RAW & E-Prime

Some of you might remember Robert Anton Wilson from his famous Illuminatus trilogy, one of the best-selling set of conspiracy novels of all time. He was purposefully spoofing conspiracies but back then I didn’t get that and believed it all. Which of course led to my joining the Masons and the HOGD.  

I just came upon this link to an excerpt of his 1990 book Quantum Psychology, where he talks about using E-Prime as our language. It’s a way of thinking, talking and writing that goes post-metaphysical. Here are some excerpts: 

E and E-Prime

In 1933, in Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski proposed that we should abolish the “is of identity” from the English language. (The “is of identity” takes the form X is a Y. e.g., “Joe is a Communist,” “Mary is a dumb file-clerk,” “The universe is a giant machine,” etc.) In 1949, D. David Bourland Jr. proposed the abolition of all forms of the words “is” or “to be” and the Bourland proposal (English without “isness”) he called E-Prime, or English-Prime.
E-Prime seems to solve many problems that otherwise appear intractable, and it also serves as an antibiotic against what Korzybski called “demonological thinking.” 

Since the brain does not receive raw data, but edits data as we receive it, we need to understand the software the brain uses. The case for using E-Prime rests on the simple proposition that “isness” sets the brain into a medieval Aristotelian framework and makes it impossible to understand modern problems and opportunities…. Removing “isness” and writing/thinking only and always in operational/existential language sets us, conversely, in a modern universe where we can successfully deal with modern issues.
 
To begin to get the hang of E-Prime, consider the following two columns, the first written in Standard English and the second in English Prime.

Standard English

1. The photon is a wave.

2. The photon is a particle.

English Prime

1. The photon behaves as a wave when constrained by certain instruments. 
2. The photon appears as a particle when constrained by other instruments.

Re: RAW & E-Prime

One of the best books on the deconstruction of “essence” is Henry Staten's Wittgenstein and Derrida.  Derrida himself gave the book a glowing review. It's not an easy read, and it presupposes having a grasp of Wittgenstein's later work and Derrida's early essays on Husserl, but it's rewarding. What I find most striking of all is that Derrida's deconstruction of Husserl has some eerie, hair-raising parallels to Nagarjuna's deconstruction of the Sautrantikas and Sarvastivadins. The scholarship of parallels between Madhyamika and Wittgenstein has a rich history, but the parallels between Derrida and the Madhyamika, on the question of essence, have yet to be explored. Part of the problem has to do with unpacking the Madhyamika analysis. Oddly enough, one person who seems to be on the right track, IMO anyway, is Fenner. His account of the Madhyamika analysis of the problem of predication is bang on, IMO.

Re: RAW & E-Prime

In the first section of Staten's Preface he makes a point relevant to E-Prime. He notes that Derrida is often unintelligible to philosophers because of his fluid use of language, his play with signifiers. Derrida not only invented neologisms to get across his ideas but his writing style was intended to be representative of those ideas; it was itself an enactive, embodied practice for those ideas, much like Deleuze & Guattari's BwO. Derrida's writing style was like E-Prime that way, in that it eliminated the essense of thingness, and this was not understandable to those philosophers stuck in Aristotilian logic. Hence the many charges of nonsense, much like the charges against Naggie in his day.

Re: RAW & E-Prime

An interesting synchronicity, Ed. The guitar player I work with has his head filled with conspiricy theories right now. My antidote for the set of symptoms he was presenting: a good dose of Robert Anton Wilson.

I loved RAW when I was younger, and enjoyed doing his prescribed  “consciousness raising exercises” — e.g., doing 'cid and reading the Book of the Dead ala Tim Leary (scared the crap out of me); smoking hash and performing “sex magick” ala Crowley (weird and ecstatic; my partner came out of her body. haha); doing 'shrooms and lying in an isolation chamber ala John Lilly (ground control to kela, are you with us?); acting out Masters and Houston “thought experiments” and “mind games”; “neurolinguistic programming”; etc. etc. What a hoot. All bogus, of course. ;-) haha.

Re: RAW & E-Prime

I recall from RAW’s books his use of Timothy Leary’s evolutionary model. Here is an excerpt from Cosmic Trigger outlining Leary’s 8 neuro-circuits (found at this link). Leary seems to have burned out some key brain physiology by abusing LSD. However it does have some interesting correlations to both Wilber’s levels and traditional states, with an ET twist.

The Eight Systems of Consciousness by Robert Anton Wilson, from Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati

Tunnel-Realities and Imprints

To understand neurological space, Dr. Leary assumes that the nervous system consists of eight potential circuits, or “gears,” or mini-brains. Four of these brains are in the usually active left lobe and are concerned with our terrestrial survival; four are extraterrestrial, reside in the “silent” or inactive right lobe, and are for use in our future evolution. This explains why the right lobe is usually inactive at this stage of our development, and why it becomes active when the person ingests psychedelics.

We will explain each of the eight “brains” briefly.

I. The Bio-Survival System

This invertebrate brain was the first to evolve (2 to 3 million years ago) and is the first activated when a human infant is born. It programs perception onto an either-or grid divided into nurturing-helpful Things (which it approaches) and noxious-dangerous Things (which it flees, or attacks). The imprinting of this circuit sets up the basic attitude of trust or suspicion which will ever after trigger approach or avoidance.

