Prometheus Rising (22 page)

the most skeptical of all mystics—writes forcefully:

For mind and body alike there is no purgative like pranayama,

no purgative like pranayama.

For mind and body alike, for mind and body alike—

alike!—there is, there is, there is no purgative like pranayama

—pranayama!—pranayama! yea, for mind and body

alike there is no purgative, no purgative, no purgative (for

mind and body alike) no purgative like pranayama!

If this is not emphatic enough, Crowley adds elsewhere:

Pranayama is notably useful in quieting the emotions and

appetites... Digestive troubles in particular are very easy to

remove in this way. It purifies both the body and the mind and

should be practiced certainly never less than one hour daily by

the serious student.

To which he adds a footnote:

Emphatically. Emphatically. Emphatically. It is impossible to

combine pranayama properly performed with emotional

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thought [second-circuit reflexes—R.A.W.]. It should be

resorted to immediately, at all times during life, when calm is

threatened.

This is very strong stuff from the mystic who filled his books

with jokes and jeers, and who always told his students, not

"Believe me," but "Don't believe me." About pranayama, for

once in his life, Crowley was serious.

In the experience of this author, pranayama will remove all

forms of depression, including profound grief and bereavement;

it will soothe anger and remove resentments; it seems beneficial

to all minor health problems and—occasionally—major health

problems. Hindus, who are professionals at pranayama, claim a

great deal more, such as: immunity to pain of all sorts,
Samadhi

("union with God"), levitation, etc.

Most notably, pranayama creates neurosomatic Turn On:

sensory
enrichment,
sensual
bliss,
perceptual
delight, and a

general laid-back Hedonic "high." Similar effects are produced

by
voluntary
isolation in a Lilly tank, by zero-gravity (the

astronaut's "mystical" experiences are all of this neurosomatic

variety) and, for the judicious or lucky, Cannabis drugs, as said

above. ; *

Negative
neurosomatic circuit effects are experienced by

amateur yogis, by many pot-heads, and by a large number of

schizophrenics. The neurosomatic feedback loop, in these unfortunate

cases, reverses the above description.
Sensory
experience

becomes unpleasant (any sound or touch is painful),
sensuality

turns into acute discomfort with the entire body,
perceptions

warp into nightmare, and general anxiety is imprinted. Light is

particularly terrifying and painful, often associated with Hell or

with "mind-control" manipulated by unscrupulous enemies.

Gopi Krishna, a Hindu bureaucrat who took up yoga originally

only for health reasons, was abruptly catapulted into a

negative neurosomatic state for several years.
All
sensations were

so painful that he many times thought he would die. The details,

in his autobiography,
Kundalini,
are pathetic, and sound much

like schizophrenia. He came out of this finally, entered a positive

neurosomatic state, and has been writing blissful books about the

Perfection of the All, typical of this circuit, ever since.

Prometheus Rising 181

Nikola Tesla, the Yugoslav genius, went through the same

"Hell" or schizoid state, without yoga, in his teens. He came out

of the horrors with the scientific theory of alternating currents

worked out, a belief in extra-sensory perception, a superhuman

memory, and a streak of visionary humanitarianism that led him

into continuous conflicts with the corporations that financed his

more-than-100 major electrical inventions. (He earned over

$1,000,000 before the age of 30, at a time when $1,000,000 was

a lot of money, and he died broke, trying to sell an invention he

said would abolish poverty.)

Most shamans, and many mystics, have been through similar

negative-to-positive neurosomatic sensitization. Christian Scientists

call it
"chemicalization."
St. John of the Cross called it,

poetically, the Dark Night of the Soul. Cabalists call it "crossing

the Abyss."

In Kazanzakis'
The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel,
Odysseus

sees a statue which seems to him urgently meaningful. The statue

was Kazanzakis' symbol for the evolution of these circuits,

which have been known (more or less) in various symbolisms for

a few thousand years. E.g., the "seven souls" of the Egyptians,

the ten "lights" of the Cabalists, etc.

The Kazanzakis statue shows an animal (Circuit I), a warrior

above the animal (Circuit II), a scholar above the warrior (Circuit

III), a lover (Circuit IV), a face in agony ("chemicalization" the

"Dark Night of the Soul", the "crossing of the Abyss" which

equals the entry to Circuit V the hard way), a face in bliss

(successful Circuit V reimprinting) and a man turning into pure

spirit (Circuit VII). Circuit VI is missing in the schemata, as

Circuit IV is missing in Jung, and everything above Circuit III is

missing in Carl Sagan.

Some lucky souls jump to Circuit V bliss without passing

through the horrors of "chemicalization" and the "Dark Night of

the Soul."

The neurosomatic circuit is "polymorphous perverse," in

Freud's unappetizing terminology. This merely means that the

nervous system itself, taking over as driver, is now directing the

rest of the body. "Every act (becomes) an orgasm," said Aleister

Crowley, giving his own Tantric emphasis to the polymorphous

nature of this circuit.

