Now let's try this theory. The ability to make time run backward gets you out of your programmed groove ("groove tracking") and renders you free. This ability and only this ability frees you from an otherwise airtight [sic] tyranny that dooms all mankind. All life forms, in fact. Thus this is a stunning and probably new survival talent, an evolutionary new ability that advances the individual up the ladder of homeostasis to a stage where he is a whole other higher organism entirely. It is equal in terms of the evolution of life to the development of the opposable thumb, the eye, the lung, the wing, the large cerebral cortex, standing upright, etc. Upon the perfection (so to speak field operation) of this ability the human has become higher than the angels and all that implies. He is operating in a supratemporal dimension, and this has vast implications for knowledge; for overcoming causality -- if he can affect the past he can modulate the present (what I called "Valis"), and if he can draw information to him from the future he can problem-solve like a crazy thing. This is not just phylogenic memory, as I supposed; it isn't limited to drawing on the distant past. The crucial information related to 3-74 was information drawn from the future. He can set up alternate worlds, so in effect he is trans-world, spans not only time but world tracks.
Now, this raises the question as to whether there exists a vast meta-mind (as I conceive Valis to be) who is encouraging the development of this time-disruption faculty in order to evolve the human species further; or, put another way, the human being who has this faculty and makes use of it (for example, under vast stress, as I was under in 3-74) is an expression of this meta-mind. I am sure of it. I was not alone in what happened; it was as if angels -- divine and partially visible -- powers were present. There may be a species mind stretching back into the past and into the future where evolved humans (imaged as the three-eyed people?) may exist already using this faculty. When you start disrupting time you may be operating in the realm of a supratemporal composite discorporate mind -- I think I was; this is what I call Valis. But it seems to me that the intrinsic nature of the sort of talent I'm discussing would cause to come in existence a meta-mind by itself, in that it would hop across expanses of time that lie outside its own lifetime, which would de facto make it a meta-mind; I mean it would be unlocked from the time span of its physical body. For one thing (here is Jung's intuition function) he would exist (his mind would exist) in alternate worlds, and this alone implies a lot; by affecting the past he would then find himself shifting across laterally (orthogonally) in time... which would explain my subcortically remembering that it had just been cool, high, and moist a climate. So the mind with this talent would in itself become a meta-mind, outside of causality, spanning alternate worlds, able to modify his own present reality by changed actions in the past, thus setting up alternate worlds; he would be the cause and would in turn be affected by himself as cause -- again the bootstrap phenomenon. Such a mind could act as cause to its own effect, affecting itself as if from outside like a feedback circuit, and, upon having successfully affected itself, the self as cause would eliminate itself as if it had never existed, which again is the ex nihilo or bootstrap paradox of time travel. Minds or versions of the mind, foci of the mind, would come into existence, influence the mind, and upon success render itself never having existed in the first place; but the mind would sense an adventitious other mind operating on itself in its behalf. Could it not then become its own AI voice, its own tutelary spirit? It would continually monitor its own status as if in a heuristic process; yes, it would be process, not hypostasis. You would have a mind that itself would evolve the way a species evolves.
It would be itself and not itself continually. It could correct a faulty solution to a problem after the faulty solution had been applied, a sort of "smart typewriter" erase circuit, again a heuristic process where it gets to apply the best solution it has; the solution proves faulty; the mind repeats the situation -- runs it by again -- with a different solution made better by knowledge derived from the faulty solution (i.e. the solution failed but it yielded knowledge as to what should have been done). It applies a solution. The solution is defective, but knowledge is derived. The mind then goes back in time and applies solution B based on solution A plus the knowledge derived from solution A (despite its failure). Solution B works, so the mind continues on in linear time.
For its B solution (which works), the mind draws on the vestigial A solution (which did not work); so underlying the B solution is the phantorn record of the A solution. Sequentially, the mind was surprised by the problem and employed the A solution but now it has gone back and overridden the A solution with knowledge based on this initial failure. So on some level the mind knows of the A solution and hence perforce is bicameral. The part of the mind that employed the A solution and that possesses the knowledge derived from the A solution (and knowledge that the A solution did not work) informs the conscious part that is employing the amended solution; so the mind has its own self for a guide, speaking out of a ghostly realm where what is is also what is not. The mind is split but not split, since both parts are working for a common goal. Rather, it is chambered. So the ratiocination for the B solution simply isn't there because in place of ratiocination there is certitude without sequential logical reasoning. No analytical steps are employed. The mind when it comes to employ the B solution does not have to think. The thinking took place in a realm or track that has been abolished; when that realm was erased the thinking was erased with it, leaving only the motor and speech centers active. The mind, when it employs the B solution, is its own machine, its own slave instrument, acting out a solution that was not the primary one.
Put another way, during solution A the mind was cause and so had to think, but when it returned to reedit and employ solution B it was the effect of solution A and the knowledge belatedly acquired in connection with solution A. Put a third way, suppose a normal person wishes to know what is in the Book of Acts. He must locate a copy and read it. But this meta-mind simply knows the contents of the Book of Acts (if he is to know it at all). How does it know it? Because he found that he had written it, and thus read it. Then he checked with a copy of the Book of Acts to corroborate that it is indeed the Book of Acts. But when and where and how did it originally enter his mind? There is no answer to that; it is ex nihilo: without cause. There is only effect, because the causal element has been erased. The meta-mind in its finished stage is dependent upon the meta-mind in its initial staging, which it knows nothing directly about, but only indirectly, the way characters in a Beckett work deduce the existence of other people.
If he finds Acts or material based on pre-Socratic thinkers in his novels he must assume that his own primary heuristic scanning device read and absorbed knowledge of these matters in the usual way, but that this track has been erased, although it leaves its marks on the extant meta-mind. By what he knows that he shouldn't know (so to speak) he can make certain deductions about the original scanning, the original normal intake of information. He did not take in more information than any other person but he can apply it retroactively and there is his advantage.
Then essentially this theory about time disruption replaces the theory I put forward earlier here, that we are dead and don't know it; what I seem to be saying is that heimarmene or determinism depends on causality and that in turn depends on time, and an ability to disrupt time amounts to an ability to gain power over causality itself -- the result of which is the abolition of the twin-tape synch system that makes of us little more than DNA robots. We are not dead but we are as if dead; we are enslaved, and in a prison. The ability to disrupt time -- i.e. to make it run backward -- brings freedom of a sort that no living creature on Earth has ever had before. And I think that this is the cryptic doctrine that is the basis of my title here: The great esoteric systems are systems in which this human ability is cultivated and brought to bear. Certainly this is true in Gnosticism, in Buddhism -- and if Buddhism then probably in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. There is no way a human can perceive that he is twin-tape programmed until he begins to break that programming, because the mechanism of determinism and occlusion is so good that until the person disrupts it he can't even tell that it is there.