Keel on Predestination
Following on from thoughts expressed in this week’s Sensational Sabbath, I thought we should consider the idea of predestination beyond a religious perspective. John A. Keel is an author and paranormal investigator, best known for The Mothman Prophecies. He writes of predestination in The Cosmic Question (Chapter 22; pages 194-195):
You and I are biochemical robots controlled by the powerful radiations being broadcast from the Eighth Tower. Our brains are programmed like computers, and many of us are suddenly and completely reprogrammed at some point in our adult life. At birth our entire lives are planned for us, and as we weave and trotter through our allotted three score and ten, we find ourselves manipulated by ‘luck’, by strange coincidences, and by sudden changes in ourselves and our environments.
Visualize a mad scientist who needs someone to clean out his secret laboratory in his castle on a forbidding mountain-top. He constructs a mechanical robot for the job and programs it so it can move freely within the lab, but if it should open the door and try to move out of the laboratory, it is programmed to self-destruct.
The robot calls it slavery. We call it free will. We are free to pursue our life in our own way so long as we conform to the hidden master plan. If we try to circumvent that plan by zigging instead of zagging, we self-destruct.
Keel should know. He has outlived many of his contemporaries in a field – paranormal research – where life expectancy is curiously low. Take for example The Mothman Death List (compiled by Loren Coleman).
Human history is filled with examples of people who self-destructed when they dared to step beyond the outer limits, when they consciously tried to alter history in ways that did not conform to our hypothetical cosmic plan. Religious and political leaders have frequently been cut down by wild-eyed assassins obeying voices in their heads or following the dictates of the loathsome entities who materialized before them during cultist rites. Then historians invent a rational lie to replace the irrational facts. Charles Guiteau is remembered as a ‘disappointed office seeker’ who shot Pres. James Garfield. ‘Serbian nationalists’ knocked off Francis Ferdinand and started World War I. Lincoln was murdered by a nutty actor who sympathized with the South. And so on. But if you dig into the original records, you will find some surprising details. John WIlkes Booth, for example, was one of ten coconspirators, all of whom were religious fanatics (as was Guiteau), Francis Ferdinand had something in common with Mohandas Gandhi. Both men were assassinated by fanatical cultists.
An intriguing theory, certainly.
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