It is absurd for a 45-year-old man to sit at a typewriter weeping over the words “Foot doot.”
Among Luna’s papers, Arlen found a note Tim Leary had sent Her from Vacaville Prison in 1974, when she asked for a personal message in Tim’s handwriting. He had written:
Beloved Satellite,
We will be coming to join you in outer space
It is four months since Luna entered cryonic suspension. I am now a Director of the Prometheus Society, a Maryland-based group engaged in lobbying Congress to create a National Institute of longevity and immortality research. Tim Leary and I are both deeply involved with the L5 Society, a group of scientists who are determined to send out the first space-city (designed by Prof. Gerard O’Neill of Princeton) by 1990. Working also with the Physics Consciousness Research Group and Jean Millay and other bio-feedback investigators, I am convinced that Intelligence2 — a planetary rise in intelligence — will also be achieved in our time. The Starseed Signals, however you explain them, did indeed contain the evolutionary imperative awaiting our generation.
Looking out my window down at the vast urban sprawl of the Bay Area, I sometimes recall that somewhere down there another young girl lies beaten to death, another poor cop is breaking the news to another pair of bereaved parents. We still have one murder every 14 minutes in this mad society.
I know, truly, that I have been a lucky man, and my family has been lucky, compared to what happened to the Jews (and most of Europe) in the 1930s and 1940s, or to the colored races on this continent for three centuries, or to the nightmare horror in Vietnam between 1940 and 1973. Or compared to most of human history, which is still, as Joyce said, a nightmare from which we are seeking to awake.
Tim Leary was here last week, lecturing at UC-Berkeley. The news arrived that his appeal had been rejected by the New Orleans court and he might have to go back to jail again. Tim didn’t let anybody know about this (I found out from the only person in the room when the news came on the phone); Tim continued to radiate humor, cheer and optimism.
Arlen had a conversation with Tim, in which she expressed gratitude for the example he had given us during the last three years of his confinement. “You convinced us that it is possible to transcend suffering,” she said, “and that helped us more than anything else in the first weeks after Luna’s death.”
Tim said, “That’s the whole point of all my work on brain change!” He hugged her excitedly. “That’s it! You’ve got it! Positive energy is as real as gravity. I’ve felt it.”
Two hours later, at the door, Tim was stopped by one of our guests with a final question before he left.
“What do you do, Dr. Leary, when somebody keeps giving you negative energy?”
Tim grinned that special grin of his that so annoys all his critics. “Come back with all the positive energy you have,” he said. And then he dashed off to the car, to the airport, to the next lecture . . . and to God-knows-what fate in the fourteenth year of his struggle with the legal system.
And so I learned the final secret of the Illuminati.
AFTERWORDS
by Saul-Paul Sirag
I first met Uri Geller in Berkeley in April 1973. I was working on a story about Geller for Esquire, and I went to New York in May and June to pursue the story. After several interviews with Geller and Dr. Andrija Puharich, both in the city and at Puharich’s house in Ossining (where Geller often stayed), they began mentioning the extraterrestrial aspects of their story. They spoke of a computer-like entity which had communicated with them and claimed it was “millions of light-years into the future” (and Puharich was quite aware that light-year is a distance, not a time). They showed me a typical UFO photo that Geller was supposed to have shot from a plane window over France. They told me of a red laser-like thing that identified itself as one form of the communicating entity. (“Now you can see how we look,” it allegedly said.) They mentioned tapes that recorded themselves and, even more miraculously, subsequently erased themselves — a fantastic yam that weirdly foreshadowed the Watergate tape erasures many months later.
I was intrigued by these extraterrestrial claims, although I regarded them as pretty far-fetched. Finally, I asked Geller if it might be possible for me to see the communicating entity if I were in an expanded state of consciousness due to some psychedelic.
Puharich was already famous (or infamous if you will) for psychedelic research in the 1950s and had written a book on ESP experiments he had conducted with Amanita muscaria, called The Sacred Mushroom. Uri was wary of psychedelics, but he said he wondered what it would be like to see me in a psychedelic state. And so I came to spend a few hours with Uri Geller while tripping on LSD. The experiment was conducted in a friend’s apartment in Manhattan, and the friend remained straight so we could compare notes later.
