The one odd dream that I had, in which I picked up most distant, the smallest, weakest signal—from a star, star-information, sidereal . . . what I heard seemed to resemble, as an analog, an AI System, not a computer, and female in tone. Reasonable and female. This was a small system, though; it knew almost nothing, not even where it was (the “Portuguese States of America,” it decided, when I suggested it look around for something written to read from, like the address on an envelope). This was a subsystem and not my tutor, but its response told me that nowhere in our world would I find the sending entity which had begun impinging on me in the form of a highly abstract and highly balanced (like the Golden Rectangle) graphics back in March. Not so much what it told me in a positive sense—where it was—but by ruling out where it is not: that helped. It isn’t here, which means here in time, space, dimension, any of the coordinates.
The past, then. Or the future. Another star. An alternate world. “The other side.” They’re all “the other side” in some way. For instance, it made me aware of God from the very start, but never of Christ; I deduce from this that it is non-Christian and probably pre-Christian. Actually I can’t catch in it any influences since the Greek Logos Doctrine. Which could be Iranian. India to Iran to Greece and then possibly (but not necessarily) to Rome. One night I had a short bitter dream in which I cried out in despair, “Ich hab’ kein Retter,” I have no Savior. Then in fear at having said that I added, “Ja, Ja, es gibt ein Retter,”8 but it was too late; the whole Ground of Being, everything around me, dwindled away and was gone; I floundered in the void, suffering. I think this was an awareness that for all its value, this new worldview being dominant in me and taking over from the old one would deprive me, perhaps forever, of Jesus Christ. I guess this is true. It’s a dreadful loss, but I can’t stop it; what can the pupil do in the hands of such a tutor? Unfortunately, though, a tutor who—well, lived before Christ and hence could not have known of Him? But Jim knew of Christ. Perhaps then I have worked the logical steps, deducing and deducting to prove that my tutor existed before the time of Christ, or if a bit later did not know of, or if knowing did not accept. Time and knowledge have been rolled back, for better or worse. Mostly it is better . . . except in this one conspicuous way. I miss my savior.
So my “unconscious,” which I’ve claimed this tutor to be, has available to it “my entire memory,” except everything pertaining to events and concepts that arose after 100 A.D. That is an extraordinarily great restriction. Obviously, that is not in any sense that we know the term “my unconscious,” laid down in my lifetime; it knows words, concepts, that I never knew—and doesn’t know the commonplace elements of the last 2,000 years. Its location is far back in time. And another climate; I keep sensing—and craving—a moist, cool, high-altitude environment, where I can watch the stars.
I remember that when this first hit me, in the first couple of weeks, I was absolutely convinced that I was living in Rome, sometime after Christ appeared but before Christianity became legal. Back in the furtive Fish Sign days.* Secret baptism and that stuff. I was sure of it. Rome, evil Rome and Caesar’s minions, were everywhere around me. So were the fast-moving hidden agents of God, always on the go, like the Logos as it creates things. I was a Christian but I had to hide it. Or they’d get me. It made me very uncomfortable to belong to a persecuted sect like that, a small minority of fanatics. I was afraid I’d blurt out my beliefs and be thrown to the lions. That is one reason my blood pressure got so high. I was waiting to be hit by Caesar’s spies, and also I anticipated the Second Coming or something good like that. Maybe the Day of Judgment. I was more excited than afraid, sure in my faith, certain of my Savior. The Last Supper was real, actual and close by me. Maybe this is a clue. I’m still in that time period, but I’ve fallen under the wise and prudent guidance of an educated Greek—high class in other words—tutor. Brought in from the provinces where the ignorant scurry about, to be educated in cultivated urban life. I think I read all this in the novel The Robe9 11 years ago. Jeez, I’ve fallen into someone else’s novel!
You know, I could if I wanted to make the most dramatic but speculative case, for fictional purposes I guess, reason that I was pulled back through time, back and back, to where It All Went Wrong, which would be where around 100 A.D. I, typifying everyone who went wrong perhaps, became a Christian. “That was a wrong turn,” the Vast Acting Living Intelligence System that creates decided. “When those people decided on Christianity. I’ll throw away 2,000 years, go back, have this one—he’ll get it going right; he’s typical—turn to some other religion instead, and have that become dominant. Let’s see. . . .” A New Start. Second Time Around. Why not? Thus, my sense that my help was coming from an alternate universe.
I don’t know why I’m speculating along like this, though, because in point of fact I’ve decided, by a process of deduction, who my tutor is. Asklepios, or one of his sons. A Greek physician, whose step-mother was the Cumaean sibyl, his father Apollo, at whose shrines “. . . the sick were given wholesome advice in their dreams,” this cult yielding only reluctantly to Christianity. Also Asklepios was according to legend, slain by the Kyklopes, a cyclops. Which would explain my extraordinary dream: I saw a fusion of his step-mother and him who Asklepios feared most in all the world.*
This also explains why the highest wisdom shown me is that associated with Apollo. His—my tutor’s—father.
Interestingly, although Apollo is considered to have been a myth, the Cumaean sibyl is thought to have really existed, and Asklepios likewise. The sibyl lived at least a thousand years, migrating to Rome and writing her Sibylline Books. Asklepios, as I say, was slain by a Kyklopes, by order of Zeus. There wasn’t anything Apollo could do about it; Asklepios was bringing a dead person back to life with his healing powers, which Zeus couldn’t tolerate because it interrupted the natural order. Which I guess is ananke again . . . which would explain why in his instructing and shaping me Asklepios would emphasize that element in life. He learned all about it. I’m getting the benefit of his unfortunate experience.
I can see me telling my therapist this. “What’s on your mind, Phil?” she’ll say when I go in, and I’ll say, “Asklepios is my tutor, from out of Periclean Athens. I’m learning to talk in Attic Greek.” She’ll say, “Oh really?” and I’ll be on my way to the Blissful Groves, but that won’t be after death; that’ll be in the country where it’s quiet and costs $100 a day. And you get all the apple juice you want to drink, along with Thorazine.
Apollo’s motto at Delphi was “Know thyself,” which forms the basis for all modern psychotherapy and mental health and certainly underlies my getting in touch with myself, as depicted here. The other night when I found myself thinking, during the hypnogogic state, in Greek, I managed to snatch a couple of words out of what I believe to be a syntactic sentence. (At the time I wasn’t positive it was Greek; it remained a problem to check on, today. It was.) I snatched out:
crypte (-) morphosis
These mean something like:
latent shape (or hidden or concealed shape)
Although I don’t have anything more to go on; it would seem to me that I—or my tutor—was musing on this whole situation, and in pithy Greek formalizing it. A latent form is emerging in me, buried perhaps by Apollo himself, when his son Asklepios was killed by the Kyklopes, so that his son’s wisdom and skills, derived from Apollo, would continue on despite Asklepios’ sudden death—remaining latent within the morphology of the Indo-European descendents of Asklepios, perhaps genetically handed down through his sons. (He had two.) Now, when needed, this crypte morphosis is emerging, again active; its external stimulating-triggering source being some aspect of the dreadful civic decline of our society, its falling into ruins. “Within the degenerate molecules, the trash of today, he (PKD) resurrects a power buried for eons.” (S. Lem, about Ubik.) Other gods of the past have at other times returned to life: Wotan in Germany, during the Nazis. Surely Apollo with his balanced wisdom, his clear healing harmony of opposites, his clear-headed self-knowledge and integrity—what better archetype or god, long slumbering, should be roused at this sad time? Of all the ancient buried deities Apollo is needed by us the most; we have seen enough of the politics of unreason, “Thinking with the Blood,” etc.