Transhumanism, Religious Engineering, and the Weird World of William Sims Bainbridge Part II

Religious Engineering and the Process Church

 As discussed in Part I, William Sims Bainbridge picked up the term religious engineering from the Process Church of the Final Judgment, a “Satanic cult,” as he describes it, which he studied up close between 1970 and 1976, doing fieldwork toward his eventual PhD in Sociology from Harvard. In 1978, UC Berkeley Press published his monographic study of the Process under the title Satan’s Power: A Deviant Psychotherapy Cult.

The term process, as it occurs in the name of the Process Church of the Final Judgment, is derivative of Scientology, a reference to the psychotherapeutic methods/processes of founder L. Ron Hubbard, which promise to elevate the individual consciousness by degrees into a higher-functioning “clear” state and beyond. Process Church founders Mary Ann MacLean and Robert de Grimston met while both were members of the London branch of the Church of Scientology. Hubbard billed his new sect as a “technological religion” based on a novel set of techniques which, if practiced correctly, would produce clears with scientific reliability. MacLean and de Grimston found that this was not the case, however, and split off to form the Process in 1966 to accomplish in earnest what Hubbard only feigned. For Hubbard, according to de Grimston, “could not really produce Supers and was therefore forced to invent a string of excuses to explain why Supers were not in evidence.”²⁹ What Scientology refers to as a “clear,” the Process called a “super,” denoting the “supernormal level of functioning aspired to by all” Scientologists. The optimum individual becomes “the Super.”³⁰

MacLean and de Grimston, who were then married, found fault with other aspects of Scientology, including the myths and doctrines devised by Hubbard, a hugely prolific science fiction writer. Relying mostly on secondary sources, de Grimston gleaned a passing knowledge of Jungian psychology and a range of other occult and New Age ideas, particularly those associated with Aleister Crowley. From these he designed the classical Process system of four “gods,” namely, Satan, Lucifer, Christ, and Jehovah. Students of esotericism or the New Age will immediately recognize these as pairs of opposites, which indicate, as in countless other such systems, an ideal that Jung termed the coniunctio oppositorum, the union of opposites. Process “theology,” explains Bainbridge, “was a coherent structure of related concepts. Its basic pattern was the transcendent duality—the union of pairs of opposites defining the extremes of reality and brought together in theoretical reconciliation.”³¹ This could be expressed in typically apocalyptic or eschatological language. “The cult,” reports Bainbridge, “claimed that it was the terrestrial manifestation of the coming Union of Christ and Satan, a force moving to achieve the end of the world in service of Satanic destruction so that a Christian Golden Age might dawn.”³²

During his stint with the cult, sometimes as a direct participant in their life and ritual, Bainbridge spent a good deal of time with de Grimston personally, who explained to him that members were trained not so much to believe in these “gods” but rather to see in them an image of the configuration of their own personalities. “The Gods Lucifer, Jehovah, Christ, and Satan represented alternate moral systems, competing models of the ideal person, and even different intellectual conceptions of the world.”³³ In short, the psychotherapeutic techniques of the cult were interpreted as occult operations whereby the true self emerges through a conjunctio oppositorum. The linchpin of such an occult worldview is apotheosis or the quest for self-deification.

“The central members of The Process,” writes Bainbridge, “were artists and architects who considered their creative work to be religious engineering.”³⁴ The term appears, in the 1978 study of the Process, in the mouth of a Process member who was also an architect, who describes the “building up” of the Process as an “architectural” enterprise: “I call it religious engineering.”³⁵ As religious engineers, members “saw nothing inappropriate or insincere about consciously scripting religious rituals, designing clerical garb, writing sacred texts, publishing surrealist tracts, composing hymns and chants, or re-inventing their own personalities.”³⁶

These mythopoetic doctrines, rituals, etc., function as tools for reengineering the consciousness of their “users” at the deepest level of the psyche, at its spiritual or religious foundation (as I would argue, from an experiential essentialist perspective). The underlying premise is that one has the power to create one’s own reality. As the Process understood them, “The Gods of the Universe”—i.e., “Jehovah,” “Lucifer,” “Christ,” and “Satan”—

were as much a psychological system as a theological one. Each defined a personality type, and together, they expressed a sociology. The rituals, emblems, and God-pattern scriptures were intended not only to bring members closer together in expressive communion and not only to impress and instruct newcomers but also to create a new reality through the magical effects imputed to the system. In describing a spiritual world, it sought to create one.³⁷

Superpowers and Countercultural Spirituality

 One of the immediate analogues for this approach is psychedelic guru Timothy Leary’s conception of religion as a “God-game,” allowing those who become conscious of it to effectively create their own religion, through which they can then activate “the various levels of intelligence” in their “own brain[s] and DNA…expressing them through the tools of modern science.” Notably, his “God-game” culminates in the attainment of deific superpowers: “Any human being who wishes to accept the responsibility is offered the powers traditionally assigned to divinity.”³⁸

