Exo-Psychology Revisited

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http://www.starlarvae.org/Star_Larvae_Addendum_Exo-Psychology_Revisited.html

Exo-Psychology Revisited
    The juvenilization of brain circuits induced by weightlessness will produce a corresponding juvenilization of subjectivity. The psychedelic, or entheogenic, experience provides a preview of the de-conditioned, de-differentiated consciousness likely to characterize the juvenilized minds of extraterrestrials.

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"Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite discarded. How to regard them is the question—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes, though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region, though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality."

—- William James
Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature

One of the more puzzling personages to emerge from the 1960s is Dr. Timothy Leary. The Harvard psychologist became a notorious public figure for promoting the mind-altering effects of psychedelic drugs. Leary eventually crossed paths with the U.S. legal system, did hard time, and fled overseas. Then, as if to confound his followers and his critics, he re-emerged in the late 1970s as a proponent of Intelligent Design. The term wasn't a commonplace at the time, but it captures Leary's post-60s philosophy. He proffered a teleological model of evolution, guided by Higher Intelligence, to audiences that attended his "stand-up philosopher" performances in the 1970s and '80s.
Babel Fish Translation

During his hiatus from the public scene, Leary steeped himself in research on the origins of life, in particular Fred Hoyle's panspermia theory, and he became an enthusiastic proponent of Gerard O'Neill's space colonization proposals. Life on Earth was seeded from outer space, Leary told his nightclub audiences, and, after four-and-a-half billion years of evolution, was now preparing to metamorphose into its mature, extraterrestrial, form. It's time to migrate (back) to space, he proposed. The new shtick elicited mixed feedback from the old hippies, young cyberpunks, and random curiosity seekers who took the time to listen.

Leary organized many of his new ideas in "Exo-Psychology", published in 1977, an ambitious and provocative book that modestly billed itself as "a manual on the use of the human nervous system according to the instructions of the manufacturers." Despite the book's appeal to teleology and Higher Intelligence, it had little to do with conventional religious thinking. Leary dismissed the Bible, except to note sardonically that Eden was the site of the first drug bust. He chose instead to search for Higher Intelligence far from religious—and scientific—orthodoxies. The psychedelic experience convinced him that DNA contains not only the past, but also the future, of evolution and that both are available for review.

Furthermore, Leary proposed that, not only forms of bodies, but also modalities of mind are pre-coded into the evolutionary program. His model of developmental psychology, based on eight "brain circuits" that are activated sequentially—during both the ontogeny of an individual and species-wide during phylogeny—includes terrestrial and post-terrestrial stages. The first four circuits govern the experiences of planetbound life. The last four are for extraterrestrial use. Leary came to believe that psychedelic drugs temporarily activate (or emulate or simulate) the extraterrestrial circuits. Although unwieldy and possibly maladaptive in the terrestrial context, the psychedelic experience delivers a preview of modes of consciousness that will be normal for space dwellers. The psychedelic experience will find its proper field of application and adaptation, according to Leary's teleological model of evolution, outside the confines of gravity.

When it became clear that space colonization and post-terrestrial consciousness lay a little too far in the future, Leary re-issued "Exo-Psychology" as "Info-Psychology." A sidelining of his extraterrestrial ideals, the re-issuing appeared to be a transparent move to cash in on the personal computing boom of the 1980s. Leary proved adept at changing lanes and became an elder statesman of the cyberpunks at about the same time that William Burroughs re-emerged as an impresario of the music and poetry punks.

Marketing maneuvers aside, Leary's "Exo-Psychology" stands on its own, and thirty years after its publication, the work deserves a re-examination. It is relevant to the star larvae hypothesis in a number of ways: It proposes that evolution unfolds according to a program, i.e., that phylogeny imitates ontogeny, that biology arrives on planets from space and returns to space in a symbiosis with its technologies after planetary incubation, and that consciousness mutates/metamorphoses concurrently with the body when planetary life becomes post-planetary.

Leary referred in passing to weightlessness and cosmic radiation, but he did not elucidate any precise physical or physiological mechanisms that would trigger the final four, psychedelic, brain circuits in outer space. Nonetheless, the retention in space brains of dense circuitry otherwise lost during development on Earth constitutes a plausible neurological foundation for a psychedelic post-planetary consciousness. This consciousness, arising from an extraterrestrial enrichment of brain tissue, will extend the trend line of human neoteny; it will be psychedelic to the extent that infantile and psychedelic states overlap. And they seem to share considerable common ground.

"The opponents of psychoactive drugs correctly complain that they cause 'other-worldly' experiences, irrelevant or even dangerous to mundane survival. The confusion and fear generated by transcendental states of consciousness may be due to the possibility that they are designed for post-terrestrial existence."

