[1:29] Christianity is like a given drama on TV; what I’ve been trying to figure out for 6½ years is not what this one drama of many is about, but how the TV set works that brings this drama and all the others (there are many, as Eliade makes clear). So: Christianity, when you think about it, could not be the answer. It is a content within the system, not the system.
[1:46] October 19, 1980
You look at one spatiotemporal continuum and another spatiotemporal continuum and you see that they are one. They do not merely resemble each other nor are they just tangent. They are the same thing in terms of some underlying essence. The quantum leap in brain-function is when you go from thinking, “These two spatiotemporal continua resemble each other” to “They are one and the same, expressed at two places and two times.” And you can only do this if you have experienced anamnesis, because if you have not recollected (recovered) you can go no further than seeing that the two continua resemble each other; you cannot make the leap—which is up out of the spatiotemporal universe. Because within our spatiotemporal universe it is impossible that USA 1974 and Rome A.D. 45 could be one and the same . . . how could they be? They are at two times and two places. The only way they could be one and the same would be if time and space were somehow not real; or, put another way, if something about the two continua themselves were not real. That is, if Rome was not Rome; USA was not USA; but both were a third thing, the same thing.
This is why I call it a meta-abstraction. USA 1974 and Rome A.D. 45 are two ways of looking at the same thing: two aspects of the same thing. And the only way you are ever going to realize this is if you literally actually see the two of them superimposed, comingled; and this will only happen if you experience anamnesis; and you will only experience this anamnesis if something stimulates—releases, actually—your blocked memory. [ . . . ]
I am saying, “One plus one equals two,” to people who are saying, “One apple plus one apple equals two apples. One table plus one table equals two tables.” It’s not their fault. I’m sorry but the difference between my meta-abstraction as a brain function and their abstracting, their brain function is that great. I’m lucky. Because of the sodium pentothal and the Christian fish sign my blocked memory of my prenatal life was disinhibited. After making the initial leap in meta-abstracting my brain drew conclusion after conclusion, day after day; and I saw world more and more in terms of conceptual or morphological arrangement and less and less in terms of the spatiotemporal; I continued to abstract reality more and more, based on the hierarchy of realms (each higher one possessing more unity and ontology than the lower) that Plotinus describes.
In a way I feel really bitter: because I can’t tell anyone or convince anyone of what I saw. I’m afraid Valis won’t convince anyone. I feel like joining them and saying, “When I played my recording of the Mahler eighth last night the performance was a lot better than when I played that recording last week.” They’d think I was a lunatic. That’s how I feel about them, in a way.
[1:49] October 20, 1980
I finally see the source of my confusion, which I will herewith straighten out and then (God willing) let it rest. The structure or mechanism of 2-3-74 was Platonist Neoplatonist anamnesis, precisely as Plato describes it (see earlier notes); it has to do with prenatal memories recovered and a Form realm that is not spatiotemporal but is morphologically arranged. However, the content of the anamnesis is, contrarily, Christian; more, the Form (eidos) involved is a Christian one: the secret revolutionary early Christians against Rome . . . and, because this is the nature of the Platonic archetype, recurring again and again throughout linear time and space. So in a sense two mutually contradictory religious systems seem to be proved by 2-3-74: Christianity and Neoplatonism. My identity in terms of the Form world is Christian; my knowledge of that identity comes to me via the structure of the Neoplatonism world-order. This is what has caused all the confusion. For example, the reincarnation involved is Neoplatonist and can only be understood in terms of myself as a Form with each incarnation as an instance of that Form in the spatiotemporal flux world; it is me against the Black Iron Prison again and again, wherein I am a secret Christian and the Black Iron Prison is, so to speak, Rome, at different times and different places.
There is no room in Christianity for reincarnation and no hierarchy of realms such as Plotinus describes and no anamnesis and meta-abstracting such as Plato describes. However, there is no mention or indication in Platonism, Neoplatonism or Pythagoras of a secret revolutionary Christian movement pitted against the Empire. As long as I pursued the Christian element I got nowhere in figuring out what happened in 2-3-74 and how it happened. I had been swamped by apostolic Christian material in terms of my identity, role and knowledge, but none of this explained what happened and how, unless I was willing to settle for “a miracle performed by the grace of God, by divine providence,” which I was not willing to settle for. So if I am interested in reconstructing apostolic—i.e., genuine—Christianity and my identity in its struggle against Rome, then I should go toward that; but much more: I want to know what happened and how, and I now know that. Interestingly, the system that is proved to be correct is Platonism and Neoplatonism (e.g., reincarnation, the Form world); whereas Christianity is shown only to be my identity-role, my commitment.
Therefore I must affirm Christianity—the authentic apostolic form—as my orientation, in fact my historic role, but it remains a matter of faith and personal identity; whether it is veridical I can’t say. Philosophically and metaphysically, Platonism and Neoplatonism in its basic elements is verified; were it not true my experience of 2-3-74 could not have occurred. I might have discovered other Forms than the Black Iron Prison: what I call “other narratives.” However, this is the one which defines me: opposition against the central tyranny, expressed over and over again.
[ . . . ]
This goes a long way toward explaining the strange basic schism in me (which finds expression, for example, in Scanner, its basic plot). It explains my twin parallel opposing views of Christianity; on the one hand I feel myself to be a Christian and on the other I view Christians and Christianity with abhorrence and contempt. It would seem that half of me is devoted to the wisdom religions of classic Greece, which is why I enjoy the pre-Socratics so much; and yet another part of me is led back again and again to the NT. “Zwei Selle wohnen ach! in meiner Brust.”71 . . . I really am two people, one of them Christian, the other pagan. As a result I am forced to function while holding two mutually exclusive views which, as F. Scott Fitzgerald says, is the mark of the true artist. [ . . . ]
I must go on being a Christian, acting out the role of genuine revolutionary apostolic Christian, as a strategy: in order to overthrow the Black Iron Prison which I detest. But that is what Christianity is for me: a strategy. I know—all the time that I am a secret, authentic, revolutionary Christian—that it is Platonism and Neoplatonism that’s objectively true. But the Platonist and Neoplatonist has no revolutionary drive; he will not change society, the world, to bring on the Kingdom; therefore I must live as if (als ob) Christianity—genuine Christianity—were true. Strange.
[1:61] October 21, 1980