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FIFTH CIRCUIT ACTIVATION & THE ECSTASY GENERATION

5th Ciruit Activation • Images From X-Gen • Notes

Mankind has been standing on the threshold of a new dream for some 100 years. It is the transition from the morally-driven social-sexual to the hedonically-driven neurosomatic which is driving modern culture into the future.

It was Timothy Leary who first came up with the Eight Circuit Model of Consciousness, in which human psychology, natural, personal and spiritual developments, neurological, behaviour, imprints and sociological changes were all arranged into a mandala of eight neurological circuits in the human brain. In essence, this theory contained the blueprints for the history and future of mankind.

In brief, the theory goes that both humans and human society undergo changes throughout their lives according to four standard ('antique') and four 'futique' circuits which are as follows (*1):

The Antique Circuits

The Futique Circuits

Leary suggested that most people only ever the first four of these circuits in their lives, and that only a few ever ventured into the four circuits desacribed as 'futique'. He also postulated that throughout history, human societies developed the ability to bring aspects of later and later circuits into the daily norm. He suggested that in the next few generations, a transition from the fourth circuit to the fifth would occur in wider human society.

This, I believe is what is happening right now in Western civilisation.

   

The first signs of this transition came about probably before even the Victorian era began - people like Lord Byron in the 1820s retiring off to a mansion in Switzerland to nurse their opium habits, partake of laudanum and write poetry. Each generation since that time created a few people who were such hedonists and they usually retired off away from the madding crowd to indulge their passions. But in general, the West was largely gripped by the dominant Christian moralistic experience.

In the 1960s however, things began to change. The rise of the hippy movement, in which dropping out of mainstream life was actively encouraged, to pursue a life of travel, pot-smoking and self exploration, brought the West closer to 5th circuit activation. But the hippy movement's goals were to seek a balanced life in nature, not to bring society to a kind of activation and the very act of dropping out meant that mainstream voyagers could safely ignore them. Numerous nature communes sprang up all over America - and some still survive - and many of them also left for kibbutzim in Israel or spiritual retreats in India.

Thus, aside from music and some eye catching imagery, and some whisperings of new ways of thinking, the hippy's contribution to the wider world was minimal.

It wasnt until the late 1980s that the 5th circuit began to rear its head, with the advent of dance music. It began in much the same way as before, as a movement or subculture at the fringes of society, and was at first called acid house. Unsurprisingly, in it's early days, the acid house movement had ideals very similar to the hippy movement, but it was to take a vastly different course to the hippies.

It was to take the mainstream world by storm.

The drug of choice for acid house ravers was not LSD as it had been in the 1960s, but a new drug that had only recently been synthesised by Alexander Shulgin in his California labs. MDMA, or Ecstacy, promoted compassionate feelings of one-ness, weightless highs, social bonding and a clarity and fearlessness of thought and action which broke down moral and social boundaries. Additionally, it gave extreme rushes of energy and provided an experience in which hedonism could flourish. In short, an almost perfectly targeted 5th circuit drug.

More importantly, it accentuated sensual and sexual feelings in the body, and combined with the breakdown in moralistic thinking that accompanied the experience, people began to enjoy the tactile feelings of touching and being touched - by male or female - in public without worry. I remember at one festival, great long chains of people massaging each other, each one attempt to give their massagee a fantastic 'coming-up' experience.

   

It was exactly in this kind of touchy-feely atmosphere that I came out as gay. No one seemed to care, and I still got invited into (often all-male) massaging circles in the midst of the dance floor! In fact, I can say with some pride that I often got told I had 'healing hands' when it came to massages, a gift I still employ today with friends.

Dance clubs in Europe became beautiful places, almost sacred to some people. As Faithless sang in their song 'God is a DJ':

This is my church
This is where I heal my hurt

Men danced shirtless, women got naked, gay guys kissed straight guys who wanted to be gay, women kissed each other and gay guys who acted like they were straight (*2), but it was all without sexual intent - at least in the club. The primary intent in the average club was hedonism. If you like the music and had a good atmosphere about you, it didnt matter who you were, what you looked like, or how you danced. It was always the same: "What's your name? What have you taken? Are you having a great night?" (*3)

As the years rolled into the 1990s, and the Iron Curtain came down across Europe, acid house parties, dance music and Ecstacy were perfectly poised to transform European culture as people surfed on the waves of optimism as Eastern Europe embraced freedom. 'Clubbing' as it came to be known surged in popularity such that it became the dominant young generation cultural force, and began bringing the older generations into its sphere.

Old punks from the 1970s started coming - actually some of them had been there from the start. European hippies found a new niche.

Dance music itself began a massive transformation. From Germany and Holland came Eurobeat and Techno, from the UK came house, followed by hardhouse, and jungle. Israel brought us trance and psychedlic trance. Other favoured ambient dance, and soon these styles had all melded and reformed into acid jazz, drum n' bass, big beat, hardcore (*4) and what seemed like a thousand others.

Public festivals to explicitly celebrate this wild force started up - the Berlin Love Parade, Tribal Gathering, Gay Pride events, Reclaim The Streets. All of these and more dominiated the city streets throughout summer. The music and the hedonism was no longer just confined to the clubs. It was there in the seriously drug-influenced advertising aimed at young people on TV. Youth and popular channels started doing dance and clubbing programs. Magazines and websites proliferated by the thousands. Free parties, festivals, clubs, love-ins, chill-out sessions, stadium DJs. It seemed in the mid 90s that not even the sky was the limit.

And there I was too, in the midst of the hedonistic, ecstatic, touchy-feely, metrosexual European dance.

   

I call it a European dance (assuming we can call Israel a part of Europe, because it definitely happened there too), because America didnt seem to understand it at all. Sure, America had given rise to the hippy movement but that was long gone. It had also given rise to a lot of the dance music - think of the Chicago and New York disco scenes in the late 70s and early 80s - as well as the MDMA drug itself.

