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← Prometheus Rising Book Summary, Notes and Highlights

Prometheus Rising Chapter 3. The Oral Bio-Survival Circuit

Author: Robert Anton Wilson Publisher: Grand Junction, CO: Hilaritas Press. Publish Date: 1983 Review Date: 2022-11-9 Status:📚

Annotations

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 474 Any multi-cellular organism must, if it is to survive, contain a hard-wired bio-survival circuit, which very simply programs an either-or choice: GO FORWARD to the nourishing, the protective, or GO BACK, away from the threatening, the predatory. Any mammal hooks the bio-survival circuit to the first imprinted bio-survival object: the teat. Bio-survival and orality are deeply blended in all mammals,

  • 36 This is why, despite the Cancer Terror, an estimated 30,000,000 Americans still smoke cigarettes … Others chew gum (spearmint, juicy fruit, even sugar-free: something for every taste), bite their fingernails, gnaw their knuckles, scrunch pencil stubs, eat more than they need (Potato chips, anyone? a Mars bar maybe? pretzels, peanuts, cashews, do you want the cheese and crackers with your beer, Mac? And do try the canapes, Mrs. Miller). Some chew their lips, gobble tranks and uppers, even munch their mustaches.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 505 the bio-survival circuit is DNA-programmed to seek a comfort-safety zone around a mothering organism. If a mother isn’t present, the closest substitute in the environment will be imprinted.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 481 How important is this oral imprinting? We read of a baby giraffe whose mother was accidentally killed by a jeep immediately after birth. The neonate, following hard-wired genetic programs, “imprinted” the first object that roughly fit the giraffe archetype—the jeep itself. He followed the machine around, vocalized to it, attempted to suckle from it, and, when adult, tried to mate with it. Similarly, Konrad Lorenz tells of a gosling who accidentally imprinted a ping-pong ball and spent his adult life, indifferent to female geese, attempting to sexually mount ping-pong balls.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 508 The “wiring” of this circuit, in primitive form, occurred in the first organisms, between three and four billion years ago. In the modern human, this structure remains in the brain stem and in the autonomic (“involuntary”) nervous system, where it is interconnected with the endocrine and other life-support systems. This is why disturbances on this circuit act “all over the body at once” and generally take the form of physical symptoms rather than “mental” symptoms and usually get referred to the M.D. instead of the psychiatrist.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 648 In pre-neurological terms, the bio-survival circuit is what we usually call “consciousness,” per se. It is the sense of being here-now, in this vulnerable body, subject to the raw energies and forces of the physical universe. When we are “unconscious,” the bio-survival circuit is turned off and doctors may cut us up without our attempting to flee or even crying out.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 497 Freudians suggest that opiate addiction is an attempt to return to the womb. In keeping with our theory, it is more likely that opium and its derivatives return us to the “safe space” on the biosurvival circuit, the warm, snug place of bio-security; opiates may trigger neuro-transmitters* characteristic of breast-feeding.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 502 Neuro-transmitters are chemicals which alter the electro-colloidal balance of the brain and hence change the perceptual field. Brain-change agents.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 512 It must be stressed that we are still in a primitive stage of evolution and conditions on this planet are quite brutal. Radical pediatricians insist, with good evidence, that childbirth by conventional means in a conventional hospital is almost always traumatic for the newborn—creates a bad imprint, in our language. Our child-rearing methods are far from ideal also, adding bad conditioning on top of bad imprinting. And the general violence of our societies to date—including wars, revolutions, civil wars and the “undeclared civil war” of the predatory criminal class in every “civilized” nation—keeps the first circuit of most people in an emergency state far too much of the time. In 1968, a U.S. Public Health survey showed that 85% of the population had one or more symptoms that we would call bad first-circuit imprinting or conditioning. These symptoms included dizzy spells, heart palpitations, wet palms and frequent nightmares.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 520 This is the first level of meaning in our brutal, cynical proposition that most people are almost as mechanical as sci-fi robots. A man or woman entering a new situation with the anxiety chemicals of a frightened infant coursing through the brain stem is not going to be able to observe, judge or decide anything very accurately. We especially refer to adrenaline and adrenalutin, which signal the whole organism to prepare to fight or flee.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 527 And this is why Gurdjieff said, in his own jargon, that people are asleep and having nightmares. “FAIRNESS? DECENCY? HOW CAN YOU EXPECT FAIRNESS OR DECENCY ON A PLANET OF SLEEPING PEOPLE?”—G.I. Gurdjieff This was the viewpoint of the earliest Christians, later condemned as heretics (Gnostics) by the Roman bureaucrats. The Gospel of Truth, first century, says bluntly that history is a nightmare:  … as if (mankind) were sunk in sleep and found themselves in disturbing dreams. Either (there is) a place to which they are fleeing . . .or they are involved in striking blows, or they are receiving blows themselves … sometimes it is as if people were murdering them … or they themselves are killing their neighbors … To these first Christians, as to the Buddhists, awakening literally meant coming out of this nightmare of terrifying fantasies. In our terminology, it means correcting the editing that causes us to behave and perceive like very badly (inappropriately) wired robots and suddenly seeing the unedited world.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 538 It must be emphasized that this circuit, being the oldest in evolutionary development, is the most mechanical, and the most rapid. One is not conscious of time at all on the bio-survival circuit.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 547 The bio-survival program first attaches to the safe space around the mother (oral imprint), and then with age moves further and further out, exploring what is safe and what is not. Without hard-wired genetic programs (i.e., automatic programs) this second stage would be impossible, and no mammal would ever leave the teat. The hard-wired programs act automatically (UNCONSCIOUSLY) because if you had to stop and think out each situation, you would be eaten by the first predator.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 550 Of course, the imprint is made by chance—by the circumstances at the moment of imprint vulnerability. (Recall the gosling who imprinted the ping-pong ball.) Some imprint bravery, inquisitiveness and the exploratory drive; others imprint timidity, infophobia (fear of the unpredictable) and withdrawal, of which the extreme case is the sad imprint called autism or childhood schizophrenia. All of which is robotic, until one learns how to reprogram and reimprint one’s own brain circuits.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 557 Of course, on top of the hard-wired imprinting of the biosurvival circuit comes “softer” conditioning. This allows the safe-space perimeter to be generalized outward from the mother’s body to the pack or tribe—the “extended family.”

