But still, we must realize that the universe, although kind to us in its entirety (it must like and accept us, or we would not be here; as Abraham Maslow says, "otherwise nature would have executed us long ago"), does contain grinning evil masks that loom out of the fog of confusion at us, and it may slay us for its own gain.
We must be careful, however, of confusing a mask, any mask, with the reality beneath. Think of the war mask that Pericles placed over his features: You would behold a frozen visage, the grimness of war, without compassion -- no genuine human face or person to whom you could appeal. And this was, of course, the intention. Suppose you did not even realize it was a mask; suppose you believed, as Pericles approached you in the fog and half darkness of early morning, that this was his authentic countenance. Now, this is almost exactly how I described Palmer Eldritch in my novel about him: so much like the war masks of the Attic Greeks that the resemblance cannot be accidental. Is, then, the hollow eyeslot, the mechanical metal arm and hand, the stainless-steel teeth, which are the dread stigmata of evil -- is this not, this which I myself first saw in the overhead sky at noon one day back in 1963, a description, a vision, of a war mask and metal armor, a god of battle? The God of Wrath who was angry with me. But under the anger, under the metal and helmet, there is, as with Pericles, the face of a man. A kind and loving man.
My theme for years in my writing has been, "The devil has a metal face." Perhaps this should be amended now. What I glimpsed and then wrote about was in fact not a face; it was a mask over a face. And the true face is the reverse of the mask. Of course it would be. You do not place fierce, cold metal over fierce, cold metal. You place it over soft flesh, as the harmless moth adorns itself artfully to terrorize others with ocelli. This is a defensive measure, and if it works, the predator returns to his lair grumbling, "I saw the most frightening creature in the sky -- wild grimaces and flappings, stingers and poisons." His kin are impressed. The magic works.
I had supposed that only bad people wore frightening masks, but you can see now that I fell for the magic of the mask, its dreadful, frightening magic, its illusion. I bought the deception and fled. I wish now to apologize for preaching that deception to you as something genuine: I've had you all sitting around the campfire with our eyes wide with alarm as I tell tales of the hideous monsters I encountered; my voyage of discovery ended in terrifying visions that I dutifully carried home with me as I fled back to safety. Safety from what? From something which, when the need was gone for concealment, smiled and revealed its harmlessness.
Now I do not intend to abandon my dichotomy between what I call "human" and what I call "android," the latter being a cruel and cheap mockery of the former for base ends. But I had been going on surface appearances; to distinguish the categories more cunning is required. For if a gentle, harmless life conceals itself behind a frightening war mask, then it is likely that behind gentle and loving masks there can conceal itself a vicious slayer of men's souls. In neither case can we go on surface appearance; we must penetrate to the heart of each, to the heart of the subject.
Probably everything in the universe serves a good end -- I mean, serves the universe's goals. But intrinsic portions or subsystems can be takers of life. We must deal with them as such, without reference to their role in the total structure.
The Sepher Yezirah, a Cabbalist text, The Book of Creation, which is almost two thousand years old, tells us: "God has also set the one over against the other; the good against the evil, and the evil against the good; the good proceeds from the good, and the evil from the evil; the good purifies the bad, and the bad the good; the good is preserved for the good, and the evil for the bad ones."
Underlying the two game players there is God, who is neither and both. The effect of the game is that both players become purified. Thus the ancient Hebrew monotheism, so superior to our own view. We are creatures in a game with our affinities and aversions predetermined for us -- not by blind chance but by patient, foresighted engramming systems that we dimly see. Were we to see them clearly, we would abolish the game. Evidently that would not serve anyone's interests. We must trust these tropisms, and anyhow we have no choice -- not until the tropisms lift. And under certain circumstances they can and do. And at that point, much is clear that previously was occluded from us, intentionally.
What we must realize is that this deception, this obscuring of things as if under a veil -- the veil of Maya, it has been called -- this is not an end in itself, as if the universe is somehow perverse and likes to foil us per se; what we must accept, once we realize that a veil (called by the Greeks dokos) lies between us and reality, is that this veil serves a benign purpose. Parmenides, the pre-Socratic philosopher, is historically credited with being the first person in the West systematically to work out proof that the world cannot be as we see it, that dokos, the veil, exists. We see very much the same notion expressed by St. Paul when he speaks about our seeing "as if by the reflection on the bottom of a polished metal pan." He is referring to the familiar notion of Plato's that we see only images of reality, and probably these images are inaccurate and imperfect and not to be relied on. I wish to add that Paul was probably saying one thing more than Plato in the celebrated metaphor of the cave: Paul was saying that we may well be seeing the universe backward.
The extraordinary thrust of this thought just simply cannot be taken in, even if we intellectually grasp it. "To see the universe backward?" What would that mean? Well, let me give you one possibility: that we experience time backward; or more precisely, that our inner, subjective category of experience of time (in the sense that Kant spoke of, a way by which we arrange experience), our time experience, is orthogonal to the flow of time itself -- at right angles. There are two times: the time that is our experience or perception or construct of ontological matrix, an extensiveness along with space as an inseparable extensiveness into another area -- this is real, but the outer time flow of the universe moves in a different direction. Both are real, but by experiencing time as we do, orthogonally to its actual direction, we get a totally wrong idea of the sequence of events, of causality, of what is past and what is future, where the universe is going.