Excerpts from
The Greatest Power in the Universe
by
U. S. Anderson

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WHAT THIS BOOK WILL DO FOR YOU
1.
It
will show you how to use the greatest power in the universe to develop
your
abilities and attain your desires.
2.
It
will teach you how to use the strongest structure in the universe to
build better
memory and accelerated mind-power.
3.
It
will show you how to use Inner Ecology to improve your health, increase
your
longevity, and restore your body to youthfulness.
4.
It
will teach you how to use the feedback signals of Outer Psychology to
remove
emotional charge from your memory bank and free your energies for
success and
achievement.
5.
It
will show you how to use the Ecology Diet to build up your vitality and
increase
your energy and free yourself from disease and malfunction.
6.
It
will teach you a simple new way to quit smoking, stop drinking, and rid
yourself of excess weight.
7.
It
will show you how to open the door to your subconscious mind and use
its forces
to win love and happiness.
8.
It
will teach you how to establish contact with your Master Mind and use
its
powers to expand your consciousness and experience astral travel.
9.
It
will show you how to meet and know your Master Self—the spiritual guide
who
controls your destiny.
10.
It
will give you techniques for recalling your past lives and teach you
how to
become free of your karma.
11.
It
will show you how to see into the future, perceive things at a
distance, read
the thoughts of others.
12.
It
will reveal to you your spiritual destiny—show you how to claim that
destiny
now—place in your hands the keys to immortality and power.
PROLOGUE -
ATLANTIS
RISING
The
American Dream is the ancient dream of the prophets of Atlantis who
sought
union with God and thereby a measure of God's freedom and power.
Today, all
that man remembers of Atlantis is “the gods who came out of the
sea”—the glory
of their golden ornaments, the transcendency of their wisdom, and the
sanctity
of their symbols. Wherever the Atlanteans roamed, they erected temples
and
pyramids patterned after the great sanctuary in their City of the
Golden Gates,
and so it was that they built the pyramids of Egypt, Mexico, and
Central America.
In the
midst of this program of colonization, the cataclysms began that sank
Atlantis
beneath the sea. The spiritually illumined withdrew from the doomed
continent,
carrying with them their Sacred Scrolls. Nearly all the cosmological
myths that
underlie the world's Great Religions are based on the Atlantean Sacred
Scrolls,
for they comprise the Great Way to spiritual illumination. There are
many
paths, but there is only one Great Way.
Now the
cast of characters has assembled once again. Now the costumes and
settings have
been taken from memory's storage and refurbished anew. Now the
orchestra
strikes the first resounding chord of the overture. The curtain is
about to go
up. Atlantis is rising . . .
Chapter 1
Discoveries
of Cybernetics
Within a
small and heavily wooded ravine in the Cascade Mountains on the Oregon
coast
nestles a tiny, jewel-like lake where human foot has seldom trod. In
crystal
depths swim giant trout, landlocked all the year except for spring
when
over-flowing waters carry them by creek down to the sea. Anglers greet
this
sudden bounty by renewing faith in the mysterious lake that not a
single one
has seen, though more than one has often searched. I, too, looked for
the lake
but never found it. I even wrote a story about a man and his son who
looked.
They didn't find it either. I realized then that the lake
symbolized the
Secret of Life.
I
discovered that secret through cybernetics.
THE REAL AND
THE UNREAL
The word
was coined in 1948 by Norbert Wiener, a mathematics professor at
Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, when he published under that name a book
describing
the functioning of the automatic feedback control devices that were
being used
in steering ships and flying planes and in the new computing machines.
He
derived the word from the Greek, meaning steersman, and much of the
book was devoted
to drawing analogies between the feedback control devices of machines
and the
feedback control devices of the human nervous system. The brain,
illustrated
Wiener, might best be likened to a complex computing machine.
Since his
book was published by M.I.T., it was distributed to a restricted
audience, but
computer developments over the next decade made Wiener's utterances so
prophetic
that John Wiley published a 1961 edition for the general public. A copy
fell
into my hands.
It is
difficult to describe my excitement. After having traveled fully around
the
world in my search for the essence of man's mind, now for the first
time, I
felt I had found something concrete and material, something
demonstrable and
repeat-able, something I surely could learn to understand and control.
Earlier
I had published several books which developed the premise of an
indwelling God,
but mine was an intellectual vision only, and the full realization had
eluded
me.
