Prometheus Rising (16 page)

His feet never touch the earth; he lives amid floating abstractions.

The monk-scholar.

The Knight of Swords is air/earth: reason and oral exhibitionism.

The actor, orator, demagogue—sometimes the artist.

The Queen of Swords is air/water; reason plus emotion. The

greats in science and art are generally of this imprint group.

The Princess of Swords is air/fire: reason and sexuality. The

good parent; usually the Puritan, but sometimes the crusader for

"sexual freedom." In any case, the motivating drive is an attempt

to impose abstract reason upon the genetic imperatives of the

mating urge.

The Princess of Wands is fire/fire: sexuality at its most powerful.

These types are usually, but not necessarily, quite promiscuous;

sometimes they pour all their erotic energy into one mate

and raise huge families, parenting being a strong part of the

fourth circuit; e.g., J.S. Bach, who may have written the sexiest

music in history, had twenty children.

136 Prometheus Rising

The Knight of Wands is fire/earth: sexuality and sensationalism.

The Playboy. Reich's "Phallic Narcissist."

The Prince of Wands is fire/air: sexuality plus reason. These

types are likely to get involved in the kind of empirical mysticism

that is not tolerated by the local Authorities—e.g., the

Tantrists in India, the Knights Templar and witches in medieval

Europe, Aleister Crowley and Wilhelm Reich most recently.

(Crowley said this card was a portrait of his "True Self.")

The Queen of Wands is fire/water: sexuality and emotional

politics. The law courts have a steady parade of this type passing

through every day.

The clever Cabalists who designed this pictorial key to the

four primitive circuits included a clue to higher consciousness.

For they teach that each element in traditional alchemy (earth,

air, fire, water) corresponds to one of these Tarot suits (discs,

swords, wands, cups) and to one of the letters in the Holy

Unspeakable Name of God—YHVH. The correspondences are

as follows:

Y fire wands CIRCUIT IV

H water cups CIRCUIT II

V air swords CIRCUIT III

H earth discs CIRCUIT I

The logic of this imagery is quite clear to the unconscious

mind, and these associations appear frequently in dreams, as

Jung documented in
Psychology and Alchemy.

Prometheus Rising 1
37

The aim of the Cabala is to make the microcosm mirror the

macrocosm"; that is, to make the human being a perfect image of

"God." This means putting together the four "alchemical" elements

symbolized by the letters Y, H, V, H. In other words,

bringing the four circuits into balance.

This is the same lesson as taught in the Buddhist mandalas

with four demons at the corners and the circle representing

awakening in the middle.

The "married look," "the "Mom and Dad look," etc., which

are not scientific concepts but which everybody can recognize at

once, have to do with an acute
time-sense.
The parent is concerned

not just with acquiring bio-survival tickets for personal

nurture, but with acquiring tickets for the young, and for the

future.

Behaviorists tell us wonderful stories about the intricate patterns

that can be conditioned into experimental animals. See they

say we have, by selective reinforcement, trained this rat so that at

the sound of a bell, he runs up a ladder, presses button A, races

across a plank and down another ladder, presses button B, dashes

across the cage and waits at the food-slot for his meal to arrive.

Lest anybody think this book is written from a perch of superiority,

consider the similar, but more complex, behavior which

the author followed for twenty years. He would set an alarm

Prometheus Rising

clock before sleep every night. When the alarm woke him, he

would breakfast hurriedly, rush off to catch a bus, ride to a

subway, change to the train, ride to an office building, rush

through the lobby, board an elevator, ride to a certain floor, enter

an office, and toil at repetitious (and generally pointless) tasks

for eight hours. This behavior sequence had been shaped, as B.F.

Skinner would say, by reinforcement delivered every second

week in the form of bio-survival tickets (money). These tickets

were necessary to the bio-survival of four dependent children.

The reader of this book can probably remember, somewhat

dimly, the imprinting and conditioning of each of these circuits.

We all began as infants in a one-dimensional world, orally

hooked to Mommy. The further away from Mommy we crawled,

the greater was our bio-survival anxiety, and we generally

returned to Mommy as quickly as possible. The key imprint

incidents of this period, together with associated conditioning,

determine, concretely, how much we currently exhibit of:

ANXIETY OR SELF-CONFIDENCE

ROOTEDNESS OR EXPLORATIVENESS

DEPENDENCY OR INDEPENDENCE

Then, when the DNA sent the appropriate RNA messenger

molecules to the glands, endocrine system, etc. a
mutation
occurred.

Our gross morphology — our whole body — changed, and

our "minds" changed in the process. That is, our reality-tunnel

dilated into two-dimensions, when we
rose up
and began to
walk

about the house, and started learning who we could dominate,

who could dominate us, who could be dominated (emotionally

bullied) at some times and not at others, etc. We developed out

of amorphous bio-survival
consciousness
into stubborn individual

ego.
We were imprinted and conditioned with a particular

style of emotional-territorial "politics."

At this stage we were imprinted and conditioned for:

Prometheus Rising 139

DOMINANCE OR SUBMISSION

SELF-CONFIDENCE OR SELF-DOUBT

STRONG EGO OR WEAK EGO

HIGH PACK STATUS OR LOW PACK STATUS

GIVING ORDERS OR TAKING ORDERS

"HERRENMORAL" OR "SKLAVMORAL"

We were subsequently conditioned to switch between these

reflexes depending on whether the person we were dealing with

was Higher in the pecking order or Lower in the pecking order.

