1987

1987 :

LEX LUTHOR, 

Greatest Criminal Mastermind 

of Our Age :

Is The World going to be vapourised?

SUPERMAN :

No, Luthor — it’s as it always is :

On The Brink —

With Good Fighting Evil.

See Ya in 20.

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.

Mars

 

you think it all breaks down into symbolism and structures and hints and clues 

no, batman, that's just wikipedia.

you actually believed all it would take is a few chemicals, a couple of days of drug-induced isolation and a cheap little nervous breakdown and you'd have me all figured-out?

like there was some rabbit-hole you could follow me down to understanding?

The Human Scapegoat in Ancient Rome

WE are now prepared to notice the use of the human scapegoat in classical antiquity. Every year on the fourteenth of March a man clad in skins was led in procession through the streets of Rome, beaten with long white rods, and driven out of the city. He was called Mamurius Veturius, that is, "the old Mars," and as the ceremony took place on the day preceding the first full moon of the old Roman year (which began on the first of March), the skin-clad man must have represented the Mars of the past year, who was driven out at the beginning of a new one. 

Now Mars was originally not a God of War but of Vegetation. For it was to Mars that the Roman husbandman prayed for the prosperity of his corn and his vines, his fruit-trees and his copses; it was to Mars that the priestly college of the Arval Brothers, whose business it was to sacrifice for the growth of the crops, addressed their petitions almost exclusively; and it was to Mars, as we saw, that a horse was sacrificed in October to secure an abundant harvest. 

Moreover, it was to Mars, under his title of "Mars of The Woods" (Mars Silvanus), that farmers offered sacrifice for the welfare of their cattle. We have already seen that cattle are commonly supposed to be under the special patronage of Tree-Gods. 

Once more, the consecration of the vernal month of March to Mars seems to point him out as the deity of the sprouting vegetation. 

Thus the Roman custom of expelling the old Mars at the beginning of the new year in spring is identical with the Slavonic custom of "Carrying out Death," if the view here taken of the latter custom is correct. 

The Similarity of The Roman and Slavonic customs has been already remarked by scholars, who appear, however, to have taken Mamurius Veturius and the corresponding figures in the Slavonic ceremonies to be representatives of the old year rather than of the old god of vegetation. It is possible that ceremonies of this kind may have come to be thus interpreted in later times even by the people who practised them. But the personification of a period of time is too abstract an idea to be primitive. However, in the Roman, as in the Slavonic, ceremony, the representative of the god appears to have been treated not only as a deity of vegetation but also as a scapegoat. His expulsion implies this; for there is no reason why the god of vegetation, as such, should be expelled the city. 

But it is otherwise if he is also a scapegoat; it then becomes necessary to drive him beyond the boundaries, that he may carry his sorrowful burden away to other lands. 

And, in fact, Mamurius Veturius appears to have been driven away to the land of the Oscans, the enemies of Rome.

Richard Nixon on Russian Leaders

"Gorbachev had STYLE -- 

...on the other hand, 

Yeltsin was one who came across -

- in Their View -

- as being BOORISH; 

he DRANK too much; 

he was a WOMANISER.... 

(At least, these were some of the stories that came out -- )

He was one who wasn't in Gorbachev's League, as far as STYLE was concerned....

For instance, I remember one columnist -- who's "An Expert" in this field -- 

after Yeltsin had made one of his trips over here, derided him on the fact that he had such poor TABLE MANNERS....

Table Manners, because he licked caviar and butter off of his fingers at a State Dinner.

Well, Let Me Tell Ya -- 

Yeltsin may not know which fork to use at a State Dinner, but he has a VERY Sharp Knife.

As I looked at The Two, I realised that Yeltsin was one who was a POLITICAL Heavyweight,

and some of The "Experts" just couldn't SEE that, because they were BLINDED by STYLE,

and They couldn't see The Real Man who was beneath."

MARS : The Colonialism of Ideology

"In the end the red weed succumbed almost as quickly as it had spread. A cankering disease, due, it is believed, to the action of certain bacteria, presently seized upon it. Now by the action of natural selection, all terrestrial plants have acquired a resisting power against bacterial diseases—they never succumb without a severe struggle, but the red weed rotted like a thing already dead. The fronds became bleached, and then shrivelled and brittle. They broke off at the least touch, and the waters that had stimulated their early growth carried their last vestiges out to sea.

