by Rudy Rucker
All the best,
Rudy Rucker
I put the letter inside a copy of Infinity and the Mind - not The Sex Sphere, for God's sake, and set it by his door. I was nervous doing this, as Friday he'd intimated that he'd shoot me if I ever stepped on his property again. But I had to get it delivered right away, before the final order to the God-Squad went down!
I hadn't told anyone yet about all this, but now my wife, noticing my furrowed brow, asked what was up. I told her about giving Cal the finger and telling him that everyone in Lynchburg hates him and Jerry.
"Boy, you're stupid, Rudy."
A few days later I got a letter back from Cal:
May 3, 1954
Dear Rudy:
Thank you for your gracious note and the book. I appreciate the spirit in which you wrote the letter.
I must say that this was the most unique introduction I have ever received to anyone!
Enclosed are a couple of my recent newspaper columns. I am now writing for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. I'll give you a copy of my book, Book Burning, when I get a chance.
Again, thanks for your note.
Sincerely,
Cal, "Vice Ayatollah"
Which was a real load off my mind. Before the letter, I'd reached the point of paranoia where I was wondering if it wouldn't be wise to go ahead and preemptively firebomb Cal before Jerry's minions could burn down my house and have the police shoot us as we ran out screaming. But this really isn't El Salvador here.
Cal's letter is quite classy - it's kind of unnerving, the fact that when you actually get to some super media pig, there is sometimes
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actually a person there, a person who wears a certain kind of public mask. Not that I particularly like Cal now, or believe anything he writes - but it is interesting to know that he has a certain sense of humor about having worked as Jerry's "Vice Ayatollah."
A few months later, I was talking to the assistant minister of St. John's Episcopal, a gentle and thoughtful man my age whom we knew socially. He said, "Rudy, your name came up the other day in a very strange context. I was talking to Cal Thomas about a student exchange program, and he asked me if I knew you. I said, yes, and then Cal told me that you'd flipped him the bird and told him that Jesus sent you here to fight him, and that everyone at St. John's hates him."
"Well, yeah, I did that. I wish I hadn't. I was pretty drunk."
"Cal asked me if you might have been drinking. I said that it was . . . possible."
"Was he pissed off?"
"It was more that he wanted to figure out . . . what had happened."
Appeared in Science Fiction Eye, #2, August 1987.
I'm glad I don't drink anymore!
Jerry Falwell continues to appear in the news now and then, always advocating the absolute worst possible ideas. He even hates science fiction:
The decline in American pride, patriotism, and piety can be directly attributed to the extensive reading of so-called 'science-fiction' by our young people. This poisonous rot about creatures not of God's making, societies of 'aliens' without a good Christian among them, and raw sex between unhuman beings with three heads and God alone knows what sort of reproductive apparatus keeps our young people from realizing the true will of God.50
50. Jerry Falwell, "Can Our Young People Find God in the Pages of Trashy Magazines? Of Course Not!" Reader's Digest, Aug. 1985, pp. 152157.
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The Central Teachings of Mysticism
This is not going to be very funny, but I hope it's at least interesting. One reason I like to talk about mysticism is that talking weird gets me high: the air gets like thick yellow jelly, you know, and everyone's part of the jelly-vibe jelly-space jelly-time . . .
All is One. That's the main teaching, that's the so-called secret of life. It's no secret, though. It's a truism that we've all heard dozens of times. The secret teachings are shouted in the streets, All is One, what can I do with that? How can I use it in the home? If that's the answer, what's the question?
I guess the most basic problem we all have to deal with is death. In Zen monasteries, the entering students are given koans to solve. A koan is a type of problem unsolvable to the rational mind: What was your face before you were born? This is not a stick. [Holds up a stick.] What shall I call it? Each of us on Earth has a special koan to work on, it's the death-koan, handed out at birth: "Hi, this is the world, you're alive now and it's nice. After awhile you die and it all stops. What are you going to do about it?"
The mystic escapes death by denying that he or she exists as an individual bag of meat. "I am God," is the easiest way to put it, though this doesn't always go over too well. "Hi, I'm God, this is my wife, she's God, too. These are the children, God, God, and . . . " What I have in mind here is that God - or the One, if you want to be more neutral-sounding - what I mean is that God is everywhere and we are all part of God. We are like eyes that God grows to look at each other with.
The word "God" does grate. Organized religion puts a lot of people uptight (we will be passing out the plates soon) and when a lot of us hear that word (get your hands outta there, friend) our first impulse is to find a brick and throw it, or just leave or go to sleep (you're gonna burn for this) . . .
