This is the first of two documents contrasting the writings of Jan Cox and Alfred De Grazia, both now deceased.
For Andrew Fitts, who was with Prof. De Grazia when he died.
Some notes on Binary Maps and The Internal Partnership
(sometimes called the (internal) Dialog.)
Part one of two.
I. by Jan Cox.
You should be able to See and Remember that all maps are a kind of mirage and they are missing something. They’re not lacking because of some fault or omission by the map makers — it’s just that ordinary consciousness is limited. Like all senses, consciousness picks up only a part of what is going on. Your eyes see only part of the spectrum of light — there are machines that can register more than vision does. All maps, even my descriptions of binary man, are flawed. The maps attempt to describe a continuous reality, just around the corner, and reality goes off in another direction, into another spectrum which you cannot see from “here.”
One way to approach this around the corner, continuous reality is on the basis of time. Experiencing a continuous reality would be like going into another dimension — you would be conscious of the rest of what’s going on. To begin to understand that suggests answers to almost everything. The fact that reality turns a corner and consciousness cannot follow explains why men believe in gods, why death is so unfathomable, why people can’t conceive of where they came from. Just around the corner, there’s another piece that is just beyond the reach of ordinary consciousness.
All binary maps are mirages of sorts. For example, I have used a map called “The Partnership” to describe the continual sensation you have that inside of you there are obviously two things: there is one, and then there is the other one that criticizes and want to change the first one. But Man, as a nervous system, is a single, unified structure: The nervous system is not cut into sections. One end of the structure talks; one end creates sound waves that go “out there” and come back to be registered by the nervous system so that is goes, “Huh?” But this is all one structure in operation.
What I have called the Line of Consciousness in humanity at any given time refers to the fact that the human nervous system is expanding, just as a tree grows, from the bottom upward. And this Line is where the expansion is happening. Man is not getting appreciably bigger, taller or stronger; no new senses are being developed at the lower circuit level. But the upper end of the nervous system keeps growing, becoming more sophisticated and “civilized.” And it keeps talking.
Even though my maps of the nervous system are useful, you should keep an awareness that there is no cutoff point in the nervous system; there are no dividing lines between the upper and lower circuitry anywhere in the system. All the maps, in some manner, divide man into an upper part and a lower part, but man is not divided. There is a continuous flow of energy through the circuitry — through this unified nervous system. One area talks and one area doesn’t talk. That’s Man, the conscious being. That’s you.
If you don’t believe this, can you see that you could prove it by shoving a screwdriver up your nose? That certainly would be a lot cheaper than brain surgery, and you would no longer be a conscious being. The only thing lacking would be the part of you that talks. Thus, the other part would no longer hear it talking. (It’s like the old tree in the forest story. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does the falling tree make a sound? “Do I hear myself talk if nobody is there to listen?”) After that, the fact that you’ve kept your weight and cholesterol down all these years wouldn’t matter anymore. You would not be considered a conscious being by any stretch.
No matter how singular you feel — no matter how complex a problem being human seems — remember the first picture I gave: You are in the midst of l5 billion light years of universe. Next to that, your little apartment is not such a big deal. Next to that, the whole planet earth is minute, and the section you take up couldn’t be seen even under a microscope. The only thing is, one part of you talks continuously. On top of that is the feeling that being human is a complex job. But, you are unified.
Another description of This Activity is to discover that you are unified, whereas everyone else in the city believes they are not. Ordinary consciousness absolutely knows you’re not unified, even as you listen to me say you are. Because consciousness knows one part of you is listening, and another part is not listening. As soon as it thinks anything, consciousness is aware of that other part which is thinking something different. To city people, that other part — whatever it is — seems to be the troublemaker which they must either change or destroy.
What if This is just discovering you are unified, when you already know you’re not? There is only a unified, single nervous system in you. Everything else is simply a map, a temporary sketch. The map might say you’re on Highway 4 in the state of Oklahoma. Well, if somebody believes they’re in Oklahoma, the only way to communicate with them is to map out Oklahoma, all the while knowing you and they are not in Oklahoma. You do it and you know that they can’t see otherwise. Everyone believes there is someone else in there. You do not have to convince anyone that they are divided in two.
If you’re really a F.R.I.P. (Fictitious, Reasonably Insane Person) and could stand back to determine what you could do that would be the most profitable — the most conducive to Life’s growth — you’d realize that it would not be to pursue any ideas you have of change. Because, if you could change, you would end up even more one-sided. You would be worse off. You must first realize that you are unified, even as you feel otherwise. These maps may be cute, but they’re not true. There is no split in the system. When religions talk of man’s “downfall,” all they’re talking about is the fact that at one point in man’s development, the nervous system began to make noise. That was man’s downfall, from one point of view.
A slight variation on this description is to picture the top end of the nervous system as a radio station. In the past, I referred to the station as WDNA. Another name would be “Station WMEE.” The upper end of the nervous system feels as though its speech is a broadcast, and seems to have some knowledge about the nature of broadcasting. The nervous system knows it must get electricity/food to power the broadcast; that it should stay out of storms, avoid sunspots and wash behind its ears. But the nervous system has no idea where the broadcast originates and can’t conceive of the source: “I’m the broadcast, but I’m not really sure where the thing comes from.” The talking part doesn’t understand that the station is the source and that the broadcast is in no way separate from the station. The nervous system feels fragmented: “I can think and say things I don’t even like. I have dreams and nightmares — where the hell do nightmares come from?” The broadcast knows it doesn’t have the slightest idea of the source.
If you had a walking-around awareness of being one unified nervous system, you’d no longer feel separate from anything else. You might still have nightmares about strangling your brother, but you wouldn’t care anymore. You’d know, “I am a unified nervous system,” — no conditions, no adjectives, no troublemaker to try to civilize. You are unified to begin with; there’s nothing to put together. You are overlapped in such a way that you can’t be underlapped or undone. The nervous system can’t conceive of that — but consider the alternatives.
Here is another addendum to the nonexistent “Revolutionist’s Code of Conduct.” Just as you should not talk about the cost of anything, you should cease dealing with yourself or speaking in terms of degrees or gradations. For example, you should not say, “I am very likely to do that,” “It’s unlikely that I will,” “I might,” “I probably won’t,” etc. If you cannot say “yes” or “no,” you should simply say, “Possibly.” To a revolutionist, “possibly” means everything. If you are asked a direct question, and you can’t at the time deal in all or nothing, say only, “Possibly.” Say it and don’t mean it, and keep your face bland. That is passionate non-committance.
This could have a salubrious and surprising effect on the matter of unification, because part of the nervous system doesn’t like doing that. The nervous system is not wired up to transfer energy that way and to do so can lead you to feel the unified polarity. You might even begin to see how crude something like hermitism is, for people to go off and chant, meditate, try to remove themselves from normal influences.
Remember, the workings of the human nervous system are in you, in you, in you. You can have an experience and understand, not only in you, but how energy goes through hundreds of people over thousands of years, and it’s all little pieces of Life coming out. Life shows someone something and then gets them to put on a hair shirt, go out and teach other people to stand on their big toe, stay away from the opposite sex, and before you know it you’ve got a religion. Just look at the size of the Catholic Church. Someone went, “Wow,” and it turned into that. A better way is to pursue the great school of “Possibly.”
