RAW's Intro to Undoing Yourself by Hyatt

INTRODUCTION
by
Robert Anton Wilson, Ph.D.
The one sure way to make yourself unpopular in the United States
these days is to mention the fact that Christianity and Democracy
have been among the worst disasters to ever befall the human race.
Nonetheless, as all students of history know, Christianity has been
the bloodiest and most destructive religion in the long career of
fanaticism on this planet; although Liberals and Rationalists keep
reminding us of that tragic record of the Religion of Love, few of
them have cared to observe or remember the data on warfare
collected by Harvard sociologist, Prof. Pitrim Sorokin. In Social and
Cultural Dynamics, and other works, Sorokin documents beyond all
doubt that democratic nations have been involved in more imperialistic
wars, and have fought them with greater ferocity, than any other
kinds of governments, from the dawn of civilization to the present.
Oriental despotisms, absolute monarchies, even modern fascist and
communist nations have all had heinous records of tyranny and
general human oppression, but collectively they have been much
less aggressive and war-like than the democracies, from ancient
Athens to modern America.
The blood-thirsty nature of Christianity and Democracy — which
is obvious, psychologically, if one listens even for a few minutes to a
typical speech by Rev. Jerry Falwell or his good friend Ronald
Reagan — is, of course, based on arrogance, megalomania and a deep-
rooted sense of total moral superiority to all non-Christian and
non-Democratic peoples. But beyond that, the violent nature of
Christian/Democratic countries is rooted in the singular delusion
shared by both the Religion of Love and the Politics of Liberty. This
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delusion is the belief that human beings are born with some sort of
metaphysical "free will" which makes them unique in the animal
kingdom and only slightly less exalted than the gods themselves.
The "free will" fantasy is not a minor error, like thinking it is
Tuesday when actually it is Wednesday. It is not even to be compared
to a major intellectual blunder of the ordinary sort, like Marx's
notion that once a totalitarian "worker's state" was created, it would
then quickly and magically "wither away." It is even more nefarious
and pernicious than the medieval lunacy that imagined witches
everywhere and burned over 10,000,000 women at the stake on the
basis of hysteria, superstition and the kind of hearsay and rumor
that no modern court would permit to be entered as evidence. The
"free will" delusion is much more serious than any of that. It is the
kind of radical 180-degree reversal of reality that, once it enters a
person's mind, guarantees that they will be incapable of understanding
anything happening around them; they might as well be deaf, dumb,
blind and wearing signs warning the world, "ULTIMATE DESTINA-
TION: THE MADHOUSE."
I do not speak flippantly, nor do I mean to be understood as
writing satire or polemic. The facts of modern biology and psychology
have demonstrated clearly and conclusively that 99 percent of the
human race is in a robotic or zombi-like state 99.99999 percent of the
time. This does not refer to "other people." It refers to YOU AND
ME. As the Firesign Theatre used to say, We're all Bozos on this bus. The
best that can be said of any of us, usually, is that we have occasional
moments of lucidity, but that can be said of any schizophrenic
patient.
EAST, WEST AND THE MIDDLE
In the Orient, which has its own idiocies and superstitions,
there has always been a singular sanity about the "free will" myth:
virtually without exception, all the great Oriental philosophers have
recognized that donkeys, grass-hoppers, dolphins, toads, humming-
birds, dogs, chickens, tigers, sharks, gophers, spiders, chimpanzees,
cobras, cows, lice, squid, deer, and humans are equally important,
equally unimportant, equally empty, equally expressive of the
"World Soul" or "Life Force." Buddhism, Vedanta and Taoism also
recognize that each of these clever animals just mentioned, including
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the humans, have about equally as much "free will" as flowers,
shrubs, rocks and viruses, and that the human delusion of being
separate from and superior to the rest of the natural order is a kind of
narcissistic self-hypnosis. Awakening from that egotistic trance is
the major goal of every Oriental system of psychology.
