"Wilson, Robert Anton - Prometheus Rising" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Anton)

Who was that Prometheus guy and why did he give us fire in the first place?

Robert Anton Wilson On the Internet at http://www.rawilson.com

INTRODUCTION By Israel Regardie

The ability to create a synthesis of diverse points of view, scientific and social and philosophical, is a rare gift. Not many are there who dare even to attempt such a task.

Imagine anyone trying to make sense of an amalgam of Timothy Leary's eight neurological circuits, Gurdjieff s self-observation exercises, Korzybski's general semantics, Aleister Crowley's magical theorems, the several disciplines of Yoga, Christian Science, relativity and modern quantum mechanics, and many other approaches to understanding the world around us! A man is required with an almost encyclopedic education, an incredibly flexible mind, insights as sharp as those whom he is trying synthesize and mirabile dictu, a wonderful sense of humor.

For several yearsЧever since I first became familiar with the writings of Robert Anton WilsonЧI have been struck with his ever-present sense of bubbling humor and the wide scope of his intellectual interests. Once I was even so presumptuous as to warn him in a letter that his humor was much too good to waste on hoi polloi who generally speaking would not understand it and might even resent it. However this effervescent lightness of heart became even more apparent in Cosmic Trigger and more latterly in the trilogy of Schrodinger's Cat. I have sometimes wondered whether his extraordinarily wide range of intellectual roving is too extensive and therefore perplexing to the average reader. Be that as it may, the humor and synthesis are even more marked in this brilliant ambitious piece of writing, Prometheus Rising.

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Even if your reading has already made you familiar with some of the concepts employed by Wilson in this book, nonetheless his elucidation even of the simplest, the most basic, is illuminating. At this moment, I am referring to the "imprint" theory which he makes considerable use of. Much of the same is true of his references to and explanation of Leary's eight neurological circuits. We become familiar with them all over again, as if they had not been introduced to us before.

Moreover I love the subtle and almost invisible use of mystical dogma that permeates all his writings. For example, consider the opening of Chapter Six. It quotes a particularly meaningful sentence from William S. Burroughs. There is no mentionЧnor need there beЧof any anterior teaching regarding this Law of Three, as it may be called. But one doctrine that emanated from a medieval mystical school philosophizes that there are always two contending forcesЧfor the sake of convenience labeled Severity and MildnessЧwith a third that always reconciles them. It is paramount to this doctrine, which has been stated and stated again in a dozen or more different ways throughout the centuries, culminating finally in the idea enunciated by Burroughs and of course used by Wilson.

There are dozens of similar seeds of wisdom sown throughout Prometheus Rising that are bound to have a seminal effect wherever and whenever the book is read. This is one of the many virtues of Wilson's book; it will leave its mark on all those who read itЧand those seeds will surely take root and bloom in the most unlikely mindsЧas well as in the more prosaic. Tarot advocates will find the most unusual and illuminating interpretations of some of their favorite cards when he falls back on the basic neural circuits. I found them all illuminating as providing a new viewpoint which had to be integrated into my general view of such matters.

The only area where I was reluctantly inclined to be at odds with Wilson was in what I considered to be his addiction to a UtopiaЧwhich he eloquently enough expresses as "the birth pangs of a cosmic Prometheus rising out of the long nightmare of domesticated primate history." The history of mankind is also the history of one Utopia after another, being enunciated with enthusiasm and vigor, calling upon all the facts of faith and

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science (as they existed at that moment in space-time) to corroborate the fantasy. A decade or maybe a century elapseЧand the fantasy is no more. The Utopia has gone down the drain to join all the other Utopias of earlier primates. However, I sincerely hope that Wilson is right in this case.