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 559 Every social animal has, in addition to the Darwinian “instinct” (genetic program) of self-preservation, a similar “instinct” to protect the gene-pool. This is the basis of altruism, and social animals could not survive without it.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 603 Extreme cases—persons who take their heaviest imprint on the first (oral) circuit—tend to be viscerotonic, because this imprint determines lifelong endocrine and glandular processes. Thus, in extreme they are “baby-faced” in adult life, never lose their “baby-fat,” are plump and round and gentle, etc. They are easily “hurt” (threatened: terrified) by disapproval of any sort, because in the baby-circuit of the brain, disapproval suggests extinction by loss of the food supply.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 562 As civilization has advanced, the pack-bond (the tribe, the extended family) has been broken. This is the root of the widely diagnosed “anomie” or “alienation” or “existential anguish” about which so many social critics have written so eloquently. What has happened is that the conditioning of the bio-survival bond to the gene-pool has been replaced by a conditioning of bio-survival drives to hook onto the peculiar tickets which we call “money”.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 566 Concretely, a modern man or woman doesn’t look for biosurvival security in the gene-pool, the pack, the extended family. Bio-survival depends on getting the tickets. “You can’t live without money,” as the Living Theatre troop used to cry out in anguish. If the tickets are withdrawn, acute bio-survival anxiety appears at once.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 568 Imagine, as vividly as possible, what you would feel, and what you would do, if all your sources to bio-survival tickets (money) were cut off tomorrow. This is precisely what tribal men and women feel if cut off from the tribe;

