Chaos & Cyberculture, by Timothy Leary, Ph.D.

That's French for "the ancient system," as in the ancient system of feudal privileges and the exercise of autocratic power over the peasants. The ancien regime never goes away, like vampires and dinosaur bones they are always hidden in the earth, exercising a mysterious influence. It is not paranoia to believe that the elites scheme against the common man. Inform yourself about their schemes here.

Re: Chaos & Cyberculture, by Timothy Leary, Ph.D.

Postby admin » Tue Jun 18, 2019 6:59 am

Part 1 of 2

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VII. DE-ANIMATION/RE-ANIMATION
1. Common-Sense Alternatives to Involuntary Death, (co-written with Eric Gullichsen)
2. Hybernating Andy


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VII.1. Common-Sense Alternatives to Involuntary Death

CO-WRITTEN WITH ERIC GULLICHSEN

Death is the ultimate negative patient health outcome.

—William L Roper, Director, Health Care Financing Administration (which administers Medicare)


Most human beings face death with an "attitude" of helplessness, either resigned or fearful. Neither of these submissive, uninformed "angles of approach" to the most crucial event of one's life can be ennobling.

Today, there are many practical options and methods available for navigating the dying process. Passivity, failure to learn about them, might be the ultimate irretrievable blunder. Pascal's famous no-lose wager about the existence of God translates into modern life as a no-risk gamble on the prowess of technology.

For millennia the fear of death has depreciated individual confidence and increased dependence on authority.

True, the loyal members of a familial or racial gene pool can take pride in the successes and survival tenacity of their kinship. For example, around the year 1600, at the height of the obedient, feudal stage, the Chinese philosopher, Li Zhi, wrote a revealing essay outlining “the five ways to die”:

1. death for a worthy cause,
2. death in battle,
3. death as a martyr,
4. death as a loyal minister, unjustly attacked,
5. premature death after finishing some good piece of work.

Thus we see that the aim of the “good (G. Gordon Liddy) life” was one of submission to authority. If your life was dedicated to serving the gene pool, then, logically, your death is the final, crowning sacrifice of your individuality.

But for the humanist who believes in the sanctity of the individual, these traditional prospects are less than exalted. Let’s be honest here. How can you be proud of your past achievements, walk tall in the present, or zap enthusiastically into the future if, awaiting you implacably around some future comer, is Old Mr. D, the Grim Reaper?

What a PR job the wordmakers did to build this death concept into a primetime horror show! The Grave. Mortification. Extinction. Breakdown. Catastrophe. Doom. Finish. Fatality. Malignancy. Necrology. Obituary. The End.

Note the calculated negativity. To die is to croak, to give up the ghost, to bite the dust, to kick the bucket, to perish. To become inanimate, lifeless, defunct, extinct, moribund, cadaverous, necrotic. A corpse, a stiff, a cadaver, a relic, food for worms, a corpus delicti, a carcass. What a miserable ending to the game of life!

Note the calculated negativity. To die is to croak, to give up the ghost, to bite the dust, to kick the bucket, to perish. To become inanimate, lifeless, defunct, extinct, moribund, cadaverous, necrotic. A corpse, a stiff, a cadaver, a relic, food for worms, a corpus delicti, a carcass. What a miserable ending to the game of life!


In the past, the reflexive genetic duty of top management (those in social control of the various gene pools) has been to make humans feel weak, helpless, and dependent in the face of death. The good of the race or nation was ensured at the cost of the sacrifice of the individual. Obedience and submission were rewarded on a time-payment plan. For his/her devotion, the individual was promised immortality in the postmortem hive center variously known as heaven, paradise, or the Kingdom of the lord.


FEAR OF DEATH WAS AN EVOLUTIONARY NECESSITY IN THE PAST

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In the past, the reflexive genetic duty of top management (those in social control of the various gene pools) has been to make humans feel weak, helpless, and dependent in the face of death. The good of the race or nation was ensured at the cost of the sacrifice of the individual.

Obedience and submission were rewarded on a time-payment plan. For his/her devotion, the individual was promised immortality in the postmortem hive center variously known as heaven, paradise, or the Kingdom of the Lord. In order to maintain the attitude of dedication, the gene-pool managers had to control the “dying reflexes,” orchestrate the trigger-stimuli that activate the “death circuits” of the brain. This was accomplished through rituals that imprint dependence and docility when the “dying alarm bells” go off in the brain.

Perhaps we can better understand this imprinting mechanism by considering another set of “rituals,” those by which human hives manage the conception-reproduction reflexes, the fertilization rituals. A discussion of these is less likely to alarm you.

The mechanisms of control imposed by the operation of social machinery are similar in the two cases. Let us “step outside the system” for a moment, to see vividly what is ordinarily invisible because it is so entrenched in our expectation.

At adolescence each kinship group provides morals, rules, taboos, ethical prescriptions to guide the all-important sperm-egg situation.

Management by the individual of the horny DNA machinery is always a threat to hive inbreeding. Dress, grooming, dating, courtship, contraception, abortion patterns are fanatically conventionalized in tribal and feudal societies. Personal innovation is sternly condemned and ostracized. Industrial democracies vary in the sexual freedom allowed individuals, but in totalitarian states, China and Iran, for example, rigid prudish morality controls the mating reflexes and governs boy-girl relations. Under the Chinese dictator Mao, “romance” was forbidden because it weakened dedication to the state, i.e., the local gene pool. If teenagers pilot and select their own mating, then they will be more likely to fertilize outside the hive, more likely to insist on directing their own lives, and, worst of all, less likely to rear their offspring with blind gene-pool loyalty.

Even more rigid social-imprinting rituals guard the “dying reflexes.” Hive control of “death” responses is taken for granted in all precybernetic cultures.

In the past, this conservative degradation of individuality was an evolutionary virtue. During epochs of species stability, when the tribal, feudal, and industrial technologies were being mastered and fine-tuned, wisdom was centered in the gene pool, stored in the collective linguistic consciousness, the racial data base of the hive.

Since individual life was short, brutish, aimless, what a singular learned was nearly irrelevant The world was changing so slowly that knowledge could be embodied only in the breed-culture. Lacking technologies for the personal mastery of transmission and storage of information, the individual was simply too slow and too small to matter. Loyalty to the racial collective was the virtue. Creativity, premature individuation was anti-evolutionary; a weirdo, mutant distraction. Only village idiots would try to commit independent, chaotic, unauthorized thought.

In the feudal and industrial eras, management used the fear of death to motivate and control individuals. Today, politicians use the death-dealing military, the police, and capital punishment to protect the social order. Organized religion maintains its power and wealth by orchestrating and exaggerating the fear of death.

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ANDY FRITH

Among the many things that the pope, the ayatollah, and fundamentalist Protestants agree on is that confident understanding and self-directed mastery of the dying process is the last thing to be allowed to the individual. The very notion of cybernetic postbiologic intelligence or consumer immortality options is taboo, sinful, for formerly valid reasons of gene-pool protection.

Religions have cleverly monopolized the rituals of dying to increase control over the superstitious. Throughout history the priests and mullahs and medical experts have swarmed around the expiring human like black vultures. Death belonged to them.

As we grew up in the 20th Century, we were systematically programmed about how to die. Hospitals are staffed with priests/ministers/rabbis ready to perform the “last rites.” Every army unit has its Catholic chaplain to administer the Sacrament of Extreme Unction (what a phrase, really!) to the expiring soldier. The ayatollah, chief mullah of the Islamic death cult, sends his teen-aged soldiers into the Iraq minefields with dog-tags guaranteeing immediate transfer to the Allah’s destination resort, Koranic Heaven. A terrible auto crash? Call the medics! Call the priest! Call the reverend!

In the industrial society, everything becomes part of big business. Dying involves Blue Cross, Medicare, health-care delivery systems, the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA), terminal patient wards. Undertakers. Cemeteries. The funeral rituals. The monopolies of religion and the assembly lines of top management control the dying and the dead even more efficiently than the living.

For millennia the fear of death has depreciated individual confidence and increased dependence on authority.

 
We recall that knowledge and selective choice about such gene-pool issues as conception, test-tube fertilization, pregnancy, abortion are dangerous enough to the church fathers.

But suicide, right-to-die concepts, euthanasia, life-extension, out-of-body experiences, occult experimentation, astral-travel scenarios, death/rebirth reports, extraterrestrial speculation, cryogenics, sperm banks, egg banks, DNA banks, artificial-intelligence technology— anything that encourages the individual to engage in personal speculation and experimentation with immortality—is anathema to the orthodox seed-shepherds of the feudal and industrial ages.

The cybernetic age we are entering could mark the beginning of a period of enlightened and intelligent individualism, a time unique in history when technology is available to individuals to support a huge diversity of personalized lifestyles and cultures, a world of diverse, interacting, small social groups whose initial-founding membership number is one.


Why? Because if the flock doesn’t fear death, then the grip of religious and political management is broken. The power of the gene pool is threatened. And when control loosens in the gene pool, dangerous genetic innovations and mutational visions tend to emerge.

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THE AGE OF INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY AND SELF-CONTROL

The cybernetic age we are entering could mart the beginning of a period of enlightened and intelligent individualism, a time unique in history when technology is available to individuals to support a huge diversity of personalized lifestyles and cultures, a world of diverse, interacting, small social groups whose initial-founding membership number is one.

The exploding technology of light-speed and multimedia communication lays a delicious feast of knowledge and personal choice within our easy grasp. Under such conditions, the operating wisdom and control naturally passes from aeons-old power of gene pools, and locates in the rapidly self-modifying brains of individuals capable of dealing with an ever-accelerating rate of change.

Aided by customized, personally programmed, quantum-linguistic appliances, individuals can choose their own social and genetic future, and perhaps choose not to “die.”

THE WAVE THEORY OF EVOLUTION

Current theories of genetics suggest that evolution, like everything else in the universe, comes in waves.

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ANDY FRITH

At times of “punctuated evolution,” collective metamorphoses, when many things are mutating at the same time, the ten commandments of the “old ones” become ten suggestions. At such times of rapid innovation and collective mutation, conservative hive dogma can be dangerous, suicidal. Individual experimentation and exploration, the thoughtful methodical scientific challenging of taboos, becomes the key to the survival of the gene school.

As we enter the cybernetic age, we arrive at a new wisdom that broadens our definition of personal immortality and gene-pool survival: the postbiologic options of the information species. A fascinating set of gourmet consumer choices suddenly appear on the pop-up menu of The Evolutionary Cafe.

It is beginning to look as though, in the information society, individual human beings can script, produce, direct their own hybernation and re-animation. Dying becomes a “team sport.”

Here we face mutation shock in its most panicky form. As we have done in understanding earlier mutations, the first step is to develop a new language. We should not impose the values or vocabulary of the past species on the new cybernetic culture.

Would you let the buzzwords of a preliterate, paleolithic cult control your life? Will you let the superstitions of a tribal-village culture (now represented by the pope and the ayatollah) shuffle you off the scene? Will you let the mechanical, planned-obsolescence tactics of the factory, Blue Cross culture manage your existence?

RE-CREATIONAL DYING

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Let us have no more pious, wimpy talk about death. The time has come to talk cheerfully and joke sassily about personal responsibility for managing the dying process. For starters, let’s demystify dying and develop alternative metaphors for consciousness leaving the body. Let us speculate good-naturedly about postbiologic options. Let’s be bold about opening up a broad spectrum of Club-Med postbiologic possibilities. Let us explore the option of recreational dying.  

It is beginning to look as though, in the information society, individual human beings can script, produce, direct their own hybernation and re-animation. Dying becomes a "team sport.”


We recognize that the dying process, which for millennia has been blanketed by taboo and primitive superstition, has suddenly become accessible to human intelligence.


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ANDY FRITH

For starters, let’s replace the word death with the more neutral, precise, scientific term: metabolic coma. And then let’s go on to suggest that this temporary state of coma might be replaced by auto-metamorphosis, a self-controlled change in bodily form, where the individual chooses to change his or her vehicle of existence without loss of consciousness.

Then, let’s distinguish between involuntary and voluntary metabolic coma. Reversible and irreversible dying.

Let’s explore those fascinating borderlands—the periods between body dying and neurological dying and DNA dying in terms of the knowledge-information processing involved.

Let’s collect some data about that even more intriguing zone now beginning to be researched in the cross-disciplinary field of scientific study known as artificial life. What knowledge-information-processing capacities can be preserved after both body death and brain cessation? What natural and artificial systems, from the growth of mineral structures to the self-reproduction of formal mathematical automata, are promising alternative candidates to biology for the support of life?

And then let us perform the ultimate act of human intelligence. Let’s venture with calm, open-minded tolerance and scientific rigor into that perennially mysterious terra incognita and ask the final question: What knowledge-information-processing possibilities can remain after the cessation of all bio-logical life: somatic, neurological, and genetic?

How can human consciousness be supported in digital, light-wave, zero-one wafers outside the moist envelope of graceful, attractive, pleasure-filled meat we now inhabit? How can the organic, carbon-constructed caterpillar become the silicon butterfly?

POSTBIOLOGICAL RE-CREATIONAL AWARENESS

We recognize that the dying process, which for millennia has been blanketed by taboo and primitive superstition, has suddenly become accessible to human intelligence.

Here we experience the sudden insights that we need not “go quietly” and passively into the dark night or the neon-lit, Muzak-enhanced Disney-Heaven of the Jesus Corporation. We realize that the concept of involuntary, irreversible metabolic coma known as “death” is a lethal, feudal superstition, a cruel marketing tactic of industrial society. We understand that one can discover dozens of active, creative alternatives to going belly-up clutching the company logo of the Christian Cross, Blue Cross, or Crescent Cross, or the eligibility cards of the Veterans Administration.

Recognition is always the beginning of the possibility for change. Once we comprehend that “death” can be defined as a problem of knowledge-information memory processing, solutions to this age-long “problem” can emerge. We realize that the intelligent thing to do is to try to keep one’s knowledge-processing capacities around as long as possible. In bodily form. In neural form. In DNA form. In the silicon circuitry and magnetic storage media of today’s computers. In molecular form, through the atom-stacking of nanotechnology in tomorrow’s computers. In cryogenic form. In the form of stored data, legend, myth. In the form of offspring who are cybernetically trained to use postbiologic intelligence. In the form of postbiological gene pools, info-pools, advanced viral forms resident in world computer networks and cyberspace matrices of the sort described in the “sprawl novels” of William Gibson.

The second step in attaining post-biologic, re-creational awareness is to shill from the passive to the active mode. Industrial-age humans were trained to await docilely the onset of termination, and then to turn over their body for disposal to the priests and the factory (hospital) technicians.

Our species is now developing the cybernetic information skills and the activists’ confidence to plan ahead, to make one’s will and testament prevail. The smart thing to do is to see dying as a change in the implementation of information processing: to orchestrate it, manage it, anticipate and exercise the many available options.

We consider here twenty-three distinct methods of avoiding a submissive or fearful dying.

POSTBIOLOGICAL RE-CREATIONAL PROGRAMMING INTELLIGENCE

In previous writings the authors have defined eight stages of intelligence: biological, emotional, mental-symbolic, social, aesthetic, neurological-cybernetic, genetic, atomic-nanotech. At each of these stages there is an input recognition stage, followed by a programming-reprogramming stage, and an output communication stage.

In order to reprogram, we must activate the circuits in the brain which mediate that particular dimension of intelligence. Once this circuit is “turned on,” we can re-imprint or reprogram.

The time has come to talk cheerfully and joke sassily about personal responsibility for managing the dying process. For starters, let’s demystify dying and develop alternative metaphors for consciousness leaving the body. Let us speculate good-naturedly about postbiologic options. Let’s be bold about opening up a broad spectrum of Club-Med postbiologic possibilities. Let us explore the option of re-creational dying.


We realize that the intelligent thing to do is to try to keep one’s knowledge-processing capacities around as Ions as possible. In bodily form. In neural form. In DNA form. In the silicon circuitry and magnetic storage media of today’s computers. In molecular form, through the atom-stacking of nanotechnology in tomorrow’s computers. In cryogenic form. In the form of stored data, legend, myth. In the form of offspring who are cybernetically trained to use postbiologic intelligence. In the form of postbiological gene pools, info-pools, advanced viral forms resident in world computer networks and cyberspace matrices of the sort described in the "sprawl novels” of William Gibson.


Cognitive neurology suggests that the most direct way to reprogram emotional responses is to reactivate the emotional stage and reprogram, replace fear with laughter. To reprogram sexual responses, it is logical to reactivate and re-experience the original teenage imprints and to re-imprint new erotic stimuli and new sexual responses.

The circuits of the brain which mediate the “dying” process are routinely experienced during “near-death” crises. For centuries people have reported: “My entire life flashed before my eyes as I sank into the water.”

This “near-death, out-of-the-body” experience can be turned on via certain anaesthetic drugs. Ketamine, for example. Or by learning enough about the effects of out-of-the-body drugs so that one can use hypnotic techniques to activate the desired circuits without using external chemical stimuli.

We see immediately that the rituals intuitively developed by religious groups are designed to induce hypnotic-trance states related to “dying.” The child growing up in a Catholic culture is deeply imprinted (programmed) by funeral rites. The arrival of the solemn priest to administer extreme unction becomes access codes for the pre-mortem state. Other cultures have different rituals for activating and then controlling (programming) the death circuits of the brain. Until recently, very few have permitted personal control or customized consumer choice.

Almost every animal species manifests “dying reflexes.” Some animals leave the herd to die alone. Others stand with legs apart, stolidly postponing the last moment Some species eject the dying organism from the social group.

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To gain navigational control of one’s dying processes, three steps suggest themselves:

1. Activate the death reflexes imprinted by your culture, experience them. Imagine dressing up like a priest, rabbi, minister, and mimic their solemn, hypnotic rituals. Visualize. Recite the prayers for the dying. Do these things in the virtual reality of your mind. Officiate at your own platonic funeral.

2. Trace their origins; then

5. Reprogram, install your own pre-mortem plan for immortality.

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BRUMMBAER

The aim is to develop a scientific model of the chain of cybernetic (knowledge-information) processes that occur as one approaches this metamorphic stage— and to intentionally develop options for taking active responsibility for these events.

ACHIEVING IMMORTALITY

Since the dawn of human history, philosophers and theologians have speculated about immortality. Uneasy, aging kings have commanded methods for extending the life span.

A most dramatic example of this age-long impulse is ancient Egypt, which produced mummification, the pyramids, and manuals like the Book of the Dying.

We do not endorse any particular technique of achieving immortality. Our aim is to review all options and encourage creative thinking about new possibilities.


The Tibetan Book of the Dying presents a masterful (Buddhist) model of post-mortem stages and techniques for guiding the student to a state of immortality which is neurologically “real” and suggests scientific techniques for reversing the dying process.

The new field of molecular engineering is producing techniques within the framework of current consensus Western science to implement auto-metamorphosis. The aim of the game is to defeat death—to give the individual mastery of this, the final stupidity.

We do not endorse any particular technique of achieving immortality. Our aim is to review all options and encourage creative thinking about new possibilities.

