Timothy Leary's Neurocomics (1981) - Tranceam זין חמאס

Updated 9 months ago

While I’ve always loved reading Leary for his bold ideas, this work was a little too weighted down with astrology symbology and an obsession with systems. I know it can be explained away as metaphorical, but it’s still grating. Growing up in the 70s (and having known a lot of acid heads) I know to treat the entire decade with caution. If you balked at Terence McKenna‘s fixation on the I-Ching, gird yourself for more of the same.
I still find it entertaining. The best part is the early ode of The Cartoon History of the Universe.
This was originally black and white, and was redone in color in 2018, which is included here, courtesy of a now-defunct Russian site, with artistic help from Limbic Splitter and E. Reshetova.

Background (from Wikipedia)

At the end of 1967, Leary moved to Laguna Beach, California, and made many friends in Hollywood. “When he married his third wife, Rosemary Woodruff, in 1967, the event was directed by Ted Markland of Bonanza. All the guests were on acid.”
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Leary formulated his eight-circuit model of consciousness in collaboration with writer Brian Barritt. The essay “The Seven Tongues of God” claimed that human brains have seven circuits producing seven levels of consciousness. An eighth circuit was added in the 1973 pamphlet Neurologic, written with Joanna Leary while he was in prison. This eighth-circuit idea was not exhaustively formulated until the publication of Exo-Psychology by Leary and Robert Anton Wilson‘s Cosmic Trigger in 1977. Wilson contributed to the model after befriending Leary in the early 1970s, and used it as a framework for further exposition in his book Prometheus Rising, among other works.
Leary believed that the first four of these circuits (“the Larval Circuits” or “Terrestrial Circuits”) are naturally accessed by most people at transition points in life such as puberty. The second four circuits (“the Stellar Circuits” or “Extra-Terrestrial Circuits”), Leary wrote, were “evolutionary offshoots” of the first four that would be triggered at transition points as humans evolve further. These circuits, according to Leary, would equip humans to live in space and expand consciousness for further scientific and social progress. Leary suggested that some people might trigger these circuits sooner through meditation, yoga, or psychedelic drugs specific to each circuit. He suggested that the feelings of floating and uninhibited motion sometimes experienced with marijuana demonstrated the purpose of the higher four circuits. The function of the fifth circuit was to accustom humans to life at a zero gravity environment. Leary did not specify the location of the eight circuits in any brain structures, neural organization, or chemical pathways. Leary wrote that the eight circuits were given to humans by a higher intelligence “located in interstellar nuclear-gravitational-quantum structures”. A “U.F.O. message” was encoded in human DNA.
In the academic community, many researchers believed that Leary provided little scientific evidence for his claims. Even before he began working on psychedelics he was known as a theoretician rather than a data collector. His most ambitious pre-psychedelic work was Interpersonal Diagnosis Of Personality. The reviewer for The British Medical Journal wrote that Leary created a confusing and overly broad rubric for testing psychiatric conditions. “Perhaps the worst failing of the book is the omission of any kind of proof for the validity and reliability of the diagnostic system,” wrote reviewer H. J. Eysenck. “It is simply not enough to say” that the accuracy of the system “can be checked by the reader” in clinical practice. When Leary still wrote for an academic audience he co-edited The Psychedelic Reader in 1965. Penn State psychology researcher Jerome E. Singer reviewed the book and singled out Leary as the worst offender in a work containing “melanges of hucksterism”. In place of scientific data about the effects of LSD, Leary used metaphors about “galaxies spinning” faster than the speed of light and a cerebral cortex “turned on to a much higher voltage”.