Damien Broderick wrote:
> At 12:50 AM 12/11/98 -0800, Paul Hughes wrote
>
> >Lest we forget, it was [Eliezer] and Damien who decided to flame me first.
>
> Sorry if you read my (rather bluntly expressed) comment on RAW/Leary as a
> flame directed personally at you. I was trying to convey a general point -
> I apologise if you felt wounded.
>
> I don't think there's much point in citing the outdated views of great
> scientists when the original daft document claimed that parts of the brain
> were designed for that future era when we enter our eventual
> extraterrestrial kingdom. This is not altogether impossible, I suppose,
> but it's so unlikely - and clearly derives from stoned fantasies which
> themselves are rather uninteresting transforms of ancient and
> empirically/theoretically ignorant mythoi - that I don't think people here
> should waste their time taking them seriously.
>
> Using such mythoi for fictive or poetic purposes, of course, is quite a
> different matter. (But I'm getting a tad suspicious about even that, as I
> see how corrupting such pseudo-ideas are and how easily they squirm into
> and conscript our hard-won scientific meme-systems.)
>
> Damien Broderick
Hopefully, maybe I will be able to share some experiential insight into the "metaphorical/alledged higher circuits." There have been ongoing attempts since time immemorial to create cartographies of trans-rational/personal states of consciousness. Some of the most popularly known being the chakra system, the tree of life, Wilber's spectrum model, Adi Da's seven stages of life, and Leary's eight circuit model. For the sake of brevity I should like to focus on a current psychopharmacological model. There has been recent interest and research involving the psychoactive effects of the plant Salvia Divinorum. Within the last year subjective reports from various experimenters have confirmed a commonality of both somatic and psychological effects that may be expected at various dosage levels. Some somatic effects include: a sense that the body is twisting, flatening, melting into a puddle, becoming part of the floor, etc. Psychological effects may include disidentification with the usual boundaries accepted as defining a sense of personal identity or Self. Experiences have included though not limited to an awareness of becoming waves of consciousness that permeate and include all beings and things.
Many yogic and magical disciplines include being able to enter into a trance/dissociative state of awareness where the barrier between the subconscious and the conscious states of mind appears to be suspended. The intended goal may generally be described as staying focused while not identifying with "personal" memories that define an individuality. It would be during the very intial stages of remembrance/ re-emergence of identity that renders the concept of metaprogramming the bio-computer possible. These moments of temporal quasi-identification vulnerability may be classified as "eighth circuit awareness" by the Leary model which obviously draws on the research of Dr. John C. Lilly.
Anyway, my two cents thus far,
Panoptes