The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  [25:9] I really am drawn to the idea of the kind stranger God intruding [down] into our screwed up chaotic world—the secret growth of Kosmos-Krasis within the vast Anomie, like its messages within (and smaller than) ours. That certainly is reason to equate this Krasis with Christ's forthcoming Kingdom, in which all is harmonie. No matter which explanation is correct, our salvation lies with the wisdom, krasis-building artificer; it is to him that we must turn in all cases. This does not make the creator evil, but "blind" also means "deaf," since it stands for unknowing.

  From a Teilhardian standpoint it seems to be consciousness either creating itself or being created. But it certainly is interesting that the Krasis building is wisdom (that I am sure of), and the Krasis seems to me (I forget why) to be a thinking composite Brain or anyhow Brain-like thing, an actualization into the physical world of the non-material entity Holy Wisdom. The Krasis builder is itself the Krasis—there is no difference between our being assimilated to it or to its edifice. Have I had an insight here without realizing it, that what is being built in linear time is identical to the Builder who lies outside of time—is it/he/she completing itself? The highest level of homeostasis: it is its own creator—self created—which is next to impossible for us to understand (somehow it would have to stand outside of time, or anyhow normal linear time, not in bondage to it as we are)—and so I found it to be—precisely that.

  Self-creating, a quality of God himself: what else is self-creating? Isn't that the ultimate hierarchical form of structure? All it needs is something to make itself out of and at the end of time there it stands complete, and thereupon, as I experienced, it travels backward and creates itself backward (in reverse, retrograde sequence, the way the writer of a mystery novel writes backward).

  [25:11] These messages: I just suddenly realized (remembered) that they serve to program us, subliminally, usually this way: a written message, one out of hundreds or even thousands which we see, is somehow caused to link with an internal (in one of us, whom Zebra selects) system—as if the system is engrammed by Zebra via the messages very deliberately, with the person consciously none the wiser. This possibly answers the question: whom are the messages for? Evidently not for the small conscious elite but anyone at any time. This possibly points to analogous internal entelechies presynchronized (from birth!) differing in different individuals so as to later link up. A good example if a big one for me was the gold fish necklace. Thus Zebra continually guides (controls?) us as we move (are moved) through the "maze" of life—disinhibited constantly and at the right time and place by the right signal.

  This is a major insight. Zebra uses these messages to communicate with all of us—exactly like the Runciter messages.

  Wow. Did Ubik touch on a major undiscovered aspect of the universe: it (God or Zebra or Ubik) talking to us if necessary via the trash graffiti in the gutter walls. But a message only works this magic if the analogous link program has been put there, a prearranged monadic harmony.

  [25:16] Zebra has invaded our world, replacing merciless determinism, with its own loving and living body, to de-program and save us. This is the great white fish giving us of its body, by which it suffers pain, that we might live (find salvation—freed from "astral" determinism). The Black Iron Prison is simultaneous in all time and places and it is the merciless world from which the living Corpus Christi saves us. I have seen it and its nature—and Zebra and its nature. It has the (magic to us) power to transform.

  Zebra mimics the deterministic structure by inserting its body between it and us. This is how astral determinism is broken; instead of the blind, striving mere mechanism, there is living volition (the salvific). The previous mechanical force is rewoven for (1) the fulfillment of Zebra's plan; and (2) the benefit of the individuals involved. Any event can be headed off, aborted, altered or brought about. Evidently this is grace or divine providence, and the individual may very well sense it. Where freedom enters into it I'm not sure, but I know one thing: Before the insertion/intervention there was none—in fact that's the main quality (bad) of the "ananke" world—the person is flat-out programmed—caused to react to cuing. The ancients were right about this being a—or even the—prime purpose of God vs. "the stars."

  [25:19] "It (Zebra) not only mimics the things of this world it also imitates the processes" (KW're Chrissy's birth defect "causality" of insight). Then in that case the Beatles song, the earlier scrotal pain, and the blinding beam of light coming through the fish sign did not cause the knowledge to enter my head: it was, rather, a simulation of causality, of the actual deterministic kind found outside Zebra. So Zebra does not just "persuade" causality along different outcome lines; it also simply mimics these.

