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The first two-circuits are based on negative feedback, in the biological sense. They maintain homeostasis — that is, they return, over and over, to the same ecological-ethological balances. The function of negative feedback is to return to such a steady state. The time-binding semantic circuit is not based on such steady-state positive feedback. It is a mechanism of what cyberneticists and biologists called positive feedback. It does not return to a steady state, but constantly seeks a new equilibrium at a higher energy level. (Negative feedback returns to a fixed point, like a thermostat.
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The third circuit has always been hemmed-in and heavily sanctioned with rules, laws, prohibitions, taboos, etc. because it breaks up such cycles. It leads, if unleashed, to an upward-hurtling spiral.
“Information is difference that makes a difference.”
Information is also known mathematically as negative entropy or, in a widely used abbreviation, negentropy.
The real source of wealth is correct ideas: workable ideas: that is, negative entropy — Information.
If you are not alone in the wilderness, lift your eyes from the page and look about. All that you see, whoever theoretically “owns” it, is the time-binding product of the materialized or manifested ideas of creative men and women. It is all negative entropy. Coherent order. And it is moving toward higher and more coherent order at a faster rate-of-change all the time.
if we accept any ordering process as intelligent, then the biosphere is indeed intelligent; but if we save the word “intelligence” only for those ordering processes that move at the same speed as our brains, then Nature is merely mechanical, not intelligent.
Nonetheless, evolution is real: quantum jumps do occur throughout the biosphere and throughout human intellectual history. We are riding a mounting tidal wave of rising consciousness and expanding intelligence which is accelerating whether we like it or not.
In ordinary language, the imprint on the socio-sexual circuit is generally called “the mature personality” or the “sexual role.” It is “the Parent” in the jargon of Transactional Analysis.
SUMMARY ~•~ The Gurdjieff titles in the above summary are deliberately negative, since he was trying to get people off these primitive circuits and into the futuristic circuits.
Sexual attraction, mating, reproduction, inheritance, genetic drift and future evolution are all stochastic processes. (That is, processes in which, out of a random series, some “intelligence” or something that can be metaphorically conceived as an intelligence, is selecting a final outcome.)
The principle function of the socio-sexual circuit, in the higher primates, is to form an adult personality — a parent.* By definition, the parent is one who cares for the young of the species; by genetic necessity, the parent also cares about the young. In symbolizing humans, this means planning, hoping and having aspirations. In the language of the mystics, this means being “attached” and “trapped on the wheel of karma”; the first effort in most mystical traditions is to break this fourth-circuit attachment by taking a vow of celibacy.
We all began as infants in a one-dimensional world, orally hooked to Mommy. The further away from Mommy we crawled, the greater was our bio-survival anxiety, and we generally returned to Mommy as quickly as possible.
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).
Utopian child-rearing will advance further, necessarily, only as society itself evolves out of authoritarianism. That is, as the accelerated changes now occurring propel us into the most rapid period of social evolution in all human history, we will then need citizens who are not robots, who are creative; who are not docile, who are innovative; who are not narrow-minded bigots, who are explorers in every sense of the word.
A third-circuit type will try to reason out the problem. This is the best approach only with problems that are themselves rational, i.e., “How do you make this machine work?” It can be blind, and futile, when the “problem” is another human being acting out one of the more destructive second-circuit rage programs.
A fourth-circuit type will try to be rational (third circuit) and to sense the emotional dimensions of the problem (second circuit) but will basically try to impose a moral solution: “Now this is the decent, fair thing to do . . .” This may or may not make sense to the third-circuit Rationalist, looking for objective justice; and it will usually make no sense at all to the totally second-circuit type dominated by emotionalism and territoriality.
We are all giants, raised by pygmies, who have learned to walk with a perpetual mental crouch. Unleashing our full stature — our total brain power — is what this book is all about.
