Prometheus Rising (11 page)

crooked individuals can "sell" a whole system of thought that

cannot bear two minutes of rational analysis. And any domesticated

primate alpha male, however cruel or crooked, can rally

the primate tribe behind him by howling that a rival alpha male

is about to lead his gang in an attack on this habitat. These two

mammalian reflexes are known, respectively, as Religion and

Patriotism. They work for domesticated primates, as for the wild

primates, because they are Evolutionary Relative Successes. (So

far.)

The emotional-territorial or "patriotic" circuit also contains

the pack's status programs or pecking order. Working in tandem

with first-circuit bio-survival anxieties, it is always able to

pervert the functioning of the semantic-rational circuit. Whatever

threatens loss of status, and whatever invades one's "space"

(including one's ideological "head space"), is a threat to the

average domesticated primate. Thus, if a poor man has one status

prop in his life—"I'm a white man, not a goddam nigger" or

"I'm normal, not a goddam faggot" or whatever—any attempt to

preach
1
tolerance, common humanity, relativism, etc. is not

processed through the semantic circuit but through the emotional

circuit, and is rejected as an attack on status (ego, social role).

The attentive reader will remember that the grid of the first

two circuits puts the pre-verbal child in a two-dimensional

world, which in the simplest of our diagrams looked like this:

Of course, preaching itself is bad second circuit politics, since it puts

you one-up on the person preached-at. You are
not
one-up unless

imprinted as such by being an alpha male in the same gene-pool or

conditioned as such by being a "boss" or other authority-figure. The

counter-culture of the 1960s, like many other idealistic movements,

failed because it did so much
preaching
from a morally one-up position

when nobody had been imprinted or conditioned to accept it as

one-up.

98 Prometheus Rising

SUBMIT

The third, semantic circuit seems intimately connected with

three dimensionality (although our binocular vision, of course,

also plays a role here). Specifically, right-handedness is a

human, or at least a primate, trait. Other mammals show no

right-hand preference; they are ambidextrous.

Recent neurology has shown that our
right-handedness
is

intimately connected with our tendency to use the
left hemisphere

of the
brain
more than the right. (The left-handed minority

are discussed below). Indeed, we use the right hemisphere so

little in ordinary life that for a long time it was called "the silent

hemisphere."

Thus, there is a genetic (hard-wired) preference, in most

humans, for
right-handed manipulations
and
left-brain mentations.

Now these connections seem intimately involved with our

verbal, semantic circuitry, because the left brain is the "talking"

brain. It is linear, analytical, computer-like and very verbal.

Thus, there is a neurological basis for the linkage between
mapping

and
manipulating.
The right hand
manipulates
the universe

(and makes artifacts) and the left-brain
maps
the results into a

model, which allows for predictions about future behavior of that

part of the universe. These are the distinctly
human
(postprimate)

characteristics.

The left-handed, on the contrary, specialize in right-brain

functions, which are holistic, supra-verbal, "intuitive," musical

and "mystical." Leonardo, Beethoven and Nietzsche, for

instance, were all left-handed. Traditionally, left-handed people

have been the subject of both dread and awe—regarded as weird,

Prometheus Rising 99

shamanic, and probably in special communication with "God" or

"the Devil."
1

There is thus a cross-over which makes for a left-right polarity

in both brain-functioning and hand-functioning, each being a

reverse mirror image of the other:

This double (and reversed) right-left polarity places us neurologically

in three-dimensional space. Rearranging our diagram

and adding the third circuit, we can illustrate the mind-field as

follows:

To visualize this two-dimensional sketch of a three-dimensional

system it is necessary to imagine that the advance-retreat

1 Aleister Crowley knew about this
pragmatically,
before modern neurology.

He taught his pupils to learn to write equally well with both

hands, thereby forcing the dormant right brain to spring to activity.

IOO Prometheus Rising

axis is at right angles to the others—that is, "see" it coming out

of the page at you.

This is "Euclidean" space. It is obvious, in this context, why

Euclidean space was the first kind of space discovered by mathematicians,

and by artists, and why it still seems "natural" to us;

why some have great difficulty in imagining the non-Euclidean

kinds of space used in modern physics.

Euclidean space is a
projection outward
of the way our nervous

systems stacks information on the bio-survival, emotional

and semantic circuits.

Thus, the imprint sites of this circuit are located in the
left

cortex
and closely linked with the delicate muscles of
larynx
and

the fine manipulations of
right-handed
"dexterity." The cortex

itself is so recent in evolution that it is often called "the new

brain"; it is found only in the higher mammals and is most developed

in humans and cetaceans (dolphins and whales).

Those extreme cases who take their heaviest imprint on the

third circuit tend to grow up cerebrotonic. They are tall and

skinny, because energy is perpetually drawn upward from the

body into the head. The caricatured evil genius, Dr. Syvlanus in

Superman, who was virtually all head, represents the extreme

toward which this type seems to be evolving. Popular speech

calls them "eggheads."

