STAF FORD BEER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 301

Figure 6.23. Chakras and plexuses. Reproduced from the Chakras , by C. W. Leadbeater
(Leadbeater 1990, 41, table 2). (With permission from The Theosophical Publishing
House, Adyar, Chennai—600 020, India. © The Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar,
Chennai—600 020, India. www.tw-adyar.org.)
of spiritual experience without intending any reduction of the spiritual to
base matter, with John Smythies and Humphrey Osmond's research on brain
chemistry lurking behind him. Gregory Bateson, Alan Watts, and R. D. Laing
likewise ran worldly psychiatry and Buddhism constructively together, with
a cybernetic ontology as the common ground. One thinks, too, of the Society
for Psychical Research (with which both James and Smythies were associ-
ated) as a site for systematic integration of science and the spiritual (chap. 3,
n. 62).
From another angle—if it is another angle—a canonical reference on the
chakras that loomed so large in Beer's thought and practice is C. W. Lead-
beater's The Chakras , continuously in print, according to the back cover of
my copy (Leadbeater 1990), since 1927, and published by the Theosophical
Society. Much of Beer's esoteric writing echoes Leadbeater's text, including,
for example, the association between the chakras and nerve plexuses just dis-
cussed (fig. 6.23). 68 Theosophy, too, then, helps define the scientific-spiritual
space of Beer's cybernetics. And coming up to the present, one also thinks of