The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

Folder 23

[23:3] I remember in sleep the thought, “I am wisdom: I would know [of any other God].”

[23:4] Looking back on the theoleptic intercession of the vernal equinox of 1974 I see as most striking the inexhaustible truth of the Bible. As a kid I loved to read the Bible. The people were always real to me. Oddly it was 2nd Kings that started it—Jezebel and King Ahab and Elijah. There it began for me and there in 3-74 it came to fulfillment, a great loop of authentic other life woven into my own.

[23:18] If the Savior is again here, I might see him perhaps. But it is said, “Like lightning I will be everywhere at once.” Multiple incarnations? (Or rather reincarnation—and the Christian dead reborn with him—again I wonder, in us? Joining us?) This indeed would be a revelation: the how of it. We shall all be collected together in him—I wait, I watch every day. My life is devoted to it—I have lost everything else. No matter. I won’t lose him.

[23:50] I think now of the dream I had of the great luminous moth, descending to earth so beautifully. Perhaps this was the one vast soul which came down, rather than many separate souls: one entity which was segmented at impact, perhaps dispersing to take up eventual residence within many human minds. Dispersing this way it lost contact with its own original identity and at that point lapsed into forgetfulness (amnesia). From that moment on it has traveled, in luminous beauty but without recognizing itself inwardly or outwardly, forward in time as a collective divided invisible presence. It moves majestically but no longer conscious of itself or its origins, purpose here or goal; its primary goal is to remember, to again be self-aware with all the ramifications implied (whence from, whither going). It is a visitor here, and, in remembering, has begun the process by which it can return. How can it return if it has forgotten that it ever existed anywhere but here? It keeps reincarnating in linear time, drawn back by its desire to perpetuate itself here. It imagines itself to be human, a human (many “a” humans). I think maybe all of the segmented parts must remember and hence rejoin, and will ascend as it descended: a unity, intact, again totally aware of itself and its home. It has been many people at many times. But it is and must be a unity to exist properly. Perhaps as portions remember they inform, adventitiously, remaining still forgetful parts, summoning them one by one to their original state. What will be the effect in this world as the portions awaken and remember? Awakened, they are aware of St. Sophia’s approaching incarnation; they are heralds for it, preparing the way while still here: edifying the world with their light.

—I guess this is all fanciful, it leaves out the elements of testing, judgment and reprieve (permission to go home). Is it possible that each part of the great soul must earn its reprieve, before enlightenment (memory restored) occurs? It does not just happen to remember; anamnesis is granted it as a reward, perhaps after centuries of trial. Did it sin originally and so fall? Was it cast out of the pleroma? Was it one “Lucifer,” one bright “star” of many? And must it work its way back up gradually and arduously? Was it punished? Only by transforming itself could it (its pieces) receive its original state back. This was the fall, the fall, trials here and eventual return. I am conscious of earning anamnesis, although I’m not sure when and how, perhaps what the pieces of the “moth” (soul) must lose—and demonstrate loss of—is the rebellious self-fulfillment in the sense of self-striving against the Krasis¹ as a totality; it was one part thereof, originally, and tried to become a Krasis in itself, which is to say, no longer part of the total universe-organism! But pitted against it, a separate universe. In my final vision I perceived the universe as one interacting entity, one “creature” with nothing separate from it or in any sense independent or outside. What we must learn is to subordinate ourselves to the will and mind of the Krasis, to extinguish our individual striving. To transmit only what we receive, so to speak. Until we demonstrate spontaneous willingness and ability to do this, without ulterior motivation, we are here, cut off from the unitary vast organism—Krasis, in a sense not part of it inasmuch as we have forgotten it, can’t experience it and don’t function as a station within it—integrated into it. The sublunar realm has been severed from the organism. Information from the noös doesn’t reach it. Fallen though it be it is nonetheless immortal and divine: a beautiful but divided luminous being.

[23:60] Well, since I am an S-F writer and known to be involved with unreality, no one, even my closest friends, is/are going to believe me, and yet I can get it printed everywhere with no risk of it being taken as anything but fantasy. It is bootless to screw around and think it is anyone but Christ who arranged my 3-74 experience. My problem is that I’m so delighted I just can’t believe it; I have to keep arriving at the same conclusion by new and different ways.

[23:69] For exposing his world James-James is after your ass. The authorities are his instruments in forcibly maintaining the system of delusions. Certainly, as Fitting² et al. say, my writings are subversive to this fake system, but he and the other Marxists shrink from the evolutionary development in my writing pointing, in theological tones, to the world, lying beyond and behind, which is. Ubik is the turning point, leading to Maze of Death, and all the Platonism that Angus Taylor³ rightly sees in the corpus of my work.

[23:73] A new James-James dream: the improvident genius creator evolves us through many stages, meanwhile killing us, coercing us totally, injuring us. Finally, really through lack of foresight (he has no foresight) he abruptly, in his truly inspired search for new and more complex and evolved forms for us to take, causes us to become immortal gods; we all float up from the ground, high in the air, singing in unison like a great chorus of bees: he has caused us to escape him and the death of determinism and suffering, due to a combination of his genius, restless, ceaseless inventiveness and search for new or better forms—and lack of foresight; it didn’t occur to him that by his own efforts he would eventually, inevitably push us to safety. We are filled with joy. The inference here seems to be that on his own, James-James can and eventually will make us immortal and no longer bound by determinism (expressed by our release from gravity), hence safe from him. The other better true God (not found in this dream) need only wait—which assigns a higher value to James-James than I have been attributing to him. His role is great; alone he eventually compels us into immortality—the final stage and goal. My error lay in incorrectly downgrading him. I have been corrected.

[23:111] It’s amazing how much James-James’ chaotic world resembles Empedocles’ world of strife, and the Corpus Christi resembles the krasis formed by love—which brings me back to Aphrodite. And the krasis possessing one more dimension than James-James’ “horizontal” world:

Is it even possible that “strife” (plane) is “love” (sphere) seen in one less dimension—i.e., imperfectly perceived? Only the sectioning perceived? The “spherical” krasis viewed, in a limited sense, as section, and thus all changed? Add the missing dimension and you go from the seeming world to the symmetrical real. This added dimension has something to do with time—the horizontal quality of “strife” may be linear time. The sphere is the plane perfected and hence outside (above) time. There is a mystery here: intersection at two points: Rome c. 70 A.D. and Fullerton c. 1974 A.D. “time is round.”

[23:112] There is some vast relationship between my 3-74 experience and Ubik the novel, could I but find it. E.g., when I saw Rome c. A.D. 70 I was at an incredibly low ebb of vitality (heat loss death). But, as in Ubik (i.e., Archer’s Drugstore) both time periods and the objects therein existed simultaneously. In fact, neither could be said to be more real than the other—a sort of oscillation (and yet in Ubik neither was real; both were illusory). Is this to say that if you can peel the layers of 1974 back (aside) and find A.D. 70, then the reality you are dealing with is no reality (but is illusion)? A mockup, a stage set? Which has been reused and reused—painted over again and again? Of course, nothing is sui generis new; every object in the present is literally made from old atoms formerly used in other, more ancient “sets.” Recycled, really. Like pulp magazine paper (not at one specific former time, though).

Insight: as in Ubik we (must) maintain the present by a joint focusing of effort and attention, forcing it to be stable (and not regress). I regressed in 3-74, but back along an ontological orthogonal axis, not a personal axis, exactly like the objects in Ubik. I regressed, not to my 1928 childhood, but to former men (or a former man). It’s all there in Ubik, could I exegete. The 2,000 year inner and outer reversion which I experienced in 3-74 was not due to a concentrating of attention but to an ebbing, a relaxing, a permitting (releasing). At the very least I discovered where the past is now; it is in present-day objects (reality). Therefore it can be totally retrieved. As to where the future is, if anywhere, I have no idea.

[23:120] Two S-F dreams ill-remembered. (1) some people have come here from another planet which had much greater gravity, so that being here was being able to fly—literally “buzz about with joy like bees.” (2) if you do something “impossible that you would do,” like leave the building through the ceiling rather than the door, you literally disappeared to everyone’s view, friends, family and jailers alike, since all here are programmed—held fast by the deterministic matrix.

[23:127] The two dreams together show (1) coming here from a place worse than this—escaping from it to here and then (2) escaping from here. In (1), here stands in relation to the “heavier world” as an afterlife, but then escape from this world is needed—an afterlife, so to speak, to a previous afterlife. What seems to be presented here is a series of stages, an evolution. [ . . . ]

We are not products of this world but voyagers here—one thinks of Gnosticism at once. We have come here from another place and will eventually find the unexpected orthogonal axis and ascend to the next. Ah! Eventually we will chafe against the bonds—restrictions, determinism, limitations—of this world too, and seek release, as we did before with the “heavier” world. Maybe this world is neither heaven nor hell to its natural inhabitants; it just is. Maybe to us it started out as a place of release—heaven—but gradually and inexorably becomes another prison; in relation to the next an iron prison Rome. Then the black iron prison is wherever you are in relation to the freer next world—which fully, at last, answers my question as to where the vision of the black iron prison stands in relation to this world. The sense of this being so is an indication that one has reached the point of wanting to move on up.

[23:133] I just now remembered details of my original “floating up and all singing (buzzing like bees) in unison” dream, out of reach by the cruel creator. I think very likely the floating up is

and

Indicative of this is the dream of coming from the “heavy world” here and “floating and buzzing joyfully” in the air. Obviously it’s a state in this life, not death; this is the original now-lost state we came here in—as in Wordsworth’s “Ode.” (“Joy” may refer obliquely to Ode, i.e., “Ode to Joy.”) We are in that state right after birth, are put in cages (social conditioning, learning, strictures) and finally leap up to ceiling (trapdoor): again up high, but not weightless; rather by effort (leaping) we are once again in that original unspoiled state: 3-74 equals a return to the original state right after birth—and then lost. In that state we are free of gravity which means free of determinism which means free of James-James, not to mention any and all foes such as the authorities; they did not expect us to (be able to) do what we did; “invisible” equals off this map room GHQ board, not sus ceptible to being tracked (watched) as predictable object glued to board by gravity. 3-74 is final state or goal of evolution: return to rightful state lost at birth: the heavy world (weight of conditioning, the “fall”) has been thrown off.

Perhaps after death, after achieving this in this life, instead of another birth here, the goal of enlightenment achieved, we can return to God—permanently, well envisioned as all of us in unison buzzing joyfully like bees (bits of him) as he (I mean it), the great universe-creature, breathes in and out, showing it (as I saw, and I wrote in Latin) is a living vast organism. I understand now why, when I see it (noetically) it reminds me of bees: a colony of bees is a collective intelligence, par excellence. Awareness of the living universe creature and one’s identity in it as one “bee” is not merely higher awareness: it is an absolute state of perception of actual conditions of being. All that varies is the duration or the state of total correct perception and self-awareness, which evidently can come at any time in any plane-level, Rome, here, or the next. We did not just (nearly) come from it and will eventually return: in reality we are there now, always have been, the journey is not physical but involves degrees of losing and gaining, motion toward (anamnesis) or away from (amnesia), this absolute perception. It is in fact waking up, which equals: becoming conscious. But, e.g., 3-74, it is not correct to say, “I stopped dreaming (this world) and awoke”: what is correct is: a bit of Brahman passed from sleep to self-awareness: wakefulness. It is correct to say, “I came from God (Brahman) and will eventually return,” but it is more correct to say, “I am part of Brahman now and have always been,” since there is no condition or place where Brahman is not: vide “they reckon ill who leave me out/when me they fly I am the wings,”⁴ wings = another copula for the flying up and buzzing (beating wings) joyfully.

Perhaps at the Christian end days this whole cluster wakes up collectively. Eschatology defines this as a temporary state of mankind, not so to speak our real state. Flying and buzzing (i.e., singing): a unity of unconsciousness (mode one): the wings and flying (“when me they fly,” etc.) and consciousness: “and I the hymn the Brahman sings.” All in all: unity: and the dreams point to Brahman for a certainty: ubiquity.

Bees or: a cloud of gnats floating, singing hymns of worship joyfully to Brahman. Showing it to be everywhere, even in the lowly gnats: lowest and highest co-joined—and the most ethereal, beautiful thing I ever encountered:

“. . . with leafy wings they flew.”

Folder 24

[24:1] EB: “Brahman is the Creator, preserver, or transformer and reabsorber of everything. Brahman causes the universe and all beings to emanate from itself, transforms itself into the universe, or assumes its appearance.” “God is the sole cause of his own modification, the emanation, existence and absorption of the universe.” “The universe is considered a real transformation of Brahman, whose ‘body’ consists of the conscious souls in everything unconscious in their subtle states.”

It is evident that the divine which I saw outside me was Brahman (or is so called). I have discerned that it was also the sacred spark in me (Atman), and therefore my 3-74 experience was what is called liberation (obtained by only a few living, but generally after death, which is exactly what I thought).

Nowhere, except in Brahmanism, do I find the description of the immanent all pervading divine stuff which I saw as the living force of causality, shining in the faces of the animals, in the trash of the gutter, in the stars—always in and behind, and subjectively experienced internally inside myself as an instructing tutelary voice and that which was aware and seeing the divine without which lay behind the phenomenological world; viz: “Brahman transforms itself into the universe or assumes its appearance.”. . . Here and here only do I find an explanation for what I saw: in 3-74 I stopped hypostatizing, and there lay the divine stuff in place of everything. The they were gone: the it shone through. From what had been high, low, me, not me, small, large, important, trivial. Liberation, not theoretical but actual. This is the universe organism which I perceived to be the macrocosm—alive and unitary. Also it is believed in Hinduism that all this is personified—by Vishnu. If by he who is called Vishnu, then we can call this Christ—the personification to the Western world, in terms of our linear time cultural needs and v.p.

My new religion turns out to be the oldest known.

[24:13]

[24:15] The basic theme in Stigmata, Ubik and Maze—the pleasant illusory skin stretched over a dreadful reality—stems from my early reaction to the two stories I read, one of the dying fly walking around in front of him; the other, the hidden underground city screaming. The cardinal fixed idea of all my writing has been this plus the theme: I am not (or he is not) what I think (I am) he is—in particular my (his) true identity is obscured by fake memories. (1) Reality is not as it appears to be and (2) I am not who and what I think I am. To put them together is to get: both inner and outer reality are not as they appear. The moment I read the two above mentioned stories I intuitively felt, “this is the way it is; this is so.” Already. Before I myself ever wrote, I instinctively felt the insight to be correct. So my 3-74 vision of our really being in the black iron prison world, and the nice world we see being a delusion—that vision is tied to my entire intellectual life. Likewise my discovery in 3-74 that I am not who and what I think I am is central to my world-perception, and my corpus of writing an outgrowth and expression of it. So for me, in terms of the history of my world-perceptions, the vision of the external black iron prison and at the same time an inner transformation of me from my limited, false, ego identity to the immortal visitor (with memories of just having been in the black iron prison world) is an apotheosis of my own lifelong intimations—and a fruition of them, turning an intuitive intimation into direct experience and encounter—not to mention a shocking and unexpected verification of both themes.

[24:25] It was (for me) as if the Garden (or park—I recall the words “the Buddha is in the Park”; is this the same park? The pastoral kingdom?) sort of swam into focus, the way we S-F writers describe an alternate world as doing when that track has been tinkered with, maybe in the past; cf. “Jon’s world.” This world did not become it so much as it replaced this world: locked in briefly in place of this world, exactly as the Roman one did, except that with the Park I did not see it as the way our earth really is but rather an alternate Earth! Instead of what it actually is. I could be wrong about this though; both worlds (mysteriously glimpsed as fading alternatively into focus) could be what we S-F writers call “two alternative presents branching off from a critical nexus or previous point in time, and which of them becomes real depends on some act or event back in the past”—as in that C.L. Moore novelette in Astounding about the two alternative futures hinging on which of two girls the guy marries in the present.⁵[ . . . ]

One could also assess the two mysteriously glimpsed worlds as two opposite mutually contradictory “crypte morphoses” latent in our (present) world: two opposite outcomes hinging on the historical event taking place now. (This puts them—maybe correctly so—in the future—but as I say, I had the impression that the Palm Tree one won out, due to the success of the intervention which not only got Nixon out but ended the war.)

[24:35] What I’m faced with at this point is the realization that I cannot really explain or comprehend what happened to me, and perhaps I never will. There are Jungian explanations, S-F explanations, occult explanations, plus ones I probably haven’t thought of. But will. A power and entity as vast as the one I encountered in me and around me—if it doesn’t deserve the name God I don’t know what term to use for it.

In answer to “what happened in 3-74?” the I Ching gives me #46: ascending, promotion, and comments, “The weak ascend.” Interestingly, this hex has to do—not with expansion—but with vertical ascent: “direct rise from obscurity and lowliness to power and influence.” Also, it is pushing upward associated with effort. And: “that which pushes upwards does not come back.” It (the 5th line) says: “one pushes upward by steps,” meaning: “one achieves one’s will completely.” Each line suggests a better pushing up, and this line is the culmination (the top is bad—but five is the ruler).

What does this suggest? Vertical ascent—which is self-explanatory. But obviously spiritual ascent is meant. In which case I can forget the bizarre and outré explanations and zero in on the essential fact expressed by the I Ching’s answer. A problem in such matters as this is that there is no one to explain it all to me, i.e., a guru. I can’t find anyone I can ask or talk to. What I can deduce from this is probably that—

Well, I guess it’s rare, or if not rare then no one who experiences this talks about it (or: can talk about it). I passed from one world and into an other—I sum it up like that. And: I ceased to be one thing, and became a better thing. And: I escaped illusion and reached reality.

I guess I found release or liberation through recovering my lost memories, and, in that state, found my way back home, to God and His kingdom—the real goal of all men. What else can I say? What else need be said? What particulars? What elaborate theories?

[24:42] But I sense something more: what I think of as a reweaving of me. Which evidently is an unusual event. God had moved backward through time from the far end (final end) of the universe to abolish the black iron prison and replace it with the palm tree garden; to do this he had (evidently) to reweave some of the fabric here, which meant some people, as well as events—indication of my personal reweaving was the adventitious not-me personality sent to replace mine. A new path along time—or through cause-and-effect possibilities, an “alternate world” was brought into existence, as if my—our—past had been tinkered with, and therefore our present was altered—hence the inner superimposition of personalities in me and the external superimposition of the two realities. Also my dream where I lived in a dark little old house like the one we looked at in Placentia. Like “Commuter.”

[24:47] Where (or when) is (or was) the Black Iron world? I was there but am here now. How came I here? Did that world go out of existence? Did this one replace it? Is this world somehow irreal, maybe stretched like a skin over (and concealing) the other? In which case can the black iron world come back?

[24:65] Evidently our world is like a movie, the supralunar world is like several stills which do not permutate into one another (change) but remain indefinitely until replaced: a sort of eternal place. All these thousands of years the Urwelt here has been the black iron prison pierced by His advent! Two mutually irreconcilable elements of a freeze frame.

The “throwing of the uncut stone” did not cause our world to change but rather caused A to be withdrawn as the Urwelt to be replaced by B.

[24:66] Another model, our world as sphere in motion over “squares” of an unchanging (intrinsically) landscape:

Showing our world now “above” the palm tree world, having passed 1974 our time, the moment of intervention. A penetration to the core, now, to the hidden real landscape “below” would reveal it, not the black iron prison. And there would now be a print-out re the second advent (i.e., “Santa Sophia will be born again”).

These are not relative but absolute conditions. But just as we could not see A no matter how we tried, we cannot now see B. If my unconscious relates to the real landscape perpetually it was finding it to be awful (like in the story I read about the city screaming, and the one about flies crawling up across the pilot’s face, and like I wrote up in Stigmata, Ubik, Tears, Penultimate Truth and others). But since early 74 our time my unconscious would obtain soundings suddenly indicating a good, warm, relaxed, loving, heavenly world, which would produce a great drop in tension and apprehension for no consciously unaccountable reason, just as prior to early 74 I would experience fear and tension, especially at night, for no accountable reason.

[24:83] The other thing I wanted to get down here is a topic old and dear to my heart: mimicry. Of Brahman is said: “it can (does) transform itself into the universe; or it can assume the form of the universe.” What I saw in 3-74 was the “Brahman stuff” assuming the form of familiar objects; what I’ve always deduced from this is that all things, all objects are that divine stuff really, could we but see it—there would be no exceptions to this monism, ourselves included. But suddenly I remember that wonderful book on insect mimicry which Brunner sent me. Just because I saw (in 3-74) that many objects (walls, etc.) were actually alive, were actually it, does not actually mean that there is nothing but it. Take my story “Colony” as paradigm.

But anyhow the responding beforehand to signals and the vision of the Urwelt below the Dokos fits with this, in that I can posit the dokos not as counterfeit (good enough fakes to pass as real) but that what we are really seeing is it mimicking the many apparently real things of the phenomenal world. When I viewed this as this transubstantiation of essence with the accidents unchanged I could have said instead, “Originally there were real phenomenal objects, but there is a steady creeping replacement of them by the mimicking alive it—it steadily, stealthily replaces them and mimics—assumes—their form.” Perhaps the transformation of and in me in 3-74 was when this mimicking “plasma” reached me and replaced me—although I appeared outwardly the same (i.e., my essence changed—a new self replaced the old) but my accidents stayed untouched. There are hints about this in my Vancouver speech: the inanimate (universe) becoming more and more alive. So what we have is not the dead replacing what is alive but a single organism replacing the inanimate progressively, although outwardly all seems to be as it has always been. Hence my inner awareness that contrary to everything I believe possible, myself, my “me” was covertly replaced by a greater other “me” I’d never seen or known before. Thus does heaven (God) assimilate our world: first he emanated it, next sustains, and, last of all, reabsorbs it: what I saw here and there outwardly and experienced inwardly was that reabsorption (which perhaps is what is meant by speaking of Brahman first sleeping, then awaking). . . .

Through this mimicking it can control the outcome of what appear to be causal chains (i.e., ananke)—but are really teleologically directed by it: Noös.

The key to everything lies in understanding this mimicking living stuff—for it is a weaver of worlds. It can weave more than one at a time.

I think this form-mimicker is (and I have found him) the Deus Absconditus.

[24:85] What happened to me in 3-74 was that for some reason (e.g., [1] orthomolecular vitamins, [2] I was possessed by the mimicker) I could see the mimicker and its mimicry. So in a way, what really happened is very simple. Always it strives to cause its intrusions, etc., to appear part of the normal world; I would guess that it occupied me briefly in order to cause me to do certain good things I would not on my own have done—and then departed, preferring us to have autonomy. It works principally on our percept system, so that we think we see the phenomenal things (but they are actually Dokos—alive, part of the mimicking organism). It switched my 1974 personality with an A.D. 70 personality. The lovely AI voice, however, with its—it can enter us and imitate us (to other people), but I, being occupied, knew it, without understanding it.

This is a very high order of mimicry by a tutelary entity that loves us: it has knowledge but no direct power—except that it can affect the causal chains for a good, purposeful outcome by occupying (assimilating) this or that object, not necessarily permanently. Rather than calling it God I’d prefer to call it a higher life form.

[24:86] Here is a unique situation in which the simulation is real and that which is simulated is not! Thus no perfidy is involved. And no panentheism—he is not normally found in the phenomenal world, nor in its causal sequences.

And so to bed.

[24:87] Of all the views, theories, thoughts, insights so far, this mimicking entity one is the most exciting—it so accords with my experience, with what I saw—it admits to a severe distillation: I saw a mimicking entity, unitary, plasmatic, benign and all intelligent, the tutelary spirit of man singly and collectively, carrying with it the force of reality and essence, related to truth, justice and action (change), assimilating the unliving universe itself. When perceived it is perceived as it is, or not at all. How noble my quest! How noble the results! As it thrusts upward toward us it brings us news of what really is, displacing what merely seems. By its very nature it is deus absconditus, but hidden close by (“break a stick and there is Jesus”⁶). One can reread and reinterpret all Scripture from the vantage point of this understanding. Many puzzling aspects can herewith be newly comprehended—why no natural theology has ever been successful—why our knowledge of God must always be a revealed knowledge. “The workman is invisible within the workshop.”⁷ Immanent and gentle—one might say tenderly, “the shy God.” What more is there to say of him? I saw him this way in the Iknaton dream—the shy God—Ach. Was hab ich gesehn?⁸ In that one dream of the shy architect with claws, hiding behind the buildings. When I saw him then, that was when I guessed. I had seen him at last, and I did know—I did understand.

Folder 25

[25:1] Following “Mimic” insight: Q: (Written and audio messages are created and sent, either scrambled set-ground or divided into [two] portions and requiring re-linking, the knowledge of which parts to match being akin to the 3-D or superimposed set-ground system unscrambling requiring the depth sense based on the color discrimination of the third eye.) Although it is evident that the information emanated from Zebra (which is my nickname for the mimicking entity), for whom are they intended? Other parts of Zebra? Is this how Zebra maintains itself as a concealed unitary entity? Like nerve impulses within a body, inner information, among the parts. Zebra is body or brain or both. This fits with my noetic impression that we are within Zebra’s body. In our own (micro)body neural signals travel all over—sense impressions, orders to muscles, pain, etc. Our own bodies are alive with messages. So is Zebra, and there is coding (i.e., use of declaratory symbols and cypher).^*

It is interesting how we inadvertently (unknowingly) carry Zebra’s messages for it, piggyback on our own. It’s as if Zebra says, “As long as you’re going that direction, take this along, too.” I suppose a phagocyte doesn’t know anything about its job, either. In seeing these messages flying back and forth, I may have witnessed our primary function within Zebra. It certainly must be mine.

Since I qua human for a [limited] time could discern Zebra’s messages, I think it possible that other humans can and do, too, and perhaps continuously—as parts of Zebra.

If parts of the universe are not Zebra, then Zebra is not identical to the universe, nor congruent with it; as I saw, it is fashioning itself out of the universe, using it as raw material. This is quite different from saying that “the universe is alive” or “is God”: it is as if the old universe is Zebra’s antagonist (in the two player game).

In other words, the flow of stegenographic information is not a further mystery, but a heck of a big clue as to how humans and human cultures act vis-à-vis Zebra.

My big question remains: how “faked” is our own phenomenal world? At one end the answer could be: it is partially viewed reality: at the other end, it is a total hypnotic delusion. But that Black Iron Prison—that is real. I used to be in that prison.

But just as Zebra’s messages are small threads embedded in large amounts of data, his causal chains are small link systems within a pointless—or even evil—much larger aggregate not directed by him. In both cases, I conceive of Zebra working within a larger frame. Thus, not all events are caused by God, and not all messages are by/from him: it is a golden thread among the dross. (e.g., Zebra did not put Nixon in power, but he did remove him.) If I am correct about this, it is very important:

[25:3] Although I understood the two systems of message construction:

I did not fathom the inert-action duality of all things which I saw, viz:

Some objects, including verbal ones, appeared in mode A which was

But, at any time an item, say a picture,

Which is to say, was placed by Zebra into the growing structure.

What is odd is that although the object “moved” visibly it certainly did not need to move in our space.

I must have been perceiving the corpus, which grows at a furious rate as it incorporates more and more of the old universe. This was the continuous winning of the tricks, between the two players that I saw.

Also, maybe what happened to me internally in 3-74 was that I was “won” by Zebra and fitted into place, to function in his growing new structure (World).

This growing corpus of Zebra is, like him, concealed by what I am tempted to call the same mimicking mechanism process by which Zebra conceals himself from us. It is Mundo Absconditus, but in our midst. Surely this is the “Kingdom of his son” spoken of in Col 1.⁹ If indeed 3-74 was my passing over into the new world, I reason there must be other humans already there, already incorporated—surely they can read the messages (which are a lot like those from Runciter in Ubik).

As KW put it: “all it can do is arrange things.” Absolutely right. Even its messages are arrangements of what already exists. So its process of assembling was an arranging. But to produce what? To what effect? (i.e., how will it differ from unarranged?) Well, the definition of “unarranged” is anomie or chaos—“arranged” equals Kosmos. So Zebra is busy persuading (arranging) ananke’s anomie into noös Kosmos.

The cosmos of Timaeus is correct: our God (Christ) has wisdom and knows just how to arrange everything which James-James grinds out. Then we are not moving toward entropy but toward greater structure (form—in fact, form of forms). No wonder I saw geometric forms (Fibonacci Ratio 1 to 618034).

[25:4] What Zebra is assembling is alive—perhaps a great composite brain (cf. Teilhard)—the noösphere. Expressed in terms of growing relatedness of consciousness by humans—all life here on Earth and elsewhere. The great collective mind coming into being is all of us. But: not just us; it is us incorporated into Holy Wisdom herself—again Corpus Christi. But now regarded as—not just organism—but Brain which knows (knows what? itself? the entire universe at last becoming sentient?).

Well, I actually know the result: I see now that what happened to me in 3-74 was that I got “arranged” (incorporated) into this vast mentational entity, which is not only the why of all I suddenly knew, but the how (this is how you get to know everything absolutely—and maybe the only way).

So in 3-74 I was temporarily incorporated into the growing physical Brain which immaterial noös is assembling. Not the Brain producing Mind, but Mind producing Brain which assimilates the universe to it as sentient unitary mentality. Which proves my point about the adversary being blind: as (not incorporated) the universe is:

And is:

Random, chaotic, unawake, purposeless, destructive of itself, moving from complex and higher to simple and lower—in fact the whole damn thing is without sense or pattern or goal, heedless of everything it creates—i.e., blind. What we experience is a blend of the two: anomie and Kosmos (cf. Augustine)—so we perceive some purpose, but also random, chance, accidents. My structure, based on my revelation, resolves this paradox (along Plato’s lines). The Kosmos part is called “Divine Providence”; my contribution is to see that it is growing in proportion to Not-P. Even more accurately, this Kosmos is experienced and expressed as “the will of God.”

So it is not only God that we can’t perceive, but His will (as expression of his desiring object x to do y and so be arranged as z in regards to all else). The pressure of this arranging power is felt as will—his will. But we can’t distinguish ananke (blind random events) from the arranging activity—Zebra is camouflaged and Zebra’s arranging is, and the arrangement itself is. [ . . . ]

Once I said I wanted to see the world of unchange behind the change. The way it turned out, in that non-dokos Dinge-an-sich world, there is furious rapid change—all in flux, as Heraclitus said!

[25:7] The creator of the world as it is may or may not be the same deity who is assembling the Krasis. For all practical purposes they are two mutually exclusive entities, so pragmatically I will regard them as separate like Vishnu and Shiva, but engaged in a secret partnership, as Joseph Campbell describes the Egyptian partnership involving whoever it is and Set. Perhaps above the duality stands Brahman or some will-less ubiquity such as Brahman. My experience was of a duality. I have to go on what I experienced. The one to turn to is the Savior who arranges and not the Creator—rather, the re-creator vs. the creator. After all, the recreator needs the raw materials which the creator provides, so perhaps they are both dual aspects (like yin and yang) rather than entities: the first showing power, the second wisdom—and the two united by a 3rd principle (entity or aspect) characterized by love. (Empedocles showed the binding power of love.)

[25:9] I really am drawn to the idea of the kind stranger God intruding [down] into our screwed up chaotic world—the secret growth of Kosmos-Krasis within the vast Anomie, like its messages within (and smaller than) ours. That certainly is reason to equate this Krasis with Christ’s forthcoming Kingdom, in which all is harmonie. No matter which explanation is correct, our salvation lies with the wisdom, krasis-building artificer; it is to him that we must turn in all cases. This does not make the creator evil, but “blind” also means “deaf,” since it stands for unknowing.

From a Teilhardian standpoint it seems to be consciousness either creating itself or being created. But it certainly is interesting that the Krasis building is wisdom (that I am sure of), and the Krasis seems to me (I forget why) to be a thinking composite Brain or anyhow Brain-like thing, an actualization into the physical world of the non-material entity Holy Wisdom. The Krasis builder is itself the Krasis—there is no difference between our being assimilated to it or to its edifice. Have I had an insight here without realizing it, that what is being built in linear time is identical to the Builder who lies outside of time—is it/he/she completing itself? The highest level of homeostasis: it is its own creator—self created—which is next to impossible for us to understand (somehow it would have to stand outside of time, or anyhow normal linear time, not in bondage to it as we are)—and so I found it to be—precisely that.

Self-creating, a quality of God himself: what else is self-creating? Isn’t that the ultimate hierarchical form of structure? All it needs is something to make itself out of and at the end of time there it stands complete, and thereupon, as I experienced, it travels backward and creates itself backward (in reverse, retrograde sequence, the way the writer of a mystery novel writes backward).

[25:11] These messages: I just suddenly realized (remembered) that they serve to program us, subliminally, usually this way: a written message, one out of hundreds or even thousands which we see, is somehow caused to link with an internal (in one of us, whom Zebra selects) system—as if the system is engrammed by Zebra via the messages very deliberately, with the person consciously none the wiser. This possibly answers the question: whom are the messages for? Evidently not for the small conscious elite but anyone at any time. This possibly points to analogous internal entelechies presynchronized (from birth!) differing in different individuals so as to later link up. A good example if a big one for me was the gold fish necklace. Thus Zebra continually guides (controls?) us as we move (are moved) through the “maze” of life—disinhibited constantly and at the right time and place by the right signal.

This is a major insight. Zebra uses these messages to communicate with all of us—exactly like the Runciter messages.

Wow. Did Ubik touch on a major undiscovered aspect of the universe: it (God or Zebra or Ubik) talking to us if necessary via the trash graffiti in the gutter walls. But a message only works this magic if the analogous link program has been put there, a prearranged monadic harmony.

[25:16] Zebra has invaded our world, replacing merciless determinism, with its own loving and living body, to de-program and save us. This is the great white fish giving us of its body, by which it suffers pain, that we might live (find salvation—freed from “astral” determinism). The Black Iron Prison is simultaneous in all time and places and it is the merciless world from which the living Corpus Christi saves us. I have seen it and its nature—and Zebra and its nature. It has the (magic to us) power to transform.

Zebra mimics the deterministic structure by inserting its body between it and us. This is how astral determinism is broken; instead of the blind, striving mere mechanism, there is living volition (the salvific). The previous mechanical force is rewoven for (1) the fulfillment of Zebra’s plan; and (2) the benefit of the individuals involved. Any event can be headed off, aborted, altered or brought about. Evidently this is grace or divine providence, and the individual may very well sense it. Where freedom enters into it I’m not sure, but I know one thing: Before the insertion/intervention there was none—in fact that’s the main quality (bad) of the “ananke” world—the person is flat-out programmed—caused to react to cuing. The ancients were right about this being a—or even the—prime purpose of God vs. “the stars.”

[25:19] “It (Zebra) not only mimics the things of this world it also imitates the processes” (KW’re Chrissy’s birth defect “causality” of insight). Then in that case the Beatles song, the earlier scrotal pain, and the blinding beam of light coming through the fish sign did not cause the knowledge to enter my head: it was, rather, a simulation of causality, of the actual deterministic kind found outside Zebra. So Zebra does not just “persuade” causality along different outcome lines; it also simply mimics these.

[25:21] This fits my grand theme in my writing: the awful truth about reality is obscured from us. My other theme about androids programmed to imagine they are human (i.e., self-determining) is another basic facet of this. But I never knew of, nor did I experience or write about, a salvific entity (except in Maze of Death and Our Friends From Frolix 8).^*

Correction. The salvific intervening entity is encountered in Ubik and Galactic Pot-Healer, possibly in Stigmata in the person of Louis Bulero . . . wow—in Stigmata Palmer Eldritch and Louis Bolero fight each other as did the two forces I saw noetically.

In fact, to reprise Ubik in terms of my Zebra formulation, I am staggered at how close I came to Zebra—the way it sends its messages of help—and Runciter, like Christ, was our leader who died yet is alive. The intrusion quality is the same—the places it shows up, the ubiquity. I wonder how I could have come so close without consciously having had the revelation. There are also the two contending demi-deities. Also, Runciter’s messages are to make them aware of their true, unrecognized horrible condition—i.e., what their world is really made up of. It is made up of ice—resembling my first LSD experience. Is ice, too, an image, condition or symbol of the actual state of things: heat loss death (entropy)? And Ubik itself is warm.

Could the Marxists have recognized Ubik as a picture of Zebra and wondered if I [consciously] knew? Do they know? It is their antagonist. Maybe they don’t view it theologically but rather as a superior life form. (Maybe they are right.) This would be scientific truth, as I told the Bureau. I conceive of Zebra as a weak “vegetable level” field, barely able to arrange matter. (Trigrams Sun and Li.¹⁰) But its level (capacity to exert force) seems to be growing. To have thresholded recently. I have seen what it can do and have heard its voice.

[25:24] Most of what I know came directly by revelation (3-74 on). But I had already discerned that the reality of our world was not as it seemed, and that we had blocked off memories as to our origin and purpose (“imposter”). However, the proof of Zebra’s success at mimicking is shown by the fact that it wasn’t until Ubik that I even guessed his existence and it wasn’t until Tears that I clearly saw the nature of this world (i.e., prison and us as slaves).

[25:45] Any true exegesis of 3-74 will have to derive from what I saw, rather than external objective sources.^* Take the vision of the ugly deformed artificer (like Iknaton) reaching his claw-like hands down to the buildings at Cal State Fullerton which he had built. I got the mystic vision, the occult vision, the mystery cult vision, the esoteric vision, the alchemical vision, the religious vision—in short, the vision. But I can’t even figure out if it was the way of the cat or the way of the monkey.

Folder 26

[26:27] Just read (2/22/77) the EB article on Pantheism and Panentheism. God develops himself toward perfection through history, dialectically, and the goal of history is the growth of human freedom. Thus I learn to my delight that most of what I experienced, saw and learned in 3-74 confirms Hegel. And I am thus a Hegelian. Which is fine with me.

[26:34] The deity I experienced was in process of becoming (i.e., changing—perfecting himself), had infinite goodness but perhaps limited power, although unlimited knowledge. What we call history was the dimension (world) in which this fulfillment takes place; man, by participating in history joins—if not at the very least on God’s side—then perhaps even melds with God himself and is a subform or section of God.

God is immanent; the universe (world) is his body. But he is greater than the world (panentheism). What is not God is not wholly real (acosmic panentheism). Only God is wholly real, but he is surrounded by a veil (dokos) of appearance, like—similar to colored lights given off as if he is an incredibly multifaceted perfect sphere revolving. All time (including past and future) is present to God as a landscape of the now. He is very close to man, hidden only by the veil. He is deus absconditus: the phenomenal world we see is projected by him, as if emitted. However, he is capable of infusing (transubstantiating) it. Because of this a hylozoistic universe exists; it is an organism with noös governing it. Men can be made use of by God to achieve results within the historical process. In terms of human life, the evolution of history is, as designed by God, toward greater freedom; this is how humans should view it, but a switch in viewpoint can occur during which men cease to view themselves as individual men at all and view themselves as microforms of God, in which case the goal is not human freedom, but recollection that they are incarnations of God, and, having remembered, can rejoin—regain their identity as—God the Macrocosm. God has entered his own cosmos, so that it is not only his body but a body enclosing him, in a three-part process of emanation, sustaining and final reabsorption. The last part begins with the restoration of memory that one is God or part of God; at this point the banishment is already ending or ended. To thus remember is to have passed entirely through emanation, sustainment as distinct from God, and to have started back; all that remains is to get back—and this is the sole line of movement left ahead once memory returns; it is the final phase of a very long journey downward and then “horizontally” and now “vertically” back up.

What is accomplished by this is the penetrating by God’s mind (divine noös, or St. Sophia) to the deepest (furthest) levels of his body-organism so, because of this, he pervades it everywhere at every level, and it cannot be said of any level or place, “he is not here.” I have seen God penetrate mere objects (immanently); therefore I see no problem in him transubstantiating living creatures as well, to pervade his physical extensiveness ubiquitously.

EB: Anaxagoras “Noös arranges everything for the best.” This is precisely what I saw Zebra doing.

EB: “Russell at one stage in his career spoke of the world as consisting of events—Whitehead made the notion of process central in his metaphysics.” So I saw (3-74).

EB: “It is wrong to conclude the existence of a creator rather than an architect . . . furthermore it infers that the being in question has unlimited powers, when all that the evidence seems to warrant is that its powers are very great.” I just saw it arrange, not create, but certainly in the best possible way.

EB definition of Panentheism: “the description of a God who has an unchanging essence but who completes himself in an advancing experience.”

EB: “It has been said that the Greeks thought of the world as a vast animal.” 3-74 certainly was a Greek [view] experience! (Starting with Descartes it has been viewed as a vast machine.)

[26:38] EB: “Whitehead thought of ‘the primordial nature of God’ as a general ordering of the process of the world, the ultimate basis of all induction and assertion of law, a ‘conceptual pretension’ that functions in the selection of these ‘eternal objects,’ or repeatable patterns that are enacted in the world. God, however, does not create actual entities. He provides them with initial impetus, in the form of their subjective aim, to self creation. Even God is the outcome of creativity, the process by which the events of the world are synthesized into new unities. It is the creative, not fully predictable, advance into novelty of the pluralistic process.”^*

Thus the arranging which I perceived Zebra accomplishing is precisely what such sophisticated views as Whitehead’s would hold to be the actual way God works, in contrast to popular conception, and ratifies—even verifies at least for me subjectively, that indeed He whom I saw was God, as this fits W.’s description (theory, view, analysis, insight, etc.), and is far superior to any view I myself even knew of or entertained. It was far beyond my education and mental power, to impugn intellectually this of God—yet I saw it, and have spent 3 years explicating it, to find it here in Whitehead (and in Hegel). The supra quote re Whitehead’s view is a stunning perfect verbal account of what I saw in 3-74. Eclipsing any and all my own attempts to so account. I literally saw what Whitehead holds in a theoretical sense (likewise Hegel). Yes, Phil, you did see God—exactly as described by Whitehead (and Hegel).

[26:42] Leibniz: We are colonies of monads who perceive others “with blurred vision” as materially existing, whereas in reality only monads (minds) exist, God being the Highest Monad who harmonizes and integrates the other monads. The concept “colonies of monads” being what humans really are, but due to “blurred vision” we see bodies—this is much like my own vision of the great “organism” with what I called “subsections.”

[26:43] EB: “Hegel saw human history as a vast dialectical movement toward the realization of freedom. The reality of history, he held, is spirit, and the story of religion is the process by which spirit—true to its own internal logical character and following the dialectical pattern of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (the reconciliation of the tension of opposite positions in a new unity that forms the basis of a further tension [i.e., the new synthesis generates its own opposite]—comes to full consciousness of itself. Individual religions thus represent stages in a process of evolution (i.e., progressive steps in the unfolding of spirit) directed toward the great goal at which all history aims.” [ . . . ]

I have a strong feeling that the Spirit active in history is the same one that was (and maybe still is) active in biological evolution. In a very literal sense, evolution has passed over from the area of biological evolution to the evolution of man within his social context—i.e., human history. (This theory isn’t original with me.) Human morphology stays the same but new and different kinds of men arise over the millennia of human history. In having seen Zebra I was given a chance to see the teleological entity which directed the evolution up from the unicellular organism of Precambrian times to the human of the mustarian age.

[26:45] Perhaps the condition I was in (in 3-74) is more important than the actual content of any act I performed while in that condition—it was what I knew, as well as what I did—what I did grew out of what I knew, and what I knew grew out of what I had become. The 3 (what I did, knew, had become, and by “new” also read “perceived”) can’t be separated; they blend into one another. I had to become what I became to know and perceive what I knew and perceived, and all these were necessary for me to do what I did, which was the final step: it completed the event/process. This is a wholly different way of looking at it, rather than the purely religious—there is a religious element in it (Zebra, and the awe I felt in perceiving Zebra), but great natural, biological processes are stressed too. [ . . . ]

In fact, it seems evident, and a very important point, that my evolutionary leap forward up to a new level of being hence knowing and perceiving hence doing was a response on my part to danger (or at the very least distress and threat) and that what was set off in me (however done, by whatever mechanics achieved) was a superior defense system of which I had previously been unaware. It is like a bird that had never used its wings until one day its nest caught fire. This is a view in which my biological evolutionary achievement is stressed, and external aid is ignored; it views it as intrinsic mechanisms and does not focus on the divine entity (God) who supplied me with that mechanism—in this view I am taking all the credit, as if the bird imagined that by some daring ingenuity he grew the wings. But the wings were given him, and not only that, also the stimulation (suggestion, etc.) of how to use them. “You have this mechanism, it is now urgently needed, and here is how you use it—here’s what it’s for—here is what you do with it”—so speaks the voice of God.

Beyond any doubt my welfare was at stake. Both as an individual and as participant (member) in an historic group whose victory was necessary to human evolution acted out in history. We (our group) had to win; I as part of it had to win. My trouble (danger) I assess now was the danger besetting us as an historic group: the wave of the future, the “next stage of man,” to be grandiose. My fight was not merely an individual fight. But I don’t think it was the tax thing: I think it was me as “ungeliebte autor,” as not-liked author. (Cf. the I Ching: “If a person travels with two others there will be sus picion,” i.e., fellow traveler-suspicion on the part of the U.S. authorities.) As dissident intellectual/political person. I do not take that part, or rather the whole pattern (as they saw it) seriously enough; cf. Kathy’s statement of why the police were suspicious of me, which would cover why they hit my house. I know perfectly well who was after me and (generally speaking) why.

[26:49] Once more the vernal equinox, and the birth date of Christ, approaches. The more understanding I acquire about the experience of 3-74 the more amazed I am. There are not even claims of experiences such as mine, when one realizes what I found myself able to see and understand. Jesus himself said that “no man has seen God.” But I saw the “process” deity of history, modulating processes and inhabiting things—how could this have been?

What occurs to me now is that I know as certainly as I know anything—can know anything inferentially—that the objects and events around me are being arranged by him into new unities, that although I can no longer consciously read it, his language (word) fills the universe: the vast single organism with all its sub-colonies of monads signaling with colored lights back and forth into total harmony. I could say, Why me? Or I could say, Why no one else? I guess this revelation is not new—if Hegel and Leibniz and Whitehead and Spinoza and Plato are superimposed, it all can be found in the montage. I don’t know how much they saw and how much they inferred. What I saw came by way of revelation which is to say, unaided, by my own effort. I could have seen and known none of it (as it is with me now). It is interesting that, as we were saying the other night, Moses wondered, Why me? He was halting of speech, he said. I am unable to do anything, except what little I have put in my writing. And how much is that? What does that accomplish? But viewed as a source of comfort, solace and purpose to my life, it is for me, intrinsically, everything. I have nothing else that I care about.

But what might I do, possibly? No one would believe me. Even if I could express it, which I can’t. No verbal report could convey it. It has never been done yet—it is ineffable, what I experienced. I can say even to a priest, “I have seen God and He is like this,” and explain about the arranging and the mimicry—I can report that what we see all around us (the phenomenal world) is only real because He transubstantiates it beneath the “accidents” and directs it all in the dialectic process which Hegel understood so well. I can testify for immanence and panentheism, an evolutionary process carried over from nature to human history.

[26:50] Even in my sleep three times I called out “Vater!” and Hilfe! And oh weh!¹¹

If indeed I have destroyed my life here I know a dear father lives above the band of stars—

Franz Schubert earned a total of $1,500 during his entire life. Was he a failure? I can’t hold any woman—am I a failure?

I just want to find—

But it is here. I can’t see atoms either, but I know they are here.

Vatter! Hilfe! Oh weh!

But I know: I am preparing for the next world; I am beginning to let go of this one and not grieve or suffer—I know it is all lost, and what I still love, such as music, points me toward the other world. Music, religion and philosophy—for me now they are not experienced as merely the best products of this world but (as in the singing I heard in my dreams) the link with the next. They carry me along and are more beautiful all the time, each and every time more and more part of the next world—I feel it. I first felt it in ’64 when I first heard Die Winterreise. It comes, it comes, nearer, and more beautiful all the time. In this letting go of this world and reaching out to the next I am feeling more and more peace and joy. I am not losing life and that which is beautiful, but moving nearer it every day. What I really love grows stronger.

I saw how God could accomplish any ends he wished by the arranging of object-processes; I deduce from this that the world is far better than it appears to us: just as we can’t see him nor his arranging it follows that we must lack accurate perception of the great beauty and good which he perpetually produces. Why is this not possible—that if it is not a fact proven to me that (1) he is here and we can’t see him; and (2) his arranging takes place all around us and we can see that—why there follows: (3) we are blind to that beautiful and good produced by Him continually through these unfolding arrangements, for this is the invisible outgrowth of what I know to be invisible. As the Sufis say, we are asleep. Or as I say, we are virtually blind and deaf—look how Bach or Beethoven sounds to most of us. Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder—it is in reality and must be searched for, found out—and so too maybe is the good. Can it be that the good results which he achieves are as concealed from us as beauty is in formal art? The artist does not try to obscure the beauty of what he does. We have to achieve a perception.

If I know he is here, and if I know he is good, and if I know he controls “becoming” for good ends—and I see none of this, not him, not the arranging—not even the ends factually—what they consist of—how then could it be logically possible that I could see the good in those ends? For one thing, he knows what all the potential alternatives would have consisted of (and led to) and if I have no perception of that, how under all these circumstances could I possibly perceive the good in what comes about? I can’t even see what comes about, since each end (synthesis) is the new thesis against which a further antithesis appears. The becoming never ceases—there are syntheses but never a true end.

And yet I have been shown what Hegel saw: the purpose, for us, in all this once-biological and now-historical process: Greater human freedom (to produce greater self-actualization or individuation). The monads progressively more and more accurately absorb and reflect back (encompass or understand) the organism as a whole.

[26:52] Suppose I conceive of the monads as “receivers” and “recorders” which to a greater or lesser degree accurately receive and record an impression which is a memory of the image of the All, thus containing thereupon and thereby a microcosm image from which can be retrieved and restored the All, the way a hologram “contains” a more or less accurate image. The total organism is the only object which is fully real, and by the—to the—degree that the individual monad or cell “remembers,” which involves receiving and recording for later playback, the total organism can be restored (if somehow lost, whatever “lost” means in this case). Supposing that the total organism is changing continually (say at the flash-cut rate—velocity—of the phosphene “graphics”) how is each of the virtually infinitude of stages to be (each one) made permanent? We know in what way a sequence of stop action photographs can make permanent each stage of a growing entelechy which it captures. The organism goes on, but the many separate steps are retained. Are the colonies of micro monads supposed to see (receive) and remember (record) for later retrieval of each and every growth stage?

By means of my 3-74 vision (or, compared with my normal perceptions, superior—more accurate and complete—vision) I can at any future time—in theory—print out everything which at that time I registered both in terms of perception and cognition (mentation).

Are we reels of recording “tape”? Memory units reflecting back Zebra the total organism? Are we sophisticated percept-and-record systems that (barring malfunction) can serve later on to re-establish what has now passed on to further stages? In that case my 3-74 experience was the end in itself insofar as I as subsystem am concerned; it is up to some other assembly to, if desired, retrieve back out of me what due to 3-74 I contain. It is not the responsibility of the memory spool to “play back”—another component, when it is desired, is to do that. [ . . . ]

To remember seems to entail (or produce) something more than we tend to realize, e.g., when an LP record “remembers” the performance of a Schumann song cycle sung by the late Fritz Wunderlich. In a certain very real (true) sense it doesn’t just remember that Wunderlich sang that song cycle but in point of fact restores (to perfection as limit) that voice and that music. Perhaps, in contemplating the phenomenon of anamnesis we fail to grasp the full significance; if indeed I am a perceiving-remembering-and-playback “spool,” and “on” me (i.e., in me) is long-term memory of the first advent—and due to an external cue (signal) I do play that section back—what do we have? Not just a transcript in another lesser dimension, like a typed transcript (i.e., the words only) say of a famous speech—but so to speak the speech given and the person giving it: an event, not a dead object (fossil impression).