Hard on
the heels of the Wiley edition came a popularization of Wiener's work
by the eminent
plastic surgeon, Maxwell Maltz. His book, Psycho-Cybernetics, combined
feedback control with positive thinking to provide a regime for
self-improvement, and it became a best-seller. Overnight, thousands of
Americans were introduced to the idea that the brain was a highly
sophisticated
machine. A few, like myself, were thus led to ask, "Who's operating
it?"
THE GHOST IN
THE SKULL
Dean
Wooldridge thought that nobody was. The wealthy co-founder of
Ramo-Wooldridge
resigned his company position in 1962 to devote himself to scientific
pursuits
and to writing, and in 1963 he published The Machinery of the
Brain, a scholarly
compendium of correspondences between brain and computer
functioning, an area
which he felt offered unparalleled opportunity for scientific
advancement.
Several
other books carried the same theme. Among them were J. von Neumann's
The Computer
and the Brain, D. O. Hebb's The Organization of Behavior, and
Brain
Mechanisms and Learning, a compendium of papers edited by Fessard,
Gerard,
Konorski and Delafresnaye. Though I refused to concede the
argument of the
materialists and give up the idea of a "ghost" in the skull,
nevertheless I had to admit that most behavior seemed automatic. The
human
machine had enormous potential, but it had to be trained to develop it.
Training was "conditioning," a term used by Ivan Pavlov to describe
the process by which he produced automatic reaction in dogs.
On a
sultry afternoon in mid-August, I received a long distance phone
call from a
vice-president of a national firm, requesting that I run a series
of training
programs for his sales force. I had received such invitations before
and had
always declined since my primary concern was man's spiritual quest
rather than
his financial aspirations, and I simply felt that my brand of
philosophy was
not particularly suited to the rough-and-tumble world of competitive
capitalism. But this time my caller was insistent. He had read three of
my
books, he said, and he knew that I was the man to do the job. He was
positive
that what his sales force needed was a spiritual anchor. The upshot was
that I
agreed to take on the task.
A
SESSION WITH GOD
The first
session was held in a resort hotel in upstate Illinois. One hundred
salesmen
were in attendance, together with their wives, and they had won this
privilege
with their sales records, so they were affluent and gregarious and
hardnosed
and fond of alcoholic beverages. The first time I mentioned the word
"God" I could feel my audience stir, and after a bit a tall man with
a large Adam's apple and wearing spectacles raised his hand and I
called on
him. He stood, removed his spectacles, polished them carefully with a
handkerchief, placed them back on his nose, stared around at the
audience, then
fixed me with his gaze.
"G-O-D,"
he said, "spells dog backwards." He sat down amid strained laughter.
I glanced
at the vice-president who was on the stage with me. Beads of
perspiration were
popping on his forehead, but he managed a sickly grin. Well, I hadn't
survived
four and a half decades by persisting in unrewarding efforts. If my
audience
didn't want God, I'd give them cybernetics.
"Apparently
we have a champion speller in the audience," I said. "Since he has
demonstrated his proficiency with three letter words, perhaps he would
like to
try something longer. Would the gentleman please stand up?"
Tall and
bespectacled, he arose from his seat, a confident smile on his face.
"Try
cybernetics," I said.
He stared.
"What?"
"Cybernetics.
It's a new science of improving human performance by feedback
control."
"Never
heard of it."
"Take
a crack at it anyway. Cybernetics."
"S-I-B-U-R-N-E-T-I-C-S,"
he spelled hesitantly.
I spelled
it correctly on the blackboard, then said, "So, you see, we've both
learned
something. I learned how to spell dog backwards, and you learned that
things
are not always what they seem. Now we both can get down to learning
something
about improving our performance through feedback control. That way
we'll make
more money."
The subsequent
three days were a roaring success.
THE
INGREDIENTS OF GENIUS
I had to
wing it, of course—make up much of it on the spot—but my head was
crammed so
full of the stuff that it just seemed to be there when I needed it, and
fortunately somebody had a tape recorder turned on, so I emerged from
the
session with a complete new course for improving human
performance. I called
it Success Cybernetics.
I like to
think that it was not simply a parroting of things I'd read, but rather
a genuine
creative effort, that all I'd learned about cybernetics was filtered
through my
experience in athletics, business, and writing, my years of study
in
philosophy and comparative religions, to produce something different
from
anything that had been done to that time. For fundamental to my
understanding
of cybernetics was awareness of the
power of a well-drawn plan to become
a self-fulfilling
prophecy. This kind of control of the future was something that seers
and
soothsayers had been after for years without notable success, and I
found
myself excited about being on the verge of a breakthrough in
mental power.
