Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy Part 22

"Then die!" die!" screamed the screamed the Zombi Zombi-the part of the Rite which had not been explained to the candidate in advance-and Hugh felt the sword cross his neck and saw the blood spurting.

He also saw the bulb which the Zombi Zombi squeezed to make the blood spurt out of the end of the sword. squeezed to make the blood spurt out of the end of the sword.

And he understood the manufacture of reality and power completely.

TRANSFORMATION.

DECEMBER 24, 1983:.

Marvin Gardens was awake again; the downers hadn't fully taken the edge off the c.o.ke excitation.

He had turned the radio on, but the only thing worth listening to was Handel's Messiah Messiah-the fourth time he had caught parts of it this week-and they were in the middle of "He was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief." Not quite what he needed at this hour, with the early morning Manhattan permeation of suicides and accidental overdoses skulking in the shadows. He wished they would get on to the Hallelujah Chorus.

Marvin found a book he'd never finished-The Autobiography of Cagliostro the Great. He opened at random and started reading: He opened at random and started reading: "Get a a job," my father said. Turning back, I saw the beggar falling to the ground, obviously fainting from starvation, but when he landed I knew, from his limpness, that it was more than a faint: that he was dead.It has sometimes occurred to me that there is a parallel here to the famous experience of the Buddha, who, like myself, had the misfortune to be born rich and only discovered what life is like for most people when he encountered a beggar and a corpse. Is this parallel an accident? I am not sure: I cannot say when when I was elected, or drafted, to receive the Aquarian message, the great affirmation that "All is joy," in contrast to the Buddha's equally true, equally false, but now obsolete "All is sorrow." I was elected, or drafted, to receive the Aquarian message, the great affirmation that "All is joy," in contrast to the Buddha's equally true, equally false, but now obsolete "All is sorrow."We never see what is in front of our eyes. My father did not see what happened inside me when that beggar died; I have brought men and women to the edge of the Vision, by various tactics, and they, afraid to see it, ran off to psychiatrists.

"It's really very simple to remember the order of the ten planets," Blake Williams explained to Natalie."Just memorize the sentence 'Mother Very Easily Made a Jam Sandwich Using No Peanuts Mayonnaise or Glue.' Got it?"

"Mother Very Easily Made a Jam Sandwich Using No Peanuts Mayonnaise or Glue," Natalie repeated dubiously.

"That's all," Williams said proudly. "You just use the initial letter of each word as a mnemonic, and you've got all ten planets. Mercury Venus Earth Mars the asteroids Saturn Ura.n.u.s Neptune Pluto Mickey and Goofy."

"Wow!" said Natalie. "Disneyland in the skies."

"Who the h.e.l.l was that?" Carol Christmas asked breathlessly, as the triangle finally faded. "Sure didn't look like a loa loa to me," she added, frowning thoughtfully. to me," she added, frowning thoughtfully.

"It was Simon Moon," Joe Malik said, also somewhat breathless. "I knew him in another universe ... or another novel ... or something...."

Carol stared at him. "You wigging?" she asked bluntly.

"No," Joe said. "I think I'm beginning to understand the trap we're all caught in, and how to get out of it."

d.a.m.nANT QUOD NON INTELLIGUNT.

G.o.d told John Disk to kill Cagliostro the Great. It was that simple; after all, who would dare to disobey the Voice of G.o.d Himself?

G.o.d had been talking to Disk for nearly a year now. The Voice had been rather faint at first, and John even thought it was the Devil for a while, because it kept telling him he was d.a.m.ned. It said he was d.a.m.ned because he sinned sometimes when he was asleep. It said many silly and blasphemous things, but John realized later that those weirdities had been the Devil trying to jam and confuse the communication, for when the Voice became strong and constant, there was no doubt at all that it was G.o.d.

