Life in the Labyrinth

1975

Chapter One

LOST IN A MAZEMENT

Unknowingly we voyage in a labyrinth, a macrodimensional maze of living

electrical force, cloaked by a thick layer of ordinary life. Our most serious

obstacle is the uncontrollable urge to convert everything to the familiar, to

reduce it all to the level of the primate brain; to reject the living, breathing

reality of the totality of all possible attention.

FROM PREVIOUS EFFORTS AND UNDERSTANDING, we have established a new relationship between the nonbiological essential self and the human biological machine, and have already demonstrated to our satisfaction that the human machine does indeed provide us with the means of transformation; we clearly see the path which we must take.

Knowing that it is necessary to awaken the machine before we can do anything of objective consequence, we have hopefully achieved some stable results.

By this time, we realize that we are now in need of further instructions to incorporate our present knowledge and take us a step further toward our ultimate aim, the formulation of which may not yet be very exact.

It ought to be obvious that we are only at the very beginning of our path, and we are anxious to take further responsibilities as beings, but before we can take effective steps toward fulfilling these responsibilities, we must first understand just precisely where we are, and what we are, in the general scale of things, and where we stand in relation to the Absolute so we can develop a method of work within this context.

We can now come to understand the essential self in its work-role as eternal voyager, exposed to perils and opportunities, purpose and distraction, fatal attraction and ultimate destruction in the nearly infinite immensity of the labyrinth.

In this quest, we lift our gaze from its firm fixation upon the world of the primate, working from this nonhuman perspective wherever we may discover ourselves to be.

In the first book of the Labyrinth Voyager Series, The Human Biological Machine as a Transformational Apparatus, the analogy of a fish tank was invoked to establish an approximate description of the human situation relative to higher dimensions which we will from now on refer to as the macrodimensions.

The animal kingdom will once again be of service, providing us with a point of view that we can easily see, understand, and relate to.

A few minutes of simple observation of a rat in a maze will clearly demonstrate to even the densest scientist that it clearly doesn’t know that it’s in a maze...it’s simply aware that it can’t get at what it wants and that it doesn’t know its way, nor—in the absence of sufficiently compelling motivators—does it much care.

It may also dimly suspect that it can’t escape; backwards, forwards, sideways—all apparent possible directions maintain the maddening slavery of the maze.

The trapped rat has no way of knowing the overall shape and configuration, rules and functions of the maze, but it may—under the influence of a sudden, unexpected, and unusual traumatic jolt—become somewhat aware of the fact of its imprisonment, if not of its precise nature.

When it comes to mazes, human primates are every bit as predictable as rats, but without the perceptual and emotional clarity, keen attention and intelligence of their hairier cousins.

A lot can be learned about mazes by experimenting with and testing rats. By altering a maze, for example, but keeping the basic clues the same, we see that the rat will follow old clues rather than the new layout of the maze—but after sufficient rewards of the edible variety, it learns to relearn. When hunger strikes, the inconvenience of synaptic restructuring becomes affordable.

With even the most rudimentary understanding of motivational reprogramming concepts, we can develop for ourselves a series of practical persuasions in user-interactive learning games which encourage intuitive, deductive and inductive reasoning and new learning.

Along these same lines, we may begin to make serious inquiries in the realms of repetitive mazes, alternating mazes, mazes that change suddenly and in unexpected ways in mid-game through interactive variables, relative constants and the absence of objective, or absolute, constants.

We ought to be easily able to make the rather feeble conceptual leap from simple observation of rats encumbered with a fairly primitive intelligence, to ourselves, totally unencumbered by intelligence, bound by artificial limits of memorized educational patterning which functions relative only to a known, oversimplified cultural environment, by which we have learned to apply old responses to cope with new stimuli.

Well, enough philosophy, already; the fact is, both rats and human primates tend to experience essentially the same problems of stress and social pressure, and possess—prior to cultural conditioning and psychoemotional imprinting, which is to say, the usual deep-brain impulse-responsive pain and pleasure formatting—precisely the same initial intuitional innocence largely through the inattention which can only come from lack of self-motivation in the absence of environmental and biological stimuli, and the general perceptual occlusion which results from environmental alienation, a hazy uncaring withdrawal which is symptomatic of deep-seated unexamined fears about things I’d rather not think about just now.

