The New Inquisition Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science Chapter 8 Creative Agnosticism

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The New Inquisition Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science Chapter 8. Creative Agnosticism

Author: Robert Anton Wilson Publisher: Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press. Publish Date: 1986 Review Date: 2023-6-23 Status:⌛️

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Highlight(pink) - Page 246 · Location 5179 We have repeatedly employed Nietzsche’s metaphor in which existential reality is Abysmal. In one dimension of meaning, this merely asserts that it is endless: the deeper you look into it, the more you see. It has the sense of infinity about it, whether or not it is topologically infinite in space-time.
Highlight(pink) - Page 247 · Location 5183 The “Real” Universe—the model which has become experienced as the real universe—is, on the other hand, quite finite. It is compact and tidy, since it has been manufactured by discarding all the inconvenient parts of existential experience. This is why those self-hypnotized by a “Real” Universe of this sort can be so oblivious to the existential continuum around them.

Highlight(pink) - Page 247 · Location 5189 The ghastly acceleration of violent, inexplicable and seemingly “pointless” crimes by Right Men in this century—and their hideous magnification into mass murders and war crimes by Right Men in governments—indicate the prevalence of this type of self-hypnosis and what Van Vogt calls “the inner horror” that accompanies it. This “inner horror” is a sense of total helplessness combined with the certainty of always being Right. It seems paradoxical, but the more totally Right a man becomes, the more helpless he also becomes. This is because being Right means “knowing” (gnosis) and “knowing” is understanding The “Real” Universe. Since The “Real” Universe is, by definition, “objective” and “outside us” and “not our creation,” we are made puny by it. We cannot act but only re-act—as The “Real” Universe pushes us, we push back. But it is bigger, so we will lose eventually. Our only defense is in being Right and fighting as dirty as possible.
Highlight(pink) - Page 247 · Location 5200 This, I think, is in succinct form the philosophy of Adolph Hitler. It is the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade, and of any rapist or thug you can find in any prison in the world.
Highlight(pink) - Page 247 · Location 5202 Where Single Vision reigns—where The “Real” Universe is outside us and impersonal—this shadow-world of violence and horror follows in its wake.

Highlight(pink) - Page 247 · Location 5203 This, probably, is why Nietzsche, who understood this pathology from within, raged against both the modeltheistic epistemology—denying The “Real” Universe entirely—and against what he called the Revenge motive.
Highlight(pink) - Page 248 · Location 5207 But his deepest attack goes at the psychology of The “Real” Universe and its connection to Revenge, and the disguises of Revenge. If a man feels overwhelmed by The “Real” Universe, he will seek to destroy what oppresses him. Since we cannot get at The “Real” Universe, revenge must be directed at symbolic targets in the existential continuum.
Highlight(pink) - Page 248 · Location 5210 The Will to Power—which Nietzsche held was essentially a will to self-overcoming: to neurological self-criticism in my terminology: to become more than one was—then becomes deflected into a Will to Destroy.
Highlight(pink) - Page 248 · Location 5213 In the language of modern existentialist and humanist psychology, Nietzsche is describing the process by which we shirk responsibility. We seek revenge, but since we are only re-acting, The “Real” Universe made us do it.
Highlight(pink) - Page 248 · Location 5219 Man as a re-active mechanism—the Materialist metaphor—is Man with a grudge.
Highlight(pink) - Page 248 · Location 5219 The most well-known, and probably the most typical, lines of verse of the 20th Century almost certainly are: I, a stranger and afraid, In a world I never made. This is the self-image of modern humanity: of the Right Man in particular, but of masses also of ordinary men and women who have internalized the Fundamentalist Materialist metaphor and made it the New Idol.

Highlight(pink) - Page 249 · Location 5232 The world looked on in horror, learned nothing, and decided Hitler was a “monster.” It remained hypnotized by the same materialistic biological determinism which, to Adolph, had justified both his self-pity and his revenge.
Highlight(pink) - Page 249 · Location 5234 And so we stumble on toward a bigger Holocaust than the Nazis could imagine, complaining bitterly that it is “inevitable.” The “Real” Universe will not give us a chance.

