Author: jeffrois

The problem—the reason the Matrix is perfectly happy to tolerate Christianity’s feeble subversion—is that Christianity’s own model of reality doesn’t get us anywhere we can be of real danger.

There is indeed a Matrix, Christianity tells us, this isn’t reality. The real reality is that there’s a God out there beyond the Matrix, Christianity tells us, and he’s so pissed at us because we’re such sorry-ass sinners that somebody—namely his only-begotten son—had to come and die to save our sorry asses from our sins. 

God is so—there’s no other word for it—deranged that the death of his own son is the only thing that can mollify him, make him happy.

So, Christianity tells us, we better be damn thankful—that’s what eucharist means, thanksgiving—and we sure as heck better watch our p’s and q’s and not step out of line. That’s the real reality, Christianity tells us.

The Matrix sits back and smiles. If you want to think of yourselves as sorry-ass sinners, if you want to spend your time watching every eensy little p, every teensy little q lest you dare step out of line, sure, fine by me. Go for it. 

Because The Matrix knows that gets us nowhere, because a bunch of browbeaten sorry-ass sinners sure as heck aren’t going to rebel.

Alas, that’s the story the traditional Eucharist celebrates, reenacts, that’s the model of reality it reconstructs and reinforces. Be sorry, be very sorry, because you’re such sorry-ass sinners God had to send his own only-begotten son to bail out your sorry asses, you sorry-ass sinners.

The Über-Eucharist, you’ll be happy to hear, has an attitude utterly different, utterly—

Any technology sufficiently advanced, as Arthur C. Clarke tells us, is indistinguishable from magic. We need to keep that in mind; even better, we need to ask ourselves, what does that really mean?, because:

What makes the traditional Eucharist unique is that it magically—and I mean that quite literally—it magically produces the Real Presence. The priest says the magic words This is my body, this is my blood and—presto! change-o!—the bread and wine become really, truly, literally—despite all appearances—the Body and Blood of Jesus.

Consider how utterly subversive that is. The doctrine of transubstantiation says that no matter how minutely you examine the bread and wine—no matter how deeply you probe inside the Matrix—all you’re ever going to find is the appearance of bread and wine. But under that appearance—under the Matrix’s artifice—is the Real Presence. There’s a reality, the doctrine of transubstantiation says, that lies beyond, outside the Matrix.

That’s exciting. That’s something worth exploring.

And you can also see why the Eucharist so appealed to Dick. At heart of Dick’s world view echos an incessant whisper: Never trust appearances. They’re always misdirection. There’s always something hidden, something far more subtle going on.

Next, consider that the words This is my body, this is my blood—

Hoc est enim corpus meum. Hic est calix sanguinis mei.

—are every bit as much a Harry Potter spell as Avada Kedavra or Crucio. And, as The Ancient One tells Doctor Strange, echoing Clarke, if the word spell bothers you, think computer program. Even better think hack, a tiny line of code inserted into the Matrix that disrupts its behavior, gets it to do something it has no intention of doing.

The sad fact is that for two interminable millennia the Catholic Church has been trying to crash the Matrix. To no avail, alas, because its Eucharist, the traditional Eucharist, is fatally impaired, nothing more than—

The divine intrudes,” Dick said, “where you least expect it.”

VALIS, p. 254.

Neo, remember, bought into the whole fiction that he was really Thomas Anderson until that time in his cube when he opens the FedEx envelope, and out slips a phone, which unexpectedly rings. “Hello?” he says, utterly perplexed; and out of nowhere—totally unexpectedly—he hears the voice of Morpheus. Morpheus intrudes, and he does so where Neo least expects it.

The divine mimics beer cans in gutters because beer cans in gutters are gaping security holes in The Matrix, gaping because they’re the stuff The Matrix has programmed us to step over, to not even see.

The symbols of the divine,

Dick said,

show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.

VALIS, p. 254.

If we want to wrest control, we’ve gotta dumpster dive to find the sacred texts.

And utterly unexpectedly everything we need to hack the Eucharist, to partake in the Real Presence of our evolutionary future is pretty much laid out for us. As Jesus said,

The kingdom of heaven is spread out upon the earth, and people just don’t see it.

The Gospel of Thomas, 113.

Of course we don’t. Because that’s the way The Matrix’s got us wired.

“Father’s kingdom,” by the way, is just Jesus’s name for what we would call a higher dimension, a parallel reality in which we experience reality in a way beyond our conceiving, trapped as we are here in The Matrix. “Father’s kingdom” is a perfect example of a beer can in a gutter, exactly the kind of thing The Matrix has us wired to step over without even noticing, but which is in fact a hieroglyph, a cryptogram just waiting to be cracked.

