Prometheus Rising (14 page)

shine everywhere—is the distinctly
Western
mystic tradi-

Virtually all the computer manufacturing firms in Silicon Valley (the

peninsula south of San Francisco) have flex-time. The employees

choose their own working hours.

Il8 Prometheus Rising

tion and does not appear in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism or any

Eastern religion.

Thomas Jefferson developed his view that "all men are created

equal" from the perception of the infinity within each of us,

which he learned from the Scottish philosophers, Reid and

Hutcheson. (It was also from Hutcheson that Jefferson got his

idea of "unalienable rights," which Congress in the interest of

stylistic elegance altered to "inalienable rights.") The Scottish

Enlightenment, like the French and English Enlightenment, was

the beginning of the materialization and manifestation of the

Judeo-Christian vision of the Heavenly City.

It was also this 18th Century Illuminati circle which introduced

the concept
of progress—
the conscious formulation of the

symbolism of Prometheus. This vision has been under so much

attack in recent decades that to defend it at all will seem archaic

and eccentric to many readers.

Nonetheless,
evolution is real:
quantum jumps do occur

throughout the biosphere and throughout human intellectual

history. We are riding a mounting tidal wave of rising consciousness

and expanding intelligence which is accelerating whether

we like it or not.

By and large, most people—and especially most ruling

elites—have not liked this acceleration factor. The migration of

capital (i.e.,
ideas)
Westward has been largely a flight from

oppression, an escapist movement—as critics today describe

Space as "escapist." Everywhere, everywhen, the rulers of society

have tried to put a brake on the third circuit, to
decelerate
the

acceleration function, to establish limits on what was printable,

discussable, even thinkable.

The Greek myth of Prometheus Bound—the Titan who

brought Light to humanity and is eternally punished for it—is the

synecdoche, the perfect symbol, of how the third circuit has been

handled in most human societies.

The peculiar way most societies have imprinted the fourth,

socio-sexual circuit—the weird taboos which restrain us all, in

every tribe, however technologically "advanced"—is part of the

acceleration-deceleration dialectic.

Prometheus Rising

The fourth circuit has been largely imprinted to serve as a

brake, holding back the free activity of the time-binding semantic

circuit.

This is the historical function of taboos and "morality."

EXERCIZES

1 . Compare Greece in the 4th Century BC, Rome in the First

Century AD, Southern Europe at the beginning of the Renaissance,

England c. 1600-1900, New York c. 1900-1950, and California

today. Note the accumulation of wealth corresponding to

the accumulation of heresies, innovations, cults, kooks, pioneers,

inventors etc.

2. Imagine you put a penny on the first square of a chessboard,

two cents on the second square, four cents on the third,

etc. How much will you have to put on the sixty-fourth square'?

This is how time-binding works, in relatively Open Societies.

3. Read the denunciations of Galileo by the orthodox of his

time.

4. Read the denunciations of Beethoven, of Picasso, of Joyce

by those who knew in advance what music, painting and novels

should be.

5. Are the most important scientific ideas of 1997 going to be

published in
Scientific American
in 1997, or in 2017?

6. Research how many years passed between the publication

of Einstein's paper on Special Relativity and the acceptance of

the idea by the majority of physicists.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE "MORAL" SOCIOSEXUAL

CIRCUIT

As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so

the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.

— William Blake,
Marriage of Heaven & Hell

121

The socio-sexual circuit is activated and imprinted at adolescence,

when the DNA signal awakens the sexual apparatus. The

teenager becomes the bewildered possessor of a new body and a

new neural circuit oriented to orgasm and sperm-egg fusion. The

pubescent human, like any other rutting animal, lurches about in

a state of mating frenzy, every call gasping for the sexual object.

Imprint vulnerability is acute, and the first sexual signals to

turn on the adolescent nervous system remain fixed for life and

forever define the individual's sexual reality.

We should not be surprised, therefore, at the various fetishes

that are so easily acquired at these sensitive moments.

In fact, we can tell precisely at what period in time a person

was sexually imprinted by noting which fetishes continue to turn

him or her on.
Black garters, booze, cool jazz,
and
crew cuts

define the sexual signals of one imprint group (generation) just

as rigidly as
sleeping hags, marijuana, heavy rock
and
tight

jeans
define another.

As Masters and Johnson have pointed out, most sexual dysfunctions

are hooked into the nervous system at these adolescent

moments of acute imprint vulnerability; their archetypal case is

that of a male who, about to mate for the first time, in the back

seat of a car, was traumatized by a policeman flashing a light on

him and his paramour. The imprint of that ghastly moment was

hooked for decades: the male remained impotent until reimprinted

by Masters and Johnson in their clinic.

The choices of heterosexuality or homosexuality, brash promiscuity

or timid celibacy, etc. are usually imprinted by exactly

similar accidents at points of imprint vulnerability. Just as biosurvival

anxiety or security are imprinted by accidents in the

nursing period, emotional domination or submission by accidents

in the toddling period, symbolic dexterity or "stupidity" by

the accidents of the learning environment.

