← Prometheus Rising Book Summary, Notes and Highlights
Prometheus Rising Chapter 15. Different Models & Different Muddles
Author: Robert Anton Wilson Publisher: Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press. Publish Date: 1983 Review Date: 2022-12-30 Status:⌛️
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2785 When a paradigm shift occurs—when we go from seeing things one way to seeing them another way—the whole world is remade. All that we “know” is what registers on our brains, so what you perceive (your individual reality-tunnel) is made up of nothing but thoughts—as Sir Humphrey Davy noted when self-experimenting with nitrous oxide in 1819, and as Buddha noticed by sitting alone until all his social imprints atrophied and dropped away. You can live in the reality-tunnel imprinted upon you by environmental accident or you can choose your own. You can go through brain changes as radically bad as those of Patty Hearst and Rusty Calley, as transcendentally beautiful as those of Buddha and Jesus, as epistemologically revolutionary as those of Darwin and Einstein. Evolutionary acceleration is forcing us to the point where each will have to take responsibility for which reality we accept.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2795 Fifteen million Americans are waiting, trustingly, for the Space Brothers to come down in their UFOs and enforce World Peace. The UFO is the, or an, extreme case. In general, everything we see is inside our heads. This is demonstrated by the well-known optical diagram encountered in every high-school physics class:
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2799 The light rays from the external object are reflected through the lens of the eye onto the retina, and reversed in the process. The brain obligingly interprets the picture, turning it right-side-up, and editing it in other ways more subtle. What is true of vision is true of the other senses. What we know is what registers on the brain. This is the answer to the famous Zen Buddhist koan (riddle), “Who is the Divine Being who makes the grass green?” The brain, in the routine course of the before-mentioned 100,000,000 programs per minute, takes in, edits, orchestrates, organizes, packages, labels, etc., all raw “existential” experience and classifies it according to the neurological Dewey Decimal System. This system varies from society to society; hence, cultural relativism—what is “real” to the Eskimo is not quite the same as what is “real” to a New York taxi-driver. To review: Each individual has a neurological system, or game, different from other members of the same society. In accord with Einstein’s physical relativism, and anthropology’s cultural relativism, we call this neurological relativism. The vegetarian does not “see” (experience) meat on a rack in the butcher shop the same way the meat-eater sees it. The racist does not see a member of another race as, say, that person’s parents do. More generally, as the Poet tells us: “The Fool sees not the same tree that the Wise Man sees.”
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2809 Among the many editorial tasks of the brain, performed so rapidly and smoothly that we do not notice it, is the classification of the separate quanta of perception into “inside” and “outside.” That this neat system does not accord with brute fact we learn from optics and neurology; that it can be abolished entirely, with great profit in terms of insight, we learn from the type of metaprogramming experience called dhyana in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. Crowley says of the dhyana experience: In the course of our concentration we noticed that the contents of the mind at any moment consisted of two things, and no more: the (external) Object, variable, and the (internal) Subject, invariable, or apparently so. By success in dharana* the object has been made as invariable as the subject. Now the result of this is that the two become one. This phenomenon usually comes as a tremendous shock. Silent meditation on one object for many weeks, like the Zen monk with the ox. In our words, “mind” (whatever that is) and its contents are functionally identical. The usual system of classifying the contents as “me” (part of “mind”) and not-“me” (“outside”) can be abolished—not just by meditation, but by certain well-known drugs—and the unity of the field of perception is then recognized. We become Metaprogrammers.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2825 This is what we might expect from the triumphs of field theory and general systems theory in sociology, anthropology, quantum theory etc. It still comes as a distinct shock when it is experienced and not just talked about. When “I” and “my world” (field of perception) become one, “I” am transformed utterly, as in “in a refiner’s fire,” as the mystics say.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2828 This sounds a bit puzzling to the average person without experience in brain-change games. Try this illustration: Assuming you are reading this in your own home, look around the room. Note that everything in your field of vision—furniture, paintings or posters on the walls, stereo set or absence of same, rugs, TV or not TV, etc.