The Eucharist, says Philip K. Dick, is a technology—

—, moreover, engineered for one, till-now-unimagined, till-now-undisclosed purpose: to extricate us from The Matrix.

You arch an eyebrow. Understandably.

But Philip K. Dick being the incomparable Philip K. Dick, perhaps we might want to hear him out. Maybe, just maybe he’s onto something.

Neo just Ups and Rises

Remember Neo at the climactic moment of The Matrix, when he’s totally flatlined, a couple of slugs in his chest, and Trinity says to him, “You can’t be dead,” and then she kisses him, and then outta nowhere, “Now get up,” she commands him, and totally impossibly, with nothing but his mind—which is of course and always has been outside The Matrix—he executes the most inconceivable, the most über of hacks ever witnessed, totally freaking out even Agent Smith (who’s never in all his born days seen anything like it, I can tell you)—Neo rises, just ups and raises himself from the dead!  

How? You ever wonder? How the heck’d he pull that off?

A Technology of Mind

“You can’t be dead,” Trinity says to him. Trinity. Come on, you don’t really think the Wachowskis named her Trinity because they just couldn’t think of anything better. It’s a clue.

Just suppose, just for the heck of it, what if wildly, improbably, inconceivably the Eucharist is a technology—not of nuts and bolts, not of chips and circuitboards—but a technology of Mind.

Don’t worry about what that means exactly. We’re not going to get the mechanics of it fully unpacked until we get to the end. Just hold on to it as a working hypothesis: The Eucharist is a technology of Mind.

‘God’

I’m going to be forced to use the word ‘God’ because Dick does, and Dick is our starting point. It’s his choice, not mine. (Dick is, it turns out, far more orthodox than you’d expect; he’s certainly far more orthodox than I am.)

I don’t find the word ‘God’ useful simply because ‘God’ can mean so many things. When people use the word you can never be sure you know what they mean; in fact you can never be sure they know what they mean.

Here’s a little thought experiment. Our alien overlords arrive, herd us all into one big room, and announce, “Earthlings! We are confused by this word ‘god.’ Decide amongst yourselves what you mean! All amongst you must agree!” Whereupon they exit, locking the door behind them.

Question: Does anyone ever get out?

Answer: I don’t think so.

I’m not saying that people don’t have individual, private, and authentic experiences of something they label ‘God.’ It’s just that the experiences, however authentic, manifestly aren’t the same experience of the same thing. Hence the label ‘God’ leaves me, like our alien overlords, unenlightened.

The Mystics

Mystics are, by the way, an exception. Across cultures, across millennia, their experience is remarkably consistent. And the one thing they all agree on is that The Experience is ineffable: you can’t sing it, you can’t dance it, you can’t draw it, paint it, sculpt it, word it, you can’t capture it in any way.* The only way to know The Experience is to have The Experience.†

*Mysticism: Holiness East and West, p. 13.

†Ibid., p. 21.

So once again slapping the label ‘God’ on it doesn’t get us anywhere.

My Atheist Friends

Parenthetically, I’m baffled by why my atheist friends choose to define themselves (a) in terms of something going on in other people’s heads, especially when (b) the people whose heads that ‘something’ is going on in often can’t even agree on what the heck it is that’s going on.

I suspect our alien overlords would find the behavior of my atheist friends even more confounding than the bickering of the believers.

Occam’s Razor

My approach is to start with Occam’s razor, the principle that the simplest explanation is probably right. Or to quote its classic Latin formulation:

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.

Only one entity is needed to account for everything: mind.

Which simplifies things enormously.

Mind Exists

First, we can all agree mind exists. I should clarify that by ‘mind’ I mean awareness, not the thoughts and concepts that clutter and cloud awareness.

We can all agree awareness exists because we’re each experiencing it right now.

Okay, granted, we can’t—at least until we master the Vulcan mind-meld—verify anybody else is experiencing awareness. But once again, Occam’s razor, the simplest explanation—that if I’m experiencing awareness, chances so are you—is probably right.

Fine, so mind exists, we can all agree, but how does that explain matter?

