My joy is to see your joy. [Italics added.]
The union of mankind with the stars is precisely forecast:
They shall gather my children into their fold; they shall bring the glory of the stars into the hearts of men.
And the sign shall be my ecstasy, the consciousness of the continuity of existence, the omnipresence of my body . . .
For I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union.
This seems a vividly poetic pre-statement of Leary’s theory that Higher Intelligence is “divided,” by sending out DNA seed to fertilize every womb-planet in the galaxy, “for the chance of union,” the return of these “children” after they have evolved past the larval circuits into higher modes of consciousness.
I love you! I yearn to you! . . . Put on the wings, and arouse the coiled splendor within you: come unto me! [Italics added.]
The Star-Mother, Nuit, is definitely calling us home, to Galactic Center. The “coiled splendor” may even suggest the DNA helix within which, Leary and other investigators now think, is the secret of immortality. But shortly comes a more interesting text:
Is a God to live in a dog?
A reference to the great Dog Star, Sirius? Instructions on contacting this Intelligence are quite specific:
To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet & be drunk thereof!
The Immortality Pill is directly mentioned:
Think not, 0 King, upon that lie: That Thou Must Die: verily thou shalt not die, but live.
In Chapter Three, Horus, the war-god, takes over and makes some ferocious predictions about the 20th century:
Now let it be understood first that I am a god of War and Vengeance. I shall deal hardly with them . . .
I am the Warrior Lord of the Forties; the Eighties cower before me & are abased.51
Now, this is not terribly bad as prophecy of the 20th century, for a book produced in 1904 — when the majority opinion of Europe was that war had been banished from the civilized nations forever.
It seems clear that the Starseed Transmissions acquired a rather heavy Timothy Leary flavor in passing through the Leary nervous system, just as the Book of the Law took on an undeniably Crowleyan aroma in passing through Aleister’s neurons; but the underlying message is hauntingly similar.
A few other oddities about the Book of the Law and the Stele of Revealing are worth noting. Crowley was an avid Cabalist and spent years examining the Cabalistic numbers for key words in the text. This is based on the traditional assumption that Cabalistic numerology is a code worked out millennia ago for communication between humans and Higher Intelligence. Be as cynical about that as you will, but consider the data: All the important words, Crowley gradually realized, had the value of 93 in Greek Cabala. (He thereafter referred to his magick work as “the 93 current,” and Crowleyans to this day speak of their work as carrying on the 93 current.)
93 is also the cabalistic numeration of the word Thelema, the “word” of the New Age, according to the communicating entity. The Abbey of Thelema, in Rabelais, had the motto “Do what thou wilt.” The Book of the Law says, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” Thelema, in Greek, means either will or the casting of a magick spell. Aiwass, the “Holy Guardian Angel” presiding over this Contact, also has the value 93. And Agape (love), another key word in the text, is again 93. The name of “God” in Genesis (Alhim) contains the value of π to four places (3.1415); add Crowley’s 93 and you get π accurate to six places (3.141593).
The second major number in the book is 418, which “coincidentally” was the number of Crowley’s home in Inverness, Scotland. Its standard Cabalistic meaning is “the Great Work accomplished,” or the Illumination of all humanity. Crowley interpreted this to mean that his mission was not to illuminate a few, as other gurus have done and are doing, but to set in motion occult forces which would result in the illumination of all, by the end of this century; 418 is also the value of “Parcifal,” the Sufi whose life so oddly intersected mine in that mad summer of 1973.
The Stele of Revealing contains, in addition to Nuit, Horus and Ankh-f-na-Khonsu, a mysterious winged globe. Dr. Jacques Vallee, in The Invisible College, gives several other forms of the winged globe from Egyptian and Gnostic sources and points out the similarity to modern sketches of UFOs by witnesses or Contactees.
The Winged Globe from the Stele of Revealing appears in many ancient Mediterranean initiatory cults. Here are two examples collected by Dr. Jacques Vallee.
