Link for this Post: Read the Annotated Bibliography of Timothy Leary at the Open Library

In  April 1995,  I moderated a panel at an event called the Whole Life Expo in San Fransisco, California called “The Future of Consciousness.” Among the panel members was Timothy Leary.

There was quite a bit of attention on Dr. Leary that afternoon. Earlier in the day, at his own workshop at the annual expo, Leary had announced to the world that he had untreatable, and most likely terminal Prostate Cancer.

I wanted to give Tim a good introduction, so when it was my turn to introduce him at the beginning of the panel, I mentioned a time I had spent with Tim, looking at a  copy of  his annotated bibliography a few years earlier, in his office at his Beverly Hills home.  The illustrate and extended bibliography, a project spearheaded by his long-time friend Michael Horowitz, published 1988 includes entries on first 17 of Leary’s book several monographs, scores of professional journal publication, many magazine and newspaper articles, films, poetry and software.

After looking though the book, I turned to Timothy and said to him, “You sure wrote a lot of words.” I recounted to the audience,that Tim replied, “Yeah, and two-thirds of them were right.”

Leary sat next to me, listening to my account, and when I got to the remembered reply, his face suddenly clouded, and he appeared angry. He took the microphone out of my hand and said, “Bruce, I never used the words “right” in regard to my work, I must have said something else, maybe interesting, or well phrased, but I would never have used the word “right.”

The online book is available for download in a number of popular ebook formats. Also, the Open Library features a well-done online reader.

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In 1983, Dr. Thomas Roberts began calling the day, Bicycle Day and it has been celebrated with increasing enthusiasm ever since.

In San Fransisco, the city probably best associated with the sixties counterculture, Bicycle Day is being celebrated by Alex Grey and his Chapel of the Sacred Mirrors crew with a special event which looks like it will be a lot of fun.

Presenters at the event include

Alex Grey & Allyson Grey from the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors
Bob Jesse — Convenor of the Council on Spiritual Practice
Rick Strassman, M.D. — Author of “DMT: The Spirit Molecule”
Dr. Ralph Metzner — Psychedelic pioneer from the famous Harvard Research Project

I heard about the event too late to get a ticket, so I will be looking forward to hearing what happens there.

Since I last posted here on my birthday back in February, I have been mostly engaged in moving Memes for the Creation of a New Culture, my living book project forward.

As I have mentioned in my February post, doing the book has been ore challenging than I imagined when I started it.

Most of my efforts the since I wrote that post have been focused on completing the book’s preface, called What This Book is About and the first Chapter called the Lao Tsu Syndrome.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Lao Tsu Syndrome, it is disorder, a kind of writers block that I am afflicted with.

Despite this pesky problem, I have gotten closer to finishing both those sections. However, the words keep piling up and somehow I have never gotten to the end of either of these two chapters yet.

When I went to college in LA back in 1967, I used to drop acid (LSD) almost every weekend. My friends and I would have either small gatherings and sometimes larger ones, in which most or all of the group tripped together, listening to record albums on a stereo phonograph, engaged in intense conversation or wordless connections. At almost of of these gatherings, one album that was sure to be among those that would be cued up was the Beatles ultras mash hit, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band.

Even without chemical psychedelic enhancement, that album takes you on a trip. The fist song on side-two of the album, Within You and Without you reflects on life from transcendent vantage point of eastern spiritual thought. Then you emerge from a point this high vantage point to the now familiar words:

When I get older losing my hair
many years from now
will you still be sending me a valentine
birthday greeting, bottle of wine
If I’d been out till quarter to three
would you lock the door
Will you still need me
Will you still feed me
When I’m sixty-four

One Minute is Sometimes a Long Time

One of the most notable aspects of that album way that the Beatles styles common to traditional English songs styles and structures with the cutting edge psychedelic sounds that set trends in popular music Like other songs on the album,

When I’m 64 was guaranteed to raise a smile. I would share smiles with my college hippie friends, part of a youth culture that trusted no-one over thirty, let along some 64 year old bald guy, But we young, the wind was at our backs, the time when we would be 64 felt so far in the future that it never would arrive.  But a small voice inside me whispered, if you live long enough, you’ll be singing that song.

Today, February 26th is my birthday, and today is that that unimagined day of my youth. Yes, I am 64 and having spent the last 30 years losing my hair, its mostly gone now. Along with my hair, a lot of the things that people call core values and beliefs are also gone, replaced by new and more carefully nuanced notions.

I’m in Palm Springs celebrating my birthday, a day I’ve been planning for a couple of months. I’m typing a post I thought about posting a few weeks ago. My sixty-forth birthday is a day I thought about, or at least the notion crossed my mind, over three decades ago.

