Irreality, then, is the basic defect of the entropic old flux/cosmos. There are valuable bits in it (e.g., Mozart symphonies; we’ll use that as an example) but they are not real in that they pass away; they never are. But the meta-soma assimilates them into itself like permanent memories stored in a mind.
[1:248] I would even be willing to argue that an experience such as mine (2-3-74) justifies the Fall in the sense of making it worth it due to the absolute joy generated by the re-collection and return. I know it was for me—all the tearful years were not only nullified; they were overbalanced by the bliss experienced in restoration. Whether my feelings in history could rightly be projected onto the deity I don’t know; but if my system is right in all respects, 2-3-74 was the deity recovering its memory and identity, and so is representative—a sort of microcosm of the total deity’s own travels, its journey. (I envision deity in dynamic process undergoing unfolding stages of self-knowledge.) Perhaps this is the ultimate price of the game: self-awareness, acquired through “external” plural standpoints, of which I am one. Then I would say, it is worth it, this journey. That’s my subjective opinion. So the Fall is a vast adventure, culminating in a joy that outweighs the arduousness and sorrow of the trip itself. And out of this adventure the deity knows itself more clearly, and, since (as I say) intellegere is its essence, this matter outweighs all else.
[1:257] November 16, 1980
Have I had it backward? I’ve always said: I saw His Body camouflaged as the world. Maybe it’s the other way. I saw how the pieces of the world fitted together to form his body—this was what I saw that I called Valis, externally. This is the same thing as I understood inwardly when I saw that the wise horn of the dialectic selected pieces of the antecedent universe, as a stockpile, and fitted the pieces together to form the macrometasomakosmos which was its own self, its own metasoma. Here seen both ways (externally as Valis and internally as an inner consciousness): world evolved into the Body of Christ; world as pieces that seen acting and operating together became—were now—Christ as cosmic body. So it is world first; or rather they, as plural pieces, are world. Then they come together so that the they becomes an it, one body made up of all the many objects and processes that were—that had formerly been—the world. The lower plural evolve into the higher unitary. This was one process seen two ways, seen inwardly and outwardly. Yet you could still say, “His body was camouflaged as world. World was transubstantiated into Christ’s Body.” But it isn’t Christ’s Body posing as world; it is world becoming—joining together to form—Christ’s body. Again: it is a cosmic evolution. Not the higher invading the lower but the lower evolving into the higher, with pieces of world added element by element to complete and perfect this titanic body, a body so vast that I could only comprehend dimly enormous—infinite—volumes of space, space such as I had never conceived or apprehended before. Larger than the universe, which in comparison is merely finite. Limited. And all of it was alive and all of it thought. And the pieces didn’t just happen to fit together; they didn’t just haphazardly come together; Christ himself searched for the pieces, took the pieces, placed each piece of the world in place correctly, integrated, beautiful, a kosmos, a macrokosmos that was good, beautiful, pleasing and harmonious, where all the many parts that had been world interacted as one unity.* And yet absolutely in no way was this vast body anthropomorphic; it was not a human body. It was a permanent body that continually became more reticulated and arborized and complex and perfect, that had once been world. So my inner vision of the macrometasomakosmos formed out of the antecedent universe, and my external perception of Valis “camouflaged” are one and the same. And it is right here. Evolution, not reversion. Gestalting on my part; form-perception.
And this was accomplished by him defeating world over and over again in dialectical combat with it, where he subdued it, disassembled it and assimilated it in the form of useful and appropriate pieces into his own vast body. Every new part incorporated—self-incorporated—came as a result of defeating and subduing world, but not defeating and subduing it by force, but rather by wisdom; by his being wiser than it, although not as powerful; it was his wisdom victorious over its power, and as it lost each time it lost another piece of itself. So the vast body grows, and with each defeat world becomes less and he becomes more: more completed, more perfected, more internally intricate and organized; and everything valuable in world is preserved eternally in his body as the right part fitted into the right place.
And he systematically deprived world of its blind, inexorable causality, and substituted his volition in simulation of that mechanical causality, so that to the unaided eye causality still remained . . . just as to the unaided eye the plural constituents of world remained plural and unalive. And unable to think. And not integrated into a whole, a whole that was evolving internally, just as world passed over—which is to say evolved—into it. So in a sense there were two evolutions: world evolving into his body, not the pieces sort of swimming together but selected and arranged by him and an evolution internal to his body: the reticulation and arborizing, based on events in the world fed into his body, continual accretions passing from world—where they were transitory—into his body—where they were forever preserved and remembered, like within a memory system in a mind or brain. And all the internal arrangement was morphological, not in terms of space and time, but in terms of information, as if arranged by meaning, like a kind of language. Like neural conduits in a brain. There was an endless processing of things as information, as if every combination was tried out, a perpetual rapid activity, like an internal metabolism, an information metabolism. It was using objects—combinations and recombinations—of objects to think with. And every given thing was limited (telos) by every other thing, in comparison to which the antecedent universe was chaotic (atelos). It was alive; it thought; and it initiated its own movement. Nothing acted on it; all its movements were self-initiated. And nothing outside it acted to construct it; it constructed itself.
And if you were outside it in the chaotic antecedent universe you were in a prison; but if you were inside it you were in a park or garden. And it constantly attacked the prison to dismantle it as a source of parts. And this had been going on for two thousand years, a really very bitter but somehow also joyful war.
Finally, when an object was incorporated into this structure it became real for the first time, as if up until then in a certain way it had been illusory: coming into being and passing away without ever having truly existed. But now it was safe from decay and harm.
And perishing. Forever. As if the body had a map of its own internal structure, the only structure ever to have been self-mapping, hence totally internally self-aware. Yet when you looked at this great system it was only ordinary objects such as you see every day. The basic things of the world, but interrelated and arranged without having moved in time and space. The internal arrangement was its own awareness of itself. Itself as map.
As incredible as it may seem, I actually didn’t realize (until last night) that when I saw what I called Valis I saw what I call macrometasomakosmos. Apparently this is the case; the case that (1) I didn’t recognize their identity and (2) they are identical. That means that my vision as to how the macrometasomakosmos is constructed (out of pieces of the antecedent universe by means of the dialectic) applies to Valis. I literally saw the macrometasomakosmos into which the flux world feeds. So Valis didn’t invade our world in a disguised or camouflaged form, as I have always supposed; it is constructed right here, but invisible to us. It grows; it becomes more complex and perfected; and it constructs itself. Absolutely it is the Cosmic Christ; either that or it is one fuck of a meta life form.76 It just ruthlessly plunders the flux world, treating it as a chaotic stockpile that it uses for parts. And it is selective as to what it assimilates and where it places it in its own soma. Did I realize this? I don’t think so; I didn’t realize that I saw it and that it is Valis. It’s as if two thought clusters in my mind finally collided and formed one thought-complex. I had two separate categories: one involving invading; one involving construction, by its own self. [ . . . ] Suddenly years of speculation are rendered void, by this realization. Valis experienced three ways. Valis is—indeed must be—the Cosmic Christ assembling itself out of the antecedent universe which it uses as a stockpile, which it (the Cosmic Christ) defeats perpetually in a dialectical combat.