Prometheus Rising (26 page)

will occur, while the Rationalist left brain invents rationalizations

to go there. Synchronicities are a language through

Prometheus Rising
205

which this circuit communicates with the left brain, in this

theory. Try explaining coincidences by that theory. What

messages is your right brain trying to send to your left brain?

6. Jung and several of his disciples (e.g., Coleman, Steiger,

Fiedler) have suggested that UFOs are messages from this

collective DNA circuit to the left brain. What do such messages

mean? What is the right brain trying to tell us?

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

INTRODUCTION TO THE

METAPROGRAMMING

CIRCUIT

It is the human situation that is basically tragic. Right and Left

revolutionaries cannot alter this basic dilemma. For instance, the

most radical Left-wing group has no program to overcome death.

The entire Right-Left establishment is still death oriented.

— P.M. Esfandiary,
Upwingers

207

CAN 100,000 PEOPLE HALLUCINATE AT ONCE?

How else do you explain history?

208

I once saw a cartoon—I forget where—that seems to me to

summarize the central fact of neurological relativism.

A cat approaches a dog and says "Meow." The dog looks

confused. The cat repeats, "Meow!" The dog still looks confused.

The cat repeats, more emphatically, "MEEOW!!!" Finally,

the dog ventures, "Bow-wow?" The cat stalks away indignantly,

thinking "Dumb dog!"

Of course, human communication, and our great philosophical

debates, cannot be on this primitive level.
Of course!

Nonetheless...

Between May and October, 1917, in Fatima, Spain, occurred

the best documented series of "miracles" in modern history. As

everybody knows, it began when three illiterate peasant girls had

a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Please note at once that it is

easy, and tempting, for the Rationalist, and the non-Catholic

generally, to treat this first incident as "merely" hallucination.

Note next how hard it is to make that explanation stick
as the

subsequent details are narrated.

At the second "visitation of the Virgin" in June there were

fifty witnesses.
All agreed that they heard an explosion and saw a

puff of smoke. (Only the three girls on this and subsequent occasions

ever saw the Lady.) Shall we assume now that, in addition

to hallucinating girls we must add
a practical joker with a smoke

bomb,
to make sense of what was going on?

At the third visitation in July there were 4500
witnesses.
All

of them heard an explosion again, at the Lady's departure, and

most of them claimed they heard humming and buzzing noises

while the children spoke to her. (This humming and buzzing is

common in later UFO stories...)

On August 13, there were
18,000 witnesses,
who saw, or

hallucinated a symphony of weirdities, including flowers falling

out of the sky, another explosion, bright flashes of light on the

clouds and on the ground (crimson, pink, yellow and blue) and a

luminous globe spinning through the sky, just like a modern

UFO.

On September 13, there were
30,000 witnesses.
All saw the

luminous "UFO" again, and there was another downpour—not

flowers this time, but glistening globules of light that got smaller

as they descended and "melted" near ground level. Dr. Carl

209

2io Prometheus Rising

Sagan would have solemnly told you, with his bare face hanging

out, that all 30,000 witnesses were hallucinating simultaneously.

October 13, the last "miracle" was witnessed by
70,000 at the

scene,
and
30,000 others
for hundreds of miles around claimed

to see some of the phenomena. Some said that the sun plunged

directly toward the earth, but others that a globe "big and bright

as the sun" had appeared and did the plunging. This was accompanied

by flashes of red, violet, blue and yellow, together with a

"heavenly" perfume permeating the air.

It is claimed that "thousands" of people were converted to

Catholicism by these events. Please note that if it had all happened

50 years later in 1967, many of these people would have

been converted to the newer mystique of the Space Brothers.

Nietzsche once said, "We are all greater artists than we realize."

It is a function of the above record (and this book as a

whole) to make that obscure joke totally clear to every reader.

But, but, but—All 100,000 witnesses who saw some of the

phenomena associated with the last Fatima "miracle" must have

been hallucinating, of course. This is the most comfortable and

conservative way of dealing with such events, and one does not

have to be as narrow as Dr. Sagan to prefer such a simple explanation.

Still...if 100,000 people can hallucinate simultaneously,

and if, as history assures us, many millions can share a

"religious" or political delusion simultaneously, only a man as

rigidly dogmatic as Sagan can avoid asking the most disturbing

questions about the origin of his own beliefs and perceptions.

Cromwell once addressed the Irish rebels, saying, "I beseech

you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you might be

wrong." History does not record that Cromwell ever addressed

the same remark to himself.

Each of us is trapped in the reality-tunnel (assumptionconsumption)

his or her brain has manufactured. We do not

"see" it or "sense" it as
a model our brain has created.
We

automatically, unconsciously, mechanically "see" and "sense" it

out there,
apart form us, and we consider it "objective." When

we meet somebody whose separate tunnel-reality is obviously far

different from ours, we are a bit frightened and always disoriented.

We tend to think they are mad, or that they are crooks

Prometheus Rising 211

trying to con us in some way, or that they are hoaxters playing a

joke.

Yet it is neurologically obvious that no two brains have the

same genetically-programmed hard wiring, the same imprints,

the same conditioning, the same learning experiences. We are all

living in separate realities. That is why communication fails so

often, and misunderstandings and resentments are so common. I

say "meow" and you say "Bow-wow," and each of us is convinced

the other is a bit dumb.

