The Ruling Elite Believe in Reincarnation and the Convergence of Man and Machine

"There exists in the world today, and has existed for thousands of years, a body of enlightened humans united in what might be termed, an Order of the Quest. It is composed of those whose intellectual and spiritual perceptions have revealed to them that civilization has secret destiny. The outcome of this 'secret destiny' is a World Order ruled by a king with supernatural powers. This king was descended of a divine race; that is, he belonged to the Order of the Illumined for those who come to a state of wisdom then belong to a family of heroes―perfected human beings." - Manly P. Hall, 33° Mason, "The Lost Keys of Freemasonry"

"Satanists believe that they will reenter the 'reincarnation cycle' in the future, at which time they will be able to enjoy the fruits of their labors from centuries before. These occultists even believe that they will come back as future leaders, at least as high as they were, based upon the occult Law of Karma. Therefore, they are patient to the extreme, but always alert to any change of the prevailing attitudes and belief structure of the people that might herald the time when the New World Order could be established." - David Bay, A Christian's View on Conspiracy in World Affairs, March 13, 1998

"Skull and Bones members, like all secret societies before them, are said to seek the 'tree of life' by which to restore man's lost immortality. This knowledge is widely believed by Bonesmen to be held in the secrets of DNA and by way of cloning so as to avoid death and judgment. In this sense Bonesmen share a common belief with cultists like the Raelians, who believe man is the product of 'alien scientists,' and who wish to overthrow traditional Christian religion with a one world religion based on 'aliens as god' with Lucifer as their chief 'god.' One of the symbols used to represent this philosophy of 'rebirth from death' is the phoenix, and it is a favorite symbol of these cultists." - BC Revolution, Secret Societies

The financial elite believe they can attain the fountain of youth and "restore man's lost immortality" by merging with technology; their goal is to evolve [through technology, science, bionics, robotics] into superhumans that will live forever. - Alex Jones, Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement

"Man is a god in the making. And as the mystic myths of Egypt, on the potter's wheel, he is being molded. When his light shines out to lift and preserve all things, he receives the triple crown of godhood." ― Manly P. Hall, 33° Mason, "The Lost Keys of Freemasonry"



The super-rich believe that they will live forever by evolving into a separate species via science and technology (they also believe that their ancestors will be reincarnated to enjoy eternal life on this earth with them). They worship the creation ('Mother Earth') rather than the Creator (our Almighty God, who will destroy this earth and create a new heaven and new earth when Christ returns), so they have an urgent need to drastically reduce the world's population (the 'useless eaters') to preserve what's left of the earth's resources for themselves (or, as they put it, 'to alleviate pressure on natural resources by slowing population growth.') Perhaps they'll allow their Sierra Club minions to live along with them in this great society of 'the enlightened' since they'll need people to run the machines and do the paperwork.

Super-Rich ‘May Evolve into Separate Species’

The rich could all be cyborgs in the future.

By Amy Willis, Telegraph
October 25, 2009

The super-rich may evolve into a separate species entirely in the future due to enhancements in biotechnology and robotic engineering, American futurologist Paul Saffo has said.

“Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton.” - Bertrand Russell, “The Impact of Science on Society,” 1953

Mr. Saffo, from San Francisco, says in the future people will be able to grow their own replacement organs, take specially tailored drugs, and use genetic research tools to alert them from any possible hereditary health dangers.

He adds that tomorrow’s world will be a fusion of biology and technology, where robots do the chores, cars drive themselves and artificial limbs are better than real ones.

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Mr. Saffo’s comments reflect claims by American scientist Ray Kurzweil who only a few months ago said immortality was only 20 years away due to the speed of advancements in nanotechnology.

But Mr. Saffo says these improvements would only be affordable to the super-rich. And because of this, he says, advancements may lead to a divide between the classes and eventually could lead to the super-rich evolving into a different species entirely, leaving his not-so-rich counterpart behind.

“In the 1980s it was the personal computer – came out of the garage, changed the world. In the 1990s it was the web. The next big device to wander into our lives is robots,” he told the Sunday Times.

“We may find we are absolutely dependent upon these electronic insects and that we don’t even know we are dependent upon them until something breaks.

“I sometimes wonder if the very rich can live, on average, 20 years longer than the poor. That’s 20 more years of earning and saving. Think about wealth and power and the advantages that you pass on to your children.”

Two Hundred and Fifty Pills to Immortality

By Courtney Boyd Myers, Forbes
May 5, 2009

Book Review: Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman's "Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever."

So you want to live forever? Ray Kurzweil will tell you how.

The life and work of the futurist and inventor was the subject of a film at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, Barry Ptolemy's Transcendent Man. When he was in his early 20s, Kurzweil watched his father lose a battle with heart disease. The experience spurred his deeply rooted desire to conquer death.

He's received White House honors from three presidents, including the National Medal of Technology, and is known for his innovations in print-to-speech text translation for the blind.

Suffering from heart disease himself at age 61, Kurzweil takes between 180 and 250 pills a day to help him live long enough to reach what he calls "Singularity," a point after which, because of tremendous advancements in technology, he believes he will be able to live forever.

