Our Brain

By Timothy Leary / From: Chaos and Cyberculture / Page 35

When you think of it, the ultimate oxymoron is organized religion. Imagine a group of control-freak men getting together and saying, "We're going to impose our order on the fifteen-billion-year evolutionary chaotic process that is happening on this planet, and all over the galaxy. We're going to chisel out the rules of a bureaucracy to keep us in power."

The human brain � the most complex, infinitely and imaginatively complex knowledge system � has a hundred billion neurons, and each neuron has the knowledge-processing capacity of a powerful computer. The human brain has more connections than there are atoms in the universe. It has taken us thousands of years to even realize that we don't understand the chaotics of this complexity. The human brain can process more than a hundred million signals a second and counting.

The best way to understand the evolution of the human race is in terms of how well we have learned to operate our brain. If you think about it, we're basically brains. Our bodies are here to move our brains around. Our bodies are equipped with all these sensory inputs and output ports to bring information into the neurocomputer. In just the last ten years, our species has multiplied the ability to use our brains by a thousandfold. The way to understand how efficiently you�re using your brain is to clock it in rpm realities per minute. Just on the basis of input/output, my brain is now operating at a hundred times more rpm than in 1960.

When we were back in the caves a million or so years ago, we were just learning to chip stones to begin making tools. We lived on a planet where everything was natural. There was almost nothing artificial or even handmade � but we had the same brains, Each of our ancient ancestors carried around an enormously complex brain that eventually fissioned the atom, sent human beings to the Moon, and created rock video. Long ago we had the same brains, but we aren't using the abilities. If the brain is like a computer, then the trick is to know how to format your brain�to set up operating systems to run your brain.

1f you have a computer, you have choice, You can have word processing or not. If you have word processing, you have WordStar or WordPerfect, all these choices. Once you've formatted your brain, trained your brain with that method, you have to go through that program to use it. The process of formatting your brain is called imprinting.

Imprinting is a multimedia input of data. For a baby, it's the warmth of the mother, the softness, the sound, the taste of the breast. That's called booting up or formatting. Now baby's brain is hooked to Mama and then of course from Mama to Daddy, food, etc., but it's the Mama file that's the first imprint.

There is the ability to boot up or add new directories. To activate the brain is called yogic or psychedelic. To transmit what�s in the brain is cybernetic. The brain, we are told by neurologists, has between seventy and a hundred buttons known as receptor sites that can imprint different circuits. Certain biochemical (usually botanical) products activate those particular parts of the brain.

In tribal times, before written language, communication was effected through the human voice, small groups, and body motion. Most pagan tribes had rituals that occurred at harvest time, in the springtime, or at the full Moon. The tribe came together and activated a collective boot-up system. They hooked all their computers to the same tribal language. This often involved the use of psychedelic plants or vegetables.

In terms of modern computers and electronic devices, this would be a multimedia imprinting ceremony. The fire was the center of light and heat. There were symbolic objects, such as feathers or bones. This experience booted up the brains of all present so they could share the basic tribal system. But each person could have his own vision quest. He could howl like a wolf, hoot like an owl, roll around like a snake. Each tribal member was learning how to activate, operate, boot up, and accept the uniqueness of his/her own brain.

A human being is basically a tribal person, most comfortable being together in small groups facilitating acceptance and understanding of each other as individuals. Later forms of civilization have discredited individualism. The history of the evolution of the human spirit has to do with new methods of media, communication, or language. About five thousand years ago, after the species got pretty good with tools and building, somewhere in the Middle East (possibly also in China) people began making marks on shells and on pieces of papyrus. This allowed for long-distance communication.

Handwriting, which linked up hundreds of thousands of people, gave total power to the people who knew how to control the writing. Marshall McLuhan reminded us that throughout human history, whoever controls the media controls the people. This is French semiotics. Literacy is used to control the poor. The educated use literacy to control the uneducated,

A typical feudal organization, such as the Catholic Church, restricted the power to send a message like this to a very special class of computer hacker-nerds called monks. Only they were authorized to touch the mainframe � the illuminated manuscripts up in the castle of the duke or cardinal. But to the others � no matter how important a person in the village or the city � the word came down from the Higher Ups.

Once people start organizing in large groups of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, the tribal situation could no longer be controlled. If a hundred thousand people are all hooked up, like a hive or termite colony, there has to be some central organization that keeps it going.