Luke’s Thought-Form

Remember the scene in The Last Jedi in which Luke Skywalker uses a tulpa—a projected thought-form of himself—to fake out Kylo Ren? Luke and Kylo engage in a light saber duel. Lasers hum, blades crack, sparks fly. But Luke is in fact nowhere near Crait, where the duel transpires. He’s back on Ahch-To, deep in meditation.

Luke is just a Jedi, a mere mortal, but he projects a thought-form so intense, to Kylo it manifests as real. The thought-form doesn’t just look real, it feels and acts just like it’s real. Luke’s illusory light saber behaves in every way—sears and scorches, cuts and wounds, resists, deflects—just as a real light saber does. 

Right now you’re having some experience of the ‘rock-solid.’ You’re sitting in a chair, you’re standing on the subway, you’re curled up in bed.

For just a second focus on your experience of the solidity you feel.

What if the object—the bed, the floor, the chair—the pressure, the resistance is just a thought-form? What if everything is just a thought-form projected by some Über-Mind?

Scientists quite seriously make the claim that chances are we live in a computer simulation. If they’re right, then the solidity you feel isn’t solid at all either. It’s just code executing. That’s precisely the claim the scientists are making: chances are there’s nothing solid or salty or warm or wet. Chances are it’s all just code executing.

I don’t buy it. There are two deep problems with the simulation hypothesis. 

Deep Problem #1

First, if this is all just a computer simulation, then there’s got to be a computer out there somewhere executing the code. Where did it come from? And there must be dev engineers who code the simulation. Where did they come from? And if the probability is that our reality is all just a simulation, then by the very same logic their seemingly rock-solid reality is just as likely to be a simulation—a simulation that requires yet another computer to run and another team of dev engineers to code. And on and on. Infinite regress.

It’s Occam’s razor again. Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate: entities—like computers and code and dev engineers—are not to be multiplied without necessity. 

If this is some sort of simulation, it’s infinitely simpler to conjecture that Über-Mind doesn’t even need a computer or code or dev engineers; rather, Über-Mind’s mere act of forming a thought makes it so. I mean, come on, if we can imagine Luke Skywalker, a mere Jedi, a mere mortal doing it just for the fun we get watching him fake out Kylo Ren, why not imagine some Über-Mind doing it for real? It’s so simple and elegant a solution.

Wait! Hold on, you say. Mind exists, yes. It’s simple, even elegant, yes. But is there the slightest evidence that mind can manifest anything physical whatsoever?   

Yes. Plenty.

The Placebo Effect

Mind manifests physical effects all the time. It’s commonplace. It’s the placebo effect. It’s such an unremarkable, such a thoroughly expected phenomenon that before the FDA approves any drug, the manufacturer has to quantify the number of subjects who manifested the physical effects of the drug not because they actually took the drug, but because they only thought they took the drug when in fact what they took was nothing but a sugar pill.

The evidence that mind alone manifests physical effects is indisputable.

Granted, we can’t manifest a steaming cup of Earl Grey for Jean-Luc. But you know what? Neither can any computer. What excuse computers have I don’t know, but it’s totally unsurprising we can’t with our little minds. We haven’t put anything like the money, the commitment, the brainpower, the recruiting, the training that’s poured into computer research and development into mind research and development.

We can’t do much with our minds yet because we’re just not really very good at it, and we’re just not really very good at it because we haven’t really tried to figure out how to be. 

Besides, chances are the capacity to materialize a light saber or a steaming cup of Earl Grey requires wiring we just haven’t fully evolved yet. We’re like the flatworm with just a little clump of light-sensitive cells. We’ve got a ways to go before we get the 3D full-color 12-megapixel upgrade with 120-degree ultra-wide f/2.4 lens, LiDAR depth mapping, 15x digital zoom, and advanced bokeh.

But one thing’s for sure. We’re sure as heck never going to get the upgrade if we refuse (a) to even recognize we’ve already got the power to use our minds to manifest physical effects and (b) to acknowledge that the ability is a scientific fact.

