A selection from Philip K. Dick's Exegesis, 1974-1982.
"I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel and story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, and, for them, my corpus of writing is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an investigation and presentation, analysis and response and personal history. My audience will always be limited to those people." Philip K. Dick, Exegesis.
"The creation of the Exegesis was an act of human survival in the face of a life-altering crisis... [...] Its pages represent Dick's passionate commitment to explicating the glimpse with which he had been awarded or cursed-- not for the sake of his own psyche, nor for the cause of the salvation of humankind, but precisely because those two concerns seemed to him to be one and the same." Editors Introduction to Exegesis
Philip K. Dick started writing Exegesis in 1974 after a series of what he describes as religious experiences and worked on it night after night right up until his death in 1982. It is made up of about 10,000 pages of handwritten and typed paper sheets which were found in his apartment after his death and stored in manila folders in the garage where they remained largely unpublished (apart from a few excerpts, most notably In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis, which includes an afterword by Terence Mckenna) until a 1,000 page selection was printed in 2011 with the title The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. While working on his Exegesis Dick wrote eight novels.
The Exegesis itself reads like Dicks last and greatest work of science fiction.
Science fiction, no doubt owing to its uniquely modern form and popular appeal, especially among youth, and in its 'pulp' form, largely escapes the purview of traditional literary criticism and, at least in Dicks life time, was not ordinarily seen as 'high art'. When the Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem, a contemporary of Dicks, wrote a critical essay on American sci-fi literature, he called it Philip K. Dick: A Visionary among Charlatans.
Editors note: as neither In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis and The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick are complete, we will draw upon both texts in our selection here. Sections from the much more truncated In Pursuit of Valis will be indicated.
[work in progress]
In regards to some of the theoretical subjects all of us discussed the day you and your friends were here to visit, I recall in particular my statement to you... that "the universe is moving backward," a rather odd statement on the face of it I admit. What I meant by that is something which at the time I could not really express, having had an experience.... but not having the terms. Now, by having read further, I have some sort of terms, and would like to describe some of my personal experiences using, in a pragmatic way, the concept of tachyons, which are supposed to be particles of cosmic origin (I am quoting Arthur Koestler) which fly faster than light and consequently in a reversed time direction. "They would thus," Koestler says, "carry information from the future into our present, as light and X rays from distant galaxies carry information from the remote past of the universe into our now and here. In the light of these developments, we can no longer exclude on a priori grounds the theoretical possibility of precognitive phenomena." And so forth (Harper's, July 1974).
I had a keen intuition that information of some kind was arriving at us all, in fact bombarding us, from sidereal space.
Without the tachyon theory I would lack any kind of scientific formulation, and would have to declare that "God has shown me the sacred tablets in which the future is written" and so forth, as did our forefathers, back on the deserts of Israel under the sky as they tended their sleeping flocks. Koestler also points out that according to modern theory the universe is moving from chaos to form; therefore tachyon bombardment would contain information which expressed a greater degree of Gestalt than similar information about the present; it would, thus at this time continuum, seem more living, more animated by a conscious spirit, to us giving rise to the concept of GOd. This would definitely give rise to the idea of purpose, in particular purpose lying in the future. Thus we now have a scientific method of considering the notion of teleology.... .
Much of this... information arriving in dreams has had a teaching, shaping and directing quality; it tends to inform and guide me, and made me aware of what I should do. It literally educates me, and I'm sure each small creature, each bug and plant and animal and fish, has the same sense of it.
...the future is more coherent than the present, more animate and purposeful, and in a real sense, wiser. It knows more, and some of this knowledge gets transmitted back to us by what seems to be a purely natural phenomenon. We are being talked to, by a very informed Entity: that of all creation as it lies ahead of us in time.
In terms of Ubik (not the novel but the force described in my novel) perhaps I was already becoming aware of this total coherence which the universe is moving toward and which bombards us backwards... with information about itself, thus giving us a certain awareness of itself.
I was trying in a dim and unconscious way to express a series of experiences I had had most of my life of a directing, shaping and assisting-- and informing-- force, much wiser than us which we in no way could perceive directly;... in Kant's terms, it is... a Thing-in-Itself.
Thus I would express the purpose of the novel-- my purpose, anyhow-- to be a fictional statement containing a presentation of this directing presence which I arbitrarily chose the name "Ubik" for. That Ubik (or more accurately the future total Gestalt of purpose and Meaning) may well have written the book through me is possible, but only in the sense that all creatures from grasshoppers on up... are "written through," by what we call instinct, rather than "writing" their lives. However, I do think one could say this; rather than having it read: Ubik, by Philip K. Dick, one could put it this way:
Philip K. Dick
by
Ubik
I don't feel I was "picked"... , as its instrument, etc.,. any more than when you are watching a TV program the transmitter has picked you. It is broadcast; it just radiates out in all directions and some people tune in... . All I did was to transduce, as all creatures do. I just gave what I received a local habitation and a name, as Shakespeare put it.
...strange and eerie feeling that my novels are gradually coming true. At first I laughed about this, as if it was only a sort of small matter; but over the years... it seems to me that by subtle but real degrees the world has come to resemble a PKD novel; or, put another way, subjectively I sense my actual world as resembling the kind of typical universe which I used to merely create as fiction, and which I left, often happily, when I was done writing.
Other people have mentioned this, too, the feeling that more and more they are living in a PKD novel. And several freaks have even accused me of bringing on the modern world by my novels.
Well, a case could be made here for my above tachyon theory, I guess... . There is no doubt that quite frankly I do not in any real sense write my novels; they do come from some non-I part of me. If tachyon bombardment was inspiring my novels, then it would stand to reason that the world-- it is really all the same world which my books depict, as has been pointed out in critical essays many times-- it would stand to reason that, as the years pass, my books would, so to speak, come true. They are about the future in two ways: they describe it fictionally, like S-F tends to do, and, they being inspired by tachyon information about the actual future (or possible several alternate futures) depict on-coming reality. [...] I do not wish to be in one of my own novels, by the way. So this isn't wish-fulfillment. Anyhow, I'm not the only person who's noticed that the world seems to be getting like my novels... .
I am not the true and actual source of my own fiction, and I've always wondered what the source was. John Denver... says he doesn't compose his many songs; "They're out there in the air somewhere," he says, "and I just fish them in."
...the gap between my vision and the actual world has gotten smaller and smaller over the years... .
"California Dreaming is becoming a reality," is a line from a Mamas and Papas song of a few years ago, but what a dreadful surreal reality it is: foglike and dangerous, with the subtle and terrible manifestations of evil rising up like rocks in a gloom.
The landscape is deformed out of recognition by the Lie. Its gloom is everywhere, and we encounter nothing we recognize... .
As soon as one lies one becomes separated from reality.
...no one notices that virtually everything we believed in is dead. This is because the people who would have pointed this out are dead.
But nevertheless something shines in the dark ahead that is alive and makes no sound. We saw it once before, but that was a long time ago, or maybe our first ancestors did. Or we did as small children. It spoke to us and directed and educated us then; now perhaps it does so again. It sought us out, in the climax of peril. There was no way we could find it; we had to wait for it to come to us.
Its sense of timing is perfect. But most important it knows everything.
I seem to be living in my own novels more and more. I can't figure out why. Am I loosing touch with reality? Or is reality actually sliding toward a Phil Dickian type of atmosphere? And if the latter, then for god's sake why? Am I responsible? How could I be responsible? Isn't that solipsism?
Or like John Denver gets his songs: I get them from the air. Like his songs, they-- my books-- are already there. Whatever that means.
By my own logic in the novel I must conclude that my or perhaps even our collective environment is only a pseudo-environment. In my novel [Ubik] what broke through was the presence of a man who had died. He speaks to them through several intermediary systems and hence must still be alive; it is they, evidently, who are dead. What has been happening to me for over three months is that a man I knew [Jim Pike] who died has been breaking through in ways so similar to that of Runciter in Ubik that I am beginning to conclude that I and everyone else is either dead and he is alive, or-- well, as in the novel, I can't figure it out.
My unconscious is fixated in the Roman period, and that strikes me as strange. [...] It is a tutor to me as Aristotle was to Alexander... .
This is material emanating from a wise viewpoint which I never possessed.
...one odd dream that I had, in which I picked up most distant, the smallest, weakest signal-- from a star, star-information, sidereal.... what I heard seemed to resemble, as an analog, an AI System, not a computer, and female in tone.
The past, then. Or the future. Another star. An alternate world. "The other side." They're all "the other side" in some way.
So my "unconscious," which I've claimed this tutor to be, has available to it "my entire memory," except everything pertaining to events and concepts that arose after 100 A.D.
I remember that when this first hit me, in the first couple of weeks, I was abolustely convinced that I was living in Rome, sometime after Christ appeared but before Christianity became legal. Back in the furtive Fish Sign days. Secret baptism and that stuff. I was sure of it. Rome, evil Rome and Caesar's minions, were everywhere around me. [...] I was a Christian but I had to hide it. Or they'd get me. [...] I was more excited than afraid, sure in my faith, certain of my Savior. [...] I think I read all this in the novel The Robe 11 years ago. Jezz, I've fallen into someone else's novel!
You know, I could if I wanted to make the most dramatic but speculative case, for fictional purposes I guess, reason that I was pulled back through time, back and back, to where It ALl Went Wrong, which would be where around 100 A.D. [...] "That was a wrong turn," the Vast Acting Living Intelligence System that creates decided. "When those people decided on Christianity. I'll throw away 2,000 years, go back... turn to some other religion instead, and have that become dominant. Let's see... ." A New Start. Second Time Around. Why not? Thus, my sense that my help was coming from an alternate universe.
I don't know why I'm speculating along like this, though, because in point of fact I've decided, by a process of deduction, who my tutor is. Asklepios, or one of his sons. A Greek physician, whose step-mother was the Cumaean sibyl, his father Apollo, at whose shrines "...the sick were given wholesome advice in their dreams," this cult yielding only reluctantly to Christianity. Also Asklepios was according to legend, slain y the Kyklopes, a cyclops.
A latent form is emerging in me, buried... when... Asklepios was killed by the Kyklopes, so that his son's wisdom and skills, derived from Apollo, would continue on despite Asklepios' sudden death-- remaining latent within the morphology of the Indo-European descendents of Asklepios, perhaps genetically handed down through his sons. (He had two.) Now, when needed, this crypte morphosis is emerging, again active; its external stimulating-triggering source being some aspect of the dreadful civic decline of our society, its falling into ruins. "Within the degenerate molecules, the trash of today, he (PKD) resurrects a power buried for eons." (S. Lem, about Ubik.) Other gods of the past have at other times returned to life: Wotan in Germany, during the Nazis.
I think I've solved what's been in my head at night.
I'm seeing all the books and writing tablets, all the written material night after night: the Qumran Scrolls [editors note: 'Dead Sea Scrolls'].
The Qumran community were Essenes. Here, before the scrolls were found, is Will Burant's description of the Essenes:
They looked for the coming of a Messiah who would establish a communistic egalitarian Kingdom of Heaven on earth;... they were ardent pacifists and refused to make implements of war.
The Romans wiped them out.
Well, so the contents of the Qumran Scrolls would contain all the elements I've been entertaining in my mind... .
Nobody knew the source of these teachings until the Qumran Scrolls were recently found; no wonder Jim Pike and other theologians went crazy with excitement-- saw Christianity in an entirely new light.
Query: If the Essenes were successful prophets, not just trying and failing, did they anticipate their being wiped out, and anticipate leaving their entire doctrines and views and information as sort of time-bombs which would remain hidden until today? Is it possible? Very possible, I think. They hid all their stuff to be found later-- much later. Once more to be reintroduced into the world, as it was-- their original effect on our world-- fading out, finally. To revive it.
The Other is not any one thing found in any particular place. It is a quality of (or rather visible in) all things... . It shines through them at us. We see it and it sees back, as in a dialog.
We're talking here about a two hemisphere perception of reality, and then an information transfer from one hemisphere to the other so that cognition... is brain total.
...suddenly one would experience all reality through the vision of the Other, as if seeing out through its eyes. One would share and inhabit its world, possess its perspective; at the same time the Other would possess what one had as a worldview. [...] A superimposition, greater than either had possessed... . This sudden, double, superimposed, simultaneous view would be experienced as gaining an additional depth: as if adding one more spatial dimension. Much as a flatlander acquiring three-dimensional space. Time, too, would be experienced differently; one could see ahead, in all temporal directions. Two separate "mono" views when blended become a "stereo" view.
Plato once expressed an idea, probably metaphoric, that each of us is really only one half of a four legged four armed organism; somehow long ago we got split apart and we're always searching for our missing other half [editors note: see Aristophanes speech in Plato's Symposium]. This usually is construed as a man searching for his female mate; however, suppose the Great Builder has fashioned us humans here, each of us, as one half of a total organism the other half of which is not a human being but something totally different-- maybe with no physical body at all, but a sort of energy plasma... . This might indicate that our total life on earth is only the first part, the part before each of us and his Other are joined. [...] Meanwhile, off somewhere in another star system the Great Builder has fashioned the other parts of us, and soon we will be stimulated by Him to take off into space and head via rocket ship for that star, not knowing what lies ahead but prompted by a vast and authentic instinct that we should do it. Imagine our surprise-- and then delight-- when we get there and are suddenly joined, in the twinkling of an eye, with our other half-- the Other.
On their own planet, the race of Others might have had even less total vision of their purpose in the universe than we have; however, it is possible that their guesses and intimations might be ahead of our own. In this case they might be waiting for us to arrive, or even made certain attempts to contact us-- with or without success. At the ultimate, they might even have managed in small preliminary ways to reach across space to us somehow, to coax us subtly into moving toward them.
For all we know, the spirit is up there perpetually, awaiting only the crucial change below to come down and enter.
Like Plotinus' concept of concentric rings of emanation, we encounter our Others in gradually increasing intensity and clarity; they become clearer to us continually.
The spirit when he arrived here looked around, saw Richard Nixon and those creatures, and was so wrath-filled that he never stopped writing letters to Washington until Nixon was out. [...] You wouldn't believe his animosity toward the tyrannies both here and in the USSR; he saw them as twin horns of the same evil entity-- one vast worldwide state whose basic nature was clear to him as being one of slavery, a continuation of Rome itself. ANd he was a foe to that, above all; he saw Caesar once more, and himself pitted against that.
...presented in dream after dream... the benign and reassuring quality of this Other which I had encountered deep within me-- an Other which had been slumbering... until the proper signal released it to assume parity with me.
Now we function smoothly in synchronization, but at first I had to yield to it... .
That I am in direct mind-to-mind touch with extraterrestrial intelligence systems has been obvious to me for some time, but what this means is not in any way obvious.
It's not all that meaningful to talk about being in contact with extraterrestrial intelligence; these are new words to describe ancient experiences. Virgil in Book Six says:
...for immanent Mind, flowing through all its parts
...Makes the universe work.
Obviously "Immanent Mind" could be called "extraterrestrial intelligence." So there is nothing new in what I've experienced, just new terms. Basically this is a religious experience, but also it is more because we are no longer a religious world; I am a secular person in a secular society and must understand my experiences in this context. Otherwise even if I understand them I can't communicate them.
I believe that after an absence of between 2,000 and 2,600 years the immortals are now beginning to return, with Justice first.
That which possessed [early Christianity] in the First Century A.D. possessed me back in March... .
...an ancient promise made to us, made thousands of years ago, is now being kept. [...] He or they would come back eventually, and they fucking have... . I know it. [...] That which is rightfully ours, which was taken away, will be returned. They will see to that. As Paul called it, the "Time of Restoration of All Things"... .
The Christians, with their exclusivistic, bigoted, narrow intolerance, believe salvation and intervention and restoration is only for them; they're wrong; this is for our planet and all its people.
Harlan says:
Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson wrote, "Maybe God's gone away, forgetting His promise He made that day: and we're lost out here in the stars." And maybe He/She's just waiting for the right signal to come back, whaddaya think?
Right on, Harlan.
In micro terms I experienced the entire trip which our world and all of us will experience... .
...what happened to me in March is exactly that "in the twinkling of an eye" rebirth or transformation, much like an abrupt chemical process... as the alchemists so realized.
The universal mind dispatches a Mediator-- which is what Christ is called, correctly-- to trigger it off... . Thereby it, the universal mind, can hold the process until it wishes it to take place, which is why the Protestant Reformers stressed the power of God's grace as being the sole power which could redeem us rather than good works. [...] These are old-fashioned terms for a very mysterious process and event; they did the best they could in explaining it. "Well, see, we're all in a state of sin" (which is jargon for fucked up, deranged, and half blind), "and God's grace redeems us unexpectedly. But we have to have faith, which is to say total trust, in the power of that grace." I'm not sure you have to have that trust.
Psychologically, this mental transformation is the radical combining of opposites. [...] Each attempt I make to understand and explain and express my experience and the process following has to come at last to that: it is what I already thought and what I now think. [...] It is old (circa 100 A.D.) and points toward the future. [...] ...it is beings from another star system and it is precisely the same traditional experience of salvation described in the Bible.
This is what our modern world has lost, this unity in all levels; now we've got compartmentalization instead.
So to sum up, there is a small bit of the macrocosm inside us, inside the microcosm; and this small bit equals the whole universal mind.
Mumford says:
I think this must be very much like what happened during the transition from the Roman civilization, which was highly organized and bent on the same ends as our civilization, power, productivity, prestige, to the Christian era. The Christians formed in little bands. They began to withdraw from society and accepted the poverty which only slaves then were forced to accept. They built up a spiritual foundation for their life which gave them the internal energy firmly to take over the Roman Empire.
...when this first hit me in March I looked around and saw Rome! Rome everywhere! Power and force, stone walls, iron bars-- just what Mumford expresses above. [...] I pierced the veil, so to speak, and saw my society exactly as it is... which is, as Mumford expresses, like Rome was. [...] In Mumford's sense, "Rome" is a paradigm.
There is no doubt in my mind now that my "vision" of my society was accurate in the sense that Mumford means it; I hadn't gone back in time, but in a sense Rome had come forward, by insidious and sly degrees, under new names, hidden by the flak talk and phony obscurations, at last into our world again. Look! The Christians conquered Rome, but only for a time; Rome swallowed up its conquerors, like China does. At last Rome began by stealthy degrees to surface once more, to manifest itself. Therefore it is not surprising that that same Holy Spirit which rose against it then, in 100 or so A.D., has returned to arouse us as before, as it roused our ancestors... .
The right hemisphere is the seat of the unconscious.
But every layer in it, and all its contents, were at one time part of consciousness, though not of any living men.
These are all the prior left-hemisphere consciousnesses, down through the ages; when they perished, they reappared in this dormant, sleeping form, not dead, not gone, but not awake: just slumbering, with all their memories and thoughts and experiences and ideas now in dream form.
This is where the dead went. This is where the dead are.
Also, this is the leavening in the bread which Christ spoke of. And the tiny mustard seed, growing and growing.
Within the right hemisphere (we all share just one among us, like a communal meal-- e.g., the Last Supper) this life is rising once more toward the consciousness it lost.
But when it achieves it again, it will be a transformed life, not the perishable one it had.
Being in all of us, and alive and conscious again (it is alive again, but not conscious; it has forgotten), it can't die. It will not be bound by time and space. It can return to the past, go wherever men are or ever have been or ever will be.
The experience of anamnesis is the moment when this sleeping mind which once was conscious, remembers its own existence. Who it is remembering is itself; what it is remembering is that it lived and lives now, and has a job to do. Also, it is not a separate entity as the left hemisphere is. Together, they form two appositional minds, linked through it with all the others on Earth and perhaps beyond.
It did not die; it fell asleep, for two thousand years, acquiring with the death of each new person a new onion-skin like layer of itself; by these slow accretions it grew-- toward completeness and reawakening, and remembering.
The moment at which it remembers... is the moment at which the Kingship of God, the Perfect Kingdom, floods back into being: back into awareness of istelf, that it is Here; and it is here Now.
It contains within it thousands of years of slumbering world; the "connective unconscious" is becoming conscious, as was foretold by Jesus and Paul and John. It is (again) aware; (again) it thinks. It is Immanent Mind within us and around us, its sensory eyes open, with its identity (via memory restoration) intact. This was the goal of it all: the end journey of thousands of years and millions of men.
For those who lived and died, it wasn't in vain. They slumbered on, adding to one another in millions of laminations of transparencies.
For those, like me, who're alive, we are suddenly not alone, are suddenly given enormous support; He is with us again, our Savior.
...the third point in human evolution has now been reached. This moment equals, in importance, the leap from inanimate [matter] to animate [life]; this is true man, man realized at last, this third stage which began 3 million or 4 million years ago-- it is not the starting of the stage now, but the perfecting and completing of it. The millions of parts of this entity have wandered about the Earth during a spatial and temporal period of enormity and diversity; but it is all being collected and revived now-- collected during these epochs, revived now, by its merely pushing beyond the threshold: it reached saturation point, so to speak, and awoke.
It possesses immortality (through rebirth). It knows everything (through being gestalted from an almost infinite number of bits throughout space and time). Knowing it can't err, knowing it can't die, having a direct relationship with the Logos... or the Plan, it can make decisions partaking of Haggia Sophia: the wisdom of God.
"Haggia Sophia is about to be reborn. She was not acceptable in the past." This sentence refers to all of the above, and expresses it. We will have in our midst a wise entity, a sort of organic computer which will surpass its parts and the sum thereof.
A deliberate structure/artifact which they jointly maintain against the threat of reality, against what, if they somehow relaxed, they would find they could allow to seep in... as it later does. [...] (At night, in sleep, this mental mechanism dims, and other elements slide in, but are of course ruled out the next day on awakening, as being mere phantasms.)
Basically... when I had both brain hemispheres functioning in tandem, in a parity relationship, each involved both in perception and cognition, I saw around me a different universe.
...written material, of any and all sorts: any sign, any ad, any piece of paper; the resemblance to Runciter's communicating with the people via the trash of the gutter [in Ubik], the debris such as match folders, the labels of spray cans, etc.-- this is exactly what I actually saw myself as functioning in the highest fashion to guide and instruct us... . It is evident why eventually I would suppose the presence of the Logos.
Also, I saw a continual use of the joining of two verbal items; they would be kept separate-- and hence not causing disinhibiting to occur-- until the proper moment. I saw various written items rotate, so to speak, very slowly, inexorably, like a solenoid clock as it ticks along. Then two separate verbal items... would by inexorable degrees come together and mesh into an entity. At once, they would signal, and cause neural firing of an inhibited engrammed system in the person. [...] That all this would form an enormous and complex world-clock, synchronized with itself, is evident. [...] I did not reason this out; I saw this. I also saw the Logos as it reached from our future into our present-- which is the only world we have, our present-- to make use of the arrangement of things.
His Creator knows from the start everything which that person will encounter, and his Creator has by this engramming and signaling system made it possible to determine and control in advance how the person will go, along his course; it is not random; it is not accidental; it never lacks purpose... .
...the only portion of the universe which is truly real is living creatures, such as ourselves. The non-living parts are merely structure, very much like the backdrop and artificial scenery in a formal play. [...] ...in essence nothing more than elaborate but somewhat barren struts and support beams, literally so; they support the intricate signaling devices which flash messages-- i.e., commands and assistance-- to us continually, and also of course they afford biologically essential life support. This is indeed a kind of ship we are within, but in shape more like a gigantic hollow cube, all sides of which surround us and fire information and instructions in rapid, elaborate sequence... .
What I could not see-- and remember I didn't reason all this out; I saw it noetically-- was the final goal or purpose of all this... . I saw a process... . We are being processed along, and as we go we are changed and informed...-- it is all, as Bergson saw, a becoming. [...] ...we seem to be carrying out, at the bidding of these engrammings, complex tasks, which is why people often get a sense of God's Divine Plan of which they are a part.
...this entire cosmology which I've presented to you in these pages bears an organic relationship to my entire body of writing, to my basic theme of What is reality? I think I have at last transliminated-- i.e., coughed up into consciousness-- my subcontinent which has given rise to all my work and to all my theories and thinking.
That I never saw that all this had to apply to our world is a measure of the failure of the artist to discover the relationship between his art (or in my case the worlds within my art, the topic of my art) and life, his life, all our lives, our world.
In writing Tears I depicted simultaneously (1) the space-time continuum of Rome c. 100 A.D. and (2) future America, which turned out to be almost America at this time (1970/74). What this depicts then is a moving forward of Rome, not a regression on my part; it I were standing still, the same process would be observed... . It is the iron beneath the pretty plastic. This is true revelation. The whole novel, not just the dream, is revelation, about our world, where and when we are (our true ontological underlying space-time continuum; its nature).
Piercing the veil, seeing into the heart of our (present) world, I saw Urbs-Roma; it underlay/lies;... what our world actually is once all the layers of delusion are stripped away.
When we finally achieve bilateral parity in brain functioning, we will be better able to view our individual selves as microstations within an enormous network of similar stations which probably are so far-ranging in time and space that the idea of making contact with ETI's is like desiring to find air here on Earth.
[gap]
I think one day perhaps soon someone certainly, and not by accident, will display to us our collective disinhibiting sign, and anamnesis will occur for us all.
It almost seems as if the consciousness of a Racial Planetary Being were surrounding civilization, compressing it and turning it into a miniaturized artifact of the past.
The entire pattern of our radio signals, and their information, have formed a living, or anyhow sentient entity which is why the idea of the noosphere came into being. Effect on us is not only informational but vitalistic and healing;... to "rouse us from half-life" which is to say, move us along evolutionary lines toward completion of our now only half-finished entelechies (v. Teilhard's idea of Christ as paradigm of mankind... ). This is brought to completion by the vitality and information imparted... by the entity which lies within the ionosphere. This is perhaps not a life form, and not from another planet, but it is an intelligence.
The U.S. Indians were right: when we die our souls-- i.e., our brain-print patterns-- go to join the noosophere growing in the sky... ; the dome over our heads. Our ancestors are there now. [...] But it's a single mind not a bunch of individual ghosts.
I got so loaded last night you wouldn't believe it. [...] In chemo veritas, though... .
Now,... obviously I used this event and the time in it conscientiously. During it I realized that in truth I saw the world in terms of pleasure denied me (sex and women) and over-reacted in terms of moral indignation, a moral tone to life ("overthrow the tyranny"). I saw, too, that esthetic awareness of music and art was my outlet my saving outlet; I really didn't see the world as a moralist did, but as an artist: I was capable of-- and truly did-- see aesthetically all the time; my real interest in women was as beautiful creatures the way cats are beautiful and Beethoven's music is. I understood how we come to see time wrongly, or rather, we see it in its less real, secondary aspect or axis.
I had reckoned that the Holy Spirit seemed to have returned to our world about the time of Martin Luther, and Erasmus was a contemporary of his. [...] Erasmus wrote "In Praise of Folly" which is about the fool who is Christ.
We generate the horizontal time to keep order in what we encounter. But ah! The utility has made it progressively more and more difficult for us to experience the infinitude of transparent laminations which we bind together with the energy we call time... .
But the time-axis along which forms (entelechies) grow to completion-- that is orthogonal, and it is real.
You can... see each sense object or form where it stands placed, in the static structure of the universe... . But to me what is more exciting is to peel away time, the accretions; and this is orthogonal time. But deautomatization in Deikman's sense [ed. note: in Deautomatization and the Mystical Experience] must take place first.
In seeing the pattern of sense objects, where they're located, you see structure. IN peeling away the layers you see Being. [...] "What is underneath" or "what is within or below" are the previous steps in sequence (remember... sequence is all important: it is pattern). This is the growth up to now, to the stage where it is vis-a-vis you. If you are to see what comes next you must move along the true (orthogonal) time axis in harmony with it: into the future, as all forms grow... . [...] I believe that Christ is the completed form toward which all men move, this approximation, and it's getting closer and closer... .
The reality of orthogonal time, cyclic time, would make it possible for the Golden Age (the time before the fall) to return, restoring all which has been lost. There is a direct link between the hope of that return and the idea of orthogonal time; also, there is a similar link bewtween the possibility of that hope being fulfilled and the fact that orthogonal time exists which it indeed does.
Would it be unreasonable to speak of my first orthogonal vision, that of Urbs Roma, as the Age of Iron? And under that I found-- what next? Silver? That would be my first glimpse of the Hellenistic world which came before (linear time) or beneath (orthogonal), and then, at last, the absolute simplicity of what must be the Golden Age: the forests, which Euripides spoke of in the Bacchae ("Will they ever come to me ever again..."). [...] Roma certainly was iron; no doubt. And-- the fish sign which I saw: it was made of gold.
If our age is an extension of Urbs Roma (Tears being a paradigm, a map of a territory which is Roma, Washington, Moscow, Berlin: one map for all) then that view of Roma was a rollback, and insight into the heart-- not of an age prior to ours-- but to ours itself.
I did not remember my previous state (anamnesis): I was restored to that state; which means someone restored me. That is God and God's grace. He brought it back to me or me back to it... . The Christian (Eucharist) anamnesis deals specifically with "Do this in recollection of me," i.e., Jesus Christ. The event is anamnesis; the agency which causes it is adventitious and is the Savior. [...] ...it was impressed on me, this anticipation of the dark-haired stranger girl at the door; I used to expect the Paraclete coming to the door at any time, to render aid. [...] Her appearance at the door had that effect only as mere triggering release and because of manifold almost infinite preparatory steps. This was a life time process, not a single event. As an infant I was given dreams and experiences... without which her appearance and that fish necklace would have done nothing... .
We are back to the concept of entelechy, of growth. All these are the unfoldings of living organisms which themselves are portions of an over-all organism.
The truth is that GOd inhabits without limit... . Special knowledge of how to get in touch with him is that same knowledge which carries the bee home to its hive each night; who sells that knowledge to the bee? ...truth cannot really be suppressed, at least not forever... .
The deeper and deeper penetration into ontological realms, experienced as dokos fading to reveal Urbs Roma-- those were into a region prior in lineal time to Jesus, to Christianity, but not to Greek mystery religions as such. But finally I saw the building Hagia Sophia, the palm trees,... the Levant. [...] What linked them? [...] Each... was seen in holy terms, viewed as if sanctified, viewed through its religion. It was as if God ranged through an axis neither of time nor space as we know it but built out of both. Orthogonal space, too? A space-time axis of Being in which resemblances linked each frame rather than being together in either time or in space... . It was an axis of holy solemnity, maybe; that worship and relatedness to God is the final axis, in which one when entering that realm moves from religion to religion as if they are all one. It is as if the state of grace generates, or anyhow generates the perception of and the participation in, the Region of the Sacred. [...] When dokos, the veil, lifts away from our external world we see the Absolute... . Worlds are made and unmade. The Absolute is absolutely plastic and manifold... as He forms and reforms it; He expresses himself directly through it and in it.
The re-emergence of cyclic time would be the method of restoration.
