I have reason to suspect,” says Whitley Strieber in The Super Natural, “that the form we live in every day of our lives is not our only state.”
The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 97.
“I want to propose the idea,” his co-author Jeffrey Kripal adds, “that a rare but real form of the imagination may be what the conscious force of evolution looks like.”
The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 118. My italics.
And I’d like to suggest that Kripal’s ‘rare but real form of the imagination’ isn’t all that rare, and that we encounter the ‘alien’ all the time—we just aren’t paying attention. Remember Murph’s watch: it just looks broken when in fact if you’re paying attention you see it’s transmitting. And that, you’ll remember, is Über-Mind’s whole cunning plot: to slip genius tech through the firewall and into The Matrix’s code without tripping any sensors.
I apologize if this post is a bit rough. I’m having a devil of a time trying to put what I’m getting at into words.
Outta Nowhere
If you’ve read any of Strieber’s books—Communion, Transformation, Breakthrough—you’ll know that he’s very careful to avoid calling the beings he’s encountered aliens. He prefers the word visitors.
Which is such a phenomenally perfect word. An entity will just ‘pop in’ on Strieber for a visit, then depart:
I myself have faced physical beings. . . . [It’s] clear that the phenomenon can emerge as an entirely real, physical presence that is quite capable of manipulating its environment. The next moment, though, it can evaporate into thin air, leaving not a trace of what was a moment before an immense and overwhelmingly real presence.
Dimensions, Vallee, p. vii (1988 edition, published by Contemporary Books);
quoted in The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 116.
Hold on, Whitley. Nothing can just pop into existence out of nothing, out of nowhere, any old time it wants. Science says!
Oh, sure, Science also says that the entire universe popped into existence out of nothing, out of nowhere in a Big Bang. But that’s different. That happened long ago in a singularity far, far away.
But it’s not like I’m going to walk into the garage tomorrow morning and find a brand spanking new Tesla parked there.
Things don’t just appear ex nihilo.
But they do. All the time.
Music in Mozart’s head, for example, words in Shakespeare’s, images in van Gogh’s.
There was a world without E = mc2, then—bam!—there was world with E = mc2. Into Einstein’s head it popped, a way of looking at the world so utterly alien we still have trouble wrapping our head around it.
Things don’t exist, then they do.
And, come on, Science doesn’t have the first clue.
Stuff—totally random, wildly unpredictable, utterly unruly stuff—just, poof!, manifests.
Let me tell you—
A Totally Trivial Story
—a totally trivial tale of my totally trivial weekend.
Last Friday I went to the grocery store and along with all the other weekly provisions I bought a fresh bottle of laundry detergent. When I got home, I took it into the laundry room, and just as I was about to set the bottle on the shelf above the washer and dryer somehow it slipped, somehow fiendishly and with malice aforethought it managed to find the one and only trajectory that took it inconceivably behind the dryer. Grrr. I mean, there’s all of about seven inches of space back there for starters, and what little space there is is taken up with the gas line, the power cord, and the big flexible tube to the outside vent. I mean, for crying out loud! And there it sat, waaaaay down there, with this totally innocent look on its little face.
Disgruntled in the extreme I climbed up on the dryer, reached my arm down as far as I could, stretched every muscle and ligament to the max—I think I almost popped my humerus out of the shoulder socket—and could just barely, barely touch the cap of the bottle. Getting any kind of grip on it was out of the question. I would’ve had to have been an orangutan.
Whereupon, I’m embarrassed to say, I had a total meltdown. I pitched a fit that was, I confess, nothing short of epic. I threw an absolute and indisputable tantrum.
Why, I’m not sure. The preceding week had had its share of frustrations, but I had no idea until that instant the magnitude of the pent up emotion, the energy I’d been bottling up. Honestly, I’m not given to tantrums. I have the occasional outburst like anybody, but I can’t remember anything quite so absurdly operatic.
It was so over the top, in fact, I was so taken aback, I found a part of my mind weirdly playing audience, marveling at my histrionics, but—more importantly—wondering, What is this about?
Certainly not a bottle of laundry detergent, for heaven’s sake.
We’ve all had the experience of watching a movie, something happens, and we have that tantalizing, delightful realization, Wait a second, this is a set-up. Something’s about to happen. We sit up.
My histrionics having run their course, I gave myself over to a good pout. I can’t deal, I thought. I’ll take care of it tomorrow.
Fast-forward, next morning about 9-ish I was getting ready to toss some laundry in the washer, aware as I sorted the darks from the lights that I wasn’t going to be able to put off the inevitable any longer. I climbed up onto the dryer again, greatly displeased, to take another look at the bottle behind it, check how it was positioned, see if I could figure out a way to extract it. To be honest, I didn’t have much hope. I was already pondering how irresponsible it would really be to leave the damn thing down there until I needed a new dryer.
Then outta nowhere, inspiration struck. Outta nowhere, two images flashed into my head: the fireplace poker, then the tongs. Outta nowhere, like I was streaming a video, I could see myself using the tip of the poker to push the bottle under the power cord, then under the tube connected to the outside vent, then under the gas hook-up, all the way over into the space between the dryer and the washer where there was just a tad more room, and where I then saw myself clamp the bottle with the tongs and extract it.
Which I thereupon did, just as the how-to video in my head had showed me. It was totally easy-peasy. In fact, it was—the solution—a revelation.
A couple of days later I was telling my friend Ken about the incident—considerably sanitized, I have to confess: I skipped the part about the tantrum, I was too embarrassed by it—and when I got to the end, I said—rather glibly in retrospect—“It’s astonishing how, if you just sleep on a problem, your subconscious figures it out and hands you the answer.”
Glibly, because I now realize what’s of interest here isn’t an utterly trivial solution to a thoroughly trivial problem. What’s of interest is the story, or rather the plot behind how that solution came to pass—how the events were arranged to bring it about.
But let me get back to that—the plot—in a minute or two because first I need to pick up a couple of loose threads.
First, you’ll remember that this current train of thought all started a couple of posts back with my asserting that sci-fi and scripture aren’t different. And their lack of difference has precisely to do with the fact that things pop into existence outta nowhere all the time in spite of Science’s insistence that such happenings are impossible.
Second, things popping into existence outta nowhere led me to Whitley Strieber’s visitors popping in outta nowhere for a visit.
So let’s rewind.
A “Setting-Face-To-Face”
Let me again quote Whitley’s suspicion “that the form we live in every day of our lives is not our only state.”
The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 97.
Okay—Danger, Will Robinson.
In just a sec, you’re gonna all of a sudden think, Aha!, what we’re talking about here is aliens are us from the future.
Nope. We’re not. We’re not talking about the almond-eyed grays are really us morphed by some, I don’t know, future nuclear holocaust, like in some episode of The Outer Limits from the 1960s.
The physical manifestation of the ‘phenomenon’—whatever form it takes, gray, saucer, tic-tac, insectoid—is totally unimportant. I mean, come on, the whole point of The Matrix is that The Matrix—the seemingly indisputably rock-solid physical reality surrounding us—isn’t physical at all, but mere appearance masking something else altogether.
If we’re going to focus on evolution, as Whitley’s co-author Jeff Kripal would like us to, then where we need to start is with the realization that it’s a pretty sorry-ass evolution that isn’t beyond conceiving. Aliens are us from the future is simply too obvious, too easy. Too totally lame-ass.
So, don’t fixate on the physical—whatever it happens to be. It’s just a distraction.
Okay, back to Whitley, who’s telling us,
I myself have faced physical beings. . . . [It’s] clear that the phenomenon can emerge as an entirely real, physical presence that is quite capable of manipulating its environment. The next moment, though, it can evaporate into thin air, leaving not a trace of what was a moment before an immense and overwhelmingly real presence.
I have even thought that it [i.e., the phenomenon] may simply be what the force of evolution looks like when it acts upon conscious creatures.
Dimensions, Vallee, p. vii (1988 edition, published by Contemporary Books);
quoted in The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 116.
Whitley is telling us the ‘phenomenon’ that manifests is just the CGI, the image that gets generated, when evolution acts on consciousness. What’s at play isn’t about the image, the spectacle playing itself out before our eyes;* it’s about consciousness, what’s happening in our head.
*I have a lot more to say about ‘manifestations’ and ‘materialization’s in a future post.
Whitley goes on to tell two stories, both illustrative.
Non-Duality
The first is quite brief. He received a letter from a woman who was prompted to write after reading Communion to tell him that she’d had her own encounter with a visitor and she’d
asked her visitor who he was. He responded, “It is me within thee.”
The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 97.
Clearly the visitor can’t by “me within thee” be referring to anything physical. Rather, as W. Y. Evans-Wentz tells us in The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation,
Even as in Sangsara [i.e., samsara], time is illusorily divided into past, present, and future
—so any notion of ‘us’ v. ‘future us’ is a total illusion to begin with—
so mind is divided into the multiplicity of finite minds. … Although the One Mind illuminates the innumerable myriads of finite minds, it remains inseparably a unit.
The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, Evans-Wentz, p. 10.
