In a frenzy of hysteria I told Tessa that I believed that these were not people I was seeing. Not people like us talking to me in my sleep and healing and educating me, but another race entirely (you know, like the saucer people talk about: "a superior race from Outer Space, Immortal and All-Knowing, Who Guide Us"). But then, as I relate in my other letter (there's always another letter) of this date I tell how last night I was disappointed to be shown that it's only Asklepios and friends, and they're all human. So acute terror gave way to keen disappointment.
I'm sure that Asklepios and friends are concerned that I not freak. This must be a perpetual risk in matters of this kind, where they surface and start curing and guiding and improving a person. The person, understandably, goes bananas and climbs the drapes, hiding up there with eyes bugged out like grapes. First of all it interferes with the therapy, but worse than that it defeats the entire purpose of it, which is to make the person balanced, sound and sane, rational and calm and in harmony and proportion within and with the outside world, so he can take anything. If he can't take the healing, then we have a sad irony; the therapy to make him sane causes him to go insane.
These last experiences at night, first the rhymed couplet about "you have to put your slippers on/To walk toward the Dawn," is a very complex but very effective way of reassuring me. The voice was quiet and somewhat motherly, and familiar. (In the dream I thought it was Olivia Newton-John, and who could be scared of her?) Also, my associations which have filtered through after absorbing the couplet are in a similar vein. "You have to put your slippers on" is what your mama says to you before you and the other little children sit down around her in a circle, at night before you go to bed, to hear the story she is going to tell you; it suggests safety and also the peace and quiet, the alpha state you get into, before she starts her soothing tale. And of course it's soothing, dummy, because you're going to bed and no mama would tell you anything scary before you went to bed. Another association that comes to me is that you, as that little child about to hear the soothing tale, put your slippers on—not to walk anywhere; slippers aren't for walking—but to keep your feet warm, which could be deciphered as, "You must not have cold feet," which again deciphered means, "Don't be scared; you must not be scared or you can't walk toward the Dawn," which itself is a metaphor for "moving toward enlightenment," quite evidently. It's a riddle. As kids would have no trouble interpreting; it's really very easy, for a riddle.
The Nice Lady: What's meant by (and she recites the couplet)?
Children (all together excitedly): I know! I know!
[The Nice Lady]: Sit around and be quiet and listen and you'll learn something!
I'm sure of this, Claudia. They, Asklepios and his gang, were aware I was getting freaked (I do a lot of that, but it's understandable, probably happens often) and set about calming me down. [...]
Yesterday I asked Tessa what she thought was going on. "They're disclosing the Mysteries to you," she said. "The Elysian Mysteries." Since the EMs were based on secret rituals to Demeter, then maybe Tessa is right. My sibyl is a chthonic deity: Demeter for instance.
Love,
Phil
[4:103] The Other is not any one thing found in any particular place. It is a quality of (or rather visible in) all things, like a specific color. It shines through them at us. We see it and it sees back, as in a dialog. If it can be seen at all it can be seen immediately, not merely in some exotic far off setting.
(1) The Other exists.
(2) We can experience it.
(3) It is found everywhere.
(4) Therefore since it exists, since we can experience it, and since it can be found everywhere, we can encounter it here. The opportunity exists now. Lem is wrong in all respects.
What is needed is a tremendous increase in our brain-efficiency. A vital improvement in set-group discrimination. Once we have done so and locked onto it we can probably continue to hold it in view. We're talking here about a two hemisphere perception of reality, and then an information transfer from one hemisphere to the other so that cognition, not just perception, is brain-total.* The morphology is already in place.
All encounters in the phenomenological world (in time and space) are exterior encounters, with constructs of our own mind—here and anywhere else we go. To experience truly, genuinely to encounter any other living entity in itself, one would have to be in it, and have it in one. This would be an interior experience; one would see nothing outside, no object, but suddenly one would experience all reality through the vision of the Other, as if seeing out through its eyes. One would share and inhabit its world, possess its perspective; at the same time the Other would possess what one had as a worldview. This might be close to a sort of energy symbiosis, an exchange of plasmas. One would not see the Other; one would see as the Other. Not possess it but possess its world. And this would not be so much an "I am in your world and you are in mine" but both would share a world made up from both previous separate worlds. A superimposition, greater than either had possessed: a total sharing within, and a to tal shared view of what lies outside. This sudden, double, superimposed, simultaneous view would be experienced as gaining an additional depth: as if adding one more spatial dimension. Much as a flatlander acquiring three-dimensional space. Time, too, would be experienced differently; one could see ahead, in all temporal directions. Two separate "mono" views when blended become a "stereo" view. Both entities, surprised by the heightened perception, would probably attribute it to the other's ability, not realizing he himself supplied half. "What a marvelous entity has taken me over," each would think, astonished. "Look at what he can see that I never could." Each would be awed by the other—i.e., the Other.
