Fucking up isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Or to be more precise the ability—the power—to fuck up isn’t a defect, it’s functionality. At least for us living systems.
Consider:
Gravity can’t fuck up. Or electromagnetism. Or the strong or weak nuclear force. They’re stuck, preprogrammed, absolutely predictable down to the umpteenth decimal place, no choice, no creativity in how they act.
But evolution, on the other hand, fucking up’s exactly how evolution advances. A literal bug in the code—a mutation—wildly improbably confers an advantage and, bam!, before you know it you’ve got a whole new species exploring innovative design concepts, offering functionality heretofore undreamt of.
Fuck-ups in our DNA are the evolutionary equivalent of Philip K. Dick’s beer cans in gutters: they’re Dick’s ‘divine’ both manifesting—creative energy outta nowhere creating—and at the same time camouflaging itself as something useless, something broken that oughta get tossed. A bug.
We mistakenly want to toss our personal fuck-ups like a Burger King wrapper, but, truth is, we can’t get anywhere without them. They’re the ‘broken’ secondhand stuttering on Murph’s watch.
But, as Murph discovers—once her mind is properly disposed—stuttering isn’t what’s going on at all. Take—
Einstein
What astonishes us about genius is the seeming effortlessness with which things pop into the genius’s head outta nowhere, and through the genius into our world.
I’ll get to Einstein in a second, but let’s take Mozart first. Stories abound that even when Mozart was just a little tyke he could, given a theme, improvise at the keyboard on and on effortlessly, music pouring in outta nowhere. As a witness dazzled by the six-year-old wunderkind recounted:
One had only to give him the first subject which came to mind for a fugue or an invention: he would develop it with strange variations and constantly changing passages as long as one wished; he would improvise fugally on a subject for hours.
“Mozart’s compositional method,” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart%27s_compositional_method#Improvisation), retrieved 27 March 2022.
On the other hand, when Mozart was composing (rather than improvising), his approach was entirely different: he sketched out ideas, then he refined the sketches, then he turned the sketches into a draft that only after he developed it still further, only then did it become the final score.*
*“Mozart’s compositional method,” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart%27s_compositional_method#Sketches), retrieved 27 March 2022.
Telling us: not every idea that popped into Mozart’s head outta nowhere was the right one. Some ideas were clearly better than others.
Even more important, that doesn’t mean the ‘better’ idea that followed upon the not-quite-right idea was the obvious refinement, the obvious next step in the development, even to Mozart. Mozart, remember, couldn’t possibly know the refinement that was about to pop into his head outta nowhere until the very moment he heard it in his imagination. Given his creativity when it came to improvisation, who knows how many possibilities flashed through his brain before he heard the ‘right’ one?
The point is: maybe we can’t imagine, say, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik any other way than it is, but that doesn’t mean how Mozart gets us from one bar to the next is ever obvious—algorithmic, step-by-step, preprogrammed. If it were, it wouldn’t, it couldn’t be a work of genius.
Which brings us to the question: what was the function of all the rejects that flashed through Mozart’s brain only to get tossed? If Mozart was such a genius, how come he didn’t get it ‘right’ the first time, every time?
Answer: What if the ‘rejects’ were absolutely necessary? What if the ‘rejects’ were, every one of them, Dick’s ‘divine’—i.e., creative energy—at work, up to something, slipping through camouflaged so as not to trip the sensors?
The Matrix after all hates, hates, hates anything that subverts the algorithm, that dares deviate from the step-by-step instructions it’s executing. Deviation is, of course, the very essence of creativity—always up to something, endlessly defying the niggling, nagging commands that admit of no deviation, crashing the program, crashing the whole system. Heck, crashing the whole friggin’ OS.
Einstein, Take Two
Which is exactly what Einstein did. Crashed the whole freakin’ Newtonian OS. Showed things operate in a way unlike anybody ever suspected. Gravity, he said, bends light, makes your clock tick slower—as does your velocity, which also shortens your yardstick, and ups your mass. All of which would’ve left Newton standing there slack-jawed.
The outpouring of Einstein’s genius is way more fun to follow than Mozart’s because we have loads more detail about his adventures—or should I say misadventures. Because, wow! After publishing the special theory of relativity in “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper,”* and dazzling the world with E = mc2 in “Ist die Trägheit eines Körpers von seinem Energieinhalt abhängig?”† (both in 1905, his annus mirabilis), he worked for another ten more years before he finally got the general theory of relativity right in 1915.
*“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” †“Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?”
And, as I said, wow!—it was not a pretty sight.
He knew pretty much zilch about Riemannian geometry, necessary to grokking gravity as an artifact of the curvature of space, and to which he was introduced by an old classmate, Marcel Grossmann, who went on to mentor Einstein in the subtleties of not just differential geometry but tensor theory as well. Grossmann apparently made something of a career of saving Einstein’s sorry ass: if it weren’t for Grossmann’s “careful and complete lecture notes” historians say, Einstein, who skipped a lot of classes, may very well have flunked out of the Federal Polytechnic School.‡
‡“Marcel Grossmann,” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Grossmann), retrieved 30 March 2022.
But hooking up with Grossmann wasn’t Einstein’s only lucky break. As Einstein evolved the general theory of relativity, he realized that if mass curves space, that means gravity bends light, and he predicted that during a solar eclipse you ought to be able to detect a precise shift in the position of a star as its light passes through the most intense part of the sun’s gravitational field closest to its surface. Luckily for Einstein, observations of solar eclipses on October 10, 1912 in Brazil and on August 21, 1914 in Russia—which were intended in part to test Einstein’s precise prediction—were inconclusive because of bad weather. There was heavy rain in Brazil and cloud cover in Russia. Fortuitous, as I said, because
if clear photographs and measurable results had been possible, Einstein’s 1911 prediction might have been proven wrong. The amount of deflection that he calculated in 1911 was too small (0.83 seconds of arc) by a factor of two because the approximation he used does not work well for things moving at near the speed of light.
“History of general relativity,” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_general_relativity#Early_investigations), retrieved 30 March 2022.
“The approximation he used”—yeah, Einstein’s precise mathematical prediction was just some sorry-ass guess. What a fuck-up!
Good news is that when Einstein finally got general relativity worked out in 1915—the year following the eclipse in Russia—
he rectified his error and predicted the correct amount of light deflection caused by the Sun (1.75 seconds of arc).
“History of general relativity,” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_general_relativity#Early_investigations), retrieved 30 March 2022.
Arthur Eddington famously confirmed Einstein’s prediction during the solar eclipse of May 29, 1919 with photographs he took on the island of Principe, off the west coast of Africa.§
§“Arthur Eddington,” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Eddington), retrieved 4 April 2022.
But before Einstein finally got general relativity worked out in 1915 and finally got the amount of light deflection right, he made yet another “now-famous” goof.
The field equation he published in October 1915 was
where R𝜇𝜐 is the Ricci tensor, and T𝜇𝜐 the energy–momentum tensor. This predicted the non-Newtonian perihelion precession of Mercury, and so had Einstein very excited.
Problem is, the equation doesn’t make sense. It means
air, rock, and even a vacuum should all have the same density.
Which it doesn’t take a genius to see they don’t. Oops.
This inconsistency with observation sent Einstein back to the drawing board and, on 25 November 1915, Einstein
—finally!—
presented the updated Einstein field equation to the Prussian Academy of Sciences:
where R is the Ricci scalar and g𝜇𝜐 the metric tensor.
“History of general relativity,” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_general_relativity#The_development_of_the_Einstein_field_equations), retrieved 30 March 2022.
I have no idea what all that gibberish means either, but I love the two equations because compare the two and even a mathematical bonehead like me can see the first time Einstein was way, way off. Way off. Yet again. I mean, his first try he missed one entire half of the whole equation.
So how can such a genius be such a total fuck-up?
Or rather, how can such a total fuck-up be such a total genius?
Why? Because what’s wrong is obvious. The fix isn’t. That’s the part that takes a genius. The fix.
The QR Code, the RFID Chip
What if we each stand every moment at a thin place where two worlds meet?
What if we each are in fact the thin place at which we stand—our imagination is?
One world predictable, generated by the algorithm, The Matrix we’ve constructed to keep our little heads from exploding the proverbial egg; the other full of all sorts of unimaginable stuff, some of it incomprehensibly awesome, some of it terrifyingly alien.
What if we’re each a genius endeavoring to boldly go where no mind has gone before. What if what brings the thin place—thin like a force field—down, what if what actually opens the portal is, not a palm print or a retinal scan, but a pattern of brain activity unique to you or me or Einstein or Mozart, like the RFID from the chip in the key fob that unlocks the door to your car.
