« 083: Threshold | Main | 085: The In-Betweener » May 10, 2004

084: Trapped in a Reality-Tunnel

I'm having a little neck trouble. I've been to two chiropractors and all I've heard so far is, "Yeah, you've got some brain pressure. Now get up on the machine so we can crack your bones." I understand that they are taking a few days to examine my x-rays and determine the best method of whanging my spine back into shape, but, in the interim, I've got an equilibrium problem. Why couldn't "brain pressure" mean that I hallucinate instead of just being dizzy?

The protagonists of Colin Wilson's The Philosopher's Stone have slivers of metal inserted into their brains in an effort to bridge gaps in the frontal lobs. As a result they become detached from "Time" and are able to exert their wills over reality: bending perceptions, extrapolating truth through lucid dreaming and communicating telepathically across time and space. Their brains have been awakened to a state where they -- the individual -- have been disconnected from the prison of the "I." They've found Robert Anton Wilson's Chapel Perilous.

Robert Anton Wilson has given me a couple of ideas to roll around my head these last few days. His version of the Chapel Perilous is one of them. The second is the phrase "habitual reality-tunnel" and the last is the idea that the origin of UFO sightings will eventually be revealed to be non-extraterrestrial in nature, that UFOs are simply the convergent language to express what is otherwise a "magickal" event. In the same way that angel visitations were realized in the Middle Ages and the expression of psychics and mediums were in the Victorian Age, UFO sightings and phenomena are simply a means of expressing an other unexplainable event. An event which is most likely caused by our brains bending or interpreting reality in a way that is beyond our shuttered world views. When we step outside our habitual reality tunnels, our brains engage with the external world in a way that is beyond our normal comprehension. In an effort to make sense of it, in an effort to communicate it to some other human being, we attach reality-tunnel language to it.

Two things: (1) Arthur C. Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic." (2) Joseph Campbell: "God is a thought. God is an idea. God is a means of expressing that which cannot be otherwise be made quantifiable."

Why couldn't the mechanisms hidden in the frontal lobes be stuck in the cerebellum? That way when the axis bone of your spine is out of place, you'd be having UFO visitations instead of just feeling like you're going to throw up.

Don't mind me. I'm just trying to think outside my reality-tunnel.

Posted by Teppo at May 10, 2004 08:58 AM

Comments

next to go on your list, "Flying Saucers" by C. G. Jung