The winged globe, with an eye in it, appears in an ancient Assyrian seal found by astronomer Temple and reproduced in his Sirius Mystery. In this case, it is accompanied by Oannes, the water-god, whom Temple identifies as probably an extraterrestrial visitor from Sirius. Note the fish-tail on Oannes. Now look at illustration below, which is a drawing from the Dogon tribe of Africa, showing Nommo, whom they claim was a visitor from Sirius; note the similar fish-tail.
The design pictured at the top is from Assyria and is several thousand years old. That at the bottom is from the Dogon tribe and is contemporary. The Dogon say their fishtailed figure is from Sirius, and astronomer Temple claims that the Assyrian design shows the same extraterrestrial with a fishtail.
Dr. John Lilly, who has duplicated much of Timothy Leary’s research and supplemented it with hypnotic methods and Sufi yoga, describes many encounters with what seem to be extraterrestrial intelligences in his Programming and Metaprogramming the Human Biocomputer. Dr. Lilly agnostically examines also the possibilities that these transmitters are time-travelers from the future, very advanced Illuminati Adepts alive now on earth, “angels” in the traditional sense, or projected aspects of his own mind. In The Center of the Cyclone he says clearly:
Such a network [of Adepts] exists and functions . . . throughout this planet. I suspect it extends farther than our earth, but this is yet to be publicly demonstrated unequivocally beyond the private experience of myself and others. [Italics added.}52
A network of adepts that extends far beyond our Earth . . . that was what your narrator was gradually coming to believe, and here it was being said, with only slight reservation, by Dr. John Lilly — the man once defined by the New York Times as “a walking one-man syllabus of Western civilization.”
But permission to visit Dr. Leary had finally been granted by prison authorities and I was to hear even more extraordinary theories from him.
(And just as I finished typing the above section, psychologist Jean Millay dropped by for a visit. With no prompting on my part, and not knowing what I was writing about, she spontaneously launched into a story about a time she had painted Nuit on the ceiling of a friend’s bedroom. “And on her belly,” she said, “I put the Eye of Horus. ” Look back at the previous graphic and note where Horus’ head is on the Stele of Revealing. Jean had never seen the stele and was intrigued when I showed it to her. Cosmic Coincidence Control Center is working overtime on this case . . .)
A visit to CMF
Vacaville is one of those little California towns that look as conventionally pretty as a brand-new starlet just getting the taste of producer’s semen out of her mouth and flouncing merrily through a screen test. When you get there in the morning, on Greyhound, the birds are singing and the sun is high and golden, and everything is clean and bright and you can’t believe you’re heading toward a combination prison-and-madhouse where men are caged like beasts.
The cab from the Greyhound station to the prison costs exactly a dollar and the cabbie calls your destination “CMF” when he speaks on the shortwave to his office. CMF — California Medical Facility — has a reputation in some quarters that Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory can hardly beat. Gay libbers, radical therapists, civil libertarians and other soreheads have commented, on occasion, that the methods of psycho-surgery and aversive therapy that have been used there to “cure” sexual deviates have more in common with Bull Conners’ cattle-prods than with anything therapeutic; but that’s the psychiatric side of
Vacaville, where they keep the people they think they are trying to help. The other side, the purely punitive side, is more humane; the inmates are merely caged until their time is up, and then let go. Nobody is trying to “cure” them, and it’s only a medium-security setup; getting shipped there, from another prison, is a reward for good conduct.
After going through the usual red tape, the Libertarian was shown into a visiting room considerably more decent than many prisons provide. Cons and visitors sat at tables, without screens or glass between them, and shared coffee and sandwiches from machines. It was not much different from any school cafeteria in the land, except that some men held their women’s hands so hungrily that you almost reeled from the pain of sexual frustration.
Timothy Leary came in the door at the other end of the room with an Irish grin spread across his face.
He looked into the Author’s eyes, with the inoffensive curiosity of an infant. He looked me up and down, with the same innocent awe; I expected him to sniff me next, like a dog. Instead, he grinned again and said that I was in great shape. From anybody else, that would have been mere politeness; from Tim Leary, after an intense inspection, it was a favorable diagnosis.
