Horror Book Reviews
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Title: Prometheus Rising |
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Review of Prometheus Rising
- Imagine trying to make sense of an amalgam of Timothy Leary's eight neurological circuits, G.I. Gurdjieff's self-observation exercises, Alfred Korzybskis general semantics, Aleister Crowley's magical theorems, and the several disciplines of Yoga; not to mention Christian Science, relativity, quantum mechanics, and many other approaches to understanding the world around us! That is exactly what Robert Anton Wilson does in Prometheus Rising. In short, this is a book about how the human mind works and what you can do to make the most of yours.
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Comments for Prometheus Rising
- Posted on 2008-07-07
Every Two Years I Read This Book Again...
Prometheus Rising is one of my all-time favorite books.
After a friend of mine asked me to store some of his books, I looked through his stash and this one caught my attention.
It persuaded me to get out of my "belief" box. And it reminded me that despite the breath of one's knowledge in a subject area, you don't know everything. The book made my even question what I think I know as well. I love it!
The book asks you to not just read it, but to live it. You're given "exercises" to perform (some are very difficult; a few almost impossible; all, radical). Any of them can give you more keen insight into the workings of your own belief/thought processes and how much you've been programmed in our modern culture.
This book will offend many people because it will call your religious ideas into question. So it's not for the fundamentalists and the hardline zealots. But for me it actually became FUN when I realized that Wilson is trying to push my buttons.
Want a true challenge to see what you're really made of? This book will provide that for you. But after reading it you'll become a better human being and a little less robotic.
Also it's dense enough to come back to reread regularly, so you can try some of the exercises you might not have tried.
This book will be with me for the rest of my life. That's how good it is.
Score: 5
- Posted on 2008-07-04
Prometheus aka Forbidden Info
This book simply covers areas such as drugs because most people are simply too narrow minded, thanks to the Corporate Industrial Military Complex that would prefer to create weapons out of drugs such as LSD, and or use such drugs to brainwash people by secretly slipping these drugs in. For all the bluster and bluff of the Nixon and Reagan "war on drugs" not to mention the callous behavior of the Clintons and now Bushs drugs should be decriminalized. People need to feel good, feeling good should not be a crime, only bad behavior, violent behavior, which this book works very hard to explain. Since the FCC has literally banned any positive mention of drugs currently illegal, they have effectively brought about a modern Inquisition against knowledge and evolution.
But this book explains this in a witty and articulate manner, unlike anyone I can recall in the modern era. Since most people would rather hit someone over the head than listen to what they say with a very sympathetic ear they will usually fear this book or throw it on a bonfire. If science essentially represents a monopoly of information than whoever controls the media controls the information and thus the science. So yes the earth does revolve around the sun and yes drugs such as LSD can in the proper setting and set bring about positive outcomes. Where are those stories in the media? Oh yeah they can't take place simply because they have been banned. As, Bill Hicks would say, where's my commercial. Maybe we have something yet to learn from these forbidden fruits.
Prometheus covers such timely topics as the monopolization of knowledge, military power, land and the issuance of currency. Genetic Imperatives, Imprints, Conditioning and Learning. He talks about modeling the brain with computers and goes into detail about "what the thinker thinks the prover proves." An excellent book about subjects that are not the least bit ordinary to people that have undergone the same experiences, but might seem confusing to those less experienced with the subject matter or those less willing to comphrehend forbidden knowledge.
Score: 5 - Posted on 2008-05-20
Junk
This is a book about "how the mind works", basically. The author does not know how it works. The first 3/4 of the book reel around the subject, interjecting political views (pro-drug, anti-"military-industrial complex"). The author gets you to think that he has no rules, besides that if you take enough LSD, you can have an out of body experience and see relatives in a different state (he actually claims this).
Then the last chapter comes and he lays down his precise, set and immutable rules. Yoga. He's just a yoga fanatic and believes exactly as they tell him to about yoga and how it works and what it is.
He uses nearly every formal and informal fallacy in the book to try to show his points and dodge around areas where he lacks information or a logical process. A book about "anti-brainwashing"... and he tries to brainwash you to his goofy, 1960's view of the world.
This book is based on LSD and all its wonders.
Score: 1
- Posted on 2008-05-14
Mind blowing
This book is exactly what I was looking for. A high colonic for your mind. RAW's use of humor is nice especially when he is destroying your old "beliefs" and other little trinkets that you used to carry in your travel bag. He lets you leave behind the stuff you thought you needed to adhere to in order to feel safe and "real" in this world.
Score: 5 - Posted on 2008-04-23
Prometheus Rising
'Prometheus Rising' reemerged from my first year at university, a time when people like Wilson, Carroll, Leary and Burroughs rocked my world, and I couldn't understand anything that wasn't said with their language. I decided to go through the book again, this time thinking more about each idea and doing (some of) the exercises. Many things that I've liked in the past haven't survived this test (due, I hope, to increasing wisdom and not to decreasing skill of being fascinated), but PR has.
The author moves through Leary's model of eight circuits of consciousness, thus analyzing everything that makes up our behaviour and our potential, from the lowest instincts to ecstatic bliss, to the possibility of reprogramming ourselves. In every chapter chances are that you will discover something about yourself that you didn't know. Reading this book makes you feel more free, even if it shows you how much you are a slave to your past programming.
I tend to classify books as 'reading books' or 'practice books'. The former is the kind which I read, usually in a small time, letting fate make the choice of what I will learn from them, what information will strike me the most and what I will retain. The latter is for books that present a self-contained, practical system. This one is a practice book, although a light one.
This means that, to get the most out of it, one should dedicate a certain period to it (let's say at least 3 months), living its models 24 hours a day, letting its ideas emerge more and more often in the interpretation of one's ordinary life, fully exploring the routes it suggests (some of the exercises involve studying other books, believing certain things for a period of time, taking martial art classes etc.).
Since at this time I couldn't afford that (being already practicing another "system") I chose a middle way: let's do only the exercises that don't require too much time, and substitute the actual living of the concepts in an extended period of time with constant meditation on them.
This worked somehow, but PR is definitely a "practice book". Exercises are of the greatest importance, and I plan to work through it again in the future when I will be able to do everything in the way it should be done.
Score: 5
