But every layer in it, and all its contents, were at one time part of consciousness, though not of any living men.
These are all the prior left-hemisphere consciousnesses, down through the ages; when they perished, they reappeared in this dormant, sleeping form, not dead, not gone, but not awake: just slumbering, with all their memories and thoughts and experiences and ideas now in dream form.
This is where the dead went. This is where the dead are.
Also, this is the leavening in the bread which Christ spoke of. And the tiny mustard seed, growing and growing.26
Within the right hemisphere (we all share just one among us, like a communal meal—e.g., the Last Supper) this life is rising once more toward the consciousness it lost.
But when it achieves it again, it will be a transformed life, not the perishable one it had.
Being in all of us, and alive and conscious again (it is alive again, but not conscious; it has forgotten), it can’t die. It will not be bound by time or space. It can return to the past, go wherever men are or ever have been or ever will be.
The experience of anamnesis is the moment when this sleeping mind which once was conscious, remembers its own existence. Who it is remembering is itself; what it is remembering is that it lived and lives now, and has a job to do. Also, it is not a separate entity as the left hemisphere is. Together, they form two appositional minds, linked through it with all the others on Earth and perhaps beyond.*
It did not die; it fell asleep, for two thousand years, acquiring with the death of each new person a new onion-skin like layer of itself; by these slow accretions it grew—toward completeness and reawakening, and remembering.
The moment at which it remembers (is disinhibited by the gold fish sign, the letter, etc.; cf. Epistle of St. Thomas27) is the moment at which the Kingship of God, the Perfect Kingdom, floods back into being: back into awareness of itself, that it is Here; and it is here Now.
It contains within it thousands of years of slumbering world; the “connective unconscious” is becoming conscious, as was foretold by Jesus and Paul and John. It is (again) aware; (again) it thinks. It is Immanent Mind within us and around us, its sensory eyes open, with its identity (via memory restoration) intact. This was the goal of it alclass="underline" the end of the journey of thousands of years and millions of men.
For those who lived and died, it wasn’t in vain. They slumbered on, adding to one another in millions of laminations of transparencies.
For those, like me, who’re alive, we are suddenly not alone, are suddenly given enormous support; He is with us again, our Savior.
For God’s purposes, the third point in human evolution has now been reached. This moment equals the leap from inanimate to animate in importance; this is true man, man realized at last, this third stage which began 3 million or 4 million years ago—it is not the starting of the stage now, but the perfecting and completing of it. The millions of parts of this entity have wandered about the Earth during a spatial and temporal period of enormity and diversity; but it is all being collected and revived now—collected during these epochs, revived now, by its merely pushing beyond the threshold: it reached saturation point, so to speak, and awoke. (Conscious ness occurs when unconsciousness has been energized to a purely quantitative point, and so passes beyond.)
It possesses immortality (through rebirth). It knows everything (through being gestalted from an almost infinite number of bits throughout space and time). Knowing it can’t err, knowing it can’t die, having a direct relationship with the Logos, or objective reality, or the Plan, it can make decisions partaking of Haggia Sophia: the wisdom of God.
“Haggia Sophia is about to be reborn. She was not acceptable in the past.”* This sentence refers to all of the above, and expresses it. We will have in our midst a wise entity, a sort of organic computer which will surpass its parts and the sum thereof.
“If this could only be done—” It has been done. They killed the Savior almost 2,000 years ago; only to find his face looking out of each person, finally, everywhere. (“The grain of wheat, unless it is planted in the furrow—the grave—leads only its solitary life; but if it is sown, it grows again in splendor.”28) This has all been silently going on behind the scenes all this time—behind the consciousness of all men, this gathering up the defeated: i.e., everyone who died, and everyone did die, so all have been gathered, collected and retained, for this, the Parousia, the Day of Restoration. What good could it be for your possessions to be restored, what you had lost, if you weren’t there too, equally restored?
Teilhard de Chardin speculated that all mankind’s long period of suffering was like the macrocosm of Christ’s Passion, his suffering being a microcosm of mankind’s. Our goal, our death and then release, at last our rebirth into new and better life—he was/is the microcosm of it, the paradigm. Now we, like Christ, have lived through the suffering part and, when we die collectively, we will be restored—collectively.
Is the Day of Wrath, the war, going to kill us all—but then we, like Christ, will be restored in new life afterward? The macrocosm of life here triumphing as He did 1,900 years ago? But like Him, we must go the whole route first, all the way to the Cross, up onto it—to get to the end we must go forward, and not evade or try to escape? This, too, was his message: submit and go through it; it can’t be evaded. It is what lies beyond that is the goal we look for, not retreat from it.
In regard to the question, “Where is He, the Savior, now?” the answer is, “Everywhere,” but in the sense of specific place, nowhere; like NK’s time, he is the universe projected from a single point, and the locus of that point cannot be determined; it is real but it is a constant variable, as He moves among us, through us, and in us—always with us.
That which brings healing, brings energy, brings wisdom: that which brings new life: the springtime for the human being as spring comes for the harvest creatures which are cut down in autumn each year, only to be reborn: the springtime for the human species, too: the Age of Saturn (the Golden Age) again. This which achieves this is Ubik, is the Savior, is the Logos, is God, is Mr. Runciter. Vinland—the new land, where vines grow.
For corn and wheat et al., the cycle is exactly one year, one circle by Earth around the sun. Our species has a longer, slower cycle but cycle it is. For 2,000 years we have labored in the winter of our cycle—maybe longer. But now it passes into spring, which should last quite a while, too.
Mankind is an old root, cut back, long dormant.
Jesus says, “I am that root. And the bright morning star. At the beginning and at the end: to start things off (as Creator) and to direct them along the way (as Logos) and to collect—receive them—at the end, as Holy Spirit. I am.”29
Thoughts while napping: “Hold out/Hold out/We are coming.” (WWII song, we being the Allies to occupied Europe. They were, too; they raised the siege.)
“My outside is just for laughs. My inner self growing, grows wiser every day—wiser and older, surpassing the outer long ago.” (This as insight.)
(St. Teresa of Avila: “Christ has no body now but yours, anywhere on the world.”30) Thus, this was basis for the above realization: also, my body and the jejune self which goes with it—rather than a split between body and spirit or body and soul, inner or outer in the usual physical-mental—that totality is as the rotting fruit is to the growing seed within; as the fruit rots, the seed within grows; a double motion within the single entity: the outer toward death, the inner toward life. What grows within me grows perhaps a new body as well as a new spirit, and discards both of the outer ones together.