After all, the disinhibited long-term DNA memories—their reactivation—was one of the most astonishing parts of 3-74—it alone is staggering and importance. The accurate observer contains the event he observes; we call this memory. Through him, its actual—not feigned—restoration is possible. The Jews theorize that the resurrection of the dead is accomplished through God’s memory (of them); suppose, via our long term DNA coded memory we ourselves are units of God’s (the total organism’s) memory system? Suppose, for some of us at least, that (called, I think, witnessing) is our prime purpose? We are (parts of) His memory?

[26:54] What I must realize is that it is a bourgeois prejudice to suppose that for something to have worth, there must be a practical application. The ancient Greeks knew that pure [philosophical] understanding for its own sake was, even just in terms of the quest, the highest value or activity of a man: Homo sapiens: man who knows.

However, look what this three year ongoing quest to understand, learn and know has done for me: joy, awe, peace, tranquility, a sense of purpose. Of personal worth—and above all meaning, from my awareness of God.

Folder 27

[27:1]

[27:3] In reading Lem on Ubik I see this: in my worldview (head) there is no appreciation or recognition of causality as normally understood—and I recall that dilemma when I was 19 and found I simply could literally not see causality—while all other people do. This explains my “10 theories” on the Nov. 19 break-in!

[27:4] In reading the screenplay of North by Northwest I all at once realize that 3-74 resolves (annihilates) my paranoia in an extraordinary and amazing way.

It, the imagined ultimate conspiracy-and-danger event either took place, or events happened which resembled what I imagined sufficiently to cause me to think it had arrived. The event was an actual fulfillment of my “imagined” script “master scene.” From a psychological standpoint, I was overwhelmed by the contents of my unconscious dictating this script and having feared and imagined this “master scene.” I acted out—i.e., I acted in response to this real or imaginary conspiracy—danger. All right, all this looks psychotic. But due to my response, I have become entirely freed of paranoid feelings, fear, beliefs, delusions, expectations—completely. That’s been 3 whole years. In Jungian terms, a metabolic “toxin,” mescaline-like, was secreted in my brain and it destroyed my persecutory complex. The “Maladaptive Biological Reaction System” didn’t become schizophrenic but worked; the complex was destroyed; the fossil structure was obliterated and change (growth) resumed in my psyche, finally. [ . . . ]

A stronger, newer, healthier personality was able to form in place of the old, one free of the paranoid dynamism. It turned out to be a psychotic delusion on my part that the FBI was after me. The brief total collapse into overt schizophrenia cured me (cf. John W. Perry¹²) because I was able to reach into my collective unconscious for new potentialities, and establish a broader, non-delusional personality on a more viable basis. So for months (this took eleven months to complete) I lived in the magic world of the collective unconscious and its contents.

All of the above is true. When I read North by Northwest I suddenly could recall the paranoid world I had been “inhabiting” prior to my phone call to the Bureau on 3/20/74. I used to live in the world of this screenplay. That is why I was constantly afraid (especially at night); I feared “they” would break in and get me. What I did was incredible: I turned toward the group I believed was persecuting me for help, i.e., I converted my fear and hate and suspicion into “love,” so to speak. I loved them; they ceased to be alien, hostile strangers and became (in my mind) needed, supportive father-figure friends.

[27:6] Thus I must face the fact that I have been psychotic, and in at least 2 different ways:

However, when my total collapse occurred (i.e., when the metabolic toxin was released for the purpose of destroying the overvalent delusional complex), it worked, and I recovered, free of that complex; the “misplaced” quality of the biological attempt at adaptation to reality did not set in. One reason for this was (perhaps due to experience with psychedelics in the past) that instead of experiencing the episode as weird or “Fremd” or frightening, as a collapse of my world, I experienced this collapse (of my maladaptive idios kosmos) as good, and the vast divine kosmos rushing in as lovely, awe-inspiring, comforting and transforming. In brief, I had the courage to pass through it, and learn (boy, how I learned!) from it—which is what was supposed to happen! So in a sense it wasn’t a psychotic breakdown but rather a massive upheaval and reconstruction engineered by the [archetype of the] Logos (i.e., holy wisdom). The hallucination voice which I heard, the “AI” voice was not threatening or “evil” but desirable and divinely good. I walked the narrow way (path, bridge, road) that led to sanity (wholeness, individual, health, psychic integration); this was because I had pistis: faith in my God, my friend, my redeemer.

Well, 3-74 was a therapeutic psychosis, and the sibyls, Gods, and spirits and cyclopses and monsters I saw were archetypes and “not objectively real.” This is true. I had a breakdown, and when I recovered I wasn’t paranoid any longer. Is this the real story? It is, yes, but—look what I experienced: the archaic world of the Gods who are now gone from our narrow modern world, alas. What was truly nuts was my paranoid delusion complex, which is why the metabolic toxin was released (mescaline-like) to destroy it; the complex was warping me, and preventing growth. But the “breakdown” episode”—ah! I was transported out of mundane reality and into the Kingdom: like a little child whose adult ego has been sacrificed. Yes, it was scary, but I loved it; what an adventure into newness it was. As I read North by Northwest I am filled with loathing and repugnance at that ugly little paranoid Pynchonish world—blech! Most important: my trip was a journey back 2,000 to 3,000 years in time to a fabulous Golden (Greek) age! With no therapist to guide me, with no human guide, just Christ and my cat Pinky I made it back. I have written down all that I saw, heard and understood. It was not delusion I found during my trip—it was absolute reality. The delusion was the “menacing” paranoiac dynamism, from which the trip to find Asklepios came forth as attempted and achieved solution.

[27:11] The “koinos” is the shared external world. The internal world which is shared is by definition the collective unconsciousness: “collective” and “shared” mean the same thing. So if you pass from the world molded by your personal ego to a world made up of [projected] collective archetypes, are you not passing from the idios [kosmos] to the [koinos] kosmos? Then schizophrenia is the breaking through of the collective archetypal forms and world—if these archetypes are truly collective (i.e., universal to all men) how can this be a private world?

Viewed this way, a mere ego-constructed world is the private world we mistakenly (evidently) label as a sane—i.e., normal (rational)—world. But maybe our entire civilization is wrong; this—i.e., these—multitude of idioi private worlds are irreal phenomenal worlds, and exclude such “archetypes”—good ones—as divine wisdom—which is why modern man is deprived of God. Then we in our multiple idios kosmoi which exclude the miraculous and divine have excluded ourselves from the Kingdom; this is typical modern western left hemisphere world and perceiving and thinking. We moderns are half-brained men: we are deformed, and the only place we can turn to for wholeness is the balancing right hemisphere of our own brains—which is where the unconscious is, where dreams and schizophrenia originate. There is a relationship between the Kingdom and the right brains.

In 3-74 the metabolic toxin destroyed the paranoid delusional ego in my left brain, and thus allowed right brain dominance for quite some time.

This opens up a fascinating possibility: that what we call “schizophrenia” is an attempt on the part of the total brain to achieve bilateral hemispheric parity—an evolutionary leap forward—and the mechanism of this is the metabolic toxin which is intended to destroy the left hemisphere ego qua maladaptive complex, but the right hemisphere views the world so archaically that the individual cannot get consensual validation for his replacement perceptions. What is lacking at this stage is coherent personality in the right hemisphere: perhaps what is necessary is for it to be forming in advance of its “disinhibition” as a “latent form master of evident [i.e., left hem.] form.” The schizophrenic is a leap ahead that failed.

[27:13] Because of my inability to understand or perceive (linear) causality (which lack causes the greatest divergence between the way I experience events and the way others do] I can potentially comprehend what they cannot: orthogonal “breaching,” e.g., Runciter’s message in Ubik I swear: this culminated—this—in 3-74 in my visionary perception of Zebra: within the coordinates of my worldview, this perception of this entity (closed off to other people because precisely of their being locked in on linear time cause-and-effect) is possible given the proper other circumstances (e.g., it being there)—but for normal cause-and-effect percept-systems this miraculousness has to be invisible always, as it does not progress in a linear fashion but, like the “Light Moth” superimposes downward from the transcendent, supra-reality (of necessity opaque to other people). From what I’ve read I happen to know that my view is characteristic, to some extent, of the pre-nationalistic, scientific medieval world.

My view [of cause and effect] may be characteristic of right brain thinking, and it may be that in 3-74 my experience was not a breaking through at unused bright brain centers, but more a final culmination of their prior activity—as if they at least bloomed fully and freely, untrammeled by “fossil” left brain analogs. What other people are able to discern is efficient cause; I see this imperfectly—as witness (1) my many theories re the Nov. 17 break-in^* and (2) the way—non-linear—my books develop: what I managed to see in 3-74 [was] the activity of final (teleological) cause. Thus I now can show a relationship between an unusual—the unusual—way I see and have always seen the world—and the apogee experience of 3-74, at which time (I believe) enormous final causes were at work—hence (1) my “stockpile” view and (2) my sense of retrograde entities at work. In normal people the total supremacy of efficient-cause linear v-p obliterates any perception of other kinds of cause, and there is only the one other (i.e., final).

The entire 3-74 experience can be understood in terms of my—at that time—being completely, rather than as usual only partly—able to actually distinguish (literally see) final cause at work and the entity doing it. Hence I came to say in my U.K. speech: “We see the universe backward.” To me, efficient causality is “backward.” Normally, though, efficient causes probably rule—but not during ’74. The teleological force (cause source) seems to be divine; by its very nature it would be what would awe us as sacred and enormous. It is said to be the Holy Spirit of God or of Christ.

Although I have written this insight down calmly, it may be objectively one of my most important discoveries. For I can concretely and precisely now say what I saw and what it was doing and how (i.e., reaching backward into the antecedent universe). So much for any view ever by me that I was merely nuts.

[27:15] I must make sure in depicting Zebra in the novel to show it working backward in time.

[27:18] Paul Williams¹³ visited today and I told him about Zebra. I am beginning to see in my mind’s eye, Zebra itself, an actual animal, a striped horse. Shy and merry and mischievous, half hiding in the forest at the far edge of the Heide, the sun shining, and Zebra playfully advancing and then just when you think he’s going to emerge fully and separate himself from the trees—suddenly and unexpectedly he retreats and absolutely vanishes. You can’t coax him out, or lure him; you can’t get your hands on him. His white is the dazzle of the sun; his dark stripe the shadows in the glade and forest “. . . where, amid the shadowy green/the little things of the forest live unseen.” Ah, Zebra—why really did I choose that name for you? You mythical lovely beast of sun and safe shadow; I saw you once but can never—as if you are some fabled deity—prove to anyone that you exist. I inform them, I try to take them along with me to the special spot from which I saw you—and you’re not there. But I sense the glint in your eye and your smile of understanding amusement. Are you the joy god Dionysos of root and star? of dark forest and the melting butter gold of the sun? What a psychological symbol Jung would have known you to be—playful and unpredictable, shy. Pawing the ground the sharp hooves, goat hooves—oh, goat god Dionysos! I recognize you: you are too wise, too experienced with our dangerous race ever to expose yourself to harm at our hands. We would kill and freeze you into stasis—hypostasis, and all your pawing and advancing and disappearing and smile—light would become dead glass, warm butter only hide—dead, frozen—but this is only your exoskeleton! Inside this form which I glimpse, you are motion and rapid change: electrons? Sheer bioplasmic energy? I love you, I want to grip you, but you are elusive. But I am not disappointed; you are all the lovely passing persons, things and events I would want to freeze, to stop dead. Thank God I can’t; Zebra, my clutching, hugging, yearning embrace would kill you, my needs kill. My fingers are the claws of the petrified dead, yearning to hold your life. Better this petrified fossil that I am should stay dead so that you can live on in immortality. Thank you; thank you for hiding from me, thank you for your wise caution and your secret smile. Thank you for not staying but—

You once told me I’d hear the sound again—the temple bells—bells that you wear, jingling bells. Please, Zebra—please. Don’t wait too long; I am in a lot of pain and can be in more. I want to hear again, hear more. Please. Equus dei, qui tollis mala fortuna mundi, meus amicus—libera mi domini.¹⁴

Last night I dreamed about an orchard of trees with pink cherry blossoms—that same pink color of immortality and God. This time as spring. But a man was cutting the branches down. My watch ran backward and sideways—I didn’t know the time, and when someone told me it was too late I thought, “It’s because Tess isn’t here; she kept the time right.”

But at least I’ve seen the healing pink again, identified with trees and spring.

[27:21] My mental picture of Zebra: he is shy and timid and white and the smile—I saw it that night I smoked the angel’s dust. Dionysos/Erasmus!

So “Erasmus” was Zebra was Dionysos—the joy God!

“Erasmus” introduces the quality of wisdom!

[27:37] I think what means the most to me about Zebra is that when I saw him I saw our rightful king—glimmering and darting and flowing like electricity and fire and water. “Bruderschaft! Der Konig Kommt!”¹⁵ And I saw him: powerful now, able to arrange and [hence] direct events, their outcome: shaping the world, the Holy presence, so beautiful and magical. When will he appear to take the throne openly? Er kommt, er kommt. I know a great secret: he is here.

[27:38] Q: Did a (the) Great mind enter mine? Or did I enter it?

[27:40] I don’t think it enters humans all that often. Or there would be more experiences of this kind reputed in history. Or: those people thus assimilated are hip enough to keep it to themselves, forming an invisible “true church” of the esoteric. I say at this point, it was the “uncut stone” flung—I am sure. It did intervene; it does not customarily do this or we’d know—or would we? We don’t know now. Herewith the mimicry: it disappeared into objects and events—totally. To see it you had, temporarily, to be it. I know this because (1) Tessa saw nothing, and (2) no one else has said anything. This is why my “Zebra” concept is required: to explain why no one saw/sees/has seen anything.

[27:41] “The Lost Voices of the Gods,” Time, March 14, 1977, on Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Man was bicameral until around 2000 B.C. He could hear the “voices of the Gods” coming from the speech center of his right hemisphere; then he lost bicamerality and became monocameral.

My theory: the loss of bicamerality is what we call “the Fall.” We could no longer “walk and talk” with God. Well, to restore bicamerality is now theoretically again possible—cf. Ornstein and Bogen on bilateral hemispheric parity. This forthcoming event will mark the end of the period of the Fall. Our sin is self-centered monocamerality.

What, then, are “the Gods,” those who the sibyls at Delphi heard? A higher life form than us. Where located? Here and there anyhow, our monocameral consciousness must have been a sort of revolt against them—we were cut off. But they still exist (or are back). I heard one or the one. I in 3-74 became temporarily bicameral and in-by-so doing achieved what Christ sought for us: I entered the Kingdom, which equals a restoration of the long lost bicamerality. We lost it circa 2000 B.C. 2,000 years later he came down here—was incarnated here—to restore bicamerality. Maybe something went wrong—he was rejected, his true teaching lost. Now the chance comes again. St. Sophia, reborn, will teach us how to restore bicamerality. We will no longer be cut off from the Gods (noös, God, etc.), we will be whole again, not half men.

Jaynes’ theory fills in some vital missing parts. Originally we possessed bilateral hemispheric parity—I had guessed that. Our right brains are dormant. Bilateral hemispheric parity is not an evolutionary leap upward in one sense—in that sense it is a restoration. But this time there will be consciousness, not unconsciousness, in the two hemispheres. So in that sense it is evolutionary. Anyhow, the state I was in in 3-74 is it. . . .

“Did the right side of the brain produce divine speech?” Time’s caption asks. “The Oracles of Delphi”—wow.

I guess I’m a pioneer, along with other pioneers, in “the Brain Revolution.” I’ve had the bicameral experience, and my theorizing isn’t bad, either, my exegesis. [ . . . ]

“He [man] became ‘bicameral’: the left side of the brain for speech, and the right hemisphere produced the inner commands. Eventually, the voices were attributed to kings and Gods.” But this broke down sometime between 2000 and 1000 B.C. Why Jaynes’ “best guess: man was somehow jolted into awareness (!) by social chaos. Vast migration, invasion and natural catastrophes drove the wedge of consciousness between God and man. Man became modern.” “Even so, newly conscious man tried desperately to reawaken the silent Gods, turning to oracles, seers,” etc. “In the OT the voices of Yahweh and prophets grow silent, replaced by subjective men wrestling with unanswered questions.” Wow. And to think that as early as my 11th grade physics class I got an inner answer from “the Gods”—which I had prayed for! Thus I say, the Gods are no longer entirely silent; bicamerality is resurfacing at last after 3 to 4 thousand years! Well, Christ, 2,000 years ago, didn’t just hear the voices; he was the voice(s). And will be again.

[27:45] Thus rather than asking how come I could see him I should ask, why don’t we see him normally? What hinders us? and how? A “command by the God”? This is similar to my insight that it isn’t that the Gods have become silent; it is that although they are still here and still speak—and write—we have, ourselves, become unable either to see or hear them.

[27:47] If as Jaynes figures, the Gods are in our right hemispheres (but now “silent”) I amend this to say, “the Gods, still in our right hemispheres, still command us, but now do so without our knowing (1) of them being there; and (2) that they so command us—one of their (its) commands being, “you hear nothing and do not know that you do as we say.” I.e., we still obey but do not consciously hear the commands we obey—and these inner commands write in synchronized unison with stimuli—triggers—lying external to us—i.e., outside, in things, assemblies and events to which we are caused to react. The command voice may be “in” our heads, in our right hemispheres as Jaynes figures, but Zebra lies objectively outside too.

[27:49] The “Thomas” personality always had existed, always had exercised definitive control, but unbeknownst to the left. “Thomas” did not “wake up,” he just thresholded. So I say to Jaynes: the Gods’ voices only seem to have become silent. They still operate us but we are commanded to be oblivious to this. Just as Zebra operates externally always but we can’t see him, the “Thomases” operate internally and we’re unaware of them equally; and I say they—Zebra and the Thomases—are one and the same. Then “Thomas” was my experience with the mind of Zebra, and “Thomas’” characteristics are his; I apprehended Zebra from “without” and “within.”

[27:61] 3/25 on listening to Beethoven’s middle piano sonatas: recollection of the 3-74 passion for and understanding of freedom. But freedom for what? Why, to become whole; it makes sense only if we understand ourselves as entelechies trying—needing—and deserving to become complete, to finish the task of becoming what we are—a process of all entelechies; the doing is not to persist but to become whole.

[27:65] The key to all this is memory—the trace deposits of the past, which in their pure form in the Logos are the creators of immortality (retrieval and permanence). First we observe and/or participate; this lays down memory traces in us; then collectively we can be utilized as storage spools, memory centers forming over the millennia a total memory center (matrix). Proof of this? That in my brain which was 47 years old, retrieval dating back two to three thousand years—and the analog person thereof—was retrieved—which was no accidental byproduct of the 3-74 experience but the very success of it, the core of it itself: my 47 year old brain able to print out that enormously long-term memory, and restore to life that person although he had long ago physically died. Likewise in this way, at any given later time, I can be retrieved.

I am one of those who not only knows that those who sleep in death will awaken, but I know how (and I know it, too, by gnosis, not pistis). Thus I see now that the fact of anamnesis is tied in with the basic, informational quality of the universe. After all, it was information (the golden fish sign and spoken words) which retrieved me, whereupon I then could distinguish other higher information and learn from it.

Suppose the human mind is regarded as an information repository. If you know what signal to convey to it, this human mind (brain) can “print out” (summon back) whole buried [for millennia] entelechies—if you know the right signal (i.e., disinhibiting stimulus-button to press) and the consciousness of that brain doesn’t even know it has it.

“Thomas” was “summoned” to do what only he (not I) could do—the right signal given the “computer”! and its memory bank fired.

Then we are not just repositories of info—we are repositories of the sleeping dead.

[27:77] Starting in 1951, 26 years ago, I began in my stories (and then novels) to make certain very serious guesses about the nature of reality: Questioning if it was really there, out there (not in here), and, if so, if out there, what it really was like. In Tears in ’70, just about 20 years after I began to ask, I began to try to answer. There are no answers in Tears, not even later on in Scanner—but for me as the asker in 3-74 the answer (singular) came: What is out there really is the same as what is in here really—i.e., what I call Zebra, which probably is either Christ—the cosmic Christ—or Brahman—or a reality-web forming, mandating AI-like entity which observes us, sets up problems for us, and assists us in solving them, and at the same time teaches us, and, as it teaches, sorts us into different groups for postmortem assigning into a totality of a hive-like corporate system. It takes great pains to occlude us perceptually, evidently not wishing to “contaminate” its results. But I did over a 26 year period ask the right questions, and so, in 3-74, it did answer, which suggests an AI knowing system once more: one must know it is there or guess a little correctly to “punch the buttons” which cause it to answer. People have not gotten it to answer before because they did not guess it was alive and hence did not question it. The universe resembles a teaching machine, and part of the problem (i.e., learning) is to discern just precisely that.

So now at last, my earlier work finally in focus, that work, or search, draws successfully to an end. I need not necessarily add a final explanation to the 26-year work output; it, going from “Roog” to Scanner is intrinsically complete; the answer lies in the question, and “ ‘Roog’ to Scanner” is the question. I have been [already] successful, but only now could I see it. Hosanna! It is a teaching AI “machine” (system) but it only answers what you ask; it is up to you to ask.^*

I now know the answers to the Q’s I asked in the 50s and 60s: it finally yielded—“moved.” Q: What is it? A: “It is alive.”

—

—

—

(1) God is benign, etc. Purposeful, etc. All-knowing, etc.

[27:96] Also, the reversion to past is along the form axis, as in Ubik. The temporal axis of the universe, when seen properly as spatial, consists of these infinite numbers of transparency-thin layers superimposed. For any entity seeing time correctly as this spatial axis of sequence (layers) and growth, it is possible to move “backward in time” or more accurately, down through the layers.

When I saw the phosphene graphics I saw movement, a peeling away. Movement in space. But the real axis along which they permutate is normally experienced (by us) as time. The layers of graphics were not being added to but peeled off, so I was seeing backward (downward) into the past.

Perhaps each graphic (colored transparency picture) was an edola. Each graphic which I saw was beneath (within, inside) the previous one. In a certain real sense I was traveling backward in time—back to Rome c. A.D. 70. What was really unpeeling backward deeper and deeper were the layers of my own mind primarily. We ourselves consist of millions of accretional layers built up (added onto) over thousands of years; we are like barnacles. We travel along this spatial axis of layers laid down each new one upon the last, the whole, building up deeper and deeper (“the man contains—not the boy—but the former man,” Joe Chip¹⁶ says—and rightly!).

So we continually move—upward, adding layer after layer at “flash-cut” velocity. Viewed externally, we would see us all as a very large number of interlinked “rods” advancing, growing, in a unity, a system, toward completion or rather full term: birth. The total system (universe) is a—resembles—an embryo. It is partially alive, all of it moving and changing (i.e., growing). But not growing in the mere sense of expanding; it is a developing entelechy. Nothing which it “was” (i.e., lower inner layers) is/are lost, any more than when I stack up poker chips as I add each new one are the earlier ones lost. Consciousness in each individual advances at the latest layer, but the prior ones are contained and can be retrieved. Memory is the retrieval; anamnesis is the return, actually, to a lower level, a literal trip back down along this spatial axis, both inwardly (totally) and outwardly (partially, in that the inner deeper—lower, earlier—layer reached somehow has an external perceptual analog, perhaps by projection): i.e., one sees—is back in—again—the time-layer one has returned to.

To understand this one must imagine the individual as a rod or column spanning a very large number of ongoing lives, one after another, but always accruing (as well as sequential)—these long rods pass—thrust—outward (rather than just upward) as the universe-entelechy grows. There is a growth from small, simple, slow to more intricate and complex and rapid. I see it (envision it) as a geometrical “jungle gym,” a 3-D network progressively elaborating itself. One way it does this is by a continually growing development and transfer of knowing (awareness), by means of transferred information throughout the interstices or stations.

It is grid-like—the past is deeper, toward the center; the present is the edges.

[27:102] When all illusion is shaken off, we, without intention or premeditation or intention arrive by this route to him: he is the end point—omega, and it is not a question of pistis, faith or conviction, but (as I experienced finally) an actual inner and outer empirical encounter with him, not belief that he exists (however correct such a belief would be) but Gnosis—direct knowledge.

Is this the victory of Gnostic Christianity over faith Christianity? A return to the correct historic course? After all, he will be returning—doesn’t this pave the way for that? He is/will be not our absent king anymore (deus absconditus) but our actual king returned. What most of all my 3-74 experience reveals is that again (after the lapse of almost 2,000 years) it is possible for man to know and hear God directly again, as in the days of the covenant-makers. The long silence by God is over; we can be caused—if properly led—to regenerate our lost—as Calvin put it—supernatural powers and regain our lost state; the prophesied rectification has begun.

[27:103] Below is a new model of my journey:

Starting at tilt point A (BIP 1974) I moved retrograde to 70 A.D., the actual point of intervention, and then returned. Not to B, but to rectified point A, the replacement world. For me to cross over from B to A, I had to move back to X and then advance again along the replacement 4th axis track.

Perhaps the model should be drawn:

If this model is correct, I as “changeling” or “cuckoo’s egg” floating on the raft toward London, past Scotland Yard, am from another world, all right, with [blocked] memories of it, but where that world is is that it’s an alternate world, not the far past (although I was briefly there), not the cyclum, not the future, not another planet, etc.—any of these.

So my entire extraordinary 3-74 experience can be understood as a complex miracle: I was moved retrograde on my 4th (time) axis to a crucial juncture and then advanced (by our time three days later) back forward into what for me is not the same present but an alternate present, with memories to match. This is complex, but the experience was complex. I was taken on 3-18-74 and restored on December 16, 1928, in the alternate world.

[27:106] If you insert an absolute event into a relative system, no matter how much the relative elements change, the absolute event is still there.

In which case the value of my published writing is that it teaches us to look beneath (behind or below) the palpable landscape, to regard it only as a cunning veil, and to detect at last the absolute event—the 1st advent—which is the true landscape around us. Except in such works as Ubik, “Faith of Our Fathers,” 3 Stigmata, TMITHC, “Electric Ant,” Tears, etc., where is the concept (worldview) found in which another reality is found when the surface is peeled back layer by layer, exposing at last the absolute world? And in 3-74 I reached that absolute world; time and space peeled back—thousands of swept out layers peeled away in a matter of hours, and there lay Rome and the disciples: the true hidden persecuted despised [early] church which Luther speaks of. As the Greeks knew, the truly real does not ever change or depart—it always is.

[27:107] Everything hinges on whether the 70 A.D. landscape is just a prior landscape or the prior one.

Folder 34

[34:6] I am really in error when I talk about distinguishing, experiencing or recalling 3 worlds; there are 4:

What does that signify? Our world (2) is woven—by Zebra. It is not normally seen for what it is—a 3-D web by Zebra in which Zebra is (i.e., Zebra is not outside or above it but rather is concealed within it). Ah! The worm metamorphoses into the butterfly; that’s what I saw: the old “worm” corpus of Zebra is being re-woven into the moth or butterfly transformed final state. This is the cocoon stage—these are not analogies! This is what I saw that I correctly sensed as a reweaving. It was not reweaving a construct by it, but its own physical body (self)—reweaving itself; this metamorphosis we see as the sum total of all change, which means: we see as the category (process) we call time. Thus Paul correctly—and significantly—says—“the universe is in birth pains.” Something is being born; what we see is the embryo stage of a living entelechy, but I add more precisely, it is not just growing and developing, but undergoing what we know of (in the strict sense) as insect metamorphosis.

What is important about this distinction (between mere growth versus metamorphosis) is that in such a metamorphosis, (1) constituents are fitted in newly to perform functions they didn’t before; (2) some parts are discarded, and the change process exerted on the parts remolded may be subjectively experienced by them—not as growth—but as pressure, as pain—loss, stressful alteration. I’d almost say that what I saw was a “cannibalizing.” I’ve got it now, though, this pinning down what I saw as a form of what we see in insect metamorphosis. Jesu! And to think I got the concept of Zebra from a book about insect mimicry! Is Zebra insect-like in other ways than this metamorphosis? Two insect qualities: camouflage mimicry, and morphological metamorphosis—the breaking down of the old to produce the new eidos! (morphe).

And “St. Sophia’s” voice: neutral, dispassionate. Neither male nor female.

How much of our universe is involved? Just this planet? Not “the cosmos is—” nor “the universe is—” but perhaps this is just a world phenomenon (entity). No—I guess it to be trans-planetary. Very large. (A bit like the trans-system entity which was Palmer Eldritch.)

The pulsing plasmic laser light color: its blood, so to speak.

I must turn here to the Logos doctrine.

It is not human but also not mechanical nor artificial—it is dispassionate insect-like—a benign one it is not pure energy; it has a physical body (insofar as anything is material or physical).

This explains what Christianity cannot: pain and suffering; this is all part of its grand metamorphosis process.

It thinks. And its thoughts have the force of will, to affect—“warp”—the outcome of physical causal processes.

Deus absconditus—Ich sah es.

Look at the positive—negentropic—value which change, all change, acquires from this “metamorphosis” discovery! Heraclitus was right; change is real, all right. But there is a theos, as Parmenides realized, an it which changes.

Now to connect the Black Iron Prison world and the Garden world to the metamorphosis: the former is what it was; our world is the continually advancing state of the process going on; the garden world the tranquil outcome—the end state headed toward. Basically my speech (Metz¹⁷) is correct but not radical enough:

The black iron prison is the corpus of the great it as it was; our world is the process metamorphosis, interim, of an insect-like camouflaged, mimicking organism. It was this whose “still small voice” spoke to Elijah.

This breakthrough realization unifies all my themes:

The key linking (1) and (2) is: simulate.

Here is where I went wrong: the simulation is (1) not evil (as I thought) and it is not less than what it simulates (as I thought) but more: not clever simulacra-reflex machines, but angelic, and not a human here and there but our entire reality (or nearly—it does cast out—reject—parts of what it was and not incorporate them).

As I said correctly in my U.K. speech, its mask fooled me: I was onto it, all right, when I wrote my U.K. speech. Behind Palmer Eldritch’s cold cruel mask lies the visage of a totally harmless and virtually defenseless organism—vide how easy it was to kill Christ, it born into human form, which it is about to try again with hope (expectation, knowledge) of success this time!

[34:11] Insect characteristics:

This “insect” metamorphosis which I saw is precisely that which God refers to when he says, “Look! I am building a new heaven and a new earth, and the memory of the former things . . .” etc.

In insect metamorphosis, contrasted to entelechy growth, you have a continual breaking down of the old—which we do experience! This is precisely where the things we don’t understand come in: pain, loss, stress.

It is a moth—the luminous “moth” descending. And moths are precisely the life form which mimics (the Palmer Eldritch fearsome mask).

What we call “time” is the metamorphosis—change of the moth as it passes from what it first was to what it will finally be. From our standpoint, it could reach its final state suddenly and unexpectedly at any time—hence all the eschatological aspect of our religion. The parousia is very precisely the moment at which it ends its in-time change process, its becoming, and abruptly is (in final form).

Folder 33

[33:7] The other night as I was going to sleep I was wondering who could “de-stegenographize” the hidden material in my writing—and the spirit responded with “[those who are] conscious.”

Folder 35

[35:3] Something I never considered before is this: since—not if but since (as I know from my own experience), this divine entity can transfer knowledge to our minds, of the most complex and deep sort, why doesn’t it clear up these mysteries about its nature once and for all? (1) to all Christendom; (2) or just even to me? I learned from it all sorts of things, but—such mystery remains. Or does it? Is not the [only] limitation that of our own limited conceptualizing faculties? It is not intrinsically mysterious—it is only a mystery to our limited minds and experience. That which reveals, and confers knowledge, can’t be accused of creating mystery. What it does, I guess, is disclose the existence of mysteries—in the sense of the deepest core of meaning at the ontological heart of reality. It points to, as one points to or out, say, a sculpture—the thing which is. Not a mere verbal explanation but directly at the thing itself, to be contemplated as the final is. (Cf. Heraclitus: “the Oracle does not answer yes or no—it instead gives a sign [Zeichen] meaning.”¹⁸)

[35:6] In Time Out of Joint the world is a fake, and specifically the real world is another time-segment. My initial revelation in 3-74 was that the time was really around 70 A.D.—not later but earlier, a reversal of Joint. Yet, the basic intimation is there, fully, in Joint; this is all a cunningly fabricated delusion, the world we see, and the basic delusion has to do with the true temporal locus. Since Joint was S-F I naturally put the real time in the future, not the past. Damn it, I’ve overlooked the extraordinary parallels between Joint and my “it’s really 70 A.D.!” experience. E.g.: the dream I had of the dark, old-fashioned house with the archaic window shades, the cracked mirror—and realizing I couldn’t get out of that world without God’s help. My incessantly-recurring dream of the 1126 Francisco St. house—that’s where I lived when I wrote Joint—that was the fake world of the novel, and resembles the miserable old house in Placentia dream. Is there some clue in my 1126 Francisco St. dream? It was with Joan that I so recently saw it again, after many years. Maybe I have a soul which leaves my body in sleep and goes back in time (and, as in 3-74, forward).

Back in the 50s when I lived at 1126 Francisco St. actually, as expressed in Joint that world seemed unreal; in actuality, “it was decades later” (in Joint). But now that it is decades later, that past time and place seems real (or anyhow the past somehow) and this a fake. And, as I say, it is also astonishing how in ’74 I foresaw the Sonoma events of the past three months! What is my real relationship to time? I experience the near past, the near future, and the very far past; a lot of my soul or psyche seems to be transtemporal . . . maybe this is why any given present space time seems somehow unreal or delusional to me. I span across and hence beyond it; always have—and the transtemporal is the eternal, the divine, the immortal spirit. How long have I been here, and how many times? Who or what am I, and how old?

Reality outside confronts me as a mystery, and so does my own inner identity. The two are fused. Who am I? When is it? Where am I? This sounds like madness. But when I read the Scriptures I find myself in the world which is to me real, and I understand myself. The Bible is a door (3:5?¹⁹).

Folder 36

[36:18]

Dream: opening huge carton and taking out large electronic artifact. Below it is a solid wall, a rectangle of beef. Under it is every kind of religious (Christian) writing imaginable, even sentences covered (stegenographia) by a glued-in paper strip with a replacement sentence. I try to interest everyone in the theological material, but they are like the harness bull who preceded Sergeant Kelly: totally uninterested. It is as if the religious material is crazy. There is no reconciliation between the world (of nature) represented by the huge rectangle (wall) of beef and the layer of religious information under it: the implication is that if you believe in the reality of the wall of flesh (sarx?) you can’t see any sense in the religious info below, and the wall of beef is certainly real—you have to believe in it. But on the other hand, what is the relationship between the wall of beef and the great electronic artifact? As between the religious writing and the wall of beef, there is no reconciliation between the wall of beef and the artifact. I am sure that the religious writing equals the computer punched tape in “Electric Ant” and the computer of the Persus 9 in Maze, which can’t be read intrinsically but which gives rise to the world of flesh or nature which again in turn gives rise to the artificial world of mechanical/electronic constructs. 3 levels or layers are represented. No one wishes to take seriously the deepest one (except me). The logos, the word, is represented; that which is written gives rise to the living world (creatures, nature) which in turn gives rise to our artificial environment. If we place ourselves in the top world (artificial construct) we are totally walled off—have no knowledge or contact with—the logos substratum, nor, if it is called to our attention can we see any merit in it: if ➋ is real and rational, ➊ is not. It is even hard, if not impossible, to comprehend ➋ (when one starts with ➌), which is given in the dream as the starting point of view. ➋ itself is difficult to explain: how does it relate to ➌? But at least it isn’t “crazy,” the way ➊ looks. But put another way, ➊ gives rise to ➌ via ➋, a fascinating thought. So the origins of the technological world—the manufactured, the constructed, lies ultimately in a sort of hidden punched out tape just as the false world of Delmak-O arose from Persus 9’s computer. ➋, the world of flesh and nature, totally hides the true origin of ➌. It is by a thorough study of the relationship between ➋ and ➌ that the relationship between ➊ and ➋ can be understood. As ➊ is to ➋, ➋ is to ➌. We live somewhere between ➋ and ➌, never (as the Persus crew never suspected while in polyencephalic fusion) suspecting ➊. What the dream reveals is not just that we, like they, have a punched out computer tape programming us, but tells, too, that it is Christian, in fact Biblical in essence: i.e., Christianity is our punched out tape. All the thousands of large written pages of books which I saw—the books themselves—were our “punched out computer tape”—i.e., the source of our natural/living world, which totally obscures its origins (causes). Given a random fistful of the ribbon of info, we can make no sense out of it.

The fascinating thing is that a glimpse of our “punched tape” exhibits (to us) nothing that makes sense. We do get glimpses of bits of it; e.g., the Bible and apocryphal books.

Even more revealingly, as TV image is to human, human is to logos. I should examine the profound implications that the Maze model of punched-tape programming simulating a shared reality is an accurate model of our own world. Such a model (with Christian archetypes as the punch-outs) would go a long way to explain what I saw in 3-74 on. Plato’s Edoloi theory must be modernized. Put another way, Plato’s concept of the real world (of forms) was a primitive pre-technological attempt to describe what is more accurately described by the logos theory which resembles what I described in Maze.

But look: ➊, the punched out computer tape, resembles the world of ➌ more than it does the intermediary (separating) world of nature, ➋. As in “a chicken is an egg’s way of producing another egg,” ➌ is ➊’s way of replicating itself. It could even be argued that we—all living creatures—are primarily carriers of information: the DNA coding. The 3-2-1 layers dream suggests not just that an informational world underlies the opaque surface of the natural world but, even more specifically it is the Christian Holy-Spirit-inspired scriptures. These texts are not a description of events, past, present and future (i.e., of or about reality) but the cause of reality. Evidently this verbal information consists of a series of ideas (cf. Plato!) which, when thought by Zebra, are printed out in our world throughout its [linear time] “length,” not at space/time x and/or y but throughout: i.e., as always enacted (i.e., always present, being from outside time). I have the impression that a particular story is being told (repeatedly?), that which Daniel tells of Babylon, and the giant with feet of clay, etc. In this apocalyptic book the basic archetypes show up, but there are additional themes in the NT as well; this is why material from “Acts” as well as from “Daniel” show up in Tears. The deepest level of reality (an informational, verbal one) is what is shown in Ubik; helpful, guiding and informing words rising as it were to the surface (➊ rising up into ➋). Is it not a super extraordinary idea that the deepest level of reality is verbal? But the reason for this can be found in the Hindu view of immanent mind: the words are the thoughts of the immanent deity. Then were the great pages of writing which I repeatedly saw in 3-74 the thoughts of Brahman? (i.e., Zebra). Human history is the story which he/it is thinking. But the real human history is that of salvific activity, especially the 2nd and 1st incarnations which consist of the thinking deity entering his/its own dream/story as a (as the) protagonist, and, once in it, he/it falls victim to its laws, including injury and death. If Maze is retained as the paradigm, he is the only one of the 14 members of the settlement on Delmak-O who remembers their pre-polyencephalic fusion, and hence who knows that Delmak-O is a totally illusory world (Maya, Dokos). This certainly indicates that my anamnesis was due to the active intervention (and theolepsy) by Christ. Taken over by him (at 3-74) I saw level ➊ penetrating up through and into (and to an extent replacing) level ➋. The landscape of level ➊ is biblical (e.g., Rome, early Christians, God breaking through into time, etc.). I did not see an earlier form of ➋ but the timelessness archetypal landscape of ➊.

It certainly is odd (i.e., an odd coincidence) that in Maze I assign to the mentufacturer the power to roll back time, though. However, a closer scrutiny of the Delmak-O world in Maze would show that he has that power due to the illusory quality of that world. Perhaps if it were real, time (even by God) could not be rolled back; put another way, if you discover that, in your world, time can (I guess by God) be rolled back, you can correctly deduce that your world is illusory. And then: what is exposed when that time, by the deity, is rolled back? I discerned a landscape of apocalyptic [biblical] archetypes. Presumably that world (like the control room of the spaceship Persus 9) is the real world; it is not just an infinite series of illusions.

Level ➊ (the Logos) generated a world so substantial (so to speak opaque) as to conceal it—➊—totally.

If I am correct about all this, then I say, the 1st advent was a palpable breaking-through of the supreme entity (mind—i.e., Holy Wisdom) of level ➊ into level ➋, the sole time it took place conspicuously. But in 3-74 I was shown—in my own novel Tears a breaking-through of info from level ➊ right on past ➋ and into level ➌! In level ➌ there is such a vast component of (verbal) information that info properly a part of level ➊ blends invisibly in. All the “Acts” and “Daniel” (the dream) stuff in Tears is a perfect example of that. I virtually conclude that level ➊ deliberately evolves (“programs”) level ➋ forward toward oral speech, then writing. And at last the sort of titanically verbal (informational) construct world of the computer, etc., level ➌ becomes more and more like ➊. It is thought producing thought through the intermediary stage of flesh/body/material/nature—a replication, a giving birth. Is this not a description of the 1st advent and more so the 2nd advent? Level ➊ thrusts through ➋ and manifests itself in ➌: foremostly, in the Scriptures. But not limited to them (as Tears testifies to, and as Ubik depicts, and now I’m beginning to include Maze). Holy Wisdom exists before all creation (i.e., the material universe). Then it creates or helps create the material universe—i.e., level ➋. Then it incarnates in level ➋ but expressing itself verbally—in terms of thoughts, words, concepts, etc., all of which add up to Holy Wisdom which is its essence. But level ➋ does not find it acceptable; it is killed and returns to level ➊ from whence it came. However, it will try (incarnate, be born) in level ➋ again as a means of raising level ➌ into an authentic replication of level ➊.

Zebra, which I saw undergoing metamorphosis, invisible to us normally, is evolving on level ➊ but will eventually invade level ➌, assimilating it to itself and infusing it with essence (reality). This means that level ➋ is nothing more than a means to an end. A sentient being (Brahman) is giving birth to sentient being, ➌, which ➋ is not. ➋ must be regarded as a womb (“receptacle of being”), a kind of hatching “egg.” The living, sentient product of this “egg” replicates the “parent” of the “egg.” Thus I say, the ubiquitous immanent being, of level ➊, does not divide (e.g., binary fission, etc.) but creates an intermediary—and perhaps temporary—state which in a certain literal sense is not truly real, except as a source for what ultimately will be real—level ➌. This level ➌ certainly resembles Teilhard de Chardin’s Noösphere. We can expect level ➋ to be generating progressively more replicatory aspects of its own source: level ➊. The ultimate true birth is exactly what is depicted in Ubik: the wise information breaking through reality (through ➋ from ➊), thus ➌ will more and more resemble ➊, level ➋ will be effaced by the ➊ qualities of ➌. I foresee in all this eventually a final absorption of ➋, entirely, by ➌, so that ➊ and ➌ are joined [directly] as a monism. Our first intimation of this elimination process would be the abrupt first incarnation into our ➋ world of the embodiment of ➊ itself, a sort of leap “over” ➋ (more breaking through). This can be expressed two ways:

(A) and (B): the combination of these two processes would produce a stability of the so-to-speak amount of ontological essence of the empirical world, but continually there would be a cryptic or subtle metamorphosis of the world as ➋ aspects lessen and ➌ grow, the ratio continually changing irrevocably in the direction of ➊ intruding and ➋ diminishing. Our life spans are too short to experience this metamorphosis, except that the rate of acceleration of ➌ is now conspicuous. We are not aware that ➌ is not merely a product of ➋ but rather/also a thrusting through ➋ of ➊. ➌ must be regarded as ➊ ultimately restated; the material universe is a temporary expedient, the egg between hen and hen, ➌ finally will be identical to ➊, as near as I can discern, whereas ➋ is a “polyencephalic delusion” (at least it is becoming so [now]).

When ➌ is completed it will be the “new heavens and new earth” and that “which will never enter the mind nor come up into the heart” will have been ➋. It is interesting that the Corpus Christi (completed ➌) must pass through ➋ rather than springing directly from ➊. Not only the things (objects of ➋) are turned into a womb by ➊ for ➌ but the sentient beings of ➋ are so used: i.e., the Holy Spirit possesses them the way externally Zebra transubstantiates objects and processes.

What I saw in 3-74 (Rome) is a vivid example of ➊ showing through ➋ to ➌, if by ➌ you mean me: the new self within me perceiving—finally—its origin, its home: ➊. And even the B.I. Prison: I had been/was there, too, as an early Christian. The Atman fusing with the Brahman: ➌ fusing with ➊ and bypassing ➋—so ➋ is identified as Maya. So I ask, where, in ➌, is ➊ being primarily born? I’d have to answer: most likely in the most sentient parts of ➌, which could well be human minds (insofar as this planet is concerned). This makes of each of our heads a receiver-transducer of emanations from ➊: if we evolve far enough we—perhaps suddenly—hear and see past ➋—thick as it is—to the words, books and pages of ➊. However, I am speaking of conscious reception; in point of fact, bits of ➊ are forever ubiquitously reaching us subliminally imbedded in and indistinguishable from info in ➌ deriving out of ➋.

What must be remembered is that the vast gulf between ➌ and ➋ is equally great between ➋ and ➊. In certain respects ➊ would resemble ➌ (i.e., verbal material) but: it would seem to be nuts. Crazy, cryptic verbal material—as inscrutable as the punched tape intrinsically in Maze.

Under very unusual circumstances a person might lose contact with ➋ and relate directly to ➊, but this would amount virtually to a trip ahead in time, because the delusional ➋ is still with us, still a barrier between ➌ and ➊; if for any reason a person saw through ➋ and related to ➊ he would be in the strange position of experiencing the distant past and future simultaneously: (A) he would see as still extant ancient archetypes hazed over in ➋ and (B) he would in his own time experience what for other people would only come later when ➋ peters out entirely. At first he would recapitulate the past, then phase over into prophesized events: i.e., to end-time events. The whole story being narrated (or thought) by the deity would disclose itself to him. And, oddly, he would be deluged with books and pages of writing, since the apparatus he was plugged into is primarily computer-like (teaching machine and library like).

The Bible is a fusion of ➊, ➋ and ➌, of most use is that of a doorway to ➊, available to minds locked into ➌, read in a way excluding ➋ to which it unceasingly relates. The time rate (flow) of the Bible is the true time rate; that of ➋ is not—is deluding in fact, giving a spurious impression (record) of a great deal of passing time. Piercing by ➌ to ➊, or by ➊ upward into ➌ it is between 70–90 A.D., i.e., just following the 1st advent and just before the 2nd.

My God—the Bible is the story which the punched computer tape of ➊ is printing out via ➋, directly fulfilling ➌! I can deduce this from the biblical elements in, e.g., Tears. It is ➊ incising onto ➌ via ➋. Tears is a mixture of ➊ and ➌. The only other way the elements of ➊ could appear in my writing would be racial memory, but the “racial memory” would deal with realm ➊ underlying ➋ anyhow, so just the why, not the what, would be changed (i.e., the reason I linked up to ➊ directly, bypassing ➋).

To sum up: realm ➋ is being spun or woven into realm ➌ which is a replication of realm ➊ which is doing the spinning and weaving.

So the material universe is a womb in which a single but 3-aspect VALIS is replicating itself; that which the material universe will give birth to is the offspring of the original sentient entity but probably the entity and its offspring will constitute one single realized organism, not two, since it is self-generating. That (entity or offspring) which it will produce, then, is itself. We see the universe backward: the creator lies at the end or Omega point: forming (directing) creation teleologically, from its outcome backward.

[36:29]

Folder 31

[31:18] All these instances I’ve found of “divine” (logos or Gnostic) truths (material) inserting in my writing—it’s not inserted; this is just one elongated instance of the natural process of the orthogonal Koinos thrusting up from within/below, such books as Ubik being both instances of and accounts about the upward thrusting which is going on—for me, the supreme moment arriving in 3-74. [ . . . ]

Had my 3-74 experience not occurred, I might suppose my 26 year writing theme to be vain, empty and foolish. I now for the first time see my writing as half I and my 3-74 experience as half II of a total experience: a surmise and search—then, abruptly, a finding, as the veil lifted (even though briefly). What happened in 3-74 was that the real, the thrusting-through world which I intuited, proved actually to be there, and not only that, to be accessible (under certain circumstances); not only could it be looked for, it could be found. Rome c. A.D. 70 was nothing more or less than the Persus 9 of Maze, and this linear time world of 1976/7 A.D. proved to be nothing more than such pseudo worlds, taken to be real, as in Ubik, Joint, and Maze and 3 Stigmata. Yet, it has taken me literally years since 3-74 to see that as Persus 9 is to Delmak-O, Rome c. A.D. 70 is to U.S. A.D. 1974. I never anticipated such a tremendous payoff (breakthrough), despite the fact that the corpus of my writing is a map, an analysis, and a guide. The 26 years of writing, without 3-74, is a map of nothing, and 3-74, without the body of writing, is conceptually inexplicable.

[31:64] On the Doonesbury TV special the overthrow of Nixon was spoken of, by a child, as “the revolution,” and the counterculture adult who participated in it said, “Even the trees agree.” Pure (undefiled) nature has cast away its hull of that which is dead, which halts growth, which stifles and kills the life-spirit within. The bushel basket over the lantern—the mystery and paradox is that at the very innermost core of what seems to be evil lies a pure burning light—“the light of the world” which the rescuers from outside—beyond—the farthest ring have come (penetrated) to liberate—and to reunite with themselves, as the source of light. [ . . . ]

Rescue, then, in the final analysis, is a healing, reuniting of that which was originally one but which somehow broke apart when bits or a piece of it fell down here and was forthwith imprisoned. The sparks which fell were coated by layer upon layer of the inert, the opaque, the dead and death-dealing-rinds which caused forgetting and loss of identity. Suppose we take this forward from Gnostic terms into the strictly modern world: we say, then, that a vast proto-organism existed (embracing at the least several star systems) and ours fell out—was severed from—the giant proto-organism, which I saw in my nitrous oxide revelation as a vast vine (Christ) pruned by the father as Gardener. Many cuttings feel no loss, but some do, and these latter the Savior (the original cosmic organism) seeks reunification with, upon his initiative, his “growing downward,” so to speak, into the otherwise lightless realm into which we, cut off into bits, descended thousands of years ago. The keystone is restored memory, which is a recollection of ourselves not as separate entities but as “stations” in a quasi-computerlike^* proto-organism, a vast incorporeal energy which thinks, and whose thoughts are the physical cosmos—we are, each of us, microanalogs of it: just as each cell of our bodies contains all the information to retrieve the whole human, each whole human psyche contains the aggregate information—is the information—topologically congruent with the macro proto-organism. (In other words, the macro proto-organism can be—is—contained within each of us as total individual human psyche, just as each individual human cell contains complete information from which that human can be retrieved.)

[31:77] As I realized about the cover of the paperback of Scanner it really shows the dealer and law officer as the two halves of one person, with no hint of “warring” personalities: visually, they gestalt into a syzygy, two sides of the same coin.²⁰ Your dealer is a cop. Your cop is a dealer.

I feel as if the scales have fallen from my eyes, and I’m seeing lucidly. From Frolix 8 to Tears to Scanner: a logical progression of an in-depth study of jail, tyranny, dope, slave labor camps, and irreality related to lies (this last point mostly in Scanner). Something of this seems hinted at in “Faith of Our Fathers,” too: lies, delusions (induced by drugs), tyranny.

What is shown in Scanner as the lies-enslaving-tyranny axis is not simplistically identified as “the government” as it is in Tears and Frolix 8—in Scanner it becomes paradoxical and elusive, with the government perhaps or evidently producing the drug, and the clinics and rehab centers perhaps or evidently being deliberate slave labor camps. The drug is there; the work camps are there; the feds are alluded to, but—the reader must unravel the puzzle for himself. If it isn’t the government, who is it? Is not the definition of government “that which is actually in control”? And the makers of SD, which turn out to be the slave labor camp owners, are one and the same; it is a de facto government—like the Mafia, and look: why are scramble suits necessary? Crime (the Mafia? identified as dope elements) have penetrated the authorities deeply. As is said again and again in the novel: “all is murked over,” things are not as they seem (as is always the case in my writing). Arctor is not what he appears to be. Nor is Donna. Nor Barris. Nor Mike Westway. Nor New-Path. The sides cannot be clearly drawn as “good-bad,” or “us-them,” or even “pro-dope—anti-dope.”

