TURN ON.

This problem of attention tuning is an old one, hacked with practices of mantra in the Buddhist tradition, the eloquence and song of Mazatec curandera Maria Sabina, and the icaros of Upper Amazonian ayhuascera well before anybody thought to synch "The Wizard of Oz" with "Dark Side of the Moon." Why did modern psychonauts, in the thick of the Cold War and, evolutionarily speaking, barely out of the trees, so favor this language of the "turn on" for all things psychedelic? The favorite analogy for the novelty and seemingly infinite potential of psychedelic experience was a machinic one: if psychedelic experience revealed itself to be extremely programmable, some psychonauts scripted themselves as informational machines both digital and analog open to yet further prorgamming, what Leary compated to the "infinite glass bead game" found in Herman Hesse. For John Lilly this "turning on" meant "turning off" the sensory world in a flotation tank in order to "turn on", program and metaprogram the human biocomputer. "Turn on" was digital, announcing a discrete state of "on" or "off." So Timothy Leary's oft quoted but perhaps misunderstood mantra begins with an experimental mapping of ourselves as Boolean machines with two states: on and off. Which one would you choose?

TUNE IN

Clearly, though, what was "turned on" was more than a machine."Set and Setting" was a mantra, too, and "Set" includes our glorious status as embodied beings meshed with a pharmacopiea dynamically connected to our own minds, and "setting" includes the entire (cosmic) context of psychdelic experience. For many this meant investigating what scholar Jeffrey Kripal has dubbed "the enlightenment of the body", an investigation of "the body and its pleasures." ( Foucault) As the ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorini points out, animal use of psychedelics abounds, particularly in the context of courtship display, where techniques of ecstasy (such as birdsong) can be as important to evolutionary success as fitness for survival. And humans are indeed (in part) animals using psychedelics, with big brains that likely evolved, biologist Geoffrey Miller argues, as a "courtship device." Miller's analysis echoes Leary's claim that "intelligence is the greatest aphrodisiac", especially when it was deployed in "the programming of psychedelic experience." "Tune in" resounds with the suddenly enormous freedom to metaprogram in pleasure and joy this obviously interactive "wetware" ( Leary) aspect of human embodiement that LSD seemed to reveal to many. Microsoft's old slogan "Where do you want to go today?" was perhaps but a simulacrum of this older exploratory hedonic -and, Kripal argues, tantric - zeal of collective psychedelic exploration. 'Heads", exploring the capacities of these seemingly new technologies which turned on the "13 billion cell computer", saw and felt the illusion of the officially scientific body/mind separation dissolve blissfully into its tantric, sexually selected interface. According to Leary, it was Richard Alpert ( now Ram Dass) who told him to "face facts":

Properly tuned, "turn on" reminded psychonauts of the remarkable sexual aspects of LSD experience, which was now, like the Turing Machine with which it was being compared, a place for exploring not only the space of all possible computations and states of mind, but the space of all possible ecstasies. In the veritgo of this internal freedom, Leary offered a programming script toward the highest Bliss of Ananda: Emptiness.

DROP OUT

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 available to any psychonaut: a "sample" of the self is examined and then subsequently dropped, released, remixed. Drop Out asked psychedelic experimentalists to query any aspect of themselves for any game other than the divine one. This penchant for letting go of accrued habit structure (Gelassenheit as Eckhart dubbed it) resonated with past seekers in what Aldous Huxley entitled ( mistakenly after Leibniz) "the Perennial Philosophy", and seemed to initiate a practice of re-imagining self in the Light of Self, embedding the part (ego) within a whole (Self) which it repeated on a different scale. In this sense psychedelic investigation repeated a long strand of heterodox science and alchemy which treated the refrain of the Corpus Hermeticum "As Above, So Below" as the achievement of alchemical practice as well as a principle fundamental to it. So according to Leary's script, "dropping out" was anything but a "giving up", but was instead an intensification of personal, yes spiritual informational rhetorical evolution necessary to the next scale of the human and transhuman adventure, the discovery of what Albert Hoffman called "Christ in matter ( teilhard)". Teilhard, of course was the theologian and anthropologist most associated wtih the next scalar jump for human consciousness: The noosphere.

