Prometheus Rising (29 page)

System. This system varies from society to society; hence,

cultural relativism—what is "real" to the Eskimo is not quite the

same as what is "real" to a New York taxi-driver.

To review: Each individual has a neurological system, or

game, different from other members of the same society. In

accord with Einstein's physical relativism, and anthropology's

cultural relativism, we call this
neurological relativism.

The vegetarian does not "see" (experience) meat on a rack in

the butcher shop the same way the meat-eater sees it. The racist

does not see a member of another race as, say, that person's

parents do. More generally, as the Poet tells us: "The Fool sees

not the same tree that the Wise Man sees."

Among the many editorial tasks of the brain, performed so

rapidly and smoothly that we do not notice it, is the classification

of the separate quanta of perception into "inside" and "outside."

That this neat system does not accord with brute fact we learn

from optics and neurology; that it can be abolished entirely, with

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great profit in terms of insight, we learn from the type of metaprogramming

experience called
dhyana
in the Hindu and

Buddhist traditions.

Crowley says of the
dhyana
experience:

In the course of our concentration we noticed that the contents

of the mind at any moment consisted of two things, and no

more: the (external) Object, variable, and the (internal) Subject,

invariable, or apparently so. By success in dharana1 the

object has been made as invariable as the subject.

Now the result of this is that the two become one. This

phenomenon usually comes as a tremendous shock.

In our words,
"mind"
(whatever that is)
and its contents are

functionally identical.
The usual system of classifying the contents

as "me" (part of "mind") and not-"me" ("outside") can be

abolished—not just by meditation, but by certain well-known

drugs—and the unity of the field of perception is then recognized.

We become Metaprogrammers.

This is what we might expect from the triumphs of field

theory and general systems theory in sociology, anthropology,

quantum theory etc. It still comes as a distinct shock when it is

experienced not just talked about. When "I" and "my world"

(field of perception) become one, "I" am transformed utterly, as

in "in a refiners' fire," as the mystics say.

This sounds a bit puzzling to the average person without experience

in brain-change games. Try this illustration: Assuming

you are reading this in your own home, look around the room.

Note that everything in your field of vision—furniture, paintings

or posters on the walls, stereo set or absence of same, rugs, TV

or not TV, etc.—is, in a sense, your
creation
or
co-creation.
You

and/or your spouse or room-mates(s)
selected
everything that got

into the room. You also
selected
or co-selected that particular

room, out of the millions of rooms on this planet where you

might otherwise live. The tunnel-reality of that room, then, in a

very real sense has been
"created"
or
"manifested"
by you, out

of a universe of infinite possibilities.

Silent meditation on one object for many weeks, like the Zen monk

with the ox.

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Prometheus Rising

Of course, only the most fanatic Freudian or Buddhist mystic

would claim your whole life history has been similarly

"selected" by you. But, stop and think a moment: the life-history

you
think
you have, the part that is stored in your brain as

"memory," has certainly been selected. You can't even remember

everything
that happened in the last five minutes. If you try

to be inwardly silent (passive; non-verbal) and notice everything

happening in your field for
one
minute, you are overwhelmed by

thousands of impressions that you cannot catalog and retain.

Conclusion: who you are, and what you think you are, is a

creation edited and orchestrated by your brain.

Everybody you meet is an "artist" who has made a similar

creation.

And these creations are, all of them, as diverse and idiosyncratic

as the musical styles of Bach, Beethoven, Rock, Wagner,

Vivaldi, Bizet, Orff, Chopin, John Cage, Soul, the Beatles, Harry

James, Disco, Scotch folk-songs, African chants...

As for the universe "outside" you: of course, you didn't create

that. But just
because you didn 't create it, you can never know

it...
except approximately. What you do know, and consider "the

universe outside" is another, part of your brain, which has made

of its circuits
a model
which you identify with the universe

outside.

These models are as varied and miscellaneous as the paintings

of Botticelli, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Picasso, Paul Klee, Wyeth,

Dali, Monet...

This the meaning of the notion that
mind and its contents are

functionally identical.

Consider the old folk-rhyme:

I saw a man upon the stair,

A little man who wasn't there.

He wasn't there again today;

Gee, I wish he'd go away.

This little man is a
semantic spook;
he exists only in the

language, and yet once the language has invoked him
it almost

seems to make sense
to wish he would go away.

Recent advances in semantics, semiotic, linguistic analysis,

foundations of mathematics, logic, etc. have demonstrated that

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our conceptual field—our symbolic environment—is haunted by

many such "spooks."

There are Empedoclean paradoxes, of which the classic is:

Theologians are vexed by questions like: Can an omnipotent

God create a rock so heavy He Himself cannot lift it? (If he

cannot, he is not omnipotent; and if he can, he is also not omnipotent.)

Philosophers and physicists are still bothered by: what

happened before Time began? Somebody is supposed to have

remarked, "I'm glad I don't like cauliflower, because if I liked it,

I'd eat it, and I hate the stuff."
Alice in Wonderland,
and any

treatise on mathematical logic, will provide hundreds of examples

of similar mind-benders.