  [25:21] This fits my grand theme in my writing: the awful truth about reality is obscured from us. My other theme about androids programmed to imagine they are human (i.e., self-determining) is another basic facet of this. But I never knew of, nor did I experience or write about, a salvific entity (except in Maze of Death and Our Friends From Frolix 8).*

  Correction. The salvific intervening entity is encountered in Ubik and Galactic Pot-Healer, possibly in Stigmata in the person of Louis Bulero ... wow—in Stigmata Palmer Eldritch and Louis Bolero fight each other as did the two forces I saw noetically.

  In fact, to reprise Ubik in terms of my Zebra formulation, I am staggered at how close I came to Zebra—the way it sends its messages of help—and Runciter, like Christ, was our leader who died yet is alive. The intrusion quality is the same—the places it shows up, the ubiquity. I wonder how I could have come so close without consciously having had the revelation. There are also the two contending demi-deities. Also, Runciter's messages are to make them aware of their true, unrecognized horrible condition—i.e., what their world is really made up of. It is made up of ice—resembling my first LSD experience. Is ice, too, an image, condition or symbol of the actual state of things: heat loss death (entropy)? And Ubik itself is warm.

  Could the Marxists have recognized Ubik as a picture of Zebra and wondered if I [consciously] knew? Do they know? It is their antagonist. Maybe they don't view it theologically but rather as a superior life form. (Maybe they are right.) This would be scientific truth, as I told the Bureau. I conceive of Zebra as a weak "vegetable level" field, barely able to arrange matter. (Trigrams Sun and Li.10) But its level (capacity to exert force) seems to be growing. To have thresholded recently. I have seen what it can do and have heard its voice.

  ***

  [25:24] Most of what I know came directly by revelation (3-74 on). But I had already discerned that the reality of our world was not as it seemed, and that we had blocked off memories as to our origin and purpose ("imposter"). However, the proof of Zebra's success at mimicking is shown by the fact that it wasn't until Ubik that I even guessed his existence and it wasn't until Tears that I clearly saw the nature of this world (i.e., prison and us as slaves).

  [25:45] Any true exegesis of 3-74 will have to derive from what I saw, rather than external objective sources.* Take the vision of the ugly deformed artificer (like Iknaton) reaching his claw-like hands down to the buildings at Cal State Fullerton which he had built. I got the mystic vision, the occult vision, the mystery cult vision, the esoteric vision, the alchemical vision, the religious vision—in short, the vision. But I can't even figure out if it was the way of the cat or the way of the monkey.

  Folder 26

  FEBRUARY 1977

  [26:27] Just read (2/22/77) the EB article on Pantheism and Panentheism. God develops himself toward perfection through history, dialectically, and the goal of history is the growth of human freedom. Thus I learn to my delight that most of what I experienced, saw and learned in 3-74 confirms Hegel. And I am thus a Hegelian. Which is fine with me.

  [26:34] The deity I experienced was in process of becoming (i.e., changing—perfecting himself), had infinite goodness but perhaps limited power, although unlimited knowledge. What we call history was the dimension (world) in which this fulfillment takes plac
e; man, by participating in history joins—if not at the very least on God's side—then perhaps even melds with God himself and is a subform or section of God.

