Prometheus Rising

by Robert Anton Wilson

Without getting embroiled in metaphysics, life (evolution) behaves as if it were always aiming at higher coherence, i.e., higher intelligence. This process accelerates because it is, as...

Hence, the accelerations noted by Adams and Korzybski are human increments in a process that has been innate in evolution all along.

The human increment accelerates faster than pre-human evolution because through the third, semantic circuit and its symbols (words, maps, equations etc.) we are able to pass information (negative entropy: coherence) from generation to generation.

World-wide wealth in terms of “Real Capital” (plants in operation, actual known resources etc.) has been doubling every generation since economists started...

Where does this wealth come from’? According to orthodox economists it comes from land, labor, and capital. According to Marxists, it comes from land and labor alone, and the capitalist is a thief who has inserted an artificial bookkeeping system into the process. Both are wrong. Land and labor alone, and land, labor and capital together, can’t produce new wealth if they are all organized by a fallacious idea, such as searching for oil whe...

The origin of these coherent (workable) ideas is the human nervous system. All wealth is created by human beings u...

This is why John Ruskin, a century ago, tried to introduce a distinction between wealth and illth. This distinction did not become accepted and incorporated into our language because people, at that time, were not ready for it.

This vision of the infinite in everything is common to East and West; what is distinctly Western, out of the Jews, is the voice of honest indignation against every institution which would deny or demean the infinity within each human soul. The release of our full human potential — to let the light of Prometheus shine everywhere — is the distinctly Western mystic tradition and does not appear in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism or any Eastern religion.

Most humans do not, due to accidents of this sort, imprint exactly the socio-sexual role demanded by their society. The fourth circuit can almost be called the guilt circuit: almost everybody, almost everywhere, is quite busy hiding their real sexual profile and miming the “accepted” sex role for their gender in their tribe.

It is the function of the nervous system to focus, to select, to narrow down; to choose, from an infinity of possibilities, the biochemical imprints which determine the tactics and strategies that ensure survival in one place, status in one tribe.

The infant is genetically prepared to learn any language, master any skill, play any sex role; in a very short time, however, he or she becomes mechanically, robotically, fixated to accept, follow and mimic the limited offerings of his social and cultural environment. In this process, each of us pays a heavy price. Survival and status mean forfeiting the infinite possibilities of unconditioned consciousness. The domesticated primate, inside the social reality-tunnel, is a trivial fragment of the potentials for experience and intelligence innate in the 110,000,000,000-cell human biocomputer.

Robert A. Heinlein wrote: A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, conn a ship, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve an equation, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a comp...

That taboo stipulates that sexuality shall not be unregulated by the tribe. That is, even though no other taboos are universal, the taboo against living without taboos remains constant. Every tribe has its own set of verbots and thou-shalt-nots, but no tribe allows the individual to choose his or her own set.

Why is there this taboo against sexual self-definition and self-actualization? Why is it that, while no two societies can agree on what is sexually “good” and sexually “bad,” every society thinks that it must make some definition?

The answer is that our first humanoid (symbolizing and conceptualizing) ancestors were very ignorant, but not at all stupid. They were ignorant of the laws of genetics, but they were smart enough to suspect that such laws exist. Sperm-egg fusion is surrounded by violent taboos and fierce tribal conformity because the survival and future evolution of the gene pool depends upon which particular spermatozoa reaches which particular ovum.

The chief role of religion has always been reactionary. This is its evolutionary function, in the dialectic of the circuitry of the brain.

These methods are “brutal” and “stupid” only if, like the above-mentioned heretics, one regards the goal of child-rearing as the production of a sane, balanced, creative [NOT CRATED] human being. THIS HAS NEVER BEEN THE GOAL OF ANY SOCIETY IN THE REAL WORLD. The traditional childrearing methods are quite logical, pragmatic and sound in fulfilling the real purpose of society, which is not to create an ideal person, but to create [CRATE] a semi-robot who mimics the society as closely as possible

Each of us has a “favorite” circuit — that is, a circuit that has been more heavily imprinted than the others. Miscommunication, misunderstanding and general misjudgment of one another is vastly increased by the fact that few of us know about these levels of circuitry, and we all tend to assume that the person we are interacting

with is on the same circuit we are.

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 mechanical nature of the bio-survival circuit is of key importance in brainwashing. To create a new imprint, reduce the victim to an infantile state, i.e., first-circuit vulnerability.

Experiments in isolation by the U.S. Marine Corps, Dr. John Lilly and others — and the records of shipwrecked sailors, as summarized by Lilly in Simulations of God — show that only a few hours of pure isolation may be necessary before hallucinations begin. These hallucinations, like those of psychedelic drugs, indicate the breaking down of previous imprints and the onset of vulnerability to new imprints.

The first step, once the victim is inside the territory (commune), is to begin isolation by cutting off all communication with the

outer world and its conflicting reality-tunnels. Meanwhile, a parental-protective atmosphere is quickly created (sometimes called “love-bombing”) and food is provided.

Whether the subject has entered voluntarily as in these communes, or has been kidnapped or arrested (as in police states), the next stage is to break down the second-circuit emotional-territorial imprints. That means that the subject continues to be fed (maintaining first-circuit oral dependence) while the second-circuit ego is attacked in every manner possible. A point-by-point comparison of the techniques of a Synanon “gamer” and U.S. Army drill sergeant, for instance, would show astonishing similarities, since the basic message is dozens and dozens of variations on “You are all wrong. We are all right. It is extremely unlikely that somebody as wrong as you will become right, ever, but we will try to teach you.” The anal...

