It is very clear to me that there is an identity between Jesus Patibilis and Hainuwele: “for by feeding on the plants and animals that sprang from his body, men actually feed on the very substance of the demi-divinity” (i.e., Hainuwele).39 This point regarding the Manichaean Jesus Patibilis escaped me: here is the Eucharist writ large: all men and even all animals feed on him and thus unknowingly re-enact the Eucharist, not in church but out in the world itself!
Folder 64
Fall 1981
[64:E-1] “Luke-Acts” transduced from word mode to object mode but still information: the universe made of information in terms of the internal mutual arrangement of the constituents as a gestalt, pastiche, a collage. Now, the cardinal topic of “Luke-Acts” is Jesus Christ. How (if at all) does he appear in this pastiche/gestalt? He does appear but not in anthropomorphic form; he is camouflaged in and as the total pastiche/gestalt, hence cosmic. As information, this universe as pastiche-gestalt read not in a linear manner but as a gestalt (form) reveals or is or contains him throughout like a steady modulation fed into it, a waveform ubiquitous in the gestalt (now construed as a field). This modulation can best be termed “a perturbation (of the reality field).” He is not it but perturbs it.
[64:E-3] Therefore: Christ is hyper information that reduces the information universe to the carrier which he modulates (i.e., perturbs). This brings to mind my “protest art” theory that rogue information has penetrated a prior “official” information system. (This relates to my analysis of Gnosticism as a “weak transmitter”—but this should read “weak interfering signal”; the transmitter may be powerful but very far away.) I conceive of this as a combat between the two information systems, and, if the Gnostics are right, the “weak transmission” that interferes is the true (transmundane) God.
[64:E-5] The universe was created out of 22 Hebrew letters (“Sepher Yetzirah”) but there is a missing 23rd letter; when his 23rd letter is added, all the negative prohibitions of the Torah vanish; severe limitation and justice are replaced by mercy and freedom: this is the third Shemittah and it is the Messianic Age. Christ, then, can be construed—as rogue information system—to be the corrected, completed basis of creation in which 23 Hebrew letters replace the 22 originally employed. He is, then, an added, formerly missing letter, and this addition changes everything, from severe limitation and justice to freedom and mercy; I construe this as nullifying specifically the lex talionis40 which has to do with punishment in connection with breaking the “thou shalt not”—the negative prohibitions in Torah. Since this carries over into physical law (causation, efficient cause), what was a mechanical system (“pitiless,” as I call it in DI) would become flexible, able to deal with exceptions: this would require the faculty of judgment, and this is another way of describing Christian justification. [ . . . ]
The 23rd letter is not just added on; the Torah returns to its jumbled matrix state and then reforms anew: differently. My God—if you add the 23rd letter you get a broader, larger, more complex, higher, more sophisticated system. Whole new combinations (of letters) would be generated. New kinds of situations would arise (analogous to my meta-abstraction vis-à-vis normal abstracting).
The plasmate is this hyper-information (the 23 letter system) feeding into the old rigid, mechanical, limited, fossilized 22 letter system. As the blood of Christ, just as Valis is his cosmic body.
[64:E-10] It is apparent to me now, suddenly, that Gnosticism is—as Jonas makes clear in his analysis of it in contrast to the Greek-Babylonian view of the Kosmos41—the absolute theoretical key system that both (1) described the entry of the hyper-information into the older, rigid, mechanical system (to combat heimarmene) and (2) that hyper-information (Gnosis) itself: as a theoretical system, Gnosticism is/was what it describes. And it is Faustian and it is (as Jonas says) the basis for modern (post-ancient) man.
[64:E-11] There is essentially an adversary situation between the two info systems (old vs. hyper) even if this is the 23 letter Torah replacing the older 22 letter Torah. The older system involves and operates by heimarmene; the newer system on a flexible, sentient, more complex, more evolved, etc., etc., basis. These are such radically different worlds that—well, the term “cosmos” cannot contain both: it is cosmos penetrated from outside—hence the Gnostic premise of the transmundane—a necessary premise in understanding the situation: transmundane deity as overruling the creator and his creation. At the very core of this lies, then, Faustian man and the Faustian ideal and Dasein; and this is the topic of Owl!42 And as I wrote ultra supra: it is the heroic (the new, the Gnostic, the Faustian) versus the tragic (the old: “sidereal passivity”). This is an issue of unprecedented importance—and has directly to do with Fate (heimarmene), hence the very basis of what the world order is and how it works, and the newer way of being (Dasein) by man in that order.
