We destroy the worlds we generated, which are not real, but they destroy lives which are real. Who is guilty? They are. Who is guileless & innocent? We are, Abba.
Shiva holds a vial of poison, “to throw against the raging cosmic ocean which threatens to destroy mankind.” His human devotees feel themselves females, married to him.
In my writing I am a destroyer of worlds, not a generator: I show them as forgeries. I unmask them & abolish their hold, their reality. I show them to be bogus, an infinitude of them, like so many skins.
(1978)
Thought (Satori): Dedalus & the maze he built & got into & couldn’t get out of again—at Crete. Myth of our world, its creation, & us?
My dream about the elevator, the poem recited, the plate of spaghetti & the trident—palace of the Minos & the maze: clue to our situation? Well, then in my writing I figured it out; it was an intellectual, not moral error.
This would explain the technology! [illegible] layer. Pink beam of light, etc. the melting).
My books (& stories) are intellectual (conceptual) mazes. & I am in an intellectual maze in hying to figure out our situation (who we are & how we got into this world, & world as illusion, etc.) because the situation is a maze, leading back to itself, & false clues show up, such as our “rebellion.”
There is something circular about our situation, esp. involving our occlusion! By our efforts we can’t think our way out (i.e. get out—reverse the original intellectual error: paradox is involved, now) this is the clue! The occlusion would then be a function of the maze; its internalization.
(1978)
“But are you writing something serious?” Note the word.
Fuck. If they couldn’t get us to write serious things, they solved the problem by decreeing that what we were writing was serious.
Taking a pop form as “serious” is what you do if it won’t go away. It’s a clever tactic. They welcome you in—look at Lem’s 1000 page essay. This is how the BIP handles it if they can’t flat out crush it. Next thing, they get you to submit your S-F writing to them to criticize. “Structured criticism” to edit out the “trashy elements”—& you wind up with what Ursula[139] writes.
Like I say in SCANNER, our punishment for playing was too great. & my last sentence is, ”& may they be happy.” (I got that from knowing what “felix” [happy] meant.)
“Let them all play again, in some other way, & let them be happy.”[140]
(1978)
The fact that after 4 ½ years of strenuous exegete, whereupon I have reached these conclusions (not to mention 27 years of published writing) I now find myself being signalled to die—which effectively makes it impossible for me to put this Gnosis in a form which I can publish[141]—is a condition which can be deduced from my exegesis itself, & shows I’m on the right intellectual path, but to no avail. I am not extricated by my exegesis but by Zebra (Christ) back in 2-3/74. The exegesis would have provided the basis for a broad, explicated formulation to sow broadcast, but of course this can never come about; these insights will die with me. All I have is a three-feet high stack of chicken scratching[142] of no use to anyone else as K.W. [143] tirelessly points out. To heap the burning coals of anti-meaning on me. I also have a lot of money for the only time in my life, but with no use to which I can or care to put it. My personal attack—war—against anti-meaning (by means of my mind) has gone the way of our collective primordial defeat at the hands—I should say quasi-mind—of the maze; I merely recapitulate the ancient, original losing by mind in this exquisitely sophisticated board game which we so cunningly devised for our delectation. This past time is once more the death of one of us—but this time I am entirely through Christ—extricated—taken out of the maze: “One by one he is drawing us out of this world.” I did not win; Christ won me for his own, so vis-à-vis me alone the maze as always won. I have earnestly sacrificed myself for nothing & I did not realize this, naturally, until it was too late to retreat back out intact. Omniae viae ad mortis ducent [All roads lead to death].
In a sense my 4 ½ years of exegete can be regarded as afurther successful strategem by the maze, in opposition to the Gnosis crossbonded onto me in 3-74 which at that time gave me life—I gave up that life via my compulsion to relentlessly exegete. But I see one further irony-one which amuses me (my only exit from this trap): here is additional proof of the quality (success) of our original craftsmanship, so this final (?) victory of the maze over me, despite Zebra (Christ) is in a paradoxical way my victory as a creative artist. (The maze regarded as our work of Art.) After all, the maze is a product of our minds. If the maze wins, our minds win (are proven). If, upon entering the maze, we outthink it, again our minds win. Ambiguity is involved in either outcome (this may be the puzzling dialectic revealed to me in 3-74). In fact,
Maybe in (during, in conjunction with) my 27 years of writing I outwitted the maze—as witness the 3 Bantam novels,[144] TEARS & SCANNER. Speaking about me personally, I won in pitting myself intellectually against the maze; I figured its nature out—in which case 3-74 was the Jackpot payoff reward, the revelation you get for so doing.
(1978)
Rightly, I seek beauty like Parsival sought the Grail—but what a price I pay.
I don’t write beautifully. I just write reports about our condition to go to those outside of cold pak. I am an analyzer.
