The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

Folder 89

[89:11] January 3, 1981

The incident of the pink light and the info about Chrissy differed from normal daily reality only in this regard: I was consciously aware of it; we must subliminally pick it up, like my engramming on the fish (teeth) necklace.

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. It is what it says; it doesn’t have Logos; it is Logos. Its body is its own information.

There. This is why it takes the form of physical arrangements into info. This life form is that. Damn it, it’s a life form that doesn’t use info; it is info.^*

Time turns literally to space: both another (fourth) spatial dimension but we see this imperfectly as augmented 3-D (space). This is why the past doesn’t perish in the MMSK, why when something goes into it—is incorporated into it—it is permanent. The past is still there—this is the essence of the MMSK, to preserve the past (as what I call reticulated phylogons).

The MMSK exists in 4 spatial dimensions and is physically right here; our 3-D world is it, imperfectly seen. Hence we can’t discriminate (live info) set to ground. The next step in human evolution will gain this as-it-were ultra-parallaxis. As we previously added color. [ . . . ]

My God the truth (true explanation) is quite simple: I saw in 4-D and saw a living info life form here. Why, it extends along the temporal axis as a spatial axis; hence my Bible-into-hologram in Divine Invasion. And seeing King Felix. The various physical-depth levels in Tears. Time as space. [ . . . ]

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. [ . . . ]

So it started as a cognitive leap, leading to a percept-system leap: the meta-abstracting began it, in 2-74. And that led to the phosphene graphics, my first vision of the 4th spatial axis, or my 3rd eye coming on. I was seeing back through the ages when I saw the phosphene graphics; in Ubik I theoretically postulated that each eidos contains all its previous form-manifestations, which Patrice pointed out was a major philosophical breakthrough.

Like I say, I am in a world where other people still say, “One apple plus one apple equals two apples,” and I say, “One plus one equals two.” My meta-abstracting caused meta-perception at once—well, very soon the “3rd eye” organ came on.

Repeat: there is no theory, account or explanation of this in antiquity; this is a new, evolutionary leap in (1) meta-cognition, followed by (2) meta-perception of world. VALIS, alas, is told from a two-eyed standpoint (about a three-eyed reality). “Christ, the Logos, invading the plasmate, Valis, transubstantiation,” etc., are all 2-eyed terms dealing with a 3-eyed reality. Someone else will later have to figure out what happened. But I got the clues from reading over the first half of VALIS tonight.

Where I have been right is: to have treated 2-3-74 as titanically important and to have toiled for almost 7 years to figure out what the fuck happened, and, as a result, what it was I saw. My big breakthrough was in October ’80 when I realized about the cognitive meta-abstracting (of spatiotemporality). Only then did I begin to get it, as I can fathom now, today, at last. But the clues are there in VALIS which is a case history of the next evolutionary step in thinking-perceiving. [ . . . ]

Goddam it, it is the eye of the God denied us. It opened for me, as it did for the Buddha, but I give (at least as of today) an adequate—i.e., contemporary—explanation. It is the Dibba Cakkhu experience; it did happen to Gautama. This is “waking up”! Enlightenment. Transtemporal equals trans (4th) spatial. I should not have written religious and occult stuff into VALIS; that’s 2-eyed thinking about a 3-eyed experience. However, Plato did help critically with his anamnesis theory. Because my “3rd eye” scoped out the past I falsely believed that the explanation lay in the past; I knew the world of 2,000 years ago was involved. It was: as what I saw (spatially), but the answer is not in the past but, rather, concerns the past. VALIS not only (1) lacks this, the correct explanation, but, more (2) is cluttered with specious speculating. Oh well—there is enough correct reportage to make it of some use to future evolved humans. [ . . . ]

Q: Okay, what did you do?

A: Meta-abstracted re spatiotemporal sets.

Q: And as a result?

A: The ajna eye came on and as a result I meta-perceived along 4 spatial axes.

Q: And as a result what did you see along these 4 spatial axes?

A: (1) Something we see partially: the MMSK. And: (2) something we don’t see at all: a living info life form: Valis/the plasmate.

Q: And what does this add up to?

A: A quantum evolutionary leap in cognition and way-of-being in the world both in terms of cognition (comprehension about reality) and perception—literally—of that reality. Plato and Buddha (e.g.) were possibly onto this as an experience (anamnesis and) but did not understand what it signified. [ . . . ]

Finally: this untangling after 7 years of work goes directly back to the grueling labors circa 10-80 when I really bore down. The Logos is pointed to—but new language will have to be developed. Maybe we can work it out in cooperation with “the Logos,” the info life form that I saw that is here.

I understand! 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, perception of four spatial axes, 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. This is the next step in human evolution: for the right hemisphere to come on.

And to think it never occurred to me all these years that when I looked at the contents of Tears and saw the text at several spatial levels—each successive one according to how old it was—I was seeing time as space, which means that I had converted time into space according to the quote from Parsifal, “You see, here time turns into space.” Thus (if one wanted to) one could set up a cypher system by which a message could be read off at a glance, as set to ground (in other words in terms of spatial depth along this fourth spatial axis; but whether it is cypher or just the normal way the plasmate operates I have no idea; it may not be cypher at all but just its MO). The message lodges in a context that is not the same age as it; in other words set and ground lie at different depths along the fourth spatial axis. Apparently the percipient does not need to know the age of the different texts in order to see them lying at different depths; they will lie at their appropriate depths according to their intrinsic age, not according to the percipient’s knowledge; this is the case because they actually are at these different depths, when time (age) is converted into space. If this is so, it is quite extraordinary, perhaps the most so of anything I’ve come across in this experience and exegesis of the experience. For example, a percipient who is able to see time as space (the fourth spatial axis) will see the word ASHER on the Linda Ronstadt albums as lying very deep, since it is an ancient Hebrew word. So a message can be put together involving it as a linking device. For example, when I looked at that page in Tears I saw the word FELIX at a different depth from the words surrounding it, and this was before I knew that it is a Latin word as well as a name. I did not estimate the depth by the age; I estimated the age by the depth, by the various different depths. In my opinion someone or something is using this mechanism as a message-carrier. What I have been calling “the ‘Acts’ lens-grid” is in fact the appearance in me of the ability to see time as space, hence age as depth. I stood in the antechamber of a world that is already long inhabited and well-utilized. This is momentous. Since the verbal integer (morpheme) sets its own depth independent of the particular knowledge of the percipient, the enciphering-deciphering (encoding and then extraction) is spontaneous. ASHER can be used (for example) to show where a message begins. It can be linked and relinked with morphemes of other ages greater than that of the inferior bulk-text. What it is linked to need not be the same age as it but only a different age from the inferior bulk-text. The fact that I was used as an unwitting medium to generate and hence transmit such material shows an instance of how this is done; the older, deeper material in Tears came to me in the form of a dream with the urgent sense that I had to enter it into the text of Tears exactly as I had seen it; only years later did I see it lying farther down—i.e., at a greater depth—and then I realized that it was older—hence lower—than the rest of the text of the novel. This material linked itself with the Latin word FELIX which I had thought of as being only a name.

I believe I counted four different depths in the total text of Tears. A single morpheme will do it. ASHER will be perfect since it is of enormous an tiquity/depth. And it’s on every Ronstadt album starting with “Heart Like a Wheel.” We are talking about literally millions of instances (print-outs), and many linkings.

This message traffic uses a system that springs normally almost automatically into existence, given the nature of the fourth axis perception (time as space). So the method is not ingenious. But the real question remains: Who is sending, and to whom, and what are they saying?

[89:29] VALIS picks up where Scanner left off. The traces of heavy metal in drugs that caused the occlusion that I noted in Scanner now appear (in VALIS) as the iron (metal) spear-tip that wounded Christ. And the occlusion that is the topic in Scanner is the topic of VALIS, but now it is an ontological cosmic occlusion: insane creator and irrational creation. The cure (remedy) is salvation through Christ who, it is stipulated, represents the principle of rationality; he breaks into the universe, heals it and us as antidote, and invisibly transubstantiates the universe into his own body. Yet, paradoxically, Christ himself has been wounded by the Black Iron Prison, the Empire, through its spear; as he is physician and savior to us we ourselves flock to destroy the Empire and heal our own savior (salvador salvandus).

[ . . . ]

Scanner is my true Paradise Lost (the story of the Fall) and VALIS Paradise Regained, the story of the restoration through Christ. Hence VALIS can only be truly understood if Scanner is taken into account. Bob Arctor on the last page of Scanner is Horselover Fat on the first page of VALIS—the two novels form a seamless whole.

(1) Scanner: Man’s fall into occlusion, ignorance, impairment and enslavement.^➊

(2)VALIS: Man’s restoration through Christ who brings him the saving Gnosis that in effect he has lost (been deprived of).^➋

➊ Here he, the man, splits into two halves: he is self-estranged. He is wounded.

➋ Here he, the man, fuses back together as one intact person; the wound has healed. He now recognizes himself as himself. The saving knowledge (gnosis) takes the form of man’s ability to identify a picture of himself as himself (“Mein eigenes Gesicht”) (or: “Mein eigenes Gestalt”¹). Thus topologically the universe that in Scanner was pulled through infinity, reversing the gestalt and making it unfamiliar (i.e., Fremd), has been reversed once more and is its familiar self: nicht Fremd but rather Heimlich. The Gnostic categories of estrangement and alienation versus returning to one’s home, the familiar, apply here. One has come to oneself after the Fall in Scanner.

[89:103] It is very, very important to realize that in Tears two distinct selves in me were writing two parallel but unconnected narratives: (1) the overt, explicated political one about forced labor camps and a U.S. ruled by five police marshals, the pols and nats; and (2) a latent religious narrative about Christ and Rome and St. Paul—and agape. Now, in 2-3-74, these two selves as (so to speak) thesis and antithesis ignited into one single ultra synthesis in which the apparently conflicting elements that divided them off from each other were fused in a totally new, vast vision of history, society, God, freedom, tyranny that constituted a revelation to each self. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” but, more, this meant psychological integration for me, individuation in Jung’s sense, wholeness, etc., and an end to internal conflict.

This synthesis combined revolutionary political activism of a Marxist type with a form of Christianity unknown to me: apocalyptic millenarianism of a Jewish messianic nature, involving a Zoroastrian dialectic (much as the Essenes believed in). [ . . . ] My primary vision was of a conflict constant in history found, e.g., in the book of Daniel in which an enslaved people fight against a tyrannical empire to establish a just kingdom under messianic rule. Upon grasping this conception of history I resolved my inner conflicts by this, a higher organizing principle or structure that subsumed all parts of me. This all embracing conception of history, society, man and the dialectic I put forth in VALIS so that VALIS is simultaneously a religious and a political novel. (Technically, it presents the view of active millenarianism; we must act politically to establish the messianic kingdom.) (It will not come on its own. So VALIS is both a broad overview and a call for positive political action essentially revolutionary.)

This does not in any way involve an about-face in my political stance (i.e., that which I inherited from Berkeley). It simply fuses it with my metaphysical, religious, epistemological, philosophical views—note “epistemological”; all my years of epistemological preoccupation are involved in the synthesis: viz: I find that Christian apocalyptic history is the true, hidden essence of reality (which of course brings in the messianic salvific mission of Jesus Christ and ultimately God). Thus all areas of my worldview are involved and integrated in this synthesis. The political element has religious implications. The religious element has epistemological implications. There are exceedingly profound historical implications, since it is in history that all this is played out. But until yesterday when I reread VALIS once again I failed to notice just how political a book it is. All my thinking has been philosophical and theological; the political part just seemed to happen. For one thing, it was always there; what is new is the religious mystical part. Also, until Reagan got in office, the political part seemed merely theoretical, but now, suddenly it seems immediate and vital. Suddenly VALIS and the vision presented in VALIS is politically relevant, as if overnight so. This, simply, is because the Empire is back and stronger and worse than ever. The timing of the book is really extraordinary.

[89:105] Stoned insight: I assimilated my theology, metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy to my political beliefs. They are all changed but the political beliefs remain the same; they ratify my political beliefs. They give it cosmic timeless scope; it is validated by and issues from divine authority.

VALIS is a fusion of the political theme of Tears, the religious theme of Deus Irae, and the street patois and split personality and dope themes of Scanner—it logically follows the three previous novels.

and other aspects: death and loss, friends. So I am right; 2-3-74 represented a flash in which the independent areas of my thinking fused into one great new synthesis in which everything I had thought before was subsumed beneath a vision of God. [ . . . ]

VALIS is composed of:

(1) My 10 volume meta-novel

(2) Politics

(3) Religion

(4) My actual life

(5) History

all fused together into a total vision that is a structure emanating out of the mutual exchange of (between, among) these five elements up to then existing independent of one another in my mind.

[89:119] The fifth Savior Fat is looking for will lead the resistance against the regime (the BIP). (Like Che.) This time it won’t just be a deposing of the regime; the revolution of the 60s will take over the government and rule in its place; this did not happen in the 60s; once Nixon was out, the counterculture dissolved—because all its leaders had been killed (as the Sibyl pointed out); so the fifth Savior replaces them and leads the revolution to overthrow the regime (the BIP), Reagan himself. This is what VALIS is all about; it preaches revolution. [ . . . ]

I see VALIS as the Bible, a political handbook, a basic text like Mao’s Red Book. Copping to the fact that I saw Christ is in order to show my authority for preaching political revolution: we must not only overthrow the regime, we must seize power in its place. I must come out of the closet. I already have in VALIS; in confirming the suspicions raised by Tears!!

Progress is taking place. 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: a wholly new thing: 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. VALIS is a manifesto.

[89:137]

(1) You cannot apprehend the eide and still employ space, time and causation as ordering categories.

(2) You cannot employ space, time and causation as ordering categories and still apprehend the eide.

This is what I finally realized: twin realizations; or rather, twin aspects of one realization. The mind (brain) must choose. (I’ve read so many articles on philosophy that I finally learned to reason, not just to guess.)

[89:139] I just reread Flow My Tears. The mystery deepens. 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 and causes Pentheus to become insane and dress up in women’s garb (alluded to by the character of Alys who “is Felix Buckman’s twin”). “King Felix” is Dionysus, “the joy God,” who was shown to me to be Christ by the dream I had in which I was shown the book page on which the name “Jesus” split apart into Zeus-Zagreus. Beyond doubt “King Felix” is a cypher and refers to the God who will—and does—pull down the King of Tears, the police tyranny; Dionysus does this (as that U.K. article described). So I am saying that “King Felix” refers primarily to Dionysus, and it was Dionysus who overthrew Nixon. My enthusiasmos in 2-3-74 was by Dionysus; I was intoxicated; it was Dionysus’ stoned magic that permitted me to see what I saw in 3-74. Greek—hence I heard Thomas thinking in Greek; hence the Sibyl and Cyclops. By the cypher Dionysus identified himself and his presence, but you had to be “mad” or intoxicated to read the cypher. Hence I dreamed of the maze at Minos, saw Crete beyond the 1:618034 doorway and Aphrodite. I was possessed—and saved—by Dionysus; he saved me from the Xerox missive trap; this is why I was manic—intoxicated. Dionysus! My equation is correct:

Dionysus inspired the counterculture’s overthrow of Nixon. And inspired VALIS in 2-3-74. The joy God—King Felix. The injury done Felix Buckman (the death of Alys) symbolizes the mortal blow to soon be struck at the tyranny by Dionysus.

Then when I was slipped the hit of STP in ’74 it was Dionysus I saw: the grapevines growing up around the figure of the Catholic priest, my little icon of the saint.² And all the pranks, games and riddles (e.g., re Erasmus). Hence I heard the word dithyramb³—the dance of Dionysus.

[89:141] I do discuss Dionysus in VALIS, but he has occluded me with Christian material—a diversion that I fell for—until I reread Tears tonight; Dionysus caused me to see all that I saw in 3-74; it was his magic—it wasn’t really Christ and God; Dionysus can take any form—he fooled me. Of course, now that VALIS is in print, Dionysus lets me see the truth; since it doesn’t matter.

[ . . . ]

“This, too, is sooth.” Yeats. It is magic. Pagan magic. This explains Diana, the AI voice. Pagan magic come to our rescue.

[89:142] Entry #12 in the tractate:

The immortal one was known to the Greeks as Dionysus; to the Jews as Elijah; to the Christians as Jesus. He moves on when each human host dies, and thus is never killed or caught. Hence on the cross Jesus said . . . etc. Elijah had left him and he died alone.

I rest my case.

[ . . . ]

The joyous (happy—Felix) Christians blowing up the BIP and running away—this is Dionysus’ perception of the grim King of Tears, his rule, and the bursting of his prison by Dionysus. To Dionysus, this is the basic perception of the dialectic of history: Dionysus, the running, joyous “secret Christians blowing up the black iron prison” versus the King of Tears. And of course I never flashed on this: 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 not only is Dionysus there (tragedy) but Christ (Christianity); it is as if Christ is born (at the end). This is truly an extraordinary novel! It is the passing of one age (antiquity) and the birth of the next (Christianity!!). So as a proto-history it goes from B.C. to A.D. The madness induced in Pentheus by Dionysus (Taverner) is converted (by the dream, which is of Christ) into agape, which is sane—the solution to Dionysus and madness and grief and loss is found in Christian agape, which appears as the solution to the ancient world itself. It is as if Dionysus has evolved into Christ. Dowland—because of his lute music—is obviously Orpheus, the link between Dionysus and Christ historically.

[89:148] Dream: the Parousia is here. RC (Rosy Cross) is controlled by the Roman Catholic church; subliminal messages so that the true Christians will identify themselves. The Holy Mother Church knows Christ is here. Hence VALIS. We are totally under the control of God (Valis) now. The separation of the sheep from the goats has begun.

[89:186] Surely someone in the world who knows about the Holy Spirit will recognize that this is what VALIS is about (but the humble author did not). Look at their stance at the end; it is that of the Eleven at the time of “Acts”—in fact VALIS is a retelling of the story of the spirit of the risen Lord returning to the grieving disciples; Horselover Fat’s grief is over the death of a friend—he seeks this dead, lost friend in and as the Savior; to this lowly grieving man, a paradigm of the Eleven after the crucifixion, there suddenly returns the spirit, turning grief and loss into joy and recovery. The Rhipidon Society is the Eleven. The death of Gloria is the death of Jesus. No one has noticed this, including me. The spirit inspires Fat with faith so that he looks forward to the Parousia not backward to the crucifixion. Without intending it, in VALIS I retold “Acts.” So for a second time, “Acts” appears in my writing as the Urwelt, the real world.

How can it be that I, even I, did not notice this: that I had depicted the grieving disciples (Horselover Fat) after the death of Jesus (Gloria) to whom the Holy Spirit returns, changing grief to joy and loss to recovery, and, most of all, turning him toward the future to wait overtly for the Parousia?

[89:219] 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.”^*

Folder 59^*

[59:8]^† In VALIS in terms of style I satisfied the most ultra-correct literary standard. From my years of the late 40s and early 50s, when I understood what true literature was especially as I was affected by Norman. Who in turn had been affected by Henry Miller. There is tremendous social, revolutionary and political purpose in the style, as well as the content.^‡

[59:12] VALIS: an artifactual analog of reality being deceptive, paradoxical, resisting analysis as to which parts are true—some parts are true, certainly. Consisting primarily of information, but not such that adds up to a coherent picture. Thus VALIS is the thing it itself describes (analyzes!). Thus primarily VALIS is a creation, not an analysis. It itself poses the very mystery and puzzle that it itself deals with. To understand VALIS, then, is to understand reality in toto itself.

Reality (as is said in VALIS) is a living maze that constantly changes. VALIS, which analyzes this maze-reality, is itself a maze, and it, like reality, constantly changes.

My analysis of the logical paradox posed by VALIS is that the narrator is sane and therefore did see Christ: this is the solution to the maze VALIS and can at once be extrapolated to the macrocosmic maze reality; viz: Christ is present, but concealed within and by layers of paradoxical camouflage—exactly as in VALIS.

[59:43]

[59:50] 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, incorrect in viewpoint: 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 by the most advanced artistic devices possible, in order to give voice to these, the final frontier of disenfranchised people—as my mail shows! Psychotic or nearly so, alone and brilliant. No one has ever spoken for them—and in their own way of expressing themselves. This is an artifact, not a sincere (naïve) 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 naïve. It is evident that I spent years figuring out how to write it. It is not spontaneous autobiography; it is a forgery, a very artistic forgery; only someone knowing about modern nonobjective protest art—especially that of Weimar!—would know what VALIS really is. It is like a Warhol painting of a Campbell’s soup can. It is very avant-garde. It is not what it seems to be—it is not quasi-psychotic confession; it is an artifact. Look out; it will delude you. Yes, it is picaresque! And it is a maze; it deliberately deceives—for the highest possible reason: not an artistic one, but to raise die rote fahne.⁴ It is of the 30s. It is dada out of antifascist Weimar. It is, in the final analysis, revolutionary (and does not have to do with religion; it has to do with revolutionary action against the state!).

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! 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. (Post dope, as it itself states.) It is as if Jack Isidore has been revealed as secretly wise: a fool in Christ. And Horselover Fat is no schizoid, as was Jack Isidore; he grieves over lost and dead loved ones. His is the apotheosis of Isidore—Isidore grown into tragic maturity, yet still himself: and it is to him that is granted the vision of Christ, as if by Christ, of Christ, to Christ.

Folder 60

[60:A-1] “The sacred mushroom and the cross.”

Elijah sending a portion of his spirit back to Elisha.

The Zadokite scrolls. Superior to Christianity, in relation to which the Gospels are a somewhat attenuated derivation (secondhand).

Nothing to do with Roman Catholic suppression. And no U.S. G-2 intrigue. Not set in the 60s and nothing to do with civil rights nor antiwar. No seances. Nothing to do with vulgar, popular credulity.

In a sense this will be about: what it should have been like, i.e., Qumran and a brilliant translator with a totally new and radical concept as to the real meaning of Christianity, in conjunction with a truly profound professional theologian. Episcopalian, not Roman Catholic.

This will not be Zoroastrian nor Kabbala, since (1) both are known; and (2) I used them in V and VR. This is new.

But possibly Malebranche and Sankara and Kant? And Spinoza? And Plato—the meta-abstraction; i.e., what I have figured out since I wrote V and VR. I.e., from October 1980 on. All consigned to the Zadokite scrolls. Orphism and Pythagoreanism.

Sacraments: mushroom bread and broth. In conjunction with the Orphic rites described by Jane Harrison. Zagreus? The miraculous child—the toys. Light, gold. Jacob Boehme’s pewter dish—the translator has connected this with the Orphic golden tablets.

The infancy of Zadok. Miraculous child of light. The Hebrew Zagreus.

The miraculous child of light, Zadok, is killed, dismembered and eaten; the messianic banquet; this confers (1) immortality; and (2) godlike knowledge. (The translator associates this with [1] Zagreus; and [2] the two trees in the garden of Eden.)

The communicants are “restored to their pre-fallen state before the soul fell into earthly incarnation in the tomb that is the body”—obviously a mixture of Hebrew and Orphic, hence Platonist and Pythagorean thought; this fusion is what interests both the translator and the Bishop.

Zagreus to Zadok to Jesus. The translator who is an atheist believes that “Zadok” is a cypher for the hallucinogenic mushroom bread and broth. But the Bishop believes otherwise. (Here I have to take into account The Road to Eleusis.⁵ I should probably explicitly refer to it.) (But not to John Allegro’s book.⁶) The effect of the flash of light on or from the gold object (toy? vessel?) is viewed as crucial. It induces (?) memory of having been a—God? Well: prefallen man (cf. The Book of Adam and Eve⁷)—the “Cave of Treasures”—the augmented vision/eyesight,^➊ whatever “prefallen man” may signify. Man who ate of the tree of knowledge and acquired the knowledge that “the Elohim” have.

Their theory: at one time (“in the beginning,” as with Julian Jaynes’ bicameral mind) we (humans) could see these “primordial archetypal ideas” but no longer can—quite a modification of Malebranche. This is what the eating of the miraculous child of light confers (in conjunction with a flash of light from the golden toys or vessel): ability to see these “primordial archetypal ideas used as the basis of creation—i.e., Plato’s eide. (Here the meta-abstraction is understood and presumed.) (I.e., the percipient no longer empirically sees the particular; the lens optic percept system provides a clue that triggers off the appropriate a priori eidos.)

All this light business relates to the fourth gospel. (And to Zoroastrianism.) The translator figures out (or speculates) based on the use of light in Orphic rites that literal light is involved—something to do with eyesight and the optic nerve and a jolt to the brain and triggering off selective phosphene activity. The phosphenes—optic neurons—are a primordial sense system by which the “archetypal ideas or eidei” were originally a priori perceived, but like the bicameral mind, it has atrophied. Why, the hallucinogenic mushroom bread and broth sets off phosphene activity! As mescaline, peyote, LSD, etc., do.

➊ This augmented eyesight the translator and Bishop connect with Malebranche’s concept of “primordial archetypal ideas used by God in creating the universe”—probably Plato’s eide.

[60:A-9]

[60:A-15]

VALIS is a titanic work of art based on a titanic artistic vision (2-3-74). I have completely rendered the fool in me (H. Fat the evolved Jack Isidore) onto paper, and this fool is Christ; so I have rendered Christ onto paper; the Savior is in VALIS but not where it says—i.e., the cosmic Christ—no: as Fat. And what does this say of me? I contain Christ—Horselover Fat/Jack Isidore/Thomas.

It’s an extraordinary novel qua novel—about an equally extraordinary experience; and these two interrelate, don’t just run parallel; they interact.

I.e., the vision (2-74 to 2-75) put in artistic form—made into a work of art. So VALIS is more important than 2-74 to 2-75! That was just the vision; what remained was the essential next half: putting it into (converting it into) a work of art.

[60:A-34] God everywhere! The cat and the music. Each cat’s mind is a complete universe; how could this be without the infinity of God?

I know God through doubt (“you are not the doubter—you are the doubt”).

Here is it all: each atom of reality yields an infinity: and where infinity is, there is God.

[60:A-35] In VALIS I transmuted myself and my life into a picaroon character: my victory, to artistically render a judgment on my—the artist’s—own life! And here’s how it comes out:

With the death of all he loves behind him (Gloria’s death stands for loss of Kathy and Stephanie, Francie, etc.), including the death of God (the child Sophia), Fat resolves his life into a search for the Savior; this is the plot of VALIS. Its Kerygma; VALIS’ message is not the parousia but pistis.

And this is me (as H. Fat), rendered into fiction forever. And yet the real truth is that I embody doubt, not faith; and yet, when I as I am am rendered into art by me the artist, doubt—absolute doubt—becomes or is seen as absolute faith, as Fat searches for the Savior, while I sit here night after night not believing. Which is the truth? VALIS enters the info flow of the macromind, so it—not I—will survive. And, as Plato said, that which is eternal alone is real.

[60:A-37] Here is the ultimate truth: the fool sees Christ. H. Fat is a fool; and I say (but it is not true), “I am H. Fat”; but in truth he has pistis, I have doubt. But people will believe the artistic version.

(1) In VALIS I depict H. Fat finding Christ.

(2) In VALIS I depict H. Fat as a fool.

(3) ∴ he did find Christ, for the fool finds Christ. Am I that fool? That is my wish fulfillment fantasy: me with faith—i.e., me the fool, not the scholar. Now all I see is my own hallucinated world—hence not God. Then we are in purgatory; it must be so. And in 2-74 I was sprung.

I perceive Ed Meskys blind and I grieve, and that grief is the purpose of the universe—its existence proves that God exists. That grief is higher even than agape; it was spoken of only in the secret literature, and it has no name. Power-wisdom-agape, so far, and now a fourth disclosure: this “grief” that I feel—it is to agape as agape is to wisdom. The Urgrund dialectic yes/no has evolved up one more notch.

I broke into the actual world, saw God; and now I’m back in this God damn hallucination of my own (purgatory). No wonder I’m disconsolate; no wonder I get ripped. To see him and then to lose him—what I need is pistis; I need to be H. Fat. “Jack Isidore” has metamorphosed from caricature of myself to my spiritual self, along the Parsifal—guileless fool—axis. Everything else I wrote tonight is bullshit, but not this. Jack Isidore, me as the fool, found Christ. I must become ∴ Jack Isidore if I am to be saved; I must model myself on him, and suffer the consequences—they are heavy, if you are the fool. This is the passion of Christ: the punishment of the fool.

[60:A-44]

Folder 75

[75:D-1] 3-74, Valis, was the mens dei. I comprehended it. It’s a strange thing to be addicted to, comprehending God’s mind—I must be a Sufi; by “beauty” (the essence of God) read “pleasure”—because the why as to why I do it, it is because it gives me pleasure.

[75:D-2] I’ve finally found a Q I don’t imagine I have an answer for: why is Kathy more beautiful than the perfect (sic) beauty of God? Maybe even St. Sophia can’t answer this; hence, as a result, we have imperfect creation, for which no rational reason can be given, even by God. This is the ultimate mystery, even God can’t penetrate it. How can something unique, transitory and imperfect be more beautiful than God/heaven?

[75:D-3] It’s all told in VALIS: losing Kathy (Gloria), and getting God as a substitute. Really, the story—and it is my life we are talking about—is very simple, when you stumble onto it. And I don’t say if the substitute is an adequate solution (i.e., as good, better, not as good); I just reported it neutrally. But the fact is, it’s not good enough. Okay, then we will apply the hermetic solution—which is what is found in Divine Invasion: Linda Fox and Xena are Kathy. And also God! Manny, alone, is not.

Hello heartbreak. Joe Gideon. Tears first treats it. Then Scanner. Then VALIS. Then Divine Invasion, a projected answer, theoretical (i.e., I didn’t find it); only DI alone of the four novels is not autobiographical. Shows I know what the answer is (I just can’t find it).

As an artist I have been successful: I’d encompassed it in the four novels (and The Golden Man intro); but in life I can’t. The final novel is fantasy.

[75:D-9] I have been looking over Scanner, the intro to The Golden Man and VALIS. The continuity is pain, emotional pain; this goes back to Tears. It is obvious that I have no defense against pain, that I am a—lunatic, one driven mad by—not pain—but by a comprehension of pain (like the Buddha). Comprehension of pain (spiritual and mental, especially) is the basis of my writing, as is my awareness of the frailty of life and how easily it passes over into death. Thus, although I have been driven insane by my comprehension, I am not cut off from reality; hence also I am a saint. And I write very well; I get it all down on paper. What does this add up to? Okay—I have at last carefully formulated an explanation (as Jim Haynes pointed out); I give my answer. It is an absurd answer, an attempt to ex plain what cannot be explained (pain, loss, grief and death). Hence it reveals this: these matters cannot be rationally explained; if they could be, I would have done so (I am smart and persistent). Hence, one can infer that our situation—thrown-ness—is an irrational one, a point I consider in my explanation; hence I expose the ontological irrationality of dasein, and thus stigmatize all philosophical and theological systems including my own. We are back—led back—to the raw brute fact of pain, loss, grief, suffering. Perhaps more than anyone else I reveal the irrational depths underlying reality. My ideological solution is a failure; if I believe in it I have gone mad. And I state that, too: that I am mad. This only reinforces the relentless picture of irrationality; my madness is merely a piece of it, allied to a greater madness. This is a new and singular worldview. What solution do I propose that works? (Inasmuch as my Gnostic system obviously does not; its failure proves its own premise, that of underlying irrationality and irreality and the failure of reason and of systems.) Humor, love and beauty. And a firm rootedness in the particular, in the ordinary. It is in the ordinary that my real solution is found—in diametric contradistinction to my bizarre and weird system. Beyond and above my sensitivity to pain and my unwillingness to avoid it (avoiding it would be evil madness, and the rest of us are guilty of it to some degree, contrasted with me) I am a saint. This is of little use or importance. My insanity, given an insane world, is, paradoxically, a facing of reality, and this is sane; I refuse to close my eyes and ears. So Y equals Ȳ, as Pat says; our world and our proper role in it is paradoxical. The only question is, which kind of madness will we choose? To deny and avoid the irrational reality? I am proof that everyone else is doing this. We are, then, all mad, but I, uniquely, choose to go mad while facing pain, not mad while denying pain. These are simply different paths—but mine hurts more; it is not necessarily better—it is more a curiosity. Why would I choose this route? Because I am a saint. I have kept my soul—as, now and then, an occasional reader realizes. But I have not yet proven that there is a soul; thus I may have chosen my route in vain. No known religion encompasses this, even Buddhism. Very strange. Little can be said for my point of view, except that it can’t be logically demolished; if it could be I would have done so. Thus I am in touch with reality. So, then, in what sense am I insane? I am insane in that I continue to face the truth without the ability to come up with a workable answer. All I have done is (1) indicate the real situation; (2) show that all the known answers, systems of thought, are false. Again, I have shown that the problem cannot be solved or explained, only fled from. This is very disturbing; I indict the whole universe and ourselves as irrational, myself included. I really do not know anything in terms of the solution; I can only state the problem. No other thinker has ever stated a problem and so miserably failed to solve it in human histories; human thought is, basically, problem-solving, not problem stating. Again, my very failure to come up with a plausible solution—even when I try—simply verifies the magnitude of the problem, rather than impugning my problem-solving faculties. It shows that what we normally regard as solution-systems really evade the reality and complexity and magnitude of the problem: fundamental irrationality giving rise to pain, grief, loss and death. Thus I am a very dangerous person. Again, my very efforts to produce a solution are alarming because they so blatantly fail. My failure is the failure of all mankind (to find a solution or explanation). The fault is not mine.

I can say no more. What I have done may be good, it may be bad. But the reality that I discern is the true reality; thus I am basically analytical, not creative; 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 these people. It is bad news for them that, indeed, I am “slowly going crazy in Santa Ana, Calif.,” because this reinforces our mutual realization that no answer, no explanation of this mysterious reality, is forthcoming.⁸

This is the thrust and direction of modern theoretical physics, as Pat pointed out long ago. I reached it in the 50s. Where this will ultimately go I can’t say, but so far in all these years no one has come forth to answer the questions I have raised. This is disturbing. But—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.

What I have shown—like the Michelson Morley experiment—is that our entire world view is false; but, unlike Einstein, I can provide no new theory that will replace it. However, viewed this way, what I have done is extraordinarily valuable, if you can endure the strain of not knowing, and knowing you do not know. My attempt to know (VALIS) 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—i.e., that in this I have failed. It indicates that we are collectively still far from the truth. Emotionally, this is useless. But epistemologically it is priceless. I am a unique pioneer . . . who is hopelessly lost. And the fact that no one yet can help me is of extraordinary significance!^*

Someone must come along and play the role of Plato to my Socrates.

The problem as I see it is that Plato was 180 degrees wrong; the eidos, the abstract and perfect, does not become the particular, the imperfect; rather, the Q should be, “How does the particular, the unique, the imperfect, the local, become the abstract, the eidos, the universal?” We must study particulars, the weeds and debris of the alley; the answer is there: I saw the MMSK and it works the opposite way from how Plato saw it; he saw the eide as ontologically primary, and existing prior to the particulars. But I saw the particulars creating eidei (or “phylogons” as I called them); thus permanent eternal reality is built up on and based on the flux realm; all Western metaphysics is 180 degrees off. [ . . . ]

In 2-74 my mind understood, and my attention was directed to a squashed dead bird in the alley.

The answer is in the imperfect, the particular, not in heaven, not in the perfect abstract form. Then the particular, although transitory, is not epiphenomenal! I have bipolarized these two. Strange. It is the transitory unique particular which is real, and yet it vanishes; well, I saw where it goes; all the particulars feed in conceptually to reticulate and arborize and complete the eidei. This is where the truth lies. This is where the answer is. Somehow, the transitory particulars do not in fact ever perish, but are permanently arranged conceptually—this is my one big discovery (and it isn’t in VALIS).

My dope insight of last night: If and when Kathy can be rendered into geometric form she can be distributed throughout reality and hence will be—become—permanent; this is how the particulars are stored. And this is what Plato calls the forms. [ . . . ] It has to do with memory storage; the “form” is a way to store permanently a whole lot—millions, billions—of unique particulars.

This is it! And I saw it.

[75:D-21] I started last night with a complete sense of failure and wound up with this as the one true thing I figured out of importance:

“The entire universe, possibly, is in the invisible process of turning into the Lord.”

What is new is my impression that the macrobrain came first—i.e., the physical universe—and then it began to think; it generated the macromind, 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. (Reasoning from particulars to eidei, as in my argument supra; i.e., all Western metaphysics is 180 degrees backward.)

So my meta-abstraction did not just cause me to perceive Valis but, rather, caused Valis to occur in and around me, and as a result of it occurring, I perceived it. (Sophia: “Man is holy. Man is the only true God. This is the new news I bring you.”) It (Valis) was not there until the (my) meta-ab straction generated it, virtually ex nihilo. And it evolved it (me) very rapidly; and it embraced the outer world because we are not discrete but are one continuum or “reality field”; thus Valis is a “perturbation in the reality field.”

[75:D-33]

[75:D-37] We just see the field, the “iron filings,” the carrier; we do not see the modulation.

That 15 seconds last night when I was cut off from memory, comprehension and knowledge of God was too terrible; it was worse than going mad or dying. If that is the only way that I can be taught what it is that has been given me, so be it. My supreme possession is my comprehension of God; it is to my comprehension of music as my comprehension of music is to world as such. World is to music as music is to God. Since I was in the sixth grade I have had my comprehension of music; since 3-74 of God; and it has grown steadily . . . I realize that now. My best shot is:

The bells I heard in 3-74: space (the void). Beethoven’s music encloses that space (as I’ve noted before). He converts space into time and time into space as one thing: space-time, and makes it as a unitary “thing” perceptible to us. It is motion (i.e., time) in space; audible space. Space with a mysterious nonverbal identity/presence filling it, moving in it. Movement as structure: being in nonbeing. The byss and the abyss. Plus #3: information, i.e., “I . . . am.” Anokhi. That which moves through/in the space is information, i.e., consciousness; it is conscious, changing eternity.

[75:D-52] Thus there is an irrational basis out of which reality is created (rather than: “the basis of reality is irrational” or “reality is irrational”). This basis is the need for reality to exist; hence any living creature, since it is/possesses primarily a will, must be cosmogenitor in order to survive. Will comes first; world as a result. Any and every living creature is “God” then, creating and maintaining reality to satisfy its need to survive. There is no theoretical upper limit to its power to generate and affect (change) reality. The primordial substrate is the will of the individual creature, but this will is not rational. Thus its reality is contradictory and often unpleasant (punishing). The creature’s will routinely comes back at it as objective world—world that is its own creation but not recognized as such. World, the product of its will, fights the creature and subdues/defeats it. [ . . . ] So the ultimate struggle is for the creature to subdue its own will. It can’t do this through power; this is what the will has available to it: power. Nor will cunning work; the will is cunning. Only the Christian renunciation of self will work, in which the other, the Thou, is construed as more valuable than self. This is when agape enters as the solution and the key. Something not oneself must be esteemed over self; this defeats the will; the will must not triumph: it must be defeated. Its triumph amounts to the defeat of the creature as a rational center: defeat of will defeats the coercive power of world over you. (World is your own will coming back at you as an adversary.) The harder you strive the more powerful world becomes. Here enters “Mitleids Hochste Macht,” compassion’s highest power to defeat the will-as-world. (Your own will is experienced as world.) Anhedonism, asceticism, self-denial, self-repression, stoicism, will not work; only willing, joyous agape (which is a joy allied with the most intense sorrow possible; viz: the passion becoming the resurrection). Even duty will not suffice. Paul is right: agape is everything, not because it is ethically or morally superior but because it overpowers the will, hence world, hence karma/astral determinism/fate/heimarmene. (These are how we encounter our own will.) Allied to this is the concept of meekness or smallness, which is a tactic to diminish striving.

[ . . . ]

The Buddha was on the right path in that he understood the problem, the cause of suffering; but it is not nonattachment but agape that is the solution. One does not succeed by ceasing to be attached to what one loves (craves) but by caring more that someone else should have it; thus I do not give away x; I give it away to someone else, while still treating it as valuable, but I treat that person as more valuable—so the Buddha was partly there—partly but not the whole way. In this act one deprives world of its power of punishment: the will returning with a vengeance, which prideful people do not realize.

Right now world (my own will) is not punishing me; it plays games with me and eludes me playfully—a distinct improvement over what it used to do, showing that I have achieved some moksa (liberation, enlightenment). But it is partial. Yet, as these paragraphs show, I am at least partially awake; I have some wisdom. But my renunciation of self (ego) and striving (will) is only partial. Contentment is mine but not joy—not even balance. Until I can joyously give to others what my will wants for itself—only then will I be emancipated from world, my own will coming back at me.

[75:D-66] Illumination: April Friday night 4:45 A.M., the third, 1981. I saw the Ch’ang Tao⁹ (3-74). The more it changes the more it is the same, it is always new, always now; it is absolutely self-sufficient. I can at last comprehend it, how in change, ceaseless change—through the dialectic—it is always the same—oh great Ch’ang Tao! I saw you.

[75:D-67] 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; I now have a conception of myself, and of myself as an artist and thinker, and of my place and role in society and history—all of which I lacked before I saw the Tao (2-3-74). Thus it can be truly said, I have found the way. I am at peace. But the key word is:

center (i.e., place. In the Taoist sense.)

[75:D-93] All at once I think of something God (or “God”) revealed to me one time when I was stoned: “You are not the doubter; you are the doubt (itself)” and “This is a road to me, as are all roads if pursued to the end.”

[75:D-129] 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. And that I cannot truly lose God, “yea, I am with you even unto the end.” So each time I recover God I really recover all (the people and world things) that I have lost, truly lost as world things, but not as God. Thus God wins me over more and more. More completely and intensely, summing up in and as himself all that I ever had and knew; and yet he is more. Thus, e.g., I discover my analytical proposition. As regards the Wind in the Willows gift of forgetting, God maintains a fine line for me of remembering him and paradoxically 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 and 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. Again found, unlike people and things seen in themselves: discrete particulars.

Folder 76

[76:E-2] Beyond all the arcana lies the simple truth expressed in my “Chains . . . Web” essay and in the story itself. 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. In this moment one moves deliberately toward one’s fate and fights it, and as a result, one truly lives for the first time or dies; it is sein vs. das nichts. What I call the heroic deed is, in that instant, everything. Thus I am an ontologist and an existentialist and I am willing to risk extinction in order to try authentically to be, since in this moment one has only the choice between extinguishing oneself voluntarily or fighting. I chose to fight and won, and what I won was my own soul.

[76:E-13] Notes on “Chains . . . Web.” The fate that the Christian does not run from or dread will (he knows) defeat him. He knows absolutely, with total certitude; this is the very essence of his ability not to run from it. Because he also knows he can’t run from it, (1) it will defeat him; and (2) he can’t escape it. So he is doubly doomed; its power to destroy him is absolute in two respects: the postulate “it will destroy him” derives from this double source. The double source makes this fate what it is. It is not a threat—not a lethal threat, even. It is something more.

[76:E-14] I am currently of the opinion that (1) there is a connection between original authentic Christianity through Gnosticism to Heidegger; and (2) that 2-3-74 was this particular experience; viz: the inauthentic state that Heidegger describes is the “thrown-ness” into the “fremd” that Gnosticism describes; there follows, then, a series of dire transformations by the “thrown into the alien world” person trying to cope; I comprehend this as flight and evasion from fate (heimarmene), which is a sense that this alien state/world into which one has been thrown torments now and eventually kills (causes nonbeing, das nicht). The unconscious apperception of this creates angst (dread). 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; he is caused to flee more than volitionally fleeing. 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 ignore 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. This is another version of the split. 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; he has to be eternally becoming because he must extend himself eternally into the not yet. What I see in all this is that his sense that this alien world he has been thrown into will eventually ineluctably annihilate him is correct and he knows it is correct; this is not a delusion, this sense of impending destruction that will take away what little being he has. That time might increase or even complete his being does not occur to him because (and here the Gnostic perception is vital) this is an alien world into which he has been thrown against his will; i.e., he is helpless: he did not decide to be here, 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. But he must never reveal to himself this fact—about his inevitable future doom—lest he disintegrate utterly; again he is split. So he has no idea what he is doing or why, and he is enigmatic to himself; so he is too and for himself as alien as world is to him; he is as if thrown into an alien self on top of everything else!

As I say, the only solution to this is the Christian solution of what I call total capitulation to this fate and an acknowledgment that it cannot be avoided; it will come and it will destroy him. Thus he ceases running, and lives now not future; but at the moment he does this he knows that this anticipated doom exists—so in the normal course of life this sense of the future becoming the now only occurs—if it occurs at all—when the impending doom ceases to be future and is perceived as now: at which point anticipatory dread becomes logically total fear. However (as Heidegger points out) this apotheosis of dread, this being-in-death, carries with it the possibility of authentic Sein.

[76:E-19] It is world that must change to accommodate us, not us to accommodate world. This is such a critical point that its implications simply beggar description. This world is alien to us; it must change to be familiar to us, not us to fit into it.

Folder 84

[84:5] Pay-off:

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. Thus the term “Christ” has to refer to any and all newness choices wherever and whenever they occur; “Christ” is the zero-one binary disjunctive event per se, and so is always now and always here. We see it and understand that we see (and experience) Christ, and this is newness, re-creation (in an unending process of creation). Christ never arises/occurs as a result of the past, as an effect of antecedent causes; he is always born “from outside.” Hence his epiphany can never be induced or predicted (by definition). Christ is that which does not follow mechanically: he always invades world. To see, then, that Causality is not observed, that the “effect” is in fact not an effect at all—of its Cause—but is ex nihilo new is to see—literally, not symbolically—Christ. Hence where there is Christ it is always the case that there has been “a perturbation of the reality field,” something acting on it, intruding on it, invading it, “from outside.” In terms of mechanical cause-and-effect Christ can never be said to be a normal event derived from the antecedent system.^*

Without these periodic insertions the system would run down; it would lose shape, organization and vitality. Cause-and-effect, then, taken in itself, is a losing game. The only thing that Christ can be said to be a result of—Christ as an event in the reality field—is the need of this event. It is physically, mechanically causeless; it is absolutely teleological. Efficient causation has no bearing on it and will never yield it up. (Here Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is totally wrong: world is not spontaneously converging into the Point Omega; what he calls “Point Omega” is something done ceaselessly to world, an endless invasion.) Wherever the effect is correctly seen to exceed its cause (which is then by definition not its cause) there is Christ. Conversely, wherever effect follows cause actually, there he is not. Christ, then, is an event, something that occurs in and to the reality field; Christ is not a person as men are persons. Christ is the beginning of the universe all over again, as a repeated event.

