"In my work as an author, I traffic in fiction, I do not traffic n lies." "Although I'll admit that the distinction is a nice one, and perhaps not easy for the layman to make, with fiction, with art and writing, it's important that even if you're dealing with areas of complete outrageous fantasy," "that there is an emotional resonance." "It is important that a story ring true upon a human level, even if it never happened." "Born in Northampton in 1953, I started life in an area known as The Burrows, this was the oldest area of Northampton and also the poorest." "It was were the rural families, who'd been drafted into the towns to man the conveyor belts of the industrial revolution ended up." "It had originally been the system of moats and forts that surrounded Northampton's castle before it was demolished, so all the streets had names like Moat place or Fort street or Dungeon Alley, or whatever." "And this a quite bleak, grim monochrome area." "There were a great many families, who were probably, looking back, incest families, where even the dog had the same harelip." "I found myself surrounded by a monochrome world with limited opportunities." "The only window out of that restricting world was the tales of mythology that I would read, or the bright 4-coloured superhero stories." "Adventures of people who had no restrictions." "People who could fly over the house tops, people who could become invisible." "This was a very important key, to a very important door." "It opened vistas of the imagination with which I was eventually able to transcend and escape the limitations of my origins." "Now comics were something that I was reading for as long as I could remember being able to read." "They were almost a staple part of working class existence, they were something like rickets, they were just something that you had." "I'd originally read most of the British comics, which mainly featured working class children in working class environments, uhm, generally being spanked by their parents or teacher, which was a peculiar fixation of the British comics of my boyhood." "And pretty much they presented a world that was almost indistinguishable from the world that I lived in." "And thus I didn't find it the most exotic world into which I could escape." "Now when I was seven, I picked up my very first American comics." "These were bright, garish 4-coloured things, that rather than taking place against some anonymous Northern British backdrop, took place in Cities like New York, which to me were as exotic as Mars." "The idea of buildings of that scale, the idea of this modernness that seemed to pervade everything." "This was a futuristic science fiction world." "And then against that backdrop you had these incredibly colourful characters, who had these amazing powers, who could transcend their human limits." "I'd a ready been attracted to mythology, fairy stories, anything which had people that could fly or become invisible or could lift huge mountains, or perform any of these heroic acts for which gods and heroes are largely famous." "And so, having discovered the American superhero comic books, it was a fairly natural transition." "Here was something where I didn't have to read the same myths over and over again, but where every month I could read something new about Superman or the Flash." "This become a preoccupation." "At first I was probably preoccupied with the characters themselves." "I wanted to know what Batman was doing this month." "Around about the time when I reached the age of say 12, perhaps a lot earlier," "I became more interested in what the artists and writers were dong that month." "It'd finally occurred to me that these stories weren't just drawing themselves." "That somebody was drawing them, somebody was writing them." "And I became very knowledgeable in the styles of the different artists," "I became critically able to distinguish between a good story and a bad story." "And comic books were still very much a part of my life," "I mean, which was in physical terms was changing quite rapidly, as it would for anybody at that age." "I'd moved from my primary school in the working class area into which I was born to a grammar school." "Now, call me naive, but entering grammar school was the very first time that I'd actually realized that middle-class people existed." "Prior to that I'd thought that there were just my family and people like them, and the Queen." "I had really not been aware that there were was a whole strata of humanity in between those two positions." "When I got to grammar school I realized that I was one of the very few working class people there, because of the 11+ system and its rigours." "And that a lot of the other children there had had the advantage of probably a better education than I'd been privy to." "Thus from being a star pupil at my primary school, from being top of the class every year, and from being made head prefect with a little green enamel badge," "I suddenly plummeted to 19th in the class, which was a tremendous blow to my already insufferably huge ego." "I don't think I ever got quite over that." "Certainly by the next term I was 25th in the class," "I think for the next couple of years I was second from bottom." "I'd finally came to the realization that I was not going to cut it in the kind of academic world that was spread out in front of me." "I decided, pretty typically for me, that if I couldn't win then I wasn't going to play." "I was always one of those sulky children, who sort of couldn't stand to lose at Monopoly, Cluedo, anything." "So I decided that I really wanted no more of the struggle for academic supremacy or anything of that nature." "After having being