If you take history as starting on this planet at midnight and you assume the life of the planet is 15 billion years which is the estimated life of a G-Type star, it is now 8 o’clock in the morning, and it’s time for us to wake up, because we’ve pretty much been operating on autopilot until now.
There was only one Buddha 2,500 years ago. Now you meet five or ten Buddhas at every city you go to
And there are signs of planetary awakening. Domesticated primate’s psychology remains pretty much the same as it was in the paleolithic. But one sees increasing evidences of mutations. There was only one Buddha 2,500 years ago. Now you meet five or ten Buddhas in every city you go to. Knowledge, wherever it is discovered, is traveling over the whole world faster and faster. The possibility of changing consciousness was discovered in the Orient 2,500 years ago at least, probably it’s older than that, but techniques were discovered to quiet the mind, pacify the mind, to remove emotional compulsions and these were organized into the science of yoga. As John Lilly says, “Yoga is the science of the East. Science is the yoga of the west.”
Science is a yoga, too. Science is a way of trying to reach an objective level in which your emotional compulsions and prejudices aren’t twisting all the facts to fit in with all your favorite reality tunnel. The scientific worldview grew up in the west between 1500 and 1750 largely due to mystics who were known as Hermeticists. This Hermetic scientific revolution saw theology as its enemy, with no conflict between Hermeticism and science—they were both based on experimentation, and they were both opposed to the authority of the church. Shortly after 1600 this began to split, the hermetic tradition faded into the background, and we developed for the first time in history a science that had absolutely no connection with anything except pure reason. The hermetic tradition believed that there is no such thing as pure reason; you’ve got to first work on your own perceiving apparatus to correct your prejudices. Further, they believed that the scientist is not separate from what the scientist observes with the general yogic attitude that, “You are the master who makes the grass green.”
Western science lost that insight and from Newton onwards we had the idea that it doesn’t matter who you are, if you follow scientific procedure you will find the truth. This began to break down after 1900 due to Sigmund Freud, who pointed out that even scientists are human beings and may have neuroses and that scientific theories may be elaborate rationalizations from neuroses. Karl Marx pointed out that no matter what you’re theorizing about, it’s a mirror of your economic status and what your economic goals are. And then anthropologists started coming back with reports about alternative reality tunnels showing that no matter what reality tunnel you live in the world will organize itself in your perceptions to be compatible with that reality tunnel.
So, science began to have data to look at science itself critically. That’s how intelligence increases: when intelligence looks at intelligence and criticizes intelligence. So, we got to the point where we could look at science and say science is the product of people, people are doing this and their prejudices are getting into it, it’s not just enough to say, “I will be objective,” you’ve got to learn to change yourself from the inside out before you can even begin to approximate toward objectivity.
How do you do that?
Well, it took a while to begin to find answers to that. The big changeover came when Albert Hofmann went for a bicycle ride one day after experimenting with ergot derivatives. Albert Hofmann, after accidentally ingesting LSD, went through a profound experience in 1942 which he did not put into words until 1982—it took him 40 years. He was educated as a classical chemist with a classical scientific background and assumed that there was such a thing as an objective observer and so on. So, it took him 40 years to figure out what LSD meant. And in 1982 he wrote an essay on the 40th anniversary of the discovery of LSD in which he says, “The main thing that I’ve learned from LSD is that there is no objective reality separate from us.” All that exists are the realities that our nervous systems construct out of the signals they receive.
This became obvious to others due to the things that were happening in quantum physics from 1900 on and with the doubling of knowledge between 1900 and 1950. Physicists discovered that the atomic world is just not describable in terms of Aristotelian logic. Firstly, you can’t describe anything on the quantum level accurately unless you include the observer in your picture. So, quantum physics turned out to be saying exactly the same thing that the psychedelic revolution was saying: that there is no objective reality separate from us, all we know is the reality that we co-create. What we think of as reality is perceived, conceived, and put together by our nervous systems. And at this point it becomes obvious that intelligence can be raised, consciousness can be altered, nothing is static, all we’ve got to do is learn how to change our nervous systems and we can go to wider and wider reality tunnels and bigger and bigger levels of perception and so on.
So, with each decade, since the 1960s, we are moving more and more to the place where we can change our nervous systems, change our reality tunnels, and make bigger and bigger reality tunnels
During that time, there was a great deal of drug research and a lot of people were getting a lot of radical ideas and so the government made it illegal. Which is the natural thing to do if you’re a politician; the last thing you want is intelligence to increase. So, then some others started saying “Okay, so they won’t let us investigate drugs, but now that we know that it’s possible to change consciousness let’s see the other techniques that they will let us investigate. Nobody has made Pranayama illegal yet because it would be impossible to enforce, you just have to read a book on yoga and learn how to breathe through alternative nostrils and you find that you go into an entirely different consciousness state. Then you go back to your ordinary consciousness and think about that state, and then go back into that state and think about your ordinary consciousness and already you’re in I squared. You’re in intelligence studying intelligence, you’re finding out how your nervous system works.
So, with each decade, since the 1960s, we are moving more and more to the place where we can change our nervous systems, change our reality tunnels, and make bigger and bigger reality tunnels. Once you look down at your reality tunnel, whether your reality tunnel is Ohio Methodist or New York Jewish or Marin County hippie or Tokyo Capitalist Zen Buddhist or Iranian Muslim Fundamentalist – once you get to the level where you are outside your reality tunnel looking down at it, you can compare reality tunnels. Then you’re on a higher level of intelligence already, because you’re no longer a conditioned mechanism just following the reality tunnel that was accidentally imprinted or conditioned. You can start choosing between reality tunnels.
Robert Anton Wilson (1932-2007) was an American author, futurist and self-described agnostic mystic.