"My dear people, we are already the children of God but what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed; all we know is, that we shall be like him because we shall see him as he really is." (1 John 3:1/2.)

It can be argued that this is the most important statement in the New Testament; certainly it is the most important not-generally-known statement. We shall be like him. That means that man is isomorphic with God. We shall see him as he really is. There will occur a theophany, at least to some. Fat could base the credentials for his whole encounter on this passage. He could claim that his encounter with God consisted of a fulfillment of the promise of 1 John 3:1/2 -- as Bible scholars indicate it, a sort of code which they can read off in an instant, as cryptic as it looks. Oddly, to a certain extent this passage dovetails with the Nag Hammadi typescript that Dr. Stone handed to Fat the day Fat got discharged from North Ward. Man and the true God are identical -- as the Logos and the true God are -- but a lunatic blind creator and his screwed-up world separate man from God. That the blind creator sincerely imagines that he is the true God only reveals the extent of his occlusion. This is Gnosticism. In Gnosticism, man belongs with God against the world and the creator of the world (both of which are crazy, whether they realize it or not). The answer to Fat's question, "Is the universe irrational, and is it irrational because an irrational mind governs it?" receives this answer, via Dr. Stone: "Yes it is, the universe is irrational; the mind governing it is irrational; but above them lies another God, the true God, and he is not irrational; in addition that true God has outwitted the powers of this world, ventured here to help us, and we know him as the Logos," which, according to Fat, is living information.

Perhaps Fat had discerned a vast mystery, in calling the Logos living information. But perhaps not. Proving things of this sort is difficult. Who do you ask? Fat, fortunately, asked Leon Stone. He might have asked one of the staff, in which case he would still be in North Ward drinking coffee, reading, walking around with Doug.

Above everything else, outranking every other aspect, object, quality of his encounter, Fat had witnessed a benign power which had invaded this world. No other term fitted it: the benign power, whatever it was, had invaded this world, like a champion ready to do battle. That terrified him but it also excited his joy because he understood what it meant. Help had come.

The universe might be irrational, but something rational had broken into it, like a thief in the night breaks into a sleeping household, unexpectedly in terms of place, in terms of time. Fat had seen it -- not because there was anything special about him -- but because it had wanted him to see it.

Normally it remained camouflaged. Normally when it appeared no one could distinguish it from ground -- set to ground, as Fat correctly expressed it. He had a name for it.

Zebra. Because it blended. The name for this is mimesis. Another name is mimicry. Certain insects do this; they mimic other things: sometimes other insects -- poisonous ones -- or twigs and the like. Certain biologists and naturalists have speculated that higher forms of mimicry might exist, since lower forms -- which is to say, forms which fool those intended to be fooled but not us -- have been found all over the world.

What if a high form of sentient mimicry existed -- such a high form that no human (or few humans) had detected it? What if it could only be detected if it wanted to be detected? Which is to say, not truly detected at all, since under these circumstances it had advanced out of its camouflaged state to disclose itself. "Disclose" might in this case equal "theophany." The astonished human being would say, I saw God; whereas in fact he saw only a highly evolved ultra-terrestrial life form, a UTI, or an extra-terrestrial life form (an ETI) which had come here at some time in the past... and perhaps, as Fat conjectured, had slumbered for nearly two thousand years in dormant seed form as living information in the codices at Nag Hammadi, which explained why reports of its existence had broken off abruptly around 70 a.d.

Entry #33 in Fat's journal (i.e. his exegesis):

This loneliness, this anguish of the bereaved Mind, is felt by every constituent of the universe. All its constituents are alive. Thus the ancient Greek thinkers were hylozoists.

A "hylozoist" believes that the universe is alive; it's about the same idea as pan-psychism, that everything is animated. Pan-psychism or hylozoism falls into two belief-classes:

1) Each object is independently alive.

2) Everything is one unitary entity; the universe is one thing, alive, with one mind.

Fat had found a land of middle ground. The universe consists of one vast irrational entity into which has broken a high-order life form which camouflages itself by a sophisticated mimicry; thereby as long as it cares to it remains -- by us -- undetected. It mimics objects and causal processes (this is what Fat claims); not just objects but what the objects do. From this, you can gather that Fat conceives of Zebra as very large.

After a year of analyzing his encounter with Zebra, or God, or the Logos, whatever, Fat came first to the conclusion that it had invaded our universe; and a year later he realized that it was consuming -- that is, devouring -- our universe. Zebra accomplished this by a process much like transubstantia t ion. This is the miracle of communion in which the two species, the wine and bread, invisibly become the blood and body of Christ.

Instead of seeing this in church, Fat had seen it out in the world; and not in micro-form but in macro-form, which is to say, on a scale so vast that he could not estimate its limits. The entire universe, possibly, is in the invisible process of turning into the Lord. And with this process comes not just sentience but -- sanity. For Fat this would be a blessed relief. He had put up with insanity for too long, both in himself and outside himself. Nothing could have pleased him more.

If Fat was psychotic, you must admit that it is a strange sort of psychosis to believe that you have encountered an in-breaking of the rational into the irrational. How do you treat it? Send the afflicted person back to square one? In that case, he is now cut off from the rational. This makes no sense, in terms of therapy; it is an oxymoron, a verbal contradiction.

But an even more basic semantic problem lies exposed, here. Suppose I say to Fat, or Kevin says to Fat, "You did not experience God. You merely experienced something with the qualities and aspects and nature and powers and wisdom and goodness of God." This is like the joke about the German proclivity toward double abstractions; a German authority on English literature declares, "Hamlet was not written by Shakespeare; it was merely written by a man named Shakespeare." In English the distinction is verbal and without meaning, although German as a language will express the difference (which accounts for some of the strange features of the German mind).

"I saw God," Fat states, and Kevin and I and Sherri state, "No, you just saw something like God. Exactly like God." And having spoke, we do not stay to hear the answer, like jesting Pilate, upon his asking, "What is truth?"

Zebra broke through into our universe and fired beam after beam of information-rich colored light at Fat's brain, right through his skull, blinding him and fucking him up and dazing and dazzling him, but imparting to him knowledge beyond the telling. For openers, it saved Christopher's life.