The tiresome concept of personal immortality is predicated on the illusion of some unchangeable precious essence that is greedy old MEEEEEE forever. The Buddhists say there is no MEEEEEE no unchanging ego ...
What we think of as our ego is a defensive reaction just as the symptoms of an illness. .. fever, swelling, sweating are the body’s reaction to an invading organism, so our beloved ego, arising from the rotten weeds of lust and fear and anger, has no more continuity than a fever sweat. There is no ego only a shifting process unreal as the Cities of the Odor-Eaters that dissolve in rain. A moment’s introspection will demonstrate that we are not the same as we were a year ago, a week ago. This opens many doors. Your spirit could reside in a number of bodies, not as some hideous parasite draining the host, but as a helpful little visitor ‘Roger the Lodger.. . don’t take up much room. .. show you a trick or two.. . never overstay my welcome.’
Some of the astronauts were peculiar people. I think it was Grissom who was killed in the capsule fire ... well he always ate two meals. And Randolph Scott is described as being notably well developed and heavily muscled and here’s a nice little visitor just for you
Heavily muscled Randy Scott
You’re my favorite astronaut
Hunky Scotty oh yohoooo
I’m going to hitch a ride with you.
This happens all the time. You think of someone and you can hear their voice in your throat, feel their face in yours and their eyes looking out. You will notice that this happens more with some people than with others. And some are more there in voice. I have but to think of Felicity Mason, an English friend, and her clear clipped upper-class British accents fairly ring through the room. And Gregory Corso has a strong absent voice. Let’s face it, you are other people and other people are you. Take 50 photos of the same person over an hour. Some of them will look so unlike the subject as to be unrecognizable. And some of them will look like some other person: ‘Why he looks just like Khrushchev with one gold tooth peeking out’.
The illusion of a separate inviolable identity limits your perceptions and confines you in time. You live in other people and other people live in you; Visiting’ we call it and of course it’s ever so much easier with one’s Clonics. When I first heard about cloning, I thought what a fruitful concept, why one could be in a hundred different places at once and experience everything the other clones did. I am amazed at the outcry against this good thing not only from Men of the Cloth but from scientists... the very scientists whose patient research has brought cloning within our grasp. The very thought of a clone disturbs these learned gentlemen. Like cattle on the verge of stampede they paw the ground mooing apprehensively... ‘Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of human non-selfness is terrifying.’
Terrifying to whom? Speak for yourself you timorous old beastie cowering in your eternal lavatory. Too many scientists seem to be ignorant of the most rudimentary spiritual concepts. And they tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work. The unfairness of it brings tears to his eyes as he peers anxiously through his bifocals. He is reading a book In His Image by David Rorvick. In this book a rich old eccentric wants to get himself cloned and contacts the author who, being a scientific reporter, knows all the far-out researchers. In fact he knows just the doctor for the job who is named Darwin. But before he fixes Max up with Darwin, Max has to promise to be ethical about the whole thing. Absolutely only one clone at a time. Max must swear to abstain from any clonish act that could be construed as a take-over by cold-eyed inhuman clone armies.
A group of identical youths stand on a rocky point overlooking a valley. One farts. No one smiles or alters his expression. One points. In a blur of movement all in perfect synch they gather their packs and rifles and move out.
A close-up as they move down a mountain trail shows that something is lacking in these faces, something that we are accustomed to see. The absence is as jarring as if the faces lacked a mouth or a nose. There is no face prepared to meet the faces that it meets, no self-image, no need to impress or assert. They blend into the landscape like picture-puzzle faces.
In the book Max refrains and settles down to watch his little clone grow. In my fictional extension he is more venturesome.
At this point I was engaged in another assignment which took me away for a year. When I returned, Roberto the chauffeur met me at the airport with new clothes and an expensive wrist watch. As we drove towards the hospital I saw that the Faculty was now an impressive complex of buildings. When we reached the Expanded Facility he led me into a lounge where I observed about fifty boys engaged in theatricals. Some were in clerical garb intoning ‘Interfering with the designs of the Creator.’ ‘Each of us has a right to a special yet unique relation with the Creator . ..’