—- Timothy Leary
Exo-Psychology

One phenomenological intersection of these states is synesthesia. The term refers to the conflation of sensory modalities, as in "hearing colors" or "seeing sounds." Reports of synesthesia are common enough in the psychedelic literature, but research suggests that synesthesia probably also characterizes the experience of neonate—and, therefore, of neotenous—brains.

Researcher Simon Baron-Cohen reviews the idea in his overview article Is There a Normal Phase of Synaesthesia in Development? Baron-Cohen cites evidence of cross-referencing of the sensory modalities of infants, as in research that shows that infants exhibit more visual interest in objects that they previously had explored tactilely, or changes in heart rate that correlate with changes in intensity of auditory and visual stimuli but that are not elicited by intensity-matched stimuli. Researcher Daphne Maurer interprets the data as evidence of neonatal synesthesia. In Baron-Cohen's words, "early in infancy, probably up to about four months of age, all babies experience sensory input in an undifferentiated way. Sounds trigger auditory and visual and tactile experiences. A truly psychedelic state, and all natural—no illegal substances play a role."

A neuroanatomical explanation seems evident for this phenomenon. Research in lab animals has found transient connections among the visual, auditory, somatosensory, and motor cortices in the brains of kittens and baby hamsters, Baron-Cohen points out, and he cites evidence that something similar occurs in human infants. It would seem then that the sensorium is less differentiated in infants than in adults. And it would follow that a retention of juvenile brain structures—neurological neoteny—a de-differentiation of brain structures and processes, would tend to preserve the otherwise transient connections among the various cortices. As a result, the normally transient sensory modality of synesthesia would become a permanent feature of subjective experience in the neotenous brains of extraterrestrials. To borrow Gould's phrasing concerning morphological neoteny, the juvenilization of extraterrestrial brains will establish a matrix within which all trends in the evolution of extraterrestrial psychology must be assessed. Synesthesia is an evident point of intersection between psychedelic and infant modes of experience. Psychedelics juvenilize and juvenilization psychedelicizes.

"Moralists complain that the youth culture is infantile. Exactly. As aimless and unproductive as a baby. The first post-larval generation (those born between 1945 and 1970) naturally bore the brunt of mutational confusion. We can imagine that the first generation of amphibians were similarly misunderstood as crazy, lazy, mixed-up kids, laying around on the shoreline passively enjoying the naked sun and sniffing oxygen."

—- Timothy Leary
Exo-Psychology

Another point of overlap between the infantile and the psychedelic, albeit one that is hard to characterize precisely, might be described as unconditioned experience. In "The Infant Mind," researcher Richard Restak illustrates by taking us inside the experiential world of a four-month-old:

    "In reaching, infants have a difficulty few adults have complained about. Their hand is so interesting, so arresting that it captures their attention whenever it enters the visual field. Only the infant truly appreciates the beauty of the human hand . . . . Indeed, a baby is unable to ignore the hand, can't treat it as an object, hasn't the immediate knack of getting along with the business of grasping . . . . The baby will start to reach, encounter the hand, and ponder 'What's that!' Moments later, attention will shift to the toy once again and reaching will be resumed only to be interrupted yet another time by the Beautiful Hand."

In "The Joyous Cosmology," Buddhist scholar Alan Watts describes a similar experience, albeit with more literary flair. While strolling a wooded path he notices that, "A rotten log bearing rows of fungus and patches of moss became as precious as any work of Cellini—an inwardly luminous construct of jet, amber, jade and ivory, all the porous and spongy disintegrations of the wood seeming to have been carved out with infinite patience and skill." Watts in this passage is recalling an experience that he had under the influence of a psychedelic drug.

A decaying log and a baby's hand would seem to have little in common, other than their ordinariness. So what power can such mundane objects possess to transfix a mind? Maybe the answer has to do with the type of mind. Normal adult minds typically don't react to commonplaces with concern, let alone intrigue. Most adults would consider a log along a path and a hand at the end of an arm eminently ignorable. But a baby hasn't yet endured the lessons of socialization. Its mind hasn't been conditioned to ignore anything.

"The capacity to wonder at trifles—no matter the imminent peril—these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good. "

—- Vladimir Nabokov
Lectures on Literature

"Gandhi said that most of the important things he learned in his life were learned from children. Children have spontaneous cognition based more on instinct than on intellect. Thus, they are closer to intuitive knowledge and to their true nature than adults. We must strive for the quality of the child's mind. We begin by concentrating on that which keeps us from knowing the truth, namely, the mind itself."

—- Swami Rama
Freedom From Karma

Starting at birth, a baby is subjected to many conditioning agents, ranging from the physical environment (electric socket, hot stove, steep stairs), to parents, teachers, and coaches (spankings, grades, benchings and high-fives), to cultural totems and taboos, employers, and, in the industrialized world, mass media. The lessons of the environment and the norms of the tribe—instilled through socialization, enculturation, and education—establish lifelong psychological habits. But what if the psychological result of all this conditioning could be suspended and consciousness returned to its natural state? What does experience feel like to a raw mind? Unfiltered by sociocultural manners, the empirical world essentially would be remade; it would revert to William James' blooming buzzing confusion.

