Because the power to bestow and withhold knowledge of what is truly there (the answer to “ti to on?”) is to say God, and no activity on our part will in itself ever unravel the mystery. (The nature of the situation dictates this, and Kant seems to be the first thinker systematically aware of this.) If on our own we try to plumb—or even discern—the interface we enter an infinite regress—as I’ve discovered for almost 8 years: since the interface is not so much:
but:
Which is to say that the interface is somehow in us and in world; so the interface simply recycles our own mind back to us over and over again; the prison gate of isolation—of the atomized self—closes once more (this is dealt with in “Frozen Journey”). Thus we know others only through the grace of God (as in the beetle satori), and this pertains of salvation: to know others—just as hell pertains to isolation. Then knowledge of God as other is knowledge of ultimate other and is the triumph and consummation of the axis of salvation that began, for me, with the beetle satori. If αγάπη (agape) equals empathy then there is only one road to salvation; in its partial form it deals with and pertains to finite creatures (but is real): in its complete form (absolute, realized form) it pertains to God; this is an axis. What and who one has loved in world (“love” here being αγάπη) has always pertained to God; it was always God who was loved, so that in the end all that was lost—all that was known and hence loved—is restored in and as God.
I never would have come to these realizations except for Malebranche. Then upon seeing the film The Elephant Man figuring out the interface. Then, last night, realizing that all my satoris, back to the first, the beetle one, are due to grace and involve knowledge—correct knowledge—that by its nature can only be revealed; whereupon I now see one vast axis of disclosure from the first (the beetle), culminating in 2-74 and then 3-74, and then tapering off in subsequent revelations. 2-3-74—and specifically Valis itself, in me and in external reality, centering around the transfer of information about Chrissy’s birth defect—then is the quintessential moment in a pattern of revelation predicated on grace and involving salvation stretching out across my entire life. What, then, I have viewed as a preoccupation with epistemology turns out to be a search for—and a finding of—God.
[55:Z-8] “A long extinct true cosmos and it’s still there.” AI voice: hypnogogic.
“Extinct” must mean: in terms of our ability to perceive it.
[55:D-70] Dio. Eureka. I found the—
Christic Institute.49 All the way back to Tears: the “Acts” material, the dream, the King-Felix cypher. Karen Silkwood.
The Parousia is here and the Holy Mother Church knows it. My 2-3-74 to 2-75 experience (back to ’70 if you include Tears) has to do with the Parousia. Eleven years and at last I hold it in my hands and it does have to do with Pere Teilhard. My Tagore vision is authentic; Christ is here. Point Omega.
[ . . . ]
What—I think—is the most exciting is that due to 2-3-74, my Tagore vision, what Victor Ferkis has said and the Christic Institute, I can now discern—albeit dimly—the outline of a new theology, rooted in the epoch we are moving into. It is a Christian-Buddhist neo-pantheism very close to Pere Teilhard’s Christocentric Point Omega, but having specifically to do with the unitary ecosphere—and for me, closely related to Malebranche’s Cartesian pantheism, which of course goes back to Augustine and Pauline mysticism—and may also include the new physics and field theory, a merging of science and theology in defense of a palpably living universe. (There may also be an information and a Platonic component.)
I feel confident now that my 2-3-74 experience is not reactionary but is carrying me into the future—a vast quantum leap from political action to one colossal metaview of reality that embraces the political and the spiritual, the scientific and the religious: what for me personally may be the quintessential summation of my entire life of inquiry and worldview; for me and for mankind a new age is opening in which the holy, expected from the top, so to speak, returns at the bottom, at the trash stratum of the alley, humble and noble, beautiful and suffering and alive and conscious, personified in and by my Tagore vision.