A Zen saying sums it all up:

"To think that I am not going to think of you anymore is still

thinking of you. Let me then try not to think that I am not

going to think of you."

Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead attempted to

resolve all such conundrums with a mathematical proposition

known as the Theory of Types. Unfortunately, it was quickly

pointed out that either (a) the Theory of Types refers to itself, in

which case it limits itself by its own terms, and does not solve all

our semantic problems, or (b) the Theory of Types does not refer

to itself, in which case there are propositions to which it does not

refer, and it is again limited, and we are left with our problems.

These third-circuit perplexities are of more than technical

logical and philosophical import. Many situations in real life take

the form of our being haunted by our own semantic spooks. For

instance, the popular novel,
Catch-22,
deals with a very real

Empedoclean knot: the hero can escape from the war if he can

prove his is crazy, but if he attempts to do this it will prove he is

sane, since it is sane to escape a dangerous situation.

The logic of the dream-world of
Finnegans Wake
is not so far

from real life, either. A patient, of German birth, at St. Elizabeth's

hospital, would not walk through doors, explaining
"Da

fressen mich die Turen."
(The doors will eat me.) This makes

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perfect sense phonetically, since it is identical in pronunciation

with
"Dafressen mich die Tieren. "
(The animals will eat me).

Word-magic? Schizophrenia? The average person, not a vegetarian,

will respond positively to "tender juicy filet mignon" on

the menu; but not to "a piece off of a dead castrated bull." But

the two expressions mean the same thing.

We all tend to conjugate sentences in the manner caricatured

by Bertrand Russell: "I am firm. You are obstinate. He is a pigheaded

fool." ("I am daring and original. You are pretentious.

She stinks." "I am flexible. You bend with the wind. They're a

bunch of opportunists.")

The magic of poetry creates "real toads in imaginary gardens,"

it has been said. When Robert Burns writes:

The wan moon is setting behind the white wave

And Time is setting with me, oh

it is hard not to feel that the abstraction "time" has become as

real as the physical moon and wave—or the little man upon the

stair.

Consider the following table:

Any phrase in column I can describe persons or events that

might very well be described, by a different speaker, with the

corresponding phrase in column II. Now the reader may feel that

some of the phrases above are so pejorative, so loaded with prejudice,

that only the most ignorant or bigoted would use them; but

that is irrelevant. What needs to be noted is that it is
easy
to see

the bias in somebody else's semantic maps, but not so easy to see

the bias in one's own semantic reality-tunnel. If the reader were

born in Arkansas in the 1920s, item 1 in Column I might seem

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235

the natural, accurate, normal way to refer to the first NAACP

worker to appear and try to organized the Blacks.

These matters are symbolic, but more than linguistic. For

example, the proverbial Englishman who dressed for dinner

every night in his lonely tropical hut was no fool. He was keeping

an English third-circuit reality bubble
around him, to avoid

becoming engulfed in the reality-bubble of the natives. See what

happens to Kurz in Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
when the

African reality-tunnel overwhelms his European reality-tunnel.

It only takes a few weeks in prison to become "a convict,"

whatever your definition of yourself was before, it only takes a

few weeks in the Army to become a "soldier."

These remarks are another elucidation of our earlier statement

that
mind and its contents are functionally identical.
The symbolizing

process is such that, once set in motion, it is virtually

impossible (without subtle neurological know-how) to escape

from a reality-tunnel one has created for oneself or had foisted

upon one by the environment.

Kurt Saxon is the author of
The Poor Man's James Bond,
a

manual that tells you everything you could ever want to know

about practical techniques of murder and mayhem,
The Survivor,

a four-volume extension of the same libretto, telling where to

acquire any possible type of weapon,
Root Rot,
a diatribe against

Alex Haley for implying that slavery was unfair to Black people,

and several similar books. Mr. Saxon does not get reviewed in

the Liberal magazines that decide which authors are important,

but he has a wide readership among the Apocalyptical sects of

the right-wing end of the political spectrum.

Mr. Saxon wrote in the 1970s that the United States would be

destroyed almost totally by 1982. This is because the government

has driven the "competents" out of business by excessive

taxation and has subsidized 30 million "incompetents" on Welfare

and another 30 million "incompetents" on Social Security.

This country has thus become, Saxon says, "a Disneyland for

dummies."

By 1982, Saxon said, the whole economy would collapse.

"Millions of taxpayers will be unemployed... Millions who are

now on Valium or other tranquilizers will go insane when they

cannot get more. Drug addicts (will) swarm over pharmacies

236 Prometheus Rising

looking for dope, ruining everything they don't steal..." We will

be helpless against Russian attack because "our politicians have

so devoted themselves to nurturing...incompetent dependents

that further industrialization to put our nation on a war footing

will be unaffordable. Even if it were not, our present unionspoiled

and demanding work force cannot be expected to

perform the way our parents did in the war plants of the late

1930s and early 1940s." The only solution, Saxon informs us, is

to buy farms, order his books on how to kill people efficiently,

and stockpile every type of weaponry, to fight off the "drooling