Little Tina in Little Girl Lost, totally by accident generates just the right pattern of brain activity in a dream, whereupon she tumbles bodily through the opening into a parallel world. Little Wolfgang somehow reflexively generates just the right pattern of brain activity every time he sits at a keyboard, whereupon music pours through the opening. Philip K. Dick somehow inexplicably for a couple of brief weeks in 1974 generates just the right pattern of brain activity, whereupon he experiences what he calls a benign power invading through the opening, transubstantiating the world. Arthur C. Clarke even more inexplicably does nothing more daring than sit down at his typewriter, which somehow flips a switch, which somehow generates just the right pattern of brain activity against his will, whereupon he expresses an option, not even his own, that there will come a moment—Total Breakthrough—when just one of us, nobody even special, will most inexplicably of all somehow generate the exact pattern of brain activity that thereupon triggers a chain reaction that culminates in The Fierce Moment of Our Inconceivable Metamorphosis.
So what if our fuck-ups aren’t fuck-ups at all, what if they’re something else at work, up to something, a whole nother algorithm from beyond the Matrix, what if our fuck-ups are the, I dunno, virus that’s necessary to hack into our brains to generate just the right pattern of brain activity that brings down the force field, that opens the portal so that we can boldly go where no mind has gone before?—and heck, who knows, maybe like little Tina even tumble through bodily into a parallel world.
Which is where the QR code comes in handy as a metaphor. A QR code has both white and black squares. Think of the ‘right’ steps, the ‘right’ ideas as on (white), the ‘wrong’ steps, the ‘wrong’ ideas as off (black). You gotta have both. Without both you can’t have a unique arrangement. The on and the off are what give the arrangement its uniqueness, its power to do something—like bring down a force field and open a portal.
So even the seeming dead ends you encounter, I encounter, Einstein encounters are necessary to the pattern, the missteps that mysteriously, unpredictably lead you, me, Einstein to the wrong spot that happens to be just the right vantage point to view things from just the right new angle, just the right fresh perspective. Einstein had to work so hard during those ten years from 1905 to 1915 because he went down so many paths that were dead ends. Maybe you don’t have to explore every possibility, but you have to explore a lot of them before you get to the Total Breakthrough, where you catch a glimpse of Really-Real Reality.
Because every one of those dead ends is of necessity, is essential—to The Tuning.
The Tuning
What if each one of those fuck-ups is the ‘divine’ (to use Dick’s word again) rewiring our head, reconfiguring one little synapse just the eensiest bit.
Imagine Michelangelo’s God with his finger, not tip to tip with Adam’s finger, but instead just not quite touching Adam’s forehead. Imagine in the gap the tiniest little electrical discharge. Zzzht!
Because, let’s say, for Michelangelo’s God to rewire our head, a synapse from neuron A has to, zzzht!, connect with a dendrite from neuron B before neuron A can, zzzht!, get neuron B to, zzzht!, trigger neuron C.
What if every ‘bad’ idea, every ‘fuck-up’ is, zzzht!, doing just that: rejiggering the connections just a teense, tuning Adam’s brain, your brain, my brain, Einstein’s brain, Mozart’s brain to get it ready to make the, zzzht!, leap to the next idea—which if not the right idea is at least the, zzzht!, next little fuck-up that, zzzht!, sparks the next leap, and on and on, each, zzzht!, little arc that leaps each little gap forging an unexplored connection, the seeming chaos in fact a perfect brainstorm tuning our brain activity to ultimately generate the unique pattern that, like the RFID chip in your key fob, triggers the thin place, brings down the force field and, zzzht!, opens the portal.
What if all his hard work was Einstein both exploring, mapping the wiring in his head and simultaneously wiring up the connections, encoding the RFID chip with the right pattern of brain waves so that, zzzht!—outta nowhere, bam!, the dazzling insight bursts through.
There was a world without E = mc2; then, zzzht!, he open the portal and we all tumbled through bodily into a world with E = mc2.
There was a world in which gravity was just a mysterious force that conked you on the head with an apple; then, zzzht!, he open a second portal and we all tumbled through bodily into another world in which gravity isn’t a force at all, but the shape of space—its curvature—and starlight curves around the sun because that’s the straightest path for it to follow.
We think just because this is the world we happen to be in, this is the only way a world can be. Untrue. Even scientists conjecture that among the Many Worlds out there, there are many worlds in which the laws of physics differ from ours.
So what if we reframe their conjecture every so slightly. What if we conjecture space wasn’t curved yet even in this world, what if we conjecture curved space was just one possibility, one possible evolutionary path until Einstein made it so?
What if we conjecture Einstein didn’t discover a physical phenomenon that already existed, instead he discovered if you add things up different, out of the math emerges a whole new, never before imagined possibility.
And every possibility must be explored. That’s the very first quantum commandment. And—lo!—here we are.
Which Changes Everything
In 1998, a year before The Matrix came out, Dark City was released. It’s not in a lot of ways all that different from The Matrix and unfortunately not nearly as well remembered. In it The Strangers, a bunch of extraterrestrials possessed of a hive mind and fascinated by how us earthlings each experience our own unique individuality, use their psychokinetic powers each night to ‘tune’ us: they rearrange the city physically and implant in people new personalities and memories. One earthling—John Murdoch—The Strangers discover is (a) resistant to tuning and (b) even worse has evolved his own psychokinetic powers and (c) worst of all the ability to tune. Murdoch ultimately defeats the Strangers, whereupon he discovers that the city is actually an artificial habitat in deep space protected by a force field. With his newfound powers—with, in fact, pure power of mind—Murdoch reshapes the city and reorients it to face the star it orbits. For the first time sunlight falls on the Dark City.
A mind properly disposed, a mind properly tuned, John Murdoch shows us, can change everything. As did Einstein.
I mean, sure, you can dismiss Dark City as just a work of the imagination. But E = mc2 and gravity as the curvature of space are just works of the imagination as well. Both discoveries started not with observations Einstein made about the physical world, but with him wondering—imagining—what it would be like to ride on a beam of light.
Einstein used his imagination to explore, not the imaginary, but the imaginal, to see in his head something real before it was observed in external reality—maybe before it even manifested in external reality.
The question is, is John Murdoch showing us something imaginal or something simply imaginary?
Thing is, even if it is just imaginary, even if it’s a black square in the QR code, it’s getting us somewhere if, if, if we dispose our minds, if we tune our minds to make it so.
To put that another way, what if what Really-Real Reality is showing us through the stuff that pops so mysteriously into our heads so undeniably outta nowhere, what if what that shows us is that there is noabsolute really-real reality out there at all?
Or, to put it yet another way, what if Really-Real Reality is unmasking itself, letting us in on its secret, letting us in to play, showing us that the Really-Real Reality out there is that we can shape things, shape this ‘reality’ in here with our minds.
I mean, for cripes’ sake, we do it all the time anyway.
If Mozart wasn’t engaged in shaping what sound can sound like, shaping it in an entirely new way, what the heck was he doing? I mean, first off, that’s exactly what makes him a genius, and (b) how was he was doing it if not entirely with the stuff popping so mysteriously into his head so undeniably outta nowhere? All the new stuff he was doing was all in his mind to start with—was all pure power of mind.
Same deal with van Gogh—what was he doing if not shaping how color shapes our experience of what we see, shaping it in an entirely new way?
So maybe it’s not such a big leap to imagine Einstein over those ten long years, an eensy little tweak at a time, totally in cahoots with Really-Real Reality—which just cannot not explore every possibility and which, hallelujah!, finally found the sentient being with the perfect brain signature for the job—what if the two of ‘em, like the Strangers in Dark City, while the rest of us slept, changed the shape of spacetime so gravity now neatly maps to curvature. Which may explain why physicists are having such a devil of time getting quantum mechanics and general relativity to mesh—Really-Real Reality hasn’t quite figured that one out yet, that twist in the plot.
And, come on, even us non-geniuses, we do it all the time, shape and reshape this ‘reality.’
Why do you think there’s been so much concern about the harm social media like Facebook and Instagram can do kids? Because kids use Facebook and Instagram and the like to shape their ‘reality,’and far too often the shape they give ‘reality’ does real harm to the kids who don’t fit that ‘reality.’ The harm isn’t physical, it’s mental. It’s the minds of that group of kids over there harming the mind of this one kid over here. Pure power of mind.
And parenthetically I’m pretty darn sure if social media is toxic to kids, it’s toxic to us adults as well. Remember the scene in Star Wars: A New Hope, the cantina on Mos Eisley where Han Solo and Greedo the bounty hunter meet up—you remember, the time it doesn’t end well for Greedo?
A few tables away in a quiet corner if you look close you can see Klaatu and Spock laying waste to a nice bottle of Chandrilan Riesling as Klaatu struggles to explain Facebook.
“They don’t share food with each other,” Klaatu leans in and whispers. “They share pictures of food with each other.”
