The Aeon: We Were All Bound Together

Westworld Season 2, Episode 8 "Kiksuya"
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Kanye West Yeezus + KIDS SEE GHOSTS

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This was an invasion of my psyche by absolute knowledge.  It bore no relation to what I had up to that moment believed, wrongly believed.  There was not even a sense of insight, of satori: it was pure knowledge, like a sort of seeing: a vision of the situation as it actually was.  And it was primarily a moral seeing.  Absolute moral rectitude occurred in me.  It simply took place.  All at once it was.  I guess I saw it as K saw it.  And how different that was!  And absolute!  It was not a viewpoint.  It was knowing.

What I have been calling “the meta-abstraction” is in fact knowledge—the act of knowing—as God knows (i.e., knows what is, i.e., world).  In 2-74 and more fully later in 3-74 I saw as God sees and understood as God understands, that is, absolutely and a priori, in which what is known is exactly the same as what is; they are assimilated to each other.  That the mind of God was at that time in my mind—I experienced that as Valis in my mind.  All that I saw (Christian apocalyptic world, the plasmate, set to ground, the prison, the secret Christians, the abolition of time—i.e., coaxial reality and the conception/perception of eternal constants)—this is how God sees; I did not see this or understand this; God saw and understood this, and, as I say, I saw and understood because he bloomed in my mind like cold white light (hence I experienced an infinitude of space).  I realize this due to Sunday night when the same absolute knowing by God in me induced a realization of my practical and moral jeopardy.  Again there was certitude—total, unconditioned knowing—but what I knew this time was dreadful and lethal to me practically and spiritually.  Once again the unitary fusion of knowing and doing occurred because for God there is no distinction between what he knows and what he does. Ratiocination—logic itself, thinking itself—does not occur because it is not required; God does not figure out; he does not reason because he does not need to reason.

It was - both times - as if my mind expanded into infinity (conceived as spatial infinity). The sense one gets is that one’s mind contains all reality, and this is because all reality is known a priori and absolutely, not sensibly and contingently.

I guess for a moment I was plunged into hell and discovered what it consists of: one is given absolute moral insight into one’s own sinful nature, and there is no way it can be rectified; it is now too late; hence hell is eternal. This is clearly and obviously the just punishment and the logical punishment: absolutely (by the knowledge of God’s own mind) to see what one has done, illuminated by the divine light that reveals all. This is total knowledge of the situation and of oneself. It can be awful. By this divine illumination one’s cognition/perception condemns one; this is absolute self-condemnation not based on arbitrary rules but on total comprehension of what, really, is structural and how one has fitted into this structure and changed it by one’s deeds. The harmony and order of the cosmos are disrupted by what one has done. It was not guilt that I experienced; it was understanding. This is more terrible than any guilt. Guilt admits of degree; this was boundless.

PKD, EXEGESIS 1982