From: sarfatti@well.sf.ca.us (Jack Sarfatti)
Subject: The Sarfatti Papers 3: The Gladstone Report II
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1992 00:23:21 GMT


Long orphaned by science and most philosophy, teleological superluminality
has found a home in drama, religion, literature, and in film.  Joyce's
Ulysses is a treasure trove of Jungian synchronicities, which may be
acausal loops-in-time that employ the future-to-past time sense.  Joyce
uses such seemingly random recurring events as a shout in the street, the
wanderings of a crumpled piece of paper, the pealing of church bells, to
order time through loops of causality.  The inner geometry of Ulysses is
not the geometry of billiards and of Newton.  It is the strange inner
geometry of Einstein and quantum mechanics.  Causality seems to slide along
this strange geometry like a roller coaster at an amusement park.  Kurt
Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five also reflects the strange geometry of future
causality:  The planet Tralfamadoria which exists in the future creates a
civilization on earth so they can get a part they need for one of their
spaceships.  Just as the Greeks in Romans used the Deus Ex Machina to
provide for a superluminal Voice of God.  Chris Marker, in the highly
acclaimed film "La Jettee" creates an eerie warring world of the future,
that makes captives of people in the past to experiment on them.  In "The
Navigator" a young man leads his people from the plague-ravaged 14th
century to the 20th century to find a cure for the mysterious disease that
is decimating them.  In the Sci-Fi genre, Sarfatti's fellow physics
graduate student at UCSD, Gregory Benford, weaves a chilling tale of a
doomed future earth in Time Scape.  In the story, scientists send warnings
to their colleagues in the past  to save the planet.  Phillip Jose Farmer's
Riverworld series which includes practically everything that ever lived,
requires future-to-past causality as well. And of course, we can't forget
"The Terminator"  or "Back to the Future" and "Peggy Sue Gets Married".

Turning and turning within the widening gyre.
              - W.B.Yeats, The Second Coming

Merging the ostensibly separate meanings of God and Machine, Edie, perhaps
unconsciously, linked herself to a turn of thought and intuition that has
its branches in antiquity and its roots in the far distant future.  From
the ancient stories of the Greek gods to the cyber-punk of today's Science
fiction, people have taken for granted the existence of a superluminal
reality.  Almost all of us have experienced this firsthand.  For example,
invariably, when I call my mother, she will say, "That's funny I was just
thinking about you."  How many times have you thought about someone,
suddenly, perhaps after a long period of time when you hadn't thought of
them at all.  Soon, sure enough, you see them in a day or two. then you
know that you've just touched the mystery. Precognitive incidents like
these have always suffered from the taint of impossibility, just like
UFO's, although admitting to a dream that proves to be true or having had a
precognitive experience may be less embarrassing than claiming to have seen
or been aboard a UFO.
Deus Ex Machina
Deus ex Machina' or the God from a machine was originally used in ancient
Greek and Roman plays, a device was brought on stage to intervene in the
action of a play when conditions were in extremis; when the situation was
such that only supernatural intervention could save the day.  Jack Sarfatti
thinks that his  article "Design for a Superluminal Signaling Device"11'
may lead to nothing less than a Deus ex Machina.  Both he and Heinz Pagels'
close friend, Nick Herbert, have spent years trying to develop God Phones
which decode and utilize precognitive messages from the future.  This is
not the same as predicting the future.  Sarfatti's goateed visage looms out
from under a Greek fisherman's cap as he proclaims: "Prediction of the
future from the past is part of the classical causality axiom, yet it is
not really supported by the evidence. In quantum mechanics both the future
and the past co-determine the present."

The increasingly likely establishment of a superluminal world-view cannot
be credited solely to an individual, or even to the sciences.  Future-cause
and past-effect has been an intrinsic part of the scientific, cultural and
religious  inheritance of the human race.

Since ancient times scientists have tried to model the universe within
their cultural and religious contexts.  According to Sarfatti,
Pythagoras,12 Newton, Einstein, Planck and Heisenberg, are the Illuminati
who receive knowledge from the future God that is bringing our universe
into being."

