[...]
To recap: it is the perception of isomorphism that overcomes cognitive estrangement because the perception of isomorphism is a grasping by the person (part) of his compatibility with the whole (Other, cosmos). This perception acts as two mirrors act: a runaway positive feedback is triggered off in the person, the part, concluding with his reincorporating into the cosmos—which is at the same time a repair—a return, if you will—of cosmos itself. Since he is now inside the cosmos rather than an external spectator to it—in fact now that there is cosmos—he grasps it from within; thus he perceives what Spinoza calls the attribute of mind, the inner side of res extensae (the outer side). This perception of an isomorphic constituent common to self and Other (world, cosmos) is known in India as the "Tat tvam asi" perception of the Atman-Brahman identity; it is a universal experience. It is pure knowing—as contrasted to belief, even correct belief—and, most of all, it is return.
This is also precisely what Heidegger describes as the condition of Greek man before "the darkening" in which Logos became merely some thing he had, as with Aristotle: a set of propositions about reality. Thus in terms of Western history man fell out of the cosmos somewhere between the time of Parmenides and Aristotle. Exactly as Heidegger says. And into the vacuum there came, of necessity, Stoicism. Cosmos was not merely no longer perceived—it was by definition gone. (Viz: it is only there if perceived, because it is a relationship: between the whole and its parts. Thus in a certain real sense what I saw in 3-74 came into existence only as and when I experienced this; yet although this was finite in terms of space and time, during its existence it was, paradoxically, infinite and eternal.)
If cosmos can be reconstituted by anyone anywhere at any time it always was, is everywhere, and always is. In saying this I am not describing an attribute of it but, rather, its nature. It needs to be only once to always be. That is, if it can be at all it is (a version of Anselm's ontological proof of the existence of God).
[...]
Here my study ends.
Except to add: My god; each step is a further fall. (1) Up to Parmenides is an intact part-whole true experience (Dasein) of intact cosmos. (2) Aristotle to the Stoics: there is no longer an actual experience of cosmos, of the part-whole relationship in which man is inside the cosmos; there is only faith that cosmos exists and it is good and wise, a belief-system replacing actual experience; that is, knowledge about the previous stage. (3) A further fall (i.e., the Gnostic Dasein). No faith, trust, the sense of the benign—all are gone; the world-order, still putatively believed to be a cosmos, is regarded as hostile and alien; thus estrangement is complete. Yes; here cognitive estrangement is so vast that there is conscious recognition of it; efforts are made to reverse it, i.e., to acquire the Gnosis. And I could add (4) where these efforts are abandoned, this occurring upon the death of the Gnostic attempt to reverse the state of ontological ignorance for ontological knowing. Oh Weh! The fall worsens! And yet I reversed it for myself. And what is the role of orthodox Christianity in all this? It is a pistis system; hence it fails to perceive the problem as one of cognitive estrangement: thus it neither seeks to nor succeeds in bringing about a reversal of cognitive estrangement. Like the Stoic system, it consists of a series of dogmatic beliefs; propositions assented to as creed! This is of no help whatsoever! To affirm loyalty to a series of propositions—this is precisely what Heidegger means by "the darkening"!
[56:G-6] In a sense (I realize) I am concerned with the absolute only insofar as it has to do with Cosmos.➊ Since I am concerned with this life—hence the cosmos—and not the next (if any). The adjustment—radical adjust ment—of my status within the cosmos (in 2-3-74) discloses two things: (1) there is a cosmos in the strict, precise Greek sense; and (2) there is a regulator, which I conceive to be an absolute. These realizations fill me with joy.
➊ if any). The adjustmentThis, then, subtly shifts my interest from theology to that which is properly the object of scrutiny of science (in the broad sense); it has to do with this world, the organization thereof, and what organizes and regulates it. This brings me at once into contact with modern physics; so this is not an idle, world-denying evasion of reality but, on the contrary, a rational attempt to understand it.