The early characterization of psychedelics as de-conditioning agents might explain certain similarities between psychedelic and infant experience. The drugs inhibit conditioned patterns of thought and perception, rendering the drug-taker a child, psychologically. The child, not yet having learned at the hands of parents/teachers/employers that it should dismiss any class of objects as mere, will examine twigs, leaves, and stones with focused intent. And the acidhead enthralled by swirling patterns in an ashtray similarly cannot dismiss the encounter as a run-in with something mere.

A vacant stare need not evince a dullard. The pull of the de- or unconconditioned experience would seem to be an aesthetic attraction. It's not that the drugged mind finds beauty where there is none; it is rather that a mind lulled by convention fails to perceive beauty but in the narrow channels recognized by the culture. A mind lulled by convention has to struggle to see through its habits. It has a hard time perceiving beauties that fail to conform to the aesthetic rules of the tribe. A psychedelicized mind, with its usual habits suspended, can constellate a satisfying aesthetic tableau from almost any perceptual field. It can extract beauty.

Timothy Leary posed the issue in terms of "game" consciousness and "reality tunnels." These terms refer to habits of mind, conditioned conventions. The psychedelic state is non-game; it suspends conditioned habits. Psychedelic drugs expose consciousness to the unconscious; they make the unconscious conscious. They promote "out of the box" experience, liberating brains from social conditioning.

Leary anticipated the development in contemporary, postmodern, philosophy that defines reality as a sociolinguistic construct. Not only are all values and beliefs cultural artifacts, to the Wittgensteinian-Heideggerian way of thinking, but so too are vocabularies themselves. Not only is it the rare person who can adopt values and beliefs outside those of his or her culture, but it is the rare person who can even articulate such a possibility. To this way of thinking, the social construct extends to include an individual's own identity. "Self" itself is a social construct, in postmodern philosophy. This discovery would seem to complete rationalism’s project to usurp religion. It would seem finally to do away with any lingering notions of an individual soul. The nexus of subjectivity that we each experience ourselves to be is a psychological artifact built up layer upon layer by environmental conditioning. This model psychological development implies that if a lifetime's cumulative conditioning could be suspended, say, chemically, the result would be coma, a cessation of consciousness altogether.

This is where the psychedelic perspective diverges from the "linguistic turn" of postmodern philosophy. Leary and his kindred understood well enough that each person's "reality tunnel" is a social construct. But the suspension of conditioned reality does not snuff consciousness; it liberates consciousness, retrieves the natural state. Leary used the term "neurological relativism" to underscore the notion that beneath all the conditioning, which works to homogenize consciousness within a culture, individuality remains. Leary located the reality-generating agency in the brain (hardware), rather than in the vocabulary, rituals, and artifacts (software) of the culture. In the psychedelic view, the individuals of a society share much common cultural input, but each remains relative to all others because each bears a unique brain. What can the sociolinguistic school say about, for example, schizophrenia, or disabilities that undermine a person’s capacity to internalize cultural conventions, or the psychedelic experience itself? Clearly, as Leary understood and asserted, no matter how dense, intense, or insistent the cultural conditioning to which it is subjected, the brain remains the arbiter of reality.

The psychedelic experience challenges the notion that enculturation, socialization, and education are constructive processes that build identity, values, and beliefs from scratch. It proposes instead that these processes are destructive processes that impose limitation and constraint on an otherwise full-blown, free-wheeling, if potentially chaotic, subjectivity. In this sense, the psychedelic perspective is Freudian, echoing Freud’s assessment of the fate of the individual at the hands of culture in "Civilization and Its Discontents." The metaphor of Plato’s cave provides another kind of commentary. In Plato’s parable, from "The Republic", a person liberated from cultural conditioning reports back his perceptions of extra-cultural phenomena to his fellows. Rather than being celebrated as a visionary, he is denounced as a dangerous, delusional krank.

Could there be a more poignant metaphor for the rise and fall of Dr. Leary’s career?

A migration into the unconscious, into the dream, must correspond to migration into a physical frontier. If transcendence doesn't correspond to a physical frontier, then we are back in the world of The Matrix, a kind of waking dream. And the mavericks, or the rebels, or the holdouts, or the free spirits, or the individualists who unplug themselves, who assert some semblance of a private identity outside the shared dream of the culture/Matrix, pose a threat to the political dominators. The hippies terrified the guardians of propriety, because they challenged people to drop out, to assert an identity outside of and beyond the collective culture.