At one point in the evening, I felt that the time was right and asked Geller if it would now be possible for me to see the Entity. He told me to look into his eyes and tell him what I saw.
My first thoughts were, “This is no way to do it. I’ll only see those red lights they’ve been telling me about. Doesn’t he realize that’s all I’ll see? Of course, he does — it’s just a psychological trick. When I see the red lights, he’ll tell me I’ve seen the Entity too, but it won’t prove a damned thing.”
Instead, when I looked into Uri’s eyes, they became quite bird-like, and suggested a bird of prey. Then his nose became a beak, and his entire head sprouted feathers, down to his neck and shoulders.
I jumped back a bit, startled. “Uri, you look just like an eagle!” I exclaimed, and I must have sounded awestruck.
Uri became very excited — as only Uri can. But he wouldn’t comment about what I had seen; he was very mysterious about it. Instead, we became involved in telepathy and bending things. I had to put my Eagle experience into the IDUNNO file. I didn’t know what to make of it — it was hardly how I expected an extraterrestrial to look.
My memory of the event went active again only in November of that year. I had returned to Berkeley in June and had become a research associate at the Institute for the Study of Consciousness. (To show how convoluted this whole business is, I might mention that Arthur Young, founder of the Institute, was the one who originally turned Robert Temple on to the idea of trying to find out how the Dogon tribe knew so much about the dark companion of Sirius. And Arthur Young, in turn, had first heard of this tribal lore from Harry Smith, a film maker, who claims to be a son of Aleister Crowley . . .)
Anyway, in November 1973 I started to hear about Ray Stanford’s teleportation stories from Alan Vaughn, who had gone to Texas to interview Stanford for Psychic magazine. Stanford claimed to have been teleported in his car twice during the Fall of 1973. Each time the teleportation occurred, Stanford said, he had been driving to the airport to pick up Uri Geller.
Stanford attributed the teleportations to SPECTRA — the name Geller and Puharich were now using to refer to the extraterrestrial entity. By this time Puharich had written his book, Uri, which has a chapter on SPECTRA, but I had not heard either Geller or Puharich use this term nor refer to SPECTRA as a hawk. To Ray Stanford, SPECTRA was a very powerful being who came to him in the form of a hawk. Stanford, you must understand, is a psychic who has long been involved in UFO research and, long before hearing of Geller, had associated UFO experiences with hawk-like entities. In fact, before the teleportations Stanford had some rather strange hawk-infested dreams in which he was invited to join forces with SPECTRA.
In this context, my “eagle” experience with Geller began to take on a certain significance.
Then in mid-December 1973, the January 1974 issue of Analog hit the stands with a cover story called “The Horus Errand.” The cover illustration showed a man in a white-and-gold uniform with a hawk-like helmet and the Eye of Horus over his left breast pocket. Over his right breast pocket was his name tag, which was (are you ready?) Stanford.
This was, to me, an incredible Jungian synchronicity, and I called Alan Vau
ghn to tell him about it. He rushed out to buy that issue of Analog and called me back with the news that the figure on the cover even looked like Ray Stanford. The synchronicity was getting heavier — and we didn’t know, yet, about Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson and their synchronicitous links with all this.
Vaughn wrote to the artist who had done the “Horus” illustration for Analog — Kelly Freas, one of the best in the science-fiction business. It turned out that Freas had never met Ray Stanford, and had not been consciously using Stanford’s face in the illustration. There was a link, however. About ten years earlier, Freas had had a psychic reading done by Stanford via mail. In the reading, Stanford claimed that Freas had been some sort of illustrator in a past life in ancient Egypt. For that reason Freas uses Egyptian symbols whenever he gets the chance — as he did in illustrating “The Horus Errand.” The Egyptian themes are very minor in the story itself, and the hero’s helmet, for instance, is never described beyond its white and gold colors. Freas had turned it into a hawk’s head because Horus, the hawk-headed Lord of Force and Fire, was the oldest known Egyptian god.