You should always deal in no less than three alternatives: all, nothing, or possibly. No degrees; simply, “It’s possible.” Possibly is better than WD-40 in the city, more fun than falafel, better than being an ingénue and especially better than being a moose. Taste it, think it, speak it. Find instances, instigate opportunities to tell people, “Possibly.”
* * * * * * * * * * *
Now back to you: How come you’re not up for an academy award? Sometimes when you hear these ideas something clicks and you get enthused and energized. You start talking enthusiastically to you, “I’ve heard enough, I’ve got to do something, right now!” Then you walk backstage and see you taking a nap. That which passes for a passionate performer — what I have sometimes called the “ruler” in you — is offstage, once you get up and go home. During a performance, some star in you announces, “We’re going to do so and so!” passionately enough that you go, “Yeah!” Then, later, you drive home and it’s like the time you walked backstage to meet your favorite star. “Gee, Mr. Star, it sure was a lot more fun when you were on stage.”
Remember, when you’re thinking about the performer and the audience, that a tango takes two. What happened was not just the performer on stage — you had to be in the audience. The star wouldn’t put on a show if no one was there. A performer has to have an audience. So you’re partially to blame; that is, you’re dancing, too.
When you go backstage, all these passionate performers turn out to be clowns, literally. You go in to meet the Pope and see him pulling a flask from his back pocket. You walk outside the concert and see your favorite musician being arrested or having his car impounded. All of this happens — IN YOU. We’re not talking about the Pope or some rock star or actor, we’re talking about inside you. So where is the energy, the enthusiasm, to pass on to yourself? Where does it come from? Why don’t you notice it this way?
There is a certain way that a Real Revolutionist would have to treat himself: with bemused condescension. He would — almost — treat himself like a retarded child. This is not a joke. All performers are like retarded children, as long as they’re operating on the basis of, “Show Biz is my life! I need to be seen, I need to perform!”
Of course, “It’s all Show Biz.” But there is a way in which anybody who’s saying, “Hey look at me!” has no talent. I’m talking about all humans — you at the ordinary level. Consider how you and all people get impassioned about themselves: they go into the dance of, “I’m going to tell you what kind of guy I am!” at the least provocation.
Within the audience, within everybody, when you get up and do your dance you apparently have at least one member of the audience who cares. That’s what the internal Partnership is about. You DO have an audience listening to you tell what kind of guy you are. The audience may be only one person, but there is an energy exchange going on when you do your show — within you.
Would anybody believe there is also one area within — a pitch black room containing a creature with a disembodied voice that has no interest at all in talk about your life, about “what kind of guy I am”? I am suggesting that such a black room with a voice, a creature that apparently is dangerous and threatening to the performer, is there in everybody. That creature has no interest whatsoever in what kind of guy you are. And that’s very frightening.
Something else: Dancers, no matter what kind of music is playing, are engaged in their own particular form of dual madness. To stretch this, consider that there is a “folie a deux” inside each person: the Partnership. Because both aspects — both partners, both voices in you at any given time — must share the major madnesses, or you would be too unstable to be out on the street. There is a continual dance inside, within the partnership. There seem to be two partners, the one that talks and the one that hears. So there’s a folie a deux going on in everybody. The partners apparently can verbally be in great conflict: “You are insane to keep taking drugs the way you do!” “I enjoy it!” Yet, they share the major madnesses. Just because one says, “I don’t approve,” doesn’t mean he will stop it.
The kind of apparent criticism the partners have of each other does not belie their shared madnesses, even when the voices are apparently in conflict. They MUST be in conflict or you would not be functional; one voice (form of behavior) must apparently talk to another voice (form of behavior) continually. The only reason one voice in you says, “I’ve got to stop this” is that another voice in you says, “I’m not going to stop.”
A Real Revolutionist — one up to a certain speed — would not be dependent upon any codified method. He would simply Do what it is that you do, and that would be it. That’s why, in many respects, This Activity does not seem to have a beginning, or an end, or any sides. This just keeps moving.
Ordinary people cannot live without a kind of formalization of power; they cannot live without laws, either written down or part of common knowledge. The idea is wired into humans that there has to be an exercise of power: the dominant and the submissive, reflected in personal life and in the codified structures of society. People insist on this and don’t know what to do without it. Even to reject laws, there must first be laws. And yet, in This Activity, there comes a time when you have to not simply be in the audience.
You’ll thank me for never actually formalizing This, in spite of all the times you kept thinking, “I wish he would just say it and get it over with.” To codify This would be to hurt you. There is a type of freedom inherent in This Activity which is stupefying. Ordinary people would go crazy from such freedom. Un-ordinary freedom is necessary because there IS no standard method for doing This. There is no method to This. Not that some particular system is right or that anything ever tried was wrong. Just that there IS no form, no method. I can’t start off by saying that. Verbally, that makes no sense, even now.
The only “method” is this: Once you know what you’re doing, you do what you do. This is not my method or anybody else’s. If any method IS codified, it won’t take you anywhere. People think, “I’ll study this method,” but there’s nowhere to go. If you’re in a uniform, you’re in a uniform. If you’re on a train, you’re on the train. You can walk around, go over to the window and look out. Notice, though, that you can’t stop the train.
* * * * * * * * * * *
I am going to try to push you a little further in a certain direction. Regardless of all I have said about ordinary memory not being able to think of more than one thing at a time, there is a way in which ordinary intelligence can almost think of two things at once. I have often pointed out that ordinary consciousness cannot think two things simultaneously, but I could also say that consciousness is capable of thinking two things at once — as long as one of them seems to be in memory.
Notice that in instances where you seem to be able to have two thoughts simultaneously, you can see that one of them is arising from memory. That is necessary, insofar as all routine, binary consciousness is based upon comparison. In order to think, you must have memories to continually bounce back against. Consciousness needs this background pool of memory — for comparison.
Your brain — that part of the nervous system circuitry that makes you human — deals with energies in such a way that you could rightly feel, “I am thinking of two things at once.” There is not one pristine voice — one single sound — within. Even if you can’t seem to verbally grasp both voices going on, you can be aware that there is not just one voice in you. There is a voice, and then there is something else. These voices (that I have called “The Partnership”) talk continually, switch places, become each other — and there “you” are. So the brain — almost — has the ability to deal with two things simultaneously, but one of them must apparently be entirely locked into the operation of memory.
Have you ever wondered why I emphasized to you that there is nothing in your past life of particular value; that for someone involved in This Activity, so-called childhood traumas or great tragedies are not even worth analyzing? The operation of memory is necessary and important — you could not think without a functional memory. But what’s in your memory is unimportant. The operation of memory is one thing; the content of memory is quite another matter.
If you’re going to pass as ordinarily intelligent, there is a minimum requirement as far as memory is concerned. You must have some knowledge of history, of language, to be able to converse. You must have enough memory to provide a basis for comparison in order to function as an “intelligent” human being. Even to do This, you must have enough knowledge of history, man’s institutions, and so on to provide a basis for comparing what seems to be “out there” with “in here.”
From a certain view, one-half of binary consciousness seems to be charged with the operations of memory. In what seems to be this inescapable Partnership, there are two sets of intellectual, Yellow Circuit awareness going on, and at any given time, one set seems taken up by the operations of memory. Consider that. Half of your intelligence is continually dealing with things suitable for a morgue. Yet, the other half couldn’t operate without that happening. Or could it?
