from Time Magazine Online:

In commercials for Domino’s Pizza, the chain’s employees wage a never ending battle against the Noid, a gremlin who delays deliveries and carries a gun that can turn a pizza ice cold. Many viewers are amused by the Noid, Domino’s says, but one of them took the advertising campaign personally. Last week Kenneth Noid, 22, walked into a Domino’s Pizza shop in Chamblee, Ga., with a .357 Magnum revolver and took two employees hostage. When police arrived, he demanded $100,000 in cash, a getaway car and a copy of The Widow’s Son, a 1985 novel about secret societies in an 18th century Parisian prison.

All Noid got was the pizza he ordered. After a five-hour siege, the two employees slipped away and Noid gave himself up. According to police, Noid has “psychological problems” and believes that he has an “ongoing dispute with Tom Monaghan,” the head of the Detroit-based Domino’s chain.

As most of you know, Dr Robert Jastrow of NASA’s Institute for Space Studies is a sober, sensible scientist; he is not a science fiction writer or a wild-eyed Futurist (like me.) Nonetheless, Dr Jastrow’s new book, The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe (Simon and Schuster, 1981) concludes that it is our destiny to achieve immortality by becoming computers.

Jastrow points out that some computers have already learned to decipher a few of the brain’s signals, and can tell if a human is excited or elated, or even distinguish if he / she is looking at a circle or a square. Eventually, Jastrow says, computers will be able to contain a human mind: “…a bold scientist will be able to tap the contents of his mind and transfer them into the metallic lattices of a computer. Because mind is the essence of being, it can be said that this scientist has entered the computer, and that he now dwells in it.”

Jastrow summarizes: “The union of mind and machine has created a new form of existence, as well designed for life in the future as man is designed for life on the African savanna. It seems to me this must be the mature form of intelligent life in the Universe. Housed in indestructible lattices of silicon, and no longer constrained by the life and death cycle of a biological organism, such a kind of life could live forever.”

from Robert Anton Wilson’s Trajectories Newsletter, March 1982.

Kurt Saxon is the author of The Poor Man’s James Bond, a manual that tells you everything you could ever want to know about practical techniques of murder and mayhem, The Survivor, a four-volume extension of the same libretto, telling where to acquire any possible type of weapon, Root Rot, a diatribe against Alex Haley for implying that slavery was unfair to Black people, and several similar books. Mr. Saxon does not get reviewed in the Liberal magazines that decide which authors are important, but he has a wide readership among the Apocalyptical sects of the right-wing end of the political spectrum.

Mr. Saxon wrote in the 1970s that the United States would be destroyed almost totally by 1982. This is because the government has driven the “competents” out of business by excessive taxation and has subsidized 30 million “incompetents” on Welfare and another 30 million “incompetents” on Social Security. This country has thus become, Saxon says, “a Disneyland for
dummies.”

By 1982, Saxon said, the whole economy would collapse. “Millions of taxpayers will be unemployed… Millions who are now on Valium or other tranquilizers will go insane when they cannot get more. Drug addicts (will) swarm over pharmacies looking for dope, ruining everything they don’t steal…” We will be helpless against Russian attack because “our politicians have so devoted themselves to nurturing…incompetent dependents that further industrialization to put our nation on a war footing will be unaffordable. Even if it were not, our present unionspoiled and demanding work force cannot be expected to perform the way our parents did in the war plants of the late 1930s and early 1940s.” The only solution, Saxon informs us, is to buy farms, order his books on how to kill people efficiently, and stockpile every type of weaponry, to fight off the “drooling imbeciles and parasites” who will flee the doomed cities and try to steal your crops.

Mr. Saxon believed that these are objective predictions based on hard “laws” of sociology and economics which he learned from the writings of Ms. Ayn Rand. He did not believe that this apocalyptical reality tunnel in which he lives is in any way an artistic creation expressing his own emotional anxieties and hostilities.

– Wilson, Prometheus Rising.

I’ve had feelings of insecurity about food for as long as I can remember. It was my jerky dad’s fault. He left our valley and our wonderful peasant heritage to join the wretched ranks of the proletariat. — Kurt Saxon’s Bio on

KurtSaxon.com

excerpts from: Cleveland Okie’s Interview with Mike Shea, son of Robert Shea, science fiction author and co-author of the Illuminatus! trilogy.

The appendix to “Illuminatus” says that eight appendices were “censored.” Are they still around, and are there any plans to publish them?

I’ve never heard of them. The whole thing was written long before computers so it’s not likely they’re still around. If I could get ahold of them, I’d publish them in a second.

The appendix refers to a sequel, “The Homing Pigeons.” Was there any work actually done on an ILLUMINATUS sequel?

There was a joint work on a book called “Bride of Illuminatus” that was due to be released. Unfortunately the publishers didn’t think it would do very well since Wilson had already written a bunch of post-Illuminatus books that didn’t do very well (Gods bless the publishing industry…). I don’t know if there’s an outline or a copy of the work anywhere. My father died before they could get started. I remember the first scene started with a sex scene between two gods.

