Prometheus Rising (21 page)

centers serve simple bio-survival. The more recent (500,000,000

year-old, roughly) emotional territorial centers serve to maintain

pack identity, habitat-space and hierarchy. The distinctly hominid

semantic circuit (100,000-year-old?) makes maps and

models—reality-tunnels—which we tend to confuse with reality

itself, and, worse yet, with "all" of reality. The (30,000? year

old) moral-social circuit creates the domesticated adult personality,

or parent-role, or super-ego.

Now, obviously the third, semantic circuit works
with and for

these other antique circuits. The maps and models it makes are

tools of adaptation, and what they adapt us to is social roles in

domesticated primate society. Thus, a Midwestern Methodist is

not "misusing his brain" as Arthur Koestler thinks in constructing

a Midwestern Methodist tunnel-reality; that is precisely what

his brain is for, to adapt him to the Midwestern Methodist tribal

system—to impose the structure of Midwestern Methodist ideology

upon the myriad of data-points he encounters in his lifetime.

The Chinese Maoist, the Iranian Moslem, the New York

Feminist, the Marin County Hedonist, etc. each has a similar,

equally arbitrary, equally complex reality-tunnel. Each tunnel is

also
equally absurd
when seen from outside.

The problems of the modern world arise from the fact that

these reality-tunnels are no longer isolated from each other.

Throughout most of human history and up to 100 years ago—up

to 20 years ago, in some parts of the world—a man or woman

could lead their entire life snugly within the cocoon of the local

tunnel-reality. Today, we all constantly collide with persons

living in wildly different tunnel-realities. This creates a great

deal of hostility in the more ignorant, vast amounts of metaphysical

and ethical confusion in the more sophisticated, and growing

disorientation for all—a situation known as our "crisis of

values."

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Prometheus Rising

The average person has a deluge of contradictory and conflicting

reality-tunnels impinging on him or her, with little training in

either cultural or neurological relativism.
Speed of travel has

increased by a factor of 1000 since 1900, and speed of communication

by a factor of 10,000,000,
according to J.R. Platt. The

deluge is accelerating and intensifying. One symptom is the fact

that
TV Guide
has been taken over by a band of terrified conservatives,

who cannot understand and can only dread this downpour

of "alien" signals; instead of being merely a guide to what

is on the tube,
TV Guide
has become a continuous wail that the

tube's tunnel-reality is wider, stranger and more varied than the

narrow tunnel-vision of the small-town WASP.

There has also arisen a
profession
of "deprogrammers," socalled.

These are neuro-technicians who will, for a fee, kidnap a

child (even a "child" over 21) who has wandered off, departed

the parental reality-tunnel and been brainwashed into the competing

reality-tunnel of some
new
(i.e.,
not established
—
not

acceptable yet)
"cult." This is known as restoring the victim to

normalcy.

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73

It is all hypocrisy and neurological ignorance, of course. The

"de-programmers" are actually
re-programmers.
The parental

tunnel-reality is as arbitrary (and, to an outsider, as bizarre) as

that of any "cult." A special system of tricky semantics allows

most people and some courts to ignore these facts. Just imagine

what would happen if a wayward child of Methodist parents had

wandered into the Roman Catholic Church, say, and the parents

attempted to have that child coercively "de-programmed" (reprogrammed)

into Methodism; or if the child had joined the U.S.

Army, like Calley, and the parents kidnapped him and tried to reprogram

him into civilian reality-tunnels.

These problems will not go away; and the abrasions they

cause, as various brainwashed robots continue to collide with

each other, will accelerate. Speed of travel and of communication

are still continuing to accelerate.

Fortunately, higher circuits are forming in the human brain

and offer broader vistas than the narrow tunnel-visions of the

antique circuits. That is the topic of our concluding chapters.

Since everybody "prefers" one circuit over the others, there

are people in each society who are easily recognizable as Narcissists

(first-circuit robots), Emotionalists (second-circuit robots),

Rationalists (third-circuit robots) and Moralists (fourth-circuit

robots).

Rationalist robots, like the other robots, may be totally mechanized

or may have some slight flexibility, or "freedom" built

into their circuitry. The totally robotized make up the vast horde

of the Fundamentalist wing of the Materialist church and the

other True Believers in the scientific paradigms of 1968, 1958,

1948 or whenever their nervous systems stopped taking new

imprints.

These are the people who are perpetually frightened and dismayed

by the large portion of human behavior mediated through

Circuit II mammalian politics. They think that because this territorial-

emotional ("patriotic") behavior is not Rational, it should

not exist. They accept Darwin as dogma, but are nervous about

"Darwinism" (because it accepts mammalian politics as an

Evolutionary Strategy that has worked thus far) and are repulsed

by the data of ethology, genetics and sociobiology. They don't

like the rest of the human race much, because it is not guided by

IJ4 Prometheus Rising

their favorite circuit, and they are uneasily aware that the rest of

the human race does not like
them
much.

These Rationalist robots are also very uncomfortable with the

newer circuits—and some of them spend most of their lives

writing articles and books devoted to "proving" that the newer

circuits do not exist and that all scientists who have recorded the

behavior of these newer circuits are liars, fools, bunglers, charlatans

or some manner of Damned Heretics.

