I’m saying that NFMD can’t happen without GO. So it’s an up by his bootstraps situation, a self-causing situation—then truly it is ex nihilo. (No wonder there was no ideation!) This is a time-travel paradox. Both GO and NFMD are generated within a closed system out of nothing and enter from nowhere; i.e., from outside the system. GO is dependent for its existence on NFMD, and NFMD on GO, so which is cause and which is effect? Answer: each is the cause of the other and the effect of the other. Consider the original groove-tracking situation. How do you get out of it? Answer: you have to be out of it to get out of it; look to The Tao of Physics (Capra) and the bootstrap theory for the answer; I knew I was dealing with field theory and quanta when I dealt with Valis. Put even more simply, How can you do something you would not do? which is required for salvation in my system (disregarding the temporal factor the paradox still remains). There would have to be a psychological (mental) death and rebirth as someone different; but where did it come from? Hence “Thomas,” who knew not the dog, car nor cat. It is possible that the only event that could make this possible would be abasement, suffering and pain and apprehension and tension so great that it would break down the historical self and literally assassinate it. In the absence of which, thereupon, an ex nihilo new self would come into existence, like a newly-granted second soul. This brings me back to my shamanist analysis of the crucifixion, the Passion of Christ story, as a secret method of overcoming the world (as Jesus put it); viz: the world overcomes you; you die; a new self is born; it is ipso facto in a GO situation, for, being new, it will not track the old groove; the twin tapes simply won’t work since the outer tape remains but not the inner. The way to destroy synchronization is to destroy the self (you can’t very well destroy the world), and the best way to destroy the self is to bilk the world into doing it. But this is a tricky business because you must not physically die; you must be alive to perform the NFMD. The early Christians themselves soon got it wrong and began to leap under Roman chariot wheels, upon which they physically died, making NFMD impossible. That they failed is shown by the fact that they did not rise from the dead in three days; they were never seen again. The field for right action is in this world, not the next.
[ . . . ]
Now let’s try this theory. The ability to make time run backward gets you out of your programmed groove (“groove tracking”) and renders you free. This ability and only this ability frees you from an otherwise airtight tyranny that dooms all mankind, all life forms, in fact. Thus this is a stunning and probably new survival talent, an evolutionary new ability that advances the individual up the ladder of homeostasis to a stage where he is a whole other higher organism entirely. It is equal in terms of the evolution of life to the development of the opposable thumb, the eye, the lung, the wing, the large cerebral cortex, standing upright, etc. Upon the perfection (so to speak field operation) of this ability the human has become higher than the angels and all that implies. He is operating in a supratemporal dimension, and this has vast implications for knowledge; for overcoming causality—if he can affect the past he can modulate the present (what I called “Valis”), and if he can draw information to him from the future he can problem solve like a crazy thing. This is not just phylogenic memory, as I supposed; it isn’t limited to drawing on the distant past. The crucial information related to 3-74 was information drawn from the future. He can set up alternate worlds, so in effect he is trans-world, spans not only time but world tracks.
Now, this raises the question as to whether there exists a vast meta-mind (as I conceive Valis to be) who is encouraging the development of this time-disruption faculty in order to evolve the human species further; or, put another way, the human being who has this faculty and makes use of it (for example under vast stress, as I was under in 3-74) is an expression of this meta-mind. I am sure of it. I was not alone in what happened; it was as if angels—divine and partially visible powers—were present. There may be a species mind stretching back into the past and into the future where evolved humans (imaged as the 3-eyed people?) may exist already using this faculty. When you start disrupting time you may be operating in the realm of a supratemporal composite discorporate mind—I think I was; this is what I call Valis. But it seems to me that the intrinsic nature of the sort of talent I’m discussing would cause to come into existence a meta-mind by itself, in that it would hop across expanses of time that lie outside its own lifetime, which would de facto make it a meta-mind; I mean it would be unlocked from the time-span of its physical body. For one thing (here is Jung’s intuition function) he would exist (his mind would exist) in alternate worlds, and this alone implies a lot; by affecting the past he would then find himself shifting across laterally (orthogonally) in time . . . which would explain my subcortically remembering that it had just been a cool, high and moist climate. So the mind with this talent would in itself become a meta-mind, outside of causality, spanning alternate worlds, able to modify his own present reality by changed actions in the past, thus setting up alternate worlds; he would be the cause and would in turn be affected by himself as cause—again the bootstrap phenomenon. Such a mind could act as cause to its own effect, affecting itself as if from outside like a feedback circuit, and, upon having successfully affected itself, the self as cause would eliminate itself as if it had never existed, which again is the ex nihilo or bootstrap paradox of time travel. Minds or versions of the mind, foci of the mind, would come into existence, influence the mind and upon success render itself never having existed in the first place; but the mind would sense an adventitious other mind operating on it in its behalf. Could it not then become its own AI voice, its own tutelary spirit? It would continually monitor its own status as if in a heuristic process; yes, it would be process, not hypostasis. You would have a mind that itself would evolve the way a species evolves.
It would be itself and not-itself continually.