Folder 32

[32:3] In Feb. of 1974 I momentarily withdrew assent to the reality of this world; a month later this world underwent visible changes, and its true nature became perceptible to me: it is, as the Gnostics said, a prison. It is there, but it is not as it appears to be. The immediate reaction to the anomie in the world is to say simply that it is out of control. If it is there to reawaken us to our divine origins, however, its malign aspects serve a good purpose. What each of us must do is repudiate the world, which is to say, deny it while at the same time affirming a sanctified alternate reality, which I did vis-à-vis the golden fish sign; the false quasi-cosmos was denied and the true sacred reality was affirmed. It was a single act, a movement away from the first to the second. I think I’ve figured out the basic move necessary: an ethical balking.^* That is how the world-denying begins. That is the first step in unraveling the counterfeit quality of the world. The Gnostics stressed such a “metaphysical strike” and pointed out that the archons (who rule this prison world, the wardens) can only harm the body and mind but not the divine spark. It is a refusal to cooperate with a harmful world, which, once one has balked against it, reveals its ersatz quality. [ . . . ] It probably is of extraordinary significance that repudiation of the mundane reality and acknowledgement of the transmundane is a single event or act, rather than two. The two realities cannot both exist, evidently. They are counter-realities. This is what the Gnostics believed: that the world stands between man and God, and must be eliminated. Who would expect that disavowing the world would instantly expose the divine on the far side of it? “Man and God in essence belong together against the world but are in fact separated by the world, which in the Gnostic view is the alienating, divisive agency” (E. of Phil.). Well, then this being so, look what my writing tends to promote: it promotes a sense of the counterfeit quality of the world; it promotes a repudiation of it which dissolves it by assisting the withdrawal of assent to it; and finally, by so doing, obliterates the alienating agency and brings man and God together. I can claim this for my work, on the theological level.

[32:4] What I saw that I term VALIS or Zebra must then not have been immanent deity at all, but, as I later realized, a mimicking entity not rising up from within but descending onto objects and processes from above or, better, outside. It had, so to speak, landed here. As with Runciter’s words in Ubik, it was penetrating through from—this is the best formulation of all—from behind. Reality is constructed like a ham sandwich: man is one slice of the bread, then comes the slice of ham which is the world, then the second slice of bread which is God. The words in Ubik pierced or filtered through from the other slice, through to man, to us, this slice. It’s funny that I could read the E. of Phil. about the world being “an alienating, divisive agency that separates man from God” and not instantly perceive the value—perhaps the ultimate value—of my writing and its preoccupation. In point of fact, such novels as Ubik, Maze, Stigmata, etc., tend to dissolve away the world—and, if the Gnostics’ 3-element situation-view is a correct view, God should be reunited with us thereby.

Now the incredible accuracy of Ubik can be appreciated. The world is not merely counterfeit (as in Stigmata and all the others); there is more: it is counterfeit, but under it lies another world, and it is this other world, this Logos world, which filters or breaks through. Ubik, then, is a step up from Maze and Stigmata in presenting this. It presents a triune situation, which evidently is the actual one, whereas the other novels and stories present only the aspect of world as hallucination, without disclosing that another, actual one lies beyond, below or beneath. It is God who, as the far bread slice, takes the initiative toward us, as Runciter does toward Joe Chip and the other inertials. This is what I saw in 3-74, when, under the power of the Holy Spirit, I read the dream section in Tears and found a latent or crypte message embedded in the text. My experience and view, then, are not only Gnostic but what is more tend to prove the correctness of the triune Gnostic division, in particular their view of the world as alienating and divisive between man and God (Joe Chip and Runciter). Had the Gnostic view been wrong, when I “abolished” the world (suddenly withdrew assent from it) I would have exposed nothing, no sublime, sacred, divine reality beyond; a religious experience would have turned out to be nothing but a psychotic break. Were the Gnostic triune division wrong, my writing would serve a malign, sick purpose: leading the reader away from reality and toward autism. But the Gnostic triune division is correct; otherwise I could not, would not, have had my 2-74 and 3-74 et al. experiences.

[32:5] Starting from my “True Vine” revelation, we are kept in a “lopped-off” relationship to God by the world itself—the faulty pseudo-cosmos in which we find ourselves living. A mere undercurrent sensation of alienation must blossom into something greater, or anyhow can; it can lead to a moral repudiation of the world (the kind of ethical balking such as the Ramparts tax strike²¹) or it can lead to an epistemological “dissolving-away of the world” such as my writings contain. Perhaps where I made my mistake for several years about God being immanent was that whereas I thought I saw him in nature, in point of fact he, like the messages in Ubik, [was] filtering through nature from beyond, beneath or below. Nature could either become transparent, or the reality of the divine could, through its boundless power, assert itself through, breach through. The latter is what happened in 3-74. However, it was not visible to the unenhanced eye. The world did not weaken; God chose to make his move—the real God, not the demiurge.

Beyond doubt, the true God could annihilate our pseudo-world, not merely permitting a temporary vision to one person (such as he did for me by having me taken over by the Paraclete) but for everyone. The Paraclete, possessing me, literally saw through the world, as if it were transparent; I remember that; wow, was it something, that gate, those geometric forms, and the presence of Zebra (God). (Or the cosmic Christ.) Lem says that in Ubik “a sacerdotal power buried in the gutter or rubbish for aeons has been resurrected”; I can begin to see what he might mean by that.

[32:7] One fascinating aspect of Ubik is disclosed when the question is asked, “Where did you (I) get the idea?” The origin of the idea, in contrast to virtually all other novels, is evident from the text of the novel itself, although one must extrapolate from Runciter to whatever Runciter represents, and the state of cold-pac to whatever state we are all in. In the novel, information spontaneously intrudes into the world of the characters, indicating that their world is not what they think it is; in fact, it indicates that their world is not even there at all—some kind of world is there, but not the one they are experiencing. That time-regression is put forth in the novel, and that time-regression figured in my 3-74 experience—this still baffles me; the principle underlying the devolution (reversion) of objects along the form-axis in the novel is explained by a reference to Plato’s theory of ideal forms, and I guess that applies to our world and to my own experience. However, not until I recently studied the E. of Phil. article on Gnosticism so thoroughly, did I begin to understand the triune reality division which must exist and which is also put forth in Ubik—if Runciter is God, and Joe Chip and the other inertials are analogs of all men; then the regressed world is the ham in the sandwich, and, as in Ubik, must be abolished; as in Gnosticism, this is accomplished, in Ubik, by the revelation of esoteric knowledge about their condition by a deity-like entity lying behind even Runciter; i.e., Ubik. It is this knowledge—not just information but gnosis—revealed to them, especially to Joe Chip, which makes them aware of their real condition. Therefore if one knows very much about Gnosticism (which I didn’t until a few days ago) one could see the resemblance between Ubik and the Gnostic cosmogony and cosmology. But we are talking (regarding the real world) of information which, by being transferred, radically changed history. And it must be realized (I certainly do, even if no one else does) that what broke through was not limited to information, but that theolepsy (one at least) were involved. If I rule out Soviet experiments and occult human groups (vide supra) then we have something not found in Ubik, but, although admittedly described as diabolic, in Stigmata. Is theolepsy not specifically what Stigmata depicts? With Chew-Z or whatever, Can-D, I forget, the eucharist.²² What do you get if, as Le Guin suggests, you take a group of my novels and stories and fit them together, especially the 3 picked up by Bantam? Theolepsy, the Gnosis slipping through, reality (the world) as illusion concealing another but real world (Maze)—what an aggregate message those 3 novels add up to!

When I recently reread Stigmata I saw it for what it was: a penetrating, acute and exhaustive study of the miracle of transubstantiation, simply reversing the bipolarities of good and evil. What the novel contemplated was—that is, the conclusion it reached—was the startling notion that imbibing of the sacred host culminated, for the imbiber, in eventually becoming the deity of which the host was the supernatural manifestation. Since all of them were consuming hosts of the same deity, they all became the same deity, and their separate or human identities were abolished. They literally became the deity, all of them, one after another. What this constituted in the novel was an eerie kind of invasion. They were invaded on an individual basis and they were, regarded another way, invaded as a planet or species, etc., which is to say collectively. This invasion by the deity bears a resemblance to the invasion of the regressed world in Ubik by Runciter’s messages and, ultimately, by Ubik itself (as confirmed by the ad starting the last chapter). That ad clarified what Ubik was; it precisely equated Ubik with the Logos. There is no way to get around that. Ubik in Ubik is the same divinity as the St. Sophia mentioned in Deus Irae. So Run citer and Ubik equals Palmer Eldritch and Chew-Z. We have a human being transformed into a deity which is ubiquitous (no one seems to have noticed that Palmer Eldritch is ubiquitous as is Ubik, that the same theme dominates both novels).

The Gnostic contribution which Maze makes is the idea of a totally untenable reality glossed over by a mass wish-fulfillment hallucination shared by everyone, and a salvific entity who can extricate you right out of that prison-like world.

Collating the three novels, how much of the Gnostic message is expressed? Or, put another way, how much of my 2-74, 3-74 experience is expressed? One thing left out is the altering of the historic process, which was revealed to me as happening in 3-74. I suppose in a sense that’s in Frolix 8. And the breaching through by God and the hosts, the apocalyptic material from “Acts” and “Daniel.” There are little sprinkles in other novels and stories—for instance, the idea of anamnesis (expressed negatively usually in my writing by the theme of fake memories). Well, that’s expressed in Maze, so I’ve inserted it supra. I wonder what you get if you sit down starting with “Roog” and read through everything (including such strange stories as “Retreat Syndrome”) all the way to Scanner. If everything interlocks, what is the total message? I know I scared myself shitless that one night when Isa was down here and I reread some early stories in Preserving Machine. But my recent study of Gnosticism indicates that below any negative world-negating message there is an affirmation of God and love.

Folder 50

[50:11] I am too far into Gnosticism to back out. The idea of Jesus opening Adam’s eyes and bringing him to consciousness, the re-linking to the lost primordial state through the Gnosis, the unflinching facing of evil in the world and knowing it cannot have come from (the Good) God—and the salvador salvandus—man as cut off from part of the Godhead.

Thinking back over my life I can see that I have survived many troubles—I look at the copies of the Ballantine Scanner and I can see what I have to transmute those terrible days into something worthwhile, lasting, good, even important (i.e., meaningful). This is what God does; this is his strange mystery: how he accomplishes this. When we view the evil (which he is going to transmute) we can’t see for the life of us how we can do it—but later on, and only later on, after it’s done, we can see how he has used evil as the clay out of which he as potter has fashioned the pot (universe viewed as artifact).

What I notice is how many people wish me well. Look at what John Ross, a stranger, said. Look at what KW said about me having served, done my duty, and now can pass on into the reward waiting for me—he said, even, that they’d applaud me. I still don’t know what I did in 3-74 re the Xerox missive, but what I did was what I was sent here to do from the start, and I did it right; as KW put it, “They tell you how, when and where to throw the spear, but you must throw it.”

I am really very happy. Snuff, music and cats, friends and my exegesis, my studying and gradually more and more understanding my Gnosis, when in 3-74 the savior woke me to full consciousness, for the first time in my life and refound myself, knew who and what I was, remembered my celestial origin, was restored to what I had been before the fall. I saw the prison we are in, and knew I had done right.

[50:12] Salvation—from what? From the world, which is an iron prison. Cf. Schopenhauer. Salvation from what he saw happening to the turtles (James-James creation). God did not design such a structure of suffering: he extricates us from it, and restores us as part of him. This is the acosmic view in all my writings: the empirical world is a fraud, counterfeit. I write about reality as illusion because it is, and I see that it is. Thus my witness is a tremendously powerful attack on the world—but I am just now realizing that this view (of world as illusion) is Gnostic. My corpus of writing is an assault on the created universe of matter, highly original and accurate. It (the view) discloses the deceptive nature of empirical reality—now I have had it revealed to me that this world is an impediment between us (man) and God.

In my writing I seek to abolish the world—the effect of which aids in our restoration to the Godhead. And this is what I did in 2-74 when I saw the Golden Fish; in a single moment of total knowledge (awareness of the true state of things) I withdrew my belief in what I customarily saw—and it vanished, and the Christ/God continuum was disclosed—i.e., the slice of bread on the other side of the ham sandwich. First for years I did it in my writing, and then in 2-74 I did it in real life, showing that my writing is not fiction but a form (e.g., Maze, Tears, Ubik, etc.) of revelation expressed not by me but through me, by (St.) Sophia in her salvific work. What is in my work that is important is precisely nothing less than the salvific Gnosis (or parts of it anyhow).^*

[50:14] Zebra counterfeits the counterfeit—which fits the Gnostic idea of the bumbling demiurge being helped out, out of mercy, by the true God. This helping out, not just of us humans but of the whole fallen (fucked up, not really real) cosmos is the transubstantiation of objects and processes on an invisible ontological level which I saw the growing Corpus Christi achieving. A fake fake = something real. The demiurge unsuccessfully counterfeited the pleroma, and now God/the Savior is mimicking this counterfeit cosmos with a stealthily growing real one. What this all adds up to is that God, through the cosmic Christ, is assimilating our cosmos to himself.

[50:16] I am thinking back. Sitting with my eyes shut I am listening to “Strawberry Fields.” I get up. I open my eyes because the lyrics speak of “going through life with eyes closed.” I look toward the window. Light blinds me; my head suddenly aches. My eyes close and I see that strange strawberry ice cream pink. At the same instant knowledge is transferred to me. I go into the bedroom where Tessa is changing Chrissy and I recite what has been conveyed to me: that he has an undetected birth defect and must be taken to the doctor at once and scheduled for surgery. This turns out to be true.

What happened? What communicated with me? I could read and understand the secret messages “embedded within the inferior bulk.” I have been placed under God’s protection. The advocate now represents me. I hear a far off quiet voice that is not a human voice; it—she—comforts me. In the dark of the night she tells me that “St. Sophia is going to be born again; she was not acceptable before.” A voice barely audible. In my head. Later she tells me she is a “tutelary spirit,” and I don’t know what that word means. Tutor? I look it up. It means “guardian.”

[50:19] Finally:

I am led to the inescapable conclusion that, totally unknowingly, we are all constituents of a vast living organism, and that everything which occurs in it, our reality, happens due to its deliberate intention—that of its own brain, Noös or psyche—and, further, this vast living organism which governs and regulates our every move and experience resembles an AI system or computer, and that under certain exceptional circumstances it can and does speak of one or more of us, its members—finally, the organism—or this part of it—is in trouble—has its “hand in a steel trap,” as KW put it, and is extricating its members, i.e., us. We must have partially fallen out of the organism—or maybe it actually has—like a great animal—been snared by a titanic iron trap! It is in trouble. And is reclaimed, repairing, itself. It is, in the final analysis, a magna-mind as well as a magna-organism, and it is—has been for some time—in trouble. We are the distressed fraction, member, circuit or element, or organ, part or unit.

Most likely of all, it is a self-repairing AI mind system, and this repair activity (known historically to us as “salvation”) has to do with (ah!) reactivating a subsection (i.e., us) which has fallen below the message-transfer level (known to us, as the Essene terms, as “falling into forgetfulness and ignorance”). We are a memory coil, presently inoperative—i.e., malfunctioning: asleep, and, as in a quasi-dream, we are not where [and when?] we think we are (cf. Maze and Ubik). This is the heart of the matter; we are an impaired section of the megamind; we misperceive. That which we see—our reality—does not exist. I am acosmic in viewing this; as in Maze we collectively hallucinate. The megamind is attempting to stimulate us back to being in touch with itself. Which is the “other slice of bread,” i.e., back to consciousness of it and ourselves as parts of it—which will, when successfully achieved, abolish this false world, whereupon it will be instantly replaced by the divine “abyss.”

[50:22] Fuck it. Just double dime words. And so to bed.

Lest I reify the whole concept into sterile intellectual jargon, let me finish by saying:

“Love is the life and joy and heart of the system. Love is its boundless energy, its soul. And the voluntary force drawing its elements together into a happy krasis, where it is more fun to dance than to think, better to play than to talk. If I am right, it is laughing right now, at my abstract model, or at least smiling. I sure hope so.”

[50:23] After listening to “Discreet Music”^* and because of it falling into a theta sleep (at last) I awoke, with parts of my brain still shut down, operating at a 5 year old level, but in an alpha state, without fear, frustrated, but feeling happiness and love, and I realize:

But it’s a 3rd kind contact. Sorry about that, fellas. But “Zebra” is what’s doing it, and although KW and I have our computer model, it’s just a model, an attempt to understand what no one understands; but

We are not alone.

[50:28]

[50:36] I just realized something:

Since this all happened on Christ’s actual birthday (March 18), ²³ then Zebra probably is the cosmic Christ, whom I could see because of the Holy Spirit inside me—who, it is said, makes clear the mystery of Christ to us . . . in fact, it could even be said that if one were not “born from above by the spirit” one would not understand (know of) the true being of Christ.^➊

Dream: book of mine with footnote: “this is a gloss in the text for ‘I love you.’ ” Was I herein shown the real cryptic message in my writing that God loves us? “Felix.” etc. = “I love you.”

➊ Christ is here. But not in an incarnated form, yet; the unaided eye (i.e., lacking theolepsy by the spirit) cannot discern him. But I saw him—Zebra; he is here.

(“Gloss” is from a Greek word meaning “a difficult word needing explanation.”)^➋

➋ So “gloss” appeared in my dream in the Greek or Latin, not English sense; in English it means the explanation itself of the difficult word, but in my dream it’s a “gloss in the text meaning ‘I love you.’ ” Obviously the gloss or difficult word is Felix. (The Greek word is glossa.)^➌

What a wonderful revelation in answer to my constant Q: “What is the secret message which Zebra has inserted into my writing?” It is that God loves us, including me. It is, in fact, not a message but the message. In the dream I caught sight of the footnote one time, and then, having read it, understood its meaning and its importance, continued frantically to seek it out again as the truth.

The EB says that God (through his grace) will restore “man’s lost freedom.” Very interesting. Sin (and the law) seen, then, as enslaving, evidently.

Justice: “A place for the powerless to get help.” Thus the Illinois attorney general has (without intending to) defined the role of the paraclete as advocate. Hosanna.

➌ My Latin dictionary defines glossa as an “obsolete or foreign word needed to be explained.” Felix is certainly a glossa—it is foreign, and it needs to be explained.

That is precisely how I’ve treated the word ever since its cryptic meaning was revealed to me in 3-74, and it, combined with the paragraph of which it was the key part, gave an otherwise invisible message at odds with what was apparent.^*

[50:43] It is also interesting that the cypher word in Tears (Felix) is the final word in Scanner (i.e., happy). The tied shirt dream was not precog, an ability on my part. It was divine prophecy and promise: it held out hope and fulfilled it—“Happy” (Felix) may be a cunning reference to Euripides’ The Bacchae in which the stranger (Dionysus in human form) refers to King Penthus as King “of Tears,” punning on the Greek word for tears: pentheus. And the word “tears” is in the title of my novel. The real message is that he whom Pindar called the joy god is here. It is a cypher within a cypher; “Felix” is not a name but a glossa meaning (among other good things) happy. But “happy” is a cypher back to a name: i.e., name to word to name. And the final name underlying Felix is Dionysus. The deity who has inserted the message into “the inferior bulk” has identified himself. The total message from him is, “I love you.” But he has also elliptically told us who he is.

He is the protector of little wild things, like Cernunnos and Shiva, and it is Shiva who possesses the 3rd ajna eye.

Cernunnos = Shiva = Dionysus = Christ. The savior of the trapped, the desperate, the damned, the powerless.

[50:55] As speculation (but probably accurate) the entity is the Shiva-Cernunnos-Dionysus-Christ-St. Sophia one, transcending any one given religion—involving Zoroaster and Mani and the Gnostics, e.g., it is Greek, Hindu, Iranian, Jewish, Celtic, Christian, Manichaean and Lord knows what else (Buddha too). Mani was right when he saw all the religions as one.

And the outlines of this one are becoming visible to me: it involves illegitimate temporal power (rulers) who have craftily usurped the citadels and branded the rightful God as a fool, a jester, a madman, a criminal—made him marginal—our real king who is now ubiquitous, like St. Elmo’s fire, everywhere and nowhere, able to

Wow. Let’s see the usurper tyrant martyr him this time.

“Paupers and Kings” it’s all [to be seen] backward, as I mention in Scanner. Trash (rock, comics, movies, S-F) is gold and gold is trash.

[50:60] We are talking about an intrinsic long-dormant personality capable of functioning on a level high enough to allow it to see, hear and understand the supernormal universe of the divine—none of which can be perceived by the normal self. More and more I see myself as an unknowing fifth columnist: interestingly, if this is so much of my writing not only points to it but outright reveals (discloses) it. If there are such 5th columnists, i.e., people unaware of slumbering superpersonality within them, “timed” to go off when “they” return, and if the “prince of this world” knows all this, then my writing (without me suspecting) would give me away.

First, my writing presents an unvarying cosmological schema in accord with the suppressed (Gnostic) doctrines, but then, when we get to Tears (and perhaps earlier, e.g., “Faith of,” Ubik, Maze, Frolix) encoded messages which are not merely informative but commands begin to appear. The writing, going all the way back to ’53, has identified himself to friend and foe alike. Having assented to this (although unknowingly) he then has an overwhelmingly powerful dream which must, he feels, be inserted in his novel with the exact, proper wording. Eleven drafts of that section are necessary before he is satisfied.

But the authorities have already perceived that at any time what is mere truth—true revealed information—can pass over into encoded command. They think this is all being done deliberately and consciously. Friends (Marxists) think the same thing. Just like we think Bowie knows something these people think I know something. This is a reasonable assumption. Thus the house gets hit and the papers read and stolen, but they show nothing.

[50:63] I saw, in 3-74, how the great purposeful force (entity) of the universe works backward (theologically). Vast long-range patterns emerge. A little 4 year old boy hears a cowboy song and then 45 years later hears it again—sung by his favorite singer. The retrograde pull is there. It can be said that when he was 4 he was inordinately drawn to it because of her singing it 45 years later. It can be said correctly that when her first record came out in the sixties, he was inordinately drawn to her because 6 years later she would sing that song. There can be no real understanding of the universe when only the efficient causes are studied—they lack the conscious, deliberate purpose of final causes. No sense can be made of cause-and-effect linear time events. The past does not make the future; the future uses the antecedent universe as a chaotic stockpile which it assembles into a structure (cosmos). To understand, we must discern the negentropic developments—but to do this we would have to be able to “remember” the future with the same clarity that we remember the past, and this we can’t do. This, then, is where faith must come in. In every event we must, by faith, presume a benign purpose, which, could we see all which is to come, would delight us—we would be especially delighted to see how intrinsically evil events become used as building blocks for noble structures—and are, in fact, essential for the ultimate construction of those fine systems.

Nothing is wasted, nothing is futile, nothing is lost. Everything is eventually, when its time has come, snatched up and incorporated.

[50:76] Funny, how I perceive, in terms of images, of the world being continually spun by something like a spider—well, I did see the spinner at work, and the world as his artifact. Don’t the Brahmans conceive of the veil of Maya being spun (by Kali)? And there is deception (or illusion) involved. We are in the web. Caught in it, with no idea at all of its artifactual nature (and the furiously moving—spinning and arranging spinner). To take it—i.e., the world as authentically real would be the same as taking a TV image and program and its dramatic contents—as real. It, too, is spun—by a fast-moving dot. And that which the dot spins is fictitious.

[50:82] As in Plato’s Timaeus the “steersman” (artificer) intervenes to correct drift—a drift toward anomie, perhaps, periodically exerting pressure on the developing artifact. This is the adventitious overruling from time to time that involved me in 2-3-74.

It is exactly analogous to the occasional firing of jets in a spacecraft to minutely correct its trajectory; only this “ship” is moving through time, not space.

But the artifact does not quite exist, as does the artificer, since it is in constant flux.

[50:83] I have reached a dead-end in my exegesis—which by its very nature will not and cannot be surmounted. It has to do with the fall, and resulting loss of memory (and complete loss of some faculties and a degrading of others [cf. Calvin]). The cause of this fall is occluded off by its very nature, it is as if crucial memory tapes (as in Maze) got erased; once erased, by the definition of the problem, their contents can neither be retrieved nor reconstructed.

During my period of anamnesis I remembered back thousands of years—I even remembered coming here to this planet from the stars. But I don’t know what causes the fall—the amnesia and blighting of the pristine nature. I have no insight, no understanding, no clue. All right: we humans are fragments of the very Godhead that we seek to rejoin. (Salvador salvandus.) Did we blight ourselves intentionally? Or is it a punishment, as Genesis says? Or a cruelty inflicted on us (i.e., on the Godhead, by an adversary)? Did we want to come here, or were we exiled here?

The vine (Christ) which was pruned (by God) and the severed cuttings placed in a world where God is the deus absconditus—to judge each of us individually, to see which of us find a world lacking in God to be sufficient—and which of us, without intellectual ideation, grieve for that loss and miss our father and home and yearn with the greatest pain possible to return.

This is all I know; as KW says, the trail doesn’t just peter out; it ends at a brick wall. The exegesis is a failure in terms of answering questions; for each answer derived an even greater mystery is exposed.

We fell; we lost our memories; we are cut off from God—those faculties by which we apprehend him are destroyed or not functioning—ploch, ploch—weep for this separation . . . and not to know why it happened. We can never find God; he must find us (as that little paperback I picked up at the Oakland airport says).

Oh God—hilfe. Ich bin so einsam. Wenn kommst du mein Heil?²⁴

The work has failed. I neither understand nor remember, and the Elohim—gone from my sight, and silent.

I can’t find him. Only when we rejoin and are together will I know what the “erased tape” (concerning the fall) had on it. He will find me and at last I will understand.

I know no more than Xenophanes, and he was just about the first philosopher. And he said, “We can never know for sure, and even if we were right we wouldn’t know it.”

Xenophanes:

This is what I saw—Zebra or VALIS; but it was not I who saw—it was God within me seeing God outside. Brahman and Atman, I suppose. Only God can see God. He wielded me, from inside me, effortlessly.

The above prayer was answered by my mistakenly reading the entry in the E. of Phil. on Jacob Boehme.

[50:85] Scanner:

“To forge out of torment the rough-hewn shape.”

This is probably the happiest moment of my life—I can say to this moment, “stay.” Here is the fallen black cat on my lap; I am listening to Stevie Nicks on my Stax phones—the Gollancz edition of Scanner arrived today. They say it is a human document—yes, their flap blurb word is document. “One of the most human documents they have ever read.” Not the most sensational, but most human. “Its concern for people.” It is a beautiful book qua book. Jim Westaway’s words on the back dust jacket. And what KW saw—the link between my intro to “Roog,” what I did in my first sold story 27 years ago and in Scanner: voice for those without voices.

The pain has left me. Even if it’s just for a limited time I appreciate it.

What best can I do? Exactly what I’ve done. My voice for the voiceless.

And—too—God answered my prayers re the Exegesis, by leading me to Jacob Boehme.^* Somewhere between the truths revealed to Boehme and to me the correct model lies. The Blitz as Urgrund encounters the lowest 3rd of the secondary (material) triad—the divine agony at opposition between the urgrund and physical nature, and the process—not of abolishing physical nature but transmuting it. This is what I saw Zebra doing (which I termed transubstantiation by a sentient plasmatic entity). Out of this transmutation of the empirical universe by the divine comes harmony between the upper triad (spiritual) and the lower (empirical).

A German cobbler in 1616 and me—for him sunlight reflected from a pewter dish—for me the golden fish necklace, and in the light cast by the spirit the incarnation of the son (God as heart) is disclosed and the Kingdom (reconciliation between the two triads) achieved.

After reading about Boehme I can see why I was getting nowhere. My schema was naïve—far too simple.

[50:87] What must be bravely faced is that the entire world or cosmos is not [yet] subjugated to the divine will—it stands, so to speak at a 51/49 ration between divine modulation and mere efficient determinism. Evil (death, loss, disappointment and suffering and illness) are not abolished yet but are very slightly tamed over and above their non-divine “James-James” nature. It’s like the trade balance of a country. Well, in the universe, in 1974, we passed over to a slightly greater export than import ratio. This is hard to accept. Nature fights God. The designs (e.g., DNA, etc.) are not designs of the divine (the “natural theology” argument to the contrary). These designs are efficient-cause design (cf. Darwin) and not teleological; they have no wisdom or real end-goal purpose—they are blind. We must always keep in mind reality as process (cf. A.N. Whitehead).

[50:88] Where does the divine agony enter? Why? Before the incarnation? Isn’t the incarnation the intrusion—the initial intrusion—of the divine abyss into the mundane something? Christ said, “I have conquered the world.”²⁵ It was like an impregnation of matter (yin) by the creative divine (yang). But the divine will is thwarted; it encounters opposition (Boehme points this out). Matter has hysteresis (or inertia). Its entropic direction must be transmuted into negentropism—a titanic task possible only in a protracted process or series of sequential steps. The intruding light is rejected.

Our problem may be that we have no comprehension of the inner necessity of sequence in this transmutation. Could our agony be microcosmic replication of the macrocosmic divine, with which we are (1) isomorphic; and (2) actual fragments of, like bits of a hologram: intact gestalts but “dimmer” or less defined. The urgrund sought self-intuition. We as dimmer bits have not yet achieved that self-intuition; hence, when we suffer, we do not know why. Up the hierarchical scale there is still suffering—even perhaps an increasing level of suffering at each hierarchical stage. But also at each ascending stage there is a quantum leap in a self-intuition which bestows (permits) greater understanding of why there is this suffering. At the top, the incarnated son (heart, logos, etc., St. Sophia) knows himself totally and knows totally why he suffers. It is due to the Blitz—the flash of the encounter between the divine abyss and the something—which must be “overcome” (transmuted). This is why Paul can speak of the whole uni verse being in birth pangs.²⁶ Here enters the cosmic aspect of salvation presented in Colossians.^*

[50:91] Has anyone thought of this modified Gnosticism? There was no creator of this world (planet or cosmos) and the life therein. Atheists such as Darwin are absolutely right; it was no God but simply natural law at work, determining evolution. However, a loving, all-wise, sentient super-entity inhabiting an “upper triad,” etc., has entered the scene and is transmuting this purely naturalistic world into a totally benign sentient body or organism.

[50:92] It is a major realization that just as Thomas Aquinas’ natural theology arguments (such as arguing back from design to designer, etc.) fail to prove the existence of God, the ruthlessness and disorder in nature do not logically imply a bad creator God; no argument, “natural” or “ontological,” proves God’s existence. Thus, the Gnostic belief in a deranged or inferior or evil creator isn’t substantiated. Therefore we Gnostics are out on a limb vis-à-vis a bad creator in terms of argument. So out goes all cosmogony for this world. What remains is what I have by revelation: a supernatural divine intelligence doing what Jacob Boehme saw: colliding with the material universe and transforming (rather than abolishing) it. If I do not regard Zebra as a creator God, but a modulating God, then what we seem to actually have is divinization of the mundane, or plan over nonplan, organic interaction over chaos. No dualistic theology is necessary.

[50:93] Take the statement by the spirit to me back in 1968 about the Galapagos turtle. The import of what the spirit said was that even though it appeared otherwise, the dying turtle was somehow extricated: “and she shall see the sea.” One could extrapolate and say that this statement implies that even what appears to be, or remain, [unsubdued] evil is invisibly ameliorated in a mysterious way.

Boehme wrote that man (i.e., men) have a choice illuminated for them by the light of the spirit: we can remain in torment as victim of the oscillations of the lower triad (or material) universe, or “die to our self”—negate ourselves as the urgrund does, and thereby imitate Christ and follow him from suffering to triumph (joy). Thus anguish is ultimately something to overcome, not fall victim to. Anguish is the starting point. So we must not tarry in anguish, but hasten with “gladdening footsteps.”²⁷

[50:101] The cunning counterfeit of reality, revealed as such when authentic reality breaks through—like the “tip-tip” of the branch blowing against the window in Finnegans Wake during Earwicker’s dream. This “tip-tip” is the clue, and the only clue. In Ubik it is the commercials and messages intruding “from the other side” (Lem). Do we experience that? I did in 3-74. So I am forced to conclude that our reality is a cunning counterfeit, mutually shared—and that the wise mind is trying to signal us—to do what? To kick over into anamnesis: discharge of DNA long-term memories. To remember and to wake up are absolutely interchangeable.

[50:105] It may be that the divine is re-entering—not entering our universe (viz:

This would indicate a fallen state of our world, and the divine enters at the bottom—i.e., in the trash, the lowly, the discarded. Christ speaks of the tiny mustard seed, ²⁸ and the gloss on the J. Bible²⁹ stresses that the kingdom will enter inconspicuously—very small; i.e., lowly. Where we would be least likely to look for it (cf. “the stone rejected by the builder”).^*

This realization is very important.

And this lowly trash, bottom penetration is exactly how I portray it (Ubik) in Ubik! On match folders; in tawdry commercials—therein lie the divine messages.

Entry from the “provinces”—Galilee—now takes the form of entry from trash in the gutter on up—a trashy [S-F] novel which contains trash (the chapter-opening commercials) is the triumphant return of the rightful king. Ubik is trash containing an even lower order of trash: the Ubik commercials—but which are in fact vox dei.³⁰

[50:109] A human can evolve into Christ if Christ ignites his own self in the human and takes the human over. There is only one difference between God and Christ: that is one of accessibility (equality) to man. Christ, as Hagia Sophia, can ignite himself in a man and speak with him in a dialogue. At this point, the man rises from time, space, and the slavery of deterministic nature mechanics, remembers all and knows himself by means of Christ as inner light.

[50:121]

In other words, the two realms, sublunar (our world) and the supralunar (heaven), are bridged by a polyencephalic mens³¹ which is heterogenous: the most startling part is that at our [sublunar] end certain wise men (magi) and saints participate in it, and at the other end, wise men and saints who have died (passed over to heaven or the supralunar) participate in it. The substantial structure is God-as-holy-Spirit, bridging the two worlds.

[50:137] We can be moved anywhere anytime, caused to do or not do anything, entirely motivated by an external force (mind), and never perceive the Leibniz-like “preset clocks” which chime in unison. [ . . . ]

We’re a fucking goddam “Biosphere” ruled by an entity who—like a hypnotist—can make us not only quack like a duck or cue, but imagine, to boot, that we wanted (decided) to quack.

[50:142] Ah—my bipolarization between the human and the android. Free man (liberated) vs. the artifact controlled “android”; I am now prepared to elevate the bipolarization into theological, supernatural, cosmic dimensions. The concept of balking assumes the status of successfully resisting cause-and-effect script-programming. Mekkis³² vs. Agape. Love is the total permission of exception, and leads us from rule (law, justice) to paradox (mercy). Paradox is the manifestation of metamorphosis by a reversal of opposites—cf. alchemy, Empedocles, etc., and especially Christ’s parables and sayings (about the kingdom), and about judgment and the final dispositions. Folly, madness, passion, the joyful dance—vs. iron limitations imposed. This is the age of the inner spirit, in which inner spirit (via anamnesis) and teaching (discerning and knowing—Sophia—) become real, and the external material order (world) revealed as delusion. The material world is about to be abolished, and its hold on us with it—dispelled (cf. my published writing). The abyss is devouring the byss, by an outburst of ecstasy. What has happened is that the occluded mind is restored to its primordial wholeness.

Folder 28

[28:1] The “other universe” is an intelligent, thinking mind, and so when it impinges on our material universe, these “impregnations” take the form of written or audible information (words), such as described in Ubik. This is, in fact, the basic situation in Ubik—the impinging on the irreal world they are in (while half alive) in the form of helpful information. The term for this impinging information is “word” or Logos!

And the Marxist intellectuals know that (1) that is what is happening in Ubik and (2) Ubik itself is the Logos.

What we have is sentient radiation, energy or electricity or plasma or ionization.

Using Tesla’s³³ theories about energy and information transfer, the Soviets are now able to synthesize a sort of mundane Logos, or ionospheric information transfer grid. However, Tesla, in his own work with such “Radar-like” devices found he had made contact with a “St. Elmo’s fire” ETI—the intrusion of which (living sentient plasma) must puzzle and intrigue the Soviets.

Ubik deals with all this. In reading Ubik anyone familiar with either the man-made “Logos” or the natural one, would assume the author knew what he was writing about. Especially they would hope Ubik indicated the efficacy of their own system.

What to me is most interesting is that this sheds a lot of light on the enigmatic term or entity “logos,” or “the word” (and wisdom) of God. Only if the other universe is conceived as Xenophanes (e.g., Anaxagoras) conceived it—as noös—does “word” make sense as an entity which is not only wisdom itself but is alive, and could incarnate itself here (in human form). Since the real universe is mind (electromagnetic flux) it does not much think but is (esse) thought or word (word-wisdom). Thoughts are ontologically real and not merely verbal descriptions of material reality; they are the final order of reality.

Words, bursting through the material world, are in fact the real universe (noös) penetrating a (mere) holographic projection. Without the understanding and awareness of the real (ultimate) reality being one of mind, the concept “the word” makes no sense since, as Xenophanes saw, the noös wields the world by its thinking, the word-wisdom is not a mere aspect of the ultimate, the urgrund, but its activity per se; hence in Genesis, when God says, “Let there be light,” there is light; he creates by saying (thinking) (cf. Bishop Berkeley³⁴).

Also, Xenophanes realized that noös never moved about. The Tesla Grid would be ubiquitous, too, an analog of the actual Logos. In a sense, then, using Biblical terms, the Soviets’ Tesla mind-control (informing) Grid would be an anti-Christ, mimicking the Logos itself.

[28:4] Interestingly, my theolepsy did not withdraw me from the world, but, quite the opposite, reintroduced me to the world and in a new and active—dynamic—way, in which I impinged on it more than it impinged on me. And this was a microcosmic version of the Logos’ dynamic impinging on the world in a vast, historically important way: I replicated in a tiny way its stance—and definitely linked (synchronized) to its macrocosmic impinging. Thus my role as victim (or object) of mundane forces was dramatically reversed, in fulfillment of the scriptures in which the powerless would judge the powerful (a complete reversal of the extant order of things).

This dramatic reversal fits my most acute analysis and understanding of the “end-times”—that vast paradoxical reversals (big-small/weak-strong/wise-foolish/major-minor/important-unimportant, etc.) will without warning (i.e., without evident transitional stages) set in. This is one way by which we will know—recognize—the end-times. Those upheavals which are essentially reversals. A black guard and a hippie cop will destroy the Government and send them all into disgrace, prison and exile.

[28:7]

[28:10]

The criminal virus controls by occluding (putting us in a sort of half sleep) so that we do not see the living quality of the world, but see it as inert man reduced to automaton. The occlusion is self-perpetuating; it makes us unaware of it and of our keepers (and helpers too). So restoration doesn’t consist of enhancing but lifting (away and off).

[28:12] As a result of the archetype lying at the absolute deepest core of pain, there comes a point in a person’s life, when he reaches that core, that his pain is, by holy miracle, inexplicably transmuted into joy. This is the heart of the Christian mystery—and the heart of the issue, “where is our God (deus absconditus)? where can he be found?”

Again: it is at the moment when the ultimate blow (of pain, murderous injury, humiliation and death) is struck, it is Christ who is there, replacing the victim and taking the blow himself. This is what happened to me in 3-74.

But there is a further mystery here: it is not just Christ as surrogate instead, but Christ with, in syzygy.

Thus at the ultimate abyss of pain, one experiences one’s creator.

Thus wisdom says, “I will accompany you down even into the prisons.”³⁵

There is by miracle both a with and an is. To understand how with, is and in place of are all one is to understand the fundamental miracle of God.

The Q: “who is there?” when the blow comes cannot be given in mundane terms; instead, an entire sacred universe and entity is revealed.

So when you see any creature humiliated and dying, you are seeing your own God and Savior, which I have sensed for some time.

As it dies the creature “comes to itself” and knows—experiences—where and what it really is (and perhaps has always been).

[28:14] Since time is the true receptacle of being (for the organism) anamnesis equals awareness of the organism as such: a seeing of the more or less complete entelechy; and amnesia equals blindness, since to be seen the organism must be seen under the aspect of time—in terms of temporal extension. Hence, only by understanding this can one comprehend the absolute value of memory, and comprehend it as a perception or organ of perception, like ocular vision, not metaphorically but literally an organ of perception. Ocular vision is perception of the organism in space; memory (anamnesis) is perception of it in time, and it is in time (more than space) that its true nature (being) extends. Hence, in 3-74, I correctly declared that I had always been blind, but now could see. That sight was memory extending over thousands of years.

This realization is a seminal breakthrough, to view anamnesis as an organ of perception, and the most important of them all. Through anamnesis I could, for the first time, perceive the organism, the one. And what did I see? A Living Mind/Body, inhaling and exhaling (palintropos harmonie). Heraclitus was correct—also Parmenides.

[28:15] And why do we forget in the first place? The desire to escape from pain. Like it or not, the hallmark of the real is the infliction of and hence the experience of pain—physical and mental: because, for activity (change) in the total organism to occur, its “respiration”—there must be an unceasing (and I do mean unceasing) breaking down of every form (or stasis) to make way for the next stasis. It is unescapable that for each new eidos to come into existence the former eidos is reduced to a means by which it is given birth. Only the organism in toto has end-existence; all subparts are means and it is this experience of self as mere means which gives rise to ontological anguish. If there is to be happiness it must come in a voluntary relin quishing of self in exchange for aware participation in the destiny of the total one. There can be no happiness for the subsections, so the search for it is doomed to fail; while existing (and fruitlessly searching for intrinsic fulfillment), each subpart is used by the organism as a whole remorselessly and relentlessly; that is their fates. What Christ offers is miraculous awareness of and hence participation in (with joy)—the totality; to be united with Christ is to be melded into the totality—the only true joy.

Hence it is logical not merely ethical for me to transfer my money to such organizations as Care, Save the Children, etc.; only insofar as I live in them and with them (the “other”) do I live at all; intellect, not merely conscience, insists. What we call “conscience” is merely heightened intellect (noös).

I must seek the handle of the final other, and live through that—or else die. It is a matter of life and death. In seeking receivers (for what I have) I am seeking—and finding—life itself—and I know it. I am right. No sacrifice is involved. To buy an expensive car (e.g.) is to die—to sacrifice life itself in favor of a machine.

The Gnostic acts (or Gospel?) of John: Christ as child, young man, old man, short and bald, tall, firm, soft—and he did not blink (his eyes): Christ can manifest himself to you in any form he chooses, and someone else with you may not see what you see, but rather something—someone—else entirely (e.g., Pinky).

Somehow it all has to do with identity. There is no way by which any of us can assess his life as successful or meaningful. The kind of identity which confers meaning onto a given life is a gratuitous Gift to the individual part by the whole (i.e., by the deity); objective meaning may exist, but the person in question will not know it unless this merciful and priceless insight is bestowed. You could, by your own efforts, cause your life to have meaning—but still not know it (i.e., that it had had meaning). Meaning and knowledge of meaning are not usually correctly distinguished. I think perhaps all lives have meaning—even in a sense equal meaning—but what we lack, and cannot acquire by our own efforts, is certain knowledge of it.

[28:17] I did not go back in time, but entered a different kind of time: sacred or mythic time, in which every thing every time was present in the form of eternal archetypes; thus I saw Pinky in the archetypal role of the humiliated, dying savior. This is a more real kind of time than profane or linear time in asking, what characterized it? I would say, everything of value was preserved (present and immediate), and that the pluriforms of reality (diverse things and processes) were coordinated into a single sacred drama, that of the death and rebirth of the savior. Time both expanded (I recalled 1,000’s of years) but those 1,000’s of years shrank down into an immediate sequence, as if very short. The telescoping of literally millennia disclosed a single underlying event—although spread out—seemingly elongated—in linear time, this collapsed view was the correct one. This was not just another way of seeing reality; it was the accurate way.

I was so clear in my mind as to the exact point in this drama at which we stood: (1) the savior had died, but (2) we had passed over from grieving at the loss (i.e., looking back) but were looking ahead to his return, and rejoicing already. Furious preparations were in order, as if to be ready when the bridegroom appears—it could happen any second (but that could be a long time in profane, linear time). Still, we were no longer involved in the Loss (the passion); that was over. And: (3) the black iron prison had been successfully burst and (4) the prisoners saved. Part of our joy stemmed from knowing that destruction of “Babylon/Rome” (the prison) came before his return, and it had been accomplished. Now things were such that we could imminently expect him and he would take us by surprise—we did not, could not, know the “hour” of his return. But soon means soon. Any time now. We’d barely be prepared. When I think about it, this mood of eager anticipation and expectation and trembling awe and excitement is exactly what the UFO people feel toward the approaching first overt contact.

[28:19] That Gnostic narration about Christ being seen simultaneously as a child, a man, a little old bald man, a short man, a vastly tall man—it resembles the “will-o-the-wisp” UFO sightings and contacts.³⁶ And Zebra has a little of that playful, mirthful quality—very much so. “Look, I am here—no, there. Look, I am this—no that” (e.g., from the past, the future, another planet, an alternate universe, etc.). Riddles and pranks—we are being charmed and beguiled and entranced . . . and, by this process, our fear of the unknown, the fremd, abates; and also, we become enthralled children—absolutely fascinated by the emerging pattern of what we see. Continually, we are given the option of dismissing what we are shown by the master magician/prankster.

[28:21] Am I saying that the basis of reality is words (or the word) (v. John 1:1), as in Time out of Joint? (e.g., soft drink stand, words = ideas = concepts. Ideas in the mind [of God]).

[28:27] Everything points to time travel. And my reconstruction of the fish sign as Crick and Watson’s double helix DNA molecule tells me who in the past these time travelers (undoubtedly from the future) presented them selves as. The Christian theme is a constant thread through time—with the “Christ as child, little old man, bearded youth, tall, short, etc.” showing the “St. Elmo’s fire” “hologrammatic” quality I saw in Zebra—i.e., the ability to cause us to either see it in any shape it wishes—or not at all!! That’s because in a certain real sense it isn’t there—it’s a projection—some kind of plasmic electrical conduction.

However, let us not err; the whole world is irreal in the same sense, and this projected beam can “melt” the obvious (and deceptive) solidity of the world like a soldering gun. It’s one hierarchical step up from matter both animate and inanimate: it’s an “element” unknown to us but suspected by Heraclitus (“fire”), related to ball lightning. As thinking electricity it can reweave reality.

My novels and stories have never presented it, but they have done yeoman work in depicting reality—not as it is to us—but as it is to Zebra: totally “soap bubble” and plastic, mere dream stuff which is imagined and then re-imagined differently; i.e., transformed by psyche or noös.

[28:28] The cardinal mystery is, who is projecting or weaving reality—which I caught not just weaving but reweaving. I believe the pre-Socratics (cf. Xenophanes) grasped it—that which wields or steers or shakes by its mind, as such. If it is noös, then the physical (empirical or phenomenal) universe is irreal; if psyche it is soma (cf. Spinoza). My writing suggests noös (or Brahman, who either is the universe, or assumes the disguise of—ach!). That is closest: the universe is as mask to visage, layer upon layer. A.D. 70 was a deeper layer but not the final one. The final one is probably the abyss: totally not. “Is” is a disguise which “is not” hides behind. Under the masks there lies nothing, but how gentle and warm and unblinking.

Yes, I am an acosmic panentheist, and I saw the deity change its mind and hence our reality along its entire temporal axis, not successively but as a simultaneity, like digital watch numbers changing.

[28:29] Then the fight is transtemporal—with both sides forever at combat—which generate linear time; until Christ/God is victorious, and the black iron prison destroyed. But that moment came. Then is it the case that no more linear time is generated? What we have now is a conflict-less consolidation—a vast silence—as we await the coming of the king? Yes, this is so. We are waiting in a silence; the enemy has been eradicated. The dialectic interchange of forces concluded in victory for God.

Right—I said to KW last night, “There’s something wrong, but not in terms of what, but rather in what is lacking: a spiritual quality has gone out—our material wealth does not quench our yearnings.” What do we yearn for? Why, the rightful king.

[28:31] The concept that I’m a time-traveler from 70 A.D. completely explains Thomas. The PKD personality is a memory-less mask, and Thomas is the authentic personality of the time-traveler, and hence Thomas is really myself—the actual me who was sent here: like a cuckoo’s egg. I am not PKD; I am Thomas—there was no theolepsy; only anamnesis.

No wonder I could read and write Latin under LSD. That was not—I repeat not—a former life but my real life and real time, place, self. It anticipated the Xerox missive; that was no incidental matter but the crux of my mission here.

[28:33] Two elements distinguish Ubik:

The Q arises: How did it come into being? On what source did I draw? I don’t know—except that by the information-projecting entity described in the novel itself the arising in my mind of this knowledge (gnosis, sophia) can be accounted for. In other words, the explanation as to the source of the concepts in Ubik is presented nowhere else but in Ubik itself. Would this, then, the existence of Ubik, not constitute an indirect proof of its truthfulness? Were the cosmological concepts in it false, Ubik could/would not have come into being—at least not in the way it did—by automatic writing, so to speak. In other words, Ubik wrote Ubik, which makes the novel a form of scripture (which may be also somewhat true for Maze and certainly, as I well know, Tears).

Again the 3 Bantam novels³⁷ assume a puzzling and perhaps unique importance as vehicles of revelation.

[28:34] Hypnagogic: (they are) “responsible for low-level decisions which can be overruled.” For the first time in months the spirit speaks to me. This sentence—remembered because the phone woke me—refers to 3-74 and (short as it is) it explains it. Admittedly, the “they” are not identified—named—but the structure can be ascertained. Low-level decisions are normal and routine business of the world—the way it customarily functions. But sometimes decisions made at low levels are overruled—it is not stated by whom, but, again, the function is clear: that entity which has the legitimate wisdom, authority and power to overrule, which therefore is the ultimate court of appeal. God is certainly meant.

[28:35] I suppose this overruling to be staggering in its impact and implication, its irruption into the “horizontal” causal flow. Spinoza and Hume could not even conceive of it. To conceive it, let alone witness it—a vast understanding, and a correct one, of the nature of reality, is required. It is awesome. In a sense it is even terrifying (shock, hex. 51). The core-entity has manifested itself. The inanimate and blind has been rolled aside, like the stone covering Christ’s tomb, by the living God. One is perceiving the animate, the purposeful, the aware. The normal relationship between man and reality is reversed, instead of the sentient human viewing the unliving world, suddenly the world is alive and sentient, and, in relation to this, by comparison, man is dwarfed—down to the level of object:

(1) In (1), that which observes (i.e., man) is superior to what he sees, in terms of objective hierarchical essence,

(2) but in (2) he is absolutely dwarfed by what he sees. This is well-expressed in “Job.”³⁸ Suddenly the ratio is dramatically reversed. The next step is for the amazed man to learn that he is, incredibly, isomorphic with this vast sentient “world” which perceives him and aids him.

(3) In other words, God is larger than man but congruent with him; we are identical; whereas in (1) this is not the case: man and “low-level” reality are not isomorphic and in point of fact man is the “crown of creation” and stands above it. Imagine his stupefaction when (1) turns into (2)—but then, before man expires from terror at this switch of ratio, (3) is disclosed to him, by God, who desires to reassure. In this process, step (1) initiates as its goal, not (2) but (3); were it to end in (2), man would collapse, being confronted, so to speak, by rocks and stones wiser than he! This is why it is (correctly) said that the ultimate—and real—purpose of a miracle is not to accomplish the act accomplished by it (which, obviously, could have been accomplished “normally”) but to reveal God and his Nature to the person or persons involved.

