Binary Neural Maps II.

This is the second 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 two of two.

I. by Jan Cox.

The idea of spending all your waking hours saying, “Blessed be the gods,” has permeated religion since ancient times.  A more recent version is the idea of continually “remembering yourself.”  Such directives for increasing awareness and consciousness have a captious effect on certain segments of humanity, people interested in unusual activities.  The methods are all presented on the basis of some metaphysical flaw in Man’s thinking that has to be fixed.  You think:  “What meaning!  If I could remember myself all the time, I’d be a different person.”  You would — but why?  The Real, neurobiological basis of such practices is the attempt to activate both sides of the Dialogue simultaneously.

The Dialogue is the simple awareness inside of everyone that there seem to be two people, two aspects and possibilities — either a voice and an ear, or an active and passive part of the intellect.  Without this internal Dialogue, you would not be aware that you’re conscious.  If not for the Dialogue, you would not be fully human.

At any particular moment, one side of the Dialogue is talking and one is listening.  But the Dialogue is not as simple as two humans having a conversation, or even two people talking at the same time.  It shifts at the speed of light, like a tongue and ear that switch places so fast you lose track of the fact that there is an active and passive part.  Examining the Dialogue is like looking at waves on the beach.  You can tell there are waves going in and out but when you try and follow them, the tide shifts and you see other waves going back and forth in the midst of it all.

Likewise, there is a certain feeling that goes along with attempting to “remember yourself.”  You start out thinking, “I’m supposed to remember I exist.  Okay, here goes — ‘I exist.'”  For a few seconds whatever you were thinking becomes passive.  Only now the voices are saying, “Am I self-remembering, am I remembering I exist?  Yeah, I am.”  Then you think, “Gee, I almost had a feeling there and now it’s gone because,” (here’s the shift) “there’s nothing unusual any more.  Thinking ‘I exist’ is now the active part of my ordinary dialogue.”

Instead of you thinking, “Boy, am I horny,” you’re thinking, “Boy, am I self-remembering.”  Whatever began to occur when you were remembering yourself drifts off and you forget about it.  The ear listening becomes the tongue speaking.  It’s surrealistic, like a Salvador Dali painting.  The tongue spreads out and turns into an ear and then you try to listen, and before you know it, suddenly the ear begins to move.  Now the ear has become a tongue and it is talking.  But when you try to stand aside and listen to what the tongue is saying, when you try to be aware of just a tongue or an ear, you can’t tell which one you’ve got.  In the midst of such surrealism, for a few fleeting seconds you remember, “I am here, I am here.”  That fleeting moment strikes a few people as being simultaneously spooky and very promising — and it does hold great promise — because it is an expansion of the operations of the brain.

On a more simplistic, less spooky level, ordinary people come up with intellectual handles, so-called mental supports and directives to help them alter their behavior.  People tell you to “Count to 10 when you get mad.”  A dieter says:  “The weight-loss clinic taught me to count calories and most important, they told me to tell myself all day long, ‘I am actually thin.'”  Employers tell their employees to be more alert and watchful.  Parents tell their kids:  “Watch it when you’re mowing the lawn, you keep cutting down the flowers.”

All of that is a simplistic expression of the desire to activate both sides of the Dialogue, to get more of your potential intellectual functions going simultaneously.  At the simplistic level there is some value to mental supports and directives:  if a worker is using equipment that can cut him, he certainly had better pay attention.  If you count to 10 when you get mad, you’ve got 10 or 15 seconds to calm down.  And, since no one can explain the dynamics of activating both sides of the Dialogue, humans come up with all kinds of names for it — everything from metaphysical experience to subliminal reinforcement of your efforts to change.  It comes out as something to help you improve your spiritual state or a way to become rich when it actually has a neuro-biological basis — the attempt to simultaneously activate both sides of the Dialogue.
While I am in this area, you should take very close note of a fact:  Although people can apparently change their behavior, they cannot change their intelligence.  That is, they cannot satisfy the Dialogue.  This is why no one is ever fully reformed, converted or recruited.  An alcoholic may actually quit drinking, but does the Dialogue quit drinking?  No.  The man may never touch a drop of alcohol again for as long as he lives, but he will never stop talking and thinking about drinking.  The Dialogue continues on and never hears a conclusive statement of change because it never has complete information.