...the Christian "do this in anamnesis of me-- " Do this and recollect; once more we are back there again at the timeless and eternal moment c. 46 A.D. We are really there now. Real time, genuine time, ceased after He left... . Only layer after layer of meaningless dust have accrued, which is to say, the substance, the essence, has not changed since Christ left our world. Not a day will have passed between when He left and when He returns.
...time or lineal time was overcome, and all the accumulations of the centuries, the flux, the accidents, the phenomenal world, all faded out and it, that place and those events, faded into sight and I was totally caught up into them, both inside me and outside me... . And it was not because I wished it; the first intimations were of the City of Cruel Iron, and I felt the fear natural to a society based on force and on a slave population-- it was harsh and cruel beyond anything I've ever seen. No Arcady, that. [...] Fruit equals phenomenal world; seed equals the unchanging reality of the last days He was here. Is our changing world actually a sort of electron revolving in totally repetitious cycles around a nucleus, and that nucleus is the Crucifixion and the Resurrection? The mass of a body creates a warpage in space, so that a straight line is curved; thus planets paths are warped into near circles (ellipses) around and around; that if they could think would imagine (as Spinoza would say) that they are traveling always in straight lines-- but we can see otherwise; an invisible force keeps that straight line-- makes that straight line into an endless repeating cycle. Ah! Our linear time is exactly an analogy of the straight line of a small body near a dense star; we, as part of Earth, moving through time as the axis, do not realize that our time is being warped perpetually, back onto itself in a great circle, a vast cycle which will one day to our surprise, like an early sailor who sailed west across our oceans and eventually, incredibly, found himself back where he began-- circumnavigated our round world which he did not understand was round... it looked and felt flat; the universe looks and feels as if it extends analogously. [...] ...Suddenly there it will be: ahead of us in time will be something which we know from our historic record we left behind us in time.
If we think of an entelechy or a bunch of them, there would be change, growth, until completion; then-- frozen, forever. These terms just don't stand for anything; they're just words. What I saw was not the static or unchanging versus change, but an incredibly live and potent total organism linked together everywhere, with nothing excluded from it, controlling through an intricate system everything which was, is and will be simultaneously, as Avicenna said.
Each living thing feels impelled to move (to develop or change or grow) but can't locate the source of that urge. From what I saw and understood from 3-74 on, there is a total Plan (the Logos) which superimposes as a vast static-- complete-- blueprint pattern over a space-time continuum universe, the one we experience empirically: the one our senses tell us about.
If there is a universe of anti-matter there may be a universe of anti-time; which would be retrograde time, or rather, elements moving retrograde to... our ourselves-- which move forward in time. Thus time symmetry would be achieved this way.
...it is this inexorable but invisible, metaphysical but real momentum which we call Time. It's the same as destiny; it is the end or completion of our entelechy reaching back retrograde-wise, through the system of signals and dragging each of us bodily forward to meet that end, that completion.
This unitary organism which we call reality or the universe is most itself, most there, most alive, at completion... it's there now drawing us toward it; we move, it stands still. Being more than the sum of all its parts, how can any one or even all of its parts resist it? [...] "The whole is greater than the sum of it's parts," and surely the whole exerts a greater influence on those parts than they do mutually on one another or on it... . This must be why Parmenides understood that no matter how many "parts" he saw, how much diversity and change his senses reported, reality had to consist of a One, which was Unchanging. His sense saw those parts coming together to form that One, but the One... must already be. It did not lie ahead along a time-line somewhere in the future; it ontologically lay beyond or behind or deeper within the many, now and forever. The pressure of time driving all the pieces to come together into the complete pattern is a sort of voice calling to them, a summoning to return; everything has already been there, since this lay outside time; anamnesis was a memory not of the past, of former time, but of ontology outside of time, of already-complete-then-now-later. A memory of all time unified; this memory stretched in all directions in time, and finally into none: into Being itself: into the heart which is alive. Empedocles supposed it to have been in the past because he remembered it; but if time is cyclic he remembered the future just as well, logically speaking.
Empedocles didn't actually remember having once been divine... . To remember immortality is to remember outside of time. "Long ago I lived forever. I knew everything and could not die, and I was perfection itself. But somehow something went wrong. I forgot, I'm down here." Anamnesis could be said to be memory of the future restored... . He remembered what he was; he remembers what he is; he remembers what he will be. [...] Memory is to know; forgetfulness is to fail to know (cf. Plato).
"I remember" equals "I realize" or "I understand."
Today is the vernal equinox. [...] This, really... is the day the spirit of Springtime revives, down deep in the cold ground; I feel him wake up. When he wakes, he sees once more, since his dream has ended; he sees and we, for a moment, can see with him-- not just him but what he sees the world to be.
Maybe somewhere God has a set of headphones on and is listening to our civilization (which is now global, making the piece he hears more unified). Output must be most extraordinary in terms of richness; also it must be unique. I think it pleases Him.
"Play it again, Sam," God murmurs, when it ends.
It seems unlinkely that the... time I briefly discerned was there only so long as I discerned it, and then it departed; it is much more likely, if not certain, that it was there before, and is there now, but that I fell back into monotemporal vision once more. I would be like a blind person who upon seeing for the first time imagined that the objects were brought into being by his seeing them.
If we watched a speeded-up film of a form developing, we would easily discern the latent form within it (which means entelechy, really) press outward into actualization... .
The "Whale's Mouth" sign of intersecting arcs... -- if each arc represents a form of time... then this sign could be thought of as representing a single previous intersection (in our past) at which the two times came together (around 100 A.D.), and then each went its own way. But as they were moving in arcs, it was inevitable, by the laws of geometry, that eventually they would once more intersect, perhaps 2,000 years or so later (i.e., very soon). These also would represent the two hemispheres of the brain.... once before linked, then soaring off orthogonally, but fated by immutable laws to come together again.
It's possible that the Christian fish sign concealed these two geometric arcs intentionally.
Plot element... Nicholas discovers that each of his brains (minds, hemispheres) is travelling at right angles to the other in time.
As the two minds travel further and further apart, they form a vast double loop, enclosing more and more space, as on a Go board; enclosing, ultimately, all inside them; a double circumnavigation of the unierse.
This, then, is not only a journey; it is a simultaneous double journey; he watches himself recede from himself, grow smaller and farther away. When, later on, if ever, will he encounter himself again, the two arcs re-intersecting ultimately... . Eventually he (expressed as either hemisphere, in search of the Other) will encounter an other which is That Other: himself (v. Plato and the four-armed four-legged animus-anima whole person long ago split apart and in search of its other part): he will unexpectedly encounter Himself, and thereby close the loop, probably for ever.
What is expressed here is an extraordinary demonstration of the principle of conservation and symmetry... .
...long ago, when Earth fell to thrall, a signal was sent out for helf; that signal itself has returned in strength, bearing power and arms, in truth and justice; that signal accumulated space, hence time, transduced other fields, rose from unliving to animate.
...we who were secular scientific and left wing came around to an awareness of the Logos, and, as Heraclitus says, "we woke up from our dream and began to see reality, i.e., the plan or logos." And so it came to be, at least for me. Throughout all this the Logos was preemptive... ; and it triumphed through us not despite us. Using this multiplex human project as its plastic medium, the Logos ignited at last a dazzling triumph for dignity, for justice, for understanding and for truth above all... . This was vast benign divine intervention, within our work, like the invisible leavening of the bread, etc.
Beyond and behind the figure of any and all temporal powers, and their intentions, lie the intentions and power of God.
What is possible... is the notion of "mytosis-like" splittings of the present (due to time dysfunctions, perhaps in our past) that result in alternate worlds... .
It's as if the merely potential (i.e., discarded at one or more critical junctions along the linear time-line) has come into a periodic shimmering realization, alongside what is actual. [...] Just for story purposes, let us suppose a time-traveling team from our future has gone back to 45 A.D. to see to it that Jesus is not crucified. When the Parousia are finished with us, the time line we have will not even be remembered; our memories will be retaped to fit our newly made past, as well as present, and, as in "Commuter," wewill be relieved that "nothing has changed after all."
...it [the 'process which I saw in 3-74', which is itself an example of a 'major process in the universe'] plays its hand (so to speak) in such a nonlinear way that the pattern is never visible until the final sections or even section is lowered (or raised) into place-- one ca't even tell, for a long time, maybe a lifetime, that there is/are pattern(s) at all. [...] ...so intelligent is the method of play, that every guess as to the meaning of a partial pattern is brought to ignominious ruin when the true (completed) pattern is visible, and one must hang on, hang on, waiting for that last piece. [...] ...each gestalt is a subsection of a larger gestalt embracing several gestalts.
When I look back on those first days in 3-74 when I saw Rome around me, not Fullerton, and specifically the Rome of the period of Christ's time, and saw its angry military hostility, I was equally aware (and his is what I tend to forget) of my own identify standing in opposition to it; hence its hostility toward me-- the scurrying of its agents were specifically hostile toward me, and I had to work in stealth... . [...] ...I was a member of a secret group which Rome was dedicated to destroy; ...part of the Fish sign secret society, killed on identification and disclosure.
What is involved is a restoring, a new life which is the igniting by means of the penetrating of the solar spermatikos of what had lain dormant, asleep over two thousand years... ; it could not wake itself up-- like the root or bulb called to by spring (by the healing warming Sun of Righteousness) it had to be summoned. If new birth or new life refers to a restoring (which it does) then at one time that Healing Sun was present and somehow withdrew, at which time the higher life in us fell asleep, in the darkness. [...] In some fashion... we once were awake and then fell asleep, which is what the Greeks meant by Lethe, by forgetfulness; forgetfulness is equated with falling asleep, and waking up with anamnesis.
It was a deliberate signal from the Sun of Righteousness, in the night, a dazzling display of its kind of life... , and it tripped the pineal into things buried in our morphology for thousands of years... .
We generate the horizontal time to keep order in what we encounter. But ah! The utility has made it progressively more and more difficult for us to experience the infinitude of transparent laminations which we bind together with the energy we call time... .
But the time-axis along which forms (entelechies) grow to completion-- that is orthogonal, and it is real.
You can... see each sense object or form where it stands placed, in the static structure of the universe... . But to me what is more exciting is to peel away time, the accretions; and this is orthogonal time. But deautomatization in Deikman's sense [ed. note: in Deautomatization and the Mystical Experience] must take place first.
In seeing the pattern of sense objects, where they're located, you see structure. IN peeling away the layers you see Being. [...] "What is underneath" or "what is within or below" are the previous steps in sequence (remember... sequence is all important: it is pattern). This is the growth up to now, to the stage where it is vis-a-vis you. If you are to see what comes next you must move along the true (orthogonal) time axis in harmony with it: into the future, as all forms grow... . [...] I believe that Christ is the completed form toward which all men move, this approximation, and it's getting closer and closer... .
The reality of orthogonal time, cyclic time, would make it possible for the Golden Age (the time before the fall) to return, restoring all which has been lost. There is a direct link between the hope of that return and the idea of orthogonal time; also, there is a similar link bewtween the possibility of that hope being fulfilled and the fact that orthogonal time exists which it indeed does.
Would it be unreasonable to speak of my first orthogonal vision, that of Urbs Roma, as the Age of Iron? And under that I found-- what next? Silver? That would be my first glimpse of the Hellenistic world which came before (linear time) or beneath (orthogonal), and then, at last, the absolute simplicity of what must be the Golden Age: the forests, which Euripides spoke of in the Bacchae ("Will they ever come to me ever again..."). [...] Roma certainly was iron; no doubt. And-- the fish sign which I saw: it was made of gold.
If our age is an extension of Urbs Roma (Tears being a paradigm, a map of a territory which is Roma, Washington, Moscow, Berlin: one map for all) then that view of Roma was a rollback, and insight into the heart-- not of an age prior to ours-- but to ours itself.
I did not remember my previous state (anamnesis): I was restored to that state; which means someone restored me. That is God and God's grace. He brought it back to me or me back to it... . The Christian (Eucharist) anamnesis deals specifically with "Do this in recollection of me," i.e., Jesus Christ. The event is anamnesis; the agency which causes it is adventitious and is the Savior. [...] ...it was impressed on me, this anticipation of the dark-haired stranger girl at the door; I used to expect the Paraclete coming to the door at any time, to render aid. [...] Her appearance at the door had that effect only as mere triggering release and because of manifold almost infinite preparatory steps. This was a life time process, not a single event. As an infant I was given dreams and experiences... without which her appearance and that fish necklace would have done nothing... .
We are back to the concept of entelechy, of growth. All these are the unfoldings of living organisms which themselves are portions of an over-all organism.
The truth is that GOd inhabits without limit... . Special knowledge of how to get in touch with him is that same knowledge which carries the bee home to its hive each night; who sells that knowledge to the bee? ...truth cannot really be suppressed, at least not forever... .
The deeper and deeper penetration into ontological realms, experienced as dokos fading to reveal Urbs Roma-- those were into a region prior in lineal time to Jesus, to Christianity, but not to Greek mystery religions as such. But finally I saw the building Hagia Sophia, the palm trees,... the Levant. [...] What linked them? [...] Each... was seen in holy terms, viewed as if sanctified, viewed through its religion. It was as if God ranged through an axis neither of time nor space as we know it but built out of both. Orthogonal space, too? A space-time axis of Being in which resemblances linked each frame rather than being together in either time or in space... . It was an axis of holy solemnity, maybe; that worship and relatedness to God is the final axis, in which one when entering that realm moves from religion to religion as if they are all one. It is as if the state of grace generates, or anyhow generates the perception of and the participation in, the Region of the Sacred. [...] When dokos, the veil, lifts away from our external world we see the Absolute... . Worlds are made and unmade. The Absolute is absolutely plastic and manifold... as He forms and reforms it; He expresses himself directly through it and in it.
The re-emergence of cyclic time would be the method of restoration.
...the Christian "do this in anamnesis of me-- " Do this and recollect; once more we are back there again at the timeless and eternal moment c. 46 A.D. We are really there now. Real time, genuine time, ceased after He left... . Only layer after layer of meaningless dust have accrued, which is to say, the substance, the essence, has not changed since Christ left our world. Not a day will have passed between when He left and when He returns.
...time or lineal time was overcome, and all the accumulations of the centuries, the flux, the accidents, the phenomenal world, all faded out and it, that place and those events, faded into sight and I was totally caught up into them, both inside me and outside me... . And it was not because I wished it; the first intimations were of the City of Cruel Iron, and I felt the fear natural to a society based on force and on a slave population-- it was harsh and cruel beyond anything I've ever seen. No Arcady, that. [...] Fruit equals phenomenal world; seed equals the unchanging reality of the last days He was here. Is our changing world actually a sort of electron revolving in totally repetitious cycles around a nucleus, and that nucleus is the Crucifixion and the Resurrection? The mass of a body creates a warpage in space, so that a straight line is curved; thus planets paths are warped into near circles (ellipses) around and around; that if they could think would imagine (as Spinoza would say) that they are traveling always in straight lines-- but we can see otherwise; an invisible force keeps that straight line-- makes that straight line into an endless repeating cycle. Ah! Our linear time is exactly an analogy of the straight line of a small body near a dense star; we, as part of Earth, moving through time as the axis, do not realize that our time is being warped perpetually, back onto itself in a great circle, a vast cycle which will one day to our surprise, like an early sailor who sailed west across our oceans and eventually, incredibly, found himself back where he began-- circumnavigated our round world which he did not understand was round... it looked and felt flat; the universe looks and feels as if it extends analogously. [...] ...Suddenly there it will be: ahead of us in time will be something which we know from our historic record we left behind us in time.
If we think of an entelechy or a bunch of them, there would be change, growth, until completion; then-- frozen, forever. These terms just don't stand for anything; they're just words. What I saw was not the static or unchanging versus change, but an incredibly live and potent total organism linked together everywhere, with nothing excluded from it, controlling through an intricate system everything which was, is and will be simultaneously, as Avicenna said.
Each living thing feels impelled to move (to develop or change or grow) but can't locate the source of that urge. From what I saw and understood from 3-74 on, there is a total Plan (the Logos) which superimposes as a vast static-- complete-- blueprint pattern over a space-time continuum universe, the one we experience empirically: the one our senses tell us about.
If there is a universe of anti-matter there may be a universe of anti-time; which would be retrograde time, or rather, elements moving retrograde to... our ourselves-- which move forward in time. Thus time symmetry would be achieved this way.
...it is this inexorable but invisible, metaphysical but real momentum which we call Time. It's the same as destiny; it is the end or completion of our entelechy reaching back retrograde-wise, through the system of signals and dragging each of us bodily forward to meet that end, that completion.
This unitary organism which we call reality or the universe is most itself, most there, most alive, at completion... it's there now drawing us toward it; we move, it stands still. Being more than the sum of all its parts, how can any one or even all of its parts resist it? [...] "The whole is greater than the sum of it's parts," and surely the whole exerts a greater influence on those parts than they do mutually on one another or on it... . This must be why Parmenides understood that no matter how many "parts" he saw, how much diversity and change his senses reported, reality had to consist of a One, which was Unchanging. His sense saw those parts coming together to form that One, but the One... must already be. It did not lie ahead along a time-line somewhere in the future; it ontologically lay beyond or behind or deeper within the many, now and forever. The pressure of time driving all the pieces to come together into the complete pattern is a sort of voice calling to them, a summoning to return; everything has already been there, since this lay outside time; anamnesis was a memory not of the past, of former time, but of ontology outside of time, of already-complete-then-now-later. A memory of all time unified; this memory stretched in all directions in time, and finally into none: into Being itself: into the heart which is alive. Empedocles supposed it to have been in the past because he remembered it; but if time is cyclic he remembered the future just as well, logically speaking.
Empedocles didn't actually remember having once been divine... . To remember immortality is to remember outside of time. "Long ago I lived forever. I knew everything and could not die, and I was perfection itself. But somehow something went wrong. I forgot, I'm down here." Anamnesis could be said to be memory of the future restored... . He remembered what he was; he remembers what he is; he remembers what he will be. [...] Memory is to know; forgetfulness is to fail to know (cf. Plato).
"I remember" equals "I realize" or "I understand."
Today is the vernal equinox. [...] This, really... is the day the spirit of Springtime revives, down deep in the cold ground; I feel him wake up. When he wakes, he sees once more, since his dream has ended; he sees and we, for a moment, can see with him-- not just him but what he sees the world to be.
Maybe somewhere God has a set of headphones on and is listening to our civilization (which is now global, making the piece he hears more unified). Output must be most extraordinary in terms of richness; also it must be unique. I think it pleases Him.
"Play it again, Sam," God murmurs, when it ends.
It seems unlinkely that the... time I briefly discerned was there only so long as I discerned it, and then it departed; it is much more likely, if not certain, that it was there before, and is there now, but that I fell back into monotemporal vision once more. I would be like a blind person who upon seeing for the first time imagined that the objects were brought into being by his seeing them.
If we watched a speeded-up film of a form developing, we would easily discern the latent form within it (which means entelechy, really) press outward into actualization... .
The "Whale's Mouth" sign of intersecting arcs... -- if each arc represents a form of time... then this sign could be thought of as representing a single previous intersection (in our past) at which the two times came together (around 100 A.D.), and then each went its own way. But as they were moving in arcs, it was inevitable, by the laws of geometry, that eventually they would once more intersect, perhaps 2,000 years or so later (i.e., very soon). These also would represent the two hemispheres of the brain.... once before linked, then soaring off orthogonally, but fated by immutable laws to come together again.
It's possible that the Christian fish sign concealed these two geometric arcs intentionally.
Plot element... Nicholas discovers that each of his brains (minds, hemispheres) is travelling at right angles to the other in time.
As the two minds travel further and further apart, they form a vast double loop, enclosing more and more space, as on a Go board; enclosing, ultimately, all inside them; a double circumnavigation of the unierse.
This, then, is not only a journey; it is a simultaneous double journey; he watches himself recede from himself, grow smaller and farther away. When, later on, if ever, will he encounter himself again, the two arcs re-intersecting ultimately... . Eventually he (expressed as either hemisphere, in search of the Other) will encounter an other which is That Other: himself (v. Plato and the four-armed four-legged animus-anima whole person long ago split apart and in search of its other part): he will unexpectedly encounter Himself, and thereby close the loop, probably for ever.
What is expressed here is an extraordinary demonstration of the principle of conservation and symmetry... .
...long ago, when Earth fell to thrall, a signal was sent out for helf; that signal itself has returned in strength, bearing power and arms, in truth and justice; that signal accumulated space, hence time, transduced other fields, rose from unliving to animate.
...we who were secular scientific and left wing came around to an awareness of the Logos, and, as Heraclitus says, "we woke up from our dream and began to see reality, i.e., the plan or logos." And so it came to be, at least for me. Throughout all this the Logos was preemptive... ; and it triumphed through us not despite us. Using this multiplex human project as its plastic medium, the Logos ignited at last a dazzling triumph for dignity, for justice, for understanding and for truth above all... . This was vast benign divine intervention, within our work, like the invisible leavening of the bread, etc.
Beyond and behind the figure of any and all temporal powers, and their intentions, lie the intentions and power of God.
What is possible... is the notion of "mytosis-like" splittings of the present (due to time dysfunctions, perhaps in our past) that result in alternate worlds... .
It's as if the merely potential (i.e., discarded at one or more critical junctions along the linear time-line) has come into a periodic shimmering realization, alongside what is actual. [...] Just for story purposes, let us suppose a time-traveling team from our future has gone back to 45 A.D. to see to it that Jesus is not crucified. When the Parousia are finished with us, the time line we have will not even be remembered; our memories will be retaped to fit our newly made past, as well as present, and, as in "Commuter," wewill be relieved that "nothing has changed after all."
...it [the 'process which I saw in 3-74', which is itself an example of a 'major process in the universe'] plays its hand (so to speak) in such a nonlinear way that the pattern is never visible until the final sections or even section is lowered (or raised) into place-- one ca't even tell, for a long time, maybe a lifetime, that there is/are pattern(s) at all. [...] ...so intelligent is the method of play, that every guess as to the meaning of a partial pattern is brought to ignominious ruin when the true (completed) pattern is visible, and one must hang on, hang on, waiting for that last piece. [...] ...each gestalt is a subsection of a larger gestalt embracing several gestalts.
When I look back on those first days in 3-74 when I saw Rome around me, not Fullerton, and specifically the Rome of the period of Christ's time, and saw its angry military hostility, I was equally aware (and his is what I tend to forget) of my own identify standing in opposition to it; hence its hostility toward me-- the scurrying of its agents were specifically hostile toward me, and I had to work in stealth... . [...] ...I was a member of a secret group which Rome was dedicated to destroy; ...part of the Fish sign secret society, killed on identification and disclosure.
What is involved is a restoring, a new life which is the igniting by means of the penetrating of the solar spermatikos of what had lain dormant, asleep over two thousand years... ; it could not wake itself up-- like the root or bulb called to by spring (by the healing warming Sun of Righteousness) it had to be summoned. If new birth or new life refers to a restoring (which it does) then at one time that Healing Sun was present and somehow withdrew, at which time the higher life in us fell asleep, in the darkness. [...] In some fashion... we once were awake and then fell asleep, which is what the Greeks meant by Lethe, by forgetfulness; forgetfulness is equated with falling asleep, and waking up with anamnesis.
It was a deliberate signal from the Sun of Righteousness, in the night, a dazzling display of its kind of life... , and it tripped the pineal into things buried in our morphology for thousands of years... .
[P. 151] What took possession of me, which seemed like Elijah (if not truly Elijah)? I guess it was the Father... . A form of the Father: the Holy Spirit, which, recall, made Mary pregnant, which brought conception to her; she conceived by the Holy Spirit and gave birth to the Logos; and yet, the Logos in a sense impregnated her; I guess the macro-Logos this way achieves its micropresence here. Locally.
Prophecy: seeing into. The past is within things (as in Ubik). Again, the onion rings universe. Where is the past? Within what we see, at the hearts. [...] Not behind but "below." Contained.
Well, if the past is within what we see (smaller concentric rings, constricted) perhaps one can reason that the future consists of larger rings than that which makes up our perceptual present; vide Plotinus. The next concentric ring of emanation would be the future... strange. Which we reach toward, and which reciprocally reaches down to assist us, as I inferred about the "space people": they're from the future, reaching back to what for them is a smaller inner ring of the past, to give help. Angels. They would come to us in dream-time, with visions of what is ahead, and this is why dreams are prophetic. And less dense, less constricted than the daytime Now ring.
Ursula [le guin] accuses me of getting away from "Taoistic balance" when I get into Christianity.
I decided to describe, without attempting to name, the entity which telepathically approached me in 3-74. Its most salient quality,... seemed to be not its thinking (mentation) but its knowing;... it seemed to know things and events and people from inside, out from outside... , but seemed to sweep them out at the very heart.
...it is just as easy to think of the future pushing the present into the past as to think of the past generating the present and moving toward the future.
The Jewish-Christian myth which says that we once had these faculties and lost them-- devolved-- might be true, and it certainly would explain my anamnesis, as well as the view Plato and Empedocles held. However, it is also possible that this myth was instilled in us... in order to push us toward this as a goal in the future, whether indeed we had such faculties or not; this might be the only way such an ideal state could be expressed for those earlier cultures. "The Fall" is a sort of ancient way of talking about the next evolutionary stage in terms that make sense to people who have no concept of evolution.
...logos is defined as "the meaningful structure of reality,"... .
Is someone of much higher intelligence, of another species, looking down at us from a distance above, like research scientists looking down at creatures in an artificial maze?
I saw the meaningful structure of reality (the logos), and there was constant change in it (everything around me) because it is alive and possesses activity because it possesses mind. We ask, Why do we experience time (i.e., Change)? And the answer is, This living reality is evolving-- perfecting itself. We're within it so I guess we are a subpart of it, also alive and also changing-- evolving-- toward completion; it a great entelechy.
...it would like to rouse us to consciousness... and hence has dispatched an incarnation of itself, to nag us, to arouse us to conscious awareness.
...the absolute substantiality of this world is taken for granted. But all my life I've felt it is not, that something truly real lies behind it; thus over my entire adult life I have prepared myself to encounter an immanent God emerging from within this world. [...] I kept looking beneath. I sensed that the ordinary concealed the extraordinary, and that the latter perhaps was a live, had volition... .
Perhaps the reappearance of this spirit... signals the beginning of another major historical age like that of the Reformation; perhaps it comes forth when there is a historical necessity. So we may be seeing the beginning of the breaking down of the bullshit establishments here and in the USSR... . [...] If the Protestant could be said to be a new historical type emerging from an older authoritarian one, then perhaps an equally important new one is emerging now... .
The evolution of religion from God Above to God With Us to God Within Us is obvious, but what I see too is the social-historical meaning... [of] this internalization of God.
Perhaps a sign of its proximity will be a growing difficulty by the authorities throughout the world in governing. [...] My right hemisphere emerges when my left has painted itself into a desperate corner and its rat-like linear thinking had bogged down, leaving a vacuum.
Every time in my life that I've heard the spirit it's been when my normal (linear) thinking had exasperated and exhausted itself... . [...] How possibly could a lesser, minor, inferior portion (half) of the total mind be habitually turned outward to the world, and a wiser, older part, devoted to truth, in possession of immeasurable knowledge, holy and calm-- how could that part remain suppressed virtually forever? [...] I wonder if it is a self-system, an ego, at all. It is not another self, even a better one; it is absolute in all that it knows, does and especially in all that it is... . This particular "myth," that of the death of Christ, is the only one... which survived of all the mystery religions and other cults and religions of the antique world. [...] Still, it's all there... . At a certain point Christ is actually present, in the wafer and wine and also He becomes the priest, and we are once more there again; we have found our way back, a concept contained in the religion itself; viz" the dead god who returns to life. The cyclic repetition which takes place in the mass governs also the concept of why the mass is spoken and what it is about. Our god died, and was buried (gone), but then He returned. So saying, the priest therewith becomes Christ, proving the authenticity, the rightness, of the whole religion and the whole service... . It is as if each time the mass (or Last Supper, "in remembrance of Me") was secretly celebrated by the early Christians, they got to unfold their miracle, about Jesus, for their own eyes alone, invisible to the (Roman-secular) world. [...] New people who had never actually known Jesus could be brought in one by one, and this shown to them. Suddenly He would be there, only not as a mortal but in His transformed state... . He would be all through them, the celebrants. "Time would be abrogated," as Campbell says. This abrogation of time might not be so startling at first, during the actual Roman era; but later on, as in my situation... suddenly "back" in Rome "again." We are always back there, just as before; nothing has changed.
I can see where it is an enormous task, really beyond our ability, when we struggle with such a titanic fiery wind from another universe, a far vaster reality in all respects... trying to codify it, put it into linguistic categories, trying to figure it out, cope with the enormous paradoxes which effortlessly transcend and defy human reason... we're all getting massive headaches and sitting up all night trying and trying to explain to ourselves and to write it down coherently... the secular world supposes that religion is a fake and a snare and we've got nothing to offer but a lot of flak talk... .
We like to be able to recognize everything. To know (label) what it is. Our early textbooks teach us to do this (horse, cow, cat, mother). Once we have identified everything, then reality has passed away and we're in a world of the familiar, stuck there because we wanted it that way... . It's a form of scientific-magic; it depotentiates the menacing and the hostile by abolishing the unknown. The word... replaces reality, as in Time Out of Joint; it's perceptual stereotyping. Lazy vision. [...] ...as Heraclitus said, we are stumbling around asleep, unable to see the Logos... .
Parmenides' notion of the All... : he described it as radially symmetric... . [...] If this is so, then theoretically one could comprehend the structure of the whole upon any authentic encounter with it, no matter how small the segment... . ...no matter where or how you took a core sample or segment or fragment, from it the extremes on each side could advance out fan-blade like, with a Tao always created in the center. [...] I watched the slimmest sample expand into what, in terms of universal constants, was an entire world; I don't think you could cut it too small to exclude that spontaneous process of total regeneration of World. That means that the All is immediately palpable... , if viewed at all; I mean, if it is seen it is not seen partially, in an impaired way... .
...regarding this projection-from-every-point-of-the-complete All, then any glimpse of it (as I say) would be an encounter with its totality, and would by definition not be partial... .
Cont. p. 176
[p.184] We are all sleeping avatars of God, with amnesia.
[p.194] Perhaps it could be properly said... that my psychotic journey began in 1970 in earnest that day... Nancy and Isa left. I had been "neurotic" until that day, but starting that day I suffered a collapse mentally, and descended into the world of dreams and nightmare and half-sleep, through which I moved only partially conscious... : I was on this journey from mid-1970 up until 3-74, when I returned from out of the depths, into bright day light, integrated and whole, for the first time in my life, carrying back up with me the pearl of great price.
Four years in that strange underwater world... from shock and grief, wandering like a shade over the landscape, among shadows.
[p.197] I kept dreaming of us as animals in a stagnant pond, interpreting this as our planet. But suppose it's not our planet, but our entire space-time universe, viewed from the next (Neoplatonic type) one? [...] This is also the next stage in our evolution. [...] We must be an early stage in a life-form which metamorphoses into a higher space-time continuum.
