Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (7 page)

I want to take up Partridge's key notion of occulture and develop it in my own directions in the pages that follow. More specifically, I want to suggest that the experience of reality—a “reality posit,” as the cultural psychologist Richard Shweder has put it—is produced from the dialectical dance of consciousness and culture, always on a particular historical and material stage.
⁵⁸
As Mind and the neurobiological hardware of the human brain are “cultivated” in different social, religious, and linguistic frames, the experience of reality shifts and changes accordingly. Reality itself—or so I am assuming—does not change, but what is generally possible and impossible to experience as real does appear to change from culture to culture, as each culture actualizes different potentials of human consciousness and energy. Such a dialectical model, I should stress, is both universalistic and relativistic at the same time. There is radical Sameness. And there is radical Difference. And neither can be sacrificed to the other.

In this model, the human being can be thought of as a kind of living musical instrument born into the world capable of playing any tune, any language, any belief system. Each culture, each historical period, each religious system, each family, however, will privilege only certain keys and will downplay, deny, or simply ignore others. Consider the research on human language acquisition. An infant,
any
infant, is born capable of speaking any language on the planet, but as the infant develops, the brain synapses and vocal abilities quickly lock onto a specific set of language skills until it is very difficult to learn other speech patterns. By the age of six or so, the brain is now wired for a specific language, by thirteen or so a specific culture and worldview. The universal musical instrument has become a very particular and local one.

It is within this same dialectical context that I understand occulture as a kind of public meeting place of spirit and matter, as the place where Consciousness
both
occults or hides itself in material and symbolic forms
and
allows itself to be seen, “as if in a mirror,” so that it can be cultivated and shaped into definite, but always relative, forms. Occulture, then, both
conceals
and reveals. Its popular and elite expressions—from a ten-cent superhero comic book to this book—should not be taken literally. Ever. But neither should they be dismissed as meaningless or unimportant. They, after all, reflect and refract some of the deepest dimensions of the real.

The provocative work of Owen and Partridge can be fruitfully read alongside Victoria Nelson's
The Secret Life of Puppets
, a beautiful study of the Neoplatonic, gnostic, or Hermetic “soul” of Western culture as temporarily repressed and demonized. Here Nelson gives us a brilliant study of the modern demonization of the soul as puppet, robot, or cyborg and the bracketing (really repressing) of the deeper questions of human consciousness within contemporary intellectual culture. In the process, she examines what we too will encounter below, that is, the imaginative exile of Spirit into the furthest reaches of “outer space,” from where, of course, it returns to haunt us as the Alien.

For Nelson, this demonization and subsequent alienation is born of an exaggerated and unbalanced scientism, a one-sided Aristotelianism that she sees us now moving beyond before a balancing Platonic resurgence. It is not about one or the other, though. It is about both. It is about
balance
. Western intellectual, spiritual, and cultural life, at their best and most creative anyway, work through a delicate balancing act between this Aristotelianism (read: rationalism) and this Platonism (read: mysticism). The pendulum has been swinging right, toward Aristotle, for about three hundred years now. It has now reached its rationalist zenith and is beginning to swing back left, toward Plato. Which is not to say, at all, that Western culture will somehow become irrational and unscientific again, that we suddenly won't need Aristotle or science any longer. This vast centuries-long process is ultimately about balance, about wisdom. It is also about making the unconscious conscious, about realizing and living our own secret life:

The new sensibility does not threaten a regression from rationality to superstition; rather, it allows for expansion beyond the one-sided worldview that scientism has provided us over the last three hundred years. We should never forget how utterly unsophisticated the tenets of eighteenth-century rationalism have left us, believers and unbelievers alike, in that complex arena we blithely dub “spiritual.” Even as we see all too clearly the kitsch of much New Age religiosity and fear the rigidity of rising fundamentalism, we remain alarmingly blind to our own unconscious tendencies in this same direction. Our conventional secular bias whispers to us that the ideas we see naively articulated on the cinema screen (ideas as blasphemous to secular humanists as they are to the religious orthodox), if they are to be taken seriously at all, signal a backward
slide
into religious oppression and intolerance. What our perspective does not allow us to recognize is the positive and enduring dimension of such ideas when they are consciously articulated in our culture. We forget that Western culture is equally about Platonism and Aristotelianism, idealism and empiricism,
gnosis
and
episteme
, and that for most of this culture's history one or the other has been conspicuously dominant—and dedicated to stamping the other out.
⁵⁹