Opposing this Oriental recognition of, and submission to, the
order of things as they are, and yet opposing also the Christian and
Democratic delusions of "free will" and "individual responsibility,"
there is the hidden tradition of Sufism in Islam and Hermeticism in
Europe. This "occult" teaching recognizes that, although domesticated
primates (humans) are born as mechanical as the wild primates (such
as chimpanzees), there are techniques by which we can become less
mechanical and approximate in daily and yearly increments toward
freedom and responsibility.
These "spiritual" (neurological) techniques of Un-doing and re-
robotizing oneself are, of course, of no interest in the Orient, where
it is accepted that we are born robots and will die robots; and they are
of even less interest in the Christian-Democratic cultures which
assume that we are already free and responsible and do not have to
work and work HARD to achieve even a small beginning of non-
mechanical consciousness and non-robotic behavior.
The Orient forgives easily, because it does not expect robots to do
anything else but what was programmed into them by the accidents
of heredity and environment. The Christian and Democratic nations
are so bloody-minded because they can forgive nothing, blaming
every man and woman for whatever imprinted or conditioned
behavior is locally Taboo. (This is why Nietzsche called Christianity
"the Religion of Revenge" and Joyce described the Christian God as a
Hanging Judge.) The Sufic and Hermetic traditions are almost
Oriental in forgiving robots for being robots, but are far from
sentimental about it. As one Sufi poet said:
The fool neither forgives nor forgets;
The half-enlightened forgive and forget;
The Sufi forgives but does not forget.
That is, Sufism and other Hermetic traditions recognize that
robots will behave like robots, and does not "blame" them, but it also
does not forget, for a moment or even a nanosecond, that we are
living in a robotic world — "an armed madhouse" in the metaphor of
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poet Allen Ginsberg. Those of this tradition know that when a man
spouts Christian and Democratic verbalisms that does not mean he
will act with brotherly love at all, at all; he will go on acting like a
badly-wired robot in most cases.
Sufism is only the largest of several Near Eastern and European
"mystic" movements which recognize the robotry of ordinary
humanity but, unlike the Orient, attempt to Un-do and de-robotize
those who have a dawning apprehension of their mechanical state
and sincerely want to become less mechanical, as far as that is
possible. I am not writing a recruiting manual for Sufism (which is
doing quite well without my advertisements): I am merely using the
Sufi school as one example of the tradition to which this marvelous
book, UNDOING YOURSELF, belongs.
Most readers, if they have encountered such ideas at all, probably
identify them with Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, two of the most
talented expositors of a school of neo-Sufism which they peddled
under the brand name of "Esoteric Christianity." The present book
also owes a great deal to Aleister Crowley, who belonged to this
tradition but sold his own brand of it under the label of Gnostic
Magick. There is also a strong influence here of the bio-psychology
of Wilhelm Reich; but all this tracing of "sources" is ultimately
trivial. The importance of Christopher Hyatt's work is what you can
get out of it and that depends entirely on what you put into it.
IT WORKS, IF YOU WORK
In my travels, I often encounter people who somehow have gotten
the wild idea that I am the Head of the Illuminati (actually, I am at
most a toe-nail) and who want me to explain the Secrets of High
Magick to them. (Although it is hard to restrain my sense of humor
at such times, I usually resist the temptation to tell them they can
achieve Total Illumination by singing "Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds" in pig Latin while standing on their heads.) The
questions I am asked most often, by those who can ask something
more specific than "What is The Secret?" are almost always about
Crowley's doctrine of the True Will. People tell me, most earnestly,
that they have read ten or twenty or more of Crowley's books, and
have read them many times, and still do not understand what "True
Will" means.
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As Gurdjieff would say, "What does this question signify? It
signifies that these people are walking in their sleep and only
dreaming they are awake. That is what this question signifies."
There is only one possible reason why people can read Crowley at
length and not understand what True Will means. That reason seems
incredible at first sight, but it is the only reason that can explain this
astounding scotoma. The reason many readers of Crowley do not
understand True Will is that these earnest students have never
performed any of the exercizes that Crowley provides for those who
sincerely want to de-robotize themselves and experience what is
meant by True Will.
