Touching the golden fish with one slender finger, the girl said, "This is a sign used by the early Christians."
Instantly, Fat experienced a flashback. He remembered -- just for a half-second. Remembered ancient Rome and himself: as an early Christian; the entire ancient world and his furtive frightened life as a secret Christian hunted by the Roman authorities burst over his mind... and then he was back in California 1974 accepting the little white bag of pain pills.
A month later as he lay in bed unable to sleep, in the semi-gloom, listening to the radio, he started to see floating colors. Then the radio shrilled hideous, ugly sentences at him. And, after two days of this, the vague colors began to rush toward him as if he were himself moving forward, faster and faster; and, as I depicted in my novel A Scanner Darkly, the vague colors abruptly froze into sharp focus in the form of modern abstract paintings, literally tens of millions of them in rapid succession.
Meta-circuits in Fat's brain had been disinhibited by the fish sign and the words spoken by the girl.
It's as simple as that.
A few days later, Fat woke up and saw ancient Rome superimposed on California 1974 and thought in koine Greek, the lingua franca of the Near East part of the Roman world, which was the part he saw. He did not know that the koine was their lingua franca; he supposed that Latin was. And in addition, as I've already told you, he did not recognize the language of his thoughts even as a language.
Horselover Fat is living in two different times and two different places; i.e. in two space-time continua; that is what took place in March 1974 because of the ancient fish-sign presented to him the month before: his two space-time continua ceased to be separate and merged. And his two identities -- personalities -- also merged. Later, he heard a voice thing inside his head:
"There's someone else living in me and he's not in this century."
The other personality had figured it out. The other personality was thinking. And Fat -- especially just before he fell asleep at night -- could pick up the thoughts of this other personality, as recently as a month ago; which is to say, four-and-a-half years after the compartmentalization of the two persons broke down.
Fat himself expressed it very well to me in early 1975 when he first began to confide in me. He called the personality in him living in another century and at another place "Thomas."
"Thomas," Fat told me, "is smarter than I am, and he knows more than I do. Of the two of us Thomas is the master personality." He considered that good; woe unto someone who has an evil or stupid other-personality in his head!
I said, "You mean once you were Thomas. You're a reincarnation of him and you remembered him and his -- "
"No, he's living now. Living in ancient Rome now. And he is not me. Reincarnation has nothing to do with it."
"But your body," I said.
Fat stared at me, nodding. "Right. It means my body is either in two space-time continua simultaneously, or else my body is nowhere at all."
Entry #14 from the tractate; The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three-dimensional and not in space or time. The information fed to us we hypostatize into the phenomenal world.
Entry # 30, which is a restatement for emphasis: The phenomenal world does not exist; it is a hypostasis of the information processed by the Mind.
Fat had scared the shit out of me. He had extrapolated entries #14 and #30 from his experience, inferred them from discovering that someone else existed in his head and that someone else was living in a different place at a different time -- two thousand years ago and eight thousand miles away.
We are not individuals. We are stations in a single Mind. We are supposed to remain separate from one another at all times. However, Fat had received by accident a signal (the golden fish sign) intended for Thomas. It was Thomas who dealt in fish signs, not Fat. If the girl hadn't explained the meaning of the sign, the breakdown of compartmentalization would not have occurred. But she did and it did. Space and time were revealed to Fat -- and to Thomas! -- as mere mechanisms of separation. Fat found himself viewing a double exposure of two realities superimposed, and Thomas probably found himself doing the same. Thomas probably wondered what the hell foreign language was happening in his head. Then he realized it wasn't even his head:
"There's someone else living in me and he's not in this century." That was Thomas thinking that, not Fat. But it applied to Fat equally.
But Thomas had the edge over Fat, because, as Fat said, Thomas was smarter; he was the master personality. He took over Fat, switched him off wine and onto beer, trimmed his beard, had trouble with the car... but more important, Thomas remembered -- if that is the word -- other selves, one in Minoan Crete, which is from 3000 b.c.e. to 1100 b.c.e., a long, long time ago. Thomas even remembered a self before that: one which had come to this planet from the stars.
Thomas was the ultimate non-fool of Post Neolithic times. As an early Christian, of the apostolic age; he had not seen Jesus but he knew people who had -- my God, I'm losing control, here, trying to write this down. Thomas had figured out how to reconstitute himself after his physical death. All the early Christians knew how. It worked through anamnesis, the loss of amnesia which -- well, the system was supposed to work this way: when Thomas found himself dying, he would engram himself on the Christian fish sign, eat some strange pink -- the same pink color as in the light which Fat had seen -- some strange pink food and drink from a sacred pitcher kept in a cool cupboard, and then die, and when he was reborn, he would grow up and be a later person, not himself, until he was shown the fish sign.
He had anticipated this happening about forty years after his death. Wrong. It took almost two thousand years.
In this way, through this mechanism, time was abolished. Or, put another way, the tyranny of death was abolished.
The promise of eternal life which Christ held out to his little flock was no hoax. Christ had taught them how to do it; it had to do with the immortal plasmate which Fat talked about, the living information slumbering at Nag Hammadi century after century. The Romans had found and murdered all the homoplasmates -- all the early Christians crossbonded to the plasmate; they died, the plasmate escaped to Nag Hammadi and slumbered as information on the codices.
Until, in 1945, the library was discovered and dug up -- and read. So Thomas had to wait -- not forty years -- but two thousand; because the golden fish sign wasn't enough. Immortality, the abolition of time and space, comes only through the Logos or plasmate; only it is immortal.
We are talking about Christ. He is an extra-terrestrial life form which came to this planet thousands of years ago, and, as living information, passed into the brains of human beings already living here, the native population. We are talking about interspecies symbiosis.
Before being Christ he was Elijah. The Jews know all about Elijah and his immortality -- and his ability to extend immortality to others by "dividing up his spirit." The Qumran people knew this. They sought to receive part of Elijah's spirit.
"You see, my son, here time changes into space."