We are trapped, by and large, in the lower realm,” Dick tells us, “but are through the sacraments … extricated.”
VALIS, “Appendix,” ¶ 48, p. 269.
(Because of an apparent proofreading error,
there are two paragraphs numbered 48.
This is from the second, beginning
“Two realms there are…”)
Extrication
Extrication is precisely where the traditional Eucharist fails us, and it fails us in two big ways.
First, take a close at Dick’s grammar:
Through the sacraments we are extricated.
Note the passive voice. We’re not the hero of our own story, active. We’re passive, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse in need of rescue.
Second, note that in Dick’s assertion that
we’re trapped, by and large, in the lower realm
is the implicit assumption that there’s something real—the ‘lower realm’—to be extricated from. There isn’t.
The traditional Eucharist fails us (a) because its focus is on the body given up, the blood poured out to save us and (b) because the misapprehension inherent in that scenario is that there’s something real to be saved from. The traditional Eucharist is, in fact, still enthralled, entranced, paralyzed by its vision of Glorious Great Buddha-Heruka, his three heads adorned with dried skulls and with raw human heads forming a garland for his body, his consort, Buddha-Krodhisvari, clinging to his neck and putting to his mouth a skull bowl filled with blood. The traditional Eucharist is totally stuck in, utterly buys into the illusion that there’s a wrathful deity who’s really wrathful, that there’s this lower realm here where we’re trapped, a heavenly kingdom above us, a hellish inferno below, that it’s all somehow real.
The problem is that if it’s all somehow real, if we’re passive, if we ‘are extricated’ in the passive voice, then when we’re extricated, we leave The Matrix intact behind us. We don’t transubstantiate the world. We don’t crash the illusion.
Remember when Morpheus offers Neo The Red Pill, when Neo takes it, he indeed ‘is extricated,’ passive voice: he gets flushed. The Matrix, however, remains completely intact behind him. Indeed. Because that’s not where the story ends. That’s where it starts.
Where the Story Ends
Where the story ends, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is with Neo totally flatlining, a couple of slugs in his chest. Whereupon Trinity announces, “You can’t be dead,” kisses him, then commands him, “Now get up.” And to the astonishment of Agent Smith, Neo—totally hacking the a-couple-of-slugs-in-the-chest algorithm—just ups and raises himself from the dead, totally breaking the rules, totally rewriting the code, totally crashing ‘death,’ scaring the bejesus out of Agent Smith.
Darth Vader is similarly astonished when, having struck the fatal blow, Obi-Wan doesn’t fall down dead but inexplicably dematerializes, crashing the Obi-Wan-is-this-meat algorithm so completely that the illusion of meat itself ceases instantaneously, and his Jedi robe falls empty to the floor. (And we can’t let ourselves forget that while Obi-Wan’s dematerialization is a mere cinematic special effect, Abbot Chö’s attainment of the rainbow body in July 1998 had witnesses.)
And of course no one is more astonished than Jesus’s disciples when, after Jesus crashes death, he then hacks into the Jesus-is-this-meat algorithm so masterfully, so playfully that he just can’t help totally showing off, breaking pretty much every rule of what a body can and can’t do to demonstrate his mastery.
Ain’t Misbehavin’ (Are Too!)
“Except ye become as little kids” takes on a whole new meaning, indeed has a whole nother meaning interleaved with the superficial meaning—and we don’t even need Blind Kent to figure this one out for us. Because Jesus is showing off, manifesting the hidden meaning right before our eyes. To wit, as often as not, kids don’t behave, they misbehave.
Jesus decidedly did not say, Except ye become as little angels. I’m pretty sure if that’s what he meant, that’s what he would’ve said. I’m pretty sure that saying what he said, he knew what he was suggesting.
Jesus is sanctioning unruliness.
I was with a friend once at an art show, we were standing in front of a painting, and out of nowhere she announced that her definition of an artist was “somebody who breaks the rules.”
“Actually,” I said, “I think that’s the definition of a career criminal.” But then I got what she was getting at.
Namely, creativity, play can’t be constrained. Nor can Neo, nor Obi-Wan, nor Jesus, nor Abbot Chö.
A career criminal breaks the rules for selfish reasons. The kind of unruliness that Jesus is sanctioning—is himself manifesting—is utterly different. There are four kinds of rainbow body, Father Tizo tells us. In
“The Way of Death Like Knowledge-Holders” … a yogin of supreme accomplishments disappears,
but they still, like Jesus, have their body and others can still see them.
This is done for the sake of setting others on the path of the Dharma. … This is considered to be the sign consisting of “inconceivable manifestations on inconceivable continents” so as to bring benefit to sentient beings.
Rainbow Body and Resurrection, pp. 116f.
When 98-pound weakling Steve Rogers bursts out of that sarcophagus totally transformed, totally buff, he knows the proper use of his super-soldiered, Vita-rayed Glorified Body isn’t to show off in cheesy roadshows. It’s to act to bring benefit to sentient beings. Even Marvel Comics groks the Glorified Body.