Shortly after my manual of de-mechanization exercizes, Prometheus
Rising, was published, I was at a Cosmic Con with, among others, E.J.
Gold of the Fake Sufi School. He told me that nobody would do any
of the exercizes in my book, but I would still get lots of letters from
people saying the book had "liberated" them. Since I sometimes
think Sufis and even Fake Sufis are perhaps overly skeptical about
humanity in its present evolutionary stage, I have made a point of
asking people, when they praise that book in my presence, how
many of the exercizes they've done.
Most people look faintly abashed and admit they have only done a
"few" of the exercizes (which probably means they haven't done
any). However, some people claim to have done all or most of the
exercizes, and these people generally look so delighted about the
matter that I tend to believe them. I therefore conclude that the Sufi
and Gurdjieff traditions are wrong in saying that 999 out of 1000
will never work on the techniques of liberation. Actually, it appears
to be only around 987 out of 1000 who prefer to talk about the work
rather than doing it. At least 13 out of every 1000 will actually do the
exercizes.
I have decided that one of the reasons that most readers of self-
liberation books never even make the effort to liberate themselves is
that reading the books is actually a kind of superstitious "magick
ritual," which they think will have an effect with no other effort on
their parts. The same sort of superstition leads others to think that
peeking at the answers in the back of the book of logical puzzles is as
beneficial as solving the puzzles for themselves; and there is even a
text out now with the answers to Zen koans, as if the answers, and
not the process of arriving at them, were the meaning of Zen.
Aside from such "symbolic magick" (as distinguished from real
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magick ritual, which is a type of Brain Change experiment), the
main reason people prefer to read neurological exercizes rather than
doing the exercizes is the dread and sheer horror which the word
"work" invokes in most people. Some great teachers, especially
Gurdjieff and Crowley, have literally frightened away thousands of
would-be students by insisting on the necessity of HARD WORK (as
I also frightened a lot of readers by using those words several times
in this essay.)
Of course, there is a quite legitimate reason why the word "work"
has such horrible conditioned associations for most people in the
modern world. That reason is that most "work" in this age is stupid,
monotonous, brain-rotting, irritating, usually pointless and basically
consists of the agonizing process of being slowly bored to death over
a period of about 40 to 45 years of drudgery; Marx was quite right in
calling it "wage slavery." Most people know this, but are afraid to
admit it, because to dislike "work" is regarded as a symptom of
Communism or some other dreadful mental illness.
I recently heard a politician admit on BBC that the reason English
workers are so notoriously "lazy" is that their jobs are so unspeakably
sub-human and dull. "If I had to do that kind of work, I would call in
sick as often as possible and goof off at every chance," he said flatly.
Alas, I had tuned in late and never did catch this chap's name, which
is a terrible misfortune for me, since I suspect he is the only Honest
Politician in the world.
It is this universal but repressed hatred of "work" that causes
almost everybody to despise and persecute the unemployed. Almost
everybody envies the folks of the dole (on Welfare, as you say in The
States) because almost everybody secretly wishes they could escape
their own jobs and live without working.
It has taken me decades to understand this, because I am part of
that very fortunate minority who work at jobs we actually enjoy. (It
is hard to make me stop working, as my wife will assure you.) The
minority who actually loves its work seems to be made up chiefly of
the writers, dancers, actors and other artists, most scientists above
the technician-troll level, computer freaks, and the righteous dope-
dealers of California. Everybody else wishes they had the courage to
go on the dole, but is ashamed of the stigma attached to being a
non-worker, and resolves the tension by being as nasty as possible to
the unemployed on every possible occasion.
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HEY! CATCH THIS! A SECRET OF
THE ILLUMINATI REVEALED!
Here I want to let you in on a real Secret of the Illuminati, one that
has never been published before.
The so-called "work" involved in Brain Change is not like
ordinary "work" at all. It is more like the creative ecstasy of the artist
and scientist, once you really get involved in doing it. Most people
are afraid of it only because they think "work" must be a curse and
can't imagine that "work" can be fun.