Quantum mechanics is illuminating a trail which may lead to the roots of
consciousness itself.  Indeed, at the quantum level our own brains may be
mirroring the quantum processes which occurred before the Big Bang itself.
As above so below, says the ancient mystical truism, and now quantum
physicists are echoing that sentiment.  Recent work done at the leading
edge of molecular biology supports this conjecture.

With  state Christianity in the Roman empire came dogma and a strategy of
repression and elimination of views that differed. Speculation on the
nature of the universe was discouraged by the Church Fathers.  For nearly
1,000 years, science remained stuck in an ancient rut.  As the renaissance
dawned, however, scientists fought a mostly losing battle to be free of the
constraints of religiouss tyranny.  Marlowe's Faust is an allegory of
scientific man's rebellion against the tyranny of Church authority.  The
careers of Bruno13 and Galileo amply illustrate the difficulties of that
struggle.  Over hundreds of years the work of Copernicus, Newton and
Descartes eviscerated the Church's authority.  Such literal Biblical
teachings as creationism are taught only as a relic of religious thought
rather than as valid theories of how the Universe comes into being. God-in-
the-Machine is now just the voice of the machine.  Anyone accepting the
literal word of The Bible as truth in today's secular world would be
considered a credulous fool by many secular westerners.

Since the beginning of this century, physicists have gone by speculation
and experiment where few can follow.  Most of us must accept the claims of
scientific authority as we once accepted the validity of religious dogma.
Some scientists claim (just as many ancients must have done after observing
a phenomenon they could not explain) that they can see the "handwriting of
God" in some of the recent pictures from the COBE satellite which show the
universe at a very early age.

Sarfatti's Hyper-History
Sarfatti suffers no embarrassment about his claims of a superluminal
connection to all kinds of historical figures. In 1978 Sarfatti was
suffering his indulgent idyll/exile in North beach, orphaned by the New Age
Movement after his bitter falling out with Werner Erhard.  He met someone
who, according to Sarfatti, clarified the historical context he was in.  He
feels trapped in a time loop of causality reversal that connects him to
such world historical figures as Hitler, Mussolini and FDR.  "Sitting on
the terrace of the Savoy Tivoli, I was introduced by a friend, Leila
Dwight,to an aristocratic-looking young man dressed in Lederhosen, the
Bavarian national dress.  She said he was her cousin but it didn't mean
anything at the time. I didn't know that Leila's family had intermarried
repeatedly with the Sedgwicks for 200 years.

He was Egon Sedgwick Hanfstaengl. At the time I met him I hadn't yet met
Suky Sedgwick.  He said something about his family being involved 'in
history' but he didn't say what.  These connections were made clear to me
years later when the book Edie by Jean Stein and George Plimpton came out.
Hanfstaengl was a cousin of Edie's and the grandson of Ernst "Putzi"
Sedgwick Hanfstaengl.

In 1904, Putzi spent hours in the basement of Teddy Roosevelt's White House
with his cousin and Harvard classmate, Frank (FDR) playing the piano in the
boisterous, somewhat oafish style, that his friends loved.  In 1920, Putzi
was playing piano to a captive audience in Munich.  His new friend Adolph
Hitler was in a hypnotic and joyous reverie listening to the music of his
beloved Wagner.  Putzi and his American wife performed a valuable service
to the future Fuhrer.  They arranged gemutlich little musical evenings with
many of the prominent figures of post WW1 Germany for Hitler.  They
smoothed his rough edges.  They eased his way into the upper circles where
the spirit of unrepentant revanchism burned undiminished by defeat.  In
1923 at Putzi's Tyrolean Villa, the distraught Hitler was in disgrace; his
Bavarian Putsch was broken and he was about to be arrested for treason.
The police were banging on the door and would soon be coming up the stairs.
All was lost; but for the timely intervention of Putzi's wife who altered
history forever when she wrestled the loaded pistol that he had pointed at
his own head from him.  Sarfatti claims that the hand of destiny that saved
Hitler, also altered his own life.  Saying that historical themes tend to
recurr in within certain familial "Destiny Matrices", Sarfatti sketched out
a nonlinear history of his clan.