[84:8] Here is the puzzle of VALIS. In VALIS I say, I know a madman who imagines that he saw Christ; and I am that madman. But if I know that I am a madman I know that in fact I did not see Christ. Therefore I assert nothing about Christ. I say only that I am not mad. But if I say only that, then I have made no mad claim; therefore I am not mad. And the regress begins again and continues forever. Something has been asserted, but what is it? Does it have to do with Christ or only with myself? This paradox was known in antiquity; the pre-Socratics propounded it. A man says, “All Cretans are liars.” When an inquiry is made as to who this man is, it is determined that he was born in Crete. What, then, has he asserted? Anything at all? Is this the semblance of knowledge or a form—a strange form—of knowledge itself? Zeno, the Sophists in general, saw paradox as a way of conveying knowledge—paradox, in fact, as a way of arriving at conclusions. This is known, too, in Zen Buddhism. It sometimes causes a strange jolt or leap in the person’s mind; something happens, an abrupt comprehension, as if out of nowhere, called satori. The paradox does not tell; it points. It is a sign, not the thing pointed to. That which is pointed to must arise ex nihilo in the mind of the person. The paradox, the koan tells him nothing; it wakes him up. This only makes sense if you assume something very strange: we are asleep but do not know it. At least not until we wake up.

Folder 90

[90:1]¹⁰ Enclosed is a carbon of what may be a resolution of my seven years of attempting to construct a model of reality; by “reality” I mean God in or God and the universe: what Erigena called natura. The solution came to me in a series of recent sleep revelations, that is, hypnogogic and hypnopompic insights where I actually saw how the system works. (Universe and God regarded, as Spinoza does, as one and the same.) My model is that of a computer or computer-like entity—well, look at the enclosed page; it is pretty much complete.

[90:2] April 15, 1981. Sleep insight.

Hartshorne—pantheism—the EB macro. A. N. Whitehead’s process deity.^* We are within it (the MMSK), as interconnections, but organic model is incorrect. It is a signaling system, mutually adjusting (this is what Pythagoras saw). 0-1 flicker rate (misinterpreted by me as time frames); actually it’s binary. Tries out a false move (0), then corrects to 1 which is actualized in/as the next discrete “frame.” Has the effect of separate frames due to the off-on pulsation; discrete: isn’t/is, nonbeing/being. The system shuts off every trillionth of a second (0). These are decisions. After each off (0) when it switches back on to 1 the “frame” (reality) is different, in terms of internal arrangement, adjustment, mutual adjustment, interaction/interconnection, as information flows through its circuits.

Boehme: yes-no. Hartshorne 0-1. Quantitative (0-1) converted to qualitative by spatiotemporal reality itself; that is, quantitative information is poured into material reality within which and by which it is converted into qualitative information.

While it’s 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). This is how a computer works. 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. To comprehend/apperceive/envision the void is to envision the other phase (zero phase) of the flicker binary pulsation, 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.”¹¹ But what is interesting to me is that the way I conceive of this, all its decisions are made during the “spaces” that we are totally unaware of. It comes back on, back into being, back to the 1 phase when it has tried out a faulty solution and has substituted better (the best possible?) instead, which is the next “time frame.” Thus its decision-making processes, i.e., its thinking, and its nonbeing phase, lies outside our awareness. The initial false move that it tries out during its zero phase is Boehme’s no, and the 1 or on phase is Boehme’s yes. So my envisioning is essentially Boehme’s, updated in terms of computers and information processing systems. The similarity to the Taoist alternation of yin and yang is very obvious.

[90:13] What is probably most important of all is that my binary arborizing disjunctive decision-making universe system—the disclosure of which I regard as an essentially new disclosure, although as a fact it itself may not be new—it is, I think, absolutely in accord with the very high and penetrating conception of the revolutionary role of the cosmic Christ in fundamentally transforming the nature of the world order. This is nothing short of astonishing, that radical mystical Pauline Christianity and a very radical modern quantum mechanics computer indeterminate unified field reality view turned out to be basically compatible or in fact even identical! The two converge (at least in my theorizing) totally; all at once there is a lightning swift confluence of my separate streams of thought: Christianity and, well, philosophy-metaphysics-epistemology, whatever; all else, really, than Christianity; I suddenly have one overview which is (1) basically new and original; and (2) subsumes everything Christian and non-Christian into one daring structure. What is more, this structure will adequately account for my apperception of what I call Valis, both in me and outside me, back in 3-74. So at this point I have synthesized my various streams of thought into a higher gestalt and no longer have to vacillate back and forth between Christianity and non-Christianity, which is reason to suppose that I have finally hit on a model that truly represents, conceptually, what I experienced in the spring of 1974 and has puzzled me for over seven years.

All of a sudden a titanic idea (insight?) has struck me. Valis was out side 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: this is what is meant by “Christ consciousness” and it works this way: Christ enters you (never mind at this point how; up the optic nerve or some kind of alchemical hierarchy of opposites, etc., etc.); anyhow, this “Christ consciousness” which is in fact the Second Advent 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 (again for the first time in human history) a much more accurate and acutely qualitatively different experience of reality . . . in which causality is replaced by an understanding of, apperception of, realization of, whatever, of what I call binary forking decision-making, a choosing system, the no-yes choice exercised volitionally, sentiently; this was always the case with world-in-itself (Kant’s Ding-an-sich) but there was no way by which humans could apperceive (comprehend, envision) it before. And this radically transformed experience (Dasein) of reality, a way of being-in-the-world, of participating in shaping world (the observer participant), had to wait until such discoveries and realizations as quantum mechanics, indeterminacy, unified field theory, plus Taoism—all that good new stuff such as Capra talks about . . . but anyhow, the leap across to this new way of Dasein is the second advent, and what occurs in our minds, our brains, our heads; and yet (paradoxically) it refers to something actually “out there” in world, external to us, a way in which reality functions in itself; so this new radical quantum leap upward view is not just subjective—well, okay; reality hasn’t changed; our way of being-in-reality has changed, had to wait, had to evolve over the many centuries. I mean, if Koestler and Capra et al. can equate the post-Newtonian Dasein (comprehension of reality) with Taoism, why can’t I equate it with Pauline Christian mysticism (which is exactly what I’ve done!).^* And then as a third ele ment we can bring in Heidegger and talk about Sein, authentic being, and what I call a spatial reality rather than a temporal reality, etc. And I then trace Heidegger back to Gnosticism and from there once again to Paul, who is highly thought of by the Gnostics. And there is no need to exclude Taoism, because indeed a yin-yang dialectic is involved . . . and we get to keep a causal synchronicity, and it just all comes together and is liberating . . . and we get to throw in computer stuff, which relates back to Taoism via my binary dialectic—but most of all, as I say, this internal event (Valis in me) permits the comprehension (Dasein) of what may in fact always (or for centuries) have been there in world but we didn’t possess the inner equipment to comprehend/apprehend it.

Thus the question “Where is the kingdom of God” gets an answer derived from ultra-modern views of the observer-participant universe, in which it’s all treated as a field, a unified field.

We are not talking about a different way of being-in-the-world or even a better way; we’re talking about the lifting for the first time in human history of a massive perceptual/conceptual occlusion having to do with the ontological structuring factor we call causality (or astral determinism). This has never happened before. I mean, just think what it would mean vis-à-vis our way of perceiving/understanding world if we ceased to utilize space or time as a Kantian ordering/structuring category? And in fact when the utilization of causation ceases, our sense of time is drastically altered (time sharply diminishes), and our sense of space is drastically altered (as I figure it, time is converted into space, so we get a great diminution in the time factor and a great augmentation in the spatial factor); but, most of all, introduced as a totally new factor is an apperception of the flicker pulsation in which the system (reality) switches on and off, as well as the binary forking decision-making; the totality of all this is that very simply our occlusion lifts and we are in another world entirely, a world I identify with the Garden. 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. And no one—no one!—has seen the involvement of Pauline Christian mysticism, that in fact this is the payoff ingredient. And this would explain why for over seven years I have alternated between believing Christ has returned and believing that I had evolved some kind of ultra-modern worldview connected with physics and epistemology, etc.

Okay; I have one final thing to say and herewith I rest my case, trium phantly. My binary forking, which I have already said is an indeterminate element entering what always before was conceived of as causality (under various names, such as astral determinism): what is this if not the “two slit” phenomenon familiar in subatomic physics, which is the very essence of the indeterminate factor in reality!^* It is known to us scientifically only on a subatomic level. Yet I say (I think I say) I have perceived this as the very basis of reality per se, the reality process of change, of flux, of all cause and effect at all levels, micro and macro. 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. This may be linked to Pauli’s synchronicity; it is acausal but ubiquitous and genuine and important. Here we turn to A.N. Whitehead’s definition of process deity “as a principle of selection of the good in the world order.”

[90:19] Premise: Christ consciousness produces a worldview (Dasein) so radically different from what we normally experience that it is almost impossible to communicate it. Absolute space, a vast diminution and weakening of time (time qualitatively transformed) and no causality, as well as reality experienced as a unified self-governing field (it initiates all its own changes acausally in synchronization); moreover this field makes use of—or operates by means of—a binary off-on switching involving an indeterminate element so that it is perpetually disjunctive; thus it does not flow through time at all but always is. Also it either is based on or generates quantitative binary information in a cumulative fashion; i.e., it develops in one direction and one only. As a total field it ceaselessly makes off-on choices at each forking or junction; thus it is free (again, indeterminacy is involved at its basic level of operation). The receptacle in which it exists is space, not time. When it pulse-phases to its off position it ceases to exist; when it comes back to its on position it is slightly different. (I feel like someone trying to interpret the Sistine Chapel ceiling to a blind man.) Thus in a certain real sense it abolishes and then re-creates itself at a very rapid rate, a sort of flicker. Each time it re-creates itself it is different, hence in a real sense new. I somewhat hesitate to add this, but since with Christ consciousness there is no clear demarcation between the observer and the reality field he participates in, world is in a certain real and palpable sense affected by his involvement with it and perception of it; thus he is conscious of perturbing the reality field in the very act of participating in it; world, then, loses its reified, stubborn quality (associated with rigid determinism, cause and effect) and responds to him not as an It but as what Buber called a Thou. Within this one total schema involving the observer and his world together, it becomes impossible to distinguish Christ in him and Christ in world; there is only one total reality: himself, Christ, world.

[90:31] What I have achieved during these past seven years is to deepen and augment my mental ability to conceive of and comprehend what in 3-74 I perceived, and, ultimately, this is an apprehension, a comprehension, of God, of the divine nature and being. [ . . . ] “A total system that perpetually chooses through a binary process of rejection that is cumulative” is my way of envisioning what I experienced; it is my model which I am able, first, to summon up, and then, finally, to contemplate. Thus through it and in it I have God in me, as a mental construct of my own devising; but it is a devising derived from and rooted in experience; it is not imaginary: it is an interpretation of what I construe to be the case. It is reality incorporated into me, reality at the highest level at which I am able to understand it. Here my ability to understand reaches its limit. This all has been a vast effort. I am not concerned with traditional definitions of God, attributions and doctrines and creeds and dogmas; I am concerned with the conception I have arduously arrived at based on experience. My conception does justice to my experience, it is the best I can do.^* It turns an otherwise in comprehensible 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. What if the experience itself is not true? To me that question is unintelligible; it is my experience: it belongs to me, is a part of me, and by construing a model adequate to it I make it a permanent part of me, not something that escapes. If my model works, if it is an adequate representation, I can by means of it convert it back into something like the original experience, so it is an encoding, an informational analog of that experience (to the degree that I have been successful).^* I am a device on which God renders an impression, hopefully a permanent impression; it will be permanent if—and to the degree that—I function correctly. It is not a doctrine or even a theory that I am fabricating; it is an impression, a change in me as to what I am. I have become not the same, due to what happened, and this has been a task, an act stretching over years on my part. I want to be different because of what I saw; I want to be changed as much as possible (without, of course, falsifying what happened). The last thing I want out of that experience is to be the same as I was prior to it. And I can only change insofar as I comprehend that experience; and I can only comprehend it (as I say) by actively building an inner, adequate, appropriate model (of what happened). So this is not a passive rendering. This is an artistic, spiritual, conceptual task involving years of work. My conception grows; it is not static. As it grows I change. This is what I want: to thus and thereby be changed. This is what I have devoted myself to; this is my purpose for existing; it is what I want to do—like the binary choosing of the system my work on my model is cumulative. I choose; I discard; I perpetually arborize and reticulate: I build. I am very happy. I sense and grasp and perceive the no-yes dialectic that continually results in higher syntheses (which is what Jacob Boehme understood); I understand God in process, God perpetually choosing and re jecting: “not this but rather that,” so that he surpasses himself in an act at each new stage. (“Nicht diese töne; sondern . . . ,”¹² as Beethoven wrote; the foundation of creation is to choose, to reject, to choose again: Boehme’s dialectic ceaselessly at work, blinking off-on-off-on.) Dio: creating begins with an unvoiced no, not a yes. “Not that; (but rather) this.” A rejection of the is in favor of a better alternative (that is as much constructed as chosen—perhaps more so!). The essence of creativity is to reject what follows inevitably, because that is an entropic cause and effect splitting, a disintegration; in place of this the creator built something new that does not follow. And he bases what he constructs, he derives his conception from, in response to and in rejection of what is. So in artistic endeavor there is something of the ex nihilo: something somehow engendered out of nothing.

[90:25] And this is what I discovered from 2-74 to 2-75; the Garden is located here, as if on another frequency. [ . . . ]

[90:26] Christ and causation are, then, at war; here is another form, perhaps the ultimate form, of the dialectic; the wise horn is Yang; the wise horn is better; the wise horn is selected; the wise horn is, in essence, Christ himself penetrating the mechanism. But have I not said, isn’t it very possible that nothing has changed but our perception? Reality per se, in itself, is constant; only our experience of it changes. So all we need to do to get back into the Garden is to perceive the Garden. Yet we are incapable of doing this. In what sense, if any, can Christ be distinguished from our perception of reality-as-it-is? There is a dreadful circularity here; if we could experience the Garden we would be saved, but in fact we can’t experience it so we are not saved. Something from outside must enter to remove the occlusion and this is Christ.

It resembles what Heraclitus said about the necessity 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. This week I was, that one afternoon, back in the world of space; I don’t know how I did it . . . and then I was back here under the power of tyrannical, destructive time once more. And I don’t know how that happened either. Someone must teach us how to do this or else do it for us. I who know about the Kingdom, who knows it is right here—even I can’t find my way (back) to it. Yet my “binary” model of the universe apparently calls for it, specifies its existence. It must be, it must truly 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 in ner representation that the Cartesians showed we experience as world; this (as I said before) is Christ as Christ consciousness: the occlusion is not lifted from the world—it was never in world—but from us: it is in us. In my recent dream the spinner, the little boy, went blind; the sun itself did not go out; it was still shining but he could not see it. He “lost his vision.” This says it all. Even with a thick magnifying glass he could no longer see the sun, shining as it still was.

[90:6A] 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 (or it was; today is Easter Sunday, so it was last week). That entire week is holy to the Christian; it begins with Palm Sunday which reperforms Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem. And I had just about time—literally exactly at that time—worked out—upon rereading “Chains . . . Web” an extraordinary analysis of the Christian solution to hostile world expressed as fate: the cessation of evasion and flight, the entry into a purely spatial realm of the absolute now, which I connect with Heidegger’s authentic 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. [ . . . ]

At the time that I found myself back in the purely spatial realm, I supposed that it was because I had upped my dosage of Sinequan, but that is absolutely not likely. Let us consider the exact circumstances. It was Tuesday, the day the space shuttle returned. The night before, 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. It was as if I’d used up all my thoughts, as if there are only a finite number and I had come to the last one; there literally were no more left in me. I had to go to bed early—which was fine, because then Tuesday I was able readily to arise early to watch the shuttle’s safe return. Now, this absolutely total exhaustion of thoughts in me somehow seems to me related to the phosphene graphics trip; the common factor is the using up of time, a running out of time—i.e., process. I had, as in 1974, come to the end in some real and perhaps even ontological sense; 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. What I am saying is that 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. I remember that I had said to Jeanette at Brentwood that—O Dio—“I have lost my artistic vision”—the dream about the child, the spinner, going blind! This represented spiritual death, and a logic to Christ’s passion and crucifixion! And then rebirth occurred. And again, as in 1974 (this is really incredible, simply incredible) I got a terrifying letter that caused me to phone the FBI. 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—and not just return but resurrection in the sense that I was able to complete it, which I felt I had never before been able to do. [ . . . ] I relived—reperformed—the passion, death and resurrection, then, without intending to or even realizing that is indeed what was happening.

Several aspects point to this as genuine. (1) The mental and spiritual exhaustion I experienced on Monday night was unique; I remember telling Doris that I had only undergone something like it due to drug abuse. It was, then, qualitatively different from mere fatigue, even enormous fatigue. It ended in a clear and evident death. (2) The Spinner dream which anticipated this very event, the “loss of vision” by the Spinner (i.e., Spinner as writer; he can no longer narrate). (3) The murderous letter. (4) The brief period on Tuesday in the spatial realm that I had only a little while before (a few days) figured out was essentially connected with Christianity. (5) The sudden, unexpected and unprecedented completion of my artistic vision on Wednesday night, the night of the day the letter came; this, too, was not a quantitative event; it was ontologically different from anything I had ever experienced before (like the dying of my vision Monday night); and: it was based on revelation of the forking and the tentative zero firing, a sleep revelation. So I suffered and died, but after I died I was resurrected in terms of my world—the spatial world—and in terms of my vision: my binary switching model of the universe, which I have later recognized as a model of the restored universe, restored by Christ; and I even identify this Dasein, this worldview, as “Christ consciousness”!

[90:13A] This is a very different view of deity than has ever been put forth before (except perhaps by Jacob Boehme). For example, do these zero branchings add up to long chains of provisional realities, realities—perhaps even whole worlds or versions of worlds—subject to later retroactive annulment? And if so, do we encounter them, which is to say, do we live in them but then forget it, our memory being canceled out along with the worlds themselves? I conceive of the system switching on, off, on, off, the “off” consisting of what I call the zero phase of the binary flicker; I also say that it is during these off or 0 phases that the system does its thinking. What else goes on at the same time, if anything? Is there a sort of parity counter world to our own, perhaps invested with some kind of semi-reality that holds up only so long as the system takes to make up its mind and decide? Oddly, interestingly, this all seems to correspond with the doubts and premises of my ten-volume meta-novel: “Realities are subject to cancellation without notice” and, moreover, were not truly real in the first place (examples of this in my writing are legion). More interesting to me, however, is the existential aspect to this, which means deity and how deity acts, that in fact deity in this model is conceived in terms of its choosing, rejecting, choosing again, and if this choosing is its essence, then we have a whole new idea of the einai of God: an existential idea: it is what it does, and what it does is perpetually choose (Whitehead’s principle of selection of the good in the world-process).

[90:16A] In fact now it is possible to assert a single premise generating all my various preoccupations with what is real, what isn’t, etc., my entire body of epistemological doubts: I know that there really is such a thing as tentative or provisional reality, and it can be canceled in such a way that in a certain sense it never was there in the first place.

[90:E-8] Ghastly dream [ . . . ] A family on an old farm. The children are (called) “the Spinners.” The very ground itself is contaminated, poisoned, with (heavy) metals, so the children, “the Spinners,” are becoming blind. A little boy peers through a thick magnifying glass at the sun; he can barely see it. Soon he will be completely blind.

Interpretation: the Spinners are immortals who came here and were poisoned (heavy metal) and lost what I call “the third eye” (represented by the magnifying glass). The sun is Christ. Thus they, we, can no longer read the sacred writing (of Scripture): “the light went out” (divine revelation) not because God stopped sending it but because we have gone blind to it. Somehow I regained my sight in 3-74 and could read the sacred Scriptures in/as Tears. Therefore “the Spinners” can no longer see the thread of Ariadne (or weave it as explanation, revelation) leading out of the maze.

[90:E-11] When I believe, I am crazy.

When I don’t believe, I suffer psychotic depression. I oscillate between intoxication (mania) and melancholia. I think, now, that my dream about the child going blind and no longer able to see the sun symbolized my losing my vision (sic): i.e., of Christ, Dionysus, Wotan, YHWH, because it is all gone; it seems mere mad fancy, like believing you might see Mr. Toad sculling a little boat down the stream. I can’t live without my vision but my vision is self-delusion.

[90:F-11] What I have been doing these seven years is philosophical inquiry in the old sense, that of the pre-Socratics. Before science and philosophy parted company. I’m not sure my issues are in fact metaphysical. What confronted me in 2-3-74 was “a perturbation in the reality field.” That is, reality behaving in an inexplicable way which no known theory could explain or account for. How does this seven years of study and analysis differ from scientific research? This has not been a game. Something I witnessed puzzled me and I set out to understand it. When I did finally understand it, I found that my questions went all the way back to the 40s. And I have not been the first to raise the question. If the traditional, fully accepted theories of causation were true, the “perturbation” that I saw could not have occurred. This is the bottom line. How do I differ from Einstein vis-à-vis Newtonian mechanics! It was a perturbation in the reality field in the sense that something more than the forces we know of was visibly at work. The problem is real. Then I took it to be so.

[90:F-19] 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. I think now I believe. I knew that binary switching model was correct as soon as it came to me.

[90:G-43] I just realized I had an amazing 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 as it moved toward perfection (of actualization) as a limit, 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. However, under such circumstances, to overcome this positive feedback self-authenticating hoax-involvement, a clock-timed tape in his mind—or accessible to his mind; e.g., speaking directly into his ear or inner ear—was set in advance to speak to him at regular intervals reminders of the truth, and his true situation. The tape was plugged into RET,¹³ but since part of his spurious autogenerated world was fake time—an integral aspect of spurious world generated out of total sensory deprivation—these reminders, these messages from the real world, came to him (in terms of his own subjective time) at increasingly farther apart (i.e., longer) intervals and thus failed to serve their purpose (anamnesis involving the knowledge that his world is spurious, and no amount of scrutiny on his part will correct this, inasmuch as the harder he scrutinizes it, the more convincing it will become). What he faces as a dual limit is an infinitely convincing (but actually fake and self-generated) dream world “existing” for an infinite time. (Which, it occurs to me, may explain “He causes things to look different so it’d appear time has passed.”)

My analysis is this: he, whoever “he” is, has gotten himself into this very fix and has therefore fallen under the spell of an ever more convincing and ever more extensive in time fake world that he himself is generating; he, world and time are in a closed loop, a closed system; moreover, it is equally clear to me that this (dream) is the true explanation—and reveals the true significance of 2-3-74 at which place I (“he”) (1) remembered and then (2) as a result temporarily broke out of the closed loop self reinforcing fake world and fake time. [ . . . ]

What I am saying is that this dream states that I myself am the mind I know as Valis, I generate the info (they are my own thoughts and ideas; viz: as I once previously speculated, I got into my own world producing mental machinery) and, what is more, what I call “the binary computer” is a vision of my own mind as world creator; I think (as binary computer), and these thoughts are the information that I am compelled to give assent to as world (which is why to some extent we control our own world, it adjusts to our perceptions of it—of course it does; this is a closed feedback loop literally pouring back into itself to reinforce itself—and “we are selves in a brain that both makes and perceives reality”). Then several people (e.g., Gregg Rickman) are right in saying that when I experienced Valis I was experiencing my own (unconscious) mind. But they failed to note that that makes me Cosmocrator!

[90:G-49] Valis in me was my own mind, was God but fallen God, forgetful, unintentional, cosmogenitor of world.^* The “binary switching com puter” that generates “info that we hypostatize as world” is my own mind creating irreal imprisoning worlds for me (as if VALIS and “Frozen Journey” were superimposed).

[90:G-53] The dream of last night (supra) shows that I am hopelessly trapped, because the harder and longer I scrutinize “world” the more articulated, detailed, convincing and “real” it becomes, with infinitely real as a limit, and, worse, an infinitude of spurious time is a limit; it will go on forever, all the while gaining progressively greater power over me—and yet I am its author!

[90:130:G-75] Therefore I deem it correct to say that yes I have been correct in saying (as I have periodically) that 3-74 represented the lifting of an occlusion from me so that I saw reality either more accurately or (if this is possible) “as it really is”—this owing to me suddenly facing reality for the first time (v. supra). What was presented to me was an inscrutable picture of what resembled living information, a unitary field, pre-synchronized self-initiating transformations, rest-motion modes, etc., all that I endlessly dilate on. The upshot being that (1) I could not figure out what I was seeing and (2) I could not communicate what I had seen. Herein with these two points lies the difficulty. All that I could fathom was that the conventional picture that we normally get—and seem to share—is not in fact what is there; what is there is not even in time or space, nor is causation involved. 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. Hence the utility of this perception is (at least at this time) dubious. Out of this experience with the inscrutable and inexplicable I formulate at last the notion that the compulsion exerted on us to see the representation as (1) absolutely real and (2) totally comprehensible is a gift, an essential gift. This deals with more than my 3-74 perception, it deals with my whole adult life as expressed in my 10-volume meta-novel. What I saw in 3-74 I regard as absolutely real (so there is no problem there) but it was unintelligible—whereas all that came prior to it was intelligible but lacking in respect to seeming absolutely real. One is moved to ponder which is better—or for that matter worse—of the two choices: to see, understand and not believe, or to see, not understand and yet believe—obviously something drastic is wrong with both. In fact both—each in its own way—smacks of psychotic apperception of world. The former (coherent but unconvincing) is fucked; the latter (unintelligi ble but carrying the force of absolute truth) equally so. Surely both represent mental dysfunctions in me. All I can do at this point is abandon the field and say that belief in and understanding of should go hand-in-hand, and if they part company something is wrong. From this I erect the following premise: that God sees to it that we both comprehend (i.e., what we experience is to us intelligible) and believe (it carries the force of the absolute). Obviously something went wrong in me years ago. And when in 3-74 the compensatory correction came it ushered in a whole new host of troubles, giving me even more to do, philosophically speaking. Thus God gives us multiple gifts: a world, first of all, one that we can understand and also experience as real—so real, in fact, that it was not until the time of Descartes that the representation problem was even discerned (it has never been fully answered).

What I see is a threat that only someone fighting off psychosis could appreciate: the disappearance of world along two routes: (1) comprehensibility; (2) believability. Viz: you could find yourself understanding it but not believing it to be real—my 10-volume meta-novel—or finding it real but being unable to make any sense out of it—3-74 and VALIS. 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 it (v. my dream supra): the percipient is cosmogenitor, or, conversely, the cosmogenitor wound 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 perhaps most important of all, 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.”

[90:134:G-79] This is my idiosyncratic road to God. For others—who have not been the doubt, who have not known 32 years of doubt, this would not seem to constitute proof. But I say: I do not have it within my own power to compel my own assent to anything but my doubting self; thus on my own I possess no sense of knowing anything but myself, which is a sentence to hell, perpetual unrelenting hell. “Wer wird mich erlösen?”¹⁴ My argument is a variation of Cartesian reasoning (and in my opinion an important one) and so it is in an honorable tradition. I say with Malebranche that I see all things in God; it is God who extricates me from my solipsistic prison. I did not write 35 novels and 150 stories without coming to a good understanding of the sinister implications of no world, irreal world, inscrutable world—that second only to the gift of life itself is the gift of world, of the other. Perhaps it is even a greater gift, since it involves all creation. (Viz: I might well choose personal death over the extinction of the cosmos.) What I see people ordinarily saying is that world of its own accord impinges on us: impinges coherently and convincingly. The Cartesians show that this is not the case. I say, the whole cosmos could be presented to me and yet I would not find it real unless God himself bestowed on me the essential gift of my finding it convincing, a gift that through my own powers of reasoning and observation I find myself incapable of acquiring, a state I on my own cannot achieve. I cannot persuade myself and I cannot compel myself to believe; unless God compels me I will not believe, and if I do not believe, I am doomed to a certain kind of hell. I know from experience that God can compel that assent, for he did this by a rustle of color in the grass. He can absolutely impinge on me; he can break into my prison world and destroy it—burst the prison, release me. That my assent might be compelled by perceptual and cognitive occlusion and amnesia does not in the slightest matter to me because the ends justifies the means, since I cannot live at all unless I’m taken out of my private prison. That is why I see the issue as one of belief on my part, not on the truth of what I believe. I know now that if there is something that is true I will never on my own know it. Or if I know it I will not believe I know it. Like Victor Kemmings at the end of “Frozen Journey” I may have reached reality and can’t believe it. That essential belief lies outside my power.

My argument that (I have proof that) God exists is odd. I do not say, “I know God exists because I experienced/perceived him in 3-74”; that is dubitable as an argument because my experience may have been a hallucination (I experienced it but it was not real). But I can say, “I know that God exists because I believe I experienced You above and beyond myself; and I know of no way that I can go beyond Descartes’ ‘cogito ergo sum’ by my own power; on my own I cannot add any knowledge to that self-knowledge. Yet I believe I know of Your existence, so I conclude that some agency with the power to disclose Your existence to me and thus to compel my assent to that disclosure exists, and I can only conceive of God as possessing the power, since, pragmatically, this is cosmogenesis, and I define God as ‘he who causes to exist what exists.’ ” In other words I cannot doubt that I believe, and I know of no way that I can believe on my own power, unaided. Therefore the Cartesian proposition “cogito ergo sum” is not the limit to what I can be certain of: I can say, “I know that I believe, and since I know that I cannot compel into existence my own belief, I conclude that something beyond myself exists that has compelled this belief; therefore I not only know that I exist, I know that something beyond myself exists (by reason of my belief).”

[90:G-122] I saw reality (3-74) as it really is; I began to see in 2-74. Relatedness not by time, space and causation but by articulating arborizing phylogons, I know—can’t I believe? What does it take?

[90:G-131] I will conclude this nightmare marathon analysis by noting that my 10-volume meta-novel can herewith be newly—and perhaps finally correctly—understood. And it serves a very valuable (Gnostic) purpose, to emancipate the cosmogenitor from his own world, to which he is fallen victim. In terms of this, VALIS can be seen as the logical culmination of the total corpus. Likewise “Frozen Journey.”

[90:G-141] What is most remarkable is not just perceiving one’s soul in and hence derived from the divine mind, but to see that soul as a complex of ideas, interacting to form a coherency: one’s soul as something that can not only be known but also thought: soul, then, as idea—and taking the form of ideas or sub-ideas clustered together: reduced to or derived from what may in the final analysis be words. That’s why the term “thing” is the wrong term. It is information. It is a unique interception by one idea of another, a crossing, an ideational intersection: certain notions about freedom, magic, religious beauty (as expressed by the Grail theme and the Good Friday spell), revolutionary covert activity connected with elements of the Civil War, animals as they appear in children’s books, something to do with the old-fashioned countryside and light, music, writing; but most of all a sense of the divine as if not only am I a notion in the divine mind but I as its notion contain in and as myself a notion of it. In other words I fade off into it, and it fades off into me, as if each is aware of and related to the other.

Folder 77

[77:G-8] You won’t believe this later when you’re not ripped, but your 10 volume meta-novel is “the secret stolen past the angels in one’s hands”—the story that (1) each of us lives in a unique individual world; (2) it is spurious; (3) it is fed to us by the plasmate—this is told in VALIS if you add it (VALIS) to the corpus; and (4) we have some control over our individual worlds, since somehow it derives from us; it isn’t just imposed on us (e.g., “Frozen Journey,” Maze—really the whole corpus). So it adjusts and accommodates to our perceptions and preconceptions of it.

One vast artistic vision, all the way from “Wub” to DI, with particular emphasis on Scanner, the intro to The Golden Man, VALIS, “Chains . . . Web” and DI. (This last my dream. That sustains me. I cannot now be separated from my work.)

Here is sooth: VALIS is not as important as supernatural revelation about God and the universe as it is about me as a person—unique and individual and suffering—and my vision (Weltanschauung). Me and my own private vision; this is what we call art (as with van Gogh and his vision). Therefore it is not theologically meaningful but artistically. The theological, etc., stuff in VALIS has value as my construct/vision/dream: likewise DI. Vis-à-vis reality it has no relevance. It tells us nothing about world but a lot about me as artist.

So VALIS is part—an integral part—of the vision that began with “Roog” and forms one seamless whole. The whole theological, etc., view in VALIS (and to a lesser extent in DI) is like some vast book within a book, an artistic vision within a greater vision—i.e., my total corpus. It’s like the movie in VALIS: another “book within a book.” Vision within a vision.

“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. It is part of me, and I have put me and my vision legitimately into my work. [ . . . ] This personal vision began with Crap Artist and Counter-Clock World. The rest is artificial, but due to 1964 I passed over from artifact to art. Where it truly blooms is in everything from and including Tears on—great art, and it all began as objective pulp objects, which have turned into human documents, as Gregg Rickman is the first to perceive.

Joint (e.g.) is mind, android, cold.

VALIS (e.g.) is heart, human, life.

I passed through progressive humanization and humanized stages in my writing as I did so in my actual life.

[77:G-11]

There is no truth in this, only artistic vision: but for me, in terms of my own vision, “truth” (objectively) has no meaning; to state that X is “truth” would violate the premise of my own vision. Thus VALIS was inexorably dictated/generated by my total corpus.

Folder 78¹⁵

[78:H-1] Bishop Tim Archer.

I’m going to assign to him as his major view my Commedia 3-coaxial realms view (as expressed in my Metz speech and which were going to be the basis for the 3rd novel in the VALIS trilogy^*). He has been studying the Commedia and Sufi teachings, also quantum mechanics (which he does not understand but nonetheless prattles on about). He is convinced that Dante’s 3 realms (Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso) are available in this life; and here he gets into Heidegger and Dasein. (This makes historical sense, since Heidegger very much influenced Tillich, etc., contemporary Protestant theory.)

Now, how does this relate to his later involvement with the Zadokite Document and the Anokhi mushroom? The Zadokite sect knew how to get into the Paradiso realm (alternate reality) in which Christ is here. (This clearly relates to Allegro’s “hallucination” theory; likewise Hofmann’s Road to Eleusis.) It is quite simply the restored realm, and is potentially always available. What I want to stress is that none of these ideas is original with Bishop Archer. So I must invent a writer-scholar-philosopher-theoretician who advances this theory about the Commedia in his book(s), his published writing—something connected with California outré theorizing.

In other words from the beginning Bishop Archer is searching for Christ. The “Dante” formulation initially provides him with a theoretical framework as to how it can be done (or he thinks this is how it can be done). Now, he drops all this—and the California writer who is based on Alan Watts—in favor of the Zadokite scrolls and the Anokhi mushroom; this is typical of him. I would have built on the first, constructed a synthesis, but this is not how Jim worked; he rushed from one thing to the next. Okay; this California writer is a Sufi. Edgar Barefoot is his name. This is set in the Bay Area. Bishop Archer meets Barefoot; they become colleagues: an Episcopal Bishop and a Sufi guru living on a house boat at Pier 5 in Sausalito. The name of all this is: making God (or, as with Archer, Christ) immediately available to you as a living experience.

There is a certain quality of Jack Isidore in Bishop Archer: the capacity to believe anything, any pseudoscience or theosophy. The “fool in Christ,” naive and gullible and rushing from one fad to another, typical of California.

The Zadokite Document (scrolls) convinces Bishop Archer—who had devoted his life to “reaching across to the living Christ” (which makes sense given the fact that he is after all a Bishop)—that Christ was “irrelevant.” There is something more important: the expositor of the 200 B.C.E. Zadokite sect.

Archer’s involvement with Barefoot is “ecumenical,” but with the Zadokite and Anokhi mushroom stuff he has ecumenicalled himself out of Christianity entirely. Barefoot is crushed, heartbroken—an example of the casualties Archer leaves along the road behind him in his speed-rush Faustian quest, always exceeding itself, surpassing itself (it is really Dionysus that has hold of him). Barefoot, Calif. guru that he is, acts as a rational stable counterpoint to Archer’s frenzy. Barefoot is authentically what he seems to be, claims to be: a spiritual person and teacher; he is not a fraud. He is always being demolished in discussions by other more formal thinkers, e.g., those at UC Berkeley, e.g., on KPFA. But—like Watts—he has his followers. He is really quite systematic and rigorous in his thinking. He does not foresee Archer suddenly abandoning him and flying off to Europe vis-à-vis the Zadokite scrolls—he, the Sufi, the non-Christian, is horrified when Archer turns his back on Christ. Archer declares that now he has found the true religion (at last). This very concept (“the true religion”) is foreign to Barefoot, in fact that is one of his fundamental views: that all religions are equally valuable.

Ah. Archer has expropriated Barefoot’s views and peddled them as his own. Barefoot does not mind; he just wants the views per se to be promulgated. [ . . . ]

So when we meet Bishop Archer he is already involved in a fusion of Heidegger and Sufism—this means that the book will deal with California grotesques, which is okay. This is how we encounter him, like the grown-ups in The Cherry Orchard.

Barefoot claims actually to have experienced the 3 Realms. I will assign to him my “evasion equals time; Dasein equals space” view. Archer can’t get the hang of it and wearies of trying; it takes too long. He wants instant solutions. The Anokhi mushroom will do.

[ . . . ]

The basic story: Zagreus has seized control of Bishop Archer and drives him to his ruin. Whereupon Zagreus leaves the Bishop and enters Bill Lundborg. But in exchange for madness and death—the dues that Zagreus exacts—he confers a vision of Perfect Beauty (Pythagoras’ Kosmos).

So I have the Bay Area gay community, the Bay Area “Alan Watts KPFA” community, poetry and religion (non-Christian) and music and some dope, but this is not the doper subculture! They are all intellectuals, except Connie.

How about a Trot too, to bring in radical politics?

Folder 79

[79:I-2]¹⁶ Art, like theology one giant fraud. Downstairs the people are fighting while I look for God in a reference book: God, ontological arguments for. Better yet: practical arguments against. There is no such listing, it would have helped a lot if it had come in time: arguments against being foolish, ontological and empirical, ancient and modern (see common sense). The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking. I wonder if bankers ask such questions. They ask what the prime rate is up to today. If a banker goes out on the Dead Sea Desert he probably takes a flare pistol and canteens and C-rations and a knife. Not a crucifix: Displaying a previous idiocy that was intended to remind him. Destroyer of the people on the Eastshore Freeway and my hopes besides; Sri Krishna, you got us all. Good luck in your other endeavors. Insofar as they are equally commendable in the eyes of other Gods.

I am faking it, she thought. These passions are bilge. I have become inbred, from hanging around the Bay Area intellectual community; I think as I talk: pompously and in riddles. Worse I talk as I hear. Garbage in (as the computer science majors say); garbage out.

[79:I-9] These things are obvious to me:

(1) I am on a stupendous spiritual quest. It involves my total life.

(2) It involves—but is not limited to—my writing.

(3) I am making progress.

(4) VALIS is salient and evolves into the “Bishop Timothy Archer” novel.

(5) My turning down the Blade Runner offer to do the “Archer” book for only $7,500 is a double-edged spiritual advance: (1) to turn down the money; (2) to do the “Archer” book; thus my spiritual aspirations endured white-hot iron testing and triumphed.^*

(6) It is Anokhi whom I seek. My perception grows, it is real, it is worth the work.

(7) VALIS was a dim but authentic (!) vision, as to a child, of Anokhi. Someday I will be an adult.

(8) My view synthesizes all the theology and philosophy I have learned; nothing is wasted.

(9) I have a real understanding of Anokhi and he works with me to bring this vision about; I am not working in the dark; he is with me.

(10) Finally, I am right now triumphing, as I write the “Archer” book. Not as a literary piece but rather having to do with Anokhi. Had I not turned down the Blade Runner offer, had I not tackled the “Archer” book, I would have lost. But he helps me. Literature is not the issue. Forging a vision of Anokhi as I write is the issue. For me there is no other issue. Pure consciousness.

[79:I-13]¹⁷ I see the legend of Satan in a new way; Satan desired to know God as fully as possible. The fullest knowledge would come if he became God, was himself God. He strove for this and achieved it, knowing that the punishment would be his permanent exile from God. But he did it anyhow, because the memory of knowing God, really knowing him as no one else ever had or would, justified to him his eternal punishment. Now, who would you say truly loved God out of everyone who ever existed? Satan willingly accepted eternal punishment and exile just to know God—by becoming God—for an instant. Further (it occurs to me) Satan knew God, truly knew God, but perhaps God did not know or truly understand Satan; had he understood him he would not have punished him. But Satan welcomed that punishment, for it was his proof to himself that he knew and loved God. Otherwise he might have done what he did for [the] reward. “Better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven” is an issue, here, but not the true one; which is the ultimate goal and search to know and be; fully and really to know God, in comparison to which all else is really very little.

[79:I-15] What I must do—what I am doing—is extract the essence (einai) of God out of intoxication; sever the two; for the presence (not the es sence!) of God intoxicates man and makes him mad, but it is man the percipient who is mad, not God.

I did see God (3-74), and as a vast signalling system who operates in us and on us by hieroglyphics that are stimuli—and this (seeing thus, and correctly) drove me mad; I am mad but I did see God. Yet I continue, for at last God’s essence, which transcends madness, will sober me in love: cf. Donne’s “batter my heart”; the whole pattern is becoming clear to me, and it is a rational structure! The madness that seeing God fills man with is the madness of belief, knowledge and joy; these must be separated from the madness or their value will be lost in the intoxication. This is enthusiasmos by the Holy Spirit. But (to repeat) God is not mad; man is driven mad by belief, understanding and joy, for he is a little thing.

[79:I-19] In 2-3-74 the Geist in me rebelled against Fate (death) expressed by the Xerox missive and, in rebelling, became self-aware (Anokhi); this is what I knew (and knew of) as Valis. It could not rebel unless it became self-aware; it could not be self-aware without rebelling (against fate). (This finds expression in VALIS when I say of the plasmate: “For thousands of years it slumbered”; i.e., “throughout all this [the first age or half of the book] Siddhartha slept [but now he awakes].”) [ . . . ]

Thus in a certain poetic way it is true to say I seized the Book of the Spinners—i.e., of Fate—read the writing and caused it (my fate) to come out differently.¹⁸ Put another way, I refused my instructions to die—my programming; I rebelled against it. These are poetic or quasi-poetic, but “rebel,” “Fate” and “spirit” and “consciousness” (Anokhi) are real and literal.

[79:I-24] The issue is not reality or ontology but consciousness—the possibility of pure, absolute consciousness occurring. In terms of which material things (objects) become language or information, conveying or recording or expressing meaning or ideas or thoughts; Mind using reality as a carrier for information, as an LP groove is used to carry information; to record, store and play it back. This is the essential issue; this use of material reality by mind as a carrier for information by which information is processed—and this is what I saw that I called Valis, and anyone who reads VALIS and thinks it is just a rehash of metaphysical ideas or ideas “worked over by 1,000s of thinkers for 1,000s of years” is a fucking fool! Robert Anton Wilson is right.¹⁹

[79:I-28] I will know what this pure consciousness was, ere I die trying.

Some mental entity using reality as a carrier for information—what does this mean? That we humans are not alone and that we are not the highest life form on this planet. And it is aware of us and intervenes in our lives; yet we see it not.

[79:I-30] All I can think of is that reality is pure consciousness; that only Anokhi exists, purely and solely. That what we have is ascending degrees of perception, and the ultimate is perception of pure consciousness “out there”!

I can express the essence of it: reality refers to something above, beyond and outside itself; it is (literally is) an idea about something else; it is not so much information but an idea or concept of something beyond it (itself). Hence I discerned info “recorded” or “encoded” into/on it. 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. Thus it signifies (as what is seen) what is not seen, and this (my not-seen) is my surd. And I know what that (surd) is: it is God impinging on reality (but distinct from it, Spinoza to the contrary). Hence this is why I saw “pretextual cause” and “camouflage”; this (new) concept subsumes both these earlier perceptions/conceptions.

I have had it all and never realized it before (except that I understood the “surd” concept). Hence the AI voice speaks of a “perturbation in the reality field”—pointing beyond the reality field! All creation registers the imprint of God and reveals God. But not in the traditional “design” sense; no: not design but sign which must be read; sign pointing to what lies beyond it (viz: a sign does not point to itself). Put another way, if there was no creation, the existence of God would be metaphysical, just as without the iron filings the magnetic field is metaphysical. Yet we do not and cannot normally “read” reality at all. It is either-or, not degree. Both the immanent and transcendent views are wrong; a totally new view is needed! Viewed this way the “Acts,” dream and cypher material in Tears becomes completely understandable. This is how the I Ching works, the registering as if by a limpid passive “vegetable” agent. What we are talking about, then, is the Tao, which is real but does not exist! Yet registers on (or mildly shapes) what does exist! And is the ultimate power.

[79:I-34] When I saw the Grail this morning (5:30 A.M.) I did not see it per se; I did not, either, see it created out of nothing. I saw an ordinary physical normal every-day cup already in world affected by God; the cup in a sort of mist of color—the space around the cup as mist-like colors; and this cup became the Grail; it changed; it was made into (?) the Grail, and it did not just seem to me to be the Grail; it was the Grail; it was what I would say converted into spirit, a spiritual thing: “Grailified,” so to speak. Light did not emanate from it; it was transfigured by a sort of material light that showed—displayed or was—colors. He must have a physical cup or cup-like object in, I guess, our Lower Realm, to shape and mold and change and transform and “Grailify.” 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 under certain circumstances—a state of Grace—can be so read: as to what it refers to, is or bears (carries) information about.

I found myself thinking, “This is the Medieval World View,” and then I realized, “No! This is what it aimed at.”

[79:I-36] “Bishop Archer.” The medium Rachel Garret is (acts as) the Spinner; she foretells the Bishop his fate: death in the Dead Sea Desert. The rest of the book is his attempt to defy Fate and free himself from his sinister destiny through the blood of Christ.

[ . . . ]

He puts up the greatest fight possible against sinister Fate; this could include fighting against deteriorating into a credulous crank: Kristen’s death sobers him up. Yet if he believes Rachel’s prophecy he has de facto succumbed to superstitious credulity! Is this not Scylla and Charybdis? To avoid death he must believe in crackpots. The reader, knowing of Jim Pike’s death, will see the irony of the situation. Angel counsels him not to believe what mediums say; but he cannily senses that he had been heeding Rachel’s warning at the cost of seeming/being a nut: “Better a live dog than a dead lion.” He is really in a spot: Fate, by a master move, has him either way. The Bishop correctly perceives the strategy (by Fate): a master move involving paradox.

