My story: Caught in the web! (Page 2 of 3)

Wynderer; u are not aware of the marelovus possibilities internet could offer to all of us, and are offering to us now. On simple example: you could read that thing i am wrinting here, and now. Your critics are useless and inadequate in my opinion. Demonization of anything is always horrible in shape. Salut.

I also think that in one sense the Net is a precursor of global telepathy.

Science-fiction novels exploring the mutant theme, like Theodore Sturgeon's More than Human (1953) and Robert Heinlein's Crowley-influenced bestseller Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) became cult favourites in the sixities. Along with Childhood's End, More than Human was central influence on the ideas of Ken Kesey, leader of the LSD-fuelled Merry Pranksters and originator of the famous Trips Festivals that got the San Francisco acid-rock scene going.

In 1964, after their first run across the States in their famous psychedelic bus, the Pranksters began to feel the effects of their daily diet of LSD. They felt they were acquiring strange powers, and developing a group mind, like the children in Village of the Damned. Neal Cassady, the model for Dean Moriatry in Jack Kerouak's influential novel On the Road, was the Pranksters' driver. He discovered he could turn his attention to several things at once -- a power that often frightened uninitiates in the passenger seat. Kesey seemed to be able to read minds.

As other alternative groups in the sixties would experience, a weird gestalt began to evolve among the Pranksters: they began to feel their separate psyches were fusing into a single collective consciousness with superhuman powers: telepathy, psychokinesis, precognition. With Teilhard de Chardin, they began to believe that "Nothing in the universe can resist the cumulative ardour of a sufficiently large number of enlightened minds working togther in organized groups".

Extract from TURN OFF YOUR MIND
The mystic sixties and the dark side of the Age of Aquarius
by Gary Lachman

In the TNT docudrama Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999), Apple founder Steve Jobs is depicted on an acid trip in which he conceives himself the conductor of his own cosmic symphony. Bob Wallace, one of the early developers of Microsoft, who now runs Mind Books, the online purveyor of tomes devoted to psychedelic and alternative consciousness, has said that his conception of shareware as a formal business application was psychedelically inspired. Lotus spreadsheet designer Mitchell Kapor, co-founder with Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet advocacy organization, has attributed certain “recreational chemicals�  with sharpening his business acumen. Bob Jesse left his position as vice president of business development at Oracle, the world’s second largest software company after Microsoft, to head the Council on Spiritual Practices, a non-profit organization that advocates (among other things) the responsible use of entheogens (divine-manifesting drugs) for religious purposes. Such a marriage of technology and psychedelic consciousness – and a resoundingly profitable and influential one at that -- might have been foretold by Marshall McLuhan’s 1968 observation that "the computer is the LSD of the business world."

http://psychedelicadventures.com/BriefHistory.htm

This process culminates into a global or universal unanimity of minds, with an intense global interaction, but without losing their indivuality, and thus conserving the ability to stay aware of, and to consciously control reality, each individual at the highest possible intellectual level. Of course, devices from Internet to direct computer-to-brain connections will significantly enhance this ability.

[...]

The Global Brain hypothesis is a "hardware" hypothesis, describing the ultimate integration of all human minds, probably combined with powerful computers, forming together one hyper-brain, functioning on a higher level than each separate brain, like then human brain functions on a higher level than each separate nerve cell. As nerve cells don't get a global image of the brain activities, ultimately the individual human brains will no longer hold a global impression of the intellectual activities of the Global Brain [!!!!!!!!!!!]. A comparison can be made with company employees (or soldiers, or spies), each working on some limited aspect of a big project, and just transmitting their results to a board of directors, who assemble the details and are the ones to oversee the whole operation.

[...]

We could compare it with a computer programme that can be personalised by each user, making macro's and adding higher definitions. Some creative people elaborate new "routines", that progressively are "copied" by other people, and become ultimately a part of the "updated" culture. As happened with the host of totally different word processors that existed since the 80s and progressively converged ("integrated") towards two or three programs with little or no differences, we can expect that the different psychological ways of functioning, by interaction and mutual inspiration during education and each form of social contact, will progressively converge to one polyvalent, but fundamentally identical "psychological software" used by all men, each adding some personal flavours and nuances.