[56:G-35] But I think the element that is the greatest shock is the recognition of the familiar, as if (or even because) all else stems from it. "Familiar" and "change is only seeming" are two aspects of one fact. (This is true, really, of the other realizations: the illusory nature of space, time and plurality; there is really only one realization—that of the familiar—but it has implications in all these other areas, space, time, change, multiplicity.) The reversal, then, of what I call "cognitive estrangement" to "cognitive affinity" has precisely to do with this familiarity: how can you be estranged from what is familiar? And ultimately it is your own nature that you know, since for this unitary, eternal, unchanging "thing" to be familiar, there must of necessity be a you to which it is familiar: a you who saw and knew and understood it before; so now you understand that there was a you and there was a before—but since time and space have been abolished, "before" either means nothing or it means something quite different than is usually meant—as I pointed out in my two February '81 postcards. That "you" and that "before" are a fortiori and perforce now and here (hence I experienced a massive time dysfunction and with it a collapse of causation). As a result of all this the holy, the dimension of the sacred flows into the profane/mundane world.
[56:H-10] This business about the atomists suggesting that the void between objects is the is-not: is it possible that before the atomists there was not a perception of plural discrete bodies, i.e., res extensae as we all now experience world—that in fact we as a civilization inherited as a way of experiencing reality the atomists' way? Not just as a philosophy but a way of actually viewing reality? (This is in sharp contrast to Parmenides specifically, who experienced a field.) And that now, due to post-Newtonian physics, we may be able to reverse this perception and return to a field perception instead? And this would collate with the time that Heidegger assigns to "the darkening"! And that this is what happened to me in 2-3- 74; after all, due to the Taoist influences on me I was conceiving of reality as a unified field when I wrote TMITHC with internal acausal connectives—what I believed, I finally experienced, and the entrance for me lay in two "areas" as keys: (1) my unusual sense that space did not exist; and (2) neither did causation.
[56:H-23] When I saw Valis I also saw the sentience (Noös) which the view of the atomists had logically driven out of the universe, by showing that consciousness and perception are epiphenomenal; therefore the atomists were materialists of necessity. So when I perceived and comprehended the universe as a continuum, it was a thinking continuum, as it had been for all the pre-Socratics prior to Leucippus. One view (atomists) must of necessity deny Noös, but why does the continuum view imply noös? Perhaps the answer is: noös is there—in world—but the atomist—discontinuous—view prevents us from perceiving it ... because our worldview literally prevents us from seeing what is there: the voluntary sentient cooperation of "things" (which aren't things in the atomist's discontinuous sense); we see pool-ball Newtonian causation instead. Thus my two early satoris were logically and structurally related: having to do with space, having to do with causation. This all pertains to the discontinuous-continuum alternatives: "the void" not only permits pool-ball causality—the random collision of atoms by blind necessity—but requires it, by the very nature of the cosmology/theory that causes us to experience this worldview. Dasein.
So if you experience world as continuum, noös or God or Logos or Tao or Brahman would naturally flow back in, as it were; whereas in the atomists' discontinuous world of atoms and void this is logically of necessity excluded. And yet in this century—and only just now!—modern theoretical physics has verified the continuum view—and sure enough, some of the physicists involved are noting how the Tao or Brahman (Noös?) fits in.
The ecosphere i
s a continuum, and the apperception of it as a unitary whole is tied to this vast transformation in worldview found in physics. And it is alive and thinks.
[56:H-25] To hold the continuum view of the Eleatics satisfies two quite different criteria: (1) it is a return to Heidegger's unity of noein and einai before "the darkening," i.e., to Parmenides' worldview, so it is authentic Sein; and (2) it is in accord with modern physics, so it is verified, and it is not abreactive.46 Then the "darkening" is ending (and I see in this the "third dispensation" regarding the ecosphere, a concept only possible in the "continuum" worldview). [...]
The void-atoms view is the decomposing cosmos that Christ reunites (in and as the ecosphere continuum view).
The atoms-void "cosmos" is not a cosmos at all.
