SAPIENS RISING


Appendix B

The Stages of Realevolution

A Summary excerpted from Changing My Mind, Among Others
                                                                               By Timothy Leary, Ph.D.

The crucial scientific question is this: What are the stages of human evolution --- both in the species and in the individual?  Most human conflict and confusion could be sweetly solved if we understood that 92 percent of other human beings (and societies) are at developmental stages different from our own.  To know all it to forgive all. We smile tolerantly at younger kids because we know we passed through those stages and that they will too.
 
A knowledge of human stages would allow us to smile at the hunter gatherers in our society who expect welfare checks; to tolerate the passionate, dramatic rhetoric of Mideastern midbrainers; to comfort domesticated parents worrying about their kids; to support advanced brain computer–electronic wizards who have activated brain circuits ahead of ours.  The answer to all human problems is to recognize your genetic stage, go to the place where your genetic peers hang out, and in that secure place prepare yourself for the future stages inevitably awaiting you.

But first we need a scientific and psychologically convincing list of human stages.

Stage 1:  (Receptive-dependent infant): Welcome to the planet. Your first assignment is to suck, float, turn your amoeboid receptors towards the warm breast and incorporate chemicals that will make you grow

Stage 2: (Biting-squirming infant: 6 months): Now you can define yourself a self-mobile, incisive shark-like individual pushing towards and away from what you want to put in your baby mouth.

Stage 3: (Crawling infant: one year) Hey, you made it to the shore-line-floor-line, ready to cut loose from the Sea-Mother and slowly, steadily start to master gravity.

Stage 4: (Toddler: age 1-2 years): Congratulations! You can precariously stand up on your 2 legs and use your bipedal neurotechnology to scurry around like a clever, tricky rodent grabbing everything you can get your hands on when they’re not looking.

Stage 5: (Territorial child, age 3-4) Oh ho! Now you’re big and crafty enough to stake out and defend your little claim. Your crib, your doll, your room, your Mommy.  Nervous, jumpy, possessive mammal.  Feeling your size, especially with the littler ones.  Just three years old and you’re a mafia-capo, a treacherous lion, a power-jumpy Kissinger. More power to you, kid.  Thanks for the smile.

Stage 6: (Show-off kid: age 3-4):  Big deal, big shot. You’ve learned that gesture, grimace, cry, posture, exhibitionist noise can attract attention, signal your needs. You’re talking, but it’s monkey-talk and bird calls.  But it works, and you’re pretty pleased with your power to communicate.

Stage 7: (Parroting mimicker: age 4-6): Now the fun begins: you learn word-magic. You catch on that you can speak or write certain words and, boy! Something happens. You are now a six-year-old with the mind of a Paleolithic savage.  You don’t understand how or why, but the ritual action works.  Most of the 20th century humanity has remained at this pre-semantic level. At least 50% of Americans don’t think for themselves: indeed they have been educated by society not to think for themselves, but to  rote-learn and parrot.

Stage 8: (Think kid: age 6-8): You’ve learned how to use words as tools, rearrange them logically, invent new combinations, figure things out on your own.  And think for yourself! As a seven-year-old you have attained the mentality of a Neolithic toolmaker.

State 9: (Group activity: age 9-12): Now you are learning how to play collaboratively, join groups, divide labor, take part in organized teams.  You have reached the tribal level of species evolution. You are still a superstitious, treacherous savage, but you are on the way to becoming a civilized human-insectoid.

Stage 10: (Adolescent barbarian): Now you’re really cooking. The sexual-courtship-mating circuits of your brain have been activated by RNA hormones. You’re a teenage robot, obsessed with your identity. You’re romantic, intense, cruel, moody, emotional, fickle, not yet socialized, wary, rebellious of those who wish to civilize you. An you love to laugh at the adults.

Stage 11: (Domesticated adult): Uh, oh.  What happened? Suddenly you’ve been tamed. All at once, you of all people have become an adult. You’ve got a job, settled down, given up your wild, romantic dreams. The territorial circuits in your brain have been activated and you’re a domesticated robot. You want to get a piece of turf, lock into a hive-task, be part of society and settle down. Build a little nest. Get married. The parenting instinct is going to lock you up. You are an adult.

Stage 12: (Senior citizen): Wow, where did it all go? It all spun by so fast. For twenty years you've been a parent-slave, obsessed with child-care, working, struggling to protect the young. Now they’ve grown and gone and the old energy juices aren’t flowing. You’ve lost fire and vigor. You are no longer interested in change, competition. You sense aging, weakness approaching. You feel vulnerable and scared. You try to cling to the past, but it’s all changing and you’re not sure you like it. You can’t protect yourself anymore. You look for security. You want a strong government, Social Security, and police-establishment to take care of you. You think you’re gonna die.

