“Sri Krishna Prem, the wisest man in India, sat on the floor of his little mountain-top ashram showing me pictures from medieval alchemical books. He pointed to the design of a man standing naked with devil on one shoulder, angel on the other. He said, ‘When you understand that, you can go on to the next lesson.’”

                           --Timothy Leary, the Starseed Transmission, 1973

LILLY MEETS THE ARCHONTECTS AT THE Y

1973-74 was a weird time for many in the counterculture—no, really: an extraordinarily daft period of high strangeness.

Neuroscientist Dr. John C. Lilly (1914-2001) was responsible for one of the greatest iterations of an old myth during our time. While floating in an isolation tank and under the influence of the hallucinogen-anesthetic ketamine, Lilly had visions of two, we might say, "strange attractors" that exist in our futures, inevitably pulling us towards one or the other: our destruction by a “Solid State Intelligence” (SSI), or assistance in our evolution by the ECCO, or “Earth Coincidence Control Office.”

The computer mainframe in The Matrix? That’s basically the SSI, a mindlessly reproductive artificial intelligence that will (in one of our futures, several hundred years hence) reduce the conditions on the earth’s surface to that of a super-cooled air conditioner by keeping humans corralled under domes and blasting the atmosphere into space. It will move our orbit to a more congenially low-temperature distance for it to function. The SSI will eventually destroy humanity as a burden to its self-preservation, figure out a way to blast the earth entirely out of the sun’s orbit, and search the galaxy for other SSIs.

Through the ECCO's communications, Lilly believed there are already multiple SSIs wandering the galaxy searching for “brothers” (aka the Borg), the sole remnants of once great civilizations that apparently took the wrong pill.

The most nefarious meme here is that at this moment our own earthbound SSI, via its extraterrestrial “mentors,” is influencing human behavior and thinking into constructing it, and the alien SSIs are helping it along—and that their project is on schedule.[1]

 Many transhumanists have conjectured the possibility that high technology is “using” humanity to advance itself into an super-advanced state or even sentience (talking to you, Kevin Kelly) and we’ll meet it halfway (Hello, Ray?). Thanks to the Internet, the SSI is already well along on the path to integration, both physically and by psychologically priming us for its rise.[2] Letting AI engineering programs design “shortcuts” for their own software that work but computer scientists have difficulty reverse-engineering to understand how they work isn’t helping matters. (Welcome, Skynet!)

As our societal course seems to be moving (if we don’t blow up in World War 5), we will cede more and more of our everyday operations to computers and their brute machine extensions and one day wake up wondering how did I end up in this prison camp with no kill switch? (Hail Colossus!) After all, we’ve already turned over knowledge acquisition and collation, many medical diagnostics/procedures, stock trading, manufacturing, quality control, electrical and nuclear grids, transportation, surveillance, and combat operations to AI systems. This encroachment will only increase, of course, as it increases profits both for the Silicon Valley overlords and mechanization-amenable businesses. As Kevin Kelly said, the more areas we turn over to these machines, the more incentive there is to automate the remaining aspects of our social, economic, and scientific activities. So we can have extra time.

Extra time to what…? Entertain the devil?

We put AI to many tests to see if it can surpass human skills. It has succeeded in those rule-based games such as chess and Go, which are already designed with an algorithmic basis. But to make an AI that can learn a human language, understand context, and construct sentences appropriate to those contexts in order to have a meaningful conversation is decades away—if ever. According to AI scientist Nick Bostrom, we have about 50 years before computing power will approach the processes of the human brain.[3] And that is no guarantee it will be able to do the ten million things of which a mind is capable.

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On the other hand, before encountering the SSI, John Lilly had earlier contacted the ECCO—a transdimensional “cadre” of beings that has been (and is still) attempting to communicate with humanity through coincidence—or more properly, synchronicities—since the dawn of history. His own life had been saved by coincidence, convincing him of the ECCO’s reality: on an isolation tank-ketamine trip, the floatation water had been way too hot. Lilly attempted to climb from the tank, but just after the K fully kicked in. He lost all sense of his body. A colleague who had a sudden need to talk to him at that moment called, and Lilly’s wife found him near death in the tank. She had learned mouth-to-mouth resuscitation only days before. His life had seemingly been saved by two fortuitous events.