It told John that he had been especially selected because of his virtue and purity, and it never mentioned what happened sometimes when he was asleep. It told him he was the only twenty-three-year-old male virgin in Unistat, the last true Christian not perverted by p.u.s.s.ycat p.u.s.s.ycat and the s.e.xual Revolution and Black Magic. It told him he had earned much merit in Heaven for his selfless activities on behalf of the antiabortion movement in the 1970s and White Heroes Opposing Red Extremism since then. and the s.e.xual Revolution and Black Magic. It told him he had earned much merit in Heaven for his selfless activities on behalf of the antiabortion movement in the 1970s and White Heroes Opposing Red Extremism since then.

It really loved John, and it never stopped telling him he was the most important man on the planet because he had been Selected.

At first it didn't tell him what he had been Selected for; but every time he read a news story about some new blasphemy by Cagliostro the Great, the Voice of G.o.d would say, "This man must be stopped."

It was only toward the end of November that the Voice became increasingly explicit and said directly that he, John Disk, had been Selected to terminate the foul existence of the infamous devil-wors.h.i.+per Cagliostro. Even then the Voice was almost drowned out by the voice of Rhoda Chief, the Scarlet Woman of Rock, chanting, "Hickory d.i.c.kory dock, I'd like to suck your c.o.c.k," and other diabolical voices howling "no wife, no horse, no mustache" and "sit down when you want to pee" and other nonsense like that. The Devil was trying very hard to keep Disk from hearing and believing the Word of G.o.d; he wanted Disk to think he was going crazy. But the Voice of G.o.d got louder and more powerful and drowned out the others, and n.o.body who heard it, Disk knew, could ever doubt that a Voice so wise and powerful was anything else but that of the Lord G.o.d Himself.

John made sure, of course. He spent a whole night praying, beating his back with a bundle of wet, stinging cords, just like he'd read in a book about the saints from the public library on Forty-second Street. He kept saying, "Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner." At dawn Jesus appeared, with a halo, and told him exactly how to find a p.a.w.n shop where he could buy a gun without the legal impediment of acquiring a permit. Then He turned into a huge red triangle, through which the impa.s.sive face of a lion stared at John, and then it was all mirrors and blue smoke until he actually found the p.a.w.n shop and got the pistol.

The Devil was determined to protect his servant, Cagliostro, so John found the mirrors and smoke increasingly getting in his way in the following days. He would be on his way to Theology cla.s.s at Fordham when suddenly all around would be thousands of hippies of all nations and a voice would be singing This is the dawningof the Age of Bavaria or he would be in a yellow submarine floating over a gigantic submerged pyramid or he would turn on the religious channel on the wall TV (the only one not full of s.m.u.t and filth these days) and find Linda Lovelace doing That Disgusting Thing to somebody named Marvin Gardens. But he continued to pray, and more and more The Voice of G.o.d would drown out all these nets and snares of Satan.

Finally, on the morning of December 24, the Voice of G.o.d told him to go to Central Park West, where Cagliostro was living, and wait on the street. The Voice told him that as a reward he would be allowed to sit at the left hand of the Father in Heaven-Jesus would keep the right hand but the Holy Spirit was being demoted to an auxiliary rank with the Virgin, so that he, John Disk, could be given the third highest position in all Paradise.

When he got to the School Book Depository and walked toward the box seat in the Ford Theatre, s.e.x mutilators and cattle educators howled at him and he realized that the Devil was still trying to deceive him and he prayed harder and harder until it was clear that he was really on Central Park West and the man walking toward him, taking a morning const.i.tutional, was the diabolical Cagliostro, a chameleon on a mirror, and the cla.s.s of all cla.s.ses that were similar to it, but he prayed and got the pistol out of his pocket, almost seeing the Grand Zombi Grand Zombi and his sword, breathing harder now because the Devil was trying so hard to confuse him, and the interviewer wanted to know which monk Vlad impaled. and his sword, breathing harder now because the Devil was trying so hard to confuse him, and the interviewer wanted to know which monk Vlad impaled.

