There are eight levels of pleasure. The four larval circuits provide rewarding, reassuring signals that the survival lines to the island-realities are secure. The four post-larval pleasures come from direct awareness of natural energy signals - the Biological equipment, freed from larval imprint, harmoniously mediating natural energies.

This book presents a neurological Zen-aesthetic - defining beauty as natural. Natural as beauty. Here again we distinguish between subjective-psychosomatic pleasure and imprinted-learned reward.

The first four circuits limit consciousness to the wiring of the imprinted and conditioned, and focus upon what is physically, emotionally, mentally and socially rewarding. The larval body is imprint-wired and trained to perform goal-directed game oriented robot sequences in Newtonian space. The billions of signals per minute which flood into the nervous system from the body and its sense receptors are censored from awareness, tuned out from consciousness at a brain-stem reflex level. The survival tactic is obvious. The body is a trillion-cell, poly-organ bio-survival instrument. If the four-brained individual tunes into the myriad symphonic waves of polymorphous signalry flashed by the senses, SHe could not attend to larval survival responsibilities.

The brain, of course, "knows" every precise detail about the anatomy and physiology of the body and monitors millions of signals per second, but the larval robot mind is "slave-wired" to reflex reaction, unable to decipher or consciously control its own equipment.

Each of the four larval circuits has its imprinted reward-pain cues which are limited and stereotyped: food preferences, emotional cues, L.M. symbolic reflexes, sexual-domestic comforts. When the "mind" discovers that the "body" is a polymorphous, psychosomatic Zen-pleasure-laboratory designed for zero-gravity floating, with trillions of cells merrily copulating every second, imprinted rewards seem pale, static, and second-hand. The activating of "natural body consciousness" is a dramatic step in evolution. The Hedonic Resurrection of the Body is the first step towards extra-terrestrial existence, a profound philosophic discovery, none the less "spiritual" because it occurs in the context of anti-social hedonic behavior, forbidden to the domesticated terrestrial.

We have called this emergence of the Fifth Circuit a "hurtling of the hedonic gap." With the four neuro-umbilical lines retracted, the "mind" discovers that the "natural is the beautiful," that the source of intensified pleasure is somatic function, that there is no social reward or terrestrial gratification which can compare with body consciousness. We have called the Zen experience of the Fifth, somatic Circuit rapture. The body freed from terrestrial attachments, ready to navigate in the zero gravity of interstellar existence.

The existence of the Fifth Circuit and the natural rapture experience has always been a taboo topic proscribed by larval social law because it is instinctively recognized that if the human being discovers a source of pleasure and revelation within Hir body, the commitment and dedication to terrestrial social rewards will diminish. This is the genetic predisposition to escape from the social imprints. Historically it is no accident that the aesthetic, rapturous experience was accepted by affluent aristocracies who are "above and beyond" social sanctions.

We have seen that each neural circuit as it emerges tends to regard the preceding stage as immature. The suckling infant is immature to the walking child. The post-pubescent flushed with the new experiences and secret discoveries of the "boy-girl-game" looks with amused tolerant scorn at the symbol-manipulations of the pre-adolescent.

It is also true that each of the imprinted "minds" looks with anxious disapproval upon newly emerging realities which tend to disrupt its stability.

We speak here of "neurogenetic politics." Metamorphic chauvinism. The transition periods in the individual's growth, as new circuits emerge, are stormy, unsettling, and vulnerable. It is well known that adolescence is such a period of sturm and drang. The emergence of a new person, a new tunnel-reality-identity, is based on complex bio-chemical changes, intricate new live-wiring of millions of neural fibres, the development of and taking-over by higher neural centers, the ascendance of new imprints, and new bio-electrical patterns. The fragility of these neuro umbilical transitions is not well understood. The passage from a First Circuit state, with its emphasis on passive security, to the second state of mobility and power exposes the nervous system to frightening vulnerability. The babe leaves the mother's arms to face the play yard. The adolescent facing with a newly-activated sexual body the pressure to develop a social identity.

The delicacy of this process and the permanence of the new imprint "fix" is both awesome and awefull. A new person is created as each circuit of the nervous system emerges.

The new extensions of the reality-island must be hooked up without disturbing the earlier "realities." The new "person" must be integrated.

The human being is at present a confused, frightened, embryonic creature, mutating from Circuit 4 to Circuit 5, from terrestrial to extra-terrestrial existence. Humans would be well advised to treat each other gently at this stage in evolution because mutation is a lime of uncertainty and fragility. Indeed, since the individual recapitulates evolution in Hir own life it would be helpful if, at each larval stage, the child were given accurate information about the neurological changes that are occurring. The facts of metamorphosis explained.

Unfortunately the different demands of the different imprints are externalized as politics, dogma and ethics. Neurological differences "exstitutionalized" as social conflicts. The dread which the child and the larval adult feels in response to the pressure to change, the suspicion of different conceptions of reality, the inability to adapt to change, are caused by the most basic larval insecurity - a loosening of the neuro-umbilical imprint connections.

The transition from the Fourth to the Fifth Circuit is complicated because it has been viewed as anti-social. The perils of hedonism! The socially dangerous discovery of the rapture circuit: "My natural bodily sensations arc more pleasurable and more interesting than territorial social-rewards. I want to stay loose and high. Mundane affairs are robot."

