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up to God, or the Ultimate Mind, which lay behind it. He wrote:
    #38. From loss and grief the Mind has become deranged. Therefore we, as parts of the universe, the Brain, are partly deranged.
    Obviously he had extrapolated into cosmic proportions from his own loss of Gloria.
    #35. The Mind is not talking to us but by means of us. Its narrative passes through us and its sorrow infuses us irrationally. As Plato discerned, there is a streak of the irrational in the World Soul.
    Entry #32 gives more on this:
    The changing information which we experience as world is an unfolding narrative.
It tells about the death of a woman
(italics mine). This woman, who died long ago, was one of the primordial twins. She was one half of the divine syzygy. The purpose of the narrative is the recollection of her and of her death. The Mind does not wish to forget her. Thus the ratiocination of the Brain consists of a permanent record of her existence, and, if read, will be understood this way. All the information processed by the Brain -- experienced by us as the arranging and rearranging of physical objects -- is an attempt at this preservation of her; stones and rocks and sticks and amoebae are traces of her. The record of her existence and passing is ordered onto the meanest level of reality by the suffering Mind which is now alone.
    If, in reading this, you cannot see that Fat is writing about himself, then you understand nothing.
    On the other hand, I am not denying that Fat was totally whacked out. He began to decline when Gloria phoned him and he continued to decline forever and ever. Unlike Sherri and her cancer, Fat experienced no remission. Encountering God was not a remission. But probably it wasn't a worsening, despite Kevin's cynical views. You cannot say that an encounter with God is to mental illness what death is to cancer: the logical outcome of a deteriorating illness process. The technical term -- theological technical term, not psychiatric -- is theophany. A theophany consists of a self-disclosure by the divine. It does not consist of something the percipient does; it consists of something the divine -- the God or gods, the high power -- does. Moses did not create the burning bush. Elijah, on Mount Horeb, did not generate the low, murmuring voice. How are we to distinguish a genuine theophany from a mere hallucination on the part of the percipient? If the voice tells him something he does not know
and could not know,
then perhaps we are dealing with the genuine thing and not the spurious. Fat knew no
koine
Greek. Does this prove anything? He did not know about his son's birth defect -- at least not consciously. Perhaps he knew about the near-strangulated hernia unconsciously, and simply did not want to face it. There exists, too, a mechanism by which he might have known the
koine;
it has to do with phylogenic memory, the experience of which has been reported by Jung: he terms it the collective or racial unconscious. The ontogeny
    
    
    -- that is,
     -- th
    e individual recapitulates the phylogeny -- that is, the species -- and since this is generally accepted, then maybe here lies a basis for Fat's mind serving up a language spoken two thousand years ago. If there were phylogenic memories buried in the individual human mind, this is what you might
    
    
    expect to find. But Jung's concept is speculative. No one, really, has been able to verify it.
    If you grant the possibility of a divine entity, you cannot deny it the power of self-disclosure; obviously any entity or being worthy of the term "god" would possess, without effort, that ability. The real question (as I see it) is not, Why theophanies? but, Why aren't there more? The key concept to account for this is the idea of the
deus absconditus,
the hidden, concealed, secret or unknown god. For some reason Jung regards this as a notorious idea. But if Godexists, he must be a
deus absconditus --
with the exception of his rare theophanies, or else he does not exist at all. The