The level of intelligence I have called “Revolutionary Consciousness” would surpass ordinary intelligence. Suppose the three levels of “intelligence” were represented by spelling the word three different ways: INTELLEGENCE; INTELLIGENCE; and finally INTELLIIGENCE.
Someone at the “intelliigence” level — someone above the Line level of consciousness — a Real Revolutionist — would, in all situations involving binary consciousness, be merging what seemed to be divisions to produce a new kind of “now.” That is, all apparent major and minor divisions — cause and effect, actions and consequences, the past and the present — would be merged in revolutionary consciousness. In a sense, for the revolutionist everything would be happening Now.
Once you see that half of your intelligence is brain-locked into the operations of memory, what do you do? What if you could take that half and the other and forcibly merge them? Then the brain would not be running off of energies which seem to be in the past. What would you have then? There’s no word for it, but I will go a little further with this description.
I can’t say it would be possible to make the brain operate entirely without resistance, so I can’t say that everything you now know would be gone. But your immediate experience would be like waking up each morning completely nude, no matter what you were wearing when you went to bed. You wouldn’t wake up not knowing how you were dressed the night before — if you went to bed wearing red pajamas, you’d wake up nude, but you’d know you were wearing red the previous night. It’s not that you’d no longer have a memory, but your memory wouldn’t mean anything to you.
If your mother called up and said, “Do you remember your Uncle Buzzy?” or the phone company called to ask, “When was the last time you paid your bill?” you’d remember. But the memories would not mean anything to you, personally. The content of memory doesn’t matter. Whatever can’t be understood doesn’t matter, to a revolutionist. The horrible wreck that killed your father — your awful experiences as a child — the worst thing you can remember — means nothing. That sounds harsh, but there is no other way to describe this.
If you were really “intelliigent” — to a new level of intelligence — you would not remember anything that was unprofitable. Think about those people you would have in the past considered to be spiritual heroes. Do you actually believe they sat around thinking about the stuff that bothered them — the really yucky stuff like starving children and how their father died? You may laugh, but some of you might truthfully answer, “Yes,” especially if you’ve been exposed to enough pictures of the prophet praying in the garden painted on black velvet. Probably you imagine somebody with superior insight would not only suffer, but would suffer in a superior way. You’re intellegent misspelled with an “e” in the middle if you believe that — as intelligent as anybody else in the City.
How can you believe someone with a nervous system operating at some higher level would think about anything that was annoying, sad or irritating to them? I’m not talking theoretically — at a higher level, you simply wouldn’t. All the yucky stuff would still be going on in memory, but it would become background noise.
As long as binaries exist in you, there will always be two “me’s,” two possibilities, a right way and a wrong way, a past and a present. Revolutionary consciousness would amount to a kind of merging of all the binaries inside you into — Now. What you are thinking Now would not be on the basis of comparing, pushing up against memory. Revolutionary consciousness would not require memory as a counterpart, the way ordinary consciousness does.
This Thing is not a battle against binary consciousness, but a struggle to push beyond that. You couldn’t think in the City sense if you only knew one word; you couldn’t function without ordinary memory. Life in the 3-Dimensional world needs two to operate. At every level of 3-D existence, the minimum requirement is a division into two. If you have only one emotion, you’re not emotional; if you know one word, you’re not literate. If not for comparison, you could not be aware of one thing in the ordinary, 3-D world.
To move beyond the 3-D level, take all binaries and forcibly merge them. Put all contemporaneous conditions into a new matrix and force consciousness to go somewhere else, beyond 3-D. You cannot do this under ordinary conditions, so under ordinary conditions, you can’t even think of what it would be like to no longer think in binaries.
What would happen if you were not limited to the binaries your ordinary brain activity requires to function? For one thing, your routine City concept of time would be affected. Everything would be all smooshed together, and your sensation of time would drastically shift. Everything would apparently be happening within your new, personal, sensation of Now. And that sense would not depend on pushing against the past.
At this new level of intelliigence with three “i’s,” the past no longer exists — you have absorbed it. You still know the past is in you, like a sandwich you’ve been carrying around in your pocket for forty years. If necessary, you can reach down and take out the past, but your concept of Now is not based upon or limited to what’s in your pocket — you don’t depend on that sandwich for nourishment.
Can you picture what that might do to your relationships with people? What if you could walk up to your mother and, with everything you know about your mother still in your pocket, treat her almost as though the two of you have just met? Remember, I said having intelliigence would be like waking up nude every morning of your life. You would treat everyone as though the past — yours and theirs — was stripped bare. You’d be naked.
Remember I once recommended that when you want some dance between you and another person to change, the first thing to consider is what you could possibly do right now to bring about change. Before even thinking about how the other person should change, consider what’s possible for you. To really do that, you have to be free of memory. Otherwise, you’re back to thinking, “We’ve been dancing like this for years,” and, “It’s that other person’s fault, they’ve always been like this,” ad infinitum. You are not a Real Revolutionist if you let memory even enter the picture. Instead you simply determine: Is there anything I can do right now that will make this situation, if not profitable, at least tolerable?
As long as the nervous system is coddled by Life — treated the way common City sense, psychology and psychiatry dictate — the past must be dealt with, brought back into consciousness, and talked about, continually. That’s the way of life in the City. But someone attempting to be more than routinely intelligent — someone attempting intelliigence — must deal with what seem to be the daily pressures of Life on the basis that everything is happening right Now. An intelliigent brain no longer deals with what’s going on now as compared to the contours of what happened twenty-five years ago, or an hour ago, or five minutes ago.
At the ordinary level — even at the level where “intelligence” is spelled correctly with one “i” — what passes for the intellect deals with methods which won’t work and promises that cannot be kept. That is, ordinary people — including you, including psychiatrists, including everybody — deal with the past. Of course, psychiatrists have to deal with people who have memory. You couldn’t get a dime out of anybody without one — you might treat them, but they’d forget to pay your fee. Memory — the past — could be described as the major mental illness. But after all, a person has to speak up and tell you who they are or you won’t know where to send their bill.
Those who pass for intelligent in the City know nothing. Nobody can ever get smart in the City, but nobody notices; they are too busy listening to this background noise of memory. The foundation — the building blocks — of the brain is memory. Take that away, and you’re no longer conscious in the City sense. Yet a revolutionist must learn not only not to depend on pushing against the contour of the past, but not to depend on the contour of what seems to be the future. There is more to push against apparently “up there” in the future, than there is “back there” in the past. And you have to abandon that.
Sometimes you have to pull out the old sandwich in your pocket and admit you remember Uncle Buzzy. And to live in the City, you have to make some plans. But you cannot allow the brain to operate in its usual mechanical fashion; you can’t depend on episodic consciousness. Left to its own devices, if the intellect is not thinking about yesterday, it’s dreaming about tomorrow. And yesterday and tomorrow are not part of what a Real Revolutionist needs to think about. Whatever won’t fit here — Now — means nothing to a revolutionist. Once you are not continually pushing against what you’ve done or your dream of what you’re going to do, everything can be merged into a new sense of what is going on Now.
