Where You Least Expect It

The divine intrudes,” Dick said, “where you least expect it.”

VALIS, p. 254.

Neo, remember, bought into the whole fiction that he was really Thomas Anderson until that time in his cube when he opens the FedEx envelope, and out slips a phone, which unexpectedly rings. “Hello?” he says, utterly perplexed; and out of nowhere—totally unexpectedly—he hears the voice of Morpheus. Morpheus intrudes, and he does so where Neo least expects it.

The divine mimics beer cans in gutters because beer cans in gutters are gaping security holes in The Matrix, gaping because they’re the stuff The Matrix has programmed us to step over, to not even see.

The symbols of the divine,

Dick said,

show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.

VALIS, p. 254.

If we want to wrest control, we’ve gotta dumpster dive to find the sacred texts.

And utterly unexpectedly everything we need to hack the Eucharist, to partake in the Real Presence of our evolutionary future is pretty much laid out for us. As Jesus said,

The kingdom of heaven is spread out upon the earth, and people just don’t see it.

The Gospel of Thomas, 113.

Of course we don’t. Because that’s the way The Matrix’s got us wired.

“Father’s kingdom,” by the way, is just Jesus’s name for what we would call a higher dimension, a parallel reality in which we experience reality in a way beyond our conceiving, trapped as we are here in The Matrix. “Father’s kingdom” is a perfect example of a beer can in a gutter, exactly the kind of thing The Matrix has us wired to step over without even noticing, but which is in fact a hieroglyph, a cryptogram just waiting to be cracked.

Let’s start with just three of the sacred texts (we’ll encounter lots more), two of which I’ve already mentioned.

First, VALIS, of course, in which the divine mimics sci-fi. The divine, remember, mimics

not just objects but what objects do.

VALIS, p. 72.

And what sci-fi does is give us a bit of escape, let us fantasize a bit. The divine’s cunning subterfuge in VALIS is to make the seemingly innocuous escapism Dick’s tale offers the very means for an escape of an entirely different order.

Second, The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal, Waite’s desperate, failed quest for the secret of the ‘Arch-Natural’ Eucharist. In it the divine mimics a ponderous and impenetrable Victorian tome. An absolute torture to read, I can tell you, it is not, as Dorothy Parker once quipped, a book to be tossed aside lightly; it should be thrown with great force. Right into the bin with the beer cans and banana peels. Honest, it’s so monumentally turgid no one in their right mind would spend twelve seconds mired in its bloated prose, let alone the weeks I spent wrestling with its interminable meanderings. Which is, of course, precisely what makes it another feat of divine and deft subterfuge. Here and there in the bloat little snippets of the algorithm we need to piece together for the hack show up—little symbols of the divine—and they “show up in our world” precisely where Dick tells us to look: in the trash.

Third up is perhaps the divine’s most ingenious, most artful subterfuge: The Gospels. Now that science, our dominant cultural paradigm, has consigned the Gospels to the trash stratum along with the greasy pizza boxes and snotty kleenexes, only now can we get to the gospel truth. Ha! Hallelujah! And the gospel truth is—