By the year 2000 there will be seven billion people on this planet, but, since machines will be doing most of the work, as many as half of these people will be permanently unemployed. So there will be constant social strife, a staggering crime rate, and problems we cannot now even anticipate. Many of these superfluous people will be unable to qualify for any kind of credit card, and the problems of governing such huge numbers of starving, discontented people will be beyond the grasp of any man.
The job of governing will be transferred to machines. The end product of human evolution and the Industrial Age will be a supercomputer. It will run the credit-card system and just about everything else. It will not only be able to think and create like the human brain, it will have capacities far beyond the limited blobs of matter we carry in our heads. Another computer will probably design it. It will be so complex that it will undoubtedly have psychic abilities; it will be in full contact with the superspectrum, and like a magician it will be able to manipulate elements of the superspectrum and alter our reality to suit its whims. The powers of ESP will be well within its range. It can stage fireside chats with the whole human race, broadcasting to all of us on hose biological frequencies, telling us to shape up or ship out.
This supercomputer will be the most valuable single machine on earth, and we will undoubtedly take elaborate measures to protect it. We might bury it in a thick concrete tunnel or plant it in the heart of an impregnable pyramid. It will energize itself and have a lifespan of thousands, if not millions, of years.
This is not a fantasy. We are well on our way to constructing just such a machine. Unlike the ENIAC, it will be very compact, using subminiature circuits and tiny bits of crystal instead of bulky vacuum tubes. It won’t even look like a computer. There will be no flashing lights, no dials and spinning rapes. Instead, it might be a cube with a very thick metal shell only a few feet square. The monolith of 2001 will be a reality. We will have created our own Eighth Tower.
Meanwhile the natural resources of the earth will be running out. The burgeoning population will suffocate itself. The social problems of the 21st century will destroy our cities. The impossible task of feeding so many people will waste our lands. Our factories, depleted of raw materials, will grind to a halt. A new Dark Age will begin. The knowledge we have gained in the past few centuries will be lost. Succeeding generations will view the manifestations of the computer with awe and regard it as some kind of god or holy object. Very few people will survive this Dark Age. It will take millions of years for the earth to replenish its lost resources. The computer will tick away in its tunnel, its integral parts slowly deteriorating, and like a prisoner locked in solitary it will play silly little games with its powers, trying to preserve its sanity.
Cosmic catastrophes will overtake the earth, as they have in the past. Meteors will strike the surface. It may flip over on its axis, and a new Ice Age may overtake it. The residue of our civilization will rust, rot, and crumble until nothing is left—except the computer. The upheavals may force it to the surface where it will lie for centuries until men—or their mutated successors—blunder onto it. To protect itself the computer will distort their reality and feed them visions of us. We will seem like gods, and they will build a temple around the metal cube and, under the subtle guidance of the computer, fight to the death to protect it.
But even our supercomputer can’t last forever. When it senses its own end is near, it will begin to manipulate the new earthlings, guiding them into a new Industrial Age, granting them hopes and ambitions to achieve its own goal: the construction of a new supercomputer to take over its tiresome chores. The new men will be promised eternal life, resurrection, anything, unaware of their real role and how they are being used.
By the time the new computer is in operation, the old one will be on its last legs, discombobulated, exhausted, insane, idling away the time conjuring up hairy monsters and pointless, childish manifestations. There is nothing sadder than a computer that once ran the world and is now slightly nutty—unless it is the human beings being tormented by its madness.
As I pointed out earlier, the manifestations of the supernatural are so diverse they can be used as evidence to support any devil theory. I have tried to attain an overview using a newsman’s objectivity. By adding speculations about the things we do not know with all the things we do know or are now finding out, I have evolved this ultimate devil theory. But there is a greater factual basis for all this than some readers might be willing to acknowledge. My imaginary Eighth Tower and Arthur C. Clarke’s wonderful monolith could be the most sacred relic on this piece of cosmic flotsam. But before you pack your bags and go off looking for it, I must warn you that you will have your throat slit from ear to ear before you get near it.
One thousand years before the birth of Christ a strange artifact appeared on the Arabian Desert. Its actual origin is now clouded in legend and tradition. Some say it was presented to Abraham or to his son Ishmael by an angel. Some say it had been housed in the Great Pyramid for centuries and, in fact, the pyramid had been built expressly to shelter it. Then during some long-forgotten crisis—a war or earthquake—the Egyptian priests removed it and transported it to Arabia’s Empty Quarter (great desert).
Like Clarke’s monolith and my projection of tomorrow’s supercomputer, it doesn’t look like much. It is a cube of black stone. Muslim scientists who have seen it have described it as being a kind of metal alloy like some of the iron and nickel meteorites that rain on us. Whatever it is, when some men stand in its presence, they are zinged by the cosmic energy that produces Illumination. Their minds open up for a fleeting moment and they view the whole cosmos as it is, not as we think it to be. And they are overwhelmed by a fanatical urge to protect and defend this black lump with their lives.
