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The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet
December 16, 2015 / Ken Finton / Leave a comment
A must see documentary from 2003 that has gone unnoticed by the vast majority. This film explores a broad scope of political and intellectual history from the 1940s through the turn of the century. It addresses the history of the formation of the Internet, the experiments with LSD in an attempt to understand how the mind can be harnessed to develop a new world order without totalitarianism or fascism, and the development of cybernetics as an attempt to merge man and machine into a new species.
From THE WHOLE EARTH CATALOG to the birth of ISIL, this somewhat disjointed film attempts cover and blend the many movements and ideas that have been lying in silent isolation beneath the current of events that have created our individual lifetimes. -KHF
Published on Mar 16, 2012
Full version of Lutz Dammbecks 2003 documentary.
Highest quality on YouTube.
The Net explores the complex back-story of Ted Kaczynski, dubbed by the CIA as the "Unabomber". An inquiry into the rationale of this notable figure situates him within a late 20th Century web of technology – a system that he grew to oppose. Incorporating a subversive approach to the history of the Internet, the documentary combines speculative travelogue and investigative journalism to trace contrasting counter cultural responses to the cybernetic revolution.
For those who resist these intrusive systems of technological control, the Unabomber has come to symbolize an ultimate figure of refusal. For those that embrace it, as did the early champions of media art like Marshall McLuhan, Nam June Paik, and Stewart Brand, the promises of worldwide networking and instantaneous communication outweighed the perils.
Working through themes of utopianism, anarchism, terrorism, and providing insights on the CIA, LSD, Project MK-ULTRA, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Dammbeck provides a fascinating view of the wider picture of the most famous neo-luddite.
—Shortened and altered summary originally from Amazon.com
Das Netz: Blotters, Bombers, and Cybernetic Trauma
Posted on December 16, 2015 by edmundberger
(In)Stability
Das Netz is a German documentary directed by Lutz Dammbeck, a strange mosaic of the collision of covert history, scientific development, and popular culture. Ostensibly it's about the case of the Ted Kaczynski, the brilliant mathematician-turned-"Unabomber" who between the years of 1978 and 1995 engaged in a bombing campaign against industrial civilization. Holed up in remote cabin in the woods near Lincoln, Montana he fashioned weapons that he then mailed to his victims, many culled from the ranks of the "Digerati" – the top-elites of the then-emergent fields of computing and information technology development. While many would be satisfied creating a linear narrative, a documentary snaking through Kaczynski's life as a mathematical prodigy who lost his mind, Dammbeck choses instead to ask the question of why? Not satisfied with the charge of insanity, the filmmaker strikes out to navigate a twisty terrain in search of causation, something that would explain why an individual who was expected to become one of the leading mathematicians of our time would flee civilization to wage a protracted war against technology – the very force that trajectory of his mathematical fields was propelling forward. In the end, this question becomes a guiding compass in the loosest sense of the word, holding together an unwieldy array of facts and tangents that span decades.
Dammbeck's journey takes him to the offices of John Brockmann, a notable of the Digerati who cut his teeth in New York City's avant-garde scene of the early 1960s before becoming the literary agent for many of the top thinkers and leaders in the fields of technoscience. The trail then leads him to Brockman's close friend Stewart Brand, where we're treated to an interview with the guru on a cramped houseboat on the California coast. Like Brockman, Brand is one of the Digerati, renowned as the founder of the early online community known as the WELL. He was present at the launch of Wired magazine, the official organ of the delirious Silicon Valley-style capitalism defined by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron as the "Californian Ideology." And like Brockman, Brand emerged from the New York avant-garde, and after filling his mind with the writings of Buckminster Fuller, Norbert Wiener, and Marshall McLuhan, struck out for the West Coast. He joined up then with the author Ken Kesey, who, having recently encountered LSD through the CIA's notorious MK-ULTRA program, banded together the Merry Pranksters. Brand recounts for the camera his role in setting-up the Prankster's Acid Tests, where participants were introduced to the drug while immersing themselves in complex, multi-media environments with a psychedelic soundtrack provided by a band called the Warlocks – later to find fame as the Grateful Dead. From this foundation, the archetypal image of the 1960s was born: the hippy counterculture, in full revolt against the Puritan society that their parents hoped to pass down.
Das Netz draws our attention to the fact that Kaczynski was teaching mathematics at the University of California at Berkley in 1967, not far from the ground zero of this counterculture at its height. It also draws our attention to Kaczynski's self-made cabin in the forests of Montana, which was fashioned from plans advertised in the Whole Earth Catalog. The Catalog, in turn, was a publication devised by Stewart Brand as a means to provide tools for the communalist movement – those in the counterculture who sought a 'back-to-the-land' lifestyle far removed from despotic urbanism and the overreaching arms of the state. Years later, the communes that so motivated the Whole Earth Catalog would be resurrected online as the WELL, itself an abbreviation for Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link. For Dammbeck, lurking behind this shifting kaleidoscope of history lurks LSD – first in the hands of CIA, which then seemed to have passed the reigns on to Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.
All this sounds like the making of a great conspiracy theory, which in many respects Das Netz can easily be read as. And indeed, many of these same facts have become fodder a vast multitude of them. But I don't think that's the ultimate point of Dammbeck's documentary. As we watch, the narrative splits fractures and spins, becomes increasingly incoherent in regards to its initial goal. Here's the Esalen Institute. Here's the brains behind ARPA, the early creators of the internet. Here's a play-by-play of the Unabomber's arrest by FBI agents. Here's some reflections on Kurt Gödel and his incompleteness theorems, which posits that there will always be true, yet unprovable statements. Like Kaczynski, Gödel suffered from increasingly debilitating paranoia that would, in the end, claim his life. This what Das Netz is really about: paranoia, and the impossibility of avoiding it in our age of complex systems and dizzying array of machines that govern every action in our waking lives. It speaks to the ontological instability that we are all subjected to, in the prefabricated, yet modular, environments crafted for us by the stipulations of non-stop, 24/7 neoliberal capitalism. It foregrounds, without speaking it, that inevitability of solipsism that Baudrillard spent a lifetime probing and diagnosing.
Readers of this blog will have noted the ongoing fascination with cybernetics, in particular its role as the defining governmenality of the neoliberal ideology. This is one of the reasons I find Das Netz so appealing: it's all there, from Norbert Wiener's attempts to build anti-aircraft batteries through collapsing man and machine together in the pseudo-metaphor of the servomechanism, to the movement of Wiener and his theories into biology, to the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation's Macy Conferences. It was there that cybernetics became articulated as the ideal instrument of liberal governance: a self-steering machine, a literal governor for maintain homeostatic social systems in a state of equilibrium. While Dammbeck doesn't mention it, it was after these conferences that the CIA begin subsidizing social science seminars around the Western world to promote cybernetics as a unified science, their experts speaking urgently of the need to win out the "cybernetics gap" allegedly forming with the Soviet Union.[1] Maybe we can feel that familiar paranoia creeping in when we consider that the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation was soon receiving money from the CIA to host a series of seminars, modeled on the Macy Conferences with many of the same participants in tow, to begin studies in LSD.