John Disk held the gun in a trembling hand and looked into Cagliostro's icy eyes.

"Oy, have you picked the wrong Black Magician," Cagliostro said in a stage-Yiddish accent.

John Disk fired five times into the heart.

The gate of Chinatown opened.

Ma.s.s LANDING.

Justin Case was released from the flying saucer in the middle of Central Park. He was still rather befoozled mentally and unsteady on his feet, so he staggered to the nearest bench and sat quietly, watching them take off.

His wrist.w.a.tch said 7:15-which seemed plausible.

"It is the morning of December 24," he said aloud. "Tomorrow is Christmas." It seemed necessary, somehow, to get the simple things cleared up first of all, before dealing with the Mysteries.

Things like this didn't happen to New York music critics. They happened to farmers in Iowa or fishermen in Arkansas, or other such unsophisticated types, and, besides, they were hallucinations.

Justin watched the flying saucer disappear across the sky, reminding himself that it was a hallucination.

But still their words rang in his ears: "It is time for your species to join the Galactic Community."

Justin finally got his mind and legs and various organs working together well enough to walk. He headed for Central Park West, hoping to find a cab.

At Fifty-eighth Street he saw a newsstand. The headlines glared at him like Tibetan demons: WORLDWIDE UFO FLAP.

Ma.s.s Landings Reported And in a corner the inevitable surrealist tag line to such a night: Mayor of Chicago Arrested Sodomy with Boar Hog Alleged As Justin stared at those remarkable messages, he heard five rapid pistol shots.

From somewhere nearby music drifted toward him. He found himself absently putting the words to the melody: He knows when you've been bad or good So be good for goodness' sake He hastily bought a newspaper and hailed a cab. He was going to go right home and, for the first time in his life, break his rule against drinking in the morning.

When he was drunk enough to stop trembling, it would be time to decide whether to report his experience or let those who had already talked take all the heat.

CROWN POINT.

Crown Point Jail, in Indiana, was called "the escape-proof jail," when John Dillinger was brought there in May 1934. On the day Dillinger destroyed that name by escaping, an out-of-work vaudeville magician was begging in Central Park, New York. One thought burned in this man's head-With a little luck, I could have been a second Houdini-and that was what he was thinking as he fought the hunger cramps and laid his spiel on Tom Crane.

When he felt the ground move in that big wobble of uncertainty, he remembered suddenly the ever-branching Tree of Life as memories of Adam Weishaupt and Mohammed and insects and trees flooded through him, a million balloons bursting inside him and outside him at once, each balloon releasing a twinkle of light, each light part of the infinite ladder of light, and he was watching himself die, in horror and ecstasy, through the eyes of a little boy.

How did my karma ever land me here? he thought as he died, and the boy heard him thinking. he thought as he died, and the boy heard him thinking.

THE ELEPHANT.

ANNALS OF GENERAL PSYCHIATRY,.

MAY 1984:.

In short, the wave of delusion, mania, and hallucination that occurred over the Christmas-New Year's holidays last year can only be attributed to the paradoxical nature of the unconscious. Where previous ma.s.s hysterias have occurred (e.g. (e.g., the end-of-the-world manias of the Middle Ages, the Orson Welles Martian invasion broadcast of 1938) the cause was, obviously, the tensions, stresses, and fears of those times. This latest eruption, coming in the midst of a time of progress, optimism, and rising expectations, can only be explained by Freud's great discovery that opposites are equal to the prelogical unconscious mind [ambivalence principle]. In other words, high hopes, like high anxieties, can unleash the dreaming mind into the waking state....

-A. Besetzung, M.D.

ANNALS OF GENERAL PSYCHIATRY,.

JUNE 1984:.

The categories of hallucination or delusion do not fully cover the phenomenon-which to some slight extent is still continuing....

The Mayor of Chicago "hallucinated" the beautiful "Princess Isis from Venus" who seduced him, in his fantasy life, but the witnesses at the stockyard insist that he was sodomizing a quite real hog at the time....

