The Über-Eucharist transubstantiates the whole world. That’s the essence of the Über-Eucharist. That’s wherein it transcends the traditional Eucharist. Of course, that’s exactly what crashing The Matrix means, when you think about it—our transubstantiating The Matrix, allowing all its appearances to remain but subverting them for a purpose they were never intended: to manifest the Real Presence of the higher order Really-Real Reality that lies beyond, outside The Matrix.
But transubstantiating the whole world, the entire Matrix, has implications that are far-reaching. In VALIS, Dick tells us,
God can be good and terrible—not in succession—but at the same time. … [W]e approach him through the mediating priest and attenuate and enclose him through the sacraments.
VALIS, p. 196.
That’s the function of the traditional Eucharist—to attenuate and enclose God—and that’s exactly why it poses no real danger to The Matrix.
But the Über-Eucharist differs profoundly from the traditional Eucharist. Without realizing it Dick, who you’ll remember had no idea there even was such a thing as the Über-Eucharist, nonetheless pinpoints the threat it poses to The Matrix.
God has escaped the confines and is transubstantiating the world; God has become free.
VALIS, p. 197. I’ve changed the verbs to present tense.
God set free can wreak all manner of havoc in The Matrix. He
can thrust himself outward and into the congregation until he becomes them. You worship a god and then he pays you back by taking you over. This is called “enthousiasmous” in Greek, literally “to be possessed by the god.”
VALIS, p. 197.
There’s a parallel concept in the Greek Church, theosis, a transformative process in which one is able to unite with God, to actually become like God. As Athanasius of Alexandria put it, “God became man so that man might become God.”
“Theosis (Eastern Christian Theology),” Wikipedia
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosis_(Eastern_Christian_theology)),
retrieved 22 September 2021.
Hallelujah, one might say. But not Dick.
Of all the Greek gods the one most likely to do this
—possess you—
was Dionysos. And, unfortunately, Dionysos was insane.
Put another way—stated backward—if your god takes you over, it is likely that no matter what name he goes by he is actually a form of the mad god Dionysos.
VALIS, p. 197.
Dick has, of course, in a few short sentences made a rather wild leap from talking about a God now free to transubstantiate the world to a mad god intent on taking everybody over for no sane reason. Mercifully, Dick qualifies his wild leap with “most likely” and “likely”; and luckily for us, however likely Mad God Syndrome may be, that’s not the diagnosis in this case.
Instead, consider this:
First, it’s pretty sorry-ass God who’s behavior isn’t occasionally beyond our rather feeble comprehending. You have to ask, is what Dick considers “insane” actually just a Mind that’s inconceivably alien? As Jacques Vallee tells us, the actions of a superior intelligence must appear absurd to an inferior one.
Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact, p. 167.
Second, and more important, what does “to be possessed” mean? For me to be taken over, there must be a ‘me’ in the first place. The question is, is each of us actually the ‘me’ we think we are? The answer is, perhaps disconcertingly, no. We’re already ‘God’—or Über-Mind—we just don’t know it. That is, I confess, a leap as wild as Dick’s and I’ll delve into it in more depth in a future post. But what it means is that we are and always have been possessed.
Third, and wildly improbably, the events in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End—Clarke’s exploration of what he posits might be humankind’s next evolutionary leap, and another of our sacred texts—parallel Dick’s description of a God who transubstantiates the world in utterly uncanny ways.
Hack the Eucharist | Crash the Matrix 