The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  Luke lived a lot in Syria. A palm tree country, like what I saw in 2-75. His beloved homeland. His concept of springtime.

  I'm certain that no other early great Christian (saint) was a physician; this distinguishes St. Luke. Now, to return to contemplation of the personality which took me over in 3-74. (The one who detested the aerosol sprays, etc.) That was St. Luke.

  Although I did not know who you were

  I thank you. "He found in heaven

  A friend," as Gray says.89

  This was a meeting which I can't convey

  To anyone, this helping hand.

  Was it because I worried about Lorraine?

  Or lit the candles?

  Why you came I can understand a little;

  Why you left is another matter.

  The days are empty now: no friend speaks.

  The candles all are cold and dead

  And about the rest—her—I know nothing.

  Days pass ... will you return?

  I don't know how to write a poem to Saint Luke, but there it is, the best I can do. [...]

  For To Scare the Dead: let it turn out to be St. Luke who shamanistically possessed him (a bridge thus established between 70 A.D. and our present), and the protag eventually discovers, through this assimilated inner contact that St. Luke (and probably also the others of the original cadre of Christians, the inner circle of Christ's) is what we call (are you ready?) a non-terrestrial, of magnificent power and authority and wisdom. I think plotwise the protag eventually learns/decides that originally such men as St. Luke were ordinary humans, "born of woman," etc., but became this—through such possession of them by the Holy Spirit, which is to say their Master, Christ (who was not an ordinary human being). And the purpose of this elevation comes through now, since our planet has had it (ecology wise, due to our using up and destroying and polluting); this is a system to get some of us, as many as possible "translated" out of here and hence saved; this is the true meaning of "being saved," saved from the holocaust. This too is the meaning of the now-arriving Parousia.

  I might add that what gives the non-terrestriality of Luke away to the protag are, e.g., the dreams in which the protag experiences himself—and man in general—as an animal among other animals, a sort of anthropological-biologist-naturalist viewpoint derived from Luke-within-him. He obtains Luke's standpoint, and it is off earth. The other-end-of-the-telescope view. What St. Luke has, as "vibes," is a humorous attitude, a smiling, almost rollicking quality—except that he has ferocious dedication and drive to the cause of truth and righteousness. Humor and zeal. And because of being a physician he has a tender healing quality.

  It's an invasion from the past, contrived in the future (the time-loop structure), from off earth, inside his (and other people's) head. It, the invader, just pops on inside him one day, and from then on it occupies the right hemisphere of his mind, which was just waiting on standby for this. (Personality of it a little like Lord Running Clam.90)

  Plot breakdown:

  Ch. before taken over (possession). Then take over.

  Mystery as to who took him over, to solution. (Lots of research.)

  Social meaning: who else has been taken over? Work in concert.

  Opposition (who? The establishment?)

  Ch. must decide where he stands: the "hallucinations" or estab.

  Ch. decides for the Messiah, whom he encounters externally: another person taken over.

  Final section: reprise of 1st century A.D., Christians vs. Rome, but with different outcome foreordained.

  End: the pale white light (where no shadows are) comes on; it is the Parousia. Ships huge ones begin to land.

  (Ch. debates all the issues I debated; e.g., Is it a spirit of a dead person? Is it a non-terrestrial? The Holy Spirit? Reincarnation? Major denouement is when he realizes that it is both—a non-t and the Holy Spirit, and I guess in a sense the spirit of a dead human—rather than either-or. This exhaustion of categories of thought should be a major achievement in this novel. [Rephrased: the quality of answers depends on the questions put.])

  I have now finally read Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End. What I wanted to do was find out if any details resembled details of my 3-74 et al. experience. Generally, no. All I can say is that his story is compatible with my experience; I mean, if my experience were so, his book could grow out of it; or, if his book were true, my experience could grow out of it. It is almost a make, but not quite. Still, it is closer than any other system—if you view it as a system, and I think it is: a philosophy disguised as a novel ... not really disguised, but more stated. One detail is right on: the idea he expresses, rather cryptically, about time, that it is more complex than we realize, and then he springs on us the idea of memories about the future (reverse time). In this one respect a detail fits into exact, precise and major place. It isn't conclusive. But—in a fuzzy way, my structure and his are identical, if you just blur or joggle them a little. They will harmonize.

