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Chapter One LOST IN A MAZEMENT Unknowingly we voyage in a labyrinth, a macrodimensional maze of living electrical force, cloaked by a thick layer of ordinary life. Our most serious obstacle is the uncontrollable urge to convert everything to the familiar, to reduce it all to the level of the primate brain; to reject the living, breathing reality of the totality of all possible attention. FROM PREVIOUS EFFORTS AND UNDERSTANDING, we have established a new relationship between the nonbiological essential self and the human biological machine, and have already demonstrated to our satisfaction that the human machine does indeed provide us with the means of transformation; we clearly see the path which we must take.
It ought to be obvious that we are only at the very beginning of our path, and we are anxious to take further responsibilities as beings, but before we can take effective steps toward fulfilling these responsibilities, we must first understand just precisely where we are, and what we are, in the general scale of things, and where we stand in relation to the Absolute so we can develop a method of work within this context. We can now come to understand the essential self in its work-role as eternal voyager, exposed to perils and opportunities, purpose and distraction, fatal attraction and ultimate destruction in the nearly infinite immensity of the labyrinth.
possess—prior to cultural conditioning and psychoemotional imprinting, which is to say, the usual deep-brain impulse-responsive pain and pleasure formatting—precisely the same initial intuitional innocence largely through the inattention which can only come from lack of self-motivation in the absence of environmental and biological stimuli, and the general perceptual occlusion which results from environmental alienation, a hazy uncaring withdrawal which is symptomatic of deep-seated unexamined fears about things I’d rather not think about just now.
The labyrinth: a macrodimensional maze camouflaged by the fabric of biological boundaries. In ordinary life, no matter what we do or accomplish, no matter where we go or who we become, we find ourselves ultimately a prisoner of the rigid rut and, submerging ourselves in a nonstop self-invoked bombardment of daily pressures, distractions and self-pity, manage somehow to successfully avoid all real help. If we know how to look, we can seize the opportunity to work our way through the passages, pitfalls and primrose paths of the macrodimensional maze; but we don’t know how to look, and in the beginning we work to fathom the reality that we can be in the maze and yet be completely unaware of it.
This is the nature of our whole experience in macrodimensions. We have been trained to compartmentalize our experiences, to isolate their connectors, thus overlooking the subtle continuity amidst apparent change and discontinuity. We have a flip-flop perception of events; where there is change, we see stability; where there is stability, we see change. What we believe is real is definitely illusion, and what we believe is illusion is probably real. Compulsive primate hallucinations constantly impose an artificial grid of time and space on our purely sensory and mental experience.
Chapter Two MAZE BRIGHTNESS When we awaken a higher learning process, we no longer exhibit confusion and disorientation in the macrodimensions. Through special internal processes which we can learn, we are able to penetrate far beyond the ordinary spectrum, into the macrodimensions, resembling consensus reality in form, but radically different in other ways, perceivable only with long, difficult training of the non-machine attention.
It might be possible to artificially induce maze awareness and transition into macrodimensional space, but we can fully expect that any resulting momentary understanding which may have been gained will almost instantaneously be mangled, mashed and mauled in the all-devouring jaws of primate convention and found thoroughly indigestible.
Pure macro-molecular structure becomes visible, matter is revealed as swirling patterns of raw energy, and time becomes nonexistent—a simple expedient to encapsulate an event or to move from one frozen energy-tableau to another; then we know that we are beginning to see things as they really are…but we mustn’t mention this to anyone in a lab smock if we don’t want to spend the rest of our lives interpreting Rorschach blots, calling off Rhine cards and singing doda kupanga udoda kukala, doda kupanga ukala shatti background vocals for Leon Russell.
Help, real help, is available only to those already well on their way toward nonprimate life, who show an already deeply rooted aptitude for the labyrinth, who have demonstrated themselves to be courageous voyagers, despite personal fears of the more terrifying aspects of the labyrinth, shown the potential ability to perform special work under very difficult and often overwhelming conditions, and most importantly, do not display the kind of delicate psycho-emotional nature we were likely to see in children who left summer camp the first or second week.
What is really useful is a method of developing intelligence through active interaction, learning from the game how to play the game, and in at least one important sense, voyaging is a game, on a very much higher level than we are used to playing; a game in which the stakes are far higher, and correspondingly much more dangerous.
AI Summary
Life in the Labyrinth by E. J. Gold and Linda Corriveau presents key insights from the Taoism tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
- [To be expanded]
Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
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