The Key by Whitley Strieber Page A

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.
    Â 
    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.
    Â 
    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.
    Â 
    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.
    Â 
    Was it a conscious machine?
    An intelligent machine. There has never been a conscious machine here.
    Â 
    What does the word “machine” mean to you? Define it.
    A machine is an organ that cannot vary its basic instructions.
    Â 
    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.
    Â 
    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.
    Â 
    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.
    Â 
    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.
    Â 
    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.
    Â 
    We’ll