[64:E-12] You take the text (which is linear, sequential and digital) of “Acts” and convert it into a world: objects in their mutual arrangement. (“Acts” is part two of Luke.) What is the basic story of “Luke-Acts”? Jesus Christ. But when you turn it into a world, although the narrative is still there, Jesus Christ cannot be seen (i.e., as an object among objects). The linear, digital text is now a gestalt (Bild) and is read simultaneously but by the right hemisphere. (The linear digital text of course as narrative is read by the left hemisphere.) Where now is Christ, if not an object among objects. He is missing. Then you discover that in a unified total gestalt (pattern) read simultaneously by the right hemisphere analogically Christ is present as the pattern itself: as unified totality. The puzzle is solved. “Luke-Acts” is not a verbal narrative about Christ—i.e., referring to Christ—it is Christ. [ . . . ]
This fits in with the intuition I’ve had for some time: that the Bible is the real world and appears in our spurious “world” as a putative book the way “Grasshopper” does in TMITHC. If what we possess in the form of a book (info) is actually a world, then what we experience as world is perhaps only info—a book. Everything is backward.
[64:E-20] I suddenly realize what is necessary in order to apperceive Christ: some kind of runaway positive feedback involving paradox (e.g., VALIS is a novel/VALIS is not a novel); the flip-flop into infinity regresses faster and faster until at last the outline (of Christ) emerges; hence the paradoxical nature of the parables: they constitute doorways to the kingdom, rather than being descriptions of it.
Folder 56
August–December 1981
August 18, 1981
Dear Pat,
I offer the following idea: that what I call “the plasmate,” which is living information, is the third testament of Joachim del Fiore which emerges as the spirit of the two testaments (OT and NT) when they are superimposed; it is the spirit of which they are the “hard rind of the letter.”
Which is to say, the two testaments are alive and are to be regarded as proto-psyches, with the OT a rigid, archaic Psyche A, and the NT a more flexible Psyche B, which when joined give rise to Ditheon Psyche C, which is the plasmate. So I maintain that underneath, the two testaments are living organisms that create recombinant new information by a process of linking and relinking, such as I saw VALIS employing; moreover, this life that I speak of is known to the Jews as Torah (see The Divine Invasion as to the Torah being alive). The living cosmic entity, which existed before creation, and for which creation exists and is justified by, is not confined to the first five books of the Bible but continues on through to the NT. It is self-replicating and sentient; it is a life form, and Joachim figured it out (although of course he could have obtained the concept from Hebrew scholars). Thus when you see a copy of the Bible lying on your coffee table you are looking at a living organism capable of growing, of reproducing, of change; like all biological organisms it must maintain a higher level of internal order than its environment, and it must absorb negative entropy from its environment—and indeed it does this, by subsuming its environment into changing arrangements of information.