So it is best not to think of Energized Meditation as "work" at all,
at least as you have experienced "work" in most of the world today. It
might be better and more accurate to consider the EM exercizes as
"play" than as "work." Of course, play has its own rigours, and you
do have to put energy into it to become a winner rather than a
perpetual loser, but it is still entirely unlike the wage slavery that
most people call "work." In fact, to be blunt about it, it is more like
sex-play than any other kind of play because it definitely unleashes
energies that have erotic as well as therapeutic side-effects. You are a
dunce if you avoid it just because you think anything that needs
effort must be "work" in the sense that people in factories and offices
are suffering from the curse of "work" in our society.
Think of it more in terms of your favorite sport or recreation—
fishing or bird-watching or softball or whatever you do with passion
and just for the excitement of it. If that kind of thing should not be
called "play," then I do not know what "play" means.
So when I wrote "Hard Work," I was just trying to jar you into
actually paying attention for once. I really should have said, for
accuracy, Hard Play.
The second part of this Secret of the Illuminati is what I have
called elsewhere Wilson's 23rd Law. (Wilson's First Law, of course, is
"Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclo-
pedia." Wilson's Second Law is the Snafu Principle described in
ILLUMINATUS: "Communication is only possible between equals."
All of Wilson's Laws will be published when the world is ready for
the staggering revelations contained therein.)
Wilson's 23rd Law is
Do it every day
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This is the most profound of all the Secrets of the Illuminati and I
have often been warned that Terrible Consequences will ensue if I
reveal it prematurely, but—what the hell, these are parlous times,
friend, and this primitive planet needs all the Light that can be
unleashed on its dark, superstitious mind. Let me repeat, since I am
sure you didn't get it the first time:
Do it every day!
Have you ever wondered why Einstein became such a great
physicist? It was because he loved the equations and concepts of
mathematical physics so much that he "worked" on them—or played
and tinkered with them—every day. That's why Otto von Klemper
became such a great conductor: he loved Beethoven and Mozart and
that crowd so much that he practised his music every day. It's why
Babe Ruth became such a great ball-player: he loved the game so
deeply that he was playing or rehearsing every day.
This rule also explains, incidentally, how people destroy themselves.
Do you want to become a suicide (it's the fashionable thing in some
circles, after all)? Practise being depressed, worried and resentful
every day, and don't let anybody distract you with Energized
Meditation or any other mind-change system. Do you want to land
in jail on an assault and battery charge? Practise getting damned
bloody angry every day. If you want to become paranoid, look
carefully every day for evidence of treachery and duplicity around
you. If your ambition is to die young, do the depression-worry-
resentment system every day but center in especially on visualizing
and worrying about every imaginable illness that might possibly
inflict itself upon you.
(On the other hand, if you want to live as long as George Burns,
"work hard" every day at being as cheerful and optimistic as he is.)
Almost anything is possible if you
DO IT EVERY DAY
Of course, this rule does not guarantee 100 percent results.
Playing Chopin on the piano every day for 4 or 5 decades does not
mean you will become as good as Van Cliburn; it merely means that
you eventually will be a better piano player than anybody in your
home state. Worrying every day does not absolutely guarantee a
clinical depression or an early death, but after only a few years it does
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ensure you will be one of the three or four most miserable people in
your neighborhood. Writing a sonnet every day for twenty years
may not necessarily make you Shakespeare or Mrs. Browning, but it
will make you the best poet for an area of about forty to fifty miles,
probably. Doing Energized Meditation or similar exercizes does not
mean you will be a Perfectly Enlightened Being or a Guru in a few
years, just that you will be a great deal happier and a hell of a lot
more perceptive, creative and "intuitive" than most people you'll
meet in an average city.
There is a story that Bobbie Fisher, the chess champion, was once
in a room with other chess masters when the conversation turned to
the latest nuclear accident and the effects of the resultant fall-out.
