Few of our ancestors were perfect ladies or gentlemen; the majority of them were not even mammals.
Any multi-cellular organism must, if it is to survive, contain a hard-wired bio-survival circuit, which very simply programs an either-or choice: GO FORWARD to the nourishing, the protective, or GO BACK, away from the threatening, the predatory.
Any mammal hooks the bio-survival circuit to the first imprinted bio-survival object: the teat. Bio-survival and orality are deeply blended in all mammals, including domesticated primates (humans). This is why, despite the Cancer Terror, an estimated 30,000,000 Americans still smoke cigarettes... Others chew gum (spearmint, juicy fruit, even sugar-free: something for every taste), bite their fingernails, gnaw their knuckles, scrunch pencil stubs, eat more than they need (Potato chips, anyone? a Mars bar maybe? pretzels, peanuts, cashews, do you want the cheese and crackers with your beer, Mac? And do try the canapes, Mrs. Miller). Some chew their lips, gobble tranks and uppers, even munch their mustaches. What goes on in the bedroom is known to the Kinsey Institute and anyone who has seen a porn film.
How important is this oral imprinting? We read of a baby giraffe whose mother was accidentally killed by a jeep immediately after birth. The neonate, following hard-wired genetic programs, "imprinted" the first object that roughly fit the giraffe archetype—the jeep itself. He followed the machine around, vocalized to it, attempted to suckle from it, and, when adult, tried to mate with it. Similarly, Konrad Lorenz tells of a gosling who accidentally imprinted a ping-pong ball and spent his adult life, indifferent to female geese, attempting to sexually mount ping-pong balls.
As Charles Darwin noted:
In our maturer years, when an object of vision is presented to
us which bears any similitude to the form of the female
bosom...we feel a general glow of delight which seems to
influence all of our senses...
The ancients pictured the great mother goddess Diana of Ephesus with literally dozens of breasts and St. Paul reports hearing her worshippers chanting rapturously "Great is Diana!" There is virtually no great artist who has not left us a portrait, or many portraits, of the nude female form, especially the breasts; and even in non-human scenes, curves are introduced wherever possible. Architects break the Euclidean straight line to introduce such curves at the slightest pretext—arches, Moorish domes, etc.
The curves of the suspension bridge are necessitated by Newton's laws ("Gravity's rainbow," in Pynchon's phrase) but, still, these double catenary curves are esthetically pleasing for the reasons Darwin suggests. As for music—where did we first hear it, who sang or hummed to us, and against what part of her body were we held?
Mountain climbers are reduced, like Mallory, to saying "Because it's there," when trying to explain their compulsion to ascend those conic peaks.
Our eating utensils (oral gratification tools) tend to be or curved. Square plates or saucers look "campy" or strange.
UFOs come in a variety of shapes, but the most popular are the oval and conic.
Freudians suggest that opiate addiction is an attempt to return to the womb. In keeping with our theory, it is more likely that opium and its derivatives return us to the "safe space" on the bio-survival circuit, the warm, snug place of bio-security; opiates may trigger neuro-transmitters characteristic of breast-feeding.
In summary: the bio-survival circuit is DNA-programmed to seek a comfort-safety zone around a mothering organism. If a mother isn't present, the closet substitute in the environment will be imprinted. For the orphan giraffe, a four-wheeled jeep was chosen to stand in for the four-legged mother. The gosling who could not find the round, white body of the mother-goose fixated a round, white ping-pong ball.
The "wiring" of this circuit, in primitive form, occurred in the first organisms, between three and four billion years ago. In the modern human, this structure remains in the brain stem and in the autonomic ( "involuntary ") nervous system, where it is interconnected with the endocrine and other life-support systems.
This is why disturbances on this circuit act "all over the body at once" and generally take the form of physical symptoms rather than "mental" symptoms and usually get referred to the M.D. instead of the psychiatrist.
It must be stressed that we are still in a primitive stage of evolution and conditions on this planet are quite brutal. Radical pediatricians insist, with good evidence, that childbirth by conventional means in a conventional hospital is almost always traumatic for the newborn—creates a bad imprint, in our language. Our child-rearing methods are far from ideal also, adding bad conditioning on top of bad imprinting. And the general violence of our societies to date—including wars, revolutions, civil wars and the "undeclared civil war" of the predatory criminal class in every "civilized" nation—keeps the first circuit of most people in an emergency state far too much of the time.
In 1968, a U.S. Public Health survey showed that 85% of the population had one or more symptoms that we would call bad first-circuit imprinting or conditioning. These symptoms included dizzy spells, heart palpitations, wet palms and frequent nightmares.