—is, in a sense, your creation or co-creation. You and/or your spouse or room-mate(s) selected everything that got into the room. You also selected or co-selected that particular room, out of the millions of rooms on this planet where you might otherwise live. The tunnel-reality of that room, then, in a very real sense has been “created” or “manifested” by you, out of a universe of infinite possibilities.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2833 Of course, only the most fanatic Freudian or Buddhist mystic would claim your whole life history has been similarly “selected” by you. But, stop and think a moment: the life-history you think you have, the part that is stored in your brain as “memory,” has certainly been selected. You can’t even remember everything that happened in the last five minutes. If you try to be inwardly silent (passive; non-verbal) and notice everything happening in your field for one minute, you are overwhelmed by thousands of impressions that you cannot catalog and retain. Conclusion: who you are, and what you think you are, is a creation edited and orchestrated by your brain. Everybody you meet is an “artist” who has made a similar creation. And these creations are, all of them, as diverse and idiosyncratic as the musical styles of Bach, Beethoven, Rock, Wagner, Vivaldi, Bizet, Orff, Chopin, John Cage, Soul, the Beatles, Harry James, Disco, Scotch folk-songs, African chants …
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2841 As for the universe “outside” you: of course, you didn’t create that. But just because you didn’t create it, you can never know it . . .except approximately. What you do know, and consider “the universe outside” is another part of your brain, which has made of its circuits a model which you identify with the universe outside. These models are as varied and miscellaneous as the paintings of Botticelli, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Picasso, Paul Klee, Wyeth, Dali, Monet … This is the meaning of the notion that mind and its contents are functionally identical.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2845 Consider the old folk-rhyme: I saw a man upon the stair, A little man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today; Gee, I wish he’d go away. This little man is a semantic spook; he exists only in the language, and yet once the language has invoked him it almost seems to make sense to wish he would go away.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2852 Recent advances in semantics, semiotics, linguistic analysis, foundations of mathematics, logic, etc. have demonstrated that our conceptual field—our symbolic environment—is haunted by many such “spooks.” There are Empedoclean paradoxes, of which the classic is: This sentence is false.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2855 Theologians are vexed by questions like: Can an omnipotent God create a rock so heavy He Himself cannot lift it? (If he cannot, he is not omnipotent; and if he can, he is also not omnipotent.) Philosophers and physicists are still bothered by: what happened before Time began? Somebody is supposed to have remarked, “I’m glad I don’t like cauliflower, because if I liked it, I’d eat it, and I hate the stuff.” Alice in Wonderland, and any treatise on mathematical logic, will provide hundreds of examples of similar mind-benders.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2859 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.”
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2861 ❗️ Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead attempted to resolve all such conundrums with a mathematical proposition known as the Theory of Types. Unfortunately, it was quickly pointed out that either (a) the Theory of Types refers to itself, in which case it limits itself by its own terms, and does not solve all our semantic problems, or (b) the Theory of Types does not refer to itself, in which case there are propositions to which it does not refer, and it is again limited, and we are left with our problems. These third-circuit perplexities are of more than technical logical and philosophical import. Many situations in real life take the form of our being haunted by our own semantic spooks. For instance, the popular novel, Catch-22, deals with a very real Empedoclean knot: the hero can escape from the war if he can prove he is crazy, but if he attempts to do this it will prove he is sane, since it is sane to escape a dangerous situation. The logic of the dream-world of Finnegans Wake is not so far from real life, either. A patient, of German birth, at St. Elizabeth’s hospital, would not walk through doors, explaining “Da fressen mich die Turen.” (The doors will eat me.) This makes perfect sense phonetically, since it is identical in pronunciation with “Da fressen mich die Tieren.” (The animals will eat me). Word-magic? Schizophrenia? The average person, not a vegetarian, will respond positively to “tender juicy filet mignon” on the menu; but not to “a piece off of a dead castrated bull.” But the two expressions mean the same thing.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2873 We all tend to conjugate sentences in the manner caricatured by Bertrand Russell: “I am firm. You are obstinate. He is a pigheaded fool.” (“I am daring and original. You are pretentious. She stinks.” “I am flexible. You bend with the wind. They’re a bunch of opportunists.”)
