Computus, in Christendom contents i. Computus, in Christendom ii. 2012 was not the end of Reality iii. autist Yahweh, TempleOS programmer iv. Zero not a year v. Religion is a landing strip for god vi. the Total Recall dilemma vii. world may resemble god by aseity viii. dream of Richard Feynman i. Computus, in Christendom Computus in Christendom is calculating Easter. Gauss solved it for the Julian & Gregorian calendars unto Eternity, and thereby solved his own birthday: which his mother knew only as a Wednesday, as a week & one day before the Feast of the Ascension. Turing, on calculating Christmas: as a small child I was quite unable to predict when it would fall, I didn't even realize that it came at regular intervals.1 1 Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma 1983 ii. 2012 was not the end of Reality 2012 was not, for the Mayans, the end of Reality. it was the end of a Great Cycle of 5,125 years, of the Fourth Great Cycle and the first one with humans in it. according to the Popol Vuh, the first three Cycles were failed worlds. by world the Mayans may have meant what we'd scale to Universe. mapped onto our Big Bang cosmology, the Fourth Great Cycle took fourteen billion years. those fourteen billion years, run within a Sim, could be 5125 years in the Sim's host-world. or: "the Mayans" [Masters of the Sim] re-run our cosmos from a pivotal recent save-point, the advent of the City, say. iii. autist Yahweh, TempleOS programmer Terry himself, chuckling over his low-bit Sim of Exodus to Apocalypse: Beg for Meat. . . .uh they got sick of the manna, and uh they wanted meat, and god gave em meat, and they got sick, ha ha, and died, hyuh hyuh hyuh. so this really works, if you talk to god, he'll talk to you . . . Third Temple prophecies measure in cubits, which now imply qubits, that the Temple is informational and its architect the Israeli David Deutsch, et cet. iv. Zero not a year around its god, a world would bend. Time itself would warp around the deity, our History center BC/AD on it. the Infinite is void-like, or massive. by vacuum or gravity, we'd warp in its vicinity. Zero is not a year: it's a center we infer, as in a Sphere. retrodicting back to T=0, to god's initial Act, our Unit of measure fines into the Infinitessimal. the ticking seconds sub-divide to nano, femto, atto, zepto. Time is slow in early Inflation. early Time mimics the Eternal. forward to the Zed-event, where god descends. our measure of Apocalypse shall sub-divide: from Epoch & Age, to Century & Decade, to tweets-per-second on the Incoming. macassar, a grooming oil for men: "with secret ingredients used by the ancients of Makassar!" this is the mid-Seventeenth Century, in Marketing history. our measure shortens, the eventstream stretches & subdivides. in the annals of America, maximal graining. the NSA memsheds swell yet we'll round the Rubik's Cube to the decade, to a widely-played toy of the 1980s. the patent shows Day/Month/Year, but History tells a story. we'll curate the archive, we'll de-select & highlight. a cursor flash awaits your every query. yet space shall be apportioned in your Gibbons tome, your half a million words on the City from the murder of our last Homo sibling on the Steppes to the Age of Intelligent Machines. how many pages on numinous Persons, on just the Jain munis? a section on '70s electronica, fine: but how many synthesizers will you name? Apocalypse is total clarity, maximum info at the end of History. approached asymptotically, perhaps. Apocalypse is total clarity, is thus the end of History. the Future is our imperfect info of it: with perfect info, the Future resolves into the Present, is the immediate content of consciousness. if god were arriving, the Archons would distract us with their best simulacra of Eternity, e.g. with a practical infinity of excellent TV. v. Religion is a landing strip for god What if we could "set a trap for God", a place where God could not resist manifesting His Will?2 2 Bruce Damer, The God Detector: A Thought Experiment, 2008 Isaiah's Messiah is vague enough that several boys are bound to self-identify. the Gospels / Puranas / Golden Age Comics are siddhi-triggers for the child-god, get him to believe in his powers. the Passion / Sacrifice, an everywhere-meme to remind him of his mission. Religion is a landing strip for god. a sequence of lights, set to receive him. a paradox of Incarnation: the alien must localize, so lose its alienness. the alien must cognitively localize, identify with his environs so risk amnesia. Religion is for god. we built it for him, the Temple where we call him down in chorus. in a later age of disuse & decline, a tourist god wanders thru, and self-realizes. the idols hold poses that mirror him. their smiles are a secret he solves. the mantra was for him: tat tvam asi. Religion is for god. in prophecy, we hope for his arrival; these same tales remind him he's here. our prophecies co-produce the Messiah. The interior felt like a synagogue, but there were no scrolls or altar. Except for low wooden benches arranged in rows, the entire space was devoted to paintings that filled the walls on all sides. All the paintings were of him and his life, both past and future.3 i'm saying each panel is itself a temple, a kind of temple, a whole Messianic tradition. and just as the Vega radio pulse encodes 2D images that link into a 3D-rotatable rendering, the several messiahs & avatars cohere into a robust Person. the several iconographies, the castings thru decades of Bible pics, when layered with the proper opacities show a facial composite that shocks the young artist into godhood. 