Customer Reviews

Info-Psychology: A Manual for the Use of the Human Nervous System According to the Instructions of the Manufacturers, and a Navigational Guide for Piloting the Evolution of the Human Individual

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I know I'm pretty liberal with the 5 star thing on amazon.com, but if I had to revise all of my previous reviews, this one would still get 5 stars. For me, this book represents an amalgamation of all the information our civilization has accumulated over the last century or so.
Based on a solid foundation of science and psychology, chemistry and biology; this book offers your every day average psychonaut the opportunity to understand both personal evolution and the evolution of humanity, as well as where we may be going. Most comprehensive in nature, the human organism take the form of an advanced bio-computational organism of eight circuits that draw from Freud, Jung, Tranactional Analysis, Darwinian evolution, Neurophysiology, psychopharmacology, and an entarouge of Leary's personal research.
As with all of Leary's books the reader should take the presentation of facts lightly. Not to say that they are false or improperly assumed details, only that it is all informtiaon filtered through the understanding of Leary himself. My use of this book - used as companion to Angel Tech, Promethius Rising, and a host of other 8-circuit oriented books - has me re-structuring the entire system from my own point of view, and relating each ciruit to all areas of my life, as well as using it as an interpretation method for better understanding of yoga, magick, science, and psychology. As a whole any book that prompts the user to better understand themselves from a wholistic point of view has my thumbs up.

If you are already of the opinion that Timothy Leary was just some fanatical cult organizer under the influence of every illegal substance known to man, you have nothing to lose by reading one of his books. You can at least hope to obtain some first-hand evidence of his alleged insanity.

On the other hand, you would have a hard time convincing me that this book was written under any influence other than a joyful wonder and awe concerning knowledge and the world, and perhaps a mild resentment toward the system that imprisoned him for far greater a period of time than is typical for possession of marijuana.

By all means, InfoPsychology presents an unconventional model of reality, the human mind, and evolution. "Crazy" seems at times to be the best description for some of the ideas presented here. But as Leary himself points out, until the next evolutionary plateau is reached, concepts associated with that plateau will seem alien and threatening to the status quo (as well they should). But that is no excuse to dismiss these ideas as crazy. Subversive, contraversial, beyond the reach of our collective understanding and acceptance, perhaps. Certainly not crazy.

And if only for the time it takes to read the book we accept Leary's logical progression, we'll see that his book must necessarily be considered "crazy." He is dealing with evolutions that have not yet occurred. We cannot expect to fully understand and appreciate the complexities of an evolved form of humanity any more than neanderthals could've been expected to understand us. And in order to be able to reprogram ourselves, we must first recognize, or be made aware of how programmed we are to begin with.

This book originally was published as "Exo-Psychology" and the title referred to Dr. Leary's interest in space colonization. Dr. Leary got caught up in the personal computer windstorm of the 1990s and (the Challenger explosion didn't help) turned his sights from outer space to cyberspace. But his original insight that psychedelic states presage those of extraterrestrial minds remains prescient. This book delineates a model of developmental psychology that spans prehistory to posthistory, and deserves a new reading by a new, postpsychedelic, generation. The book sprung from a philosophical context that Dr. Leary called Interstellar Neurogenetics. The term never caught on, but its spirit lives at www.starlarvae.org.

This was one of the most influential books that I read while i was in college. It helped me to understand my psychedelic experiences and to shape my ideas about the evolution of consciousness more than almost any other book. I think that Leary's 8-Circuit model of the brain, and his theory of neural imprinting and psychedelic reimprinting, is one of the important contributions to 20th Century psychology. Leary was a brilliant philosopher, an uncannily creative psychologist, and his extraterrestrial vantage point in this book can be hilarious at times. This is one of my all-time favorite books.

I read an earlier version of this book, titled "Exo-Psychology," when I attended Washington University in St. Louis back in the late 1970's. I had also joined the L-5 Society in those years and aspired to become a space colonist, and Leary had come to my notice when he appeared on Tom Snyder's late night talkshow circa 1976 to promote what he called "SMI2LE," his acronym for "Space Migration, Intelligence Increase (or squared?), Life Extension." From glancing at the current edition of this book, it looks like Leary de-emphasized the space colonization ideas popular in the 1970's and rewrote parts of it to make it appeal to the early 1990's computer geek culture.

You know, we all do stupid things in our youth, and we fall for stupid fads. I suppose our brains have to go through this novelty-seeking phase as they reach the threshold of maturity.

Over 30 years later, in our mysterious, far-future year 2012, what can we say about Leary's neuroscience- and evidence-free fantasies of mental transformation, physical immortality & space colonization? Well, the prophecies about creating a utopian, superhuman consciousness from acid-tripping clearly failed; Leary died pretty much on schedule, along with his buddies Robert Anton Wilson and F.M. Esfandiary; and nobody has colonized space lately, despite the recurring progress porn on the covers of magazines like "Popular Science" about sending people to Mars.

In other words, Leary sucked as a prophet & "futurist." Why does he still have a cult following among people who should know better than to take Leary seriously just by looking at the real world?

so fascinated myself, as an aspiring mystic, I created a website around a system of initiation designed to trigger 8th circuit activation. the mind becomes an objective, quantum, indiscriminately loving processing unit, capable of accessing cosmic memories at will, & traveling into the past or future - in the sense of knowing. Not in the sense of Ability to Affect.

the 6th circuit, metaprogramming: merely acknowledging you can program your own emotions, I think, is extremely important. Meditation + objective: indiscriminate love.

my profile contains the link to the website, which definitely recommends reading this book.

although it is a bit more complex than RAWilson's presentation - a tad too intellectual. I think Wilson transcended the establishment because LSD triggered too much love for them to keep him, I don't think he completely killed his ego.

If you really want to know what Tim was thinking this is it. (Though The Game Of Life is good too!) By the way, he wrote something while in Harvard before the 60s thing took off. It had something to do with the way we react to others depending on the angle one is approached--very interesting. If he would have continued with that and hooked it with exo-psychology he would have had something interesting. I think the best way to incorporate exo-psychology is revaluate the second and fourth circuits to Swiss army knife evolutionary psychology--try Dunbar or perhaps Mithen.

This book is a more thorough and technical analysis of the Eight Neural Circuit Model of human consciousness. The diligent magical reader may more easily compare personal magical development to the circuits understood as general stages of consciousness evolution.

Great book for anyone interested in Philosophy. Lengthy discussion/explanation of evolution, space migration, intelligence, and life extension. A very interesting and inspiring book. Highly recommended for hippies, yogis, artists, musicians, people interested in psychology, metaphysics, and alternative modes of thinking.

Sadly, Tim re-wrote this edition in prison I believe had a big 'thing' about getting off the planet due to that. Clearly lacking the Leary sense of self depricating humor and sly wit. Try his other works.