Let’s just say for now that the nervous system receives incoming information, distills it and talks back to itself about what is going on.  Information comes in saying, “Do you notice how much better we feel down here below because we’ve quit drinking?”  And the brain notes, “I’m aware of that, go on,” (as though the brain is waiting, “Yeah, yeah,” on one foot).  “So, how come I haven’t calmed down?  How come I’m still thinking about drinking?  How come I can’t shut up about this?  If this is indeed over, why don’t I think it’s over?”  Religions, although they don’t much venture into telling people how to change their thinking, have recognized some part of what I am describing, to wit they tell their followers:  “You haven’t really changed until you have changed in your heart and mind.  You may have quit committing adultery, but if you still have lustful thoughts, you haven’t won the battle.”

But, there’s only one real change to a Real Revolutionist — to change behavior and undergo a parallel change in intelligence.  Only a Real Revolutionist can do something, walk away and forget about it as though indeed there were a period put on the end of a sentence.  Even a Revolutionist does it a lot less than you might think.  The whole idea may not be as full bore as you would imagine — rather than a .44 magnum, it’s closer to a .22 short.

But under ordinary conditions people don’t even have a pistol.  They may change their behavior but they cannot alter intelligence.  People can no doubt quit smoking, lose weight and stop beating their spouse.  The lazy can start running.  You are surrounded by people who can apparently change the way they behave, but none of them can change the way they think.  In the City it is not important to change your intelligence.  To do so is barely important to anybody.

Do you now realize why I’ve pointed out in our fictitious list of revolutionary rules of conduct that, for instance, if you changed you wouldn’t tell anyone?  It is not for any reason you can describe under ordinary conditions.  You must realize that if you actually change both sides of the Dialogue, what changes is not only your behavior, but also the way you think — and then the Dialogue has nothing else to say about the subject.  For you to then mention it means you’ve gone back and churned up your own account.  You’ve rubbed sandpaper over a wound that’s almost healed and pulled the cut back open — you went back and undid something that you did.

It would be bad enough to be caught flat-footed under social conditions where someone says, “Didn’t you do so and so?” and you have to make up an answer.  But to ever bring it up on your own, to say, “Yes, I used to drink.  Nasty habit.  Let me tell you how much better I feel.”  You just quit feeling better.  If you’ve got to talk about it you ain’t feeling better.  The Dialogue has started back.  Your account is being churned at no profit to you.  None.

Human speech itself is not detrimental to anything mortally feasible, but talking about what you’re doing does not go hand in hand with actually doing anything, because when you actually Do something both sides of the Dialogue get taken care of.  When you do something, when both your behavior did it and internally you did it, there is nothing to talk about.  That is what a real man of action is — just look at any of the archetypical strong, silent heroes in literature and the cinema.  Does John Wayne stand around talking about what he’s going to do?  People had wrestled with the puzzle of untying the Gordian Knot for years, fooled around, debated and came up with all kinds of theories.  Then Alexander came along and just whacked it apart with a sword.  There is a neuro-biological basis for such direct actions being silent ones.

The only way the Dialogue goes on is if there is some question on the subject.  In the broadest possible sense, binary consciousness is always asking, “Should I do this or that?”  That is the most basic question in the human nervous system, residing slightly above the query, “Will this kill me?”  The question of “Should I do this?” is a little less pressing to your physical health.  It becomes a matter of morals and spirituality.  It becomes an intellectual question:  “Is this the proper way for a human to behave?”
This question, the Dialogue, is continually present — even in the most ardent fanatic.  A person who fanatically believes something is evil is still subject to the operation of the human nervous system.  Perhaps they gave their life for their belief and proclaimed with their dying breath, “I still say it is evil.”  You might argue, “Now there was someone fully convinced.”  But they were not.  Perhaps they were more passionately half convinced than the person who killed them, but in the City, you can’t ever be more than half convinced because if you can be convinced something is right, you are also convinced that there is a “wrong” alternative.

If you knew what you were doing you wouldn’t have anything to say.  You wouldn’t die for anything, or else you would die for everything.  It’s not a matter of morality — if you knew what you were doing about any one thing, you’d be seeing around the corner where binary words do not quite cover matters.  When you actually Do something, there is no longer any discussion on your part — there is nothing to say.  You are no longer the supporter for:  (fill in the blank — goodness, truth, justice, mercy, whatever is “right” to you at the time).  You are no longer the defender of any of that.  Can you see how people could accuse someone involved with This of being shallow?  In a sense, you would be shallow because under certain conditions, with certain subjects, you would really have no Dialogue going on.

