(Wilson’s scope: synthesizing circuits, semantics, yoga, and quantum mechanics)
The ability to create a synthesis of diverse points of view, scientific and social and philosophical, is a rare gift. Not many are there who dare even to attempt such a task. Imagine anyone trying to make sense of an amalgam of Timothy Leary’s eight neurological circuits, Gurdjieff’s self-observation exercises, Korzybski’s general semantics, Aleister Crowley’s magical theorems, the several disciplines of Yoga, Christian Science, relativity and modern quantum mechanics, and many other approaches to understanding the world around us! A man is required with an almost encyclopedic education, an incredibly flexible mind, insights as sharp as those whom he is trying synthesize and mirabile dictu, a wonderful sense of humor.
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. Israel Regardie Phoenix Arizona July 1983
All that we are is the result of all that we have thought. It is founded on thought. It is based on thought. — Buddha, The Dhammapada
In the area of extra-sensory perception, the results are uniform after more than a century: everybody who sets out to prove that ESP exists succeeds, and everybody who sets out to prove that ESP does not exist also succeeds.
And this is why Gurdjieff said, in his own jargon, that people are asleep and having nightmares. “FAIRNESS? DECENCY? HOW CAN YOU EXPECT FAIRNESS OR DECENCY ON A PLANET OF SLEEPING PEOPLE?” — G.I. Gurdjieff
All of which is robotic, until one learns how to reprogram and reimprint one’s own brain circuits. In most cases, such metaprogramming skill is never acquired. It all goes by in a flash, on mechanical auto-pilot, in zero time. “I just found myself doing it,” says the soldier as he is being court-martialed for cowardice or decorated for bravery.
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
(Reality tunnels, time-binding, and bio-survival anxiety as social control)
HUMAN BEINGS ARE TIME-BINDERS The third semantic circuit handles artifacts and makes a “map” (reality-tunnel) which can be passed on to others, even across generations. These “maps” may be paintings, blueprints, words, concepts, tools (with instructions on use transmitted verbally), theories, music, etc.
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. And any domesticated primate alpha male, however cruel or crooked, can rally the primate tribe behind him by howling that a rival alpha male is about to lead his gang in an attack on this habitat. These two mammalian reflexes are known, respectively, as Religion and Patriotism. They work for domesticated primates, as for the wild primates, because they are Evolutionary Relative Successes. (So far.)
- Buy some ZOOM or LIFT (two names for the same caffeine-high stimulant) at a Health Food Store. (This gives a close approximation of the effects of illegal cocaine.) When you are Zooming or Lifted and your mind is racing, find a victim and explain the universe to him or her, until they are able to escape you. What you experience in this “speed rap” is what the head of the compulsive Rationalist is always like. This is the verbal circuit gone wild and totally oblivious to information coming in on any other circuit. It explains why most people cannot stand Rationalists. “Speed” drugs evidently trigger neuro-transmitters characteristic of the verbal centers of the left cortex.
A neurotic young man once went to a Zen Master and asked how he could find peace of mind. “How can you lack anything,” the Roshi asked “when you own the greatest treasure in the universe?” “How do I own the greatest treasure in the universe?” asked the young man, baffled. “The place that question comes from is the greatest treasure in the universe,” said the Master, being more explicit than is common for a Zen teacher.
But he knew that the brain produces all that we experience — all our pain and worry, all our bliss states and ecstasies, all our higher evolutionary vistas and trans-time Peak Experiences, etc. It is also “the greatest treasure in the universe” in the most materialistic economic sense: it creates all the ideas which, socially employed, become wealth: roads, scientific laws, calendars, factories, computers, life-saving drugs, medicines, ox-carts, autos, jet planes, spaceships .
Wealth, in Ruskin’s sense, consists of all those artifacts (concretized ideas) which enhance human life, or life generally.
The first step in leaving the civilian reality-tunnel and being initiated into the Army reality-tunnel is, thus, the physical examination, in which the subject is stripped naked and made to march around a large building with other naked victims while the fully-clothed Army personnel give the briefest possible orders: “Stand up. Sit down. Go there. Come back here,” etc. The Masonic initiation, which only removes part of the clothing of the subject, is a milder version of the stripping away of previously secure social parameters.
(Brainwashing, acculturalization, and the social robot)
When the Russian mathematician, Ouspensky, was first studying with Gurdjieff, he had great trouble understanding Gurdjieff s insistence that most people are machines and totally unaware of the objective world around them.
In the next chapter we will explain further how being captured (“drafted”) by an army is the model of all brainwashing experience. Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot.
The concept of “washing” is, of course, unscientific and crude. The brain is not a dirty garment but an electro-colloidal information processor — 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. Society has always known how to wire children; the process is called acculturalization; it explains why children of Catholics tend to become Catholics, children of Samoans fit into Samoan society, children of Communists become good little Communists, etc. Each generation “brainwashes” the next.
(Rapid brain-change: Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus, and the neurosomatic circuit)
Buddha was an ordinary Hindu nobleman, and then he experienced a rapid brain-change, after which he became a great Teacher. Mohammed was a humble camel-driver, with no sign of exceptional intelligence or ambition, and then he experienced a rapid brain change, after which he became Teacher, Conqueror, Law-Maker and Prophet. We hear nothing of Jesus (save a few fables) until the age of 30, when he experiences a rapid brain-change, and puts forth a doctrine that is to overturn the Roman Empire and influence Western Civilization until the present.
