The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  In his article, Dr. NK states that (1) Time is an energy which enters material systems; (2) It maintains everything; (3) It is everywhere simultaneously; and therefore (4) It can transmit information everywhere telepathically; and (5) In this fashion it probably transmits instinctive knowledge to living creatures, all biological entities; and (6) It is even possible that it regulates and informs and harmonizes "inanimate" entities such as stars.

  This is a description of the Logos.

  Energy plus information which is everywhere.

  That's Mr. Runciter plus the spraycan of Ubik.

  If we can see identity between Dr. NK's "Time" and the "Logos, the Word of God," then there is no problem in explaining the entry (even a preemptive entry) into any successful time-density activity by the Logos, outsmarting long in advance man's own personal plans. By definition, by affecting a massive density in time they are involving the Logos, which is already informed (i.e., whatever information might be "artificially" trans ferred telepathically, this is the normal method used by the Logos to assist and inform living creatures anyhow; the "artificial" information would simply enter as a portion of a vaster, older stream). [...]

  The best way of viewing all these elements (Dr. NK's theory, Ubik, March 1974) is to see confirmation of the Logos' reality (vide Dr. NK's paper when he discusses simultaneous transfer of information throughout the universe to all biological entities, via Time).

  The Pulkovo work has rediscovered the Logos at work, and given it the name of Chronos instead—father Chronos from whose race we are all descended, and who controls all things.

  It could be said that if Dr. NK—i.e., Pulkovo—was feeding lines to me, the Logos was feeding lines—i.e., prompting—to him. Beyond and behind the figure of any and all temporal powers, and their intentions, lie the intentions and power of God. Here is an excellent illustration of that: Man proposes/God disposes. If indeed telepathy is the universal medium of information-exchange, then the Logos, if it existed, would use it; also, those involved in experimentation with time and its info-transfer uses, would be in more direct connection with the Logos as Plan than most of us.

  We still serve our ex-employer, Mr. Runciter; and he still assists and advises, as before. Nothing has changed; he knows how to get through to us, and what to bring us to restore us, and what advice (info) to lay on us. All of us. [...]

  The dream about James-James certainly expressed what I saw in 3-74: with the Creator producing first solar flares (or the atom and its moving parts), then from it the baby, and then evolving from the baby Kathy. But that he had to injure Tessa (because she stood up to see his "act" better)—this was what I saw as an objection to linear forward moving time and continual creation anyhow: that in the powerful huge surging-forward drive of life, so many creatures are wounded and crippled, left to die, behind the flock. And in my dream I asked for help, and none of the thousands sitting around to form an attentive audience for James-James would lift a finger, despite my appeals. But then the wide glass doors opened, and the first scouts entered the great building. "We need medical assistance," I said to them, and they came toward me; small as they were, and only the first vanguard, they did represent another force, one which heard and responded. Surely this is a dream-drama expression of the retrograde force which is the other game-player and which I construe as either the Logos or Christos or the Holy Spirit—and which to me is the "good" although so far weaker of the two players. Certainly the dream showed me clearly that the primary miracle, the one which of necessity must precede all others, is the miracle of life born out of the unliving, the miracle of creation itself; then the movement up the evolutionary scale, from form to higher form to highest form; this surely is the primary work of the universe, to do this, its hardest, first, and most solemn task, over which nothing else can take precedence. How can anyone question that? But although there must be a flock to go on (the species, I guess, or all life), before there can be those who fall back too weak or sick to keep up—this in the dream was so damn clear: one person out of thousands in that auditorium caused trouble, stood up (against James-James rules) and was thrust back down and crippled. The ratio of success to failure was maybe 10,000 to 1. So I am concerned with that 1, and stepped forward, halting James-James and his continual miracles of evolving creation (certainly the most extraordinary event I've seen in dream time or waking time, ever). I was asking for medical attention, not for me or for her, but for us. "We need medical attention" or assistance, whichever. There is such a need; there are casualties, and I understand that He Whom I follow, He sees to it that the 1 casualty is assisted: i.e., gets medical attention. The image of the good scouts: good Samaritans, maybe; those which lend a hand to those in need. [...]