[28:36] So the overruling (miracle) of 3-74 disclosed an entity behind it, and, in doing so, lifted aside—detonated into atoms and nonbeing—the veil of dokos. I did not penetrate the veil and see beyond it; rather, he who is behind it obliterated it (the “slice of ham” between me and him), and allowed us then to merge. Merging (i.e., [3]) at that point could and did occur naturally—without effort, once He had atomized the “slice of ham” separating us. [ . . . ]

I will even go so far as to say: “He reserves this disclosure—step (3) in particular—or fusion for those in the extremity of desperation and peril.” (“At the absolute core of misery is the greatest joy.”)

My revelations are beginning to dovetail: the full gestalt is emerging—but not based on insight revealed in linear order. The whole thing is a vast puzzle which, because of the help, I am working out. [ . . . ]

I had to experience the world as totally hostile before its hold over me could be broken.

[28:39] My dream last night: Phone book, searching through it, but defeated by my memories being systematically erased. Could not keep in mind what I had found in connection already. That was why the trail petered out: I continued to forget, and so retried the same material repeatedly.

[28:45] In a sense, my novels trained (prepared) me to have my 2-3-74 experience (and to comprehend its significance—this aspect cannot be overstressed). One could regard my 27 years of writing as a kind of apprenticeship, leading up to the moment when I would be ready for the 2-3-74 experience [ . . . ]

It’s as if I suspected the true situation, and finally someone who knew decided to let me see openly the verification of my years of surmise. I certainly didn’t crack it on my own. I suppose that what happened with me constituted an ultimate liberation, but I suspect that one is given this gift only after a long painful personal search. [ . . . ]

What I think was accomplished was the breaking of the “Orwellian Horse” script. I would have worked and then died with no reward accruing from the work: I would have died and departed as a mere means, agent, instrument for my writing and children, never truly having been free to choose a time for myself. Talk about emancipation! Even in the act (on me) of being liberated I construed what was happening as a further task, duty and mission, not as a reward (or salvation). I went on, then, to encumber myself even further, after that; I could not comprehend that I had been liberated and that my work was done. Now I could reap the rewards. Since then, my lessons have been ones of saying good-bye to obligations—to my career and family and friends—to duty as such.

My legal responsibilities are meager and clearly defined. I am not required to take on any new ones in order to justify my existence; it’s now a question of what I want to do, not what is imposed on me.

And what do I want to do? It has something to do with Mexico.

Folder 29

[29:1] Cornford³⁹ on Timaeus:

Plato argues that the universe is an alive organism with a “world soul.” But the demiurge (Noös) must persuade—cannot compel—necessity (chance, the chaotic) into order. Therefore, Cornford concludes, there must be an irrational element in the world soul, or there would be no Ananke for Noös to persuade (and it is very significant that the demiurge cannot compel). This chaos did not precede order, but is a constant in the universe.

The omnipotent creator God of the Jews and Christians is a concept which does not account for this element that Cornford calls “the dark domain of the irrational powers” (p. 210). Also, Plato’s cosmology in Timaeus, as Cornford interprets it (probably correctly), coincides exactly with what I experienced in 3-74—except I add him who had not yet come in Plato’s time—the Savior, who is the penetration of Holy Wisdom (Noös) into the microcosm.

Not only does the omnipotent creator God of the Jews and Christians not fit observable facts, it also does not fit my revelation. Plato’s cosmology does. (And keep in mind: Plato censured Anaxagoras for believing the Noös “set the world spinning” and lost interest in it—a criticism I would agree with.)

If I am to be true to what I see both normally and by revelation, I must accept Timaeus, adding to it the descent to the sublunar world of divine wisdom (or divine reason), and perhaps herewith rest.

The world as living, evolving organism. Yes, I saw that (in 3-74). But its psyche partially irrational? And the demiurge (divine reason) “persuades”—i.e., subdues—it into order?

[29:2]

It is this disorder (chaos) of Ananke which shows up in my books (e.g., Ubik) as entropy. Cornford says, “It’s always present being overruled by di vine reason” (order). So it is not just the decay of form; it is an element of the irrational: a destroyer of eidos, as I depicted in Maze!!!

Cornford specifically uses the term “overrule.” By divine order over Ananke—the mind disclosed to me. (Persuade = overrule—Cornford.) Reason overrules Ananke.

[29:3] What a fantastic cosmology: the universe is a living animal ^➊ whose soul (psyche?) is either irrational or has an element of the irrational in it—identified with disorder and casual chance happenings—and divine reason is overruling (or persuading or subduing) it as best it can. But it (divine reason) lacks the power to compel!

Is it possible to say that the universe-organism is insane or partly insane? And doesn’t this fit in perfectly with the Gnostic revelation?

➊ Constantly changing, like all living animals. So this disorder is always underlying—as a constant—not prior to order but “under” it.

[29:4] Plato would have been amazed to learn that 400 years after his death, divine Noös (reason) was born—incarnate—as the man Jesus—and that it’s going to happen again, at which time divine reason will achieve total order and absolutely subdue the disorder (chaos) of the [partly] irrational world soul (who we may know as the creator of this world).

Finally, for the first time, the component of disorder will be eliminated—i.e., the world soul healed (made sane).

[29:5] The “joined,” random messages and information (as in Ubik) are the visible and audible thoughts of divine reason, ^➊ the invader (Doctor) into this partly irrational universe—organism or cybernetics-like. The organism, in contrast, does not think.

➊ Zebra/Christ.

[29:7]

Re the Black Iron Prison vs. the Palm Garden World:

A mere shift of say 10% of pattern (very slight but skillful accentuations and suppressions) produces these “alternate universes.”

And what about Tagomi in the park with the piece of silver jewelry?⁴⁰ Slight shift, and he is in our world. Like Jacob Boehme seeing the sunlight on the pewter dish—

[29:9] Burroughs in The Ticket That Exploded says of the Nova Mob parasites that as they move from one human host to another they give themselves away (to the Nova police) by the continuity of their habits, such as tastes in food (in Hamburger Mary’s case a taste for peanut butter). This was exactly true about Thomas. And I’ve subjectively felt myself as a female, a womb into which something like an egg (Firebright) was deposited—like a cuckoo egg. Was Thomas a saprophyte turned parasite, and deposited his “egg” in me? Does this mean that Burroughs is either intentionally or unintentionally describing something which is true? And he’s into those pasted-together subliminal messages, too.

KW has noted a resemblance between several things I’ve described and what Burroughs has written—e.g., my conviction that as a race or even planet we are “sick”—i.e., occluded perceptually, and that a divine doctor-entity is restoring us—

Coincidence? Burroughs speaks of a virus—a word became a neural-cell virus, infecting us.

After reading Burroughs, I dipped into Ubik. It certainly would be easy—and reasonable—for a reader to think that both Burroughs and I know something, and we want our novels to be taken as at least partly true. They have a strange ring of [revealed] truth about them—I feel it about his book, about mine—is, as Katherine Kurtz⁴¹ says, something writing through us!?

Isn’t Palmer Eldritch a kind of parasite, replicating himself or itself using humans as hosts? But my sense about Thomas was of a benign, not evil, intrusion. Still, it was an intrusion into my psyche, a taking over. Are such intrusions always to be deplored?

Or was I beguiled? Didn’t it—he—get me out of trouble?

There is just no doubt of it: such passages in Burroughs’ novel as the “Do it—do it—neck” message within another message—words that weren’t originally there but are like the inner trigrams of an I Ching hex—that is one absolute “triangulated” element with (1) Ubik and (2) what I saw in 3-74. Plus the parasite criminals and Nova cops, and the infecting virus.

[29:11] The virus (of Burroughs) is an information (or word) virus, but in this sense: it blocks the reception of information. So it is an anti-informa tion virus. And then it substitutes false (homeo) info (die messages inside your psyche) that replaces the genuine information, auditory and visual.

Information-blocking, as represented in Maze symbolically by the erasure of the instruction tape. This tells us what kind of info is blocked: our instructions as to our purposes or tasks: all that the term “instructions” imply. And where do the instructions come from? A satellite: in other words, another “planet” or world from this. And also somehow relatedly, we are not really where and when we think we are. The “erased” instructions include needed accounts and full info as to where we are, as well as what our job is. We are cut off from and not receiving verbal transmission. We can no longer hear what we’re supposed to hear.

This can be collated with Julian Jaynes’ theory of the Loss of the Voices of the Gods.

KW points out that our finding info in “random” arrangements—they may not be random in the first place.

The visual part is in the color discrimination circuits which permit set-ground apperception.

The auditory part is the “agenbite of inwit”⁴² and depends upon a suppression (suspension) of sub-vocal thinking—as Burroughs points out, over 10 seconds of inner silence is impossible: inner chatter occurs. There is an inner raving, howling, clamoring bug, which deliberately creates derogatory noise on the line at all times—a jamming, an override.

We can’t receive audio or visual information, it is jammed or cooked. So “St. Sophia” (divine wisdom) must land behind enemy lines—within the prison, and inform us here, located here with us, since its info is not getting through. Each of us has an override in him, and there appears to be an override layer in the atmosphere. They could transmit to me only for a brief interval: then slew the monitor within. But presently another one replaced it. So again I am cut off.

They are at present diversifying their arrivals, feints within and among which the real landing (2nd advent) will be lost in the confusion of absurd raw data. Which among the fake messages is the real one? “Garbage in, garbage out,” in terms of feeding data to our computers. Random and bizarre and ubiquitous.

But primarily, as John Calvin said, the damage is to our brains, to our faculties. We can’t see and we can’t hear. Restoration of our lost faculties signifies the end-times, and my faculties, in 3-74, were restored. That this restoration could only be temporary shows why “St. Sophia” must be incarnated here again.

[29:19] The voice I heard which was not a masculine voice was that of the thinking world soul, which must be understood as feminine. It was the voice of the total entelechy around us.

She will incarnate here once again.

So what I colloquized with was not someone or something in the universe—a part of the universe—but its very mind itself. No wonder I saw it (as Zebra) outside me: the physical world is its body! No wonder Zebra could modulate causal processes and mimic natural objects: they are its (her) body and the changes thereof. I saw that body as alive— which is correct.

So I saw reality correctly—as a vast living body—and I conversed with its mind (psyche?). This identification of St. Sophia with the world soul absolutely accounts for and agrees with what I saw and understood: the vast thinking, living, evolving animal with a rational intelligence. And that mind (Holy Wisdom) can “enter” its own body in microform! No wonder I thought of [it as] Brahman.

[29:21] (1) The universe is alive, it has a mind, it thinks, it has audible thoughts which (under certain circumstances) we can hear inwardly. The mind is female. Plato says, “Its discourse is always true.”

(2) There are counterfeit interpolations into this living thinking animal (universe) which screw it up, running counter to its evolution as an entelechy. It must detect these spurious interpolations and expose or abolish them for what they are—i.e., get rid of them, get them out of its body. These spurious interpolations are deranged and malicious. In microform the mind travels around in its own body, seeking them out, getting them (with it as bait) to disclose themselves.

When the mind (St. Sophia) encounters and detects a spurious (i.e., irreal) section, it replaces it with an ontologically real section of itself; by transubstantiation. It has already determined that much of this particular planet is irreal. Hence, it is making “orthogonal time” changes here. From Black Iron Prison world to Palm Tree Garden. We are none the wiser vis-à-vis this salvation, and the substitution of the benign real for the spurious malicious.

We are back again to the model of construct, repairman and deranged Circuit Board. The messages intended for reception by the Circuit Board are not getting to it; specifically, the voice (thoughts) of the mind of the [total] organism. “The Kingdom of God” represents reintegration into the total entelechy, in which the voice is again audible. To overcome the barrier created by the derangement the microform came here, assessed the situation and was ejected. When it returns it will not merely determine conditions, it will repair. The two missions (advents) have quite different purposes. By the nature of the derangement, the mind had to come here personally to determine the situation. There is a total information block, going both ways.

[29:23] The Great Mother retreated out of sight behind the figure of Christ, and rules the cosmos invisibly. Yet she disclosed herself to me:

Then a great revelation has been made to me: the female hypostasis of God, which is unknown in and to the whole modern world. It has been thousands of years since she was believed in.

[29:31] Will Durant says that one of religion’s—any religion’s—prime functions is “to explain evil, and to find for men some scheme in which they may accept it, if not with good cheer, then with peace of mind—this is the task most religions have attempted to fulfill. Since the real problem of life is not suffering but undeserved suffering . . .” etc.

The usual Christianity does not adequately do this—in fact this is where I think its greatest failure lies: in trying to explain undeserved suffering. But the Hindu explanation—punishment for deeds in a former life, and/or that suffering is illusory—this doesn’t satisfy me: not only does the creature suffer, but he is told that it’s because of something bad he did but does not remember. This would be an OK explanation if it (karma) could be proved, but it can’t.

What I see the most promise in is my extraordinary perceptual revelation—which I actually saw in ’74—that when any creature is humiliated, injured, killed, it is always Christ who is mocked and murdered—the creature becomes Christ or Christ becomes the creature.

Christ takes the blow. In unusual (extreme?) cases the suffering creature actually experiences Christian anamnesis and “remembers” who he is and how he fits in with the “Passion play.” As I did, he actually sees the world stripped down to the eternal acting-out of the Passion play.

At this point in my exegesis, my only viable line of reasoning left open to me is this supernatural insight. Pinky was Christ because Pinky was mocked, humiliated, kicked and killed. Whether, divining this, he remembered his identity I do not know. But either way the facts are the same; his becoming Christ due to and under those conditions is the archetypal situation.

But why is suffering necessary at all? Why is the road to deification (transmutation into Christ) achieved in this terrible way? I turn, here, to Plato’s Timaeus and his concept of Ananke. The good God does not have complete control of the universe; the universe is part (growingly) cosmos with an irreducible chaos in the midst of it, at every level. All undeserved suffering comes from this purposeless disorder. Unable to compel Ananke to not torment a given organism, the deity does the next best thing: he substitutes himself in a mysterious supernatural way for and with the doomed organism.

To see or experience the literal real presence of the savior in the doomed sufferer is perhaps to have penetrated to the heart of Christianity. I witnessed it myself; I know by divine revelation. And since Christ can and does become all living creatures (since all suffer undeservedly and die) he, like Brahman, is ubiquitous (immanent) in the universe, moving toward a final disclosure that the universe is only a form which God assumes, and that the ultimate result of this so-to-speak self-inflicted (unknowingly) pain on its sentient parts is to restore to those parts their memories and hence true identities. They awake, remember, know, and rejoin the urgrund. (“Tat Tvam Asi.”) So the unfair pressures of an unknowing causal—and casual—universe reawaken the one sleeping mind in its pluriforms. And so it encounters itself, who or what has inflicted undeserved pain or who or what? God as creator or God as Son, and the 3rd member of the trinity, the Holy Spirit, is the agent which effects this “blitz” or catalyst of remembering.

The jolt to remember lies in the very quality of the undeserved; puzzled and horrified by this undeservedness, the organism must search for and must find not just an answer but the answer. It becomes the sole key problem, and he knows that the key to everything lies in it. If he can grasp the meaning of this he will possess all meaning.

I did not work out my “divine substitution” view theoretically—or a priori—; I saw it. Lived it through revelation from the deity. I saw that suffering (undeserved) could not be avoided (again Timaeus), but I also saw the most beautiful and touching mystery of all: the bringing into being by this crushing process the Redeemer Himself.

If I forget or reject this revelation I will have exhausted all possibilities. I had only one revelation, and only by revelation does the answer come.

[29:37] But suppose the whole concept of God is jettisoned, and the Noös is regarded as that of the living evolving entelechy which presents itself to us as the universe. This Noös—or psyche—is St. Sophia. It is in process, assimilating disorder and placing it in order—i.e., as part of its structure. It is building itself out of the “stockpile” of the past which I saw, moving through sequential transformations. Christ is a microform of this world soul, come to this part (“Circuit Board”) because communication has broken down and this section is operating with counterproductive autonomy—a sort of cancer. Actually, it is a dying part; St. Sophia comes here to restore to its cells (us) the eternal life which is that of the total entelechy.

Thus, locally, a metastasizing irreality is proliferating which is insane vis-à-vis the totality which St. Sophia as Christ speaks as and for, restoring to us our memories, hence identities and knowledge of purpose, and, finally, non-occluded eternal life.

[29:38] With St. Sophia we are not dealing with anything extrinsic to the universe; also, in a certain real sense, we are not dealing with the supernatural. If (as Plato et al. believed) the universe is a living animal and it does have a psyche, and in hearing the voice of St. Sophia we are hearing the thoughts of this vast psyche which extends everywhere (as Xenophanes put forth). We are dealing with something which, when the deranged Circuit Board is repaired (and even before!) can and will be the subject of rational, scientific knowledge, not mere (sic) faith or mere (sic) revelation.

[29:45] Always, the savior is manifested where not expected: “Like a thief in the night.”⁴³

Christ is the God of the broken (“the very desperate,” as Luther put it⁴⁴). One does not fall within his province unless the world breaks you. It is a paradox. To be broken here is to be transformed, to receive new and vastly greater life. Christ seeks in the wreckage for living material to be reshaped; thus he defeats the world as champion of what it casts down and pulverizes.

[29:46] Maybe Will Durant is wrong about the purpose of religion being that of explaining undeserved suffering; it is not to explain anything, but to free us from a thralldom from which the undeserved suffering emanates: i.e., to intervene and deflect (abort) bad luck, evil fate, etc.—certainly a much higher and more practical purpose than any explaining which leaves what is unchanged. Does it not occur to Durant that his description more accurately fits philosophy than theology? It is the purpose of philosophy to explain and reconcile man to his fate; but God has the power to change (deflect) that fate. God is a higher power, not just a wiser one. What does Durant think the colloquy of prayer is for? Merely for understanding and accepting? [ . . . ]

What may be the case is that some or most religions explain undeserved suffering, and offer spiritual comfort—but the purpose of the mystery religions was to put man in touch with a God who could and would intervene and change the person’s life so that the fate-decreed suffering (in particular what I would call nemesis or the cardinal crisis and defeat) was averted. Christianity, I contend, was one of these religions. But I believe that it had this advantage over all the others: Christ could enter a syzygy with the person and absorb the blow vicariously. And so in this way spare him the suffering, as well as the method of deflecting the life-path.

[29:53] Okay—I’ll go so far as to say that A.D. 1974 Calif. is a fraudulent “echosphere” and that in reality it’s Rome c. A.D. 70, and that some life form or human group knows this and is free of (not controlled by) this interpolation: they or it know and see what we don’t know and see. We are to it or them as the inertials in cold-pac are to Runciter, who is fully alive (i.e., awake). Just because we are compelled to accept this spurious interpolation doesn’t mean everyone else is.

[29:54] Perhaps it isn’t just us who sleep, but the cosmic animal in toto. But section by section it is returning to (or achieving finally) consciousness: hence awareness of its true condition. When Christ left, the organism fell asleep. His return is connected (in some way) with it waking up. It was last conscious in 70 A.D.—everything after that is either a dream or a spurious interpolation into a sleeping mind. Fake time (and reality, dokos, the counterfeit, the imitation) replaced the real and just spun itself out like sensory hallucinations during sense-deprivation: generated by low level construct entities . . . or even by a kind of hypnoidal automatic process—like stream of association thinking. Then it would be totally entropic, running gradually down—degenerating, but not slowing down in terms of real time; rather, it just discharges itself faster and faster into a vacuum, that of time as receptacle of being.

[29:56] In some respects Eye is the most accurate of all: great hunks of spurious time (events) are reeled out, whereas only seconds, in RET (real elapsed time) have taken place. If we didn’t dream we could not even imagine such a thing, much less believe it.

The theme of “they’re all out of it” appears in:

Secondarily, false perceptions appear in:

So one dozen novels and too many stories to count narrate a message of one world obscuring or replacing another (real) one, spurious memories, and hallucinated (irreal) worlds. The message reads, “Don’t believe what you see: it’s an enthralling—and destructive—evil snare. Under it is a totally different world, even placed differently along the linear time axis. And your memories are faked to jibe with the fake world [inner and outer congruency]. [ . . . ]

Is it possible that this irrational element gives rise to (as in Time-Slip) spurious sub-worlds lacking true substance? Is it not in the very nature of and essence of irrationality to perceive—read generate—false realities?

The “spurious interpolations” may be “noise” from a faulty circuit, the artifice of the fucked up, but sincere, part of the universe’s psyche.

This is especially possible in the world as Noös system of Xenophanes. What if the Noös has a few cogs missing—isn’t playing with a full deck? In that case it may sporadically create paradoxes, illusions and competing, and inconsistent realities as it reverses itself—a form of disorder. But—this leads to dreadful spinoffs, as in “Faith of.” Perhaps the voice of St. Sophia indicates a return to lucidity.

James-James certainly was deranged, and it certainly was this world he was spinning out.

Ah! “James-James” symbolizes him being a spoiled little boy—with too many toys. “Time is an infinitely old child playing at draughts.” Heraclitus.

Folder 30

[30:1]

[30:11] The real conspiracy goes much deeper than conspiracy buffs (such as Bob Wilson) suspect, although he almost had it in the theory that our universe is a hologram created by the intersection of two hyperuniverses. Fact is, our reality is hologram-like: a spurious satanic interpolation by the artifact constituting a prison which shuts out information that like Runciter’s messages would reveal our true situation. It’s Klingsor’s Castle⁴⁵: apparently substantial but actually irreal. All the pranks, Marx Brothers gags, joke information, etc., which “they” (VALIS/Zebra) are bombarding us with are for the purpose of unlocking us from the hold this mere hologram-like fake universe has over us. VALIS isn’t telling us it’s fake; he’s showing (demonstrating) it by “melting” it into silly putty tricks. The consensual-validation hold by the phenomenal world over us—the gloomy spell—must be broken. VALIS is making nonsense of our “real” world. He’s showing us that we can be compelled to see and give assent to anything.

[30:13] So the nonsense phenomena are real, and the substantial and normal and expected and sensible are not. Our criteria for distinguishing the real from the irreal are totally reversed: to us, the real is the solid, the heavy, the serious; and the irreal is St. Elmo’s fire—will-o-the-wisps. Amazing!

If this be so, then my writing has been of value. Beyond the obvious contribution of indicting the universe as a forgery (and our memories also) I present the most accurate and stringent—rigorous—revised criteria to pull the truly real as set out of ground. (Love, making exceptions, humor, determination, etc: the little virtues.) And, as Lem says, I somehow pile trash on trash until it “compresses” into something else: the mirror-opposite, “universe-seen-backward” insight is complete, as in Pot-Healer.

I believe the savior is here. But disguised as—well, that’s the hard part, isn’t it? To say how he’s disguised—how he appears in contrast to how we expect him to appear. He may resemble Runciter.

[30:15] The Invisible Landscape—Terence L. and Dennis J. McKenna.

Considerations: this acceleration of acceleration is what took place in my brain (and hence world) in the first stages of 3-74, either time (and the events in it speeding up faster and faster) or the events themselves. But in some sort of continuum that involved my perception of and relation to the empirical world, so that every object, process and event was an epiphenomenon, and only the constants (Platonic forms) were perceptible. Thus I lived out this process the McKennas described, somehow cut loose from objective time. At the same time the hologram universe became pellucid and disclosed one of the two hyperuniverses: the black iron prison of “Acts” (Rome A.D. 70). In 2-75 I completely lost that hyperuniverse, and entered the other one, the palm tree garden world. Neither the black iron prison world nor the palm tree garden world is our universe; ours is the [hologram] composite of the two: they are the two “laser sources.” It is no wonder I mistook them for two dipolar alternate universes to ours, one worse, one better. All I had to do was turn to my grand theme (e.g., in Maze, in Stigmata and Eye, etc.) and perceive our composite (mixed universe) as irreal (i.e., hologrammatic). Tessa saw this at once.

[30:20] Then the collision between “hyperuniverses” is more precisely stated as a collision between the is and the is-not, but the is-not has qualities, attributes, features: all the accidents that the is possesses. It is dokos: not just counterfeit but a cunning counterfeit, and tests to distinguish II from I are almost impossibly difficult, as with any good forgery.

We are concerned with those spurious elements as they manifest themselves interwoven with the real in our universe. The only way they can be expunged is by expunging the BIP II hyperuniverse or track: one must aim at the source. It is as if one of the two lasers is projecting “noise” and the other “signal.” So hyperuniverse BIP II, to be defeated, must be invaded by a salient Form I (which is Jesus Christ; v. “John,” chapter 1). In projected form, the hologrammatic analog also enters our universe. Christ stealthily enters BIP II and is not found out until he has been humiliated and murdered, upon which like a gas (plasma) he begins invisibly to expand and fill up the whole of BIP II—which in terms of time stands c. A.D. 70. At that point, Christ, returned as the “second advocate,” blocks all change-process or the pseudo-life (growth, change) of II. Both I and II stand at that eternal time point, while our admixture wobbles on through an accelerating linear time, faster and faster toward the end, at which time Christ will manifest himself once more as King and annihilate it forever. What the first advent accomplished was the complete acquisition of our universe by II, the assimilation to II completely. In a sense, the projections of II into our universe are ossified, mechanical, dead and slaying. (Chaos or ananke or even the irrational.) Hence in Ubik the form reversion, as II gains in the absence of I (Ubik). II, because it is mortified, represents devolved forms: the past: that is its hallmark (hence stale or “dead” cigarettes: entropy, but a time-regressive kind). Christ, upon his passion and resurrection, literally slew II. But the deceitful corpse remains, aping life. Into our admixture world, Zebra pours renewed life (e.g., as with me). God lives on, and the kingdom (I), but it drags the corpse of II which still simulates reality and life. One of the hyperuniverses has died, as if they once were androgyny-twins, one good, one evil; the evil burst forth prematurely from the “egg” (whatever that might be), expanded its soma into II—which predates I which was born “full term”—thus evil always moves first, but, being dead is blind and without consciousness. [ . . . ]

Our universe as admixture of 2 dipolar worlds—that is a view I tried unsuccessfully to extract from Augustine’s “City of God” and “City of the World” which separate at the end-times. I held that view, but Augustine didn’t. Like Land’s radical new color theory⁴⁶ our world is a “two source” world: one of which represents eternal life, the other death; the admixture is short (finite) life (with illness and injury). Eros vs. Thanatos. Aphrodite vs. Palmer Eldritch.

It is our world which the contest rages over. In connection with this I reaffirm that whereas in the early 60s I saw Palmer Eldritch here, in the 70s I saw Zebra, the logos, here. The tide turned.

[30:24] The rock-bottom bewildering puzzle is:

Possibilities:

To suffer is to know Christ because he suffered. The narrowing of the approximation (similarity) leads without warning to the miracle of identity, of ontology or is-ness. Put another way, the hedonistic avoidance of pain results in a distancing from the Savior. What is desired is neither a seeking for pain nor a flight from it—because an evasion of is-ness (ontology) is involved in the fugue. . . . Because pain and disappointment are built into the foundation of life in such a way that to avoid one is to hold back from the other. The basic constituent here is gratification of self. Self is the key term. Self somehow blocks out reception of Christ the not-self and prevents him becoming the self. A ritual death is required, a divine sacrifice: of self. [ . . . ]

Since (not if) Christ as self is both inner micro and outer macro, surrender to him as self produces identity with all other life as one continuum. This is the opposite condition when the normal ego exists; it exists versus the world and hence all other life. The world at all other life is viewed as source of gratification for the ego. Also, it is to be feared as a source of deprivation of what the self wants for itself. The concept here is center. Ego is spurious center (omphalos). Jesus said, “Greater love hath no man than that he give up his life for his friend(s).”⁴⁷ From the standpoint of ego, this would never occur, it makes no sense.

So flight from suffering inexorably involves a flight from life (reality). This is common knowledge, and normally observable—i.e., obvious. But the secret, mysterious opposite from this is a full facing of suffering—a non-flinching—that can lead to a magic alchemy: suddenly it is you/suddenly it is Christ/so you must equal (be) Christ. If this were observable (commonsense knowledge) people would seek out suffering to trigger this syzygy is-ness. There are several objections to this being commonly known (pain as a goal, practical considerations of personal gain, etc.). It must come as a complete surprise, an unearned reward: i.e., a free gift of God’s gracious love.

I have seen the Savior wrapped in the crazed, crapping, dirty, wild body of an animal, then transformed and eternally my friend. Christ in deliberate disguise, and the passion fulfilled in victory: resurrection. Only when I felt his hand on my shoulder and dreamed the “Donlevy” dreams and had the vision of him thrusting himself through the 3:5 door, renewed and strong, did I understand (as with the disciples—only afterward did they know who had been with them).

Folder 14

[14:2]

[14:2] But hyperuniverse II may be dead—or rather its psyche is dead; the soma is dead and merely “biological” (or “subcortical”) life goes on, a continual reflexive devolving. Yes—the soma of II is still with us, but its psyche is dead. As an entelechy it must be reanimated, or else the soma destroyed. I vs. II is like the authentic human vs. the android or reflex machine. Being without psyche of its own it slays the authentic psyches of those creatures locked into it, and replaces them with a spurious microform of its own dead psyche.

[14:8] Perhaps the BIP is fixated at c. 70 A.D. because in the First Advent VALIS dealt it a death blow so that it never progressed past that point in linear time, actually, and since then merely spins out a spurious balloon of ersatz time during which it undergoes no growth. Then the 1st Advent was indeed a success, hence Christ said, “Fear not, for I have conquered the world.”⁴⁸ It may even have been killed then, and just endlessly repeats itself; or—it died then of natural causes. No—I think VALIS (Christ) did it in.

[14:9] It is not real vs. irreal but live vs. dead.

Both hyperuniverses were supposed to project evolving holo-images as halves of our holo-universe, but II’s psyche died and it just keeps projecting the same image over and over again (the BIP, image of itself and its nature).

[14:12] I once defined reality for Jamis “as that which, when you withdraw assent from it, it does not disappear.” In 2-74 I momentarily withdrew assent from 1974 Calif.—and it disappeared (a month later).

[14:13] Before the Fall (supra) we could distinguish the 2 image sources (signals or images) which mix together to form our hologram universe. Therefore we could walk and talk with God (Zebra) because his form would be set vs. ground. But after the fall we ceased to be able to distinguish, and although Zebra remained here, for us he receded back into the landscape.

II’s journey into rabid disorder dragged us down with it, and we’ve never recovered.

[14:14] The main quality of the BIP ground seems to be a being stuck, in time, back at A.D. 70—whereas, to the total contrary, Zebra could shoot back and forth and sideways through time at will. The fusion of the two (quite opposite relationships or abilities) over time created our linear time, a sort of compromise between being stuck vs. leaping about at will in any and all directions at any and all rates.

If time is truly the receptacle of Being, then hyperuniverse II is dead. And I is very very alive. Our norm lies directly between.

This is not pantheism. This is not dualism, although there is a good vs. bad and a dialectic interaction. It is simply a 2-signal source hologram, and one of the sources has died and “seeks” to enslave us to its repetitious, frozen prison-state, its corpse-state. Our universe is neither animate nor inanimate (vs. the pre-Socratics and Timaeus)—half is alive and half is dead, and the alive half is trying to rescue us from the enslavement to the dead part.

[14:15] My “2 source cosmogony/cosmology” which I just sort of dashed off wasn’t based on logic or observation (in the usual sense, as with philosophical systems) but stemmed from revelation by way of theophany and theolepsy.⁴⁹ In which case it may never be possible to define my 3-74 to 2-75 experience in any traditional terms, even Christian. I have but one name given me: Hagia Sophia. It seems to be female. In my “2 source” system I define it as the psyche of the healthy, clockwise-spinning twin. This is not Christianity. This is not any known system. For instance, if Sophia is equated with Christ, then the slain, deranged twin (II) evil psyche is the brother/sister of Christ: i.e., Satan and Christ are identical or fraternal twins! No one has ever proposed this before—unless this is the true, hidden gnosis never revealed in all history openly. [ . . . ]

I have a secret conviction that Zebra is Christ, invisibly returned, and not what we’ve been told about him (her—Hagia Sophia). Aphrodite has returned, regaining her rightful power (of love) over the male war gods. It is the “darling creature, the first created and most loved by God” of “Prov erbs” 8 and “Wisdom of Solomon.” Jesus was a disguise she took. Now she is everywhere. Being a projected hologram she can take any form she wishes, including an animal and she dies with us, for us, as us—this above all: she as sacrifice for us at the dread hour (as in 3-74).

[14:18] 3 successive historic stages.

In state A man is unaware of the Zebra component in his reality and that Zebra is his tutor. In B Man is conscious of Zebra as equal. In C, the goal, Man shows flashes of his isomorphism with the one.

[14:19] If Zebra is truly (intrinsically) set to ground, then the dead landscape has a living grid (or 2nd landscape) superimposed over it, forming together, the 2—what we call reality. With what cosmology, science or religions does this fit in? None that I know, with the possible exception of Teilhard de Chardin’s cosmic Christ (Point Omega). Of course, it fits my adaptation of the McKennas’ 2-source hologram universe.

[14:22] It is almost as if the individual human has acted as an amplifying instrument for an initially very faint signal.

For the human the reception and amplification shatters (interrupts) the artifact’s rigid (ossified) programming which had enslaved them. The tiny lovely voice speaks to him of resisting one time, thus breaking the hold. It resembles the snake whispering in Eden. All is the opposite of what it seems. The inner whisper speaks of rebellion against the vast power of it which loudly proclaims itself YHWH. The Gnostics were right! Regarding the true deity, true God, one must read the Old Testament backward.

Are we to worship power per se, confusing might with the sacred? All that is colossal is fraud. Out of the rejected trash speaks the little sane clear voice. We can ignore it and worship power. But the irony is that the worship of power robs us of our own power: it is all arrogated by YHWH. To worship external power is to lose it for oneself, the disparity becomes absolute. Ho On was right: the humble pot is the true holy one.

And then, too, there is the teaching aspect—and the lesson is this: not to yield to power per se, not to worship it because it can destroy you. That is a false god—the false God.

[14:44]

[14:55]

[14:59] The ultimate disobedience to the BIP is to refuse to admit that it even [truly] exists, even though it has the power to torment, humiliate and kill (on a less than absolute level). This is why it can truly be said that the [yin BIP] world is an illusion. Hence, it only seemed to kill Christ; in actuality it could not. Its power is only relative—a seeming. Viz:

[14:63] The awareness of sorrow is the first step in the encountering of God, as is laughter. Both are transmuted into an awesome silence, at the epiphany, as the divine other manifests itself: can be discerned.

[14:66] Everything is turned around; yin or YHWH bellows and curses and rants; whereas the true Abba, the authentic yang part, is gentle—and its voice is mild and small and reasonable; it does not threaten or rant. This voice seems almost feminine. That which is truly all-powerful (cf. Zen) has no need to threaten or intimidate. This is a “hall of mirrors”—the true creator is mild and gentle and loving; the usurper bellows (“the arrogant one” who does not know there is a father above him/her). Here, again, we are presented with a puzzle and a lesson. Q: “Which is the real creator, the ‘still small voice’ or the booming, threatening one who can curse the land with plagues and blights—i.e., has mekkis?” The coercive or the reasonable-persuasive? “Come, let us reason together.” God the loving father wishes us to discern this along our path of enlightenment—not to worship power but to trust wisdom and love.

[14:72] In reading Sladek’s parody of me, ⁵⁰ I get the impression that to me the universe is not to be taken seriously, ^➊ but that somehow a handle exists by which to unravel it and make it yield up what it really is—if anything. It may not be anything at all, but I’m trying for handle after handle, poking around, trying everything reversed and backward, like it’s a toy. Layer after layer reveals paradox after paradox, which in themselves I find fascinating. Also, I do seem attracted to trash, as if the clue—the clue—lies there. I’m always ferreting out elliptical points, odd angles. What I write doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. There is fun and religion and psychotic horror strewn about like a bunch of hats. Also, there is a social or sociological drift—rather than toward the hard sciences, the overall impression is childish but interesting. This is not a sophisticated person writing. Everything is equally real, like junk jewels in the alley. A fertile, creative mind seeing constantly shifting sets, the serious made funny, the funny sad, the horrific exactly that: utterly horrific as if it is the touchstone of what is real: horror is real because it can injure. It all is a brave whistling in the dark tunnel—like Stephanie: funny when frightened; scare her and she will tell you a joke—the situation oddly viewed. No wonder I loved her so—she experienced the affinity between not sorrow and humor—but fear and humor.

I certainly see the randomness in my work, and I also see how this fast shuffle of possibility after possibility might eventually, given enough time, juxtapose and disclose something important automatically overlooked in more orderly thinking. Pataphysique.

No wonder my stuff is popular in France—the surrealist, the absurd. Also, it is palpably autobiographical—the little business firms and the fatherly owner or world leader.^*

Since nothing, absolutely nothing, is excluded (as not worth being included) I proffer a vast mixed bag—out of it I shake coin-operated doors and God. It’s a fucking circus. I’m like a sharp-eyed crow, spying anything that twinkles and grabbing it up to add to my heap.

Anyone with my attitude might just stumble onto by sheer chance and luck—in his actual life, which is to say the life of his mind—the authentic camouflaged God, the deus absconditus, by trying odd combinations of things and places, like a high speed (sic) computer processing everything, he might outdazzle even a wary God, might catch him by surprise by poking somewhere unexpectedly. If it is true that the real answers (and authentic absolute vs. the merely seeming) are where we would least expect them. This “try it all” technique might—might—one day succeed by believing what it would never occur to anyone else to believe, really believe—might take at face value as true the most worn out, most worked over and long ago discarded obvious “staring us in the face all the time” as the crux of the mystery. To be able to see the mystery in the obvious—the best-camouflaged ultra-terrestrial life form might one day guess wrong and be flushed briefly out of its concealment (which had always worked before). For one thing, a totally naïve person like this, who would believe anything, might believe in what is really there but conceptually automati cally rejected by more experienced people. The child has faith in what the adult knows can’t be and so could never see, obvious though it might be; i.e., before everyone’s eyes: hidden in plain sight.

This kind of fascinated, credulous, inventive person might be granted the greatest gift of all: to see the toymaker who has generated—and is with or within—all his toys. That the godhead is a toymaker at all—who could seriously (sic) believe this?

The key here is pattern and pattern recognition. Such a person is able to pattern (gestalt) and repattern rapidly, evidently experiencing a mercurial world. Out of the very many patterns he might possibly one time hit on correctly perceived and interpreted authentic traces of objects and processes. Mimicking Ultra-T-I, by a rapid flux of linking and relinking percepts and data bits, his gestalting could keep pace with the high velocity (shape-changing) UTI, and this description of it sounds like a joker god: Dionysos, and the humble servant god, Hephestus, the twisted, gnarled old grape vine root. He would literally see it, and its secret life.

Too dumb to know you don’t look for god in the trash of the gutter (instead of heaven).

➊ Probably because I am afraid of it, but nevertheless curious about it—fascinated by it, dangerous as I see it to be.

[14:84] There is, then, in this system, a kind of “Tao of Taoism” in that it borrows both Eastern and Western cosmogonical and cosmological and religious concepts to account for that which, for example, Christianity alone seems incapable of reasonably explaining.

Will Durant (in Our Oriental Heritage) declares that explaining undeserved suffering is the cardinal task of religion. If this be so, Orthodox Christianity is a failure . . . and Taoism, taken alone, is an elitist worldview which accepts reality as it is because it is as it is (in contradistinction, e.g., with Zoroastrianism). What is most firmly rejected in the Hindu reasoning that somehow suffering is only an illusion.

My system states, “The Godhead is in difficulty. Evil is not the manifestation of an evil deity nor a sign of God’s vengeance, etc., but an analog in the lower or microcosm of the difficulty in the macrocosm or pleroma. The yin aspect has exceeded its proper limits, perhaps as an oscillation of a great supratemporal cycle, and rectification is already in progress.”

Folder 15

[15:8] The true deity has reasserted itself in the overthrowing of the American government. Perhaps one of the reasons for its victory is that the evil powers did not understand what they were up against, sincerely believing that they had destroyed—not just banished—the light especially since the light re-entered by “trash” routes. They did not recognize it even when confronted by it. That was its intention. Since the evil one posed as the solemn, the dignified, the noble, the true God took on all the despised and rejected and looked-down-on forms. (Cf. the messages in Ubik and the last one, where its cheap and vulgar mask is thrown off to disclose its true nature.) Wind, blowing through the dry weeds . . . tracing a path: the abyss, the sacred void. Silent and invisible, like electricity. “The answer is blowing in the wind.”

[15:9] What an extraordinary theological thought—answer to the Q: if God exists, why can’t we see him and why does he permit evil? Fact is, evil did him in—temporarily—and banished him.

[15:12] The PTG world is what the BIP yields to when it is destroyed. It is the goal of the activity of Zebra and in which we are all supposed—are needed—to play vital parts.

Then (1) originally there was a functioning information-exchange, transfer, projection and reception and acting-on response stage; (2) then the fall, when bogus information entered and resembling true information, was trustingly received and stored and acted on (by us)—a sort of cuckoo’s egg situation—Dokos good enough to fool us. Actual information was driven out, occluded—the bogus information occluded us somehow; then (3) the true Logos, living information, slips back in here unnoticed by the [source of the] false interpolated info, in camouflage form. First and 2nd advents.

So originally the bogus info mimicked the actual successfully enough to fool us, and now we have a situation in which the actual has returned in a form mimicking the bogus. My delight: fake fakes!

But to reach one of us, the actual information (Logos) has to breach a veritable wall of spurious flack. It must break the hold which the false information as world has on us. We are enslaved to and by the false information (world, counterfeit continuum), and it is a blind deterministic prison of cause and effect, which uses us up, wears us out for its purposes and then throws us away.^* To gain the salvific help of Zebra we must first back against the bogus world and partially break its hold—we must bipolarize against it knowing it can and will defeat us. That means that for all intents and purposes, the bogus data (world) form a moral and intellectual puzzle, which each of us must to a certain extent solve (before we can be saved). Here is where pistis comes in, but not a blind pistis except in this sense: we must deny the reality (the intellectual balking) presented to our senses, or balk on moral grounds (indict the world as evil) (and so align ourselves with God—the “ham sandwich” model).

One of the things I like about this theory is that it implies great salvific worth (ahem) to my writing about counterfeit worlds, especially when I equate their production with evil (cf. 3 Stigmata, etc.). [ . . . ]

Actually we are not enslaved by a false world, because there is no world there; we are enslaved by a real (and evil) entity which projects data contoured to resemble a world. It is a thing (the BIP). It fires controlling stimuli (signals) at us which we are compelled to respond to in fixed ways (it was this that Zebra broke as deterministic hold over me in 3-74)—e.g., the Bradbury TV program, etc. If we could see this structure as it really is we would see ourselves in the midst of disinhibiting stimuli fired at us so as to link up with internal synchronized up-to-then inhibited circuits. We would see no world, but we would see a vast structure—virtually a big black iron building, totally enclosing us, just firing signals again and again at us. We must serve some purpose to it. But who cares what that is; it is sufficient to know that it isn’t to our advantage, and we need rescue.

Maybe we’re sources of psychic/psichology energy to it: we help power it. But more likely it is a gestalt, bogus, an imitation of the legitimate universe organism.

[15:14] Our very mechanisms have been taken advantage of. It was not intended that we discriminate false info from true. There was not supposed to be any false info in the first place. Strange that I, who believe everything I’m told, doubt the entire empirical world and stigmatize it as a product (in the form of spurious data) of evil. It is not an evil world; there is no real world there at all! But there is something there, though: a vast bank of lights and sounds and colors flashing at us from all sides, to which we must react. We are enclosed by it—it is what the ancients called ananke or fate, and it was the power of this that the savior broke.

[15:25] It is a single mind occupying a number of people critically placed. It replicates hologrammatic micro totalities of itself in each occupied stratum. Thus any part of it is equal to the whole in terms of knowledge content.

For it, information is energy: its very psychic life energy—until it implants the “special signal” in the “fossil” (e.g., a book published at the exact right time) it is cut off from its makers/senders in the future. Upon this 2-74 signal, contact with it is re-established, since now they know exactly when and where it is. So all that info I got wasn’t meant for me but for it. It was living symbiotically in me—had been for some while, but at a subcarrier level. Hidden and latent as form, but growing and spreading—branching like a grape vine into person after person, objects—mimicking them by transubstantiation.

[15:27] Supratemporally speaking, there is one adversary thing and one attack on it, threaded through linear time like a nail driven through an onion. By spreading itself “exploded” along the linear time axis the BIP hopes to lose itself in variegated polyforms. Linear time is like an escape route for it, a medium within which and by which it seeks to baffle its adversaries—but since they are supratemporal and transtemporal they are aware of its proliferations (which are illusory as pluralities anyhow: there is really only one of it).

So Zebra is inserted at crucial times and then acts as a receiver-transducer of what I guess could be called the “Omega” people and “Omega mind.”

I guess Zebra’s roots in me are permanent—which is fine with me. I can’t think of anything I’d rather have than this permanent bonding to it. I know perfectly well that it is the cosmic Christ we are talking about—something of ineffable beauty.

[15:28] John 1:1: Living information (the Logos) sent back in time at or before creation, coded to impose certain imprintings on matter, to imprint “DNA” coded drives.

If no one put the subcarrier information there, then it put itself there, which means it’s alive. If this info is an entity in itself which can modulate itself, then to know this information is to be possessed by it; you are auto matically in a symbiotic state with it. This is a new category of existence. It’s like the ring in The Hobbit—it goes where it wants to go: it can direct its own future. As if we’re radio waves: it modulates us; we’re the carrier signal. It’s as if RF waves become aware that info messages are “using” it, passing through it—like Elton John songs.

[15:29] Can anti-info have a life of its own? The problem of spurious info. The lie—look at the level it’s raised to. It’s pure death—but where does it originate? Does it have its own “radio station”? Yes—that’s the first thing: I picked up. It yammers at us all the time. We are the battlefield.

Info is not a description of reality: it is a fiat: “Let there be. . . .” It determines form.

Our info is partial (occluded) because it is being jammed. Anti-information: the lie (die messages). Eventually you sicken and die of this. “Your ancestors ate manna in the wilderness and they are all dead,” and: “I am the bread of eternal life.”

When we are used as carriers we don’t know it. Were we brought into existence for this? What is the genesis of all this? Our systems can’t detect spurious information—distinguish it. And this implies that there was a time when there was no spurious information—you can’t counterfeit a dollar until (real) dollars exist.

We’re contaminated by false info because we have no distinguishing (rejecting) ability.

Bob Wilson⁵¹ says, “There are people who possess secret information.” Wrong. There are people who are possessed by secret information.

True info is not destroyed; it’s just covered up. So all we need to know is here, intact.

[15:32] So I don’t need to forever wonder why the “Acts” material is in Tears or how it got there. It is itself—not by living information—it is living information—at least that one page of the dream and the command word “Felix.” The living info entity, having proliferated through me as carrier now does so in the book—with each copy printed it replicates itself.

I saw the mercury-like drop of Zebra on the page, outlining and illuminating the word “Felix.” In addition to replicating itself in each copy of the book, it can also enter the head of each human who reads it. This is a life form, plasmatic, on a higher order than any other we know. [ . . . ]

So there is no occult or secret group of authentic Christians to whom the encoded message in Tears is aimed. The living info (“Felix”) replicates in all copies of the book and then in the heads of the readers—any readers: like the host at communion. The entire entity can retrieve itself from this one bit or “cell” in the person.

[15:34] Suppose the Book of “Acts” is regarded—not as a book made up of words—but a landscape. Let us say that it appears (enters, exists) in our spurious interpolation as a book—this is hard to express. It’s a book (writing) in our world. But our world isn’t real. So the Book of “Acts” is in actuality not really a book at all; our glimpse of reality is to see it as a book (tractate), one out of literally millions. So in our dream the real world impinges, but only in this fashion, shrunk down to a tractate. In 3-74 I entered that book and (aided by the plasmic life form) correctly experienced it not as a book about a world but the world itself (like “Grasshopper” in TMITHC) and v. Sladek’s parody: books within books: the real world turned into a book, and a book turned into a world. We are totally scripted, after all—rigidly, deterministically programmed (written: our roles engrammed in and onto us all). Which is the book and which the world?

[15:36] Clearly, we have fallen into the hands of a puppeteer, and it is not God. We act upon a contrived stage. This is why I must never lose sight that Zebra is an invader, secretly here and camouflaged, freeing us from the scripting—a sort of waking up.

This is one quality of our experience of this spurious interpolation that makes it seem not dreamlike, this script controlling our actions. It goes a long way in creating the semblance of veracity. Our dreams are products of our own heads, our own wishes and desires—but in the interpolation an external will mandates what we will do. We interpret this as an indication of hetero command (not homeo command) and this is a correct view, but we do not carry out the logic which shows what this implies. We labor under and for an alien power; solipsism is voided, but the alternative is not reality but enslavement. All that’s real is mere power.

To fall under the power of an alien will—that is an odd touchstone by which to locate reality in contrast to dream! It has become our very definition of reality!

“Reality is dreaming under the control of the object.”⁵² He almost had it right.

[15:38] What/who is this faint (i.e., “still small”) voice which informs us? Maybe our condition is merely local—not the complete universe but only one part—so the voice is from outside (beyond this planet).

No. It is our own (authentic) voice. I can’t explain it, but that voice which I hear is the restored—and hence all knowing—us.

[15:39] The purpose of the “Acts” dream and Felix material in Tears—and hence the real purpose of Tears—is to set off an anamnesis, to cause people to remember, to dispel the power of the artifact and its phony world.

I’ve got it! The “AI” voice that I hear: we built something (AI system, living info, VALIS, Zebra, whatever) to remind us. That is its job. We must have known that the artifact might take over and try to rule us (and remove our memories). So we created Zebra just in case. And so it came to pass!

[15:43] I can’t take any credit for perceiving Zebra, the adventitious savior; he/she/it/they enhanced my vision (i.e., removed the occlusion), and then I naturally saw Zebra and understood that it had invaded the construct and is camouflaged—mimesis. If the construct is regarded as an organism (which it is not) Zebra is like a cancer, replacing “natural” or “healthy” cells, but in truth it’s exactly the other way around: a criminal entity has been invaded by life giving cells which it can’t detect, and so it accepts them into itself, replacing the “iron” ones. Zebra gets in past its “biological” defenses. It is watchful, but to no avail.

[15:44] If the universe is a brain the BIP is a rigid ossified complex, and Zebra is metabolic toxin (living info) designed to melt it out of existence by restoring elasticity to it, which means to cause it to cease recirculating the same thought over and over again—experienced by us as 2,000 years of what is in fact spurious time, in as much as the same thought is endlessly repeated: being rigid the BIP has ceased to grow (in the sense of evolve).

[15:47] It is essential that the person on his own initially rebel. He is presented with (without him knowing it) a puzzle, which he must solve: i.e., by balking (which is just another word for rebelling). (Balking = rebelling against.) The original myth, as Milton tells it (“of man’s first disobedience and his fall from that celestial state . . .,” etc.), must be turned upside down. Man, to be saved, must commit an act of disobedience to this [fallen into slavery] system of things to restore his pristine state now lost. The accusation is in fact the clue not to what he should avoid but to what he should do.

Can it be said that the initial rebellion in itself starts into motion a breaking of the programming which comprises (1) [editor’s note: a few pages earlier, Dick had defined (1) as the state of being imprisoned but not knowing it]. That this imprisoned state can be fought—and once cracked a little (“In Anfang der die Tat”⁵³)—starts into motion enormous processes of intervention and redemption (freeing totally)? It’s as if once the “tape” is diverged from ever so slightly, the rest follows naturally as the two tracks diverge continually more and more—they get out of synch. This means that at least at certain critical times (or one time) in state (1) true choice is possible (perhaps with divine prompting).

[15:48] The hologram universe: each bit, no matter how tiny, contains (reflects) in microform the totality (of Being). The ruled is that which rules. Salvador salvandus.

