🔮 The Cosmos

Search

SearchSearch

← Prometheus Rising Book Summary, Notes and Highlights

Prometheus Rising Chapter 11. The Holistic Neurosomatic Circuit

Author: Robert Anton Wilson Publisher: Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press. Publish Date: 1983 Review Date: 2023-2-23 Status:📚

Annotations

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2094 THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY NEED NOT BE POSTPONED UNTIL AFTER DEATH. IT CAN HAPPEN AT ANY MOMENT.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2095

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2096 This is a copy of Crowley’s inspired drawing. For his original see The Book of Thoth or study his Tarot deck. The beast with four heads represents the antique circuits: the hedonic “laid-back” nude is neurosomatic rapture. The serpent is “the rising of the kundalini serpent,” a Hindu metaphor for imprinting this Circuit V neurosomatic bliss-control.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2197 The neurosomatic circuit probably began to appear around 30,000 years ago. (That is the conclusion of Barbara Honnegger, who has made a profound study of European cave paintings, coming to the conclusion that many of them show exercizes to increase right-brain activity similar to those still used in surviving shamanic and yogic traditions.)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2199 This fifth circuit is bonded into the right cortex and neurologically linked to the limbic (first circuit) system and the genitalia. These neural links explain the sexual metaphor of “kundalini” or “serpent” energy used to describe this circuit in systems as varied as Indian Tantra, Gnosticism and Voodoo, and the Chinese yin yang (male-female) energies associated with it. Prolonged sexual play without orgasm always triggers some Circuit V consciousness.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2203 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):

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2208 There is no tribe known to anthropology which doesn’t have at least one neurosomatic technician (shaman).

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2103 The word “psychosomatic” has been around long enough to be generally understood; unfortunately, it is another semantic spook. The concept of “psyche” or “soul” was borrowed from the theologians, who, being bankrupt, are in no position to lend anything. What we know and experience—our tunnel-reality—is what registers on the brain and nervous system. The phenomena of “faith healing,” “regeneration,” “rejuvenation,” bliss, ecstasy, rapture, etc. have been occurring for many thousands of years, in all known cultures. In the pre-scientific language of yesterday’s psychology we would refer to such events as “psychosomatic.” In our deliberately modernistic and almost sci-fi jargon, we prefer to call them neurosomatic.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2109 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. Of the former device, pranayama, Aleister Crowley—certainly the most skeptical of all mystics—writes forcefully: For mind and body alike there is no purgative like pranayama, no purgative like pranayama. For mind and body alike, for mind and body alike—alike!—there is, there is, there is no purgative like pranayama—pranayama!—pranayama! yea, for mind and body alike there is no purgative, no purgative, no purgative (for mind and body alike) no purgative like pranayama! If this is not emphatic enough, Crowley adds elsewhere: Pranayama is notably useful in quieting the emotions and appetites … Digestive troubles in particular are very easy to remove in this way. It purifies both the body and the mind and should be practiced certainly never less than one hour daily by the serious student. To which he adds a footnote: Emphatically. Emphatically. Emphatically. It is impossible to combine pranayama properly performed with emotional thought [second-circuit reflexes—R.A.W.]. It should be resorted to immediately, at all times during life, when calm is threatened. 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.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2132 Negative neurosomatic circuit effects are experienced by amateur yogis, by many pot-heads, and by a large number of schizophrenics. The neurosomatic feedback loop, in these unfortunate cases, reverses the above description. Sensory experience becomes unpleasant (any sound or touch is painful), sensuality turns into acute discomfort with the entire body, perceptions warp into nightmare, and general anxiety is imprinted. Light is particularly terrifying and painful, often associated with Hell or with “mind-control” manipulated by unscrupulous enemies. 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.”
  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2153 Some lucky souls jump to Circuit V bliss without passing through the horrors of “chemicalization” and the “Dark Night of the Soul.” 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.
  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2156 The lives of the saints are full of stories which seem “miracles” to the four-circuited majority, or are rejected as “lies, hoaxes, yams” by the three-circuited dogmatic Rationalist, but which seem perfectly normal from the viewpoint of five-circuited polymorphous consciousness. The saint says he is in rapture, and full of gratitude to God, for giving him such a feast for dinner as—plain bread and water. (Of course, many a pot-head will understand that degree of neurosomatic rapture …) 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. The fire-walkers in many shamanic traditions walk on the fire, as they tell enquiring anthropologists, to prove their control over “the spirit”—i.e., to demonstrate to themselves and others that they have achieved high-quality neurosomatic tuning. *By which we mean nothing “mystical.” It is now known that many physical energies radiate from the body, and that even chemical effects can be transmitted (experienced as emotional “vibes”) from one person to another, the chemicals acting as stimuli to trigger neurotransmitter actions in the second person.
  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2170 One faith-healer told the present author, “Most people die of adrenaline poisoning.” In our terminology, most people have too much first-circuit anxiety and second-circuit territorial pugnacity for their own good. They are literally struggling for survival, as no other animals do, despite Darwin. 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. The faith-healer went on, “What cures them is realizing that I’m not afraid.” That is, contact with a fifth-circuit personality, a person who controls his or her own Circuit II adrenaline-trips, can be a catalyst, throwing the sufferer upward into a personal fifth-circuit experience.
  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2176 The avant-garde 20% of the population, due to the 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.* Please re-read this sentence, and think about it.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2184 ❗️ 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.-