One of the great novels to bring together cybernetics, the 60s, and the encroachment of paranoia is Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, which may be very well the model for what Dammbeck attempts to carry out in Das Netz. Pynchon's protagonist, Oedipa Maas, finds herself ensnared in a worldwide conspiracy between two different mail distribution companies, which the novel articulates in terms of cybernetic systems on two levels: the literal level (it's dealing with communication systems) and the metaphorical level (language drawn from cybernetics and information theory abound). To make matters worse for Maas, however, is that the conspiracy itself might not even exist. Uncertainty lurks at the center of Pynchon's novel, which like an unstable cybernetic system veers off on a positive feedback loop, far from any sense of linearity. Like the exploding counterculture, she "moves from a uniform, univocal, suburban America to an America characterized by infinite multiplicity, an America where anything can happen and where events can have any number of meanings."[2] But is this freedom or control? Maas reflects that she finds herself feeling "trapped between the zeros and ones of an enormous computer."
Pynchon carries the themes of cybernetics and paranoia over to his next novel, Gravity's Rainbow, which foregrounds many of Norbert Wiener's primary concerns by focusing much of the plot on missile trajectories and the blurring of flesh with weapons systems in the context of the Second World War. Conspiracies again abound in text, snaking their way through the heart of the conflict as competing interests rush to lay claim to the mysterious "Rocket 00000". Along the way, readers are treated to scenes of wealthy industrials participating in occult rituals (with dubious outcomes), the dipping of characters into shared hallucinations, and the breakdown of linear perspective in the collapse of Calvinistic deterministic universals in the face of quantum indeterminacy. At one point the character of Edward Pointsman (a Pavlovian psychologist with a penchant for determinism and control) pauses to ask "Suppose we consider the war itself as a laboratory?" Andrew Pickering, in his brilliant analysis of emergence of the cyborg sciences (cybernetics, game theory, systems analysis and the like) in the halls of World War 2's military-industrial-academic complex, uses this quote as his launching pad. For Pickering, this complex itself is a cyborg system that begins at the intersection of these three dimensions, before spilling out into the social arena.[3]
Das Netz, too, looks at the war as a laboratory, but engages not so much in the careful analysis through STS (science and technology studies) techniques that Pickering privileges, opting instead to probe the hard to discern feedback loops between self and society that cybernetic principles were soon applied to. If the war is a laboratory, it is a laboratory for studying what is inside the human, what makes it tick and move, desire, fall in line or move far from order. Pickering, in later analyses, would unveil that the foundations of wartime cybernetics can be found in attempts to study the brain, particularly when it is in abnormal states: experiencing trauma, hallucination, mystical experience, so on and so forth.[4] For Dammbeck, cybernetics emerges as a direct heir to behavioralism, a conclusion shared by the historian of science of Peter Galison.[5] If a human is like a computer, it is capable of being reprogrammed – or so the postwar cyberneticians believed. The brain is an error-correction mechanism that asses the environment, calculates statistical probability paths for action in that environment, and chooses what appears to be the proper action. Change the environment, shift the nature of the feedback system linking brain to environment, and the human effectively becomes changed.
(Re)Construction
Dammbeck insists that the Macy Conference participants were motivated by The Authoritarian Personality, a sociological study published in 1950 that carried out statistical measurements of individual outlooks and personality traits in search of the 'fascist personality'. The work utilized a unit of measure described as the "F Scale" (F for fascist), the application of which the authors of the study hoped to reveal what elements in American society could be altered to avoid a slippery slope into fascism. Buried deep in The Authoritarian Personality are Marxist roots: the study's key author was Theodore Adorno, the exiled philosopher from the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, and much the work that informed the development of it was undertaken by the School in Germany years prior. But to suit the conditions of the Cold War and the American values that were to be instilled, these Marxist roots were in fact obfuscated – something most evidenced by the removal of any overt reference to class relations and its impact on individual psychology (the key aspect, perhaps, of Frankfurt School analysis as a whole).
While there seems to be little evidence suggesting a direct relationship between Macy Conferences and The Authoritarian Personality, one of Adorno's colleagues from the Frankfurt School, psychologist Kurt Lewin, was an avid participant in the Macy Conferences. He was long acquainted with many of its key organizers, having years earlier been a member of the Committee for National Morale (a wartime social science organization/propaganda outfit) with Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. The overarching focus of the CNM (which I discuss in my earlier essay Into the Mystic) was to analyze the conditions that led to the rise of fascism in Germany, which was quickly diagnosed as something intrinsic to one-way communication media platforms. The singularity of unilateral communication left the German people fragmented; by extension, multi-directional media would create what they called the "whole person", one capable of rejecting fascism for an embrace of the "Democratic Personality". The CNM doesn't feature in Dammbeck's narrative, but is the subject of a recent book by Fred Turner titled The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties.[6]
Turner traces the ambitions of Mead, Bateson, Lewin, and psychologist Gordon Allport, among other CNM participants, to the creation of what he calls "surrounds" – modular architectural spaces infused with multimedia systems that would allow spectators to play an active role in shaping the experience. This, they felt, would education the individual on his or her relationship to the greater social totality, something necessary for building an open society. As Turner shows, the concept of the surround came to inform the multimedia aesthetics of the New York City avant-garde, from John Cage to his students at Black Mountain College to Andy Warhol and his Exploding Plastic Inevitable. It also became the inadvertent prototype for the "happening" and the "be-in", the outbreaks of mass spontaneity that defined the 60s countercultural experience. In one illuminating section of the book, he shows how the concept of the surround was deployed by the art troupe USCO to illustrate life inside systems that did not differentiate between machine and man. A young Stewart Brand was a participant in USCO's mystically-tinged, technological happenings; when he moved to the West Coast and joined Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, he imported the concept straight into the infrastructures of the Acid Tests. The counterculture, the mass exodus from the Fordist disciplinary society, seems to be for Turner the inevitable accident of the social scientist's attempt to remake the world in the image of American liberalism – just as the turning on of their children's minds through LSD was the accident of the CIA's own forays into the world of psychedelic drugs.
