The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  But what might I do, possibly? No one would believe me. Even if I could express it, which I can't. No verbal report could convey it. It has never been done yet—it is ineffable, what I experienced. I can say even to a priest, "I have seen God and He is like this," and explain about the arranging and the mimicry—I can report that what we see all around us (the phenomenal world) is only real because He transubstantiates it beneath the "accidents" and directs it all in the dialectic process which Hegel understood so well. I can testify for immanence and panentheism, an evolutionary process carried over from nature to human history.

  ***

  [26:50] Even in my sleep three times I called out "Vater!" and Hilfe! And oh weh!11

  If indeed I have destroyed my life here I know a dear father lives above the band of stars—

  Franz Schubert earned a total of $1,500 during his entire life. Was he a failure? I can't hold any woman—am I a failure?

  I just want to find—

  But it is here. I can't see atoms either, but I know they are here.

  Vatter! Hilfe! Oh weh!

  But I know: I am preparing for the next world; I am beginning to let go of this one and not grieve or suffer—I know it is all lost, and what I still love, such as music, points me toward the other world. Music, religion and philosophy—for me now they are not experienced as merely the best products of this world but (as in the singing I heard in my dreams) the link with the next. They carry me along and are more beautiful all the time, each and every time more and more part of the next world—I feel it. I first felt it in '64 when I first heard Die Winterreise. It comes, it comes, nearer, and more beautiful all the time. In this letting go of this world and reaching out to the next I am feeling more and more peace and joy. I am not losing life and that which is beautiful, but moving nearer it every day. What I really love grows stronger.

  I saw how God could accomplish any ends he wished by the arranging of object-processes; I deduce from this that the world is far better than it appears to us: just as we can't see him nor his arranging it follows that we must lack accurate perception of the great beauty and good which he perpetually produces. Why is this not possible—that if it is not a fact proven to me that (1) he is here and we can't see him; and (2) his arranging takes place all around us and we can see that—why there follows: (3) we are blind to that beautiful and good produced by Him continually through these unfolding arrangements, for this is the invisible outgrowth of what I know to be invisible. As the Sufis say, we are asleep. Or as I say, we are virtually blind and deaf—look how Bach or Beethoven sounds to most of us. Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder—it is in reality and must be searched for, found out—and so too maybe is the good. Can it be that the good results which he achieves are as concealed from us as beauty is in formal art? The artist does not try to obscure the beauty of what he does. We have to achieve a perception.

  If I know he is here, and if I know he is good, and if I know he controls "becoming" for good ends—and I see none of this, not him, not the arranging—not even the ends factually—what they consist of—how then could it be logically possible that I could see the good in those ends? For one thing, he knows what all the potential alternatives would have consisted of (and led to) and if I have no perception of that, how under all these circumstances could I possibly perceive the good in what comes about? I can't even see what comes about, since each end (synthesis) is the new thesis against which a further antithesis appears. The becoming never ceases—there are syntheses but never a true end.

  And yet I have been shown what Hegel saw: the purpose, for us, in all this once-biological and now-historical process: Greater human freedom (to produce greater self-actualization or individuation). The monads progressively more and more accurately absorb and reflect back (encompass or understand) the organism as a whole.

  [26:52] Suppose I conceive of the monads as "receivers" and "recorders" which to a greater or lesser degree accurately receive and record an impression which is a memory of the image of the All, thus containing thereupon and thereby a microcosm image from which can be retrieved and restored the All, the way a hologram "contains" a more or less accurate image. The total organism is the only object which is fully real, and by the—to the—degree that the individual monad or cell "remembers," which involves receiving and recording for later playback, the total organism can be restored (if somehow lost, whatever "lost" means in this case). Supposing that the total organism is changing continually (say at the flash-cut rate—velocity—of the phosphene "graphics") how is each of the virtually infinitude of stages to be (each one) made permanent? We know in what way a sequence of stop action photographs can make permanent each stage of a growing entelechy which it captures. The organism goes on, but the many separate steps are retained. Are the colonies of micro monads supposed to see (receive) and remember (record) for later retrieval of each and every growth stage?

  By means of my 3-74 vision (or, compared with my normal perceptions, superior—more accurate and complete—vision) I can at any future time—in theory—print out everything which at that time I registered both in terms of perception and cognition (mentation).

  Are we reels of recording "tape"? Memory units reflecting back Zebra the total organism? Are we sophisticated percept-and-record systems that (barring malfunction) can serve later on to re-establish what has now passed on to further stages? In that case my 3-74 experience was the end in itself insofar as I as subsystem am concerned; it is up to some other assembly to, if desired, retrieve back out of me what due to 3-74 I contain. It is not the responsibility of the memory spool to "play back"—another component, when it is desired, is to do that. [...]