Plato once expressed an idea, probably metaphoric, that each of us is really only one half of a four legged four armed organism; somehow long ago we got split apart and we're always searching for our missing other half.* This usually is construed as a man searching for his female mate; however, suppose the Great Builder has fashioned us humans here, each of us, as one half of a total organism the other half of which is not a human being but something totally different—maybe with no physical body at all, but a sort of energy plasma which fits over or is "poured into" each of us, as the Parakletos is said to be. This might indicate that our total life on earth is only the first part, the part before each of us and his Other are joined. Possibly many if not most of us die before being joined; maybe we never are, or we are joined after death. Meanwhile, off somewhere in another star system the Great Builder has fashioned the other parts of us, and soon we will be stimulated by Him to take off into space and head via rocket ship for that star, not knowing what lies ahead but prompted by a vast and authentic instinct that we should do it. Imagine our surprise—and then delight—when we get there and are suddenly joined, in the twinkling of an eye, with our other half—the Other.
On their own planet, the race of Others might have had even less total vision of their purpose in the universe than we have; however, it is pos sible that their guesses and intimations might be ahead of our own. In this case they might be waiting for us to arrive, or even made certain attempts to contact us—with or without success. At the ultimate, they might even have managed in small preliminary ways to reach across space to us somehow, to coax us subtly into moving toward them. A few of them—a small part of their total energy—might have arrived here already, even long ago, and touched a few of us, bringing those few into the total entity the Builder was preparing. That entity would, in our words, be a man and also a spirit—touched by the Holy Spirit or born a second time, whatever: born of water and spirit, perhaps.15 And, being all this, he would have a lot to tell us.
We are going to link up.
In all this, we would become aware of (1) those creatures toward which we moved with whom we were to link up; and (2) the Great Builder Himself moving all things. Regarding the first, we would have a natural instinctive tendency to venerate them as godlike, but in fact on their own, without us, they a
re probably no more and no less than we. It is the fusion which is superior. Their proper attitude toward us might well be the same veneration as ours toward them. What is truly to be venerated and revered is the Builder Himself and His Plan which caused both our species to come into being and then move toward each other to join. True worship should go to Him alone. We would experience him as the powerful, gentle will within us, prompting us to move toward our other halves. They are, like us, created; He is self-creating always.
It's interesting that Jesus spoke of being born again as being "born of water and spirit," which is from two sources; two coming together, in contrast to being "born from the womb," one source, one element. He was indicating a fusion. Water, perhaps, indicated our own part, with the Other, the spirit, coming down from above.
Certainly Jesus was speaking about a totally different kind of birth just in that respect alone; two elements joined together and became one entity. Another difference between the first birth and the second is crucial: we do not decide to be born in the first place; it happens to us, but the second birth (born again) requires a decision. This means that it does not occur naturally or spontaneously and in fact may not occur at all. It must be accomplished—done by us, or anyhow sought for. Somehow the spirit must be enticed or welcomed or attracted. Water—our part of the two agents necessary—we obtain in the sacrament of baptism, but we can't perform the other part: obtaining the spirit. We must wait for it to arrive, having done our part, the water part. Evidently for some reason the spirit can't come to us unless the water—baptism—is there; baptism must change us in a way we can't see, perhaps making us a conductor, grounded, and hence able to attract an electrical-like field from the heavens (sky). For all we know, the spirit is up there perpetually, awaiting only the crucial change (water) below to come down and enter.
Like Beethoven, the Creator is a joiner; not of organizations but of sections assembled separately in different places and then somehow brought together; the places are our category "space," then, when brought together, "time."
If the Other is not bound by the categories of perception time and space, then he is here now, was here, will be, and since not phenomenalistically, then he is not outside but within us. Like Plotinus' concept of concentric rings of emanation, we encounter our Others in gradually increasing intensity and clarity; they become clearer to us continually. It is as if the will which drives animals and bugs, in the form of blind instinct, begins one day in us to actually speak. This is the Logos perhaps.
Letter to Ursula Le Guin, September 23, 1974*
[4:106]
Dear Ursula,
I just sent you a big manila envelope of material but I wanted to say this, that the 14-page piece is all true, it really did happen to me, and it is strange and I can't fully explain it—which is to say, name who what poured itself into me back in March and is still there, still here, I mean. Still in a symbiotic relationship with me.
Tom Disch came back a couple of weeks ago and I told him about it. He suggested perhaps it was Elijah who had possessed me, and so I read up on Elijah; that explanation fits as well as any other, and so I ran with that until last night when, in falling asleep, I thought the words "poros" and "krater," and then looked them up today and sure enough once more, they are Greek words, and words which I certainly didn't know.
I doubt if Elijah would be ruminating in Greek, but he probably reap peared (after two parts of his spirit returned to Elisha) as John the Baptist and then other Essenes; it is probably all one spirit which can divide itself in any fashion it wants (like the Advocate which Christ says He will have God send after He, Christ, is gone). All these are one; this is a mystery, but to me very exciting.
