It works by means of a dialectic utilizing the principle of enantiodromia, again and again, probably faster and faster—and certainly, for sure, each time involving a larger and more inclusive and complex pattern to be converted (into itself).
I’ve worked all this out; I just don’t know what to call it, besides Valis or Ubik.
Just what I worked out tonight—that we still see the two constituents that it links rather than the unitary meta-constituent that goes into its meta-soma—should prove this isn’t just hot air I’m spouting. To see it we have to cease to see normal plurality and see one contour, one pattern, one meta-soma. But we continue to see the plural constituents at our hierarchical level, not the meta-units at its higher level. When the two constituents are linked they take a quantum upward leap and become a single unitary meta-constituent, but we see no change . . . so its meta-soma may range over the whole planet, made up of combinations of our objects and processes; it can duplicate our causation, simulate it.
This is the most emancipated and profitable way to view Valis, rather than viewing it theologically (which is an obsolete model) or metaphysically (which is pragmatically useless to us) (however epistemologically true). And what are the most complex objects that it can structure into meta-units? Why, human brains. It can arrange them into endless combinations, like neural cells.
I say, “The basis of Valis is that it unites” (two of our plural constituents into one meta-unit, while we still see the two constituents). This is because it is negentropic, and working diametrically against entropy. It is a life form that is evolving very rapidly; its relationship to time is totally different from ours—i.e., its relationship to change. It doesn’t see change as we do; for instance it remembers everything; it does not, therefore, lose the past but adds onto it.
It is one quantum leap upward hierarchically in levels of reality (ontology) and invisible to us, but here . . . invisible because its soma consists of structure, not some substantia; so in a sense it is immaterial (although consisting of material things, but primarily using them as language/information).
Of course it is negentropic; it is a life form. Damn it; can’t I finally drop the theology and the metaphysics and deal in levels of homeostasis, hierarchies of organization, in such terms as complexity, evolution, assimilation, reticulation, arborization, enantiodromia, etc., and not Christ and such? Plato likewise? The “Realm of Forms,” that sort of stuff?
It (Valis) is only in the “Realm of Forms” in that it is a quantum leap up hierarchically in terms of organization so that it is a meta-entity compared with us and our perception of reality. Our perception of reality does not include it and its meta-soma.
[83:23] Okay: Christ is some kind of divine life form that came here to enlighten and aid man; specifically, to lift the occlusion that fell over man in primordial times, a perceptual and cognitive occlusion such as I noticed in 1971; what I now call the “schizophrenia virus.” There is absolutely no orthodoxy—and perhaps no heresy that I know of—that would explain “The secret stolen in one’s hands, through (the ring of) angels.” This reve lation, from Christ himself, has stupendous significance. It means that part of the divine machinery, a very high part, detached itself two thousand years ago and came here with healing information for us. Our ecosphere is surrounded by a ring of what we know of as angels, who administer the inflexible karmic law that the Gnostics knew of as heimarmene; but, worst of all, we are occluded. Christ is, above all else, not a revealer but a physician; he is here not just to teach us—inform us of our condition—but to extricate us from our condition which is cruelly imposed on us. Probably the “secret stolen” is imaged in Genesis by the other tree that we did not eat of: that of eternal life, which explains Jesus’ remark, “Your forefathers ate manna in the wilderness and they are all dead. But I . . . am the bread of eternal life.” In other words our death is the result of genetic programming, of the DNA death strip; and this is what Christ overcomes by causing it to fire harmlessly.
The secret (stolen and brought to us) is that we are enslaved, in a prison, that we are sick (with the occlusion) and die, that Christ has revolted against the divine machinery and brought the knowledge and skills here to reverse our condition (described by John Calvin) and restore us to what we once were. In other words, it’s a secret that it’s a secret; I mean, it’s been a secret that what Christ brought to us as depicted in the gospels was stolen. This is like Prometheus. He paid for doing this with his life, but he is still alive, not discorporate (the Holy Spirit) but in a risen body, what I call the meta-soma; we can’t see it but it is here like a great arborizing vine.
