I think I mentioned a more recent dream about double domed men with rather golden skin—huge egg-shaped craniums, very fierce and formidable and decisive, with an enormous yearbook type book “which you can’t get right now because it’s not available.” Last night, with sudden fear, I broke through the memory block about that dream; in it one of those double domed golden skinned men opened a huge cyclops eye which at once, as with the cyclops sibyl, shoved his regular two eyes aside. He wasn’t looking at me, thank god, but it so scared me that when I woke up I couldn’t remember that. Last night when I did remember, the image from the dream was so vivid that I thought, I actually thought, that maybe I hadn’t dreamed it, I had actually seen a cyclops such as this during the day, in reality. Only by a priori reasoning, that this was not possible, did I deduce it therefore had to have been in the dream.
In a frenzy of hysteria I told Tessa that I believed that these were not people I was seeing. Not people like us talking to me in my sleep and healing and educating me, but another race entirely (you know, like the saucer people talk about: “a superior race from Outer Space, Immortal and All-Knowing, Who Guide Us”). But then, as I relate in my other letter (there’s always another letter) of this date I tell how last night I was disappointed to be shown that it’s only Asklepios and friends, and they’re all human. So acute terror gave way to keen disappointment.
I’m sure that Asklepios and friends are concerned that I not freak. This must be a perpetual risk in matters of this kind, where they surface and start curing and guiding and improving a person. The person, understandably, goes bananas and climbs the drapes, hiding up there with eyes bugged out like grapes. First of all it interferes with the therapy, but worse than that it defeats the entire purpose of it, which is to make the person balanced, sound and sane, rational and calm and in harmony and proportion within and with the outside world, so he can take anything. If he can’t take the healing, then we have a sad irony; the therapy to make him sane causes him to go insane.
These last experiences at night, first the rhymed couplet about “you have to put your slippers on/To walk toward the Dawn,” is a very complex but very effective way of reassuring me. The voice was quiet and somewhat motherly, and familiar. (In the dream I thought it was Olivia Newton-John, and who could be scared of her?) Also, my associations which have filtered through after absorbing the couplet are in a similar vein. “You have to put your slippers on” is what your mama says to you before you and the other little children sit down around her in a circle, at night before you go to bed, to hear the story she is going to tell you; it suggests safety and also the peace and quiet, the alpha state you get into, before she starts her soothing tale. And of course it’s soothing, dummy, because you’re going to bed and no mama would tell you anything scary before you went to bed. Another association that comes to me is that you, as that little child about to hear the soothing tale, put your slippers on—not to walk anywhere; slippers aren’t for walking—but to keep your feet warm, which could be deciphered as, “You must not have cold feet,” which again deciphered means, “Don’t be scared; you must not be scared or you can’t walk toward the Dawn,” which itself is a metaphor for “moving toward enlightenment,” quite evidently. It’s a riddle. As kids would have no trouble interpreting; it’s really very easy, for a riddle.
The Nice Lady: What’s meant by (and she recites the couplet)?
Children (all together excitedly): I know! I know!
[The Nice Lady]: Sit around and be quiet and listen and you’ll learn something!
I’m sure of this, Claudia. They, Asklepios and his gang, were aware I was getting freaked (I do a lot of that, but it’s understandable, probably happens often) and set about calming me down. [ . . . ]
Yesterday I asked Tessa what she thought was going on. “They’re disclosing the Mysteries to you,” she said. “The Elysian Mysteries.” Since the EMs were based on secret rituals to Demeter, then maybe Tessa is right. My sibyl is a chthonic deity: Demeter for instance.
Love,
Phil
[4:103] The Other is not any one thing found in any particular place. It is a quality of (or rather visible in) all things, like a specific color. It shines through them at us. We see it and it sees back, as in a dialog. If it can be seen at all it can be seen immediately, not merely in some exotic far off setting.
(1) The Other exists.
(2) We can experience it.
(3) It is found everywhere.
(4) Therefore since it exists, since we can experience it, and since it can be found everywhere, we can encounter it here. The opportunity exists now. Lem is wrong in all respects.
What is needed is a tremendous increase in our brain-efficiency. A vital improvement in set-group discrimination. Once we have done so and locked onto it we can probably continue to hold it in view. We’re talking here about a two hemisphere perception of reality, and then an information transfer from one hemisphere to the other so that cognition, not just perception, is brain-total.* The morphology is already in place.
All encounters in the phenomenological world (in time and space) are exterior encounters, with constructs of our own mind—here and anywhere else we go. To experience truly, genuinely to encounter any other living entity in itself, one would have to be in it, and have it in one. This would be an interior experience; one would see nothing outside, no object, but suddenly one would experience all reality through the vision of the Other, as if seeing out through its eyes. One would share and inhabit its world, possess its perspective; at the same time the Other would possess what one had as a worldview. This might be close to a sort of energy symbiosis, an exchange of plasmas. One would not see the Other; one would see as the Other. Not possess it but possess its world. And this would not be so much an “I am in your world and you are in mine” but both would share a world made up from both previous separate worlds. A superimposition, greater than either had possessed: a total sharing within, and a to tal shared view of what lies outside. This sudden, double, superimposed, simultaneous view would be experienced as gaining an additional depth: as if adding one more spatial dimension. Much as a flatlander acquiring three-dimensional space. Time, too, would be experienced differently; one could see ahead, in all temporal directions. Two separate “mono” views when blended become a “stereo” view. Both entities, surprised by the heightened perception, would probably attribute it to the other’s ability, not realizing he himself supplied half. “What a marvelous entity has taken me over,” each would think, astonished. “Look at what he can see that I never could.” Each would be awed by the other—i.e., the Other.
Plato once expressed an idea, probably metaphoric, that each of us is really only one half of a four legged four armed organism; somehow long ago we got split apart and we’re always searching for our missing other half.* This usually is construed as a man searching for his female mate; however, suppose the Great Builder has fashioned us humans here, each of us, as one half of a total organism the other half of which is not a human being but something totally different—maybe with no physical body at all, but a sort of energy plasma which fits over or is “poured into” each of us, as the Parakletos is said to be. This might indicate that our total life on earth is only the first part, the part before each of us and his Other are joined. Possibly many if not most of us die before being joined; maybe we never are, or we are joined after death. Meanwhile, off somewhere in another star system the Great Builder has fashioned the other parts of us, and soon we will be stimulated by Him to take off into space and head via rocket ship for that star, not knowing what lies ahead but prompted by a vast and authentic instinct that we should do it. Imagine our surprise—and then delight—when we get there and are suddenly joined, in the twinkling of an eye, with our other half—the Other.