If indeed it is the triumph of Christianity to dignify the lowly, here now is a whole new leap along that axis: the lowly snail darter becomes identified with suffering ubiquitous Christ and by being assimilated to him is glorified as if nature itself—and the electronic environment of info and signals and message traffic—is able to perish and be resurrected as and with the cosmic Christ (Jesus Patibilis) of Pere Teilhard. Thus Christ extends even beyond the reality of the organic to bits of newspaper and song lyrics and random pages of popular print: one vast entity that evolves and thinks and has both personality and consciousness. It perfects itself and includes us all, subsuming and incorporating progressively more and more of its environment into arrangements of information—which is to say negative entropy: this is, in fact, a runaway positive feedback loop of greater and greater complexity and organization.
Malebranche is not only compatible with this neo-pantheism—more: it is a highly sophisticated modern-day version of how God can be here—all around us—and we be yet unaware: that is, he is everywhere yet unseen. Malebranche’s mystical pantheism is the philosophical explanation of eco-theology. In other words, Malebranche is the how and eco-theology the what.
[55:D-84] Thus what I have been trying to do in the exegesis—and which exhausts me—is deliberately on my own part again to do what I did in 2-3-74! But that was sparked by the messenger, and now I have him not. Hence I simply become more and more weary as world becomes more and more powerful over me. I seek to regain, to recapture, the Liberator of 2-74 to 2-75—whereupon world regained its power over me: the vision was lost and I fell back. I do not seek to gain Gnosis and liberation but to regain it; I had it and lost it! This is why trying to write Owl broke me: it is this that is the topic of Owl! Although my effort seems cerebral (having to do with thinking) it is really existential—but failing.
Cerebral = knowledge = Gnosis; typically Faustian, as in Goethe’s Faust, part one.
VALIS built the maze and fell into it. The maze changes because it is alive.
It is alive because it draws on and from the very thoughts of the creation trapped in it; his efforts to solve it are thoughts, and it is these thoughts that “fuel” it—i.e., it is one vast Chinese finger trap; the harder I try to get out, the more powerful world becomes. Hence hex. 47: my increasing exhaustion. What, then, should I do?
[55:D-85] I was treated to a demonstration of YHWH: thought, word and reality were one, with no ideation separate from the word and no difference between the word—what I said—and the deed; it was the deed. Moreover, there was absolute a priori knowing (about Denise, about Tess). And this unitary “thing” (thought, word, act) is his power (omnipotence). He willed it so, by the use of Holy Wisdom, a separate hypostasis who is never apart from him.
[ . . . ]
The really extraordinary thing [is] that although I was terror-stricken I experienced absolute lucidity; I saw and understood my total situation perfectly, without degree and without reasoning it out. It was utter knowledge. I was—had been—destroying that which was of most value to me in the world: Tessa and Christopher: they are all I have. However good or bad Denise is intrinsically: that was secondary and tangential: God summoned me back to what was morally right and what existed: it was right and it was real. I had been occluded and severely jeopardized this most precious element in my life. This was no vague intimation; YHWH summoned me back from the lip of the abyss. What I stood to lose by my wrong actions was that which my very physical life depended on. I was on the brink of literal doom, yet indirectly so: Denise would destroy me not by what she did but by what I did. There was in this a vast moral summons, for in Judaism, God and morality are one and the same. This was the Lord God of Israel, not just a vague God but YHWH—and I knew it. This was the God of the Torah summoning me back to moral reality, with no choice; he willed it; he comman
ded me to return to life and what was right. (In him and by him the two are one and the same.) Thus morality and that which gives and sustains life stood bipolarized to immorality (sin) and that which takes life. Sin and death, then, were one. I sinned and I died. Abandoning Tessa and Christopher meant my death. Moreover, he gave me words to express all this to them (rather than just an understanding of it) so deed was conjoined to knowledge: what I knew I did—act and cognition being one, as morality (the law of God) and life were one.
[ . . . ]
It was 3-74 all over again, but with moral overtones. Carried beyond the irresistible to the terrifyingly irresistible. In this case I had fallen into mortal sin (this was not the case in 3-74; there I was in peril but not in peril of mortal sin); I could, then, lose my freedom or life, but here I lost my soul; I not only doomed myself—I damned myself. Here, power and wisdom prevailed; in 3-74 knowledge and love prevailed: this yesterday was YHWH, not Abba.