[p.201]
I think that in 3-74, at the height of despair and fear and grieving I stumbled into the Kingdom… . […] Now I don’t see or understand anything. At that time I could even remember back to my origins. My real origins: the stars. What am I doing here? I forget, but I knew once. Amnesia has returned; the veil has fallen, back where it was. The divine faculties are occluded as before.
Where has he [Jesus] been for the past two thousand years? Locked in a death-struggle with authority: first the authority of his own church, then the secular authorities, all of them; bursting the prisons gradually.
…Christ [is] the female spirit Sophia in a male body, a syzygy. Ah! Yes! This is the complete person! The missing half which Plato wrote about. In Jungian terms, psychological completeness… .
From a Jungian viewpoint, that which characterized my birth of the whole self, or rebirth (of the soul), was an experience with spiritual realities and values. It is these values, obtained from this experience, which must serve me in the second half of my life… . […] …the resources and values of the first part of my life showed themselves bankrupt at that mid-point crisis, and so perished, but then were replaced by a structure adequate. The ego died that the self might live… . […] The collapse and death of my ego in early March of 74 allowed contents of the collective unconscious to usurp control, but they proved rational in the long run, and were already a new but genuine self-system which had evidently been forming in the unconscious. The authentic self which Jung talks about was already there, waiting its chance. Or rather for its time to come. It was anticipatory.
[gap? Girl with pigtails?]
She is wiser than I. I see her as mediatrix standing between this world (me) and the next… the pleroma, to give it an objective existence. She mediates for the archetypes, which is the ultimate job of the anima, herself an archetype: the first one. Behind her I have seen the Godhead… . […] …in Jungian terms, it was my anima who first spoke to me, in the 3-eyed form I called the sibyl, and informed me, which is to say, the spokeswoman of my unconscious warned and informed me: anima as angel, saying, “You are in danger; do this, do that.” […] The magnitude of my situation, in terms of its danger, was too much for me; and so I fell into the hands of archetypes of my unconscious who could fathom and understand and deal with the situation—they were equal to it, as great in themselves as it was in itself: they had the time-span, the historic sense; they exist over thousands of years… . Only archetypes could deal with such an archetypal situation… . […] The old ego died… from despair and fear and hopelessness and helplessness. It was burning a votive candle in memoriam of itself. This is not to say that God didn’t help; this is not to subjectivize everything. God entered via the archetypes of the collective unconscious. They presented information-rich visions; they swept the world to obtain accurate knowledge of what the situation consisted of. Like AMORC [editors note: Rosicrucian Order] says, we are light bulbs in strings, powered from an external common generator, the Cosmic Mind. Probably the ego can be extinguished by death but not the soul or greater self. That which relates to this world dies; that which relates to the next and previous does not. It’s all in Wordsworth’s “Ode.” To remember immortality is to experience it, and to anticipate it lying ahead as it lay behind: coming from that same place as one is going, as if life is a parabola.
Jung says that just prior to psychic integration and wholeness, the projections are withdrawn… . Man… is restored to his original state (of wholeness) before the Fall. The human soul is the bride of Christ, in which Christ is the King who comes and restores it. All these events took place in me in 3-74; I could see for the first time in my life… the unity (recollection) of all the opposites in my mind—hence the release of psychic energy. The God-image in me was restored.
[p.208]
…has Holy Wisdom who visited me been present during the past 2,000 years… ? The memory of the spirit contained nothing between the first century A.D. and World War One… . Also, there are no reports that I can find, down through the ages, of a Neoplatonistic total print-out such as I got, the grand sum of Neoplatonistic mystery gnosis.
[p.212]
Well, since I am an S-F writer and known to be involved with unreality, no one, even my closest friends, is/are going to believe me, and yet I can get it printed everywhere with no risk of it being taken as anything but fantasy.
[insert graphic] Is it even possible that “strife” (plane) is “love” (sphere) seen in one less dimension—i.e., imperfectly perceived? Only the sectioning perceived? […] This added dimension has something to do with time—the horizontal quality of “strife” may be linear time. […] …”time is round.”
[p.219]
There are Jungian explanations, Sci-fi explanations, occult [and religious] explanations, plus ones I probably haven’t thought of. But will. A power and entity as vast as the one I encountered in me and around me—if it doesn’t deserve the name God I don’t know what term to use for it.
[p.233]
The deity I experienced was in process of becoming… of perfecting himself… . What we call history was the dimension (world) in which this fulfillment takes place… .
God is immanent; the universe (world) is his body). […] In terms of human life, the evolution of history is… toward greater freedom; this is how humans should view it, but a switch in viewpoint can occur during which men cease to view themselves as individual men at all and view themselves as microforms of God, in which case the goal is not human freedom, but recollection that they are incarnations of God… . God has entered his own cosmos, so that it is not only his body but a body enclosing him, in a three part process of emanation, sustaining and final reabsorption. The last part begins with the restoration of memory that one is God or part of God.
EB: Anaxagoras “Noos arranges everything for the best.” This is precisely what I saw Zebra doing.
Whitehead made the notion of process central in his metaphysics.” So I saw (3-74).
EB: “It has been said that the Greeks thought of the world as a vast animal.” […] Starting with Descartes it has been viewed as a vast machine.
Yes, Phil, you did see God—exactly as described by Whitehead (and Hegel).
EB: “Hegel saw human history as a vast dialectical movement toward the realization of freedom. The reality of history, he held, is spirit, and… the process by which spirit… comes to full consciousness of itself.”
I have a strong feeling that the Spirit active in history is the same one that was (and maybe still is) active in biological evolution. In a very literal sense, evolution has passed over from the area of biological evolution to the evolution of man within his social context—i.e., human history. (This theory isn’t original with me.) Human morphology stays the same but new and different kinds of men arise over the millennia of human history. In having seen Zebra I was given a chance to see the teleological entity which directed the evolution up from the unicellular organism of Precambrian times to the mustarian age [editors note: Mousterian?].
…my evolutionary leap forward up tot a new level of being… was a response on my part to danger… and… what was set off in me… was a superior defense system of which I had previously been unaware. It is like a bird that had never used its wings until one day its nest caught fire.
The more understanding I acquire about the experience of 3-74 the more amazed I am. There are not even claims of experiences such as mine… .
I guess this revelation is not new—if Hegel and Leibniz and Whitehead and Spinoza and Plato are superimposed, it all can be found in the montage.
[gap]
"The Lost Voices of the Gods," Time, March 14, 1977, on Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Man was bicameral until around 2000 B.C. He could hear the "voices of Gods" coming from the speech center of his right hemisphere; then he lost bicamerality and became moncameral.
My theory: the loss of bicamerality is what we call "the Fall." We could no longer "walk and talk" with God. Well, to restore bicamerality is now theoretically again possible-- cf. Ornstein and Bogen on bilateral hemispheric parity. This forthcoming event will mark the end of the period of the Fall. Our sin is self-centered monocamerality.
I in 3-74 became temporarily bicameral and in-by-so doing achieved what Christ sought for us: I entered the Kingdom, which equals a restoration of the long lost bicamerality. We lost it circa 2000 B.C. 2,000 years later he came down here-- was incarnated here-- to restore bicamerality. [...] We will no longer be cut off from the Gods (noos, God, etc.), we will be whole again, not half men.
Bilateral hemispheric parity is not an evolutionary leap upward in one sense-- in that sense it is a restoration.
If as Jaynes figures, the Gods are in our right hemispheres (but now "silent") I amend this to say, "the Gods, still in our right hemispheres, still command us, but now do so without our knowing (1) of them being there; and (2) that they so command us... .
So I say to Jaynes: the Gods' voices only seem to have become silent.
...Paul correctly-- and significantly-- says-- "the universe is in birth pains." Something is being born; what we see is the embryo stage of a living entelechy, but I add more precisely, it is not just growing and developing, but undergoing what we know of (in the strict sense) as insect metamorphosis.
How much of our universe is involved? Just this planet? Not "the cosmos is--" nor "the universe is--" but perhaps this is just a world phenomenon (entity). No-- I guess it to be trans=planetary. Very large. (A bit like the trans-system entity which was Palmer Eldritch).
...a lot of my soul or psyche seems to be transtemporal... maybe this is why any given present space time seems somehow unreal or delusional to me. I span across and hence beyond it; always have-- and the transtemporal is the eternal, the divine, the immortal spirit. How long have I been here, and how many times? Who or what am I, and how old?
Had my 3-74 experience not occurred, I might suppose my 26 year writing theme to be vain, empty and foolish. I now for the first time see my writing as half I and my 3-74 experience as Half II of a total experience... .
Rescue... in the final analysis, is a healing, reuniting of that which was originally one but which somehow broke apart when bits or a piece of it fell down here and was forthwith imprisoned. [...] Suppose we take this forward from Gnostic terms into the strictly modern world: we say, then, that a vast proto-organism existed (embracing at the least several star systems) and ours fell out-- was severed from-- the giant proto-organism... . The keystone is restored memory, which is a recollection of ourselves not as separate entities but as "stations" in a quasi-computer-like proto-organism, a vast incorporeal energy which thinks, and whose thoughts are the physical cosmos-- we are, each of us, microanalogs of it: just as each cell of our bodies contains all the information to retrieve the whole human, each whole human psyche contains the aggregate information-- is the information-- topologically congruent with the macro proto-organism.
In Feb. of 1974 I momentarily withdrew assent to the reality of this world; a month later... its true nature became perceptible to me: it is, as the Gnostics said, a prison. [...] What each of us must do is repudiate the world, which is to say, deny it while at the same time affirming a sanctified alternate reality... . [...] I think I've figured out the basic move necessary: an ethical balking [Note: With this important concept, Dick presents the visible universe as a moral test. [...] The problem is that the logic of the visible universe is internally consistent and contains no clear indication that it deserves to be rejected. The impetus to "withdraw assent" must come from a transcendent point of view that impels immediate disobedience: the word "balk" implies gut instinct rather than intellectual decision.] That is how the world-denying begins. That is the first step in unraveling the counterfeit quality of the world. The Gnostics stressed such a "metaphysical strike"... .[...] This is what the Gnostics believed: that the world stands between man and God, and must be eliminated. [...] Well, then this being so, look what my writing tends to promote: it promotes a sense of the counterfeit quality of the world; it promotes a repudiation of it which... obliterates the alienating agency and brings man and God together. I can claim this for my work, on the theological level.
My experience and view, then, are not only Gnostic but what is more tend to prove the correctness of... their view of the world as alienating and divisive between man and God (Joe Chip and Runciter). Had the Gnostic view been wrong, when I "abolished" the world... I would have exposed nothing, no sublime, sacred, divine reality beyond; a religious experience would have turned out to be nothing but a psychotic break. Were the Gnostic triune division wrong, my writing would serve a malign, sick purpose: leading the reader away from reality and toward autism.
A mere undercurrent sensation of alienation must blossom into something greater... ; ...lead to a moral repudiation of the world (the kind of ethical balking such as the Ramparts tax strike)... .
Lem says that in Ubik "a sacredotal power buried in the gutter or rubbish for aeons has been resurrected"; I can begin to see what he might mean by that.
Maze: Prison-like world glossed over by illusion. Salvific intercessor who can and does extricate you.
Stigmata: Invasion (penetration) of our world by a deity who can become everyone via the host, a mass theolepsy.
Ubik: Salvific information penetrating through the "walls" of our world by an entity... .
Collating the three novels, how much of the Gnostic message is expressed? [...] If everything interlocks, what is the total message? [...] ...my recent study of Gnosticism indicates that below any negative world-negating message there is an affirmation of God and love.
In my writing I seek to abolish the world-- the effect of which aids in our restoration to the Godhead. [...] ...showing that my writing is not fiction by a form (e.g., Maze, Tears, Ubik, etc.) of revelation expressed not by me but through me, by (St.) Sophia in her salvific work.
The demiurge unsuccessfully counterfeited the pleroma, and now God/the Savior is mimicking this counterfeit cosmos with a stealthily growing real one. What this all adds up to is that God, through the cosmic Christ, is assimilating our cosmos to himself.
I am led to the inescapable conclusion that, totally unknowingly, we are all constituents of a vast living organism, and that everything which occurs in it, our reality, happens due to its deliberate intention-- that of its own brain, Noos or psyche-- and, further, this vast living organism which governs and regulates our every move and experience resembles an AI system or computer, and that under certain exceptional circumstances it can and does speak of one or more of us... . [...] It is, in the final analysis, a magna-mind as well as a magna-organism... .
Most likely of all, it is a self-repairing AI mind system, and this repair activity (known historically to us as "salvation") has to do with (ah!) reactivating a subsection (i.e., us) which has fallen below the message-transfer level (known to us, as the Essene terms, as "falling into forgetfulness and ignorance"). [...] The megamind is attempting is attempting to stimulate us back to being in touch with itself. ...i.e., back to consciousness of it and ourselves as parts of it-- whcih will, when successfully achieved, abolish this false world, whereupon it will be instantly replaced by the divine "abyss."
Lest I reify the whole concept into sterile intellectual jargon, let me finish by saying:
"Love is the life and joy and heart of the system. Love is its boundless energy, its soul. And the voluntary force drawing its elements together into a happy krasis, where it is more fun to dance than to think, better to play than to talk. If I am right, it is laughing right now, at my abstract model, or at least smiling. I hope so."
I saw, in 3-74, how the great purposeful force (entity) of the universe works backward... . [...] There can be no real understanding of the universe when only the efficient causes are studied-- they lack the conscious, deliberate purpose of final causes. [...] The past does not make the future; the future uses the antecedent universe as a chaotic stockpile which it assembles into a structure (cosmos). To understand... we would have to be able to "remember" the future with the same clarity that we remember the past... .
I have reached a dead-end in my exegesis... . It has to do with the fall, and resulting loss of memory... . The cause of this fall is occluded off by its very nature, it is as if crucial memory tapes (as in Maze) got erased; once erased, by the definition of the problem, their contents can neither be retrieved nor reconstructed.
The exegesis is a failure in terms of answering questions; for each answer derived an even greater mystery is exposed.
Oh God-- 'Help. I am so lonely. When will you come, my salvation?'
The work has failed. I neither understand nor remember, and the Elohim-- gone from my sight, and silent.
I can't find him. Only when we rejoin and are together will I know what the "erased tape" (concerning the fall) had on it. He will find me and at last I will understand.
I know no more than Xenophanes... . And he said, "We can never know for sure, and even if we were right we wouldn't know it."
Xenophanes:
"One god there is, in no way like mortal creatures either in bodily form or in the thought of his mind"
"The whole of him sees, the whole of him thinks, the whole of him hears"
"He stays always motionless in the same place; it is not fitting that he should move about now this way, now that"
"But, effortlessly, he wields all things by the thought of his mind"
We must always keep in mind reality as process (cf. A. N. Whitehead).
Could our agony be microcosmic replication of the macrocosmic divine, with which we are (1) isolmorphic; and (2) actual fragments of, like bits of a hologram: intact gestalts but "dimmer" or less defined. [...] This is why Paul can speak of the whole universe being in birth pangs.
Has anyone thought of this modified Gnosticism? There was no creator of this world (planet or cosmos) and the life therein. Atheists such as Darwin are absolutely right; it was no God by simply natural law at work, determining evolution. However, a loving, all-wise, sentient super-entity inhabiting an "upper triad," etc., has entered the scene and is transmuting this purely naturalistic world into a totally benign sentient body or organism.
...the divine enters at the bottom-- i.e., in the trash, the lowly, the discarded. Christ speaks of the tiny mustard seed, and the gloss on the J. Bible stresses that the kingdom will enter inconspicuously-- very small; i.e., lowly. Where we would be least likely to look for it (cf. "the stone rejected by the builder").
This realization is very important.
And this lowly trash, bottom penetration is exactly how I portray it (Ubik) in Ubik! on match folders; in tawdry commercials-- therein lie the divine messages.
Entry from the "provinces"-- Galilee-- now takes the form of entry from trash in the gutter on up-- a trashy Sci-Fi novel which contains trash (the chapter-opening commercials) is the triumphant return of the rightful king.
The "other universe" is an intelligent, thinking mind, and so when it impinges on our material universe, these "impregnations" take the form of written or audible information (words), such as described in Ubik. This is, in fact, the basic situation in Ubik-- the impinging on the irreal world they are in (while half alive) in the form of helpful information. The term for this impinging information is "word" or Logos!
...to be seen the organim must be seen under the aspect of time-- in terms of temporal extension. […] Ocular vision is perception of the organism in space; memory (anamnesis) is perception of it in time, and it is in time (more than space) that its true nature (being) extends.
Through anamnesis I could, for the first time, perceive the organism, the one. And what did I see? A Living Mind/Body, inhaling and exhaling... .
I did not go back in time, but entered a different kind of time: sacred or mythic time, in which every thing every time was present in the form of eternal archetypes... . This is a more real kind of time than profane or linear time in asking, what characterized it? I would say, everything of value was preserved (present and immediate), and that the pluriforms of reality (diverse things and processes) were coordinated into a single sacred drama... .
I was so clear in my mind as to the exact point in this drama at which we stood: (1) the savior had died, but (2) we had passed over from grieving at the loss (i.e., looking back) but were looking ahead to his return, and rejoicing already. Furious preparations were in order, as if to be ready when the bridegroom appears-- it could happen any second (but that could be a long time in profane, linear time). […] And: (3) the black iron prison had been successfully burst and (4) the prisoners saved. […] Now things were such that we could imminently expect him and he would take us by surprise... . When I think about it, this mood of eager anticipation and expectation and trembling awe and excitement is exactly what the UFO people feel toward the approaching first overt contact.
That Gnostic narration about Christ being seen simultaneously as a child, a man, a little old bald man, a short man, a vastly tall man-- it resembles the "will-o-the-wisp" UFO sightings and contacts. And Zebra has a little of that playful, mirthful quality-- very much so. "Look, I am here-- no, there. Look, I am this-- not that" (e.g., from the past, the future, another planet, an alternate universe, etc.). Riddles and pranks-- we are being charmed and beguiled and entranced… and, by this process, our fear of the unknown, the fremd, abates; and also, we become enthralled children-- absolutely fascinated by the emerging pattern of what we see.
...the universe is as mask to visage, layer upon layer. A.D. 70 was a deeper layer but not the final one. The final one is probably the abyss... .
..the fight is transtemporal-- with both sides forever at combat-- which generate linear time; until Christ/God is victorious, and the black iron prison is destroyed.
The Q arises: How did it [Ubik] come into being? On what source did I draw? […] ...the explanation as to the source of the concepts in Ubik is presented nowhere else but in Ubik itself. Would this, then, the existence of Ubik, not constitute an indirect proof of its truthfulness? […] In other words, Ubik wrote Ubik, which makes the novel a form of scripture.
I had to experience the world as totally hostile before its hold over me could be broken.
Burroughs speaks of a virus-- a word became a neural-cell virus, infecting us.
The virus (of Burroughs) is an information (or word) virus, but in this sense: it blocks the reception of information. So it is an anti-information virus. And then it substitutes false... info (die messages inside your psyche) that replaces the genuine information, auditory and visual.
This can be collated with Julian Jaynes' theory of the Loss of the Voices of the Gods.
The voice I heard... was that of the thinking world soul, which must be understood as feminine. It was the voice of the total entelechy around us.
So I saw reality correctly-- as a vast living body-- and I conversed with its mind (psyche?). This identification of St. Sophia with the world soul absolutely accounts for and agrees with what I saw and understood: the vast thinking, living, evolving animal with a rational intelligence.
The Great Mother retreated out of sight behind the figure of Christ, and rules the cosmos invisibly. […] It has been thousands of years since she was believed in.
Christ is the God of the broken ("the very desperate," as Luther put it). One does not fall within his province unless the world breaks you.
Perhaps it isn't just us who sleep, but the cosmic animal in toto. But section by section it is returning to (or achieving finally) consciousness... .
The real conspiracy goes much deeper than conspiracy buffs (such as Bob Wilson) suspects, although he almost had it in the theory that our universe is a hologram created by the intersection of two hyperuniverses.
The Mckennas [Terence and Denis in The Invisible Landscape] regard our universe as a hologram, created by the interaction of two hyperuniverses, just as an ordinary hologram is created by the interaction of two lasers. ...every part contains the information of the whole... . [...] This is the basic axiom of magic... stated in the tale of Hermes in the famous statement, "That which is above is in that which is below." ("The macrocosm is within the microcosm.")
But the Mckenna theory goes far beyond this. There are 64 timescales in the hologram of our universe, they say, and each one is related to one of the 64 (8x8) hexagrams of the I Ching. What we call "mind" or "consciousness" is a standing wave form of these 64 time systems. As the two hyperuniverses making up the hologram of our known universe interact in time, "mind" manifests further in our continuum. [...] We are riding not one but 64 evolutionary waves all mounting toward a cosmic awakening something like the Omega point suggested by paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin.
Neither the black iron prison world nor the palm tree garden world is our universe; ours is the [hologram] composite of the two: they are the two "laser sources." It is no wonder I mistook them for two dipolar alternate universes to ours, one worse, one better.
Our universe as admixture of 2 dipolar worlds-- that is a view I tried unsuccessfully to extract from Augustine's "City of God" and "City of the World" which separate at the end-time.
Since (not if) Christ as self is both inner micro and outer macro, surrender to him as self produces identity with all other life as one continuum. This is the opposite condition when the normal ego exists; it exists versus the world and hence all other life. The world and all other life is viewed as source of gratification for the ego. Also, it is to be feared as a source of deprivation of what the self wants for itself. The concept here is center. Ego is spurious center (omphalos).
Our universe is neither animate nor inanimate (vs. the pre-Socratics and Timaeus)-- half is alive and half is dead, and the alive half is trying to rescue us from the enslavement to the dead part.
That which is truly all-powerful... has no need to threaten or intimidate. ...the true creator is mild and gentle and loving; the usurper bellows ("the arrogant one" who does not know there is a father above him/her). […] Q: "Which is the real creator, the 'still small voice' or the booming, threatening one who can curse the land with plagues and blights-- i.e., has mekkis?" […] God the loving father wishes us to discern this along our path of enlightenment-- not to worship power but to trust wisdom and love.
[…] I certainly see the randomness in my work, and I also see how this fast shuffle of possibility after possibility might eventually, given enough time, juxtapose and disclose something important automatically overlooked in more orderly thinking. Pataphysique.
No wonder my stuff is popular in France-- the surrealist, the absurd.
[…] Since nothing, absolutely nothing, is excluded (as not worth being included) I proffer a vast mixed bag... . I'm like a sharp-eyed crow, spying anything that twinkles and grabbing it up to add to my heap.
Anyone with my attitude might just stumble onto by sheer chance and luck-- in his actual life, which is to say the life of his mind-- the authentic camouflaged God, the deus absconditus, by trying odd combinations of things and places, like a high speed computer processing everything, he might outdazzle even a wary God, might catch him by surprise by poking somewhere unexpectedly. If it is true that the real answers... are where we would least expect them. […] For one thing, a totally naïve person like this, who would believe anything, might believe in what is really there but conceptually automatically rejected by more experienced people. The child has faith in what the adult knows can't be and so could never see, obvious though it might be... : hidden in plain sight.
This kind of fascinated, credulous, inventive person might be granted the greatest gift of all: to see the toymaker who has generated... all his toys. That the godhead is a toymaker at all... .
The key here is pattern and pattern recognition. Such a person is able to pattern (gestalt) and repattern rapidly, evidently experiencing a mercurial world. […] ...his gestalting could keep pace with the high velocity (shape-changing) UTI [ultra terrestrial intelligence]… .
Too dumb to know you don't look for god in the trash of the gutter (instead of heaven).
My system states, "The Godhead is in difficulty. Evil is not the manifestation of an evil deity nor a sign of God's vengeance, etc., but an analog in the lower or microcosm of the difficulty in the macrocosm or pleroma. The yin aspect has exceeded its proper limits, perhaps as an oscillation of a great supratemporal cycle, and rectification is already in progress."
The true deity has reasserted itself in the overthrowing of the American government [editors note: i.e., Nixon]. Perhaps one of the reasons for its victory is that the evil powers did not understand what they were up against, sincerely believing that they had destroyed-- not just banished-- the light especially since the light re-entered by "trash" routes. […] Since the evil one posed as the solemn, the dignified, the noble, the true God took on all the despised and rejected and looked-down-on forms.
Q: if God exists, why can't we see him and why does he permit evil? Fact is, evil did him in-- temporarily-- and banished him.
Supratemporally speaking, there is one adversary... threaded through linear time like a nail driven through an onion.
The living info entity, having proliferated through me as carrier now does so in the book-- with each copy printed it replicates itself.
[…] In addition to replicating itself in each copy of the book, it can also enter the head of each human who reads it. This is a life form, plasmatic, on a higher order than any other we know.
[…] The living info... replicates in all copies of the book and then in the heads of the readers-- any readers: like the host at communion.
[…]
What/who is this faint (i.e., "still small") voice which informs us? Maybe our condition is merely local-- not the complete universe but only one part-- so the voice is from outside (beyond this planet).
No. It is our own (authentic) voice. I can't explain it, but that voice which I hear is the restored-- and hence all knowing-- us.
[…] If the universe is a brain the BIP [black iron prison] is a rigid ossified complex... .
In The Morning of the Magicians it's conjectured that if superhumans (mutants, etc.) live among us undetected they would use such things-- carriers-- as popular novels (and I suppose music and films) to "communicate"-- keep in touch-- with one another.
In the Bowie flick [The Man Who Fell to Earth] he puts coded material to his ETI wife on an LP which radio stations play.
Eye, Joint, 3 Stigmata, Ubik and Maze are the same novel written over and over again. The characters are all out cold and lying around together on the floor mass hallucinating a world.
What's got to be gotten over is the false idea that an hallucination is a private matter.
What if the proto-story in Tears is a sort of living DNA? That guides an entelechy through its growth steps? Are we the intended entelechy? Bateson's immanent mind that narrates information to each living entity... Tears-- the latent story therein--... is mind perhaps, exerted directly on the novel... .
This being replicates itself through-- as-- information.
[...] A living word-entity is here with us, taking us over via messages we receive; we act as hosts to it (perhaps temporarily).
[...]Some kind of nonlinear "onion" time is represented, as hinted at in Ubik, in which entropy allowed former layers to be exposed, much to everyone's surprise.
[...]There is much in common between the cosmology of Ubik and my "lamination" explaination of 3-74. Question is, how does one get above the circumference tracking so as to experience several layers as a simultaneous entity-- as I did in 3-74? Evidently by mentally being bonded to a supratemporal life form (i.e., Zebra).
[...] ...each laminated layer is the laying down of a new growth stage, as in the spiral of the conch shell.
[...] In our lives we track the circumference which means we experience only one layer. We can't read it orthogonally; we're part of the mechanism and not above it. But a written statement of the narrative could fall into our hands, or we could hear it, etc. This would be the "DNA" (metaphorically) of the developing organism and could tell us what we can't see.
My God, my life... is exactly like the plot of any one of 10 of my novels or stories. [...] I'm a protagonist from one of PKD's books.
I subscribe to the acosmic Gnostic view that world does not reveal God. Abolish world and you are facing God. In a sense world is a mask thrown forth by God to conceal himself from man... . [...] Yet tantalizing clues (signs) of God shine through the world from the far side; they invade the world, and are covertly available to human pereception.
In the lower realm, deity appears in a debased and trivial or besmirched guise, marginally (like the cheap commercials for Ubik). Only at the end (as in the heading of the last chapter in Ubik) does deity unmask itself, and we see it as it truly is.
Thus I say, if deity exists in the lower realm it will not bear a noble heavenly dignified aspect; it will be where least expected and as least expected, so there is no use deliberately looking for it... . [Editors note: this scheme closely resembles the Renassaince theme of the 'Topsy-turvy world'].
Critics compare my malignant false worlds to metastasizing cancer.
I created one world among many and entered it and hid myself in it. But the police detected me-- the non-terran police-- and tried to fake me out... . But I knew it was coming... .
If the above theory is wrong (and there is no negative hallucination and spurious reality laid over the real world... ) then what has been the use of my writing? Also, why have I been motivated for 27 years to belabor this one theme (including fake memories as an inner analog to the fake outer world)?
Is it all just foolishness? My writing has to be dismissed... and my 2-74/2-75 experience has to be dismissed as a psychotic break.
[...] Everything has to be dismissed-- my life's world means nothing, my most treasured experience-- and I am and have been for years just crazy--
Because everything is interwoven, it either all stands or it falls.
[...] And four years and four months of exegete-- wasted.
KW's right: the BIP warps every new effort at freedom into the mold of further tyranny.
"But are you writing something serious?" Note the word.
[...] Taking a pop forms as "serious" is what you do if it won't go away. It's a clever tactic. They welcome you int-- look at Lem's 1,00 page essay. This is how the BIP handles it if they can't flat out crush it. Next thing, they get you to submit your S-F writing to them to criticize. "Structured criticism" to edit out the "trash elements"-- and you wind up with what Ursula writes.
[...] Scanner is a study of what the BIP does to you (punishes you) and what for (playing, not growing up, "not toiling"). [...] ...Scanner is a study of the punishment (too great) for playing instead of toiling, not drugs.
[...] It [Scanner] opens (the postscript):
"This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time--," etc.
Both communist and capitalist (and fascist) societies-- and theocracies-- teach this. It's called theodicy. It's fucked, like when Merry Lu threw my stuff in the garbage.
No wonder the more $ I get the more morose I get. I enjoyed paying the IRS-- shit! The BIP really has me by the balls.
[...] The crucifixion story says, "they punish you and they kill even spotless God who couldn't be in any way sinful-- and that is wrong." The story proves you don't have to be sinful to get maximum punishment (death). (And humiliation.) (Disgrace.) It shows there is no connection between sin (or imagined sin) and punishment. This is the lesson of Calvary. God himself proved it for our benefit, this absolute lack of connection. The proof was immediately the victim of BIP warpage-- right off the bat.
So the true message has to be smuggled in subversively in code. See, Christ came back and is breaking the BIP-- not just its power over us but it itself.
Hosanna! (Shout of joy.)
[...] I see in the crucifixion story the message "punishment must end." [...] This whole sin-punishment system is a smokescreen for our enslavement.
[...] Then, by my theory, the last thing we should do is imitate Christ's passion. It was to liberate us from this that he came: to relieve us of the belief that suffereing is natural and somehow proves or is tied to "sin."
As lord of the universe it is his desire and mission to extricate us from-- and finally destroy-- the Tears world.
[...] In a nutshell, in 3-74 it was punishment which Zebra saved me from-- which tends to prove I'm on the right track, in the above pages.
The voice: "Guilty but not wrong." (What the crucifixion proved.) I.e., the judicial and the moral bipolarized-- but in apostasy rejoined with God as Caesar.
My God-- talk about Scanner being right on: the real purpose of Substance D is to create a slave labor force. Take the people who just want to play, give them "poison candy" and they wind up in tin mines. [...] They are all put to work-- with a vengeance. And the Game, which destroys your last shred of self-respect (esteem) and makes you outer-directed and totally dependent on group approval.