Deep Problem #2

Far more fatal than infinite regress for the simulation hypothesis is its second deep problem. Namely, the simulation hypothesis requires not only that code simulate a seemingly rock-solid reality, but that it manifest—not simulate, but manifest—actual consciousness awareness.

It’s indisputable that we are right this instant experiencing awareness. If this is a simulation, then the hypothesis must offer a testable and falsifiable mechanism to account for the phenomenon we observe.

But the truth is how such awareness might arise in a simulation from mere code the scientists never adequately explain. Hands are waived, and—poof! like magic!—consciousness arises spontaneously from complexity like medieval maggots from rotting meat. It’s all rather unsatisfyingly prescientific.

The fact is there’s not one single shred of evidence—not one eensy teensy little weensy shred of evidence that computer code, no matter how complex, can ever produce the kind of awareness we’re experiencing right this instant. You can’t even call that a conjecture. It’s unmitigated fantasy. It’s just some sad porno wet dream.

So I say if scientists can conjecture some über-computer, I can certainly conjecture some Über-Mind. Fair is fair.

Moreover, the fact is we have indisputable evidence that even our untrained, rudimentary little minds can manifest real quantifiable physical effects. And the fact is we have precisely zero evidence computer code can manifest anything remotely resembling real conscious awareness.

Based on the evidence, which path seems more promising? Über-Mind or über-computer?

The Matrix

But don’t confuse The Matrix with the simulation hypothesis. The two aren’t even close.

Both life and consciousness exist prior to and independently of The Matrix. That is, after all, what enables The Matrix to function. It hijacks the energy of our biological processes to power its computational processes and simultaneously subverts our conscious processes with its fake Netflix ‘reality’ to keep us in thrall.

Neo, remember, takes The Red Pill, wakes up, decouples, and thereupon gets flushed. That’s possible only because he lives independently, his awareness exists independently of the code that is The Matrix.

Conversely, if we’re part of a computer simulation, we’re just code. Bad code gets debugged and overwritten. It has no ‘life,’ no consciousness outside the simulation.

To be honest, I don’t have any problem with the simulation hypothesis as a metaphor. As a metaphor, it’s great fun and has enormous potential to enlighten us about the nature of what’s really going on.

But it’s not real. Nor is The Matrix. They’re both just metaphors.

Über-Mind, on the other hand, isn’t just real—Über-Mind is Reality. Really-Real Reality—alas, hidden from us by this Netflix sleight of mind in which we wander totally clueless and hopelessly in thrall.

Hence our need for a technology of Mind to crash The Matrix, to wake up, to decouple, to get flushed if necessary, to do whatever it takes to get the heck out of our cozy little, dreamy little womb.

So let’s make a start—though I should warn you, as Morpheus says to Neo just before he inserts that big old neural probe into the base of his skull, This will feel a little weird.

Time

Time, as physicist John Archibald Wheeler quipped, is God’s way of keeping everything from happening all at once. NEWSFLASH! 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,” as Einstein famously said, “is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Why, then, shouldn’t the future shape the past just as much as the past shapes the future?

The Face of Mind

And what if Mind plays a far greater role in the shaping of things—past, present, and future—than we suppose? “Matter is plastic in the face of Mind,” Dick tells us. If matter, then why not time? Why not events?

Take the Crucifixion. It wasn’t the Romans who crucified Jesus—and it sure as heck wasn’t the Jews. It was the Christians, so determined were they, so determined have they been for two millennia that somebody had to die to save them from their sins. What if what crucified Jesus was their need for him to die on the cross? What if their imagining so powerfully, so relentlessly that Jesus’s dying had to happen, what if their imagination acted on and continues to act on the past to arrange events so that that’s exactly what did in fact happen? The Buddhists after all didn’t need the Buddha to die. They needed him to live a long life to teach them how to free themselves from their ignorance and suffering. And that’s exactly what happened as well.

Now take the Resurrection. What if Jesus’s rising from the dead—his Glorified Body, his dazzling powers to materialize and dematerialize at will—was in fact a leap in human evolution that his followers misinterpreted as a religious event simply because two millennia ago they had no concept of ‘evolution’? And what if we’re compounding the error by misinterpreting their misinterpretation as mere myth when the Resurrection is an actual fact? Why is rising from the dead so hard to imagine? Neo does it in The Matrix; we have no problem with that.