The
automatic feedback control devices in the human nervous system were
easy enough
for most people to grasp. They could understand that you could never
become a good
automobile driver, a good typist, a good piano player, until you were
able to
perform all the necessary movements automatically, without
thinking, responding
to signals in much the same way as an electronic computer responds to
signals.
Nearly everyone had had the experience of driving five or ten miles to
the
office through heavily congested traffic, making all the appropriate
moves,
with his mind on something else, so that when he arrived at the
office he
couldn't remember a single event that had transpired en route. Thus
nearly
everyone understood that the nervous system usually performed
automatically.
The obvious corollary of this understanding was the principle that to
achieve
skills you must practice. And practice. And practice. Until the skills
were
ingrained in the nervous system and functioned automatically.
To most
people this realization came as a shock. They had thought that Heifitz
just
walked out there and played the violin, that Bob Hope was born with
that
timing, that Einstein popped out of the womb clutching the Theory of
Relativity. For a person by dint of sweat and diligence to be able to
train
himself to genius seemed heresy.
HEREDITY
AND ENVIRONMENT
Was
environment more important than heredity then? Or was heredity more
important
than environment?
I couldn't
help thinking that the question was much like the one that had plagued
me from
the start. Was materialism more important than spirituality?
For
example, among people who practiced the same amount, some would perform
better
than others. And among the people who practiced the least would be
someone who
could perform better than somebody who practiced the most.
So there
was a mystical factor.
But was
heredity so mystical? Hadn't we isolated the genetic structure?
Didn't it carry
a coded signal to other cells to tell them what kinds of cells to be,
just like
the master program of an electronic computer?
Oh, that
coded signal could tell those cells what to be, all right, but could it
tell
them what to do?
It
could not tell them what to do. It could only tell them what to be.
They would
have to learn what to do.
So in the
seminars we concentrated on goals—all the things we wanted to get done
or see
done sometime in the future, whether it was two hours from now or
twenty years from
now. You can't imagine the consternation this produced. People sat for
hours
with lead pencils to their tongues. It turned out that the cause of
this paralysis
was their feeling that they were being required to predict the future
rather
than make it up. That anyone could possibly make it up was foreign to
their
thinking. When it was pointed out that a writer made up a story, and an
artist
made up a painting, and a composer made up a song, they thought that
the
comparison was unfair because they were being asked to make up
something that
was real.
"The
future isn't real yet," I objected. "It has to be made up."
"But
that isn't always true," they complained. "The future isn't always
what we think it is going to be. It's usually a surprise."
The
only people who are surprised by the future are the people who don't
make it
up.
GOAL
ACHIEVEMENT
That got
us into goal achievement. We were able to understand that the only
way a
person could learn a skill was to get a mental picture of himself
performing that
skill. That was a goal. The goal gave him a means of disciplining his
actions.
After he had practiced enough to learn the skill, he didn't need the
mental
picture anymore, because the appropriate reactions had been trained
into his
nervous system. That was cybernetics.
Goals and
automatic reactions—what you wanted to accomplish and the steps
that would
accomplish it—practicing the steps, getting good at them, doing them,
reaching
the goal—a nice little system for getting things done. It used both the
mind
and body, but there seemed no place for the soul. I missed the
soul, but apparently
nobody else did. The program won immediate acceptance.
Soon
people were acting as if they had mastered all the secrets. "It's
really
so simple!" they exclaimed. That worried me. But as time passed and
more
and more people embraced the program enthusiastically, I gradually put
my fears
aside. After all, the proof of a thing was in its performance, and
everybody
who took to getting things done the cybernetics way was getting things
done
better and faster. Demands on my time, however, began to accelerate, so
it
eventually occurred to me to put the course in book form, thus it could
be
taught by sales managers and personnel directors and athletic coaches
and
military officers and business executives and school teachers and
whoever else
had a stake in improving human performance.
About this
time, a disconcerting thing happened. One of my prize pupils, a
super-achiever,
was stricken with a heart attack. A relatively young man of 42, he was
forced
into a life of semi-retirement, being told by his doctor that he had
strained
his resources beyond the breaking point and would need much time and
rest to repair
the damage. To the credit of my stricken friend, he never once
suggested that
his cybernetics program might have brought on his heart attack, but I
couldn't
help toying with the possibility myself, and I didn't much like what I
saw.
MR.