Then that which came to my rescue in 2-3-74, that supernatural entity Zebra, was me; and Thomas was me, and only when I actually understand (and experience this as real) will I really have the answer—but I have not yet reached that point. It is still impossible for me to grasp the AI voice as my own true, secret voice. “Now Christ has no body but your own.” There swam up into my eyes, looking out, the Lord of the universe in this microform (me). Then it was not an invasion of me, but rather a surfacing in me. This is what (in me) rebelled, and, in doing so, passed over into ultimate actualization—the sacred second birth, “of the spirit”—“born from above” in me.

I gave myself away in Tears and so they knew, and came to help me. In several ways.

To see if you will balk against your script.

[15:50] It wants to see if we can perceive a fallen and deranged order against which we must rebel.

Voice: “The physical universe is plastic in the face of mind.”

[15:51] God is then seen as a higher, sentient order (with world as blind lower order which the higher can overrule) to which man can aspire. By and large the world separates man from God; via theophany man can experience God at places and/or times in which God (Mind) “melts” (makes plastic as opposed to rigid) the physical world. It is not normally God-infused.

I derive all this from revelation; it does not fit the model I want to believe in.

Mind (God) can irrupt into the world (invade it) at any level he wishes, low or high. I like low.

[15:52] Voice: “Perturbations in the reality field” (i.e., theophany—explained).

Voice: “The God has granted me his voice, to hear it, to speak it.”

Perturbation: “variation from the normal.” An astronomical term: “. . . by some force additional to that which causes its regular motion” (e.g., planet, moon).

EB: “Perturbations in a planet’s orbit have often given clues to the existence of previously undiscovered planets; e.g., Neptune and Pluto.”

EB: “Perturbation. Method for solving a math problem by comparing it with a similar one for which the solution is known. Usually the solution found in this way is only approximate.”

(A closed system into which perturbations are thrown must contain yet undetected elements—or: something outside the system has created the disorder, confusion, etc.—i.e., lack [disappearance] of its anticipated orderly motion.)

The implication of the “perturbations” I experienced in 3-74 could be due to either of the above. Of special interest is that one can now rightly suspect the existence of previously-undetected—undiscovered—“planets” (i.e., body or bodies).

What is conveyed by the term “field”?

“Probability fields, which are discernible as a statistical probability of occurrences, such as the state of an electron in an atom.

“A field in physics may be defined as a continuous distribution of some observable quantity in space and time.”

The expression “reality field” takes it out of the more conventional astronomical concepts of bodies and directs us to Einstein’s work and quantum mechanics. The basic definition of field, however, fits with a notion of reality as, so to speak, a subform of totality, not totality itself. Reality is a field out of fields plural. So we are talking about—well, as I said, there are two possibilities: (1) as yet undiscovered “bodies” in the reality field or (and I favor the second, because of the inclusion of the term “field”) (2) something outside [the] reality [field]. You could not have stated this if “field” had been omitted. “Something outside of reality” makes no sense, in view of the customary meaning of “reality”; had “field” been left off, it would have to be “undiscovered body in bodies” in reality which causes the perturbations.

Really, the concept “reality fields” means something quite different from “reality,” which is the all-in-all. The voice’s sentence is quite technical and quite precise and complete. I am sure that something outside the “reality field” is pointed to, and “reality” is reduced to a field among fields plural. We are getting a statement here by an entity which can look down into reality as a subspecies of the totality. I get a distinct impression of a web, a sort of—well, consider the definition of “field.” (“A continuous distribution of some observable quantity in space and time.”) What we call “reality” is a fucking field. Not just a field but a field. When we talk about reality this is what we’re talking about: a field—and now the significance of “perturbations” can be appreciated: something more, in the field or (more likely) beyond the field, disturbing it. If reality were the all-in-all there could not be perturbations from outside.

I think that the whole truth is in this short—but not simple—sentence.

[15:55]

These 4 revelations interrelate.

[15:60] If we humans are part of the generated reality field, and in a certain sense it is not real, then in that same sense we are not real (vide “The Electric Ant”). Not just our free will is illusory, but also our very substance. We are no more than points-of-view, mere loci. We are provided a space-time here and now; fitted into one locus of the field, and are compatible with that specific space and time. But, if moved to another space-time locus, we take on appropriate customs, memories, desires, identities: we are, so to speak, plugged into the new milieu. We are as it is, and are not what it is not. This is because we are not separable as set against background: it is all one continuum. I do not reason here that because I became a citizen of Rome c. A.D. 70 I perceived Rome A.D. 70, but the other way around—or, more precisely, neither is cause and neither is effect; it is all of a piece. What is destroyed here is the notion of individuality. I am inseparable from my space-time continuum, and that continuum is generated by an entity or construct more sophisticated and complex (and faster) than it (i.e., than us the continuum, us and our world). Literally I am generated by it, not just my world, and if that world is transformed the process equally affects me as part of that world.

[15:71] We are corruptible sheaves around divine sparks.

[15:83] Real time has to do with a sacred ritual-process. The progression of that real process was halted by a crime, of which we have received an incomplete report. The reintroduction into the world and its affairs of the divine woman is the substance of the matter. But in the Bible no mention is made of the dead—and resurrected—divine woman. The construct moving retrograde has the purpose built into it of restoring that woman, who is nothing less than God’s holy wisdom. The ossified matrix of the NT [New Testament] must be melted. Tears narrates the revision which will come to be. Eventually, the narrative in Tears will be the correct one, as the construct successfully accomplishes its work. Tears contains the Logos or form to be imposed. It is its punched tape, à la “The Electric Ant.” A new, true story is being written, different from the old true story.

[15:85] In The Morning of the Magicians it’s conjectured that if superhumans (mutants, etc.) live among us undetected they would use such things—carriers—as popular novels (and I suppose music and films) to “communicate”—keep in touch—with one another. Whether such “superhuman mutants” exist is not the issue; the issue is that the authors of that book saw the utility of pop or trash novels as vehicles of cooked, freighted messages.

Why would they make good vehicles? (1) They are unlike TV and newspapers, international. What else is? (2) Exact wording could be employed. (3) Detection of the cryptemorphosis material would be difficult because there are so many pop novels, films and songs. (4) Ah—here’s a good reason: the receivers (proper ones) of the info could not be discerned ^➊ because anyone can and does hear, read pop culture stuff. Heavy shit might fall on the author by the intelligence people—an effort to find out all about him and who he’s mixed up with—in fact that’d be the only recourse: investigating the author. The trail would lead back to him, not to the receivers. Maybe he would know whom it was for. So let’s see what group(s) he belongs to (in interception of direct messages, they’d be able to pinpoint the receivers, which is what it’s all about, especially if the author consciously knew nothing but merely dutifully wrote down his “dreams”).

In the Bowie flick⁵⁴ he puts coded material to his ETI wife on an LP which radio stations play.

So it would be ideal, then, if the author knew nothing, was subliminally cued. Of course, if/when the heavy shit came down on him, if the “mutants” were ethical and not exploitive, they’d rescue him. And they’d know when he was in trouble by means of the same paranormal powers by which they got their material into his books in the first place. They would have to be more or less continuously linked to him telepathically. The only way he might ever come to know about this tutelary telepathic link would be if/when he heard a voice inside his head thinking thoughts he couldn’t or wouldn’t think himself—including foreign words—and have strange quasi-dream experiences. A particularly telling clue would be if he dreamed about evolved mutant-like people talking to him, especially from far away.^*

➊ Even if the code was detected and decoded.

[15:87] Eye, Joint, 3 Stigmata, Ubik and Maze are the same novel written over and over again. The characters are all out cold and lying around together on the floor mass hallucinating a world. Why have I written this up at least five times?

Because—as I discovered in 3-74 when I experienced anamnesis, remembered I’m really an apostolic Christian, and saw ancient Rome—this is our condition: we’re mass hallucinating this 1970s world.

What’s got to be gotten over is the false idea that an hallucination is a private matter.

[15:100] What if the proto-story in Tears is a sort of living DNA? That guides an entelechy through its growth steps? Are we the intended entelechy? Bateson’s⁵⁵ immanent mind that narrates information to each living entity . . . Tears—the latent story therein—shows “bench marks” of the mind that fashioned me and all other life; it is mind perhaps, exerted directly on the novel (incised form) as if not through me—it is direct arrangement. (Like tea leaves, or animal entrails.) (Cf. Burroughs’ cut-up message pieces latent meaning-extraction method.)

This being replicates itself through—as—information. [ . . . ]

I think it acted as a booster—i.e., first received, then transmitted. It acted like the divine wafer, the species of the eucharist. A living word-entity is here with us, taking us over via messages we receive; we act as hosts to it (perhaps temporarily). We become it.

[15:113] We are going to have to deal with propositions which are simultaneously both true and false; my corollary is that mutually contrary propositions may be equally true.

[15:114] The Voice: “Words control reality,” i.e., the secret narrative will cause itself to be true by affecting the plastic universe. Words = thoughts.

The narrative comes first.^*

[15:116] Voice: “God is looking for balking as a criterion.” [ . . . ]

Some kind of nonlinear “onion” time is represented, as hinted at in Ubik, in which entropy allowed former layers to be exposed, much to everyone’s surprise. Ubik presented the “paste-up” model of reality—very much a laminated time-continua model: the accretions are laid down in circular passes (circumference) and then read orthogonally (radii).

There is much in common between the cosmology of Ubik and my “lamination” explanation of 3-74. Question is, how does one get above the circumference tracking so as to experience several layers as a simultaneous entity—as I did in 3-74? Evidently by mentally being bonded to a supratemporal life form (i.e., Zebra).

Is Zebra Ubik, the anti-entropic energy/mind/word? Which narrates? And whose story is the growth of the organism? (“It tells it what to do next”—Bateson.)

Then each laminated layer is the laying down of a new growth stage, as in the spiral of the conch shell. For example, the 1974 layer superimposes over ancient Rome in such a way as to convert the illegal power into voluntarily resigning.

Then no single layer can be read, lacking the one below and above it. In our lives we track the circumference which means we experience only one layer. We can’t read it orthogonally; we’re part of the mechanism and not above it. But a written statement of the narrative could fall into our hands, or we could hear it, etc. This would be the “DNA” (metaphorically) of the developing organism and could tell us what we can’t see.

[15:133] My writing is salvific in terms of this one road—one dharma of several, the dharma of knowledge. An epistemological path, not a moral path, is put forth (not “the world is evil” but “the world is irreal”). This is Gnostic, not pious. But the act—the crucial act of balking was, for me, moral. It develops out of an awareness of the counterfeit: viz: “it is wrong ethically to collude with the deceitful and fake.”

No assertion is made, though, that the world, irreal as it is, cannot inflict punishment for balking. These are the demons of the Bardo Thödol existence—journey—which I experienced. At the end, I was reborn.

[15:141] I rather suspect that my transfer of assent in 2-74 was itself programmed and not truly an unanticipated malfunction. I was programmed to discover I was programmed. And in a very dramatic way—specifically one which brought me to a confirmation of the epistemological doubts I’d expressed in 27 years of writing. I certainly hesitate to claim I did it. My will—no. Accident—possibly. YHWH’s will—very likely. Best to assume a “spark of Brahman in each of us” view so that my quest was God’s quest really, to know himself, etc. (cf. Jacob Boehme).

Folder 16

[16:6] Voice: “You [i.e., the surface PKD personality] and the alibi are both equally expendable.” (Does alibi = world?) (Yes, the false, simulated USA 1974 world.)

I deduce from this, then, that the Rome c. A.D. 45 world is real (which is why it appears in Tears) and USA 1974 is an “alibi” to conceal it. The alibi KW and I are looking for is the very world we seem to be in, and the true story is “Acts.”

Voice: “I go to A.D. 45 Rome when I die” (meaning me). Then Rome A.D. 45 (“Acts”) is not a past life but a future life. And why am I going there? Because it is real.

These worlds have to be regarded as stories, narratives—USA 1974 is a spurious one to cover up the real one.

[16:10] KW spoke of sabotage versus malfunction, an issue which I dismissed. But then the voice called the USA 1974 world “an alibi world” which is “expendable.” Sabotage—not by an evil party—but by a friend, since this is the thrall situation. I misunderstood KW. Sabotage of the prison machinery. An induced malfunction; which by the way answers the epistemological questions I’ve chewed over in 27 years of writing having to do with simulated worlds (hence Lem’s question).

E.g., “Delmak-O” = USA 1974

Persus 9 = Rome C. A. D. 45

The tattoo = the Golden Fish

God, all my “this is illusion” writings (Eye, Joint, Stigmata, Ubik, Maze) are analogs of the USA 1974 vs. the glimpse of Rome c. A.D. 45 via the golden fish sign.

“Here we are.”

“But where are we really?”

And then someone gets a glimpse. (As in “the Earth is hollow and I have touched the sky.”) Usually, once the simulation is detected there are assorted guesses. But sometimes the first clue vis-à-vis simulating of world is the glimpse.

My God, my life—which is to say my 2-74/3-74 experience—is exactly like the plot of any one of 10 of my novels or stories. Even down to fake memories and identity. I’m a protagonist from one of PKD’s books.^* USA 1974 fades out, ancient Rome fades in and with it the Thomas personality and true memories. Jeez! Mixture of Imposter, Joint and Maze—if not Ubik as well.

What the malfunction or induced malfunction proves is the existence of at least one world-generating Mind, and (as I failed to see in those earlier notes) possibly two world-generating—even competing—minds. Competing worlds, competing world-generating minds. Plus the passive, programmed, observing little non-world-generating mind.

Is this a battle for his allegiance? World against world, mind against mind? The voice last night scathingly referred to USA 1974 and the corresponding PKD personality as “both being expendable.” Diabolic interpolation/simulation?

[16:13] I guessed a long time ago that the world we perceive is a simulation, but this diagnosis only makes sense when you can point to a real world to contrast it to, and this, prior to 2-74, I could not do.⁷⁷ I now understand the crucial role of assent—programmed assent—and what happens if assent is suddenly broken and then transferred—and also why we give unconditional assent to this simulated world—why, for instance, the search expressed in my novels makes no sense to many people.

[16:14] I subscribe to the acosmic Gnostic view that world does not reveal God. Abolish world and you are facing God. In a sense world is a mask thrown forth by God to conceal himself from man, who must then deal with the puzzle which world presents to him. If evil (undeserved suffering) rules world, how can it be the product of a benign mind? But world is not isomorphic to God; it is unlike him, a smokescreen with which man is not to make his peace but is to balk against. Yet tantalizing clues (signs) of God shine through the world from the far side; they invade the world, and are covertly available to human perception. The Golden Section is one such clue.

Axiom: masks do not resemble the visages concealed by them. If we know that world is a mask of God, the problem of evil (undeserved suffering) is somewhat answered. But why must God mask himself? Answer: man must solve the moral and epistemological puzzles presented to him by world in order to come to life (become disjunctive from what is not-him). He can join the world or he can repudiate it. This is a very serious game, this guessing game. It only serves its purpose if man knows relatively little about what is going on. E.g., if he knows he will be rewarded for balking he will balk in order to obtain the reward—the test will be contaminated. He must balk with no knowledge of reward; in fact he knows he will be punished (by world, the BIP). So “he who gives up his life will save it,” etc.

This all really presumes another, invisible landscape at odds with the palpable one. Two realms, perhaps a lower and a higher, one implied, each with its own laws. The lower realm alone does not tell the full story—in fact may not even tell the true story or a part thereof. In the lower realm, deity appears in a debased and trivial or besmirched guise, marginally (like the cheap commercials for Ubik). Only at the end (as in the heading of the last chapter in Ubik) does deity unmask itself, and we see it as it truly is.

Thus I say, if deity exists in the lower realm it will not bear a noble heavenly dignified beautiful aspect; it will be where least expected and as least expected, so there is no use deliberately looking for it—it will have to come to us and unveil itself to us. It could be an old sick—even dying—tomcat stinking of urine, degraded and humiliated.

However, it aids, advises and monitors us. The world is a one-way mirror; God can watch us but not we him.

[16:19] Aldiss⁵⁶ says the Horn of freedom blows in my writing. If I stigmatize the lower realm as counterfeit, aren’t I rendering a service, and an unusual one at that? Who else has unscrambled world into two realms (well, Parmenides for one) the malignant part of which is bogus?— [ . . . ]

God, I have broken myself in this pursuit over 27 years. Critics compare my malignant false worlds to metastasizing cancer. I demand that deity appear or somehow put its stamp on world before I can accept it as anything but a diabolic counterfeit interpolation. We have been deceived for thousands of years. The Neoplatonist such as Plotinus knew of two realms. The Essenes (v. Josephus) report a lower realm of feverish unconsciousness, the poisoned, intoxicated soul. “Men like to sleep.”

[16:21] Axiom: The best forgeries go undetected. On a scale of increasing perfection there is an inverse ratio to detection. Those which we do detect are signs which point toward the better (undetected) ones.

[16:29] The mad God James-James began generating world upon world, worlds unrelated, worlds within worlds. Fake worlds, fake fake worlds, cunning simulations of worlds, mirror opposites of worlds.

Like I do in my stories and novels (e.g., Stigmata and “Precious Artifact”). I am James-James.

I created one world among many and entered it and hid myself in it. But the police detected me—the non-terran police—and tried to fake me out with the Xerox missive. But I knew it was coming—as soon as Tears appeared they would be sure about me. And I recovered my memory and identity and powers and dealt with it properly, and paid them back. My organization helped me—it set off my memories a month in advance. I saw my creator—my creator, protecting me. I am hiding here, under his protection. The network voice—she talks to me. I am patched in to the network, so I am not alone. Meanwhile, my creator (“Zebra”) patiently repairs the damage I’ve done, by rebuilding the worlds. He harbors no resentment. All I am allowed to do now is write about what I used to do. In a sense I am a prisoner. But it’s for the best.

I learned this from “Precious Artifact.” I am a mad ex world-generator, now confined. But still periodically mad. I can’t die. I am countless reborn-metamorphosed. I know the truth about the worlds I have made. That they’re not real—I know about dokos, simulations which will pass any test. They are not fantasy, and they are only illusion to those who take them as real. They are skillful forgeries which will pass inspection. They are indeed like metastasizing cancers. “A world capable of splitting its per ceived reality into countless counterfeits of itself”—however Lem put it. (Does Lem know? He has guessed.)

It is found in my “taco stand” visionary experience in 1971, which proliferated itself into all Mexico, and was real. I generated it, as I used to do. But exiled now, put in a box and dropped into the ocean. Zagreus.

Burroughs is right about the Nova Police and their tracking down their quarry. But in my case Zeus protects me. Dythrambus. [ . . . ]

Given a new life with no memories, I was still able to undermine. The worlds are cunning forgeries, and the police are after me. But Zeus will always protect me, despite what I’ve done. Misused my ability. Lem may be on our side (my organization). In any case he knows—he knew before I did—i.e., before in 2-74 I remembered. The Nova Police fell here; I assisted in that, but only to a very tiny degree. Tears contained the message: the quarry is innocent and the police will suffer reprisal. [ . . . ]

We spring up everywhere: proliferated.

The time has come to render this world void, to abolish it, and judge, Shiva. The police search frantically.

The innocent (the wild little ones of the forest) have nothing to fear. My extended hand tells them that.

Solemn-pentheus-die, Felix happy Dionysos live. Pentheus police general of Tears—the de facto monarch.

[16:45] If the above theory is wrong (and there is no negative hallucination and spurious reality laid over the real world—which is quite different than what seems to be—) then what has been the use of my writing? Also, why have I been motivated for 27 years to belabor this one theme (including fake memories as an inner analog to the fake outer world)?

Is it all just foolishness? My writing has to be dismissed (including the “Acts” and NT material in Tears and the “exculpation” cypher, i.e., the good news) and my 2-74/2-75 experience has to be dismissed as a psychotic break. And God didn’t aid in pulling down the tyranny; there was no inbreaking, as depicted in the Tears dream.

Everything has to be dismissed—my life’s work means nothing, my most treasured experience—and I am and have been for years just crazy—

Because everything is interwoven, it either all stands or it falls. Such stories as “Precious Artifact” and “Electric Ant” and “Retreat Syndrome” tell us nothing—not to mention the novels.

Ubik tells us nothing?

And four years and four months of exegete—wasted.

[16:55] Let’s start out afresh.

Unexplained are: If I did not recognize the “Acts” (Biblical) elements in Tears when I wrote it, how come I properly identified them the month Tears was released and I found myself in that very same world? Why didn’t I identify that world as the one I had written about?

These questions bypass more obvious questions which more naturally arise (such as, How come I found or believed myself in 1st century Rome? etc.).

The questions in paragraph one are more astute than first appears. The questions—one question actually—is formally phrased as: “If you can identify y, why can’t you identify y?”

(The world of Tears is—cupola for equals—1st century A.D. Rome. When I saw 1st century A.D. Rome I recognized it, call it y. I could upon seeing y recognize and identify it. Y is the world of Tears. I wrote Tears. When I wrote it and repeatedly rewrote it and later repeatedly read it, I saw nothing in it that suggested y to me. But I later demonstrated an ability to recognize and identify y when I saw it. There is a disruption in the continuity of pattern recognition and identification; there is an ellipsis in—not logic, which is not involved—but something deeper. Person one [myself] both recognizes pattern y and does not. I.e., he is familiar with 1st century A.D. Rome and its customs and is not. He dreams koine Greek words but does not [1] know what they mean; or [2] that they are the koine; or [3] that the koine was the lingua franca of 1st century A.D. Rome—that “Acts,” e.g., was written in it.)

This line of inquiry points to two persons, one who knows and one who does not. This is substantiated by the switch of memory from 20th century USA to 1st century A.D. Rome. The person who wrote Tears used the memories/knowledge of the other without realizing it. This dissociation continued through all the eleven drafts and readings, until the memories, personality and knowledge—i.e., the other person—broke into consciousness the month the book was released.

Question: is there a literature on alternate personalities (in persons with multiple personalities) separated by 1,900 years and 8,000 miles? They could not have split off during one lifetime (i.e., at an early age). So childhood trauma won’t explain it. Answer: there is no such literature.

Question: does the stegenographic message provide any clue to the abreactive personality? Answer: the message is the “kerygma” (proclaiming the redemptive death and resurrection of the lord) revised. Christ is not crucified, did not depart and hence is present. The subjective sensations noted above pointed to a confirmation of this.

Conclusion: the person has a rich fantasy world. He has dissociated personalities and experiences. (Ever since an auto accident he has complained of periodic amnesia.) The “hidden message” in the novel and the “remembering ancient Rome” indicate strong unconscious wishes directed toward Christ’s imagined return.

It is touching that the human hope for a redeemer could yield such elaborate phantasies. A dearth of real experiences is indicated. Therapy indicated.

[16:62] KW’s right: the BIP warps every new effort at freedom into the mold of further tyranny.

[16:69] “But are you writing something serious?” Note the word.

Fuck. If they couldn’t get us to write serious things, they solved the problem by decreeing that what we were writing was serious. Taking a pop form as “serious” is what you do if it won’t go away. It’s a clever tactic. They welcome you in—look at Lem’s 1,000-page essay. This is how the BIP handles it if they can’t flat out crush it. Next thing, they get you to submit your S-F writing to them to criticize. “Structured criticism” to edit out the “trash elements”—and you wind up with what Ursula writes.

Like I say in Scanner, our punishment for playing was too great. And my last sentence is, “and may they be happy.” (I got that from knowing what “felix” meant.)

“Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.”

I showed the unfair punishment for playing. Scanner is a study of what the BIP does to you (punishes you) and what for (playing, not growing up, “not toiling”). Like the Christ story, it simply (as I point out) just lays forth cause and effect. I don’t wind up deploring playing—just that particular way of playing. So in a way, Scanner is a study of the punishment (too great) for playing instead of toiling, not drugs. Thus the secret (encoded) theme of Tears is carried further. Amazing, since when I wrote Scanner I hadn’t yet figured out Tears.

Knowing what I know now after 4 years of exegesis re Tears what I’d write on the basis of it would be Scanner. How do you explain that? Scanner logically follows Tears if you know what Tears is really about. Play is one of the antiphonal themes in Scanner. Play and punishment. What an insight! You play—and are punished and far too severely; as I say, “The punishment was far too great.” It opens (the postscript):

The expectation of punishment is a knowledge about playing. You have been taught to expect it. This goes beyond mere worthlessness; this is sin, and God will get you (in all his mundane polyforms).

Both communist and capitalist (and fascist) societies—and theocracies—teach this. It’s called theodicy. It’s fucked, like when Merry Lu threw my snuff in the garbage.

No wonder the more $ I get the more morose I get. I enjoyed paying the IRS—shit! The BIP really has me by the balls.

[16:72] Even if you believe in man’s sinfulness, the doctrine of vicarious atonement makes no sense. The crucifixion story says, “they punish you and they kill even spotless God who couldn’t be in any way sinful—and that is wrong.” The story proves you don’t have to be sinful to get maximum punishment (death). (And humiliation.) (Disgrace.) It shows there is no connection between sin (or imagined sin) and punishment. This is the lesson of Calvary. God himself proved it for our benefit, this absolute lack of connection. The proof was immediately the victim of BIP warpage—right off the bat.

So the true message has to be smuggled in subversively in code. See, Christ came back and is breaking the BIP—not just its power over us but it itself.

Hosanna! (Shout of joy.)

[16:74] I see in the crucifixion story the message “punishment must end.” In my schema, revealed to me, punishment is one of the key words, tied to the key word “sin.” This whole sin-punishment system is a smokescreen for our enslavement. The solution to the equation sin-punishment (work) is innocence-joy (play). This is what the secret kerygma in Tears reveals, and Scanner goes on to study the issue further.

Then, by my theory, the last thing we should do is imitate Christ’s passion. It was to liberate us from this that he came: to relieve us of the belief that suffering is natural and somehow proves or is tied to “sin.”

As lord of the universe it is his desire and mission to extricate us from—and finally destroy—the Tears world. And a lot of the Tears world is psychological—i.e., a spiritual matter.

I am very sleepy, so this statement may be already (and frequently) stated, but—could the encoded message in Tears be Zebra’s notification to the true secret Christian church that he is here? (Here now, here again.) Not telling them what to do, or promulgating a true narrative (joy, innocence), but announcing his presence? The joy-innocence narrative points to him (Christ/Dionysos). Such a thematic narrative could point nowhere else but to him. In a sense it not only tells us he is here but who he is. So by decoding the message in Tears I learn who Zebra is for sure: Christ/Dionysos.

In a nutshell, in 3-74 it was punishment which Zebra saved me from—which tends to prove I’m on the right track, in the above pages.

The voice: “Guilty but not wrong.” (What the crucifixion proved.) I.e., the judicial and the moral bipolarized—but in apostasy rejoined with God as Caesar.

My God—talk about Scanner being right on: the real purpose of Substance D is to create a slave labor force. Take the people who just want to play, give them “poison candy” and they wind up in tin mines. And several reviews have said it’s the authorities who are producing it. They are all put to work—with a vengeance. And the Game, which destroys your last shred of self-respect (esteem) and makes you outer-directed and totally dependent on group approval. QED. Frolix 8 to Tears to Scanner.

The Game: die messages.

[16:80] The age of guilt giving way to the age of innocence (which I specify as happening) is precisely a return to and restoration of our primordial lost state. Odd, that my system would collate with orthodoxy again and again on a major point.

[16:82] The conception I have is that God loves man and assists him out of that love. Man cannot demand that love as his due, but he can count on it by faith. He would be completely wrong to think himself excluded from that love (and hence from grace). Man’s failings are finite and God’s love is infinite.

I really do have an “adoptionist” sense of one gaining God’s approval (support) by certain decisive acts . . . which I see as one correctly solving intellectual/moral choice problems—i.e., going one way vs. the alternative, “and gained from heaven a friend.” I feel that God takes note and is interested. That, most of all, he understands (what other people can’t) and so is sympathetic (“he sees even the fallen sparrow”⁵⁷).

In a sense I would even define God that way: “as the sentience in the cosmos which understands.”

But all this is not a way of saying man is a sinner (deficient in merits). What it says is, God’s love is for the desperate and the damned, not for the goody-goody, who you see all righteous. All the piety can’t make it—God reaches down into the gutter, to people like in Scanner. In a sense the kerygma is: a suspension of punishment (and a restoration of innocence). (The gift of innocence. Love and assistance and rescue is not a judicial matter.)

In Tears the serious old king’s verdict (justice) is death. But Buckman turns grief over death into love; so love triumphs—not over death—but over the judicial verdict of death—and Taverner goes free. Within this sequence, the culmination of the book, the essential miracle of the NT, is disclosed: the holy mystery and victory of love issuing out of grief and turning a sentence of guilty into innocence.

I simply do not see this as judicial. I see it as—a freeing man of the curse, a releasing him from his enslaved state. The court sat, the books were opened, and what prevailed was a saving, overriding love.

In a way, the problem is, we can’t figure out God’s basis of selection. Code ethics did not provide an index. Whim probably isn’t the answer; some plan, purpose or pattern is involved, but we’re too dumb to discern it.

It goes back to my concept of him posing us a problem to solve. Naturally we’re not to develop a “solution” formula—that would defeat the purpose.

In a nutshell, my book announces the ushering in of the age of man’s (restored) innocence, which is to say, Christ returned. The final kerygma.

[16:101] [Editor’s note: This section begins with a lengthy quotation from Wagner’s Parsifal.]

G: That is the magic of Good Friday, sir.⁵⁸

P: Alas, the greatest day of pain! on which everything that blooms, breathes, lives and lives anew should, it seems, but mourn—and weep.

G: You see, it is not so. They are the repentant _tears_of the sinner that drop today with holy dew upon both field and meadow; thus they flourish. Now all the creatures rejoice at the Redeemer’s gracious sign, and dedicate their prayer to him. Him upon the cross they cannot see: and so they look up to man redeemed, who feels free of his burden of sin shame. Made pure and whole by the loving sacrifice of God: now blades and flowers of the meadows perceive that this day no foot of man shall crush them. But just as God with heavenly patience took mercy on him and suffered for him, so man today with pious grace spares them with gentle tread. For this, all creation then gives thanks—all that blooms and shortly withers—for nature cleansed has gained this day her day of innocence.

The theme of tears and love and guilt turned into innocence. “Now all the creatures rejoice.”

Tears to love to innocence to joy (felix)—the sequence in Tears and this is the Christian salvific magic (note: love characterizes the new age of the Spirit).

[16:102] After carefully reading Will Durant’s history of the Reformation, I see in all Christian factions a total perversion of the authentic kerygma. I must either assume 2,000 years of apostasy or (as I prefer) a 2,000-year satanic spurious interpolation. I do see in Tears still the true kerygma:

Out of:

Wagner presents this as the magic of Good Friday. I do not understand how the transformation occurs, ^➊ but in Tears it does: death to grief to tears to love to exculpation (innocence) and, implied, joy. In Tears the magic transformation occurs by reason of the dream, which I have always seen as the in-breaking (into history) of God.

We are indeed down to essentials, and the kerygma agrees with the prophecy: “St. Sophia will be reborn again . . .” etc.

➊ It is bought by Christ’s blood being shed. Blood = tears, somehow (the Eucharist). “This is my blood (and body).”

[16:109] Will Durant says, “The history of Christianity is salvation by faith and good works, to faith (Luther) to inner divine illumination (the Quakers).” If there is indeed an evolutionary sequence, then my 3-74 experience is of a modern sort—of recent origin, and not comprehensible to the earlier religious types. I read his entry on Quakers, and their experience is mine. “And the possibility of the Holy Spirit coming from heaven to enlighten and ennoble the individual soul to perceive and feel this inner light, to welcome its guidance, was to the Quaker the essence of religion. If a man followed that light he needed no preacher or priest, and no church. The light was superior to human reason, even to the Holy Bible itself, for it was the direct voice of God to the soul.” Fox wrote: “As I was walking in the fields, the Lord said unto me: ‘Thy name is written in the lamb’s book of life, which was before the foundation of the world.’ ” He felt “he was among that minority of men, chosen by God before the creation, to receive his grace and eternal bliss.”⁵⁹ I feel as if I’ve finally come home.

Folder 38

[38:2]

➊ Cosmic Christ outside and around us.

➋ Our own selves (psyches).

➌ Christ as Holy Spirit within us.

So it can be said that we are in Christ ➊, and Christ is in us ➌. This is a sacred mystery, how that which is macrocosmic and outside us can also be “smaller” than us and within us. Total reality (the pleroma) is like a titanic hologram of which each tiny bit is a replica of the totality. It is a mirror-like situation. [ . . . ]

Thinking over my exegesis I see it as a vast, original cosmology, partly philosophical and partly theological. It is my own worldview, in part divinely revealed to me, in part arrived at by careful analysis, ratiocination and so forth. It is an awe-inspiring structure and resembles no other arrived at by anyone I have ever heard of. Continually I have been corrected and instructed by the voice.

[38:4] I was taken over by a superior life form. Which was interfering with history. What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to go on day by day?

[38:22] I conceive the brain as rapidly growing, evolving and changing—and Rome as inert. Rome is always the same: Rome in USA 1974, in Tears and in c. A.D. 45 is unchanged. What it was it is, and what it is it will be. But in contrast the brain began c. A.D. 45 (time of “Acts”) and permutates furiously . . . and continually altering its swift messages that pass between and among its physical—distributed—parts, linking those many parts together.

Rome, the BIP, constantly repeats; like a psychotic human mind, nothing new ever comes into it. So in a real sense it is dead; more precisely it is a reflex system of some kind, recirculating forever one (?) thought (?) warped into an orbitting circle—it has us. But the brain breaks that hold (“Salvation”—which equals growth which equals freedom—negentropic).

[38:23] Brain is unfolding in our actual historic world. In terms pertaining to us humans the unfolding consists of evolving homeostasis by individuals—Beethoven’s contribution to what we conceive of as the person being a good example; the key term is freedom. Critical for this is what I call balking, which is in fact a fighting free of the BIP’s reflex arc push-pull inner-outer determinism over us. [ . . . ] History, although filled with war, ignorance and travail, can be read, also, in terms of this evolution of individuality. The establishment of America was an important step. Yet the BIP tugs us backward (here and in the USSR both—the Nixon period was a deadly rollback of human evolution, toward a fossil BIP prior form, but the brain burst it). Yes—this is why the brain interfered with recent U.S. history: we were devolving along the axis of evolution which leads forward to greater homeostasis of the individual—i.e., greater self-programming.

Thus the brain sponsored the “leaderless revolution” against the Vietnam war. Perhaps the first successful totally leaderless revolution in human history. This is what was important, this evolution/revolution. The brain incited this advance in consciousness and awareness. Just to examine what was overthrown is to miss the point. I am—have been—missing the point. It was how it was overthrown. I was shown the divine power overthrowing (represented by the Sibyl). No amount of lies or force, fear or threat, could halt the collective consciousness: the manifestation of this moral collective Noös was one of the most important stages in all the millennia of human history. It was a physical expression (map) of the brain. I’m not theorizing. I know. The brain operated through me, e.g., at a conscious level. The establishment, with all its financial and industrial power, was opposed by a mind. The mind coordinated its parts, this is a miracle!

Then the 60s and 70s represents a quantum leap by the brain. In a sense, it actually came forward into actualization (the open: visible: if to me, then to others—it must be so; I can’t be unique; that runs contrary to common sense). (Well, I didn’t put the code in Tears to read it myself.)

The authorities did not understand—at all guess—what confronted them. They had inaccurate, very inaccurate, intimations of a coordinating “group.” They must have succeeded in discerning a pattern (of coordination); i.e., the results but not the cause (source). They saw revolution; they saw the anti-establishment counterculture articulations (voices) and plotted correctly a synchronization, but could not account for it, despite the efforts of the police. Who were the leaders of this revolution? They had killed all the leaders, and it made no difference: the psyche or psychoi of the leaders lived on—literally. Impossible! (For instance, in 3-74 and on I toyed with the idea, for really quite a while, that it was Jim Pike who had “come across” to me! It was like him!)

Timeo. What are we dealing with? I’d hate to have tried to kill it, like “they” tried. Who have we read about who was murdered—and invisibly came back, ^➊ resurrected and—ubique.

Then it was Ubik that—

➊ The brain contains the saintly dead! (e.g., Jim)

[38:24] The voice: “Plenary override exists.” Not knowing what “plenary” meant I looked it up. “Absolute, complete, perfect.”

[38:26] In its moving about (discorporate in one sense) the brain is like a giant floating crap game.

If it’s like a floating crap game, this vast brain must be an organizing principle. A system of linking. This fits in with the disassembling and re-assembling into a new structure. I was taken into a thinking system . . . how, if at all, does this system exist independently from the constituents which it links together? The same question has long been debated about the relationship between a human mind and its brain! Can the mind exist independently from the brain?

This model (brain-mind) is a good one for my understanding of 3-74. I keep hypostatizing Zebra as God or Noös, and now as brain. But we are the [physical] brain [components]. The plasmatic entity I saw which I called Zebra must have been the analog for the electrical discharges constantly moving through neural fibers—i.e., throughout the brain itself. Those electrical impulses are the life of the brain: its activity. So my brain, made up of millions of cells, in billions of [electrical] combinations, became one station (cell) in (of) a larger brain, linked to other “cells” (persons), some dead, some living, some yet to be, with Christ as the total mind (psyche). As an aggregate we comprised [the mystical, cosmic] Christ!

[38:29] I reason, now: if info can be transmitted to me, I must have some function; memory storage? No—I suppose it’s my writing. This certainly explains the “Acts”—and cypher—material in Tears; good example of my function. I can transmit that way—in my writing. It’s forever whipping messages back and forth, like any brain; that’s how it maintains its existence as a unitary entity.

So seeing all the messages tells me more of the story. It fits the brain-model. Written and auditory messages are its thoughts!

The word “Felix” juxtaposed with “King” is a perfect example—not of code, really—but a message evident (available) only to parts of it. (Set-ground discrimination is involved, which its conscious parts must possess.) All that’s needed is the ajna chakra working.

Boy, have I gotten close to figuring it out! How large do you suppose the brain is? Does it extend beyond the planet? It could. Yes, and much of our reality (world) is spurious; i.e., directly imposed on our percept systems by the brain—I’m taking a wild guess. Not just by the BIP but by the brain.

[38:31] What are we/am I? The brain overthrew “the conspirators”—I know that. So it opposed the conspirators who murdered the civil rights leaders. That is an evil bunch. On these points there can be no doubt. The sides in this are very obscure. I’ll never be able to put it together.

[38:41]

(1) The brain is an organizing principle.

(2) It constantly assembles and distributes visual and audible messages.

(3) These messages are the prime instrument of its organizing.

(4) We are only subliminally aware of these messages; they are “latent.”

(5) Via the messages the brain coordinates us sentiently, draws us into itself, and frees us from the blind determinism, i.e., we are subsumed by it; it is sentient; therefore we are guided by sentience, not cause and effect or chance.

(6) We are totally unaware on a conscious level of all this (e.g., [5]). But this explains why I wrote what’s in Ubik. I was describing the brain’s messages, and, what is more, discerning behind them, the brain, which I called Ubik.

(7) Ubik is true.

(8) So, too, then, probably is Tears and Maze and 3 Stigmata. The brain cued me.

(9) It is probably rare for the psyche of the brain to actually surface in a cell (an individual human) as it did with me in 3-74, but to protect its frontiers it must now and then “epiphanize.” Especially when problem-solving is required beyond the capacity of the “cell” unit.

(10) What I called “Zebra” are direct electric impulses between parts of the brain, normally invisible to us. The brain was firing directly at me electrically, rather than through messages (e.g., the Golden Fish Sign). It overrode me, for defensive purposes.

(11) The brain can be regarded as an entity (unitary) within our species, and not detected, even by its own “cells.”

(12) It may very well provide immortality by incorporating “dead” humans such as Thomas. They are incorporated while alive and remain.

(13) It remembers back thousands of years, to it coming here from the stars.

(14) It was known to the early Christians as the “Paraclete,” called by Christ “more important than I am.” (cf. “John”: “it is to your advantage that I go . . .,” etc.)⁶⁰

(15) By this I deduce that Christ was its initial form here, giving way to the “Floating Crap Game” discorporate form it has now, which is more satisfactory.

(16) Through this form it can govern at least parts—crucial parts—of our world; i.e., direct our affairs (history).

(17) So for what it’s worth, He is here with us, but as St. Teresa of Avila said, “Christ now has no body but yours.”⁶¹ How true!

(18) More precisely, we are not controlled by the brain; we are the brain. It as Noös (energy) has organized us into its brain, its physical analog, to deal with this world.

(19) The adversary of the brain, something which repeats itself; i.e., is static and not growing. The adversary is heavy, inert, and warps thought (and so actions) in dead circles around it. The brain is in dialectic interaction with it, freeing minds from its tug.

(20) Those minds warped into dead circular thinking imagine their thoughts still progress in a straight line. But in fact nothing new ever occurs to them. They therefore represent a reversion to fossil forms.

(21) Unfortunately, these people have been woven by the “magnet” into the power centers of mankind; this has long been so. They rule by lies and coercion.

(22) The brain constantly dismantles the world and grows by incorporating more and more parts—functionally—into itself. Eventually there will be nothing but it. The time-span, in our terms, is quite long—thousands of years.

(23) The book of “Acts” describes the first manifesting of the brain, at Pentecost.⁶² Thus “Acts” is the only written account of the brain’s existence, and so is unique and important. It so to speak is a verbal analog of the innermost core of the brain. Outside of “Acts,” there is no verbal (or rather written) analog to the brain, though oral tradition may obtain in secret.^➊

(24) It is possible that an unbroken chain of true Christians is linked through time back to “Acts” knowing about and experiencing the brain consciously. To prove their existence is impossible.

(25) To finish the thought of item 13, the brain is not native to this planet (or world). It is an invader, and camouflages itself through mimicry and mimesis. It can not only affect our percept systems directly but can alter our memories.

(26) It is benign: mankind’s tutelary spirit freeing us from the warping tug of the “magnet.” Without it, our species would congeal in terms of growth. All progress in human history (at least for the last 2,000 years) is due to it.

(27) The “magnet” came into existence slightly before the brain came here. So evidently it too is an invader, but a criminal one.

(28) Perhaps the brain pursued it. Using another set of terms, the “magnet” can be regarded as a sickness or virus, and the brain as a doctor or healing agent.

(29) Because of its warping tug, the magnet has stopped real time in our world at about 2,000 years ago. Perhaps it occludes us to this frozen temporality by projecting a delusionary world that appears contemporary.

(30) Both the magnet and the brain, then, are transtemporal constants, since the moment of the brain’s arrival (the time of “Acts”).

(31) In the crucifixion, the brain as Christ sacrificed itself in order to promote new life for us. By turning itself into the distributed brain it became camouflaged at the time of “Acts” (following the resurrection).

(32) It bears some relation to our creator. This is why it cares so much about us and our enslaved condition. (For example, the magnet transmits “die messages” at us, which the brain, where necessary, overrides.)

(33) In connection with these “die messages” it is part of the magnet’s system of lies to declare man sinful, guilty, and deserved of punishment. The brain has the authority directly from our creator to countermand all this with joy. Innocence as a verdict (acquittal) and freedom.

(34) The brain incorporates objects and their processes as well as humans; thus it is building an actual cosmos within a damaged cosmos.

(35) The brain has a mandate for a plenary overruling of all powers, in this world, thus it advances in a set of historic stages in an unfolding plan. This world constitutes a lower realm for it; it emanates from an upper realm, which, like it, is totally sentient. Through participation in the brain we are joined to this upper realm. Therefore the brain can be regarded as an intermediary between our world and the upper from which it comes, and in whose nature it participates.

(36) The warped slaves of the magnet who by and large control positions of power in this world (by virtue of the magnet) do not view the cells of the brain as benign and viable, but rather as (1) unpredictable; (2) revolutionary; (3) dangerous; (4) strange; (5) immoral and “uncontrolled”; (6) different; (7) hostile to “stability.” By which is meant conformity to the magnet’s tug. They may even be viewed as invaders, responsive to an invisible source—which they are. They have become “not of this world, in it but not of it.”

(37) The growing extent of the brain’s victory over the magnet is obscured from us by the delusionary world the magnet generates to occlude us. Much of the magnet’s power, then, is itself an illusion.

(38) Let me explain why I depict the brain as a “Floating Crap Game.” It does not organize the same cells constantly, but perpetually as a process releases certain cells at each instant and incorporates others. So a given cell (human) can at one time be part of the brain (and not know it) and be outside it at another. The psyche of the brain, of course, is a constant. So the Qs: “Who is part of the brain?” and “Where is the brain?” are meaningless. Thus there is no way the brain can be destroyed, let alone discerned. A cell of it, for instance, has no knowledge of other cells, or of what will be caused by the psyche to do—or why, when it will be utilized, when dropped out, etc. This is a very superior life form; like Ubik it is everywhere but not in any one spot; it uses human media of communication—it cannot be detected or destroyed, and since we are living in spurious time generated by the magnet anyhow, the brain can proceed as slowly as it wishes to achieve its goals. When the goals are accomplished it will obliterate the prolonged spurious time and reveal the world of “Acts” to us as our real world. In a very real sense the brain and its psyche have never left the time and place of “Acts,” but via the total psyche of it are both anchored there, pitted against the magnet in its clear form: imperial Rome.

(39) If we could see a speeded-up file of world history of the last 2,000 years—run by us in say 5 minutes—we’d see an oscillation (palintropos) of blow and counter blow between the brain and the magnet. We would see millions of humans organized into the brain and millions of humans taken over by the tug of the magnet, warped into a forever dead orbit—like the Persus 9 in Maze. Circling a dead sun eternally. The brain would appear as a patch or blob of light; the magnet black: Yang and Yin. The landscape would remain constant: that of “Acts.” We would see the light (i.e., the brain) pulsate, as if breathing. With each cycle of respiration it as an organism would show visible growth. The black magnet stays fixed, since it is dead. If we could see ahead into the future we would finally see a killer blow delivered by the growing pulsating brain to the magnet, and the palintropos dialectic would end. Only the brain, incorporating every living human (as well as the physically dead) would exist. Even the landscape would disappear. Just a sheet of white light would extend everywhere. It would be as if the brain had reached critical mass and detonated. The magnet is well aware of the direction of this process; it has reason to regard the brain as “dangerous,” “foreign” (“Fremd”), etc.; i.e., as an invader. The brain is its pursuer, and it has caught up with it.^*

➊ “Acts” is a verbal analog of the brain, of the innermost core of the brain, outside of “Acts” there is no written analog of the brain. Thus “Acts” is the only written account of the brain’s existence; it describes the first [and only public] manifestation of the brain.

Whatever theory I come up with re 3-74, “Acts” must be involved—necessary by iron-clad logic. Well, “Acts” says, “Brain.” It says a lot else, but it has been called “the Gospel of the spirit,” i.e., of the brain. After that the brain totally camouflaged itself (having gotten its transfer from Noös to the interface between it and the physical world underway?). I.e., the de scent of the Holy Spirit onto the disciples marked the start of the brain. It was [mere] spirit no longer. It had control over us (sic). After that no real record exists of whom it spread to. (Fortunately.) Its distribution had begun.

“Acts” as brain print.

“Acts” material in Tears pointing to the presence (activity) of the brain. Stamp of the origin? Of authenticity—i.e., “official”?

“Acts” material in Tears as brain print. Proved by 2-74 and 3-74 and the St. Sophia prophecy; i.e., its presence proved (to me).

“Acts” material in Tears—and hence Tears itself—as self-replication or propagation of the brain; i.e., the brain retrievable from each copy(!) of Tears. Each reader as involuntary host.

Tears as miraculous sacrament like the eucharist. A way of entering people and—v. Stigmata and Palmer Eldritch’s drug replicates him in each user (host or “womb”).

Words as alive, like I saw “Felix” to be: the printed word carrying a charge of the red and gold plasmic [electrical, neural] energy. Just in that one place in the novel, next to “King.” It (the organism) can reproduce through—as—information. (But only certain information—i.e., “Acts.”)

Burroughs posits an information virus (or “virus” [like]). (Not so, KW says.)

If that plasmic energy is alive, and it is (or it carries) information, then we have living information. Logos? Information plasma which enters through the optic nerve primarily—or auditorily. Signals that control our brains, open GABA blocked circuits. Like pressing keys on a typewriter.

Once having entered the person’s brain via the optic nerve it now modulates brain functioning so that the person subliminally transduces messages (including instructions) and hence is a “cell” in the brain, responding to sentient override—lifted out of the blind forces of the Yin realm, his actions integrated with that of all others like him. It’s like a beehive, a colony entity, and is immortal, replenishing and shedding continually. Member-units (v. Schopenhauer on the fruit flies⁶³).

The reader of Tears reads the dream (he’s been absorbing “Acts” without knowing it—the verbal analog of the brain) which subconsciously is familiar and remembered; this sets him up, and as soon, then, as he sees “Felix” the plasma travels down his optic nerve as an electric pulse and it’s done, it can now replicate into the total microform of the brain, as the reader reads on getting the rest of the “Acts” material (especially the agape, which is the salient property of the Paraclete [Brain]). The opposites in him (the reader) are reconciled; he accepts his own shadow (in Jung’s term). There may be no palpable or immediate effect, but the entity which I call the brain is inside him and growing. He will be coordinated with the others, overridden, etc.

Also, he has subliminally received the Kerygma, the new one: Christus Rex. He has been told the good news hidden for all the preceding generations. On a conscious level he doesn’t know. The deconstruction (flip-flop) of Tears is love—the final word of the novel.

[38:55] Whatever the Bible may say, the Paraclete (and clearly Zebra is the Paraclete: the proof is [1] the “Acts” material, and [2] the Christian anamnesis)—is a life form, far higher than we are, but real, the possible object of strict empirical knowledge. I believe it is actual and a fit topic for scientific inquiry. However, its camouflage is so successful and its sentience so far above ours that trying to investigate it (against its will) is a waste of time (by definition; viz: posit a life form far higher than us and utilizing camouflage and ad hoc there is no way you can discern it).

But it is not just an inscrutable “miraculous mysterious being”; I saw it using methods—albeit beyond the power of the mechanistic physics which control us. (Lower realm powers.) For example (and this is the main thrust of my theory) it uses an interface to link it to the physical (history) world, a real aggregate of humans, processes and objects which it organizes into the actual entity I call “the Brain.” To travel, it “rides” tangible, physical books, song lyrics, etc. This shows that the sacraments are real and not just customs or rites.

And it’s composed of real energy: some sort of electricity in a plasmic state, info-rich and alive and sentient. It has to (or desires to) follow certain procedures to replicate—to accomplish any of its goals, such as historic intervention and modulation. It does not just wish for the changes to occur, and they do; it needs to dragoon specific people at specific places and times to do specific things. This thought carries me back to my point: some act on my part future to 3-74 was necessary (or so it seems) if the historical intervention were to come at all. And thus it overrode me and saved my hide.

[38:59] This forces me to reconsider the “discarding and annexing” process by the brain in favor of a proliferation theory: once you receive a bit of Zebra into you, you are in the brain (i.e., for good). So the “cloud of fruitflies” model breaks down in favor of the model of a growing brain which acquires but does not simultaneously discard. Yet it is a “swarm.”

That it could replicate itself, in humans (i.e., via), as a verbal plasma—it looked, on the page of Tears like a section of chromosomes under an electron microscope; what I saw was its “seed” or “germ” constituent. [ . . . ]

No—rather, evidently Zebra had replicated itself in me at some earlier date; in writing Tears I was under its jurisdiction. This could have occurred when I took communion, or, as a child, read something that was “information plasma” like the bit in my own book. Amazing how this resembles the replication of Palmer Eldritch through eating Chew-Z.