Others were up as doddering scientists meandering in senile dementia “We cannot ethically get to know if cloning is feasible.’ ‘Precipitating an identity crisis.’
A hideous scientist croaks out like some misshapen toad. ‘Differences of appearance reinforce our sense of self and hence lend support to the feeling of individual worth we seek in ourselves and others.’
‘The thought of human non-selfness is terrifying!’ screeches a snippy old savant. He ducks into his study and recoils in horror. A replica of himself is sitting at his desk going through his notes. I realize that the boys are mocking the opponents of cloning. At this point Max comes in with Doctor Darwin. Darwin is a changed man. Gone are his petulance and hesitation, his prickly ego. He glows with health and confidence. The boys greet him boisterously.
‘How many you kill today Doc?’
Max seizes both my hands and looks deep into my eyes with a quiet intense charm.
‘Good to see you.’
The boys have stripped off their make-up and they are all perfect specimens of young manhood.
‘Boys,’ Max announces like a circus barker. ‘The Immaculate, the Virgin birth is at hand.’
He leads the way to a maternity clinic got up as a manger where fifty girls are in labor. I notice they were wearing decompression suits .. .
‘We got it down to a few minutes now,’ Darwin tells me.
‘They pop out.. .’
Even as he spoke there was a popping sound like the withdrawal of a viscous cork and a medic held up a squalling baby.
‘Yipppeeeee!’ a boy screamed ‘I’m cloned!’
I pointed out to Max that all this was in flat violation of our agreement.
He doesn’t hear me. ‘All the resources of Trak are now channeled into clone factories ... All over the world they are popping out. .. My little poppies I call them... .’
Roberto does a chick breaking out of the shell act as he sings in hideous falsetto:
‘PIO PIO PIO YO SOY UN POLLITO!’
And Max bellows with laughter. ‘No I am not mad. Nor is this ego gone berserk. On the contrary, cloning is the end of the ego. For the first time the spirit of man will be able to separate itself from the human machine, to see it and use it as a machine. He is no longer identified with one special Me Machine. The human organism has become an artifact he can use like a plane or a space capsule.’
John Giomo wondered if maybe a clone of a clone of a clone would just phase out into white noise like copies of copies of a tape. As Count Korzybski used to say:
‘I don’t know, let’s see.’
I postulate that true immortality can only be found in space. Space exploration is the only goal worth striving for. Over the hills and far away. You will know your enemies by those who attempt to block your path. Vampiric monopolists would keep you in time like their cattle.
‘It’s a good thing cows don’t fly,’ they say with an evil chuckle. The evil intelligent Slave Gods.
The gullible confused and stupid pose an equal
threat owing to the obstructive potential of their vast numbers.
I have an interesting slip in my scrap book. News clipping from The Boulder Camera. Picture of an old woman with a death’s head false teeth smile. She is speaking for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
‘WE OPPOSE CHILD ABUSE, INTEMPERANCE AND IMMORTALITY.’
The way to immortality is in space and Christianity is buried under slag heaps of dead dogma, sniveling prayers and empty promises must oppose immortality in space as the counterfeit always fears and hates the real thing. Resurgent Islam ... born-again Christians ... creeds outworn ... excess baggage ... raus mit!
Immortality is prolonged future and the future of any artifact lies in the direction of increased flexibility, capacity for change and ultimately mutation. Immortality may be seen as a byproduct of function: ‘to shine in use.’ Mutation involves changes that are literally unimaginable from the perspective of the future mutant. Cold-blooded, non-dreaming creatures living in the comparatively weightless medium of water, could not conceive of breathing air, dreaming and experiencing the force of gravity as a basic fact of life. There will be new fears like the fear of falling, new pleasures and new necessities. There are distinct advantages to living in a supportive medium like water. Mutation is not a matter of logical choices.