This means that 85 out of the next 100 people you meet should be regarded as, more or less, "the Walking Wounded."
This is the first level of meaning in our brutal, cynical proposition that most people are almost as mechanical as sci-fi robots. A man or woman entering a new situation with the anxiety chemicals of a frightened infant coursing through the brain stem is not going to be able to observe, judge or decide anything very accurately.
And this is why Gurdjieff said, in his own jargon, that people are asleep and having nightmares.
"FAIRNESS? DECENCY? HOW CAN YOU EXPECT FAIRNESS OR DECENCY ON A PLANET OF SLEEPING PEOPLE?" — G.I. Gurdjieff
This was the viewpoint of the earliest Christians, later condemned as heretics (Gnostics) by the Roman bureaucrats. The Gospel of Truth, first century, says bluntly that history is a nightmare:
... as if (mankind) were sunk in sleep and found themselves in
disturbing dreams. Either (there is) a place to which they are
fleeing...or they are involved in striking blows, or they are
receiving blows themselves... sometimes it is as if people were
murdering them...or they themselves are killing their
neighbors...
To these first Christians, as to the Buddhists, awakening literally meant coming out of this nightmare of terrifying fantasies. In our terminology, it means correcting the editing that cause us to behave and perceive like very badly (inappropriately) wired robots and suddenly seeing the unedited world.
It must be emphasized that this circuit, being the oldest in evolutionary development, is the most mechanical, and the most rapid. One is not conscious of time at all on the bio-survival circuit. Observe the speed of your dog's reaction at the first sound of an intruder: the threatening bark, and the movement of the whole body to alert status, is automatic. Then the dog starts taking in other cues, to determine how this particular intruder should be treated.
As Robert Ardrey reports the remarks of primatologist Ray Carpenter, to understand this part of your brain...
Imagine that you are a monkey and you're running along a
path past a rock and unexpectedly meet face to face another
animal. Now, before you know whether to attack it, to flee it,
or to ignore it, you must make a series of decisions. Is it
monkey or non-monkey? If non-monkey, is it pro-monkey or
anti-monkey? If monkey, is it male or female? If female, is she
interested? If male, is it adult or juvenile? If adult, is it of my
group or some other?... You have about one fifth of a second
to make all these decisions, or you could be attacked.
The bio-survival program first attaches to the safe space around the mother (oral imprint), and then with age moves further and further out, exploring what is safe and what is not. Without hard-wired genetic programs (i.e., automatic programs) this second stage would be impossible, and no mammal would ever leave the teat. The hard-wired programs act automatically (UNCONSCIOUSLY) because if you had to stop and think out each situation, you would be eaten by the first predator.
Of course, the imprint is made by chance — by the circumstances at the moment of imprint vulnerability. (Recall the gosling who imprinted the ping-pong ball.) Some imprint bravery, inquisitiveness and the exploratory drive; others imprint timidity, info-phobia (fear of the unpredictable) and withdrawal, of which the extreme case is the sad imprint called autism or childhood schizophrenia.
All of which is robotic, until one learns how to reprogram and re-imprint one's own brain circuits. In most cases, such meta-programming skill is never acquired. It all goes by in a flash, on mechanical auto-pilot, in zero time. "I just found myself doing it," says the soldier as he is being court-martialled for cowardice or decorated for bravery.
Of course, on top of the hard-wired imprinting of the bio-survival circuit comes "softer" conditioning. This allows the safe-space perimeter to be generalized outward from the mother's body to the pack or tribe—the "extended family."
Every social animal has, in addition to the Darwinian "instinct" (genetic program) of self-preservation, a similar "instinct" to protect the gene-pool. This is the basis of altruism, and social animals could not survive without it. Wild dogs (and wolves) bark to warn the rest of the pack that an intruder is coming. Your domesticated dog identifies you as a pack-leader; he barks to warn you that an intruder is coming. (He also barks, of course, to warn the intruder that he is ready to fight
for his territory.)
As civilization has advanced, the pack-bond (the tribe, the extended family) has been broken. This is the root of the widely diagnosed "anomie" or "alienation" or "existential anguish" about which so many social critics have written so eloquently. What has happened is that the conditioning of the bio-survival bond to the gene-pool has been replaced by a conditioning of bio-survival drives to hook onto the peculiar tickets which we call "money".