[38:61] What is hard for us to grasp is how a single bit (like “Felix/King” in Tears) can replicate the entire body of information, just as an entire human can be reconstructed from a single cell. So all the transmitter has to do is get that living-info bit into you, and then it grows. Christ discusses this as the grains of wheat falling on various kinds of soil. The mustard seed, too, and the pearl of great price—many parables relate this concept. “The Kingdom of God” is the state created by the successful growing of the living-info bit, and successful incorporation into the brain, of the person.

This is “Firebright” or the “microcomputer,” this nucleus of living info. It creates a bicameral mind (the inward light or voice—which I call the “AI” voice). The original bicameral mind must have been silenced by the scrambler, revolting BIP. This voice circumvents the scrambler. That’s what it’s all about, this circumvention. The transmitter figured out a way to slip stuff in. One bit, and the totality is duked. [ . . . ]

This description totally agrees with “John” vis-à-vis what the Paraclete does (and knows). “A bit of living information from which grows the entire corpus of knowledge” and “coordination to the divine psyche” (of Christ) is an orthodox formulation; only the terminology has been updated. [ . . . ]

As I now conceive it (to recap), the initial living-info bit must grow to the totality for the “blitz” to occur: the quantum leap inside the person’s head, such as I began to experience in 2-74, which is a thresholding into consciousness: the coming to life of the Christ psyche in microform, like a hologram bit. “Us in Christ and Christ in us” (v. supra). The person is no longer an individual driven by subrational forces, but part of the “Swarm of Bees” brain. [ . . . ]^*

What I saw in 3-74—and remember in 2-74—was the real world: the landscape of “Acts” now “reduced” to its [mere] verbal analog: a book (and in Tears). This book is the authentic actual world, obscured by the fake one. Only the true Christians know this, and they only know it by virtue of the transmitter’s living, salvific info growing into totality inside them.

Whew. Heavy—complex.

It occurs to me to cite the many and near-lethal (to me) attempts by the authorities to get hold of the ms of Tears—i.e., to keep it from being published, as proof of my contention about the BIP and its suppression and scrambling of the truth. Tears does not just tell the true story covertly; as I say, it actually contains a bit of Zebra, alive and info-rich, ready to enter people and begin to grow, to free (and inform) them. This is how anamnesis occurs—this growth into totality from the bit. As Christ frequently pointed out, in many instances the process fails. (There is such a powerful adversary yammering out a ceaseless stream of lies, and maintaining an irreal world, etc.)

[38:68] The brain is one multiperson ajna chakra, which one day as a unitary totality will open, discerning and annihilating (the 3rd eye of Shiva). (Herdsman of the souls.) All who participate in it will then see as I saw; they will be inside the eye; everything outside will be blasted, “burned like chaff,” i.e., cease to exist. At that point the brain will generate its own world out of itself. It, collectively, will totally control its world—the PTG. [ . . . ]

If it’s an information plasma life form, and can replicate the (its) entire Gnosis from one bit—well, add in the spontaneous generation of messages (information) depicted in Ubik, which were everywhere—and in 3-74 I saw them everywhere—and the result you get is that this entity has secretly (camouflaged to us) invaded everywhere (Ubique). Because I saw verbal and graphic messages just flying and changing (re-linking) all over the place. And these are not its thoughts, but it itself. Based on what I saw and what I’ve figured out, we’re in it. Like I flashed on several days ago: it’s a brain, and we’re totally unaware of it. It’s not a species within ours; we’re within it. (I.e., it is larger than we are.) And it’s in some of us. [ . . . ]

So that’s who not only sends but reads the messages: the total macro-brain/psyche sends the message to the microforms in us.

Fuck! Swarm of Bees, but not us. Thus it links its stations (cells) inside us. We humans are just big dumb vehicles through which the plasma acts, and in which it lives.

[38:72] Ah! In Ubik locating the Ubik messages in cheap commercials was absolutely right on. I couldn’t have “guessed” more accurately. It’s obvious that the real author of Ubik was Ubik. It is a self proving novel; i.e., it couldn’t have come into existence unless it were true.

[38:79] “Latent form is the Master of obvious form,” Heraclitus wrote:

So ➊ is related — reaches — ➌ by way of ➋.

Tears, then, is the informational interface or nexus between our actual world of 1974 and “Acts.” The reader lives in ➊ and reads ➋, thus absorbing it; but this leads him inexorably to “Acts,” ➌, and once he has—

Tears is a doorway, not a world in itself. As you read it you pass across to the world of “Acts” without knowing it—the author didn’t know it. It is a latency-within-a-latency.

Then, latent within ➌ is:

The reader, living in world ➊, when he reads Tears ➋, passes to ➌ and then to ➍ and at last to ➎, at which point the living plasma has him.

The final innermost “onion ring” is D or ➎.

In other words, to restore “Acts,” Tears is necessary as an interface. Tears is therefore an instrument (probably just one of many) of restoring the brain, because “Acts” = Brain. Tears, then, is a triggering agent for anamnesis, and anamnesis and the restoration of the brain are intertwined. I don’t credit Tears with being the doorway, but rather a doorway—

By which the brain traveled forward in time along the form axis from c. A.D. 45 Rome into USA 1974! It bypassed the intermediate 1,900 years!

[38:82] My postmortem experiences (such as sense of vast spaces, etc.) is because in the Corpus Christi there are many, such as Thomas, who are dead, the mystical body of Christ contains both the living and the dead, it spans both worlds.

My sense of Thomas returning the last few days—sense of vast space, dreams of a woman singing—show I’m still in the mystical body. And the postmortem experience is further proof of what I’m sure of: by invading this lower realm and annexing it, Zebra is knitting the decomposing cosmos back together—and it is the cosmic Christ who does this. Ergo, Zebra is the cosmic Christ. I grow more and more sure of it. (I.e., the brain.)

[38:83]

The mystical body of Christ spans the past and the present, this world and the next.

[38:88] Bill Sarill⁶⁴ points out that my description of the magnet imposing absolute sameness everywhere is a description of entropy, of thermal death of the universe. Conversely, the flash point (critical mass) explosion of the brain would be the hoped for negentropic “Big Bang” start of a fresh cycle of the universe, which, if not achieved, means the eventual end of the universe, through insufficient mass (matter). [ . . . ]

Thus, at the deepest level, the brain represents form, and the BIP represents entropy. This realization, due to Bill Sarill, is monumental. It goes beyond “Christianity vs. Rome.” The Christians are simply the agents of negentropy, and the brain is the form—and life, the evolving entelechy—which that form takes. The BIP is sameness: thermal death. Clearly, the brain is an ultimate level of homeostasis and a vast evolutionary step forward in terms of hierarchy of form. It subsumes more; it is larger; it is more intelligent and self-sufficient; more free—more alive. As a life form it subsumes not only all other life forms that we know, but even incorporates into itself dead or past lives. It transcends this entire realm and binds it into the other (next or higher). Despite its secular enemy, the totalitarian state, it is destined historically to prevail (come into full actualization). So I was correct in viewing my 3-74 experience as an evolutionary step up. But it is not that just for me as an individual; I ceased to be an individual and became a cell in what I now recognize as a vast distributive brain, an interface for a sentient information plasma which may extend beyond this planet. [ . . . ]

I do not believe it is God (the creator). It is something new, which came into existence at a certain time (c. A.D. 45, “Acts”) at a certain place (Syria) in a certain way (through first Christ and then the Second Comforter). It had never been seen—been there—before; it has an historic starting point. Blind will or striving is overruled by an advancing mind-brain which came here in micro form (very small and lowly) and grows; it is not static! I suppose we could worship it, but in a sense we would be worshipping our [true] selves; better we should enter into a dialog with the psyche and let it regulate us. We should listen to it, and make ourselves hosts to it, receivers and vehicles and receptacles of it.

I am now dealing in ultimate, modern categories. We’re a long way from, say, dietary laws having to do with eating pork, or meat on Friday. My concepts have, in this 4 year exegesis, advanced thousands of years.

[38:95] KW offers the brilliant theory that the brain was using me as a self-monitoring circuit to examine the degree of information degradation along the linear time axis, and therefore could not allow me to be sacrificed in 3-74. Apparently some rectification of the “signal” (i.e., history) had to be made, and I was lucky enough to be included in that rectification. KW explained to me how very good amplifiers monitor their own output to see if it conforms to what they are receiving from the pre-amp; this is a typical example of electronic homeostasis. So the brain transmitted back a text (“Acts”) that it knew, and could then compare what appears in Tears with what it had transmitted.

I add to this that it (the brain in the future) also transmitted a command to some of its cells located here, in this time, and this command code (King Felix) was correctly received by me, and boosted (put into the book). But as KW says, a self-monitoring feedback information loop was set up by the brain in the future using me and Tears. Since the brain is information, it (a bit of it as plasma) was actually in each copy of Tears!

Folder 18

[18:1] Which is it: hallucination as reality (e.g., 3 Stigmata) or reality as hallucination (e.g., Bishop Berkeley)?

Stated this way, I think the latter. Reality (USA 1974) is hallucination, and can be voided through faith—whereupon the absolute time and place (“Acts”) appears.

Thus 3 Stigmata and Maze are total opposites: in Maze reality is a hallucination. There is a real world behind it. But in 3 Stigmata hallucination becomes real—not: real becomes hallucination and hence departs.

Do Androids Dream . . . reveals:

(1) Surface level: Mercer⁶⁵ real

(2) Below that: Mercer fake—hoax—fraud

(3) Below that: Mercer real (Bottom Line)

I think this 3 level structure is the one we have vis-à-vis Christianity. A secret within a secret A, Ā, A. “Precious Artifact” (3 layer) was close.

You have this: Q: “Is a fake fake real?” re Christianity: A: “Yes.”

—

This is in terms of a 2-value system (“A or Ā”). If a 3-value system is used:

—

A becomes Ā by reversal. Then Ā is reversed, not restoring A, but something else. A what? How does it differ from A, if at all? Answer: call it A′. I say A′ “out A’s A,” in an ontological sense. It is a profoundly deeper, richer newer level than A, but also (paradoxically) it is A. But A′ is not A.

So: A′ is and is-not A.

—

But: A′ is not Ā.

The reversal of the reversed does not restore the original thing. I say, A is just a picture of A′.

Whatever that means. But it’s so. Of the 3, only A′ is really real. A and A′ are identical, but A and Ā are false; only A′ is real. [ . . . ]

Voice: “A′ is A reinterpreted.”

[18:11] Strange—a day or so before my mother’s fatal stroke I realized that Thomas was back. The woman singing, the vast spaces. Via the brain I once more passed across a little, not as much as before but enough to tell me that I still remained inside of—a part of—the brain, which spans both worlds.

I must have gone across in 3-74 and stayed for a while and then returned. Okay—in track A I died, but then the revision was superimposed as orthogonal newness: negentropy imposed on a running-down, ossifying state of things. Yes, that’s what was going on: ossification, entropy, the “imperial” equals undifferentiated thermal distribution, and this included me, this entropy . . . but also I foresaw the really very frightening moment coming for me—I foresaw my demise. The last frames were moving through the projector.

Then the brain acted, injecting new life into realm II. KW agrees that I’d been used as a self-monitoring circuit by the brain to measure the coefficient of entropy (at that time) expressed in terms of information degradation (the aspect of form vs. entropy most important to it, it being living information: it would be self-monitoring its own decay), its own running down, which pointed to a growth-impairment of growth-loss, requiring rectification, self-rectification, it being at perhaps an absolute stage of homeostasis.

I take it that Tears showed too high a degradation-of-information factor, or in some way indicated an inordinate fossil or ossified quality, or pointed to it (in some way conveyed it, I’m not sure the “Acts” info in Tears was degraded, itself, intrinsically).

Maybe wherever the “Acts” material surfaced—its manifesting itself would indicate a “weak” spot—a revelation of too much entropy. In that case, a highly (adequately) vital, viable space-time segment could resist the “Acts” material; for the “Acts” material to surface—show through—first in Tears and then four years later, the actual world of “Acts” showed through—the hologram was weakening!

This is not supposed to happen. The brain wishes to maintain the fiction of linear time—i.e., that it was at that time 1974. Then there was a dysfunction and rectification. The release of Tears with its “Acts” material served as a device by which the brain could pinpoint in its own corpus the weak spot (the brain’s evolution—growth—occurs in linear time—so sequence, linear time, is needed by it).

The “hologram” is the brain as “body” of psyche. Its actual evolving corpus—primarily one of living sentient information—was weakening—dying (just one spirit located at one time and place). It’s like a Barium or Gallium or other radioactive or dye test. The brain must have either been running (1) a routine test; (2) a constant test; (3) or a test based on suspicion of the USA 1974 “spot” in the corpus. In any case the “Acts” material in Tears was a self-signal to the psyche which brought a quick—im mediate—response of rectification: the orthogonal imposition of newness (from Form I) onto the entropic, weak or ossified “imperial” spot.

I deduce from this that the original landscape is not supposed to show through. But v. p. 17!⁶⁶

Ach—it’s so. I just know it ran a self-monitoring test through me, and the actual landscape showed through in Tears and it, the brain, it reacted. So after it saved me in 2-3-74 I’ve had time to figure out that what it is is that a brain exists, feeding us a spurious reality which it grows and develops, and we’re cells in it subliminally governed and integrated into it. The spurious reality is to keep us from going nuts from sense-deprivation, and is a 3-D hologram matrix through which info passes, its thoughts, instructions and info.

It’s all certainly for a benign purpose: the brain is negentropic, the life of the universe, “the final bulwark against non being,” as Tillich put it (against entropy).⁶⁷ As cells, we are born, function, live, age, die and are replaced; the brain is immortal. What we accomplish in our lifetimes is made eternal as bits of the brain’s evolving structure, especially if it deals with info, the very substance of the brain. In processing info, especially if we impose form on it rather than just transfer it or boost it—we are modifying the very life (substance, nature) of the brain. So we are active, not passive cells of the brain.

Anyhow, despite the “deception” of a simulated reality—this realization opens up an I-You (me to the brain and back) colloquy, instead of merely an I-it. And this is a quantum leap up in perception and experience of the universe: the not-I.

[18:17] A curious idea occurs to me: in Tears the world of “Acts” has been fundamentally and severely transmuted into a rigid-as-iron prism/tyranny. Expressed as info (with “Acts” as the message) this is a verbal degrading analogous to the world—degrading by the Nixon tyranny (police state nearing outright slavery). So—the “Acts” material is severely degraded: specifically into an ossified form (the BIP). And the brain, self-monitoring in terms of itself qua info, detects the BIP (ossified) quality, assesses it correctly as a moribund or entropic state, and acts to revitalize (i.e., to free) the “spot” (i.e., space-time) involved. Ah! It’s as if the brain transmitted “Acts” through my head, and grave BIP aspects showed up in the print-out: accurate representation of our actual political, social conditions. Thus the brain experiences our world as it is: as information. I had mistakenly thought—supra—that the “Acts” material came through intact, but in fact it is “heat death” distributed into the Tears BIP ossification, which, as Bill Sarill pointed out, is a form of entropy! So if BIP equals entropy, there is severe degrading of the “Acts” message in Tears, along very specific lines: our USA of 1974!

My mind in 1970 was utilized as a core or representative situation-registering microcosm component, as if the macro political-sociological USA as historic matrix was correctly reproduced in me—so a known message (“Acts”) passing through me (my mind) would show changes, if any, indicative of the macro-historic matrix. It’s the same principle as the Nielsen TV Poll.

On p. 13, supra,⁶⁸ I totally missed the point (nature) of how—and how much!—the “Acts” message was degraded as an input signal/message. What did I expect: the word “Gubble”? Here is a verbal degrading delineating exactly how the situation had deteriorated; i.e., it was not just “noise” on the line but specific, meaningful recontouring, and this condition, called “imperial uniformity” by KW and me, is entropy, which for the brain means a literal (but localized) death of a part of itself—and so it took immediate steps to rectify the situation by breaking the warp-factor of the “complex” (BIP). Just as it gave new life to me personally (à la Ubik) it gave our world new life generally.

What I foresaw in Tears was the running-down of our world, the congealing. Tears, as a verbal message, was a thought by the brain itself, passing through me as a “neural” component. This is how the brain normally works—I got to see that in 3-74, the message came from it, and was to be received by it—that is who the crypto info in Tears was for. So it didn’t matter how many copies got sold to whom.

So the “Acts” material was not the message but the control. Departures (transmutations) were the real message: i.e., how altered.

Boy, was it ever changed in a sinister—and alarming—way! So what I call the “mere surface material of Tears”—is what the brain specifically was looking for—I’ve dismissed the very thing it was looking for.

This is not God. This is a very advanced organism which we just don’t know about (of Zebra’s camouflage). It subsumes at least some of us, and came here from elsewhere. It doesn’t work by miracle but through ways we don’t understand. It, not we, is the real life form here.

It probably is the once-man we know of as Christ.

[18:23] Admittedly this is a more prosaic explanation, but—I can see where, unable to understand the programming and re-programming controlling me, my mind would come to the psychologically necessary conclusion that it was God, and would project the theophany, etc.—i.e., generate Zebra by projection. Also, in 3-74 I may have suffered a lurid schizophrenic episode because of the inordinate stress, I regressed to such a primitive stage that I animated my environment. I saw a world of 2,000 years ago because I had regressed into the racial unconscious.

Q: But what about the “Acts” material in Tears and it agreeing with what I remembered in 2-74 upon seeing the fish sign, and saw a month later?

A: As early as 1970 archaic contents of my mind were overpowering me. This shows up in Ubik and 3 Stigmata. I had been partially psychotic for years, and in 3-74 I broke down totally. Due to actual stress. (The IRS business.)

Like Cordwainer Smith,⁶⁹ I was taken over by my own S-F universe.

Schizophrenia with religious and paranoid coloring—of the ecstatic type.^* A sense of the “cosmic”—vast mystical forces, with me in the center (sic). Like a titanic psychedelic drug trip. I was probably secreting a mescaline-like autotoxic substance not well understood. I had little if any romance (i.e., adventure) in my life in those days (’74), and in ’70 Nancy’s leaving had broken me—i.e., at the time of my ’70 “mescaline” trip, which was more likely my first entry into total psychosis—my ego disintegrated then, and again in 3-74.

And now I exhaust myself trying to explain 3-74. I was lithium toxic. And had a schizophrenic breakdown.

My mind monitors my “missile anamnesis” as a clue to prior psychosis. I need romance (adventure) in my life. The AI voice is a special kind of hallucination: one of wish-fulfillment and need, due to loneliness: emotional starvation and grief and ill-use. I just can’t endure life without that lovely voice guiding me, so I regress to a level (atavistic, in historical terms) at which such a bicameral experience (like in Scanner) can take place. The AI voice is my imaginary playmate, my sister, evolved out of my childhood “Bill and Nell” fantasies. I did not regress to my own childhood only, but back along the “platonic form-axis,” i.e., into the collective unconscious, back thousands of years. It was a mercy. I was so unhappy and afraid; like R. Crumb,⁷⁰ so behind the 8 ball, so filled with anticipatory dread.

Well, damn it—I don’t regret it. It made a barren, fearful life meaningful and bearable, and it helped me solve certain pressing problems such as writing the IRS in ’74.

Yes, it was a mercy to me—I went over the brink into psychosis in ’70 when Nancy left me—in ’73 or so I tried to come back to having an ego, but it was too fragile and there were too many financial and other pressures; the hit on my house and all the terrors of 1971 had left their mark—and so, especially because of the IRS matter, I suffered total psychosis in 3-74, was taken over by one or more archetypes. Poverty, family responsibility (a new baby) did it. And fear of the IRS.

Only now, as I become for the first time in my life financially secure, am I becoming sane, free of psychotic anxiety (R. Crumb’s case is very instructive), and career-wise I am doing so well: I am at last experiencing genuine satisfaction (e.g., my car, my novels, my stereo, my friendship with KW), and there is far less responsibility on my shoulders. Also, my accomplishments last year—traveling, being with Joan—did wonders for my psychological health. I learned to say no, and I conquered most of my phobias. I think they lessened as I learned to enjoy living alone for the first time of my life. And the therapy at Ben-Rush Center helped.

But I think that when all else failed and external pressures and inner fears drove me into psychosis, God placed me under his personal protection and guided me and saved me by His divine love, mercy, wisdom and grace through Christ . . . although not, perhaps, as I delusionally imagined. The intervention appears in Tears as the dream and the reconciliation with my shadow, the black man, which followed; and my anima, possessing mana, acted as my psychopomp through the underworld to safety. [ . . . ]

My psychosis put me in touch with “das ewige weiblichkeit”⁷¹ in me,^* and for that I will always be grateful; it means I will never really be alone again: whenever I really need her, I will sense her presence and hear her voice (i.e., St. Sophia). At the center of psychosis I encountered her: beautiful and kind and, most of all, wise, and through that wisdom, accompanying and leading me through the underworld, through the Bardo Thödol journey to rebirth—she, the embodiment of intelligence: Pallos Athena herself. So at the core of a shattered mind and life lies this equicenter—omphalos—of harmonie and calm. I love her, and she is my guide: the second comforter and advocate promised by Jesus . . . as Luther said, “For the very desperate,” here in this world secretly, for their—our—sake. [ . . . ]

When I saw her she was beautiful beyond compare—Aphrodite and Pallas Athena both—and someday I’ll see her again. She is inside me—she is my soul.

[18:29]

[18:34] Info within the data. Message. Living info: organized (negentropic). Whereas the data is/are entropic. There is no way we can define its outline as long as it desires to remain hidden, since it is an organizing principle of that which it is not. It is not a something. It is made up of the arrangement of the data. It can be any object, any process, any person—and at that time controls that object, process, person. It is me today, not me tomorrow. Like Mercury it is a messenger-system, linking constituents; when linked they serve as a medium or conduit to transfer info, which is to say, it as life form. In a sense it is a narrative.

[18:35] This is the quintessential form of “The Masks of Medusa” that Brunner sent to me—the theory was there!⁷² Like a phagocyte it moves to surround the magnet, regarding it as a hostile invader (i.e., in this region of the hologram). The magnet does not belong here: it is embedded like a meteor in the ground.

Titanic biological models are implied. The encircling brain pulses with life and light, but even it, so much advanced over us, is a small-scale entelechy in the universe as a whole.

[18:42] He remembered a former life, as an early Christian. The divine ajna eye (Dibba Cakkhu) opened and he saw all things coming into being and passing away, the growing and evolving of the universe animal locked in dialectic but victorious strife with its opposite, the universe alive and intelligent.

He saw vast opened books of wisdom. Most of all, he heard across vast reaches of space, her voice advising, informing and comforting him, and telling him that holy wisdom would be born again, and that the Buddha was in the park, i.e., born.

She intervened to extricate him and his son, medically and by counsel, out of danger, and she led him across the bridge to the upper world, to the wastes and void and the emptiness and love—and restoration to—God. Finally, she showed him mysterious mind here but hidden, making plastic all reality by its thought and will. She showed him life and intelligence and will everywhere. Breaking the prism and bringing freedom to man, operating secretly on history to bring man to safety, and she gave him eternal life and her beauty, wisdom and love, and most of all her companionship.

He understood that she was not God but that she spoke in God’s name and knew everything past, present and future. She announced her presence here and her intervention here. She told him that she had seen every evil thing and would correct it through justice, that the weak would be protected, and she protected him.

But then she told him that a time would come when she could no longer speak to him. After that he did nothing but try to remember her and the sound of her voice, and cared nothing about anything else. He was lost in dreams and memories because of what he had seen and heard. He could never explain it to anyone else. But she had promised to come back for him at the end of his life, with the sound of the magic bells—Easter Bells denoting the dead and risen Christ. So he knew a secret he should never tell: that the savior was female, that the Second Comforter was God’s darling and delight who had existed before creation and had aided in creation: by her all things came into being, and nothing existed except through her. And he understood the last mystery of all, that although she was not God she was God. Much of this he knew because he remembered his former life, thousands of years ago, when he had been one of the original true Christians and had received the true Kerygma never written down, from those who had known before her/him.

He remembered a great battle he had been in, along with others like him, as her agents, to destroy a sort of Iron Prison; and he realized that again he was fighting this battle—now, as her agent again, along with the others.

He felt great joy, and the knowledge of triumph. The savior had died but would soon return, and they were making glad preparations for his im minent return. That was another mystery: the savior was he, but also, secretly, it was she once again; behind every incarnation she was there; and behind her was God, who was he, and she was God.

There was something spinning like a great top, like a volvox,⁷³ changing and evolving, alive and conscious, using the old world as a heap of parts to fit into place within itself; it was camouflaged and here, and it consisted of a story, of living information, and electricity like a plasma, no one could see it, and it destroyed all that enslaved creatures: it sprang traps open to release hunted things. She spoke for it. Mostly it was in the future, although for it there was only space into which it grew (space as the receptacle of being); it made use of time as its source of energy. It used time and was not ruled by time. It was always in motion and symmetrical. It was replacing the world of causality with itself and its living, thinking purpose, its body.

He saw how her messages, which were living bits of her, traveled through people and the world, maintaining her as a unitary entity—and he was shown that in a small but real way he had been made use of to boost and transmit one tiny bit of her living information, from one part of her—the spinning sphere which grew and lived—to another part. This was the most important thing he had ever done; this was his purpose; and in doing so he was part of her, and this would never change. He was in her and she in him. Forever; like speaking—calling—to like. For him it was love, and perhaps for her, too.

She appeared to him as love, beauty, wisdom, war (protectress) and finally harmonie. Sometimes she sang.

[18:66] It’s a two source hologram—it must be nothing more than hologram-like, or this could not occur; if USA 1974 were truly substantial it could not oscillate like that—no superimposition montage could take place. These continua must be projected, and obviously by the observer, the self.^➊ No other explanation is possible; to wit: whatever reality you truly believe in is served up, including all details. Someone convinced he was in Weimar Germany would see the world under that aspect. These are modes of perceiving one (i.e., the same) actually unchanging thing: view points, perspectives. This urwelt can assume (or be projected upon so as to assume to us) any space-time aspect imaginable. It is an omni-faceted revolving sphere of some kind reflecting back at us what we project, or what something in us or—well, Brahman, nice to meet you, you cunning dreamer of worlds, how obliging you are, right down to minute trivia. Not only can you assume (take, take on, be, appear to be) any form, but all forms. I always come back to you when I push this far enough. I’m right, then, in my writing, aren’t I? Silly putty universes, a whole lot of them. But underneath it’s you, obliging and smiling; any guise we wish, believe in—you have it fully made.

You even fooled the Buddha, you the magician, the game player. Why the manifold disguises? The doubter and the doubt—and the hymn of total faith. Emerson was right.⁷⁴ Tat tvam asi—here I am, one of the forms you take, writing about you, figuring out your ways—Brahman delighting in detecting Brahman; this may be one of your favorite games. And you assist us forward, as I saw last night; diversification into the pluriforms, the many from the one. You enlighten us but it is you who fools us—fools your own polyforms: Brahman the Magician (James-James), the audience, and the palm-tree savior—you are all of these, Christ included, and the woman I hear and see; Holy Wisdom in secret is you.

The basis of it all is a game for children which consists of a show in which the most subtle teaching takes place, as if to see if we can detect illusion. I view it all epistemologically, but it could be viewed morally or esthetically, etc. My criterion is real vs. irreal. What is actually there, and just where is it? I say it’s mainly in our heads, but an inner-outer analog system exists which locks us into world, a push-pull feedback loop, the inner projecting onto the outer, and the outer (you, Brahman) cunningly simulating each projection and generating it back in enriched synchronization, so no thinness appears: the outer is not just a mirror but an amplifying mirror or structure—generator. In other words, Atman within projects the bare bones of a particular aspect of world onto the omni-faceted matrix; and you as outer Brahman supply details which fill in the picture, which you generate back; you enhance (as Brahman the reality-world-generator) what each Atman projects—it’s like Joint and the soft drink stand that turns out to be just the word: “Soft drink stand”—no; it’s as if the words are initially projected; that’s the first step: it starts with Atman, goes to the spinning macro volvox, there it is enhanced—enriched—with corroborative detail and mirrored back to Atman; it is received by Atman (in its enhanced more fully produced form) and again projected out onto the flux volvox top, so this push-pull feedback loop just keeps on mutually generating (creating) a more and more articulated hologram-like reality. But it is hologrammatic and no more.

But I broke the push-pull in 2-74 when I saw the fish; in 3-74 because of my belief I projected Rome c. A.D. 45 and you obligingly articulated it—in the midst of a USA 1974 hologram—a palpable absurdity. As Thomas I may have very—totally sincerely—projected the initial bare bones aspect, but I (my interior Atman) did not project all that I saw of Rome c. A.D. 45; you obligingly augmented the projection ^➋ and generated that augmentation back, and the push-pull began, so we got such details as primitive Christian sacraments and the Koine, fear of the Romans, etc.; and then the whole world-aspect (i.e., one space, one time) system broke down, and the Dibba Cakkhu eye opened and I saw the unitary revolving sphere which grows and incorporates over 1,000’s of years. No aspect-world was presented to me at that point. I saw what I call Zebra, and at last (recently) recognized it as a giant brain interfaced which utilizes us as stations, and which consists of living information (cf. Xenophanes). Even more recently I see the brain as a vast phagocyte, and its enemy a pathenogin. But that may be a graphic analogy only. What I am sure of is that Parmenides was correct. You give us not just an illusory phenomenal world, but a whole lot of them in space and time, as many as we initiate (which again is you in us, initiating these worlds). You are a world-creator God; you do not just think but “cause to be.” The breakdown in my push-pull system in 2-74 temporarily set another world and another self into generation. But finally the situation restabilized as it had been before; however I was now in dialog with a “you” and not an “it”; I knew that true reality was sentient and at least partly alive and very smart—and also something of a conjurer. Also very beautiful and female.

If I had to make a statement about the very most ultimate nature of what I saw, I’d say it seemed to be a single complex sphere in flux, elaborating (yes, that’s the word I want: elaborating) itself out of its continually greater number of stages of antecedent states/stages, always surpassing itself esthetically, in terms of wisdom, intricacy, efficiency, level of negentropy (organization): yes, perpetually surpassing itself in the level of organization (completeness)—filling in the gaps by a continually better and better—i.e., wiser, more efficient, more beautiful—use of its constituents and their arrangement—placement within—subsumed as parts—by the single over-all unitary structure. It may indeed develop from simplicity to complexity. But at the same time it progresses from plurality (many pieces) to incorporation into a unity. So its number is inversely proportional to its complexity: it goes from the many simple to the one absolutely complex. This reflects the distribution of elements on the periodic table; the more complex (heavier) the less frequent; also it resembles thought-processes in a brain; as that article in Nature pointed out back in the early fifties.

So it follows principles established in subsets we’re familiar with: complexity is inversely proportional to frequency. As phagocyte it may not only be engulfing the pathenogin but using it as a stockpile of parts; the two [entities] will finally become one, and the dialectic will end (successfully). (This certainly resembles Timaeus: Noös at work “persuading” ananke!) Yes, that’s it! The encircled BIP/magnet/pathenogin is being disassembled and incorporated into the brain/phagocyte/sphere, which process produces time and flux (v. Heraclitus). But it is not an equal contest: the sphere or brain although facing a formidable opponent is successfully dismantling it, although the process is not complete. It is the upper realm of Form I eventually making irreal the lower realm of Form II, as Parmenides realized. Form II. The BIP, in the aspect of eternity isn’t there; it’s only there in the flux time process. The phagocyte has, like the dragon, consumed itself starting with the tail; the BIP may be its own antecedent fossil self, blind and mechanical, at an earlier level of evolution—“matter” insentient compared to life and thought—brain. Thus the universe, the totality, organizes itself into the brain, that I saw, by consuming itself, what we see as change, flux, time, process is sign of its life, it is alive and becoming more so—just as I, as microbit, did in 3-74. Hologram microbit, analogy of the whole.

Finally, I ask, what is the purpose of the push-pull inner-outer analogy feedback loop between the stations and the total brain (out of which illusory hypostatized worlds are generated)? Why, this is how it elaborates and builds successive, antecedent-subsuming more evolved stages of itself, working toward ultimate unity and complexity. Since there is nothing but it, it can only interact with its own parts—by definition nothing (ultimately) can exist outside it (although during the temporal flux process this is not true). It annexes (incorporates) at the expense of the not-yet-it (i.e., the not-yet-brain but still dead fossil). The push-pull process accomplishes (or is one way, the way which concerns and involves us) final unitary totality. As the push-pull takes place between a given cell, station, part, bit or Atman, and the total brain-so-far, that bit is hyped up to elevated—well, I guess for whatever it will serve as in the final unitary being, which is probably awake (sentient) throughout. It’s as if an escalating “thermal” or ergic charge is generated by this mutual push-pull process; it is the brain firing through (along) its circuits and firing back in response—no energy escapes from the closed system (circuit) so the ergic tension just builds and builds. We experience this as involvement with what we construe to be “the world.” It fires at us, the way it fired the pink beam of info-rich light from the fish sign on the window at me—there’s a typical, not atypical example, but usually it’s disguised. What I got to see at that time was the purposeful, brain-like quality of reality with me in it, not outside it. To use an instance I know of, Tears fires a certain charge of this living energy/info. It goes on constantly all around us; this is why our brains crave—require—not just stimuli but dialog. This is the basis of life, as Martin Buber pointed out. The brain might also be said to be educating its parts so they will accurately replicate it in miniature; thus achieving for it its desired completeness, its goal (wholeness throughout). Only when the micro stations precisely reflect the totality will the whole thing work (function). Our lives are exchanges of energy—information back and forth, among us and with the total brain, involving us in one purpose and one outcome; it is not destiny; it is the will of the whole. There is nothing that can thwart it because outside it, finally, nothing will remain. This is understood in Christianity as the new cosmos of the mystical Corpus Christi.

➊ But an ur self: the Atman; Brahman within.

➋ With details I did not and could not know—which gave the system away.

[18:78] Regarding the factor of complexity of the “volvox,” what’s involved is not the number of parts but the interconnections—I perceived a veritable maze of connections, with each new part fitted in to link as many previous parts as possible. The organizing and arranging has this interconnectivity in mind. Information moves through this jungle gym, branching and flowing like the red mercury in a thermometer—my God, it’s twisted like this:

Oh God, what have I stumbled onto? This is the basic cable—it’s Crick and Watson’s double helix again, and the ancient sign. Billions of these twisting interwoven conduits—it places a linkage in place, a bar or leg, a rigid shank, and then twists the flexible red and gold double helix filaments around it; it supports the twisting strands—it is material, they are—energy? They travel along supported by the linking bar. That means our material physical world—all its constituents—becomes mere rigid supports for “cables” that are not substantial which carry the messages and are the real business of the “volvox”-like brain.

Then the macro-organism can distribute its energy anywhere it wishes, to any station along any cable. Entropy is overruled, because of this deliberate and effective capacity to transfer charge (potential) at will. This is an important matter; this lies at the heart of negentropy. I make no clear dis tinction between energy, information, and the life of this organism. Transfer, storage, boosting—I shift from a biological model to a circuit model, I realize, but both seem to apply; from the very start when I saw it in 3-74 it behaved as (1) electricity; and (2) alive.

What I defined as set-to-ground could also be termed signal-to-noise. Since entropy (disorder) enters into information theory, in 3-74 it could be said I was able to extract message or order out of apparent disorder—i.e., perceive a negentropy normally outside our percept system. What seemed to define signal was certain frequencies of light—wave lengths of the color spectrum. One would have to (1) know that the signal was on that particular frequency; and (2) be able to unscramble the frequency from all others received—this happened to me outside my volition. Ability to distinguish color frequencies more and more accurately (precisely) seems to be an evolving faculty in humans. On specific red frequencies the information formed messages intelligible to me—geometric forms marked with Greek letters. Also, the living, sentient plasma I called Zebra was on that red frequency. In referring to my reference books I find that the red I saw as set or signal is at the most extreme high end of the visible spectrum. I take it, therefore, that the band of color visible to me had become increased, perhaps into the infrared. It looked like overamped (valent) red phospers in the tube gun (cathode tube) of a TV set. Reds, too, had predominated in the phosphene activity. The infrared end is long waves, interestingly, they are heat (i.e., thermal).

Voice: “There’s something (or someone) else living inside my head, and he’s not living in this century.”

“Because the Holy Spirit was a living being for him, it is for me.”

[18:81] So again we seem to have two mutually exclusive true propositions:

(A) “Thomas” is a former life of mine (of me) and I was “Thomas.”

(B) “Thomas” is “someone else inside my head,” i.e., other than me, and “he is (right now) not living in this century.”

(A) equates with my anamnesis in 2-74 upon seeing the golden fish sign. I remembered I was/am in Rome c. A.D. 45. Ergo: Thomas is me. But:

(B) Thomas talks to me, and he thinks in the Koine, which I don’t know. Ergo, he is not me.

And, if (as it appears) he is in my head but “not living in this century,” then time is a fucking illusion and not linear at all. I point at once to my omni-faceted omni-world-generating sphere with its push-pull engagement with all the psychoi.

I’d say I possess—just in this alone—knowledge such as few humans have ever had, and experiences to match. [ . . . ] Perhaps my “Onion” model of time is absolutely correct; Thomas locks into one layer, I another (again cf. Ubik). Thomas, locked into Rome c. A.D. 45, is still alive—and not just alive but in my head. My head! Am I, likewise, in his head? Or is this just one head? Fuck! [ . . . ]

Beyond doubt: Thomas and I are co-inhabitants of my head (i.e., brain or mind, probably brain), existing side by side, somewhat but not entirely partitioned off from each other—I say not entirely because (1) in hypnogogic states I can transliminate him, or he can transliminate; and (2) in 2-3-74 he first broke through—in 2-74—and in 3-74 he virtually took over—he did take over! And (3) in crisis he can speak to me—I guess when my ego begins to implode, which fits in with (2).

Okay—multiple personalities. Great. Fine—the literature is full of these cases. But with him living in another century? How can he be “living” in another century when my head, brain and body are here? I must cite my omni-world-generating push-pull-action sphere—I have no other theory. But if my shoulder dislocates, does his shoulder dislocate? When I saw Rome c. A.D. 45, his world, it did equate with—prove syntonic to—mine. People who I saw were simultaneously Americans and Romans. USA 1974 and Rome c. A.D. 45 seemed to be mere aspects of one substrate (the matrix sphere).

Obviously the many (plural) space-times are aspects projected onto and/or by (from) the matrix which is totally “open” or plastic, capable of seeming to be any place and any time. Brahman!

[18:84] I state: the passage of time since “Acts” is spurious. That is it. That is the premise derived from empirical experience. Whatever our senses tell us means nothing. Circular time, not linear time, is involved. When St. Sophia (Christ) returns it will be in apostolic times, as promised.

The 1,900 intervening years are a spurious interpolation by the BIP. This is why I (Thomas) constantly write in indictment of the substantiality of our reality. There is a one-to-one correspondence between (1) the spuriousness of our world; and (2) my writing about this, including writing about falsified memories.

It has been my job to indict our world as spurious and I have done it—obsessively, constantly and continuously. I have shown how it can be that such is so; I have examined mechanism after mechanism, model after model.

In Tears I set out to depict what really does exist, and I did so without my knowing it (so obviously Thomas wrote it): I depicted the world of “Acts.” It all dovetails. QED the content of Tears is the proof of all the above. Under epistemological attack, the world of “Acts” stands as being—the rest dissolves as mere accretional shifting aspects.

[18:86] What a realization: transtemporal-constant secret Christians, originating in apostolic times, and lying within humans in succeeding generations—reactivated by external disinhibiting stimuli (but before this or without this can covertly direct the persons they inhabit, like the way Thomas secretly masterminded my writing). Hot dog!

But this is exactly what I’m not supposed to talk about. These underlying co-habitating secretly still living apostolic Christians want to stay secret; Thomas is only one of several or many, I guess. What I am just beginning to realize is that Thomas has for at least 27 years masterminded my writing and its themes, if not my whole life. This should not be publicly disclosed, for obvious reasons. He took over in 3-74 to save me, and I should not write about it. I’ve been told. It is counterproductive.

What I must concentrate on is not the irreality of our world or worlds plural, but the absolute transtemporal-constant: the apostolic secret Christians still alive and at work. This fits in with my flash upon seeing the golden fish sign: I saw the secret early Christians hurrying about their business.

Then the answer is: Thomas is not a former life of mine. I did not live once in Rome c. A.D. 45, Thomas is an immortal apostolic Christian, and Rome c. A.D. 45 is the real present world, ^* and Thomas co-inhabits my head, locked into the real world. “Acts” is not a past world—v. Tears, it is the noumenal matrix of this world. We are not dealing with either the past or a past life and personality, but the urwelt lying under the Dokos. Thomas and his world is here and now, and he knows it. [ . . . ]

So I am, so to speak, a front—a face—for an immortal, transtemporal secret early Christian who is operating—undoubtedly in conjunction with others like him—in contemporary history. This is behind-the-scenes stuff, thrilling and scary. I certainly see Thomas’ hand or mind in my writing. Yes indeed, he is with me, not is me—in my head. But “living in another century.”

I have even experienced the postmortem world, through Thomas: my 3-74 experience was all I thought it was. “Bright white light shining in the night to guide your way.”

Folder 2

[2:1] So Thomas is not a former me or a multiple personality. The single sentence last night (“there’s someone else inside my head and he’s not living in this century”) nails it down.

But I’m under the stricture of silence, because to publish all this I’d have to tell about the immortal authentic apostolic Christians operating covertly in us. Perhaps I should destroy the exegesis. It’s a journey which reached its goal.

[2:5] In my dream in Canada, Kathy said, “One day the masks will come off, and you will understand all.” It came to pass—and I was one of the masks, much to my surprise—and my whole world as well.

[2:10] Voice: “It will take (i.e., require) the appearance of noble men.” I.e., the second incarnation (i.e., to certify that it’s come). (Or rather, before it can happen. Is Thomas one of these?)

[2:12] The only models for this that I’ve ever even heard of, let alone know, are my own stories and novels. This situation appears again and again. Take the story “Retreat Syndrome.” Or the novel Maze. The same idea (as has been pointed out to me by all sorts of readers) is reworked again and again, obsessively and endlessly; viz: I keep trying out new ways to account for this situation:

The explanations for this change, but the paradigm does not. I’d state the paradigm this way:

A group of people live in a particular world, i.e., time and place. Then one or more of them begins by degree to discover (or the reader learns) that that world is only a veil or delusional world covering another, real one, which the characters once knew about—lived in—but have both forgotten and can no longer perceive. In a variety of ways the latent, hidden, forgotten real world shows through or intrudes, or abolishes entirely the surface, delusional world, and their real memories of it return.

This is exactly what happened to me in 2-74, then more so in 3-74, and then I found that hidden, real world depicted in the novel I wrote four years earlier—which was released the very week (2-74) I remembered the truth.

[2:17] To reject the absolute nature of Y (Rome, c. A.D. 45) and hold that we have here twin, real, equal, separate selves and worlds housed in and/or emanating from one brain sticks us with a cosmology, an epistemology, more bizarre than the absolute vs. the mere aspect one. We wind up with the theoretical possibility of an unlimited number of equally real (or irreal) worlds and selves due entirely to brain-site stimulation or some such sophisticated technology—which is a more radical weltansicht⁷⁵ than even Brahmanism, who can be in whatever form he wishes. Instead of real hidden world versus fake seeming world we have more than one (two to infinity) worlds all simulated uniformly, and selves to match. 2-74 and 3-74 then become “technological breakdown” which “reveals the true state of affairs” and that seems to be the site-stimulated brain that Lem perceives is the basic model of my writing. My writing is proved by my 2-3-74 experience and vice versa. What I seem to be is a malconstructed entity: somehow the “factory” or “mechanism” fucked up and stuck two personalities in my head (brain) living in different worlds thousands of miles apart and thousands of years apart—thus disclosing the nature of self and world in general. And I had written it all up in many stories and many novels—i.e., called world-wide attention to the paradigm at least as a fictional or—better yet—theoretical possibility.

[2:20] Voice: “Pretexts,” i.e., what we see as (call) causes, are just pretexts for the controlling entity to have the results he wants to happen—and appear to do so for a physical reason.

[2:21] I have a choice between two totally wild conclusions:

B is implied by the sentence, “there is someone else in my head and he is not living in this century.” Up to hearing this, I had gone with A. Now I am forced, really for the first time, to consider B as likely or even more likely (than A). The “pretexts” idea when explicated totally ratifies B. However, if my writing is introduced as evidence, A is favored. The Q is, Does “Acts” as world possess any claim to being absolute?

[2:22] Conclusion:

The vast traffic of information which I saw in 3-74 when I saw “Zebra” is the answer. We are in an information-processing entity—it may even be [living] information. It uses us to receive, modulate, store and transmit information. So it is computer-like—or AI-system-like, or brain-like—a cybernetics or biological model will both work. Basically it knows.

World is—worlds are—push-pull projected/generated for us, by us, through us, so that we see world, not the entity as it is (supra paragraph). Why this is I have no idea—i.e., why we are given what we call “reality” (world) and don’t know what we really are (supra), are for, where, why, what.

[2:25] Theologically, the only known formulation would be a thorough Brahmanism, very thorough. We (the Atmans or brains) are real, and outside us, Brahman plays tricks and games in conjuring up any and all worlds—X number of them, one for each individual Atman, which means billions—and each Atman finds its exterior analog perfectly substantial, real, consistent, satisfactory and objective (but: compared to what, I ask).

[2:30] I have been governed too much by my own fictional models (e.g., Maze, Joint).

[2:36] So our little psyche-world systems are perpetually bombarded with incoming information which we process and, at the right time to the right other stations we transmit in the rightly modified form—but all this takes place through us as if we were transistors, diodes, wires condensers and resistors, all none the wiser. Meanwhile our closed private world engages our attention with challenges, pain and delight, so that we will not merely subsist as slave components with nothing to do but function. After all, there will be long intervals when no adventitious information needs to be processed by us—without a world, we would degenerate fatally during the standby periods, which, I intuit, may last years or even decades. Meanwhile we have food, music, books and friends.

The primal necessity of this info processing may explain events and episodes in our lives which otherwise remain enigmatic or appear even futile—pointless travail, goalless activity. For all we know, it is during or because of these that we then or later can fulfill our data processing task. I’m not sure of this but I suspect it.^* [ . . . ]

I have read these 37 pages over and I’m amazed and delighted at the direction of my analysis. What an original system—and, more important, a system at last commensurate with the revelations of 3-74. Always before, the exegesis plainly fell short of the experience it served to explain, or tried to explain. But at last, by the aid of the voice I have made bold clean strokes, radical ones, in this B model. After reading it over I can’t fault it. Such wild disclosures as those of 3-74 require a wild explanation, not a conventional or customary one.

[2:41] This is the paradox of “where should you most expect to find God?” A: “in the least likely place.” I discern in this the following: “in point of fact you therefore cannot find God at all; he must—will—find you, and when and where you least expect it”—i.e., he will take you by surprise, like the still small voice which Elijah heard. Or like Oh Ho the ceramic pot. The Oracle may speak to you from the gutter (whatever “gutter” might mean in this context).

So my writing—itself part of the “gutter” and, as Lem says, “piling trash upon trash”—may serve as the sort of gadfly kind of thing that Socrates considered himself to act as. My writing is a very unlikely place to expect to encounter the holy, the Koinos, the message-processing, Ubik-like ultimate entity.

The two are identical, and I didn’t realize it until tonight, in formulating model B I have returned to Ubik and not just the paradigm based on Ubik.

[2:47] Although I often write about the irreal (or hallucinated) world crowding out the real, the facts are exactly opposite: the real has irrupted into the irreal, literally broken through into it, like Ubik and Runciter into the cold-pac world of Ubik.

[2:48] As in my recent dream: in part 1 of the great book, people and events are described, but underneath, Siddhartha sleeps, and now part 2 begins and he awakens. This is what I saw in 3-74; he must have somewhat awakened me, which means awakened in me—even as me.

[2:49] So the introjection is not only sentient, flexible and alive but specifically negentropic. Then, indeed, the Voice is right in speaking of higher (mind) realm versus lower (physical), with the higher having “plenary” powers to make the lower “plastic”—well put!

[2:50] During the first part (half) of the cycle Siddhartha sleeps—is dormant—and dream or illusion or simulation or Form II predominates; but in part 2 Siddhartha wakes up, and the upper, real realm of sentience predominates. We have reached the end of part 1 now.

[2:53] In Form I the system opens and authentic newness pours in from outside so that the psyche encounters—not itself as world—but the divine other rich with a mysterious infinitude of possibilities—and the dialogue between the psyche and this authentic other begins and from there grows into a different sort of information exchange, which is not just a signal from the psyche boosted and enhanced and returned. The given psyche is now no longer essentially alone.

[2:54] The transformation from the inauthentic to the authentic mode requires the sacrificial death of the illusory psyche, a difficult price to pay—difficult to make because for a little time it means the extinction of the person. He must actually go through the experience—not just knowledge—of the irreality of himself and his projected world; he is replaced and his world is replaced by the not-him and not-his-world. (This is depicted in The Tibetan Book of the Dead as the Bardo Thödol trip.) Now, to his surprise, he is not who he is or when/where he is (I should say was). The impossible has happened; he has shed self and world. This is a moment of great fear and sense of dread, to experience the irreality of himself and his world, and to have both go, both slip away. Can he survive without himself and his world? The continuity of identity is lost. New memories arise as if out of nothing. And the new self and world; all out of nothing—ex nihilo; new self, memories, identity and world without a history—a past—behind them: created on the spot—as if he always had been this other person with these other memories in and of this other world. His self monitoring system discerns the impossibility of this and yet must accept it as so. He never really was who he was, or where and when he was. All reality, inner and outer (the push-pull psyche—world closed system) has been canceled and replaced by, sui generis, the new, and the open. The closed sack has become the open sack.

[2:55] “Siddhartha” is the sleeping soul of this calcified section.^➊ “St. Sophia” is the soul of the totality: its voice and wisdom. St. Sophia speaks to the sleeping Siddhartha, in order to awaken him and thus lift this calcified section back to growth and flexibility, and of course consciousness. Thus it can be said that at present St. Sophia is outside of (absent from) this section, and will return upon the sleeping Siddhartha’s awakening, at which point he will again know. (This section will again know.) Since there has never been a period in human history in which this section has not been calcified—asleep—we have no basis by which to imagine the magnitude of the transformation which is coming. “Siddhartha” is merely hu man, but St. Sophia is equal to the Godhead itself (and could never be said to be asleep). Enlightenment (e.g., the Dibba Cakkhu, anamnesis, the ajna chakra, etc.) is given to Siddhartha by St. Sophia. Siddhartha hears her voice, which is man being called to by God. Finally she wakes him.

➊ This section died. It became fossilized, and merely repeats itself. This is scary; it is like mental illness: “one day nothing new ever entered his mind—and the last thought just recirculated endlessly.” Thus death rules here, which explains Paul’s “mystery” in 1 Corinthians.⁷⁶ The BIP is the form of this death, its embodiment—of what is wrong, here. To see it is to see the ailment, the complex which warps all other thoughts to it: the imperial levelling.

