Some of the intensified experiences were “merely subjective,” but nonetheless tremendously important to the Author, in ways that even the Skeptic would admit were non-pathological. For instance, on one occasion, the entity spoke directly, in a melodious and angelic voice, to say,
They live happiest who have forgiven most.
This is rather trite, one admits; all the major religions preach forgiveness. What was impressive was (a) the timing — the Struggling Writer was very pissed off, that week, at certain publishers who were slow in paying monies owed; and (b) the pragmatic emphasis, tailored to the Libertarian’s hedonic philosophy at the time. It did not say, “Forgive, because ‘God’ demands it”; it said, “Forgive, and you will be happier.” The Libertarian Hedonist tried it, and still is trying it, and it works. The fewer resentments you harbor, the happier your life will be. Why are we all such fools as to ignore this obvious lesson, which a truly rational person would have figured out by the age of 8 or 9, if not sooner?
Other experiences were more objective. One day in 1974, when another publisher was late with monies owed, the Shaman decided to try a ritual of money-magick, to cause the check to arrive in Monday’s mail. In the climax of the ritual, It spoke again, in the same richly solemn “angelic” voice, saying, “Thursday.” This was accompanied by a vision of the check in the mailbox. The Skeptic immediately communicated the prophecy to Arlen and to two neighbors, Charles Hixson and Stephen McAuley, who will confirm this.
The check did arrive on Thursday.
Mostly, the Holy Guardian Angel still communicated by synchronicity. I would look on page 23 of a new magazine, and there would be a line from a dream of the night before. I must admit that most of these messages were nauseatingly moralistic and childishly optimistic by the standards of our cynical, swinish and despairing age. A lot of them involved the paradoxes of time.
Occasionally, the Angel would speak, to give me utterly trivial information. For instance, I’d meet somebody and the Angel would say, “Gemini.” I would ask, to check out the Angel’s credibility, “Are you a Gemini?” The answer would be yes. These cases I firmly classified as my own mind expanding its ESP powers through the convenient fiction of an alien entity, and I disliked them intensely, as show-offy, corny and tending to turn me into a damned carnival act.
Then, abruptly, the entity would be quite exterior again, manifesting when I was depressed or worried, to pass on messages of cheer and love that were too moving to be ignored.
I could not help but be grateful to it, whatever the hell it was.
Beings of Light, talking dogs, more extraterrestrials and other weird critters
The entity or entities contacted by me during July 1973-October 1974 had most of the characteristics of the “being of light” described by persons who have been resuscitated after what is called near-death experience. Dr. Raymond Moody has collected 150 cases of this sort of vision, including many by persons who were declared “clinically dead” during the interlude.40
Many cases showed real ESP — the revived subjects remember things they couldn’t have observed while in the state of coma or clinical death, including things in other rooms of the hospital. Christians generally describe the “being of light” as Jesus, Jews as “an angel,” and nonbelievers agnostically say it is luminous, telepathic and intensely loving. The author found it to possess all of these qualities and also a damned peculiar sense of humor. For instance, it talked apparent gibberish at times (just like the alleged extraterrestrials encountered by Uri Geller and Dr. Puharich). Most of the seeming gibberish concerned time, the future, and infinity, three phenomena on which everybody, including our greatest philosophers, seems to talk nonsense. But the entity always intently urged that I should try to understand time better.
I often had the feeling that the communicating entity was not incoherent at all but, rather, one’s own mind could not grasp what it was trying to communicate.
This is typical of UFOs and of Fortean phenomena generally. Let us give some examples of the experience of others.
I. Consider the following illuminating dialogue between a “UFOnaut” and a human being:
UFOnaut: What time is it?
Human: Two-thirty.
UFOnaut: You lie. It is four o’clock.
This incident occurred in France in 1954, and the UFO sped away immediately after the dialogue. The time actually was 2:30.41
Why did the “UFOnaut” ask the time if It knew the answer already? Why lie about it, when the human had a watch and could detect the lie? Are we being invaded by the galactic equivalent of the Marx Brothers maybe? And why that damned 23 in 2:30?
