The Mind Parasites

Nothing could be more dangerous for the human race than to believe thai its affairs had fallen into the hands of supermen”.’

he important thing was to gather a small army of men of high intellectual standing.

he veil of fog lifts, and man becomes a traveller in the mind as he has become a traveller on sea and in the air and in space. What he then does is up to himself. He can simply make brief pleasure trips into this new land, or he can set out to map it. We explained why, at present, we dared not use psychedelic drugs, and we told him of what we had been able to add to the realms of phenomenology.

It is once again a matter of ‘focusing’ emotion.

The business of mapping these mental realms was in every way more exciting and rewarding, for it brought a far more exciting kind of control. Human beings are so used to their mental limitations that they take them for granted. They are like sick men who have forgotten the meaning of health.

ow, without the slightest effort, I grasped the theory of functions, multi-dimensional geometry, quantum mechanics, game theory or group theory. I also read through the fifty volumes of the composite Bourabaki for bedtime reading—I found that I could skip whole pages at a time because the reasoning seemed so obvious.

aw that he was correct in saying that this was our greatest advance so far, in a philosophical as well as a practical sense. For, in a certain sense, man’s scientific progress has been progress in the wrong direction. Take the matter of the Karatepe diggings; we had been treating it purely as a mechanical problem, how to raise a city from underneath a billion tons of earth, and this reliance on machines meant that we were ceasing to treat the human mind as an essential element in the operation. And the more this same human mind produces labour-saving machines, the more it blinds itself to its own possibilities, the more it tends to regard itself as a passive ‘reasoning machine’. Man’s scientific achievement over the past centuries had only thrust man deeper and deeper into a view of himself as a passive creature.

is easier to make a living object do what you want, because its vitality can be used by you, and there is no inertia to overcome.

No, ‘willed it’ is the wrong phrase. You do not ‘will’ your hand to open and close; you just do it.

However, I did not do what I used to do in the old stupid days—let my fatigue plunge me into depression. I simply let my mind relax, deliberately soothing it, and turned my thoughts elsewhere. Ten minutes later, in the library, the feeling of mental cramp had disappeared.