[48:834] Hypnagogic: When I saw Valis, reality was breaking down (to what it really consisted of), and not an invasion of reality.
This is “breaking down” in the sense of breaking down an engine or model of something to see what it’s made out of.
This is de-Gestalting: analysis and not right hemisphere. A surprising realization. Could that mean that my left hemisphere came in? Suddenly. Well, the Rorschach test that Claire Thompson gave me showed that my dominant function was intuition, which is Gestalting, which is right hemisphere: to repeat: dominant, and to the greatest extent she’d ever seen. So my left hemisphere thinking function cut in: analysis. Well, then, it would be as if a child seeing the world for the first time could reason about it with an adult’s thinking capacity. And it’s connected to the unconscious and the archetypes. So in dreams its ratiocination appears as writing, and now (and formerly) it is heard as the AI voice. Then it analyzed the Xerox missive situation subliminally. It broke that down, too. And in hypnagogic state, I transliminate its thinking. Hence my anima is the spirit of reason (St. Sophia). She is not moody but incisive of course: the Sibyl. My anima as ancient wise woman. The ajna eye analyzes: breaks down the situation: sees shrewdly into it.
So in apprehending reality she sees into it and deconstructs it with ruthless concentrated analysis: and discerns Valis hidden by camouflage; she extracts Valis out of total reality, rather than Gestalting all reality into one; Valis is separated from the rest of reality, pitilessly. There is Valis and not-Valis. Valis is contrasted to its environment.➊
Then 3-74 was a psychosis: an invasion by the unconscious of the fragile consciousness and an overwhelming of it; but the rational faculty was in the unconscious! The judging, analytic, thinking faculty.
This explains why I felt myself to be female.
She was surprised to see Valis, but she had logically figured out that it must exist—i.e., Ubik.
➊ And this explains her seeing the set-ground discrimination, the plasmate; it is an analytical function, not synthetic. The written pages are digital thinking, not analogic. And the speech center is normally in the left brain, so she speaks (the AI voice). No wonder I had the impression that I was hooked up to a computer!
[48:836] If (as it would appear) she is my anima, then I am backed up by powerful forces: a composite of the Sibyl, Athena, and St. Sophia and Diana (and the Fairy Queen).
So she detects a highly intelligent macro life form camouflaged in our reality, and she and it exchange information. And she sees its “blood” which are messages; then Valis is the dominant life form and she the true (phylogenic) human! Not me as ontogenic epiphenomenon.
[ . . . ]
She is in syzygy with Valis, not with me—no. She is daughter to it. “His first creation: his darling and delight”!38
Well, I am very happy to think of the woman (Sibyl, AI Voice) as part of myself. (Recognize it as a hallucination from my unconscious: my anima, and not emanating adventitiously.) I gain by this introjection of what I’ve previously been projecting because I live and respect—in fact venerate if not outright worship—her. If she is a part of me, I can take more pride in what I am. I just wish I could hear her more often; in fact take me over again. I would prefer it if she were running things, since she is so shrewd.
Could she have “been” Valis via an observer-participant-universe situation, as a sort of inner-outer field? Did she “warp from plumb”? And did the info about Chrissy come from her “projected”? The border between me and not-me had dissolved in an oceanic mystical-psychotic-psychotomimetic state. But (in my opinion) this was the correct way to experience myself and world, as a sentient volitional field.
[48:839] Hypnagogic: repeat of “and [he] is alive” heard, and this seen on page: YHWH—small letters in intertwined luminous gold and red, like the plasmate, and raised—like a glowing scarab. Synchronized with the word “he.”
Then the God who is instilling knowledge directly in me is none less than YHWH. And it is he who “is alive”—the Living God who must work outside the Churches and restores the Lost (deliberately destroyed by Satan) worship; he deals directly with those such as me. He is in-breaking.
The AI voice: The still, small voice that Elijah heard.
The tetragrammaton shone like a polished precious jewel and metals and pure color and fluid light interwoven like strands.
