Lucy in the Sky
In only a few months, Hollywood has produced 3 movies promoting the deranged aspirations of transhumanism, the latest manifestation of the CIA’s MK-Ultra program and their totalitarian dream of creating Huxley’s Brave New World, a dystopia where we will be deluded into loving our servitude through psychedelic drugs and mindless sex.
First there was Her, starring Joachin Phoenix, Transcendence with Johnny Depp, and now Lucy, with femme du jour, Scarlett Johansson. But unlike the first two, Lucy is of an another order of magnitude, using maximum decibels and all the glitzy tricks of Hollywood to lend blockbuster credentials to make sure you are getting the message loud and clear. It is the Luciferian message of MK-Ultra, that we are approaching the Singularlity, where through the use of psychedelic drugs we will be able to untap the hidden powers of the mind and ultimately merge with computers and the internet, which represents the accumulated knowledge of the ages, and thus achieve omniscience, and become as gods.
In Lucy, Johansson plays a young American woman in China who is caught up in a drug smuggling scheme. She’s captured by Korean gangsters and turned into one of a group of unwitting drug mules, by cutting her open and implanting in their intestines with a large package of an experimental new drug. In a scuffle, Johansson is kicked in the gut, and the pouch bursts inside of her, unlocking, a la MK-Ultra, the “full potential” of her mind.
The movie begins by offering the most bold hint, in the meaning of its title, explaining to the audience that Lucy is the name given to the fossil of the earliest human (Australopithecus) who lived an estimated 3.2 million years ago. The insinuation is that Lucy will be like a new Eve, marking a new leap in evolution, becoming the first “transhuman.” And there is another clue associated with the choice of the name: the name of Lucy was selected for the fossil, inspired by the Beatles’ song, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” from their 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s album.
Although Lennon denied it, in a 2004 interview, Paul McCartney admitted that the song was about LSD, stating,
“A song like ‘Got to Get You into My Life’, that’s directly about pot, although everyone missed it at the time… ‘Day Tripper’,” he says, “that’s one about acid. ‘Lucy in the Sky,’ that’s pretty obvious.” [1]
The Beatles famously included as one of the many figures on the cover sleeve of the album confessed drug fiend and notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, member of the Golden Dawn who later founded the O.T.O., alongside various illuminati such as Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and T. E. Lawrence.
The Beatles, according to former British intelligence officer John Coleman, were a project of the nefarious Tavistock Institute. Their music, he said, was actually written by Theodor Adorno, a leading member of the Frankfurt School, the true architects of the 60s counterculture, who made use of a combination of drugs and left-wing politics to upend the American Christian value system. [2] As John Lennon later noted, “changing the lifestyle and appearance of youth throughout the world didn’t just happen—we set out to do it. We knew what we were doing.” [3]
According to Beatles biographer Geoffrey Giuliano, at a party in California in 1973, John Lennon “went berserk, hurling a chair out the window, smashing mirrors, heaving a TV against the wall, and screaming nonsense about film director Roman Polanski [director of Rosemary’s Baby] being to blame [for the murder of his wife Sharon Tate by members of Charles Manson’s gang].” [4] John Lennon was shot in 1980 in front of the Dakota Building in New York, which was used in the filming Rosemary’s Baby by suspected MK-Ultra victim, Mark David Chapman.
The Lucy fossil is also a key piece of evidence in support of the Darwinian theory of evolution, the basis of the transhumanist hypothesis. The astounding paradox of our time is that we as a society have been made to believe we live in an age of unprecedented scientific advance and scrutiny, all the while having been duped into believing that the completely absurd Darwinian theory that we “evolved” from apes is exemplary of that same rationalism.
Darwin’s theory of evolution is not science, but magic. The leading defender of Darwin’s theory was Aldous and Julian Huxley’s grandfather, Thomas Huxley, a fellow of the Royal Society, a Masonic organization modeled on the “Invisible College” of Rosicrucian adepts described in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. According to Rabbi Kook (1865—1935), the most important exponent of Religious Zionism, “is increasingly conquering the world at this time, and, more so than all other philosophical theories, conforms to the Kabbalistic secrets of the world.” [5]
The occult myth of evolution begins with Isaac Luria, founder of the New Kabbalah in the sixteenth century, when he posited that human intellectual history represented man’s evolution towards becoming God. An occultist Balthazar Walther travelled to Palestine at the beginning to the seventeenth century to study the teachings of Luria, which were the communicated in Christian language by the mystic Jacob Boehme, whose thought contributed to the Rosicrucian movement, and ultimately to philosophy of Hegel, the great oracle of the Illuminati.