In his most recent book, Transcend, he and co-author Terry Grossman offer detailed support for the "living long enough to live forever" concept, which was introduced in their previous book, Fantastic Voyage.

Many academics liken Kurzweil to a prophet; others call him a crackpot. Either way, he has reached celebrity status for his bold theories about Singularity, when man and machine will converge, creating super-intelligent, immortal beings.

According to Kurzweil, within this century we will have blood-cell-sized robots, or "nanobots," swimming through our bloodstreams to keep us healthy by zapping cancer, correcting DNA errors, removing toxins, extending our memories and eating up brownies before they hit our thighs... 

Each chapter of Transcend ends with futuristic conversations between "Ray, Terry2034 and Reader," which provide a glimpse into Kurzweil's visions for the future of health care. He sees a world equipped with technological advances and far fewer negative biological consequences.

The 400-plus-page book is easily summed up: don't smoke, eat well, get frequent check-ups, manage stress and exercise—and, of course, buy Kurzweil and Grossman's longevity supplements. But what sets this self-help book aside from the rest is its overall goal—to literally live forever.

Many believe that what Kurzweil preaches is science fiction. What's certain, however, is that his vision—that we will reach Singularity by 2045—make him a brazen optimist. Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired magazine, doubts Kurzweil will be able to live forever, writing on his blog, "The Singularity is an illusion that will be constantly retreating—always 'near' but never arriving." 

But whether Kurzweil's controversial ideas provoke academics or challenge religious zealots, it's impossible not to recognize him as a man who, in his quest for immorality, has so blurred the boundary between man, machine and medicine.

Calling All Transhumanists

By Courtney Boyd Myers, Forbes
October 2, 2009

Technology futurists love to talk about the Singularity as the point in time when technology starts to progress so rapidly that machine intelligence melds with and surpasses human intelligence. It is to futurists what the Rapture is to fundamentalist Christians.

Those who welcome or fear this eventuality are gathering this weekend in New York City for the fourth annual Singularity Summit. Speaking at the summit are some of the better-known tech soothsayers, including author and programmer Ray Kurzweil; Steve Wolfram, the founder of the novel search engine Alpha; and Aubrey de Grey, an expert on anti-aging science. Also giving talks are Australian philosopher David Chalmers, whose idea inspired the Matrix film series, and Pay-Pal co-founder Peter Thiel, who has donated in the six figures to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the organization putting on the event. Last year, the summit drew 1,000 curious academics and entrepreneurs in San Jose, Calif. (See our story on the 2007 Summit here.)

Michael Vassar, the president of the institute, gives the Singularity just under a 25% chance of happening by 2040 and a 70% chance by 2060. When we do cross that line, Vassar says nothing will be the same.

“Humans living in the post-Singularity world will be as powerless as jellyfish are in today’s world,” he says.

His odds don’t take into account the chances of the world plunging into rapid technological decline due to a nuclear war or a worldwide collapse into barbarism.

Vassar’s six staffers at the Singularity Institute, including Kurzweil, publish papers with titles such as, “Uncertain Future Project,” “Global Catastrophic Risk Project” and “Economics and Machine Intelligence,” and have developed software that supposedly predicts technology’s trajectories and generates odds on the occurrences of global catastrophes like nuclear war and global warming.

Singularists fall into optimist and pessimist camps:

Optimists, such as Kurzweil, look forward to living in an age in which human intelligence is enhanced by brain implants that extend our memories, enhance our senses and allow us to solve problems faster and with greater accuracy.

The pessimists, and Vassar is one of them, see threats to humanity from the rise of an unfriendly machine intelligence that will want to enslave humans (think The Matrix) and use our brain matter for endless computation, much as we’ve used computers in the past 60 years.

Vassar says he and his colleagues at the Singularity Institute are working on seeing that a Matrix-like future never happens. Institute research fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky coined the term “Friendly AI” to describe an AI that could be built to have a moral conscience. One of the institute’s chief goals is to encourage other scientists to create this Friendly AI. (Read "Vassar's Machine Minds" in the AI Report.)

Many computer scientists and engineers remain very skeptical of the Singularity and the cargo-cult enthusiasm that surrounds it. They don’t believe in humanity’s ability to reach a point at which technology will be so complex as to render us inconsequential. It’s also likely that for economic reasons, technical progress and computer hardware performance will never accelerate at the speed required to reach the Singularity.

Will Wright, the creator of The Sims videogame series, has gone on record saying that machines will never achieve the kind of intelligence and creativity of which humans are capable. But he does believe that machines will one day be able to make themselves more intelligent, effectively reprogramming themselves until the first real AI achieves its own sort of sentience, one that is very alien to our own human cognizance.

Ariel Rabkin, a third year Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkley’s Computer Science program, doubts that many technical people take the Singularity seriously.

“Human-comparable AI is really hard,” he says, “And we’re nowhere close to achieving it.” He adds, “I can tell you that nobody I work with at Berkeley or elsewhere has ever mentioned it. And just to be clear, I don’t just mean, ‘We don’t talk about it in courses.’ I mean, nobody mentions it, at all, ever. We don’t think about it.”