"The direction of evolution on the whole is toward more complex actualities, resulting from God's basic creative purpose, which is the evocation of actualities with greater and greater enjoyment. [. . . .] To maximize beauty is to maximize enjoyment. God's purpose, then, can be described as the aim toward maximizing either beauty or enjoyment. It is on the basis of these criteria of intrinsic value that the evolutionary process can be viewed as in part a product of divine providence."

—- John B. Cobb, Jr. and David Ray Griffin
Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition

"The goal of evolution is Higher Intelligence—the sequential development of the nervous system—increasingly capable of receiving, integrating, and transmitting a wider spectrum of signals of greater intensity, complexity, and speed."

—- Timothy Leary
Exo-Psychology

Cannabis, or marijuana, is a milder psychedelic drug that also seems to juvenilize consciousness. As such it provides another potential window into the extraterrestrial mind. In David Soloman's "The Marijuana Papers," psychiatrist Sheldon Cholst lauds the cannabis experience for its childlike dimension. He gushes,

    "The child lives in a world of wonders, he searches, finds, turns away and is afraid sometimes of being hurt or 'put down' by adults. But now he is both—so he feels 'high,' tall like an adult and yet still a child. O wonder of wonders! What more can this 'child at heart' want—for that is what a 'head' or hashish taker who really 'turns on' is. He has turned off adult reality — 'what to do, where to go, what am I allowed to do' and has returned to the life of the free, primitive child who wanders in his happiness."

Dating to the heyday of hippie culture, Cholst's paean captures the naïf sensibility of the flower children. Hippies left behind the conditioned norms of bourgeois adulthood, their drug regimen conveying them into a de-conditioned state of polymorphous hedonism. In their survey of human neoteny, "Man-Child, a Study of the Infantilization of Man," David Jonas & Doris Klein offer many peculiar observations and speculations along these lines, including,

    "In our own lifetimes, we see large numbers of children surviving childhood illnesses who would never have been able to live out their normal life spans had they been born in the days of our own childhood. They begin to form the nucleus of yet a new subspecies, regressing still another notch toward fetalization. Perhaps the appearance of deviant societies like those of the beatniks, the hippies, the flower children and many other of these types all over the earth would prove to that patient scientist from another world that the process of regression continues unabated."

A weird sentiment, but the authors, writing in 1970, seem to concur with Timothy Leary that the hippies represented the leading edge of evolution, albeit a little too far ahead of their time.

"The first post-Hiroshima generation has produced millions of Zen 'Hippies' who have evolved from the mundane but do not realize that they are extraterrestrial. [. . . . ] Five-brained persons flopping around sporadically detached from mundane imprints, lacking a vocabulary and methodology for extraterrestrial movement, fall back on larval concepts of transcendence. Caterpillar fantasies about what post-larval life will be like. A warning is in order. Many five-brained hippies and yogis are the most vehement opponents of extraterrestrial evolution. They use three bland sets of clichés to resist practical plans for interstellar migration:

    * Look within. Astral travel, passive changing of consciousness will transport us to the promised land.
    * Return to nature. Back to the Paleolithic! Simplify, avoid technology, stalk the wild asparagus, rely on body wisdom, organic purity, sensory pleasure.
    * All is one. The cosmos is a homogeneous mist of flavorless cotton-candy. Exo-psychology and neurogenetics are attacked as unnatural, elitist attempts to differentiate the vanilla-pudding unity of simplistic Hinduism, Buddhism. u.s.w.

Underlying all three of these occultist postures is a revulsion against science, technology, evolution and intellectual competence. Implicit in the occultist theory is the assumption that there is nothing left to learn except to rote-memorize some Hindu chants, to rote-recite some glib theosophical dogmas, to quiet the restless, inquiring mind. "

—- Timothy Leary
Exo-Psychology

The infantile-psychedelic parallel becomes startlingly clear in this passage from Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory:

    "What we can imagine in the early years of the child's life, then, is not a unified subject confronting and desiring a stable object, but a complex, shifting field of force in which the subject (the child itself) is caught up and dispersed, in which it has as yet no center of identity and in which the boundaries between itself and the external world are indeterminate. Within this field of libidinal force, objects and part-objects emerge and disappear again, shift places kaleidoscopically, and prominent among such objects is the child's body as the play of drives laps across it. One can speak of this also as an 'auto-eroticism,' within which Freud somethimes includes the whole of infantile sexuality: the child takes erotic delight in its own body, but without as yet being able to view its body as a complete object."

We now know that, in at least some mammals, the concentration of cannabinoid receptors in the brain peaks shortly after birth. These receptors are the brain's natural docking stations for the primary active ingredient in marijuana. "There is a striking temporary concentration of these [cannabinoid] receptors in the visual cortex during a critical period, when the brain fine-tunes its structure and function," reports neuroscientist Max S. Cynader (Science News, November 27, 1993).