  James-James represented ruthless creative power. But a balance is needed, both in each individual and for our planet as a whole. It was not with malice but with zeal that James-James (YHWH, I guess) smashed Tessa's elbow (ulna, the crippled lamb limping along) (my right shoulder). But I threw my weight in on the balance-scale on the side of the injured, the minority, although I personally could only ask for (medical) help; I had only the power to notice, to step forth, to voice the need—i.e., put it in words. (My writing? My speeches, etc.? Letters? Call attention to human needs?)

  But regarding possible time dysfunctions (due either to experiments at, e.g., Pulkovo, or natural, due to overloading of the ontological matrix, or both), most of my experiences have had to do, not with time, but with space (mostly about Mexico or what resembles Mexico and is taken to be). Future space at some future time? The only for sure time dysfunction I felt was in March 74, and that was, if it existed at all, probably artificially obtained (Pulkovo). The other, spatial ones—they probably were natural dysfunctions, sudden brief windows into the future of both space and time. What is possible, though, as I've said before, is the notion of "mytosis-like" splittings of the present (due to time dysfunctions, perhaps in our past) that result in alternate worlds (as in TMITHC).

  It's as if the merely potential (i.e., discarded at one or more critical junctions along the linear time-line) has come into a periodic shimmering realization, alongside what is actual (vide William James65 on the sea of potential facts around each actualized fact—each that, so to speak, makes it). Like in my story "The Commuter." Also, there is to me the real thought that adjustments (à la "Adjustment Team") are being made in our past, which are to an ever increasing degree making a certain "alternate present" (or time line) actual—in place of the one we have, not alongside it. I sense a series of minute tinkerings going on (vide Peter Mann's conversation with me recently on that idea). They are realigning our reality so it will conform to what the Plan (Logos) called for, thus losing the error fact, finally, which crept in. I suppose they could be making this critical correction back as far as 100 A.D. Just for story purposes, let us suppose a time-traveling team from our future has gone back to 45 A.D. to see to it that Jesus is not crucified. When the Parousia are finished with us, the time line we have will not even be remembered; our memories will be retaped to fit our newly made past, as well as present, and, as in "Commuter," we will be relieved that "nothing has changed after all." I guess the realigned-correctly world will have California still the property of Spain-Mexico. Portugal will retain its States of America. The Catholic Church will not have been rent asunder by the Reformers; this world will have only one huge Christian church/body, for all.

  [5:54] I am less in doubt that this was the Parousia (I am not in doubt about that at all; it is exactly what Jesus and Paul anticipated, if not John) than I am in doubt—in perplexity—as to whether it was solely in my own world, my idios kosmos, that it took place. Does the koinos kosmos remain the same? I don't think, really, that it has. But no one else that I know of saw what I saw, which by general standards at the very least limits it to a subjective experience, a personal one, for me alone. I think that seeing the signals around me firing, the living organism, may have been what Malachi meant by "The Lord of Hosts shal
l suddenly come to his temple," etc.; suddenly He was within everything, and visible, at least to me. "At least to me." I saw His presence. Perhaps I err when I assume that he had always been there, but not visible to me; that my eyes were suddenly opened to what had always been. Maybe He had been gone, and came back; my eyes were opened and He came back and therefore I saw Him. If my eyes had been opened a month earlier I wouldn't have seen Him because He hadn't arrived then, as yet.

  Let us consider the miracle involved. When God enters time, when he pierces our world, pierces the veil and rends it—where go the usual categories of personal subjective, then-now, etc.? Did He come for all men or just for me? Will what happened to me in March 1974 still later on happen for others, or did it happen once for everyone? This is the same question about Christ's death on the cross; does he really die again and again for each man, so-to-speak sequentially, or simultaneously, which is to say, once? I think both are true; the usual categories don't apply.

