Robert Anton Wilson - 2
5. The Neurosomatic System, containing the brain-neuropeptide-immunological feedbacks discussed in our section on "mind/body" unity. This system has existed long enough, and techniques of activating it have appeared in somany varieties of yoga, shamanism, hypnosis, "faith healing", etc. that almost everybody outside of the AMA and CSICOP knows a little about it and folk-lore contains many proverbs relating to it. The statistics from Prof. Barefoot of Duke University, showing that optimists outlive pessimists, surprise nobodt but Fundamental Materialists. Folk-wisdom knows enough about neurosomatic feedbacks -- without knowing the scientific details at all -- that most people "try to cheer the patient up" with some assurance that positive thinking expresses more than wishful thinking and will have some effect on recovery rates. An evolutionary-revolutionary turning point, or quantum jump, seems imminent because scientific study of immunological/neuropeptide feedbacks, neurochemistry, Ericksonian and post-Ericksonian hypnosis and Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) seems likely to produce a "scientific yoga" or, as I elsewhere call it, a H E A D Revolution -- Hedonic Engineering And Development. The neurosomatic healings and neurosomatic "highs" (yogic or chemical ecstasies) found intuitively or accidentally in the past will then give way to a precise technology of staying High and living Well. Whole magazines already exists devoted to popularizing the latest scientific findings in neurosomatics. A vast public already knows much about the drugs (legal and otherwise), the vitamins, the nutrients, the brain machines and the computer games that allow access to neurosomatic states. This public of HEAD explorers will grow in the next decade, just as the information explosion in the relevant sciences will unleash newer and better technology to unchain us from the bondage of imprinting and open the gates to metaprogramming (selective re-imprinting). The neurological part of this system seems centered in the right brain hemisphere (which explains why most verbalizations about it, until recently, have sounded like gibberish. Elegant verbalisms only emerge after information has passed through the left hemisphere semantic circuits).
6. The Metaprogramming System, based on yoga and scientific method, began to emerge in the West after the scientific revolution, among various "Hermetic" societies, circa 1500-1700 e.v. It accelerated in the 1960s when LSD showed the majority of psychologists and neuroscientists that rapid changes in human brain functioning could occur easily, given the right techniques. When the government banned LSD, the research moved into "legal" areas -- other drugs (some of which the government then added to the Tabu list), isolation tanks, bio-feedback, etc. Information flow in this system also seems destined to continue accelerating, just as the "audience" or "consumers" for this information seem to grow exponentially every decade. To put it simply, Dr. Timothy Leary sounded like a nut (to most people) when he said, "You can change your self as easily as you change the channel on a TV." Now, even though Dr. Leary still suffers from media slander and misrepresentation, the avant one-third of the population understands very well what Leary meant, viz--
A. No "essential self" or static ego exists;
B. We can metaprogram our nervous systems for a variety of "selves", many of them evolutionarily far in advance of the present Terran average.
As the technology and inner arts of metaprogramming advance, another evolutionary quantum jump will occur, even more profound than the mastery of the neurosomatic system, which will "only" give us Longevity. (The neurological part of this system seems located in the frontal lobes -- the newest part of the brain.)
7. The Morphogenetic System contains the "selves" and information banks of all living beings. The first description of this system appears in the language of the "reincarnation" model, as the shamans and yogis who imprinted this system could only talk-and-think about the flood of non-ego information by assuming some transcendental ego that jumped across time from one body to another. Freud and Jung did a little better. Encountering information from this system in the dreams of their patients, they posited a "racial memory" or "collective unconscious".
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