But ultimately, they didnt seem to understand. Apart from the occasional club in New York, it was all too cool, all too posey. People seemed to care too much about what they looked like and how cool they were. Granted, there were people like that in Europe too, but we always used to laugh at them.

Basically, they didnt take over the streets of New York or Chicago every damn weekend of the summer, they didn't guzzle Ecstasy pills by the handful (*5). They didnt look like they were having even half as much fun as we were, and once they'd laid the groundwork of the music, they concentrated on making it corporate. They stopped developing the dance, and so it was up to Europe to endlessly create and reinvent the fashion, the music and the culture.

Plus America seemed obsessed with miserable old grunge. They called Kurt Cobain a prophet and when he shot himself not one clubber looked up to sympathise. We just didnt get that whole grunge thing (some Europeans did obviously...) - we were too into making our lives wild and fun. Grunge was a little voice in hedonistic Europe.

And then Europe started to export what it had created. The Ecstacy Generation started to travel. You could go to Thailand, Egypt or Morocco and you could find parties or festivals going on. In some of the most conservative countries in the world, people got out to the desert or a tropical island, stripped down to the waist and started dancing.

At no other time in history can I ever conceive of what I saw on a website for a festival in Bali, Indonesia: a horde of fit, gorgeous go-go boys dancing down the streets and the beaches dressed only in skimpy hot pants and a bandana. Oh, there were girls doing much the same, but you can bet you know what I was watching!

   

At that time, a lot of people were talking in clubs about world peace and for a while it seemed possible. Worldwide 5th circuit activation seemed only a breath away - we just needed some kind of critical mass. One more go-go boy, one more festival, a new fashion or a music style. Something (someone...) new to play with (*6).

But like the hippies, I guess the very nature of our culture was our own undoing on the activation score. Just as the hippies dropped out, thereby removing themselves from the mainstream to which they could offer the culture they created, the clubbers were ultimately only after one thing: FUN. Fun weekends, fun nights, fun parties, fun clothes (or lack of), fun bleepy noises, fun people, fun sex, fun drugs, fun rock n' roll. Unlike the hippies, the European mainstream danced with us for a while, but eventually it got tired.

The mainstream got bored of us and wanted to move on. Or move back into its shell.

By 1998, the dream had died. Actually for some people it probably died earlier than that, but I remember going to psy-trance nights in Bristol and Birmingham and it still having the same feeling. It was only when you went to drum n' bass nights did the old punk aggro come out, or at hardhouse nights when the posey clans came out. Alcohol came back onto the scene with a vengeance, and although there were pockets of resistance, it all slowly faded away.

I don't really go to clubs any more - maybe I've just got older, but the hedonism doesn't seem to be there any more. People seem more concerned to look good and act cool, and there's none of those long chains of massages or touchy-feely male-on-male-on-female-on-female love-ins anymore. No more go-go boys to play with, no more go-go girls to grin at and then hug. No more true hedonism.

And without that, there's more of an anxious desperation in the air, as if people are going to have fun even though they have to stay cool and not be tactile. And not talk to your neighbour on the dance floor. And not strip off and get funky.

But hold on. It's not entirely dead. The hippies might have left a few remnants into the mainstream culture, but us clubbers...we left so much more.

We left the mainstream our music, our dance and our fashion. We dominated Europe and the travelling and tourist circuits for a while, we activated our 5th circuits without getting lost in retreats or yearning for nature. We embraced technology, strapped ourselves into primitive virtual realities (*7) and would've got implants if it had been fun, we looked constantly for innovation, new experiences, new people, new conversations. We lived for the future and we knew that not even the sky was the limit. We reinvented our lives, had a hilarious time, went hedonistic.

We brought all that to the world and demanded that the mainstream listened to us. And because there were so many of us, with all that disposable income to spend somewhere, we got listened to.

Look around and you will see our imagery everywhere, in advertising, in music, in art and design, on TV and in films (*8). Just about every computer game contains something of us, from Crash Bandicoot to Resident Evil. There are now dance clubs all around the world, and they're not quite what was going on in the 90s but sometimes they're not far off. Hell, we even forced hoary old rockers U2 to get hip and change their style (*9).

What we were became the mainstream, and as it did, it lost its fifth circuit activation along the way. But we brought it closer, and it almost happened.

Only one question remains. When the American hippy generation grew up and got sensible, they created California. They got technological and put together software companies, Silicon Valley, flexi-time and the fifth largest economy in the world.

What will happen when Europe's Ecstacy Generation grows up? How will we put our love of technology, our sense of fun, sex and unity together to make a world?

Already, Europe is talking of union, though whether this is trade or federal no one can say yet. Perhaps it's a bit early, because the Ecstacy Generation hasn't quite finished maturing. When we do, maybe it will be time to recreate that unity we felt on the dance floor and in the streets, but on a larger scale - between countries. Maybe it will be time to throw away our old moral systems and embrace a system that speaks of ecstacy, that looks to the future. Maybe it will be time for us to migrate into space, to strap technology into our bodies and enjoy the ride.

There's no knowing what Europe will be like when our generation grows up, but it will be interesting and fun, that's for damn sure. And when in 20 or 30 years' time, the next generation of hedonists starts to trip into the 5th circuit, they will find it easier because of the ground work we and the hippies before us laid. Maybe they'll even be the ones to push it over the edge to full global activation, just as we nearly did.

We, the Ecstacy Generation, activated ourselves into the 5th neural circuit - neurosomatic ecstasy - and we took it to the world. We nearly made it. The world nearly understood.

With Love and Tactile Fun
Bruce Rimell x x x June 2005

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