expelled from school at the age of 17," "I found that my horizons rapidly contracted." "The headmaster who had dealt with my expulsion had I think taken me rather personally." "He had written to all of the colleges and schools that" "I might have thought of applying to and told them that they should under no circumstances accept me as a pupil, because this would be a corrupting influence upon the morals of the other students." "I believe that he did at one point in the letter, refer to me as "sociopathic" which I think was rather harsh." "The same thing applied with jobs, any job that I was applying for meant that I would need a reference from the school" "and the references I was getting from the school were kind of the anti-matter equivalent of references." "Thus the only jobs that I could get, were ones were they didn't give a damn who they employed." "So I found myself working at a skinning yard and tannery at the bottom of Bedford Road in Northampton, which was probably one of the bleakest places that I'd ever encountered, where you would turn up at 07h30 in the morning and drag huge heavy dripping sheep skins" "out of vats of mingled blood, urine, water and excrement." "That the only relief from this was the concentration camp humour of throwing chopped off testicles at each other as a break to the monotony." "And it was indeed monotonous." "I was expelled from that job after a couple of weeks for smoking dope in the mess room, which really wasn't improving my career curve any." "The next job I was able to get was that of a toilet cleaner at a hotel and it more or less went downhill from there until I finally ended up as a comics writer." "Quitting my day job and starting my life as a writer was a tremendous risk, it was a fool's leap, a shot in the dark." "But anything of any value in our lives whether that be a career, a work of art, a relationship, will always start with such a leap." "And in order to be able to make it, you have to put aside the fear of failing and the desire of succeeding." "You have to do these things completely purely without fear, without desire." "Because things that we do without lust of result, are the purest actions that we shall ever take." "I originally, having delusions of adequacy as an artist, had both drawn and written some strips for one of the music papers and for a local paper." "After a couple of years I'd realized that I could not draw well enough or fast enough to ever make any kind of career from this and so had started to look at the possibilities of actually writing comic strips for other people to draw." "This had landed me a couple of early jobs at places like 2000 AD and the British Doctor Who monthly and weekly that were published around that time." "I learned my craft doing very short stories, 3 or 4 pages each, which is an excellent way to learn writing of any sort," "progressed to doing a couple of series where I'd gotten a little more say in the nature of the material and was able to take more chances, to be a bit more experimental." "And these started to win awards in Britain, which impressed the Americans no end." "The Americans tend to think that every award is an Oscar and didn't realize that the comic industry awards are all voted for by 30 people in anoraks with dreadful social lives." "And so as far as they were concerned, if I was an award winner then I was an English genius." "And so they brain drained me to America and set me to working on the DC comics Swamp Thing title, which caused a bit of a stir and at least made DC trust me enough to give me other projects," "again allowing me more or less to write whatever I felt like writing." "This lead to Watchmen in the middle 80s and that was one of the books that was responsible for the ridiculous blizzard of publicity that comic books or graphic novels as somebody in the marketing department had decided by then that they should be called," "became popular." "I got into the swing of my writing career in the early 1980s which was a very overcast time politically." "Most of the liberal world was watching in horror at the inexorable rise of the Reagan-Thatcher right wing fuck-buddy coalition." "At the same time we had elements of fascism starting to make themselves prevalent upon the streets of Britain with the rise of the National Front and all in all things were looking fairly bleak." "I decided that if I wanted to write about this grim present, the best way to do it, was in the form of a story set in the future, which is by no means a new trend." "Most dystopian science fiction is not actually about the future, it s about the times in which it was written." "And the script that I came up with, V for Vendetta was no exception." "This was set in what at the time seemed an unreachably distant period in the future which was 1997" "and Britain had been taken over by a coalition of fascist groups, with a very Romantic anarchist adventurer set in opposition against that." "To get over the idea of fascism," "I needed some symbol that would convince the readers that they were looking at a fascist police state." "The thing that I finally settled upon was the idea of security cameras mounted upon every street corner and watching every move." "I figured that looks pretty much like fascism in action and the readers were equally impressed, and apparently so were government figures who must've been reading it at that time and decided that security cameras on every corner of the metropolis" "was indeed just what we needed for the late 1990s." "Good evening London, it's 9 o'clock and this is the Voice of Fate, broadcasting on 275 and 285 in the medium wave." "It is the 5th of the 11th, 1997." "The people of London are