← Prometheus Rising Book Summary, Notes and Highlights
Prometheus Rising Chapter 18. The Non-Local Quantum Circuit
Author: Robert Anton Wilson Publisher: Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press. Publish Date: 1983 Review Date: Status:⌛️
- Remote viewing, clairvoyance, etc. siddhis
- rebirth
- the gateway process
Annotations
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3273 We have made a beautiful (we hope beautiful) model of consciousness in terms of brain hardware and software. Now we need to remember again that, while the brain can be modeled by a computer, the model is never the whole system. The model-maker or metaprogrammer is bigger than the model or program.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3275 In what are called “out of body experiences” (OOBEs) by parapsychologists, awareness seems to escape the confines of the nervous system entirely. Such experiences are routinely triggered by advanced yoga practice, and they also occur spontaneously during what is called “near-death” or “clinical death” in which the patient appears to die, by all medical standards, but is revived by modern resuscitation techniques. OOBEs also occur with heavy does of LSD and with ketamine, an anesthetic with strange psychedelic side-effects. They are also reported in shamanic traditions all over the world and by many “occultists” in our own society.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3282 We can process this datum in various ways. We can say that my “astral body” actually traveled to Arizona; this is the occultist theory. We can more conservatively say that I developed extrasensory perception and “saw” Arizona without “going” there; there are many parapsychologists who prefer this third-circuit map of the 8th-Circuit experience. We can try to aver that I only “happened” to think of that scene while it was happening, by synchronicity; this is the Jungian approach. Or we can sweep it under the carpet by muttering “mere coincidence” or “sheer coincidence;” which is the traditional Rationalist approach. We prefer to say, in accord with earlier writings of Timothy Leary and the present author and the speculations of the Physics/Consciousness Research Group in San Francisco that such cases illustrate a special working of what is called in quantum mechanics Bell’s Theorem.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3288 Bell’s Theorem is highly technical, but in ordinary language it amounts to something like this: There are no isolated systems: every particle in the universe is in “instantaneous” (faster-than-light) communication with every other particle. The Whole System, even the parts that are separated by cosmic distances, functions as a Whole System.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3291= Now, such faster-than-light communication seems to be forbidden by Special Relativity, which makes a problem. Bell’s Theorem, however, is inescapable: a theorem in physics is not a mere “theory”; it is a mathematical demonstration which must be true, if the mathematics contains no flaw, and if the experiments on which it is based are replicable. Bell’s Theorem contains no mathematical flaw, and the experiments are replicable and have been replicated several times. And yet we cannot dispense with Special Relativity either, because the mathematics there is equally flawless and the experiments are legion that confirm it.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3295 Two solutions have been proposed and both assume that the “communication” involved in Bellian transmissions does not involve energy, since it is energy that cannot move faster than light. Dr. Edward Harris Walker suggests that what does move faster than light, and holds the Whole System together, is “consciousness.” We may eventually be forced to accept this, in which case physics will have justified pantheism or at least panpsychism. The other alternative, proposed by Dr. Jack Sarfatti, is that the medium of Bellian transmissions is information. Pure information, in the mathematical sense, does not require energy; it is that which orders energy. It is the negative of entropy, that which brings disorder to energy systems.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3301 Dr. Sarfatti explains his theory as follows: Imagine that your brain is a computer, as modern neurology suggests. Now imagine that the whole universe is a big computer, a mega-computer, as John Lilly has proposed. Then imagine that the sub-quantum realm, the realm of what Dr. David Bohm calls ‘hidden variables’ is made up of mini-mini-computers. Now, the hardware of each ‘computer’—the universe, your brain, the sub-quantum mechanisms—is localized. Each part of it is somewhere in spacetime, here not there, now not then. But the software—the information—is non-local. It is here, there and everywhere; now, then and everywhen.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3311 The highest varieties of shamanic and yogic consciousness seem to begin from dilation beyond the immediate (“out-of-body-experience”) and dilate, rapidly and dizzily, much further, to union with the smallest and the largest—the “Cosmic Mind” in short. This seems to be what would necessarily happen if the brain turned on to the non-local information system proposed by Sarfatti and implicit in Bell’s Theorem. The meta-physiological circuit, then, is this cosmic Information System. The synchronicities of circuits V to VII are just the dawning notes of the symphony of all inter-related harmonies revealed to those who have experienced Circuit VIII in action. It is hard to avoid hyperbole when talking of such matters, but everything one can associate with the idea of Oneness With God—or Oneness with “Everything”—is part of what is experienced in the vistas, beyond space-time, of this meta-physiological circuit.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3317 Mystics stammer, gibber and rave incoherently in trying to discuss this. Beethoven says it for all of them, without words, in the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony. The words of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” which Beethoven set to this virtually superhuman music, are a linear third-circuit map conveying only a skeleton key to the multi-level meanings of the 8-circuit “language” of the melodic construction itself, which spans all consciousness from primitive bio-survival to meta-physiological cosmic fusion.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3322 THE METAPHYSIOLOGICAL CIRCUIT Wheels within wheels within wheels … Dr. Sarfatti’s computers within computers within computers … Consciousness or information perceived as coherent Intelligence expanding to infinity in all directions.