On their own planet, the race of Others might have had even less total vision of their purpose in the universe than we have; however, it is possible that their guesses and intimations might be ahead of our own. In this case they might be waiting for us to arrive, or even made certain attempts to contact us—with or without success. At the ultimate, they might even have managed in small preliminary ways to reach across space to us somehow, to coax us subtly into moving toward them. A few of them—a small part of their total energy—might have arrived here already, even long ago, and touched a few of us, bringing those few into the total entity the Builder was preparing. That entity would, in our words, be a man and also a spirit—touched by the Holy Spirit or born a second time, whatever: born of water and spirit, perhaps.15 And, being all this, he would have a lot to tell us.
We are going to link up.
In all this, we would become aware of (1) those creatures toward which we moved with whom we were to link up; and (2) the Great Builder Himself moving all things. Regarding the first, we would have a natural instinctive tendency to venerate them as godlike, but in fact on their own, without us, they are probably no more and no less than we. It is the fusion which is superior. Their proper attitude toward us might well be the same veneration as ours toward them. What is truly to be venerated and revered is the Builder Himself and His Plan which caused both our species to come into being and then move toward each other to join. True worship should go to Him alone. We would experience him as the powerful, gentle will within us, prompting us to move toward our other halves. They are, like us, created; He is self-creating always.
It’s interesting that Jesus spoke of being born again as being “born of water and spirit,” which is from two sources; two coming together, in contrast to being “born from the womb,” one source, one element. He was indicating a fusion. Water, perhaps, indicated our own part, with the Other, the spirit, coming down from above.
Certainly Jesus was speaking about a totally different kind of birth just in that respect alone; two elements joined together and became one entity. Another difference between the first birth and the second is cruciaclass="underline" we do not decide to be born in the first place; it happens to us, but the second birth (born again) requires a decision. This means that it does not occur naturally or spontaneously and in fact may not occur at all. It must be accomplished—done by us, or anyhow sought for. Somehow the spirit must be enticed or welcomed or attracted. Water—our part of the two agents necessary—we obtain in the sacrament of baptism, but we can’t perform the other part: obtaining the spirit. We must wait for it to arrive, having done our part, the water part. Evidently for some reason the spirit can’t come to us unless the water—baptism—is there; baptism must change us in a way we can’t see, perhaps making us a conductor, grounded, and hence able to attract an electrical-like field from the heavens (sky). For all we know, the spirit is up there perpetually, awaiting only the crucial change (water) below to come down and enter.
Like Beethoven, the Creator is a joiner; not of organizations but of sections assembled separately in different places and then somehow brought together; the places are our category “space,” then, when brought together, “time.”
If the Other is not bound by the categories of perception time and space, then he is here now, was here, will be, and since not phenomenalistically, then he is not outside but within us. Like Plotinus’ concept of concentric rings of emanation, we encounter our Others in gradually increasing intensity and clarity; they become clearer to us continually. It is as if the will which drives animals and bugs, in the form of blind instinct, begins one day in us to actually speak. This is the Logos perhaps.
Letter to Ursula Le Guin, September 23, 1974*
[4:106]
Dear Ursula,
I just sent you a big manila envelope of material but I wanted to say this, that the 14-page piece is all true, it really did happen to me, and it is strange and I can’t fully explain it—which is to say, name who what poured itself into me back in March and is still there, still here, I mean. Still in a symbiotic relationship with me.
Tom Disch came back a couple of weeks ago and I told him about it. He suggested perhaps it was Elijah who had possessed me, and so I read up on Elijah; that explanation fits as well as any other, and so I ran with that until last night when, in falling asleep, I thought the words “poros” and “krater,” and then looked them up today and sure enough once more, they are Greek words, and words which I certainly didn’t know.
I doubt if Elijah would be ruminating in Greek, but he probably reap peared (after two parts of his spirit returned to Elisha) as John the Baptist and then other Essenes; it is probably all one spirit which can divide itself in any fashion it wants (like the Advocate which Christ says He will have God send after He, Christ, is gone). All these are one; this is a mystery, but to me very exciting.
The spirit which filled me starting in March was primarily rooted in these realities: justice, truth and freedom. His pursuit of the first and his devotion to the second is what made Tom Disch think of Elijah, I think. The spirit when he arrived here looked around, saw Richard Nixon and those creatures, and was so wrath-filled that he never stopped writing letters to Washington until Nixon was out.* He wrote again and again to Charles Wiggins, for instance—especially him, with an enormous intensity. Congressman Wiggins wrote back a long detailed answer to each letter; the spirit even wrote to the Wall Street Journal (a letter which they printed) informing them that Nixon’s transcripts were self-serving and full of lies, and time would reveal this . . . as it certainly did. This spirit, very Elijah-like but also as Christ spoke of the Advocate being, confuted the lies of the world with enormous insight into them; he used legal terms I don’t generally use. You wouldn’t believe his animosity toward the tyrannies both here and in the USSR; he saw them as twin horns of the same evil entity—one vast worldwide state whose basic nature was clear to him as being one of slavery, a continuation of Rome itself. And he was a foe to that, above all; he saw Caesar once more, and himself pitted against that. [ . . . ]
What perhaps is involved here is time travel. The ability by someone, or several someones, far back in the past (circa 600 B.C.) to travel forward through to our period, by large leaps, surfacing in one or more of us. . . . In February I had major oral surgery, and was home recovering, still under the influence of the sodium pentothal, and in severe pain. Tessa phoned the oral surgeon and he phoned a pharmacy to send out a pain killer. The doorbell rang and I went, and there stood this girl with black, black hair and large eyes very lovely and intense; I stood staring at her, amazed, also confused, thinking I’d never seen such a beautiful girl, and why was she standing there? She handed me the package of medication, and I tried to think what to say to her; I noticed then, a fascinating gold necklace around her neck and I said, “What is that? It certainly is beautiful,” just, you see, to find something to say to hold her there. The girl indicated the major figure in it, which was a fish. “This is a sign used by the early Christians,” she said, and then departed. Soon thereafter the dazzling shower of colored graphics descended over me in the night, and you know the rest. During the first weeks while the spirit was within me in full force I saw, among all the other insights I developed, that there are external signals which act on us as disinhibiting stimuli, which cause a vast drop in GABA fluid in the brain, releasing (intentionally, as with the little creatures) major engramming. Evidently this is what the fish sign did to me. In fact I read in one article on brain function that when inhibiting GABA fluid drops quite a bit—which is when an external signal causes major disinhibition to take place—the person experiences “abstracts much like the modern painters have reproduced,” and this does fit my experience.