The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  By the way—I've now found the section in Virgil's Aeneid which so many of my early "dreams" pointed to: it is Book Six. Also I've found that a number of my dreams are visions of Canto XXVIII of Dante's "Purgatorio" from the Comedy. This is linked directly to Virgil, of course, who has been Dante's guide up to this Canto. I learn much from all this, much which is specific (you would not believe the research I've been doing).

  It's not all that meaningful to talk about being in contact with extraterrestrial intelligences; these are new words to describe ancient experiences. Virgil in Book Six says:

  ... for immanent Mind, flowing through all its parts

  and leaving its mass,

  Makes the universe work.

  Obviously "Immanent Mind" could be called "extraterrestrial intelligence."* So there is nothing new in what I've experienced, just new terms. Basically this is a religious experience, but also it is more because we are no longer a religious world; I am a secular person in a secular society and must understand my experiences in this context. Otherwise even if I understand them I can't communicate them.

  Well, Claudia, I will tell you what I think They are telling me via graphic visions and written and audio material. Enclosed you will find three pages I already wrote (I hope I didn't send them to you already), but recently I came across this "Fourth Eclogue" of Virgil:

  Now comes the final age announced in the Cumaean Sibyl's chant;

  The great succession of epochs is born anew.

  >Now the Virgin➊ returns; the reign of Saturn returns;

  Now a new race descends from heaven on high.

  O chaste Lucina (goddess of births)! smile upon the boy just born.

  In whose time the race of iron shall first cease,

  And a race of gold shall arrive throughout the world.

  Thine own Apollo is now King.

  When I was possessed back in March it was justice which I first sought out everywhere, which was most important to me. I think that the Cumaean sibyl's prophecy has not been fulfilled. (Virgil's Eclogue is based on an actual prophesy which she made slightly before the Christian Era.) My "dreams" have led me to this Eclogue intentionally; the information is here. When you read the enclosed three pages you will see how close to realizing this I already was (I wrote them about 45 days or more ago). I believe that after an absence of between 2,000 and 2,600 years the immortals are now beginning to return, with Justice first.

  The actual esoteric purpose of early Christianity was for the worshippers to be possessed by their god, as with other mystery cults and religions.* That which possessed them then in the First Century A.D. possessed me back in March, but I identify Him more as Apollo than as the Holy Spirit described by Paul. I think He appears to different cultures under different names; to the Greeks one, to the Hebrews as Elijah, and so forth. He is plasmatic, immortal, and the great civilizing influence of Greece and Egypt and Persia. He can divide himself, being plasmatic. To me he brought reason, so I see him as Apollo ... but interestingly, this fits what the Sibyl predicted. It is a Greek god-possession experience I went through, not Jewish. Assuming that what Virgil calls Immanent Mind transcends each individual possession, then there is no problem in drawing them all together into an integration. These are specific agencies of an overall sentient, living entity.

  By the way—in Book Six of the Aeneid, the Sibyl is possessed by the god, by Apollo. Paul Williams* when he was here showed me a passage from one of Ted Sturgeon's novels which Paul felt showed that my experience had been precisely that of the early Christians. I do feel that it was under the aspect of Apollo, however, because my needs were for that, for syntonos and reason.

  This happened not because of my needs—we all have needs—but because they are coming back. The Immortals. Here is a quote from Paul Williams' book Turning Upward which I just came across (p. 237):

  Men are coming, great men who are among us now, who will unite the extremes into an unshakeable structure, unshakeable not because of its suppression of the will of the people, but because of its perfect expression of that will. And from the present bewilderment, anger and chaos a true will must arise to replace that shadow of will, that vacant greed which is now called the will of the people by the clumsy dwarves who stumble where graceful giants ought to stride.

  You should read Paul's whole section in this book. I think it is all true, the above.

  I get very frustrated writing to you about this because I have so much to say and can't spit it out. Papers slide off my desk; books I'm quoting from fall shut; I type wrong letters entirely. I am so fucking excited, keyed up, high on all this, and terribly impatient, which is not cool—impatient to find people to tell this to, the Good News, so to speak. Claudia, an ancient promise made to us, made thousands of years ago, is now being kept. Who made it I don't know, but it was made. He or they would come back eventually, and they fucking have, Claudia, they fucking have!!! I know it. Again and again in unmistakable ways they have assured me of this, and have in addition shown me glimpses of what we can expect. That which is rightfully ours, which was taken away, will be returned. They will see to that. As Paul called it, the "Time of Restoration of All Things"18—it is here now, Claudia. It took a hell of a long time, by our standards, but they did keep their ancient promise; they are back.

  The Christians, with their exclusivistic, bigoted, narrow intolerance, believe salvation and intervention and restoration is only for them; they're wrong; this is for our planet and all its people. There are saviors for all of us, everyone here. To the Immortals such distinctions as Christian versus atheist mean nothing; it is like Holstein cows versus Jerseys, and my spelling and typing are so shot now that I will sign off.