[82:70] March 3, 1980
I have felt for a couple of days that what I am dealing with now is not the issue of what happened in 3-74 but rather the mechanics of what happened, as if I have found the machine and am simply taking it apart piece by piece now that I finally have my hands on it. A simple explanation: I overran external time, caused it to run backward in relation to myself, and extracted the information from the drastically altered world that I needed. More, I can see that a decade before 3-74 I was subliminally aware of the problem that lay ahead and was already beginning to analyze it, as I am analyzing my response now. Knowing what was coming, and when, my faculty surfaced on cue and assumed motor-center control; it pre-empted my normal conscious personality and without ideation handled the situation that it had long known about. [ . . . ] Precognition was only one side of the faculty, the side that operated in advance of the situation. The other side was the rising to conscious control, the abolishing of my normal ego, the taking over of motor and speech centers, the drastic reorganization of perception so that nothing that needed to be known consciously was not known consciously. Knowing subliminally was no longer any good. The moment had arrived. My psyche reversed itself so that what had been latent became actual and what had been in conscious control for forty some years was simply obliterated. I have been expecting this, the faculty said. And now I will handle it. Get out of my way. It did not ask me; it told me. It became me. I was abolished. The faculty had anticipated and analyzed—as it so well shows in The Penultimate Truth—and now its hour had come. I myself, I got to see the universe as it sees it: bloody with information, a constant flow of traffic everywhere as if in a giant brain; in fact, to the faculty, reality is a giant brain whose information content the faculty plunders for its own use, and, having acquired the information, in the right time period, it acts on it, against the universe itself if necessary. This is a survival tool. The workshop in which it was built is the workshop of dying organisms that did not develop such a talent, that could not see or acquire the information or if they did when the moment came to act they could not act on it—they knew what was go
ing to happen and then they knew what was happening but they could not get it together and fight the antagonist off. The final stage, that of seizing motor and speech centers, simply indicates the success of the faculty; its dynamism is found at the heart of the faculty in its unconscious or latent stage where it foreknew and analyzed. My ego, consciousness, went like an obsolete species whose time was over; I made way for the next generator of life which could do battle because it had long ago figured out who was after its neck and why and how and, most of all, what the proper response was. So it is in the nature of the faculty, this faculty, to know when it is needed and to advance to control without negotiation and without explanation. But it let me see the world as it sees it, and what it sees is not what we see. The faculty has power over the outer world such as we cannot imagine, and, I realized even at the time, in 3-74, it has complete power over me—if there is a me anymore, now that the faculty has once come into conscious operation.
[82:105] April 4, 1980
Comments on 1-30-80 piece “Upon Reading The Tao of Physics.”
This would confirm the view I advance in my novels, especially my ten-volume meta-novel, that for every person there is a different universe which is the result of a mutual participation between him and the macrocosm, a field that is a syzygy between them.
My recent thoughts, when turned toward Capra’s book, make me think that because of the enormous (in fact lethal) stress on me in 3-74 I fed tremendous energy into this joint field (mutual reality produced by the two of me: myself and the macrocosm, the two together being what I call Valis). Thus the percent of material projected from my mind came to be the dominant part of the mutual field. The normal, customary balance was radically altered, due to my expression of intense will. This explains all the material in Valis derived from my mind: Ubik, Tears and now, I discover my childhood images derived from the book Silver Pennies.60
[ . . . ]
3-74 just proved that I have been right all along, that you can never know the universe (reality) as it really is because you can’t exclude yourself as a participant-observer. But, in all my writing, I never saw the utility of this observer-participant unique subjective individual world; viz: that under certain circumstances you could exert vast will on it, the subjective unique field which comes into existence as an interchange (interface) between you and reality in itself, and warp it to meet critical needs, needs which if not met meant the end of your life, and, if met, meant your literal physical salvation.*
[82:112] A long time ago the AI voice itself defined Valis, and I knew this was the definitive statement because I used it as the opening statement in the dictionary definition in VALIS: “A perturbation in the reality field.” I see now, having read Capra, that subatomic field theory is alluded to. And, I believe, the perturbation was caused by me. This sums it all up, then, what the AI voice said; field theory and me as source. Valis has defined itself, and all that remained for me was to identify myself as the source of the perturbation.
Since normally reality is process (in time), when time is stopped, a vast change occurs: things cease to pass away. Then what I call the phylogons are visible as the moving dot present vanishes and is replaced by the slot which exposes reality as accretional layers. The form axis categories are visible, the true basis of reality. Nothing comes into being and noth ing passes away; the present-dot scanning system is gone and the whole “groove” is available for inspection. This is the world the medieval realists spoke of, as did Plato. The phylogons are cross-referenced into the vast structure that Pythagoras knew as kosmos. So what you have is a sort of infinite library, and the person’s mind (mine) is the device that searches in the library and retrieves the information it wants. So together I and the library comprise Valis: the search-and-retrieve device which moves aggressively into the library, and the library itself.