II. The Emotional-Territorial System

This second, more advanced bio-computer formed when vertebrates appeared and began to compete for territory (perhaps 500,000,000 B.C.). In the individual, this bigger tunnel-reality is activated when the DNA master-tape triggers the metamorphosis from crawling to walking. As every parent knows, the toddler is no longer a passive (bio-survival) infant but a mammalian politician, full of physical (and psychic) territorial demands, quick to meddle in family business and decision-making. Again the first imprint on this circuit remains constant for life (unless brainwashed) and identifies the stimuli which will automatically trigger dominant, aggressive behavior or submissive, cooperative behavior. When we say that a person is behaving emotionally, egotistically or 'like a two-year-old,' we mean that s/he is blindly following one of the tunnel-realities imprinted on this circuit.

III. The Time-Binding Semantic System

This third brain was formed when hominid types began to differentiate from other primate stock (circa 4-5 million B.C.) and is activated for the linear left-lobe functions of the brain, determines our normal modes of artifact-manufacture and conceptual thought, i.e., third circuit 'mind.'

It is no accident, then, that our logic (and our computer-design) follows either-or, binary structure of these circuits. Nor is it an accident that our geometry, until the last century, has been Euclidean. Euclid 's geometry, Aristotle's logic and Newton 's physics are meta-programs synthesizing and generalizing first brain forward-back, second brain up-down and third brain right-left programs.

IV. The Social-Sexual System

The fourth brain, dealing with the transmission of tribal or ethnic culture across generations, introduces the fourth dimension, time.

Since each of these tunnel-realities consists of biochemical imprints or matrices in the nervous system, each of them is specifically triggered by neuro-transmitters and other drugs.

Notice how drugs that stimulate the first four circuits, which are already activated, tend to be dangerously addictive, roughly ordered ascending from the first circuit.

To activate the first brain take an opiate. Mother Opium and Sister Morphine bring you down to cellular intelligence, bio-survival passivity, the floating consciousness of the newborn. (This is why Freudians identify opiate addiction with the desire to return to infancy.)

To activate the second tunnel-reality, take an abundant quantity of alcohol. Vertebrate territorial patterns and mammalian emotional politics immediately appear when the booze flows, as Thomas Nashe intuitively realized when he characterized the various alcohol states by animal labels: “ass drunk,” “goat drunk,” “swine drunk,” “bear drunk,” etc.

To activate the third circuit, try coffee or tea, a high-protein diet, speed or cocaine.

The specific neurotransmitter for circuit four has not been synthesized yet, but it is generated by the glands after pubescence and flows volcanically through the bloodstreams of adolescents.

None of these terrestrial drugs change basic biochemical imprints. The behaviors which they trigger are those which were wired into the nervous system during the first stages of imprint vulnerability. The circuit II drunk exhibits the emotional games or cons learned from parents in infancy. The circuit III “mind” never gets beyond the permutations and combinations of those tunnel-realities originally imprinted, or abstractions associated with the imprints through later conditioning. And so forth.

But all this Pavlovian-Skinnerian robotism changes drastically and dramatically when we turn to the right lobe, the future circuits and extraterrestrial chemicals. The four evolving future 'brains' are:

V. The Neurosomatic System

When this fifth “body-brain” is activated, flat Euclidean figure-ground configurations explode multi-dimensionally. Gestalts shift, in McLuhan's terms, from linear visual space to all-encompassing sensory space. A hedonic turn-on occurs, a rapturous amusement, a detachment from the previously compulsive mechanism of the first four circuits. I turned this circuit on with pot and Tantra.

This fifth brain began to appear about 4,000 years ago in the first leisure-class civilizations and has been increasing statistically in recent centuries (even before the Drug Revolution), a fact demonstrated by the hedonic art of India, China, Rome and other affluent societies. More recently, Ornstein and his school have demonstrated with electroencephalograms that this circuit represents the first jump from the linear left lobe of the brain to the analogical right lobe.

The opening and imprinting of this circuit has been the preoccupation of “technicians of the occult”–Tantric shamans and hatha yogis. While the fifth tunnel-reality can be achieved by sensory deprivation, social isolation, physiological stress or severe shock (ceremonial terror tactics, as practiced by such rascal-gurus as Don Juan Matus or Aleister Crowley), it has traditionally been reserved to the educated aristocracy of leisure societies who have solved the four terrestrial survival problems.

About 20,000 years ago, the specific fifth brain neurotransmitter was discovered by shamans in the Caspian Sea area of Asia and quickly spread to other wizards throughout Eurasia and Africa . It is, of course, cannabis. Weed. Mother Mary Jane.

It is no accident that the pot-head generally refers to his neural state as “high” or “spaced-out.” The transcendence of gravitational, digital, linear, either-or, Aristotelian, Newtonian, Euclidean, planetary orientations (circuits I-IV) is, in evolutionary perspective, part of our neurological preparation for the inevitable migration off our home planet, now beginning. This is why so many pot-heads are Star Trek freaks and science fiction adepts. (Berkeley, California, certainly the Cannabis Capital of the U.S., has a Federation Trading Post on Telegraph Avenue, where the well-heeled can easily spend $500 or more in a single day, buying Star Trek novels, magazines, newsletters, bumper stickers, photographs, posters, tapes, etc., including even complete blueprints for the starship Enterprise.)

