The Adding Machine (15 page)

But the voice of God was not dead People continued to hear and obey voices and they still do.
New York Post,
Friday January 18, 1980: ‘Escaped mental patient tells police that voices commanded him to bash in the head of elderly passerby.’ Why are the voices obeyed? If bicameral man obeyed the voices willingly and without question, modem man seems compelled to obey
because the voice is there.
The voice has taken over motor centers by its presence. Julian Jaynes cites the case of a man who was ordered by a voice to drown himself. Rescued by a lifeguard the recovered patient gives this account of his experience. ‘The deep voices, loud and clear, pounded in as though all parts of me had become ears with my fingers and my legs and my head hearing the words. There is the ocean. Drown yourself. Just walk in and keep walking.
I knew by its cold command I had to obey it.’

What was the origin of the voices in the first place? Jaynes does not venture to speculate. If we can produce voices by electrical stimulation of the non-dominant brain hemisphere, perhaps the voices were originally produced by electrical stimulation coming from without. We approach the realms of science fiction which is rapidly becoming science fact. Fifteen years ago experiments in Norway indicated that voices can be produced directly in the brain by an electromagnetic field. Progress along these lines is probably classified material.

The difference between a normal and a pathological manifestation is quantitative, a question of degree. When you think of someone you may hear his voice distinctly just as you may see his image. You will observe that some people are more audible than others. I have but to think of a certain English lady of my acquaintance and hear her voice as if she were sitting next to me. Other friends of hers report the same experience. So what is the line between memory and hallucination?

Psychiatrists tend to assume that any voices anyone hears in his head originate there, and that they do not and can not have an extraneous origin. The whole psychiatric dogma that voices are the imaginings of a sick mind has been called in question by voices which are of extraneous origin and are objectively and demonstrably there on tape, Freud says that errors and slips of the tongue are unconsciously motivated. And I agree that errors and accidents are
motivated.
For example dropping or spilling things. It may not be easy to remember what you were thinking about when this happened. In my case it usually happens when I am thinking about someone I dislike or with whom I am quarrelling. It is a demonstration then of hostility but the hostility may be quite unconscious. Other errors may have a more complex etiology and often seem quite inexplicable,

Here is an example. In Boulder, Colorado, I went to a fish market called Pelican Pete’s, They accept American Express cards so I proffered what I thought was my American Express card in payment. However, I had accidentally handed him my Chase Manhattan Bank check cashing card. A simple error is it not? Months later I was on my way to cash a check at the Chase Manhattan Bank at Houston and Broadway. Just across from the bank some one had set up a street stand and was selling fish. I noted the fish stand in passing. So when I got in the bank I accidentally handed the teller my American Express card instead of my Chase Manhattan check cashing card. What is unconscious here? Only the moment in which the error is made, But a whole train of association leads up to this moment. One has the impression of another presence muttering away at all hours of the day and night of which one is only partially or occasionally aware. One rule applies: lightning always strikes twice in the same place. One mistake with cards makes another mistake that much more probable. But the motivation remains obscure.

Freud states that dreams always express the fulfillment of a wish. The dream content may be frightening or repugnant to the dreamer because the wish expressed is unconscious. Consider the syndrome of combat nightmares. The veteran dreams he is back in a combat situation. In what sense is this wish fulfillment?

Recent studies of dream and sleep have yielded a wealth of data that was not available in Freud’s day. Perhaps the most important discovery is the fact that dreams are a biologic necessity. Deprived of REM sleep, experimental subjects show all the symptoms of sleeplessness, no matter how much dreamless sleep they are allowed. They become irritable and restless and experience hallucinations. No doubt prolonged deprivation would result in death.

An interesting discovery by Jouvet is the fact that all warm blooded animals including birds dream, but cold blooded animals do not dream. He attributes this to the fact that the neural tissue of the cold blooded animals renews itself and heals from traumas whereas the neural tissue of the warm blooded animals, once damaged, does not heal. There is however a part of the mammalian brain that does have the ability to heal and this is the pons. If the pons is removed experimentally from cats they act out their dreams lapping imaginary milk and chasing dream mice. The pons then serves to immobilize the body during dreams. Further, research should shed light on the function of dreams, which is far from being understood.

