Prometheus Rising (5 page)

8. The Non-Local Quantum Circuit.
This is imprinted by

Shock, by "near-death" or "clinical death" experience, by

OOBEs (out-of-body-experiences), by trans-time perceptions

("precognition"), by trans-space visions (ESP), etc. It tunes the

brain into the non-local quantum communication system suggested

by physicists such as Bohm, Walker, Sarfatti, Bell, etc.

These circuits will be explained in detail as we proceed.

42 Prometheus Rising

EXERCIZES

1. If you don't already have a computer, run out and buy one.

Then re-read this chapter.

2. To understand
hardware
and
software are
(as applied to the

human brain) perform the following meditation.

Sit in a room where you will not be disturbed for a half hour

and begin thinking, "I am sitting in this room doing this exercize

because..." and list as many of the "causes" as you can think of.

For instance, you are doing this exercize because, obviously,

you read about it in this book. Why did you buy this book? Did

somebody recommend it? How did that person come into your

life? If you just picked the book up in a store, why did you

happen to be in just that store on just that day?

Why do you read books of this sort—on psychology, consciousness,

evolution etc.? How did you get interested in those

fields? Who turned you on, and how long ago? What factors in

your childhood inclined you to be interested in these subjects

later?

Why are you doing this exercize in
this
room and not elsewhere?

Why did you buy or rent this house or apartment? Why

are you in this city and not another? Why on this continent and

not another?

Why are you here at all—that is, how did your parents meet?

Did they consciously decide to have a child, do you happen to

know, or were you an accident? What cities were they born in? If

in different cities, why did they move in space-time so that their

paths would intersect?

Why is this planet capable of supporting life, and why did it

produce the kind of life that would dream up an exercize of this

sort?

Repeat this exercize a few days later, trying to ask and answer

fifty questions you didn't think of the first time.
(Note that you

cannot ever ask all possible questions.)

Avoid all metaphysical speculations (e.g., karma, reincarnation,

"destiny" etc.). The point of the exercize will be mindblowing

enough without introducing "occult" theories, and it will

be more startling if you carefully avoid such overtly "mystical"

speculations.

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4. Pick up any household item—a spoon, a pen, a cup etc.

Perform the same exercize as above—why is it here? Who

invented it, if you can find out? How did the invention get to this

continent? Who manufactured it? Why did they manufacture that

instead of bird cages? Why did they become manufacturers

instead of musicians? Why did you buy it? Why did you pick

that object, of all the objects in your house, for this meditation?

ANSWER QUICKLY NOW

ARE YOU YOUR HARDWARE,

OR YOUR SOFTWARE?

OR BOTH?

CHAPTER THREE

THE ORAL BIO-SURVIVAL

CIRCUIT

Genes, like Leibnitz's monads, have no windows; the higher

properties of life are emergent.

— Edward Wilson,
Sociobiology

45

Few of our ancestors were perfect ladies or gentlemen; the

majority of them were not even mammals.

Any multi-cellular organism must, if it is to survive, contain a

hard-wired bio-survival circuit, which very simply programs an

either-or choice: GO FORWARD to the nourishing, the protective,

or GO BACK, away from the threatening, the predatory.

Any mammal hooks the bio-survival circuit to the first

imprinted bio-survival object: the teat. Bio-survival and orality

are deeply blended in all mammals, including domesticated

primates (humans). This is why, despite the Cancer Terror, an

estimated 30,000,000 Americans still smoke cigarettes... Others

chew gum (spearmint, juicy fruit, even sugar-free: something for

every taste), bite their fingernails, gnaw their knuckles, scrunch

pencil stubs, eat more than they need (Potato chips, anyone? a

Mars bar maybe? pretzels, peanuts, cashews, do you want the

cheese and crackers with your beer, Mac? And do try the

canapes, Mrs. Miller). Some chew their lips, gobble tranks and

uppers, even munch their mustaches. What goes on in the

bedroom is known to the Kinsey Institute and anyone who has

seen a porn film.

How important is this oral imprinting? We read of a baby

giraffe whose mother was accidentally killed by a jeep immediately

after birth. The neonate, following hard-wired genetic

programs, "imprinted" the first object that roughly fit the giraffe

archetype—the jeep itself. He followed the machine around,

vocalized to it, attempted to suckle from it, and, when adult, tried

to mate with it.

Similarly, Konrad Lorenz tells of a gosling who accidentally

imprinted a ping-pong ball and spent his adult life, indifferent to

female geese, attempting to sexually mount ping-pong balls.

As Charles Darwin noted:

In our maturer years, when an object of vision is presented to

us which bears any similitude to the form of the female

bosom...we feel a general glow of delight which seems to

influence all of our senses...

The ancients pictured the great mother goddess Diana of

Ephesus with literally dozens of breasts and St. Paul reports

hearing her worshippers chanting rapturously "Great is Diana!"

There is virtually no great artist who has not left us a portrait, or

many portraits, of the nude female form, especially the breasts;

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48 Prometheus Rising

and even in non-human scenes, curves are introduced wherever

possible. Architects break the Euclidean straight line to introduce

such curves at the slightest pretext—arches, Moorish domes, etc.