Which is why, The Tibetan Book of the Dead tells us, we must, as a loved one approaches the moment of death, put our “lips close to the ear” of the dying person and say:
Now thou art experiencing the Radiance of the Clear Light of Pure Reality. Recognize it.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Evans-Wentz, p. 95.
“Repeat it distinctly,” The Tibetan Book of the Dead urges us,
clearly impressing it upon the dying person so as to prevent his mind from wandering even for a moment.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Evans-Wentz, p. 95.
Because, Evans-Wentz says, if at the instant of death we’re lucky enough to be familiar with that state, the “setting-face-to-face with the Clear Light”* as it’s called,
*The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Evans-Wentz, p. 89.
in virtue of previous spiritual training in the human world, and have power to win Buddhahood at this all determining moment, the Wheel of Rebirth is stopped, and Liberation instantaneously achieved.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Evans-Wentz, p. 97, n. 1.
But, Evans-Wentz tells us, chances are,
Owing to unfamiliarity with such a state,
—because it’s so frigging alien—instead we fail:
karmic propensities becloud the consciousness-principle with thoughts of personality, of individualized being, of dualism, and … the consciousness-principle falls away from the Clear Light. It is ideation of ego, of self, which prevents the realization of Nirvana.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Evans-Wentz, p. 97, n. 1.
The “setting-face-to-face with the Clear Light”—what if that’s exactly what the woman’s face-to-face meeting with the visitor was, a “setting-face-to-face” with non-duality? “It is me within thee,” her visitor tells her, Recognize it.
A Two-Way Mirror
Whitely’s second story is totally surreal. Shortly after Communion was published, an editor from his publisher stopped by a bookstore only to find two aliens with “huge, glistening eyes just like the ones the being on the cover of the book had”
looking through a copy of the book. They were turning the pages very rapidly and laughing together. When he went closer, he could hear that they were saying that I’d gotten this wrong or that wrong, then paging along and snickering.
. . . He watched them walk off into the afternoon crowd on Madison Avenue. Nobody seemed in the least concerned that two aliens were strolling down the street in overcoats and hats on a warm afternoon. He told me people would look right at them and not react at all.
The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 99. My italics.
Whitley reports that he insisted the editor take a lie detector test, which he passed.
Even Whitley himself was nonplussed.
I was debating in my own mind whether or not the experience was real or imaginal—that is to say, a tangible presence somehow generated by the imagination.
The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 99. My italics.
Jeff Kripal, Whitely’s co-author, helpfully unpacks that last phrase—“a tangible presence somehow generated by the imagination”:
I take it that he is implying that the two aliens would not have been seen as such by someone other than [the editor], that is, that others in the same bookstore either (a) would not have seen them at all, or (b) would have perceived the pair as simply two human beings, since that is also what they were.
The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 117. Kripal’s italics.
Kripal then takes two of Whitley’s insights—(a) that the ‘phenomenon’ “may simply be what the force of evolution looks like when it acts upon conscious creatures,” and (b) that his editor’s experience was not ‘real’ but imaginal—and weds them:
I want to propose the idea that a rare but real form of the imagination may be what the conscious force of evolution looks like.
The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 118. Kripal’s italics.
By ‘looks like’ Kripal says he means two things: (a) “how the evolutionary force appears to a human mind”; and (b) “how the evolutionary force itself ‘sees’.”
The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 118.
Kripal goes on to say that the imaginal—in its “rare but real form”—works kind of like a two-way mirror. Both the reflecting back and the seeing through take place simultaneously: we see the reflection of evolution at work before our very eyes (i.e., a setting-face-to-face), while evolution through us sees an opportunity and avails itself.
To pause for a sec to take stock, we now have three different ways of thinking about the imaginal:
Nâ-Kojâ-Abâd, “the country of no-where” described by Suhrawardi, Jung, Huxley, Tesla, with destinations and people, as Tesla put it, who “were just as dear to me as those in actual life and not a bit less intense in their manifestations”; the opening to which Celtic lore tells us lie at a thin place, where the boundaries of our physical world and a pure mind-space touch, a permeable membrane between realities.
Second, the good sort of memory that doesn’t work only backward, an echo from the future that van Gogh sees in his imagination as he sets to work on Starry Night; an echo, moreover, that when we hear it today in, say, Handel’s aria “The Trumpet Shall Sound,” when we hear it with a mind properly disposed it somehow inexplicably captures something of the experience of an evolutionary leap, the moment of our inconceivable metamorphosis.
And, third, the ‘rare but real form of the imagination’ identified by Strieber and Kripal that sees through us to effect our evolution and which is simultaneously a reflection of, a setting-face-to-face with itself.
Don’t think of those three different ways of thinking about the imaginal as in some way opposed or mutually exclusive. Think of them more as a sort of quantum computing, different possibilities superposed, a simultaneous exploration of parallel paths.
My “Setting-Face-To-Face”
At the beginning of this post I suggested that Kripal’s ‘rare but real form of the imagination’ isn’t all that rare, and that we encounter the ‘alien’ all the time—we just aren’t paying attention. I’d also like to quibble with his notion that what’s behind our evolution is some impersonal ‘force’. It’s not. It’s Über-Mind. Which Kripal himself actually says, he just doesn’t hear himself saying it.* I’ll get back to that.
*Kripal says that the bizarreness, the strangeness, or the absurdity of visionary phenomena arising from the symbolic imaginal “is a necessary function of the translation across the border or threshold between two radically different forms of mind and being.” (The Super Natural, p. 126.) Mind is mind; it isn’t a force like electromagnetism or gravity.
First, let me return to my trivial little story, or rather to the plot—the cunningly arranged chain of events behind it.
I glibly characterized the sudden appearance of the solution to my dilemma to my friend Ken, you’ll remember, as a feat my subconscious pulled off while I slept. Which sounds great, but come on, it’s an assertion that there’s no conceivable way to test. I could just as easily have said Harry Potter came to me in the night as I slept, touched the Elder wand to my forehead, and thereby planted the images in my brain. The only real difference between those two scenarios is that we believe in the magic of the subconscious, but we don’t believe Harry Potter makes house calls. Oh, okay, the subconscious is real and Harry Potter is fiction, but don’t get all pedantic. My point is nobody has ever actually observed the subconscious solving a problem like we can track a computer executing the steps in an algorithm. My attributing the solution to my problem to the agency of my subconscious is pure surmise.
Gary Lachman, Whitley Strieber, and Jeff Kripal—oh, and Jesus—have all suggested to me a far more tantalizing explanation.
O Cursèd Spite. What’s important about my trivial little story of extracting the bottle of laundry detergent from behind the dryer, as I said, isn’t the trivial solution to my trivial problem; rather, what’s important is the plot behind how that solution came to pass—how the events were arranged to bring it about.
Every good plot begins with something a miss. As Hamlet famously said,
The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite
That ever I was born to set it right. (Hamlet, I.v.210f)
The plot of my trivial tale began not with my buying the bottle of detergent last Friday. It begins, rather, a Sunday ago with my immersing myself in the chore of trying to craft this very post, struggling with the devilish task—o cursèd spite—of putting into words an experience I have of a reality quite different from our consensus reality (aka The Matrix). My getting the idea to write this post—my quest, so to speak—is what Gustav Freytag, the 19th century dramatic theorist, calls the inciting incident. And it’s my quest, not my buying the bottle of laundry detergent, that triggers all that follows.
Outrageous Coincidence. It seems to me highly coincidental plotwise that while I’ve set bottles of detergent on that shelf above the dryer scores of times—in fact, since I take the bottle off the shelf to add detergent every time I do a load of laundry and each time put it back, I’ve executed that exact action of placing the bottle on the shelf literally hundreds of times over the years—I find it highly, outrageously coincidental plotwise that this past Friday, the Friday of the week I’m immersed in writing this post, this past Friday of all Fridays just happens to be the one and only time I somehow manage to drop the bottle and it somehow manages to find its way down behind the dryer into the dust.
The Dust Stratum. Speaking of which, have you ever noticed how much dust accumulates behind the dryer? Sweet Jesus! When I poked my head back there for a look I was shocked to see the little dust bunnies were, I swear!, taking on the frightening proportions of dust badgers.
Which brings me to the next plot point. “The symbols of the divine,” as Dick tells us, “show up in our world initially at the trash stratum”*—or the dust stratum, if that’s all that happens to be handy. If God can mimic beer cans in gutters, there’s no reason he can’t drop a detergent bottle behind a dryer to move the plot forward. Again plotwise it’s highly suspicious. Remember, that’s exactly the way Über-Mind hacks this so-called ‘reality,’ how it slips stuff through the security holes in The Matrix’s firewall without triggering the sensors—exactly like that. All innocent like. Oops!, my goodness, how did that happen?!
*VALIS, Dick, p. 254.
Except Ye Become as Little Kids. As I said in an earlier post, if Jesus had meant, Except we become as little angels, that’s what he would’ve said. He didn’t. What he said was, Except we become as little kids, we shall not enter The Many Worlds.