  Next year in a book of Harlan Ellison's that Harper and Row are bringing out, Harlan says:

  Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson wrote, "Maybe God's gone away, forgetting His promise He made that day: and we're lost out here in the stars." And maybe He/She's just waiting for the right signal to come back, whaddaya think?19

  Right on, Harlan.

  In March I abruptly pierced through to the heart of things; I saw within, saw reality as it is, and saw the Immortals approaching. I saw the iron prison we live in, and I experienced first them and then vision after vision of what our world, our lives will be like when they join up the two parts: universe A and universe B. Ours is one part, and with them they tow the other. What they will do with our world, the macrocosmos, will be an analog of what they did with me and other isolated individuals or microcosms: in a flash they ignite and fuse everything and then imprint an entirely new eidos. It all happens without warning. In micro terms I experienced the entire trip which our world and all of us will experience: months of hunger and want, then growing fear and helplessness, then a renunciation of everything, knowing it to be lost forever—then the manifestation of the dazzling chromatic forms. From want and no hope and fear and a total giving up at once there will be a total rebirth, a restitution and a renaissance; life will start up anew, without warning.

  In the visions of every Pythagorean in history (Euripides in The Bacchae, in Wordsworth's "ode," etc.) I discover the same visions that I have seen: what in Dante is called Earthly Paradise. (He is led to it and finds the lady singing and picking flowers; in dream after dream I've seen her and heard her singing; now I know who she is, and I know what the beautiful park which I see is. It is going to be here and not in the next world; it's what Dante himself saw and depicted too clearly, and his vision is amazingly similar to that of the 6th century B.C. Greek Orphics.)

  Well, I got to sign off because we have to replace all the cat boxes in the house now; the cats are grumbling, and when Chester grumbles, we all move into action.

  Love,

  Phil

  ➊ Astraea, or Justice, the last immortal to leave the Earth in the legend of the Saturnian age.

  Letter to Claudia Bush, November 29, 1974

  [4:112]

  Dear Claudia,

  Can I rattle on some more
at you? Especially since the big blue cat we got ran away as soon as we let him out? Thank you.

  I hope you had a nice Complaingiving.

  Jean-Pierre who bought the Ubik screenplay hasn't contacted me since October.20 Next Monday (on which day you'll probably receive this) he owes me $2,500, which he didn't have on November first, so we gave him another 30 days. I'll bet he's in Paris right now. I'm sure I already told you that Robert Jaffe suggested that maybe the Ubik purchase was laundered Soviet money, and the screenplay right now is in Krakow, Poland. Could be. I still maintain that there is some scientific principle in Ubik which I thought was fiction, but which is either a new discovery or more likely a rediscovery of one discarded long ago—Ubik, the force, itself. Ubik would roughly correspond to the universal immanent mind which Virgil mentions. Not only does it animate the universe and cause it to work, but since each of us is a piece of the universe (more properly the kosmos, as Pythagoras called it) each of us has inside him a spark of that universal mind. The Orphics in Greece were the first known group to express this idea, and the entire collection of mystery cults was seeking to find ways of bringing out or anyhow contracting that spark of divinity within. The God Apollo and such like would be links between the universal mind within and that in the kosmos around us; he would, so to speak, serve to ignite that spark within so that it fused or took over the total mind; this would be what possession by the god would more precisely be.

  These categories obviously correspond to the three persons of the Trinity. Historically, god-above-the-universe is encountered first (the Umwelt of the European Existential psychiatrists), then god-with-us as a human (the Mitwelt, which for us would be the second period of man-god encounter: the encounter with Christ), then the third and final: God within, the Holy Spirit (the Eigenwelt). At the same time, as Jung points out, man is withdrawing his projections from the outer world. So these three steps are not only present historically but are psychologically logical and successive. We can no longer expect to encounter the divine—which is to say, the universal immanent mind—anywhere but within ourself although in a sense it is true that the prior two persons or forms of god still remain; nonetheless it is inside that we will find him, which is to say, as close to us as he could possibly get. I do think that the igniting of this spark so as to consume and so-to-speak overpower our own ego or consciousness is achieved from without somehow; it is an adventitious process, which means, it is not an intrinsic addition. It does not merely happen on its own, spontaneously, although everything is within us, except for the catalyst, which may be nothing more than an external disinhibiting stimulus. In my case I saw the dark-haired girl wearing the fish sign necklace in March of this year, and it acted as that catalyst.

  The three persons or forms of god inhabit the three worlds which each of us experiences; they interact and harmonize. By doing this they keep in accord—keep together—the cosmos—all sets of reality. This process of harmonization is extraordinary; in the short interval I perceived it I was astounded. That's the period in which I saw, as you'll recall, that there are no accidents.