Here's where the second central teaching comes in. All is One,
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fine. But: The One is unknowable. "God" - that's just a noise I'm making up here, a kind of pig-squeal. We don't know God's name, and we never will. The ultimate thing, the fundamental Reality - it's not something the rational mind can tie up in a net of words. I can't really tell you what I'm thinking about. In a way it's pointless to talk about mysticism at all. "If you see God, only piss to mark the spot" - that's a line from a poem I wrote when I was thirty. I was down in the islands, standing on a beach at night. If you see the Buddha in the road, kill him.
So here's two teachings: All is One, and The One is unknowable. The third (and last) teaching is The One is right here. You're totally enlightened right now, right as you are. You see God all the time; you can't stop seeing Him. We're all in heaven and there is no hell.
First I claim that all of reality is one single thing, a sort of giant orgasm or something. Then I say that this One is unknowable, but right away I turn around and say that the One is perfectly easy to see, it's everywhere. Do we have a contradiction? How can the mystics say that, on the one hand, God is unknowable, and that, on the other hand, God is everywhere?
People who have a more or less fascist view of religion are perfectly comfortable with the idea of God as something way up there, something unattainable: the Commander in Chief, the Head Technician, our Fearless Leader, the Great Scientist who put all this together. The Church of Christ, Cosmic Programmer. What's God thinking about? Smart stuff, hard stuff, stuff we can never understand. That's the God is unknowable teaching. No rational human description can exhaust the riches of the One.
The other side of the coin is that we know the One perfectly well. You can't describe God in any complete way, but God's as much a part of you as your body is. You can know something in an immediate way without knowing it in any kind of analytic way. You don't need to be a geneticist to know how to make babies.
So when mysticism says The One is unknowable and then says The One is right here, there isn't really a contradiction. It's just that there's two kinds of knowing. We can't know the One rationally, but we can know it in an immediate and mystical way. Anyone can go into the temple, but you have to leave your shoes outside. "Temple" stands for
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a mystical vision of God, and "shoes" stands for conventional ways of talking. You take off your shoes and walk into the temple.
We don't have to go to the Far East to find mystical religion. Christianity is based on the idea that, on the one hand, God is way up there in seventh heaven, and that, on the other hand, Jesus comes down to live in our hearts. It's a strange thing that many of us are more comfortable with Buddhism than
we are with Christianity. It's strange, but the reasons are pretty obvious - I mean, imagine if there were a 24-hour-a-day Buddhist Broadcasting TV network:
"Friends, I want to talk to you about samadhi. This blessed state of union with the Void - Void being Nothingness, friends - this blessed state was first experienced in a little town near the Ganges River. God brought a man - a man, friends, and not a woman - God in His wisdom brought forth this human - a human, friends, and not a Communist - God brought to this seeker a vision of the Void. How best might you, in your ignorance, in your sin, in your present debased circumstances, how might you best seek the Void? The Void can be found in your wallet, dear seeker, if only you will send its contents to me . . . "
So you go turn on the radio, man, and instead of music there's some grainy-voiced guy yelling:
" . . . hatred. Yes, hatred, my fellow enlightened ones, Buddha came to preach hatred. I know this may sound strange to some of you out there in the radio audience, but it's not a matter of conjecture. God hates the unbeliever, just as the unbeliever hates me . . . "
There is so much negative stuff associated with religion, that many of us would just as soon never talk about God at all. But there's still that death-koan hanging overhead: life is beautiful, life ends, what can I do? If I decide not to think about bad stuff like death and loneliness, then I end up spending all my energy on not thinking. I can buy lots of stuff, but every visit to the repair shop is an intimation of mortality. I can get real high, but I always have to come down. And not choosing anything at all is itself a choice.
Mysticism offers a way out. It's really just a simple change of perspective. A person's life is like a design in an endless spacetime tapestry. Molecules weave in and out of your body all the time. Inhale/Exhale; Eat 'n' Excrete. You breathe an atom out, I breathe it
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in. I say this, you answer that. Atoms, thoughts and energies play back and forth among us. We are linked spacetime patterns, overlapping waves in an endless sea. No one exists in isolation, everyone is part of the Whole. If a person can only take the word "I" to be the Whole, then that "I" is indeed immortal. In the book of Exodus, Moses asks God what His real name is. God answers: "I AM." All is One, All is One.
If this were just an abstract idea, then mysticism would not be very important. What makes mysticism important is that you can directly experience the fact that All is One.