http://noosphere.cc/globalmind.html

Many people know Timothy Leary as drug-guru of the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s. Not so many people know, however, that Leary reemerged in the eighties as energetic promoter of the Internet and spokesman of the Cyberpunks, an Information-Age counterculture whose members believe that technology can help us to free ourselves from all limits - physical as well as metaphysical. In this paper, I describe the development of Leary's theories - how his focus shifted from psychedelic drugs to computers -, and discuss Leary's impact on the cybernetic counterculture (the Cyberpunks) of the eighties and nineties. I compare Leary's earlier theories, in which he praises LSD as key to "cosmic consciousness" and sweeping societal changes, to his later theories, in which he describes the computer as tool of liberation and transcendence. In a critical analysis of the cybernetic counterculture I try to find out what role Leary played in this counterculture. My comparison of Leary's earlier and later theories shows that the psychedelic counterculture of the sixties and the cybernetic counterculture of the eighties and nineties have many things in common; most important of all, they share the same aim: Individual freedom and ecstasy. I argue that the cyber-movement of the eighties and nineties is a continuation of the freedom revolution of the sixties counterculture. For Leary, the emergence of a global electronic cybernetic communication network is a logical consequence (or further development) of psychedelic consciousness-expansion. In my analysis of the cybernetic counterculture I come to the conclusion that Leary was one of the founding fathers of the cyber-movement and therefore plays a central role in the cybernetic counterculture.

http://www.geocities.com/arno_3/

During his later days, he [Leary] didn't talk about it [the Eight Circuit model] much. I think as he embraced "chaos", he wanted to distance himself from the tidiness of the model. After all, did any of us live perfect, smooth, Circuit-Six, psychedelic, yogic lives? Or did we not, occasionally, get drunk[...] But when I think about it, I'm impressed, particularly with how the evolution of the technoculture since the 1970s matches his predictions of future evolution. In a clear gelatin capsule: Circuit Six, the neuroelectric circuit, is already a pop culture phenomenon, otherwise known as cyberculture, wired, the Web, the Net, cyberspace, etc. The notion of living in electricity is with us. More important, it surprised our culture by preceding Circuit Seven, the neurogenetic circuit - biotechnology as a popular phenomenon, which is just slowly coming into its own. When you hear about garage gene hacking, you'll know we've arrived. And who would have guessed that nanotechnology mainman Eric Drexler would come along and begin mapping Circuit Eight, the neuroatomic level, human empowerment on the molecular/atomic level?

http://www.geocities.com/arno_3/3/3-5.html

In this scheme, the x represents the progress of time, and y the level at which transitions occur: from simple, materialistic aspects of daily life, e.g. respecting the rules of traffic, towards high psychocultural concerns, e.g. searching together to find the secret of happiness in a long lasting love. This graph illustrates two tendencies:

(1) in the beginning human co-operation and social interaction is rather absent. There is a chaos where each person struggles for his own profits. The strongest dominate the less strong. Progressively, thanks to many forms of social and moral pressure, formerly imposed by kings, priests and other rulers, but nowadays achieved by revolutions, free press, trade unions and Non Governmental Organizations including Greenpeace and Amnesty International a kind of law and order is imposed. And finally, education and social sensitivity introduced enough moral responsability and long term thinking that spontaneous co-operation and mutual respect emerge.

(2) at the same time there is a progression from superficial, elemetary and 'material' topics to more cultural and psychological areas. The shift from chaos towards an imposed, and later a spontaneous order and coordination occurs first in the more direct and material domains, and only at a much later stage in the emotional, psychological, cultural and spiritual areas.

Legislation and education starts rather with regulations for traffic security and with the prevention of excessive forms of sexual misbehaviour than with more subtle questions including optimal communication, tenderness, positive thinking, spirituality etc.

It is important to consider that these 3 stages of socialization not only depend from the structures and personality of the dominating person or system, but also from the synergic maturity of the members of the organized group: a cooperating group of people is only able to function along a synergistic mode, on the condition they are well informed and have an intense and easy communication at their disposal, are able to make integrations with this information rather than choices, and can act with correctness and self-discipline. More primitive modes of social control in fact are a compensation for insufficient or less developed synergic maturity.

The second phase of socialization, called here imposed order, can further be subdivided into a number of sub-stages, e.g. (1) uncontroled domination (monarchy, dictature), (2) inspired domination (enlighted despotism, oligarchy), (3) controled domination (parliamentary monarchy, democracy).

http://noosphere.cc/consciousnessEvolution.html