Timothy Leary's dead--not just on the outside, looking in, as he does in this,  the most (and only) humorous exposition of primate psychology ever to come from the pen of a (formerly) mainstream author and researcher. (R.A. Wilson is arguably funnier than Leary, but he has never been mainstream.)  Formerly mainstream-- for this book was originally written (and published as Exo-Psychology in 1977) while Leary was in jail for that most victimless of crimes, the possession of marihuana.

     Stop.  No.  Marihuana use is not a victimless crime.  Look at the avalanche of propaganda and drug testing that has been employed to bury the consciousness revolution; look to the source of this spew of lies, psychological mind-control, and intrusion into the private lives of millions (brought to you by the same politicians who trumpet loudly about getting the government off the backs of [rich] people),  and you will see who is victimized by marihuana use:  peddlers of plastic inanities, control freaks from business, government, and 'religion' who can't stomach fun;  the legions of the secretly scared whose happiness depends on cash flow, distraction, and the absolute absence of anything spontaneous anywhere.
 

DOMESTICATED PRIMATES:  Humans who do not think for themselves.  Human beings who belong to tribes,  states, churches, rigid organizations, nations, industrial societies.  The stages which precede individual cyber-life. This is another typical snide Sufi (Gurdjieffian) barb at people who do not think for themselves....To label fellow human beings as belonging to primitive stages of evolution does not insure immediate popularity.  This satirical usage reflects the authorâs traditional, Celtic playful arrogance, here inflated by jailhouse blues.

     To these sick, sad people, the presence in the world of a plant that anyone can grow, anywhere (a window box or two could easily supply the average New Yorker), that can relax physical and mental pain, loosen neural pathways (and thus encourage original thinking), and help break down the barriers between people is anathema.
     --Wow, and we havenât even gotten to LSD yet.

     Oh, yes--LSD--Tim was the Prometheus who brought this sacred fire from the elite to the masses  As a psychologist he had zeroed in on flashes of profound insight as the crucible in which people could make deep, lasting changes in their lives and habits,  and when he discovered that psychedelics could reliably produce those insights, what else could he, as a man of conscience, do but spread the word?
 

Once the First Circuit has imprinted a fear stimulus, the only way this chemico-electric synaptic pattern can be changed is to suspend or replace the wiring.  The intransigence of human ãphobiasä and ãsecurity blanketsä is caused by imprints. The only way to rewire neural patterns is to interfere with the neurotransmitter sequence at the synapse, thus retracting the old imprint and allowing for a new imprinting.  Shock, illness, trauma, drugs, child delivery, stimulus deprivation and electrical charge are the only ways to change the chemistry of the synapse.  When action inside the body becomes overwhelmingly intense so as to alter synapse chemistry, the imprint life-lines to the external environment are retracted.  The chance to re-imprint is offered. When the concept of neural imprinting is understood, techniques for psychological treatment will be changed.  The doctor will teach the patient the principles of re-imprinting and the patient will select the new reality SHe wishes to create.  Democracy and collaboration are necessary in neurologic treatment.  The doctor cannot prescribe or control the treatment, because the result is a new reality for  the patient.

   And when Leary further discovered ancient religious texts that seemed to be designed to teach those ways, he used his power and position to disseminate them.  Many of us first experienced Padmasambava and Tibetan Buddhism as a living force through his reworking The Bardo Thodol into The Psychedelic Experience, a book Leary undoubtedly hoped would sell in the tens of millions.  But he left himself vulnerable, far too vulnerable, and the government largely succeeded in discrediting, silencing, and ultimately jailing him, thus effectively decapitating the psychedelic movement.  The movie Dazed and Confused has been decried as a 'pro-drug' comedy; when I saw it, I cried at the shallowness and absence of wisdom/teachings that it portrayed.
 

 The dismal fact about casual LSD sessions is that the ill-prepared person tends to re-imprint the past conditioned structure, thus charging with new energy the habit patterns of the old island reality.

     That Tim Leary was undismayed by his fall speaks to the seriousness of his calling as a bringer of light.  Not only was Info-psychology written in jail, it was written while Leary was in solitary confinement.   Leary used this time as a time of retreat, a time to grasp not only the past but the future of human evolution, and to map that evolution on the chakra system, all the while prophesying the computer revolution with his constant references to intelligence and information as the modes in which human evolution was imminent.
 

These four sciences (neurology, ethology, neurochemistry, information science) provide an impressive convergence of evidence suggesting that the brain is a bio-electric-computer in which each nerve impulse acts as an information "quanta" or "bit"; that the nervous system is structurally wired into genetically pre-programmed circuits designed to automatically select and relay certain perceptual cues and to discharge rote reactions; that imprinting of models accidentally present in the environment at critical periods determines the tunnel realities in which humans live.....

There can be no question that humanity has begun its migration to interplanetary and eventual interstellar existence. The effects of this transition on the nervous system and the DNA code will be profound.  Just as amphibian and land-dwelling organisms mutated rapidly, developing the neural and physiological equipment for the new environment--so so will humans mutate rapidly living in High Orbit....

The psychological effects will be dramatic.  Space migration requires accelerated, relativistic, multi-dimensional flexibility of which the nervous system is capable.  It is inevitable that extra-planetary humans will be as advanced beyond current earth-dwellers as 'man' is beyond the cave-dwelling ancestors.

      This fascination with space migration is a failing of the book, or perhaps a failing of our culture; it is ironic that, as we begin to actually detect other solar systems in the universe, it has become economically more difficult for us to actually explore off-planet; Leary expected that there would be functional space colonies by now.  Instead, there is only Mir, held together with chewing gum and bailing wire while billions of dollars and millions of gallons and kilowatts of irreplaceable energy are wasted on war machines.  LSD is not only illegal but virtually unavailable; perhaps we will sink into post-apocalyptic barbarism, or post-industrial ant-heap fascism, and never leave the planet, and Timothyâs elegant epistles will be remembered only as a highway sign to what might have been. Perhaps, though, we are too far down the evolutionary ways to turn back anymore, acid or no acid.
 

 The brain is an extra-terrestrial organ.  The brain is an alien intelligence.  The brain has no more concern for earthly affairs than the cultured, sympathetic traveller for the native village in which SHe spends the night. The discovery that the brain, which one has naively considered one's own ego-tool, is actually an alien presence (viewing the host-personality with the aesthetic eye which an elegant aristocrat might cast upon an ignornant, gross, uneducated, opinionated, irascible rural inn-keeper) is shocking to the unprepared LSD-user and can lead to frenzies of shame and humiliation.  The so-called 'bad trip' is often nothing more than the 'ego' viewing itself through the clear lens of its own Higher Intelligence... LSD activates post-terrestrial contelligence.  Humanityâs home is in space.  Humanity's natural atmosphere is zero-gravity.  We are designed to float, to evolve into flight, to swim around in null-G freedom.

     Can we realize this vision for mankind?  The Tibetans say that Dzogchen is practiced in thirteen other solar systems than this one.  Will we take our place in the intergalactic sangha?

Info-Psychology, Timothy Leary, Falcon Press, 1989