[4:118]
Dear Claudia,
I just wrote Diane Pike; we’ll see what happens. I’d already written her and got back a Love Project card. I will keep you informed; she sounds trippy and sweet.
Love works! Always! That’s what the card says. I can dig it. Can’t you? Where do we begin? (The La Paz bar.)
Claudia, this is an addendum to my previous letter of Friday. John Calvin (1509–1564) gives this statement which beyond all doubt describes my experience and my thoughts about it afterward:
. . . The natural talents in man have been corrupted by sin, but of the supernatural ones he has been wholly deprived. . . . Therefore, when he revolted from the divine government, he was at the same time deprived of those supernatural endowments which had been given him for the hope of eternal salvation. Hence it follows, that he is exiled from the Kingdom of God, in such a manner that all the affections relating to the happy life of the soul are also extinguished in him, till he recovers them by the grace of regeneration. . . . All these things, being restored by Christ, are esteemed adventitious and preternatural; and therefore we conclude that they had been lost (Ital. mine). Again: soundness of mind and rectitude of heart were also destroyed; and this is the corruption of the natural talents. For although we retain some portion of understanding and judgment together with the will, yet we cannot say that our mind is perfect and sound. . . . Being a natural talent, it could not be totally destroyed, but is partly debilitated. . . .*
Also, I read something fascinating in the Monitor yesterday, an article about Lewis Mumford.25 (How can a man with no college degrees be all bad?) Mumford says:
I think this must be very much like what happened during the transition from the Roman civilization, which was highly organized and bent on the same ends as our civilization, power, productivity, prestige, to the Christian era. The Christians formed in little bands. They began to withdraw from society and accepted the poverty which only slaves then were forced to accept. They built up a spiritual foundation for their life which gave them the internal energy firmly to take over the Roman Empire.
If you remember my mentioning it, Claudia, when this first hit me in March I looked around and saw Rome! Rome everywhere! Power and force, stone walls, iron bars—just what Mumford expresses above. That I saw this in an instant (“in the twinkling of an eye”) is and was not of my doing; it didn’t come out of my mind, my mental processes; it wasn’t a concept or even an awareness internally: I perceived it. I saw it. I pierced the veil, so to speak, and saw my society exactly as it is . . . which is, as Mumford expresses, like Rome was. What puzzled me was, since I knew intellectually that Rome was a city in Italy and an empire and republic back before Christ, then where was I, in Fullerton or back there, now or back then? Again, the [question is “is] it this or is it that,” and the answer is, “it is both.” In Mumford’s sense, “Rome” is a paradigm. I was so to speak taken up on the mountain, a metaphor in itself, and shown. “See?” the Spirit said. “What do you see all around you? You see Rome.”
I was amazed, troubled, and fucked up. It was a dreadful sight: a slave state, like Gulag.
There is no doubt in my mind now that my “vision” of my society was accurate in the sense that Mumford means it; I hadn’t gone back in time, but in a sense Rome had come forward, by insidious and sly degrees, under new names, hidden by the flak talk and phony obscurations, at last into our world again. Look! The Christians conquered Rome, but only for a time; Rome swallowed up its conquerors, like China does. At last Rome began by stealthy degrees to surface once more, to manifest itself. Therefore it is not surprising that that same Holy Spirit which rose against it then, in 100 or so A.D., has returned to arouse us as before, as it roused our ancestors, metaphorically speaking. It is the trumpet call to fight once more for freedom.* Like Mumford says.
Well, I got to go because a lot of publicans and sinners, tax collectors and other riffraff abound, and I must deal with them.
Love,
Phil
P.S. I tell you, Claudia, Calvin is right; we’re (1) missing entirely certain faculties and (2) what we have, the remaining ones, are very much hazed over. When I saw correctly in March it’s like when you get a new pair of glasses and can read everything, see everything. Really, his distinction is meaningful between the natural faculties such as reason which are fucked up, and the other ones which we can’t even catch a glimpse of until they return. The only thing is, how come this happened? How did we (1) lose certain faculties entirely? and (2) have the remaining ones occluded as they are, for all of us, unless somehow, as in a miracle of healing, they’re restored? Surely there must be a scientific explanation for this, having to do with brain function and dormant sections, inhibited firing of whole neural circuits* . . . and this is precisely what I was trying to achieve back in March, to get neural firing roused, to cause circuits to fire which had never fired. What I think now, with Calvin, is that one time (our childhood? thousands of years ago) they did fire or anyhow were intended to fire, to be firing all this time. But something went wrong. Something dreadful.
At the very least they can be somehow made to fire, finally, whether they ever fired before or not. The next step in human evolution or a lost section of our brains . . . either way the results are outta sight.
[4:131] A human being is a material system which time, a form of energy, enters. Probably time enters him also as noös—Mind.
Time, the future, contains in it all the events which are going to occur. Therefore when time enters a person as energy, and acting as noös to him, it brings with it in potentium all that will happen to him, like a window shade unrolling to display an unfolding pattern. Events in the future pop into being, into actualization, the present, but until they do, they are not truly real—not yet actualized—but there in an encoded form, like the grooves of an LP before the needle reaches it; the only “music” is where the needle touches—ahead lies only an encoded wiggle along a helical spiral. Thus, dreams deal with the future lying direct ahead, as during the night, the next series of encoded future events begin to move toward actualization: i.e., the present. What is hard to realize is that in a certain very real way these events are inside the person, within his head, so to speak; but only in their potential, encoded form; the arena in which they are actualized is that of space; time, in the present, flows out to fill space—i.e., the spatial universe.
This is why we experience déjà vu. We have somehow caught a glimpse now and then of the script unrolling in our head—caught a glimpse in advance, so we feel “I know exactly what I’m going to say next, and what gestures he’ll make,” etc. Sure; they’re encoded—encased, waiting—in time, and time, being energy, has entered you; is burning bright inside, like Blake’s tyger.
Or however.
[4:132] The right hemisphere is the seat of the unconscious.