Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (46 page)

He was only fifty-three. During his abbreviated life span, Phil wrote over fifty volumes of novels and stories. By doing all that writing (and a ton of reading), he modified the structure and contents of his own mind so that new perceptions of an increasingly complex mystical order could flow through it: anamnesis of eternal truths, or Plato’s Forms. If you’re like me (a space- and time-transcendent soul fresh from the Other Side, lightly tethered to a fetus waiting to be born), this will start you thinking about
memes–
a word coined by Richard Dawkins to refer to bits of culture, or ideas, that reproduce and compete just like genes. Or maybe you’ll start thinking about William Burroughs’ language as a virus theory as it relates to the Logos doctrine regarding Christ–Logos being defined by Phil as “both that which thought, and the thing which it thought: thinker and thought together.” But it’s too easy to get lost there, obviously–so let’s just keep it simple by saying that on February 20th, 1974, Phil experienced what he described as a theophany, “an in-breaking of God, an in-breaking which amounts to an invasion of our world….”

“Lurking, the true God literally ambushes reality and us as well,” Phil wrote in his novel,
VALIS
(an acronym for
Vast Active Living Intelligence System
), which tried to make sense of the whole business. “God, in very truth, attacks and injures us, in his role as antidote. As Fat can testify to,” (Horselover Fat, Phil’s insane, split-off alter-ego in the book), “it is a scary experience to be bushwhacked by the Living God. Hence, we say the true God is in the habit of concealing himself…”

–
which sounds just like how a daimon operates, now doesn’t it?

Anyway, whether it resulted from a daimon or the True God or the inexplicable workings of the Logos, we’re talking Gnosis with a capital G here. What happened was this: Phil was at home moping around after having two impacted wisdom teeth pulled. His dentist had shot him full of sodium pentathol (truth serum) and its effects were just wearing off when a girl from the local drugstore showed up at his door to deliver some prescription painkillers. Phil found himself entranced by the gleaming gold fish pendant on the delivery girl’s necklace. He asked her what it was and she said it was a sign worn by the early Christians (the
vesica piscis
). In an instant, Phil saw “fading into view the black prison-like contours of hateful Rome” circa 50 AD, where he and the girl were secret Christians.

“We lived in fear of detection by the Romans,” Phil wrote of the experience later. “We had to communicate with cryptic signs. She had just told me all this, and it was true. … But, of much more importance, I remembered Jesus, who had just recently been with us, and had gone temporarily away, and would very soon return. My emotion was one of joy. We were secretly preparing to welcome Him back. It would not be long. And the Romans did not know. They thought He was dead, forever dead. That was our great secret, our joyous knowledge. Despite all appearances, Christ was going to return, and our delight and anticipation was boundless.”

I guess you could write all this off as a weird drug hallucination. Or you might hypothesize that our buddy Phil was experiencing a psychotic breakdown. Whatever it was, the visions and revelations continued over the next several weeks–and if anything, they got even freakier. Phil started to believe he was living two overlapping lives: one as himself and the other as a guy named Thomas, a Gnostic Christian who lived during the first-century under the shadow of the Roman Empire. Phil also discovered he could speak in Koiné Greek, an ancient language that was used to write the New Testament. And one day while he was lying around listening to KNX-FM on his little beside radio, Phil heard the lyrics of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ change into the prophetic warning: “Your son has an undiagnosed right inguinal hernia. The hydrocele has burst, and it has descended into the scrotal sac. He requires immediate attention, or will soon die.”

(“Inguinal Hernia Forever….” Go ahead–just try to imagine John Lennon carrying a tune to that.)

Phil told his wife, Tessa, to make an immediate doctor’s appointment for their ten-month-old son, Christopher. The doctor confirmed that the warning was essentially true (Christopher had a life-threatening hernia and
two
swelling hydroceles–but neither of them had burst). Surgery was scheduled. The hernia was repaired and the hydroceles were excised.

Theophany, drug-fueled hallucinations, or psychosis–whatever you ascribe it to, Christopher’s life was saved.