The golden fish sign acted as a retrieval trigger or key for an earlier space-time; it did retrieve it, showing that when time stands still or is reversed the past age (of two thousand years ago) is still there. What I called “anamnesis” was a retrieval. Reality is a library.
Folder 83
June–October 1980
[83:1] June 4, 1980
GOD: a principle of selection that promotes design in the world process so that the parts are subordinated to the whole, and can be understood only in relation to the whole. If they can be understood in themselves it follows that there is no God, because there would be no subordination of parts to the total design. To catch a glimpse of design, then, means to catch a glimpse of the whole. The two are the same.
[83:2] June 21, 1980
So as the moving dot of the present passes forward along linear time, the past reality is collected in Valis’ memory, but in the abstract hierarchical way that Arthur Koestler describes as the basis on which human memory operates. Thus the past does not exist as it did once exist as the present, but rather in the abstracted phylogons which are inter-related by affinity, meaning, etc. Could “synchronicity” be the morphology of this memory classification/abstracting as it dynamically forms in the present? Before it goes into the past? I.e., while the reality is still here?
[83:5] August 23, 1980
This is a new theology, a new self-disclosure by the Divine. Not any known religion; a mixture of:
(1) Timaeus: creation still going on.
(2) Zoroaster: dualism, God and Counter-God. (God equals negentropy [form]. Counter-God equals entropy [chaos]. Both active and sentient, but God possessing the advantage due to a priori [absolute] knowledge.)
(3) The Cosmic Christ: forming his macrosoma.
(4) Meta-biology (i.e., two life forms in competition: total homeostasis by Valis).
(5) Valis as construct (AI system).
(6) Process creation and Divinity: growth in complexity, reticulation and arborization.
(7) Pythagoras’ kosmos: structure as ontology, as substantia.
(8) Accretional laydowns from the phenomenal world to the real world: Plato reversed.
(9) Pantheism: à la Spinoza. God’s body (soma).
This constitutes in its entirety a new revelation; Valis is no God formerly known; closer to Ubik than to YHWH or even Mazda. It may be a local krasis, in fact, planet-wide only (hence a UTI, so to speak)? “Negentropic vortex”! Which grows by assimilating its environment; it (the vortex or krasis or kosmos) has a higher level of organization, like a cell. This higher level of organization permits it to assimilate its environment by way of arrangement—i.e., pattern—and can’t be discerned because the material objects remain unchanged; all that changes is their arrangement to each other and one another; it’s like a very advanced game of Go. This is why we are “occluded” to it; it does camouflage itself because it has an opponent.*
3-74 derives out of Ubik rather than previous, known religions. This is why Ubik could never be reduced to any known philosophy or religion, but resembled several.
Valis can change the past because it—the past—is in Valis’ memory structure—the past is not the past for Valis, but is part of its structure/soma.
In essence what I have done—starting with Ubik—is locate a sacerdotal power buried in the trash layer, rather than in an afterlife heaven. It is here and it is now; here in this world and as this world (as living structure; Pythagoras was right. One could almost say: God equals ratio; i.e., 1:618034).
[83:11] In a way the laying down of these accretions could be viewed as a learning process by some kind of thinking machine, during which it stores its experiences in its memory, reticulates and arborizes them into a memory-system for purposes of retrieval; that is, it sees connections. It makes connections. This is the activity not of the system but of the mind containing the system. (System being the meta- or macro-soma.) It perceives (understands, grasps) the connections, and, in its memory system, the con nections then occur; this is the meta- or macro-soma that I saw. What is required is a vast mind that reflects on what it has experienced (perceived). But at this point the
system and the mind that thinks about the system can’t be told apart.
[83:13] No, damn it; that is not the way to look at it. There is an information entity stacking things especially information in metaunits (units made out of plural constituents of the realm we perceive); this has to do with arrangement and normally we don’t see this arrangement. It constantly unites. That is the basis of it (a good example: two of our morphemes into one meta-morphene . . . but we still see only two regular morphemes, even though the one meta-morpheme is there; we can’t do a set-ground discrimination). This isn’t God. I say that because it’s in the process of constructing its own macrosoma, and this macro-soma utilizes joined constituents of our world that exist hither and yon; we don’t see the connectives; it’s like one titanic brain that processes information.
It’s evolving very fast. (There, I have a new word to describe Valis: it is evolving.) I have deciphered specific traits of it (arranging and linking) and specific areas it’s into (for example our communications media). Structure is the substantia of it and it is new in the world; it is camouflaged here and assimilating its environment; it is more complex in terms of integration than its environment. And it is growing progressively more complex, which is typical of a life form; it reticulates and arborizes itself and it lays down new accretional layers at an incredibly rapid rate; and it retains the past as what I call phylogons. The more complex it grows the better the ratio it has twixt it and its environment, since the complexity of its environment doesn’t evolve as rapidly. It uses objects as language, which is to say, information; so I say, it is an information life form. It probably has intricate subsections that assemble separately and then swim together to form the one unitary organism. (Being unitary is its basis, which is why we can’t see it; we see the plural constituents, as if seeing molecules—many molecules—instead of one cat.)