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.And you underwent sensory deprivation.""Well, I lay in bed unable to sleep.""You started seeing colors.Floating colors." Kevin had begun to shout again in excitement; whenhis cynicism vanished he became manic."That's described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead;that's thetrip across to the next world.You were mentally dying! From stress and fear! That's how it's done --reaching into the next reality! The dream-time!"Right now Fat sat on the plastic and chrome couch mentally dying; in fact he was already mentallydead, and in the room he had left, the experts were deciding his fate, passing sentence and judgmenton what remained of him.It is proper that technically qualified non-lunatics should sit in judgment onlunatics.How could things be otherwise?"If they could just get across to the dream-time!" Kevin shouted."That's the only real time; all thereal events happen in the dream-time! The actions of the gods!"Beside Fat the huge old lady held a plastic pan; for hours she had been trying to throw up theThorazine they had forced on her; she believed, she rasped at Fat, that the Thorazine had poison in it,by which her husband -- who had penetrated the top levels of the hospital staff under a variety ofnames -- intended to finish killing her."You found your way into the upper realm," Kevin declared."Isn't that how you put it in yourjournal?"#48.Two realms there are, upper and lower.The upper, derived from hyperuniverse I orYang, Form I of Parmenides, is sentient and volitional.The lower realm, or Yin, Form II ofParmenides, is mechanical, driven by blind, efficient cause, deterministic and withoutintelligence, since it emanates from a dead source.In ancient times it was termed "astraldeterminism." We are trapped, by and large, in the lower realm, but are, through thesacraments, by means of the plasmate, extricated.Until astral determinism is broken, we are noteven aware of it, so occluded are we."The Empire never ended."A small, pretty, dark-haired girl walked silently past Fat and the huge old woman, carrying hershoes.At breakfast time she had tried to smash a window using her shoes and then, having failed,knocked down a six-foot-high black technician.Now the girl had about her the presence of absolutecalm."The Empire never ended," Fat quoted to himself.That one sentence appeared over and overagain in his exegesis; it had become his tag line.Originally the sentence had been revealed to him in agreat dream.In the dream he again was a child, searching dusty used-book stores for rare old sciencefiction magazines, in particular Astoundings.In the dream he had looked through countless tatteredissues, stacks upon stacks, for the priceless serial entitled "The Empire Never Ended." If he could findit and read it he would know everything; that had been the burden of the dream.Prior to that, during the interval in which he had experienced the two-world superimposition, hadseen not only California, U.S.A., of the year 1974 but also ancient Rome, he had discerned within thesuperimposition a Gestalt shared by both space-time continua, their common element: a Black IronPrison.This is what the dream referred to as "the Empire." He knew it because, upon seeing the BlackIron Prison, he had recognized it.Everyone dwelt in it without realizing it.The Black Iron Prison wastheir world. Who had built the prison -- and why -- he could not say.But he could discern one good thing: theprison lay under attack.An organization of Christians, not regular Christians such as those whoattended church every Sunday and prayed, but secret early Christians wearing light gray-coloredrobes, had started an assault on the prison, and with success.The secret, early Christians were filledwith joy.Fat, in his madness, understood the reason for their joy.This time the early, secret, gray-robedChristians would get the prison, rather than the other way around.The deeds of the heroes, in thesacred dream-time.the only time, according to the bushmen, that was real.Once, in a cheap science fiction novel, Fat had come across a perfect description of the Black IronPrison but set in the far future.So if you superimposed the past (ancient Rome) over the present(California in the twentieth century) and superimposed the far future world of The Android Cried Me aRiver over that, you got the Empire, the Black Iron Prison, as the supra- or trans-temporal constant.Everyone who had ever lived was literally surrounded by the iro n walls of the prison; they were allinside it and none of them knew it -- except for the gray-robed secret Christians.That made the early, secret Christians supra- or trans-temporal, too, which is to say present at alltimes, a situation which Fat could not fathom.How could they be early but in the present and thefuture? And if they existed in the present, why couldn't anyone see them
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