Let me expand upon my increasing use of the terms simplistic and complex.  When I speak of more complex attitudes and understanding I am not referring to an increase in ordinary mechanical ambiguity, haziness or convolution.  In the City they could say, “The further science goes, the more complex it becomes.”  That’s not what I’m talking about.  You might go from being a Baptist to being Presbyterian or even Episcopalian.  You might think you’re more complex because you have shed your simplistic views that, “If you go to the movies or have a cocktail you’re evil.”  But such ordinary views of complexity are not what I’m talking about.  What I’m talking about is not the opposite, but as always, it’s almost the opposite.

What I speak of as complex is an enrichment in known information.  In the City complexity seems to be a step backwards because complexity goes hand in hand with things becoming more obtuse and harder to understand.  People declare, “Yeah, I know they call this new invention progress, but they’re just trying to fix things that don’t need fixing.”  However, when your thinking actually becomes more complex it almost becomes more simplistic.

To do This Thing you have to personally and individually, intellectually, become more complex.  But it is not an encumbrance.  Complexity does not cloud up what you see.  You begin to see how there is more and more information piggybacked, hand in hand and dancing with what you apparently already knew.  Complex thinking is not a bunch of mystical words coming down in code from a dead Iranian rug merchant who lives in spirit on Pluto.  It’s just ordinary information — except you understand that there is additional, parallel information — you find out there are side bands on your TV that broadcast other programs.

The different views of ordinary sight literally overlap and where things overlap there is information not ordinarily seen.  A Revolutionist has more complex information, but the complex information is involved with the presently available information.  Enrichment is not new or extraneous, spooky or shocking.  The information that’s available right now becomes more complex.

The complexity does not make things more questionable and uncertain; it makes them more certain.  Complexity makes things more simplistic, more easily seen, that is, if you properly belong here.  Then, once you expand the view into greater certainty, you understand that taking the wide-range movie that’s been clipped for TV back to it’s original wide view is not the point — because when you reach that point you understand that behind every expansion is another expansion.  Behind every complexity is a further complexity.

Once you get the process going, once you get your own brain activated, you understand that everything you see is not the end of it.  The enrichment continues.  You might go on to something else, or you may drop the matter, but you do not leave it thinking, “Well, I sure got that case closed.”  If you think you closed the case then you closed something worse — you closed up you.

You can think more complexly; you can take that which you’ve looked at all your life and realize, “I’ve been looking through a little slit.  I can see now that this one little thing is connected with something else and now it makes a lot more sense.  It makes so much sense I don’t even know how much more I need to see.  It makes so much sense that I have just had a small-scale atomic mystical explosion that in the City would be good for a lifetime’s work.  I now see what I couldn’t see before.”  That is the increased complexity of intelligence that I refer to.

Here’s something else to consider.  If you find shopping to be a mechanical hobby, a low-level addiction (shopping is a fine hobby in the City) then with an enriched intelligence, you can take non-shopping as your hobby.  You can refrain from shopping and have just as much fun as if you were shopping.  It’s not to hurt yourself or to prove to the gods that you are not materialistic.  If you’re properly involved with This, then not doing a hobby is even more fun then doing it, at least in the beginning.

Now expand this.  Whenever you find one of your patterns getting interrupted, whenever you are accidentally caught on one foot — rather than be annoyed, you can grab the situation and willfully push the disruption even further — to the point where the disruptive behavior, vis a vis your past pattern, becomes a new pattern.  “Not shopping” can be the new hobby to replace “shopping” for some length of time.

Everyone’s nervous system is wired up to be annoyed when a behavioral pattern is interrupted.  It’s natural.  Dogs, possums, popes, priests, politicians and prune pickers all feel that way.  But someone doing This, rather than being annoyed and irritated, rather then trying to get back in balance, can take the disruption and use the energy — grab it up as a new hobby — make it a new habit.  If you miss your weekly shopping spree and have to stay home with your baby brother on Saturday afternoon, from then on, every Saturday afternoon make it a point to stay home with your baby brother.  Or, just stay around the house when you would normally go out shopping.  Just make the disruption the new pattern.  Don’t worry about how long a period of time you should do it — you don’t know how long you’re going to be alive.

Also, have you noticed that you can pick up a jar with coffee or any substance in it and with almost no thought just shake the surface even?  Let’s say you’ve been taking coffee out by the spoonful and you look down at the top one day and notice how the surface is bumpy and piled up against one side.  Without any conscious intention, without any particular art, you can take that jar and shake it so that the surface levels out.

