← Prometheus Rising Book Summary, Notes and Highlights
Prometheus Rising Chapter 19. Prometheus Rising
Author: Robert Anton Wilson Publisher: Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press. Publish Date: 1983 Review Date: Status:📚
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- Highlight(pink) - Location 3332 asana, which consists of holding a single posture (usually sitting) for prolonged periods of time. This is an attempt, in our terminology, to stabilize the bio-survival circuit by drowning it in monotony. You sit, and sit, and sit, and sit. Eventually, an “internal peace” is reached, which signifies the atrophying of all background levels of “unconscious” or unnoticed bio-survival anxiety. In other schools, since asana is so monotonous and slow-working and because war (second-circuit mammalian struggles over territory) is so common among domesticated primates, an alternative method of stabilizing the bio-survival circuit is used: martial arts. Akido, judo, karate etc. all emerged from yoga-like mystic schools, as bio-survival reprogrammers.
- Highlight(pink) - Location 3341 dharana or mantra. Dharana consists of concentrating on a single image, such as a vividly imagined red triangle, and ruthlessly pushing aside any other images, verbalizations or impressions that cross the mind’s screen. In practice, this is beyond the powers of most students, so the majority of yoga teachers substitute mantra, which is concentration (by repetition) on a single sentence, usually nonsensical, such as “Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare” or “Aum Tat Sat Aum” or whatever. Either practice, dharana or mantra, stops the third-circuit “internal monologue,” if persisted in for long enough periods each day. The Western mystical equivalent is Cabala, the most complicated “Jewish joke” ever invented. Briefly, Cabala exhausts the third, semantic circuit by setting it to solve intractable numerological and verbal problems. The Far Eastern equivalent is the Zen Koan, which serves the same function in a less maniacally systematic way than Cabala, e.g., “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Zen koans are always combined with zazen (sitting Zen), which combines the first-circuit-clearing asana with second-circuit-mellowing breath-counting (a weaker pranayama).
- Highlight(pink) - Location 3350 When the student has acquired sufficient detachment from first-circuit anxieties, second-circuit emotions and third-circuit reality-maps, by way of asana, pranayama and dharana or mantra, Patanjali recommends the practice of yama. This includes, but is not limited to, celibacy. The ultimate of yama is to lose all interest in both the social and sexual aspects of the fourth circuit; to cease to care at all about family, tribal or societal matters. This is accomplished by self-denial, which is easier for those skilled in asana, pranayama and dharana, but still requires intense determination. Some take a short-cut at this point, discovered after Patanjali or not known to him, by having themselves locked up in caves. Such isolation, as indicated earlier, helps vastly in bleaching out all four hominid circuits. An alternative, for those not attracted to either celibacy or becoming hermits, is Tantra, invented in northern India around the time of Patanjali. This simply transmutes the fourth circuit by ceremonial, physiological and “magick” (self-hypnotic) explosion of the (prolonged) sexual act into fifth-circuit neurosomatic rapture.
- Highlight(pink) - Location 3359 For those following the orthodox path of Patanjali, the fifth circuit is imprinted by niyama, which signifies “super-control” or “no-control,” being the paradoxical state of being spontaneous deliberately. You cannot be taught niyama; you can only learn it by personal experience. We hypothesize that the bio-energies have to discharge somewhere, and then when one has driven them out of the first circuit by asana, out of the second circuit by pranayama, out of the third circuit by dharana or mantra, and out of the fourth circuit by yama, they are driven explosively upward into fifth-circuit neurosomatic illumination.
- Highlight(pink) - Location 3364 The sixth step in yoga, according to Patanjali, is dhyana, which means “meditation” only in the roughest way. Dhyana means actually union with the object on the mind’s screen, i.e., realization of the total meaning of the proposition that mind and its contents are functionally identical, i.e., opening the metaprogramming circuit. One can make dhyana on anything; yogis talk of making dhyana on a tree or a dog, just as don Juan Matus, the Mexican shaman, talks of becoming one with a coyote or a star in the books of Castaneda.