John Dunne, an English physicist and mathematician, wrote a book called
An Experiment With Time
that was first published in 1924. Dunne wrote his dreams down and observed that they contained material from the future as well as the past. He gives a number of examples and states that anyone who will take the trouble to keep a pad and pencil by his bed and write his dreams as they occur will, after a period of time, turn up precognitive dreams. He observed that if you dream of a future occurrence say a flood or fire or plane crash.. . you are dreaming not about the occurrence itself but of the time that you learn of the occurrence. . . Usually through a newspaper picture. In other words you are dreaming your own future time track. I have written my dreams down over a period of years. And I have noticed that, if I don’t write the dream down immediately I will in many cases forget it, no matter how many times I go over the dream in my mind. I wake up, too much trouble to turn on the light but I can’t possibly forget it and I do. It would seem the memory traces of dream experience are much fainter than with waking experience. I have experienced a number of precognitive dreams that are often quite trivial and irrelevant. For example I dreamed that a landlady showed me a room with five beds in it and I protested that I didn’t want to sleep in a room with five people. Some weeks later I went to a reading in Amsterdam and the hotel keeper did show me a room with five beds in it. Well the sponsor took me to another hotel. In another dream I saw a wardrobe floating by. The next day I was in the Café de France in Tangier and looked up and there was the wardrobe floating by the window. A man was carrying it on his back with a strap around his forehead so I could not see the bearer just the wardrobe. Precognition is not confined to the dream state. In fact I have the impression it is going on all the time. Nor is the dream state confined to sleep. It is my experience that the dream state goes on all the time, and that we can contact it in a waking state. Years ago I was into gambling. I recall I was standing in line at the race track to make a bet and the tune SMILES was playing over and over in my head. But I didn’t bet on Smiles the winning horse. Anyone who has done any target shooting or archery will tell you that he knows just before he shoots or looses an arrow whether it will or will not hit the target.

For me dreams are extremely useful professionally. I get perhaps half my sets and characters from dreams. Occasionally I find a book or paper in a dream and read a whole chapter or short story... Wake up, make a few notes, sit down at the typewriter the next day, and copy from a dream book.

As soon as we endeavor to describe or define the unconscious we are immediately faced with definitions of conscious which are necessarily misleading, since we have by definition reduced consciousness to a purely verbal and front brain activity. Consciousness is that which defines consciousness. Who is aware of what? Korzybski, who formulated General Semantics, describes consciousness as the reaction of the organism as a whole to its total environment. ‘You think as much with your big toe as you do with your brain,’ he told his students, ‘and a lot more effectively.’

If we postulate that the unconscious is manifested through the non-dominant brain hemisphere we realize that while it may in some cases be a source of pathological and destructive thought and behavior, the non-dominant brain hemisphere is also the source of artistic and creative thought, useful intuitions and ESP faculties, spatial perception, of valuable and essential abilities. It seems evident that consciousness has been so altered since the 19th century partly through therapeutic approaches opened by Freud and his followers, that we now need new terms. Voltaire said of the Holy Roman Empire that it was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire. And the so-called unconscious is no longer unconscious. We are dealing with levels and degrees of awareness. Certain activities require more dominant hemisphere front brain activity than others. In some activities consciousness is a hindrance... I quote from a manual on the martial arts.. . ‘Once thought no longer becomes necessary, the unified reaction will be attained.’

As regards ESP I think that these abilities and the use of them is very widespread, in fact a part of daily life... I recall a former policeman who told me about this telepathic cop. He suddenly for no apparent reason stop and go into a lunch cart and make an arrest. He said he just felt it up through the back of his neck. Others may call it a hunch or a feeling. In face to face it is not possible to separate telepathy from other encounters, other factors, voices, timbre, gestures, facial expression etc. I find that so-called ordinary people are more receptive to ESP experience than intellectuals and scientists, some of whom display an irrational fear and aversion to anything they cannot explain in terms of cause and effect. One scientist said he would never believe in telepathy no matter what evidence was presented.

From my point of view there is no such thing as a coincidence. But the word is charged with emotional significance. How many times in fiction, when faced by evidence of ESP or any manifestation beyond his rational understanding, the scientist hero cries out.

‘Coincidence!
It has to be! Anything else is unthinkable!’

