The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  Having experienced this blissful mystical understanding of it all, everything I've been into from 3-74 to now, I am thinking, Perhaps I can infer that the Parousia are not here in any universal or objective sense; but surely for me, as an individual, the entire sequence of depicted events came—and in the order described. Which causes me to ask, If as Meister Eckhart says, the Kingdom of God is within the Soul of each person (i.e., an entirely individual, inner event) then is not the entire realm of the Parousia, all of it, within the inner individual soul of one-person-at-a-time? But if so, then why do not other people report my experience as theirs? Over 2,000 years there is no individual report like mine, except perhaps Eckhart? Well, no matter how I cut it I will have trouble explaining some parts.* [...]

  In an effort to understand how this parabolic reverse-direction comes about I turn to the I Ching (by memory, alas) about the "seeds of the future being buried in the present." Always, the seeds, concealed, of the future are here now, if we had a method of discerning them, which could mean set-ground discrimination; anyhow, I am at this moment in sudden wild ecstasy, because viewed this way such "Logos material," as I've called it, as the dream in Tears, plus Prelude's song "After the Goldrush" are very likely—wow!!!!!—such seeds of the future emerging as fragments of that impending, cohering future, now. This would set them apart from all the objects and constituents which are purely part of the present. How extraordinary it would be to all at once see (would you believe in a special illuminated red and gold shimmer of color???) these seeds wherever you looked. You would be seeing tomorrow! It would enthrall you, as if time had moved backward: the future building itself here and now. You might then manage to discern the shape of future things, the pattern emerging. (Or you might not.) Well, then by this token, what I have seen indicates the Parousia, so we are back to it as an objective forthcoming event!

  There is a great mystery about the Kingdom of God, as to where it is, and the Parousia in general; it is in you, but also among you, and it is invisible but actual. He must mean it is transpersonal. When you participate (yes, that is it); you enter it—did He not use this key word? You enter it; therefore it already exists before you and outside you, which indicates objective existence (contrast, "I entered sadness," a state of mind). It is real and it is there; one by one we enter it, or we don't. We cross over and enter, led by our shepherd. In response to the sound of his voice. A place of safety and peace, where we remain with Him. We find our way to it. Recall my vivid experience in 3- or 4-74 in seeing a pylon or archway with a silvery moonlit world beyond, and Greek letters—silence. I could pass through the gate and enter that world beyond; I could see it clearly, first here, then there, now over there, glowing and waiting, open to me. Not in any one spot but glimpsed again and again:

  That was no subjective state; that was a perception of something real which others couldn't see; a set-ground gestalting. I discerned the doorway repeatedly; it was multilocated and authentic. Not omnipresent but multipresent. The Secret Kingdom, hidden.

  A moment of fear touches me; did I then fail to pass through that gate and enter it? I think I passed on through, because after seeing it (that was quite early along) I then had the holy waste and void dreams, or visions, visionary trance experiences, where I was with God; that came later, I'm sure; yes, that was later, after the Carmel dream which ushered it in. So I did enter. [...]

  When I was little I used to haul out big wooden cartons and boxes to play inside of ... it is as if, through the pylon gate, I found my way back to the peace and safety of those cartons of my childhood ... God has brought me at last to safety and a realization, at last, of safety, the safety I yearned for and did not have even then (5 years old). Viewed another way perhaps it can be said that I have been brought safely into the fold, after straying all over the landscape. Either way we are talking about the same place. I feel a great peace now, at last, for the first time in my life. This whole period, including 3-74, has been arduous; I had to work hard and hustle after my illumination (3-74), right on down through the months, these 14 months, writing on this as I am doing, reading and researching and writing and meditating in order to understand. I believe I've worn myself out more with this than with any previous writing, any novel or group of novels. I have educated myself regarding my experience. Gone to school over it. What does it add up to (at this point in my knowledge)? I passed through the narrow gate in mid-74, and now I am told that He will come back for the world itself, fairly soon. Thus an individual experience will be made/is being made into a common or group or collective or objective experience by our people in general. As with other questions, the answer to the question, Is it subjective and individual or objective and general, is, Both. [...]

  If I were to go and declare that I had been changed (in Paul's sense: "Behold! I tell you a sacred secret; we must all be changed," etc.103), then if anyone believed me—if—they would say, "The Time prophesized has come." I guess I must be wrong, except if I am wrong, that I am changed, then what did happen that should so resemble it and unfold in correct order and yield the results attributed? Q: How does my 3-74 experience, going up to date differ from what was prophesized? Compare the two. Contrast them. Write an essay on the difference.

