Prometheus Rising (18 page)

novels by Bob Shea and myself. In the course of the drama came

a scene Shea and I had almost forgotten writing in the seven

years since the books were finished in 1971. The scene concerned

a lunatic messiah who orders 3300 of his robot disciples

to commit suicide by drinking cyanide. The mindless automatons

obey and each drinks his cyanide cocktail.

Shea and I had written that bizarre sequence to illustrate the

extremes to which brainwashing can go. We both regarded it as

an extravagant fantasy, for satirical purposes—an exaggeration

of our serious theme.

Yet while the actors on the stage were depicting this "fantasy"

every TV and newspaper in the land was discussing the exact

same species of mass zombie behavior. Our fictional maniac

guru was Adolph Hitler; in November 1978, while our play was

being performed, another maniac-guru, Jim Jones, had played the

whole sequence out in reality. In Guyana, he had ordered 900 of

his robots to drink cyanide and they had all obeyed.

It was particularly interesting to me that Jones had staged his

Gotterdammerung
while our play was having its American

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premiere. It was even more interesting that the tool of mass

suicide, in our fiction and in Jones' reality, had been cyanide.

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.

Wait. It gets weirder..; »

HEIRESS TO BANK ROBBER

When Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation

Army on February 4, 1974, she was a "normal" young

heiress. She was attending a normal college, had a normal live-in

boyfriend and smoked a normal amount of weed for a young

heiress of that time. 57 days later, she had become a new person,

with a new name—Tania—and was living in a new realitytunnel.

Where Patty had been heterosexual, Tania was bisexual.

Where Patty largely accepted the Hearst family tunnel-reality

with only a few "liberal" modifications typical of her age group,

Tania was a violent and fanatic revolutionary. Where Patty had

been respectful to her parents, Tania denounced them as

"corporate liars" and castigated them as being involved in a

capitalist plot to "murder" the poor people of the U.S. "down to

the last man, woman and child." Where Patty had been "nice"

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and polite and certainly non-violent, Tania had her photo taken

holding a tommy-gun and assisted in at least one bank robbery

and perhaps other felonies.

What had happened? When Patty-Tania was captured and

brought to trial, the defense claimed that she had been

"brainwashed." The jury either did not understand or did not

believe this; they sentenced Patty to prison for the crimes Tania

had committed. Debate about this case continues to the present,

since some people think Ms. Hearst was "responsible" for the

consciousness change she underwent while held captive by the

SLA and others are just as sure she was not "responsible."

Leaving metaphysical questions of "responsibility" aside for a

moment, it seems obvious that a young lady of Hearst's class and

background would almost certainly not have taken up bank

robbing if she had not first been kidnapped and incorporated by

the SLA.

Since the SLA called itself an army, let us compare it to an

army; this may prove illuminating.

One does not get kidnapped into an army the way Hearst got

kidnapped into the SLA, but the process is not entirely dissimilar.

U.S. Army recruiters do not break into a young man's house

in the middle of night with guns, as the SLA did with Patty: they

simply send the young man a notice in the mail. Nonetheless

coercion
is there; the young draftee knows that if he ignores the

letter, government agents will be around to seize his body in a

short while, (unless he flees the country.) He will then either go

into the army or into jail. Thus, whether we are speaking about

the S.L. Army or the U.S. Army, the subject is reduced to infantile

helplessness: other people are deciding what is to be done to

his or her body. One is pushed to the neonate position of being

one foot high in a six foot tall world, as it were. Like the small

child, one is learning that the first rule of survival is to obey.

Most people (except nudists) are shy about appearing naked

in public—and this is the most common of all nightmares,

"There I was with no clothes on!" (Joyce made this the central

incident in the dream that is all dreams,
Finnegans Wake.)
The

first step in leaving the civilian reality-tunnel and being initiated

into the Army reality-tunnel is, thus, the physical examination, in

which the subject is stripped naked and made to march around a

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large building with other naked victims while the fully-clothed

Army personnel give the briefest possible orders: "Stand up. Sit

down. Go there. Come back here," etc. The Masonic initiation,

which only removes part of the clothing of the subject, is a

milder version of the
stripping
away of previously secure social

parameters.

