ATDTDA (9): 239/251 Take This Chance, Chums

[Keith]

It's 'real' in the sense that characters in the novel have that  
perspective. It's real to them. Other characters do not. (If you're  
asking *me* what is /real/ and what is not, I haven't a clue. If  
you're asking me what I think Pynchon is presenting as real, I  
haven't a clue. I think Pynchon is telling a very complex story inter- 
weaving multiple perspectives. The airship lands now and then, but  
not for long, and not at the end.)

Ken Wilber sounds a lot like Miles, even recommending dropping the  
masks:

The Atman project: the attempt to find Spirit in ways that prevent it  
and force substitute gratifications. [...] [T]he entire structure of  
the manifest universe is driven by the Atman project, a project that  
continues until we--until you and I--awaken to the Spirit whose  
substitutes we seek in the world of space and time and grasping and  
despair. The nightmare of history is the nightmare of the Atman  
project, the fruitless search in time for that which is finally  
timeless, a search that inherently generates terror and torment, a  
self ravaged by repression, paralyzed by guilt, beset with the frost  
and fever of wretched alienation--a torture that is only undone in  
the radiant Heart when the great search itself uncoils, when the self- 
contraction relaxes its attempt to find God, real or substitute: the  
movement in time is undone by the great Unborn, the great Uncreate,  
the great Emptiness in the Heart of the Kosmos itself.
      And so, [...] remember the great event when you breathed out  
and created this entire Kosmos; remember the great emptying when you  
threw yourself out as the entire World, just to see what would  
happen. Remember the forms and forces through which you have traveled  
thus far: from galaxies to planets, to verdant plants reaching upward  
for the sun, to animals stalking day and night, restless with their  
weary search, through primal men and women, yearning for the light,  
to the very person [you now are]: remember who and what you have  
been, what you have done, what you have seen, who you actually are in  
all those guises, the masks of the God and the Goddess, the masks of  
your own Original Face. http://tinyurl.com/2tlwfp

On May 20, 2007, at 5:04 AM, Jasper wrote:

Outstanding!  So but considering these passages are spoken by  
characters with questionable reliability -- the Cohen and Miles  
respectively --  (and several times removed from Author), should we  
consider this platonic "more real" to be real?  Or is it an  
illusion?  Or a lie?  Or doesn't it matter?  Is it the seeking alone  
that counts?