"Our humanism is scientific," wrote communication specialist Lyman Bryson in 1947, "because we believe in the control of social change by intelligence and experience… we shall use social engineering to solve the problem of setting up the conditions of freedom, but not to determine what men shall do with freedom when they get it."[7] This concept, of defining the parameters of freedom in the service of liberal corporatism, was the over-arching desire of a vast network of social science and communication studies institutions, think-tanks, and study groups bound together by interlocking members and funding bodies. In the early days of the Second World War, this funding was carried out primarily by the Rockefeller Foundation – also the philanthropy behind earlier behavioral psychological research and later cybernetic studies. This funding would continue, with the philanthropy being joined by the Ford Foundation and the CIA. One key institution, for example, was the joint Harvard-MIT Center for International Studies (CENIS), which with Ford Foundation and CIA money and direction would become the hotbed of modernization theory, an approach to foreign policy that saw American liberalism as the highest stage in historical evolution (this perspective would go on to provide the intellectual and policy frameworks for the American excursion into Vietnam).[8] "We later became convinced," one CENIS member later recounted, "that our strongest psychological weapon was our potential ability to help the nations of the free world achieve political stability by helping them expanded their productivity and their standards of living."[9]This particular perspective became known described as the promotion of People's Capitalism, an inversion of Soviet propaganda stylings to describe the Fordist affluent society, the world of washing machines and coca-colas, happy factory workers and family values.
By looking at the swirling menagerie of individuals, institutions, policy papers and academic articles from this time, we glimpse into the heart of the liberal postwar state itself. It is the rhetoric of inclusiveness, stability, harmony and trust – the balancing of interests between states, between races, between the self and society, to achieve an idealized homeostasis (assuming, of course, that this homeostasis took place in the context of Keynesian state capitalism). And yet a dark underbelly laid beneath the surface. American People's Capitalism was to be everything that fascism was not; almost the entirety of the social scientists' concerns were motivated by finding a fix-it for the massive error that had created Nazism. While the vast majority singled in on the relationship between media and the structures of society, others went further. Notable here was Dr. Ewen Cameron, a president of the American Psychopathological Association and the World Psychiatric Association, who attributed the Third Reich to cultural, social, biological and racial factor intrinsic to the German people. They were, he argued, naturally aggressive; going further, he soon applied these notions to society as a whole. The conclusion he came to was similar to the mainstream of liberal social scientists – that society had to be properly managed to navigate society – but he differed by asserting the 'weak' of society had to phased out by the rigorous application of the behavioral sciences.
In 1943, Cameron received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to set up Allen Memorial Institute for Psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal; he became the first director of the institution and went to work establishing a global psychiatric network. By the 1950s his primary focus was schizophrenia; a cure for the ailment, he wagered, could be found by deconstructing the patient's psyche and reprogramming it from the ground-up. To pursue these ends he subjected unwitting patients to bizarre and increasingly violent experimentations. Subjects were placed in sensory deprivation tanks up to sixteen hours a day, followed by multiple rounds of electroshock therapy. Sometimes they were kept sedated for nearly two months at a time, while at other points their psyches were bombarded with heavy doses of hallucinogenic c drugs – including LSD. This process was called depatterning, described by Cameron as the bringing of the patient to the "desired level of disorganization" capable of disturbing his or her "space-time". This will ensure, he continues, that the patient will live "in a very narrow segment of space time. All aspects of his memorial function are severely disturbed. He cannot well record what is going on around him. He cannot retrieve data from the past."[10] At this point, the process of psychic driving was to start. The patients became subjected to endless audio loops whilst under the influence of muscular paralytic drugs and hallucinogens. With their inability to resist exposure to the messages, Cameron believed that he could construct new personalities from the ground up. Through psychic driving a "reorganization of the personality might be brought about without the necessity of resolving conflicts or abreaction or the reliving of past experiments."[11]
Cameron's work was subsidized by the Rockefeller Foundation, but most of the funds flowed form the Human Ecology Fund; one board member of this organization was Adolf Berle, a Wall Street lawyer who had announced the advent of corporate liberalism with his 1932 book The Modern Corporation and Private Property. Margaret Mead, meanwhile, was another recipient of research grants, as were a host of anthropologists and social scientists, the majority of which were intimately related to wartime and post-war research institutions.[12] The founder of the Human Ecology Fund was a neurologist by the name of Harold Wolff, later to have been recruited in the endeavor by CIA director Allen Dulles as part of the MK-ULTRA program. The Human Ecology Fund as a whole as a well-crafted front organization for the agency, bestowing grants to established researchers such as B.F. Skinner to maintain an air of authenticity.[13] Quite frequently, the recipients of the funding did not know that their research grants were ultimately traceable to the CIA's coffers, or that their research into psychology was to be instrumentalized to "to develop new techniques of offensive/defensive intelligence use" (to quote Wolff).[14]
Describing the activities of the Human Ecology Fund, Adolf Berle wrote in his personal journal "I am frightened of this one. If the scientists do what they have laid out for themselves, men will become manageable ants."[15] His words recall directly Norbert Wiener's great fear for the cybernetic project he helped inaugurate – that it would assist to "organize the fascist ant-state with human material."[16]
(Un)Certainty
Henry A. Murray was many things: a leading Harvard psychologist, an authority on the works of Herman Melville, and a staunch advocate of World Federalism. He was a student of Alfred North Whitehead, and was close to later countercultural icons like Timothy Leary and Lewis Mumford. His early reflections for measuring personalities would lay the foundation of the methodology used in Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality. He designed psychological aptitude tests for the OSS during World War 2, and served on the advisory board of the Committee for National Hygiene alongside fellow OSS officer Frank Fremont-Smith – an executive at the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation and a key organizer of the Macy Conferences. Murray was also close friends with the Committee on National Morale's Gordon Allport, with whom he founded Harvard's Department of Social Relations in 1946. There is much existence to suggest that Murray was also entangled in the CIA's MK-ULTRA network, and that the Department of Social Relations was its key institution on the Harvard campus.
Between 1959 and 1962, Murray carried out a series of strange tests designed to measure the functioning of an individual under extreme stress. While the details remain hazy, the test subjects – exceptionally bright undergraduates – were faced with techniques that Murray had developed in the OSS, and later perfected for the Navy (with the aid of a Rockefeller Foundation grant). "In one part of the experiment, subjects were pressured to respond to questions asked under extreme duress, with bright lights and cameras pointed at them and electrodes attached to their bodies."[17] At other points, the students were forced to endure "vehement, sweeping and personally abusive" attacks, including having their most cherished ideals rigorously and forcefully deconstructed. While the majority of the participants in Murray's study have remained anonymous, others have come forward to report PTSD-like symptoms that persisted long after the events. One such test subject was Ted Kaczynski.
Was this the event that drove Kaczynski away from the world of mathematics and science, and into a process of becoming that ended in a small shack in the woods of Montana? It is near impossible to say, but it is the question that lurks at the heart of Das Netz, the small fragile piece that holds the whole historical narrative together. In his interview with Dammbeck, Stewart Brand describes Kaczynski as something of a "countercultural hero" – and indeed, his flight away from industrial civilization in search of pristine nature resembles that of the communalist of the 1960s. Like Kaczynski, they too were all the offspring of an experiment whose outcome seemed certain, but was moored in uncertainty. Perhaps it is that proximity to uncertainty and unknowability that drove Kaczynski to the lengths he went to, to become the Unabomber.