  God is immanent; the universe (world) is his body. But he is greater than the world (panentheism). What is not God is not wholly real (acosmic panentheism). Only God is wholly real, but he is surrounded by a veil (dokos) of appearance, like—similar to colored lights given off as if he is an incredibly multifaceted perfect sphere revolving. All time (including past and future) is present to God as a landscape of the now. He is very close to man, hidden only by the veil. He is deus absconditus: the phenomenal world we see is projected by him, as if emitted. However, he is capable of infusing (transubstantiating) it. Because of this a hylozoistic universe exists; it is an organism with noös governing it. Men can be made use of by God to achieve results within the historical process. In terms of human life, the evolution of history is, as designed by God, toward greater freedom; this is how humans should view it, but a switch in viewpoint can occur during which men cease to view themselves as individual men at all and view themselves as microforms of God, in which case the goal is not human freedom, but recollection that they are incarnations of God, and, having remembered, can rejoin—regain their identity as—God the Macrocosm. God has entered his own cosmos, so that it is not only his body but a body enclosing him, in a three-part process of emanation, sustaining and final reabsorption. The last part begins with the restoration of memory that one is God or part of God; at this point the banishment is already ending or ended. To thus remember is to have passed entirely through emanation, sustainment as distinct from God, and to have started back; all that remains is to get back—and this is the sole line of movement left ahead once memory returns; it is the final phase of a very long journey downward and then "horizontally" and now "vertically" back up.

  What is accomplished by this is the penetrating by God's mind (divine noös, or St. Sophia) to the deepest (furthest) levels of his body-organism so, because of this, he pervades it everywhere at every level, and it cannot be said of any level or place, "he is not here." I have seen God penetrate mere objects (immanently); therefore I see no problem in him transubstantiating living creatures as well, to pervade his physical extensiveness ubiquitously.

  EB: Anaxagoras "Noös arranges everything for the best." This is precisely what I saw Zebra doing.

  EB: "Russell at one stage in his career spoke of the world as consisting of events—Whitehead made the notion of process central in his metaphysics." So I saw (3-74).

  EB: "It is wrong to conclude the existence of a creator rather than an architect ... furthermore it infers that the being in question has unlimited powers, when all that the evidence seems to warrant is that its powers are very great." I just saw it arrange, not create, but certainly in the best possible way.

  EB definition of Panentheism: "the description of a God who has an unchanging essence but who completes himself in an advancing experience."

  EB: "It has been said that the Greeks thought of the world as a vast animal." 3-74 certainly was a Greek [view] experience! (Starting with Descartes it has been viewed as a vast machine.)

  [26:38] EB: "Whitehead thought of 'the primordial nature of God' as a general ordering of the process of the world, the ultimate basis of all induction and assertion of law, a 'conceptual pretension' that functions in the selection of these 'eternal objects,' or repeatable patterns that are enacted in the world. God, however, does not create actual entities. He provides them with initial impetus, in the form of their subjective aim, to self creation. Even God is the outcome of creativity, the process by which the events of the world are synthesized into new unities. It is the creative, not fully predictable, advance into novelty of the pluralistic process."*

  Thus the arranging which I perceived Zebra accomplishing is precisely what such sophisticated views as Whitehead's would hold to be the actual way God works, in contrast to popular conception, and ratifies—even verifies at least for me subjectively, that indeed He whom I saw was God, as this fits W.'s description (theory, view, analysis, insight, etc.), and is far superior to any view I myself even knew of or entertained. It was far beyond my education and mental power, to impugn intellectually this of God—yet I saw it, and have spent 3 years explicating it, to find it here in Whitehead (and in Hegel). The supra quote re Whitehead's view is a stunning perfect verbal account of what I saw in 3-74. Eclipsing any and all my own attempts to so account. I literally saw what Whitehead holds in a theoretical sense (likewise Hegel). Yes, Phil, you did see God—exactly as described by Whitehead (and Hegel).

  [26:42] Leibniz: We are colonies of monads who perceive others "with blurred vision" as materially existing, whereas in reality only monads (minds) exist, God being the Highest Monad who harmonizes and integrates the other monads. The concept "colonies of monads" being what humans really are, but due to "blurred vision" we see bodies—this is much like my own vision of the great "organism" with what I called "subsections."

  [26:43] EB: "Hegel saw human history as a vast dialectical movement toward the realization of freedom. The reality of history, he held, is spirit, and the story of religion is the process by which spirit—true to its own internal logical character and following the dialectical pattern of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (the reconciliation of the tension of opposite positions in a new unity that forms the basis of a further tension [i.e., the new synthesis generates its own opposite]—comes to full consciousness of itself. Individual religions thus represent stages in a process of evolution (i.e., progressive steps in the unfolding of spirit) directed toward the great goal at which all history aims." [...]