  To remember seems to entail (or produce) something more than we tend to realize, e.g., when an LP record "remembers" the performance of a Schumann song cycle sung by the late Fritz Wunderlich. In a certain very real (true) sense it doesn't just remember that Wunderlich sang that song cycle but in point of fact restores (to perfection as limit) that voice and that music. Perhaps, in contemplating the phenomenon of anamnesis we fail to grasp the full significance; if indeed I am a perceiving-remembering-and-playback "spool," and "on" me (i.e., in me) is long-term memory of the first advent—and due to an external cue (signal) I do play that section back—what do we have? Not just a transcript in another lesser dimension, like a typed transcript (i.e., the words only) say of a famous speech—but so to speak the speech given and the person giving it: an event, not a dead object (fossil impression).

  After all, the disinhibited long-term DNA memories—their reactivation—was one of the most astonishing parts of 3-74—it alone is staggering and importance. The accurate observer contains the event he observes; we call this memory. Through him, its actual—not feigned—restoration is possible. The Jews theorize that the resurrection of the dead is accomplished through God's memory (of them); suppose, via our long term DNA coded memory we ourselves are units of God's (the total organism's) memory system? Suppose, for some of us at least, that (called, I think, witnessing) is our prime purpose? We are (parts of) His memory?

  [26:54] What I must realize is that it is a bourgeois prejudice to suppose that for something to have worth, there must be a practical application. The ancient Greeks knew that pure [philosophical] understanding for its own sake was, even just in terms of the quest, the highest value or activity of a man: Homo sapiens: man who knows.

  However, look what this three year ongoing quest to understand, learn and know has done for me: joy, awe, peace, tranquility, a sense of purpose. Of personal worth—and above all meaning, from my awareness of God.

  Folder 27

  MARCH 1977

  [27:1]

  [27:3] In reading Lem on Ubik I see this: in my worldview (head) there is no appreciation or recognition of causality as normally understood—and I recall that dilemma when I was 19 and found I simply could literally not see causality—while all other people do. This explains my "10 theories" on the Nov. 19 break-in!

  [27:
4] In reading the screenplay of North by Northwest I all at once realize that 3-74 resolves (annihilates) my paranoia in an extraordinary and amazing way.

  It, the imagined ultimate conspiracy-and-danger event either took place, or events happened which resembled what I imagined sufficiently to cause me to think it had arrived. The event was an actual fulfillment of my "imagined" script "master scene." From a psychological standpoint, I was overwhelmed by the contents of my unconscious dictating this script and having feared and imagined this "master scene." I acted out—i.e., I acted in response to this real or imaginary conspiracy—danger. All right, all this looks psychotic. But due to my response, I have become entirely freed of paranoid feelings, fear, beliefs, delusions, expectations—completely. That's been 3 whole years. In Jungian terms, a metabolic "toxin," mescaline-like, was secreted in my brain and it destroyed my persecutory complex. The "Maladaptive Biological Reaction System" didn't become schizophrenic but worked; the complex was destroyed; the fossil structure was obliterated and change (growth) resumed in my psyche, finally. [...]

  A stronger, newer, healthier personality was able to form in place of the old, one free of the paranoid dynamism. It turned out to be a psychotic delusion on my part that the FBI was after me. The brief total collapse into overt schizophrenia cured me (cf. John W. Perry12) because I was able to reach into my collective unconscious for new potentialities, and establish a broader, non-delusional personality on a more viable basis. So for months (this took eleven months to complete) I lived in the magic world of the collective unconscious and its contents.

  All of the above is true. When I read North by Northwest I suddenly could recall the paranoid world I had been "inhabiting" prior to my phone call to the Bureau on 3/20/74. I used to live in the world of this screenplay. That is why I was constantly afraid (especially at night); I feared "they" would break in and get me. What I did was incredible: I turned toward the group I believed was persecuting me for help, i.e., I converted my fear and hate and suspicion into "love," so to speak. I loved them; they ceased to be alien, hostile strangers and became (in my mind) needed, supportive father-figure friends.

  [27:6] Thus I must face the fact that I have been psychotic, and in at least 2 different ways:

  (1) Paranoiac schiz from late 71 to 3-74

  (2) Complete schizo breakdown in 3-74, lasting a year, during which time I gradually recovered—and not back to the paranoid delusional state that had preceded it (but to anxiety neurosis—my vertigo and depression).

  However, when my total collapse occurred (i.e., when the metabolic toxin was released for the purpose of destroying the overvalent delusional complex), it worked, and I recovered, free of that complex; the "misplaced" quality of the biological attempt at adaptation to reality did not set in. One reason for this was (perhaps due to experience with psychedelics in the past) that instead of experiencing the episode as weird or "Fremd" or frightening, as a collapse of my world, I experienced this collapse (of my maladaptive idios kosmos) as good, and the vast divine kosmos rushing in as lovely, awe-inspiring, comforting and transforming. In brief, I had the courage to pass through it, and learn (boy, how I learned!) from it—which is what was supposed to happen! So in a sense it wasn't a psychotic breakdown but rather a massive upheaval and reconstruction engineered by the [archetype of the] Logos (i.e., holy wisdom). The hallucination voice which I heard, the "AI" voice was not threatening or "evil" but desirable and divinely good. I walked the narrow way (path, bridge, road) that led to sanity (wholeness, individual, health, psychic integration); this was because I had pistis: faith in my God, my friend, my redeemer.