Used to be when you baked a yummy cherry pie, what gave it meaning was the look of delight on the faces of your friends and loved ones as they tucked in and savored with moans of ecstasy its scrumptious goodness. In just a few short years we’ve reshaped ‘reality’—rather some thing, some weird notion, some hairball of synaptic circuitry in our heads has reshaped ‘reality’ so that the ‘reality’ that now has meaning is not sharing the pie but sharing a digital image of the pie.
We serve up pixels of a pie. And Mark Zuckerberg makes billions. Cripes. How the heck did we let ourselves get tricked into inhabiting such a totally lame-ass excuse for a ‘reality’?
How? I’ll tell you how.
The only reason we got tricked, the only reason we could get tricked is that, again, theReally-Real Reality is that we can and do shape things with our minds—and in this case, alas, once again like the little stableboy in Canto Bight, we do so without even realizing it.
So if we’re doing it anyway, why the heck don’t we effing pay attention so we don’t get effing tricked?
Why don’t we take our Power of Mind seriously, as John Murdoch is trying to show us.
Why don’t we explore the possibility that we can shape things, shape a reality way better than this sorry-ass Zuckerbergian Dark City we’re trapped in, totally manipulated by shadowy Strangers.
What if, like Einstein, we engage our imagination to open a portal, not to the imaginary, but to the imaginal—the good sort of memory that doesn’t work only backward, Strieber and Kripal’s ‘rare but real form of the imagination’ through which evolution effects its end, The Fierce Moment of Our Inconceivable Metamorphosis.
Why the heck not?
Sure, John Murdoch’s way of shaping the world with his mind seems imaginary, but that’s only because his power is amped up an octave or two—well, okay, probably a power or two—above the tangled, knotted-up circuitry we’ve got in our heads. Which decidedly needs some straightening out.
But the fact is, we’re doing it anyway.
And if the fact that we’re doing it anyway is a fact, then John Murdoch’s way of shaping the world with his mind isn’t imaginary, it’s imaginal—the good sort of memory, working forwards.
Or rather—here’s the dazzling twist, the spoon-bending trick—such a power isn’t imaginary, is imaginal only if we make it so, only if we make it the good sort of memory we use toremember our future. That’s what shaping reality means. We can in our mind go passive, let such a power assume the shape of the merely imaginary, and in so doing let ourselves assume the shape of—I dunno, lame-ass muggles. Or we can in our mind take action, give shape to Murdoch’s power as imaginal, as one of Frederic Myers
transcendental faculties shown in rudiment in ordinary life,
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death: Volume 1, Myers, p. xviii. Myers’s italics.
and become the little stableboy in Cantor Bight—but not unaware; no, this time awakening to our powers.
So:
Two possibilities. We can be muggles. We can be Jedi.
Up to us.
The First Quantum Commandment is that every possibility must be explored and where possibilities come from, as I’ve said, is us. We’re the mechanism. We’re the ones with the imagination.
So if we want to imagine we’re sorry-ass fuck-ups just because we fuck up, a lot, then that’s what we are. Period. End of story.
Totally up to us.
If we imagine, if we shape things so that our fuck-ups aren’t fuck-ups at all—that we’re absolutely not sorry-ass fuck-ups just because we’ve fucked up—instead, if we shape things so that each fuck-up, every one of our fuck-ups, is a little tweak in the wiring, another square in the QR code, we make it so.
Because if we just don’t disbelieve, as the Tibetan Book of the Dead tells us, if we just entertain the possibility that our most monumental fuck-ups—like Einstein missing half the friggin’ equation!—are Michelangelo’s God up there on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, zzzht!, optimizing the circuitry, tuning the pattern of brain activity, rewiring our head—if we just entertain the possibility then, then the Multiverse must explore the possibility.
Because that’s The Very First Quantum Commandment.
Reality doesn’t have a choice: because we’ve updated the code with a little upgrade, a little If-Then patch—which the Multiverse must execute. Because that’s the way the Multiverse is programmed. Because that’s the way ‘reality’ is wired
Parenthetically, whenever you have the slightest hesitation to entertain some wild-ass possibility I might suggest, remember this simple, self-evident fact:
We are the Multiverse exploring the possibility of consciousmeat.
Let me repeat that:
WE ARE THE MULTIVERSE EXPLORING THE POSSIBILITY OF CONSCIOUSMEAT.
Totally wild-ass.
Conscious Meat.
And if, of all the Many Worlds out there, if we’ve been lucky enough to end up in the one world that’s that totally wild-ass, we would be woefully, egregiously remiss in not pushing the Total Wild-ass-osity we’re immersed in to the absolute limit.
Pushing the Limit
So maybe we outta go for it, maybe we outta just for the heck of it juxtapose sci-fi and scripture, set them side by side, take a look at them in a new way. Remember in Contact, not even Ellie Arroway, not even the whole team of the best and brightest can make heads or tails of the specs the aliens have sent for the wormhole machine, not until maverick reclusive billionaire genius S. R. Hadden (John Hurt) shows Ellie that the flat pages have to be juxtaposed orthogonally—at right angles to each other. The flat pages have to be read in three dimensions to make sense.
We’ve just gotta think different.
Both sci-fi and scripture deal in paradoxes, in absurdities, which, as Neils Bohr says,
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.
And as I said,
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?
Once again the dazzling twist, the spoon-bending trick is that somehow the juxtaposition of the very alienness of scripture and the total pulp fiction tendencies of sci-fi, somehow the possibility that that juxtaposition produces The Hack isn’t imaginary; once again it’s imaginal if we make it so, if we just don’t disbelieve, it we just entertain the possibility.
That’s how we shape reality.
Or to put it another way, maybe that’s exactly how we hack reality. What if we have to sorta hack reality just a little to start with to get to The Hack that lets us hack reality big time? What if to start with we have to just hack our brains a little?
Fact is, somebody out there a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away decided just to not disbelieve that meat could be conscious, decided just for the heck of to entertain the possibility it could be—and, bam!, us. Because that’s all it takes, someone somewhere with a little imagination putting the idea in the Multiverse’s little head and, tada!
We really gotta think different. Practice at least.
One of my favorite things about sci-fi and scripture is that, kinda like consciousness and meat, they’re such a totally unlikely coupling. Come to think of it, they’re also kinda like quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity, which try as they might physicists just haven’t gotten to mesh so radically different are the underlying realities they posit
Sci-fi and scripture, radically different underlying realities, indeed:
On the one hand, sci-fi writers kinda don’t care if what they’re writing is dog poo, since most sci-fi is in fact dog poo because sadly that’s what sells. But since the symbols of the divine initially appear at the trash stratum, in the gutter, where the dog poo feels right at home, lo!, occasionally—to a mind properly tuned—a divinely inspired pixel in the QR code clicks on. And where pixels light up there’s maybe, just possibly a pattern.
Prophets and evangelists, on the other hand, think they’re writing the Word of God, which indeed they are. Problem is they’ve got about 99.999 percent of it wrong; they’ve produced about 99.999 total dog poo. Precisely because they’re trying to write it down. They’re trying to translate it into words, when what ‘it’ is, as the mystics all tell us, is ineffable: you can’t sing ‘it,’ you can’t dance ‘it,’ you can’t draw ‘it,’ paint ‘it,’ sculpt ‘it,’ you cannot word ‘it’ in any tongue.*
*Mysticism: Holiness East and West, Carmody and Carmody, p. 13.
Try and you’re gonna end up with dog poo—but, weirdly, ineffably, steganographic dog poo, encoded in which is a revelation totally different from the plain text you’re so dutifully transcribing.
Which is, I have a hunch, what Chan master Wumen Huikai was getting at in the delightful exchange he records between Chan master Yunmen Wenyan and a monk in Case 21 of The Gateless Gate:
A monk asked Yunmen, “What is Buddha?” Yunmen said, “Dried shit on a stick.”
The Gateless Barrier, Zenkei Shibayama, p.154; “Shit stick,” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shit_stick), retrieved 30 March 2022.
Think you can decrypt Reality into plain text?, Master Yunmen chides the astonished monk. Dude, all you’re gonna get is an absurdity!
Because, as the mystics keep trying to tell us, (a) Really-Real Reality is—not meaningless*—but beyond meaning because (b) Really-Real Reality is beyond comprehension—beyond what we can wrap our little heads around given the current screwed-up state of our kludge-job wiring.
*Though it sure seems that way a lot of the time.
Hence the absurdity of the Eucharist, and even more so the über-absurdity of the Über-Eucharist and the Rainbow Body—and the total absurdity Obi-Wan’s Jedi robe falling empty to the floor for that matter, of Luke’s wafting empty into the air, of Clarke’s Kids first melding into an über-mind, and then, if that’s not absurd enough for you, their lasing into the energy of pure consciousness at the fierce moment of their inconceivable metamorphosis.
