Imagine if, unlike the Wachowskis and The Matrix, you had no notion of computers and artificial intelligence, but you knew that this so-called ‘reality’ just didn’t add up.
Imagine if, unlike Christopher Nolan and Interstellar, you had no notion of black holes and tesseracts, but things were bad down here and you knew that out there somewhere if you could just get to it was the answer you needed to save all humankind.
Or what if, just like Philip K. Dick and VALIS, you had an actual experience in actual real life in which you’d witnessed a benign power invade the world, like a champion ready to do battle, and you knew if you could just make up a story about it you could maybe wrap your head around what it was really all about.
Or what if, just like Arthur C. Clarke and Childhood’s End, opinions rattled around in your head—opinions about aliens manifesting outta nowhere, about little kids with supernormal powers, little kids mind-melding and beaming out of their bodies into pure consciousness—opinions you knew weren’t your own, opinions you didn’t even agree with, but something nonetheless compelled you to make up a story to express them.
Imagine there were no movies or TV shows or streaming videos or novels that let the imagination take flight, no genre where the imaginal could take shape. What would you get instead?
Scripture maybe.
We think of scripture as being full of certitude, when in fact it’s full of mystification, shock. Take the original ending of the Gospel of Mark. Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome come to Jesus’s tomb,
And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted. And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him. But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter…. And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.
Mark 16:5-8. My italics.
Affrighted. Fled. Trembled. Amazed. Afraid.
Bewilderment, outright terror are the original state.
What if the prophets, the evangelists—originally—didn’t reallyknow what the heck they were talking about in their scripture anymore than we really know what the heck we’re prating on about in our sci-fi?
And what if the prophetic, evangelical certitude—with all its self-importance and bullying—is just a pietistic, ex post facto, revisionist fraud?
So what if we filter out the revisionism—and the certitude and the self-importance and the bullying and the fraud—and get back to the raw story? What if we get back to the utter bafflement?
Alien Worldone
What if what scripture and sci-fi are both struggling with is an imaginative, an imaginal encounter with an inconceivably alien world in which shockingly, inconceivably, but in point of fact in which we are and always have been and always will be totally immersed, from which we’re separated, insulated only by the thinest membrane of our own self-delusion?
Yes, what if—intriguing thought—we’re the ones doing the separating? What if it’s only pure power of mind, ours, the pure power of our own denial—a supernormal telekinesis we’ve already mastered and just don’t know it—with which we ‘protect’ ourselves from Dick’s benign power, which which we seal the portals against Whitley’s “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.
After all, the woman who wrote Whitley after reading Communion told him she’d
asked her visitor who he was. He responded, “It is me within thee.”
The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 97.
The ‘alien’ out there is something we already are in here.
And when you think about it a sec, the self-delusion, the denial are actually totally understandable. Whatever visits us from the other side is unquestionably other. And as Jacques Vallee tells us, the actions of a superior intelligence must always appear absurd to an inferior one.*
*Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact, p. 167.
Jeff Kripal moreover tells us that that very absurdity, the high strangeness that characterizes our encounters with Whatever It Is Out There
is a necessary function of the translation across the border or threshold between two radically different forms of mind and being.
The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 126.
Radically different.
Maybe the self-delusion, the denial are some sort of evolutionary adaptation. Maybe they—like our stubbornly persistent illusion of time—are all that’s keeping our little heads from exploding like the proverbial egg in the proverbial microwave.
Until we’re ready at least; as Hamlet tells us, the readiness is all.
Because exploding like the proverbial egg in the proverbial microwave is precisely the fate that awaits the Earth, Arthur C. Clarke tells us in Childhood’s End:
In a soundless concussion of light, Earth’s core gave up its hoarded energies.
There was nothing left of Earth: They had leeched away the last atoms of its substance. It had nourished them through the fierce moments of their inconceivable metamorphosis.
Childhood’s End, Clarke, p. 236.