A PRELIMINARY LIST OF RE-CREATIONAL OPTIONS
(TO REPLACE INVOLUNTARY IRREVERSIBLE METABOLIC COMA)

 
PSYCHOLOGICAL-BEHAVIORAL TRAINING TECHNIQUES

The techniques in this category do not assist in attaining personal immortality per se, but are useful in acquiring the experience of “experimental dying,” reversible-voluntary exploration of the territory between body coma and brain death, sometimes called out-of-body experiences; or near-dying experiences. Others have termed these experiences astral travel or reincarnation memories.

It seems likely that, by the year 2000, ceremonial, dignified celebration of one’s own transition will be considered a basic human ritual.


1. Meditation, hypnosis.

The classic yogic routes to exploration of nonordinary states of consciousness, well-known to be labor and time-intensive. The aim is to attain an out-of-body experience.

2. Psychedelic drug experiences.

The use of re-creational (psychedelic) drugs to access information and operational programs stored in the brain of the individual. In normal states of consciousness, these states are not available for voluntary access.

3. Re-creational anaesthetics.

Carefully designed for experimental out-of-body experiences. John Lilly has written extensively about his experiences with small dosages of anaesthetics such as Ketamine. It is possible that the out-of-body subjective effects of such substances are interpretations of proprioceptive disruption. Nevertheless, information is available through these investigative routes.

4. Sensory deprivation.

Primarily accomplished in isolation-tank immersions, a method most comprehensively investigated by John Lilly.

5. Reprogramming exercises.

Suspending and replacing socially imprinted “death” imprints.

6. Development of new rituals to guide the post-body transition.

Our cultural taboos have prohibited the development of much detailed work in this area, but some important research has been done by E. J. Gold and others.

7. Pre-incarnation exercises.

Using the preferred altered-state method (drugs, hypnosis, shamanic trance, voodoo ritual, born-again frenzies) to create future scripts for oneself.

8. Voluntary dying.

This procedure is called “suicide,” i.e., “self-murder,” by officials who wish to control the mortem process. Until recently, self-induced death has been considered a cowardly or insane attempt to interfere with the natural order. Anyone who wished to manage and direct their own dying was condemned by law and custom.

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In a pagan or nature-attuned tribal culture, there is a common-sense genetic wisdom implied in this passive acceptance of one’s termination. The brain continually monitors the vital functions of the body, and as the body starts failing, terminal programs take over. The brain quietly shuts down the body and during the few minutes between body death and neurological death, the brain’s hundred billion neurons probably enjoy an astonishing “timeless” review of all and everything.

In the late 20th Century, however, mechanical medical science started “interfering” quite dramatically with the “natural” order. Tubes and machines are now used to keep patients “alive” long after the cessation of consciousness. A stroke victim who twenty years ago might have died in an hour can now be revived, only to spend years in machine-induced coma.

Most people are shocked and outraged by mechanical-medical methods that strip dignity and human consciousness from the terminal-coma patient The American Medical Association has supported the right of the family to remove medical treatment from terminally ill comatose patients.

Then there is the problem of intractable pain suffered by patients terminally ill from “artificial” diseases caused by industrial pollution like cancer, which cause agonizing pain. The brain housed in the body of a person living in the industrial low-rent, tacky culture of the late 20th Century is not programmed to handle these new diseases. The brain is capable of producing endorphin pain-killers naturally. The brain is beautifully geared to slowly, gracefully turn out the lights for humans— as they do for other animals. Our sisters and brothers, the other pack animals like wolves and dogs and cats (for example), manage to die in dignity without screaming to veterinarians for sedation or priests for extreme unction.

But the factory-hospital environment, run efficiently by factory managers (doctors and nurses), is a very strange environment for any normal hundred-billion-neuron brain. Hospitalized patients whose brains are imprinted to perform as factory units when terminally ill and in great pain passionately beg to be put out of their hopeless misery.

Fundamentalist religious groups and neofeudal officials oppose any “pro-choice” initiative that allows individuals to manage their own lives. These groups also are actively opposed to “euthanasia.”

[By 1990 a growing movement had developed in California to allow terminally ill patients to arrange for their own dying: Americans Against Human Suffering (Freedom of Choice for Physician Aid-in-Dying). In Holland, "euthanasia on request" is made available after a prudent, suitable period of review. Since 1992 Michigan doctor Jack Kevorkian has repeatedly tested the law by helping his terminally ill patients exercise their right to choose the time and manner of their death.]

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It seems likely that, by the year 2000, ceremonial, dignified celebration of one’s own transition will be considered a basic human ritual.

9. Pre-mortem hybernation.

In the last section we have considered active management of one’s own dying: voluntary irreversible metabolic coma. This planful procedure takes on a different meaning when the person does not “die,” but slides into cryonic or brain-bank hybernation. This option is called “pre-mortem suspension.” It has been ruled legal in California, in a case brought by the Alcor Foundation.
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Re: Chaos & Cyberculture, by Timothy Leary, Ph.D.

Postby admin » Tue Jun 18, 2019 7:01 am

Part 2 of 2

SOMATIC TECHNIQUES FOR LIFE EXTENSION

Techniques to inhibit the process of aging comprise the classic approach to immortality. In the present state of science, these serve to buy time.

10. Diet.

The classic research on diet and longevity has been done by Roe L. Walford, M.D. (The 120-Year Diet; Maximum Life Span). The bottom line: gluttony and greed are the killer addictions. Skinny folks live much longer.
 
The brain is beautifully geared to slowly, gracefully turn out the lights for humans-as they do for other animals....

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wolves and dogs and cats (for example), manage to die in dignity without screaming to veterinarians for sedation or priests for extreme unction.


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ANDY FRITH

11. Life-extension drugs.

Anti-oxidants, etc. A comprehensive reference is Sandy Shaw and Durk Pearson’s Life Extension.

12. Exercise regimens.

13. Temperature variation. Heat kills.

14. Sleep treatments (hybernation).

15. Immunization to counter aging process.

SOMATIC-NEURAL-GENETIC PRESERVATION


Techniques in this class do not ensure continuous operation of consciousness. They produce reversible metabolic coma. They are alternatives for preserving the structure of tissues until a time of more advanced medical knowledge.

16. Cryonics or vacuum-pack body "pickling."

Letting one’s body and brain rot seems to imply no possibility at all for your future. Why let the carefully arranged tangle of dendritic growths in your nervous system which store all your memories get eaten by fungus? Perpetual preservation of your tissues by freezing is available today at moderate cost.

17. Cryonic preservation of neural tissue or DNA.

Those not particularly attached to their bodies can opt for preservation of the essentials: their brains and the instructional codes capable of regrowing something genetically identical to their present biomachinery.

Techniques are now emerging to permit a much more vivid guarantee of personal persistence, a smooth metamorphic transformation into a different form of substrate on which the computer program of consciousness runs.


BIOGENETIC METHODS FOR LIFE EXTENSION

Is there any need to experience metabolic coma? We have mentioned ways to gain personal control of the experience, to stave it off by “conventional” longevity techniques, to avoid irreversible dissolution of the systemic substrate. Techniques are now emerging to permit a much more vivid guarantee of personal persistence, a smooth metamorphic transformation into a different form of substrate on which the computer program of consciousness runs.

18. Cellular/DNA repair.

Nanotechnology is the science and engineering of mechanical and electronic systems built to atomic specifications. Nanotechnology has a potential for production of self-replicating nanomachines living within individual biological cells. These artificial enzymes will effect cellular repair, as damage occurs from mechanical causes, radiation, or other aging effects. Repair of DNA ensures genetic stability.

19. Cloning.

Biologically based replication of genetically identical personal copies of yourself, at any time desired, is approaching the possible. Sex is fun, but sexual reproduction is biologically inefficient, suited mainly for inducing genetic variation in species that still advance through the accidents of luck in random combination. The idea is to reserve sex as a means of communication and to reproduce asexually!

Cybernetic Methods for Attaining Immortality
(ARTIFICIAL LIFE "IN SILICO"), BY ERIC GULLICHSEN


Some silicon visionaries believe that natural evolution of the human species (or at least their branch of it) is near completion. They are no longer interested in merely procreating, but in designing their successors. Carnegie-Mellon robotics scientist Hans Moravec writes,

We owe our existence to organic evolution. But we owe it little loyalty. We are on the threshold of a change in the universe comparable to the transition from nonlife to life.


Human society has now reached a turning point in the operation of the process of evolution at which the next evolutionary step of the species is under our control. Or, more correctly, the next steps, occurring in parallel, and resulting in an explosion of diversity of the human species. We are no longer dependent on fitness in any physical sense for survival. Our quantum appliances and older mechanical devices provide the requisite means in all circumstances. In the near future, the (now merging) methods of computer and biological technology will make the human form a matter totally determined by individual choice.

As a flesh-and-blood species we are moribund, stuck at “a local optimum,” to borrow a term from mathematical optimization theory. Beyond this horizon, which humankind has reached, lies the unknown, the scarcely imagined. We will design our children, and co-evolve intentionally with the cultural artifacts that are our progeny.

Humans already come in some variety of races and sizes. In comparison to what “human” will mean within the next century, we humans are at present as indistinguishable from one another as are hydrogen molecules. Our anthropocentrism will decrease.

Consider two principle categorizations of the form of the human of the future, one more biological-like: a bio/machine hybrid of any desired form; and one not biological at all: an “electronic life” on the computer networks. Human as machine, and human in machine.

Human as machine is perhaps more easily conceived. We already have crude prosthetic implants, artificial limbs, valves, and entire organs. The continuing improvements in the old-style mechanical technology slowly increase the thoroughness of human-machine integration.

From this viewpoint, the immortality options become cybernetic methods of preserving one’s unique signal capacity. There are as many souls as there are ways of storing and communicating data.


The electronic life form of human in machine is even more alien to our current conceptions of humanity. Through storage of one’s belief systems as on-line data structures, driven by selected control structures (the electronic analog to will?), one’s neuronal apparatus will operate in silicon as it did on the wetware of the brain, although faster, more accurately, more self-mutably, and, if desired, immortally.

[end of Eric Gullichsen]

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20. Archival-informational.

One standard way of becoming “immortal” is by leaving a trail of archives, biographies, tapes, films, computer files, and publicized noble deeds. The increasing presence of stable knowledge media in our cybernetic society make this a more rigorous platform for persistent existence. The knowledge possessed by an individual is captured in expert systems and world-scale hypertext systems, thus ensuring the longevity and accessibility of textual and graphical memes.

Viewed from outside the self, death is not a binary phenomena, but a continuously varying function. How alive are you in Paris at this moment? In the city in which you live? In the room in which you are reading this?

21. Personality data-base transmission.

“Head Coach” is a system developed by Futique, Inc., one of the first examples of a new generation of psychoactive computer software. The program allows the user (performer) to digitize and store thoughts on a routine daily basis. If one leaves, let us say, twenty years of daily computer-stored records of thought-performance, one’s grandchildren, a century down the line, can “know” and replay your information habits and mental performances. They will be able to “share and relive experiences” in considerable detail. To take a mundane example, if an individual’s moves in a chess game are stored, the descendants can relive, move by move, a game played by Great-Great- Grandmother in the past century.

As passive reading is replaced by active rewriting,” later generations will be able to relive how we performed the great stories of our time.

Yet more intriguing is the possibility of implementing the knowledge extracted over time from a person: their beliefs, preferences, and tendencies, as a set of algorithms guiding a program capable of acting in a manner functionally identical to the person. Advances in robotics technology will take these “Turing creatures” away from being mere “brains in bottles” to hybrids capable of interacting sensorily with the physical world.

22. Nanotech information storage: direct brain-computer transfer.

When a computer becomes obsolete, one does not discard the data it contains. The hardware is merely a temporary vehicle of implementation for structures of information. The data gets transferred to new systems for continued use. Decreasing costs of computer storage, CD-ROM and WORM memory systems mean that no information generated today ever need be lost.

We can consider building an artificial computational substrate both functionally and structurally identical to the brain (and perhaps the body) of a person. This can be achieved with predicted future capabilities of nanotechnology. Communicating nanomachines that pervade the organism may analyze the neural and cellular structure and transfer the information obtained to machinery capable of growing, atom by atom, an identical copy.

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BRUMMBAER

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, “soul” is “the animating and vital principle in man credited with the faculties of thought, action, and emotion, and conceived as forming an immaterial entity distinguishable from but temporarily coexistent with his body .” From the perspective of information theory, “immaterial” can be understood as “invisible to the naked eye, i.e., atomic-molecular-electronic,” and “soul” refers to information processed and stored in microscopic-cellular, molecular, atomic packages. “Soul” becomes any information that “lives,” i.e., that is capable of being retrieved and communicated.

All tests for “death” at every level of measurement (nuclear, neural, bodily, galactic) involve signal unresponsiveness. From this viewpoint, the immortality options become cybernetic methods of preserving one’s unique signal capacity. There are as many souls as there are ways of storing and communicating data. Tribal lore defines the racial soul. The DNA is a molecular soul. The brain is a neurological soul. Electron storage creates the silicon soul. Nanotechnology makes possible the atomic soul.

23. Computer viral existence in the cyberspace matrix.

The previous option permitted personal survival through isomorphic mapping of neural structure to silicon (or some other arbitrary medium of implementation). It also suggests the possibility of survival as an entity in what amounts to a reification of Jung’s collective unconscious: the global information network.

In the 21st Century imagined by novelist William Gibson, wily cybernauts will not only store themselves electronically, but do so in the form of a “computer virus,” capable of traversing computer networks and of self-replication as a guard against accidental or malicious erasure by others or other programs.
 
In the 21st Century imagined by novelist William Gibson, wily cybernauts will not only store themselves electronically, but do so in the form of a "computer virus,” capable of traversing computer networks and of sell-replication as a guard against accidental or malicious erasure by others or other programs.


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ANDY FRITH

Given the ease of copying computer-stored information, one could exist simultaneously in many forms. Where the "I" is in this situation is a matter for philosophy. We believe that consciousness would persist in each form, running independently (and ignorant of each other’s self-manifestation unless in communication with it) and cloned at each branch point.

[Note: The above options for voluntary reversible metabolic coma and auto-metamorphosis are not mutually exclusive. The intelligent person needs little encouragement to explore all these possibilities, and to design many new other alternatives to going belly-up in line with management memos.]

Preserve your body-
preserve your brain-
preserve your DNA.
To immortalize: digitize!


KON-TIKI OF THE FLESH

In the near future, what is now taken for granted as the perishable human creature will be a mere historical curiosity, one point amidst unimaginable, multidimensional diversity of form. Individuals, or groups of adventurers, will be free to choose to reassume flesh-and-blood form, constructed for the occasion by the appropriate science.

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ANDY FRITH

VII.2. Hybernating Andy

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This is an excerpt from a forthcoming novel about high-tech decadence in the film, computer, and art-fashion-literary worlds, as they interface the frontiers of pop science.

The narrator, Dani Mellon du Pont, is currently on assignment as publicity director of the Alcor Foundation, Riverside, California, to popularize the cryonic-hybernation re-animation option.

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OKay. Let’s get organized here.

I am on American Airlines flight 103 from J. Fitz. K. to Miami, Florida, my flop-top computer lapping-flapping away, writing to the Alcor Foundation to report on how the cryonic suspension (hybernation) of Andy Warhol’s body and soul was accomplished.

ANDY WARHOL'S SECRET DESIRE TO REJOIN HIS IDOL, WALT DISNEY

Andy became interested in cryonic immortality (as he so quaintly called it) when he learned that Walt Disney’s soul (brain) and flesh is being hybernetically frozen and preserved until Eric Drexler’s M.I.T. nanotechnology (atom stacking) has mastered the logical steps to re-animate and restore him, i.e., Walt Disney.

Andy shared the almost universal belief that Walt Disney was one of the most important members of the 20th Century. You see, Walt Disney created “screen-iconic” entities of such global-mythic attraction that they are immediately recognized and loved by almost every quark on this globe. Andy told me over and over again that Walt Disney created pop culture. By pop, Andy means the popularization, humanization of ideas.

Andy was well aware of my assignment as publicity director of the Alcor Foundation to personalize, popularize, humanize, Disneyize the cryonic-hybernation re-animation option.

Andy shared with us the reasonable aversion to having his body and soul (i.e., brain) eaten by maggots or burned in an oven. For this reason (and others) he had discussed with me the procedures involved and shyly, as was his wont, wrung from me a promise that I would arrange for his “hybernation re-animation” at that moment when his body had been “flat-lined,” i.e., when he was being evicted from his current (and let’s face it) tacky, mittel-European, washed-out, low-energy, unstylish, albino meat vehicle.

I “undertake” (ha ha) this assignment because the funereal dread I sense in American culture, the very concepts of cemeteries, undertakers, tombs, burials, crematoriums, obituaries, and life-insurance policies (which are, when you think about it, death assurance policies), have become a nightmare of insanity.

May I put it bluntly in four-letter words? I did not want worms to eat Andy Warhol.

And neither did he!

THE LEGAL AUTHORIZATION FOR LIBERATING ANDY WARHOL’S BODY AND SOUL (BRAIN)

The first logical question in anyone’s mind is: Did Andy choose neurological (head-soul) freezing? Or total body cryonic hybernation?

At first he was undecided. Andy could, of course, afford total body ($100,000), but he seemed more interested in the neurological option ($35,000). Andy liked the idea that, when his meat functions fiat-lined, his brain (soul) could be preserved, awaiting the kinky moment when an attractive young person of either or both sexes would—as the tragic result of some car accident after the Junior Prom or a crack-house shoot-out—be lying comatose in the emergency ward, a brain-dead neo-mort, available for a transplant from a super-attractive brain.

Andy Warhol is not dead. He hybernates, a regal Ice Queen in cool serendipity.
His new life cycle has begun!
No thanks to medical silence (and given a little bit of luck),
Andy will return to paint and paradox again!


I promised Andy, on three occasions, that I would do everything necessary to prevent him from being buried by the MOMA or the equally insidious Valerie Solanis/Saint Patrick Cathedral gang, or turned over to the M&O (maggot and oven) crowd, i.e., destroyed by legally sanctioned DNA-killers. In return for this promise, Andy gave me his power of eternity, which I transmitted by American Express.

On these three occasions, Andy begged me, "Please don’t let my body be exhibited publicly in the Museum of Modern Art or Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.”

The documents signed by Andy authorizing his hybernation-re-animation have been properly affidavitted. Andy’s plans will remain, as per his wishes, secret

There were several witnesses: Ultra Violet, who still wants to rock ’n’ roll like days of old despite the fact that she’s become a Mormon or a Christian Scientist I have witnesses! Viva, two. These were two, fine pioneer women that Andy signed up in his weirdo wagon train. Edie Sedgwick, three.

Andy, by the way, recorded these conversations and shot Polaroid pix of all present.

A DISTRESSING PHONE CALL TO GRACE JONES

At 6:00 A.M. PST on Hybernation-Day-minus-1, I was notified that Andy’s meat vehicle was deteriorating sharply and that cardiac arrest was, at most, two days away. I reserved space on the noon flight to New York. My cover for this mission was to model a Guess gene commercial shoot by Helmut Newton. My true mission was:

1. to assist in the removal of Andy’s body from the hospital to our mortuary on West 91st Street;

2. to assist in the cryonic freezing of Andy;

3. to ship the cryonic patient (Andy) to the California depository;

4. to attend the Andy Warhol funeral at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and the subsequent ghoulish body-destruction festivities to see if there were any signs that anyone was aware that Andy’s body had been liberated from Christian neuro-terrorists who were so enthusiastically driven to consign all of Warhol’s organic tissue-information banks to the ever-hungry worms.