The situation was intricate, unstable, ambiguous. There was a single right choice and it had to be made then and no later. God made it for me, based on his wisdom, power, and because it involved morality, goodness (as exemplified by the law). Thus, having justified me in 2-3-74, he forbade me from sinning any further; he intervened absolutely.* [ . . . ]
This was an invasion of my psyche by absolute knowledge. It bore no relation to what I had up to that moment believed, wrongly believed. There was not even a sense of insight, of satori: it was pure knowledge, like a sort of seeing: a vision of the situation as it actually was. And it was primarily a moral seeing. Absolute moral rectitude occurred in me. It simply took place. All at once it was. I guess I saw it as God saw it. And how different that was! And absolute! It was not a viewpoint. It was knowing.
What I have been calling “the meta-abstraction” is in fact knowledge—the act of knowing—as God knows (i.e., knows what is, i.e., world). In 2-74 and more fully later in 3-74 I saw as God sees and understood as God understands, that is, absolutely and a priori, in which what is known is exactly the same as what is; they are assimilated to each other. That the mind of God was at that time in my mind—I experienced that as Valis in my mind. All that I saw (Christian apocalyptic world, the plasmate, set to ground, the prison, the secret Christians, the abolition of time—i.e., coaxial reality and the conception/perception of eternal constants)—this is how God sees; I did not see this or understand this; God saw and understood this, and, as I say, I saw and understood because he bloomed in my mind like cold white light (hence I experienced an infinitude of space).➊ I realize this due to Sunday night when the same absolute knowing by God in me induced a realization of my practical and moral jeopardy. Again there was certitude—total, unconditioned knowing—but what I knew this time was dreadful and lethal to me practically and spiritually. Once again the unitary fusion of knowing and doing occurred because for God there is no distinction between what he knows and what he does. Ratiocination—logic itself, thinking itself—does not occur because it is not required; God does not figure out; he does not reason because he does not need to reason.
It was—both times—as if my mind expanded into infinity (conceived as spatial infinity). The sense one gets is that one’s mind contains all reality, and this is because all reality is known a priori and absolutely, not sensibly and contingently.
[ . . . ]
I guess for a moment I was plunged into hell and discovered what it consists of: one is given absolute moral insight into one’s own sinful nature, and there is no way it can be rectified; it is now too late; hence hell is eternal. This is clearly and obviously the just punishment and the logical punishment: absolutely (by the knowledge of God’s own mind) to see what one has done, illuminated by the divine light that reveals all. This is total knowledge of the situation and of oneself. It can be awful. By this divine illumination one’s cognition/perception condemns one; this is absolute self-condemnation not based on arbitrary rules but on total comprehension of what, really, is structural and how one has fitted into this structure and changed it by one’s deeds. The harmony and order of the cosmos are disrupted by what one has done. It was not guilt that I experienced; it was understanding. This is more terrible than any guilt. Guilt admits of degree; this was boundless. [ . . . ]
These revelations that took place Sunday night tell me a great deal about God, wisdom, morality and the Torah, and the order and sustaining of the cosmos—understandings I never had even an inkling of before. I see how correct moral laws function in the divine government and are inseparable from the physical laws that regulate reality itself; moreover, this being the case (the homologizing—logically—of physical law and moral law in sustaining the cosmos, i.e., order) shows why God as cosmocrator is on tologically the source of morality as his primary attribute or manifestation (as Judaism teaches): and as I say, the Gnostics are correct: heimarmene combines causation and the Mosaic dispensation because both are essential in the divine government. God’s will, then, which (as Spinoza rightly says) is physical law, is based on Holy Wisdom who informs the creator of what is, and in a certain real sense the absolute comprehension of what is (omniscience) determines what should be.
Thus (as I say) wisdom and morality and the preservation of the cosmos—universal rules—become one. My radical new comprehension stems from sharing God’s view of reality and morality as a unitary “thing”; they only become unitary—one and the same—when Holy Wisdom is involved so that absolute a priori knowing exists.