The curves of the suspension bridge are necessitated by

Newton's laws ("Gravity's rainbow," in Pynchon's phrase) but,

still, these double catenary curves are esthetically pleasing for

the reasons Darwin suggests. As for music—where did we first

hear it, who sang or hummed to us, and against what part of her

body were we held?

Mountain climbers are reduced, like Mallory, to saying

"Because it's there," when trying to explain their compulsion to

ascend those conic peaks.

Our eating utensils (oral gratification tools) tend to be

rounded or curved. Square plates or saucers look "campy" or

strange.

UFOs come in a variety of shapes, but the most popular are

the oval and conic.

Freudians suggest that opiate addiction is an attempt to return

to the womb. In keeping with our theory, it is more likely that

opium and its derivatives return us to the "safe space" on the biosurvival

circuit, the warm, snug place of bio-security; opiates

may trigger neuro-transmitters' characteristic of breast-feeding.

In summary: the bio-survival circuit is DNA-programmed to

seek a comfort-safety zone around a mothering organism. If a

mother isn't present, the closet substitute in the environment will

be imprinted. For the orphan giraffe, a
four-wheeled
jeep was

chosen to stand in for the
four-legged
mother. The gosling who

could not find the
round,
white body of the mother-goose fixated

a
round,
white ping-pong ball.

The "wiring" of this circuit, in primitive form, occurred in the

first organisms, between three and four billion years ago. In the

modern human, this structure remains in the
brain stem
and in

the
autonomic ( "involuntary ") nervous system,
where it is interconnected

with the endocrine and other life-support systems.

This is why disturbances on this circuit act "all over the body at

' Neuro-transmitters are chemicals which alter the electro-colloidal

balance of the brain and hence change the perceptual field. Brainchange

agents.

Prometheus Rising 49

once" and generally
take the form of physical symptoms rather

than "mental" symptoms and usually get referred to the M.D.

instead of the psychiatrist.

It must be stressed that we are still in a primitive stage of

evolution and conditions on this planet are quite brutal. Radical

pediatricians insist, with good evidence, that childbirth by

conventional means in a conventional hospital is almost always

traumatic for the newborn—creates a bad imprint, in our language.

Our child-rearing methods are far from ideal also, adding

bad conditioning on top of bad imprinting. And the general

violence of our societies to date—including wars, revolutions,

civil wars and the "undeclared civil war" of the predatory criminal

class in every "civilized" nation—keeps the first circuit of

most people in an emergency state far too much of the time.

In 1968, a U.S. Public Health survey showed that
85%
of the

population had one or more symptoms that we would call bad

first-circuit imprinting or conditioning. These symptoms

included dizzy spells, heart palpitations, wet palms and frequent

nightmares.

This means that 85 out of the next 100 people you meet

should be regarded as, more or less, "the Walking Wounded."

This is the first level of meaning in our brutal, cynical

proposition that most people are almost as mechanical as sci-fi

robots. A man or woman entering a new situation with the anxiety

chemicals
1
of a frightened infant coursing through the brain

stem is not going to be able to
observe, judge
or
decide
anything

very accurately.

And this is why Gurdjieff said, in his own jargon, that people

are asleep and having nightmares.

"FAIRNESS? DECENCY? HOW CAN YOU EXPECT

FAIRNESS OR DECENCY ON A PLANET OF SLEEPING

PEOPLE?"

— G.I. Gurdjieff

This was the viewpoint of the earliest Christians, later condemned

as heretics (Gnostics) by the Roman bureaucrats. The

We especially refer to adrenaline and adrenalutin, which signal the

whole organism to prepare to fight or flee.

jo
Prometheus Rising

Gospel
of
Truth,
first century, says bluntly that history is a

nightmare:

... as if (mankind) were sunk in sleep and found themselves in

disturbing dreams. Either (there is) a place to which they are

fleeing...or they are involved in striking blows, or they are

receiving blows themselves... sometimes it is as if people were

murdering them...or they themselves are killing their

neighbors...

To these first Christians, as to the Buddhists,
awakening
literally

meant coming out of this nightmare of terrifying fantasies.

In our terminology, it means correcting the editing that cause us

to behave and perceive like very badly (inappropriately) wired

robots and suddenly seeing the unedited world.

It must be emphasized that this circuit, being the oldest in

evolutionary development, is the most mechanical, and the most

rapid.
One is not conscious of time at all on the bio-survival

circuit. Observe the speed of your dog's reaction at the first

sound of an intruder: the threatening bark, and the movement of

the whole body to alert status, is
automatic.
Then the dog starts

taking in other cues, to determine how this particular intruder

should be treated.

As Robert Ardrey reports the remarks of primatologist Ray

Carpenter, to understand this part of your brain...

Imagine that you are a monkey and you're running along a

path past a rock and unexpectedly meet face to face another

animal. Now, before you know whether to attack it, to flee it,

or to ignore it, you must make a series of decisions. Is it

monkey or non-monkey? If non-monkey, is it pro-monkey or

anti-monkey? If monkey, is it male or female? If female, is she

interested? If male, is it adult or juvenile? If adult, is it of my

group or some other?... You have about one fifth of a second

to make all these decisions, or you could be attacked.