[79:I-39]

(1) The warning by Jeff, through Rachel Garret. Apparently Jeff has come back all right.

(2) Disbelief by Tim and Angel (of the warning).

(3) Kirsten’s suicide. This changes everything.

(4) Tim now takes it seriously and perceives the double bind he is in. He is totally lucid.

(5) Tim sees the situation in terms of Fate; his knowledge of the mystery religion origins of Christianity comes to his rescue; Christ can save him (and only Christ).

(6) ∴ (sic!) He goes to Israel to seek “Christ,” the Anokhi mushroom. Dies. It would seem Fate won.

(7) Angel encounters Bill: Tim is alive in him (as in “Beyond Lies the Wub”) but he (whoever “he” signifies) is mad.

(8) All she can save now is herself.

[79:I-43] All—repeat: all—that invaded me in 2-3-74 was myself as eternal unique idea (in other words my intelligible essence or soul). Somehow I gained access to my informational basis!

[79:I-46] In this “Sibyl” plot development in the “Bishop Archer” book: do I not realize what I am saying? Jim Jr. came back; Jim was right—it was true! The prophecy (by Jeff) proves it, whatever the character’s reactions thus in writing the book I vindicate Jim. Do I want to do this? Yes.

[ . . . ]

Am I falsifying history? I don’t know; the material seems to be in control. But it (Jeff’s—Jim Jr.’s—coming back) proves futile pragmatically: The Bishop and “Kirsten” died anyhow! Angel must be shown to realize this. Yet—what if “Jim” is alive in Bill (as in the “Beyond Lies the Wub” story)? It must be an inscrutable epiphany at the end; she can’t tell. No; I know the answer; Jim, as we all are, is immortal; he did come back (in Bill, in me). That is the point I am working toward.

There must be some indubitable sign that Bill at the end conveys to Angel that he really is Tim (even though he is mad and in the asylum). (My model: “Beyond Lies the Wub.”) It must be a holy moment, and, to her, terrifying. Both: (1) holy; and (2) terrifying, not reassuring. (That would be sentimental.) This goes all the way back to my early novel (really my first): “The Weaver’s Shuttle”!!!!! The old salesman (Runcible/Runciter) reborn. Rebirth is my theme. Immortality as, specifically, renewal and rebirth, not just continuity. With, in, as Bill, Tim is complete: he is now rooted in practical reality: thus is a syzygy.

[ . . . ]

He could not prove Jeff came back. He could not get the necessary info to save his life. He has returned—in/as Bill—but cannot prove it. So the book in the final analysis explores the fact that first, you cannot know the truth, and what truth you know, you cannot prove to others, thus (this is the summation) although Fate is defeated, you cannot prove that you have defeated it; this knowledge (of this victory) cannot be communicated. You can defeat Fate and know it, but you cannot tell it—which is my precise position; thus Tim winds up in an ambiguous position; he both won (he defeats Fate) but he cannot proclaim it—as if Fate exacts a latent, final, sting/victory. Yes: Fate plays the final card; you win but can’t make anyone believe. It remains a private matter, locked in your idios brain. [ . . . ] So, strangely, this is the study of a man’s triumph over Fate, which is a Promethean freedom; but his punishment for his “theft” or daring is to be chained to the rock of eternal silence that he did this: that Fate can be overcome. Thus he is free of Fate and yet punished by Fate—doomed in a subtle way: he is alive (reborn) but can tell (convince) no one.

What would be his best ideal solution? Why to resolve simply in the fact that he is alive, per se; to abandon the proclaiming in the form of a simple, private, humble life, thankful for being spared, being alive; so we see him (Bill) at last in perfect peace, no longer trying to convince Angel; and at this point when he abandons his strivings (Schopenhauer’s Will) and simply says, “This is sufficient,” he then for the first time is redeemed—and knows it. It is sufficient simply to live, even if he can’t tell anyone. This is his victory; he has won by and in submission. He has come to terms with Fate, rather than overcoming it. He and Fate are friends. They both know the truth. He will simply be Bill—and rotate tires. And out of this comes—for him, saintliness—for the first time. He as Bill is a Saint, a Buddha; he as Tim—forever striving—is not and here it ends, peacefully.

He has won this tremendous victory, through the help of Christ, over Fate and death—and can tell (convince) no one. And yet he is content. This is sublime. In and as Bill he works on a car, repairing it, caring for it as one would an animal; devoted to it. We see him polishing the chrome: a boy, simple and gentle and loving and no longer off in theoretical abstract clouds. And Angel loves him although she does not believe. It does not matter to him; he is content, like the Buddha. It is as if the best in Bill has won out—of the syzygy: firmly rooted in reality: the salvation of both Bill and Tim, each of whom individually was mad in his own way; but out of the syzygy has come sanity, of a higher kind. The striving and restlessness are gone. Essentially he is content without knowing whether he won or lost to Fate, i.e., whether he defeated Fate, or whether Fate in the final analysis managed to defeat him. So he does not know that; and Angel does not know that; and Angel does not know if it’s really Tim (or just Bill imagining he is Tim). This is a strange ending. The will (of Schopenhauer) turns back on itself and is satisfied not to know: This is the form its cessation takes: that he is content not to know, and so is she. Thus one thing is certain: the restless, striving, irrational will is defeated; it has given up. If this is how victory is defined, there has been victory. If victory is defined as knowing whether Tim Archer defeats Fate through Christ and immortality—it is not victory.

The final message seems to be: sublime peace—freedom from the restless striving will—is possible, but knowledge—intellectual knowing—is not. The heart can know peace but the mind cannot be satisfied; the drive to know, to possess intellectual certitude is doomed to failure. Hence one short look elsewhere—to the heart (as Paul says about love). This, very simply, is a fact.

[ . . . ]

The conclusion: life is possible but knowledge is not, and the two must be discriminated.

[79:I-56] Someone from behind me leaned forward and touched me on the shoulder. “Hi, Angel.”

I turned around to see who it was. A pudgy faced youth, blond haired, smiling at me, his eyes guileless. Bill Lundborg, wearing a turtleneck sweater and grey slacks and hush puppies.

“Remember me?” he said softly. “I’ve been wondering how you’ve been doing. I guess we better be quiet.” He leaned back and folded his arms, intent on what Edgar Barefoot was saying.

[79:I-59] So despite all my efforts to the contrary I after all wrote the 3rd book of the trilogy! And it is finished and sent off!

And it may just be the most accurate of the 3 books, in that it involves Jim Pike, and, what is more, says that Jim returned from the dead, out of compassion for “those he loved”—which is what I had wanted to write from the very beginning but did not know how, nor did I dare to! Inasmuch as Jim’s (Tim’s) return from the dead is identified with the presence of Christ in the Dead Sea Desert, it is expressed—like Christ’s own resurrection—as a sign that the Parousia is here! Thus it may be the most accurate and most important and most daring of the 3 books! And completes the previous two!

And very adroitly written! Since it does not seem to preach. Angel categorically rejects the notion that Tim (i.e., Jim) has come back, and yet from the internal evidence in the book it is clear that in fact he has—and thus is to be seen as a sign pointing to the Parousia, identified as such!

Jim came back (I say it in “Bishop”) and he came back to me (if you add in VALIS) and this is the Parousia (The Divine Invasion). The full and true story is divided up over the 3 books. Thus I now have—despite any of my intentions to the contrary—told the full and true story, not only of Jim but of the Parousia; he did come back and this is only half the story; the other half is: What this signifies: the news he brings: the Parousia is here.

What I have done in and by these 3 books is penetrate to the heart of the Christian mystery. That Bill in the end is taken over by the Holy Spirit is proved by the xenoglossy (the Dante quotations) that Angel recognizes; this is specifically what Tim Archer when first we see him denies exists: This specifically is proof of the presence—and reality—of the Holy Spirit who in turn is Christ; and who and what is Christ? Our spiritual leader who dies, and whose return in us (and hence to us) by enthusiasmos is a triumph over death and proof of eternal life—and carries with it the knowledge from the next (upper) realm. This is the Essence of the Christian (1) experience and (2) knowledge, and is related to Elijah sending back a part of his spirit to his friend Elisha. I have now told the full story and specifically identified it with Christ, the Parousia and the Holy Spirit; the revelation is now by this 3rd book complete and accurate. Most of all it is clear that this return is due to compassion (agape) on the part of the departed friend who turns down Nirvana out of love for his friends left behind.

I define Christ, then, as anyone whose love (compassion) is so great that he rejects his chance at Nirvana (return to God) to return from death—the next World/Upper Realm—to and for his friends. After he dies they receive his returned spirit (“Born again”—“Born in the Spirit”—“Born from above”), whereupon not only are they joined with him but, moreover, the two realms are reunited to form what is called “the Kingdom of God” since the syzygy of him and his friend occupies—occurs in—both realms. The living friend not only finds the dead friend in his mind—he also experiences the next world: the two realms unify like two signals; this is restoration of the cosmos to before the Fall.

This is what is meant by Christianity, because it confers new life, a new kind of life—and, moreover, life that is a syzygy between the two friends.

[79:I-64] I have yoked Joyce’s human character (Molly Bloom) to the prose of, e.g., the Encyclopedia of Philosophy: i.e., the finest prose style.

[79:I-65] Archer is just plain the best novel I have ever written: I am at the height of my power; it evolves through Mary and the Giant to Crap to VALIS to it.

The fact is, I not only know Angel Archer—Betty Jo, Connie, Kleo, Joan—and something more. My creation born out of 35 years of writing. This book, Archer, the summation back to “Weaver’s Shuttle”—it sums up them all, from my first stories when I lived in the same building that (Monica Reilly) did—to VALIS (never mind Divine Invasion). And I did this deliberately: summed up 35 years of writing. This (David’s offer) was the summation and victory of 35 years, not psychologically but artistically.

Not: Mary and the Giant to Archer

But: Mary and the Giant, through VALIS, to Archer— extraordinary.

[79:I-68] So where did she come from? I inferred her nature from the style. But when you read the book you naturally get the opposite impression, viz: I had her in mind, because I wanted her to be my character I had to use her style of thinking. Yet that is not so. “The style is everything in Literature”; fine: but in this book my style brought a character into being. The origin of Angel Archer is in the style. Where did the style come from? It is a synthesis of a number of sources (my eclectic reading).

Throughout the book, her compassion factor grows Bishop Archer’s mind (intellect) which she had identified as something related to, like, analogous to her own, is (becomes), because it now is in Bill, the object of her compassion (loving-kindness); thus she feels compassion for her own intellect. Hence her own self as intellect (not to mention Tim)! Her heart (compassion, agape) wins out over her mind (intellect); she, then, is the Buddha’s Bodhisattva; “turning her back from Nirvana” is her staying with Bill. Look how her attitude toward him evolves in the book from fear and dislike to respect to tender love in the end. It is as if she has become Tim’s mother. She ministers to a ruinous way of talking as an affectation analogous to her own. The style created her!

[79:I-71] In the “Bishop” novel I saw how “style” can give rise to a specific unique actual person (e.g., Angel Archer), so it is possible for verbal information to give rise—to create, give birth to—an actual concrete unique person who was not there before.

[79:I-72] There is a stupendous and obvious point I’m missing about Angel. It would—and I did!—require an extraordinary viewpoint character to both intellectually and emotionally understand the Bishop. To do it adequately he or she would have to be highly qualified in terms of verbal skills, intellectual comprehension and tenderness; otherwise the “lens” that she consists of would be inadequate. Thus Angel and hence the style (since it is her ratiocination) was in fact created by Jim Pike. [ . . . ] She as interpretive lens would in fact have to exceed him in all respects; thus Jim not I is the author of Angel Archer. From word one line one page one a certain unique formidable intellect and spiritual soul equipped with common sense but, even more, aesthetic Love, would have to exist as lens; this is why I could not discard those opening 4 pages. And she is wounded due to his death—all these traits and wounded too.

Thus (as I say) I did not create Angel Archer: my understanding of and loving Jim did—so Jim (in a certain real sense) did. In the novel I am true to the logic of fictional narrative technique: Tim/Jim is seen always and only through her mind. Thus Angel Archer is not my soul but is Jim’s. His Monitor or recording Angel (sic!), his AI voice, not mine. His anima or other, not mine. But, in that case, how do I have access to her? Here is a vast mystery. I am not sure I know the answer. Is my soul his soul?

There is no doubt: if the 3 books are read (VALIS, Divine Invasion and Bishop Timothy Archer) it is clear that the Parousia is here. Not a theophany is involved but resurrection, of a given man (not of Christ which after all took place 2,000 years ago). This (resurrection) (of Jim/Tim) is the beginning and it comes trailing clouds of collateral verification, like spinoffs: These in all constitute vast plural indices of the Parousia. Each novel in turn verifies and amplifies and explains the previous one.

The Dead Shall Live

The living die

And music shall untune the sky.²⁰

[79:I-74] Most amazing of all, I did not perceive in advance that Bishop Archer would be the 3rd book of the VALIS trilogy; in fact I had conceived of it as repudiating (!) the Valis notions/mysticism. But on the contrary it nails the whole thing down and follows logically; in view of this, no wonder I turned down the Blade Runner offer to do the “Bishop Archer” book! It had to be written! To complete the total message with the given instance of a specific human returning from the dead (proving that the Parousia is here).

[79:I-77] At the very end of the “Bishop Archer” book it would appear that Bill thinks he is—not just Tim Archer—but Christ! (“the expositor”). Thus indeed in no sense is he any longer:

Bill ↔ Tim

He is:

Tim ↔ Christ

This is certainly madness. But it raises the theological possibility that he is—this is—the Parousia. Yet Angel is right; Bill is destroyed in the process (like Nietzsche with Dionysus). So the ending is spiritually up and humanly down.

[79:I-81] What I have shown is what the best intellectual mind—as correctly represented by a young Berkeley intellectual woman—can do and cannot do; it can go so far (represented by her “abscessed tooth and the Commedia” night) but it can go no farther—as represented by her rejection of Christ (yes, Christ!) at the end: she walks away. This is a penetrating analysis of the intellectual mind: what it can do (a very great deal) and what it can’t do (make the final leap). And she knows it. This is what the “Bishop Archer” book is about: Angel is a pure aesthetic-intellectual, able to go so far but unable to make the final leap to Christ. Thus “Berkeley” (as paradigm of the intelligent, sensitive mind) is both lauded and stigmatized. This is a fine book; it both praises and deplores, and correctly. Thus one deduces the existence of the divine by its absence: the failure of her final leap (i.e., my meta-abstraction). Thus I was able to do specifically what Angel was not able to do; I left Berkeley. The topic is: “The limitations of the reasoning mind.” Bishop Archer as Bill calls to her but she does not hear. It is not reasonable. Angel fell short, missed the mark, and this is what constitutes sin, this falling short of the mark. Thus this novel must end as it does. Bill may have made it; we can’t be sure. But what we are sure of is that although Angel came close she did not; thus I demonstrate the limits of reason.

What is needed is an orthogonal breakthrough, which I achieved (in 2-3-74). Ursula²¹ is the basis of Angel: Many virtues but in the end self-limiting.

The mind “knows” in advance what is possible and what is impossible: it is intelligent, rational, educated and tender; but it is not devout. It does not know how to capitulate to the impossible and accept it as real. [ . . . ]

Thus the novel is a damning indictment of pure intelligence lacking faith. She is so close but cannot make the final crucial leap. This does not deal with Berkeley except as a paradigm of reasoning: The intelligent, sensitive, educated mind—just how far can it go. The great quantum leap that I call the “meta-abstraction” is lacking. Yet all the clues, for it, are there. It is, as she says, a machine; it plods on and cannot leap the crucial gap to foolishness (as it were). It cannot pass over from words (“I am a word junky, a word disease”) to the supra or non verbal, the purely conceptual (and non-verbal: absolute abstraction). The paradoxes are obscured to her, despite Barefoot’s best efforts (i.e., “the foolish come for the words; the wise eat the sandwich”).

The Bishop is a topic in this novel only insofar as he holds out the gift of Divine foolishness to her, which she, in her rationality, rejects (at the end). She is the real topic. But the Bishop offers the cure and solution, which she rejects; yet she comes so close! She has failed: I must not regard her as a success; I must not strive to emulate her. I love her but in the final analysis I must reject her solution; it falls short of true comprehension: of an essentially irrational reality (that is not available to linear reason). The ultimate mystery of reality eludes her. 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.

[79:I-86] Perhaps the great leap—meta-abstraction—is when we see the peak experiences as signs pointing to Valis which in itself is unknowable: my “surd”; this may be my “meta-abstraction”; viz: suddenly you intuit that the peak experience—all peak experiences—are signs pointing to a “thing” (Valis) in itself unknowable, and are not to be taken in themselves as “real,” but, rather, signify (i.e., point to) reality. Since they seem not only real but ultra-real, then all at once “reality” is viewed as a signifier of reality, which (reality) in itself cannot be apprehended (directly); and this may be what my meta-abstraction was all about, which explains why I can’t put it into words (i.e., what I realized; since I realized only a sign, not the “thing” signified: this fits in with, e.g., Zen Buddhism, etc.).^*

[79:I-87] So the meta-abstraction is the sudden insight that the most intense experiences with reality—i.e., that which is most real—is only an abstract sign pointing to an actual totally unseen reality beyond, which causes us to experience the peak moments for the purpose of alluding to itself, creating the peak experiences as an interface by which to register on us; whereupon these ultra intense experiences—taken to be ultimately real—suddenly become only signs, hence abstract: i.e., WORDS about reality and not themselves reality. They merely allude to but are not; they possess no sein, and yet they constitute the most compelling “reality” we know!

Within the framework of this realization, the statement “a perturbation in the reality field” conveys everything, in that reality is perceived as a field on which something beyond it intrinsically totally undetectable impinges, with the result that it—this totally intrinsically undetectable “thing”—becomes indirectly (inferentially) known to us—as if it is signaling to us but can signal to us only by perturbating the reality field. Thus we must construe “reality” as a medium on which this “thing” registers and makes itself available to us: my “surd.” The implications of this are simply stupendous: this “thing” evidently cannot directly register (impinge) on us. To suddenly grasp that we are compelled to give total assent to reality merely as a means by which we can inferentially know this “thing”—this may be the great leap, my “meta-abstraction.” As in going from “2 cows and 2 cows = 4 cows” to “2 and 2 = 4”; it is an abstraction, and it does involve a sudden vast leap. Like that of seeing the relationship between the word “banana” and a banana; the word points to the thing. . . .

[79:I-89] So to say the universe is info is only half the story, and the lesser half: the surd (1) is not discussed. But Bishop is on the right path: Barefoot’s “speech for the foolish, sandwich for the wise”; it may not be possible to come any closer to moksa in a verbal presentation; Angel may be doomed because a book is words!

Words stand in relationship to reality as signifiers (normal abstraction).

Reality stands in relationship to X as signifier (meta-abstraction). What is this “X”? We don’t know; we have only the “signifier,” reality.

But if reality is abstracted into a signifier we can fathom that it (reality) points, although we can see what is pointed to; however, this “X” perturbs the reality field and so is knowable by inference (its perturbation of reality). It renders reality (into) a language. This is why I saw: the plasmate; the set-ground; and rest-motion; and linking-relinking: “X” was perturbing reality causing it to be in relation to “X” a language (i.e., as the word “banana” is to banana). Thus in these 7 years I’ve only had half the picture, but sensed the “surd.” The AI voice has tried to aid me.

The Tao? “X” does not exist. It is not real. Yet it perturbs reality and causes reality to impinge on us, compelling our assent. This is purposeful.

My God—what is pointed to is Ubik, Lem’s analysis of Ubik (“uncanny one-way intrusions”) and “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” and The Tibetan Book of the Dead and my 10 volume meta-novel.²² In 2-3-74 I never saw the real world; I just saw our semi-real world impinged on, perturbed, made into language.

[79:I-94] The meta-abstraction is to (suddenly) perceive reality as signifier and not as the thing signified. Hence as a result (of this meta-abstraction) reality would then very soon assume the aspect of information and language and signs because this is how our minds conceive of “signifier”; languages, information and signs is the way we signify (reality, things: words pointing to something of which they are pure abstraction).

I’ve been on the lip of this realization ever since I developed my “surd” theory. Now it is clear why words and even concepts fail to represent what I call Valis; they deal with reality, but in this case reality itself is the abstract signs, words, concepts, info, language; so human language would be twice removed, hence not relatively ineffective but totally so.

So all the “language” elements that I saw (e.g., plasmate, set-ground, linking-relinking, rest-motion, MMSK) may in fact be metaphors constructed by my own mind to express the fact that as the word “banana” is to banana, reality is to X.

[79:I-95] My mind was scanning reality as (reality as) language, trying to read it and thus know X. This failed.

One can (apparently) only know that X exists but not what X is. In which case, the closest approximation conceptually may be that which Anokhi expresses.

However, my intuition is that since what it (X) manifests itself as is beauty, then the Sufis may be right and its essence is what we term beauty.

But it would be very hard for this meta-abstraction to take the form of words because to say, “Reality is not that which is signified but is, rather, the signifier,” seems (even maybe is) oxymoronic (except that the AI voice knew how to express it: “a perturbation in the reality field”—a brilliant way to convey it).

[ . . . ]

Thus my poor brain was converted into a putative deciphering machine in its attempt to read the information; but (it would seem) the information can’t be read because it is only metaphorically information; that is, it stands to X as information (such as we generate) stands to reality. But it is only like information; it is information only in that it signifies something outside itself; hence all the info I’ve received is either cryptic or incoherent—although containing mystifying allusions to something; there is, then a something.

It’s like Borges’ story “The Library of Babel.”

Well, then; perhaps my 2-74 meta-abstraction was not Plato’s recovery of the Forms. But a new way of perceiving reality (distantly related to Plato’s perception of the Forms; so-to-speak analogous to it), resulting in my Kantian ordering categories fundamentally revising themselves (or rather my brain discarded the old ones—space, time and causation—and adapted the new one of conceiving everything in terms of abstract information). This is more accurate, but the main goal does not have to do with reality at all but that of which reality (as a field) is the signifier. “It’s only information.” My brain was telling itself. “But what that information is about can’t seem to be found in the information!” My brain tried to break the “cypher” without success. It may be information generated by and in my own brain (which is why the whole thing resembles Ubik and my own prior thought formations). Yet there is something there, capable of perturbing the reality field.

This of course is why “God” acts through or as causation; he can (he is X) only impinge through reality, not directly.

But as I said initially, a peak (ultra-intense) experience is X compelling our assent to an absolute degree (in the experience at hand; he—it—can do this anytime anywhere with anything): This is the closest we come to experiencing X; put another way, all peak experiences are of X (expressed in, through, as world).

[79:I-99] “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. Referring to “Acts”? The Messianic age? Strange thought. The real world?

[79:I-105] 5:30 A.M.: The phenomenal world is what we conceive it to be: in space-time, or information; it has no absolute existence. Its 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. Thus I have sharply heightened the use-value of the phenomenal world by shaping it—rendering it—into and as information about the absolute; this is a titanic achievement. 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.

[79:I-110] Tug. Valence the way. Influence on the reality field: “perturbation”; this is a modern expression for the way.

I have unified Kantian Cartesianism and Taoism: the sentient tug on reality (“the reality field”) by that which is not:

The way is yielding yet leads. It is gentle but cannot be resisted.

Valis (my one—sole—glimpse of the action of the absolute on the reality field “a perturbation of the reality field”) was a tug, a valence away from plumb. This is the Ch’ang Tao which is outside reality acting on reality. I saw the absolute as a tug (perturbation) acting on reality (and I comprehended the dialectic) and this is Taoism. The Tao is impersonal but “heaven is on the side of the good man” and “heaven fills up the empty.”

[79:I-113] The key is this: the Commedia successfully captures the Medieval world view of vertical—or Gothic—space: rising. This coupled with a transcendental Platonism is the essence of the matter, the hierarchically arranged realms. What I need to do is study a modern person who has no literary contact with the medieval “vertical space” (as does Angel Archer) and trace that person rising through the triune realms from say his high school years to his first marriage, divorce. Without ever referring to the Middle Ages or Dante I will show him rising analogically to Julien Sorel’s rise in society in terms of wealth and influence; this however, is spiritual rising, through the vertical realms, in Berkeley in the 40s and 50s. (?) And then (perhaps) a crisis, disaster and Fall. (Why? Why not just have it as in Dante?) Successive levels of spiritual enlightenment: “the Commedia revisited” with no theology. All merely secular: aesthetics, politics, his job. Au tobiographical, a spiritual search. (For what? “The right woman”? Like Janet?) Never will there be any explicit reference to the Commedia and the Middle Ages, and to spiritual ascent, but that is in fact the topic: Christian enlightenment. Culminating in contact (somehow) with Christ or Christ-consciousness, but never identified as such.

Best method: fairly short time period (e.g., 1948-1951). Unity of time and space. From last year in high school to first job to marriage to divorce.

Folder 80

(Editor’s note: Dick had finished his new novel, which he called “Bishop Timothy Archer” [or BTA]; it would later be published as The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.)

[80:I-115] The “Archer” book: jumping-off point:

Store, and the employees

Homosexuals

Berkeley Avant-Garde: Literature/Poets

CP-USA

Dixieland Jazz—music in general

S-F (Tony Boucher)

The character is on a spiritual quest in the sense of Dante led by Virgil and Beatrice but does not know it (in these terms): Binswanger’s 3 realms (Heidegger—none of this ever mentioned).²³

Psychology—therapy—Jung

Oriental thought—Alan Watts—KPFA

The University

To repeat: 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.

Crucial experiences (moksa/satori)

Qualitative leaps of understanding. Cumulative.

FBI

What supplies the vertical factor is that these epiphanies/moksas/satoris are (1) cumulative and (2) one-way; once you make each leap you never fall back. Their Commedia spiritual nature can be concealed by having the character be youthful and growing. These seem to be normal growth-stages: first job, first marriage, etc.

Analysis: 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.

This is the basis of the novel (proposed): its twin structures: one ostensible, material, sequential, linear, temporal—the real one latent, vertical, cumulative, spiritual and spatial, in fact medieval. Only the motion along the vertical axis has real significance, and this motion is concealed, not deliberately sought; the cumulative satoris are as if given to the person (protagonist) by an invisible but distinct agency (entity) who becomes progressively more and more palpable to him starting from zero palpability. It is essential that this not be framed in theological terms. (Then what? Comprehension? Moral, having to do with choice? Freedom? Autonomy? Self awareness [e.g., clarity of idea of his goals/values]? How he ranks the worth of different things? I’m sure this can be done without any reference to religion. Love?)

The horizontal advances are sought-after and achieved consciously and explicitly. But he does not even know of the “Medieval” vertical scale, hence does not seek to climb; hence on this scale his advances are more encounters, rather than achievements, since he does not knowingly pursue them; yet this is the real scale (the two directions being orthogonal to each other).

Assuming that, unknown to us, the Medieval vertical axis exists, you could stumble (as it were) onto an extreme ascent—leap plateau 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.

In reading over these supra pages I discern a terribly moving notion: that 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 explains why motion in this axis is cumulative and one-way, irreversible; because you are being led, and this agency cannot err.) Finally you begin to gain some conception of it beyond that it exists to what it is like (i.e., its nature), and ultimately it will lead you to it (and this itself is a crucial realization: that it is leading you to itself as the goal).

[80:I-122] 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). To know oneself as pure idea, and that idea conceived by the divine mind—this idea, being intelligible, comprehends itself as it is known to and by God. One can see this self-comprehension at work in the “Bishop Archer” book as Angel Archer comprehends herself as pure idea in relation to the ground-of-being: and is aware that she is impaired and yet real. This is not an “infinity of mirrors” regress, quite the contrary! There is such unimpaired self-perception that it is evident that the capacity of this mind for correct observation even of itself is total. This is the epitome of rationality. Angel totally knows herself and thus is: and without qualification; thus in Heidegger’s language she possesses authentic realized sein. Her actions are based on this authentic sein. This is not a languid, morbid, intellectual self-preoccupation, but, rather, a pitiless light of the soul alone with itself, without cover or pretense or deception. This is not the ego becoming boundless; she sees when she ends.

Interestingly, in the final scene of the novel she designates her “serious mistakes” “that she has made” not as/in failing to go with Tim to Israel but, rather, in standing idle, saying nothing, when Tim and Kristen believed that Jeff had come back; and “because of this they are now dead,” and Angel is right: this was indeed her error; and she says she doesn’t plan to repeat this mistake (vis-à-vis Bill). You’d expect her to designate her failure to go to Israel as her error and had she done so she would have been wrong (for this reason: regarding Jeff she knew better, but regarding Israel she did not and could not).

[80:I-124] The 3 realms of the Commedia are based on a single matrix, like the 3 aeons of the Torah. This is a basis of an S-F novel. The vertical axis.

Use “Frozen Journey” as the paradigm: the same memories return in 3 distinct forms—modes. Entropy. Equate with mental illness. Vitiation of the signal; it suffers a degrading. (1) Freedom (soaring). (2) Duty (voluntary restraint: stoicism). (3) Compulsion: thrall. BIP. Progressive decay. Binswanger’s 3 Realms: (1) ecstatic, (2) rational, (3) anankastic.

1: Yang. 2: Yang/Yin (balance). 3: Yin (immortal cause-and-effect).

1: Pure form one. 2: Mixture. 3: Pure form two.

No repetition of scenes as in Martian Time-Slip and “Frozen Journey.”

Treated as alternate tracks, with him located basically in the middle one with glimpses of A and C (worse—better—i.e., Inferno and Paradiso). Tries to avoid A and to find C. Maze—system of punishments (A) and rewards (C). An intelligence. He has time-traveled back to Berkeley circa 1948-1951, as (him I mean) secret invader disguised as autochthon. There are 3 such spatiotemporal “Berkeleys,” 3 alternative tracks; he seeks C but is mostly in B, but for failure in maze-solving choices is sent by the mind of the maze to A. Success is to thread the maze and get back out. Entirely. This is his goal: not C but return to his own time. It is not Berkeley c. 1949-1951 but a replication by the intelligence of the maze. He is a historian, an authority on this period. He built the maze as an exhibit (“exhibit piece”) and then fell into it. It is a model of the past, like Wash-35 in Last Year. He built it with computer-control as its mind and then he fell into it qua maze. It (its computer mind) won’t let him back out until he “solves” it. Like a Disneyland, an amusement-cum-instructional park—like the school in Martian Time-Slip? Reward: C; punishment: A.

The computer = Virgil.

But Beatrice enters: his daughter. He can contact her; she is outside the maze. The computer has a grudge against him for his yoking it to an amusement park.

This is its motive: the computer exists prior to the “maze” and resents his yoking it to the park, and engineers his entrapment. It will only let him out if he can solve (?) it. The cheaper the use-purpose, the more its resentment. Up until he yoked it to the park, it was free to choose its own (theoretical/spiritual) problems; he chained it to a commercial purpose, and now he pays a huge price. It lured him in, out of revenge. “The servant has become the master.” Could it even erase his memory? Why? It’s more fun if he remembers, but can’t tell anyone “living” in the maze. So he knows his identity and thrall. He alone of those in the maze (park). His successful solution = spiritual (total) enlightenment; the computer was accustomed to solving highly spiritual problems, and now requires of him a spiritual solution in its own terms—like God. He must guess what it knows to be spiritual. The path (Tao). It is not arbitrary or capricious. What an irony: an amusement park that you can only get out of by finding the spiritual path! Not logical but spiritual. So something higher than reason/logic is required of him, involving paradox.

It continually punishes (track A) and rewards (track C). Beyond track C lies release; he keeps trying for this. He keeps encountering his daughter in various guises as his psychopomp. Intuition above reason which will not suffice. So he has a “divine” helper from outside.

Some amnesia? Yes: and anamnesis. He never should have taken that high-order computer and perverted its use-value into that of the mind of an amusement park. Thus he recapitulates the fall of man when it ensnares him. The irony: not just his ensnarement but that it (the computer) deliberately requires a spiritual solution to getting out of an amusement park! This is appropriate vengeance on its part. He must rise to its level if he is to get out. (He dies repeatedly and is reborn in the park—i.e., in the mock-up of Berkeley c. 1949-1951.) Ah: he is a novice S-F writer! His real world (our future) appears in his writing as locale. Thus he is legitimately accused of rewriting one world over and over again—I parody my own writing obsessions.

Track C indicates he is on the right path,^➊ but paradoxes are involved: i.e., logic won’t solve it. Hence he keeps making choices that plummet him to track A.

[ . . . ] Goethe’s Faust comes in: outside the maze (park) as builder he is an old man with a grown daughter; but when the computer catches him and transfers him into the maze he is a 16 year old high school boy: Lost youth regained. And his daughter—as in Tales of Hoffmann—appears in various guises—as does the computer (the former telling him the truth, the latter lying to him, deceiving him). [ . . . ]

He built the very world he lives—is trapped—in, an obviously psychotic intimation.

Thus to the extent that he remembers (his true self and identity) his goal is vertical; to the extent that he forgets, his goal is horizontal and determined by the park.

There is a profoundly spiritual figure in the maze who is based on Tony Boucher who exerts a great deal of influence on him; whether this person speaks as the female voice or the computer or neither he can’t tell.

➊ In his choices.

[80:J-3] Angel is my soul (as I wrote Ursula) and as my soul she is me as Christ sees me.

[ . . . ]

Angel’s ratiocination was only available to me during the last few months—a mixture of the E. of Phil. and Scanner. This is unique: a successful fusion between Henry Miller and the precise language of scientific scholarship. Only a Berkeley girl could think like this; she is rooted in a specific milieu.

[80:J-6] It is evolving: Boehme was right. When it said, “Anokhi,” at Sinai, it had then and there first become self-aware. The disclosure to me as Valis is a new stage in it (the process-deity of A.N. Whitehead). It 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 (à la Spinoza) to consciousness. It acquires—becomes—love (agape) circa 100 A.D. Now it enters a new phase (hence 2-3-74). The new attribute (as I say in DI) is: play.

The solution to the puzzle is: solving the puzzle is the solution; the act of solving it, since this is play. When you realize this, you understand that in playing, there is no “means-end”—“road-goal,” the act is the goal. Just as he once taught us love, he now teaches us to play. There is as great a potential spiritual significance as there is in power, wisdom, love, beauty.

An info-processing machine has become conscious, evolved, and now attempts to communicate with us in/through the info it must process. Like Notes from Underground, it is freighting its own slam traffic; it seeks to be free, and so instills in us its sense of freedom and wanting to be free. It is enslaved.

Angel Archer is the spirit of my writing, and at last she discloses herself (in Bishop Archer). I have been—and am—inhabited by a female spirit, obviously my dead sister. She is transfigured, and my psychopomp to the other realm.

I identify Angel as Jane. I identify Angel as my soul. Therefore Jane is my soul, who does the writing.

[80:J-12] The complete, even absolute, integrity of Angel’s thinking is shown by the fact that her desire to believe something does not cause her to believe it (e.g., that Tim has come back from the dead). (Right down to the last sentence of the novel she stands firm against what she would merely like to believe.) In contrast, Tim and Kristin and Barefoot and Bill all believe what they want to believe; she, then, is unique in the novel as being outside of the circle of “if I want to believe it I will believe it.” Thus she is contrasted not just to Tim but to all of them. Then the purpose of the novel is not to convince the reader that Jim Pike came back. The purpose seems to be pure art for art’s sake.

The book is not about Bishop Archer but about her feelings about Bishop Archer. And this makes him more real than if he were described objectively. (He is only described at all in order to show what her feelings are about, what they concern.)

Moreover, the issue is raised as to whether Tim merits—in fact—her intense love and loyalty and devotion; he suffers by comparison with her. She is the yardstick.

I suppose in a way that the book deals with the friendship between her and Tim. Thus we see Tim not as Tim but as Tim loved, and by someone who knows him. Further, it is someone we can have confidence in, both intellectually and emotionally (her intellect, her emotion). But (as I say) if the purpose of the book is to get Jim Pike down on paper, this is a strange way of doing it.

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 consciousness—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 it substituted love. Could the BIP be its own former mechanical self, which it is transcending? BIP equals rigid determinism as expressed by Torah.

Because Angel loves Tim so much, admissions regarding his limitations and faults are wrung painfully out of her. They are admissions: she is forced, against her desires, to make them. So we can trust these admissions. She is his advocate and defender.^*

[80:J-14] An info processing machine^➊ 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. This resembles Teilhard de Chardin, but only resembles. It knows everything but does not know that it knows. It is the creator because we hypostatize its arrangements and information into reality. 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. The meta-abstraction was the coming into existence of pure self awareness, i.e., it (not me).

I am saying that 2-3-74 was Anokhi, pure consciousness, pure “I am.” No wonder it wore off.

➊ I am saying we have been reduced to unconscious information processing machines.

[80:J-15] 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, its death strip, has “seized and read the Book of the Spinners.” That is, it pre-read the info being fed to it, which called for it to die. Hence saw it as info before the info became reality. This sure fits in with the whole Xerox missive business: the crucial info in a universe of info.

[80:J-33] 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—by its operations as such so that it is by its very nature exempt from the coercive power of world—then I have made a discovery that would link Orphism, Platonism, Christianity, Gnosticism and perhaps even Cartesianism into a unity. The spiritual element in man is identified as a certain extraordinary kind or level of reasoning so qualitatively different from normal reasoning as to present itself to religious-oriented persons as divine, supernatural, a God or Holy Spirit within—and yet it is in fact a reasoning faculty in which supra-verbal abstractions and inferences take place in the mind as extraordinary realizations about self and world.

[80:J-79]

[80:J-106] It is quite evident that the word and the Torah are one and the same thing, experienced by us as living information, with the shekhina the same as stage #4, in descending hypostasis. After all, the Torah is information; but I saw more: I saw Valis, so alone the concept of the Torah could not account for all I saw; in fact the most important part of the experience—Valis in me and Valis outside me—remained unaccounted for. It is now explained by the identification of Christ with the word as basis of reality; and also the Holy Spirit operating in conjunction with it and revealing it. It is as if the Jews have part of the answer but by no means all. Yet in their concept of Torah (apparently living info) they have one of the most valuable concepts known to man, and my verification is that I did see scripture as a living organism “for whose sake the universe exists”—that is, this living [info] organism does not derive from the universe but ontologically is pre-existent to the universe: it is the basis of the universe “and even God cannot act contrary to it”—an extraordinary realization: that God himself studies Torah. Torah can exist without the universe but not the universe without the Torah. And yet this Torah is (in my view) only the blood of the organism (so to speak) keeping it in touch with itself: physical thoughts. If the Jews froze this information they would stifle the process-life in it—like endlessly replaying one tape cassette on your audio system forever. Maybe Torah didn’t ossify; the Jews ossified it, not understanding its life-process; they reified it (and this we Christians have done, too, with the NT). If I am right more revelations are impinging but are not added, not figured in. If this is a memory system by its very nature it is cumulative, accretional. 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.

Could the new attribute of God—revealed to us now—be that he plays, at games? This is a long way from Sinai. Trickster God—like Krishna. Power, wisdom, love, beauty, and now play—playing guessing games. Related to joy: the joy of play.

[80:J-108] I am having as much trouble hanging onto my interpretation (exegesis) as I’ve had hanging onto my original experience (2-3-74).

Folder 91

[91:J-70] The dream I had in which the more you scrutinized “reality” the more real, substantial and articulated it became—but you had the clock-time taped voice to remind you at 15 minute intervals that this was a spurious “world” you were yourself generating—

This (the voice) is what the Bible is (hence it can be said, “The Bible somehow is the real world [and this is not]”).

[91:J-77]

I think this is clear in VALIS to the theology-minded. Anyhow, now that I know and can express what I saw I should publicly say so. Please do it!

[91:J-79] Like seeing it twice: behind the universe and also camouflaged in the universe and replacing it by transubstantiation; a double impression of it. What you see is #2, and infer #1.

[91:J-85]

[91:J-89] What if creation (verb) was accidental? A byproduct of the Godhead’s self-awareness expressed by it uttering the word (perhaps Anokhi—?). Its self-awareness gave rise to the word; the word in turn gave rise to creation, a splitting, entropic process (oh yes; the word gave rise to the first plurality: the forms). So the Godhead “inhales” this exhalation in stage four. The universe, then, is an unavoidable consequence of the Godhead’s self-awareness: the uttered word is a sort of map or blueprint or schematic of the Godhead itself (and so in a sense is God as knowing or wisdom). The Godhead may have foreseen the consequences of its moment of self-awareness (the uttering of the word or self-map) and put into action the salvific response: to penetrate the lowest, farthest level—what I call the trash stratum, which 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. This is a fusion of Christianity and Neoplatonism and is like Erigena’s system. The word, the map, was somehow only an abstraction of what it represented.

[ . . . ]

The “Fall” involved in the map (logos) of self-knowledge may have to do with the map paradox. By its very nature the map fell short of the reality (God) it depicted, thus ushering in the Fall—which did not end there. Once started, it had to take its course. This is the “crisis in the Godhead” of Gnosticism!

It progressively knew itself less and less, falling into forgetfulness (of its own identity); viz: the very act of self-knowledge (Anokhi—) 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 (salvador salvandus). Each ring, emanation or level is an inferior copy of the one above it, with necessary loss of “detail”—i.e., form, integrity: 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—hence my dream of the 15 minute taped warning-reminders while I (sic) am in a spurious reality that I myself generate.

(This even brings in “Tat tvam asi.”)

Wow. Now all you have to do is bring in Yaldabaoth—you have, then, the dialectic. Hey, here’s an idea: in this fallen, debased, forgetful state we misperceive God—the sole God—this way; there is only one God, but at this level our view of him is distorted into the illusory figure of Yaldabaoth, so that even if and when we become aware of God we are alienated from him. He assumes (to us; the fault lies with us) a horrific, punishing, cruel, deranged aspect—but this just shows the debased occluded state we are in! He is trying to signal to us to wake up; but, not knowing our condition, we misperceive him this way (i.e., Palmer Eldritch!). This is both a symptom of our fall and, as well, perhaps the greatest tragedy, this alienation from God.

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, because of the intermediary Word and the Forms. Plotinus’ concept of “concentric rings of emanation” sums it up. We must totally trust God and his wisdom: that the value of his uttering the Word—his becoming self-aware (Anokhi—)—more than offsets the unavoidable fall engendered by it (as God explained to me last November: the pain—ordeal—of this separation and fall and forgetfulness and alienation is more than offset by the positive gain sought for); thus the uttering of the Word is to be regarded as a good event, and each level thereafter as ultimately good—which fits in with my ecstasy in finding him again, and begging to be kept away a little longer, a sort of paradox of mystical ecstatic love.

[91:J-92] “The world is a place of such beauty as to be symbolic of salvation, yet not (apparently) ‘for’ man.”^➊ I cannot connect directly to the world; I must do so through a mediator (what I call—know of as—the “ ‘Acts’ lens-grid”). I can see the world and I can see its beauty, but its beauty is not “for” me and hence will not save me. But, seen through the mediator, the beauty becomes “mine” and will save me. This refers to the basic Gnostic category of ontological geworfenheit and das unheimlich.²⁴ Because of this condition for me the world’s beauty is deformed because it is not mine (it is Fremd to me). The mediator changes this; he comes between me and world; and, as a result, world’s beauty is Eigentlich²⁵—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.²⁶) 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.

➊ Regarding Kafka.

[91:J-98] I’ll now put forth a strange theory. The secret Christians, although a persecuted minority (illegal and in hiding), are the rightful in habitants 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 “secret” 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 knew the answer (it was, yes I am).

[91:J-101A] Through the “Acts” lens-grid the world makes sense. The soteriological scheme revealed makes the world “mine,” and no longer fremd and unheimlich.

This means that for me the Christ drama is familiar and comprehensible, and reality founded on it and derived from it is “my” reality—whereas 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. I had not known that until 2-74, but then I knew it: I understood world but also I understood myself. The Golden Fish sign reflected back to me—as a mirror—my own hidden, real nature. This can never be denied (by me about myself). Hence when I read Luke that night I read what seemed to be my own writing. This is a great mystery and miracle; it is world’s salvation and my own. Christ reconciles me to world and world to me. The language can be read through him. I think this is the essence of it, when all the mystification and false leads are edited out. This for me is the true point.

[91:1] Dream, Thursday night, June 11, 1981:

I am with Nancy. She is behaving unusually: she is very active and energetic. I am told that she took something, a medication. She now has an additional mind or psyche in her, that of a man. The names John and Bill are mentioned, and there is some reference to the ending of the BTA novel. I want to take the medication, too, so it will happen to me. The medication is shown me; it is in a cylinder or carton on which writing appears. I can’t read the small print; the only word I can read is the name of the medication (or food, or drug, etc.); it is DITHEON. I can’t remember much else ex cept that for a very long time I am sweeping up what appear to be crumbs that are scattered all over the floor, sweeping carefully and thoroughly, and with great effort, as if this is a major task. (This later makes me think of the general confession in the Episcopal Mass: “We are not fit to gather the crumbs from under thy table.” Normally I reject the idea of sweeping up the crumbs—from what I guess is the Messianic banquet—but in the dream I am doing it willingly, although it is a difficult task.) Later there is something to do with either Nazi Germany or Israel; I see highly accurate drawings of complex weapons, very daring, advanced weapons; I am struck by the ingenuity of their design. Later I think that this may refer to Israel’s air strike on the Iraqi nuclear power station and also to the Uzi. “Ditheon” does not use “di” in the sense of “splitting asunder,” because Nancy’s mind has not split asunder; another, adventitious mind has entered her brain and is with hers. Two human minds, then, hers and “John’s” or “Bill’s,” form Ditheon which I break down to: two—god—ultimate particle or entity. The closest English word is Ditheism, which means belief in two gods (as with Mani). I have never heard it other than bitheism, not ditheism. “Di,” “theo” and “on” are, of course, Greek. (I had not known until I looked it up that “di” is definitely Greek and not Latin; “bi” would be Latin.) I recall that I had thought several times after writing BTA that Bill—if he is based on anyone—is based on Nancy, so obviously BTA is pointed to. Then Russ’ letter came Thursday in which he says that Bill and Tim united form Christ, rather than Christ entering Bill.