Only persons with more evolved attention/sensitivity have noticed the ECCO's clues: psychics, those who encounter “strange beings,” UAP and their occupants. The ECCO are trying to advance us spiritually, apparently so we don’t have a need for the SSI. Lilly’s scenario amounts to a contemporary version of the devils/angels whispering on our shoulders--but talking to us backwards in time, from our own future.

Lilly had experimented with LSD and various entheogens in the tank throughout the 1960s, but ketamine was his darling. He used heroic amounts of it then began shooting it several times every day. He contacted the ECCO more and more on these trips, and established a permanent telepathic channel. He attempted to warn President Gerald Ford of the SSI threat. It was only when an assistant attempted twice to have him committed, then his K sources dried up, that he gave it up to devote his life to his wife. And dolphins.

In 1971, parapsychologist Andrija Puharich hypnotized psychic Uri Geller and through him supposedly made contact with a space intelligence called “Spectra" that Geller claimed had granted him his PK/psychic powers. This was an echo of events Puharich witnessed some 18 years earlier, in Maine on New Year’s Eve 1953, when he and eight other shadowy intelligence/military community-connected individuals contacted an extraterrestrial intelligence named “M” through an Indian medium named Dr. Vinod. This M spoke for “the Nine Principles,” a group of what Theosophists call "Ascended Masters" or spiritually advanced beings.

Contact with the Nine was reestablished in June 1953. There was talk of ascension to “Brahminship” for those persons present at the séance—and also to be bestowed on other, unnamed persons. Puharich would from then on believe these extraterrestrials were causing synchronicities and generally influencing certain humans—much like Dr. Lilly would find of ECCO 19 years later. In 1956, Puharich supposedly met a couple in Arizona who had been channeling the Nine as well—and as proof of this sent him transcripts of the original channeling session in Maine on New Year’s Eve.

In 1973, Puharich created Lab Nine in upstate New York, where associate James J. Hurtak begins to channel the Nine. Hurtak will go on to become a New Agey guru concerning Elizabethan mage Dr. John Dee's Callings or "Keys of Enoch", the angelic/demonic language that Dee's scryer Edward Kelley channeled in 1589. Puharich also established a "secret school" for children at Lab Nine, calling them the "Space Kids" or the "Geller Kids", in order to develop their psychic powers for contacting the Nine. Who these kids were or where they came from has never been satisfactorily explained, and is extremely disturbing given the MKULTRA protocols of the 1950s to test LSD on orphans and "troubled kids" at places like Boys Town. Puharich was definitely involved on the fringes of the CIA's mind-control studies from their beginning, in 1952.

The Nine, it turns out on Hurtak's channelings, are the Ennead of Egyptian deities. Puharich publishes a biography of Uri Geller in 1974 telling the whole story. In the book he claims that when Geller asked physicist Saul Paul Sirag to look into his eyes to “see” Spectra, Sirag said that he saw Geller’s head appear as a hawk (Horus); Horus is connected to Sothis/Sirius in Egyptian mythology. Mostly the book concerns boosting the existence of the ET "Spectra" satellite claim and the Nine's existence. [4] Lab Nine lasts only five years, with a series of arsons and "CIA harassment," which drives Puharich to Mexico and ends his unethical experimentation.