I used to read about mysticism and wonder how to score some enlightenment. There's something so slippery about the central teachings - the way the One is supposed to be unspeakable, yet everywhere all the time - it used to really tantalize me. And then finally I started getting glimpses of it, sometimes with chemicals, sometimes for no reason at all. I'd see God, or feel the world synch into full unity, and I'd love it, but whenever I tried to grab onto it, the life would somehow drain out, and I'd just have some dry abstract principle.
After I got so I could occasionally feel that All is One, I started being uptight that I couldn't be there all the time. I bought lots of books by totally enlightened men. Eventually I concluded that no one does stay up there all the time. You can't always be having a shining vision that All is One; you have to do other stuff, like deal with your boss, or fix the car, meaningless social hang-ups, the stuff like walking and eating and breathing. You can't always be staring at the White Light.
But you can. That's the next level, you see. The Light is everywhere, all the time. Being unenlightened is itself a kind of enlightenment. There are no teachings, and there's nothing to learn.
Congratulations, Mary.
Appeared in Transreal, WCS Books, 1991.
In 1982, a friend of ours named Mary Molyneux Abrams had been taking classes at Sweetbriar College so she could get her Bachelor's degree. But then she decided to stop going to school, and her husband said, "Why not give Mary a graduation party anyway?" He made up engraved invitations mentioning me as the commencement speaker. At the party, I handed
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out mimeographed copies of "The Central Teachings of Mysticism" and read it to the audience of some forty people.
Looking back at this little lecture, I enjoy its flow, but I feel like it's missing something. God isn't just some kind of logic puzzle, God can directly touch your heart. Over the years I've added a fourth and a fifth "teaching." God is Love, and God will help you if you ask. Help you do what? To be less selfish, more loving, less driven, and more serene - to let go and stop trying to run everything.
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Haunted by Phil Dick
My head was in a very bad place in the spring of '82. I often think of life as being like surfing. Ups and downs, manic-depression, all you can really do is ride it out. Hang ten. On the board. Sometimes you fall off, the board hits you in the head, sharp coral comes up, etc. I'd lost my most recent teaching job, my wife and I were fighting, I was singing in a psycho-punk band called the Dead Pigs.
Phil Dick died around then, and I started thinking about him a lot. In May '82 I started working on a post-WWIII book called Twinks. Every day, starting out, I'd pray to Phil Dick and ask him for guidance - to some extent I was trying to twink him. ''Twink" is a SF word I made up; to "twink" someone means to simulate them internally, to let their spirit take possession of you. The idea is based on my notion that Soul = Software.
Let me explain this concept a bit. Using a computer analogy, we can compare the body to hardware, and the mind to software. The personality, memories, etc., can all, in principle, be coded up to give the individual person's software soul. A powerful enough hardware system can boot and run any given software. Given enough information about another person, you can twink them.
In fall of '82 I got a contract for a nonfiction book called The Fourth Dimension, and Twinks was set aside. I still thought about Phil Dick a lot. Sometimes, me walking around some tree-lined Lynchburg neighborhood, he would feel very close. I heard I'd been nominated for the first Philip K. Dick award (for my novel Software) and I felt I had a good chance of getting it. I begged Phil, or my internal simulation of him, to make sure I would get it. I'd done five SF paperbacks at this point, and was getting zero recognition. I really needed a break.
Later that winter - like in January '83 - Audrey and I and a friend named Henry Vaughan went out to a party at a girl's house in the country. We didn't know too many of the people - they were sort of rednecks, where those days in the South a redneck was a per-
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Rudy at the first Phil Dick award ceremony.
(Photo by S. Rucker.)
son with long hair and a scraggly beard. It was mellow, plenty of weed, loud music, and everyone getting off.
At some point I glanced across the room and in walked Phil Dick. He didn't say he was Phil Dick, but he looked to be wearing his circa-1974 body . . . hair still dark, beard . . . hell, I don't know what Phil Dick "really" looks/looked like, but I knew this was the guy.
At first I just grinned over at him slyly - like Aphid-Jerry eyeing "carrier people" in A Scanner Darkly. Then, finally, I introduced myself and drank beer and whisky in the kitchen with him for awhile. Of course I was too hip to confront him with my knowledge of his true identity.
The man's cover was that he was in the garbage business. "The Garbage King of Campbell County." He said he had a fleet of trucks, and that he'd furnished his entire house with cast-off items gleaned from the trash-flow.
I steered the conversation around to science fiction, mentioning my novel Software.
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"What's it about?"
"It's about robots on the moon. In a way they're black people. The guy who invented them - he's my father - is dying and the robots build him a fake robot body and get his software out of his brain."
"Go on."
"They run the software on a computer, but the computer is big and has to be kept at four degrees Kelvin. It follows him around in a Mr. Frostee truck. There's a big brain-eating scene, too."