Your web site says that Shea and his friend and collaborator, Robert Anton Wilson, had “philosophical and political disagreements” and that these disagreements enriched ILLUMINATUS! Can you give me a couple of examples of their disagreements?

A lot of the words on my site came from other sources on the net. I’ve never written much myself about my dad. That’s one of the reasons I’m so happy for this opportunity. Honestly I don’t know much about the philosophical differences and neither does my mom. I’d say the only differences I knew about came after I was born and my dad moved to more mainstream fiction.

As I mentioned in my blog posting, the synopses in the second and third ILLUMINATUS! books are not reprinted in the omnibus edition. Are there any plans to reprint them, perhaps on the Internet?

I just put down a bid for the three original Illuminatus covers. I’ll get them and, assuming they aren’t too long and I can find the time, I’ll retype them and publish them on my website. I might get in a little trouble for it, but I tend to doubt it. I’ll just do it and see what happens. I currently own the rights to all of my father’s original work but that doesn’t include ILLUMINATUS. That one still belongs to myself and Wilson’s heirs, so we’d have to get together todecide if publishing the whole work is ok or not. For synposes written in 1980, though, I can’t imagine I’ll get any heat for that.

I’ll make it happen.

Supposedly the idea for ILLUMINATUS! came from when your father and Robert Anton Wilson were sitting in a bar after work in Chicago, and your father suggested that it would be funny to write a novel that took seriously all the various crackpot conspiracy theories that were sent in to the Playboy Forum, which your father edited. Did your father ever give you his version of this story?

Yep, a lot of the themes in ILLUMINATUS came from when RAW and he worked at Playboy on the adviser. All of the crazy conspiracy theories gave them the idea to write a book that tied them all together. He never gave me his side of the story, really, but he didn’t believe in all the conspiracy theories. He was pretty practical. He never trusted the government, however (who can blame him?), so he wouldn’t put something past them like the Kennedy assassination, but he never really got too bent about it all. He was very scientific in his thought and believed in Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is likely the right one.

Kaddish and Other Poems
Allen Ginsberg
City Light Books, 1961 (100 pages)

from Coincidance : A Head Test by Robert Anton Wilson.

Forty years ago, Ezra Pound made his celebrated boast of the social function of art: “The artist is the antenna of the race, the barometer and voltmeter.” Allen Ginsberg is nothing if not contemporary. He brings the boast up to date with a stunning effectiveness:

I am the Defense Early Warning Radar System
I see nothing but bombs

These lines are typical of Ginsberg’s unpolished-looking verse. He seems to work in poetry the way Rouault worked in paint: hacking his way savagely, with crude and sweeping strokes, toward an image of maximum ferocity. Look at Rouault’s “Three Judges,” those faces of moronic evil plastered on the canvas as if in rage and colored with the darkest, smeariest blacks and browns this side of downtown Passaic; this is the typical “feel” of a Ginsberg poem. Actually, of course, neither Rouault nor Ginsberg work in a frothing frenzy. Ginsberg in particular probably spends as much effort sounding “uncivilized” as Henry James ever spent in sounding “civilized.”

There has been little technical analysis of Ginsberg’s verse thus far; the job requires an ear delicate as Pound’s and the patience of an elephant. It generally takes me three or four readings aloud to feel my way toward Ginsberg’s music; his great bass, as Pound would call it, is strong as a Watusi drum, but, like a Watusi drum, full of surprising polyrhythms and unexpected variations. I have heard that the poetry reviews in the Saturday Review, New York Times, etc. are actually written by machines; and, from the reviews Ginsberg has gotten in those and similar publications, I would gather that the machines in question, like most university poetry teachers, are not yet capable of following a meter more challenging than the traditional umpty-umpty-umpty (followed occasionally by umpty-umpty-UMty.)

Let’s take a closer look at one of Ginsberg’s oral constructions. A poem is a statue in sound, or “frozen architecture,” or anyway you slice it it’s basically a structure, a form manufactured by a man. The chief thing about Allen Ginsberg as a poet is that he always shows you his form emerging, the way it builds up, a thing created out of ordinary speech but suddenly, by the height of its emotion, transcending ordinary speech. Kaddish begins with words you or I might speak:

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on
the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village

Like most modern poetry, this cannot be broken down into a traditional meter, but has to be considered in terms of Pound’s Second Law of Imagism: “to write in the sequence of the musical phrase.” There are three phrases above, the second syncopating slightly with the first, and the third a prolonged complication on both of the first two. It’s rather like Charlie Parker taking off and searching for his theme. In a few lines Ginsberg finds his basic beat:

… and I’ve been up all night, talking, talking,
reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to
Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm

We are still in the area of normal American speech, but Ginsberg is beginning to pick out of it his own building blocks. “And I’ve been up all night, talking, talking” … “Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph, the rhythm the rhythm:” these lines syncopate beautifully, and the internal phrase, “reading the Kaddish aloud” picks up on the initial “Strange now to think of you.” Allen Ginsberg sifts through the resources of American English like a placer miner going through his dust, carefully lifting out a nugget at a time.