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.
This is very strong stuff from the mystic who filled his books with jokes and jeers, and who always told his students, not “Believe me,” but “Don’t believe me.” About pranayama, for once in his life, Crowley was serious. 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, for the judicious or lucky, Cannabis drugs, as said above.
Nikola Tesla, the Yugoslav genius, went through the same “Hell” or schizoid state, without yoga, in his teens. He came out of the horrors with the scientific theory of alternating currents worked out, a belief in extra-sensory perception, a superhuman memory, and a streak of visionary humanitarianism that led him into continuous conflicts with the corporations that financed his more-than-100 major electrical inventions. (He earned over $1,000,000 before the age of 30, at a time when $1,000,000 was a lot of money, and he died broke, trying to sell an invention he said would abolish poverty.)
(Fifth circuit activation: pranayama, Tantra, and neurosomatic bliss)
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 Mary Baker Eddy once wrote (thereby making herself hugely unpopular with those who love to talk of matters mystical but have no empirical knowledge):
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Acquire my book Sex & Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits and try the Tantric exercizes there described.
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Learn how to do pranayama properly, from an expert. (I have tried describing this elsewhere, and have found there is no way to prevent gross errors in verbal transmission of this nonverbal knowledge. Get a Hindu to show you.)
Re-read all the miracles in the New Testament, using each of these filters: Jesus had the correct teaching; Jesus was using auto-suggestion; the sufferers’ brains unleashed endorphins when Jesus gave them positive auto-suggestion; Jesus was a con-man using shills.
Yogis, mathematicians and musicians seem more inclined to develop metaprogramming consciousness than most of humanity. Korzybski even claimed that the use of mathematical scripts is an aid to developing this circuit, for as soon as you think of your mind as mind-1, and the mind which contemplates that mind as mind-2 and the mind which contemplates mind-2 contemplating mind-1 as mind-3, you are well on your way to metaprogramming awareness. Alice in Wonderland is a masterful guide to the metaprogramming circuit (written by one of the founders of mathematical logic) and Aleister Crowley soberly urged its study upon all students of yoga.
Conclusion: who you are, and what you think you are, is a creation edited and orchestrated by your brain.
Alice in Wonderland, and any treatise on mathematical logic, will provide hundreds of examples of similar mind-benders. A Zen saying sums it all up: “To think that I am not going to think of you anymore is still thinking of you. Let me then try not to think that I am not going to think of you.”
(Patanjali’s eight steps mapped onto the circuit model)
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 mellowing-out second-circuit emotional programs.
(It will already be seen that yoga, like brainwashing, begins from the bottom up, working on the more primitive and older circuits first.) The third step in yoga is dharana or mantra. Dharana consists of concentrating on a single image, such as a vividly imagined red triangle, and ruthlessly pushing aside any other images, verbalizations or impressions that cross the mind’s screen. In practice, this is beyond the powers of most students, 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. Either practice, dharana or mantra, stops the third-circuit “internal monologue,” if persisted in for long enough periods each day.
When the student has acquired sufficient detachment from first-circuit anxieties, second-circuit emotions and third-circuit reality-maps, by way of asana, pranayama and dharana or mantra, Patanjali recommends the practice of yama. This includes, but is not limited to, celibacy. The ultimate of yama is to lose all interest in both the social and sexual aspects of the fourth circuit; to cease to care at all about family, tribal or societal matters.
Some take a short-cut at this point, discovered after Patanjali or not known to him, by having themselves locked up in caves. Such isolation, as indicated earlier, helps vastly in bleaching out all four hominid circuits. An alternative, for those not attracted to either celibacy or becoming hermits, is Tantra, invented in northern India around the time of Patanjali. This simply transmutes the fourth circuit by ceremonial, physiological and “magick” (self-hypnotic) explosion of the (prolonged) sexual act into fifth-circuit neurosomatic rapture.
The sixth step in yoga, according to Patanjali, is dhyana, which means “meditation” only in the roughest way. Dhyana means actually union with the object on the mind’s screen, i.e., realization of the total meaning of the proposition that mind and its contents are functionally identical, i.e., opening the metaprogramming circuit. One can make dhyana on anything; yogis talk of making dhyana on a tree or a dog, just as don Juan Matus, the Mexican shaman, talks of becoming one with a coyote or a star in the books of Castaneda.
(Metaprogramming consciousness: drugs, LSD research, and dialing the nervous system)
Dr. Nathan Kline has predicted that soon we will have drugs to improve memory, drugs to erase unpleasant memories, drugs to increase or decrease any emotion, drugs to prolong or shorten childhood, etc. It takes no great imagination to foresee that such chemicals will allow us greater control over our neural tunnel-realities than ever before. Obviously, people will use and abuse these potions in many ways, but the most intelligent will use them in the most intelligent way, namely to increase and intensify their intelligence in every direction possible on our spectrum of eight circuits.
One of the least known facts about the LSD research in the 1960s was that the longest single research project with LSD, at Spring Grove Hospital, Maryland, showed an average 10% increase in linear IQ alone as well as the metaprogramming vistas and neurogenetic awakenings popularized by the outlaw LSD culture and its gurus.
We need to realize that the same technology, wisely used by intelligent men and women, can free us from every form of neurotic and irrational rigidity, to dial and focus our nervous systems as easily as we dial or focus our TV, turning any channel or circuit off and on as we choose. This is what metaprogramming (cybernetic) consciousness means.