- Highlight(pink) - Location 3368 The seventh step in yoga is Samadhi, from sam, (union; cognate of Greek syn) and Adhis, the Lord (cognate, Hebrew Adonai, Greek Adonis). Here Patanjali and his successors are in violent dispute, some claiming there is only one Samadhi, others claiming two or three or many. Since this corresponds with the opening and imprinting of the neurogenetic circuit, we must opt for the opinion that there are many Samadhi, depending on which or how many of the Godly archetypes of the genetic archives are imprinted. Catholic mystics make Samadhi on the Virgin, Sufis on Allah, Aleister Crowley on Pan, etc.; and, above all this, the eighth circuit cosmic information network can also be imprinted, making union not just with all sentient beings and some emblematic archetype of the DNA master program, but with the inorganic universe as well. It was from this second order or meta-physiological Samadhi that Gandhi said, “God is in the rock, too—in the rock!” and pantheists of all sorts, in all traditions, emphatically agree with Canadian psychiatrist, R.M. Bucke who said after his own Eighth-Circuit Samadhi that the universe “is not a dead machine but a living presence.”
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3388 Let us just summarize the matter by saying that stupidity has murdered and imprisoned more geniuses (and more ordinary people), burned more books, slaughtered more populations, and blocked progress more effectively than any other force in history. It may be no exaggeration to say that stupidity has killed more people than all the diseases known to medicine and psychiatry. Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission. If intelligence could be increased, obviously solutions could be found more quickly to the various Doomsday scenarios threatening us. There is nothing rationally desirable that cannot be achieved sooner if rationality itself increases. This is virtually a tautology, but we must consider the corollary; Work to achieve Intelligence Intensification is work to achieve all our other sane and worthwhile goals.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3401 Maurice Nicholl, physician, psychiatrist, student of Jung, Gurdjieff and Esoteric Christianity, wrote that “the only purpose in work on consciousness is to decrease the amount of violence in the world.” This is Public Health Problem Number One in the nuclear age, the age of overkill. We are not talking about mere increase in linear IQ—third-circuit semantic cleverness. We are talking of also the kinds of right-brain intelligence that Nicholl acquired from Jungian neurogenetic research and Gurdjieff’s meta-programming techniques. We are talking of, say, Beethoven’s intelligence, which so disturbed Lenin, who could not bear to listen to the Appassionato (Sonata 23) because it made him “want to weep and pat people on the head, and we mustn’t pat them on the head, we must hit them on the head, hit them hard, and make them obey.” More of Beethoven’s intelligence is needed, desperately, to create a signal that the current Lenins cannot ignore, that will make them weep, and stop hitting heads. We need more mentations, less munitions. The second-circuit mammalian political games are a million years obsolete.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3414 The potential for a neurological revolution—planetary Intelligence Intensification—should be quite clear to anyone who has even a slight knowledge of so primitive a psychedelic as LSD. One of the least known facts about the LSD research in the 1960s was that the longest single research project with LSD, at Spring Grove Hospital, Maryland, showed an average 10% increase in linear IQ alone as well as the meta-programming vistas and neurogenetic awakenings popularized by the outlaw LSD culture and its gurus.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3418 And there is a direct feedback loop between neuro-pharmacology and other brain sciences. As William Burroughs says, “Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.” Yoga plus bio-feedback produces detachment from old imprints quicker than yoga alone; hypnotism and mind-drugs produce synergistically more than either produces without the other; John Lilly has duplicated LSD effects in his isolation tanks; etc.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3421 It is commonplace for alarmists to warn us that the full armory of synergistically interacting neurosciences now evolving will allow unscrupulous tyrants to brainwash us more totally than ever before. We need to realize that the same technology, wisely used by intelligent men and women, can free us from every form of neurotic and irrational rigidity, to dial and focus our nervous systems as easily as we dial or focus our TV, turning any channel or circuit off and on as we choose. This is what meta-programming (cybernetic) consciousness means. Why be depressed when you can be happy, dumb when you can be smart, agitated when you can be tranquil? Obviously, most people are depressed, dumb and agitated most of the time because they lack the tools to repair and correct damaged, defective circuits in their nervous system. We are acquiring the tools, and this Intelligence Intensification has the Pleasure Principle to fuel it. That is, the more internal freedom you achieve, the more you want. It is more fun to be happy than sad, more enjoyable to choose your emotions than to have them inflicted upon you by mechanical glandular processes, more pleasurable to solve your problems than to be stuck with them forever.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3430 In brief, Intelligence Intensification means intelligence-studying-intelligence (I2), and the first thing discovered by intelligence-studying-intelligence (the brain studying the brain: metaprogramming) is that the more types of intelligence you have, the more fun it is to try to develop even more subtle, sensitive, futique levels of awareness; higher intelligence still. In summary, Intelligence Intensification is desirable, because there is not a single problem confronting humanity that is not either caused or considerably worsened by the prevailing stupidity (insensitivity) of the species: badly wired robots bumping into and maiming and killing each other.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3435 Intelligence Intensification is attainable, because modern advances in neuroscience are showing us how to alter any imprinted, conditioned or learned reflex that previously restricted us. Intelligence Intensification is hedonic, because the more freedom and consciousness you achieve, the more you want; the less willing you are to slip back to dumb, blind, mechanistic circuits.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3440 Like death and poverty, stupidity has been around so long that people cannot imagine human life without it, but it is rapidly becoming obsolete. However many special interest groups (intelligence agencies so-called, advertisers, tyrants, clergy, etc.) may profit from stupidity, humanity as a whole will profit more for its abolition.
