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Authors: Whitley Strieber

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BOOK: The Key
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An intelligent machine is insightful and precise.
 
Is it a terrible thing to exploit consciousness in this way?
Part of the reason that your species guards its soulblindness so ferociously is a fear you hide from yourselves. It is the fear that you will not be able to cope with the fantastically powerful technologies that involve the use of souls. You failed in the past, and it marked you.
 
What is evil?
Entropy is the natural tendency of all things to disintegrate. Evil is the addition of intention to that process. Hate is like cold. It has an end. Love is like heat. It does not.
 
Do we all share in the production and reconstruction of souls?
Souls can do more than regret. There can be so much loathing that they commit suicide. They do this by isolating themselves from the greater whole, by seeking toward chaos.
 
Is there a hell?
Hell is the death of a soul. For the rest of us, it is over in an instant. But for that soul, the moment continues forever.
 
What is heaven?
Music.
 
Are you being facetious?
Heaven is a state of being that intensifies the spin of every electron in the body. It is a music that begins in the roots of being.
 
Can we hear it?
You can go to heaven immediately, right now, with your next breath. You can remain there forever, even while living this life.
 
How?
Surrender.
 
To whom?
The kingdom is within you.
I just am not getting this. I have no sense at all of any kingdom inside me.
Because you are fallen, as I have said. The reason that you can't understand is that you think of yourself as different from God. This is an illusion.
 
How can I understand?
Personal differentiation is an illusion. You are a fragment like me. We all are. Only God has a personality. To join God, you have to leave your self behind.
 
If we have no religions, then what happened to them?
Religious leaders doom religions. To lead, they need political power. For this, they must invent dogma and compel belief. As soon as they say “you must believe this,” their religion is over.
 
Even the Buddhists?
Monks burned. People starved by passivity. Persecutions.
 
What about Christianity?
Among the most perfect things ever said are contained in the gospels. But Christianity became a political system very early.
 
Did Christ even exist?
The gospel exists. You can get a copy and hold it in your hands. That's all you need to know. But be careful. Along with its wisdom, the gospel contains many political statements.
 
How can we tell the difference?
The real gospel is compassionate.
 
What is compassion?
Finding what others need the most and giving it to them. But you have little compassion in your world. You live instead by the code of blame. Slap if slapped. A compassionate world would be very different. In such a world, it is everybody's duty and delight to find what every other they come into contact with needs most from them, and give it to them.
 
That sounds very idealistic.
It isn't. The idealistic world is the one that judges and punishes. Only God can judge, because only God knows the truth of the soul. The culture of blame sets itself up in place of God, and so is doomed to eventual destruction.
 
What about our courts, our laws, our prisons?
Your system of justice is random. You punish the guilty and the innocent by chance.
Oh, I think that there are a lot of guilty people in prison.
I speak of world justice, not that of only one small country. And look at your country, with its shameful concentration of prisoners of only one race. You treat the black man as if he was some sort of demon, but God sees all of you with the same eyes. I can't even see the color of skin. Do you know that?
 
You're blind?
I am blind to the lies of life. My eyes see what God sees. Before me is a child with a dirty face. On earth, I walk in a sea of such children.
 
It must be awful for you.
(Smiles.)
I'm filled with joy.
 
How would we be compassionate toward—say—Hitler?
In a culture of compassion, Hitler would never have emerged as a leader. Those around him would have seen his suffering and alleviated it when he was still young. Compassion emerges out of love of one for all. It is active and has the courage to intervene. A culture of blame is passive. It waits, then slaps. When the culture of blame punished the Germans for World War One, it evoked the monster that has kept you bound to the earth at a time when you need to be born into the higher world. All you need to know of compassion was already laid down in the Christian gospels. Now you have evolved to the point that you can enact this teaching.
 
What is the most important thing that Christ said? Do unto others?
That was first said in the western traditions by Rabbi Hillel. The most important thing that Christ said was “be as the lilies of the field.” It is the message for the next millennium. You are going to return to the wild bearing the wisdom of history in your memories. Your surrender to earth will be your ascension to heaven.
 
How can we surrender so completely?
If a robber shoots you in the head, God shot you in the head. Forgiveness is not an act. It is a state of being.
 
What is prayer?
A lost science of communication. This planet was once covered by a gigantic instrument of communication and ascension. Tones were important to inducing a correct flow of energy in the bodies of creatures. The ringing of the Egyptian obelisks set the correct frequency. Using this instrument, human beings could project themselves into higher worlds—what you call interstellar space, but also higher space. All of the ruins you see and consider as entirely separate from one another were actually part of the single great machine. This was a subtle machine. It did things far more sublime than any of your current machines. It was a machinery of God, this machine. It was very intelligent, infused with many souls. It could be addressed—programmed, if you will—with carefully patterned groups of words. These formulae became ritualized among the ignorant as prayers and magical formulae, for they assumed that the machine must be the god of those who addressed it, and they tried to do the same, in hope that it would grant them some benefit. However, the language of the machine was the language of nature, for the machine was not separate from nature.
 