Highlight(pink) - Page 249 · Location 5238 The reason that it is usually easy to induce hypnosis in humans is that we have a kind of “consciousness” that easily drifts away into such “Real” Universes rather than deal with existential muddle and doubt.
Highlight(pink) - Page 249 · Location 5243 We visit them all the time, but especially when existential concerns are painful or stressful.
Highlight(pink) - Page 249 · Location 5244 Every “Real” Universe is easy to understand, because it is much simpler than the existential continuum.
Highlight(pink) - Page 249 · Location 5246 because of this simplicity of the edited object as contrasted with the complexity of the sensory-sensual continuum in which we live when awake (unhypnotized).
Highlight(pink) - Page 250 · Location 5249 Being hypnotized by a “Real” Universe, we become more and more detached from the existential continuum, and are annoyed when it interferes with us.
Highlight(pink) - Page 250 · Location 5250 “Real” Universes make us puny, however, because they are governed by Hard Laws and we are small compared to them. This is especially true of the Fundamentalist Materialist “Real” Universe, and explains the helplessness and apathy of materialist society.
Highlight(pink) - Page 250 · Location 5253 Since the criminal mentality derives from such hypnosis by a “Real” Universe and the helplessness and rage induced by such metaphors, the criminal becomes, more and more, the typical person of our age.
Highlight(pink) - Page 250 · Location 5256 When the “Real” Universe becomes politicized—when the hypnotic model is based on “Us”-versus-” Them” Aristotelian logic—the criminal graduates into the Terrorist, another increasingly typical product of the materialist era.

Highlight(pink) - Page 250 · Location 5261 In existentialist and humanist models—models influenced by the thought and experiments of researchers such as Maslow, Sullivan, Ames, Perls, Leary, Krippner, and many others—the human being is seen as both in-DIVIDE-ual and in-UNITE-ual, separated in some ways but connected with all things in other ways.
Highlight(pink) - Page 250 · Location 5267 According to existential-humanist psychology, where the materialist says “I perceive,” it would be more correct to say “I am making a bet.” Concretely, in Ames’s cock-eyed room, we “make a bet” that we are seeing something familiar to us. If allowed into the room and asked to touch a corner of the ceiling with a pointer, we quickly discover the gamble in every act of perception.
Highlight(pink) - Page 250 · Location 5271 Typically, we hit almost everything but the corner in our first attempts—the walls, other parts of the ceiling, etc. A strange thing happens as we go on trying. Our perceptions change—we are making a new series of bets, one after another—and gradually we are able to find the corner we are aiming for.
Highlight(pink) - Page 251 · Location 5275 The same sort of thing happens in any psychedelic drug experience, which is why existentialist-humanist models became more popular with psychologists after the 1960s. The same sort of thing, again, happens in meditation—clearing the mind of its habits—and that is why so many psychologists of this tradition have been involved in researching what happens, physiologically, to those who meditate.
Highlight(pink) - Page 251 · Location 5278 When we return to the ordinary world of social interactions after such shocks as the cock-eyed room, LSD or meditation, we observe that the same processes are going on—people are making bets about which model fits best at a given time—but they are not aware of making bets. They are—it must be repeated—hypnotized by their models.
Highlight(pink) - Page 251 · Location 5282 If the models do not fit very well, they do not revise them but grow angry at the world—at experience—for being recalcitrant.
Highlight(pink) - Page 251 · Location 5283 Most typically, they find somebody to blame, as Nietzsche noted again and again.

Highlight(pink) - Page 251 · Location 5284 Edmund Husserl, who was as important as Nietzsche in pioneering this kind of existential analysis, points out that, where in the materialist metaphor consciousness appears passive, once we recognize the gamble involved in every perception, consciousness appears very active indeed. Nobody is born a great pianist, or a quantum physicist, or a theologian, or a murderer: people have made themselves into those things by actively selecting what types of perception-gambles they will make habitual and what types of other experiences they will edit out as irrelevant.
Highlight(pink) - Page 252 · Location 5300 The alleged conformist—the typical “bank-clerk,” say—will reveal some astonishing creative acts in his or her private model, if you talk to such a person long enough.
Highlight(pink) - Page 252 · Location 5302 In short, consciousness, in this model, is not a passive receptor but an active creator, busy every nanosecond in projecting the art work that is an individualized reality-tunnel and is usually hypnotically dreamed of as The “Real” Universe. This trance, in most cases, appears as deep as that of anybody professionally hypnotized to repress pain during surgery.
Highlight(pink) - Page 252 · Location 5308 We are not the victims of The “Real” Universe; we have created the particular “Real” Universe that we happen to dwell in.