Usually when you think of a secret stolen you think of a “How to . . .” secret, not a “that” secret in the sense of, “It is a secret that . . .“: i.e., suppressed information. “He stole the secret of how to . . . ,” etc. How to what? How to be immortal; he said so. By participation in the vine:
I am the true vine,
and my Father is the vinedresser . . .
As a branch cannot bear fruit all by itself,
but must remain part of the vine,
neither can you unless you remain in me.
I am the vine,
you are the branches. 61
J. Bible comment: “On the vine image, in the Synoptics, Jesus uses the vine as a symbol of the kingdom of God.”
Whoever remains in me, with me in him,
bears fruit in plenty;
for cut off from me you can do nothing.
In my hypnopompic state, and that time under nitrous oxide, I saw Christ and Valis as an arborizing, reticulating vine. He is literally a vine, with a vast number of filaments stretching throughout this ecosphere; this is the meta-soma that I saw. We become immortal by becoming part of it: “You are the branches. . . .”
[ . . . ]
This vine is also the kingdom of God itself, which is to say, man restored back to the Palm Tree Garden, freed from the Black Iron Prison, which is the Empire and occlusion and DNA programming.
What I saw that I called the plasmate are the filaments of the vine; they are information, hence energy (or else information without a carrier).
“The secret stolen, in one’s hands, through the angels.” What secret do I have or know?
[83:27] Consider [>] of my notes:62
How could I ask myself, What possibly could I know what (i.e., that) I’m not supposed to know?—When (1) I know about the occlusion; and (2) of Valis’ presence here? I should ponder the fact that I came within inches of death twice after knowing about
And there the notes end, because at that moment the phonecall from Russ came where I learned that Bantam doesn’t feel it can publish VALIS. What a place for the notes to end! What was I going to say, had I not been interrupted? “After knowing about ———,” well, I guess I already said. (1) We are all occluded in this ecosphere. And (2) there is a vast life form here, that has invaded this world and is camouflaged, and it has grown vine-like into our information media; it is an information life form . . . and the presumption is, it occludes us.
[83:30] What we must do is welcome a new savior, now—hence the prophecies by the AI voice; this is why the “theological overkill”: St. Sophia, Buddha, Siddhartha, The Head Apollo, YHWH, this is why it said, “The time you’ve waited for has come. The work is completed. The final world is here. He has been transplanted and is alive.” The Third Age begins, and it is not a Christian Age; it is a Post-Christian, but it is cumulative, just the way the NT is built on the OT; but, just as between the OT and the NT there is a real antithesis. What would be the basis of the Third Age? I don’t think love, even though the Roman Church attributes love to the Spirit. The first age: Justice. Christ’s age was what? Not even justice; certainly not love, and very certainly not wisdom. The Roman Trinitarian division of attributes breaks down; there wasn’t wisdom connected with the Christian Age but the suppression of wisdom.
I have no idea. But the Spirit would know. [ . . . ]
 
; What did Joachim predict?* The withering away of the clerical institutions, the formal churches, the Eucharist; total individualism, a direct inner relationship to God; hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit: My three divisions: First, God above man (the Father, Mosaic Age, the Torah). Then God with man as fellow man (the Son, the NT). Then God inside each man (the Spirit, an age not yet here; no churches, no sacraments, no priests; direct dialog between man and God inwardly, as with what Martin Buber talked about; inner information).
Autonomy. Inner-directed. Totally. Religious anarchists. Self-regulating because in inward direct touch with God.
I’ve thought of much of this before, but I never visualized the Third Age as pitted against Christianity just as Christ was pitted against Judaism and the Law.
Age One: Information (Torah) handed down to man.
Age Two: Information from a human being (Christ who spoke the new law).
Age Three: Information occurring inside you; you see it on an inner screen; that way there can be no signal loss, distortion, decay, etc. There is some loss in Age Two; more in Age One. With each age the gap between information source and the human transduction lessens; in Age Three it is gone.
The individual human of Age Three doesn’t read scripture; he writes Scripture (produces it himself out of himself).
He is the source of Scripture; proof: he can a priori retrieve parts of the Bible, which would seem impossible.
The NT will be retained, just as the OT was retained by the Christians.