Fisher listened impatiently for a few minutes and then exclaimed
irritably, "What the hell does that have to do with chess?" While I am
not urging that you imitate that degree of monomania or obsession,
there is a significant lesson in this tale. The reason Fisher became a
champion is that he cared so much about chess that he did not even
have to nag himself or remind himself to
do it every bloody day.
WARNING!
THREATS TO THE PRIMATE EGO
ARE COMING!
Unfortunately—while the Energized Meditation system is fun,
and erotic, and makes you "smarter" (in the sense of more aware of
detail and complexity), and even jolts you out of total mammalian
reflex behavior into something approximating in slow but definite
increments toward that mystic "free will" Christians claim you were
given at birth, and I recommend it heartily—I must admit that there
are pages coming up shortly in this book that will probably make
you extremely uncomfortable.
Dr. Hyatt is a rude, insulting and deliberately annoying writer. He
does not soothe or pacify the reader with the Christian and
Democratic mythology of our society by pretending that we are all
free and rational people here. He insists on reminding us, every few
pages, in the most blunt language possible, that most of us most of
the time are conditioned chimpanzees in a cage.
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Don't let it worry you too much.
The situation is this: there are mechanical systems operating
throughout the domesticated primate (human) organism, each on
different levels. For instance, as Bucky Fuller liked to say, you never
sit down and ask how many hairs you should sprout on your head
and body in the next week: that is one of the thousands of biological
programs that operate entirely on mechanical circuitry. Except in
various systems of yoga, you do not have much control over your
breathing, either: that is also an auto-pilot. The digestive-excretive
circuits also operate with a minimum of conscious attention or
strategy, except when you need to find a public toilet and the bars are
all closed. (Make a list of ten more programs that keep you alive and
functioning, over which you have never had any conscious control.
Be one of the 13 readers out of a thousand who actually do it before
reading on.)
The reason that mystics and certain other psychologists are always
"attacking" the ego is that the ego is the one mechanical circuit that
suffers chronically from the illusion that it is non-mechanical and
"free."
The ego and its delusions must be undermined—either attacked
openly and bluntly, as in the Gurdjieff system and this book, or
subverted more subtly and slowly, as in certain other systems—
before any real progress can be made toward "liberation," "enlighten-
ment," "finding IT," discovering the "True Will" in Crowley's sense,
or whatever is your favorite term for becoming less robotic and more
aware—less the computer and more the programmer of the computer—
less the conditioned rat in the Behaviorist's maze and more the
Beyond-Human that the Sufic-Hermetic traditions and Neitzsche
have predicted.
The main reason you shouldn't be afraid of this attack on your
precious little ego is that the ego is infinitely resourceful and finds
ways to sneak back into its habitual mechanical trance no matter
how many times you think you have Awakened once and for all.
This is another Secret of the Illuminati and explains the great
humility and the keen sense of humor of all the genuine Mages. In
other words, if you think it is scary to lose your precious primate
ego abruptly and forever, don't worry about that; it is no more likely
than becoming the world's greatest Rock star tomorrow morning.
The only real way to get loose from mechanical ego trips is to learn
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several ego-transcending games and then for twenty or forty years
or longer DO THEM EVERY DAY
Before you put that much effort and time into it, you need
not worry that your wonderful, precious and totally marvelous Ego
will go away suddenly, it will merely get transformed a bit,
"enlarged" in perspective and "reduced" in conceit (a little), freed
from some of its more idiotic habits, and it will even pretend to go
away at times, but it will always come back and usually at the most
embarrassing times. It's easier to assassinate the President of the
United States than to kill your own ego.
500 micrograms of pure Sandoz LSD will "destroy" the ego more
totally than any of the EM exercizes in this book—atom bomb it out
of existence, as it were. The results even in that case, as all old
acid-heads will assure you, are, however spectacular, always temporary.
As Dr. John Lilly wrote in Programming and Metaprogramming in the
Human Biocomputer, after a heavy trip on genuine laboratory Acid,
For a time, the self then feels free, cleaned
out. The strength gained can be immense; the
energy freed is double . . . Humor appears in
abundance, good humor... Beauty is enhanced,
the bodily appearance becomes youthful . . .