Which brings me to my tantrum, which as I said, surprised even me. I’ll go into this in much more detail in a future post, but in a nutshell what Hugh Everett III’s Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics tells us is that everything that can happen does. Flip a coin, and you don’t get either heads or tails, you in fact get two universes, two yous, one you observing the coin came up heads, the other you observing it came up tails.
At the instant I saw the bottle slip behind the dryer, the universe replicated into as many different versions as needed to accommodate my every possible reaction. You’re reading this post only because I transported us into the universe in which I surprisingly reacted with a childish tantrum.
By the way, I’m not recommending or defending throwing tantrums. I’m just observing (a) that I did and (b) that plotwise it triggered a most interesting consequence. To wit—
A Mind Properly Disposed. Kripal says of his and Strieber’s “rare but real form of the imagination” that
in very special moments, the human imagination somehow becomes temporarily empowered or “zapped” and functions not as a simple spinner of fantasies (the imaginary) but as a very special organ of cognition… .
The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 119.
What “zapped” my imagination was a little chain reaction: the detergent bottle with wild improbability slips behind the dryer, an event stage managed by Über-Mind to move the plot forward, which it does, triggering my histrionic meltdown, which in its turn brings my imagination to critical mass.
But before my imagination achieved ignition—which I’ll get to in just a second—my tantrum had another effect. You’ll remember I said that a part of me became the audience, watching aghast. The force of the tantrum knock me right out of myself, like that moment in the movie Doctor Strange when The Ancient One whomps Stephen Strange so hard he has an out-of-body experience. She was demonstrating something essential to him, the very thing my tantrum was demonstrating to me, namely, the ‘me’ that ‘I’ experience, and the awareness that experiences the ‘me’ are ontologically different.
My friend Ken, later in our conversation, reminded me that there’s solid neurological evidence that shows us that unbelievably we don’t make a decision and then act. Neurologically, we start acting a fraction of a second before we consciously ‘decide.’ Apparently, what’s actually doing the deciding is the wiring in our head. Our conscious ‘decision’ is just an echo we mistake for the source.
So: what if the ‘me’ is just the content, the sum of all that has gone before? What if, plotwise, the ‘me’ is just a character in Über-Mind’s spontaneous play? What if the ‘aware’-ing* that’s going in our head is the only thing that’s really real?
‘Aware’-ing. Weird we don’t have a verb for it.
And as I said, I’m not recommending or defending or excusing throwing tantrums. But apparently in my case at least, Über-Mind, always playful, just decided I needed a good whomp to properly dispose my mind for—ah! the plot thickens—
Visions. The Prophet Joel famously tell us
And it shall come to pass afterward
—afterward—after Über-Mind whomps the living daylights out of you to properly dispose your mind, to zap your imagination—
it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions. (Joel 2:28)
The ‘vision’ of the fireplace poker, the tongs, the whole how-to video popped into my head outta nowhere. How did it come to pass?
My first surmise was, as I said, that my subconscious worked it out while I slept, a conjecture for which, as I said, there’s neither a shred of evidence nor a conceivable test.
I now have a far better surmise. Granted, it too has neither a shred of evidence nor a conceivable test. But it has far more explanatory power. It explains not just the trivial solution, but the important part: how the events were arranged to bring it about.
Interestingly, my little ‘vision’ maps neatly to the three different ways of looking at the imaginal that I outlined earlier. Remember they’re superposed, not mutually opposed—meaning they’re all three kinda happening all at once.
The ‘Good’ Sort of Memory. What if the ‘vision’ of the fireplace poker, the tongs, the whole how-to video popped into my head so vividly just a minute before I actually went into the living room and got them and then actually used them just like the how-to showed me—what if the ‘vision’ was so vivid precisely because a minute beforehand I was just close enough to my own action in time to sense an echo of it from the future?
Granted, that makes it sound a lot like a jinn, a device in a time-travel story that lets, say, Einstein drop in from the future on his past self just long enough to hand his past self a copy of “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper,” his paper on the special theory of relativity, which his past self has yet to write, but which his past self now can and does indeed write (well, copy), which then gets published, which is exactly what enables his future self to pop in for a visit to drop it off. The problem with the jinn—“Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” in this case—is that its actual content comes out of nowhere.
Except, dig a little deeper, and you realize, while nobody of course handed Einstein anything, every idea in “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” at some point did indeed just come to him, pop into his head outta nowhere. I mean, it wasn’t like he knew he was going to have a thought before he had it, anymore than Mozart knew the melody he was going to hear in his head before he heard it in his head. Heck, Arthur C. Clarke fessed up that opinions just came to him, opinions so compelling he was persuaded to express them even though he knew they weren’t his, even though he didn’t even agree with them.
Moreover, not a single one of Einstein’s thoughts was inevitable. Otherwise “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” wouldn’t be a work of genius, and Einstein wouldn’t be a visionary.
Nâ-Kojâ-Abâd, “the country of no-where.” But, what if the echo of the tongs and poker wasn’t a jinn at all because in a superposed way, I was also sorta simultaneously streaming a video of a parallel universe. Everything that can happens does. So out in the multiverse somewhere there was a Parallel Jeff who didn’t throw a tantrum, who calmly thought through the situation logically, who after he finished putting away all the other groceries walked into the living room to put his keys in the bowl on the bookshelf, just like I always do, and at that instant the fireplace poker and tongs caught his eye and—bingo!—he made the logical deduction that he didn’t need to be an orangutan if he extended (a) his arm with the poker and (b) his grasp with the tongs.
But wait, if I’m live-streaming the poker and tongs from a parallel world, doesn’t that make the echo of the tongs and poker totally extraneous? No, not at all. Something far more intriguing, exciting is going on.
Time.
Time—the nature of time—is so problematic that physicist John Wheeler, fed up, dismissed it with the quip
Time is just God’s way of keeping everything from happening all at once.
The End of Time, Barbour, p. 57.
Newsflash, Dr. Wheeler, everything is happening all at once. Time is just evolution’s way of keeping our little heads from exploding like an egg in a microwave.
The distinction between past, present, and future
—Einstein famously said—
is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
“Albert Einstein,” Wikiquote (en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein), retrieved 13 March 2022.
In fact, as physicist Julian Barbour put it bluntly,
Time does not exist at all.
The End of Time, Barbour, p. 4.
Which is the intriguing part. Because if everything that can happen does, if time is just a stubbornly persistent illusion that doesn’t really exist at all, then any future moment is just as much present now as this present moment is. The future moment of my actually using the poker and tongs to extract the bottle of detergent was just as much present at the moment the echo popped into my head as the echo itself—as was the parallel moment of Parallel Jeff’s actually using the poker and tongs in a parallel universe.
Remember Occam’s razor:
Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate.
Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity.
“Occam’s Razor,” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor), retrieved 25 October 2021.
If only one entity is needed to account for a phenomenon, that simplifies things enormously. And the simplest explanation is probably right.
So what if the two actions—Future Jeff’s using the poker and tongs and Parallel Jeff’s using the poker and tongs—were one single action? What if when two Parallel Jeffs perform the same action, when they totally mind-meld, what if the two parallel worlds sync perfectly in that instant for that instant? What if that’s one meaning of the Celtic notion of a ‘thin place’ where worlds meet? The two worlds don’t just meet, they attain identity; they become one world, the same world in that instant for that instant. And most intriguingly what might we be able to do if we could master the Total Mind-Meld, master the ability to superpose with our parallel selves at will? Maybe the equivalent of some sort of quantum computing exploring every possibility without the encumbrance of machinery.
The ‘Rare but Real Form of the Imagination.’ And what if a mind meld that transcends the stubborn illusion of time, that opens up parallel words is exactly Strieber and Kripal’s ‘rare but real form of the imagination’ that sees through us to effect our evolution and which is simultaneously a reflection of, a setting-face-to-face with itself—a mind-meld with, a setting-face-to-face with the imagination that can grasp realities the senses can’t?
What I’m struggling to get at here is two things.
Our ‘Other’, ‘Rare’ State
First, I’m struggling with how to respond to Whitley’s suspicion “that the form we live in every day of our lives is not our only state”* and Jeff Kripal’s idea “that a rare but real form of the imagination may be what the conscious force of evolution looks like.”† And just to make the connection between those two statements explicit, Whitely’s other state is Jeff Kripal’s rare state in which “the human imagination somehow becomes temporarily empowered or ‘zapped’ and functions . . . as a very special organ of cognition.”‡
*The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 97.
†The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 118. Kripal’s italics.
‡The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 119.
Okay, so I’m actually struggling with just one thing, I guess, not two. Again, sorry, this post is a bit rough.
Anyway, my struggle, my quibble, as I’ve said, is with the notion that the state is “rare,” that it happens only “in very special moments.” Not so. We’re just not paying attention. My encounter with the bottle of laundry detergent was neither rare nor special but it conforms in pretty much every other way to the state of imagination Strieber and Kripal describe.
Manipulating the Environment. Whitley says,
[It’s] clear that the phenomenon can emerge as an entirely real, physical presence that is quite capable of manipulating its environment.
Dimensions, Vallee, p. vii (1988 edition, published by Contemporary Books);
quoted in The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 116. My italics.