Such a Platonic balancing or mystical revival, of course, cannot enter the house of elite culture directly. Its kitsch clothes and tastes in movies are too easily rebuffed, demeaned, belittled, and shamed by the scientistic and pious doorkeepers. So it walks around the house and comes in the back door, through the imaginative products of popular culture and the inexorable mechanisms of market capitalism (if elite intellectuals and orthodox religious leaders don't buy this stuff, almost everyone else does, literally). In our own time, Nelson argues, this back-door
gnosis
arises out of the “sub-Zeitgeist” of science fiction, superhero comic books, fantasy, and especially film.

This material is fundamentally gnostic or, better, Hermetic for Nelson, which is to say that it is very much about a cosmic form of consciousness that participates in the material world but also transcends and overflows that world. The Hermetic or gnostic soul, then, is someone who seeks a liberation from the limitations of an illusory world, who, like Neo in
The Matrix
, “takes the red pill” and discovers virtually limitless human powers within an unreal virtual reality. There is a dark side, a very dark side, however, to Neo's awakening. Basically, he discovers that his body is being used as a human battery to power a world ruled by aliens who deceive their human harvest by implanting a virtual-reality existence in their wired-up brains.

Things are not always this dark, of course. A gentler model can be found in the character of Truman in
The Truman Show
, who realizes, with more than a little anger, that he has been living his entire life in a television reality show, in essence, on a stage set. At the end of the movie, he sails out into the fake lake, discovers “a door in the sky,” and walks through it. Whether disturbing or touching, demonic or divine, by consuming such “art forms of the fantastic,” Nelson suggests, “we as nonbelievers allow ourselves, unconsciously, to believe.”
⁶⁰
We fly under the radar, perhaps even under our own radar.

Nowhere is this truer than in the ultramodern genre of science fiction, a genre closely allied with the fantastic. To take just one example that Nelson treats and that bears directly on my present methods, consider the iconic figure of Philip K. Dick, the American sci-fi writer who claimed to
have
been “resynthesized” by a pink laser beam emanating from a vast supercosmic consciousness he called VALIS, for “Vast Active Living Intelligence System.” Valis was no abstract literary conceit for Dick. Nor was the Pink Light. Both were autobiographical facts for him of immense significance. Literally. This, after all, was a Light that beamed the noetic energies of
entire books
into him and hid itself in and as the material-virtual world.

Dick's biographer, Lawrence Sutin, is very clear that Dick's later work flowed out of the author's metaphysical encounters with this superbeing or Sci-Fi Spirit. Dick's encounter with Valis took place in the late winter of 1974. Hence Dick's constant elliptical reference to “2-3-74,” that is, February and March of 1974. During this period of time, Dick, in Victoria Nelson's words now, “had the overpowering sensation of being ‘resynthesized' by an entity he called ‘the Programmer.'
”
⁶¹
He also called this entity Zebra, for its ability to hide in the world, and Brahman, for its omnipresence and mystical nature. Here is how Dick himself described it:

At the moment in which I was resynthesized, I was aware perceptually—which is to say aware in an external way—of his presence . . . It resembled plasmic energy. It had colors. It moved fast, collecting and dispersing. But what it was, what he was—I am not sure, even now, except I can tell you that he had simulated normal objects and their processes so as to copy them and in such an artful way as to make himself invisible within them.
⁶²

And this is before we even get to Dick's fascination with quantum physics and synchronicity, manifested in such moments as when he met a woman on Christmas Day of 1970 whose name, age, relationships, and life resembled in uncanny detail a “fictional” character he had written earlier that year in
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
.
⁶³
Or his story about how he once diagnosed his young son's otherwise invisible internal hernia while listening to the Beatles' “Strawberry Fields Forever” after the pink beams of Valis zapped him. The surgery that was scheduled after Dick's diagnosis was professionally confirmed potentially saved the boy's life.

