Star Larvae Addendum: Exo-Psychology Revisited

Link for this Post: Star Larvae Addendum: Exo-Psychology Revisited.

There was a time, a quarter century ago, when the hippest thing you could be doing was reading Timothy Leary essays written like channeled manuscripts, published from behind prison walls.

Here is a bit of vintage Tim quoted on the website which is the subject of this post:

The juvenilization of brain circuits induced by weightlessness will produce a corresponding juvenilization of subjectivity. The psychedelic experience provides a preview of the de-conditioned, de-differentiated consciousness likely to characterize the juvenilized minds of extraterrestrials.

And here is an excerpt from this essay itself, published by a guy who blogs under the name Heresiarch:

Leary published "Exo-Psychology" in 1977, an ambitious and provocative book that modestly billed itself as "a manual on the use of the human nervous system according to the instructions of the manufacturers." Despite the book's appeal to teleology and Higher Intelligence, it had little to do with conventional religious thinking. Leary dismissed bible stories, except sardonically to note that Eden was the site of the first drug bust, choosing instead to search for Higher Intelligence far from religious—and scientific—orthodoxies. The psychedelic experience convinced him that DNA contains not only the past, but also the future, of evolution and that both are available for viewing.

An academic psychologist by training, Leary primary interest was in the study of subjective experience, and he proposed that modalities of mind, as well as of body, are pre-coded into the stages of evolution. His model of developmental psychology, based on eight "brain circuits" that are activated sequentially—during both the ontogeny of an individual and species-wide during phylogeny—includes terrestrial and post-terrestrial stages. The first four circuits govern the experiences of planetbound life. The last four are for extraterrestrial use. Leary came to believe that psychedelic drugs temporarily activate (or emulate or simulate) the extraterrestrial circuits. Although unwieldy and possibly maladaptive in the terrestrial context, the psychedelic experience delivers a preview of modes of consciousness that will be normal for space dwellers. The psychedelic experience will find its proper field of application and adaptation, according to Leary's teleological model of evolution, outside the confines of gravity.

When it became clear that space colonization and post-terrestrial consciousness lay a little too far in the future, Leary re-issued "Exo-Psychology" as "Info-Psychology." A sidelining of his extraterrestrial ideals, the re-issuing appeared to be a transparent move to cash in on the personal computing boom of the 1980s. Leary proved adept at changing lanes and became an elder statesman of the cyberpunks at about the same time that William Burroughs re-emerged as an impresario of the music and poetry punks. Marketing maneuvers aside, Leary's "Exo-Psychology" stands on its own, and thirty years after its publication, the work deserves a re-examination. It is relevant to the star larvae hypothesis in a number of ways: It proposes that evolution unfolds according to a program, i.e., that phylogeny imitates ontogeny, that life arrives on planets from space and returns to space after its planetary incubation, and that consciousness mutates/metamorphoses concurrently with the body when planetary life becomes post-planetary.

Reading this stuff takes my mind back to one of the first evenings I spent with Timothy Leary in the fall of 1977 at a home I shared with author Peter Stafford.

When I was in high school the other kids used to call me "The Professor" mainly because I loved to give presentations in science or English class about space travel. Having grown up on a diet of Sci Fi and science books about "our future in space," I knew how far off that future would be.

Timothy who did not share this background had become a new convert to migration into space. During the evening's discussion, I respond to his "spacey" ideas about traveling to the stars, "Tim, that is going to be many decades in the future."

Tim glared at me and said, "How do you know?"