The Legacy of Timothy Leary, Part Three

For all his ground-breaking early work in psychology, Leary is rarely mentioned in high regard among academic circles. Although the standardized personality tests he devised have been re-used and updated and remixed in many forms throughout the years, he rarely gets the credit for these basic innovations. Instead, he's derided as a flake who got a taste of insanity and went native; preferring to hob-nob with felons, savages, and the great unwashed instead of grace the halls of academia with actual research. And worse, Leary's notorious Eight-Circuit Model of consciousness -- which was cobbled together well after psychedelics had led him towards more esoteric schools of thought -- was met with much eyebrow raising and scorn amongst staid academics. With the Eight-Circuit Model, Leary thought he had finally found his blueprint to human consciousness; but it was literally too much and too late. If all that time studying the Tibetan Book of the Dead and running for Governor of California had instead been spent studying neuroanatomy, developmental biology, and evolutionary theory, then maybe Tim might have come up with something viable in his grand-unified-theory of consciousness. But he didn't; he came up with something... else.

When viewed from some considerable distance, the thinking that went into the Eight-Circuit-Model of consciousness was obviously conflated with the trendy influences of the time. To Leary it seemed obvious that there were certain "circuits" of the mind responsible for emotions, behavior, higher-dimensional awareness, alien contact, the conception of genetic or cosmic phenomena, etc., but in reality he was simply trying to classify his own psychedelic imprinting and metaprogramming experiences in an orderly fashion. And while the Eight-Circuit Model may still be useful as a metaphor for the various epistemological levels at which the human brain interacts with and perceives reality, when I look at it now I can't help thinking of Ptolemy and his concentric circles of the heavens, all revolving around Earth at the center. Ptolemy's ego-centric view was, in hindsight, wishfully simplistic thinking, and I think the same can be said for Leary's Eight-Circuit Model. Leary put his own tripped out brain in the center of the theory, made a bunch of assumptions about all of human culture, and came out with what looked like a convincing theory; to him.

That said, I must admit that when I first came across Leary's Eight-Circuit Model I was suitably blown away, but then again I was an undergrad anthropology major at the time. Since then I have come to see the Eight-Circuit Model for what it was; a mandala of the LSD experience. If Leary had named his theory the "Eight Quantum Perspectives of Psychedelic Consciousness," then I would concede that he still has some decent points to be made. However, when trying to apply such an esoteric model to all of human culture it still seems a bit vague and "out there" to be taken seriously. But then again, since Leary was fairly new to the whole LSD thing (and to be fair, so was everyone at that time), all he was doing was making a map to these new and unusual experiences that he considered "archetypal" to human experience; when in reality, mundane things like work and food and laundry and status and sex were the archetypes most people cared about on a daily basis, not 4-D reality, DNA, metaprogramming, and alien telepathy.

But we've come a long way since Leary. When the jaded goofballs of today catch a telepathic alien or DMT elf in the psychedelic experience, they stomp those buggers and call 'em "fags" for being such fairies. If Leary's Eight-Circuit Model had incorporated hard-rock demons riding flaming hell-choppers over crushed skulls to the metal riffs of Rob Zombie, then I would sit up and be more inclined to take a closer look at what he had to say. However, in retrospect, it is clear Leary was trapped in the pop-philosophy of his time, trying to piece together an invisible puzzle that was still decades beyond his grasp. He was right about classifying consciousness as a "circuit" though, as modern cognitive theory has demonstrated that all human thought is trapped in networks of electrical impulses traveling through closed-loop neural schematics. However, I highly doubt Leary was envisioning an actual neural "circuit" between, say, the hippocampus and amygdala, when describing the Emotional Circuit (for instance), but perhaps he was and didn't quite have the cognitive schematics to back him up. To be fair, this sort of thinking was a good twenty to thirty years beyond his time.

But not having all the data never stopped Timothy Leary from trying to make progress. Despite his disabilities (impulsiveness, impatience, arrogance, intellect, being a man-out-of-time...), Leary never let little things like "reality" or "research" stop him from trying to move humanity forward. And this, more than anything, is what I see as the legacy of Timothy Leary. Despite the pigs and paranoia, the fascist bummers, the naive hippies, and the clueless anarchists, Tim still believed in a better future, one in which humans spent their time reaching for knowledge, immortality, and the stars; not wallowing in some war-torn hell-hole of pettiness, corruption, and fear. Though his ends don't always justify the means, Leary eventually came around and became a kinder, gentler statesman for human potential, trading in his trite revolutionary dogma for a more winning SMIILE; treating himself to clever, self deprecating jabs for being a senile old hippie burnout, a victim of the human condition, just like everyone else. And though everyone expected Leary to go out fighting -- his head frozen in perpetuity for Futurama generations to thaw out and prod at -- in the end he finally gave in and said, "Why not?"

Why not indeed.