Pilgrimage, TV Series: Tools for Utopian Activist From Disney to Discovision Who is this man and why is he saying these things?
(Note: what is referenced below as “discovision”
was the first name put onto the laser disc technology
developed by MCA & Phillips, now used in CD’s and DVD’s)
Thursday, January 4, 1979
The Santa Barbara News and Review
Pilgrimage, TV Series: Tools for Utopian Activist
--- A natural electric field surrounds the globe;
it could be tapped into and broadcast wirelessly,
almost limitlessly. ---- [highlighted text block shown]
By Gale Holland
"All through history, the power of the riff-raff has been ignored."
--- I.V. park habitue, nameless at his request
Not unmindful of the lumpenproletariat's potential to energize
revolutionary change is David Williams, modern day prophet
for paradise on Earth.
In his Trigo Street apartment, a handful of "street people" for
the past month have slept and eaten food, all gathered for free
by Williams and his wife, Carolynne, from the refuse of merchants:
fruits and vegetables from the trash bins in back of the markets and
Sunburst, old Good Shepherd sandwiches, day-old doughnuts.
The street people seem largely impassive to the handmade signs
and leaflets on the walls heralding Williams' projects: Paradise
Psibernetics Productions, The Great Planetary Peace Pilgrimage,
and newspaper clippings detailing his concerns: parapsychology,
nuclear research, street culture.
Williams hopes to expand his free kitchen and shelter to other apartment
units, eventually buying the building and establishing a new kind of
rehabilitation center to get the people off S.S.I. (welfare for the
totally mentally and physically disabled).
This activity he calls the "pre-production phase" of his central project:
the pilgrimage, which he expects to film himself and sell to a major
television network as a prime-time weekly series. In Williams' vision of
future shock, mid-April will see an encampment of 1000 New Age fellow
travelers in the empty lots of Isla Vista, who will trek through a major
international symposium on humanity in Pasadena, to the Black Mesa in the
Four Corners area of Arizona to stop the coal strip mining there and
establish planetary peace.
Then next season, we can break from the inter-galactic hype of "Mork and
Mindy" and "Battlestar Gallactica" for the intercosmicological consciousness
of the weekly saga, "The Great Planetary Peace Pilgrimage -- A True Life
Adventure" which Williams bills as "the most popular television series
ever."
Williams' nonviolent sword for change carries many New Age edges,
but basically his all-inclusive Mission Pac for a new future is an
integration of his insights as a scientist and as a spiritual seeker, toward
the goal of paradise here on Earth: "true peace, harmony among all life
and free natural abundance," freedom from war, want and ecological
disaster.
Williams believes our energy needs could be fulfilled worldwide by the
development of already conceptualized technology that would incidentally
also eliminate the spiritual and ecological desecration of the planet:
-- Tesla World Energy System: Nikola Tesla, a Yugoslavian scientist
who discovered the alternating current, left encoded in four different
languages instructions for a new world-wide energy system, Williams says.
A natural electric field surrounds the globe because of its polar
magnetism, this theory goes; it could be tapped into and broadcast
wirelessly, almost limitlessly, Williams believes. Black Mesa is one
part of the planet with a high electro-magnetic potential, Tesla stated.
This is corroborated by the Hopi's insistence that this spot is important,
that the strip mining there is spiritually devastating for the whole Earth.
Williams thinks a plant built there on Tesla's principles would have
easy access to the globe-girdling field.
-- Radioactivity Decay Accelerator: one outgrowth of the heavy particle
research in physics that is winning Nobel Prizes these days, Williams thinks,
could be a device to sap radioactivity out of objects -- say nuclear
waste -- and use it as energy, discarding the resulting harmless inert
byproducts. If scientists can manipulate the mass of these sub-atomic
particles, Williams reasons, they should be able to manipulate the rate of
decay, based on Einstein's theory of relativity between mass and time. I
remember that one in sci-fi novellas as why, after 100 years in space, I'd
weigh one ton but age only two years.
-- Tetron Natural Unified Field Theory: Williams has developed a set of
mathematical equations, an update on Einstein's revolutionary E=mc^2,
that he thinks describe all natural phenomena Einstein's didn't. Such as
"psi" phenomena -- Uri Geller bending metal spoons with his consciousness.
Key Williams postulations include "c" speed of light, not just as visible
light, as Einstein defined it, but as all light , inclusive of the spiritual
sense of the word, as in "Let there be...," his addition of a term
signifying the "human mind's consciousness orientation function of light"
and another term equating the mind function with the essential nature
of any energy system. In other words, the outer reaches of physics
and spirituality merge: spiritual consciousness is light, the light of
faith within each individual is the light of the world. All this presented
in mathematical notation.
Williams thinks his theory of tetronics can be applied so that individuals
can get in vehicles, hone their consciousness to the correct beam, levitate
the vehicle and travel without any other energy support system wherever they
wish.
This type of application which appears to this observer distant, could be
enacted rapidly by using the science of cybernetics, Williams thinks.