As I crossed the bridge, the sound of “Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” ceased. It was, as it were, cut off. The silence came like a thunderclap.... Before the dawn my courage returned, and while the stars were still in the sky I turned once more towards Regent’s Park.... I felt no fear, only a wild, trembling exultation, as I ran up the hill towards the motionless monster. Out of the hood hung lank shreds of brown, at which the hungry birds pecked and tore.

In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange shelter places. And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians—dead!—slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.

For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things—taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many—those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance—our living frames are altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. 

For neither do men live nor die in vain.

Here and there they were scattered, nearly fifty altogether, in that great gulf they had made, overtaken by a death that must have seemed to them as incomprehensible as any death could be. To me also at that time this death was incomprehensible. All I knew was that these things that had been alive and so terrible to men were dead. For a moment I believed that the destruction of Sennacherib had been repeated, that God had repented, that the Angel of Death had slain them in the night.

I stood staring into the pit, and my heart lightened gloriously, even as the rising sun struck the world to fire about me with his rays. The pit was still in darkness; the mighty engines, so great and wonderful in their power and complexity, so unearthly in their tortuous forms, rose weird and vague and strange out of the shadows towards the light. A multitude of dogs, I could hear, fought over the bodies that lay darkly in the depth of the pit, far below me. Across the pit on its farther lip, flat and vast and strange, lay the great flying-machine with which they had been experimenting upon our denser atmosphere when decay and death arrested them. Death had come not a day too soon. At the sound of a cawing overhead I looked up at the huge fighting-machine that would fight no more for ever, at the tattered red shreds of flesh that dripped down upon the overturned seats on the summit of Primrose Hill.

I turned and looked down the slope of the hill to where, enhaloed now in birds, stood those other two Martians that I had seen overnight, just as death had overtaken them. The one had died, even as it had been crying to its companions; perhaps it was the last to die, and its voice had gone on perpetually until the force of its machinery was exhausted. They glittered now, harmless tripod towers of shining metal, in the brightness of the rising sun....

At any rate, in all the bodies of the Martians that were examined after The War, no bacteria except those already known as terrestrial species were found. That they did not bury any of their dead, and the reckless slaughter they perpetrated, point also to an entire ignorance of the putrefactive process. But probable as this seems, it is by no means a proven conclusion.

MARS : The Ideology of Colonialism

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. 

With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

He was full of speculation that night about the condition of Mars, and scoffed at the vulgar idea of its having inhabitants who were signalling us. His idea was that meteorites might be falling in a heavy shower upon the planet, or that a huge volcanic explosion was in progress. He pointed out to me how unlikely it was that organic evolution had taken the same direction in the two adjacent planets.

“The chances against anything manlike on Mars are a million to one,” he said.

My Yard

[Trial room]

VALEYARD: 

Members of The Court, 

We have just witnessed a typical 

glorious escapade of The Doctor. 

Mr. Six : 

Madam! I ask that The Court protect Me 

from the abuse of The Brickyard here. 

VALEYARD: 

How pathetic and juvenile are 

Your Attempts at humour. 

INQUISITOR: 

Gentlemen, may I remind you, 

This is A Court of Law, 

not a Debating Society for 

maladjusted, psychotic sociopaths. 

You will both conduct yourselves 

in an orderly manner 

and show proper respect 

for the judicial procedure. 

I hope I make myself very clear. 

(The Doctor and the Valeyard bow.) 

INQUISITOR: 

And Doctor, The Prosecuting Counsel's Title 

is The Valeyard --

Not The Brickyard, Backyard, 

Knacker's Yard or any other kind of yard. 

Again, do I make myself clear? 

Mr. Six : 

Piercingly and Irrefutably so, Madam. 

INQUISITOR: 

Proceed. 

VALEYARD: 

As I was Saying, We have just witnessed 

a sequence in The Doctor's History 

which illustrated perfectly 

his almost gleeful pleasure 

in interfering in the development 

of alien life forms. 

Mr. Six : 

I object! 

INQUISITOR: 

Sit down and shut up! 

VALEYARD: 

Thank you, Sagacity. 

Mr. Six : 

Sagacity? You Sycophant! 

Since when has that been 

a form of address used 

in a Gallifreyan Court of Law? 

VALEYARD: 

I am simply showing respect to our learned Inquisitor. 