If we are to produce a potent method for our excursions into the macrodimensions, we need only recognize that one rat can be encouraged to venture outward into dark and unknown territory, while another rat cannot bring itself out of its mechanically imposed inertness, no matter what the provocation.

Still, this doesn’t actually ensure that anything will come of it; after all, even the most experienced rat is still subject to the maze, still a prisoner, a laboratory animal subject to outside whim, and in this sense—but only in this sense—the rat is not free.

Freedom is a subtle and elusive intangible which lies in an unexpected direction, far beyond the bounds of biological slavery and hard-edged walls, as we will soon discover.

Never could understand why—given the same training, the same opportunities, the same and even additional exposure to the maze—nine out of ten rats never seem to be able to extricate themselves from the pleasant robotic muck of animal life.

The labyrinth: a macrodimensional maze camouflaged by the fabric of biological boundaries. In ordinary life, no matter what we do or accomplish, no matter where we go or who we become, we find ourselves ultimately a prisoner of the rigid rut and, submerging ourselves in a nonstop self-invoked bombardment of daily pressures, distractions and self-pity, manage somehow to successfully avoid all real help.

If we know how to look, we can seize the opportunity to work our way through the passages, pitfalls and primrose paths of the macrodimensional maze; but we don’t know how to look, and in the beginning we work to fathom the reality that we can be in the maze and yet be completely unaware of it.

Voyagers—which is what we really are—seldom understand or are aware, and can easily fail to recognize the labyrinthine quality of what they are experiencing, because they lack the power of serious, rooted and undistractable attention behind the physical senses with which to view it.

We fail to recognize that we have passed this way many times before, that we have made this or that turn. And, more importantly, we fail to recognize the futility of everything we have done in the trivial pursuits of primate life.

But futility is the name of this game; we learn young to flow downstream, toward some awesome, unknowable end, some great, all-engulfing cosmic septic system.

We have thoroughly bought into the cultural norm, perpetuating a pathetically passive posture in relation to the maze—at the same time experiencing all the frustration, anger and fear of any lost, frightened and hungry rat.

Immersed in sleep and stunned by fear, we automatically assume that our house is all in order; that everything is always exactly the same as we expect it to be.

In our preoccupation with trivial distractions of the biological machine, our superficial attention races quickly, almost in embarrassment, past the majestic vistas of macrodimensional events, which we evidently feel compelled to translate immediately or sooner, into the most pedestrian of all possible worlds.

We are neither amused, astonished nor amazed. This translation into the primate is a genuine sickness, as clinical as any commonly accepted medical condition.

Because the essential self with its qualities of attention and presence is able to view things differently, it, on the other hand, is able to perceive crossover into direct maze-perception when it takes place.

Imagine driving a car and, contrary to our customary habit, we viewed the car as stationary, the road actually surrounding and being absorbed by the vehicle, more precisely the vehicle’s windscreen, sliding past the side windows, spewing itself out the back, after which, it recycles and comes out of a tiny hole in front, expanding and flowing around the car once again.

This is the nature of our whole experience in macrodimensions. We have been trained to compartmentalize our experiences, to isolate their connectors, thus overlooking the subtle continuity amidst apparent change and discontinuity. We have a flip-flop perception of events; where there is change, we see stability; where there is stability, we see change. What we believe is real is definitely illusion, and what we believe is illusion is probably real.

Compulsive primate hallucinations constantly impose an artificial grid of time and space on our purely sensory and mental experience.

We view our passage through Creation from the point of view of an artificially decided upon direction of space and time in direct contradiction to what we already know from geometry, mathematics and physics, periodically updating our perception of events with slight changes in our space-time model, although carefully avoiding the full consequences of what we really know from these disciplines.

I don’t mean to complain, but we act as if the primate world really exists, as if we have a direct interface with it, as if there is an absolute certainty and tangible quality to it, when in fact none of it exists—in the sense that we take it to exist—even remotely We have walled ourselves into a veritable Garden of Familiarity and now we are trapped in it with no hope of escape.