advised that the Brixton and Streatham areas are quarantine zones as of today." "It is suggested that these areas be avoided for reasons of health and safety." "Police raided 17 homes in the Birmingham area earlier this morning, uncovering what is believed to be a major terrorist ring." "20 people, 8 of them women are currently in detention awaiting trial." "Queen Zara today appeared at the opening of a new waste reclamation plant in Plaistow." "This was the Queen's first public appearance since her 16th birthday in June." "The Queen was wearing a suit of peach silk created specially for the occasion by the royal couturiers." "Watchmen also grew out of the politically shadowy landscape of the 1980s, when the cold war was at probably at its hottest in 20 or 30 years, and when nuclear destruction suddenly seemed a very real possibility." "Watchmen used the clichés of the superhero format to try and discuss notions of power, and responsibility in an increasingly complex world." "We treated these fairly ridiculous superhuman characters as more human than super." "We were using them as symbols of different kinds of ordinary human beings, rather than as different super beings." "I think there were probably quite a few things about Watchmen that chimed well with the times, but to me perhaps the most important was the actual storytelling, where the world that was presented didn't really hang together" "in terms of linear cause and effect." "But was instead seen as some massively complex simultaneous event with connections made of coincidence, synchronicity and I think that it was this world-view, if anything, that resonated with an audience that had realized that their previous view of the world" "was not adequate for the complexities of this shadowy and scary new world that we were entering into." "I think that Watchmen if it offered anything, offered new possibilities as to how we perceive the environment surrounding us and the interactions and relationships of the people within it." "RORSCHACH'S JOURNAL," "October 12th 1985:" "Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach." "This city is afraid of me." "I have seen it's true face." "The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown." "The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout "save us!"" "And I'll look down and whisper no." "Stood in firelight, sweltering bloodstain on chest like map of violent new continent." "Felt cleansed, felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in the night." "Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat, and God was not there." "The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone." "This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces, it is not God who kills the children, not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs." "It's us." "Only us..." "Whenever anybody talks about comics, they usually make a great deal of the similarities between comics and film." "And while I agree that a comic creator who understands cinematic techniques will probably be a better creator than one who doesn't," "I feel that if we only see comics in relationship to movies, than the best that they will ever be are films that do not move." "I'd found it in the mid '80s preferable to try and concentrate upon on those things that only comics could achieve." "The way in which a tremendous amount of information could be included visually in every panel, the juxtapositions between what a character was saying and what the image that the reader was looking at would be." "So in a sense, I suppose that you could say that that most of my work from the '80s onwards, was more or less designed to be unfilmable." "Which is what had to explain to Terry Gilliam, when he was originally selected as the director on the touted Watchmen movie, that was being discussed at that time." "I realized that I was becoming a celebrity, which was nothing I'd ever expected, given that comic writer was the most obscure profession in the world when I'd actually entered the job." "The thing about fame is that fame in its current sense had not really existed before the 20th century." "Back in previous eras even if you were very very well known, that would perhaps be amongst a thousand people at most if you were a pope or somebody." "In the 20th century however, with these massive surges in communication, suddenly a different sort of fame was possible." "And I tend to think that what fame has done, it has replaced the sea as the element of choice of adventure" "for young people." "If you were a dashing young man in the 19th century you would probably want to run away to sea," "just as in the 20th century you might decide that you want to run away and form a pop band." "The difference is that n the 19th century before running away to sea, you would have at least some understanding of what the element was that you were dealing with and you would have perhaps say learned to swim." "The thing is that there is no manual for how to cope with fame, so you'll get some otherwise likeable young person who has done one good comic book, one good film, one good record, who is suddenly told that they are a genius" "and who believes it and who runs out sort of laughing and splashing into the billows of celebrity and whose heroine sodden corpse is washed up a few weeks later in the shallows of the tabloid." "I'd never signed up to be a celebrity and I came to the realization that it was nothing that I was very comfortable with." "I realized that celebrities are a kind of an industry, there a kind of a crop." "Media moguls like Rupert Murdoch or people who run the big networks, they need a constant stream of celebrities to fill the