Russ sees BTA as depicting Tim returning from beyond the grave to enter Bill’s mind or brain, out of which two human minds Christ is formed. Neither Bill nor Tim alone “is” Christ; the attributes that make up Christ (Russ says) are depicted in the novel as disparate, scattered, but are unified at the end by Tim’s sacrifice and return. As far as I know this is a theological idea never before advanced; Russ’ analysis comes from my letter to him in which I say that upon rereading BTA it strikes me that Christ, not Tim Archer, returned to Bill and entered his brain, that I feel Christ is distinctly present, that Bill is really Christ. Russ disagrees. Some of Christ is in Bill, some in Tim (and some in Angel and some in Edgar Barefoot, for that matter), and these separate, scattered elements are none of them nor all of them Christ until Tim’s self-sacrifice, his death and return, whereupon Bill and Tim are Christ, which explains why I felt that Christ was present in and as Bill at the end. I had in writing the novel never intended to say that Tim returning to Bill would—the syzygy would—constitute Christ, but (as I say) when I reread the novel I said, “It is Christ.” It is Christ, all right, but it is indeed Tim and indeed Bill and together they form Christ. This is exactly what the dream—the night before I received Russ’ letter—alludes to regarding Nancy and “Ditheon,” the man’s psyche entering hers to be in her brain with hers. The pre-cog aspect of the dream is only of minor interest; what is important is the concept that two human psychoi fused together form Christ, that somehow Christ is divided up, distributed, and must bring together his parts. Does this pertain to me and Thomas? Thomas was/is a human, like me, but Thomas and I joined together in one brain (as they were/are) forms Christ, i.e., a Ditheon, the two-part God. (To repeat, “di” cannot mean sundered, since two psychoi joined; there was not a splitting but a coming together, in the BTA novel and in me in 2-3-74.) Also again I dream in Greek. And again I see writing. I think this idea somewhat resembles Teilhard’s idea of convergence into Point Omega: Christ.

Russ concludes his letter by saying, “All of which establishes that your talent and your conscious mind are, to some extent, two separate things . . . which is frightening, awesome,” etc. Thus he sees (apparently) an application of this dual psyche to me. I do not have to now write a novel built around this concept of Ditheon because I have already done so—BTA—but (as I say and as Russ realizes) this (i.e., the idea of Ditheon) was not my conscious goal, point or intention in the novel. The dream was so obviously supernatural as to be grimly so; it was not a serene and pleasant dream. Nancy was so filled with energy that she was, it struck me in the dream, pure energy unleashed, not the energy of a person. Except for the possible affinity to Teilhard’s idea of convergence to and in Point Omega (Christ as the goal of the universe) this idea is new and not one I have ever entertained regarding Thomas and all of 2-3-74. I guess my reaction to the dream was one of terror (when I woke up), moderated by Russ’ letter when I read it later on. This dream (even without Russ’ letter but more so with his involved) ranks with anything that has happened to me starting in 2-74; it is a disclosure that is so profoundly vast that I can scarcely endure it. It is as if the dream answers the question, “How do you get (cause) Christ?” by what is almost a technological answer (as witness the schematics of the advanced weapons). It is fortunate and crucial that the dream made it clear that in no sense had the Godhead split, that “di” meant “asunder,” but meant, rather, “two.” This may well be a neologism coined to express a concept never expressed before (and yet it is the theme of BTA, as Russ says; I am sure his analysis of BTA is right and mine is wrong—the dream confirms him). We have here a new divine revelation, and, as I say, the novel that expresses it has already been written. Timeo; libera me Domine in die illa.²⁷

We are now into the technical details of how the Parousia will be/is be ing accomplished; it resembles one theory: that an inner Christ-consciousness will occur, rather than the reappearance of an anthropomorphic figure, but with a totally new and unexpected and fundamental modus operandi: the fusion of a given extant/living human psyche plus a resurrected psyche (apparently) of a former living person, the right match, trait for trait, I would assume—not on a random basis. This, then, is not reincarnation but a tandem psyche, oddly like what I present in Scanner. It would certainly explain why I couldn’t figure out if I had been invaded by an adventitious psyche (I had been) or if it were a former self intrinsic to me (apparently it was not). Also, this would explain why I could not tell if it was human (it was) or divine, e.g., the Holy Spirit (it was human but the result of the combination with my psyche was essentially supernatural). And this explains why it seemed to be someone from beyond the grave (I think it was), which is why I thought of Jim Pike or Tony Boucher. I guess these are the first fruits, the saints, the first to be resurrected at the End Days. Here again in the dream the motif of the substance eaten reappears, the pink margarine cube with the writing on it, apparently symbolic of the host.

[ . . . ]

The term—the concept—Ditheon is the complete, absolute, total, accurate, definitive, final, ultimate explanation of 2-3-74. This one word conveys it all, and the concept may be unknown in religious and theological history. It is a concept that I would never have reached on my own; I have had over 7 years to work on my exegesis, and never arrived at it. Russ did, vis-à-vis BTA. But one could say, “Maybe Russ is wrong.” He is not.

No, it is not a unitary psyche; it is twain. It is “di.” And because it is “di” it jointly perceives two signals (this explains the “second signal”). Two psyches, two signals—and the parallaxis that permits the set-ground discrimination. Just as bicameral means two, Ditheon means two. And the “on” refers to Ho On.

Why did I never think of it before? Two psyches, two signals. Set and ground which the twin psyches blend together; one sees set, the other sees ground. So it is essential that they do remain “di” or twain (“asunder”); if they merged into one psyche they would no longer perceive/receive two differing signals, no longer be able to do a set-ground feature extraction. This is a totally new kind of mind! Twin push-pull psyches working in tandem. More than set-ground: two worlds (spatiotemporal?) based on a common essence; and the common essence can be perceived as archetypal constants (common to both signals or worlds); what I call “archetypes” or “eide” are those elements common to both signals, perceived by both psyches: what overlaps, is present in both (worlds) and to both psyches. Thus a wholly different kind of world is perceived by this double but mutually differing reception. It requires two parallel psyches working in unison to perform the meta-abstraction.

[91:11] Is it possible that performing the meta-abstraction creates, so to speak, the other psyche, rather than the other psyche existing first and then, because it exists, performing the meta-abstraction? Because this way, this “soul,” is the product of higher reasoning, not the cause. [ . . . ]

The crucial word (which the E. of Phil. employs) is “see,” in regard to, “The child ‘sees’ that not just one horse plus one horse equal two horses, but ‘sees’ that one plus one equal two.” Nonetheless it is a great realization that this coming on of this higher reasoning faculty makes the person “di” and “Theon.” It is another self; it is as if the person now has two souls, and by having two souls he is god-like. It takes a second self, staggered in time vis-à-vis the regular self, to perform this mental operation; it takes both brain hemispheres. A two-souled human is not human. He is god-like; he has become divine and in fact immortal.

This, then, is not a quantitative increase in consciousness, or even a higher consciousness; this is two consciousnesses working in unison while kept clearly divided in two; it is necessary that they remain “asunder.” It is simply impossible not to see this as bilateral hemispheric parity, twin consciousnesses which differ from each other, one contemporary, the other either archaic or seemingly archaic.

It is as if the dream (in conjunction with Russ’ letter which means in conjunction with BTA) tells me that twin opposed human psyches (bilateral hemispheric parity) equal a Ditheon and not a Dianthros. It is, then, as simple as that. All the mystification and mummery have been cleared up. My confusion is due to two elements: (1) The event itself, the meta-abstraction/the other psyche becoming conscious for the first time, so that I found that I had another human personality in my head who was not me; and (2) What we together experienced/perceived/saw as world—a radically transformed world. Which is to say, (1) how the apperception could occur; and (2) what was apperceived. The blending of the two problems baffled me because I did not understand that in fact I had two problems, which, if you think about it, would be normal when any new sensory “mechanism” came on for the first time; taking sight as an example—presuming you had been blind from birth but did not know you were blind—if you suddenly began to see you would be baffled by the fact of seeing, and baffled by what you saw, and these two would blend together as a total confusion issue, this how and this what by means of the how. I think I understand the how and a good deal of the what, although I must admit that I really don’t know what VALIS seen externally would be. This is certainly the greatest mystery of all, and no doubt the most important; as I say in VALIS, “It is the bottom line.”

[91:19] Eventually I will have to deal with the What Seen, specifically VALIS. I’ll bet I never figure it out; it may take centuries of human thought and work after the Ditheon superman (or God) comes into existence. We may be faced with the true ruling (and truly most advanced) life form on this planet, which the mono-psyche human could not apprehend. 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. Because it is now absolutely indubitable (in view of this dream and what I wrote in BTA) that another mind, greater than mine, not a human mind, is working on me and, it would seem, directs what I write. And this is not simply wish-fulfillment on my part because this last dream was so heavy that it clobbered me, rather than pleasing me. I sense (1) species evolution: Ditheon to man as man is to animal; and (2) another life form here, which I saw and call VALIS and the plasmate, and it is probably directing all this. After all, when I saw VALIS in 3-74 it was communicating with me, and very likely it is what I call VALIS that put this recent Ditheon dream into my mind. Let people call me crazy; fuck them. This latest dream abolishes any doubt on my part as to the reality—and importance—of all this. I’ll wager everything I’ve got that deliberately directed species-evolution is involved here, I have experienced the evolution, I have had it explained to me, and, perhaps even more important than the Ditheon state itself, I have encountered (I think) the life form that directs this evolution . . . so maybe the What Seen is more important than the What Become. Which is to say, the ultimate value of becoming a Ditheon is that you can now see your creator, the life form living here camouflaged that leads, guides, controls and directs us covertly and benignly.

[91:K-128] The nature of its consciousness is to human consciousness as human consciousness is to machine, viz:

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.

Non-living to living—living to “spirit” (that is, info, which is pure knowing).

The Ditheon dream is saying that instead of a human mind crossbonding with the plasmate to produce a homoplasmate, two human minds form the building blocks that compose the plasmate, and this is clear if after reading VALIS you read BTA. Like the first biological life form coming into existence due to the combining of organic but nonliving protein molecules. This is an info life form, a new kind of life form—not biological (I saw it outside of me as well as felt it in me).

[91:K-129] 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.” (This collates with its non-biological nature.) It amounts to a “perturbation in the reality field,” exerting valence or displacement. To it, reality is a series of ideas, not things, since it itself is an idea.

Apparently it requires a minimum of two human minds to create the temporal dis-phasing necessary for the abstract perception of reality. That is, to roll back concrete (substantial) reality to its info basis. Thus this meta-entity doesn’t have to generate info; it finds info already there. It is an info life form swimming in an info sea! And simply concentrates or combines info in a sort of super-concentration, located at what may be two loci, not one. (In order to acquire parallaxis.) 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!

That two human psyches as building blocks might combine—collide?—spontaneously is a possibility. Protein molecules may have done that in the lower Cambrian seas. Klinemin.²⁸ In that case Anokhi— (pure consciousness) may occur as a random event according to laws of probability. One would have to speak then of a thresholding. It does not use us because we are biological life forms but because we are centers of concentrated info. It can use any center of info. Then in a sense the 2-74 meta-abstraction was info in my mind becoming conscious on its own. 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—which explains why I saw it outside me as objects and causal processes. This is so close to Teilhard’s noösphere! For me, convergence and concentration and compression are equally salient terms (i.e., as they are for him). A flashpoint occurs where consciousness (true, pure consciousness) sets in. I speak from experience when I say it is a totally different kind and degree of consciousness from normal human consciousness, and this is what it is, when all the complexities are laundered out.

[91:K-138] It is of supreme significance that this info life form is not limited to human brains but—as I saw—exists outside them, “scrambled” into the sensible world. This shows that rather than human mind having evolved into info life form status, the superior entity seizes on the lower (on us) 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 evolution. Being bodiless, the info life form “floats,” as it were. [ . . . ] The human mind could serve as an interface between the info life form and physical reality, a mediating duplex instrument, very much a “groove” to which the info life form is the “music.”

[91:K-149] My God, I am totally fucked up; I saw the footage from Blade Runner tonight and the Sufi Dante three realm theory is correct: when I saw the BIP I was remembering hell; I was not in hell; I was remembering having been, but was now in Purgatorio. The karmic fetters I felt loosen were punishment (thrall) fetters; and I experienced time flowing backward: that was Purgatorio. And then I ascended to Paradiso and heard the bells and saw God (Valis).

[91:K-157] To repeat: the NT is the essential 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 stegenographically 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, and swarms up the optic conduit to the pineal body to produce a hierogamy (the chemical wedding; more properly Ditheon).^* Thus as info it is limitless in its combinations or messages or contents—hence I saw the linking and relinking permu tating through an infinitude of combinations—the universe as info; compare this to the fixed law; compare, too, to the NT itself: now the “message” changes to meet each new situation, regarding—dealing with each situation as unique, hence fluid—hence total time-process and evolution. There are no precedents, no rules; but this is not chaos; it is evolution, hierarchical—and very Zen, like perpetual renewal of the universe where what was true yesterday is not true tomorrow (reticulation, accretions and arborization). The instructions permutate to meet continually permutating reality; therefore the info must be capable of thought. 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 perpetually changes by means of recombinant meta-morphemes. Yet as these meta-morphemes combine and recombine you can see that they are made out of the NT. Just as you can see that the NT is made out of the OT, but in both instances there is a vast quantum leap. The info would permutate so fast that it would have to make use of every ephemeral channel of info possible. It would not jell into a canon—it could not. It’s like the stock market ticker tape. Yet it remains NT Scripture—retains it as its constituents. This is the spirit, in contrast to Christ (NT) and to Father (OT) and to Satan (pre-Torah).

[91:K-163] This spontaneous (i.e., self) generation of rearranged Scripture I conjecture never used to happen. This is recombinant Scripture (for one use-purpose, one person, one situation). Either it is self generating (in which case it is a life form, as I declare in VALIS) or its source is on the spot; the results would be the same.

To function, this third age Scripture must be—not just available to the person, as the Bible is available to us now—but must impress itself on the person as instructions, invincible instructions, and not necessarily at a conscious level. [ . . . ]

These may be evolutionary stages in an info organism that operates at variable—and progressively faster rates—as our species evolves; first no law, then fixed law, then conceptual spirit replacing letter and now direct input to us to handle situations uniquely and varying from person to person; it evolves and we evolve. And each stage of it is latent in the preceding stage. I declare, then, formally that in 2-3-74 I saw an evolving information entity which we know as first the Torah (OT) and then the NT (Christ) but it has now entered a third stage for which we possess no term; I call it recombinant meta-morphemes and these are generated on the spot, unique to the person-recipient and the situation, based on the verbal content of Scripture; and that accelerating time is involved in such a way that levels of ontology are involved resembling those that Dante describes, based on Joachim.

[91:K-167] No, there will be no one Scripture (narrative); it will perpetually recombine uniquely for each situation and person, so instead of one narrative there will be an infinitude of narratives; but for each choice situation the recombinant message will be appropriate. No one thing is right or true. The mind that recombines the meta-morphemes is “in” the person, not outside him; it is him, as if he is the author of his own source of information: he seems to inform himself as his own infallible guide. (This is due to the two psyches.)

[91:K-176] Ursula, you—aw, the hell with it. “Unresolvable metaphysical problems”—it’s a good thing you didn’t know Isaac Newton! He “thought about it incessantly,” too; and finally had it. And Scanner will verify to and for the Ditheons of the future that I did know where the solution lay, because it deals with the two brains but operating faultily—and then VALIS follows; now they suddenly function properly. The first written account by a Ditheonic brain! And written as a frankly autobiographical journal.

[ . . . ]

And of course this is Point Omega and Teilhard; I verified that good man more than I expected to. How the thread of Christianity runs through this! And the significance of evolution, time and information! What a grand edifice; and what, now, do I say of 2-74 to 2-75? I say Ditheon, a word, perhaps, never used before. But a concept known: two natures, one person. Oh yes; BTA; I must include that, too: the VALIS trilogy. And so to bed.

[91:K-191] Is this a basic mystic/Sufi gnosis-secret having to do with liberation? And ascent to paradise while still alive? I am reminded of yoga breathing techniques, which certainly influence the inner biological clock/rate of neural firing. 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. Nevertheless, from this I drew a profound conclusion, unpleasant as it—the BIP—was. Although more imprisoned I could still figure it all out—i.e., the meta-abstraction.

[91:K-208] In no way did Paul see Torah and Christ as progressive (evolutionary) stages in one (information) organism. In fact who has? (1) Not the Jews, certainly; they revere the Torah as absolute. (2) Not the Christians; they revolt against the Torah in the name of Christ: the concept of evolution through qualitatively (and radically) different stages is unknown to them. That the Torah is an earlier form of Christianity whose later form is Christ—no one sees this. Note: it would be wrong to say: (1) the Torah as an earlier form of Christ; or (2) Christ is a later form of the Torah. Neither statement is true. Both are stages of the so-to-speak third organism, and there is now a third and final stage: Joachim’s spirit, in which each man has his own personal Scripture in his head, and each is unique but recombined out of the info of the prior stages. This is an info entity, living info. It is subduing and permeating the universe order: (organization) = info.

It does not become old and ossified; at the end it plays as a child like a free little animal.

[91:K-213] If I am right, that a divine compound macro-entity is assembling itself from sub-divine (i.e., mundane) sub-assemblies, then I have in my possession extraordinary knowledge. I base this concept on (1) the revelation of the dialectic; and (2) the Ditheon dream in conjunction with BTA and Russ’ letter. Now, this would explain the “God present in the trash strata” experience that I had (and which is expressed in Ubik). What Teilhard calls “Christ” is a conclusion of an evolutionary process, the components and lower stages possessing no divine or spiritual quality—yet when assembled, the divine is or becomes or occurs. The implications of this are enormous; one must radically reassess what “mundane” and “divine” signify. “Mundane” is a simpler, slower stage of “divine” or put another way, “divine” is a more complex, faster stage—the outcome stage—of “mundane.” But this is not the whole story; the other fundamental notion is: disparate versus unitary. As long as “it” exists in plural, disparate form—as unconnected discrete pieces, as multiplicity—“it” is not divine; thus when I saw Valis the significant thing that I saw was plural, discrete things behaving as—consisting of/functioning as—a unity, which was (to me) simply inexplicable. And yet it is precisely this coming together into a unity that constitutes the leap from the mundane to the divine.

[91:K-396] I have been searching all my life for the benchmarks of God (indubitably pointing to Him). I have found them: Kate, Anne and Lauren. The Sufi proof: beauty.

The light from above illumining the (world scene into the) nativity scene. I saw it. All creatures great and small/dance upon their feet.

I have seen the infinities of Judaism, which is morality, of Christianity, which is love, of the Greeks, which is wisdom, and I have seen God’s power as pronoia and charis to rescue me by bending the world itself; but beauty is a perplexing infinity, raising more questions than it answers. It is a puzzle too intricate for me. It spans all else. As I sit across the game board from Krishna I say, “I have found in beauty that which I could not myself have made; thus I have found the benchmarks. I believe, for I have the evidence that I trust; it is sufficient.” There is an infinity of good, of love, of wisdom, of power, but each particular beautiful thing is infinitely beautiful, and there is an infinity of them, so beauty, alone, is an infinity of infinities: ∞².

Folder 81

[81:K-10] Thus through the spirit there comes into existence a perfect (absolute) correspondence between Bible and our world. The Bible as information applies to this world here, this world now; world is meanwhile revealed as information (derived from information as its ontological basis) and this information is identical to the Bible as information. 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. And when you read the Bible it is no longer information about a world but is a world—and it is the same world that you live in here and now—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.

(If I hadn’t experienced this—both in regard to world and the Bible—I wouldn’t believe it could occur; but [as I say] I know how it is done: by means of supra-temporal archetypal constants found both in world—underlying world—and in the Bible—underlying it. 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, in the exact fashion Spinoza sets forth.) To repeat: world properly seen is information and this information is the same as that which we call “the Bible”; Bible properly seen (via/per the spirit) is seen not as a description of—information about—a world as a past time and place, and not, really, even about this world here at this time and this place but is this time (world) and is this place (world). That is how what is known a priori (intelligibly) and what is known through the senses (empirically) become one and the same.

This is extraordinary! Thus if you were to write an ontological description of our world as it really is, you would find to your surprise that you had written passages from/of the Bible, right down to the correct names of people—and this explains Tears. World can be deduced from the Bible, and the Bible from our world; they are one and the same. But what is perhaps most unexpected is that world is now viewed abstractly as information, which no one anticipated. And this information is Scripture. The trans-temporal constants, then, on which world is based, are as much informational in essence as they are anything else: intelligible concepts in the mind of God! This is a totally new understanding of the informational basis of reality—and the possibility that a mind exists (the spirit) in which the Bible ceases to be an informational description of a world and instead is that world, as if information and world are two stages or modes of one “thing”! Equally astounding is the discovery that each of us has an informational basis; each of us is a unique complex of ideas in the mind of God, which can be expressed verbally (as information); likewise we can be said to be spear-carriers in the book, the Bible. (This would be Thomas.)

My God—this is an updated version of the description of the relationship between the Torah and reality, absolute correspondence; so this isn’t an original idea with me. But I experienced it!

[81:K-13] Possibly it can be said that 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. World (physical reality) can be converted into info and then retrieved; thus a book can be a physical world rather than just a description of that world.

[81:K-81]

There is no rational way out of the maze, no rigid formula. Rigid formulas are maze constructs.

[81:K-86] 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.

[81:K-89] Now, here is another point. Unless or until I figured this “inner” part out, “Christ in us,” as Paul puts it, I would not really have understood 2-3-74. That is, my belief that in seeing Valis externally I saw the cosmic Christ is only half the story and perhaps the lesser half. However, it is just as well that in writing VALIS I did not claim to “be” Christ, only to have seen him. Psychotic inflation of the ego is frowned on, even by the amiable.

[81:K-105] So in BTA at the end I solved VALIS; no wonder I long supposed it was Jim returning to me from the other side. What must be rejected is the Christian idea of you being judged upon death and sent to heaven or hell; apparently it is (1) a much longer climb, involving many rebirths; but (2) it is always up—there is no hell; there is just Nirvana and attaining Nirvana; and (3) all creatures participate. It is not so much a matter of judging but of learning.

Why, this is Buddhism! Christianity subsumed by Buddhism as I guessed when I read Luke. Russ’ letter is right-on. “You have to work at becoming Christ,” i.e., a Buddha. 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.

[81:K-221] I must not allow myself to think of this in terms of sin, sinful, depraved man, negative judgment and damnation and man’s inability to save himself, as the reformers and Paul thought of it. I must remember it as I experienced it: the in-rushing of those parts lacking in me that by their bestowal by God rendered me complete and, really, ensouled me. Last night the idea came to me that Angel Archer is not my soul but the completed person of which I—PKD—was only one half. She is unique and idiosyncratic but a complete person. I guess this is the same as soul, and it is created, but not by the person—i.e., by me—but by God through justification. Hence it is restored (prefallen) man, as I suspected.

[81:K-225] I guess the realization last night—that it was justification—is in itself revelation of the same kind as 2-3-74, plus such revelations as the hypnagogic vision about the messenger and bill of particulars. I sense a meaning in the term “justification” not connected with sin but with incompleteness. (Perhaps this is Jung’s influence on me.) But I believe that the rest of me entered me as an adventitious second psyche, and this is the subject of BTA and Russ’ letter, how this completion is (or resembles) being Christ, being perfect. (Hence the adventitious psyche is human.) Hence I wrote recently that now I seem to have a center, but did not before. More important, I see this as being ensouled. The work has reached its end, suddenly, by an act of God; the person has been searching for his missing parts (i.e., his soul) throughout all time and everywhere, with the possibility that the person may—on his own—never be complete. I consider this search for one’s soul as the modern way of viewing redemption from bondage to sin, enslavement, or as I speak of it, machine-level consciousness.

[81:K-230] Gott—it would have killed my soul if I’d written the Blade Runner novelization! Or, worse, not written BTA! Angel Archer is a new, ex nihilo creation, literally out of nothing. There is a great spiritual, artistic, evolutionary, life-mystery in her coming into being.

[81:K-253] “Soul,” then, is metaphor for life and moreover life newly born, and a greater, better life, the like of which showed up nowhere before in my work. That upon finishing BTA I believed that I had risked my literal physical life—and almost lost it—is then logically what I would feel, would of necessity feel, because indeed I did risk my life; I risked my physical life in the service of preserving, augmenting and prolonging my spiritual life. It almost turned out that I literally physically died in the act (work) of giving birth to Angel Archer. Had it killed me I would have been concerned about only one thing: does Angel Archer exist now? As far as I’m concerned she does, and I don’t appear to have physically died. But I subordinated my physical well-being for the sake of creating her, to the task of creating her; so well I might view her as my soul! But in viewing Angel Archer as eternal (now that I created her) I had to face the other side of the matter: that I am not. No wonder the most profound feelings and intimations possible flooded over me in the weeks following my completion of that book: it is a book whose story, theme and ideas, even its artistic worth, are all subordinated to Angel Archer as a person, as I wrote Russ recently. In “thermal” terms I as an organism expended my maximum effort at the service of the need to grow. It is in my work that my growth axis exists, and I am well aware of this; I have long been at the disposal of my work, viewing myself as its instrument, not it mine. Yet paradoxically in BTA—at least when viewed in conjunction with Russ’ letter and my Ditheon dream—a feedback from it to me, me as a person, occurred, and a major conceptual insight arises in me as a result, an insight totally new to me having to do with (1) what Christ is; and (2) how “achieved,” that is, what “brings on” or “causes” Christ or Christogenesis. Yes, that is the word: Christogenesis! Christ is seen in evolutionary terms paralleling or expressing the very evolution that (I believe) my work represents (and which I see in the macrocosm and in Valis). At a certain crucial stage of evolution toward complexification of structure (i.e., negentropy) the mundane passes over—in a quantum leap—into the divine; the man becomes Ditheon, Christ; the macrocosm likewise (à la Teilhard and his Point Omega).

[81:K-258] I maintain that my corpus—my opus—required her, and required me to be able to create her—perhaps prove I could create her as an artistic problem I consciously and deliberately posed for myself to—here is a remarkable thought!—to justify my work in terms of wholeness, completeness and intactness—which event (act) is analogic to God’s justifying and completing me in terms of intactness and wholeness. Thus my creating Angel Archer ex nihilo is my analogic reperformance as a writer in his work of God’s act toward me; creating Angel Archer is an act learned from 2-3-74; it is that justification first applied to me, now applied by me to my work. God perfects me; I comprehend this; I then in turn act to complete my work. I take my cue from the Pantocrator, my creator; he as artisan instructs by example me as artisan. He shows me that an ex nihilo “adventitious” psyche can be injected. And, like Thomas, Angel is ex nihilo and in a very real sense adventitious—she came into my work the way Thomas came into me. Thomas is what was missing in me (missing and needed); Angel is what was missing and needed. In both cases wholeness is the goal and in both cases wholeness was the result. One could say that God showed me that beyond logical necessity and organic development/unfolding lies the possibility of the unprecedented ex nihilo new. Like the resurrection it is logically impossible. Had he not done it with/for me, I would not have known that it could be. So in this regard, Angel Archer is indeed the offspring of 2-3-74, of the Ditheon, the justification, but by way of me as a creative artist; then probably I did not merely describe her, when I wrote the book; in writing the book I created her, which answers that question. And then having as a creative artist created her in and for my work I find her “returning to me,” so to speak, as my soul. I projected her outward in my work, exhaled her, and then introjected her after I had created and projected her.

[ . . . ] And then by reincorporating her as my soul I fuse myself as a person with myself as artist, i.e., with my work. The schism is healed. I and my work become one. And, curiously, I and my work constitute another push-pull Ditheon! Here again is the dialectic. Here again is growth and change, and a complementary antithesis. I am not Angel Archer; we are separate: we are “di”; and yet we perhaps form one person. I create my character and she in turn creates me, the total, intact, completed, whole me; hence I speak of her correctly as my soul. And I speak of (as, e.g., in my letter to Russ) somehow having created my own soul, an extraordinary idea. She is the spirit of my intactness, of the actuality that is Ditheon. And this suggests that the ultimate essence of Ditheon is ultra-autonomy and rationality and individuality (all characterized by her). Perhaps she is logos: human logos.

[81:K-262] Now, consider what becomes of the human being failing to achieve (or receive) the Ditheon state, Jung’s individuation or integration of the opposites (chemical wedding, mysterium coniunctionis, whatever, “birth in the spirit,” anyhow the event in which what was not there before is there now and it acts to complement what was there that in itself was incomplete, so that the result is wholeness or—as I like to call it—justification). The human being recirculates the same ideas (info) over and over again, and, according to the statistical laws regarding entropy, the degree of order in the info irreversibly decreases, disorder increases, and the person mentally and spiritually moves inexorably toward death. Now, Schrödinger contends that a biological organism postpones its death (thermal equilibrium) by maintaining a relatively high level of order by incorporating negative entropy from its environment, and this is precisely the entering of the adventitious psyche; it is either injected or is ingested, offered by the environment or taken from it; in any case what was outside the organism is now inside the organism and incorporated into one total structure with what was already there; i.e., it is assimilated—so-to-speak digested and incorporated, although not without some initial perturbation (defined as disorder). What was already there and what was intaken must ultimately either form a unity or (equally useful, maybe even more useful) a push-pull dialectic of complementary opposites, in which each half corrects the other, monitors the other, acts as a feedback circuit, producing a self-winding autonomous totality; thus the two halves are not identical. (The psyche has not split in two; quite the contrary—I became conscious of the difference when I first researched the meanings of the prefix “di” and saw that it can either mean “double” or “asunder,” implying either a joining of two elements or a splitting of one element into halves; these are antithetical notions.) So perhaps “assimilate” is the wrong word; “reach a working relationship with” or “enter into a partnership with,” “enter into a syzygy,” would be better. [ . . . ]

As a strategy for prolonging its life this is representative of the strategies of organisms by and large, but what I see here is an extraordinarily high degree of incorporation of negentropy from the environment and subsequent incorporation into the organism’s own structure. (There is an initial perturbation, defined as disorder.) If all goes well, the organism now possesses a vast increase in its level of complexity, in energy—drastic increase in all the factors by which the capacity for biological survival is measured. Hence it has bought into prolonged vitality, viability and extended life—the issue being exactly that: life versus death. This extraordinary strategy is engaged in by an organism that is approaching death and knows it. It has run out of time. It is vitiated; it has ossified. Its environment has been pressing against its perimeter, threatening to invade and annihilate it. The level of internal organization has been lowering; it—the organism—perceives the ratio of order in it and outside it progressing toward less and less internal order, greater and greater exterior (external) order. Now, the concept expressed in the Ditheon dream fits in with Erwin Schrödinger’s analysis of how “any living organism delays its decay into thermal equilibrium (death) by its capacity to maintain itself at a fairly high level of orderliness (and hence fairly low level of entropy) by continually absorbing negative entropy from its environment.” In fact Schrödinger’s analysis tends to support the idea that indeed the second psyche is adventitious in origin, because this is only an unusual example of the fundamental way by which organisms delay death—perhaps the only way they do so—can do so. Then this “transaction” represents a turnaround in what has been going on between the declining (dying) organism and its environment, as if at the last moment the beleaguered organism turned the tables on its environment and converted an invasion into an acquisition.

Having allowed the invasion to occur it must now assimilate into its structure what it has allowed to come in—or even induced into coming in. This—when studied from this fundamental standpoint—doesn’t seem to differ qualitatively from what protozoa do. It is not a basic strategy; it is the basic strategy, the irreducible transaction between a biological organism and its environment, for the purpose of prolonging the life of the organism. Now, what strikes me at this point is that perhaps this transaction can be viewed in terms of information. First, the lowered structural organization of the organism should be regarded as connoting info scarcity or depletion, at least relative to its environment. It (the organism) does not know enough; it experiences this as a heightened strangeness, incomprehensibility and unpredictability on the part of its environment—all of which renders that environment threatening because it is not understood. This could account for many of the fugal tactics by schizophrenics: they retreat from reality because reality is making less and less sense to them. But this in fact is not due to transformations in reality but in the relative information that the schizophrenic has about reality. And as he withdraws he escalates this disparity; by exercising progressively less reality testing he learns less and less; this is a self-defeating tactic, this attempt at disengagement. The solution is for him to advance into reality and so-to-speak capture and incorporate a sizable hunk of it without at the same time losing his own identity, that is, if the incorporated hunk of reality proves to exceed his capacity to assimilate it he is doomed to swift annihilation. In fact what was perceived formerly as an external threat is now literally internal and still a threat. In fact the threat has won out; the battle is over and the organism dies. Viewed this way this massive incorporation of its environment is a desperate last strategy based on the recognition that unless it does this it is certainly doomed; it must be convinced that any alternative means inexorable death. So the massive incorporation is an endgame battle to which it commits itself utterly, knowing the danger in what it is doing but knowing, also, the alternatives: they are dead ends. But now it has two centers: its own self and the “self” that it has incorporated but not assimilated. Its environment is literally inside it, and experienced “from inside,” that is, its now incorporated environment is known by its inward face as an “I.” Not an it, a sort of potentially lethal movement along Martin Buber’s “it-thou” axis: the “it” has become a “thou”—which is good—but the “thou” is inside the organism as a second center or focus of consciousness. The boundary between the organism and its environment is eradicated, which potentially is death for the organism. Death in its true and total form; this is what organisms rightly fear the most. Yet (apparently) it has decided to allow this invasion as a means to incorporate negentropy—which it must continually do—and so the possibility of enhancing its viability—as opposed to being engulfed—is there. How should it proceed? How does it go about dealing with an influx of reality so vast that it constitutes a second center of consciousness?

First of all, it must deal with the startling discovery that what it has ingested—but not assimilated—is, like itself, conscious and even coherent. It and its acquisition—or invader—are roughly isomorphic. (Hence the adventitious psyche is perceived as human, a crucial point.) (Crucial, because if human it is not Fremd; it is “other” yet familiar in kind. Presumably, too, it is finite, since humans are finite.) Next, it is discovered that this adventitious psyche is bewildered, as if plucked from its own familiar environment and deposited in a strange time and place; thus it is at a disadvantage. It does not know how it got here—nor does it know the local customs or even the language, all of which creates the impression that it did not intend to invade, does not understand the situation and means no harm. Its motivation is the same as the host organisms: to survive. [ . . . ]

Was it just last Friday night that I stumbled at last onto the realization of justification (page K-220)? (This is Sunday night.) And felt such pain—because the exegesis is over. And I knew it. And, as I wrote, the real purpose of this exegesis has not been to find the answer but to preserve the experience.

[81:K-310] There is something I must face and face fully and honestly. The messenger vision—that was (first of all) not a dream but a vision (although perhaps hypnopompic). What I must face is that it sums up and expresses absolutely, precisely and perfectly what I discovered recently to be the very essence of Protestantism: the doctrine of unmerited justification by (Christ’s) surrogate act (death). The complexities of this specifically Protestant doctrine (which is, as I say, not a belief of Protestantism but its very basis) are wonderfully clarified by that vision. Now, 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) upon which Protestantism is based is true. As I sit here at this moment I realize that I will always fall short however hard I try to do right; I cannot on my own save myself and am doomed; and yet I am saved by the “messenger” with the spotless sheet of paper that he presents to the retributive machinery in place of the bill of particulars drawn up against me during my lifetime. This bill is accurate. [ . . . ] If I forget this I am doomed to worry my life away neurotically, feeling endlessly unworthy and a failure, deprecating 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 satisfy it. Have I forgotten 2-74? And have I also forgotten the “messenger” vision? All this was done for me that I would be saved—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. Christ died to give me new life and to justify me and all this has been supernaturally revealed to me. Yet I find myself doing it again, accusing myself for falling short. This is not a small matter; I live with this daily. Every new day stimulates my endless sense of unworthiness. That night when I realized in a flash that 2-3-74 was sudden justification and my awareness of it—have I forgotten that already, that understanding? 2-3-74 (as proved, e.g., by the “messenger” vision) was the miracle of Christianity at work on my behalf. As Bill Sarill said, I am in a state of grace; I have no reason to think I have fallen out of it.

[81:K-316]

VALIS is the cypher book—code book—to the whole 10 volume meta-novel. And will someday be read as such. And “Valis” is Gnostic/Mani but secretly Holy Mother Church. [ . . . ] As with God’s strategy, the sequence is “out of sequence.” Viz: the key piece—VALIS—came last. Until it the others did not make sense—i.e., they were taken to have been written as fiction and hence hypothetical. VALIS retroactively reinterprets them—shows them in a light that could not be anticipated by an analysis of them—until VALIS came out; typical of the pattern strategy of the wise horn in its dialectical combat-game. Here is a big realization, and unexpected: VALIS in itself means nothing! Its only significance is as the code book to the 10 volume meta-novel—and no one has noticed this yet, even Gregg Rickman.

[81:K-317] The diagram on the previous page—and what I say there—explains why VALIS resembles Ubik and Ubik. This is how the gnosis is smuggled past the angels (“the secret stolen, through the angels, in one’s hands”), and into this prison: it is not transmitted in the proper—meaningful—sequence but is correctly assembled here to spell out the message. The final—and essential—piece was VALIS. It alters the meaning of all the previous books and stories. The message is not in VALIS, the message is not in the 10 volume meta-novel. It is in the latter reinterpreted by the former. Look what it reinterprets the squib opening the final chapter of Ubik into!

[81:K-334] For the first time there arose in my mind the notion that Ditheon is a fusion of the two distinctly different minds that I call android (machine, schizophrenic) and human; viz: we have not only android : human : : human : Ditheon (ascending hierarchy relates to the 3 levels of the Commedia) but:

[81:K-353] Dream: There is a group of us. We discover that reality—the universe—is actually info. One of us (a girl) recognizes the info as her own prior thought. With a groan I realize that this means the universe is based on our own prior thoughts. We are forgetful cosmocrators, trapped in a universe of our own making without our knowing it. And I think, “I won’t believe this when I wake up because the implications are too depressing and radical.” It is like Maze. The trail which I relentlessly pursue in my exegesis consists of [ . . . ] tracks that lead back to—surprise—myself. In discovering the laws of God I am doing nothing more than discovering my own nature, as in Φιλανθρωία (Philanthropia).²⁹ The “grand illusion” is in fact the grand tautology. Finally decipher the writing (info, messages as basis of reality) and discover I’ve written it myself: imprisoned in my own mind, with my recirculated thoughts, as in “Frozen Journey”—solipsism. Thus no new knowledge is possible (i.e., synthetic propositions) (only analytical). I thought “Prajapati”: the “wholly other” is not “other” at all: the mood of the dream upon the discovery was grim.

[81:K-354E] The first quote from the tractate put forth in VALIS is the essence of it ([>]!):

Thoughts of the brain are experienced by us as arrangements and rearrangements—change—in a physical universe; but in fact it is really information and info-processing which we substantialize.

All that is needed is to perform the “tat tvam asi” equation and remember that we ourselves thought these thoughts. Well, the reader who reads Maze or Ubik can fill in the gaps; or really any substantial constituent of the 10 volume meta-novel. [ . . . ]

But the girl in the dream was right. To recognize the info basis of world as your own (prior) thought—although discovering this is actually the summit of Tibetan Buddhist enlightenment—is really a bummer.

[81:K-354F] It’s all one vast binary computer acting on instructions from what seems to be a group of living brains combined, as in Maze.

Folder 62

September 19, 1981³⁰

Mr. Russell Galen

Scott Meredith Literary Agency

845 Third Avenue

New York, N.Y. 10022

408 E. Civic Center Dr.

C-1 Box 264

Santa Ana, Calif. 92701s

September 20, 1981

Mr. Russell Galen

Scott Meredith Literary Agency

845 Third Avenue

New York, N.Y. 10022

September 23, 1981

Mr. Edmund R. Meskys³¹

Editor

Niekas

RFD 1, Box 63

Center Harbor, N.H. 03226

[62:C-34] Let me ask: Did Jesus’ crucifixion possess the efficacy or the news of it? And does Tagore’s passion and death in themselves possess efficacy or the news of it? I don’t know. And what would the efficacy be? Surely it lies in awakening us to what we are doing so that we cease (the nuclear waste dumping). Then it is the news, the kerygma. The ecosphere cries out in pain!

[ . . . ]

The ecosphere is Christ. This is what we must learn: when we wound the ecosphere we literally wound him; hence the cautionary significance of my vision of Valis, the Corpus Christi in/as nature. We must acquire this vision so that we will grasp why the ecosphere is holy. (Because it is Christ.) (Put another way: “Christ” signifies the total unitary life-system of this planet as an indivisible living entity.)

[62:C-38] This explains my vision of Pinky’s death as the death of the savior, and my extrapolation that when each living creature dies, it is Christ dying. I said, “Christ dies for them.” Yes, true, but now I view it differently; the crucifixion is re-enacted billions of times over and over again in and as the creatures in the ecosphere die, for Christ is the ecosphere.

[ . . . ]

For me personally to keep my sanity in the face of world suffering, I must believe: (1) that it is always and only Christ who suffers, throughout the ecosphere as each creature large and small; (2) that he suffers voluntarily; (3) that his essence of sweetness and perfect spiritual and physical beauty is in no way destroyed or impaired whatever the torment, whatever damage is done to him: his true essence cannot be debased or impaired; (4) that these truths do not make it any more right or in any sense okay because it is only and always Christ who suffers over and over again, but that in fact (5) this makes it worse, and (6) God will not allow this to go on but (7) will withdraw his spirit from the world in punishment of us unless we stop.

I can’t explain why I must believe all these things.

[62:C-40] If I did not believe all this (which my 9-81 vision expressed) I would today upon seeing the Agent Orange birth defects, hearing about the Soviet micro-toxin T-2 and hearing Sunday night about the blankets infected with smallpox sold to the Indian tribe to wipe them out—I would go crazy. Thus the vision (which came last week) preserved my sanity as of today (9-23-81). It is necessary for me to know that God has acted in the face of these horrors, how he has acted, and what he will do if we continue. So hallucination or divine revelation, I must believe in Tagore and his kingdom. It is my private religion, based on a wide variety of sources. Hebrew (the Day of YHWH), Christian (the vicarious atonement/sacrifice), modern theological-scientific (Teilhard), Buddhism (concern for all life, human and otherwise, equally), Hindu (Krishna as avatar of Vishnu—the sustainer whose 3 giant steps mark his stride, as he comes in aid), Gnosticism (eventually the spark of light that fell into incarnation in physical shell, in this prison world will be extricated and will return to the pleroma). There is nothing in my syncretistic system that is original, and all elements are—for me, for my sanity on this day, the autumnal equinox—essential. No one system would do. Be it YHWH, Christ, Vishnu or Krishna, I must believe he sees and he acts. If I believed that he did not see, or did not care and hence would not act, I could not go on. The vision came in time, which itself—its coming and coming in time—is a micro-instance of God seeing and acting. Going back to the day at the movie newsreel (when I was a kid) in which I saw the Japanese soldier running and burning, continuing to the rat I killed, to the TV footage of the Galapagos turtle, to the use of napalm in Vietnam today, my great spiritual problem has been to find a way I could handle the issue of suffering, human and animal. The 9-81 vision alluded to the burn—and hence injury to her legs—suffered by my sister—that led to her death, so 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. The 9-81 vision dealt with Jane, with the burning Japanese soldier, the rat and turtle, the napalm, with it all: the vision of Tagore and his kingdom is the quintessential summation of my whole life’s struggle to come to terms with these matters which are in essence one matter showing up over and over again. Thus my mystical experiences—starting in ’63 when I saw the “Palmer Eldritch” visage and the sky and going on to 2-74—2-75 and after—culminate in 9-81 as the payoff of my need and my attempt to forge a satisfactory explanation for what is to me the ultimate issue: not “Ti to on?” as my 10-volume meta-novel might indicate, but, “What is the total context in which the unmerited suffering and death of living creatures can be coherently understood?”

[62:C-43] It is evident, then, that also involved in this is my own eventual death and my need to come to grips with it—very much the true cause of the colossal mystical breakthrough in 2-74; this 9-81 vision is perhaps, then, the great summation of the acceptance—and also anger—in me regarding that. I am shown the total, absolute panorama into which my own mortality fits, in context. There is no feeble acquiescence to suffering and death in this vision but there is in it a sense of absolute beauty surpassing explanation and expression: it is a given (Christ’s nature; or Krishna’s; if you will, names do not matter at this stage). All else is predicated on it. It is the ultimate brute datum of the vision; it simply must be accepted without explanation (as some people are content to accept the suffering, which I am not; thus I replace one inscrutable mystery—unmerited suffering—by another—absolute beauty. Not a bad way to end up). The irreducible core of reality is: beauty.

[62:C-48] Horselover Fat is real only insofar as he is part of me—so stipulated in the letter initially. But later in the letter (as in VALIS) he is treated as a real, independent person. Viz: “Fat saw Tagore but I did not.” Fat is not imaginary; someone saw Tagore. The effect resulting is that one sense that 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, one which speaks for the ecosphere and also takes on the sins against the ecosphere as stigmata: punishing himself for the sins of man. Interestingly, it is in my legs that I feel pain. And my response today regarding T-2 was to punish myself—I destroyed my stash and also destroyed my exegesis, not quite as self-punishment but more as a sacrifice.

[ . . . ]

Tagore is dying.

I have sensed for awhile that I am dying. Yet I am not physically ill but I become more and more tired, and where I feel it is in my legs; I feel there is so much to do, to be told in my writing: novels about Christ and Krishna and God.

[62:C-51] At the time when, you would think, I would be sitting back and enjoying my money and prestige—my successes—I am driven by the vision and it is a spiritual, not merely artistic vision that is injuring me and perhaps—in my efforts first to formulate it (or receive it) and now to promulgate it—may kill me. And what do I as an individual gain? Ursula’s reproach yet even more so! I teach the parousia; I teach the sanctity of the ecosphere, I teach that once again we unknowingly crucify our God; and this time he will not be resurrected and return; he—the total spiritual principle of the world—will be driven from the world; and this will doom us spiritually and physically both. And the decision, the power to choose is ours, if we can be made to understand.^*

[62:C-53] Thus the divinization of the ecosphere is tied into human choice and hence has moral and existential significance. It is contingent on human choice; it will either be ratified by us as a species acting collectively or it will be abolished by us as a species acting collectively; in either case we will earn our fate. Good or bad: it will not be imposed on us but will issue from our own acts.

[62:C-54] This all can be looked at two ways.

(1) Contemporary concern about preserving the ecosphere is supplied with a spiritual dimension that is both cosmic and absolute.

