A. E. van Vogt

Because of the holidays and because of the subject matter, we're pared down to a handful, but this is the culminating lecture in this entire year, which we have devoted to trying to understand the American tradition, the Hermetic America. And we have, in this last thirteen week section, looked at 20th century America. And we've looked at it in the light of it being a culmination. And we have seen through most of the figures that we have taken, that the American psyche has indeed flowered in the late 20th century, but flowered in a way which shows the power of the unveiled individual being able to step off into an increasingly open parentheses of possibility. And whereas the European mind experiences this as a frightening abyss, the American mind sees this as a pioneering freedom. And so tonight we come to the final figure, A. E. van Vogt, whose work we have lectured on some three and a half years ago. And in that lecture, on Primordial Image Base, we chose Van's work to illuminate possibilities of the mind. And tonight we will see how Van's latest work, Null-A Three, expands the vision which he has had now for over 40 years.

Van is an extraordinary individual. Aside from being one of the great science fiction writers, also is the creator of a language-learning methodology. And this methodology, I was glad to participate in introducing it to the general public when I was in Hollywood for many years. And this program was initially called, in 1979, the 200 Language Club, and he evolved a methodology whereby in certain cassette recording ways, we would be able to learn in a lifetime some two hundred languages. And if you're interested, I have his brochure here, the original brochure, and he has all of these programs still available. Van was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1912, and a lot of his oral reflections are available at UCLA, in the library. A selection of them were made by Fictioneer Books some time ago, and in here, beginning chapter 11, he relates to us that,

“Simon and Schuster, under Jack Goodman, were the first hardcover publishers after World War II to take on a science fiction novel. They published my Astounding serial, The World of Null-A, in 1948. That is, they published a revised version.” And this is the first edition from 1948. And of course, with this Van came into the foreground as one of the great science fiction authors of the world. He also relates that when he “arrived in Los Angeles” - where he still lives - “with a seven-days-a-week writing routine behind me, but I sank and sank and sank, to about one hundred eighty thousand words a year, if that. [And] That's only a $3,000 year.” That's barely surviving.

And so Van began after the Second World War with the publication of The World of Null-A in hardcover. The success of publishing this work led him to write a sequel, and while the Astounding Science Fiction magazines of August 1945, September and October 1945, that had the original series in it. And notice that The World of Null-A comes out August 1945, just about the time that nuclear energy bursts upon the world scene. And the sequel, the Players of Null-A, began coming out in November of 1948 in Astounding Science Fiction Magazine. Later on, The Players was published in several paperbound versions. This one is published by Berkley Books. Many years went by, and it was only in 1984 - last year - that Van finally published the third volume, Null-A Three, so that he has worked for more than 40 years upon this trilogy.

The title Null-A comes from a non-aristotelian approach to mentality. That is to say, the syllogistic mind which Western civilization seems to have believed that it has founded itself upon. And of course, we have seen over the last six years of lecturing that this assumption of an Aristotelian basis to Western thought is not only able to be challenged, but severely impaired. But before we get into Null-A and get into Van's presentation of the flawed Western mind, we should look at another work of his, which in paperbound was entitled, Mission Interplanetary. But in its hardcover version, The Voyage of the Space Beagle. And it’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle that I wish to put before us before we go to Null-A Three, because there is an evolution of concern, of thought, that becomes apparent with this contrast. The greatness of Van's creative mind, the tremendous writing ability. One of Van's pet theories of writing is that every nine hundred words, something should happen, that there should be a twist, a turn, so that the presentation, the experience of reading has its labyrinthine shaping in the human experience.

The Voyage of the Space Beagle, of course, is a updating of Charles Darwin's Great Voyage of the Beagle, which was the exploratory voyage lasting many years that led Darwin to all of his basic research that years later came out in his presentation of evolutionary theory. The voyage of the Beagle then, in the 19th century, was a voyage of basic data gathering in order to establish a base, a differentiation base, upon which the character of life could be established in its evolutionary permutations.

Last week we saw with the lecture on the I Ching, on Khigh Dhiegh’s presentation of the I Ching, a very interesting diagram, the diagram of cosmic principles from the Soong Dynasty in China, illuminating the basic philosophy of the I Ching that instead of starting the mind on a differentiation base - a differentiation of yes and no, of one and zero - instead of starting on a binary polarity, which then in every case yields a sense of identity as the basic tautological definitional mode that the I Ching slips one level down below that and goes to a zero-base of non-differentiation. And we'll see that Van Vogt, in his tremendous insight, without having the Chinese background, ostensibly, discovers in Null-A Three Just this zero-base non-differentiate. And so sidesteps the entire issue of identity of a mind based on tautology, upon a civilization whose basic rationale is ultimately equivalence. Van slips below and away and free from that mentality.