The extraterrestrial meaning of being “high” is confirmed by astronauts themselves; 85% of those who have entered the free-fall zero gravity describe “mystic experiences” or rapture states typical of the neurosomatic circuit. “No photo can show how beautiful Earth looked,” raves Captain Ed Mitchell, describing his Illumination in free-fall. He sounds like any successful yogi or pot-head. No camera can show this experience because it is inside the nervous system.

Free-fall, at the proper evolutionary time, triggers the neurosomatic mutation, Leary believes. Previously this mutation has been achieved “artificially” by yogic or shamanic training or by the fifth circuit stimulant, cannabis. Surfing, skiing, skin-diving and the new sexual culture (sensuous massage, vibrators, imported Tantric arts, etc.) have evolved at the same time as part of the hedonic conquest of gravity. The Turn-On state is always described as “floating,” or, in the Zen metaphor, “one foot above the ground.”

VI. The Neuroelectric System

The sixth brain consists of the nervous system becoming aware of itself apart from imprinted gravitational reality-maps (circuits I-IV) and even apart from body-rapture (circuit V). Count Korzybski, the semanticist, called this state “consciousness of abstracting.” Dr. John Lilly calls it “metaprogramming,” i.e., awareness of programming one's programming. This Einsteinian, relativistic contelligence (consciousness-intelligence) recognizes, for instance, that the Euclidean, Newtonian and Aristotelian reality-maps are just three among billions of possible programs or models for experience. I turned this circuit on with Peyote, LSD and Crowley 's “magick” metaprograms.

This level of brain-functioning seems to have been reported first around 500 B.C. among various “occult” groups connected by the Silk Route (Rome-North India). It is so far beyond the terrestrial tunnel-realities that those who have achieved it can barely communicate about it to ordinary humanity (circuits I-IV) and can hardly be understood even by fifth circuit Rapture Engineers.

The characteristics of the neuroelectric circuit are high velocity, multiple choice, relativity, and the fission-fusion of all perceptions into parallel science-fiction universes of alternate possibilities.

The mammalian politics which monitor power struggles among terrestrial humanity are here transcended, i.e., seen as static, artificial, an elaborate charade. One is neither coercively manipulated into another's territorial reality nor forced to struggle against it with reciprocal emotional game-playing (the usual soap-opera dramatics). One simply elects, consciously, whether or not to share the other's reality-model.

Tactics for opening and imprinting the sixth circuit are described and rarely experienced in advanced rajah yoga, and in the hermetic (coded) manuals of the medieval-Renaissance alchemists and Illuminati.

No specific sixth circuit chemical is yet available, but strong psychedelics like mescaline (from my 1962-63 “sacred cactus,” peyotl) and psilocybin (from the Mexican “magic mushroom,” teonactl) open the nervous system to a mixed-media series of circuit V and circuit VI channels. This is appropriately called “tripping,” as distinguished from straight-forward fifth circuit “turning on” or “getting high.”

The suppression of scientific research in this area has had the unfortunate result of turning the outlaw drug culture back toward fifth circuit hedonics and pre-scientific tunnel-realities (the occult revival, solipsism, Pop Orientalism). Without scientific discipline and methodology, few can successfully decode the often-frightening (but philosophically crucial) sixth circuit metaprogramming signals. Such scientists as do continue to study this subject dare not publish their results (which are illegal) and record ever-wider tunnel-realities only in private conversations–like the scholars of the Inquisitorial era. (Voltaire announced the Age of Reason two centuries too soon. We are still in the Dark Ages.) Most underground alchemists have given up on such challenging and risky self-work and restrict their trips to fifth circuit erotic tunnels.

The evolutionary function of the sixth circuit is to enable us to communicate at Einsteinian relativities and neuro-electric accelerations, not using third circuit laryngeal-manual symbols but directly via feedback, telepathy and computer link-up. Neuro-electric signals will increasingly replace “speech” (hominid grunts) after space migration.

When humans have climbed out of the atmosphere-gravity well of planetary life, accelerated sixth circuit contelligence will make possible high-energy communication with “Higher Intelligences,” i.e., ourselves-in-the-future and other post-terrestrial races.

It is charmingly simple and obvious, once we realize that the spaced-out neural experiences really are extraterrestrial, that getting high and spacing out are accurate metaphors. Circuit V neurosomatic rapture is preparation for the next step in our evolution, migration off the planet. Circuit VI is preparation for the step after that, interspecies communication with advanced entities possessing electronic (post-verbal) tunnel-realities.

Circuit VI is the “universal translator” often imagined by science-fiction writers, already built into our brains by the DNA tape. Just as the circuits of the future butterfly are already built into the caterpillar.

VII. The Neurogenetic System

The seventh brain kicks into action when the nervous system begins to receive signals from within the individual neuron, from the DNA-RNA dialogue. The first to achieve this mutation spoke of “memories of past lives,” “reincarnation,” “immortality,” etc. That these adepts were recording something real is indicated by the fact that many of them (especially Hindu and Sufis) gave marvelously accurately poetic vistas of evolution 1,000 or 2,000 years before Darwin , and foresaw Superhumanity before Nietzsche.