  Well, 3-74 was a therapeutic psychosis, and the sibyls, Gods, and spirits and cyclopses and monsters I saw were archetypes and "not objectively real." This is true. I had a breakdown, and when I recovered I wasn't paranoid any longer. Is this the real story? It is, yes, but—look what I experienced: the archaic world of the Gods who are now gone from our narrow modern world, alas. What was truly nuts was my paranoid delusion complex, which is why the metabolic toxin was released (mescaline-like) to destroy it; the complex was warping me, and preventing growth. But the "breakdown" episode"—ah! I was transported out of mundane reality and into the Kingdom: like a little child whose adult ego has been sacrificed. Yes, it was scary, but I loved it; what an adventure into newness it was. As I read North by Northwest I am filled with loathing and repugnance at that ugly little paranoid Pynchonish world—blech! Most important: my trip was a journey back 2,000 to 3,000 years in time to a fabulous Golden (Greek) age! With no therapist to guide me, with no human guide, just Christ and my cat Pinky I made it back. I have written down all that I saw, heard and understood. It was not delusion I found during my trip—it was absolute reality. The delusion was the "menacing" paranoiac dynamism, from which the trip to find Asklepios came forth as attempted and achieved solution.

  [27:11] The "koinos" is the shared external world. The internal world which is shared is by definition the collective unconsciousness: "collective" and "shared" mean the same thing. So if you pass from the world molded by your personal ego to a world made up of [projected] collective archetypes, are you not passing from the idios [kosmos] to the [koinos] kosmos? Then schizophrenia is the breaking through of the collective archetypal forms and world—if these archetypes are truly collective (i.e., universal to all men) how can this be a private world?

  Viewed this way, a mere ego-constructed world is the private world we mistakenly (evidently) label as a sane—i.e., normal (rational)—world. But maybe our entire civilization is wrong; this—i.e., these—multitude of idioi private worlds are irreal phenomenal worlds, and exclude such "archetypes"—good ones—as divine wisdom—which is why modern man is deprived of God. Then we in our multiple idios kosmoi which exclude the miraculous and divine have excluded ourselves from the Kingdom; this is typical modern western left hemisphere world and perceiving and thinking. We moderns are half-brained men: we are deformed, and the only place we can turn to for wholeness is the balancing right hemisphere of our own brains—which is where the unconscious is, where dreams and schizophrenia originate. There is a relationship between the Kingdom and the right brains.

  In 3-74 the metabolic toxin destroyed the paranoid delusional ego in my left brain, and thus allowed right brain dominance for quite some time.

  This opens up a fascinating possibility: that what we call "schizophrenia" is an attempt on the part of the total brain to achieve bilateral hemispheric parity—an evolutionary leap forward—and the mechanism of this is the metabolic toxin which is intended to destroy the left hemisphere ego qua maladaptive complex, but the right hemisphere views the world so archaically that the individual cannot get consensual validation for his replacement perceptions. What is lacking at this stage is coherent personality in the right hemisphere: perhaps what is necessary is for it to be forming in advance of its "disinhibition" as a "latent form master of evident [i.e., left hem.] form." The schizophrenic is a leap ahead that failed.

  [27:13] Because of my inability to understand or perceive (linear) causality (which lack causes the greatest divergence between the way I experience events and the way others do] I can potentially comprehend what they cannot: orthogonal "breaching," e.g., Runciter's message in Ubik I swear: this culminated—this—in 3-74 in my visionary perception of Zebra: within the coordinates of my worldview, this perception of this entity (closed off to other people because precisely of their being locked in on linear time cause-and-effect) is possible given the proper other circumstances (e.g., it being there)—but for normal cause-and-effect percept-systems this miraculousness has to be invisible always, as it does not progress in a linear fashion but, like the "Light Moth" superimposes downward from the transcendent, supra-reality (of necessity opaque to other people). From what I've read I happen to know that my view is characteristic, to some extent, of the pre-nationalistic, scientific medieval world.

  My view [of cause and effect] may be characteristic of right brain thinking, and it
may be that in 3-74 my experience was not a breaking through at unused bright brain centers, but more a final culmination of their prior activity—as if they at least bloomed fully and freely, untrammeled by "fossil" left brain analogs. What other people are able to discern is efficient cause; I see this imperfectly—as witness (1) my many theories re the Nov. 17 break-in* and (2) the way—non-linear—my books develop: what I managed to see in 3-74 [was] the activity of final (teleological) cause. Thus I now can show a relationship between an unusual—the unusual—way I see and have always seen the world—and the apogee experience of 3-74, at which time (I believe) enormous final causes were at work—hence (1) my "stockpile" view and (2) my sense of retrograde entities at work. In normal people the total supremacy of efficient-cause linear v-p obliterates any perception of other kinds of cause, and there is only the one other (i.e., final).