Which sounds pretty darn apocalyptic. I mean, heck, in the actual Book of the Apocalypse about the worst that transpires is
a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great. … And every island fled away, and the mountains were not found.
Revelation 16: 18, 20.
A few sentences from Childhood’s End set side by side with a few verses from the Book of the Apocalypse sure as heck seem to suggest that sci-fi and scripture explore imaginal realms that are far more alike than we’d maybe like to admit. I mean, for heaven’s sake, a lot of the time it’s not even subtle. Frank Herbert gave us Dune Messiah and Heretics of Dune. The Wachowskis have Neo literally rise from the dead. Obi-Wan—all shimmery—clocks more apparitions than the BVM. And on and on.
So you have to admit that what’s totally weird is that—
Alien Worldtwo
—(a) given that sci-fi is totally obsessed with All Things Alien—I mean, if it weren’t for the fortuitous advent of CGI, we woulda by now sucked every rubber tree in the Amazon dry of every last drop of latex to give literal shape to our endless fantasies about contact with alien civilizations, about bonding with our alien shipmates as we boldly go seeking out new life, new civilizations, about heroically battling our badly dentured, multiple-brow-ridged, scaly-skinned alien foes; and
(b) given that The Prime Directive is don’t interfere, don’t judge other cultures, however alien; given both those things, you’ve gotta admit
(c) it’s really kinda totally weird that what we find so off-putting about scripture is, let’s be honest, nothing more than that its way of thinking, its way of expressing itself is so friggin’ alien.
“Unfamiliar and disturbing or distasteful”—that’s the definition of alien. And it’s pretty much the definition of how we react to any random handful of verses from any random scripture. How can they believe that weird shit?—it’s so, ya know, weeeird.
I mean, come on. Lo!, we’ve got an alien world inches away, but we refuse to explore it—because it’s so alien, because they’re so freakin’ alien! Eek! Eek! Eeeek!
Come. On. Risk is our business, as James T. Kirk tells us.
We need to make contact.
Why?
Because what if, what if, what if both us and them, what if we’re both engaged in the same pursuit—the most adventurous, the most far-sighted of us on both sides anyway—the pursuit of The Fierce Moment of Our Inconceivable Metamorphosis.
Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye
1 Corinthians 15:51f
—inconceivable metamorphosis, a consummation Paul wants so bad he can taste it.
What if, what if, what if hidden somewhere in the very alienness of scripture—in its alien mindset, its alien tongue—are cunningly concealed the missing parts of the camouflaged instructions for The Hack, wisely concealed to keep their power out of the hands of those who simply are not ready, who have not yet evolved, whose minds are not yet tuned to see what stands revealed?
What if?
That’s exactly, precisely—exactly, precisely—what Philip K. Dick is telling us: concealed in the Eucharist is a technology—which is yet another concept totally alien.
But go ahead, give it a try, wrap your head around it.
We need not now shy away from visionary phenomena that are bizarre or strange
—let me quote Jeff Kripal again, this time more fully—
visionary phenomena that are bizarre or strange
—like the Eucharist as an alien technology, like the Eucharist as the Real Presence of something other, as Dick tells us, something from out there, something beyond—
simply because they appear absurd or outrageous to our rational egos and ordinary sensory experiences. Indeed, we might well expect with our new notion of the symbolic imaginal that this absurdity is a necessary function of the translation across the border or threshold between two radically different forms of mind and being.
The Super Natural, Strieber and Kripal, p. 126.
Astonishingly, while Science itself can’t wrap its little head around such thinking, individual scientists—the most adventurous, the most far-sighted—can. Take physicist Neils Bohr, the towering intellect behind the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics.
The idea of a personal God,
he said,
is foreign to me.
‘Alien,’ he might have said.
But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science.
Remarks after the Solvay Conference 1927, as quoted in Physics and Beyond by Werner Heisenberg.
See “Neils Bohr,” Wikiquote (en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr), retrieved 27 December 2021.
No great insight there. But then Bohr makes this remarkable statement:
We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.