Granted, in my case the ‘phenomenon’ didn’t in fact appear as “an entirely real, physical presence,” grab the bottle of detergent from my hand, and drop it behind the dryer. But that’s exactly the point I’m trying to make. The ‘phenomenon’ exists in fact on a spectrum. Strieber and Kripal focus only on one extreme, and in so doing completely overlook the more subtle ways the ‘phenomenon’ manipulates the environment. I return again to Murph’s wristwatch, which looks like it’s broken, like it’s malfunctioning, when it’s in fact transmitting. Sometimes the ‘phenomenon’ is overt and unmistakable. Other times it’s as subtle as the stuttering secondhand on a watch. We need to learn to tune our faculties, hone our senses if we want to participate in our own evolution.
The bottle of detergent finding its way improbably, dramatically, fiendishly and with malice aforethought into the dust stratum behind the dryer was all nothing but a bit of CGI, just a bit of sleight of hand—or maybe sleight of mind—waiting to be recognized as such. It was Über-Mind manipulating the environment, and in so doing manifesting, materializing.
Real Presence. Whitley then says,
The next moment, though, it can evaporate into thin air, leaving not a trace of what was a moment before an immense and overwhelmingly real presence.
Dimensions, Vallee, p. vii (1988 edition, published by Contemporary Books);
quoted in The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 116. My italics.
What was so truly bizarre about my tantrum—I forgot to mention this—was that I reflexively cried out, literally out loud, “Stop it! This isn’t funny! I don’t need this!” as if there was maybe not “an immense and overwhelmingly” but at least a palpably real presence at work. Or maybe at play. The situation was so otherwise unaccountable it felt like Something must be up to something.
And I can’t help but notice Whitley’s* choice of the words real presence, which of course is exactly the nature of the Eucharist: the Real Presence of the Body and Blood behind the mere appearance of the bread and the wine. The mere appearance is what Philip K. Dick is forever trying to get us to look beyond.
*Whitley was, by the way, brought up Catholic.
“Whitley Strieber,” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitley_Strieber), retrieved 15 March 2022.
Non-duality. Whitley, as I mentioned, quotes the woman who wrote to him to tell him she
asked her visitor who he was. He responded, “It is me within thee.”
The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 97.
And Evans-Wentz tells us the very heart of Tibetan Buddhism is the discovery, the experience that
although the One Mind illuminates the innumerable myriads of finite minds, it remains inseparably a unit.
The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, Evans-Wentz, p. 10.
You’ve gotta admit that there’s no better starting point for the ultimate experience of non-duality than (a) the realization that there’s a parallel ‘me’ out there and (b) the recognition that for an instant our minds synced, actually became one—that I actually experienced a mind-meld, a ‘setting-face-to-face.’
Seen As Such. Whitley, as I said, was himself nonplussed by his editor’s story of encountering two aliens in a bookstore on Madison Avenue in midtown Manhattan:
I was debating in my own mind whether or not the experience was real or imaginal—that is to say, a tangible presence somehow generated by the imagination.
The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 99.
By “somehow generated by the imagination” Jeff Kripal understands Whitley to mean
the two aliens would not have been seen as such by someone other than [the editor], that is, that others in the same bookstore either (a) would not have seen them at all, or (b) would have perceived the pair as simply two human beings, since that is also what they were.
The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 117. Kripal’s italics.
Once again, my experience was at the subtle end of the scale rather than the extreme. But mutatis mutandis, same deal. Someone other than me “(b) would have perceived the” bottle of detergent “as simply” a bottle of detergent, “since that is also what” it was. They wouldn’t have perceived what I did precisely because they hadn’t been ‘zapped’ as I had.
When Evolution Acts. Whitley observes,
I have even thought that it [i.e., the phenomenon] may simply be what the force of evolution looks like when it acts upon conscious creatures.
Dimensions, Vallee, p. vii (1988 edition, published by Contemporary Books);
quoted in The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 116.
The ‘phenomenon’ is “what the force of evolution looks like,” Jeff Kripal says, because his rare, my subtle form of the imagination works kind of like a two-way mirror. Both the reflecting back and the seeing through take place simultaneously: we see the reflection of evolution at work before our very eyes (i.e., a ‘setting-face-to-face’), while evolution through us sees an opportunity and avails itself.
When you pause to think about it, it’s really a much more compelling argument that at the subtle end of the spectrum, all evolution had to see me do was to reach out to put a bottle of detergent on shelf and—bam!—it saw an opportunity and took advantage.
Moreover, our seeing what evolution looks like must itself confer an evolutionary advantage, or what’s the point? I mean, for heaven’s sake, if evolution is so constructed that it has to wait around for the extreme or the extraordinary to transpire—well, I can tell you, three and a half billion years later we’d still be pond scum. Maybe just maybe the subtle end of the spectrum is paradoxically more powerful than the extreme end, maybe just maybe it happens way more often, and we just need to pay attention. Just maybe.
The Symbolic. I truncated the following quote about the “rare but real form of the imagination” earlier so I could focus just on the part about getting zapped. Let me give you the whole quote now and unpack the rest of it:
… in very special moments, the human imagination somehow becomes temporarily empowered or “zapped” and functions not as a simple spinner of fantasies (the imaginary) but as a very special organ of cognition and translation (the symbolic), as a kind of super-sense that is perceiving some entirely different, probably nonhuman or superhuman order of reality but shaping that encounter into a virtual reality display in tune with the local culture: in short, a reflecting back and a seeing through at the same time.
The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 119. Kripal’s italics.
First, Kripal’s rare, my subtle form of the imagination acts as “a very special organ of . . . translation (the symbolic).” As soon as I’d executed my tantrum (zap!) and settled into my pout, in snuck—right through the firewall of my mood—in snuck “the symbolic.” The bottle of detergent in the dust stratum was Über-Mind’s approximation of Dick’s beer can in the gutter. A symbol of the divine—right there behind the dryer.
Nonhuman or Superhuman Order of Reality. Next, Kripal’s rare, my subtle form of the imagination acts as “a kind of super-sense that is perceiving some entirely different, probably nonhuman or superhuman order of reality.”
Like the weird improbability of Whitley’s editor running into aliens in a bookstore on Madison Avenue in midtown Manhattan at the extreme end of the spectrum, there was at the subtle end the weird improbability of the bottle of detergent ending up behind the dryer, the equally weird improbability of my tantrum. Like the very presence of the two aliens, there was my actually shouting, literally out loud at the very presence of the Something responsible. Like the two aliens snickering as they flipped the pages of the book, the bottle of detergent lay back there, down there at the dust stratum, all innocent-like, mocking me. The magnitude of my tantrum was, I now realize, triggered by some sense that what was happening was a big deal, a higher order of reality. It sure as heck felt like it. Which is why, “Stop it!” I cried out. “This isn’t funny! I don’t need this!”—this, this phenomenon, this intrusion, this Presence manipulating my environment. Because that’s sure as heck what it felt like was going on. Manipulation.
A Virtual Reality Display. If I understand Kripal correctly, he’s saying (a) out there is Really-Real Reality—a “probably nonhuman or superhuman order of reality” in his language, “the One Mind” in Evans-Wentz’s, Über-Mind in mine—while (b) in here in my head is his rare, my subtle form of the imagination and (c), his key point, they’re in cahoots.
Über-Mind wants to make an appearance, imagination stage manages it.
Imagination, Kripal says, shapes the encounter I have with Really-Real Reality “into a virtual reality display” with which I’m drawn to interact. Imagination is the prop master (the bottle of detergent), the scene shop (the dryer, the dust), the special effects team (the images, the live-stream from the parallel world), and the fight choreographer (the bottle leaps from my hand, eludes my efforts to extract it, at last responds to my prodding with the poker, and finally submits to being extracted with the tongs).
Local Culture. The virtual reality display, Kripal says, isn’t arbitrary; significantly, the imagination-as-super-sense crafts the VR so it’s “in tune with the local culture.“ What Kripal is getting at is that today people are visited by grays because they expect to be visited by grays, and they expect to be visited by grays because contemporary culture—movies, books—tells them if ‘something’ drops in for a visit it’s going to be a gray. Imagination-as-super-sense, Kripal is saying, shapes whatever it is they’re encountering into a gray, just as in a different time, a different place, a different culture, imagination might’ve shaped it into a fairy, an angel, a yokai, a jinn.
In my case, to get my attention, to bring about the ‘setting-face-to-face’ in the most effective way, the VR was tailored specifically, even idiosyncratically to my circumstance. I’m struggling with my quest, writing this post, so Über-Mind expresses itself in my very own language, it uses my very own idiolect to manifest.
I pick up a bottle of detergent, Über-Mind instantly sees its chance, a split-second later it and imagination are in cahoots, totally plotting!, and imagination stages manages the encounter so that—bam! before I know it, there it is, right before my eyes, almost taking the words right out of my mouth, a bottle in the dust stratum! A dead giveaway, but I’m not paying attention. Instead, I’m like Hamlet all—
The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite
That ever I was born to set it right. (Hamlet, I.v.210f)
I rant, I pout, I sulk. Then, bam! before I know it, there it is, right before my eyes, once again almost taking the words right out of my mouth, stuff—images from a parallel world, a live-streaming how-to—stuff popping into my head outta nowhere!, the very thing I keep asserting that makes sci-fi and scripture not different.
