Now that's really a coincidence... Coming events cast their shadows before.
Science proceeds as if the past were the home of explanation; whereas the future, and the future alone, holds the key to the mysteries of the present.
If you were anybody at all in the cultural scene that was exploding in New York in 1965 you knew Edie. Edie Sedgwick had cachet. She came from that long, august line of New England Sedgwicks, whose firmament was illuminated by genuine brilliance but was often blighted by suicide and mental anguish.
Edie's Face was everywhere. Diana Vreeland featured her in Vogue Magazine . She was in all the teenybopper rags. Her short hair, black tights, and great legs were always moving in a maelstrom of whirlwind activity, from limo to club to limo again, in an endless frenzied spiral. It was 1965. For a while Andy worshipped androgenous Edie. He made her a star. Warhol's "factory" provided a nucleus around which Edie and her entourage spun their high speed orbits, high energy particles soon to crash. Her face and style impressed everyone.
riding the newest musical waves, intersected Edie's orbit. Indeed, Dylan and Edie were lovers and his song
was written for her. Film actress, Kyra Sedgwick, who is married to Kevin Bacon is Edie's cousin, though she looks more like Sarfatti's former grand passion, Suky.
Everyone knew she was the real heroine of Blonde on Blonde. [1] She was one of the many things that moved me, Bob Dylan, Jackson Pollack... The first time I saw Edie was in Vogue Magazine in 1965. You have to understand where I came from. Living in south Jersey you get connected with the pulse beat of what's going on through magazines... It was all image... She was like a thin man in black leotards, white hair and boat- necked sweater. She was such a strong image that I thought, "That's it." It represented everything to me, radiating intelligence, speed, being connected with the moment.
singer-songwriter, Patti Smith Edie's last starring vehicle was "Ciao! Manhattan", now a cult classic. The infamous Dr. Roberts, inaugurated the film by shooting up the entire cast with amphetamines for an orgy scene at a health club. Edie describes her activities in Jean Stein's Edie,
...an incredible sexual tailspin... every kind of sex freak from homosexuals to nymphomaniacs... Gobble, gobble, gobble. Couldn't get enough of it. Sex and speed. Wow. Like oh, God! A twenty-four hour climax that can go on for days. I'd like to turn on the whole world for a moment... just for a moment. I'm greedy. I'd like to keep most of it for myself and a few others, a few of my friends... so that I'd radiate sunshine.Strangely, the fictional plot of "Ciao Manhattan", with its theme of UFO contact and mafia-like spooks watching them, foreshadows the actual future relationship between Edie's sister, Suky, and Jack Sarfatti.And I'd like to see her rise again.
Patti Smith [2] Edie's image lives on. An icon that has the power to evoke an era or inspire imitation. Carl Jung attributed to such images a kind of magnetic power to attract events, linking the future and the past through loops of meaning which cannot be explained by the accepted definition of causality. Edie's power to fascinate is demonstrated by her continual 'resurrection' in books and films. While working on this article, Oliver Stone's
"The Doors"
played on the TV unwatched. Suddenly, I looked up and there was Edie, gyrating amid a swirl of bodies on the screen - 10 seconds of Edie and we are back at the Factory, ca., 1967. Edie is gone. Andy wants nothing more to do with her. Viva has taken her place but she is not Edie. Jim Morrison, the latest avatar of the god of "Rock and Cock", is brought to the Factory to meet Andy who greets Morrison like the returning prodigal son. The camera focuses on a gold telephone, which Warhol picks up and holds out to Morrison saying:
The moment has a ritual intensity, as if Edie, as Muse, uses Warhol as her channel to annoint Morrison as the next immortal living legend, and the "God-phone" a symbol of sovereignty. Jim and Edie become interlinked in a loop of meaning, a synchronicity, which has the power to cause events in the here and now. Changing the article to include this synchronicity entangled me in a strange loop of meaning.Edie gave me this phone, it's a God phone. ... She said I could talk to God with it. I don't have anything to say to God... This is for you. Now you can talk to God.
Edie's God Phone is a symbolic representation of a device and a new paradigm that could change our lives and our view of the universe. What we are talking about here is a universe designed and created from the future. In such a universe, things that seemed to be mere random coincidences, acquire new levels of meaning. becoming part of a new kind of "supercausality". Unhappy with the classical explanation of causality, because it left so many meaningful events in his life unexplained, psychologist Dr. Carl Jung coined the term 'synchronicities' which are meaningful coincidences. Thoughts and events sharing a common meaning are attracted to each other like magnets, across the seemingly impenetrable barrier of space-time; although there is no ordinary causal relationship between them, they are inextricably linked.