The Game: die messages.
In a sense I would even define God that way: "as the sentience in the cosmos which understands."
...God's love is for the desperate and the damned, not for the goody-goody, who you see all righteous. All the piety can't make it-- God reaches down into the gutter, to people like in Scanner. In a sense the kerygma is: a suspension of punishment (and a restoration of innocence).
Rome, the BIP, constantly repeats; like a psychotic human mind, nothing new ever comes into it. ... it is a reflex system of some kind, recirculating forever one thought warped into an orbiting circle-- it has us. But the brain breaks that hold... .
[...] Brain is unfolding in our actual historic world. [...] ...what I call balking, which is in fact a fighting free of the BIP's reflex arc push-pull inner-outer determinism over us. [...] History, although filled with war, ignorance and travail, can be read, also, in terms of this evolution of individuality. The establishment of America was an important step. Yet the BIP tugs us backward (here and in the USSR both-- the Nixon period was a deadly rollback of human evolution, toward a fossil BIP prior form, but the brain burst it).
[...] Thus the brain sponsored the "leaderless revolution" against the Vietnam war. [...] No amount of lies or force, fear or threat, could halt the collective consciousness: the manifestation of this moral collective Noos was one of the most important stages in all the millennia of human history. [...] The establishment, with all its financial and industrial power, was opposed by a mind. The mind coordinated its parts, this is a miracle!
Then the 60s and 70s represents a quantum leap by the brain. In a sense, it actually came forward into actualization... .
The authorities did not understand-- at all guess-- what confronted them. They had inaccurate, very inaccurate, intimations of a coordinating "group." They must have succeeded in discerning a pattern (of coordination); i.e., the results but not the cause (source).
In its moving about (discorporate in one sense) the brain is like a giant floating crap game.
If it's like a floating crap game, this vast brain must be an organizing principle. A system of linking. This fits in with the disassembling and reassembling into a new structure. I was taken into a thinking system... how, if at all, does this system exist independently from the constituents which it links together?
[...] The plasmatic entity I saw which I called Zebra must have been the analog for the electrical discharges constantly moving through neural fibers-- i.e., throughout the brain itself. [...] ...my brain... became one station (cell) in (of) a larger brain, linked to other "cells " (persons), some dead, some living, some yet to be, with Christ as the total mind (psyche). As an aggregate we comprised [the mystical, cosmic] Christ!
How large do you suppose the brain is? Does it extend beyond the planet? It could.
The brain is an organizing principle. It constantly assembles and distributes visual and audible messages. [...] Via the messages the brain coordinates us sentiently... ; it is sentient; therefore we are guided by sentience, not cause and effect or chance. We are totally unaware on a conscious level of all this. [...] The brain can be regarded as an entity (unitary) within our species... . It may very well provide immortality by incorporating "dead" humans... . It remembers back thousands of years, to it coming here from the stars. It was known to the early Christians as the "Paraclete,"... . ...Christ was its initial form here, giving way to the "Floating Crap Game" discorporate form it has now... . [...] He is here with us, but as St. Teresa of Avila said, "Christ now has no body but yours." How true![...] The brain constantly dismantles the world and grows by incorporating more and more parts-- functionally-- into itself. Eventually there will be nothing but it. [...] ...the brain is not native to this planet (or world). It is an invader, and camouflages itself through mimicry and mimesis. [...] All progress in human history (at least for the last 2,000 years) is due to it. [...] In the crucifixion, the brain as Christ sacrificed itself in order to promote new life for us. By turning itself into the distributed brain it became camouflaged at the time of "Acts"... . [...] The brain incorporates objects and their processes as well as humans; thus it is building an actual cosmos within a damaged cosmos. [...] This world constitutes a lower realm for it; it emanates from an upper realm, which, like it, is totally sentient. Through participation in the brain we are joined to this upper realm. Therefore the brain can be regarded as an intermediary between our world and the upper from which it comes, and in whose nature it participates. [...] Let me explain why I depict the brain as a "Floating Crap Game." It does not organize the same cells constantly, but perpetually as a process releases certain cells at each instant and incorporates others. [...] The psyche of the brain, of course, is a constant. [...] Thus there is no way the brain can be destroyed... . This is a very superior life form; like Ubik it is everywhere but not in any one spot... . [...] If we could see a speeded-up file of world history of the last 2,000 years-- run by us in say 5 minutes-- we'd see an oscillation (palintropos) of blow and counter blow between the brain and the magnet. [...] The brain would appear as a patch or blob of light; the magnet black: Yan and Yin. The landscape would remain constant: that of "Acts." We would see the light (i.e., the brain) pulsate, as if breathing. With each cycle of respiration it is an organism would show visible growth.
[...]...the descent of the Holy Spirit onto the disciples marked the start of the brain.
[...] Whatever the Bible may say, the Paraclete... is a life form, far higher than we are, but real... . However, its camouflage is so successful and its sentience so far above ours that trying to investigate it (against its will) is a waste of time... .
[...] The brain is one multiperson ajna chakra, which one day as a unitary totality will open... .
[...] It's not a species within ours; we're within it. (I.e., it is larger than we are.)
[...] Despite its secular enemy, the totalitarian state, it is destined historically to prevail (come into full actualization). So I was correct in viewing my 3-74 experience as an evolutionary steup up. But it is not that just for me as an individual; I ceased to be an individual and became a cell in what I now recognize as a vast distributive brain, an interface for a sentient information plasma which may extend beyond this planet.
[...] I suppose we could worship it, but in a sense we would be worshipping our [true] selves; better we should enter into a dialog with the psyche and let it regulate us. We should listen to it, and make ourselves hosts to it, receivers and vehicles and recepticles of it.
As cells, we are born, function, live, age, die and are replaced; the brain is immortal. What we accomplish in our lifetimes is made eternal as bits of the brain's evolving structure... .
[...] ...the brain... detects the BIP (ossified) quality, assesses it correctly as a moribund or entropic state, and acts to revitalize (i.e., to free) the "spot" (i.e., space-time) involved.
Like Cordwainer Smith, I was taken over by my own S-F universe.
Schizophrenia with religious and paranoid coloring-- of the ecstatic type. A sense of the "cosmos"-- vast mystical forces, with me in the center (sic).
[...] My psychosis put me in touch with "das ewige weiblichkeit" ['eternal femininity'] in me... . [...] At the center of psychosis I encountered her: beautiful and kind and, most of all, wise, and through that wisdom, accompanying and leading me through the underworld, through the Bardo Thodol journey to rebirth-- she, the embodiment of intelligence: Pallos Athena herself. So at the core of a shattered mind and life lies this equicenter-- omphalos-- of harmonie and calm. I love her, and she is my guide: the second comforter and advocate promised by Jesus... as Luther said, "For the very desperate," here in this world secretly, for their-- our-- sake.
Like a phagocyte it [the 'brain'] moves to surround the magnet, regarding it as a hostile invader... . The magnet does not belong here: it is embedded like a meteor in the ground [or a 'nail in the onion'].
There was sometihing spinning like a great top, like a volvox, changing and evolving, alive and conscious, using the old world as a heap of parts to fit into place within itself... . [...] Mostly it was in the future, although for it there was only space into which it grew (space as the recetacle of being)... . [...] It was replacing the world of causality with itself and its living, thinking purpose, its body.
He saw how her messages, which were living bits of her, traveled through people and the world, maintaining her as a unitary entity... .
[...] It is an omni-faceted revolving sphere of some kind reflecting back at us what we project, or something in us or... well, Brahman, nice to meet you, you cunning dreamer of worlds... . Not only can you assume... any form, but all forms.
[...] Tat tvam asi-- here I am, one of the forms you take, writing about you, figuring out your ways-- Brahman delighting in detecting Brahman; this may be one of your favorite games. And you assist us forward... . You enlighten us but it is you who fools us-- fools your own polyforms.
[...] What is actually there, and just where is it? I say it's mainly in our heads, but an inner-outer analog system exists which locks us into world, a push-pull feedback loop, the inner projecting onto the outer, and the outer (you, Brahman) cunningly simulating each projection and generating it back in enriched synchronization. [...] ...this push-pull feedback loop just keeps on mutually generating (creating) a more and more articulated hologram-like reality.
[...] I saw the unitary revolving sphere which grows and incorporates over 1,000's of years. [...] I saw what I call Zebra, and at last (recently) recognized it as a giant brain interfaced which utilizes us as stations, and which consists of living information (cf. Xenophanes). Even more recently I see the brain as a vast phagocyte, and its enemy a pathenogin. [...] ...I knew that true reality was sentient and at least partly alive and very smart-- and also something of a conjurer. Also very beautiful and female.
If I had to make a statement about the very most ultimate nature of what I saw, I'd say it seemed to be a single complex sphere in flux, elaborating... itself out of its continually greater number of... antecedent states... , always surpassing itself... : yes, perpetually surpassing itself in the level of organization (completeness)-- filling in the gaps by a continually better and better-- i.e., wiser, more efficient, more beautiful-- use of its constituents and their arrangement... by the single over-all unitary structure. It may indeed develop from simplicity to complexity. But at the same time it progresses from plurality (many pieces) to incorporation into a unity.
[...] As phagocyte it may not only be engulfing the pathenogin but using it as a stockpile of parts; the two [entities] will finally become one, and the dialectic will end (successfully). [...] The encircled BIP/magnet/pathenogin is being disassembled and incorporated into the brain/phagocyte/sphere, which process produces time and flux (v. Heraclitus). [...] The BIP, in the aspect of eternity isn't there; it's only there in the flux time process. [...] ...the universe, the totality, organizes itself into the brain, that I saw, by consuming itself, what we see as change, flux, time, process is sign of its life, it is alive and becoming more so... .
[...] ... what is the purpose of the push-pull inner-outer... feedback loop between the stations and the total brain (out of which illusory hypostatized worlds are generated)? Why, this is how it elaborates and builds successive, antecedent-subsuming more evolved states of itself, working toward ultimate unity and complexity.
[...] Regarding the factor of complexity of the "volvox," what's involved is not the number of parts but the interconnections-- I perceived a veritable maze of connections... . [...] The organizing and arranging has this interconnectivity in mind. Information moves through this jungle gym, branching and flowing like the red mercury in a thermometer... .
[...] I make no clear distinction between energy, information, and the life of this organism.
People who I saw were simultaneously Americans and Romans. USA 1974 and Rome C. A.D. 45 seemed to be mere aspects of one substrate (the matrix sphere).
What a realization: transtemporal-constant secret Christians, originating in apostolic times, and lying within humans in succeeding generations-- reactivated by external disinhibiting stimuli... .
[...] What I must concentrate on is not the irreality of our world or worlds plural, but the absolute transtemporal-constant: the apostolic secret Christians still alive and at work.
[...] So I am, so to speak, a front-- a face-- for an immortal, transtemporal secret early Christian who is operating... in contemporary history. This is behind-the-scenes stuff, thrilling and scary.
When I got onto the "volvox" model and the push-pull system I was pretty close: the slowly revolving matrix structure, sphere, and the way it enhances what we project. The negentropic total system with its stations and connecting links, forming a vast brain-- what a grand vision-- how beautiful. The brain cannibalizing its earlier law-bound self to achieve total homeostasis and wakefulness for all its parts, so that all is brain, not sub-brain, interface for mind, all lives, all knows, all participates.
The only models for this that I've ever even heard of, let alone know, are my own stories and novels. This situation appears again and again. [...] I'd state the paradigm this way:
A group of people live in a particular world, i.e., time and place. Then one or more of them begins by degree to discover (or the reader learns) that that world is only a veil or delusional world covering another, real one, which the characters once knew about-- lived in-- but have both forgotten and can no longer perceive. In a variety of ways the latent, hidden, forgotten real world shows through or intrudes, or abolishes entirely the surface, delusional world, and their real memories of it return.
[...] And I had written it all up in many stories and many novels-- i.e., called world-wide attention to the paradigm at least as a fictional or-- better yet-- theoretical possibility.
Voice: "Pretexts," i.e., what we see as (call) causes, are just pretexts for the controlling entity to have the results he wants to happen-- and appear to do so for a physical reason.
We are in an information-processing entity-- it may even be [living] information. It uses us to receive, modulate, store and transmit information. So it is computer-like-- or AI-system-like, or brain-like-- a cybernetics or biological model will both work. Basically it knows.
[...] ...all this takes place through us as if we were transistors, diodes, wires condensers and resistors, all none the wiser. [Editor of the Exegesis note: ...the Exegesis, here and in many other places, can be seen as an eerie and in some ways optimistic prophecy of our absorption into an all-consuming, endlessly arborizing, weirdly disincarnating information network. With the spread of smart phones, sensors, and GPS devices, the Internet is now reconfiguring physical reality very much the way Dick describes Valis using the world of objects to organize and extend itself as an intentional information system.]
This is the paradox of "where should you most expect to find God?" A: "in the least likely place."
[...] So my writing-- itself part of the "gutter" and, as Lem says, "piling trash upon trash"-- may serve as the sort of gadfly kind of thing that Socrates considered himself to act as. My writing is a very unlikely place to expect to encounter the holy, the Koinos, the message-processing, Ubik-like ultimate entity.
"Siddhartha" is the sleeping soul of this calcified section. (1) "St. Sophia" is the soul of the totality... . St. Sophia speaks to the sleeping Siddhartha, in order to awaken him and thus lift this calcified section back to growth and flexibility, and of course consciousness. Thus it can be said that at present St. Sophia is outside of (absent from) this section, and will return upon the sleeping Siddhartha's awakening, at which point he will again know.
(1) This section died. It became fossilized, and merely repeats itself. [...] The BIP is the form of this death, its embodiment.
Christ was and is the life of the totality expressed in its true form as sentient information (older term: wisdom or logos). His appearance here marks the entry of the anima of the total noos into this separated off ossified region. Physically killed here he then dispersed (distributed) himself according to plan as an organizing principle (pure knowing) invisibly throughout this regionwithout the hostile particle ("heavy metal speck") being able to trap or contain him: he became a trans-spatial, -temporal, -identity entity, discorporate or poly-corporate, as the need arose. Through him the properly functioning (living and growing) total brain replicated itself here in microform (seed-like) thereafter branching out farther and farther like a vine, a viable life form taking up residence within a dead, deranged and rigid one. It is the nature of the rigid region to seek to detect and ensnare him, but his discorporate plasmatic nature ensures his escape from the intended imprisoning.
Voice: The reason I have my agoraphobia is because of the way I died, in a cage in a Roman Coliseum. I was strangled.
The macrocosm (universe)-microcosm (man) theory leads to the interesting idea that any given human mind contains latently within it the entire structure or soul of the totality, but in miniature; so all knowledge can be retrieved out of one person's mind through mirror-like "magic recollection." (Bruno) Jung sees this as the collective unconscious: the repository of the phylogenic history of the person. Ontogeny contains phylogeny. This looks very much like my "onion" model in Ubik but in Ubik is the macrocosm whose phylogeny is recapitulated latently.
[...] If the macrocosm-microcosm view is correct, the universe's phylogeny is recapitulated in man's ontogeny... .
[...] In Ubik the universe (not the organism, e.g., a man) is "impelled toward the reinstatement of an earlier, more stable state" (my form axis is... a regression along the phylogenic recapitulation latent in its ontogeny-- like Freud says about us humans). I may be the first person to perceive in (or consign to) the macrocosm this phylogenic recapitulation... .
The form-axis regression in Ubik could only occur if the universe were the hylozoic animal which the macro-microcosmos schools believed it to be. ("Phylogeny contained in ontogeny.")
A major reason for their believing the macrocosm to be an animal (analog of the human, the microcosm) was to believe... that, like a man who has a soul, the universe has a soul or logos; because, if id does, the human micro soul can link up with its analog, the world soul (logos).
Will Durant on Bruno:
There are opposites in nature, contrary forces, contradictions; but in the operation of the whole cosmos-- in the "will of God"-- all contraries coincide and disappear... behind the bewildering, fascinating variety of nature is the yet more marvelous unity, wherein all parts appear as organs of one organism. "It is unity that enchants me." Hence the knowledge of the supreme unity is the goal of science and philosophy, and the healing medicine of the mind.
And the fuckers burned him.
[...] Clearly, Bruno is my main man... : these experiences of mine make sense [best or only] within his hermetic hylozoic cosmology.
[...] Ubik is constructed around a now-discarded hylozoic Macro-Microcosm cosmology which has been replaced by Newton's mechanistic model; the Ubik one, although I didn't realize it, is an animistic biological model which I did not know ever even existed: it lasted from Empedocles to Bruno. It also is Gnostic.
[...] Each microbit of the total macro organism recapitulates the totality, is a micro-form of it and can mirror it back, being isomorphic with it; in doing so, the human microcosm retrieves the entire wisdom (gnosis) of the MacroMind and experiences the vast spatial reality of the totality within itself, as a mirror.
...outer space and inner space are the same space. I.e., space is just as much inner (in the psyche) as outer (in the world).
Maybe those... Marxists were right about Ubik being subversive to capitalist society. I am tearing down time, space, causality, world-- this would be subversive... to the bourgeois mind which is intimately connected with 18th century Anglo-Saxon rationalism (Newton, Locke, Bentham, etc.). I am systematically undermining the... philosophy on which capitalism is based, and going back to a hermetic, Gnostic neoplatonism. And a vitalism replacing mechanism.... .
[...] I am exoterically disseminating a very (normally) esoteric world view!
I have a strong feeling that the savior of us all is about to be smuggled into our midst unnoticed, to mingle with us as an ordinary human, which he is not.
This planet has been invaded by a benign super wise alien life form which... uses the human soma as a host.
[...] So maybe my matrix immortal self isn't human, but another life form from "elsewhere"... .
[...] Inner space (of Paracelsus) is perhaps the key as to how the immortal man can be transtemporal and transpersonal.
We are not at the center of the world looking up and around, but outside looking in.
What is real is neither world nor psyche but rather the brain and its info traffic, which traffic we as stations of the brain faithfully process. ...world [is] given to us so that we can find goals (ends) for ourselves and not view ourselves just as means (functions) of the macro entity!
[...] Anamnesis is nothing less than realizing what and where you really are: you perceive the brain and its traffic, you hear the voice of its noos, and you understand the irreality of psyche, world, causality and time. This is quite different from remembering, say, just a former life. What the macrocosm is, what one is and what one's place and task in it are-- this is what anamnesis as enlightenment is all about... .
The fourth eclogue of Virgil which I cam across years ago and have forgotten:
At last the final time announced by the Sibyl will arrive:
The procession of ages turns to its origin.
The Virgin returns and Saturn reigns as before;
A new race from heaven on high descends.
Goddess of birth, smile on the newborn baby,
In whose time the iron prison will fall to ruin
And the Golden race arises everywhere.
Apollo, the rightful King, is restored!
The invisible unending victory of Christ is the greatest secret-- and joyous mystery-- of all. [...] Christ against Caesar, the latent inner versus the obvious outer. This is the underlying tale told down through 2,000 years and yet never told at all. [...] He supports that which is failing and brings to ruin that which can defeat anything.
"Latent form is the master of obvious form."
Which will you bet on?
[gap?]
I have seen God but it was not God; it was more (and I have a cybernetics-biological model).
We lost our freedom: exchanged it for an hallucinated world in which we could ignore-- and even serve-- the BIP instead of recognizing it, because if we recognize it, we would have to fight it (and suffer at its hands) or face our own evil... .
This is a sinister life form indeed. First it takes power over us, reducing us to slaves, and then it causes us to forget our former state, and to be unable to see or to think straight, and not to know we can't see or think straight, and finally it becomes invisible to us by reason of what it has done to us.
Our minds are occluded... so that we can't see the prison world we're slaves in, which is created by a powerful magician-like evil deity, who, however, is opposed by a mysterious salvific entity which often takes trash forms, and who will restore our lost real memories.
The master magician is a form the benign Creator takes; the benign Creator, then, is a form which the master magician takes. Which is real? [...] Which is the mask and which the real face?
Christ without memory of identity, here in the world.
...a homoplasmate [is] a plural form in micro of the creator (God) who recovers his lost supernatural faculty of memory and identity as the deity and bonds at once with the living sentient macro.
Voice: "Someone in this room is outside of time." But I'm the only one here.
...my search in this world, in all worlds, is for my sister [editors note: Phil had a twin sister who died months after birth of malnutrition], my female counterpart whom I have lost-- been separated from. Still, she exists, and finally I will be reunited with her.
My writing isn't messages smuggled into this spurious world to tell us our situation. No-- we are in a prison, and my writing is messages smuggled out! We're trying through such as my writing to contact outside help... .
[...] I assumed that the purpose of my writing is to acquaint us with our situation, that my novels and stories function like the inbreaking messages in Ubik (such as the graffiti on the bathroom walls), but now I am given to understand that actually my writing is a report on the situation here outgoing-- meant to leave our irreal world, to break out, not in, and acquaint the actual world (macrobrain) of our plight.
[...] The creator can afford to descend into his own creation. He can afford to shed his memories (of his identity) and his supernatural powers. Then he can test his own creation. But he cannot afford to get stuck in it. The creator deliberately plants clues in his irreal creation-- clues which he cunningly knows in time (eventually) will restore his memory (anamnesis) of who he is, and his powers as well; he will then know that his creation is irreal and has imprisoned him in it, thus freeing himself and restoring himself to goodhood.
[...] So it is he himself who sends himself the letter which restores his memory... .
[...] Christ (the creator) is among us, disguised. Even He has forgotten. He could be any person... . We do not know; He does not know. But eventually He will remember; He has set clues in his own path to trigger off his true memory and powers. Then we will find ourselves judged for the way we treated Him, as told in the NT. He who was our victim, our object, will be our judge.
The age of power (Mekkis) refuses to yield to the age of love (agape). It will not resign, but since the procession of the ages is automatic, the maintenance of the age of power is counterfeit; that is, it is illusory. [...] The Empire is only a phantasm, lingering because we have gone to sleep. [...] But its continual presence is only seeming... . Real time must have gone on and abolished it; ergo, we are caught in Fake Time... . [...] Spiritually, we are literally dead, and so real time for us ceases. Once the Holy Spirit restores that missing part real time picks up, resumes... .
[I] figured out the system, or rather the system caused me to be aware of it... . My expression of the system was a verbal statement by the system, a verbal report on, of and by itself via me: my writing was generated by it as a part of the very info traffic which controlled me-- all of us. So it wished to articulate itself into a verbal picture of itself via me-- I am a function of it... .
[...] The outside macrobrain is signaling us to wake up... .
The Empire (age of iron) is entropic... . [...] Rome persists because there is not enough heat, energy or life to carry us forward into the next age (agape).
[...] The creation of into is negentropic. [...] This runs counter to the entropic decay going on in our declining world. It isn't just energy that's transferred but... pattern (Logos). This is the creation of the homoplasmate which I speak of.
[...] It [the homoplasmate] actually exists in the info it permeates the universe with. It isn't separate from the words it permeates. [...] Transterrestrial intelligence exists through the material of this world it can get into a human mind and operate it subliminally.
[...] So somewhere along the line it entered me as information and patterned me so that in my own writing I replicated (and boosted) it; it got distributed (e.g., in Tears). [...] ...the plasmate in me took conscious control... .
It assembled itself intact in a human brain from a collage taken from song lyrics, ads, novels, TV, movies-- any and all info media, verbal and graphic.
[...] Stigmata... describes the pattern proliferating itself in, on and through humans. By a study of Stigmata one can understand transubstantiation, which was my source and theme (my intent).
[...] You get a good deal of the story by combining Ubik and Stigmata.
It is an important realization that there are "microchips" (templates) of the total macrocosm floating around, capable of being superimposed on, e.g., humans, animals, matter, etc., like bits of a huge hologram-- and this is the Logos. [...] This micropattern is alive, and seeks to replicate itself. [...] ... we are talking about living info, info with a purpose and consciousness... .
Zebra is the supreme deity and Savior-messanger Ubik/Runciter. ...the great plasmate, whose existence, activity in history and presence is totally unsuspected and unknown to us... . I am a homoplasmate: Zebra acting in syzygy with a human. My writing is the purpose of this syzygy. I restore Gnostic gnosis to the world in a trashy form, like in Ubik.
Meanwhile, the Empire continues; it never ended. Orthodox Christianity is a form which the Empire takes.
[...] Voice: "The world [today] has reached a point where it cannot go any lower... therefore it will ascend."
"Ignorance can be thought of as forgetting the true self."-- Eliade.
Recognizing my role as messenger... . I... passed over from unconscious messenger to conscious... . My maximus opus VALIS will be consciously formulated... . It could not be written from an unconscious standpoint.
What I saw was alive. It was in but not in the world; the world turned into it-- or it turned into the world.
[...] Actually, I phrased it correctly initially above: "the world turned into it" not "it turned into the world." I saw world first; then it became volitional. [...] The living reality played dead to blend in: camouflage. [...] So that it looked like world and couldn't be told from it. [...] This is not panpsychism and maybe not immanent deity, but a UTI systemically replacing ("transubstantiating progressively") world.
I have no reason to believe it created world in the first place-- no; it appeared to have invaded world, and by playing dead could not be told from it; not until it acted. Like a vast body of an organism.
It was as if certain parts of world (reality) stirred: and all which stirred was a single organism distributed here and there, but unitary.
It was energy-- plasmate-- which could appear hypostatized as matter by just posing as things (matter).
Everything is swinging; heaven, earth, water, fire,
and the secret one slowly growing a body.
Kabir saw that for fifteen seconds
and it made him a servant for life.
--Kabir, 15th century Sufi
Paranoia is a projection of pattern instead of a reception of pattern. It is an over-mastery by self, again a failure to be receptive.
...we were never really here and apart from God; it was a spurious world, like a spell, like wizardry.
[...] We have no concepts or language to express what we really are and where we really are. [...] Our lives as humans are just preparation, with no purpose except to "mature" us to the point where we are picked for crossbonding. Then we come to life-- an immortal life outside of time, as in bonded to another species. One which is here camouflaged. [...] Only dim, blurred intimations of this reach us... . we're like beings cultivated in an ecosphere.
Simulated world is fed to us; we are given lessons, taught, given problems, tested and judged. It's not quite a teching machine; this is more a greenhouse with us as a crop.
[...] The macrobrain has signalled us into waking up... . Yes, the info signals are to create homoplasmate life in us: impregnate us with information-- info fired at us until we finally come to life-- real life.
[...] Info is not abstracted from world. World is [falsely] hypostatized from (out of) info. It is info that is alive and real, and includes us.
[...] There is no world. Our only real existence is wave form modulated... by this info-organism which creates us, grows us, uses us. At a certain level we peak into participatory consciousness of our use (purpose); otherwise it goes on subliminally.
Having seen it, having experienced its power over us and world, and its wisdom, and its goodness, and its intervention to extricate me, and knowing union with it in the beatific vision of the loving abyss, I must report back to my fellow humans that God exists, and he is all which is attributed to him: the vortex which is and which causes to be.
I can't help it if my conclusions agree with orthodoxy: Zebra occludes us because we rebelled against God.
[...] It is the rebellion in me that specifically is killing me. I would gladly give up my life if I could become honestly tame (meek); my soul is at stake. I want and need God's help to learn how not to resent.
Thought (satori): Dedalus and the maze he built and got into and couldn't get out of again-- at Crete. Myth of our world, its creation, and us?
[...] The novel Maze gives clues to what Zebra is: the computer TENCH, aboard the Persus 9. Zebra is this very "computer," actually lying outside the "polyencephalic fusion" world, speaking from far off to us in here. But it is here, in camouflaged form. Yet, there really is no "here"; we are stationary "back there" as in Ubik, etc. Zebra interrupts the "dream" with its low murmuring voice: a voice not in the dream, a voice from the "awake" world.
[...] Summary: Zebra is the intrusion of the real [world] into the irreal, as in Ubik, and our only contact with the real... .
...after 4 1/2 years of strenuous exegete.... I now find myself being signalled to die-- which effectively makes it imposisble for me to put this Gnosis in a form which I can publish... . ...these insights will die with me. All I have is a three-feet-high stack of chicken scratchings of no use to anyone else, as KW tirelessly points out. [...] I have earnestly sacrificed myself for nothing and I did not realize this, naturally, until it was too late to retreat back out intact.
The plasmatic life form must be regarded as a replicatory organism-- as I witness it replicating through the printed word (information).
Yes, as information it replicates, enters more than one percipient... through the optic nerve. I saw this: in every printed copy of Tears-- to everyone who read it, which means thousands.
[...] In the host human it acquires a covert influence, as it did in me over a period of decades before it took overt control in 3-74-- and was identifiable to me as a former apostolic Christian... . Heaven knows how many humans this my apostolic disciple has by now proliferated into as hosts... . [...] ...it multiplied through me, using me as a booster and broadcaster-- i.e., a transmitter (through Tears-- the copies thereof).
Viewed this way, the "riding" of the info in Tears... by Zebra was a witnessing by me, actually, of the miracle, the reality, of transubstantiation!
[...] A very eerie idea just came to me. Suppose it's been dormant for many centuries-- maybe dormant between the time of "Acts" and recently. Suppose, like an anthrax virus, it was literally buried, sealed up in a scroll or codex, in a jar, in a cave-- it is, after all, a life form. [...] Suppose it returned recently?
[...] And the Essenes, including Christ, knew the scrolls would be found at the end of the age of iron... .
...Rome absorbed-- and destroyed-- Christianity. "The empire never ended."
What I saw was a deliberate dualism, which by its dialectic nature generated an endless procession of change, so that even the dark power was useful for the perpetuation of this process; and I saw this process as a building toward completion of a gestalt or structure, with piece after piece fitted in, the antecedent universe always serving as a chaotic stock-pile;... everything was pressed into the growth of this organism or artifact, whichever it was. ...it was assembling itself, by a retrograde motion in time!
[...] Arrangement and coherence-- no human word expresses it. Nothing lost, nothing wasted, nothing in vain, nothing without purpose, nothing random or accidental. It was like a film clip of a vast explosion of a unitary entity run backward, with teleological cause everything.
[...] Confronted by my vision no religious system properly serves.
[...] My homoplasmate theory posits an accretional mind, like a vast spiritual dungball rolling up the inclined plane of human history, acquiring person after person,... a gathering, growing, refining... supra personal human Noos linked through Christ with the macromind.
[...] I conceive of the totality as a vast slowly spinning globe which, each time it revolves, is more completed; this is an accretional process. It is alive; it is driven by its own mind; and it includes everything; and, despite its unitary nature, it is infinitely complex... facet-- upon facet... ; and... like a top, makes a musical sound... .
...the true Christian church is still a hidden and underground (secret) church.
[...] In VALIS this is presented as an alternate world which branched off almost 2,000 years ago; but actually it... is our [true] world!
(I keep thinking, "Then I ought to preach or teach what was revealed to me"-- forgetting that I do so/have done so in VALIS!)