Once he has found what he’s looking for, he hammers it out with the remorseless monotony of Beethoven, or perhaps I should say Bizet in the Arlessienne Suite. Kaddish moves towards its close through a hymn to the God who allowed the poet’s mother to go mad:

In the house in Newark Blessed is He! In the
madhouse Blessed is He! In the house of
Death blessed is He!

Even the tragedy of the poor old woman is blessed:

Blessed be you Naomi in Hospitals! Blessed be you
Naomi in solitude! Blest be your triumph! Blest
be your bars! Blest be your last years’ loneliness!

But an even stronger rhythm breaks in to mourn the all-too-true truth that there is nothing blessed, only pain, in the story of Naomi Ginsberg:

only to have seen her weeping on gray tables in long wards of her universe
only to have known the wierd ideas of Hitler at the door …
only to have seen the time-jumps, memory lapse, the crash of wars, the
roar and silence of a vast electric shock

and the reality, the lack of blessing and triumph, is therupon hammered like Pound’s rock-drill till it almost bursts the reader’s brain:

with your eyes running naked out of the apartment screaming into the hall
with your eyes being led away by policemen to an ambulance
with your eyes strapped down on the operating table
with your eyes of the pancreas removed
with your eyes of appendix operation
with your eyes eyes of abortion
with your eyes of shock
with your eyes of lobotomy

The theme beats into the soul like a drum:

with your eyes
with your eyes

– and then suddenly turns around on itself and bursts forth into a line of sheer genius:

with your Death full of flowers

From “Strange now to think” through “the rhythm the rhythm” the poem has gradually created, just through the integrity of its own emotion, the justification from the drum-beat and thunder of “only to have, only to have” and “with her eyes, with her eyes.” If anybody else repeated the “formula,” it would only be a trick, because the emotion is in the words and the discovery of the words is the discovery of the emotions. It is Ginsberg’s personal Golgotha that we meet here, and if you or I were to tell our own stories we would have to find our own words and emotions. That is why a great work of poetry is always so original as to seem “formless” at first glance. It appears to have no form because it is a new form, manufactured in heart’s agony, a shape cut in the air as a sculptor cuts.

The last movement opens with a bird call:

Caw caw caw crows shriek in the white sun over grave stones in
Long Island

The crows seem to burst onto the page with the vividness of real life; we actually hear them before we see them. But Ginsberg, with the audacity of genius, has another trick for us in the next line:

Lord Lord Lord Naomi underneath this grass my halflife and my own
as hers

The tom-tom is back again, this time in a half-rhymed fugue with “Caw caw caw” chasing “Lord Lord Lord” down the page. It is “only to have” and “with your eyes” picked up into greater urgency than before:

Lord Lord great Eye that stares on ALLand moves in a black cloud
caw caw strange cry of Beings sung up into sky over waving trees

The ending is pure fugue, pure as Bach:

Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord

The harsh monosyllables of American speech have dominated the poem from “Strange now to think” right through to “caw caw caw Lord.” Pound showed us how to do this forty years ago, with his “Blue jade cups well set” etc., but he has had no student to apply him half so well as Allen Ginsberg. And the economy and magnificence of using “Lord Lord Lord” against “caw caw caw”-an implied identification picked up in the montage-like shift from Godas “black cloud” to the black cloud of crows-this is balancing a poem as skillfully as Roebling balanced the Brooklyn Bridge.

Among the shorter poems in this volume, particularly good are “Poem Rocket,” “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear,”"The Lion for Real,” and “Ignu.” “Poem Rocket” contains a line that evokes extra-terrestrial beauty better than the best of the science-fiction writers: “Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?” And “The Lion for Real” brings the Spirits of Terror to the page in a way that makes one think of Dante: You can’t laugh off Ginsberg’s Lion anymore than you can smile at Dante’s hell, or Blake’s Tyger, or Melville’s Whale. Ginsberg has seen the Lion, and by God, he makes you see it, too. Naturally, Life magazine describes his vision as “sick” and “warped”; the System which is willing to create twenty thousand abnormal babies everytime it sets off a nuclear bomb cannot afford to listen to the reports of this extremely delicate instrument, the “Defense Early Warning Radar System” that is the soul of the poet today.

from Neuropolitique.
by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson.

The fight for Patty Hearst’s mind is symptomatic of the world-wide battle for
the control of consciousness.

“Mom, Dad. — I’m OK. I had a few scrapes and stuff, but they washed them up, and they’re getting OK…I heard that Mom is really upset and that everybody was at home, and I hope this puts you a little bit at ease… I want to get out of here, but the only way I’m going to do it is if we do it their way… I just want to get out of here and see everyone again and be back with Steve.” February 12,1974.

