The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  [32:4] What I saw that I term VALIS or Zebra must then not have been immanent deity at all, but, as I later realized, a mimicking entity not rising up from within but descending onto objects and processes from above or, better, outside. It had, so to speak, landed here. As with Runciter's words in Ubik, it was penetrating through from—this is the best formulation of all—from behind. Reality is constructed like a ham sandwich: man is one slice of the bread, then comes the slice of ham which is the world, then the second slice of bread which is God. The words in Ubik pierced or filtered through from the other slice, through to man, to us, this slice. It's funny that I could read the E. of Phil. about the world being "an alienating, divisive agency that separates man from God" and not instantly perceive the value—perhaps the ultimate value—of my writing and its preoccupation. In point of fact, such novels as Ubik, Maze, Stigmata, etc., tend to dissolve away the world—and, if the Gnostics' 3-element situation-view is a correct view, God should be reunited with us thereby.

  Now the incredible accuracy of Ubik can be appreciated. The world is not merely counterfeit (as in Stigmata and all the others); there is more: it is counterfeit, but under it lies another world, and it is this other world, this Logos world, which filters or breaks through. Ubik, then, is a step up from Maze and Stigmata in presenting this. It presents a triune situation, which evidently is the actual one, whereas the other novels and stories present only the aspect of world as hallucination, without disclosing that another, actual one lies beyond, below or beneath. It is God who, as the far bread slice, takes the initiative toward us, as Runciter does toward Joe Chip and the other inertials. This is what I saw in 3-74, when, under the power of the Holy Spirit, I read the dream section in Tears and found a latent or crypte message embedded in the text. My experience and view, then, are not only Gnostic but what is more tend to prove the correctness of the triune Gnostic division, in particular their view of the world as alienating and divisive between man and God (Joe Chip and Runciter). Had the Gnostic view been wrong, when I "abolished" the world (suddenly withdrew assent from it) I would have exposed nothing, no sublime, sacred, divine reality beyond; a religious experience would have turned out to be nothing but a psychotic break. Were the Gnostic triune division wrong, my writing would serve a malign, sick purpose: leading the reader away from reality and toward autism. But the Gnostic triune division is correct; otherwise I could not, would not, have had my 2-74 and 3-74 et al. experiences.

  [32:5] Starting from my "True Vine" revelation, we are kept in a "lopped-off" relationship to God by the world itself—the faulty pseudo-cosmos in which we find ourselves living. A mere undercurrent sensation of alienation must blossom into something greater, or anyhow can; it can lead to a moral repudiation of the world (the kind of ethical balking such as the Ramparts tax strike21) or it can lead to an epistemological "dissolving-away of the world" such as my writings contain. Perhaps where I made my mistake for several years about God being immanent was that whereas I thought I saw him in nature, in point of fact he, like the messages in Ubik, [was] filtering through nature from beyond, beneath or below. Nature could either become transparent, or the reality of the divine could, through its boundless power, assert itself through, breach through. The latter is what happened in 3-74. However, it was not visible to the unenhanced eye. The world did not weaken; God chose to make his move—the real God, not the demiurge.

  Beyond doubt, the true God could annihilate our pseudo-world, not merely permitting a temporary vision to one person (such as he did for me by having me taken over by the Paraclete) but for everyone. The Paraclete, possessing me, literally saw through the world, as if it were transparent; I remember that; wow, was it something, that gate, those geometric forms, and the presence of Zebra (God). (Or the cosmic Christ.) Lem says that in Ubik "a sacerdotal power buried in the gutter or rubbish for aeons has been resurrected"; I can begin to see what he might mean by that.

