In Book III of The Aeneid there is a long description of the Cyclops.
In a later book, Aeneas meets Queen Dido, “. . . Then the Sibyl takes him through mystic passages of the Blissful Groves where those who led good lives bask in green valleys and endless joys” (Will Durant’s Caesar and Christ, [>]). Note: “Blissful Groves.”
So we have here (1) the Cyclops, (2) the sibyl, and (3) the “Blissful Groves” which is indubitably what I saw in my dream, and also the fact that the sibyl has a lot of books of prophecies which she burned one by one, as in my dream of the singed book held up to me to read, each page rimmed with singed black. As if the book had gone through a fire but had been rescued.
Now, Claudia, I never knew any of these things. And it certainly is odd how much are from a single strand of myth from Roman and Greek times: right down to specific Greek words such as Syntonos, or however it’s spelled in Greek. Also I dreamed the word “ulna” one time, as I mentioned in the form “Sadasa ulna.” Well, I looked it up and it is Latin for “elbow,” but also it can stand for a measure of length, and the citation in my complete Latin dictionary for that use is Virgil’s The Aeneid, book III. The word “ulna” appears there as used by Virgil in that fashion, and although other citations follow, its appearance in that book would seem to be the initial use of it that has survived. And the best known, to scholars.
So my dreams seem to refer again and again to a specific paradigm and that paradigm is being explicated with each dream until now I can’t avoid seeing what the paradigm is.
Or was 2,000 years ago.
So this could be placed under the rubric “ESP” or more accurately ESP knowledge.
What the dreams I’ve had from mid-March to now, which is to say scores and scores of them, mean is that: This is prophetic knowledge. Which is to say, I can take what comes and has already come as accurate prophecy. Once this is established, the so-to-speak credentials, then it can and has gone on to the knowledge itself. Such as last night, about the assassinations in this country, which the sibyl said included Jim Pike, Bishop Pike that is, who knew Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King, and who is my friend; I knew Jim very well.
The sibyl said that the three burglaries of my house between November 1971 and March 1972 in which all my papers were taken finally, by the time it was over, had to do with the belief or fear that I had material Jim Pike had given me before his death. (I had said he had done so in the foreword of my 1969 novel A Maze of Death.) This was the purpose of the three burglaries of my files. They had reason to think so; I had said so in A Maze of Death.
I always wondered why my papers were taken. I could never figure it out and the police said they were baffled, too.
In April of this year when I was in the hospital for high blood pressure (caused really by these “dreams”) I met a lawyer and told him at length about the hits on my house. His theory after careful thought was that it was most likely that they were after papers concerning Jim Pike, religious material Jim had given me or told me before his death. In at least one of my dreams, Claudia, I was Jim Pike; I know that because I saw “my mother” and it was Jim’s, Mrs. Chambers, who I once met. Also, Jim was a Latin scholar. His specialty, in fact, his joy in life.
I am freaked, when you consider his book The Other Side, about the dead coming through to the living. He gave credit to me in its foreword, for research work.
Love,
Phil
Letter to Claudia Bush, July 16, 1974
[4:34]
Dear Claudia,
Herewith you will find a copy I made for you—did the whole damn thing word by word on my own typewriter—of a short piece I wrote which I think a lot of.
I’m sending it to you because first I do think it has worth and it’s a present to you from me, what I have best to give. (I was going to put it on the market, but never mind.) There is however a second reason. I wrote this short piece with no thought to any formal system of thought past or present. It is just what I experienced and believed. The next day when I read it I saw instantly that it was unquestionably Hindu doctrine. There is the path: dharma. There is the delusion that hangs over reality: maya. And there is the light of God shining below maya: Brahman. But later on I realized that even more was involved: the clear concept of the liar, when I looked through my reference books I came across it and recognized it at once when I turned to a passage about Zoroastrianism. The God of Light versus the Master of the Lie. There it was. I could not recall ever having known that before. Perhaps I did, but it was no longer a conscious part of me.
Needless to say, honesty was valued by the Persians as the first virtue, after piety (which was needed to justify honesty, evidently, since in those days everything had to be assigned to a supernatural cause to make it stick). They believed other good things, as revealed to them by Zoroaster as revealed to him by Ahura-Mazda by way of the Avesta, such as it being a sin to feed unfit food to an animal such as a dog. The greatest thing in the Persian system of course was its affirmation of life, the value of life, the joy of life, the justice possible in this world and not the next, the value of trying. It put down passivity, resignation, despair, and I’m glad to say once released from the power of the Lie I saw passivity, resignation and despair as intended by-products of the Lie, and any system of thought or religion which taught those as virtues (Christianity included) as a manifestation of the Lie.
Well, there I went and said it. Any system which says, This is a rotten world, wait for the next, give up, do nothing, succumb—that may be the basic Lie and if we participate in believing it and acting (or rather not acting) on it we involve ourselves in the Lie and suffer dreadfully . . . which only reinforces that particular Lie. I imagine that if Sweet Jesus is listening to me He is becoming very angry now, but if He follows his own philosophy He will fold his hands, look tragically toward heaven, and do nothing.
Meanwhile, I am trying to bring back an affirmative view of life, as was stamped out furiously wherever it appeared in history, and all I can hope is that I won’t get caught. Well, I will be, but hopefully not too soon. It’s a nice world and I’d like to stick around and enjoy it for a long time . . . but I got to say what I think is so, right? Whatever the consequences.
Love,
Phil
July 8, 1974: The First Day of the Constitutional Crisis
(Enclosure, letter to Claudia Bush, July 16, 1974)
But the state of things is so dreary here in the U.S.—they say the elderly and poor are eating canned dog food, now, to stay alive, and the McDonald hamburgers are made from cows’ eyes. The radio also says that today when Charles Colson, the President’s former counsel, went into jail he still wore his Richard M. Nixon tie clasp. “California dreaming is becoming a reality,” is a line from a Mamas and the Papas song of a few years ago, but what a dreadful surreal reality it is: foglike and dangerous, with the subtle and terrible manifestations of evil rising up like rocks in the gloom. I wish I was somewhere else. Disneyland, maybe? The last sane place here? Forever to take Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and never get off?*
The landscape is deformed out of recognition by the Lie. Its gloom is everywhere, and we encounter nothing we recognize, only familiar things without the possibility of accurate identification. There are only shocks, until we grow numb, are paralyzed and die. When I suddenly stopped believing in the Lie I did not begin to think differently—I saw differently, as if something was gone from the world or gone from between me and the world which had always been there. Like a scrambling device that had been removed: deliberate scrambling. All, suddenly, was clear language. God seemed to seek me out and expressed things through things and what took place. Everywhere I saw signs along a path, marking His presence.