The individual believer the source of Scripture. As if he’s a transducer. No one else, even Christ, will transduce it for him (cf. Spinoza on Christ as the voice Elijah externally heard). [ . . . ]
This is what “the secret stolen” means: the revolutionary character of the Third Age contra Christianity. Spiritual knowledge has been “stolen” and given to us directly: “in one’s hands”; that is, directly to us, without a church or priest or written scriptures acting as intermediaries. I’ve solved it.
[83:34] The Savior of the Third Age, unlike Jesus, will not be in human form; he will (as Jesus says) be everywhere, like “lightning.”63 Another human savior would replicate the Second Age. No—something different is meant. Everywhere. Ubique.
I suddenly have the eerie feeling that Christ is meant but a different kind of Christ from Jesus entirely. A meta-organism. [ . . . ]
Christ as secret ruler of the world available directly to the believer, without human mediation. And in the believer God as the Spirit; both Christ and the Spirit are equally God. God outside and God inside. An apotheosis of reality inner and outer.
The “He has been transplanted and is alive” and then seeing the Sacred Tetragrammaton is notification to me to go out and preach the good news—which I did in the form of VALIS Regained. That will be published, even if VALIS isn’t.
[83:38] I have come across the expression in the EB “the imperial church,” with prisons, with the secular authority to back it up. The accretions of dogma of the imperial church are as the Torah was to early Christianity: letter and not spirit, as Paul put it.64 The Holy Spirit has been undermining this imperial church for centuries; it revealed this to me (vis-à-vis the Dutch Wars). So the Holy Spirit has a long history of revolutionary activity against the imperial church. But what I must keep in mind is my insight of yesterday that the key to it all is Joachim’s three ages, and that the third is as revolutionary vis-à-vis the second as the second (the Christian Age) was to the first. New Scriptures are needed, new prophets and perhaps a new savior.
[83:39] “The time you’ve waited for has come. The final world is here. The work is completed. He has been transplanted and is alive.” And the next night when the AI voice (the Holy Spirit) repeated those words I saw the sacred Tetragrammaton—and I at once wrote VALIS Regained.
[ . . . ]
Let’s put the complete messages together:
THE TIME YOU’VE WAITED FOR HAS COME. THE WORK IS COMPLETE. THE FINAL WORLD IS HERE. HE HAS BEEN TRANSPLANTED AND IS ALIVE. THE SECRET STOLEN, IN ONE’S HANDS, THROUGH (past) THE ANGELS.
Now all the messages:
SAINT SOPHIA IS GOING TO BE BORN AGAIN: SHE WAS NOT ACCEPTABLE BEFORE. THE BUDDHA IS IN THE PARK. THE HEAD APOLLO’S ABOUT TO RETURN. THROUGH ALL THIS SIDDHARTHA SLEPT (but now in part 2 will awaken). THE TIME YOU’VE WAITED FOR HAS COME. THE WORK IS COMPLETE. THE FINAL WORLD IS HERE. HE HAS BEEN TRANSPLANTED AND IS ALIVE. YHWH. THE SECRET STOLEN, IN ONE’S HANDS, THROUGH (past) THE ANGELS.
I break it down into sequence this way:
A NEW SAVIOR IS COMING. HE IS COMING SOON. HE IS HERE. HE CARRIES A SECRET STOLEN FOR US, PREVIOUSLY DENIED US. HE IS GOD (or equal to God) (or carries God’s approval). (Or was sent by God.) (Or has the authority and power of and from God.)
[83:45] Valis is thoroughly involved in our flux world; can affect it and does affect it. Valis—the macrometasoma—grows like a vast reticulated arborizing vine into our flux world. Which is to say, there is no real separation between Valis’ macrometasoma and this flux world of the dialectic. Our world is, to be metaphoric, Valis’ metabolism. Once Valis removes a constituent bit (piece) from our world and inserts it in the correct place in its macrometasoma, it is there forever, although subject to the accretions derived later on from the flux world; the flux world gives rise to fast and many accretions of the phylogons (the basic integers of the metakosmos, Valis’ macrometasoma). The accretions act to further reticulation and arborizing, since this is basically a memory-structure in which the past is preserved, but not preserved the way it happened; no: it is ordered, unified, structured, interrelated which is to say, reticulated and arborized, and made ever more complex. So the complexity—level of internal organization—of the macrometasoma perpetually grows in ratio to our flux world; it is like a life form whose internal structure grows more complex, more evolved hierarchically, than its environment constantly.
