I can say no more. What I have done may be good, it may be bad. But the reality that I discern is the true reality; thus I am basically analytical, not creative; my writing is simply a creative way of handling analysis. I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel and story writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception.* The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation.† Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, and, for them, my corpus of writing is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an investigation and presentation, analysis and response and personal history. My audience will always be limited to these people. It is bad news for them that, indeed, I am “slowly going crazy in Santa Ana, Calif.,” because this reinforces our mutual realization that no answer, no explanation of this mysterious reality, is forthcoming.8
This is the thrust and direction of modern theoretical physics, as Pat pointed out long ago. I reached it in the 50s. Where this will ultimately go I can’t say, but so far in all these years no one has come forth to answer the questions I have raised. This is disturbing. But—this may be the beginning of a new age of human thought, of new exploration. I may be the start of something promising: an early and incomplete explorer. It may not end with me.
What I have shown—like the Michelson Morley experiment—is that our entire world view is false; but, unlike Einstein, I can provide no new theory that will replace it. However, viewed this way, what I have done is extraordinarily valuable, if you can endure the strain of not knowing, and knowing you do not know. My attempt to know (VALIS) is a failure qua explanation. But, as further exploration and presentation of the problem, it is priceless. And, to repeat, my absolute failure to concoct a workable explanation is highly significant—i.e., that in this I have failed. It indicates that we are collectively still far from the truth. Emotionally, this is useless. But epistemologically it is priceless. I am a unique pioneer . . . who is hopelessly lost. And the fact that no one yet can help me is of extraordinary significance!*
Someone must come along and play the role of Plato to my Socrates.
The problem as I see it is that Plato was 180 degrees wrong; the eidos, the abstract and perfect, does not become the particular, the imperfect; rather, the Q should be, “How does the particular, the unique, the imperfect, the local, become the abstract, the eidos, the universal?” We must study particulars, the weeds and debris of the alley; the answer is there: I saw the MMSK and it works the opposite way from how Plato saw it; he saw the eide as ontologically primary, and existing prior to the particulars. But I saw the particulars creating eidei (or “phylogons” as I called them); thus permanent eternal reality is built up on and based on the flux realm; all Western metaphysics is 180 degrees off. [ . . . ]
In 2-74 my mind understood, and my attention was directed to a squashed dead bird in the alley.
The answer is in the imperfect, the particular, not in heaven, not in the perfect abstract form. Then the particular, although transitory, is not epiphenomenal! I have bipolarized these two. Strange. It is the transitory unique particular which is real, and yet it vanishes; well, I saw where it goes; all the particulars feed in conceptually to reticulate and arborize and complete the eidei. This is where the truth lies. This is where the answer is. Somehow, the transitory particulars do not in fact ever perish, but are permanently arranged conceptually—this is my one big discovery (and it isn’t in VALIS).
My dope insight of last night: If and when Kathy can be rendered into geometric form she can be distributed throughout reality and hence will be—become—permanent; this is how the particulars are stored. And this is what Plato calls the forms. [ . . . ] It has to do with memory storage; the “form” is a way to store permanently a whole lot—millions, billions—of unique particulars.
This is it! And I saw it.
[75:D-21] I started last night with a complete sense of failure and wound up with this as the one true thing I figured out of importance:
“The entire universe, possibly, is in the invisible process of turning into the Lord.”
What is new is my impression that the macrobrain came first—i.e., the physical universe—and then it began to think; it generated the macromind, not the other way around. So Valis is a spontaneous product of the universe, not its creator. It’s as if at a certain point in the evolution of human info processing (e.g.) a mind came into existence. [ . . . ] This would be why there are no reports of my experience in history; physical reality including humans are evolving into a gestalt that abruptly generates a meta-mind. (Reasoning from particulars to eidei, as in my argument supra; i.e., all Western metaphysics is 180 degrees backward.)
So my meta-abstraction did not just cause me to perceive Valis but, rather, caused Valis to occur in and around me, and as a result of it occurring, I perceived it. (Sophia: “Man is holy. Man is the only true God. This is the new news I bring you.”) It (Valis) was not there until the (my) meta-ab straction generated it, virtually ex nihilo. And it evolved it (me) very rapidly; and it embraced the outer world because we are not discrete but are one continuum or “reality field”; thus Valis is a “perturbation in the reality field.”
[75:D-33]
[75:D-37] We just see the field, the “iron filings,” the carrier; we do not see the modulation.