The brain can be tuned, like a TV, to turn off any channel, and to bring in a new channel. This is what the veterans of the 1960s-1970s Neurological Revolution know. This is the major threat, and the major promise of our time.
Jung, in turn, had observed that such synchronicities — weird coincidences — tend to occur when certain deep structures in the psyche are activated. He assumed that these structures were at what he called “the psychoid level,” below the collective unconscious, where mind and matter are not yet distinct — the quantum foam out of which matter and form and consciousness hierarchically emerge. Wait. It gets weirder . .
a living network of over 110 billion nerve cells capable of (102733000) interconnections, a number higher than the total of all the atoms in the universe. In this elegant, micro-miniaturized biocomputer more than 100,000,000 processes are programmed every minute. From the viewpoint of neuro-sociology, how I perceive “myself” and “my world” depends on how each circuit has been wired in my brain.
Each generation “brainwashes” the next.
Christianity, Buddhism and Islam, between them, are the most potent brain-programming institutions on this planet.
Buddha insisted that his enlightenment was perfectly natural — “Are you a God?” he was once asked. “No.” “Are you a saint?” “No.” “Then what are you?” “I am awake.”
As noted earlier, when the bio-survival circuit flashes danger, all other mental activity ceases. There is no “time” on the bio-survival circuit; reflexes act without emotional ego, rational mind or adult personality participating: “I just found myself doing it.”
All the martial arts — judo, akido, kung fu, etc. — are reimprinting techniques for the bio-survival circuit. They are intended to ensure that what happens mechanically (“without thought”) really does serve bio-survival, since the reflexes imprinted accidentally on this circuit are not that dependable.
Among the Zuni Indians, the male at adolescence is kidnapped by masked “demons” who carry him away from the tribe (away from mother and other imprinted security figures.) He is dragged out into the desert and threatened with whips. Then the masks come off, revealing his maternal uncles, and in that moment of imprint vulnerability the tribal “secrets” (the local reality-tunnel) are explained in a way that leave an indelible mark on his consciousness.
The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born. All of the above principles then immediately go into action, a process which social psychologists euphemistically call socialization. The bio-survival circuit automatically hooks onto or bonds to the most appropriate mother or mothering object; the emotional-territorial circuit looks for a “role” or ego-identification in the family or tribe; the semantic circuit learns to imitate and then use the local reality-grids (symbol systems); the socio-sexual circuit is imprinted by whatever mating experiences are initially available at puberty.
What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves . . . whether you are living in a Christian reality-tunnel, a Mansonoid reality-tunnel, an Immortalist reality-tunnel, a vegetarian reality-tunnel, a Rationalist reality-tunnel . . . Everybody has the only true true religion.
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.
The function of the domesticated primate brain, insofar as we have described it up to this point and leaving out the higher, newer circuits, is to serve as an “organ of adaptation” in Freud’s phrase. Specifically, the oldest, most primitive, most mechanical centers serve simple bio-survival. The more recent (500,000,000 year-old, roughly) emotional territorial centers serve to maintain pack identity, habitat-space and hierarchy. The distinctly hominid semantic circuit (100,000-year-old?) makes maps and models — reality-tunnels — which we tend to confuse with reality itself, and, worse yet,
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The Chinese Maoist, the Iranian Moslem, the New York Feminist, the Marin County Hedonist, etc. each has a similar, equally arbitrary, equally complex reality-tunnel. Each tunnel is also equally absurd when seen from outside.
Since everybody “prefers” one circuit over the others, there are people in each society who are easily recognizable as Narcissists (first-circuit robots), Emotionalists (second-circuit robots). Rationalists (third-circuit robots) and Moralists (fourth-circuit robots).
These Rationalist robots are also very uncomfortable with the newer circuits — and some of them spend most of their lives writing articles and books devoted to “proving” that the newer circuits do not exist and that all scientists who have recorded the behavior of these newer circuits are liars, fools, bunglers, charlatans or some manner of Damned Heretics.
