Without these periodic insertions the system would run down; it would lose shape, organization and vitality. Cause-and-effect, then, taken in itself, is a losing game. The only thing that Christ can be said to be a result of—Christ as an event in the reality field—is the need of this event. It is physically, mechanically causeless; it is absolutely teleological. Efficient causation has no bearing on it and will never yield it up. (Here Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is totally wrong: world is not spontaneously converging into the Point Omega; what he calls “Point Omega” is something done ceaselessly to world, an endless invasion.) Wherever the effect is correctly seen to exceed its cause (which is then by definition not its cause) there is Christ. Conversely, wherever effect follows cause actually, there he is not. Christ, then, is an event, something that occurs in and to the reality field; Christ is not a person as men are persons. Christ is the beginning of the universe all over again, as a repeated event.
[84:8] Here is the puzzle of VALIS. In VALIS I say, I know a madman who imagines that he saw Christ; and I am that madman. But if I know that I am a madman I know that in fact I did not see Christ. Therefore I assert nothing about Christ. I say only that I am not mad. But if I say only that, then I have made no mad claim; therefore I am not mad. And the regress begins again and continues forever. Something has been asserted, but what is it? Does it have to do with Christ or only with myself? This paradox was known in antiquity; the pre-Socratics propounded it. A man says, “All Cretans are liars.” When an inquiry is made as to who this man is, it is determined that he was born in Crete. What, then, has he asserted? Anything at all? Is this the semblance of knowledge or a form—a strange form—of knowledge itself? Zeno, the Sophists in general, saw paradox as a way of conveying knowledge—paradox, in fact, as a way of arriving at conclusions. This is known, too, in Zen Buddhism. It sometimes causes a strange jolt or leap in the person’s mind; something happens, an abrupt comprehension, as if out of nowhere, called satori. The paradox does not tell; it points. It is a sign, not the thing pointed to. That which is pointed to must arise ex nihilo in the mind of the person. The paradox, the koan tells him nothing; it wakes him up. This only makes sense if you assume something very strange: we are asleep but do not know it. At least not until we wake up.
Folder 90
[90:1]10 Enclosed is a carbon of what may be a resolution of my seven years of attempting to construct a model of reality; by “reality” I mean God in or God and the universe: what Erigena called natura. The solution came to me in a series of recent sleep revelations, that is, hypnogogic and hypnopompic insights where I actually saw how the system works. (Universe and God regarded, as Spinoza does, as one and the same.) My model is that of a computer or computer-like entity—well, look at the enclosed page; it is pretty much complete.
[90:2] April 15, 1981. Sleep insight.
Hartshorne—pantheism—the EB macro. A. N. Whitehead’s process deity.* We are within it (the MMSK), as interconnections, but organic model is incorrect. It is a signaling system, mutually adjusting (this is what Pythagoras saw). 0-1 flicker rate (misinterpreted by me as time frames); actually it’s binary. Tries out a false move (0), then corrects to 1 which is actualized in/as the next discrete “frame.” Has the effect of separate frames due to the off-on pulsation; discrete: isn’t/is, nonbeing/being. The system shuts off every trillionth of a second (0). These are decisions. After each off (0) when it switches back on to 1 the “frame” (reality) is different, in terms of internal arrangement, adjustment, mutual adjustment, interaction/interconnection, as information flows through its circuits.
Boehme: yes-no. Hartshorne 0-1. Quantitative (0-1) converted to qualitative by spatiotemporal reality itself; that is, quantitative information is poured into material reality within which and by which it is converted into qualitative information.
While it’s off, reality ceases to be. When it comes back on it is slightly different. It (the system) doesn’t transmit a zero bit; it (the system) ceases to be. This is when it makes a tentative move which had been canceled in favor of a better move; at every junction (trillionth of the second, flicker rate) it discards an inferior move in favor of a better one; hence Leibniz’s view that “this is the best of all possible worlds” (this is a rapid selection process). This is how a computer works. The zero position is the void; hence when I conceive of God as Valis I am only getting the 1; I need also the void, the zero. To comprehend/apperceive/envision the void is to envision the other phase (zero phase) of the flicker binary pulsation, the sum of the two phases being the totality. Thus the Muslims are correct; the universe is destroyed “every day” (actually every trillionth of the second) “and re-created.”11 But what is interesting to me is that the way I conceive of this, all its decisions are made during the “spaces” that we are totally unaware of. It comes back on, back into being, back to the 1 phase when it has tried out a faulty solution and has substituted better (the best possible?) instead, which is the next “time frame.” Thus its decision-making processes, i.e., its thinking, and its nonbeing phase, lies outside our awareness. The initial false move that it tries out during its zero phase is Boehme’s no, and the 1 or on phase is Boehme’s yes. So my envisioning is essentially Boehme’s, updated in terms of computers and information processing systems. The similarity to the Taoist alternation of yin and yang is very obvious.
[90:13] What is probably most important of all is that my binary arborizing disjunctive decision-making universe system—the disclosure of which I regard as an essentially new disclosure, although as a fact it itself may not be new—it is, I think, absolutely in accord with the very high and penetrating conception of the revolutionary role of the cosmic Christ in fundamentally transforming the nature of the world order. This is nothing short of astonishing, that radical mystical Pauline Christianity and a very radical modern quantum mechanics computer indeterminate unified field reality view turned out to be basically compatible or in fact even identical! The two converge (at least in my theorizing) totally; all at once there is a lightning swift confluence of my separate streams of thought: Christianity and, well, philosophy-metaphysics-epistemology, whatever; all else, really, than Christianity; I suddenly have one overview which is (1) basically new and original; and (2) subsumes everything Christian and non-Christian into one daring structure. What is more, this structure will adequately account for my apperception of what I call Valis, both in me and outside me, back in 3-74. So at this point I have synthesized my various streams of thought into a higher gestalt and no longer have to vacillate back and forth between Christianity and non-Christianity, which is reason to suppose that I have finally hit on a model that truly represents, conceptually, what I experienced in the spring of 1974 and has puzzled me for over seven years.