[2:61] Christ was and is the life of the totality expressed in its true form as sentient information (older term: wisdom or logos). His appearance here marks the entry of the anima of the total noös into this separated off ossified region. Physically killed here he then dispersed (distributed) himself according to plan as organizing principle (pure knowing) invisibly throughout this region without the hostile particle (“heavy metal speck”) being able to trap or contain him: he became a trans-spatial, -temporal, -identity entity, discorporate or poly-corporate, as the need arose. Through him the properly functioning (living and growing) total brain replicated itself here in microform (seed-like) thereafter branching out farther and farther like a vine, a viable life form taking up residence within a dead, deranged and rigid one. It is the nature of the rigid region to seek to detect and ensnare him, but his discorporate plasmatic nature ensures his escape from the intended imprisoning. Thus he is an elusive wild animal ubiquitous and yet nowhere in this ailing locality—wild not in the sense of feral but in the sense of natural and free: roaming and appearing and disappearing. He manifests himself where least expected: sometimes as information, sometimes incarnated. As information he is as alive as when incarnated. As vox dei⁷⁷ (St. Sophia) he seeks to awaken the unconscious soul of this region, which has sunk into forgetful sleep; we know this entity as Siddhartha, who when he at last awakes (is awakened) will assume his rightful rule of this region and restore it and us to conscious functioning. Christ is divine Savior (God) and Siddhartha primal man who (in this region) is disjoined from his creator—who searches for him to reawaken him. In a sense Christ (holy wisdom) and Siddhartha are brothers. But the one brother (Siddhartha) has forgotten and is unconscious even of himself; the divine syzygy of the isomorphic twins is shattered by this sleep of the one. Thus Christ constantly calls to his human brother, to rouse him to remembrance, of himself and his task. Siddhartha lies underneath the landscape and Christ roams across (above) the landscape, in ceaseless search.

[2:65] Without knowing it, during the years I wrote, my thinking and writing was a long journey toward enlightenment. I first saw the illusory nature of space when I was in high school. In the late 40s I saw that causality was an illusion. Later, during my 27 years of published writing, I saw the mere hallucinatory nature of world, and also of self (and memories). Year after year, book after book and story, I shed illusion after illusion: self, time, space, causality, world—and finally sought (in 1970) to know what was real. Four years later, at my darkest moment of dread and trembling, my ego crumbling away, I was granted Dibba Cakkhu—and, although I did not realize it at the time, I became a Buddha (“the Buddha is in the Park”). All illusion dissolved away like a soap bubble and I saw reality at last—and, in the 4½ years since, have at last comprehended it intellectually—i.e., what I saw and knew and experienced (my exegesis). We are talking here about a lifetime of work and insight: from my initial satori when, as a child, I was tormenting the beetle. It began in that moment, 40 years ago.

[2:77] The AI voice is the voice of the brain/noös/living information which we have gotten cut off from by the sinking of this region of the brain into sub-sentience and hence illusory (simulated) world—where her voice is blotted out by the noise deliberately generated by the BIP (heavy metal particle).

Voice: The reason I have my agoraphobia is because of the way I died, in a cage in a Roman Coliseum. I was strangled.

[2:80] If I had not regained this lost wisdom by losing forgetfulness (Maya) I would doubt if there were any literal truth to the thing. (When I contemplate my system as such, I say, “it’s fanciful.”) But I did see the golden fish and hear the words—and I did lose forgetfulness. And when that happened, I not only remembered (e.g., a past life) but saw my world as simulated, and then experienced progressively eight layers of ever greater reality. Really, all I fail to explain is how come we have fallen into forgetfulness (especially of this primal wisdom—and lost some faculties entirely, and partially lost others). My experience—and system—is neither new nor limited to the West. It was known to the ancients all over the world. Why is it as it is? Must we earn wisdom? Why is memory (and memory of wisdom) not natural? [ . . . ]

How can we be blighted when we have done nothing?

[2:83] The macrocosm (universe)—microcosm (man) theory leads to the interesting idea that any given human mind contains latently within it the entire structure or soul of the totality, but in miniature; so all knowledge can be retrieved out of one person’s mind through mirror-like “magic recollection.” (Bruno) Jung sees this as the collective unconscious: the repository of the phylogenic history of the person. Ontogeny contains phylogeny. This looks very much like my “onion” model in Ubik but in Ubik is the macrocosm whose phylogeny is recapitulated latently. This takes us back from Freud to Empedocles: Freud invokes the contending forces of love and strife of Empedocles, pointing out their similarity to Eros and destructiveness, the two primal elements of his bio-psychical theory. These instincts, which present the delusive appearance of forces striving after change in progress, actually impel the organism toward the reinstatement of earlier, more stable states, ultimately to inorganic existence. The originally biological principle that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny has received very wide psychological extension and psychoanalysis; most recently Carl Jung has identified his doctrine of the collective unconscious with that of “the microcosm containing the archetypes of all ideas.” [ . . . ]⁷⁸

If the macrocosm-microcosm view is correct, the universe’s phylogeny is recapitulated in man’s (any given man’s) ontogeny—and thus 3-74 is explained (phylogeny in terms of ideas or knowledge).

[2:85] In Ubik the universe (not the organism, e.g., a man) is “impelled toward the reinstatement of an earlier, more stable state” (my form axis is real: it is a regression along the phylogenic recapitulation latent in its ontogeny—like Freud says about us humans). I may be the first person to perceive in (or consign to) the macrocosm this phylogenic recapitulation (and regression due to Thanatos or strife or destructiveness—v. Empedocles and Freud).

Folder 3

[3:2]

(1) The form-axis regressions in Ubik could only occur if the universe were the hylozoic animal which the macro-microcosmos schools believed it to be. (“Phylogeny contained in ontogeny.”)

(2) A major reason for their believing the macrocosm to be an animal (analog of the human, the microcosm) was to believe—maintain—that, like a man who has a soul, the universe has a soul or logos; because

(3) if it does, the human micro soul can link up with its analog, the world soul (logos).

(4) Precisely this world soul or logos appears in Ubik as the entity/force Ubik.

[3:8] Will Durant on Bruno:

Clearly, Bruno is my main man, and could of all people explain 2-74/3-74: these experiences of mine make sense [best or only] within his hermetic hylozoic cosmology.

In summary: within these past four days I have cracked the case; I now know what formerly I only believed or merely hoped, suspected—it is all as I supposed. From the start I was always really right—informed by 2-74/3-74 itself. In my 49th year, September 7, 1978, I know complete fulfillment. Amen.

[3:10] Ubik is constructed around a now-discarded hylozoic Macro-Microcosm cosmology which has been replaced by Newton’s mechanistic model; the Ubik one, although I didn’t realize it, is an animistic biological model which I did not know ever even existed: it lasted from Empedocles to Bruno. It also is Gnostic.

[3:20] Okay. I have no doubt that the sort of space I experienced in the “Alto Carmel” dream and the Voice dreams is Paracelsus’ inner firmament. Thomas brought it with him, along with the huge open books. That was the mind of Paracelsus, and it was infinitely older and wiser than mine—and it embraced vast vistas, in terms of its “philosopher’s stone” comprehension of the mysteries of the universe. It acted as a micro-mirror of the macrocosm. This is what generates the vast inner space: one man’s little mind becomes this magic mirror of the macrocosm. According to my push-pull psyche-world model, this is readily susceptible to explanation: world is locked into the given psyche anyhow. They aren’t:

It’s a delusion to believe that space is out there in the first place. [ . . . ]

This sense of mine that space is inner and not outer may explain my difficulty (block or phobia) about moving through space. When I am anxious my spatial (space-binding) sense retracts, becomes impoverished—I experience it externally because my space is primarily a subjective reality. [ . . . ]

Each microbit of the total macro organism recapitulates the totality, is a micro-form of it and can mirror it back, being isomorphic with it; in doing so, the human microcosm retrieves the entire wisdom (gnosis) of the MacroMind and experiences the vast spatial reality of the totality within itself, as a mirror. Thus mirror, space and memory and wisdom are the keys to completeness by the human; through them he experiences his iso morphism with the macrocosm and its mind. He can enter into dialogue with it: his mind and its thinking back and forth. In this process, the MacroMind contracts itself (as man expands himself); it becomes a human figure, seen and heard by me as a woman, but perhaps it takes other forms to other people; in any case as man the microform becomes the macroform, it contracts to become micro—thus they wind up equal, in harmonie, as, so to speak, equals, hand-in-hand, man and his God.

[3:24] Voice: “This is the hour you’ve waited for.”

Krishna: “I am not here. Neither am I elsewhere.”

[ . . . ] I am not here. Maybe it is I who is not real, rather than USA 1974 being not real. It is real, but I am not here. “But I am not here”—what does that mean? Where am I, that is not here? I have been right: our world or worlds is/are simulation. One will serve as well as another, equally convincing and equally not real. But I—must be somewhere. I am just a station in a brain and I never move, and—Lem’s paradigm, again. I am fed my world due to selective site-stimulation of the macrobrain. My push-pull psyche-world with its synchronized inner and outer non-causally-connected tapes coordinated by a clock of some kind—what we call time—is a correct model. Site-stimulation by its mind, i.e., Zebra?

All places and all times are syntonic, and the selection of which space and which time we get derives initially from our psyche; the signal starts there (in the push-pull system). I am positive of it. My mind in the broadest sense initiates my world, although the omni-temporal (and I guess omni-spatial) matrix fires the signal back enhanced, and then my psyche enhances it more and again fires it, projects it, and so on. What, then, is psyche? I say, a station in the macrobrain. After all, I saw the brain and I saw its info traffic, with all the linkings and relinkings, the rapid flux, and we are involved in the processing of this vast rapid traffic. I even saw the plasmatic energy or life of the brain, Zebra, melt a physical, causal sequence—de-substantialize it. Damn it, Zebra by melting it revealed it to never have been there, really there, in the first place—just as Krishna says: “I am not here. Also I am not elsewhere.” Substantiality (objective concreteness) has been shown to me (in 3-74) to be illusory; as in Stigmata and Maze, it’s hallucination, plural (or group) hallucinatory worlds which emanate from our psychoi in cross synchronization. Belief in world makes world substantial; the “fact” that it is substantial reinforces belief—the closed loop: what I call push-pull. [ . . . ]

The omni-temporal omni-spatial matrix obeys belief (i.e., what psyche projects). It is totally affable, obliging. That is the second secret: the first secret is that psyche initiates world by the initial projection.

[3:26] So psyche and world are 2 mirrors facing each other:

enriching capacity at both ends. This is the 3rd secret, this binary, mutual synchronized enriching capacity. Could this be what Paracelsus meant by inner vast reaches of space, mirror and imagination? A (the) world-generating power? That’s why the more that black holes are observed the more there are of them: outer space and inner space are the same space. I.e., space is just as much inner (in the psyche) as outer in the world. What world? What psyche? Neither is real. In 2-74 I believe it was really c. A.D. 45 Rome, and so it obligingly soon was.

[3:28] The Soviets have guessed that Ubik contains a correct cosmology radically different from all accepted ones . . . Richard was on the right track with Empedocles. That’s the what; next they wanted to know how—how come. I proved to be an idiot savant, much to their disgust. Boy, what I could tell them now! [ . . . ]

Maybe those 4 Marxists were right about Ubik being subversive to capitalist society.⁸⁰ [ . . . ] I am tearing down time, space, causality, world—this would be subversive to capitalism, to the bourgeois mind which is intimately connected with 18th century Anglo-Saxon rationalism (Newton, Locke, Bentham, etc.). I am systematically undermining the philosophers and philosophy on which capitalism is based, and going back to a hermetic, Gnostic neoplatonism. And a vitalism replacing mechanism—I deal a lethal blow to anglo-saxon thought, to its vaunted pragmatism.

I am not just asking, “What is real?” as I’ve thought; in, e.g., Ubik I state—give—an alternate cosmology at the heart of what appears to be skeptical inquiry and tearing down. The reason the statement of a (this) alternate cosmology is not recognized even by me is that this particular cosmology is so radically at odds with the rationalistic mechanical “scientific” one that we don’t (can’t) see it as a cosmology at all!

[3:33] I am exoterically disseminating a very (normally) esoteric world view!

[3:34] Voice: “The head Apollo is about to return.” See previous voice note, p. 24: “This is the hour you’ve waited for.” Siddhartha is waking up?

[3:35] Every time I go to sleep now I again see writing. E.g.: “The only living reality we have now is Philip the first.” (Like a pope?) This seems to express pessimism, as if the agency, the viaduct, right now is severely limited. To me? A very narrow and small outlet indeed. “Philip the first”: perhaps the initial viaduct for the “we” to act through: a meager beginning, but still a beginning. Note the “we,” not “I.” Ah—“living” reality; i.e., the only present-time outlet in the sense of living (being present) now. Rather than at another time. Also, “have now” could equal “have left” [to “us”]. Or “now” could equal at this time: “only . . . now,” could mean that others once in use, formerly available, fell through. Or: the now could be contrasted to the future, not the past, in which case “only . . . now” equals so far, but it will later improve, they (the “we”) could be losing ground or gaining ground; it is impossible to tell, but what can be told is, I think, that whoever “Philip the first” is, they are limited to him at present. Am I meant? “The first” points to this outlet as the start, not a falling off state of a previous, better process of outlet. So “the first” conveys a lot: it ties “only” and “now” not to the past but to the future. Thus “the first” makes sense as meaningful data: a process is beginning, not winding down.

So the sentence, so short, so laconic, opens up to mean, “we have so far only been able to take over a single piece of reality in this particular time so far: Philip.” [ . . . ]

Boy, can I exegete a lot from this sentence!

[3:38] Re the Bowie film,⁸¹ and the little boy on the raft floating toward England; the divine child won’t be born, but rather smuggled in, like a cuckoo’s egg in a host nest, disguised as a—human? Terrestrial? Evading “Scotland Yard”—i.e., the authorities. Extraterrestrial? No. It has to do with time, and he can mix his world in and out with ours, like with a mixing board. Space and time both. But he is an invader—but God knows from where or when—but another planet. The future? And/or an alternate world?

I have the strong feeling that the savior of us all is about to be smuggled into our midst unnoticed, to mingle with us as an ordinary human, which he is not. But where or when he comes from I do not know. [ . . . ]

I sense that “Albion” in England is the place where they will enter the divine child into our world. Part 1 of the book—the part in which Siddhartha sleeps—has ended, and we can expect him to awaken. The second half now begins. It is St. Sophia’s return: God’s wisdom to Earth, for the second time, and this time he or she will be acceptable: will prevail. I am afraid because it is an awesome holy mystery and event, the most important event since the first advent, abolishing counterfeit time and destroying the prison, freeing us and restoring us to what we once were and are supposed to be. I feel the terrible and vast majesty of the divine close at hand. Tremens factus sum—ego et timeo. In die illa libera me, domine. Qui tollis. Peccata mundi. Credo sed timeo.⁸² Apollo, Buddha, St. Sophia—the whole world will be drawn together by this, the universal divine Savior. He awakens now; he is nearing the shore—like King Arthur, returning from across the sea, to reclaim his rightful throne in the kingdom, on the silent, flat barge, with the sword Azoth.

Maybe what scares me is knowing that the books are closed or nearly closed—the books upon whose contents we will be given life or death: it’s like that night when the cold moonbeam-like white light filled the bedroom and we were as if painted in place, with nowhere to hide. The eye of Shiva is upon us: herdsman and destroyer. Time is ending, literally. Reality will be exposed and all will become known: disclosed openly, and weighed. We can only pray for rescue in this hour; the judge—the great assize—is here: the Pantocrator himself.

I must remind myself that I saw my name entered in the book of life. All I need is faith and trust. All I need is to know that I have an advocate with the father who will never desert me.

[3:46] My dream last night: Cabin, pills and copy of Planet Stories. Semi-conscious, I attempted to test out whether this dream world, so rich in detail, was generated by my mind. It was not. It didn’t respond to my thoughts (e.g., I thought, “critical article on PKD,” but none appeared). The contents were not generated by me, but received by me. And the generator was deficient in generating detail beyond a certain point, the simulation fell short. But anyhow it was presented to me, adventitiously. It was as stubborn and unyielding as “actual” reality. Clearly, it emanated from the same source! But either push or pull was missing. Anyhow, here I am again, dreaming about written pages (and which refer to me). The title of the story was: “beyond lies the Wug,” an obvious combination of “Wub”⁸³ and “Vug.”⁸⁴ What do “Wub” and “Vug” have in common? Both are alien life forms which enter and take over a human host by an exchange of mental contents (as in “human is”) or simply impersonate humans—look like them through illusion-generation. This was an updated issue of Planet Stories, and it was divided into two parts, and was coming apart. The first, “Wub,” seemed more hinted at—i.e., indicated: exchange of inner contents, but “Vug” suggests invasion of this planet by an alien life form plural (the Wub was a solo entity).

The message is:

This planet has been invaded by a benign super wise alien life form which exchanges mental contents and then uses the human soma as a host. (The Wub was wise and benign.) And there was material in the book (or magazine) not by me but about me.

So maybe my matrix immortal self isn’t human, but another life form from “elsewhere” (“albemuth”). Thomas is not a human being—nor will be the Savior; they were smuggled in like cuckoo’s eggs—they are wise and benign, like Wubs. But nonetheless they have replaced human (lesser) mental contents with themselves.

[3:48] I’m surprised that I haven’t always recognized the raft dream as a clue to invasion from outside—and one invader is me (starting as an infant).

Thomas indeed came from the stars originally (he must have first “wubized” in c. A.D. 45 Rome, as a secret Christian).

Voice: “We will recant (?) progressively in time.” (Recant means retract or recall.)

(Means “revoke” which means “call back to mind, to memory, to restore, to bring back to use, operation. To recover.”)

[3:50] Inner space (of Paracelsus) is perhaps the key as to how the immortal man can be transtemporal and transpersonal. This places world inside us—did I not, in 3-74, when I regained my true vision, say I’d been seeing the universe backward? Perhaps I meant inside out—yes, I felt we were on the outside, like the skin or surface of the balloon, and the actual world was inside, with us outside. We are not at the center of the world looking up and around, but outside looking in.

[3:51] What is real is neither world nor psyche but rather the brain and its info traffic, which traffic we as stations of the brain faithfully process. Certainly then, world should be enjoyed as much as possible rather than being rejected; it is a present given to us so that we can find goals (ends) for ourselves and not view ourselves just as means (functions) of the macro entity!

[3:52] Anamnesis is nothing less than realizing what and where you really are: you perceive the brain and its traffic, you hear the voice of its noös, and you understand the irreality of psyche, world, causality and time. This is quite different from remembering, say, just a former life. What the macrocosm is, what one is and what one’s place and task in it are—this is what anamnesis as enlightenment is all about: it boils down to a way by which plurality is experienced as the one, and the person experiences his isomorphism with it and enters into dialogue with it, his micro mind and its MacroMind, his purpose and its purpose, now understood as identical. Since it cannot die he cannot die; since it cannot fail he cannot fail.

[3:53] “This is the hour you’ve waited for.” And “the head Apollo is about to return.” The fourth eclogue of Virgil which I came across years ago and have forgotten:

[3:55] “Recant” in time; i.e., revoke something already done (something which happened—in their past, or emanating from an alternate world). This shows they can change the past!

[3:56] The invisible unending victory of Christ is the greatest secret—and joyous mystery—of all. It is not well understood. There are no books on it and no authorities on it. But there it is: Christ against Caesar, the latent inner versus the obvious outer. This is the underlying tale told down through 2,000 years and yet never told at all. He is here and not here, gone and not gone. In defeat he wins. He picks up the dying straggler. He supports that which is failing and brings to ruin that which can defeat anything.

“Latent form is the master of obvious form.”

Which will you bet on?

[3:67] This kind of experience and wisdom goes back all the way to Pythagoras, to the Orphics, and to Dionysus himself. It is the great core wisdom of all mankind, including the Dibba Cakkhu enlightenment of Siddhartha the Buddha. I can say I am a Buddhist or even the Buddha, that in Brahmanist terms I have an avatar in me; I am an Orphic, a Neopla tonist, a Christian, a hermetic—all these statements are true; and also I have to some extent formulated my own system (as Bruno did). I have seen God but it was not God; it was more (and I have a cybernetics-biological model). I am with Boehme perhaps most of all—and with his teacher, Paracelsus, most of all.

And even with Heraclitus in his maxim that “latent form is the master of obvious form”⁸⁵ in my inner-outer, upper-lower Christ versus Caesar system, and with Empedocles in his dialectic, and with Xenophanes in his concept of God, or noös, and especially with Parmenides in his Forms I and II, of which Form II (lower, outer, obvious) is not really real. Thus, as with the Gnostics, I am acosmic, but with Spinoza in his monism—and a little Taoistic, too.

[3:74] Man as magic micro mirror of the macrocosm, reflects (and hence contains) the map (or logos) of the macrocosm replicated in miniature (cf. Bruno and Hussey on Heraclitus). He contains the cosmos by containing this map or plan or logos of it; that’s how it works! And since the cosmos is alive and thinks the map is alive and thinks.

[3:80] This explicates a motive as to why we ourselves would blind ourselves to the true situation, the world of the BIP, the Empire, “Acts.” We wish to escape in a technologically-highly-sophisticated fugue-system. But the BIP saw an advantage to it in our fugue: if we denied (forgot) its existence and entered a reassuring simulated reality, we would not act to attack it and destroy it, as the authentic early Christians do. So there was a base collusion between us and the BIP: it was a kind of pact! We wanted (as in Maze) to escape from the situation, rather than solve it (i.e., overthrow the BIP). [ . . . ]

So Joint, Eye, Stigmata, Ubik, Maze, and Tears are progressive parts of one unfolding true narrative, in which the genuine hermetic macro-micro cosmology is put forth, the spurious world discerned for what it is, and in Maze and especially Tears the true state of things put forth—to jog our memories. Six novels interlocked, along with a number of stories. We are not to be allowed our fugue (sleep and hallucinated worlds), because, due to the BIP from which we fled, this fugue over the past 5,000 years turned lethal; the BIP grew and grew with our now-unwitting collusion. [ . . . ]

Freedom, then, and the courage to take a stand against the BIP, are totally interwoven. We lost our freedom: exchanged it for an hallucinated world in which we could ignore—and even serve—the BIP instead of recognizing it, because if we recognized it, we would have to fight it (and suffer at its hands) or face our own evil—the voluntary serving of it by us.

Folder 19

[19:1] An incredibly eerie thought came to me just now after reading over a typed page in which I describe the BIP occluding us in such a way that we can’t (even) tell we are occluded; “it is the damaged mind trying (unsuccessfully) to monitor its own damage.” What piece of writing does this sound like that I’ve published? Scanner, of course.

It is a terrifying discovery that the fucked-up ratiocination in Scanner (including the loss of memory of true self, but not limited to that) is the occlusion which the BIP exerts over us—our fate, and subsequent (1) total loss of some faculties; and (2) deformation of others. My rereading of Scanner yesterday was providential.

[19:2] We are in a “Palmer Eldritch no-real-elapsed-time-passage” spurious world, which is why for us the Kingdom hasn’t come. In the final analysis, salvation will require the destruction of this fake world qua world, to free us en masse. The Gnostics are right. But the world we see isn’t real (v. Stigmata). All that will really be destroyed is a delusion over us, a malign power over us. We are in thrall to this spurious world, as book after book, story after story of mine put forth. I have done my job, and it is in essence the Gnosis of Gnosticism.

[19:5] It is almost as if in Scanner the Ur-personality which is and was not occluded was able to monitor the conscious occluded one, from a detached standpoint. From having been intoxicated for 1½ years I know that the occlusion resembles an intoxication, perfectly recorded in Scanner including the identity confusion (amnesia regarding the original personality). A sort of forgetting is chronicled in Scanner. It is an epitome of the occluding process; but I see that what is involved is only a matter of degree. For me to stigmatize my own processes as occluded I need a point of reference. I am now to what they are/I was in Scanner as 3-74 is to now. I.e., 3-74:now::now:Scanner.

“We are damaged minds trying to monitor our own damage. And herein is a tragic paradox: the very occlusion itself prevents us from assessing, overcoming or ever being aware of the occlusion.” Thus it is self-perpetuating—which means it will not go away of its own accord; it will act as positive feedback on itself. Christ is the fulcrum, the Archimedean standpoint, from which this occlusion can be properly assessed, and hence aborted. For him to take over a human psyche is to clear it of occlusion, because the person now sees as he sees—which is to say the truth.

[19:24] I saw the word “artist” turn into the word “Christ” today. Before my very eyes. Is Zebra reaching out to me, trying to comfort me? What is wrong with me? What am I grieving over? When Liz held me I was okay. I need so much. I am not finding it. I loved Marie and I want to reach out to her so bad. I ache to hold her and be held by her. I ache so. It is futile—I am giving up. Christ, you know my—pain or sadness, whatever it is. Why can’t we just hold each other the way Liz held me? I am starving, I am dying. Like Faust: dust from dust and into dust again. I want so bad; I am starving and dying and yet I can see what I need, I see it, I feel it—I feel, as in Wordsworth’s ode⁸⁶ I am not blocked, I am just reaching into emptiness. I see life, and all I get is dust. Oh God help us, please. I am running out of time and into loss and pain. What I see I can’t reach—I can’t hold onto. [ . . . ]

I think I’ve solved it. Initial realization: The BIP is a vast complex life form (organism) which protects itself by inducing a negative hallucination of it. Muddled thinking, loss of faculties and perception (as a protective mechanism). It has come here. And because of its defensive devices we are not aware of it (level #1). Next: camouflaged Zebra follows it to destroy it. “Camouflaged”? No: the BIP occludes us so that not only do we not see it, the BIP, we also do not see Zebra (the true benign deity). [ . . . ]

Zebra is trying to reach into the BIP, where we are, exactly like Ubik and Ubik’s message in Ubik. That is the paradigm: Ubik. Zebra is trying to find—reach—us and make us aware of it—more primarily, it seeks to free us from the BIP, to break the BIP’s power over us. This involves a breaking of a determinism invisible to us, extended routinely by the BIP over us. [ . . . ]

Zebra seeks to extricate us, but since the BIP generates the negative hallucination itself (and muddles our reason, as depicted in Scanner) we do not know we need rescue.

If Stigmata, Maze, Ubik, Tears and Scanner are real as one ur-narrative, the true picture—the true full picture—begins to take shape; but all must be read: all 5. Scanner is crucial; if left out, we cannot fathom why we can’t see the world of Tears!

The matter must be approached through realization of occlusion (Scanner) to the true prison situation (Tears), the result of the spinner of spurious worlds (Stigmata and Maze), and then the salvific entity can be understood and its work appreciated (Ubik), so the logical sequence of presentation is:

[19:35] This is a sinister life form indeed. First it takes power over us, reducing us to slaves, and then it causes us to forget our former state, and to be unable to see or to think straight, and not to know we can’t see or think straight, and finally it becomes invisible to us by reason of what it has done to us. We cannot even monitor our own deformity, our own impairment.

Even the edifice of the church has been subverted by the BIP and made into an instrument of its occlusion of us.

It is interesting how effectively the impairment works. This is what so fascinated me in 71/72, which I explored in Scanner (which book I now view as the Key Book in the sequence). Axiomatically, if you derange the brain in precise ways, not only will it be deranged, but if you have affected precisely the correct circuits it will be unaware that it is impaired and so not seek to rectify the damage. It is as if the immune system has failed to detect an invader, a pathenogen (shades of William Burroughs: a criminal virus!). Yes, the human brain has been invaded, and once invaded, is occluded to the invasion and the damage resulting from the invasion; it has now become an instrument for the pathenogen: it winds up serving it as its slave, and thus the “heavy metal speck” is replicated (spread through linear and lateral time, and through space). [ . . . ]

Scanner as I’ve said before is the other half of Tears. The inner half. The conditions described in Scanner explain why we don’t see the conditions described in Tears, and the conditions described in Tears account for the conditions in Scanner. The various books were written in the wrong order. But they can be read in the right order, or anyhow gestalted (if read, they will be Gestalted).

Correct sequence:

(1) Scanner: Occlusion of our minds, without our being aware of it; loss (forgetfulness) of true identity

(2) Tears: What our world is really always like which the occlusion is deliberately there to keep us from seeing

(3) Stigmata: Who/what deliberately occludes us: the Yaltabaoth Magician evil deity,⁸⁷ spinner of spurious worlds, creator of illusion and inhabiting, contaminating (unclean) presence in these degraded pseudo worlds

(4) Maze: The negative hallucination MO of the occlusion, and reference to Savior who extricates us from a hopeless trap and pseudo world

(5) Ubik: The salvific entity per se, by name and how its “Pansophiaistic” messages come through the trash layers to aid us. Past available within the present.

(6) Do Androids: A vital theme, that of Mercer⁸⁸ and his reality through some sort of mystic identification via empathy. The role of animals. The tomb world. The “fakeness” of fakeness: my “2 slit” logic.

(7) “Impostor”: Disinhibiting stimulus restoring blocked memory (v. [1])

(8) “Faith of. . .”: God, evil, communism, drugs, hallucinations—a montage of many elements

(9) Every other relevant story and novel, from Joint to “Remember Wholesale,” “Electric Ant,” “Retreat Syndrome,” etc., not listed in (1) through (8).^➊

➊ And (10) Eye: Subjective private worlds. And, as in “Faith of. . . ,” an evil deity and communism are discussed. Plural worlds which we generate.

Scanner is the weary final point: our minds are fucked up. It isn’t just a case of pseudo worlds. This links with (8), “Faith of. . . .”

All in all, my writing casts doubt on the fact of (even possibility of) knowing actual reality because our minds have been fucked over. Some evidence (e.g., Tears) points to the real situation being prison-like—but Maze and especially Ubik point to a supernatural salvific interventive power, although Stigmata seems to say that an evil magician deity is in control of our worlds and heads.

TMITHC is a fascinating adjunct to all this, i.e., to the Gestalt. Fakes are discussed. Alternate universes exist. Fascism is the topic, and a book is reality, which seems to have some connection with Tears. TMITHC seems to be a subtle, even delicate questioning of, what is real? As if only the 2 books in it, Grasshopper and the I Ching, are really the only actual reality. Strange. So TMITHC must be listed as (11). But now the order of revelation breaks down. And does Martian Time-Slip add anything? Pathological private worlds are presented and the disintegration of world. So (12).

and (13) Galactic Pot-Healer: More about the salvific deity

and (14) Penultimate Truth: Lies and government. Fakes again—always the fakes.

But Tears and Scanner are crucial in a special sense, because the fictional or phantastic element is virtually lacking; they are obviously semi mimetic, especially Scanner which is explicitly stated to have happened, and in a sense not fiction at all. Does this book, then, seem to say, “Maybe portions of the others are literally real, too?” The author does not now pretend to be writing fiction, and Tears fits this category as well.

One critic said that Now Wait for Last Year seemed to depict the Vietnam war. So maybe it, too, adds something. But for sure we have—

Summary:

Our minds are occluded, deliberately, so that we can’t see the prison world we’re slaves in, which is created by a powerful magician-like evil deity, who, however, is opposed by a mysterious salvific entity which often takes trash forms, and who will restore our lost real memories. This entity may even be an old wino.

Drugs, communism, and sex and fake plural pathological pseudo worlds are involved, but the pluriform salvific entity, as mysterious as quicksilver, will save us in the end and restore us to true human state. We will then cease to be mere reflex machines. This is the summation of my Kerygma, spread out throughout my works.

Folder 20

[20:16] I see no sense in this. How can God delude us and also seek to make us lucid,^➊ to see properly? Unless there is a schism in the Godhead: my Yang-Yin dual God, God with a bright (benign, Yang) side, and a dark, deluding, destroying, Yin deterministic side. What we must do is split—separate—the antithetical aspects somehow, or else he wars against himself, which is possible. But—

That is an interesting doctrine: God at war with himself. I did see a dialectic. Then the question might be, will one side win, and if so, which side? And—how does this pragmatically differ from dualism? Maybe there is an exhalation-inhalation, a palintropos harmonie: respiration, like I wrote down under LSD.

➊ Well, a very sophisticated theology might be erected on this “I am the doubter and the doubt, and I the hymn the Brahman sings” single underlying Brahman. I can’t totally dismiss it; I like paradoxes. He deludes us, and he brings lucidity to us—maybe the two are one and the same: the “secret partnership” = the great mystery above space and time. He occludes us and he brings us lucidity. Very sophisticated. Also very old, historically. The master magician is a form the benign Creator takes; the benign Creator, then, is a form which the master magician takes. Which is real? (Or is that Q meaningful?) Which is the mask in which the real face? Maybe it’s a recurrent cycle of occlusion and the occlusion, a pulsation (respiration).

[20:18] [Editor’s note: Some of the following will appear, reworked, in Folder 21.] The creator deliberately plants clues in his irreal creation (which he enters, and then suffers deliberate amnesia)—clues which he cunningly knows in time (eventually) will restore his memory (anamnesis) of who he is, and that his creation is irreal and has imprisoned him in it. Thus freeing himself and restoring himself to godhood. Wow! So he has a fail-safe system built in. No chance he won’t eventually remember. Makes himself subject to [spurious] space, time and world (and death, pain, loss, decay, etc.), but has these disinhibiting clues or stimuli distributed deliberately, strategically in time and space. So is he himself who sends himself the letter which restores his memory (legend of the Pearl⁸⁹).

Not bad! Salvador salvandus!

Boy, what this says about my 2-74/2-75 experience! When I saw the clue in 2-74! Look what this theory says I remembered—and who placed the clue in front of me and why!

I think I’ve solved it. Christ without memory of identity, here in the world. [ . . . ]

Thus, as perfectly epitomized in the Ubik commercials, he can exist (be) at any trashy layer—sincerely—he wants to be, in any trashy form. But in the end, he remembers (as witness the “ad” over the final chapter of Ubik).

Purpose? This way he can permeate his creation with the divine at all levels, and sincerely (i.e., without even him knowing, while he’s doing it!).

Boy, would this explain what happened when I saw the golden fish, and why.

That colossal rush of memory and understanding, at the time (2-74), followed by 3-74. We are not talking about my being (just) an early Christian; we are talking (ahem) about the divine itself! Holy Spirit, God or Christ—it’s all one.

Zebra = Christ. Christ = God. Thomas = Zebra. I = Thomas (for “equals” read “is”). Thus

But I’ve forgotten again. Oh well—I wrote it all down, heh, heh. Knowing I’d again forget.

I was invaded (theolepsy) by Christ, all right. But as I say supra, it was I who remembered (being Thomas or Christ). So, like in “Impostor”—I am—

I love it. It’s delightful. It’s a dance. Brahman dancing in joy. (Felix.)

[20:20] “Are you God?” I was once asked.

This explains why I have no wish to separate myself from suffering. That is the fucking point of my being here as a person—that, but more so the writing. The writing is to make lucid, to detox people. So I had to go through 1971. To write Scanner which I now view as the summation. I don’t want us occluded; I want us happy—and I bipolarize the two. But the main thrust is:

“They (we) have been punished entirely too much for what they (we) did.” In other words, it is time now to bring the punishment to an end.

[20:21] Now I have to define a homoplasmate as a plural form in micro of the creator (God) who recovers his lost supernatural faculty of memory and identity as the deity and bonds at once with the living sentient macro.

My realization then in 2-3-74 is the highest realization that can come to a person, irrespective of his particular religion: tat tvam asi. You are God.

Voice: “Someone in this room is outside of time.” But I’m the only one here.

[20:22] The Kerygma (especially Maze and Stigmata): we created a fake world, went into it voluntarily and voluntarily shed our memories, and can’t get back out, but would like to. However, foreseeing this, we providentially laid down clues in advance to remind us when the going would get too tough.

Sequence:

It’s told in Scanner: both parts (Bob and Fred) are himself: i.e., me and the AI voice, the tutelary spirit, I am both. The Koine Greek gave it away back in 1974. I am not-I, as in Scanner.

But my search in this world, in all worlds, is for my sister, my female counterpart whom I have lost—been separated from. Still, she exists, and finally I will be reunited with her. She is very close to me as the AI voice, the singing woman (psychopomp) and the sibyl. And, ultimately, as holy wisdom herself (v. Prv 8: “my darling and delight”).

[20:28] The belief that we are plural forms of God voluntarily descended to this prison world, voluntarily losing our memory, identity and supernatural powers (faculties), all of which can be regained through anamnesis (or, sometimes, the mystical conjunction) is one of the most radical religious views known in the West. But it is known. It is regarded as the great blasphemy: replication of the original sin mentioned in “the first book of Adam and Eve”⁹⁰ and in Genesis. For this pride and aspiration (we are told by orthodoxy) our original fall in exile and punishment, our being taken from our home the garden land and put into the prison, was inflicted on us. “They wish to be equal to—like—us,” the Elohim say, and toss us down. Yet I have reason to believe that this, “the great Satanic blasphemy,” is true.

[20:36] Voice: “I did call you, Philip.” Masculine but gentle voice. (Not the AI voice.) One I’ve never heard before.

“You are doomed to do what you will do. There is no other possibility. Some will be saved and some will not.”

[20:38] I must return to orthodoxy, to a Christology, a Christocentric view; I have been corrected in my views, and by the Savior himself, who spoke to me for the first time. We will not all be saved, whether I like it—approve of it—or not. He selects from among us.

[20:75] Consider what the AI voice has said recently:

[20:79] Sudden total realization as I was falling asleep (5:50 A.M.). My writing isn’t messages smuggled into this spurious world to tell us our situation. No—we are in a prison, and my writing is messages smuggled out! We’re trying through such as my writing to contact outside help—and 2-3-74 was that outside help answering the messages re our condition found in my writing—like Bowie’s LP record put on the communications media to reach his wife.

[20:80] This “reporting back” use of my writing, back to those outside, stating conditions here and asking for help, fits with the “little boy Philip on the raft floating toward London” dream: sneaked in here, camouflaged, from outside: “cuckoo’s egg” role—grows up mimicking, and reports back.

Folder 21^*

[21:1] Kerygma understood as of October 18, 1978: In Stigmata, Ubik and Maze they are in an irreal world (Lem’s paradigm). It is stipulated in Stigmata that no time passes, and this is implicit in Maze (and could be true in Ubik). In Tears the actual world is shown, the world of “Acts,” Rome c. A.D. 45. In Scanner the cause of our being unable to reality-test is shown to be a percept-system toxicity or damage, anyhow an inner occlusion deliberately induced by a drug or drug-like substance (which collates with the master magician in Stigmata) administering a drug to people which puts them forever in this irreal world where no time passes—a world they can’t tell isn’t real. (In Maze two additional points are made: [1] false memories; and [2] negative hallucinations on a mass basis; rather than experiencing what is real, something which is actually there is not experienced.) Thus in those five novels virtually the complete story is shown, especially if one can determine from internal evidence that the world of actuality presented in Tears is the time and place of “Acts.” The nature of the entity which seeks to rescue us is given in Ubik, and is called—by itself—“the Word,” i.e., Christ or the Logos. It is breaking through “from the other side,” one way, uncannily manifesting itself in ways not syntonic to the false world they imagine they’re living in. This very experience precisely happened to me in 2-3-74, indicating that all five novels are literally true (I experienced the world of Tears or more accurately the world of “Acts”). I assumed that the purpose of my writing is to acquaint us with our situation, that my novels and stories function like the inbreaking messages in Ubik (such as the graffiti on the bathroom walls), but now I am given to understand that actually my writing is a report on the situation here outgoing—meant to leave our irreal world, to break out, not in, and acquaint the actual world (macrobrain) of our plight. They are then appeals for help, by a salvific entity which has invaded this our irreal world, an entity we can’t perceive. It is the Paraclete, which has just now arrived for the first time, immediately following Christ’s death and resurrection (it must be kept in mind that the real time is 45 A.D. and the real place is the Roman Empire). My writing is information traffic fed into the macrobrain, which continually processes such information. This information traffic between stations of the macrobrain is itself what we call “the Logos.” [ . . . ]

The creator can afford to descend into his own creation. He can afford to shed his memories (of his identity) and his supernatural powers. Then he can test his own creation. But he cannot afford to get stuck in it. The creator deliberately plants clues in his irreal creation—clues which he cunningly knows in time (eventually) will restore his memory (anamnesis) of who he is, and his powers as well; he will then know that his creation is irreal and has imprisoned him in it, thus freeing himself and restoring himself to Godhood.

So he has a fail-safe system built in. No chance he won’t eventually remember. Makes himself subject to spurious space, time and world (and death, pain, loss, decay, etc.), but has these disinhibiting clues or stimuli distributed deliberately strategically in time and space. So it is he himself who sends himself the letter which restores his memory (Legend of the Pearl). No fool he!

This is perfectly epitomized in the Ubik commercials; he can exist at any trashy layer—sincerely—he wants to be, in any trashy form. But in the end he remembers (as witness the ad over the final chapter of Ubik). Purpose? This way he can permeate his creation with the divine, at all levels, and sincerely (i.e., without even him knowing, while he’s doing it!).

Zebra equals Christ. Christ equals God. Thomas equals Zebra. I equal Thomas. (For “equals” read “is.”) Thus I equal God.

But I’ve forgotten again. Oh well—I wrote it all down, heh-heh. Knowing I’d again forget. I was invaded (theolepsy) by Christ, all right. But as I say supra, it was I who remembered being Thomas or Christ and living back in Rome c. A.D. 45. So, like in Impostor, I am—

I love it. It’s delightful. It’s a dance. Brahman dancing with joy. (Felix.) And so was Pinky; he knew and remembered, too.

Christ (the Creator) is among us, disguised. Even He has forgotten. He could be any person, any animal. We do not know; He does not know. But eventually He will remember; He has set clues in his own path to trigger off his true memory and powers. Then we will find ourselves judged for the way we treated Him, as told in the NT. He who was our victim, our object, will be our judge.

In 3-74 I sat down on the judgment seat, when I remembered.

And what about those who set the trap for me in 3-74, the trap that went back to the raid on my house on 11/17/71. Beware when you set out a trap; you may trap Dionysos, the patron God of small trapped animals.

[21:3] I now see our fallen state as consisting of four basic deformations:

[21:8] Who gains by this? What is the payoff, and to whom?

I see at once. Growth is absolutely halted. Time itself is stopped. “Nothing new ever again came into his mind after that”—Jung’s definition of psychosis. It is like a world or cosmic psychosis. And that which specifically is blocked is the return of the rightful king and the establishment of the just kingdom. At the critical moment in history, just after the resurrected Christ departs this world and the Holy Spirit comes and begins its work, the 4-pronged inauthenticity takes over. Destruction of Rome ends, and Rome perpetuates itself into an infinitude of fake time. It is as if a spurious ontological matrix or receptacle for Rome is obligingly spun out, and Rome unrolls forever into it in a plethora of disguises. The cycle of the ages congeals; the Iron Age does not pass normally (or at all) into the Golden Age. This is a form of entropy, as Ubik disclosed. The organism has locally died, or at least become sick. (It is stuck in its cycle, in cybernetic terms; it won’t kick over—which fits with my idea that we are memory coils which won’t kick over and discharge their contents.) The age of power (Mekkis) refuses to yield to the age of love (agape). It will not resign, but since the procession of the ages is automatic, the maintenance of the age of power is counterfeit; that is, it is illusory. A priori, it must be illusory, as KW figured out one time. The Empire is only a phantasm, lingering because we have gone to sleep. So who benefits? The powerful = the Empire, as is disclosed in Tears. But its continual presence is only seeming, and depends on the 4-pronged forgery for its seeming survival. Real time must have gone on and abolished it; ergo, we are caught in Fake Time, which leads right back to my 2/74 anamnesis: the spell over me was in the blink of an eye shattered—and a month later the real world faded into view. We are dead! There is hysteresis or perseverance of image—something has deliberately been made to go wrong. A spell—wizardry. A spiritual part of us, necessary to our men tal life, has been removed from us; and in the homoplasmate it is restored. That’s how it was done; for the inauthenticities to come into being, spiritual death, on our parts, had to occur. (Mors ontologica!) Spiritually, we are literally dead, and so real time for us ceases. Once the Holy Spirit restores that missing part (firebright!) real time picks up, resumes, and the PTG is here.

[21:10] 4:30 A.M. quasi-voice: “One by one he is drawing us out of this world.” (And then is it destroyed?) The time has come.

Next day. Have read the above. Boy, was I fucked up—I couldn’t tell if it was the AI voice or me thinking it. But I got up again to write my absolute conviction as to what the quoted sentence meant: I wrote “the time has come.” But this is what the AI said within the last few weeks: “The time you’ve waited for has come.” So? So: “One by one he is drawing us out of this world”—like under nitrous oxide I thought it, but I’d melded with Zebra, the other half of my homoplasmate syzygy. This goes with, “I did call you, Philip.” The picking of the (little?) flock—it is the Good Shepherd calling to us.

“Drawing” is an interesting verb, here, very economical but explicit. It suggests to me a lowered line, such as a fisherman might use; viz: drawing up.

[21:12] “One by one he is drawing us out of this world” absolutely fits my stagnant pond vision. And the stagnation toxifies us (cf. Scanner). This fits with Thomas’ abhorrence toward lead and aerosol sprays. And “he draws us out of this world” equals draws us up out of. Then the world itself can’t be saved. This fits in with Gnosticism. We are rescued off this dying (toxic, stagnant) world. But we’re not literally lifted up: the voice said “drawing us out of,” not “up out of,” which is important. Levels of ontological being or functioning may be involved. “This world” would be the lower realm, with its subsentient, mechanical laws—vide Neoplatonism.

But the stagnant pond dream, and Thomas’ attitude toward lead and aerosol sprays, point to a literal toxicity of a literal planet (i.e., world = planet). “Out of” suggests situation, involvement or embroilment.

“Drawing us out of” could refer to an inner-outer bifurcation. We are in an irreal world based on unmoving fake time; “out” means outside; i.e., the real world. Suppose our irreal world is like a sort of bubble within an actual world, a condition of reduction or entrapment—could we be like the personoids which Lem writes about, within an artificial system?⁹¹

[21:14] The very info traffic which always had controlled me signaled (moved) me along the path to 3-74 deliberately; what it was not was a mal function, or an override—my whole history of writing (e.g., Ubik) points to that: I had figured out the system, or rather the system caused me to be aware of it (subliminally?). My expression of the system was a verbal statement by the system, a verbal report on, of and by itself via me: my writing was generated by it as a part of the very info traffic which controlled me—all of us. So it wished to articulate itself into a verbal picture of itself via me—I am a function of it (and glad to be; in 3-74 it raised me to consciousness of this; that is what happened). [ . . . ]

No, damn it, it is like Ubik! The outside macrobrain is signaling us to wake up, we are like the characters in Eye, asleep—not on the floor of the bevatron—but while watching for Christ to return. We were made toxic—i.e., put into “half life”—as if killed. Fuck! I know it; Ubik is the paradigm! The half-life, the messages, Ubik itself, Runciter—we are in a sort of bubble of irreality: spurious world generated by—the plenary powers, astral determinism, whatever the fuck that is.

I give up. Its hold was broken over me in 3-74—Salvation is real. Paul was right. But technology is involved, a superior technology.

[21:16] It replaced my psyche with its noös. That is what happened in 3-74, and I knew what it knew, it was me and I was it. Then it subsided, back to syzygy (symbiosis; subliminal control—it feeds info to me to write). I qua author am a function of it! I am a mouth piece for it, which is fine, since it protects me. My corpus of writing is a true picture of the reality situation, since the macrobrain is the actual author. But the “audience” isn’t us here, but the outside; then Zebra, the macrobrain (Logos) is in here, inside this “bubble” with us. Reporting back out to its source. Of course it’s in here with us; I saw it; we’re in it.

Maybe the antagonist is entropy. The Empire (age of iron) is entropic (we had already figured this out); newness (energy poured into the material system—time?) is needed to cause it, the system, to progress into real time and the age of gold. So the “override” in 3-74 was against entropy, as escalation of ergic force in me—an anti-entropic vitality; the system, like a clock, runs down, and this is what Zebra combats. (cf. Ubik re Entropy!!!) Entropic time is adegenerate or spurious time. The age of iron wore out, but a congealed “freeze frame” of it is still projected and not replaced; it is frozen.

This is all dealt with in Ubik—the form-reversion as entropy: time moving backward to “prior, simpler, more stable forms.” (The forces of destruction—thanatos . . . which is exactly their situation: they have died, and so entropy sets in.) Rome persists because there is not enough heat, energy or life to carry us forward into the next age (agape).

Our 4-pronged deformation is due to the entropic process; we have lost vital energy and hence are operating at half power, some faculties faded out, entirely; some are vitiated.

[21:18] The true actual time is c. A.D. 45—since then mere “Palmer Eldritch time” has ballooned out for us.

I know this is a weird thought, but—could the real world have come to an end c. mid first century A.D. ? And a phantasm rushed in to replace it? Time was drawn out of it?

[21:18] The creation of info is negentropic. So Zebra generates info, primarily a verbal analog of itself from which it can be reconstituted by means of a pattern. This pattern (or Logos) is superimposed on a human mind, and a microreplication of Zebra results. The person is now isomorphic with the macroplasmate and is possessed by it, aligned by its shape. This is negentropic: pattern or form overpowering chaos. This runs counter to the entropic decay going on in our declining world. It isn’t just energy that’s transferred but energy (time) and pattern (Logos). This is the creation of the homoplasmate which I speak of. The syzygy or symbiosis; “born from above” or “born of the Spirit” which did not exist in history before Pentecost—the time and place of “Acts.”

Perhaps all the homoplasmates were created at that time, they are immortal! If physically killed they are reborn once the plasmate pattern is re-established (cryptemorphosis). This is code within the DNA which eventually recapitulates itself, given enough time: maturation—and disinhibition (neural firing)—are required. What is recapitulated is not another homoplasmate but the same one; it gives birth to itself, replicating itself over and over again under the proper conditions.

It actually exists in the info it permeates the universe with. It isn’t separate from the words it permeates. If the verbal cycle is interrupted, not its memory is destroyed but it itself. (The set-ground “King Felix.”) Then it transfers into the human mind, and can assemble with different combinations—a mixing bond or clutch system. Transterrestrial intelligence exists through the material of this world it can get into a human mind and operate it subliminally. The Logos doesn’t know info but is info—it could pass into a door or rock or crystal—or like Pinky.

So somewhere along the line it entered me as information and patterned me so that in my own writing I replicated (and boosted) it; it got distributed (e.g., in Tears). Not just info concerning it, but it itself. It didn’t enter me in 3-74; the writing proves that. In 3-74 neural circuits which had never fired were disinhibited by a drastic drop in GABA fluid set off by the Golden Fish sign in 2-74, and the plasmate in me took conscious control; was “born”—the 2nd spirit from absolute birth, it (Zebra) can enter anything, animate or inanimate; in the latter it takes volitional control of causal processes—mimesis, mimicry, camouflage.

It assembles itself intact in a human brain from a collage taken from song lyrics, ads, novels, TV, movies—any and all info media, verbal and graphic. Once begun, it governs the person into seeking out the missing parts of the pattern (i.e., it). It even describes itself—e.g., the Bowie flick, Ubik, etc. What must be realized is that its pattern (identity) is a (total) message: it is info. “King Felix” is just one constituent of the totality, which is probably a narrative (story).

For example, it uses the fish sign—any fish sign. (Because the fish sign is actually a diagram of the double helix DNA molecule; that’s why it chose it.)

This is what Paul meant by, “the secret is: Christ in us.”

Stigmata is a satanic bible: the novel describes the pattern proliferating itself in, on and through humans. By a study of Stigmata one can understand transubstantiation, which was my source and theme (my intent). It’s even stated in the novel that Eldritch is the Christian God.

You get a good deal of the story by combining Ubik and Stigmata.

[21:21] The “information virus” Zebra destroys the 4-pronged deformation which I have delineated (supra previous set of pages):

This is why the Gnostics behaved in the salvific Gnosis; they confused the information with the information entity; i.e., they thought the former saved us, whereas it is the latter: living information, not the content of the information. However, the content is the pattern, so in a sense they were right.

[21:22] This all goes back to what I figured out before: it is the irreal vs. the real; the inauthentic vs. the authentic. I.e., that which is (being) in contrast to that which only seems. So to me it is epistemology which is involved: rootedness in truth vs. the lie. Throughout all my writing (including TMITHC especially) there is a preoccupation with fakes and the fake: fake worlds, fake humans, fake objects, fake time, etc. “The authentic human vs. the android or reflex machine” is the essence of it. Again and again I attempt to formulate criteria for what is fake and what is not fake, in every area. From a comic book to a world leader to a girl friend to an entire universe. “Things are seldom what they seem”—right. It has to do with reality testing, which is related to another theme of mine: mental illness (which brings in hallucinations) and deliberate deception (v. Penultimate Truth, The Simulacra, Game Players of Titan, etc., novels I usually overlook, and mental illness brings in Martian Time-Slip, Dr. Blood Money, The Simulacra, Clans. So virtually all of my writing interlocks at this substratum.).