  This is the way to put it: "What do you have to do to enter the Kingdom of Heaven?" and then the list which follows conforms to the list one would draw, in sequence, of what I experienced, back before that, too, to the distress—lost—period which ran on months if not years. What I went through both bad (before 3-74) and good (3-74 on) had to be gone through, like an enormous spiritual transcendental car wash—a human being refurbishing system, so complex as to beggar description, beginning with the dreams of the flying monsters with horse's necks (dragons) and then picking up in distinctness with the chromatic flash-cut graphics, the latter night being, if any section can be so said to be, the moment when the Spirit began to pour out onto and into me. The beginning, in other words, of the New. Up to then it had been nothing but various aspects of me perishing—dying. The rebirth began with the graphics; the turning-point in the parabolic orbit had begun. I was re-entering life, as new life re-entered me: "from above." The thing about all this is that if it is said to me, severely, "You have to do (experience, go through) a lot to enter the Kingdom of Heaven; you can't do it like you are; you've got to be very much changed, and receive the Spirit," etc., I can say, "I know." (Or I think I know. I hope I know. I hope I don't just have hubris about this. I hope I'm not just boasting. If I am I'm sorry.) I think, though, really, what is convincing about it when I view it objectively is that, remembering back, I was genuinely broken down, stripped down, torn down to my skeletal plating, like an insect who has woven a cocoon, and then I passed through months of uniquely and actually unimaginable rebuilding processes, all adventitious to me, improving and teaching me, altering me—well, the "possession" part alone remade me in the most fundamental way indeed—and clearly as completely remaking me as can be conceived.

  (1) I believed I was someone else.

  (2) From another time period.

  (3) Dead centuries ago and reborn.

  (4) A holy Christian person.

  (5) I spoke Attic Greek somewhat and remembered Rome.

  (6) I wanted a new name and trimmed my beard.

  (7) All my interests and habits changed—instantly.

  (8) My linguistic idiosyncrasies altered permanently.

  (9) Even the way I margined my pages changed.

  (10) I wrote people I'd never written before.

  (11) I joined religious organizations I'd never heard of.

  (12) All my political alliances of a lifetime changed totally.

  (13) I called cats "she" and dogs "he."

  Ergo: He who was alive died, and someone else lives now in me, replacing me.

  (14) I talk to and am talked to by God.

  Well, what more can you ask out of a transformed person? I know the future and things beyond my senses, but I'll skip that because I am not sur
e if that counts.

  (15) I stopped drinking wine and drank beer.

  (16) I knew that aerosol sprays were lethal; likewise cigarettes.

  (17) I could discern evil and could tell what was true.

  (18) My spelling is unchanged. (To give some continuity.)

  (19) I recovered from most of my quasi-physical ailments.

  (20) Most of my time since I spend studying theology.

  (21) The level of my intelligence is increased—this includes reading retention, speed, and abstract thinking.

  (22) My depth perception is improved.

  (23) Mental operations which baffled me are now easy (i.e., mental blocks now seem gone).

  (24) My psychological projections are withdrawn.

  The only problem is, I am in no customary sense—maybe in no sense whatsoever—spiritualized or exalted. In fact I seem even more mean and irascible than before. True, I do not hit anybody, but my language remains gungy and I am crabby and domineering; my personality defects are unaltered. In the accepted sense I am not a better person. I may be healthier (maybe not that; vide the blood pressure). But I am not a good person, even though my emotions and moods are better under control. Maybe I just have a long way to go, yet.

  I have a sudden new thought about "Vinland" and "Portuguese States of America" et al. No one is coming here to a New World, and we are not going (i.e., space flight) to a New World, but this world will be changed into a new world. These are symbols of renewal for our world, related to Spring. They are precog images of how it is going to be for us here, on what has become a depleted worn-out old world: rebirth.

  These are all clues, many of them, as to what it's going to be like: the future is seeping back to me in dreams. And I dream often of green grass and moisture ... like a park or garden. If only I could figure out—

  And so to bed.

  But as to the lack of proper spiritual refurbishing in me ... perhaps we have too clear an attitude toward pious transformations as being the ones He wishes in us. Perhaps these are our standards for the very pure; after all, He would retain the individual, I think, and not force us all into one proper mold. I have been changed, but not in all ways; I have been improved, but not according to human standards. I can only hope I am obeying His will and not my own.

