Tunnel-Realities and Imprints written by Robert Anton Wilson
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 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 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.
(I think MDMA is in part a 4th-circuit activator that promotoes social
cohesion - Paul)
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.
Source: Cosmic Trigger, 1977
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