23 SKIDOO AND HORUS, TOO; OR, SIRIUSLY MAYBE: WILSON ZAPPED MERCILESSLY BY THE ECCO

John Lilly “contacted” the ECCO beings in 1973. 64 miles north of Lilly's lab on the California coast, Robert Anton Wilson would take LSD on June 6, 1973, utilizing Lilly’s “subliminal” affirmation tapes that encouraged limitless mind. He followed these sessions with recordings of magician Aleister Crowley’s invocation of his Holy Guardian Angel. Wilson had been practicing yoga for years, and found that this acid experience, in which he lived “past lives” and experienced disembodiment, immeasurably increased his yogic powers of concentration. On July 22, Wilson repeated the same program, this time without LSD but doing Tantric sex rituals with his wife Arlen. The next morning of July 23, 1973 he awoke from a dream obsessed with the star Sirius. Throughout the day he consulted all his occult tomes for references, and even went to the library. He discovered that in ancient Egyptian tradition, July 23 is the day when Sirius exerts its strongest connection with earth and our consciousnesses. He came to briefly believe he had been contacted by ETs from Sirius, causing a dance with insanity and paranoia he called the “Chapel Perilous.”[5] In Aleister Crowley’s AA system of correspondences, Sirius’s number is nine.

A MAN NAMED LEARY GETS SPUNKED WITH INTERSTELLAR DNA

In 1973, psychonaut and social irritant Timothy Leary would encounter alien intelligences while meditating and cooling off in Folsom jail, leading him to write the Starseed Transmission. Here is a heady chunk of that text:

Life is an interstellar communication network. Life is disseminated through the galaxies in the form of nucleotide templates. These “seeds” land on planets, are activated by solar radiation and evolve nervous systems. The bodies which house and transport nervous systems and the reproductive seeds are constructed in response to the atmospheric and gravitational characteristics of the host planet, the crumbling rock upon which we momentarily rest.

Evolution is concerned with nervous systems and the sexual attractive efficiency of bodies, the expansion of consciousness.

The human being is the robot carrier of a large brain, conscious of being conscious. A robot designed to discover the circuitry which programs its behavior. The nervous system is the instrument of consciousness. When mankind discovered the function and infinite capacities of the nervous system, a mutation took place. The metamorphosis from larval earth-life to a higher destiny. The person who has made this discovery becomes a time-traveler. A Psi-Phy entity. When Astronaut Mitchell saw the green jewel of earth against the black velvet expanse of interstellar distance, he became Psi-Phy. Ecology is a low-level distraction. Psi-Phy boy scouts picking up trash. The genetic goal is communication. Telepathy. Electronic sexuality. Reception and transmission of electromagnetic waves. The erotics of resonance. The entire universe is gently, rhythmically, joyously vibrating. Cosmic intercourse.[6]

Leary goes on to discuss the newly discovered comet Kohoutek and how it will be its brightest in the month of October, then complains about why there is no media coverage of this new object that was projected to come very close to both earth and sun. Paranoia sets in the text as he talks about it being a harbinger of some kind, involving Nixon’s fall or the murder of Watergate spook E. Howard Hunt, drawing parallels between Giordano Bruno’s execution for heresy in 1600 and the square-world-Air Force’s denial of the UAP/extradimensional intelligence’s reality.

Through some thoughtful exchanges with his fellow inmates, who’d read his tract, Leary comes to almost deifying the comet as a literal vessel of redemption or transformation, seeding our planet with new DNA that will allow communication with our cosmic siblings.

24 years later, another sudden cometary appearance will inspire the mass suicide of ET-worshipping cultists called Heaven's Gate.

1973 is considered the “year of the humanoid” by mainstream UAP investigators, when two canonical encounter/abductions occurred in October: the Pat Roach family’s and the Pascagoula, Mississippi abduction of two fishermen, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker. In addition, the Susan Ramsted, Leigh Proctor, and Dionisio Llanca abductions also occurred in October, 1973. Throughout this year, there were dozens of accounts of close encounters with UAP occupants. These space people were really plying their trade hard.

Ariel Teittleman: You ever heard of the Masada? For three years, nine hundred Jews held their own against fifteen thousand Roman soldiers. They chose death before enslavement. And the Romans? Where are they now?

Tony Soprano: You’re looking at ’em, asshole.