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2187 The great musician has developed a remarkable feedback between fifth-circuit Gestalt-ing and the third-circuit function of coding such “coherent structures” into the inspired symbolism of music. Music always leads to some right-brain activity in listeners, and the fifth circuit is almost certainly located in the right brain hemisphere.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2189 Beethoven, we remember, was left-handed. Since the left hand is neurologically linked to the polymorphous right brain, one might say he was genetically inclined to right brain activities, that is, to sensing coherent wholes, to plunging into neurosomatic bliss almost “at will,” and to sensory-sensual raptness and rapture. Everybody “knows” that the Sixth Symphony is “pantheistic,” but whether Beethoven was an ideological pantheist or not, that way of responding to nature is normal and natural right-brain Circuit V functioning. That is, anybody on the Fifth Circuit will “talk like a pantheist” whether or not he has developed a “philosophy” about pantheism. The miracle of Beethoven is not that he felt the universe that way—a few thousand fifth-circuit types throughout history have also felt and sensed nature that way—but that he mastered the third-circuit art of music with such skill that he could communicate such experiences, which is precisely what the ordinary “mystic” cannot do.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2209 ❗️ Large-scale outbursts of neurosomatic consciousness have occurred frequently in all the major historical periods, usually being stamped out quickly by the local branch of the Inquisition or the AM.A.; other outbursts have been co-opted and diluted.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2211 As we read in the New Testament: And when he had called into him his twelve disciples, he gave them power against unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease … And as ye go, preach, saying, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give.—Matt 10: 1-8 It may or may not have happened exactly like that; as Mark Twain would say, there might be a few stretchers in there. But something like this, however much the evangelist may exaggerate it, must have happened to account for Christianity’s rapid triumph over other, but probably less effective, systems of opening the fifth circuit. Mithraism, the Eleusinian cult at Athens, the Dionysian cults, etc. all had age-old shamanic techniques for inducing neurosomatic rapture; Christianity (at first) seems to have been superior in creating neurosomatic control. In St. Paul’s metaphor, the “Old Adam” (Circuits I-IV) got bleached out, and the “New Adam” (Circuit V) took over as the center of consciousness and self-government. In another metaphor, the body became the flexible clay and the awakened (illuminated) brain became the sculptor.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2223 ❗️ In general, fourth-circuit problems take the form of guilt; “I cannot do what I am supposed to do.” Third-circuit problems take the form of perplexity; “I cannot understand how I got into this mess, or how to get out of it, or what is expected of me,” etc. Second-circuit problems take the form of bullying or cowardice: “I will force them, or I will surrender and let them force me.” First-circuit problems take the form of body symptoms: “I feel rotten all over” gradually centering in, under enough stress, on one acute disabling symptom. This last is Eric Berne’s “Wooden Leg” game, which asks to be relieved of social participation or interaction on the grounds of being physically hors de combat. Fifth-Circuit neurosomatic consciousness bleaches out all these problems at once. The disappearance of first-circuit “physical” illnesses only seems more “miraculous” than the transcendence of second-circuit emotionalism, third-circuit perplexity and fourth-circuit guilt. It is the Cartesian mind/body dualism that makes us think of such first-circuit “physical” cures as somehow stranger or more spooky than any rapid improvement on the other circuits. One of the intents of our terminology is precisely to transcend that Cartesian dualism, making all the circuits equally comprehensible within one context.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2237 The robotized Rationalist fears and resents Circuit V rapture and its holistic intuitive faculties (just as the robotized Emotionalist fears and resents Circuit III reason). Thus, when the neurosomatic circuit feedback begins to function, and the mutated Circuit V person tries to describe his or her rapture and at-oneness, the Rationalist hastily mutters that this is “merely subjective.” Misery is “merely subjective,” too, but that doesn’t keep it from hurting. The neurosomatic skill of transmuting all experience, so that one is high and happy in a situation where the four-circuited majority would be miserable, is worth learning for the very simple, egotistic reason that it’s more fun to be happy than to be in agony. It is also socially beneficial, because, as Tim Leary often said, “You can’t do good until you feel good.” Just as misery loves company, the high and happy want everybody else to be high and happy. (The first lesson the fifth-circuit adept has to learn is to control this upsurge of altruism and not make a nuisance of oneself by trying to force everybody to be happy …)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2245 The Rationalist is even more alarmed by the results of prolonged fifth-circuit bliss, which includes the ability to heal a wide variety of diseases both in oneself and in others. Even the well documented current research on endorphins—which gives us the beginning of a neuro-chemical explanation of how such healings operate—is regarded with discomfort or hostility by the more robotized Rationalists. It all sounds “metaphysical” and therefore it cannot exist. Endorphins are neurotransmitters that trigger Circuit V. They can be activated by cannabis drugs, psychedelics, meditation, pranayama, or visualization of white light. The last is the most common system used by “faith-healers” and was known to the medieval Rosicrucians.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2254 There is nothing supernatural about the fifth circuit. It merely appears “supernatural” by comparison to the earlier circuits; but the third circuit, of which the Rationalist is so proud, undoubtedly appeared “supernatural” when it first appeared. (The Egyptians attributed speech and writing, third-circuit functions, to divine intervention by the god Thoth.) The fifth circuit, like the earlier circuits, is just another evolutionary mutation, necessary to us as we move toward a more complex neuro-social level.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2284 ❗️

