Prometheus Rising

by Robert Anton Wilson

This writing reminds me so much of the Hindu concept of Indra’s Net. The latter is sometimes described as being a great net extending throughout the whole universe, vertically to represent time, horizontally to represent space. At each point where the threads of this Indra’s net cross one another is a diamond or a crystal

bead, the symbol of a single existence. Each crystal bead reflects on its shining surface not only every other bead in the whole net of Indra but every single reflection of every reflection of every other bead upon each individual bead — countless, endless reflections of one another. We could also liken it to a single candle being placed in the centre of a large hall. Around this hall tens of mirrors are arranged in such a manner that, when the candle was lit, one saw not only its reflection in each individual mirror, but also the reflections of the reflections in every other mirror repeated ad infinitum.

Rather, quantum leaps, in outlook ala Teilhard de Chardin, occur with a fantastic jump to a new horizon or level of perception. This insight usually comes from a revolutionary overview which realigns or transforms former thinking into a new and more enlightening frame of reference.

As Dr. Leonard Orr has noted, the human mind behaves as if it were divided into two parts, the Thinker and the Prover.

one law only: Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves. To cite a notorious example which unleashed incredible horrors earlier in this century, if the Thinker thinks that all Jews are rich, the Prover will prove it.

In the short run, Orr’s law always holds: Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove.*

1. Genetic Imperatives. Totally hard-wired programs or “instincts.” 2. Imprints. These are more-or-less hard wired programs which the brain is genetically designed to accept only at certain points in its development. These points are known, in ethology, as times of imprint vulnerability. 3. Conditioning. These are programs built onto the imprints. They are looser and fairly easy to change with counter-conditioning. 4. Learning. This is even looser and “softer” than conditioning.

Four of the circuits are “antique” and conservative, they exist in everybody (except feral children). 1. The Oral Bio-Survival Circuit. This is imprinted by the mother or the first mothering object and conditioned by subsequent nourishment or threat. It is primarily concerned with sucking, feeding, cuddling, and body security. It retreats mechanically from the noxious or predatory — or from anything associated (by imprinting or conditioning) with the noxious or predatory. 2. The Anal Emotional-Territorial Circuit. This is imprinted in the “Toddling” stage when the infant rises up, walks about and begins to struggle for power within

the family structure. This mostly mammalian circuit processes territorial rules, emotional games, or cons, pecking order and rituals of domination or submission. 3. The Time-Binding Semantic Circuit. This is imprinted and conditioned by human artifacts and symbol systems. It “handles” and “packages” the environment, classifying everything according to the local reality tunnel. Invention, calculation, prediction and transmitting signals across generations are its functions. 4. The “Moral “ Socio-Sexual Circuit. This is imprinted by the first orgasm-mating experiences at puberty and is conditioned by tribal taboos. It processes sexual pleasure, local definitions of “right” and “wrong,” reproduction, adult-parental personality (sex role) and nurture of the young.

5. The Holistic Neurosomatic Circuit. This is imprinted by ecstatic experience, via biological or chemical

yogas. It processes neurosomatic (“mind-body”) feedback loops, somatic-sensory bliss, feeling “high,” “faith-healing,” etc. Christian Science, NLP and holistic medicine consist of tricks or gimmicks to get this circuit into action at least temporarily; Tantra yoga is concerned with shifting consciousness entirely into this circuit. 6. The Collective Neurogenetic Circuit. This is imprinted by advanced yogas (bio-chemical - electrical stresses). It processes DNA-RNA-brain feedback systems and is “collective” in that it contains and has access to the whole evolutionary “script,” past and future. Experience of this circuit is numinous, “mystical,” mind-shattering; here dwell the archetypes of Jung’s Collective Unconscious — Gods, Goddesses, Demons, Hairy Dwarfs and other personifications of the DNA programs (instincts) that govern us. 7. The Meta-programming Circuit. This is imprinted by very advanced yogas. It consists, in modern terms, of cybernetic consciousness, reprogramming and reimprinting all other circuits, even reprogramming itself, making possible conscious choice between alternative universes or reality tunnels. 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.

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.

In summary: the bio-survival circuit is DNA-programmed to seek a comfort-safety zone around a mothering organism.

infophobia (fear of the unpredictable)

Such a pattern is unconscious in three ways. It is unconscious because it is 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-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.”