These positive effects can last as long as two to
four weeks before reassertion of the old programs
takes place.
We are the products of mechanical genetic programs, mechanical
imprints and mechanical conditioning, just like the other animals.
The progress to post-animal, non-mechanical and trans-ego freedom
is often rapidly accelerated for a period, or several periods, of sudden
flash-like Awakenings and post-human perspectives, and I personally
suspect that is happening increasingly under the stress of our age of
terrorism and accelerated evolutionary change, but the ultimate
result of a true transcendence of robot consciousness is approached
in slow increments over years and decades. (Total "freedom" from
mechanism on all circuits seems impossible to me, in my current
level of ignorance. I don't think the organism would survive if most
of it did not remain a smooth-running and unconscious machine.)
E.J. Gold of the Fake Sufi School, mentioned earlier, has a saying
to the effect that the attempt to achieve total Transcendence of
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mechanical ego programs is as absurd as "sticking toothpicks
between your eyelids to be sure you never go to sleep for a moment."
There seem to be genuine biological reasons why we need to spend
about one third of our lives asleep and a large part of the other
two-thirds half-entranced by mechanical conditioned processes. The
purpose of all schools of liberation is to wake up fully often enough
to have some perspective outside the sleeping and conditioned ego
states.
WHAT "IS" ALL THIS?
The great Dublin scientist and philosopher, de Selby, once took an
empty jam jar and filled it with all the small cruddy items he could
find around the house. The fuzz that accumulates on carpets, the
dust on book shelves, bent paperclips, broken staples, the grunge
from bathtub rings, grotty kitchen encrustations, nameless shards of
forgotten plaster statues long broken, archaeological excavations
from the cellar, miscellaneous delvings in the rubbish bin, torn
covers of match books scrawled with inscrutable phone numbers,
even belly-button lint, all went in. This was a labour of some weeks,
and when it was finished even de Selby himself could not remember
or classify the total contents of the jar. He then selected a statistical
universe of 123 Dubliners and 246 visitors form England or the
Continent just off the Dun Laoghaire ferry and asked each to guess
what the jar contained.
77.6 percent of the sample answered at once, "Oh, I know, it
is
" and then made some wild guess. (The most common guess,
given by 54.3 percent, was that it "was" the stuff mixed into the curry
sauce in Pakistani restaurants. Others commonly said it "was"
uranium ore, wood cement and tree bark.)
Of the 22.4 percent who did not guess what it "was," 83.5 percent
immediately asked the directions to Clontarf Castle and presumably
did not want to guess because they were in hurry to catch the
evening Musical show.
De Selby concluded that most Europeans, at this stage of
evolution, believe that everything and anything can meaningfully be
described in a simple proposition in the form, "This is a thingamajig."
I believe, on the basis of experience, that similar results would be
found in an American sample of the same size. We are still haunted
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by the ghost of Aristotle, the bloke who first tried to describe and
explain the whole universe in permutations of sentences having the
form, This is a Y, All Z are Y, Some Y are X, therefore some Z are X.
Most people, and especially most politicians and clergymen, remain
firmly convinced that anything and everything can be meaningfully
discussed in that Aristotelian manner—or as Ernest Fenollosa once
said, Western culture thinks that "A ring-tailed baboon is not a
Constitutional Assembly" is one of the two types of meaningful
statements (the other being "The U.S. Congress and U.K. Parliament
are Constitutional Assemblies.")
From the point of view of current science, c. 1980-87, there appear
to be two things wrong with this Aristotelian mind-set. In the first
place, scientific models are not expressed in this metaphor of
identity (A is a B) but in the functional language of relationships
(When A moves an increment of x in any dimension, B will move an
increment of y in some other dimension.) The latter type of
functional statement allows for scientific predictions, which can be
partially verified or totally refuted by experience and experiment;
the former, Aristotelian type of is-ness statement leads only to
verbal argument.