  I am a child trying to understand adult concepts.

  As in Frolix 8—the change rushes across the world, the way I saw the black band rush across the sky on Good Friday: the band that joined the old universe with the new ... and in that instant as I and Laura watched, I understood that we were on film, on a loop. This 3-hour strip rushing at so high a speed—it tied the two ends together. And started the sequence anew. Thus, back in 1962, my first mystic understanding of Easter, and of the Death of Christ, the dead god—in the bonds of death "Christ lag in Todesbanden," etc.66—I saw it then. What I saw then was real and I knew it then to be real; what I experienced in 1974, which was maybe 12 years later—at the same time of year ... it was real, too. We can maybe resolve this when we ask, When you play your LP of Beethoven's 7th symphony, is it a different performance each time? Does von Karajan repeat it? One hears it again and again, but it is the same: like the archetype, printing out: the die stamping. What we hear is the "print."

  The great miracle is that it is always new, and always it is the same, once more: unchanged. Suppose I play my LP of the 7th symphony until I know it by heart, and then I give it to you and you play it. You have never heard it before; to you it is entirely new, no more and no less new in relationship to my knowing it—I mean, however many times I have played it, however new or old it is to me, this has no effect on how new it is to you (assuming the LP isn't worn or damaged). For you it is new independent of me, and herein lies the miracle. However many times Christ has died for man; however many people have had my experience; it was as new for me as if no one had ever had it before; in my world, it was unique, it had never happened before, and so Christ died for me solely. He is infinitely new, infinitely divisible, infinitely everywhere—I guess he is Ubik.

  If a simple, workable, theoretical model were wanted by which all could be restored, then this might serve:

  (1) Reality in concentric rings of greater being (completeness), which the person initially encounters in terms of a ring less real than one he later encounters (best of all, finally encounters). Thus, the final ring encountered is the most real and gathers up—accumulates—all that he ever encountered before.

  (2) There would be a "writing backward" system by which the person would be presented, for engramming-on purposes, lesser fragments of forms the larger fragments of which he will encounter later—that is, later for him. Thus, his encounter-line would be arranged backward to the direction he himself experiences it, the way a mystery novel is written. What he has had, and possibly lost, which would make the term "restoration" meaningful to him, would so to speak be deliberate clues presented ahead of time (early in his life) with the full knowledge that these were the certain experiential items he would later on come onto. The interesting part of this is that he could be easily, almost effortlessly, engrammed in a random fashion, yet have the sense of total meaning. Here is a synthetic example: let us say that at the end of his life-line he winds up in the Lusitania Hotel which is in the shape of a boat and has cherrywood furnishings including broom plants (Acacia) as the floral items. Intrinsically neutral in value (these are virtually a pattern-less collection of elements) they would, for him, acquire meaning—Bedeutung—if one were to place early in his life small replicas of these constituents: one would see to it that as a child he grew up for a few months—long enough to create engramming—in a yard with flowering Acacia, which is really a weed, and that he watched a film on the sinking of the Lusitania on his family's TV set ... and so forth, seeing to it that there was a vast wasteland of these items, so to speak, until the glide pattern part of his life. Finally he would begin to encounter these dear long lost engrammed-on bric-a-brac, and have a deep sense of cosmic completeness. Thus any life, theoretically, could be given a subjective sense of completeness and meaning and purpose and wholeness just by seeing to it that retrograde "clues" of what was in the natural course of events to happen along were stuck here and there at very early strategic points. The economy of these would be beautiful, since one would simply work backward from the "solution," i.e., the end as pure random given. "I am getting all back what I lost," the person would sigh gratefully, and see a Divine Plan, a Godish Hand in all this. Of further interest: he would be right. There is really no way this simple, economic system of imbuing an ordinary life with completeness could be accomplished without the agency of (a) deliberate design and (b) the ability to accomplish it by retrograde motion in time. What is to me of supreme interest is that the person involved—the subject—would be able to detect the subtle but to him indubitably real hand of the Creator in the final section of his life—although no one else could, and anyone else could argue himself black in the face that no pattern was evident. The subject, all his life, would have carried these key engrammed-on external gestalts, slumbering always in his psyche; he would know, when he began to re-encounter them, what it signified (not that the end was near but that the whole process was subsumed by intention, design, and a plan or Logos). These would be absolute signs along the trail that there was indeed a trail—and it was one intended for him; he and it were isomorphic.

