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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.
And it is unconscious because it is all-over-the-body-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.”
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, one could “see” each animal he discussed,
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.
People are strangling their inner organs every day because they are afraid.
Absolute faith that “God” is supporting you, beamed out from the brain all day long, day after day, signals the muscles to relax, and natural buoyancy and health returns.
To create a new imprint, first reduce the subject to the state of infancy, i.e., bio-survival vulnerability. We will enlarge upon this later.
Meditate on “Unless ye become as a little child, ye shall in no wise enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” (paraphrase of Matthew 18:3)
Get “high” (on marijuana if this is permissible to your superego, or on ginseng, which is legal everywhere and recommended by many holistic physicians) and then go to a health spa. Enjoy a good swim, a massage and a sauna. Repeat every week, forever.
this circuit will organize itself into a strong, dominating role in the pack (or family) or a weak, submissive role.
As a result of this inability to see the obvious, Benny was constantly alarmed and terrified by the behavior of himself, his friends and associates and especially the alpha males of the pack. Since he didn’t know it was ordinary primate behavior, it seemed just awful to him.
The standard “authority” reflex on the emotional-territorial circuit is to swell the muscles and howl. You will find this among birds as well as mammals, and in the Board meeting of your local bank. The standard “submission” reflex is to shrink the muscles, lower the head, and “crawl away.” You will find this among dogs, primates, fowl and employees who wish to keep their jobs everywhere.
It is the Phlegmatic (friendly weakness; dependent neurotic) type who generally turns up in the psychotherapist’s office seeking reimprinting voluntarily. They are not-okay, but they have great faith that the therapist is okay.
an influential psychological test in this country, the Leary Interpersonal Grid (1957), divides the four quadrants into sixteen sub-quadrants and allows one to grade each in terms of moderate-to-excessive tendency to behave that way.
The irony and the tragedy of human life is that none of these subjects are aware at all of their robotry. Each will explain to you, at great length and with great conviction, why each of these robotic, endlessly-repeated reflexes are caused by the situations around them, i.e., by the “bad” behavior of other people.
Since we all contain a territorial-emotional circuit we need to exercize it daily. Playing with children is one good exercize — especially if you play with large groups, in which case you will have to referee mammalian territorial disputes. Swimming, jogging or whatever else appeals to you is good, to keep the muscles from feeling you are trying to starve them. Trying to “psych out” somebody else’s emotional state is one of the best exercizes for this circuit, and is very educational in general.
as the pioneer semanticist, Korzybski, noted, that those who rule symbols, rule us.
humans can be moved to action even by words which have no real meaning or reference in actuality. This is the mechanism of demagoguery, advertising and much of organized religion.
Whoever can scare people enough (produce bio-survival anxiety) can sell them quickly on any verbal map that seems to give them relief, i.e., cure the anxiety.
These two mammalian reflexes are known, respectively, as Religion and Patriotism. They work for domesticated primates, as for the wild primates, because they are Evolutionary Relative Successes. (So far.)
Almost always, these cerebrotonic Third-Circuit types ignore or are hostile to their first and second circuit functions. Playfulness puzzles them (appears silly or eccentric) and emotions both baffle and frighten them.
Kuhn demonstrated, at length, that each scientific revolution took one full generation to turn over the old world view. And Kuhn further showed that the older scientists never are converted to the new semantic paradigm.
But if science, the most self-correcting of all information processing third-circuit functions, has this one-generation time lag, what can be said of politics, religion, economics? Time-lags of centuries, or even millenniums, are common there.*
Everywhere, everywhen, the rulers of society have tried to put a brake on the third circuit, to decelerate the acceleration function, to establish limits on what was printable, discussable, even thinkable.
It is important to realize that chance, genetics and malice (anger) are among the “accidents” that create imprints at the points of vulnerability.
The aim of the Cabala is to make “the microcosm mirror the macrocosm”; that is, to make the human being a perfect image of “God.”
Are traditional schools very much like mini-prisons? Do they stifle imagination, cramp the child physically and mentally, and run on various forms of overt or covert terrorism? Of course, the answer is an unambiguous yes; but such schools are necessary to train people for roles in the ordinary office or factory or profession, which are also very much like mini-prisons, stifle imagination, cramp the person physically and mentally and run on terror (threat of loss of bio-survival tickets, in the form of pay-checks or tenure).
That is, concretely, most people are not encouraged to be very smart, and are rather heavily programmed to be comparatively stupid.
Naturally, they usually vote for the charlatan who can activate primitive bio-survival fears and territorial (“patriotic”) pugnacity.
The most robotic Rationalist will descend to the first circuit, eventually, if threat to bio-security is forcibly enough presented on the screen of consciousness.
enough to pretend to accept the new reality-tunnel; to escape further humiliation, ego-loss, terrorism and permanent Bottom Dog status, one must begin to accept it sincerely.
We, as a species, exist in a world in which exist a myriad of data points. Upon these matrices of points we superimpose a structure and the world makes sense to us. The pattern of the structure originates within our biological and sociological properties.
Pranayama is notably useful in quieting the emotions and appetites . . . Digestive troubles in particular are very easy to remove in this way. It purifies both the body and the mind and should be practiced certainly never less than one hour daily by the serious student.
Most animals simply play most of the time, solve problems of survival when they have to, or die of not solving the problems; only humans are conscious of struggling, and hence worried and depressed about the Game of Life.
“We are all giant robots manufactured by DNA to make more DNA.”
“Who are you?” would be to hum the Hammerklavier. For, with music of that quality, one is hypnotized into rapt attention: there is no division between “me” and “my experience.”
The seventh, meta-programming circuit is the most recent in evolutionary time and seems to be located in the frontal lobes. That is why the traditional Hindu exercize to activate it is to fix the consciousness in the front of the forehead and hold it there, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, until the metaprogrammer awakes and you begin to perceive-create infinite realities where before there was only one static jail-cell “reality” in which you were trapped.
“Mind” is a tool invented by the universe to see itself; but it can never see all of itself, for much the same reason that you can’t see your own back (without mirrors). Or as Alan Watts liked to say, because the tongue ultimately cannot taste the tongue.
The only sensible goal, then, is to try to build a reality-tunnel for next week that is bigger, funnier, sexier, more optimistic and generally less boring than any previous reality-tunnel.
Our schools are mini-factories or models of factories because their main job was, when they were founded, to prepare people for factory work. The schools, in fact, were necessary because, while feudalism does not require literacy of the masses, industrialism does. Similarly, offices were modeled on factories, and kept factory-hours, even when this had little or nothing to do with how the offices could most efficiently be managed. And in general, “indust-reality,” the reality of the industrial age, moved everybody into the robot lockstep of the factory system.*
