Prometheus Rising

by Robert Anton Wilson

The neurosomatic circuit is “polymorphous perverse,” in Freud’s unappetizing terminology. This merely means that the nervous system itself, taking over as driver, is now directing the rest of the body. “Every act (becomes) an orgasm,” said Aleister Crowley, giving his own Tantric emphasis to the polymorphous nature of this circuit.

The guru comes into the room and his bio-energy* has such a charge that a cripple jumps up and is “healed”; the cripple merely acquired neurosomatic turn-on by contact, as some people get "contact high” when others are on drugs.

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.

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 population, a major historical revolution will have occurred, as profound as the Life Extension Revolution.*

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.

Prolonged sexual play without orgasm always triggers some Circuit V consciousness.

It is quite easy to determine if the Fifth Circuit has been activated successfully or not. How often does a person go to a doctor? If a mind researcher is “glowing” rather than greyish, “bouncy” rather than craggy, if he or she has a “sparkle” — and if he or she virtually never goes to a doctor — the neurosomatic circuit has been mastered.

As the semanticist Alfred Korzybski often warned, when we split verbally that which is never split existentially we introduce fallacies into our thinking.

Korzybski’s favorite example was the matter of “space” and “time”; for in experience, we never encounter “space” without “time” or “time” without “space,” i.e., a year measures the space the Earth moves around the sun, and the space the Earth travels in one orbit gives us the time we call a “year.” The verbal separation of “space” and “time” became such a problem in late 19th Century physics that paradoxes and contradictions multiplied endlessly; and this was only resolved when the genius of Einstein went back before the verbal categories, realized we had created them, and started physics over from the ground up on the simple existential fact that we never encounter “space” or “time” separately but only the undifferentiated “space-time continuum.”

The revolutionaries of any decade will become the reactionaries of the next decade, if they do not change their nervous system, because the world around them is changing. He or she who stands still in a moving, racing, accelerating age. moves backwards relatively speaking. Thus, there are hundreds of “Thanatological” seminars available in the once revolutionary but now-reactionary Consciousness Movement. These seminars are designed to reconcile people to death, and are about as reactionary as seminars c. 1860 designed to reconcile Black people to slavery. Only one offshoot of the Consciousness Movement, the Theta Seminars of Leonard Orr, are designed to prepare people for our oncoming immortality.

What I see with my eyes closed and with my eyes open is the same stuff: brain circuitry.

This computer is much more powerful and scientifically advanced than the rapture-machine in the neurosomatic circuit. It has total access to all the earlier, primitive circuits, and overrules any of them. That is, if you put a meta-programming instruction into this computer; it will relay it downward to the old circuits and cancel contradictory programs left over from the past.

"Whatever you say it is, it isn’t,” Korzybski, the semanticist, repeated endlessly in his seminars, trying to make clear that third-circuit semantic maps are not the territories they represent; that we can always make maps of our maps, revisions of our revisions, meta-selves of our selves.

R. Buckminster Fuller illustrates the meta-programming circuit, in his lectures, by pointing out that we feel puny in comparison to the size of the universe, but only our bodies (hardware) are puny. Our minds, he says — by which he means our software — contain the universe, by the act of comprehending it.

For instance, Niels Bohr proposed the Copenhagen Interpretation, which merely says, in the manner of Godel, that our equations do not describe the universe really. They describe the mental processes we have to put ourselves through to describe the universe.

You are still in life, or life is in you, but since there are infinite aspects to everything, especially to the “you” who is observing/creating all these muddles and models, there are no limits. 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.

Consider the belief system or reality-tunnel of an educated reader 1200 years ago — in 797 AD. How much of that tunnel still seems “Real”? How much in our reality-tunnel was unknown or invisible then? 3. Consider the reality-tunnel of an educated person 1200 years from now — in 3197 AD. How much of our

reality-tunnel will still seem “Real”? How much of the 3197 AD reality-tunnel is unknown or invisible to us?

