NOTES ON THE RADIX TETRAD

Vedantic masters of ancient India claimed that the whole universe is inside us. I wrote the Radix Tetrad from that remarkable point of view, the way storytellers of old did, dramatizing the natural world in human form - only instead of sun gods and moon maidens intriguing with mortals, I wrote about aliens from other worlds confronting human beings. The story’s the same: It’s the hero’s clash with the gods. In our psychological age, that clash is the individual’s struggle to create an identity, and thus a destiny, out of the infinite flux we label reality.

The Tetrad retells the stories of the solar king and his journey into the abyss, to the home of the wind, the land of the dragon, where the creative and destructive powers collide. These timeless adventures, recast in modern form, ask the same questions that the myths do: Who are we? Is the infinite expanse of the universe really inside each of us? And, if so, what do we do with infinity?

Scientists agree that the universe itself appears infinite: Black holes collapse to singularities, which are infinitely dense; and light - the fabric of reality - has no rest mass and so is timeless. Yet, few of us actually believe that we are infinite. Such a bold conception seems a delusion of grandeur, because we refuse to accept the basic Vedantic assumption that waking and dreaming are the same.

Radix, the first volume in the series, is about waking up to this unifying perception. The solar votive hero of the myths reincarnates in the obese, slovenly form of Sumner Kagan, who lives in a world exposed to the strange light from an open black hole at the center of our galaxy. This naked singularity has transformed Earth into the landscape of the soul, where everything contaminates everything else: Animal and human forms bleed together into distorts, ideas from bizarre alternate universes fuse with flesh and become godminds, starlight rearranges the human genetic code and reconstructs alien sentiences called voors. On this haunted Earth, everyone Sumner confronts is actually himself, and the world changes around him exactly as he does.

In Other Worlds and Arc of the Dream both begin when the solar king, in the guise of the books’ two heroes, sees that all is a dream. In the mythology of science, that means facing the weird solipsism of the parallel universe theory.

Carl Schirmer, the complacent hero of In Other Worlds, falls through a subquantal black hole, impelled by alien forces to visit alternate Earths. There, he must defeat his complacence and decide which of the infinite possibilities open to him he will make his own.

Encountering the central, abstract terror of isolation, which the hero must bear to become an individual, frames the task in Arc of the Dream. The solar hero this time is an adolescent bully, Dirk Heiser. He confronts the fiery-cold spirit of the inner world in the form of Insideout, an alien from a realm smaller than a quark, a reality of infinite energy. Insideout is the innermost secret teacher, who shows the startled-awake hero that the opposite of singularity is not infinity but love.

The Last Legends of Earth embodies the Tetrad’s coda, in which an alien intelligence billions of years after we have become extinct awakens again the dream of human life. People find themselves in a realm of drifting planetoids built from the shattered remains of Earth, where a higher order sentience treats them as things, bait for an alien enemy. This is the hero’s world, the timeless solitude and weirdness of the individual outside the tribe, outside society, in what the aboriginals call the land of the dead - which is really the lengthened shadow of life beyond good and evil. The animal soul gets confused there. The secret understanding of transformation eludes it. It becomes regressive and depressional. And that’s where the villains in the Tetrad come from. Those same villains stalk us in our waking lives - the fear, ignorance and pain of human existence.

Finally, the Tetrad, as an adventure series of heroes and villains, is a celebration of those dark forces that challenge the solar power in each of us. After all, the villains are the ones who call down the spiritual powers. They make necessary that confrontation from which all true vitality emerges, often as healing wisdom - so that what before was merely accidental and ambivalent begins to work profoundly on us, and we inherit the power to find meaning, to invent it, and so create a more valid world.