Nothing could’ve possibly been more “in tune.”
The Big Reveal
Okey, dokey, to be perfectly honest I have no idea what the Big Reveal is. There’s something lurking in the shadows that I can’t seem to put my finger on. Again, as I’ve said, I’ve been having a devil of a time trying to put what I’m getting at into words.
I think this may be a bit like watching Murph’s watch stutter for a bit, which you have to do before you catch on that it’s not a stutter at all, it’s Morse, and there’s a message.
And, honest, I’m not asking you to buy into everything—or anything—I’m about to suggest; that’s not what I’m asking.
Instead, think of it this way. We live in a multiverse where, Science tells us, a coin doesn’t come up either heads or tails, but both, superposed. Really-Real Reality isn’t either-or, it’s Both+And. Which is why, as physicist Julian Barbour tells us,
The first quantum commandment is that all possibilities must be explored.
The End of Time, Barbour, p. 267.
So just entertain the possibilities I’m about to explore. As the Tibetan Book of the Dead says,
One is liberated simply by not disbelieving.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Fremantle & Trungpa, p. 71. My italics.
Cf., The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Evans-Wentz, p. 152.
Hang on to whatever your view of reality is, but just for a minute or two let an alternate reality coexist with it superposed, like images of two parallel earths that somehow get briefly superimposed. Because I’m pretty darn sure that one of the things quantum physics is trying to teach us is how to hold in mind two things that are in fact mutually exclusive, two things that both can’t possibly be true simultaneously, but nonetheless are. Like a coin that’s somehow inexplicably come up both heads and tails.
Okey, dokey, Murph’s watch begins to stutter, and—
A Dead Giveaway. Let me pick up where I left off in the last section. To wit, the bottle of laundry detergent in the dust stratum was a dead giveaway. I mean, good grief, I’ve referenced Philip K. Dick’s “beer cans in gutters” metaphor no less than nine times since I began this blog (I just counted). Nothing could’ve been more perfectly tailored.
It was an absolutely ginormous clue that the bottle of laundry detergent’s ending up in the dust behind the dryer wasn’t just some random happenstance—
It Was a Plot! If the bottle of laundry detergent in the dust—a metaphor come to life!, for heaven’s sake—wasn’t enough of a dead giveaway, the solution for retrieving it certainly was. The poker and tongs, the live-streaming how-to appeared in such an outrageously dramatic fashion—a literal revelation!, for crying out loud—precisely to make it unmistakable that the whole shebang was being staged for my benefit.
The story, moreover, had an arc as all well-crafted stories must:
- An inciting incident (I’m struggling with my quest, this post!)
- Complications (the bottle of laundry detergent ends up behind the dryer! I don’t have time for this, I have a post to write! I can just touch it, but—)
- A crisis (—I can’t grasp it! I’m not an orangutan! What shall I do?!)
- A resolution (The poker! The tongs! The how-to!) in which order is restored and the hero walks away a bit chastened, a bit wiser.
The instant I put fingers to keyboard to write this post, Evolution saw an opportunity—and availed itself. It threw itself into the project like any good screenwriter, pulling off dazzling twists, dramatic revelations!
But why?
Ah!, the plot thickens.
An Illustrative Story. You’ll remember than when Whitley writes about his belief that our everyday form isn’t our only state, his experience with the reality of the ‘phenomenon’ and its ability to manipulate the environment, he immediately tells two vivid stories to illustrate what he means (the woman who writes to tell him about her conversation with her visitor, his editor’s encounter with the two aliens in the bookstore).
And as I’ve said more than once, I’ve been struggling with this post from the outset because of the devilish task of putting into words the sense I have of a reality quite different from our everyday ‘reality.’ I’ve been struggling because for the most part the only way I have to talk about that other quite different reality is in the abstract, which is almost impossible, which was as a consequence growing increasingly frustrating, when—bam!
Ever playful, Über-Mind drops a bottle of laundry detergent into the dust stratum behind the dryer, throwing me into tantrum, just so it can live-stream a video from a parallel world into my head precisely to provide me with something concrete, an illustrative story, a perfect example of the very other reality I’m trying to put into words.
Come on, that’s cunning!, you gotta admit.
Karma. Remember that Jeff Kripal says Whitely’s editor is the only one who sees the aliens in the bookstore as such. That’s because Whitely’s editor is the only one with a mind properly disposed, “zapped” as Kripal says.
You’ll remember that when I threw the tantrum, I immediately found a part of my mind weirdly playing audience, marveling at my histrionics, wondering what it was about, feeling it was somehow a setup. Indeed it was. Totally.
Karma is a fascinating concept. We just think kinda superficially that you got bad karma, then bad things happen, you got good karma, good things happen. I think there’s an entirely different, far more engaging way to look at karma.
Hamlet, remember, at the beginning of the play whines,
The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite
That ever I was born to set it right. (Hamlet, I.v.210f)
Born to set it right. It’s his karma. So what if he’s been born to set things right—which is indeed a weighty, ultimately tragic task in his case—not because of ‘bad’ karma or ‘good’ karma, but just because of the appropriate karma. What if in a past life he did something that perfectly suits him in this life, that makes him uniquely ready to set things right, daunting as that task may be. Hamlet is simply, in the world of the play, in the words of Morpheus, The One—the one perfectly suited, uniquely ready.
And indeed by Act V, Hamlet sees things altogether differently:
If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come,
it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come:
the readiness is all. (Hamlet, V.ii.234ff)
So what if my throwing a tantrum was karmically scripted to awaken me to the moment, to properly dispose my mind, to trigger my unique readiness, to tune me in to what was happening—not just the trivial little events, but the whole scenario.
As I said, I’m not recommending tantrums. But, heck, I was in the house alone. It wasn’t like I was taking it out on anybody. And as I said, what if, plotwise, the ‘me’ is just a character in Über-Mind’s spontaneous play? What if the ‘aware’-ing that’s going in our head is the only thing that’s really real? And what if at that moment ‘my’—Jeff’s—karma was to throw a tantrum. What if that was just the role Jeff was playing to heighten the readiness of the ‘aware’-ing so it could have an experience, not of the trivialities, but of the “probably nonhuman or superhuman order of reality” behind them?
Except ye become as little kids, Jesus tells us, ye shall not enter the higher reality. In a pinch, a tantrum apparently suffices.
“Somehow,” Jeff Kripal says, “in very special moments, the human imagination” gets “zapped.” Forced to MacGyver, a tantrum apparently does the trick.
“They are still testing their powers,” Clarke says of the kids before they encounter their Fierce Moment of Inconceivable Metamorphosis. “But they have done nothing that seems to have any purpose”*—yeah, well, nor does the stuttering of Murph’s watch seem to reveal anything other than it’s busted because Murph at first just isn’t paying attention.
*Childhood’s End, Clarke, p. 222. My italics.
But as Hamlet tells us,
There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. (Hamlet, V.ii.233f)
Or in the throw of a tantrum. The trivial may seem trivial, but maybe it’s not. Maybe just maybe Something’s up to something—something providential.
“Do Not Be Distracted,”† The Tibetan Book of the Dead admonishes us as we hover in the bardo between the moment of our last breath, of our last heartbeat and our death, as we drift in the bardo between death and rebirth. “Do not be distracted.”
†The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Fremantle & Trungpa, p. 38.
Cf., The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Evans-Wentz, p. 99.
Bardo means gap,
Francesca Fremantle and Chögyam Trungpa say in their commentary on the text.
There are all kinds of bardo experiences happening to us all the time, experiences of paranoia and uncertainty in everyday life.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Fremantle & Trungpa, p. 1f.
Uncertainty like, how the heck am I going to get that damn bottle of detergent from behind the damn dryer?! Paranoia like, “Stop it! This isn’t funny! I don’t need this!”
As I’ve said, Kripal’s “very special moments” are just the extreme end of the spectrum. Subtle moments are, as Fremantle and Trungpa say, “happening to us all the time”—and maybe they’re special in their own way for that very reason. But we’re totally distracted. We’re just not paying attention. I’m sure as heck not—obviously.
The bottle of laundry detergent in the dust as a metaphor-come-to-life, the tantrum it evoked, the dramatic live-stream of the tongs and the poker and the how-to were all just—like Glorious Great Buddha-Heruka‡—dramatic devices
‡The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Evans-Wentz , p. 137.
coming forth from your own brain
—from my “zapped” imagination—
and shining vividly upon you. Be not awed. Recognize them as the form of your own mind. Do not throw a tantrum, for in reality
—the ‘phenomenon,’ as Whitley says, with its dazzling twists and dramatic
revelations—
may simply be what the force of evolution
—what the inconceivable focus of Über-Mind, the inconceivable intensity of Über-Mind, what the inconceivable intensity of Our Inconceivable Metamorphosis—
looks like when it acts upon conscious creatures.
Dimensions, Vallee, p. vii (1988 edition, published by Contemporary Books);
quoted in The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 116.