To review: Each individual has a neurological system, or game, different from other members of the same society. In accord with Einstein’s physical relativism, and anthropology’s cultural relativism, we call this neurological relativism.

Of course, only the most fanatic Freudian or Buddhist mystic would claim your whole life history has been similarly “selected” by you. But, stop and think a moment: the life-history you think you have, the part that is stored in your brain as “memory,” has certainly been selected. You can’t even remember everything that happened in the last five minutes. If you try to be inwardly silent (passive; non-verbal) and notice everything happening in your field for one minute, you are overwhelmed by thousands of impressions that you cannot catalog and retain.

Conclusion: who you are, and what you think you are, is a creation edited and orchestrated by your brain.

As for the universe “outside” you: of course, you didn’t create that. But just because you didn’t create it, you can never know it . . .except approximately. What you do know, and consider “the universe outside” is another part of your brain, which has made of its circuits a model which you identify with the universe outside.

“The peoples of the earth are islands,” said the late Clement Atlee, “shouting at each other over oceans of misunderstanding.”

The chief of these “reactionary” factors was described in my novel Illuminatus! as the Snafu Principle or Celine’s Law. It holds that communication is only possible between equals.

Adequate communication flows freely between equals. Communication between non-equals is warped and distorted by second-circuit Domination and Submission rituals perpetuating communication jam and a Game Without End.

Every authoritarian structure can be visualized as a pyramid with an eye on the top. This is the typical flow-chart of any government, any corporation, any Army, any bureaucracy, any mammalian pack. On each rung, participants bear a burden of nescience in relation to those above them. That is, they must be very, very careful that the natural sensory activities of being conscious organisms — the acts of seeing, hearing, smelling, drawing inferences from perception, etc. — are in accord with the reality-tunnel of those above them.

But this leads to an equal and opposite burden of omniscience upon those at the top, in the eye of the pyramid. All that is forbidden to those at the bottom — the conscious activities of perception and evaluation — is demanded of the Power Elite, the master class. They must attempt to do the seeing, hearing, smelling, etc. and all the thinking and evaluating for the whole pyramid.

But a man with a gun (the power to punish) is told

only what the target thinks will not cause him to pull the trigger (write the pink slip, order the court-martial). The elite, with their burden of omniscience, face the underlings, with their burden of nescience, and receive only the feedback consistent with their own preconceived notions and reality-tunnels. The burden of omniscience becomes, over time, another and more complex burden of nescience. Nobody really knows anything anymore, or if they do, they are caref...

As Paul Watzlawick notes, that which is objectively repressed (unspeakable) soon becomes subjectively repressed (unthinkable). Nobody likes to feel like a coward and a liar constantly. It is easier to cease to notice where the official tunnel-reality differs from existential fact. Thus SNAFU accelerates and rigiditus bureaucraticus sets in — the last stage ...

Secrecy is the original sin. Fig leaf in the Garden of Eden. The basic crime against love . . . The purpose of life is to receive, synthesize and transmit energy. Communication fusion is the goal of life. Any star can tell you that. Communication is love. Secrecy, withholding the signal, hoarding, hiding, covering up the light is motivated by shame and fear.

“Everything works out more perfectly than I plan it.”

What is man? A bridge between the ape and the Superman — a bridge over an abyss. — F.W. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

The Third Wave, which began when Shannon and Wiener defined information and Von Neumann designed the first programmable computer, is well under way already. Home computers became as common as TV sets by the mid-1980s. Now the Net — computers “talking to” computers — is doubling every four months. This transformation, again, will be total: it will create a whole new “man,” a new “woman,” a new “child,” a new “self,” new “society,” a new concept of “work” and “energy” and “reality,” etc.

Dr. Prigogine’s work deals with the processes we have been discussing — the emergence of negative entropy (coherent order) out of stochastic processes — but he has taken a giant leap beyond the pioneering insights of Schrodinger, Weiner, Shannon and Bateson.

