Prometheus Rising (24 page)

learn to do it for themselves.

Prometheus Rising

One of the greatest historical practitioners of this neuroscience

was Hassan i Sabbah, who used relatively simple techniques,

including, evidently, a time-release capsule invented by the
Sufi

College of Wisdom in Cairo.

As I describe Hassan's technique — based on historical

records — in my novel,
The Trick Top Hat:
Two young candidates

dine with Hassan; the food is laced with a time-release

capsule. When asleep the candidates are taken to Hassan's

famous "Garden of Delights." The capsule had released a heavy

does of opium and they were quite thoroughly unconscious and

unaware of their surroundings.

The garden — of officially known as the "the Garden of

Delights" — covered several acres. Here candidates were prepared

for admission to the Order of the Assassins: they were to become

the most feared and legendary professional killers in history. But

here also, in this same garden, were prepared candidates for

admission to the Brotherhood of Light, the Illuminati. The candidates,

in fact, were prepared the same way. They themselves

selected, unknown to themselves, which order they would

enter — the political Assassins or the mystic Illuminati.

Both young men were conveyed into the Garden of Delights

and placed several acres apart from each other. In a short time,

the second stage of the time-release capsule began to work;

cocaine was released into their bloodstreams, thereby overwhelming

the traces of the soporific opium and causing them to

awaken full of energy and zest. At the same time, as they woke,

hashish also began to be released, so they saw everything with

exceptional clarity and all colors were jewel-like, brilliant,

divinely beautiful.

A group of extremely comely and busty young ladies —

imported from the most expensive brothel in Cairo — sat in a

circle around each of the young candidates, playing flutes and

other delicately sweet musical instruments. "Welcome to

heaven," they sang as the awakening men gazed about them in

wonder. "By the magic of the holy Lord Hassan, you have

entered Paradise while still alive." And they fed them "paradise

apples" (oranges), far sweeter and stranger than the earth-apples

they had known before, and they showed them the animals of

paradise (imported from as far away as Japan, in some cases),

Prometheus Rising 191

creatures far more remarkable than those ordinarily seen in

Afghanistan.

"This
is
heaven!" the first young man exclaimed, in ecstasy.

"Great is Allah, and great is the wise Lord Hassan Sabbah!"

But, twenty acres away, surrounded by similar lovely ladies

and other wonders, the second young man merely gazed about

him, smiled in contentment, and said nothing.

And then, in both cases, the
houris
of Paradise, as promised in

the
Koran,
began to dance, and as they danced, they discarded

one by one each of their seven veils. As the veils were thrown

off, more and more hashish was released from the capsules and

the young men saw with greater clarity, felt with deeper intensity,

experienced beauty and sexual joy in a way completely

unknown in their previous earth lives.

Then, as each young man sat entranced by the beauty and

wonder of Heaven, the
houris
finished the dance, and nude and

splendid as they were, rushed forward in a bunch, like flowers

cast before the wind. And some fell at the candidate's feet and

kissed his ankles; some kissed knees or thighs, one sucked raptly

at his penis, others kissed the chest and arms and belly, a few

kissed eyes and mouth and ears. And as he was smothered in this

hashish-intensified avalanche of love, the lady working on his

penis sucked and sucked and he climaxed in her mouth as softly

and slowly and blissfully as a single snowflake falling.

In a little while, there was no more hashish being released and

more opium began to flow into the bloodstream, the young

candidates slept again; and in their torpor, they were removed

from the Garden of Delights and returned to the banquet hall of

the Lord Hassan.

There they awoke.

"Truly," the first exclaimed, "I have seen the glories of

Heaven, as foretold in
Al Koran.
I have no more doubts. I will

trust Hassan i Sabbah and love him and serve him."

"You are accepted for the Order of Assassin," said Hassan

solemnly. "Go at once to the Green Room to meet your superior

in the order."

When this candidate had left, Hassan turned to the second,

asking, "And you?"

792
Prometheus Rising

"I have discovered the First Matter, the Medicine of Metals,

the Elixir of Life, the Stone of the Philosophers, True Wisdom

and Perfect Happiness," said he, quoting the alchemical formula.

"And it is inside my own head!"

Hassan i Sabbah grinned broadly. "Welcome to the Order of

the Illuminati!" he said, laughing.

Hassan i Sabbah was not the first or last student of the ways

in which sexuality can be transmuted into fifth-circuit rapture.

Further to the East, there were Tantric schools within Hinduism,

Buddhism and Taoism, which taught techniques by which

prolongation of the genital embrace could explode into dramatic

brain-change. In the West, underground cults of Gnostics,

Illuminati, alchemists and witches kept similar techniques as

closely guarded secrets, for if the Holy Inquisition ever learned

of such practices the participants would be denounced as devilworshippers

and burned at the stake.

In our own time, there has been a revolutionary upsurge of

these ancient neurological secrets, with an admixture of more

modern techniques. Tantric teachers are available in many cities.

Masters and Johnson use quasi-Tantric practices to treat sexual

dysfunctions. As early ..as 1968, a poll by McGlothlin showed

that 85% of the pot-smokers in the country said their chief interest

in the Weed was its function as enhancer of erotic sensation.

Vibrators and other sexual toys proliferate; Gays come out of the

closet; philosophers of a culture without repression (Norman

Brown, Henri Marcuse, Charles Reich) become best-sellers.

