TOWARD A SOUL-SIZED STORY

[THE VISITORS] HAVE TAUGHT ME BY DEMONSTRATION THAT I HAVE A SOUL SEPARATE FROM MY BODY. MY OWN OBSERVATIONS WHILE DETACHED FROM MY BODY SUGGEST THAT THE SOUL IS SOME FORM OF CONSCIOUS ENERGY, POSSIBLY ELECTROMAGNETIC IN NATURE.

WHITLEY STRIEBER, TRANSFORMATION

THE SOUL IS NOT IN THE BODY. THE BODY IS INSIDE THE SOUL. DO YOU UNDERSTAND? LOOK. WE ARE YOU. TRY TO REMEMBER.

HYPERDIMENSIONAL ALIENS IN GRANT MORRISON’S THE INVISIBLES

So what are we supposed to make of all of this? What can we say, really, about the mythical patterns and paranormal currents that have absorbed us over the last seven chapters? An erotic transmission under a Tantric goddess in Calcutta, a magical conversion, a Goetic demon, a time-transcending DNA snake, shiny silver anti-bodies from the fifth dimension, and a god electrocution in Kathmandu; polar holes, conscious mythmaking, a mushroom-like manuscript in a book of love spelled backward, and a Martian in a Swiss silk shop; occult supermen, imaginal insects, flying saucers, a new American Bible, and ancient astronauts; an od and an id, a superspectrum, a Mothman, sex and violence become radioactive superheroes, and an evolutionary yoga; a morning of magicians, California mutants, Cold War psychic spies, military spoon benders, an Israeli magician-psychic initiated by a UFO, and a NASA astronaut’s yogic union in outer space; a storm-raising contactee named PK Man, a thought experiment named Starman, Superman and Batman in Tantric Tibet, and a discarnate spirit named Roy; time loops, a summer of superpowers, a pink cosmic zapping, a sci-fi gnostic, a possessing bishop, and a divine humanity evolving itself backward and forward in time; an ancient Mesopotamian goddess showing up in a New York cabin, sunglass-wearing aliens in a bookstore, and a nondriving, Canadian tax evader bestowing secret teachings in a hotel room—if you are not really confused by now, you have not been paying very close attention. What can we say? How can we conclude?

I suppose the first thing to say is that all of this is completely impossible within our present mirrored cultures of religious fundamentalism and scientific materialism, which appear oddly united in their ferocious “damning” of the paranormal: Fort’s two Dominants of Religion and Science again. A conservative social system, whether defined by the true believer or by the pure rationalist, protects itself from the dim awareness of the impossible nature of consciousness by defining those who know better as frauds, heretics, liars, selfish New Age floozies . . . mere promoters of popular culture . . . just anecdotes.

Here there are no Origins events or superpowers (pure fantasy). There can be no legitimate Orientations, no transforming pilgrimages to the East (just more romanticism or, worse yet, more colonialism in disguise). Nor can there be any experience of Alienation worth having, much less any empowering Radiations or evolving Mutations (so much pseudoscience, bunk). Nor liberating Realizations or creative Authorizations (obviously, narcissism run amok—you can’t fricking write reality). And my little X in the parking lot, with which I began this book? It meant nothing. It was a cheap coincidence. Junk.

These are not my personal conclusions, of course. My conclusion is that American popular culture is suffused with these seven mythemes (and no doubt many more), which are forming a kind of Super-Story, a modern living mythology, right in front of our eyes. My conclusion is that American metaphysical currents—like all rich religious systems—are complexly indebted to other cultures, even as they profoundly transform that which they adopt and embrace from these other sources. My conclusion is that the X in the parking lot was functioning as a little piece of material magic, that is, as a sign that participates in that which it signifies. In Grant Morrison’s terms, it was a synchronistic sigil. In Alvin Schwartz’s terms, it was a symbol that acted “as a means of release and transformation of psychic energy,” a release and transformation of psychic energy that in turn produced this book.

Which you are still holding.

So how did you do?

I am reminded again of Dick’s Valis. The whole experience was triggered by a shiny piece of Christian jewelry on a girl’s neck in California that led Dick back to the gray-robed secret Christians of ancient Rome. At one point, Horselover Fat is even spiritually guided by “a beer can run over by a passing taxi” (V 318). I was guided by a shiny piece of jewelry run over by a moviegoer, which I originally mistook as a Christian cross, that led me back to the X-Men of California. As Dick famously concluded in the same novel, “the symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum” (V 384). No argument here.

Like Dick, of course, my authors and artists knew far more than beer cans and broken jewelry. Still, in the end, perhaps all we can know as readers and viewers of their material art is that such bodies of work are first and foremost, and maybe entirely, about the souls who first realized and then authorized them. Or can we know more?

Consider D. Scott Apel’s Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection. In this extraordinary book, Apel tells the story of how, after Dick died, Apel found himself caught in an intricate web of powerful synchronicities involving, in true Phildickian style, things like Dick’s novels, National Geographic magazines, a tape recorder, television sitcoms, a passing truck, and hyperreal dreams in which his dead friend would appear to him in places like Disneyland or plot scenes of Apel’s own writings. Overwhelmed, Apel contacted professional mediums and recorded two channeled sessions, the “dramatic harmony” of which deeply impressed him.

Apel eventually came to conclude that Dick was “energizing” or “turbo-boosting” his friends’ writing practices from the other side, even commenting on his own books in order “to illuminate them with higher consciousness energy,” as one of the séance session transcripts describes it in the familiar vibration-language of the channeling literature. Although he is perfectly aware that he lacks any final proof, Apel himself takes the final and logical step—almost unheard of in the ultrahip, postmodern world of Dick scholarship—and concludes from his own experiences that there is real “evidence of a life beyond death,” and that “the spirit of Philip Kindred Dick lives on . . . not symbolically, through his writings, but literally.” Indeed, “we all live on.”¹ Now there is a conclusion worth drawing.