  Of most value would be to take his novel and to approach my experience strictly in the kind of S-F terms he uses (where religious symbolism and experience are subsumed by modern S-F "non-terrestrial" explanations, rather than vice-versa). If I did this, I would say:

  (1) We are not only being watched; we are being controlled, but don't know it; they remain beyond our threshold of vision.

  (2) They work for a higher purpose, one we can't understand but which fits our concepts of spiritual, moral purposes.

  (3) We are instruments, therefore, of an invisible spiritual force which causes us to grow and develop in certain arranged directions.

  (4) Some of us are either part of their race or can be elevated to their level, as they work through these individuals.

  (5) The probable reason for their concealment is our evil qualities. We cannot be trusted, individually or collectively (man qua beast).

  (6) A critical moment has approached or is approaching; this is a unique period in their work, therefore in our use-purpose.

  (7) The extent of camouflage and delusion induced in us is extraordinary in amount and degree.

  I'm not sure these S-F concepts mean much. In terms of S-F yield, this is about it as far as what my 3-74 experience gives. This is why I reject an S-F type of explanation; a theological one yields so much more. The above simply do not explain. They are paltry, and no more than the convention of the moment. What is needed is a harmonization of theology and S-F without a reduction of the former to the latter, as Clarke does. It looks (what he does) like an improvement, but it is not. The devil "really" is a non-terrestrial race. You see? And yet, what is extraordinarily significant is that the two modes of interpretation which I hover most between are S-F and theology, which surely tells us something about S-F we otherwise might not know. The two must be related in some important way.

  "I've recovered some buried memories, of about two thousand years ago."

  "From a previous life?"

  "No, strangely, from this one." (Dialog for Scare.)

  [5:168] The Moth, which in descending can be viewed as progressively illuminating every sector of the landscape (past present and future) simultaneously. Its light is white like moonbeams. It is always getting closer but it has never arrived, which is to say, touched down at one point only (i.e., at one instant).

  From fatigue I've failed to put down a lot. But the descending Moth exhibits in model form how an entity or universe outside time enters one confined by linear time. It is throughout matter—i.e., throughout in the lesser, linear universe, as if the whole landscape is light-spattered. It took me over 12 hours to realize that the descending Moth, like a hollow Japanese paper lantern, was actually a ship landing, a huge one. This was the ultimate vision for me, this great light-giving ship identified in the dream only as the "Moth," which I guess is its individual name. Thus I am enabled to conceive what up to this point I couldn't conceive, the way the "Kingdom" enters our world, the relationship it has to our world constantly, etc. (Those two are the same: how
it enters and its constant relationship.) (It is a constant entering, as the EB macro says, but I couldn't conceive this. Now I can.) The maximum linear-time entry point has already been fixed, and entry has begun ("the loading had begun"). We are experiencing or feeling or encountering its effects! As if in the periphery of light-spatter on the time landscape. The outskirts of it, but still, particles of light (illumination) are falling now. [...]

  The light was not like sunlight. It was that which I saw light up the bedroom that Sunday night before Pinky died; it was the raising, I think, that night of the veil of limitation (on me). This was frightening to me, because I rightly associated it with approaching death. I guess this means that when/as we die, we begin to see what formerly was concealed to us, or from us, and the shock is great, since we have, all our lives, been trading (doing business) with evil. The first things seen are negative, and what is worse, we've been part of this negative reality, which, as Tagomi realized, is an actual evil, not merely a view-point evil. It is basically self-awareness: self as part of this and now disclosed (to a higher eye). It is the ultimate fulfillment of paranoiac vision ... my evil inside is seen! This is universally experienced as the Day of Wrath, and rightly so. "Oh dreadful day!" "Oh wretched me, to be here on this day!" Etc. There was nothing inappropriate in my reaction.