All I got was the subtlest glimpse, of course, not an extreme encounter like Whitley. But maybe that’s Whitley’s karma, his role, what he’s uniquely ready for. Maybe my karma is to notice Murph’s watch, transmitting tick by tick. Maybe that’s the turn of events, the discovery on which the whole plot hangs—the discovery that lost in the background noise, in the trivialities of everyday life there’s the signal of the higher order reality, but a signal with a bandwidth so low it transmits only a tick at a time, transmits only pixel by pixel like some probe way the heck out there beaming back an image of Pluto with no more power than the bulb in the fridge.
A signal, a discovery for which one must not be distracted.
Trivialities Are Powerful. There’s a form of cryptography called steganography, the essence of which is to create a message that seems to be about one thing—something utterly trivial—but that’s in fact about something else entirely.
The power of the triviality of the superficial message is that it distracts everybody from the secret encoded. They pay no attention.
Don’t be distracted, the The Tibetan Book of the Dead tell us, for that very reason. Only a mind properly disposed can decrypt the hidden communication.
The Eyes of The Matrix See the Lies of The Matrix. You’ll remember in The Matrix, after Neo takes the red pill, after The Matrix flushes him from his cozy little amniotic sac—completely bald and totally naked—after he’s rescued by the Nebuchadnezzar, after Morpheus plugs him into the ship’s computer to introduce him (and us) to The Matrix, Neo’s first reaction is astonishment at the verisimilitude of the simulation. “This isn’t real?” he asks in wonder. Morpheus draws Neo’s attention to the fact that he now has his hair back, he’s wearing his old familiar clothes. Morpheus refers to them as Neo’s ‘residual self image.’
To use a less polite, but more accurate term, they’re a lie.
Neo never had hair like that, or clothes. In his cozy little amniotic sac he was, after all, completely bald, totally naked all the time. The hair, the clothes were never anything more than lines of code that The Matrix was executing. Inside The Matrix Neo could, in fact, have had an entirely different body, been an entirely different gender, an entirely different race, heck, an entirely different species than the corpus enclosed in the amniotic sac. No matter what he actually looked like in reality (i.e., in the cozy little amniotic sac), whenever he looked at himself inside The Matrix he would’ve seen whatever body was coded for him to see.
His body inside The Matrix was a total fabrication, a total fiction, a total lie. Moreover, even the eyes of that fictitious body were not the eyes of the corpus in the amniotic sac, but the eyes coded for him, rendered for him by The Matrix.
And the eyes of The Matrix see only the lies of The Matrix—the lies the evil AI uses to manipulate humankind for its nefarious purposes.
Same deal with us. All we see with the eyes of The Matrix are the lies of The Matrix.
But with a clever twist.
Indeed just like as in the Wachowskis’ flick the whole point of the plot is to get Neo to see the lies of The Matrix are lies—which, you’ll remember, is touch and go to the very end because, you’ll remember, when Agent Smith pumps a clip full of slugs into Neo’s chest, Neo in fact at first does indeed die just as programmed, indeed totally flatlines in reality back on the Nebuchadnezzar as well as in The Matrix, only to then when Trinity commands him to do so ups and raises himself from the dead. In very much the same way, the whole point of my trivial little domestic drama wasn’t the trivial little domestic drama at all. My trivial little domestic drama was what Philip K. Dick calls camouflage. The whole point was rather, to quote Jeff Kripal again (and to paraphrase him only ever so slightly), the clever twist was to get a glimpse of
… a very special moment, in which the human imagination somehow becomes temporarily empowered or “zapped” and functions not as a simple spinner of fantasies (the imaginary) but as a very special organ of cognition and translation (the symbolic), as a kind of super-sense that is perceiving some entirely different, probably nonhuman or superhuman order of reality but shaping that encounter into a virtual reality display in tune with the local culture.
The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 119. Kripal’s italics.
The whole point wasn’t to extract the bottle from behind the dryer—the trivial problem my subconscious was focused on solving (if it even was). It was to experience the reality beyond The Matrix, the other reality. It was to see the bottle of laundry detergent in the dust stratum as a symbol of ‘the divine’—of Über-Mind at play. It was to see the future as it really is, present. It was to mind-meld with a Parallel Jeff in a parallel world somewhere out there in the multiverse.
Or at least to entertain the possibility of such things. At least to not disbelieve such things—which, as I’ve said, The Tibetan Book of the Dead tells us is all that’s required:
One is liberated simply by not disbelieving.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Fremantle & Trungpa, p. 71. My italics.
Cf., The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Evans-Wentz, p. 152.
We are, as I’ve said, as Clarke tells us, still testing our powers. What if among the powers we’re testing is the power to entertain a possibility, the power to just not disbelieve?
A Thin Place—a place where parallel worlds touch, a permeable membrane between realities—isn’t, as I’ve said, necessarily a literal place. In fact, my guess is that far more often it’s one of Jeff Kripal’s “very special moments” when the imagination gets zapped.
One of the things that intrigues me most about Richard Matheson’s 1962 Twilight Zone episode “Little Girl Lost”* is that little Tina’s distraught parents Chris and Ruth, their next-door neighbor physicist Bill are—of course, understandably—so caught up in bringing little Tina back from the parallel world she’s fallen out of bed into, none of them ever bother to ask, “Wait a second, how the heck did a portal to another dimension just happen to open right smack dab next to Tina’s bed?”
*“Little Girl Lost,” The Twilight Zone, Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Girl_Lost_(The_Twilight_Zone)),
retrieved 7 January 2022.
Simplest answer, Tina opened it.
Kids have wild imaginations—not to mention the occasional accident as they test their powers—so the simplest explanation: Tina was dreaming, and somehow wildly improbably in a “very special moment” of the dream, zap!, she just sorta figured out how to ‘empower’ her imagination, and she just sorta hacked reality. And, shazam!, a portal opened.
But like Chris and Ruth and Bill, Jeff Kripal seems more interested in the fact that the imagination gets zapped, rather than in how, and how we get the damn process to stop being random and temporary, how we take control of whatever the mechanism is and make it our own.
Come on! Occam’s razor! Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity! So chances are it’s not some entity out there—“the force of evolution,” for crap’s sake.
The simplest explanation is it’s not something happening to us, it’s something we are, like Tina, doing. Neo, remember, doesn’t die precisely because he does something: he ups and raises himself from the dead, damn The Matrix!, damn the code it’s in the process of executing at that moment that specifies otherwise!
Who says you can’t open a portal in the wall next to your bed? Who says you can’t mind-meld with a Parallel Jeff in an alternate universe? Who says you have to wait around for a mysterious entity to zap you?
I’m pretty sure we don’t. I’m pretty sure we’re the force of evolution, we’re Über-Mind, we just don’t know it—just like the Tibetan Book of the Dead is trying to tell us, for Pete’s sake.
Transubstantiating the World. Philip K. Dick says in VALIS—in which, you’ll remember, he fictionalizes his struggle to comprehend an actual experience he’d had in real life in which he’d “witnessed a benign power which had invaded this world”—in VALIS he says,
God has escaped the confines [of the traditional Eucharist] and is transubstantiating the world; God has become free.
VALIS, Dick, p. 197. I’ve changed the verbs to present tense.
Transubstantiation, you’ll remember, is the literally magical act by which the plain old bread and wine are transformed into the Real Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ, while paradoxically retaining the appearance of plain old bread and wine. I can’t repeat enough (a) that transubstantiation is a total hack because The Matrix can continue to execute the code that generates the appearance of the plain old bread and wine all it wants, because the mere appearance of plain old bread and wine is exactly all we expect out of The Matrix; but the mere appearance is mere appearance, while the reality is that beyond the scope of The Matrix’s code, beyond the mere appearance that the code renders, is the Real Presence of Something Else Altogether. And (b) it’s a sort of steganography: there’s Something Else Altogether encoded in the apparent triviality of the plain old bread and wine, Something that isn’t trivial at all, Something that’s equally and unquestionably apparent to a mind properly disposed.
You’ll remember in the midst of throwing my tantrum—in fact, the more I think about it, this was actually the very thing that triggered my meltdown—I literally shouted out loud, “Stop it! This isn’t funny! I don’t need this!” as if there was Real Presence up to no good behind it all.
What if there was—a Real Presence? Not “up to no good,” but certainly “behind it all.”
The whole point of the Real Presence of the Body and Blood is not just body on a plate, blood in a cup; the whole point of the Real Presence of the Body and Blood is that what it is in fact making manifest is the Real Presence of Jesus in the Very Act of giving up his body, pouring out his life’s blood to save our sorry asses. The only reason the Body and Blood are really present, are even important is because they’re necessary to the Act.
So, what if what I was sensing was the Real Presence of Über-Mind in the Very Act of seizing an opportunity, of giving its all, of trying its darnedest to liberate this little spark of awareness from delusion, from the code that was being unthinkingly executed (gravity pulls bottle down), from the programmed fictions the code was mechanically rendering (bottle sitting in the dust)? Not of course because I’m anything special, but just because that’s what Über-Mind does.