Dammbeck certainly thinks so. In the most fascinating segment in Das Netz, he arrives at the house of Heinz von Foerster, another cybernetician (and editor of the Macy Conference's official papers, a task he was recruited for by Margaret Mead) who become a countercultural icon. Von Foerster describes to Dammbeck the philosophies of radical constructivism, taking the logical positivism of early Vienna scientific philosophers to their relativistic extreme. When it comes to physics, he says, the theoretical construct of the "particle" does not exist, and only serves to hide holes in theories. At the end of all things, it is only theories that exist, and each is nothing more than a story told to explain the "origin of the universe." "And yet, he tells Dammbeck, "All theories are correct because they can all be deduced from other theories. It goes on deducing indefinitely. That's the good thing about it. You can go on forever." Dammbeck, in his fascination with Godel's conclusion of fundamentally unknowability, is obviously enticed with von Foerster's constructivism, which seems to embody the most exciting aspect of the counterculture's appropriation of cybernetics: the possibility of endless multiplicity. Unlike Pynchon's Oedipa Maas (and Kaczynski, for that matter), von Foerster does not find himself lodged in the probability space dictated by the functions of the computer. Dammbeck, in a series of letters, attempts to get Kaczynski to comment on Godel, only to receive a philosophy much akin to von Foerster's own, but moored deeper in that unavoidable sense of paranoia:
In your last letter you asked me about the mathematician's imagination. You probably assume that mathematicians always imagine something mathematical. But that's not true. Experienced mathematicians seldom think of mathematics. Usually they imagine flowers, sunshine, and birds singing in spring. Perhaps now and then they think about women, but they don't do that very often for they are pure in heart. How is it, you will ask, that mathematicians don't think of mathematics constantly? I must tell you that mathematicians are not scientists, they are artists… Apart from the most elementary mathematics, like arithmetic or high school algebra, the symbols, formulas, and words of mathematics are have no meaning at all. The entire structure of pure mathematics is a monstrous swindle, simply a game, a reckless prank. You may well ask: 'Are there no renegades to reveal the truth?' Yes, of course. But the facts are so incredible that no one takes them seriously. So the secret is in no danger.
How can one speak truth to power if power is but an abstraction, the oscillation moving through simulation and simulacrum? For Stewart Brand, it was the communalists, and perhaps for Dammbeck, it is Kaczynski. Early in Das Netz he browses an anarchist bookstore in Seattle and finders the published copies of the Unabomber's Manifesto, sitting alongside Murray Bookchin and Noam Chomsky. The film refracts and images and clips of the famous Battle of Seattle, where thousands of protestors pushed back against the neoliberal system in the form of the World Trade Organization, slips across the screen. We know the usual story: the radical anarchist enclaves full of people like John Zerzan and their role in those protests in 1999, and their interesting primitivist defense of Kaczynski. Beyond this, one might see a reflection of the Unabomber's cabin being fashioned from suggestions in Brand's Whole Earth Catalog in the anarchist's interest in the Manifesto, as if non-linear feedback loops trace themselves out down through the decades. The counterculture had rejected the liberal world system designed by their parents in their laboratories, and these protestors were rejecting the neoliberal world system designed by their own parents – that is, the generation of the counterculture itself.
Throughout Das Netz, we hear news clips playing in the background describing the events of September 11th, and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. While we're drawn to make a comparison between Kaczynski and the fighters in the streets of Seattle, we're to draw yet another to the attacks of al-Qaeda. By the time this had happened, the cybernetic system of governance drawn up in the postwar years had mutated far beyond the expectations of the social scientists. Cybernetics, communication platforms, and social engineering had been a grand bid for rational management, a methodology that allowed states and their citizenry to make decisions in an increasingly complex world. And yet by the end of the 1960s, it was clear that social management could not work in such a linear format. At Ford Foundation-funded spaces like the RAND Corporation and the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences, these systems became internalized in an idealized form of the individual. Instead of having these systems guide policy, policy was transformed by these theorists of rational choice to create the environmental frameworks where these systems became the individual's reality. The state's goal became one of establishing the artificial environment in which self-modulation, in accordance with the flows of the market, would serve as a vast order of self-regulation. By the 1990s, this was the crushing order that the Zapatistas, the Seattle protestors, and the alter-globalization movement tried to push back. By 2000, with the return of the conservatives to office, this world order seemed to be all but absolute – only to fall messily to ground in the collapse of the World Trade Centers – felled by the unexpected offspring of yet another failed experiment.
Here, in 2015, I'm also reminded of ISIS, crawling out of the rubble of Iraq and seizing upon opportunities provided by a failed democratic revolution in Syria. We can see all the social media platforms – these postmodern descendants of the multi-media systems longed for the postwar social scientists – being reverted against the West, the subversion of popular memes and iconography used to shatter the linearity of our consumer society. I'm also reminded, however, of the usage of media in this country to obscure reality for what it is, be it the attacks on immigrants and Muslims by Donald Trumps, or the ongoing climate change denial by a well-greased PR campaign. I'm reminded that a government agency is recorded data from every phone call, text message, email, website visit, and Gmail chat conversation being carried out not only by myself, but possible every person, everywhere. That computer-geek whistleblowers can be chased across the world by a sovereign government bent on keeping its secrets, aided by hacker organizations, is reflection of much our world resembles the world less and resembles more a science-fiction novel. That few seem to honestly care makes it all more perplexing. Looking at this strange, contorted and fragmented whole, the overwhelming weirdness of our times cannot help but trigger that creeping paranoia, that unavoidable solipsism. How could such chaos come from such ambitious design? And how could it possibly be real?