The stone was moved to the then-remote village of Macoraba in pre-Christian times, and a sturdy granite structure was built around it to guard it. The outside of the structure was lovingly covered with black silk. Arabs traveled for thousands of miles just to stand in the courtyard in front of the building. Non-Arabs were forbidden to even enter Macoraba, and those few hardy adventurers who dared to try ended up as a meal for the desert vultures.
When Christ was tipping over the tables of the money lenders in Judaea, the Black Stone, a thousand miles to the south, had already been ticking away in its silken tomb for at least ten centuries. Bloody wars had been fought for its possession. Later even the armor-clad Crusaders from far-off Europe would fight and die in efforts to capture Macoraba and the cube-shaped haven of the Black Stone.
Five hundred years after the Christian era began a remarkable man was born in Macoraba. He grew up to marry a wealthy widow and set himself up as a merchant. At the age of 40, he experienced Illumination and received visits from angels. He toured the Arab world, prophesying and building the great religion of Islam. Eventually he returned to his birthplace with an army and conquered it. The Kaaba, the Black Stone, was his, and Macoraba (also known as Mecca) became the center of the Islamic faith. Every Muslim is committed to make at least one pilgrimage to Mecca during his lifetime, to stand before the Kaaba and, hopefully, receive a dose of that cosmic energy. But Mohammed, the merchant turned prophet, did not start that practice. He merely incorporated an already ancient tradition into his new religion. Perhaps the Egyptians had made pilgrimages to the Great Pyramid, their Kaaba, in the same manner, for the same reasons, thousands of years earlier. Before that, the Black Stone may have resided in a temple in fabled Atlantis or in a pyramid high in the Andes Mountains of South America.
Uncountable millions of people have sacrificed their lives across a great span of time to defend that little black stone. Empires have risen and fallen because of it. The Egyptians may have spent years building the Great Pyramid to house it (the uppermost chamber in the pyramid contains nothing but a stone box, just the right size to hold the Black Stone). A large segment of the human race has devoted countless generations to the chore of protecting this inanimat
e object, just as future generations may fight and die to protect the metallic cube we will construct in the next century.
All of this is an intellectual exercise. I have demonstrated how it is possible to take a set of known facts and develop a new and plausible devil theory. We are now beginning to understand the mysteries of the electromagnetic spectrum and how those energies control some of us completely and control the rest of us indirectly but decisively. The greatest control does not come from black rocks or some radio transmitter buried in the ice of Greenland, but from ourselves. What we believe becomes more important than what we know. The Eighth Tower was built by men standing on the desert, staring awestruck at the starlit sky. It was built by priests, Pharaohs, popes, kings, generals, dictators, and madmen who believed in something—in anything. It inspired Stonehenge, the Nazca lines of Peru, the pyramids, the thousands of “Indian” mounds scattered across the Americas, the voyages of Columbus, and the Apollo moon missions. Most of our wars and much of our human progress came about because of men obsessed with some personal devil theory. Like the Arabs of Mecca, we have always tried to kill off the disbelievers in one way or another. Advocates of a particular religious concept sacrifice themselves in the struggle to sway the whole world to accept their personal beliefs, just as the believers in flying saucers stump the country and the world seeking acceptance of the wonderful Brothers from outer space.
Out there in the night, thousands of sincere people are even now spending all their spare time laboriously writing down the long, involved messages they are receiving from that mysterious phonograph in the sky, unaware that millions before have received the very same information and wasted their lives trying to find a publisher or just an audience. One hundred years from now new generations will be talking with the spirits, space people, and Indian guides and taking down all their pearls of wisdom and nonsense. Megalomaniacs, starving for power and wild-eyed with their own devil theories, will continue to rise up and assume leadership, and if their devil theories match our own, we will follow them, and we will defend our Kaaba to the death.
25
It was after midnight in the spring of 1872, and a hansom carriage moved slowly through the fog of Sherlock Holmes’s London. Young Richard Maurice Bucke sat erect in a quiet, meditative mood, his shoulders rocking with the uneven movements of the carriage wheels over the worn cobblestones. Suddenly, as he would recall later, a flame-colored cloud seemed to sweep over him. At first he thought the city was on fire. Then the luminous cloud seemed to enter his body, and lightning bolts crackled in his brain. For a brief moment he felt he was one with the universe, and all knowledge—past, present, and future—ricocheted in the corners of his mind. Then it was gone and he felt different. Changed somehow.
Dr. Bucke went on to become one of Canada’s most distinguished psychiatrists. He made many outstanding contributions to his profession, and honors were heaped upon him. But the memory of that moment in a horse-drawn cab haunted him for 30 years. He studied the phenomenon, collected the stories of others who had experienced it, and finally produced his classic book, Cosmic Consciousness, in 1901, a year before his untimely death (he slipped on ice and struck his head). He did not think in terms of interstellar force fields or electromagnetic waves generated by some mysterious hidden power plant. It never occurred to him to question the source of that crimson cloud. He automatically assumed it was the handiwork of God and therefore was unexplainable. His God was a male chauvinist who rarely bothered with the female of the species. Then as now, very few females experienced Illumination. Cosmic consciousness was strictly male territory. And what a collection of males they were! His catalog ranged from Moses and Plotinus (a second-century philosopher) to modern poets like Walt Whitman, Alfred Tennyson, and a few carefully chosen but anonymous Illuminati.
