Col. Breen:
Mars is dead, nothing there
but a few scraps of lichen.
Professor Bernard Quatermass:
Five million years ago it may have been very different.
Suppose at that time there were living beings on it with techniques that let them visit The Earth at a time when the most highly evolved creatures here, our own ancestors, were only a type of Pliocene ape.
Minister of Defense:
Go on.
Professor Bernard Quatermass:
They may have wanted to found another colony,
when their own world was doomed,
but couldn't endure our atmosphere,
so they experimented.
Minister of Defense:
Oh, and The Insects were responsible?
Professor Bernard Quatermass:
There is clearly some connection.
My guess is that those were ape mutations
being brought back for release on Earth.
Col. Breen:
And you really believe this was possible?
That apes were systematically taken from this planet to another and...
Professor Bernard Quatermass:
Altered, by selective breeding, atomic surgery,
methods we can't guess,
and with new faculties
instilled in them,
higher intelligence,
and perhaps something else.
Howell:
In effect, a colonisation.
Professor Bernard Quatermass:
It would be a way of
possessing The Earth.
Only a colony by proxy,
but better than leaving
nothing at all behind.
Howell:
Surely it had to be carried out on a huge scale.
Professor Bernard Quatermass:
Yes, if I'm right, if I'm right,
we've come on a single instance,
probably an accident,
a landing that went wrong and they all died.
The Thames Valley was swamp then.
Minister of Defense:
You realize what you are implying?
That we owe our human condition here to the intervention of insects.
Professor Bernard Quatermass:
I suppose I am.
“So what I’m suggesting is that we start working with that —
Abandon The Personality;
Abandon The Individual;
Abandon The “I”
Because It’s A Lie,
and It has held us down;
it’s been like
A Weight round our necks.
It was useful for the last two thousand years of history, because it created this out of the chaos that was – and this is more coherent; more useful; more meaningful. It has its problems; everything does; every system has – but we’re getting better.
And I think what we should do is walk away from the crap of the 21st century, and start thinking about what we’ve been experiencing.
My feeling about the 20th century, and about World War II and about Auschwitz and all of that stuff is that we had to go through it. We had to do it. That was humanity’s dark night of the soul, and it will never, ever happen again. But it had to happen.
Every single nightmare image, every image of hell that we have in our minds happened. Everything you can think of; people were flayed, brutalised, gassed, tortured, cut into pieces, turned into pigs – everything you can imagine happened. The world was a wasteland. There were cities completely annihilated. We went through it.
Why did we do that?
Stanislav Grof has a conception of the ‘perinatal matrices‘, which was one of the big influences on the film The Matrix. You might recognise some of this. He says that things that happen to us around birth are really profound, and they have all kinds of weird effects. They effect society, they effect the self; they effect everything. They have reverberations.
And he claims that there are several states, that he calls “Basic Perinatal Matrices”.
The first state is oceanic bliss – which we’re all familiar with, I’m sure. Oceanic fuckin’ bliss, mate. And that is the state of the baby in the womb, untouched – everything is provided for; everthing is there; everything you need will turn up out of the blue.
Basic Perinatal Matrix 2 is a different thing. It’s when the womb starts to turn a little toxic, and begins to suggest we’re about to be expelled. And, y’know, we don’t remember this stuff – what happened? What was the feeling of that fetus in there who suddenly thinks: “My entire universe has been overturned and I’m about to be shit out”?
Does he know where he’s going? “What the fuck’s this? Y’know, I was happy there. It was cool; I was getting everything I wanted.”
And so on into BPM 4 – which is kind of a release from tension; which is the birth process.
So I’m beginning to think.. as a society – and returning to the idea of ontogeny as history.. phylogeny, or whatever the fuck the word is.. what we’re looking at now is humanity’s process through Grofian matrices.
And what we went through is actually a Stanislav Grof Basic Perinatal Matrix 3 experience.
Every image that he talks about: death camps, control, the idea of people.. babies trapped in tubes.. you’ll recognise all this from The Matrix, as I said.
Oil, mechanisms, machines that hate us; destructive technology.. it all happened.
What if this little baby that is the universe; this little larvae that’s approaching culmination, has had to go through these stages? Because everything does. If you want to get rid of war, how do you get rid of war? You inoculate yourself against war by having the worst fuckin’ war you’ve ever had in your life. And everything after that’s just an aftershock. We’ve done nothing worse than what we did in those few years. Humanity’s never come close to anything like it. We’ve tried; there’s been a few lunatics who’ve tried. But nothing on that scale.
So what if we choose to imagine that humanity has passed through that stage?
We’ve reached the 21st century, and we’re now approaching Basic Perinatal Matrix 4. Which is: victory after war. Which is: the struggle is over. Which is: we’re all here; what do we do next?
There was no apocalypse; there was no Christ. There was no rapture. There is nothing. All this stuff is shit.
There is only us. And we’ve still got another thousand years, and maybe another thousand beyond that, and maybe another twenty thousand beyond that.
What are we gonna do?
Who are we?
Are we gonna stick to these personalities; these bounded, territorial things?
Are we gonna expand ourselves; make ourselves bigger? So that if you happen to like.. [say] ‘world music’ and I don’t, I can tap into your love of ‘world music’, and experience it – and it means something.
So all I’m suggesting here is that we all take up magic. Because basically it works. We can change the world. It’s quite simple; the technology’s there. The Buddhists have been telling us.. as I said, people have been telling us this for so long. And in the last two hundred years, it’s been driven underground and we’ve forgotten.
And people like us are here today to try and recover something of that. And the way to recover it, is to do it. Do the techniques. Go buy an Aleister Crowley book; [or] buy one by Phil Hine or Peter Carroll that’s a bit more up to date, and you don’t have to bother with that 18th century fucking language. But do the shit, and you will find it works.
And We Stand Here Now. This is the counterculture. We are the counterculture.. this is like, this shit. I went to this thing in, like, 1987 and it was Robert Anton Wilson and the whole deal – and I remember sitting in the audience thinking “fuck, rave is dead”. Because it was that kind of thing; that version of it’s dead. The hippy version of it’s dead.
We stand here.
And we’re looking ahead.
What are we gonna do?
Abandon The Personality
is what I suggest.
Get rid of the Sense of Self.
Get rid of the sense of “I”,
and
Make yourself
something bigger.
Imagine that every time you want to learn something new, it’s a new computer program; you can buy the operating system; the update. You can learn to fly a plane in seven days according to Neuro-Linguistic Programming – so why not? Let’s do it.
Do we want to change things? Or are we just sitting here talking?
No answer.
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