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 billion 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 last for life. It also identifies the external stimuli 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 when the older child begins handling artifacts and sending/receiving laryngeal signals (human speech units). If the environment is stimulating to the third circuit, the child takes a “bright” imprint and becomes dextrous and articulate; if the environment is made of stupid people, the child takes a “dumb” imprint, i.e., remains more or less at a 5-year-old stage of artifact clumsiness and symbol-blindness.
In popular speech, the first circuit tunnel-reality is generally called “consciousness” per se: the sense of being here-now, in this body, oriented to the survival of the body. (When you are “un-conscious,” the first circuit is anesthetized and doctors may perform surgery on you or enemies may attack you, and you will not evade them or flee.) The second circuit, in the same vernacular language, is called “ego.” So-called “ego ” is the second circuit mammalian sense of status (importance-unimportance) in the pack or tribe. The third circuit is what we generally call “mind” — the capacity to receive, integrate and transmit signals produced by the hominid hand (artifacts) or the hominid 9 laryngeal muscles (speech).
The imprinting of these three circuits determines, by about age 3½, the basic degree and style of trust/distrust that will color “consciousness,” the degree and style of assertiveness/submissiveness that will determine “ego”-status, and the degree and style of cleverness/clumsiness with which “mind” will handle tools or ideas.
In evolutionary terms, first brain “consciousness” is basically invertebrate, passively floating toward nurture and retreating from danger. Second brain “ego” is mammalian, always struggling for status in the tribal pecking-order. Third brain “mind” is paleolithic, hooked into human culture and dealing with life through a matrix of human-made gadgets and human-created symbolism.
The fourth brain is post-hominid, specifically characteristic of Homo sapiens, the “domesticated” WoMan. This is:
IV. The socio-sexual circuit. This fourth brain was formed when hominid packs evolved into societies and programmed specific sex-roles for their members, circa 30,000 B.C. It is activated at puberty, when the DNA signals trigger the glandular release of sexual neurochemicals and the metamorphosis to adulthood begins. The first orgasms or mating experiences imprint a characteristic sex-role which, again, is biochemically bonded and remains constant for life, unless some form of brain-washing or chemical re-imprinting is accomplished.
In daily speech, fourth circuit imprints and tunnel-realities are known as the “adult personality.”
Masters and Johnson have demonstrated that specific sexual “dysfunctions” — so-called “perversions,” “fetishes,” low-or-no performance conditions like premature ejaculation, impotence, frigidity, etc., or imprints defined as “sinful” by the local tribe — are determined by specific experiences in early adolescent mating. The same is true of the equally robotic behavior of the “normal,” “well-adjusted” person. The sex-role of the human is as rote and repetitious as that of any other mammal. (Or bird or fish or insect.)
These four circuits are normally all the networks of the brain ever activated. It should now be clear why Leary calls them terrestrial. They have evolved on, and have been shaped by, the gravitational, climatic and energy conditions determining survival and reproduction on this kind of planet circling this variety of Type G star. Intelligent organisms born in outer space, not living at the bottom of a 4,000-mile gravity well, not competing for territory on a finite planet-surface, not limited by the forward-back, up-down, right-left parameters of earthly life, would inevitably develop different circuits, imprinted differently, and not so inflexibly Euclidean.
Forward-back is the basic digital choice programmed by the biocomputer operating on Circuit I: Either advance, go forward, sniff it, touch it, taste it, bite it — or retreat, back away, flee, escape.
Up-down, the basic gravitational sense, appears in all ethological reports of animal combat. Rear up, swell the body to maximum size, growl, howl, shriek — or cringe, drop the tail between the legs, murmur softly, skulk away, crawl and shrink the body size. These are domination and submission signals common to iguana, dog, bird, and the Chairman of the Board of the local bank. These reflexes make up Circuit II “ego.”
Right-left is basic to the polarity of body-design on the planetface. Right-hand dominance, and associated preference for the linear left-lobe functions of the brain, determine 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 the 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.
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 fl
ows 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 of 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 straightforward 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 neuroelectric accelerations, not using third circuit laryngeal-manual symbols but directly via feedback, telepathy and computer link-up. Neuroelectric 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 Hindus 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 can now see that this, also, is an evolutionary forecast, since we stand right now on the doorstep 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.”88
Final Secret of the Illuminati Page 23