[ . . . ]
Christ is a revolutionary. The ultimate revolutionary. And he has magical (technological?) powers. And he is still alive: this explains it all. . . .
[62:C-57] Hypnogogic: I mail out the 85 “notices”—the Ed Meskys Xerox image: marathon runners carrying the torch: two of them, picking up the torch and running in different directions; i.e., out of the 85 people, there are at least two of “the right people” whom I’ve now notified; but notified of what? Could the whole Tagore ecosphere revelation—like the dream in Tears—be cypher for revolution?32
The ragtag motley band of believers who wrote me when I published VALIS—I was thinking. Believers, “ragtag motley band.” Like 2,000 years ago. There need be no “underground.” The event creates it, not it the event.
[62:C-59] I am/was victimized, so-to-speak, by my own conspiratorial proclivities.
[62:C-61] Because the ecosphere is an indivisible unity, it either survives as a unitary totality or perishes as a unitary totality. It is an interconnected system. Part of it can’t survive while the other part perishes; we’ve now reached that point, literally, where it is a global matter. And in reference to this, it has one psyche who either stays with us or departs, and if it departs we die because the ecosphere dies.
[62:C-66] But who is Tagore, then?
Answer: Tagore.
There has to be a premise. I stipulate Tagore as the irreducible premise. Logos? Krishna? Buddha?
No: Tagore.
[62:C-68] The strangest thought came to me. If the spiritual principle has penetrated the ecosphere itself and assimilated it, we now can’t turn down spiritual life—the spiritual principle—without forfeiting our literal physical lives! This is a whole new condition of the spiritual dimension; it now, so-to-speak, has leverage—decisive leverage.*
[62:C-69] An odd idea came to me tonight: My Tagore vision and Kerygma seem, upon acute and prolonged examination, to issue from very ancient religious sources both Eastern and Western. The Eastern: pan-Indian (before Buddhism and Hinduism split apart); the Western: quite old Semitic notions of the role pre-fallen man held toward the Garden, when man lived with nature in harmony and was the caretaker of the Garden; thus an idyllic primordial state is sought for: restoration of that state depicted in Western (Near-Eastern) thought but by means of pan-Indian acknowledgement of suffering as the basis of all life, and that the spiritual being suffers for and with the totality of life the solution to which is withdrawal from the world—yet this Eastern view is neatly balanced by an appeal to man to repent of his ways, that man brought suffering into the world and disturbed the primordial harmony . . . in fact destroyed it by plundering nature and then attacking it, rather than protecting and guarding it. If man is the cause, man can by changing his ways repair what he has done and restore the original harmony. What is to be done is a Western view; how man will be induced to change his ways and do this is Eastern.
[62:C-74] Dream/hypnagogic: I have a wound on my leg, a vast vagina like healing wound, like a slit. A voice is saying, “Lesimi.” With a start I wake up fully; this is Tagore’s wound (and, I realize now, Amfortas’ and by extension Christ’s, from the spear).
I have achieved spirituality (the Buddha or Christos state) but by sacrificing myself, physically injuring myself to the point where death is now a real possibility.➊ The spiritual element would not die; it would simply as cend out of this world back to its origin and home. But Tagore, my spiritual self, begs for an end to the inflicting of these burns—which (I repeat) I have taken on voluntarily by identifying myself with all life and the suffering of all creatures. It will not end by my ceasing to take on these stigmata; that is not what Tagore pleads for. Tagore pleads for an end of the crimes against life—not my life but other lives—that result in these voluntarily-assumed burns. Tagore—myself—he is crippled now, and yet he emits “an ineffable beauty, absolute, not relative, loving beauty, like music and perfume and colors.” Tagore—my spiritual self—could cease at any time this voluntary taking on of the injuries, but he will not; he will die first; to repeat, it is the injuries that must stop, not his taking on of these injuries.
Agent Orange and T-2: the day I typed up the Xerox letter. “Wounded and in pain and in mortal peril cries out for our help.” The spiritual element in me, making my last appeal.