Highlight(pink) - Page 252 · Location 5310 This existentialist-humanist psychology thus comes around to the same conclusion as the majority of quantum physicists: whatever we are talking about, our mind has been its principle architect. “Nothing is real and everything is real” as Gribbin says. That is, in this model, nothing is absolutely real in the philosophical sense, and everything is experienced reality to those who believe in it and select it in their perception-gambles.
Highlight(pink) - Page 252 · Location 5315 If we recognize some validity in these observations and try to “wake” ourselves from the hypnotic trance of modeltheism—if we try to recall, moment by moment, in an ordinary day that The “Real” Universe is only a model we have created and that existential living cannot be compressed into any model—we enter a new kind of consciousness. What Blake called “Single Vision” begins to expand into multiple vision—into conscious bet-making. The person then “sees abysses everywhere,” in Nietzsche’s deliberately startling metaphor. (Blake says it more soothingly when he speaks of perceiving “infinity in a grain of sand.“) The world of living experience is not as finite, or static, or tidy, as the trance called The “Real” Universe. Like Godel’s Proof, it contains an infinite regress.
Highlight(pink) - Page 253 · Location 5326 As the Buddhists say, the other person and indeed the whole continuum of experience now seems to “be” X and not-X and both X and not-X and neither X nor not-X. All that seems like relative certainty is that whatever I think I “know” about a person or a whole world is just my latest gamble.

Highlight(pink) - Page 253 · Location 5330 One begins to perceive that there “are” at least two kinds of consciousness. (There seem to be many more.) In “ordinary consciousness” or hypnosis, models are considered The “Real” Universe and projected outside. In this state, we “are” modeltheists, Fundamentalists, and mechanical; all perceptions (gambles) are passive mechanical acts. We “unconsciously” (neurologically) edit and select bits of existential experience and admit them to The “Real” Universe only after they have been processed to accord with the “laws” of The “Real” Universe.
Highlight(pink) - Page 253 · Location 5334 Being mechanical and passive, we are also, or experience ourselves as, dominated by The “Real” Universe and pushed here and there by its brutal impersonality.
Highlight(pink) - Page 253 · Location 5336 In this existentialist-humanist mode of consciousness, on the other hand, we “are” agnostic, and consciously recognize our models as our creations. In this state, we “are” model-relativists, “sophisticates” and actively creative; all perceptions (gambles) are actively known as gambles. We consciously seek to edit less and tune in more, and we look especially for events that do not neatly fit our model, since they will teach us to make a better model tomorrow, and an even better one the day after. We are not dominated by The “Real” Universe since we remember that the linguistic construct is just our latest gamble and we can make a better one quickly.
Highlight(pink) - Page 254 · Location 5342 In the first, materialist mode of consciousness—as Timothy Leary says—we are like persons sitting passively before a TV set, complaining about the rubbish on the screen but unable to do anything but “endure” it. In the second, existentialist mode of consciousness, to continue Leary’s metaphors, we take responsibility for turning the dial and discover that there is not just one “show” available, that choice is possible. The tuned-in is not all of existence; it is only—the tuned-in.

Highlight(pink) - Page 254 · Location 5347 To ask which mode of consciousness is “true,” after experiencing both, seems as pointless as asking whether light is “really” waves or particles, after seeing the two-hole experiment. In fact, the emphasis on “choice” and “creativity” in existentialist-humanist psychology has an exact parallel in the two-hole experiment. Many physicists think the best metaphor to describe that experiment is to say that we “create” the wave or particle depending on which experimental set-up we “choose.”