Almost always, these cerebrotonic Third-Circuit types ignore

or are hostile to their first and second circuit functions. Playfulness

puzzles them (appears silly or eccentric) and emotions both

baffle and frighten them.

Since we all contain this circuit, we all need to exercize it

regularly. Make up a schematic diagram of your business or

home and try to streamline it for more efficiency. Design a chart

that explains the whole universe. Every few years, study a

science you know nothing about, at an Adult Education center.

And don't neglect to
play
with this circuit: write poems, jingles,

fables, proverbs or jokes.

REMEMBER, MR. CROWLEY SAID:

YOU TOO ARE A STAR

P.S. HE ALSO SAID:

DO NOT LUST AFTER RESULTS

Prometheus Rising
IOI

THE NEUROLOGICAL IMPRINT IS THE BLUEPRINT

FOR THE ENTIRE ORGANISM.

IO2 Prometheus Rising

As with the earlier circuits, the semantic circuit builds all of

its conditioning and learning onto a bedrock of hard-wired

imprinting. Thus, many existentially thinkable thoughts are

socially unthinkable, since (a) everybody in a given society has

roughly the same semantic imprint and (b) this is reinforced

daily by assumptions that are mechanically taken for granted.

Thus, a genius is one who, by some internal process, breaks

through to Circuit VII—a minor neurological miracle loosely

called "intuition"—and comes back down to the third circuit

with the capacity to paint a new semantic map, build a new

model of experience. Needless to say, this is always a profound

shock to those still trapped in the old robot-imprints, and is

generally considered a threat to territory (ideological head

space). The long list of martyrs to free enquiry, from Socrates

onward, shows how mechanical this
neophobia
(fear of new

semantic signals) is.

As Thomas Kuhn showed in
The Structure of Scientific

Revolutions
science itself—the apotheosis of third-circuit

semantic rationality—is not free of this neophobia. Kuhn

demonstrated, at length, that each scientific revolution took one

full generation to turn over the old world view. And Kuhn

further showed that the older scientists
never
are converted to the

new semantic paradigm. They are, in our terminology,

mechanically hooked to their original imprints. The revolution is

complete, as Kuhn shows, only when a second generation, not

hooked to the old imprint, is able to compare the two models and

decides rationally that the newer one really does make more

sense.

But if science, the most self-correcting of all information

processing third-circuit functions, has this one-generation time

lag, what can be said of politics, religion, economics? Time-lags

of centuries, or even millenniums, are common there.'

We commented earlier that in bio-survival neurology, there is

no time.
"I just found myself doing it," we say after passing

through an automatic reflex on the bio-survival circuit.

This only refers to
other people's
politics, religions and economics,

needless to sag. The reader's own opinions on these subjects are the

only reasonable and objective ones. Of course.

Prometheus Rising
703

Emotional-territorial circuit actions begin to include time as a

factor. Dominance signals may not "work": the seemingly

weaker mammal may offer a counter-challenge. Two dogs will

walk around each other for several minutes growling and sniffing

(the chemical secretions of each reveals its actual degree of fear

to the other) before Top Dog and Bottom Dog becomes clear.

On the human level, we often agonize over emotional

decisions, becoming acutely conscious of
time
as we hesitate. As

every suspense writer knows, the principle way to increase

emotional tension is to set a
time limit
on a difficult or dangerous

decision. (See any
Star Trek
script; the time-limit is never

missing. Or see any of Irving Wallace's bestsellers. Suspense is

always increased, of course, if the time-limit is abruptly

shortened just before the climax.)

On the third circuit, time becomes
conceptualized
as well as

experienced.
We know ourselves as creatures of time; the "tale

of the tribe," the totem pole, the
Odyssey
of Homer, the
Old

Testament,
the
Vedas,
etc. tell us what came before and often

contains prophecies of what will come later. Science expands the

third circuit into contemplation of time-spans that stagger our

imaginations. The very use of written languages and other

symbols like mathematics creates the time-binding sense of

Korzybski: we know ourselves as receivers of messages sent by

sages "of olde" and as potential transmitters of messages that

may be scanned ages in the future.

The fourth circuit causes us to be even more involved in, and

pressured
by, time.

In closing this chapter let us be reminded that Giordano Bruno

was burned at the stake February 18, 1600, for teaching that the

earth moves. Was he
guilty
or
not?

EXERCIZES

1. If you are a Liberal, subscribe to the
National Review,
the

country's most intelligent (and witty) conservative magazine, for

a year. Each month try to enter their reality-tunnel for a few

hours while reading their articles.

2. If you are a Conservative, subscribe to the
New York

Review of Books
for a year and try to get into their head-space

for a few hours a month.

IO4 Prometheus Rising

3. If you are a Rationalist, subscribe to
Fate
magazine for a

year.

4. If you are an occultist, join the Committee for the Scientific

Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and read their journal,

The Skeptical Inquirer,
for a year.

5. Buy a copy of the
Scientific American
and read any article

in it. Ask the following questions: Why do they sound so sure?

Does the data support dogmatism at this point, or is dogma
a