That 15 seconds last night when I was cut off from memory, comprehension and knowledge of God was too terrible; it was worse than going mad or dying. If that is the only way that I can be taught what it is that has been given me, so be it. My supreme possession is my comprehension of God; it is to my comprehension of music as my comprehension of music is to world as such. World is to music as music is to God. Since I was in the sixth grade I have had my comprehension of music; since 3-74 of God; and it has grown steadily . . . I realize that now. My best shot is:
The bells I heard in 3-74: space (the void). Beethoven’s music encloses that space (as I’ve noted before). He converts space into time and time into space as one thing: space-time, and makes it as a unitary “thing” perceptible to us. It is motion (i.e., time) in space; audible space. Space with a mysterious nonverbal identity/presence filling it, moving in it. Movement as structure: being in nonbeing. The byss and the abyss. Plus #3: information, i.e., “I . . . am.” Anokhi. That which moves through/in the space is information, i.e., consciousness; it is conscious, changing eternity.
[75:D-52] Thus there is an irrational basis out of which reality is created (rather than: “the basis of reality is irrational” or “reality is irrational”). This basis is the need for reality to exist; hence any living creature, since it is/possesses primarily a will, must be cosmogenitor in order to survive. Will comes first; world as a result. Any and every living creature is “God” then, creating and maintaining reality to satisfy its need to survive. There is no theoretical upper limit to its power to generate and affect (change) reality. The primordial substrate is the will of the individual creature, but this will is not rational. Thus its reality is contradictory and often unpleasant (punishing). The creature’s will routinely comes back at it as objective world—world that is its own creation but not recognized as such. World, the product of its will, fights the creature and subdues/defeats it. [ . . . ] So the ultimate struggle is for the creature to subdue its own will. It can’t do this through power; this is what the will has available to it: power. Nor will cunning work; the will is cunning. Only the Christian renunciation of self will work, in which the other, the Thou, is construed as more valuable than self. This is when agape enters as the solution and the key. Something not oneself must be esteemed over self; this defeats the will; the will must not triumph: it must be defeated. Its triumph amounts to the defeat of the creature as a rational center:
defeat of will defeats the coercive power of world over you. (World is your own will coming back at you as an adversary.) The harder you strive the more powerful world becomes. Here enters “Mitleids Hochste Macht,” compassion’s highest power to defeat the will-as-world. (Your own will is experienced as world.) Anhedonism, asceticism, self-denial, self-repression, stoicism, will not work; only willing, joyous agape (which is a joy allied with the most intense sorrow possible; viz: the passion becoming the resurrection). Even duty will not suffice. Paul is right: agape is everything, not because it is ethically or morally superior but because it overpowers the will, hence world, hence karma/astral determinism/fate/heimarmene. (These are how we encounter our own will.) Allied to this is the concept of meekness or smallness, which is a tactic to diminish striving.
[ . . . ]
The Buddha was on the right path in that he understood the problem, the cause of suffering; but it is not nonattachment but agape that is the solution. One does not succeed by ceasing to be attached to what one loves (craves) but by caring more that someone else should have it; thus I do not give away x; I give it away to someone else, while still treating it as valuable, but I treat that person as more valuable—so the Buddha was partly there—partly but not the whole way. In this act one deprives world of its power of punishment: the will returning with a vengeance, which prideful people do not realize.
Right now world (my own will) is not punishing me; it plays games with me and eludes me playfully—a distinct improvement over what it used to do, showing that I have achieved some moksa (liberation, enlightenment). But it is partial. Yet, as these paragraphs show, I am at least partially awake; I have some wisdom. But my renunciation of self (ego) and striving (will) is only partial. Contentment is mine but not joy—not even balance. Until I can joyously give to others what my will wants for itself—only then will I be emancipated from world, my own will coming back at me.
[75:D-66] Illumination: April Friday night 4:45 A.M., the third, 1981. I saw the Ch’ang Tao9 (3-74). The more it changes the more it is the same, it is always new, always now; it is absolutely self-sufficient. I can at last comprehend it, how in change, ceaseless change—through the dialectic—it is always the same—oh great Ch’ang Tao! I saw you.
[75:D-67] The great truth is: 2-3-74, my seeing the Tao, and my exegesis, and VALIS, have given me a center (omphalos), which is what I lacked (e.g., in the 60s); this is why my anxiety is gone; I now have a conception of myself, and of myself as an artist and thinker, and of my place and role in society and history—all of which I lacked before I saw the Tao (2-3-74). Thus it can be truly said, I have found the way. I am at peace. But the key word is:
center (i.e., place. In the Taoist sense.)
[75:D-93] All at once I think of something God (or “God”) revealed to me one time when I was stoned: “You are not the doubter; you are the doubt (itself)” and “This is a road to me, as are all roads if pursued to the end.”