column space in their magazines, to fill time upon their TV shows and because celebrities tend to burn out quickly" "you have to constantly create new ones." "And I really didn't feel I wanted to be part of that process and so I withdrew to the relative obscurity of Northampton." "On my fortieth birthday, rather than merely bore my friends by having anything as mundane as a mid-life crisis" "I decided it might actually be more interesting to actually terrify them by going completely mad and declaring myself a magician." "This had been something coming for a while, it seemed to be a logical end step in my career as a writer" "and the problem is that with magic, being in many respects a science of language, you have to be very careful of what you say." "Because if you suddenly declare yourself to be a magician without any knowledge of what that entails, then one day you are likely to wake up and to discover that is exactly what you are." "There is some confusion as to what magic actually is." "I think this can be cleared up." "If you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic." "Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as "the art"." "I believe that this is completely literal," "I believe that magic is art and that art, whether that'd be writing, music, sculpture or any other form is literally magic." "Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images to achieve changes in consciousness." "The very language of magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events." "A grimmoir for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar." "Indeed, to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people's consciousness." "And I believe this is why an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world that you are likely to see to a shaman." "I believe all culture must have arisen from cult." "Originally, all of the facets of our culture, whether they'd be in the arts or the sciences were the province of the shaman." "The fact that in present times, this magical power has degenerated to the level of cheap entertainment and manipulation is I think a tragedy." "At the moment the people who are using shamanism and magic to shape our culture are advertisers." "Rather than try to wake people up their shamanism is used as an opiate to tranquillize people, to make people more manipulable." "Their magic box of television, and by their magic words, their jingles can cause everybody in the country to be thinking the same words and have the same banal thoughts all at exactly the same moment." "In all of magic, there is an incredibly large linguistic component." "The Bardic tradition of magic would place a bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician." "A magician might curse you." "That might make your hands lay funny or you might have a child born with a club foot." "If a bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, then that could destroy you." "If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates, it would destroy you in the eyes of your family." "It would destroy you in your own eyes." "And if it was a finely worded and clever satire that might be survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries, then years after you were dead people still might be reading it and laughing at you and your wretchedness and your absurdity." "Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic." "In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river." "They have accepted the prevailing belief that art, that writing are merely forms of entertainment." "They're not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being, that can change a society." "They are seen as simple entertainment, things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour while we're waiting to die." "It is not the job of artists to give the audience what the audience want." "If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn't be the audience." "They would be the artist." "It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need." "My career as a magician continues to evolve." "Since I to a certain degree believe art and magic to be interchangeable, it'd only seemed natural that art should be the means by which I express magical ideas." "This has found its way into my prose writing, in works such as Voice of the Fire and probably most visibly has found its way into the performance pieces that I've done at various locations over the past 8 years." "Beautiful little psychedelic artefacts in their own right, which actually capture the kind of narrative journey that we've tried to take the readers on as part of these performances, to overwhelm the sensibilities of the audience, to tip them over" "into a kind of psychedelic state, where we can hopefully actually change their consciousness and direct it to different places, different levels, hopefully into new and hopefully magical spaces." "When we are doing the will of our true Self, we are inevitably doing the will of the universe." "In magic these are seen as indistinguishable, that every human soul is in fact one human soul." "It is the soul of the universe itself and as long as you are doing the will of the universe, then it is impossible to do anything wrong." "Murder is something which is intricately connected with society in a number of ways." "And with From Hell, what we wanted to do was not so much to create a "whodunit,"" "as to create something which asked "what happened"" "where we could trace all of these complex threads from the heart of the murder and see what kind of areas they let us into." "Areas of history, occultism, mythology, architecture, social considerations." "All of these played a