Turn in, Turn in, I Beseech you

As a rhetorical practice, dwindling any non divine aspect of self almost by definition brings out larger scale structures within which we are embedded, and suddenly, the scale shifts to the ecosystem and our awareness of it - the noosphere. Working with mantra as algorithms, "Programming the Psychedelic Experience" offered a linguistic, visual and sonic re-orientation of the self through inquiry that let go of linguistic phenomena as anything but labels for our benefit and conscious evolution, echoing that other influential mantra from Count Korzybski, "The Map is not the territory!" Letting go of any particular rhetorical formulation about the self, the incessant inner speech of Who I Really Am, something larger scale came into relief. For Leary it was an "inner light" fusing the individual with that multiplicity, "internal life processes":

This unification with "life processes" could not have come at a better time, arriving at the same moment when scientific models of living systems were overwhelmingly focused on the molecular scale of life. Understandably entranced by the discovery of the genetic code and its protein messages, researchers sometimes seemed to forget the embodied, ecological and often symbiotic scalar contexts for the evolution and expression of DNA. So too did LSD itself both strengthen the reductionist biochemical model of mind - you can hack your "13 billion cell computer" with a molecule - and focus psychonautical attention on the larger scale structures - the body, the ecosystem, the cosmos - discovered through the withering of the ego and its incessant news broadcasts about - itself. DROP OUT

"Liberation is the nervous system devoid of mental-conceptual redundancy. The mind in its conditioned state, limited to words and ego games, is continuously in thought-formation activity. The nervous system in a state of quiescence, alert, awake but not active, is comparable to what Buddhists call the highest state of dhyana (deep meditation). The conscious recognition of the Clear Light induces an ecstatic condition of consciousness such as saints and mystics of the West have called illumination...The first sign is the glimpsing of the "Clear Light of Reality, the infallible mind of the pure mystic state" - an awareness of energy transformations with no imposition of mental categories."

"Inner" and "outer" were some of the mental categories that were no longer imposed, and this language and visualization of "light" echoes with many earlier practicioners of the Perrenial Philosophy such as the Quaker William Penn. In his youth, the founder of Pennsylvania discovered an inner light revealed through silence. Like many psychonauts, Penn tried hard to describe this light:

That blessed principle, the Eternal Word... is Pythagoras's real light and salt of ages; Anaxagoras's divine mind; Socrates's good spirit; Timaeus's unbegotten principle and author of all light; Hieron's God in man; Plato's eternal, ineffable and perfect principle of truth; Zeno's maker and father of all; and Plotin's root of the soul....

In this context, Penn urges us, like Leary, to drop out from the ego chatter of self and media, and to behold the inner light common also to meditative and, yes, psychedelic conditions. In an uncanny resonance with Leary's phrasing, the Pre-Cybernetic Penn asks us to "Turn in" rather than "on":

"Therefore, O friends, turn in, turn in, I beseech you...."

Turn on, Tune in, Get Epic

But it was not only Perrenial Philosophes who were investigating this "inner" realm that gave way to the scale of the divine, "Hieron's God in man; Plato's eternal, ineffable and perfect principle of truth; Zeno's maker and father of all..." Researchers Jay Stevens and Steven Marks have helped remind us of the important roles played by the intelligence community in the emerging science of psychedelics. Initial CIA interest in psilocybe mexicana, for example, focused on the possibility that "magic mushrooms" could be a potent "truth drug." In other words, psychedelics were seen as aids to rhetorical practice - in this case, interrogation. This history repeats the horror of Dachau, where mescaline was investigated as an interogation drug. But in their indigenous context, mushrooms were a kind of information technology of healing and divination. Maria Sabina, the curandera made famous by (sometime CIA funded) mycologist Gordon Wasson offered her own refrains, rhythmic chants with that hallmark of information: redundancy

