← Prometheus Rising Book Summary, Notes and Highlights
Prometheus Rising Chapter 13. Introduction to the Metaprogramming Circuit
Author: Robert Anton Wilson Publisher: Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press. Publish Date: 1983 Review Date: Status:⌛️
Annotations
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Highlight(pink) - Location 254 Each of us is trapped in the reality-tunnel (assumption-consumption) his or her brain has manufactured. We do not “see” it or “sense” it as a model our brain has created. We automatically, unconsciously, mechanically “see” and “sense” it out there, apart from us, and we consider it “objective.” When we meet somebody whose separate tunnel-reality is obviously far different from ours, we are a bit frightened and always disoriented. We tend to think they are mad, or that they are crooks trying to con us in some way, or that they are hoaxters playing a joke. Yet it is neurologically obvious that no two brains have the same genetically-programmed hard wiring, the same imprints, the same conditioning, the same learning experiences. We are all living in separate realities. That is why communication fails so often, and misunderstandings and resentments are so common.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2559 The UFO debate, or quarrel, hinges upon the two categories which we find central to our thesis—the innocent-looking ideas of “inside” and “outside.” Broadly speaking, the UFO “skeptics” are those who claim the UFO is “inside” the UFO observer (“hallucination,” misidentification, etc.), while the UFO “believers” claim the UFO is “outside” (objectivity).
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2562 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.”
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2569 Applying this Einsteinian operational orientation to the UFO problem, we observe that we never hear of a UFO without a human observer. In fact, even the UFOs “seen” on radar become UFOs (unidentified, rather than identified, flying objects) through processes of evaluation in the nervous system of the radar operator. It is, therefore, the Einsteinian and operational approach to accept the seamless unity of UFO-observer and cease to separate them into “UFO” and “observer.”
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2582 One consistency does appear in this confusing picture: those who have had Close Encounters show marked personality change afterwards. At one extreme we find paranoid and schizophrenic breakdowns or acute anxieties requiring hospitalization; at the other, “illuminations” similar to those of Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus, St. Paul. In the middle we find a great deal of messianic fanaticism typical of vulgar religiosity everywhere. Rationalism—a philosophy for which we have great sympathy, as for a backward relative—wants to take UFO “observers” by the collar, shake them vigorously and shout in their ears, “Look you so and so. It never happened!—you got it, buddy?” Well, maybe it didn’t—and then again maybe it did. In either case, UFO-observers are all better artists than they realize. It should also be obvious that the Rationalist is a better artist than he realizes. Amid millions of people who have or create such experiences every day in every city on the planet, the Rationalist has created a separate reality in which such things never happen—to him.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2606 Flying saucers and ESP (not to mention Fatima and its “miracles”) may seem far removed from Patty Hearst’s “decision” to become a bank-robber. We are trying to show that there is an intimate connection between all the weirdities of consciousness. The process by which we construct a kitchen chair out of a whirl of atomic energy is just as creative (artistic) as the processes by which Patty Hearst turned her father from a beloved parent into a Pig Imperialist. Your whole world has been constructed that way. You are “reconciled” to death because you have been told, all your life, that everybody must die. Only the Extropian minority—which can be found wherever scientists, science-fiction fans, Futurists and space enthusiasts gather—is living in the separate reality that claims we no longer have to accept this axiom of despair.
- Highlight(pink) - Location 2613 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.
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EXERCIZES
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Buy a copy of Christian Science Sentinel and read all the faith healings reported that month. Note that each “miracle” is attributed to the correct teaching as transmitted by Jesus Christ and Mary Baker Eddy.
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Buy a copy of The Peyote Cult by anthropologist Weston LeBarre which attributes the same effects to auto-suggestion.
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Read Brain/Mind Bulletin for any recent year, and observe that similar healings are reported regularly and attributed to endorphins in the brain.
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Witnesses have testified that Jim Jones (like a few other professional faith-healers) used shills part of the time, a shill being a person who pretends to be ill and pretends to be cured, in order to get the audience in the right frame of mind. 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. Since you weren’t there at the time, does your choice among these theories, or your combination of them, tell more about Jesus or more about your own favorite reality-tunnel?
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Did you ever really give a good trial to our exercize, “I can now exceed all of my previous hopes and ambitions?” Try it; and at the same time, try, “I can be healthier than I have ever been before.”