The second objection to Aristotelian A is a B statements is that
they appear totally contradicted by neurology and experiments with
instruments. Neurologically, we never know what A "is," but what
it appears to our senses and brain. The senses pick up some (not all)
the signals of the space-time event and the brain edits and
orchestrates these signals into some familiar Gestalt. (This seems to
be how de Selby's subjects edited and orchestrated a jar full of junk
into Pakistani sauce or uranium ore.) Instrumentally, the same
editing goes on. An instrument does not tell us what A "is" but what
class of signals from A that particular instrument can measure. A
voltmeter tells us nothing about the temperature of A, a thermometer
tells us nothing about the height of A, a ruler or scale tells us nothing
about the molecular structure of A, etc.—each instrument creates its
own gloss or reality-tunnel, just as our inner instruments (brain and
perceptors) create a gloss or reality-tunnel. To speak accurately, we
should never say "This 'is' an A," but, rather, "This seems to fit the
category of A in my system of glossing or in this instrument's
reality-tunnel."
Does this sound like pedantry or unnecessary hair-splitting?
Consider for a moment the human suffering and social catastrophes
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that have been unleashed in various times and places by such
statements as "Miss Jones is a witch," "Mr. Smith is a homosexual,"
"Mr. Goldberg is a Jew," "This book is heretical," "This painting or
photo is pornography." If you think about this deeply enough, it
might almost appear that the Catholic witch-hunts, most idiotic
censorship, Hitler's annihilation camps and quite a few other
historical horrors never would have happened if we had no words
for "is" in our languages, or if we remembered that "is" always
functions as a metaphor.
Most of the guilt and "chronic low-grade emergency" (as Fritz
Perls called it) which keeps you from realizing your full potential can
usually be traced to some sentence having the form "I am a B" in
which B equals roughly "no-good shit." That sentence got conditioned
into you when you were very young and you may not think it
consciously any more, or you may well think it and even say it aloud
frequently, but if you feel basically unhappy with your life some
such sentence exists somewhere in your brain.
Even is-ness sentences that seem factual contain dangers due to
the mechanical-conditioned level of most human consciousness on
this planet at this time. "He is a homosexual" may appear a safe
remark when heard in a Group Encounter session, or at a San
Francisco cocktail party, but in the Bible Belt, "homosexual" contains
the conditioned association of "sinner" and particularly nefarious
"sinner" at that, and it is not unknown for violence or even murder
to result from this is-ness sentence, just as "Jew" seems to be a
neutral label for one of three major religions of the West but in Nazi
Germany signified somebody subject to arrest, slave labor and
eventual execution.
I read recently in a science-fiction fan magazine, "The Irish really
are disgusting." Leaving aside my own mechanical prejudices (as a
person of partially Irish genetic structure who lives by preference in
Ireland) the most fascinating thing about this is-ness statement
seems to me that it occurred in a publication where one would never
see such semantically isomorphic statements as "The Jews really are
sub-human" or "Women really are inferior to men."
To quote Mr. G. again, "What does this signify? It signifies that
most people are walking in their sleep and dreaming they are
awake." That is, certain historically infamous types of racial or
sexual stereotypes have become unfashionable and virtually Taboo
in "educated" circles, but the mechanical conditioned reactions
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underlying such stereotypes still exist, the machine is still asleep, in
Gurdjieff's terms, so people who would not stereotype Jews see
nothing inconsistent in stereotyping the Irish or the Poles or some
other group. In a mechanical or primitive stage of evolution, this
cannot be considered surprising.
What does still surprise me (occasionally) is that people who can
see this mechanical level of functioning in others can remain
blissfully oblivious of the same mechanisms in themselves.
One way to understand Energized Meditation, and simultaneously
grasp the significance of what I have just been saying about
Aristotelian habits, is to apply mathematical subscripts to significant
nouns in the manner urged by the semanticist, Alfred Korzybski. For
instance, the Nazi mentality consists of something like
Now this is obviously false to sensory-sensual space-time experience.
