Man on a Pendulum

I wish young Jack Sarfatti had been present when In order to illustrate the motion of a pendulum, a science teacher once asked my school class to imagine a man sitting on a swing and being given some initial push. Upon asking the name of the man on the swing and also the name of the person who gave the first push, I created uproar in class equal to poor Oliver Twist asking for more porridge. The hapless teacher, after having quelled the melee, said that neither person had a name, whereupon I asked if the two people involved were political prisoners. The resulting laughter earned me a day in detention accompanied by a stern Thou Shalt Not warning by the headmaster himself (indeed) about the dangers of trying to "personalise pure abstractions." It might come as a surprise to some that yes indeed, teachers of those pre-Fall days (I was but 10 years of age), used such language to youngsters as distinct from giving politically-correct talks about alternative sexuality, diets, cooking tips, or the politics of dance.

Of course I was later to find that science seen as a culture amongst cultures had more Thou Shalt Nots per unit-concept than a jack- rabbit had second cousins.
This experience was a good warning introduction to science. Many years later, whilst writing my biography of Charles Fort “Politics of the Imagination,” I learned only too well that intellectual conformity and paranoid cultural fear appeared to be the scientific order of the day. Certainly scientists cloaked large-scale anomalies (such as the UFO phenomenon) just as Victorian piano legs were draped lest they should inspire outrageous erotic dreams beyond all compass.


My science teacher was the modern equivalent of Dickens’ Mr Gradgrind of the novel Hard Times. Many years later I was to meet a considerable number of scientists in the course of my work, and I found that things had not improved much from the days of Gragrind or my school experience. Symbols of post-industrial despair, such human Rubik cubes weighed and measured and calculated like gone-mad grocers. Despite Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, they poured out facts and figures most of which were untrue, ill-conceived, rigged, or were sets of “facts” derived from mass deceptions such as Y2K or Global Warming.

Due to this depressing influence I left science forever until I met up with Dr. Jack Sarfatti Ph.D and read his books. It is indeed a miracle that Sarfatti is still alive and well after a 20th century cultural maelstrom which instituted a holocaust as regards all heretical scientific opinions. Like most of the Amazon rain-forest, statistically speaking, Jack Sarfatti should now be buried alive under ten feet of that solid corporate car park called Official Science.

As a scientific Bigfoot impossibility Sarfatti actually speaks, he has a face, a name, an opinion and a unique vision. Parts of Destiny Matrix read like a scientific version of Rousseau’s “Confessions.” The travels, the meetings with significant people, the tempestuous affairs, the broken relationships - and indeed his singing career - come from the inspirations of the major underground avant garde movements and institutions of both Europe and America.
It has to be pointed out here that Jack Sarfatti is not the perfect example of good liberal politically-correct views. He is always being asked to explain, to be rational and reasonable like more conventional folk. He looks down upon humble engineers and mechanists as if they were ragged and impoverished supplicants at his very own Court of Camelot. These rather grand aristocratic gestures are somewhat excusable because after all, he IS something of an aristocrat, being the direct traceable descendant of Rashi de Troyes, the mediaeval Rabbinic Scholar. Of course, such behaviour from a scientific visionary had resulted in him accumulating enemies by the tumbrel load.

The trouble is that Jack Sarfatti is a star. This makes things far worse. He has stardust all over him. He was born of StarTrek, in which he had a part. All stars have something of the magic of fantastic impossibilities in them. By contrast to the scientific drones, as an authentic 21st century Wizard, Sarfatti represents the StarTrek hopes and fears of all the technological years in a much more genuine sense.



He is possessed also of numerous other damning qualities. For infernal cheek, he has the nerve to add more than a touch of mystico-Illuminati to some of his scientific speculations. Of late, even a whiff of that was enough to send the clocks and measuring rods of the nation who gave us Alice in Wonderland into a veritable nanny-tizzy. Representatives of the nation who gave us that other Wonderland rabbit-hole called the Military-Industrial Complex were equally as baffled.

Being “disinvited” from your own conference is a lifestyle achievement few could equal. Recently, Brian Josephson (a Nobel Prize Winner to boot), physicist David Peat and our Jack were barred from attending a conference on Bohm’s ideas on quantum theory. Sarfatti himself had proposed such a conference and offered funds to support it. These three scientists were barred because of their interest in that great scientific bête noire called the paranormal.
It was all enough to disturb the horses in the street!

The disinvite to the Bohm conference was a watershed not only for the participants but for physics as a whole. I myself was a non-scientific participant in that I contributed to the comments section of an article in the UK Times Higher Education Supplement which discussed the disinvitation. After three days my comments were taken down from the Supplement, although all others were retained. I asked the Editor for an explanation and he did not have the manners to reply. This made me the only member of what must be one of the world’s most exclusive clubs.

All this might sound like great liberal fun, were it not at such times we have surely a glimpse of the theme from Polanski’s film Rosemary’s Baby, or Jack Starrett’s film Race with the Devil. In these works, every innocent social-democratic perspective becomes suddenly alive with menacing conspiracies beyond the sun and moon.

Few scientists are of any kind of personal interest. Most have no more a name than does a particular herring from a particular net. By contrast, Sarfatti glitters and sparkles as if he is still on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. By comparison, almost all scientists at some time or other are sentenced to work within some terrifying department of the Military-Industrial Complex, the perfect equivalent to Kafka's novel The Castle. Grinding away in such modern versions of Blake's "Satanic Mills," almost all are finally rendered quite faceless, anonymous and often quite speechless.

