[90:F-19] All these seven years I’ve feared I was nuts (hence H. Fat is so described). Especially I’ve been nervous about quoting the AI voice; after all, I’m hearing voices. I think now I believe. I knew that binary switching model was correct as soon as it came to me.
[90:G-43] I just realized I had an amazing dream. I—or the character—was deprived of world totally. At once he—his own mind—filled in the sensory vacuum with a spurious autogenerated world, so he wouldn’t go crazy. Next thing, he took this world to be real; the closer he scrutinized it, due to the fact that he as percipient was in fact generating it, the more actualized, detailed and convincing it became, because his perception of it was (in a certain real way) his production of it; hence the more intense scrutiny and more actualized, articulated and convincing it became as it moved toward perfection (of actualization) as a limit, the more it compelled his assent. Put another way, the less he realized—would tend to realize on the basis of his empirical observations that (1) it was spurious; and (2) he himself was its creator. However, under such circumstances, to overcome this positive feedback self-authenticating hoax-involvement, a clock-timed tape in his mind—or accessible to his mind; e.g., speaking directly into his ear or inner ear—was set in advance to speak to him at regular intervals reminders of the truth, and his true situation. The tape was plugged into RET,13 but since part of his spurious autogenerated world was fake time—an integral aspect of spurious world generated out of total sensory deprivation—these reminders, these messages from the real world, came to him (in terms of his own subjective time) at increasingly farther apart (i.e., longer) intervals and thus failed to serve their purpose (anamnesis involving the knowledge that his world is spurious, and no amount of scrutiny on his part will correct this, inasmuch as the harder he scrutinizes it, the more convincing it will become). What he faces as a dual limit is an infinitely convincing (but actually fake and self-generated) dream world “existing” for an infinite time. (Which, it occurs to me, may explain “He causes things to look different so it’d appear time has passed.”)
My analysis is this: he, whoever “he” is, has gotten himself into this very fix and has therefore fallen under the spell of an ever more convincing and ever more extensive in time fake world that he himself is generating; he, world and time are in a closed loop, a closed system; moreover, it is equally clear to me that this (dream) is the true explanation—and reveals the true significance of 2-3-74 at which place I (“he”) (1) remembered and then (2) as a result temporarily broke out of the closed loop self reinforcing fake world and fake time. [ . . . ]
What I am saying is that this dream states that I myself am the mind I know as Valis, I generate the info (they are my own thoughts and ideas; viz: as I once previously speculated, I got into my own world producing mental machinery) and, what is more, what I call “the binary computer” is a vision of my own mind as world creator; I think (as binary computer), and these thoughts are the information that I am compelled to give assent to as world (which is why to some extent we control our own world, it adjusts to our perceptions of it—of course it does; this is a closed feedback loop literally pouring back into itself to reinforce itself—and “we are selves in a brain that both makes and perceives reality”). Then several people (e.g., Gregg Rickman) are right in saying that when I experienced Valis I was experiencing my own (unconscious) mind. But they failed to note that that makes me Cosmocrator!
[90:G-49] Valis in me was my own mind, was God but fallen God, forgetful, unintentional, cosmogenitor of world.* The “binary switching com puter” that generates “info that we hypostatize as world” is my own mind creating irreal imprisoning worlds for me (as if VALIS and “Frozen Journey” were superimposed).
[90:G-53] The dream of last night (supra) shows that I am hopelessly trapped, because the harder and longer I scrutinize “world” the more articulated, detailed, convincing and “real” it becomes, with infinitely real as a limit, and, worse, an infinitude of spurious time is a limit; it will go on forever, all the while gaining progressively greater power over me—and yet I am its author!
[90:130:G-75] Therefore I deem it correct to say that yes I have been correct in saying (as I have periodically) that 3-74 represented the lifting of an occlusion from me so that I saw reality either more accurately or (if this is possible) “as it really is”—this owing to me suddenly facing reality for the first time (v. supra). What was presented to me was an inscrutable picture of what resembled living information, a unitary field, pre-synchronized self-initiating transformations, rest-motion modes, etc., all that I endlessly dilate on. The upshot being that (1) I could not figure out what I was seeing and (2) I could not communicate what I had seen. Herein with these two points lies the difficulty. All that I could fathom was that the conventional picture that we normally get—and seem to share—is not in fact what is there; what is there is not even in time or space, nor is causation involved. There seems to be a mind and we are in it—but even now after seven years of mulling it over I am baffled as ever. Hence the utility of this perception is (at least at this time) dubious. Out of this experience with the inscrutable and inexplicable I formulate at last the notion that the compulsion exerted on us to see the representation as (1) absolutely real and (2) totally comprehensible is a gift, an essential gift. This deals with more than my 3-74 perception, it deals with my whole adult life as expressed in my 10-volume meta-novel. What I saw in 3-74 I regard as absolutely real (so there is no problem there) but it was unintelligible—whereas all that came prior to it was intelligible but lacking in respect to seeming absolutely real. One is moved to ponder which is better—or for that matter worse—of the two choices: to see, understand and not believe, or to see, not understand and yet believe—obviously something drastic is wrong with both. In fact both—each in its own way—smacks of psychotic apperception of world. The former (coherent but unconvincing) is fucked; the latter (unintelligi ble but carrying the force of absolute truth) equally so. Surely both represent mental dysfunctions in me. All I can do at this point is abandon the field and say that belief in and understanding of should go hand-in-hand, and if they part company something is wrong. From this I erect the following premise: that God sees to it that we both comprehend (i.e., what we experience is to us intelligible) and believe (it carries the force of the absolute). Obviously something went wrong in me years ago. And when in 3-74 the compensatory correction came it ushered in a whole new host of troubles, giving me even more to do, philosophically speaking. Thus God gives us multiple gifts: a world, first of all, one that we can understand and also experience as real—so real, in fact, that it was not until the time of Descartes that the representation problem was even discerned (it has never been fully answered).