Confession) a favorite trick is to take the subject out of his cell, march him to a courtyard, place a

noose about his neck, and convince him he is about to be hanged. The relief, when this turns out to be a bluff, creates ideal imprint vulnerability.

The rebirthing of the second circuit is (relatively) complete when the Bottom Dog subject begins to seek, sincerely (not hypocritically) to win the approval of the Top Dogs. This, of course, only begins as play-acting; the skilled brainwasher knows that, and does not really object. With subtle reinforcement the play-acting becomes more and more genuine. Edmund Burke noted long ago, and every Method Actor knows, that you cannot make

three dramatic gestures of rage in a political speech, without beginning to feel some real rage. You cannot make three gestures of submission without beginning to feel really submissive. (This is the psychology of the “company man,” who truly identifies with his employer after years of obedience.)

The draftee first tries to please the sergeant, to avoid further humiliation and punishment. Gradually, he genuinely wants to please the sergeant, i.e., to prove he is not all wrong and is “good enough” to be a soldier. Patty Hearst undoubtedly pretended to accept the SLA reality-tun...

Since people are more complicated than Behaviorists know, it is necessary to vary this with occasional punishments for “insincerity,” or “backsliding,” so that the subject learns that after the initial stage, it is not 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.

At this point a certain amount of arbitrary nonsense is of great value. That is, the new reality-tunnel or symbol-system (like the old one) should contain pitfalls (gross violations of previous reality tunnels and common sense) so that the subject can be accused of backsliding (being “all wrong,” after all) and thereby incited to try harder to become part of the new reality-tunnel.

The neurological and sociological function of such “nonsense” (which makes the Rationalist gasp in shock) is to sharply segregate those within the new reality-tunnel from those outside. This makes for group solidarity, group-reinforcement, and a strong sense of alienation and discomfort when on rare occasions it is necessary to talk at all with those outside the brainwasher’s semantic system. The group must ensure, of course, that this alienation is experienced as “superiority.” Those who are outside the reality-tunnel must be perceived as “all wrong” — just as the subject was, before being brainwashed.

Cults and outlaw terrorists generally follow the above procedures by further rewiring of the fourth, socio-sexual circuit. (Governments usually leave that circuit alone, since government agents are largely puritanical-authoritarian and afraid to get involved at all with raw Eros.) It is no secret that the most powerful secret society of the middle ages, the Knights Templar, forced recruits to participate in both blasphemy and sodomy. Just as the deliberate nonsense of all cultish third-circuit semantics isolates the group from the rest of society, this initiation separated the Templars from the rest of Christendom; the alienation could easily be conditioned into a sense of superiority.

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.

Thus, a Midwestern Methodist is not “misusing his brain” as Arthur Koestler thinks in constructing a Midwestern Methodist tunnel-reality; that is precisely what his brain is for, to adapt him to the Midwestern Methodist tribal system — to impose the structure of Midwestern Methodist ideology upon the myriad of data-points he encounters in his lifetime. 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.

Throughout most of human history and up to 100 years ago — up to 20 years ago, in some parts of the world — a man or woman could lead their entire life snugly within the cocoon of the local tunnel-reality. Today, we all constantly collide with persons living in wildly different tunnel-realities. This creates a great deal of hostility in the more ignorant, vast amounts of metaphysical and ethical confusion in the more sophisticated, and growing disorientation for all — a situation known as our “crisis of values.”

The average person has a deluge of contradictory and conflicting reality-tunnels impinging on him or her, with little training in either cultural or neurological relativism. Speed of travel has increased by a factor of 1000 since 1900, and speed of communication by a factor of 10,000,000, according to J.R. Platt.

It is all hypocrisy and neurological ignorance, of course. The “de-programmers” are actually re-programmers. The parental tunnel-reality is as arbitrary (and, to an outsider, as bizarre) as that of any “cult.”

Fortunately, higher circuits are forming in the human brain and offer broader vistas than the narrow tunnel-visions of the antique circuits. That is the topic of our concluding chapters.

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. We can only emphasize, one more time, that each and every reality-tunnel created by a domesticated primate brain is a finite cross-section of that brain’s personal history;

The totally robotized Rationalist, the one whose nervous system has stopped growing entirely, can be recognized by two signs: He or she is constantly trying to prove that much of the daily experience of the rest of humanity is “delusion,” “hallucination,” “group hallucination,” “mass hallucination,” “mere coincidence,” “sheer coincidence,” or “sloppy research.” And he or she never thinks that any of his or her own experience would fit into any of those categories.

The neurosomatic circuit of the brain is much more recent than the antique circuits previously discussed. It does not manifest in all human beings, and appears late in life, usually, to those who do activate and imprint it.

Temporary neurosomatic consciousness can be acquired by (a) the yoga practice of pranayama breathing and (b) for those who can handle it, by ingestion of Cannabis drugs, such as hashish and marijuana, which trigger neurotransmitters that activate this circuit.

In the experience of this author, pranayama will remove all forms of depression, including profound grief and bereavement; it will soothe anger and remove resentments; it seems beneficial to all minor health problems and — occasionally — major health problems. Hindus, who are professionals at pranayama, claim a great deal more, such as: immunity to pain of all sorts, Samadhi (“union with God”), levitation, etc.

Most notably, pranayama creates neurosomatic Turn On: sensory enrichment, sensual bliss, perceptual

delight, and a general laid-back Hedonic “high.” Similar effects are produced by voluntary isolation in a Lilly tank, by zero-gravity (the astronaut’s “mystical” experiences are all of this neurosomatic variety) and, ...

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.”