INQUISITOR: 

An attitude I much approve. 

Mr. Six : 

Well, you would, wouldn't you? 

'Sagacity', indeed.... 

INQUISITOR: 

Doctor! Continue. 

VALEYARD: 

I should now like to present 

The Doctor's next frightening adventure. 

In fact, the one in which he was engaged 

when removed from Time 

and brought to This Court. 

(The Doctor raises his arm.) 

INQUISITOR: 

Doctor? 

Mr. Six : 

What about The Box? 

INQUISITOR: 

The Box? 

Mr. Six : 

And the fact that Earth 

was two light years away 

from its original position? 

VALEYARD: 

That is not relevant to this segment of evidence. 

Mr. Six : 

It was relevant enough to be bleeped 

from The Matrix record. 

INQUISITOR: 

The Valeyard is quite right. 

That is a matter for The High Council 

to adjudicate upon. 

It is not The Business of This Trial. 

VALEYARD: 

If we may see from The Doctor's arrival 

on the planet Thoros Beta : 

Twenty fourth century, 

last quarter, fourth year, 

seventh month, third day.

In his book The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan describes a battle between The Accuser, Apollyon, and Christian in The Valley of Humiliation. 

One of Apollyon’s ploys is to recite a laundry list of Christian’s sins [i.e., Errors, Mistakes and Human Weaknesses] : “Thou didst faint at first setting out, when thou wast almost choked in the Gulf of Despond; thou didst attempt wrong ways to be rid of thy burden, whereas thou shouldst have stayed till thy Prince had taken it off; thou didst sinfully sleep and lose thy choice thing; thou wast also almost persuaded to go back at the sight of the lions; and when thou talkest of thy journey, and of what thou hast heard and seen, thou art inwardly desirous of vain-glory in all that thou sayest or doest.”

Christian’s response to the accuser is full of humility and faith: “All this is True; and much more which thou hast left out : but The Prince whom I serve and honour is merciful and ready to forgive. But besides, these infirmities possessed me in thy country; for there I sucked them in, and I have groaned under them, been sorry for them, and have obtained pardon of my Prince.” 

At the mention of Christ’s forgiveness, Apollyon flies into a rage; Satan The accuser cannot abide the fact that his accusations are overcome by the grace of God in Christ.

Me Doing Him

“Authority 28 caused some problems for me personally because I wrote the story as a favour and then, surprisingly, wasn't paid or acknowledged for it until I called Wildstorm and the situation was quickly resolved. 

I wanted the issue to go out under some whimsical credit like 'The Mock Millar Experience' but otherwise I had no intention of putting my name on it. It was a gag. This is the story of watch gears turning and bureaucratic springs unwinding - hardly the fuel for so much rumour among so few. 

The best bit no-one saw was the first page - another victim of the censor's scythe. My original had a splash page with Jesus Christ, Allah, and Buddha all standing in front of a bullet-pocked wall. Each wears a blindfold and sweats nervously, fag in the lips. A big balloon from off panel reads...'FIRE!'. Turn the page and it goes into the Surgeon's speech before they meet Religimon.”

“Sprinkled throughout Superman and the Authority are some nods towards the writing style of my erstwhile protégé and great mate Mark Millar who lit a fresh fire under The Authority with Frank Quitely in 2000…

‘THING IS SWEETHEART, I PLEDGED YOUR PRECIOUS SOUL TO ENTITIES THAT WERE ANCIENT LONG BEFORE SATAN WAS CONCEIVED IN THE MIND OF MAN.’

… is Me doing Him.

Without War, A Lot of People CAN’T Survive

“There is NO Movie without a bomb, or at LEAST a smashed face —

We are all enjoying it.

When it really HAPPENS, We Say :

“We are Shocked, SHOCKED..!!”

It doesn’t work like that, Life.

Wars are almost inevitable —

because 

economies are 

BUILT on War.

Without War, a lot of People 

can’t Survive.

The Largest Industry 

on The Planet 

is Arms and Armaments.”

The Garden of Death

For years, interpretations of Simberg’s artwork have been a place of mystery for historians and psychologists alike.

However, The Garden of Death is one of the few paintings whose symbolism Simberg explained; typically he preferred to let viewers come to their own conclusions. In a note on one sketch he described the garden as “the place where the dead end up BEFORE going to Heaven”.

Because of this explanation, there is a connection from this piece of artwork to spiritualism.