  But what is even more amazing was the following morning when I was unnaturally up and about at 7:00 A.M., and felt the spirit (of 3-74) back in me again. This time I asked its name. It said it represented what it called "The Nameless God," that it itself was the Virgin, but not the Christian Virgin, rather the Roman one, which is Astraea. (I looked it up in Virgil.) This time, for the first time, she, Astraea, answered my questions as I put them; I was not passive but active. I asked what they would do as judgment, since Astraea, the Virgin or Virgo, is the Immortal of Justice. She told me candidly that they would condemn, by fire, those who have despoiled the Earth, and she cited such matters as the defoliation in Viet Nam. I was overjoyed to know that the destroyers of Earth would themselves suffer fire as judgment, so I tend to be skeptical about this whole experience, viewing it as wish-fulfillment rather than truly receptive; nonetheless that day my blood pressure, when taken, was normal for the first time, fantastic proof of the subjective concept at 7 that morning that now everything was okay. The arrival of Virgo that day was certainly to coincide with the blood pressure taking, to help me in what had become a terrifying vital matter. I have throughout the year wondered how in any real sense I could claim or imagine myself as healed when my blood pressure was in fact even more elevated. The spirit returned as a calming spirit, a tranquil spirit of ma'at like balance and harmony. Out of that day's combined experiences I felt the most intense relief and joy, which is easy to fathom. Now as I write this I feel it revive in me, a true uprising of joy. I attribute both my physical repair and the psychological state of ease (which the nurse noticed) I experienced as coming directly from heavenly intervention; no shit. Truly I had faltered, being afraid to go to get the b.p. reading any more. But that day I was changed, and by that adventitious entity which had entered me in 3-74. And then the next day I found the Stone Pony LP I longed for so badly ... there it was again, reissued after 4 or 5 years. (Maybe my letter to Capitol helped me do it!)

  Since then (this is a diary now) I've dreamed some pre-cog dreams (big breasted Tzarina, broken phono with Tessa trying to fix it, a vast attempt by the Russian nobility to set up shop in another continent, obviously a paradigm for the CP), and then last night very strange dreams in which I read a book, again large and serious, about economics—the economics of the German Social Democrat movement, starting post WW1. [...]

  Idea for To Scare the Dead. Dreams, but not about the past as are the dreams in Peter Proud91; rather, they are like the dreams about the approaching Spaniards by the Aztecs—visions of the future. Like the Moth dream, which is a dream about the arrival of a ship, and S-F in style. (This was used in Clans somewhat, when Ledebur had visions about the ship arriving.) Pre-cog dreams. The cities he dreams himself in are futuristic—from the next century! Also—my MBS92 script, later made into a minor short story, where the guy has a phobia from an event in the future—why can't I expand on this story idea, here? Make a novel use of it? Man who remembers the future rather than the past—the psychiatrist setting, even. Autobiographical ... even unto my experience which caused me to summon Mr. Kelly: experiencing disinhibiting stimuli before they arrived (in normal sequence and interval). Beforehand, as mere word and/or light signals to us. Now, having read the EB macro article on time, I know that what I saw were events up the manifold ahead before they had entered linear time; before they had "popped into existence ahead of us." I saw them in less than time reality but still in sequence, like the next film reel still in the can, not yet projected. Only as the future enters the present does it get projected into (obviously) this space-time continuum which we experience. Thus of course I saw it "reduced" to mere words and light signals; it hadn't entered either time or space, only had sequence. Didn't look real (substantial). The Minkowski block universe93 ... I verified it without knowing in the slightest what I was experiencing. It's exactly like that time when I was a little kid on the ranch and saw inside the dead hen, saw the eggs, very small and flat, which she was going to lay each day, later on ... and maybe this boyhood scene could start To Scare the Dead.

  [5:182] We seem to be confined within a metal prison, but something vital has secretly penetrated the enclosing ring around us and fires assistance and advice to us in the form of video and audio signals. Neither the prison ring is visible to us nor the signal system which fires nor the entity which has penetrated through us. The signals emerge as if from cores drilled through the metal; they're in color. Thus, our prison was breached a long time ago. Help is here, but we still remain here within the prison; we aren't yet free. I take it that the camouflaged invisibility of the signals is to keep the creator of the prison from knowing that help is here for us. The drilled out "tubes" through the prison wall to us can't be discerned; they blend perfectly, as if alive (the signals too seem alive). It is like the penetrating roots of a plant (!!!) which over the centuries have grown through rock or concrete. These root tips come through and into here, the enclosed open space where we're kept, and then they burst into colored changing light patterns which register on us subliminally.

