Timothy Leary on The 'Religious Experience' : Its Production and Interpretation c. 30 Aug., 1963

from a Lecture delivered at a meeting of Lutheran psychologists and other interested professionals, sponsored by the Board of Theological Education, Lutheran Church in America, in conjunction with the 71st Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, Philadelphia, Bellevue Stratford Hotel, August 30 ,1963....from the pdf copy of The Psychedelic Review, Vol. 1, #3, 1964, Aldous Huxley Memorial Issue...at
http://www.maps.org/psychedelicreview/



What Is the Religious Experience?

The Religious Experience: You are undoubtedly wondering about the meaning of this phrase, which has been used so freely in the preceding paragraphs. May I offer a definition?

The religious experience is the ecstatic, incontrovertibly certain subjective discovery of answers to seven basic spiritual questions.

There can be, of course, absolute subjective certainty in regard to secular questions: Is this the girl I love? Is Fidel Castro a wicked man? Are the Yankees the best baseball team? But issues which do not involve the seven basic questions belong to secular games, and such convictions and faiths, however deeply held, can be distinguished from the religious. Liturgical practices, rituals, dogmas, theological speculations, can be and too often are secular, i.e., completely divorced from the spiritual experience.

What are these 7 basic spiritual questions?

1. The Ultimate Power Question

What is the basic energy underlying the universe—the ultimate power that moves the galaxies and nucleus of the atom? Where and how did it all begin? What is the cosmic plan? Cosmology.

2. The Life Question

What is life? Where and how did it begin? How is it evolving? Where is it going? Genesis, biology, evolution, genetics.

3. The Human Being Question

Who is man? Whence did he come? What is his structure and function? Anatomy and physiology.
http://www.luminist.org/archives/7tongues.htm

another version of Leary's Project here

The Seven Tongues of God

The lecture in which he presented his theory of human consciousness for the first time is a lecture he gave in 1963 at a meeting of Lutheran psychologists. By describing his model of the Seven Levels of Consciousness Leary tried to show that eastern philosophies and discoveries of western science do not contradict but rather complement each other . The lecture, which in The Politics of Ecstasy appears under the title "The Seven Tongues of God"(PE 13-58), was originally titled "The Religious Experience: Its Production and Interpretation." Leary begins this lecture by describing two formal experiments with psilocybin that were carried out at Harvard. (The description of the first experiment helps to see that his approach to psychotherapy was really revolutionary.)
http://www.geocities.com/arno_3/2/2-2.html

Dorian Sagan's productions, BioSpheres, Sex, The Holocene, P.K. Dick, etc

Notes from the Holocene: A Brief History of the Future (Sciencewriters)

This is a sole-authored book in which I use a combination of science, science fiction examples (e.g., the works of Philip K. Dick), the psychology of deception embedded in sleight-of-hand magic, and philosophy to investigate some of the biggest questions we can ask: Why are we here? Is the Earth's surface alive? Is the whole universe? Does God exist? (and of course, Where do socks go when they die?)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/A1MWAQCQ1G3CL3/ref=cm_blog_dp_artist_blog

there is no let UP^! here! Erik Davis updates the Azid Tao Revolution with new Preface

The Psychedelic Reader
A new introduction (2007)

January 26, 2008

http://www.kensingtonbooks.com/finditem.cfm?itemid=4692

from Erik Davis
The Psychedelic Reader is a time capsule, a message in a bottle—or better yet, a fistful of messages, rolled up tight like reefers and slipped into small vials labeled Sandoz LSD-25. Like those vials, the articles come from another time: the middle of the 1960s, the last span of time in modern history when psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, and DMT were studied, and consumed, legally in the West.

Psychedelic Explorations, Leary, Harvard, Millbrook, Alpert and Metzner update

forthcoming this Summer

August 2008

THE BIRTH OF PSYCHEDELIC CULTURE: CONVERSATIONS ABOUT LEARY, THE HARVARD EXPERIMENTS, MILLBROOK, AND THE SIXTIES

By Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner
With Gary Bravo

Paperback ISBN 9780907791386

http://www.synergeticpress.com/forthcoming.html

Reading The Noosphere with Flobius Mobius

Reading The Noosphere

Exegesis/Seminar/Discussion/Meditation/Composition Collective

Shall we collectively grok the Noosphere? The Noosphere, a concept first coined by Vernadksy, names the effect of awareness on the living systems. Vernadksy's definition was essentially a functional one - the noosphere is the effect of collective human attention on the Biosphere, which in turn transformed the lithosphere through the processes of living systems. Given what we now know about plant, fungal and bacterial intelligence, it now seems necessary to expand Vernadksy's definition to include all organisms and groups of organisms capable of actively increasing their dissipation of exergy (available energy). Every layer of this system appears to be thermodynamically informed, so we will use concepts from thermodynamics to orient our investigation of this emergent attribute of our planet. Every two weeks we will contextualize Vernadksy's concept by looking to the history of philosophy, sacred and scientific texts of diverse sorts in order to experiment with our collective attention on the concept of collective attention. Recursively we will explore, together, the ecological, psychological and spiritual effects of this

re-mapping of ecological and individuated mind.