In The Voyage of the Space Beagle we have this time not a ship on the seas of this planet, but we have an enormous spaceship. An enormous spaceship which is going through not just planetary systems, or even interstellar systems, but is eventually making its way out of the galaxy, out of our galaxy, out of the Milky Way. And on its way in the development of the novel, there are increasing dimensions of challenge presented to the crew. There are creatures; there are characters who are encountered, who, in increasing dimension, challenge the completeness of man's ability to respond. On the ship of the Space Beagle it becomes increasingly apparent that all of the crew, in their various scientific modes, are outstripped increasingly by the challenges, and do not have the ability to come up with a creative response that their limited perspectives produce rational understandings of the events occurring, but that there is no effective integration, so that a complete response can be engendered to meet the challenge. And it becomes increasingly apparent in The Voyage of the Space Beagle that there must be, in fact is a need, for a coordinating discipline among human beings. There is just one person aboard the Space Beagle: a man whose name is Gross Benner, who has for his specialty the relationality of all sciences. And Van at this time, early in his career, 1939 - the first story to come out here was in July 1939, Astounding Stories - it began with one of the most exciting beginnings of any science fiction story. In fact, when the University of Southern Illinois reprinted that entire science fiction issue of Astounding Stories as a book form several years ago, they called it the classic that began modern science fiction. It was that issue, it was this story, that catapulted science fiction from a speculative entertainment into a prescience that became the most influential genre in the 20th century. Here's how it began.

“On and on Coeurl prowled. The black, moonless, almost starless night yielded reluctantly before a grim reddish dawn that crept up from his left. It was a vague light that gave no sense of approaching warmth. It slowly revealed a nightmare landscape. Jagged black rock and a black, lifeless plane took form around him. A pale red sun peered above the grotesque horizon. Fingers of light probed among the shadows. And still there was no sign of the family of id creatures that he had been trailing now for nearly a hundred days. He stopped finally, chilled by the reality. His great forelegs twitched with a shuddering movement that arched every razor-sharp claw. The thick tentacles that grew from his shoulders undulated tautly. He twisted his great cat head from side to side, while the hairlike tendrils that formed each ear vibrated frantically, testing every vagrant breeze, every throb in the ether. There was no response. He felt no swift tingling along his intricate nervous system. There was no suggestion anywhere of the presence of the id creatures, his only source of food on this desolate planet. Hopelessly, Coeurl crouched, an enormous catlike figure silhouetted against the dim, reddish sky line, like a distorted etching of a black tiger in a shadow world.”

A nightmare. A nightmare image that in the vast depths of this reality, there are nightmares. That they have a reality. And the poignancy of the reality is to challenge us. And in every instance, if we are not able to come up with a response, it will be our end. And so the theme of The Voyage of the Space Beagle develops this, but the vehicle in which the challenge response takes place, the matrix at this early stage in 1939 that these events unfold, is within the context of a spaceship. It is a spaceship, a machine, a journeying machine, that is the matrix for all of the events that happen, and the only coordinating intelligence within that matrix able to keep it continuing is this protagonist Gross Benner with his interdisciplinary science called “Nexialism.” And it's a special training. And the training is particularly concerned about man not being subject to habitual thought, not being subject to hypnotic image basis, not being subject to the manipulations that come to him through a synchronous patterning always based upon the analogy of outer and inner images, and the further corollary that the polarity between these analogies of outer and inner have a correspondence. And if you wiggle one, the other must wiggle also. That the theme of the coordinating success of man's journeying through this universe is his ability to cut those ties, specifically those ties, so that it is his choice whether he will respond in an analogous way or not, or in some completely new fashion. That his ability to survive at all is dependent upon his success of snipping those ties.

Later on in Voyage of the Space Beagle, “Somebody whispered in Grosvenor's ear, so softly that he could not catch the words. The whisper was followed by a trilling sound, as gentle as the whisper and equally meaningless. Involuntarily, Grosvenor looked around. He was in the film room of his own department, and there was nobody in sight. He walked uncertainly to the door that led to the auditorium door. But no one was there either. He came back to his workbench, frowning, wondering if someone had pointed an encephalo-adjuster at him. It was the only comparison he could think of, for he had seemed to hear a sound. After a moment, that explanation struck him as improbable. Adjusters were effective at short ranges only. More important, his department was shielded against most vibrations. Besides, he was only too familiar with the mental process involved in the illusion he had experienced. That made it impossible for him to dismiss the incident. As a precaution, he explored all five of his rooms and examined the adjusters in his technique room. They were as they ought to be, properly stored away. In silence, Grosvenor returned to the film room and resumed his study of the hypnotic light-pattern variations, which he had developed from the images that the Riim had used against the ship.”

There had been these bird-like creatures on the planet who had developed tremendous psychic abilities to project out hypnotic light patterns and images and it completely baffled the minds of the entire crew, except for Grosvenor, who had realized in time that they were going to be hypnotized, that they were being manipulated, the Riim.