What if that’s what Über-Mind was doing. And me?—what do I do? I act just like Neo. Remember the very first thing Neo does when Morpheus shows him real reality? He freaks. Pitches a fit. Throws a tantrum. “I don’t believe it,” he fumes; “it’s not possible.” “Let me out!” he shouts.
Which is exactly why the Tibetan Book of the Dead tells us that when we encounter the Great Glorious Buddha-Heruka,
Fear that not. Be not awed. Recognize him as the form of your own mind. As he is your own guardian deity, do not be terrified. … Recognition and liberation are simultaneous.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Evans-Wentz , p. 137.
But we freak anyway.
We fail, let me quote Evans-Wentz again, because
karmic propensities becloud the consciousness-principle with thoughts of personality, of individualized being, of dualism, and … the consciousness-principle falls away from the Clear Light. It is ideation of ego, of self, which prevents the realization of Nirvana.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Evans-Wentz, p. 97, n. 1.
We’re so cozy immersed in our dreamy little womb, in our comfy little self—our comfy little self that in actuality has never ever been anything more than lines of codes that the The Matrix is executing. We’re so cozy, so comfy, we’re oblivious to the real reality: there’s a Real Presence of Something Else Altogether that’s really present in a way that does not compute.
It’s that Something Else Altogether that Neo discovers—the Real Presence that Neo encounters—when he doesn’t die, when he ups and raises himself from the dead, damn The Matrix!, damn the code it’s in the process of executing at that moment that specifies otherwise!
Trinity’s love for Neo, which she confesses to Neo the moment before his rising up, isn’t itself the Something Else Altogether that manifests. Trinity herself says so. She tells Neo she loves him, she kisses him, and then she says, “Now get up.” Love may be the motivation, the trigger, but it isn’t itself the Whatever It Is that brings about Neo’s Inconceivable Metamorphosis.
Neo rises from the dead because something transubstantiates The Matrix, becomes Really Present in what is in fact nothing more than the mere appearance of Neo that’s being rendered by the code that’s in the process of being executed.
Something transubstantiates The Matrix, namely, mind. Must be. Inside The Matrix, Neo is dead meat. Outside The Matrix on the Nebuchadnezzar, Neo is brain dead, totally flatlining.
Mind is all he’s got left.
Mind, despite all appearances, is Really Present.
And the AI is helpless to stop it. It does not compute. That’s transubstantiation. That’s Dick’s benign power invading mere appearance, transubstantiating the world, transubstantiating The Matrix.
Some benign power both invaded and camouflaged itself as the bottle of laundry detergent in the dust behind the dryer, both invaded and camouflaged itself as the whole friggin’ trivial drama, in the process transubstantiating the whole shebang into a symbol of itself, manifesting its Real Presence.
Why? I dunno. To just sorta clear its throat maybe to get my attention. To inconceivably metamorphose me for a nanosecond or two into—
A Mind Properly Disposed. Aha! Or you, to metamorphose you. Maybe my mind isn’t the one Dick’s benign power is after at all. Maybe it’s yours.
Whitley and Jeff Kripal are, as I’ve said, talking about the far end of the spectrum where the extreme stuff happens; I’m talking about the other end, the subtle stuff. Whitley and a lot of other people, they get the big-ass CGI. That’s their karma. Maybe we’re the other lot, the ones who don’t actually need the summer blockbuster version of an invasion of wrathful aliens like in Independence Day or a visitation by benign aliens like in Arrival.
Remember Elijah:
A great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. . . . And, lo, the voice came unto him, and saith, What doest thou here, Elijah? (1 Kings 19:11-13)
What are you doing here, reading this blog? I mean, if it’s not your mind that Dick’s benign power is after, What doest thou here?
Maybe that’s the question, maybe that’s the Big Reveal.
I mean, seriously, I am after all nothing but a voice in your head right now, lo, a voice come unto you. To be honest, when I write, I’m a voice in my own head. As you may have noticed, weird stuff seems to pop in outta nowhere all the time. Whence it comes, I tell ya, I sometimes wonder.
Which brings me once again to Clarke’s defiant disclaimer:
THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED
IN THIS BOOK ARE NOT
THOSE OF THE AUTHOR.
And Paul’s claim,
It is not I who live, but Christ who liveth in me. (Galatians 2:20)
And my own speculation, way back in my first post, that all those dev engineers in Silicon Valley being apparently too busy to pay attention, Dick’s benign power for its own mysterious reasons picked me, found a couple of loose wires somewhere in the decidedly peculiar circuitry in my head that it could hot-wire, and—zhhhhht!
Then again—intriguing alternative—for all you know, I could be an alien. Heck, for all I know, I could be an alien (it would explain a lot). Either way, if I were an alien, this would be the perfect set up to communicate with you earthlings.
A third—ha! and I think this may be my favorite—intriguing alternative is that I in fact have this mostly, almost totally wrong. But every real writer knows you’ve gotta let yourself write bad if you want to write anything good. Maybe
THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED
IN THIS BLOG ARE NOT
mine but Dick’s benign power, Strieber and Kripal’s force of evolution just letting itself write bad, trying to get just the rough shape of the story down on paper, just enough to trigger something else altogether in somebody else’s head—the something, the one thing that’s actually going to spark the actual Fierce Moment of Our Inconceivable Metamorphosis.
What if, in fact, I’m actually writing this for an audience of one—you know, The One whom Morpheus sought, The One destined to crash The Matrix.
And—intriguing speculation—what if that one is you?
Seriously.
What dost thou here?
See, thing is, the Wachowskis and Frank Herbert get totally wrong something Arthur C. Clarke gets exactly right. In The Matrix and Dune, The One is a messianic figure held in awe, awaited with longing, spoken of only in hushed tones. In Childhood’s End, The One is just some seven-year-old kid.
It had to happen to someone,
—as Karellen (the commander of the alien Overlords, who have come from a distant world to observe our species’ apotheosis) tries to explain to the little kid’s baffled parents—
There is nothing special about him, any more than there is about the first neutron that starts the chain reaction in an atomic bomb. It simply happens to be the first. Any other neutron would have served—just as Jeffrey might have been any boy in the world.
Childhood’s End, Clarke, p. 190f.
You don’t have to be special to be The One. You just have to happen to be the first.
Ha! Okey-dokey, now I’ve got it—
The Big Reveal. You’ll remember that the imaginal is different from the imaginary. The imaginal is something ontologically real that the imagination can grasp but the senses can’t. Einstein, for example, used thought experiments to imagine the underlying nature of energy and matter, space and time, which led to his discovery of the counterintuitive reality at the heart of his theory of relativity.
That’s how the imaginal works in science.
But in art, the imaginal opens up new realities to us in quite a different way.
For starters, don’t confuse real with literal. Science is literally true. Art is different. As Picasso famously said, art is a lie that tells the truth. Art is true, is real in way that transcends the merely literal.
Let me give you another example from Star Wars.
No, wait, let me go back to the imaginal for just a second.
The world imaginal comes from the Latin word imago, which means, as you can probably guess, image. But imago is also an English word used in entomology to mean “the final and fully developed adult stage of an insect, typically winged.”* Nineteenth-century psychic researcher Frederic Meyers was the first to take advantage of that derivation, and to use it to give imaginal a new, broader, non-entomological sense. He defined imaginal as
*“Imago,” Dictionary, Apple, version 2.3.0 (284), retrieved 15 March 2022.
a word used of characteristics belonging to the perfect insect or imago—and thus opposed to larval—metaphorically applied to transcendental faculties shown in rudiment in ordinary life.
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death: Volume 1, Myers, p. xviii. Myers’s italics.
“The larval stage of an insect,” as Jeff Kripal points out, “looks nothing like its adult form or imaginal stage, although the latter develops from the former.”†
†The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 122.
Indeed; but far more importantly, the leap Myers makes is to apply imaginal to “transcendental faculties shown in rudiment in ordinary life.”
Now we’re getting somewhere.
Okay, back to Star Wars: The Last Jedi. In the very last scene—after Luke has attained the rainbow body letting his Jedi robe (as you will recall) waft empty into the air, after Rey and the handful of tattered fighters who are all that remain of the rebel alliance escape Crait on the Millennium Falcon—two of the stable boys on Canto Bight listen rapt as a third tells them the tale of a great hero and his wondrous deeds in some incomprehensible alien tongue. Only two phrases are intelligible, but they leap out: “Luke Skywalker” and “Jedi knight.” Mere seconds pass before the boss bursts in, catches them goofing off, bellows a warning, and the boys scatter. One—the kid who earlier in the film helped Rose and Finn escape—dashes outside to attend to his neglected chore, sweeping the courtyard. Effortlessly and without even realizing it, he draws the broom to his hand with The Force. He sweeps the cobbles ineffectually for a moment, then stops and looks up into the stars. Rapt, scarcely aware, he raises the broom handle as if it were a light saber.
The little kid drawing the broom to his hand—effortlessly and without even realizing it—is exactly what Myers means by the imaginal: “transcendental faculties shown in rudiment in ordinary life.”
Okay, here’s The Big Reveal.