A well-respected scientist once pointed out that all the physical laws known to man, e.g., the laws of physics and chemistry, came from man’s mind. So he supposed that at some point, man might reach a limit in the laws he could come up with. The scientist further surmised that there could be extraordinary laws of the universe — laws below quarks and semi-quarks, laws within the actual fabric of life — radical basic laws we didn’t know yet. He thought that rather than coming from the mind, these extraordinary laws might exist outside of the human mind. If this were so, said the scientist, these laws might be difficult, if not impossible to comprehend, because they would be, ultimately, irrational.
That is a reasonably intelligent (at the second level) observation. Of course, it was Life, not just some scientist, speaking. Life had this guy say that we might eventually run up against a brick wall in what we can theorize or observe. So, laws to actually describe the building blocks of reality might be beyond the limits of man’s mind, and if this is so, such laws are probably hopeless anyway because they will be irrational. If they were rational, we would think of them.
That is most interesting; otherwise I would not have remembered it all these years. It is intelligent in the realm of physics and even philosophy vis a vis the world of ordinary hard science. But, as intelligent as that seems at the second level, the sentiment — the idea that the scientist pondered — starts off with the most basic serious flaw in intelligence of the second kind: He divides up consciousness into what goes on “in here” and what goes on “out there.”
Of course, any fool realizes “in here” and “out there” are two different things, except me. If I told this scientist that the structure of consciousness is the structure of Life, he might go for that. But then if I said, “But dig it doctor, the order of reality ‘out there’ IS the order of consciousness.” He’d go “Uhhh, I’ve never heard of you. What are your credentials? And by the way, I’m in a hurry.”
The first part of what I just said is not that difficult to swallow. That is almost what the scientist was saying: what we now make of reality is based upon our brain’s ability to make reality. I’m not simply sloughing that off. That’s still an integral part of the prevailing views of quantum physics, e.g., that our observations, human consciousness affects the “laws” we come up with. Large numbers of cellular collections known as humans would agree that human consciousness in some way affects reality.
But an ordinary person wouldn’t be able to turn the concept around. When I said, “Your consciousness not only reflects reality, as you call it, reality reflects consciousness,” he’d go, “No, that’s silly.” He wouldn’t even get that far, but if you could, and you saw this, you’d go, “Aha! Now I am intelligent with three ‘i’s!”
You need to simply see that anything you take to be a true idea you are taking as being a physical law, and these “laws” came from your mind. Not only so-called physical laws, but things like, “My ex-partner was a thief,” “My mother is heartless,” “The Russians are out to get us.” Everything you take as being an actual reflection of reality came from your mind. And where did your mind come from? It did not come from the victory garden, or the local nursery — you don’t know where your mind came from (unless of course you’re a psychiatrist and then you know that your mind came from your past and your memories).
I’m referring to all laws — not just what you regard as scientific laws, but what you take as being the laws of reality: that up is up and down is down; that good people are good and bad people are bad and some people you just can’t figure out. Everything at the middle level — the basic level of intelligent spelled correctly, assuming you pass for being bell-curve middle class sane — everything you believe is reality, is based upon reason. Everything is.
Now, I will tell you what “reason” is. Reason, as it is ordinarily known, is the end of one level of intelligence. That is it, literally. Here is a good old classic example that covers all of what is commonly known as “reason”: All A’s are B’s, C is an A, and therefore C is a B. That is the beginning and the end of the operations of the human brain when it operates within this second level of intelligence — when it functions reasonably. That is it — from Einstein to Prince Arnold the Loud, to Pope Pious the Maybe, to you. The basis of reason is the end of one level of intelligence.
Reason is the termination of one line, one level, of intelligence. You must come to the conclusion, “therefore, C is a B,” or nothing would make sense. Without reason, you couldn’t order food in a restaurant, you couldn’t go shopping, and you couldn’t do your job or comb your hair. Without reason, you couldn’t put on red pajamas and go to bed every night, and you couldn’t get out of bed the next morning. Every law and fact that you know is simply the point terminus in you of one line of intelligence.
On a wider scale, beyond some individual point of knowing how to get out of bed and make pancakes, is the whole range of you being intelligent with two “i’s.” To be intelligent you have to be reasonable. To be intelligent there has to be a whole spectrum — a whole line of intelligence — that came to an end. When the line came to an end is when you stood up and said, “I am now intelligent,” just as everyone else in the City did.
For all humans to say, “I am now intelligent,” a great Line, a whole level of intelligence, had to reach its end. That is the only way that man came to be reasonable. It is the only way that you can come to any conclusion. To be intelligent at the second level, you have to be able to say, “All A’s are B’s, C is an A, therefore…” Man is operating right at the end of that level; this is where everyone gets ready to say, “Therefore…C is a B.” Period. Conclusion. That has got to be true or Life would not work at the 3-D level. That has got to be true or man would be bad news instead of being worthwhile to Life. Humanity would be a bad meal waiting to pass on, a gallstone waiting to be removed.
Everyone starts out assuming that an extraordinary intelligence would be weird. They ask, “Will I be able to raise the dead, read minds and pick tomorrow’s numbers? Will I be able to hypnotize the opposite sex so they just roll their knickers down when they see me coming?”
Real Revolutionary consciousness makes ordinary intelligence look childish, but not in some weird, mystical way. Having “intelliigence” means that you are no longer limited to the specific awareness of hard-wired intelligence. Everything that you think you don’t know, you know. Everything that you think cannot be known, is known. Everything that doesn’t make sense, makes sense. Everything that you don’t want to think about, you don’t ever think about. So what else do you want? This Activity is in no way anti-intellectual, as you should already realize. You just go from intellegence misspelled, to ordinary intelligence, to a new level of intelliigence. And, my trope for this new level is to add an extra ‘i’ to the word.
Someone asked me a question recently about what I have described as the Primal Flow, and how it divides itself up. The question concerned how this kind of centralized, specific energy ends up being diffused and split up into the Three Forces in human life. They recalled that I had pointed out that humans do not have a direct sensation of the Primal Flow. The person then asked how this unperceived, undifferentiated flow changes over into the different energies in humans. In other words, how does this one, centralized, stable, undifferentiated flow — how can the Primal Flow, as I called it — change into the various personal energies in man?
That’s the question. We’ll start off with a simple answer: The Primal Flow changes by being only partially known.
Now, let me ask you a question: What if there is no such thing as the Primal Flow? It would just stand to reason that there is; every ounce of your nervous system just seems to yell out that whatever you call it, there has got to be some great something somewhere from whence we all came — the great one, the river of life, some kind of godhead. That just stands to reason. So, I ask you: What if there is no Primal Flow? And what if the human nervous system simply induces this concept of a primordial flow, from the actions of all the lesser flows in which we are all up to our armpits?
Here’s a fast sidetrack: to say that a lesser level induces — that a lesser level takes generalities and then tries to concoct and derive some more specific principle — is backwards. It can seem that way, but it’s backwards. But, as soon as you see this backwards, then go back and it’s the other way around. Induction and deduction are one and the same thing.