➊ This says it all.
[62:C-79] I guess you could say that I have a messiah complex, and because of this am led ineluctably to voluntary crucifixion. To what? Achieve what? Protest the sins of the world. As I say supra: not to be saved—I am saved—but to save, and to perfect myself (vide supra). The drive toward the spiritual so strong in me now that I would give up my life in pursuit of it: for I have experienced the spiritual domain and know its joys. This is not anhedonia or masochism; the joys of the spiritual domain—to draw near to Krishna—are beyond all that this world is or has.
I realized tonight—the ecosphere is my body: “the indivisible unity” is my total psychosomatic (mind-body) being. Animals and all less (sic) than human life are my body; and the humans poisoning the ecosphere—this is my mind (“mind”—“human species”) poisoning my body by not recognizing that it must live in harmony with it, that they are parts of one indivisible whole. “If the ecosphere dies” means “if my body dies”—“then we (humans) die” and my mind dies.*
* * *
[62:C-82–83] But underneath the content of my ideas is the value to me of ideas themselves, of the search (an Orphic idea) and the enjoyment of ideas with emphasis on the abstract, the enjoyment of using the abstracting faculty itself . . . which is when I wrote Eureka.
But it is not the intellect that characterizes Tagore; he is far beyond that. Nor is it love nor beauty, although both are there. It is sweetness, an ineffable sweetness related to love, related to beauty, but perhaps more to perfume, music and colors, as I say in my letter. This is a spirituality that cannot otherwise be categorized and it is this that tells me that his spirituality is absolute, for it transcends love and beauty, the two ultimate ontological categories of God. This is not God: this is a man, a given, individual man; this is not a deity (although he is also—but secondarily—deity), this is the perfection of a man such as we are, this is not the “wholly other” toward which one moves in delight and rapture: this is he—as man—who moves toward the wholly other—this is what we as humans can become at best, the transfiguration of the natural to its ultimate without ceasing to be natural, a created thing, not creator.
[62:C-85] Who and what is Tagore? He is Tagore (a particular, not [a] God). But I know now: he is either Buddha, the Buddha, or a Buddha (awakened or enlightened one), and this is very seriously considered in VALIS as one of the possibilities; e.g., “the Buddha is in the Park.” This is not mysticism or metaphysics or theology or philosophy; those have come to me and I enjoyed them, but they pass away and Tagore remains. And his concern is for life, the ecosphere, not a concern for speculations and flights of fancy. Compassion, the way of Buddha, the noblest way of all.
Rejoice!
Everything so far has been a head-trip, a system of thought, ideas, abstractions, speculations, beliefs. But Tagore is a man, a real and actual man. Even (which I doubt) if he is me, why, he is still a man, for I am a man.
[62:C-86] Tremendous breakthrough insight 5:15 A.M. The whole Christian magic of 2-74 on worked because I believed in it; but it worked—not because Christianity is true—in contrast to other systems/religions which are false but because Sankara and the Buddhists are right: it is a conjurer’s trick; it is magic; and what this points to (the fact that my total belief on that day in 2-74 when I saw the Christian fish sign caused everything that followed to occur) is illusion; as I say: magic, conjurer’s tricks. Viz: Christianity to magic to conjurer’s tricks to illusion. And what does illusion point to? The truth of Buddhism and Sankara; pan-Indian thought about the il lusory nature of “reality”; i.e., maya, not as a veil but as a so-to-speak plastic mist that obliges.
&nbs
p; [62:C-87] In the face of this, spiritual perfection depends on enlightenment that there is a grand illusion, inner and outer; and, finally, the kind of compassion for all the living creatures caught in the “weary wheel” of illusion’s karma and rebirth, etc.