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.

Throughout human life, when the bio-survival circuit senses danger, all other mental activity ceases. All other circuits shut down until the bio-survival problem is “solved,” realistically or symbolically. This is of crucial importance in mind-washing and brain-programming. 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.

MOST MAMMALS MARK THEIR TERRITORIES WITH EXCRETIONS. DOMESTICATED PRIMATES MARK THEIR TERRITORIES WITH INK EXCRETIONS ON PAPER.

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.

Advanced work with this circuit, involving some hazards in personal relations, would involve such games as learning to bully somebody if you’ve never been able to do that before, learning to submit docilely if you’ve never been able to do that before, and learning to express anger appropriately and letting go of it when it is no longer necessary.

When the accumulated facts, gimmicks, tools, techniques and gadgets of neuro-science — the science of brain change and brain liberation — reaches a certain critical mass, we will all be able to free ourselves from these robot cycles. It is the thesis of this book that we have been approaching that critical mass for several decades now and will reach the crossover point faster than you expect.

It says that when you put two minds together, there is always a third mind, a third and superior mind, as an unseen collaborator. — William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, — The Third Mind

Human beings (domesticated primates) are symbol-using creatures; which means, as the pioneer semanticist, Korzybski, noted, that those who rule symbols, rule us.

Since words contain both denotations (referents in the sensory-existential world) and connotations (emotional tones and poetic or rhetorical hooks), 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.

The bio-survival circuit only divides experience into two sets: that which is good for me or nourishing, and that which is bad for me or threatening. The emotional-territorial circuit also divides the world into two halves: that which is more powerful than me (higher in the pecking order) and that which is less powerful than me (lower in the pecking order).

Cynics, satirists and “mystics” (circuit V-VIII types) have told us over and over that “reason is a whore,” i.e., that the semantic circuit is notoriously vulnerable to manipulation by the older, more primitive circuits.

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. By frightening people with Hell and then offering them Salvation, the most ignorant or crooked individuals can “sell” a whole system of thought that cannot bear two minutes of rational analysis.

Whatever threatens loss of status, and whatever invades one’s “space” (including one’s ideological “head space”), is a threat to the average domesticated primate. Thus, if a poor man has one status prop in his life — “I’m a white man, not a goddam nigger” or “I’m normal, not a goddam faggot” or whatever — any attempt to preach* tolerance, common humanity, relativism, etc. is not processed through the semantic circuit but through the emotional circuit, and is rejected as an attack on status (ego, social role).

Thus, there is a genetic (hard-wired) preference, in most humans, for right-handed manipulations and left-brain mentations. Now these connections seem intimately involved with our verbal, semantic circuitry, because the left brain is the “talking” brain. It is linear, analytical, computer-like and very verbal. Thus, there is a neurological basis for the linkage between mapping and manipulating. The right hand manipulates the universe (and makes artifacts) and the left-brain maps the results into a model, which allows for predictions about future behavior of that part of the universe. These are the distinctly human (postprimate) characteristics.

Those extreme cases who take their heaviest imprint on the third circuit tend to grow up cerebrotonic. They are tall and skinny, because energy is perpetually drawn upward from the body into the head. The caricatured evil genius, Dr. Syvlanus in Superman, who was virtually all head, represents the extreme toward which this type seems to be evolving. Popular speech calls them “eggheads.”

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.

Thus, a genius is one who, by some internal process, breaks through to Circuit VII — a minor neurological miracle loosely called “intuition” — and comes back

down to the third circuit with the capacity to paint a new semantic map, build a new model of experience. Needless to say, this is always a profound shock to those still trapped in the old robot-imprints, and is generally considered a threat to territory (ideological head space). The long list of martyrs to free enquiry, from Socrates onward, shows how mechanical this neophobia (fear of new semantic signals) is.

We commented earlier that in bio-survival neurology, there is no time. “I just found myself doing it,” we say after passing through an automatic reflex on the bio-survival circuit. Emotional-territorial circuit actions begin to include time as a factor. Dominance signals may not “work”: the seemingly weaker mammal may offer a counter-challenge.