[1] On the CIA, the "cybernetics gap", and the role it played in the early stages of the ARPAnet, see Richard Barbook Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village Pluto Press, 2007, pgs. 150-154, 164-168
[2] Lois Tyson Psychological Politics of the American Dream: The Commodification of Subjectivity in Twentieth-Century American Literature Ohio State University, 1994 pg. 102
[3] Andrew Pickering "Cyborg History and the World War 2 Regime" Perspectives on Science, vol. 3, no. 1, 1995
[4] Andrew Pickering The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future University of Chicago Press, 2010. For a continued dialogue on the relationship between cybernetics and trauma, see Matteo Pasquinelli (ed.) Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas Centre for Digital Cultures, 2015
[5] Peter Galison "The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision" Critical Inquiry Vol. 21, No. 1, 1994
[6] Fred Turner The Democratic Surround: Multimedia & American Liberalism from World War 2 to the Psychedelic Sixties University of Chicago Press, 2013
[8] For an excellent history of modernization theory, see Michael E. Latham Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and Nation Building in the Kennedy Era University of North Carolina Press, 2000. On modernization theory, computer simulation, and the Vietnam War, see Barbrook Imaginary Futures pgs. 221-252
[9] Turner, The Democratic Surround, pg. 232
[10] Ewen Cameron "The Depatterning Treatment of Schizophrenia" Comprehensive Psychiatry Vol 3, No. 2, April, 1962 http://www.naomiklein.org/files/resources/pdfs/depatterning.pdf pg. 3
[11] Quoted in Mary D. Young Encyclopedia of Asylum Therapeutics, 1750s-1950sMcFarland, 2015, pg. 276
[12] David H. Price "Buying a Piece of Anthropology" Anthropology Today Vol. 23, No. 3, 2007 https://wikileaks.org/w/images/AT-june07-Price-PT1.pdf
[14] Michael Otterman American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and BeyondPluto Press, 2007, pg. 24
[15] Quoted in Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, HarperCollins, 1995, pg. 265
[16] Norbert Wiener The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society Houghton Miffln, 1950
[17] Kirsten G. Studlien "Murray Center Seals Kaczynski Data" The Harvard Crimson July 14th, 2000 http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2000/7/14/murray-center-seals-kaczynski-data-plondon-buried/?page=2
THE FABRIC OF REALITY
November 23, 2015 November 23, 2015 / Ken Finton / Leave a comment
http://www.nature.com/news/theoretical-physics-the-origins-of-space-and-time-1.13613
QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT
http://www.nature.com/news/the-quantum-source-of-space-time-1.18797?WT.mc_id=SFB_NNEWS_1508_RHBox
1899 INTERVIEW WITH NIKOLA TESLA
May 31, 2015 / Ken Finton / Leave a comment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla
Nikola Tesla was a Serbian American inventor, electrical engineer,mechanical engineer, physicist, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current electricity supply system. Born: July 10, 1856, Smiljan, Croatia Died: January 7, 1943, Manhattan, New York City, NY.
Tesla gained experience in telephony and electrical engineering before immigrating to the United States in 1884 to work for Thomas Edison in New York City. He soon struck out on his own with financial backers, setting up laboratories and companies to develop a range of electrical devices. His patented AC induction motor and transformer were licensed by George Westinghouse, who also hired Tesla for a short time as a consultant. His work in the formative years of electric power development was involved in a corporate alternating current/direct current "War of Currents" as well as various patent battles. Tesla went on to pursue his ideas of wireless lighting and electricity distribution in his high-voltage, high-frequency power experiments in New York and Colorado Springs and made early (1893) pronouncements on the possibility of wireless communication with his devices. He tried to put these ideas to practical use in his ill-fated attempt at intercontinental wireless transmission, which was his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project. In his lab he also conducted a range of experiments with mechanical oscillators/generators, electrical discharge tubes, and early X-ray imaging. He also built a wireless controlled boat, one of the first ever exhibited.
Tesla was renowned for his achievements and showmanship, eventually earning him a reputation in popular culture as an archetypal "mad scientist."His patents earned him a considerable amount of money, much of which was used to finance his own projects with varying degrees of success. He lived most of his life in a series of New York hotels, through his retirement. He died on 7 January 1943. His work fell into relative obscurity after his death, but in 1960 the General Conference on Weights and Measures named the SI unit of magnetic flux density the teslain his honor. Tesla has experienced a resurgence in interest in popular culture since the 1990s.
Interview: 1899 Nikola Tesla and John Smith (From the American magazine "Immortality")
JOURNALIST: Mr. Tesla, you have gained the glory of the man who got involved in the cosmic processes. Who are you, Mr. Tesla?
TESLA: It is a right question, Mr. Smith, and I will try to give you the right answer to it.
JOURNALIST: Some say you're from the country of Croatia, from the area called Lika, where together with the people are growing trees, rocks and starry sky. They say that your home village is named after the mountain flowers, and that the house, where you were born, is next to the forest and the church.
TESLA: Really, all it true. I'm proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland.
JOURNALIST: Futurists say that the 20th-and 21st centuries were born in the head of Nikola Tesla.
They celebrate conversely magnetic field and sing hymns to the Induction engine.Their creator was called the hunter who caught the light in his net from the depths of the earth, and the warrior who captured fire from heaven. Father of alternating current will make the physics and chemistry dominate half the world. Industry will proclaim him as their supreme saint, a banker for the largest benefactors. In the laboratory of Nikola Tesla for the first time is broken atom. There is created a weapon that causes the earthquake vibrations. There are discovered black cosmic rays. Five races will pray to him in the Temple of the future, because they had taught a great secret that Empedocles elements can be watered with the life forces from the ethers.
TESLA: Yes, these are some of my most important discoveries. I'm a defeated man. I have not accomplished the greatest thing I could.
JOURNALIST: What is it, Mr. Tesla?
TESLA: I wanted to illuminate the whole earth. There is enough electricity to become a second sun. Light would appear around the equator, as a ring around Saturn. Mankind is not ready for the great and good. In Colorado Springs I soaked the earth by electricity. Also we can water the other energies, such as positive mental energy. They are in the music of Bach or Mozart, or in the verses of great poets. In the Earth's interior, there ie energy of Joy, Peace and Love. Their expressions are a flower that grows from the Earth, the food we get out of her and everything that makes man's homeland. I've spent years looking for the way that this energy could influence people. The beauty and the scent of roses can be used as a medicine and the sun rays as a food. Life has an infinite number of forms, and the duty of scientists is to find them in every form of matter. Three things are essential in this. All that I do is a search for them. I know I will not find them, but I will not give up on them.
JOURNALIST: What are these things?
TESLA: One issue is food. What a stellar or terrestrial energy to feed the hungry on Earth? With what wine watered all thirsty, so that they can cheer in their heart and understand that they are Gods?
Another thing is to destroy the power of evil and suffering in which man's life passes! They sometimes occur as an epidemic in the depths of space. In this century, the disease had spread from Earth in the Universe.
The third thing is: Is there an excess Light in the Universe? I discovered a star that by all the astronomical and mathematical laws could disappear, and that nothing seems to be modified. This star is in this galaxy. Its light can occur in such density that fits into a sphere smaller than an apple, a heavier than our Solar System. Religions and philosophies teach that man can become the Christ, Buddha and Zoroaster. What I'm trying to prove is wilder, and almost unattainable. This is what to do in the Universe so every being is born as Christ, Buddha or Zoroaster.
I know that gravity is prone to everything you need to fly and my intention is not to make flying devices (aircraft or missiles), but teach individual to regain consciousness on his own wings … Further; I am trying to awake the energy contained in the air. There are the main sources of energy. What is considered as empty space is just a manifestation of matter that is not awakened. No empty space on this planet, nor in the Universe.. In black holes, what astronomers talk about, are the most powerful sources of energy and life.
JOURNALIST: On the window of your room in hotel "Valdorf-Astoria", on the thirty-third floor, every morning, the birds arrive.
TESLA: A man must be sentimental towards the birds. This is because of their wings. Human had them once, the real and visible!