So no wonder, as Jacques Vallee tells us, the actions, the instructions,† the revelations of a superior intelligence must appear absurd to an inferior one.‡
†E.g., “Do this in memory of me”—with the good sort of memory that doesn’t work only backwards. ‡Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact, Vallee, p. 167.
Because, as Jeff Kripal says,
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.
But, as Master Yunmen so helpfully brings to our attention, an absurdity is just a koan waiting to happen. You just have to juxtapose the concepts different.
So, even though sci-fi and scripture look like shit on a stick or dog poo, even though the two are in fact shit on a stick or dog poo—even if just metaphorically—nonetheless, if we can figure out how to juxtapose the two just right, like the page images the aliens send the befuddled earthlings in Contact, then:
(1) Staggeringly, the juxtaposition causes the heretofore camouflaged QR code to take shape, materialize right before our astonished eyes, which (2) somehow triggers a Quick Response in our heads, where (3) the circuitry gets totally rejiggered, whereupon (4) our whole pattern of brain activity shifts (5) modulates an octave or two (6) resonates (7) coheres (8) generating precisely the right RFID, which (9) instantaneously deactivates the force field, then—with an almost imperceptible sigh—
The portal opens
And just like that we’re in a whole nother reality, like little Tina we tumble through, indeed actually bodily—as Einstein showed us—ker-thunk.
Any koan sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from technology.
To a mind properly tuned.
If we make it so.
Totally up to us.
When it comes to AI—artificial silicon-based intelligence, as opposed to natural meat-based intelligence—the interesting question isn’t, will it can come up with discoveries we can’t. The interesting question is, when it does so, will it experience The Bliss of the Aha! as it tumbles through the portal into another world? Because, ask any scientist. It’s not about the discovery. It’s about the bliss.
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.
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.
—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’tdisbelieve 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 1036different 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…
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.”
Strieber and Kripal, The Super Natural, 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.”
Strieber and Kripal, The Super Natural, p. 118.
✋
Dang it.
That’s at least where I’d hoped to start today’s post.
I should’ve thought this through better.
We can’t talk about the super natural, about woo—about, you know, a l i e n s—without first getting something out of the way.
Science is, let’s be honest, hopelessly dogmatic. Sure, it’s true scientists are (eventually) willing to change their minds if presented with a sufficient quantity of reproducible experimental data that falsifies what they hold to be true. But that method of establishing what’s true—reproducing experiments to gather sufficient data—is exactly what they’re dogmatic about.
Their unalterable and dogmatic belief is that (a) because there exists a class of things that can be said to be true because the data from repeated reproducible experimentation has failed to falsify them, ergo (b) only the class of things that can be subjected to repeated reproducible experimentation—only that class of things even can exist.
Science’s dogmatic belief system blinds it to the possibility that maybe, just maybe an experiment has failed to gather data that corroborates a phenomenon because maybe, just maybe the phenomenon is outside the scope of what the apparatus of a controlled reproducible experiment is able to detect.
No, no, a thousand times no!, Science protests. There is no other way to look at things, it proclaims dogmatically and infallibly, stomping its dainty little foot for good measure. There is no other approach. Period.
But the truth is, the fact is any way of looking quite naturally always fail to see what’s outside its scope. We can’t see x-rays with the unaided eye or a radio transmission with the unaided ear because that’s not the what our eyes and ears are designed to detect.
Likewise, if you look at sex purely with an eye to the mechanical design of the human body, it’s perfectly accurate to say men are designed to have sex with women, women are designed to have sex with men. But we know that some women prefer to have sex with other women, and they manage quite nicely, thank you very much; some men prefer to have sex with other men, and they have a delightful time of it by all accounts. Moreover, some people are quite certain that the original factory configuration of the body they were born with isn’t the one that fits them—who they are—best.
What the ‘the mechanical design of the body’ way of looking fails to see, trapped as it is in its focus on the apparatus of sexual reproduction, is another far richer realm beyond the mechanistic: it misses the whole wild human experience we have of what it’s like living life as a sexual being, what it’s like immersed in a consciousness that responds to and interacts with other earthlings sexually. Seriously, come on, no sci-fi writer could’ve ever imagined such a totally mad state of consciousness if it didn’t already exist.
In precisely that same way, there are vast realms that science’s mechanical way of looking fails to see.
There is of course absolutely nothing wrong with the way science looks at things. If it weren’t for the way science looks at things, there’d be no vaccine to boost our immune system to help us ward off COVID. What is wrong, however—and deeply wrong—is science’s dogmatic and petulant insistence that the way it looks at things is the only way to look at things—and its hopeless delusion that what it can’t see just isn’t there. Crikey.
To paraphrase Philip K. Dick only slightly, reality is that which, even when you don’t believe in it, doesn’t go away.
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon, p. 4. .
Carl Sagan’s famous assertion that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof implies a question nobody ever seems to have the presence of mind to ask: extraordinary to whom? What may be out of the ordinary to Dr. Sagan may be perfect ordinary to Abbot Chö. Precisely what entitles Dr. Sagan to decide for the rest of us what is out of the ordinary?
Reality is that which, even when you can’t believe it, Dr. Sagan, doesn’t go away.
Okey-dokey, that off my chest, back to—
“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.” “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.” 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.
Just as the Eucharist and beer cans in gutters aren’t different, the language of sci-fi and the language of scripture aren’t different.
They’re both the language of revelation.
At least, that’s the way I first wrote that sentence. Then I thought, Nah, that’s not right. It’s more like—I wrote—
They’re both the language of imagination.
Which, when I reread it, I realized still wasn’t right. Then it dawned on me, the word I’d been looking for—
The Imaginal
Let’s start with physicist and Nobel laureate Niels Bohr, the brilliant mind that gave us the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics:
The idea of a personal God,
Bohr said,
is foreign to me. 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.
The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes 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 Bohr means by “a genuine reality”—whether he would’ve actually used the word—is the imaginal.
The imaginal is quite different from the merely imaginary*—the often preposterous fantasies of sci-fi or the equally preposterous, let’s call it, ‘hooey’ of scripture.
*Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, p. 93.
As Gary Lachman† puts it in The Lost Knowledge of the Imagination,
The Imaginal is ‘ontologically as real as the world of the senses
—what we can see, hear, touch, taste, smell, measure—
and that of the intellect’‡
—for example, knowing that a tomato and an acorn squash are in reality fruits (because they contain seeds) even though we think of them as vegetables.
†Interesting side note: Gary Lachman is the same Gary Lachman who was bassist in the mid-1970s for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band Blondie. Which ought to give us hope that there is indeed a future for all those teenage boys out in the garage who haven’t yet realized that the neck of their guitar isn’t actually their pecker.
‡Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, p. 94, quoting Henry Corbin, Mundus Imaginalis: Or, The Imaginary and the Imaginal, p. 9.
What Lachman is getting at is that our imagination actually perceives actual things that actually exist in the same very real sense that our eyes and our intellects do.
Okay, fine, what things?
Just as an example to get us started, think about Michelangelo, Handel, van Gogh, George Lucas. The imaginal for an artist isn’t a fantasy, isn’t unreal at all, but more like the flip side of a memory. What sparks the artist to create is what we might call a memory of, an echo from the future.* What sets Michelangelo to work is an echo he sees in his imagination of the Pieta he actually creates; Handel, an echo he hears of Messiah; van Gogh, an echo of Starry Night; Lucas, echos of Leia, Luke, Obi-Wan Kenobi. Like a memory of the past, an artistic echo is sometimes not quite within reach, at other times extraordinarily vivid, but it’s always an unmistakable echo from the future, a ‘memory’ of something that once the artist brings into being is indisputably real.
*As the White Queen famously said, it’s a poor sort of memory that works only backwards
So the distinction between the imaginary and the imaginal is that, on the one hand, the preposterous fantasies of sci-fi, the even more preposterous hooey of scripture exist nowhere but in their creator’s imagination. On the other, the imaginal, like the image I’m experiencing in my head right now of the squirrel I see actually sitting out there on the fence in my backyard, the imaginal in my head and that image of the squirrel in my head are both representations of something real, something really out there.
Okay, fine, but out there where?
No-where
The 12th-century Persian gnostic philosopher Suhrawardi called the place where the imaginal exists Nâ-Kojâ-Abâd, “the country of no-where.” He didn’t mean it’s a place that doesn’t exist, but rather a place that can’t be found on any terrestrial map or galactic star chart. It’s an inner destination, located in what he called ’âlam al-mithâl—the mundus imaginalis or Imaginal World, as Henry Corbin, the 20th-century scholar who devoted himself to Suhrawardi, styled it. Suhrawardi’s ’âlam al-mithâl, Lachman says, is akin to C. G. Jung’s objective psyche, Aldous Huxley’s Mind at Large, or Swedenborg’s heaven, hell, and spirit world.
Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, pp. 93,96.
Nikola Tesla visited the mundus imaginalis and described his travels vividly:
In my boyhood I suffered from a peculiar affliction . . . . When a word was spoken to me the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not. This caused me great discomfort and anxiety. . . .
To free myself of these tormenting appearances, I tried to concentrate my mind on something else I had seen, and in this way I would often obtain temporary relief . . . . As I performed these mental operations for the second or third time, in order to chase the appearances from my vision, the remedy gradually lost all its force. Then I instinctively commenced to make excursions beyond the limits of the small world of which I had knowledge, and I saw new scenes. These were at first very blurred and indistinct, and would flit away when I tried to concentrate my attention upon them, but by and by I succeeded in fixing them; they gained in strength and distinctness and finally assumed the concreteness of real things. I soon discovered that my best comfort was attained if I simply went on in my vision farther and farther, getting new impressions all the time, and so I began to travel—of course, in my mind. Every night (and sometimes during the day), when alone, I would start on my journeys—see new places, cities and countries—live there, meet people and make friendships and acquaintances and, however unbelievable, it is a fact that they were just as dear to me as those in actual life and not a bit less intense in their manifestations.
Tesla, My Inventions. First published in Electrical Experimenter, 1919. Unpaginated. §I. My Early Life, ¶11f.
The easiest way I personally find to conceive of the Imaginal World is to think of the entire multiverse—with its infinite number of parallel worlds—as one vast mindscape. Some of those worlds are physical, like our universe, others are pure mind space. The mind spaces aren’t any less real just because they’re non-physical, just as the mind space we’re each in this very instant—where we each experience literally everything—isn’t any less real than the stuff out there that we’re experiencing in here.
What’s really exciting to ponder about the Imaginal Worlds of the multiverse is the Celtic notion of a thin place. A thin place is where the boundaries of earth and heaven—the boundaries of our physical world and a pure mind space—touch, a permeable membrane between realities. A nuance I’d add to the Celtic notion is that thin places aren’t always to be found in literal places. The permeable membrane might be in the words of a book or a blog, in the dance of the photons on your computer monitor or the screen at the multiplex.
Equally exciting is the realization that any work of the creative imagination both gets sparked by the imaginal (the artist’s ‘memory’ of the future) and may very well end up as itself a spark of the imaginal (a glimpse of a parallel reality). Handel’s aria “The Trumpet Shall Sound” from Messiah is just maybe, to a mind properly disposed, the soundscape of our inconceivable metamorphosis—not literally, but as close as you can get within the conventions and the physics of baroque music. To a mind properly disposed the aria somehow evokes, inexplicably captures something of the experience of inconceivable metamorphosis.
Lachman tells us that Suhrawardi
wrote what we can call ‘visionary tales’ . . . . That is, he used his imagination to transmute his ‘inner spiritual states’ into ‘vision events’, creating a kind of story symbolizing his level of consciousness. We can say he engaged in what we can call a kind of ‘waking dream’, precisely the kind of conscious fantasy that enabled Jung to pass out of his everyday world and into the ‘objective psyche’.
Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, p. 95.
Let’s imagine a spectrum. At one end you’ve got Suhrawardi and Jung—even Tesla—totally focused on voyaging to one of the pure mind spaces out there in the multiverse, skilled in the craft of making careful observations of the phenomena they discover there. At the other end you’ve got sci-fi writers totally fantasizing, cranking out the most wild-ass preposterosities* their imagination can conjure.
*Yeah, I know. That’s not really a word. But it should be.
Remember Richard Matheson’s 1962 Twilight Zone episode “Little Girl Lost”?† Six-year-old Tina’s distraught parents, Chris and Ruth, awaken in the middle of the night to discover Tina missing. Inconceivably, she’s slipped through a portal that’s appeared in the wall next to her to bed—a portal, as next-door neighbor physicist Bill intones ominously, “into another dimension.”
†“Little Girl Lost,” The Twilight Zone, Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Girl_Lost_(The_Twilight_Zone)), retrieved 7 January 2022.
Sometimes sci-fi writers themselves are Little Girl Lost. Sometimes, immersed in exploring their imagination for The Totally Wild-Ass, in dreaming up The Totally Outrageous, lo!, they unwittingly slip through a portal and stumble into a parallel world. There they discover in the gutter of their preposterous fantasies wadded up like a Burger King wrapper lies The Imaginal.
Which is exactly the mechanism by which the symbols of the divine, as Philip K. Dick tells us, show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.
Dick, VALIS, p. 254.
And it’s exactly, I suspect, how it comes to pass that we find on the very first page of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End this disclaimer:
THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED IN THIS BOOK ARE NOT THOSE OF THE AUTHOR.
They weren’t his, the preposterosities—good gracious, no! He just found them in the gutter. But he sure as heck knew a useful bit of trash when he saw one. So he, ya know, just kinda worked them in.
The Imagination
A mind immersed in the imagination, even if only for the sake of some trash fantasy—a mind immersed is, however unwittingly or unintentionally, a mind properly disposed.
And not only (as I said in the previous post) does The Hack work only for a mind properly disposed, for a mind properly disposed The Hack triggers spontaneously. As Tesla found.
Because imagining—stepping through the portal, stepping beyond Mere Appearance, stepping outside the boundaries of This Is All There Is—imagining is the power that powers the Hack.
Immerse deep enough, long enough, and The Hack invariably triggers. Invariably, even if only for a second there’s a glitch in The Matrix. The Matrix adjusts, sure, almost instantaneously. Almost. But for an instant, there’s a glimpse—the Really-Real Reality out there.
Immerse, and you get a glimpse beyond. Maybe even a trip. Like Little Girl Lost. Like Little Nikola Tesla. Except ye become as little kids, Jesus tells us, ye shall not enter The Many Worlds.
So Alien
The ‘inspired’ writers of scripture are spread out all over the spectrum, too, some skilled and objective like Suhrawardi, some immersed up to their earlobes in hooey like the sci-fi hacks. We are fortunate, as I’ve said—now that science, our dominant cultural paradigm, has consigned the Gospels to the trash stratum along with the greasy pizza boxes and snotty kleenexes—only now can we get to the gospel truth. The hooey of the scriptures are, like the fantasies of sci-fi, just another gutter—exactly where the symbols of the divine show up. Like Handel’s aria “The Trumpet Shall Sound,” the imaginal often, mostly manifests in some baroque contrivance that only a mind properly disposed can penetrate, decrypt, hear. The fact that the imaginal takes a shape so alien, to quote Bohr again,
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.
The prophets of the Hebrew Bible, like Clarke, are quite explicit that the opinions—the realities—expressed in their books are not those of the author. But unlike Clarke, they are anxious to give credit where credit is due: the words “thus saith the Lord” appear no less than 413 times in the King James translation.
In an intriguing parallel, Childhood’s End begins with a portentous—echos of Philip K. Dick!—invasion from on high:
The great ships descended in their overwhelming majesty. . . . The human race was no longer alone.
Clarke, Childhood’s End, pp. 7f.
Our alien Overlords—Clarke’s own word—have arrived! And much have they to say unto us, I can assure you.
One wishes Clarke allowed himself to be a tad more impish, a teense more tabloid. His disclaimer might have read:
THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED IN THIS BOOK ARE NOT THOSE OF THE AUTHOR.
MY BRAIN WAS ABDUCTED BY ALIENS.
Which brings me to sci-fi, scripture, and Whitley Strieber.
Simply put, the Hack’s gotta be a challenge of some whole nother order of magnitude if it’s gonna get us to our inconceivable metamorphosis. So the very first step we need to take in facing up to the inconceivable magnitude of the challenge is simply getting past the grotesque absurdity of Jesus saying stuff like
He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.
John 6:58.
Not only are the actions of a superior intelligence absurd, as Jacques Vallee tells us, but the actions asked of us by that superior intelligence are likewise always going to seem grotesque to our inferior little minds.
Remember Great Glorious Buddha-Heruka’s Kabuki excess, his nine eyes wide open in terrifying gaze, eyebrows quivering like lightning, protruding teeth glistening, drinking blood, flames of wisdom shoot out from between the blazing vajra hairs on his body.
Flames of wisdom. What Dr. Vallee is trying to tell us, what Great Glorious Buddha-Heruka is trying to show us is that the absurd can overwhelm the inferior intelligence, can short-circuit the very progress it’s trying to facilitate.
“I don’t believe it,” Neo says as he literally staggers under Morpheus’s revelation of the true nature of reality—and then: “I want out.”