On the third circuit, time becomes conceptualized as well as experienced. We know ourselves as creatures of time; the “tale of the tribe,” the totem pole, the Odyssey of Homer, the Old Testament, the Vedas, etc. tell us what

came before and often contains prophecies of what will come later. Science expands the third circuit into contemplation of time-spans that stagger our imaginations. The very use of written languages and other symbols like mathematics creates the time-binding sense of Korzybski: we know ourselves as receivers of messages sent by sages “of olde” and as potential transmitters of messages that may be scanned ages in the future.

The fourth circuit causes us to be even more involved in, and...

The first and second circuits are Evolutionary Stable Strategies. They have worked, in more or less the same form, not just for primates but for other mammals, and for many other species, over vast aeons of time. The third, semantic circuit is an Evolutionary Unstable Strategy. It could very accurately be called revolutionary rather than evolutionary. 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.

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.

Under the influence of Newton’s physics, Adams suggested — and he was very tentative about this: a fact to be remembered by those who ridicule his “naivete” — that the utilization of energy might move forward as the inverse square of time just as Newton’s gravity functions as the inverse square of distance.

Since 300 is the inverse square of 90,000, Adams assumed that the next great leap was happening while he was writing, around 1900 — 300 years after Galileo. Looking about him, he decided this next jump to higher energy was occurring in the researches of the Curies, who had discovered radioactivity. As many commentators have noted, it is impossible to read Adams on this subject without feeling that he is very accurately forecasting the Atomic Age.

Brooks Adams proposed, goes through four stages: 1. The monopolization of knowledge by priests. E.g., the Egyptian priests kept written language a secret among themselves, as did the Mayan priests. 2. The monopolization of military power by conquerors who made themselves States or governments. E.g., “a French bastard” (Tom Paine’s description of William the Conqueror) lands on the shore of England with a superior technology — warriors on horse versus native warriors on foot — and he becomes King. His relatives and sycophants become Lords-of-the-land. 3. The monopolization of the land by these land-Lords. The extraction of tribute (“rent”) from those who live on the land. 4. The monopolization of the issue of currency by National Banks. The extraction of tribute (“interest”) for each piece of currency put into circulation.

What Korzybski assumed at first was that if all the inventions, discoveries, etc. of some hypothetical first generation of humans could be represented by P, and the rate by which the second generation could surpass this by R, then, mathematically, the sum total of inventions, discoveries etc. at the end of the second generation would be PR. Quite true, algebraically. Then, after a third generation, the stockpile would be PRR. And after four generations, PRRR. Generalized, this becomes PR1, where (t) is the number of generations from whatever generation you have picked as your base-line. The curve of PR1, if you put it on graph paper, ascends more rapidly with each generation. Korzybski was looking straight at what Alvin Toffler later called “Future Shock” and was trying to write a mathematical formula for it.

What underlies the accelerations noted by Henry Adams and Korzybski is nowadays known as the selection of negentropy out of stochastic processes. Our understanding of this is chiefly due to almost-simultaneous discoveries (1946-48) by quantum physicist Erwin Schrodinger, mathematician Norbert Weiner and an electronics-communication expert at Bell Laboratories, Claude Shannon. A stochastic process is a random series, but it is a special kind of random series. In a stochastic process, some agent or agency is making selections — picking out of the randomness a pattern that is not random. A pattern that is not random is known mathematically as information. Information can also be defined as organization, or as coherence. Gregory Bateson has defined information as “differences that make a difference.”

The dynamism of evolution, we repeat, is the selection of information, coherence, out of a random series of events.

But consider by contrast: Roses are red Ink is black Do me a favor Go sit on a tack This crude jest (of grade school origin) has more information for more readers, because it is less predictable. Another leap in information-content occurs in Steve Allen’s: Roses are red Violets are blue You think this will rhyme

But it ain’t gonna

Information is also known mathematically as negative entropy or, in a widely used abbreviation, negentropy. Entropy is a measure of the deadness of a system. Negentropy or information is a measure of the liveliness of a system.

Evolution is always a matter of at least two stochastic processes, each one acting as “selector” of the other(s). That is, in non-living systems, where no such “selection” is involved, entropy (lack of coherence) steadily increases, as stated in the famous Second Law of Thermodynamics. In living systems, due to stochastic co-selection, negentropy (information) steadily increases. In Schrodinger’s phrase, “Life feeds on negative entropy.” Life is an ordering, selecting, coherence-making process.