What is really being "stripped away" is more subtle; it is the

whole social system in which one has lived before being

snatched by a U.S. or an S.L. Army. When the doctor tells the

naked draftee, "Bend over. Spread your cheeks," so-called

normal reality has ended as totally as if the victim had been

incorporated into a surrealist movie. If an employer becomes too

obnoxious, one can always find a new job. You cannot walk out

on the U.S. or S.L. Army that way, because acute first-circuit

helplessness is being imprinted.

When the Russian mathematician, Ouspensky, was first

studying with Gurdjieff, he had great trouble understanding

Gurdjieff s insistence that most people are machines and totally

unaware of the objective world around them. Then, one day,

after World War I had begun, Ouspensky saw a truck full of

artificial legs.
These artificial legs were being sent to the frontline

hospitals, for soldiers whose legs had not even been blown

off yet, but whose legs
would
be blown off. The prediction that

these legs would be blown off was so certain that the artificial

legs were already on their way to replace the natural legs. The

prediction was based on the mathematical certainty that millions

of young men would march to the front, to be maimed and murdered,

as mindlessly as cattle marching into a slaughterhouse.

In a flash, Ouspensky understood the
mechanical
nature of

ordinary human consciousness.

( "I can 't get out — my horns won 'tfit through the door. ")

Initiation into the "Manson family" is not dissimilar. Lynette

Fromme was much like Patty Hearst — a "normal" American

young woman, with less money than Hearst, but no special

proclivity for criminal behavior. After passing through General

Manson' s basic training, Lynette had become Squeaky Fromme

and was convicted for pointing a gun at the U.S. President with

seeming intent to assassinate him.

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In the next chapter we will explain further how being captured

("drafted") by an army is the model of all brainwashing experience.

Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine

whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot.

The concept of "washing" is, of course, unscientific and

crude. The brain is not a dirty garment but an electro-colloidal

information processor—a living network of over 110 billion

nerve cells capable of (10
2733000
) interconnections, a number

higher than the total of all the atoms in the universe. In this

elegant, micro-miniaturized biocomputer more than 100,000,000

processes are programmed every minute.

From the viewpoint of neuro-sociology, how I perceive

"myself and "my world" depends on how each circuit has been

wired in my brain. Society has always known how to wire children;

the process is called acculturalization; it explains why children

of Catholics tend to become Catholics, children of Samoans

fit into Samoan society, children of Communists become good

little Communists, etc. Each generation "brainwashes" the next.

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. This is not to denigrate

the contributions of Confucianism, Judaism, Hinduism, modern

science, etc., but merely to emphasize the extent to which the

higher civilizations have been shaped by the four creators of

these three omni-religions: Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus and St.

Paul. What did these four men have in common?

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."

Buddha was an ordinary Hindu nobleman, and then he

experienced a rapid brain-change, after which he became a great

Teacher.

Mohammed was a humble camel-driver, with no sign of

exceptional intelligence or ambition, and then he experienced a

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rapid brain change, after which he became Teacher, Conqueror,

Law-Maker and Prophet.

We hear nothing of Jesus (save a few fables) until the age of

30, when he experiences a rapid brain-change, and puts forth a

doctrine that is to overturn the Roman Empire and influence

Western Civilization until the present.

St. Paul, who took the teaching of Jesus and turned it into a

militant movement, suffered an extreme form of brain-change, of

which he tells us that he was temporarily struck blind and lifted

up into the heavens where he beheld things "of which it is not

lawful to speak."

On all else but the experience of Illumination they disagree.

Buddha insisted that his enlightenment was perfectly natural—

"Are you a God?" he was once asked.

"No."

"Are you a saint?"

"No."

"Then what are you?"

"I am awake."

Mohammed informs us that he "spoke" to the Angel Gabriel,

Jesus that the "Father which is in heaven" spoke
through
him,

and St. Paul that he saw the lights and wonders above mentioned.

Making every possible reservation about fable and myth, we

get this one coincidence: A nobody experiences rapid brainchange

(consciousness dilation) and abruptly becomes very

much a historical Somebody. Much of the human race is still

living on the legacy of these four bio-electrical "illuminations,"

for good and for ill.

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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Rising
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If you have seen this 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 brainchange

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...

Similar forms of major brain-change underlie all revolutionary

breakthroughs in the arts, and in science as well. Neurosociology

is a history of massive brain changes, as we quantumjumped