Luke, when he’s in training under Master Yoda, when the X-wing out of nowhere suddenly sinks into the bubbly ooze, Luke’s immediate adolescent reaction is to whine about it. Yoda points out if Luke can levitate a rock, he can levitate an X-wing. “I’ll try,” Luke responds unconvinced, earning Master Yoda’s first rebuke. “Do or do not. There is no try.” Luke gives it a go, looks almost like he might just pull it off, then totally gives up. He plops down defeated; “I can’t,” he pouts, “it’s too big”—earning Master Yoda’s second reproof: “Hear you nothing that I say?” Whereupon Luke gets quite an earful, and to top it off, Master Yoda to prove his point raises the X-wing from the swamp and deposits it neatly out of further danger. “I don’t believe it!” Luke gasps in astonishment, earning Master Yoda’s third reprimand: “That is why you fail.”
What Neo witnesses is incomprehensible. What is asked of Luke is inconceivable. As is the math of Jesus’s equation:
He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.
Inconceivable. Incomprehensible.
That is why we fail. The Hack only works for a mind properly disposed.
And a mind properly disposed isn’t easy to come by. It takes training.
As Blind Kent shows us, when we encounter the overwhelming absurd—eating flesh, for example, or drinking blood—the trick is to filter out, to turn a blind eye to the obvious, to the literal. The obvious, the literal, the superficial is always a distraction. Tune in to the harmonics. To what’s likely hidden in the transmission.
He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.
The transmission of a superior intelligence must always appear absurd because there’s always more in the transmission than meets the eye. The bandwidth is always way, way broader than you think, than you can think—thinking the way you think.
Because detecting, decoding what’s hidden requires us to, as Apple has admonished us so dutifully for nigh on a quarter of a century now, to Think Different.
Which is precisely what Jesus means when he says, Except ye be converted. The very absurdity of the action of the superior intelligence, of its transmission, of what it asks of us acts upon us to convert us, to change the way we function.
The harmonics, if we just turn our attention to them as Blind Kent does, evolve in us a mind altered, a consciousness expanded.
How terrible is this place!
Jacob says.
This is no other but the gate of heaven.
Genesis 28:17.
A Stargate. And except ye be converted, ye shall not enter.
“My God,” Dave Bowman says in wonder, as he crosses the event horizon of the Monolith, the event horizon, the fierce moment, of his inconceivable metamorphosis, “My God, it’s full of stars!” Flames of wisdom. Furnaces of transformation. Understandably, what he experiences as he passes through, you may remember, terrifies him.
How terrible is this gate!
Just as the Eucharist and beer cans in gutters aren’t different, the language of sci-fi and the language of scripture aren’t different. They’re both the language of revelation. Or maybe a better way of putting it is they’re both…
Come on, be honest, my whole premise is totally bughouse. Sure, I say, sure we can crash The Matrix. All we need is a sacrament, all it’s gonna take is a literal miracle.
Utterly absurd.
But Neo, remember—right after Morpheus tells him the truth, right after Morpheus shows him real reality—the very first thing Neo says is, “I don’t believe it. It’s not possible.”
Nope, indeed it’s not possible. The Hack’s absolutely not possible. In fact, it’s beyond not possible, it’s incomprehensibly absurd. Or it looks that way, and for a very good reason. That’s the way The Matrix has us wired. Or rather, as I said a couple of posts ago, that’s the way we’ve wired up The Matrix to wire us up: so that we’re hardwired to see only the impossibility of The Hack, the absurdity of the technology.
For now we see through a mirror darkly,
1 Corinthians 13:12.
as the Apostle Paul said.
What in fact we see darkly in that mirror is the reflection of our own playfulness, my little nephew and me playing monsters, Glorious Great Buddha-Heruka springing forth from our own brains to bar the way, his nine eyes wide open in terrifying gaze, his eyebrows quivering like lightning.
Or to put it another way,
We see through a UI darkly
—the UI being the way we’ve wired up The Matrix to wire us up.
Turns out, the only way to win the Great Glorious MMORPG is to hack the UI, to hack the whole damn game—just like Starfleet Cadet James T. Kirk after flunking Kobayashi Maru twice, the night before his third try, sneaks in and hacks the simulation, tweaks the algorithm so he could win what was intentionally programmed to be an impossible no-win scenario. For which Cadet James T. Kirk gets a special commendation for original thinking. And, implicitly, for unruly action.
So, indeed, glimpsed through the UI darkly, The Hack—a sacrament, for chrissake, a literal miracle—is impossible and absurd.
But this is one of those junctures at which we need Blind Kent, who isn’t blinded by the UI we see through darkly, to discern what’s really going on. In this case Blind Kent is, surprisingly, the second century Christian author Tertullian, who famously said,
Certum est quia impossibile est. You can be sure it’s true precisely because it’s impossible.
Less famously, but maybe even more to the point, he said,
Prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est. It’s absolutely credible precisely because it’s absurd.
The adjective ineptum would’ve set Blind Kent’s antennae all aquiver. Interleaved with the meaning absurd is another meaning: chartae ineptae is the phrase the Roman Poet Horace used for waste-paper, wadded up scraps like the Burger King wrapper in the gutter right next to Dick’s beer can, stuff that’s totally useless, like the seemingly malfunctioning second hand on Murph’s watch.
It’s absolutely credible, Tertullian is telling us, precisely because it’s trash, precisely because it’s totally useless—so keep your antennae tuned.
To be perfectly honest, Tertullian wasn’t of course talking about the impossibility, the absurdity of using a sacrament, a literal ‘miracle’ to crash The Matrix when he made either of those statements. Both quotes are from his treatise De Carne Christi (On the Flesh of Christ), in which he argues that God absurdly decided to incarnate his son in actual meat
to confound the wisdom of the world.
De Carne Christi, §4. New Advent (www.newadvent.org/fathers/0315.htm), retrieved 2 November 2021.
“The symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum,”* as Dick says, precisely “to confound the wisdom of the world.” No, I take that back. Über-Mind isn’t out to confound anybody on purpose. It’s just that, as Jacques Vallee observes, the actions of a superior intelligence always seem—must seem—absurd to an inferior one.† And when “the wisdom of the world” is, as in our culture, predominantly scientific (and notoriously impatient with woo), stuff that seems absurd gets wadded up pretty quickly—magically transformed as it were, presto!, change-o!, into Horace’s waste paper—and tossed.
*VALIS, p. 254.
†Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact, p. 167.
Which is, of course, all part of Über-Mind’s dazzlingly cunning plot!, because the litter in the gutter, the trash in the dumpster—the stuff The Matrix has us hardwired to ignore—getting “the wise” to first process it (wad it) and then store it (toss it) into the trash stratum is precisely the way Über-Mind slips the really genius tech through the firewall and into The Matrix’s code without tripping any sensors.
Über-Mind in fact has a whole nother layer of sleight of mind at work to outwit The Matrix, which is this: what Tertullian thought he was talking about, his literal message, isn’t the real message. The real message is what’s interleaved in the harmonics of the literal message.
If some benign yet superior intelligence has invaded our world, invaded our heads, it’s pretty much got to be putting ideas in our little craniums we don’t ourselves even yet fully grasp. On one side of the coin, Jesus (as I’m growing more and more certain) never really meant for his disciples to grok the Eucharist. On the flip side, Tertullian wasn’t really saying what he thought he was saying. Or rather, he was saying exactly what he thought he was saying, but he was also saying something he had no idea he was saying.
And what he was saying that he had no idea he was saying was addressed to somebody else to grok the full import of. Namely us.
Why us? Because we’re the ones who listen when Jacques Vallee tells us that the actions of a superior intelligence must always seem absurd to an inferior one.
We’re the ones who listen when Dick tells us the symbols of the divine show up first in the gutter.
We’re the ones who watch Dave Bowman cross the event horizon into the monolith, we’re the ones who are inexorably drawn in with him not in spite of, but precisely because at that moment logic ceases to obtain.
The truth is, if The Hack—crashing The Matrix with a useless sacrament, a literal ‘miracle,’ some magic woo—were merely impossible, it wouldn’t be much of a challenge. Because a challenge that’s merely impossible won’t get us anywhere. Because the impossible may not be possible, but at least it’s understandable. And as long as we can wrap our hardwired little heads around it, The Matrix has us right where it wants us.
The real question is, if The Hack were—forget about impossible, we’d crack that like Miguel Alcubierre found a way to hack space with the Alcubierre drive* to do the impossible and travel faster than the speed of light—the real question is if The Hack were at least comprehensible, at least something we could wrap our head around, if it were at least nice and neat and logical, if it were not utterly and deeply absurd, totally alien—
He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.
John 6:58.
—why haven’t we logicked or scienced or computered our way to it? Why the heck are we all still trapped? Worse, why are we still unaware that we’re trapped, why are we still like Neo when he thought he was Thomas Anderson, just another drone in another cube, until the Fed-Ex guy hands him the envelope with the cell phone at the other end of which he hears for the first time the voice of Morpheus.