Highlight(pink) - Location 3443 Approximately 50% of the human race has not evolved fully into the third circuit yet. That is, although they can exchange primitive signals and handle primitive artifacts, they are still mostly operating on the mammalian emotional circuit and the pre-mammalian bio-survival circuit. Newt Gingrich is their current leader in the United States. Third-circuit types cannot understand this and regard it as sinister, but it is simple mammalian herd-behavior. Gingrich is the typical primate leader; the noises he makes, which appear meaningless to the third circuit Rationalist, are urgently meaningful to the territorial-emotional-patriotic minds of the majority of primates. Another 20% are “responsible, intelligent adults” with fully developed third and fourth circuits. They spend most of their time worrying, because the predominantly primate parameters of human society seem absurd, immoral and increasingly dangerous to them. Another 20% are neurosomatic adepts. Fourth-circuit Moralists denounce them as “mystics,” “space cases,” “nuts,” “the Me generation,” “irresponsible hedonists,” etc. Most of the fifth-circuit adepts (aquarian conspirators) have learned Joyce’s arts of “silence, exile, cunning”: they are invisible. Others have turned their talents to “faith-healing” or various occult gimmicks of that sort, and very carefully do not tell their clients that the local ideology, morality and reality-tunnel is what made them ill in the first place. They give “good energy” and sensibly avoid conflict with the moral ideological “authorities.” Another 5% have neurogenetic consciousness, and function as Evolutionary Agents—servants of the Life Force, in Shaw’s terminology. Their “God” is Pan (life), and their goal is immortality. Another 3% have mastered the meta-programming circuit and make up what Gurdjieff called “the Conscious Circle of humanity.” They are Free Masons, in the original meaning of that debased term: co-creators of future realities. Only 2% are neuro-quantum adepts and beyond space-time categories entirely.
Highlight(pink) - Location 3459 The newer circuits (neurosomatic bliss, neurogenetic “Atman” consciousness, meta-programming reality-games, non-local “cosmic” awareness) must have some function. We can only assume they are preparing us for our new situation in space-time, after Space colonization, after longevity and immortality, after the Acceleration Factor accelerates even faster. Engineers rate an engine in revolutions-per-second. Looking at human history in terms of this metaphor we clearly see that: In the Old Stone Age, the acceleration factor was just slowly beginning to operate. We could estimate change then in, perhaps, revolutions per 10,000 years. With the neolithic revolution and urbanization soon after, the pace began to pick up. We can speak from that point on in terms of revolutions-per-millennium. After Galileo, revolutions-per-century became the normal rate of change. In this century we have moved into revolutions-per-generation. We are now obviously moving into an acceleration of revolutions-per-decade. By the time the Consciousness Revolution peaks, the Longevity Pill is widely available, cloning is normal and all the ideas in this book, including the most wild and radical ones, seem quaint and old-fashioned—i.e., about 2005—we will probably be growing accustomed to thinking in terms of revolutions-per-year.
- Highlight(pink) - Location 3470 There is no reason to accept the tunnel-reality of this book as final. If you really understand the message, you will invent a bigger and better Future than I have suggested. As Barbara Marx Hubbard says: THE FUTURE EXISTS FIRST IN IMAGINATION, THEN IN WILL, THEN IN REALITY