Prometheus Rising (6 page)

The bio-survival program first attaches to the safe space

around the mother (oral imprint), and then with age moves

further and further out, exploring what is safe and what is not.

Without hard-wired genetic programs (i.e., automatic programs)

this second stage would be impossible, and no mammal would

ever leave the teat. The hard-wired programs act automatically

Prometheus Rising

(UNCONSCIOUSLY)
because if you had to stop and think out

each situation, you would be eaten by the first predator.

Of course, the imprint is made by
chance —
by the circumstances

at the moment of imprint vulnerability. (Recall the

gosling who imprinted the ping-pong ball.) Some imprint bravery,

inquisitiveness and the exploratory drive; others imprint

timidity, infophobia (fear of the unpredictable) and withdrawal,

of which the extreme case is the sad imprint called
autism
or

childhood schizophrenia.

All of which is robotic,
until
one learns how to reprogram and

reimprint one's own brain circuits. In most cases, such metaprogramming

skill is never acquired. It all goes by in a flash, on

mechanical auto-pilot, in
zero
time. "I just found myself doing

it," says the soldier as he is being court-martialled for cowardice

or decorated for bravery.

It's safe out here!

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Prometheus Rising

Of course, on top of the hard-wired imprinting of the biosurvival

circuit comes "softer" conditioning. This allows the

safe-space perimeter to be generalized outward from the

mother's body to the pack or tribe—the "extended family."

Every social animal has, in addition to the Darwinian

"instinct" (genetic program) of self-preservation, a similar

"instinct" to protect the gene-pool. This is the basis of altruism,

and social animals could not survive without it.

Wild dogs (and wolves) bark to warn the rest of the pack that

an intruder is coming. Your domesticated dog identifies you as a

pack-leader; he barks to warn you that an intruder is coming. (He

also barks, of course, to warn the intruder that he is ready to fight

for his territory.)

As civilization has advanced, the pack-bond
(the tribe, the

extended family)
has been broken.
This is the root of the widely

diagnosed
"anomie"
or "alienation" or "existential anguish"

about which so many social critics have written so eloquently.

What has happened is that the conditioning of the bio-survival

bond to the gene-pool has been replaced by
a conditioning of

bio-survival drives to hook onto the peculiar tickets which we

call "money".

Concretely, a modern man or woman doesn't look for biosurvival

security in the gene-pool, the pack, the extended family.

Bio-survival depends on getting the tickets. "You can't live

without money," as the Living Theatre troop used to cry out in

anguish. If the tickets are withdrawn, acute bio-survival anxiety

appears at once.

Imagine, as vividly as possible, what you would feel, and

what you would do, if all your sources to bio-survival tickets

(money) were cut off tomorrow. This is precisely what tribal

men and women feel if cut off from the tribe; it is why exile, or

even ostracism, were sufficient punishments to enforce tribal

conformity throughout most of human history. As recently as

Shakespeare's day the threat of exile was an acute terror signal

("Banished!" cries Romeo, "the damned use that word in Hell!")

In traditional society, belonging to the tribe was bio-security;

exile was terror, and real threat of death. In modern society,

having the tickets (money) is bio-security; having the tickets

withdrawn is terror.

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Welfare-ism, socialism, totalitarianism, etc. represent attempts,

in varying degrees of rationality and hysteria, to re-create

the tribal bond by making the State stand-in for the gene-pool.

Conservatives who claim that no form of Welfare is tolerable to

them are asking that people live with total bio-survival anxiety

and
anomie
combined with terror. The conservatives, of course,

vaguely recognize this and ask for "local charity" to replace

State Welfare — i.e., they ask for the gene-pool to be restored by

magic, among people (denizens of a typical city) who are not

genetically related at all.

On the other hand, the State is not a gene-pool or a tribe, and

cannot really play the bio-survival unit convincingly. Everybody

on Welfare becomes paranoid, because they are continually worrying

that they are going to get cut off ("exiled") for some minor

infraction of the increasingly incomprehensible bureaucratic

rules. And in real totalitarianism, in which the bogus identification

of the State with the tribe is carried to the point of a new

mysticism, the paranoia becomes total.

Real bonding can only occur in face-to-face groups of reasonable

size. Hence, the perpetual attempt (however implausible in

industrial circumstances) to decentralize, to go back to the tribal

ethos, to replace the State with syndicates (as in anarchism) or

affinity-groups (Reich's "Consciousness III"). Recall the hippie

crash-pad of the sixties, which lives on in many rural communes.

Back in the real world, the tickets called
"money"
are the biosurvival

bond for most people. Anti-Semitism is a complex

aberration, of many facets and causes, but in its classic form (the

"Jewish Bankers' Conspiracy") it simply holds that a hostile

gene-pool controls the tickets for bio-security. Such paranoia is

inevitable in a money economy; junkies have similar myths

about who controls the supply of heroin. Thus, as anti-Semitism

has declined in America, the "Bankers' Conspiracy" lives on in a

new form. Now the villains are old New England WASP families,

the "Yankee Establishment." Some Leftists will even show

you charts of the genealogies of these WASP bankers, the way

anti-Semites used to show Rothschild genealogies.

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C.H. Douglas, the engineer and economist, once made up a

chart, which he showed to the MacMillan Commission in 1932

when they were discussing money and credit regulation. The

chart graphed the rise and fall of interest rates from the defeat of

Napoleon in 1812 to the date the Commission met in 1932, and

on the same scale, the rise and fall of the suicide rate in that one

twenty-year period.