What if you had conscious liver cells? They would induce, they would imagine, that there was some higher, more centralized knowledge than what they were exposed to daily. (I’m not playing some childish form of anthropomorphism. I just picked out the liver at random, but if you had liver cells that were conscious in some way, they would almost immediately induce with a certainty that there exists a higher, more centralized, more specific purpose and energy — that would only stand to liver reason.) It’s one step from there to ideas of a liver god, a higher liver consciousness. The liver cells would have no choice.
Being in the midst of splattered, episodic, splintered reality, the cells in Life — and thus the cells in man — end up inducing (or, if you prefer, deducing, which is the same thing) something “higher.” Now that is really weird, that you can either derive higher specifics from generalities, or you can obtain and see splintered episodic generalities taken from one higher stable unity. On top of that, these two things are apparent opposites. Well, they are opposites if a fish can live out of water and the water can live without fish. The process of induction and deduction are the same thing.
Liver cells are born into their own poker game, just as you are. You were born in this closed game room — nothing comes in and nothing goes out, that you can make any sense of — and you can’t just get up and leave the game. What if you could — not just leave the table (which is hard enough), not just change positions or pass up a few hands, but get up and leave the room?
But what if the Primal Flow — somebody or something that could get up and not only leave the poker game, but leave the room and take the room with them — doesn’t exist? What if there is no Primal Flow? What if there’s just a whole bunch of stuff always happening, in your house, in your room, in the City, on the other side of the world. There’s just stuff happening, happening, happening.
No matter what your particular nervous system would call it, using religious terms or not, it just stands to your nervous system’s reason that somewhere all this stuff happening comes together. What should really interest you is that that doesn’t stand to reason, yet everyone on this planet believes it does stand to reason. Everyone believes this regardless of their background, environment or culture. Everyone has the feeling that I’m in the midst of this splattered, splintered, segmented, episodic, chopped-up linear arrangement which goes on and on. Yet in the midst of this perceptual chaos is my belief in my Primal Flow (by whatever name) where all of this stuff comes together. Or (the same thing) in the midst of chaos is my certainty that all this stuff was once united somewhere in some Primal Flow and then it all got torn asunder, somehow.
What if that simply is not so? What if there is no Primal Flow? I didn’t say there wasn’t, but what if? What would that do to what passes for your certainty now? What would that do to the certainty that there is a basic unified reality somewhere? What if that’s simply not true?
I can ask you, but operating at the second level of intelligence, you can’t answer because you can hardly bear to think about it. If you could move up somewhere between the second and third levels of intelligence, you might even have a flash of, “Hey, wait a minute, that would mean that this is everything, that there is nothing behind any of this, that ‘This is it!'”
Once again, lest you think I’m badmouthing ordinary intelligence, nay, nay. Contraire Pierre! Were it not for the great ability of ordinary intelligence, you couldn’t bear the possibility that all of what I just said might be true. But, having ordinary intelligence, you can bear it. Is that not sweet? Does it not work out for the benefit of almost all of us?
You may not want to think about this, but just remember: even conscious liver cells would concoct their own idea, their own liver language, to describe a Primal Flow somewhere. They’d be certain there is a higher, centralized, flow of energy/purpose beyond the liver level. Yet no matter how literate any particular component cells were, whatever they came up with would still be simply a liver’s view. Just remember that, in case any liver tries to impress you with its theories and ideas about the universe. Just remember that, in case you ever decide I wasn’t just talking about liver cells. And, if you’re too intelligent to think about crude stuff like this, well then, good!
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II. by Alfred De Grazia
Most scholars believe that man has progressed since his original appearance on earth. Probably so, but it has been a strange kind of progress, not well understood, and often showing a negative balance of the “bad” over the “good.”
Some scholars believe that man is a rational animal. In limited ways he is, but, again, it is a strange kind of rationality, more ape-like than other traits of humans that are called “non-rational.” For, to preview an argument that comes later, man is continually
seeking ways to reestablish the uninterrupted instinctive responses of his forebears, and this is the homologue of “rationality.” When Descartes wrote of animals as machines, he
was obviously unaware that the precise “rationality” of man, which he, of all philosophers, elevated to awesome status, was just this homologue of the machine and animal. So constrained and confused is whatever is called human
rationality, that I prefer to call mankind by the name homo schizo, that is, homo sapiens schizotypus, rather than homo sapiens. Humans were created and are born schizotypical, with a set of traits to be distinguished in this book. They were from
the first, and are now, more schizophrenic than otherwise. What is called “rational” is a derivation out of schizotypicality. This line of argument is also pursued in a companion volume, Homo schizo II: Human Nature and Behavior, which deals with
today’s people.
The thrust of legends, when scientifically considered, is directed at humanization as a discrete kind of event, remembered by a mind that recalls not what happened beforehand to itself but what happened then and ever thereafter — a new kind of
memory. And, we guess, this was and remained a fearfully composed memory, compulsively and obsessively recollecting itself. Somehow a barrier was suddenly thrust up between humans and animals.
Hans Bellamy alludes to the “remarkable fact that the mythologist, though he knows an immense number of creation myths, cannot point to a single one whose report starts right at the beginning of things… Almost everywhere we find the ordering of a chaotic muddle of pre-existing things, a formation or a reformation on an improved plan, a recreation rather than a creation in the primary sense of the term.”[21] The Earth is
fashioned out of the body of a vanquished monster, or fished out of the primordial sea, or created by the word of a demiurge, this last a favorite of later priests, so that, for instance, the creator gods assembled, and called “Earth!” and the Earth arose from the waters. As St. John said, “In the beginning was the word; the word pervaded God; the word was God.” Afterwards man was created, as earlier stated. ‘Of course,’ it can be argued, ‘these are typical schizophrenic delusions, having no basis in reality.’ Very well — although it is rather early in the book to accept our thesis that man was born schizophrenic and has always been schizotypical. Can we not also suggest here that
man was striving in manifold ways to recall a hologenesis of mind and culture? And that he must have been a true human at the time of the events at issue?
It is in this connection, too, that we can address the extensive work of Mircea Eliade on The Myth of the Eternal Return [22]. For he finds everywhere in the world, and displaced onto all of the functions of life, such as farming and sex, a compulsion to conduct anniversaries and rites to commemorate the first great days of human existence, insisting that ‘this is the way things were in the beginning,’ illo tempore. Eliade does not analyze the causes of this universal human behavior; he rests with the facts,
uncovered with so much toil. Here we take what seems to be the necessary step beyond, asserting that humans may remember their origins. Now, if this is so, then the cultural, or ‘intrinsic’, memory of man must be extremely long, or the time allocated to human
origins must be far too long. Probably the moment has not yet arrived for calling into question the estimates of the duration of human becoming. We still have not heard the stories — we shall not call them legend — told by the scientists who have worked with the rocks, the bones, and the artifacts composing the under-ground history of mankind.
* * * * * * * * * * *
More often, natural selection is proven by a kind of question-begging. Thus, a trait of a species, one not found in a fossil relative, is given an ex post facto justification by natural
selection. A common formulation reduces to this: a species which did whatever was done tended to survive in greater numbers. But no proof is offered. Both natural selection and mutation theory abound with the stated or implied premise that
whatever changed must have changed because the change helped the species to survive.
