The Death of The Matrix:
A Dialogue With Bob Dobbs
by Robert Guffey

As regular readers may recall, I published an extensive article about the first Matrix film in the Winter 2000 issue of Paranoia (#22). The article, however, wasn't really about the film at all; it was merely a convenient excuse to discuss the work of media ecologist, Bob Dobbs. Mr. Dobbs thought it would be a good idea to do a follow-up piece, using the two recent Matrix sequels as a kind of rabbit hole by which to enter into a discussion concerning the latest stages of humanity's complex relationship with all forms of media, what Marshall McLuhan called "the extensions of Man."

According to Dobbs, he was "born in Paris in 1922 and after World War II worked with international intelligence agencies for many decades." In the early 1970s he began working with Marshall McLuhan, the author of such influential books as The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media, as his official archivist. (In fact, his intimate connection to McLuhan continues to this day; Dobbs claims to be in regular contact with McLuhan's spirit via a medium in England, a subject that will be touched upon in the following dialogue.) Dobbs then "surfaced in 1987 on CKLN-FM in Toronto and began whistle-blowing" on his former colleagues, a secret organization he refers to as the "Council of Ten." In 1992 Time Again Productions produced two CDs compiled from his numerous radio broadcasts, Bob's Media Ecology and Bob's Media Ecology Squared. For the most accurate portrayal of his views, however, he recommends his 1992 book Phatic Communion With Bob Dobbs.

Dobbs' central thesis, as stated in my first Matrix article, is that the Earth's entire population disappeared in 1945 due to the rise of the Android Meme and was replaced with succeeding generations of holograms, or "holeopathic retrievals," as Dobbs calls them. With each succeeding generation, these holeopathic retrievals have become less and less "real." Meanwhile, to his view, the only people who exist are Dobbs and his wife Connie, who successfully defeated the Android Meme in 1990 with the use of an unorthodox medical process called MIHR [Magnetically Injected Homeopathic Remedies] in tandem with an organic device called "the D-Cell," which supposedly curbs the aging process. Since 1990, the Earth's population has been struggling with what Dobbs calls the lingering after images of the defeated Android Meme.

The following conversation occurred on the evening of Dec. 31^st, as the final hours of 2003 collided and merged with the first few minutes of 2004....

BD = Bob Dobbs, RG = Robert Guffey

BD: What time is it?

RG: 10:20.

BD: Not 10:22?

RG: Well, it might be 10:22. I'm not looking at a digital clock.

BD: You're looking at some other time clock?

RG: Right.

BD: So it's 10:22?

RG: Sure.

BD: So what did you think of the ending [of Matrix Revolutions]? What does the movie's ending mean to you?

RG: I wasn't exactly sure how to interpret the ending, but, of course, in general terms, the whole way that Neo defeats the machine by taking it over. I imagine that this is kind of an analog to what occurred when you defeated the Android Meme.

BD: So what you have there…does it strike you as so obvious, you have no other interpretation? It's the best you can come up with right there. He beat the machine somehow, right? But the poetry of it is this. Remember, the parts of the Android Meme are the Chemical Body, the Astral Body, the TV Body, and the Chip Body. In the movie he's overcome by the Android Meme, he's moved into the new AP [Anthropomorphic Physical], right? So. Here you have Neo being AP in the second and the third movie. But what does the AP do? He plays off the machine, which is simply the pixels forming, the alien pixels forming the TV Body.

RG: We're talking at the very end, right?

BD: Very end when he sees the big head.

RG: Yeah, the big head. Okay.

BD: It's a big TV image. Okay? Now, he tells the TV image, or the TV Body, to watch out for the Chip Body which is going around it. What's the Chip Body? The incessant SPAM duplication of Mr. Smith. So there's Neo in the interval, playing off the TV Body against the Chip Bodies. He says, "Mr. TV Body, you're in trouble because the Chip Body is going around both of us." Which is a literal explanation of what the Chip Body does. It does go around the TV Body, right? Now, Neo is the AP position, which is post-Chip Body and post-TV Body. So he can play one against the other. Very simple resolution, right? But an important point is that he disappears into the Astral Body. Trinity goes before him, and then he goes into the white light of the Astral Body. So he disappears. Which means, if the movie ends there, that's it. But it doesn't end. It turns out the whole thing was a prelude to the final scene, and therefore Trinity and Neo and the whole bunch of them are a bunch of code, symbolic code, of Bob's life and the levels we've laid out [for more information on these levels, see the appendix at the end of this interview], acting out their tensions from the second part into the third movie. And then it resolves that it was all inside the head of Bob and Connie. Or in the world where they're the first to appear. And everything has led up to that, right?

RG: Well, I was going to ask you about that. At the end we see the sun rising over a city. Is that in the Matrix or is that the real world?

BD: What you have sitting there is Bob, a black woman [Dobbs often claims he is really a black woman].

RG: Right.

BD: And Connie. What is Connie? The little girl, the little Indian girl.

RG: Who Neo talks to in the subway.