This difference between who you are (basically, genetically) and which temporal stage you are passing through has always confused the individual and those who seek to explain human behavior.
 
You may be wired with a Stage-5 brain --- possessive, controlling, aggressive (society needs you for its protection) Or you may be wired with a romantic, flamboyant, intense Stage-10 brain. In either case, you go through the temporal, recapitulatory stages. If your structural caste is 5, you may become a parent (Temporal stage 11) and your parenting will be controlling. If you are Caste 10, when and if you become a parent you will raise your kids with a flashy, flirtatious style.

So far, this list of Temporal Stages of human life is fairly standard. But now we shall consider, possibly for the first time, a systematic prediction of twelve stages of human evolution to come!  The following list of prognostication is also immediately and practically applicable to your life. It set up a specific sequence of self-growth. This is, therefore the first program of individual development to specify how the intelligent human can follow a schedule of inner development correlating with the astonishing and liberating advances in external science.  Now that we have mastered those first twelve primitive, survival techniques and can handle 21st century social realities, we are ready to pass through the steps of post-cultural, post-bureaucratic, self-confident, self-contained self-direction.
 
Stage 13: (Hedonic consumer): Your ability to avoid, compassionately and humorously, the limits of your social-hive, allows you to define yourself as an aesthetic consumer. Your body belongs to you. You must learn to relax, transcend the guilty-pessimism of pre-scientific religions, become a sensually receptive, artistically indolent, passively-hip, pleasure lover. Rejoice in your ability to live as an esthetic dilettante, a neurological gourmet, a happy-go-lucky hippie, wandering through the Judeo-Christian Garden of Eden.

Now you must resist 2,000 years of grim pressure to make you into a slave of society. Hedonic consumerism is a stage you are going through. Like sucking infancy, like careless adolescence. You are not going to remain at this level forever. But you must master the sensual, erotic instruments of your body, use your sensorium as a complex mosaic of rapture, understand how to indulge and pleasure yourself.
 
Then, when you are clever enough, and diligent enough to get your sensory-somatic scene together, you can advance to:

Stage 14: ( Hedonic artist): This next step is simple and playful. You have taken the great, basic step by freeing yourself from the hive-morality of submission-suffering. Now you start creating an esthetic environment around you. You will have lots of help. There are thousands of texts, manuals, courses, teachers to assist you, to offer leads and methods. The only danger is that you might get caught in one style.  In your liberated exuberance, you may sign up too quickly in one mode of self-actualization. Scout out the field.  For thousands of years the most intelligent, free, strong people have been fabricating personal esthetic realities. Don’t fall for the first neighborhood master. Remember, to keep developing in the future, there is only one trap to avoid: loss of faith in yourself, your own tough, innocent, potential to grow.
 
You will learn to make your life a work of art, a quiet, smiling dance of growing beauty. There is no hurry. Each esthetic yoga takes time --- the complexity of your somatic and neural equipment is infinite and unique. Also, as you continue to evolve, you will constantly add to your esthetic style. Indeed each stage beyond simple Esthetic Mastery requires that you go back and improve, simplify, complicate your growing singularity.

Stage 15: ( Esthetic linkage): After you have located the source of virtue and pleasure within yourself and learned how to create external projections of your inner style, you are ready to take the next logical step in personal development. Link up with another or others.
 
At this point we can look back and see that the Consciousness movements of the 1960’s brought millions of Americans and Western Europeans through stages 13 and 14. If you remain at stage 13, you’re a lazy hippie. If you remain in lonely splendor at stage 14, a narcissist. Both are stages to pass through. The inclination to club, to fuse, to link-up with others who share your esthetic style is the obvious progression --- linkage based not just on economics or territorial defense but for shared esthetic vision. A new social connection of free, confident individuals whose aim is to enhance personal growth, to stimulate in each other inner development, to turn each other on, to add to each other’s hedonic progress.

The ancient name for this stage is tantra, fusion of the erotic-spiritual-psychological. Usually this occurs au pair --- two enlightened people discover that one-times-one equals infinity.

The stages to come make great demands upon one’s strength and confidence. It is almost impossible to maintain a solitary life of continual mutation-metamorphosis. The support and balance and broadened perspective of the shared-voyage require conscious fusion.

Stage 16: (Neurological-electronic consumer): At rare and wonderful times in human history, societies have emerged affluent-secure enough to allow certain intelligent individuals the freedom to explore the three stages just described. Since World War II an entirely new dimension of human neurotechnology has developed. The suburban child of five has experienced a million times more realities than the most educated-traveled aristocrat before 1940.  During the sixties, millions of people ingested brain-accelerating drugs and exposed themselves to mind-lowing audio-visual overloads. This wow produced a now-generation of passive neuroelectronic consumers who grooved on the McLuhan multiplicity, 2001 Space Odysseys, who saw protean realities flash on their cerebral projectors, but could not make it wok in our own lives. Thus the great retreat back to the hot-tub, wholistic hedonism.