Continuum—idealism—God/Noös
Discontinuous—materialism—blind necessity
I saw the new cosmos.
[56:J-6] He has ensouled the biosphere as a whole. The logos, penetrating it, endows it with reason; thus it now uses language (logos = word = language). This is the greatest evolution since creation—Genesis—itself; man as a species now ascends to a totally new level of intelligence, such as I experienced in 2-3-74. This will permit an articulation by the ecosphere that we will hear. This has never been the case before. I am saying that we will hear the voice of the ecosphere and we will enter into dialogue with it; Dio! "The voice of the ecosphere"! "We will hear it." This is Pere Teilhard's noösphere; could this be the AI voice? The biosphere? It is not a disembodied voice or mind but speaks for all the creatures; this is Tagore. Is the AI voice, then, Tagore? Or, put another way, when I saw Tagore did I see the source of the AI voice?➊ This may be a new entity, since prior to this the ecosphere had no voice, for it did not possess the logos. The logos penetrates it, ensouls it with reason, and it (the ecosphere) speaks; to repeat my insight of Saturday night: the creator has now granted speech to the animals—i.e., the ecosphere. Then can it be said that Tagore is the ecosphere?
He has ensouled the biosphere with reason. Thus it can now speak, to him and to us; this is Tagore. It can enter into dialogue with us and with him.
The conflagration of the world foretold as its eschatological fate ("last time water, next time fire") is what I saw; but God out of mercy sends his son into the world once more, to enter the ecosphere and to plead for the world, that it not be burned up; thus the world is to Tagore as man was to Christ! It (mankind) faced destruction but God intervened, and both times in the same way: as voluntary sacrifice and surrogate, taking the burns as stigmata upon his own body so that the world will be spared as, the time before, man was spared. Thus Tagore is world's advocate as Christ was man's; God sees not the lowly earthworm, but sees Tagore, his son, and hears Tagore's voice which is the voice of the earthworm, the ecosphere itself. This is why the animals have been ensouled with reason: so they can ask for help. They have been given the gift of speech so that they can artic ulate their needs and plight to the creator. Then it is not just we (humans) who hear Tagore but God hears him, too; God primarily. He (Tagore) is mediator between the biosphere and God, in his role as logos.
The attempt by the animals to speak that I saw in 3-74 is fulfilled in and by Tagore. This is an evolution primarily of great mercy by God for the creatures (and it does show up in DI in the scene with the dying dog).
The dog run over and dying in DI is Kevin's cat in VALIS—here lies the ultimate enigma and the solution. This is what God must respond to, and he does so by sending Tagore. Tagore, then, is the solution to the axial problem formulated in VALIS. I have received my answer and it is not theoretical; he is here: the AI voice said so.
➊ The AI voice may be a new voice, not Ruah and not the Holy Spirit, but Tagore, the biosphere, who is Tagore, whose voice we hear and whose voice God hears; what I hear, then, when I hear the AI voice is what God hears. It addresses me and it addresses God. It is to God as Jesus is to God, him and yet not him. Tagore exists separately in his own right, as Jesus did.
[56:J-29] We are embedded in a tremendously elaborate biosphere or even noösphere (as Teilhard calls it) already, but cannot discern it due to our discontinuous view of reality, our materialist-atomist blindness. Were it to signal us we would most likely experience—or rather seem to experience—the sort of uncanny "one-way" information intrusions such as occur in Ubik. It is aware of us and our involvement in it, but we are not; thus, where it deliberately signals us we would note the signal and react appropriately but have no notion—nor even perception—what—if anything—had done the signaling. Thus (probably) we would experience what Bishop Berkeley speaks of as the impression that objects seen are "in" our eyes rather than spatially removed. [...] It would be as if the visible (or anyhow palpable) signal came out of an invisible yet tangent—i.e., immediate—source. But the problem stems from the very basis of our "discontinuous" worldview; signals and especially information would seem to arise (1) out of nothing; and (2) immediately at hand; as I say, as if "in" our own percept systems, yet at the same time partaking of Other, of the external. It would be a paradox, and one only solvable at the most fundamental ontological level of world experience; we would have to learn to see (or "see") what is in fact there in what I call the "Eleatic continuum" worldview in which the void is denied: viz: there is no such thing as "nothing."