The speaker is Patty Hearst. Although she has been held prisoner by the Symbionese Liberation Army guerrillas for eight days, she sounds relatively normal, and the tape is reassuring to her parents. A second tape is released by the S.LA. 49 days later, and everything changes. A new voice, that of a stranger named Tania, is speaking and the words are hostile…

“I know for sure yours and Mom’s interests are never the interests of the people. You, a corporate liar, of course, will say that you don’t know what I’m talking about, but I ask you then to prove it. Tell the poor and oppressed people of this nation what the corporate state is about to do. Warn black and poor people that they are about to be murdered down to the last man, woman and child.”

This tape is accompanied by the famous photo of Tania holding a tommy gun, standing before the Symbionese seven-headed cobra.

There is no escape from our robothood unless and until we first recognize the fact. Only then can we learn to take control of our nervous systems and to reprogram our individual realities.
Randolph Hearst, Father of the Year and top manager of a mass-media propaganda machine that has helped domesticate millions of minds during the past century, comes before the TV cameras and says, unconvincingly, “We had her 20 years; they’ve only had her 60 days. I don’t believe she’s going to change her philosophy that quickly and that permanently.” Two weeks later, Tania is photographed robbing a bank with her new comrades, and the third tape, even more vehement, describes the parents she had wanted to see again as “pigs” and Steve Weed, the lover she had wanted to return to, as “a clown” and a “sexist pig.” Tania would live to change her mind again, but obviously she would never again be the original Patty Hearst.

During the trial of Lieutenant William Calley, it was obvious to millions all over the world that the U.S. Army was seeking to disguise its own guilt by making a scapegoat out of a singularly naive young man. It was not obvious to Calley, however. “I’m for the Army all the way,” he told reporters. “I’m behind it, a member of it. The Army comes first. No matter how much I could help my own defense, I won’t make any derogatory statement about the Army.”

Rusty Calley was, before induction, an unattached, marginally employed drifter — a bellhop, a dishwasher, a pieceworker until he underwent the brain-changing ordeal of infantry basic training. Today he dutifully defends his brainwashers as robotically as Tania once defended hers, and he justifies mass murder in the jargon of the true believer.

Between the time of her arrest for pointing a gun at Gerald Ford last summer and her conviction last November, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme did nothing to aid her own defense and everything to broadcast the philosophy of Charlie Manson, in whose commune she had been brainwashed. Nothing said by the judge or by her own lawyer could make Fromme’s legal situation real or
important to her. All that she cared about was having the attention of the media in order to broadcast Manson’s message.

There is nothing to indicate any special weakness in Patty or Rusty or Squeaky. They were quite normal young Americans until they came into the ambience of, respectively, the S.L.A., the U.S. Army and the Manson family.

This is the first lesson we must UNDERSTAND. The four survival brains are progressively bleached out and reimprinted in the relatively simple mechanical process called brainwashing. Brainwashing, like malaria, is a disease of exposure. Put people in a malarial environment and most of them will get malaria. Put them in a brainwashing institution and most of them will get brainwashed. The concept of “washing” is, of course, unscientific and crude. The brain is not a dirty garment but a bio-electric computer — a living network of over 110 billion nerve cells capable of 10^2783000 interconnections, a number higher than the total of all the atoms in the universe. In this elegant, microminiaturized computer, more than 100,000,000 processes are programmed every minute.

The brain and the nervous system, like the rest of the body, are designed and programmed by the genetic code. The human being, like all other life forms, is primarily “a giant robot created by DNA to make more DNA,” as Nobel geneticist Herman J. Muller has observed. We are all neurogenetic robots. And, however unpleasant it may be for Christian theologians or sentimental humanists to acknowledge this, there is no escape from our robothood unless and until we first recognize the fact. Only then can we learn to take control of our nervous systems and to reprogram our individual programs.

A basic example of brain programming, which helps us to understand Rusty, Squeaky, Patty and ourselves, concerns the newborn giraffe whose mother was shot by hunters. The baby giraffe — in accordance with its genetic program — imprinted the first large moving object it saw, which happened to be the hunters’ jeep. It followed, vocalized to, tried to suckle and eventually to mate with the unresponsive vehicle. The giraffe’s survival instincts were hooked to that jeep. The human being also imprints — or hooks its neural equipment to — external objects.

Among humans, these imprints come in four stages:

1. The infant biosurvival circuit, concerned with safety-danger signals here and now.
2. The older-infant (toddler) circuit, or ego; concerned with motion and emotion;
3. The student, verbal-symbolic circuit, or mind; concerned with language and knowledge; 4. The adult sociosexual circuit, or personality; concerned with domestic behavior.

These four circuits are the four brains that are progressively bleached out and reimprinted in the relatively simple mechanical process called brainwashing. The process is simple, because the original imprinting of these circuits was also relatively simple.

Throughout human life, when the biosurvival brain flashes clanger, all other mental activities cease. To create a new imprint, first reduce the subject to the state of infancy, i.e., firstbrain vulnerability.