One of the aspects of life I noticed, and have increasingly become aware of, is that every item on your schedule, every planned event, no matter how far off, finiteness of life, the coming and passing of all life events, at first occasionally noticed and silently acknowledged, later becomes a rapidly accelerating, omnipresent reality.

The Danish 19th Century Philosopher , Soren Kierkegaard wrote:

It is quite true what philosophy says; that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards. Which principle, the more one thinks it through, ends exactly with the thought that temporal life can never properly be understood precisely because I can at no instant find complete rest in which to adopt a position: backward.

We think or our life as stream of time, always flowing forward. However, the notion of the flow of time is completely absent in modern physics. Aging and death, the nature and passage of time remain life’s ultimate mystery.

I decided to take the leap of creating an entire book online about two years ago. I started it by blogging the book but quickly realized shortly into the first chapter that blogging and publishing a book length work are so different that it is better not to try and combine them in the same place.

A blog is an online journal composed of a series of online posts, each with a title and often organized by date. Beyond those specifics, blogs range a wide gamut of written content, ranging from a collection of essays or editorials on the long end and on the other end of the extreme, the blogging genre sometimes called micro-blogging,  posting in short bursts,, taking the form of sharing a link to some other content online, another post, some news, a video or picture, sometimes with bit of commentary and sometimes without.

Micro-blogging itself has spread to other online genres, starting with group micro-blogs like Digg and Delicious, and made popular by the social media giants, Facebook and Google+.

Writing a book is more than a share, more than a post, it is a putting forth a sequenced hierarchy of essays comprising a long narrative on a consistent theme. The process of writing a book off-off-line is more like a trial by fire than the civilized process I imagine most people think it is. A book sometimes starts with a proposal and sometimes without one. But it can involve the writing and rewriting, organizing and reorganizing or major sections as well as several levels of proofreading. That is before it finds its way to the printing press, if it manages to get that far.

The idea of publishing a book online has a lot going for it. Seth Goodin in a 2007 post, Advice for Authors points out book authoring and publishing are both really hobbies, not lucrative businesses. Only a few writers, mostly fiction writers, Stieg Larsson, Stephanie Meyer. Steven King, Anne Rice, J.K. Rawling and perhaps one or two others find book authoring financially gratifying.

Another problem with print book publishing, according to Goodin, is the long gap, that span of time between when an author gets a contract, or even when they submit their manuscript and when the book finally hits the bookstores, that can be a year or more. That was fine back before the advent of the Internet, which seen the information explosion go on steroids. By the time a book hits the stands, the idea often goes stale.

The process I am currently does not have the lengthy and often grueling experiences of print publishing, peddling a manuscript (even getting rejection letters) multiple edits, awkwardly reading printed gallay proofs. Instead it could best be described as combination of walking a high rope without a safety net and leaving on vacation but forgetting to have a destination.

Online publishing has always been a high wire act,  before the Internet I used at leas two revisions of anything I wrote before it was published. Being typo blind, since blogging came along, I publish my work quickly and then am embarrassed later to find out how much revision it needed.

The aspect of leaving on vacation without a destination refers to dirty little secret that a lot of writers share, that when they start out writing something, an essay, article or book, they are not sure where it is going to go or how it is going to end up.  While I write, I am constantly researching to enhance the output with supporting information.  The last couple of weeks have been an adventure that way, as the process of discovery has shaped and reshaped the final form the book will take.

New Home Page of Memes for the Creation of a New Culture

When I wrote the post Memes Book Moving Forward last November, I did so with the intention of getting the book online after I had taken it offline for over a year.

When I put the book up for viewing on the web, I announced that the first chapter had been completed. In my mind, it had been completed, but when I looked, I had left out a “last section” which I thought I would complete quickly after the book went up.

I spent the next two months, adding section after section at the end of the first chapter and it is still not done. In the process, I noticed that the book was not getting much Internet traffic. At first this was a relief but after a while it started worrying me. After all, I was writing the book so it would get read and assumed that since it was so publicly available, people would read it the way the have read everything I have written since I published my first essay when I was 16.  But from looking at the blog stats, the site was getting less traffic than Highway 1 in Big Sur California, after a winter rock slide.

I started investigating the situation. I noticed that when people arrived on home page of the book, it told people that a book was here, but gave them no clue of what the book was about, other than the title and referring them to an outline full of cleaver section titles. So I decided to write a proper introduction to the book, which was give people a fairly clear idea about the nature of the material to be covered including where it would start off and where it would end up.

