Prometheus Rising (28 page)

instance, try feeding it on such meta-programming instructions

as:

1. I am at cause over my body.

2. I am at cause over my imagination.

3.1 am at cause over my future.

4. My mind abounds with beauty and power.

5.1 like people, and people like me.

Remember that this computer is only a few decades ahead of

present technology, so it cannot "understand" your commands if

you harbor any doubts about them. Doubts tell it not to perform.

Work always from what you can believe in, extending the area of

belief only as results encourage you to try for more dramatic

transformations of your past reality-tunnels.

This represents
cybernetic consciousness;
the programmer

becoming self-programmer, self-metaprogrammer, meta-metaprogrammer,

etc. Just as the emotional compulsions of the

second circuit seem primitive, mechanical and, ultimately, silly

Prometheus Rising 22 3

to the neurosomatic consciousness, so, too, the reality maps of

the third circuit become comic, relativistic, game-like to the

metaprogrammer.

"Whatever you say it is, it isn't, "
Korzybski, the semanticist,

repeated endlessly in his seminars, trying to make clear that

third-circuit semantic maps are not the territories they represent;

that we can always make maps of our maps, revisions of our

revisions, meta-selves of our selves.

"Neti, neti"
(not that, not that), Hindu teachers traditionally

say when asked what "God" is or what "Reality" is.

Yogis, mathematicians and musicians seem more inclined to

develop meta-programming consciousness than most of humanity.

Korzybski even claimed that the use of mathematical scripts

is an aid to developing this circuit, for as soon as you think of

your mind as mind
1
, and the mind which contemplates that mind

as mind
2
and the mind which contemplates mind
2
contemplating

mind
1
as mind
3
, you are well on your way to meta-programming

awareness.
Alice in Wonderland
is a masterful guide to the metaprogramming

circuit (written by one of the founders of mathematical

logic) and Aleister Crowley soberly urged its study upon

all students of yoga.

R. Buckminster Fuller illustrates the meta-programming circuit,

in his lectures, by pointing out that we feel puny in comparison

to the size of the universe, but only our bodies (hardware)

are puny. Our minds, he says—by which he means our software

—
contain
the universe, by the act of comprehending it.

The seventh, meta-programming circuit is the most recent in

evolutionary time and seems to be located in the
frontal lobes.

That is why the traditional Hindu exercize to activate it is to fix

the consciousness in the front of the forehead and hold it there,

hour after hour, day after day, year after year, until the metaprogrammer

awakes and you begin to perceive-create infinite realities

where before there was only one static jail-cell "reality" in

which you were trapped.

As said above, this circuit is the "soul" of the Gnostics, as

distinct from the self. The self seems to be fixed and firm, but is

not; that is, whatever circuit you are operating on at the moment

is your "self at that moment. If I point a gun at you, you go to

Circuit I consciousness at once, and that is your "self at that

224 Prometheus Rising

instant. But if you are sexually attracted to somebody, you go to

Circuit IV and that is your "self until you are orgasmically

satisfied (or hopelessly frustrated). Most of the preliminary exercizes

in Sufi and Gurdjieff schools consist in making you aware

that the "self is not constant but shifts back and forth between

the imprints on the various circuits.

The "soul" or Circuit VII is constant, because it is, as the

Chinese say, void or no-form. It plays all the roles you play—

oral dependent, emotional tyrant, cool rationalist, romantic

seducer, neurosomatic healer, neurogenetic Evolutionary Visionary

—but it is none of them.
It is plastic.
It is no-form, because it

is all forms. It is the "creative Void" of the Taoists.

If this begins to sound like nonsense, that is inevitable on this

level.
As Lewis Morgan notes, in books on linguistics there

always comes a point at which the prose itself becomes wildly

incomprehensible, disintegrating into nonsense.

The same happens, Morgan notes, beyond a certain point in

modern mathematics:

Godel's Theorem was once explained to me by a patient, a

gentle mathematician, and just as I was taking it all in,

nodding appreciatively at'the beauty of the whole idea.. .it all

turned into nonsense inside my head.

It happens in both linguistics and mathematics, because it

happens in consciousness itself,
language and math are just

models of consciousness.

"Mind" is a tool invented by the universe to see itself; but it

can never see all of itself, for much the same reason that you

can't see your own back (without mirrors). Or as Alan Watts

liked to say, because the tongue ultimately cannot taste the

tongue.

Ideas about ideas—mathematics about mathematics (Godel)

—language about language—consciousness of consciousness—

the whole seventh circuit brings us into what Hofstadter calls

Strange Loops.
Like the legendary ko-ko bird, we follow our

own tail around in ever-narrowing circles, but unlike that mythic

bird we never complete the process by flying up our own

rectums and disappearing. It just seems like we're about to selfdestruct

in that colorful way, and we decide that what we have

been reading, or thinking, or perceiving, must be "nonsense."

Prometheus Rising 225

It is not nonsense. We are merely confronting infinity where

we least expected to encounter it—in our own lonely selves.

Physics joined linguistics, mathematics and psychology in this

mete programming hall of mirrors when Schrodinger demonstrated

that quantum events are not "objective" in the Newtonian

sense. For fifty years since then, physicists have been struggling

to build a system that will get them out of this Strange Loop. The

results have been as funny as a Zen
koan.