[ . . . ] E.g., the Ƴ turning into a palm tree doesn’t verify Christianity; it verifies the conjurer’s trick and this is pan-Indian thought. So from 2-74 to 2-75 I was in the grip of maya. But: because “reality” (sic) obligingly altered to accommodate my belief (especially my seeing Rome A.D. 70 and Syria!) I had without realizing it verified not Christianity but maya as a doctrine. I was totally under the spell of illusion but, paradoxically, this very illusion (I mean the transformations in it!) held the clue to the real solution. I have not been radical enough; I have thought in terms of either something (reality) vs. nothing (illusion) but maya is not just hallucination; something is there (as Sankara pointed out), but it is able to assume any guise it wishes. (Sankara’s example: the magician can cause you to take a rope to be a snake, but there is a rope there; something is there, but not a snake, but also not nothing.) Maya is halfway between hallucination (nothing) and reality (something that is what it seems to be); and this is why it resembles Ubik.
[62:C-99] I don’t know what’s the matter with me—the “no-nukes” topic is the topic of protest and the new counter culture now, as the Vietnam war was in the 60’s and 70’s; the Tagore dream places me squarely in the middle of the new, current bipolarized battle—right where I ought to be. And this is what the Silkwood pamphlet must have made me realize, for it tied the nuclear issue in with all that I had to deal with and combat in the 60’s/70’s; all of a sudden it all came together as a single whole.33 Now the authorities are harassing and trying to silence the foes of nuclear power and weapons and waste-disposal. Perhaps my unconscious knew this; yet—for my coming to see this being part of the revelation of the savior himself—not just a dream about radioactive waste being dumped in the ocean, but about Tagore—this unites my spiritual vision (i.e., VALIS) and my political vision into one.
[62:C-161] Where Gnosticism is indispensable is twofold: (1) exact analysis of fallen man’s condition; and (2) it is 180 degrees reversed by what is called “Gnosis,” a cognitive event. But their overall system is unsound. Nonetheless Gnosticism contains essential pieces of the puzzle. They have an exact understanding of the malady and also the correct idea that the remedy somehow involves cognition and knowledge and this knowledge comes as a gift from a savior or messenger—i.e., Christ. Thus they fully appreciate what “salvation” refers to, in contrast to which orthodox Christianity is virtually a cargo cult making futile motions that ape without efficacy the real thing.
[62:C-168] I have supra done something never before done: rather than drawing on Gnosticism I have figured out the real teaching of the Gnostics. At some primordial time there was indeed a crisis in the heights, but this isn’t what interests the Gnostics; Gnosticism is practical: the Gnostics have studied the effect of this crisis and figured out that the intactness of each person in the world is either damaged or abolished (destroyed); each of us has suffered a primordial inner schism with the result that any given human self is only part of a once-intact greater self. Each of us is alienated from the world (man contra world) because each of us is alienated from himself, not just warring or in conflict: no: the parts of the self have become separated from each other and because of that, experience of world is partial, occluded, impaired, deformed. A partial self experiences a partial world, with the result that world is alien, irreal, hostile, strange, arousing perplexity and dread. Man does not understand world because he does not understand himself; thus Gnosticism derives its epistemology (and cosmogony and cosmology) from an ontology of psychology. If the missing piece of self is rejoined—if the severed parts come back together, experience of world—Dasein, being-in-the-world—will take care of itself: the rupture between self and world will heal on its own because now world will be experienced radically differently, 180 degrees differently. Gnosticism has hidden its ontological psychology within a weird and grotesque mythology that successfully obscures both real purpose and real means to that purpose: to bring the two parts of the self back together (the in-gathering of the light by the messenger who is “the savior saved.” Clear evidence that this divine champion is the person himself rescuing himself).
[62:C-170] The absolutely basic key to Gnosticism is the encounter with the familiar in the midst of the alien landscape: the partial self recognizes something that it has seen before and yet cannot have seen before because by definition this is a fremd (unfamiliar) landscape, not the self: “own.” With this recognition comes unavoidable returned (restored) memory, which is memory of what it—the self—once was. What it is remembering is its true nature. (The relation to Orphism is obvious.) But it is missing half of itself; it now knows itself to be a partial fragment of a once intact self that is now somehow scattered. Thus although anamnesis is not pri mary—it is predicated on recognizing something familiar in the uncanny world—it is the crucial event, because it is in and through anamnesis that the parts of the self, separated for aeons, come back together. This means that all the pieces comprising the total, restored, intact self are somehow “in” the self in some way, as if split or dormant or mutually estranged. This would explain the drop in GABA fluid, the blocked neural circuitry disinhibited and at last firing. This literally occurs, as an organic, physiological brain-function.
