The circumstances under which the theophany occurred (I gave up on the exegesis and kicked back and massively turned on) are not capricious causes but follow the logic of the dialectic along several axes. This shows the hauntingly eerie paradoxical (almost seemingly whimsical or playful) nature of enlightenment: it comes to you only when you cease to pursue it. When you totally and finally give up. Another way of putting this is to say that the answer lies in the least likely place, where you are least likely to look. This is what gave rise to Zen. Yet, emerging from this maze of paradox and mirror opposites, of seeming, of infinite change, here, finally, is the answer I sought, the goal I sought. And it is where I started from back in high school in my physics final when I prayed to God, the Christian God—who was always there, leading me to him.
My guess in VR—that it was YHWH—was correct. But it wasn’t a guess; it was what the AI voice told me. Always, faintly and distantly but clearly, the AI voice pointed the way to the truth. It knew the answer from the beginning, and spoke in the spirit of God (Ruah). Through it I figured out that Valis was not God but reality perturbed by God. I knew, then, that I had not found God after all. My great discovery, then, was not in knowing what I had found, but facing the fact of what I had not found—the very thing I was searching for.
Ironies abound. But the playfulness ended in infinity, exhaustion and the great reversal. The God was reached, and the journey did not begin in 1974. It began in high school during that physics test when I first heard the AI voice. 35 years!
[1:279] In 3-74 when I saw the second signal and Valis I saw world from a highly advanced standpoint, but it was still world. Yesterday I, on the other hand, knew God, and he was wholly other than world and transcendent and not complex and not material and not in process. There is no dialectic in him; that has to do with time, flux, change, growth, perfection, completion; something like an organism. He is not seen by the eyes in world or as world. The Jews and Christians are correct. And he has personality, which Valis lacked; Valis was machinelike, computerlike, an evolving mechanism, like a clever artifact. Intricate and growing more intricate. God ist ein lieber vater überm sternenzalt.78 I found him to be a person like myself, with personality and love and simplicity. He was not involved in world (pantheism). He manifested himself to reassure me—it is only a little pain that we feel now here in world—nothing compared to the bliss to come. Of which he gave me a little that I might see how it would be. And he was no foreign God but the God of my fathers, our own God. What he wills is. He simply wills it. This is simple; there is no mechanism, no complexity. Valis is the world properly seen, as if from outside from an objective standpoint outside space and time, but still world, with all its history preserved in it and advancing through its growth stages via the dialectic, it (Valis) is, simply, reality. But that is other than God. When I saw the glint of color in the alley and the rippling of the weeds I saw the edge, the end of creation, but not the beginning of God: I saw him not. But there is nothing to see, because he is not physical. All that happens he either wills (ordains) or allows.
I think 3-74 was something I did vis-à-vis world that did not involve God. It involved world and information, but it was physical. I am the doubt; God allows it but it is satanic and rebellious. It is Satan the accuser of God’s handiwork, Satan in me as rebel questioning reality under the guise of epistemological inquiry. It is hubris and intellectual arrogance yet God allowed it. It was—has been—blasphemy. World, which I questioned, came back at me in a subtle form, the subtle serpent, world as Valis which I then took to be real, and so fell even more under its domination than any average Christian is dominated by world; Valis is world as Satan’s kingdom, subtly disguised in such a way as to fulfill my personal, individual preconceptions about God; this is why 3-74 resembled Ubik and Ubik; it was my own preconceptions and theology fed back at me to “ratify” them. This is world’s—Satan’s—victory, this great intellectual subtlety. World as it normally appeared was not complex and illusive enough to satisfy me, so Satan obliged: with world that would satisfy me emotionally and intellectually. (And in doing so, burned me with the hell labor of this exegesis.) [ . . . ] I have sinned in this exegesis; it is one vast edifice of hubris, of Satan in me questioning and accusing.
And I finally began to realize it; I prayed to be delivered from it. 3-74 was some vast enantiodromia in which I pulled reality inside-out, used up and hence froze time, saw the past (“Acts”) and the future (the second sig nal) so it was a great feat. But it was still reality: epistemology and not even metaphysics, and no theology—world rightly seen—but not God.
[1:293] November 24, 1980
The arguments for Valis being the Cosmic Christ are not conclusive but they are compelling. I call my own attention to the typed pages of 11-16-80 which preceded by only a short while the theophany of 11-17-80. They were in fact the last thing I wrote before the theophany.
[1:301] Strange to say, when I look back to 11-17-80 what seems to me now the most proof that it really was God is not so much the bliss but the distinct individual personality (with its intense love); the distinctness, the uniqueness, the individuality of the personality. I could then and still can imagine what he would look like were he physically visible: an old man in a robe, very old, very dignified and wise, but, most of all, loving and kind and gentle (yet firm, very firm)—but not as he is usually pictured, not a patriarch in the usual sense, more, perhaps, like a magician in contrast, though, to (say) Gandolf; much darker: gray and brown and black, in shadow, yes: in shadow, like Michelangelo painted him in his creating Eve, yet not so, but close to it. Not heroic, as Michelangelo painted him, and not Hebrew. More supernatural. Really sort of physical, not “spiritual.” Yes: physical and supernatural, not a king or patriarch, all dark. Like a druid or humanist: learning. Not classical. Like a tree or a scholar.
I know: _like a book._ Hence made of parchment, tree, branches, paper, cloth.
He was not a type, like “the wise old King,” not an archetype, not like a statue; he was an individual, not man but a given specific man (in contrast to sort of Platonic eidos). It was as if the universe had been created by one given specific individual man.
Book. Robe. Tree. Gray. Brown. Dark shades and fabric.
There was nothing generic about him. No so to speak DNA. No latency; all was actualized and distinct. As if you had gone from the physical, material realm of specifics to the Platonic archetypal—and then back to the specific man! Like a complete circle. Strange. He was like all ontogeny!
As if a wise old scholar, a sage, had conjured up creation, not God as we normally think of him, but a scholar of love and tenderness, but of vast learning. Again I see a book.
[1:303] But there were elements about him not found in man or men as I have experienced them: specifically, infinite love (agape). Not agape greater than I have ever known but infinite—and from it stems absolute theodicy and, for us, infinite bliss. (I might also add that infinite kindness was contained in this infinite agape, but—I would think—that is due to the nature of agape; it cannot be separated from it, something I already knew about agape—v. my story notes for the Ballantine collection.79) Here I see my earliest—and really inadequate—definition of agape as “worry”; by that I meant and mean concern for that which by definition is not you, that which is independent of you, having its own einai. This is what you cherish due to your agape: the integrity of the einai of the other (creature). You offer it life.*