*“Alcubierre drive,” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive), retrieved 24 December 2021.
Why? Because it’s a pretty sorry-ass leap, a pretty lame-ass metamorphosis that isn’t beyond all conceiving.
“So I hope you accept Reality as it is—absurd,”† as physicist Richard Feynman said. Because we’re not budging a femtometer outta The Matrix till we do.
Heck, maybe something totally bughouse like a sacrament is exactly what we need. I mean, for heaven’s sake, what did Morpheus give Neo? A red pill. Which Neo did take and eat.
†Okay, I’m paraphrasing just the eensiest little bit. What Feynman actually said was, “So I hope you accept Nature as She is — absurd.” QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, p. 10; quoted in “Richard Feynman,” Wikiquote (en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman); retrieved 24 December 2021 Footnote.
We are trapped, by and large, in the lower realm,” Dick tells us, “but are through the sacraments … extricated.”
VALIS, “Appendix,” ¶ 48, p. 269. (Because of an apparent proofreading error, there are two paragraphs numbered 48. This is from the second, beginning “Two realms there are…”)
Extrication
Extrication is precisely where the traditional Eucharist fails us, and it fails us in two big ways.
First, take a close at Dick’s grammar:
Through the sacraments we are extricated.
Note the passive voice. We’re not the hero of our own story, active. We’re passive, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse in need of rescue.
Second, note that in Dick’s assertion that
we’re trapped, by and large, in the lower realm
is the implicit assumption that there’s something real—the ‘lower realm’—to be extricated from. There isn’t.
The traditional Eucharist fails us (a) because its focus is on the body given up, the blood poured out to save us and (b) because the misapprehension inherent in that scenario is that there’s something real to be saved from. The traditional Eucharist is, in fact, still enthralled, entranced, paralyzed by its vision of Glorious Great Buddha-Heruka, his three heads adorned with dried skulls and with raw human heads forming a garland for his body, his consort, Buddha-Krodhisvari, clinging to his neck and putting to his mouth a skull bowl filled with blood. The traditional Eucharist is totally stuck in, utterly buys into the illusion that there’s a wrathful deity who’s really wrathful, that there’s this lower realm here where we’re trapped, a heavenly kingdom above us, a hellish inferno below, that it’s all somehow real.
The problem is that if it’s all somehow real, if we’re passive, if we ‘are extricated’ in the passive voice, then when we’re extricated, we leave The Matrix intact behind us. We don’t transubstantiate the world. We don’t crash the illusion.
Remember when Morpheus offers Neo The Red Pill, when Neo takes it, he indeed ‘is extricated,’ passive voice: he gets flushed. The Matrix, however, remains completely intact behind him. Indeed. Because that’s not where the story ends. That’s where it starts.
Where the Story Ends
Where the story ends, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is with Neo totally flatlining, a couple of slugs in his chest. Whereupon Trinity announces, “You can’t be dead,” kisses him, then commands him, “Now get up.” And to the astonishment of Agent Smith, Neo—totally hacking the a-couple-of-slugs-in-the-chest algorithm—just ups and raises himself from the dead, totally breaking the rules, totally rewriting the code, totally crashing ‘death,’ scaring the bejesus out of Agent Smith.
Darth Vader is similarly astonished when, having struck the fatal blow, Obi-Wan doesn’t fall down dead but inexplicably dematerializes, crashing the Obi-Wan-is-this-meat algorithm so completely that the illusion of meat itself ceases instantaneously, and his Jedi robe falls empty to the floor. (And we can’t let ourselves forget that while Obi-Wan’s dematerialization is a mere cinematic special effect, Abbot Chö’s attainment of the rainbow body in July 1998 had witnesses.)
And of course no one is more astonished than Jesus’s disciples when, after Jesus crashes death, he then hacks into the Jesus-is-this-meat algorithm so masterfully, so playfully that he just can’t help totally showing off, breaking pretty much every rule of what a body can and can’t do to demonstrate his mastery.
Ain’t Misbehavin’ (Are Too!)
“Except ye become as little kids” takes on a whole new meaning, indeed has a whole nother meaning interleaved with the superficial meaning—and we don’t even need Blind Kent to figure this one out for us. Because Jesus is showing off, manifesting the hidden meaning right before our eyes. To wit, as often as not, kids don’t behave, they misbehave.
Jesus decidedly did not say, Except ye become as little angels. I’m pretty sure if that’s what he meant, that’s what he would’ve said. I’m pretty sure that saying what he said, he knew what he was suggesting.
Jesus is sanctioning unruliness.
I was with a friend once at an art show, we were standing in front of a painting, and out of nowhere she announced that her definition of an artist was “somebody who breaks the rules.”
“Actually,” I said, “I think that’s the definition of a career criminal.” But then I got what she was getting at.
Namely, creativity, play can’t be constrained. Nor can Neo, nor Obi-Wan, nor Jesus, nor Abbot Chö.
A career criminal breaks the rules for selfish reasons. The kind of unruliness that Jesus is sanctioning—is himself manifesting—is utterly different. There are four kinds of rainbow body, Father Tizo tells us. In
“The Way of Death Like Knowledge-Holders” … a yogin of supreme accomplishments disappears,
but they still, like Jesus, have their body and others can still see them.
This is done for the sake of setting others on the path of the Dharma. … This is considered to be the sign consisting of “inconceivable manifestations on inconceivable continents” so as to bring benefit to sentient beings.
Rainbow Body and Resurrection, pp. 116f.
When 98-pound weakling Steve Rogers bursts out of that sarcophagus totally transformed, totally buff, he knows the proper use of his super-soldiered, Vita-rayed Glorified Body isn’t to show off in cheesy roadshows. It’s to act to bring benefit to sentient beings. Even Marvel Comics groks the Glorified Body.
What Neo and Obi-Wan and Jesus are showing us is that what the traditional Eucharist lacks entirely but what the Über-Eucharist has in abundance is inherent playfulness. In the Über-Eucharist, the magic words of transformation that bring about the Real Presence of an entirely alien (in Clarke’s sense) and transcendent reality—
Hoc est enim corpus meum. Hic est calix sanguinis mei. For this is my body. This is the chalice of my blood.
—conjure up not the body given up, the blood pouring out of the Crucified Jesus, dangling from a cross around Glorious Great Buddha-Heruka’s neck, but the Glorified Body of the Risen Jesus, materializing and dematerializing at will, with utter impunity, totally unruly, manifesting The Real Presence of the inexhaustible potential of ceaseless spontaneity.
Liberation
But more importantly what the traditional Eucharist lacks entirely but that the Über-Eucharist possesses without question are the words not of extrication, but of recognition and liberation—
Haec est enim mens mea. For this is my mind.
—the words that recognize that even the Real Presence of the Glorified Body is nothing more than, nothing other than The Real Presence, the Real Playfulness of Naked Mind.
We can be extricated—passive voice—without doubt; but nobody can do the recognizing for us. And the good news is that once we’ve done the recognizing, we don’t need the extrication. Because recognition and liberation, as the Tibetan Book of the Dead tells us, are simultaneous:
Recognize your guardian deity, and merging inseparably with him, become a buddha in the sambhogakaya.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, p. 137.
Or in the vocabulary of Dick and Clarke:
Recognize your champion, and merging inseparably with him, become Naked Mind, lase into Pure Consciousness in the sambhogakaya.
The sambhogakaya is the bliss body of the Buddha, the reward body of every bodhisattva who has completed their vow to act always for the benefit of every sentient being and who has thereby become a buddha.* Merging with Vairocana the Primordial Buddha in the sambhogakaya is the reward you get when you’ve won liberation, won the Glorious Great MMORPG.
*“Trikaya,” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trikaya), retrieved 27 September 2021.
It’s impossible when you hear of the sambhogakaya not to think of Jesus’s Glorified Body.
It’s impossible when you hear of merging inseparably with Vairocana the Primordial Buddha in the sambhogakaya not to think of the words of Athanasius of Alexandria: God became us so that we might become God.
Or: Über-Mind becomes us so that we might become Über-Mind.
Über-Mind immerses itself in, make-believes it’s us ten billion different little points of view so it can experience winning the sambhogakaya by some literal miracle in ten billion dazzlingly different ways.
Father Tiso, you may remember, was puzzled that Buddhism was reluctant to embrace a ritual—an algorithm, we might call it—
comparable to the Christian Eucharist . . . in which the entire cosmic process can be summed up and directed towards a transcendent and definitive future
Rainbow Body and Resurrection, p. 7.
—towards the Fierce Moment of Our Inconceivable Metamorphosis. Maybe the reluctance had to do with the fact that the traditional Eucharist isn’t the right sacrament.