  [32:7] One fascinating aspect of Ubik is disclosed when the question is asked, "Where did you (I) get the idea?" The origin of the idea, in contrast to virtually all other novels, is evident from the text of the novel itself, although one must extrapolate from Runciter to whatever Runciter represents, and the state of cold-pac to whatever state we are all in. In the novel, information spontaneously intrudes into the world of the characters, indicating that their world is not what they think it is; in fact, it indicates that their world is not even there at all—some kind of world is there, but not the one they are experiencing. That time-regression is put forth in the novel, and that time-regression figured in my 3-74 experience—this still baffles me; the principle underlying the devolution (reversion) of objects along the form-axis in the novel is explained by a reference to Plato's theory of ideal forms, and I guess that applies to our world and to my own experience. However, not until I recently studied the E. of Phil. article on Gnosticism so thoroughly, did I begin to understand the triune reality division which must exist and which is also put forth in Ubik—if Runciter is God, and Joe Chip and the other inertials are analogs of all men; then the regressed world is the ham in the sandwich, and, as in Ubik, must be abolished; as in Gnosticism, this is accomplished, in Ubik, by the revelation of esoteric knowledge about their condition by a deity-like entity lying behind even Runciter; i.e., Ubik. It is this knowledge—not just information but gnosis—revealed to them, especially to Joe Chip, which makes them aware of their real condition. Therefore if one knows very much about Gnosticism (which I didn't until a few days ago) one could see the resemblance between Ubik and the Gnostic cosmogony and cosmology. But we are talking (regarding the real world) of information which, by being transferred, radically changed history. And it must be realized (I certainly do, even if no one else does) that what broke through was not limited to information, but that theolepsy (one at least) were involved. If I rule out Soviet experiments and occult human groups (vide supra) then we have something not found in Ubik, but, although admittedly described as diabolic, in Stigmata. Is theolepsy not specifically what Stigmata depicts? With Chew-Z or whatever, Can-D, I forget, the eucharist.22 What do you get if, as Le Guin suggests, you take a group of my novels and stories and fit them together, especially the 3 picked up by Bantam? Theolepsy, the Gnosis slipping through, reality (the world) as illusion concealing another but real world (Maze)—what an aggregate message those 3 novels add up to!

  When I recently reread Stigmata I saw it for what it was: a penetrating, acute and exhaustive study of the miracle of transubstantiation, simply reversing the bipolarities of good and evil. What the novel contemplated was—that is, the conclusion it reached—was the startling notion that imbibing of the sacred host culminated, for the imbiber, in eventually becoming the deity of which the host was the supernatural manifestation. Since all of them were consuming hosts of the same deity, they all became the same deity, and their separate or human identities were abolished. They literally became the deity, all of them, one after another. What this constituted in the novel was an eerie kind of invasion. They were invaded on an individual basis and they were, regarded another way, invaded as a planet or species, etc., which is to say collectively. This invasion by the deity bears a resemblance to the invasion of the regressed world in Ubik by Runciter's messages and, ultimately, by Ubik itself (as confirmed by the ad starting the last chapter). That ad clarified what Ubik was; it precisely equated Ubik with the Logos. There is no way to get around that. Ubik in Ubik is the same divinity as the St. Sophia mentioned in Deus Irae. So Run citer and Ubik equals Palmer Eldritch and Chew-Z. We have a human being transformed into a deity which is ubiquitous (no one seems to have noticed that Palmer Eldritch is ubiquitous as is Ubik, that the same theme dominates both novels).

  The Gnostic contribution which Maze makes is the idea of a totally untenable reality glossed over by a mass wish-fulfillment hallucination shared by everyone, and a salvific entity who can extricate you right out of that prison-like world.

  Maze: Prison-like world glossed over by illusion. S
alvific intercessor who can and does extricate you. Induced amnesia.

  Stigmata: Invasion (penetration) of our world by a deity who can become everyone via the host, a mass theolepsy.

  Ubik: Salvific information penetrating through the "walls" of our world by an entity with personality representing a life- and reality-supporting quasi-living force.

  Collating the three novels, how much of the Gnostic message is expressed? Or, put another way, how much of my 2-74, 3-74 experience is expressed? One thing left out is the altering of the historic process, which was revealed to me as happening in 3-74. I suppose in a sense that's in Frolix 8. And the breaching through by God and the hosts, the apocalyptic material from "Acts" and "Daniel." There are little sprinkles in other novels and stories—for instance, the idea of anamnesis (expressed negatively usually in my writing by the theme of fake memories). Well, that's expressed in Maze, so I've inserted it supra. I wonder what you get if you sit down starting with "Roog" and read through everything (including such strange stories as "Retreat Syndrome") all the way to Scanner. If everything interlocks, what is the total message? I know I scared myself shitless that one night when Isa was down here and I reread some early stories in Preserving Machine. But my recent study of Gnosticism indicates that below any negative world-negating message there is an affirmation of God and love.

  Folder 50

  JANUARY 1978

  [50:11] I am too far into Gnosticism to back out. The idea of Jesus opening Adam's eyes and bringing him to consciousness, the re-linking to the lost primordial state through the Gnosis, the unflinching facing of evil in the world and knowing it cannot have come from (the Good) God—and the salvador salvandus—man as cut off from part of the Godhead.

