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Third, and staying with the theme of performance, we could recall from
chapter 3 that Grey Walter offered cybernetic explanations not just for the
altered states achieved by Eastern yogis, but also for their strange bodily per-
formances, suspending their metabolism and so on. We have not seen much
of these strange performances since, but now we can go back to them. Wizard
Prang himself displays displays unusual powers, though typically small ones
which are not thematized but are dotted around the stories that make up the
topic. At one point Prang makes his end of a seesaw ascend and then descend
just by intending it: “Making oneself light and making oneself heavy are two
of the eight occult powers”; Prang can see the chakras and auras of others and
detect their malfunctioning; Perny “change[s] the direction of a swirl [in a
stream] by identifying with it rather than by exerting power”; the logs in the
fireplace ignite themselves; spilled wine evaporates instantly on hitting the
tiles; Prang sends a blessing flying after two of his disciples, “with the result
that Toby [slips] and [falls] over with the force of it.” More impressively, Perny
remarks that “you give me telepathic news and I've seen you do telekinetic
acts,” and at one point Prang levitates, though even this is described in a hu-
morous and self-deprecating fashion: “The wizard's recumbent form slowly
and horizontally rose to the level of where his midriff would be if he were
standing up. He stayed in that position for ten seconds, then slowly rotated.
His feet described an arc through the air which set them down precisely,
smoothly onto the floor. 'My God,' breathed Silica, 'What are you doing?' . . .
'Demonstrating my profession of wizardry, of course.' 'Do you often do things
like that?' 'Hardly ever. It's pretty silly, isn't it?' ”
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I paid little attention to these
incidents in Beer's text until I discovered that the accrual of nonstandard pow-
ers is a recognized feature of spiritual progress by the yogi, and that there is
a word for these powers:
siddhis
.
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Beer's practice was securely within the
tantric tradition in this respect, too.
In these various ways, then, Beer's spiritual knowledge and practice reso-
nated with the cybernetic ontology of exceedingly complex performative sys-
tems, though, as I said, the detailed articulation of the ontology here derived
not from cybernetics but from the accumulated wisdom of the tantric tradi-
tion. Having observed this, we can now look at more specific connections that
Beer made between his spirituality and his cybernetics.
Beer's worldly cybernetics as I described it earlier is not as worldly as it might
seem. This is made apparent in
Beyond Dispute
. For the first ten chapters, 177
pages, this topic is entirely secular. It covers the basic ideas and form of team