After the visions stopped, or at least slowed down some, Phil spent the remaining years of his life trying to figure out just what, exactly, the hell had happened to him. He tried to assimilate the experience, and make sense of it, using the vocabulary and understanding he’d built up through all of his years of reading and writing. Phil wrote everything down in a journal that he called his Exegesis, which ran to something like 8,000 pages–over a million words. As Phil described the process in
VALIS
: “Fat must have come up with more theories than there are stars in the universe. Every day he developed a new one, more cunning, more exciting and more fucked.” One theme that Phil kept coming around to in the Exegesis was that there must be “a mysterious Holy Spirit which has an exact and intimate relation to Christ, which can indwell in human minds, guide and inform them, and even express itself through those humans, even without their awareness.”

Whether he realized it or not, Phil was writing about his own daimon.

The third-century Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus spoke of daimons as being “both within us and yet transcendent”–meaning they can show up inside our heads (in our dreams and interior voices of inspiration), and outside our heads (as apparitions, etheric Indian shamans, and Phildickian visions). Carl Jung, who referred to his own daimon as Philemon, elaborated on those two paths for daimonic manifestation in his commentary on the
Bardo Thödol–
or as it’s known in the West,
The Tibetan Book of the Dead:

“Not only the ‘wrathful’ but also the ‘peaceful’ deities are conceived as sangsâric projections of the human psyche, an idea that seems all too obvious to the enlightened European, because it reminds him of his own banal simplifications. But though the European can easily explain away these deities as projections, he would be quite incapable of positing them at the same time as real. The
Bardo Thödol
can do that…. The ever-present, unspoken assumption of the
Bardo Thödol
is the antinominal character of all metaphysical assertions, and also the idea of the qualitative difference of the various levels of consciousness and of the metaphysical realities conditioned by them. The background of this unusual book is not the niggardly European ‘either-or’ but a magnificently affirmative ‘both-and’.”

Try thinking of the
Bardo
as analogous to the light spectrum. We only see the visible light that makes up the colors of the rainbow, but that doesn’t mean the infrared and ultraviolet edges of the spectrum don’t exist. We just can’t see them. The
Bardo
is sort of like that. It’s all around us–we’re actually swimming in it–but most of us can’t see it (cats see more of it, which is why they jump at things when we think there’s nothing there). The
Bardo
includes the physical realm we know on Earth, but that’s just one level–like one station broadcasting at a specific frequency on the radio (“You’re tuned to 90.3, Earth Realm, on your
Bardo
dial…”). When we tune in to a new station the old one doesn’t disappear, right? It’s still broadcasting; we’re just not listening to it anymore. Occasionally, we’ll hear a fuzzy hint of another station, as static, if the station frequencies are set too close together. Maybe that’s what happened to Phil on February 20th, 1974. He experienced some metaphysical reality static.
Bardo
bleed-over.

Phil arrived at a similar conclusion when he wrote that ‘hallucinations, whether induced by psychosis, hypnosis, drugs, toxins, etc., may be merely quantitatively different from what we see, not qualitatively so.’ Maybe hallucinations are just other aspects of metaphysical reality that our brain’s neural filters are keeping out, so we can go on with our everyday consensus reality convictions on “the mundane plane,” as Mircea Eliade described it. The human brain’s hundred billion neurons must be sensitive to all kinds of things outside the normal range of our five senses. Maybe even the act of thinking can generate thought patterns in subtle energy fields that can be picked up by other brains and translated back into the same thoughts–again, like a radio signal. The renowned biologist Rupert Sheldrake called this theory Morphic Resonance.

Who knows? If that’s how it all works, as Phil found out, it’s almost impossible to prove. If seeing certain aspects of metaphysical reality is intrinsically linked to the level of a person’s consciousness, then that metaphysical reality can’t be fully comprehended by others until their own level of consciousness has changed.

Another recurring theme in Phil’s Exegesis was that the Roman Empire never really ended. Look at Entry 29, for example (published in the appendix of
VALIS
): “We did not fall because of 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.’”

You want my take? What Phil is saying there is basically true, but it goes much deeper. The Empire is just one of the many faces of the Dark Brotherhood, and they’ve been around since the very beginnings of this planet. The Dark Brotherhood is made up of the Archons–the demonic punishers and exploiters of mankind–and those who’ve joined their cause over the course of human history.

