The Politics of Consciousness Expansion by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert EXPANSION-CONTRACTION. The tension between the flowing process and the fixed structure. Inorganic processes: The expanding gaseous cloud whirls into temporary patterned structures. The structures always changing, hurtling towards eventual entropy. Organic processes: Watery, electro-biochemical globules cluster into cells. Cells cluster into temporary hardened forms (vegetative or animal), themselves always changing, eventually returning to the entropic. Social processes: The free expansive vision is molded into the institutional. Hardly has the institutional mortar set before there is a new cortical upheaval, an explosive, often ecstatic or prophetic revelation. The prophet is promptly jailed. A hundred years later his followers are jailing the next visionary. One is led naively to exclaim: Will man never learn the lesson of cyclical process? Must we continue to jail, execute, exile our ecstatic visionaries, and then enshrine them as tomorrow's heroes? Naive question, which fails to appreciate the necessary tension of the expansion-contraction play. Membrane contracts. Life force bursts membrane. Establishment controls vision. Vision bursts establishment. The expansion process in physics and biology is described in evolutionary terms. The expansion process in human affairs is defined in terms of the word "freedom." We measure social evolution in terms of increased freedom external or internal. Freedom to step out of the tribal game and move to construct a new social form. Freedom to move in space. Freedom to experience. Freedom to explore. Society needs educated priest-scholars to provide structure the intellectual muscle, bone and skin to keep things together. The university is the Establishment's apparatus for training consciousness-contractors. The intellectual ministry of defense. Defense against vision. This statement is not pejorative but a fact about evolutionary function. We need stability. We need expansion. The far-out visionary. The academic council which sits in learned judgment on Socrates, Galileo, Bacon, Columbus, Thoreau. The protagonists in these dramas are neither good nor evil. No villains, no heroes. They just are. What will be the next step in biological and social evolution? Here are two clues. (1) You are more likely to find the evolutionary agents closer to jail than to the professor's chair. (2) Look to that social freedom most abused, most magically, irrationally feared, by society. Exactly that freedom which you, the intellectual, the liberal, would deny to others. Good. Now you are getting close. The administration always recognizes intuitively the next evolutionary step that will leave it behind. To cast this drama in terms of saints and Pharisees is entertaining, but outmoded. The drama is genetic. Neurophysiological. So spare us, please, the adolescent heroics of Beethoven - Shakespeare. Where, then, will the next evolutionary step occur? Within the human cortex. We know, yes we know, that science has produced methods for dramatically altering and expanding human awareness and potentialities. The uncharted realm lies behind your own forehead. Internal geography. Internal politics. Internal control. Internal freedom. The nervous system can be changed, integrated, recircuited, expanded in its function. These possibilities naturally threaten every branch of the Establishment. The dangers of external change appear to frighten us less than the peril of internal change. LSD is more frightening than the Bomb! There are two obvious avenues toward this next stage of human evolution. (1) Biochemical methods of freeing the nervous system, slowed down by heavy learned concepts and starved of tryptamine.* We are, in a real sense, prisoners of our cognitive concepts and strategies. Passed on from generation to generation. The cognitive continuity of history. And the stuff of it is words. Our current reliance upon substantive and "closing-off" concepts will be the amused wonder of coming generations. We must entertain nonverbal methods of communication if we are to free our nervous system from the tyranny of the stifling simplicity of words.

The Politics of Consciousness Expansion by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert EXPANSION-CONTRACTION. The tension between the flowing process and the fixed structure. Inorganic processes: The expanding gaseous cloud whirls into temporary patterned structures. The structures always changing, hurtling towards eventual entropy. Organic processes: Watery, electro-biochemical globules cluster into cells. Cells cluster into temporary hardened forms (vegetative or animal), themselves always changing, eventually returning to the entropic. Social processes: The free expansive vision is molded into the institutional. Hardly has the institutional mortar set before there is a new cortical upheaval, an explosive, often ecstatic or prophetic revelation. The prophet is promptly jailed. A hundred years later his followers are jailing the next visionary. One is led naively to exclaim: Will man never learn the lesson of cyclical process? Must we continue to jail, execute, exile our ecstatic visionaries, and then enshrine them as tomorrow's heroes? Naive question, which fails to appreciate the necessary tension of the expansion-contraction play. Membrane contracts. Life force bursts membrane. Establishment controls vision. Vision bursts establishment. The expansion process in physics and biology is described in evolutionary terms. The expansion process in human affairs is defined in terms of the word "freedom." We measure social evolution in terms of increased freedom external or internal. Freedom to step out of the tribal game and move to construct a new social form. Freedom to move in space. Freedom to experience. Freedom to explore. Society needs educated priest-scholars to provide structure the intellectual muscle, bone and skin to keep things together. The university is the Establishment's apparatus for training consciousness-contractors. The intellectual ministry of defense. Defense against vision. This statement is not pejorative but a fact about evolutionary function. We need stability. We need expansion. The far-out visionary. The academic council which sits in learned judgment on Socrates, Galileo, Bacon, Columbus, Thoreau. The protagonists in these dramas are neither good nor evil. No villains, no heroes. They just are. What will be the next step in biological and social evolution? Here are two clues. (1) You are more likely to find the evolutionary agents closer to jail than to the professor's chair. (2) Look to that social freedom most abused, most magically, irrationally feared, by society. Exactly that freedom which you, the intellectual, the liberal, would deny to others. Good. Now you are getting close. The administration always recognizes intuitively the next evolutionary step that will leave it behind. To cast this drama in terms of saints and Pharisees is entertaining, but outmoded. The drama is genetic. Neurophysiological. So spare us, please, the adolescent heroics of Beethoven - Shakespeare. Where, then, will the next evolutionary step occur? Within the human cortex. We know, yes we know, that science has produced methods for dramatically altering and expanding human awareness and potentialities. The uncharted realm lies behind your own forehead. Internal geography. Internal politics. Internal control. Internal freedom. The nervous system can be changed, integrated, recircuited, expanded in its function. These possibilities naturally threaten every branch of the Establishment. The dangers of external change appear to frighten us less than the peril of internal change. LSD is more frightening than the Bomb! There are two obvious avenues toward this next stage of human evolution. (1) Biochemical methods of freeing the nervous system, slowed down by heavy learned concepts and starved of tryptamine.* We are, in a real sense, prisoners of our cognitive concepts and strategies. Passed on from generation to generation. The cognitive continuity of history. And the stuff of it is words. Our current reliance upon substantive and "closing-off" concepts will be the amused wonder of coming generations. We must entertain nonverbal methods of communication if we are to free our nervous system from the tyranny of the stifling simplicity of words.



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