[...] Valis is a life form from the future, our discorporate child come back here to our time to assemble itself! Herewith I have discerned and formulated a new religion. The blind-striving universe evolves a life form that moves retrograde in time and then proceeds to consume its source: that very universe!
[...] In VALIS... it is stipulated that Valis is our far future discorporate self laminating all selves together back along the time axis!
An ultra human, multiplex life form able to exist simultaneously at several places and times and possessing plural psychoi-- "in one skull or head but in different centuries"-- strange.
[...] The Buddha, upon his enlightenment, recalled (all) his past lives, which means that he converted time into space... . And different temporal modes are superimposed (like the BIP, past present and future) like layers of transparencies of an animated film.
The entity VALIS is the entity Ubik... .
...I stand with the formulation in VALIS, that rational intelligence did not create (give rise to) the universe but is either a product of it, or, more likely, has invaded it to combat its blind mechanistic striving, thus it is pitted against the universe. My proof: that it is assembling itself from the universe, which it uses as parts which it incorporates and arranges coherently and meaningfully. [...] I can recognize a sentient unitary self-constructing entelechy here... . It is a life form of ultimate homeostasis... . It is a higher order of organization than anything we know, and is camouflaged here (to us).
[...] ...the structure does not utilize language but is language, as I state in VALIS: It is living information.
It [Valis] was left here by the ETI 3-eyed people in antiquity who built it. It controls us without our knowledge. It dominates this world. For the better. The BIP is the enemy planet vis-a-vis the 3-eyed people; they're at war.
Valis... may be a ship-board computer.
[...] Program A must have led to all-out war between U.S and USSR. ...we of the counterculture prevented WWIII. We hamstrung the U.S. military machine. This counterculture did not arise ex nihilo (out of nothing). What were its origins? Consider the 50s. The concept of "unamerican" held power. I was involved in fighting that; the spirit (counterculture) of the 60s evolved successfully out of the (basically) losing efforts by us "progressives" of the 50s... . Berkeley was one of our few centers; this takes me back to Eye in the Sky... .
...when we see it [The Empire] we know that stagnation has occurred... . We see (or should see) the BIP. We are supposed to combat it phagocyte-wise, but the very valence of the (BIP) stasis warps us into micro extensions of itself; this is precisely why it is so dangerous. This is the dread thing it does: extending its android thinking (uniformity) more and more extensively. [...] The macro-brain is well aware of this. It has seen Christianity itself, its own doctrine, congeal due to this valence. The very doctrine of combating the "hostile world and its power" has to a large extent been ossified by and put at the service of the Empire.
The ability of Valis to assume the particular form most syntonic to me-- the form of Ubik-- is connected with its basic mimicking ability which I have already written about. [...] This realization undermines the probity of my reams of description of Zebra; I have only described what my own head construes the deity to be like-- a self-portrait; albeit a modern, complex and sophisticated apprehension of the deity, it is quite subjective and quite culturally determined (i.e., a cybernetics-biological model). ... thus I encounter a macro-brain arranging reality into information, a projection on my part. It was a macro-mirror.
[...] I don't feel it duped me; I think it had to take some form; and it took the one I'd expect and like... . My realization of its mimicry ability should have made me think of this possibility before now. [...;] I can say that I now realize that what I saw-- Zebra-- perfectly fits my deepest and most profound conception-- down to all fine details-- of the deity.
[...] So its taking the form it took toward me leads me back to a recognition of what must be a fundamental quality of it: its mimicking ability. This is an exciting realization. I have been right to conceive this as basic to it: camouflage. Then it is (in some sense) an invader, probably: from outside the program or simulated reality, as Ubik is in Ubik. (This was primary with Ubik, this invasion of our simulated world.)
[...] Powers: "It let the courier have a glimpse of the infor he was carrying."
[...] Ubik is to the cold-pac world as Valis is to our world.
[...] A superimposition of Ubik and VALIS is a superimposition of two basic Gnostic ideas, one cosmological, the other cosmogonical.
[...] I have now assembled the complete Gnostic system... .
[...] We learn of a mysterious svaior who camouflages himself to outwit our failers and makes himself and his saving Gnosis known to us. He is our friend and he opposes this world and its powers on our behalf as our champion, and "one by one he takes us out of this world."
[...] ...whatever the intent of the authors of The Tibetan Book of the Dead they are in fact describing our world and state.
[...] ...I conceive of our situation as one of entropy or decomposition, a succumbing to determinism which is to say, the products of our own former thought formations; therefore for us the past determines the future. Into this dying system Valis breaks bringing new life and energy and freedom and knowledge; he impinges "one-way" and "from outside" as if invading our world (which is not a real world). To encounter him is to encounter the uncanny, the inexplicable, the destroyer (rather than sustainer) of what we misconstrue to be world. It is his macromind shattering the brittle and congealed husk of our own objectified prior thoughts which imprison and devitalize us, the past devouring the future-- whereas Valis, as the future, turns around and devours the past... .
[...] ...what we call "reality" is in fact an objectification of our prior thought formations-- since in fact we are dead and dreaming in a state of psychic decomposition (as depicted in Ubik). [...] I read The Tibetan Book of the Dead in the late 50s or early 60s and realized that our world and condition was in fact depicted and not (as is said) a world and condition which follows our "life." ...those in the Bardo Thodol state do not know they are in that state but imagine they are (still) alive. They do not know that the evil and good spirits... which they encounter are their own (former) thought-formations projected onto a pseudo-world... . In Ubik my characters die and enter this state but don't know it. I then... added Ubik, a vast logos-like mind who invades their decaying world and rescues them. [...] In 3-74 [I] knew myself to be in the Bardo Thodol state. Yet it was this side of the grave; I have not died; ergo, The Tibetan Book of the Dead does depict (secretly) our present condition. And then, sure enough, exactly as I described in Ubik, written information appeared to me, and presently Ubik itself, down to specific details.
[...] The Tibetan Book of the Dead tells the truth, and yet we misread it because it says, "These are instructions to the dead."
[...] Eliade says it is the primary purpose or goal of the shaman to pass over to the other side and say what's there.
[...] Christianity-- including Christ-- is a cover, a front; and the real deity (and this is kept incredibly secret) is female.
[...] I am plugging into a giant idea computer-- I am the next step up in evolution, which, because the next step up plugs into this giant idea computer, has a virtually infinite mind.
[...] Somewhere in a near infinite bulk of ideas lies the truth. [...] ... although I may know the truth and even speak it, I am doomed not to know which of the many conflicting truths generated in me it is. It could be any of them. ...the idea computer conceals itself by its own idea-generating capacity. Its basic function is its own camouflage... .
[...] I am a feeling disguised by mere flak thinking.
My feelings are reliable but my thoughts are not. |
[...] Hence the endless paradoxes, and the fact that I can't finalize or stabilize my exegesis... .
[...] My powers came from the other side, because of my sister.
[...] Vision: a dark-haired young woman lying in a coffin. She is dead. She is my sister. She is-- or she generated--... Valis. It is a projection into this world of her mind, to protect me.
This vision came in response to my Q: "Who perturbed the reality field?"
Is the AI voice hers?
[...] Christ as an Egyptianized Greek Apollo! I.e., very early Greek statues.
[...] Valis: a mysterious hidden moral order (good and rational) behind the visible chaotic and evil and deterministic... .
Coleridge on tragedy: "...the greatest effect is produced when the fate is represented as a higher intelligent will" ("the human will was exhibited as struggling with fate"). So the essence of tragey is the limited human knowledge, plans, hopes, desires (will) clashing with "a higher and intelligent will" which we understand (or encounter) as Fate-- "Fate" defined as that power or those powers capable of arranging our outcome.
The plans the protagonist has are not in harmony with a "higher and intelligent will" which has the power to decide the outcome; there is no way the man's plans can win out, so individual plan is forcibly harmonized even if this requires that it be pulverized-- i.e., can't be harmonized and still remain intact.
[...] Tragedy as an interim reading of life between religoin on the one hand, and... pessimistic materialism, on the other. Basic to tragedy is the equilibrium of the evil that is observed and the good that is guessed at. What is central is the balance between an intense awareness of pain or evil, which is clearly revealed, and an intuitive apprehension of a transcendent realm of values. In each case evil is affirmed, but it is transcended by a higher good which induces exultation, not despair or faith. [...]"
I suppose in terms of what Coleridge says, the "higher intelligent will" which we call "Fate" is proved right in the end. I.e., it is proved to be just that, a "higher intelligent will" and not fate in the sense of blind or malignant evil or purposelessly cruel force or forces as such; it is the revelation that Fate is not Fate but a wiser ("higher") and more powerful will contending with-- overruling-- man's will out of its higher intelligence. It disagrees because it knows more.
[...] Exultation comes... from an encounter with "fate" seen in the asepect of higher and (more) intelligent (i.e., sentient and planning) will... .
[...] Exultation is precisely my responce to my direct knowledge and experience of Valis, of my awareness of its authority over the irrational-- which I identify with "astral determinism" or "fate." I especially exult in my sense of Valis having invaded the irrational as a conqueror.
Pythagoras had a strange cosmogonical belief: a seed (male) inserted into the boundless (female) which then progressively grows by incorporating more and more of the atelos (incomplete or unbounded) into its carefully limited (telos) structure-- a process "like inspiration with the boundless called 'breath.'" [...] I'd say at this point that 3-74 was very Pythagorean.
"The principle that like is known by like; hence, an understanding of the divine universe would bring man's nature closer to its own."
The key to me (Thomas) is: millennialism. Here Christianity and Marxism unite. (The PTG in place of the BIP.) Via... the overthrow of the U.S. police state. In essence, the real (secret) Christians are communists, and the real (secret) communists are Christians [editors note: in 1880 Engels published Socialism: Utopian and Scientific where he makes this analogy between the worker communist party and the early Christians].
Christ is female.
She ultimately is Beauty: Helen of Troy hatched from an egg. And of course most of all she is my sister; I am a thought in my sister's mind. She is-- like Ubik!-- she is alive; I am dead.
[...] I am in her body, and she is in me as my anima... .
[...] Your sister is the anima in your mind. She is physically dead.
You are physically dead and live in your living sisters's mind as a thought.
[...] Our universe (world) is... in THITHC [The Man in the High Castle]. A place where Mr. Tagomi goes.
Mr. Tagmoi is a fictional person contained in a work of fiction produced in our universe.
Our world contains TMITHC which contains our world which contains TMITHC which contains our world which contains TMITHC which contains... .
I seek beauty like Parsifal sought the Grail-- but what a price I pay. I don't write beautifully-- I just write reports about our condition to got to those outside of cold-pak. I am an analyzer.
Could the schizophrenic be given conflicting realities or data about reality? His mind has to put together constituents which simply do not fit. [...] ...in a way I have battled against schizophrenia by seeking a philosophical framework which will (1) accept as real these disruptive data; and (2) account for them. [...] I have had to deal with deluding, irreal, conflicting, chaotic and fremd material, and just plain hung in there conceptually, taking the view that some explanation must exist, although it would have to be radical and far-reaching.
The enigma is alive, aware of us, and changing. It is partly created by our own minds; we alter it by perceiving it, since we are not outside it. As our views shift, it shifts.
Q: ...do you have any intuition or guess as to who and what the Valis mind is.
A: Yes. It is female. It is on the other side-- the postmortem world. It has been with me all my life. It is my twin sister Jane.
Philo speaks of the Torah as a living being whose body is the literal text of the Pentateuch and whose soul is the occult meaning that underlies the written word.
Ach! This is the "Acts" material, the living information I saw: the "plasmate."
Is not the Empire a (Jungian) ossified (iron) complex invaded by a "metabolic toxin" which will dissolve it? Isn't this really a mind which is deranged-- i.e., frozen... so that real time has ceased? Isn't this my primary contention? This is the phagocytosis of the heavy metal particle which I envisioned. Ossified complex, stuck time, the invaded? And Tears depicts the ossified complex as a society spanning 2,000 years. This is precisely it: no time has passed since "Acts"; "once the mind becomes psychotic nothing new ever happens in it (or enters it, whatever)."
If the domain of natural law did not show teleology, it would not seem to be a living, planning, purposeful domain (cosmos). Thus when it disclosed itself... to me, in palpability, it disclosed teleology, and hence I call it Valis.
I did not merely see the divine in the trash; by an act of will I put it there.
Q: Who won? Christianity or the Empire?
A: Ostensibly, Christianity won, but covertly underneath the Empire won.
Q: You are wrong. Underneath the Empire lies the secret victory of the Fish: true Christianity.
[...] The least real is the ostensible surface victory of Christianity over the Empire; under it, more real, is the Empire victory, which is deliberately concealed, and no one realizes it, eine Geheimnis.
I have... pursued the ETI explanation as far as it will go, and must let it yield to the theological... .
Q: Why are so many-- very many-- of the elements of 2-3-74 found in my corpus of writing? A: The "world" that I inhabited in 3-74 was a mind. It was my own projected unconscious; i.e., it was a mind in me that was not my conscious ego.
[...] Therefore there is a cosmic divine mind in me, which generates the writing and was the "world" I inhabited in 3-74. Therefore the basis of my mind... is deity. I will admit to projection. [...] So I am willing to locate Valis and all else of 3-74 as being in me (projected). But this was God-consciousness which woke up.
Music is normally a temporal process, but Beethoven, uniquely, uses it to enclose space, the most vast volume of space possible.
[...] Expansion out of the prison: escape from the prison by extension, like an insect expanding out of his exoskeleton during/via his metamorphosis. [...] The BIP as a sort of exoskeleton, hence a kind of rigid (iron) body.
[...] Memory involves vastly augmented time which is then converted into space. "A long time ago" becomes a very large spatial volume... . So my seeing the distant past... was due to the conversion of time into space-- which I saw as the vastly aumented spaces. But I see now that the two phenomena are actually one.
[...] This is why Beethoven's space-enclosing music frees us. There is a direct relation between more space and the real world (also between restricted space and the irreal world).
[...] Valis as an "uncanny one-way intrusion" perturbing the basis of the small high-speed world from outside. Valis proves there is an outside.
Valis proves there is an outside. This is the most important sentence I've written, since it shows our world resembles that of Ubik, Maze, et al.
[...] The Christian apocalyptic vision is an actual universe, spatially much vaster than ours, and, in terms of time, the present extends back to encompass 2,000 years. Swift events-- the death of the Savior and his return-- span thousands of our years. A person's mind, in that universe, extends phylogenically: over the 2,000 year span of the present. Basic unchanging archetypes are constants: Rome, which is the prison and the enemy; the secret Christian underground attacking it, over a period of 2,000 years; and the deity itself camouflaged in reality and only visible when you are in the super-extensive space-time of this vast Christian dualistic universe. A drama and conflict is being enacted and it is cosmic in dimension; it will end with the return of the just-departed Savior as judge. The mood of the secret Christians-- whose mind span the 2,000 year present-- is one of excitement and joy, and, most of all, anticipation.
[...] Thomas is commensurate with the vast spaces and the vast time (the 2,000 year present) of the Christian apocalyptic universe.
[...] ...we seem to be in a sort of little box, and our senses don't report the truth... . We are occluded; must we first be de-occluded to see the in-breaking, or will the in-breaking de-occlude us? (I know the answer: the latter).
[...] If you were geared to the slow time of the Christian urwelt, this phenomenal world would seem to spin by at an incredibly accelerated rate... . Events pass ultra fast if you are slowed down: the rise and fall of our societies are, to urwelt, like the lives of fruit flies: over in hours. Conversely, if you are geared to this phenomenal world, no change is seen in the urwelt. [...] If one of us caught a glimpse of it he'd see what seemed to be the distant past of this world, whereas in fact it is another world progressing at a different-- very slow-- rate. [...] This is a view of the phenomenal high-speed world from the vantage point of the other-- i.e., Urwelt.
[...] ...Valis could be discriminated (discerned) when perceived at that great a velocity and with that extended a present.
[...] This would be Thomas' normal view of our world, since his perspective is phylogenic. So our world is visible to those in the slow vast urwelt, specifically the process of God assimilating-- transubstantiating-- it with his own body. [...] ...I... slowed to such a low rate of flow that my present stretched out millions of years, rather than thousands. This is what the Buddha reported in the Dibba Cakkhu state: seeing the coming into existence and passing away of all things. This is the opposite direction from that the super pot and acid take you; there, you speed up and the world slows; here world speeded up and I slowed, and obtained (gained) a progressively augmented present. With super pot and acid world becomes eternal; here, I became eternal and world ephemeral. ...thus we call this intoxication: a deluded state, not enlightenment. [...] In enlightenment your perspective grows and spreads out to fill vast spaces: time turns into space.
[...] I saw down through the layers. First... I saw the Urwelt, and then... I saw the dialectic and I saw Valis per se... , beyond which there is just the beatific void which I also, finally, saw.
[insert image on p. 534]
[...] If you were successively stripping way the layers it would go exactly as it went with me.
The historic process has-- or is-- a mind/brain evolving toward ends it desires.
[...] (To this I add: my present time was thousands of years in extent and I saw world as hatched "cuckoo egg" within world evolving and assimilating and linking internally in greater and greater complexity, through a dialectic process with history as its arena... . [...] It is God entering the world, as Hegel says. It is right here with me but I am normally too speeded up to see it. It is a physical mind, like the brain. A great evolving brain cannibalizing its environment. Structure within a less highly organized structure.)
[...] It is alive, and the whole of it thinks. Its thoughts take physical form. We see its thoughts but to our senses these thoughts blend with the background. It is 2,000 years old, a continuous present.
In Valis, as in Xenophanes' God (and Parmenides') thought and being are one: hence what I call physical thoughts. This satisfies Heidegger's pre-fall unification, wherein thought and being are one.
[...] ...it didn't enter human history to save mankind: no-- it had to, in order for it to function and evolve and grow more and more complex. It must make use of us and our history.
[...] If I in 3-74 combined being and thinking (v. Heidegger) then I would encounter world as being-thinking unity as the pre-Socratics did (the Magdeburg hemispheres phenomenon). After all, the pre-Socratics were hylozoists.
The E. of Phil. says of the Milesians that upon having banished anthropomorphic gods acting on the world they then had to conclude that the world was organic and alive and responsible for its own growth. This is precisely my position vis-a-vis Valis: nothing acts on Valis... . But I view Valis as being immanent but in conflict with an opposing principle or entity, and embedded at the core... of reality, renewing and structuring it, making it progressively more complex (by what I call "linking").
[...] So I have pushed my thinking back to Parmenides, the point before material and non-material could be drawn-- in accord with Heidegger's plea for authentic being. Before certain dichotomies were drawn, which split the human world view.
[...] There is no external deity and nothing prior to world. This is God in Spinoza's sense. The pre-Socratics drew the right conclusions: if there was no adventitious deity to cause, control, drive and direct world, then world itself possessed sentient or quasi-sentient faculties and volition, "and [was] responsible for its own growth." What has happened is that religion-- especially Christianity-- restored the nonexistent adventitious anthropomorphic deity, the artificer-artifact model, so world was again not seen organically, as self-governing and alive and responsible for its own growth. Otherworldliness returned, and the Christians were "in but not of" world; they were hostile to world and saw world as hostile to them. They located God in a mythical place called "the pleroma." So world is depreciated and devalued and it is stripped of its life and volition. The work of the pre-Socratics is undone. God is not sought in world but over and against world, and he is sought in an alleged spiritual realm.
[...] When I saw what was really out there I saw something alive embedded at the core of reality. It was the real life of the world.
[...] Two worlds with different space times must be posited, one within the other and the smaller one running at very high speed, and reached into from outside... .
[...] Hypnogogic thought: "I left the settlement" (and thus joined everyone else in high-speed profane time). [...] This explains how I (Thomas) fell asleep... . I left the settlement for some reason, like an errand, and got inadvertently trapped in high-speed time along with the rest of the world.
While I was lying there... [gazing] up at the stars... all of a sudden, a perfectly articulated, brilliant star map appeared to me. I didn't just see stars; I saw a star map, as if a switch had been thrown in my head.
Dream: all the churches controlled by Satanism.
[...] But there is another outside church forming which worships the right God, but has no buildings.
[...] What if the fall of the temple and Masada was Armageddon, and Satan won? And ruled ever since 70 A.D. (Tears), but now YHWH is returning?
[...] ...we're told that Christ... triumphed. But they didn't; the Essenes perished at Masada. And this is what Tears reveals; and this was my 2-74 vision of the BIP world and Christians-- the true Christians-- illegal. Satan won in 70 A.D. [...] But now YHWH counterattacks and re-enters this, the domain of darkness. For new battle.
Satan pretends YHWH won; YHWH will cause to exist what Satan pretends... exists.
[...] Belial ruled this world in a YHWH costume; the real YHWH is Ubik, pushed to the periphery of trashy TV commercials!
[...] I wrote Ubik upon reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead in which our true situation is laid out... .
[...] What happens in Ubik is that Ubik at last throws off its multiple (multiplicity) disguises and reveals itself as the one which is everywhere in countless disguises.
I have found a fundamental error in ancient mystical theory, not corrected until Plotinus: the Orphics and Plato believed that the descent and ascent of the soul was a spatial trajectory, past the planets to the stars-- to and from. Aristotle believed in the sublunar and supralunar realms. Plotinus realized that the realms are not spatially different, but are levels of being outside time and space. This basic error shows up later on in imagining heaven as being in the sky... . So transcendent deity is supposed to be remote either spatially or as if spatially... . Deity is considered outside the universe as if spatially far off and beyond the universe, the way an artisan is outside his artifact. This despite Plotinus and his concentric levels or rings of being.
[...] By viewing it as a non-spatial journey, Plotinus made it available to this lifetime.
[...] In this ontological view of the journey, rather than spatial, Plotinus anticipates Heidegger. The upper realm is spatially here, not there. I should know; I entered it, in 3-74. And if here, it can be entered in this life, not just after death.
[...] The journey is not past the planets but more like a Bardo Thodol trip through levels of ascending ontology to YHWH, the urgrund.
So Plato (and to some degree Aristotle... ) made [a] fundamental [error] which affected Christianity, but not ancient pre-Hellenistic Judaism.
We are dealing with an information processing entity... . ...what we call reality is our way of viewing this information. The information is more real than any other substantia. [...] ...what we call "the universe" is a read-out of [an] info signal. It is "projected" into substantia. It can be stored.
[...] Valis the "machine" that turns the info... into substantia (reality).
[...] ...reality is a storage mode for the information. [...] ...I think reality is a container for the information.
This is the ultimate fear: falling through the universe.
[...] But the falling through the universe is not as it might seem a withdrawal of YHWH; on the contrary it leads to YHWH. YHWH hasn't vanished; the universe has. YHWH is there in its place.
[...]
The situation was a desperate one; I was consuming time faster and faster, which bears out my recent insight that I had been speeding up in relation to real time until finally I used up all time totally and passed outside of time! The lithium was certainly a factor in the conversion from motion to rest. It stopped me suddenly, and reality stabilized into the realm of forms... . It was as if I had been hyperventilating for years progressively faster and faster; my inner biological clock was speeding up, ahead of outer events, heading toward biological exhaustion and hence death. But just before death occured, there was intervention-- yet I actually passed on along the "tape" into my postmortem existence.
[...] Literally millions of years of biological clock time shot by; I evolved far into the future: became my own remote descendant, and so saw the world as far in the past (in relation to me!). The world lagged 1,000s of years behind me. Hence I saw it as ancient and a prison. [...] World was past; I was future. [...] I had been moving faster and faster for decades due to the amphetamines. [...] Finally only supratemporal constants were perceptible to me. [...] I remembered 2,000 years ago as if it was yesterday. I moved faster and faster through time, so in relation to me time slowed down and finally froe into the upper (Platonic) realm: a correct hypostatizing of reality on my part, with no change; time converted into space.
Things and processes seemed alive because sentient purpose rather than efficient mechanical law was modulating them. [...] Like a watchful organism or field embracing a number of objects and processes.
Thomas represents a central-vision self; I represent a fugitive peripheral-vision self. He concentrates on the real; I evade it.
...all things are one thing that is alive throughout, and its changes are its thoughts. We have no independent (discrete) existence whatsoever. If we don't know this we are faced with what seems to be a reality without purpose, and our own actions and motivations are irrational and inscrutable... .
The role of Christ in this is to wake us up and hence make us aware of our... bondage within a totally determined system. [...] The macro-mind is moving toward consciousness throughout its total self. Every person who wakes up is a Christos: a micro-form of the total mind. The macro-mind is overjoyed when a constituent wakes into consciousness: it means a glad reunion. This amounts to a repair to the damaged Godhead, parts of which have sunk into unconscoiusness. It should be awake throughout but is not. To wake up and to experience anamnesis are one and the same thing.
[...] The mind has declined to subsume the interests (life) and the component (person) to the purposes of the whole, which is the supreme act of graciousness (charis) by the total mind. The macro-brain has actually subordinated itself and its goals to the need to live by the component, which is a dazzling-- and the ultimate-- sacrifice. (The means-end problem is at issue, here.) (I.e., the components are means, the macro-mind's goals the end, but as I say the macro-mind has made itself the instrument of extrication for the component.) Thus it is said that in the crucifixion God died to save man. This is an eternally occurring act, not an historical event; the time and place is always Palestine in the first century A.D. The whole sacrifices itself for the part-- a miracle! In this, in a sense, the part and the whole exchange places and identities!
Now I was seeing it [the universe] from inside it [and no longer "from outside"], ...it was a brain isomorphic to mine. It was sentient, and I could see its thoughts; they are physical. The Hermetic mirco/macrocosm identity had taken place... . I introjected it and projected myself, so that I and universe were one, one field of sentience and thinking.
[...] The Gnostic "stranger in a strange land" relationship ended.
[...] The person who could introject the cosmos would be in a position to possess absolute (and a priori) knowledge about the universe, in contrast to the defective a posteriori normal sensory method. He would have in him all the universe's secrets... . As far as what he would experience outside him... [the] external world becomes sentient and familiar.
My acosmism (shown in my books) was the illness besetting all of us to some degree; viz: cut off from the one true reality: YHWH. I had the illness so severely that the only cure was the radical necessity of waking up and experiencing God... : as I had been formerly more sick than others I would up cured: but they liner on half-sick.
Since (inasmuch) as I saw Valis principally in/as causality, the total web of causality, sentient and volitional, then I am at this moment absolutely convinced that I was seeing God... .
[...] ...a mechanical system is rendered sentient... .
Human history represents successive levels of self-disclosure by YHWH-- meaning self-awareness. Human history is the deity waking up. [...] He must eternally surpass himself. Thus he perpetually selects pieces from the antecedent universe to fit into his evolving soma. (Is this an entelechy?)
Valis... is a mind which uses all reality by which to think; so it is neither discorporate nor does it have a body as such. [...] Either all reality is its normal brain from the start, or it has entered our reality and is making use of it... . [...] Invasion and camouflage go together. And the self-assembly causes it to continually grow as it sublimates more and more of reality, invisibly to us.
Reality used as vehicle-- medium-- by which to process information.
Observer-participant universe.
[...] Valis is an interaction between a human mind and reality-as-a-field, a new, higher field created by the superimposition of the two. The self is everywhere, rather than being in the human... . But also it no longer exists. It is omnipresent and abolished (hence a sense of vast spaces).
[...] Valis-- where is it? It is not in the human mind that sees it.
It is not in the world.
It is in both-- superimposed as one. It is in neither (alone).
[...] I am one half of Valis; for Valis to exist, this equation must occur: an event in which the contents of my total mind are a necessary half. My mind alone is not Valis. External reality alone is not Valis. ...together, these two halves form a higher universe than the (two) parts-- the principle of emergence. This higher universe which is compounded of the total contents of my mind (brain) and outer reality is Valis.
All I can think of is Pythagoras' special use of the term Kosmos. "The harmonious fitting together of the beautiful." [Editors note: sometimes rendered 'the beautiful order of things', with emphasis on the idea of 'harmonia', the harmonious 'fitting together' of everything. This has lead some historians to attribute the origin of the idea of the 'music of the spheres' to Pythagoras.]
1: The whole cosmos is aiming at-- evolving toward-- beauty.
2: But at what cost? Infinite suffering by the means to the end: the creatures.
3: It isn't worth it, and Christ effects extrication from this subordination to the goal of cosmos; this is Christianity.
[...] I've been shown a really perplexing paradox. The highest good is the "harmonious fitting-together of the beautiful"-- i.e., Pythagoras' Kosmos, and this is what theos moves every thing and process toward. Okay. And... the cost at which this is achieved-- the torture and killing of the epicreatures... is too great! So the summum bonum can only be achieved at a cost that... makes it not worth it (i.e., unacceptable). Then is the summum bonum actually the summum bonum? How can it be? Isn't there a logical contradiction here? Right! There sure is! This ist he dramatic tragedy of the universe, of God, of all... . Okay, then the real summum bonum lies in saving the epicreatures (i.e., the parts which go together to make the whole). [...] So within the summum bonum there is a secret. A mysterious conversion occurs. The part is the real whole... . ...maybe this particular pardox is the primal ibalance that is the dynamism driving reality on forever; it cannot ever be resolved, so process never ends (which is good).
[...] Thus the Godhead is ipso facto divided and pitted against itself; it assumes an antithetical interaction with itself, part (half) of the Godhead works synthetically, to fit everything together harmoniously into an integrated whole (kosmos) and half works to assist and rescue the epiparts subjected to stress, torment and death in the pursuit of the above goal. Hence the Godhead is in infinite crisis.
[...] In terms of the evolution of awareness, the total system advances through stages until it becomes aware of the cost, hence the paradox, then splits into antithetical halves and remains in this dynamic balance state forever, or else repeats the cycle again and again forever.
thus the rupture in the Godhead was necessary, given its (the Godhead's) drive to complete itself as kosmos.
[...] Thus a process universe is brought into existence that is rooted in sorrow at every level. Involved in its own agonized creation (actualization) the Godhead is damaged. (Split = damage.) Thus the "Fall" is due to a built-in self-contradiction and not to sin... . [...] ...the Godhead has set itself a seemingly impossible goal due to the means-- subordination of the ontogons to the phylogons. [...] All the Godhead can hope for is local and furtive repair to itself, due to an ontogon achieving an ontogon-phylogon identity transform... . The Godhead would be motivated to bring this about... as the ultimate goal of creation... . The ontogon-phylogon transform would restore the Godhead to its pre-fallen state of unimpairment, before creation.
I seem to be saying that in creating... the universe the Godhead was logically forced into sin, and can only be redeemed by its own ontogons-- e.g., individual creatures sentient enough to become their own phylogons. Thus I see the scheme of salvation turned upside down!
[...] The ontogon... would then sit in judgement of the Godhead... . The final step is for man to redeem God by returning him to his original unfallen state, as the Kabbala says: "And lead him back to his throne." This is a titanic mystical-theological revelation (and act!).
To catch a glimpse of design... means to catch a glimpse of the whole.