“Terror struck his mind like a blow. Grosvenor cringed. And then there was the whisper again, as soft as before, yet somehow angry now, and unthinkably hostile. Amazed, Grosvenor straightened. It must be an encephalo-adjuster. Somebody was stimulating his mind from a distance with a machine so powerful that the protective shielding of his room was penetrated.”

And so the challenge goes on, and Grosvenor is able to meet the challenge again. And the novel ends; one of the most beautiful poetic endings to a science fiction novel.

He paused and “Grosvenor [then] entered the auditorium room of his department, and saw that his class had again enlarged. Every seat was occupied, and several chairs had been brought in from adjoining rooms. He began his lecture of the evening.”

He is now teaching his fellow human beings on the ship how to survive, how to integrate themselves so that his fellow beings have become his students.

“‘The problems,’” he began, “‘which Nexialism confronts are whole problems. Man has divided life and matter into separate compartments of knowledge and being. And, even though he sometimes uses words [to] indicate his awareness of that wholeness of nature, he continues to behave as if the one, changing universe had many separately functioning parts. The techniques we will discuss tonight…’” Ellipse. “He paused. He had been looking out over his audience, and his gaze had suddenly fastened on a familiar figure well to the rear of the room. After a moment's hesitation, Grosvenor went on. ‘...will show how this disparity between reality and man's behavior can be overcome.’ He went on to describe the techniques, and in the back of the room Gregory Kent” - his archenemy - “took his first notes on the science of Nexialism. And, carrying its little bit of human civilization, the expeditionary ship Space Beagle sped at an ever-increasing velocity through a night that had no end. And no beginning.”

And so, as early as the late 1930s, man was already at work, already bringing up, allowing from himself in a technique that he explained one time as opening himself up to dreams in a waking state. So that instead of having images well up while one was asleep, that in a waking state they would well up and be more poignant and more powerful. And by using his nine hundred word writing technique, man was able to polish the imagery almost like a jeweler cutting facets to it, in a way almost forcing by the adoption of this form the pristine sense of jewel-like wholeness of the theme to come forth. And so Van's work increasingly came to take on this tone where stories revealed a tremendous capacity for visionary wholesomeness for human capacity, especially in the longer novels which increasingly took on the shape of having sequels to them. There was a series called The Weapon Makers - The Weapon Shops of Isher and The Weapon Makers. There was the Null-A series. There have been other series.

In The World of Null-A, years later, we come to a protagonist. Now, instead of being Grosvenor his name is Gosseyn - spelled in a Dutch way, G-O-S-S-E-Y-N - that can be pronounced go-sane, Gilbert Gosseyn. And as a protagonist, Gosseyn is introduced as a small town farm boy who's going to the big city sometime in the 26th century AD, and this big metropolis is the city of the Games Machine. The Games Machine, an enormous building, an enormously complicated computer which has hundreds and hundreds of testing booths and all people at a certain age come and take the tests, almost like a civil service test. And the Games Machine coordinates their capacities with their job horizons, and they're given a place, and they're given certain work passports. And Gilbert Gosseyn comes, and when he sits down, the Games Machine asks him for his name. He gives his name and his background, his place of birth. And the machine says, you're lying. There's no such person. You are not who you say you are. And Grosvenor become Gosseyn now enters upon the biggest challenge of all - who is he then? If he's not who he thought he was, who he remembers that he was, that a tremendously sophisticated machine, the most sophisticated machine ever devised by man, tells him that he is not the identity that he assumed that he was.

The biggest challenge of all. We are not who we think we are. It's been a convenient label. It's been an analogy pasted upon us, which we have accepted, and the only way that we could have accepted it is by believing the polarity, the basic identification tautology, that there must be something in us that corresponds to what we are told is our background. We are the children of so and so. We are born in so and so. We have gone through such and such experiences and we now arrive here - it is not true. Yes, it is true. As long as one is co-opted in the analogy, as long as one accepts the basic tautological base upon which that whole fiction rests. But as soon as one slips down to a zero-base, where there is an undifferentiate, all of that polarity vanishes. Its efficacy is no longer there. One is freed in the most precarious way possible. One is left without any identity whatsoever. You must discover by living, who and what you are. You can't assume anything. And so Gilbert Gosseyn becomes this great mid-20th century American science fiction protagonist.

Well, who am I? Why is it that I have no identity? Why am I the only one? He becomes like a great Gnostic figure, a protagonist for whom the world is seriously flawed precisely in terms of his reality. His reality does not fit anywhere in the pattern of things as they are supposed to be. But he cannot accept non-identity. And so he slips even below that basic tautological principle of being and non-being. The story develops, and in the sequel the story develops even further that Gosseyn has an extra brain. That he, in fact, is a very peculiar kind of an individual, that he is an X-factor in a great power play that is going on in the world as we all are in reality X-factors, we are unknowns.