Note: victimhood vs resposibility

Highlight(pink) - Page 254 · Location 5352 The wave/ particle complimentary seems to mirror the existential experience of consciousness even more closely when we examine it. The ordinary consciousness of the “self”—in the vernacular sense, with no technical philosophic doctrine implied—is much like a particle: “solid,” “isolated,” “real,” encapsulated by the skin and more or less static. When one becomes detached enough for neurological self-criticism—for revising models as one goes along—the “self” appears more like a process and even a wavy process: it “is” a succession of states, rather than a state itself (as Hume noticed) and these states come and go in a wave-like manner, “flowing” between “inner” and “outer.”
Highlight(pink) - Page 254 · Location 5358 As one observes them come and go, one learns to choose desirable states, at least to the same extent that the two-hole experiment “chooses” waves or particles.
Highlight(pink) - Page 255 · Location 5363 This simple experience, available to all, makes clear that in-UNITE-ual and flowing modes of consciousness are existentially as “real” as the in-DIVIDE-ual “particles” that we normally experience as our “selves.”
Highlight(pink) - Page 254 · Location 5360 One of the best ways to learn to experience the wave-aspect of consciousness, of course, is listening to music, especially Baroque music, with one’s eyes closed. Much quicker than Oriental meditation, this makes one aware of consciousness’s wave-like flowing aspect, and of its synergetic nature. At its richest, as in meditation, consciousness appears to become the object of its attention; “there is no separation between me and the music,” we say.

Highlight(pink) - Page 255 · Location 5379 Powerful churches, political parties and vested (financial) interests, for example, have a strong desire to program the rest of us into the particular “Real” Universes that they find profitable, and to keep us from becoming self-programmers. They want to “take responsibility” for us, and they have no wish to see us “take responsibility” for ourselves.
Highlight(pink) - Page 255 · Location 5382 Materialism-in-the-philosophical-sense is very much supported by materialism-in-the-economic-sense.

Highlight(pink) - Page 255 · Location 5383 To summarize: Consciousness is not a given, or a fact. Our mode of consciousness seems historically to have been determined by neurological (unconscious) habits. When we become aware of this, and struggle against the inertia of habit, consciousness continually mutates, becomes less particle-like and “fixed,” spreads like a flowing wave. It can move between the poles of pure in-DIVIDE-ualism and pure in-UNITE-ualism, and between many other poles, and can become increasingly “creative” and “self-chosen.”

Highlight(pink) - Page 256 · Location 5394 In the “Real” Universe, all things are determined, including us and our thoughts. In the experienced world, things come and go incessantly and some come and go so fast that we can never know why; causal models fit only sombunall of experience. There is a sense of flow, process, evolution, growth, and of what Bergson called “the perpetual upsurge of novelty.” In this experienced world, and not in abstract theory, we are faced by apparent decisions continually. We make them and we experience the sense of choice as we do so. We can never know how much such choice is “real” absolutely, but since we can never know anything else absolutely, we make do on probabilities.

Highlight(pink) - Page 259 · Location 5462 Ultimately, existentialist psychology agrees with neurology (and sounds remarkably like quantum mechanics) in stressing that there is no model that is not an expression of the values and needs of the model-maker, no description that is not also an interpretation, and hence no “objective observer behind a glass wall” who is merely watching what happens.

Note: Humanistic and Existential Theory Frankl, Rogers, and Maslow

Highlight(pink) - Page 259 · Location 5464 the whole traditional language of “the thing out there,” “the image in here,” and “the mind” separate from both is totally inadequate to describe our experience, and we need a new holistic or synergetic language.

Highlight(pink) - Page 260 · Location 5470 The human brain, from the viewpoint of perception theory and existentialist psychology, appears much like a very unique self-programming computer. It chooses—usually unconsciously and mechanically—the quality of consciousness it will experience and the reality-tunnel it will employ to orchestrate the incoming signals from the experienced world.
Highlight(pink) - Page 260 · Location 5473 When it becomes more conscious of this programming, its creativeness becomes truly astounding and has been called metaprogramming by Dr. John Lilly.
Highlight(pink) - Page 260 · Location 5475 In metaprogramming or neurological self-criticism, the brain becomes capable of deliberately increasing the number of signals consciously apprehended. One looks casually, in the normal way, and then looks again, and again. Dull objects and boring situations become transformed—partly because they “were” dull and boring only when the brain was working on old mechanical programs—and, without being too lyrical about it, the synergetic unity of observer-observation becomes a thrilling experience.
Highlight(pink) - Page 260 · Location 5480 Every experience becomes the kind of intense learning that usually only occurs in school when cramming for exams. This state of high and involved consciousness—called awakening by the mystics—seems perfectly normal and natural to the brain that has been programmed to watch its own programming.
Highlight(pink) - Page 260 · Location 5482 Since, in the existential world of experience, we have to make bets and choices, we are consciously “cramming” all the time, but there is no special sense of stress or anxiety involved. We are living time instead of passing time, as Nicoll said.