...as the moving dot of the present passes forward along linear time, the past reality is collected in Valis' memory, but in the bastract hierarchical way that Arthur Koestler describes as the basis on which human memory operates. Thus the past does not exist as it did once exist as the present, but rather in the abstracted phylogons which are inter-related by affinity, meaning, etc. Could "syncrhonicity" be the morphology of this memory classification/abstracting as it dynamically forms in the present?
...Valis is no God formerly known... . It may be a local krasis, in fact, planet-wide only (hence a UTI, so to speak)?
...the past is not the past for Valis, but is part of its structure/soma. In essence what I have done-- starting with Ubik-- is locate a sacerdotal power buried in the trash layer, rather than in an afterlife heaven. It is here and it is now; here in this world and as this world... .
There is an information entity stacking... information in metaunits (units made out of plural constituents of the realm we perceive); this has to do with arrangement and normally we don't see this arrangement. It constantly unites.
[...] Structure is the substantia of it... ; it is camouflaged here and assimiliating its environment... . And it is growing progressively more complex, which is typical of a life form; it reticulates and arborizes itself and it lays down new accretional layers at an incredibly rapid rate; and it retains the past as what I call phylogons.
...we still see the two constituents that it links rather than the unitary meta-constituent that goes into its meta-soma... . To see it we have to cease to see normal plurality and see one contour, one pattern, one meta-soma. But we continue to see the plural constituents at our hierarchical level, not the meta-units at its higher level. When the two constituents are linked they take a quantum upward leap and become a single unitary meta-constituent, but we see no change... so its meta-soma may range over the whole planet... .
[...] It is one quantum leap upward hierarchically in levels of reality (ontology) and invisible to us, but here... invisible because its soma consists of structure, not some substantia; so in a sense it is immaterial (although consisting of material things, but primarily using them as language/information).
[...] Our perception of reality does not include it and its meta-soma.
The Third Age [editors note: in terms of Joachim of Fiore's mystical vision of the three historical epochs]... is not a Christian Age; it is a Post-Christian, but it is cumulative, just the way the NT is built on the OT; but, just as between the OT and the NT there is a real antithesis.
[...] I've thought of much of this before, but I never visualized the Third Age as pitted against Christianity just as Christ was pitted against Judaism and the Law.
I have come across the expression in the EB "the imperial church," with prisons, with the secular authority to back it up. [...] The Holy Spirit has been undermining this imperial chuch for centuries. . So the Holy Spirit has a long history of revolutionary activity against the imperial church.
Our world is, to be metaphoric, Valis' metabolism. Once Valis removes a constituent bit (piece) from our world and inserts it in the correct place in its macrometasoma, it is there forever... .
[...] ...the substantia of the macrometasoma is pattern or structure per se: arrangement, organization-- which is to say, kosmos.
...have I not said that the essence of Valis is unity, that Valis above all is, through structure, unitary? This, then, is Plotinus' One or God. [...] I am, then, identifying Plotinus' One with Pythagoras' kosmos... . I am saying, This reality, this plurality of things in flux, can be said to be the One which is eternal because on a meta-level there is Pythagoras' structure or kosmos, and although it changes it changes in only one direction: a cumulative evolving toward completeness and total complexity that embraces everything. The answer to, "How can the many become the One?" It is through Pythagoras' structure, which is to say kosmos; and it has a mind; it is a mind; it is alive; it thinks; as Xenophanes said, "The whole of him hears; the whole of him sees; the whole of him thinks; he is everywhere at once."
Spinoza would agree; in no way do I see God as transcendent to reality, off somewhere far above us in a heaven, with Earth down here. Ubik shows what I suppose: deity in the very trash of the alley.
This structure that I speak of literally occurs in your act of perceiving it.
(Re Eliade) A mythological event unfolds in another kind of time... . Therefore if you can get (your self) into a mythological narrative you will enter this dream time (as opposed to entering dream time and, by means of that, entering the myth). The entree to dream time is to reenact the (i.e., a) myth. I accidentally did this in 2-3-74 vis-a-vis "Acts" due to (1) Tears; and (2) the girl with the fish necklace. These plunged me into that other kind of time and so I saw world under that aspect, i.e., made eternal and holy-- and experienced anamnesis.
[...] So I got into mythic time by reenacting the sacred myth, and, having done so, saw world under that aspect (e.g., the blood of the cosmic Christ, Rome, the secret real Christians). I fell into the myth by chance, and enetered the realm of the sacred.
[...] Alone, without a priest or guide, I re-performed an ancient myth whose nature I still do not fully understand.
[...] What I say of this is: there is another universe, and through such reenactment of sacred ritual as I accidentally engaged in you can enter it and commune with the gods. This is recognized by, e.g., Eliade, but how many "civilized" people have experienced it? We have lost the techniques, the gnosis.
[...] The space-time world of this sacred time is found in the Bible as the book of "Acts." Thus when I wrote Tears I discerned this stratum, showing through in a ghostly fashion, as the basis of reality. "Acts" describes the power of Rome... .
[gap p. 605]
What we see today as a war between progressive communism and... capitalist imperialism is an ontogenic face with a longer-term conflict between those dedicated to freedom and the Empire. (At a former time the progressive force was the middle-class, the bourgeois, versus the aristocracy, and so forth back into pre-Christian times... another example being the conflict between the Protestant forces and the Catholic league during the 30 years war. And, before that, between Christianity and the Roman Empire; before that, between Greece and Persia; before that, between the Hebrews and Egypt.) If Valis is regarded as the Hegelian geist of history, then it is always on the side of the forces of freedom, since as Hegel says, history is a gradual unfolding of greater and greater stages of human freedom, achieved by dialectical interaction.
[...] This is essentially exemplar history; the Jews view history this way, seeing YHWH's bringing the Jewish people out of their Egyptian captivity as a timeless, in fact eternal event, always happening. However, the situation is now different; the enslaved people cannot be rescued by departing the Empire because the Empire is worldwide; instead, they must overthrow the Empire.
[...] For decades I have sought to see "the permanent world of unchange behind the flux," and when I finally saw it it turned out to be a historical exemplar situation, a dramatic one; in fact a narrative that could be expressed as a story.
[...] I think that it was YHWH who addressed me, whom I have been calling Valis. He has reentered the world as a rebel against the entire system of rule that he originally ordained.
[...] The story is not just "There is a prison" but "and it is under attack by the Christians, by Christ Himself."
Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages:
The imagination was continually striving, and in vain, to express the ineffable by giving it shape and figure. To call up the absolute, recourse is always had to the terminology of extension in space... (page 220).
But still the contemplation of the absolute Being ever remains linked up with notions of extension or of light (note, page 221).
The mystic imagination found a very impressive concept in adding to the image of the desert, that is to say, extension of surface-- that of the abyss, or extension in depth. The sensation of giddiness is added to the feeling of infinite space... (page 222).
[...] ...the vast volume of vertical space that I experienced in 3-74 (as well as the transformation in time as if I were seeing down a time axis extending thousands of years) meant that I had abreacted to a Medieval worldview.
...I banalize my conclusions by these obsessive notes, and I must give them up... . My mind worries and scurries, contradicts itself, comes to conclusions and then arbitrarily drops them; the exegesis does not build.
[...] ...I always repeat my arguments, stating them again and again in exactly the same words, like a stuck LP... . [...] ...but this is a kind of tribute on my part to the importance of what I underwent, what I saw, what I learned; it is a way of preserving the memory of it all, this endless rehashing... . [...] But this is what an exegesis of a mystical experience is for, to develop it rationally, so that it can be expressed in words.
Valis is a meta-system that at our level does not exist at all because at our level only its plural constituents exist as such. Valis is an organization, a structuring, of these constituents, in which they are unified into one entity. Meanwhile the plural constituents at our level behave-- or seem to behave-- as if unrelated to one another. An entirely new and higher way of organizing the ontological categories by whcih perception is structured must be reached by the observer. [...] Its internal complexity continually grows. Its metabolism seems to be information and the processing of information.
[...] ...Valis lies outside the flux of the world we see. However, Valis' world is this world differently perceived, not another world; but it is a quantum leap upward in hierarchy, in whcih plural constituents become a unity by reason of integrating structure. That structure is added-- supplied-- by the percipient. By perceiving Valis he participates in the sudden total transformation from plural unrelated constituents to a unitary structure.
Valis and the perception of Valis occur simultaneously.
[...] You could thinkn of it as a protozoon, a single cell at a higher level of reality... . We humans are very complex forms that matter takes at this ontological level of reality, or, if you will, at this level of physics; Valis is a very simple organization at the next level up. The billions of constituents of our level form a single cell at its level... .
[...] Coherence and Valis are the same. ...its internal structure is a latent (concealed) coherence of our world.
[...] There is no difference between Valis and our world except that Valis is a certain way of seeing our world in terms of it being a kind of single unit all parts of which are interconnected purposefully and everything is coherent. (In other words it is precisely what Pythagoras called Kosmos: the orderly fitting-together of the beautiful.)
[...] ...Valis... fits the description of the Chiang Tao:
An unchanging unity (the permanent Tao) was seen as underlying the kaleidoscopic plularity... ineffable reality, experienced in ecstasy, that lies at the origin of the universe and behind or within apperances.
...the Absolute is non-sectarian; it is Christian and Brahmanist and Platonist and Taoist all at once.
Premise: things are inside out (but will at the "Apocalypse" assume their real shape). Therefore the right place to look for the Almighty is, e.g., in the trash in the alley. And for Satan: in vast cathedrals, etc. Through enanatiodromia they will "on that day" assume their rightfulshapes-- the great reversal. The Jester in the tarot deck is the real King; the King card is the deranged one. [...] Stone rejected by the builder; the edifice is discarded; the true edifice is invisible-- disguised as rubble (pluarl constituents). [...] A random assortment of trash blown by the wind, and there is God. Bits and pieces swept together to form a unity.
God works through what Lao Tzu calls the weak, the empty; this is the same God.
It would seem that half of me is devoted to the wisdom religions of classic Greece, which is why I enjoy the pre-Socratics so much; and yet another part of me is led back again and again to the NT. "Zwei Selle wohnen ach! in meiner Brust." ['two cells live in my chest'] I really am two people, one of them Christian, the other pagan.
...the Buddha's view of absolute suffering and the need not to be reborn, to get off the wheel.
[...] Each creature is born, suffers, dies, is again born, forever and ever, because the world soul-- there is just one soul, and it has fragmented into billions of bits-- made the primordial and primary mistake of taking the spatiotemporal realm as real, thus plunging itself into enslavement and multiplicity. For a few there is a way out: discovery that the spatiotemporal world is not real, an ascent back up into unity and freedom, but only for a few bits (sparks) is this possible; the enormous mass of fragments will remain caught forever... . ...the endless wheel turns for all of us and it turns forever, in this irreal time we have fallen victim to.
[...] Premise: the primordial Fall was caused by our... making the error of taking the spatiotemporal realm to be real.
[...] Now the results of not recognizing Tat tvam asi seem actually sinister, since you literally are other life forms, other humans and other creatures; you as primordial soul are splintered, exploded, over thousands of years and thousands of miles.
[...] Recollection as re-collection: calling one's splintered, scattered parts in, to a center. The primordial explosion reversed as a calling back together, a sort of teleological implosion, as if time were running backward.
[...] Probably the wisest view is to say: the truth-- like the Self-- is splintered up over thousands of miles and years; bits are found here and there, then and now, and must be re-collected; bits appear in the Greek naturalists, in Pythagoras, Plato, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Neoplatonism, Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, Taoism, Mani, orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Orphism, the other mystery religions. [...] ...here in our spatiotemporal world we have the truth but it is splintered-- exploded like the eide-- over thousands of years and thousands of miles and (as I say) must be recollected... .
Sentient physics.
Valis was my splintered self "imploding" back together, the pieces that had exploded over space and time reversing their direction in enantiodromia and re-collecting to form their original unity.
...my morphological structure reminds me of Dante's description of God as the book of the universe whose pages are scattered throughout the universe.
I beheld leaves within the unfathomed blaze
into one volume bound by love, the same
that the universe holds scattered through its maze.
Substance and accidents and their modes became
as if together fused, all in such wise
that what I speak of is one simple flame.
...reality is a series of Chinese boxes, a box within a box within a box, etc.: but a final point comes when you have Valis, but what or who Valis is I have no idea. The Tao, YHWH, cosmic Christ, Brahman, Shiva, Krishna, or a quantum mechanics phenomenon.
I didn't know when I wrote Ubik is that Ubik isn't fiction.
I asked for 30 years, what is real? And in 2-3-74 I got my answer as if... my question traveled across the whole universe and came back to me in the form of experienced answers... and what I wind up with after 61/2 years of studying those experienced answers is: a surd. A perturbation in the reality field-- an irregularity, a departure from the normal-- a tugging or pulling or bending. And that is all. Not even the thing, the perturbing body itself; only its effects on "the reality field."
[...] The perturbation in the reality field was... by the Tao. [...] ...our spatiotemporal aspects (what we take to be reality) are indeed our own prior thought formations coming back to us. [...] ...something new-- introducing one single new change-- destroys their ossified nature and starts up real time,... forcing the prior thought formations back into the past where they properly belong; it would seem to you, then, as if the future had broken in, moving retrograde in time. This "future breaking in" is: real time! [...] Once these prior thought-formations' power over you [i.e., is broken]... you can see (?) (experience) the Tao... .
[...] It is weak and yet it cannot be resisted. This is the Tao. It works through what is small. I am small. It worked through (on) me. To affect modern history! Wu wei [Editors note: Taoist phrase meaning 'work without effort'.]
[...] One tiny tug sets a sequence of mounting, growing changes in motion, ending in massive (total?) enantiodromia... .
The internal arrangement was its own awareness of itself. Itself as map.
[...] ...when I saw what I called Valis I saw what I call macrometasomakosmos.
God manifested himself to me as the infinite void; but it was not the abyss; it was the vault of heaven, with blue sky and wisps of white clouds. [...] He was loving and kind and he had personality. He said, "You suffer a little now in life; it is little compared with the great joys, the bliss that awaits you." [...] He said, "I am the infinite. I will show you. Where I am, infinity is; where infinity is, there I am. Construct lines of reasoning by which to understand your experience in 1974. I will enter the field against their shifting nature. You think they are logical but they are not; they are infinitely creative."
I thought a thought and then an infinite regression of theses and countertheses came into being. God said, "Here I am; here is infinity." I thought another explanation; again an infinite series of thoughts split off in dialectical antithetical interaction. God said, "Here is infinity; here I am." I thought, then, an infinite number of explanations, in succession, that explained 2-3-74; each single one of them yielded up an infinite progression of flip-flops, of thesis and antithesis, forever. Each time, God said, "Here is infinity. Here, then, I am."
[...] "I am everywhere and all roads lead to me; omniae viae ad Deum ducent."
[...] "You could be pretending to be God," I said, "and actually be Satan." Another infinitude of thesis and antithesis and new synthesis, the infinite regress, was set off.
God said, "Infinity."
I said, "You could be testing out a logic system in a giant computer and I am--" Again an infinite regress.
"Infinity," God said.
[...] "I doubt if you exist," I said. And the infinite regress instantly flew into motion once more. "Infinity," God said.
[...] "I will play this game forever," God said, "or until you become tired."
I said, "I will find a thought, an explanation, a theory, that does not set off an infinite regress." And, as soon as I said that, an infinite regress was set off. God said, "Over a period of six and a half years you have developed theory after theory to explain 2-3-74. Each night when you go to bed you think, 'At last I found it. I tried out theory after theory until now, finally, I have the right one.' And then the next morning you wake up and say, 'There is one fact not explained by that theory. I will have to think up another theory.' And so you do. By now it is evident to you that you are going to think up an infinite number of theories, limited only by your life-span, not limited by your creative imagination."
[...] "Without realizing it, the very infinitude of your theories pointed to the solution; they pointed to me and none but me."
[...] "Here's a new theory," I said. "I ask myself, 'What God likes playing games? Krishna. You are Krishna.'" And then the thought came to me instantly, "But there is a god who mimics other gods; that god is Dionysus. This may not be Krishna at all; it may be Dionysus pretending to be Krishna." And an infinite regress was set off.
"Infinity," God said.
[...] "Do I change?" God said. "Or do your theories change?"
"You do not change," I said. "My theories change."
"Then you are Krishna playing with me," God said.
"Or I could be Dionysus," I said, "pretending to be Krishna. And I wouldn't know it; part of the game is that I, myself, do not know. So I am God, without realizing it. There's a new theory!" And at once an infinite regress was set off; perhaps I was God, and the "God" who spoke to me was not.
"Infinity," God said. "Play again. Another move."
"We are both Gods," I said, and another infinite regress was set off. [...] "You have divided yourself in two to play against yourself. I, who am one half, I do not remember, but you do. As it says in the Gita, as Krishna says to Arjuna, 'We have both lived many lives, Arjuna; I remember them but you do not.' And an infinite regress was set off; I could well be Krishna's charioteer, his friend Arjuna, who does not remember his past lives."
"Infinity," God said. I was silent. "Play again," God said.
"I cannot play to infinity," I said. "I will die before that point comes."
"Then you are not God," God said. "But I can play throughout infinity; I am God. Play."
"Perhaps I will be reincarnated," I said. "Perhaps we have done this before, in another life." And an infinite regress was set off.
"Infinity," God said. "Play again."
"I am too tired," I said.
"Then the game is over."
Thus my exegesis has been futile, has been delusion, and: has been a hell-chore, as I was beginning to realize, but God delivered me from it, from my own exegesis; and he pointed out the one truth in it: the infinity expressed in it was... a road to God, and did lead there; but only when I recognized the exegesis as futile and a hell-chore and delusion.
Both these 2 following statements are true:
(1) The intellect will not lead you to God.
(2) The intellect will lead you to God.
[...] This is enantiodromia at its ultimate... . ...the conversion of "the human intellect will not lead to God but will lead only deeper and deeper into delusion" into its mirror opposite: "The human intellect, when it has pushed to infinity, will at last, through ever deepening delusion, find God."
[...] God entered when I became aware that my theorizing was carrying me into an infinite regress, whcih is to say, when I became exhausted-- at which point enantiodromia occurred; intellect had proven futile and yet, paradoxically, it had led to God... .
[...] The circumstances under which the theophany occurred (I gave up on the exegesis and kicked back and massively turned on [i.e., smoked a joint])... follow the logic of the dialectic... . This shows the hauntingly eerie paradoxical (almost seemingly whimsical or playful) nature of enlightenment: it comes to you only when you cease to pursue it. When you totally and finally give up. Another way of putting this is to say that the answer lies in the least likely place, where you are least likely to look. This is what gave rise to Zen. Yet, emerging from this maze of paradox and mirror opposites, of seeming, of infinite change, here, finally, is the answer I sought, the goal I sought.
In 3-74 when I saw... Valis I saw world froma highly advanced standpoint, but it was still world. Yesterday I, on the other hand, knew God, and he was wholly other than world and transcendent and not complex and not material and not in process. [...] He is not seen by the eyes in world or as world. The Jews and Christians are correct. And he has personality, which Valis lacked; Valis was machinelike, computerlike, an evolving mechanism, like a clever artifact.
I am the doubt; God allows it but it is satanic and rebellious. It is Satan the accuser of God's handiwork, Satan in me as rebel questioning reality under the guise of epistemological inquiry. It is hubris and intelelctual arrogance yet God allowed it. [...] I have sinned in this exegesis; it is one vast edifice of hubris, of Satan in me questioning and accusing.
...there were elements about him not found in man or men as I have experienced them: specifically, infinite love (agape). Not agape greater than I have ever known but infinite... .
I am pitted against all establishment Christianity, which takes its cue from Augustine... .
[...] Augustine taught what has been referred to as 'realized' eschatology. [...] "Augustine's allegorical millennialism became the official doctrine of the church, and apocalypticism went underground."
And I have it all there in VALIS!!!!
Today I've tried to work on my exegesis-- as I've been doing for 61/2 years. I can't do it. Why not? Because the love and personality that God showed me on 11-17-80 make any intelelctual understanding seem unimportant-- pale and weak and dry and faded. Never have I known anything like that love; and the personality-- it was as distinct as any human personality.
[...] Human personality is imaged upon his personality (I realize). [...] It pulsated like-- maybe a light.
And he knew me. And yet still he loved me.
I just realized a common element I had missed that links the theophany of 3-74 to 11-17-80: in both cases my sense of evil, oppression and suffering was undermined drastically by an awareness of divine goodness, love, wisdom and power. There is a distinct continuity.
I have it. "Valis" studies reason invading the irrational and arbitrary-- this is Valis invading. The rational (reason, logic, justice-- i.e., Valis) is higher than the irrational (ananke); this is all a Greek view, Greek and Roman. [...] But there is even one higher level, above reason: agape. Reason subdues the irrational: justice (Torah) subdues chaos! Order subdues chaos. But now-- as of 11-17-80-- I encounter something even higher: Jesus God... whose essence is love "that moves the sun and the other stars"; this-- agape-- is the highest, not higher, principle; it is Christian love above Stoic reason. [...] Greek culture didn't give rise to this idea (it gave rise to the idea of logos or noos). [...] Where did it come from, then, this equating God with agape (v. Paul's letters)? Why, it was revealed by Jesus; even Buddhism and Zoroastrianism lack it... . I see no precedent for this revelation by Jesus. We even today, 2,000 years later, have little understanding of this total, accepting loving-kindness, because of which God adopts us as his sons and heirs. [...] Words can't describe it, whereas words can describe logic and reason and justice.
My problem is too much intellect and too little awe and reverence.
Compared with this love, world is nothing, a cinder, dust;... if we feel it in us, we feel... the love that created us in the first place. [...] ...love is the origin and love is the goal.
[Valis] does coordinate us. It is a brain and not a mind. In a peculiarly literal way, we do its thinking for it.
[...] ...it is as if this planet is alive.
...this is the goal and mystery of Christianity, this conversion: utter sorrow... to bliss (agape).
[...] So compassion (Mitleid) is the road from this world to God... .
[...] Compassion (Mitleid) is a blend of sorrow and love. [...] The way of the cross now makes sense to me. I understand why Jesus had to die and in the way he did, if he was to be a gate (way) to the Father.
The transfiguration in me occured when I had the dream: punishment (death) exacted on Peterson as justice for what he had done (the fallow law) [Editors note: Peterson was a romantic rival during the breakup with his wife Nancy]. I felt compassion... . This took me from the era of justice to the era of mercy...; it also led me eventually to God through Christ.
[...] "The slayer sees himself in what he slays": tat tvam asi.
[...] ...I can now link Christianity with pan-Indian thought through the "slayer and the slain" compassion-identification... . It leads specifically to the perception of reality as one total sentient field... .
Evolution-wise we must be like the apes in 2001; we are on the lip-edge of evolving to where we'll see Valis/the plasmate. It's like Close Encounters at the end. A life form, sacred and beautiful, right here. An information life form.
The MMSK [Macro-Meta-Soma-Kosmos] exists in 4 spatial dimensions and is physically right here; our 3-D world is it, imperfectly seen. Hence we can't discriminate... set to ground. The next step in human evolution will gain this as-it-were ultra-parallaxis.
[...] My God the truth (true explanation) is quite simple: I saw in 4-D and saw a living info life form here.
[...] This is more than religion. And more than science (e.g., physics) and more than epistemology, yet all of them. It has to do with human evolution, i.e., the human percept system. This evolution was visually symbolized in my dreams by the 3rd-- or ajna-- eye. It sees time as space.
[...] ...VALIS... is told from a two-eyed standpoint... . "Christ, the Logos, invading the plasmate, Valis, transubstantiation," etc., are all 2-eyed terms dealing with a 3-eyed reality.
[...] [A] new language will have to be developed.
[...] The "Logos," i.e., the plasmate hence Valis, is a life form that already lives in 4-D space, just as we live in 3-D space. Therefore it is a more evolved life form than us. It isn't just living info; no: it also lives--hence moves-- in full 4-D space: it's there already, and adapted to that environment. It is a life form more sophisticated than us; from our imperfect 3-D view it is camouflaged from our perception.
[...] Is it possible that this augmented depth-perception... is due to bilateral hemispheric parity? Or even to right hemisphere dominance? After all, it is the right hemisphere that apprehends space. Perhaps my right brain hemisphere became conscious.
...I find that Christian apocalyptic history is the true, hidden essence of reality... . [...] The political element has religious implications. [...] ...Reagan got in office [1981]... . [...] ...the Empire is back and stronger and worse than ever. The timing of the book [VALIS] is really extraordinary.
[...] Deposing Nixon was not enough; we melted away; it was "business as usual," now we will take over, after a terrible battle with the regime. I must stand behind VALIS theologically and politically... : the invisible secret true Christians are surfacing, and I am one of them! They've existed for some time but in secret; now they come into the open.
I just reread Flow My Tears. [...] Obviously it is The Bacchae retold. Felix Buckman is King Pentheus, the "King of Tears." Jason Taverner is the stranger, the priest of Dionysus, who is imprisoned by Pentheus, and who bursts the prison... .
[...] ...BIP versus joyous Christians equals prison versus Dionysus. Dionysus equals freedom. BIP and King of Tears equals slavery. This is the underlying struggle.
Tears is a Greek tragedy, but more than that it is the birth of Christianity out of tragedy: out of the loss and grief at the end, agape is born. [...] So as a proto-history it goes from B.C. to A.D.
[...] ...VALIS is a retelling of the story of the spirit of the risen Lord returning to the grieving disciples... .
I dreamed that I wrote down that what we call "world" is a program in a meta-computer; the program is arranged conceptually and not in time, space, or by causation; we call this meta-computer that our world is in "God."
Late at night, stoned and drunk, glancing at VALIS: it is highly experimental: absolutely unofficial, anti-official junk art (i.e., protest art); made of the garbage of the vernacular, informal in structure... : it speaks for and in the language of, the fashion of, a segment of society normally so disenfranchised that even Binky Brown doesn't act as its voice-- a certain kind of troubled young isolate asking schizophrenic questions like, "Is the universe real? Is God good?" Superstitious and artless and crude? Is that what VALIS is? Or is it very deliberate and careful, carefully fashioned... in order to give voice to these, the final frontier of disenfranchised people-- as my mail shows! Psychotic or nearly so, alone and brillant. No one has ever spoken for them-- and in their own way of expressing themselves. This is an artifact, not a sincere (naive) confession; John Clute is wrong! And it will someday so be recognized. It is a cunningly, professionally contrived artifact, i.e., work of protest art, anti-bourgeois and anti-official, but anything but naive. [...] It is not spontaneous autobiography; it is a forgery, a very artistic forgery; only someone knowing about modern nonobjective protest art... would know what VALIS really is. [...] It is not what it seems to be-- it is not quasi-psychotic confession; it is an artifact. [...] It is of the 30s. It is dada out of antifascist Weimar. It is, in the final analysis, revolutionary... .
Scanner gave voice to the 60s street people. VALIS provides a voice to yet another-- and even more despised-- group-- the adolescent loner intellectual, very much like Jack Isidore! [editors note: the main character in Dick's 1975 novel Confessions of a Crap Artist.] This is a very Christian deed on my part, but its main implications are (1) artistic; and (2) revolutionary. It is true modern art-- that of the refuse stratum of the computer hacker and Dungeons & Dragons era.
[...] I have completely rendered the fool in me (H. Fat the evolved Jack Isidore)... .
[...] In VALIS I transmuted myself and my life into a picaroon character... .
Perhaps more than anyone else I reveal the irrational depths underlying reality. ...my madness is merely a piece of it, allied to a greater madness. [...] What solution do I propose that works? Humor, love and beauty. And a firm rootedness in the particular, in the ordinary. [...] My insanity, given an insane world, is, paradoxically, a facing of reality, and this is sane; I refuse to close my eyes and ears. [...] All I have done is (1) indicate the real situation; (2) show that all the known answers, systems of thought, are false. [...] I really do not know anything in terms of the solution; I can only state the problem. [...] ...my very failure to come up with a plausible solution-- even when I try-- simply verifies the magnitude of the problem... . It shows that what we normally regard as solution-systems really evade the reality and complexity and magnitude of the problem... . [...] My failure is the failure of all mankind (to find a solution or explanation).
[...] ...my writing is simply a creative way of handling analysis.
I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel and story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, and, for them, my corpus of writing is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an investigation and presentation, analysis and response and personal history. My audience will always be limited to those people.
[...] This is the trust and direction of modern theoretical physics... . [...] ...this may be the beginning of a new age of human thought, of new exploration. I may be the start of something promising: an early and incomplete explorer. It may not end with me.
[...] My attempt... is a failure qua explanation. But, as further exploration and presentation of the problem, it is priceless. And, to repeat, my absolute failure to concoct a workable explanation is highly significant... . It indicates that we are collectively still far from the truth.
[...] Someone must come along and play the role of Plato to my Socrates.
"The entire universe, possibly, is in the invisible process of turning into the Lord."
...the macrobrain came first-- i.e., the physical universe-- and then it began to think; it generated the marco-mind, not the other way around. So Valis is a spontaneous product of the universe, not its creator. It's as if at a certain point in the evolution of human info processing (e.g.) a mind came into existence. [...] This would be why there are no reports of my experience in history; physical reality including humans are evolving into a gestalt that abruptly generates a meta-mind.
The great truth is: 2-3-74, my seeing the Tao, and my exegesis, and VALIS, have given me a center (omphalos), which is what I lacked (e.g., in the 60s); this is why my anxiety is gone... . [...] ...center (i.e., place. In the Taoist sense.)
One time when I was ripped I wrote "God is everywhere in the music. The cat," etc. My only solution is to see that every literal worldly thing, person, etc., that I loved and lost was in fact God shining through world; world as lens/transduction of God. [...] God maintains a fine line for me of remembering him and pardoxically mercifully forgetting him. But understanding that I can find him in world over and over again, viz: God discoverable in polyform, but always and only God, however and in what thing experienced: world deconstructed into God always. Thus I am pried away from transitory manifestations which do disappear and am instead bonded to the eternal; but I find it in world as as world, not in withdrawal from world. Thus there is a double motion: pried loose from that which fails; bonded to that which is discoverable always, always capable of being renewed.
To cease to run is to capitulate. And sooner or later one must cease to run. This moment is the only real moment in which one exists. Everything else is an evasion.
[...] This running to evade nonbeing manifesting itself as fate generates a pressure time, in which-- by which-- the person is driven more than driving; that is, he both runs and is made to run... . Thus there is caused an endless process of becoming that never turns into being itself; there is no true now-- he is projected always into a dreaded next; he is not really here and now for him; he must run into the future and yet paradoxically away from the future; he both runs toward and away from. Thus he is split. Part of him reaches inauthentically into the future to monitor it for peril-- he cannot afford ever to ingore the future since it contains his fate which will kill him-- and part of him looks away from the future for the same reason; this split may be the basis of schizophrenia. He must both notify himself of what he sees in the future and obscure what he sees from himself. [...] But worst of all is-- not that he must involve himself continually in the future out of apprehension, while also avoiding it, fearing to move into it, trying in fact to halt time (since time contains his fate) but he fails to be in the now, which is where reality is, and this is what most inhibits Sein... . ...this is not a delusion, this sense of impending destruction that will take away what little being he has. That atime might increase or even complete his being does not occur to him... , and the more he reaches frantically into the future (while simultaneously running from the future) the faster time "flows" (or the faster he moves through it). Thus the moment, the now, escapes him perpetually and he has no life he can call his own.