Our very existence, once conscious as an unknown, jeopardizes any plan that any authority has. Any organization that any group of people have is jeopardized precisely because the deck that they are playing with has finally a joker in it. That whatever game is being played with the cards that count, the joker negates the validity of the game because the whole process of playing it is subject to question - a primordial, basic question.

And so Gilbert Gosseyn becomes the focus increasingly of anybody and everybody who is in a power struggle. They try to assume that he should be on their side, or that he should be rubbed out if he's not going to be on their side. But they dare not rub him out too soon because, who is he anyway? How does he come to be, anyway? Are we all in jeopardy? And through The World of Null-A, the world of Non-Aristotelian thought, Gosseyn discovers, in fact when he dies, when his body is blasted, he wakes up in another identical body - Gilbert Gosseyn 2 - who has all the memories of Gilbert Gosseyn, has in fact the same mind and discovers in himself that he is a perfect clone of Gilbert Gosseyn. And that in some mysterious way there might be other Gilbert Gosseyn’s. There might be a whole series of Gilbert Gosseyn’s. Who has done this? Who has made this? And in fact, there's a mysterious character in The World of Null-A called X. Someone who is a wreck of a human being, has been replaced by plastic and metal and wheels and lights until there's only just the basic brain and neural system left this X.

And in The World of Null-A, towards the end X is saying, as Gosseyn kneels and listens over the still heart, trying to find out about himself.

“‘...I used to wonder if there wasn't someone else. I [used to think] of myself as a queen in the game – in such a setup you would be a pawn in the seventh row, just about ready to queen. But then I would come to a blank, for a queen, no matter how powerful, is only a piece. Who, then, is the player? … Frankly, Gosseyn, I don't think there is one… Once more… …the circle is completing, we are no further ahead…’

“Frantically, Gosseyn fought to hold the connection, but there was a blur, and then nothing. As he strained for more thoughts, he grew conscious of the fantastic thing he was doing. He pictured himself in this shattered, bejeweled building trying to read the mind of a dead man. Surely, in all the universe, this was unique. The personal thought faded, because once more – contact.

“‘...Gosseyn, more than five hundred years ago… I nourished null-A, which someone else started… The secret of immortality could not, of course, be given to the unintegrated, who would, like Thorson, think of it as a means to supreme power…’

“The blur came back, and during the minutes that followed it was evident the cells were losing their unity of personality. Wild cells remained, bewildered groups, masses of neurons, holding their separate pictures unsteadily against the encroaching death. Finally, he caught another coherent thought:
‘...I discovered the galactic base, and visited the universe… [and] I came back and superintended the construction of the Games Machine – only a machine could in the beginning control the undisciplined hordes that lived on Earth… [at that time, five hundred years ago] And above everything else, I chose Venus as the planet where men of null-A could– could–’

“That was all he got. Minutes and minutes passed, and there was only an occasional blur. Gosseyn climbed at last to his feet. Except for one thing, he was satisfied. He felt the glowing excitement of a man who had triumphed over death itself. After a moment, the exception began to bother him. It had been vague, but now it came to the fore, product of an overtone picture that had come from Lavoisseur's brain.

“‘He couldn't have meant that,’ Gosseyn thought shakily.

“But the other things began to fit, the mental telepathy; and besides who else could he be? Feverishly, he went in search of a shave salve. He found a jar in a washroom down the hall. With trembling fingers, he rubbed it over the beard of the still, dead face.

“The beard came off easily into a towel. Gosseyn knelt there looking down at a face that was older than he'd thought, seventy-five [perhaps], possibly eighty years old. It was an unmistakable face, and of itself answered many questions. Here beyond all argument was the visible end-reality of his search.

“The face was his own.”

The World of Null-A ends by discovering that he was a clone of some mysterious man, some odd, weird scientist. The Pawns of Null-A, or The Players of Null-A, as it's called in the science fiction, begins right away. And again, Null-A Abstracts start the chapters. The first abstract here:

“A normal human nervous system is potentially superior to that of any animal’s. For the sake of sanity and balanced development, each individual must learn to orientate himself to the real world around him. There are methods of training by which this can be done.”

We hear this in an Aristotelian type of mentality, and we think the real world, these things, they're not real, they're convenient, they're in fact arbitrary. Well, the purpose is to orient oneself to the real world. One deepens the perception of reality. One goes into the mind. One orients oneself to the mind. One discovers there. It's arbitrary that the basis of the arbitrariness eventually becomes this polarity, this analogy, this tautological identity, that there's nothing rational in one equals one - that's a short circuit. A mentality based upon that is ignorant, but a slight conversion of one equals one to one over one produces a unity, produces a basic ratio of unity. But the base upon which that unity can exist is inescapably an undifferentiate unity, and that, to the mind, becomes nothing. Because it becomes not a one so much as a zero or an infinity, which completely takes away all of the short circuiting, all of the tautology.

