R.A. Lafferty Devotional Forum
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Rafferty's peculiar mental make-up?
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Author:  Gray [ Thu Jul 12, 2001 5:50 am ]
Post subject:  Rafferty's peculiar mental make-up?

I think R.A. Lafferty may have a peculiar mental make-up. Based on many of his stories I have been led to believe he has multiple personalities.

To go back a few steps; 'Arrival at Easterwine- The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine' alludes to being a dictated script to Lafferty by the machine/transpersonal entity Epiktistes. Note also references such as (to paraphrase) 'only a few other machines around the world will understand how literally I mean it when I say.' This may refer to the vagaries of multiple-multiple contact prior to the web. I believe Lafferty begun to understand his condition through contact with different brands of Shamanism in various cultures (which have recognised multiples far longer than "the West").

The transpersonal entity Epikt in the aforementioned novel actually operates very much I have witnessed in multiple personality collectives (many people in one body) like some 'host-type' personalities and "constructs" (personalities in a multiple system often identify as constructed machines, designed to shuttle memory/perceptual information/skills/bodily functions etc between the other personalities in the system; and moreover machines that are made of bits of other personalities), or other members of multiple personality households. Trust me - although I am not multiple I have intimate personal experience of that state of being.

Many other references in RAL books have led me to this conclusion

Other authors who may be multiple are Stephen King (the 'back room boys') and Doris Lessing ('the diary of Jane Summers'). They make even more dead-pan references to their scripts being dictated to them by another entity than Lafferty (who wrote in an era where this was less acceptable), but don't show as much awareness of multiple states of minds as does RAL. At least in some of these cases these people are speaking quite literally. There are forms of variations on multiple/dissociative personality states that merge with the phenomenon of channeling. Also many US multiples report having (inner) persons who are of native American Indian origin. Also a particular interest of Lafferty's. The link I've included here is to a multiple household with American Indian.

Sorry this is such a ramble but if anyone out there has any scintillas of life-experience in common with me they will know what I'm on about. Write me on my e-mail.

RAL is (a collective of) genii!

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