The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  What I experienced was the restitution of balance, and since it was on such a vast order I perceived the ultramundane origins of the forces at work. This was no whim of a deity; it was a palintropos harmonie in motion—the swing of oscillation, and these forces were a corporate body or entity which was alive and which had intention, as I have; we were isomorphic, and that is that. [...]

  Dream about Dodger stadium and low class Mexican type U.S. celebrations of every sort; abrupt awakening and thought: I think we're (each of us is) a colony, like a colony of bees. A collection of loosely interrelated entities, which light up in patterns; game board style. Also, each of us is isomorphic. We're inside a great colony of bees, any number and combination of which can light up at any one time. Like cells—in a battery. Any output (both each of us; and It). Clusters: each cell with a slightly different idea of what it'd be like; hence the otherwise inexplicable diversity and variety. We must function in some very loose physical arrangement, but with a field exchange created, such as social insects can be assumed to possess; each of us is that field (vide acupuncture), and the Great Mind is made up of diverse and even discrete physical entities which form an exchange field capable of a vast variety of interconnections or firing sequences of patterns. Arrangements are by commingling and by inter-signaling. Intensity and threshold are major features. It's a micro-collective, a vast macro-collective. My "Dodgers stadium celebration" dream suggests that one idea can be presented to a vast collection of cells and each processes it in an individualistic way, giving it slight modification; all cells share common purpose and memory and form an identity, but don't need to be mechanically linked. We and our environments form such interconnected cluster systems that mutually process information and alter it while exchanging it; we are all (humans) like a vast compound eye which shows a repetition of the motion of a single object but each cell reflecting slightly differently. Instead of saying, We are within a Great Mind (immanent mind) I would like to modify that and say, We are within a Great Brain, made up of countless cells as are our own (I mean many many cells, with an incredibly vast number of possible combinations of circuitry linkage). Whatever it is that it is doing, it may have parts, like our own brain (regions with functions associated thereto) or it may go on levels at different places, quantitative surges, etc. But there is a sort of "control room" part which can infuse and override "autonomic" functions; what we see is autonomic or reflexive brain-function except at crucial/exceptional times, when there is the equivalent to our "consciousness," or a rise in level of intention and awareness, of purpose (locally, I guess). [...]

  I am lying in bed here and I am musing, "God can simulate the inanimate. Or rather, God can pretend to be anything he wants, any part of His creation. He can replace any part, be it." And then it came to me what you call this; you call it the Miracle of Transubstantiation. This is exactly what is believed to take place in the host, during the Communion. Exactly and precisely. What I saw that day in the alley and everything else I saw, God "immanent," I have for over one full year tried on my own to develop the concept of transubstantiation. Well, it was not wasted time because what I did was prove the reality of the miracle of the Mass, and finally I pinned this down in terms of nomenclature and description. I just saw it on a wider scale; also, I did see it. I did see it. I saw it; the world as "this is my body and this is my blood. I am here." No wonder my tiny mind had shuddered under the weight of trying to understand. This is the holy of holies, the miracle of miracles.

  I would like to add that my description (and memory) of what Pinky did in trying to heal me (lying on me transversally) I now learn Elijah did to help restore the widow's son.74

  I guess the votive candle and the little saint helped. God consecrated reality right and left around me: miracle of miracles. I understand. Credo.

  I have had in this one very small clue, but absolute: the sound of the bells, the Osterglöchen. Christ arisen! The bells of Easter. This delineates it beyond ... the sound of the healing bells which mean transformation (as in Parsifal). The wound closed. But only One, Christ, ever spoke through the Osterglöchen. (And it was at that time of the year, too.)

  So it was a vision.

  I must never forget the bells.

  I wrote of God manifesting himself in transubstantiation; but of course it is Christ. This now causes me naturally to wonder, No one ever reported seeing the miracle even in the objects of the Mass. How come I saw this (not how come it happened), but why extended, as I saw it? Also, it advances it down the time manifold, out of the distant past, into the medieval period anyhow ... I should really go back over everything I've written over the whole 14 months and put the correct word "Christ" wherever I speak of having experienced God (especially immanent God; it is immanent or the actually present Christ). Beebread. We are fed in each individual cell, but must emerge to join cooperative.

  [5:98] Today (after reading in the L.A. Times where a psychic says there is another life form on Earth smarter than we are, but that it lives in the water "and has no hands") I decided to describe, without attempting to name, the entity which telepathically approached me in 3-74. Its most salient quality, when I went to enumerate all of them, seemed to be not its thinking (mentation) but its knowing; it knew everything ... and I reported, to myself, how it seemed to know things and events and people from inside, out from outside (external facts), but seemed to sweep them out at the very heart. And then I realized that I had given an excellent description of the Parakletos which Jesus in "John" says God will send here as Comforter, Advocate, etc. Also, it finally came to me that the state of agitation and distress and perturbation I was in in 3-74 when it suddenly approached me with aid was exactly the state of agitation, distress and despair and perturbation—at the end of my rope, really—I was in back in my high school physics class when I took the test that dealt with Archimedes' principle. In both cases the need was the same: the acute despair and prayer petition on my part: need of an acute sort. The same small calm inner voice came both times, knowing everything and informing me. Rendering assistance of a particular sort: it knew the answers which I needed in order to survive. It knew and it told me, and then it departed. It was God I called on then, back in the mid-40's. I'm sure it was He Who answered then; evidently now, too.

  All the trillions of written pages I've seen in sleep ... I'm sure they're equivalent to the spoken answers I heard in my head in my high school physics class (where I was awake and so couldn't dream). This is information of the highest kind, from the ultimate source: the Spirit of Truth, as Jesus explained it. "Who sweeps out and knows even the heart of the Father." Mainly it gave me absolutely correct information (and insight) plus the zeal to put into action Handlungstreie based on that knowledge. Also, it seems likely that my preview of Fullerton (dream for 8 hours while awake back in 1971 of "Mexico") plus the Tears dream, both of which had permanent effects on me, came from this source; there had been one source throughout and I think this is the historic name for it, and historic promise. Here are 4 examples of absolute for sure intervention. Maybe there have been others I never was aware of. Between example 1 (high school) and 3-74 lies 30 years—a huge gap, most of my life in fact. I ask, What about the horse dream in Canada? Look: again a horse; the Tears dream involves a posse of horses. The Vancouver dream—the horse attempting to leap the house, which was the Point Reyes house, where the Tears dream took place, attempting and failing—that told me something obscure but overwhelming. "I have had a dream like no other dream I ever had," I wrote my mother. "The oracle," Heraclitus wrote, "does not answer yes or no; he gives a sign." Also, the in-cage-under-Houston-Astro-Dome dream had flying horses in it ... the horse as sign for death. The adversary, maybe? Fate? Destiny? [...]

  Thought: back 20 pages, where Joseph Campbell75 says, "You can view God as being every thing or every where." If everywhere, then we have Ubik again, who is everywhere. Must see which I settled on, where or thing. Hope it was where. (Ho On: Greek for I AM, a title of God.) [...]


  Oh, yes; I heard the voice one other time: "And she shall see the sea," which was probably back around 1968/9, no later. As I wrote Phil Farmer, I knew it could not be my own thoughts or voice. I see now that beyond doubt that voice was the "physics test" voice and the one from 3-74 on. Again, it came as a result of agonizing despair on my part, and a need to know something, to understand; it brought relief and help and comfort. [...]

  I had an infinitely complex insight today that it is just as easy to think of the future pushing the present into the past as to think of the past generating the present and moving toward the future; since we don't remember the future the way we do the past we don't discern these "heavy" events weighing on the present and forcing the present into annihilation, into the past. What our minds do is link everything in a sort of string, one after another, in the order in which we encounter them. Thus, if we reach into a fishbowl of numbered slips randomly distributed, we will write down as a linear sequence the numbers we draw. In whatever order or non-order we encounter events (experience them) our memory will arrange them on this linear track, as if they happened that way. Actually, they didn't happen (were not arranged) that way but only encountered that way. But, having lined everything up, we imagine the past in this orderly line, which is readily translated into a causal string because so arranged it has that look to it. Eventually in this way we create in our heads an enormous past pressing inexorably against the present to create the events of the future. But suppose we imagine everything in the present like a stage set, with actors; however, in the wings wait the set and actors for the next scene. These latter, dimly discerned, will inexorably push everything on the stage off eventually. It is not the prior act but the next act which exerts the force; conceive of the present as fragile or unstable, and this pressure "from the wings" becomes inexorable. Logically, this is as plausible as the idea of cause-and-effect from the past operating as force on the present. Also, if as Dr. NK says, time is energy entering a material system, perhaps it enters from the future—is the future; i.e., time has more charge, more force in the future, drains out into the spatial reality of the present, and at last dissipates down into the drain-off slot which is the used up past. This is a disturbing new view but oddly enough it coincides with my dream experiences, my precognition of events moving this way from the future; I feel them inexorably approaching, not generated from the present, but somehow already there but not yet visible. If they are somehow "there" already, and we encounter them successively (the Minkowski block universe; events are all already there but we have to encounter them successively76) then this view might be a correct view of time and causality. The reason (again) why we feel the past to be real but not the future is simply that we have experienced the past and recall it; memory bits lie in our brain tissue, but this is not true of the future. However, I have never experienced Bombay India and I have San Francisco; but the latter in reality is no more real than the former. (For myself, I would guess that we have, as the Hopis believe, two realities only: that which is manifest, and that which is in the process of manifesting. The former is the present; the latter is our future, sort of rising up from within, from potent to actual. This can be represented spatially in terms of rings, concentric, of actualization, à la Plotinus.)

  Eureka! I've been reading Rollo May's77 Love and Will. He describes Eros, the spirit of life, mediator between men and gods, partaking of the human and the divine; it is the élan vital of Bergson, Dionysos, it is especially Socrates' daimon—this is the voice I hear; this is what "possessed" me in 3-74. But an overwhelming intriguing mystery presents it self: Socrates was Greek; Eros is a Greek myth; Dionysos was a Greek god; if Eros (as RM says) is not an actual entity, then how come I heard words in Attic Greek and it, the daimon, thought in Attic Greek? This both confirms and yet adds more mystery, pins it down for sure and yet—the coincidence (Greek speaking) is too great; it must indicate something—a vital clue beyond all other clues!!!!!! [...]

  Thus in reading Rollo May's book I have ruled out (in my own mind) any possibility that my 3-74 experience was spurious or somehow engineered by human persons or groups; it was what it seemed to be. Rollo May traces it back to Attic Greece and he himself affirms it as a major source of human viability, unrecognized as it has been for centuries. It is the anti-Thanatos force per se. The source of all life, however named. But what I wonder, having experienced this and come to certify it by ancient and now modern authority—why doesn't it occur more often? How strange, that God through some mediating demiurge can revivify any given human being, at his will, and yet until I read Rollo May's account of Socrates' daimon, I had found not a single other account of exactly what I had had since high school physics class; not one other anywhere, in any reference book. How could it remain unknown? This implies God uses it sparingly; it is virtually nonexistent, or anyhow non-reported. The only thing I can think of offhand is this: 3 different sources indicate that this daimon, under another name, ceased to be present in men's lives around 100 A.D.: Gibbon says that the Christians lost the actual power; the International Community of Christ agrees; the Witnesses say so, too, or maybe it's the Megiddo Mission people78; anyhow, since this may well be the Christ-consciousness or Holy Spirit thing, then perhaps the human being at this end must do something, and has forgotten how to do it or even that it can be done (vide the Int. Community of Christ). God waits for us to do an initiating act. Or, the Holy Spirit (the power) was withdrawn, and the dry period of nearly 2,000 years has taken place, without contact between man and God. If this is so then perhaps the Spirit has returned, which is what I did feel, especially I felt that Elijah had come. Either way, it has been gone for 2,000 years, either because God withdrew the Holy Spirit or because for one reason or another man lost the method and the notion. And then all that came were daemons rather than daimons—evil spirits only, not from God.

  Yet this still seems strange to me; if God through a demiurge can do this, why doesn't he do it a lot? Look: if I assume that what happened to me in 3-74 was due to something I did, which others don't ever do, then heaven's sake, I stumbled onto something of such vast value—it is what the Int. Community of Christ had deciphered over 17 years, and maybe they don't know exactly how. This sort of makes me like a Van Vogt character: pos sessing the most utterly priceless wisdom/formula-for-immortality on the planet, which I find hard to believe; this is megalomania, for sure. But if God did it all, then why me, and why just me? Why not others, many others? Either way I am into what is for me an insoluble puzzle; we either have an unconvincingly incredible human (me), or we have a God whom we cannot understand; he can help but doesn't and yet he helped me—me of all people in the world! Either theory is absurd. Neither can explain it. But what happened did happen, and RM had to go back to 400 B.C. Athens to find an example of the daimon at all, let alone the sanctification and new birth which 3-74 ushered in for me.

  There is one more possibility ... perhaps for instance the records of the 17th century Reformers contain accounts, but these are dismissed, even suppressed, by a totally secular age, now. As Ursula dismissed my account. These transfigurations happen but are denied by the world.

  One can go, then, to Dr. Bucke's book Cosmic Consciousness; as I recall he was able to find 6 instances for sure in history, entire world history, of experiences like mine; maybe 20 possibles. That includes the Reformers and the Greeks. That still isn't many.

  However, Dr. Bucke does advance one theory which might account for this, one which would be in accord with Jesus' cryptic parables about the mustard seed, the leaven in the bread, etc.; Dr. Bucke says he thinks this is an evolutionary advance, the next step up. In the past certain precursors of the New Man appeared (e.g., Socrates, Jesus). Dr. Bucke thought the frequency would increase soon. This ties in with Bergson's élan vital, too, and with Eros as the push of life forward in evolution. This is how God works. This is how God has always worked, from the day creation began: progressively, successively, continuously. "Day" after "day." Dr. Bucke's wise the
ory would account for the rarity of cosmic consciousness in the past, and would untie the knot of the dichotomy expressed above. I am, ahem, like a van Vogt character after all; like a Slan. (The next step up.)

  God works through evolution, not to circumvent it.* This, too, would explain my strong intuition that what happened in 3-74 didn't consist of one desperate event and supernatural solution, but the inevitable outcome of an entire lifetime. All my life I had been moving toward this metamorphosis; the dormant possibility of it lay slumbering in me from birth; cf. my dreams of childhood, where I arrive on a raft avoiding Scotland Yard, climb to the top and then turn out to be a cuckoo egg. This would explain why now I feel that unless I went through everything I went through I couldn't have gotten there; my metasystem wouldn't have fired. It was programmed to fire after the proper sequence (of events? of learning? of experience? of trial and failure????? aha!) had passed, and all the changes, or steps or stages, necessary had taken place in me.

  Makes much, much sense.

  Got my right hemisphere to fire. Instinctively knew how to do it: the ortho-molecular vitamins, the manta, etc. Did like the bird in building a nest. Made myself a nest and then lay down to wait, expecting. And it came. The golden fish necklace told me it was time; I began my work, like the worm constructing its cocoon. In order to die, in its original primal lower form, to be remade into a better newer creature! To fly up from the "sea" into the sky!

  I imagine these jumps forward, back to the Cambrian Period, are associated with pain and stress and a great deal of uncertainty and fear. The creature toils alone, under duress, staggers or ventures out into the unknown, to his species anyhow ... he must exhaust all the possibilities which they still rely on for better or worse; he must try, be urged on by the life force, the élan vital, to break new ground. He suffers, maybe fails. Exhausted, oppressed, but finally the night ends—maybe—in gasping victory. The bright light floods over him from above, signal he's succeeded! The Jewish-Christian myth which says that we once had these faculties and lost them—devolved—might be true, and it certainly would explain my anamnesis, as well as the view Plato and Empedocles held. However, it is also possible that this myth was instilled in us (never mind how) in order to push us toward this as a goal in the future, whether indeed we had such faculties or not; this might be the only way such an ideal state could be expressed for those earlier cultures. "The Fall" is a sort of ancient way of talking about the next evolutionary stage in terms that make sense to people who have no concept of evolution.