Now I am not unmindful of the fact that the Utopia of which Wilson speaks, echoing many of the best scientific and philosophic minds of our day, is a distinct possibility at some time, but that it could occur within the next decade seems rather improbable to me. It seems improbable of course only in terms of the current state of world enlightenment, or lack of it, and because it implies a "miracle" occurring in vast numbers of living primates simultaneouslyЧwhatever semantic theories are involved in the meaning of the word "simultaneously."

Anyway, this is a minor point considering the seminal brilliance of the greater part of this enlightening book.

In a previously written book, Wilson wrote that

[in] 1964, Dr. John S. Bell published a demonstration that still has the physicists reeling. What Bell seemed to prove was that quantum effects are 'non-local' in Bohm's sense; that is, they are not just here or there, but both. What this apparently means is that space and time are only real to our mammalian sense organs; they are not really real.

This writing reminds me so much of the Hindu concept of Indra's Net. The latter is sometimes described as being a great net extending throughout the whole universe, vertically to represent time, horizontally to represent space. At each point where the threads of this Indra's net cross one another is a diamond or a crystal bead, the symbol of a single existence. Each crystal bead reflects on its shining surface not only every other bead in the whole net of Indra but every single reflection of every reflection of every other bead upon each individual beadЧcountless, endless reflections of one another. We could also liken it to a single candle being placed in the centre of a large hall. Around this hall tens of mirrors are arranged in such a manner that, when the candle was lit, one saw not only its reflection in each individual mirror, but also the reflections of the reflections in every other mirror repeated ad infinitum.

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One of the several virtues of Prometheus Rising is that Wilson using Leary's neurological circuits believes that a new philosophical paradigm is about due. In reality, this is really Wilson's answer to my proposed criticism of his Utopian fantasy. It may not be within a decade that we shall realize whether it is true or false. But that is not important. What is clear is that thanks to the insights of many modern thinkers, major new intellectual findings do not come solely from the slow drip and grind of tiny new discoveries, or from new theories simply being added to our present armamentarium of time-honoured truisms. Rather, quantum leaps, in outlook ala Teilhard de Chardin, occur with a fantastic jump to a new horizon or level of perception. This insight usually comes from a revolutionary overview which realigns or transforms former thinking into a new and more enlightening frame of reference.

This dovetails with his equally fascinating thesis that everything alive is really alive in the fullest and most dynamic sense of the word. It twitches, searches, throbs, organizes and seems aware of an upward movement. Twitches seems almost the right word, recalling to mind the myoclonisms of Wilhelm Reich's vegetotherapy which, at sometime, are infinitely disturbing to the patient on the couch who, because of them, feels he is falling apart, being shattered into a thousand pieces. He isn't really. It is as though the organism were gathering itself together for an upward or forward leap into the unknown, to a higher order of looking at things.

The transition to a higher order of functioningЧor hooking on to a higher neural circuitЧis often accompanied by considerable anxiety or a turbulence in personal life which seems as if the organism were falling apart or breaking up. This phenomenon of instability is really the way that every living organismЧsocieties, human primates, chemical solutions, etc.Чshakes itself, as it were, by myoclonisms or similar convulsions into new combinations and permutations for higher and new levels of development. So perhaps the space-time Utopia of a new area of primate exploration has some validity after all, as indicating that the more vigorous the disturbance or myoclonism the greater the quantum jump into a higher neurological circuit. This is one

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reason why I firmly believe that the transition to the next spiral will not be smooth nor without much suffering and chaos.

All of which suggests, with Wilson and Leary, that the brain is considerably more sophisticated than any of us previously had imagined. It is quite possible that it operates in dimensions so beyond the lower neural circuitry that it occasionally "throws us a bone" every day so that we can continue to function in the make-believe world of everyday status quo. In the meantime, it is a multidimensional structure at ease in far more than the narrow primate world we have been programmed to live in. It may interpret waves and frequencies from other dimensions, realms of "light," of meaningful unrestricted patterned realityЧ that are here and nowЧand which transcend our present myopic tunnel realities of our rigid perceptions and conceptualizations of space and time.