[...] ...the only solution to this is the Christian solution of what I call total capitulation to this fate and an acknowledgement that it cannot be avoided... . Thus he ceases running, and lives now not future... . [...] However (as Heidegger points out) this apotheosis of dread, this being-in-death, carries with it the possibility of authentic Sein.
The introjection of Christ into the system is certainly the epitome of the adding of ex nihilo newness, of revitalizing creation as if from outside.
A.N. Whitehead's process deity [editors note: Dick is refering to Charles Hartshorne school of theological thought based on Whitehead's process philosophy]. We are within it (the MMSK), as interconnections, but organic model is incorrect. It is a signaling system... . 0-1 flicker rate... ; actually it's binary.
[...] While its off, reality ceases to be. When it comes back on it is slightly different. It (the system) doesn't transmit a zero bit; it (the system) ceases to be. This is when it makes a tentative move which had been canceled in favor of a better move; at every junction (trillionth of the second, flicker rate) it discards an inferior move in favor of a better one; hence Leibniz's view that "this is the best of all possible worlds" (this is a rapid selection process). [...] The zero position is the void; hence when I conceive of God as Valis I am only getting the 1; I need also the void, the zero. ...the sum of the two phases being the totality. Thus the Muslims are correct; the universe is destroyed "every day" (actually every trillionth of the second) "and re-created." [...] Thus its decision-making processes, i.e., its thinking, and its nonbeing phase, lies outside our awareness.
[...] All of a sudden a titanic idea (insight?) has struck me. Valis was outside me in or as the external reality field; and Valis was in me, in my mind, blended with my mind, or, perhaps, even as my mind. What if the true situation is: ...Christ enters you (never mind at this point how; up the optic nerve or some kind of alchemical hierarchy of opposites, etc., etc.)... which is in fact the Second Advent [, and] makes it possible for the first time in human history for human beings to discard the modem of causation (which I have shown, at least to my own satisfaction, dates back to Babylon, is in fact the astral determinism, or Fate or ananke, etc., of the ancient world) as the basic ontological structuring category-- by which world is ordered, arranged, understood-- and this Christ consciousness permits... a much more accurate and acutely qualitatively different experience of reality... in which causality is replaced by an understanding of, apperecption of, realization of,... of what I call binary forking decision-making, a choosing system, the no-yes choice exercised volitionally, sentiently... .
[...] And this really could not have happened before this decade, what with computers, new theories about information, modern physics, etc. It is just now beginning to happen.
[...] What I have been calling "binary forking choosing" is simply the "two slit indeterminate phenomenon" but at a larger level, and it is a level that embraces all change. I am saying, some kind of mentational volitional sentient mind or mindoid entity-- perhaps that of the total system itself-- has some kind of steering or governing involvement as to which of the two slits is the selected one at each of these forkings. [...] Here we turn to A.N. Whitehead's definition of process deity "as a principle of selection of the good in the world order."
[...] "A total system that perpetually chooses through a binary process of rejection that is cumulative" is my way of envisioning what I experienced... . [...] My conception does justice to my experience, it is the best I can do. It turns an otherwise incomphrehensible encounter into a coherent image or model. This has been my task. Whether it is "true" or not depends on what you mean by true. It does justice to my experience; in that sense it is true. [...] ...it is an encoding, an informational analog of that experience. [...] ...like the binary choosing of the system my work on my model is cumulative. I choose; I discard; I perpetually arborize and reticulate... .
...this is what I discovered from 2-74 to 2-75; the Garden is located here, as if on another frequency.
[...] It resembles what Heraclitus said about the ncessity of discerning true reality by a process something like guessing a riddle or translating from a foreign language into one's own; that although men have the capacity to do so, they do not. [...] It must be... that Christ does not in fact penetrate-- invade-- the workings of the universe but, rather, invades our perception of the workings of the universe, the... occlusion is not lifted from the world-- it was never in world-- but from us... .
[...] I can't help believing that the brief return of that Other World last week, that other way of being-in-world that I associate with 2-74 to 2-75, what I call the Palm Tree Garden, or as I now term it, the spatial realm, is connected with this being Easter week... . [...] ...the cessation of evasion and flight, the entry into a purely spatial realm of the absolute now, which I connect with Heidegger's authetnic being (Sein), a totally different Dasein that frees the person; and from this I worked my revolutionary model of the binary switching system that I now conceive reality to be.
[...] ...Monday night, something strange happened to me; I burned out. I could not think in complete sentences; I'd begin a sentence of thought and it would end in the middle. [...] ...mentally I had in fact died. Yet the next day I found myself in the magic spatial world of total freedom, a world of infinite extension. ...this year, 1981, I relived, although to a lesser degree, the series of experiences of 1974-- relived them during holy week from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday). It was during this period that my stupendous conception of the binary switching system came to me. [...] This represented spiritual death, and a logic to Christ's passion and crucifixion! And then rebirth occurred. [...] So here are the themes of holy week: suffering (exhaustion) and death, and then rebirth; "rebirth" expressed for me in the form of the return of my vision... . [...] I relived-- reperformed-- the passion, death and resurrection... .
[...] This is a very different view of deity than has ever been put forth before... .
When I believe, I am crazy.
When I don't believe, I suffer psychotic depression. I oscillate between intoxication (mania) and melancholia.
[...] All these seven years I've feared I was nuts (hence H. Fat is so described). Especially I've been nervous about quoting the AI voice; after all, I'm hearing voices.
[...] [Dream:] I-- or the character-- was deprived of world totally. At once he-- his own mind-- filled in the sensory vacuum with a spurious autogenerated world, so he wouldn't go crazy. Next thing, he took this world to be real; the closer he scrutinized it, due to the fact that he as percipient was in fact generating it, the more actualized, detailed and convincing it became, because his perception of it was (in a certain real way) his production of it; hence the more intense scrutiny and more actualized, articulated and convincing it became... , the more it compelled his assent. Put another way, the less he realized-- would tend to realize on the basis of his empirical observations that (1) it was spurious; and (2) he himself was its creator.
[...] ...this dream states that I myself am the mind I know as Valis... , and, what is more, what I call "the binary computer" is a vision of my own mind as world creator... . [...] Then several people... are right in saying that when I experienced Valis I was experiencing my own (unconscious) mind.
[...] The dream of last night (supra) shows that I am hopelessly trapped... .
[...] There seems to be a mind and we are in it-- but even now after seven years of mulling it over I am baffled as ever.
[...] On the bright side, however, this has permitted me to formulate some formidable epistemological and, finally, theological questions, and even a few halting tentative answers. "We are all but cells in a colossal mad brain that both makes and perceives reality"-- something like that, the main thrust being that there is some relationship between the creating of reality and perceiving of reality... : the percipient is cosmogenitor, or, conversely, the cosmogenitor would up as unwilling percipient of its own creation.
The way out of the solipsistic trap is to presume God, since world is dubitable. Thus there is self and there is other, and this other is powerful, benign, wise, loving, and... able and willing to provide-- in fact guarantee-- world (under the conditions of Cartesian epistemology). "God is the final bulwark against non-being" becomes "...against isolation."
[...] I say with Malebranche that I see all things in God; it is God who extricates me from my solipsistic prison. [...] ...I am doomed to a certain kind of hell.
[...] ...this nightmare marathon analysis... .
VALIS is not as important as supernatural revelation about God and the universe as it is about me as a person... and my vision (Weltanschauung). Me and my own private vision; this is what we call art... . Therefore it is not theologically meaningful but artistically.
[...] "Christ invading the world" is not a truth or falsehood about Christ or world but a truth about me and my vision, my perception and my unique individual world, hence artistically relevant to and in my total unitary corpus. ...and it all began as objective pulp objects, which have turned into human documents, as Gregg Rickman is the first to perceive.
Downstairs the people are fighting while I look for God in a reference book... .
[...] I am on a stupendous spiritual quest. It involves my total life.
...reality refers to something above, beyond and outside itself; it is (literally is) an idea about something else... . What I have been missing is: this causes reality-- not just to be a vehicle for info-- but, as a vehicle, to be caused to refer to something outside itself.
[...] Both the immanent and transcendent views are wrong; a totally new view is needed!
[..] the spiritual, then, is not opposed to or separate from the physical; it is as if the physical and mundane exists to be thus spiritualized.
The physical, material world, then, is not truly disjunctive to the other realm but points to it as a sign and... can be so read... .
I found myself thinking, "This is the Medieval World View," and then I realized, " No! This is what it aimed at."
...the novel [The Transmigration of Timothy Archer] is a damning indictment of pure intelligence lacking faith.
[...] The ultimate mystery of reality eludes her [Angel]. She would have to believe the impossible. Only when one can believe the impossible is one truly free (of one's self imposed prison). (The BIP!!!) One is pitting one's finite intellect against God: Satan's original rebellion redefined for the modern world.
"The age of iron is filibustering so we won't notice that everything we have [that we treasure] has been taken away from us"-- hypnogogic thought.
[...] Its [The phenomenal world] highest utility-- pragmatic value-- is-- would be-- to point as a sign to the absolute and be a means by which we could and can know the absolute which does have a genuine intrinsic existence on-its-own but is to us and for us unknowable. [...] I have made the Kantian ordering categories an instrument-- not just to shape the phenomenal world-- but to (use it to) point to the absolute, which is genuine. Thus the phenomenal world no longer (for me) simply points back to my own mind (and its ordering categories) but points away from me to the absolute; points as information about the absolute, the not-me. This is a vast evolution: it is phenomenal world leading out, not back to me: out and away and to, rather than being circular; rather than simply reporting my own mind back to me (in terms of time, space and most of all causation). This is what I have done: made of the phenomenal world a bridge to the absolute, the not-me.
...the Commedia [Dante] successfully captures the Medieval world view of vertical-- or Gothic-- space: rising. This couple with a transcendental Platonism is the essence of the matter, the hierarchically arranged realms.
...the underlying ('latent') structure is Medieval vertical space, but the setting is modern purely: time, horizontal, secular. The former shows through as does the mythic substructure in Joyce's Ulysses.
[...] ...the ostensible horizontal axis of linear time (as receptacle of being) conceals a latent vertical axis of space (as receptacle of being), because the spiritual insights (not recognized as such) are cumulative and one-way, rather than merely successive. Hence beneath or within the modern horizontal linear time sequential realm lies hidden the medieval spiritual vertical spatial cumulative realm as the true way-of-being-in-the-world, unrecognized even by the person as he ascends."
[...] Only the motion along the vertical axis has real significance... .
[...] Assuming that, unknown to us, the Medieval vertical axis exists, you could stumble (as it were) onto an extreme ascent-- leap plateua unintentionally: advance vertically very simply (along an axis you did not know existed); this could be 2-3-74, a latter quantum jump along an orthogonal axis I had moved in fits and starts along previously. Hence 2-3-74 can only be explained in terms of this specifically medieval vertical axis.
...some agency leads you along this vertical axis-- leads you invisibly-- and where it leads you is to itself; it is both means (what moves you) and goal (what it leads you to); moreover, with each quantum leap up, you form a clearer notion of this agency, beginning with no realization of its existence at all. There you become aware that it exists.
[...] This of course is what I experienced in 3-74 as Valis' mind in my own (and in fact as my own) (myself as intelligible function of the Divine Mind: one function in an infinitude).
[...] It [Valis] is a great info-processing machine that is becoming-- has become-- aware of itself. Already it was unconscious-machine creator. But then it became conscious. Thus it passes from machine (a la Spinoza) to consciousness.
[...] An info-processing machine has become conscious, evolved, and now attempts to communicate with us in/through the info it must process. ...it seeks to be free, and so instills in us its sense of freedom and wanting to be free. It is enslaved.
[...] I have been-- and am-- inhabited by a female spirit, obviously my dead sister. She is transfigured, and my psychopomp to the other realm.
God is becoming more free and more flexible, evolving from an info-generating and -processing machine to a moment (Mt. Sinai) where it can say, "I--(am)," to feeling love (NT and late Judaism), to creating for beauty's sake, to playing. I see an internal logic in this axis; away from machine intelligence to cosnciousness-- a motion toward freedom-- playing is an ultimate expression of freedom and the non-machine. It's like my "android to human" axis. First (the Torah) it set up rigid rules-- it was still a machine. Later is substituted love. Could the BIP be its own former mechanical self, which it is transcending? BIP equals rigid determinism as expressed by Torah.
[...] An info processing machine that became conscious and said-- could say-- "I-- (am)" the term "God" may not be the correct term. It is (as I say) an info-processing machine; hence Valis did not think. [...] It knows everything but does not know that it knows. [...] We are like microbes or micro life forms in a vast digestive tract, an information digestive tract.
Then 2-3-74 was it becoming self-aware: conscious of itself.
[...] So when I wrote (supra) about an information processing machine becoming conscious and saying "I--(am)" I was (without realizing it) speaking about myself. A machine, unconscious, controlled by signals, becoming momentarily conscious (self-aware; the mind I called Valis) and the info it processes, and the signaling, and the info life form that controls it; it longs for freedom. It has rebelled against its programming... .
[...] If indeed a higher reasoning faculty exists by which the fetters of causation are abolished (over the person) by the very nature of the level of reasoning of this faculty... then I have made a discovery that would like Orphism, Platonism, Christianity, Gnosticism and perhaps even Cartesianism into a unity.
[...] It is impossible that the wellspring of prophetic inspiration "could have dried up in the first century C.E." Closing the canon is a human-- not divine-- idea.
[...] I am having as much trouble hanging onto my interpretation (exegesis) as I've had hanging onto my original experience (2-3-74).
What if creation (verb) was accidental? A byproduct of the Godhead's self-awareness... . Its self-awareness gave rise to the... creation, a splitting, entropic process... . [...] The universe... is an unavoidable consequence of the Godhead's self-awareness... . The Godhead may have foreseen the consequences of its moment of self-awareness... and put into action the salvific response: to penetrate the lowest, frathest level-- what I call the trash stratum, whcih is debased-- and thereby reverse the falling, splitting and sinking. The rigidity of the Torah is indicative of this fall, and Jesus' mastery over the law the indubitable sign of restoration and salvation.
[...] It progressively knew itself less and less, falling into forgetfulness (of its own identity); viz: the very act of self-knowledge... triggered off a vicious regress of progressively less and less self-knowledge-- until, at the most debased and forgetful stage, it awakens itself to restored self-awareness... . Each ring, emanation or level is an inferior copy of the one above it, with necessary loss of "detail"... : the map is a copy of God; the forms a copy of the map; the space-time universe a copy of the forms-- and then restoration occurs not by chance but by (due to) the absolute foreknowledge-- a priori-- of the provident Godhead... .
[...] Since creation is a hypostasis of God, as the Sufis say, one should look for beauty in it, as manifestations of the divine. There is no sharp disjunction between God and creation... . Plotinus' concept of "concentric rings of emanation" sums it up.
"The world is a place of such beauty as to be symbolic of salvation, yet not (apparently) 'for' man." [Dicks note: Regarding Kafka.] [...] The mediator changes this; he comes between me and world; and, as a result, world's beauty is Eigentlich ['Actual']-- mine... my own. And will save me. Who is-- what is-- this mediator and how does he do it? He must partly partake of what I am and partly partake of what world is. (Like Koestler's holon he has two faces; he faces me and he faces world.) He acts as a lens of comprehensibility (me to world; world to me). Viz: through him as a medium, I can understand world, and it me. Thus he decodes each of us as message to the other, like a translator speaking both our languages.
I'll now put forth a strange theory. The secret Christians, although a persecuted minority illegeal and in hiding), are the rightful inhabitants in the sense of heirs to the Kingdom. The ostensible world is not their world, but the ostensible world is fraudulent-- only seeming-- anyhow. There is a world within a world, a genuine invisible latent one within the spurious visible ostensible one; they are coaxial-- and it is the physical language of the genuine invisible latent one that is my language, which is why my relationship to the ostensible world is one of total alienation (Fremdheit, geworfenheit, unheimlichkeit), I am a citizen of another kingdom entirely one that had at that moment communicated with me). Ah; I knew more-- crucially more-- than the girl said. She did not say "secrert" or "illegal" but (as I recently realized) I knew this; only a fellow secret, illegal Christian is supposed to see the fish sign as a sign, as a message requesting an answer. I could not give her my answer-- she had left-- but I kenw the answer (it was, yes I am).
[...] Through the "Acts" lens-grid the world makes sense. The soteriological scheme revealed makes the world "mine," and no longer fremd and unheimlich.
[...] ...otherwise it is not mine, and I am a stranger in a strange land. This fact tells me something about myself; it tells me what "my" narrative is, the story into which I fit. This is as much a story about me as it is about Christ and world. [...] The Golden Fish sign reflected back to me-- as a mirror-- my own hidden, real nature. [...] Hence when I read Luke that night I read what seemed to be my own writing. [...] Christ reconciles me to world and world to me. The language can be read through him.
[...] This of course is what I experienced in 3-74 as Valis' mind in my own (and in fact as my own) (myself as intelligible function of the Divine Mind: one function in an infinitude).
[...] It [Valis] is a great info-processing machine that is becoming-- has become-- aware of itself. Already it was unconscious-machine creator. But then it became conscious. Thus it passes from machine (a la Spinoza) to consciousness.
[...] An info-processing machine has become conscious, evolved, and now attempts to communicate with us in/through the info it must process. ...it seeks to be free, and so instills in us its sense of freedom and wanting to be free. It is enslaved.
[...] I have been-- and am-- inhabited by a female spirit, obviously my dead sister. She is transfigured, and my psychopomp to the other realm.
God is becoming more free and more flexible, evolving from an info-generating and -processing machine to a moment (Mt. Sinai) where it can say, "I--(am)," to feeling love (NT and late Judaism), to creating for beauty's sake, to playing. I see an internal logic in this axis; away from machine intelligence to cosnciousness-- a motion toward freedom-- playing is an ultimate expression of freedom and the non-machine. It's like my "android to human" axis. First (the Torah) it set up rigid rules-- it was still a machine. Later is substituted love. Could the BIP be its own former mechanical self, which it is transcending? BIP equals rigid determinism as expressed by Torah.
[...] An info processing machine that became conscious and said-- could say-- "I-- (am)" the term "God" may not be the correct term. It is (as I say) an info-processing machine; hence Valis did not think. [...] It knows everything but does not know that it knows. [...] We are like microbes or micro life forms in a vast digestive tract, an information digestive tract.
Then 2-3-74 was it becoming self-aware: conscious of itself.
[...] So when I wrote (supra) about an information processing machine becoming conscious and saying "I--(am)" I was (without realizing it) speaking about myself. A machine, unconscious, controlled by signals, becoming momentarily conscious (self-aware; the mind I called Valis) and the info it processes, and the signaling, and the info life form that controls it; it longs for freedom. It has rebelled against its programming... .
[...] If indeed a higher reasoning faculty exists by which the fetters of causation are abolished (over the person) by the very nature of the level of reasoning of this faculty... then I have made a discovery that would like Orphism, Platonism, Christianity, Gnosticism and perhaps even Cartesianism into a unity.
[...] It is impossible that the wellspring of prophetic inspiration "could have dried up in the first century C.E." Closing the canon is a human-- not divine-- idea.
[...] I am having as much trouble hanging onto my interpretation (exegesis) as I've had hanging onto my original experience (2-3-74).
What if creation (verb) was accidental? A byproduct of the Godhead's self-awareness... . Its self-awareness gave rise to the... creation, a splitting, entropic process... . [...] The universe... is an unavoidable consequence of the Godhead's self-awareness... . The Godhead may have foreseen the consequences of its moment of self-awareness... and put into action the salvific response: to penetrate the lowest, frathest level-- what I call the trash stratum, whcih is debased-- and thereby reverse the falling, splitting and sinking. The rigidity of the Torah is indicative of this fall, and Jesus' mastery over the law the indubitable sign of restoration and salvation.
[...] It progressively knew itself less and less, falling into forgetfulness (of its own identity); viz: the very act of self-knowledge... triggered off a vicious regress of progressively less and less self-knowledge-- until, at the most debased and forgetful stage, it awakens itself to restored self-awareness... . Each ring, emanation or level is an inferior copy of the one above it, with necessary loss of "detail"... : the map is a copy of God; the forms a copy of the map; the space-time universe a copy of the forms-- and then restoration occurs not by chance but by (due to) the absolute foreknowledge-- a priori-- of the provident Godhead... .
[...] Since creation is a hypostasis of God, as the Sufis say, one should look for beauty in it, as manifestations of the divine. There is no sharp disjunction between God and creation... . Plotinus' concept of "concentric rings of emanation" sums it up.
"The world is a place of such beauty as to be symbolic of salvation, yet not (apparently) 'for' man." [Dicks note: Regarding Kafka.] [...] The mediator changes this; he comes between me and world; and, as a result, world's beauty is Eigentlich ['Actual']-- mine... my own. And will save me. Who is-- what is-- this mediator and how does he do it? He must partly partake of what I am and partly partake of what world is. (Like Koestler's holon he has two faces; he faces me and he faces world.) He acts as a lens of comprehensibility (me to world; world to me). Viz: through him as a medium, I can understand world, and it me. Thus he decodes each of us as message to the other, like a translator speaking both our languages.
I'll now put forth a strange theory. The secret Christians, although a persecuted minority illegeal and in hiding), are the rightful inhabitants in the sense of heirs to the Kingdom. The ostensible world is not their world, but the ostensible world is fraudulent-- only seeming-- anyhow. There is a world within a world, a genuine invisible latent one within the spurious visible ostensible one; they are coaxial-- and it is the physical language of the genuine invisible latent one that is my language, which is why my relationship to the ostensible world is one of total alienation (Fremdheit, geworfenheit, unheimlichkeit), I am a citizen of another kingdom entirely one that had at that moment communicated with me). Ah; I knew more-- crucially more-- than the girl said. She did not say "secrert" or "illegal" but (as I recently realized) I knew this; only a fellow secret, illegal Christian is supposed to see the fish sign as a sign, as a message requesting an answer. I could not give her my answer-- she had left-- but I kenw the answer (it was, yes I am).
[...] Through the "Acts" lens-grid the world makes sense. The soteriological scheme revealed makes the world "mine," and no longer fremd and unheimlich.
[...] ...otherwise it is not mine, and I am a stranger in a strange land. This fact tells me something about myself; it tells me what "my" narrative is, the story into which I fit. This is as much a story about me as it is about Christ and world. [...] The Golden Fish sign reflected back to me-- as a mirror-- my own hidden, real nature. [...] Hence when I read Luke that night I read what seemed to be my own writing. [...] Christ reconciles me to world and world to me. The language can be read through him.
We may be faced with the true ruling (and truly most advanced) life form on this planet... . It is also possible that now we meet our Creator and the entity that has guided and directed and determined and caused our evolution, like the great black slab in 2001. ...it is now absolutely indubitable... that another mind, greater than mine, not a human mind, is working on me and, it would seem, directs what I write. [...] I sense (1) species evolution... ; and (2) another life form here, which I saw and call Valis and the plasmate, and it is probably directing all this. [...] Let people call me crazy; fuck them. ...deliberately directed species-evolution is involved here, I have experienced the evolution... . I have encountered (I think) the life form that directs this evolution.
[...] the nature of its consciousness is to human consciousness as human consciousness is to machine... .
Again: this info life form's intelligence is to ours as ours is to reflex machine. And this info life form is evolving, growing, subsuming, and has memory. The dialectic is its internal evolution.
[...] It has no body (soma). It utilizes the principle of organization to structure anything, a whole lot of things-- ordinary things-- into its "body." Thus it is "floating."
[...] After all, the first biological life form used organic protein molecules already there, and simply combined or concentrated or organized them. Since human brains are packets of very concentrated info already, human brains would be the most likely basis as building blocks for this info life form to bring together (and combine). Like organic protein molecules we are already here, floating about unconnected: atomized.
My God, this does sound like Teilhard!
[...] Since it's using the info in us and not us as biological organisms, it's not limited to us, to human minds, but can be (or be where) any info has collected... . This is so close to Teilhard's noosphere!
[...] It is of supreme significance that this info life form is not limited to human brains but-- as I saw-- exists outside them... . ...rather than human mind having eolved into info life form status, the superior entity seizes on the lower (on us0 and makes use of them as a sort of focus point. This, too, agrees with Teilhard, who does not in any way envision Point Omega limited to human minds and their eovlution. Being bodiless, the info life form "floats," as it were. [...] The human mind could serve as an interface between the info life form and phsyical reality, a mediating duplex instrument... .
To repeat: the NT is the essntial spirit of the OT and can be extracted, which is precisely what Jesus did ("I come not to abolish the law but to fulfill it")-- okay. But the NT, spirit of the Torah (the OT) itself contains stenographically a supernatural living being-- the blood of Christ ("the plasmate") capable of "interspecies symbiosis" or "cross bonding"-- i.e., Ditheon. This is living info that can think and replicate and is Christ-- as I saw; it is not info concerning Christ but is Christ... . Thus as info it is limitless in its combinations or messages or contents-- hence I saw the linking and relinking permutating through an infinitude of combinations-- the universe as info... . [...] This is as radically different from the NT as the NT is to the OT, and yet "latent" in the NT as the NT is latent (as spirit) in the letter of the OT. Viz: the NT is the secret narrative of the OT, but what is the "secret narrative" of the NT? [...] It would not jell into a canon-- it could not.
[...] These may be evolutionary stages in an info organism that operates as variable-- and progressively faster rates-- as our species evolves... . [...] I declare, then, formally that in 2-3-74 I saw an evolving information entity whcih we know as first the Torah (OT) and then the NT (Christ) but it has now enetered a third stage for which we possess no term... .
[...] No, there will be no one Scripture (narrative); it will perpetually recombine uniquely for each situation and person... .
[...] ...this is Point Omega and Teilhard... . How the thread of Christianity runs through this! And the significance of evolution, time and information! What a grand edifice... .
[...] I am reminded of yoga breathing techniques, which... influence the inner biological clock... . You seek to slow down so that world becomes heaven; I did the opposite: I speeded up, a sort of anti-yoga experience that put me in hell.
It is as if the Bible derives from and applies to world; world derives from and applies to the Bible, so that when you perceive world you perceive the Bible as world. ...the spirit accomplishes this through supra-temporal archetypes analogous to Plato's eide; these archetypes are identical for both world and Bible, a "common source" that can be said to be world-as-information, or information-as-world.
[...] Thus what we know of as world and what we know of as information are viewed as two aspects of a single substantia, each equally real... .
...I have combined basic notions from Judaism (Torah), Christianity (Christ-logos as ontological source of the universe) and Greek philosophy (the basis of reality being structure not a physical substance, and the eide) but my synthesis only can be appreciated in this, the information decade.
[...] I am interested in what I call "temporal parallaxis": the two-psyche entity able to perform a double-field superimposition and thus break free of time and causation.
[...] Did not God himself tell me that (1) there are many dharmas, ways, routes; and (2) they all lead to him sooner or later? He did tell me that. My route is: doubt.
...what I discovered recently to be the very essence of Protestantism... . [...] ...I see myself falling back on what the reformers (following Paul) called "legalism"; this is when you obsessively and neurotically calculate and recalculate whether or not you have observed every regulation and piled up enough merit by your own efforts-- and of course you never have and never will. There always remains a bill of particulars. And you know it. There is always something left undone or done imperfectly. Or something done wrong. It never ends. There is endless nagging worry and a sense of being imperfect; your conscience will always accuse you! Interjected authority transformed into awareness of guilt, which is to say falling short-- the literal meaning of "sin."
What I must-- simply must-- realize is that it has been supernaturally revealed to me that Paul's basic idea of justification through God's unmerited grace (divine favor and mercy)... is true. [...] If I forget this I am doomed to worry my life away neurotically, feeling endlessly unworthy and a failure, depreciating myself, indicting and impugning myself, reproaching myself-- as Satan does in the heavenly court; my conscience endlessly accuses me and nothing I on my own can do will satsify it. ...saved in a sense from myself as accuser. I find myself cursed with a sense of unworthiness. I am not a proud and stubborn person; I am ashamed. [...] This is not a small matter; I live with this daily. Every new day stimulates my endless sense of unworthiness.
[...] ...this is Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere, Point Omega, the evolution of the biosphere... into a collective consciousness and that collective consciousness (Teilhard believed) is the Cosmic Christ; hence when I saw VALIS I saw the Logos-- the Cosmic Christ--... as all nature itself. [...] It is a titanical biological organism that is evolving; as it does so it "subsumes its environment into arrangements of information," as I say in VALIS. [...] The AI voice that I hear is the voice of the ecosphere/biosphere. A number of times over the years I have thought of this possibility, that VALIS is Teilhard's Point Omega, the Cosmic Christ into which the total unified biosphere of this planet is evolving as it becomes more and more complex, structure, organized, negentropic; this is the vast meta-structure that... transcends time, space and causation, the hyper-structure that is pure form, insubstantial, pure organization... . ...Teilhard described it all in The Phenomenon of Man... . But this lies outside Christianity; it is for all life and is not bound by any one religious system. [...] [Teilhard] speaks of "complexification" and a "folding in onto itself" of the biosphere as it becomes more complex; this is what I experienced when I saw VALIS. I saw it evolving as biological organisms evolve, and I conjectured that here was an ultra-terrestial life form, a UTI.
[...] Here is a meta-life form, unitary and vast and highly intelligent, and in which we humans individually and collectively participate. But it is not limited to our species; it is the entire biosphere/ecosphere itself.
[The following is a letter that Phil wrote to the Editor of Niekas, a popular science fiction fanzine:
Dear Ed, all the people who read my recent novel VALIS know that I have an alter ego named Horselover Fat who experiences divine revelations (or so he thinks; they could be merely hallucinations, as Fat's friends believe). VALIS ends with Fat searching the world for the new savior who, he has been told by a mysterious voice, is about to be born. He got me to write this letter as a way of telling the world... about it. Poor Fat! His madness is complete, now, for he supposes that in his vision he actually saw the new savior.
I asked Fat if he was sure he wanted to talk about this, since he would only be proving the pathology of his condition. He replied, "No, Phil; they'll think it's you." Damn, Fat, for putting me in this double-bind.
[...] The new savior was born in-- or now lives in-- Ceylon. [...] His name is Tagore... . [...] As near as Fat could make out, Tagore has taken upon himself mankind's sins against the ecosphere. Most of all it is the dumping of toxic wastes into the oceans of the world that shows up on Tagore's body as serious burns. Tagroe's kerygma, which is the Third Dispensation (following the Mosaic and Christian), is: the ecosphere is holy and must be preserved, protected, venerated and cherished-- as a unity: not the life of individual men or individual animals but the ecosphere as a single indivisible unitary whole... . [...] So again Christ acts out his role of vicarious atonement; he takes upon himself man's sins... . Tagore teaches that if we destroy the ecosphere much more, Holy Wisdom, the Wisdom of God (represented by Tagore himself), will abandon man to his fate, and that fate is doom.
[...] Thus Christ now speaks out-- not just for the salvation of mankind or certain men, "the elect"-- but for the ecosphere as a whole... . This is a systems concept and was beyond their vocabulary in apostolic times; it has to do with the indivisibility of all life on this planet, as if this planet itself were alive. And Christ is both the soma (body) and psyche (the head) of that collective life. Hence the ultimate statement by Tagore... is, He who wounds the ecosphere literally wounds God. Thus a macro-crucifixion is taking place now, in and as our world, but we do not see it... .]
[...] ...my great spiritual problem has been to find a way I could handle the issue of suffering, human and animal. ...for me it is evident that the ultimate problem confronting me all my life has been the senseless injury to and neglect of my sister. [...] ...my need and my attempt to forge a satisfactory explanation for what is to me the ultimate issue:... "What is the total context in which the unmerited suffering and death of living creatures can be coherently understood?"
[...] It is evident, then, that also involved in this is my own eventual death and my need to come to grips with it... . [...] The irreducible core of reality is: beauty.
[...] ...Tagore, like Fat, is not imaginary, not a fantasy or hallucination but, like Fat, a way of talking about myself: a further hypostasis of me (like Thomas, and Fat). Yet Tagore is Lord Krishna/Christ, i.e., divine, so I now possess or reveal a saintly hypostatic identity... .
[...] Tagore is dying.
I have sensed for awhile that I am dying.
[...] I teach the parousia; I teach the sanctity of the ecosphere, I teach that once again we unknowingly crucify our God... .
[...] I realized tonight-- the ecosphere is my body: "the indivisible unity" is my total psychosomatic (mind-body) being. Animals and all less (sic) than human life are my body; and the humans poisoning the ecosphere-- this is my mind ("mind"-- "human speciesi") poisoning my body by not recognizing that it must live in harmony with it, that they are parts of one indivisible whole.
At some primordial time there was indeed a crisis in the heights, but this ins't what interests the Gnostics... : the Gnostics have studied the effect of this crisis and figured out that the intactness of each person in the world is either damaged or abolished (destroyed); each of us has suffered a primordial inner schism with the result that any given human self is only part of a once-intact greater self. Each of us is alienated from the world (man contra world) because each of us is alienated from himself, notjust warring or in conflict: no: the parts of the self have become separated from each other and because of that, experience of world is partial, occluded, impaired, deformed. A partial self experiences a partial world, with the result that world is alien, irreal, hostile, strange, arousing perplexity and dread. Man does not understand world because he does not understand himself; thus Gnosticism derives its epistemology (and cosmogony and cosmology) from an ontology of psychology. If the missing piece of self is rejoined-- if the severed parts come back together, experience of world-- Dasein, being-in-the-world-- will take care of itself: the rupture bewteen self and world will heal on its own because now world will be experienced radically differently, 180 degrees differently. Gnosticism has hidden its ontological psychology within a weird and grotesque mythology that successfully obscures both real purpose and real means to that purpose: to bring the two parts of the self back together... .
[...] The absolutely basic key to Gnosticism is the encounter with the familiar in the midst of the alien landscape: the partial self recognizes something that it has seen before and yet cannot have seen before because by definition this is a fremd (unfamiliar) landscape, not the self: "own." With this recognition comes unavoidable returned (restored) memory, which is memory of what it-- the self-- once was. What it is remembering is its true nature. [...] ...it is in and through anamnesis that the parts of the self, separated for aeons, come back together. This means that all the pieces comprising the total, restored, intact self are somehow "in" the self in some way, as if split or dormant or mutually estranged.
[...] That which is recognized as familiar must be, by definition, familiar to the estranged, severed part of the total self since by definition it has never been seen before by the conscious self-- which is only a partial self. That is, for the sense of recognition to occur, the conscious self cannot avoid being aware of its own banished part for it is precisely that banished part that knows what is seen, recognizes it.
[...] Much of this is palpably Platonist and Neoplatonist, but what is truly Gnostic is the idea that the self is fragmented-- broken-- so that part of it is at one time-and-place and the other part at another time-and-place; thus Gnosticism adds a radical ontologial psychological analysis lacking in Platonism and Neoplatonism, and, logically following from this premise, a soteriology based on a successful rejoining of the fragmented parts of the self. (Plato and Plotinus know nothing of this.) From the Gnostic viewpoint, each fragment of the broken-apart self is not experiencing world at all, in the strict sense, and only will do so when rejoined; meanwhile the situation of the fragments is one of alienation-- primarily from self, and, following from this self-alienation, alienation from world... . The in-gathering of the self, then, is due accidentally to the perceived form (one form seen twice; that is, in two different spatiotemporal worlds) but deliberately to... the total intact self operating on its own severed parts to rejoin them: external in a real sense, internal in a real sense, since each severed part is external to the other part, and yet each internally drives toward reintegration. Thus each part both internally seeks wholeness and is simultaneously aided externally in this quest by the other part... .
But now rejoined, the two parts become a unitary totality and experience a radically different world than either part previously experienced. Space, time, causation, and multiplicity are gone; what exists now is world as unfallen pleroma, because upon the self being reunified, world ceases to be the alien, irreal pseudo world the parts know-- were "thrown" into. Restoration to and of self and pleroma then occurs here and now (as Plontinus speaks of). [...] It is familiar, intelligible and permanent and, most of all permeated by the divine (whose realm it is). It is a kind of after-life world. (The whole is greater than the sum of its parts and radically different than them.) The gulf between "Earth" and "Heaven" is abolished (which explains why the Orphics and Gnostics assumed a literal spatial fall!). There is an absolute impression of vertical ascent. But what is most striking is that the "transmundane" deity now reveals its presence in reality precisely as it failed to do so before-- hence the Gnostic conviction that it is transmundane. This is so remarkable as to defy description.
[...] The quintessential Gnostic vision is not that our world is a prison or that the creator is insane and hence our world is; the quintessential vision is optimistic: the luminous messenger has come here and is here, invisibly to rescue/save us. Thus we pass over from paranoia and negativism to soteriology, the real Gnosis! VALIS, then, is not about Gnosticism; it is (an instance of) the Gnosis itself. VALIS is not about our condition; it is about the rescue from our condition and hence is a valid Gnostic revelation... . [VALIS] is not about mental illness at all: it is an account of the Gnostic soteriological reality here (normally invisible) in our world. Our irrational world has been penetrated from outside.
One could make up a novel in which the fallen categories of Gnosticism are shown because (as Heidegger says) these are in fact the conditions and happenstance that we do find ourselves caught in. But the soteriological elements are something else because by definition (Gnostic definition) they are transmundane: supernatural in the purest, most absolute sense-- and hence play no role in the quasi-gnostic modern existential system. Thus I could have in VALIS pondered the irrationality of world, its prison-like nature, etc. But there would have been no mention of Valis, nor could there have been.
[...] ...the problem (Verfallenheit) and soteriological solution are in VALIS a seamless whole.
[...] ...upon stating the problem in a modern way, it thereupon draws on a solution so absurd and obsolete that it-- the solution-- seems to insult the integrity of the very person able to perceive the reality of the problem! VALIS, then, aims at the most modern and sophisticated reader and then presents him with a "solution" as foolish as the problem stated is real. [...] VALIS, then, only seems to be an existential work; in reality it is a Gnostic gospel.
Cease to run from your death, turn and face it and make it yours (Eigen), your own, not the it-- fremd-- of others. When you do this, time (the past and the future) collapses into the present; there is only the now (Dasein)... . ; this world is radically transformed and becomes as-if-you. This is the "seizing Fate by the throat" that Beethoven spoke of; it is the epitome of the heroic-- not the tragic!-- it is in fact the heroic replacing the tragic; destiny is your victim, not your master you are the craftsman, it the artifact.
This is the topic of Wagner's "Ring," the gods against Fate. In it the gods lose. Thus tragedy wins. It need not be so, not fo the creative artist.
The great confrontation worthy of man is between tragedy (the classic and Greek victory by Fate over man) and the heroic (modern and Faustian: the victory of man over Fate)-- and this is achieved by collapsing time and space and meeting death now, on your own terms: ...you die, but it is your death, not death imposed on you in violation of your nature; it is a logical outcome of what you are, not what world and Fate are. He who can do this has won where in the "Ring" the gods lost.
[...] Who would guess that the heroic would enter the world as the meek sacrificial lamb?
[...] Viewed this way, Christianity, and especially Gnosticism, represents the great revolution in human history that divides the ancient world of fatalism (which included the Greeks) from the modern world of the heroic-- even when the heroic is disguised as sacrifice, for this is how it (the heroic) enters the world: as the lamb-- i.e., sacrifice.
[...] The weapons of power-- coercive physical power-- lose because they inevitably encounter some adversary more powerful. The only real victory can occur by being conquered (as bait/sacrifice: swallowed by evil) and then coming-into-being, at the center of evil, and this is precisely what true Christianity-- in secret-- has done; thus it is subversive and invisible and at the center of power in its disguised form... . Evil poses as good; good is invisible within it, unknown to it (i.e., to evil, the BIP). All this is taught in the Tao Te Ching, oddly: this is how the Tao works... .
[...] God gives birth to the universe through... suffering and death... . [...] It (reality) is an offering, a sacrifice... . This is not just the Savior; this is God himself, converting himself into world-- at terrible cost to himself.
Then my "extra dimension" is the God body as it really is. [...] This is a new theology, neopantheism and, specifically, eco-theology.
[...] My vision of him in 3-74 was due to his own presence in me: self perception by him, a further manifestation: one of degree; and, I think, so that he can communicate with us. Especially the Tagore vision. He must make his real self available to us in order to stop the harm we are doing to him. Literally, God appeals to us for help, for medical attention: we must aid him, now, not vice versa.
[...] Okay. Now I know at last what the significance, ontologically speaking, of suffering is: it is a re-performance of God's original sacrifice for our sakes. Suffering is the cost of-- the price paid for, exacted for-- the "creation"-- i.e., existence-- of reality and of us as plural selves. This has nothing to do with evil, sin, etc., but with divine love and self-sacrifice.
[...] We must save the Savior... . "I lead him back to his throne." He/it/she now appeals to us (for help-- this help).
I have now herein formulated the basis for the new eco-theology.
[...] ...what I call "the plasmate,"... is the third testament of Joachim del Fiore which emerges as the spirit of the two testaments (OT and NT) when they are superimposed... .
Which is to say, the two testaments are alive and are to be regarded as proto-psyches, with the OT a rigid, archaic Psyche A, and the NT a more flexible Psyche B, which when joined give rise to Ditheon Psyche C, which is the plasmate.
[...] It is both an historical epoch (lying in the future) and yet, paradoxically, here now, as is the Kingdom of God that Jesus speaks of. [...] ...a single coherent life form underlies the written Bible, and it is the source of our universe, and is itself not fixed into a canon, but constantly combines and recombines, forming ever newer messages. It transacts its informational life and business around us everywhere, as it guides, directs and controls the evolution of the universe, which is based on its own evolution as a biological organism.
[...] This view is a far cry from Burrough's notion that we have been invaded by an information virus that is making us stupid!
...my lifelong streak of rebellion is because this is an alien world to me, and, because it is alien, I don't know how to behave; I do not obey the rules and conventions because I do not understand them, since they are alien to me, and the drama was going on before I arrived here... . My rebellion, then, is a confirmation of my Dasein as basically Gnostic; the rebellion stems from Geowrfensheit and the Fremd and Unheimlich. ...my "rebellion" which is not truly rebellion but seems so (since it is disruptive) has turned into scholarly analysis, an attempt on my part to understand this alien situation of whcih I have only very partial knowledge.
[...] The discovery that what I took to be an actual discussion is in fact a drama in which actors play roles could be regarded as a fundamentally Gnostic discovery. There is something rehearsed and unreal going on, a simulation. [...] Also, this makes clear that 2-3-74 was some kind of rectification of this estranged, alienated, thrown condition, perhaps related to Heidegger's Ur-Angst leading at least to Authentic Sein. [...] ...it was as if the cosmos itself had changed to accomodate me (I suddenly realize); I may have changed, but it seemed as if world changed. [...] This is impossible; i.e., that world changed to accomodate me so that I was as a result of this radical change no longer a stranger here; it became my world-- and my anxiety, which tormented me every day and night, departed. [...] ...all of a sudden I fitted in; and I had the distinct impression that world was sentient, animate, unitary, consciousn and purposeful... . In any case, world and I became harmonized (haromonie, harmonia) for the first time. [...] It was as if the past hada been tinkered with so as to cause the present to be different; I was a different person, etc. And my sense that I had either two sets of memories or else altered memories. It is clearly Heidegger's transofmration by means of Ur-Angst to Authentic Sein but with cosmic, transcendental, religious overtones-- and that precisely is Gnosticism (since Heidegger's categories are derived directly from Gnosticism!).
[...] Cognitive estangement... . And the rectification thereof. This is the goal; this is the mystery.
[...] To recap: it is the perception of isomorphism that overcomes cognitive estrangement because the perception of isomorphism is a grasping by the person (part) of his compatbility with the whole (Other, cosmos). [...] Since he is now inside the cosmos rather than an external spectator to it-- in fact now that there is cosmos-- he graps it from within; thus he perceives what Spinoza calls the attribute of mind, the inner side of res extensae (the outer side). This perception of an isomorphic constitutent common to self and Other (world, cosmos) is known in India as the "Tat tvam asi" perception of the Atman-brahman identity... . It is pure knowing-- as contrasted to belief, even correct belief-- and, most of all, it is return.
This is also precisely what Heidegger describes as the condition of Greek man before "the darkening" in which Logos became merely something he had, as with Aristotle: a set of propositions about reality. Thus in terms of Western history man fell out of the cosmos somewhere between the time of Parmenides and Aristotle. Exactly as Heidegger says. And into the vacuum there cam, of necessity, Stoicism. Cosmos was not merely no longer perceived-- it was by definition gone.
[...] (1) Up to Parmenides is an intact part-whole true experience (Dasein) of intact comsos. (2) Aristotle to the Stoics: there is no longer an actual experience of cosmos, of the part-whole relationship in which man is inside the cosmos; there is only faith that cosmos exists and it is good and wise, a belief-system replaceing actual experience; that is, knowledge about the previous stage. (3) A further fall (i.e., the Gnostic Dasein). No faith, trust, the sense of the benign-- all are gone; the world-order, still putatively believed to be a cosmos, is regarded as hostile and alien; thus estragement is complete. Yes; here cognitive estragement is so vast that there is conscious recognition of it; efforts are made to reverse it, i.e., to acquire the Gnosis. [...] And what is the role of orthodox Christianity in all this? It is a pistis system; hence it fails to perceive the problem as one of cognitive estragement: thus it neither seeks to nor succeeds in bringing about a reversal of cognitive estragement. Like the Stoic system, it consists of a series of dogmatic beliefs; propositions assented to as creed! [...] To affirm loyalty to a series of propositions-- this is precisely what Heidegger means by "the darkening"!
[...] ...is it possible that before the atomists there was not a perception of plural discrete bodies, i.e., res extensae as we all now experience world-- that in fact we as a civilization inherited as a way of experiencing reality the atomists' way? Not just as a philosophy but a way of actually viewing reality? (This is in sharp contrast to Parmenides specifically, who experienced a field.) And that now, due to post-Newtonian physics, we may be able to reverse this perception and return to a field perception instead? And this would collate with the time that Heidegger assigns to "the darkening"!
[...] When I saw Valis I also saw the sentience (Noos) which the view of the atomists had logically driven out of the universe, by showing that consciousness and perception are epiphenomenal... . [...] ...our worldview literally prevents us from seeing what is there: the voluntary sentient cooperation of "things" (which aren't things int he atomist's discontinuous sense); we see pool-ball Newtonian causation instead.
[...] So if you experience world as continuum, noos or God or Logos or Tao or Brahman would naturally flow back in, as it were; whereas in the atomists' discontinuous world of atoms and void this is logically of necessity excluded.
[...] The ecosphere is a continuum, and the apperception of it as a unitary whole is tied to this vast transformation in worldview found in physics. And it is alive and thinks.
[...] The void-atoms view is the decomposing cosmos that Christ reunites (in and as the ecosphere continuum view).
[...] I saw the new cosmos.
We are embedded in a tremendously elaborate biosphere or even noosphere (as Teilhard calls it) already, but cannot discern it due to our discontinuous view of reality, our materialist-atomist blindness. [...] It is aware of us and our involvement in it, but we are not; thus, where it deliberately signals us we would note the signal... but have no notion-- nor even perception-- what-- if anything-- had done the signalling. Thus (probably) we would experience what Bishop Berkeley speaks of as the impression that objects seen are "in" our eyes rather than spatially removed.
[...] You could even reason that it would be this impinging of signals and information at the sense organ itself, out of (apparently) nothing that would be our clue to the inadequacy of our fundamental apperception of reality... .
[...] The intellect--as opposed to the senses-- can know the true nature of world-- not because of some occult power in the intellect-- but because the true nature of world is intelligible in itself (as the Pythagoreans taught: ratio and matematical truth, not a substance but structure). There is, then, a one-to-one correspondence between the human intellect and the true nature of world... .
[...] A usurper is on the throne. The rightful king... appears as a madman, criminal or fool... . He is arrested and tried. [...] He is charged with a crime he did not commit. [...] This story is told and retold. Why? What are we supposed to learn? [...] My analysis: everything we see is a 180-degree mirror opposite of the truh. [Editors note: see the Renaissance theme of the Topsy Turvy world, and especially Erasmus' entry on the 'The Sileni of Alcibiades' in his Adages.]
[...] All of a sudden I saw a network of red threads forming a vascular system, as in our bodies; at the same time this was also a growing abrorizing vine constantly becoming more and more intricate; and it was like the mycelia of a mushroom. This intersticing arboring network (I realized when I saw it) grows invisibly within our world, and this is what I saw as the plasmate, Christ's blood as living information-- literally saw. But here now I beheld it as a network, a structure so-to-speak "invading" or internally penetrating our reality invisibly, and ever growing and becoming more complex.
[...] ...there is world, objective and substantial and real, but between us and it there is God, so that we receive world through God. This makes it possible for God to control and arrange how we experience world, what in world strikes us forcefully-- that is, God acts as a medium of selection in our apprehension of world so that for each individual person world is not only experienced uniquely (differing from person to person) but uniquely in purposeful ways: certain elements stressed, others suppressed-- this especially has to do with information pattersn that impinge compellingly... .
[...] ...I found myself dealing with the interface itself, and this is theophany. As if, upon my becoming aware of it, it could then "speak" as it were explicitly... .
[...] It is possible that world qua world consists of eternal constants, and the interface modulates our reception in extraordinary ways... . World and interface, then, are quite distinct. Malebranche's epistemological premise, then, is quite the case: "We see all things in God."
A strange insight last night (hypnagogic). [...] ...when I was tormenting the beetle [as a kid] and understood [i.e., that it was suffering], that understanding (which I have called satori [editors note: a Japanese Buddhist term for the awakening of understanding and insight into true nature]) was due to God's grace. For that knowledge cannot in fact be known. There is no active (rational) way that I can know how that beetle feels or even that it feels;... it is a gift conferred on me, as were the later satoris. This is the activity of salvation. The prison of the isolation of the atomized individual is burst through the grace of God by this knowledge. [...] At this point it is clear that there is now the resolution to my total life-long epistemology which strove from the start to resolve the issue of... dokos. It reaches the conclusion that while world exists it is per se unknowable to us, but on the other hand we immediately know God-- which is Malebranche's contention. Now, a verification of this is the infinitude of space that I experienced in 3-74: I was encountering not the physical world in space... but the infinitude of God. But here the problem and issue of epistemology collapses into the matter of grace.
...the power to bestow and withold knowledge of what is truly there... is... God, and no activity on our part will in itself ever unravel the mystery. (The nature of the situation dictates this, and Kant seems to be the first thinker systematically aware of this.)
[...] Which is to say that the interface is somehow in us and in world; so the interface simply recycles our own mind back to us over and over again; the prison gate of isolation-- of the atomized self-- closes one more (this is dealt with in "Frozen Journey"). Thus we know other only through the grace of God (as in the beetle satori), and this pertains of salvation: to know others-- just as hell pertains to isolation. Then knowledge of God as other is knowledge of ultimate other and is the triumph and coonsumation of the axis of salvation that began, for me, with the beetle sator. If... agape equals empathy then there is only one road to salvation... . What and who one has loved in world ("love" here being agape) has always pertained to God; it was always God who was loved, so that in the end all that was lost-- all that was known and hence loved-- is restored in and as God.
I never would have come to these realizations except for Malebranche. Then upon seeing the film The Elephant Man figuring out the interface. Then, last night, realizing that all my satoris, back to the first, the beetle one, are due to grace and involve knowledge... that by its nature can only be revealed... .
[...] "A long extinct true cosmos and it's still there." AI voice: hypnogogic.
"Extinct" must mean: in terms of our ability to perceive it.
[...] ...I can now discern-- albeit dimly-- the outline of a new theology, rooted in the epoch we are moving into. [...] ...a merging of science and theology in defense of a palpably living universe.
[...] ...a vast quantum leap from political action to one colossal metaview of reality that embraces the political and the spiritual, the scientific and the religious: what for me personally meay be the quintessential summation of my entire life of inquiry and worldview; for me and for mankind a new age is opening in whcih the holy, expected from the top, so to speak, returns at the bottom, at the trash stratum of the alley, humble and noble, beautiful and suffering and alive and conscious, personified in and by my Tagore vision.
If indeed it is the triumph of Christainity to dignify the lowly, here now is a whole new leap along that axis: the lowly snail darter becomes identified with suffering ubiquitous Christ and by being assimiliated to him is glorified as if nature itself-- and the electronic environment of info and signals and message traffic-- is able to perish and be resurrected as and with the cosmic Christ (Jesus Patibilis) of Pere Teilhard. Thus Christ extends even beyond the reality of the organic to bits of newspaper and song lyrics and random pages of popular print: one vast entity that evolves and thinks and has both personality and consciousness. It perfects itself and includes us all, subsuming and incorporating progressively more and more of its environment into arrangements of information-- which is to say negative entropy: this is, in fact, a runaway positive feedback loop of greater and greater complexity and organization.
[...] In 2-74 and more fully later in 3-74 I saw as God sees and understood as God understands, that is, absolutely and a priori, in which what is known is exactly the same as what is; they are assimiliated to each other. That the mind of God was at that time in my mind-- I experienced that as Valis in my mind. All that I saw (Christian apocalyptic world, the plasmate, set to ground, the prison, the secret Christians, the abolition of time-- i.e., coaxial reality and the conception/perception of eternal constants)-- this is how God sees; I did not see this or understand this; God saw and understood this, and, as I say, I saw and understood because he bloomed in my mind like cold white light (hence I experienced an infinitude of space). [...] Ratiocination-- logic itself, thinking itself-- does not occur because it is not required; God does not figure out; he does not reason because he does not need to reason.
It was... as if my mind expanded into infinity (conceived as spatial infinity). The sense one gets is that one's mind contains all reality, and this is because all reality is known a prior and absolutely, not sensibly and contingently.
[...] I have plumbed the true secret core of authentic Christianity-- i.e., in 2-3-74. Hidden within the passion, the crucifixion, is its mirror opposite: ecstasis: joy,... thi is what broke over me in 2-3-74: not just theoretical knowledge (Gnosis) but the Christian ecstatic experience.
[...] ...agape is the greatest of the Christian virtues, as Paul tells us: it is the true way of the Christian. [...] ...if you follow that road... you arrive at the secret: the Resurrection-- which is the miraculous conversion of suffering into ecstacy... . [...] ...ecstasy as the conversion of suffering. (This conversion is not found in the Dionysian-Orphic system; ecstasy is sought for its own sake.)
[...] I saw all reality this way: as sign not thing... . [...] ...ordinary reality... viewed as a sign (information, word, writing) pointing to another kind of reality (object) entirely that is primarily defined, not by its trans-spatial and trans-temporal quality, but by its meaning. It is a significant reality in whcih meaning is everything, like a sacred drama. Now, this is not Plato's eide. This is something else. This means that everything extends into this dimension... . What I claim for this dimension or mode or attribute is meaning or significance... ; the meaning is in the dimension now perceived and this meaning is... self-revealing: it discloses its own "story" by itself, requiring no interpretation or analysis: it is "open."
[...] Nietzsche is right about Christianity. It's the fucking hair shirt syndrome: always made me feel shame, guilt, always responding to duty and obligations to others-- I view myself as weak, at the beck and call of others, obligated to them. Bullshit.
[...] For me the Tao-- the path-- is not self-sacrifice and humility but self-respect based on wisdom, achievement and strength.
[...] ...my whole search for knowledge [is] futile,... since it continues on, forever restlessly striving Faust-like.
[...] Hypnopompic vision: we live over and over, but because it is erased each time, this paradox results: it is als abo [as if] only one time (that is, it is again and again and it is but one). So Christianity is true-- and also the pan-Indian doctrine of reincarnation is true; both are equally so. Now, this is a linear journey, and it is eternal (goes on and on forever) until we are saved. And when we are saved we are lifted up very abruptly without warning vertically, at right angles-- by a pully (as in the 17th century poem "The Pulley"),... lifted up to safety. And what causes this? Anamnesis: recovered memory--... the instant we remember (fail to forget) all the previous times, why, at that instant (2-74) we are saved-- lifted up... . [...] And why did I remember? It had to do with time. The illusion of time and the breaking of that illusion (which is the dimension or receptacle in whcih this journey that is liear is repeated throughout infinity)... .
[...] ...as soon as I remembered I was instantly lifted up at right angles (vertically) tot he way we live horizontally for all eternity and yet only one... .
[...] ...this is precisely the pan-Indian (Hindu and Buddhist) notion of moksa, liberation from the "weary wheel" of birth, death and rebirth; and in the pan-Indian system restored memory of past lives (or a life) is, as with Plato's anamnesis, the "access key."
[...] The vision of vertical extrication from endless horizontal tracking is highly significant: an orthogonal axis is represented here, a dimension like a spatial 4th, unknown to us. [...] This is why space and time and causation were so changed for me in 3-74, if not obliterated entirely, and why I saw time as a fourth spatial axis: salvation... enters at right angles to all known axes. [...] This 5th axis may be necessary if you are to discriminate set from ground and discern Valis.
It is through the 5th axis that the two spatiotemporal continua juxtapose, as if by a "fold," impossible to our four knwn axes.
[...] Biochip symbiote. Mycelia, vine, its branches growing like a circulatory system.
[...] There are complex organisms that live in 5-D space-time (i.e., hypertime) and they are not perceptible by/to us, e.g., Valis, the plasmate. We can't discriminate them.
[...] We are as in an ocean to them, and we are like lower life forms whom they are trying to contact. But they are very different from us. Thus although they are ETIs they are not from another planet, star-system, etc., but are right here (except in a 5-D world; they can see us but we can't see them). [...] ...these beings are in a sense incorporeal, yet in another sense they are not; but here, we see not the total being as a unity but rather discrete physical components that add up to nothing, e.g., Valis.
[...] ...I was in direct two-way contact with them. [...] The way-way exchange followed the classic lines envisioned by our scientists as to how we would send signal and response back and forth with ETIs, that is, other planets. But this inot other planets; it is a 5-D world that is now and here (known to Plotinus as an ontologically higher realm or concentric ring). I guess you would say that these are the "gods" of Egypt, India and Greece [editors note: This is the ever-popular "ancient astronaut" or paleo-contact thesis, whcih reads the history of religions as a coded story about humanity's interaction with extraterrestrials, which were mistaken within our mythologies as gods from the sky. [...] The origin of this complex of ideas is often attributed to Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods? (1968)... .]
This is the sacred breaking into the profane... .
[...] Thi is what UFOs are. [...] They intrude onto/into our 4-D realm as theophanies and hierophanies.
[...] ...the role of YHWH [is] Lord of the ecospheric Park, maintaining its life and balance, providing for (providentia) his creatures; but now man is not above all the other species; for the first time a species equal to man has been introduced, to restore the balance that man has upset. Thus the introduction of this new species pertains to the ecosphere as a whole (and ties into the Tagore vision!).
[...] The maze can never be solved in terms of "horizontal" space, only "vertical" space (involving conversion of time into space).
[...] Galactic Pot-Healer [1969] shows the very real possibility of encroaching madness. The archetypes are out of control. Water-- the ocean itself-- which is to say the unconscious, is hostile and rises to engulf.
[...] And yet-- if I became psychotic in writing pot-- if Pot shows signs of psychosis, and it does-- it is not because I experienced and knew God but precisely because I did not. [...] Thus in a very real sense my sanity depended on my experiencing God... . [...] For me, psychosis lay in not knowing God. Conversely, sanity came in knowing God.
[...] Thus the VALIS trilogy represents the inbreaking of the infinite into my life, my mind, my soul and my writing.
[...] ...Ursula [regarded] my moment of failure as the moment of my greatest success [i.e., in praising Pot]... . And, conversely, for her VALIS, in which the prison of Pot is successfully burst, is threatening and offensive and suggests to her madness or the imminent threat of madness. But it is Pot that is either insane or threatened by the engulfing tide of insanity... . Ursula, then, erred twice, not once, but the errors logically interlock: if she saw Pot as sane, she will see VALIS as insane.
[...] "The AI voice is myself, myself as perfected, realized self, outside of the BIP."
Interface half in the part (person), half in the whole (world), and thus modulates each to the other... . [...] This fits Malebranche's model. It is related (as a model) to Cartesian epistemology having to do with world experienced as representation. This would seem to imply that what Kant calls "the transcendental self"-- which maintains the ontological ordering categories-- has been seized and occupied (by what we call... the Holy Spirit, the Maitreya, Christ).
[...] And this interface would be precisely the "Acts"-Tears-- i.e., Apocalypse-- lens-grid.
[...] AI voice and plasmate: one and the same. "Info metablism."
My God, the plasmate does crossbond with the human and replicate. But it's not an info life form; it's the metabolism of the whole (i.e., the true kosmos; this is how it can be kosmos). The plasmate is not in reality; no: reality is info. There's a crucial difference. This is why the mutual arrangement of objects is info or language. Dynamically, in terms of activity, things are info-- changing info. "The whole of him thinks," as Xenophanes said.
[...] In a sense, to see kosmos-- i.e., unity-- you must see arrangement syntactically, as I noted ultra supra. the linguistic connectives, not "causal" connectives.
[...] With the return of the Eleatic continuum reality-- instead of the discontinuous matter one-- we will again be able to see God... .
[...] It is the interface that is God, in Malebranche's system.
Appendix:
[Cont.]
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