The fundamental building block in the macrometasoma is information; in a way every piece that is incorporated is treated as information, rather than an object. A piece is not put in place according to shape or size but according to meaning, or morphological import. This is because the substantia of the macrometasoma is pattern or structure per se: arrangement, organization—which is to say, kosmos. I speak of connectives of relatedness. The relationship between everything actually occurs in the form of connectives in the macrometasoma, but these connectives arise within our flux world, and enter the macrometasoma as further accretions; so the development or evolution or complexification of the macrometasoma is dependent on events in our flux world. This is why I say our flux world is the metabolism of the macrometasoma, its brain activity. Plato was right and the Medieval realists were right; the categories really do exist and they are permanent; but our world is not a reflection, a pale shadow, of them; it is the source for the “Form world,” to use Plato’s term. If Plotinus had had my 3-74 experience he would have decided that he saw the Form world, and the Form of Forms: God (or the Good); as the Christian Platonists taught, the Forms—the Form world itself—exist in God’s mind . . . I would agree. I saw, however, how this Form world—which I call Valis and Valis’ macrometasoma—draws from our world rather than casting it as its shadow. This again shows how accurate Ubik was, and why 3-74 resembled Ubik. Ubik is sort of Christian platonism, with the Forms existing in God’s mind, God being Ubik, of course; Platonist metaphysics redefined by Christian monotheism.
[ . . . ]
I have reached really monumental conclusions about Valis; I have come to Christian Platonism and am very close (if not congruent to) Plotinus’ Neoplatonism and the possibility, expressed by Plotinus, of experiencing the Form world and the Mind of the One, Valis being the One; have I not said that the essence of Valis is unity, that Valis above all is, through structure, unitary? This, then, is Plotinus’ One or God. And unity is what I saw that made me realize I had seen Valis (as I call it). I know how the One can be the One; it is via Pythagoras’ structure which is to say kosmos
in the sense that Pythagoras meant that term to be used: “The harmonious fitting-together of the beautiful.” I am, then, identifying Plotinus’ One with Pythagoras’ kosmos, with a hint of Sankara’s doctrine about Brahman and the Atman. I am saying, This reality, this plurality of things in flux, can be said to be the One which is eternal because on a meta-level there is Pythagoras’ structure or kosmos, and although it changes it changes in only one direction: a cumulative evolving toward completeness and total complexity that embraces everything. The answer to, “How can the many become the One?” It is through Pythagoras’ structure, which is to say kosmos; and it has a mind; it is a mind; it is alive; it thinks; as Xenophanes said, “The whole of him hears; the whole of him sees; the whole of him thinks; he is everywhere at once.”
Now, it is also the case that Valis is not passively related to the world but “steers” everything (to use a Greek concept of the relationship between God and the world order). God is totally involved in the world order. (The Gnostics are absolutely wrong, as Plotinus realized.) Everything that happens in our flux world can be said to be the God “shaking” things (to use Xenophanes’ term). So in a very real sense God feeds into this world as its motive force and then takes out what occurs for the metakosmos—the “Form world.”
Quantum mechanics enters because I am regarding the world order as a single interacting field (as presented dramatically in TMITHC). The One can be regarded as the noös of this field; or a psyche-soma biological model can be envisioned. Or even the Logos—I have no idea which is correct, and neither does anyone else. There is a single interacting field and there is a mind ubiquitous in it, immanent in it—cf. Ubik. Spinoza would agree; in no way do I see God as transcendent to reality, off somewhere far above us in a heaven, with Earth down here. Ubik shows what I suppose: deity in the very trash of the alley. And deity intimately connected with and utilizing—if not actually being—information. “Ravished away and full of God,” as the E. of Phil. article on Plotinus says. Ecstatic comingling.