Leary also happened to be an early supporter of the transhumanist movement, stretching back to its “proto-transhumanist” phase before Max More’s Extroprian Institute and the WTA. Ed Regis’s Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, the best history of the pre-Max More transhumanist movement, covers Leary’s transhumanist affiliations at some length. He was an early member of Alcor, for example, signing up, at the same time as Robert Ettinger and other pioneering transhumanists, to have his body cryogenically frozen for later reanimation.³⁹ Shortly before his death, he changed his mind about the decision, opting instead to have some of his ashes shot out into space, which he had long regarded as a new frontier in consciousness expansion.

Bainbridge and Prisco, for their part, openly acknowledge and celebrate the countercultural and New Age influence on transhumanist spirituality. “Ultra-rationalist ‘bureaucrats of philosophy’ usually dismiss ‘hippie new-age attitudes,’” writes Prisco, “but we should not forget, that the hippie new-age of the 1960s shaped the Internet technology revolution. Perhaps we had the right attitude in the beautiful, visionary, anti-authoritarian 1960s, and we should recover it to shape new transhumanist technology revolutions.” He therefore looks “forward to new approaches bridging the 1960s and the 2010s, cosmic visions of technology, spirituality and transhumanism.”⁴⁰

The 1960s-era religious engineering programs of the Process Church, Timothy Leary, and a related set of influences on transhumanist spirituality have all in turn drawn heavy influence from the occult ideas of Aleister Crowley and some of his leading disciples. Leary told a PBS interviewer that he was “carrying on much of the work” that Crowley “started a hundred years ago.” Crowley, in short, is a primary source for the countercultural false religion of apotheosis.

Members of the Crowley-inspired Process Church aspired to achieve divine superpowers by reengineering their personal realities through fiction, especially comic books. “They wanted to be superheroes,” explains Bainbridge.

They delighted in the similarity between themselves and the superheroes portrayed in Marvel comics. On several occasions, I observed members reading comic books such as Thor, The Avengers, and Spiderman. They often discussed the exploits of these surrealistic beings with great seriousness. While outsiders might read Time or Newsweek to catch up on the news of the conventional world, [Process members] read Marvel Comics to keep up-to-date on the news of the magical world.

The Process “published Marvel panels” in their official magazines with the permission of Stan Lee, whom the cult “counted among its closest friends.”⁴¹ A few members even paid Lee a visit in his office, where, according to leading Process member Timothy Wyllie, they were “welcomed by him much as if two of his caped crusaders had muscled into the room. He was predictably thrilled by our garb”—black robe and cape, a Christian cross and a Goat of Mendes displayed across the chest—“and, if I remember rightly, listened intently to our spiel about the reconciliation of opposites.”⁴² Another member, an avid reader of Avengers comics, told Bainbridge that he saw in the cult’s techniques “a way he could become a transcendent heroic being, rising far above normal life to dwell with the Gods.”⁴³

For Bainbridge, promises of superpowers and godhood clearly function as “compensation” for transhumanists, just as they did for members of the Process and as they continue to do, on a more or less subconscious level, for generations immersed in superhero fantasies. As I am using the term, religious engineering refers particularly to the reengineering of other people’s religious orientations, not merely one’s own. The type of religious engineering used by Bainbridge to promote transhumanism, which he derived from the Process Church, consists basically in the externalization of the spiritual methods peddled by the religious engineers of the 1960s and the New Age. These two senses of religious engineering are apt to be confused (and are often conflated by Bainbridge), however, because the more or less false promise of personal transformation (e.g., into a superpowered immortal) is the psychological lever by which individuals and groups are (externally) religiously engineered.

The Archaic Revival

 Transhumanist religion is in fact being engineered, with knowing intent, by the same methods used to engineer counterculture spirituality in another era. Consider another aspect of Bainbridge’s theory of religion reflecting the influence of perennialism and the psychedelic counterculture. In a 2013 monograph for Oxford University Press titled eGods: Faith versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming, for example, he posits a “curvilinear model of religion,” according to which

faith was fluid and inseparable from fantasy early in human history, and it will be the same late in human history, but near the middle of human history the social conditions associated with agricultural empires favored the emergence of religious bureaucracies that demanded faith.⁴⁴

Modern fantasy worlds in general, from movies and television to video games and state-of-the-art virtual environments, are for Bainbridge functionally equivalent to the nighttime fireside storytelling of prehistoric times. At present, however, computer games, both solo and MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online roleplaying games), are “the most effective media

for fantasy, because they allow a person to experience magic directly and to act in the fantasy world as if it were real.” “Thus,” he concludes, “the newest secular technology returns us to the origins of religion so we ‘arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’”⁴⁵

The final line comes from a T. S. Eliot poem,⁴⁶ but Bainbridge could just as easily have dropped a reference to Terence McKenna’s “archaic revival,” or the idea that the cultural explosion of the 1960s, and the psychedelic counterculture in particular, marked a more or less inevitable rebirth of the collectivist values and shamanic religiosity of “the late neolithic” era.