(Middle-class people, e.g., Reagan conservatives, John Birchers,

etc. will
always
revere those Higher in the pecking order; and,

equally, will always have some reason to persecute—peck at—

the poor, who are Lower in the pecking order. Hence, they will

say and even believe, that they are being robbed by the poor on

Welfare—who get about 4% of the tax dollar—and never

"notice" that the military-industrial complex is getting 72% of

their tax dollar. This is normal mammalian sociobiology.)

After this second-circuit reality-tunnel is wired in, the organism

molts and mutates again into the verbal stage, and a third

circuit style of mentation imprinted. That is, on top of protoplasmic

consciousness and mammalian ego, we acquire human

mind,
which is created by and creator of human artifacts and

speech.

Feral children, who survived in isolation from human society

(artifacts and speech), have .no
"mind"
in the human sense;

which is why they are called feral.

In the semantic stage of imprint vulnerability we acquire

either:

FLUENCY OR INARTICULATENESS

DEXTERITY OR CLUMSINESS

"GOOD MIND" OR "DUMB MIND"1

Why do we say "dumb" (mute) for
stupid?
Because "a good mind

means a good mouth," and the human mind is a verbalizing circuit.

140 Prometheus Rising

At puberty, another DNA trigger fires and RNA messengers

initiate another morphological mutation of body-mind. The

"adult personality" is imprinted and conditioned. We become:

"MORAL" OR "IMMORAL"

ROBOT-OBEDIENT OR ROBOT-DISOBEDIENT

SOLID CITIZEN OR SEXUAL OUTLAW

"PARENT" OR ANARCHIST

Lack of understanding of these morphological changes, and

their persistence in imprint circuits in the brain, is responsible for

most
failures in communication, and for the general sense of

exasperation with which we too often confront each other. Since

everybody's imprints are a little bit different—
the average is that

which nobody totally is
1
—
we all feel at times like the legendary

Quaker who told his wife, "All the world is mad but me and thee,

and sometimes I wonder about thee."

Reichians, disciples of Dr. Spock and the Summerhill School,

etc. have called attention, with some impatience, to the brutality

and stupidity of many of our traditional child-rearing methods.

These methods are "brutal" and "stupid" only if, like the abovementioned

heretics, one regards the goal of child-rearing as the

production of a sane, balanced, creative [NOT CRATED] human

being.
THIS HAS NEVER BEEN THE GOAL OF ANY SOCIETY

IN THE REAL WORLD.
The traditional childrearing methods are

quite logical, pragmatic and sound in fulfilling the
real
purpose

of society, which is
not
to create an ideal person, but to create

[CRATE] a semi-robot who mimics the society as closely as

possible—both in its rational and its irrational aspects, both as

the repository of the wisdom of the past and as the sum total of

all the cruelties and stupidities of the past. Very simply, a totally

aware, alert,
awakened
(unbrainwashed) person would not fit

very well into any of the standard roles society offers; the damaged,

robotized products of traditional child-rearing
do
fit into

those slots.

1
James Joyce justified anarchism on the grounds that "the state is

concentric and the individual is eccentric."

Prometheus Rising 141

That is, there is a neuro-sociological "logic" to the illogical.

Are traditional schools very much like mini-prisons? Do they

stifle imagination, cramp the child physically and mentally, and

run on various forms of overt or covert terrorism? Of course, the

answer is an unambiguous
yes;
but such schools are necessary to

train people for roles in the ordinary office or factory or profession,

which are also very much like mini-prisons, stifle imagination,

cramp the person physically and mentally and run on terror

(threat of loss of bio-survival tickets, in the form of pay-checks

or tenure).

The permissive movement in child-rearing appeared only

when it did, and has succeeded only to a limited extent, because

society has always needed and still thinks it needs human robots.

Utopian child-rearing will advance further, necessarily, only as

society itself evolves out of authoritarianism. That is, as the

accelerated changes now occurring propel us into the most rapid

period of social evolution in all human history, we will then need

citizens
who are not
robots,
who are
creative;
who are not

docile,
who are
innovative;
who are not
narrow-minded bigots,

who are
explorers in every sense of the word.

Traditional child-rearing began to falter only when society

began to enter into the present period of accelerated change and

technological omni-transformation of all traditional values.

Failures in communication generally derive from sending a

message to the wrong address. That is, your husband has an
ego

problem and you send a message to his
mind.
Adapting a

diagram from Transactional Analysis what has happened is this:

142 Prometheus Rising

The message is addressed from Circuit I to Circuit IV. It

means "I feel weak; help bolster me up." If the answer comes

back from Circuit III to Circuit III, "Well, let's analyze the

problem..." there has been a Wrong Address.

Of course, this example is deliberately untypical, although not

impossible. It is untypical because women traditionally are

trained
not
to make this kind of mistake—to be "emotionally

sensitive," to be "supportive," etc. It is much more likely, statistically;,

that this kind of Wrong Address will go the other way—

husband to wife. That is, the wife signals "Help!" and the

husband on Circuit III says, "Let's analyze the problem..."

We have said that the imprinting of the circuits contains a