Prometheus Rising Chapter 14 The Meta-Programming Circuit

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Prometheus Rising Chapter 14. The Meta-Programming Circuit

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

Annotations

Highlight(pink) - Location 2635 According to Alfred Korzybski, any “idea” or mental state is a brain circuit which the brain itself can contemplate, thereby having an idea about the idea, or a mental state about the mental state, etc. There is no theoretical or real limit to the higher-ordering process; it is the “Infinity Within” of which mystics speak. Dr. John Lilly says, “In the province of the mind what is believed true is true or becomes true within limits to be learned by experience and experiment. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind there are no limits.”
Highlight(pink) - Location 2640 Mind and its contents are functionally identical: My wife only exists, for me, in my mind. Not being a solipsist, I recognize the converse: I only exist, for her, in her mind. Lest the reader exclaim, like Byron of Wordworth, “I wish he would explain his explanation!”, let us try it this way: If I am so fortunate as to be listening to the Hammerklavier sonata, the only correct answer, if you ask me suddenly, “Who are you?” would be to hum the Hammerklavier. For, with music of that quality, one is hypnotized into rapt attention: there is no division between “me” and “my experience.” In heavy meditation, when I think of me, I am me; when I think of me and you, I am me and you; when I think of you alone, I am not there anymore; when I think of God, I am God. What I see with my eyes closed and with my eyes open is the same stuff: brain circuitry.
Highlight(pink) - Location 2646 Mathematician J.W. Dunne puts the matter in a parable. A painter, who had escaped from the asylum to which he was (justly or unjustly) confined, decided to paint the field in which he found himself. Finished, he looked at the result and realized that something was missing: namely, himself and his canvas, which were part of the field. So he started over and painted himself and his canvas in the field. But, examining the results with philosophical analysis, he realized that something was still missing: namely, himself and his canvas on which he was painting himself and his canvas in the field. So he started a third time … and a fourth … ad infinitum. We think of the paintings of M.C. Escher at this point: Or we recall the old folk-tale of the farmer who set out to market with ten donkeys, on one of which he rode. After a while, he began to wonder if any of the donkeys had strayed and he began counting and there seemed to be only nine. Disturbed, he dismounted and walked around the herd, counting carefully—and there were ten after all. So he remounted and went on riding, until worry beset him again. So he counted another time . . .and there were nine. So, once again, he dismounted and walked about counting carefully to find ten. The process is repeated until he finally solves the problem, carrying one donkey on his back and driving the other nine before him. The “disappearing donkey” trick is the epitome of ideas about ideas about ideas, paintings of paintings of paintings, etc. The disappearing donkey is a synecdoche of the meta-programming circuit of the nervous system.
Highlight(pink) - Location 2658 The meta-programming circuit—known as the “soul” in Gnosticism, the “no-mind” (wu-hsin) in China, the White Light of the Void in Tibetan Buddhism, Shiva-darshana in Hinduism, the True Intellectual Center in Gurdjieff—simply represents the brain becoming aware of itself. The artist seeing himself in his painting, seeing himself seeing himself in his painting … In the Zen metaphor, it is a mirror that reflects anything, but does not hold onto anything. It is a conscious mirror that knows it can always reflect something else by changing its angle of reflection.
Highlight(pink) - Location 2662 This is analyzed mathematically in G. Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form; an analog, using not Brown’s math but Godel’s, and employing illustrations from the music of Bach and the paintings of Escher, is Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach.