A similar kind of shaking up goes on inside the human nervous system, and you can use it.  This happens in the City in a very mechanical and temporary fashion — through what appear to be tragedies, pressures and surprises — interruptions in patterns of behavior, patterns of your life.  It’s commonly known as stress.  Everyone has some knowledge of this.  You can see it in people when a close family member dies.  They go through the motions at the funeral, they welcome the people from out of town, but you can see they are in a state of shock.  People try to bring themselves out of it, or their relatives will say, “Hubert, we’re all hurt by this death, but you haven’t eaten or slept in two weeks.  Snap out of it.”  Normally they do.

To varying degrees, the same thing happens when you interrupt a pattern.  You’re mad because you have to stay home with baby brother and you can’t go shopping.  Your pattern is interrupted.  You may get so mad your mother says, “Ease up.  Good grief, you can’t die over a missed shopping spree.  You can go next week.”  This shaking up, this interference has a potential use for you people.  It’s almost as though you’re the uneven level of coffee and Life shakes the jar and puts you back at ground zero.  It’s almost as though you had a clean slate — as though you’re back to a more primordial level of uniformity.

In the City this shaking up does not matter.  Not only is it mechanical and temporary, it is not put to any use.  It’s generally looked at in a negative way:  “Snap out of it.  Get yourself back to where we recognize you.  Get out of the house, take a shower, eat.”  “Yeah, you’re right.”  Or, to someone pouting because they couldn’t go shopping, you say, “Come out of yourself.  I see how mad you are, but good grief, someone had to watch the baby and you know I had to go pick up your father at the airport.”

You can willfully use that because where other people find surprise or disappointment, pressure or interference, a Real Revolutionist finds opportunity.  It’s as though someone has shaken the pattern you’ve been operating under.  Somebody’s been taking coffee out of one side of you for the last few days and now the surface inside the jar is lopsided.  Life shakes the jar, and the disruption gives someone involved with This a chance to do something different.  Even a small thing can give you a chance.

It’s almost as though Life doesn’t know what it’s doing.  Of course, Life does know what it’s doing, but it’s as though Life doesn’t know that anybody’s going to get anything out of this little shake up.  There you are playing Hide And Go Seek with Life.  Life turns it’s back and says, “I’m going to grease up everyone’s saddle.  Most of you probably can’t get back on, but I’m going to turn my head anyway and count to 10.”  A few people realize, “I can use this,” and they wipe off the saddle right quick, jump on and ride off.  You have to move quickly because Life’s not fair.  Life’s not going to count to 10.  Life will go “Alright, 1,” and it will turn back around.  That’s when you holler, “Life’s unjust!”

I can’t speak for everything that Life does, but it just shows how dumb you are if you haven’t caught on that Life always counts to 1 and turns back around.  It’s a pattern, so you can’t say, (unless you’re ordinary) “Life is turning it’s head and giving me the chance to do something.  Let’s see, I’ve got until 10 to plot what I’m going to do.”  Life will turn it’s head and say, “1,” then turn back and say, “Gotcha.”  After Life has done that to you over and over and over don’t keep saying, “Life’s unfair.”  Give yourself a break.  Go look in the mirror and say, “Dumb.”  Don’t keep being surprised that Life says, “Alright, Hide and Go Seek — 1,” and time and time again it turns around.  Life ain’t gonna count to 10 — it’s gonna count to 1.

If you are looking for new tricks and great breakthroughs, take the minor interruptions to your patterns, every time something apparently goes wrong.  Most people don’t pay any attention to the patterns.  But quite often, one of them breaks up and you get annoyed.  It’s as though Life has shaken up your coffee jar and turned it’s head for a second.  This interruption is meaningless to Life in general, meaningless to ordinary people, and by and large it slips past your attention, but you can use it, profitably, to the point that you won’t question why you did it.  You will understand immediately, “This is the right thing to do.”  You don’t have to look for some kind of complicated way to do it.  Don’t try to go back and reestablish the old pattern; don’t try to straighten things up, that is, to get the uneven level back to where it was.  Just take the pattern that has been broken up, just take a small thing, and make it your new pattern.

“I never realized what a big hobby shopping was until I had to stay home one afternoon with the kid.  I realized I was annoyed.  Aha.  There’s a new hobby.”  (Not “being annoyed” — that’s already one of your sub-carrier hobbies.)  “The new hobby is ‘I won’t go shopping.’  Every Sunday afternoon when I usually go shopping I’m going to tell mom, ‘I want to stay here with baby brother.  I want you to take off, take a nap.  I know, you go shopping!  Let me stay here and spend quality time with my kid brother.”