MIDAS
After some
prompting, his wife revealed how he had set a goal to be president of
his
company and how he had worked day and night to achieve it. She
confirmed that
the resultant seven-day-a-week, 16-hour-a-day schedule had been too
much for
him. So, for the time being at least, his goal had been defeated.
I thought
over this problem for a long time but could see no solution.
Eventually, I
shrugged it off as just one of those things—the exception, perhaps,
that proved
the rule—and turned again to happier areas where things were working
fine.
Then
another unusual thing happened. A young man who had set a goal of
making a
great deal of money had made over two million dollars during a hectic
nine week
period on the commodity market. Everybody who visited him brought back a strange
report. He appeared
downcast, not at all elated. Some even reported him despondent. That
observation was apparently close to the point, for within a few weeks
he attempted
suicide, and his death was narrowly averted. His friends prevailed upon
me to
call on him, which I did with misgivings. One does not easily face
up to the
fact that his antagonist is death.
I found
him tucked into a lounge chair on the balcony outside his
apartment. Though it
was a pleasant day, he was bundled up in blankets, and his face was
pale and
drawn. The autumn sun cast shadows on the street below, and in the
distance,
the shimmering haze of the ocean could be seen. He apologized for not
rising to
receive me, and explained that he had been overcome by such lethargy
that the
simplest movements were beyond him. I tried to bring the
conversation around
to the money he had made, but he seemed not to hear me, staring into
the
distance in a manner which made me uncomfortable. Finally I tried
talking
about all the things he could do with the money, all the places he
could go,
the things he could see, but this made no impression either. At last I
arrived
at my wit's end, and we sat on the balcony in silence.
When I
rose to go, his liquid eyes stared at me. "Call me Mr. Midas," he
said.
A
STRANGE MEETING
The
interview had depressed me, and I felt like being alone, so I let the
car have
its head and before long discovered that I was driving south from Santa
Monica
along the Southern California coast. Eventually, I reached a deserted
beach
where a jetty jutted into the sea. On impulse, I decided to park and
walk out
on the pier, there to look upon the ocean and feel the breeze and
reflect upon
my afternoon visit.
The night
had settled down chill, and by the time I found a parking place, I was
thankful
that I had a sweater in the car. Donning it, I hiked across the sands
and made
my way out on the pier. Along the horizon hung a faint reddish glow
from the
starboard running lights of a ship. The sky was overcast. Not a star
was to be
seen. Breaking seas ran beneath the jetty with an exaggerated whoosh
and roar.
I wandered
out onto the pier, staring unseeingly at the sea and night. Thus
it was that I suddenly came
upon a man sitting on a small bench toward the seaward end of the
jetty. His
presence startled me. Doubly so, his appearance.
He wore a
violet jacket of old-fashioned cut, a white ruffled shirt, dark striped
trousers, square-toed boots, and he rested his hands on a gold-crested
walking
stick. His hair was long, dark and abundant, and he wore a full
mustache and
neatly trimmed beard. Clear blue eyes were fixed on me quizzically, and
he
looked so elegant sitting there that I wondered if I was suffering an
hallucination.
"You
look like an educated man," he said. "Do you know Faust?"
The
question took me aback, but I managed to admit that I was familiar with
Goethe's work.
He nodded
his head, as if in affirmation. "One must pay, of course. That is what
makes a bargain."
I suppose
that at any other time the obliqueness of the conversation would
have irritated
me and I would have demanded to know at once what was meant, but there
was
something so sophisticated about his appearance that I found myself
weighing
the various meanings that might be intended. My mind was drawn at once
to the
situation of Mr. Midas.
THE
FANTASTIC BARGAIN
"Can
one truly have anything in the world if he gives up his immortal soul?"
I
asked.
"That
is apparently what Goethe was trying to say," answered my
companion.
"Why
would Goethe occupy himself with such a question?"
The
walking stick was raised then thumped against the planking of the pier.
Its
owner gave vent to a melodious laugh and said in high good humor, "Tell
me, truly now, is there anything else for man to be concerned
with?"
"Assuming
he has a soul, I suppose not."
"Do
you assume that he has no soul?"
"It
is a question to which I have been addressing myself most seriously.
For a long
time, I felt that man had a soul and I made every effort to discover
it, but at
last it seemed mere vanity, so I turned away from the abstract to the
concrete,
which has proven a great deal more useful to both myself and others."
"Then
you've made the Faustian bargain."
"How
do you mean?"
"You've
given up the abstract for the concrete, which simply means that you've
given up
your soul in order to have things."