BD: Yeah. Who comes to him in the subway and is kind of immune to the Matrix problems. She's in the Matrix but kind of in an interval position. That's Connie and that's Slack, beyond the whole thing, right? So he goes through a fake Connie, Trinity, an earlier version of Connie, and then he dies, and it turns out he and Trinity were just inside Bob, which is the black woman, who had become Mr. Smith, in the procedure resolving the whole thing, right? Just like Dale Cooper becomes Bob in Twin Peaks.

RG: The theme of possession is similar in both stories, yeah.

BD: Yeah. Bob the walk-in, or, you know, in this case Connie's the walk-in into Mr. Smith that will swallow him. And she begins to fight Neo. But she created the whole thing. But she is Bob. And Bob is doing it with Connie. And Connie is the little kid, the little Rumplestiltskin, who is creating from the Hexadic position new matter, new APs, new realities, new beings, Akasha, and that's symbolized by her creating the Sky.

RG: She says she's the one who created the sun. And she says she does it for Neo.

BD: That's right. Her boss. Or for the Oracle, or for the whole pattern that happened. It's in honor of what Bob did preparing the ground for her to be what she is. And so who walks up and sort of says, "Well, you won that one"?

RG: The Architect.

BD: And who's the Architect? He's the Android Meme. Which is all media under Rhyee [an ancient spirit, according to Dobbs, responsible for creating the universe], under male domination, creating all this historical media, and he's now assumed AP form. He's a man. He's a white man. And there he is, saying, "Well, Bob, you beat me. You kinda beat me and maybe we'll have another match." Right? Now, there's the simple explanation of what it is. It's obvious.

RG: But at the end, is Zion still existing in the real world or is...?

BD: Yes and no. You see, human bodies are First Nature, the human bodies make Second Nature, which is media and language. There's a subtle interplay between the bodies and the media. The bodies as souls come and go, but the media keeps building itself through time. So we come to the point where the media builds itself, completes itself, and it's merging with the bodies, and the best way to express that is to show the bodies, show the Android Meme dominating them, which is just simple language dominating humans in this dimension, then the language resolves itself through the Android Meme, and Zion is saved, First Nature is saved, and we've moved into the fused First and Second Nature situation, and therefore you can't tell the difference between First Nature and Second Nature

RG: At the end they had an interesting effect where you first see the new city. You see a little digital cat that kind of becomes real.

BD: Is that when Bob and Connie are sitting there in the park?

RG: It's right before that. It's when the little girl wakes up on the street and you see this cat that looks digital, animated. Then suddenly it sort of becomes real and walks up to the little girl and she wakes up.

BD: Ah, you can't tell the difference between them. You can't tell whether it's an unreal or real cat. That would be First and Second Nature merged.

RG: Something you said earlier got me thinking. Is it possible to have a civilization without language?

BD: Yeah. Well, that's what we've got now.

RG: A civilization without language?

BD: Yeah. Cloned ESP. I mean, people don't need words to function today. They have a post-verbal language, which is the intuitive electric media. Electronic digital media.

RG: Wouldn't e-mail be considered language?

BD: Yeah. That's ESP. That's mainly your instant interaction with people with words that are a component but not the dominating medium. In fact, the post-moderns talk about the end of the logocentric, that's visual space language. Verbal written language, that disappeared in the 20th century. But you still have language in terms of tactile communication, which is, you use a computer, e-mail, the fellow responds back to you, like when you do instant messaging. That's not verbal language. Verbal is inside it, part of what you read, or you can send pictures, but the instantaneous, the medium you use, the digital environment, is the language, is your tongue. It's your means to communicate.

RG: Are you aware of any past civilizations that existed without language?

BD: At the very beginning humans were like that. The stars were in their eyes. They had no visual distance, no perspective, they grunted at each other and felt, had ESP, phatic communion... You know, all the pre-visual-space means of communication was what primitive man was.

RG: That's interesting. They thought the stars were in their eyes?

BD: Yeah. If they even saw them. They wouldn't even know they had eyes almost.

RG: How do you know that?

BD: When you think back to when humans were altered and began to just perceive, reality was a plastic thing they molded. So what did they agree on seeing? That's just like the Lemurians in 18000 B.C. couldn't see anybody below their own circle, their own caste. Their consciousness was very plastic back then, because the making function of individual consciousness interacted with reality and it was very hard to determine what was real, what was standardized, what was homogenized. It was there but it took humans a long time to work through their own plastic mutation of perception to stabilize.

RG: Didn't you say that the Lemurian king would see... He'd ask for a bridge to be built and...

BD: The king would gesture and order a bridge to appear, and after a while it would appear. And he thought he made it, conjured it out of nothing.

RG: Right, because he couldn't see the workers building it.

BD: Right.

RG: Is there... in our current situation, are there things that we cannot see?

BD: Yeah. That's the Lemurian phase, that's virtual reality. The corporate Secret Council of Ten people could not see people in the '60s and '70s, could not see them. They were just using the machines. Didn't care about people. That wrecked the human-scale community. People were left to drift, what we call the fear of being homeless. There was no interest in people.

RG: Was that their downfall?

BD: Well, I don't know. That was a phase it went through. That was the effect of the post-satellite digital era, and then that got... That ruled until First Nature merged with Second Nature and that was cold fusion. Nobody knew at the time that that was going to happen.