But the Singularity continues to pique the curiosity of the layman. Over the next 12 months, Hollywood will release several movies with trans-humanist themes, such as Jonathan Mostow’s Surrogates, James Cameron’s Avatar, Barry Ptolemy’s Transcendent Man and The Singularity is Near, with a script by Ray Kurzweil. 

In a time when the publishing industry is struggling, Better Humans LLC has just launched a new magazine called H+ covering the trans-humanism scene for fans of radical technological change.

It’s possible that because the Singularity is a relatively new idea, it’s embraced mostly by the youth and dismissed as a counter-cultural trend by an older generation of professors and scientists.

“I’m the older side of the Singularists,” says Vassar, who is 30 years old.

The Singularity probably won’t destroy humanity in our lifetime, but it’s productive to keep asking the question of whether technology is serving us or if things are the other way around.

Microchip Implant: Mark of the Beast or the Coming 'Singularity'?

By Jim Edwards, Bnet
October 9, 2009

The news that Novartis wants a deal with Proteus Biomedical to produce a microchip implant called “Raisin” that will text your mobile phone when it’s time to take another pill, and VeriChip’s efforts to link microchip implants to online health records, has caused two separate controversies that seem bound to collide: some Christians believe the devices are eerily similar to the “mark of the beast” as described in the book of Revelation; while “singularity” buffs — those who look forward to the merger of humans and intelligent technology — regard it as a bold step forward in improving health.



The Christians make the obvious argument. On the subject of “the beast,” Revelation 13:16-18 states:

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: 

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. 

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

The suggestion is that if the government starts requiring chip implants, then this will be a sign that the antichrist is in charge and we’re at the end of days. (Of course, the beast in question will have “two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon,” which should be easy to spot in a presidential candidate.)

On the other hand, the singularity buffs see nothing but good news. There’s an obvious advantage on the club scene, as VeriChip could replace both photo ID and cash:

Beautiful club-goers have a problem: If you’re going to wear a halter top and micro-skirt, there’s not much of anywhere to put a wallet. And who wants to carry a purse when you’re there to dance? Luckily, a company called VeriChip this year unveiled a solution based on radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology.

More importantly, the chip that increases your compliance with your prescription — so you don’t stop taking them before the full course of pills is up — will only improve public health, the singularitarians believe:

Raisin, or any system that helps us discipline our health habits is bound to help us live longer and happier. That’s the promise of Body 2.0 and I hope that the partnership between Proteus and Novartis means that promise is gaining ground in the global marketplace.

And finally: Proteus CEO Andrew Thompson believes his company’s market opportunity could be $100 billion. This is delusional. The serious debate here is over privacy and tracking concerns, and whether anyone might be required to have an implant. The vast majority of patients and consumers simply won’t want one.

The Psychedelic Transhumanists

By Michael Garfield, H+ Magazine
September 29, 2009

...Transhumanism in a fortune cookie: the familiar human world is just one point along a continuum of evolution, and we have an unprecedented capacity to participate in that process...
The common vision of “psychedelic transhumanists” shares much with the rest of the transhuman community, including an embrace of technology and science as both potent and inevitable; an evolutionary model of the universe and humanity; a sense of the human organism as something that can be tinkered with and expanded; a recognition of drugs as a technology that can dramatically reinvent identity, and a playful challenging of fixed boundaries....

McKenna: Everything is about to get very much more complicated, much larger, the number of choices are about to exponentially explode. In a sense, these technologies point us toward, if not literal godhood, then a kind of fictional godhood. We are all going to become the masters of the narrative in which we are embedded. Our separate stories are going to take on dimensions so multifarious that for all practical purposes we will each move into a cosmos of our own creation and control.

Pearce: ...Given an imperfect knowledge of the future, we have to be careful that transhumanism does not lapse into merely commodifying the unknowable, playing to people’s drive for immortality and pleasure as a meme in competition with the satisfaction of more immediate concerns. If transhumanism is understood as faith in our transcendental potential, then wisdom is a technology and real transhumanism starts now.

Davis: ...If one thing makes itself apparent from the psychedelic experience, it’s that the more you know the more you don’t know, and admitting this is a form of death. The acceleration of intelligence and extension of the individual lifespan means that life itself will increasingly come to resemble a constant re-imagining of self — not the indefinite perpetuation that many of us desire, but an ongoing process of death and rebirth. And by its very nature, death is across the event horizon, an impenetrable unknown...

Leary: A renaissance preaches a basic religion of humanism. The aim of individual life is to know yourself and treat each other as human beings...

McKenna: ...So this is an enterprise of integrity and millennial implication, and what lies as the goal is true humanness, in sympathetic symbiosis with the planet, and with these strange children that we have brought into the world, our machines. That is the challenge at the end of history. As we approach the event horizon, the only mature response is a humble participation in its unfolding mystery... which involves a deep scrutiny of our assumptions that the future will be the modified present, that the posthuman will be merely “humanity plus”...

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