Prometheus Rising Read Free

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 mention—nor
    need there be—of 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 forces—for the sake of convenience labeled Severity
    and Mildness—with 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 it—and those seeds will surely take root and bloom in the
    most unlikely minds—as 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
    Utopia—which 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
    Prometheus Rising 19
    science (as they existed at that moment in space-time) to corroborate
    the fantasy. A decade or maybe a century elapse—and 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
    simultaneously—whatever 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 bead—countless,
    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