Highlight(pink) - Location 2664 Most of the occult literature of the world—aside from the 95% of it that is sheer rubbish—consists of tricks, gimmicks and games (which the Hindus call upaya, “clever ways”) to trigger meta-programming consciousness. This generally means leading the student “all around Robin Hood’s barn” as many times as are necessary, until the poor victim discovers that he has created the barn himself. For instance, a popular game with California occultists—I do not know its inventor—involves a Magic Room, much like the Pleasure Dome discussed earlier except that this Magic Room contains an Omniscient Computer. To play this game, you simply “astrally project” into the Magic Room. Do not ask what “astral projection” means, and do not assume it is metaphysical (and therefore either impossible, if you are a materialist, or very difficult, if you are a mystic). Just assume this is a gedankenexperiment, a “mind game.” Project yourself, in imagination, into this Magic Room and visualize vividly the Omniscient Computer, using the details you need to make such a super-information-processor real to your fantasy. You do not need any knowledge of programming to handle this astral computer. It exists early in the next century; you are getting to use it by a species of time-travel, if that metaphor is amusing and helpful to you. It is so built that it responds immediately to human brain-waves, “reading” them and decoding their meaning. (Crude prototypes of such computers already exist.) So, when you are in this magic room, you can ask this Computer anything, just by thinking of what you want to know. It will read your thought, and project into your brain, by a laser ray, the correct answer. There is one slight problem. The computer is very sensitive to all brain-waves. If you have any doubts, it registers them as negative commands, meaning “Do not answer my question.” So, the way to use it is to start simply, with “easy” questions. Ask it to dig out of the archives the name of your second-grade teacher. (Almost everybody remembers the name of their first grade teacher—imprint vulnerability again—but that of the second grade teacher tends to get lost.) When the computer has dug out the name of your second grade teacher, try it on a harder question, but not one that is too hard. It is very easy to sabotage this machine, but you don’t want to sabotage it during these experiments. You want to see how well it can be made to perform. It is wise to ask only one question at a time, since it requires concentration to keep this magic computer real on the field of your perception. Do not exhaust your capacities for imagination and visualization on your first trial runs. After a few trivial experiments of the second-grade-teacher variety, you can try more interesting programs. Take a person toward whom you have negative feelings, such as anger, disappointment, feeling-of-betrayal, jealousy or whatever interferes with the smooth, tranquil operation of your own bio-computer. Ask the Magic Computer to explain that other person to you; to translate you into their reality-tunnel long enough for you to understand how events seem to them. Especially, ask how you seem to them. The Poet Prayed: Oh would some power the giftie gie us To see ourselves as others see us - Robert Burns. This computer will do that job for you; but be prepared for some shocks which might be disagreeable at first. This super-brain can also perform exegesis on ideas that seem obscure, paradoxical or enigmatic to us. For instance, early experiments with this computer can very profitably turn on asking it to explain some of the propositions in this book which may seem inexplicable or perversely wrong-headed to you, such as “We are all greater artists than we realize” or “What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves” or “mind and its contents are functionally identical.” 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. For instance, try feeding it on such meta-programming instructions as: 1. I am at cause over my body. 2. I am at cause over my imagination. 3. I am at cause over my future. 4. My mind abounds with beauty and power. 5. I like people, and people like me.Remember that this computer is only a few decades ahead of present technology, so it cannot “understand” your commands if you harbor any doubts about them. Doubts tell it not to perform. Work always from what you can believe in, extending the area of belief only as results encourage you to try for more dramatic transformations of your past reality-tunnels.

Highlight(pink) - Location 2706 This represents cybernetic consciousness; the programmer becoming self-programmer, self-metaprogrammer, meta-meta-programmer, etc. Just as the emotional compulsions of the second circuit seem primitive, mechanical and, ultimately, silly to the neurosomatic consciousness, so, too, the reality maps of the third circuit become comic, relativistic, game-like to the metaprogrammer.
Highlight(pink) - Location 2709 “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.
Highlight(pink) - Location 2719 The seventh, meta-programming circuit is the most recent in evolutionary time and seems to be located in the frontal lobes. That is why the traditional Hindu exercize to activate it is to fix the consciousness in the front of the forehead and hold it there, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, until the metaprogrammer awakes and you begin to perceive-create infinite realities where before there was only one static jail-cell “reality” in which you were trapped.

