Timothy Leary's Model of Consciousness
Graphic for a Psychedelic Session led by Leary, 1965.
Molly Hankins August 28, 2025
While Timothy Leary was in and out of prison during the early 1970s, his friend and collaborator Robert Anton Wilson began expanding on Leary’s Eight-Circuit Model of Consciousness, which he published in multiple books the following decade. Two of these, Prometheus Rising and the Cosmic Trigger series, use this model to describe the evolution of our species from mortals to higher dimensional selves. Humans move, Leary tells us, from a baseline Bio-Survival Intelligence that helps us stay alive into more refined states of being with a greater capacity for information sharing, creating and processing. According to Wilson, as information and understanding increases, humanity draws closer to a critical mass of self-awareness where we can begin to override our conditioning and experience true free will.
Wilson describes the Bio-Survival Circuit as part of our DNA programmed to, “seek a comfort-safety zone around a mothering organism.” This circuit of consciousness orients us to what is supportive and nourishing and keeps us away from what is predatory or toxic. Born from ancestral survival strategies, this circuit first expresses in infancy to encourage bonding with the adult humans around us who can keep us alive. When we mature into adulthood, we can easily be brought back into this circuit when our nervous system is stimulated to produce the same state of fear we experienced as helpless infants. The results are predictable, robotic responses that make us incredibly easy to manipulate. Wilson wrote in Prometheus Rising, “A man or woman entering a new situation with the anxiety chemicals of a frightened infant coursing through the brain stem is not going to be able to accurately, observe, judge or decide anything very accurately.” As long as we allow our nervous systems to be negatively influenced, we can’t access free will.
In modernity, we instead of looking to interpersonal relationships to soothe our nervous systems from survival anxiety, we instead look to money. This brings us into the second circuit of hierarchy determined by our perception of territory associated with the ‘ego’. Known as the Emotional Territorial Circuit, in this level of consciousness money is a form of territory and the scarcity of it can keep us locked in these lower circuits.This imprint often comes from and is triggered by a father figure, or the lack thereof. According to Wilson and Leary, intergenerational DNA mutations take place based on imprinting we get as children that affects our nervous system in a way that conditions behavior. If we get stuck on this circuit, we lock in a territorial mindset of protecting ourselves from scarcity.
The third circuit is the Semantic Intelligence Circuit, which maps our reality tunnel and informs what is possible or not. These include language, concepts, tools, art, theories, equations, music, or poetry and all wind up informing our internal monologue somehow. “The Semantic Circuit allows us to sub-divide things, and reconnect things, at pleasure. There is no end to its busy-busy-busy labeling and packaging of experience,” Wilson writes of the third circuit. At this level of consciousness, we’re still easily manipulated because our reality tunnel can be reoriented by activating the Bio-Survival Circuit using fear. We update our map based on information gleaned from a dysregulated nervous system operating on first circuit consciousness data. Our range of responses shrinks and we begin to see the world through the lens of our wounding, which we’re revisiting every time our nervous system is dysregulated.
We can begin to break out of this strange loop at the semantic level by consciously updating our reality tunnel map, which expands our perception and propels us forward. The first and second circuits run on negative feedback as a precursor to returning to stasis, whereas at the third, semantic level we’re enriched by tailoring our perception of reality to meet our needs. This creates a forward propulsion out into the world and brings us to the next circuit -Socio-Sexual Intelligence. This is imprinted in adolescence and creates connection with others from either a regulated or dysregulated state. At this level, dysregulation can express itself in more covert ways, like being overly rational or moralistic. As Wilson wrote in Cosmic Trigger II, “Socio-Sexual Intelligence allows us to manage our social and sexual relations in ways that keep us reasonably happy or at least out of jail.” We learn how to get what we want on this circuit, hopefully in healthy ways.
“Operating on all eight circuits is an integration of body, mind, spirit and emotions that gives us the regulated state Hermeticists agree is necessary for successfully influencing reality.”
As we update our reality tunnel map in ways that help us get what we want, we become more difficult to manipulate. The fifth, Holistic Neurosomatic Circuit processes mind-body feedback loops and is imprinted throughout our lives by heightened states of awareness, whether ecstatic or fearful. We can manipulate our state of being to our advantage, moving beyond negative Emotional Territorial reactivity to a level of consciousness where we can select our preferred state of being from the platform of a regulated nervous system. This necessary mutation activates a new era of humanity that appears supernatural, but learned nervous system regulation represents a leap in evolution at the neuro-social level.
At the sixth Collective Neurogenetic Circuit, we come in contact with the Akashic Records, which holds the ancestral data informing our genetic expression. Wilson writes, “The Neurogenetic Circuit is best considered, in terms of current science, as the genetic archives activated by excitement of anti-histone proteins - the DNA memory coiling back to the dawn of life and containing all the genetic blueprints for the future of evolution.” At this level we remember the Creator through ancestral knowing that connects us to higher consciousness. It can come in the form of a spontaneous spiritual experience or from knowing that all of life is connected, from a work of art, meditation, being in nature or a heartfelt message, and the knowledge will stick with us if we spend enough time in sixth circuit consciousness.
At the seventh circuit level of Meta-Programming Intelligence, we learn to re-imprint ourselves so we can choose our preferred reality tunnel. We tune into specific circuits from this level and utilize them to our advantage. Instead of being trapped in the reality tunnel our brain has manufactured, we can imagine how we want it to be and tell our brain that story to program it accordingly. “The Meta-Programming Circuit, known as the soul in Gnosticism… simply represents the mind becoming aware of itself,” Wilson states, distinguishing the soul from our human self. “Simply accept that the universe is so structured that it can see itself, and that this self-reflexive arc is built into our frontal lobes, so that consciousness contains an infinite regress, and all we can do is make models of ourselves making models. Well, at that point, the only thing to do is relax and enjoy the show.”
As our soul kicks back to enjoy the human show, we enter the eighth and final Non-Local Quantum Intelligence Circuit and learn to consciously affect life at the subatomic level. Call it magic, magick, manifestation, or mystical experience, but Wilson calls it being able to affect reality on a meta-physiological level. Non-Local Quantum Intelligence Circuit activation can be brought on by near death or out-of-body experiences, and sometimes can be activated by psychedelics. To really work with it is to have agency in affecting reality to conform to our will, which is the definition of magic. Operating on all eight circuits is an integration of body, mind, spirit and emotions that gives us the regulated state Hermeticists agree is necessary for successfully influencing reality. Paradoxically, by existing in this detached way, we create the right conditions to materially affect our lives.
Towards the end of Prometheus Rising Wilson reminds us, “It is more fun to be happy than sad, more enjoyable to choose your emotions than to have them inflicted upon you by mechanical glandular processes, more pleasurable to solve your problems than to be stuck with them forever… The future exists first in imagination, then in will, then in reality.” And as we take responsibility for curating our reality tunnel and map, we experience true free will.
Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.