A typical problem occurs with asymmetrical brain organization in the human, which accompanies, but not necessarily in a mutually causative relation, handedness – right-handedness in about 87% of the species. Left-handed people are more brain-bilateral, both anatomically and functionally. Their left and right crania exhibit less asymmetry and their speech areas are less centralized in their dominant hemisphere. There occur thereupon the typical rationalizations of brain asymmetry and handedness: these ‘help the species to survive by promoting dexterity;’ and ‘the left hemisphere, with an accomplished right hand, can carry out its dominating wishes and calculations.’
In acute brain lesions of the dominant hemisphere, left-handed persons suffer less speech loss than right-handed persons. “If the majority of the LH (approximately 70%) have bilateral representation of speech, this atypical organization would spare
them from the more severe and prolonged effects of a unilateral lesion that would be seen in the RH person whose speech mechanisms are more laterally differentiated.”[28] Now, if enough clubs smashed enough skulls in the billions of fights
during the ascent of man, and if speech were important after the battles ended, and if other variables were not present, then man should by now be left-handed and retrogressed to bilaterality. However, apart from these particular ‘if’s,’ there occur scores of additional ‘iffy’ variables. For instances, left-handers are considered wrongheaded by most people, and maybe inferior, so might they not be exterminated? Also, might not left-handed club-wielders be more surprising and effective in battle and therefore reduce the right-handers with evolutionarily significant frequency? Or be employed by right-handers to fight and disproportionately die, while the right-handers remained home to breed?
And might not the right-handers, being more asymmetrical, be also more schizoid, and being more schizoid, be more paranoid, assertive and socially dominant over the left-handers; but schizotypicality is fostered, too, by invidious cultural discrimination, so should not the left-handers like Leonardo da Vinci more than hold their own in the evolution of the species. So do we not have a statistical stand-off, what evolutionists might gratefully refer to as ‘an evolutionary equilibrium of 70 and 30 proportions resulting from the operations of natural selection’? This line of thought could go on almost indefinitely, with every question begged by the interposition of the magical term “natural selection.”
* * * * * * * * * * *
We return to the contention that mentation and culture have developed by small increments over millions of years. We find in it a subtle ideological attempt at cutting change into such fine bits that it will simply blow away and nothing will be left to explain. Let us address it nonetheless.
The human is compelled to behave humanly in both mind and culture. Once granted that self-awareness was a quantavolution rather than very slow evolution, mentation and culture must originate at once. So one should ask whether self-awareness came at once.
Self-awareness is a trait that varies quantitatively among humans; some people are apparently unselfconscious, until closely observed — then time, space, gods, rituals, discipline, and anxiety appear, until it is obvious that their ‘unawareness of self’
is a catatonic suppression. In any human group, we invariably discover a capacity to be taught self-awareness among practically everyone. Even the hominids among us, if there are such, know how to ‘put on a good act.
All of this is not impossible. It is widely believed that some hundreds of physical and cultural changes were laid upon Hominid ‘X’ gradually over millions of years, and that the “flowering” of culture occurred among Upper Paleolithic man
and then again in Neolithic times, and then again in the iron age, and once more in the recent centuries of science – these “flowerings” being expected as accumulative, branching effects. However, the external environment and the internal tensions of
homo schizo, the ones who were fully self-aware, would immediately have stressed the whole community to maximize self-awareness. The drive is socially contagious, and
irresistible. It comes from the fear of itself and the need to control itself. It is not dealt out by a third party. It is excited by itself. Therefore it cannot emerge piecemeal. It must emerge for all it is worth as soon as it exists. A homo schizo in a group of Hominid ‘X’ would dominate or die. But might the self-aware have been precisely those who gradually became such? No. Unless a guiding hand to physical evolution were present, we cannot expect this trait to have emerged in ever-increasing quantities by successive mentations, like a turning of the screw, each turn producing a higher level of self-awareness with a consequent output of new ideas, fabrication, and social inventions. Indeed, evolutionists teach us to avoid such pathetic notions. Who advocates such a guiding hand? The psychosomatic Lamarckians probably, and I may sympathize with them. But why should a beast will for himself a small increment of self-awareness, and then another and another, especially when the psychological effects of self-awareness are not at all comfortable, not even tolerable, so that, if man had the ability to choose, he would, like a volunteer soldier caught in a battle, renounce his original enlistment gladly. Neurotics are notoriously fond of dumb animals.
Conventional evolutionary theory does not provide for an intelligence that would direct mutations toward every-increasing self-consciousness. Isolation and inbreeding among a slightly more schizoid band would be counted upon to produce a type
that would, given the chance, venture forth and shove aside less able hominids, or, later on, humans. But this cannot go on for long, unless there is a mutated element present in the germ plasm allowing ultimately the full exercise of self-awareness.
Here is an area where evolutionary thought is especially self contradictory
and, consequently, slippery and evasive. It can only get from one small change to the next but cannot get from the beginning to the end; it can explain some intra-species
changes, like horse-breeding and the Beltsville turkey, but it cannot explain a major development. No known mechanism directs a long string of slight modifications in the germ plasm. Even if we were to concede that the jump from hominid to
human were only apparently large but was biologically small, human genesis would admittedly be a hologenetic occurrence; when it occurred, hominid life changed drastically; it speciated.
BRAIN SPECIALIZATION
Nor can humanization wait upon a slowly evolving culture, no more than the bee was anatomically created and then evolved the basic elements of its social system over millions of years. Even though he does not draw the consequences — hologenesis
— we can agree with Robin Fox when he writes: “The nature of order is part of the order of nature. It is not that man is as culture does but that culture does as man is.”[2]
Recent researches into the differing behaviors prompted by the separate hemispheres of the brain can also be considered. Hominid ‘X’ may or may not have had a large brain before he was humanized, that is, before he became schizotypical. The fibrous conjunction (corpus callosum) bridging the left and right hemispheres of the brain may be playing an effective role in conditioning humans for schizotypical behavior, even if it is not indeed the physical location of the genetic factor that so many are searching for.
In his treatise on The Ghost in the Machine [3], Arthur Koestler has placed the origins of human ‘mis-behavior’ in a malfunctioning relation of the limbic system to the cerebral
region. The basic reptilian and mammalian control and response systems are located below and behind the cerebrum, which is grossly ‘over-developed’ in man. The rational and constructive inclinations of the uniquely human cerebrum, he thinks, may be
frustrated all too often by the more instinctive, unconscious, and irrational animal systems. Human behavior, as a result, is prone to contradictions, rage and aggressiveness, destructiveness, and madness.
Even while admitting that a specialization is occurring here in the human central nervous system that can bring about schizoid behavior from a lack of perfect coordination, we must say that the problem is incorrectly stated and may explain why Koestler did not arrive at the focal center of human nature. The problem is not one of ‘mis-behavior’ but simply of behavior, both ‘bad’ and ‘good,’ ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal.’ Pari passu, there is no ‘malfunctioning,’ but only ‘functioning.’ We do not turn off a spigot marked ‘rational’ and turn on the spigot labeled ‘irrational.’ Once we brush aside this specious and decrepit Aristotelianism and scholasticism, Koestler’s work becomes valuable. For now it becomes possible to seek a mechanism of delayed instinct
between the automatic and cognitive specialization of the brain, which, in conjunction with other sources of delayed, diffused, and over-loaded responses, may explain the self-awareness, existential fear, and profuse displacements of the human being.
