We humans, the warm-faced and tender, with thoughtful eyes -- we are perhaps the true machines. And those objective constructs, the natural objects around us, and especially the electronic hardware we build, the transmitters and microwave relay stations, the satellites, they may be cloaks for authentic living reality inasmuch as they may participate more fully and in a way obscured to us in the ultimate Mind. Perhaps we see not only a deforming veil, but backward. Perhaps the closest approximation to truth would be to say: "Everything is equally alive, equally free, equally sentient, because everything is not alive or half alive or dead, but rather lived through." Radio signals are boosted by a transmitter; they pass through the various components, modified and augmented, their contours changed, noise eliminated and rejected ... we are extensions, like those metal arms that pick up radioactive objects for scientists. We are gloves that God puts on in order to move things here and there as He wishes. For some reason He prefers to handle reality this way (I will not budge but will defend that pun).
We are suits of clothing that He creates, puts on and uses, and finally discards. We are suits of armor, too, which gives misleading impression to certain other butterflies within certain other suits of armor. Within the armor is the butterfly, and within the butterfly is -- the signal from another star. In the novel I am writing (that the Dreamer, perhaps, is expressing through me), that star is called Albemuth. I hadn't read Ms. LeGuin's novel Lathe of Heaven when the idea came to me, but the reader of that novel will find there also what I just now meant by our being stations within a vast grid -- and not realizing it.
Consider this Meditation of Rumi, a Sufi saying [translated] by Idries Shah, who is a favorite among modern Sufis: "The worker is hidden in the workshop."
Since it is evident that more than anyone else Dr. Ornstein has pioneered the way to discover the new worldview, which involves a bilateral brain parity unsuspected since the time of Pythagoras and Plato, I recently summoned my courage and wrote him. Fans now and then write me, their hands shaking nervously; my entire typewriter shook nervously as I wrote to Dr. Ornstein. Here is the text of my letter, which I place here as a final note to explain how I have transcended the categories of reality-versus-illusion by his help, and thus brought into clear sight an end to twenty years' study and effort on my part. I quote:
Dear Dr. Ornstein:
Recently I met Mr. Henry Korman and Mr. Tony Hiss (Tony had come to interview me for The New Yorker). I got into a marvelous discussion with Henry about Sufism and I mentioned my admiration, bordering on fanatic enthusiasm, for your pioneer work with bilateral brain hemispheric parity. Thus I, having learned that they know you, am summoning my courage to write you and ask, What has become of me, since experimenting with bringing on my right hemisphere (I did it mainly by the orthomolecular formula vitamins, plus a good deal of concentrated meditation)?
By this I mean to say, Dr. Ornstein, ten months ago this took place, and for ten months I have been a different person. But what to me is most extraordinary (I am writing a book about it, but in the form of fiction, a novel called To Scare the Dead) is that -- well, let me give the premise as I placed it into the noveclass="underline"
Nicholas Brady, an ordinary American citizen with contemporary worldly values and drives (money and power and prestige), suddenly has inside him a winking into life of an entity that has slumbered for two thousand years. This entity is an Essene, who died knowing that he would be given the promised resurrection; he knew it because he and other Qumran individuals had in their possession secret formulae and medications and scientific practices to ensure it. So suddenly our protagonist, Nicholas Brady, finds that there are two of him: his old self, at his secular job and goals, and this Essene from the Qumran wadi back circa A.D. 45, a holy man with holy values and utter antagonism to the secular physical world, which he sees as the "City of Iron." The Qumran mind takes over and directs Brady in a complicated series of acts until it becomes evident that others such as this Qumran man are coming back to life here and there in the world.
Studying the Bible, along with this Qumran personality, Brady finds that the New Testament is in cipher. The Qumran personality can read it. "Jesus" is really Zagreus-Zeus, taking two forms, one mild, the other utterly powerful, on which his followers can draw when in need.
The Qumran personality, who, for fictional purposes, I call Thomas, gradually informs Brady that these are the Parousia, the Final Days. And to be prepared; Thomas will prepare him by reminding him of his own divinity -- anamnesis, Thomas calls it. Thomas develops a special parity relationship with Brady, but evolves as a source of teaching for the incredibly ignorant Brady the entity known as Erasmus, who is in fact a station in the noosphere, which is now so fully charged around Earth that if you are aware of it you can consciously, rather than unconsciously, draw from it; these are the "Seas of Knowledge" that were known in ancient times and upon which the Sibyl at Delphi drew. But this is a cover, because Brady realizes that in point of fact, the Qumran men had as their god not the mythical Jesus but the actual Zagreus, and by doing research, Brady soon learns that Zagreus was a form of Dionysos. Christianity is a latter form of the worship of Dionysos, refined through the strange and lovely figure of Orpheus. Orpheus, like Jesus, is real only in the sense that Dionysos is becoming socialized; born here as a child of another race, not a human one but a visiting race, Zagreus has had to learn by degrees to modify his "madness," which is now kept to a low ebb. Basically, he is with us to reconstruct us as expressions of him, and the MO of this is our being possessed by him -- which the early Christians sought for, and hid from the hated Romans. Dionysos-Zagreus-Orpheus-Jesus was always pitted against the City of Iron, be it Rome or Washington, DC; he is the god of springtime, of new life, of small and helpless creatures, he is the god of mirth and frenzy, and of sitting here day after day working on this novel.
But in the novel, Thomas says, "The Final Days have come. The overthrow of the tyranny is that which, in lurid language, John described in Revelation. Jesus-Zagreus is seizing his own, now, one after another; he lives again."
During winter, it was believed that Dionysos, the god of the vine plant, of vegetation, of the crop, slumbered. It was known that no matter how dead he seemed (James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is a wonderful account of this, where they accidentally spill beer on the corpse and it revives), he was actually alive, though you'd never know it. And then -- not to the surprise of those who understood him and believed in him -- he was reborn. His followers knew he would be; they knew the secret ("Behold! I tell you a sacred secret," etc.). We are speaking here of the mystery religions, all of them, including Christianity. Our God has been sleeping, during the long winter of the human culture (not for one year's rotational cycle of seasons, but from A.D. 45 through the centuries of mental winter to now); just when winter holds all in its grip, the snow of despair and defeat (in our case, political chaos, moral ruin, economic ruin -- the winter of our planet, our world, our civilization), then the vine, which was gnarled and old and seemingly dead, breaks into new life, and our God is reborn -- not outside us as such, but in each of us. Slumbering not under snow over the ground surface but within the right hemispheres of our brains. We have been waiting, we didn't know for what. This is it: This is spring for our planet, in a deeper, more fundamental way. The cold chains of iron are being thrown off, but by what a miracle. As with my character, Nicholas Brady -- I've had Zagreus awaken in my right hemisphere, and felt the flooding of renewed life, his vigor, his personality, and his godlike wisdom; he hated the injustice he saw around him, and the lies, and he remembered "The dear one lands untroubled by men, where amid the shadowy green / The little ones of the forest live unseen" (Euripides). Dr. Ornstein, thank you for helping bring winter to an end, and ushering in -- not just spring -- but the living life of Spring alive but asleep inside us.