Jung relates a story of such a synchronicity that occurred to him while conducting analysis with a young woman. "The night before coming to see him she dreamt that she had been given a golden scarab. Jung was sitting with his back to the closed window listening to her recount her dream when he heard a gentle tapping behind his shoulder. Looking round, he saw a small insect knocking against the windowpane. Opening the window, the insect flew in and he caught it in his hand. what he saw was a scarabaeid beetle, the closest equivalent to a golden scarab one could find in Switzerland. 'I must admit', Jung wrote, 'that nothing like it has ever happened before or since and that the dream of the patient has remained unique in my experience.' Jung kept coming across connections which 'I simply could not explain as chance groupings.'" [3]
Jung's intuitive rebellion against causality were encouraged by new developments in quantum physics. Jung studied physics with his patient Wolfgang Pauli [4], in order to learn more of the nature of causality.
Dissatisfied with what he learned, Jung concluded that the quantum theory must be incomplete. Many years later biological scientist John Lilly, famous for his work with dolphins, also found the scientific explanation of causality to be unacceptable. What he calls "cosmic coincidence control" and what Jung called "synchronicities" are an integral part of what Dr. Jack Sarfatti says "is the ordering principle of a superluminal (faster-than-light) universe."
In a superluminal universe, what seems to be miraculous or impossible, becomes everyday. People remember the future. Famous cases of accurate dreams of the sinking of a ship or the death of a loved one will be explainable under the new theories being propounded at the leading edge of quantum physics. Becoming aware of Edie's image on my TV screen at the same moment I was writing about her caused me to alter what I was writing, because it seemed as if something was telling me to include Edie in the story. If true, this is the kind of future intervention that alters lives, often without our being consciously aware of anything happening.
Sarfatti describes a synchronicity linking him with Edie and the Sedgwicks:
" My girlfriend, on and off, from 1981 to 1987 was Suky Sedgwick, Edie's sister. While waiting for Suky at San Francisco State library, I came across a book that had the name Sedgwick on the binding. The book was called Apology for Old Maids by Suky's grandfather, Henry Dwight Sedgwick. In an essay called 'House of Sorrow' ,there is a quote claiming that the future rather than the past is 'the home of explanation'. I was stunned. I had just read Sir Fred Hoyle's book The Intelligent Universe and had seen almost the same quote. Sedgwick's book was almost 80 years older than Hoyle's. I'd experienced yet another 'loop' in time."
I should like to make an alarming suggestion...I suggest that we may actually be going badly wrong when we apply the usual physical rules for time when we consider consciousness! There is indeed, something very odd about the way that time actually enters our conscious perceptions... suppose there is something even vaguely teleological about the effects of consciousness, so that a future impression might affect a past action. Surely this would lead us into a contradiction.
Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind What Penrose, a Royal Society Fellow at Oxford, is considering with some trepidation, is the complete overturning of our notions of cause and effect. The question is this 'Do we live in a superluminal universe or not'? Upon the answer depends the very nature of existence itself. A superluminal universe means final cause, or what we call God. A universe that is not superluminal is most probably random without God.
3.. 2.. 1.. Contact
In 1952, Jack Sarfatti, now a physicist and would-be designer of a quantum signaling device or God Phone that will receive messages from the future, received a phone call when he was thirteen years old that changed his life.
I was reading a book on computer switching circuits at home when the phone rang. I answered it and heard a strange sequence of clunking mechanical sounds. Then a metallic sounding voice comes on the line. A cold mechanical voice is the only way I can describe it. It gives a long series of numbers that I did not understand and then calls me 'Jack' and says it's a 'conscious computer on board a spacecraft.'. It may have said it was from the future, but I am not sure. However, that was the implication of what it said. Anyway, it says I've been selected to be one of '400 young receptive minds' to be part of a special project but that I must make the choice myself. The voice on the phone told me that I would begin to meet the others I was to work with in twenty years. I was scared and everything in me screamed to say NO! and hang up. I felt a strong jolt of electricity go up my spine to the base of my skull and I heard myself say YES. I was terrified and fascinated. The voice said 'Good, go out on your fire-escape and we will send a ship to pick you up in ten minutes'. When I hung up I ran like a bat out of hell and found my friend Winky, who is now a homicide detective in Brooklyn. We, and a few other kids, went back to my apartment to wait for the flying saucer but it never came.Years later, while Jack's mother, Millie, was reading Andrija Puharich's book URI, she came across the account of Uri Geller's alleged contact by a conscious computer aboard a spacecraft which mirrored Sarfatti's experience even to the details. Millie, said to Jack,"This sounds just like all those phone calls you got when you were a kid."Sarfatti said,"I was stunned. I only remembered one phone call. I still only remember one call. Millie told me that there were many calls over a three week period. She said I was walking around glassy-eyed. Finally she picked up the phone and listened out of concern for me. She heard the cold mechanical voice. She told it to quit bothering me and stop calling. The calls stopped."