The bilateral structure of the brain, providing two hemispheres, had been fashioned long before the advent of humans, probably one some quantavolutionary occasion between two ages. A division of functions between the hemispheres may have come
only with the origination of mankind. The skullcase tends to warp to conform to the concentration of functions in the brain; and external asymmetry conforms to the internal asymmetry. Such asymmetry, implying human specialization, may
characterize most or all hominids. Ornstein asserts that hemispheric specialization (asymmetry, that is) appears to be unique to humans [4]. Handedness in favor of the right hand, and language, are dominated by the left hemisphere. Asymmetry in the language region is, for instance, discoverable on the skull of “Arago XXII” coming from Tautavel, France. This specimen is classified as homo erectus and assigned an age
of 450,000 years by uranium-thorium and electron-spin resonance tests. (Source: Musée de l’Homme, Paris.) Besides governing right hand and body movements and
language, the left hemisphere is specialized in analysis and mathematical functions. It is also assertive and, in observed behavior and experiments, tends to dominate decision-making. The right hemisphere of the cerebrum initiates and supports activities of the left side of the body, and pursues non-verbal and holistic forms of thought and appraisals of experience. It is described as artistic and analogical in its ways of processing the
external world for internal consumption and action. Thomas Parry has surmised that a relation exists between ancient catastrophism and a take-over of internal and external behavioral leadership by the right hemisphere of the brain on the occasion of traumatic experiences [5].
Each hemisphere alone can convey to the whole person the possibility of physical and mental survival. Each is in constant touch with the other through the medium of the corpus callosum which carries millions of connecting links between them. The severance of this membrane has permitted direct observation of the individuality of the two hemispheres. It leaves a still “normal” person “with two separate minds, that is,
with two separate spheres of consciousness.” If the key to humanization is a general delay of instinctive response with a consequent choice-factor introduced into a wide
range of behavioral decisions, then a possible source of the delay lies in the corpus callosum and/or any drug that can inhibit the full and complete communication or near-identity of action of the two hemispheres. If, for example, fatigue and exhilaration both produce schizoid symptoms, some quantitative measure of interaction between the cerebral hemispheres may define the normal schizotypical state of the hemispheric relationship; the norm itself would be genetically and/or socially induced on a continuing basis, providing typical human behavior. The recent association of high or
uncompensated adrenalin secretion with schizophrenic symptoms suggests offering this drug as a candidate for a humanizing auxiliary.
One is inclined to distrust so simple a solution to so fundamental a problem, even after posting the usual warning signs: that the process is more complicated than it appears; that we know next to nothing about the circulation of adrenalin and other
drugs with which it interacts in process; and that historical proofs of such an evolution are probably impossible.
One might as well suppose, while offering the same type of warnings, that an electrical change has brought about human behavior. If the Earth has gained charge in recent millennia, the human body may be operating in a hyper-electrical mode relative to the environment in which it evolved. This would be the case with the biosphere generally; insects, birds, and mammals are all sensitive to electromagnetic fields and changes
in them. The hominid might then become the ‘nervous human’ who turns upon the not-quite-quantavoluted hominids and trains them to be human, meanwhile through adaptations and interbreeding creating a new race, whose, members are
quantitatively distributed about the genetic norm of the ‘nervous human.’
As with every significant element in the quantavolutionary theory of homo sapiens schizotypus, the hypothesis of the physiological source of humanization is put forward to orient thought and method. The theory as a whole serves to show
where we can go when deprived of the assumptions of a uniformitarian external force field of evolution and of the free, long expanses of evolutionary time.
SIGNALING HORMONES
A logical candidate for mutation and environmental transformation in the chaotic period is the endocrinal system. It is an anciently derived collection of glands, separate from but connected with the brain, the nervous system, blood pressure,
metabolism, growth, sex, fear, and stress. It discharges numerous hormones that stimulate and regulate these systems. Its main components are the pituitary gland, the pancreas, and the adrenal cortex and medulla. Lionel Tiger places “phyletically prescribed environmental boundaries” around “sociogenic processes,” treating mainly of endocrinology [6]. The bio-social movement may help quantavolution much,
because of the intense scrutiny it gives to the logically necessary biological and social interface where the great change of humanization had to occur. The endocrinal system, especially the adrenal cortex, is stimulated by stress and establishes counter-stresses in the organism. For example, rats bred in the laboratory have smaller adrenal
glands and less resistance to stress, fatigue, and disease than wild rats. Their thyroid glands are less active and their sex glands develop earlier and permit greater fertility. They have smaller brains, are tamer, and are more tractable.
In humans, similar differences occur between people who are stressed by the environment and those who are not. New Yorkers usually have enlarged adrenal medullas, compared with the American population at large. Paranoid and obsessive traits, involving distortions of reality, are commonly observed among persons who suffer from an excess of adrenalin either as a result of great fear and anxiety or in consequence of inadequate suppressive and discharging chemicals and mechanisms.
Schizophrenia involves at least some separation of the ‘primary’ self from a second self, which includes part of the self and engages in profuse identifications with the outer world. Frequently observed in mind-workers, it evidences heavy pituitary
stimulation of the brain as well as insulin and adrenalin ‘excesses.’ The brain often becomes ungovernable owing to endocrinal disturbances. Notable, too, is the association of fear, aggressiveness, and sexuality in variations of the endocrinal system. It is then reasonable to suppose, for instance, that sexuality is determined more by the stresses of the quantavolutionary period than by the aboriginal oedipal complex or simple sexual drives.
Other modes of mutation or transformation also point to the importance of the endocrinal system in developing humanness. Solar radiation stimulates the adrenal system, both directly and indirectly. Hence, abruptly changed levels of solar and other types of extraterrestrial radiation may have prompted humanizing behavior. The types of social imprinting imposed upon the first generations of mankind and all generations since then were, so far as we can tell, the same; delusory, symbolic, obsessional, and aggressive; these are typical products of endocrinal excesses.
Finally, the obsessive will to mutate, to change one’s core-being down to the egg and sperm themselves, has been proposed by Freud as an evolutionary example of “the omnipotence of thought;” so strong a will would be more probably and capably
generated in individuals who are endocrinally excited. More than by growth of the brain, therefore, the accelerated development and passover of hominid to human in a
quantavolutionary period may be owed to the endocrinal system.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Niccolò Macchiavelli, the clear-headed founder of modern political science, was not above a little harmless hallucinating: When evening comes I return to the house and enter my writing-room, and on the threshold I take off my everyday clothes full of mud and mire and put on royal and court robes, and properly reclothed I enter the ancient courts of the men of antiquity where, received by them affectionately, I pasture on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born, where I am not too timid to speak
with them and ask them about the reasons for their actions; and they in their courtesy answer me; and for four hours of time I feel no weariness, I forget every trouble, I do not fear poverty, death does not dismay me: all of myself I transfer into them [1].
This is acceptable behavior. The relatives of a young farm lad who behaved so would think him rather mad. An atheist regards similar behavior in a working priest as a typical and appropriate feature of the great delusion of religion. It verges on the
delusory, the megalomanic, the impractical, the hallucinatory. Abandoning the living to identify with the dead; treating words as voices; speaking to several people a thousand years apart in defiance of time and space. The genius of Machiavelli lay in his ability — cultured or genetic— to abandon himself to his mad world and afterwards to return to everyday chores, but more than this, to draw upon his conversations for writing that has
been for several centuries a by-word for realism and the scientific approach to politics.
