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Introduction to The Tree of Lies by Christopher S. Hyatt
by Robert Anton Wilson
I remember the first time I entered
Alternate Reality and accepted a lie as fact. I was five or six years
old at the time and my parents had taken me to see a wonderful movie called
The Wizard of Oz. Toward the end of the film there was a scene
in which the Wicked Witch of the West, riding her broom, wrote in the
sky like one of the mysterious skywriting airplanes that I was accustomed
to seeing. The airplanes always wrote the same strange message--I.J. FOXFINE
FURS--but the Wicked Witch wrote something far different and absolutely
terrifying. She wrote:
SURRENDER DOROTHY
I was so frightened that I burst into tears. My parents had a hell of
a job quieting me down, and I must have annoyed all the adults in the
theater. Today, over 50 years later, I understand better what had happened.
Sitting in the dark, staring at the movie screen, I had crossed the line
between "reality" and "fantasy"--a line that is not
nearly as firm for a child as it is (or seems to be) for an adult. Dorothy's
danger, up there on the screen, was more "real" than my safety,
down in the dark audience. This may or may not qualify as an imprinting
experience in the Lorenzian sense, but it was traumatic in the Freudian
sense. Even today, as I typed the terrible words "Surrender Dorothy,"
I felt a reflex shudder pass through me.
Well, a few years later I was able to distinguish movies from "real"
reality. I watched the Frankenstein monster wreak havoc on the villagers,
King Kong run amok in New York, Lon Chaney Jr. turn into a werewolf, and
none of it fooled me. I was amused at the younger kids who screamed during
these films, or closed their eyes "in the scary parts." Still--only
my conscious ego, or forebrain, was immune to the hypnosis. I still jumped
when the director pulled his shock scene.
Watching adult audiences these days, none of whom believe literally in
Indiana Jones or the Temple of Doom, or even in Batman and Joker,
I see that, whatever they think they know, parts of their old brain, and
of their bodies, still enter hypnosis easily. That's why they gasp, and
cringe, and breathe hard, and have similar physical reactions, when things
get rough up there on the silver screen. I can still see these reactions
in myself, too, of course.
Only a small part of our brains, or our "selves," is able to
resist the lies of a good artist. Nobody can sit through Alien,
I would wager, without at least one sound of fear or distress escaping
their lips during that "ordeal"...which consists only of looking
at pictures projected on a screen...
A movie theater is the best place to learn the true meaning of Plato's
parable of the prisoners in the cave, who accept shadows as reality. Every
artist who moves us, from a movie maker to Beethoven or Shakespeare, is
a bit of a hypnotist.
In this sense that seemingly stupid and mechanical contraption we call
"society" must rank as the greatest artist on the planet. For
instance, when I was seven or eight, and feeling superior to the kids
who closed their eyes "during the scary parts," I was entering
a deep hypnosis created by another Virtual Reality called language. This
hypnosis was a worse nightmare than the Wicked Witch of the West or King
Kong or the Wolf-Man or any of their kith and kin, but it made me a "member
of society"--and "a member of the Body of Christ" as well.
The hypnosis was performed by the good and pious nuns at the school to
which my parents sent me. Every day, school began with a prayer. After
lunch, there was another prayer. When lessons were finished for the day,
before they let us go, there was another prayer. Five days a week, September
to June every year, for eight years, these prayers formed my consciousness
into a Catholic mold. They were reinforced by Religious Knowledge class,
in which we memorized the catechism, containing all the dogmas of the
church. We had to pass examinations on that, just like we did in arithmetic,
as if the two subjects were equally valid.
The result of all these prayers and all that memorization was that I came
to do well in a Virtual Reality in which a nasty old man living on a cloud
a few miles above Earth was watching me all the time and would probably
charbroil me or roast me or toast me if he ever caught me doing anything
he didn't like. He was called God. He had a partner, even nastier, called
Satan, who presided over the charbroiling and roasting and toasting, in
caverns that honeycomb the hollow Earth. Between the two of them, God
and Satan, life was far more terrifying than any "horror movie."
