The three persons or forms of god inhabit the three worlds which each of us experiences; they interact and harmonize. By doing this they keep in accord—keep together—the cosmos—all sets of reality. This process of harmonization is extraordinary; in the short interval I perceived it I was astounded. That’s the period in which I saw, as you’ll recall, that there are no accidents.
The mystery cults kept their purpose and techniques secret until Jesus so-to-speak stole it and made it available for everyone—same as what’s his name did with fire. And paid the ultimate price. However, as Jesus remarked, “I have conquered the world,”21 meaning that he was successful; what was until then available only to a few life-long esoteric students of the cults we can all have. We didn’t even know about it until then; Paul is not being vague in his speech when he says, “Hark! I tell you a sacred secret: we shall not all sleep in death,” etc.22 He means it literally; he told them all what up to then was indeed a sacred secret, guarded by the mystery cults, the secret that (1) you can be reborn (which is not the same as being immortal; it means you must die as you are and then after that you are again alive, but different and permanent), and (2) how this can be achieved, or more precisely, how it was achieved. No more valuable secret was even stolen and released to the general public than that. I wouldn’t presume to try to add to or modify Paul’s own explanation of all of this, or John’s, but let me say that what happened to me in March is exactly that “in the twinkling of an eye”23 rebirth or transformation, much like an abrupt chemical process . . . as the alchemists so realized. But it must as I say be touched of adventitiously—which is the role Christ plays or did play, his work being already done. He set it in motion. It can’t be turned back. He died, but he died knowing he did it. And of course he shared—he was the first to share—in the fruits of his own secret. He did add, though, that most of us would laugh at all this, finding it incredible and impossible and senseless, not to mention stupid. It never meant anything to me until March, and in March when it happened to me I couldn’t relate what had happened to anything I’d ever been taught about God or religion. I thought god was up there in the sky. However, he is not; he is a spark which can fuse the total mind in each of us into something entirely new which was not there before (a description of irreversible chemical processes), burning off the dross and making stable (or as the Bible says, uncorruptible) the valuable contents. You can readily see the analogy between this and a chemical reaction in which the results are spectacular, as with ignited gunpowder. There is no way to anticipate the results based on a study of the three prior constituents, and if I told you what would happen unless you had seen it you probably wouldn’t believe me. Fire is the adventitious element added; in the case of the transformation I went through, it is also a kind of fire: seen as chromatic phosphene activity. Probably this is radiation phosphene stimulation; the Soviets say that such radiation stimulating phosphene activity can come here—and does—from sidereal space. I believe it. This is the catalyst.
The valuable aspect of the external catalyst is that it keeps the process within the control of who it is who controls these things; it isn’t going to simply occur at a random time for no reason at all. The universal mind dispatches a Mediator—which is what Christ is called, correctly—to trigger it off; or anyhow the fish sign or any Logos triggering agent. Thereby it, the universal mind, can hold the process until it wishes it to take place, which is why the Protestant Reformers stressed the power of God’s grace as being the sole power which could redeem us rather than good works. The act must be done by God alone, not by us. These are old-fashioned terms for a very mysterious process and event; they did the best they could in explaining it. “Well, see, we’re all in a state of sin” (which is jargon for fucked up, deranged, and half blind), “and God’s grace redeems us unexpectedly. But we have to have faith, which is to say total trust, in the power of that grace.” I’m not sure you have to have that trust. I think what you have to come to is the last few frames of the long reel of film which was your firstborn ego or personality or consciousness, which is what I did. Rationally, at least according to the impaired rationality we have, it would seem evident that when the final frame is gone, only the void would remain; however, the void is I guess God Himself, the Brahmin; He fills it up. We have an incorrect idea of the nature of the void, and an equally incorrect one as to the nature of objects—which are only phenomena, constructs our brain makes out of sense impressions. “Literally, God is not,” Erigina said.24
Claudia, on this day we must count our cursings.
Psychologically, this mental transformation is the radical combining (not reconciliation but combining) of opposites. From then on everything is understood in terms not of “Is it this or that—” but “Both this and that.” Each attempt I make to understand and explain and express my experience and the process following has to come at last to that: it is what I already thought and what I now think. For instance, it is Elijah and the Holy Spirit, not Elijah rather than the Holy Spirit. It is Apollo and the Holy Spirit; it is Pagan and Christian. It is old (circa 100 A.D.) and points toward the future. It is a literal event in the material world and it is symbolism (I mean my dreams or visions); it will be the future here; it will also be the Other World when I see it. It involves me alone, and it is for the entire world. Lastly, it is beings from another star system and it is precisely the same traditional experience of salvation described in the Bible.
You find this same unity in Dante’s Comedy. This is what our modern world has lost, this unity in all levels; now we’ve got compartmentalization instead. A thing is either scientifically true or it is religious. It is metaphor rather than literal.
So to sum up, there is a small bit of the macrocosm inside us, inside the microcosm; and this small bit equals the whole universal mind. The microcosm contains the macrocosm, another concept not thinkable in formal logic. God within me sees God outside; the two commune with each other. The two link up through the mediating flesh or body. So he or it, whatever, is made visible here on this world, at this time. Meanwhile, Satan is up at the McDonald’s stand, ordering coweye burgers and plastic malts, thinking to keep his power. A few more years of coweye burgers and plastic malts, and he’ll have had it.
Letter to Claudia Bush, November 30, 1974