You could even reason that it would be this impinging of signals and information at the sense organ itself, out of (apparently) nothing that would be our clue to the inadequacy of our fundamental apperception of reality, like the frogs KW speaks of bopping against what for them is an invisible wall—because they have no template for "wall."
How if at all would this differ from an hallucination? I believe that hallucinations appear organized in space-time; they are governed by the Kantian categories. They are projected sources. But here, information arises at the sense organ minus a palpable source. One supposes that one sees X or hears Y, but in what I'm talking about this is precisely what is missing; therefore the signal or information is de facto uncanny, being causeless. The problem is not that you see and hear but that you do not. There is a blind spot, an omission.
The "logic" of the discontinuous reality system denies that there can be anything there: only the void is there—hence, as I say, the stimulus seems as if it arises at the sense organ or in it or directly tangent to it (and not in space-time). Not only is there no way to tell what the signal (stimulus) is arising from. There isn't even a where.
[56:J-34] (Pronoia): affectionate behavior by world. [Agape]) strange orthogonal thought, following the sudden thought, "all this—my research—is sterile (i.e., cold, devoid of feeling)."
[56:1a] 2-3-74 was: I was not just in contact with God—I was in the mind of God, Kosmos Noetos47: world "became" the preexistent eternal ideas. Then I realized myself to be equally eternal—an eternal notion in that mind.
This is the whole explanation. [...]
The exegesis was not a waste of time; I came to understand noesis, the use and the cognitive function, the pre-existent ideas, the basis of it all being mind, intellect, forms, logos, idea, ideas—eternal and unchanging including myself—in God's mind,➊ hence world to be truly known must be intelligibly known, because it is an interlocking set of ideas in God's mind. This is the key to it all.
➊ This is where anamnesis and meta-abstraction become (revealed as) one and the same operation: (A) pertaining to world; (B) pertaining to me as an equally eternal and unchanging idea in God's mind.
[56:19a] The intellect—as opposed to the senses—can know the true nature of world—not because of some occult power in the intellect—but because the true nature of world is intelligible in itself (as the Pythagoreans taught: ratio and mathematical truth, not a substance but structure). There is, then, a one-to-one correspondence between the human intellect and the true nature of world, and this explains the meta-abstraction: why it re vealed the true nature of world to me (and my own nature to myself). The true structure of the univers
e is cognate to human reasoning, and this is the paradigm of Pythagoras and his insight upon hearing the anvil struck. Thus my exegesis with its emphasis on the reasoning faculty, the meta-abstraction, the overcoming of "cognitive estrangement" is by no means a waste of time or a blind alley but is pure Platonism, the meta-abstraction being noesis acquired through anamnesis. One might even say that the meta-abstraction is not only a revelation of how the universe is constructed but that it is an intelligible structure and that the human reason is able to comprehend it—and it is precisely this that overcomes "cognitive estrangement" by yielding up cognitive comprehension as the final yield pertaining both to self and world: the part-whole relationship. Thus it is taught by Plato that there is a spark of the divine in the human soul.
[56:1b] December 12, 1981
Though he seeks to sell his (Satan's) power fantasies (Blade Runner) he unknowingly promulgates the Third Kerygma: the ecosphere (animals) is now ensouled: holy. [...]
My god, this movie is the greatest defeat (what was done to the book) and victory (the Tagore kerygma promulgated); the first is ostensible, the latter cryptic. Oddly, the first appears ostensibly to be a victory but is really a defeat; nonetheless a real victory lurks secretly under it, but it is not the victory that people will think the making of a movie from my book is. They will say, "It is a great victory to have your book made into one of the biggest movies of all time," but they will not know why; it doesn't have to do with what is in the movie, etc.; it has to do with what is in the novel. [...]
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick Page 103