Freas also said that he hadn’t made any conscious connection between the Stanford in the story and the Ray Stanford who had given him a psychic reading by mail ten years earlier. He emphasized that he didn’t know what Ray Stanford looked like.
Another unusual feature of the Analog cover, Freas said, was that he usually paints human figures from either photos or live models, but in this case he had simply painted from imagination.
The Analog cover also shows a red laser-beam streaming off the top of a pyramid-shaped building directly behind the figure of Stanford. The story mentions no such laser-beam, but that was what I had expected to see in Uri Geller’s eyes . . .
There is a further dimension to this whole story. Geller and Puharich had first described the extraterrestrial entity to me as a spacecraft computer. By November of 1973 I had learned that they were also describing the entity as a hawk and calling it SPECTRA. In Puharich’s book, Uri (published in 1974), SPECTRA is described as a giant computer which occasionally projects a hawk-like entity onto this planet.
People tell me that the name, SPECTRA, smacks of grade B science-fiction. While that’s true, it is also true that RCA used to manufacture a large computer called Spectra-70. RCA suddenly went out of the computer business entirely in October 1971 under mysterious circumstances. Two months later, in December 1971, SPECTRA came through to Geller and Puharich as a mechanical sounding voice claiming to be a spacecraft-computer “53,069 light-ages” away. Later SPECTRA came in the form of a hawk. Of course, Dr. Puharich has a long background in electronics and the name of the RCA computer, Spectra-70, was undoubtedly buried somewhere in his conscious or unconscious. But that does not explain my own bird-of-prey experience with Geller, or Ray Stanford’s hawk-SPECTRA dreams, or the teleportations that Stanford (and others) have claimed occur around Geller.
Since meeting Robert Anton Wilson, I have been learning the occult lore of Horus, and have discovered that synchronicities are to be found everywhere. For instance, after Illuminatus was published, I half-jokingly told Wilson that he should have put San Francisco into his conspiracy-mythos since San Francisco, like the Illuminati, was founded in 1776. We both laughed about that. Then a few months later I came across the fact that Phi Beta Kappa was founded in 1776, and suggested that Wilson include that if he ever writes a sequel to Illuminatus.
Later, just to check, I looked into Heckethom’s The Secret Societies of All Ages and Countries. There was the flat statement that Phi Beta Kappa was a Bavarian Illuminati order introduced to the United States on December 5, 1776. Their motto, incidentally, was Philosophy is the Rule of Life.
The most comprehensive conspiracy theory I know of is the interpretation of quantum mechanics devised by Sir Arthur Eddington. (Remember that Wilson claims that every time he tells me something weird I can find a model in quantum theory that might explain it — so here goes . . .)
Eddington says that the lesson from physics and especially from quantum mechanics is that insofar as we can describe the world at all we are necessarily describing the structure of our own minds. In case you think I’m over-simplifying Eddington’s view, let me quote from his Philosophy of Physical Science, page 148:
The starting point of physical science is knowledge of the group-structure of a set of sensations in a consciousness. When these fragments of structure, contributed at various times and by various individuals, have been collated and represented according to the forms of thought that we have discussed [i.e. group structure] . . . we obtain the structure known as the physical universe.
In case Eddington’s meaning is not perfectly clear to you, I will quote a slightly more poetic version, from an essay of his reprinted in The World of Mathematics, edited by James Newman, page 1104:
We have found a strange foot-print on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the foot-print. And Lo! It is our own.
Recently, I have been using Eddington’s approach to derive the proton-electron mass ratio. (Actually, I’m using a slight modification of Eddington’s approach, to be exact.) From Eddington’s group-theoretical point of view, creatures to whom space-time has four dimensions will find algebraic structures having 10 elements and 136 elements playing a very fundamental role.