In Null-A Three, Van brings a very interesting lecture forth again, a lecture like Grosvenor’s towards the end of The Voyage of the Space Beagle. And in it Van gives us some very interesting Thoughts. He tells us that, the realities underlying existence or nonexistence is not a concern of general semantics. General semantics begins by accepting what is perceivable and operates within the frame of what every normal human, animal, or insect can perceive by way of the perceptive system of each individual. But Gosseyn’s extra brain seems to function on the level of the underlying nothingness. For the extra brain operates in a very peculiar fashion, a fashion which Van comes to identify as a twenty-decimal similarity that by taking an image and refining it, exactly, molecularly, atomically, subatomically to a twenty decimal resolution that any given time-space resolves instantly to any other given time-space when both are resolved to twenty decimal similarity. That being here instantly is being there, wherever that is. That the reality of separation no longer holds and this is done mentally. The shift is from a ship to a mind. The basic matrix of journeying is no longer a ship as it was in the late 1930s, but it becomes man's mind. That's his journeying vehicle. And while the ship operates with speed, the mind operates with non-speed, instantaneously. Its basic mode, its basic mode is nothingness. And we'll come back to this and after we take a little break and we'll see how Van develops this.

Let's take a break.

Van writes in the introduction to Null-A Three: “What does 10, 20, 30 or 40 years do to a reader's recollection of a novel read during one of those distant times? My first novel about General Semantics, ‘The World of Null-A’, was originally published in Astounding Stories (now called Analog) in 1945 as a three-part serial. In those days, editors of magazines that published novels in serial form, either had a low opinion, or a correct opinion, of the ability of the majority of their readers to recall the early installments. So, I, as author, was expected to provide a summary of the first part as a preliminary to Part Two and summaries of both parts One and Two when Part Three was published a month later. In what follows I have combined the ‘best’ parts of these original magazine summaries of the first two installments and then added a summary of Part Three.”

And he goes on to describe the tremendous complexities of the story. And as the story unfolds, there is a tremendous development. There is conflict between power groups on many levels. There are planetary groups, there are interplanetary groups, there are interstellar groups, there are galactic groups. And at last, in Null-A Three, we see that there are intergalactic power groups. So that the extensions of the complications of the polarized mentality extend like a core of conflict through the entire hierarchies of the universe. For we can see that if there are conflicts between power groups, between galaxies, that this goes on indefinitely. That this is a characteristic then, of the universe. Not just of the universe, but the universe in its most integrated and formed way in its mind. Or to be more specific, because Van is extremely precise, mentality anywhere in the universe, because of the nature of its ‘rationality’ based upon identity and on the contrast to identity, non-identity. That mentality anywhere in the universe then suffers from this flaw; or rather suffers from this ignorance. And the ignorance is that this is real. I, in my identity, am real; you in your identity are real. To guard ourselves, to ensure our reality, we should band together against those who would impair us. And ever larger threats of impairment occur. And that the basic development, the basic expansion, the basic pioneering of intelligence in the universe, reveals increasing jeopardy, increasing hierarchies of jeopardy, so that our banding together has to be ever more deviously wrought in order to ensure its survival. We can't just have an alliance. These are new hierarchies of jeopardy, and therefore we must penetrate ever deeper into the ways in which we are bound together. And in doing that, we discover that we are very precarious in our binding together, because what is most precarious is the way in which we are bound together to ourselves. And by having a protagonist like Gosseyn on the loose, he's living proof that it is we who are crazy, we are insane, we are not rational at all. And none of the activities, which we participate in, which we precipitate, which we plan for, are effective.

In Null-A Three, Gosseyn Number Three awakens. “So here he was – his belief – in a room, now; no longer inside the capsule.” He had awakened and he was inside of a capsule, a space capsule. He awakened and it was the first time ever in his existence that he had a sensate feeling. He felt that there was a light sheet over his naked body and that when he reached up, he could raise an arm. And when he reached up about twelve inches, there was a little bit of a cushion, and then no more. And the same on the sides, that he was in some kind of a coffin. He awoke to initial consciousness in a vehicle of death and burial. The perfect symbol, the portal, into a non-realm. But he did not enter that realm from life. But he entered it from non-life. No, that can't be, it wasn't non-life, it must have been a suspension. Suspended animation, one would colloquially say. But Van means it poignantly that he was in a suspension from all of the polarities, all of the identities, all of the mistaken irrationalities. He surfaced into this coffin from that. And it turns out that this is an extraordinary synchronicity, because his awakening and his capsule coincides with the arrival of a tremendous extragalactic ship. At first it's described as a hundred and seventy-eight thousand ships, but later on it becomes refined. Van makes a shift about midway between in the novel, and it's a hundred seventy-eight thousand man ship, a battle ship from another galaxy. And that, in fact, at the end of The Players of Null-A (The Pawns of Null-A) Gilbert Gosseyn Number Two along with several other highly talented, special-minded people – a woman named Leej, L-E-E-J, who's a predictor; a huge man named Enro who's the master of a galactic empire who was able to see into other galactic spaces; and other individuals – have teamed up with Gilbert Gosseyn to try to discover the origin of all of the Gosseyn’s, the origin of all human beings. That we have come here to this galaxy, this Milky Way galaxy, seeded from this other galaxy. And they were trying to return there to solve the mystery. They were trying to use the twenty decimal similarity technique to go from one galaxy to another instantaneously. What happened was that a battleship, the royal battleship of the greatest empire in that galaxy, was instantly transported to this galaxy exactly at the place where Gilbert Gosseyn Three was asleep - can that be the term? Where he was in his capsule and he awakened just at that moment.