The “akashic records” of Theosophy, the “collective unconscious” of Jung, the “phylogenetic unconscious” of Grof and Ring, are three modern metaphors for this circuit. The visions of past and future evolution described by those who have had “out-of-body” experiences during close-to-death episodes also describes the trans-time circuit VII tunnel-reality.

Specific exercises to trigger circuit VII are not to be found in yogic teaching; it usually happens, if at all, after several years of the kind of advanced rajah yoga that develops circuit VI facility.

The specific circuit VII neurotransmitter is, of course LSD. (Peyote and psilocybin produce some circuit VII experiences also.)

Circuit VII is best considered, in terms of 1977 science, as the genetic archives, activated by anti-histone proteins. The DNA memory coiling back to the dawn of life. A sense of the inevitability of immortality and interspecies symbiosis comes to all circuit VII mutants; we now see that this, also, is an evolutionary forecast, since we stand right now on the doorstep of extended longevity leading to immortality.

The exact role of the right-lobe circuits and the reason for their activation in the 1960s cultural revolution now becomes clear. As sociologist F.M. Esfandiary writes in Upwingers, “Today when we speak of immortality and of going to another world we no longer mean these in a theological or metaphysical sense. People are now traveling to other worlds. People are now striving for immortality. Transcendence is no longer a metaphysical concept. It has become reality.”

The evolutionary function of the seventh circuit and its evolutionary, aeon-spanning tunnel-reality is to prepare us for conscious immortality and interspecies symbiosis.

VIII. The Neuro-Atomic System

Hold on to your hats and breathe deeply–this is the farthest-out that human intelligence has yet ventured.

Consciousness probably precedes the biological unit or DNA tape-loop. “Out-of-body experiences,” “astral projection,” contact with alien (extraterrestrial?) “entities” or with a galactic Overmind, etc., such as I've experienced, have all been reported for thousands of years, not merely by the ignorant, the superstitious, the gullible, but often by the finest minds among us (Socrates, Giordano Bruno, Edison, Buckminster Fuller, etc.). Such experiences are reported daily to parapsychologists and have been experienced by such scientists as Dr. John Lilly and Carlos Castaneda. Dr. Kenneth Ring has attributed these phenomena to what he calls, very appropriately, “the extraterrestrial unconscious.”

Dr. Leary suggests that circuit VIII is literally neuro-atomic–infra, supra and meta-physiological–a quantum model of consciousness and/or a conscious model of quantum mechanics by the turned-on physicists discussed previously (Prof. John Archibald Wheeler, Saul-Paul Sirag, Dr. Fritjof Capra, Dr. Jack Sarfatti, etc.) indicates strongly that the “atomic consciousness” first suggested by Leary in “The Seven Tongues of God” (1962) is the explanatory link which will unite parapsychology and paraphysics into the first scientific empirical experimental theology in history.

When the nervous system is turned on to this quantum-level circuit, space-time is obliterated. Einstein's speed-of-light barrier is transcended; in Dr. Sarfatti's metaphor, we escape “electromagnetic chauvinism.” The contelligence within the quantum projection booth IS the entire cosmic “brain,” just as the micro-miniaturized DNA helix IS the local brain guiding planetary evolution. As Lao-tse said from his own Circuit VIII perspective, “The greatest is within the smallest.”

Circuit VIII is triggered by Ketamine, a neuro-chemical researched by Dr. John Lilly, which is also (according to a wide-spread but unconfirmed rumor) given to astronauts to prepare them for space. High doses of LSD also produce some circuit VIII quantum awareness.

This neuro-atomic contelligence is four mutations beyond terrestrial domesticity. (The current ideological struggle is between circuit IV tribal moralists-or-collectivists and circuit V hedonic individualists.) When our need for higher intelligence, richer involvement in the cosmic script, further transcendence, will no longer be satisfied by physical bodies, not even by immortal bodies hopping across space-time at Warp 9, circuit VIII will open a further frontier. New universes and realities. “Beyond theology: the science and art of Godmanship,” as Alan Watts once wrote.

It is therefore possible that the mysterious “entities” (angels and extraterrestrials) monotonously reported by circuit VIII visionaries are members or races already evolved to this level. But it is also possible, as Leary and Sarfatti more recently suggest, that They are ourselves-in-the-future.

The left-lobe terrestrial circuits contain the learned lessons of our evolutionary past (and present). The right-lobe extraterrestrial circuits are the evolutionary script for out future.

Thus far, there have been two alternative explanations of why the Drug Revolution happened. The first is presented in a sophisticated way by anthropologist Weston LaBarre, and in an ignorant, moralistic way by most anti-drug propaganda in the schools and mass media. This explanation says, in essence, that millions have turned away from the legal down drugs to illegal high drugs because we are living in troubled times and many are seeking escape into fantasy.

This theory, at its best, only partially explains the ugliest and most publicized aspect of the revolution–the reckless drug abuse characteristic of the immature. It says nothing about the millions of respectable doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc., who have turned away from second circuit intoxication with booze to fifth circuit rapture with weed.