(1978)
Ah! Realm I is at CAD[145] 45; Realm II is at 1978. (Am I repeating myself? Oh well.)
I } Real time: CAD 45, the Roman Empire & the infant church.
———
II } Spurious time: AD 1978. Or world of TEARS. Any world you want to name.
To experience Acts time & place is to encounter the upper realm, which has plenary overrule power over the lower realm. My stories and novels in which spurious realities are depicted refer to Realm II. The two realms have split apart. The brain invades Realm II out of Realm I, camouflaging itself & its thoughts. Realm II is dokos over the actual. Significant for Realm II—& us—is the return of Christ, which came when promised. He descends into Realm II & dissembles & annexes it piece by piece. As each piece is captured it is freed.
27 years of trying to chart the contours of the real landscape concealed by the fraud; at last, accomplished in TEARS. I always presumed a bogus phenomenal world. This approach finally paid off. Again & again I put forth the notion that your world—& your memories—could be delusions & you would have no way to detect it (cf. Lem’s statement of the problem: the brain fed a spurious reality; is there any test by which it can tell?)[146]
(& I relate this to Berkeley’s idea of God directly feeding world to our percept systems.)
God can feed it to us, or he can enlighten us—deocclude us—via the Holy Spirit. The power is all his, not ours. Hence the concept of Grace, issuing out of the Mystery religions & the (correct) concept of the deterministic yin (lower) worlds & his reaching down from the pleroma to free (save) us (one at a time?). No, he interfered with our entire history in 1974! But people don’t see or know.
I occupy the position of an O.T. prophet who pits himself against the evil king & reveals God’s plan, which God reveals to him. Such prophets were rarely listened to.
I’ve done my best.
(1978)
[....]This is the paradox of, “Where should you
most expect to find God?” A: “In the least likely place.” I discern in this the following: “In point of fact you therefore cannot find God at all; he must-will— find you, & when & where you least expect it”—i.e., he will take you by surprise, like the still small voice which Elijah heard. Or like Oh Ho the ceramic pot.[147] The Oracle may speak to you from the gutter (whatever “gutter” might mean in this context).
So my writing—itself part of the “gutter” & as Lem says, “Piling trash upon trash”—may serve as the sort of gadfly kind of thing that Socrates considered himself to act as. My writing is a very unlikely place to expect to encounter the Holy; the Koinos,[148] the Message-processing, Ubik
-like ultimate entity.
(September 1978)
[ ... ]Then the illusions of space, time, world, causality & individual psyches will be abolished & we as primal man restored will again dwell—& know we dwell in the living information/brain of Christ & Noös,[149] where we belong: functioning parts of the whole, thinking as it thinks. Living & growing as it lives & grows. & once again experiencing the ecstasy of union with God our macroisomorphic father. These promises have all been made to us, & will be kept. But we do not know when. I speak as a witness who has seen & experienced what it will be like; the Savior woke me temporarily, & temporarily I remembered my true identity & task, through the saving Gnosis, but I must be silent, because of the true, secret, trans-temporal early xtians at work, hidden among us as ordinary humans. I briefly became one of them, Siddhartha himself (the Buddha or Enlightened One), but must never assert nor claim this. The true Buddhas are always silent, those to whom dibbu cakkha [enlightenment] has been granted. Yet, buried in my 27 years of writing lies information: in these writings I have told what I knew without knowing what I knew. I know now. This is the paradox: when I did not know that I knew (or who & what I am) I could speak. But now I am under the stricture of silence—because I know. The Journey, the Quest, ends successfully not in assertion but in silence. & among the things I know is why, i.e., why that has to be.
Without knowing it during the years I wrote, my thinking & writing was a long journey toward enlightenment. I first saw the illusory nature of space when I was in high school. In the late forties I saw that causality was an illusion. Later, during my 27 years of published writing, I saw the mere hallucinatory nature of world, & also of self (memories). Year after year, book after book & story, I shed illusion after illusion: self, time, space, causality, world—& finally sought (in 1970) to know what was real. Four years later, at my darkest moment of dread & trembling, my ego crumbling away, I was granted dibbu cakkha—&, although I did not realize it at the time, I became a Buddha (“the Buddha is in the Park”). All illusion dissolved away like a soap bubble & I saw reality at last—&, in the 4 ½ years since, have at last comprehended it intellectually—i.e., what I saw & knew & experienced (my exegesis). We are talking here about a lifetime of work & insight: from my initial satori when, as a child, I was tormenting the beetle.[150] It began in that moment, forty years ago.
