The first Cosmic Trigger covered the dark side of the "New Age" movement, such as links between Aleister Crowley, the Jet Propulsion Laboratories at Pasadena (which launched the Apollo space missions), and Scientologist L.Ron Hubbard. But mainly, these books were nothing less than a manifesto for self controlled evolution, which all true religious teachings point to: an effort to exalt the gift of isolate awareness, reason, and the unnatural aspect of mankind's consciousness. Neo-Nietzschean in flavour, they presented the reader with the modern Quest for the Holy Grail - the realisation of the unique (polarised) self (or ubermensch).

Extending John Cunningham Lilly's idea that the mind can be modelled by computers (thus linking with his work on informations theories and guerilla ontology), Wilson/Leary postulated 4 basic circuits that program our behaviour: (1) the Oral Bio-Survival Circuit; (2) the Anal Emotional-Territorial Circuit; (3) the Time-Binding Semantic Circuit; and (4) the "Moral" Socio-Sexual Circuit. Wilson acknowledged that these circuits are antique and conservative, existing in everybody and readily manipulated. When reprogrammed, they allow control of the five senses, which if properly trained allow the psyche to experience the world directly, but most often act as blockages. However his most inspiring work deals with the next four circuits - relatively new in terms of our evolution, which Wilson hopes will foreshadow our future stages of development. These four new circuits are: (5) the Holistic Neuro-somatic Circuit; (6) the Collective Neurogenetic Circuit; (7) the Metaprogramming Circuit and (8) the Non-Local Quantum Circuit.

These circuits are triggered by certain psychoactive drugs and other "peak experiences", leading to deeper appreciation of aesthetics, noetic apprehension and the eventual unravelling of "the language of the gods" - contained in Egyptian hieroglyphs and the DNA Double Helix. In one stroke Wilson and Leary had linked the post-Einstein Quantum Physics revolution with modern religious, occult, and psychological techniques. This is one reason why despite the model being over twenty years old, Wilson sheepishly wrote, "I'm embarassed to say that I still like the 8 circuit model of the brain better than any other. This embarasses me because I said frequently over 20 years ago that it would be replaced by a better model within 10 years. Maybe it has been made obsolete already and I just don't know about it . . . but in my area of knowledge, the 8 circuit model still fits more facts than any other model."

The Wilson/Leary model extends on the Sufi/Gurdjieffian analogy of the "body as a transformational apparatus for energy," linking with physicist Jack Sarfatti's theory that higher levels of consciousness are a special form of energy within the universe, which only a few in each generation will discover and control.

"One of the major revisions in my current seminars (I haven't published this yet) changes the names of the polarity of the first circuit. Instead of calling the extremes neophilia and neophobia, I now call them infophilia and infophobia, which I consider more general. I also have started (not always consistently) replacing 8 "circuits" with 8 "systems" because the circuit metaphor seems a little too electronic and I think humans are more electro-colloidal systems than the electronic models of human "mind" that we find in computers. In other words, like all protoplasm we can be modelled by computers but we remain more chemically complex and otherwise more complex than mere circuitry describes. I'm not trying to drag in some New Age "spirituality" here. I just mean that General Systems Theory seems more . . . well, more general than computer theory.

"I got the electro-colloidal idea from Charles M. Childs in his Individuality in Organisms. He says all protoplasm exists in electro-colloidal suspension between sol and gel and dies if it moves too far in either direction. (He says a lot of other interesting things, too . . .) So I tend to see humans as dynamic living systems in that kind of suspension between sol and gel. That means they can only be understood holistically or organically, not in a linear or mechanistic way. Hence, I prefer Systems to Circuits as models."

This revision poses some important implications for Artificial Intelligence work, and whether computers will ever acheive consciousness. Wilson's revision suggests that they may acheive some form - such as awareness of death, or intelligence (seen in the example of viruses approaching the complexity of low level bacterial forms), but never the "self-consciousness" that makes mankind unique on Earth.

Leary linked this model to his SMIČLE paradigm (Space Migration, Intelligence Intensification and Life Extension) which envisions a future free of restrictive Judeo-Christian morality and the limits imposed on us by a certain death. His monograph 22 Alternatives to Involuntary Death was an important contribution to the LE field, which involves a diverse range of technology and techniques, such as yoga, virtual reality, AI, cryonics, flotation tanks and certain elements of magick Commenting on the present trends, RAW observed that, "The people I know in anti-aging research all expect some major breakthrough soon, but I would not hazard a guess about in what area of research it will occur or when.

"I think anti-AIDS research will most likely give us the key to what causes the accelerated breakdown of the immune system in that disease, and that will probably but give us the key to what causes the slower breakdown that leads to aging and death for the rest of us who don't even have AIDS. It will be a wonderful, and kindly, joke on the Fundamentalists if the greatest scientific gift to Gay men becomes a wonderful gift to the Fundamentalists, too."

In the mid-1980s after having his work published by a range of major and independent publishers, RAW became involved with New Falcon Publications, a loose cabal of similarly minded authors, spearheaded by Dr. Christopher Hyatt, who wrote the seminal Undoing Yourself with Energized Meditation (1989). New Falcon reprinted his earlier work, along with tracts by Leary, Crowley and other proponents of brain change. Currently New Falcon is one of the leading publishers of such modern grimoires, differing from other New Age publishers in jettisoning pompous acedmia or hazy cosmic foo foo.