The key term is being (Sein, esse, einai); this is what is preserved because this is what Holy Wisdom knows. Hence the role of God as creator is stressed. (I did manage to deal with some of this in DI.) I can now see clearly why and in what way Hagia Sophia is the primary agent in creation.
All this (based on Sunday night) is probably one of the greatest leaps in my theology-epistemology-worldview-ideology. There is nothing radical in it; it is fundamental: the OT itself. And yet, significantly, I was already moving in this direction, in my thinking (as expressed in DI) and in my life (conservatism, preservation, accrual and building/creating). (And, very important, stability.) What epitomizes all this is not idealism but the rational (as Rabbi Hertz and others point out regarding Judaism). One could say that Sunday night absolute rationality invaded my mind and totally possessed it. (Apollo, then, in contrast to Dionysus or Faust.) Yes, ever since 2-74 I have venerated and sought out St. Sophia, for it was she of whom the AI voice spoke. I see myself as intoxicated up to Sunday night; whereupon I became sober; I came to my senses very suddenly—at the last moment.
➊ Augustine teaches this: the divine illumination, later picked up by Malebranche.
[55:D-110] I have plumbed the true secret core of authentic Christianity—i.e., in 2-3-74. Hidden within the passion, the crucifixion, is its mirror opposite: ecstasis: joy, i.e., Dionysus, and this is what broke over me in 2-3-74: not just theoretical knowledge (Gnosis) but the Christian ecstatic experience.
Hence when I read Luke I recognize Jesus as a miracle worker, a guru, a magician. He is the God of change.
* * *
[55:D-115] This means that my lifetime search in plumbing the depths of suffering in order to unravel its mysteries has proven successful. This relates to the rat, the beetle, the burning Japanese soldier, the Galapagos turtle; this has to do with empathy—my empathy—which is another word for agape: and agape is the greatest of the Christian virtues, as Paul tells us: it is the true way of the Christian. But why? Because it is good, i.e., a virtue?* Not exactly. Agape is a road along which one travels in imitation of Christ, to penetrate to the core—deepest ontological layer—of suffering (his passion and crucifixion), and there, if you follow that road—and that road only—you arrive at the secret: the Resurrection—which is the miraculous conversion of suffering into ecstasy, which is uniquely the Christian miracle; this is how Christianity and Christianity alone solves the problem of suffering. This solution is not a philosophical, intellectual understanding (e.g., why there is suffering) but an
event: the dramatic conversion of suffering, not into mere stoic apathy, the mere lack of suffering, but into its affective and ontological bipolar opposite: ecstasy—and here, precisely, Dionysus-Zagreus enters; Jesus “is” Dionysus-Zagreus as a solution to suffering; this is not just ecstasy but, more, ecstasy as the conversion of suffering. (This conversion is not found in the Dionysian-Orphic system; ecstasy is sought for its own sake.)
There is, then, no exultation in suffering per se, here; suffering, as in Buddhism, is to be solved; thus Jesus addresses the same problem that Buddhism and Stoicism address, but solves it quite differently. If Buddhas can be called victors, certainly, then, the Christian (who goes all the way to the end of the road of agape) is even more a victor, for he is not merely liberated from suffering—he experiences ecstasy. Why? My perception is: he remembers Christ the bridegroom having just been here and anticipates his imminent return, and is now as bride preparing for that re turn; the Christian is right now making the wedding preparations in this the tiny interval between Christ leaving and his anticipated imminent return; this is the Dasein of the true Christian, and this is joyful, in fact ecstatic. I know because I experienced it. There is memory of Christ (anamnesis) and anticipation (eschatology), and, most of all, the sense of oneself as the bride of Christ (which is, as soul, which is female). This hierogamy is consummated by the birth in the Spirit, the purpose of the messianic mission; and I do speak of this in VALIS. All time and all space collapse into this: the memory, the anticipation, and the understanding of oneself as the intended bride—which is literally (not just symbolically!) fulfilled by the birth in the spirit which occurs now: it is not anticipated but occurs.