JOURNALIST: You have not stopped flying since those distant days in Smiljan!
TESLA: I wanted to fly from the roof and I fell. Children's calculations could be wrong. Remember, the youth wings have everything in life!
JOURNALIST: Have you ever married? It is not known that you have affection for love or for a woman. Photos from the youth show you were handsome man.
TESLA: Yes. I did not. There are two views: a lot affection or not at all. The center serves to rejuvenate human race. Women for certain people nurtures and strengthen its vitality and spirit. Being single does the same to other people. I chose that second path.
JOURNALIST: Your admirers are complaining that you attacking relativity. The strange is your assertion that the matter has no energy. Everything is imbued with energy, where it is?
TESLA: First was energy, then matter.
JOURNALIST: Mr. Tesla, it's like when you said that you were born by your father, and not on you.
TESLA: Exactly! What about the birth of the Universe? Matter is created from the original and eternal energy that we know as Light. It shone, and there have been appear star, the planets, man, and everything on the Earth and in the Universe. Matter is an expression of infinite forms of Light, because energy is older than it. There are four laws of Creation. The first is that the source of all the baffling, dark plot that the mind cannot conceive, or mathematics measure. In that plot fit the whole Universe. The second law is spreading a darkness, which is the true nature of Light, from the inexplicable and it's transformed into the Light. The third law is the necessity of the Light to become a matter of Light. The fourth law is: no beginning and no end; three previous laws always take place and the Creation is eternal.
JOURNALIST: In the hostility to the theory of relativity you go so far, that you hold lectures against its Creator at your birthday parties.
TESLA: Remember, it is not curved space, but the human mind which cannot comprehend infinity and eternity! If relativity has been clearly understood by its Creator, he would gain immortality, even yet physically, if he is pleased.
I am part of a light, and it is the music. The Light fills my six senses: I see it, hear, feel, smell, touch and think. Thinking of it means my sixth sense. Particles of Light are written note. A bolt of lightning can be an entire sonata. A thousand balls of lightning is a concert. For this concert I have created a Ball Lightning, which can be heard on the icy peaks of the Himalayas.
About Pythagoras and mathematics a scientist may not and must not infringe of these two. Numbers and equations are signs that mark the music of the spheres. If Einstein had heard these sounds, he would not create theories of relativity. These sounds are the messages to the mind that life has meaning, that the Universe exists in perfect harmony, and its beauty is the cause and effect of Creation. This music is the eternal cycle of stellar heavens. The smallest star has completed composition and also, part of the celestial symphony. The man's heartbeats are part of the symphony on the Earth. Newton learned that the secret is in geometric arrangement and motion of celestial bodies. He recognized that the supreme law of harmony exists in the Universe. The curved space is chaos, chaos is not music. Einstein is the messenger of the time of sound and fury.
JOURNALIST: Mr. Tesla, do you hear that music?
TESLA: I hear it all the time. My spiritual ear is as big as the sky we see above us. My natural ear I increased by the radar. According to the Theory of Relativity, two parallel lines will meet in infinity. By that Einstein's curved will straighten. Once created, the sound lasts forever. For a man it can vanish, but continues to exist in the silence that is man's greatest power. No, I have nothing against Mr. Einstein. He is a kind person and has done many good things, some of which will become part of the music. I will write to him and try to explain that the ether exists, and that its particles are what keep the Universe in harmony, and the life in eternity.
JOURNALIST: Tell me, please, under what conditions angels can adapt on the Earth?
TESLA: I have ten of them. Keep good records vigilant.
JOURNALIST: I will document all your words, Dear Mr. Tesla.
TESLA: The first requirement is a high awareness of its mission and work to be done. It must, if only dimly, exist in the early days. Let us not be falsely modest; Oak knows that it is oak tree, a bush beside him being a bush. When I was twelve, I have been sure I will get to Niagara Falls. For most of my discoveries I knew in my childhood that I will achieve them, although not entirely apparent … The second condition to adapt is determination. All that I might, I finished.
JOURNALIST: What is the third condition of adjustment, Mr. Tesla?
TESLA: Guidance for all the vital and spiritual energies in labor. Therefore purification of the many effects and needs that man has. I therefore have not lost anything, but just gained.
So I enjoyed every day and night. Write down: Nikola Tesla was a happy man…
The fourth requirement is to adjust the physical assembly with a work.
JOURNALIST: What do you mean, Mr. Tesla?
TESLA: First, the maintenance of the assembly. Man's body is a perfect machine. I know my circuit and what's good for him. Food what nearly all people eat, to me it is harmful and dangerous. Sometimes I visualize that chefs in the world are all in conspiracy against me … Touch my hand.
JOURNALIST: It was cold.
TESLA: Yes. Bloodstream can be controlled, and many processes in and around us. Why are you frightened young man?
JOURNALIST: It's a story that Mark Twain wrote a mysterious stranger, that wonderful book of Satan, inspired by you.
TESLA: The word "Lucifer" is more charming. Mr. Twain likes to joke. As a child I was healed once by reading his books. When we met here and told him about, he was so touched that he cried. We became friends and he often came to my lab. Once he requested to show him a machine that by vibration provokes a feeling of bliss. It was one of those inventions for entertainment, what I sometimes like to do. I warned Mr. Twain as not to remain under these vibrations. He did not listen and stayed longer. It ended by being, like a rocket, holding pants, darted into a certain room. It was a diabolically funny, but I kept the seriousness.
But, to adjust the physical circuit, in addition to food, dream is very important. From a long and exhausting work, which required superhuman effort, after one hour of sleep I'd be fully recovered. I gained the ability to manage sleep, to fell asleep and wake up in the time which I have designated. If I do something what I do not understand, I force myself to think about it in my dream, and thus find a solution.
The fifth condition of adjustment is memory. Perhaps in the most people, the brain is keeper of knowledge about the world and the knowledge gained through the life. My brain is engaged in more important things than remembering. It is picking what is required at a given moment. This is all around us. It should only be consumed. Everything that we once saw, hear, read and learn, accompanies us in the form of light particles. To me, these particles are obedient and faithful. Goethe's Faust, my favorite book, I learned by heart in German as a student, and now I can recite it all. I held my inventions for years 'in my head, " and only then I realized them.
JOURNALIST: You often mentioned the power of visualization.
TESLA: I might have to thank to visualization for all that I invented. The events of my life and my inventions are real in front of my eyes, visible as each occurrence or the item. In my youth I was frightened of not knowing what it is, but later, I learned to use this power as an exceptional talent and gift. I nurtured it, and jealously guarded. I also made corrections by visualization on most of my inventions, and finish them that way, by visualization I mentally solve complex mathematical equations. For that gift I have, I will receive rank High Lama in Tibet.
My eyesight and hearing are perfect and, dare to say, stronger than other people. I hear the thunder of a hundred fifty miles away, and I see colors in the sky that others cannot see. This enlargement of vision and hearing, I had as a child. Later I consciously developed.
