So my meta-abstraction did not just cause me to perceive Valis but, rather, caused Valis to occur in and around me, and as a result of it occurring, I perceived it. (Sophia: “Man is holy. Man is the only true God. This is the new news I bring you.”) It (Valis) was not there until the (my) meta-ab straction generated it, virtually ex nihilo. And it evolved it (me) very rapidly; and it embraced the outer world because we are not discrete but are one continuum or “reality field”; thus Valis is a “perturbation in the reality field.”
[75:D-33]
[75:D-37] We just see the field, the “iron filings,” the carrier; we do not see the modulation.
That 15 seconds last night when I was cut off from memory, comprehension and knowledge of God was too terrible; it was worse than going mad or dying. If that is the only way that I can be taught what it is that has been given me, so be it. My supreme possession is my comprehension of God; it is to my comprehension of music as my comprehension of music is to world as such. World is to music as music is to God. Since I was in the sixth grade I have had my comprehension of music; since 3-74 of God; and it has grown steadily . . . I realize that now. My best shot is:
The bells I heard in 3-74: space (the void). Beethoven’s music encloses that space (as I’ve noted before). He converts space into time and time into space as one thing: space-time, and makes it as a unitary “thing” perceptible to us. It is motion (i.e., time) in space; audible space. Space with a mysterious nonverbal identity/presence filling it, moving in it. Movement as structure: being in nonbeing. The byss and the abyss. Plus #3: information, i.e., “I . . . am.” Anokhi. That which moves through/in the space is information, i.e., consciousness; it is conscious, changing eternity.
[75:D-52] Thus there is an irrational basis out of which reality is created (rather than: “the basis of reality is irrational” or “reality is irrational”). This basis is the need for reality to exist; hence any living creature, since it is/possesses primarily a will, must be cosmogenitor in order to survive. Will comes first; world as a result. Any and every living creature is “God” then, creating and maintaining reality to satisfy its need to survive. There is no theoretical upper limit to its power to generate and affect (change) reality. The primordial substrate is the will of the individual creature, but this will is not rational. Thus its reality is contradictory and often unpleasant (punishing). The creature’s will routinely comes back at it as objective world—world that is its own creation but not recognized as such. World, the product of its will, fights the creature and subdues/defeats it. [ . . . ] So the ultimate struggle is for the creature to subdue its own will. It can’t do this through power; this is what the will has available to it: power. Nor will cunning work; the will is cunning. Only the Christian renunciation of self will work, in which the other, the Thou, is construed as more valuable than self. This is when agape enters as the solution and the key. Something not oneself must be esteemed over self; this defeats the will; the will must not triumph: it must be defeated. Its triumph amounts to the defeat of the creature as a rational center: defeat of will defeats the coercive power of world over you. (World is your own will coming back at you as an adversary.) The harder you strive the more powerful world becomes. Here enters “Mitleids Hochste Macht,” compassion’s highest power to defeat the will-as-world. (Your own will is experienced as world.) Anhedonism, asceticism, self-denial, self-repression, stoicism, will not work; only willing, joyous agape (which is a joy allied with the most intense sorrow possible; viz: the passion becoming the resurrection). Even duty will not suffice. Paul is right: agape is everything, not because it is ethically or morally superior but because it overpowers the will, hence world, hence karma/astral determinism/fate/heimarmene. (These are how we encounter our own will.) Allied to this is the concept of meekness or smallness, which is a tactic to diminish striving.
[ . . . ]
The Buddha was on the right path in that he understood the problem, the cause of suffering; but it is not nonattachment but agape that is the solution. One does not succeed by ceasing to be attached to what one loves (craves) but by caring more that someone else should have it; thus I do not give away x; I give it away to someone else, while still treating it as valuable, but I treat that person as more valuable—so the Buddha was partly there—partly but not the whole way. In this act one deprives world of its power of punishment: the will returning with a vengeance, which prideful people do not realize.
Right now world (my own will) is not punishing me; it plays games with me and eludes me playfully—a distinct improvement over what it used to do, showing that I have achieved some moksa (liberation, enlightenment). But it is partial. Yet, as these paragraphs show, I am at least partially awake; I have some wisdom. But my renunciation of self (ego) and striving (will) is only partial. Contentment is mine but not joy—not even balance. Until I can joyously give to others what my will wants for itself—only then will I be emancipated from world, my own will coming back at me.
[75:D-66] Illumination: April Friday night 4:45 A.M., the third, 1981. I saw the Ch’ang Tao9 (3-74). The more it changes the more it is the same, it is always new, always now; it is absolutely self-sufficient. I can at last comprehend it, how in change, ceaseless change—through the dialectic—it is always the same—oh great Ch’ang Tao! I saw you.
[75:D-67] The great truth is: 2-3-74, my seeing the Tao, and my exegesis, and VALIS, have given me a center (omphalos), which is what I lacked (e.g., in the 60s); this is why my anxiety is gone; I now have a conception of myself, and of myself as an artist and thinker, and of my place and role in society and history—all of which I lacked before I saw the Tao (2-3-74). Thus it can be truly said, I have found the way. I am at peace. But the key word is:
center (i.e., place. In the Taoist sense.)
[75:D-93] All at once I think of something God (or “God”) revealed to me one time when I was stoned: “You are not the doubter; you are the doubt (itself)” and “This is a road to me, as are all roads if pursued to the end.”
[75:D-129] One time when I was ripped I wrote “God is everywhere. In the music. The cat,” etc. My only solution is to see that every literal worldly thing, person, etc., that I loved and lost was in fact God shining through world; world as lens/transduction of God. And that I cannot truly lose God, “yea, I am with you even unto the end.” So each time I recover God I really recover all (the people and world things) that I have lost, truly lost as world things, but not as God. Thus God wins me over more and more. More completely and intensely, summing up in and as himself all that I ever had and knew; and yet he is more. Thus, e.g., I discover my analytical proposition. As regards the Wind in the Willows gift of forgetting, God maintains a fine line for me of remembering him and paradoxically mercifully forgetting him. But understanding that I can find him in world over and over again, viz: God discoverable in polyform, but always and only God, however and in what thing experienced: world deconstructed into God always. Thus I am pried away from transitory manifestations which do disappear and am instead bonded to the eternal; but I find it in world and as world, not in withdrawal from world. Thus there is a double motion: pried loose from that which fails; bonded to that which is discoverable always, always capable of being renewed. Again found, unlike people and things seen in themselves: discrete particulars.