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Prometheus Rising

The lives of the saints are full of stories which seem

"miracles" to the four-circuited majority, or are rejected as "lies,

hoaxes, yarns" by the three-circuited dogmatic Rationalist, but

which seem perfectly normal from the viewpoint of five-circuited

polymorphous consciousness. The saint says he is in rapture, and

full of gratitude to God, for giving him such a feast for dinner

as—plain
bread
and
water.
(Of course, many a pot-head will

understand that degree of neurosomatic rapture...) The guru

comes into the room and his bio-energy
1
has such a charge that a

cripple jumps up and is "healed"; the cripple merely acquired

neurosomatic turn-on
by contact,
as some people get "contact

high" when others are on drugs. The fire-walkers in many

shamanic traditions walk on the fire, as they tell enquiring

anthropologists, to prove their control over "the spirit"—i.e., to

demonstrate
to themselves and others that they have achieved

high-quality neurosomatic tuning.

One faith-healer told the present author, "Most people die of

adrenaline poisoning." In our terminology, most people have too

much first-circuit anxiety and second-circuit territorial pugnacity

for their own good. They are literally
struggling for survival,
as

no other animals do, despite Darwin. Most animals simply
play

most of the time, solve problems of survival when they have to,

or die of not solving the problems; only humans are
conscious of

struggling,
and hence worried and depressed about the Game of

Life.

The faith-healer went on, "What cures them is realizing that

I'm
not afraid." That is, contact with a fifth-circuit personality, a

person who controls his or her own Circuit II adrenaline-trips,

can be a catalyst, throwing the sufferer upward into a personal

fifth-circuit experience.

The
avant-garde
20% of the population, due to the

Consciousness Movement (a secularization of much ancient

shamanic wisdom), already understands every "wild" idea in the

last few pages. They have had enough neurosomatic experience

By which we mean nothing "mystical." It is now known that many

physical
energies radiate from the body, and that even
chemical

effects can be transmitted (experienced as emotional "vibes") from

one person to another, the chemicals acting as stimuli to trigger

neurotransmitter actions in the second person.

Prometheus Rising 183

to know that they were once totally robotized (as most people

still are) and are knowingly engaged in acquiring more neurosomatic

know-how.
When this reaches 51% of the population, a

major historic al revolution will have occurred, as profound as

the Life Extension Revolution.
'

In McLuhan's terms, the fifth circuit is "non-linear" and

"global." That is, it is not limited by the one-thing-at-a-time

sequences of the semantic circuit; it
thinks in Gestalts.
This is

why it is so often connected with "intuition," which is a way of

thinking between and around data-points on the perceptual

screen—sensing what total field the points must be part of.

The great musician has developed a remarkable feedback

between fifth-circuit
Gestalt-ing
and the third-circuit function of

coding such "coherent structures" into the inspired symbolism of

music. Music always leads to some right-brain activity in listeners,

and the fifth circuit is almost certainly located in the right

brain hemisphere.

Beethoven, we remember, was left-handed. Since the
left

hand
is neurologically linked to the polymorphous
right brain,

one might say he was genetically inclined to right brain activities,

that is, to sensing coherent
wholes,
to plunging into neurosomatic

bliss almost "at will," and to sensory-sensual raptness

and rapture. Everybody "knows" that the Sixth Symphony is

"pantheistic," but whether Beethoven was an ideological pantheist

or not, that way of responding to nature is normal and natural

right-brain Circuit V functioning. That is, anybody on the Fifth

Circuit will
"talk like a pantheist"
whether or not he has developed

a "philosophy" about pantheism. The miracle of Beethoven

is not that he felt the universe that way—a few thousand fifthcircuit

types throughout history have also felt and sensed nature

that way—but that he mastered the third-circuit art of music with

such skill that he could
communicate such experiences,
which is

precisely what the ordinary "mystic" cannot do.

The neurosomatic circuit probably began to appear around

30,000 years ago. (That is the conclusion of Barbara Honnegger,

who has made a profound study of European cave paintings,

coming to the conclusion that many of them show
exercizes to

Please re-read this sentence, and think about it.

184 Prometheus Rising

increase right-brain activity
similar to those still used in surviving

shamanic and yogic traditions.)

This fifth circuit is bonded into the
right cortex
and neurologically

linked to the
limbic
(first circuit)
system
and the
genitalia.

These neural links explain the sexual metaphor of "kundalini" or

"serpent" energy used to describe this circuit in systems as

varied as Indian Tantra, Gnosticism and Voodoo, and the

Chinese
yin yang
(male-female) energies associated with it.

Prolonged
sexual play without orgasm always triggers some

Circuit V consciousness.

It is quite easy to determine if the Fifth Circuit has been activated

successfully or not. How often does a person go to a

doctor? If a mind researcher is "glowing" rather than greyish,

"bouncy" rather than craggy, if he or she has a "sparkle"—and if

he or she virtually
never
goes to a doctor—the neurosomatic

circuit has been mastered. As Mary Baker Eddy once wrote

(thereby making herself hugely unpopular with those who love to

talk of matters mystical but have no empirical knowledge):

"The Word was made flesh." Divine Truth must be known by

its effects on the body as well as on the mind.

There is no tribe known to anthropology which doesn't have

at least one neurosomatic technician (shaman). Large-scale outbursts

of neurosomatic consciousness have occurred frequently

in all the major historical periods, usually being stamped out

quickly by the local branch of the Inquisition or the A.M.A.;