Defense Implications of International Indeterminacy (1972) by Robert J. Pranger, p. 11,
and Theorizing Modernism: Essays in Critical Theory (1993) by Steve Giles, p. 28.
See “Neils Bohr,” Wikiquote (en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr), retrieved 27 December 2021.
And then even more remarkably he goes on to say:
The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes
—in paradoxes, in absurdities—
means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality.
Remarks after the Solvay Conference 1927, as quoted in Physics and Beyond by Werner Heisenberg.
See “Neils Bohr,” Wikiquote (en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr), retrieved 27 December 2021.
What setting sci-fi and scripture side by side is about is following Bohr’s lead, to wit,
establishing mental connections.
Okay, and before you start to hyperventilate or have an aneurysm or something, let me hasten to add: what nobody is saying—well, I’m certainly not—is that all scripture is ‘good’ any more than all sci-fi is ‘good.’
What I am saying—let me be explicit—is that there are three flawed conjectures:
First Flawed Conjecture. All scripture—and only scripture—is the Word of God, and every word of it is to be taken literally.
Second Flawed Conjecture (corollary to the First). No sci-fi, which is nothing but pulp fiction, could possibly be the Word of God.
Third Flawed Conjecture (antithetical to both the First and the Second). There is no such thing as the Word of God because there’s no such thing as ‘God.’ Get real.
Okay, in reverse order:
Third. Don’t take ‘God’ literally. Crikey. There’s unquestionably a Really-Real Reality, right here, right now, smack dab in the middle of which we are immersed, and you’d have to be totally daft to think we’ve come anywhere near grokking it. And whatever it is, as Bohr is telling us, it’s ineffable. Any label you slap on it is a misnomer, or at best poetry. So chill. If using the word ‘God,’ if using the word ‘divine’ makes Philip K. Dick happy, let him.
Second. Everything is the metaphorical ‘Word of God,’—an expression of the Really-Real Reality, smack dab in the middle of which we are immersed right here, right now. Since we’d have to be daft to think we’ve come anywhere near grokking Really-Real Reality—what it is, what it’s up to, what it’s capable of—we’d have to be equally daft to rule out the possibility that Really-Real Realty is incapable of what Wallis so neatly phrases an “innate capacity for self-expression.”*
*Tantra Illuminated, Wallis, p. 190.
First. Let’s take the tantric notion that scripture is
a kind of encoded energy, a cipher of the deep structure of reality
Tantra Illuminated, Wallis, p. 190.
and flip it. What if anything that’s “a kind of encoded energy, a cipher of the deep structure of reality” is the ‘Word of God,’ i.e., Really-Real Realty exercising its “innate capacity for self-expression”—who cares if the words haven’t been canonized, who cares if they haven’t been given “the form of a body of scripture”?
If you want a good example of “a kind of encoded energy, a cipher of the deep structure of reality,” how about this:
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
(Genesis 1:3)
Which tells us something startling about Really-Real Realty’s self-expression: it doesn’t just describe something, it doesn’t just narrate something, it makes it so. Or to put that another way: (a) Really-Real Reality expresses itself in a metaphorical programming language, and (b) the expression is itself simultaneously the execution of the code.
So sure a benign power has invaded—in the form of a few lies of code, a cunning little hack—invaded and at the same time seemingly inexplicably camouflaged itself as something utterly useless and trivial—something like, say, sci-fi—but that’s not really inexplicable at all because that’s precisely how the benign power slips itself into The Matrix, right through the firewall, right past its security controls without tripping a single sensor.
And sure it’s transubstantiating the world, as Dick says, which is just another way of saying it’s hacking The Matrix, modifying the OS, getting it to work different. It invaded like a champion ready to do battle, like a ninja on a mission: to crash The Matrix by stealth, to bring it down in order to create something entirely new—and to do so with such consummate stealth, in fact, The Matrix never even realizes it’s been hacked. To The Matrix, the Eucharist still looks like plain old bread, plain old wine, Neo with a chest full of slugs still looks like dead meat.