3 Deepak Chopra, Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment [HarperCollins 2008] p 190 a Recognition Tale with many cool variants, e.g. The Man Who Fell to Earth: our prophecies compell a crash-landed alien to martyrdom. a tragic case of mistaken ID: instead of getting home, he's killed by Rome. vi. the Total Recall dilemma what's more likely, the Doc demands: A you're an interplanetary super-agent, your cover deep as amnesia; or B you're deep into an ego trip, a Savior Sim. in favor of A, remember we're watching a movie. odds aren't bad it's a Hero story. Saviors are popular with writing staff. are chosen as Protagonists. in favour of B: delusional messiahs make a good story. The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, the tragi-comic pseudo-Hero they are chosen, too. for Quail / Quaid, B is hard to dismiss. i'm the One? of all the numberless beings? his theory re his eerie fit with ancient writ, his messianic sympathies, should be cautious, that i'm tripping. Dick's heroes are often deluded: that they're normal. a planet's fate does depend on Ragle Gumm, in Time Out of Joint. total recall, anamnesis, wakens Quaid/Quail from the quotidian. Dick himself wonders, Why me? why did Zebra wink at me? [18:23] Admittedly this is a more prosaic explanation, but I can see where, unable to understand the programming and re-programming controlling me, my mind would come to the psychologically necessary conclusion that it was God, and would project the theophany, etc. i.e., generate Zebra by projection. Also, in 3-74 I may have suffered a lurid schizophrenic episode because of the inordinate stress, I regressed to such a primitive stage that I animated my environment. I saw a world of 2,000 years ago because I had regressed into the racial unconscious. amphetamine abuse, pareidolic projection sceptical lemmas Dick allows, holds in abeyance till death. he's deep in aporia, dazzled for life by the pink info-beam. though small & playful, ever peripheral, Zebra is VALIS: the awesome Mysterium that "bursts the bounds of interpretation", in Otto's formulation. Q: But what about the 'Acts" material in Tears and it agreeing with what I remembered in 2-74 upon seeing the fish sign, and saw a month later? A: As early as 1970 archaic contents of my mind were overpowering me. This shows up in Ubik and 3 Stigmata. I had been partially psychotic for years, and in 3-74 I broke down totally. Due to actual stress. (The IRS business.) Like Cordwainer Smith, I was taken over by my own S-F universe. Schizophrenia with religious and paranoid coloring of the ecstatic type. A sense of the "cosmic" vast mystical forces, with me in the center (sic). Like a titanic psychedelic drug trip. I was probably secreting a mescalinelike autotoxic substance not well understood.4 he makes the Doc's case, in pages like these. yet the Doc is his concoction: an Interlocutor whom Dick summons into playspace, then dismisses with writerly mastery; yet whose argument lingers. 4 The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. p 370-71 what are the odds you're the saviour of Mars? if Cosmos is a story by Philip K. Dick, then Quaid/ Quail could be both the Messiah, and some schlub in a Messiah Sim. Messiah is the star of cosmic History to People of the Book. yet the book you're star of is shelved in a Borges library: one spine in an endless row of selectables. We may indeed suspect that the real power of historical events lies in their descriptions; only by virtue of their passage into language can they continue to occur, and once recorded (even if no more than gossip), they become peculiarly atemporal, residing in that shelved-up present which passes for time in a library, and subject to a special kind of choice, since i can choose now to read about the war on the Peloponnesus or the invasion of Normandy5 my pulling book from shelf is an act of Genesis. in reading Dick, Quail/Quaid is spoken into being. 5 William Gass, "Imaginary Borges and His Books", in Fiction and the Figures of Life [Knopf, 1970], p. 126. my assessment of the Exegesis is like Hardy's take on the Ramanujan letter: He figured that Ramanujan's theorems "must be true, because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them"6 VALIS is either [i] real, and Dick its prophet; or [ii] Dick's invention, spun from his life's meagre input in which case The Exegesis is a supreme Sci Fi, and Dick its god-level author. 6 Robert Kanigel, The Man Who Knew Infinity: a Life of the Genius Ramanujan [Scribners, 1991] vii. world may resemble god by aseity rather than depend on god, Creation might resemble god by aseity. to us, the world is god-like: a regression of many infinities into mystery. what's best in Shakespeare is hardest to explicate, so keeps us performing his plays we're busy, still, translating him. his Sonnets are weak, though always worth reading. i do not say they're bad. they're Outsider Art, songpoems that ape a genre yet are utterly sui generis since there's so much of him in them. i do not mean confirmable biography, but his own sexual anxiety on the page. whoever he was, he knew the cuckold intimately. he's the Mason removed, in his Plays. by his sacrifice, his quiet recession from the stage, his world is granted life & autonomy. viii. dream of Richard Feynman the Incarnation may be ecclesial, this time, a Messiah emergent from our loving interactions - why Richard Feynman put half his Nobel prize in the Congo to compound there: faster than the half he kept domestic. Time is maybe finer in environs where the people still rely on love for mutual survival so interest compounds extra, at a rate you could tabulate a micro-penny extra per century, say. Feynman was a lapsed Jew, so open to the thesis of Jesus. Feynman was a gambling man. Feynman liked to strew his future with possible trips to active centers of bongo he came to Earth enticed by the prospect of a burgeoning Physics in a still-active center of bongo - so why not check his growing Pile in person while he's at it? Feynman found the bongo independent of the Beats: w/out smoking hash with Corso et al, and he didn't scout desert with eden abhey, yet learned to draw quanta like the California rock art - so far as i know from a dream i come out of, writing down at 2 a.m. and i see its absurdity. yet what should i say: that i just dreamt Feynman told me all this, slapping my chest for emphasis, getting us drunk & cracking me up or Richard Feynman came to me, in a dream?