Knowing our propensity for self-illusioning, it isn’t at all surprising to find that we have developed a mythology of banishment from the same garden in which we are forced to live out the remainder of our days.

The majority of those voyagers who happen to accidentally find themselves momentarily wandering in the macrodimensions are unaware of the change, and should they somehow become aware of this unaccountable alteration in reality-perception, may end up explaining their experience to someone with a Ph.D. and two hefty orderlies to protect them.

We can always emulate our fellow barely-upright-primates, shuffling aimlessly through the maze oblivious to the subtly clamorous experiences that present themselves to us, or we can awaken to our surroundings and direct ourselves with intelligence and understanding.

Being rather reluctant voyagers, human primates have, through none of their own intention, formed a preconceived idea of the way things should be, and therefore refuse obvious choices; if given the opportunity to follow their natural inclinations, most humans will obey the cultivated rut of brain and body, wherever they may lead.

As popular as it may be, blind, robotic, slavish obedience to habit is considered by the experienced labyrinth voyager a very inelegant method of macrodimensional functioning.

We learn the maze by rote, voyaging in typical human mechanical fashion, and even occasionally arrive accidentally by this method at the heart of the labyrinth, and so long as we remember to do everything exactly the same, and no aberrations of our routine occur, we will seem as if maze-bright, until something happens which isn’t exactly on the menu....

Someone really soaked in the wine of primate life, who may have wandered seventy trillion and two times through the same macrodimensional sector will fail to make the Palladian connection; the tendency is to lose contact with the macrodimensional state of consciousness.

Numberless primates have been and seen...yet, through some strange vagary of the mind, blissfully forgotten; many more there are, who didn’t see, whose occlusion indicates that they were just plain perceptually inept.

All this can lead any outside observer to conclude that a bizarre form of culturally-induced schizophrenic alienation occurs between maze consciousness and consensus human reality, agreed upon by convention, which in relation to macroconsciousness can hardly be considered to represent consciousness.

Human primates

Evidently think

They are all alone

In their sector,

And they should be.

Chapter Two

MAZE BRIGHTNESS

When we awaken a higher learning process, we no longer exhibit

confusion and disorientation in the macrodimensions. Through special

internal processes which we can learn, we are able to penetrate far beyond

the ordinary spectrum, into the macrodimensions, resembling

consensus reality in form, but radically different in other ways, perceivable

only with long, difficult training of the non-machine attention.

AS A CHILD OF THIRTEEN AND FOURTEEN, I found my bedroom overrun with lab rats, and more or less as an afterthought—I had no other use for them, not being particularly attracted to vivisection and the like—built a few mazes to study rat behavior.

One item stood out clearly in my observations of dozens of rats stumbling, bumping and sniffing their way toward their final reward as they learned to synthesize experiential data through a primitive form of deduction...or didn’t learn, and nearly starved to death.

I discovered, independently of texts on behavioral sciences, something which I later learned was by convention called maze brightness, which could be defined for the moment as becoming able to find new paths through the maze toward the reward-point through sheer repetition, from which we could, if we weren’t overly concerned about how far we could quantum leap, deduce that some rats eventually become aware of the general rules of maze construction, of course only on a purely subjective-instinctive nose-and-gut level.

I discovered through this a special learning process which could enable the rat to solve not only one known maze but virtually any maze it may thereafter happen to encounter by accident or design.

I also concluded, probably rightly, that such a rat would, eventually—having blundered its way through a sufficient number of mazes—in spite of itself, begin to dimly recognize the inescapable fact that it is in a maze and that, moreover, it cannot—at least by present means—remove itself to parts unknown.

Once this first all-important recognition has been achieved, without which nothing further is possible in any direction except down, it can begin to perceive and analyze its surroundings as they actually are, and not as its unexamined fears and perceptual occlusions have caused it to imagine them to be.

Because the perceptual-emotional conflict will have, for the moment, been resolved, it will no longer exhibit the compulsion to maintain a self-constructed veil of confusion and disorientation.

One would think the thrill of observing that single rat which, out of dozens, suddenly gave indications of having become aware of the maze would soon pall, but au contraire...the shared excitement of this simple yet magnificent discovery never failed to strike me as anything less than downright apotheotic, and any behavioral scientist worth his or her weight in potassium nitrate who says any different is spouting pure scoria.

