my own fears in the ’60s, but now I have no fear of other people’s fears. Truth. Truth. Truth. That’s the highest circuit of all . . .”
He mentioned a prominent counter-culture hero: “He hates me now, because I’m not suffering. If I were in misery, he’d love me. He suffers every time he drags himself out of bed, I’m sure. But glorification of suffering is one of the larval reflexes we must lose. I’m free, you see, and those people can’t stand that. They want to feel sorry for me. But I’m too busy trying to free the rest of humanity out there.
“They don’t have to keep repeating the old misery imprints. They can become immortal and go to the stars . . .”
Stopping the biological clock
Carl Spann put me in touch with another local Immortalist, Paul Segall, Ph.D., a researcher at U.C.-Berkeley. Dr. Segall has been involved in life-extension work for 17 years.
Dr. Segall looks and dresses exactly like anybody’s idea of a Hippie New Leftist. He belongs to Earth People’s Park, an association of former ’60s radicals which owns several houses in Berkeley and land in Oregon. E.P.P. runs a rescue service for people in trouble, runaways, dopers and others who can’t deal with the kind of help you get from government offices. In a very real sense, Earth People represents the survival, despite the Nixon counter-revolution, of the early, nonviolent New Left in all its anarchist idealism and grass-roots Populism.
With one difference. Due to Paul’s influence, almost all the Earth People are Immortalists, and many of them have returned to college to seek science degrees.
Paul says he was “drenched in science from the cradle” — his father and an uncle were both engineers, and another uncle was a chemist. Paul himself set out to be an engineer — until a Turn-On experience in an art class. As he tells it, “They were showing slides of cave paintings from 30,000 years ago, and I suddenly felt this urgent inner question, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ I mean, ‘What am I doing with my life?’ I became an immortalist then and there, years before I read any of the immortalist literature.”
Paul changed his major to biology and set out to find out precisely why every complex organism must die and what he could do about it. Over the past 17 years he has spent time in research on seven approaches to longevity-immortality:
1. Suspended-animation studies, in which life processes are turned off and then restored.
2. Gerontology, the study of the processes of aging on biological and chemical levels.
3. Transplantation, which might eventually allow us to go on replacing organs until the point at which “we are still there but “our” whole body is new . . .
4. Prosthetics and cyborgs (human-machine combinations).
5. Resuscitation — literally bringing back the dead. In the last decade this has been moved upward from resuscitation a few seconds after “clinical death” to five minutes later, and Paul thinks we will soon have it up to a half-hour.
6. Identity-reconstruction through cloning.
7. Regeneration, the study of the processes by which cells renew themselves.
Paul is also an executive of the Bay Area Cryonics Society, which is a group of scientists who have arranged to have their bodies frozen at “clinical death” in hopes of resuscitation by techniques to be discovered in the future.
In the mid-sixties Paul attended a lecture by Dr. Leary which he found to be a turning point in his own intellectual development. What Leary had communicated, Paul says, was that “everything we experience is hallucination, maya. The reality is a structural-mathematical-logical principle that we don’t see. That is, each person creates his own universe out of his own neurological processes. Science is nothing else but the search for the unseen structural integrities that underlie these appearances.”
Paul generalized this Buddhist-scientific synthesis into the theory that we are information.
“The ultimate reason that Immortality is possible,” Paul told me, “is that we are not the stuff we’re made of. Literally. You can trace a chemical through the body with radioactive tracers, but the body goes on after the chemical has left. We are not the chemicals but the pattern, the mathematical construct. You might say that the formula for Immortality is Cybernetics + DNA. But DNA is itself Cybernetics, the first application of cybernetic information theory to biology. DNA is entirely an information system, a programming system. Cybernetics is the key, the realization that we are programmed and can be re-programmed.”
In recent years, Paul’s studies have concentrated on finding the chemical trigger that sets the senescence-death program into action. In fact, he believes he was the first one to introduce the concept of “programmed death” into scientific literature.
“Back in the ’60s,” Paul reminisces, “biologists were still regarding aging as a stochastic process — the random decay of random cells. One day I met a woman I hadn’t seen in a year, and the change in her was so complete that I immediately thought of the word ‘metamorphosis.’ I suddenly realized I might hav
e found what I was looking for. Suppose aging isn’t stochastic and random. It might be a definite, pre-programmed metamorphosis just like the evolution from fertilized egg to new-born infant, or the biopsychic mutation at puberty, or the tadpole-to-frog or caterpillar-to-butterfly transformation.” Paul developed the theory that all ontogeny is preprogrammed. “I think I was the very first to put this idea on paper, and I am delighted that it is the working hypothesis of increasing numbers of investigators,” he says.
“Traits are not naturally selected only for individual survival, as Darwin thought,” Paul insists. “Some are selected for species survival. Pre-programmed death was an unthinkable concept when we regarded the individual as our monad; how could natural selection produce such a genetic program if selection is only for the advantage of the individual? But if some traits are for the advantage of the group, and for group evolution, it all falls into place. Throw out the ’77 models, bring in the ’78 models. Once again, I found Dr. Leary and Alan Watts, with their holistic trans-ego concepts, very helpful in firming up my thought.”
Dr. Segall has found three ways to reverse the aging trigger in experimental rats — to stop aging for periods equal to the normal life-span of the animal and then allow normal aging to begin. He believes that his research will soon isolate the exact trigger that starts or stops aging.
Curiously, all three of Paul’s methods deprive the brain of tryptophan, directly or indirectly. He believes this is a significant clue. “Tryptophan,” he says, “is very closely related to serotonin, the basic brain-bonder, and to the psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, DMT, mescaline and so forth. The stopping of time experienced by psychedelic users may be related to tryptophan deprivation while the psychedelic is in the system. ”
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