He led me to another visiting area, where we sat at a table with our sandwiches and coffee. He was commenting excitedly on my most recent letter to him, and insisting that I must begin corresponding at once with an English poet named Brian Barritt. Leary is very sober indeed when explaining a technical point; the famous grin goes away entirely, and his concentration goes into intense commitment to total clarity. It was made obvious that neither Barritt nor I could afford to write another line until we had gotten our heads in synch, since we were exploring the same elephant from two sides.
The elephant was named Aleister Crowley, and Leary himself had been scrutinizing that odd Beast for the past few years also.
In Switzerland, during his exile, Leary was shown a deck of Crowley’s Tarot cards. To test its divinatory power, he asked “Who am I and what is my destiny?” Then he cut to a single card and got the Ace of Discs. This shows a large disc bearing the Greek letters TO MEGA THERION* (The Great Beast) Crowley’s name for himself. Leary interpreted this to mean that he is Crowley Reborn, and is supposed to complete the work Crowley began, preparing humanity for cosmic consciousness.
~•~
*By Cabala, TO MEGA THERION = 666
~•~
(The Confessions of a Hope Fiend, Leary’s account of his jailbreak and his months in Algiers with Eldridge Cleaver, is deliberately titled to recall Crowley’s Diary of a Dope Fiend.)
Dr. Leary of course did not take the doctrine of reincarnation literally. In his terminology, everybody who makes a strong impression on your nervous system reincarnates with you. In this sense, Leary feels that he reincarnates everyone from Socrates onward who has sent a time-binding signal that changed his nervous system on reception.
Dr. Leary was explaining this when David Hilliard wandered over to our table. David is a former Black Panther who once got busted for saying in public that Nixon should be assassinated. He was in Vacaville for “assaulting” a policeman.
Tim and David rapped about Eldridge Cleaver for a while, and David seemed rather embarrassed about Cleaver’s treatment of Tim in Algiers.
“I didn’t understand Eldridge until I got to Folsom,” Tim said. “He’s just the toughest guy in the cell-block, that’s all. The King, you know.”
Hilliard nodded with profound sadness. “We’ve all got the Oppressor inside ourselves,” he said.
Tim introduced the Libertarian. “This is Robert Anton Wilson one of the wisest men on the planet Earth,” he said.
David and I shook hands. I felt somewhat overwhelmed by the introduction and wondered inanely if I should try to say something Wise to justify Tim’s hyperbole.
I was remembering what Dr. Israel Regardie once said about Aleister Crowley: that the Beast got into most of his troubles by trusting the wrong people. When you turn on the higher neurological circuits, Regardie said, you are quite apt to imagine that everybody else is there with you. “Some of the Hindu gurus honestly believe everybody they see is in Samadhi with them,” Regardie added, “and Crowley often had the same illusion.”
After we chatted some more with David Hilliard and he finally went off to see someone else, Timothy started to outline his ideas about the higher neurological circuits turned on by psychedelics. It was his opinion that these circuits evolved for use in outer space, not merely for getting blissed-out on the earthside trip. All the shamans and mystics who opened these circuits knew they had something to do with cosmic energy, he said, but they didn’t know the why, the how, and the next step.
We potentially have eight circuits, he said. The first four are linear and designed for use on Earth. They underlie Euclidean space, Newtonian time, the whole “square” mentality. Imprinted with the local, “tribal” games or value-systems, these circuits narrow the polymorphous infant into an adjusted adult with one personality, one sex-role, one system of coordinates — “usually conservative and mildly paranoid, to mesh with the conservative and mildly paranoid local value-system.” he said ironically.
The four later, still-evolving circuits activated by shamans and mystics are not just an “escape” from the anxiety of the dualistic ego, he said. “You aren’t supposed to just turn them on, go into bliss, and sink into a hedonistic silk-lined womb. That’s just the input stage, comparable to the adolescent dropout into compulsive masturbation when the Sex Circuit first turns on.
“You should then go on to find the program, the proper use of the new energies,” Tim continued. “The pot-head who sits around blissed-out hasn’t found out yet what pot is for, what rapture imprints do to all the earlier imprints. The acid-head or the guru who has turned on the ecstasy circuit and just blissed himself out is again just taking the input and not doing anything with it. Transcendental Masturbation.