The theory was incorporated into the notion of “spiritual evolution,” professed by the leading occultists of recent times, beginning with H. P. Blavatsky, known as the godmother of the New Age, who founded the Theosophical Society. In addition to Blavatsky, early proponents included Max Theon, Henri Bergson, Rudolf Steiner, Sri Aurobindo, and Alfred North Whitehead.
Bergson (1859—1941), whose sister married Golden Dawn leader McGreggor Mathers, put forward an alternate explanation for Darwin’s mechanism of evolution, suggesting that evolution is motivated by a “vital impetus” that can also be understood as humanity’s natural creative impulse. Bergson influenced Bertrand Russell’s collaborator, Alfred North Whitehead (1861—1947), who developed what is called process philosophy, which identifies metaphysical reality with change and development.
But the leading exponent of the evolutionary ideas of the transhumanists is the radical Jesuit priest, Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard’s reading of The Creative Evolution by Henri Bergson was, he said, the “catalyst of a fire which devoured already its heart and its spirit.”
In the 1930’s it was not the Vatican but his own order, the Jesuits, who forbade Teilhard from publishing and lecturing during his lifetime. However, soon after becoming Pope, Pius XII persuaded the Jesuits to lift the ban so that a series of Teilhard lectures could take place in German-occupied Paris during the latter years of the war.
Writing the introduction to de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man was Julian Huxley, according to whom, “evolution is nothing but matter become conscious of itself.” [6]
Teilhard de Chardin is known for his attempt to synthesize Christianity and the theory of evolution. Teilhard, who was trained as paleontologist and geologist, took part in the infamous Peking Man and Piltdown Man, the largest academic scandal in history, that attempted to substantiate the truth of Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis.
The use of the term “transhuman” goes back to de Chardin who, through his postulation that man would create the Noosphere (based on the Greek term Nous, meaning mind), a supreme consciousness, is often regarded as the patron saint of the internet. As explained by Erik Davis in TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information:
Writing in the early 1950s, he underscored the global reach of radio, cinema, and television, while also drawing attention to “the insidious growth of those astounding electronic computers.” In a sense, Teilhard recognized the emergent outlines of a worldwide electronic and computational brain at a time when few engineers were even thinking about the possibilities of networked computers. Or as Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg bluntly declared in Wired, “Teilhard saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived.” [7]
The movie Lucy is founded on the occult-influenced Human Potential Movement, which can be traced back to Julian’s brother Aldous, through his influence on the Esalen Institute. According to Wouter Hanegraaff, in New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, in addition of the Hippies, Esalen was the second major influence of the 60s counterculture and the rise of the New Age movement. [8]
The movement seeks to explore occult practices and paranormal phenomena, in other words magic, which are interpreted to lie latent in the mind. Similarly, the premise of Lucy is that we use only a small portion of a cerebral capacity, and that if we could make use of greater proportions, we could achieve those potencies jealously pursued through by centuries of magicians and sorcerers.
In 1973, the Institute for Noetic Sciences (IONS), named after de Chardin’s concept of Nous, was founded to encourage and conduct research on human potentials. IONS, it claims, “conducts, sponsors, and collaborates on leading-edge research into the potentials and powers of consciousness, exploring phenomena that do not necessarily fit conventional scientific models while maintaining a commitment to scientific rigor.” IONS partly funded the experiments with spoon-bender and Mossad agent Uri Geller at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), as well as remote-viewing experiments, until the CIA eventually acknowledged responsibility for them.
Headquartered in Menlo Park, California, SRI is one of the world’s largest scientific research organizations, funded directly by US intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA’s Office of Technical Services and Office Research. According to John Coleman, SRI “can be described as one of the ‘jewels’ in Tavistock’s crown in its rule over the United States.” [9] Originally founded as a means of attracting commercial business research at Stanford University in California, SRI began taking on military and intelligence contracts, many of them classified.