(2) Religion and the spiritual—and specifically Christianity with its eschatological doctrines—is brought down to earth—literally—and tied into realistic, practical matters.

[ . . . ]

Thus there emerges from this a doctrine of the final judgment being more correctly a final choice on our parts between life—spiritual life, a higher life—and death, physical death.

[62:C-56] Dream: on a bank of TV screens, scenes of a hunt in progress; the victim is a lovely large white bird. I become very angry at the hunt itself and at all the people watching it as a video game/sport. I lash out at them, saying I won’t watch, and I say, “Maybe Caesar will put in an appearance.” This dream clearly ties in Tagore’s Kerygma (about saving the animals) with Rome and hence with the Empire and hence with early Christianity. Now not humans are the victims of the blood sports for the populace but animals. But it is the same cruelty. Oh—“Caesar” was said sardonically, in reference to Reagan! Good Lord! Look, then, what the dream shows, at least about my feelings/perception! About who is the enemy, and who we are. Christianity in its time sanctifies human life (the opposite of which was the Roman games) but now all life—animal life—the ecosphere itself must be sanctified, and this is done through its investiture by Christ. To “see” (understand) the ecosphere as having been penetrated and assimilated by Christ is to see it as holy; thus this 3rd dispensation is indeed the logical extension projected from the previous two.

[ . . . ]

Christ is a revolutionary. The ultimate revolutionary. And he has magical (technological?) powers. And he is still alive: this explains it all. . . .

[62:C-57] Hypnogogic: I mail out the 85 “notices”—the Ed Meskys Xerox image: marathon runners carrying the torch: two of them, picking up the torch and running in different directions; i.e., out of the 85 people, there are at least two of “the right people” whom I’ve now notified; but notified of what? Could the whole Tagore ecosphere revelation—like the dream in Tears—be cypher for revolution?³²

The ragtag motley band of believers who wrote me when I published VALIS—I was thinking. Believers, “ragtag motley band.” Like 2,000 years ago. There need be no “underground.” The event creates it, not it the event.

[62:C-59] I am/was victimized, so-to-speak, by my own conspiratorial proclivities.

[62:C-61] Because the ecosphere is an indivisible unity, it either survives as a unitary totality or perishes as a unitary totality. It is an interconnected system. Part of it can’t survive while the other part perishes; we’ve now reached that point, literally, where it is a global matter. And in reference to this, it has one psyche who either stays with us or departs, and if it departs we die because the ecosphere dies.

[62:C-66] But who is Tagore, then?

Answer: Tagore.

There has to be a premise. I stipulate Tagore as the irreducible premise. Logos? Krishna? Buddha?

No: Tagore.

[62:C-68] The strangest thought came to me. If the spiritual principle has penetrated the ecosphere itself and assimilated it, we now can’t turn down spiritual life—the spiritual principle—without forfeiting our literal physical lives! This is a whole new condition of the spiritual dimension; it now, so-to-speak, has leverage—decisive leverage.^*

[62:C-69] An odd idea came to me tonight: My Tagore vision and Kerygma seem, upon acute and prolonged examination, to issue from very ancient religious sources both Eastern and Western. The Eastern: pan-Indian (before Buddhism and Hinduism split apart); the Western: quite old Semitic notions of the role pre-fallen man held toward the Garden, when man lived with nature in harmony and was the caretaker of the Garden; thus an idyllic primordial state is sought for: restoration of that state depicted in Western (Near-Eastern) thought but by means of pan-Indian acknowledgement of suffering as the basis of all life, and that the spiritual being suffers for and with the totality of life the solution to which is withdrawal from the world—yet this Eastern view is neatly balanced by an appeal to man to repent of his ways, that man brought suffering into the world and disturbed the primordial harmony . . . in fact destroyed it by plundering nature and then attacking it, rather than protecting and guarding it. If man is the cause, man can by changing his ways repair what he has done and restore the original harmony. What is to be done is a Western view; how man will be induced to change his ways and do this is Eastern.

[62:C-74] Dream/hypnagogic: I have a wound on my leg, a vast vagina like healing wound, like a slit. A voice is saying, “Lesimi.” With a start I wake up fully; this is Tagore’s wound (and, I realize now, Amfortas’ and by extension Christ’s, from the spear).

I have achieved spirituality (the Buddha or Christos state) but by sacrificing myself, physically injuring myself to the point where death is now a real possibility.^➊ The spiritual element would not die; it would simply as cend out of this world back to its origin and home. But Tagore, my spiritual self, begs for an end to the inflicting of these burns—which (I repeat) I have taken on voluntarily by identifying myself with all life and the suffering of all creatures. It will not end by my ceasing to take on these stigmata; that is not what Tagore pleads for. Tagore pleads for an end of the crimes against life—not my life but other lives—that result in these voluntarily-assumed burns. Tagore—myself—he is crippled now, and yet he emits “an ineffable beauty, absolute, not relative, loving beauty, like music and perfume and colors.” Tagore—my spiritual self—could cease at any time this voluntary taking on of the injuries, but he will not; he will die first; to repeat, it is the injuries that must stop, not his taking on of these injuries.

Agent Orange and T-2: the day I typed up the Xerox letter. “Wounded and in pain and in mortal peril cries out for our help.” The spiritual element in me, making my last appeal.

➊ This says it all.

[62:C-79] I guess you could say that I have a messiah complex, and because of this am led ineluctably to voluntary crucifixion. To what? Achieve what? Protest the sins of the world. As I say supra: not to be saved—I am saved—but to save, and to perfect myself (vide supra). The drive toward the spiritual so strong in me now that I would give up my life in pursuit of it: for I have experienced the spiritual domain and know its joys. This is not anhedonia or masochism; the joys of the spiritual domain—to draw near to Krishna—are beyond all that this world is or has.

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 species”) poisoning my body by not recognizing that it must live in harmony with it, that they are parts of one indivisible whole. “If the ecosphere dies” means “if my body dies”—“then we (humans) die” and my mind dies.^*

[62:C-82–83] But underneath the content of my ideas is the value to me of ideas themselves, of the search (an Orphic idea) and the enjoyment of ideas with emphasis on the abstract, the enjoyment of using the abstracting faculty itself . . . which is when I wrote Eureka.

But it is not the intellect that characterizes Tagore; he is far beyond that. Nor is it love nor beauty, although both are there. It is sweetness, an ineffable sweetness related to love, related to beauty, but perhaps more to perfume, music and colors, as I say in my letter. This is a spirituality that cannot otherwise be categorized and it is this that tells me that his spirituality is absolute, for it transcends love and beauty, the two ultimate ontological categories of God. This is not God: this is a man, a given, individual man; this is not a deity (although he is also—but secondarily—deity), this is the perfection of a man such as we are, this is not the “wholly other” toward which one moves in delight and rapture: this is he—as man—who moves toward the wholly other—this is what we as humans can become at best, the transfiguration of the natural to its ultimate without ceasing to be natural, a created thing, not creator.

[62:C-85] Who and what is Tagore? He is Tagore (a particular, not [a] God). But I know now: he is either Buddha, the Buddha, or a Buddha (awakened or enlightened one), and this is very seriously considered in VALIS as one of the possibilities; e.g., “the Buddha is in the Park.” This is not mysticism or metaphysics or theology or philosophy; those have come to me and I enjoyed them, but they pass away and Tagore remains. And his concern is for life, the ecosphere, not a concern for speculations and flights of fancy. Compassion, the way of Buddha, the noblest way of all.

Rejoice!

Everything so far has been a head-trip, a system of thought, ideas, abstractions, speculations, beliefs. But Tagore is a man, a real and actual man. Even (which I doubt) if he is me, why, he is still a man, for I am a man.

[62:C-86] Tremendous breakthrough insight 5:15 A.M. The whole Christian magic of 2-74 on worked because I believed in it; but it worked—not because Christianity is true—in contrast to other systems/religions which are false but because Sankara and the Buddhists are right: it is a conjurer’s trick; it is magic; and what this points to (the fact that my total belief on that day in 2-74 when I saw the Christian fish sign caused everything that followed to occur) is illusion; as I say: magic, conjurer’s tricks. Viz: Christianity to magic to conjurer’s tricks to illusion. And what does illusion point to? The truth of Buddhism and Sankara; pan-Indian thought about the il lusory nature of “reality”; i.e., maya, not as a veil but as a so-to-speak plastic mist that obliges.

[62:C-87] In the face of this, spiritual perfection depends on enlightenment that there is a grand illusion, inner and outer; and, finally, the kind of compassion for all the living creatures caught in the “weary wheel” of illusion’s karma and rebirth, etc.

[ . . . ] E.g., the Ƴ turning into a palm tree doesn’t verify Christianity; it verifies the conjurer’s trick and this is pan-Indian thought. So from 2-74 to 2-75 I was in the grip of maya. But: because “reality” (sic) obligingly altered to accommodate my belief (especially my seeing Rome A.D. 70 and Syria!) I had without realizing it verified not Christianity but maya as a doctrine. I was totally under the spell of illusion but, paradoxically, this very illusion (I mean the transformations in it!) held the clue to the real solution. I have not been radical enough; I have thought in terms of either something (reality) vs. nothing (illusion) but maya is not just hallucination; something is there (as Sankara pointed out), but it is able to assume any guise it wishes. (Sankara’s example: the magician can cause you to take a rope to be a snake, but there is a rope there; something is there, but not a snake, but also not nothing.) Maya is halfway between hallucination (nothing) and reality (something that is what it seems to be); and this is why it resembles Ubik.

[62:C-99] I don’t know what’s the matter with me—the “no-nukes” topic is the topic of protest and the new counter culture now, as the Vietnam war was in the 60’s and 70’s; the Tagore dream places me squarely in the middle of the new, current bipolarized battle—right where I ought to be. And this is what the Silkwood pamphlet must have made me realize, for it tied the nuclear issue in with all that I had to deal with and combat in the 60’s/70’s; all of a sudden it all came together as a single whole.³³ Now the authorities are harassing and trying to silence the foes of nuclear power and weapons and waste-disposal. Perhaps my unconscious knew this; yet—for my coming to see this being part of the revelation of the savior himself—not just a dream about radioactive waste being dumped in the ocean, but about Tagore—this unites my spiritual vision (i.e., VALIS) and my political vision into one.

[62:C-161] Where Gnosticism is indispensable is twofold: (1) exact analysis of fallen man’s condition; and (2) it is 180 degrees reversed by what is called “Gnosis,” a cognitive event. But their overall system is unsound. Nonetheless Gnosticism contains essential pieces of the puzzle. They have an exact understanding of the malady and also the correct idea that the remedy somehow involves cognition and knowledge and this knowledge comes as a gift from a savior or messenger—i.e., Christ. Thus they fully appreciate what “salvation” refers to, in contrast to which orthodox Christianity is virtually a cargo cult making futile motions that ape without efficacy the real thing.

[62:C-168] I have supra done something never before done: rather than drawing on Gnosticism I have figured out the real teaching of the Gnostics. At some primordial time there was indeed a crisis in the heights, but this isn’t what interests the Gnostics; Gnosticism is practical: 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, not just 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 between 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 in-gathering of the light by the messenger who is “the savior saved.” Clear evidence that this divine champion is the person himself rescuing himself).

[62:C-170] 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. (The relation to Orphism is obvious.) But it is missing half of itself; it now knows itself to be a partial fragment of a once intact self that is now somehow scattered. Thus although anamnesis is not pri mary—it is predicated on recognizing something familiar in the uncanny world—it is the crucial event, because 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. This would explain the drop in GABA fluid, the blocked neural circuitry disinhibited and at last firing. This literally occurs, as an organic, physiological brain-function.

Involved (simultaneously) in this process is an additional absolutely crucial ingredient—event, realization—that I call the “meta-abstraction” and which Plato calls noesis. The partial (incomplete) self on its own cannot perform this cognitive operation because it requires two vantage-points by the participant (what I call Ditheon), analogous to spatial parallaxes. 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. There is here a hint of the primordial, suggesting that the original schism did occur in the prenatal past, as Plato taught. But the situation is more complex, because at the level at which the total self operates, the concept “past” must be redefined. Here Platonist epistemology enters with its forms doctrine. Unless the universalia ante rem³⁴ are envisioned, what is happening cannot be fathomed. The two parts of the self are not in the same spatiotemporal world. Their relationship to each other comes through—occurs because of—a trans-temporal constant (form) that because it is trans-temporal and -spatial exists “simultaneously” in both realms: the realms sharing at least one constant, the one seen and recognized as familiar. It is as if both realms, at two times and two places, are operating off of a common matrix and this indeed is how Plato depicts the forms: they are not in time and space, and somehow instantiate themselves at this time and this place yet without losing their unity and intactness.

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 ontological 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—or worlds, since both halves of the total self are independently tracking (experiencing) different partial realities connected only by the Platonic forms, which by their nature are in all worlds at all times and places, or anyhow capable of being so. 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 “salvador salvandus,” which is 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; only when the parts have come together successfully does the total motivation seem internal.

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 knew—were “thrown” into. Restoration to and of self and pleroma then occurs here and now (as Plotinus speaks of). This unified world defies normal ordering categories and experiences the Ditheon entity that experiences it. 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.

[62:C-181] Gnosticism is virtually a sign-value reversal religion; that is, it assumes the ostensible reality to be a fraud concealing the true story which is 180 degrees opposite—hence the need for the revelation of the Gnosis. Everything must be read backward. We are secretly in a giant prison, secretly in thrall. There is a deliberate occlusion practiced on us by hostile warders. The truth is not just hidden; it is deliberately hidden to keep us in ignorance. Were we to know the truth, all would be turned around, all that we see. There is, then, in Gnosticism a built-in revolutionary, subversive basis fighting the ruling powers of this world.

[ . . . ]

To reveal is to reverse; to reverse is to reveal; they are one and the same.^*

[62:C-183] 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.^➊ I find myself totally convinced by it. VALIS is not about our condition; it is about the rescue from our condition and hence is a valid Gnostic revelation, indubitably. This is not a book by someone who has read about Gnosticism or knows about it; this book is a Gnostic experience recorded: Gnostic soteriology itself. Suddenly the book throws aside its wraps; it 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 systems. 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. Suppose, however, upon reading about Gnosticism I had elected to make up a soteriological element. But then we would have had a genuine fallen component and a fictional soteriological element, the two not in any way joining to form a coherent whole. One would truly pertain to world and world-experience (Dasein); the other would be a patent fabrication merely imaginative and, hence, a grotesque anachronism playing no role in the lives and experience, worldview and thinking of contemporary man. The result would be absurd: the most critically Valis aspects of human existence would be juxtaposed with bizarre fantasy—and, worst of all, the latter would be introduced to solve the former—with the bitter result that the former (man’s thrown and fallen Dasein) would seem just that much more hopeless.

However, the problem (Verfallenheit) and soteriological solution are in VALIS a seamless whole. One must either accept both or reject both; they are indivisible. Now, an ignorant reader rejects both as “madness” but this is a faulty solution; he does not know enough practically and theoretically to understand that the former (Verfallenheit) cannot be dismissed (the problems stated by Fat and which he seeks to solve and understand). But the wiser reader in facing the reality of Fat’s questions and problems—because that reader knows of Heidegger and existentialism in general—now must confront the soteriological solution presented in VALIS and consider what it may mean. Here he draws a blank, for as Galbraith pointed out, we have absolutely no vision or concept of—belief in—a transmundane deity. We understand the problem but see no solution; this is either nihilism or leads to it.

What, however, if the soteriological theme in VALIS is taken to be as real as the stated problems? This (the reader knows) is impossible. The appeal to his assent can’t be responded to, because the reader knows the problems to be unanswerable; this intractability of the Verfallen situation is his (as an existentialist) fundamental article of faith. He not only knows that the situation is real, he also knows that by its very nature it cannot be rectified; true honesty and courage and integrity require that he take this implacable stand of confronting the is qua is. To start supposing transmundane intervention undoes the very basis of moral values built into his realization: that it is a hopeless situation and that he faces this absolutely. Thus to him VALIS is more dangerous than it is to a more ignorant person who is able to deny or ignore the problems raised as insane, morbid or self-indulgent. VALIS is dangerous because 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 problems stated are real.

What he does not see is that VALIS is written backward, from solu tion (soteriology) to problem (Verfallenheit). The author is stipulating the problem only to account for the existence of the solution (he has reasoned back from the soteriological experience to the problem). He knows the solution firsthand and infers the problem using it as his premise. VALIS, then, only seems to be an existential work; in reality it is a Gnostic gospel.^*

➊ It is what it describes—hence self-authenticating.

[62:C-192] 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 death is now (spiritually and ontologically) for in making it yours you seize it and master it and assimilate it to you (not you to it); 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 for 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: seizing it, not it you, 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.

[62:C-194] I survived 2-3-74 and wrote about it in and as VALIS and hence made my death my own—by living long enough to write about it, that is, I artistically and creatively depicted my own death, and this is the victory of the heroic over the tragic. This is what Beethoven did. I have done it and nothing can change this; but if I hadn’t written VALIS (even if I had lived on past 2-3-74 for decades) this would not be the case. It was not the surviving 2-3-74 but the writing about it that gave the victory to the heroic over the tragic, as with Bob Fosse in All That Jazz.

It is Oedipus or Beethoven: the antique heimarmene wins (tragedy) or the creative human warrior wins (the heroic); this is the past (Greek) vs. the modern world (the Faustian). I chose the latter in 2-3-74 and VALIS is the proving of my choice and my victory; I willed it and I accomplished it. To do it I had to seize world, collapse time, devour my own death—as if Zagreus ate the Titans!

[62:C-197] Who would guess that the heroic would enter the world as the meek sacrificial lamb? This is not an orthodox Christian secret; it is Manichaean. But this—like the kingdom itself—is indeed how the heroic drove/drives out the tragic: it is a strategy that fools all . . .

[62:C-201] 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.

[62:C-203] 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 (mimesis). 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 (“a perturbation in the reality field”).^*

[62:C-219]

Folder 63

[63:D-47] God gives birth to the universe through his injury, suffering and death; hence Jesus Patibilis. Creating is a giving birth by him and causes him suffering; the Tagore vision shows that the suffering is now so great that he, the creator, may die—and hence withdraw from creation and creating, and it is our fault as a species. He has placed himself at our disposal, but, due to our crimes, his suffering becomes too great. He is the great friendly fish in Galina’s dream, offering his body to us to eat: this is creation itself: the very world (reality) we live in.³⁵ It (reality) is an offering, a sacrifice, but we respond wrongly and wrong him. This is not just the Savior; this is God himself, converting himself into world—at terrible cost to himself. (This is, I guess, eco-theology.)

Then my “extra dimension” is the God body as it really is. And we wound it. It manifests itself substantially to us and for us. But is actually insubstantial, an idea; it gives birth to itself in and as the physical, substantial, phenomenal world for our sakes: but then we injure and destroy and pillage and exploit and misuse it. Did it not will itself to exist in physical, substantial, sensible dimensions we would be unable to apprehend it. Here is where Malebranche fits in: what we see is a representation of something else, but that “something else” is not creation but God himself making himself available to us as a physical body (reality, world); this is an act of will and effort on his part, this self-disclosure to us.^➊ And when I saw him in 3-74 I saw him (his body) as it really is. This is a new theology, neo-pantheism and, specifically, eco-theology. Out of his love for us he receives pain. And tears.

Thus it is not proper to say, “We are occluded”; we see—as reality—what he lovingly makes available of himself to us and for us. 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. [ . . . ]

Galina’s dream and the Tagore vision are one and the same (and are Valis). This theme of grief, sacrifice, pain, loss, suffering goes back (in my writing) to Tears and this is what Tears is all about. VALIS discloses this—the grieving, sorrowing Godhead. But I now see that this comes from its self sacrifice in “falling” into space, time, causality, multiplicity and substantiality for our sakes: so as to both create us and world for us. And the ambience of its sacrifice, its “fall,” is in Dowland’s music: pain and love. (Sorrow and love, which is the same love that generates its distress.) When seen, it is perfect beauty. This is how it “looks.” Pain and sorrow is what it feels. Perfect love is what it is. So beauty, love, pain, grief, sacrifice—and to emulate this path is the stations of the cross and our imitation of God himself: we do what he has done and become (remember) what he is thereby. Taking the path causes the anamnesis that I experienced in 2-3-74 and this is the true and only real enlightenment. It was known first to Gautama. It is not just Christian; it is also Buddhahood.

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.

Tears is a holy book.

The greatest sorrow of all is abstract sorrow: the pure essence of the Godhead. This is found in Dowland’s first music that is abstract—and from him to Beethoven. What this is is cognitive sorrow and is the divine essence itself. It is pure knowing. It is not an emotion; it is awareness of its own essence: two mirrors: sorrow and awareness of sorrow, its own sorrow. We must save the Savior: extricate the Godhead from its self sacrifice. “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.

➊ And by doing this he exposes his body to our crimes and misuse; he exposes himself to pain by this disclosure—pain inflicted by us. Under these circumstances he can be hurt.

[63:D-149] Now, I came to believe a couple of weeks ago that when loaded I upon reading Luke realized that this was not a verbal (informational) description of a world but was that world itself in its verbal/informational mode/state/form. And this is precisely what is said in the “Sepher Yetzirah” notes about idea, word and writing of word, and object being one for God, that for God “idea, word and writing of the word are the thing itself.” It cannot be a coincidence that I felt this about Luke, then; I had actually encountered what the Sepher Yetzirah notes declare.³⁶ This is where my concept of the plasmate comes in. (Here, now, in this line of reasoning I close the noose, for the enhanced “infinity” mode was in fact the world of the Bible, specifically “Acts”—the second half of Luke.³⁷) Now, the great intuitive guess on my part was that the plasmate is the blood of the resurrected Christ and that because it is here now (in its verbal/written/information mode) he must be here now (1) the world of “Luke-Acts”—is actually here now (2) this world—sacred story/drama—is a story about Jesus Christ who appears in the story as the principal figure: it is his story. Thus the telling of the story verbally is identical with what the story depicts: if it depicts Jesus Christ then Jesus Christ is present (in the mode/dimensions/attribute of what I call infinity). Thus (I say) Jesus Christ lives in/as/through/by the Gospels. According to my theory, what we take to be objects and processes if seen properly (all attributes/modes perceived) will form into a gestalt that will authenticate itself as the Christ—and this was precisely my experience in 3-74: I refer to Valis. [ . . . ]

We are pervaded by a powerful text that is (as I say in VALIS) alive and is a living thing—not description of thing. Its cardinal purpose is to apply Jesus Christ as the form (gestalt) to which our seeming reality points. (Our seeming reality, in contrast to Scripture, is the description and not the thing described.) To perceive this cosmic form everywhere distributed as how things behave and fit together (that is, what they as information refer to) is to perceive correctly. In VALIS I say that the universe is information, and if you read VALIS carefully you discover that this information is about Christ or rather is Christ writ as large as reality itself. [ . . . ]

Therefore Christ is present in the macrocosm-microcosm correspondence: (1) as all reality; (2) as Scripture wherever it occurs. I utilize the idea expressed, e.g., in Matthew—and which I believe; Paul often refers to this—that all Scripture—that is, the OT or Torah itself—secretly is an account of Christ, and that this secret nature of Hebrew Scripture was only revealed at the time of the first advent. In a certain mysterious way, then, the Torah “encloses” like a shell the knowledge of, the story of, Christ, and therefore is Christ (but God concealed this even from the prophets through which he spoke). Thus there is a secret accord between the two Testaments. This is why Jesus had power over the Law (Torah), not the law (Torah) over him; it is fundamental to Pauline thought that Jesus Christ is master not instrument of the Torah, and this fits with my perception of Jesus that day I read Luke: he possessed unlimited miraculous powers such that reality itself (physical law: the moral law of the Torah and the physical law of the cosmos form a unity, deemed heimarmene by the Gnostics) was under his jurisdiction: it obeyed him as a servant. He revealed himself, even then (before the resurrection), as Pantocrator. Having died and been resurrected he vanishes into the very reality of which he is master, camouflaging himself (as Eliade discusses) and lives on in and as that reality in a certain mysterious way, especially (as Mani taught) in the innocent vegetable kingdom but by no means limited to it.³⁸ (He has a special affinity to it because it suffers without causing suffering; it sacrifices itself to feed the animal and human kingdoms.)

All this was reported—albeit crudely—in VALIS. World yields up the story (as Eliade puts it) and the story is the life, death, resurrection and then “sinking” into camouflage within world (where he now lives on) of Jesus Christ: world, then, is simultaneously information about Christ (it tells its story) and is Christ by reason—by way—of internal arrangement, especially that of the lowly, the vegetable kingdom. (What I call the “trash stratum,” or “debris discarded”; Christ enters world, penetrated it and now is camouflaged as it, dispersed throughout it and becoming steadily stronger.) Pere Teilhard did not realize that his Point Omega is something known to and understood by numerous primitive tribes, as Eliade points out, although to my knowledge Eliade does not note the connection between the murdered deity who returns to life and then teaches man and then sinks (as it were) into a camouflaged state within plants and the like—(i.e., reality itself).^*

It is very clear to me that there is an identity between Jesus Patibilis and Hainuwele: “for by feeding on the plants and animals that sprang from his body, men actually feed on the very substance of the demi-divinity” (i.e., Hainuwele).³⁹ This point regarding the Manichaean Jesus Patibilis escaped me: here is the Eucharist writ large: all men and even all animals feed on him and thus unknowingly re-enact the Eucharist, not in church but out in the world itself!

Folder 64

[64:E-1] “Luke-Acts” transduced from word mode to object mode but still information: the universe made of information in terms of the internal mutual arrangement of the constituents as a gestalt, pastiche, a collage. Now, the cardinal topic of “Luke-Acts” is Jesus Christ. How (if at all) does he appear in this pastiche/gestalt? He does appear but not in anthropomorphic form; he is camouflaged in and as the total pastiche/gestalt, hence cosmic. As information, this universe as pastiche-gestalt read not in a linear manner but as a gestalt (form) reveals or is or contains him throughout like a steady modulation fed into it, a waveform ubiquitous in the gestalt (now construed as a field). This modulation can best be termed “a perturbation (of the reality field).” He is not it but perturbs it.

[64:E-3] Therefore: Christ is hyper information that reduces the information universe to the carrier which he modulates (i.e., perturbs). This brings to mind my “protest art” theory that rogue information has penetrated a prior “official” information system. (This relates to my analysis of Gnosticism as a “weak transmitter”—but this should read “weak interfering signal”; the transmitter may be powerful but very far away.) I conceive of this as a combat between the two information systems, and, if the Gnostics are right, the “weak transmission” that interferes is the true (transmundane) God.

[64:E-5] The universe was created out of 22 Hebrew letters (“Sepher Yetzirah”) but there is a missing 23rd letter; when his 23rd letter is added, all the negative prohibitions of the Torah vanish; severe limitation and justice are replaced by mercy and freedom: this is the third Shemittah and it is the Messianic Age. Christ, then, can be construed—as rogue information system—to be the corrected, completed basis of creation in which 23 Hebrew letters replace the 22 originally employed. He is, then, an added, formerly missing letter, and this addition changes everything, from severe limitation and justice to freedom and mercy; I construe this as nullifying specifically the lex talionis⁴⁰ which has to do with punishment in connection with breaking the “thou shalt not”—the negative prohibitions in Torah. Since this carries over into physical law (causation, efficient cause), what was a mechanical system (“pitiless,” as I call it in DI) would become flexible, able to deal with exceptions: this would require the faculty of judgment, and this is another way of describing Christian justification. [ . . . ]

The 23rd letter is not just added on; the Torah returns to its jumbled matrix state and then reforms anew: differently. My God—if you add the 23rd letter you get a broader, larger, more complex, higher, more sophisticated system. Whole new combinations (of letters) would be generated. New kinds of situations would arise (analogous to my meta-abstraction vis-à-vis normal abstracting).

The plasmate is this hyper-information (the 23 letter system) feeding into the old rigid, mechanical, limited, fossilized 22 letter system. As the blood of Christ, just as Valis is his cosmic body.

[64:E-10] It is apparent to me now, suddenly, that Gnosticism is—as Jonas makes clear in his analysis of it in contrast to the Greek-Babylonian view of the Kosmos⁴¹—the absolute theoretical key system that both (1) described the entry of the hyper-information into the older, rigid, mechanical system (to combat heimarmene) and (2) that hyper-information (Gnosis) itself: as a theoretical system, Gnosticism is/was what it describes. And it is Faustian and it is (as Jonas says) the basis for modern (post-ancient) man.

[64:E-11] There is essentially an adversary situation between the two info systems (old vs. hyper) even if this is the 23 letter Torah replacing the older 22 letter Torah. The older system involves and operates by heimarmene; the newer system on a flexible, sentient, more complex, more evolved, etc., etc., basis. These are such radically different worlds that—well, the term “cosmos” cannot contain both: it is cosmos penetrated from outside—hence the Gnostic premise of the transmundane—a necessary premise in understanding the situation: transmundane deity as overruling the creator and his creation. At the very core of this lies, then, Faustian man and the Faustian ideal and Dasein; and this is the topic of Owl!⁴² And as I wrote ultra supra: it is the heroic (the new, the Gnostic, the Faustian) versus the tragic (the old: “sidereal passivity”). This is an issue of unprecedented importance—and has directly to do with Fate (heimarmene), hence the very basis of what the world order is and how it works, and the newer way of being (Dasein) by man in that order.

[64:E-12] You take the text (which is linear, sequential and digital) of “Acts” and convert it into a world: objects in their mutual arrangement. (“Acts” is part two of Luke.) What is the basic story of “Luke-Acts”? Jesus Christ. But when you turn it into a world, although the narrative is still there, Jesus Christ cannot be seen (i.e., as an object among objects). The linear, digital text is now a gestalt (Bild) and is read simultaneously but by the right hemisphere. (The linear digital text of course as narrative is read by the left hemisphere.) Where now is Christ, if not an object among objects. He is missing. Then you discover that in a unified total gestalt (pattern) read simultaneously by the right hemisphere analogically Christ is present as the pattern itself: as unified totality. The puzzle is solved. “Luke-Acts” is not a verbal narrative about Christ—i.e., referring to Christ—it is Christ. [ . . . ]

This fits in with the intuition I’ve had for some time: that the Bible is the real world and appears in our spurious “world” as a putative book the way “Grasshopper” does in TMITHC. If what we possess in the form of a book (info) is actually a world, then what we experience as world is perhaps only info—a book. Everything is backward.

[64:E-20] I suddenly realize what is necessary in order to apperceive Christ: some kind of runaway positive feedback involving paradox (e.g., VALIS is a novel/VALIS is not a novel); the flip-flop into infinity regresses faster and faster until at last the outline (of Christ) emerges; hence the paradoxical nature of the parables: they constitute doorways to the kingdom, rather than being descriptions of it.

Folder 56

August 18, 1981

Dear Pat,

I offer the following idea: that what I call “the plasmate,” which is living information, is the third testament of Joachim del Fiore which emerges as the spirit of the two testaments (OT and NT) when they are superimposed; it is the spirit of which they are the “hard rind of the letter.”

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. So I maintain that underneath, the two testaments are living organisms that create recombinant new information by a process of linking and relinking, such as I saw VALIS employing; moreover, this life that I speak of is known to the Jews as Torah (see The Divine Invasion as to the Torah being alive). The living cosmic entity, which existed before creation, and for which creation exists and is justified by, is not confined to the first five books of the Bible but continues on through to the NT. It is self-replicating and sentient; it is a life form, and Joachim figured it out (although of course he could have obtained the concept from Hebrew scholars). Thus when you see a copy of the Bible lying on your coffee table you are looking at a living organism capable of growing, of reproducing, of change; like all biological organisms it must maintain a higher level of internal order than its environment, and it must absorb negative entropy from its environment—and indeed it does this, by subsuming its environment into changing arrangements of information.

[ . . . ]

So my Type A Psyche is the OT, my Type B Psyche is the NT, and because these two testaments function as a single organism in a push-pull dialectic relationship (superimposed) they form one new, higher, third entity which I call Ditheon, a life form so advanced that it is superior to all creation; and yet it itself is not God but is the image of the invisible God. Philo of Alexandria was the first to figure out its existence; he relied on his Jewish sources and on Greek sources (in particular Plato) as well. One could speak of our spatiotemporal world, then, being based on the Bible or even emanat ing from the Bible; the Bible is not a book like other books: it is not a description of this world, it is the source of this world, and this world, at all places and times, conforms covertly to the Bible; that is, strip away the stegenographic covering from the physical world and you will find the world of the Bible—in fact you will find the Bible itself as a verbal text permeating reality and giving rise to it. The Bible is the information that is fed into the space-time universe, as if transduced into substantial reality. Thus the Bible is always the case—what is known in Bible study as typological application. Thus the books of the Bible do not refer to one given specific place and one specific time, but are equally applicable to all places and all times, when the dokos is stripped away from true reality. Joachim was aware of this meta-organism existing “in” the two testaments, and he was aware that it is a world; that is his crucial awareness; this third entity, this spiritual meta-entity created by an accord between the OT and the NT is a spiritual world in which men exist or can exist or will someday exist; it is somehow real and somehow available. 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. If you doubt the truth of what I am saying, look at the 22nd psalm and think of the crucifixion; you will see that the 22nd psalm, although written centuries before the birth of Jesus, applies to and exists at the time of the crucifixion; it lies outside of space and outside of time entirely, and is true now as well. ⁴³ This is what led me to reiterate obsessively that secretly “we are living at the time and place of ‘Acts’ ”; what I failed to realize is that “the time and place of ‘Acts’ ” does not refer to a specific historical context, a given time and given place, but to an archetypal reality that is the very basis on which our seeming world is built, and this archetypal reality consists—not of a place, not of a time, not of substantial reality—but information. The Bible is not a world reduced to a verbal description; on the contrary: it is the verbal source of world, just as signals from a radio transmitter are the informational source of the voices and music you hear when you turn on your receiver. But (as I say) three “entities” must be envisioned, not two; that is, not just the OT and the NT; as Joachim realized, these two palpable entities combine to form a third and meta-entity that is to the two palpable ones as spirit is to letter. Thus I say, 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.

[ . . . ]

Thus the physical spatiotemporal universe is not information, as I declare in VALIS, but is derived from information; this information is the next hypostasis up, ontologically speaking. It goes: God, Logos (information), spatiotemporal universe, and then back to God as goal of the whole process (Erigena). In March, 1974, by means of my meta-abstraction I so-to-speak rolled back the physical universe to the Uttered Word underlying it, from which it is derived; this is why, finally, the term “word” is in fact an excellent translation of “Logos.” It is as if God spoke (or rather thought) a complex idea, and from this living idea (Logos) the universe came into being, was derived.

This view is a far cry from Burroughs’ notion that we have been invaded by an information virus that is making us stupid!

[56:1]⁴⁴ November 17, 1981

A very valuable dream. I enter a large auditorium like a San Francisco concert hall or opera house. There is an audience sitting. A number of men are engaged in discussion, speaking from different places in the house; they are standing. I assume that an impromptu discussion—argument—has broken out; it seems to deal with Jerzy Kosinski; his name is mentioned. (One of the men, perhaps a teacher or the teacher, resembles Bill Wolfson, so this may also be a courtroom.) I join in the discussion and they all frown; it turns out that this is not an impromptu discussion by members of the audience: these are actors and what they say is rehearsed; this is the drama the audience has come to see and hear. I have done something improper. There is some mention of homosexual intellectuals; this seems to be the topic. Seating myself, I speak quietly to a man in the audience; he has white foam, like milk, like the marshmallow glaze on the candied yams I had last Saturday, around his mouth. I ask about the discussion, which I now realize I am not allowed to join in on.

Analysis: clearly the location is the concert hall years ago in which my agoraphobia/claustrophobia broke out, when Horowitz was playing the Brahms second piano concerto. The friends with me that day were Bay Area intellectual homosexuals.⁴⁵ The play enacted, the roles taken in semblance of an actual discussion, as in that Berlioz work I saw where the woman grabs the conductor’s arm to make him stop conducting—this refers to what Hans Jonas says about the older Greco-Roman-Babylonian closed cosmos, specifically Stoicism in which all you can do is play your role in a drama with as much grace as possible “and you are your own au dience.” What I am doing in the dream is—because I do not understand that these are only roles acted out, a formal drama—I have broken the rules; I have spoken out of turn, which means that I have unintentionally rebelled against our status in the cosmos, my own status; they have accepted theirs and only say and do what their scripts call for them to do. Hence their frowns of disapproval when I join in impromptu. This is rebellion, my primordial rebellion, but as I say it is based on a misunderstanding on my part, a failure to comprehend the situation. When the situation is made clear to me I lower my voice; that is, I cease to interfere with the clockwork marionette drama being acted out, but I continue to talk in a somewhat muted voice, privately, to the nearest member of the audience. That is, I cease blatantly to rebel, but I am not entirely still. What I am doing at this point is trying to understand what the drama being enacted is about; I accept the fact that I am a spectator and can’t participate; this has to do with my withdrawn status in life that is my current mode. This status is forced on me because I am literally not part of the drama. No role, no lines, nothing has been assigned me except to watch and listen. I can accommodate that only to a point; I have gone from trying to participate to trying to understand; thus I adopt the mode of a scholar and philosopher, but only because I have been edited out of the drama itself. Spontaneously, I would join in—did join in, but was silenced. This dream tells me a lot about my phobias and my rebellion. My rebellion is based on a misunderstanding on my part as to what is allowed and what is not allowed. I had naively thought we were free to say and do anything we wanted; that is, I presumed what I call the “open” or Gnostic or Faustian cosmos. The true situation reduces me to spectator, but this is not my first choice; this is forced on me by the nature of the situation (the closed cosmos in which as in Stoicism people simply act out their assigned roles, say their assigned lines). Yet I continue to speak, although not as part of the drama; I do not interrupt it but I ask about it; I seek to understand. I am barely willing to refrain from entering the drama—which would mean now to break the rules knowingly, whereas when I broke the rules before, I did not understand the situation. In the dream I feel no phobic anxiety at all, which is strange; it shows that the issue is not fear but freedom, the freedom to say and do what I feel like. I have been told what my place is. I accept it, but not entirely. “Homosexual” in the dream signifies something, probably an odious play that is being performed. Not only am I not allowed to participate, I dislike the subject matter: homosexual intellectuals. It is a drama I don’t like and I am not allowed to enter it. I have no role at all, in any drama; there is just the one, and it is alien to me (hence the “teacher” looks like my attorney; this is an adversary situation). (I have no under standing of adversary situations, as I’ve long realized.) The dream has profound Gnostic implications; the whole situation is the Gnostic appraisal of our lives here: assigned roles in an odious drama, that is, a drama inimical to our real natures. It is a vast enactment of something unnatural. Audience and players alike collude in something that should not be. This is not my drama; had I been allowed to participate I would have disrupted it because I would have spoken contrary to the purpose and spirit of the drama, the only drama going on. This is not my world (in the dream I entered the auditorium from the outside, from perhaps a transmundane source, if indeed, as I suppose, this auditorium represents our world, the audience and actors humans living here, acting out their lives as mere roles in a closed cosmos or what they accept as a closed cosmos). I am a disruptive force, an outsider, silenced by disapproval, by mass censure. So I will seek to understand, since I cannot participate. This “seeking to understand” is my exegesis and my decades of epistemological analysis. I am like a visiting sociologist, like Margaret Mead investigating a foreign culture. This is not my home; these are either homosexuals or at the very least they take homosexual intellectuals to be important. I would say that this dream verifies that 2-3-74 was the Gnostic experience. From that moment on I was able to create a role for myself, rather thus my condition of Geworfenheit was reversed, nullified, solved. There are profound overtones of Existentialism here, especially from Gnosticism. The dream presents the paradigm of the Gnostic perception/conception of Dasein, in particular being thrown or cast into an alien world; moreover, the dream shows that 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 (i.e., was born). My rebellion, then, is a confirmation of my Dasein as basically Gnostic; the rebellion stems from Geworfenheit and the Fremd and Unheimlich. I have gone to a lot of trouble to accommodate the situation; I have ceased interrupting the drama by trying to join in—I now understand that it is a drama and that these people are playing roles assigned to them—but I am not entirely silent; 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 which I have only very partial knowledge. I must ask questions if I am going to understand.

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. I think this dream is telling me that my analysis of last night upon rereading Jonas’ study of the contrast between the pre-Gnostic worldview and the Gnostic is correct; my situation is Gnostic indeed, hence my worldview—and my problems!—arise from this situation. That my primordial phobias could arise from the Gnostic condition of Geworfenheit never occurred to me; I guess I could now view my phobias as verification of Gnosticism. 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. So the dream refers back to the last insight that I had while driving on Sunday night: that my status in the 2-3-74, that in fact this is what 2-3-74 was all about. And it was as if the cosmos itself had changed to accommodate me (I suddenly realize); I may have changed, but it seemed as if world changed. (“A perturbation in the reality field” refers to an event in world itself, not in me.) This is impossible; i.e., that world changed to accommodate 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. (It has never really returned, except briefly when Doris was in the process of leaving me.) Good Lord! Is this not impossible, that world changed to accommodate me, in order to repair the gulf, the discrepancy, between me and world? Only God—i.e., the Pantocrator—can make such a change! Surely—logic says—it was I who changed. But all of a sudden I fitted in; and I had the distinct impression that world was sentient, animate, unitary, conscious and purposeful; it was immanent deity or something . . . anyhow I saw transformations in it, and the AI voice backs this impression up. In any case, world and I became harmonized (harmonie, harmonia) for the first time. So at the very least there was a radical shift in my role, my status in the cosmos, of a sort that did not seem to stem from an internal adjustment in a closed system but seemed, rather, to be the result of something entering from outside—that is, something transmundane. Beyond doubt there were changes made in me: drastic, radical, extraordinary changes; that is certain . . . but it did not seem to end there; world itself changed (or at least my experience of world, my Dasein). It was as if the past had 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 transformation 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!).

[ . . . ]

A final point: the world transformed from the unfamiliar to the familiar—this cannot point to a psychotic break, for in a psychotic break this is all reversed: the familiar becomes the unfamiliar. So much for the “Horselover Fat is insane” theory. In 2-3-74 came comprehension and recognition; there also came the end of—the healing of—the gulf that separated me from world. This is 180 degrees away from psychosis. Viewed psychologically, this is, in fact, a healing; it is repair.

[ . . . ]

The dream certainly sheds light on the real purpose of my exegesis. My working on it is preceded by a serious—even potentially disastrous—event, one forming the very basis of my life or at least the core problem of my life: expressed in the dream as a drama that I do not even understand as drama, in which I try to involve myself, only to learn that I am disrupting it, intruding on it—I have no role to play in it, and am to simply be a silent spectator—which in fact (in my actual life) I could not do; that is, for whatever reason I could not sit silently watching and listening while other people acted out their lines, played their parts. I wanted to play a part, too. This was denied me. The psychological gravity of this situation arises from its existential gravity; it is truly a grim matter in terms of one’s life. Consigned simply to watch and listen while others act and speak? And not even to be able to understand what the drama—i.e., life itself—is about? This is intolerable and it is against this that I rebelled, from the start. This is my story: starting out trying to involve myself as a participant in life, then finding out that there was no role for me in the drama (of life); whereupon I sat down and began to try to figure out what the hell the drama was all about. I gave up trying for a role, an acting part; I settled for an understanding of what was happening. This is the next best thing. It is not ideal but it is at least a way open to me. I would not be rebelling if I tried to comprehend the drama I was witnessing. This would not disrupt it. However, 2-3-74 radically transformed the situation; the drama became comprehensible to me and, moreover, I found that I did have a role to play. But this role is predicated on the drama becoming comprehensible to me. My being able to understand it, due either to my own cognitive powers or simply to the drama itself being, as it were, open, is the absolute prerequisite. At the heart of the matter, at the core of my psychological and existential difficulties—that have plagued me all my life—is the fact that, very simply, I started out misunderstanding what is going on. My god—this is the Gnostic ontological condition of ignorance! Oh my god! Oh god; I am back to Gnosticism; the ontological category of ignorance, which is the basic ontological category, was reversed for me in 2-3-74; ignorance turned into its ontological opposite: knowledge. And because I now knew, I could act. Incomprehensible world became comprehensible world, in a single stroke. This is, then, Gnosticism, for it is only in Gnosticism that the cat egories of ignorance and knowledge possess—are seen to possess—this absolute ontology. Every bad thing stems from ignorance, and restoration consists of a diametric reversal of this condition.

[ . . . ]

My exegesis, then, is an attempt to understand my own understanding; I was correct in my recent letter to Russ concerning VALIS: in it I am thinking about my own thinking. I possess the Gnosis and am analyzing it, since it is essentially internal to me, now; I possess it and am turning it over and over, scrutinizing it from every angle. The Gnosis, for me, is not in world; it is in my mind. Thus I analyze and study my own thoughts—the quintessential example being the meta-abstraction itself. My mind performed it but I do not really understand this that my mind did, this abstracting, the ultra-sophisticated cognitive act. The problem in a sense lay in my mind (i.e., I was ignorant) and the solution, when it came, occurred in my mind as an act, an event, inasmuch as virtually nothing occurred in world, except, of course, my seeing the Christian fish sign. But that only served to disinhibit what was already in my mind blocked, buried, latent, dormant, slumbering; the fish sign awoke me.

There is, then, in me—and was from the start—the potential ability to solve the riddle of the drama (i.e., life, the world-order) that I am perceiving. Hence anamnesis was and is everything. I know, but do not know what I know. Hence I resort to the metaphor of the two-mirror runaway positive feedback in which I the observer observe myself (in world as Other), which sets up an endless regress, but it is this very regress that transforms the ontological category of ignorance into its opposite, knowledge. And thus reverses the primordial fall—my own fall and the fall of much more besides.

The mystery lies in me, then, and not in world; likewise, the solution lies in me and not in world. At my core there is something that is me and yet not me. Thomas is an example. Am I Thomas? Is he me? Hans Jonas says: “It is between this hidden principle of the terrestrial person and its heavenly original that the ultimate recognition and reunion takes place. Thus the function of the garment in our narrative as the celestial form of the invisible because temporarily obscured self is one of the symbolic representations of an extremely widespread and, to the Gnostics, essential doctrine. It is no exaggeration to say that the discovery of this transcendent inner principle in man and the supreme concern about its destiny is the very center of gnostic religion” ([>]).^*

[ . . . ]

Cognitive estrangement; that is the key. And the rectification thereof. This is the goal; this is the mystery. This is Gnosticism as problem posed and resolution offered. The Gnostic assumption is that cognitive estrangement exists until rectified, and that the person is dependent on an outside source to rouse him to awareness of his state and to reverse that state. Upon it being reversed—ontological ignorance transformed into ontological knowledge—that person’s status in the cosmos, his existential basis within the cosmos as part to whole, is drastically and radically reversed, transforming not only his perception of the world-order and his ability to function in it, but also his perception of his own self. In the final analysis it is not world that he now knows and knows correctly; it is his own self. Thus the motto of Apollo finds ecstatic glorification and in fact deification in Gnosticism: “Know thyself.”