Involved (simultaneously) in this process is an additional absolutely crucial ingredient—event, realization—that I call the “meta-abstraction” and which Plato calls noesis. The partial (incomplete) self on its own cannot perform this cognitive operation because it requires two vantage-points by the participant (what I call Ditheon), analogous to spatial parallaxes. That which is recognized as familiar must be, by definition, familiar to the estranged, severed part of the total self since by definition it has never been seen before by the conscious self—which is only a partial self. That is, for the sense of recognition to occur, the conscious self cannot avoid being aware of its own banished part for it is precisely that banished part that knows what is seen, recognizes it. There is here a hint of the primordial, suggesting that the original schism did occur in the prenatal past, as Plato taught. But the situation is more complex, because at the level at which the total self operates, the concept “past” must be redefined. Here Platonist epistemology enters with its forms doctrine. Unless the universalia ante rem34 are envisioned, what is happening cannot be fathomed. The two parts of the self are not in the same spatiotemporal world. Their relationship to each other comes through—occurs because of—a trans-temporal constant (form) that because it is trans-temporal and -spatial exists “simultaneously” in both realms: the realms sharing at least one constant, the one seen and recognized as familiar. It is as if both realms, at two times and two places, are operating off of a common matrix and this indeed is how Plato depicts the forms: they are not in time and space, and somehow instantiate themselves at this time and this place yet without losing their unity and intactness.
Much of this is palpably Platonist and Neoplatonist, but what is truly Gnostic is the idea that the self is fragmented—broken—so that part of it is at one time-and-place and the other part at another time-and-place; thus Gnosticism adds a radical ontological psychological analysis lacking in Platonism and Neoplatonism, and, logically following from this premise, a soteriology based on a successful rejoining of the fragmented parts of the self. (Plato and Plotinus know nothing of this.) From the Gnostic viewpoint, each fragment of the broken-apart self is not experiencing world at all, in the strict sense, and only will do so when rejoined; meanwhile the situation of the fragments is one of alienation—primarily from self, and, following from this self-alienation, alienation from world—or worlds, since both halves of the total self are independently tracking (experiencing) different partial realities connected only by the Platonic forms, which by their nature are in all worlds
at all times and places, or anyhow capable of being so. The in-gathering of the self, then, is due accidentally to the perceived form (one form seen twice; that is, in two different spatiotemporal worlds) but deliberately to the “salvador salvandus,” which is the total intact self operating on its own severed parts to rejoin them: external in a real sense, internal in a real sense, since each severed part is external to the other part, and yet each internally drives toward reintegration. Thus each part both internally seeks wholeness and is simultaneously aided externally in this quest by the other part; only when the parts have come together successfully does the total motivation seem internal.
But now rejoined, the two parts become a unitary totality and experience a radically different world than either part previously experienced. Space, time, causation, and multiplicity are gone; what exists now is world as unfallen pleroma, because upon the self being reunified, world ceases to be the alien, irreal pseudo world the parts knew—were “thrown” into. Restoration to and of self and pleroma then occurs here and now (as Plotinus speaks of). This unified world defies normal ordering categories and experiences the Ditheon entity that experiences it. It is familiar, intelligible and permanent and, most of all, permeated by the divine (whose realm it is). It is a kind of after-life world. (The whole is greater than the sum of its parts and radically different than them.) The gulf between “Earth” and “Heaven” is abolished (which explains why the Orphics and Gnostics assumed a literal spatial fall!). There is an absolute impression of vertical ascent. But what is most striking is that the “transmundane” deity now reveals its presence in reality precisely as it failed to do so before—hence the Gnostic conviction that it is transmundane. This is so remarkable as to defy description.