LOST IN A MAZEMENT

Unknowingly we voyage in a labyrinth, a macrodimensional maze of living electrical force, cloaked by a thick layer of ordinary life. Our most serious obstacle is the uncontrollable urge to convert everything to the familiar, to reduce it all to the level of the primate brain; to reject the living, breathing reality of the totality of all possible attention.

FOM PREVIOUS EFFORTS AND UNDERSTANDING, we have established a new relationship between the nonbiological essential self and the human biological machine, and have already demonstrated to our satisfaction that the human machine does indeed provide us with the means of transformation; we clearly see the path which we must take.

Knowing that it is necessary to awaken the machine before we can do anything of objective consequence, we have hopefully achieved some stable results.

By this time, we realize that we are now in need of further instructions to incorporate our present knowledge and take us a step further toward our ultimate aim, the formulation of which may not yet be very exact.

It ought to be obvious that we are only at the very beginning of our path, and we are anxious to take further responsibilities as beings, but before we can take effective steps toward fulfilling these responsibilities, we must first understand just precisely where we are, and what we are, in the general scale of things, and where we stand in relation to the Absolute so we can develop a method of work within this context.

We can now come to understand the essential self in its work-role as eternal voyager, exposed to perils and opportunities, purpose and distraction, fatal attraction and ultimate destruction in the nearly infinite immensity of the labyrinth.

In this quest, we lift our gaze from its firm fixation upon the world of the primate, working from this nonhuman perspective wherever we may discover ourselves to be.

In the first book of the Labyrinth Voyager Series, The Human Biological Machine as a Transformational Apparatus, the analogy of a fish tank was invoked to establish an approximate description of the human situation relative to higher dimensions which we will from now on refer to as the macrodimensions.

The animal kingdom will once again be of service, providing us with a point of view that we can easily see, understand, and relate to.

A few minutes of simple observation of a rat in a maze will clearly demonstrate to even the densest scientist that it clearly doesn't know that it's in a maze ... it's simply aware that it can't get at what it wants and that it doesn't know its way, nor — in the absence of sufficiently compelling motivators — does it much care.

It may also dimly suspect that it can't escape; backwards, forwards, sideways — all apparent possible directions maintain the maddening slavery of the maze.

The trapped rat has no way of knowing the overall shape and configuration, rules and functions of the maze, but it may — under the influence of a sudden, unexpected, and unusual traumatic jolt — become somewhat aware of the fact of its imprisonment, if not of its precise nature.

When it comes to mazes, human primates are every bit as predictable as rats, but without the perceptual and emotional clarity, keen attention and intelligence of their hairier cousins.

A lot can be learned about mazes by experimenting with and testing rats. By altering a maze, for example, but keeping the basic clues the same, we see that the rat will follow old clues rather than the new layout of the maze — but after sufficient rewards of the edible variety, it learns to relearn. When hunger strikes, the inconvenience of synaptic restructuring becomes affordable.

With even the most rudimentary understanding of motivational reprogramming concepts, we can develop for ourselves a series of practical persuasions in user-interactive learning games which encourage intuitive, deductive and inductive reasoning and new learning.

Along these same lines, we may begin to make serious inquiries in the realms of repetitive mazes, alternating mazes, mazes that change suddenly and in unexpected ways in mid-game through interactive variables, relative constants and the absence of objective, or absolute, constants.

We ought to be easily able to make the rather feeble conceptual leap from simple observation of rats encumbered with a fairly primitive intelligence, to ourselves, totally unencumbered by intelligence, bound by artificial limits of memorized educational patterning which functions relative only to a known, oversimplified cultural environment, by which we have learned to apply old responses to cope with new stimuli.

Well, enough philosophy, already; the fact is, both rats and human primates tend to experience essentially the same problems of stress and social pressure, and possess — prior to cultural conditioning and psychoemotional imprinting, which is to say, the usual deep-brain impulse-responsive pain and pleasure formatting — precisely the same initial intuitional innocence largely through the inattention which can only come from lack of self-motivation in the absence of environmental and biological stimuli, and the general perceptual occlusion which results from environmental alienation, a hazy uncaring withdrawal which is symptomatic of deep-seated unexamined fears about things I'd rather not think about just now.

If we are to produce a potent method for our excursions into the macrodimensions, we need only recognize that one rat can be encouraged to venture outward into dark and unknown territory, while another rat cannot bring itself out of its mechanically imposed inertness, no matter what the provocation.

Still, this doesn't actually ensure that anything will come of it; after all, even the most experienced rat is still subject to the maze, still a prisoner, a laboratory animal subject to outside whim, and in this sense — but only in this sense — the rat is not free.

Freedom is a subtle and elusive intangible which lies in an unexpected direction, far beyond the bounds of biological slavery and hard-edged walls, as we will...