But are we ready for such a conclusion? Many individual readers no doubt are, but as a public culture things seem less certain, and this for one simple reason: we still lack a story big enough for the soul. Alas, too often we seem torn, split in half between religious beliefs that are all too presuming about the scope and nature of the soul, and a materialistic scientism, which denies the presence of spirit altogether. As a result, I fear we are rather like the X-Men’s Jean Grey—we cannot contain, cannot handle the full cosmic potential of the species. Our stories are too small, our visions of human nature much too puny.

Not so with the Super-Story. For all its confusions, here at least we have a vision of mythical proportions that can hold, handle, and sometimes even express such a Force. Is this not exactly what we have seen with our artists and authors? And to the extent that the self is a story and that we all share in this mysterious Force called life, are not we all, in our own ways, such artists and authors of the energy?

In “Man, Android, and Machine” (1976), Dick speculated that the right brain may be a “transducer or transformer of ultrasensorial informational input” that the left brain cannot process, and that all of our billions of right brains together make up a kind of collective unconscious or plasmic noosphere that in turn interacts with solar and even cosmic fields of energy and mind (SR 221–23). It is this Overmind, Dick believed, that primarily determines our reality, not our ego-centered, discrete left brains, which have far less to say than we suppose.

I am not promoting the exact specifics of Dick’s metaphysical speculation here (and he would be the first to question them). But its general spirit—that we are not who we think we are, that we have not recognized the limits of reason, that we are individually Two, and that we are weaving, both together and plurally, some vast global reality-posit—rings true enough. As does Dick’s constant call to us to become more aware of the vast reaches of the human psyche and so become our own authors, to step in and out of the storylines of our cultures and egos as we write ourselves toward the future (and maybe from the future!).

I would only warn us away from the too simple notion that the left-brain work of Culture and ego is merely filtering or only transducing the right-brain field of Consciousness and Mind. I think that such language, which I also used in Authors of the Impossible, is correct enough on one level, for the witness of the history of mystical literature strongly suggests that, yes, there really is Mind beyond brain or Self beyond self—the Human is Two. But the same language is much too dualistic and misleading on another level, for both brain and social self appear to have evolved to express Mind and Self, and most brain functioning operates globally, that is, across both hemispheres—the Human is also One. As I suggested in the very first pages of this book, I think that what we have here, what we are, is a nondual system of Consciousness and Culture evolving itself in loop after loop; that Consciousness needs Culture to know itself as and in us, just as Culture needs Consciousness to exist at all; and that it is just as foolish to erase the universal (Consciousness) for the local (Culture) as it is to erase the local (Culture) for the universal (Consciousness). As Alvin Schwartz taught us on his Path without Form, form is formlessness and formlessness is form.

This central, paradoxical, “loopy” notion of the Human as Two—which, as we have seen, in turn spins out into the experience of Time as Two, the World as Two, God as Two, and so on—is about as conclusive as one can get at the moment—as conclusive as I can get, anyway. So here is my conclusion stated in its clearest terms: the Human as Two (and One) is the neuroanatomical, cognitive, and spiritual bedrock of the paranormal and its fantastic both-and, physical-mythical, masterful-mental, real-unreal expressions in popular culture.

This Two-in-One, this Third Kind, this impossible structure is why we have something profound to learn from the imaginative genres of science fiction and superhero comics. This is why the truth can sometimes only be spoken through the trick, and why the fantasy sometimes also expresses the fact. This is what makes both the words and the images necessary, and why the two together can feel (and work) like magic. Most of all, though, this is why we need to leave a door open to the human psyche in all its high strangeness, and, more radically still, why we need to see that high strangeness not as some delusion to damn and deny, but as part of the deepest message of who we are and what we may yet be.

In short, this is why we need to return anew to the question of the human soul not as it is naively imagined as some sort of stable thing or religious ego lasting through a never-ending linear time (for that would just be Two), but as our raging gnostic authors have understood and dramatically experienced it as a series of Thirds—as the Marvellous beyond mind and matter that sets up a “perpetual struggle” between “the creed of reason” and “the question” occult openings put to that reason (Bulwer-Lytton); as a subliminal Self that is evolving toward its own supernormal powers, imaginal potential, and godlike destiny (Lloyd, Myers, Murphy, Bergson, Bucke, and Wallace); as a subliminal romance or super-imagination that cannot possibly be captured by the “ostrich philosophy” of the materialists or the “puerile beliefs” of the spiritualists (Flournoy); as an Era of Witchcraft that can only be damned by the Dominants of Science and Religion (Fort); as a form of cosmic consciousness or Mind at Large that is transmitted into space and time through the portal of the brain-body but is finally contained by none of these (Moore, Morrison, Huxley, Targ, Swann, Schwartz, Windsor-Smith, and Dick); as a dialectical “metareasoning” or “infinite logic” that reflects our double experience of reality as a holographic projection or unreal-real interference pattern between two separate psychical systems—the infinite, constructed, temporal ego and the infinite, immortal, eternal Logos or Divine Mind (Dick); and as an astonishing plasmic presence of giant form that intuits the mythical countenance of the alien as the force and future face of itself (Strieber).

These are astonishing claims. They are all also, every one of them, empirically, experientially grounded in real paranormal events. As are the colorful works of popular culture that we have celebrated and enjoyed in these pages. We dismiss these real events and cultural works, or uncritically believe them, at our own risk and loss. Much better to read them, as we have done here, in the light of gnostic, esoteric, and mystical literature, interpret them, and make them our own—to become our own authors and artists of the impossible.