Jakob Bohme. "God goes through stages of self-development, he taught, and the world is merely the reflection of this process. Bohme anticipated Hegel in claiming that the divine self-development occurs by means of a continuing dialectic, or tension of opposites, and that it is the negative qualities of the dialectic that men experience as the evil of the world. Even though Bohme, for the most part, stressed absoluteness and relativity equally, his view that the world is a mere reflection of the divine -- apparently denying self-development on the part of creatures -- tends toward acosmic pantheism" (Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Pantheism and Panentheism").
During my enormous revelations and anamnesis in March 1974 I perceptually observed God and reality combined, and progressing through stages of evolution by means of a dialectic, but I did not experience what I called "the blind counterplayer," which is to say the dark side as part of God. However, although I perceived this dialectic between good and evil, I could not ascertain anything as to the source of the evil. However, I did see the good side making use of it against its will, since the dark counterplayer was blind and therefore could be made use of for good purposes.
Hans Driesch (1867-1941). "My soul and my entelechy are One in the sphere of the Absolute." And it is at the level of the Absolute only that we can speak of "psychophysical interaction." But the Absolute, so understood, transcends all possibilities of our knowing, and it is "an error to take, as did Hegel, the sum of its traces for the Whole." All considerations of normal mental life lead us only to the threshold of the unconscious; it is in dreamlike and certain abnormal cases of mental life that we encounter "the depths of our soul."... My sense of duty indicates the general direction of the suprapersonal development. The ultimate goal, however, remains unknown. From this point of view, history took on its particular meaning for Driesch. Throughout his work Driesch's orientation is intended to be essentially empirical. Any argument concerning the nature of the ultimately Real will therefore have to be hypothetical only. It starts with the affirmation of the "given" as consequent of a conjectural "ground." His guiding principle in the realm of metaphysics amounts to this: The Real that I posit must be so constituted that it implicitly posits all our experiences. If we can conceive and posit such a Real, then all laws of nature, and all true principles and formulas of the sciences, will merge into it, and all our experiences will be "explained" by it. And since our experience is a mixture of wholeness (the organic and the mental realms) and nonwholeness (the material world), Reality itself must be such that I can posit a dualistic foundation of the totality of my experience. In fact, to bridge -- aw fuck. In fact, there is nothing -- not even within the ultimately Real -- to bridge the gap between wholeness and nonwholeness. And this means, for Driesch, that ultimately there is either God and "non-God," or a dualism within God himself. To put it differently, either the theism of the Judeo-Christian tradition or a pantheism of a God continually "making himself" and transcending his own earlier stages is ultimately reconcilable with the facts of experience. Driesch himself found it impossible to decide between these alternatives. He was sure, however, that a materialistic-mechanistic monism would not do (Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 2).
It would appear that Bohme and T -- I'm at the end of my rope; I can't even type, let alone think. That Bohme and Driesch are talking about the same thing, and that both are process philosophers (or theologians, like Whitehead). Both stress dialectic quality in God; Driesch sees the dialectic working itself out in history. This is almost certainly the dialectic that I saw during my March 1974 revelations, and I am willing to admit that it is certainly possible that the blind, dark counterplayer against which the vitalistic good element worked could be "God's own earlier stages," as Driesch viewed it. One thing I like about Driesch is the fact that at a certain point he simply said, "I don't know." That's where I'm at and have been at for a long time; I just do not know. God created everything; evil exists as part of the everything; therefore God is the source of evil -- that is the logic, and in monotheism there is no escape from this argument. If you posit two (or more) gods, including an evil god, you have the problem of, Where did it come from? But that problem exists for monotheism, too; if there is only one god, where did he come from? Answer: from the same place the two gods of dualism came from. In other words, I see this problem of origin as equally difficult for monotheism to answer as it is for a dualism. We just don't know.
If we regard evil as simply earlier stages of a god in process, which he is working to overcome -- well, that does fit my own personal revelations, and is syntonic to me. I was shown how the whole thing works but I did not comprehend what I was seeing; they were showing it to Mortimer Snerd. I did have the feeling that I was witnessing a cosmic two-person board game, with our world as the board, and that one side (the winning side) was benign, and the other was neither winning nor was it benign; it was just very powerful, but hindered by the fact that it was blind. The good side possessed absolute wisdom, could therefore absolutely foresee the future, and could lay down moves long in advance of payoffs that the evil, blind, dark counterplayer could not anticipate. It was an encouraging vision. In every trick the good won; it beat the dark antagonist unerringly. What more could I ask from an Ultimate Vision of Absolute Total Reality? What more do I need to know? The score reads: Evil zero; Good infinity. Let me stop there, satisfied; the final tally is explicit.
"The Tagore Letter" (1981)
All the people who read my recent novel Valis know that I have an alter ego named Horselover Fat, who experiences divine revelations (or so he thinks; they could be merely hallucinations, as Fat's friends believe). Valis ends with Fat searching the world for the new savior, who, he has been told by a mysterious voice, is about to be born. Well, Fat has had another vision, the one he was waiting for. He got me to write this as a way of telling the world -- the readership of Niekas, more precisely -- about it. Poor Fat! His madness is complete now, for he supposes that in his vision he actually saw the new savior.
I asked Fat if he was sure he wanted to talk about this, since he would only be proving the pathology of his condition. He replied, "No, Phil; they'll think it's you." Damn you, Fat, for putting me in this double bind. Okay; your vision, if true, is overwhelmingly important; if spurious, well, what the hell. I will say about it that it has a curiously practical ring; it does not deal with another world but this world, and extreme is its message -- extreme in the sense that if true we are faced with a grave and urgent situation. So let 'er rip, Fat.
The new savior was born in -- or now lives in -- Ceylon (Sir Lanka). He is dark-skinned and either a Buddhist or Hindu. He works in the rural countryside with an organization or institute practicing high-technology veterinarian medicine, mainly with large animals such as cattle (most of the staff are white). His name is Tagore something; Fat could not catch his last name: It is very long. Although Tagore is the second reincarnation of Christ, he is taken to be Lord Krishna by the local population. Tagore is burned and crippled; he cannot walk but must be carried. As near as Fat could make out, Tagore is dying, but he is dying voluntarily: Tagore has taken upon himself mankind's sins against the ecosphere. Most of all it is the dumping of toxic wastes into the oceans of the world that shows up on Tagore's body as serious burns. Tagore's kerygma [teaching], which is the Third Dispensation (following the Mosaic and Christian), is: The ecosphere is holy and must be preserved, protected, venerated, and cherished -- as a unity: not the life of individual men or individual animals but the ecosphere as a single indivisible unitary whole, a life chain that is being destroyed, and not just temporarily but for all time. The demonic trinity against which Tagore speaks -- and that is wounding and killing him -- consists of nuclear wastes, nuclear weapons, and nuclear power (reactors); they constitute the enemy that not only may destroy the ecosphere but already, as toxic wastes, are destroying it now. So again Christ acts out his role of vicarious atonement; he takes upon himself man's sins. But these sins are real, not doctrine sins. Tagore teaches that if we destroy the ecosphere much more, Holy Wisdom, the Wisdom of God (represented by Tagore himself), will abandon man to his fate, and that fate is doom.