Is somebody using Zen Discordianism to illuminate us?
II. One day in 1908, a dog walked up to two police detectives on a street in Pittsburgh, said “Good morning” politely, and then vanished in a puff of green smoke.42
In keeping with modern cybernetic models of neurological processes, we can recount this story more objectively by saying that certain signals received by the nervous system of the detectives were organized by their metaprogrammer into an impression of a dog saying “Good morning” and vanishing in a puff of green smoke.
In keeping with the same cybernetic approach, it would not be perfectly objective to say that you are reading a book. Rather, you are receiving signals which your metaprogrammer is organizing into the impression that you are reading a book.
III. In Brazil in 1971, two young men were riding in an automobile when they had the impression that a bus was pulling up rather closely behind them. Then their metaprogrammers diverged. One man had the impression that a flying saucer landed. He thought he was taken aboard and had the usual “trip to an alien planet.” Next he found himself standing behind his car, which somebody had parked by the side of the road. The other man had the impression of a lapse of memory (or a jump in time?) and simply found himself standing behind the car, with no recollection of who had stopped the car or how or when he had gotten out of it.43
There are at least three models for this experience.
One, a flying saucer grabbed both of them, experimented upon them, and then used a defective “memory-erasing machine,” which malfunctioned and only worked to erase the memory of one of the victims.
Two, there was some kind of abnormality in the Earth’s electronic or magnetic field at that spot which administered a traumatic shock. One victim had a hallucination of a flying saucer, and the other had a blackout.
Three, “They” (sinister experimenters) were in that enigmatic bus that came so close just before the mindfuck. “They” turned some kind of “mindfucking” machine on the two men . . .
More pancakes from outer space . . .?
Let’s go back to those unfortunate detectives in Pittsburgh again and try it another way: An extraterrestrial scientist, with a parapsychology only a few million years ahead of ours, sent a thought-projection of a talking dog onto that street and then made it vanish in a puff of green smoke. He wanted to see how two trained detectives would react when their reality-model was abruptly contradicted. (This abrupt contradiction of a person’s reality-model is known, in psychology, as cognitive dissonance. Those subjected to it tend to become either very flexible and agnostic or very rigid and schizophrenic.)
To paraphrase Charles Fort, we all like to think of ourselves as skeptical and hard to bamboozle, but if we contemplate a few more talking-dog and astral-pancake stories, the reader will find it hard to resist taking at least one peek around the room to see what Damned Thing might have gotten in during the last few minutes.
Starseed
The next step in whatever is wrong with me again involved Timothy Leary.
I was conducting a series of experiments in July-August 1973 — following the Sirius Transmission — in which I attempted astral projection. I met all sorts of odd and amusing entities on all sorts of astral planes, but none of those experiences ever developed into anything evidential. However, I was continually interrupted during my v
oyages by impressions of Leary doing similar experiments in his cell at Folsom. I also had visions of him flying over the walls of the prison.
I specifically mentioned these experiences of ESP-contact with Leary in an article on Tantric yoga, published in the Chicago Seed in September 1973.*
~•~
* Copies of the Seed can be found in the collection of radical and underground political publications at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
~•~
It was four years later, in 1977, that Lynn Wayne Benner, who was Leary’s closest friend in Folsom, told me of the events of that August of 1973. According to Benner, Leary and he were not only doing the interstellar ESP experiments described below but also tried experiments at levitation, in which they attempted to fly over the walls of Folsom.
I wrote to the warden of Folsom in late August, and asked for permission to correspond with Dr. Leary. Bureaucratic red tape being what it is, this permission was delayed for several weeks.
Shortly after the telepathic flashes of Leary (July-August 1973) ended, Walter Culpepper, the attorney for P.R.O.B.E. — a Leary-created organization to abolish prisons-had a benefit for the Leary Defense Fund and P.R.O.B.E. Two rock groups played and then we were shown “At Folsom Prison With Timothy Leary, Ph.D.,” produced by Joanna Leary.