With thousands of people carrying rocks to build a pyramid, or thousands of people building the churches of the pope, a feudal society can�t function if the workers are accessing their singular-brain programs. To illustrate the totalitarian power control of the feudal situation, consider the basic metaphor of the �shepherd� and the �sheep.� �The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.� Now, if the Lord is your shepherd, who the fuck are you? Bah! Even today, when the pope flies around to third-world countries, they speak of �the pope and his flock.�

Another example of brain control preventing the individual from accessing his or her own computer is the first chapter of the Bible. The opening text of Genesis lays it right out. God says, "I made the skies, I made the planets, I made the earth, I made the water, I made the land, I made the creepy-crawly things, and I made you, Adam, to be in my  likeness, and I put you in the ultimate destination resort, which is the Garden of Eden.Boy, you can do anything you want. I'm going to pull out a rib and give you a helpmate like a little kitchen slave, named Eve. You can do whatever you want, Adam. This is paradise.

"However, there are two Food and Drug regulations. See that tree over there? That's the Tree of Immortality. It offers cryonics and cloning. You shall not eat of the fruit of that lest you become a God like me and live forever. You see that tree over there? That's even more dangerous. You shall not eat of the fruit of that because that is the Tree of Knowledge. It offers expansions of consciousness.�

Genesis makes it clear that the whole universe is owned, operated, controlled, and fabricated by one God � and he�s a big, bad-tempered male. That�s why we have a war on mind drugs. The one thing that no mass society can stand is individuals and small groups that go otto start learning how to program, reprogram, boot up, activate, and format their own brains.

There�s a good reason for these taboos. The feudal and industrial stages of evolution are similar to the stages in the evolution of individuals. Young children are glad to have Daddy be shepherd, hut after a while the child has to take responsibility.

Feudal societies imprinted millions to totally devote their lives to being herd-flock animals. Imagine living on a farm fifty miles from Chartres during the 15th Century. On Sundays you walked five miles to get to a little village. There the priest told you, �Listen, six months from now we�re all going to Chartres. There�s going to be a big ceremony because the archbishop will be there.�

You spent a week to hike there. You walked into the central square of Chartres, You looked up and saw a cathedral taller than any trees, almost like a mountain, with its stained-glass windows and statues, and there were all those people the priest told you about. They�re seven or ten feet tall, You walked in, looked up at the towering Gothic arches, the rose windows, heard the organ music and chanting, smelled the incense.

Talk about multisensory, multimedia imprinting! If you think that the Grateful Dead light show is something, for almost two thousand years the wizards of the Catholic Church have orchestrated one hell of a show. The smell of perfume, the candles, the chanting getting louder and louder, until suddenly the bishop appeared, bejeweled, carried in on a big golden throne. You'd never seen anything like that back on the farm.

"Alright, down on your knees. Say after me: 'Thine is the kingdom and power and glory.' Now i want you all to go to the Middle East and kill heathens for Christ." "Sure, anything you say."

An earlier multimedia sprinting event took place near Athens before the birth of Christ. The Eleusinian mystery rite was an annual religious event that reoccurred for over a thousand years. The wisest people as well as ordinary folk came to the temple of Eleusis to participate in the secret ceremony. An LSD-type drink made from ergot of barley was drunk by all the initiates. An extravagant light show and a powerful dramatic reenactment was performed, resulting in a group experience of chaos and rebirth for the audience.

It's no accident that the Greek philosophers, dramatists, and poets left an incredible record of creative self-expression and polytheism. When Socrates said, "The function of human life is to know yourself; intelligence is virtue,� he was invoking the Greek notion of humanism that was to later influence the Renaissance and the romantic periods.

Far more than by weapons, society is controlled by multimedia, neurological imprinting. Marshall McLuhan reminded us that the medium is the message.

When Gutenberg invented moveable type, it empowered dukes and cardinals to print and distribute thousands of Bibles and histories of the Crown. Within a few decades, many Europeans were learning how to do what only the monks could do. Gutenberg created the one device that was basic to the future industrial-factory civilization � mass production for consumers.

In the industrial age, the virtuous person was good, prompt, reliable, dependable, efficient, directed, and, of course, replaceable, There was not much need for the individual to operate his or her own brain in a factory civilization. The bosses can't have people on an assembly line becoming too creative, as in the Cheech and Chong movie where cars are coming down the line.

"Hey, Cheech, I'm going to eat now.""You can't, not yet." "Why not?" "You can't eat until the bell rings." "Okay, let's paint the next car rainbow."

You cannot operate industrial society with too much individuality and access to the multimedia capacities of the brain.Around 1900 Einstein came up with the idea that space and time only exist in an interactive field, and Max Planck devised a theory that the basic elements of the universe are particles of information. Then came Heisenberg's proof that you create your own reality. And a new philosophy emerged called quantum physics, which suggests that the individual's function is to inform and be informed. You really exist only when you're in a field sharing and exchanging information. You create the realities you inhabit.

What's the brain for? Why do we have this incredible instruments? Our brains want to be hooked up with other brains. My brain is only in operation when she's slamming back and forth bytes and hits of information. Multimedia intercommunication.

The original basic dream of humanity is that the individual has divinity within. There is this enormous power within our bio-computer brains. We are going to have to learn how to use this power, how to boot it up.