Highlight(pink) - Page 260 · Location 5486 The brain, it seems, works best under pressure. The soldier being decorated for bravery often says “I don’t remember doing it—it all happened too fast.” Even in situations less terrifying and punishing than war, most of us have had flashes of this staggering efficiency and rapidity of brain processes in emergencies.
Highlight(pink) - Page 261 · Location 5488 It seems very likely that habitual feelings of “helplessness” and “inadequacy” derive chiefly from our habit of wandering off into The “Real” Universe and not being directly involved in where we are, what we are doing, and what is going on around us.
Highlight(pink) - Page 262 · Location 5511 To use the brain efficiently—to be aware of where one is and what one is doing and what is going on around one, and to take responsibility for one’s bets or choices—seems to increase “intelligence” and “creativity.” That is hardly a surprise. Whatever our technical definitions of these mysterious functions, it is obvious that they are somehow connected with the number of signals consciously apprehended, and with the rapidity of the revision process. When one model is held statically between ourselves and experience, the number of signals drops, no revision occurs, and “intelligence” and “creativity” correspondingly decline.
Highlight(pink) - Page 262 · Location 5517 When many models are available, and when we are consciously involved in our choices, the number of signals consciously apprehended increases, and we behave more “intelligently” and “creatively.”

Highlight(pink) - Page 262 · Location 5525 ❗️ Once again, it appears that the materialist model of mechanical consciousness covers some but not all experience, and it excludes precisely that part of experience which makes us human, esthetic, moral and responsible beings.
Highlight(pink) - Page 262 · Location 5527 One may suspect that this is why the materialist age has become increasingly inhuman, ugly, amoral and blindly irresponsible.

Highlight(pink) - Page 257 · Location 5407❗️ Neurological research during the past two decades has rather clearly demonstrated that the passive consciousness in which there is a “Real” Universe “out there” is characteristic of left-brain domination. Correspondingly, any method of moving into the flowing-synergetic-holistic mode of consciousness—with meditation, or with certain drugs, or by the process of Zen-like attention described in the previous pages—leads to an increase in right-brain activity. Presumably, if we stayed in the flowing right-brain mode all the time we would become, in Mr. Okera’s term, Dionysian.
Highlight(pink) - Page 257 · Location 5412 It is more amusing, and more instructive, I think, to orchestrate one’s consciousness, by “dialing” the TV set—choosing which mode one uses. This way one learns the best, and worst, of both hemispheres of the brain.
Highlight(pink) - Page 257 · Location 5414 One also can learn, with self-experiment, that there are other modalities besides right and left. There seems to be a top-bottom mode also, connected with the degree of possible delay we can tolerate: the bottom or old brain seems to be reptilian in its reflexes, the top or new brain more easily visualizes a multiple-choice reality-labyrinth in place of the either/ or of pure reflex.
Highlight(pink) - Page 257 · Location 5417 And there even seems to be a front/ back polarity: the frontal lobes seem to fine-tune the intuitions in the general direction of that damned and verboten “ESP.”
Highlight(pink) - Page 257 · Location 5420 In short, it appears to those who try the experiments/ experiences of yoga and humanistic psychology, that what is tuned in is a function of how we use our brains habitually, and what is not-tuned-in may, in many cases, become tuned-in, with practice in neurological reprogramming.* ~• ~ * A variety of exercises to test these general conclusions for yourself can be found in my book, Prometheus Rising.

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The New Inquisition Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science Chapter 8. Creative Agnosticism

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