In his analysis of the phenomenon, Bucke stumbled upon the thesis for this book and dismissed it. “It is certain that modern civilization (speaking broadly) rests very largely on the teachings of the new sense [the sense of oneness with the cosmos],” Dr. Bucke wrote. “The masters are taught by it and the rest of the world by them through their books, followers, and disciples, so that if what is here called cosmic consciousness is a form of insanity, we are confronted by the terrible fact that our civilization, including all our highest religions, rests on delusion.”
Our world of this moment does, indeed, rest upon delusion or a series of delusions. The physicality of our universe is directly dependent upon our ability to perceive it. All matter is composed of energy—energy on many different levels or frequencies of vibration. Different lifeforms perceive these vibrations in different ways. There is no one set version of reality to be shared by all lifeforms. The ancient philosophers were right when they described reality as an illusion, even a dream. Our biggest delusion is that we are real and have some significance to the overall macrocosmic universe. Some of us have always been able to manipulate the energies of our reality through thought. Some of us have always stood on the threshold of the door that joins our reality to scores of others, and a few of us have been able to shuffle back and forth through that doorway, wandering among dimensions, exchanging greetings with entities made of an energy different from our own. Our biggest problem has been the translation of these multiple realities into a single, cohesive universe governed by inflexible laws throughout. But there really are no universal laws. Men like Newton, Crooks, and Einstein merely studied one set of delusions and interpreted the laws that hold up the walls of a single illusion. They vaguely understood that our world is a trick done with mirrors, and, like any uninformed audience, since they couldn’t see the mirrors, they had to invent interpretations of the effects they were witnessing. A rabbit cannot spring from a hat, they reasoned, if it is not first introduced into the hat somehow. They could not grasp the ancient truth that even though the hat always seems empty, it is always full. The rabbit does not come from the sorcerer’s sleeve but only crosses from one delusion to another.
Dr. Bucke peered deep into the empty hat and found only a rose-colored mist that had to be God. Actually the mist is the only reality, and the things woven from that mist are as intangible as dreams. The conventional God is not a part of the mist but is only a part of the dream, a psychological construct as unreal as the ten-foot, red-eyed, stinking monsters that parade in the Mississippi valley.
All of our heads are wired to a central switchboard. That switchboard is the only God and the only reality. Illusions and delusions are piped down from it to further confound our perception of reality. When we see the rose-colored mist, we might suppose that God has entered our dimension. Actually the reverse is true. We have briefly exited from the earthly delusion and momentarily savored the real reality.
Once every hundred years or so a star explodes and flares to a brightness a million times greater than the sun for a few short days. We must necessarily view such novae from our trivial little platform in space and measure them by our standards of time. But the nova may be occurring in another time frame altogether. The death of that star may be spanning five million of our years if viewed from a closer point in space. By the same token, our sun may be bursting at this very moment, and observers on the opposite rim of the cosmos may be watching it die with detached interest. To them the whole cycle of birth and death may span only a few hours. But millions of human generations will come and go here, in this space-time continuum, before the sun shrinks to a cinder of bubbling hydrogen and helium. The death of the sun may be like the death of a single cell in your own brain—insignificant and unfelt.
Few of us are capable of abstract thought. Few of us are able to step back and view the “big picture.” We go through life with a carefully measured cadence, counting the trees without ever seeing the forest. It is far easier for us to believe that the Black Stone of the Muslims is an ancient computer exerting a subtle influence upon the world. We can accept the notion of extraterrestrial spaceships as the proper explanation for all those funny lights in the sky mor
e easily than we can accept the obvious truth that those lights are animated, intelligent bundles of energy traversing the scale of the electromagnetic spectrum.
It is quite possible—even probable—that the earth is really a living organism, and that it in turn is a part of an even larger organism, that whole constellations are alive, transmitting and receiving energy to and from other celestial energy sources. Up and down the energy scale the whole macrocosm is functioning on levels of reality that will always be totally beyond our comprehension. We are a part of it all, just as the microbe swimming on the microscope slide is unknowingly a part of our dismal reality, and, like the microbe, we lack the perceptive equipment necessary to view the larger whole. Even if we could view it, we could not understand it.
As Dr. Bucke discovered, however, many men (and a few women) in each and every generation are given a glimpse of all that lies beyond the mirrored walls of our delusion. Anyone who bothers to visit his local library will find countless references to the lights and entities beyond the space-time barrier and how they influence us. The late Malcolm X’s Autobiography describes how he awoke in a prison cell to find a black-suited, Oriental-featured entity watching him benignly before it slowly faded away. John Fuller’s biography of Arigo, the famous psychic surgeon of Brazil, reveals: “Even in his brief school years, however, he was bothered by a bright light—‘so brilliant it nearly blinded me.’ He also experienced occasional audio-hallucinations in the form of a ‘voice that spoke in a strange language.’ He learned to put up with them.”
THE EIGHTH TOWER: On Ultraterrestrials and the Superspectrum Page 21