My flight was delayed; so I called Grace Jones from the airport to tell her I’d be late.

Grace was not part of the freezing operation, although she played major roles in some of Andy’s last public triumphs. .Andy symbolically married Grace in public shortly before his hybernation. His very last video performance occurred on Grace’s MTV production of “I’m Not Perfect, But I’m Perfect for You.” Andy, a Cabalist and numerologist (to put it mildly), knew at the time that his nights were numbered.

I suggest you play this MTV tape and observe Andy’s comatic state. How well he concealed his 1968 illness!

Andy’s chronic impression was contagious. It nibbled at my brain like worms. These are certainly strange daze!

... all this for a barbaric tissue-destruction ceremony. I can no longer remain silent when the people I love wind up in squirm holes and cremation barbecues.


Writing becomes difficult, and I have to be careful not to let my imagery become too disteanciated. My writing is nothing if not the history of my illness. The entire staff of Interview magazine is in danger of suffering from the same chronic impression.

The role of the Museum of Modem Art in this matter is not exemplary. They showed no great enthusiasm for Andy during his long, long period of dying (1968-87). And then they go after him con brio as soon as they think (erroneously) that he is dead. The bake-meats are barely frozen cold upon the funeral table when MOMA announces the palladium of a full-scale retrospective!

Weft, the joke’s on they who are marketing Andy like a combination of Jesus Christ and Donald Duck, and don’t realize that Andy is not dead, but sleeping. Next to... guess who?

WHY I RAN UP A $3,500 PHONE BILL WHILE ALOFT

I was, at this point in time, fucking 55,000 feet high, a nervous wreck, suffering mental fatigue with the portable phone linked to my Toshiba laptop, jacking into certain counterculture sectors of cyberspace, of w hich there are literally infinite numbers. I was not phoning my bookmaker, undertaker, pimp, wall-street pallbearer. I was not ordering call girls or fast pizza delivery.

I spent a most pleasant hour on “interscreen” digitizing with the Chaos Hacker group in Germany, who are very weft known to Interpol and the KGB. We have developed these hilarious, international, digital intersex romances. I tell you, you can learn a lot about human nature quarking around in Cyberia! Digital intercourse is the best way to prepare for the juicy, sweaty, warm-flash transaction of “hard reality.”

At last, my touchdown in Eastern Metropolis! Am I happy? No way! My bumper sticker reads: I Image N.Y.

THE SWITCHING OF THE BODIES; THE RAPID COOLING OF ANDY’S

Within an hour, Couri Hay from Team B knocks on my hotel-room door and murmurs the password. We drive in Couri’s limo to the hospital. Our people—nurses, ward physician, attendants, security guards—are in total control of the ward. I wait down the hall with the perfusion team. And the substitute corpse, whom we Andy fans remember from the hoax in Salt Lake City.

At 3:45 AM. EST we were notified that Andy was experiencing final, agonal respirations. At 3:59 A.M. our man, Dr. Mellon Hitchcock, pronounced Andy legally dead.

The switching of corpses was performed swiftly. We immediately started cardiopulmonary support using a heart-lung resuscitator. We employed an esophageal gastric tube airway to secure Andy’s airway against stomach secretions and ventilate him. Andy quickly regained colour and showed good chest expansion. He looked better, in fact, than he had since 1968, the year he was shot by Kynaston McShine, one of the hangers-on at his studio at MOMA.

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This weird ritual demonstrates that We cannot escape Their mortal coil. The semiotic message is clear. Everything in this mediaeval stone castle warns us it is folly for individuals to seek immortality except through faith in one of the three Mediterranean monotheistic mafias.


Andy was then packed in ice and wheeled to the back elevator. We arrived at our mortuary on West 91st Street at approximately 4:30 AM. and began administration of transport medications at 4:40 AM. By 5:25 AM. Andy was positioned on the mobile advanced life-support system, and surgery was underway to raise his femoral artery. In addition to his continuing good skin color, Andy’s arterial blood was bright tomato red (indicating good oxygenation), and he had bright red capillary bleeding into the wound during surgery -- all good signs. The coy blandness, pervasive and teasing in its appeal to the media, was gone! The deathless, albino pallor was gone!

I know, I think, how Andy felt at this moment.

Andy often experienced the stigmata of the insane science-fiction artist alienation, blurred reality, despair. And here he lies, on the hybernation table, no longer looking like the last dandy. Flushing with cool blood, he is no longer the figure of the Artist as Nobody, but the Romantic Stereotype of the Artist—pinkish, involved, grappling with fate and transcendence.

He had already cooled to 29.3°C by the time bypass was started, and he rapidly cooled to a rectal temperature of 9°C over the next forty-five minutes. Imagine that!

A REGAL ICE QUEEN AWAITING THE KISS OF RE-ANIMATION

After supervising this delicate business, I am, understandably, thoroughly descoobied. So I went out to an Eighth Avenue bar, which was noisy with kinky sexual innuendoes. My whole head revolved around laughter and crying, as my life turns down.

By the time I returned, blood washout and cryoprotective perfusion had progressed nicely. At 8:43 A.M. I approved the decision to discontinue perfusion. Was this fair to Warhol? No, if you are among those who think he had about five remarkable years (1962-67) followed by a long down-slope decline into money-making banality with his silk-screen editions of dogs, famous Jews of the 20th Century, and Mercedes Benzos. Yes, if you think that Andy was the most important American artist since Jackson Pollack. In any case, following the closure of the scalp and chest incisions, Andy was placed inside two heavy plastic bags and submerged in a silicone oil (Silcool) bath that had been precooled to -17°C.

Warhol’s life force, uneven as it was, lay in an emotional fiction that contradicted the cold, fixed, iconic surface, lowered at a rate of approximately 1°C per hour to -17°C by gradual addition of dry ice to the artificial (fake?) calm. My sense of Jamais Vue could hardly be blamed on the MOMA curator who selected these icons. A high-capacity pump was used to circulate the oil through a spray-bar assembly positioned over the patient This technique completely eliminated the “hot spots” and “cold spots” that have plagued other artist’s careers.

At 19:42 EST, the dewar was completely filled with nitrogen, and Andy Warhol had entered long-time hybernation! With him was put to rest gloomy images of foreboding and death, like the skulls that plagued the last years of his first, brief life.

That night, at the Gramercy Park Hotel, how I envied Andy’s cool tranquillity as the hot fevered hand of sleep sucked me down into the grave-ity of that dark ground.

Andy Warhol is not dead. He hybernates, a regal Ice Queen in cool serendipity.

His new life cycle has begun!

No thanks to medical silence (and given a little bit of luck), Andy will return to paint and paradox again!

THE PUBLIC CELEBRATION Of ANDY’S DESTRUCTION

Dateline: April 1, 1987.

Fifth Avenue in front of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral was teeming with spectators and photographers and these last survivors of the human race who live in giant time-warp bubbles that they leave only to go to funerals, cremations, autopsies, and airplane crashes. They were lined up behind police fences, gaping at celebrities talking and grinning at the wide-eyed cameras celebrating the destruction of Andy’s precious tissues. (Or so they hoped!)

They were lined up behind police fences, gaping at celebrities talking and grinning at the wide-eyed cameras celebrating the destruction of Andy's precious tissues. (Or so they hoped!)


The large doors of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral opened this time portal into the Muddle Ages, high Gothic arches designed to dwarf the spirit of us individual quarks. Inside, this organist is playing, not Lower Eastside punk rock, not Velvet Underground, but fucking Bach!

People file in with unhappy expressions. Young men with rainbow-dyed hair looking uncomfortable in suits and ties. And all this for a barbaric tissue-destruction ceremony. I can no longer remain silent when the people I love wind up in squirm holes and cremation barbecues.

HOMAGE TO THE MAGGOTS. THE DREAD SIGN OF CRUCIFICTION. THE CLOWN OF THORNS.

The orthodox Catholic witchcraft rituals begin predictably. The dread Sign of the Cross! The ominous kneeling in submission. Meanwhile, the clerical aliens quietly observing the humans, unsmiling in black-cloth (!) garments, family and friends sitting in peaceful twisted apathetic conformity. Don’t be fooled by them, these Catholic-Jewish-Islamaniacs who sit brooding silently in darkened stone buildings. Behind their frozen faces they are thinking about their loved ones in the grave. Don’t be fooled by this fake Bible-Talmud-Koran piety. Their Holy Books are male-order catalogues of death worship. Their minds are busy thinking about the maggots eating the flesh and brains (souls) of their presumed loved ones. Or about the cruel oven flames (dials turned to roast!) crackling the skins of their dearly departed. Do you seriously think that they can repress, just ignore the culinary facts? Not hear the squishing noises of the maggots breeding cheerily in the tissues of their sincerely departeds? The more honest of these mourners are probably pondering their own fate that awaits them in the fire and worms departments.

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The grisly papist plot crumbles to Gothic horror! To put it charitably, Andy’s funeral in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral is not an immortalist commercial. This weird ritual demonstrates that We cannot escape Their mortal coil. The semiotic message is clear. Everything in this mediaeval stone castle warns us it is folly for individuals to seek immortality except through faith in one of the three Mediterranean monotheistic mafias.

WOULD ANDY LET ALIEN PRIESTS SEND HIM PACKING, SOUL AND BONES, TO THE MAGGOT FARM?

Our little, silver-haired pal, the solemn, socially insecure, East European waif from Pittsburgh got the point. Andy understood the cold, mechanical impersonality of the industrial culture. Didn’t he just blow into the Big Applesauce factory from Pittsburgh, PA, and call himself the Pope of Pop? Call his studio the Factory? Send a reasonable facsimile, silver-wigged model of himself around to give Warhol lectures at colleges? Enter the Campbell Soup contest? Paint reasonable facsimiles of soup-can labels and Marilyn Monroes to win gigantic cash prizes? And admission to correspondence art schools?

You think this crafty fox would let them pack him, brain and bones, in a factory carton for easy delivery to the maggot farm? Can you possibly think that Andy Warhol would allow this public snuffing of his essence by black-garbed minions of the cardinal? Who, come to think of it, never tended to hang out at the Factory and the office of Interview magazine.

By the way!
Andy asked me
to especially
invite all of
you to his
re-animation party.


ANDY INVITES YOU TO HIS RE-BIRTHDAY PARTY

I understand that members of the Alcor Cryonics Foundation and thoughtful people around the four worlds who know about the hybernation of Walt Disney and Andy Warhol are celebrating and drinking toasts to the brave team who snatched Andy, literally, from the mouths of the maggots.

I also understand that some members of the Alcor Foundation, being of the very sincere, sober, scientific extraction, are concerned that a person of my colourful reputation could undermine Alcor’s respectability and credibility. Particularly since disrespectability and incredibility are my predestined career goals in life.

I worry, myself, that since Alcor’s important work is the ultimate threat to religious and political control, the last thing needed is to take on the negative public baggage of a notorious jet-set victim of the National Enquirer mentality.

Then I remember that to be a member of Alcor is to elect oneself as part of a noble band of heroes who are about to save humanity from the horror of involuntary, irreversible, metabolic coma. And therefore Alcor members are tolerant of my eccentricity, knowing it is a hard job, in this weirdo, death-worshipping culture, to be continually recast in these “Oscar Wilde” sequels.

By the way! Andy asked me to especially invite all of you to his re-animation party.

Andy was very insistent that, at the glorious moment of re-animation, when his friends gather around his hybernation crystal, that you be there. Either in the ice tray or on the hoof. Write the Alcor Foundation if you have any questions about transportation to the party. “PLAN A HEAD” is our motto!

The grey-haired black man warned Andy, as he did me and Bill Burroughs: Stay out of prisons and hospitals, son. Avoid ministers, priests, and rabbis. All they got is the key to the shit house. And promise me, boy, you will never wear the badge of a lawman. And if you do end up serving time in the white man’s body factories (complete service from womb to tomb), join a gang of friends that will cover for you. And if you have to be admitted to the disposal room (planned obsolescence is their marketing strategy), just be sure you’ve got friends hanging around, watching over you day and night, lest someone make off with your beloved albino animal skin. And contents thereof.
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Re: Chaos & Cyberculture, by Timothy Leary, Ph.D.

Postby admin » Tue Jun 25, 2019 3:03 am

Part 1 of 2

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VIII. MILLENNIUM MADNESS
1. Backward Christian Soldiers: A Brief History of the Warrior Caste in America
2. God Runs for President on the Republican Ticket
3. Who Owns the Jesus Property?
4. High-Tech Paganism, (co-written with Eric Gullichsen)


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VIII.1. Backward Christian Soldiers: A Brief History of the Warrior Caste in America

Legionnaires' disease: so called from its first recognized occurrence during the 1976 American Legion convention: a lobar pneumonia caused by a bacterium (Legionella pneumophila).

Esquire magazine says war is the secret love of a white man’s life. The cover of its November 1984 issue shows a gorgeous young white woman wearing a Marine helmet and tom brown GI T-shirt.

The effect was sexually ambiguous, but steamy!

Great cover lines: “War! It is a sexual turn-on .... It is a brutal, deadly game, but the best game there is. It is for men what childbirth is for women. It is like lifting the comer of the universe and looking at what is underneath.”

At the halfway point of the Brezhnev-Reagan era, Esquire’s motto is, “Man at His Best” The title of the cover story : “Why Men Love War.” The subhead is lyrical: “The Awesome Beauty, the Haunting Romance, of the Timeless Nightmare.” The piece was written by William Broyles, Jr., a white Protestant ex-Marine from Texas, who made a good living in the 1980s relighting the Vietnam War in magazines and glorifying the enduring addiction of the American warrior caste and its sponsor, the Republican party, to killing coloured people with high-technology weapons.

The Esquire piece appeared just when Reagan was lobbying to bully our Latin neighbours—once again. It’s a recurrence of that old Caribbean fever, a paroxysmal virus that plagues the White House. Apparently the Oval Office can’t be disinfected. President after president keeps coming down with the Latin-basher Legionnaires’ disease.

When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, everyone knew he was itching and feverish to send American troops into action. Somewhere. He just had to stand tall and bully some third-world country to regain the American manhood that General William Westmoreland and Rambo say we lost in Vietnam.

But where to conduct a nice, little, easy to win, ego-massaging war?

The Russkis? Too mean.

Asians? The slopes proved too tough for MacArthur in Korea and for Westmoreland in ’Nam.

The Middle East? Much too volatile. Ronnie blustered a bit in Lebanon, but pulled out quickly after frivolously, whimsically wasting the lives of hundreds of U.S. military personnel.

Oh well, back to the old, familiar playground for the Republican party and the warrior caste. Let’s snuff some Latins for God and manhood.

Cuba? Too risky.

Grenada was fun for a warm-up, but short and limited and easy.

... Reagan was lobbying to bully our Latin neighbours- -- once again. It’s a recurrence of that old Caribbean fever, a paroxysmal virus that plagues the White House. Apparently the Oval Office can't be disinfected. President after president keeps coming down with the Latin-basher Legionnaires’ disease.
 

Hmmm... Well, there’s always good old Nicaragua. Since the 1890s, the American military has occupied or controlled this least-populated nation in Central America. And for almost a century, guerrilla forces there have opposed American intervention. In 1933, we pulled out our occupation troops and set up a puppet dictatorship run by the Somoza family. The younger Somozas were proteges of the American warrior caste. Anastasio Somoza Debayle, for example, graduated from the U.S. Military Academy, returned home, and, at age 21, took command of the National Guard. Because of the brutality of this regime, all democratic elements of the Latin World despised America. In 1979, the Sandinistas overthrew the Somozas, to the dismay of the West Point Academy classmates of Somoza.

IT STARTED WITH THE SPANISH CONQUISTADORES

The first Europeans to subdue Cuban, Nicaraguan, and South American natives for Christ and Plunder were the Spanish. In 1495, Christopher (Christ-Carrier) Columbus returned to the Newe World with a disorderly rabble of male buccaneer thugs seeking gold. It was hard going. No quick payoff. So, to man his third expedition in 1498, Columbus was forced to impress hooligans, convicts, rapists, and thieves. An ominous precedent for Ollie North.

The next centuries of Spanish intervention were not designed to raise the morale of Caribbean natives, who were immediately looted, raped, baptized, and reduced to serfdom by hoodlums representing Crown and Church. The Spanish settlements were rigidly controlled by Madrid. The colonists were the scum of Europe—soldiers, priests, and plunderers. Black Africans were kidnapped to work as slaves.

Few Spanish women were involved in the first expeditions; so there was much forcible interbreeding with Indian and African slave women. This ancient custom produced the rich mestizo races, which now people these fertile lands. On the up side, Latin America was at least spared the shameful genocidal policies that characterized the North American colonization. Better to use the Catholic plan, to rape ’em and enslave ’em, than use the Cromwell-Protestant-Puritan tactic of spermless genocide.

When the South American countries gained independence from Spain, the feudal-military-Catholic traditions remained. Thus was created the unstable, volatile, romantic cultural environment that has left Latin America masochistically vulnerable to enduring and relentless Protestant, Yankee adventuring.

Lincoln, as would Lenin sixty years later, created a centralized, industrial, militaristic, expansionist government. Just as the Communist party has managed the USSR since 1921, so has the Republican party, USA, controlled the police, the military, the banks, the manufacturing plants, the organs of information.


THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND THE WARRIOR CASTE LOVE WAR

Esquire’s ex-Lieutenant Broyles tells us that he and his Marine Corps buddies adored Vietnam because war “offers a sanction to play boys’ games.”

Image... Because "war replaces the difficult grey areas of daily life with an eerie, serene clarity."

Image... Because "war is the best game there is."

Image... Because "no sport I had ever played brought me to such deep awareness of my physical and emotional limits."

Image... Because the "love of war stems from the union, deep in the core of our being, between sex and destruction, beauty and horror, love and death."

Image... Because some youths "who never suspected the presence of such an impulse in themselves have learned in military life the mad excitement of destroying."  

Image... Because war is funny. "After one ambush my men [sic] brought back the body of a North Vietnam soldier. I later found the dead man propped against some C-ration boxes. He had on sunglasses, and a Playboy magazine lay open in his lap; a cigarette dangled jauntily from his mouth; and on his head was perched a large and perfectly formed piece of shit. I pretended to be outraged, since desecrating bodies was frowned on as un-American and counterproductive. But it wasn't outrage I felt. I kept my officer's face on, but inside I was... laughing."

Believe me, ex-Lieutenant Broyles, the people who founded our country—thoughtful men such as Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin—would not have considered this funny. Nor would three billion non-Caucasians with whom we share the planet Including Yours Truly.

HOW AN INDIAN CHIEFTAIN'S HEAD ENDED UP ON A POLE IN MASSACHUSETTS

In the early 17th Century, New England was controlled by a wise and benevolent leader. His friends called him Massasoit In 1620, the first wave of immigrants from Europe started arriving in the lands of Massasoit The original Plymouth colony was dominated by a Moral Minority, a small sect of fanatic fundamentalist Cromwellian Protestants. These Puritans were regenerate (born-again) Christians who held a strict Calvinist belief in “the Elect versus the Damned,” and who publicly confessed their conversion experiences. These militant, fanatic Protestants doggedly believed that human nature was inherently sinful and evil.