Again, the prospect of neural neoteny—the retention of juvenile brain structures—in extraterrestrials suggests the prospect of otherwise temporary conditions becoming permanent fixtures. Cannabis, incidentally, is an antiemetic drug that is used licitly and illicitly to alleviate the nausea produced by chemotherapy and other medical treatments. The antiemetic properties of the drug suggest that, if space brains retain a concentration of cannabinoid receptors, then evolution will have equipped our extraterrestrial descendants with an endogenous prophylactic against space sickness.

In Leary's model, marijuana specifically activates the fifth "circuit" of the nervous system—the first of the four post-terrestrial circuits. More powerful psychedelics activate the remainder of the extraterrestrial circuitry. Consciousness, in this model, as it evolves in space, concerns itself less and less with events outside the body and increasingly with events inside the body, with the body itself being subject to radical redefinition (see the above passage from Eagleton). The first of the post-terrestrial circuits, triggered by marijuana, directs attention to bodily sensations per se, hence the somatic interests of the pothead: hedonism, sensuality, yoga, vegetarianism. The next extraterrestrial circuit takes as its object the physiological activity within the brain. The third focuses on the information encoded in DNA. And the last of the eight circuits concerns the source of subjectivity itself, as consciousness merges with events at the quantum level.

"The fact that much of the freedom with which we deal is outside our bodies, rather than in them is precisely because we are not God, not the cosmic consciousness, but localized fragmentary ones. It is odd how the very thinkers who pride themselves most on transcending anthropomorphism are often the very ones who fall into it. Nothing is more anthropomorphic than the idea that to know or influence something is to deal with what is simply outside oneself. To God everything is at least as close and as much a possession (though not a necessity) as our brain cells are to us."

—- Charles Hartshorne
Wisdom As Moderation

"There are eight levels of pleasure. The four larval circuits provide rewarding, reassuring signals that the survival lines to the island realities are secure. The four post-larval pleasures come from direct awareness of natural energy signals—the biological equipment, freed from larval imprint, harmoniously mediating natural energies."

—- Timothy Leary
Exo-Psychology

Leary referred to the experience of the eighth circuit as "metaphysiological" consciousness. He insisted that he was not proposing anything metaphysical, probably to separate his scientific ideas from the mysticism of hippies and New Agers and as recognition that quantum mechanics to some degree blurs the physical/metaphysical distinction. A notion that can be traced back to this model is the re-classification of psychedelic drugs as information technologies.

More recently, the notion of a psychedelic-quantum connection has gained substance from the work of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, specifically their assertion that the gravitationally induced collapse of quantum superpositions is the ontological basis of conscious experience. This explanation implies that not only is subjectivity not epiphenomenal to the physiochemistry of the synapses in the brain (the prevailing scientific view), but that it participates fundamentally in the transition from the potential to the actual, that is, operationally, conscious experience occurs concomitantly with the collapse of quantum superpositions into empirical events.

In the Penrose-Hameroff model, quantum superpositions cohere through large volumes of brain tissue. The larger the volume of coherence, the shorter its duration before collapse, so that large superposed volumes produce more conscious events per unit of time. Hameroff's explanation, in paraphrase, runs like this: The hollow interiors of neural microtubules provide a protected environment within which the quantum processes can proceed free from external contamination. Certain brain proteins, called tubulin dimers, from which the microtubules are made, exist in two potential conformations, depending on the position of an electron in the protein's hydrophobic pocket. If the electron is held in superposition, the whole protein molecule is held in a superposition of its two possible conformations. Any molecule that binds to the protein and retards electron mobility in the hydrophobic pocket will tend to reduce consciousness, by frustrating the electron's ability to suspend itself in a superposition. This seems to be the mechanism by which surgical anesthetics work.

Hameroff notes that psychedelic drugs appear to have the opposite effect; they enhance electron mobility in the hydrophobic pockets of tubulin dimers. He suggests that this is how the drugs produce their effects on consciousness. By making it easier for tubulin molecules to remain in a state of superposition, the drugs facilitate quantum coherence across neurons, and hence more neurons participate in the coherent state. The collapse of the quantum coherence through these larger than normal volumes of brain tissue produces, in effect, larger than normal conscious experiences. This is the psychedelic effect, or at least Hameroff suggests this model. (See Computer Simulation of Anesthetic Binding in Protein Hydrophobic Pockets, pp. 425-434, in "Toward a Science of Consciousness: The First Tucson Discussions and Debates", MIT Press, 1996.)

The Penrose-Hameroff model implies that consciousness varies on a quantitative scale and that psychedelics and anesthetics are the two extremes of chemical intervention. When Leary and other early researchers called psychedelics "consciousness-expanding drugs" they might have been more precise in their terminology than they imagined. If the Penrose-Hameroff model, or something like it, is correct, then the drugs deliver on their promise literally to expand consciousness.

