Could it be said that every now and then an additional bit is reticulated? So-to-speak revealed? So 2-3-74 could contain one or more elements of the truth that are new?
In one area the Evangelical Christians are correct: in regard to Bible prophecy. The Bible does contain archetypes that print out over and over again, and are—some of them—applicable to present-day times. (I need only recall “Acts” and the dream material in Tears, the latter specifically being either from Daniel or Revelation.)
So one great realization is: the map is exploded; the map is splintered. (And, perhaps, the map is not complete; see Hussey on the map paradox, the vicious regression.73)
[1:86] October 24, 1980
If the eide are exploded through the spatiotemporal realm, so must be Noös: disintegrated here in realm #4; but if the percipient ascends from realm #4 he may see Noös re-collected, reintegrated and hence unitary, as it actually is. What I am saying is that the eide are not actually exploded; they are exploded in terms of the spatiotemporal realm, if my meaning is clear; since realm #4 is illusory, the explosion, the splintering, is illusory. And if this is true of the eide, the Forms, this also is true of Noös: our false categories of ordering, of arranging time and space, explode and splinter the eide; and they explode and splinter Noös; but this is not really the case. This is why it is correct to say that our realm #4 and its spatiotemporal ordering are irreal. If they were real, then the eide and Noös would in actuality be exploded and splintered; but they are not. To see Noös integrated is not for Noös to reintegrate, but to be seen as it is and always is.
This was what I saw that I called Valis: Noös reintegrated in terms of my perception of it: re-collected.
Noös exploded (here in realm #4) is Noös banalized, as in the chapter headings in Ubik: Noös re-collected is as Ubik appears in the heading of the final chapter, no longer banalized, trivialized, debased into rubbish. This banalization is a measure of the Fall of this realm; and again it illustrates what I have remarked on: that things do not appear in this realm #4 as what they really are, that finally Christ will bring about what I call “the great reversal,” whereupon we will no longer see Noös (God) banalized and exploded, but, as if reversed, sacred and a unity: as it really is. Meanwhile, here, with things appearing in reverse to what their essence is, Noös is obscured; veiled.
October 25, 1980
But whereas a given eidos is finite in realm #4—it only enters at certain places and certain times, i.e., is printed out at one place and time but not another—Noös is ubiquitous. Therefore if it chooses to so-to-speak drop its mask and reverse appearances in realm #4 (enantiodromia) it is in everything at every time; it is infinite (cf. Xenophanes). Or, put another way, it can be anything or any constellation of things and their processes at any place and any time.
[1:88] October 25, 1980
If a gun were put to my head and I had to give one short answer as to what Valis was, I would say, “The Tao, as the Absolute.” And as to what happened in 3-74: the regulation of the Yin and the Yang, i.e., the dialectic, by the Tao; the Tao asserting itself as master of the dialectic that makes up our world-order of flux and strife. (“The Tao is what lets him first the light, then the dark”—this has always stuck in my mind as the basic definition of the Tao.) And this has to do with advanced physics; so Warrick is right about Valis and 3-74. Sentient physics.
But also: Valis was my splintered self “imploding” back together, the pieces that had exploded over space and time reversing their direction in enantiodromia and re-collecting to form their original unity. Of this I am absolutely certain; but look: this, too, could be an example of an event of higher physics! (This is why time seemed to flow backward; and forward-moving time had exploded my self over thousands of years and miles.)
This is why I had the distinct and indubitable impression that my own earlier thought-contents were coming back to me in the form of world—e.g., Ubik and “Faith of . . . ,” etc. World was familiar to me as my own earlier mind. I never could explain this until now. It was (I see now) the re-collecting of my own splintered self as if time were running backward, turning an explosion into an implosion. So beyond doubt enantiodromia and other higher laws of physics perceived by the Taoist and Greek naturalists (pre-Socratics) were involved! I see! The normal process of self splintering was reversed. [ . . . ]
The first space-time thing that returned to me was my most recent book, Tears, and the world (“Acts”) in it where a main part of myself had been exploded to. Then later came Ubik.
The above paragraph is the most important realization of my six and a half years of exegesis.
[1:93] October 26, 1980
Therefore my experience in 2-3-74 now that it has been followed by a successful exegesis—and only in the last two weeks has it become successful—pays off in the way that I perceive ordinary daily reality. I cannot bring back the absolute vision of the morphologically arranged realm that I had in 2-74, the anamnesis; but I now can apprehend this realm from the standpoint of the realm #3 reality; I can see in the epiphenomenal realm the constants shining through . . . and this is the triumph in practice of Platonist metaphysics, its whole point: that you learn to see in the flux realm the constants, literally see them with the educated eye, educated by Plato’s metaphysics of the forms. [ . . . ]
But the real success of the exegesis is that as I become old, now, and wear out, I feel myself wearing out only as an instance of an eternal soul or form; that nothing is lost, nothing is destroyed; and although I don’t crave immortality I do crave vigor and joy and the running that I associate with my eidos. And I know, too, that all that I have lost in my life is epiphenomenal, people and cats and things, that in reality nothing is lost. So I can face my own aging and mortality with calm and even pleasure, since I am grounded in both a mystical vision of super reality and an intellectual exegesis based on that vision, the totality of which provides me with a philosophy and with an experience with world that is harmonious and wonderful and intellectually satisfying: it is a vision of intactness, of my own self and world. Of everything as a negentropic whole. As regards my writing: it will permanently affect the macrometasomakosmos in the form of reticulation and arborizing—and hence will survive in reality forever, in the underlying structure of the world order.
[1:94] November 1, 1980
This is the surd I am left with after completing the metaphysical system of my exegesis: a surd. There is what the AI voice called “a perturbation in the reality field.” This is Valis; this is the most important part. Originally I spoke of it as a valence away from plumb. Now I think of it as a tugging, like the moon’s effect on Earth’s oceans creating, by tugging, the tides.
I say, the reality field is not real but the tug is. But what the tug points to—that is, what is doing the tugging—I have no idea. I know of it only by its effects on reality, in setting up an irregularity in reality, in the field, the way reality, the field, behaves. It is being affected from outside—outside reality.