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 573 Welfare-ism, socialism, totalitarianism, etc. represent attempts, in varying degrees of rationality and hysteria, to re-create the tribal bond by making the State stand-in for the gene-pool. Conservatives who claim that no form of Welfare is tolerable to them are asking that people live with total bio-survival anxiety and anomie combined with terror. The conservatives, of course, vaguely recognize this and ask for “local charity” to replace State Welfare—i.e., they ask for the gene-pool to be restored by magic, among people (denizens of a typical city) who are not genetically related at all.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 578 On the other hand, the State is not a gene-pool or a tribe, and cannot really play the bio-survival unit convincingly. Everybody on Welfare becomes paranoid, because they are continually worrying that they are going to get cut off (“exiled”) for some minor infraction of the increasingly incomprehensible bureaucratic rules. And in real totalitarianism, in which the bogus identification of the State with the tribe is carried to the point of a new mysticism, the paranoia becomes total.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 581 Real bonding can only occur in face-to-face groups of reasonable size. Hence, the perpetual attempt (however implausible in industrial circumstances) to decentralize, to go back to the tribal ethos, to replace the State with syndicates (as in anarchism) or affinity-groups (Reich’s “Consciousness III”). Recall the hippie crash-pad of the sixties, which lives on in many rural communes.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 584 Back in the real world, the tickets called “money” are the biosurvival bond for most people.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 585 Anti-Semitism is a complex aberration, of many facets and causes, but in its classic form (the “Jewish Bankers’ Conspiracy”) it simply holds that a hostile gene-pool controls the tickets for bio-security. Such paranoia is inevitable in a money economy; junkies have similar myths about who controls the supply of heroin. Thus, as anti-Semitism has declined in America, the “Bankers’ Conspiracy” lives on in a new form. Now the villains are old New England WASP families, the “Yankee Establishment.” Some Leftists will even show you charts of the genealogies of these WASP bankers, the way anti-Semites used to show Rothschild genealogies.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 592 C.H. Douglas, the engineer and economist, once made up a chart, which he showed to the MacMillan Commission in 1932 when they were discussing money and credit regulation. The chart graphed the rise and fall of interest rates from the defeat of Napoleon in 1812 to the date the Commission met in 1932, and on the same scale, the rise and fall of the suicide rate in that one-hundred-twenty-year period.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 595 The two curves were virtually identical. Every time the interest rate went up, so did the suicide rate; when interest went down, so did suicide. This can hardly be “coincidence.” When interest rises, a certain number of businessmen go bankrupt, a certain number of workers are thrown out of their jobs, and everybody’s bio-survival anxiety generally increases.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 598 Marxists and other radicals are urgently aware of such factors in “mental health” and hence scornful of all types of academic psychology which ignore these bio-survival issues. Unfortunately, the Marxist remedy—making everybody dependent for bio-survival on the whims of a State bureaucracy—is a cure worse than the disease.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 600 Bio-survival anxiety will only permanently disappear when world-wide wealth has reached a level, and a distribution, where, without totalitarianism, everyone has enough tickets.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 602 The Hunger Project, the idea of the Guaranteed Annual Income, Douglas’ National Dividend plan, etc. represent groping toward that goal. The ideal can only be achieved in a technology of abundance.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 607 We all have this circuit and need to exercize it periodically. Cuddling, sucking, hugging etc. and daily playing with (a) one’s own body (b) another’s body and (c) the environment, are perpetually necessary to neurosomatic-endocrine health. Those who deny such primordial functions because of rigid imprinting on the Third (rationalistic) or Fourth (moralistic) circuit tend to become “dried up,” “prune-faced,” unattractive, “cold,” and muscularly rigid.
  • Highlight(pink) - Location 612 If this initial imprint is negative—if the universe in general and other humans in particular are imprinted as dangerous, hostile and frightening—the Prover will go on throughout life adjusting all perceptions to fit this map. This is what is known as the “Injustice Collector” syndrome (in the language of Dr. Edmund Bergler). The female members of this imprint group become Radical Feminists; the male members are less organized and can be found in fringe groups of the extreme Left and extreme Right.