For instance, Niels Bohr proposed the Copenhagen Interpretation,

which merely says, in the manner of Godel, that our

equations do not describe the universe really. They describe the

mental processes we have to put ourselves through to describe

the universe. True enough—and this whole book is a Copenhagen

Interpretation of psychology and owes
everything
to Dr.

Bohr, but we are still in a Strange Loop, and most physicists

want to get out.

Dr. John von Neumann proved that there was no way out.

This is technically known as Von Neumann's Catastrophe of the

Infinite Regress, and it merely shows that any device that will

get us out of the first Strange Loop (the Copenhagen collapse of

objectivity) will just lead us into a second Strange Loop; and any

way out of that will lead to an inexorable third Strange Loop;

and so on, forever.

Everybody is still trying to refute von Neumann; but nobody

has been successful.

"I can't get out—my horns won't fit through the door.

The meta-programming circuit is
not
a trap. As Joyce would

say, it only looks as like it as damn it. Simply accept that the

universe is so structured that it can see itself, and that this selfreflexive

arc is built into our frontal lobes, so that consciousness

contains an infinite regress, and all we can do is make models of

ourselves making models...

Well, at that point, the only thing to do is relax and enjoy the

show.

This is what the Hindus call
Shiva-darshana,
or the divine

dance. You are still in life, or life is in you, but since there are

infinite aspects to everything, especially to the "you" who is

observing/creating all these muddles and models,
there are no

limits.

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Prometheus Rising

The only sensible goal, then, is to try to build a reality-tunnel

for next week that is bigger, funnier, sexier, more optimistic and

generally less boring than any previous reality-tunnel.

And once you have built that bigger, funnier, happier universe

of thought, build a bigger and better one, for next month.

EXERCIZES

1. If all you can know is your own brain programs operating,

the whole universe you experience is inside your head. Try to

hold onto that model for at least an hour. Note how often you

relapse into feeling the universe as
outside you.

2.
Consider the belief system or reality-tunnel of an educated

reader 1200 years ago—in 797 AD. How much of that tunnel

still seems "Real"? How much in our reality-tunnel was unknown

or invisible then?

3. Consider the reality-tunnel of an educated person 1200

years from now—in 3197 AD. How much of our reality-tunnel

will still seem "Real"? How much of the 3197 AD reality-tunnel

is unknown or invisible to us?

4. Re-read Moses' encounter with I AM WHO I AM in

Deuteronomy. Try the theory that Moses was talking to his own

meta-programming circuit.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

DIFFERENT MODELS &

DIFFERENT MUDDLES

It1 is not just a riot of blots and blurs and disjointed jottings linked

by spurts of speed... it only looks as like it as damn it.

— James Joyce,
Finnegans Wake

1 Presumably the input (software) or the brain (hardware). Or both.

227

"REALITY" IS THE TEMPORARY RESULTANT OF

CONTINUOUS STRUGGLES BETWEEN RIVAL GANGS

OF PROGRAMMERS.

And every moment is a new and shocking

Transvaluation of all we have ever been.

— T.S. Eliot,
Four Quartets

228

When a paradigm shift occurs—when we go from seeing things

one way to seeing them another way—
the whole world is

remade.
All that we "know" is what registers on our brains, so

what you perceive (your individual reality-tunnel) is made up of

nothing but thoughts—as Sir Humphrey Davy noted when selfexperimenting

with nitrous oxide in 1819, and as Buddha noticed

by sitting alone until all his social imprints atrophied and

dropped away.

The Copernican Revolution in astronomy, the Darwinian

revolution in biology, the Relativity and Quantum revolutions in

physics, have all been as shocking to those who lived through

them as the Immortalist Revolution is today.

You can live in the reality-tunnel imprinted upon you by

environmental accident or you can choose your own. You can go

through brain changes as radically bad as those of Patty Hearst

and Rusty Galley, as transcendentally beautiful as those of

Buddha and Jesus, as epistomologically revolutionary as those of

Darwin and Einstein.

You can join those who have already entered the Immortalist

Reality Tunnel, the Scientologist Reality-Tunnel or the Communist

Reality-Tunnel.

"There are a lot of different realities going around these

days," Abby Hoffman once said. Evolutionary acceleration is

forcing us to the point where each will have to take responsibility

for which reality we accept.

Fifteen million Americans are waiting, trustingly, for the

Space Brothers to come down in their UFOs and enforce World

Peace.

The UFO is the, or an, extreme case. In general,
everything we

see is inside our heads.

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Prometheus Rising

This is demonstrated by the well-known optical diagram

encountered in every high-school physics class:

The light rays from the external object are reflected through

the lens of the eye onto the retina, and reversed in the process.

The brain obligingly interprets the picture, turning it right-sideup,

and editing it in other ways more subtle.

What is true of vision is true of the other senses. What we

know is what registers on the brain. This is the answer to the

famous Zen Buddhist
koan
(riddle), "Who is the Divine Being

who makes the grass green?"

The brain, in the routine course of the before-mentioned

100,000,000 programs per minute, takes in, edits, orchestrates,

organizes, packages, labels etc. all raw "existential" experience

and classifies it according to the neurological Dewey Decimal