Any organized system, according to Prigogine, exists in dynamic tension between entropy and negentropy, between chaos and information. The more complex the system, the greater is its instability.

Instability is not always bad: in fact, it is absolutely necessary for evolution to occur. Insect societies are highly stable and have not evolved at all in several million years. Human societies are highly unstable and are in continuous evolution.

Prigogine demonstrates the evolutionary value of instability by his concept of the “dissipative structure.” A dissipative structure is highly complex and therefore highly unstable. The more complex it is, the more unstable it is, mathematically, certainly; and the more unstable, the more likely it is to change — to evolve.

All dissipative structures are teetering, perpetually, between self-destruction and re-organization on a higher level of information (coherence). If that sounds grim, it isn’t really. Prigogine’s math is highly optimistic, He shows that the more complex structures — such as our world-round human society today, midway between Second Wave indust-reality and the emerging Third Wave — are mathema...

Prigogine is the mathematical demonstration of McLuhan’s intuition that many seeming symptoms of breakdown are actually harbingers of breakthrough.

Taking the Sun’s expected life span of about 20 billion years as our model to be mapped onto a single day, we find that it’s now around eight in the morning. Life has been mostly unconscious until now — operating on auto-pilot, as it were — but in the last million years (the last few seconds on this model) signs of consciousness and Awakening are beginning to appear.

Example: One day in 1973, during a neuro-programming experiment, I “saw” something happening to my son at exactly that time in Arizona, over 500 miles away. We can process this datum in various ways. We can say that my “astral body” actually traveled to Arizona; this is the occultist theory. We can more conservatively say that I developed extrasensory perception and “saw” Arizona without “going” there; there are many parapsychologists who prefer this third-circuit map of the 8th-Circuit experience. We can try to aver that I only “happened” to think of that scene while it was happening, by synchronicity; this is the Jungian approach. Or we can sweep it under the carpet by muttering “mere coincidence” or “sheer coincidence;” which is the traditional Rationalist approach.

Bell’s Theorem is highly technical, but in ordinary

language it amounts to something like this: There are no isolated systems: every particle in the universe is in “instantaneous” (faster-than-light) communication with every other particle. The Whole System, even the parts that are separated by cosmic distances, functions as a Whole System.

Dr. Sarfatti explains his theory as follows: Imagine that your brain is a computer, as modern neurology suggests. Now imagine that the whole universe is a big computer, a mega-computer, as John Lilly has proposed. Then imagine that the sub-quantum realm, the realm of what Dr. David Bohm calls ‘hidden variables’ is made up of mini-mini-computers. Now, the hardware of each ‘computer’ — the universe, your brain, the sub-quantum mechanisms — is localized. Each part of it is somewhere in spacetime, here not there, now not then. But the software — the information — is non-local. It is here, there and everywhere; now, then and everywhen.

First is asana, which consists of holding a single posture (usually sitting) for prolonged periods of time. This is an attempt, in our terminology, to stabilize the bio-survival circuit by drowning it in monotony. You sit, and sit, and sit, and sit. Eventually, an “internal peace” is reached, which signifies the atrophying of all background levels of “unconscious” or unnoticed bio-survival anxiety.

In other schools, since asana is so monotonous and slow-working and because war (second-circuit mammalian struggles over territory) is so common among domesticated primates, an alternative method of stabilizing the bio-survival circuit is used: martial arts. Akido, judo, karate etc. all emerged from yoga-like mystic schools, as bio-survival reprogrammers.

The second step in classical yoga, according to Patanjali, is pranayama. We have already commented on the efficiency of this breathing technique in quieting and mel...

The third step in yoga is dharana or mantra.

so the majority of yoga teachers substitute mantra, which is concentration (by repetition) on a single sentence, usually nonsensical, such as “Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare” or “Aum Tat Sat Aum” or whatever.