During the 1960's both Presidents Johnson and Nixon clearly recognized that the American work-aesthetic was threatened by hedonism. While young men lost interest in fighting on far-flung foreign shores, ominous comparisons were made in State of the Union speeches to the "fall of the Roman Empire." The misguided implications were that Hedonism corrupted the Empire and, that if Decadence could be checked, the Empire would continue expanding.

The static moralism of Johnson-Nixon fails to perceive the evolutionary cyclical nature of history. Just as blossom follows bud so does virtuous republic (Stage 11) become centralized empire (Stage 12) and empire flower into somatic hedonism (Stage 13). It is to slow this trend that the socialisms ban rock-and-roll.

In the past, hedonism invariably led to the collapse of empire. Imperial Capture could not compete with private rapture. Hedonism has, therefore, never been recogonized by larval historians as an evolutionary advance, but as a social threat. When the somatic nervous system can be attached to and detached from larval imprints at will the first step away from imprinted-robothood has been taken. The Fifth brain begins to transceive directly the first language of nature - the metacultural biochemistry of the body. When the individual begins to attain control of neurosomatic function, can dial and tune the pleasures of the body, SHe is taking the first step towards control of the nervous system.

In the book The Principles and Practice of Hedonic Psychology,[1] a crude attempt was made to encourage a science of neurosomatics, a systematic study of the psychology of pleasure. Hedonics is not an end-point, but must be seen as a transitional phase in the evolution towards extra-terrestrial existence.

The emergence of Hedonic Psychology in the 1960's was greeted with official scorn and persecution. Larval politicians correctly saw the cultural perils of hedonism. The neurosomatic perspective frees the human from addiction to hive rewards which are now seen as robot) and opens up vistas of natural satisfaction and meta-social aesthetic revelation. The revelation is this: "I can learn to control internal, somatic function, to select, dial, tune incoming stimuli, not on the basis of security, power, success, or social responsibility, but in terms of aesthetics and psychosomatic wisdom. To feel good. To escape from terrestrial pulls."

Since the Neurological sixties we have seen an efflorescence of consumer sensuality and body interest. Massage, sensory awakening, yoga, martial art, diet, health-food-fads, erotic performance. The "new hedonics" is a manifestation of the first beginnings of Circuit 5 Zen Consciousness.

The triggering causative factor in this Fifth Circuit mutation was, of course, the discovery of neurosomatic drugs. In the 1960's people in technological societies discovered that neurosomatic chemicals "turn-on" the body and provide escape from mundane reality-islands. The moment of this discovery is, for most, an ethical detonation. Bodily revelation has been routinely condemned as immoral by every larval social-ethical system at the same time it has been eloquently praised by those aesthetes who have tuned into the somatic network. But the problem of neurosomatic rapture is that it is a post-larval reaction, and has mixed survival value for terrestrial existence.

The ability to receive, integrate, and transmit somatic sensations, to control the body as time-ship, is necessary in extraplanetary existence but can be a dangerous distraction for mundane life. The drug culture of the 1960's produced millions of en-raptured hedonists, Hippies, sensualists, nature-lovers floating free of social ties but with no place to go. Some Zen philosophers cynically make a virtue out of this navigational uncertainty. Werner Erhart, for example, glorifying the meaningless of life.

Activation of the Fifth Circuit marks the infancy of interstellar existence. Hippies and Zen adepts are grounded butterflies, neurologically ready but technologically unprepared for flight. Instead of being hailed as harmless heralds of a mutation to come, they were predictably derogated and forced underground.

Musicians, poets, artists, aesthetes have traditionally been the exponents of neurosomatic consciousness and of drugs which enhance sensory experience because the Fifth Circuit defines the aesthetic level of reality. The Einsteinian relativity of direct sensuality, of the natural. The Zen insight. "That's the way it is: beautiful."

Beauty lies in the neurosomatic "I" of the beholder.

Each circuit of the nervous system has its own imprinted criterion for "pleasant" or "rewarding." At Circuit 1 Mother's apron or the gun can be pleasant. Safety is beautiful. Circuit 2 welcomes stimuli promising dominance and mobility. At Circuit 3 L.M. symbolic rewards appear beautiful. A hundred dollar bill. At Circuit 4 there is the sperm-egg stimulus - "the girl's underpants" memorialized by Kurt Vonnegut. These positive cues are sought for their imprint-conditioned reward and not for the aesthetic pleasure of the natural "seen" as it is.

Larval reward-pleasure has been institutionalized in the form of "show-business" and social "art." The skillful artist unconsciously selects the stimuli which social conditioning has associated with safe-dangerous, powerful-weak, competent-stupid and sexually arousing. The criteria for what is considered artistically successful are stylized, socially conditioned, learned in terms of larval symbols. Fifth Circuit rapture, however, is the response of the sense organs to natural stimulation, divorced from terrestrial conditioned meaning.

In advanced civilizations of the past, the Fifth Circuit was attained by adepts and hedonists who created the disciplined tradition of sensual-delight. Somatic art is the Zen aesthetic of the naked-natural. Direct stimulus by-passing symbols. Neurosomatic art gets the body high.

The origin of much social art is somebody's neurosomatic signal which has been socialized-imprinted and learned as "artistic."

At the present time our scientific knowledge of bodily function combined with our technical affluence (especially birth control devices) has brought us to a point of Fifth Circuit breakthrough. Humans are devoting more time to body-consciousness, learning how to tune into somatic conversations, master somatic yogas which provide precise control of bodily function.

However, beauty and rapture are not evolutionary ends in themselves, but anticipatory preparations on the part of a neurogenetically evolving species for extra-planetary existence.