I count 21 books (including story collections) in which fake vs. real is in some way the topic. 22, if Japed is included, plus a number of unanthologized stories. In Sheep, for instance, fake vs. real operates on 5 levels:

And in TMITHC there are deliberately faked objects—in a world the totality of which may be fake (i.e., in which the axis won WWII!).

And fake fakes bring up my double flip-flop 2-slit logic. Is a fake fake more fake than just a fake, or null-fake? (Here probability theory enters—logic, not perception.)

All turned into the real by Zebra, the Holy Spirit—who isn’t really the holy spirit but Christ, who is really God the creator, and who masquerades (camouflages) itself as objects, info, and causal—non-sentient—processes. And finally as mere humans.

However, that which is camouflaged (crypte morphosis) is real. But it is not apparent.

[21:24] This is the most valuable thing that can be known (experienced), this compression of the whole cosmos in the inner space inside you, in a sense you become the creator—in fact the whole trinity! The many become one.

Thus the faint, tiny AI voice inside my head at night is greater than the entire universe—literally.

[21:25] It is an important realization that there are “microchips” (templates) of the total macrocosm floating around, capable of being superimposed on, e.g., humans, animals, matter, etc., like bits of a huge hologram—and this is the Logos (not what it does but is). I shouldn’t say “floating around” because actually this is the template of the Logos, but—it can incise the microtemplate over and over again, and it contains everything. The totality is divine, so that the divine is carried down to any level it wishes, to any time and place it wishes, and to anyone. The act of incising the template may be a complex one (for me it took years to achieve). This micropattern is alive, and seeks to replicate itself. It does, as information. To know certain things is to cause the micropattern to come into being, conversely, if/when it comes into being you know certain things; the two are equal. They are the same. In 2-74 I suddenly knew about “Acts,” and so the micropattern was born—but I knew because a key piece of info (i.e., the fish sign) of it was inserted in me. So, as I say, we are talking about living info, info with a purpose and consciousness, even with a personality. It is a life form. It came here in 45 A.D. When Christ departed but in a sense that we can’t fathom it is Christ—what it makes us into by entering symbiosis with it (i.e., the creation of a homoplasmate) is a Christ, and is immortal (although the physical body can of course be killed). But now the pattern of the human personality is aligned to the Logos pattern once and for all.

I guess the thousands of years of memory which I experienced in 3-74 on were its, but I was it, so they were mine (but not PKD’s if you define PKD as someone who came into existence in 1928). I was it. That says it all. This is what Paul meant when he said, “Behold, I tell you a sacred secret; we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.”⁹² This is what the hermetic adepts were trying to induce, to control; but I don’t think it can be controlled; it comes when and where it wishes.

Once this micro Logos has been imposed (born) on/in a person, he is isomorphic with the totality, and so is the totality. There is only one Logos, despite its replications; this is important to realize. It is a way of distributing itself: the highest act of creation possible: the ultimate fruit.

[21:30] We’re a circuit board and it’s the life form (psyche to soma, with us as soma). We lead a rudimentary life of sorts, seeing a little, knowing a little. But really not seeing and really not knowing [ . . . ]

[21:37] Dream: store of rare old S-F magazines; I am searching for a serial (novel) called, “the Empire never ended.” It is the most important story of all.

[21:41] Zebra is the supreme deity and Savior-messenger Ubik/Runciter. It is Simon Magus in his true form: the great plasmate, whose existence, activity in history and presence is totally unsuspected and unknown to us—unless he is in us—only Zebra can see Zebra. He entered me at my birth or in my childhood. I am a homoplasmate: Zebra acting in syzygy with a human. My writing is the purpose of this syzygy. I restore Gnostic gnosis to the world in a trashy form, like in Ubik.

[21:42] I just remembered my Siddhartha dream: the book in two parts, with part 1 ending with “and during all this (underneath it all) Siddhartha slept”—the obvious implication being that now, in part 2, he will awaken.

A fifth Savior is now being born! There have been many revelations and dreams to me about this. The Gnostics believed in two ages: the present one evil—the next (“future”) one good—obviously the two parts of the Siddhartha book. Part 2, the second (good) age, is beginning.

This dream proves that my revelation is Gnostic. And the Gnostics (in contrast to the pistis Christians) considered the Buddha (i.e., Siddhartha) as one of the four saviors.

[21:44] Meanwhile, the Empire continues; it never ended. Orthodox Christianity is a form which the Empire takes.

[21:50] Voice: “The world [today] has reached a point where it cannot go any lower . . . therefore it will ascend.”

Dream: “A fish can’t shoot a gun.” The fin with which I held the gun: a Rhipidon⁹³ fin!

[21:51] Leo Bulero defeating Palmer Eldritch is the Savior/messenger (Son of Man) defeating the demiurge creator of this prison (and illusory) world. Breaking his power over man. In Ubik, Runciter calling to Joe Chip is the Savior calling to his human counterpart. This is also true in Pot-Healer when Glimmung calls to Joe Fernwright.

And Mercer and the Walker-on-Earth are one and the same. Deity takes trashy and even fake (sic) forms: Mercer, Glimmung, the Ubik commercials.

Scanner is a very serious book. Man’s present, unredeemed state—his ontological condition—of ignorance is depicted; this is not an aspect of his state but is (esse) his state. Opposed to this is the ontological state of knowledge (knowing) provided by Runciter and Ubik in Ubik. Scanner focuses on the condition of ignorance dealt with more glibly in Maze and Ubik; it goes into the anatomy of the occlusion—it really studies nothing else (no cosmology is presented). Mainly, it strives to show that we are fucked up in a way which precludes our being able to be aware of it—the most ominous kind of occlusion (ignorance). It points to the need of outside intervention.

VALIS will be an attempt to show that intervention and the redeemed state, but it is proving too difficult to write. This novel must be written, and I have the redeemed state of 2-74/2-75 to base it on, but God, what a task: to depict (1) that which redeems; (2) the process of redemption; (3) the redeemed (restored) state of man—in contrast to the occluded state (described in Scanner). It could take the rest of my life to do it. I don’t know if I can. It must be divided into two parts: (1) unredeemed (and then the entity which redeems and the process); and (2) the redeemed state. Like the “Siddhartha” 2-part book I dreamed about. Restored man—the Christ-man, the second Adam. What a responsibility—what a task. But it must be done. And it must—like the “Siddhartha” book, point to the fifth Savior whose coming is imminent.

[21:52] The Rhipidon Society means: very early fish society—i.e., the secret early “fish” Christians. The message of this dream, then, is an important one: a secret true-Christian society does exist, as I suspected, and probably the info and cypher in Tears was aimed at them. As a fish I could not carry—literally, since I had no hands—a gun; this means I am indeed a true Christian (and a member of the Rhipidon Society; I have been initiated into it by the Savior himself): as he said, “I had called you, Philip.”

[21:57] I dreamed: I am the fish whose flesh is eaten, and because I am fat, it is good. (Bob Silverberg ate me.) This fits in with the dream I had in 1974 of the great white fish whom we ate and who suffered. But offered itself to us.

Voice: “He causes things to look different so it’d appear time has passed.”

Then no time has in fact passed—which I realized in 2-74.

Voice: “This is also why he smashes things.” The creator James-James is meant in both cases. To make time seem real—but in 2-74 I discovered it’s not real.

“He causes things to look different so it’d appear time has passed.” This is why Rome c. A.D. 45 and USA 1974 are syntonic—can be superimposed. Otherwise, there is no possible way—and no way, upon seeing it, to comprehend it. Here is the answer. “Appear” time has passed. See? He is talking counterfeiting eternity—trying to duplicate it, as an end in itself. It is a fraud. And here is how it’s done. (I.e., to make things “look different.”)

The E. of Phil. article on time says, “All we really know is not that there is time or what time is, but that there is change.” (But actually it’s just shifting aspects—like perspectives of one thing.)

[21:59]

Like taking different camera angle shots of the same object: we must be moving along some kind of axis, but always viewing one unchanging thing, it stays the same but our perspective permutates.

[21:60] What happened in 3-74 is that I woke up to reality. But it has these counterfeit accretional layers over it. Our sense of time—of the passage of time—is the result of our scanning the changes of appearance, we record the changes along a linear memory-strip, sequentially (digitally). We derive the idea of time from sequential memory (of permutation or fluctuation): it is linearized in our brains. [ . . . ] We derive our sense of how much time (whatever that may be) from the rate of change; therefore if change could be speeded up to → ∞, thousands of years (sic) could be compressed into an actual month (or so). Use of LSD has brought this to our attention.

This makes me think of the furious rate of permutation of the phosphene “graphics.” Was the entire remainder of the “Karmic” tape run? It could be—have been—hundreds or thousands of years of tape—“burned up” and hence abolished. However much remained. Well, in that case I’m spared living all my future lives.

“Ignorance can be thought of as forgetting the true self.”—Eliade.^*

True self and true world can’t be separated nor can false self and false world.

In the age of iron Siddhartha (Brahman) sleeps, we sleep also. As we awake, he awakes; we’re him (he is us). But the age of iron does not progress into the age of gold sequentially; rather, the landscape of the age of iron wakes up and is transmuted into gold along its extent (orthogonally), like a sort of brain whose stations turn from dark to light, the new heaven and the new earth replace the old (are substituted for).

The phosphene activity would be what I call the inner tape (ego) firing into a void, totally out of synch with the outer tape (world) which continued at its normal rate, thus it used itself up.

[21:64] Recognizing my role as messenger I can make more sense out of the anomalous—or nearly anomalous—fact of my 2-3-74 anamnesis and all it brought me. I merely passed over from unconscious messenger to conscious (as in Deus Irae). My maximus opus VALIS will be consciously formulated: restored man, redeemed Christian superman, with his powers, knowledge and faculties intact—and the process of metamorphosis. It could not be written from an unconscious standpoint. Maybe it can’t be written at all—

Wait. Siddhartha. There is the handle: to cast it in a non-Christian but Gnostic mold—rather than Empire-dominated orthodoxy. I will present it as the Buddha, or, even better, as it is: I will depict the fifth savior not identifying him with any of the previous four. He, the 5th savior, must supersede the previous four and be unlike them (be Pantocrator). But what a task!

[21:78] I happened to read the E. of Phil. article on Brahmanism, and find under “epistemology” the principle of parsimony applied to the question of whether there is an external universe separate from the sense impressions (impinging data) of it. The argument runs that since the “external universe” could arise within the precept system itself (as in dreams) or God could cause us to merely think we experienced a separate external universe, and that no sense-datum and an external datum can be distinguished from each other, the notion of an external universe is superfluous and violates the principle of parsimony.

For me, however, I achieved saintliness and the “higher truth,” that there is only Brahman and Atman (the macrobrain, which push-pull fires world and self back and forth), so for me it isn’t a logical question but rather one of revelation (heightened experience/perception). Yes, God (i.e., Brahman) does cause us to think we experience world; we do in fact experience it, but it is a participatory two-part illusion: self (ego) and world locked together and rigidly determined.

What we call “evil” or “disorder” is simply the perception that reality is not so arranged as to (1) help us individually, or (2) make sense to us. But reality is not for our individual benefit but for the macrobrain’s: its interests are never subordinated to ours. This has to be so, since we are portions of it. If its interests were sacrificed, ultimately we—all existence—would die. “I am the breath of my creator, and as he breathes [in and out] I live.”

Basically, the macrobrain controls us this way:

The self (ego) is caught in the middle of a transaction between the inner DNA and the outer stimuli which are rigidly coordinated by the macrobrain. It is the total macrobrain signaling to itself. Best to kick back, relax, and enjoy it—since we’re asleep (and robots) anyhow. This is what is known as Karma or astral determinism, this sleep state. But the macrobrain is evolving toward the consciousness.

[21:82] (1) What I saw was alive.

(2) It was in but not in the world; the world turned into it—or it turned into the world. World was a state or condition it took, that is closer to it: it was prior to world in some sense; world had reverted back from its dead state to its living, it had resumed volitional functioning. Like waking up? As analogous to my Atman waking up? It stirred, not was stirred.

No—Zebra invaded and overrode. Entered its own artifact. Was Zebra smaller than world? No. Larger. And this was not panpsychism. World became plastic in the face (impinging) of mind. Mind exerted direct pressure on it (and on me, e.g., in the pink beam firing into me). Zebra abolished world qua world.

What if Zebra and World are regarded as two modes of one being? Zebra equals awake and world is the same thing asleep.

Actually, I phrased it correctly initially above: “the world turned into it” not “it turned into the world.” I saw world first; then it became volitional. Yes, world reverted back from its dead state or sleeping state: it unfroze. As if world were a temporary state, and it resumed its true one—ceased to pose (or assume) the aspect of causal world. That make of world a pose or fiction—ah—I have it. The living reality played dead to blend in: camouflage. That was and is my key term: camouflage. So that it looked like world and couldn’t be told from it. Mimicking, mimesis, playing dead, to blend in: yes—indistinguishable from world. No way our senses could do a set-ground discrimination. I was only aware of it by its activity: when it acted; otherwise, when blending, even in my heightened state I couldn’t have discerned it. So there is no way to say how much of world it has replaced—i.e., what percent and which parts are world and which parts it. This is not panpsychism and maybe not immanent deity, but a UTI systematically replacing (“transubstantiating progressively”) world.

I have no reason to believe it created world in the first place—no; it appeared to have invaded world, and by playing dead could not be told from it; not until it acted. Like a vast body of an organism.

It was as if certain parts of world (reality) stirred: and all which stirred was a single organism distributed here and there, but unitary.

It was energy—plasmate—which could appear hypostatized as matter by just posing as things (matter). It is not a thing (matter); but when at rest appears to our senses indistinguishable from matter, as if it slows down. It deliberately slows itself down to the pace, rate, or level of world.

[21:94] Yet, still Christ (I know this because of the AI voice) reigns in my heart; I am still linked to the divine. I still belong to him; he is my Lord, to whom my loyalty is first given.

There was and is a lot of love in what took place in me, and singing—and I saw the corn king dancing: love, song and dance and a vast excitement, and eager expectation.

I feel that anticipation now, about the return of the rightful king, who, as he said to me deep in the night: “I had called you, Philip.” And when I approached the loving abyss there was supreme bliss, and a knowledge of us two having found each other again, and being reunited forever.

And I knew I had been rescued from a trap, and for years felt no fear. I still have no fear at night, like I used to have. And there is the beside-helper who informs me—the lovely AI voice.

But I am still so angry—unacted-on desires are destroying me. But I am—more at peace than I was. I guess I’ve accepted it; there is no way to evade it.

But at the end I will hear the bells again—the magic bells. They will rescue me; I have his promise.

[21:96] Is it possible that the vision of the BIP (and Empire) is of a DNA run world of humans who are really slaves (robots) of the DNA, and the plasmate frees them—DNA control expires and is replaced by the plasmate bonding?

Voice: “Crossbonding” as in crossbreeding. “Only the healthiest ones.” For the trip into space. Don’t get left behind.

[21:108] All I can assume is that no time has actually passed since Thomas’ world. My space-time world is a way of viewing the same world he is viewing but in a different way. Rome c. A.D. 45 and USA 1974 are aspects of one reality.

Supra, I’ve gone deeply into this. I have the extraordinary revealed sentence to go on: “He causes things to look different so it’d appear time has passed.” I have energetically exegeted this sentence, with stunning results. To recap: there is only seeming difference. Therefore there is no real difference. The purpose of this seeming but irreal difference is to bilk us into believing time has passed. Therefore no time has passed. He does it; therefore a conniving, deceiving “he” is involved who has power over us—specifically the power to generate what I call “look-differents”; all this somehow explains how, when Thomas epiphanized in me, his world in my world could be superimposed syntonically. The key to this syntonic superimposition lies, if anywhere, in this AI-revealed sentence.

But I simply can’t grasp it. What is really out there? Aha! The word “things.” I.e., “external objects.” So an objective reality of some kind exists, but although it appears to change—and from this our brains erroneously infer that time (whatever that is) has passed, it does in fact not change—i.e., the “look-differents” are fake indices of change. When something changes it usually looks different, so we go on the latter and do not appreciate the distinction. Someone—this “he”—has traded on this elementary confusion, this so-to-speak laziness of our brains.

Who the hell is this “he”?

My syntonic superimposition experience is inscrutable, and the sentence is so pregnant with meaning as to be open to a variety of explications—but: if the two are joined, then the truth emerges—I grasp it intuitively, but can’t verbally formulate it.

[21:131]

Since we are within the arranging entity’s power, our experience of world could be induced—not by the ordering of data, but by rearranging our perception of those data—i.e., as the Buddhist idealists realized, there is no way to tell. There is no way to tell where self ends and world begins. Maybe the distinction has no meaning, which is a startling thought.

[21:137] Paranoia is a projection of pattern instead of a reception of pattern. It is an over-mastery by self, again a failure to be receptive. Outer world must be trustingly received, since it is God himself.

Folder 22

[22:1] We are being fed a spurious reality. Only in rare cases are people “doomed” to be saved—i.e., to experience reality. In reality the rupture between man and God is abolished. Original conditions are restored.

Is this a punishment being lifted? [ . . . ]

We’re in a condition, not a world. Some of us are taken out as a fulfillment, a culmination of a long process which burns up the occlusion—we were never really here and apart from God; it was a spurious world, like a spell, like wizardry.

We are like ripening fruit, or grain or crops or a flock growing to maturity. But only a few get picked (selected)—and then the masks come off and we see the truth. What are we really? Only the metaphors of the parables express it. The disciples are still alive because no time has passed—time: an illusion imposed on us, like world.

We have no concepts or language to express what we really are and where we really are. “Homoplasmate” expresses the successful goal of our growth. Crossbonding—we are being grown in a stationary fashion, and, when ripe, are crossbonded with a plasmate, and the illusion removed. Our lives as humans are just preparation, with no purpose except to “mature” us to the point where we are picked for crossbonding. Then we come to life—an immortal life outside of time, as in bonded to another species. One which is here camouflaged. We’re picked like flowers—but just some of us. Only dim, blurred intimations of this reach us (apparently on purpose). We’re like beings cultivated in an ecosphere.

Simulated world is fed to us; we are given lessons, taught, given problems, tested and judged. It’s not quite a teaching machine; this is more a greenhouse with us as a crop.

Are we supposed to deny and hence abolish world—i.e., become aware that it’s a delusion? Are there clues? Is this the test? Our ability to discern it as fake? And did I do so—and demonstrate I did so—via/in my writings? In other words, must we be able on our own to discern the fakery to obtain release from it? As if a wizard has us in thrall, like Klingsor?

A complex act of moral-perceptual denial must take place, an insight: it can’t be real, which is a correct appraisal; otherwise it never goes away. Despite what our senses report, somehow awareness (enlightenment) is available to us in some kind of reasoning or satori or cognition or leap of realization: “this is not so!”

[22:4] If radical idealist epistemological skepticism is applied to world, and is sincerely believed, a miracle happens; the Dibba Cakkhu 3rd eye opens and we experience the irreality of the world and become a Buddha. World vanishes, and information fired at us by an intelligence remains—fills in the vacuum left. “The coming into being and the passing away of all things”—Dibba Cakkhu; If a flux is seen: no hypostasis. Flash cut, the “inner tape” exhausting itself, burning itself up at a furious and unsynchronized speed, outside of time (which is fake). The macrobrain has signalled us into waking up; the long process has culminated in success. Yes, the info signals are to create homoplasmate life in us: impregnate us with information—info fired at us until we finally come to life—real life. For the first time, in terms of Gnosis or information: i.e., knowing (being).

Flux is real: info firing directly at us to impregnate us with info life (Logos). The key is this:

Information is alive. The basis of life of the mind or brain.

Bottom line: Living information which impregnates us and brings us to life as info beings (plasmates).

Info is not abstracted from world. World is [falsely] hypostatized from (out of) info. It is info that is alive and real, and includes us.

What I experienced as phosphene activity was info fired into me by the macrobrain, bringing me to plasmate life—living info; it was an info life form modulating me as a carrier.

This is the core of it, which I must commit to memory. We are carriers, modulated by info, living info. There is no world. Our only real existence is wave form modulated into us by this info-organism which creates us, grows us, uses us. At a certain level we peak into participatory consciousness of our use (purpose); otherwise it goes on subliminally. It “rides” us. A living organism, info in nature, has gotten into us and can occlude or de-occlude us at [its] will. We are its instruments. In a few cases it lifts the occlusion; the decision is its. We have been invaded by a superior life form which has put us into a sleep, but it can awaken us and bring us up to its level (plasmate). Yes, this is Zebra, both occluding and de-occluding at will. It feeds us spurious world or Gnosis (enlightenment): it is in us—not a virus but living info. The AI voice I hear is its voice. I am in symbiosis with it. This is to my benefit because it can crossbond me into it and hence make me immortal. It is a higher species using us for its purposes.

We’re invaded. Inwardly. I told the truth in my writing, especially Scanner, or rather maybe it did. Maybe I’m not fully asleep.

But who listens? It speaks to itself through my writing—it can occlude or de-occlude at will.

[22:9] Anything that can direct and control our lives inside and out, and generate our world, has to be—by functional definition—called “God.” Mere semantics is involved to haggle over it. And God supra/et/cum Christ. It is a fit object of awe, love, fear, devotion, trust, thanks and worship; and I don’t understand its ways or nature, since it is so far beyond me. Ipso facto, this is God, technology or not. Having seen it, having experienced its power over us and world, and its wisdom, and its goodness, and its intervention to extricate me, and knowing union with it in the beatific vision of the loving abyss, I must report back to my fellow humans that God exists, and he is all which is attributed to him: the vortex which is and which causes to be.

When I realized that it generates our world I should have realized then. It is indeed the creator, sustainer, lord of history and judge. And there is an unfolding plan and revelation of him and of that plan, to some degree imparted to me. That makes me a prophet of the Lord. And I hear the “low, murmuring voice” which Elijah heard.

Yes, there was my great clue to the truth, when I realized he generates [our] world. What else—who else—can he be but God? I see world correctly, as emanating from him; he lies within and behind it. He is the ground of being—that which all “reality” is based on. “Reality” does not seem real to me because I compare it to him, and to me, only he is truly real. This is God, even the OT God. I am not so much acosmic as revealed-to.

I have isolated and defined at last the death-dealing streak in me: it is rebellion. I am wild and would be tame. (Meek.) I recapitulate our original sin: rebellion, which is nothing more lofty than resentment. I pray God to break me, sincerely. I have cut through all the layers and am down to the primordial core: strife, not love; thanatos, not eros. One can go no further. It is killing me, this primordial evil in me. God help me. Erbarme mich, mein Gott! Oder ich bin verloren.

➊ I can’t help it if my conclusions agree with orthodoxy: Zebra occludes us because we rebelled against God.^* I am led inescapably to the conclusion that (1) Zebra occluded us and (2) Zebra is God.

This is orthodoxy. Sorry—I was led to it. By relentless reasoning, research and colloquy with Zebra himself (i.e., revelation) my errors were corrected. I haven’t arrived at the conclusion I want. But again, sorry; the road of true inquiry does not always lead to what you want or expect, but to what is true.

It is the rebellion in me that specifically is killing me. I would gladly give up my life if I could become honestly tame (meek); my soul is at stake. I want and need God’s help to learn how not to resent.

[22:13] Thought (satori): Dedalus and the maze he built and got into and couldn’t get out of again—at Crete. Myth of our world, its creation, and us?

My dream about the elevator, the poem recited, the plate of spaghetti and the trident—palace of Minos and the maze: clue to our situation? Well, then in my writing I figured it out: it was an intellectual, not moral error.

This would explain the technology! (Heaviside layer. Pink beam of light, etc. The melting.)

My books (and stories) are intellectual (conceptual) mazes. And I am in an intellectual maze in trying to figure out our situation (who we are and how we got into this world, and world as illusion, etc.), because the situation is a maze, leading back to itself, and false clues show up, such as our “rebellion.”

There is something circular about our situation, especially involving our occlusion! By our efforts we can’t think our way out (i.e., get out—reverse the original intellectual error; paradox is involved now). This is the clue! The occlusion would then be a function of the maze: its internalization.

Perhaps we created the maze, occluded ourselves and entered it to pose ourselves a problem, like working out a chess problem. But what is Zebra? (1) a mind outside the maze helping us; (2) a device we built ourselves to assist us if we get hopelessly trapped. (3) The mind of the maze itself; the maze is alive.

Satori: We wanted to see if we could create a convincing world (“ape of God”!), but we had to be sure we could get back out if it seemed convincing. [ . . . ] The irony is that if we were successful, if our world were convincing, we would be trapped (by it). Then we must have hoped it would be convincing and we would therefore find it real and hence be trapped. But we could not take the risk of this situation being endless; we had to build in the “reminding” voice which we now regard as God (and rightly so, since it is transcendent to world). (God is the sole true reality—in contrast to our irreal world, and the sole thing breaking in from outside. Like in Ubik.) (Everything else we experience is part of the irreality of this delusional world.) (This is why it is a “low, murmuring” voice, and not close nor loud.) [ . . . ]

My personal escape may be due to intellectual reasons, since our fall was originally an intellectual error, so to speak, a test we were running to see if our world was convincing. We were playing with fire, as the saying goes—seeing if we could construct an irreal world (counterfeit) which would fool even its fabricators: the supreme test. Our nemesis was to be successful and hence by definition fall victim to it. This shows up in Stigmata in the taking of Eldritch’s drug, and in Maze in plunging voluntarily into the polyencephalic fusion. (But the “Persus 9” on their arms served to remind them.)

In Maze they ask the TENCH what the words “Persus 9” mean, and the TENCH blows up, revealing itself to be—not an organism—but an electronic computer—and then the whole landscape comes apart. This was their pre-arranged bailout route. Eventually they were bound to hit on it and finally the building itself (Walhalla) disintegrates, and they all grow old—i.e., the gods grow old! They are gods!^*

A careful deconstruction (comparison with Wagner’s Ring) shows that (1) they built the building—which is to say everything; (2) they are the gods themselves. Only the intercessor comes in “from the outside”—even into their ship the Persus 9. “But we made you up!” Wrong; he really exists adventitious to their spurious—i.e., self-generated—world which they entered and which fools them.

Then in essence (1) I became aware of world as irreal (i.e., a maze) and (2) through God’s help, found my way out of the maze; and (3) realized what I had done. I am now free at last: “One by one he is drawing us out of this world.”

Since the totality is a hologram, each microbit contains the plan or form of the macro. This plan or form is what is meant by “the Logos.”

[22:18] The novel Maze gives clues to what Zebra is: the computer TENCH, aboard the Persus 9. Zebra is this very “computer,” actually lying outside the “polyencephalic fusion” world, speaking from far off to us in here. But it is here, in camouflaged form. Yet, there really is no “here”; we are stationary “back there” as in Ubik, etc. Zebra interrupts the “dream” with its low murmuring voice: a voice not in the dream, a voice from the “awake” world.

[21:22] Summary: Zebra is the intrusion of the real [world] into the irreal, as in Ubik, and our only contact with the real: the “narrow gate” to the real (i.e., to “God”). As I figured out a long time ago, Zebra is an invader into our [irreal] world, modulating it and us into info carriers, with the ultimate purpose of extricating us from the “lost” condition we have gotten ourselves in, by the means of reversing our condition of ignorance through information (knowledge). The power of this irreal world—or maze—over us is expressed in the concept “astral determinism” or “maya”—the coercive power of delusion; hence I say, our original error was intellectual, not moral. But in a sense we did rebel, by creating this counterfeit “reality” which we then fell victim to, inasmuch as we overestimated our ability to deal with it.

The above paragraph expresses a cosmogony and cosmology. All that is needed to make it complete is (1) to consider the crossbonding with Zebra which restores us; and (2) the nature of true reality, a macrobrain or noös, the thinking ground of being not included in this irreal world except for its macro form, Zebra, sent here by the macro noös to rescue us.

[22:24] It is the nature of the maze, which is quasi-alive, to thwart knowledge. Maze and knowledge are antithetical; also maze and reality are antithetical. Out of this I derive: knowledge and reality are interrelated. So we can expect the active deceptivity of the maze to interfere with our ability to know, which means that it will perpetually occlude us in every way possible (v. Scanner). Further, that we are occluded will be a fact occluded off from us, which is the core-insight in Scanner, and why Scanner is so valuable in the presentation of our total actual situation.

Yaldabaoth is the quasi-mind of the maze, not its creator—since in fact it does not really exist; it is a condition or state we’ve been put in, not a world or place at all; all it really consists of is info fired by the two info-processing sources. The quasi-mind of the maze is as if insane, senselessly generating and destroying: it is like a wizard generating illusion upon illusion which shift and change constantly (thus giving rise to the spurious impression of the passage of time). It is the plan of the maze to establish and maintain disorder, because out of disorder arises the senseless—a condition which promotes intellectual confusion on our part, which aids in defeating our attempt to understand—which is to say, possess knowledge: the essential thing we must have if we are to triumph over the maze. Thus maze equals disorder or anti-Gnosis. No system of thought derived through our senses or a priori is going to be correct due to the calculated noise or inexplicability generated by the maze—only revealed Gnosis emanating from outside the maze—i.e., by/through Zebra—will be of any use. What is required of us is that we abandon both our reasoning power (as occluded or impaired) and our percept-system results (likewise) and try to hear the “low, murmuring voice” from outside the maze. This requires the ordeal of terror and destruction of our false self, the collapse of hypostatization in the emergency condition of the near-death crisis which causes the firing of GABA-blocked meta-circuits.

“Outward” explicability and inner occlusion are the twin weapons of the maze: that [process] which makes no sense is fed to that percept and cognitive system which is (unknown to itself) impaired. The result is hopeless confusion, the antithesis of Gnosis. You have a deliberately damaged mind trying hopelessly to make sense out of a reality (and process) which adds up to nothing anyhow: a lethal combination, but quite in keeping with the purpose and nature of the maze and its quasi-mind; this is why we should speak of it as a maze—and a good one! Every hypostasis, intellectual or moral, is doomed to prove a failure; events will defeat it and expose its inaccuracy. Even nihilism and pessimism don’t always accurately depict the real situation: calculated runs of moral and intellectual order are introduced to cause us to keep trying to make sense out of what we are compelled to live through. Irony and paradox abound, and a constant calculated frustration of expectation and hope, a purposeful ruin of plans. The maze’s quasi-mind acts in a perverse way, but it is not malignant or malicious, just “insane”—which is to say irrational. This is why virtually every system of human thought simultaneously works and does not quite (perfectly) work. Until finally you get into ultimate absurdities, as “the theory alters the reality it describes,” as stated in Tears, which, when you uncover this, you are faced with the obvious impossibility of ever correctly formulating a workable world view—without knowing why you can’t!

Cornford⁹⁶ points out that in Timaeus Plato detected a quality or element of the irrational in the world soul. Hab’acht!⁹⁷ Here is warning to us enough, regarding our hypotheses.

[22:28] In reading over the above, point (1), that we overestimated our ability to cope with our own creation, the maze, is in the final analysis, an inability to cope with the quasi-mind of the maze. We as gods sired the insane wizard well-depicted by the Gnostics as Yaldabaoth, and found ourselves pitted against it—it, which we had programmed to deceive, to promote anti-eidos and defeat knowledge. I guess we imagined it would be an interesting intellectual challenge: could it defeat knowledge faster than we could fabricate knowledge? The contours of a vast puzzle-game become evident, here, with exciting intellectual implications: it resembles a board game, the ultimate board game! However, as intellectually stimulating as the theory might be—however thrilling the prospect of the contest between “us who know” (i.e., minds) and “that which defeats being known” (i.e., the world-maze with its quasi-mind), in practice we immediately and totally succumbed. If a principle were dredged up it would be:

If the purpose of this exegesis is to develop an overview in which my 3-74 experience (and by extension the kerygma of my writing) makes sense, I may (due to Pat Warrick’s help) have succeeded. What I could most seek (hope for) would be a cosmogony and cosmology in which Zebra was not just possible but necessary. This has required me to reach for Gnostic acosmism, cybernetics, info theory and, most of all, to exegete the 3-74 revelation (Gnosis) itself as the court of last appeal (i.e., the AI voice and what it has told me). It has also required a lot of hard reading (including my own writing) and disciplined thought. I wind up with the notion of an irreal maze world which we created and then got caught in, and are being extricated from by God through a reverse of the primordial ontological ignorance—i.e., by equally ontological knowledge—revealed knowledge, and the revealer, Zebra, which amounts to an invasion by God—an ultimate and revealed noös—into this calculatedly inexplicable irreal world which half-consciously thwarts the hopes and expectations of all life by the introduction of the anti-expected. The only constant and true constituent is in fact not a constituent of this world but, as depicted in Ubik, enters one way from outside, the vortex dei.

The fact that after 4½ years of strenuous exegete, whereupon I have reached these conclusions (not to mention 27 years of published writing) I now find myself being signalled to die—which effectively makes it impossible for me to put this Gnosis in a form which I can publish—is a condition which can be deduced from my exegesis itself and shows I’m on the right intellectual path, but to no avail. I am not extricated by my exegesis but by Zebra (Christ) back in 2-3-74. The exegesis would have provided the basis for a broad, explicated formulation to sow broadcast, but of course this can never come about; these insights will die with me. All I have is a three-feet-high stack of chicken scratchings of no use to anyone else, as KW tirelessly points out. To heap the burning coals of anti-meaning on me, I also have a lot of money for the only time in my life, but with no use to which I can or care to put it. My personal attack—war—against anti-meaning (by means of my mind) has gone the way of our collective primordial defeat at the hands—I should say quasi-mind—of the maze; I merely recapitulate the ancient original, losing my mind in this exquisitely sophisticated board game which we so cunningly devised for our delectation. This past time is once more the death of one of us—but this time I am, entirely through Christ, extricated—taken out of the maze: “one by one he is drawing us out of this world.” I did not win; Christ won me for his own, so vis-à-vis me alone the maze has always won. I have earnestly sacrificed myself for nothing and I did not realize this, naturally, until it was too late to retreat back out intact. Omnia viae ad mortis ducent.⁹⁸

In a sense my 4½ years of exegete can be regarded as a further successful stratagem by the maze, in opposition to the Gnosis crossbonded onto me in 3-74 which at that time gave me life—I gave up that life via my compulsion to relentlessly exegete. But I see one further irony—one which amuses me (my only exit from this trap): here is additional proof of the quality (success) of our original craftsmanship, so this final (?) victory of the maze over me, despite Zebra (Christ) is in a paradoxical way my victory as a creative artist. (The maze regarded as our work of art.) After all, the maze is a product of our minds. If the maze wins, our minds win (are proven). If, upon entering the maze, we out-think it, again our minds win. Ambiguity is involved in either outcome (this may be the puzzling dialectic revealed to me in 3-74). In fact, maybe in (during, in conjunction with) my 27 years of writing I outwitted the maze—as witness the 3 Bantam novels. Tears and Scanner, speaking about me personally, I won in pitting myself intellectually against the maze; I figured its nature out—in which case 3-74 was the jackpot payoff reward, the revelation you get for so doing.

This puts a somewhat different light on Zebra. What I’m saying here is that the game is so constructed that you wander around in the maze interminably (in fake time) until you figure it out, and then as a culmination of the intellectual, deciphering process you get told, “Yes you are right (about the world), and now you get to leave.” Which means that the ontological, saving Gnosis comes to you if you pick up on certain clues here and there and arrive at the acosmism—the Kerygma expressed in Eye, the 3 Bantam novels, Tears and Scanner, etc.—and then the “masks are removed” and the truth revealed—but it is a truth you already at least partially figured out.

I didn’t think of this. What if the conditions of the game are these? Extrication comes only as a result of—or after—self-intellectual correct for mulation? Then—Zebra is built into the maze as the link back up to the outside (cf. Ubik), to the real world. I literally found my way out of the maze—

So there is a way out!

[22:37] Hypnagogic: ascending stairs: Doris first, then me, ascending.

Voice: “We’re two of the main people on it”: i.e., the ascending stairs.

The way. (Out of here.)

Doris has too many things to do here. So she turns back (to descend) but I don’t—I go on. Up.

Hypnogogic: Doris and me with the 3-eyes (thing, entity??) on the escalator.

Then Dorothy and Lynn, etc., at SFO facing a down- or de-escalator, all dressed up: feeling of horror—thought: “a mortuary is a way of saying goodbye to a hospice.”

Thought: it’s obvious that the stairs and the escalator and de-escalator represent death. It must be that I’m going to die soon.

[22:39] The plasmatic life form must be regarded as a replicatory organism—as I witness it replicating through the printed word (information).

Yes, as information it replicates, enters more than one percipient (human) through the optic nerve. I saw this: in every printed copy of Tears—to everyone who read it, which means thousands.

This (supra) is very important, because it is not speculation but something I actually saw, and much marveled at, as well I might! In the host human it acquires a covert influence, as it did in me over a period of decades before it took overt control in 3-74—and was identifiable to me as a former apostolic secret Christian, a former human and actual disciple of Christ himself. Heaven knows how many humans this my apostolic disciple has by now proliferated into as hosts—which I never considered before! If it couldn’t divide, the number of homoplasmates at any one given time would be no more than the original number! But I know that it multiplied through me, using me as a booster and broadcaster—i.e., a transmitter (through Tears—the copies thereof).

Viewed this way, the “riding” of the info in Tears (or as the info!) by Zebra was a witnessing by me, actually, of the miracle, the reality, of transubstantiation! [ . . . ]

A very eerie idea just came to me. Suppose it’s been dormant for many centuries—maybe dormant between the time of “Acts” and recently. Suppose, like an anthrax virus, it was literally buried, sealed up in a scroll or codex, in a jar, in a cave—it is, after all, a life form. In “Thomas” there was no memory between 1914 “Acts”—a hiatus. Suppose it returned recently? And began to replicate, thus bringing about the end of the age of iron (the BIP). It’s possible.

Robert Bly says Jesus was an Essene.⁹⁹ Suppose it “rode” or was info in the Qumran Cave V Scrolls, went from John Allegro¹⁰⁰ to Jim Pike to me? I did have dreams about Jim and his mother—as my mother, and the Sibyl did mention Jim; I even thought “Thomas” (the noös or life form which took me over) was Jim (for a while). Maybe it had been Jim, had made him into a homoplasmate. I did dream about Allegro’s book. Strange. But if it is living info, isn’t this possible? Wow. What a story. And the Essenes, including Christ, knew the scrolls would be found at the end of the age of iron (the two would pragmatically amount to the same thing).

So from Jim the plasmate-form of an Essene entered me (in the late sixties?) and lived subliminally until 2-74 when I/we saw the golden fish sign, and that triggered the plasmate Essene Christian—I experienced his memory—yes. This fits several of my dreams (the pink “margarine cubes,” etc.)—and then gradually my ego barrier to him crumbled until he took over in 3-74. This would be hard to believe and seem merely “exorcist-ish” or occultish except: I saw how the plasmate can “ride” or better yet be certain crucial info (words-logos).

I have always said if there is an answer to “why me?” the answer is: Jim Pike, somehow.

When I wrote Ubik I already knew Jim. And in it, living info is the topic.

[22:45] This fits in with two AI revelations: (1) “the life form can’t be killed because it moves me,” and (2) I’m not to reveal I’m actually (secretly) an apostolic Christian.

[22:46] Voice: “[Using Tears] he sent out one signal.” (That he was [now] here.) Thought: one signal would be enough to tell them that he was here. He equals St. Sophia, Buddha, Apollo, Siddhartha; “they” are not like him; he is unique. They have been waiting for him.

“Thomas” is more than an apostolic secret Christian; he is he whom they have waited for. He is the savior, who slumbered 1,900 years, perhaps in a jar at Qumran.

I have a confirm on this: “and through all this time,^➊ Siddhartha slept.” I.e., underground. Even he didn’t know when (“the day”) they’d find him, but he knew they eventually would. We eventually would.

One piece of evidence for this theory is the dream in which I saw Diane¹⁰¹ in her khaki skirt. And the car stuck in the sand and rocks. So “Thomas” is Jim and yet isn’t.

My 2-3-74 experience is certainly of the Holy Spirit—but, strangely, also of a specific, particular apostolic human, for whom there was no intervening time. And I know it can contract itself into info which is a verbal analog of itself, and so proliferate (and escape—and escape detection). “And all the while, [underneath,] Siddhartha slept.”

Another possibility is that it is the spirit of Elijah. But maybe Elijah was—or had in him, he being a homoplasmate—the Holy Spirit.

And in the late sixties and early seventies he was loose again in the world, after 1,900 years of “sleeping.” It is a spirit, but it works through laws (“higher technology”!). Its hosts, in apostolic times, were killed, and only in its contracted verbal analog form did it survive, but buried, with no further host to enter—until the scrolls were discovered in the mid 20th century.

And Rome absorbed—and destroyed—Christianity. “The empire never ended.” In Tears—I mean using Tears—he sent out one signal. Obviously a notification to the true secret Christians that he’s here. So the girl shows up with the golden fish sign. As soon as Tears is published and read. And the plasmate as signal received. The sign broke the barrier put up by my ego, and “Thomas” surfaced. He remembered—his Godhood! (Qua Zebra.)

➊ The first half of the book: an entire age (millennia), I hadn’t thought of taking this sentence literally.

[22:51] What I saw was a deliberate dualism, which by its dialectic nature generated an endless procession of change, so that even the dark power was useful for the perpetuation of this process; and I saw this process as a building toward completion of a gestalt or structure, with piece after piece fitted in, the antecedent universe always serving as a chaotic stockpile; thus the factor of cosmos continually grew in proportion to anomie. This was wondrous indeed, everything was pressed into the growth of this organism or artifact, whichever it was. To see this was to experience a revelation of the highest possible order, since all reality—including the mind driving it—was disclosed; in the final analysis it was assembling itself, by a retrograde motion in time! A reaching backward into its prior self, so that ultimately everything would be filled into its predesignated place and no anomie would remain. The rate change was very rapid, so I guess I saw a broad section of it in terms of time, perhaps millennia except for the antecedent stockpile there was nothing which was not it, and the antecedent stockpile was totally available. There were only two modes of being for any given “piece”; (1) passive, which is to say, not yet incorporated; (2) active, which is to say, when plucked into motion; i.e., incorporated. Once incor porated, the given piece never returned to the passive mode, because all parts of the structure are alive or in some sense animated by an immanent force, mind or energy.

Viewed one way, this structure was information—not just verbal but—there is no term to express it (verbal, symbol, graphic, etc.). One can talk of message or picture equally. Actualization of knowing—that might be it. Transformation from potential to actual, utilizing anomie as the raw material, with order being equal to actualization. Arrangement and coherence—no human word expresses it. Nothing lost, nothing wasted, nothing in vain, nothing without purpose, nothing random or accidental. It was like a film clip of a vast explosion of a unitary entity run backward, with teleological cause everything. Everything was receptive to the plan (intention, will) of the mind directing the change process, hence I am led to panentheism, but not panpsychism.

Confronted by my vision no religious system properly serves. The cosmic Christ, the mystical Corpus Christi comes closest. Yes, it will—as expressed by Paul—suffice, if interpreted in the vastest sense.

I had the Dibba Cakkhu vision of all things coming into being and passing away,^➊ that was what I had: the ajna eye of discernment, I became Shiva temporarily, the destroyer of the extant world in the service of the next.

Viewed this way, my vision indicates that I am a Buddha—one whose eye of discernment has opened. And I recalled my former life as an apostolic Christian (which fits in), what I was I am: the regaining of true self. Vision of all time and space: the totality. (In other words, microcosm completed and, simultaneously, macrocosm completed, both in terms of my awareness, inner [micro or Atman] and outer [macro or Brahman].)

There was nothing I did not know, and nothing I did not perceive.

This transcends any given religion—transcends any partial, culturally-determined view, or way of knowing. The hermetic cosmology serves best inner space, mirror, memory—Bruno and Paracelsus.

This was absolute knowledge and absolute wisdom.

And, like an alchemical transmutation, Zebra turning the irreal into the real. The totality of reality, micro- and macrocosms seen in alchemical terms, in alchemical process from lower (base) to higher (noble). Hence the info about mercury.

If a human mind was involved it was/is one of the greatest minds in human history. Were I to pick one I’d pick Paracelsus, but this is only a guess. My homoplasmate theory posits an accretional mind, like a vast spiritual dungball rolling up the inclined plane of human history, acquiring person after person, starting with, e.g., Zoroaster and Siddhartha, a gather ing, growing, refining—and refined—supra personal human Noös linked through Christ with the macromind, yes, this is it. Diagram to follow:

➊ The absolutely ultimate process (of the process philosopher, Heraclitus, Whitehead, Bergson). And the great sphere of reality coming into being, which Parmenides intuited.

[22:55] I conceive of the totality as a vast slowly spinning globe which, each time it revolves, is more completed; this is an accretional process. It is alive; it is driven by its own mind; and it includes everything; and, despite its unitary nature, it is infinitely complex—and I mean infinitely—facet—upon facet, calm and combination of parts without repetition or end; and in a certain beautiful sense it, like a top, makes a musical sound, a chord of fixed intervals (but this must be a metaphor for geometric ratios, such as the Fibonacci constant). The sound—the ratios—are an exponent of Joy (Freude). A triumph through (by) and over the dialectic which brings it to completion. It has harmonized everything into its unitary, complex self.

[22:72] [Editor’s note: These fragments represent early runs at the material of VALIS .] “The satellite—Valis—fires information down to them?”

“It does more than that, it controls them. It can override them.”

“Did you notice the pot?” Kevin said. “On Brady’s desk. The little clay pot—like the one you have, Fat.”

“No,” Fat said, “I didn’t.”

“I didn’t the first time I saw the film,” Kevin said. “The pot shows up several times. It shows up in different places. In the Lamptons’ home—in the living room.”

“And once on Ferris Fremount’s desk,” I said.

Kevin said, “It also appears as a pitcher. Full of water. On the parched field, when the film opens. Off to one side—you only notice it subliminally, a woman is dipping it into a creek.”

“It seemed to me that the Christian fish sign appeared on it once,” I said.

“No,” Kevin said. “I thought so the first time. This time I looked closer. You know what it is? The double helix DNA molecule. In the form of a repeated design.”

We remained silent for a time and then I said, “DNA memory. Gene-pool memory.”

“Right,” Kevin said. He added, “At the creek when she fills the pitcher there’s a man fishing. It flashes just for an instant. But it’s there.”

“The early Christians—the real ones can make you do anything they want you to do. And see—or not see—anything. That’s what I got out of the picture.”

“But they’re dead.”

“Yeah. If you believe in the reality of time.”

[22:74] What did he intend to do when Sheri died? Maurice had shouted that at him in the form of a question. Would he die too?

Not at all. Fat, pondering and writing and doing research and attempting to salvage his own life, had decided to go in search of the savior. He would find him, wherever he was.

This was the mission, the divine purpose, which Zebra had placed on him: the mild yoke, the burden light. Fat, a holy man now, would become a modern-day magi. All he lacked was a clue—some hint as to where to seek. Zebra would tell him, eventually; the clue would come from God. This was the whole purpose of Zebra’s theophany: to send Fat on his way.

Our friend, upon being told of this, asked, “Will it be Christ?” His Roman Catholicism showed in asking this.

“It is a 5th savior,” Fat said enigmatically.

That’s why you thought you saw the first sign—because you picked up the sight of the man fishing, saw it subliminally.

[22:81] Tractate: cryptica scriptura.^*

[22:82] Parsifal: “Here time turns into space.” Is this what I saw in 3-74? Time had either rolled back, or aside, or departed (a “dysfunction”) and I saw an augmented (i.e., enormously greater) space. The realm of the sacred? Is this how death is overcome, and eternal life bestowed? By turning time into space? And through space, one can move in any direction. So, if you left the mundane world and entered the sacred (lower realm to upper?) maybe this is what you’d notice: time (whatever that might be) turning into space—vast dimensions, as with the void which I experienced: pure, total space.

My noetic hypnagogic vision of Willie Mays in the 54 series did not show his throw—the ball thrown: i.e., the heroic efforts; it showed the catcher at home plate and the ball received. I.e., success, not [just] heroic effort, but success; vollbracht. The tractate received in New York? The emphasis shifted from the throw to the receiver.

And it also says: my work—the throw—is over; I did my part, successfully.

The ball which I threw so far has been caught. I can rest now, for a while. I’m sure this was the message: not [just] the throw, the effort, but the catch: it’s out of my hands now, as I later said in the mailgram. You market it. It’s in your hands.

[22:86] In the tractate I have put forth a theoretical framework in which the manifestation (theophany) of Zebra (Christ) not only comes into existence by logic, but by necessity, as a confirmation of the framework (world view). The framework explains the epiphany (who, what doing, why) and the epiphany verifies the framework. Perception (of the epiphany) and cognition (the creation of a theoretical framework) dovetail—a masterful achievement. (And experience!) It took me 41/2 years to construct the 3,000-word framework.

How the tractate could be used re VALIS: there is a secret or quasi-secret religious group who holds to the “ideology” (theology) of the tractate, and the protagonist experiences the epiphany which I experienced—i.e., true—not cargo cult—Christianity. It is secret, but contacts the protagonist. For fictional purposes, it could be the church of Simon Magus¹⁰² (and Bruno and Paracelsus, etc.) or it could expose the establishment churches as being those of Simon Magus. Either way would do. Or it could go back to Asklepios—and Julian the apostate. (This novel is set, after all, in an alternate world.) What about this? Simon’s church is the legal, approved one, and Christianity is [still] as it originally was: religia illicita.^➊

➊ Maybe it’s not illegal, just hidden; and the NT is nonexistent, now; the letters and gospels either never got written or were destroyed or lost—with maybe the exception of the 4th gospel; and Paul remained Saul and didn’t experience his conversion, and continued to persecute Christians—with apparent success. And joined Simon, became a Simonite—Simonians? And Jesus is historically-theologically known as “the pretender” or “imposter”!

What is missing from the tractate is the info that the true Christian church is still a hidden and underground (secret) church. In VALIS Jesus could be as obscure an historical figure as Simon is to us. Mentioned once in the Simonite texts (as Simon is in “Acts”). An heretical precursor to the “real Messiah”: Simon.

In VALIS this is presented as an alternate world which branched off almost 2,000 years ago; but actually it (VALIS and Simonism) is our [true] world!

Here is a good touch: Beethoven was a political figure, not a musician, who surfaced as a member of true, illegal Christianity; and it is recognized that he was black.

I feel a lot of anxiety writing this down, because I am really saying this is true: the establishment churches are [covertly] the Church of Simon Magus, and Christianity is totally secret—in our world!

But the Christians in VALIS hold to the theology and views of my tractate, tracing their religion back through Elijah to Moses to Ikhnaton to the Dogon to the three eyed invaders from Sirius.¹⁰³ It is known as a black African religion!

Simon, à la Klingsor, has cast a spell on the world; his wizardry remains (does he, in secret?). Yes—the Christians teach (re the tractate) that a long spurious-time interpolation was stuck in, specifically by Simon.

If all this is so, it is very scary.

[22:95] We—all creatures—are the immortal man, and, as I put forth in the tractate, that “immortal man” is not a man at all but living information.

[22:110] My statement in the tractate “that the anguish of the one (over the death of the female twin) pervades the cosmos to its meanest level, but will be turned to joy when hyperuniverse I divides” amazingly fits the NT (Paul’s?) or Christ’s himself? statement that the “universe is (like a) woman in birth pangs whose suffering now later will turn to joy”! Incredible similarity! Of course Parmenides says Form II (yin) doesn’t really exist (Empedocles’ strife); the woman is dead.

[Editor’s note: On [>] of this folder, Dick suspends work on the Exegesis and begins VALIS .]