Over the decades the actions of the Republican party (exactly like the Nazi party in Germany and the Communist party in Russia) can be understood only if we recall that they were bred to the terrible notion of being the Elect of God. Ronald Reagan deeply believes that there can be no mercy for nonbelievers. Those who are not “one of us” deserve no pity. Remember how Ronnie called the Democrats “immoral” when they didn’t vote for his military budget? Recall how he gave bloodcurdling sermons about the need to destroy Godless communism? That’s not election rhetoric. The guy believes it. He really feels that he and his military friends are agents of the totalitarian God. Brezhnev and his friends believed that they were agents of their own weird totalitarian prophet, Karl Marx.

Believe me, ex-Lieutenant Broyles, the people who founded our country -- thoughtful men such as Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin-would not have considered this funny. Nor would three billion non-Caucasians with whom we share the planet. Including Yours Truly.


When the Puritans showed up in Plymouth, they considered it their right and religious duty to plunder the land of the heathen Pequot Indians. Poor King Massasoit wasn’t ready for a Jesse Helms approach. In all good faith he had signed a peace treaty in 1621, to which he and his son, King Philip, faithfully adhered for many years in spite of continued land-grabbing by the white settlers.

In 1675, a typical colonial-liberation war broke out. King Philip's forces successfully avoided pitched battles and kept the conflict going until the European invaders, using “search and destroy” methods, and with the help of local contras, overthrew the native government Philip, betrayed by a Christian convert, was drawn and quartered, and his head stuck on a pole in front of the church in Plymouth. This was known as the final solution.

I’m a total, all-out 101 percent patriot, Jack. I yield to no one in my contempt for socialism, communism, or any enemy of freedom. I also believe in a strong, intelligent, effective military to defend our beloved land. That’s exactly why I oppose the Christian fanatics and the war wing of the Republican party. That’s why I write about the con job that they have pulled off for the past hundred years.


It was all right, you understand, because these heathens were already damned. In the 365 years since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, the holy-war faction of the white, spiritual fathers of the Republican party has kept up a continual series of expansionist crusades against people with darker skins.

Indeed, for the born-again militants, it has become a tradition, a rite of passage, a religious ritual. This is not just my opinion; Mr. Broyles agrees.

A RELIGIOUS KICK

In Esquire, William Broyles tells us that war provides aesthetic and religious ecstasies. He recounts the case of a “sensitive” Marine officer who watched enemy bodies being disposed of “like so much garbage” with a “look of creative contentment on his face that I had not seen except in charismatic churches. It was the look of a person transported into ecstasy.”

“War is beautiful,” Broyles gushes. “There is something about a fire fight at night... brilliant patterns that seem, given their great speeds, oddly timeless, as if they had been etched in the night” Here Broyles soars into elegant gourmet connoisseurship. “Many men loved napalm... I preferred white phosphorous.”

Intoxicated by this toot of white phosphorous, ex-Lieutenant Broyles invokes his white Calvinist divinity. “And then perhaps the gunships called Spooky come in and fire their incredible guns like huge hoses washing down from the sky, like something God would do when He was really ticked off.”

Here we have the official Republican-warrior-caste version of the Christian God: a vengeful colonial deity casually wasting third-world peasants who irritate Him.

THE ELECT AND THE DAMNED

The Republican party is the warrior caste. The Republican party, white and very Protestant, has always represented the militarist tradition in America.

The Democratic party, by and large, represents the anti-warrior constituency. During this century Democrats have been the party of progressives, Catholics, passivists, scientists, gays, intellectuals, ecologists, agnostics, Jews, blacks, Latins—minority groups that have always been barred from the highest ranks of the military.

In the 1985 budget fight, it was the Republicans who wanted to cut social-educational programs and the Democrats who wanted to trim the military funds.

The warrior caste in America—the generals, the admirals, the cops—is overwhelmingly Republican. This is ominous. George Marshall, the only famous Democratic general of this century, is most renowned for his plans to wage peace.

This linkage of the GOP and the warrior caste is not new. From the Civil War through Eisenhower, seven out of twelve Republican presidents have been ex-generals or glamourous warriors.

This tradition of the warrior president goes back to the beginning. George Washington, the Father of our Country, won his first fame in the Indian Wars.

It is important to note that the other “Father of Our Country,” Thomas Jefferson, the spiritual founder of the Democratic party, was an antimilitarist. It was Jefferson who framed the philosophic and legal documents that led to the Revolution and who wrote the Declaration of Independence. Their Constitution was exquisitely designed to protect states’ rights and individual rights against a centralized federal authority.

A JEFFERSONIAN PRESIDENT MAKES A SENSIBLE PROPOSAL TO AVOID WAR WITH EUROPE

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It is important to note that the other "Father of Our Country." Thomas Jefferson. the spiritual founder of the Democratic party, was an antimilitarist. It was Jefferson who framed the philosophic and legal documents that led to the Revolution and who wrote the Declaration of Independence. Their Constitution was exquisitely designed to protect states' rights and individual rights against a centralized federal authority.


President James Monroe, a disciple of Jefferson, is known for the treaties and diplomatic accords with England, France, and Spain that managed to expand American interests without war. The Monroe Doctrine is his most famous achievement There w ere two important and interdependent clauses in this manifesto. The first was a formal restatement of the Washingtonian America-first neutrality. Beware of foreign entanglements! America promised not to intervene in European and (implicitly) Asian politics. In return, America declared the Newe World off limits for European intervention.

Modern American presidents such as Kennedy and Reagan are on solid historical and common-sense ground when they object to Russian meddling in Cuba and Central America. We all want to ban Soviet weapons from the Newe World. But Reagan is in direct violation of the Monroe Doctrine when he turns around and meddles in conflicts of the Olde World. Arms to Pakistan and Turkey. More than two hundred thousand U.S. troops in Germany. Forty thousand in Korea. Marines landing in Lebanon to protect our oil interests.

THE FILIBUSTER PRESIDENT

Filibuster... An adventurer who engages in a private military action in a foreign country... (originally freebooter... from Dutch vrijburter, pirate, "one who plunders freely").


The classic device of using a foreign adventure (the Filibuster) as a stepping-stone to the presidency was invented by Andrew Jackson. In 1818, Jackson, then a major general, was sent off to Florida to campaign against the Seminole Indians. These natives, employing standard liberation tactics, fled across the border to Spanish Florida. Disregarding his orders and violating international laws, Jackson invaded Spanish territory and wasted various natives. He also executed two British subjects. Jackson's own private war created an international crisis. Responsible American officials denounced the action, but Jackson's illegal wog-bashing won support from populists, expansionists, ultranationalists, imperialists, and Calvinist Protestants looking for a crusade against the heathen.

Jackson rode a wave of personal popularity that almost won him the presidency in 1824. In 1828, he swept into office, and for two terms was able to use his populist Western support to protect Eastern financial interests. Sound familiar, Ronnie?

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There are circuits in the human brain that when activated produce heightened states of awareness. Among these are certain neural tracts, mainly centered in the midbrain, which mediate convulsive survival behavior. These ancient primitive circuits are involved in height, flight, territorial defense, and male dominance. When a guy engages in violence, he falls into a trancelike state that produces an incredible adrenaline rush. Some call this the mad-dog reflex, or going berserk.


IS IT A CONDITION OF MANHOOD TO LOVE WAR?

In his Esquire piece, which passionately glorifies the mechanized mass murder of Orientals, ex-Marine William Broyles, Jr., is less than scientific. He writes, “Most men who have been to war would have to admit, if they are honest, that somewhere inside themselves they loved it... loved it as much as anything that happened to them before or since.”

But wait a minute. Isn’t ex-Lieutenant Broyles describing a well-known altered state of consciousness that can be and usually is attained by many other less-violent means?

The scientific situation seems to be something like this. There are circuits in the human brain that when activated produce heightened states of awareness. Among these are certain neural tracts, mainly centered in the midbrain, which mediate convulsive survival behavior. These ancient primitive circuits are involved in height, flight, territorial defense, and male dominance. When a guy engages in violence, he falls into a trancelike state that produces an incredible adrenaline rush. Some call this the mad-dog reflex, or going berserk.

This sympathetic-nervous-system hit is necessary for our survival repertoire. It’s like the endorphin-opiate rush that protects us from pain. Useful for desperate survival, but dangerously addictive.

At this point we must remind ex-Lieutenant Broyles that the destructive paroxysmal state (DPS), which he glamourizes and politicizes, is not restricted to war.

We have all felt on occasions this seductive invitation to “flip out” in wild destructiveness. You don’t have to ship eight million young Americans eight thousand miles across the Pacific to waste a small Asian country. Just go downtown, Broyles, and catch a barroom brawl in a Burt Reynolds-Clint Eastwood movie. Tune into a prime-time television show like The A-Team.

Alcohol trips off the DPS. Drop into any redneck saloon in Texas, Broyles. Visit a clinic for battered wives, ex-Lieutenant Broyles, and you’ll get a glimpse of your favorite “comer of the universe.” Put on some black leather and join a bikers’ club. Bullies love to express their manhood by riding in male-bonded packs. Join the Mexican Mafia, an inner-city gang. Cops and Bloods in the ghetto feel it. The Waffen SS felt it. It’s called “warrior love.”

FROM THE HALLS OF MONTEZUMA TO THE SHORES OF TRIPOLI

The Mexican War (1846-48) is another good example of the fun-fame-fortune rewards of Latin-bashing. After this conflict Mexico conceded two-fifths of its land to America. Are you listening, Adolf?

The Mexican War was a bonanza for the warrior caste and for ambitious Republican politicians. Take Zachary Taylor. For starters, Zach earned his general’s stars by snuffing Sac, Fox, and Seminole Indians, for which he won the label “Old Rough and Ready.” His Mexican War triumphs assured him the presidency at the age of 65.

General Winfield Scott had good wog-busting credentials. He fought the Creeks and the Seminoles and supervised the removal of the Cherokee to the Southwest. Scott won the battle of Mexico City and proceeded to defy the U.S. envoy during the peace negotiations, causing considerable embarrassment in Washington. Agents of God shouldn’t have to obey diplomatic rules; Reagan and Ollie North understand that. So did Adolf and Brezhnev!

THE RECENT REHABILITATION OF THE FREEBOOTER ETHIC

How, we wonder, can a presumably respectable journalist like William Broyles, Jr., get away with a cover story in Esquire celebrating the wanton, lustful Nazi-Stalinist-Marxist Pol-Pot slaying of millions of Asians in the name of self-fulfillment? Well, it turns out that Broyles, for self-esteem and profit, was shrewdly surfing the wave of neomilitarism generated by the Reagan regime.

During the humanist “give peace a chance” antiwar movement of the 1960s, and the human-rights moments of the Carter period, the Puritan-killer ethic got pushed around a bit, but it never disappeared. The Schwarzenegger-Stallone hero figures were still packing them into the theatres. The Reagan administration brilliantly rehabilitated militarism. Ronald was a film star. He knew how to put the adventurist hero back in the saddle! Wog-bashing was back in style. It was the triumphant return of the Wild West, John Wayne-Ollie North pirate who scornfully ignores the legalities of effete politicians and takes the law into his own hands.

Lieutenant Calley, you’re forgiven. The heroes of My Lai are marching down Fifth Avenue in a ticker-tape parade. Crank up Ollie North.

This Christian-soldier stuff is not limited to the redneck South and Southwest. It plays well all around white, Calvinist America. The American Legion, the National Rifle Association, the Hell’s Angels, the Marine Corps Association, the survivalists, the G. Gordon Liddy crowd, and Soldier of Fortune readers are visible tips of a profoundly deep, white American need to get kicks from wasting coloured people.

A STRANGE LITTLE EPISODE IN NICARAGUA

William Walker (1824-60) merits a footnote in history as a classic case of an Ollie North American warrior compulsively involved in private, illegal plundering raids of Caribbean countries. In 1853, Walker led a group of frontier hoodlums in quest of Latin American plunder. First these white, American thugs tried Sonora, Mexico. The freebooting mission failed miserably. Walker was arrested for violation of neutrality laws. An understanding frontier American jury acquitted him. He was apparently a charismatic, John Wayne kind of thug. A good communicator, you might say. And after all, it was only Mexicans he had wasted.

This Christian-soldier stuff is not limited to the redneck South and Southwest. It plays well all around white. Calvinist America. The American Legion, the National Rifle Association, the Hell's Angels, the Marine Corps Association, the survivalists, the G. Gordon Liddy crowd, and Soldier of Fortune readers are visible tips of a profoundly deep, white American need to get kicks from wasting coloured people.


In 1855, Walker joined a group of contra terrorist revolutionaries in Nicaragua. After overthrowing the government, Walker obtained recognition from the U.S. State Department and set himself up as dictator of Nicaragua. But the real power in Nicaragua those days was American tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose Accessory Transit Company monopolized trade in that inviting land. When Walker’s operation became competitive, Vanderbilt ran him out.

But Walker still suffered from that old Caribbean Freebooter Legionnaires’ disease, as recurrent as malaria. In 1860, based now in Honduras, he led still another pirate attempt to take over Central America. It failed, and Latin-basher William Walker was finally done in by a Honduran government firing squad, leaving behind a book that has some relevance today. It’s called War in Nicaragua!

Onward Christian Soldiers! It's another crusade against Satan. It’s jihad time.
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Blow it all up for Allah! Kill for Qaddafi!
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Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition! Hand me that red phone, boy. Howdy there, God. Time to drop the Big One on the Godless heathens like the Good Book says!
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THE COMMUNIST PARTY TAKES OVER AMERICA

The American Civil War (1861-65), one of the bloodiest conflicts in history, was provoked when a manic-depressive, psychotic, Christian bully strongman, Abraham Lincoln, used federal troops to ruthlessly suppress the independence of the southern states and force them unwillingly into the American Union. Before this “Brezhnev maneuver,” the United States of America was a loose confederation of small sovereign, agricultural states. Lincoln, as would Lenin sixty years later, created a centralized, industrial, militaristic, expansionist government Just as the Communist party has managed the USSR since 1921, so has the Republican party, USA, controlled the police, the military, the banks, the manufacturing plants, the organs of information.

This change from small, feudal, independent-interdependent agricultural states to a highly organized, mechanistic, imperialistic, monolithic, state-centered society is an inevitable stage in human evolution. Let us not daemonize Abraham Lincoln. The time had come for the industrialization stage. In the eighty years after Lincoln and the “party” seized control of America, other smokestack countries—Japan, Germany, Italy, Russia—set up similar centralized military-industrial systems controlled by a “party.”

Alter the Civil War the party leadership in the American Union automatically went to military men. U. S. Grant was succeeded by Major General Rutherford B. Hayes. Then Major General James Garfield, a lay preacher in the Disciples of Christ, was succeeded by Quartermaster General Chester A. Arthur. President Benjamin Harrison was a brigadier general. All, of course, were party members.

It was during this stage of industrial-military growth that the glorification of the warrior caste hit its peak. Statues were raised in the center of every town and city: a general (and party leader) on a bronze horse, riding off to war. With the Cross of Jesus going on before!

THE RELIGIOUS ISSUE JUST WON’T QUIT

Now comes Esquire magazine, publishing an inflammatory moral justification of warfare at a spooky moment in history when nuclear conflagration threatens and when the religious right wing in this country and in several Islamic theocracies speaks approvingly of Holy Wars, Evil Empires, and Armageddons. Onward Christian Soldiers! It’s another crusade against Satan. It’s jihad time. Blow it all up for Allah! Kill for Qaddafi! Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition! Hand me that red phone, boy. Howdy there, God. Time to drop the Big One on the Godless heathens like the Good Book says!

Reflect for a moment on the quotes from the Broyles article. Glazed-eye babble about brotherly love among the napalm, and God as the gunner in a helicopter gunship, and blissed-out looks on the faces of charismatic Protestants, and the psychotic Marine assassin with “Just You and Me, Lord” tattooed on his shoulder.

My wife is worried about this article. She thinks that I’ve gone too far. She fears that this expose of the warrior caste is going to sound unpatriotic. "America is a young country without traditions,” she explains. "We need heroes and a glorious history.”


CARIBBEAN FEVER STRIKES AGAIN

The war for Southern independence ended in 1865. Between 1869 and 1878, more than two hundred pitched battles were fought against a newly invented enemy: the Plains Indians. The Massacre of Wounded Knee was the final solution for this overpopulation problem. More than two hundred unarmed men, women, and children were killed. “The soldiers later claimed that it was difficult to distinguish the Sioux women from the men,” a complaint to be heard again in later wars against coloured people.

By 1898, the expansionists and war lovers and heretic-bashers had simply run out of poor neighbours to invade. A new generation of young men hungered for the “awesome beauty, the haunting romance, the timeless nightmare” of a colonial war. Well, how about a little rumble in Cuba?

It so happened that there were heavy .American investments to protect on the island. The military, with its eye on Panama and Nicaragua for a canal, stressed the strategic position of the island. It was easy for the press to whip up support for the contras fighting against Spain.

Cuba was a media war. William Randolph Hearst broadcast fake propaganda. There was a Gulf of Tonkin-Korean Air Lines Flight 007 faked incident involving the American battleship USS Maine.

The war itself was a pushover. The Spanish put up token resistance. The biggest winner was a wealthy politician named Teddy Roosevelt, who organized his own semiprivate regiment (Western cowboys and “adventurous blue bloods from Eastern universities”) and whose routine exploits were highly publicized. Quick results: Within three years Roosevelt— a swashbuckling, militaristic, Reagan-type—was in the White House. Roosevelt’s regime was continually involved in Latin-bashing, dollar diplomacy, Venezuela, and the Philippines. He infuriated all of Latin .America by placing, in the Dominican Republic, U.S. customs officers who stole revenues for the benefit of American business. He backed a group of contras who hijacked Panama from Colombia. Just eight years ago, when Jimmy Carter returned the canal to Panama, the Republicans screamed, “Treason! We stole that canal fair and square!”

Teddy Roosevelt’s jingoistic imperialism made him the scourge of Democrats, progressives, and Jeffersonian Americans. And in 1906, Teddy, the ultimate war freak and ultra-imperialist, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Shades of Henry Kissinger!

A BUSY TIME FOR THE WARRIOR CASTE

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As I review American history, I see a large glorious company of heroic men and women who represent our red-white and blue ideals of initiative, intelligence, tolerance, humour, compassion, common sense, optimism, and good-natured skepticism of bureaucracy and authority. People who believe in fair play and who dislike armed bullies running around in uniforms.


During the 20th Century, every generation of young Americans has been offered a foreign expeditionary war. World War I against the Huns. World War II against the Nazis and Japanese. To prop up the unspeakably fascist regime of South Korea, our generals sacrificed more than fifty thousand American lives. General Douglas MacArthur, the ultimate freebooter, started to wage his own little psychotic war against a billion “slant-eyed” Chinese until he was forcibly removed by President Truman. “Dugout” Doug returned as a hero and announced his candidacy for the presidency. On the Republican ticket, of course.

Then came Vietnam. And Cambodia.

More explosives were dropped on Vietnam than during all of our two hundred years of warfare. Not to mention a small sea of Agent Orange, which has left much of that unfortunate land blighted for years to come. We have listened recently to a deafening chorus of aggrieved-victim complaints from Vietnam vets who feel unrewarded; we hear very little about the punishing casualties we inflicted upon the peoples of Vietnam and Cambodia. We won the Body Count War! We wasted ’em—soldiers, civilians, women, and children.