And, by the way, I have Jeff Kripal and all the poets and philosophers of the Romantic movement to back me up in what I’m about to say. They—all the poets and philosophers of the Romantic movement—Kripal tell us, asked this crucial question:
What is the imagination? Is it simply a spinner of fantasies? Or can it also become a “window” of revealed truths from some other deeper part of the soul or world?
The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 118.
A “window”—a thin place; revealed truths; some other deeper part of the world—or another world, maybe.
So, (a) maybe just maybe I’m not entirely crazy—or at least not any crazier than all the poets and philosophers of the Romantic movement.
And, remember, (b) I’m not asking you to believe this; rather, as the Tibetan Book of the Dead advises, just don’t disbelieve it, just entertain the possibility. And remember also that (c) chances are I’ve got this almost totally wrong because there’s something steganographically encoded that I don’t have the mind properly disposed to decrypt—but (d), goldang it, the whole point is that there is indeed something steganographically encoded. And maybe just maybe you’re The One with the mind properly disposed to decrypt it properly.
And, lastly, (e) remember what Jedi Jesus tells us: except we become as little kids, we shall not enter the Many Worlds.
Okay, so The Big Reveal. And, parenthetically, this is going to sound like it’s about me, but it’s really about you, or rather us—all of us, every last one of us.
Item 1. I am—or was for just that moment when, attending to my chores, the bottle of laundry detergent slipped from my grip and fell behind the dryer—I’m the little kid from The Last Jedi in real life. Just as he, effortlessly and without even realizing it, drew the broom to his hand with The Force, I—once I’d thrown my tantrum and had become again a little kid—I effortlessly and without even realizing it live-streamed the future, I live-streamed a mind-meld with a parallel me in a parallel world, and to top it off, I saw in the literal appearance of the plain old bottle of laundry detergent in the plain old dust behind the dryer a symbol of, the Real Presence of what Philip K. Dick calls the divine—aka The One Mind, Über-Mind.
Item 2. As Arthur C. Clarke has Karellen, our alien Overlord, explain to the parents of the little kid who triggers humankind’s leap from larva to imago—let me repeat this—
It had to happen to someone. There is nothing special about him, any more than there is about the first neutron that starts the chain reaction in an atomic bomb. It simply happens to be the first. Any other neutron would have served—just as Jeffrey might have been any boy in the world.
Childhood’s End, Clarke, p. 190f.
I’m nothing special, trust me. I’m pretty sure what I did, we all do. And like the little stableboy, we just don’t notice we’re doing it. Our transcendental faculties show up in rudiment in ordinary life all the time. We’re just not paying attention.
They are still testing their powers,
as Clarke says of the kids in Childhood’s End.
But they have done nothing that seems to have any purpose.
Childhood’s End, Clarke, p. 222.
But this time there was a purpose, just not mine. It was a plot!, as I’ve said. Über-Mind engineered my little episode just as I set to work on this post, not for me to tell you this story about me, but to tell you this story about you, about all of us.
To quote the Prophet Joel again:
And it shall come to pass in the last days,
—as we approach Childhood’s End, the End of Larvahood—
I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
—because transcendental faculties will show up in rudiment in ordinary life!—
your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions. (Acts 2:17)*
*My italics. Joel 2:28 is quoted in Acts 2:17, with a wording slightly different from the original.
So I had a vision; and I’m here to tell you—
Item 3. We’re all Karellen’s first neutron, we’re each Karellen’s first neutron. Because, as I said, my trivial little story is about all of us, every last one of us.
And I’ve got not just all the poets and philosophers of the Romantic movement backing up my thinking on this point, but Science as well. Physicist Richard Feynman tells the story of how one day, when he was a grad student at Princeton, he got a call from his grad school advisor, equally famous physicist John Wheeler, who announced,
“Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass.”
“Why?” asked Feynman.
“Because, they’re all the same electron!”*
*“One-electron Universe,” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe),
retrieved 13 March 2022.
Every single electron, every single positron, Wheeler was saying, all of them are actually just myriad manifestations of a single entity moving backwards and forwards in time. Occam’s razor with a vengeance!
Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate.
Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity.
“Occam’s Razor,” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor),
retrieved 25 October 2021.
There’s no necessity for 1036 different electrons; you only need one.
Just so, we’re all somehow the same first neutron, each of us is somehow the first to trigger the chain reaction that unleashes the Fierce Moment of Our Inconceivable Metamorphosis.
We’re all, in Wheeler’s words, a single entity; to quote Evans-Wentz again,
Although the One Mind illuminates the innumerable myriads of finite minds, it remains inseparably a unit.
The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, Evans-Wentz, p. 10.
Item 4. How we’re all, how we’re each the first neutron is, I suspect, somehow tied up with physicist Julian Barbour’s assertion that
The first quantum commandment is that all possibilities must be explored.
The End of Time, Barbour, p. 267.
If the quantum world must explore every possibility, as Hugh Everett III’s Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics tells us, then everything that can happen does. Flip a coin, and as I’ve said, you don’t get either heads or tails, you get two worlds, two yous, one you observing the coin coming up heads, the other you observing it coming up tails. Really-Real Reality is Both+And, not either-or.
And what the Schrödinger equation tells us is that all those things that do happen just because they can, they all exist superposed.
And as Barbour tells us,
Time does not exist at all.
The End of Time, Barbour, p. 4.
If time doesn’t exist, then not only is is true that all those possibilities that must be explored are being explored, it’s also true that they’re all being explored simultaneously. Everything is happening all at once. Everything—every possibility, every event—exists right this instant superposed.
So if every possibility, every event exists superposed with all the others, it’s kinda no surprise that little Tina can open a portal next to her bed and slip through into a parallel world: because there’s no real distance separating any of the Many Worlds. And what’s the big deal about me mind-melding with a parallel Jeff, streaming a how-to, watching as he does it?
And if that isn’t all mind-bendy enough, Barbour also tells us:
We cannot look to the past to explain what we find around us. The here and now arises not from the past, but from the totality of things.
The End of Time, Barbour, p. 312. My italics.
All those infinite Many Worlds that are superposed right this instant aren’t hermetically sealed. What’s happening right here right now is as much a consequence of what’s happening in the future, of what’s happening in all those parallel worlds as it is of what happened five minutes ago.
There’s nothing special about the first neutron. It just happens to be first. And since there’s nothing special about it, we—each of us, all of us—possess the possibility, the very same probability that we’re the first.
Moreover, (a) the multiverse must explore that possibility; and (b) in order to explore that possibility it must generate a unique world in which to do so; and (c) since there’s nothing special about the first neutron, since there’s nothing special that makes me more likely to be first than you or you more likely than me, since the probability is exactly the same for each of us, then (d) in each of those unique worlds in which the totality of things explores the possibility, the totality of things discovers the possibility that each of us is the first is in fact an actuality.
Which is happening right now, right this instant.
And all those worlds are superposed.
And it’s the totality of things, not the past, that explains what we find around us.
Science says.
Item 5. This is weird, but just like Chris, Ruth, and physicist Bill don’t think to ask how the heck did a portal to another dimension just happen to open in the wall smack dab next to little Tina’s bed?, and Jeff Kripal doesn’t think to ask how the heck do we take control of the mechanism that zaps the imagination and turns it into a super-sense and make it our own?, there’s another question no one ever thinks to ask.
Where do possibilities come from?
Answer: from us.
Which is precisely why, I’m pretty darn sure, The Tibetan Book of the Dead makes the rather astonishing assertion that
One is liberated simply by not disbelieving.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Fremantle & Trungpa, p. 71. My italics.
Cf., The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Evans-Wentz, p. 152.
Because all we have to do is entertain a possibility and, poof!, the possibility comes into existence. The quantum world can’t dismiss the possibility out of hand; it doesn’t know whether it’s really possible or not. The quantum world must explore it because it’s only by exploring it that it can test its actuality. That’s why the first quantum commandment is a commandment.
And all that brings us to a crisis.
You’ll remember a crisis is the point in the plot at which things must go one way or the other. Neo is either gonna lay there dead meat, flatlining—or he’s gonna do the impossible. He’s gonna just somehow up and raise himself from the dead.
So—
Item 6. —which is it gonna be?
What dost thou here?
The quantum world isn’t gonna figure this out on its own. We’re the ones with the imagination.
In VALIS, Philip K. Dick tells us,
The machinery for this transformation … is at work now; in eternity
—in the totality of things—
it is already accomplished.
VALIS, Dick, p. 268.
Just don’t disbelieve, just entertain the possibility—that’s the machinery Dick is talking about.
Just entertain the possibility, that’s all—and it must be explored. It’s a commandment the quantum world must obey.
It’s the way we get the multiverse to do what we want. It’s this sorta superpower. If we don’t just lay there, braindead.
What if they didn’t know what they were really talking about in their scripture anymore than we know what we’re really talking about in our sci-fi. Moreover, it’s all, as Jeff Kripal tells us, a virtual reality display in tune with the local culture. Their world is as alien to us as ours is to them. And we’re both struggling with the high strangeness, the absurdity that “is a necessary function of the translation across the border or threshold between two radically different forms of mind and being”—ours and…
Coming April 2022
Hack the Eucharist | Crash the Matrix 
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