And in Null-A Three it's extraordinary because everyone begins to treat him as they treated Gilbert Gosseyn One, only on a much larger level now. Who is he? How does this come to be that he somehow he in himself is the key to all the mysteriousness that has happened? How do we come to be here? Who are you people? Where are we? Tremendous questions because Gilbert Gosseyn Three when he awakens, has no idea of where he is, but he discovers that the context in which he is awakened they do not understand where they are either. That they're even more lost than he is, and that, as the story develops, in fact, as the whole trilogy unfolds itself, increasingly people discover that they don't know what is going on. That they really don't know what is going on. They knew in terms of their plans what was going on. But when conditions surfaced outside those plans, all of their plans were then problematical, if not ambiguous, on a very primordial level. And so they adjusted their plans to these new situations and made larger plans, and then found that this repeated itself again and again, and now the sequence has become intergalactic. Nobody knows what's going on. And Gilbert Gosseyn is a kind of a Socrates – he's the only one who knows that he doesn't know what's going on. Everyone else thinks they know. Because they believe their identity, they believe their plans. He knows that he doesn't know. And he is wise in the Socratic mode. And he's the only one free then to inquire. And he inquires of everyone, through the way in which the storyline, the plot, the mythos unfolds, as it always does. The conscious human being who knows that he isn't this. This is convenient. It's arbitrary. What he is, is yet to be determined.

This was exactly how we began the Hermetic America series. We began the Hermetic America series in January of this year by showing that American civilization is not founded on a European model at all, but is founded upon the most problematical personality of the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin, who didn't know who he was either and continued to grow and reveal throughout his eighty-four years that he was infinitely developable. That's what he was. That the basic nature of man is unknown – we don't know. But we continue to develop, apparently indefinitely, as long as we keep at it.

This was the prototype of the new man. You talk about a new age. We're not talking about a new age in 1960s, 1980s, we're talking about somebody born in 1706. That's a new age to discover that you are infinitely developable, that instead of being a pilgrim in reality, one is really a pioneer, creating the reality as one goes along. And that as soon as you step away from some time-space, that's equally as problematic as the next one that you haven't gotten to. And that the only characteristic moving is the integrity of discoverability. That's no bridge. That's no tightrope even. That's pure space. That's pure timelessness. That seed of personality developed, and developed as we have seen in this whole year long series. Nobody in Franklin's time understood that until he was an old man, and he ran across the first human being that really understood that, and the first human being that understood what Franklin was all about was Thomas Jefferson. And Franklin and Jefferson, getting together, within a couple of weeks what did they produce: the Declaration of Independence.

Is it a declaration of independence of political entities? No. It's a declaration of independence of human beingness in terms of the discoverability of identity, which is as yet unknown. All men are created equal in the sense that there is a zero-base, undifferentiate reality available to all of us. We don't have to accept the polarized identity which is given to us. You don't have to be what your father was. You don't have to stay in the guild. You don't have to stay in the country. You don't have to stay in the city. You don't have to keep even the same name if you don't want. You be who you want to be. That's freedom. And as an old man, we saw how Franklin, who won the war of independence in Paris through his diplomacy – it was never won on the battlefields. The old Franklin said, he was getting ready finally, near the age of eighty, to go home. He said I can finally go home because Mr. Jefferson is coming and he'll be able to take the situation. And he did.

And Jefferson, understanding, as we saw through five lectures, that the whole idea of trying to make George Washington some kind of a king was a poignant psychological dilemma, for the new man was not yet born. That the conditions had to be freshened and made completely new; all the partitions had to be taken down, and the whole idea of uniting thirteen colonies into a seaboard of a country, and this was going to be a new kingdom, and all of this had to be completely opened up. And how are you going to do it? It's like Franklin and Jefferson talked about just among themselves. We can't stop with the Appalachian Mountains. Franklin said, I've heard there's a big river called the Mississippi a thousand miles away. Maybe, maybe we'll do that. Maybe that's a big enough unknown so that we won't settle into this junk mind. And of course, by Jefferson's time, by the time 1800 came around and he had the great revolution – the real American Revolution was in 1800. It was the defeating, as we have seen, of the whole attempt to regress back, reactionary back into the European mind, the tautological mind, the identity that this is what we can play with. And Jefferson said, we're not even going to stop with the Mississippi, we're going to go all the way. We're going to go to the ocean. We're going to go as far as the land goes. When it runs out, maybe we'll take a view.