The concept of an archaic revival, in the sense the expression is used by Bainbridge and McKenna, may have originated with another social scientist, one who also happened to be on the ground floor of the cybernetics movement. Indeed, Gregory Bateson was an original member of the interdisciplinary Cybernetics Group that participated in the Cerebral Inhibition Meeting (1942) and then the Macy Conferences (1946–53) on cybernetics.⁴⁷ Similar to Bainbridge, he maintained many high-level government contacts and had abiding personal and professional interests in the sociology of religion, and he exerted an enormous but underrated influence on the counterculture and on the subsequent spiritual milieu of Silicon Valley. He introduced Allen Ginsburg to LSD in 1959, at the Mental Research Institute near Stanford, and in 1961 led one of the first seminars at Esalen, where he was a fixture in the last years of his life.⁴⁸ Bateson died, in 1980, at the San Francisco Zen Center.⁴⁹ His contribution to the New Age or countercultural notion of an archaic revival arose out of his work in applied sociology (or applied anthropology), in a clear case of what I understand as religious engineering.

During World War II, the English-born Bateson found himself in the employ of the American OSS (the precursor to the CIA), crafting highly successful “black propaganda” for the Asian theater.⁵⁰ It was in this period, in 1944, that he drafted a memo formulating his “native revival” policy, a policy he claims the Russians pursued with great effectiveness to subjugate the shamanic culture of the Siberians. According to Bateson, the standard British policy, whereby colonizers expect colonized populations to conform themselves to the rigid examples of the conquerors, frequently provokes a native cultural revival turned “against the white man.” By way of remedying this policy, Bateson prescribes the judicious encouragement of the “native peoples to undertake a native revival while they themselves admire the resulting dance festivals and other exhibitions of native culture, literature, poetry, music and so on.”  By fostering “spectatorship among the superiors and exhibitionism among the inferiors,” local political movements could be easily controlled. David Price points out that this memo, unlike most OSS documents, was still in the CIA archives as late as 1989, and it “prefigured the sort of psywar, culture-cracking approach to conquest” employed overseas by the CIA in subsequent decades.⁵¹

Following World War II, the Macy Conferences were instrumental in spreading cybernetics among intellectual, military, and intelligence elites. Another leading participant in the conferences, Harold Abramson, gave Bateson his first dose of LSD in 1959 as part of an early CIA experiment with the drug. At the time, Bateson was working on a Rockefeller-funded project at the Menlo Park VA Hospital, the same facility where Ken Kesey had his first acid experiences as a volunteer in a CIA-funded experiment. ⁵² The secret umbrella program for the CIA’s drug research was codenamed MKUltra. A laundry list of major universities and medical centers, along with some of the most distinguished doctors and psychiatrists in the world, took part in the research, which involved often horrific experimentation on unwilling or unwitting human subjects. The program’s purpose was to unlock the secrets of mind control, and most MKUltra doctors, e.g., Jose Delgado and Ewen Cameron—and even psychedelic pioneer John C. Lilly, author of Programming and Metaprogramming the Human Biocomputer (1968), who was a recipient of MKUltra funds—relied heavily on a cybernetic concept of the human.

 Transhumanism and the Legacy of New Age Religious Engineering

Taking for granted the rudiments of the same cybernetic anthropology, Yuval Harari recently announced to the World Economic Forum that humans are now “hackable animals.” “If you know enough biology and have enough computing power and data,” he asserts, “you can hack my body, and my brain, and my life, and you can understand me better than I understand myself.”⁵³ Half a century earlier, Bateson was no less convinced that cybernetics represented an unparalleled scientific breakthrough enabling scientists and technocrats to reengineer the human mind and society at large. During the war, he insisted that the social sciences would in future play a dominant role in the “ordering of human relationships,” and there is no question that he applied the same theories and techniques that he developed with the OSS and the Macy crowd to shaping the counterculture and the Californian Ideology, bringing together the psychotherapeutic and computational routes of transformation.⁵⁴

Kesey, Leary, and even John Lennon have framed the troubling continuities between government-sponsored mind control and psychedelia in somewhat simplistic terms: they admit that LSD, hypnosis, and other methods of altering consciousness had been the stock and trade of government mind control operations, from which they seeped into the culture at large; but they, the psychedelic pioneers, successfully repurposed them as technologies of liberation via consciousness expansion, accessible in principle to anyone. Harari, too, stresses the same uneasy duality with regard to transhumanist tech: the very technologies by which humans will be upgraded into superhuman gods are also technologies of unprecedented control and surveillance—technologies that render humans “hackable” and hence vulnerable to manipulation by governments, corporations, and other entities with the resources to wield them.