part upon shaping the world that the crimes happened in and it seemed to me to be important to investigate all of those possibilities, to try and create a map of this event that included" "all of those strange foreign areas that aren't generally included when one considers a murder." "I was not concerned with "whodunit,"" "I was concerned with what happened," "I was concerned with the "whydunit" aspects of the thing." "The one place in which Gods and demons inarguably exist is in the human mind where they are real in all their grandeur and monstrosity." "Much of magic as I understand it in the Western occult tradition is the search for the Self, with a capital S." "This is understood as being the Great Work, as being the gold that alchemists sought, as being the Will, the Soul, the thing that we have inside us that is behind the intellect, the body, the dreams." "The inner dynamo of us if you like." "Now this is the single most important thing that we can ever attain, the knowledge of our own Self." "And yet there are a frightening amount of people who seem to have the urge not just to ignore the Self, but actually seem to have the urge to obliterate themselves." "This is horrific, but you can almost understand" "the desire to simply wipe out that awareness, because it's too much of a responsibility to actually posses such a thing as a Soul, such a precious thing," "what if you break it, what if you lose it." "Might it not be best to anaesthetize it, to deaden it, to destroy it, to not have to live with the pain" "of struggling towards it and trying to keep it pure." "I think that the way that people immerse themselves in alcohol, in drugs, in television, in any of the addictions that our culture throws up" "can be seen as a deliberate attempt to destroy any connection between themselves and the responsibility of accepting and owning a higher Self" "and then having to maintain it." "Back when I was doing Swamp Thing, which was ostensibly a horror comic," "I found that it wasn't really effective to just sort of swamp the readers in horror every issue." "You needed to do other things that would alleviate the repetitive qualities of the horror and to make it more than a one note strip." "I decided that what might be useful is to try and link up the elements of fantasy horror from our imaginations, werewolves, vampires, zombies and the like" "with real life horrors." "Racism, sexism, pollution, the collapse of the environment and thus lend these social issues some of the weight that fantasy fiction could offer." "Most of us have little to fear from vampires." "And yet we live in cultures that are every bit as dangerous despite the non-existence of terrible supernatural forces." "One of things that I did was a strip in which we explored the erotic possibilities of Swamp Thing." "I figured that if you could fill comic book after comic book every month with fights, then surely you should be able to fill at least one comic book with a sexual act, surely that was as interesting as a fight was." "The book was very well received and it led to me thinking seriously about the possibilities of erotica or as I prefer to call it pornography, because I think that the difference between the two words is largely dependent upon the income bracket of the reader." "In the 90s" "I met up with Melinda Gebbie and we decided that we'd like to work upon a major piece of erotic fiction together, which has resulted in the forthcoming Lost Girls." "And this entire drama is being played out against the background of Europe and specifically Austria in 1913, when everything is gearing up towards the exact anti-thesis of sex." "It's gearing up towards what humans do when they don't put their energies into sex." "Which is kill each other." "That the healthy sexual drive that is seizing most young men" "when they're in their teens is perverted by older men, who perhaps have lost some of their sexual drive and all of that sexual energy gets shipped over to somewhere like Flanders and is perverted into killing other young men." "Energy that should be going into something honest like fucking is instead diverted into something appalling like killing." "There is a brain-penis blood ratio that tends to get in the way of writing intelligent pornography." "If it becomes too intelligent all the blood rushes through your brain, you lose your erection." "If it becomes too sexually exciting you are no longer in any state to appreciate it's aesthetic value." "It is a difficult balancing act." "My thoughts upon pornography tend to revolve around the fact that while few of us are zombies, detectives, cowboys or spacemen, there are an infinite number of books that are recounting the stories of those lifestyles." "However, all of us have some sort of feelings or opinions about sex." "And yet the only art form which in any way is able to discuss sex or depict sex is this grubby despised under-the-counter art form which has absolutely no standards." "This was what Lost Girls was intended as a remedy for." "That there is no reason why a horny piece of literature that is purely about sex could not be as beautiful, as meaningful and have as absorbing characters as any other piece of fiction." "I've been looking at the kind of the history of magical thinking and where it starts to go wrong." "And for my money where it starts to go wrong is monotheism." "I mean if you look at the history of magic, you've got it's origins in the caves." "You've got it's origins in shamanism, in animism, in a belief that everything around you, every tree, every rock, every animal" "was inhabited by some sort of essence, some sort of spirit that could perhaps be communicated with." "You would