That will produce what seems to be new energy.  It also opens up the potential for you to look through new holes, new cracks in the fabric of things.

Here is a story I made up.  A person spends a long period of time pursuing a desire to transcend the limits of ordinary consciousness and perception.  They are just sure there are other worlds, and they expend intense energy at great expense.  The day finally comes when they fall into a trance and become aware of this other world — but, the other world is exactly like this one.  What could be the meaning of this other world being exactly like this one?

*           *           *           *           *           *           *           *           *

 

II. by Alfred De Grazia:

We have already ruled out most of the traits that scholars have joined to the ladder of evolution — skeletal, muscular, sensory, alimentary, sexual and lingual pharyngeal mutations –as the crux of humanization. We have ruled out as well the growth of the cranium. We should also rule out the piling up of reinforced primate experience in a growing storage-box brain that would eventually begin to expel human products. One need only contrast the races of mankind to see how little difference so many changes do make in psychology and behavior. With skin color from black to pink, hairiness from hirsute to hairless bodies, height from the very tall Watusi to the neighboring Pygmy, nose from flat to hooked, head from broad to long, cranial capacity from 830 to 2000° cc., differences of dentition, of blood groups, and so on, homo schizo has nevertheless come to possess a similar array of psychological qualities whatever his outward appearances. We should look most closely for signs of self-awareness, of a split ego, for from this, we believe, and only from this, would come the flood of fear, the insatiable demand for self-control, and the outward movement of this need to control, taking the form of showers of displacements that would be transformable into human conduct. Symbolism would be the necessary external manifestation of the inward symbolizing needed to tie together the ego that had been split asunder. We would expect our newly quantavoluted person to behave recognizably as an imaginary Hominid ‘X’, close to the chimpanzee, in that his basic needs would be the same. Much of his behavior, too, might appear instinctive. What would become quickly a critical difference would be an unending stream of delayed and unrecognizable stimuli in great numbers. He could be interpreted as an animal trying in amazing ways to consummate a new kind of stimulus-response, where the responses were delayed, as much as he might try to speed them up. He would be an action-delayed, hence decision craving creature. Whatever its cause, the character of the mutation may have been quite simple, confounding high-flown speculations that have adorned debate about human nature over the centuries. It may have been what Dobzhansky called a polygenic mutation, carried over into many chromosomes, providing a slight quantitative, not ‘qualitative’ change, but yet a change with great effects. A systemic delay of microseconds in overall signal transmission in the brain might act as a suppressant of instinctual response, set up an echo of the self, and excite perennial hyperendocrinalism. The gestalt of creation (treated in the next chapter) would promptly take effect. Besides mutation, it is conceivable that an environmental constant may have changed, provoking a human response that must continue as long as the constant remains unchanged. Further the human mind may have quantavoluted culturally because of experiences so intense and memorable that a new kind of creature emerged from them. We must look into these possibilities more closely. But before we do so, I ought to stress the importance of natural catastrophes as a background and source of quantavolutions in biology.

The closest that we can come to distinguishing a key factor in humanization is an instinct-delay system operating in the brain but serviced by the body’s electrical and hormonal system. This could be called the humanizing factor. In baseball language, the animal in us has been forced to touch base several times before completing the circuit and scoring, and so the human ball game is on. A close investigation of instinct-delay (see Homo schizo II) emerged with the theory that it is an effect of the specialization of the brain, with consequent transmission delays in coordination of the total brain and organism, and that there is an overcrowding of consciousness because of a spillover of repeatedly insistent messages taking alternative routes for delivery or ending up in functional cul de sac. I shall try to formulate the process of instinct delay here in a manner that will assist in seeking the mechanism of humanization. Instinct-delay (D) is a function or ratio of the product of the mass of the brain tissue requiring service (M), and the specialization thereof (S), to the product of access facilities (the number of receptors or docks and the number of routes pursued by messages) (A), the input of electro-chemical signals (E), and the velocity of the work of transmission (V). That is, D = f(MS/AEV). When all other variables are held

constant:

1. If the mass of the brain increases, instinct-delay (D) will usually increase.

2. If specialization of the brain increases, D will usually increase.
3. If the number of message docks and the number of routes to them increase, D will usually decrease.