Dick explicitly identified this cosmic consciousness with the teachings of early Christian gnosticism and wrote
eight thousand pages
of interpretation in his private journals—known to his fans as the
Exegesis
—in order to explain it to himself. Not that he ever explained it. His ruthlessly honest interpretations ranged widely, from the possibility that he was being deluded (by what or who it was not at all clear) to the conviction that Valis was metaphysically related to his beloved fraternal twin sister, who had died shortly after they were both born. Sutin puts the matter in a way that
bears
directly on my own uses of the fantastic as the hermeneutical key to the paranormal:

For all the subsequent confusion he sowed, Phil never really doubted that the visions and auditions of February–March 1974 (2-3-74) and after had fundamentally changed his life.

Whether or not they were
real
was another question. As usual. In seeking an answer, Phil hovered in a binary flutter:

Doubt. That he might have deceived himself, or that It—whatever It was—had deceived him.

Joy. That the universe might just contain a meaning that had eluded him all through his life and work.

The dialectic lies at the heart of the eight-year
Exegesis
. . . and of
Valis
. . . . In fact, the 2-3-74 experiences resemble nothing so much as a wayward cosmic plot from a Phil Dick SF novel—which is hardly surprising, given who the experiencer was. . . .

Indeterminacy is the central characteristic of 2-3-74.

And how fitting that is. Mystical experiences are almost always in keeping with the tradition of the mystic. Julian of Norwich, a Catholic, perceived “great drops of blood” running down from a crown of thorns. Milarepa, a Tibetan Buddhist, visualized his guru surrounded by multifold Buddhas on lotus seats of wisdom.

Phil adhered to no single faith. The one tradition indubitably his was SF—which exalts “What IF?” above all.

In 2-3-74, all the “What Ifs?” were rolled up into one.

As
Valis
proved, it was, say whatever else you will, a great idea for a novel.
⁶⁴

Which is all to say that Phil Dick wrote out of that fundamental hesitation, that both-and, that real-unreal place that is the surest mark of the fantastic. Here is how
he
put it: “My God, my life—which is to say my 2-74/3-74 experience—is exactly like the plot of any one of ten of my novels or stories. Even down to the fake memories & identity. I'm a protagonist from one of PKD's books . . . ”
⁶⁵

And us?

It would be easy, of course, to assert that a sci-fi author like Dick is not “really” religious, that he is pretending a revelation that he does not in fact possess, that his vast
Exegesis
was the result of temporal lobe epilepsy and a subsequent paranoia and hypergraphia.
⁶⁶
It would be much more interesting and altogether more historical, though, to admit that what we now call “religion” is closer to what we now call “fiction” than anyone is willing to
admit,
that living mythology has
always
followed along the tracks of whatever science was available at the time, and that there are no good intellectual reasons (as opposed to ideological or religious ones) to distinguish whatever was speaking through Dick's gnostic systems from whatever was speaking through the systems of the early Christian and Jewish gnostic authors.

Hence Nelson's precise (and, in my mind, correct) invocation of the Platonic realm to describe Dick's Valis, “a meta-organism identical in all its features to Plotinus's World Soul.”
⁶⁷
Compared to Nelson's historically nuanced religious reading, an easy phrase like “temporal lobe epilepsy” offers little, as such neurological events could be the necessary biological condition or neurological opening, as opposed to the materialist cause, for such spiritual inrushes (much more on this in my conclusion). Besides, the early Christian and Jewish authors had temporal lobes too. Why deem one set of firing lobes revelatory and the other solipsistic? What
is
the difference?