have had some central shaman or visionary who would've been responsible for channelling ideas that were useful to survival." "By the time you reach the classical civilizations you can see that this has formalized to a degree." "The shaman was acting purely as an intermediary between the spirits and people." "He was in his position in the village or community I should imagine very much like a spiritual plumber." "You know, that people in the group would have had their own roles." "The person who was best at hunting would've been a hunter, the person who was best at talking to the spirits, perhaps because he or she was a bit crazy, a bit detached from our normal material world," "then they would've been the shaman." "And they would not have been masters of a secret craft, they would've simply been dispensing their information throughout the community, because it was believed to be helpful to the community." "When you get the actual classical cultures emerging, this has been formalized so that you've now got pantheons of gods." "And each of those gods will have a priest cast that will act to certain degree as intermediaries who will instruct you in the worship of that god." "So the relationship between humans and their gods, which could be seen" "as the relationship between humans and their highest selves, that was still a very direct one." "When Christianity comes in, when monotheism comes in, then all of a sudden you've got a priest cast moving in between the worshipper and the object of worship." "You've got a priest cast becoming a kind of spiritual middle-management between humanity and the divine within itself that it is seeking." "You no longer have a direct relationship with the godhead." "The priests don't really necessarily have a relationship with the godhead." "They just got a book that tells you about some people who lived a long time ago who did have a direct relationship with the godhead." "And that's all right." "You don't need to have miraculous visions, you don't need to have gods talking to you." "In fact if you do have any of that stuff, you're probably insane, you know." "In the modern world that stuff doesn't happen." "The only people who are allowed to talk to gods, and in a very kind of one-sided way, are priests." "Monotheism is to me a great simplification." "I mean the Quabala has a great multiplicity of gods, but at the very top of the Cabalistic diagram - the tree of life - you have this one sphere that is absolute God." "The Monad." "Something that is indivisible, you know." "And all of the other gods, and indeed everything else in the universe is a kind of emanation of that God." "Now, that's fine." "But it's when you suggest that there is only that one God, at this kind of unreachable height above humanity and there is nothing in between, you're limiting and simplifying the thing." "I mean, I tend to think of paganism as a kind of alphabet, as a language." "It's like all of the Gods are letters in that language, they express nuances," "shades of sort of meaning or certain subtleties of ideas." "Whereas monotheism is just one vowel, and it's just something like:" "Oooouh." "It's this monkey sound." "You can almost imagine the Gods becoming frustrated, contemptuous." "That with all this richness of spiritual concepts that are available, why reduce it to one plaintiff single note that the utterer does not even understand." "The alchemists had two components to their philosophy." "These were the principles of Solve et Coagula." "Solve was basically the equivalent of analysis, it was taking things apart to see how they worked." "Coagula was basically synthesis, it was trying to put the disassembled pieces back together, so that they worked more efficiently." "These are two very important principles which can be applied to almost anything in culture." "There has recently in literature for example been a wave of post-modernism, deconstructionism." "This is Solve." "Perhaps it is time in the arts for a little more Coagula." "Having deconstructed everything, perhaps we really should be starting to think about putting everything back together." "Spiritualism was the natural state of human thinking up until the Renaissance and the subsequent age of reason that grew out of it." "Our original way of seeing the world was as a place entirely inhabited by spirits, where everything had its indwelling essence, where everything was in some sense sacred, including ourselves." "The age of reason changed all that." "While it's inarguable that Reason brought many great benefits and was a necessary stage of our development, unfortunately this lead to materialism, where the physical material world was seen as the be-all and end-all of existence, where inevitably we were seen as creature that had no spiritual dimensions," "that had no souls, living in a soulless universe of dead matter." "In the mid 1980s I was asked by an American legal institution known as the Christic Institute, to compile a comic book which would detail the murky history of the CIA from the end of the 2nd World War to the present day." "Covering things such as the heroine smuggling during the Vietnam War, the cocaine smuggling during the war in Central America, the Kennedy assassination and other highlights." "What I learned during the frankly horrifying research was that I had to slug through to accomplish this, was that yes there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up." "And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists and ham-fisted clowns." "If you are on a list targeted by the C.I.A., you really have nothing to worry about." "If however, you have a name similar to somebody on a list targeted by the C.I.A. then