The film blew the Skeptic’s mind. Timothy came on screen and immediately flashed the famous Love-Peace-Bliss grin at the camera — as if he were greeting visitors to his home. We never saw a man look less like a suffering martyr. Tim took a chair and answered the interviewer’s questions in a serious and thoughtful manner, explaining that he wasn’t interested in drugs any more since they had only been “microscopes” to him: tools to reveal the focus and re-focus possibilities of the nervous system. He wanted to talk about something more exciting now — Outer Space. The interviewer kept leading him back to drugs, and Leary kept maneuvering back to Cosmic Dimensions.
I began to notice an odd thing: Timothy looked younger than he had in the 1960s.
Tim led the interviewer to ask about the strange design on his prison uniform. “This is Starseed,” Tim said, proud as a new father. The emblem was that strange miniature infinity-sign, the nucleotide template formed as DNA imprints messenger-RNA to start a new growth program.
Starseed, however, was not just any nucleotide template. It was the one recently found on a meteor which landed in Orgeuil, France, when scientists examined the rock microscopically. It is the first chemical proof that the mechanism of chemical “intelligence” — the building of life-programs (RNA) out of information-codes (DNA) — exists elsewhere in the universe.
Starseed, Leary enthusiastically told the interviewer, proves that cellular intelligence is not exclusively earthly. It therefore increases the probable grounds to believe many forms of life and intelligence exist in space-time.
Other cons in Folsom, after Leary left, picked up the Starseed symbol, carved it on belts, painted it on sketch-pads, sewed it on clothing, and formed bull sessions to rap with Hal Olsen (life-termer, illustrator of Leary’s Terra II) and Wayne Benner (“the Tuxedo Bandit” and one unit in Leary’s four-person telepathy experiments) about the possibility of Higher Intelligence and the transcendental implications of modern science.
I meanwhile went on researching Sirius. I was quite moved, as you will readily understand, when I found the following in O.T.O. Grand Master Kenneth Grant’s new book, Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God:
Crowley was aware of the possibility of opening the spatial gateways and of admitting an extraterrestrial Current into the human life-wave . . .
It is an occult tradition — and Lovecraft gave it persistent utterance in his writings — that some transfinite and superhuman power is marshaling its forces with intent to invade and take possession of this planet . . . This is reminiscent of Charles Fort’s dark hints about a secret society on earth already in contact with cosmic beings and, perhaps, preparing the way for their advent. * 44
~•~
* Grant here quotes, in a footnote, from Fort’s The Book of the Damned, “ . . . some other world is not attempting but has been, for centuries, in communication with a sect, perhaps, or a secret society, or certain esoteric ones of this earth’s inhabitants.”
~•~
This sounds more than a little sinister, and was especially eerie for me, since I had already incorporated into Illuminatus a variation on the Lovecraft mythos. Lovecraft has written several stories and novelettes in which the “Cthulhu cult” or some other secret society was aiding the schemes of hostile Aliens; I had attached this theme to the Illuminati as a kind of deadpan put-on and laughed like hell at the thought that some naive readers would be dumb enough to believe it. Now here it was being proclaimed by Kenneth Grant, who alleges that the Ordo Templi Orientis was formed in the 1890s by amalgamating P.B. Randolph’s Hermetic Brotherhood of Light with the original Bavarian Illuminati. I thought for the first time (as I was to think again, many times, during the Watergate Scandals), “My God, can’t I invent any preposterous paranoid fantasy that doesn’t have some truth behind it?” But Grant goes on to cheer us up, if we are willing to trust him at this point:
Crowley dispels the aura of evil with which these authors (Lovecraft and Fort) invest the fact; he prefers to interpret it Thelemically, not as an attack upon human consciousness by an extra-terrestrial and alien entity but as an expansion of consciousness from within, to embrace other stars and to absorb their energies into a system that is thereby enriched and rendered truly cosmic by the process.
