Prometheus Rising (2 page)

They only realize, vaguely, that somebody has screwed them out

of something, but they don't have enough zest or bile to try to

find out who screwed them and what they were screwed out of.

Fortunately, this Age of Stupidity cannot last very long.

Already, most people know that if you want a good TV or VCR,

you buy Japanese; for a good car, Japanese or German, etc.

Eventually, in order to compete, the Elite will have to allow a bit

more education for American youth, before we sink fully to the

level of a Third World nation.

The other day I saw a film called
The Edge,
which I regarded

as the best thing to come out of Hollywood since
The Silence of

the Lambs.
Perhaps not coincidentally, this flic also starred

Anthony Hopkins. In one scene, Hopkins and his co-star, Alec

Baldwin, seem in an absolutely hopeless situation, lost in the

Arctic, stalked by a hungry bear, without weapons, seemingly

doomed. Baldwin collapses, and Hopkins has a magnificent

monologue, talking Baldwin out of his despair. The speech runs,

roughly, like this: "Did you know you can make fire out of ice?

You can, you know. Fire out of ice. Think about it. Fire out of

ice. Think. Think."

This riddle has both a pragmatic and symbolic (alchemical)

answer. The pragmatic answer you can find in the film, explicitly;

and it might prove useful if you ever get lost in the north

woods; and the alchemical, or Zen Buddhist, answer is also in

the film, implicitly, and only perceptible to those who understand

One of the spokespersons for Gen X, named Shann Nix, has a talk

show on KGO, one of the most powerful radio signals on the West

Coast. On one show, she announced that the Vatican is not a State.

On another, she proclaimed that Jury Nullification was a recent

invention by the far right. Etc.

Prometheus Rising
/5

the dense character Hopkins plays in the story. It might prove

useful whenever despair seems to overwhelm you.

So, to those who at the end of this book still can't understand

or sympathize with my Nietzschean yea-saying, I quote again:
"Fire out of ice. Think. Think."
Who was that Prometheus guy and why did he give us fire in

the first place? Robert Anton Wilson

On the Internet at http://www.rawilson.com

INTRODUCTION

By Israel Regardie

The ability to create a synthesis of diverse points of view, scientific

and social and philosophical, is a rare gift. Not many are

there who dare even to attempt such a task.

Imagine anyone trying to make sense of an amalgam of

Timothy Leary's eight neurological circuits, Gurdjieff s selfobservation

exercises, Korzybski's general semantics, Aleister

Crowley's magical theorems, the several disciplines of Yoga,

Christian Science, relativity and modern quantum mechanics,

and many other approaches to understanding the world around

us! A man is required with an almost encyclopedic education, an

incredibly flexible mind, insights as sharp as those whom he is

trying synthesize and
mirabile dictu,
a wonderful sense of

humor.

For several years—ever since I first became familiar with the

writings of Robert Anton Wilson—I have been struck with his

ever-present sense of bubbling humor and the wide scope of his

intellectual interests. Once I was even so presumptuous as to

warn him in a letter that his humor was much too good to waste

on hoi polloi who generally speaking would not understand it

and might even resent it. However this effervescent lightness of

heart became even more apparent in
Cosmic Trigger
and more

latterly in the trilogy of
Schrodinger's Cat.
I have sometimes

wondered whether his extraordinarily wide range of intellectual

roving is too extensive and therefore perplexing to the average

reader. Be that as it may, the humor and synthesis are even more

marked in this brilliant ambitious piece of writing,
Prometheus

Rising.

l8 Prometheus Rising

Even if your reading has already made you familiar with some

of the concepts employed by Wilson in this book, nonetheless his

elucidation even of the simplest, the most basic, is illuminating.

At this moment, I am referring to the "imprint" theory which he

makes considerable use of. Much of the same is true of his references

to and explanation of Leary's eight neurological circuits.

We become familiar with them all over again, as if they had not

been introduced to us before.

Moreover I love the subtle and almost invisible use of mystical

dogma that permeates all his writings. For example, consider

the opening of Chapter Six. It quotes a particularly meaningful

sentence from William S. Burroughs. There is no mention—nor

need there be—of any anterior teaching regarding this Law of

Three, as it may be called. But one doctrine that emanated from a

medieval mystical school philosophizes that there are always two

contending forces—for the sake of convenience labeled Severity

and Mildness—with a third that always reconciles them. It is

paramount to this doctrine, which has been stated and stated

again in a dozen or more different ways throughout the centuries,

culminating finally in the idea enunciated by Burroughs and of

course used by Wilson.

There are dozens of similar seeds of wisdom sown throughout

Prometheus Rising
that are bound to have a seminal effect

wherever and whenever the book is read. This is one of the many

virtues of Wilson's book; it will leave its mark on all those who

read it—and those seeds will surely take root and bloom in the

most unlikely minds—as well as in the more prosaic. Tarot

advocates will find the most unusual and illuminating

interpretations of some of their favorite cards when he falls back

on the basic neural circuits. I found them all illuminating as

providing a new viewpoint which had to be integrated into my

general view of such matters.