Mars is as inhospitable to life as Venus, but a prominent music critic has told this author, in private, of an abduction by little green Martians out of 1930s science fiction, but this obviously hallucinatory experience does not help us understand how the man was transported from his apartment on Twenty-third Street to the middle of Central Park, where he heard the shots shots of a murder that never occurred.... of a murder that never occurred....

One of the blind men cured by the Virgin of Perth Amboy had been examined at Johns Hopkins just one week earlier, where the optic nerve was found to be irreparably dead, so that this is not a matter of hysterical blindness cured by hysterical faith, but of real real blindness cured by hysterical faith.... blindness cured by hysterical faith....

-B. Gilhooley, M.D.

UFO REPORTER,.

JANUARY 1985:.

As the "Christmas Miracle" continues to accelerate worldwide, it becomes more obvious than ever that the old concept of aliens coming here in s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps just cannot account for it. Even those most committed to the s.p.a.ceman theory must admit, in the light of the recent events, that the sciences involved in what is being done to the human race are primarily psychic or parapsychological. If s.p.a.ce beings are doing it, whatever it is, they must be doing it by what I can only call, vaguely, "psychotronic technology," and they could be doing it, for all we know, from their home planets, without physically traveling at all. By the same token, we have no need to posit s.p.a.cemen at all, since whoever or whatever is doing this could be as close as the psychology department of some obscure university or the mind-control sector of any Intelligence Agency....

Human minds are being manipulated on a ma.s.sive scale; that is all we know, and all theories about the Manipulators-terrestrial or extraterrestrial-are mere guesswork....

-J. Lacombe, Ph.D.

UFO REPORTER,.

MARCH 1985:.

... The idea that the "Christmas Phenomenon" is being done to to us us by by some Agency (terrestrial or otherwise) is based on the categories of Indo-European grammar and Aristotelian logic, which modern physics has long known to be inadequate. A Taoist or a Hopi Indian, for instance, with a different semantic "set," might regard the events as a cosmic happening or growth process, without trying to isolate out one part of the universe as the "cause" and thus relegating the rest of the universe to the dependent position of "the effects." Modern quantum theory, at least since Bell's Theorem (1964), would suggest strongly that these holistic Chinese-Amerindian concepts are more accurate maps of what is happening than the linear A-causes-B sequences of Aristotelianism.... some Agency (terrestrial or otherwise) is based on the categories of Indo-European grammar and Aristotelian logic, which modern physics has long known to be inadequate. A Taoist or a Hopi Indian, for instance, with a different semantic "set," might regard the events as a cosmic happening or growth process, without trying to isolate out one part of the universe as the "cause" and thus relegating the rest of the universe to the dependent position of "the effects." Modern quantum theory, at least since Bell's Theorem (1964), would suggest strongly that these holistic Chinese-Amerindian concepts are more accurate maps of what is happening than the linear A-causes-B sequences of Aristotelianism....

Does this mean that we abandon the search for a "cause"? Not at all. It merely implies that looking for humans or superhumans who did it is as fruitless as the medieval search to explain each oddity as the work of angels or demons. We should seek the cause in the quantum structure of life and of matter itself....

-B. Williams, Ph.D.

NATIONAL ENQUIRER,.

JUNE 1991:.

Of all the perplexing pixiedom that continues to trail in the wake of the Christmas Miracle, the most baffling thing to show-biz people is the continued absence of Cagliostro the Great. The idea that the magician's disappearance was a publicity stunt, calculated to cash in on the other mysteries beginning that amazing morning eight years ago, has long since been abandoned, as Cagliostro continues to remain hidden, wherever he is....

The most bizarre sideline of this story concerns John Disk, the man who claimed to have murdered Cagliostro. Although held by the New York police for some months, Disk was finally released when no body could be found and the clothes discovered on Central Park West and identified as Cagliostro's were free of bullet holes. Disk, we have learned, is now an officer of the First Bank of Religiosophy and refuses to talk about his experience that mad and mysterious morning.