[48:842] I know that St. Sophia, the Buddha, Siddhartha and Apollo have been mentioned. So the stamp of the divine has been there from almost the start. And yet to see the tetragrammaton and have it connected (synchronized) with the audio “he” in “he is alive” seems different and unique to me, and a matter of a higher—the highest—order. I guess to me the fact is that none of these other names allude to God in the sense that YHWH does. It is as if the others are attributes or cultural (i.e., man-made) hypostases, and YHWH is YHWH; viz: there is no God but God, i.e., the God who “is what he is,” the tetragrammaton. The others are names humans give to God; YHWH is the name by which God referred to himself when he conversed with Moses; it tells who he is. It is (v. the EB) his personal name and means “He brings into existence what is.”
[48:846] Am I to assume that Christianity as it has developed has led us away from true monotheism—just as the Jews say? That Christ is—the trinity is a false (even Satanic?) doctrine? To worship Christ is blasphemy? The Gnostics had it totally backward? Jesus is a revelator of the nature of God, and high priest and holy wisdom. But there is God (YHWH) vs. Satan (v. Zoroaster and Qumran!!).
What if the fall of the temple and Masada was Armageddon, and Satan ➊ won? And ruled ever since 70 A.D. (Tears), but now YHWH is returning?
➊ I.e., the “Sons of Darkness.” So the 1st advent was a failure: “She was not acceptable before.” But we’re told that Christ (i.e., the Sons of Light) triumphed. But they didn’t; the Essenes perished at Masada. And this is what Tears reveals; and this was my 2-74 vision of the BIP world and Christians—the true Christians—illegal. Satan won in 70 A.D. And real creation stopped. But now YHWH counterattacks and re-enters this, the domain of darkness. For new battle.
[48:847]
Satan pretends YHWH won; YHWH will cause to exist what Satan pretends (i.e., occludes us into believing) exists. It is a sort of trick played on Satan, but in deadly earnest: to make Satan’s “falsework” (pretense) real. A wise strategy.
God turns the lie (“God won”) into the truth, and Satan is surprised; he didn’t foresee this. Thus those most duped are most right, paradoxically; YHWH takes advantage of the irony and ambiguity to cause to be what seems to be; this is his fundamental power/nature. Thus salvation—not just of the individual but of creation—depends on being a guileless fool. “Id non est; atque credo.”39
I don’t know if the supra is right. YHWH revealed the truth—the actual Tears world—to me, so obviously it is the divine strategy to reveal this, the real situation. I think that it’s just so awful that I’m flinching. So forget the above. The fact is, this is a prison. Satan won in 70 A.D. and the Essenes are dead; but YHWH is instilling them in some of us in the present; this, too, is true, and revealed, and good.
[ . . . ]
The battle is going on, but Satan is at the center—of government, of church. Still, YHWH has the crucial advantage of a priori foresight. It was revealed to me that ultimately he wins every hand. This was my primary vision: the dialectic and how it works. The OT is harsh, but it accords with the facts: we are in literal slavery, and must be taken out of it, as the Jews were delivered from Egypt.
[48:850] (1) The double worlds superimposition and two selves in me: like Altman’s 3 Women.40 (2) And then (later) I see Valis.
What is the relationship between (1) and (2)? It would seem as if (2) is actually what is there, and not what we see that is included in (1). I.e., (1) raises a question that is answered by (2). Conversely, the purpose of (2) is shown us by (1). Upon seeing (1) and not (2), we would be left in the frightening dream “world” of 3 Women
with the possibility that nothing could replace something, or, worse, that it is this way now—a dream, with no substance behind it. This was the fear that 3 Women left me with. But I must remember that later on I saw Valis is not a dream, but which explains the dream, i.e., (1).
It can be argued that there is a terrible risk to decompose world because if it is the only “thing that is the case,” you will be left with nonbeing; but in point of fact I wound up with Valis—so it was a net gain and not a loss (of reality). There was more reality “behind” world than in world qua world. Nonetheless it is terrifying to realize that something provides world and that on its own it has no substance (substantia). Either (1) or (2) alone would pose an unfathomable mystery. But together they form a coherence—and yet it is a startling and mysterious coherence that few people have ever encountered: the dissolving of the world (of multiplicity) to be replaced by another world of multiplicity, and then a sentient volitional unity underlying everything as mind revealed. And it not only thought world—it also thought me—which is really startling.