The first circuit, or biosurvival brain, is activated at birth. Its function is to seek food, air, warmth, comfort and to retreat from what is toxic, harsh, or dangerous. The biosurvival circuit of the animal nervous system is DNAprogrammed to seek a comfort-safety zone around a mothering organism. If a mother is not present, the closest substitute in the environment will be chosen. For the newborn giraffe, a four-wheel jeep was fixated. In one of Konrad Lorenz’s ethological studies, a gosling that could not find the rounded white body of a goose to fixate imprinted a round, white ping-pong ball. Throughout human life, when the biosurvival brain flashes danger, all other mental activities cease. This is of key importance in brain programming: to create a new imprint, first reduce the subject to the state of infancy, i.e., first-brain vulnerability.

The initial step in this process is isolation of the victim. A small, dark room is ideal, since the social, emotional and mental techniques that formerly ensured survival will not work there. The longer the person is isolated in such a state, the more vulnerable to new imprint he or she becomes. As Dr. John C. Lilly has pointed out, it takes only a few minutes of true isolation before anxiety appears and only a few hours before hallucinations begin, and the victim is ready to be imprinted with a new protective, maternal object. It is no paradox that even the captor who is imposing this brainwashing on the unwilling subject can be the one imprinted. The victim is forced by instincts — biochemical programs — many millions of years old to seek this imprint and to hook it to whatever external entity comes closest to the mother archetype. For a human prisoner, any two-legged being who brings food will serve.

The second circuit, the emotional brain, or ego, is initially imprinted when the child begins to use muscle power to crawl, walk, master gravity, overcome physical obstacles and manipulate others politically. The muscles that perform these functions are very quickly imprinted with what become chronic, lifelong reflexes. Depending on the accidents of environment, this imprint will make for either a strong, dominating ego or a weak, fearful ego. Status in the pack or the tribe is assigned on the basis of an unconscious signaling system in which these muscle reflexes are crucial. All of the emotional games or cons, listed in the popular game-manuals of Dr. Eric Berne and the transactional analysts, are second-brain imprints, or standard mammalian politics.

To re-create second-brain imprint vulnerability in an adult, the subject must be made to feel like a clumsy infant. The subject’s neurological Scoreboard must clearly register the message, “I am one foot tall, ignorant, inept, frightened and wrong. They are six feet tall, wise, clever, powerful and right.”

Helplessness can be escalated to panic by means of terror tactics. In Costa-Gavras’ film The Confession, the Communist brainwashers take the subject from his cell, put a noose around his neck and lead him to a place where he expects to be hanged; some African tribes take candidates for “initiation” and bury them alive for hours. Basic imprint vulnerability occurs when the subject comes to believe, “I have no choice; they can do anything they want with me.” At this point, the emotional brain hooks into the victim internalizes a rank in the pecking order under the protection of the most powerful figure available.

The third brain, or rational mind, is imprinted when the child begins to use artifacts and to ask questions. The imprint sites are the nine laryngeal muscles that are used in speech and a neural feed-back loop between the right hand and the left cortex, which is used in examining, classifying and rearranging the objects of the environment. The entire edifice of science, art and knowledge is built on this foundation.

The quickest way to reimprint the third brain is to detach the victim from those who share the same language, symbols and doctrines by placing the victim in a situation where his usual verbal skills and physical dexterity won’t work, where he has to imprint new signals and skills in order to survive. For example, it is well known that the best way to learn a foreign language is by living with those who speak that language only: Hook the first-circuit survival needs (food, shelter) and the second-circuit status needs (security, recognition) to the third-circuit necessity of mastering the new tongue.

Conversely, the proverbial Englishman who dressed for dinner every night in his lonely tropical hut was no fool. He was keeping an English bubble around him by constantly reaffirming an English reality, and so avoiding being engulfed in the reality of the natives. It is not unusual for a man to become a Communist when he lives with Communists, or a convict when he lives with convicts. In fact, it requires delicate neurological engineering to remain oneself under such conditions.

The fourth brain, or personality, is activated and imprinted at adolescence, when the DNA signal awakens the sexual apparatus. The teenager becomes the bewildered possessor of a new body and a new neural circuit hooked to orgasm and sperm-egg fusion. The pubescent human, like any other mammal, lurches about in a state of mating frenzy, every neuron gasping for the sex object. Imprint vulnerability is acute, and the first sexual cues to turn on the adolescent nervous system remain fixed for life and forever define the individual’s sexual reality. We should not be surprised, therefore, at the various fetishes that are so easily acquired at these sensitive moments. In fact, we can tell precisely at what period in time a person was imprinted by noting which fetishes continue to turn him on: black garters, booze, cool jazz and crewcuts define one whole generational imprint group, just as sleeping bags, Mick Jagger, grass and tight jeans define another. When Sinatra sings at Las Vegas, the menopausal fan ignores his wrinkles and double chin and the neurons kick over in reflex rapture. The younger generation is amused and bored: “What’s that balding old man got to do with sex?” No group ever understands the fetishes of another sexual-imprint group.