Primitives (so-called) know these facts and surround all the

points of imprint vulnerability with rituals, "ordeals," "rites of

passage," etc. well designed to imprint the desired traits of a

well-integrated member of that tribe at that time. Relics of these

imprint ceremonies survive in Baptism, Confirmation, Bar Mitzvahs,

Marriage Ceremonies, the Masonic "raising," etc.

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124 Prometheus Rising

It is important to realize that chance, genetics and malice

(anger) are among the "accidents" that create imprints at the

points of vulnerability.

Most humans do not, due to accidents of this sort, imprint

exactly the socio-sexual role demanded by their society. The

fourth circuit can almost be called the
guilt circuit:
almost everybody,

almost everywhere, is quite busy hiding their real sexual

profile and miming the "accepted" sex role for their gender in

their tribe.

In ordinary language, the imprint on the socio-sexual circuit is

generally called "the mature personality" or the "sexual role." It

is "the Parent" in the jargon of Transactional Analysis.

It is amusing to note that Freud recognized the first circuit as

the oral stage, the second as the anal stage and the fourth as the

genital stage. He did not notice the third, semantic circuit—

perhaps because as an obsessive Rationalist he was so absorbed

in verbal and conceptual programs that they were invisible to

him, as water may be to fishes. Similarly, Jung described the first

circuit as the
sensational
faculty, the second as the
feeling

faculty, the third as the
rational
faculty—and skipped the sociosexual

circuit entirely. (There may be a clue here as to why Jung

could not abide Freud's fourth-circuit emphasis and built a

separate, less sexual psychology of his own.) Jung then went on

to lump all the higher circuits under the rubric of the faculty of

intuition.

It is the function of the nervous system to focus, to select, to

narrow down; to choose, from an infinity of possibilities, the

biochemical imprints which determine the tactics and strategies

that ensure survival in
one
place, status in
one
tribe.

The infant is genetically prepared to learn
any
language,

master
any
skill, play
any
sex role; in a very short time, however,

he or she becomes mechanically, robotically, fixated to accept,

follow and mimic the limited offerings of his social and cultural

environment.

In this process, each of us pays a
heavy price.
Survival and

status mean forfeiting the infinite possibilities of unconditioned

consciousness. The domesticated primate, inside the social reality-

tunnel, is a trivial fragment of the potentials for experience

Prometheus Rising 125

and intelligence innate in the 110,000000,000-cell human biocomputer.

As Robert A. Heinlein wrote:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an

invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, conn a ship, write a

sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the

dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve an

equation, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a

computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

Specialization is for insects.

But as long as we remain on the antique circuits we are not

very different from the insects. That is, just as the insects repeat

their four-stage program (egg, larvae, chrysalis, adult) from

generation to generation, we repeat our four-stage cycle also.

The antique circuits are genetically conservative. They ensure

the survival and continuation of the species, but do no more. For

future evolution we must look to the futuristic circuits.

SPECIALIZATION
IS FOR INSECTS

126 Prometheus Rising

It is sometime mistakenly stated that there are no universal

sexual taboos. This is not true. There is one omni-purpose taboo

which exists in every tribe.

That taboo stipulates that sexuality shall
not
be unregulated

by the tribe. That is, even though no other taboos are universal,

the taboo against living without taboos remains constant. Every

tribe has its own set of
verbots
and thou-shalt-nots, but no tribe

allows the individual to choose his or her own set.

An American President may not marry his own sister (if he

wants to get re-elected); an Egyptian Pharaoh
had to
marry his

own sister. Confronted by this moral relativism, many social

scientists have failed to notice the invariable: both the President

and the Pharaoh are expected to obey
local
rules. So are the

Samoan, the Russian, the Eskimo and the Cuban.

Why is there this taboo against sexual self-definition and selfactualization?

Why is it that, while no two societies can agree on

what is sexually "good" and sexually "bad," every society thinks

that it must make some definition?

1
The Gurdjieff titles are deliberately negative, since he was trying to

get people off these primitive circuits and into the futuristic circuits.

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The answer is that our first humanoid (symbolizing and conceptualizing)

ancestors were very ignorant, but not at all stupid.

They were ignorant of the laws of genetics, but they were smart

enough to suspect that such laws exist. Sperm-egg fusion is surrounded

by violent taboos and fierce tribal conformity because

the survival and future evolution of the gene pool depends upon

which
particular spermatozoa reaches
which
particular ovum.

Etymologists confirm the Freudian theory that there are

ancient linkages between the words for the sacred, the erotic, the

obscene, the awe inspiring, the awe-ful, the divine, the

"thrilling." All of these are primitive, powerful
physiological

responses to the mysteries of
sexual attraction, mating, reproduction,

inheritance, genetic drift, future evolution.
The earliest

god-forms found by archeologists are pregnant goddesses and

ithyphallic gods. The most intolerant, bigoted and recalcitrant of

all prejudices—the very last to fade away after cosmopolitanizing