Eddington attempted, unsuccessfully, to derive the proton-electron mass ratio from the two numbers 10 and 136, together with the number of unity, 1. I have pointed out that if you have 136 elements and want to order them two at a time (e.g., one for the proton, one for the electron), you will have 18,360 ways to order these 136 things. (This holds true, of course, whatever the 136 things are.) Since I want to do something with Eddington’s 10, I divide our ways of ordering into 10 parts (for the 10 dimensions of curvature in space-time). We then obtain 1,836 — which is very close to the desired proton-electron mass ratio.
Like much of the data in this book, this might seem like “mere coincidence.” But after making this calculation, I found in an old Scientific American (May 1963) an article by P.A.M. Dirac, which states that “The gravitational field is a tensor field with 10 components. One finds that six of the components are adequate for describing everything of physical importance and the other four can be dropped out of the equation. One cannot, however, pick out the six important components from the complete set of 10 in any way that does not destroy the four-dimensional symmetry.”
Dirac, one of the founders of quantum theory, was here attempting to marry quantum mechanics to general relativity and was running into trouble. His extremity was my opportunity. I had gotten the proton-electron mass ratio by dividing 10 into 18,360. So from what Dirac proposed, I decided to see what would happen when I divided 18,360 by 9, by 8, by 7 and by 6. What I got was the electron mass numbers of the other Baryons, the Lambda, the Xi, the Sigma and the Omega.
Dirac had complained that when one uses fewer than 10 tensors one destroys space-time symmetry; but that is just what I want. The reason is that, since Dirac wrote in 1963, it has been discovered that mass splittings can come about by breaking an underlying gauge symmetry. This is how the weak force is gotten out of the electromagnetic force by Steven Weinberg and various other physicists much in vogue today. I am now preparing a paper in which I get the strong force out of the gauge symmetry of general relativity. (Actually, this has already been done by Abdus Salam and Jack Sarfatti. I’m just giving them more ammunition.)*
But things begin to look positively contrived when one notices that Eddington’s 1, 10 and 136 are members of a well-known mathematical series that goes 1, 10, 45, 136, 325 . . . etc.
The next number in that series is 666.
Berkeley, California
Summer, 1977
~•~
* For those who wish to see the entire mathematical derivation, see “A Combinatorial Derivation of
Proton-Electron Mass Ratio,” by Saul-Paul Sirag, Published in Nature, Vol 268, July 28, 1977.
~•~
NOTES and INDEX
NOTES
Prologue: Thinking About the Unthinkable
1. The best single reference on the Illuminati in fact and legendry is The Illuminoids, by Neal Wilgus, Sun Press: Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1977. Seventeen mutually contradictory and quite typical anti-Illuminati books or pamphlets are quoted in Volume I of Illuminatus (The Eye in the Pyramid, by Robert J. Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, Dell: New York, 1975).
2. The Book of Lies (falsely so called) by Aleister Crowley, Samuel Weiser: New York, 1952.
3. A typical work linking Crowley with the Illuminati conspiracy is The Trail of the Serpent by “Inquire Within,” Christian Book Club of America: Hawthorn, Cal., 1969. “Inquire Within” was the pen name of Carolyn Stoddard who, like Crowley himself, was a former member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret occult order active in England and America from 1888 to the present. Crowley, Carolyn Stoddard and Dr. Israel Regardie (The Eye in the Triangle, Llewellyn: St. Paul, 1970) have all traced the Golden Dawn order back to a mysterious Anna Sprenger of Bavaria, possibly an initiate of the original Bavarian Illuminati.
4. The Illuminoids, op. cit., p. i.
5. The Sirius Mystery, by Robert K.G. Temple, St. Martin’s Press: New York, 1976.
6. Simonton’s pancakes are discussed in The Edge of Reality, by J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallee, Regnery: Chicago, 1975, pp. 147-154.
7. The experience of the two Naval Intelligence officers is recounted in The Invisible College, by Jacques Vallee, Dutton: New York, 1976, pp. 12-16. A Pentagon official confirmed this story on a Rod Serling “UFO Report” on NBC-television during 1976. Both officers are still with Naval Intelligence and regarded as sound and sane by their superiors.
Final Secret of the Illuminati Page 27