In the East, the control of the neurosomatic circuit is known as dhyana, cha’an or Zen; the state is sometimes called “Buddha-mind” or “Buddha-body.”

Note: jhana and piti in theravada

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2285 To the ancient Greeks, where rituals to achieve it with psychedelic drugs were performed yearly at Eleusis, those who accomplished the ritual successfully were called digenes, “twice-born.” The metaphor lingers in the “born again” terminology of charismatic Christianity, and is symbolized by the myth of the Resurrection of the Body. Freud recognized this state, vaguely, as the “oceanic experience.” Gurdjieff calls this circuit the Magnetic Center.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2289 Faith-healers and adepts of a few yogic schools seem to live in neurosomatic consciousness permanently; most who have achieved it at all tend to have it only in flashes, as noted by Ezra Pound: Le Paradis n’est pas artificial but is jagged For a flash, for an hour. Then agony, then an hour.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2300 This “Paradis,” this condition of neurosomatic (“mind-body”) peace, should be considered a new brain circuit toward which all humanity is evolving, slowly and painfully, out of mammalian antique circuits. This progression, from primate emotion to post-hominid tranquility, from “man” to “super man.” is the Next Step that mystics forever talk of; you can hear it in most of Beethoven’s later, major compositions.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2303 ❗️ As mentioned before, governmental brainwashers are generally too puritanical to handle, or manhandle, the socio-sexual circuit and content themselves with mind-washing and brain-programming on the bio-survival, emotional and semantic circuits, while outlaw bands like the SLA or Mansonoids go further and reimprint the socio-sexual circuit also. It is necessary to note that some cults presently active on this backward planet go even further than that and engage in neurosomatic brainwashing. A permanent neurosomatic circuit can only be imprinted by prolonged practice of one of the yogic, Tantric or related sciences, and perhaps good genes, good environments and good luck generally. Neurosomatic brainwashing—the most powerful form of robotization—consists in temporary activation of the neurosomatic circuit by the brainwasher, together with assurances that only the brainwasher (or the “god” who “acts through him”) can turn on this circuit.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2311 For full effect, this is, of course, proceeded by normal brainwashing. The victim is first isolated from his or her previous environment and trained to hook the bio-survival circuit onto the “guru” and/or the Ashram or commune. The emotional circuit is bent and broken by continuous attacks upon status (ego), until the only emotional security left is found in Total Submission to the group reality-island. The re-infantilized victim is then ready to imprint any semantic circuitry desired, from psychological cults, political cults, religious cults, etc. The socio-sexual circuit can then easily be programmed for celibacy, for free love, or for whatever sexual game the guru has selected. Then, and only then, the neurosomatic buttons are pushed and ecstasy is “given” to the subject “by” the guru.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2355 Hassan i Sabbah was not the first or last student of the ways in which sexuality can be transmuted into fifth-circuit rapture. Further to the East, there were Tantric schools within Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, which taught techniques by which prolongation of the genital embrace could explode into dramatic brain-change. In the West, underground cults of Gnostics, Illuminati, alchemists and witches kept similar techniques as closely guarded secrets, for if the Holy Inquisition ever learned of such practices the participants would be denounced as devil-worshippers and burned at the stake.