← Prometheus Rising Book Summary, Notes and Highlights
Prometheus Rising Chapter 9. Mindwashing & Brain Programming
Author: Robert Anton Wilson Publisher: Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press. Publish Date: 1983 Review Date: Status:⌛️
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- Highlight(pink) - Location 1749 ❗️ Carl Jung, the psychologist, and Wolfgang Pauli, the physicist, had a name for peculiar coincidences of that order of eeriness. They called them synchronicities and said they represented an acausal and/or holistic principle in nature that acts outside the linear past-present-future of Newtonian time. Pauli, like most quantum physicists, was aware that subatomic events cannot be understood in Newtonian terms and must require some sort of acausality (indeterminism) or holism (superdeterminism) to explain them. In either case, the distinction between “observer” and “observed” breaks down. (About that, more later.) Jung, in turn, had observed that such synchronicities—weird coincidences—tend to occur when certain deep structures in the psyche are activated. He assumed that these structures were at what he called “the psychoid level,” below the collective unconscious, where mind and matter are not yet distinct—the quantum foam out of which matter and form and consciousness hierarchically emerge.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 1806 Christianity, Buddhism and Islam, between them, are the most potent brain-programming institutions on this planet. Approximately half the art and philosophy of the human race—the architecture, the music, the paintings, the literature, the educational ideals, the “great ideas”—has been influenced by and/or nurtured by these three great systems of theology.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 1810 As Aleister Crowley points out, “No point of doctrine, no point of ethics, no theory of a ‘hereafter’ do they share, and yet in the history of their lives we find one identity amid many diversities.”
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Highlight(pink) - Location 1823 Making every possible reservation about fable and myth, we get this one coincidence: A nobody experiences rapid brain-change (consciousness dilation) and abruptly becomes very much a historical Somebody.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 1825 Most people (the present author included) would consider what happened to Patty Hearst “bad” and what happened to Buddha “good.” It needs to be emphasized that both the “bad” and the “good” brain change experiences are functionally the same. The process is modeled, on a small scale by any design such as the following:
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Highlight(pink) - Location 1829 If you have seen the above graphic only one way, look at it again. There are two opposite ways of seeing it. When your whole world, not just a design on a book-page, is transformed this way, you are experiencing the kind of brain-change that can turn a rich heiress into a bank robber, an obscure carpenter into a Messiah, or an ordinary bank teller into a mental patient …
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EXERCIZES
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Imagine yourself into the reality-tunnel of the far-right group known as the John Birch Society. Believe for a while that the U.S. government is 85% under covert United Nations (UN) control and an open UN dictatorship will be declared soon. Turn on the TV in that frame of mind and look for all the evidence that each newscaster is either a conscious or an unconscious dupe of the UN conspiracy.
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Imagine yourself into the Head Space of a dogmatic Rationalist. Analyze the Jim Jones-cyanide-llluminatus synchronicity as “mere coincidence.”
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Imagine yourself into the Head Space of an occultist. Analyze the Jim Jones-cyanide-Illuminatus synchronicity as an Omen. What does it mean? Jungians say synchronicities contain “messages” from the deep structure of the collective mind. What is the message?
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Enter the Immortalist head-space for a few minutes. Imagine you invest only $1000 at normal bank interest, compounded annually. What will you have in 100 years? In 200 years? (Nobody has used this conservative path to investment and gotten rich on it before because nobody has lived long enough.)
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Why are you not a nudist (if you aren’t)? Make up five good reasons, then go find a nudist and explain them to her (or him).
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Become a Nazi for thirty three minutes. Believe that all politics is a matter of strength, stealth and treachery: that all liberalism is hypocrisy or folly. Plan a campaign to take over the world by force and fraud.
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Go to a Fundamentalist revival meeting where faith-healings are performed. Or watch Jerry Falwell on TV. Remember all the time that Jim Jones started out with that routine. See if you can get into the head space of the Believers and decide whether or not they would drink cyanide if their HOLY MAN told them to.