Tuesday, December 07, 2010

The Expanding Human

  
It's mind-boggling how many syncs and connections erupt when you deal with issues of consciousness. 

This episode of The Outer Limits is obviously drawing on the then-contemporary controversy over the Harvard Psychedelic Club, yet it also prefigures many of the plot strands in Altered States (which itself took place at Harvard).

  Did Chayefsky see this episode and store it in his unconscious or did he deliberately yank ideas from it, perhaps thinking no one would remember the original? Or is there something else entirely at work? 

We recently discussed the interesting parapolitical connections that Outer Limits creator Leslie Stevens had- was this more of the same? It certainly jibes with the idea of radical evolution and alien identity that we see in the original series. And again the connections here deal with psychedelic awareness and its potential as evolutionary agent. 

I guess there's a very good reason that this show embedded itself into my unconscious mind from a very early age. Either way, this is just more grist for those of us that believe that the real evolutionary agent is within the unexplored recesses of the mind, not in some Transhuman chimera. 

This is an absolute must-watch. Note James Doohan, aka Mr. Scott as the lead detective, just to add some even greater synchronistic resonance.