  I do not conform to my own views of goodness, but maybe I do to His.

  It could be an important observation or insight to say that I did not have a religious mystical experience, with God—as such; I encountered or discerned or perceived or experienced (assimilated the Dinge-an-sich in totality) which we call the universe, and found it to be alive, wise, active (Vast Active Living Intelligence System) and supporting to life, such as ours. Only by degrees—and the process of elimination—did I come at last to call this "God." I did so because what I experienced is customarily called that and nothing else, except perhaps Immanent Mind; however, this is more than mind, it also being active (like Ptath the artificer). Thus I arrived at the idea that I had found God along lines which did not involve me flying to easy concepts or solutions. In a very real sense I started at the beginning of thought, without preconceptions or expectations, and invented, so to speak, the categories I used, had to use, and wound up with. I think had no one preceded me in this I would still have arrived at these conclusions; I mean, had there been no human knowledge of God or gods, or had I never heard of this (e.g., born into a totally atheistic society with total suppression of news of God actually or in terms of historical belief), I would then be coming to my people to tell them that He Lives.

  [...] To return to Heinrich Zimmer's "Magdeburg Hemispheres,"104 probably, if not certainly, my perceptions of the outside universe cleared up and became lucid and total because my inner world, my psyche, cleared up and became lucid and a total unity: like outer, inner; like inner, outer. In Jungian terms I abruptly integrated the contents of my mind, with spectacular results (hence all the dreams about alchemy and the Greek period). (I got down to archetypes of the collective unconsciousness, to the very bottom.) This is the road; this is how you do it, total integration. This is the road to God, withdrawing all projections, reconciling the opposites, release of all libido. Transformation from ego to true self. But—How did I accomplish that, while lying in my room listening to bubblegum rock, with no outside help (sic: none?)? Spontaneous psychic integration, the goal of analytical psychology. I went on the journey into the unconscious, which Jung and John Weir Perry105 describe (period before the graphics). (Resembling the Bardo Thödol.) Perhaps it could be properly said, as I sometimes think, that my psychotic journey began in 1970 in earnest that day I kept playing the Paul McCartney record over and over, when Nancy and Isa left. I had been "neurotic" until that day, but starting that day I suffered a collapse mentally, and descended into the world of dreams and nightmare and half-sleep, through which I moved only partially conscious ... yes, this indeed is so, is so, and must never be forgotten in understanding this: I was on this journey from mid-1970 up until 3-74, when I returned from out of the depths, into bright day light, integrated and whole, for the first time in my life, carrying back up with me the pearl of great price—thus showing John Perry to have been right. During those years I lived among huge archetypical projections of a collective sort; yes, it is so. What a world of daemons and so forth.

  Four years in that strange underwater world ... from shock and grief, wandering like a shade over the landscape, among shadows.

  Also, it must be realized that the journey part (1970/74) was characterized by acute primitivism of outlook on my part, the mystique thing Lévy-Brühl106 talks about (I think I'm talking about schizophrenia, here, not manic depression). But this indicates that the 3-74 experience, which was re-entry, is non-psychotic, a healed experience, and the withdrawn projections indicate a sophisticated non-primitive viewpoint or functioning. As Jung says re Meister Eckhart, by withdrawing my projections I experienced God psychologically, as an inner event not entangled with external objects, but purely so: authentically. Put another way, starting the chromatic graphics, I evolved up through 2,000 years of human history-evolution-psychological-growth. Thus a very archaic personality came awake in me, suddenly, which is to say, the adult I had never been in all my life. Buried deep in my collective unconscious all these years, it possessed spiritual and practical wisdom acquired from the archetypes. Therefore I say this new personality or person was created from the deepest levels of my psyche, a child or rather new man from the collective experience and wisdom of the race, and has an incontestable superiority over my original ego self. This fits the description of "born again" as certainly as could be.* From madness to sanity and a new, better self. I think I should feel free to attribute my cure to God, as a miracle of His doing—as when Jesus caused the blind man to see: it shows God's love. Certainly I did not heal myself, and it is hard to rationalize that it somehow was spontaneous, which is to say, uncaused. I would know, wouldn't I? I heard the voice of my "physician," did I not, both in dreams and while awake? Given that there is a physician, who else could this physician be (Asklepios was an avatar of Him). [...]