And of course when the hack takes the form of a stealth technology like the Eucharist, sure even to us it seems, as Dick puts it, like a “literal miracle” precisely because—using its ninja-like stealth—Really-Real Realty’s got the OS doing something, executing functionality that the unhacked OS can’t possibly do, that the unmodified OS totally doesn’t support: the code that renders the plain old bread, the plain old wine, dead-meat Neo somehow inconceivably hosts The Real Presence of something else altogether, something impossible. Which shocks even Agent Smith, as you’ll remember, scares the crap right out of him into his boxer shorts. So of course it seems like a “literal miracle.”
And we have absolutely got to not overlook the absolutely essential component of Really-Real Realty’s subterfuge: us. The hacks—the unauthorized modifications that Really-Real Realty has gone to all the trouble of hacking into the OS in order to implement, namely, the very capacity for new functionality—those hacks to the OS work only because there’s now finally hardware, a device that evolution’s been obsessively, indefatigably kludging together in its subterranean lab, undaunted by failure after failure.
Us.
Yes, Us v2.0.
More wild-ass, more bizarre, more “outrageous to our rational egos” than even conscious meat is conscious meat into which evolution has somehow kludged
transcendental faculties
—sure, so far shown only—
in rudiment in ordinary life.
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death: Volume 1, Myers, p. xviii. My italics.
But (a) come on, it’s a total kludge, what do you expect?; and (b) that’s about to change.
That’s the prophecy the Wachowskis are prophesying: I mean, for crying out loud, dead-meat Neo just ups and raises himself from the dead. That’s the prophecy Arthur C. Clarke is prophesying: heck, even our Alien Overlords, Clarke tells us, travel across the galaxy just for the privilege of witnessing in breathless, helpless wonder something they’re utterly incapable of: our Total Breakthrough, our Fierce Moment of Inconceivable Metamorphosis.
We shall all be changed, as Paul says, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. Scripture and sci-fi are in total agreement.
We are Really-Real Reality’s self-expression, we are the Word of God:
God said, Let there be us, and there’s us. Bam!—v2.0
We are the code, the hack—we are the hack executing.
That is “the deep structure of reality”: a metaphorical programming language of inconceivable power executing itself by means of us, by awakening our awareness to our undiscovered, total kludge-job, total rudimentary transcendental functionality.
And I can’t help but point out “awakening our awareness to our undiscovered, total kludge-job, total rudimentary transcendental functionality” takes us back again to the little stableboy in Canto Bight; and the appearance of the little stableboy in Canto Bight—the broom handle raised as if a lightsaber, like a champion, like a ninja, like a Jedi ready to do battle—his appearance (a) prophesies the very same prophecy the Wachowskis, Arthur C. Clarke are prophesying and (b) reveals indisputably, unquestionably that Really-Real Reality has, for heaven’s sake, every intention of using any means at its disposal to trigger the awakening, no matter how seemingly trivial. Ergo, anything in which the awakening is encrypted, anything in which its energy is encoded is scripture—you know, like the specifications for the technology in Contact that Blind Kent discovers hidden in the harmonics of the footage of Hitler at Nuremberg. You can’t get much deeper in the gutter, encounter a more reeking turd than old Adolf. Canonical scripture isn’t somehow privileged just because it’s canonical. What’s privileged is what carries the cipher, what encodes the energy, what makes it so—‘it’ meaning our awakening, Our Fierce Moment of Inconceivable Metamorphosis.
So, yeah, unquestionably most sci-fi is dog poo. So is most scripture—but: it’s dog poo in the very same gutter with the beer cans and the Burger King wrappers, in the trash stratum where, as Philip K. Dick tells us, the symbols of the divine that manifest in our world first appear. Meaning: even when it’s dog poo, it can very possibly be revealing—scripture or sci-fi can—to a mind, an awareness properly disposed.
Think of it working kinda like a QR—a Quick Response—code.
Let me explain.
Hack the Eucharist | Crash the Matrix 