part0040

Earlier, we discussed the four basic systems that, in the majority of Terrans at this stage of evolution, make up the hardware and software out of which our multiple selves emerge. To review:

1. The Oral Bio-Survival System, largely determined by early infantile imprints, deals with seeking Safe Space and avoiding the Dangerous or Alien.

If somebody points a gun at you, whatever self has predominance in this bio-survival system "takes over" the brain at once. Whether you run, or faint, or smash the assailant with a karate chop, you won't remember making the decision. "I just found myself doing it," you will say afterward, because the ancient reptilian circuits of this system move as instant reflexes.

2. The Anal Territorial System, largely determined by imprints at the toddler stage, deals with seizing territory and holding some defined status in the mammalian pack or human family and/or community.

Even a low status, once imprinted, will automatically function thereafter and seem "normal." E.g., the persons with an imprinted Bottom Dog self in this system will feel very uncomfortable, insecure and angry if circumstances force them into a sudden Top Dog position . . . just as automatically as those with imprinted Top Dog selves will feel uncomfortable, insecure and angry if forced into a Bottom Dog position.

3. The Semantic Time-Binding System, imprinted when language and other symbolisms begin to "make sense" to the growing child, deals with speech, thought (internal speech) and making maps and models of the environment.

Since information increases logarithmically, this system tends to produce new maps and models faster and faster as time passes. These new reality-tunnels unleash new technologies, which alter politics, economics and social psychology in unpredictable ways.

While the first two systems maintain the constants of evolution, the semantic system unleashes fractal "chaos" — the mathematical term for high unpredictability. A time-binding semantic organism, such as the human, departs from evolutionary norms and functions as a revolutionary agent . . . at least potentially.

To prevent the accelerated change and Unknown Results of rapid information flow, most societies dim the timebinding function by setting heavy taboos on speech, writing and other communications. Once these taboos began to break down — after the English and American Bills of Rights became widely copied — information flow increased markedly and the world began quantum-jumping from one reality-tunnel to another with dizzying rapidity. This so alarms conservatives (neophobes) that undoing the Bill of Rights has always played a central role in any conservative program.1

1 Under the Reagan administration, Colonel Oliver North drew up the FEMA plan, allowing the President to suspend the Bill of Rights at whim. Similar plans appear whenever conservatives gain power anywhere.

4. The Socio-Sexual System, imprinted at puberty, produces a characteristic Sex Role and the "self" capable of playing that Role consistently. "Morals" get conditioned on top of this imprint and produce the gradual "civilizing" process by which loyalty to the family can grow into loyalty to any member of the tribe, to higher loyalties to nation-states etc., and even, in recent times, to an emerging sense of loyalty to the human species and to the living Earth itself.

As mentioned earlier, four later systems seem to appear frequently in minorities and may play a larger role in our future evolution. We will now describe these emerging Futurist systems.

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 so many varieties of yoga, shamanism, hypnosis, "faith healing," etc., that almost everybody outside the A.M.A. 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 nobody but Fundamentalist 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 (i.e., will probably occur before the year 2000) 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 HEAD 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 exist 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, c. 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 Taboo 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, nearly 30 years ago, "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 —

B. We can meta-program 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.

7. The Morphogenetic System contains the "selves" and information banks of all living beings. The first descriptions of this system appear 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." Neither term qualifies as operational science, but the Freudian and Jungian records at least alerted other psychologists to pay attention to non-ego information systems.

LSD, again, accelerated progress. Finding that vast floods of non-ego information from past ages appeared in LSD sessions, Leary, at Harvard, posited a "neurogenetic circuit." Grof, in Czechoslovakia, posited a "phylogenetic unconscious" and other researchers made up other labels or just recorded the data without trying to name it.

The first scientific model of this system appeared in Dr. Rupert Sheldrake's A New Science of Life. Where Leary and Grof, like Jung and Freud, assumed the non-ego information, not known to the brain, must come from the genes, Sheldrake, a biologist, knew that genes cannot carry such information. He therefore posited a non-local field, like those in quantum theory, which he named the morphogenetic field. This field communicates between genes but cannot be found "in" the genes — just as Johnny Carson "travels" between TV sets but cannot be found "in" any of the TV sets that receive him.

It will probably take a long, long time — maybe a quarter of a century (i.e., not until around 2015) before we learn the art and science of using the morphogenetic system for fun and profit.

Nonetheless, those who have the most experience of this system all seem to agree with Jung (and Leary): this information system contains not only memories of the past but distinct trajectories of the future.

The morphogenetic system may serve as a kind of evolutionary "radar" preparing us for future quantum jumps in consciousness by showing us the records of past mutations.

8. The Non-Local Quantum System (described by modern physics in the last chapter) appears in the reports of a few shamans, yogis and poets in almost every century since the dawn of history. Parapsychologists have made the beginnings of a scientific study of how this non-spatio-temporal system interacts with our other "selves," but largely lacked the operational vocabulary to make their work precise and scientifically crisp. The recent developments in Quantum Mechanics now open the way to much more rapid progress in understanding "paranormal" and "transcendental" states.

When the "self" operates on the non-local system it becomes a different "self" again, just as always happens whenever we move up from one of these systems to another. The non-local "self" — beyond time and space — and also beyond "mind" and "matter" — has not yet survived translation into left-brain linear verbalism. It transcends all either/ors and, as Buddhists know, we cannot even properly call it a "self."

The Chinese, who seem to have had more experience with this system than anybody else (more than the Hindus, even) define non-local experience in negatives — "not mind," "not self," "not doing," "not existence," even "not non-existence."

The same super-synergy appears in Dr. Bohm's attempts to describe his implicate order in words. However clear his math, his words begin to sound Chinese when he says the implicate order does not consist of "mind'' but that it has "mind-like qualities."

Obviously, it will take us at least 50 years to get a scientific handle on this level of quantum psychology.

Meanwhile, we at least have learned from the Copenhagenists that whatever model we make of non-local experience, the model will always contain less than the experience itself.

That should save us from the dogmatism, and the gibbering incoherence, of most writers who have tried to discuss the non-local Self.

I would consider it the height of intellectual laziness and mental incompetence to invoke the word "God" to cover the limitations of my imagination and vocabulary. Instead, I will conclude with the wise words of Aleister Crowley. When asked to define the Tao he said,