The Power of Myth Explained as a History of Supernormal Sign Stimuli

Evidence will appear, in the course of our natural history of the gods, of the gods themselves as supernormal sign stimuli; of the ritual forms deriving from their supernatural inspiration acting as catalysts to convert men into gods; and of civilization--this new environment of man that has grown from his own interior and has pressed back the bounds of nature as far as the moon--as a distil­late of ritual, and consequently of the gods: that is to say, as an

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organization of supernormal sign stimuli playing on a set of IRMs [Innate Releasing Mechanisms, i.e., our psychic icons, our "buttons"] never met by nature and yet most properly nature's own, inasmuch as man is her son.

But for the present, it suffices to remark that one cannot assume out of hand that simply because a certain culturally developed sign stimulus appeared late in the course of history, man's response to it must represent a learned reaction. The reaction may be, in fact, spontaneous, though never shown before. For the creative imagination may have released precisely here one of those innate "inclinations" of the human organism that have nowhere been fully matched by nature. Hence, not only the ritual arts and the develop­ment from them of the archaic civilizations, but also--and even more richly--the later shattering of those arts by the modern ar­rows of man's flight beyond his own highest dream, would per­haps best be interpreted psychologically, as a history of the super­normal sign stimuli that have released--to our own fright, joy, and amazement--the deepest secrets of our being. Indeed, the depths of the mystery of our subject--which are the depths not only of man but of the living world--have not been plumbed.

In sum, then: Within the field of the study of animal behavior ­which is the only area in which controlled experiments have made it possible to arrive at dependable conclusions in the observation of instinct--two orders of innate releasing mechanisms have been identified, namely, the stereotyped, and the open, subject to im­print. In the case of the first, a precise lock-key relationship exists between the inner readiness of the nervous system and the external sign stimulus triggering response; so that, if there exist in the human inheritance many--or even any--IRMs of this order, we may justly speak of "inherited images" in the psyche. The mere fact that no one can yet explain how such lock-key relationships are established does not invalidate the observation of their exist­ence: no one knows how the hawk got into the nervous system of our barnyard fowl, yet numerous tests have shown it to be, de facto, there. However, the human psyche has not yet been, to any great extent, satisfactorily tested for such stereotypes, and so, I am afraid, pending further study, we must simply admit that we do not know how far the principle of the inherited image can

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be carried when interpreting mythological universals. It is no less premature to deny its possibility than to announce it as anything more than a considered opinion.

Campbell, J. (1968). The Masks of God: Primitve Mythology. Princeton.

That's how the symbols and narratives of myth are available to propagandists for jacking us into Waste Lands. They're the supernormal carrots held out before our mythical noses.

Ah, but with practice, we can see right through them, like the proverbial emperor's new clothes.

There are some among us, who think they know how to machine us into Being aware of this we share: our shared Becoming.

"From its late 17th century inception in modern form, science has strongly privileged the reductionist mode of thought that breaks overt complexity into constituent parts and then tries to explain the totality by the properties of these parts and simple interactions fully predictable from the parts. ("Analysis" literally means to dissolve into basic parts). The reductionist method works triumphantly for simple systems — predicting eclipses or the motion of planets (but not the histories of their complex surfaces), for example. But once again — and when will we ever learn? — we fell victim to hubris, as we imagined that, in discovering how to unlock some systems,we had found the key for the conquest of all natural phenomena. Will Parsifal ever learn that only humility (and a plurality of strategies for explanation) can locate the Holy Grail?

The collapse of the doctrine of one gene for one protein, and one direction of causal flow from basic codes to elaborate totality, marks the failure of reductionism for the complex system that we call biology — and for two major reasons.

First, the key to complexity is not more genes, but more combinations and interactions generated by fewer units of code — and many of these interactions (as emergent properties, to use the technical jargon) must be explained at the level of their appearance, for they cannot be predicted from the separate underlying parts alone. So organisms must be explained as organisms, and not as a summation of genes.

Second, the unique contingencies of history, not the laws of physics, set many properties of complex biological systems....[Gould, S. J. (February 19, 2001). Humbled By The Genome's Mysteries, opinion article originally published in New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/19/opinion/19GOUL.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5070&en=eec9b1271e4b19eb&ex=1227330000]

Scott McClellan calls it "manipulating the media narrative," as if war-mongering lies had no consequences for the reality-based community.

Rumsfeld used a machine to sign the death letters, the letters to families of the ones he and his followers killed on false pretenses. Is there nothing alive, man?

There is nothing alive in the reductive Newtonian mechanism that now dominates American thinking and is passing itself off as psychology. We imprison and torture our detainees in our approaching them as mere machines.

John McCain's slip is painfully apt: "My fellow prisoners...."

The science of the mind being practiced at our black sites, and the showrooms at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, is a weaponized monstrosity, an abuse of being human by its founding assumptions.

By modeling itself after physics; by basing itself on the absolutely isolated point particle; modern psychology collapses our psyches into quantum singulatiies of pain; cellf-imprisoning us in cellves of our own mistaken making.

Isolation and psycho-religio attacks, are the hallmarks of the Bush-APA Torture Doctrine. Any1 who denies that obvious pattern obtained during the last election will answer to NO1.

Now, all we need is NO1 to assert OUR authority over OUR government. WE are sovereign here, not the tools of governance.

Any1 seen NO1, we need NO1 front-and-center, please, paging NO1! Cyclops, I'm looking at you, pal, have you seen d'oh! my bad, that was 'no man.' Here comes Some1 now.

Here!

I am

NO1 (and so are you, o reader my Reader! that's the Good News)