Saul Kent, a writer on medical science for general audiences,

has even suggested that electronic sexual surrogates can and will

be manufactured in the near future. (Your own Marilyn Monroe

doll!) Instead of joining Tom Wolfe and the neo-puritans in

throwing up our hands in horror at such an idea, let us consider it

for a moment. Let us see if we can peek outside our imprinted

conditioned reality-tunnel.

If a sexual android is possible in 2005 or 2050 or whenever,

why not a totally programmed sexual environment? Let us call

this, in memory of Herman Hesse, the Magic Theatre. We start

with what is concurrently available in high-priced brothels in the

hedonic Sun Belt section of America.

Prometheus Rising 193

Massage, a first-circuit tranquilizer, has all the advantages of

the opiates without being habit-forming. Our Magic Theatre,

then, would include computerized body-relaxers-and-energizers

better than current massage techniques.

Porn movies are available, for stimulation, in the better

brothels. Our Magic Theatre would have them in 3D on all four

walls, obviously.

Marijuana and stimulants like cocaine or speed are available

in brothels everywhere. Our Magic Theatre would have better

chemical rapture-agents.

One can go on adding details, according to personal fantasy,

until one has created a room in which bliss can be extended in all

dimensions, indefinitely.

A strange thing has happened in constructing this cyberneticized

brothel. We seem to have gone beyond sex to something

that might be called meta-sex. While specific genital pleasure

might still be fun, it is hardly as important as it seemed to us

before we came into the multi-dimensional Pleasure Dome

where all senses are stimulated to ecstasy.

And the most peculiar thing about this bawdy science-fiction

projection is that we don't even need to build a Magic Room. It

is built into our brains already. We have been describing the

positive neurosomatic consciousness which Freud called

"polymorphous perversity" in one of his Puritan moods and "the

oceanic experience" in one of his mystical moments. This is

what the neurosomatically turned-on brain feels like.

In alchemy this was known as "the multiplication of the first

matter" or "the Philosopher's Gold," which was unlike ordinary

gold in that it could not be
spent
or used-up, since it perpetually

multiplied and renewed itself. It is the "Third Eye" of the Illuminati

tradition, which transforms all it sees; the eye of which Jesus

speaks in his gnomic aphorism,

"The light of the body is the eye; if therefore thine eye be

single, thy whole body will be full of light."

— Matt 6:22

EXERCIZES

1. Get the lesson book from the local Christian Science Reading

Room and read the lessons for a month.

194 Prometheus Rising

2.
Attend a Sufi week-end seminar.

3. Acquire my book
Sex & Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits

(New Falcon Publications) and try the Tantric exercizes there

described.

4. Learn how to do pranayama properly, from an expert. (I

have tried describing this elsewhere, and have found there is no

way to prevent gross errors in verbal transmission of this nonverbal

knowledge. Get a Hindu to
show
you.)

5. Da Free John, an American guru, says you can reach

Illumination by constantly asking, "Who is the One who is living

me now?" Well—is it Circuit I consciousness, Circuit II ego,

Circuit III mind, Circuit IV sex-role, Circuit V Gestalt-field, or a

higher circuit?

Who is it? Where is it?
How old
is it?

6. Dr. Aiden Kelly has suggested that the so-called "unconscious"

is
more conscious
than the so-called conscious mind.

That is, the "unconscious" contains all the feedbacks of the

neurosomatic circuit and the other circuits that maintain life.

Consider this idea. Is this the "One who is living you now"?

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE COLLECTIVE

NEUROGENETIC CIRCUIT

It is no longer only the Right that is conservative. The entire Left is

also suddenly conservative. The liberal and the radical Left have

fallen behind.

— P.M. Esfandiary,
Upwingers

195

The sixth circuit of the brain kicks into action when the nervous

system begins to receive signals from
within the individual

neuron—
from the RNA-DNA "dialogue," the neurogenetic feedback

system.

The entire nervous system, including the brain, has been

designed like the rest of the body, by the "code" within the DNA

molecule, which sends signals via messenger RNA molecules to

tell the organism what to do:
Grow red hair. Have blue eyes.

Stand up and walk now. Start to talk. Find a mate.
Etc. Our

entire mental lives—our brain hardware and software—exist

within the perimeters of this DNA master-tape.

With neurogenetic consciousness, these DNA archives

become accessible to brain scanning,
while awake.
(They are

always accessible, as archetypes of the Jungian "collective

unconscious," during dreaming sleep.)

The first to achieve neurogenetic awareness, a few thousand

years ago, spoke of "memories of past lives," "re-incarnation,"

"immortality," etc. That these neurological adepts were speaking

of something real, in the best language of their day, is indicated

by the fact that many of them (especially Hindus and Sufis) gave

marvelously accurate poetic vistas of evolution millennia before

Darwin and foresaw Super-humanity before Nietzsche.

The Greeks called this "the vision of Pan," the Chinese "the

great Tao," Hindus "Atman consciousness." The numinous,

awful, sublime "God" "Goddess" and "Demon" figures who

appear in the initial stages of this Awakening are Jung's

"archetypes of the collective unconscious" and are recognized as

"victors from dream-time" by primitives, as "them from Sidde"

by witches, as the Weird People in a thousand folk-traditions.

Gurdjieff calls this circuit the True Emotional Center.

The "akashic records" of Theosophy, the "phylogenetic

unconscious" of Dr. Stanislaus Grof, the "Gaia hypothesis" of