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Extracts

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The original title of this book was The Johnson Family. "The Johnson Family" was a turn-of-the-century expression to designate good bums and thieves. It was elaborated into a code of conduct. A Johnson honors his obligations. His word is good and he is a good man to do business with. A Johnson minds his own business. He is not a snoopy, self-righteous, trouble-making person. A Johnson will give help when help is needed. He will not stand by while someone is drowning or trapped under a burning car.

The only thing that could unite the planet is a united space program… the earth becomes a space station and war is simply out, irrelevant, flatly insane in a context of research centers, spaceports, and the exhilaration of working with people you like and respect toward an agreed-upon objective, and objective from which all workers will gain. Happiness is a by-product of function. The planetary space station will give all participants an opportunity to function.

For three days Kim had camped on the mesa top, sweeping the valley with his binoculars. A cloud of dust headed south told him they figured him to ride in that direction for Mexico. He had headed north instead, into a land of sandstone formation, carved by wind and sand - a camel, a tortoise, Cambodian temples - and everywhere caves pocked into the red rock like bubbles in boiling oatmeal. Some of the caves had been lived in at one time or another: rusty tin cans, pottery shards, cartridge cases. Kim found an arrowhead six inches ling, chipped from obsidian, and a smaller arrowhead of rose-colored flint.

On top of the mesa were crumbled mounds of earth that had once been houses. Slabs of stone had been crisscrossed to form an altar. Homo sapiens was there…

Somebody made this arrowhead. It had a creator long ago. This arrowhead is the only proof of his existence. Living things can also be seen as artifacts, designed for a purpose. So perhaps the human artifact had a creator. Perhaps a stranded space traveler needed the human vessel to continue his journey, and he made it for that purpose ? he died before he could use it ? He found another escape route ? This artifact , shaped to fill a forgotten need, now has no more meaning or purpose than this arrowhead without the arrow, and the bow, the arm and the eye. Or perhaps, the human artifact was the creator's last card, played in an old game many light-years ago. Chill of empty space…

As soon as an article goes into mass production the company does not want to know about a simpler better article, especially if it is basically different. So a number of very good inventions are scrapped and forgotten. We can extrapolate that the same formula applies to living organism once they have accepted the supposition that living organisms are artifacts created for a definite purpose. There are no cosmic accidents in this universe. I mean of course the universe which we see and experience. No reason to think that this is the only universe. This universe is probably a minute fraction of the overall picture, which we will not have time to see. And if we saw it it would be, to our limited perceptions, completely incomprehensible, which is why we can't see it. (A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.)

So at the outset is a breakthrough that makes a new technology possible and an efflorescence of inventions good and bad. Then one of these models, and not necessarily the best one, goes into mass production and that's it. No more changes, no more basic innovations … just technical improvements. There is no basic difference between Kitty Hawk and a modern jet liner.

Now apply this concept to living organisms… Look at Homo sapiens… Before they went into mass production there must have been some good models lost in the shuffle and for what ? Look around you on the street and what do you see, a creature that functions at one-fiftieth of its potential and is only saved from well-deserved extinction by an increasingly creaky social structure… So let's go back and take a look. ..

The magical theory of history: the magical universe presupposes that nothing happens unless someone or some power, some living entity will it to happen. There are no coincidences and no accidents. A chaotic situation is always deliberately produced. Ask yourself who or what sort of creature could benefit from such a situation. Even in the crudest economic terms there are those who profit from chaos… speculators, black marketeers, ultimately warlords and bandits…

Now look at the whole of human history and pore-history from this viewpoint. Look at it spread out spatially before you…

Mechanical devices exteriorize the processes of the human nervous system.. A tape recorder externalize the vocal function, a computer externalizes one function of the human brain, the faculty that stores processes data. See human history as a vast film spread out in front of you. Take a segment of film.

The only thing not prerecorded in a prerecorded universe is the prerecordings themselves: the master film. The unforgivable sin is to tamper with the prerecordings. Exactly what Kim is doing. Acting through his representatives like Hart or Old Man Bickford, God has prerecorded Kim's death…

So our local war revolves around a basically simple situation: a conflict between those who must fo into space or die and those who will die if we go. They need us for their film. They have no other existence. And as soon as anyone goes into space the film is irreparably damaged. One hole is all it takes. With the right kind of bullet, Kim thought, with that little shiver…

Yes we can lose any number of times. They can only loose once. They say a silver bullet can kill a ghost. Garlic could kill a vampire if it was strong enough and he couldn't escape, trapped for example in an Italian social club. So what bullet, what smell can rupture or damage or immobilize or totally destroy the film ? Quite simply, any action or smell not prerecorded by the prerecorder, who stands outside the film and does not include himself as data.

Castaneda would describe it as a sudden eruption of the Nagual, the unknown and unpredictable, into the Tonal, which is the totality of prerecorded film. This violates the most basic laws of a predictable control-oriented universe. Introduce one unforeseen and therefore unforeseeable factor and the whole structure collapses like a house of cards.

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