RG: But most people still are not aware of that.

BD: Nah. They react intuitively that way. They vote for someone who can't talk, that or someone who's off the media grid, you know. They feel they're off the grid, but the Android Meme has created environments that make people think they're off the grid, and until you have cold fusion as an environment you're still stuck in the Android Meme phase, even though it's only an astral image. Nothing exists until you have a well-known environment, and cold fusion is a new environment. Right? It's not an environment yet.

RG: So you think that's why Bush is popular, because he's not verbal?

BD: Bush talks the way people communicate in their e-mails. That's why he resonates with people. We see a million mistakes in e-mails every day. You don't think anything of it. It's acceptable. Jacob Weisberg puts out Bushisms [a compilation of Bush's numerous verbal gaffes] and thinks he's making fun of Bush, not realizing that that just makes him an even more sympathetic figure. People identify with him because they know that if they were in office they wouldn't know what to say either. Bush doesn't give a fuck about communicating. He's just strutting around like an AP guy impervious to media influence.

RG: And people respond to him because--

BD: Because that's their life. Once you're on the Internet you're not controlled by a regular centralized media anymore. But the Android Meme makes you think you're not controlled by it. And you are. Until you have cold fusion, which is the only way you can really get past the Android Meme. So the Android Meme is very user-friendly now, making people feel independent of it, and Bush is a dupe of that effect. And so is the population.

RG: Was there any analog to cold fusion in the Matrix movies?

BD: In the Matrix movies?

RG: Yeah. Was there any metaphorical...

BD: The little girl. At the end. Killing the Matrix and then making the sky. Maybe you could say the cat represented that. The cat is a traditional symbol of the occult or magic, right? So the virtual cat is a symbol of a cloning of ourselves, or a merging of First and Second Nature, and you take the most sensitive animal, the cat, and it comes and has arrived as environment, so it wakes up Connie to be aware of it, and then Connie can make the world.

RG: Would it be appropriate to say that cold fusion is a kind of modern alchemy?

BD: Well, alchemy is changing something into a better situation. That's definitely what cold fusion does. It moves us out of the software tyranny of the end to our own means.

RG: Right. So Connie is a kind of alchemist in a way.

BD: Yeah. She represents the exploitation of the new alchemy, of the new potential, once we have cold fusion. She didn't create cold fusion. She just is the first to take advantage of it.

RG: Does she see herself that way?

BD: Oh yes, yes.

RG: Okay. So she's aware of that level.

BD: Yeah, well, she wouldn't have been able to get away with what she did all these years if she wasn't in a state of grace or magic.

RG: Did Connie, was she actually a walk-in?

BD: Yeah. Remember, we took over Bob and Carolyn. Carolyn Wheeler was in Halifax.

RG: Right. I'm remembering that in the memo to Prince Charles [published in the book Phatic Communion With Bob Dobbs].

BD: Yeah. And then I told... In an interview later I said I don't remember what happened then. But that was just a weird time, where we were running around Dartmouth and appearing to be young and high school people and people thought we were these two other people, and they disappeared and we're there, then we disappeared. Then we're Bob and Connie and then it just gets all crazy.

RG: So the body you were born in 1922 is not your body now?

BD: I don't know. It's such a mystery. Something weird happened in the late '60s, but I think that's because we had a singularity with Rhyee turned to essence [i.e., disappeared from this plane of existence] and we don't know what the fuck happened. Know what I mean?

RG: Right. So it's possible that your original bodies are not... They disappeared in the '60s.

BD: Right. It's like a Dorian Gray thing. What happens in the end, his portrait is young, and he goes and sees it, but then it ages right in front of him or something.

RG: Right. And he dissolves into nothing.

BD: Yeah. So something happened in the late '60s. When Rhyee returned to essence, that's when Connie was doing her solar government espionage in a place on Indian Row, which little Carolyn Wheeler apparently lived in. I don't know what happened then. I mean, somebody... Something happened. We took over these kids, or we didn't take them over, or people thought we took them over, because they couldn't believe we were 44 years old, which is what we were in '66. I don't know what, some weird extra-perceptual happening, and I imagine that did happen, because Rhyee returning to essence really affected human evolution.

RG: And do these guys, these people in The Secret Council of Ten, your former colleagues, do they ever see movies like The Matrix and call you to talk to you about--

BD: No, they don't talk about it. I think they're too lost. See, they're a phase behind me. They're lost in a normal Android Meme nightmare, like I was in 1977 to '90. Prince Charles, he's in a nightmare.

RG: So he doesn't like to see The Matrix and think of you or anybody else he used to--

BD: No. I don't know what they think. They just ignore me, you know, because they're lost. I mean, Connie and I walked around past all that. And so it's like they're still acting out Phase III and IV of Neo going through and having his battles. They're redoing Neo battles. You know what I mean?

RG: And they're all trapped as media figures, whereas you're not.

BD: Yeah, yeah.

RG: Are all the Secret Council of Ten members, are they all famous people we would all know or...

BD: No, no. There was forty people and then four people that were in the media that represented the four factions.