you are dead." "The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting." "The truth of the world is that it is chaotic." "The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12 foot reptiloids from another dimension that is in control." "The truth is far more frightening, nobody is in control." "The world s rudderless..." "The substance that has most effect upon our culture and upon our lives is completely invisible" "We can only see its effects." "This substance is information." "Science started out as an off-shoot of magic." "The two became completely divorced from each other and bitter enemies." "Although I tend to think that at the present moment the two are growing back together again." "I was reading recently that people at the cutting edge of quantum physics believe that information is a "super weird substance"" "to quote the actual phraseology, which underlies everything in the universe, which is more fundamental than gravity or electro-magnetism or the two nuclear forces." "This would tend to suggest that our entire physical universe is the secondary by-product of a primal information." "Or to put it in more magical acceptable terms:" ""In the beginning, there was the word"..." "As I understand the theory of period information doubling, this states that if we take one period of human information as being the time between the invention of the first hand axe, say around 50,000 BC and 1 AD," "then this is one period of human information and we can measure it by how many human inventions we came up during that time." "Then we see how long it takes for us to have twice as many inventions." "This means that human information has doubled." "As it turns out, after the first 50,000 year period, the second period is about 1500 years, say around the time of the Renaissance." "By then we have twice as much information." "To double again, human information took a couple of hundred years." "The period speeds up, between 1960 and 1970 human information doubled." "As I understand it, at the last count human information was doubling around every 18 months." "Further to this, there is a point somewhere around 2015 when human information is doubling every thousandth of a second." "This means that in each thousandth of a second we will have accumulated more information than we have in the entire previous history of the world." "At this point I believe that all bets are off." "I cannot imagine the kind of culture that might exist after such a flashpoint of knowledge." "I believe that our culture would probably move into a completely different state, would move past the boiling point, from a fluid culture to a culture of steam." "Originally, there was only one science of existence." "Our entire world view was magical." "Everything we did, everything that happened in the world had a kind of shamanic, magical significance." "If you look at the very earliest cultures, some of them are still extent upon the planet, the aboriginal cultures," "most of their languages only have one tense." "Everything is subsumed within the present." "They can talk about things that happened and things that haven't happened yet, but will happen in the future, but they talk about them in the present tense." "Now it seems that not only have we split up our existence, our study of existence into all of these different areas, but we've also subdivided our notion of time" "into different zones." "Whereas once, there was this great eternal present, which I assume to be the kind of constant Now that animals exist in for example." "But we as conscious individuals have as a species adapted this different notion of time, where we almost see time as a bead on a wire." "That the now is just this constantly moving, tiny little moment that we're all in that is sliding inexorably along a wire from past to future." "If you look at some of the models that people like Stephen Hawking have suggested for time, then you find something which is actually much closer" "to that primitive apprehension of how time is structured, than to our rather simplistic and fatalistic idea of past, present and future." "I believe that Hawking talks about space-time as a kind of a gigantic, starry football, a rugby ball if you like." "And at one end of it you have the Big Bang and at the other end of it everything comes together again in a big crunch." "But, that the whole football exists all the time." "That there is this gigantic hyper moment in which everything is occurring." "That would mean that it was only our conscious minds that were ordering things into past, present and future." "The idea of solid flying saucers from Alpha Centauri, coming and visiting us now or any time in the past." "This is not a rational idea." "And yet, because it involves machinery, warp thrust engines, or pseudo scientific concepts like that," "then we in the West will actually pay it serious attention, as we probably did with von Danicken." "Whereas, spiritual ideas from other cultures, we will regard them as - well they're complete non-sense." "This is an example of the limitations of Western thought, that we believe that we understand the entire cosmos." "But, actually we understand the insides of our heads." "And even then only very poorly." "Was it Niels Bohr, the physicist, who in his Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, said that when we talk about or describe, remote events, whether that be in the furthest stars, or in the smallest and most remote quanta," "that all we can ever truly be doing is talking about ourselves and our own processes." "That all we see is our perceptions, we mistake that for reality." "And consequently we tend to be chauvinistic about our picture