[48:852] So my writing—and thinking—have been a search for God; but in the end, when the crisis came—in Heidegger’s sense of me being aware of my own death, of my own non-being—it was YHWH who found me, not me him.*
At all costs the world must be real; it must not betray its epiphenomenality except under certain exceptional circumstances, such as 2-3-74, since the consequences can be lethal (since they involve [1] non-being and [2] the revealing of non-being). Thus such a crisis engages the percipient in death, and, if all goes well, resurrection; but only the most extreme circumstances would call it forth; it is, in my opinion, the ultimate move by God, since in allowing world to dissolve (display non being) he replaces it with himself (pellucid theophany). Both self and world disappear for a moment. The seriousness of this can’t be overstated—and the possible benefit (in terms of outcome experience of being by the creatorial percipient). It is like the bichlorides: “a very poisonous poison for you”; but if used in a “measured dose” a medicine that cures madness; viz: the drugged intoxication of our earthly state. But it can kill, if misapplied.
[48:857]
[48:859] Then Stigmata and “Faith” tell the true story! Worship of Belial as YHWH—in YHWH’s place. My analysis of the visage in the sky in 1963 was correct. Belial ruled this world in a YHWH costume; the real YHWH is Ubik, pushed to the periphery of trashy TV commercials!
My God: it is specifically stipulated that Ubik is the—not a—reality support!
[48:861] “St. Sophia is going to be born again; she was not acceptable before.” I.e., the first advent was a failure—I have to face that. Crucifixion was not the intended goal. There is no original sin and hence no vicarious atonement. Paul made it all up to explain why Jesus “succeeded,” whereas the light went out and a false (Satanic) church arose based on the cross not the fish.
[48:865] Their experiences (including world) in Ubik can’t be explained except by their being dead and not knowing it; through these phenomena they deduce the truth: their true—vs. apparent or imagined—state. My experiences in 2-3-74 were like those in Ubik. (And this was before I read the Commedia.) Therefore I am dead. YHWH is rescuing us by breaking into our umwelt. What I must keep in mind is that I wrote Ubik upon reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead in which our true situation is laid out: the Great Secret.
Being dead, we can rise or sink. If we rise we can reach the one (Valis, Ubik, YHWH, the semplice lume41) (cf. Plotinus). What happens in Ubik is that Ubik at last throws off its multiple (multiplicity) disguises and reveals itself as the one which is everywhere in countless disguises. It can be found anywhere but in profane (“trash”) disguises; i.e., camouflaged. It pervades the reality that it has “created” (or is). It is not separate from that reality, like artificer and artifact. But it is absconditus: hidden by means of taking countless disguises. Only if it chooses to reveal itself (theophany) can it as sentient, volitional unity be detected. This is certainly very much like Brahman.
I have found a fundamental error in ancient mystical theory, not corrected until Plotinus: the Orphics and Plato believed that the descent and ascent of the soul was a spatial trajectory, past the planets to the stars—to and from. Aristotle believed in the sublunar and supralunar realms. Plotinus realized that the realms are not spatially different, but are levels of being outside time and space. This basic error shows up later on in imagining heaven as being in the sky: even with Schiller: “Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen überm Sternenzelt.” 42 So transcendent deity is supposed to be remote either spatially or as if spatially, and immanent deity is near. Deity is considered outside the universe as if spatially far off and beyond the universe, the way an artisan is outside his artifact. This despite Plotinus and his concentric levels or rings of being. In The Commedia, they travel upward physically; i.e., spatially. God is not here; he is there (in the sky). This is corrected in Ubik. It all has to do with a confusion between the pleroma and the cylum, the latter being the vault of heaven. If this error is made, then there exists no conceptual framework to account for the sort of non-spatial rising to a superior—i.e., “higher”—level of being in this lifetime (à la Plotinus) while being spatially unmoved (i.e., not ascending to the cylum43). If the spatial idea is abandoned, transcendent deity is as close as immanent deity.
