"Psychobiological immortality. Only--modern man, being so pompous about what goes on in his cortex and repressing so much of what goes on in the rest of his brain, has construed the 'immortal' aspect of instinct as a property of his ego. The natural urge to live through his species, through kids--to love, that is--to be man's father--is drained off into the asinine notion that his personal ego will live in a slap-happy eternity." "Man," said Tom, "has a pretty damned powerful feeling about that personal immortality. Hard to shake." "Why not? It's fashioned out of his most powerful instinct. The one that supports life itself, reproduction, and that at least accompanies evolution. Man takes that billion-year-old galaxy of instincts, filters it through his cortex, and comes up with the idea of Heaven. It's a childish mistake. But even a child, when it's mistaken about the actual nature of an instinct, still has as powerful a compulsion in his error as he would have if he were correct. Say he's frightened by something that isn't really frightful: he's still just as much afraid. And we--most of us--are in that state about pretty much all of our inner selves." "And have been, you think, for a long while?" "Sure. Since thousands of years before Christ. You guys in medicine ought to quit studying tissue per se--and study its functioning some more. Contemporary man--as a rule--never gets even a glimmering of how his personality is split and how the conscious part can bamboozle the unconscious part--and believe it has got away with it. You know the fact--you ignore the implications. For instance, Tom, we actually see upside-down, right?" "Sure." "In our first few weeks--as babies, we react according to the fact of our vision. We want to grab the top of something--but we reach for the bottom--because human vision is inverted." "It is." "We learn--by experience--that we see upside-down. As we age--month by month--we develop a 'mind' that makes the correction for us. By the time we're some months old, everything 'looks' rightside-up. And only once in a while, under peculiar conditions, does anybody's mind ever glimpse the world the way his eyes see it--inverted." "So what?" "So--that is an example of useful autohypnosis. An immensely potent example. It shows how the 'mind' can establish a set of facts directly opposite to those observed by the eyes. A mind that can go through life looking at an inverted world but 'seeing' it the way it is--manifestly is capable of accepting almost any degree of suggestion from its other parts, and its various senses--of accepting true suggestion or false suggestion. Manifestly, it isn't necessarily 'right' or 'wrong' about anything not proven." "An argument for empiricism."