Leary, by contrast, remained optimistic to the end of his life about the liberatory side of consciousness-altering technology, as witnessed, for example, by a 29-minute video titled How to Operate Your Brain, released in 1993. Leary’s narration accompanies hyper-frenetic imagery designed to “overload, scramble, confuse” and “unfocus your mind,” thereby returning “the brain” to its “natural state” of “chaos,” whence it is ripe to be “reprogrammed.”⁵⁵ In the words of one blogger, “If you follow the video (or transcript) to the end, you’ll discover that ones and zeros have basically taken the place of LSD,” which itself is a sort of technology, the product of chemical engineering.⁵⁶ In the video, Leary purports to be handing the tools of cybernetic reprogramming over to the viewer, so that anyone can “reprogram, reform, inform your own brain” and thus self-evolve into higher forms of consciousness. And yet he clearly intends, through the presentation itself, to inculcate a very definite program of his own, that is, the creation of a “global language” that will produce a “global brain linkup”—“one global village…one global human spirit, one global human race” no longer “separated by words or minds or nationalities or religious biases.”⁵⁷ Evolution only goes in one direction. In short, what Leary offers as a technological method of consciousness liberation is no less an instance of religious engineering.

Nor was Leary, in the course of his celebrated career as a psychedelic guru, a stranger to the disturbing overlap between countercultural liberation and government-sponsored mind control. In 1977, shortly after his release from prison, he was interviewed by his former friend Walter Bowart, who went on to publish Operation Mind Control (1978) about the CIA’s MKUltra program. Pointing out that the CIA was “the world’s largest consumer of Sandoz LSD,” Bowart confronted Leary with a CIA memo directing agents to gather information concerning Leary’s own psychedelic experiments at the Millbrook Estate (which was loaned to him by scions of the powerful Mellon family), among other indications that Leary’s anti-authoritarian crusade was tainted with an undercurrent of totalitarian mind control. While denying any direct knowledge or involvement, Leary admits that Milbrook was certainly infiltrated by the Agency. Surprisingly—shockingly even—Leary furthermore downplays the significance of these ghastly experiments and finally declares, “I like the CIA!”⁵⁸

The career arcs of Bateson and Leary demonstrate a crucial link between what Bainbridge calls “psychotherapeutic transformation” and top-down “utopian transformation.” Methods of “utopian transformation,” or, in other words, radical technocratic social engineering projects, are simply the externalization of techniques billed as psycho-spiritual methods of personal empowerment and transformation. Bainbridge criticizes early manifestations of transhumanist spirituality for being too focused almost exclusively on “computational” and “biological” routes of transformation (genetic engineering, mind uploading, etc.)—a reflection of an overly individualistic mindset among transhumanists like FM-2030. As a result, they have neglected to effectively combine these routes with the psychotherapeutic and utopian routes.⁵⁹ Precisely echoing Bainbridge’s critique, Prisco too recommends to “those who wish to develop and spread new scientific religions” that they “think beyond science and technology, and pay more attention to esthetics, emotions, and community.”

Applying these principles late in his career, Bainbridge has turned much of his attention to gaming and virtual worlds, beginning around 2010, when MIT Press published his study of the online role-playing game World of Warcraft, subtitled Social Science in a Virtual World.⁶⁰ The Turing Church was launched in the Second Life virtual world, in the virtual Terasem Amphitheater. The plasticity of these virtual environments—and in particular, the malleability of personal identity or “avatars” in them—makes them ideal for generating and promoting transhumanist religions, in the view of Bainbridge and his disciples. Nonetheless, transhumanist religion is mostly the preserve of the superclass, and not by accident. In both versions of the “Galactic Civilizations” essay, Bainbridge specifies that the new religion is aimed at “giving a sense of transcendent purpose to dominant sectors of society.”⁶¹ Those who have read Harari will know that’s in part because those sectors are all that’s supposed to be left. But transhumanism thrives among this globalist superclass because it flatters their ill-starred desires for immortal godhood and the construction of a post-Christian New World Order—desires which themselves witness to a fundamentally Luciferian spirituality at the heart of not only transhumanism but of the Western occult and the countercultural spiritualities that have influenced the movement all along.

Link to Footnotes