"Exo-Psychology presumes to offer new solutions to these classic questions by suggesting:
1. That life on this planet is not unique
2. That the planet has been seeded
3. That the evolution of the various species unfolds on all biological planets according to the same pre-determined plan
4. That life is designed to migrate from the nursery planet
5. That great mutations are pre-programmed to appear in our future."

—- Timothy Leary
Exo-Psychology

If adaptation to weightlessness includes the preservation of juvenile brain functions, and the result is a psychedelicized consciousness, then one might expect to catch glimpses of this in the reports of astronauts. To date there are only suggestive reports that anything weird is going on. It's not clear that NASA would be up front about sharing reports from astronauts about disturbing mental states in any event. And it might be that the time astronauts spend in weightlessness isn't sufficient to produce dramatic effects. Whereas, a lifetime spent negotiating the all-around body space of weightlessness would introduce a more formative set of influences.

Nonetheless, there are enough odd occurrences surrounding astronauts to be worth mentioning.

In his book, "The Overview Effect," Frank White collected reports from American and Soviet space travelers about their psychological reactions to their adventures. Astronaut Charles Walker, recalls, "I have heard other space travelers express a perception that I have had: the feeling of euphoria beginning and continuing several days after launch. It is a feeling that new possibilities must be present where physical orientation and visual perception are under control but always variable." Wally Schirra describes his positive impressions of weightlessness this way: "You feel exquisitely comfortable . . . and you feel you have so much energy, such an urge to do things, such ability to do things. And you work well, yes, you think well, you move well, without sweat, without difficulty."

The experiences can attain a life-transforming intensity. Edgar Mitchell's seemingly telepathic experiences in space inspired him to found a parapsychological research tank, the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Astronaut James Irwin returned to Earth sufficiently moved by some sort of revelation to mount several expeditions in search of Noah's Ark. But not everyone who orbits comes back inspired. Astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon, crash landed in a mental institution. Apparently the spectre of the bad trip looms over this kind of tripping too.

But most space cases return favorably disposed towards NASA's version of getting high. Astronaut Senator John Glenn in unequivocal: "I found weightlessness to be extremely pleasant. I am sure that I could have gone for a much longer period in a weightless condition without being bothered by it at all. You feel completely free. The state is so pleasant, as a matter of fact, that we joked that a person could probably become addicted to it without any trouble. I know that I could."

As ennobling as it has been, the enterprise of space flight, to date, constitutes barely a toe in the water with regard to enabling humans to luxuriate in the cradle of weightlessness. But less patient species have forged ahead. The cetacea—whales and dolphins— provide extreme examples of the large-head, small-limb allometric proportions that neoteny promotes and that humanity's extraterrestrial descendants have to look forward to. But more intriguing is the peculiar neurological endowment that these animals have evolved. Cetacean brains provide a suggestive model for the likely direction of exo-neurological development.

The mystique surrounding their minds makes whales and dolphins intriguing candidates for proto-extraterrestrials. The data on the size and complexity of cetacean brains makes it tempting to ascribe to these creatures a world of rich conscious experience. Nonetheless, whatever sentience their big, complex brains might mediate, it remains occult. The burden on evolutionary scientists is to explain why nature endowed these mighty fetal creatures with such impressive neurological hardware. What's the adaptive advantage? How much brain power does a whale need? Dinosaurs pushed their massive bodies around with proportionately much smaller brains. Fish have been living in the water longer than the cetacea with relatively meager brains.

Maybe the cetaceans just lucked out. Maybe when their land-lubbing ancestors, hippo-like creatures as far as paleontology can make out, lumbered into the seas, they took their large mammalian, and presumably adaptably plastic, brains with them. By migrating back into Gaia's womb, they might have set off on a path of neurological enrichment unwittingly. Water simulates weightlessness at least enough so that underwater training is a standard part of the astronauts' pre-flight curriculum. It delivers the floaty, three-dimensionality of space, even if in a vitiated form.
Embryo Human Neoteny     Beluga Marine Neoteny     Embryo Human Neoteny     Beluga Marine Neoteny     Embryo Human Neoteny     Beluga Marine Neoteny     Embryo Human Neoteny

An interesting adaptation to their three-dimensional world is the cetacean's acoustic imaging capacity. Might their sonar signaling and sensitivity portend an adaptation to the 3-D world of weightless space? Cetaceans communicate with one another and scan their environments by emitting patterns of clicks and squeals that act as sonar signals. Through their echoes, these sounds return information about the environment. McLuhan argued that modern culture is moving from a bias toward the visual sense, which literacy promoted, back to a bias toward the auditory sense, which electronics promotes and in so doing retrieves pre-literate sensibility. This transition might be laying the groundwork for a much more radical transformation toward the dominance of the auditory in the posthuman sensorium. The auditory sense naturally better accommodates a three-dimensional world than does the visual sense. Ears can hear from all directions at once. This potentially adaptive advantage will have to give the auditory sense primacy over the visual in the three-dimensional environment of space.

