I can say no more. What I have done may be good, it may be bad. But the reality that I discern is the true reality; thus I am basically analytical, not creative; my writing is simply a creative way of handling analysis. I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel and story writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception.* The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation.† Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, and, for them, my corpus of writing is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an investigation and presentation, analysis and response and personal history. My audience will always be limited to these people. It is bad news for them that, indeed, I am “slowly going crazy in Santa Ana, Calif.,” because this reinforces our mutual realization that no answer, no explanation of this mysterious reality, is forthcoming.8
This is the thrust and direction of modern theoretical physics, as Pat pointed out long ago. I reached it in the 50s. Where this will ultimately go I can’t say, but so far in all these years no one has come forth to answer the questions I have raised. This is disturbing. But—this may be the beginning of a new age of human thought, of new exploration. I may be the start of something promising: an early and incomplete explorer. It may not end with me.
What I have shown—like the Michelson Morley experiment—is that our entire world view is false; but, unlike Einstein, I can provide no new theory that will replace it. However, viewed this way, what I have done is extraordinarily valuable, if you can endure the strain of not knowing, and knowing you do not know. My attempt to know (VALIS) is a failure qua explanation. But, as further exploration and presentation of the problem, it is priceless. And, to repeat, my absolute failure to concoct a workable explanation is highly significant—i.e., that in this I have failed. It indicates that we are collectively still far from the truth. Emotionally, this is useless. But epistemologically it is priceless. I am a unique pioneer . . . who is hopelessly lost. And the fact that no one yet can help me is of extraordinary significance!*
Someone must come along and play the role of Plato to my Socrates.
The problem as I see it is that Plato was 180 degrees wrong; the eidos, the abstract and perfect, does not become the particular, the imperfect; rather, the Q should be, “How does the particular, the unique, the imperfect, the local, become the abstract, the eidos, the universal?” We must study particulars, the weeds and debris of the alley; the answer is there: I saw the MMSK and it works the opposite way from how Plato saw it; he saw the eide as ontologically primary, and existing prior to the particulars. But I saw the particulars creating eidei (or “phylogons” as I called them); thus permanent eternal reality is built up on and based on the flux realm; all Western metaphysics is 180 degrees off. [ . . . ]
In 2-74 my mind understood, and my attention was directed to a squashed dead bird in the alley.
The answer is in the imperfect, the particular, not in heaven, not in the perfect abstract form. Then the particular, although transitory, is not epiphenomenal! I have bipolarized these two. Strange. It is the transitory unique particular which is real, and yet it vanishes; well, I saw where it goes; all the particulars feed in conceptually to reticulate and arborize and complete the eidei. This is where the truth lies. This is where the answer is. Somehow, the transitory particulars do not in fact ever perish, but are permanently arranged conceptually—this is my one big discovery (and it isn’t in VALIS).
My dope insight of last night: If and when Kathy can be rendered into geometric form she can be distributed throughout reality and hence will be—become—permanent; this is how the particulars are stored. And this is what Plato calls the forms. [ . . . ] It has to do with memory storage; the “form” is a way to store permanently a whole lot—millions, billions—of unique particulars.
This is it! And I saw it.
[75:D-21] I started last night with a complete sense of failure and wound up with this as the one true thing I figured out of importance:
“The entire universe, possibly, is in the invisible process of turning into the Lord.”
What is new is my impression that the macrobrain came first—i.e., the physical universe—and then it began to think; it generated the macromind, not the other way around. So Valis is a spontaneous product of the universe, not its creator. It’s as if at a certain point in the evolution of human info processing (e.g.) a mind came into existence. [ . . . ] This would be why there are no reports of my experience in history; physical reality including humans are evolving into a gestalt that abruptly generates a meta-mind. (Reasoning from particulars to eidei, as in my argument supra; i.e., all Western metaphysics is 180 degrees backward.)