It is important for the brainwasher to understand that sexual behavior is intensely influenced by social-domestic morals. The tribe always surrounds sperm-egg exchange with fierce threats and violent taboos — to the degree that most people don’t even know that the word morals refers to anything other than sexual no-nos. Everywhere, in every society, the sexual brain is ruthlessly domesticated, channeled into tribal productivity. Socially approved orgasm is directed toward monogamous procreation; pleasure directed orgasm is denounced and the practitioners are often persecuted. Rewiring the sexual circuits, then, breaks the domestic bond, fissions the domesticated personality and allows for the creation of a new bond to a different subculture and to its heretical sexual value system. Such reimprinting of the erotic brain can be a most effective mind-washing technique but only as an adjunct to the basic bleaching out of the first-and second-brain circuits of security and ego status. For example, if Cinque had raped Patty Hearst the first night of her captivity, a strong revulsion on her part would probably have occurred. However, after the subject has come to look to the brainwasher for biosecurity, physical support, emotional reality definition, then a sexual seduction can imprint a new erotic field.

In order to maintain one’s reality bubble, it is necessary to surround oneself with tribal reassurance. Most human communication is embarrassingly primitive, consisting of endless variations on “I’m still here. Are you still there?” (hive solidarity) and “Nothing has really changed” (hive business as usual).

Isolation, the first step in brainwashing, removes this protective bubble. When the subject no longer receives feedback — “We’re all still here; nothing has changed” — the imprints begin to fade. Explorers and shipwrecked sailors who have survived prolonged isolation, Dr. Lilly has
noted, are quite shy after being rescued. They are literally afraid of human conversation — sometimes for weeks — because they know that what they will say might sound insane to the domesticated ordinary adult; their imprints have faded and they are in the unconditioned free-floating world of the yogi or the mystic. It takes many days, at least, to reimprint their social bubble.

Similar imprint vulnerability and return to infancy occurs in many cases of prolonged hospitalization, an ominous fact that many medical technicians do not understand. Some patients are literally brainwashed into becoming lifelong invalids — a classic case of second-brain helplessness — and are accused by the staff of being malingerers, a label that shifts the blame from the incompetent technicians to the helpless victim.

It is the function of the nervous system to focus, to select, to narrow down, to choose, from an infinity of possibilities, the biochemical imprints which determine the tactics and strategies that ensure survival in one place, status in one tribe. The infant is genetically prepared to learn any language, master any skill, play any sex role; in a very short time, however, he becomes rigidly fixated to accept, follow and mimic the limited offerings of his social and cultural environment. In this process, each of us pays a heavy price. Survival and status mean forfeiting the infinite possibilities of unconditioned consciousness. The domesticated personality inside the social bubble is a trivial fragment of the potentials for experience and intelligence innate in the 110-billion-cell human biocomputer. We have literally been robbed blind; we have literally taken leave of our senses; we are literally only slightly more conscious than any other herd animal.

The brainwasher’s job is simple, then, because it consists only of substituting one set of robotic circuits for another set. Once the subject looks to the reprogrammer for biosecurity and ego support, just as the infant looks to its parents, any third-brain ideology can be impressed on the vulnerable neurons. Because we are all imprinted by our own social bubbles, it isn’t generally recognized that each reality map held by humans — however eccentric and paranoid — makes nearly as much sense as any other. People are vegetarians or nudists or Communists or snake worshipers for the same reasons that other people are Catholics or Republicans or liberals or Nazis. During imprint vulnerability, anybody can be switched from one system to another. We can easily be induced to go from intoning “Hare Krishna” to “Jesus died for our sins” to “Kill the pigs,” and to find meaning in each of the implied ideologies. The next step is for the brainwashers to persuade us that anybody who doesn’t see the world according to a particular reality map is wicked, or stupid, or insane. After programming a third-brain bubble around the subject, a complete brain-washing procedure must then reimprint sexual drives and taboo systems. It is here that governmental brainwashers are amusingly inept, as compared with outlaw bands.

Governments are prudish, uptight and sexually cold, because domestication depends on directing genital passions away from individual gratification and into the nuclear family — or, in modern insectoid socialisms, away from the individual and the family, and into collective hive productivity.

Sexual reprogramming can imprint either a new sex role (as when the Mau Mau insisted that would-be members perform an act of homosexuality, in order to sever themselves from family-oriented sex) or a sex-avoidance role (as with nuns, who become brides of Christ and convert sexual charges into religious tingles). The military and the prison systems, after isolating people from ordinary social reality, allow and tacitly approve asocial sexual imprints, whether heterosexual or homosexual; a year’s worth of sperm on cell or barracks sheets is a year’s programming in anti-domesticity.

Similarly, everybody knows that the classic attraction of military life has been the opportunity for socially approved sexual license, including whorehouse adventures and the rape of enemy women — an enticing program to a young male primate. (The great mystery that puzzled and irritated the menopausal males who ruled America in the Sixties — why weren’t young males eager for the adventure of Vietnam? — is easily answered in a neurological context: The new sexual imprints of the marijuana revolution made it unnecessary and unaesthetic to go to Saigon to get righteously laid.)

Continual follow-up is necessary to reinforce any new reality imprint. The ironic truth is that our concept of reality is so fragile that it collapses in a matter of days if we do not have continual spot announcements reminding us of who we are and that our reality is still there.