JOURNALIST: In youth you have several times been seriously ill. Is it a disease and a requirement to adapt?
TESLA: Yes. It is often the result of a lack of exhaustion or vital force, but often the purification of mind and body from the toxins that have accumulated. It is necessary that a man suffers from time to time. The source of most disease is in the spirit. Therefore the spirit and can cure most diseases. As a student I got sick of cholera which raged in the region of Lika.
I was cured because my father finally allowed me to study technology, which was my life. Illusion for me was not a disease, but the mind's ability to penetrate beyond the three dimensions of the earth. I had them all my life, and I have received them as all other phenomena around us.
Once, in childhood, I was walking along the river with Uncle and I said: "From the water will appear the trout. I'll throw a stone and it is out."
That's what happened.
Frightened and amazed, my uncle cried: "Bade retro Satan's!"
He was an educated and he spoke in Latin …
I was in Paris when I saw my mother's death. In the sky, full of light and music floated are wonderful creatures. One of them had a mother's character, who was looking at me with infinite love. As the vision disappeared, I knew that my mother died.
JOURNALIST: What is the seventh adjustment, Mr. Tesla?
TESLA: The knowledge of how the mental and vital energy transform into what we want, and achieve control over all feelings. Hindus call it Kundalini Yoga. This knowledge can be learned, for what they need many years or is acquired by birth. The most of them I acquired by birth. They are in the closest connection with a sexual energy that is after the most widespread in the Universe. The woman is the biggest thief of that energy, and thus the spiritual power. I've always knew that and was alerted. Of myself I created what I wanted: a thoughtful and spiritual machine.
JOURNALIST: A ninth adjustment, Mr. Tesla?
TESLA: Do everything that any day, any moment, if possible, not to forget who we are and why we are on Earth. Extraordinary people who are struggling with illness, privation, or the society which hurts them with its stupidity, misunderstanding, persecution and other problems which the country is full of a swamps with insects, leaves behind unclaimed until the end of the work. There are many fallen angels on Earth.
JOURNALIST: What is the tenth adaptation?
TESLA: It is most important. Write that Mr. Tesla played. He played the whole of his life and enjoyed it.
JOURNALIST: Mr. Tesla! Whether it relates to your findings and your work? Is this a game?
TESLA: Yes, dear boy. I have so loved to play with electricity! I always cringe when I hear about the one also the Greek who stole fire. A terrible story about studding, and eagles peck at his liver. Did Zeus did not have enough lightning and thunder, and was damaged for one fervor? There is some misunderstanding … Lightning are the most beautiful toys that can be found. Do not forget that in your text stand out: Nikola Tesla was the first man who discovered lightning.
JOURNALIST: Mr. Tesla, you're just talking about angels and their adaptation to the Earth.
TESLA: Am I? This is the same. You could write this: he dared to take upon himself the prerogatives of Indri, Zeus and Peron. Imagine one of these gods in a black evening suit, with the bowler hat and wearing white cotton gloves prepares lightning, fires and earthquakes to the New York City elite!
JOURNALIST: Readers love the humor of our paper. But you confuse me stating that your findings, which have immense benefits for the people, representing the game. Many will frown on it.
TESLA: Dear Mr. Smith, the trouble is that people are too serious. If they were not, they would be happier and much longer would have lived. Chinese proverb says that the seriousness reduces life. Visiting the inn Tai Pe guessed that he visits the Imperial Palace. But that the newspaper readers would not have frowned, let's get back to things which they consider important.
JOURNALIST: They would love to hear what your philosophy is.
TESLA: Life is a rhythm that must be comprehended. I feel the rhythm and direct on it and pamper in it. It was very grateful and gave me the knowledge I have. Everything that lives is related to a deep and wonderful relationship: man and the stars, amoebas' and the sun, the heart and the circulation of an infinite number of worlds. These ties are unbreakable, but they can be tame and to propitiate and begin to create new and different relationships in the world, and that does not violate the old. Knowledge comes from space; our vision is its most perfect set. We have two eyes: the earthly and spiritual. It is recommended that it become one eye. The Universe is alive in all its manifestations, like a thinking animal. Stone is a thinking and sentient being, such as plant, beast and a man. A star that shines asked to look at, and if we are not a sizeable self-absorbed we would understand its language and message. His breathing, his eyes and ears of the man must comply with breathing, eyes and ears of the Universe.
JOURNALIST: As you say this, it seems to me like I hear Buddhist texts, words or Taoist Parazulzusa.
TESLA: That's right! This means that there is general knowledge and truth that man has always possessed. In my feeling and experience, the Universe has only one substance and one supreme energy with an infinite number of manifestations of life. The best thing is that the discovery of a secret nature, reveals the other. One cannot hide, there are around us, but we are blind and deaf to them. If we emotionally tie ourselves to them, they come to us themselves. There are a lot of apples, but one Newton. He asked for just one apple that fell in front of him.
JOURNALIST: A question that might be set at the beginning of this conversation. What was Electricity for you, Dear Mr. Tesla?
TESLA: Everything is Electricity. First was the light, endless source from which points out material and distribute it in all forms that represent the Universe and the Earth with all its aspects of life. Black is the true face of Light, only we do not see this. It is remarkable grace to man and other creatures. One of its particles possesses light, thermal, nuclear, radiation, chemical, mechanical and an unidentified energy. It has the power to run the Earth with its orbit. It is true Archimedean lever.
JOURNALIST: Mr. Tesla, you're too biased towards electricity.
TESLA: Electricity I am. Or, if you wish, I am the electricity in the human form. You are Electricity; too Mr. Smith, but you do not realize it.
JOURNALIST: Is it thus your ability to allow fails of electricity of one million volts trough your body?
TESLA: Imagine a gardener who is attacked by herbs. This would indeed be crazy. Man's body and brain are made from a large amount energy; in me there is the majority of electricity. The energy that is different in everyone is what makes the human "I" or "soul". For other creatures to their essence, "soul" of the plant is the "soul" of minerals and animals. Brain function and death is manifested in light. My eyes in youth were black, now blue, and as time goes on and strain the brain gets stronger, they are closer to white. White is the color of heaven. Through my window one morning, landed a white dove, which I fed. She wanted to bring me a word that she was dying. From her eyes the light jets were coming out. Never in the eyes of any creature had I not seen so much light, as in that pigeon.
JOURNALIST: Personnel in your lab speak about flashes of light, flames and lightning that occur if you are angry or into kind of risk.
TESLA: It is the psychic discharge or a warning to be alert. The light was always on my side. Do you know how I discovered the rotating magnetic field and induction motor, which made me became famous when I was twenty-six? One summer evening in Budapest, I watched with my friend the Sigetijem sunset. Thousands of fires were turning around in thousands of flaming colors. I remembered Faust and recited his verses and then, as in a fog, I saw spinning magnetic field, and induction motor. I saw them in the sun!