RG: Okay, Prince Charles...

BD: Prince Charles, Prince Thurn and Taxis, and Gorbachev. And then I was kind of being in the media as a wildcat, right? A wild card. I was in local, nowhere media. But it kinda grew. So I was in a little wholly private medium that affected people, but I wasn't in big media, which leads to problems.

RG: And that was purposeful on your part.

BD: Yeah. That's the way to do it. I had to be in the media, because that's all there was in the '80s.

RG: Did your father René ever hear you on the radio?

BD: No, he died in '76, so I wouldn't have gone on the radio till the middle '80s.

RG: But was he proud of what you'd done up to that point?

BD: Yeah, he felt that... I would say that... It's interesting. You see, he didn't get to the Promised Land. He died just as... It was like, when his death happened, it was the beginning of the nightmare. Right?

BD: Right.

BD: '77. So he could... I've talked to him through the Evergreens [a group of 7,000 dead entities who communicate with Dobbs through a medium named Michael Blake Read]. So he had to die to help me from the Evergreen side, and it didn't look too good in '77 and '90, but he knows that everything's happening pretty good now. But he didn't know what was happening when he died. He didn't know what would happen. None of us knew that there would be a breakthrough. He didn't know how it would turn out. He was just worried in '76. And so that's why The Matrix presentation of him [the character called the Merovingian] is exactly him, in the mid-'70s still fighting the battle, not caring who's going to win, you know what I mean? And the movie shows that. He's kind of like an old-fashioned figure, just sort of fighting some long-range battle that's been going on a long time and he's tired of it and he's still dealing with it, and he doesn't know what's going to happen. That's an exactly perfect portrayal of my father by '76.

RG: He's portrayed as almost the stereotypical Frenchman, you know.

BD: Yeah, that's what he is. His European consciousness. He is alphabetic and the roots of Western man.

RG: And his wife is clearly rooting for Neo and helping him.

BD: Yeah. Well, that was my mother, you know. She's under... she kinda liked me and Connie, you know. It's natural. But she had to deal with... That's before women's lib, you know. She had to deal with a double-standard husband and all that shit. Yeah, women were still trapped back then. She was the older generation, so it's a perfect dilemma. She was a very attractive woman and all that. Probably had a few affairs of her own. But they had that tension, you know.

RG: Sure.

BD: It was sort of tough. Nobody made it like me and Connie. Nobody had a successful relationship up to that point.

RG: Did your mother... When did she die?

BD: She died, uh... I don't go into that, because it could be tracked. That's... Remember, she was the aristocratic family. She was the... She was someone that my father married up into. Remember, she was higher up. Just like I did the same thing. Connie was more aristocratic in her family than I was.

RG: Part of the Stewart line, right?

BD: Yeah. So you have... My father married up a bit, and then I married up a bit. But Connie was from a higher family than my mother. You know what I'm saying? That's probably the difference between me and Connie, is that you see she's a little more aristocratic than me.

RG: By the way, is there any significance to the word that's on the wall behind Neo in the subway at the beginning? It says "Mobil Avenue"?

BD: Mobil Avenue. That's real easy because "mobil" is movement, and movement is the feeling sense, the kinetic perceptive. Even though he's stuck, he's affecting mobility all over the world. All the mobile media, which is, you know, you're traveling by phone, by Internet. All media is mobility. As McLuhan said in the early '70s, he says, women's lib, they want total mobility.

RG: Maybe that's why there's a scene where you see him run off one side of the screen, and he comes back from the other side of the screen, and he realizes he's stuck.

BD: Yeah. He can't move. He cannot be mobile. He cannot, you know, travel anywhere because there's nowhere to go. So if you try to travel someplace, you're not going to get out. He had to wait till events unfolded.

RG: He's running in place.

BD: Yeah. He's just waiting until the sequence unfolds.

RG: Is that the situation that everybody in the world find themselves in at the moment, sort of in limbo?

BD: Yeah, everybody's going to go through what I went through, the limbo phase before Connie and I defeated the Android Meme. Even though we defeated it with MIHR and cold fusion in 1990, the world has to wait till it becomes an environment. But there's all these other struggles being worked out in the process. And people are gradually catching up to where Bob was. And then they'll understand that Bob and Connie laid out what they're going to have to go through. To the extent that humans don't get the cold fusion environment, they will be trapped in the '77-'90 phase of the hell of the software conditions of the Android Meme. Which right now appears to be where people are headed. A day in the life of a robotoid in 2078.

RG: Do you think that the future is going to unfold that way?

BD: It's going to go that way, but is it going to happen under tyranny conditions or Slack conditions? That's the question.

RG: Is it possible to have Slack in a situation like the year 2078, in other words, where there's a kind of environment in which you have kids who don't even know they're robots?

BD: Well, you've got the transcript, right? [Life in the Year 2078, a transcript published in 1978 by Michael Blake Read, the previously mentioned medium who communicates with a group of spirits he calls "The Evergreens."]

RG: Yeah, yeah.