The military accordingly constructs a military-reality island for its personnel. Every successful brainwasher, whether Synanon, a Jesus cult, a Hindu swami movement, a Manson-type family, or a militant terrorist group, creates a similar reality island; once a person joins, he is in all the way, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Similarly, revolutionary governments dare not relax censorship or permit free communications in their drive to wash out the old imprints and reinforce new ones. Foreign or dissenting signals cannot, therefore, be tolerated. This reality-island context helps us to appreciate the ease with which the Army brainwashed Calley.

A confused, ineffective youth joins the Army; during basic training, he is isolated from civilian society and all reinforcers of domesticated-herd imprints; his food, clothing and shelter are provided by the Army; and new authority figures make him feel helpless and inferior. Once Rusty has been reduced to an infant state and made totally dependent on the new father figures, he is allowed to work his way up in the new pecking order and to become one of the elect. After a few weeks of being made to feel one foot tall, helpless and clumsy, he is given weekend leave to explore the new soldier morality of easy camaraderie and socially approved casual sex. (And where else in straight America is casual sex so enthusiastically approved?)

Day after day, Rusty’s third brain is being programmed with military jargon, military concepts, military reality. When he encounters civilians on the street during weekend leaves, they seem alien. Rusty has now been fully incorporated into the Army reality bubble. When his superior officer, Medina, shouts “Kill!,” Calley will not ask about the Articles of War, the Nuremberg precedents, the ethics of Sunday school — they belong to other reality islands. He kills. The whole function of the reimprinting in basic training has been to ensure that Calley will obey in such situations.

The robotization of Squeaky Fromme by Charles Manson was just as simple, although the source of Manson’s powers has been misunderstood. It is insufficient, first of all, to say that Manson — and his powers over the family members — was a product of the drug culture. The hippie movement, with its estimated 35,000,000 pot smokers, can, in fact, be viewed as an enormous, mostly amateurish experiment in self-induced brain change. Neurotransmitter drugs perform the same function as isolation, as they weaken or suspend the users’ old imprints.

This is exactly why conservatives dread dope: They do not want the younger half of the population experimenting with consciousness alteration, ego change, mind metamorphoses and sex-role roulette. If the military had pioneered the use of grass as an adjunct to imprinting military obedience, social attitudes would probably have been reversed. Conservatives would have defended Cannabis with the same pragmatism that they brought to the dropping of napalm bombs, and radical dissidents would have dreaded Cannabis as much as they fear wire tapping.

Manson used drugs as but one brainwashing tool, and he did so for ends
alien to the drug culture. While other gurus of the sixties used drugs to
rewire their followers for the peace-love-ecology trip, Manson used the same
drugs to imprint his family for fascism, racism, sexism. Manson could have
become a platoon sergeant in the Green Berets.

In Helter Skelter, prosecutor Bugliosi lists the programs Sergeant Manson
employed with his drugs: first-brain fear and isolation from straight society;
second-brain communal status and rote-repetition of emotional phrases from
the ever-convenient Bible; third-brain occult teachings; fourth-brain guiltfree
sex. In The Family, Ed Sanders adds that female members were usually
initiated with an LSD trip, during which Charlie performed oral sex on them
several times. Of course, Manson’s hypnotic power also derived from the
pathetic fact that he was the most brainwashed robot of them all; Manson
not only followed but believed in the blood-drenched script of the book of
Revelations — the great beast, the war between good and evil, the last
judgment. Instant apocalypse defined Manson’s third-brain reality bubble;
prison taught him how to enforce it.

Manson spent 17 of his first 32 years in prison; isolation behind walls and
bars reinfantized his survival brain; competing gangs of cons and guards
impressed the most violent mammalian politics on his emotional brain; a
weird variety of fundamentalist and racist ideologies was fed to his symbolic
brain; and anything except domesticated reproductive sex programmed his
erotic brain. The reality bubble Manson later created at the Spahn Movie
Ranch near Los Angeles was the stereophonic 3-D dream of every pimpdoper-
convict.

The S.LA. hideout of general field marshal Cinque, another graduate of the
California archipelago, was the Marxist version of the same convict fantasy:
guns, stolen cars, girls, obedience, senseless killings. S.L.A. kidnapers
merely applied to Patty Hearst the standard brainwashing techniques learned
by Cinque in the brain-change prisons of California: first, the physical shock
of kidnap, the disorientation of the cartrunk ride and confinement in a small,
dark room. Then came Cinque’s visits to the isolation cell, and the
transformation in his role from that of captor into that of the source of Patty’s
biological survival. The motherlike Cinque brought food and drink; the
fatherlike Cinque told her sternly that her survival depended on his whims.
Patty is reduced to the status of a suckling infant, one foot tall in a six-foottall
world. Throughout life, when the first brain flashes danger, all other
mental activities cease.