Concretely, a modern man or woman doesn't look for biosurvival security in the gene-pool, the pack, the extended family. Bio-survival depends on getting the tickets. "You can't live without money," as the Living Theatre troop used to cry out in anguish. If the tickets are withdrawn, acute bio-survival anxiety appears at once.
Imagine, as vividly as possible, what you would feel, and what you would do, if all your sources to bio-survival tickets (money) were cut off tomorrow. This is precisely what tribal men and women feel if cut off from the tribe; it is why exile, or even ostracism, were sufficient punishments to enforce tribal conformity throughout most of human history. As recently as Shakespeare's day the threat of exile was an acute terror signal ("Banished!" cries Romeo, "the damned use that word in Hell!")
In traditional society, belonging to the tribe was bio-security; exile was terror, and real threat of death. In modern society, having the tickets (money) is bio-security; having the tickets withdrawn is terror.
Welfare-ism, socialism, totalitarianism, etc. represent attempts, in varying degrees of rationality and hysteria, to re-create the tribal bond by making the State stand-in for the gene-pool.
Conservatives who claim that no form of Welfare is tolerable to them are asking that people live with total bio-survival anxiety and anomie combined with terror. The conservatives, of course, vaguely recognize this and ask for "local charity" to replace State Welfare — i.e., they ask for the gene-pool to be restored by magic, among people (denizens of a typical city) who are not genetically related at all.
On the other hand, the State is not a gene-pool or a tribe, and cannot really play the bio-survival unit convincingly. Everybody on Welfare becomes paranoid, because they are continually worrying that they are going to get cut off ("exiled") for some minor infraction of the increasingly incomprehensible bureaucratic rules. And in real totalitarianism, in which the bogus identification of the State with the tribe is carried to the point of a new mysticism, the paranoia becomes total.
Real bonding can only occur in face-to-face groups of reasonable size. Hence, the perpetual attempt (however implausible in industrial circumstances) to decentralize, to go back to the tribal ethos, to replace the State with syndicates (as in anarchism) or affinity-groups (Reich's "Consciousness III"). Recall the hippie crash-pad of the sixties, which lives on in many rural communes. Back in the real world, the tickets called "money" are the bio-survival bond for most people.
Anti-Semitism is a complex aberration, of many facets and causes, but in its classic form (the "Jewish Bankers' Conspiracy") it simply holds that a hostile gene-pool controls the tickets for bio-security. Such paranoia is inevitable in a money economy; junkies have similar myths about who controls the supply of heroin. Thus, as anti-Semitism has declined in America, the "Bankers' Conspiracy" lives on in a new form. Now the villains are old New England WASP families, the "Yankee Establishment." Some Leftists will even show you charts of the genealogies of these WASP bankers, the way anti-Semites used to show Rothschild genealogies.
C.H. Douglas, the engineer and economist, once made up a chart, which he showed to the MacMillan Commission in 1932 when they were discussing money and credit regulation. The chart graphed the rise and fall of interest rates from the defeat of Napoleon in 1812 to the date the Commission met in 1932, and on the same scale, the rise and fall of the suicide rate in that one twenty-year period.
The two curves were virtually identical. Every time the interest rate went up, so did the suicide rate; when interest went down, so did suicide. This can hardly be "coincidence." When interest rises, a certain number of businessmen go bankrupt, a certain number of workers are thrown out of their jobs, and everybody's bio-survival anxiety generally increases.
Marxists and other radicals are urgently aware of such factors in "mental health" and hence scornful of all types of academic psychology which ignore these bio-survival issues. Unfortunately, the Marxist remedy—making everybody dependent for bio-survival on the whims of a State bureaucracy—is a cure worse than the disease.
Bio-survival anxiety will only permanently disappear when world-wide wealth has reached a level, and a distribution, where, without totalitarianism, everyone has enough tickets. The Hunger Project, the idea of the Guaranteed Annual Income, Douglas' National Dividend plan, etc. represent groping toward that goal. The ideal can only be achieved in a technology of abundance.
Extreme cases—persons who take their heaviest imprint on the first (oral) circuit—tend to be viscerotonic, because this imprint determines lifelong endocrine and glandular processes. Thus, in extreme they are "baby-faced" in adult life, never lose their "baby-fat," are plump and round and gentle, etc. They are easily "hurt" (threatened: terrified) by disapproval of any sort, because in the baby-circuit of the brain, disapproval suggests extinction by loss of the food supply.
We all have this circuit and need to exercize it periodically. Cuddling, sucking, hugging etc. and daily playing with (a) one's own body (b) another's body and (c) the environment, are perpetually necessary to neurosomatic-endocrine health. Those who deny such primordial functions because of rigid imprinting on the Third (rationalistic) or Fourth (moralistic) circuit tend to become "dried up," "prune-faced," unattractive, "cold," and muscularly rigid.