[ . . . ]
By viewing it as a non- spatial journey, Plotinus made it available to this lifetime. (I mean, if you’re alive and in your body, how are you going to travel up past the planets one by one?) I see: Ubik stipulates that they are dead and so—so-to-speak inadvertently—has the divine—Ubik—available in the trash level: close at hand. So I’m not dead (v. supra). It’s just that Plotinus is right.
[48:874] Hypnagogic thought: Elijah operating you (whom I call Thomas, Thomas is Elijah).
Two routes to determining the spurious:
(1) Observation of reality; the Joint syndrome
(2) Memory. You had not been here but elsewhere and were someone else.
(1) and (2) are twin prongs. They are the only route to detecting a pseudoworld; either one alone is conclusive. But both would logically exist, so if either is detected the other could be, logically.
In the case of (2), you were evidently taken from the real world to this one, and your memory tampered with. In the case of (1), your perceptions/cognition are occluded.
So if you can see de-occluded and also remember, then you know.
I realized this while having a dream that I was (back again) at 1126 Francisco St. It seemed real. To verify, I could either (1) carefully scrutinize this reality for signs of simulation, or (2) remember where I really had been—or am now really. (1) and (2) together would mutually reinforce and exclude any possibility of error. I studied a lamp—the little red lamp I used to have—and it did not seem quite real. Okay; point (1). Then I remembered—but only dimly—being later and elsewhere, but could not pin it down to Santa Ana 1979. Still, just the impression—because it pointed to lack of history, of continuity—was enough. Thus within the dream I was able to determine that it was irreal; and I drew the conclusion that God was providing me with 1126 Francisco as a wish fulfillment reward, since I liked it. However, in the case of Santa Ana 1979 I cannot draw that conclusion; it is more of a punishment, and in 74 when the punishment got too great (the pain and fear too much) I woke up.
[ . . . ]
Note: the dream world of 1126 Francisco St. draws on actual memory—my memory. Often I speculate that this (one) is drawn from memory constituents. Fed back to me. See, in the dream, the only reference point I have against which to check the veracity of the world is my memory, and the world is drawn from that very same memory, a better, unimpaired source of it than mine. So the “reality” will invariably hold up! It’s like deciding something is real by comparing it with itself. So it’s a fool-proof simulation, if based on that basis. So in a sense the more you reality test in the conventional way the more convincing it is—if it is contri
ved out of half-forgotten memories (not recognized as memory) and compared to memory itself—it can just spin out pseudoworld as if from a bottomless well. And the cut-off point is the same for “world” and comparison so pragmatically it equals ¥.
Nonetheless all I’d have to do is remember being somewhere else and someone else. But to also see reality as simulated.
If you put pressure on the reality, and if it’s based on forgotten memories, it’ll just spin out more and more of itself, like the dialectic. The proliferation of multiplicity is a guarantee of nothing, since sensory deprivation allows the mind to auto-spin out world endlessly to fill the vacuum.
The raising of the perceptual occlusion will indicate irreality, but anamnesis does more: it indicates—in contrast—a real world and a real you. So it does not just dissolve away. It substitutes. Real self and real world.
[48:882a] That dream about the tall building: “Alto Carmel”—there were fire engines parked around it. And it was on Mount Carmel that Elijah called down the heavenly fire.44
Phoning my friend Elisha.
Dream of prophet called “Elias.”
Tom Disch felt that the personality who had taken me over was Elijah (it was near the time of Passover) but he didn’t connect it with the prophecy in Malachi that the return of (the spirit of) Elijah heralded the advent of the Messiah.45 But since then I’ve heard all the prophecies by the AI voice.
Perhaps also significant is that it was Elijah who experienced the theophany of YHWH as the “low murmuring voice” just as I do.46
He was afraid of the Romans because as John the Baptist he had been killed by them—my dream about being in the cage in Roman times. And this would be why he spoke/thought in the Koine rather than Hebrew and remembered the Christians as illegal—a secret underground. He expected Christ to return very soon and felt joy, not sorrow.