A rat achieves maze-brightness, and its eyes seem somehow at once older and younger; general posture and behavior toward the environment and toward itself show radical signs of alteration. It seems less frantic, more self-assured, and noticeably less self-destructive.

At the same time, one can see visible signs of excitement as a new sense of freedom descends overwhelmingly upon it, the same sense of freedom which humans who have discovered what they call enlightenment experience. Of course for humans, this first glimpse of real freedom, not from the maze but from self-induced boundaries, purely psycho-emotional limitations, does not last very long and soon enough, the customary humdrum primate activity reasserts itself

In the guise of ordinary existence, the maze is all the more diabolical because it has been hidden by itself, yet ultimately, it is the same sprawling macrodimensional complex of corridors and chambers, openings and closings, twistings and turnings reduced to the flat hard-edge walls of organic reality.

Like the complacent rats who fall so easily into apathy—if, indeed, they ever emerge from it—especially after the first glimmering of rudimentary maze-awareness has presented itself, human primates whose perception had become momentarily open to the whole macrodimensional vision of the unobstructed labyrinth seem to be in an awful hurry to lock themselves into a closet once again.

It might be possible to artificially induce maze awareness and transition into macrodimensional space, but we can fully expect that any resulting momentary understanding which may have been gained will almost instantaneously be mangled, mashed and mauled in the all-devouring jaws of primate convention and found thoroughly indigestible.

At the same time, we are presented with the first real opportunity to penetrate far beyond the ordinary reality spectrum, in a far-seeing and sweeping vision, somewhat resembling consensus reality in form, but radically different in its significance, scale and intensity.

Pure macro-molecular structure becomes visible, matter is revealed as swirling patterns of raw energy, and time becomes nonexistent—a simple expedient to encapsulate an event or to move from one frozen energy-tableau to another; then we know that we are beginning to see things as they really are...but we mustn’t mention this to anyone in a lab smock if we don’t want to spend the rest of our lives interpreting Rorschach blots, calling off Rhine cards and singing doda kupanga udoda kukala, doda kupanga ukala shatti background vocals for Leon Russell.

An understanding of what this really means in the objective sense comes only much later when we have demonstrated how even a jungle-wise Zulu can get lost in the bush.

When we have developed total trustworthiness, shown our fortitude and continued enthusiasm in the face of endless repetition, clearly exhibited signs of unshakable loyalty to the Work, successfully separated ourselves from the ways and attitudes of the primate, we will have earned the right to become involved in a different type of work, something beyond the primate.

This other type of work can only result from serious and concentrated efforts to enter and perform work obligations in macrodimensional chambers, in unimaginable domains, and to perform such work in ways not at all to the liking of primate directives and biological imperatives of the human biological machine.

Best, then, to be taken everywhere by the hand and shown, but what good is it, if we cannot also at the same time wake up at our own initiative, and survey the very height and breadth of the labyrinth?

Ah, but we must first recognize that there is a maze and that we are in it. If we haven’t achieved at least this one small step, then how can we expect to make the giant leap, to bring ourselves into the waking state, when it is important to do so?

Help, real help, is available only to those already well on their way toward nonprimate life, who show an already deeply rooted aptitude for the labyrinth, who have demonstrated themselves to be courageous voyagers, despite personal fears of the more terrifying aspects of the labyrinth, shown the potential ability to perform special work under very difficult and often overwhelming conditions, and most importantly, do not display the kind of delicate psycho-emotional nature we were likely to see in children who left summer camp the first or second week.

When one considers the profound time limit imposed upon a working school and the small number with whom one can work seriously, it only makes sense that any training effort is concentrated in those who show the highest potential, to isolate the winners and eliminate the losers.

There is, among new voyagers—most of whom never quite make the grade and of whom this is typically symptomatic—a certain amount of impatience to experience unusual, meaning exotic and dangerous, sectors of the maze, but before exposing ourselves, along with our predictably runamuck machines, to the excitement of these deliciously dangerous environs, a number of preparatory steps must be taken to increase our reasonable chances of survival, not for ourselves, but for the sake of the Work, so that our training and transformation