Matter, as Dick tells us, is plastic in the face of Mind. Why should the body be exempt?

What if—just as it was those needy Christians who arranged Jesus’s crucifixion, not the Romans, not the Jews—what if it wasn’t God who raised Jesus but us, what if we’re the ones who are right now engineering his evolutionary leap by imagining that’s what must’ve happened, our imagination acting so powerfully that we’re arranging events so that’s what did in fact happen. Why is that so hard to imagine?

Time and events are after all, just like matter, plastic in the face of Mind.

The Face of Our Future

Why, you ask, would we imagine Jesus’s Resurrection so powerfully? Because what if Jesus’s evolutionary leap is our evolutionary future?—our liberating ourselves from this meat, our transforming ourselves beyond conceiving.* 

*Heck, even if you’re aiming to upload your head into the metaverse, a Plan B never hurts.

Granted, it’s entirely plausible a conjecture so wildly improbable, a notion so far-fetched—so daft—just popped into my head out of nowhere. Wouldn’t be the first time. But what if it didn’t? What if some evolutionary future version of us put it there?  

Interstellar

Remember the movie Interstellar? In it, some inconceivably advanced future version of humankind constructs a tesseract—a physical representation of spacetime in which every moment in time is a location in space—to engineer two wild improbabilities:

The first enables Coop to transmit backward in time to his earlier self the coordinates of NASA’s secret base from which he’s launched on a mission to Saturn, near which orbits a wormhole, through which he travels to some distant sector of the galaxy, where he gets sucked into a black hole, which somehow navigates him to the very tesseract constructed by our inconceivably advanced descendants so that:

Wild improbability number two, he can transmit to his daughter Murph again backward in time encoded in Morse—using the utterly trivial device of what appears to be a malfunctioning second hand on the wrist watch he gave her—the information about the singularity at the heart of the black hole, the very information she needs to save all humankind so that we can then evolve into some inconceivably advanced future version of ourselves able to manipulate our own past to effect our own evolutionary transformation.

Trigger

Sure it’s just a movie. But why’s it so hard to imagine it just might be possible in real life? What if, in fact, the trigger of The Fierce Moment of Our Inconceivable Metamorphosis, as Arthur C. Clarke calls it, is something as trivial as your reading right now what I’m typing right now. After all, the second hand on Murph’s watch looks like it’s broken. But it’s not. It’s Coop tapping out a message that Murph is reading. What if I’m just the broken watch, transmitting. You don’t always get a big, shiny monolith.

Technology

What if the Eucharist is indeed a technology that Jesus disclosed to his followers—“Do this in memory of me,” he instructed them—a technology they misinterpret as a religious ritual simply because they have no concept of ‘technology’? What if we’re compounding the error by misinterpreting their misinterpretation as mere superstition when, as the incomparable Philip K. Dick tells us,“We are trapped, by and large, in the lower realm, but are through the sacraments … extricated”? 

Moreover, “the machinery for this transformation … is at work now,” he tells us unequivocally; “in eternity it is already accomplished.”

What if—just imagine—the Eucharist is a technology—not of nuts and bolts, not of chips and circuitboards, not even of fundamental physical forces—but a technology of an entirely different order: a technology of Mind.

“Do this in memory of me,” Jesus said. And the White Queen tells us, not without purpose: “It’s a poor sort of memory that works only backwards.” What if (a) Jesus was remembering a future technology—any technology sufficiently advanced, Arthur C. Clarke tells us not without purpose, is indistinguishable from magic—and what if (b) he was encoding that future technology in the Eucharist, never expecting his followers to grok it, encapsulating it for us, like Murph on the point of despair, to finally notice? 

Indistinguishable from Useless

After all, the very thing about the second hand that makes it look broken, that makes it indistinguishable from useless, that very thing is in fact a code, a message unrecognized, waiting to be decrypted.

So maybe Philip K. Dick, being the incomparable Philip K. Dick, is onto something. So maybe, just maybe—