Cybernetics is logical and persistent goal attainment. It was first
invented in war; it was discovered that a gunshot could make its mark more
easily if when it missed, all measurements related to the miss were relayed
back, and the shot repeated based on the new information. This line of
reasoning, Williams says, put us on the moon.
Putting aside for the moment the reality function of Williams' ideas, he
sees, through his popular TV series, that people will begin to realize
that people can live in harmony and abundance without strife; that
technology is available to provide limitless energy with no pollution or
natural destruction: so next stop (12 years, by Williams' calculation),
paradise on Earth.
From Disney to Discovision
Who is this man and why is he saying these things?
Williams, 33, the son of a film and television industry administrator, grew
up in Panorama City, a suburb of L.A. His Boy Scout Explorer Troop, made
up of sons of workers in the film industry, was funded by Walt Disney to
make movies. So at 18, Williams was the head of a motion picture production
company. He feels he knows the business and his series will sell, and will
make it in the ratings.
Not, perhaps, with the usual deodorant et al sponsors: "The Pilgrimage" will
be sponsored by a different type of product, Williams suggests discovision,
a new product by MCA-Phillips (the combined effort of one of the top
entertainment companies -- MCA is Universal Studios -- and the top European
electronics manufacturer). With discovision, a color film and stereo
sound can be played off your record player and into your TV set. Williams
sees segments in his series in which discovision is used by a participant to
"see the future or the past," according to the fads of the moment (now, it
would be a Star Wars spot) to enhance the show's entertainment value.
Audiences will like the show, he feels, because so many of them will be on
it, as the pilgrimage passes through their cities; and because best-loved
local and national entertainers will be performing at pilgrimage
encampments.
Williams has a Bachelor of Science from the California State University at
Northridge in chemistry, but his business career was as an insurance
underwriter and insurance and investment salesman. From this experience
he has written a prospectus for Paradise Psibernetics Productions Inc.,
asking for an initial capitalization of $10,000, which is being circulated
now. The company will be for profit, but the investors only will realize
it; the employees will receive no salary or commission, but all their
business and living expenses will be paid.
Since the crash of his business career in 1973, Williams has lived as a
renunciate, developing his Tetron field theory and preparing spiritually
and otherwise for the inception of his corporation.
Does he have support? Last January, a group of a dozen or so walked
with him from Isla Vista to L.A. for a New Age gathering, including
Nipponzan Myohoji Japanese Buddhist monks, who walk for peace in their
country. Using walking en masse as a tool to force public opinion is not
new; in Japan, they walk in the tens of thousands beating the type of drum
Williams carries around I.V. In our country, the Bicentennial walk and the
Indians Longest Walk have been similar activities.
Williams also claims the support of Kote Lotah, the spiritual leader of the
Chumash; of I.V. community activists; and of street culture. All may not
walk, he says, but will be ready in April to welcome those who come to walk.
Williams also expects members of the Rainbow Family and other roving
New Age activists in April. The Rainbow Family, a group that defines itself
as not an organization, is responsible for the Rainbow Festivals, week-long
gatherings for the past few years around the Fourth of July at remote
idyllic camps in New Mexico and Oregon. Everything is free and everyone
is welcome; yet there is always enough food etc. for everyone and all bills
are paid.
Last year 25,000 people attended; this year the festival will be near the
Black Mesa. And the Rainbow Family wishes to leave behind a
permanent settlement, sanctioned by the government authorities to live
self-sufficiently and in harmony with the land. So they will join Williams
to reach Arizona early to prepare for the permanent outpost.
The L.A. focus for the first leg of the Isla Vista to Arizona walk will
be the World Symposium on Humanity, April 7-14. The gathering will take
place simultaneously in LA, Toronto, and London, hooked by video satellite,
with movement and other stars appearing at one of the locations from Ram
Das, Carl Sagan, and Frances Moore Lappe to Dick Gregory, Ellen Burstyn
and Marcel Marceau. Williams here can expect to get televison coverage.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of Williams' plans and ideas. He
can, and does, talk for hours of the upcoming technological revolution as
he sees it; a world without money, ruled by a one nation/one world set-up;
peace temples to be built all over the states; walks from Jerusalem to
Moscow then to Peking for the second and third seasons of the television
show; drugs to improve our access to our own human intelligence; and many
others. Often his language is alienating, too heavy on the symbolic
layering and scientific jargon embedded in otherwise easy to grasp
metaphyscial concepts. His knowledge is vast, which is not to say it's
accurate. But it's hard to dispute his contention that 12 years before
those events, the nuclear bomb and moon walks seemed as remote
as paradise here does now.
Williams will stage a preliminary walk January 10, from Isla Vista to
Pasadena, to attend the Rainbow Rose Festival, the International
Cooperation Council's world celebration, with Norman Cousins and
Buckminster Fuller. Those interested can contact him at 7571 Trigo #3,
or at an L.A. telephone (213) 780-3348