(September 1978)
Premise: things are inside out (but will at the “apocalypse” assume their real shape). Therefore the right place to look for the Almighty is e.g., in the trash in the alley. & for Satan: in vast cathedrals, etc. Through enantiodromia they will “on that day” assume their rightful shapes—the great reversal. The jester in the tarot deck is the real king; the king card is the deranged one, the witless one. UBIK in its commercials & final theophany shows this reversal process. USA 1974 is really Rome c. 45 C.E. Christ is really here; so is the kingdom. I found my way into it once. The long path is the short path-ponderous books of philosophy won’t help me; Burroughs’ JUNKY[151] will. That “Thieves & Murderers” 17th century poem of Herbert’s[152] will. Stone rejected by the builder; the edifice is discarded; the true edifice is invisible—disguised as rubble (plural constituents).[153] ” The fly grooming himself—they (the divine powers) have to reveal the kingdom to you; you can never on your own pin it down. So to search at all is to miss the point. Tricks, paradox, illusion, magic, enantiodromia. The apparently harmless xerox missive was my death warrant. The AI voice says the secret stolen has been successfully smuggled to me; I have it. But what is it? My worst book, DEUS IRAE, is my best. God talked to me through a Beatles tune (“Strawberry Fields”). (“Nothing is real. Going through life with eyes closed.”) A random assortment of trash blown by the wind, & there is God. Bits & pieces swept together to form a unity.
(1980)
So if you push essence far enough in terms of ascending levels, you find you have gone a full circle, & you wind up encountering ultimate deity cooking & riding pop tunes on the radio & popular novels, & a breath of wind in the weeds in the alley.
It’s as if the ultimate mystery is that there is no mystery—it’s like what Robert Anton Wilson says in THE COSMIC TRIGGER about being outside the castle when you think you’re in, & inside when you think you’re out.
& in a way what is most paradoxical is that I said it all in UBIK years ago! So in a way my exegesis of 2-374 says only, “UBIK is true.” All I know today that I didn’t know when I wrote UBIK is that UBIK isn’t fiction. In all of history no system of thought applies as well to 2-3-74 as UBIK, my own earlier novel. When all the metaphysical & theological systems have come & gone there remains this inexplicable [illegible]: a flurry of breath in the weeds in the back alley—a hint of motion & of color. Nameless, defying analysis or systemizing: it is here & now, lowly, at the rim of perception & of being. Who is it? What is it? I don’t know.
(1980)
I’m an addict; I’m addicted to infinity. This is Love for God & an understanding of him on my part.
3-74, Valis, was the Mens Dei [Mind of God]. I comprehended it. It’s a strange thing to be addicted to, comprehending God’s Mind.
I must be a Sufi; by “Beauty” (the essence of God) read “pleasure”—because the why as to why I do it, it is because it gives me pleasure.
(1981)
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 & 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 exploration. 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, &, for them, my corpus of writing is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an investigation & presentation, analysis & response & 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,”[154] because this reinforces our mutual realization that no answer, no explanation of this mysterious reality, is forthcoming.
This is the thrust & direction of modern theoretical physics, as Pat[155] 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 & answered 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 & incomplete explorer. It may not end with me.
What I have shown—like the Michelson-Morley experiment[156] —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, & knowing you do not know. My attempt to know (VALIS) is a failure qua explanation. But, as further exploration & presentation of the problem, it is priceless. &, 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. & the fact that no one yet can help me is of extraordinary significance!
Someone must come along & play the role of Plato to my Socrates.
The problem as I see it is that Plato was 180° wrong; the eidos, the abstract & 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 search particulars, the weeds & debris of the alley; the answer is
there: I saw the mask & it works the opposite way from how Plato saw it; he saw the eid as ontologically primary, & existing prior to the particulars. But I saw the particular creating the eid (Or “phylogons” as I called them); this permanent eternal reality is built up on & based on the flux realm; all Western metaphysics is 180° off. Here is where the fault lies. Universals are real (nominalism is not the case; realism is the case, but the eid begin as many unique particulars. This (truth) is somehow tied in with my meta-abstraction: in it I somehow saw the real relationship between particulars & eide & this is the way, the Direction, the Flow, the Line in which actual reality move. Thus the lower gives rise to the higher & so is ontologically prior/primary—I mean the particulars. But the eid are not mere intellectual categories of ordering; they are intrinsically real. & this is what I comprehended in 2-74.
(1981)
Illumination: April Friday night 4:45 a.m., the 3rd, 1981. I saw the Ch’ang Tao (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 in opposition you are unified; unified, you oppose yourself; unified, you differentiate; unified, you become (the many) (yet you are always one (field). You want nothing. The more you change, the more you become what you are. For you, change is: remaining constant. This is your great mystery: by changing (in the dialectic) you renew yourself, hence you never change. Always new, always now. What can be said of you is, you are great (in meekness!!!) The Gentle.
(3 April 1981)
Chapter Four: Interpretation of His Own Works
In Pursuit of Valis Page 16