According to reliable statistics, over 100,000,000 citizens of

the U.S. "believe in" UFOs and
at least
15,000,000 have seen a

UFO. The system of ideas, rumors, myths, hopes etc. clustered

about the UFO phenomenon may be
the most powerful sociological

force
for change currently acting upon our society, as Dr.

Jacques Vallee recently stressed in an address to a special United

Nations committee on the UFO mystery.

The UFO debate, or quarrel, hinges upon the two categories

which we find central to our thesis—the innocent-looking ideas

of "inside" and "outside." Broadly speaking, the UFO "skeptics"

are those who claim the UFO is "inside" the UFO observer

("hallucination," misidentification, etc.), while the UFO

"believers" claim the UFO is "outside" (objectivity).

As the semanticist Alfred Korzybski often warned, when we

split verbally that which is never split existentially we introduce

fallacies into our thinking. Korzybski's favorite example was the

matter of "space" and "time"; for in experience, we never

encounter "space" without "time" or "time" without "space," i.e..

a year measures the
space
the Earth moves around the sun, and

the space the Earth travels in one orbit gives us the
time
we call a

"year." The verbal separation of "space" and "time" became

such a problem in late 19th Century physics that paradoxes and

contradictions multiplied endlessly; and this was only resolved

when the genius of Einstein went back before the verbal categories,

realized we had created them, and started physics over

from the ground up on the simple existential fact that we never

encounter "space" or "time" separately but only the undifferentiated

"space-time continuum."

Applying this Einsteinian operational orientation to the UFO

problem, we observe that we never hear of a UFO without a

2/2
Prometheus Rising

human observer. In fact, even the UFOs "seen" on radar become

UFOs (unidentified, rather than identified, flying objects)

through
processes of evaluation
in the
nervous system
of the

radar operator.

It is, therefore, the Einsteinian and operational approach to

accept the seamless unity of UFO-observer and cease to separate

them into "UFO" and "observer."

The types of "critters" who appear in human-UFO experiences

include the following:

Black men, blue men, green men, black-faced men with green

bodies;

Fish-scaled men, hairy dwarfs, huge-headed bald dwarfs,

armless humanoids;

Dwarfs with three fingers, dwarfs with eight fingers, clawhanded

men, one-eyed men;

Elephant-eared men, long-haired sexless WoMen, man-apes,

man-birds;

Robots, beer-can shaped entities walking on fins, headless

things, dwarfs in Nazi uniforms;

Sinister "Greys" who engage in sexual and/or genetic tamperings

with humans.

This is only a partial zoology of the UFO experience.

The craft favored by this odd crew includes big blobs of light,

little blobs of light, clusters of lights, hard metallic ships, flatbottom

discs, conic discs, coin-like discs, domed discs, ovals,

spheres, spheroids, cigar-shaped craft, cubes, tetrahedrons, crescents,

"eggs," teardrop shapes, boomerangs. This is also a partial

list.

"We are being invaded by beings from dozens of galaxies,"

said Otto Binder, a believer in the extraterrestrial theory of

UFOs, when this list was shown to him.

One consistency does appear in this confusing picture: those

who have had Close Encounters show marked personality

change afterwards. At one extreme we find paranoid and

schizophrenic breakdowns or acute anxieties requiring hospitalization;

at the other, "illuminations" similar to those of Buddha,

Mohammed, Jesus, St. Paul. In the middle we find a great deal of

messianic fanaticism typical of vulgar religiosity everywhere.

Prometheus Rising
2/j

Other statistical clusterings can be found in the literature.

Blinding lights
are very common—do we recall St. Paul and the

thousands at Fatima? And
drumming and humming noises are

also common—as in shamanism everywhere, at Fatima, and

even in so sophisticated a brain-change system as Tibetan

Buddhism.

Let nobody underestimate this phenomenon just because it is

irrational. It is equally irrational for 900 people to drink cyanide

because a paranoid on pep-pills tells them to, and Nazism and

the Holy Inquisition were equally irrational. As Dr. Jacques

Vallee told the UN committee on UFOs,

It is the
third aspect
o/the UFO phenomenon which deserves

full attention... The third aspect is the social belief system

which has been generated by...the expectation of space

victors. This belief.
..is creating new religious, cultural and

political concepts
of which social science has taken little

notice. [Italics in original.]1

Rationalism—a philosophy for which we have great sympathy,

as for a backward relative—wants to take UFO "observers"

by the collar, shake them vigorously and shout in their ears,

"Look you so and so. It never happened!—you got it, buddy?"

Well, maybe it didn't—and then again maybe it did. In either

case, UFO-observers are all better artists than they realize.

It should also be obvious that the Rationalist is a better artist

than
he
realizes. Amid millions of people who have or create

such experiences every day in every city on the planet, the

Rationalist has created a separate reality in which such things

never happen—to him.

Flying saucers and ESP (not to mention Fatima and its

"miracles") may seem far removed from Patty Hearst's

Dr. Carl Jung has compared the UFOs in general and Close Encounters

in particular with the "signs and wonders" that accompanied the

breakdown of Roman paganism and the rise of Christianity. It is

ironic to remember that the Rationalists of that time—the Stoics,