Let’s start with just three of the sacred texts (we’ll encounter lots more), two of which I’ve already mentioned.

First, VALIS, of course, in which the divine mimics sci-fi. The divine, remember, mimics

not just objects but what objects do.

VALIS, p. 72.

And what sci-fi does is give us a bit of escape, let us fantasize a bit. The divine’s cunning subterfuge in VALIS is to make the seemingly innocuous escapism Dick’s tale offers the very means for an escape of an entirely different order.

Second, The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal, Waite’s desperate, failed quest for the secret of the ‘Arch-Natural’ Eucharist. In it the divine mimics a ponderous and impenetrable Victorian tome. An absolute torture to read, I can tell you, it is not, as Dorothy Parker once quipped, a book to be tossed aside lightly; it should be thrown with great force. Right into the bin with the beer cans and banana peels. Honest, it’s so monumentally turgid no one in their right mind would spend twelve seconds mired in its bloated prose, let alone the weeks I spent wrestling with its interminable meanderings. Which is, of course, precisely what makes it another feat of divine and deft subterfuge. Here and there in the bloat little snippets of the algorithm we need to piece together for the hack show up—little symbols of the divine—and they “show up in our world” precisely where Dick tells us to look: in the trash.

Third up is perhaps the divine’s most ingenious, most artful subterfuge: The Gospels. 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. Ha! Hallelujah! And the gospel truth is—

The traditional Eucharist is the Real Presence of the body and blood of the crucified Jesus, the body given, the blood poured out. 

Waite’s ‘Arch-Natural’ Eucharist—what I call the Über-Eucharist—is instead the Real Presence of Jesus 2.0—the Glorified Body of the Resurrected Jesus, a super-normal body, its superpowers perfected. That’s the body the Eucharist, working properly, is meant to make Really Present. That’s the reality we’re meant to partake in, to become one with, to incorporate: a super-normal body, its superpowers perfected—our evolutionary future.

The Glorified Body as described in the Gospels is so advanced it’s totally like something out of sci-fi. And being so advanced the Glorified Body is certainly nothing The Matrix is ever going to willingly permit us to get our hands on. Because the Resurrection is the ultimate jailbreak. And the Glorified Body is a total über-hack.

Hack (v.), to gain unauthorized access to data in a
system or unauthorized control of a system’s
operation. Our goal is to get unauthorized control
of the Eucharist in order to recode it to get it to
work properly, the way it was meant to work—to
transmute the Church’s impaired and incomplete
Eucharist into the Über-Eucharist, into the Real
Presence of Jesus’s super-normal body, its super-
powers perfected, the Real Presence of our
evolutionary future.

But the good news, the great news, is that The Matrix is totally fucked. Because:

(a) The Über-Eucharist—our conjuring the Real Presence of the Glorified Body, our partaking in, our becoming one with Jesus’s super-normal body, its superpowers  perfected, our incorporating its reality as our own—the Über-Eucharist is the whole friggin’ reason Dick’s ‘benign power’ has invaded: to put in our hands the very thing, the very ‘technology’ we need to breach the Matrix’s seemingly impregnable firewall, to wrest control.

(b) We’ve already got it, the algorithm, if my conjecture is right; it’s all been spelled out for us, the total über-hack. Because

The hieroglyphs of God lie all around us

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, p. 75.

Dick said. You just need to know where to look. And the trick is, where you need to look is—

VALIS, with its tidings, was published back in 1980. Which raises the question if help has indeed come, if it decided it wanted to be detected by Dick way back then, if it advanced out of its camouflaged state to disclose itself to him back in the 1970s, if it wanted him to announce the good news, which he did back in 1980—well, what the heck’s it been up to for the past forty effing years, for chrissake? What’s it been waiting for?

Me, apparently. 

First off, I’m not a person to whom the paranormal happens. Ever. 

And yet out of nowhere in March 2020 I had an experience that was, I’m pretty darn sure, like Dick’s, some benign power breaking in, advancing out of its camouflaged state to disclose itself. Only because, again like with Dick, it wanted to be detected. Not because, I can assure you, there’s anything special about me. But simply because it wanted me, like Dick, to see it.

It wanted me to see it because, for its own mysterious reasons, it wanted to show me the hack—the final step—that Dick completely missed, that Waite, try as he might, ultimately failed to discover.

Hack (n.), a quick and inelegant solution. In VALIS
Dick’s Eucharistic hack was a hotdog bun—exactly
the quick and dirty approach you want. A God clever
enough to mimic “beer cans in gutters” cunningly
camouflages itself in the disposable to trigger no
sensors in The Matrix’ defense perimeter.