In sensory-sensual space-time experience—or what we ordinarily
call "reality" if we haven't been ruined by philosophy courses—every
Jew we meet is a specific event in the space-time continuum. The
first may be a poet, the second an actress, the third a grocer, etc. if we
place this group in the gloss of category-by-occupation. Put them in
the category of good looks, and the first may seem as handsome as
Paul Newman, the second as unhandsome as Edward G. Robinson,
the third as cute as Barbra Streisand, etc. Put them in any other grid,
and differences still emerge, just as there are no two leaves on an oak
tree that are exactly the same in all respects.
Don't go back to sleep yet; hang in there a moment. We are not
preaching a sermon on "tolerance" like a 1950s Hollywood movie.
We are just using anti-semitism as an example of a mechanical
mental set that illuminates many, many other mechanical mental
sets that you are going to have to recognize in yourself if Energized
Meditation is to do you any good.
For instance, at the beginning, for the shock effect, I said some
critical things about Christianity and Democracy. If you drew the
conclusion that I dislike all aspects of Christian and Democratic
society, you had a mechanical "is" somewhere in your evaluations. In
fact, I would much rather live in Christian Democratic nations, for all
their faults, than in any of the Moslem Fundamentalist nations or
Buddhist nations, and I would rather be gored by a rhinoceros than try
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to live in a Marxist nation. As for fascist nations, whether I tried to
cope or not, I rather suspect they would shoot me in a few months, if
not in the first week.
If the Nazi mentality acts "as if Jewn = Jewk or any Jew is "the
same" as any other Jew, people who seem a lot more sophisticated
often act "as if any Rock music = any other Rock music (it "is" all
equally wonderful or equally "barbarous")/ or any science fiction
novel = any other science fiction novel (the book critics in Time seem
to have that mechanical conditioned reflex), or "all television should
be abolished" (there was a book on that subject recently, in which the
author seriously seemed to have the Nazi-like hallucination that TV
shown = TV showk), or any cop = any other cop, or any fast food
place is as "bad" as any other fast food place, etc.
Mechanical reactions are the statistical norm; full conscious
attention remains very rare. (That's why one Zen Master always
gave the answer "Attention!" when he was asked what Zen "is.") We
started from that unChristian and unDemocratic premise and we
have worked our way back to it by a circuitous route, but now
perhaps we can see more clearly what this mechanical A=B hypnosis
does to us.
We have been using examples of difference between elements of
the "same" group, but no element remains unchanged in time.
Consider yourself as an element, X, in the group "humanity." It
should be obvious that
X1987 is not X1976
You have changed quite a bit in the last ten years, have you not? If
people weren't in the habit of calling you by the same name, you
might not even "believe" that the You of today "really is" in some
sense the You of 1976. In fact, if you can forget your name for a few
moments, the entity or more precisely the space-time event called
You obviously was changing, sometimes faster and sometimes more
slowly all through the decade. If you are more than 20 years old, just
think of how absurd it would be to claim that the You of 1986 "really
is" the You of 1966 ...
Think about this seriously. It would be a damned good idea, right
now, to make a list of ten important changes that have occurred in
"You" since 1966 and ten changes since 1976. Is it too much trouble
to get a paper and pen? Well, at least make a list in your head. Can
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you even visualize what you looked like and dressed like in 1966?
Really think hard about some of the other changes in You over 20 years.
Now, to understand what this book can do for you, try to apply
this awareness on a smaller time-scale. Is it possible that Youlast
week "really is" in every respect Youthis week? Alas, this may almost
seem possible, but it is not strictly true unless you have died and they
pickled you in formaldehyde.
Think, really, about the changes in "You" in one week. How many
more changes could have occurred in that week, if You did not have
the illusion that You are a finished product and not a Work in
Progress?
Keep at it. Think seriously about whether it is strictly and totally
true that Youyesterday really is Youtoday.
When you get to the point of understanding that Youone second
ago is not strictly Youright here and now, then you are ready to begin
to understand what Christopher Hyatt is offering you in this book
and how you can use it.
Howth, Ireland
17 November 1986