of reality as if that were the only one." "Then the only way that we can look at other cultures is to imagine that they are deluded or primitive or just haven't got it yet." "That is a way in which we in terms of information we isolate ourselves terribly." "It's our culture, kind of insisting upon its own values, blinds itself to what might actually be very useful concepts and ideas, belonging to other more deeply rooted cultures." "They offered perhaps richer readings of the world than cold behaviourist science does." "Science cannot talk about consciousness because science is a thing that deals entirely with empirical evidence." "With things that can be repeated in a laboratory and thoughts do not come into th is category" "Therefore science generally tends to try to disprove the existence of consciousness." "They will say that consciousness is some accident of biology, which is itself based upon chemistry, which is itself based upon physics and wholly explicable within a normal rational scientific framework." "Rupert Sheldrake, who is a kind of heretical scientist who put forward the theory of a morphogenetic field in order to try and understand some of the spookier effects of consciousness." "I'm probably simplifying it horribly here, but I think that the basic concept was that once a form has occurred, whether that be a physical form or an idea form," "then it is much more likely and possible for it to occur again." "Now Sheldrake says that this is because there is a kind of what he calls a morpho-genetic field, linking everything." "And that once the idea existed then it somehow existed in this morpho-genetic field." "It struck me that this might explain a lot of things, about the way the human mind works." "Even things say for example, like the fact that the steam engine seem to have been invented by five or six different people at approximately the same time." "After hundreds, thousands years of the steam engine not being invented, all of a sudden within the matter of a couple of weeks, everybody is, you know, it's steam engine time." "Everybody is coming up with an idea of steam propulsion." "I mean this is similar to the idea that I put forward of idea space." "A kind of, a space in which mental events can be said to occur." "An idea space which is perhaps universal." "Our individual consciousnesses have access to this vast universal space." "Just as we have individual houses, but the street outside the front door belongs to everybody." "It's almost as if ideas are pre-existing forms within this space." "As human beings we inhabit two distinct and separate worlds, two landscapes." "We inhabit the physical world, but at the same time since we can only ever truly experience our perception of that world, then it would seem that we more truly inhabit a world purely of consciousness and ideas." "It strikes me that the landmasses that might exist in this mind space would be composed entirely of ideas, of concepts." "That instead of continents or islands you might have large belief systems or philosophies." "Marxism might be an island," "Judeo-Chrstian religions might make up another landmass or continent." "Human minds interact, albeit weakly in limited ways, with idea space every moment of the day just in order to carry out our daily lives." "If you want truly unique ideas, if you're an artist or an inventor or somebody who deals in unique and fresh ideas then you will have to plunge right into the undergrowth, into the depths of idea space" "in order to find those ideas that have never been spotted before." "If we assume that idea space or something like it exists, then we may decide that we wish to explore that space." "Whether for artistic reasons, perhaps for scientific reasons or perhaps as magicians, as occultists." "Now if we're going to venture into this hypothetical and more or less entirely unknown territory, it would seem to only make sense that we should try and track down route maps that may have been made by previous explorers." "Now when you're talking about the territory of the mind and perhaps the spirit, the only route maps available are magic systems from antiquity." "You're talking about systems like the Quabalah, with its map of every conceivable human state." "You're talking about systems like Tarot, a pantheon of archetypal images that provide the cartography for a map of the human condition." "Most people find the word Apocalypse, to be a terrifying concept." "Checked in the dictionary it means only revelation, although it obviously has also come to mean end of the world." "As to what the end of the world means," "I would say that probably depends on what we mean by world." "I don't think this means the planet, or even the life forms upon the planet." "I think the world is purely a construction of ideas, and not just the physical structures, but the mental structures, the ideologies that we've erected," "THAT is what would call the world." "Our political structures, philosophical structures, ideological frameworks, economies." "These are actually imaginary things, and yet that is the framework that we have built our entire world upon." "It strikes me that a strong enough wave of information could completely overturn and destroy all of that." "A sudden realization that would change our entire perspective upon who we are and how we exist." "History is a heat, it s the heat of accumulated information and accumulated complexity." "As our culture progresses, we find that we gather more and more information and that we slowly start to move almost from a fluid to a vaporous state, as we approach the ultimate complexity of a social boiling point." "I believe that our culture is turning to steam."