  While you are dead the Kingdom remains invisible to you. I think in 2-75 I began to see it. It is a spiritual kingdom, and in the process of becoming actual (physical, literal, visible). We are the dead, as in Ubik, who must be roused by the sound of His voice. But not roused to physical life but spiritual life (as the grain of what is not raised as it was sown). (But raised in a new, spiritual, better body.) This is why when I saw the King He was dancing among the furrows—which is where the wheat lies sleeping (in death); he made a sound to them in some way; a form of music. He, the spring King, was calling the sleeping wheat up into life, from where they were buried in the furrows; this is what spring, and his voice, mean. Thus it is said of Dionysos that he "is a god of vegetation" and the mystery of Elysius as a grain of wheat planted in the furrow is reborn, and the grave equals the furrow—the dead human, buried, is reborn. This is what I saw in 2-75 without (as usual) u
nderstanding it. As He calls to the wheat, who are dead in their furrows, he calls to us who are dead (in our graves), exactly as I depicted in Ubik (Runciter's voice, their friend who died but who, for them, has returned to help them). [...]

  The "solitary" life which both Christ and Paul speak of as an affliction, [is] in contrast to the ear of corn in which all grains are together in corporate life; it was an ear of corn that was held up at Elysius, to demonstrate the mystery: I think the mystery is, the solitary grain(s) will be sown, then will grow again in corporate life, a corporate body of which Christ is the head. Paul in 1 Cor makes it perfectly clear that resurrection is in a spiri tual body as opposed to the prior physical body 107; as in Neoplatonism, we can expect to ascend on to a spiritual "next ring" universe in a spiritual, nonphysical, immortal body, leaving this one behind; it grows out of this one after this one is dead and buried, as with the grain of wheat/corn in the furrow: what comes next is different; it is a complete misunderstanding to expect—or even want—the originally physical "solitary" inferior body back ever again; it is metamorphosis which we are talking about; Paul in 1 Cor makes this perfectly clear. The incorruptible body is not a physical body, like this only eternal, but a spiritual body. Death is regarded as a doorway, with something better on the other side, exactly like the doorway I saw in 3- and 4-74, like a Greek pylon, with the moonlight and clear water beyond, which was everywhere, here and there, that I looked. A study of the other mystery religions (all based on the dying lunar god Osiris) shows this. Of all the things (visions) I saw, none is more significant than the pylon or arch-like doorway with the Greek water and nighttime island scene, so beautiful and peaceful on the other side. That was not a transformed view of this world (as with the iron ring and later spring time and Santa Sophia the building), that was a doorway to another world for sure. It wasn't to death; death was the doorway, the passage, with life beyond. It was a rather narrow entranceway. (When did I see that doorway? It must have either been after my shoulder surgery, or led into that period, because just after Pinky died I remember seeing him, all healthy and full-chested, squeezed through the doorway looking into this world at us.) (It just occurs to me that the doorway always had the proportions of the Golden Rectangle.) And at first I saw it as a geometric drawing of the Golden Rectangle complete with Greek-letter markings at corners, etc., at that point not yet projected into the world, found there as doorway and 3-D, but "in my 3rd eye or inner mind or mind's eye," not yet fused with the landscape; later, whenever I saw it, I actually picked out the Golden Rectangle in the real world, discerned it, but saw it as a doorway, and saw the lovely quiet peaceful world on the other side, waiting. Thinking about it now I realized that the discernment of this Golden Rectangle doorway within the real world here and there was on the identical order of the iron ring, God in the trash of the alley, everything else, especially equal to seeing Springtime in 2-75; it was a major event, and not to be ignored or forgotten; it was another transformation of the landscape, another vision of the next world or the New Creation. Offhand I'd say its message was, One can get from here (this world) to there, which is to say, to the Spiritual Universe. It's immediately at hand, if we could but see it. That which is seen through the doorway is not superimposed on our world but lies beyond it. For instance, it is nighttime there. (Although midday here.) I'm sure it's "on the Other Side," and you would have to die to get there; after all, Pinky, after his death, immediately after, looked back into this world from there. It is another place, another time entirely. I don't think it's the Kingdom of God; I think everything else I experienced is. If it is indeed a glimpse through the doorway into the Next World, then the Next World (for me anyhow) is very much like Minoan Greece, like the Aegean and Crete (where many of my first visionary dreams were set). (Also, where Zagreus/Dionysos came from.) All the straight john uptight rigid description and attitudes by the Christians about it are just so much a row of swords to protect it; once inside it's lovely. You can sit down on a Grecian bench and relax in the cool of the evening. [...]