And then he adds, quite nonchalantly again, that one star is especially important:
The Order of the Silver Star is thus the Order of the Eye of Set, “the Sun behind the Sun.” . . . The Silver Star is Sirius.45
Magick, Technology or Both?
It is interesting, at this point, to attempt to argue, at least tentatively, that the phenomena we are discussing are reducible to Jung’s categories of the “collective unconscious” and synchronicity. Certainly, these Jungian notions cover a great deal of whatever-the-hell-is-going-on, but they do not cover all of it. Jung was brilliantly right in saying, in the 1950s, that the flying saucer phenomenon would become “an important spiritual and religious transformation of humanity.”46 — and many UFOlogists, including Jacques Vallee and John Keel, have noted that the majority of Contactees eventually became embroiled in mystical or occult groups, sometimes even as the founders of Messianic new cults. But let nobody assume that the weirdness is, therefore, “merely” subjective.
UFOs have been reported by NASA missions in the following list.47
~Feb. 20, 1962: John Glenn, Mercury capsule flight. Three UFOs followed him.
~May 24, 1962: Scott Carpenter, Mercury VII. Photograph taken by Carpenter of UFO he saw.
~May 30, 1962: Joe Walton, X15. Photograph taken by Walton of five UFOs.
~July 17, 1962: Robert White, X15. White photographed several UFOs
~May 16, 1963: Gordon Cooper, Mercury IX. Cooper saw a green UFO, also tracked by radar on the ground.
~October 3, 1963: Walter Schirra, Mercury VIII. Schirra reported several UFOs.
~March 8, 1964: Russian Voshkod II. One UFO reported.
~June 3, 1964: Jim McDivitt, Gemini IV. McDivitt photographed several UFOs.
~November 14, 1969: Apollo XII. Conrad, Bean and Gordon reported a UFO that followed them from Earth to within 130,000 miles of the moon.
[This is only a partial list from The Edge of Reality, by J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallee, Regnery: Chicago, 1975.]
NASA cases fall in the category of craft that look and act like spaceships from elsewhere, as Dr. Hynek, who collected them from Air Force files, has indicated. The trouble is that Hynek and Vallee, in the same book, have numerous cases of things that behave in a way that no machine can possibly behave — jumping around at impossible accelerations or appearing and disappearing like a ghost in a horror movie. As Vallee, Keel and others have emphasized, t
he UFO is an adaptable beast, acting in a technological fashion when dealing with technologists and acting occult when dealing with occultists. Brad Steiger proposes that the only safe generalization about UFOs is that they always fit into the cosmology of the human observer . . .
I even read a Freudian once, somewhere, who pointed out that the UFOs come in two major types — round, discoid ones and long, cigar-shaped ones. The round ones, he said, were breast symbols and the long ones were phallic symbols.
Maybe.
Those mysterious Sufis
A man without God is like a fish without a bicycle.
– Found on the men’s room wall, Larry Blake’s Pub, Berkeley, 1977
Before the summer of 1973 ended, the spookiness accelerated.
Illuminatus, still unsold two years after completion, was being proven partially true in the daily headlines. Shea and I had based our ultra-paranoid version of government on two main sources: (1) our own surrealistic imaginations and (2) letters to “The Playboy Forum” by individuals complaining that the government was conspiring to destroy their civil liberties. The latter, of course, were subdivided, by ourselves and by Nat Lehrman and the executives of the Playboy Foundation, into two sub-classes: (a) the documented or documentable cases by sane individuals who really were catching hell from Nixon’s counter-revolution and (b) the obviously paranoid who were imagining vast and incredible world-wide plots. Only (a) got into the Forum or received financial aid from the Playboy Foundation; (b), however, served the purposes of Illuminatus. If a story was paranoid enough, we adapted it into our epical satire, which was supposed to portray the most totally evil and devious government that the most clinical paranoid could imagine.
Final Secret of the Illuminati Page 12