Nor does it account at all for the thoughtful, philosophical sixth circuit investigations of persons of high intelligence and deep sensibility, such as Aldous Huxley, Dr. Stanley Grof, Masters-Houston, Alan W. Watts, Carlos Castaneda, Dr. John Lilly and thousands of scientific and lay researchers on consciousness.

A more plausible theory, devised by psychiatrist Norman Zinberg out of the work of Marshall McLuhan, holds that modern electronic media have so shifted the nervous system's parameters that young people no longer enjoy “linear” drugs like alcohol and find meaning only in “non-linear” weed and psychedelics.

This is certainly part of the truth, but it is too narrow and overstresses TV and computers without sufficiently stressing the general technological picture–the ongoing Science-Fiction Revolution of which the most significant aspects are Space Migration, Increased Intelligence and Life Extension, which Leary has condensed into his SMI?LE formula.

Space Migration plus Increased Intelligence plus Life Extension means expansion of humanity into all space-time. SM + I? + LE = infinity.

Without totally endorsing Charles Fort's technological mysticism (“It steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time”), it is obvious that the DNA metaprogram for planetary evolution is far wiser than any of our individual nervous systems–which are, in a sense, giant robots or sensors for DNA. Early science-fiction of brilliant writers like Stapledon, Clarke, Heinlein; Kubrick's 2001–all were increasingly clear DNA signals transmitted through the intuitive right lobe of sensitive artists, preparing us for the extraterrestrial mutation.

It is scarcely coincidental that mainstream “literary” intellectuals–the heir of the Platonic-aristocratic tradition that a gentleman never uses his hands, monkeys with tools or learns a manual craft–despise both science-fiction and the dope culture. Nor is it coincidental that the Whole Earth Catalogs - created by Stewart Brand, a graduate of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters–are the New Testament of the rural drop-out culture, each issue bulging with tons of eco-technological information about all the manual, dextrous, gadgety know-how that Plato and his heirs consider fit only for slaves. Not surprisingly, Brand's latest publication, Co-Evolution Quarterly, has been devoted to publicizing Prof. Gerard O'Neill's space-habitat, L5.

Nor is it an accident that dopers seem to prefer science-fiction to any other reading, even including the extraterrestrial-flavored Hindu scriptures and occult-shamanic circuit VI-VIII trip-poets like Crowley and Hesse .

The circuit VI drugs may have contributed much to the metaprogramming consciousness that has led to sudden awareness of “male chauvinism” (women's liberationists), “species chauvinism” (ecology, Lilly's dolphin studies), “type-G star chauvinism” (Carl Sagan), even “oxygen chauvinism” (the CETI conference), etc. The imprinted tunnel-realities which identify one as “white-male-American-earthian” etc. or “black-female-Cuban” etc. are no longer big enough to enclose our exploding contelligence.

As Time magazine said on November 26, 1973, “Within ten years, according to pharmacologists, they will have perfected pills and cranial electrodes of providing life-long bliss for everyone on Earth.” The 1960s hysteria about weed and acid was just the overture to this fifth circuit break-through. Nathan S. Kline, M.D., predicts real aphrodisiacs, drugs to speed up learning, drugs to foster or terminate any behavior. … Those who were jailed or beaten by cops in the 1960s were forerunners of the Revolution of Inner Technology.

Star Trek is a better guide to the emerging reality than anything in the New York Review of Books. The life-support and defense-system engineer, Scotty (circuit I), the emotional-sentimental Dr. McCoy (circuit II), the logical science officer Mr. Spock (circuit III) and the alternately paternalistic and romantic Captain Kirk (circuit IV) are perpetually voyaging through our future neurological history and encountering circuit V, VI, VII, and VIII intelligences, however crudely presented.

In short, the various levels of consciousness and circuits we have been discussing, and illustrating, are all biochemical imprints in the evolution of the nervous system. Each imprint creates a bigger tunnel-reality. In the Sufi metaphor, the donkey on the which we ride becomes a different donkey after each imprint. The metaprogrammer continually learns more and is increasingly able to be aware of itself operating. We are thus evolving to intelligence-studying-intelligence (the nervous system studying the nervous system) and are more and more capable of accelerating our own evolution.

Copyright: Robert Anton Wilson

Re: RAW & E-Prime

From circuit 8: “Consciousness probably precedes the biological unit or DNA tape-loop.”

Compare to Austin's notion of no “Big Mind in the ether” without a body.

Re: RAW & E-Prime

I think Leary was a nut before the 'cid. It merely helped manifest his nuttiness. (That's what psychdelic means: “mind manifesting”) ;-) 

It's hard to tell when Wilson has his tongue in his cheek. 

He mentions the following “turned on physicists:” “Prof. John Archibald Wheeler, Saul-Paul Sirag, Dr. Fritjof Capra, Dr. Jack Sarfatti.”  Saul-Paul Sirag is a nut, and he and Sarfatti are interested in what I call “paraphysics,” that is, attempting to explain things like telepathy and distant viewing through wacked out interpretations of quantum physics. John Wheeler is a respected “mainstream” physicist who suggested that an observing intelligence is implied by the existence of a “universe.” Several new age writers have taken this idea and run with its idealistic implications. Wheeler was once invited to a “paraphysics” conference. He used the opportunity to denounce “paraphysics” as pseudo-science, and to tell those present, in most emphatic terms, to stop using his ideas to promulgate their hare-brained fantasies. haha. I wish I had been a fly on the wall, or had been able to see it through “distant viewing.”
 