Since the book is called Memes for the Creation of a New Culture, I started the introduction by talking a bit about memes. I wrote:

A meme is a theoretical notion, postulating the existence of core creative ideas or cultural knowledge, having a propensity for transmission between between people using words, gestures and other imitable behaviors. A meme can be thought of as the fundamental particle of human ideas or a virus of the mind, spreading between people, infecting human culture.

A meme is that song you hear on the radio that you can’t get out of your head or that new fashion that everyone starts wearing or an an old saying, such as “a penny saved is a penny earned” that gets passed from generation to generation intact. Those are just a few examples of many memes that fill our heads.

While talking to my sister on the phone, I read here these two paragraphs. She told me that the language was a bit dense. Not a really good way to start out.

I looked at these mimetic passages again and cut and pasted then into a new section below the beginning and decided to tell a story in order to introduce memes and how they might lead to a new culture. So I started by telling the often told story of the Hundredth Monkey. On researching the story, I found out that the story had been properly debunked by skeptics. In explaing to my readers how this story had been debunked, the process lead me to remember how I first heard the story and this opened a Padora’s box of additional memories and discoveries, each which both complicated and enriched to story.

In fact the story had become so interesting and involving that I had to take a break from writing it. So I decided to post about this process on Vision Thing, to explain a bit where the book that started here was going, and invite you again to take a look.

For example, there is a UK blog called thinktech with the tagline The UK’s Leading Brain-Computer Interface, Mind Controlled & Neurotechnology Gadget Blog which I stumbled upon while Googling on the subject which first tipped me off about the rapid proliferation of BCI that has taken place. I would recommend taking a look at that blog to get a notion of the diversity of development taking place.

Just in the past couple of years, a number of devices which use EEG biofeedback have become available at prices which most would consider affordable. You can get a rundown of these devides on one of those thematic Wikipedia pages that have begun popping up a lot recently called Comparison of Computer brain-computer interfaces.

I recently purchased one of these gadgets called Neurosky Mindwave at a web store appropriately named ThinkGeek. Until recently, the cheapest mobile EEG biofeedback device cost over a thousand dollers but this one cost under a hundred bucks.

Neurosky developed a complete brain wave biofeedback device on a small circuit board that it uses in Mindwave as well as some some higher end devices targets at researchers and rich people. It also licenses the board for other companies to use. Toymaker Mattel uses the board popular toys Mindflex and Mindflex Duel Another company Uncle Milton Science Toys makes a toy called Star Wars Science – Force Trainer.

The Mindwave device is not aimed at kids but rather at adult geeks like myself. So I spent a few hours playing around with the device. Although Mindwave is packaged Apple style in a artfully decorated boy with just the headset, a USB dongle and a CD-ROM, using the device is anything but simple. I’ve used similar types of devices before in my role as head of the Mindware catalog and before that in a college class at UC Santa Cruz back in the late seventies with the guy who invented biofeedback. Dr. Joe Kamiya.

All of those credentials did not make using Mindwave any easier. I first hooked it to one of my Windows Workstations. I installed the software and it even updated itself from the Internet. Putting on the headset was fairly awkward and when i went to the Neorsky website, I found out that there were several more sophisticated headsets which did not use plastic and which apparently made it easier to clip one part of the headset to your ear and press the other to your forehead without inflicting quite as much pain as I did on my try.

Worst of all, once all properly set up, I could not get any of the applications what came with the device to register my brainwaves. I went to the Neurosky app store and found out that there were hundreds of apps for the device. Neurosky has made available a developers toolkit and created a software API for the device. Unfortunately the most promising ones I could find in their app catalog were fairly expensive.

I finally downloaded a  14 day demo of a Windows program called Mind Workstation by a developer I know called Transparent Corp. The program has built in drivers for the Mindwave as well as other devices by Neurosky, Emotive and several more.  However, again no luck. So I gave up for the day.

Thinking about the situation later, I had an aha moment remembering when I demoed a another device of its type and found that it worked better with my Macintosh than with Windows. So I gave it a shot and and after another hour or some of trial and error, I managed to get one of the supplied programs called Meditation Journal to display my brain waves.

That was about an hour ago. Later, I’m going to give a shot at using the same program on the Windows computer and now that I know what to look for, I can probably get it to work there as well.

Most of the biofeedback games on the market until this year like those from Journey to Wild Divine use GSR biofeedback. GSR is short for Galvanic Skin Response which means that the sensors measure the electrical conductivity of your skin.

This new generation of brain games use EEG which is short for Electroencephalogram. The devices measure brain waves that are found at the surface of your scalp. Although this is a bit more promising of direct brain computer connection, there are still a lot of hurdles to overcome before we all are writing blog posts by brain waves.