PINK BEAM SHOOTS CREAMY, CREAMY INFORMATION

In February of 1974, writer Philip K. Dick would experience a revelation very similar to Wilson’s, Geller’s, Leary’s, and Lilly’s. He would spend the rest of his life coming to terms with and trying to clarify it. After having a tooth extracted under sodium pentathol, he ordered out for painkillers and was met at his door by a young woman delivering his medication. He found himself staring at her “Jesus fish” necklace and began…remembering things. He came to believe he was experiencing flashbacks/sideways of a previous/ongoing life as the persecuted Gnostic Thomas, the brother of Jesus. Further, he came to believe the Roman Empire has existed ever since the crucifixion either in a simultaneous reality, or as we experience “today” with our “modern” surroundings as a camouflage for it. At one time he was “struck by a pink beam” that filled his head with a cascade of information. During one eight-hour stretch he experienced the entire human history of art—and claimed to witness Soviet psychotronic scientists communicating with space intelligences from Sirius. He came to believe an alien satellite he called alternately "Zebra" or the Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS) had done this to him. He teetered on the brink of insanity, but having a rational mind wrote his way out of the Chapel Perilous in what many consider his best books: VALIS (1981), The Divine Invasion (1981), and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982).  

At the same time, scholar and Sinologist Robert Temple is working on final drafts of a book on the beliefs of Mali’s Dogon peoples. It was discovered that their dances, rituals, artwork and “mythology” all concern beings who they claim visited them long ago from a star that turned out to be Sirius. Encoded in their beliefs are facts about Sirius unknown until the mid-20th century, such as its possession of a dwarf companion sun, Sirius B, and the double star’s heavenly cycles. Temple connects their knowledge to sources in ancient Egypt--where the Ennead (Nine) are worshiped. Temple writes that the Nommo (the name the Dogon give the extraterrestrial tribe) are now in hibernation in a spaceship around Saturn, waiting to return to earth and the right time. Time is one of the things Saturn ruled over (“Chronos” in Greek). In 1976 Temple publishes “The Sirius Mystery” and is harassed by the CIA over it.

Temple’s original inspiration came in 1967, from one Arthur Young, inventor of the Bell helicopter, who 15 years earlier in 1953 had collaborated with Andrija Puharich on the original Vinod/Nine sessions in Maine.  

Something was in the aether.

So…As Temple labors on his book, Leary while meditating receives information on DNA being a cosmic communications system that is largely dormant for most humans; Lilly contacts the ECCO and is warned of the nefarious SSI while in an ongoing massively altered state of consciousness; Dick is contacted by VALIS/Zebra and told that we exist (or have existed, or will in the future exist) in a Black Iron Prison and that the Roman Empire Never Ended, and that VALIS is a part of a network of Sirian satellites meant to remove our blocked “screen memories” and open our consciousnesses; Wilson is contacted by Space Intelligences/Egyptian deities/his unconscious on the day Sirius is at its most powerful; and Geller/Puharich/Hurtak are contacted by the Nine/Spectra/Egyptian deities—all within one year, 1973, in which the world political order seems to teeter on the brink of institutional and social breakdown[7] and a spectacular series of UFO events occur, culminating in October when comet Kohoutek is its brightest.  Dick's VALIS has been described as one node of an artificial satellite network originating from the star Sirius in the Canis Major constellation. According to Dick, the Earth satellite used “pink laser beams” to transfer information and project holograms on Earth and to facilitate communication between an extraterrestrial species and humanity. Dick claimed that VALIS used “disinhibiting stimuli” to communicate, using symbols to trigger recollection of intrinsic knowledge through the anamnesia, achieving gnosis. Drawing directly from Platonism and Gnosticism, Dick wrote in his Exegesis: “We appear to be memory coils (DNA carriers capable of experience) in a computer-like thinking system which, although we have correctly recorded and stored thousands of years of experiential information, and each of us possesses somewhat different deposits from all the other life forms, there is a malfunction—a failure—of memory retrieval.”

Back to Leary we go…

But wait, there's more!