Like the Emotional robot, the Moralistic robot, the Narcissist

robot etc., the Rationalist robot cannot be "argued" out of his

narrow reality tunnel. We can only emphasize, one more time,

that each and every reality-tunnel created by a domesticated

primate brain is a finite cross-section of that brain's personal

history; and each such finite reality-tunnel is as "personalized" as

the music of Bach or Beethoven, the paintings of Rembrandt or

Picasso, the novels of Joyce or Raymond Chandler, the comedy

of the Three Stooges or Monty Python, the religions of Roman

Catholicism or Zen Buddhism, the politics of Libertarianism or

the IRA, the architecture of St. Peter's or Disney land...

And each of these art-works seems like "reality" to the people

who have created them and live in them. Rationalism is just

another such group art-work, a little less tolerant than most, a

little more useful to technologists than any other, a little stupid

when it can no longer transcend the last paradigm it has created.

The totally robotized Rationalist, the one whose nervous

system has stopped growing entirely, can be recognized by two

signs:

He or she is constantly trying to prove that much of the daily

experience of the rest of humanity is "delusion," "hallucination,"

"group hallucination," "mass hallucination," "mere coincidence,"

"sheer coincidence," or "sloppy research."

And he or she never thinks that any of his or her own experience

would fit into any of those categories.

EXERCIZES

1. Become a pious Roman Catholic. Explain in three pages

why the Church is still infallible and holy despite Popes like

Alexander VI (the Borgia Pope), Pious XII (ally of Hitler), etc.

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2. For those of you who remember Mai Lai, become Lt.

Galley. Say aloud, and really
feel and believe,
"The Army comes

first. I'm for the Army all the way." If you don't remember try

Jerry Falwell. Say aloud, and really
feel and believe,
"Help us

fight moral decay, send your checks in today."

3. Refute this whole book. Demonstrate that everybody else

has been brainwashed but you and your mother (father) has the

one, real,
objective
view of the universe.

4. Accept this book, if not in whole at least in general outlines.

Assume you have been brainwashed. Try to learn as much

from every human you meet about their separate reality-tunnel

and see how much of it you can use to make your reality-tunnel

bigger and more inclusive. In other words,
learn to listen.

5.
James Joyce said he never met a boring human being. Try

to explain this. Try to get into the Joycean head space, where

everybody is a separate reality-island full of mystery and surprise.

In other words,
learn to observe.

6. Read Aldous Huxley's
The Genius and the Goddess.
Note

how the Circuit III scientific Genius reverts to Circuit I helpless

infant when his wife leaves him.

7. After experimenting with the Nazi reality-tunnel, the

Catholic reality-tunnel etc., re-enter your "normal" reality tunnel.

Does it still seem totally objective, or do you begin to recognize

how much of it is your own software and hardware running

programs?

8. Finally, explore the tunnel-busting reality of Christopher S.

Hyatt' s book titled
Undoing Yourself With Energized Meditation

and Other Devices.
What tunnel-reality is he selling and how

sincere is he about his writing? Also, do you think he has read

my work and I his, or is this last statement a gimmick of the publishers

played on two innocent authors and the trusting public or

even worse did I write his book, or could it be, that we are one

and the same?

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

THE HOLISTIC

NEUROSOMATIC CIRCUIT

But there is also in us an aspiration for the mastery of Nature...

Health, strength, duration, happiness and ease, liberation from

suffering, are part of the physical transformation which.. .evolution

is called upon to realize.

— Sri Aurobindo,
The Future Evolution of Man

177

THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY NEED NOT BE

POSTPONED UNTIL AFTER DEATH. IT CAN HAPPEN

AT ANY MOMENT.

This is a copy of Crowley's inspired drawing. For his original

see
The Book of Thoth
or study his Tarot deck.

The beast with four heads represents the antique circuits; the

hedonic "laid-back" nude is neurosomatic rapture. The serpent is

"the rising of the kundalini serpent," a Hindu metaphor for

imprinting this Circuit V neurosomatic bliss-control.

Calling all downs. Calling all downs to dayne. Array!

Surrection! ... It is just, it is just about to, it is just about to

rolywholyover.

— James Joyce,
Finnegans Wake

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The word "psychosomatic" has been around long enough to be

generally understood; unfortunately, it is another semantic

spook. The concept of "psyche" or "soul" was borrowed from

the theologians, who, being bankrupt, are in no position to lend

anything.

What we know and experience—our tunnel-reality—is what

registers on the brain and nervous system.

The phenomena of "faith healing," "regeneration," "rejuvenation,"

bliss, ecstasy, rapture, etc. have been occurring for many

thousands of years, in all known cultures. In the pre-scientific

language of yesterday's psychology we would refer to such

events as "psychosomatic." In our deliberately modernistic and

almost sci-fi jargon, we prefer to call them
neurosomatic.

The neurosomatic circuit of the brain is much more recent

than the antique circuits previously discussed. It does not manifest

in all human beings, and appears late in life, usually, to those

who do activate and imprint it.

Temporary
neurosomatic consciousness can be acquired by

(a) the yoga practice of
pranayama
breathing and (b) for those

who can handle it, by ingestion of Cannabis drugs, such as

hashish and marijuana, which trigger neurotransmitters that activate

this circuit.

Of the former device,
pranayama,
Aleister Crowley—certainly