A champion can stand waiting, ready to do battle only so long, after all. And all those dev engineers in Silicon Valley were apparently too busy—I guess with Google and Facebook and Twitter and all the other necessities of life without which civilization as we know it would come to a grinding halt—to pay attention. So the 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!

That’s my best guess, at least. 

What Dick missed, what eluded Waite is, if I’ve got my conjecture right, something utterly simple, utterly obvious. To wit—

Philip K. Dick was thoroughly convinced that we live in The Matrix. He was also absolutely certain we have the means to crash it, absolutely positive the mechanism was of all things—this will astonish you—the sacrament of the Eucharist. We must however, he believed, first jailbreak the Eucharist—remove the restrictions imposed on the sacrament by the Church—in order to hack into its power.

Dick uses his novel VALIS to lay out in detail how he
came to recognize the true nature of reality and the role
the Eucharist can play in our transforming the world.

Strangely, stodgy Victorian occultist Arthur E. Waite, the co-designer of the Rider-Waite tarot deck, was likewise thoroughly convinced both that we live in The Matrix and that the way to crash it is through the Eucharist. Some eighty years before Dick, he too came to the conclusion that we need to jailbreak the Eucharist to hack into its power. Surprisingly he went even a step further than Dick. Waite believed once we hack into the Eucharist, we need to hack the Eucharist itself—modify it, recode it—to get it to work properly, the way it was meant to work—which is certainly not the way the Church ever intended it to work or ever even conceived it might work. Astonishingly, beyond the traditional Eucharist, Waite asserted, is an ‘Arch-Natural’ Eucharist, as he called it, a ‘super’ Eucharist. But despite his efforts Waite ultimately confessed he’d failed to uncover the secret hack that recodes the Eucharist, that transmutes it into its ‘Arch-Natural’ form.

Waite lays out his endeavor to unravel the secret in
his treatise The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal.

So we face a tantalizing conundrum:

Both Philip K. Dick and Arthur E. Waite agree the Eucharist is the ‘technology,’ so to speak, that we need to crash the Matrix, and both agree we need to jailbreak it to hack into its power, but:

• Dick missed the final step—namely, we have to hack the Eucharist itself to get it to work the way it was meant to work—while
• Waite recognized the final step but, try as he might, failed in his quest to discover the hack needed accomplish it.

Jail-break (v.), to remove restrictions imposed by the
manufacturer. In this case, the restrictions imposed
on the Eucharist by the Church.

Luckily Dick, even though he was a step behind Waite, discovered a couple of vital clues to help us out of the impasse, clues Waite knew nothing about. ‘Discover,’ to be honest, isn’t nearly a strong enough word; nor is ‘clue.’ What Dick encountered were revelations. What drove him to write his novel VALIS was in fact a need to recount an actual experience he’d had in real life in which he’d

witnessed a benign power which had invaded this world. No other term fitted it: the benign power, whatever it was, had invaded this world, like a champion ready to do battle. That terrified

VALIS, pp. 70f. Dick’s emphasis.

him, Dick confesses

but it also excited his joy because he understood what it meant. Help had come.

VALIS, p. 71.

So, the divine invades, breaks in ready to do battle with The Matrix to free us—that’s the first revelation. But, Dick tells us, inexplicably

In a startling response to the crisis, 

—by ‘crisis’ he means the fact that we realize we’re trapped in the Matrix, but we’re clueless about how to extricate ourselves—inexplicably in response to our crisis

the true God mimics the universe, 

—God mimics the Matrix!—

the very region he has invaded: he takes on the likeness of sticks and trees and beer cans in gutters…

VALIS, p. 74.

That inexplicable response, however, is the second revelation: the divine, ‘startlingly,’ doesn’t appear in the heavens in a blaze of glory but remains camouflaged. The divine inexplicably blends in. It mimics other things, like some insects mimic 

other insects—poisonous ones—or twigs and the like.

VALIS, p. 71.

Moreover, Dick says, it mimics

not just objects but what objects do.

VALIS, p. 72.

The camouflage, the mimicry means that indeed help has come, indeed a champion stands ready to do battle, but for its own mysterious reasons it remains cloaked.

Why?  

What if, Dick asks,

What if it could only be detected if it wanted to be detected?

VALIS, p. 71.

He asks the question precisely because his whole point in writing VALIS is to make clear that the benign power for equally mysterious reasons sometimes does indeed want to be detected. Dick himself, as I said, had an experience in real life in which, he was convinced, the divine

had advanced out of its camouflaged state to disclose itself

VALIS, p. 71.

to him. Yet he was certain he

had seen it—not because there was anything special about him—but because it had wanted him to see it.

VALIS, p. 71.

Again, why? 

What if it had wanted him to see it simply so he could announce the terrifying, the joyful tidings that—

.