Esquire is off to a good start. Let’s encourage these psycho vets to tell their stories about the fun of body desecration, and the “perfectly formed piece of shit” on the non- Caucasian’s head, and “the mad excitement of destroying.” And about how impossible it is to talk about it unless you were there. It’s good Freudian catharsis. And let’s build them a monument where they can weep, not for Vietnam and Cambodia wasted, not for America rent by conflict, not for Jeffersonian ideals lost, but in pity for themselves.

But the ticker-tape parade led by General Westmoreland isn’t enough. Even cover stories in national magazines can’t heal the scar of ex-Lieutenant Broyles. Even a full-page picture of him in natty suit and tie, looking very serious-grim like a young Dallas stockbroker, standing in front of a war memorial with his blonde kid (a boy, of course) in his arms, holding (no shit) the American flag in front of an enormous bronze statue of three real young, clean-cut, good-looking white soldiers—Texas A&M types—raising still another American flag over Iwo Jima, Managua, or even Havana?
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Re: Chaos & Cyberculture, by Timothy Leary, Ph.D.

Postby admin » Tue Jun 25, 2019 3:04 am

Part 2 of 2

PATRIOTISM AND THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

My wife is worried about this article.

She thinks that I’ve gone too far. She fears that this expose of the warrior caste is going to sound unpatriotic. “America is a young country without traditions,” she explains. “We need heroes and a glorious history.”

Her warning is well taken; so let me explain. I’m a total, all-out 101 percent patriot, Jack. I yield to no one in my contempt for socialism, communism, or any enemy of freedom. I also believe in a strong, intelligent, effective military to defend our beloved land.

That’s exactly why I oppose the Christian fanatics and the war wing of the Republican party. That’s why I write about the con job that they have pulled off for the past hundred years.

As I review American history, I see a large glorious company of heroic men and women who represent our red-white-and-blue ideals of initiative, intelligence, tolerance, humour, compassion, common sense, optimism, and good-natured skepticism of bureaucracy and authority. People who believe in fair play and who dislike armed bullies running around in uniforms.

Let’s list a few examples of true American heroes—gentle William Penn, founder of Philadelphia, city of brotherly love; Henry David Thoreau, the Concord libertarian; Edgar Allan Poe, a West Pointer who became a literary star, inventors such as Eli Whitney, Robert Fulton, and Thomas Edison; Ralph Waldo Emerson, philosopher of self-reliance; Walt Whitman and Mark Twain.

Let’s recall the long line of blacks who have provided us models of noble humanity, creatively waging peace, not war—George Washington Carver, Ralph Bunche, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., among others.

THE CIVILIZED AMERICAN HERO

What, indeed, is any thoughtful American going to feel when exposed to this American Legion, born-again fake patriotism?

Most of us—Catholics, Jews, Latins, women, and men—are descendants of those who came to the United States of America to escape militarism and to create a better social order. Basically, most of us don’t want to stir up foreign adventures and turn our country into a Christian empire. We’ve got enough real problems here at home—the complicated transition from an industrialized economy; the agonizing racial tensions; the collapse of our education system. There is a need for heroes, not to lead religious crusades, but to apply goodwill, tolerance, and intelligence to make the American Dream come true.

So let’s issue some patriotic American commands to ex-Lieutenant Broyles and his comrades.

ABOUT FACE! ORDER ARMS! AT EASE!

Hear this, lads: We have called off the Christian crusade. You don’t have to bully others to prove your manhood!

So let’s issue so me patriotic American commands to ex-Lieutenant Broyles and his comrades. ABOUT FACE! ORDER ARMS! AT EASE! Hear this, lads: We have called oil the Christian crusade. You don’t have to bully others to prove your manhood!


Brace yourselves, folks. The Roaring 20th Century is boiling up to a Chaos Climax. In the next few years Millennium Madness is gonna inundate this planet!

VIII.2. God runs for president on the republican Ticket

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Check out the history books and read about the years 987 to 1000. In those days a lot of fruit loops were running around stirring up trouble. Exactly one thousand years ago Grand Prince Vladimir of Russia started a religious Cold War by joining the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church. The Persians and Arabs and Christians were waging a Holy War. People were scared and confused back then—just as they are today.

And in the next few years, I believe we will see similar irrational kookiness, messianic megalomanias, mass insanities, apocalyptic paranoias, end-of-world prophecies; demented demagogues, Holy Wars, crazy crusades, lunatic leaders, disharmonic divergences, and thousands of just plain old four-square evangelical bad trips. Ollie North, Jim Bakker, Muammar Qaddafi, Shirley MacLaine, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Oral Roberts, and, yes, Pat Robertson—they’re just warm-ups for the eccentricities and terror-activated manias to come.

No question about it, most of the violence and angry politics that are apparent these days pit one biblical God against another. The Cold War has taken a back seat. It’s as if America and Russia have become mere pawns on God’s chessboard. It’s the Roaring 9th Century all over again! Feudal Super Bowl crusader time! My God versus your Great Satan! Israel versus Rome versus Byzantium. Shi’ites versus Sunnis. Hindus versus Buddhists. Hindus versus Sikhs. Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia. Jehovah versus Allah for the world championship.

And now, with the emergence of the militant evangelicals and the candidacy of Reverend Pat Robertson, the angry, jealous, fundamentalist God has thrown his bellicose hat into the American political ring.

I have studied the skillfully written press releases of the Christian Broadcasting Network, a monstrously successful media empire that had a take of $182 million in 1987. I have pored over stacks of lavishly adulatory columns on Robertson from small-town newspapers and unashamedly adoring articles in mainline publications. I was stunned, for example, to read this Chicago Tribune headline: The $70 Million Miracle Named CBN. It was subtitled: "With the Lord's Grace , Pat Robertson Builds a Cable Empire."

Huh? A presumably rational, mainstream newspaper invokes the Deity in its discussion of a political candidate? What is Chicago coming to?

Robertson’s platform is not surprising. It’s your standard right-wing, strident, millenarian kook show. Predestination, here we come. The familiar Jimmy Swaggart, Oral Roberts, Pat Buchanan, Ronnie Reagan platform. An appeal to the chosen people. An expectation of the imminent and miraculous intervention of God or his messianic prophet A belief in the total transformation to the perfect kingdom. In eternal struggle against the Evil Empire.

Fiercely ascetic white-bread puritanism. Anti-abortion, anti-gay witch-hunting. Pro-school prayer, pro-creationist “science.” What most astonishes and disturbs, how ever, is the shamanic power of Robertson’s evangelical television show. The “700 Club” is designed to produce an altered state of consciousness, a classic voodoo hypnotic trance.

To begin with, the show’s production is that of state-of-the-art prime-time television, using the same slick, commercial techniques that seduce us into buying Coors beer and Extra-Strength Tylenol. The actors who appear on the show look like local news anchors. Dignified Ben Kinchlow with his white trimmed mustache looks like a Supreme Court justice. The lovely assistant Danuta Soderman, looks like a model for some sensible home product such as Drano or Roach Motel.

The program builds efficiently toward its climax, namely the invocation of the Deity. Buckle your seat belts, trippers, while Shaman Pat leans over, his eyes clenched in painful concentration. Hey, the guy’s possessed! When the audience is whipped into a classic trance state and is neurologically vulnerable, Robertson starts to imprint the commercials. He dials up the sponsor and starts to discuss God’s agenda—namely His impatience with what’s happening on the planet Both Robertson and the Almighty Lord are “sick and tired” (the candidate’s favorite buzz phrase) of God’s country being taken over by sinners, homosexuals, Democrats, secular humanists, atheistic scientists, communist dupes, pornographers, and, above all, the anti-Christ Iranians.

Meanwhile, the older pious-looking chap next to Robertson—the guy wearing the Episcopal clerical collar—is softly singing, beseeching, “Jesus! Jesus!” It’s a gentle, soothing, imploring chorus behind Shaman Pat.

Eventually Robertson begins to beg the Lord to strengthen and arm his people to deal with his enemies. The “Jesus! Jesus!” chorus increases in volume and tempo. Soon the two of them have worked up a voodoo rhythm. The cameras zoom in for close-ups of the audience, their faces twisted with awe and righteous self-pity. Soon the folks are holding hands, softly chanting and sighing the name of Jesus.

Hey, I've participated in as many trance experiences as anyone. I’ve tripped out to voodoo rites in Haiti. I’ve been mesmerized by Gnaoua drummers in Tangier. I’ve attended Navaho peyote ceremonies, Ken Kesey’s acid tests, ganja funeral rituals along the Ganges, sacred mushroom chants in Oaxaca, Pan rites in the Rif mountains of Morocco. I’ve seen folks holding hands, softly chanting and sighing the name of Jerry Garcia. I’ve even participated in sunrise davening prayers with Hassidic rabbis.

So swear me in, bailiff, and I’ll testify as an expert witness that the born-again rituals of our homegrown southern Pentecostals are authentic head trips, and that preachers such as Pat Robertson are performing the classic shamanic role of brainwashing.

The problem I have with these Bible Belt altered-statesmen has to do with their motive and cultural framework. When the power of the shamanic tripping is hooked to a confrontational, monotheistic religious dogma, you’ve got the potential for major mind games. Reverend Pat taps into the old “One God,” Middle Eastern Numero Uno, w ho is congenitally jealous, possessive, and given to vengeful genocide if and when His monopoly is challenged. (“And the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the Earth, and it grieved Him to His heart,” reads Genesis: 6. “So the Lord said, ‘I will blot out man whom 1 have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for 1 am sorry that I have made them’.”)

As I watch Robertson incite hatred of nonbelievers, 1 am reminded of those familiar television news scenes in which mobs in the streets of Tehran lash themselves with chains into frenzies of sorrowful rage against the Great Satan. Discounting superficial cultural differences, there do seem to be striking similarities between Robertson and the Ayatollah. They’re both media shamans—electronic wizards who are able to use television to convey magnetizing charisma. And they both head highly efficient political organizations.

... our middle-aged leaders simply don't understand altered states of mind. They’re neurological innocents. They never had to talk down a tripping college roommate. They’re totally unequipped to handle cabinet-level kooks and White House zealots who use slick television advertising techniques to rave about their biblical revelations and millennium dreams.
 

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ANDY FRITH

Come to think of it, Robertson and the Ayatollah are mirror images of each other. Their beliefs stem from the same monotheism. And when they look at each other, guess what they see: the Great Satan.

For instance:

1. They both present themselves as agents of God. Those who oppose them are, by definition, evil. They aim to create a theocratic state.

2. They both whip up hatred of nonbelievers—a condition that leads to holy-war crankiness. Their approach is divisive and confrontational.

3. As God's agents, they can allow no compromise with Satan. This leads to a profound impracticality. They can't be bothered with such prosaic human concerns as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They're engaged in an all-out Holy War against evil.

4. Their opponents are treated without tolerance or mercy. Robertson, for example, publicly wished for the deaths of Supreme Court justices Marshall, Brennan, and Stevens. (Scientific duty compels me to admit that all three justices were hospitalized within weeks after Robertson's curse. In fairness to the Ayatollah, I must also note that every American move against Iran has mysteriously backfired.)

5. They're both full of biblical sternness for unrepentant sinners. They're for the death penalty, punitive police action, a big military, and an aggressive foreign policy. They don't blink at nuclear weapons.

6. They believe that women should be subservient to men.

7. Both exhibit obsessive prudishness and a hatred of modern lifestyles; they believe in the censorship of books, drama, music, movies.

8. They're committed to an apocalyptic vision. Both of them yearn for the end of the world, when God will reward His faithful.

9. They distrust science, Western culture, and secular education.

10. They appeal to the dissatisfied who feel that they've been left out of the secular mainstream. The American fundamentalists have been scorned by the mainline Protestant sects and ridiculed by such intellectuals as Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, and Garry Trudeau. Their followers include hardworking, God-fearing, small-town folk who bitterly resent the freedom of liberals, hedonists, and other urban followers of Satan.

11. They long for a return to a simpler, more ordered society.

12. They're intensely antihumanist. They see humanism as a satanic attempt to place worldly issues before the will of God.

13. They seek political power to further their religious aims. They're unconcerned with social and economic issues.

Robertson’s platform doesn’t seriously address nuclear disarmament, the budget deficit, racism, the agonizing conversion to a postindustrial society, the trade imbalance, and the environment The Ayatollah is unperturbed by the slaughter of his young soldiers on the Iraqi front They don’t worry about social injustice and the fate of the Earth, because they’re counting down to Armageddon. With only a few years left before the millennium, prayer in schools is obviously a key survival issue.

Since 1946 the Cold War has obsessed the planet’s politics. Why did we support a monster like Ferdinand Marcos? Why are the Soviets wasting billions on an incompetent megalomaniac like Fidel Castro? Why are we in the Persian Gulf now? Why are the Soviets using toy bombs against Afghan children? It’s because every country in the third world is a pawn on the red-black chessboard.

The American obsession with the Cold War came to a screeching halt in the mid-1960s, when the first waves of the baby-boom generation—76 million strong—started to hit college. The Dr. Spock people are the first post-Cold War generation. Winston Churchill and Omar Bradley are as alien to them as Ulysses Grant and General Jack Pershing.

I’ll testify as an expert witness that the born-again rituals of our hometown southern Pentecostals are authentic head trips, and that preachers such as Pat Robertson are performing the classic shamanic role of brainwashing


The group initiations of the Spock kids occurred not at Anzio Beach or Normandy but at Malibu Beach and Fort Lauderdale. They were the First postnuclear, the first postindustrial, the first electronic generation. Extremely individualistic, supremely self-confident, indulged, and ennobled by demand feeding, these affluent children of a doting adult culture are obsessed with such practical, down-to-earth matters as enriched sex, physical comfort, aesthetic style, and personal growth. Above all, they were and still are consistently antiwar and antidraft. The 1976 election pitted a dependable Cold Warrior, Gerald Ford, against Jimmy Carter, who actually quoted Bob Dylan in his speeches. The election was a toss-up. The militant Bible vote was split Carter, alter all, was a born-again Southerner.

Mainstream America is now learning what psychedelic researchers learned in the early 1960s and what most baby-boomers learned in the 1970s: Religious, mystical, visionary possession states are powerful and wonderful—they open the doors of perception, polish our sensory lenses, shake up the autonomic nervous system, and get the hormones surging—but they’re intimate and precious. They shouldn’t be imposed on others. And above all, they should be kept out of politics. The real issue here is the separation of state and religious visions.


The election landslide of 1980 was produced by an alliance between fundamentalist Protestants, fundamentalist Catholics, and cold-war conservatives. The Reagan Revolution will surely go down in history as the most zany, irrational, unrealistic period in American history. Common sense has floated out the window. The national debt has exploded, the trade balance has collapsed, the industrial base has shrunk, the educational system has failed, and Reagan's ring-ding regime has launched military strikes in Beirut, Libya, Central America, Grenada, and the Persian Gulf, not to mention its highly publicized and ineffective War on Drugs. So what's going on here?

Oh, have you forgotten? It’s Millennium Madness. Just a few more looney-tune years to go until A.D. 2000. Happens every thousand years.

Ronald Reagan, let us not forget, believes in the apocalyptic script. George Bush is an Episcopalian Christian. Can you imagine what Pat Robertson would do if he had the Pentagon and the CIA under his command?

How, you wonder, can these nitwits get away with this stuff? Why do the Democrats and the liberals and the moderate Republicans and other practical people sit by with dazed expressions and let harebrains like Pat Buchanan, Richard Secord, Thomas Clines, and Manucher Ghorbanifar run U.S. foreign policy?

Oh, have you forgotten? It’s Millennium Madness. Just a few more looney-tune years to go until A.D. 2000. Happens every thousand years.


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Why? Because our middle-aged leaders simply don’t understand altered states of mind. They're neurological innocents. They never had to talk down a tripping college roommate. They’re totally unequipped to handle cabinet-level kooks and White House zealots who use slick television advertising techniques to rave about their biblical revelations and millennium dreams.

The same thing happened in Tehran. The Iranian middle class and the technicians and the merchants watched with amazement as madman Khomeini whipped up holy-war passions.

Mainstream America is now learning what psychedelic researchers learned in the early 1960s and what most baby-boomers learned in the 1970s: Religious, mystical, visionary possession states are powerful and wonderful—they open the doors of perception, polish our sensory lenses, shake up the autonomic nervous system, and get the hormones surging—but they’re intimate and precious. They shouldn’t be imposed on others. And above all, they should be kept out of politics. The real issue here is the separation of state and religious visions.

As we approach the millennium, our survival could depend upon staying calm and cooling out the crazies among us.

VIII.3. Who Owns the Jesus Property?

I've been trying to make sense out of the current flap about the film version of The Last Temptation of Christ . Why are fundamentalist Protestants attacking this movie inspired by a novel penned by a tormented Greek Catholic, adapted by a guilt-ridden Protestant, and directed by a moody Italian Catholic? Since they all claim to be sincere Christians, why all the rhubarb?

Here's my theory:

What we have here is a typical bunch of quarreling Christian sects—exactly the same noisy cast of characters who have been profiting from similar theological battles for two millennia. They've bickered, century after century, about the trinity or the virgin birth or that always explosive topic, the personality, habits, and human/divine endowments of Jesus.

The sides in these well-publicized debates are usually drawn along geographic lines. In general, the people from North Europe tend to define Jesus and the women in his life as less emotional than people from the Mediterranean do. The Nordics want a Jesus like themselves, cold and repressed. The Southerners want a passionate, volatile Jesus—again, like themselves.

There is a fascinating parallel here with Islam. The angry born-again fundamentalists in Iran; the moderate Sunni and Saudi Arabs who are just trying to make a buck on the Mecca tourist trade and the oil wells, but who are forced to band together to resist the highly impractical Iranian militants.

... the ancestors of these bad-tempered European Bible thumpers were running around bare-assed in bearskins, sacrificing virgins to Thor the Thunder God, when the original Christ script was penned.


This relativistic speculation cheered me up. It showed me, once again, how far our American Christians (and American Jews and Moslems) have evolved from their pesky counterparts in the Olde World. In the Middle East these theological differences are still being fought out with tanks and bombers and poison gas; in Northern Ireland, the dour Protestants and passionate Catholics have at each other with guns and gelignite. Just like the Middle Ages, except for improved weaponry.

But here in the U.S. our sectarian Christians merely quarrel like talent agencies disputing who owns the screen rights to the Jesus Christ story. We're hassling over the ownership to one of the most valuable properties of all time. Look at the script: The birth in the manger. The walking on water. The loaves and fishes. The scourging of the money lenders from the Temple. (Well, on second thought, let's not stress that scene.) The betrayal by Judas. (I wouldn't mention the thirty pieces of silver, to spare Jerry Falwell's feelings.) The crown of thorns. The ever-popular Crucifixion Climax. The surprise¬ ending Resurrection. It beats Indiana Jones, doesn't it?

Our fundamentalists and television evangelists understandably insist that they have a monopoly on the Jesus Property. Of course, there's no shred of evidence to support this in any court. There's not a single paper anywhere that says the Christ family, Jesus, Mary, Joseph, etc., signed away these valuable docudrama rights to North European Protestants and their descendants in the right wing of the Republican party. Hey, these Johnny-come-lately Protestants didn't appear on the scene until fourteen centuries after the death scene went down. To be absolutely frank, the ancestors of these bad-tempered European Bible thumpers were running around bare-assed in bearskins, sacrificing virgins to Thor the Thunder God, when the original Christ script was penned.

