Change Your Brain

Rating:
Summary: Numbingly Stupid
Review: I have a moderate amount of experience with psychedelics in authentic native religious ceremonies. I thought perhaps reading Leary would give me the white man's perspective on these experiences.

Having read this one book of Leary's, I'm not sure if the title of this review refers to the book or the reader :) Some of the history of the 1960s drug culture contained in this book was interesting. However, the interesting historical tidbits occur randomly with little clear context or relationship to the rest of the book. In fact, this volume reads not like a book but rather like so many unrelated paragraphs. Most paragraphs make some degree of sense by themselves but there is little if any connection from one paragraph to another. The book is a context-free mish-mash of history, scientific classifications of experience and art, rants against modern society, scholarly analysis of the history of science and philosophy, and personal resentments.

Perhaps I haven't re-imprinted my brain sufficiently, or perhaps I've not re-imprinted it closely enough to Leary's own re-imprinting, or perhaps I'm just dumb. Either way, I didn't get much out of this book.

Rating:
Summary: Numbingly Stupid
Review: I have a moderate amount of experience with psychedelics in authentic native religious ceremonies. I thought perhaps reading Leary would give me the white man's perspective on these experiences.

Having read this one book of Leary's, I'm not sure if the title of this review refers to the book or the reader :) Some of the history of the 1960s drug culture contained in this book was interesting. However, the interesting historical tidbits occur randomly with little clear context or relationship to the rest of the book. In fact, this volume reads not like a book but rather like so many unrelated paragraphs. Most paragraphs make some degree of sense by themselves but there is little if any connection from one paragraph to another. The book is a context-free mish-mash of history, scientific classifications of experience and art, rants against modern society, scholarly analysis of the history of science and philosophy, and personal resentments.

Perhaps I haven't re-imprinted my brain sufficiently, or perhaps I've not re-imprinted it closely enough to Leary's own re-imprinting, or perhaps I'm just dumb. Either way, I didn't get much out of this book.

Rating:
Summary: I love this book
Review: I recieved this book yesterday and finished it today. this is a wonderful book on creativity, in fact one of the most innovative books on the market for developing and understanding the creative experience. Also, it gives a relatively interesting viewpoint on psychology, and how it has developed in the last century or two, and the direction it should be going in today. Of course, the reader should understand that this is a highly speculative and imaginative book. So read it with your imagination open. Also, if you are interested in the creative process offered in this book, and you can handle the speculative nature of the material, I suggest looking into articles by the late great Claude Rifat,especially his treatise on Polythought, which is best characturized, in my opinion, by Learies chapter on types and functions of art.

Rating:
Summary: I love this book
Review: I recieved this book yesterday and finished it today. this is a wonderful book on creativity, in fact one of the most innovative books on the market for developing and understanding the creative experience. Also, it gives a relatively interesting viewpoint on psychology, and how it has developed in the last century or two, and the direction it should be going in today. Of course, the reader should understand that this is a highly speculative and imaginative book. So read it with your imagination open. Also, if you are interested in the creative process offered in this book, and you can handle the speculative nature of the material, I suggest looking into articles by the late great Claude Rifat,especially his treatise on Polythought, which is best characturized, in my opinion, by Learies chapter on types and functions of art.

Rating:
Summary: Not read yet
Review: Ihave not read this book. I've just heard of it because of Leary's connections with mystic stuff. If you've read it I'd be glad to hear from you.

Rating:
Summary: Consciousness Beyond The Mind - The Esoteric Secret
Review: This is valuable information, not from a guru or merely eccentric mind, no, but from a former Harvard University psychologist who subjectively and objectively and systematically tested, experimented and clinically proved that LSD and other psychedelics and their subsequent human reactions, mind interpretations and experiential conscious observations were both beneficial and related to outside the limited human mind or chessboards of values and ideas. Of course the government's are threatened by any and all such ideas that venture outside their limited schematical ideas and systems used for social structure, control and submissive subjection and therefore administer intensely unjust persecution.

But to write this information off as arbitrary and valueless is the common human response to change and growth as a human evolutionary species, a rejection that has been practiced since the beginning of time. Therefore those enlightened by such spiritual, rational/non-rational perceptive illuminations have remained relatively unspoken for many thousands of years and have paradoxically been the progenitors of all religious teachings and many political ideologies.

From chapter 8: "To use our heads, to push out beyond words, space-time categories, social identifications, models and concepts, it becomes necessary to go out of our generally rational minds. . .

Our present mental machinery cannot possibly handle the whirling, speed-of-light, trackless processes of our brain, our organ of consciousness itself. . .

We cannot study the brain, the instrument for fabricating the realities we inhabit, using the mental constructs of the past. . . "

And from Chapter 9:
"From the standpoint of established values, the psychedelic process is dangerous and insane - a deliberate pscyhotization, a suicidal undoing of the equilibrium man should be striving for. With its internal, invisible, indescribable phenomena, the psychedelic experience is incomprehensible to a rational, achievement-oriented, conformist philosophy. but to one ready to experience the exponential view of the universe, psychedelic experience is exquisitely effective preparation for the inundation of data and problems to come."

What impressed me about Leary's information is that of mental imprinting - which only occurs during infancy and/or early childhood, the period of stasis - which is basically our entire lives, and the idea of reimprinting, or breaking on through the imprinted frozen or previously impressed mind - which can occur through psychedelics.

Apparently, there is a short time period as an infant only for many species, or both infant and early childhood for humans, which then ends shortly, permanently imprinting the humans social and cultural frame of mind through linguistics for the remainder of their lives. Experiments with birds and the immediate introduction towards a human, or even a ping pong ball, causes the bird to search for this parental ideal the remainder of their lives. As humans we are subject to the attempt to the ideals that were first exposed to us in early childhood, attempting to get as close to that model for the remainder of our lives, anotherwards we all take a still snapshot on reality, forever freezing our interpretation on what otherwise is a moving transient reality.

With psychedelics, there is an opening again as in infancy and early childhood where a person can perceive the moving essence of reality outside our snapshot of imprinted mindset, our still schematic, and see the moving, multifacted reality in its many different levels, through more than one of the chakras, where one then reimprints their minds with new perceptions of reality and refocuses on previous chessboard structures, thus re-entry into society with much broader and wider perceptive capabilities with significant healing properties that are extremely beneficial.

This book is truly ahead of it's time, and of course, rejected as non-conforming to traditional paradigms and therefore considered a major threat to the comfort zones of our societal and cultural games that we take too seriously as a one and only level of reality.