"n.o.body would believe me," he told our reporter. "You have to go to Chinatown and see it yourself."

GALACTIC ARCHIVES:.

To understand what happened to the primates of Terra in the 1980s, a metaphor may be useful.

Charlatans, jongleurs jongleurs, wandering minstrels, stage magicians, etc., on all primitive planets, employ a device known as a Trick Top Hat. This appears to be an ordinary hat, and looks empty to the audience, but it actually contains a pouch out of which all sorts of amazing things can be made to appear-rabbits, yards of bright-colored cloth, gla.s.ses of water, and in general whatever the magician wishes to produce for the delight and amazement of his audience.

This ritual, like all rituals and religious visions or ecstasies, is actually a memory of the future memory of the future, but there is no way for primitives to understand that.

Consider the epistemological plight of the Terran primates at the time of this ancient Romance. They knew that they were made of molecules, which were made of atoms, which were made of subatomic particles, which were expressions in s.p.a.ce-time of quantum probability matrices. This knowledge, alas, was so recent that it had never been integrated into their philosophies, or into the rules of their social games, like religions, politics, economics, etc. Their whole social reality-tunnel was based on prequantum superst.i.tion and ignorance. The sociological nexus was Euclidean-Aristotelian-Newtonian; even Maxwell and Einstein had only been digested by a few.

Over twenty-five hundred years earlier, one mutant primate, Lao-Tse, had written: "The greatest is within the smallest." Less than one-one hundredth (0.01) of one percent of the Terran primates were capable of understanding this before 1984. They looked for causality everywhere else: some known as astrologers scanned the distant stars; others known as Marxists scanned economics, etc. They knew that the physicists understood causality better than any other group on their planet, but few of them, even among the physicists, realized how quantum theory applied to their own behavior. Quantum psychology did not begin to emerge until the 1990s.

What was known in their planet as Bell's Theorem-an elementary, kindergarten-level discovery routinely divined on every planet at about the same time as atomic energy and s.p.a.ce travel are beginning-was only twenty years old among them and barely understood even by the physicists. The few quantum theorists, such as Sarfatti, who dared to speculate about "macrocosmic quantum effects"-large systems engaged in quantum-jumping-were usually dismissed as Romantics by their colleagues, despite the fact that each stage of metamorphosis of every living creature, including the Terran primates themselves, was obviously a quantum leap.

The primate Mystics, most of them brain-damaged, endlessly told the other primates to "look within." Most primates a.s.sumed, in primitive Aristotelian fas.h.i.+on, that what was within was some gaseous ent.i.ty which they called "mind" or "soul." Unable to find such an abstraction, they either gave up in despair or took their negative results as a positive revelation and became adherents of the "no-mind" or "no-ego" philosophy of Buddha and David Hume.

Of course if they had truly looked within, scientifically, they would have found that their thoughts, percepts, and reality-tunnels were determined by the structure of the primate nervous system, which was determined by the genetic or molecular design of the primate evolutionary script, which was determined by the laws of quantum biophysics. That is concretely, their brains were shaped by cells shaped by molecules shaped by atoms shaped by quantum probabilities.

Since the quantum connection is nonlocal, it is inevitable that introspection and meditation could discover no "ego" within; within; within and without are Euclidean parameters that do not apply to the quantum world. But the primates could not understand this. When, due to trauma, m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic religious practices, alkaloid herbs, or mere statistical chance, their neuroatomic circuitry propelled them into Quantum Consciousness, they could not conceptualize that they were outside s.p.a.ce-time entirely. s.p.a.ce and time, they still thought even after Einsein, were as solid as walls. They could only imagine, primate fas.h.i.+on, that they were traveling within and without are Euclidean parameters that do not apply to the quantum world. But the primates could not understand this. When, due to trauma, m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic religious practices, alkaloid herbs, or mere statistical chance, their neuroatomic circuitry propelled them into Quantum Consciousness, they could not conceptualize that they were outside s.p.a.ce-time entirely. s.p.a.ce and time, they still thought even after Einsein, were as solid as walls. They could only imagine, primate fas.h.i.+on, that they were traveling in in s.p.a.ce and s.p.a.ce and out of out of their bodies; they called it "astral projection" and devised numerous primate superst.i.tions about it. their bodies; they called it "astral projection" and devised numerous primate superst.i.tions about it.