  Being a novelist I can appreciate how easily this could be done; the or dinary person would suppose that the tinkering to produce a wholeness would be done at the end (i.e., the final elements in time would be placed there to conform with the very early childhood ones), but of course it's the other way; at an early age certain gestalts would be stuck in, and at this point the child's worldview, his sense of reality, in fact his reality, would be so hazy that he would accept anything; there could be no rejection of any item as "out of context" or "not supposed to be there and hence unconvincing or suspicious in nature." God could stick a sardine can in the middle of the sky, and the 2-year-old would gaze at it with awe (as we would) but with total acceptance (which we would not). God could see to it that these key (and they need be only a few) engrammed-on items could be striking—would leave a vivid impression, and a lasting (for obvious reasons) effect. The child, as he grew up, would find himself wondering, every so often, why the yellow blossoms of the Acacia plant seemed so significant to him and lingered in his memory tapes, after much else had dimmed ... and then finally he would delight in re-encountering the Acacia plant, at the Lusitania Hotel, and marvel that he had somehow "found his way home" or better, more accurately, "been led home."

  (In my life, this would be why I always remembered the name of my babysitter, Olive Holt, when the names of most teachers afterwards were forgotten. It was because that "name" in divided form would crop up in the Xerox letter, by accident—it could to a certain vague but real extent be found there; I would see it in the Xerox letter and my mind would work in a retrograde way, which is the direction the retention was impressed at the time, when I was 4 years old, because it would come up later—because that would clue me in, in 1974.)

  This is an example of a process which I saw in 3-74 as a major process in the universe: it plays its hand (so to speak) in such a nonlinear way that the pattern is never visible until the final sections or
even section is lowered (or raised) into place—one can't even tell, for a long time, maybe a lifetime, that there is/are pattern(s) at all. What is given is not given in sequence, anyhow not in causal sequence, or any 1,2,3,4 sequence. The significance, therefore, of any element early in the "game," which is to say, in life, cannot be assessed; one can dream at any time a dream the events and things of which although impressive and vivid admit to no understanding—until the missing integers show up subsequently. So selective, so intelligent is the method of play, that every guess as to the meaning of a partial pattern is brought to ignominious ruin when the true (completed) pattern is visible, and one must hang on, and hang on, waiting for that last piece. Thus, things seem to turn into their opposites, or anyhow into what they were not, as an additional piece is added; and each gestalt is a sub section of a larger gestalt embracing several gestalts. We therefore can reason that if we watch the universe in its process, its continual creation, we cannot guess what shape it will assume when complete until it is complete—it could turn from a short fat mean dull dry universe to a thrilling warm green hat-shaped one, with the addition of a single sly piece, and God Himself could show a complete visage which was quite different from the semblance up to then ... this might provide a new clue as to "unreality" versus "reality": the latter is anything correctly apprehended, which is to say, when it—I repeat it—is complete; until then, no matter how scrupulously observed, it would be less than real; it would be illusion? A phantom? The not-real, anyhow. It would not really achieve is-ness or true being, but only have temporal (!!!) function or mode until then. The "false work" of the universe, serving until final pieces are in, and Being or true is-ness, takes place, which could be Suddenly and Unexpectedly! It would be witnessed as a transformation, not a mere addition to, but a total transformation from being (not truly so, just existed in the mode of) one thing into being (this time truly) another!!