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2359 In our own time, there has been a revolutionary upsurge of these ancient neurological secrets, with an admixture of more modern techniques. Tantric teachers are available in many cities. Masters and Johnson use quasi-Tantric practices to treat sexual dysfunctions. As early as 1968, a poll by McGlothlin showed that 85% of the pot-smokers in the country said their chief interest in the Weed was its function as enhancer of erotic sensation. Vibrators and other sexual toys proliferate; Gays come out of the closet; philosophers of a culture without repression (Norman Brown, Henri Marcuse, Charles Reich) become best-sellers.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2363 ❗️ Saul Kent, a writer on medical science for general audiences, has even suggested that electronic sexual surrogates can and will be manufactured in the near future. (Your own Marilyn Monroe doll!) Instead of joining Tom Wolfe and the neo-puritans in throwing up our hands in horror at such an idea, let us consider it for a moment. Let us see if we can peek outside our imprinted conditioned reality-tunnel. If a sexual android is possible in 2005 or 2050 or whenever, why not a totally programmed sexual environment? Let us call this, in memory of Herman Hesse, the Magic Theatre. We start with what is concurrently available in high-priced brothels in the hedonic Sun Belt section of America. Massage, a first-circuit tranquilizer, has all the advantages of the opiates without being habit-forming. Our Magic Theatre, then, would include computerized body-relaxers-and-energizers better than current massage techniques. Porn movies are available, for stimulation, in the better brothels. Our Magic Theatre would have them in 3D on all four walls, obviously. Marijuana and stimulants like cocaine or speed are available in brothels everywhere. Our Magic Theatre would have better chemical rapture-agents. One can go on adding details, according to personal fantasy, until one has created a room in which bliss can be extended in all dimensions, indefinitely.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2373 A strange thing has happened in constructing this cyberneticized brothel. We seem to have gone beyond sex to something that might be called meta-sex. While specific genital pleasure might still be fun, it is hardly as important as it seemed to us before we came into the multi-dimensional Pleasure Dome where all senses are stimulated to ecstasy.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2376 And the most peculiar thing about this bawdy science-fiction projection is that we don’t even need to build a Magic Room. It is built into our brains already. We have been describing the positive neurosomatic consciousness which Freud called “polymorphous perversity” in one of his Puritan moods and “the oceanic experience” in one of his mystical moments. This is what the neurosomatically turned-on brain feels like.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 2379 In alchemy this was known as “the multiplication of the first matter” or “the Philosopher’s Gold,” which was unlike ordinary gold in that it could not be spent or used-up, since it perpetually multiplied and renewed itself. It is the “Third Eye” of the Illuminati tradition, which transforms all it sees; the eye of which Jesus speaks in his gnomic aphorism, “The light of the body is the eye; if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body will be full of light.”—Matt 6:22

Highlight(pink) - Location 2385

EXERCIZES

  1. Get the lesson book from the local Christian Science Reading Room and read the lessons for a month.

  2. Attend a Sufi week-end seminar.

  3. Acquire my book Sex & Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits and try the Tantric exercizes there described.

  4. 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.)

  5. Da Free John, an American guru, says you can reach Illumination by constantly asking, “Who is the One who is living me now?” Well—is it Circuit I consciousness. Circuit II ego. Circuit III mind, Circuit IV sex-role. Circuit V Gestalt-field, or a higher circuit? Who is it? Where is it? How old is it?

  6. Dr. Aiden Kelly has suggested that the so-called “unconscious” is more conscious than the so-called conscious mind. That is, the “unconscious” contains all the feedbacks of the neurosomatic circuit and the other circuits that maintain life. Consider this idea. Is this the “One who is living you now”?

Notes

Amount: 10

Graph View

Backlinks