The ordinary human voice, already unique in nature for its range of articulations, could serve native extraterrestrials as a sound source for a cetacean-like sonar system. The notion of "acoustic imaging" suggests a convergence of modalities in the sensorium. Synesthesia suggests itself again as a prospective adaptation to weightlessness that introduces a psychedelic dimension.

If the test of a scientific theory is its ability to make predictions, what can be made of the theory of evolution? I have just laid out a set of predictions based on the principles of parallel evolution in similar environments: womb, ocean, space, and extended it to include not only allometry, but also structural neurology and its concomitant psychology/phenomenology.

For the sake of completeness, it is worth noting two theories of human descent that complement certain aspects of the star larvae hypothesis' model of post-human descent. These are the "Aquatic Ape" hypothesis developed by Elaine Morgan, and a not-formally-named hypothesis by Terence McKenna, in which he proposes that early hominids accelerated their evolution by incorporating psychedelic plants into their diet.

The aquatic ape hypothesis is the older and more widely known of the two and has garnered more commentary. Morgan's series of books on the hypothesis argues that humans differ radically from other primates because human evolution took a turn early on into an environment that other primates avoided: the water. She argues that a primate species was in the process of adapting to an aquatic environment when that path was interrupted and the partially adapted aquatic ape returned to the land, where it gave rise to humankind. Our bodies carry evidence of the aquatic episode, in the form of what Morgan calls, "The Scars of Evolution."
Aquatic Ape Extraterrestrial     Human babies seem content in the water.

The aquatic ape argument centers on rising sea levels that turned the Danakil Alps in Eastern Africa into islands for a period of from 1.5 to 3 million years, 5 to 10 million years ago. On the islands Australopithecenes partially adapted to their aquatic environment, goes the argument. Morgan's case is circumstantial, but the number of anomalies of anatomy and behavior that she cites makes an impressive list. Many characteristics of human biology do not fit the usual model of human descent, which situates key developments in the savannah of Africa:

    * Loss of body hair. Primates generally are hairy; humans are not. Our minimal body hair is a trait we share with cetacea and other aquatic mammals.
    * Subcutaneous fat. The primates generally possess little subcutaneous fat. Our propensity to pack on the pounds is a trait we share with the blubber-bearing cetacea and other aquatic mammals.
    * Tears. Humans are the only "weeping primate." Our capacity to shed tears is a holdover from the days when our aquatic ancestors needed to shed excess salt. Copious tearing still can be seen in seals, for example.
    * Bipedalism. Wading along shorelines would encourage standing tall.
    * Webbing. The occasional mutation that causes webbed fingers and toes is unique to humans.
    * Copulation. Face-to-face copulation is practiced across all human cultures, and is the norm for aquatic mammals ranging from the cetacea to dugongs and manatees. It is unknown among non-human primates.
    * Speech. Precise control of breathing, which would have been selected for by an aquatic environment, is necessary also for speech. Controlled vocalization requires precise breath control.

Morgan acknowledges that the aquatic hypothesis dovetails with the neoteny model of human descent, citing the cetacea (whales and dolphins) as an extreme case imposed by an aquatic—in their case, pelagic—environment. She agrees with the general assessment of human neoteny, but disagrees that the savannah would have encouraged neoteny. Alternatively, she argues that an aquatic environment would. Her case for the contribution of an aquatic past to enriched human neurology is the argument that neoteny extends fetal growth patterns, which favor prolific neurological growth. Not contradicting, but supplementing, Morgan's argument is the complication of the sensorimotor lives of the primates produced by an aquatic environment's added vertical dimension, which would select for genes susceptible to neurological enrichment.

Several millions of years after the aquatic apes returned to the land they got an evolutionary boost from another source, according to Terence McKenna (who, by the way, makes no reference to the aquatic theory). In "Food of the Gods," McKenna proposes that uniquely human consciousness and language evolved with the help of botanical catalysts. Early hominids, as they migrated to new territories and searched for new foods, would have sampled various unfamiliar objects growing around them, overcoming distaste when they got sufficiently hungry. Chimpanzees, for example, out of curiosity and especially if hungry, will tend to sniff and nibble objects in the environment, apparently testing them for palatability. Assuming that early hominids displayed similar behavior, McKenna argues that the presence of ungulates, including cattle, in the grassland environment would have set the stage for an encounter between early hominids and Stropharia cubensis, a psilocybin-containing mushroom that grows in cattle manure. He cites research showing that psilocybin in small doses measurably improves visual acuity, which would have given hominids that developed a taste for the mushroom an adaptive advantage. Psilocybin is at large doses a powerful psychedelic drug and this property probably would have been discovered early on. Consequently, McKenna argues, the mystical/religious sensibility might have been born concomitant with human speciation. The religious intepretation of the psychedelic experience led researchers in the 1970s to to coin the term entheogen, meaning "God within," as an alternative to hallucinogen and psychedelic. Recent anthropological work suggests that even Western monotheism has roots traceable to psychedelic drug use. In "The Holy Mushroom" researcher Jan Irvin elaborates on the work of Dead Sea Scrolls translator John Allegro to argue that Christianity rose from a mushroom cult.