  The core tubes are at right angles to the prison walls. They are possibly very long—light years long. The first great well-kept secret is that we are slaves, in prison. The second, that help has quietly breached through the walls to inform us. To teach us how to lift the siege—what to do and when. Really, all it can do is inform teach and educate us; it has no power. The prison builders have all the power. In the James-James dream, the scouts coming in through all the many doors: penetrating the wall, so to speak, of the building which we were all in, thousands of us. And I told them we needed medical assistance. Perhaps their help is passing or will pass from information only to their actual presence here (as referred to by the St. Sophia news). In the dream they were decidedly motorized (modern technology?). They came at a point when I felt desperate over our medical situation. Maybe that actual time has now arrived (in my life, anyhow). [...]

  My 3-74 experience: I was inside the Immanent Mind. As in a womb? Not mere analogy, perhaps. Made to grow. Both within the parent organism and also isomorphic with it, but much smaller and less developed. We are in God; moving toward comprehension, which requires further growth/development. We are like the nymph or larva stage of mosquitoes. Hence my dreams about the Pond. Again—Wachet auf.94 [...]

  March 1974: I reached reunion with the Father. Today 5-31-75 I had a dream in which I was a child again back in the '30s; at an old-fashioned table I sat with other people, and a man gave me a bowl of cereal. I saw that He was the Savior, and I began to cry with ecstatic joy. When I woke up I took a couple hours and managed to reconstruct the meaning of this dream. When I was very small, Christ fed me His Real Presence i
n the typical host-form: cereal (i.e., bread). I took him into me back then, and, as in the parables of the mustard seed and the leavening, He grew within me. Later on, in adult life, I felt a growing need to nourish other people, especially to feed them (in '74 we sent $400 for famine relief, for example). That which was given to me grew in me and began to yield fruit, or expression in my giving nourishment; I became by degrees the Man who fed me as a child. Viewed this way, my 3-74 experience is not something dropped on me from outside, due to the "painted in the corner" need-situation I was in, but in fact the pay-off of a lifetime process of growth. It was the culmination of something alive and advancing inside me; in 3-74 I made it or reached it, reunion with the Father, which is to say, Christ as Mediator restored me to the Father (I didn't achieve it but was brought to it). Thus both Christ and the Father were present: Christ within me, leading me to the Father. This explains the long-term intimations I have had about being moved along toward a pay-off destiny (e.g., the dream in Canada wherein Kathy and everyone else take off their masks, finally, and Kathy says, "Now it all can be explained to you, what it was all about"). I was moving by degrees, step by step, toward the encounter with the dark-haired girl at the door with the gold fish-sign necklace. I assume that when I acted as the Savior and gave an analogous bowl of cereal to someone that I set a simi lar process in motion in him or her, too; thus, Christ delivers us, spreading Himself out through us by means of this "unauthorized" communion with His Real Body. Christ's role as mediator is now clear to me. A man, such as I, could never on his own find his way back to union with God. Therefore God Himself initiates the reunion, and it is God as Christ who acts to lead a man, myself in this case, along the difficult, long, narrow, confusing path to final redemption; to the right conclusion, which I experienced. A man's tragic difficulty does not begin as a situation at any given moment in his life; he is born into it: separation from God. Thus Christ begins to lead a man back from the start; intervention began in my life long ago—in fact as many of my dreams showed, in early childhood the groundwork was laid down; He was already active. 3-74 was not the difficulty but the pay-off. The last step before resurrection (finding immortality) was the death in the tomb, which I had experienced during those many sleepless nights. This is what Teilhard de Chardin said; each man as Christ; the entire species working its way along the stations of the cross, which is also what Claudia Hambro says in Confessions when she says she can feel the crown of thorns. "Christ didn't die for us; he was an example which each of us must follow, and suffer as he did to attain what he attained," as she puts it to Jack Isidore (paraphrase). No man can die—atone—for your sins. You must atone yourself, following him as model; he is the guide, the mediator, not a sacrifice. Christ was not—repeat not—a sacrifice, but the first immortal man, showing us the path to immortality. How He did it, His steps, is how we must do it individually and collectively. "Now you grieve but later you will rejoice," He told them.95 What I experienced is precisely the Long Dark Night of the Soul as depicted.96 As I look back, there really is no natural explanation of my prolonged, intense fear; I'd been in worse spots before and not felt that. Now I am sure, looking back, that a supernatural or religious element was at work in me, moving toward fruition. Again, psalm 116. I could feel the coffin around me in the night, and then the darkness of the night was broken through to me from a long way off, the expression of a Vast Mind thinking intentionally toward me, with me in mind. My fear went away, and, 14 months later, has never returned.