The human mutants must take a step into the unknown, a step that no human being has ever taken before.
‘We were the first that ever burst into that silent sea.’
‘We are such stuff as dreams are made of.’
Recent dream research has turned up a wealth of data but no one has assembled the pieces into a workable field theory.
By far the most significant discovery to emerge from precise dream research with volunteer subjects is the fact that dreams are a biological necessity for all warm-blooded animals. Deprived from REM sleep, they show all the symptoms of sleeplessness no matter how much dreamless sleep they are allowed. Continued deprivation would result in death.
All dreams in male subjects except nightmares are accompanied by erection. No one has proffered an explanation. It is interesting to note that a male chimpanzee who did finger and dab paintings, and was quite good too, went into a sexual frenzy during his creative acts.
Cold-blooded animals do not dream. All warm-blooded creatures including birds do dream.
John Dunne discovered that dreams contain references to future time as experienced by the dreamer. He published his findings An Experiment With Time in 1924. Dream references, he points out, relate not to the event itself but to the time when the subject learns of the event. The dream refers to the future of the dreamer. He says that anybody who will write his dreams down over a period of time will turn up precognitive references. Dreams involve time travel. Does it follow then that time travel is a necessity?
I quote from an article summarizing the discoveries of Professor Michel Jouvet. Jouvet, using rapid eye movement techniques, has been able to detect dreaming in animals in the womb even in developing birds in the egg. He found that animals like calves and foals, who can fend for themselves immediately after birth, dream a lot in the womb and relatively little after that. Humans and kittens dream less in the womb and are unable to fend for themselves at birth.
He concluded that human babies could not walk or feed themselves until they had enough practice in dreams. This indicates that the function of dreams is to train the being for future conditions. I postulate that the human artifact is biologically designed for space travel. So human dreams can be seen as training for space conditions. Deprived of this vital link with our future in space, with no reason for living, we die.
Art serves the same function as dreams. Plato’s Republic is a blueprint for a death camp. An alien invader, or a domestic elite, bent on conquest and extermination, could rapidly immobilize the earth by cutting dream lines, just the way we took care of the Indians. I quote from Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt (Pocket Books):
‘The nation’s hoop is broken and scattered like a ring of smoke. There is no center any more. The sacred tree is dead and all its birds are gone.’
It Is Necessary to Travel...
‘It is necessary to travel. It is not necessary to live.’ These words inspired early investigators when the vast frontier of unknown seas opened to their sails in the fifteenth century. Space is the new frontier. Is this frontier open to youth? I quote from the London Daily Express, December 30, 1968: ‘If you are a fit young man under twenty-five with lightning reflexes who fears nothing in heaven or on earth and has a keen appetite for adventure don’t bother to apply for the job of astronaut.’ They want ‘cool dads’ trailing wires to the ‘better half from an aqualung. Dr Paine of the Space Center in Houston says: ‘This flight was a triumph for the squares of this world who aren’t ashamed to say a prayer now and then.’ Is this the great adventure of space? Are these men going to take the step into regions literally unthinkable in verbal terms? To travel in space you must leave the old verbal garbage behind: God talk, country talk, mother talk, love talk, party talk. You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live it alone in silence. Anyone who prays in space is not there.
The last frontier is being closed to youth. However there are many roads to space. To achieve complete freedom from past conditioning is to be in space. Techniques exist for achieving such freedom. These techniques are being concealed and withheld. We must search for and consider techniques for discovery.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Famine ... Plague ... War... Death... Portentous and purposeful as the Priest advancing on a dying man to administer the last rites ... so the four caballeros, by their solid presence, indicate that time has been called for that particular biological or sociological experiment. .. Closing time gentlemen.