The only area where I was reluctantly inclined to be at odds

with Wilson was in what I considered to be his addiction to a

Utopia—which he eloquently enough expresses as "the birth

pangs of a cosmic Prometheus rising out of the long nightmare of

domesticated primate history." The history of mankind is also

the history of one Utopia after another, being enunciated with

enthusiasm and vigor, calling upon all the facts of faith and

Prometheus Rising 19

science (as they existed at that moment in space-time) to corroborate

the fantasy. A decade or maybe a century elapse—and the

fantasy is no more. The Utopia has gone down the drain to join

all the other Utopias of earlier primates. However, I sincerely

hope that Wilson is
right
in this case.

Now I am not unmindful of the fact that the Utopia of which

Wilson speaks, echoing many of the best scientific and philosophic

minds of our day, is a distinct possibility at
some time,
but

that it could occur within the next decade seems rather improbable

to me. It seems improbable of course only in terms of the

current state of world enlightenment, or lack of it, and because it

implies a "miracle" occurring in vast numbers of living primates

simultaneously—whatever semantic theories are involved in the

meaning of the word "simultaneously."

Anyway, this is a minor point considering the seminal brilliance

of the greater part of this enlightening book.

In a previously written book, Wilson wrote that

[in] 1964, Dr. John S. Bell published a demonstration that still

has the physicists reeling. What Bell seemed to prove was that

quantum effects are 'non-local' in Bohm's sense; that is, they

are not just here or there, but both. What this apparently means

is that space and time are only real to our mammalian sense

organs; they are not
really
real.

This writing reminds me so much of the Hindu concept of

Indra's Net. The latter is sometimes described as being a great

net extending throughout the whole universe, vertically to represent

time, horizontally to represent space. At each point where

the threads of this Indra's net cross one another is a diamond or a

crystal bead, the symbol of a single existence. Each crystal bead

reflects on its shining surface not only every other bead in the

whole net of Indra but every single reflection of every reflection

of every other bead upon each individual bead—countless,

endless reflections of one another. We could also liken it to a

single candle being placed in the centre of a large hall. Around

this hall tens of mirrors are arranged in such a manner that, when

the candle was lit, one saw not only its reflection in each individual

mirror, but also the reflections of the reflections in every

other mirror repeated
ad infinitum.

2O Prometheus Rising

One of the several virtues of
Prometheus Rising
is that Wilson

using Leary's neurological circuits believes that a new philosophical

paradigm is about due. In reality, this is really Wilson's

answer to my proposed criticism of his Utopian fantasy. It may

not be within a decade that we shall realize whether it is true or

false. But that is not important. What is clear is that thanks to the

insights of many modern thinkers, major new intellectual findings

do not come solely from the slow drip and grind of tiny new

discoveries, or from new theories simply being added to our present

armamentarium of time-honoured truisms. Rather, quantum

leaps, in outlook
ala
Teilhard de Chardin, occur with a fantastic

jump to a new horizon or level of perception. This insight usually

comes from a revolutionary
overview
which realigns or transforms

former thinking into a new and more enlightening frame

of reference.

This dovetails with his equally fascinating thesis that everything

alive is really
alive
in the fullest and most dynamic sense

of the word. It twitches, searches, throbs, organizes and seems

aware of an upward movement. Twitches seems almost the right

word, recalling to mind the myoclonisms of Wilhelm Reich's

vegetotherapy which, at sometime, are infinitely disturbing to the

patient on the couch who, because of them, feels he is falling

apart, being shattered into a thousand pieces. He isn't really. It is

as though the organism were gathering itself together for an

upward or forward leap into the unknown, to a higher order of

looking at things.

The transition to a higher order of functioning—or hooking

on to a higher neural circuit—is often accompanied by considerable

anxiety or a turbulence in personal life which seems as if the

organism were falling apart or breaking up. This phenomenon of

instability is really the way that every living organism—societies,

human primates, chemical solutions, etc.—shakes itself, as

it were, by myoclonisms or similar convulsions into new combinations

and permutations for higher and new levels of development.

So perhaps the space-time Utopia of a new area of primate

exploration has some validity after all, as indicating that the

more vigorous the disturbance or myoclonism the greater the

quantum jump into a higher neurological circuit. This is one

Prometheus Rising 21

reason why I firmly believe that the transition to the next spiral

will not be smooth nor without much suffering and chaos.

All of which suggests, with Wilson and Leary, that the brain

is considerably more sophisticated than any of us previously had

imagined. It is quite possible that it operates in dimensions so

beyond the lower neural circuitry that it occasionally "throws us

a bone" every day so that we can continue to function in the

make-believe world of everyday status quo. In the meantime, it

is a multidimensional structure at ease in far more than the

narrow primate world we have been programmed to live in. It

may interpret waves and frequencies from other dimensions,

realms of "light," of meaningful unrestricted patterned reality—

that are here and now—and which transcend our present myopic

tunnel realities of our rigid perceptions and conceptualizations of

space and time.

If so, then the title of this book
Prometheus Rising
is representative

of more than a catchy title to a profound fascinating

book. It becomes a title, instead, to the very attempt which we

are now making to reach beyond ourselves with a quantum leap

into a new world which has been envisaged only by a very few.

Wilson is one of this group who are preparing themselves and if