But we didn’t quit, did we? We were just taking a Me-generation breather. We haven’t come this far to spend the rest of our lives as spectators of the cosmo-genetic moving picture show. So we mutated to...

Stage 17: ( Neuro-electronic artist): Hey, hurray! We’ve suddenly realized that the universe is not a heavy, gravitational mosaic of stellar-stones or solar-fusion-furnaces, but a web or radiant information. E=mc²; and Energy is not Newtonian force-work, but bits of fast-moving decipherable intelligence. Reality is moving pictures filtered through a side-lens brain, and God (i.e. you) directs the action, writes the script, selects the locations, casts the players, arranges the distribution and promotion.

These days there are swarms of Tesla-type “idiot savants” and 17th stage, 21st century brains popping up, producing amazing advanced, futique neurological tools. Let’s use them.

Stage 18: (Neuro-ectronic linkage): And once we start managing high-speed information transmitters, we are free from our land-locked, terrestrial status. Now that intelligence (not fire-power, man-power, land-power) is the key to survival, we are ready to leave the surface of the planet and move into high-orbit.  The land-locked social groupings to defend turf or to control natural resources are no longer relevant once we have access to unlimited space and the natural resources of the moon and asteroid belt and free energy devices now appearing.
 
Intelligence is high-speed communication and transportation which allows us to form more efficient linkages with others of our kind. This is a definition of love. High fidelity fusion. Aren’t we wonderful!

Stage 19: (Genetic consumerism; sperm intelligence): Ever since the first neolithic agricultural settlements we have understood the importance of breeding to produce desired life forms. For millennia humans have manipulated sperm-egg exchanges to protect and control. Not only our sexual mores but even our theories of evolution have been based on grabbing egg-supplies. The Darwinian theories of evolution suggest that male competition for breeding dominance was the mechanism of evolution. Natural selection is a concept of genetic consumerism: take what is there.

The deciphering of the DNA code (which occurred exactly at the time  when physics decoded the atom, pharmacologists decoded and synthesized brain chemicals, and electronic information-processing emerged on the scene) initiated the era of Genetic Consciousness.  By reshuffling the chromosomes we can select the new species that we desire. Most exciting is the probability, indeed, the inevitability, that we can decipher the ageing sequences and inoculate ourselves against aging and death.
 
Stage 20: (Genetic intelligence; egg wisdom): In our enthusiasm to breed our animals, manage our family gene-pool, manipulate the codes of life, we have made that same classic consumer error ---- which we committed when we accepted word magic, feudal power, body rapture, and electronic passivity. Sperm intelligence is a stage through which we must joyfully pass. The next step in our development is to realize that there is a biological wisdom that fabricated DNA, that designed us so that we could become smart enough to decipher the code.

We are in the wonderful position of being the nervous system of the Biological Energy. Now isn’t that the best job we’ve ever been offered? Conscious Evolutionary Agent! Isn’t that the best role we have been cast for in any of the philosophical scenarios? And it’s all based on up-to-date evolutionary science!

Stage 21: (Genetic symbiosis, DNA linkage): After we got control of our bodies, we linked up and got access to our brains. After we got control of our brains, we linked up and got access to DNA.  Now that we understand our genetic function, we can and must link up to continue the process of our own evolution. Symbiosis is the secret of life.   Symbiosis, at the DNA level, is an inevitable step in our growth.

(I have felt comfortable and clear about the first 20 stages of evolution presented in this book because I have experienced them and science has confirmed my intuitions. But DNA symbiosis is a stage which I have not reached yet and which our geneticists have not worked our yet. In preparing myself for this wonderfully loving step, I have tried to open myself up to unicellular wisdom and DNA collaboration.  Timothy)

Stage 22: (Quantum consumer): Here, and in the two stages to come, we are beyond the objective knowledge or our species; but we can resonate in harmony with the best speculations of our boldest and smartest minds. Quarks are probably cluster-clouds of information bits defined by the basic coordinates of particles moving through space/time. Of these our material world is made: and can be remade by us. Quantum consumerism is the heady discovery of Heisenberg  Determinacy --- our brains define the basic nature of nuclear reality.

Stage 23: (Quantum intelligence: gravitational engineer): Our nuclear fusion physicists have created small stars. Our astronomers and gravitational physicists have detected black holes. Our mathematicians have produced equations for fabricating the universe, manipulating fusion and black hole energies. We await with interest the discoveries and technologies which will allow direct translation of our biological-neural equipment to nuclear-atomic form.

Stage 24: (Neuro-atomic fusion): and when we have defined and translated ourselves into basic particle form we shall link with other like quantum minds in a wonderful, totally revelatory, celebratory fusion. We look forward with delight to that which awaits us on the other side of the Gravitational Gate.



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