I stared at
him. "I should not like to think that the bargain was irreversible."
His gaze
seemed to discern my innermost thoughts. "The fact that you are here is
proof that the bargain is not yet irreversible." He banged his
stick
against the pier in emphasis. "Not yet, at least." Then he stood and
threw a cloak about him. "Well, I must be going. It has been an
interesting
chat." He started off along the pier and immediately disappeared from
view. A light fog had risen, and I was left in the isolation of my
thoughts.
A strange
sensation of vertigo seized me, as if there was no place solid to
stand. I felt
that I was immersed in a dream, trying desperately to awaken.
Staggering along
the pier toward the shoreline, it seemed that I must walk this
narrow way
forever. Finally I reached the sand then found the car and managed to
drive
home. When I went to bed, my dreams were haunted by an elegant figure
in a violet
jacket, and I knew that some great change was about to enter my life.
TREADING
THE FAUSTIAN LINE
In the
morning, I arrived at a decision. I would postpone my teaching. An
invisible
weight disappeared from my shoulders, and I sang boisterously in the
shower. I
hadn't felt so good for months. Now I understood that I had only half
the
truth, and until I had much more, I had best confine myself to being a
student
rather than a teacher.
The
question was, how best to start? Should I circle again the perimeter of
man's
philosophical and religious thought, hoping to discern something that
had
escaped me the first time? Or should I pick up my search among the
axioms and
formulas of science, an area that at least had produced
cybernetics? I was
persuaded at once, because of the little I knew of science, that
whatever was
missing from my complete understanding existed in the area where I
understood
the least. I resolved to carry on my subsequent investigations in the
area of
science.
In high
school and college, I had a terrible time with mathematics. It
seemed to me
that numbers were a waste of time because there were no ideas in them.
Five
years later I woke to the fact that not only were there ideas in them,
but
those ideas were permanent. In other words, they were laws.
The
way I came to see this was I became navigating officer of my ship
during World
War II. They gave me some tables so I could correlate my star sight
(height
above the horizon, compass direction and time) with my ship's
position on the
face of the ocean. I got to wondering how all this was done, and that
launched
me into spherical trigonometry. When I started drawing in my mind
those great
triangles of balancing pressures that extend throughout the universe,
when I
actually started seeing that those triangles existed evermore, when I
began
realizing that the relationship between them was immutable and
unchanging, for
the first time I felt I had touched the eternal heart of God.
Now, I was
treading the Faustian line. Because, to really get into something, one
had to
get into it exclusively. To get into science exclusively, I had to
exclude mysticism.
That meant I had to become one-sided. That meant I must adopt a
hard-headed,
materialistic, show-me, I'm-from-Missouri type of practical realism
about
everything that crossed my path.
Oh, I
could play the role. What, after all, is an actor but his quest? And I
knew I
could save myself from being permanently cast in the role. What, after
all, is
strong enough to stand against growth? And the objective was
intriguing,
indeed. What is the meaning of man's life? Or was there a meaning? And
if so,
where was that meaning to be found?
THE
MIND CONTROLS EVERYTHING
When one
takes on an area of knowledge as broad as science itself, and an arena
as large
as the universe, he is likely to find himself in the position of not
knowing
where to start. In such cases, the winds carry their own boding, and
leaning ladders,
and black cats, and most of all, well-meaning friends. Thus it was, on
a Saturday
night, in the midst of a party that was "high" if not drunken, a
friendly fellow who had known me in college told me that he was now a
professor
at U.C.L.A. Though I didn't remember him, I acknowledged the past, then
politely inquired what he taught. "Brain Sciences," he answered, and for the rest of
the
evening, he educated me.
It turned
out that the University of California at Los Angeles had a Brain
Research
Laboratory that was doing extraordinary work in lifting the mystery
that surrounded
the working of the human brain. W. S. Adey had come up with some
remarkable
findings that indicated how little was known and understood about how
the brain
really functioned.
I
acknowledged that I had heard of Dr. Adey.
"Brainwaves!"
cried the professor. "That's the thing of the future! Adey is
discovering
all sorts of things. For example, right now I know you're in beta.
You'd feel
better if you were in alpha. You'd get better ideas if you were in
theta. Well,
whatever, somewhere along the way we're going to discover that the mind
controls everything."
"Are
you an M.D.?" I asked.
"Everything
is chemical," he replied.
"Where
do I find out about these brainwaves?"
"Try
the Biomedical Library at
U.C.L.A."
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