You are a green Father, a Father of clarity

You are a green Mother, a Mother of clarity

You are a budding Mother, a Mother of offshoots

You are a green Mother, a Mother of clarity

Maria Sabina's eloquence, as poet and theorist Jerome Rothenberg points out, was not simply a result of the mushrooms; an entire shamanic and poetic tradition was referenced and re-worked by Maria Sabina in her healing chants. But nor can her eloquence be rigorously separated from psilocybe mexicana: "The sacred mushrooms are considered the source of Language itself — are, in Henry Munn’s good phrase, "the mushrooms of language." So despite our sense that "information technology" is a modern invention and catalyst of the globalizing economy, Maria Sabina reminds us that human speech, and its poetic, rhetorical and healing effects, can be amplified and modulated by plants and fungi.

Munn, a translator of Maria Sabina's, called the rhetorical state achieved by Maria Sabina 'ecstatic signification". Psychologist Roland Fischer, in collaboration with the literary critic Colin Martindale, mapped the effects of this "ecstatic signification" induced by psilocybin on writers, and found that writing influenced by psilocybin contained more "primary process content" - content associated with the unconscious - than writing without. Perhaps most intriguing, Martindale and Fischer found that the pattern of primary process content produced by psilocybin induced writing was isomorphic to the primary process content of epic literature. By 1973, Fischer was ready to argue that this epic structure of psilocybin discourse bore the hallmarks of an information compression or omptimization technology:

“Thus far, our studies suggest that certain hallucinogenic drug induced transformations in visual space may be regarded as an optimization of information.” Roland Fischer, 1973

Just Say Yes to the Noosphere

If the noosphere is the feedback effect of attention on our environment - Vernadksy was amazed at the sudden ubiquity of "cultural minerals" of that rare metal Aluminum, and named the domain that brought it forth "the noosphere" - then the attention focused on Maria Sabina and her healing mushrooms by Wasson's 1957 Life magazine article indeed had a feedback effect on the Sierra Mazateca. With the news of psilocybe mexicana, thousands of travelers headed in search of Maria Sabina, and the result was the (partial) destruction of the very context that sustained the mushrooms and the healing poetics associated with them. So too did media attention focused by Wasson, Hoffman, Leary and others seem to amplify

stamets on the internet

Of Maria Sabina and psychedelics as rhetorical adjuncts:

"

She goes on talking and talking, non-stop; there are lulls when her voice slows down, fades out almost to a whisper; then come rushes of inspiration, moments of intense speech; she yawns great yawns, laughs with jubilation, claps her hands in time to her interminable singsong; but after the setting out, the heights of ecstasy are reached, the intoxication begins to ebb away, and she sounds the theme of going back to normal, everyday conscious existence again after this excursion into the beyond, of rejoining the ego she has transcended..."

Eleusis Mystery Theatre - was the most power rhetorical practice in ancient greece catalyzed through psychedelics?

Skaldic Versification, Soma and the Vedas - Enabling the perception of the pattern that connects? ( Bateson)

From Angiosperms to Birdsongs: The Noosphere as the effect of Attention on the Biosphere: Sexual Selection

Visualization technology of invention: Mullis, Crick, Pesce, Kapor

Two: Tripping On the Past: Al Hubbard and Ecodelic Perception in the invention of Information Technologies ( Psychedelics as Meta-Information Technologies?} ( feedback of eloquence on eloquence; The Information Pyre Theory of Evolution; autism and "nerdiness")

http://www.hofmann.org/papers/creative/index.html

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/stafford.htm

Ego death and the Evolution of the Noösphere - Levy, Bloom, Minsky

Three: Noospheric Seductions - Say Yes in A Culture of No!

Four: La Condition Transhumaine - an evolutionary feeback loop

Outro: Valis Transmission One, \"The Universe is a Way of Tricking Yourself\" 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!