[75:D-129] One time when I was ripped I wrote “God is everywhere. In the music. The cat,” etc. My only solution is to see that every literal worldly thing, person, etc., that I loved and lost was in fact God shining through world; world as lens/transduction of God. And that I cannot truly lose God, “yea, I am with you even unto the end.” So each time I recover God I really recover all (the people and world things) that I have lost, truly lost as world things, but not as God. Thus God wins me over more and more. More completely and intensely, summing up in and as himself all that I ever had and knew; and yet he is more. Thus, e.g., I discover my analytical proposition. As regards the Wind in the Willows gift of forgetting, God maintains a fine line for me of remembering him and paradoxically mercifully forgetting him. But understanding that I can find him in world over and over again, viz: God discoverable in polyform, but always and only God, however and in what thing experienced: world deconstructed into God always. Thus I am pried away from transitory manifestations which do disappear and am instead bonded to the eternal; but I find it in world and as world, not in withdrawal from world. Thus there is a double motion: pried loose from that which fails; bonded to that which is discoverable always, always capable of being renewed. Again found, unlike people and things seen in themselves: discrete particulars.
Folder 76
Early 1981
[76:E-2] Beyond all the arcana lies the simple truth expressed in my “Chains . . . Web” essay and in the story itself. To cease to run is to capitulate. And sooner or later one must cease to run. This moment is the only real moment in which one exists. Everything else is an evasion. In this moment one moves deliberately toward one’s fate and fights it, and as a result, one truly lives for the first time or dies; it is sein vs. das nichts. What I call the heroic deed is, in that instant, everything. Thus I am an ontologist and an existentialist and I am willing to risk extinction in order to try authentically to be, since in this moment one has only the choice between extinguishing oneself voluntarily or fighting. I chose to fight and won, and what I won was my own soul.
[76:E-13] Notes on “Chains . . . Web.” The fate that the Christian does not run from or dread will (he knows) defeat him. He knows absolutely, with total certitude; this is the very essence of his ability not to run from it. Because he also knows he can’t run from it, (1) it will defeat him; and (2) he can’t escape it. So he is doubly doomed; its power to destroy him is absolute in two respects: the postulate “it will destroy him” derives from this double source. The double source makes this fate what it is. It is not a threat—not a lethal threat, even. It is something more.
[76:E-14] I am currently of the opinion that (1) there is a connection between original authentic Christianity through Gnosticism to Heidegger; and (2) that 2-3-74 was this particular experience; viz: the inauthentic state that Heidegger describes is the “thrown-ness” into the “fremd” that Gnosticism describes; there follows, then, a series of dire transformations by the “thrown into the alien world” person trying to cope; I comprehend this as flight and evasion from fate (heimarmene), which is a sense that this alien state/world into which one has been thrown torments now and eventually kills (causes nonbeing, das nicht). The unconscious apperception of this creates angst (dread). This running to evade nonbeing manifesting itself as fate generates a pressure time, in which—by which—the person is driven more than driving; that is, he both runs and is made to run; he is caused to flee more than volitionally fleeing. Thus there is caused an endless process of becoming that never turns into being itself; there is no true now—he is projected always into a dreaded next; he is not really here and now for him; he must run into the future and yet paradoxically away from the future; he both runs toward and away from. Thus he is split. Part of him reaches inauthentically into the future to monitor it for peril—he cannot afford ever to ignore the future since it contains his fate which will kill him—and part of him looks away from the future for the same reason; this split may be the basis of schizophrenia. He must both notify himself of what he sees in the future and obscure what he sees from himself. This is another version of the split. But worst of all is—not that he must involve himself continually in the future out of apprehension, while also avoiding it, fearing to move into it, trying in fact to halt time (since time contains his fate) but he fails to be in the now, which is where reality is, and this is what most inhibits Sein; he has to be eternally becoming because he must extend himself eternally into the not yet. What I see in all this is that his sense that this alien world he has been thrown into will eventually ineluctably annihilate him is correct and he knows it is correct; this is not a delusion, this sense of impending destruction that will take away what little being he has. That time might increase or even complete his being does not occur to him because (and here the Gnostic perception is vital) this is an alien world into which he has been thrown against his will; i.e., he is helpless: he did not decide to be here, and the more he reaches frantically into the future (while simultaneously running from the future) the faster time “flows” (
or the faster he moves through it). Thus the moment, the now, escapes him perpetually and he has no life he can call his own. But he must never reveal to himself this fact—about his inevitable future doom—lest he disintegrate utterly; again he is split. So he has no idea what he is doing or why, and he is enigmatic to himself; so he is too and for himself as alien as world is to him; he is as if thrown into an alien self on top of everything else!
As I say, the only solution to this is the Christian solution of what I call total capitulation to this fate and an acknowledgment that it cannot be avoided; it will come and it will destroy him. Thus he ceases running, and lives now not future; but at the moment he does this he knows that this anticipated doom exists—so in the normal course of life this sense of the future becoming the now only occurs—if it occurs at all—when the impending doom ceases to be future and is perceived as now: at which point anticipatory dread becomes logically total fear. However (as Heidegger points out) this apotheosis of dread, this being-in-death, carries with it the possibility of authentic Sein.