In this respect, just like my science teacher again, Big Science (as General Groves of Los Alamos called it) has always had a love-hate relationship with concepts involving such "non objective" things as character, identity and personality. To most Stalinists and Victorian Station Masters, these things represent such wondrous modern fables as "noise in the system" in that they are full of very non-Cartesian animals such as images, symbols and metaphors. Such are now propagated by that other complex now called Big Media. Most scientists have not met such a messy and rather indeterminate thing as Media yet, big or small. Most think still that TV alone is a thing to keep the kids quiet upstairs: apparently the absorption of billions of powerful images per second plays no part in modern “scientific” ideas of “causation,” which is still conceived as being essentially made up of “objective” mechanisms in nature and function. Apparently to be “real,” one thing has to bang against another thing.

In this respect, no scientist on Earth has yet noticed that the CERN Collider is producing as many images, symbols and metaphors as it is producing “facts,” both of which operate within a framework of cultural deception of one sort or another.

In putting foreword a "no thrust" theory of UFO propulsion alone, Sarfatti is way ahead of the postmodern gaming syndrome. He is indeed “back from the future.” In contrast, Stalinist mechanists still have their fingers stained with chemicals and theories of "actuality," another word for the constellated "real," which is the very best commercial break in our Entertainment State.

The Book

When we examine the verbal surface of Destiny Matrix we find that Jack is creatively hyperactive. He winds the universe up and lets it spin into infinity. One sentence alone can bring alive whole galaxies of names threading though conspiracies, science and mysteries going back through decades. Here surely is his idea of “back from the future.” It appears that he does not forget a single thing. Each wound and sneer, each bit of praise or criticism is real and alive within him as if he were still acting out some particular slice of time and life a full half-century after it occurred. Perhaps this total inability to forget any single instant of his life drives his sense of time passing and gives him his ideas on retrocausality in the sense that mentally he is always going to and fro, not by the hour or the day, but by the decade. Every minute of the deep past is still living and developing within his mind. Moreover, in what would be a nightmare to most non-cerebral folk, every single minute of every single experience is scanned as if looking for some vital existential connection within the quantum hologram he proposes as a cosmological model. As Destiny Matrix shows, he is inside and out of his model such that each past meeting, each incident is a story-cluster rather like a meme. Each rise and fall of destiny and achievement is a tremor in the spider’s web of the retrocausal hologram. Moreover, the interpretations of each meme permit retrocausal extensions of themselves rather like the opening of a fractal. He has entered the system and the system is talking to him. This is a quantum life. The Microcosm has become the Macrocosm. This is a singular and unique vision of a new kind of stream of consciousness. This is the Matrix visualised before The Matrix was filmed or talked about.

We can only imagine Sarfatti’s problems as he disturbs the Thou Shalt Nots who live in the cooing dovecotes and whited sepulchres of professional science. His great sin appears to be that whilst he is perfectly capable of describing his cosmology mathematically, he insists that he lives within the equations, fleshing them out to become living parameters. Most scientists don’t see themselves as living within the flesh and blood of their proposed models, even if those models become generally accepted, such as Relativity or quantum theory.

Like all good books Destiny Matrix makes us think about the unthinkable. The book is a brilliant collection of many unanswered questions in both science and scientific philosophy. Deconstructed science, in the sense that it has to use language sooner or later, reveals many dialectical defences and wilful self-deceptions. These are part of the management of psycho-social frameworks of perception. For example, scientists speak universally of cosmic events in the present tense, when according to Relativity, we are “seeing” the deep past within what the philosopher A.N. Whitehead called “an ever-widening penumbra of uncertainty.”

This aspect of what Big Media calls “real time” makes Sarfatti’s concept of “action at a distance” appear positively endearing. We might ask what the concept of “distance” means here within such a non-Cartesian dialectical warp as described by Sarfatti.
Since all cultures are advertising systems of one sort or another, we might have to consider mass existential deception within a warp continuum. This idea is the central core of the Matrix with the heart of the Big Media complex in which we now live.

We have to consider such things if only because Sarfatti’s inspirations are somewhat multi-media. As an accomplished singer in musical theatre, we can now add Entertainment to that unholy triad called the Military-Industrial-Complex.

No matter what, for Jack Sarfatti all trails lead back from the future to StarTrek and what happened to him in a Brooklyn flat in 1952 when he picked up a ringing phone and what he later assumed was an outer-space Valis computer spoke to him. This was the very beginning of his StarTrek quest two decades before StarTrek was conceived. Back from the future again! He was to become a thorough-going postmodern icon with TV programmes and equations pouring out of his head at the same time, both mixed with thoughts worthy of Rabelais and Cervantes as well as P.K. Dick. Both Warhol and McLuhan would have been proud of him as a complete postmodern icon.

He is more than a futurist. He drives his liminal engine through the dimensions of holographic retrocausality.

I can’t imagine anything more StarTrek than that.

That Sarfatti has never suffered from what Norman Mailer once described as America’s “massive failure of nerve” is a sufficient compliment to the StarTrek wizard. Representing one of the last toys of scientific innocence, StarTrek still sparkles amongst our rapidly diminishing collection of things of worth. The wizard Sarfatti is Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes trying to find the enchanted house in the forest he once glimpsed in his early youth. Each time shift forward or back becomes a pilgrimage to the site of his StarTrek lair. This is the fountain of his youth, the map of his impossible endeavours, and it contains still the magical codes of his thought and creation.

When fact has failed us, the archetypal TV shows will always be there. Already they have replaced History and Religion. Whatever else they will replace eventually remains to be seen.

In the meantime Jack Sarfatti, may the gods bless thee and thy holy book, oh magician of our time!

Colin Bennett
Author, London
Editor, the New Fortean Times
www.combat-diaries.co.uk
July 2010