The baby-functions of playing with one's own body, another's body and the environment continue throughout life in all animals. This "playfulness" is a marked characteristic of all conspicuously healthy individuals of the sort Maslow calls "selfactualizers." If this initial imprint is negative—if the universe in general and other humans in particular are imprinted as dangerous, hostile and frightening—the Prover will go on throughout life adjusting all perceptions to fit this map. This is what is known as the "Injustice Collector" syndrome (in the language of Dr. Edmund Bergler). The female members of this imprint goup become Radical Feminists; the male members are less organized and can be found in fringe groups of the extreme Left and extreme Right.
Such a pattern is unconscious in three ways. It is unconscious because automatic: it happens without thought, as a robot program. It is also unconscious because it began before the infant had language and hence it is pre-verbal, inarticulate, felt rather than considered. And it is unconscious because it is all-over-thebody-at-once. Specifically, it is characterized by the Respiratory Block first noted by Wilhelm Reich: a chronic muscular armoring that prevents proper, relaxed breathing. Popular speech recognizes this state as "being up-tight."
All of the most successful reimprinting techniques (therapies) for this kind of chronic anxiety work on the body first, not on the "mind." The Reichians, Rolfers, Primal Scream therapists, Orr's "rebirthers," Gesaltists, etc. all know, whatever specialized jargons they may use, that a bad bio-survival imprint can only be corrected by working on the biological being itself, the body that feels perpetually vulnerable and under attack. Even Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) begins by inducing the patient to relax and breathe easily.
As Gregory Bateson has pointed out. Konrad Lorenz acquired his marvelous insights into the imprinting process—for which he won the Nobel prize—by consciously imitating the body movements of the animals he was studying. Watching Lorenz lecture, one could "see" each animal he discussed, because Lorenz would dramatize or "become" that animal, in the manner of a Method Actor.
Even earlier, Wilhelm Reich discovered that he could understand his patients with remarkable clarity by imitating their characteristic body movements and postures. The bio-survival imprints, especially traumatic ones, are all-over-the-body, frozen (in Reich's metaphor) in chronic muscle and gland mechanisms.
If you can't understand somebody's "irrational" behavior, start by observing their breathing. You will very quickly get an idea of what is bothering them. This is why all schools of yoga—Buddhist, Hindu or Sufi—place such emphasis on restoring natural breathing before trying to move the student on to higher circuits and wider consciousness.
This is of more than "psychological" import. Every study of the psychosomatic aspects of cancer and asthma, for instance, finds this pattern of chronic muscular contraction (subjectively felt as anxiety) among the predisposing factors. What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves. People are strangling their inner organs every day because they are afraid.
Mary Baker Eddy may have been exaggerating slightly when she said, "All illness is manifested fear;" but holistic medicine more and more recognizes that if that damned word "all" is replaced by a more tentative "most," Mrs. Eddy was close to the facts.
Even old-fangled M.D.s who won't consider holistic ideas for a minute, admit that some persons are mysteriously "more susceptible" to disease than other persons. What is this metaphysical "susceptibility"? Anthropologist Ashley Montagu has collected numerous statistics on children who were deprived of maternal love at the crucial point of imprint vulnerability in infancy. They not only died younger than the national average, but were sicklier all their lives and even grew up to be several inches shorter than the average adult height for their sex.
What makes for "susceptibility" (aside from possible geneticfactors) can only be such an anxiety imprint (muscle tension) on the first circuit. Christian Science—or any other religion that dogmatically insists that "God" wants us to be happy and successful—can cure such conditions "miraculously." What the Thinker thinks the Prover proves. Absolute faith that "God" is supporting you, beamed out from the brain all day long, day after day, signals the muscles to relax, and natural buoyancy and health returns.
Throughout human life, when the bio-survival circuit senses danger, all other mental activity ceases. All other circuits shut down until the bio-survival problem is "solved," realistically or symbolically. This is of crucial importance in mind-washing and brain-programming.
To create a new imprint, first reduce the subject to the state of infancy, i.e., bio-survival vulnerability. In pre-neurological terms, the bio-survival circuit is what we usually call "consciousness," per se. It is the sense of being herenow, in this vulnerable body, subject to the raw energies and forces of the physical universe. When we are "unconscious," the bio-survival circuit is turned off and doctors may cut us up without our attempting to flee or even crying out.
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