4. If the input of electro-chemical signals increases, D will usually decrease.

5. If the signals move faster, with less impedance, D will usually decrease.

However, the variables are not entirely independent, although we do not know the extend of their interdependence. Thus, an increase in brain tissue may not bring a proportional increase in docks and routes available to supply the tissue. Nor will the larger brain necessarily be supplied by an increased input of hormones, which come from several places, or electrical charges, to transport messages. Nor do we know whether the electric and chemical signals will carry on with their former speed or will move less rapidly, unless some other factor increases their speed (which may, for example, be an electromagnetic change in the state of the environment).

That is, we cannot identify precisely the agents, nor the cause of their behavior. All that we can feel confident of, at this point, is that there are here the rudiments of an explanation for instinct-delay, hence self-awareness, hence humanization. We believe, too, that such a system is capable of empirical verification and modification. Further, it seems to answer a need in science for a concept that will go along with most of what is known of human development and human nature, and will not lead us astray as we seek to understand how mutation and other mechanisms could have occurred. Finally the concept will pay a large profit when it correlates with the mental and cultural behavior of the human during and after humanization.

External events can introduce continuous and to some extent permanent changes (operating as a new constant), if the events and the conditions they bring about persist. So long as heavy noise, air pollution, rapid movement, and other high-stress life conditions of New Yorkers are constant, New Yorkers will tend to have swollen adrenals. Or, so long as the proportion of oxygen in the air of the High Andes is relatively low, the people there will have unusually developed lungs. A connection of the endocrine system with megavitamin therapy has registered effects upon schizophrenia through facilitating the physiological discharge of adrenalin. A diminished oxygen supply or incompatibility of oxygen type in the atmosphere may introduce schizoid symptoms to some part of the population. The brain needs oxygen not only to survive but to energize neuro-transmissions throughout its

domain. In schizophrenics the oxygen level in the brain is sharply lower than normal. Further, frontal lobe brain activity is low. Thought dissociation may be produced by oxygen deficiency in the frontal lobe. A radiation storm; a material fall-out; a sweep-out or in-take of atmosphere in transactions with extraterrestrial bodies; intense electrical storms; and the dropping of canopies (opening of skies) can drastically reform the atmosphere. They might change atmospheric constants abruptly or over a period of time. The new atmosphere forces upon the hominids a new ‘norm’ of response. The new norm is, at least among some individuals, within the range of genetic capability. The adaptable survivors behave according to the new norm, which is to say that they now behave as “humans.”

The reconstructed atmospheric constant may affect most importantly the fetal environment of the humans-to-be. This happens when the new chemicals in the air find their way into the hormonal food supply of the fetus. And/or the new constant presents its demands for changed physiology and behavior upon the infant after birth. Man, and all life, lives off a radiation diet that is generally unperceived. Even today, delicate scientific instruments are required to detect radiation, and the symptomatology of radiation poisoning is not very clear, or where clear does not readily name its precise cause. The atmosphere of chaos was a mutator. The sun of the later Solarian Age may not have been. Nevertheless, the finally settled atmosphere has played a role in humanization. Legends around the world speak of a primordial cloudy sky. The opening of the skies would increase radioactive influences from perhaps still nearby and hot planetary bodies, and also and especially from the sun. Exposure to helio-radiation (including ultra-violet rays) generally increases physical resistance, relieves arthritic and muscular pain, lends a feeling of well-being, stimulates ergosterol and hence Vitamin D production, counteracts rickets and respiratory disease, and kills bacteria and fungi of the skin. It promotes the healing of wounds and athletic performance; it increases the rate of basal metabolism. All of these occur at the price of occasional skin cancers, and possibly of still unknown deep changes [33]. Although they would contribute to a higher general level of health and activity, they would not create the human. Larger events are required.

The Earth’s geomagnetic field has come under intense study in the past few years, because evidence now available points to reversals in the past. Whether the field has reversed quickly and often, as quantavolutionists believe, or gradually and rarely, as evolutionists think, a reversal of the North Magnetic Pole introduces as interval during which cosmic rays can descend upon the Earth unhindered and bring about mutations in great numbers. Some studies have indicated a coincidence of reversals with waves of biosphere extinction. B. Heezen, pioneer oceanographer (for it is on the rocks of the ocean bottom that magnetism can be most readily traced), has speculated that the last reversals was before the time of man. However, the time of man has been pushed back well beyond this period in conventional theory, and in quantavolutionary theory the times of the last several reversals are well within the human span, one having occurred in the eight century B.C. according to an examination of the orientation of iron particles