In 1976, president of IONS and a leading figure of SRI, Willis Harman wrote An Incomplete Guide to the Future in which he advocated a society based on the ideals of Freemasonry. Harman believes that the symbol of the pyramid with the floating capstone on the Great Seal “indicates that the nation will flourish only as its leaders are guided by supraconscious intuition,” and he defines this as “divine insight.” [10] This recalls the words of Henry Wallace, who was responsible for the adoption of the Great Seal, who wrote:
It will take a more definite recognition of the Grand Architect of the Universe before the apex stone is finally fitted into place and this nation in the full strength of its power is in position to assume leadership among the nations in inaugurating “the new order of the ages.” [11]
SRI directed numerous studies of computer-display technology that were showcased at a public demonstration famously called “the Mother of All Demos,” in 1968 in San Francisco, which essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing. Many of SRI’s former employees were then hired by Xerox PARC, a research and development company in Palo Alto, with a distinguished reputation for its significant contributions to the modern personal computer, including graphical user interface (GUI), featuring windows and icons and operated with a mouse. The evolving mythos is that Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computers, was granted access to view PARC’s developments, and was able to turn them into marketable products by integrating them into the Macintosh computer.
Filming “the Mother of All Demos” was Stewart Brand, a former member of the Merry Pranksters, led by MK-Ultra patient, Ken Kesey. By publishing the Whole Earth Catalogue, Brand helped steer fears away from the prospect that computers were going to serve Big Brother, to banking on the 60s counterculture to market them as a tool for liberation.
As Steve Jobs related, Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue was “one the bibles of my generation.” According to former CIA asset Timothy Leary,
“It’s well known that most of the creative impulse in the software industry, and indeed much of the hardware […] derived directly form the sixties consciousness movement.” He asserts: “[The Apple cofounder] Steve Jobs went to India, took a lot of acid, studied Buddhism, and came back and said that Edison did more to influence the human race than Buddha. And [Microsoft founder Bill] Gates was a big psychedelic person at Harvard. It makes perfect sense to me that if you activate your brain with psychedelic drugs, the only way you can describe it is electronically.” [12]
According to Leary, it is no accident that “the term ‘LSD’ was used twice in Time magazine’s cover story about Steve Jobs.” [13]
According to Erik Davis in TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information,
“With a name that hearkened back to Eden’s fruit of knowledge (and an initial selling price of $666), the Apple proffered the Promethean dream of putting godly power in your hands.” [14]
It was Leary who led the charge of techno-liberation in combination with the “mind-expanding” powers of LSD, when he reemerged in the 1980s as a spokesperson of the cyberdelic counterculture, proclaiming that the “PC is the LSD of the 1990s” and admonished bohemians to “turn on, boot up, jack in.” [15] Leary became one of the most philosophical promoters of personal computers (PC), the Internet, and immersive virtual reality. Leary’s adherents called themselves “cyberpunks.”
As early as 1973, Leary predicted that some day the world would be linked through an “electronic nervous system” and that computers could be used to empower the individual. [16] Leary’s model of an “electronic nervous system,” which was based on the Hindu Chakra system, proposed that every citizen would have a personal computer which is connected to a worldwide electronic network, in which they can express their opinion, would help us to create a new governmental structure which “gets the country alive and laughing again.” [17] However, “He was literally laughed off the sets of TV news shows in the 1970s for predicting that most human beings would some day be sending one another ‘messages through their word processors’ and that the world would be linked together through a new ‘electronic nervous system’,” writes Douglas Rushkoff, a friend of Leary’s. [18]
Rushkoff is one of several leading members of the cyberpunk movement, which also included Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, RU Sirius, Paul Krassner, Robert Anton Wilson, Ralph Abraham, Genesis P-Orridge, Ralph Metzner, Grant Morrison, Mark Pesce, Erik Davis, Douglas Rushkoff and other writers, artists and philosophers interested in the intersection of technology, society and culture. A number of them figure in a recent documentary titled, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, where subjects under the influence of DMT (Dimethyltryptamine) described experiences that were mirrored cinematically portrayed in Johansson’s Lucy character.
A leading proponent of the cyberdelic movement was psychonaut and Esalen figure, Terence McKenna. Heavily influenced by Teilhard de Chardin and Alfred North Whitehead, in Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge — A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution, McKenna presented his “Stoned Ape” theory, which proposed that the transformation from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens was the result of the addition of the magic mushroom to their diet.
During the final years career before his death in 2000, McKenna had become an early proponent of “technological singularity.” Borrowing from the concept developed by de Chardin, McKenna referred to it as the Omega Point, believing that it would take place in 2012, coinciding with the end of the Mayan calendar, thus inspiring the frienzied anticipation associated with that date. In his last recorded public talk, “Psychedelics in The Age of Intelligent Machines,” McKenna outlined ties between psychedelics, computer technology, and humans. He also became enamored with the Internet calling it “the birth of [the] global mind,” believing it to be a place where psychedelic culture could flourish.