What Neo and Obi-Wan and Jesus are showing us is that what the traditional Eucharist lacks entirely but what the Über-Eucharist has in abundance is inherent playfulness. In the Über-Eucharist, the magic words of transformation that bring about the Real Presence of an entirely alien (in Clarke’s sense) and transcendent reality—
Hoc est enim corpus meum. Hic est calix sanguinis mei.
For this is my body. This is the chalice of my blood.
—conjure up not the body given up, the blood pouring out of the Crucified Jesus, dangling from a cross around Glorious Great Buddha-Heruka’s neck, but the Glorified Body of the Risen Jesus, materializing and dematerializing at will, with utter impunity, totally unruly, manifesting The Real Presence of the inexhaustible potential of ceaseless spontaneity.
Liberation
But more importantly what the traditional Eucharist lacks entirely but that the Über-Eucharist possesses without question are the words not of extrication, but of recognition and liberation—
Haec est enim mens mea.
For this is my mind.
—the words that recognize that even the Real Presence of the Glorified Body is nothing more than, nothing other than The Real Presence, the Real Playfulness of Naked Mind.
We can be extricated—passive voice—without doubt; but nobody can do the recognizing for us. And the good news is that once we’ve done the recognizing, we don’t need the extrication. Because recognition and liberation, as the Tibetan Book of the Dead tells us, are simultaneous:
Recognize your guardian deity, and merging inseparably with him, become a buddha in the sambhogakaya.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, p. 137.
Or in the vocabulary of Dick and Clarke:
Recognize your champion, and merging inseparably with him, become Naked Mind, lase into Pure Consciousness in the sambhogakaya.
The sambhogakaya is the bliss body of the Buddha, the reward body of every bodhisattva who has completed their vow to act always for the benefit of every sentient being and who has thereby become a buddha.* Merging with Vairocana the Primordial Buddha in the sambhogakaya is the reward you get when you’ve won liberation, won the Glorious Great MMORPG.
*“Trikaya,” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trikaya), retrieved 27 September 2021.
It’s impossible when you hear of the sambhogakaya not to think of Jesus’s Glorified Body.
It’s impossible when you hear of merging inseparably with Vairocana the Primordial Buddha in the sambhogakaya not to think of the words of Athanasius of Alexandria: God became us so that we might become God.
Or: Über-Mind becomes us so that we might become Über-Mind.
Über-Mind immerses itself in, make-believes it’s us ten billion different little points of view so it can experience winning the sambhogakaya by some literal miracle in ten billion dazzlingly different ways.
Father Tiso, you may remember, was puzzled that Buddhism was reluctant to embrace a ritual—an algorithm, we might call it—
comparable to the Christian Eucharist . . . in which the entire cosmic process can be summed up and directed towards a transcendent and definitive future
Rainbow Body and Resurrection, p. 7.
—towards the Fierce Moment of Our Inconceivable Metamorphosis. Maybe the reluctance had to do with the fact that the traditional Eucharist isn’t the right sacrament.
The Über-Eucharist is.
Dumpster Diving
I feel like I’ve been sort of all over the map up to this point, but that’s been necessarily so in a sense because there’s been so much to connect from so many disparate sources. The symbols of the divine, as Dick says, show up in our world initially at the trash stratum; and dumpster diving is a messy business.
So before I dive even deeper, let me summarize as simply as possible where Dick’s faith in the power of the Eucharist and A. E. Waite’s certainty about the existence of an ‘Arch-Natural’ Eucharist have led us:
The traditional Eucharist is the Real Presence of the Body and Blood of the Crucified Jesus, still in thrall to the Wrathful Deity. Traditional Christianity without question celebrates the Resurrected Jesus; but weirdly, the words of the traditional Eucharist utter not so much as a peep that that—the Resurrection—is the whole point.
The Über-Eucharist, on the other hand, is the Real Presence of the Glorified Body and Blood of the Resurrected Jesus and more importantly, beyond that, an experience—a real experience—of the Real Presence of the Glorified Mind, the Really-Real Reality of which everything else, including the Glorified Body, is just the luminous manifestation. And by a real experience of Really-Real Reality I mean an experience so real, so palpable you can literally taste it.
You can literally taste the Real Presence of Über-Mind.
The next, the obvious question is what exactly is the ritual—the algorithm, so to speak—that constitutes the technology of the Über-Eucharist, that gives us that so very real experience of Really-Real Reality?
Before I get to that—my hypothesis about it, at least (I’m sure as heck not claiming divine inspiration or infallibility)—I’d like to introduce you to a simpler algorithm, a lesser sacrament: the Sacrament of The Red Pill.
But before even that, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. The machinery for the transformation that Dick tells us is at work now—that machinery, as I’ve said, is us. The circuitry in our heads. Rewiring that is where we need to start.
And we’ve got our work cut out, I can tell you.
Come on, be honest, my whole premise is totally bughouse. Sure, I say, sure we can crash The Matrix. All we need is a sacrament, all it’s gonna take is a literal miracle. Utterly absurd. But Neo, remember—right after Morpheus tells him the truth, right after Morpheus shows him real reality—the very first thing Neo says is, “I don’t believe it. It’s not possible.” Nope, indeed it’s not possible…
Coming 24 December 2021
Hack the Eucharist | Crash the Matrix 
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