  I have a strong feeling that the Spirit active in history is the same one that was (and maybe still is) active in biological evolution. In a very literal sense, evolution has passed over from the area of biological evolution to the evolution of man within his social context—i.e., human history. (This theory isn't original with me.) Human morphology stays the same but new and different kinds of men arise over the millennia of human history. In having seen Zebra I was given a chance to see the teleological entity which directed the evolution up from the unicellular organism of Precambrian times to the human of the mustarian age.

  [26:45] Perhaps the condition I was in (in 3-74) is more important than the actual content of any act I performed while in that condition—it was what I knew, as well as what I did—what I did grew out of what I knew, and what I knew grew out of what I had become. The 3 (what I did, knew, had become, and by "new" also read "perceived") can't be separated; they blend into one another. I had to become what I became to know and perceive what I knew and perceived, and all these were necessary for me to do what I did, which was the final step: it completed the event/process. This is a wholly different way of looking at it, rather than the purely religious—there is a religious element in it (Zebra, and the awe I felt in perceiving Zebra), but great natural, biological processes are stressed too. [...]

  In fact, it seems evident, and a very important point, that my evolutionary leap forward up to a new level of being hence knowing and perceiving hence doing was a response on my part to danger (or at the very least distress and threat) and that what was set off in me (however done, by whatever mechanics achieved) was a superior defense system of which I had previously been unaware. It is like a bird that had never used its wings until one day its nest caught fire. This is a view in which my biological evolutionary achievement is stressed, and external aid is ignored; it views it as intrinsic mechanisms and does not focus on the divine entity (God) who supplied me with that mechanism—in this view I am taking all the credit, as if the bird imagined that by some daring ingenuity he grew the wings. But the wings were given him, and not only that, also the stimulation (suggestion, etc.) of how to use them. "You have this mechanism, it is now urgently needed, and here is how you use it—here's what it's for—here is what you do with it"—so speaks the voice of God.

  Beyond any doubt my welfare was at stake
. Both as an individual and as participant (member) in an historic group whose victory was necessary to human evolution acted out in history. We (our group) had to win; I as part of it had to win. My trouble (danger) I assess now was the danger besetting us as an historic group: the wave of the future, the "next stage of man," to be grandiose. My fight was not merely an individual fight. But I don't think it was the tax thing: I think it was me as "ungeliebte autor," as not-liked author. (Cf. the I Ching: "If a person travels with two others there will be sus picion," i.e., fellow traveler-suspicion on the part of the U.S. authorities.) As dissident intellectual/political person. I do not take that part, or rather the whole pattern (as they saw it) seriously enough; cf. Kathy's statement of why the police were suspicious of me, which would cover why they hit my house. I know perfectly well who was after me and (generally speaking) why.

  [26:49] Once more the vernal equinox, and the birth date of Christ, approaches. The more understanding I acquire about the experience of 3-74 the more amazed I am. There are not even claims of experiences such as mine, when one realizes what I found myself able to see and understand. Jesus himself said that "no man has seen God." But I saw the "process" deity of history, modulating processes and inhabiting things—how could this have been?

  What occurs to me now is that I know as certainly as I know anything—can know anything inferentially—that the objects and events around me are being arranged by him into new unities, that although I can no longer consciously read it, his language (word) fills the universe: the vast single organism with all its sub-colonies of monads signaling with colored lights back and forth into total harmony. I could say, Why me? Or I could say, Why no one else? I guess this revelation is not new—if Hegel and Leibniz and Whitehead and Spinoza and Plato are superimposed, it all can be found in the montage. I don't know how much they saw and how much they inferred. What I saw came by way of revelation which is to say, unaided, by my own effort. I could have seen and known none of it (as it is with me now). It is interesting that, as we were saying the other night, Moses wondered, Why me? He was halting of speech, he said. I am unable to do anything, except what little I have put in my writing. And how much is that? What does that accomplish? But viewed as a source of comfort, solace and purpose to my life, it is for me, intrinsically, everything. I have nothing else that I care about.