in pottery of that age [34]. Yet another reversal is said to have occurred around four to six thousand years ago in connection with large biosphere and natural destruction [35]. Furthermore, the geomagnetic field (GMF) is declining slowly. I have already introduced the work of Dubrow on the subject. If the decline has been exponential from some past peak, as I believe and will be discussing with Earl R. Milton in a forthcoming book, then the hominid was subjected to a sharply different paleomagnetic field. So we must ask ourselves whether the relaxed grip of the electromagnetic field disorganized the hominid brain and in effect created homo schizo. For he would be presented with an intellectual freedom in the form of a bewildering number of options for action instead of the more closed system of stimulus-response accorded Hominid ‘X.’ The ‘constant’ is still changing, but slowly, today. Still the frequency of heart attacks has been convincingly associated with internationally collected measurements of geomagnetic activity as registered by magnetometers.

It may be possible, too, that many animals, including especially the primates, acquired a loosened behavioral potential at the same time, in the same way. Relieved of the heavier GMF, the minute electrical charges that operate the central nervous system may have stepped up their activity, relatively speaking, and, crowding the access points, delayed instinctive reactions and promoted displacements. An electric shock, administered experimentally or therapeutically (at this supposed new level of the human mind), provokes mental activity (mania), hallucinations, and amnesia, while reducing depression and anxiety. ECS [Electroconvulsive shock] leaves a permanent change in brain excitability.

That a marked change in the Earth’s electrical field would have affected the human brain is not difficult to accept. We have mentioned that much testimony on a primordial canopy of clouds exists, at the time of the first god Uranus (known by many names.)[36] The sky cover was probably removed in the time of human creation. The results would include a new and constant heavy bombardment of the biosphere with cosmic and solar particles. What legends frequently describe as the primordial chaos could have been a combination of actual celestial turbulence, ground bombardment, and mass biosphere mutations and extinctions, associated with the shock of being transmuted from hominid to homo. The Hebrew Genesis is by no means unique in referring to this concatenation of events. Nor does this conclude speculation about the possibilities of the ancient skies. If large bodies transacted in close encounter or collision with Earth, as is argued elsewhere in the Quantavolution Series, large electrical charges would be exchanged between the bodies. The Earth could either lose or gain immense charges, sufficient to affect deeply the human nervous system. Then the proto-human must cope either with an enhanced or lesser charge on the Earth’s surface or in the atmosphere, either as a sudden terminator event or as a new constant or both.

At this point of the discussion, the multiplicity of possibilities begins to bewilder and I would, if I could, sing the praises of “Occam’s razor.” Would the hominid mind split and develop instinct-delay and the poly-ego from any one or all of these possibilities? Or would man becomes stupefied, more hominidal, instead of electrified, confused, and energized? Reasoning ex post facto, which is to say, begging the question, I shall have to say that since he became the latter, whatever happened, even combinations of opposites, worked to the same end of instinct-delay and poly-ego problems.

   In Seneca’s ancient tragic drama, Thyestes, the chorus chants of the shocking fiery passage of Phaeton in his solar chariot, when each and every constellation deviated:

This is the fear, the fear that knocks at the heart

That the whole world is now to fall in the ruin

Which Fate foretells; that Chaos will come again

To bury the world of gods and men; that Nature

A second time will wipe out all the lands

That cover the earth and the seas that lie around them

And all the stars that scatter their bright lights

Across the universe [37].

A fifth means of transforming hominid into human nature might be by the social imprinting of shock upon the individual. The hominids again afford the basic genetic capability and a preadapted habitat. In this case, however, natural disasters inflict shocks upon the hominid beyond its ‘normal’ tolerances of stimulation. The shocks in themselves are the grossly exaggerated homologues of the shocks of ‘normal’ existence.

They take the form of a celestial scene inhabited by new symbolic references and other mind-openers; of terrorizing high-energy expressions including spectres and pandemonium; of crushing and effacing effects that are prolonged and of high intensity; of the ranging of the natural elements. The shocks are so traumatic that the victims adopt response behaviors that become patterned as the essence of human nature. The traumatized catastrophical survivors retain the memories, but distort and use them in ways that are typically human. Most importantly, they devise in the very process of their own creation the social means of perpetuating their own changed mentalities and behavior. Human nature is then and thereby guaranteed by a collectivity of humans formed into a group or society. The memorial generations transmit and adapt new traumatic and ‘normal’ tribulations to the fixated human nature.