Identification — a set of projections of himself to a wide net of characters—and control, the ability to grasp them and organize them within his personal ego system: we see these qualities fairly sharply. But we also see a typical syndrome of human nature — the conventional and the alienated rubbing shoulders, so to say: the security blanket of his authoritative clothing that admitted him to the great company; the compelling obsessiveness to tie his life experiences into the mainstream of his culture; as well as the other qualities which I have already labeled. Thus does Schizotypicality crop up in Machiavelli.
A book could be easily filled with material to show that “People do the strangest things.” It is not difficult to prove that all humans are a bit crazy. Quirks, exhibitionism, phobias, dizziness, hang-ups, depressions, avoidance, suspiciousness, acid stomach, fear of abandonment, nightmares and other symptoms of stress and troubles of the mind abound in ordinary experience. To have psychological problems is normal, even universal. “Do you know, Martha, I think everybody is crazy, except thee and me,” said the Quaker to his wife, “and sometimes I’m not so sure about thee.” Most people can joke bout the prevalence of psychic disturbances. “It’s a funny world.” And it takes but a minute to get them to agree that politics, the world of public affairs, is a circus of abnormal behavior. An informant of the F. B. I. in the Abscam exposés, which recently disgraced a number of American officials, repeatedly declared on network television that “congressmen are crooks, perverts, and alcoholics.”
I do not intend to fish in these shallow waters. Down deep the big fish swim. There we can expect to locate the monstrous forms of an idea, that the human being is essentially and normally “insane,” that what we call normal human thought and behavior are derivatives, vitally important to be sure, of the same schizotypical core that manifests itself in those whom we label insane. If everybody, at some time, acts a bit crazy, it is
not because they are departing from their normal human state but because they are reaching for their normally insane nature.
Of course, then, the term “insane” should have to be dropped. “Insane” is a deviation from a standard, that of “sanity.” If the standard is “insane,” then the deviations must be something else—sanity? It is uncomfortable to say so, but, yes, in a way, although and until a better term should be found. For the insane of society are no more fixed and pure representatives of the core of human nature than the sane. All of humanity, sane or insane, normal or abnormal, typical or untypical, forms globally around the core of human nature that we can best describe with the word “schizoid.”
Human nature is a set of qualities to be found only among people. Of course we must keep a wary eye on the animal kingdom and its curators, the ethologists, who persist in finding identities between animals and men where once only large differences were thought to exist. We must avoid saying what is human nature, only to find that it is animal nature as well.
At the same time, we cannot get around the fact that our chromosomes and culture manage to fashion hundreds of differences between animals and humans. No matter how close the similarity, no animal trait is precisely typical of humans. We differ in every way conceivable, just as, for that matter, humans differ as individuals in every respect, no two people being alike. Withal this book must confine itself to those
qualities which are both distinctively human and important as such.
What is the nature of homo sapiens that he should be relegated to the status of schizotypicality? According to Pascal, “Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.” Mainly the nature of the human is that he is
either normally insane or insanely normal, or both. If either or both, he is not the man we thought he was. Whereupon we should analyze his nature more critically than has been the custom, and learn what makes him behave so, and what we can expect of him. Dunbar points out that “Through the study of the unusual or deviant, the obscurity of many normal processes is penetrated. Just as the mutant is the ultimate ancestor of the
race, so the deviant is often the common denominator of processes too complex to be broken down in the norm.” In searching for the roots of human nature, I have to use a number of concepts that are modern, psychiatric, and originally invented for the diagnosis of disease, beginning with the very word schizophrenia. However I also use the terms of old science, like human nature and instinct, and the jargon of the computer age, and of electricity and politics. For the assault upon the problem of the human constitution and its origins levy verbal troops from everywhere. If the assault is successful, there will be time enough to provide these with the linguistic uniform that new science invariably prescribes.
“Schizophrenia” is a widespread affliction. Its provenance is world-wide and has little regard for social class. Dunham reports its worldwide rates as “quite comparable,” with a prevalence between two and nine per thousand [13]. His narrow definition, of course, leaves us the task of showing that some 90% may be “schizotypical.” J. Murphy also found comparable rates of indigenously defined schizophrenia (nonhospitalized
cases) in Sweden (5.7 per 1000), Canada (5.6), and among Eskimo (4.4) and Yoruba (6. 8). “Explicit labels for insanity exist in these cultures…Almost everywhere a pattern composed of hallucinations, delusions, disorientations, and behavioral aberrations appear to identify the idea of ‘losing one’s mind,’ even though the content of these manifestations is colored by cultural beliefs” 14]. intellectuals are prone to the ailment; counselors at leading universities sometimes warn psychologists not to use their students as standards for psychological testing because they are skewed towards the
schizoid.
The rates of schizophrenia rise with rising indices of social disorganization, according to many studies [15]. One might guess that “wherever anything important is happening” schizophrenia rates will increase, beware of a departure from “normal” routines (but we shall have to explore later on whether “routines” themselves are “normal”). Beware, too, of the masking of increased schizophrenia when the non-routine and important happens; war and religion are often ways of containing the increase in madness by legitimizing them. One percent of the American population is markedly ill with “schizophrenia.” Since it is a gradient illness, the number may be defined upwards or downwards. Their family members may reach thrice this number, and are sorely disturbed and often “infected” by them; the victims of the disease are outnumbered, so to speak, by their public.
Borderline cases are in the millions. Practically anybody who reads a piece on the subject (and literature on the subject reaches into the mass media) finds the symptoms uncomfortably close to home.
And, of course, we shall be insisting throughout this book that everyone who is human is schizoid, that is, a borderline case. But this requires absorbing all mental disease into schizophrenia and then reabsorbing all schizophrenia into human nature.
With all this interest, there is a little corresponding illumination. It is an exasperating mental illness. Its symptoms are so diverse and irreconcilable that many savants deny that it exists. They make and unmake classifications often so as to order the mental
diseases by some abiding and knowable principle. Hyperclassification is a disease of ignorance. When a new family of phenomena is discovered (or admitted to discussion),
be it mental illness or sub-atomic particles or geological strata, a plethora of terms and categories is excreted.
* * * * * * * * * * *
From the beginning, Schizotypicality has been the essence of human nature, and schizophrenia has been the thrusting spearhead of human nature. These were established as such when mankind was “quantavoluted.” Their existence tends to
prove that mankind was created in a leap, and not evolved point by point over millions of years. On one day, in one place, and under knowable conditions, the hominid was transformed into the creature, homo sapiens, that perhaps should more properly be called homo sapiens schizotypus. Thence, by understandable and logical processes of adaptation, domination and succession, this creature came to represent the human race and still does. Mind, behavior, and institutions veer towards the schizophrenic. Not only is the disease of great importance in society, but actual schizophrenia is only the eminently visible surface of a heavily schizoid world.
SCHIZOPHRENIC AND SCHIZOTYPICAL
Examples from thousands of evident cases of normal and abnormal common mental aberrations from the psychiatry standpoint found in typical human mentation.
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(End first part of Notes On Binary Maps)
.HJK
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