I give this illustration only to show that either my unconscious has been reading articles on engineering that elude my memory and my conscious attention and interest, or there are, shall I say, dream-universe people from, shall I say, Aldebaran or some other star with us. Perhaps joining their noosphere with ours? And offering assistance to a crippled, blighted planet that has been bogged down, like a rat on a weary wheel, in the dead of winter for over two thousand years? If they bring the springtime with them, then whoever they are, I welcome them; like Joe Chip in Ubik, I fear the cold, the weariness; I fear the death of wearing out on endless upward stairs, while someone cruel, or anyhow wearing a cruel mask, watches and offers no aid — the machine, lacking empathy, watching as mere spectator, the same horror that I know haunts Harlan Ellison. It is perhaps more frightening that the killer himself (in Ubik it was Jory), this figure that sees but gives no assistance, offers no hand. That is the android, to me, and the evil demigod to Harlan; we both shudder at the idea of its existence. What I can tell you about the dream-universe people is that if they do exist, whoever they are, they are not that unsympathetic android; they are human in this deepest of all senses: They have reached out a helping hand to our planet, to our polluted ecosphere, and perhaps even assisted in throwing down the tyranny that gripped the United States, Portugal, Greece, and one day they will throw down the tyranny of the Soviet bloc as well. This is what I think of when I grasp the idea of springtime: the lifting of the iron doors of the prison and the poor prisoners, in Beethoven’s Fidelio, let out into the sunlight. Ah, that moment in the opera when they see the sun and feel its warmth. And at last, at the end, the trumpet call of freedom sounds the permanent end of their cruel imprisonment; help, from outside, has arrived.
Every now and then someone comes up to a science fiction writer, smiles a crazy, secret in-the-know smile, and smirks, “I know that what you’re writing is true, and it’s in code. All you SF writers are receivers for Them.” Naturally, I ask who “Them” is. The answer is always the same. “You know. Up there. The space people. They’re already here, and they’re using your writing. You know it, too.”
I kind of smile and edge off. It keeps happening. Well, I hate to admit it, but it is possible that there is (1) such a thing as telepathy; and (2) that the CETI project’s idea that we might communicate with extraterrestrial beings via telepathy is possibly a reasonable idea — if telepathy exists and if ETIs exist. Otherwise we are trying to communicate with someone who doesn’t exist with a system that doesn’t work. At least that’ll keep a lot of us busy for a long, long time. But I understand now that a Soviet astronomy bunch, evidently headed by the same Dr. Nikolai Kozyrev, who developed the time-as-energy theory I mentioned previously, has reported receiving signals from an ETI within our solar system. If this were true, and our people are saying that the Soviets are just monitoring stale, flat, and unprofitable old signals from our own discarded satellites and other junk ships — well, suppose these ETI entities or corporate mind are within, say, the great plasma that seems to surround Earth and is involved with solar flares and the like; I refer, of course, to the noosphere. It is ETI and TI at once, and possibly bears a strong resemblance to what Ms. LeGuin has written about in Lathe. And as every SF fan knows, my own works deal with similar themes. . . thus giving an annoying couple of marks for plausibility to these freaks who are forever lurching up to every SF author and saying, “What you’re writing is in code. . .,” etc. In truth, we may be influenced, especially during dream states, by a noosphere that is a product of our own, capable of independent mentation, and involved with ETIs, a mixture of all three and God knows what else. This might not be the Creator, but it would be as close to Infinite Mind as we might get, and close enough. That it is benign is obvious, to recall Maslow’s remarks that if nature didn’t like us it would have executed us long ago — here read Infinite Noosphere for nature.
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 novel:
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.