In the course of working on a Maybe Day article, I had a question about the Leary-Wilson Eight C'ircuit model of consciousness. It's obvious which RAW book one should read to learn about the model, e.g. Prometheus Rising, but which Timothy Leary title should one read? I posed the question to a couple of people who had done a lot of research on the model, and I'm sharing their answers here.
Joseph L. Flatley is the author of a new book, The Occult Timothy Leary: The Tarot, Magical States, and Post-Terrestrial Evolution. (See this interview). When I asked him to suggest a Leary title on the model, he replied:
"Obviously the best introduction to the 8 circuit model is Prometheus Rising. As for Leary's work, I would recommend Neuropolitique, which is a collection of articles written around the time of his release from prison. A lot of them refer to the eight circuit model and are very readable. Even the articles that don't refer to the circuits provide a great introduction to the Leary worldview. His two major reference books on the 8th circuit model, Infopsychology and The Game of Life are really hard to get through and I wouldn't necessarily recommend them to beginners."
Many of you know Mike Gathers from the Hilaritas Press podcast, and he is busy working on an article on the Eight Circuit model, about which more below, but first, here is Mike's answer:
"Good question. Info-/Exo-psychology is weird. Like Bucky Fuller on Freud and LSD. Game of Life is just... super weird. Not my thing. Flatley led me to appreciate it, but not my thing. You can find PDFs of Neurologic out there pretty easily. There are two different versions that appear to be two different 1973 printings of the same 'edition.' It runs 40-60 pages depending on the printing. Higgs felt it was Leary's best presentation of the model."
"The 44 page version of Neurologic can be found here:
https://www.scribd.com/doc/2350894/NeuroLogic-by-Timothy-Leary
https://www.scribd.com/doc/17278486/NeuroLogic-by-Timothy-Leary
https://mirror.explodie.org/Timothy%20Leary%20-%20Neurologic.pdf
"I have a 74ish page version that I think is the original, full printing, but I don't see it up on the interent anyway for public access."
As for Mike's upcoming article: "The 8 Circuit Ascencion people are putting together an anthology. So I have a 4-8000 word chapter that will be a "Then and Now." Half history of the model and half bringing it up to 2026. I'm thinking I will do a Leary vlog/pod that goes into more detail. We'll see what follows. I seem to have found some motivation on the whole thing and am basically retired (or on a one year sabbatical, depending on my mood) and doing what I want. The deadline for the chapter is 10/31. "
(Footnote to the above: Despite a similarity in titles, Neurologic and Neuropolitique are separate Leary titles. Neuropolitique is actually a revision of an earlier book, Neuropolitics: The Sociobiology of Human Metamorphosis.
Also, I have been trying to post fewer links to Amazon -- not an anti-Amazon jihad, just a preference to promote actual bricks and mortar bookstores -- but I could not find a Barnes and Noble link to Neuropolitique and opted to post a useful link. I just bought the ebook of Neuropolitique.)
4 comments:
Neuropolitique is my favorite of the latter (prison/post-prison) Leary books, and a lot of it has to do with RAW's contribution. I tend to agree with James Penner's choices of Leary writings, collected in the wonderful Timothy Leary: The Harvard Years.
I like most of TL's stuff, especially Chaos and Cyberculture, the oddness of Info-Psychology I find intriguing. Changing My Mind, Among Others seems notable to me because there are moments in which he seems to be honestly assessing his own past and not putting on a Leary Show.
Penner wrote that, of the books the appeared after "acid guru" Leary, he liked Politics of Ecstasy. That one's rich and you can smell that moment in time in the book.
Oddly, I think Design For Dying (a lot of it ghost-written by K. Goffman?) might be something people read 50 years from now. Leary's attitude toward dying feel way underrated to me.
I see Game of Life as an occult transmission, while Info-Exo-psychology comes a cross as more of a "scientistic" presentation - Leary frequently drew connections between the sciences and his ideas, but he was also all over the map there (or rather, he wasn't consistent and drew from all sorts of various scientific maps and models), so you can't really call it scientific, bur rather 'scientistic' (science-like?). I think of Neurologic as more of a proto-Exo-psychology. Short and concise. Not all the fluff with the three sub-stages and SMI2LE, just a bit about the genetic code's role in defining our evolutionary path and sending us back into space to the Origin of it all. (kinda pre-Terence McKenna with genetic determinism instead of the "attractor at the end of time."
I remember enjoying Neuropolitics/politique when I read it in a bookstore 30 year ago and getting a good feel for the 8Cs and reimprinting (How to wash brains), but when I looked again in consideration of Tom's question, it didn't seem like the best fit, but I like the way Flatley puts it in that it has a bunch of his other writing from that period. (He saw that as plus, but I wrote it off as a distraction at first).
The only other Leary take on the model that I'm aware of is What Does WoMan Want? where Leary weaves 2 fictional stories, one of which is the infamous Professor Adams transmission of the model at Millbrook that Antero made famous. Fun read, but not a serious presentation of the model.
Seems worth adding that the 44 page version of Neurologic that's available all over the web is the also the full version. The 74 page one I have from Level Press is just longer because of fonts and margins and all that. I believe the Level Press version I have is the original June 1973 printing and the 44 page Starseed version came out later that same year..
My story is a bit different. I discovered the model in my early 20s through Exo-Psychology then The Game of Life. I love both those books, the latter was very important to me. It's where I got the name for my Sound Engineering co. over 40 years ago and that has worked out well. Due to the way I found this model, the three stages for each circuit always seemed natural, and proved very useful and helpful, for me. I had never been introduced to the concept of nutrition and eating healthy until reading stage 14, Hedonic Engineering, in The Game of Life. Discovering that biochemistry affects how you feel profoundly changed my life. I experienced chronic High Anxiety in the late teens/early twenties from much psychedelic use, particularly from the very potent THC products found in Western Canada, combined with a diet of total junk food beginning at age 16 when I moved out of my dad's house. Thanks to Leary's model, I found a non-institutionalized way to solve that problem.
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