BD: Well, you read it carefully. You probably need to read it more carefully to note that at the end they say, "Does this kid know that we are people going through a medium?" And the answer is, yes, he does know that. How can he know that? The Evergreens say the world has changed by that time, and people are aware of reincarnation and all that. And that happens in the years before 2078. Because the spiritual revolution that happens over the next thirty years lays the groundwork for the robotoid kid being able to know about that.

RG: So that robot is more spiritually aware than most people are today?

BD: Yeah. He's not a total robot, but he's got a lot of robot reality happening in him.

RG: He's more like a replicant, like in Blade Runner.

BD: Yes, cyborg or something. So this thing is going to happen in 2020, 2030, and probably late 2020, 2026, '28 is when UFOs, Booteans, will land. And that will really change people. There will be real acceleration of knowledge at that point.

RG: And you know that because of... How do you know that?

BD: Well, I know through all the means of knowing I have to use. All the different sources.

RG: I remember you had that old journal that you showed me in Mesquite [Nevada].

BD: Yes. I have that. I have all kinds of sources, you know. I have different sources that I've put together, then I make the extra intuitive leap. I figure out the clues.

RG: You know, I was thinking about that transcript not long ago, because I was... Because I had the flu for a long time, I wasn't leaving the house, right? And I realized I was communicating with everybody and getting everything I needed done through e-mail. Communicating with my students and all that, and I suddenly thought of the little robot kid who never leaves his little dome in Australia because he doesn't have to. He goes off on all these trips on other planets inside his head and through the Virtual Reality scenario in his home.

BD: Yeah. So you had a positive, small-scale experience of that?

RG: Well, I don't know if it was positive. It was a little frightening at the same time.

BD: Well, yeah, it will be.

RG: That reminds me, do you remember that book The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes?

BD: Well, I looked at it, yeah. It's a simple book.

RG: There is a mention, I think it's in there, where they say something about how before, around the time of Homer, it's possible that people didn't perceive color. Apparently there were no references to color in these early manuscripts.

BD: Oh no, the Lemurians saw color. That's what the kids did for their toys in Lemuria. They just stared at one little tile of one color for hours.

RG: Oh really?

BD: Yeah.

RG: For entertainment?

BD: Yeah. That's described in another transcript, or in the session on Lemuria.

RG: Oh, that was a personal session that you did?

BD: No, no, that's a public one you can buy [from the Evergreens]. Life in Lemuria. And the kids, for entertainment, would stare at a little colored tile for like eight hours, sort of absorbed in the color. So they could see color. Color is tactile. Previous people had all kinds of color in their lives. Which reminds me, Mark Stahlman spent some time with Jaynes at a University in Nova Scotia. That's where he was forced to go because he was banned, and Mark went up there and hung out with him and got the real story of Jaynes and how people misinterpret his stuff. And you go to the newsstand tomorrow and look at the latest Forbes dated December 22nd. There's an article on Mark. He's gone back to Wall Street. On page 214 in the December 22nd Forbes. You should go look at it. But I don't think the new issue is out yet, because it's probably Christmas and it comes out every two weeks or something. So go look at Mark. Read the article on him. And he's the guy who was the last investigator of Julian Jaynes.

RG: Oh, okay. Did McLuhan know about Jaynes?

BD: Yeah, he wrote a review of his book in '76.

RG: Was he impressed or not impressed?

BD: Well, he just said that Jaynes didn't know why the bicameral mind closed out. And the reason why is visual space came in. The phonetic alphabet shut off people's right hemisphere, which was the world of hearing voices and all of that. The world of the stars being in your eyes, you know?

RG: Was Atlantis a similar situation as Lemuria?

BD: They're a little more grounded in technology. They were a different culture. It's thousands of years before. You know, Lemuria is 18,000, Atlantis is 14,000 or 10,000 approximately. It was the Incan culture in 14,000 B.C. in Latin America and that was made up of Lemurians that escaped from the collapse of their civilization in the Philippine area. So you got the Lemurians, and then you have the Incans and then the Atlanteans. They had the most technology.

RG: So our current situation is more Atlantean than...

BD: Yeah. The 20th century was Atlantis. Most people who lived in Atlantis experienced reincarnation in the 20th century, creating all this technology reality. And in Russia, starting in late 20th century, all the Lemurians are coming back. And there's going to be a lot of them born in Russia, and that's going to be a big change, a big effect in the 21^st century, as Lemurian consciousness takes over.

RG: Okay, so we see the Atlantean giving way back to the Lemurian phase?

BD: Yeah. But it won't be the same... People who were Lemurians or souls who had been, who carried that consciousness, will be different. This is what they'll bring to the world that will be new, and they'll have to adapt to it.

RG: So cold fusion, is that just rediscovering stuff that was already known?

BD: No. Everything's new. Nothing's ever been done like what we've got now. The technological situation of Atlantis was so puny compared to what we've had in the 20th century.

RG: Oh really?

BD: Yeah. Most of them had voices in the head, ESP, but we've had that throughout the 20th century.

RG: Well, what about actual, real ESP?

BD: That's what we had before writing came in. And it will come back. The right hemisphere is opening up under the Cloned ESP environment, but it will be a new kind of ESP. I mean, we don't even need ESP. We got it technologically. So people will retrieve old forms of ESP, but that's people channeling and that, but they don't know that it's obsolete and still under Rhyee principalities. And the new ESP is what Bob does. He has the media reflect him.