By referring only to skewed behavior patterns, those that would have resulted from an affinity for the psychedelic experience, as a stratifying agent in the hominid gene pool, McKenna skirts accusations of Lamarckism. The putative evolutionary mechanism McKenna leans on is called the Baldwin-Waddington Effect. Richard Dawkins, in "The Extended Phenotype," illustrates the concept by proposing to breed a race of lactating men. By treating men with estrogen and selectively breeding those who showed the greatest susceptibility to its effects one could in theory produce an evolutionary result that would mimic a Lamarkian effect.

Isn't it odd, and a strain of the logic of Darwinism, that a fungus, genetically extremely remote from the human line of descent, would produce a molecule that not only crosses the highly selective blood-brain barrier, but also produces a profound alteration in consciousness once it finds its specific receptor in the brain, and, in a strictly clinical sense, is nontoxic? McKenna even has suggested, though he leaves the suggestion out of "Food of the Gods", probably to avoid casting a dubious shadow on an already controversial hypothesis, that because of certain unique chemical properties of psilocybin, the molecule may be a product of alien genes. Richard Evans Schultes in "Hallucinogenic plants (A Golden Guide)" explains: "This indole derivative, named psilocybin, is a new type of structure, a 4-substituted tryptamine with a phosphoric acid radical, a type never before known as a naturally occurring constituent of plant tissue." In the context of panspermia theory, however, the presence on Earth of an alien gene is less than surprising.

Then again, the coincidence of a fungus manufacturing a structurally peculiar molecule that passes readily through the highly selective blood-brain barrier to bond to a specific receptor site on certain neurons and there profoundly to affect consciousness, yet leave no trace of toxic effect on any bodily tissue, surely must qualify as an example of the Specified Complexity in nature that Intelligent Design proponents cite as proof of God's design. It must be, then, that outlawing psychedelic mushrooms, and indeed any plant drug, is an affront to God, a rejection and vilification of His design.

The psychedelic revelation in the broad society is gnosis non grata.

Mircea Eliade's "Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions," includes a chapter called Spirit, Light, and Seed, which covers various themes related to the star larvae hypothesis. In particular, in a section titled, A South American Example: 'Sun-Father,' Photic-Sexual Symbolism, and Hallucinatory Visions, Eliade describes the mythology of the Desanas, "a small, Tucano-speaking tribe living in the equatorial forests of the Vaupes River in Columbia Amazonia." The tribe persists in an archaic hunting-based culture. Its religious mythology revolves around the creative power of the Sun-Father.

"According to the Desanas, the soul is a luminous element which possesses its own luminosity, bestowed by Sun at the birth of every human being." The association of luminescence with spirit is expanded and reinforced by ritual use of the psychedelic drug, yagé. "The myth of the cult's origin tells that the supernatural yagé-Woman gave birth to a child who had 'the form of light: he was human, yet he was Light; it was yagé.'" During the yagé-drinking ritual, the initiate is told by the shaman that "he is ascending to the Milky Way." He then is led to a subterranean world also inhabited by luminous beings. Eliade says, "Taking yagé is expressed by a verb meaning, 'drink and see,' and it is interpreted as a regressus to the cosmic womb, that is, to the primeval moment when Sun Father began the creation." Light also is associated with semen and sexuality. For example, another aspect of the creation myth involves souls originating from semen that falls from the rays of the sun. Eliade summarizes:

    "If everything which exists, lives, and procreates is an emanation of the sun, and if 'spirituality' (intelligence, wisdom, clairvoyance, etc.) partakes of the nature of solar light, it follows that every religious act has, at the same time, a 'seminal' and a 'visionary' meaning. The sexual connotations of light-experiences and hallucinatory visions appear to be the logical consequence of a coherent solar theology."

Timothy Leary's 1960s persona might always overshadow his later work.

But his spaced-out thinking after the hippie revolution might have been his most prescient.

He was right, it seems. The journey to the stars turns out to be a journey to the center of the mind.

"Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance. The transitions to new fruitfulness of understanding are achieved by recurrence to the utmost depths of intuition for the refreshment of imagination."

—- Alfred North Whitehead
Adventures of Ideas

"Einstein's ability to write the basic equations of energy-matter may have resulted in his having experienced in this own body and brain the implications of light speed travel—which had been reported for centuries by mystics and yogis who were not able to symbolize them in mathematical form."

—- Timothy Leary
Exo-Psychology

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Einstein's ability to write the basic equations of energy-matter may have resulted in his having experienced in this own body and brain