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2875 The magic of poetry creates “real toads in imaginary gardens,” it has been said. When Robert Burns writes; The wan moon is setting behind the white wave And Time is setting with me, oh it is hard not to feel that the abstraction “time” has become as real as the physical moon and wave—or the little man upon the stair.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2880 Consider the following table:
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2881 Any phrase in column I can describe persons or events that might very well be described, by a different speaker, with the corresponding phrase in column II. Now the reader may feel that some of the phrases above are so pejorative, so loaded with prejudice, that only the most ignorant or bigoted would use them; but that is irrelevant. What needs to be noted is that it is easy to see the bias in somebody else’s semantic maps, but not so easy to see the bias in one’s own semantic reality-tunnel. If the reader were born in Arkansas in the 1920s, item 1 in Column I might seem the natural, accurate, normal way to refer to the first NAACP worker to appear and try to organized the Blacks.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2886 These matters are symbolic, but more than linguistic. For example, the proverbial Englishman who dressed for dinner every night in his lonely tropical hut was no fool. He was keeping an English third-circuit reality bubble around him, to avoid becoming engulfed in the reality-bubble of the natives. See what happens to Kurz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness when the African reality-tunnel overwhelms his European reality-tunnel. It only takes a few weeks in prison to become “a convict,” whatever your definition of yourself was before, it only takes a few weeks in the Army to become a “soldier.”
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2890 These remarks are another elucidation of our earlier statement that mind and its contents are functionally identical. The symbolizing process is such that, once set in motion, it is virtually impossible (without subtle neurological know-how) to escape from a reality-tunnel one has created for oneself or had foisted upon one by the environment. Mr. Saxon believed that these are objective predictions based on hard “laws” of sociology and economics which he learned from the writings of Ms. Ayn Rand. He did not believe that this apocalyptical reality tunnel in which he lives is in any way an artistic creation expressing his own emotional anxieties and hostilities. Mr. White believes that these are objective predictions based on eternal “laws” of karma which he learned from various occultists and gurus. He does not believe that the apocalyptical reality-tunnel in which he lives is in any way an artistic creation expressing his own emotional anxieties and hostilities.
- Highlight(pink) - Location 2917 If we confront the world without ideas we see only a muddle, the formless void that existed before “God” (intellect) started to create a universe (a system) in Genesis. Once we become the “image of God” by making our own universe, we have a model of the muddle. The model is very convenient—we could not be human without it—but it is also very misleading whenever we forget that we have created it.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2920 None of the reality-models discussed in this chapter, however bizarre they may seem to some readers, are any more arbitrary than the official reality-model known as consensus-reality, which is a statistical average and not nearly consensual as it seems. Travel 100 miles in any direction, and the consensus begins to crumble. Travel 1000 miles and very little consensus is left … “The peoples of the earth are islands,” said the late Clement Atlee, “shouting at each other over oceans of misunderstanding.” Each island is a separate reality-tunnel created by (a) our culture, (b) our sub-culture and (c) by the myth-maker or artist in each of us who is the adamantine individuality that makes you and me unique human selves, not replicable units like the ants in a hive.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2933 Wilson believes that these are good guesses based on scientific probabilities, but he does not think there are any hard economic or karmic laws guaranteeing them. He recognizes that this reality-tunnel was generated by his own brain, that he is the artist who created it, and that it expresses his own hopes and desires, as well as scientific probabilities. It is, he knows, the reality-tunnel that keeps him happy, creative, busy and full of zest for life. He doesn’t think it is any crazier than anybody else’s reality-tunnel, and he claims it is a lot more fun than any other.
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EXERCIZES
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Using the four circuit model, try to guess which specific imprints created Mr. Saxon’s reality-tunnel.
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Apply the same analysis to Mr. White and Mr. Wilson.
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Apply the same analysis to Jesus, Hitler, Walt Whitman and your own father and mother.
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Write a criticism of this chapter from the viewpoint of Christian Fundamentalism.
Notes
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