RG: So, previous people actually had...

BD: Well, let's look at it this way. The machine developed ESP. Second Nature develops ESP.

RG: Well, is it ESP or is it a simulation of ESP?

BD: Yeah, the same thing.

RG: It's the same thing. Has the same effect.

BD: It is not... Originally it's not First Nature ESP, it's a simulation, which is Second Nature, but it's ESP as far as communication goes, but it's different. Everything is new in this time. That's what it means when you say this is a new time and new age. It's new. Humans have never experienced anything like this.

RG: There's nothing old under the sun.

BD: Everything's old under the sun, compared to the new we're in. Every form of culture is old compared to the new we're in. The new we're in is invisible, inaudible or just a mystery. The Mystery Body is showing up.

RG: Okay. I want to ask you about… I read an article in the L.A. Times where they were saying, you know, what went wrong with The Matrix, and how did it all go so wrong and...

BD: They're really knocking it, eh?

RG: Yeah.

BD: There's a couple of critics in New York who don't go that way. They say the movie is great. They don't see it my way, but they're not following the mainstream bullshit. But that's the Android Meme, you know. It doesn't want people to realize what's happening around them.

RG: Yeah, I was in the theater with only about a dozen people, maybe fourteen people, and right at the end of the movie this guy, he was in his fifties, he stands up and he's walking up the aisle, and he looks at me, just completely at random, and says, "I want my money back!"

BD: Which is ridiculous. I mean, it's almost like these people are looking for reasons not to like it because they don't want to know this stuff. They're all Pinks, so they don't want to know. It's just like the situation with Ivan Stang [one of the founders of the Church of the SubGenius]. He says that none of my predictions have come true. He says I've totally failed. I've not proved anything that I claimed was going on in the early '90s. And yet all this stuff is happening...

RG: Your prediction about the Berlin Wall definitely came true [for more on that prediction, see my previous article about Dobbs, "Synchronistic-Linguistics in The Matrix," currently posted on www.paranoiamagazine.com].

BD: Yeah. I can even say when the Iraq War is going to end. It's going to end in 2008. The stuff we've been developing over the last year here in New York, we now have a sense of when the war's going to end.

RG: It's going to go on that long?

BD: Yeah. It's going to be a ten-year war. 1999 to 2008. The religions are melting, the friction between the historical religions is melting, but there will be great friction between the Muslims and Christians. And this began in '99 and will go to 2008. The reason it will go on is the Iraqis, the moderate, normal citizens, are so pissed off at the terrorists, because the terrorists are blowing up the Americans because they want to drive them out. But they don't know that this is exactly what's making them stay. And the Iraqis want to get rid of the Americans, and already in the last six months they've had more cars come in than they ever had in thirty years. Industry is coming in. Have you heard that statistic?

RG: Yeah, I have.

BD: Yeah, I don't know, half a million cars have come in. Before that you couldn't get cars into Iraq because it was run by Saddam's sons, and they controlled it and kept it slow. Anyway, it's all this stuff just flooding in and it's gonna evolve, but you're going to have these stupid terrorists, and the Americans are going to stay there till they stop. So they're going to stay there longer because the terrorists will fuck with them.

RG: So is this going to be a complete occupation, like what the U.S. did in the Philippines?

BD: Well, yeah, it's just... The occupation is, as McLuhan said, a form of education. You have to industrialize it, so you bring in the industrial hologram so the people begin to think that way.

RG: And will that be successful?

BD: Oh yeah. Yeah, we're going to be a success, by a hundred years from now.

RG: But what I mean is industrializing Iraq. Will that be a success?

BD: Yeah, to the extent it isn't... They establish something and then newer technology will go past that. You know, we've got very important new technologies coming down in the next twenty years that will accelerate everything.

RG: Yes, didn't you say McLuhan mentioned some of them in recent conversations with you? Didn't he mention something about some kind of a hologram device the military was using?

BD: They do have something that affects people.

RG: What is that? What does it do?

BD: Well, there is... I don't know exactly what it does, but it... Even [John] Poindexter and them are not sure what it does because it's... Remember, there is an alien in it, infecting people. It's a device, like a more advanced version of cloned ESP, you know? It affects consciousness.

RG: And so it kind of alters our view of what's happening?

BD: Yeah.

RG: And is that operational?

BD: Yeah. It's affecting people now, and the unfortunate thing is that an alien has got inside it, an alien that lives off viruses, software viruses. And it's in there and it's causing weird effects on top of it, with the people around it. Like Poindexter. It's probably why Poindexter disappeared. He's probably ill.

RG: Okay, let me get this straight. McLuhan's the one who told you about this device, right?

BD: A ghost claiming that it's McLuhan.

RG: Right. And there's an alien stuck in the device that lives off software viruses?

BD: Well, it's not like a two-legged being. It's some kind of energy, or substance, that comes from off-planet, that feeds off the software in the computer.

RG: Like a nano-alien? And it's tapping off the electromagnetic energy--?