The Archons never left us.

Think of the Archons as spiritual challengers from the lower realms of the
Bardo,
demigods who work behind the scenes to advance the agenda of the Dark Brotherhood–a sort of world-encompassing metaphysical Mafia that shows nothing but contempt for human laws. The Dark Brotherhood can be recognized by its steadfast and stealthy opposition to the natural evolution of liberation and enlightenment for all of humanity. They’re like the greedy CEOs of corrupt, polluting global corporations. In fact, they are–among other things–the greedy CEOs of corrupt, polluting global corporations. They want all the power in the world, and they want it for their own selfish, antisocial ends. (“More tax cuts for the filthy rich, anyone?…”) They’re the exemplars of Lord Acton’s dictum, coined after the First Vatican Council’s declaration of papal infallibility: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The typical human representative of the Dark Brotherhood is an incredibly vain, arrogant, psychopathic personality who has cultivated his lower soul, or False Self, over many lifetimes with no time in-between spent on the Other Side (for him it’s just one damned incarnation after the other…). In the process, he’s cut himself off from his higher soul–and its chances to merge with spirit–in exchange for the Dark Brotherhood’s promise of temporal wealth and power. This is what we mean when we say someone has sold their soul to the devil. They’ve really just clipped their soul’s wings by putting it in service to the Archons.

Most of the human Dark Brothers are mere puppets, completely unaware of the Archons pulling their strings. Their naked greed–their lying, cheating, hoarding, crassly manipulative ways–puts them in harmonic vibration with the
Bardo’s
lower levels; they become almost mechanical, easily susceptible to morphic resonance from the superior group-mind of the Archons. Often, without even realizing it, these humans (who can be Presidents and kings) act on thoughts and compulsions that aren’t their own.

Okay, so maybe on the surface all this sounds too weird and impossible to be true, but check with your intuition–you’ve known something like this has been happening all along. It explains the demonic nightmare-logic and anti-evolutionary tendencies in the flow of human history. If all the progressive and regressive currents in world events constitute the moves in a five-dimensional Gnostic chess game, as Gordon intuited, then the True God must be on one side and the Dark Brotherhood on the other:

“Your reality move…” says the True God.

“We’ll blow Kennedy’s brains out in Dealey Plaza,” says the Dark Brotherhood.

“Fuck! That’s the same move you pulled on me with Lincoln!” says the True God. “I can’t believe I fell for that again!”

“All the signs were right there in front of you,” sneers the Dark Brotherhood. “You should’ve seen it coming when we went after Marilyn….
Putz.
”

It’s in the inherent nature of the Dark Brotherhood to sow fear and hatred among the world’s people. They feed on it. (More about that later….) But there are at least some rules to this game that the True God and the Dark Brotherhood are playing. One of those rules is called the Law of Free Will. Basically, what that means is that the Archons or the True God or your personal daimon are not allowed to do certain things that would upset your life and reality unless you give them permission first. They can’t just come right out and ask you, because even the act of revealing themselves would constitute a violation of your free will. So instead, they have to do a lot of beating around the bush.

The direct approach wouldn’t work too well for the Archons, anyway (“Hey, um, would it be okay if we torch your house, rape your dog, and paralyze you from, let’s say, your nipples on down? Just wondering…. Oh, and by the way, we plan on dismantling the Social Security system and privatizing schools so they can be run by our highly trained, crack teams of pedophiles and book-burning sadists. You don’t mind, do you?”). With the direct approach out, what the Archons do instead is provide you with a few synchronistic hints and nudges and plenty of meaning-laden symbols to show you how the deal will go down. That’s supposed to be fair–and it would be, if people knew about the Law of Free Will and could study Archon symbolism in advance. But the sad fact is that most people have been media-hypnotized into complacency (the Dark Brotherhood pretty much owns Hollywood and all the major news providers), so instead of heeding the warnings, they just act like a bunch of cows and do nothing. Their free will is then considered relinquished and the Archons are free to do their dirt.