We saw how he beat Napoleon. How did he beat the Emperor? Jefferson had his attache, James Monroe, go personally into Napoleon and give him the note that Jefferson had written with his own hand. It said, we have taken the survey. You have about twelve thousand French people in the New World. You can arm about eight of nine thousand of them. I am sending twenty thousand Americans a month through the Cumberland Gap. Don't play with me. Tough. But he meant to have a vista so large in terms of the mentality of the time that it was wide open. Manifest Destiny, it was called. We saw how Jefferson stood at Monticello one night and just the waves of angelic light going over his head, heading west, and he knew - that's it. And the image, the symbol that came up in his mind was that of the Great Natural Bridge, he owned that. On his land in Virginia, this great huge rock arch, about two hundred, three hundred high. And a couple hundred years later, that natural bridge was built out of beautiful concrete form and put there in Saint Louis, right on the Mississippi River. The Jefferson Arch on the west side of the Mississippi River saying, “Let my people go through.” That's how this country was founded. This kind of vision.

And if you look back through the Jefferson Arch to the eastern bank of the Mississippi, there the ruins of Cahokia, the great Indian metropolis thousand years before. Same place. Because it's the center. It's the visionary center. It's the place where the mystical geography of the whole North American continent comes to have its focus. You can stand there like old Pan Gu with a Tai Chi, and you can move the whole continent from that. Jefferson Arch is right there across the river.

Then Vogt's vision is like Franklin's. Man is able to be developed indefinitely. His vision is like Jefferson's - we've got to have all of that open to us, otherwise we're going to fall into these mindsets for sure. We've got to not only consider that we are free to go to the moon, or to the planets, or to some stars that we can see; we're free to go to stars that we can't see. We're free to go to whole masses of galaxies which we can't even name, don't even have numbers on. We have that kind of freedom, that kind of a context of reality. What are you going to do with your mind that says that you are you given the set of situations. You're going to accept that? No way. How can you do that? You don't know what you'll be revealed as.

So Gilbert Gosseyn becomes a protagonist of this, develops completely in his extra brain, and develops to the point to where he realizes that not only has one ship come over from another galaxy, but another ship has come over. And that this ship is run by half-human creatures. They're not quite fully human at all, except they have tremendously developed minds. They’re called Troogs, and they have developed a tremendous sense of technology and are able to manufacture machines that approximate what his mind can do - a twenty decimal similarity. And they begin experimenting by watching Gosseyn. And they develop a technology based upon Gosseyn’s movements. But they do not have a quality which Gosseyn has, which he discovered is not a quality of his extra brain, but is a quality of his first human brain. It's a quality that General Semantics brings out. That understanding how to penetrate beneath the assumptions that language delegates, that the mind delegates through labeling, through meaning, that Gosseyn can play. He can invent; he can intuit. He finds a way to challenge every level of authority, every possibility, and then finally comes face to face with the Troogs. And he writes in here about the truth of science and about this particular situation that has come up.

“‘We are Troogs.’ The tone of voice had in it, suddenly, an imperious quality. The expression of personal power evoked from Gosseyn his next question: ‘Are you the–’ he hesitated –’emperor?’ There was a distinct pause. The face and eyes continued to fix on Gosseyn. Finally, almost reluctantly – it seemed – the alien said, ‘We Troogs do not have emperors.’ Another pause. Then: ‘I am the appointed leader of this ship.’ ‘Who appointed you?’ Gosseyn asked. If possible, the great eyes grew even rounder. Then, impatiently: ‘I appointed myself, of course.’ The sudden irritation abruptly produced more words: ‘Look, our authority system is none of your business.’ Gosseyn rejected the meaning with a gentle shake of his head. Then: ‘Sir,’ he said politely, ‘you've made this entire situation my business by your relentless pursuit of me and your attempt to control me.’”

Notice the shift. By being pursued, by being an object of wanting to be controlled, we now come into command of the situation. What is the focus of a mass culture? The masses? No. It's any individual that it comes to focus on. An individual becoming conscious of that is in a position, immediately, of control of the entire situation. He can only lose control of it if he loses sight of his basic reality. As long as he maintains that reality, he is in control. And if his reality is based, as Gosseyn says, is on a unity of reality undifferentiate, there is no end to his freedom. There is no way that he can be controlled. And increasingly, the structure of control unravels itself around the quandary of his non-differentiate existence.

This is what Gandhi told the British Empire. He said, we really don't need an army, all we need is one real satyagrahi – one truth-holder. If there is – he said, it's a lesson in the Bhagavad Gita. It's what Krishna tells Arjuna. The man of truth is the redeemer of all reality. No matter how far it stretches, if he maintains the truth in himself. He is the reality of the universe. All the lies, all the rest of it will unravel eventually. So that maintaining that integrity is all that needs to be done. Gosseyn discovers this in Van Vogt's great Null-A Three.

“‘I should therefore,’” he says, “‘comment that I find your system of government significant. Are you saying, in effect, that no one else was motivated to appoint himself commander-in-chief?’ Pause; then: ‘Several.’ The big eyes stared into his. ‘What happened to their acts of self-appointment?’ In front of him the small mouth twisted slightly. Then: ‘They never reached the appointment stage. When they spoke of their ambitions, nobody listened. So they got the message.’ ‘I gather that, somehow, you had put yourself over?’ Gosseyn spoke the comment in a questioning tone. The impatience was still there. ‘Mr. Gosseyn,’ the leader said, ‘you yourself manifest many qualities of a commander. I feel certain that, among human beings we have aboard, there is not one, considering the particular predicament they are all in, who would not accept your orders. Automatically.’ Particular predicament! It was a relation-to-statement, and therefore within the General Semantics frame of reasoning. The words that had been so casually spoken had an additional revelatory meaning.”

So, “Self-appointed government [it] could work. There was a pragmatism involved in that, in most situations, [and] had a potential for almost sensational success. The self-appointed whatever arriving at a cul-de-sac in his own forward drive – plan – purpose – research; and so not offering a resistance when an assistant asserted leadership by asserting that his – whatever – would work. There was a sort of things-get-done momentum in such an idea. At least a partial certainty of nothing ever slowing down because a single individual could never for long fool his colleagues. Observably, the project he was working on would either be going forward, or it would not be. Such a system could conceivably work best in the area of physics and chemistry. The results were [already] visible; and if a research-leader lagged, there were eager usurpers waiting down the line for the slightest sign of slowdown in creativity. In fact, the leadership system could explain the superiority of Troog science, on the one hand, and a misuse of it, on the other.”

Is it allegory? Is it allegory? No.

“[but,] obviously, psychology, and the so-called social sciences, as well as humanitarian ideas, could never be observably true. In those fields, there could, as on earth, be ‘schools’ with the usual variant beliefs. It was in such areas of study that General Semantics offered the individual a method for avoiding the need for certainty.”

A method not of finding certainty, but of avoiding the addictive need for certainty, because certainty is always then in terms of a partiality, always involved identity and identification. It's the addiction; it's like the ultimate addiction, the need for certainty. Gilbert Gosseyn challenges the Troog in front of his friends and finds that the man is unable, the being, the alien, is unable to handle the reality of Gosseyn, and quickly one of his colleagues leaps to the fore and says, I'm the new leader, and the first decision he makes is going to work with Gosseyn. He's going to accept the situation instead of accepting it as a challenge, which becomes a quandary. He accepts it that Gosseyn is going to help them get back to their own galaxy, and Gosseyn immediately realizes that he has unraveled the entire structure of this alien threat. And in doing so, he has also unraveled the structure of the intergalactic wars. And by taking that context of jeopardy away, all down the line, all of the polarized realities which have been compartmentalizing, people also lose their momentum, lose their addictive surrealness, the vitality of the spell is lessened, and almost as if it were like Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream, where all the levels of magic are finally working again together in a single unity through the world of fairies, through the world of royalty, through the world of men and women, down into the elementals, the entire universe of beings working together in one smooth coordinate unity produces a marriage, produces the Mysterium Coniunctionis, the meeting of opposites, and the shift, the transformation away from the dull round of permutations that trapped them on the rim in an imaginative projection, collapses and transforms from permutation into transformation. And a unity occurs – symbolized by the marriage, and Gilbert Gosseyn Three.

“She smiled suddenly, as if her own reasoning had brought a sudden inner release. ‘So I think conditions have changed. What do you think?’ He said simply, ‘I hope you realize that I'm the only father he'll ever accept.’ With that, without a word, the silken, beautiful female being stood up, and, without a word, came over, and, exactly as a mother [would], whether trained in General Semantics or not, put her arms around him. The kiss he gave her was accepted in a way that telegraphed adequate acceptance. When she drew back, she said, ‘I think we’d better go into my bedroom and close and lock the door… It was a triumph of one level of reality over another– Gosseyn deduced, [and] as he followed her across that beautiful room into a [fantastically] elegant bedroom. He directed his thought at his alter ego: ‘Gosseyn Two,’ [he said,] ‘turn your attention elsewhere!’

I've left a lot out, but I think you'll be interested in reading it for yourself. Thank you so much for coming.