What is this rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.
W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming Albert Einstein, father of relativity and a deeply religious man, was never comfortable with the idea of a Godless, random universe. In 1953, almost 20 years after his famous EPR paper prohibiting "spooky" action-at-a-distance, Einstein admitted to his assistant, Ernst Straus, that he had second thoughts "You know I have recently lost confidence in the principle of no action-at-a-distance."
Sarfatti explained that Einstein's 1935 paper showed that the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle could be violated without action-at -a-distance. Since quantum mechanics is based on the uncertainty principle, it could not be considered a complete description of reality. The uncertainty principle asserts that certain physical properties (like energy and time or momentum and position) are incompatible with each other and cannot be measured to arbitrarily small precisions (statistical standard deviations) simultaneously in the same experimental setup. In plain language this means you can't change your tires and give your car a speed test at the same time.
Sarfatti continued:
"Einstein couldn't accept action-at-a-distance because that would violate causality. Causality means causes before effects. It stems directly from the way conscious beings experience the flow of time. Einstein's theory of relativity rested on two pillars, causality and symmetry. In 1935, Einstein believed that both pillars were essential for relativity. Today's experimental data shows that causality, the major stumbling block in the way of action-at-a-distance and superluminal communication, is wrong and that only symmetry is necessary for relativity."Sarfatti's eyes glow with intensity as he takes on the dubious task of explaining the forbidding subject of quantum mechanics to a non- scientist.
"Quantum mechanics is only an approximation for inanimate matter!", he says, referring to the insistence of most physicists that useful faster-than-light communication is beyond our reach. Eberhard, Stapp, and Josephson all believe in action-at-a-distance, but say there's no way within standard quantum mechanics to locally decode such influences. They also think that quantum mechanics is only an approximation to a deeper theory of living matter in which superluminal communication does happen."Recent discoveries may have bolstered the case for a superluminal universe. The lead headline in the New York Times recently trumpeted, "Scientists Report Profound Insight On How Time Began," The large type and the picture were impressive enough but the latest computer generated pictures from the COBE satellite provide very strong confirmation for the existence of cold dark matter, the (as yet) invisible stuff which reveals itself only through its gravity and is now thought to comprise 90% of the universe. According to Sarfatti:
"This mysterious dark matter, moving in the imaginary time of quantum gravity, may bring a brave new world of time travel through wormholes and starships roaming the vastness of interstellar space."The crux of the matter as far as superluminality is concerned is that the universe obeyed the laws of quantum mechanics at its birth subjecting it to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle when it was smaller than an electron. Hoyle and Sarfatti believe that it was at this primordial moment that consciousness from the future created the universe bringing itself into being.Einstein's work on relativity provided a starting point for intuitive physicists such as Wheeler, Feynman, Josephson and others. The new physics has also given rise to a new cosmology of which Sir Fred Hoyle is a leading proponent. Hoyle compiled a massive body of evidence in his book The Intelligent Universe that seems to strongly suggest that only a living and intelligent (superluminal) God could have created a universe where life (us) exists. The very conditions of the birth of the universe (the big bang) were specifically tailored to produce life. The final anthropic cosmological principle championed by Hoyle, Sarfatti and others was first discovered in weaker form by Brandon Carter, who in 1968 stated
"Had the numerical values of certain fundamental constants (the speed of light, the mass of an electron etc.) been only slightly different - the universe would not be able to sustain life as we know it."Experimentalist Alain Aspect proved [5], the reality of faster-than-light action-at-a-distance in an experiment on the quantum connection between pairs of photons [6]. Delayed choice experiments [7] and gamma photon-proton scattering experiments [8] showed that future causes do create past effects.
Recent work by such respected physicists as David Deutsch, Kip Thorne, Yakir Aharanov, Alcubierre and Sarfatti, involving time-travel to the past, future-causality and other mind-boggling vistas, is invigorating superluminal physics as never before. For example, Alcubierre has shown that a Star Trek faster-than-light warp drive is possible within the known laws of physics. Indeed, Sarfatti, interviewed by Kim Burrafato in UFO Magazine (Vol 9, No. 30 1994), speculates that UFO's, if real, would be time-travelling ships from our future explaining the strange phone call(s) he got in 1952. Sarfatti is no true believer here. He is quite willing to admit that the 1952 call(s) may have been some sort of prank, and all the subsequent synchronicities a random coincidence.