The seminal work in the cyberpunk genre is William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, in which he describes transhumanist themes of a world of outlaw computer hackers who are able to link up their brains to computer networks and operate in cyberspace, which he described as a “consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.”
Similar ideas have been glamorized for decades in Hollywood, such as in Kubrik’s version of 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke, the Terminator series, and Blade Runner based on LSD-influenced Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Dick, who was also inspired by Teilhard de Chardin. Other movies following the transhumanist trends have been the anime classic The Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix, the remake of Robocop.
But the leading figure in the transhumanist movement today is Ray Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google, who is the proponent of what is called the Singularity, which is effectively what is featured in Lucy, where the Johansson character in the end finally achieves her 100% potential merges with a computer, becoming immortal and omniscient. The term Singularlity was popularized by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who argues that artificial intelligence, human biological enhancement, or brain-computer interfaces could be possible causes of the singularity.
Kurzweil believes evolution provides evidence that humans will one day create machines more intelligent than they are, and “will appear to have their own free will” and even “spiritual experiences.” Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity Is Near, (was a New York Times bestseller), says this will lead to a technological singularity in the year 2045, a point where progress is so rapid it outstrips humans’ ability to comprehend it. Once the Singularity has been reached, Kurzweil predicts machine intelligence will be infinitely more powerful than all human intelligence combined. Afterwards, Kurzweil says, intelligence will radiate outward from the planet until it saturates the universe.
With Kurweil at the helm, Google seems to be participating in the totalitarian ambitions of the transhumanist movement. Before 2013, all purchases of Google were intended to develop and optimize services directly related to Internet. But more recently, Google seems to have completely changed its purchasing policy, and companies bought by them are now related to various fields associated with transhumanist ambitions, such as robotics, neural networks (DNNResearch), natural language understanding (Wavii), renewable energy (Makani Power), wearable computing (WIMM Labs), movement/facial recognition (Flutter, Viewdle), home automation (Nest Labs), and so on. [19]
Larry Page himself, one of the cofounders of Google with Sergey Brin, declared in their Google+ Page:
“So you’re probably thinking wow! That’s a lot different from what Google does today. And you’re right. But […] there’s tremendous potential for technology more generally to improve people’s lives. So don’t be surprised if we invest in projects that seem strange or speculative compared with our existing Internet businesses. And please remember that new investments like this are very small by comparison to our core business.”
footnotes
[1] Victorino Matus. “The Truth Behind “LSD””. The Weekly Standard (June 2004).
[2] The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations: Shaping the Moral, Spiritual, Cultural, Political and Economic Decline of the United States of America (Joseph Holding Corporation, 2005).
[3] Mikal Gilmore, Stories Done: Writings on the 1960s and Its Discontents, (New York: Free Press, 2008) p. 154
[4] Geoffrey Giuliano, Lennon in America: based in part on the lost Lennon diaries, 1971-1980 (Cooper Square Press, 2000), p. 57.
[5] Rabbi A. Kook (Orot Hakodesh Book 2 Chap. 537).
[6] Pierre Teilard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon, (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press), p. 114.
[7] Erik Davis. TechGnosis: : Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information. (London: Serpents Tail, 2004) p.296.
[8] Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, (Boston, Massachusetts, US: Brill Academic Publishers, 1996), pp. 38–39.
[9] John Coleman, The Committee of 300, “Tavistock Institute Of Human Relations.”
[10] Picknett & Prince, The Stargate Conspiracy), p. 319.
[11] Ibid., p. 320.
[12] Mark Dery. Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. (Grove Press, 1996) p. 28.
[13] Timothy Leary. Chaos and Cyberculture. (Berkeley: Ronin, 1994) p. 42.
[14] Erik Davis. TechGnosis: : Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information. (London: Serpents Tail, 2004) p.166.
[15] Timothy Leary; Michael Horowitz; VickyMarshall. Chaos and Cyber Culture. (Ronin Publishing, 1994)
[16] Timothy Leary. Neuropolitics. (San Diego: 88 Books, 1977) p. 45f.
[17] Timothy Leary. Neuropolitique. (Tempe, Arizona: New Falcon, 1988b) p. 49.
[18] Douglas Rushkoff,. E-mail to the author of Timothy Leary – Psychedelics to Internet. (11 Sep 1997) p. 22.
[19] David Excoffier, “The H+ shift of Google (Part 4/4: Transhumanist shift),” Sogeti Labs (March 4, 2014)
See also:
Transhumanism: From MK-Ultra to Google