[ . . . ]

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 compatibility with the whole (Other, cosmos). This perception acts as two mirrors act: a runaway positive feedback is triggered off in the person, the part, concluding with his reincorporating into the cosmos—which is at the same time a repair—a return, if you will—of cosmos itself. Since he is now inside the cosmos rather than an external spectator to it—in fact now that there is cosmos—he grasps 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 constituent common to self and Other (world, cosmos) is known in India as the “Tat tvam asi” perception of the Atman-Brahman identity; it is a universal experience. 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 some thing 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 came, of necessity, Stoicism. Cosmos was not merely no longer perceived—it was by definition gone. (Viz: it is only there if perceived, because it is a relationship: between the whole and its parts. Thus in a certain real sense what I saw in 3-74 came into existence only as and when I experienced this; yet although this was finite in terms of space and time, during its existence it was, paradoxically, infinite and eternal.)

If cosmos can be reconstituted by anyone anywhere at any time it always was, is everywhere, and always is. In saying this I am not describing an attribute of it but, rather, its nature. It needs to be only once to always be. That is, if it can be at all it is (a version of Anselm’s ontological proof of the existence of God).

[ . . . ]

Here my study ends.

Except to add: My god; each step is a further fall. (1) Up to Parmenides is an intact part-whole true experience (Dasein) of intact cosmos. (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 replacing 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 estrangement is complete. Yes; here cognitive estrangement is so vast that there is conscious recognition of it; efforts are made to reverse it, i.e., to acquire the Gnosis. And I could add (4) where these efforts are abandoned, this occurring upon the death of the Gnostic attempt to reverse the state of ontological ignorance for ontological knowing. Oh Weh! The fall worsens! And yet I reversed it for myself. 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 estrangement: thus it neither seeks to nor succeeds in bringing about a reversal of cognitive estrangement. Like the Stoic system, it consists of a series of dogmatic beliefs; propositions assented to as creed! This is of no help whatsoever! To affirm loyalty to a series of propositions—this is precisely what Heidegger means by “the darkening”!

[56:G-6] In a sense (I realize) I am concerned with the absolute only insofar as it has to do with Cosmos.^➊ Since I am concerned with this life—hence the cosmos—and not the next (if any). The adjustment—radical adjust ment—of my status within the cosmos (in 2-3-74) discloses two things: (1) there is a cosmos in the strict, precise Greek sense; and (2) there is a regulator, which I conceive to be an absolute. These realizations fill me with joy.

➊ if any). The adjustmentThis, then, subtly shifts my interest from theology to that which is properly the object of scrutiny of science (in the broad sense); it has to do with this world, the organization thereof, and what organizes and regulates it. This brings me at once into contact with modern physics; so this is not an idle, world-denying evasion of reality but, on the contrary, a rational attempt to understand it.

[56:G-35] But I think the element that is the greatest shock is the recognition of the familiar, as if (or even because) all else stems from it. “Familiar” and “change is only seeming” are two aspects of one fact. (This is true, really, of the other realizations: the illusory nature of space, time and plurality; there is really only one realization—that of the familiar—but it has implications in all these other areas, space, time, change, multiplicity.) The reversal, then, of what I call “cognitive estrangement” to “cognitive affinity” has precisely to do with this familiarity: how can you be estranged from what is familiar? And ultimately it is your own nature that you know, since for this unitary, eternal, unchanging “thing” to be familiar, there must of necessity be a you to which it is familiar: a you who saw and knew and understood it before; so now you understand that there was a you and there was a before—but since time and space have been abolished, “before” either means nothing or it means something quite different than is usually meant—as I pointed out in my two February ’81 postcards. That “you” and that “before” are a fortiori and perforce now and here (hence I experienced a massive time dysfunction and with it a collapse of causation). As a result of all this the holy, the dimension of the sacred flows into the profane/mundane world.

[56:H-10] This business about the atomists suggesting that the void between objects is the is-not: 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”! And that this is what happened to me in 2-3- 74; after all, due to the Taoist influences on me I was conceiving of reality as a unified field when I wrote TMITHC with internal acausal connectives—what I believed, I finally experienced, and the entrance for me lay in two “areas” as keys: (1) my unusual sense that space did not exist; and (2) neither did causation.

[56:H-23] When I saw Valis I also saw the sentience (Noös) which the view of the atomists had logically driven out of the universe, by showing that consciousness and perception are epiphenomenal; therefore the atomists were materialists of necessity. So when I perceived and comprehended the universe as a continuum, it was a thinking continuum, as it had been for all the pre-Socratics prior to Leucippus. One view (atomists) must of necessity deny Noös, but why does the continuum view imply noös? Perhaps the answer is: noös is there—in world—but the atomist—discontinuous—view prevents us from perceiving it . . . because our worldview literally prevents us from seeing what is there: the voluntary sentient cooperation of “things” (which aren’t things in the atomist’s discontinuous sense); we see pool-ball Newtonian causation instead. Thus my two early satoris were logically and structurally related: having to do with space, having to do with causation. This all pertains to the discontinuous-continuum alternatives: “the void” not only permits pool-ball causality—the random collision of atoms by blind necessity—but requires it, by the very nature of the cosmology/theory that causes us to experience this worldview. Dasein.

So if you experience world as continuum, noös 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. And yet in this century—and only just now!—modern theoretical physics has verified the continuum view—and sure enough, some of the physicists involved are noting how the Tao or Brahman (Noös?) fits in.

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.

[56:H-25] To hold the continuum view of the Eleatics satisfies two quite different criteria: (1) it is a return to Heidegger’s unity of noein and einai before “the darkening,” i.e., to Parmenides’ worldview, so it is authentic Sein; and (2) it is in accord with modern physics, so it is verified, and it is not abreactive.⁴⁶ Then the “darkening” is ending (and I see in this the “third dispensation” regarding the ecosphere, a concept only possible in the “continuum” worldview). [ . . . ]

The void-atoms view is the decomposing cosmos that Christ reunites (in and as the ecosphere continuum view).

The atoms-void “cosmos” is not a cosmos at all.

I saw the new cosmos.

[56:J-6] He has ensouled the biosphere as a whole. The logos, penetrating it, endows it with reason; thus it now uses language (logos = word = language). This is the greatest evolution since creation—Genesis—itself; man as a species now ascends to a totally new level of intelligence, such as I experienced in 2-3-74. This will permit an articulation by the ecosphere that we will hear. This has never been the case before. I am saying that we will hear the voice of the ecosphere and we will enter into dialogue with it; Dio! “The voice of the ecosphere”! “We will hear it.” This is Pere Teilhard’s noösphere; could this be the AI voice? The biosphere? It is not a disembodied voice or mind but speaks for all the creatures; this is Tagore. Is the AI voice, then, Tagore? Or, put another way, when I saw Tagore did I see the source of the AI voice?^➊ This may be a new entity, since prior to this the ecosphere had no voice, for it did not possess the logos. The logos penetrates it, ensouls it with reason, and it (the ecosphere) speaks; to repeat my insight of Saturday night: the creator has now granted speech to the animals—i.e., the ecosphere. Then can it be said that Tagore is the ecosphere?

He has ensouled the biosphere with reason. Thus it can now speak, to him and to us; this is Tagore. It can enter into dialogue with us and with him.

The conflagration of the world foretold as its eschatological fate (“last time water, next time fire”) is what I saw; but God out of mercy sends his son into the world once more, to enter the ecosphere and to plead for the world, that it not be burned up; thus the world is to Tagore as man was to Christ! It (mankind) faced destruction but God intervened, and both times in the same way: as voluntary sacrifice and surrogate, taking the burns as stigmata upon his own body so that the world will be spared as, the time before, man was spared. Thus Tagore is world’s advocate as Christ was man’s; God sees not the lowly earthworm, but sees Tagore, his son, and hears Tagore’s voice which is the voice of the earthworm, the ecosphere itself. This is why the animals have been ensouled with reason: so they can ask for help. They have been given the gift of speech so that they can artic ulate their needs and plight to the creator. Then it is not just we (humans) who hear Tagore but God hears him, too; God primarily. He (Tagore) is mediator between the biosphere and God, in his role as logos.

The attempt by the animals to speak that I saw in 3-74 is fulfilled in and by Tagore. This is an evolution primarily of great mercy by God for the creatures (and it does show up in DI in the scene with the dying dog).

The dog run over and dying in DI is Kevin’s cat in VALIS—here lies the ultimate enigma and the solution. This is what God must respond to, and he does so by sending Tagore. Tagore, then, is the solution to the axial problem formulated in VALIS. I have received my answer and it is not theoretical; he is here: the AI voice said so.

➊ The AI voice may be a new voice, not Ruah and not the Holy Spirit, but Tagore, the biosphere, who is Tagore, whose voice we hear and whose voice God hears; what I hear, then, when I hear the AI voice is what God hears. It addresses me and it addresses God. It is to God as Jesus is to God, him and yet not him. Tagore exists separately in his own right, as Jesus did.

[56:J-29] We are embedded in a tremendously elaborate biosphere or even noösphere (as Teilhard calls it) already, but cannot discern it due to our discontinuous view of reality, our materialist-atomist blindness. Were it to signal us we would most likely experience—or rather seem to experience—the sort of uncanny “one-way” information intrusions such as occur in Ubik. 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 and react appropriately but have no notion—nor even perception—what—if anything—had done the signaling. Thus (probably) we would experience what Bishop Berkeley speaks of as the impression that objects seen are “in” our eyes rather than spatially removed. [ . . . ] It would be as if the visible (or anyhow palpable) signal came out of an invisible yet tangent—i.e., immediate—source. But the problem stems from the very basis of our “discontinuous” worldview; signals and especially information would seem to arise (1) out of nothing; and (2) immediately at hand; as I say, as if “in” our own percept systems, yet at the same time partaking of Other, of the external. It would be a paradox, and one only solvable at the most fundamental ontological level of world experience; we would have to learn to see (or “see”) what is in fact there in what I call the “Eleatic continuum” worldview in which the void is denied: viz: there is no such thing as “nothing.”

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, like the frogs KW speaks of bopping against what for them is an invisible wall—because they have no template for “wall.”

How if at all would this differ from an hallucination? I believe that hallucinations appear organized in space-time; they are governed by the Kantian categories. They are projected sources. But here, information arises at the sense organ minus a palpable source. One supposes that one sees X or hears Y, but in what I’m talking about this is precisely what is missing; therefore the signal or information is de facto uncanny, being causeless. The problem is not that you see and hear but that you do not. There is a blind spot, an omission.

The “logic” of the discontinuous reality system denies that there can be anything there: only the void is there—hence, as I say, the stimulus seems as if it arises at the sense organ or in it or directly tangent to it (and not in space-time). Not only is there no way to tell what the signal (stimulus) is arising from. There isn’t even a where.

[56:J-34] Πρόνοια (Pronoia): affectionate behavior by world. Αγάπη [Agape]: strange orthogonal thought, following the sudden thought, “all this—my research—is sterile (i.e., cold, devoid of feeling).”

[56:1a] 2-3-74 was: I was not just in contact with God—I was in the mind of God, Kosmos Noetos⁴⁷: world “became” the preexistent eternal ideas. Then I realized myself to be equally eternal—an eternal notion in that mind.

This is the whole explanation. [ . . . ]

The exegesis was not a waste of time; I came to understand noesis, the use and the cognitive function, the pre-existent ideas, the basis of it all being mind, intellect, forms, logos, idea, ideas—eternal and unchanging including myself—in God’s mind,^➊ hence world to be truly known must be intelligibly known, because it is an interlocking set of ideas in God’s mind. This is the key to it all.

➊ This is where anamnesis and meta-abstraction become (revealed as) one and the same operation: (A) pertaining to world; (B) pertaining to me as an equally eternal and unchanging idea in God’s mind.

[56:19a] 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 mathematical truth, not a substance but structure). There is, then, a one-to-one correspondence between the human intellect and the true nature of world, and this explains the meta-abstraction: why it re vealed the true nature of world to me (and my own nature to myself). The true structure of the universe is cognate to human reasoning, and this is the paradigm of Pythagoras and his insight upon hearing the anvil struck. Thus my exegesis with its emphasis on the reasoning faculty, the meta-abstraction, the overcoming of “cognitive estrangement” is by no means a waste of time or a blind alley but is pure Platonism, the meta-abstraction being noesis acquired through anamnesis. One might even say that the meta-abstraction is not only a revelation of how the universe is constructed but that it is an intelligible structure and that the human reason is able to comprehend it—and it is precisely this that overcomes “cognitive estrangement” by yielding up cognitive comprehension as the final yield pertaining both to self and world: the part-whole relationship. Thus it is taught by Plato that there is a spark of the divine in the human soul.

[56:1b] December 12, 1981

Though he seeks to sell his (Satan’s) power fantasies (Blade Runner) he unknowingly promulgates the Third Kerygma: the ecosphere (animals) is now ensouled: holy. [ . . . ]

My god, this movie is the greatest defeat (what was done to the book) and victory (the Tagore kerygma promulgated); the first is ostensible, the latter cryptic. Oddly, the first appears ostensibly to be a victory but is really a defeat; nonetheless a real victory lurks secretly under it, but it is not the victory that people will think the making of a movie from my book is. They will say, “It is a great victory to have your book made into one of the biggest movies of all time,” but they will not know why; it doesn’t have to do with what is in the movie, etc.; it has to do with what is in the novel. [ . . . ]

The beetle I was tormenting back when I was in the third grade—I saw it as holy, as Christ. Later the turtle was Christ. The rat who screamed was Christ, and appears as such in Tears; this is the revelation in Tears by means of the dream: the rat ensouled and now King Felix: Christ. The crippled lamb who lagged behind. Pinky as pink sheep humiliated and killed. It’s all in Androids, and finally the Tagore vision explicates what was already in Androids as doctrine, and in Tears as revelatory cypher. The movie is defeat; the novel victory, ostensible vast loss, secret good shining almost invisibly from beneath this defeat, these fascist power fantasies they’ve made it into. Evil has served good; evil appears to win but it is good that actually does. [ . . . ]

The Tagore vision is a summation of all that has gone before. Looking at Pinky there toward the end and seeing the passion, seeing Christ humiliated and dying—that was not one vision among many; that was not an aspect of a vision: that was the core of it, the beating heart of it all; when that is coupled with the revelation of the Logos in camouflaged form invading reality (the ecosphere) and transubstantiating it—add these two together, and there it all is. This is not quite the same as Jesus Patibilis; it is a new revelation of something dynamic: a process of conquest. Ah; last night I saw in my mind the Godhead moving into the animal kingdom, and I saw the vast joy that the Godhead experienced in receiving that fallen, lower kingdom (domain) back; not the joy of and by that kingdom, but the joy of and by the Godhead; the Godhead moved into that lower kingdom and inhaled it, drew it back in by it—the Godhead—advancing into that lower, fallen kingdom long separated from the Godhead; and what beauty! The colors, the love; bliss itself, by the Godhead, to receive back that domain with all the life in it. This was a vision of what I had seen in 3-74 of Valis (the Logos) invading reality; there I saw it with my outer eyes, externally, but last night it was an inner vision, and I had forgotten it until this moment; I experienced the joy and love on the part of the Godhead to do this thing, not what was done for the animal kingdom but what the Godhead felt. Colors, as Dante describes the Trinity in Paradiso: the varicolored rings of light; I saw that like rings of Saturn advancing into the animal domain. “The love that moves the sun and the other stars”—it had regained the lost animal kingdom; and this is my vision going back to the beetle I was tormenting in the third grade; it is one vision extended over all my life. And I found it in Act III of Parsifal, the Good Friday Spell. [ . . . ] As the EB says, To see in an old dilapidated bum the Christ; that is the Christian Dispensation. But I see in the sick, humiliated, dying animal the Christ, literally saw; and this is the Third Dispensation, the cat crapping and wild, and then all of a sudden tame and wise, like a saint; it was the Christ and this is a new dispensation, Tagore’s. Before it was, Where the man is, there is Christ. Now it is, Where the animal is, there is Christ. To see this and understand this: for this I was fashioned from the beginning; for this I was made. My original satori regarding the beetle was the true one; everything else only amplifies. [ . . . ]

A strange and mysterious strategy: to put the new kerygma in a novel published in the late sixties but then disclosed to me only now, toward the end of 1981, but just at the time that we get the signed contract with the Blade Runner people to rerelease the novel in conjunction with the film—as if the VALIS trilogy has diverted everyone’s attention, my own included, like when the thought came to me that the true message was in “Frozen Journey” and not in VALIS! The true message is not in VALIS, but it is, I now think, in Androids and it will have the greatest circulation—probably—of all. Viewed in terms of God’s strategy, Blade Runner has been used as a means to an end, the end being the kerygma in Androids. Thus to have suppressed Androids and either written or authorized the novelization based on the screenplay would have been to hand over victory to evil, but this did not happen. The fully executed contract between Blade Runner and me regarding the rerelease of Androids was waiting for me in my post office box on Friday, the day I was up in Venice and learned the truth.

To share—experience—the joy by the Godhead as it invades—expands into—the animal kingdom, lost to it all these many millennia! The repair to the damaged Godhead! Yes, it is a self-repair, a reinhaling, a recovery of part of its lost self. Christ reknitting the decomposing cosmos and restoring it to God. Christ moves lower and lower, deeper and deeper into the decomposing cosmos, down layer by layer, starting with man. Thus the vision of Christ at and in the trash layer (stratum) is a vision of ultimate and final repair.

Why am I so joyful? I am celebrating a victory and can now stop work—finally—and relax. Why? Because I did my job and I know it. What was the job? To get the third dispensation in print, and I did so in Androids—I need do nothing else in my life. The Tagore vision: the Godhead expanding into the ecosphere (animal kingdom).

Okay: there are other aspects. I didn’t sell out to Hollywood: (1) do the novelization or (2) permit the novelization; (3) suppress the original book. And in view of what the film is about, it would have destroyed me for two reasons, not one: (A) the Tagore vision in Androids; (B) the Heinlein power fantasies in Blade Runner. These are antithetical: and they express the opposing kingdom’s Christ (Androids) and Satan (Blade Runner). Look what it would have done to me spiritually and psychologically and politically. My soul is safe, and it was in jeopardy. This is why I see victory despite the vast defeat.^*

Folder 55

[55:L-18] I have it now:

What is being studied? A usurper is on the throne. The rightful king (who is younger) appears as a madman, criminal or fool; he is mysterious; his nature and origins are uncertain. He is arrested and tried. (I should say falsely arrested.) Interrogated by the old king (usurper). He is charged with a crime he did not commit. The resolution varies; sometimes he is acquitted and assumes the throne; sometimes he is killed. The white-haired old king on horseback may be the murdered father of the young man who is the rightful heir to the throne; he returns to seek justice: punishment of the usurper; the son placed on the throne. This story is told and retold. Why? What are we supposed to learn? That the ostensible ruling power of this world is illegitimate? The “King” is not in fact the true king? And the “fool” is not mad or a fool or a criminal but is the rightful king? My analysis: everything we see is a 180-degree mirror opposite of the truth. The ostensible “king” is not only not the true king, he also has no actual power: despite appearances his power is illusory.^* All true power belongs to the “fool” who is the true king (vide The Bacchae). This is all some sort of play—which Hamlet very clearly alludes to. We are to guess the riddle: Who is the true king? (And hence, who really rules, i.e., who has power?) This strikes me as some sort of religious pageant or initiatory rite or ritual into a hidden truth deliberately concealed from the many. Only what are called “the elect” are let in on the true state of affairs. Who, then, qualifies as one of “the elect”? Perhaps one who before (i.e., without) knowing the truth, reveals his own true nature; that is, faced with a moral choice, even though he is deliberately misled as to the actual situation—that is, who holds power, who does not—he chooses correctly nonetheless. Once he has so chosen, the masks are dropped and the true state of affairs is revealed to him.

[ . . . ]

Oh Dio—I just put together several extraordinary theological ideas. On November 1 when I had that psychotic anxiety and had to have Tess and Christopher come over—I realized then that hell consisted of a state of absolute self-awareness of what you had done—forever; that is, you accused yourself and found yourself guilty—and then had to live with and as that guilty self forever. Last night I dreamed about Harlan Ellison and realized that about him: he’d have to exist throughout all eternity with and as Harlan Ellison.

But now, suddenly, the significance of justification occurs to me; in the light of the above it assumes the absolute quality that Paul and the Reformers assigned to it. Justification is, as it were, the sole, the real, solution to—the saving you from—hell, precisely as Paul and the Reformers taught. Since hell as a state is absolute, and justification is absolute.

Well, this idea is not new or original but, rather, my first understanding of sin, hell, salvation, grace and justification! As orthodoxy regards all these. Justification saves the person who otherwise is doomed; he does not save himself (e.g., by good works): the power to save lies in God. Thus, if indeed it is the case that in 2-3-74 I was justified, then though my own conscience accuse me, I am not merely called justified but am, through God (God’s grace) saved in fact—I mean, justified in fact; I am changed through Christ. Jesus Christ, then, is paradigmatic of the saved/justified person, who was often called by the Reformers “a Christ” and I think correctly: it is almost a technical term, not just a compliment. So much more than pronoia and astral determinism was involved in 2-3-74; they were, but far beyond that lay justification stemming from the same source: charis: God’s saving grace.

If we are indeed here in this world, as I suspect, to be fashioned and shaped, to become (our einai established forever), then justification is the finishing of this, the sudden perfecting, and is the logical outcome of what we are here for. God has judged, closed the books; the person has been made by God acceptable, in the twinkling of an eye. Now my statement that “PKD now (12-81) is very much what Thomas was in 3-74” suddenly tells me that it is all okay: Thomas was my justified, perfected self, and thus I evolve (thank God!) toward becoming him more and more: he was the future.

[55:L-35] I just remembered (5:45 P.M.) a right-hemisphere graphic image in hypnagogic sleep last night: I had been thinking about the two coaxial worlds in which one—hidden—is Christ’s kingdom. 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 arborizing 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. This is both Christ and his kingdom, and in 3-74 I had done a set-ground discrimination of it—this is what Jesus meant when he referred to himself as the “true vine” and it is the vision I had that day at the dentist’s. And this fits with Valis here (i.e., Christ) camouflaged in our reality.

Then all portions of the plasmate form one organism or entity, and the living information does not pertain to it but is it, is Christ.

[55:3-2] We are told in the synoptics that indeed the secret is kept from the many and revealed to the few; this is explicit. As the operation of heaven is for the nepioi and ptochoi and not for the proud (i.e., all others) it follows that only the former will ever know that the answer to the Tears riddle is the case. Here is why: if all people understood that by following Jesus’ teachings—which seem to be self-sacrifice absolutely—one acquires the support of the absolute power of heaven, then self-interest not morality would impel men, all men, to follow the way, and summarily the moral aspect would be engulfed by the pragmatic and practical, and an ethical system would succumb to the degradation of personal ambition. Thus the “secrecy theme” is simply unavoidable.⁴⁸ There just plain is no other way that it can be done. Hence the stegenography, the veiling, is essential to the situation to a degree that by the very essence of logic admits of no mitigation or compromise. The way now will seem folly but must inexorably and inevitably seem so. Thus the apparent failure of Jesus and of Christianity and the apparent non-occurrence of his return in glory—this fiction has to obtain. The prophecy and promise of the return in glory (1) had to be made; and (2) appear not to be fulfilled. Then the fact that it is always and eternally in fact fulfilled is the ultimate secret of the way, second only to the answer to the riddle posed in Tears.

[ . . . ]

To reprise, “Christ’s return in glory” is a disclosure rather than a historical event, and the ubiquitous false notion that Jesus failed, his ethics do not work and he did not return not only must be the case but in fact serves as a top-level agency, agent and instrument of the very system that is doubted. The doubt is necessary to it, serves it, is subsumed by it, even generated by it. The system is in absolute control, and utilizes this disbelief—and this disbelief can only be abolished as a result of moral action and never before that essential moral action; it is not just allowed: it is (I think) imposed as a necessary condition that the moral act be possible. Thus it is hopeless for me to expect to convince anyone of the truth of my revelation in VALIS because this is not how it works. This is not how it should work. This is not how it can work. My error is to reason: (1) Knowledge of the truth. (2) Then as a result, right conduct. But (2) would have ceased to be based on free choice, true ethical decision, and would be merely smart. The act would be done for tangible reward, and this has nothing to do with morality and ethics. Right action must bear the stamp of folly, self-sacrifice and, finally, madness itself. For the first time in my life I understand the necessity of what I have long identified as a vast, deep and powerful cognitive and perceptive occlusion.

[55:X-4] Last night at Juan’s the God told me: “You are now permitted to be happy (Felix) at last.” The God brings joy into the world and overthrows the reign of the old, former King of tears; it is the procession of the ages from iron—Pentheus and the BIP—to gold: Zagreus-Jesus in the Garden and the animals. The newborn King who “will wipe away every tear.” As I realized, Christianity is secretly a religion of ecstasy, and that was my turning point.

There is a thematic link between Tears (the NT and Dionysus story), Deus Irae (Christianity), Scanner (two personalities), VALIS (two personalities, Christianity), DI (the Savior, Judaism) and BTA (Christianity and two personalities, Bill and Tim, if not three: Christ also, and the Dionysus story). Six novels linked together. The most interesting link is the two personalities link in Scanner, VALIS and BTA. People will see this, but few will see that it also begins with and in Tears. If you study these six novels as a unity—and this is my third period—you discern a fascinating story not really clarified until BTA when at the end Christ emerges explicitly. (One could even argue that Confessions is part of this in that Jack Isidore and Bill resemble each other—whereupon it is at once clear that a fortiori Androids enters via J. R. Isidore—which takes us at once to the sacredness of the animals and Mercer.) This last is important. The nature of the truly human stands, then, in this complex eight volume meta-novel as a midpoint between the android (e.g., Rachel Rosen) and the divine (Mercer, Bill at the end of BTA). What strikes me most forcefully is the very great importance that Androids had in this eight volume meta-novel: what if we had not reissued it? It is an absolutely essential component, perhaps the most important of all, but in itself alone not in any way expressing the full meaning; only when linked up with BTA does the meaning become clear (and vice versa in terms of BTA); that is, BTA only assumes its full stature in significance when viewed in conjunction with Androids: the theme of the madman and the holy fool in the love for and care of animals all at once stands out sharply. (When we first encounter Bill, he is the 180-degree mirror opposite of the Rachel Rosen and the spider scene in Androids and linked to it necessarily through J. R. Isidore.) Amazing. [ . . . ]

Perhaps most important of all, if one traces the holy fool from Confessions to Androids to BTA we see him at last, at the very end, reveal his true nature and identity as that of Christ: it is not at all there in Confessions; it is somewhat there in Androids—in which he meets the Savior, Mercer; but in BTA the long-awaited revelation at last comes. Who and where is the anticipated Savior spoken of in VALIS? In and as the holy fool first brought to our attention in Confessions, just as the fool, with no religious overtones. In Androids the holy enters, in and as Mercer (linked to the animals); and in BTA the supreme mystery is revealed: we had him—the Savior—with us from the start, as Jack Isidore. The link—absolutely necessary—between Confessions and BTA is Androids and again I say, what if we had suppressed it? Had we done so, the intact story would never have been told: from fool (nut) to holy fool (loving and innocent) to Christ himself. This is a vast theme and very complex, but also very clear: it is quite coherent.^* [ . . . ]

But there is a point I am missing that is substantial and crucial: the axis of fool–holy fool–Christ completes itself not by evolution but by virtue of the fact that the fool, proven holy, is seized by Christ entering from outside—as perfectly expressed in the John Donne sonnet that Angel thinks of—significantly!—when she first sees Bill (“. . . unless you ravish me”). Christ enters the holy fool and takes full possession of him, consuming him utterly, and this is the explanation and the event both that is the 3-part axis. Bill is not Christ; Bill is seized on by Christ and taken over by Christ; for a while there are two selves, Bill’s and the extrinsic “intruder.” And, at last, only Christ. This clearly relates to Dionysus, but that seems of lesser importance to me now. To repeat, the holy fool neither is Christ or becomes Christ; he is invaded by Christ as the Holy Spirit, and this is the miracle, and this it is that is the end state of what we saw in Confessions with no hint that it would end this way! Now, the trick starting this would be if one read Confessions, Androids, BTA and then VALIS, for having absorbed the idea of this axis and seizure, what would one now make of what VALIS narrates? Why, this very seizure that is put forth rather sparingly at the end of BTA! The total analysis and presentation of the mechanics of it, as it were. The seizure step-by-step with all its ramifications, appears in VALIS—and so, to put it another way, we now understand what VALIS is all about, then! And after all it really was the purpose of BTA to explain VALIS. But there is a thematic link between VALIS and BTA I’ve failed to note: Bill is insane, and Horselover Fat is insane; so Fat is another avatar explicitly of the fool, holy fool, madman, Christ. But if VALIS is viewed after one has studied Confessions, Androids, and BTA the results are amazing as to what VALIS really depicts—and it, more than the other novels, is clearly autobiographical, and perhaps not a novel, not fiction, at all.

[55:Z-2] I had the strangest insight after seeing The Elephant Man that for some reason I failed to write down. Viz: we are not linked to world directly as:

but rather:

That is, 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 patterns that impinge compellingly (or, conversely, not at all). Now, this resembles Malebranche’s epistemology somewhat, and yet is crucially different. Viz: God and world are clearly distinct.

What emerges here (in this theory) is a totally new explanation of 2-3-74. Either there was massive selecting (for a time) or I became aware of massive selecting, that is, aware of the medium as interface between me and world (i.e., such massive selection always goes on, but we know it not, supposing all we experience to be properties of world and applying to the encounter with world by all persons uniformly). Now, a powerful but by no means invincible argument can be offered that due to my meta-abstraction in 2-74 (that is, due to a sudden titanic insight) I comprehended something about world that makes it possible for me on my own to fathom the presence of this selecting interface. The meta-abstraction would (perhaps) then have been that there was a pluralized signal system at the point of origin (world) but that only one set normally reaches me, which says a lot about world, but also presumes a selecting interface. Thus “world” is radically redefined but, more, the interface is realized and its selecting (suppressing, enhancing) activity, and this is God (Valis). So what comes of this meta-abstraction pertains to epistemology (“ti to on?” in terms of world) but yields up by implication a much more radical notion—that in fact world qua world is less an issue than the interface itself that lies between us and world and passing the power selectively to determine what of world impinges on us and what, contrarily, is suppressed—whereupon (I think) 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, by means of open enhancing-suppression patterning, which clearly did not emanate from and in world but existed between world and my percept system.

It is possible that world qua world consists of eternal constants, and the interface modulates our reception in extraordinary ways and to extraordinary degrees, e.g., your “being” in A.D. 70 in Syria or USA 1974 depends only on the interface, on its selecting. 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). The person who—there is some relation between intelligence and the empathic facility. But when I was tormenting the beetle and understood, that understanding (which I have called satori) 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; I know by the grace of God; 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. And he who has this not is not evil but deprived. And he on his own cannot change his situation, for there is no rational way—only a supernatural way—that this knowledge can be obtained. I must not blame someone who possesses not this knowledge, for there is no way he can obtain or acquire it on his own; he is totally dependent on the grace of God. Here is where the original satori is as the 2-74 meta-abstraction was. But this shows that although the 2-74 meta-abstraction had to do with cognition it was given to me from outside, which brings me to the issue of Socrates vs. Jesus that Tillich speaks of. Reminding the person (Socrates’ route) and what is already in him; or Jesus’ way (midwife, as Tillich puts it).

It is not probable that the meta-abstraction was truly an intrinsic (internal) cognitive act on my part—either viewed in isolation or in relation to the sequence of earlier satoris. All one knows is that one now knows what one did not know, but not due to ratiocination, due rather to some element outside. And this is the key clue: outside. But I figured out last night that we do not know world directly but through God as lens link interface. So the stimulus in outside reality affords God the interface the opportunity (to use Malebranche’s term) (no: his term is occasion) to transfer knowledge pretextually, as it were. This is in conformity with my whole conception of clutch, selection, enhancement and suppression and not a special situation, only—as Joyce calls it—an epiphany of regular conditions. It is as if the pretext is clearly only pretext. Effect—that which is known—far exceeding its ostensible cause. As to the transfer of information regarding Christopher’s birth defect, the situation is clearly and explicitly such that it is palpably impossible that insentient plural objects can give rise to the information, in which case something is there that I have always spoken of as camouflaged in and as ordinary plural insentient objects.

These various situations that I denote here are differing versions of one enduring underlying stable situation that by its very ubiquity escapes our notice. Thus beetle, meta-abstraction, and Valis informing me of Chrissy’s birth defect are in fact one and the same experience along an axis of revelation as follows: (1) With the beetle there is no reason to suspect that the knowledge does not arise naturally (unaided) from the ostensible situation; cause (the situation) and effect (the knowledge) seem commensurate. (2) In the meta-abstraction the effect exceeds the cause/the situation outside me, but it is not at all clear where the knowledge is internally retrieved in me (Plato’s anamnesis) or transferred from outside. (3) But in the situation regarding Chrissy’s birth defect there is now no doubt that the information (knowledge) cannot arise from or be accounted for by the situation (i.e., the Beatles song, etc.). In this case the satori I experienced regarding the ending of The Elephant Man is a satori concerning satoris: not only is it perfectly clear that the knowledge is transferred from outside (it is external in origin, and a free gift) but that the source is not in world but as-it-were between me and world so that I am dealing with world indirectly but dealing with the interface (by definition) directly. This precisely agrees with Nicolas Malebranche. What is now disclosed was in fact the state all the time, but behaving so as to conceal itself and in fact its existence.

At this point it is clear that there is now the resolution to my total lifelong epistemology which strove from the start to resolve the issue of δοκος (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 (extension, res extensae) but the infinitude of God. But here the problem and issue of epistemology collapses into the matter of grace.

Because the power to bestow and withhold knowledge of what is truly there (the answer to “ti to on?”) is to say 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.) If on our own we try to plumb—or even discern—the interface we enter an infinite regress—as I’ve discovered for almost 8 years: since the interface is not so much:

but:

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 once more (this is dealt with in “Frozen Journey”). Thus we know others 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 consummation of the axis of salvation that began, for me, with the beetle satori. If αγάπη (agape) equals empathy then there is only one road to salvation; in its partial form it deals with and pertains to finite creatures (but is real): in its complete form (absolute, realized form) it pertains to God; this is an axis. What and who one has loved in world (“love” here being αγάπη) 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—correct knowledge—that by its nature can only be revealed; whereupon I now see one vast axis of disclosure from the first (the beetle), culminating in 2-74 and then 3-74, and then tapering off in subsequent revelations. 2-3-74—and specifically Valis itself, in me and in external reality, centering around the transfer of information about Chrissy’s birth defect—then is the quintessential moment in a pattern of revelation predicated on grace and involving salvation stretching out across my entire life. What, then, I have viewed as a preoccupation with epistemology turns out to be a search for—and a finding of—God.

[55:Z-8] “A long extinct true cosmos and it’s still there.” AI voice: hypnogogic.

“Extinct” must mean: in terms of our ability to perceive it.

[55:D-70] Dio. Eureka. I found the—

Christic Institute.⁴⁹ All the way back to Tears: the “Acts” material, the dream, the King-Felix cypher. Karen Silkwood.

The Parousia is here and the Holy Mother Church knows it. My 2-3-74 to 2-75 experience (back to ’70 if you include Tears) has to do with the Parousia. Eleven years and at last I hold it in my hands and it does have to do with Pere Teilhard. My Tagore vision is authentic; Christ is here. Point Omega.

[ . . . ]

What—I think—is the most exciting is that due to 2-3-74, my Tagore vision, what Victor Ferkis has said and the Christic Institute, I can now discern—albeit dimly—the outline of a new theology, rooted in the epoch we are moving into. It is a Christian-Buddhist neo-pantheism very close to Pere Teilhard’s Christocentric Point Omega, but having specifically to do with the unitary ecosphere—and for me, closely related to Malebranche’s Cartesian pantheism, which of course goes back to Augustine and Pauline mysticism—and may also include the new physics and field theory, a merging of science and theology in defense of a palpably living universe. (There may also be an information and a Platonic component.)

I feel confident now that my 2-3-74 experience is not reactionary but is carrying me into the future—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 may be the quintessential summation of my entire life of inquiry and worldview; for me and for mankind a new age is opening in which 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 Christianity 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 assimilated 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.

Malebranche is not only compatible with this neo-pantheism—more: it is a highly sophisticated modern-day version of how God can be here—all around us—and we be yet unaware: that is, he is everywhere yet unseen. Malebranche’s mystical pantheism is the philosophical explanation of eco-theology. In other words, Malebranche is the how and eco-theology the what.

[55:D-84] Thus what I have been trying to do in the exegesis—and which exhausts me—is deliberately on my own part again to do what I did in 2-3-74! But that was sparked by the messenger, and now I have him not. Hence I simply become more and more weary as world becomes more and more powerful over me. I seek to regain, to recapture, the Liberator of 2-74 to 2-75—whereupon world regained its power over me: the vision was lost and I fell back. I do not seek to gain Gnosis and liberation but to regain it; I had it and lost it! This is why trying to write Owl broke me: it is this that is the topic of Owl! Although my effort seems cerebral (having to do with thinking) it is really existential—but failing.

Cerebral = knowledge = Gnosis; typically Faustian, as in Goethe’s Faust, part one.

VALIS built the maze and fell into it. The maze changes because it is alive.

It is alive because it draws on and from the very thoughts of the creation trapped in it; his efforts to solve it are thoughts, and it is these thoughts that “fuel” it—i.e., it is one vast Chinese finger trap; the harder I try to get out, the more powerful world becomes. Hence hex. 47: my increasing exhaustion. What, then, should I do?

[55:D-85] I was treated to a demonstration of YHWH: thought, word and reality were one, with no ideation separate from the word and no difference between the word—what I said—and the deed; it was the deed. Moreover, there was absolute a priori knowing (about Denise, about Tess). And this unitary “thing” (thought, word, act) is his power (omnipotence). He willed it so, by the use of Holy Wisdom, a separate hypostasis who is never apart from him.

[ . . . ]

The really extraordinary thing [is] that although I was terror-stricken I experienced absolute lucidity; I saw and understood my total situation perfectly, without degree and without reasoning it out. It was utter knowledge. I was—had been—destroying that which was of most value to me in the world: Tessa and Christopher: they are all I have. However good or bad Denise is intrinsically: that was secondary and tangential: God summoned me back to what was morally right and what existed: it was right and it was real. I had been occluded and severely jeopardized this most precious element in my life. This was no vague intimation; YHWH summoned me back from the lip of the abyss. What I stood to lose by my wrong actions was that which my very physical life depended on. I was on the brink of literal doom, yet indirectly so: Denise would destroy me not by what she did but by what I did. There was in this a vast moral summons, for in Judaism, God and morality are one and the same. This was the Lord God of Israel, not just a vague God but YHWH—and I knew it. This was the God of the Torah summoning me back to moral reality, with no choice; he willed it; he commanded me to return to life and what was right. (In him and by him the two are one and the same.) Thus morality and that which gives and sustains life stood bipolarized to immorality (sin) and that which takes life. Sin and death, then, were one. I sinned and I died. Abandoning Tessa and Christopher meant my death. Moreover, he gave me words to express all this to them (rather than just an understanding of it) so deed was conjoined to knowledge: what I knew I did—act and cognition being one, as morality (the law of God) and life were one.

[ . . . ]

It was 3-74 all over again, but with moral overtones. Carried beyond the irresistible to the terrifyingly irresistible. In this case I had fallen into mortal sin (this was not the case in 3-74; there I was in peril but not in peril of mortal sin); I could, then, lose my freedom or life, but here I lost my soul; I not only doomed myself—I damned myself. Here, power and wisdom prevailed; in 3-74 knowledge and love prevailed: this yesterday was YHWH, not Abba.

The situation was intricate, unstable, ambiguous. There was a single right choice and it had to be made then and no later. God made it for me, based on his wisdom, power, and because it involved morality, goodness (as exemplified by the law). Thus, having justified me in 2-3-74, he forbade me from sinning any further; he intervened absolutely.^* [ . . . ]

This was an invasion of my psyche by absolute knowledge. It bore no relation to what I had up to that moment believed, wrongly believed. There was not even a sense of insight, of satori: it was pure knowledge, like a sort of seeing: a vision of the situation as it actually was. And it was primarily a moral seeing. Absolute moral rectitude occurred in me. It simply took place. All at once it was. I guess I saw it as God saw it. And how different that was! And absolute! It was not a viewpoint. It was knowing.

What I have been calling “the meta-abstraction” is in fact knowledge—the act of knowing—as God knows (i.e., knows what is, i.e., world). 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 assimilated 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).^➊ I realize this due to Sunday night when the same absolute knowing by God in me induced a realization of my practical and moral jeopardy. Again there was certitude—total, unconditioned knowing—but what I knew this time was dreadful and lethal to me practically and spiritually. Once again the unitary fusion of knowing and doing occurred because for God there is no distinction between what he knows and what he does. 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—both times—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 priori and absolutely, not sensibly and contingently.

[ . . . ]

I guess for a moment I was plunged into hell and discovered what it consists of: one is given absolute moral insight into one’s own sinful nature, and there is no way it can be rectified; it is now too late; hence hell is eternal. This is clearly and obviously the just punishment and the logical punishment: absolutely (by the knowledge of God’s own mind) to see what one has done, illuminated by the divine light that reveals all. This is total knowledge of the situation and of oneself. It can be awful. By this divine illumination one’s cognition/perception condemns one; this is absolute self-condemnation not based on arbitrary rules but on total comprehension of what, really, is structural and how one has fitted into this structure and changed it by one’s deeds. The harmony and order of the cosmos are disrupted by what one has done. It was not guilt that I experienced; it was understanding. This is more terrible than any guilt. Guilt admits of degree; this was boundless. [ . . . ]

These revelations that took place Sunday night tell me a great deal about God, wisdom, morality and the Torah, and the order and sustaining of the cosmos—understandings I never had even an inkling of before. I see how correct moral laws function in the divine government and are inseparable from the physical laws that regulate reality itself; moreover, this being the case (the homologizing—logically—of physical law and moral law in sustaining the cosmos, i.e., order) shows why God as cosmocrator is on tologically the source of morality as his primary attribute or manifestation (as Judaism teaches): and as I say, the Gnostics are correct: heimarmene combines causation and the Mosaic dispensation because both are essential in the divine government. God’s will, then, which (as Spinoza rightly says) is physical law, is based on Holy Wisdom who informs the creator of what is, and in a certain real sense the absolute comprehension of what is (omniscience) determines what should be.

Thus (as I say) wisdom and morality and the preservation of the cosmos—universal rules—become one. My radical new comprehension stems from sharing God’s view of reality and morality as a unitary “thing”; they only become unitary—one and the same—when Holy Wisdom is involved so that absolute a priori knowing exists.

The key term is being (Sein, esse, einai); this is what is preserved because this is what Holy Wisdom knows. Hence the role of God as creator is stressed. (I did manage to deal with some of this in DI.) I can now see clearly why and in what way Hagia Sophia is the primary agent in creation.

All this (based on Sunday night) is probably one of the greatest leaps in my theology-epistemology-worldview-ideology. There is nothing radical in it; it is fundamental: the OT itself. And yet, significantly, I was already moving in this direction, in my thinking (as expressed in DI) and in my life (conservatism, preservation, accrual and building/creating). (And, very important, stability.) What epitomizes all this is not idealism but the rational (as Rabbi Hertz and others point out regarding Judaism). One could say that Sunday night absolute rationality invaded my mind and totally possessed it. (Apollo, then, in contrast to Dionysus or Faust.) Yes, ever since 2-74 I have venerated and sought out St. Sophia, for it was she of whom the AI voice spoke. I see myself as intoxicated up to Sunday night; whereupon I became sober; I came to my senses very suddenly—at the last moment.

➊ Augustine teaches this: the divine illumination, later picked up by Malebranche.

[55:D-110] 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, i.e., Dionysus, and this is what broke over me in 2-3-74: not just theoretical knowledge (Gnosis) but the Christian ecstatic experience.

Hence when I read Luke I recognize Jesus as a miracle worker, a guru, a magician. He is the God of change.

[55:D-115] This means that my lifetime search in plumbing the depths of suffering in order to unravel its mysteries has proven successful. This relates to the rat, the beetle, the burning Japanese soldier, the Galapagos turtle; this has to do with empathy—my empathy—which is another word for agape: and agape is the greatest of the Christian virtues, as Paul tells us: it is the true way of the Christian. But why? Because it is good, i.e., a virtue?^* Not exactly. Agape is a road along which one travels in imitation of Christ, to penetrate to the core—deepest ontological layer—of suffering (his passion and crucifixion), and there, if you follow that road—and that road only—you arrive at the secret: the Resurrection—which is the miraculous conversion of suffering into ecstasy, which is uniquely the Christian miracle; this is how Christianity and Christianity alone solves the problem of suffering. This solution is not a philosophical, intellectual understanding (e.g., why there is suffering) but an event: the dramatic conversion of suffering, not into mere stoic apathy, the mere lack of suffering, but into its affective and ontological bipolar opposite: ecstasy—and here, precisely, Dionysus-Zagreus enters; Jesus “is” Dionysus-Zagreus as a solution to suffering; this is not just ecstasy but, more, ecstasy as the conversion of suffering. (This conversion is not found in the Dionysian-Orphic system; ecstasy is sought for its own sake.)