  The mystery cults kept their purpose and techniques secret until Jesus so-to-speak stole it and made it available for everyone—same as what's his name did with fire. And paid the ultimate price. However, as Jesus remarked, "I have conquered the world,"21 meaning that he was successful; what was until then available only to a few life-long esoteric students of the cults we can all have. We didn't even know about it until then; Paul is not being vague in his speech when he says, "Hark! I tell you a sacred secret: we shall not all sleep in death," etc.22 He means it literally; he told them all what up to then was indeed a sacred secret, guarded by the mystery cults, the secret that (1) you can be reborn (which is not the same as being immortal; it means you must die as you are and then after that you are again alive, but different and permanent), and (2) how this can be achieved, or more precisely, how it was achieved. No more valuable secret was even stolen and released to the general public than that. I wouldn't presume to try to add to or modify Paul's own explanation of all of this, or John's, but let me say that what happened to me in March is exactly that "in the twinkling of an eye"23 rebirth or transformation, much like an abrupt chemical process ... as the alchemists so realized. But it must as I say be touched of adventitiously—which is the role Christ plays or did play, his work being already done. He set it in motion. It can't be turned back. He died, but he died knowing he did it. And of course he shared—he was the first to share—in the fruits of his own secret. He did add, though, that most of us would laugh at all this, finding it incredible and impossible and senseless, not to mention stupid. It never meant anything to me until March, and in March when it happened to me I couldn't relate what had happened to anything I'd ever been taught about God or religion. I thought god was up there in the sky. However, he is not; he is a spark which can fuse the total mind in each of us into something entirely new which was not there before (a description of irreversible chemical processes), burning off the dross and making stable (or as the Bible says, uncorruptible) the valuable contents. You can readily see the analogy between this and a chemical reaction in which the results are spectacular, as with ignited gunpowder. There is no way to anticipate the results based on a study of the three prior constituents, and if I told you what would happen unless you had seen it you probably wouldn't believe me. Fire is the adventitious element added; in the case of the transformation I went through, it is also a kind of fire: seen as chromatic phosphene activity. Probably this is radiation phosphene stimulation; the Soviets say that such radiation stimulating phosphene activity can come here—and does—from sidereal space. I believe it. This is the catalyst.

  The valuable aspect of the external catalyst is that it keeps the process within the control of who it is who controls these things; it isn't going to simply occur at a random time for no reason at all. The universal mind dispatches a Mediator—which is what Christ is called, correctly—to trigger it off; or anyhow the fish sign or any Logos triggering agent. Thereby it, the universal mind, can hold the process until it wishes it to take place, which is why the Protestant Reformers stressed the power of God's grace as being the sole power which could redeem us rather than good works. The act must be done by God alone, not by us. These are old-fashioned terms for a very mysterious process and event; they did the best they could in explaining it. "Well, see, we're all in a state of sin" (which is jargon for fucked up, deranged, and half blind), "and God's grace redeems us unexpectedly. But we have to have faith, which is to say total trust, in the power of that grace." I'm not sure you have to have that trust. I think what you have to come to is the last few frames of the long reel of film which was your firstborn ego or personality or consciousness, which is what I did. Rationally, at least according to the impaired rationality we have, it would seem evident that when the final frame is gone, only the void would remain; however, the void is I guess God Himself, the Brahmin; He fills it up. We have an incorrect idea of the nature of the void, and an equally incorrect one as to the nature of objects—which are only phenomena, constructs our brain makes out of sense impressions. "Literally, God is not," Erigina said.24

  Claudia, on this day we must count our cursings.

  Psychologically, this mental transformation is the radical combining (not reconciliation but combining) of opposites. From then on everything is understood in terms not of "Is it this or that—" but "Both this and that." Each attempt I make to understand and explain and express my experience and the process following has to come at last to that: it is what I already thought and what I now think. For instance, it is Elijah and the Holy Spirit, not Elijah rather than the Holy Spirit. It is Apollo and the Holy Spirit; it is Pagan and Christian. It is old (circa 100 A.D.) and points toward the future. It is a literal event in the material world and it is symbolism (I mean my dreams or visions); it will be the future here; it will also be the Other World when I see it. It involves me alone, and it is for the entire world. Lastly, it is
beings from another star system and it is precisely the same traditional experience of salvation described in the Bible.

  You find this same unity in Dante's Comedy. This is what our modern world has lost, this unity in all levels; now we've got compartmentalization instead. A thing is either scientifically true or it is religious. It is metaphor rather than literal.

  So to sum up, there is a small bit of the macrocosm inside us, inside the microcosm; and this small bit equals the whole universal mind. The microcosm contains the macrocosm, another concept not thinkable in formal logic. God within me sees God outside; the two commune with each other. The two link up through the mediating flesh or body. So he or it, whatever, is made visible here on this world, at this time. Meanwhile, Satan is up at the McDonald's stand, ordering coweye burgers and plastic malts, thinking to keep his power. A few more years of coweye burgers and plastic malts, and he'll have had it.

  Letter to Claudia Bush, November 30, 1974

  [4:118]

  Dear Claudia,

  I just wrote Diane Pike; we'll see what happens. I'd already written her and got back a Love Project card. I will keep you informed; she sounds trippy and sweet.

  Love works! Always! That's what the card says. I can dig it. Can't you? Where do we begin? (The La Paz bar.)

  Claudia, this is an addendum to my previous letter of Friday. John Calvin (1509–1564) gives this statement which beyond all doubt describes my experience and my thoughts about it afterward: