TLS signed “"Love, Phil," who adds Greek characters below, "ΙΧΘΥΣ,” two pages, 8.5 x 11, August 31, 1981. Letter to science fiction author Patricia Warrick, in full: “I enjoyed very much talking with you tonight. After our conversation I thought over in my mind the question, What does constitute the ultimate revelation insofar as I have understood and experienced it? This is not my latest, newest theory; this is my distillation from all my years of searching, my satoris, my mystical and epistemological experiences…I offer it to you not as the truth but the truth as I, personally, have found it:
The Great Enlightenment comes—is—at the moment when you recognize something in world as familiar, and from this recognition—called by Plato anamnesis—comes the realization that world, creation, is your creation, that you are Pantocrator. This world that you see it is an objectification of your own prior thought-formations; it is substantial now, but originally it consisted of ideas (Plato's eide); that is, it has two modes of existence: first as ideas in a mind—and it is your mind—and then as objective, substantial creation coming back at you- as-percepient. Thus you are not what you thought you are, and you have an origin and nature different from what you supposed; you have a history, and if that history is followed backward in time (and up the ladder of ascending ontology) you arrive at the Absolute, call it Ch'ang Tao, or Brahman, or God, or the one, or the Good, or the Prime Mover—names do not matter; perhaps it has no name. This realization is the Awakening, but it leads, after a time, to further realizations equally great, which ineluctably follow, and carry equal weight; if you came from this Absolute, it follows that you will inevitably return; this is something that cannot be doubted; it is understood to be indubitable. It is as indubitable a truth as the truth of your origin.
But there is more. You and this Absolute, although in a sense identical, are, paradoxically, different; this is the I-Thou relationship expressed by Martin Buber. When you return to this Absolute you will not be extinguished or absorbed; you will not merge with it and disappear; thus although you are it, you are also not it. The esse (einai, Sein) of you and it is identical, and yet—well this cannot be explained, only realized. And this leads inevitably to the greatest of the mystical paradoxes, for in the moment that you catch sight of this Absolute (God, the One, the Good, Brahman) you cry out, ‘Keep me from you longer; do not let me return now; for I love you so much that I wish to be kept away from you longer—I wish to postpone the joy of return. But, in this separation from you, I now know of you and I now know what I am and where I came from, and this joy, being infinite, is what I must retain; the joy of separation from you is greater than the joy of returning to you; and yet the joy of anticipated return is what makes the joy of separation what it is. Did I not know that it is inevitable that I will return, this separation would be no joy.’
And so, while sensing the presence of the Absolute, you move away from it, precisely because you love it so; and the quality that it reveals to you when you at last perceive it is: beauty. As the Sufis teach. The essence of God is not love nor wisdom nor power nor goodness but beauty. And creation serves the purpose of a medium by and through which this beauty manifests itself in an infinity of infinities; viz: there are an infinite number of beautiful things (the pluralization of the One) and each one of this infinitude is, itself, alone, infinitely beautiful. Thus beauty is the only infinitude that yields up an infinity of infinitudes; there is only one goodness, only one love, only one power, only one wisdom, but there is an infinitude of infinities of beauty; beauty can be broken down—pluralized, multiplied, divided—infinitely, and each fragment remains infinitely beautiful; so beauty is the ultimate infinity, possessing an infinity of axes. This is recognized in the arts, and it is in the arts in the aesthetic sensibility—that God is best understood, and this the Sufis teach. True, goodness can be infinite (God is infinitely good); wisdom can be infinite; God is infinitely wise, and so forth, but the fragments of wisdom, the fragments of goodness, the fragments of love, being fragments are incomplete, and so, when manifested in this world lack the ontological completeness that they have as when they exist in the Absolute; in the fall from hypostasis to hypostasis (from Kether to Malkuth) they all lose something with each drop; but beauty does not.
Thus, knowing your origin and knowing your ultimate return, you ask to stay in the world exactly where and as you are now, being exactly what you are now, with no change whatsoever: who, where, what you are is exactly right, except that you know now what you did not formerly know: you know your origin, you know your nature, you know you will return to your origin, and, most of all, you have in this lifetime, not in the next, experienced God/the Absolute/the source and goal/your own true nature; but you put it by and go on exactly as before. So the person who truly knows God does not wish to leave this lower hypostasis, at least not now, and this is not because he desires to help others find Liberation; he desires nothing; he is content in what he knows; he is supremely joyous. And this is what the Divine signifies for him: entry into perfect joy. And everywhere in this lower world he finds the autograph of God, expressed as perfect beauty; fragmented beauty and still complete, the great paradox of God's ultimate nature: divided and yet infinite, and here. This sums up all that I have experienced and learned. I do not say it is original, but I say (for me) it is true.” In fine condition, with a rusty paperclip impression to the upper left corner. Accompanied by the original mailing envelope.
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