The spirit which filled me starting in March was primarily rooted in these realities: justice, truth and freedom. His pursuit of the first and his devotion to the second is what made Tom Disch think of Elijah, I think. The spirit when he arrived here looked around, saw Richard Nixon and those creatures, and was so wrath-filled that he never stopped writing letters to Washington until Nixon was out.* He wrote again and again to Charles Wiggins, for instance—especially him, with an enormous intensity. Congressman Wiggins wrote back a long detailed answer to each letter; the spirit even wrote to the Wall Street Journal (a letter which they printed) informing them that Nixon's transcripts were self-serving and full of lies, and time would reveal this ... as it certainly did. This spirit, very Elijah-like but also as Christ spoke of the Advocate being, confuted the lies of the world with enormous insight into them; he used legal terms I don't generally use. You wouldn't believe his animosity toward the tyrannies both here and in the USSR; he saw them as twin horns of the same evil entity—one vast worldwide state whose basic nature was clear to him as being one of slavery, a continuation of Rome itself. And he was a foe to that, above all; he saw Caesar once more, and himself pitted against that. [...]
What perhaps is involved here is time travel. The ability by someone, or several someones, far back in the past (circa 600 B.C.) to travel forward through to our period, by large leaps, surfacing in one or more of us.... In February I had major oral surgery, and was home recovering, still under the influence of the sodium pentothal, and in severe pain. Tessa phoned the oral surgeon and he phoned a pharmacy to send out a pain killer. The doorbell rang and I went, and there stood this girl with black, black hair and large eyes very lovely and intense; I stood staring at her, amazed, also confused, thinking I'd never seen such a beautiful girl, and why was she standing there? She handed me the package of medication, and I tried to think what to say to her; I noticed then, a fascinating gold necklace around her neck and I said, "What is that? It certainly is beautiful," just, you see, to find something to say to hold her there. The girl indicated the major figure in it, which was a fish. "This is a sign used by the early Christians," she said, and then departed. Soon thereafter the dazzling shower of colored graphics descended over me in the night, and you know the rest. During the first weeks while the spirit was within me in full force I saw, among all the other insights I developed, that there are external signals which act on us as disinhibiting stimuli, which cause a vast drop in GABA fluid in the brain, releasing (intentionally, as with the little creatures) major engramming. Evidently this is what the fish sign did to me. In fact I read in one article on brain function that when inhibiting GABA fluid drops quite a bit—which is when an external signal causes major disinhibition to take place—the person experiences "abstracts much like the modern painters have reproduced," and this does fit my experience.
I felt, during those initial days, a clear and real sense of being in the hands of programming or engramming, from a very early period in my life, probably within the first four years of it; I was quite frightened, being unable to grasp what this indicated in terms of what it might cause me to do. However, it swiftly informed me via written material presented in dream after dream of the benign and reassuring quality of this Other which I had encountered deep within me—an Other which had been slumbering, inhibited by the GABA fluid until the proper signal released it to assume parity with me.
Now we function smoothly in synchronization, but at first I had to yield to it; rapidly it handled my problems in ways I never would have thought of. Resourceful and wise—and concerned always with the general good, not mine alone. Looking always clearly at the future.
Love,
Phil
Letter to Claudia Bush, November 26, 1974
[4:108]
Dear Claudia,
The other day I lay down and at once saw a hypnagogic vision of a great tall man with white thatched hair; he stood smiling, holding an enormous book. He wore white shining robes and sandals. At the same time a fragment of Greek flitted through my mind. At once I woke up and had Tessa research the Greek. This time it was for sure from the Pauline Texts; with her various reference books she was able to establish that it was from Hebrews 7:26,16 that that particular sequence of words appears nowhere else in the New Testament. What is
interesting is that I had just been reading a book of excerpts of Jung in which he discussed—at the part I'd been reading—a passage from Hebrews 7:17,17 just a few lines previous. I've never read Hebrews and certainly not in Greek. After reading the Jung I fell asleep and saw the person described in that section of Hebrews: an ancient Hebrew priest considered by the Christian theologians to have been a Logos incarnation prefiguring that of Christ. I've believed for some time that the snatches of Greek I hear at night are from the Pauline Texts, but couldn't prove it before.
This is all a feedback system, where I'm given information I couldn't possibly have on my own; best of all is like this when he or they can complete a sequence, especially in the original tongue. I read in Jung a quote from Hebrews 7:17; ten minutes later I dream from Hebrews 7:26 in Paul's own Greek. If you study theories of information transfer and communication, especially between different cultures (as for example in our attempts to get in touch with extraterrestrial entities, the CETI program, etc.) this is what would be theoretically striven for; this is ideal. We start a logical or math sequence and they complete it and return to us the missing integers. You can see that this is precisely what has been happening in my head. That I am in direct mind-to-mind touch with extraterrestrial intelligence systems has been obvious to me for some time, but what this means is not in any way obvious.
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick Page 8