As a result of all the lies the nuns told me, I became a pretty good liar
myself. When it came time for high school, I convinced my parents I wanted
to be an engineer. That persuaded them to send me to Brooklyn Technical
High School, and I didn't have to listen to the nuns drone on about God
and Satan and Hell and all that horror movie stuff anymore. That was my
real goal--getting out of the Catholic nexus. I didn't want to become
an engineer at all.
At seventeen I became a Trotskyist. That was hot stuff in New York in
the late 1940s. We Trots were more radical than anybody, or we thought
we were. Of course, I was lying to myself again. Who the hell knows enough,
at seventeen, to make an intelligent or informed choice among competing
political ideologies? I had picked Trotskyism because one part of my mind
was still Catholic and needed a hierarchy; the Central Committee made
a good substitute for the Vatican. It allowed me to feel modern, scientific,
"altruistic," brave, rebellious etc. and it did all my thinking
for me.
At eighteen I quit The Party just before they could expel me. I pledged
allegiance to the principles of individualism, free thought and agnosticism.
From now on, I said, I will not by hypnotized by groups: I will think
for myself. Naturally, I then spent over 20 years following various intellectual
and political fads, always convinced I had at last escaped group conditioning
and finally started "really" thinking for myself. I went from
Agnosticism back to dogmatic atheism, and then to Buddhism; I bounced
from Existentialism to New Left Activism to New Age Mysticism and back
to Agnosticism. The carousel turned around and around but I never found
a way to stop it and get off.
All this, mind you, occurred within the network of language--the Virtual
Reality created by the strange symbol-making capacity of the upper quarter
inch of our front brain. Language created God and Satan and Hell, in my
childhood, and it created Liberty and Equality and Justice and Natural
Law and other fictions that obsessed me at other stages of my "development."
Language creates spooks that get into our heads and hypnotize us.
It is obvious, once one considers the subject at all, that our eyes cannot
see the whole universe. They can't even see the whole room in which we
happen to be sitting (they only see what is front of us, and not all of
that...). Similarly, our stomachs cannot swallow the whole universe, and
our brain cannot "know" the whole universe (they only know the
signals they have received up to this second, and do not remember all
of them consciously...).
Nonetheless, language programs us to try to speak, or to accidentally
give the impression that we are trying to speak, as if we possessed the
kind of infallibility claimed by the Pope or the Central Committee of
a Marxist party. That is, language allows us to say things like "The
rose is red," and in the mild hypnosis of this Virtual Reality we
then promptly forget that the rose is more and other than red- that it
is fragrant, for example, and that it is temporary and will wither soon,
and that it is made of electrons, which are made of quarks, and that it
"is" only red to creatures with eyes like ours, etc.
Every over-simplification becomes a lie quickly (if we are not very cynical
about language); ergo, language always lies, just because it over-simplifies.
From "The rose is red" to "The National Debt forces us
to raise taxes again" to "ARKANSAS MOM RAPED BY MIDGETS FROM
MARS" to "Pornography is murder" (A. Dworkin) we proceed
from one fiction to another, every time we open our mouths to speak.
(See my Quantum Psychology, New Falcon Publications, 1990, for
further examples of how language creates a Virtual Reality experienced
as just as real as a bottle of beer and a ham sandwich.)
Is it is possible to use language to undo the hallucinations created by
language? The task seems impossible, but Zen riddles, Sufi jokes, the
works of Aleister Crowley, and a few heroic efforts by philosophers such
as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein seem able to jolt readers awake--shake them
out of the hypnosis of words. The following book by Dr. Hyatt [The
Tree of Lies] also makes that gallant effort to use words to transcend
words. Success in this field does not depend on the author alone, however.
It requires not only the right words, but the right reader at the right
time, before the shock and awakening can occur.
Will it work for you? I don't know, but the odds of a favorable outcome
increase if you do not "browse" or "skim" but read
and re-read carefully, meditating all the while on the following two propositions:
1. Words can never say what words can never say.
2. With the right reader at the right time, words can, in fact, say what
they can never say.
One of those propositions is the most dangerous lie in this book. Can
you see which one it is?
Robert Anton Wilson
Los Angeles, CA
Copyright: Robert Anton Wilson