Welcome to Da Noosphere.

Syllabus

http://biotelemetrica.pbwiki.com/DaNoosphere

Biosphere II info
March 2008

ME AND THE BIOSPHERES:
A MEMOIR BY THE INVENTOR OF
BIOSPHERE 2

By John Allen

Paperback ISBN 9780907791379
Retail to be determined

Visit the official website here

You would think it would take several lifetimes to attend four universities, earn degrees in engineering, metallurgical-mining, writing, classics, world history, anthropology and business (including a MBA from Harvard),
http://www.synergeticpress.com/forthcoming.html

from LSD to the iPhone, We owe it all the hippies by Stewart Brand

from The Way Back Machine

Stewart Brand wrote from TIME magazine way back in 1995

Wednesday, Mar. 01, 1995

WE OWE IT ALL TO THE HIPPIES

By STEWART BRAND

As they followed the mantra ``Turn on, tune in and drop out,'' college students of the '60s also dropped academia's traditional disdain for business. ``Do your own thing'' easily translated into ``Start your own business.'' Reviled by the broader social establishment, hippies found ready acceptance in the world of small business. They brought an honesty and a dedication to service that was attractive to vendors and customers alike. Success in business made them disinclined to ``grow out of'' their countercultural values, and it made a number of them wealthy and powerful at a young age.

Doyle Updates Leary Project psychedelics & ecodelics

mobius updates Leary Project

TURN ON. Why do we so favor this language of the "turn on" for all things psychedelic and, hence, wikidelic? Our only analogy for the novelty and seemingly infinite potential of psychedelic experience was a machinic one -we chose to compare ourselves to an informational machine both digital and analog. "Turn on" is digital, announcing as it does a discrete state of "on" or "off." So Leary's mantra begins with an experimental performative mapping of ourselves as Boolean machines.TUNE IN. "Tune in" resounds with the suddenly enormous freedom to metaprogram this obviously interactive - and hence, for Leary, cybernetic - machine we momentarily map ourselves as. As a third order cybernetic operation, ( a map of a map of a map that clears new territories) "Drop Out" tunes the tuning toward the most proximate bit of order with which we have an analogy, with which we are continuous -a "sample" of the former self which is then dropped, released. Any aspect of ourselves for which we do not have a satisifying narrative, either (1) produces a narrative, and in a jiffy, through difficulty and out or (2) is released due to inability to narrate. This penchant for letting go of some accrued noise (Gelassenheit as Eckhart dubbed it) seems to initiate a tropism toward re-imagining self in the Light of Self.DROP OUT. So "dropping out" was anything but a "giving up", but was instead an intensification of personal yes spiritual iinformational rhetorical evolution necessary to the next stage of the human and transhuman adventure. Add to the mix that this brings out larger structures within which we are embedded ( See the Witkin Embedded Figure Test and its responsiveness to psychdelics, and Pop goes the dissipative structure - the noosphere! Psychedelics offered a rhetorical re-orientation, a living within Korzybski's "The Map is Not the Territory" that lets go of linguistic phenomena as anything but labels for our benefit and evolution. When I drank ayahuasca, I learned to let go of former versions of my self that were not sustainable in the context of larger versions of my Self ( ecosystem), and I did so by releasing them and seeing them for what they are - aspects of my self and not my Self, maps and not territories.

Leary famously gave out the mantra "Turn on, Tune in, Drop Out", and we seem unable to hear the original context of this "drop out", which was really a "dropping in" to radical learning through the breakdown of established rhetorical habit structures. From the beginning, Leary treated the sacred context of psychedelics as both fundamental and implicit in the rest of his work. In this way Wiki is in its way as psychedelic as LSD. It "manifests" "mind", but hints at a collective mind, a Millbrook for the Noosphere. So we are "turned on" to our evolutionary feelin' through sexual selection in evolution, a sorting of our selves by our Selves in intensive, ecstatic mutual self examination. To put it in primate terms, the self is put under the microscope by the Self, and groomed. Mobius has written of the "ecodelic hypothesis" in his forthcoming tome, and with the right googlin you can find it!

wonderful talk with John Lash & Joanna Harcourt-Smith on origins of Psychedelic Revolution

Huxley lineage and Wasson lineage in origins of most important change in Human History in the last 40,000 years. The End of That Era and the beginning of the Great Human Adventure to Dash accross the Stars to our Creators Home at the Center of the galaxy! see Tim's trilogy,
StarSeed, neurologic, & Terra II for more details of the Project!

http://futureprimitive.org/mp3/randr/rr1.mp3

Five discussions with John Lash:

RAPTURE AND REVOLUTION

Discussions on Entheogens and the Planetary Shift.


LATEST BROADCAST - December 29, 2007
The Wasson Thesis and the Religious View of Nature

LEFT CLICK LISTEN | RIGHT CLICK (save as) DOWNLOAD
http://futureprimitive.org/mp3/randr/rr1.mp3
LENGTH: 45:06 mins. SIZE: 20.6MB

http://futureprimitive.org/randr.php