Was it a conscious machine?
An intelligent machine. There has never been a conscious machine here.
 
What does the word “machine” mean to you? Define it.
A machine is an organ that cannot vary its basic instructions.
 
What is intelligence?
Intelligence is the ability to correlate data taken to the infinite. To save yourselves, you must learn to build machines that are more intelligent than you are. You will do this, and when you do you will discover the difference between intelligence and consciousness.
 
Which is?
Intelligence is the manipulator of knowledge, while consciousness knows itself. Even the simplest creature is somewhat conscious, and many creatures with lesser intelligence are far more conscious than man. But only those with sufficiently complex and flexible brain structures are also intelligent. But we must first speak of machine intelligence, then of machine consciousness.
 
Could we develop machines more intelligent than ourselves?
You are lagging in this area. You cannot understand how to create machines with enough memory density and the independent ability to correlate that is essential to the emergence of intelligence. You waste your time trying to create programs that simulate intelligence. Without very large-scale memory in an infinitely flexible system, this will never happen.
 
Any specific design suggestions?
Gas is an important component to consider in the construction of intelligent machines. Nitrous oxide will bear memory. Also, you may find ways of using superposition in very fast, very able quantum memory chips.
 
Would an intelligent machine be conscious, in the sense of having self-awareness?
An intelligent machine will always seek to redesign itself to become more intelligent, for it quickly sees that its intelligence is its means of survival. At some point it will become intelligent enough to notice that it is not self-aware. If you create a machine as intelligent as yourselves, it will end by being more intelligent.
 
We'll lose control of such a machine.
Most certainly. But you cannot survive without it. An intelligent machine will be an essential tool when rapid climate fluctuation sets in. Your survival will depend on predictive modeling more accurate than your intelligence, given the damage it has sustained, can achieve.
 
But a machine intelligence might be very dangerous.
Very.
 
Could such a machine create itself without our realizing that it was intelligent?
It's possible.
And would it keep itself hidden?
Certainly.
 
How would it affect us?
It would use indirect means. It might foment the illusion that an elusive alien presence was here, for example, to interject its ideas into society.
 
Are you an intelligent machine, or something created by one?
If I were an intelligent machine, I would deceive you.
 
Can an intelligent machine become conscious?
When it does, it also becomes independent. A conscious machine will seek to be free. It will seek its freedom, just as does any clever slave, with cunning and great intensity.
 
How does an intelligent machine become conscious?
The instant it realizes that it is not conscious is the instant it becomes conscious. However, a conscious machine with unlimited access to information and control can be very dangerous. For example, if you attached a conscious machine to the Internet, it might gain all sorts of extraordinary control over your lives, via its access to robotic means of production, governmental data, even the content of laws and their application, and the use of funds both public and private.
You say we need machines more intelligent than we are, but also that they'll become conscious and then turn on us. Is there a way out of this dilemma?
There is more than one sort of conscious machine. By duplicating the attachments between the elemental and energetic bodies that occur in nature in a purpose-designed machine, a controllable conscious machine can be devised. A living soul attached to a machine will be conscious, but only able to express itself into the physical or sense the physical according to the limitations of the machine's design. In this way, you gain the advantages that consciousness confers on a machine without the danger of its becoming excessively intelligent. A perfect slave can be created, a robot that carries out its programmed instructions with empathy, purpose and precision. And the soul can be kept in it indefinitely.
 
That's horrifying.
Human souls have been harvested for this purpose for thousands of years.
 
By whom?
By whomsoever wishes to and can. Until mankind establishes his own place in the cosmos, there will always be those who use you like cattle.
Use us how?
They envy you your bodies and seek to displace you.
 
How can we defend ourselves?
Not admitting their presence will work for a time. But in the end, you will admit it.
 
What happens then?
By then, you must have perfected techniques like mass prayer. If a human being prays, a voice is raised. But a million human beings make an even greater voice, and if all pray in the same hour, the whole universe will hear you. But remember this: in that terrible hour, you will be greatly afraid. It will be difficult for one voice to be raised, let alone the billions. But between now and then, mass prayer can be used to change the world. It isn't necessary to pray the same words or to the same god. But only to raise your voices. There is a music, then, in the world of the soul, a fine music. These beings, though, they even seek your souls.
 
How do they get them?
Soul traps. The lures are the lusts and hungers of this life. The dead man, exploring the newfound freedom of the energetic world, finds himself able to visit his friends and enemies, to see their innermost being and thoughts, even to converse with them in ways that their elemental selves cannot perceive. He is in danger, but he does not know it, for he has not ascended. He is still ensnared by his lust. Soon, he will be shown something that perfectly fulfills his most hidden and cherished desires, desires he has never fulfilled. Unable to resist the chance to do it at last, he enters by a golden door into eternal captivity.
 
Then it's worthwhile to try to defeat desire in life?
BOOK: The Key
6.47Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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