“Star Trek is a better guide to the emerging reality than anything in the New York Review of Books. The life-support and defense-system engineer, Scotty (circuit I), the emotional-sentimental Dr. McCoy (circuit II), the logical science officer Mr. Spock (circuit III) and the alternately paternalistic and romantic Captain Kirk (circuit IV)”

Haha. I loved this metaphor then and still do now. There should Tarot trumps with the Star Trek heroes' faces on them.

I suspect that the parallels with Wilber's maps, and other “maps,” like those of the theosophists, can be attributed to the fact that maps of these types have been around since the time of Plato. For example, in the works of Plato we find the following hierarchy:

appetite (epithumia)
spirit (thumos)
reason (logos)
intellect (nous)

In Wilson's tract, there's also some loose correlations with Bubba's “gross, subtle, and causal” path distinction. At least there's a similar attempt to rank various paths. Wilson mentions the following in relation to the “circuits”:

fifth: hatha yoga and tantra
sixth: “magick”; alchemy; raja yoga
seventh: advanced raja yoga; sufism
eight: “astral projection,” so by implication, shabda yoga

haha. It's easy to run with this kind of thing: 23….23….23…. 23!

Re: RAW & E-Prime

Balder brought up E-Prime before in a Multiplex discussion.

Re: RAW & E-Prime

Here’s the Preface to RAW’s 1986 Edition of Cosmic Trigger. It exemplifies what he calls “neurological agnosticism.” Many of our postemetaphysical themes are contained therein. From his homepage:  

Cosmic Trigger was originally published by And/Or Press about ten years ago, and by Pocket Books shortly thereafter. Although some of my novels have sold far better, in two dimensions at least it is my most “successful” book in human terms.
1. From the date of the first printing to the present, I have received more mail about Cosmic Trigger than about anything else I ever wrote, and most of this mail has been unusuallly intelligent and open-minded. For some reason, many readers of this book think they can write to me intimately and without fear, about subjects officially Taboo in our society. I have learned a great deal from the correspondence, and have met some wonderful new friends.  

2. On lecture tours, I am always asked more questions about this book than about all my other works together.  This new edition presents an opportunity to answer the most frequent questions and to correct the most persistent misunderstandings.  

It should be obvious to all intelligent readers (but curiously is not obvious to many) that my viewpoint in this book is one of agnosticism. The word “agnostic” appears explicitly in the prologue and the agnostic attitude is revealed again and again in the text, but many people still think I “believe” some of the metaphors and models employed here. I therefore want to make it even clearer than ever before that I DO NOT BELIEVE ANYTHING.
This remark was made, in these very words, by John Gribbin, physics editor of New Scientist magazine, in a BBC-TV debate with Malcolm Muggeridge, and it provoked incredulity o the part of most viewers. It seems to be a hangover of the medieval Catholic era that causes most people, even the educated, to think that everybody must “believe” something or other, that if one is not a theist, one must be a dogmatic atheist, and if one does not think Capitalism is perfect, one must believe fervently in Socialism, and if one does not have blind faith in X, one must alternatively have blind faith in not-X or the reverse of X.  

My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes, the less there is left to think about, and a person sure of everything would never have any need to think about anything and might be considered clinically dead under current medical standards, where absence of brain activity is taken to mean that life has ended.
 
My attitude is identical to that of Dr. Gribbin and the majority of physicists today, and is known in physics as “the Copenhagen Interpretation,” because it was formulated in Copenhagen by Dr. Niels Bohr and his co-workers c. 1926-28. The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called “model agnosticism” and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski, the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan, “The map is not the territory.” Alan Watts, a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy, restated it more vividly as “The menu is not the meal.”
 
Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, “My current model” – or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel – “contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised.” In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.
 
Cosmic Trigger deals with a process of deliberately induced brain change through which I put myself in the years 1962-1976. This process is called “initiation” or “vision quest” in many traditional societies and can loosely be considered some dangerous variety of self-psychotherapy in modern terminology. I do not recommend it for everybody, and I think I obtained more good results than bad ones chiefly because I had been through two varieties of ordinary psychotherapy before I started my own adventures and because I had a good background in scientific philosophy and was not inclined to “believe” any astounding Revelations too literally.
 
Briefly, the main thing I learned in my experiments is that “reality” is always plural and mutable.
 
Since most of Cosmic Trigger is devoted to explaining and illustrating this, and since I still encounter people who have read all my writings on this subject and still do not understand what I am getting at, I will try again in this new Preface to explain it ONE MORE TIME, perhaps more clearly than before.
 
“Reality” is a word in the English language which happens to be (a) a noun and (b) singular. Thinking in the English language (and in cognate Indo-European languages) therefore subliminally programs us to conceptualize “reality” as one block-like entity, sort of like a huge New York skyscraper, in which every part is just another “room” within the same building. This linguistic program is so pervasive that most people cannot “think” outside it at all, and when one tries to offer a different perspective they imagine one is talking gibberish.
 