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ANDY FRITH

The televangelists are obviously worried that their alleged monopoly on the $50 billion a year Christ Market will be threatened by passionate Latin and Greek versions that attribute Mediterranean humanity to Christ in contrast to the pale, blonde, plastic doll, blue-eyed killer version that they are peddling. The primordial Greek-Latin image of J. C. is too "human" and emotional for dogmatic Jerry Falwell or shy, onanistic Jimmy Swaggart, or sexually naive Jim "Motel" Bakker.

In my scenario of these events, Jesus and Mary Magdalene and Peter the Fisherman and the rest of the rowdy gang would be laughing their haloes off at this grubby wrangling for the screen rights to their story. After all, the Jewish Jesus, or Yeshuah—the prototype, even older than Greek-Latin versions—seems to have been an easy-going Reform rabbi with a sly sense of humour, a genial, Hin-Jew rabbi like Ram Dass.

Anyway, if the Writers Guild takes an interest, they should demand residuals for Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, those four hard-working, ink-stained wretches who penned this eternally interesting and controversial script.

In general, the people from North Europe tend to define Jesus and the women in his life as less emotional than people from the Mediterranean do. The Nordics want a Jesus like themselves, cold and repressed. The Southerners want a passionate, volatile Jesus—again, like themselves.


God is not a tribal father, nor a feudal lord, nor an engineer manager of the universe. There is no God (in the singular) except you at the moment.... Since God # 1 appears to be held hostage back there by the bloodthirsty Persian ayatollah, by the telegenic Polish pope, and the Moral Majority, there's only one logical alternative. You "steer" your own course. You and your dear friends start your own religion. The Temple, of course, is your body. Your minds write the theology. And the holy spirit emanates from that infinitely mysterious intersection between your brain and the brains of your team.


VIII.4. High-Tech Paganism
CO-WRITTEN WITH ERIC GULLICHSEN

THE CYBERPUNK AS MODERN ALCHEMIST


The baby-boom generation grew up in an electronic world (1960s to 1970s) of turn-on, tune-in television and personal-computing screens. The cyberpunks, growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, develop new metaphors, rituals, and lifestyles for dealing with the universe of information. More and more of us are becoming fuzzy-logic shamans and digital alchemists.

The parallels between the culture of the alchemists and that of cyberpunk computer adepts are numerous. Both employ knowledge of an occult arcanum unknown to the population at large, with secret symbols and words of power. The “secret symbols” compose the languages of computers and mathematics, and the “words of power” instruct computer-operating systems to complete Herculean tasks.

Knowing the precise code name of a digital program permits it to be conjured into existence, transcending the labour of muscular or mechanical search. Rites of initiation or apprenticeship are common to both. “Psychic feats” of telepresence and action-at-a-distance are achieved by selection of the menu option.

Young digital alchemists have at their command tools of a clarity and power unimagined by their predecessors. Computer screens are magical mirrors, presenting alternate realities at varying degrees of abstraction on command (invocation). The mouse or pen of the digitizing tablet is the wand, controlling the fire of the CRT/monitor display and harnessing the creative force of the operator. Spinning disk drives are the pentacles, inscribed with complex symbols, earthen tablets to receive the input of “air,” resulting in the crackling intellectual electricity of the processor-chip circuitry programming. The RAM chips are, literally, the buffers (“buffer pools”), the water, the passive element capable only of receiving impressions and retransmitting, reflecting.

Iconic visual programming languages are a Tarot, the pictorial summarization of all possibilities, activated for divination by juxtaposition and mutual influence. It is a Periodic Table of Possibilities, the Western form of the Eastern I Ching. Traditional word-oriented programming languages—FORTRAN, COBOL, and the rest—are a degenerate primitive form of these universal systems, grimoires of profit-oriented corporations.

Detailed data-base logs of the activity of operating systems form the Akashic records on a microscale. At a macroscopic level, this is the “world net” knowledge base, the world-wide online hypertext network of information soon to be realized by the storage capacity of CD-ROM and the data-transmission capability of optical fiber—William Gibson’s cyberspace “matrix.”

Personal transmutation (the ecstasy of the “ultimate hack”) is a veiled goal of both systems. The satori of harmonious human-computer communication resulting from the infinite regress into metalevels of self-reflection is the reward for immaculate conceptualization and execution of ideas.

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BRUMMBAER

The universality of 0 and 1 throughout magic and religion—yin and yang, yoni and lingam, cup and wand—are manifested today in digital signals, the two bits underlying the implementation of all digital programs in the world in our brains and in our operating disks. Stretching it a bit, even the monad, symbol of change and the tao, visually resembles a superimposed 0 and 1 when its curving central line is stretched through the action of centrifugal force from the ever-increasing speed of rotation of the monad.

CYBERRELIGION OF THE BABY- BOOMERS

By the year 2000 the concerns of the baby-boom generation will be digital or (to use the old paradigms) philosophic-spiritual.

During their teens the boomers went on an adolescent spiritual binge unequalled since the Children’s Crusade. In their revolt against the factory culture, they reinvented and updated their tribal-pagan roots and experimented with Hinduism, Buddhism, American Indianism, Magic, Witchcraft, Ann Arbor Voodoo, Esalen Yoga, I Ching, Taoism, Exorcism of the Pentagon, 3-D Re-Incarnations, Love- Ins, and Psychedelic Celebrations.

As Buddha. Krishna, Guidjieff, et al., have taught: The aim of your life is to take care of yourself so you can take care of others.


Born-again Paganism! Pan-Dionysus on audiovisual cassettes. Mick Jagger had them sympathizing with the devil. The Beatles had them floating upstream on the Ganges. Jimi Hendrix taught them how to be a voodoo child. Is there one pre-Christian or third-world metaphor for divinity that some rock group has not yet celebrated on an album cover?

You and your friends can do anything that the great religions and empires and racial groups have done in the name of their God. And you're certain to do it better because... well, look at their track records. There’s no way your Personal State could produce the persecutions and massacres and bigotries of the past and present. There’s only one of you, and even with the help of your friends the amount of damage individuals can do is insignificant compared with that of a collective.


ONTOLOGY RECAPITULATES THEOLOGY

The baby-boomers in their evolving life cycle seem to have recapitulated the theological history of our species. Just as monotheism emerged to unify pagan tribes into nations, so did some boomers rediscover fundamentalist, born-again Judaism and Christianity in their young adulthood. Even far-away Islam attracted gourmet blacks and ex-hippies like Cat Stevens. Bob Dylan nicely exemplifies the consumer approach to religion. For twenty-five years Dylan has continued to browse through the spiritual boutiques, dabbing on a dash of Baptist “born again,” nibbling at Hassidism, before returning to his old-time faith of sardonic reformed humanism.

We can laugh at this trendy shopping around for the custom-tailored, designer God, but behind the faddism we find a powerful clue. Notice how Dylan, for example, preserved his options and tried to avoid shoddy or off-the-rack soulware. No “plastic Christs that glow in the dark” for Bob!

The real religion here is Evolutionism, based on the classic humanist, transcendental assumptions:

• God is not a tribal father, nor a feudal lord, nor an engineer-manager of the universe. There is no God (in the singular) except you at the moment. There are as many Gods (in the plural) as can be imagined. Call them whatever you want. They are free agents like you and me.

• You can change and mutate and keep improving. The idea is to keep “trading up” to a “better” philosophy-theology.

As Buddha, Krishna, Gurdjieff, et al., have taught: The aim of your life is to take care of yourself so you can take care of others.

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM YOUR FRIENDS

This generation, we recall, was disillusioned by the religions, politics, and economics of their parents. Growing up with the threat of nuclear war, the assassination of beloved leaders, a collapsing industrial system, an impossible national debt, religious fundamentalisms (Christian-Jewish- Islamic) that fanatically scream hatred and intolerance, acquired immune deficiencies, and uncomprehending neglect of the ecology, they have developed a healthy skepticism about collective solutions.

No wonder the baby-boom generation has created a psychology of individual navigation. Singularity. The basic idea is self-responsibility. You just can’t depend on anyone else to solve your problems. You gotta do it all by yourself... with a little help from your friends.

A DO-IT-YOURSELF RELIGION

Since God #1 appears to be held hostage back there by the blood-thirsty Persian ayatollah, by the telegenic Polish pope, and the Moral Majority, there’s only one logical alternative. You “steer” your own course. You and your dear friends start your own religion. The Temple, of course, is your body. Your minds write the theology. And the holy spirit emanates from that infinitely mysterious intersection between your brain and the brains of your team.

The attainment of even the suburbs of paradise involves good navigation and planning on your part Hell is a series of redeemable errors. A detour caused by failure to check the trip maps. A losing streak.

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BRUMMBAER

Reward yourself for making choices that lead to friendship and pleasure. Build a cybernetic cycle of positive feedback. Only from a state of free selfhood can any truly compassionate signals be sent to others.

THE ADMINISTRATION OF A PERSONAL STATE

The management and piloting of a singularity leads to a very busy career. Once the individual has established herself as a religion, a country, a corporation, an information network, and a neurological universe, it is necessary to maintain personal equivalents of all the departments and operations of the bureaucracies that perform these duties.

This means forming private alliances, formulating personal political platforms, conducting one’s own domestic and foreign relations, establishing trade policies, defense and security programs, educational and recreational events.

On the up side, one is free from dependence on bureaucracies, an inestimable boon. (Free agents can, of course, make temporary deals with organizations and officials thereof.) And if countries have histories and mythic origins, why shouldn’t you?

THE PERSONAL MYTHOLOGY

Search and research your very own genetic memory banks, the Old Testaments of your DNA-RNA, including, if you like, past incarnations, Jungian archetypes, and funky pre-incarnations in any future you can imagine. Write your very own Newest Testament, remembering that voluntary martyrdom is tacky, and crucifixions, like nuclear war, can ruin your day.

Write your very own Newest Testament, remembering that voluntary martyrdom is tacky, and crucifixions, like nuclear war, can ruin your day


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Intelligent post-humanists will not only store themselves electronically, but may do so in the form of a "computer virus,” capable of traversing computer networks and of self-replication as a guard against accidental or malicious erasure.


You and your friends can do anything that the great religions and empires and racial groups have done in the name of their God. And you’re certain to do it better because ... well, look at their track records. There’s no way your Personal State could produce the persecutions and massacres and bigotries of the past and present There’s only one of you, and even with the help of your friends the amount of damage individuals can do is insignificant compared with that of a collective.

Besides, you’re children of the 1960s and 1990s. You’re imprinted to want a peaceful, tolerant, funny world. You can choose your Gods to be smart, funny, compassionate, cute, and goofy.

"IRREVERENCE” IS A PASSWORD FOR THE 21st CENTURY

Human society has now reached a turning point in the operation of the digital programs of evolution, a point at which the next evolutionary steps of the species become apparent to us, to surf at will.

In the near future, the methods of information technology, molecular engineering, biotechnology, nanotechnology (atom stacking), and quantum-digital programming could make the human form a matter totally determined by individual whim, style, and seasonal choice.

The sanctity of our body image, along with the irrational taboos about sex and death, seems to be one of the most persistent anachronisms of industrial-age thought The human being of the future may be a bio-computer hybrid of any desired form, or an “electronic entity” in the digital info-universe.

Human as program. Or human in programs.

Through storage of one’s belief systems as data structures online, and driven by desired programs, one’s neuronal apparatus could operate in “silicon” basically as it did in the meatware of the brain, though faster, more predictably, more self-mutably, and, if desired, immortally.

Intelligent post-humanists will not only store themselves electronically, but may do so in the form of a “computer virus,” capable of traversing computer networks and of self-replication as a guard against accidental or malicious erasure.

"What's on this CD?" "Ah # that's just boring, adolescent Leary. Let's go ahead and reformat it."


One speculation is that such viral human forms might already inhabit our computer systems. Cleverly designed, they would be very difficult if not theoretically impossible to detect Current programs do not permit matching the real-time operation speed and parallel complexity of conventional brains. But time scale of operation is subjective and irrelevant, except for the purposes of interface.

Of course, there is no reason to restrict one’s manifestation to a particular form. With ever-loosening physical constraints (through perhaps inescapable economic constraints), one will be able to assume any desired form.

Given the ease of copying computer-stored information, it should be possible to exist simultaneously in many forms. Running independently and cloned at each branch point, intelligence would persist in each of these forms. Where the “I’s” are in this situation is a matter for high-tech pagans and digital philosophers.
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Re: Chaos & Cyberculture, by Timothy Leary, Ph.D.

Postby admin » Tue Jun 25, 2019 4:48 am

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IX. EPILOGUE
Brillig in Cyberland, by Wim Coleman and Pat Perrin


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HOWARD HALLIS

It was a void.

It wasn't darkness or silence. It was the absence of all sense. J. X. Brillig couldn't think in terms of blindness or deafness, because there was no such thing as sight or sound—and certainly not touch. She couldn't remember words like eyes and ears. Space itself had no meaning.

IX. Brillig in Cyberland
by Wim Coleman and Pat Perrin
FEATURING A CONVERSATION WITH TIMOTHY LEARY


“I guess this is what that first line of Genesis meant, ” thought Brillig. She floated through the void. She had no idea for how long. Time didn’t mean anything, either.

Then came a voice: “Hey, Josie. Can you hear me?” The voice was warm and full of good humour.

“Sound! ” thought Brillig. “What a novel concept!”

She heard herself answer: “Yes, I can hear you.” She was surprised at the lightness, the lilting buoyancy of her own voice. She didn’t yet know why. “Can you hear me?”

“Yeah, loud and clear.”

“Good. Now maybe you can tell me where I am. Maybe you can tell me what I am.”

The void was empty of sound again for a moment. Then the voice answered, “You mean you don’t know?”

Suddenly, two human figures appeared in the void—two men, flickering and wavering, threatening to dissolve or collapse into a swirl of television snow. Brillig’s reality had a weak horizontal hold. But it was a moderately convincing picture, as holograms go.

The man on the right was perched on an invisible stool, punching instructions into a keyboard that rested on his lap. He wore a cowboy hat, and was smoothly outfitted in black—but was it leather or some sort of synthetic? Optical fibers poked out of his head like an unruly mane of hair. At the ends of the fibers, tiny points of light danced around his craggy features. Brillig couldn’t tell whether those were functional or not.

The one on the left was a tall, jolly fellow with silvery hair and Celtic features. He sported an enormous grin and mischievous eyes. He looked more than a little familiar.

“Can you see us, Josie?” asked the man on the left.

“Yes, ” said Brillig.

“Good. Do you recognize either of us?”

“I don’t believe so, ” answered Brillig. “I’m not sure.”

“Well, first off, let me introduce you to Upton Orndorf, database cowboy extraordinaire.”

“Not so ‘extraordinaire’ just this minute, damn it, ” grumbled the cowboy, looking up from his console. “Something’s not working right, here.”

“Orndorf, ” thought Brillig. “The name is familiar. Where have I—?”

“And I’m Timothy Leary, ” said the tall, silver-haired gentleman. “Don’t you remember me at all?”

Brillig’s memory strained. “I remember headlines, news stories, ” she said. “I remember a Harvard psychologist getting mixed up with psychedelics and the counterculture during the 1960s, eventually getting into computer software and stand-up philosophy—”

Leary let loose a peal of laughter. “Whoa, you’re way out of date.”

“Please don’t talk in riddles. I’m very confused here. The last thing I remember was swallowing a little capsule.”

“When was that?”

“How am I supposed to know? It could have been minutes or hours or days. I don’t even know what those words mean anymore.”

“The year, Josie? What was the year?”

“Uh, 1994, I believe.”

“You mean you don’t remember anything past 1994?”

“No. Should I?”

Orndorf let out a wail of frustration. It was tough, gravelly, abrasive. “Holy shit! I broke through a wall of the blackest, meanest metaphor-chains in any inscape—to rustle a construct with a memory stuck back in 1994! I’m sorry, Leary. I guess I’m losing my touch.” The fiberoptic lights whipped around his head as he shook it.

“But who am I?” asked Brillig. “What am I doing here?”

“You’re a bio, ” Orndorf said offhandedly. Then he continued to Leary, “You should’ve read it, one simile just rolled into another and another and another. The oxymoron fence was easy, but then I ran into a cortazar continuity.”

“What... what... who...” Brillig stammered frantically.

“You’re supposed to be the recorded memory of Josephine Xaviera Brillig, one of the legendary pioneers of cyberspace, ” said Orndorf, a bit impatiently. “It was a serious marienbad, but I thought I’d broken out okay. Maybe it was eschered more than I thought”

“Are you telling me I’m not even myself?” cried Brillig. “I’m just a memory?”

Orndorf turned to Leary. “That’s a problem with these bios, ” he said. “They think they’re sentient beings.”

“1 resent that, ” cried Brillig. “If I think I’m sentient, then I must be sentient.”

“That’s another problem with ’em, ” Orndorf told Leary. “They’re semi-stuck in the Cartesian paradigm. Like all those junior prosejockeys educated too spec—you know, majors and all that. No flex, no reflects.”

“If I’m just Brillig’s memory, ” Brillig demanded, “then what’s happened to Brillig?”

“Brillig was remaindered, ” said Orndorf. He shivered. Tiny lights bounced. “1 guess it could’ve just happened to me. I had a hell of a time getting back into this borgespath.”

“What do you mean, remaindered?” Brillig kept futilely trying to pull at the hologram’s arm.

“Remaindered. Discarded. Flat-lined, to use an older term, ” said Orndorf. “Do you understand brain-dead?” he asked when Brillig just looked uncomprehending. “Brillig died in the inscape, in cyberspace. Nobody knows why. That’s why we did a re-release on you, to find out what happened. We didn’t count on you being defective. We thought maybe you’d remember.”

“Well, I don’t remember, ” shouted Brillig. “I think this is all completely crazy. And what is cyberspace, anyway?”

“Relax, ” said Leary. “We’ll fill you in on a few things. Where would you like to start?”

“Well, maybe you could give me an historical update.” Brillig composed herself a bit.

“Gibson’s the teller here, ” said Orndorf. “You’ll have to grab that story line.”

“What... who...” Brillig was sputtering again.

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ANDY FRITH

On other planets, they’ve just been waiting around until we develop a global matrix brain or cyberspace entity that they can interact with.”


“Maybe I can explain, ” chuckled Leary. “You see, it’s now A.D. 2044. The culture, the habitat, the way of life right now was written very specifically and brilliantly back in the 1980s by William Gibson in his books, Neuromancer, Count Zero, Burning Chrome, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. Did you ever read any of those?”

“I’m afraid science fiction was never in my line, ” said Brillig, vaguely remembering a career involving the classics. She seemed stunned, docile.

So Leary continued. “Show her a map, Upton.”

Orndorf punched some instructions into his board and the two men vanished. A great, holographic globe appeared, revolving in front of her. It was brilliantly detailed with familiar land masses— but instead of national boundaries, there were thousands, maybe millions of white lines, all radiating from various points around the world. An extraordinary number converged on the little island of Japan, which looked like a cluster of dazzling stars.