In explaining the development of the human mind in relation to the catastrophes of Venus and Mars in the period 1453 to 687 B.C. Velikovsky pushes beyond Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, and Eliade with the concepts of collective amnesia and aggression [38]. Mankind is destructively aggressive as a result of suppressing its memories of natural disasters. “The inability to accept the catastrophic past is the source of man’s aggression… Freud did not come to understand the true nature of the Great Trauma — born in the Theogony or battle of the planetary gods with our Earth, brought more than once to the brink of destruction — which was the fate of Mercury, Mars, and Moon. Freud died in exile from his home, when a crazed worshiper of Wotan was preparing another Götterdämmerung.”[39]

The view which I am setting forth embraces this criticism of Freud and the concepts of collective amnesia or repression concerning catastrophes. Also, aggression is to be correlated with this suppression, and the techniques of aggression are in a direct sense analogized unconsciously and consciously to events witnessed in the sky. Nevertheless I perceive social imprinting as at best an auxiliary source of human nature, an intensifier, which itself needs to be intensified from time to time by fresh natural (or man-made) catastrophe. The Middle Bronze age civilizations, 3500 years ago, whose trials Velikovsky describes so vividly, were pre-adapted to catastrophes; their societies behaved in ways already learned, and with institutions inherited from prior disasters. Ultimately, though, with the earliest disasters, a physiological change had to take precedence. Even in the genetic humanization of man, catastrophe was an on-looker, carrier, and psychological and cultural reinforcer of gene-fracturing elements.

John V. Myers and Warner B. Sizemore declare “that the disintegration of objective reality during cosmic catastrophe could produce subjective states similar to those of schizophrenia, and that the disintegration of subjective reality in the schizophrenic is accompanied by visions of cosmic catastrophe.”[40] I argue that the reality recognized by the first human was catastrophic and his mind was as well. There was never — and here I think we diverge from a common view of Velikovsky and a great many others, including conventional long-term evolutionists — a clean minded, rational evolved human whose mind was ‘blown’ by catastrophic experiences: the recurrent disasters proved to homo schizo that his vision of the world was correct!

It is perhaps apparent to the reader by now that I prefer, as a ‘holding position,’ a complicated mix of several means of humanization, altogether happening within a very short period of time. The mutation of an individual hominid is given prominence generally in the scenarios to come. But it is not difficult to switch from the one to the other, or to stress a combination. The changed atmospheric constant as the mode of humanization has the value of inherent continuity, and is as efficient as genetic mutation in explaining generational inheritance; also it permits humanization to occur simultaneously among many hominids at the same time, in the same month or a few years. We might begin a search for humanizing mechanisms that are present in the modern atmosphere but would not have been present in an atmosphere in which hominids could thrive.

The branches of the human race have changed in some respects, mostly cosmetically, since the cosmic beginnings of homo schizo. But the basic ways of behaving as human were determined in the midst of great crises: the interruption of the Earth’s motions, the loss of electrical charge, the dropping of the immense cloud canopies in deluges, and the first openings of the sky. An allotment of a thousand years would have been sufficient for these tremendous experiences to bring about humanization.

Even while mutations were abundantly occurring among all species, a single group of hominids, largely potentiated as humans beforehand, in distress and in terror, would find amongst themselves individuals of flexible, if erratic, genetic constitution, who were capable of expanded symbolic behavior and signaling various interpretations of the new giant forces of the environment.

The same group would become capable of managing its newly installed communication system, and then lend its cooperative forces to the evolving interpretation of the universe, the aboriginal cosmology. The group would be driven to adopt the new system even before all of its members shared the mutant genes. In the endeavor to ease their pains and anticipate the sharing of the inheritable traits, it is possible that non-mutants actually mutated themselves by will power, adding a consistent but different emotional mechanism to the hereditary pool of the human-dominated group. Whereas the first mutants would operate by genetic instructions, the second kind of mutants would work out genetically a mode of hyper-excitation of the endocrinal system. This would lend the group an element of obsessive emotionality as soon as genetic miscegenation began. The social imprinting of shock would come about not by itself alone but in the course of executing symbolic references of the first mutant type, in accepting the obsessive drive of the second mutant type, and in the development of followership among the erstwhile normal band, consisting of sophisticated crowd behavior already possessed by hominids. All elements would be caught up in the atmospheric reformation. The mutations were consistent with it; they were in fact created by it and responsive to it so that, in a fundamental way, the correspondence of the new world with the new being was assured. Although it did not eradicate the old ‘normal beings,’ the radicalized atmosphere punished them and preferred those who responded readily to the new constants.

 

(End second part of Notes On Binary Maps.)