The external information or gnosis, then, consists of disinhibiting instructions, with the core content actually intrinsic to us -- that is, already there (first observed by Plato; viz: that learning is a form of remembering).
The ancients possessed techniques (sacraments and rituals) used largely in the Greco-Roman mystery religions, including early Christianity, to induce firing and retrieval, mainly with a sense of its restorative value to the individuals; the Gnostics, however, correctly saw the ontological value to what they called the Godhead Itself, the total entity.
The Godhead is impaired; some primordial crisis occurred in it which we do not understand.
Fat reworked journal entry #29 and added it to his ON OUR NATURE entry:
#29. We did not fall because of a moral error; we fell because of an intellectual error: that of taking the phenomenal world as real. Therefore we are morally innocent. It is the Empire in its various disguised polyforms which tells us we have sinned. "The Empire never ended."
By now Fat's mind was going totally. All he did was work on his exegesis or his tractate or just listen to his stereo or visit Sherri in the hospital. He began to install entries in the tractate without logical order or reason.
#30. The phenomenal world does not exist; it is a hypostasis of the information processed by the Mind.
#27. If the centuries of spurious time are excised, the true date is not 1978 c.e. but 103 c.e. Therefore the New Testament says that the Kingdom of the Spirit will come before "some now living die." We are living, therefore, in apostolic times.
#20. The Hermetic alchemists knew of the secret race of three-eyed invaders but despite their efforts could not contact them. Therefore their efforts to support Frederick V, Elector Palatine, King of Bohemia, failed. "The Empire never ended."
#21. The Rose Cross Brotherhood wrote, "Ex Deo nascimur, in Jesu mortimur, per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus," which is to say, "From God we are born, in Jesus we die, by the Holy Spirit we live again." This signifies that they had rediscovered the lost formula for immortality which the Empire had destroyed. "The Empire never ended."
#10. Apollonius of Tyana, writing as Hermes Trismegistos, said, "That which is above is that which is below." By this he meant to tell us that our universe is a hologram, but he lacked the term.
#12. The Immortal One was known to the Greeks as Dionysos; to the Jews as Elijah; to the Christians as Jesus. He moves on when each human host dies, and thus is never killed or caught. Hence Jesus on the cross said, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani,"to which some of those present correctly said, "The man is calling on Elijah." Elijah had left him and he died alone.
At this moment as he made this entry, Horselover Fat was dying alone. Elijah, or whatever divine presence it was that had fired tons of information into his skull in 1974, had indeed left him. The dreadful question that Fat asked himself over and over again did not get put down in his journal or tractate; the question could be put this way:
If the divine presence knew about Christopher's birth defect and did something to correct it, why doesn't it do something about Sherri's cancer? How could it let her lie there dying?
Fat could not figure this out. The girl had gone an entire year wrongly diagnosed; why hadn't Zebra fired that information to Fat or to Sherri's doctor or to Sherri -- to someone?
Fired it in time to save her!
One day when Fat visited Sherri in the hospital, a grinning fool stood there by her bed, a simp who Fat had met; this thing used to shamble in while Fat and Sherri lived together and would put his arms around Sherri, kiss her and tell her he loved her -- never mind Fat. This childhood friend of Sherri's, when Fat entered the hospital room, was saying to Sherri,
"What'll we do when I'm king of the world and you're queen of the world?"
To which Sherri, in agony, murmured, "I just want to get rid of these lumps in my throat."
Fat had never come so close to coldcocking anybody into tomorrow as at that moment. Kevin, who had accompanied him, had to physically hold Fat back.
On the drive back to Fat's lonely apartment, where he and Sherri had lived together for such a short time, Fat said to Kevin, "I'm going crazy. I can't take it."
"That's a normal reaction," Kevin said, showing nothing of his cynical pose, these days.
"Tell me," Fat said, "why God doesn't help her." He kept Kevin up on the progress of his exegesis; his encounter with God in 1974 was known to Kevin, so Fat could talk openly.
Kevin said, "It's the mysterious ways of the Great Punta."
"What the fuck is that?" Fat said.
"I don't believe in God," Kevin said. "I believe in the Great Punta. And the ways of the Great Punta are mysterious. No one knows why he does what he does, or doesn't do."
"Are you kidding me?"
"No," Kevin said.
"Where did the Great Punta come from?"
"Only the Great Punta knows."
"Is he benign?"
"Some say he is; some say he isn't."
"He could help Sherri if he wanted to."
Kevin said, "Only the Great Punta knows that."
They started laughing.
Obsessed with death, and going crazy from grief and worry about Sherri, Fat wrote entry #15 in his tractate.
#15. The Sibyl of Cumae protected the Roman Republic and gave timely warnings. In the first century c.e. she foresaw the murders of the two Kennedy brothers, Dr. King and Bishop Pike. She saw the two common denominators in the four murdered men: first, they stood in defense of the liberties of the Republic; and second, each man was a religious leader. For this they were killed. The Republic had once again become an empire with a caesar. 'The Empire never ended."
#16. The Sibyl said in March 1974, "The conspirators have been seen and they will be brought to justice." She saw them with the third or ajna eye, the Eye of Shiva which gives inward discernment, but which when turned outward blasts with desiccating heat. In August 1974 the justice promised by the Sibyl came to pass.
Fat decided to put down on the tractate all the prophetic statements fired into his head by Zebra.
#7. The Head Apollo is about to return. St. Sophia is going to be born again; she was not acceptable before. The Buddha is in the park. Siddhartha sleeps (but is going to awaken). The time you have waited for has come.
Knowing this, by direct route from the divine, made Fat a latter-day prophet. But, since he had gone crazy, he also entered absurdities into his tractate.
#50.The primordial source of all our religions lies with the ancestors of the Dogon tribe, who got their cosmogony and cosmology directly from the three-eyed invaders who visited long ago. The three-eyed invaders are mute and deaf and telepathic, could not breathe our atmosphere, had the elongated misshapen skull of Ikhnaton and emanated from a planet in the star-system Sirius. Although they had no hands, but had, instead, pincer claws such as a crab has, they were great builders. They covertly influence our history toward a fruitful end.