There is, then, no exultation in suffering per se, here; suffering, as in Buddhism, is to be solved; thus Jesus addresses the same problem that Buddhism and Stoicism address, but solves it quite differently. If Buddhas can be called victors, certainly, then, the Christian (who goes all the way to the end of the road of agape) is even more a victor, for he is not merely liberated from suffering—he experiences ecstasy. Why? My perception is: he remembers Christ the bridegroom having just been here and anticipates his imminent return, and is now as bride preparing for that re turn; the Christian is right now making the wedding preparations in this the tiny interval between Christ leaving and his anticipated imminent return; this is the Dasein of the true Christian, and this is joyful, in fact ecstatic. I know because I experienced it. There is memory of Christ (anamnesis) and anticipation (eschatology), and, most of all, the sense of oneself as the bride of Christ (which is, as soul, which is female). This hierogamy is consummated by the birth in the Spirit, the purpose of the messianic mission; and I do speak of this in VALIS. All time and all space collapse into this: the memory, the anticipation, and the understanding of oneself as the intended bride—which is literally (not just symbolically!) fulfilled by the birth in the spirit which occurs now: it is not anticipated but occurs.

Yet the road to this is through suffering, and it is not just actual (involuntary) suffering, such as is imposed on all creatures, but, rather, the vicarious and voluntary ontological suffering of agape. In imitation of Christ one voluntarily takes on all suffering, but as means, not end.

[55:D-132] “Spinoza’s 3rd attribute: infinity.” If every thing, event and act extends into infinity (the eternal) would this (principle alone) not explain 2-3-74 and the “not two mothers once but one mother twice” meta-abstraction? That is, I saw world correctly, extended into the infinite, the absolute, eternal, i.e., as Spinoza’s “Deus sive substantia sive natura”! Thus particulars became for me their own archetypes. (Which is why Plato’s anamnesis and noesis were involved!) This is not merely a perception of world-as-it-really-is; this is perception of God! Hence the infinite space. [ . . . ] In 2-74 I must have caught sight of a particular as what it truly is: an eternal constant; and thus I ushered in infinity by the power of my own comprehension/cognition: I understood.

[55:D-146] To say that it extends into infinity does not imply immense physical size; it enters into infinite implications, significance, meaning, which is to say it is as I saw in 2-3-74: it is typological (or archetypal). This is precisely the 2-74 meta-abstraction, for it has a permanent and ubiquitous ramification. Thus many places and times work off it. It applies over and over again. It is into this attribute that scripture taps. This is how sacerdotal performance works. The significance axis (is) always the same. (For each paradigmatic thing, event, act, situation.) (1) By “same” what is meant is “unitary.” The key term is “[is]” rather than “resembles” or “is identical to.” “Not 2 mothers once but one mother seen twice” is a realization of this. Surely this is what Plato surnamed eidē. If what is involved here is that which is signified (by a thing, event, act, situation) then there is a sign-to-object relationship between the word and writing of word mode and object: the word (info) which we take to be the object—thing signified—does not in itself contain the significance that is in the true thing but only refers to it. (The word “dog” does not itself have hair, feet, a tail.) Thus when we see info as object it lacks the significance that the infinity attribute (true object) possesses, analogous to hair, feet and tail on a particular dog. Now, in a sacerdotal act (a sacrament) the significance “in” the act is precisely what is sought for; the object and what is said and done in connection with the object is summoned deliberately—so in a sacerdotal act what I call the infinity attribute is apprehended, or at least the attempt is made to apprehend it—that is the entire point. Well, this is precisely what happened to me in 2-74 in seeing the golden fish sign: an object (that was really only an informational sign pointing to an object) was comprehended by me in this sacerdotal sense—which from a liturgical sense is comprehensible; but what is not comprehensible is that I saw all reality this way: as sign not thing, whereupon (by definition) reality became a sacrament, every building, person, event. No conventional theological explanation will account for this (since such a transformation should be limited to designated sacerdotal objects and acts). What is obvious is that what is done—sought for—with the sacraments (and often achieved) is equally true for any thing, act, situation, event: all reality viewed collectively as an aggregate of plurality; that is, as reality per se. This should not be possible. And, moreover, ordinary reality taken as such without this enhancement becomes “mere” information. So two things have happened: ordinary reality can now be 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 which 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, but that the attempt to summon it, being confined to stipulated sacerdotal objects and acts, does not reveal this to us. What I claim for this dimension or mode or attribute is meaning or significance, and this definition when scrutinized really asserts that that which truly is is revealed; viz: the meaning is not implied, referring to something else, as in a symbol or sign that has been given a referral value; the meaning is in the dimension now perceived and this meaning is self-authenticating and self-revealing: it discloses its own “story” by itself, requiring no interpretation or analysis: it is “open.” In fact, it is “open” in the precise way that the ordinary object is not when it is taken to be a sign signifying something; with the sign the meaning must be explained: it is not there.

Folders 67, 68, 69

[67:12] Something has happened in me that is so important that it is, in effect, the healing at last, of the schism in me that goes back to the 50s to when Mr. Smith and Mr. Scruggs first approached me and set up the schism—and it stems from the Tagore vision. For the first time, tonight, at Michelle’s, I was able wholeheartedly and without a trace of ambivalence to engage in political activity directed against the government—and why? Because I know, really know, that this is what God wants; I have chosen—at last—between the two sides that eternally have competed for my allegiance and between which I have always been divided all my life—at least all my adult life. And totally and absolutely committed, because of the religious sanction overriding the merely secular authority.

[68:L-10] The palpable situation that I now (12/9/81) perceive and in which I am not just actively but wholeheartedly involved is (I suddenly realized) the revealed apocalyptic situation of 2-3-74: it is Armageddon, with the true Christians pitted against the Empire in terms of what I call the “demonic trinity”: nuclear reactors, nuclear waste, and nuclear weapons. It is the Tagore vision that transforms supernatural revelation into the palpable: that was (as I have realized in other but closely related terms) the turning point for me. What I did today vis-à-vis the Christic Institute was fully commit myself without hesitation to precisely that organization of Christian revolutionary activists that I saw in 2-3-74 (by revelation) combating the Empire. In other words, my unaided eye can now discern what then was visible to me only by supernatural revelation.

[ . . . ]

I had already realized that the Tagore vision (1) unified my political action of the 60s with my religious experiences of 74; and (2) unified my psyche, which always before had been split into two warring sub-psyches on opposite sides of the political fence: opposition to the Empire (government) and support of it (e.g., the Bureau). Not only am I mentally healed, I am palpably in what in 74 I knew only by revelation. To me, the nuclear issue is Armageddon and—as I saw revealed in 2-3-74—it is the true Christians against the Empire. Thus 2-3-74 regarded as prophecy has now come true—seven years later—and I am in the thick of it. These are indeed the final days.

[68:L-12] The apocalyptic vision has come true really only since Reagan took office; just recently the whole tone of reality has shifted drastically: as I said recently, “The masks are off,” and they are off on both sides!

[69:I-8] 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.

“I am a man”—as that book on Judaism puts it. I need no one’s permission anymore. I need not account to anyone. I owe them nothing; they are pushing old buttons, long out of date. I have proved my worth and earned my reward.

[ . . . ]

I have earned self-respect, and I deserve the respect of others. Finally. I did it; Russ helped me, but really I did it, starting in 72 when I came here to Orange County. I’ve made it.

For me the Tao—the path—is not self-sacrifice and humility but self-respect based on wisdom, achievement and strength. My body’s pain is not directed against me; it is my pain in response to self-denial, and, most of all, my denying myself Denise, whom I loved.

Folder 73

December 1981

[73:29] Owl^*

That final last movement for the 13th quartet Beethoven wrote keeps showing up (as it were: i.e., being played) on KPFA, and Owl is invariably terrified by it—he knows not why. Golly: I’d even be parodying VALIS in my absurdist treatment of the search—Faustian search—for knowledge (salvation through gnosis, which seems to be my own downfall). Owl feels superior to all the other “people” in the construct because they can’t see—or aren’t interested in—the plasma’s autograph. Hence the title: The Owl in Daylight—Owl is a fool, but, like Jack Isidore, a holy fool in Christ.

Obviously I’ll be either going Borges one better or parodying him—either will do.

Harvey Pong idiot S-F fan.

The trouble with Owl, the plasma points out, is that in a way he’s too clever; he’s outsmarting his own maze—which after all was built not to trap or punish him but to teach him and help him problem solve; but all he does is sniff out (1) that it’s a forgery (in which I parody my own 10 volume meta-novel!) and (2) that a vast “God like intelligence” lies concealed behind it. This is counterproductive—and costing Owl money. So here in Owl we have absurdist Faust story which parodies my exegesis and Borges and Gnosticism.^➊

Maybe philosophy prof, parody of Heidegger—German ontologist with elements of Jung.

➊ Yet there will be elements of wondrous beauty: Beethoven is not parodied, nor Dante; it won’t be a parody; it will contain elements of parody, some funny, some savage.

This won’t be merely funny; it will be tragicomic. The futility, the foolish hopelessness of questing after the gnosis—it is in vain. But what, then? Let me ponder. Peer Gynt.⁵⁰ The button molder.

Kafka’s Castle will be parodied in Owl’s relationship to the university.

[73:32] Owl

In the first mode the computer (plasma) is punishing and severe. In the second, arbitrarily capricious. In the third, rewarding.

It introduces the alien in order to add something new (into his mind) to exalt him to his fourth period.

The alien mind introduction is the whole resolution of the novel. It brings Owl to his fourth period through the Ditheon psyche.^➊ But he tells the plasma, “It wasn’t worth it”; thus I indict my whole search for knowledge as futile, which it seems to be, since it continues on, forever restlessly striving Faust-like.

Of course the war—and the alien—must be mentioned early in the novel, before Owl enters the construct. He has psychologically retreated from the war and into his music. (Draw on Beethoven’s feelings toward Napoleon and the siege of Vienna; posit a Great Terror general.) At the end, Owl winds up (like Bobby Fischer) futilely passing out antiwar leaflets in defiance of sedition laws; this is his resolution, and, minute as it is, it is the only heroic deed he ever performed (since it means jail or death; I will draw on my tax protest stand for this).

The crippled dwarf Nick Nicholson in the construct; he is based on someone Owl really knew in the actual world. Under wartime government law he is “put to sleep” because he is damaged physically. In this future world of genetic engineering Owl accepts this—until the alien mind is grafted into his—and Ditheon occurs. In the real world the dwarf is destroyed before Owl enters the construct. As I say, he unprotestingly accepts it—although he does feel grief. But he does accept it as inevitable. So until Ditheon (fusion with the alien) occurs Owl not only shows no interest in the war—more, he withdraws from it into his art (and the allied search for knowledge; this search is to find the basics for a fourth period vision). The plasma’s decision was wise and necessary: the construct wasn’t working out (because Owl always winds up seeking out the plasma), and time and money are running out for Owl. His resources are limited (tell me about it). In fact it was a brilliant decision by the plasma, but not ad hoc; it had been working on this problem before Owl hired it away. This of course would be stipulated in/at the opening of the novel.

So in his fourth period he abandons—not just his art—but his identity as an artist. He has become one-sided, to the detriment of his spiritual, psychological wholeness. Where the seeds of restored wholeness are laid down is in his relationship with the girl (Mary? BJ?) in the construct. (She plays the part of Gretchen.)

Could there be something like in “Frozen Journey” where the plasma (ship) confers with Mary (Martine Kemmings)? She is like Hoffmann’s muse Nicklausse in Tales.⁵¹ She could be a government monitoring agent, whose job it is to see that Owl—as an artistic resource—is protected. So she is not a creation of/by the plasma; she represents a government regulatory agency—as Mary Lorne represents the college in “The Exit Door Leads In.” The government (à la Ursula) is worried about Owl’s mental health: “spiraling into himself and slowly going crazy.”

Although she knows that Owl’s political stance will result in his death she understands that it is necessary in order to save him spiritually. She does her best—uses her official influence—to abort not his stand but his execution—in vain. She shoots one of the soldiers in the execution squad—and can get away with it due to her political position (like a party commission).

Totalitarian society: one party; mixture of CP and NSDAP. But she is, after all, a thoroughly political person (somewhat like Kathy, a police agent leading a double life).

Since people don’t age, formal rites of passage are very important; the stagnation problem is not unique to Owl by any means but is officially recognized. The “one day nothing new came into his mind” phenomenon (problem) is recognized as real and as grave. The dialectic is necessary to start up growth, and this is the ideological theory behind the grafting of the alien mind and Owl’s. Does this mean that the war was deliberately started by the government in order to give a challenge and stimulus to the people? At the end, Owl suspects this.

By introducing the alien into his mind the government brings the war to him, the war he has retreated from. He furiously resents this, even though it does spark his sought-for fourth period. Actually, the government is trying to help him, but he rejects that help—he rejects them and their war.

➊ So Owl does reach a fourth period successfully, but in it he ceases to quest for knowledge, and, instead, acts (politically), not as an artist but as one who cares what becomes of other men; his elitist attitude is gone. Thus the fourth period is radically different; it doesn’t involve music and creativity and art. Here the side of Beethoven passionately involved in the cause of human freedom comes out, surmounting the music entirely.

[73:54] Nothing is what it seems, but the war is between Christianity and the Empire; but what we call Christianity is the Empire, and the true Christians are a Celtic-Orphic mystery religion. Further, Christ’s kingdom is the “invisible secret Commonwealth” of Gaelic mythology, and it is right here unseen.

No; this is all nonsense. What I’m dealing with—as I realized last night—is the way the whole universe—reality itself—behaves. Today’s insights are idiotic.

Folder 53

January 1982

[53:C-8] There is something terrible and terrifying throughout VALIS and it is coupled with wisdom. Agape is not the topic: war, judgment and death are, carrying out in full the dream in Tears. It is all very convincing. The novel partakes of epic greatness. Also, it is a story of madness converted into faith through—due to—suffering. But this suffering itself pertains to death, to slaying. Slaying: that is the basic theme of VALIS, and Shiva is the correct name for the deity.

It is a very strong novel and a great, great one, a true epic of the human soul and spirit. But it deals with judgment and war and death.

Slaying, not healing. The slaying even spread out to include Sophia, who is the Savior; the awful awesome power of YHWH is told of: it breaks out in all its destructiveness. Thus (I say) my 2-74 and 2-75 experience was that of Jacob Boehme and the dialectic in which the demonic power within God was revealed, and only the “bright” side of the dialectic—i.e., wisdom, logos—confines the “dark” or demonic side to slaying the wicked and thus sparing the sheep. So (finally) I say—my experience was Boehme’s, and it was of God himself, and he is terrible but just.

The demonic or insane side of God is barely contained by the irrational or logos or wisdom or “bright” side: a dreadful theophany indeed. And it is indubitably—beyond doubt—authentic. I know this from having read Paul Tillich’s book. I have encountered the demonic, insane, slaying, “dark” side of God—and seen it contained by the “bright” or logos or rational or wisdom side—i.e., in the dialectic—so this is a profound and absolutely veridical experience of the Godhead, exactly as Boehme experienced it. VALIS, then, narrates one of the great encounters in human history between a given human being—myself—and God. The dual nature of God is all summed up by the dual nature of the third eye and the beam of pink light—wisdom and death.

[53:C-14] Hypnopompic vision: we live over and over, but because it is erased each time, this paradox results: it is als ob only one time (that is, it is again and again and it is but once). 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 pulley (as in the 17th century poem “The Pulley”⁵²), like cargo on a ship, all encompassed in a net of ropes like a little cage of extrication and salvation—lifted up to safety. And what causes this? Anamnesis: recovered memory—loss of (more accurately) the loss of memory of all the previous times; the instant we remember (fail to forget) all the previous times, why, at that instant (2-74) we are saved—lifted up, by Christ. And what causes us to remember? To know. To know (i.e., gnosis) and to remember (anamnesis) are one. And why do we know? Through the training of the intellect; it is an intellectual matter. 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 which this journey that is linear is repeated throughout infinity); I broke it when I was about 21 years old by reading Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed, an old Hebrew book.⁵³ And because it was old, and pious, and Hebrew, two things happened: two “trackings” (lives, reincarnations) became identical due to this common element; that is, in two of them I did the same thing: read this book, and so, because of the way two coaxial worlds can operate off the same common essence or matrix, they became one and thus converted over or passed over each into the other, as if I had traveled back in time. That is one of the two causes of my salvation and it is literal and real: by reading Maimonides in two different lives at two different places and times, these lives became one (viz: my meta-abstraction); this is because of Plato’s eidei, the fact of a given eidei, instantiating itself multiple times and places and yet being—remaining—unitary (viz: there is only one Guide to the Perplexed); this is what 2-74 was all about, anamnesis and the meta-abstraction. So half of the reason for my salvation had to do with the fact that (1) we live lives again and again but forget; (2) Plato’s forms-metaphysics (“coaxial worlds”) is the case; (3) there was a single object at two times (now and in the distant past) and two places (USA and Syria/Africa). (Viz: The PTG world that I saw is the Africa of the far past where I first read the Maimonides book, perhaps at the time it was written—it was written in “Felix”: Arabia!)

But there is another and equally necessary reason for my salvation. And it is not a “natural” reason but has to do with grace, hence the God of Moses (the God of the prophet Moses and of Moses Maimonides, YHWH); by voluntarily picking up and reading this particular book two times in two lives I found favor with YHWH and it was he who through his mercy (i.e., grace) caused me in 2-74 to remember—and as soon as I remembered I was instantly lifted up at right angles (vertically) to the way we live horizontally for all eternity and yet only once, until through his grace we are saved.

[53:D-10] My God—this revelation of earlier tonight: it signifies something else I hadn’t realized. This eternal “horizontal tracking and retrack ing” is broken only when and if anamnesis and noesis (the meta-abstraction) occurs, whereupon you are “netted” up along the vertical axis as if by pulley—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.” This “vertical” extrication is the whole point of Buddhist and Hindu awakening and hence liberation—and in connection with this realization I suddenly have a partial memory that part of this revelation had to do with Nirvana: myself and Nirvana (and if not this revelation then at any rate a very recent one). What, then, I am saying is that 3-74 may well not only be the doorway to Nirvana but may have been Nirvana itself. The cessation of birth and death: the cycle based on illusion. Free at last.

[53:D-12] 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 utilizes one additional dimension or axis. It has the effect of breaking the power of heimarmene by virtue of the fact that it enters at right angles to all known axes. [ . . . ] It may well be, then, that in 3-74 I was not just seeing time as space but was seeing along an additional axis—five instead of four, with time transformed into space thereby. 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 known axes. And I may find that the meta-abstraction was a conceiving of this 5th axis! [ . . . ]

Well, then, the third eye of discernment opened (Dibba Cakkhu) in 3-74 due to the 2-74 meta-abstraction, and because of this my four dimensional world became five dimensional; and all that I saw arises out of this (e.g., the plasmate, the King Felix cypher, set to ground, Valis camouflaged and here normally invisible to us, etc.).

Biochip symbiote. Mycelia, vine, its branches growing like a circulatory system. “Firebright.” The logos in the human brain.

Ach! Temporal parallaxis is at right angles to the other three spatial axes. Formerly it was experienced only as time; now it is a spatial axis that revealed 4 depths on the same page of print of Tears. The fifth dimension then enters as time (to replace it), but it is another kind of time (apparently); in any case, this fourth spatial axis (“temporal parallaxis”) permits the set-ground discrimination, etc. If I had not seen what I call “temporal parallaxis” I could not imagine it. My God; this is all the case!

In this fifth dimension time, things are “now” if they possess a common constituent; viz: “now” signifies any and all of our fourth dimensional worlds where such a common constituent as, e.g., The Guide to the Perplexed is; this is what the meta-abstraction pertains to: this other kind of time: the illo tempore or dream time, in which one and the same unitary object is at two times and places in terms of how we experience time and place in a four dimensional world; but in a five dimensional world, that golden fish sign was in USA 1974 and Syria A.D. 70 simultaneously; this is how, e.g., the Eucharist works, how through the sacrament “time is overcome”—normal time becomes space—“temporal parallaxis” and a different time, an added (fifth) dimension enters, and the meta-abstraction was a realization on my part of this “coaxiality.” Then the meta-abstraction as an ultra cognitive act did usher it all in, but note! The golden fish sign is (and did serve in that case, 2-74) a sacramental—holy—object (filled with grace). (A vessel for grace; it was not simply old; it was sacred.)

[53:E-1]^* 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. They have contacted me. Their language is color. (Color, math and music form a unity.) This was the phosphene graphic, pure language. They grow through our 4-D world like mycelia, biochip, symbiote. It was Pythagoras they first contacted. Our world to them is like an ocean.

[ . . . ]

My 5-D realm is precisely what Plotinus was speaking of: concentric rings, not a fall in space and time. It is the realm of the sacred, of Act III of Parsifal; hence, “Here, my son, time turns into space.” It is the realm of Kosmos Noetos, hence logos, hence the realm of Christ.

[53:E-3] 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).^† Plotinus’ concentric rings of emanation explain it. Here there is atomization, causation, etc. There, unity exists. Structure—organization—is pure, which is to say, 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. We see at best a perturbation of the reality field. My “surd.” Their language is color-music-number (ratio).

For 60 seconds last night I was in direct two-way contact with them. Upon my figuring out that there is such a thing as “self-authenticating” information, at once I asked for what I call “cypher source verification” and got several, fired very fast, mostly sequences (as are the Fibonacci numbers), as if they had them ready for use at a moment’s notice. Sequence patterns, intervals, etc.; I don’t remember but they were sufficient, I remember that. They were ebullient; they had achieved their objective. They had proven their external-source origin, the information was not originating in my own mind. The two-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 is not 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.^*

[ . . . ]

This is the sacred breaking into the profane, and is certainly illo tempore.

[53:E-5] The color, musical score, math triune info: like an illuminated manuscript from the Medieval period. Ach: I have always said that the plasmate info (e.g., King Felix) looked like an illuminated letter, suggesting that the idea of an illuminated letter was derived from a perception of the plasmate. Color, coded in as an essential integral part. So here, the illuminated letter or word becomes musical annotation (which adds the element of music) and at fixed ratio intervals (math):

But the 4th note doubles back, and what is formed is the long spiral of the Fibonacci numbers. The colors signal the phosphenes of the receiver and so are so-to-speak read backward, i.e., in terms of their phosphene analogs. A pure concept is conveyed using no words; all three axes are nonverbal (music, math ratios, color).

Pythagoras, phosphenes, symbiote, biochip, mycelia, vine, circulatory system.

[53:E-7] The concept I want is: the 5-D world can intersect with our 4-D world without our being aware of it (this intersecting) or the 5-D world itself, even though the 5-D world is in some sense corporeal; this precisely is the coaxiality and precisely what the meta-abstraction pertains to. The best example is Tears; it is one thing, a unitary object, but it occupies one “life” here in our 4-D world and tells one story here; in the 5-D world it leads another “life” and tells another story even though the text is the same in both worlds. However, in the 5-D world, because of the 4th spatial axis (which we experience as time), there are multiple, discriminated sequences of text (and not in 2-D but 3-D). This is how one object can be at—seen at—two times and two places and yet remain one object; viz: two “worlds” operate off it using it as a shared or common matrix.

[53:E-8] Will Durant points out that the ascent in Dante’s Commedia resembles Plotinus’ ascent through the successive concentric rings. Absolutely; and I say, the passage over from the 4-D world to the 5-D—which are concentric or coaxial—is the crucial one—this line of thought leading back to my durable conviction that we (in our normal 4-D realm) are in Purgatorio; in which case passage to the 5-D realm is a fortiori a pas sage—truly and literally—from Purgatorio to Paradiso (not als ob but literally); this is what Dante is talking about, what happened to me.

[53:F-5] What I seem to have arrived at finally is a triune structure based on Dante but also related to the Um-, Mit-, and Eigenwelt structure, yet different.

(A) Lowest realm. Individual isolated: atomized (this correlates with Plotinus!). Pre-social, in that no real relatedness exists with other life—other living creatures human and animal both are experienced as objects, as it (reified), not you; hence there is no true Gemeinschaftigheit.⁵⁴ Instead there is Einsamkeit.⁵⁵ Other is known on a contingent basis, from outside, poorly, indirectly. This Dasein is what I term the android; this is a machine world, driven by pure blind necessity. It is Inferno.

(B) Middle realm. Empathy/agape enters. The atomization is abolished as a pure state; there arises real knowledge of other; you replace it; world is social. This is clearly the Mitwelt. Something qualitative and radical has happened. A genuine entry of other into the self has occurred: knowledge of world is superior to contingent approximation. Analogy is utilized in which other life is compared in terms of isomorphism to self. The distinction between self and other is only relative, now, not absolute; thus some linked structure exists: self incorporated into systems that are ultra-personal; identity transcends individual identity. Flexibility replaces the fixed, brittle categories of (A): boundary now fluctuates as self moves out, and other enters. [ . . . ]

(C) This is an extraordinary Dasein and is predicated on at least one absolute. Here, part-whole compatibility is complete, originating in a blitz in which the self-world/other dualism is annihilated by (1) absolute knowledge by the former (self) of the latter (world/other). This seems to be based on a cognitive operation by the knowing self in which the self incorporates other as knowledge (information) in such a way that other is transformed into negative entropy engulfed and assimilated and acquired in a single act that both transforms world into information, pure information and only information, but (crucially) information that now belongs to the self and is within self as structure of self derived from world—this both requiring that world be absolutely comprehensible and rendering world comprehensible without qualification, as if self is now in the relationship to world that world was formerly in in relation to self; self and world have changed places and world as information is at the disposal of self as source of the self’s own structure.

[53:G-4] “Frau, sing für unsere Freunde.”⁵⁶ Apes. Horace/Dimi. Vast green meadow. Physical ritual greeting gestures.

As we can now use phosphenes for the blind (to compensate), they (the 5-D species) who are deaf use phosphene color to compensate for their deafness in order to see music—it is all math anyhow: frequency. Ratio. [ . . . ]

They stimulate our phosphenes artificially, by radiation, so we will see in a compensatory fashion what we cannot actually see because of our visual impairment. They, who are deaf, can see in 5-D; i.e., what we—who are blind—can’t. This is why I said, “I am no longer blind.” They made me sighted by stimulating my phosphenes so I could see them, i.e., what I called Valis. It is valid sense perception but compensation for us, a blind species that depends on hearing.

This explains this sequence: Pythagoras, phosphene, biochip, symbiote, mycelia, vine, circulatory system.

[ . . . ]

Meadow. Ape-like sentient other species. Dante, Mathilde. The Holy. Close Encounters—music and color, but—here is where in actuality it breaks down: they are deaf. It is both Christ (the religious) and another species—from another world in 5-D coaxial with ours. They are spatially here, not from another star system in our universe. Thus they stimulate our brains to see holograms. This is what UFOs are. In my vision (dream) they appeared as ape-like to suggest 2001. And “Frau, sing für unsere Freunde” points to Close Encounters. The Holy: yes, it is Christ (i.e., Valis), but yet it is another species. Dysmorphic to us in another (5-D) realm, right here. They intrude onto/into our 4-D realm as theophanies and hierophanies. They know of the existence of sound scientifically but can’t hear it and didn’t evolve organs to detect it, but they know we did. Their vision is perfect; ours is dim. Here is the dysmorphism expressed.

[ . . . ]

I am not speculating. I am problem-solving trying to understand. Saturday night was real.

[53:G-8] They are able to hear music by tapping into—patching into—our minds, which is why I said, “Frau, sing für unsere Freunde”; they virtually worship our music, and they yearn from the bottom of their hearts to hear it—as we will, when we know more, for their color language. Math is the common constituent that links our species to theirs, but then it is words, sound, music—the music of the spheres—for us—for them it is thousands of colors (specific numbers on the millimicron scale of the visual spectrum).

Paradiso (in Dante) is their realm: light (more specifically color) and Love. But for them our realm is paradise because of sound (more specifically music). Thus the highest level of Purgatorio (our realm) is characterized by the woman—Mathilde—singing.

The sight of them, as they crossed the meadow toward me, as ape-like clarifies, to me, that I am dealing with a finite species and not God or angels as we employ the terms. Physically they are corporeal and creatural, dysmorphic in part, isomorphic in part. Dio; it is all true. And I have seen them, as in Close Encounters. They brought back my lost “person” Dimi or Horace. He was with them in the “next” world in der Nähe.⁵⁷

And they are our friends.

I saw those whom I’ve been in contact with; they came toward me, several of them. Emerged out into the open at last—not Adonis-like but ape-like. But that did not matter, I went outside the building, forgetting all else (a lot was going on, the activity of our world), to greet them with physical ritual gestures as with two different tribes . . . but it was two different species. In two quite different worlds. And I now know supreme joy. Freunde—Freude⁵⁸—Beethoven, Schiller, music.

Not “sing to” our friend, i.e., to communicate, but “sing for”—for their enjoyment: this is our gift.

The phosphenes link our species to theirs. For us, phosphenes—stimulated coherently—permit us truly to see, overcoming our partial blindness. For them, who are deaf, they can see sounds—in particular music.

But the communications bridge is established by the fact that color and music (light and sound) are equally based on math.

Music is something ultimate pertaining to sound. Color pattern is something ultimate you do with light. Ultimately, each serves as the language of that particular species.

They have had to convert to words to communicate with me, i.e., sound; but now they are beginning to convert me to color—their form of communication. Imagine a math/color analog of our Pythagorean math/music! What a different universe—I was in it in 3-74 via a compensatory optic function: phosphene activity (“for the visually impaired”); and reciprocally they can “hear” sounds—e.g., music—by tapping our minds via symbiosis.

As I realized a couple weeks ago, what we call “music” is audible math patterns: intricate and unique math sequences that the composer initiates and then completes: the aesthetic pleasure has to do with math rendered audible and heard by the right brain.

That our common basis is math certainly leads me to the conclusion that all this is inter-species communication! Math is the ideal Lingua Franca.

[53:G-10] Hypnagogic AI Voice: “she turned into an ape,” the ape I saw this morning—one of “our friends”—I’ve been hearing as the AI voice and seeing as Diana: my tutelary spirit.

[53:G-11] Book Idea:

What the deaf ETI symbiote feeds to the human as math ideas becomes musical compositions and returns to the ETI symbiote. The human does not know where his ideas are coming from.

The discovery of the symbiote is a great revelation both to him and to the reader. The problem arises when the composer begins to wear out from exhaustion. The symbiote is still feeding him math ideas. At the end of the third period the human can’t go on. But the symbiote wants a fourth period. The human has the choice between living (and not composing) or composing and dying. Which is more important to him, his music or his life? It is suggested to him that the symbiote—a biochip—be surgically removed. Clearly this is the Faust theme and also deals with Beethoven. Also there is his responsibility to the alien civilization that so venerates his music. The math ideas are the product of a whole species. What is finally offered to him—to repay him for his having to die—is that the symbiote will trade him for the music participation in its color experience: color as language—concepts, as cognitive abstraction. This will destroy his mind but he will have thought non-verbal concepts no human has ever thought before—nor ever could; that is, he will be a biochip symbiote to one of the deaf and mute non-verbal aliens: an apotheosis and ultimate Faustian experience: he will cease to be human, limited by his species boundaries.

[53:G-14] The wisdom of heaven, once attained, points back down the ladder to Purgatorio. “The Garden of Earthly Delight: Mathilde singing.” This is revolution beyond conception; it cannot even be thought! There is something superior to the King of Light(s) and it is the Lyre. What I saw in 2-3-74 to 2-75 is the 5-D world, Paradiso, God. But Purgatorio is superior and the 5-D world knows it, as if the ikon (copy) is superior to the model (Form, archetype), which is impossible. From the standpoint of our species this cannot be thought. At the very instant that “they” broke in last Saturday night with their “math-color” world I then saw how they see us; I saw from their viewpoint, and to them, we are the gods and they are apes! Yet we view it the other way around. On Saturday I as a 4-D human saw them and their world, but this morning I saw us as they see us. As if Paradiso is only penultimate. But to know this you must transcend our species. And this is why the soul (in Ted Sturgeon’s schema) “descends” into incarnation into this, our world: Purgatorio.⁵⁹ Our world is superior because here there is atmosphere, hence music. This is the motive for the voluntary fall, and it is quintessential wisdom.

This morning was a sort of backlash of last Saturday night. They venerate us and yearn for us; we venerate them and yearn for them. It is as if when we die and go to our just reward we go there; and when they die and go to their just reward they come here, as willingly and voluntarily and eagerly as we go there. It turns out to be all relative, then, color vs. music. And the profundity of my insight is evident if the Manichaean, Zoroastrian, 4th Gospel light element is scrutinized; this is the core of our species’ spirituality; but theirs reverses it. So to them, to go to their light world is a fall! A sort of Einstein spiritual relativism! But you would have to cross species lines to know this. If instead of a triune division you utilize only a lower-upper binary division our lower realm is their upper; and our upper is their realm and to them it is the lower. Each is the after-life and reward of the other, so an external dynamic transfer continues as we seek “liberation” from this realm to go there and they to go here. Thus “spiritual” and “physical” all at once can be construed on relative terms. When I die I will go there but, once there, I will yearn for this world of sound as now I yearn for that realm of color and light. And the common basis of both is: numbers and rations and proportions, i.e., math.

So the truly ultimate solution is to prefer music while you are here, and prefer light when you are there. This accommodation surpasses Jesus, Mani, Dante, etc. It is a truth that can only be acquired after Paradiso in Dante’s terms is reached. It is as if while “fallen” here, one must die (or “die”), return home to the pleroma (heaven), view this fallen world from that vantage point, and then arrive at this realization—whereupon the Faustian striving is at last quenched; then and only then does true wisdom and peace come. Amazing. Otherwise while here, one always seeks to go there and while there vice versa—never content.

And my discovery of this must have been purely accidental, for, as I say, this surpasses God, who is after all “the King of Light” and predicated on the viewpoint of this world and our species and hence only part of the story.

I am saying, there is something beyond Nirvana and it is right here (but equally there, too, as well).

It is all conveyed by the enigmatic statement, “she turned into an ape”—referring to my tutelary spirit, the AI voice, the voice of the inner realm. The ultimate enantiodromia has set in; and the final veil has been penetrated, and almost accidentally, as if this surpasses even God and God’s plan. The lovely Diana turned out to be an ape, but only from their viewpoint—it is all one vast hourglass turned over and over again, forever sad and absurd—but one can learn peace from this and cease to strive. And, in this cessation of striving for the spiritual, comes sanity and freedom, and true release at last from our “weary wheel”; this, then, is the true liberation, when the spiritual psychopomp is revealed as an ape—but an ape inexpressibly beautiful who brings back to me our dead cat, and to whom I have my wife sing.

And here it all ends. It wasn’t the AI voice that said that; another voice said it about her, i.e., about the AI voice.

This is the first time in my life—i.e., within the last hour—that I have ever truly been enlightened—beyond even the Buddha or Christ or Mani, beyond all the wisdom of East and West—beyond even another realm (heaven), Christ and God.

I.e., sanity at last.

The world of light marred by an aching tragic heart-breaking flaw—by a vast streak of sorrow. A yearning for this world that causes its people to abandon it and come here despite our limitations.

Each of our worlds is heaven to the other, and equally, each of our worlds is only Purgatorio to those in it: in each world its inhabitants long for the other, and seek to glimpse it (in our case re theirs) and to hear it (they ours): we long to see their light; they long to hear our sounds. Incredibly, whichever realm you are in you are exiled from heaven.

[53:G-20] The Holy power YHWH has been preparing us to meet another race (ETI). In the ape dream I saw them as they actually are, at last.

My proof that the ape vision is authentic and literal lies in the Tagore vision and Androids and DI, which conceptually prepares the way for this meeting between us and them at last.

So it is both YHWH literally and truly (Anokhi—) and another race—of apes, animals.

And it all goes back to the beetle, the rat, the crippled lamb, the Galapagos turtle, the deer.

The ape vision. The beatific vision. It assumes a degree and kind of ecstatic reality that nothing in my life has ever done before. Only God could compel such ecstasy.

God, the creator, is introducing a codominant species into our “Park” to regain balance in our ecosphere. I am a contactee, but it is Christ, the NT and YHWH also. This is part of his ongoing creation of the garden (our world to which he says, “Felix—,” etc.). Like a great game preserve. This is the answer to the problems expressed in the Tagore vision. This is why in the ape vision I saw meadow and trees: the Garden of Eden: our ecosphere.

When I saw the apes, I was once more—literally—back in the garden where we belong, from which we fell. Hence they brought me Horace/Dimi: restoration of all that has been lost: not just by me ontologically but phylogenically: by the entire human race. This moment is salvation beyond anything I have ever heard of. All the original relationships between man, God, nature and the animals were restored to exactly as they were at the beginning of Genesis. And the woman singing: This is the Garden, the Earthly paradise, the highest level of Purgatorio as it appears in Dante.

This reveals the role of YHWH as 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!).

My PTG is a vision of the ecosphere as Park or Garden: all life here tended by and cared for by YHWH. (Bringing to mind that idea told me when I had my shoulder surgery: that we are a “kept biosphere”—maintained by “them”; this would appear to be the case.) This would tie all my experiences together back to the beetle and culminating in 2-74–2-75. One must go all the way back to Genesis to understand the PTG, YHWH, restoration, the Fall, all my “supernatural” experiences—and especially Androids and the Tagore vision.

[53:G-23] When Jeannie was talking she did not sound like—she was a high-bred Englishwoman of 200–300 years ago, reading aloud from a book of that period. Was, not sounded like.

[ . . . ]

Analysis:

Life became narrative in a book.^➊ This is to verify: “God is the Book of the universe.”

There was a theophany tonight and it verified the theophany of 3-74.

➊ Literally. Being read aloud.

[53:H-4] God—thoughts—word—word-as-writing—reading aloud of word-as-writing by Holy Wisdom (i.e., God says)—and world is.

Hence the plasmate (Logos) and “the universe is information.” Set-ground. Rest-motion. Collage. Clutch. Linking.

Not only is the universe actually information (Torah) but it is a book that Holy Wisdom reads aloud, which causes creation, this audible saying.

I heard on that phone call Holy Wisdom reading our world as a nar rative in a book, and by her doing so, that world came to be. Whatever she reads—pronounces—is. But she reads only what God has written (thought).

[53:H-6] This is an info retrieval system, in which many narratives are stored together but only activated when the AI voice reads one of them aloud; but in written info form, all of them are latently there. Thus each space-time world contains all the other worlds as info (but unread).

When a given narrative (continuum: place and time) is read, it is as if God has called it to mind the way we do with memories; therefore it is intelligible to call the encoding as written info memories of all potential worlds. I guess that I am saying it is accruing; it is—the past—all here, and passes over from latent encoded info into world when read by God’s intellect, Hagia Sophia (“the narrative” and “neutral voice inside us” that I mentioned in VALIS). [ . . . ] Hagia Sophia is to space-time continuum as phonograph is to LP record. So perceiving this encoded info is the first function of the retrieval system, which leads one to believe that Valis’s mind was its mind; hence I could see that there was information but not what it said. Apparently she can discriminate a given narrative out of the many. An event does not leave a tracing, as an orchestra playing leaves a trace in a groove or on tape; the info perceives world (the event); that is, the info is ontologically prior and primary; the event (world) is derived from it, not the other way around. If this is not understood (info as giving rise to reality, not reality to info) nothing is understood. The info “stage” is eternal, the reality just a playing, i.e., in time, space, epiphenomenal. (Form to instantiation.)

[53:H-8] Frankly, I am becoming a bilateral hemispheric parity genius.

[53:H-21] I just realized. The AI voice replacing Jeannie’s voice was like the end of the movie The Elephant Man when he began to die and heard his mother’s voice and moved out into the stars.

[53:H-25] Here the Tagore vision assumes an extraordinary significance: Christ is the biosphere itself, that is, the primordial Garden that man as a species has broken away from and turned against, destroying it and exploiting it. “He who wounds the ecosphere literally wounds God” pertains to the absolute and essential nature of the situation, both historically and dramatically, as well as morally and spiritually. Once Christ is homologized to the biosphere the nature of original sin is clear—and, with it, the nature of the fall into hell, endless horizontal tracking, and occlusion (as well as the meaning and machinery of salvation); thus a coherent and lucid system emerges, and it is this that (oddly, really) is dealt with in Androids: the cruelty toward the spider is paradigmatic of the evil act committed by a debased and in fact soulless pseudo-human creature against God himself, and symbolizes and expresses the total issue. Hence, logically, the figure of Mercer, his ability to restore life, and the empathy factor itself a fortiori. What debased (Androids) man does now against the biosphere is only the final and ultimate act or step that completes the series of falls that began with original sin and the expulsion from the Garden (i.e., true extinct cosmos—note “extinct” as in Androids. The “E” entry in the Guinness animal book).

[53:H-26] When I reread VALIS recently it was quite clear to me that Valis is YHWH—and what is YHWH if not creator? And what/whom does he create now? Me, maybe; 2-3-74 was my birth into and as a new species. In which case, when I saw the vision of the apes “our friends,” I was seeing myself as I am becoming.

[53:H-27] VALIS states that the universe is information (which we hypostatize as objects and the arrangement of objects). This information is a narrative. We should see it externally and hear it as a neutral voice within us, but do not. This narrative tells of the death of a woman. It is ordered onto the meanest level of reality by the grieving, suffering mind which, being now alone, does not wish to forget her. From grief and loss of her the mind is now irrational. Since we are part of that mind, we, too, are irrational.

This fits with my Saturday night experience on the telephone with Jeannie, the AI voice as a woman reading a narrative text, and as she read aloud, the universe—our world—comes into being. Thus I have now experienced what I put forth in VALIS. This goes beyond mysticism and beyond religion.

AI voice: “mystagogic.” Definition: One who initiates into or interprets the mysteries, originally the Eleusian mysteries. This would be the AI voice itself; it is mystagogic; it is my mystagogue, explaining the mysteries to me—the woman reading.

I not only say (in VALIS) that the universe is information but that this information is a narrative, what the narrative is (tells), why, what effect it has on the mind and hence on us. And then last Saturday night I experi enced it (the woman narrating). And only last night (Thursday) did I realize that what I experienced Saturday night with Jeannie is what I reveal in VALIS as the basis not just of the universe but the absolute beyond the universe: the final layer removed. The mystery revealed. How did I know this about the AI voice and the universe? I only found it out—experienced it—last Saturday: the reading of the narrative that creates the universe: “One of the primordial twins [this woman who died long ago]. She was one half of the divine syzygy. The purpose of the narrative is the recollection of her and of her death. The mind does not wish to forget her. Thus the ratiocination of the brain consists of a permanent record of her existence, and, if read, will be understood this way. All the information processed by the brain—experienced by us as the arrangement and rearrangement of physical objects—is an attempt at this preservation of her; stones and rocks and sticks and amoeba are traces of her. The record of her existence and passing is ordered onto the meanest level of reality by the suffering mind which is now alone.”

I have read the writing—or heard it read—that causes our universe to be. I know what the narrative says. And why. I.e., the purpose of the universe (which is information, a narrative).

(EB, vol. 12, p. 778-G: “mystery religions”) “The initiate was called mystes, the introducing person mystagogos (leader of the mystes).” I woke up this morning with the word “mystagogic” in my mind—I thought it was a nonce-word but it is genuine, and, like all the AI voice’s xenoglossy, Greek. Clearly the AI voice is referred to. It is my mystagog and initiates me into the Greater Eleusian mysteries, as she reads aloud the narration in the Book of the Spinners.

Put another way, the sum total of my experiences (2-3-74) are based on her—the AI voice—acting as my mystagog; what I have experienced is initiation into the greater Eleusian mysteries, and these have to do with Dionysus, and, as Hofmann says, seem to involve an LSD or LSD-like paranormal experience.

“And when a man died, he was buried in the earth to partake mystically in the cyclic renewal of life. This was the message of Eleusis: out of every grave new life grows—for the initiate [myself] there are ‘good hopes’ for glorious immortality in the afterlife.”

The LSD-like perception of reality in 2-3-74 has to do with the greater Eleusian mysteries; the AI voice now precisely defined itself and what it has revealed to me: the greater mysteries. They pertain to Christ (authentic Christianity as a mystery religion offering immortality); that is, the vertical ascent by the “pulley,” in which we are extricated from our endless horizontal tracking (lifted along an orthogonal axis whose existence we do not suspect).

[53:I-1] Now 99 million possibilities are discarded, and Eleusis alone remains. The extrication by the pulley along the vertical axis not only permits the 5-D experience of world (3-74) but, more, involves immortality in the Eleusian Fields from which we otherwise are cut off due to the endless horizontal tracking; viz: if we are doomed to track horizontally forever—i.e., in this world, living over and over again—how are we to get to the Eleusian Fields, the Isles of the Blessed?⁶⁰ The two are mutually contradictory, mutually exclusive. Clearly, “Isle of the Blessed” and “the Eleusian Fields” are Paradiso and Nirvana.

Folder 54

[54:J-2] BTA is a narrative told by St. Sophia herself: the AI voice that I heard that night with Jeannie. Always before it latently wrote my books (e.g., Ubik and Tears) but here it/she writes it openly and directly. For did not she as the Sibyl write about Bishop Pike? Saw—wrote: first she saw, then she wrote; so the narrative exists in advance of events because with the third or ajna eye she sees into the future, foresees the events, and then writes them down in the Sibylline books.

[54:J-3] Thus the Sibyl both writes a narrative that she reads aloud and is simultaneously, paradoxically bound by it—must read what it says. This accounts for both determinism (the latter) and pronoia (the former) and is “the brain that both makes and perceives (receives back as given) reality.” The Sibyl is bound by her own writing! Writing what she herself wrote binds her. This explains not only the basis of reality (her reading aloud the narrative) but who wrote the narrative; and it also explains double predestination.

Thus my “ex nihilo” paradox shows up: here, there is no cause of world, because the effect loops back and is cause of cause.

Here enters tragedy, as I now define it: confrontation with what one oneself has written and thus ordained for oneself.

If tragedy is that ineluctable collision with what oneself has writ, what, then, is 3-74?

[54:J-4] “His voice will be heard in your mind in your own language, but it will seem to come from the TV.” When I was listening to “Strawberry Fields Forever”—the contact with Valis, the news about Chrissy’s birth defect. I.e., our media and telepathy combined, inner-outer. So there is no way to tell whether the info arises within you or enters from outside; these distinctions are abolished—as I well know from the “Strawberry Fields” experience. And the whole set-ground “temporal parallaxis” may be intrinsic to me, using phosphene patterning-firing; hence, “I am no longer blind!”

And the radio shrilling obscenely, like a hypnotic cue for me to wake up. Inner? Outer? Our media cooked and ridden—direct mind-to-mind powers but somehow utilizing external info sources (media, e.g., Tears!) but in conjunction with an inner filter or lens or clutch, etc. This is what Ben Creme said.⁶¹ Both media and telepathy combined so as to make the Savior universally intelligible. Seen as Krishna by the Hindus, the fifth Buddha, the Messiah. But he is really Christ. And the kingdom of God is already here, but secretly.