Like the Emotional robot, the Moralistic robot, the Narcissist robot etc., the Rationalist robot cannot be “argued” out of his narrow reality tunnel.
Accept this book, if not in whole at least in general outlines. Assume you have been brainwashed. Try to learn as much from every human you meet about their separate reality-tunnel and see how much of it you can use to make your reality-tunnel bigger and more inclusive. In other words, learn to listen.
James Joyce said he never met a boring human being. Try to explain this. Try to get into the Joycean head space, where everybody is a separate reality-island full of mystery and surprise. In other words, learn to observe.
Most shamans, and many mystics, have been through similar negative-to-positive neurosomatic sensitization. Christian Scientists call it “chemicalization. ” St. John of the Cross called it, poetically, the Dark Night of the Soul. Cabalists call it “crossing the Abyss.”
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.
The faith-healer went on, “What cures them is realizing that I'm not afraid.” That is, contact with a fifth-circuit personality, a person who controls his or her own Circuit II adrenaline-trips, can be a catalyst, throwing the sufferer upward into a personal fifth-circuit experience.
The avant-garde 20% of the population, due to the Consciousness Movement (a secularization of much ancient shamanic wisdom), already understands every “wild” idea in the last few pages. They have had enough neurosomatic experience to know that they were once totally robotized (as most people still are) and are knowingly engaged in acquiring more neurosomatic know-how. When this reaches 51% of the pop...
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In McLuhan’s terms, the fifth circuit is “non-linear” and “global.” That is, it is not limited by the one-thing-at-a-time sequences of the semantic circuit; it thinks in Gestalts. This is why it is so often connected with “intuition,” which is a way of thinking between and around data-points on the perceptual screen — sensing what total field the points must be part of. The great musician has developed a remarkable feedback between fifth-circuit Gestalt-ing and the third-circuit function of coding such “coherent structures” into the inspired symbolism of music.
The miracle of Beethoven is not that he felt the universe that way — a few thousand fifth-circuit types throughout history have also felt and sensed nature that way — but that he mastered the third-circuit art of music with such skill that he could communicate such experiences, which is precisely what the ordinary “mystic” cannot do.
Prolonged sexual play without orgasm always triggers some Circuit V consciousness.
In another metaphor, the body became the flexible clay and the awakened (illuminated) brain became the sculptor.
In general, fourth-circuit problems take the form of guilt; “I cannot do what I am supposed to do.” Third-circuit problems take the form of perplexity; “I cannot understand how I got into this mess, or how to get out of it, or what is expected of me,” etc. Second-circuit problems take the form of bullying or cowardice: “I will force them, or I will surrender and let them force me.” First-circuit problems take the form of body symptoms: “I feel rotten all over” gradually centering in, under enough stress, on one acute disabling symptom.*
Fifth-Circuit neurosomatic consciousness bleaches out all these problems at once. The disappearance of first-circuit "physical” illnesses only seems more “miraculous” than the transcendence of second-circuit emotionalism, third-circuit perplexity and fourth-circuit guilt.
The neurosomatic skill of transmuting all experience, so that one is high and happy in a situation where the four-circuited majority would be miserable, is worth learning for the very simple, egotistic reason that it’s more fun to be happy than to be in agony. It is also socially beneficial, because, as Tim Leary often said, “You can’t do good until you feel good.”
* Endorphins are neurotransmitters that trigger Circuit V. They can be activated by cannabis drugs, psychedelics, meditation, pranayama, or visualization of white light.
There is nothing supernatural about the fifth circuit. It merely appears “supernatural” by comparison to the earlier circuits; but the third circuit, of which the Rationalist is so proud, undoubtedly appeared “supernatural” when it first appeared. (The Egyptians attributed speech and writing, third-circuit functions, to divine intervention by the god Thoth.) The fifth circuit, like the earlier circuits, is just another evolutionary mutation, necessary to us as we move toward a more complex neuro-social level.
