Change Your Brain Chapter 8 By Timothy Leary

Get Out of Your Mind

In 1964 the first commercial book summarizing LSD experimentation was edited by David Solomon, an early pioneer in psychedelic drug research who served a cruelly long sentence in an English prison for manufacture of LSD. The British judge who sentenced Solomon justified the Turkish barbarism on on the grounds that Solomon had influenced millions of minds through his writings about drugs. This 20th century scholar was jailed for his ideas! Reflect for a moment on the melancholy fact that a pioneer scholar languished in prison for, among other things, publishing the book for which much material presented here (in Change Your Brain, by Timothy Leary) was used in its introduction.

A bourgeois hysteria about recreational drugs that convulsed the United States

Many ethnologists have noted that in dealing with cultural change, British and Western European countries run about ten years behind America. The bourgeois hysteria about recreational drugs that convulsed the United States during the Nixon administration has now moved eastward to 19th-century "Europe, where police officials and moralists have a new victimless crime to persecute.

Our team made three important contributions to neuro-logic. Major was the Motto: To us your head you have to go out of your mind which solves the classic dilemma of prescientific psychology and philosophy. We cannot study the brain, the instrument for fabricating the realities we inhabit, using the mental constructs of the past.

We cannot study the brain, the instrument for fabricating the realities we inhabit, using the mental constructs of the past.

Visionary plants like the peyote cactus, the divine mushrooms of Mexico divinatory vines and roots have been used for thousands of years. Today's technology provides synthetics of the active ingredients of these ancient and vulnerable concoctions. These foods and drugs produce ecstasy, the most sought after and most dread experience known to man. Ex-stasis means, literally, out of , or released from a fixed or unmoving condition. Some theorists like to suppose a steady growth in human consciousness; others, especially Eastern philosophers, point to alternating cycles of expansion and contraction and warn that man's awareness may contract down to the robot narrow precision of certain over organized species of life. The anthill and the computer remind us that increased efficiency does not necessarily mean expanded awareness. I believe psychedelic drugs and their effects should be viewed in the context of this emergent philosophy of evolution of intelligence.

Lord of All Species

The Renaissance-Reformation mythos would have us believe man is the chosen lord of all species. But in the last few decades, scientific instrumentation has confronted man with visions, vistas, and processes that have thoroughly dissipated his philosophic securities. Astronomers speak of billions

Our present mental machinery cannot possibly handle the whirling, speed-of-light, trackless processes of our brain, our organ of consciousness itself.

of light years, physicists of critical nuclear process structures that last only microseconds. The genetic blueprinting strands are so compact that they seed of every human being on earth today could be contained in a box 1/8 inch on a side. The new scientific data define man as an animal only dimly aware of the energies and wisdom surrounding and radiating through him.

We can use our rational faculties to change our instruments and language, invent new mathematical and symbols to deal with processes beyond our neurological scope. But then comes the neurological implosion. Rational consciousness is a fragile, tissue-thin artifact easily blown away by the slightest alteration of biochemistry, by the simplest external stimulation - for example, by a few microvolts strategically introduced into specific areas of the brain, or by the removal of accustomed stimulation.

A Being uncertain, ready to spin out unproven hypotheses is a sign of the preliminary, rapidly changin speculaton that inevitablty characterizes a new breakthrough in the realm of ideas.

The potential of cerebral association is of the order of thirteen billion to the twenty-five-thousandth power, per second. But we think rationally at a maximum rate of three concepts - ten phonemes - a second. Our present mental machinery cannot possibly handle the whirling, speed-of-light, trackless processes of our brain, our organ of consciousness itself.

The Paradox

To use our heads, to push out beyond words, space-time categories, social identifications, models and concepts, it becomes necessary to go out of our generally rational minds. If we at times seem uncertain, too ready to spin our unproven by protheses, this is a sing of the preliminary, rapidly changing speculation that inevitably characterizes a new breakthrough in the realm of ideas.

And from Chapter 9:

From the standpoint of established values, the psychedelic process is dangerous and insane - a deliberate pscyhotization, a suicidal undoing of the equilibrium man should be striving for. With its internal, invisible, indescribable phenomena, the psychedelic experience is incomprehensible to a rational, achievement-oriented, conformist philosophy. but to one ready to experience the exponential view of the universe, psychedelic experience is exquisitely effective preparation for the inundation of data and problems to come.