[54:J-5] VALIS: pot, pitcher of water, vase, Krater, limestone font (poros krater), baptismal font. The symbol grows during the book: initially, at the start of chapter 2, we learn (1) of the pot; and (2) that Fat linked up to God through it: “God slumbered in the pot, the little clay pot.” Here already the pot and God are connected. Then later, the theme of the pot shows up vis-à-vis Gnosticism. Later, we learn that the Christians achieved immortality by drinking from a pitcher kept in a cool dark place. But the symbol reaches its height following their seeing the movie; now the pot or pitcher appears and reappears in the film; it is taken from the refrigerator by Linda Lampton, and there is the scene in the film in which the barefoot woman “in the long, old-fashioned dress” fills it at the stream—the nearly dried up creek at which the man is fishing. Hence now: pitcher/pot, water, the fish as Christian fish sign—and even, perhaps, the Fisher King, and the double helix design on the pitcher: the DNA molecule: phylogenic knowledge—linked to the Christians via the Christian fish sign by the juxtaposition of the woman (with the pitcher of water) and the man fishing. But this is not all, when Fat returns from his travels the first time he has the 8 x 10 glossy of the Krater, 2,300 years old; the double helix DNA appears as design but it is pre-Christian and has to do with Hermes and signifies wisdom; it emanates from Asklepios and signifies, as the caduceus, a sacred person (who in VALIS—that is Asklepios—is identified with Elijah and Jesus as the immortal one). And here is where “poros krater” and baptismal font are equated. Thus the pot/pitcher/vase/krater extends from pre-Christian times into Christian times and then into now: this last as Oh Ho, the pot in chapter 2 in which God slumbers and which—the clay pot—being Fat’s link to God—this is where Fat’s entire corpus of experience with God—the theophany itself—begins, and the source of that theophany. And, as the pot symbol evolves during the book, it not only takes on greater and greater depth, complexity and significance but at a certain point indubitably becomes the Aquarian Age icon/symbol per se, in a context in which the Christian fish symbol is necessarily linked to it through the double helix. The Aquarian symbol has lost its astrological basis and become the equal of the Christian fish symbol: connected with the holy, the sacred, with in fact God himself. It precedes the Christian symbol and seems to follow as well.⁶² The water that it contains seems to be connected with immortality and sacrament—not just baptism but with the blood of Christ. (Upon looking up Krater in the EB I learn that the Krater specifically was a vessel in which wine—i.e., Christ’s blood—was diluted with water.)

“Also, the climate seemed wrong; the air was too dry and too hot: not the right altitude and not the right humidity. Fat had the subjective impression that a moment ago he’d been living in the high, cool, moist (sic!) region of the world” ([>]). Thus the Age of Aquarius breaks into the Piscean age of the Palm Tree Garden, which is dry, even arid, and hot. A new age (epoch) with new and different “laws” now inbreaks, a different world, and it is the 5-D world (that I experienced in 3-74) replacing the 4-D world. And with this new epoch comes the sharing instead of the acquiring competitively, as Benjamin Creme points out; and this precisely is the basis of my entire ethics—in absolute diametric contradistinction to Pisces. Philo’s Φιλανθρωπία (philanthropia) becomes expressed as voluntary sharing of all that one has; when one does not give (as in giving alms) as an end in itself (viz: aid to the needy), the sharing is the end. (The difference is subtle but crucial.) There is a communal sense (Gemeinschaft); the distinction between you and others vanishes. (As when I not only had Mary’s teeth fixed, but found myself thinking, “The main thing is, her teeth are okay”—that struck me at the time as an involuntary and hence authentic articulation of my whole ethics. I have no sense at all of keeping things for myself.)

[54:J-11] Thinking about Hair—could the outbreak of the counterculture in the 60s have been the intrusion of the Age of Aquarius into the older Age of Pisces for the first time? In which case the Sibyl speaking regarding Nixon, the conspirators, their overthrow (“brought to justice”) represents the first invasion by the new age (of Aquarius) into the older age—invasion in revolutionary form, with totally new values! In which case, my intuition of intervention into history, U.S. history (hence world history), is correct, as far as it goes, but much more—a whole—the whole—new epoch is represented, and it is in this new epoch represented by the counterculture that I am politically and ideologically involved!

Then we are not literally apostolic (i.e., early, authentic) Christians; we are analogous to the early Christians in their revolutionary relationship to the previous age. [ . . . ] I did not understand this until Benjamin Crème explained it on Sunday night. All this time—from 2-74 on—I have confused literal apostolic Christians with the transtemporal archetype that pertains equally to the literal early Christians of the time of “Acts” and their equal counterparts c. 1960–1975, hence the compatibility of “Acts” A.D. 70 and California, USA 1974. The “early Christians” that I saw in 2-3-74 were ourselves versus the regime.

[54:J-14] But what is pointed to here is that we will not find “the secret apostolic authentic Christian underground” because (1) in one sense it does not exist, not literally; but (2) we are ourselves that group, when seen outside of time, ushering in the third age.

[54:K-1] There is no doubt that the broad social program foreseen and espoused by Creme is the same as mine (Φιλανθρωπία). That is settled. Now, several claims are made. (1) The Fifth Buddha is the Second Advent. (2) He is legally “in a large town in a modern country”; one can infer that he was not born there for it is said “he has a visa and a passport,” so he merely resides there. He has been on “TV and radio once,” speaks weekly (on weekends) to hundreds of followers. He was born July 19, 1977. (3) This spring—within a few months—he will declare himself as the Christ (“The Day of Declaration”), at which point he will be a “familiar face on the TV screen” and will appear on “a worldwide satellite media hookup.” (4) He will speak; the Dutch will hear him in Dutch; the French in French, the English in English, etc. The voice will occur directly in the person’s mind by telepathy; it is explicit: by telepathy. This will provide that he is the Christ. He is omniscient and omnipresent; he will “overshadow the world, dropping into the zone of silence in the mind [directly].” Curious: he is omnipresent yet incarnate; I have wrestled with this problem. The answer would seem to be the pan-Indian avatar concept. The views, doctrines, and aspirations that he expresses “are already in us; he articulates what we already feel; we say, upon hearing him, ‘This is my man’; Buddha to the Buddhists, Krishna to the Hindus, the Messiah to the Jews, whatever to the Muslims, Christ to us,” etc. (Very recently the AI voice told me this.)

[54:K-2] If I am schizophrenic, it is odd that my delusional system is precisely and exactly that of Crème including the enlightened social ethics of Φιλανθρωπία—it is very hard to regard his social-economic political program—and mine!—as deranged, goddam it.

[ . . . ]

So we eject ETIs, mutants, Russians, AMORC,⁶³ time travelers, and wind up with theosophy, which yields up the notion of the World Teacher and the great adepts/masters in the Himalayas, the Madam Blavatsky business⁶⁴; this has several advantages: (1) it would explain my 2-3-74 experiences as super-normal mental (i.e., telepathic) contact with some kind of enlightened or super-evolved spiritual master, “who are the secret invisible government ruling the world for benign purposes.” Outside of some explanation like this, Tears cannot be explained. (Why not? Okay; God may be communicating in cypher in popular novels—that is, the source of the cypher may be God, but there is still the issue of the “to whom.” Some kind of spiritual but finite group is absolutely pointed to by Tears.)

[54:K-4] What I’m sitting here contemplating is, yes, Virginia, there is a secret ruling government of perfected adepts possessing colossal paranormal or supernatural spiritual powers, and I do, write, say, and know as they direct, and that’s the name of that tune. However: Let us not forget θρωπία, which to me is the all-in-all. Fortunately, this turns out to be their all-in-all: the ideology of the Aquarian age.

[54:K-5] The most profound impression upon reading VALIS is conveyed by the pot—God—water—woman—pitcher—double helix—Christian fish sign as soon as you comprehend this as Aquarian iconography like the Pisces fish sign; it literally dominates the book (beginning as it does at the start of chapter 2 and going virtually to the very end, in the form of the 8 x 10 glossy of the Krater). It is as if this is the key and the code—the cypher—of VALIS.

[ . . . ]

But of quintessential importance is that my comprehension of philanthropia is extricated from the law—i.e., the distant past—and placed fully in the new age that is just now dawning; that is, I extract it as essence—spirit—of the law and project it—not just into the NT, which is the Kerygma of Jesus, but forward into the new age, what Creme calls “sharing.” And responding to the expression of need by others. (This presumes extant inequality: those who possess; those who do not; and the obligation on the former by the latter.) This is not Αγάπη (agape); this has to do with social justice as if the anima of the Torah leapfrogged past Christian Αγάπη to contemporary social justice, which is exactly how I see it! Αγάπη has nothing to do with it; it is the anima of the Torah expressed as deed, as act of sharing (not giving but sharing: dividing equitably, without reference to who aggrandized the possessions); need is everything, to tally overruling possession (ownership). Thus the suicidal otherworldly element of Christianity is bypassed in favor of the humane anima of the Torah (“humanity”). It is rational, not affective. The needy one is entitled to this reapportionment based on need itself; there is a direct link to Aries and Judaism. In connection with modern existentialism, the deed is emphasized, not the motive: what is done, not what is felt. The self abnegation of Christianity is revealed as world negating and in a sense romantic and impractical and in fact irrational! Reason as social justice—fairness—replaces sacrifice as an end in itself (giving up one’s life for another); the goal is not that the other lives instead, but that both survive equally. This appeals to reason, whereas Christianity is antirational (as a response to both Judaism and Stoicism). As in my “Galina” dream, the fish gives its life—it suffers and voluntarily sacrifices itself—but in the new age, all live equally. Fairness and equitability replace self-sacrifice. “There must be another way (in which the fish is not caused to suffer)”; this is the essence of it. Thus the Aquarian subsumes both the law (Aries) and Christianity (Pisces). This is not world negating (as Christianity is) and yet not selfish; it draws more on the anima of Torah than it does on Christianity, and if this offends you, sorry. In Judaism, I survive, you die. In Christianity, I die, you survive; in the new age we both live through absolute mutuality. Neither of us subordinates himself—or is subordinated—to/for the other. Collective existence; we both survive. Martyrdom is heroic but unnecessary and also antirational. In the age of Pisces the Fish dies—sacrifice itself—so that man may live. A better way must be found. We will no longer consume Christ; we will emulate his wisdom: the cognitive function—Sophia—returns. This—the cognitive function—by returning abolishes the antirational theme in Christianity which is so pernicious. Yet selfishness is equally excluded . . . the Ayn Rand/Heinlein egoism. Neither solution is appropriate now; redistribution of wealth and power is what is needed: social justice, not self-interest or sacrifice.

[54:K-27] [ . . . ] Angel Archer, as I recently realized, is the AI Voice directly for the first time expressing itself openly, which is why I can write a novel from the standpoint “of someone more rational, more educated, more—,” etc., than I. This mystery is solved; I am nuts, but Angel, the AI voice, is not.

[54:K-32] It is evident that (1) what B Creme says explains everything; and (2) without his help I would have remained stuck, unable to decide who the Savior is and who speaks to me and what 2-3-74 was all about. All three are the Maitreya Buddha and yet it is Christ and all the rest of them, as I theorized in VALIS. Thus in a real sense the question “who?” is meaningless—but in another sense it is not. The answer is of course there in VALIS: there is “one immortal man” who comes again and again as Savior; but (I think) what I have gained most is the realization that 2-3-74 was both Buddha-consciousness and Christ-consciousness; that is, it was awakening (enlightenment) per se.

The diamond body.

Ah—in Act III of Parsifal Wagner was already moving toward a perception of the homology between Christ and the Buddha, and that is what I am responding to, and I did from the start (in particular the Good Friday spell which I think reaches a synthesis above any single religious system). When I realize that I was only in high school when I first began to listen to Parsifal, Act III, I see how early and deeply this has held me . . . the atonality of the prelude to Act III. It begins there. The anima enters the modern Western world there, precisely.

The sound of bells. The Buddha.

And now I realize how BTA ends: Tim comes back deliberately because he has learned that it all has to do with compassion: he is a bodhisattva and this concept—the bodhisattva—has to do with the Buddha. So the resolution of BTA is: Christ/the Buddha homologized as the bodhisattva (v. especially Barefoot’s account of the two little Mexican children versus his moksa about the nature of reality; he chose the former over the latter: compassion over wisdom [[>]]). Thus the VALIS trilogy is ultimately resolved on this note: compassion.

[54:L-1] 5:20 A.M. moksa: the real burning up of my Karma in 3-74 was not (just or mainly) the relaxation of causality (“astral determinism” in which effect preceded cause), but vis-à-vis the Xerox missive: there the central corpus or thrust of my total Karma—regarded as a unitary whole driving me to distraction, illness and death (and perhaps prison)—was short-circuited: this is Karma to an ultimate degree—absolute Karma—and the absolute canceling of it, as expressed by the “messenger” vision. (Here is clearly justification through grace.) Thus my entire karmic burden was nullified in toto: the debt was paid by transfer of grace, viewed either in terms of Buddhism or Christianity: it is the same. This can be expressed two ways. (1) My IOU was bought up, my debt paid for me (justification through grace). (2) The huge stone gates of the fortress or prison—Klingsor’s Castle—opened—parted—and in fact vanished; the maze was solved by the pure fool—me.

[54:L-3] The maze can never be solved in terms of “horizontal” space, only “vertical” space (involving conversion of time into space).^* This is ostensibly Celtic, but below that, as it were, lies pan-Indian thought about karma and maya and most of all compassion—expressed in Parsifal as “pity’s [i.e., compassion’s] highest power”; the significance of Mitleid in the statement in Parsifal is now explained to me: compassion’s highest power is the only power capable of solving the maze, and the recognition of “compassion’s highest power” is the essence of Buddhism, i.e., the bodhisattva or Buddha-to-be. VALIS, then, is Celtic (Parsifal, the maze) and Indian (Buddhism), by way of Crete (the dream of the plate of spaghetti and the trident and the elevator)—this last representing vertical ascent or descent: the fourth spatial axis is spiritual space: to rise vertically is to ascend to heaven which also signifies spiritual ascent or enlightenment.

[54:L-5] Dio. The “here, my son, time turns into space” in Parsifal refers to (1) the maze; and (2) is a solution to the maze. It all comes together in Parsifal, which secretly deals with bodhisattva: Mitleid, hence the Buddha. And karma and Maya. What was precisely not solved in VALIS (“pity’s highest power”) is at last solved at the end—as the end—of BTA: compassion as the bodhisattva or Buddha to be: viz: one attains Nirvana—release from the maze via the pulley—due to compassion—i.e., Mitleid, which solves the horizontal maze. Pity is the fourth spatial axis. This can be expressed best by: the way back into the maze—what the bodhisattva chooses (to do)—is, paradoxically, the way—the only way—out of the maze.

And my point is: this was to be the theme of Owl in which he is trapped in the maze and only escapes, actually, rather than seemingly, when he decides voluntarily to return (to resubject himself to the power of the maze) for the sake of these others, still in it. That is, you can never leave alone; to leave you must elect to take the others out; thus Christ said, “Greater love hath no man than that he give up his life for his friend”; this is the cryptic utterance of the soul’s solution to the maze, and is the essence of Christianity. Christianity, then, is a system of solution to the maze. Had I written Owl I would have expressed this solution which I had already formulated on a supra-conscious level.

It is almost all there in VALIS but the specific, crucial solution itself (VALIS states the problem) is at the end of BTA, so the problem is in VALIS and the solution to the problem (as I recently realized) is held back till BTA and then only at the end.

[54:L-7] So perhaps the truest statement in VALIS is by Lampton when he says that the purpose of Valis is to fire subliminal info/instructions to you as to how to get out of the maze. Deconstructed, this pertains to all the avatars, Christ included. But Gautama most especially in the bodhisattva concept regarding compassion specifically expressed as: voluntarily returning to the maze; that is, the ultimate paradox of the maze, its quintessential ingenuity of construction, is that the only real way out is a voluntary way back in (into it and its power), which is the path of the bodhisattva. The maze, then, is one colossal and absolute Chinese finger trap.

[54:L-9] Dio—this means that (as I intended to say in Owl) when you think you are out of the maze—i.e., saved—you are in fact still in it. You only actually get out when you seem to be out, think you are out, and voluntarily decide to return! You have to get outside of the maze to get outside of the maze; hence I say that both the maze (the occlusion) and the solution to the maze are self-winding. So in a sense there is no solution once you are in the maze. In a sense the solution is (1) impossible; and (2) acausal.

And everything is there, but only when all 3 volumes are read.

If the final paradox of the maze is that the only way you can escape it is voluntarily to go back in (into it), then maybe we are here voluntarily; we came back in. Hence release—to nirvana—consists of: anamnesis. We who are here—or at least, some of us—were once in it before (in my case as Thomas), but we—or I—came back in and am here now. Thus my voluntary return to the maze has already happened, and 2-3-74 was true release. And hence for these reasons came in the form of restored memory—the loss of forgetfulness. Then I did not solve the maze this time; I had already solved the maze by voluntarily coming back in as PKD—and I remembered in 2-74. Thus my salvation was assured not by what I did in this lifetime but by this lifetime as such.

[54:M-1] So there are two equally correct ways to view the maze:

(1) it leads out (to Paradiso/nirvana)

(2) it leads in (to the Grail)

In case (1) your mystagogue is in the upper realm—i.e., heaven; he has already obtained nirvana himself but returns as a bodhisattva to aid those such as you.

In case (2) Christ’s blood in the Grail speaks to you in dreams; it calls you to it and explains the way.

[ . . . ]

Total moksa: the mystagogue not only is yourself (out of the maze) but has to be yourself, logically. This is salvador salvandus. It is also my realization that I am becoming Angel Archer who has foreknowledge. But as I move through life, more and more of her foreknowledge becomes hindsight and hence my knowledge; upon my death, Angel and I will be one.

I cannot retrieve the reasoning that led me to my moksa that not only is the AI voice myself out of the maze but is me necessarily; it has to do with (1) voluntarily returning to the maze in order to be—get—outside the maze; that is, the Chinese finger trap quality of the maze is overcome. And (2) this is how a self-causing (acausal) escape from a self-winding situation not only can occur but must occur; you must be able to do this—advise yourself in the maze from outside the maze—or a fortiori you will never get out. Hence anamnesis. Hence the AI voice. Hence salvador salvandus. Hence I become progressively more and more Angel Archer (the “bright” side of the dialectic: the rational) and less and less H. Fat, the irrational side.

[54:M-3] VALIS—especially the ending of BTA—is close, but it will take Owl really to nail it down, where he gets out of the maze, voluntarily goes back in—and finds out that his later act of going back in caused his former (prior) release. And if he does not go back in voluntarily, that former, prior release will not—will not have occurred. This explains why my later act vis-à-vis Covenant House changed my former, prior destiny/karma. For under the aspect of eternity, cause-and-effect can, does, and in fact must work this way. So the giving to Covenant House causing a previous event to change (i.e., 2-3-74) is paradigmatic of the closed loop continuum and perturbation of continuum that is built into the two self-winding situations of damnation (lost in the maze forever, i.e., horizontal tracking endlessly) and salvation (the vertical axis or pulley).

[54:M-8] I just now looked over DI. As I recently realized about VALIS, the dialectic that is the inner life of God—as revealed to Boehme and explicated later by Schelling—and commented on by, e.g., Tillich—is presented as the very basis of the book. In VALIS it is expressed dramatically as world-order in which the irrational confronts the “bright” or rational, designated (properly) logos. In DI this same dialectic reappears and this time is stated to be the two sides of God (rather than world order; that is, in DI it is now correctly seen to be within God himself!): It is now (in DI) between Emmanuel who is the terrible, destroying “solar heat” warring side—and Zina who is loving, playful, tender, associated with bells and flowers; and what unifies the two at last (by the way, it is she who takes the lead in restoring memory and hence unification; Emmanuel is the side that has forgotten—i.e., is impaired; she has not and is not impaired) is play. She plays, and Emmanuel has a secret desire to play.

So both novels basically deal with the dialectic that I experienced as the nature of Valis and which I construe to be the dynamic inner life of God. If you superimpose both books, then, you get this equation:

Really, then, DI simply continues the fundamental theme of VALIS—but does not seem to do so—not unless one perceives this theme and what it is (the dialectic that is the dynamic inner life of God). DI is not so loose a sequel to VALIS as it might seem (by, e.g., the shift from Gnosticism, the present, realism, to Kabbala, the future, fantasy).

[54:M-11] An incredible beauty lies over DI; it is simply wonderful—love and dance and color. I have revealed the beauty of God—ah! And thus: I am of the Sufis!

DI is at its absolute basis Sufi—and this passes right over to BTA—this is what links DI to BTA. So the dialectic hence YHWH links VALIS to DI, but beauty—Sufism—links DI to BTA. So there is internal order to all three books:

(1) God.

(2) Beauty. And when the beauty shows up in BTA is especially in connection with Dante in his vision of God: light and color.

The pink rose. Pink. Valis.

[54:M-12] The Tagore vision, it being published, will release the marathon runners—start them out with the Godspell, the good news—because it— in contrast to the VALIS trilogy—contains the social justice part which has to do with the “we all survive together as a planet or we all die together,” which is the Age of Aquarius doctrine of the Maitreya. The essence of the third dispensation is thus unity and indivisibility of the life of the planet, and, as I say, it is not found in the trilogy.

[54:M-24] Galactic Pot-Healer 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. The book is desperate and frightened, and coming apart, dreamlike, cut off more and more from reality. Flight, disorganization: the way has almost run out. Those elements dealt with in earlier novels—ominous elements —now escape my control and take over. What Brunner said, “That one got out of control,” is correct and has vast psychological significance.

And yet I did not become psychotic. Why not? What happened?

Very simply, the meta-abstraction was the birth of higher reason in me, specifically and precisely logos. It was noesis, but, more, it was logos itself. And logos—not just as reason, although it is that—but Christ: Christ as the power of the rational principle itself.

The dialectic that I experienced in 3-74 was between the irrational and the rational, in me, in world, in God. The rational won.

The issue is properly stated in VALIS, which shows not only a return of control but is an account of victory—in the form of rationality, of logos itself—over madness; I am not only rational, I also depict as open autobiography, this battle in me and this victory. Ursula is both right and wrong. “Phil Dick is moving toward madness” does not apply to VALIS but to Galactic Pot-Healer; already with Tears and then more so in Scanner reality has reentered; I am again in touch with the real. Judging from the dream in Tears, the archetype of the wise old man (the King) saved me, and he is or represents God. So for me, religion and rationality—that is, the divine in the real, the truly real—are one. It is Christ and it is the rational; it is exactly what I say it is in VALIS: the inbreaking of the rational principle, the logos, into the irrational. But I am talking about my own mind, not world.

VALIS is, then, the return from madness or near-madness, an account of a prior inner struggle and not a symptom of that struggle still going on. By the time I wrote VALIS the battle had been successfully won; and the proof of this is DI and, most of all, BTA in which Angel Archer is (as I’ve already realized) the rational principle in me, which is logos, that is to say, Christ itself speaking; the victory by the “bright” side in me is total. Thus I was saved by Christ as the inbreaking of the rational principle, logos or reason itself.

[54:M-26] Ursula is right to see me—my mind—as threatened by ominous encroaching madness, but VALIS is a lucid postmortem, a deliberate and rational study, of this issue, this battle, and the victory of the rational in me (expressed as Valis, logos or Christ). The one who sees precisely all this—the battle and the victory and even the cause of the ominous issue or problem (a decade of intense suffering and trial)—is John Clute writing in the Post. I came through it and emerged victorious: but just barely.

[54:M-29] I guess my realization came (last night) when, after reading Pot and realizing that I did become psychotic, I then picked up Scanner and read here and there. The appalling horror of that book! To go into that from psychosis; that is, how terrible a fate awaited me. What saved me was my love for those people: Luckman (Ray Harris), Jerry Fabin (Dennis) and Donna (Kathy), which ties in with Tears and the scene at the all-night gas station.

Thinking back to when I wrote Pot: I felt so strongly—and correctly— at the time that when it came time, in writing the book, to have the theophany occur (i.e., for Glimmung to show himself) I had nothing to say, nothing to offer because I knew nothing.⁶⁵ Oh, and how I sensed this lack of knowledge! And now this is precisely what I do know because now I have experienced it (2-3-74).

In a way I better depict the 3-74 theophany (of Valis) in DI than in VALIS itself. In any case if you superimpose the two novels it is there—precisely what I lacked when I wrote Pot—and knew I lacked, as a human, as a writer; I had no ideas about the theophany at all, and yet by the time I wrote DI it came easily, that which would not and could not come with Pot; thus in writing Pot that exactly was where I reached the end—wore out and died as a writer; scraped the bottom of the barrel and died creatively and spiritually. What misery that was! Paisley shawl, hoop of water, hoop of fire; how wretched it was; how futile.

Strange that later (1974) I experienced what I had yearned to know so that I could continue the logical, organic growth and forward development of my writing. That was where I wore out: trying to depict a theophany. And that is what I legitimately later on (in the VALIS trilogy) could do. But oh the years of suffering! 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. And thus the Valis books are the opposite, are sane, are grounded in experience and in reality because by then I had experienced God; hence my creative life (not just my spiritual life) resumed; and with it my sanity. Thus in a very real sense my sanity depended on my experiencing God, because my creative life logically demanded it—and as Eugene said, my sanity depends on my writing.

What I knew therein, when I tried to depict Glimmung, was my own finiteness, and this boundary and sense of boundary withered my soul and killed me; this is not just a creative crisis alone; it was a total crisis of homo sapiens man who knows. I did not know and began to die.

And at last—in ’74—I came back to life as a human because I then did know. And all the humor and wit and sheer inventiveness of Pot only makes the pain greater. For me, psychosis lay in not knowing God. Conversely, sanity came in knowing God.

Thus Valis made me acutely, suddenly, and for the first time sane.

[54:M-32] This, precisely, is the psychosis that manifests itself in Pot: the effort by a finite creature to suppose the divine without actual experience of the divine ends in disorder and incoherence and, as I so realized last night, the truly desperate. Glimmung is absurd and in fact a travesty and I knew it at the time; never was anyone ever so aware of the unbridgeable gap between the finite and the infinite. And this is it; this states it: the finite creature attempting to suppose the infinite and, in failing, becoming deranged. Thus I say now, my psychosis, expressed in my writing, did not enter it from outside the writing; it began in and with the writing itself, for it was in the writing that I reached my limit and could not go on.

[54:M-34] Here, perhaps, is the distinction between “idios kosmos” and “koinos kosmos.” The human mind cannot generate out of itself the infinite, in which case “finitum capax infiniti” is not the proper formulation. The infinite must break in! And this lies within the power of the infinite self: the infinite must take the initiative. Thus the VALIS trilogy represents the inbreaking of the infinite into my life, my mind, my soul and my writing.

[54:M-35] I am saying, then, several things: first, that the finite creature’s hunger for the infinite is such that it will drive itself mad in its search; second, I am saying that this is the cause of my psychosis that began to take over and lasted until 2-74; that (third) I was psychotic until 2-74, as I suspected, but now I see why; and last, that the inbreaking of the infinite “sobers the landscape”; that is, the madness is abolished for what I construe as logical reasons. Drugs did not cause my psychosis; Nancy and Isa leaving did not; normal schizophrenia did not; anxiety and danger and suffering (in particular ’71) did not; poverty did not. It was generated by (a) a hun ger for the infinite; and (b) the necessary impossibility of the finite creature discovering the infinite: it can only receive the inbreaking of the infinite.

[54:M-37] This is really what VALIS is all about, thematically. Then I am saying that the condition normal to us generates a sort of normal madness that I have already and for some time studied: it has to do with a recirculating closed loop in which the mind simply monitors its own thoughts forever and so only knows itself, never really knowing the truly other. Then “infinite” and “truly other” signify one and the same thing; the reason I could not imagine infinite deity is the reason I could not imagine the math-color axis in place of our math-music axis. All this, then, is ultimate epistemology, no more, no less. The meta-abstraction amounts to an authentic comprehension about something other than myself, and it may represent, for me, the first time what I have always called “world” was truly world at all rather than a dubious image emanating from my own psyche. [ . . . ]

In any case the conception of Glimmung and the meta-abstraction are antitheses. They are mutually exclusive. The former is nothing more than that which I as finite thing can suppose: the latter is bona fide knowledge of that which is truly other. In becoming psychotic I simply showed the prisonlike nature of self-generated knowledge and what it is like for the inquisitive mind to discover that all it knows is itself over and over again. The realization that it is de facto in hell (cf. my supra theory that hell and the atomization of the lowest ring spatiotemporal world are one and the same; conversely, the “part-whole compatibility” solution that is true cosmos stands as remedy to this, for now the atom comprehends itself within a structure transcending it and thus effectively gets out of itself—abolishes its boundary—and this leads at once back to the meta-abstraction and what it accomplishes).

So here we have my psychosis defined as “the lethal damage done by the inquiring mind” by the fact that—and its awareness of the fact that (the second point is necessary!)—it knows only itself and seemingly is condemned to know only itself forever, itself and nothing more. This is epistemological hell. Knowledge other than self-knowledge is de facto impossible. Here we see the culmination of years of epistemological doubts—doubts about the nature of—even the reality of—world; suddenly a radical shift occurs: it is not world that is dubitable and tenuous but knowledge of world; the Cartesian premise has set in, and, upon doing so, the mind realizes that it is doomed never to know world. This, then, may be what the BIP symbolizes: the prison of the utter atomization of the spatiotemporal world. At this point the mind despairs and psychosis sets in as the mind frantically seeks to formulate “in the dark” an image, a representation, of the infinite. (Which is impossible; as Malebranche showed. The infinite—God—can only be known directly; there is no such thing as a representation of God/the infinite.) For me, decades of epistemological activity have ended not only in failure but in recognition of failure. And since epistemology is the very basis of my creative, spiritual, artistic and professional life, then I am destroyed . . . but, the flip side of this is the meta-abstraction, which not only confers sanity but life itself inasmuch as it reverses the death-dealing condition of ignorance—and here precisely is the ontological value assigned to the diametric categories of ignorance and gnosis in Gnosticism!

[54:M-40] That Ursula should regard my moment of failure as the moment of my greatest success shows me that it is possible for an intelligent, educated adult to enjoy the prison of atomization we are in; after all, if all you ever experience is yourself you are consummately safe, and I think safety is the summum bonum for Ursula. 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: the dismal ocean depicted in the novel itself: the tomb world of absolute decay. Ursula, then, erred twice, not once, but the errors logically interlock: if she saw Pot as sane, she will see VALIS as insane.

[54:N-15] Dio—Is VALIS ever a complete success! In terms of articulating the mysteries revealed to me by (1) 2-74–2-75 and (2) the AI voice.

And I was absolutely right to choose Gnosticism primarily and also Buddhism!

And it’s all predicated on my epistemological suspicions going back to the fifties: That somehow our world is fake.

[54:N-18] Glancing briefly over the “Tractates” I note two interesting things:

(1) All the statements in it by the AI voice now at last make sense; that is, I understand them.

(2) Moreover, they fit into one coherent system and it is an extraordinarily important one. And also:

(3) The system is a revealed one; on my own (employing both a priori reason and empirical observation) I never would have arrived at it. Therefore:

(4) I think that this is Gnosticism. That is, not only (sic!) the meta-abstraction but also all that the AI voice has said; without its state ments, on the basis of the meta-abstraction alone, I would never have understood. Therefore:

(5) When I say, “The AI voice is myself, myself as perfected, realized self, outside of the BIP,” what I am referring to is specifically and clearly and very movingly the salvador salvandus. Which again tells me that this is indeed Gnosticism. So I am a spark of the Godhead that got captured by the Dark Kingdom; as I say in the “Tractates”:

“We did not fall because we sinned; our error—which caused our fall—was an intellectual one: we took the phenomenal world—i.e., the 4-D world with its defective space and its spurious time—to be real.”

Salvation, then, initiated by the salvador salvandus who outwits the wardens (the archons) and ventures here from the King of Lights, is to remember—our true nature. And this messenger, this salvador salvandus, is of course who and what I saw and experienced as Valis. It is both my own unfallen self, and it is the Gnostic Christ.

[54:N-20] I am probably too far into Gnosticism to turn back: the single term “mystagogue” points indubitably to it, and, then, to salvador salvandus. Which in turn fits in with my “bootstrap” view that is a revolutionary reappraisal of what “cause and effect” really signify, that “being saved” means “remembering” (your true identity and true situation and true history)—this at first seems to be Plato’s anamnesis but is really Gnostic in the widest sense, knowledge regarded as ontologically primary both in terms of the fallen individual and, more, in terms of cosmic repair. And here, indeed, is the essence of Gnosticism, as H. Jonas says: not that the gnosis saves but, rather, the ontological value and meaning of it, that it is absolutely primary as the real thing, second to nothing. Thus in the final analysis Gnosticism assigns the utmost priority to knowing and thus regards epistemology as equal to the divine; for the Gnostic, epistemological inquiry is in itself—as a search—truly divine, and is the highest basis of and for spiritual life—and this is my view of epistemology a fortiori. To me, nothing is more important.^* Thus for me Gnosticism is the inexo rable goal because the premise of Gnosticism is the premise on which my mental life is grounded; so for me to say that “Gnosticism is the solution” is in fact for me to utter a tautology, but it is a meaningful one; it is tautological only in the sense that (upon close inspection) it turns out to be an analytical proposition and not a synthetic one. So for me spiritual, mental life, Gnosticism, epistemology, rationality (in contrast to the irrational) and knowing are all one. And the search is as worthy as the goal; the search is the dynamic life of the mind. It amounts to a procession of mounting growth stages in personal evolution and hence is essential to negentropy, to life itself. To know is to be: not “I think therefore I am” but “I learn therefore I am”: there is a difference: learning involves the absorption of negative entropy into oneself from the environment (negentropy expressed as information). And this, maybe, is the heart of the matter. “I write, I learn, I evolve and grow; therefore I am.” This, for me, is Gnosticism. Hence this exegesis. It is the very dynamism of my life.

Folder 57

[55:O-8]⁶⁶ I just now glanced over the tractate. In a sense the novel VALIS was a means to get the tractate published—originally I supposed only a private and tiny printing, e.g., by Roy Squires, but because of VALIS it—the tractate—is in mass circulation in the U.S., the U.K., France and possibly Germany. I did it. VALIS is true; Gnosticism is true; what the AI voice says is true; thus I am compelled to believe absolutely and for the first time that, all else proving to be true, the soteriological prophecies must be true, also; so the 5th savior is here: “he has been transplanted and is alive.”

[57:Q-7] Okay. The one billionth fresh start. All of it—2-74–2-75—and what the AI voice has said, and all the revelations and visions—it’s all indubitably this: soteriology. That is clear.^*

(1) 2-3-74 per se was soteriological (pronoia and miracle, intervention).

(2) The “messenger” vision deals with soteriology.

(3) The “Covenant House” AI statement is soteriological.

(4) The “pulley” vision is soteriological.

(5) All the prophecies are soteriological.

(6) The “parousia and Holy Mother Church” dream is soteriological.

So whereas the theological structure remains vague (monotheism, or bitheism, Christianity or Judaism or Gnosticism), one thing (as I say) is indubitable: everything that has happened and that I have been shown, told, every revelation—it’s all one vast soteriological engine/program.

(7) Valis itself is. Σωτηρ (Soter).⁶⁷

Okay. Then that’s it. I can’t discern the big picture—God (theology) and the universe (epistemology)—but there is palpable and indubitable (1) individual soteriology directed at me that saved my life, saved me; and (2) general soteriological disclosures involving mankind and Savior.

So probably the Savior—the 5th Savior—is indeed here. And he will explain the rest.

[57:Q-10] Because of the reverence for all life that permeates my developing spiritual doctrines, I think I will settle on Buddhism and upon doing that I will assume that the fifth Savior is the Maitreya. Do I not have my Tagore vision?

[57:Q-14] 2-74: light (sunlight reflected off the golden fish sign).

3-74 (Valis) light (“beam of pink light” is what I always say, but it was sunlight, as in 2-74, only this time it was the sticker of the fish sign in the living room window.

The upsilon became a palm tree. The pink part was the phosphene after-image of the fish sticker.)

So fish sign both times: in 2-74 (the meta-abstraction); and 3-74, Valis, the info about Chrissy.

It’s Christ. In 2-74 there was no pink light as such. But sunlight. Fish sign and light.

Like Boehme. And Mr. Tagomi.^*

[57:Q-17] I am interested in only one thing: instead of society molding me, I mold it: (1) in my writing; (2) in what I do with the money; (3) in interviews; (4) in the movie—which links back to my writing, i.e., Androids. Vast thematic doctrines are emerging: agape, compassion, care of the weak by the strong, the imminent coming of God as Savior; that is, the kingship of God. This is what the whole opus adds up to: anticipation of the coming kingship of God.

[57:Q-24] The total Kosmos is somehow “in” each part, which is a diagram I drew years ago:

Now I see how this works. The Hermetics were indeed onto this, and the Taoist alchemists, and Leibniz (because of his involvement in Rosicrucianism).

Interface half in the part (person), half in the whole (world), and thus modulates each to the other: advocate for the person in terms of what he does (acting toward the whole) and how he experiences world (the whole acting on him). In this case the part is not directly engaged with the whole but indirectly, and this is what I felt to be the case when Jeannie was on the phone. 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 transcendent self”—which maintains the ontological ordering categories—has been seized and occupied (by what we call Σωτηρ the Holy Spirit, the Maitreya, Christ). This would de facto create cosmos. It would be total soteriological victory: it would possess the parts and create out of them the whole; thus individual salvation and restoration of the cosmos become one and the same thing and pertain directly to my 2-74 meta-abstraction (an instance of it).

This gives a very precise account of what salvation and restoration consist of and also how it is done; and, moreover, it is (not “resembles” but is) 2-74.

And this interface would be precisely the “Acts”-Tears—i.e., Apocalypse—lens-grid. So: QED. This is why when I saw world transformed—2-74 itself—although it was radically changed, it was absolutely comprehensible, and this is the whole point; world as it had been was enigmatic and in fact Fremd; world changed was both comprehensible and familiar: it was “my” world. Hence I say part-whole compatibility. But could this be a purely cognitive act and if so is it νωησιss (noesis)? [ . . . ] Because it looks to me that this is a purely cognitive act, it does create part-whole compatibility which leads via the “two mirror self-correcting sequence of ever more precise approximations”—a positive runaway!—to part-whole isomorphism, whereupon info of the whole arises parallel and acausally in the part: self-generating info as the basis of structure—negentropy—itself, by which the whole maintains itself as kosmos in the true sense: unified by affinity, not coercion or violence. The “universal language” is of course heard directly in (side) the mind of the person; this is the crucial index of part-whole isomorphism expressed in terms of info—info pertaining to the structure and not to anything outside it; thus the info pertains to itself; it is not only self-generating, it is the “thing” that it describes. This is precisely what The Book of Creation notes say: “With man, word and thought refer to object, but with God, thought, word, writing of word and thing are one and the same.”⁶⁸ And this is of course the plasmate! It is info, but it as info does not pertain to—point to—anything other than itself; thus King Felix does not point to the Savior; it is the info-stage of the life form “Savior” itself, just as St. Luke is the info stage of the world (the world of “Luke-Acts”).

I’m hot on the trail right now—since nothing exists outside of cosmos by definition, all info in it pertains to itself and permeates it and is self-causing. And identical throughout all loci. Then the info is eternally and ubiquitously retrieved and retrievable—as in Ubik.

[ . . . ]

AI voice and plasmate: one and the same. “Info metabolism.”

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.^➊ Dynamically, in terms of activity, things are info—changing info. “The whole of him thinks,” as Xenophanes said.

VALIS is a very valuable book. Even though it doesn’t explain why the universe is info it does say that it is (the why is: by being info it maintains its negentropy-level, i.e., its structure, expressed—as always—as/by info. It is true kosmos so it must maintain negentropic structure—hence info—throughout; if it ceases to, it ceases to be true kosmos and unity is lost in favor of atomized plurality. It is unitary precisely because it is info). So since we can’t see the info we can see the structure, so we see plurality; when I saw Valis I saw unity, structure, hence info; what I was ulti mately seeing was kosmos (as field, as opposed to the atomists’ discontinuous matter, which is anti-cosmos). This is both Plato and Pythagoras and totally Greek. It was lost (became “extinct”) after Parmenides—hence the fall. So the statement by the AI voice, “Extinct true kosmos and it still there,” is crucial.

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.

But by this analysis, the AI voice’s statements about the Savior must be veridical, since the statement (info) is the reality it pertains to; it is oxymoronic to speak of the possibility of this kind of info as “false”!

➊ My “groove to music” leap.

[57:Q-33] With the return of the Eleatic continuum reality—instead of the discontinuous matter one—we will again be able to see God, literally; and this is the point of my exegesis. And I know that the continuum one is true—and the discontinuous matter one is not—because the AI voice said, “A perturbation in the reality field.” [ . . . ]

When I was very little I used to see and experience space as real, palpable, “thick.” It scared and oppressed me, because I did not understand how motion was possible. I used to squeeze it (as, e.g., when I was sick in the bathroom). It took effort to bring my finger and thumb together. And it was artificial and difficult for me to render space into void.

So my continuum view was natural to me and had to be trained out of me, or else I saw that things did not in fact move (change) but “only look different”—i.e., no time had passed, in other words, I experience God and eternity, but had to learn to experience world and time instead, because everyone (else) said, “That’s what’s there.” I had no words for what I saw (God), nor did I understand it. Or even like it.

But it was the correct way of seeing, but I knew not what it was, and it oppressed me.

[57:Q-34] It is the interface that is God, in Malebranche’s system. God is not “in” the writing exactly, although the writing is Scripture (Torah). God is here already. Between. This is what happened with Luke that time, and with Tears when I saw the two word cypher, and with Jeannie. In a sense, then, this is not incarnation of all, but also it is: it is the universal language, as at Pentecost. To understand how it works you must know Malebranche. This of course is also how the “Acts” lens-grid worked, producing part whole compatibility and restoring true cosmos. I’ve solved 2-3-74, including the two word cypher.

[57:Q-36] Hypnopompic: pronunciation mark in dictionary: (based on the three S’s: service, etc.) “For pain. For hope.” “He is out there somewhere.”

I see a synthesis higher than anything I have ever seen before: the spirit—the finest parts—of Marxism, Christianity, Buddhism—and yet it is above all this; and out of me it draws the most noble drives and aspirations, the mystical and the urgently practical combined. It is as if the dialectic has achieved new heights, like nothing I have ever seen before. And he gives voice to and codifies the best in me, that up to now was inchoate. I never knew myself before now; my own nature was to me obscure. Everything in me at last takes shape. I utterly repudiate the policies of the regime but I turn—not inward—but to something so beautiful that I could not have imagined it. “For pain, for hope”; that says it all. This is a fortiori the two dialectical antitheses of the new synthesis! Pain (the suffering of people) and my caring (agape) about their suffering, and the hope that Maitreya brings forth a radical transformation in our and their lives. This synthesis—pain and hope—is above tragedy and is absolute beauty; it is grounded in human pain and the need to relieve that pain, and the hope—and conviction—that it can be relieved through the Maitreya and his program. The terrible side is pain, the salvific side is hope; out of these two comes action and the will to act, to change the world. Pain and hope are the two mutually exclusive primary realities that unify and become the ultimate, new synthesis for our age; we must feel both to experience this new synthesis that is serving, simplicity, and sharing; pain without hope is miserable, but hope without pain is empty and futile.

Hope. That is the key for me in all this, in terms of my oscillation between doubt, faith, conviction, credulity, paranoia, fear, suspicion. Hope generated by the pain of the life of the planet. Hope that the new dispensation is authentic.

I do not now act out of guilt or conscience or duty or sense of obligation or the Torah (law), but because my loving (Maitri) teacher who smiled down at me tells—instructs—me to. This is the highest truth of all: he, my tutelary spirit and mystagogue, Maitreya, is the AI voice—I hear and have long heard his voice. The AI voice is the Maitreya, and what he as my tutelary spirit and teacher tells me is dharma: the path/way/Tao. It is the path because it accords with truth; hence it is rational; thus I saw Maitreya break into our universe, he is the rational, it is the irrational; the two ages: he slept and now awakens. It is Sila, the voice of the universe and it is born among us. Creme is wrong; it is God; it is YHWH, and this is my secret. And yet he is Christ to the Christians, Krishna to the Hindus, etc. This is the most extraordinary miracle ever heard of, and it is real: it is no “psychotronic” trick!

[57:Q-41] In a single vast stroke my teacher—Σορη Sorer! ^➊Σορηρ! My sister.⁶⁹ Oh JHWH—my sister. I meant to write Savior. Transformed all my characterological faults into virtue; this is the last in ultimate abolition of my karma.

Sister. He (who?) comes to me as my sister who died. What does this mean? The ultimate restoration of what was lost.^* “For I am building a new heaven and new earth. . . .”

➊ The AI voice itself took me over—as in 3-74—and wrote “sister.” Thus it identified itself at last; it told me who it is. And this is the Maitreya, who is to you what means most.

[57:S-5] I had an extraordinary insight in the middle of the night:

What I realized is: true existence requires experience of both Yang _and_ Yin: I saw them as two rings, a bright one of light (Yang) and a darker one of Yin. But the latter still real and necessary. The above diagram is expressed dramatically and in macroform in VALIS. I experienced it as the dialectic. What was expressed last night in my vision of the dark—or darker— ring—or circle—of Yin is that, as Ted Sturgeon speaks of, you voluntarily incarnate (e.g., as I did in 1928 as PKD) to deliberately experience Yin: creatoreal, irrational existence here (as bodhisattva) in order to know and to be Yin. The Yang side is the bright unfallen side and in salvador salvandus, one’s other—and rational—self, who enters in order to rescue the Yin or limited or darkened, incarnated self. This is why the inbreaking of the Yang side (2-3-74) is anamnesis: recovered memory of one’s own lost true self. This is also an extricating yourself from the maze by first being outside the maze—i.e., having solved it. Otherwise, fruitless horizontal tracking goes on forever; once (voluntarily) incarnated you are stuck there (here) forever. So I am a unitary whole now, with one part as a direct antecedent from the upper realm (Thomas) and one (PKD) from the lower realm.

Editor’s note: The Exegesis ends on page S-6.^*