Once Patty had imprinted Cinque in place of her distant parents and
unavailable lover, he introduced the new symbol system, the new reality
bubble. His powerful laryngeal muscles filled the air of the tiny room with
the sonorous, poetic rhetoric of the ghetto, the prison and the underworld,
strengthened by Marxist apocalyptical theology. The same mindwashing has
been experienced by thousands of runaways and dropouts who, during the
past decade, found themselves in the crowded, womb-warren pads of
Haight-Ashbury or the East Village, vulnerable to a new, hip version of the
ancient anarchist, outlaw symbolism. (The importance of funk cannot be
overestimated in these cases. The brain of the baby — and of the reinfantized
adult — craves warmth, texture, skin smell, sloppymoist contact. The
newborn correctly equates dirt and smell with survival, and so does the
hairy, aromatic hippie who thrives on incense, candlelight, sleeping bags,
crash pads. Domesticated moralists who denounce this rank way of life do
not realize that, to the reinfantized brain, funk means survival bliss.)

The culmination of Patty Hearst’s reprogramming was the new sexual reality
imposed on her fourth brain. In a curiously naive account of Patty’s
captivity, an anonymous S.L.A. member has unwittingly outlined the
brainwashing procedure:

“There are many people who still cannot comprehend Tania’s swift evolution
from sheltered bourgeois to freedom fighter. We wish to end all
metaphysical speculation around brainwashing and sexual enslavement.”
With this disclaimer, the S.L.A. account found in the Harris’ San Francisco
hideout proceeds to describe classic brainwashing techniques.
“In the beginning, we provided for Tania’s basic needs: shelter, food,
clothing, medical attention and news from the outside. Although we
considered sex a basic human need, our commitment to not exploit her
sexually, coupled with her over-all status as a P.O.W., denied Tania the
freedom to have sex with another person. But later on…as she became more
integrated into the day-to-day aspects of cell life, we tried to treat Tania as
an equal. It was only natural that with increased personal interaction…these
relations would develop sexually.”

Tania’s S.LA. imprints, reinforced by 24-hours-a-day immersion in the new
tribe’s reality, seem to have remained durable until the Los Angeles shootout.
Jack Scott’s description of Tania in the subsequent months of crosscountry
flight, however, reveals a restless, irritable, unsettled person. The
chief programmer, Cinque, was gone and Patty/Tania eventually returned,
with the instincts of a migratory bird, to San Francisco, the locale of her two
birthplaces.

After arrest, a campaign to reprogram Patty yet again was initiated by her
captors. Again her biosurvival needs were satisfied by her
captors; her ego status depended on pleasing them, and ceaseless effort was
made to induce her to verbalize anew the symbol system of her parents. The
only deficiency in the new program was its lack of attention to Tania’s
liberated sexual imprints.

The hope for Patty Hearst — as for the rest of us brainwash victims — is to
realize how robot-imprinting works, to exult in joyous insight and to start
choosing our own imprints.

Was Rusty Calley, the Florida drifter, guilty of murder? No. The crimes
were committed by Lieutenant Calley, a brainwashed robot programmed by
the Army to kill on command. Was Lynette Alice Fromme guilty of
attempted assassination? No. The Sacramento gun was carried by Squeaky
Fromme, a brainwashed robot from Charles Manson’s zombie platoon. Was
Patty Hearst guilty of any crime? No. Tania is a brain-changed product of
the neurotechnology of Drill Instructor Cinque.

But let us pursue the neurology of guilt a few steps farther. Who taught
Charles Manson and Cinque the techniques of brain change, as well as their
philosophies of violence? The prison system did. And who supports the
prisons that robotized Manson and Cinque, along with the Army that
mechanized Calley? Taxpaying citizens.

Our purpose here is not to provoke another round of liberal we’re-all-guilty
handwringing. Guilt, innocence, morality and will power
have nothing to do with the neurological situation, which, in brief, is that we
are all automatons responding automatically to imprinted realities of an
embarrassingly arbitrary nature. The motivations of criminality and lawabiding
virtue, of violence and love, of domestication and deviance, of
laziness and industry, promiscuity and prudery, stupidity and cleverness, are
always random neurological imprints. What impresses the neurons during
imprint vulnerability is what gets imprinted. Guilt, innocence, punishment,
forgiveness, law and order, rehabilitation — all constitute the mythology that
masks the simple reality of badly wired robots bumping into one another.
Most agonizing and supposedly intractable social problems are caused solely
by our ignorance of the brain’s capacity for rote repetition and abrupt
change.

Brainwashing is happening to all of us all of the time. Knowledge of brain
function is our only protection against it. The solutions to our predicament
are neurological. We must assume responsibility for our nervous systems.
Our robothood can remain static if we endlessly repeat the imprints of
infancy to adolescence, or it can be drastically altered by brainwashers
without our consent, or we can take control of our nervous systems. If we
don’t assume this personal responsibility, somebody else will; if we do take
over the control board, we can each be any person we want to be.

………. December 1975
………. San Diego Federal Prison

If you do decide to move to San Francisco I know a few people there and in Berkeley. Bob Wilson is there an old friend and fan who used to work for Playboy now involved in Leary’s spaceship.
………. William S. Burroughs in a letter to his son. From the book Cursed from Birth by William S. Burroughs Jr.