Highlight(pink) - Location 2722 As said above, this circuit is the “soul” of the Gnostics, as distinct from the self. The self seems to be fixed and firm, but is not; that is, whatever circuit you are operating on at the moment is your “self’ at that moment. If I point a gun at you, you go to Circuit I consciousness at once, and that is your “self’ at that instant. But if you are sexually attracted to somebody, you go to Circuit IV and that is your “self’ until you are orgasmically satisfied (or hopelessly frustrated). Most of the preliminary exercizes in Sufi and Gurdjieff schools consist in making you aware that the “self’ is not constant but shifts back and forth between the imprints on the various circuits.

Highlight(pink) - Location 2727 The “soul” or Circuit VII is constant, because it is, as the Chinese say, void or no-form. It plays all the roles you play—oral dependent, emotional tyrant, cool rationalist, romantic seducer, neurosomatic healer, neurogenetic Evolutionary Visionary—but it is none of them. It is plastic. It is no-form, because it is all forms. It is the “creative Void” of the Taoists.
Highlight(pink) - Location 2736 “Mind” is a tool invented by the universe to see itself; but it can never see all of itself, for much the same reason that you can’t see your own back (without mirrors). Or as Alan Watts liked to say, because the tongue ultimately cannot taste the tongue.
Highlight(pink) - Location 2738 Ideas about ideas—mathematics about mathematics (Godel)—language about language—consciousness of consciousness—the whole seventh circuit brings us into what Hofstadter calls Strange Loops. Like the legendary ko-ko bird, we follow our own tail around in ever-narrowing circles, but unlike that mythic bird we never complete the process by flying up our own rectums and disappearing. It just seems like we’re about to self-destruct in that colorful way, and we decide that what we have been reading, or thinking, or perceiving, must be “nonsense.” It is not nonsense. We are merely confronting infinity where we least expected to encounter it—in our own lonely selves.

Highlight(pink) - Location 2743 Physics joined linguistics, mathematics and psychology in this meta-programming hall of mirrors when Schrodinger demonstrated that quantum events are not “objective” in the Newtonian sense. For fifty years since then, physicists have been struggling to build a system that will get them out of this Strange Loop. The results have been as funny as a Zen koan. 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. True enough—and this whole book is a Copenhagen Interpretation of psychology and owes everything to Dr. Bohr, but we are still in a Strange Loop, and most physicists want to get out. Dr. John von Neumann proved that there was no way out. This is technically known as Von Neumann’s Catastrophe of the Infinite Regress, and it merely shows that any device that will get us out of the first Strange Loop (the Copenhagen collapse of objectivity) will just lead us into a second Strange Loop; and any way out of that will lead to an inexorable third Strange Loop; and so on, forever. Everybody is still trying to refute von Neumann; but nobody has been successful. “I can’t get out—my horns won’t fit through the door …”

Highlight(pink) - Location 2753 The meta-programming circuit is not a trap. As Joyce would say, it only looks as like it as damn it. Simply accept that the universe is so structured that it can see itself, and that this self-reflexive arc is built into our frontal lobes, so that consciousness contains an infinite regress, and all we can do is make models of ourselves making models …
Highlight(pink) - Location 2756 Well, at that point, the only thing to do is relax and enjoy the show. This is what the Hindus call Shiva-darshana, or the divine dance. 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.
Highlight(pink) - Location 2759 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. And once you have built that bigger, funnier, happier universe of thought, build a bigger and better one, for next month.

Highlight(pink) - Location 2762

If all you can know is your own brain programs operating, the whole universe you experience is inside your head. Try to hold onto that model for at least an hour. Note how often you relapse into feeling the universe as outside you.
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?
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?
Re-read Moses’ encounter with I AM WHO I AM in Deuteronomy. Try the theory that Moses was talking to his own meta-programming circuit.

Notes

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🔮 The Cosmos