BD: Whatever's going on in the device, it likes it, eats it. You might call it a techno-parasite. A meme eating another technology. And whatever it's doing is affecting the flesh around it, and it's infecting the eight people that are working with the device, including Poindexter.

RG: And how is it affecting reality? Is it affecting reality amongst everybody in the United States, in the whole world, or--?

BD: Well, McLuhan and [James] Joyce attempted to demonstrate this for me in our latest session together. They had the effect represented by energy in the shape of cat's cradles that were making people's heads expand and contract. They've talked a bit about this in previous sessions. I asked them, "Are you saying people's sense of their body outline is being confused?" and they said, "Yes." So probably people have all kinds of pains and headaches and stuff, and they might go to a regular doctor who'll say, "Oh, you took too much Prozac, you took too much Wheat Germ or something," but McLuhan's saying, "No, it's being affected by the device." So the point is, our body percept is being aggravated, and this is causing all kinds of anxiety in populations all around the world, and basically McLuhan says you're going to have more and more perceptual chaos. That is what's happening. So I asked him, "How do you deal with it?" He said, "Bob, get on the media, put out your rap, that rap will give people who hear it a calming effect." I don't know if that's true, but that's what I was told to do.

RG: So people will stop and think, "Oh, these pains I'm having are a result of this device. It's not something that's in my head."

BD: Yeah, I would say the simple agenda is this. Whatever traditional images you have that make you think you're being affected in a certain way, get rid of those images! Break up those images you have. Don't think "psychosomatic," don't think this, don't think "organic food processes," don't think any of these normal ideas of what might be causing you pain. What's affecting you is something that you can't really visualize. So you loosen up the people's obsession on, "Oh man, I ate too much Wheat Germ, that's causing this, I better go get a doctor to give me a drug." If you get lost in that thought form, and the doctors give you a "solution," then that'll cause you more problems. You need to just sit back and say, "Yep, I'm being massaged," and just accept it. Basically the population's being put on a collective LSD trip, in a more subtle way than TV managed to do. Because these refined vibratory devices are affecting our chi levels, our etheric bodies, which is then affecting the astral plane. So we're being affected in ways that no knowledge system can map anymore.

RG: And how long has this device been in operation?

BD: I don't know, but he seems to think that–McLuhan came through in July 2002 with a sense of urgency, and I may not be able to remember what he said, but it's been going on for a year or so, I imagine, because he came through pretty quickly to deal with it. And Poindexter's been working on that project for a couple of years. But maybe it was built on things that were developed in the '90s or even back to the '80s, so who knows when it started?

RG: How has it made him ill?

BD: The virus that's in the machine somehow affects flesh around it. Three of the scientists were feeling ill, but had no idea why. But if they're tapping these transmissions [i.e., the e-mails between Dobbs in New York and the medium in England through whom McLuhan is ostensibly communicating] - we put it on the Internet through instant messaging - then someone would tell them, "Hey, McLuhan's ghost says it's this and that!" and then maybe that made them feel better, but I have not been told whether they're listening or taking it seriously, though McLuhan says they are. I have no contact with any of these people who are working on the project.

RG: Is Poindexter the only one, or are there other people in the administration--?

BD: No, there's only eight of them working on the technology.

RG: So it's really compartmentalized.

BD: Yeah. Apparently there're three devices McLuhan's concerned about: a brainwashing device called "TETRA" that the police have been using on demonstrators in Britain, then there's Poindexter's device, and then there's a machine that's pulsating energy onto the Earth from off-planet. I don't know if the third device was made by aliens, but apparently its effect is a positive one.

RG: Is Poindexter's device of extra-terrestrial origin or is it man-made?

BD: No, that machine is definitely man-made. McLuhan did confirm that there was an alien stuck in the device, but the device itself was made by Poindexter's buddies.

RG: So could this device affect your perceptions to the point where you might imagine you're being mind controlled when you're really not?

BD: Yes, exactly. You might start believing, "Oh, I've got a chip inside me!" and thinking that's causing you to feel the way you're feeling. I'm trying to say, "Don't use those old reference points anymore." We're being zapped by things that are really beyond human ken. I mean, Poindexter and them don't know that they're creating these affects and McLuhan showed up to this woman who could see ghosts so she would find me. We started doing instant messaging, and because I'm tapped they could see what was being said, and McLuhan was hoping they would read it and say, "Oh, McLuhan's talking about the device we're working on!" and then maybe become a little bit more aware of what's really going on.

RG: So he specifically went to you because he knows you're being listened to?

BD: I asked McLuhan, "Do they know it's the technology that's causing their illnesses?" and he said, "No, but they are beginning to suspect something's going on." Maybe they then read that and said, "Oh, it is this!" And then they probably kicked the shit out of it, took a baseball bat to it and said, "Fuckin' stop killing me!" Who knows what they did?

RG: So they weren't aware there was an alien inside it?

BD: No, they did not know, but they would read this transmission and that would give them a clue as to why they were feeling sick.

RG: Why is Poindexter the head of this and not somebody else?