The notion that “reality” is a noun, a solid thing like a brick or a baseball bat, derives from the evolutionary fact that our nervous systems normally organize the dance of energy into such block-like “things,” probably as instant bio-survival cues. Such “things,” however, dissolve back into energy dances – processes or verbs – when the nervous system is synergized with certain drugs or transmuted by yogic or shamanic exercises or aided by scientific instruments. In both mysticism and physics, there is general agreement that “things” are constructed by our nervous systems and that “realities” (plural) are better described as systems or bundles of energy functions.
 
So much for “reality” as a noun. The notion that “reality” is singular, like a hermetically sealed jar, does not jibe with current scientific findings which, in this century, suggest that “reality” may better be considered as flowing and meandering, like a river, or interacting, like a dance or evolving, like life itself.
 
Most philsophers have known, at least since around 500 B.C., that the world perceived by our senses is not “the real world” but a construct we create – our own private work of art. Modern science began with Galileo's demonstration that color is not “in” objects but “in” the interaction of our senses with objects. Despite this philosophic and scientific knowledge of neurological relativity, which has been more clearly demonstrated with each major advance in instrumentation, we still, due to language, think that behind the flowing, meandering, inter-acting, evolving universe created by perception is one solid monolithic “reality” hard and crisply outlined as an iron bar.
 
Quantum physics has undermined that Platonic iron-bar “reality” by showing that it makes more sense scientifically to talk only of the inter-actions we actually experience (our operations in the laboratory) ; and perception psychology has undermined the Platonic “reality” by showing that assuming it exists leads to hopeless contradictions in explaining how we actually perceive that a hippopotamus is not a symphony orchestra.
 
The only “realities” (plural) that we actually experience and can talk meaningfully about are perceived realities, experienced realities, existential realities – realities involving ourselves as editors – and they are all relative to the observer, fluctuating, evolving, capable of being magnified and enriched, moving from low resolution to hi-fi, and do not fit together like the pieces of a jig-saw into one single Reality with a capital R. Rather, they cast illumination upon one another by contrast, like the paintings in a large museum, or the different symphonic styles of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Mahler.
 
Alan Watts may have said it best of all: “The universe is a giant Rorschach ink-blot.” Science finds one meaning in it in the 18th Century, another in the 19th, a third in the 20th; each artist finds unique meanings on other levels of abstraction; and each man and woman finds different meanings at different hours of the day, depending on the internal and external environments.
 
This book deals with what I have called induced brain change, which Dr. John Lilly more resoundingly calls “metaprogramming the human bio-computer.” In simple Basic English, as a psychologist and novelist, I set out to find how much rapid re-organization was possible in the brain functioning of one normal domesticated primate of average intelligence – the only one on whom I could ethically perform such risky research – myself.
 
Like most people who have historically attempted such “metaprogramming,” I soon found myself in metaphysical hot water. It became urgently obvious that my previous models and metaphors would not and could not account for what I was experiencing. I therefore had to create new models and metaphors as I went along. Since I was dealing with matters outside consensus reality-tunnels, some of my metaphors are rather extraordinary. That does not bother me, since I am at least as much an artist as a psychologist, but it does bother me when people take these metaphors too literally.
 
I beg you, gentle reader, to memorize the quote from Aleister Crowley at the beginning of Part One and repeat it to yourself if at any point you start thinking that I am bringing you the latest theological revelations from Cosmic Central.
 
What my experiments demonstrate – what all such experiments throughout history have demonstrated – is simply that our models of “reality” are very small and tidy, the universe of experience is huge and untidy, and no model can ever include all the huge untidiness perceived by uncensored consciousness.
 
I think, or hope, that my data also demonstrates that neurological model agnosticism – the application of the Copenhagen Interpretation beyond physics to consciousness itself – allows one to escape from certain limits of mechanical emotion and robot mentation that are inescapable as longa s one remains within one dogmatic model or one imprinted reality tunnel.
 
Personally I also suspect, or guess, or intuit, that the more unconventional of my models here – the ones involving Higher Intelligence, such as the Cabalistic Holy Guardian Angel or the extraterrestrial from Sirius – are necessary working tools at certain stages of the metaprogramming process.
 
That is, whether such entities exist anywhere outside our own imaginations, some areas of brain functioning cannot be accessed without using these “keys” to open the locks. I do not insist on this; it is just my own opinion. Some people seem to get through this area of Chapel Perilous without such personalized “Guides.” I know of one chap who did it by imagining a super-computer in the future that was sending information backwards in time to his brain. More clever people may find even less “metaphysical” metaphors.
 
Ten years after the point at which this book ends, I do not care much about such speculations. Our lonely little selves can be “illuminated” or flooded with radical science-fiction style information and cosmic perspectives, and the source of this may be those extraterrestrials who seemed to be helping me at times, or the Secret Chiefs of Sufism, or the parapsychologists and/or computers of the 23rd Century beaming data backward in time, or it may just be the previously unactivated parts of our own brains. Despite the current reign of our New Inquisition, which attempts to halt research in this area, we will learn more about that as time passes. Meanwhile, agnosticism is both honest and becomingly modest….
 