What is this magic word that exorcises and banishes magic? I turn to Funk and Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary. Coincidence: circumstance agreeing with another implying
accident
.

I do not understand exactly why this assertion of randomness produces such a potent sedative effect it seems to convey a comforting conviction that there is no God in any heaven and what is happening here is no one’s plan, intention or responsibility. It
just happened.
Ask why it happened and why just at this particular time and once again the magic word is invoked.

‘It was a coincidence.’

The universe is random, Godless and meaningless. Any belief in creators or purpose is wishful thinking. And when you point out that perhaps all thinking is wishful, reactions of intense irritation give evidence that we are dealing not with logic but with faith.

Truth is another highly charged word. However, truth is used to vitalize a statement rather than devitalize it. Truth implies more than a simple statement of fact. ‘I don’t have any whisky,’ may be a fact but it is not a truth.

‘What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate, and prudently did not stay for an answer. For Christ indeed spoke the truth as enunciated by the Voice of God from the non-dominant brain hemisphere. He spoke with the raw material of which dogmatic truth is made. He spoke with the voice that must be obeyed because it is
there.
Julian Jaynes, in
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Brain,
postulates that this voice was once heard by all men and guided human destiny up to about 1000 B.C. The priest-king, he says, was regarded with awe because he had the power to produce his voice in the brains of his loyal subjects. The voice lost power and prestige during a period of chaos, migrations and social upheavals. The voice is still heard by some individuals, but is now regarded as a symptom of mental disorder. To hear that voice is to obey, and so Pilate had as much reason to avoid contact with Christ as he would to avoid a loathsome and highly contagious disease. Many have related the awesome power of the voices, often ordering the subject to commit some violent and dangerous act. We now know that these voices are transmitted from the non-dominant brain hemisphere, and that they can be induced by electric stimulation of the transmitting area in the non-dominant brain hemisphere of normal subjects. Perhaps the voices must be obeyed because they have taken over the motor centers of what is normally voluntary action under control of the dominant brain hemisphere.

As to where the voices came from in the first place and how they gained access to the non-dominant brain hemisphere, that is one of the mysteries. The theory set forth in
2001,
that stranded space travellers took over a tribe of apes, in this way teaching them at the same time to understand and obey the spoken word, seems to me as probable as any other theory I have heard on the origin of language. According to Jaynes’s hypothesis, language derived not from practical necessities but from the religious experience. Religious truth is always of a categorical and dogmatic nature. ‘I am
the
way and
the
light.’ Use of the definite article conveys the concept of one and one only.
The
way.
The
universe.
The
truth. No proof or argument is admissible. Religious truth is
absolute.
Certain individuals seem to have been charged with this truth and able to infect others over thousands of years.

Generations of believers believe because an inner voice tells them that this is the
truth.
And this is a brand of truth as potent as Einstein’s great truth: Matter into energy. However, religious truth seems to go in the other direction of grounding energy into matter, that is, into lifeless repetition of dogmatic formulations. Korzybski, who developed the concept of General Semantics, the ‘meaning of meaning’, points out that Western thought has been crippled by the formulations of Aristotle and Plato. We are still thinking in either/or, absolute terms that don’t correspond to what we know about the human nervous system and the physical universe ... Korzybski would start a lecture by thumping a table ... ‘Whatever this may be it is
not
a table. It is not the verbal label table. We can call it anything so long as we agree that this object is what we are referring to.’ Take an abstract word like ‘truth’. You can’t see it, you can’t touch it. Everyone who uses the word has a different definition. Some are referring to religious truth, others to scientific truth, magical truth, pragmatic truth, some to a private lunacy. Everyone is talking at cross purposes. And all this tedium derives from the idea that if you have a label, there must of necessity be something that the label refers to, some absolute essence of truth floating about in a Platonic cave, along with ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘justice’, and other meaningless abstractions. I am sometimes asked if technology is good; well, for exactly whom, where and when? If you have a clear purpose in mind then you can decide what is good or bad, relative to your purpose. For example you are building a bridge. What leads to getting a workable bridge finished is good. Concepts that result in the bridge falling down are bad. Philosophy, sociology, and psychology tend to founder in verbiage for lack of a clearcut purpose.