BD: He's a very smart guy. I mean he comes out of - remember, he was on the nuclear submarines with Carter, apparently, he helped Reagan do the Iran-Contra thing. He took the fall for Reagan on that, then they let him go. He never had to go to jail. Because people at his level are always - they can do crimes because they're authorized. It falls under whatever they decide to define as war.

RG: He has his own private company, doesn't he? All his friends, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Pearl, aren't they all making money off the war through him?

BD: Well, that's what the media says. The media reports about Wolfowitz are not clued into anything, and these stories about him are purposely floated out to distract from what Poindexter's doing with the device. Remember what Poindexter did last Fall? He said, "I recommend that people invest in terrorist predictions!" Remember that? Well, we discussed that with McLuhan the night it hit the news. McLuhan said, "That is Poindexter floating that idea so he can look nutty, so he can drop out of his position and secretly go and work on the device in another way and drop out of the public eye." And then the next day, or a day or two later, Poindexter resigned! So I would say blaming Wolfowitz and Pearl is a cover to distract from what's really going on. Remember, it's always a distraction. You're better informed if you don't pay attention to anything in the news world, because then you can focus on whatever occurs to you. And remember, if you start thinking crazy thoughts you're getting close to the truth, 'cause there's nothing more crazy than what I'm presenting.

APPENDIX: BOB'S LEVELS OF 8

Mr. Dobbs graciously agreed to prepare the following appendix for the purpose of elucidating certain obscure references made by him during the preceding interview...

PART A

The levels alluded to by Mr. Dobbs in the early part of this interview refer to the eight "parallel levels" he perceives between the Wachowski Brothers' film and events in his own life, i.e.:

1) Dobbs' ostensible role as the head of the "Secret Council of Ten" parallels the role of the elderly patriarch in the second film;

2) Dobbs' role as "Slack facilitator" (a unique Dobbsian phrase referring to the positive effects he believes his media appearances generate among the general public) parallels Morpheus' role in the first film, particularly in regards to Neo's gradual "awakening";

3) Dobbs' experiences arriving in North America for the first time parallels Neo's "awakening" into the real world in the first film;

4) Dobbs' role as the husband and colleague of Connie Dobbs parallels Neo's relationship with Trinity;

5) Dobbs' role as a media personality parallels Neo's initial challenge to the Machines in the last scene of the first film;

6) Dobbs' role as a mentor to various scholars such as Marshall McLuhan and Dr. Peter Beter parallels the Oracle's role in all three films;

7) Dobbs' goal to "give birth" to what he calls "the Morpheus Generation" parallels Neo's role as a messiah-like figure in the third film;

8) Dobbs' intention to construct what he calls "Dobbstown" (a kind of utopian society of the near future, Dobbs says, that can only be instituted after the controversial process of "cold fusion" becomes a readily available alternative fuel source for the whole world) parallels the "New City" seen in the final moments of the third film. This "New City" also parallels the hexadic level of Mr. Dobbs" chart, available for viewing on-line at www.xenochrony.com.

PART B

The essentially Gnostic skeleton for the Matrix is highlighted by the Black and White racial worlds. And since Bob is a Black Woman, the Yin (Black) world mirrors the Yang (White) world:

1) Morpheus organizes the AP world while the Architect structures the Android Meme world;

2) Link is key aide in Morpheus' world while Agent Smith is key for the Architect;

3) Morpheus' black oracle helps Neo as does the Architect's Keymaker;

4) Niobe is Morpheus' love as Trinity is for Neo;

5) Commander Lock is an anxious black as Neo is an anxious white;

6) Cornel West is black advisor to Morpheus as the old sleepless patriarch is to Neo;

7) The non-white dancing mob is to Morpheus as the Merovingian is to Neo;

8) Sati (the little Indian girl) helps the Oracle in the final battle as Seraph (the Chinese man) helps Neo find the Keymaker.

PART C

Bob's personal biography is mirrored in the major characters:

1) The Architect represents Bob's employer, the Chairman of the Secret Council of Ten;

2) Neo and Trinity's adventures represent Bob and Connie's wild intelligence years (as seen in fictionalized form in David Lynch's film WILD AT HEART);

3) The Keymaker's ordeal represents Bob's North American experience from the age of 33 (1955) to 60 (1982);

4) Trinity and Niobe's histories represent Connie's personal intelligence history;

5) Neo and Commander Lock's histories represent Bob's personal intelligence history;

6) Cornel West and the Sleepless Advisor represent Robert Neveritt, Bob's "uncle" and René's chartered accountant;

7) The Merovingian and his wife, Persephone, represent Bob's parents;

8) Neo and Trinity in the Machine City represent Bob and Connie's years as heads of the Secret Council of Ten (1988-1992).

- Bob Dobbs

Some say Bob Dobbs does not exist, that he is merely the pseudonym for Robert Guffey. Many of Mr. Dobbs' articles can be found under the Baedeker section of the McLuhan Institute website at www.mcluhaninstitute.org. He can be contacted at purple@tellurian.com.

Some say Robert Guffey does not exist, that he is merely the pseudonym for Bob Dobbs. Mr. Guffey is a staff writer for Paranoia Magazine. He can be contacted at rguffey@hotmail.com.