The Reactive Mind consists of goals so reuplsive or frightening to the subject that he compulsively reacts against them and it is percisely this reaction that keeps those negative goals in operation.
p. 45 -- juxtaposition of control commands
A reconstruction of the symbol system that must underlie the Reactive Mind would open the way for more precise and speedy erasure.
To travel in space you must learn to leave the old verbal garbage behind: food talk, priest talk, mother talk, family talk, love talk, party talk, country talk. You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to see what is in front of you with no preconceptions.
And what does the money machine eat to shit
psychopath = "refractory to control"
...the whole country is a shell around a great sullen core of violators.
America may well be the hope of the world. It is also the source of such
emotional plagues as drug hysteria, racism, Bible belt morality, Protestant
capitalist ethic, muscular Christianity that have spread everywhere
transforming this planet into an annex of Hell.
The distinction between eroticism and sexuality, for example -- I think
this is another case of the either-or in Western thought; it's either love
or sex...
The program proposed is essentially a disintoxicationform inner fear and
inner control, a liberation of thought and energy to prepare a new
generation for the adventure of space. With such possibilities open to them
I doubt if many young people would want the destructive drugs.
Compulsive verbal patterns are actually word viruses that maintain
themselves in the central nervous system by manipulation of the speech
centers, throat muscles and vocal cords.
When people speak of clarity in writing they generally mean plot,
continuity, beginning middle and end, adherence to a 'logical' sequence. But
people don't think in logical sequence. Any writer who hopes to approximate
what actually occurs in the mind and body of his characters cannot confine
himself to such an arbitrary structure as 'logical' sequence. Joyce was
accused of being unintelligible and he was presenting only one level of
cerebral events: conscoius sub-vocal speech. I think it is possible to
create multilevel events and characters that a reader could comprehend with
hs entire organic being.
Q: To what extent can this "new mythology", this new framework of
associations and images, affect the awareness of the reader, and make him
move about in space and time?
A: That would depend entirely on the reader, how open he is to new
experience, and how able he is to move out of his own frame of reference.
Of course most people are only able to give a very small fraction of their
attention to what they read -- to anything they're doing -- because of
their various compulsive preoccupations, and with just a thenth of their
attention on something they don't move very far. Others are able to apply
muc more attention.
Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.
The wavelength most dangerous to human life is 7 hz.