Furthering this interpretation further, the work is described as having the skeletons symbolize being a friend and performing typical home rituals. Simberg’s juxtaposition of the traditionally frightening imagery of death with the tenderness and humor of his portrayal invite the viewer to consider mortality in a new light.

The image of death as the gardener is considered a significant reference to Simberg’s typology.

The garden used in the work can be seen as philosophical gardens, possibly even pointing to an overall symbol of a new type of religious garden. Following the idea of religious gardens, the gardens created by Simberg follow the Gardens of Eden, the Garden of Christ, and the Garden of Virtues.5 Because Simberg decided to mix both positive and negative characters in the artwork, many leaders within the Catholic Church were left questioning the indirect notion of biblical characters. Many of the Church’s authorities felt irritated and ultimately opposed the artwork.

The painting was a favored subject of Simberg’s and he made several versions using different techniques, including larger fresco version of the painting in the Tampere Cathedral, which also contains other works by Simberg.

Since Simberg gave observers a slight explanation the artwork, many still try to interpret the symbols used in the piece today.

Inferior Divine Power

“When I first read for the part of Q., 

it reminded me of a quote that was once said of Lord Byron — 

and that was, that

He was 

“Mad, Bad, and 

Dangerous to Know.”

— John De Lancie

A skeleton parodies human happiness by playing a hurdy-gurdy while the wheels of his cart crush a man as if his life is of no importance. 

A woman has fallen in the path of the death cart; she has a slender thread which is about to be cut by the scissors in her other hand —

Bruegel’s interpretation of Atropos. 

Nearby another woman in the path of the cart, 

holds in her hand a spindle and distaff, 

classical symbols of the fragility of human life— 

another Bruegel interpretation of Clotho and Lachesis; 

a starving dog nibbles at the face of a dead child she holds. 

Just beside her, a cardinal is helped towards his fate 

by a skeleton who mockingly wears the red hat, 

while a dying king’s barrels of gold and silver coins 

are looted by yet another skeleton; 

oblivious to the fact that a skeleton is warning him with an empty hourglass that his life is about to literally run out of time, the foolish and miserly monarch’s last thoughts still compel him to reach out for his useless and vain wealth, 

seeming unaware of the need for repentance. 

In the centre, an awakening religious pilgrim 

has his throat cut by a robber-skeleton for his money purse; 

above the murder, skeleton-fishermen catch people in a net.

In the bottom right-hand corner, 

a dinner has been broken up and the diners are putting up a futile resistance. 

They have drawn their swords in order to fight the skeletons dressed in winding-sheets; 

no less hopelessly, the court jester takes refuge beneath the dinner table. 

The backgammon board 

and the playing cards 

have been scattered, 

while a skeleton thinly disguised with a mask 

(possibly the face of a corpse) 

empties away the wine flasks. 

Of the menu of the interrupted meal, 

all that can be seen are 

a few pallid rolls of bread 

and an appetiser apparently consisting of a pared human skull. 

Above the table are two women-the one on the left struggles in vain 

while being embraced by a skeleton in a hideous parody of after-dinner amorousness. 

The woman on the right is horrified with the realisation of mortality when a skeleton in a hooded robe mockingly seems to bring another dish, also consisting of human bones, to the table.

In the bottom right-hand corner a musician who plays a lute while his lady sings; both are oblivious to the fact that behind both of them, a skeleton that plays along is grimly aware that the couple can not escape their inevitable doom. 

A cross sits in the centre of the painting. 

The painting shows aspects of everyday life in the mid-sixteenth century, when the risk of plague was very severe. 

Clothes are clearly depicted, as are pastimes such as playing cards and backgammon. 

It shows objects such as musical instruments, an early mechanical clock, scenes including a funeral service, and various methods of execution, including the breaking wheel, the gallows, burning at the stake, and the headsman about to behead a victim who has just taken wine and communion. 

In one scene a human is the prey of a skeleton-hunter and his dogs. In another scene at the left, skeletons drag victims down to be drowned in a pond; a man with a grinding stone around his neck is about to be thrown into the pond by the skeletons—an echoing of Matthew 18.6 and Luke 17.2; on the bridge just above at the right a skeleton is about to strike a prostrate victim with a Falchion.

The Colonialism of Ideology

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.

A.I. Guy

All A.I. Guy scenes in Upload - Season 1(2020)