In 1923, Margherita Sarfatti, was the lover of Benito Mussolini, and later
was patroness of the fascist cultural movement, Nouvocento, (New Century)
which expressed a belief in the philosophy of future cause.  She was the
mother of one Italy's WWI heroes, Roberto Sarfatti, killed at the age of
eighteen at Mussolini's side in the trenches.  Roberto was later enshrined
as one the immortals in the fascist pantheon.  Samuel Sarfatti was the
personal physician to Pope Julius II and he was instrumental in getting
Michaelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. 'Sarfatti' means
'the Frenchman' in Hebrew and traces back to the great Rabbi, Rashi de
Troyes (1040 - 1105)."  Sarfatti sees himself linked in  meaningful causal
loops with many historical figures. "This historical context is not my
creation", he says, "but  a recurrent theme over hundreds of years that
expressed itself in the lives of real people, who happened to be my family
and Suky's family. Just like I happened to get that phone call. We were
brought together as players in a scene written in the far future."

He is not the only one to see himself this way.  Sarfatti and his
superluminal physics are portrayed in Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus
Trilogy.  Carlos Suares, a cabalist mystic and intimate of Henry Miller
annointed Sarfatti to be the "heir" to his tradition.  "I didn't know what
he was talking about at the time. But he was a Cabalist Master who knew a
great deal more than I about the significant role some of my relatives
played in Jewish history."  Fictionalized as Balthazar, in Lawrence
Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, Suares urged Sarfatti to "smash the wall of
light.", which Sarfatti sees as one and the same as Einstein's light
barrier. "I saw myself as a Parsival character. I reached the Grail Castle
and didn't know what I was doing there and I didn't get the Grail. But I
got the challenge to "smash the wall of light" and that's what I'm trying
to do.

Since the publication of his latest paper in a prestigious physics journal
and his reestablishment of ties with academics at Berkeley, Sarfatti's
credibility seems to be rising phoenix-like from the ashes.  It was at
Berkeley in Ray Chiao's quantum optics seminar that Nobel Laureate Charles
Townes was told by Chiao that a paper by Sarfatti some twenty years
previously had helped them in their research.  At another seminar, David
Mermin,head of the physics department at Cornell, told the group that he
had read Sarfatti's paper and had been perplexed because he couldn't find
anything wrong with it.  He finally realised what was wrong but he he said
he couldn't remember.  Sarfatti says the seminar broke up in laughter.  His
most recent salvo against 'fortress mentality' of the physics establishment
is a paper he believes will invalidate Phillippe Eberhard's proof against
communicating useful messages from future to past.

With the help of modern technology man is extending his intelligence out
into into the vast reaches of space and down to the mysterious level of
quantum phenomena.  In the worlds of art and science, ( which seem to
uncannily mirror each other) there has long been dissatisfaction with  the
theories and dogmas which leave far too much of our real world unaccounted
for.  Sarfatti sees this as a 'vacuum of reason' which he like nature
abhors. "What I'm after is simple.  I want to prove the existence of God
and a superluminal universe created from the future which created us so
that the universe could itself be created.  Let's not play games and stand
on high horses when it comes to radical advances in thought.  Let
experiment decide. If it doesn't work then we've still learned something."


1 arguably Dylan's greatest album
2 from the poem "Edie" written on hearing of Edie's death.

3 Beyond Time, Danah Zohar
4 discoverer of the Pauli exclusion principle and the neutrino
5 at the University of Paris in 1982,
6 quanta of light
7 Carol Alley of the University of Maryland
8 Charles Bennett of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory
9 a resort near Big Sur in California,famous for sixties style sexual
experimentation and lectures promoting a New Age of enlightenment.
10 Newsweek, 1980.
11 Physics Essays, Vol. 4, No.3 Sept. 1991 (University of Toronto Press).
12 whose famous theorem is at the foundation not only of relativity but
also of quantum mechanics.  Pythagoras was one of the great scientists of
all time but also a mystic and religious leader.
13 Bruno was burned at the stake and Galileo was placed under a church
edict to keep silent regarding his heretical beliefs.