Brillig turned back to Leary, who was explaining the globe. “Politically, national states have diminished in power. The human species is basically organized into competing multinational corporations. There is no more large-scale warfare or national rivalry, because the multinational corporations won’t allow it. It’s bad for business. Way back when the Japanese started buying up most of America, they simply wouldn’t have let the Russians bomb us, because they owned us. And of course, the American companies have formed conglomerate partnerships with the Swiss, and with the Japanese and the Chinese.”

“Science fiction, ” Brillig mumbled, trying to look away from the image. “Is that where you got your, uh, new vocabulary?” she asked Orndorf.

"Politically, national states have diminished in power. The human species is basically organized into competing multinational corporations. There is no more large-scale warfare or national rivalry, because the multinational corporations won’t allow it. It’s bad for business..."


“Gibson and some others defined a lot of terms we still use way back in the 1980s, ” Orndorf said. “But me, I take to the newniverse. It’s based on fores who cogged the inscape.

Then the image changed. It looked like a 1980’s newsreel-only holographic, multidimensional. Brillig gasped. “Didn’t you say there was no more warfare?”

“Oh, there are still some conflicts here and there, ” said Leary. “Iraq and Iran are still fighting each other. But no one worries about the Persian Gulf. If Iraqis want to fight the Iranians, everybody lets them do it. It’s the same elsewhere.”

The hologram extended and wrapped around Brillig entirely. Jet fighters fired rockets at tankers. There were terrorist bombings. Leary explained, “Monotheists like Catholics and Protestants are still fighting each other in places like Belfast Those kinds of conflicts are totally isolated; so they’re just considered local customs.”

Images of a riot swept by. Street punks surrounded Brillig, looking much like gang members of the 1980s, only with extraordinary innovations: electrical jacks and plug-ins built into their bodies, and weapons protruding from their flesh—switchblades that flashed from their fingers, forearms that concealed surgically implanted guns and launchers.

“And there still are street gangs in the urban centers, ” Leary continued amiably. “But they’re high-tech street gangs, and so long as they’re localized, people have the option to leave those areas if they want to.”

Brillig cringed from the action around her. Despite their armaments, the cyberpunks fought each other mostly on computer screens and consoles, over networks and modems. Their plugs seemed more potent than their knives. Still, she was grateful when the scene changed again.

Now the view was from above. Brillig rushed high over the face of the Earth at unspeakable speeds, and as far as the eye could see was the interminable vastness of lighted cities merged together in enormous sprawls.

“The big cities are plastic fantastic. Both in the good and bad sense of it. But there still are places where you can get away into nature.” Leary continued, “Instead of fighting over terrain—the Golan Heights, say—most of the competition is now commercial— among the big conglomerates. And what they’re mainly fighting for is smart human beings. They’re kidnapping smart human beings and high-tech secrets.”

But Brillig was puzzled. “In 1994, ” she said, “a lot of us considered a world dominated by multinational corporations a rather frightening prospect.”

Both Leary and Orndorf chuckled, disembodied sounds.

The intelligent groups now running things see the importance of diversity and plurality to allow an evolution of new creativity.


“No, it’s wonderful!” Leary explained. “It’s a step ahead! Remember, they don’t want warfare, because that’s bad for business, and they want people to be prosperous, so they can buy stuff. And they don’t want to interfere in your privacy. They don’t care about your sex life or whether you take drugs or what you do alone, as long as you’re consuming. The intelligent groups now running things see the importance of diversity and plurality to allow an evolution of new creativity.”

.. they don't want warfare, because that's bad for business, and they want people to be prosperous, so they can buy stuff. And they don't want to interfere in your privacy. They don't care about your sex life or whether you take drugs or what you do alone, as long as you're consuming. The intelligent groups now running things see the importance of diversity and plurality to allow an evolution of new creativity.”


But Brillig was swept with a wave of disorientation. “But— where are you? Where are we?”

“In high orbit, ” said Leary with a note of pride. “You see, the space migration I predicted way back in the 20th Century has just now begun. There are many permanent settlements in high orbit.”

And now the scene included various objects hanging miles above the Earth, satellites cleanly diagrammed with computerized isometrics, eerily motionless in geosynchronous orbits. Her point of view zoomed in on a huge, wheel-shaped space station, whirling majestically above the Earth.

“But how do you get up here?” asked Brillig.

“By way of regular shuttles, like airlines. We call it ‘going up the well.’ Some of these settlements you see are industrial; others are scientific. But most of them are recreational. The one we’re in, for example, is a bit like Las Vegas—an erotic vacation place, sort of a high-tech Club Mediterranean.”

“Come on,” Orndorf said. “Join us. Do it.” And suddenly she was a hologram herself, with the curious physical illusion of being a body moving through space. She was with Leary and Orndorf inside the spectacular orbital playground where thousands of people strolled among shopping malls and health spas. Leary, still playing the garrulous tour guide, pointed out lakes, small forests, genetically engineered wildlife—and even a simulation of a mountain ski lodge.

How much of it was real, and how much holographic? Radiating from the center of the station was an astoundingly brilliant and convincing semblance of Sun, clouds, and blue sky. Were those real birds fluttering above her? She couldn’t be sure. To the happy hedonists roaming the satellite, it surely didn’t matter.

“Living in space is still considered somewhat adventurous, the way the Wild West once was.”

“That was a little before my time, ” interjected Brillig.

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“Most people are still living on the surface of the planet But many very wealthy families have established their own private realms up here, and there are some space colonies made up of religious groups and people forming new gene pools, people who enjoy the same lifestyle. There’s one for vegetarian lesbians, for example.”

Then they walked into a spa, where astounding medical feats were taking place. “Science has given every individual self-managerial control over almost every aspect of physical life, ” said Leary. “There are muscle implants. You can be any height you want, or any race you want Plastic surgery and vat-grown organs are available; so everyone can have the body and the appearance that he or she wants.”

The answer to a question began to dawn on Brillig. “And your outfit—” she began.

“Vat-grown leather, ” chortled Orndorf. “The best. No need for crocodiles to worry.”

“Life extension can be achieved by means of hybernation techniques, ” continued Leary, “and there is cloning, too.”

“So everyone... everyone will be... perfect?”

“No, not everyone is making use of all this, because the old monotheistic religions, which want to control people, are still operating. They don’t want you to change your looks, because they think God wants you to look a particular way.”

Suddenly, Brillig stopped cold. The sight of all these extraordinary transmutations brought something to mind. Something vague and indefinable had been bothering her since she bad arrived—something about her name, the unusual lightness of her voice, some difference in her movements. And now she knew what it was.

"I'm a woman!” she cried with alarm.

“Of course you’re a woman, ” said Orndorf. “What did you expect?”

“You don’t understand! In 1994 I was a man! Joseph Xavier Brillig! That was my name! What happened?”

Leary and Orndorf laughed. “Son of a gun, ” chuckled Orndorf, his fiberoptic lights dancing. “You think you’ve really got somebody cogged! As far as we could figure, you’d always been a woman.”

Science has given every individual self-managerial control over almost every aspect of physical life...


“No need for alarm, ” added Leary. “You just made a smart choice at one time or other. Women are now seen as the superior sex by far. The ascendancy of the male during the last five to ten thousand years of monotheism, feudalism, and all that has been completely changed. Today, it’s just like William Gibson predicted. The women are incredibly powerful, strong, tough, sleek, attractive creatures. And we men are kind of dirty klutzes doing our best.”

“It’s the women who are the real poets, ” said Orndorf.

“With all this control over our bodies, ” mused Brillig, “people should be able to live virtually forever.”

“Oh, certainly, ” said Leary.

"Basically, immortality is digitizing. The more of yourself you digitize, the more of yourself is going to be immortal. The more of your actions and memories you yet digitized, the more immortal you’re going to be. I was one of the first people to discover this. My claim to fame today is that there is more of me in digital form than of almost any other person from the 20th Century.”


“Unless they’re dumb enough to get remaindered in cyberspace, ” qualified Orndorf with a slight sneer.

“In general, ” Leary continued, “people who were born after 1946 have had a better chance at life extension than people born before that The later you got born, the higher the probability that you had the option. Hybernation was a crucial factor.”

And they stepped into an adjoining area, filled with rows of “coffins.” Human forms could be seen vaguely through the transparent sides. One was being opened by a clinician, as a friendly group of bystanders watched. As the sleeper groggily awoke, she was warmly welcomed by her fellows.

“The life-extension transition was made within groups, ” Leary said. “At first, the idea of waking up as a stranger in a strange land surrounded by lab technicians was kind of scary. But in the 1990s. intelligent people got together—people who liked to five together and see each other as friends, and they did pretty much what the Mormons did long before them. They formed future companies. By pooling their resources, by pooling their support, by pooling their familial connections, their chances of being resuscitated were much greater, because they became part of a future family. Dying and re-animating are team sports. It was like the migration from the Olde World to the Newe World in the 16th and 17th Centuries. The Puritans went together to New England, and the Catholics went to Maryland. Different ethnic groups went together. You went with people who shared your belief. That’s happened here, too. When you wake up from hybernation, you’ve got to be protected by your chronologically extended family—but not necessarily your genetic family.”

“Then surely there are other folks from the late 1900s still around, ” said Brillig. She was eager to see some familiar faces. But Leary’s response was a little cautious.

“Well, people who have been around since then were people who forecast these changes, and arranged for themselves to be here. All religions are against this sort of personal immortality. But some people saw the light. Ram Dass, for example, used to be very anti-tech, but he’s always been very intelligent, and an opportunist in the best sense of the word. And when he saw how things were going, he came along—kind of reluctantly.”

“Tell her the truth, ” said Orndorf, laughing. “You had to kidnap him and bring him along.”

“Okay, that’s true, ” said Leary, laughing. “It’s always been like that with him. It took me a long time to get him to take psilocybin, and once he took psilocybin it was hard to get him to take LSD. And it was the same with computers. But he’s still around, because he’s part of the gang and we’ll never leave him behind.”

“But immortality! It’s a terrifying idea, ” said Brillig with a shudder. She looked closely at Leary. “Isn’t the boredom intolerable?”

Leary shrugged. “Well, obviously, if you’re bored you hybernate. I wish I could have hybernated through much of the late 20th Century, Whenever Republicans were elected, I would gladly hybernate for eight years.”

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COURTESY OF DYNAMIC GRAPHICS, INC.

"Privacy is the evil of monotheism... basically, lettered writing is always about secrets.”


“So death has become an unnecessary luxury!”

“Absolutely. The answer to boredom is not irreversible involuntary coma. We simply take a nap.”

“But you’d wake up like Rip Van Winkle and have no idea what’s happened—just like me!”

“Not true, ” said Leary. “We’ve got brain-information transfers, so that even while you’re asleep you know what’s going on.”

Only yours erewhoned, ” Orndorf added. “Shoddy workmanship.”

“More and more of human intelligence is getting stored in living electronic form, ” said Leary. “Everything that a human being thinks or expresses can be electronically preserved. When you wake up in the morning you can jack your thoughts into your master program. Also, any important part of your life can be on video; so I can show you the highlights of everything that happened to me during the last ten years.

“Basically, immortality is digitizing. The more of yourself you digitize, the more of yourself is going to be immortal. The more of your actions and memories you get digitized, the more immortal you’re going to be. I was one of the first people to discover this. My claim to fame today is that there is more of me in digital form than of almost any other person from the 20th Century.”

“But death is so fundamental!” Brillig cried with incredulity. “Even our models of evolution and progress are based on organisms dying and clearing the way, passing their characteristics on to their offspring.”

Leary scoffed. “These are primitive ideas, vestiges of when we had only one cave, say, and you couldn’t have a hundred people living in that one cave—or in one tree, or on one plot of land. You had to die for the sake of the five kids who were supposed to inherit your plot of land, right? You see, everything is information now. Space is free; so the more the merrier. All the ethics and morals and sage principles of the industrial/feudal/land-machine world are totally overthrown in the info-world.”

“Everything seems so communal, ” Brillig mused, “What about privacy?”

“Privacy is the evil of monotheism, ” Leary replied. “When literacy started, it was a code the Phoenician traders used, because they didn’t want the Greek traders to know what the price was. And the Bible itself was a code by those cabalist guys who had that trick going; they w ere passing on information they didn’t want anyone else to know. So basically, lettered writing is always about secrets.”

Brillig felt an irrational wave of panic. “But surely you’ve still got books?” She turned toward Orndorf. “Why, you’re bubbling over with literary references. Don’t you read books?”

Orndorf barely seemed to understand the question. “Books? Hell, once we popped all the literature into the matrix, who needed books?”

But before Brillig could ask for an explanation, Leary had slipped into far-off reverie. “Back in the late 1980s, ” he said, “I remember talking to Spalding Gray. Wonderful, wonderful guy. He was a monologuist. I wonder what happened to him? He told me way back then that he was going to start writing. And I remember saying to him, ‘Jesus Brown, why are you going to write? Why are you going to freeze your wonderful thoughts into lettered words?’

Essentially, there’s a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace-electronic space.


“He said, ‘Well, I have to go through that stage, so I can recapitulate through to the human race.’

“I tried to explain it to him. I said, ‘If you type “T-I-M” on a typewriter, that’s just ink stained onto wood pulp, right? You can’t change it. But if you type that on a computer keyboard, within seconds you can modem it up to a satellite, and a hundred million people can watch you type “T-I-M.”’

“And do you know what he said to me? ‘Maybe I don’t want a hundred million people to see what I’m typing.’”

Leary chuckled. “You see that? That’s your basic secrecy. Well, I respect that If you want to keep secrets, make your own little code. A lot of people have kept on that way. The nice thing about human nature is that it’s so perverse and so pluralistic, and so creative in both negative and positive ways, there will always be a lot of people who won’t want to take advantage of all the things we’ve got—thank the Gods! Because those of us that do will be allowed to do what we like. It’s like people in the 20th Century who didn’t want to get stoned on drugs, and I always said, ‘Great!’ Those of us who did were all the freer for it.”

But Brillig was still staggered by questions and perplexities. “What difference has all this really made?” she asked. “Are people any different, any better off—any smarter?”

“Lots, ” said Leary. “The level of intelligence has been tremendously increased, because people are thinking and communicating in terms of screens, and not in lettered books. Much of the real action is taking place in what is called cyberspace. People have learned how to boot up, activate, and transmit their brains. Essentially, there’s a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace—electronic space.”

The trio stopped and looked at one another. The surrounding orbital resort suddenly vanished. Brillig faced Orndorf and Leary again. There was anticipation in the air.

“So, ” said Orndorf after a silence. “Are you starting to remember or what? You were one of the legendary riders of the inscape. Want to try it again?”

... An incredible sensation -- as though she had done an extraordinary somersault from one reality into another. And suddenly she was plunging through an altogether different universe, careening among glorious, glittering geometric towers of light. The sense of space was extraordinary. Her mind swelled with incredible knowledge and perception. She had no voice or body, but she could still communicate...


Orndorf punched more instructions into the board, and Brillig felt an incredible sensation—as though she had done an extraordinary somersault from one reality into another. And suddenly she was plunging through an altogether different universe, careening among glorious, glittering geometric towers of light The sense of space was extraordinary. Her mind swelled with incredible knowledge and perception. She had no voice or body, but she could still communicate with Orndorf or Leary. Their thoughts had merged.

“What's this called?” she wondered.

“Myoelectric interface, ” she felt Orndorf answer.

“Like it?” she felt Leary ask.

“Like it? It's wonderful! But where am I? What is this?”

“Cyberspace—a consensual hallucination of all the world’s information.”

Brillig felt a twinkle of memory. She was back on her turf again—even if she still didn’t quite grasp what it was. She was inside cyberspace, a world of pure information.

“What are those great towers of light?”

“Data banks. All the information of the world is now in them—and you gain access to them in cyberspace. All of the human signals that used to sell as books have been digitized and are now available and stored in these data banks—plus all the pictures, all the movies and the television shows—absolutely everything.”

“Of course!” she began to remember as she swirled among the towers. “These are symbolic receptacles of all the knowledge of the world!” The thought thrilled her.

“There is tremendous competition and actual fighting over data bases, ” Leary continued. “For example, the Bank of Japan can’t let the Bank of America into their data bases. So cyberspace is where all the action takes place. In a way, it’s just like it used to be. Even back in the 1980s—can you remember?—trillions of dollars were exchanged every day in the computer network. These exchanges of money were all done by computer. Hundreds of billions of dollars were being moved around between Japan, Europe, America. I cite that as an archaic example of what’s happening right now.

“And each of those towers is surrounded with ICE—intrusion countermeasures electronics—techniques of defending your base. That doesn’t stop a lot of code rustling from going on.”

Brillig felt herself swell with cybercosmic laughter. “Code rustling! Sure, I remember. Legitimate accountants and CEOs work inside those towers , cowboys and rustlers like me work on the outside, busting in through layers of ice. A world of outrageous, high-tech adventure!”

Her thoughts blended more and more with Leary’s. “Everything is information, ” she felt him think. “Information is much more important than material goods. The politics of information, that’s what we’re talking about So just as you had rustlers and cowboys in the Wild West, today you’ve got rustlers and cowboys and black marketeers in this info-world. Almost everything the Gods used to do, now the average person can do—change your body, change your mind, change your DNA code, clone, and also be part of the highly advanced wisdom center.”

“And a part of a fantastic new mythology!”

“And a whole new theology, too, ” answered Leary’s mind. “Once we established this information world, we’d also created a new intelligence entity—a superintelligence. People that operate at that level have formed networks of superintelligence.”

Orndorf chimed in, “Even when we worked out the mathematics of recovering reality, it was more mysterious than we had expected. New story lines kept forming, beyond our programming.”

Brillig tumbled through cyberspace, letting forth a cry of delight “Who’d ever want to go back?”

Leary seemed to enjoy the question. “There’s a real social conflict about that The hottest political and social conflict now is between those people who want to spend all their time in cyberspace, and those who see it as very dangerous and addictive, who don’t want their loved ones to leave them and spend more and more time in the info-world. Once you get into the info-world, there’s no question that it’s much more exciting than coming down and pushing a body around. So there is now, as there always will be with an intelligent species so genetically varied, a number of viewpoints. There are those who think cyberspace horrible, and those who consider their ‘meat’ existence slow and vulgar.”

It wasn't just the flesh that tied you down. It wasn't just prosaic forces like gravity. The physical universe itself seemed cramped, claustrophobic -- a realm of space-time bent by hunks of mass into gross finitude. It couldn’t compare to an infinite ocean of uncut metaphor, a neuroelectric realm containing the absolute essence of literally everything.


No, she couldn’t imagine going back. It wasn’t just the flesh that tied you down. It wasn’t just prosaic forces like gravity. The physical universe itself seemed cramped, claustrophobic—a realm of space-time bent by hunks of mass into gross finitude. It couldn’t compare to an infinite ocean of uncut metaphor, a neuroelectric realm containing the absolute essence of literally everything.

They passed beyond the man-made information monoliths, out onto the mysterious high seas of cyberspace. Brillig knew she had been to these parts before. But what had she found out here? Leary wanted to know the answer, too.

“According to Gibson’s predictions, our planet now ought to be able to interchange messages with other species that have reached this level elsewhere. On other planets, they’ve just been waiting around until we develop a global matrix brain or cyberspace entity that they can interact with.”