JOURNALIST: Hotel service telling that at the time of lightning you isolate into the room and talk to yourselves.
TESLA: I talk with lightning and thunder.
JOURNALIST: With them? What language, Mr.Tesla?
TESLA: Mostly my native language. It has the words and sounds, especially in poetry, what is suitable for it.
JOURNALIST: Readers of our magazine would be very grateful if you would interpret that.
TESLA: The sound does not exist only in the thunder and lightning, but, in transformation into the brightness and color. A color can be heard. Language is of the words, which means that it is from the sounds and colors. Every thunder and lightning are different and have their names. I call some of them by the names of those who were close in my life, or by those whom I admire. In the sky brightness and thunder live my mother, sister, brother Daniel, a poet. Jovan, Jovanovic Zmaj and other persons of Serbian history.
Names such AsIsaiah, Ezekiel, Leonardo, Beethoven, Goya, Faraday, Pushkin and all burning fires mark shoals and tangles of lightning and thunder, which does not stop all night bringing to the Earth precious rain and burning trees or villages. There is lightning and thunder, and they are the brightest and most powerful, that will not vanish. They are coming back and I recognize them among the thousands.
JOURNALIST: For you, science or poetry is the same?
TESLA: These are the two eyes of one person. William Blake was taught that the Universe was born from the imagination, that it maintains and it will exist as long as there is a last man on the Earth. With it was a wheel to which astronomers can collect the stars of all galaxies. It is the creative energy identical to the light energy.
JOURNALIST: Imagination is more real to you than life itself?
TESLA: It gives birth to the life. I have fed by my taught; I've learned to control emotions, dreams and visions. I have always cherished, as I nurtured my enthusiasm. All my long life I spent in ecstasy. That was the source of my happiness. It helped me during all these years to bear with work, which was enough for the five lives. The best is to work at night, because the stellar light, and close bond.
JOURNALIST: You said that I am, like every being, the Light. This flatter me, but I confess, I do not quite understand.
TESLA: Why would you need to understand, Mr. Smith? Suffice it to believe it. Everything is light. In one its ray is the fate of nations, each nation has its own ray in what great light source we see as the sun. And remember: no one who was there did not die. They transformed into the light, and as such exist still. The secret lies in the fact that the light particles restore their original state.
JOURNALIST: This is the resurrection!
TESLA: I prefer to call it: return to a previous energy. Christ and several others knew the secret. I am searching how to preserve human energy. It is forms of Light, sometimes straight like heavenly light. I have not looked for it for my own sake, but for the good of all. I believe that my discoveries make people's lives easier and more bearable, and channel them to spirituality and morality.
JOURNALIST: Do you think that time can be abolished?
TESLA: Not quite, because the first feature of the energy is that it transforms. It is in perpetual transformation, as clouds of Taoists. But it is possible to leverage the fact that a man preserves consciousness after the earthly life. In every corner of the universe exist energy of life; one of them is immortality, whose origin is outside of man, waiting for him. The universe is spiritual; we are only half that way. The Universe is more moral than us, because we do not know his nature and how to harmonize our lives with it. I am not scientist, science is perhaps the most convenient way to find the answer to the question that always haunt me, and which my days and nights turned into fire.
JOURNALIST: What is matter?
TESLA: How are your eyes brightened! … What I wanted to know is: what happens to a falling star as the sun goes out? Stars fall like dust or seed in this or in other worlds, and the sun be scattered in our minds, in the lives of many beings, what will be reborn as a new light, or cosmic wind scattered in infinity. I understand that this is necessary included in the structure of the Universe. The thing is, though, is that one of these stars and one of these suns, even the smallest, preserves.
JOURNALIST: But, Mr. Tesla, you realize that this is necessary and is included in the constitution of the world!
TESLA: When a man becomes conscious, then his highest goal must be to run for a shooting star, and tries to capture it; shall understand that his life was given to him because of this and will be saved. Stars will eventually be capable to catch!
JOURNALIST: And what will happen then?
TESLA: The creator will laugh and say: "It fall only that you chase her and grab her."
JOURNALIST: Isn't all of this contrary to the cosmic pain, which so often you mention in your writings? And what is it cosmic pain?
TESLA: No, because we are on Earth … It is an illness whose existence the vast majority of people are not aware of. Hence, many other illnesses, suffering, evil, misery, wars and everything else what makes human life an absurd and horrible condition. This disease cannot be completely cured, but awareness shall make it less complicated and hazardous. Whenever one of my close and dear people were hurt, I felt physical pain. This is because our bodies are made as of similar material, and our soul related with unbreakable strands. Incomprehensible sadness that overwhelmed us at times means that somewhere, on the other side on this planet, a child or generous man died. The entire Universe is in certain periods sick of itself, and of us. Disappearance of a star and the appearance of comets affect us more than we can imagine. Relationships among the creatures on the Earth are even stronger, because of our feelings and thoughts the flower will scent even more beautiful or will fall in silence. These truths we must learn in order to be healed. Remedy is in our hearts and evenly, in the heart of the animals that we call the Universe.
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Los Mochis is a young city in the north of Sinaloa. In the local indigenous language, Los Mochis means "place of the turtles" and today, this is the third largest city in the state.
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El Fuerte is one of 4 Magical Towns (Pueblo Mágico) in the state of Sinaloa and is situated on the Chepe train line, just 1 ½ hours from Los Mochis. El Fuerte gets its name from the fort the Spanish built here in 1610 to protect them from attacks. This was an important mining center, which can still be seen today in the city's rich history and old mansions, many of which have been converted into boutique hotels. Enjoy visiting the home of General Pablo Macias, the Casa de la Cultura, the Cathedral and the Main Square.
A favored destination for those looking for tranquility and extraordinary natural beauty. The Cerocahui mission town is situated 18 kilometers from the Bahuichivo station. Cerocahui was founded by the Jesuit missionary Juan Maria de Salvatierra in 1680 in a beautiful valley with a favorable climate that is mild year-round, creating a spectacular green carpet throughout the area.
This station is a must stop on the Chepe Express. It offers one of the most spectacular natural wonders in Mexico and the world. Three canyons are found here: Urique, Tararecua and Cobre. In this place of privileged beauty, we recommend a walk around the edge of the canyon to enjoy the majestic views. Three of the best hotels in the area are in Divisadero. From the comfort of your room balcony, you will feel surrounded by the lush beauty of the Copper Canyons.
Creel is a Magical Town (pueblo mágico) located 260 kilometers (160 miles) southwest of Chihuahua. It takes 3 ½ hours by highway to get there from the capital. Creel is at an altitude of 2,240 meters (7,350 feet). With its proximity to the Copper Canyons, its many hospitality services, roadways, valleys and waterfalls, this town is considered the gateway to the Sierra Tarahumara and to the Copper Canyons.
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