Dinosaurs bellow piteously. Famine saddles up his cayoose and gallops through lush swampland leaving dust bowls behind him. The outmoded dinosaurs subside into museum skeletons, gaped at by human spectators. Their day will come... The CIA and other organizational dinosaurs bellow piteously.. . We were just doing our job ... trouble deep heaven with their bootless cries.
At the present time the situation is more complicated, since the subject of this experiment, in this case the human species, can to some extent control the conditions of the experiment. Not such an advantage as one would think since they cannot control themselves. Since the human creature has demonstrated through the centuries a stubborn disclination to control himself... However, not so ... If I may indulge a whimsy, had we been dinosaurs we might have built great dams to preserve our simple way of life, and hunted down the despicable mammals as the egg-sucking rats they were. (Some have theorized that the mammals undermined the dinosaurs by eating their eggs.)
There is such basic disagreement as to how existing conditions can be altered, by exactly who and for the benefit of whom these wondrous laterations should be made. That stupidity and shortsighted self-interest may well swamp spacecraft earth before the horsemen can saddle up. Meanwhile the spectral riders are being eagerly wooed by the CIA and similar agencies in other countries. Wise and far-sighted men who will no doubt use their awesome knowledge of famine, war, plague and death for the good of all mankind .. .
‘Put that joker Death on the line. Take care of Mao and his gang of cutthroats.’
Famine, seemingly the most fortuitous of the quartet, is transcending the caprices of weather, deforestation, and overpopulation, and catching a new look. We can extend the area of famine to include the lack of substance or condition essential to the support of life. We can in fact create needs quite as compelling as the need for food or water. Drug addiction is an example of a biologic need artificially produced by the administration of opiates. No doubt drugs much more habit forming than heroin could be produced in the laboratory by tinkering with the habit-forming molecule .. . We now have substance X which can be introduced into the water supply, food or even in a gaseous form into enemy air. X h
as no effects unless it is removed.. . then a battery of crippling symptoms, disabling symptoms reduce the enemy to impotence. Think of it. . . The Russkies at our mercy and they don’t even know it yet.
There are certain metabolic illnesses like Wilson’s disease in which the subject is unable to absorb certain essential vitamins and minerals no matter how much he ingests ... In fact it is not too far-fetched to conceive of inducing metabolic changes that would reduce the absorption of any nutrients so that no matter how much he eats the subject will die of starvation . ..
The alliance between war and plague was cemented with the first germ warfare experiments. In this area there have been a number of interesting developments despite some mealy mouthed talk about discontinuing such experiments and the closing down of the biological and chemical warfare center at Fort Detrick in Maryland. The center is now dedicated to cancer research. (Cancer research incidently overlaps the more sophisticated areas of biologic weaponry.) As early as World War II England had the doomsday bug which was a mutated virus produced by exposing such viruses as hepatitis and rabies to radiation.... A number of experiments have been carried out.
It is difficult to believe that such a promising line of research was abandoned, and disturbing to speculate or contemplate where this research is at the present time. There has been talk of discontinuing such experiments. Here is an item from the London Times of 18 April 1971 .. . New Cancer Virus made by accident... A completely new Virus probably capable of producing cancer in humans has been made by accident in an American research laboratory ... fears expressed by cautious scientist that some medical research could inadvertently produce new forms of human disease instead of curing existing ones... The new agent was discovered by Dr Aronson of the National Cancer Institute near Washington... under special conditions the mouse virus could be persuaded to infect human cancer cells grown in a test tube. Though the process was an extremely inefficient one... Dr Abrahams now reports in Nature that the mouse virus has changed its nature... it has become highly infective to human cells and completely non-infective to mouse cells... a permanent major genetic change has occurred in the virus... what amounts to a completely new virus has emerged. The virus has picked up a human gene and incorporated it giving it the ability to multiply readily in human cells ... Sir Macfarlane Burnet warns in the Lancet... of the almost unimaginable catastrophe of a virgin soil epidemic involving all the populated regions of the world.