[
. . . ]
So my Type A Psyche is the OT, my Type B Psyche is the NT, and because these two testaments function as a single organism in a push-pull dialectic relationship (superimposed) they form one new, higher, third entity which I call Ditheon, a life form so advanced that it is superior to all creation; and yet it itself is not God but is the image of the invisible God. Philo of Alexandria was the first to figure out its existence; he relied on his Jewish sources and on Greek sources (in particular Plato) as well. One could speak of our spatiotemporal world, then, being based on the Bible or even emanat ing from the Bible; the Bible is not a book like other books: it is not a description of this world, it is the source of this world, and this world, at all places and times, conforms covertly to the Bible; that is, strip away the stegenographic covering from the physical world and you will find the world of the Bible—in fact you will find the Bible itself as a verbal text permeating reality and giving rise to it. The Bible is the information that is fed into the space-time universe, as if transduced into substantial reality. Thus the Bible is always the case—what is known in Bible study as typological application. Thus the books of the Bible do not refer to one given specific place and one specific time, but are equally applicable to all places and all times, when the dokos is stripped away from true reality. Joachim was aware of this meta-organism existing “in” the two testaments, and he was aware that it is a world; that is his crucial awareness; this third entity, this spiritual meta-entity created by an accord between the OT and the NT is a spiritual world in which men exist or can exist or will someday exist; it is somehow real and somehow available. It is both an historical epoch (lying in the future) and yet, paradoxically, here now, as is the Kingdom of God that Jesus speaks of. If you doubt the truth of what I am saying, look at the 22nd psalm and think of the crucifixion; you will see that the 22nd psalm, although written centuries before the birth of Jesus, applies to and exists at the time of the crucifixion; it lies outside of space and outside of time entirely, and is true now as well. 43 This is what led me to reiterate obsessively that secretly “we are living at the time and place of ‘Acts’ ”; what I failed to realize is that “the time and place of ‘Acts’ ” does not refer to a specific historical context, a given time and given place, but to an archetypal reality that is the very basis on which our seeming world is built, and this archetypal reality consists—not of a place, not of a time, not of substantial reality—but information. The Bible is not a world reduced to a verbal description; on the contrary: it is the verbal source of world, just as signals from a radio transmitter are the informational source of the voices and music you hear when you turn on your receiver. But (as I say) three “entities” must be envisioned, not two; that is, not just the OT and the NT; as Joachim realized, these two palpable entities combine to form a third and meta-entity that is to the two palpable ones as spirit is to letter. Thus I say, a single coherent life form underlies the written Bible, and it is the source of our universe, and is itself not fixed into a canon, but constantly combines and recombines, forming ever newer messages. It transacts its informational life and business around us everywhere, as it guides, directs and controls the evolution of the universe, which is based on its own evolution as a biological organism.
[ . . . ]
Thus the physical spatiotemporal universe is not information, as I declare in VALIS, but is derived from information; this information is the next hypostasis up, ontologically speaking. It goes: God, Logos (information), spatiotemporal universe, and then back to God as goal of the whole process (Erigena). In March, 1974, by means of my meta-abstraction I so-to-speak rolled back the physical universe to the Uttered Word underlying it, from which it is derived; this is why, finally, the term “word” is in fact an excellent translation of “Logos.” It is as if God spoke (or rather thought) a complex idea, and from this living idea (Logos) the universe came into being, was derived.
This view is a far cry from Burroughs’ notion that we have been invaded by an information virus that is making us stupid!
[56:1] 44 November 17, 1981
A very valuable dream. I enter a large auditorium like a San Francisco concert hall or opera house. There is an audience sitting. A number of men are engaged in discussion, speaking from different places in the house; they are standing. I assume that an impromptu discussion—argument—has broken out; it seems to deal with Jerzy Kosinski; his name is mentioned. (One of the men, perhaps a teacher or the teacher, resembles Bill Wolfson, so this may also be a courtroom.) I join in the discussion and they all frown; it turns out that this is not an impromptu discussion by members of the audience: these are actors and what they say is rehearsed; this is the drama the audience has come to see and hear. I have done something improper. There is some mention of homosexual intellectuals; this seems to be the topic. Seating myself, I speak quietly to a man in the audience; he has white foam, like milk, like the marshmallow glaze on the candied yams I had last Saturday, around his mouth. I ask about the discussion, which I now realize I am not allowed to join in on.