In this connection, I am often asked about two books by other authors which are strangely resonant with Cosmic Trigger – namely VALIS by Philip K. Dick and The Sirian Experiment by Doris Lessing. VALIS is a novel which broadly hints that it is more than a novel – that it is an actual account of Phil Dick's own experience with some form of “Higher Intelligence.” In fact, VALIS is only slightly fictionalized; the actual events on which it is based are recounted in a long interview Phil gave shortly before his death (see Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament, by Gregg Rickman.) The parallels with my own experience are numerous – but so are the differences. If the same source was beaming ideas to both Phil and me, the messages got our individual flavors mixed into them as we decoded the signals.
 
I met Phil Dick on two or three occasions and corresponded with him a bit. My impression was that he was worried that his experience was a temporary insanity and was trying to figure out if I was nutty, too. I'm not sure if he ever decided.
 
I interviewed Doris Lessing a few years ago for New Age magazine. She takes synchronicities very seriously, but was as agnostic as I am about the possibility that some of them are orchestrated by Sirians.
 
I heartily recommend all three volumes – VALIS, The Last Testament and The Sirian Experiments – to readers of this book. Unless you are locked into a very dogmatic reality-tunnel, you will have a few weird moments of wondering if Sirians are experimenting on us, and a few weird moments can be a liberating experience for those who aren't scared to death by them.
 
What is more important than such extra-mundane speculation, I think, are practical and pragmatic questions about what one does with the results of brain change experience. It is quite easy, I have discovered by meeting many New Age people, to use the techniques in this book and go stone crazy with them. Paranoid and schizophrenic cases are quite common among those who experiment in this area. Less clinical, but socially even more nefarious, are the leagues of self-proclaimed gurus and their equally deluded disciples, who have discovered, as I did, that there are many realities (plural), but have picked out one favorite non-Occidental reality-tunnel, named it Ultimate Reality or True Reality, and established new fanaticisms, snobberies, dogmas and cults around these delusions.
 
There is a great deal of lyrical Utopianism in this book. I do not apologize for that, and do not regret it. The decade that has passed since the first edition has not altered my basic commitment to the game-rule that holds that an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.
 
Since we all create our habitual reality-tunnels, either consciously and intelligently or unconsciously and mechanically, I prefer to create for each hour the happiest, funniest, and most romantic reality-tunnel consistent with the signals my brain apprehends. I feel sorry for people who persistently organize experience into sad, dreary and hopeless reality tunnels, and try to show them how to break the bad habit, but I don't feel any masochistic duty to share their misery.
 
This book does not claim that you “create your own reality” in the sense of total (but mysteriously unconscious) psychokinesis. If a car hits you and puts you in the hospital, I do not believe this is because you “really wanted” to be hit by a car, or that you “needed” to be hit by a car, as two popular New Age bromides have it. The theory of transactionaly psychology, which is the source of my favorite models and metaphors, merely says that, once you have been hit by a car, the meaning of the experience depends entirely on you and the results depend partly on you (and partly on your doctors). If it is medically possible for you to live – and sometimes even if the doctors think it is medically impossible – you ultimately decide whether to get out of the hospital in a hurry or to lie around suffering and complaining.
 
Most of the time, this kind of “decision” is unconscious and mechanical, but with the techniques described in this book, such decisions can become conscious and intelligent.
 
The last part of this book deals with the worst tragedy of my life. I want to say, without self-pity (a vice I despise) that my years on this planet have included many other terrible and punishing experiences, starting with two bouts of polio when I was a child and including dozens of other things I don't want to complain about in public. When I write of creating a better and more optimistic reality-tunnel, of transcending ego-games, and of similar matters, it is not because I have lived in an ivory tower. It is because I have learned a few practical techniques for dealing with the brutal conditions on this primitive planet.
 
People at my lectures and seminars usually ask me if I am still optimistic about civilian space programs and life extension. I am more optimistic than ever. Despite the seemingly terminal case of rigidicus bureaucraticus at NASA, I have reason to believe certain European countries will soon jointly launch the kind of space migration effort advocated here; and Reagan's SDI, for all its jingoism, means that more money will be spent on basic research than at any previous time in history.
 
On the life extension front, there have been several best-sellers on the subject since this book first appeared; there is interest even in the most intellectually backward part of U.S. society (namely, the Congress); and scientiests in the longevity field whom I have met recently all cheerfully say they are getting more moeny for research than in the 70s. The breakthrough cannot be far away.
 
Finaly as a matter of some entertainment value, not all the mail I have received about this book has been intelligent and thoughtful. I have recieved several quite nutty and unintentionally funny poison-pen letters from two groups of dogmatists – Fundamentalist Christians and Fundamentalist Materialists.
 
The Fundamentalist Christians have told me that I am a slave of Satan and should have the demons expelled with an exorcism. The Fundamentalist Materialists inform me that I am a liar, a charlatan, fraud and scoundrel. Aside from this minor difference, the letters are astoundingly similar. Both groups share in the same crusading zeal and the same total lack of humor, charity, and common human decency.
 
These intolerable cults have served to confirm me in my agnosticism by presenting further evidence to support my contention that when dogmas enter the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.
 Dublin 1986