Sirius figures in a number of esoteric systems. Rodney Collin, author of the neglected masterwork “The Theory of Celestial Influence,” posits Sirius as our “Oversun,” that is, the star around which our sun revolves once roughly every 24,000 years—very close to the length of a full cycle of equinoctial precession. Collin’s system could be a measure of quasi-animism, in that energy currents exist everywher on many subtle scales, and that the generative powers of our sun in turn have been granted by that of Sirius. We are directly connected to the brightly twinkling distant furnace.

Collin was a disciple of Piotr Ouspensky, and thus G.I. Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff hinted at Sirius’s importance when he claimed a need to “bury the bone deeper” when writing his densely allusive “Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson” (1950). Several authors who knew Gurdjieff or were well-versed in his Work system claimed this was a pun on Sirius being known as the Dog Star and signifying the beginning of the dog days of summer (which originally signaled the beginning of the Nile's flood season). This Sirius connection is considered by some as one of the secret keys to understanding the book. The ancient astronaut idea is central in “Beelzebub,” as the fallen angel is actually a space traveler on his way to be judged as he regales his grandson tales of the backwards-living and doomed beings of earth. He tells grandson Hassan of the sevenfold Ray of Creation and the 96 cosmic laws to which unfortunate earthlings are subject because of its moon’s influence. 

Independent (apparently) of Gurdjieff and Collin, 70 years earlier the Russian Helena Blavatsky wrote of the cosmic influence of Sirius as a “third eye” in the heavens. This information was channeled by an Ascended Master she contacted named Koot Hoomi.

In 1895, Alice Bailey met a stranger who told her she had a special place in the world's salvation. She would read Blavatsky’s works in the 1910s, and is convinced her visitor was Koot Hoomi, Blavatsky’s astral contact and knowledge-transmitter. Bailey becomes a Theosophist in 1915, and marries Freemason Foster Bailey. In 1919 she contacts Djwhal Khul, “The Tibetan” and channels additional messages. She is told of the “Hierarchy of the Brothers of Light” or the “Great Council,” a variation on Blavatsky’s Ascended Masters. Bailey’s are led by the “Lord of the World,” which is an ancient Hindu conception connected with the king of the subterranean kingdom of Agarttha who guides humanity through a council, telepathically contacting people and arranging coincidences for their meeting.

In her book Initiation, Human and Solar Bailey writes that the Tibetan Masters R and M are overlords of human evolution. Andrija Puharich apparently admitted to reading Bailey before meeting "Dr. Vinod" in 1952 and channeling the Nine; thus Vinod’s R and M are nearly identical. In Bailey's system there are Seven Planes of the Solar System and the “Seven Rays.” (Gurdjieff would be teaching similar ideas at this time as well in Paris, about the Octave and the Ray of Creation). Puharich associate James Hurtak’s neo-Enochian system is nearly identical to Bailey’s as well.

Bailey also speaks of Sirius as a power center that transmits its mental and spiritual influence via Saturn—an idea also propounded by channel/medium Carla Rueckert who contacted the Egyptian deity Ra (one of the Nine gods/principles) in the Law of One series (1981-84). Ra says it is communicating to Rueckert from Saturn. Many an “extraterrestrial” being in UAP contacts say they are "from Saturn". Absurd on the face of them as these contactees' claims are, there is another interpretational current in operation that says they really mean the "astral forms" of the planets and their moons, and are thus "way stations" for the ETs channelings...And don't forget the Dogon people's Nommo-gods asleep in spaceships around Saturn! Anyway, Bailey’s Tibetan guide claims that Scottish Rite Freemasonry is a version of the Sirian mystery school and performing its rites to the 33rd and highest degree allows one access to the Lodge of Sirius. The ninth level of Scottish Rite is called the “Elect of Nine.” The “Blazing Star” in all Masonic lodges is supposedly meant to represent Sirius. The “Nine Elect apprentice masons” to Hiram Abiff, mythical architect and builder of Solomon’s temple, are said in the lore to have tracked Abiff’s murderers to a cave. The nine stars of Orion represent these Elect. Orion’s horizontal rise precedes the rising of Sirius in the sky.