The two curves were virtually identical. Every time the interest

rate went up, so did the suicide rate; when interest went

down, so did suicide. This can hardly be "coincidence." When

interest rises, a certain number of businessmen go bankrupt, a

certain number of workers are thrown out of their jobs, and

everybody's bio-survival anxiety generally increases.

Marxists and other radicals are urgently aware of such factors

in "mental health" and hence scornful of all types of academic

psychology which ignore these bio-survival issues. Unfortunately,

the Marxist remedy—making everybody dependent for

bio-survival on the whims of a State bureaucracy—is a cure

worse than the disease.

Bio-survival anxiety will only permanently disappear when

world-wide wealth has reached a level, and a distribution, where,

without totalitarianism, everyone has enough
tickets.

The Hunger Project, the idea of the Guaranteed Annual

Income, Douglas' National Dividend plan, etc. represent groping

toward that goal. The ideal can only be achieved in a technology

of abundance.

Extreme cases—persons who take their
heaviest
imprint on

the first (oral) circuit—tend to be viscerotonic, because this

imprint determines lifelong endocrine and glandular processes.

Thus, in extreme they are "baby-faced" in adult life, never lose

their "baby-fat," are plump and round and gentle, etc. They are

easily "hurt" (threatened: terrified) by disapproval of any sort,

because in the baby-circuit of the brain,
disapproval
suggests

extinction
by loss of the food supply.

We all have this circuit and need to exercize it periodically.

Cuddling, sucking, hugging etc. and daily playing with (a) one's

own body (b) another's body and (c) the environment, are perpetually

necessary to neurosomatic-endocrine health. Those who

deny such primordial functions because of rigid imprinting on

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the Third (rationalistic) or Fourth (moralistic) circuit tend to

become "dried up," "prune-faced," unattractive, "cold," and

muscularly rigid.

The baby-functions of playing with one's own body, another's

body and the environment continue throughout life in all

animals. This "playfulness" is a marked characteristic of all conspicuously

healthy individuals of the sort Maslow calls "selfactualizers."

If this initial imprint is negative—if the universe in general

and other humans in particular are imprinted as dangerous,

hostile and frightening—the Prover will go on throughout life

adjusting all perceptions to fit this map. This is what is known as

the "Injustice Collector" syndrome (in the language of Dr.

Edmund Bergler). The female members of this imprint goup

become Radical Feminists; the male members are less organized

and can be found in fringe groups of the extreme Left and

extreme Right.

Such a pattern is unconscious in three ways. It is unconscious

because automatic: it happens without thought, as a robot program.

It is also unconscious because it began before the infant

had language and hence it is pre-verbal, inarticulate,
felt
rather

than considered. And it is unconscious because it is all-over-thebody-

at-once. Specifically, it is characterized by the
Respiratory

Block
first noted by Wilhelm Reich: a chronic muscular armoring

that prevents proper, relaxed breathing. Popular speech

recognizes this state as "being up-tight."

All of the most successful reimprinting techniques (therapies)

for this kind of chronic anxiety work on the body first, not on the

"mind." The Reichians, Rolfers, Primal Scream therapists, Orr's

"rebirthers," Gesaltists, etc. all know, whatever specialized

jargons they may use, that a bad bio-survival imprint can only be

corrected by working on the biological being itself, the body that

feels perpetually vulnerable and under attack. Even Neurolinguistic

Programming (NLP) begins by inducing the patient to

relax and breathe easily.

As Gregory Bateson has pointed out. Konrad Lorenz acquired

his marvelous insights into the imprinting process—for which he

won the Nobel prize—by consciously imitating the body movements

of the animals he was studying. Watching Lorenz lecture,

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one could "see" each animal he discussed, because Lorenz would

dramatize or "become" that animal, in the manner of a Method

Actor.

Even earlier, Wilhelm Reich discovered that he could understand

his patients with remarkable clarity by imitating their

characteristic body movements and postures. The bio-survival

imprints, especially traumatic ones, are all-over-the-body, frozen

(in Reich's metaphor) in chronic muscle and gland mechanisms.

If you can't understand somebody's "irrational" behavior,

start by observing their breathing. You will very quickly get an

idea of what is bothering them. This is why all schools of yoga—

Buddhist, Hindu or Sufi—place such emphasis on restoring natural

breathing before trying to move the student on to higher

circuits and wider consciousness.

This is of more than "psychological" import. Every study of

the psychosomatic aspects of cancer and asthma, for instance,

finds this pattern of chronic muscular contraction (subjectively

felt as anxiety) among the predisposing factors. What the

Thinker thinks, the Prover proves. People are strangling their

inner organs every day because they are
afraid.

Mary Baker Eddy may have been exaggerating slightly when

she said, "All illness is manifested fear;" but holistic medicine

more and more recognizes that if that damned word "all" is

replaced by a more tentative "most," Mrs. Eddy was close to the

facts.

Even old-fangled M.D.s who won't consider holistic ideas for

a minute, admit that some persons are mysteriously "more susceptible"

to disease than other persons. What is this metaphysical

"susceptibility"? Anthropologist Ashley Montagu has collected

numerous statistics on children who were deprived of maternal

love at the crucial point of imprint vulnerability in infancy. They

not only died younger than the national average, but were sicklier