Sarfatti's credibility among other physicists, like the superluminal conjecture, seemed for years to lay dormant in the barren soil of a conservative physics establishment. For many years, talk of faster-than-light communication and time travel has been beyond the pale of good science. It was a suitable subject for comic books and science fiction only, 'strictly kid stuff.'
Sarfatti, a physics professor at SDSU in the sixties (while still in his twenties) suffered for his connection to this 'kid stuff'. He quit his job at SDSU and went to the University of London to learn from David Bohm who had worked with Einstein. Sarfatti then spent almost twenty years out of the 'academic loop' of mainstream physics.
During his 'exile' he spent his time lecturing on time machines over cappuccinos and vino in the Caffe Trieste in San Francisco's ragged Bohemia, North Beach. Sarfatti's former Cornell professor, Herb Gold, mentions Sarfatti's North Beach seminars in his recent books Travels in San Francisco and Bohemia.
The dictum that nature abhors a vacuum was certainly true for Sarfatti. He became friendly with some prominent local conservatives, among them neoconservative leader A. Lawrence Chickering [9] and movie magnate Marshal Naify. [10]
"The three of us were having lunch at Enrico's in North Beach. Suddenly Naify launched into a monologue describing the future Star Wars program in what turned out to be astonishingly accurate detail. It was an amazing performance."Sarfatti said."Even more astonishing since Naify was not involved in the sciences and no one was talking about anything resembling Star Wars in the media at that time. Chickering was so impressed by the idea he asked me to give a scientific summary of what Naify had outlined. The summary was sent to Paul Nitze, Reagan's chief nuclear weapons negotiator. Chickering told me Nitze liked what I wrote. I talked about rendering nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete. A channel to Cap Weinberger had opened up through his son, Cap Jr. I sent him all the same material, which reached Reagan through his father, the Secretary of Defense. The physics was questionable, but it made good psychic warfare against the Soviets. We bluffed the Soviets and won the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust."A fervent believer in synchronicity and in himself, Sarfatti made numberless versions of God Phones or "Future Machines" - many of them wrong, he admits. He fired his salvos to colleagues all over the world. Feynman believed he had gone crazy, and he certainly wasn't alone in that belief. Mostly they reacted bemusedly when his name came up. A few had sterner reactions. Henry Stapp, of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, who carried on a ten year correspondence with Sarfatti, wrote an angry letter to the Editor of Physics Essays that Sarfatti was incompetent for insisting that faster-than-light communication was possible in standard quantum mechanics. More than ten years ago the late Heinz Pagels, a highly respected professor at Rockefeller University and President of the New York Academy of Sciences, shouted at me on the telephone that Sarfatti was "a charlatan" for his belief in action-at-a-distance. "Sarfatti was crazy", who was he to sweep aside causality with a wave of his hand. Pagels held Sarfatti in bad odor because, in addition to his support for action-at-a-distance, he worked on precognitive remote viewing with New Age people from Esalen [11], such as Uri Geller and Andrija Puharich. Esalen would also serve as the place where the "Hot Tub Diplomacy" [12] of the early 80's took place.
Something rather chilling occurred a few years later. Pagels dreamt of mountain climbing (he was an expert climber) and falling to his death. So shaken was he by the dream's vividness that he told his friends and even mentioned it at the very end of his book, The Cosmic Code.
I dreamed I was clutching at the face of a rock but it would not hold. Gravel gave way. I grasped for a shrub but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I fell into the abyss. Suddenly I realized that my fall was relative; there was no bottom and no end. A feeling of pleasure overcame me. I realized that what I embody, cannot be destroyed. It is written into the cosmic code, the order of the universe.Not long afterward, while on an undemanding climb with friends, he slipped and fell to his death. Had Pagels experienced a genuine precognition? That was something that he just knew was impossible. Yet it consumed his attention until he slipped and fell on a climb that was regarded as easy, safe even for a less experienced climber than Pagels. Sarfatti has no doubt but that Pagels had a first hand experience with future causality. Many people, he says have a strange blindness to this kind of thing. In some way Pagels believed and accepted his precognition as part of his cosmic destiny as we can see from a closing quote in The Cosmic Code: "But it seems certain that the recent human contact with the invisible world of quanta and the vastness of the cosmos will shape the destiny of our species or whatever we may become.And, as Sarfatti points out,"The invisible world of the quanta obey the superluminal dictates of the future."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 Parsifal [19] 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."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.
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