Analysis: clearly the location is the concert hall years ago in which my agoraphobia/claustrophobia broke out, when Horowitz was playing the Brahms second piano concerto. The friends with me that day were Bay Area intellectual homosexuals.45 The play enacted, the roles taken in semblance of an actual discussion, as in that Berlioz work I saw where the woman grabs the conductor’s arm to make him stop conducting—this refers to what Hans Jonas says about the older Greco-Roman-Babylonian closed cosmos, specifically Stoicism in which all you can do is play your role in a drama with as much grace as possible “and you are your own au dience.” What I am doing in the dream is—because I do not understand that these are only roles acted out, a formal drama—I have broken the rules; I have spoken out of turn, which means that I have unintentionally rebelled against our status in the cosmos, my own status; they have accepted theirs and only say and do what their scripts call for them to do. Hence their frowns of disapproval when I join in impromptu. This is rebellion, my primordial rebellion, but as I say it is based on a misunderstanding on my part, a failure to comprehend the situation. When the situation is made clear to me I lower my voice; that is, I cease to interfere with the clockwork marionette drama being acted out, but I continue to talk in a somewhat muted voice, privately, to the nearest member of the audience. That is, I cease blatantly to rebel, but I am not entirely still. What I am doing at this point is trying to understand what the drama being enacted is about; I accept the fact that I am a spectator and can’t participate; this has to do with my withdrawn status in life that is my current mode. This status is forced on me because I am literally not part of the drama. No role, no lines, nothing has been assigned me except to watch and listen. I can accommodate that only to a point; I have gone from trying to participate to trying to understand; thus I adopt the mode of a scholar and philosopher, but only because I have been edited out of the drama itself. Spontaneously, I would join in—did join in, but was silenced. This dream tells me a lot about my phobias and my rebellion. My rebellion is based on a misunderstanding on my part as to what is allowed and what is not allowed. I had naively thought we were free to say and do anything we wanted; that is, I presumed what I call the “open” or Gnostic or Faustian cosmos. The true situation reduces me to spectator, but this is not my first choice; this is forced on me by the nature of the situation (the closed cosmos in which as in Stoicism people simply act out their assigned roles, say their assigned lines). Yet I continue to speak, although not as part of the drama; I do not interrupt it but I ask about it; I seek to understand. I am barely willing to refrain from entering the drama—which would mean now to break the rules knowingly, whereas when I broke the rules before, I did not understand the situation. In the dream I feel no phobic anxiety at all, which is strange; it shows that the issue is not fear but freedom, the freedom to say and do what I feel like. I have been told what my place is. I accept it, but not entirely. “Homosexual” in the dream signifies something, pr
obably an odious play that is being performed. Not only am I not allowed to participate, I dislike the subject matter: homosexual intellectuals. It is a drama I don’t like and I am not allowed to enter it. I have no role at all, in any drama; there is just the one, and it is alien to me (hence the “teacher” looks like my attorney; this is an adversary situation). (I have no under standing of adversary situations, as I’ve long realized.) The dream has profound Gnostic implications; the whole situation is the Gnostic appraisal of our lives here: assigned roles in an odious drama, that is, a drama inimical to our real natures. It is a vast enactment of something unnatural. Audience and players alike collude in something that should not be. This is not my drama; had I been allowed to participate I would have disrupted it because I would have spoken contrary to the purpose and spirit of the drama, the only drama going on. This is not my world (in the dream I entered the auditorium from the outside, from perhaps a transmundane source, if indeed, as I suppose, this auditorium represents our world, the audience and actors humans living here, acting out their lives as mere roles in a closed cosmos or what they accept as a closed cosmos). I am a disruptive force, an outsider, silenced by disapproval, by mass censure. So I will seek to understand, since I cannot participate. This “seeking to understand” is my exegesis and my decades of epistemological analysis. I am like a visiting sociologist, like Margaret Mead investigating a foreign culture. This is not my home; these are either homosexuals or at the very least they take homosexual intellectuals to be important. I would say that this dream verifies that 2-3-74 was the Gnostic experience. From that moment on I was able to create a role for myself, rather thus my condition of Geworfenheit was reversed, nullified, solved. There are profound overtones of Existentialism here, especially from Gnosticism. The dream presents the paradigm of the Gnostic perception/conception of Dasein, in particular being thrown or cast into an alien world; moreover, the dream shows that my lifelong streak of rebellion is because this is an alien world to me, and, because it is alien, I don’t know how to behave; I do not obey the rules and conventions because I do not understand them, since they are alien to me, and the drama was going on before I arrived here (i.e., was born). My rebellion, then, is a confirmation of my Dasein as basically Gnostic; the rebellion stems from Geworfenheit and the Fremd and Unheimlich. I have gone to a lot of trouble to accommodate the situation; I have ceased interrupting the drama by trying to join in—I now understand that it is a drama and that these people are playing roles assigned to them—but I am not entirely silent; my “rebellion” which is not truly rebellion but seems so (since it is disruptive) has turned into scholarly analysis, an attempt on my part to understand this alien situation of which I have only very partial knowledge. I must ask questions if I am going to understand.