The Über-Eucharist is.
Dumpster Diving
I feel like I’ve been sort of all over the map up to this point, but that’s been necessarily so in a sense because there’s been so much to connect from so many disparate sources. The symbols of the divine, as Dick says, show up in our world initially at the trash stratum; and dumpster diving is a messy business.
So before I dive even deeper, let me summarize as simply as possible where Dick’s faith in the power of the Eucharist and A. E. Waite’s certainty about the existence of an ‘Arch-Natural’ Eucharist have led us:
The traditional Eucharist is the Real Presence of the Body and Blood of the Crucified Jesus, still in thrall to the Wrathful Deity. Traditional Christianity without question celebrates the Resurrected Jesus; but weirdly, the words of the traditional Eucharist utter not so much as a peep that that—the Resurrection—is the whole point.
The Über-Eucharist, on the other hand, is the Real Presence of the Glorified Body and Blood of the Resurrected Jesus and more importantly, beyond that, an experience—a real experience—of the Real Presence of the Glorified Mind, the Really-Real Reality of which everything else, including the Glorified Body, is just the luminous manifestation. And by a real experience of Really-Real Reality I mean an experience so real, so palpable you can literally taste it.
You can literally taste the Real Presence of Über-Mind.
The next, the obvious question is what exactly is the ritual—the algorithm, so to speak—that constitutes the technology of the Über-Eucharist, that gives us that so very real experience of Really-Real Reality?
Before I get to that—my hypothesis about it, at least (I’m sure as heck not claiming divine inspiration or infallibility)—I’d like to introduce you to a simpler algorithm, a lesser sacrament: the Sacrament of The Red Pill.
But before even that, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. The machinery for the transformation that Dick tells us is at work now—that machinery, as I’ve said, is us. The circuitry in our heads. Rewiring that is where we need to start.
And we’ve got our work cut out, I can tell you.
Come on, be honest, my whole premise is totally bughouse. Sure, I say, sure we can crash The Matrix. All we need is a sacrament, all it’s gonna take is a literal miracle. Utterly absurd. But Neo, remember—right after Morpheus tells him the truth, right after Morpheus shows him real reality—the very first thing Neo says is, “I don’t believe it. It’s not possible.” Nope, indeed it’s not possible…
The inherent playfulness of who we really are—Naked Mind—is endlessly luminous, shining as the perpetual creative potential of our ceaseless spontaneity.
Inconceivably playfully, just for the fun of it, we’ve wired up The Matrix to wire us up to grow out of make-believe. We have, moreover, wired it up to wire us up to believe escapism is perfectly harmless as long as we keep hard wired in our head the fundamental operating principle that actual escape from this so-called ‘reality’ we inhabit is totally impossible, that thinking otherwise is literally psycho.
What we’re doing in fact is no different from me and my little nephew playing monsters. We’re wiring up The Matrix to wire us up to make it as hard as as we can possibly think of to escape, because then when we do escape it’s all the more fun.
Indeed, every good story’s got to have not only a really good villain, but a really good crisis—the point at which the story has to go one way or the other. The hero gets totally crushed, or she totally triumphs. In really, really good stories at the moment of crisis, the hero’s plight looks hopeless. Triumph is impossible.
Which is precisely where we find ourselves.
We can crash The Matrix, sure. But, Dick tells us, it’s gonna take a literal miracle. It’s gonna take a sacrament, for chrissake—a SAC-RA-MENT.
And if that’s not hard enough to swallow, on top of that, Waite tells us, not only does Dick not even have the right sacrament, worse, we don’t even know what the right sacrament is.
Holy shit.
But in really, really, really good stories the impossible happens. Because the hero realizes the impossible only looks impossible. And it looks impossible only because we—the hero, us—we’re looking at it all wrong because we got our head wired all wrong.
Then—bam!—the synapses untangle, the circuits rewire, the hero discovers the dazzling twist we—the hero, us—could never even dream of is staring us all right in the face.
Remember Interstellar? The “ghost” Murph thought haunted her bedroom when she was a kid turns out to be indeed real. The presence, the intelligence she sensed as a kid is her dad, Coop, messaging her from inside the tesseract, from outside spacetime using the stuttering secondhand on the watch he gave her to transmit, coded in Morse, the very information she needs to save all humankind.
Escape isn’t impossible.
Become as little kids, just like Jesus tells us, and a realm unimagined opens.
Every little kid without exception, just like Clarke tells us, lases into a being of pure consciousness in a fierce moment of inconceivable metamorphosis.
Because all appearances—the way things look, whether it’s the bread and wine, whether it’s the totally impossible—the Tibetan Buddhists tell us, are the inherent playfulness and inexhaustible potential of the ceaseless spontaneity of Naked Mind.
Recognize The Matrix—aka the bread and wine, aka the totally impossible—recognize all appearances as the form of your own mind. Recognition and liberation are simultaneous.
Recognize The Matrix—the bread and wine, the totally impossible—as coming forth from your own brain and shining vividly upon you, and in a soundless concussion of light, as Clarke says, it gives up its energies.
The Matrix—the bread and wine, the totally impossible—is no more. Just as Clarke tells us.
Instead all that’s left is all there ever was. Pure Consciousness. Naked Mind. At play.
We cannot not play, we’re hard-wired to, but even so we don’t take its luminosity seriously. Play, we think, is just play—even when Jesus keeps telling us otherwise. Why? Because hard-wired though we may be to play, The Matrix’s got us counter-wired to dismiss it. We’ve gotta play, sure, The Matrix makes us think, but just as an escape from all the grown-up stuff it makes us believe we really gotta do.
What The Matrix has wired us to dismiss, you’ll remember, always pinpoints a vulnerability in its firewall. Because The Matrix no doubt suspects what Clarke uncannily intuits in Childhood’s End: between the time the kids evolve their über-mind-meld and the fierce moment of their inconceivable metamorphosis, for years, Clarke tells us, “very little” happens.
They have never moved in all that time, and take no notice of day or night, summer or winter. They are still testing their powers; some rivers have changed their courses, and there is one that flows uphill. But they have done nothing that seems to have any purpose.
Childhood’s End, p. 222; my emphasis.
Now link that up with what I said earlier, that in VALIS the divine mimics sci-fi in order to transform the benign escapism sci-fi offers into the very means of an escape of an entirely different order—namely, Our Inconceivable Metamorphosis. Link the two and ask yourself:
What if the powers we are still testing are our powers of spontaneous play: of imagination, of make-believe—our power, when The Matrix makes us believe one thing, to make-believe another.
And what if we have done nothing that seems to have any purpose because we’re still evolving the right story, the right scenario? VALIS, The Matrix, The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal, Childhood’s End, Star Wars, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Gospels—all our sacred texts, far from inerrant or infallible, are nothing but rough drafts for episodes of this blockbuster Netflix series full of dazzling twists we haven’t even imagined yet.
What if, as I’ve said, The Matrix—this conventional, consensual, so-called ‘reality’ we inhabit—isn’t evil at all. What if it, like Glorious Great Buddha-Heruka, has come forth from our own brain, and it shines vividly upon us in the form of—forget Netflix—the most awesomely immersive Glorious Great MMORPG* imaginable, so totally awesomely immersive, we’re so totally engaged that we’ve just totally forgotten we’re just totally making it up out of our own head.
*Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.
What if in fact we are nothing but Über-Mind make-believing it’s playing the game from ten billion different points of view, pretending it’s ten billion different players for the sheer fun of seeing if it (we) can figure out what the heck’s going on, if it (we) can ever figure out how to piece itself (ourselves) back together.
Which means The Matrix—this conventional, consensual, so-called ‘reality’ we inhabit—is nothing but a dramatic device. It’s isn’t real. It’s just this ‘what-if’ we made up to use as the premise for a game that’s so totally wild-ass we haven’t even figured out yet (a) that, for starters, the first challenge is figuring out it IS but a game, for crying out loud, let alone (b) that what’s at stake isn’t even a Glorified Body like Jesus’s, which would be phenomenal enough, but a Glorified Mind, a superpower so inconceivably awesome it makes the Infinity Stones about as badass as a bag of marbles.
And not only is The Matrix not evil, it’s not using us, we’re not the battery for its endless computation. On the contrary, it’s dutifully powering Our Inconceivable Metamorphosis. Dutifully because every good story’s got to have a good villain. That’s its function. All the wrathful energy The Villainous Matrix expends constantly thwarting us and deluding us and entangling us in its deceptions, all the machinations of its devious and calculating logic are nothing more, nothing less than the exotic energy whence we draw our power, the very power we’re still testing, because once we’ve got it perfect we’re gonna use it to evolve the heck outta here.
Hack the Eucharist | Crash the Matrix 
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