  • Highlight(pink) - Location 616 Such a pattern is unconscious in three ways. It is unconscious because it is automatic: it happens without thought, as a robot program. It is also unconscious because it began before the infant had language and hence it is pre-verbal, inarticulate, felt rather than considered. And it is unconscious because it is all-over-the-body-at-once. Specifically, it is characterized by the Respiratory Block first noted by Wilhelm Reich: a chronic muscular armoring that prevents proper, relaxed breathing. Popular speech recognizes this state as “being up-tight.” All of the most successful reimprinting techniques (therapies) for this kind of chronic anxiety work on the body first, not on the “mind.” As Gregory Bateson has pointed out, Konrad Lorenz acquired his marvelous insights into the imprinting process—for which he won the Nobel prize—by consciously imitating the body movements of the animals he was studying. Even earlier, Wilhelm Reich discovered that he could understand his patients with remarkable clarity by imitating their characteristic body movements and postures. This is why all schools of yoga—Buddhist, Hindu or Sufi—place such emphasis on restoring natural breathing before trying to move the student on to higher circuits and wider consciousness.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 636 Even old-fangled M.D.s who won’t consider holistic ideas for a minute, admit that some persons are mysteriously “more susceptible” to disease than other persons. What is this metaphysical “susceptibility”? Anthropologist Ashley Montagu has collected numerous statistics on children who were deprived of maternal love at the crucial point of imprint vulnerability in infancy. They not only died younger than the national average, but were sicklier all their lives and even grew up to be several inches shorter than the average adult height for their sex. What makes for “susceptibility” (aside from possible genetic factors) can only be such an anxiety imprint (muscle tension) on the first circuit.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 641 Christian Science—or any other religion that dogmatically insists that “God” wants us to he happy and successful—can cure such conditions “miraculously.” What the Thinker thinks the Prover proves. Absolute faith that “God” is supporting you, beamed out from the brain all day long, day after day, signals the muscles to relax, and natural buoyancy and health returns.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 644 Throughout human life, when the bio-survival circuit senses danger, all other mental activity ceases. All other circuits shut down until the bio-survival problem is “solved,” realistically or symbolically.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 646 This is of crucial importance in mind-washing and brain-programming. To create a new imprint, first reduce the subject to the state of infancy, i.e., bio-survival vulnerability.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 650 EXERCIZES 1. Determine to enjoy this primitive circuit fully from now on. Play with yourself and others and the environment shamelessly, like a newborn baby. Meditate on “Unless ye become as a little child, ye shall in no wise enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” (paraphrase of Matthew 18:3) 2. Never mind your diet—you will reach the optimum weight for your height when your brain is operating properly. Enjoy one really sweet and gooey desert every week. Diabetics, of course, should buy this goody in the non-sugar section. 3. Get “high” (on marijuana if this is permissible to your superego, or on ginseng, which is legal everywhere and recommended by many holistic physicians) and then go to a health spa. Enjoy a good swim, a massage and a sauna. Repeat every week, forever. 4. Take a course on kung fu or karate for at least three months, then re-read this whole chapter. You will be surprised at how much more every sentence will mean. 5. Lie on your back and pant rapidly to the count of 20. (Each exhale-inhale cycle counts as one, not as two.) Panting means breathing rapidly through your mouth, as forbidden by almost all experts on health, but this is only an exercise, not a full-time practice. When you reach 20, stop and resume nose-breathing, in the slow, rhythmic manner recommended by yogis, to the count of 20. Then repeat the panting to the count of 20. Then repeat proper yoga breathing. This is known as the “breath of fire” in Tantric yoga. The results are most amusing and enlightening. Try it!* • *Like opiate use, this exercise seems to trigger neuro-transmitters similar to mother’s milk; i.e., it takes you back to the snug security of breast-feeding. And it is not addictive. • 6. Visit an aquarium and observe very closely. Try to see the bio-survival circuit of the fish brain in operation and recognize when and how that circuit in your own brain has operated throughout your life. 7. If you don’t have a baby, or haven’t had one for many years, play with somebody else’s baby for an hour. Then reread this chapter.

Notes

Amount: 12

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