“The real meaning of acid won’t be clear until we live normally in free-fall,” Leary insisted. “When the up-down dualism of the domination-submission circuit goes, the other dualisms start to go also. The first four imprints — statistically normal consciousness through most of our history — will crumble. Right now, the astronauts all show some kind of altered awareness, to a greater or lesser degree. Ed Mitchell already realizes the linkage between his spiritual experience in space and the old occult and mystic traditions. That’s why he’s formed the Institute for Noetic Studies and plunged into parapsychology and ESP.”
The most important events of the next three decades, Leary predicted, will be the invention of an immortality pill and a pill that simulates the death experience without killing the person taking it.
Tim forecasted the longevity pill in Terra II, published in January 1973, saying it would appear around 1980. One month later, in February, Michigan State University released the information that they were researching a pill that might extend life to 200 years. In April, Dutton published The Immortality Factor by Osborn Segerberg, Jr., which reviews current research on aging and predicts a life-extension pill by 2000 or so.
Dr. Leary doesn’t insist that a literal immortality formula will be found that quickly, of course. Rather, he feels that extension of life to around 400 years is most probable; then, those who live a few centuries will acquire further medical technology expanding life into millennia, hundreds of thousands of years, millions . . .
“I expect to be alive when the solar system has burned up 5½ billion years from now,” he said happily. “Nobody in this generation has to die, unless they want to.”
A simulated death-pill, creating the neurological equivalent of death without actually killing the body, will also be along in a few decades, Leary also predicted that day in Vacaville. This will complete the work of LSD in re-imprinting old circuits through ritual death-and-rebirth in one body. “I call it serial reincarnation,” he said.
Interstellar ESP may have been going on for all our history, Tim went on, but we
just haven’t understood. Our nervous systems have translated their messages into terms we could understand. The “angels” who spoke to Dr. Dee, the Elizabethan scientist-magician, were extraterrestrials, but Dee couldn’t comprehend them in those terms and considered them “messengers from God.” The same is true of many other shamans and mystics.
Leary spoke warmly of Carl Sagan, the astronomer, who visited him at Vacaville. “A brilliant man, brilliant,” Tim said. In fact Tim has recently renamed his own specialty Exo-Psychology in imitation of Dr. Sagan’s coining of the term Exo-Biology. Both sciences attempt to deduce the characteristics of life and consciousness throughout the galaxy, based on mounting astronomical evidence that Earth is more typical than atypical. The galactic intelligences who are more advanced than we are, Tim said, can be regarded as our own genetic future — the embodiment of levels of consciousness toward which we are still evolving.
But Leary was not keen about Sagan’s Project Cyclops, an attempt to contact Higher Intelligence by building enormous radio receivers to scan the galaxy for meaningful signals. “Why passively wait for them to make the first move?” Tim asked rhetorically. “Are we adolescents so unsure of ourselves that we can’t take the initiative? I want to go cruising,” he said emphatically, emphasizing the sexual metaphor with a lustful grin.
Only once in five hours did Leary mention the fact that he was in prison. “I’m so high,” he said briefly, “that I forget where I am. Then, occasionally, there are kinds of research I can’t do here, and I realize I should really try to get out.” But he didn’t enlarge on the subject; he got off on another scientific-mystic speculation about the Einstein space-time circuits and the neurological functioning of men and women living deep in space.
The Investigator has seen other people in the high-energy high-consciousness state that Dr. Leary lived in at Vacaville. They were all Oriental gurus, expert in one or another of the Buddhist, Hindu, or Sufi training systems for expanded awareness. None of them had Tim’s scientific background and, accordingly, their verbalizations were less startling; they spoke of vast undefined abstractions which have no operational meaning except in reference to their own mutated consciousness. Leary is trying to define these free mental states in precise neuro-genetic terms; but nobody can understand him fully without sharing in both the higher states of awareness and the scientific systems Leary knows so well.
Final Secret of the Illuminati Page 14