Similarly, when one of them would begin to learn how to use the metaprogramming circuits in the forebrain, they could not conceptualize that they were peering into alternative quantum probability matrices. Instead, they devised a whole mythology of heavens, h.e.l.ls, purgatories, astral planes, fairy lands, demons, G.o.ds, angels, UFOnauts, etc., to make Euclidean "maps" of such quantum experiences.

We should be charitable to the Terran primates. All planets have gone through such superst.i.tious stages before the HEAD Revolution is complete among them.

When the neuroatomic circuitry, only occasionally released during most of their history, began to function fully in 1984, the primates could not begin to understand what was happening, for all of the above reasons. They were suddenly in communication, not just with one reality-tunnel, but with all possible reality-tunnels. They could see quantum probabilities leading to all possible futures, but they were unable to conceptualize what they saw. The primate brain, always quick to cover ignorance with a primate archetype, projected all their traditional superst.i.tions on what was happening.

Terra was a weird and crazy place for several years. Giant lobsters with ray guns, Tibetan demons, Ignatz the anarchist mouse, and dozens of other fantasy figures were likely to appear at any time, any place, even in churches during funerals or at top-secret governmental meetings. The joke "We're all living in a surrealist novel" gained wide currency, although few realized how close to the truth it was.

The intelligence-raising drug NEURO began to change things a bit after it appeared in 1988. People's fantasies gradually became more sophisticated and philosophical, and their reality-tunnels accordingly adapted. With the publication of Sirag's General Field Theory in 1993, the smarter primates immediately realized what was really occurring on their planet and throughout the cosmos.

They gradually comprehended that all their myths had been memories of the future memories of the future, available to them through the nonlocal activity of the quantum waves making up their brains. Age-old religious visions of Immortality, for instance, they recognized as precapitulations of the inevitable end product of their current longevity research. The "magic carpets" and "seven-league boots" they already had; the New Heaven and New Earth they were rapidly building. The superhuman heroes and heroines of romantic fiction were the humans they were themselves becoming as the HEAD Revolution accelerated them toward greater intellectual efficiency, more flexible emotional equilibrium, neurosomatic rapture, and metaprogramming wisdom.

They understood that the Boddhisattva's Vow, common among the neurosomatic-circuit Eastern primates, was no idle fantasy, either, even though it promised to redeem all sentient beings. With time-travel made possible through the General Field Theory, they could change any past probability wave, creating a new universe where each ent.i.ty would take the best possible path instead of whatever sad paths it had taken to arouse their compa.s.sion and intervention. They understood the words, previously totally opaque, of the Jewish mystic, Jesus, who had said, "All that I do, ye shall do, also; and more." They understood that every political and mystical ideal of freedom, however aborted in its first appearances, was fated to be achieved in some form, in the infinite nonlocal cosmos opening before them.

They understood that the "oneness with earth" so many had discovered in the previous two decades had only been the overture to the discovery of nonlocality, as they shared more and more in oneness with all that is all that is, and all that can be. all that can be.

And they understood, of course the time-honored allegory of the Trick Top Hat, which was just a symbol of the brain. This ritual was pa.s.sed on from generation to generation, since it represented the greatest treasure in the universe, which is shared by all and belongs to none: the faculty of creativity, partially unleashed in each sentient being, fully released at the proper Galactic-genetic time by the HEAD Revolution.