"Any multi-cellular organism must, if it is to survive, contain a hard-wired bio-survival circuit, which very simply programs an either-or choice: GO FORWARD to the nourishing, the protective, or GO BACK, away from the threatening, the predatory." Prometheus Rising. 47,

The story begins with a desire to eat and a fear of being eaten. From the beginning of the story there are the child, the good mother, and the devouring bitch, or, perhaps the devouring bitch is the vengeful father in disguise. The game is to eat and avoid being eaten. This is the first frame of a film that ends in the frameless.

It is in the second frame that we see the child take up arms against that other who would eat him/her. It is in the second frame that the film becomes three-dimensional and in this three-dimensional fantasy we see that the child has aquired an appetite for the predator. "The second circuit, the emotional-territorial networks of the brain, is concerned entirely with power politics." Prometheus Rising. 63. In the second circuit is recorded the "primal crime", the conspiracy between the good mother and her sons, to kill the father and partake of his flesh in common. Eating the enemy is communal, is political.

I just finished reading Robert Anton Wilson's book, Prometheus Rising. He makes a convincing case for technology, or, the spiritual project; more convincing than any case I might make against it. But nevertheless, having read his book, I remain here in my hermitage tapping out these words. He writes that reading is not enough, or, that reading books cannot get you where the spirit desires to go. At the end of each chapter of the book there are exercises which the reader is to perform if he/she is to experience the power of technology to transform the reader into a super-computer, or Superman.

I have always experienced a wave of ennui when presented with such technological tasks. For one who identifies him/herself with the reader, this feels like a temptation that will lure me out of the womb of the book and back into the reality from which I flee in reading. I am suspicious of the idea of the evolution of consciousness. The Promethean process is a process that begins with bio-computer circuit one and culminates in circuit eight. But what is, before and after the process? And if it is nothing but the process, then doesn't the culmination trigger the beginning again, again, again . . . . ? One climbs the mountain from base to peak, only to find that the peak is the base.

The idea is that death can be eliminated without eliminating the process. Except in the experience of dying, there is no memory of birth. A story without end is what a story is not.