But it was Orndorf who came out and asked the crucial question: “Josie, before you came out here that last time, you told us you were about to connect with something, an extraterrestrial, extradimensional intelligence—an entity named Llixgrijb. No one else could do it. You went riding off into the inscape to make contact with Llixgrijb.

“Do you remember? Did you succeed?”

The question turned over and over in Brillig’s mind. “Llixgrijb ... Did I succeed? ... Do I remember?...”

And she felt that presence again, a mind unlike any mind she had ever imagined, at once far away and inside of her, a mind from which she, the physical universe, and cyberspace itself seemed to emanate—a mind which contained all other minds. Could this be Llixgrijb?

But a force came down on her like a giant hand pushing her back. She felt herself moving out of cyberspace, backward through space and time, as if sucked into a terrible maelstrom.

“It's no use, ” she called to her companions. “It's sending me back to the time I came from It's sending me back to 1994. I'll have to wend my way back the way I came.”

She felt Leary’s mind receding far into the future, sending one last message to her, saying, “It’s all right. We understand. We’ll miss you. But be sure to tell anyone back there in the 1990s who wants to know how we’re getting along now to read William Gibson’s stuff. It’s a nitty-gritty, down and dirty, street-smart blueprint of how we’re living and the options we have.”

“And next time don’t get remaindered, ” added Orndorf. “Watch your ways on the borgespaths.” She caught a final glimpse of tiny dancing lights as the message from Orndorfs mind trailed away.  
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Re: Chaos & Cyberculture, by Timothy Leary, Ph.D.

Postby admin » Tue Jun 25, 2019 5:45 am

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X. RESOURCES
1. Checklist of Primary Works by Timothy Leary
2. Bibliographic Data
3. List of Illustrations
4. Cybertising


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ANDY FRITH

X.1. Timothy Leary: checklist of Primary Works (with dates of first publication)

Multilevel Measurement of Interpersonal Behavior (1956)
Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality (1957)
The Psychedelic Experience (1964). With Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert.
Psychedelic Prayers (1966)
Start Your Own Religion (1967)
High Priest (1968)
The Politics of Ecstasy (1968)
The Declaration of Evolution (1970)
Timothy Leary, Appellant v. State of California (1970)
Jail Notes (1970)
Neurologic (1973)
Confessions of a Hope Fiend (1973)
Starseed (1973)
Terra II (1974)
The Curse of the Oval Room (1974)
What Does WoMan Want? (1976)
Exo-Psychology (1977)
Neuropolitics (1977). With Robert Anton Wilson and George Koopman.
The Intelligence Agents (1979)
Neurocomics (1979)
The Game of Life (1979)
Changing My Mind, Among Others (1982)
Flashbacks (1983)
Mind Mirror (1986; software)
Timothy Leary’s Greatest Hits (1990)
Chaos & Cyber Culture (1994)

WORKS CURRENTLY IN PRINT

Mind Mirror (Mindware, 1986; software)
Info-Psychology (New Falcon Publications, 1987; revision of Exo-Psychology)
An Annotated Bibliography of Timothy Leary (Archon Books, 1988)
What Does WoMan Want? (New Falcon Publications, 1988; revised)
Flashbacks (J. P. Tarcher, Inc., 1990; additions)
The Politics of Ecstasy (Ronin Publishing, 1990; additions)
Timothy Leary’s Greatest Hits (KnoWare, 1990)
The Game of Life (New Falcon Publications, 1993)
How to Operate Your Brain (Retinalogic, 1993; video)
The Psychedelic Experience (Citadel Press, 1993)

X.2. Bibliographic Data

I. SCREENS.


1. “How I Became an Amphibian” was first published in different form in Timothy Leary’s Greatest Hits (1990).

2. “Custom-Sized Screen Realities” was first published in different form in Timothy Leary’s Greatest Hits( 1990).

3. “Imagineering” is previously unpublished.

II. CYBERNETICS: CHAOS ENGINEERING.

1. “Conversation with William Gibson” is taken from “High Tech High Life” published in Mondo 2000 (1989).

2. “Artificial Intelligence: Hesse’s Prophetic Glass Bead Game” was first published in Literature and Altered States of Consciousness, a special issue of Mosaic, a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, Volume 19, Number 3/4 (Summer/Fall 1986).

3. “Our Brain” is adapted from talks delivered circa 1990, and first published in different form in The (San Francisco) City (August 1991).

4. “How to Boot Up Your Bio-Computer” was published in shortened form under the title “Digital Dependence” in the Omni Whole Mind Newsletter (1987). Reprinted by permission ©1987, Omni Publication Int’l.

5. “Personal Computers, Personal Freedom” was first published in Digital Deli, Ed. Steve Ditlea (New York: Workman Publishing Co., 1984).

6. “Quantum Jumps, Your Macintosh, and You” is taken from “Quantum Jumps, Your Commodore, and You” and “The Role of the Free Agent in the Computer Culture” published in Guide to Computer Living (October and November 1986).

III. COUNTERCULTURES.

1. “The Woodstock Generation” w as first published in Timothy Leary’s Greatest Hits (1990).

2. “From Yippies to Yuppies” was first published in High Society (October 1985).

3. “The Cyberpunk: The Individual as Reality Pilot” was first published in Mississippi Review (1988).

4. “The New Breed” was first published in different form in Timothy Leary’s Greatest Hits (1990).

5. “Electronic Cultures” is taken from “Hear Me Hear Me: How Home Media Designs Cultural Evolution” published in Creem (April 1993).

6. “The Next Twenty Years” was first published in different form in Whole Earth Review (Winter 1988).

7. “The Godparent: Conversation with Winona Ryder” is taken from “A Meeting of the Minds” published in Interview (November 1989).

IV. INFO-CHEMICALS £ DRUG WARS

1. “Conversation with William S. Burroughs” is taken from “A Couple of Bohos Shooting the Breeze” published in Mondo 2000 (1991).

2. “The Sociology of LSD” was first published in different form in Psychedelic Reflections, Ed. Grinspoon and Bakalar (New York: Human Sciences Press, Inc., 1983; “Some Superficial Thoughts on the Sociology of LSD”); material added from “Criminalizing the Natural and Naturalizing the Criminal, ” Timothy Leary’s Greatest Hits (1990).

3. “Just Say Know: The Eternal Antidote to Fascism” was first published in different form in American Book Review (Nov.-Dee. 1989); reprinted in Timothy Leary’s Greatest Hits (1990).

4. “Czar Bennett and His Holy War on Drugs” was first published in New Perspectives Quarterly (Fall 1989); enlarged with portions of the previously unpublished “The Solution to Drug Abuse” (1993).

5. “MDMA: The Drug of the 1980s” was first published in different form under the title “Ecstasy: Drug of the Nineties” in Chic (July 1985); reprinted as “Ecstatic Electricity” in NY Talk (August 1985).

6. “The Case for Intelligent Drug Use” is a fragment of an interview published in Maclean’s (March 5, 1984).

V. CYBEROTICS.

1. “Hormone Holocaust” first appeared in Puritan International (1987).

2. “In Search of the Thie Aphrodisiac” was first published in Chic (November 1985); reprinted in Timothy Leary’s Greatest Hits (1990).

3. “Operation Sex Change” was first published in Hustler (October 1986).

4. “Digital Activation of the Erotic Brain” was first published in Hustler (February 1985); reprinted in Timothy Leary’s Greatest Hits (1990).

VI. GUERILLA ART

1. “Pranks: An Interview, ” was first published in RE/Search till: Pranks! Ed. A. Juno and V. Vale (San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1987). RE/Search Publications, 1232 Pacific Avenue, San Francisco, California.

2. “Keith Haring: Future Primeval” was first published under the title “One Rent in the Fabric Is All It Takes for Pandemonium to Sluice Through” in Keith Haring: Future Primeval by Barry Blinderman (Normal, OL: University Galleries, Illinois State University, 1990). Blinderman’s work, Keith Haring: Future Primeval, which inspired the re titling of this article, is available in a new edition from Abbeville Press, New York.

3. “Robert Williams: Power to the Pupil” first appeared in different form as an introduction to Robert Williams’s Views from a Tortured Libido (San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1993).

4. “On William S. Burroughs’s Interzone” was first published in Die Well (1990); an English translation was published in Off the Wall (1992); our current version is significantly revised.

5. “William Gibson: Quark of the Decade” was first published in different form in Mondo 2000 (1989).

6. “How to Publish Heresy in Mainline Publications” was first published in Trajectories (1989).

7-8. “Reproduced Authentic The Wizardry of David Byrne” and “Conversation with David Byrne” were first published in different form as “TVvo Heads Talking” in Mondo 2000 (1992).

VII. DE-ANIMATION/RE-ANIMATION

1. “Common-Sense Alternatives to Involuntary Death” was first published as “22 Common Sense Alternatives to Involuntary Death” in different form as a KnoWare monograph (1988); in C. Hyatt, Undoing Yourself Too (1988); reprinted in Timothy Leary's Greatest Hits (1990) and in Magical Blend (April 1991).

2. “Hybernating Andy” was published in different form as “Andy Warhol’s Secret Desire to Rejoin His Idol, Walt Disney” in Mondo 2000 (1991).

VIII. MILLENNIUM MADNESS

1. “Backward, Christian Soldiers” was first published in Hustler (October 1985); reprinted in Timothy Leary’s Greatest Hits (1990).

2. “God Runs for President on the Republican Ticket ” was first published as “Robertson” in Regardie’s Magazine (November 1987).

3. “Who Owns the Jesus Property?” was first published in Trajectories (Autumn 1988).

4. “High-Tech Paganism” appeared in a different version under the title “High-Tech Paganism and Digital Polytheism” in Reality Hackers (1988).

IX. EPILOGUE.

“Brillig in Cyberland, ” by Wim Coleman and Pat Perrin, first appeared in the newsletter The Jamais Vu Papers (1988) and was reprinted in a book of that title (New York: Harmony Books, 1991).

X.3. List of Illustrations

COVER


Cover designed by Brian Groppe, incorporating illustrations by Carolyn Ferris, Vic Keller, Robert Williams, and Brummbaer

FRONT MATTER

ii. Acceleration of Brain Power (first appeared in Creem, 1993)
vii. Timothy Leary with Virtual-Reality Gear (drawing by Michael Witte ©1991 Discover Magazine; reprinted with permission)
viii. Susan Sarandon (Carolyn Ferris)
xii. You Are Here (Brummbaer)

I. SCREENS

2. Timothy Leary (Dana Gluckstein)

4. Timothy Leary bus stop Gap ad (Michael Shields)

6. Psychedelic Tim (Brummbaer)
8. Multimedia Tim (Carolyn Ferris and Timothy Leary; first appeared in Creem, 1993)
12. It Came from Cyberspace (Vic Keller)  
17. Digital art (Andy Frith)
18. Digital art (Andy Frith)

20. Virtuality by Spectrum Holobyte (Peter Booth Lee)

II. CYBERNETICS: CHAOS ENGINEERING

22. William Gibson (Carolyn Ferris; drawing rendered from photo by Morgan Russell, which appeared first in Mondo 2000, Issue #1, 1989)

25. Molly (Brummbaer)

36. Virtual Nerves (Vic Keller)

40. Cyberhead (Mike Saenz, from Virtual Valerie)

42. Digital Gutenberg (Michael Horowitz and Vic Keller)

44. Digital art (Andy Frith)

46. Digital art (Andy Frith)

50. Digital art (Andy Frith)

III. COUNTERCULTURES

52. Oracle cover of Leary, Ginsberg, Watts, Snyder: San Francisco Oracle Co-op; San Francisco Oracle , volume 7 (photo by Paul Kagan © 1994 Paul Kagan Estate; page design by Hetty McGee MacLise)

56. Pow-Wow poster (Rick Griffin)

57. Counterculture Reunion (Carolyn Ferris)

68. Three Ronin (Matt Gouig)

70. Digital art (Andy Frith)

76. VR Machine (Peter Booth Lee)

79. Digital art (Andy Frith)

84. Digital art (Andy Frith)

86. Winona Ryder (Herb Ritts)

IV. INFO-CHEMICALS & DRUG WARS

94. William S. Burroughs (Carolyn Ferris)

98. LSD blotter art from Psychedelic Solution art gallery Cure of Souls exhibition (courtesy of Jacaeber Kastor and Mark McCloud)

100. Sandoz LSD Ampoule (Jeremy Bigwood)

106. Bumper stickers (Cindy Horowitz)

109. Digital art: Xochipilli (Andy Frith)

112. Digital art: Amanita (Andy Frith)

113. Marijuana plants (Hi Leitz)

114. Drug Ticket (Vic Keller)

116. MDMA crystals (courtesy Bruce Eisner)

117. Ecstasy: The MDMA Story (cover art by Mark Franklyn)

119. Digital art (Andy Frith)

121. World's Hottest Gossip (Vic Keller)

V: CYBEROTICS

124. Rapture (Vic Keller)

129. Digital art (Andy Frith)

130. Tiresias (Vic Keller)

134. Timothy & Barbara Leary (Dana Gluckstein)

136. Digital art: Moksha (Andy Frith)

139. Barbara Leary (Dana Gluckstein)

146. Data Process (Vic Keller)

149. Digital art (Andy Frith)

151. Digital art (Andy Frith)

VI. GUERILLA ART

156. Circle of Genius (Carolyn Ferris)

159. Digital art (Andy Frith)

162. Digital art (Andy Frith)

166. Weeping WoMan (Keith Haring)

171. Vanity of the New (Robert Williams) first appeared in Views from a Tortured Libido (San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1993)

177. Digital art (Andy Frith)

181. David Byrne (Carolyn Ferris)

VII. DE-ANIMATION

186. Virtual Head (Howard Hallis)

189. Digital art (Andy Frith)

191. Digital art (Andy Frith)

192. Digital art (Andy Frith)

195. Lost Marbles (Brummbaer)

198. Digital art (Andy Frith)

201. Cycle (Brummbaer)

202. Digital art (Andy Frith)

203. Digital art (Andy Frith)

207. Digital art (Andy Frith)

209. Digital art (Andy Frith)

VIII. MILLENNIUM MADNESS

212. Millennium Madness (Carolyn Ferris)

226. Digital art (Andy Frith)

231. Digital art (Andy Frith)

233. Digital Man (Brummbaer)

235. Open for Business (Brummbaer)

IX. EPILOGUE

238. Leary in Top Hat (Howard Hallis)

241. Digital art (Andy Frith)

244. Digital art (Andy Frith)

247. Digital art (Dynamic Graphics, Inc.)

252. Digital art (Andy Frith)

THROUGHOUT THE BOOK:

Slogan buttons and computer icons on pages 9, 39, 40, 41, 54, 104, 122, 200, 218, 247 from the collection and archives of Vicki Marshall

Slogan buttons and event flyers on pages 40, 67, 102, 126, 169, 204, 236 from the collection and archives of Michael Horowitz

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SATURDAY-AFTERNOON IN THE UNIVERSE
INTERGALACTIC PLACEMATS
Momentos from Brummbaer's Holidays in Cyberspace
Perfect for a 3:00 Brunch. For more information write:
SATURDAY-AFTERNOON IN THE UNIVERSE
520 Washington Blvd., Ste. 114, Marina del Rey, CA 90292


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CAROLYN FERRIS'S ILLUSTRATIONS FOR TIMOTHY LEARY'S CHAOS AND CYBER CULTURE
Limited Edition Prints are available of her drawings in this book:
Each print is an 11 x 14 inch custom black-and-white glossy photo-reproduction. Price: $50. Signed by Timothy Leary: $75.
"Multimedia Tim, " by Ferris and Leary, 11 x 14 inch limited edition full color photo-reproductions, inscribed by Timothy. $150.
All prints mounted under museum-quality 19 x 16 inch white double-matt and shrink-wrapped. All prices include tax and shipping.
Original artwork available. Please inquire.
Dealers inquiries welcomed.
Send check or money order to: Tamtience. P.O. Box 967, Fairfax, CA 94930 or call 800-697-8439. Visa/MasterCard accepted.
Prices subject to change.


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Timothy Leary
Signed Books, Software, Tapes
Exo Psychology $15.95
Flashbacks $15.00
The Game of Life $14.95
Greatest Hits $15.00
Mind Mirror $19.95
Just Say Know Button $2.50
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[i]ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF TIMOTHY LEARY
A detailed listing of all of Dr. Leary's books, monographs, scientific papers, magazine articles, interviews, lectures, vinyl recordings, audiocasettes, videotapes, film appearances, software, posters, slogan buttons and bumperstickers from 1942 through 1986. Also included is a lengthy selection of works about Dr. Leary, and the legal briefs pertaining to his arrests, trials and imprisonments on four continents. Over 1, 200 entries, 304pp, with 50 items illustrated. Clothbound. $45 postpaid.
SHAMAN WOMAN, MAINLINE LADY
The first anthology of writings by women about their experiences with mind-altering drugs. Over 60 writers explore the psycho-sensual-political landscape of women's drug experiences from mythic times to the contemporary shamanistic revival. Included are Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Sand, Charlotte Bronte, Louisa May Alcott, Edith Wharton, Isabelle Eberhardt, Billie Holiday, Anais Nin, Laura Huxley, Diane di Prima, Grace Slick and Patti Smith. Profusely illustrated with portraits and rare graphic works. 8-1/2 x 11 inches, 288pp, $15 trade paperback or $25 hardcover postpaid.
LYSERGIC WORLD/MONDO LYSERGICA
A psychedelic tabloid prepared for the 50th anniversary of the discovery of LSD. "Packed so full of history and trivia that it stands alone as a significant document''- Factsheet Five. "Absolutely incredible LSD newspaper printed in psychedelic colors" -Freakbeat Magazine. "Collectors, denizens of the underground, ravers, '60s nostalgia freaks, and the millions of psychedelic heads everywhere will all thoroughly enjoy browsing through Mondo Lysergica"- Terence McKenna. 16pp, 15 x 12 in., 50 illustrations. $5 postpaid.
Semi check or m.o. to: I -World
40 Fourth St.-Suite 260
Petaluma. CA 94952


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vic keller • studio
psych erotica • p.o. box
193 • philo ca 95466
(707) 895-2919
 

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Spiritual Effects
Computer Graphics
Multi-media Design
PH: 415-___/ FAX: 415-___


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FROM CONCEPT TO PRINT ... AND ANY STEP IN BETWEEN
"We feel that any job done is done best by using the latest technology and equating quality with cost." ~:.) Mark Twain
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BOOK SPECS

The illustrations in this book were scanned and fine-tuned by Tobin Mayell, Norman Mayell and Rick Greer of Generic Type.
The pages were designed by Judy July.
The cover is 12-point C1S, printed with a 4-color process and foil stamped. The holographic foil is Crown Roll Leaf Pattern #301, Shade #100, “Heavenly.” Cover design and color separations were made by Brian Groppe.
The paper used is 60-pound Delta Opaque.

TYPE

The display and text type include Avenir, Big Cheese, Remedy, Triplex Condensed Sans and Triplex Condensed Serif, Univers Ultra Condensed, Walbaum, Whirligig, and Zapf Dingbats.

PRODUCTION SUPERVISION

Sebastian Orfali, Ginger Ashworth, and Judy July at Generic Type in Emeryville, California.  

PRINTED & BOUND

Delta Lithograph Company.

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