At the time that I found myself back in the purely spatial realm, I supposed that it was because I had upped my dosage of Sinequan, but that is absolutely not likely. Let us consider the exact circumstances. It was Tuesday, the day the space shuttle returned. The night before, Monday night, something strange happened to me; I burned out. I could not think in complete sentences; I’d begin a sentence of thought and it would end in the middle. It was as if I’d used up all my thoughts, as if there are only a finite number and I had come to the last one; there literally were no more left in me. I had to go to bed early—which was fine, because then Tuesday I was able readily to arise early to watch the shuttle’s safe return. Now, this absolutely total exhaustion of thoughts in me somehow seems to me related to the phosphene graphics trip; the common factor is the using up of time, a running out of time—i.e., process. I had, as in 1974, come to the end in some real and perhaps even ontological sense; mentally I had in fact died. Yet the next day I found myself in the magic spatial world of total freedom, a world of infinite extension. What I am saying is that this year, 1981, I relived, although to a lesser degree, the series of experiences of 1974—relived them during holy week (from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday). It was during this period that my stupendous conception of the binary switching system came to me. I remember that I had said to Jeanette at Brentwood that—O Dio—“I have lost my artistic vision”—the dream about the child, the spinner, going blind! This represented spiritual death, and a logic to Christ’s passion and crucifixion! And then rebirth occurred. And again, as in 1974 (this is really incredible, simply incredible) I got a terrifying letter that caused me to phone the FBI. So here are the themes of holy week: suffering (exhaustion) and death, and then rebirth; “rebirth” expressed for me in the form of the return of my vision—and not just return but resurrection in the sense that I was able to complete it, which I felt I had never before been able to do. [ . . . ] I relived—reperformed—the passion, death and resurrection, then, without intending to or even realizing that is indeed what was happening.
Several aspects point to this as genuine. (1) The mental and spiritual exhaustion I experienced on Monday night was unique; I remember telling Doris that I had only undergone something like it due to drug abuse. It was, then, qualitatively different from mere fatigue, even enormous fatigue. It ended in a clear and evident death. (2) The Spinner dream which anticipated this very event, the “loss of vision” by the Spinner (i.e., Spinner as writer; he can no longer narrate). (3) The murderous letter. (4) The brief period on Tuesday in the spatial realm that I had only a little while before (a few days) figured out was essentially connected with Christianity. (5) The sudden, unexpected and unprecedented completion of my artistic vision on Wednesday night, the night of the day the letter came; this, too, was not a quantitative event; it was ontologically different from anything I had ever experienced before (like the dying of my vision Monday night); and: it was based on revelation of the forking and the tentative zero firing, a sleep revelation. So I suffered and died, but after I died I was resurrected in terms of my world—the spatial world—and in terms of my vision: my binary switching model of the universe, which I have later recognized as a model of the restored universe, restored by Christ; and I even identify this Dasein, this worldview, as “Christ consciousness”!
[90:13A] This is a very different view of deity than has ever been put forth before (except perhaps by Jacob Boehme). For example, do these zero branchings add up to long chains of provisional realities, realities—perhaps even whole worlds or versions of worlds—subject to later retroactive annulment? And if so, do we encounter them, which is to say, do we live in them but then forget it, our memory being canceled out along with the worlds themselves? I conceive of the system switching on, off, on, off, the “off” consisting of what I call the zero phase of the binary flicker; I also say that it is during these off or 0 phases that the system does its thinking. What else goes on at the same time, if anything? Is there a sort of parity counter world to our own, perhaps invested with some kind of semi-reality that holds up only so long as the system takes to make up its mind and decide? Oddly, interestingly, this all seems to correspond with the doubts and premises of my ten-volume meta-noveclass="underline" “Realities are subject to cancellation without notice” and, moreover, were not truly real in the first place (examples of this in my writing are legion). More interesting to me, however, is the existential aspect to this, which means deity and how deity acts, that in fact deity in this model is conceived in terms of its choosing, rejecting, choosing again, and if this choosing is its essence, then we have a whole new idea of the einai of God: an existential idea: it is what it does, and what it does is perpetually choose (Whitehead’s principle of selection of the good in the world-process).
[90:16A] In fact now it is possible to assert a single premise generating all my various preoccupations with what is real, what isn’t, etc., my entire body of epistemological doubts: I know that there really is such a thing as tentative or provisional reality, and it can be canceled in such a way that in a certain sense it never was there in the first place.
[90:E-8] Ghastly dream [ . . . ] A family on an old farm. The children are (called) “the Spinners.” The very ground itself is contaminated, poisoned, with (heavy) metals, so the children, “the Spinners,” are becoming blind. A little boy peers through a thick magnifying glass at the sun; he can barely see it. Soon he will be completely blind.
Interpretation: the Spinners are immortals who came here and were poisoned (heavy metal) and lost what I call “the third eye” (represented by the magnifying glass). The sun is Christ. Thus they, we, can no longer read the sacred writing (of Scripture): “the light went out” (divine revelation) not because God stopped sending it but because we have gone blind to it. Somehow I regained my sight in 3-74 and could read the sacred Scriptures in/as Tears. Therefore “the Spinners” can no longer see the thread of Ariadne (or weave it as explanation, revelation) leading out of the maze.
[90:E-11] When I believe, I am crazy.
When I don’t believe, I suffer psychotic depression. I oscillate between intoxication (mania) and melancholia. I think, now, that my dream about the child going blind and no longer able to see the sun symbolized my losing my vision (sic): i.e., of Christ, Dionysus, Wotan, YHWH, because it is all gone; it seems mere mad fancy, like believing you might see Mr. Toad sculling a little boat down the stream. I can’t live without my vision but my vision is self-delusion.
[90:F-11] What I have been doing these seven years is philosophical inquiry in the old sense, that of the pre-Socratics. Before science and philosophy parted company. I’m not sure my issues are in fact metaphysical. What confronted me in 2-3-74 was “a perturbation in the reality field.” That is, reality behaving in an inexplicable way which no known theory could explain or account for. How does this seven years of study and analysis differ from scientific research? This has not been a game. Something I witnessed puzzled me and I set out to understand it. When I did finally understand it, I found that my questions went all the way back to the 40s. And I have not been the first to raise the question. If the traditional, fully accepted theories of causation were true, the “perturbation” that I saw could not have occurred. This is the bottom line. How do I differ from Einstein vis-à-vis Newtonian mechanics! It was a perturbation in the reality field in the sense that something more than the forces we know of was visibly at work. The problem is real. Then I took it to be so.