  Thinking back over my life I can see that I have survived many troubles—I look at the copies of the Ballantine Scanner and I can see what I have to transmute those terrible days into something worthwhile, lasting, good, even important (i.e., meaningful). This is what God does; this is his strange mystery: how he accomplishes this. When we view the evil (which he is going to transmute) we can't see for the life of us how we can do it—but later on, and only later on, after it's done, we can see how he has used evil as the clay out of which he as potter has fashioned the pot (universe viewed as artifact).

  What I notice is how many people wish me well. Look at what John Ross, a stranger, said. Look at what KW said about me having served, done my duty, and now can pass on into the reward waiting for me—he said, even, that they'd applaud me. I still don't know what I did in 3-74 re the Xerox missive, but what I did was what I was sent here to do from the start, and I did it right; as KW put it, "They tell you how, when and where to throw the spear, but you must throw it."

  I am really very happy. Snuff, music and cats, friends and my exegesis, my studying and gradually more and more understanding my Gnosis, when in 3-74 the savior woke me to full consciousness, for the first time in my life and refound myself, knew who and what I was, remembered my celestial origin, was restored to what I had been before the fall. I saw the prison we are in, and knew I had done right.

  [50:12] Salvation—from what? From the world, which is an iron prison. Cf. Schopenhauer. Salvation from what he saw happening to the turtles (James-James creation). God did not design such a structure of suffering: he extricates us from it, and restores us as part of him. This is the acosmic view in all my writings: the empirical world is a fraud, counterfeit. I write about reality as illusion because it is, and I see that it is. Thus my witness is a tremendously powerful attack on the world—but I am just now realizing that this view (of world as illusion) is Gnostic. My corpus of writing is an assault on the created universe of matter, highly original and accurate. It (the view) discloses the deceptive nature of empirical reality—now I have had it revealed to me that this world is an impediment between us (man) and God.

  In my writing I seek to abolish the world—the effect of which aids in our restoration to the Godhead. And this is what I did in 2-74 when I saw the Golden Fish; in a single moment of total knowledge (awareness of the true state of things) I withdrew my belief in what I customarily saw—and it vanished, and the Christ/God continuum was disclosed—i.e., the slice of bread on the other side of the ham sandwich. First for years I did it in my writing, and then in 2-74 I did it in real life, showing that my writing is not fiction but a form (e.g., Maze, Tears, Ubik, etc.) of revelation expressed not by me but through me, by (St.) Sophia in her salvific work. What is in my work that is important is precisely nothing less than the salvific Gnosis (or parts of it anyhow).*

  [50:14] Zebra counterfeits the counterfeit—which fits the Gnostic idea of the bumbling demiurge being helped out, out of mercy, by the true God. This helping out, not just of us humans but of the whole fallen (fucked up, not really real) cosmos is the transubstantiation of objects and processes on an invisible ontological level which I saw the growing Corpus Christi achieving. A fake fake = something real. The demiurge unsuccessfully counterfeited the pleroma, and now God/the Savior is mimicking this counterfeit cosmos with a stealthily growing real one. What this all adds up to is that God, through the cosmic Christ, is assimilating our cosmos to himself.

  [50:16] I am thinking back. Sitting with my eyes shut I am listening to "Strawberry Fields." I get up. I open my eyes because the lyrics speak of "going through life with eyes closed." I look toward the window. Light blinds me; my head suddenly aches. My eyes close and I see that strange strawberry ice cream pink. At the same instant knowledge is transferred to me. I go into the bedroom where Tessa is changing Chrissy and I recite what has been conveyed to me: that he has an undetected birth defect and must be taken to the doctor at once and scheduled for surgery. This turns out to be true.

  What happened? What communicated with me? I could read and understand the secret messages "embedded within the inferior bulk." I have been placed under God's protection. The advocate now represents me. I hear a far off quiet voice that is not a human voice; it—she—comforts me. In the dark of the night she tells me that "St. Sophia is going to be born again; she was not acceptable before." A voice barely audible. In my head. Later she tells me she is a "tutelary spirit," and I don't know what that word means. Tutor? I look it up. It means "guardian."

  [50:19] Finally:

  I am led to the inescapable conclusion that, totally unknowingly, we are all constituents of a vast living organism, and that everything which occurs in it, our reality, happens due to its deliberate intention—that of its own brain, Noös or psyche—and, further, this vast living organism which governs and regulates our every move and experience resembles an AI system or computer, and that under certain exceptional circumstances it can and does speak of one or more of us, its members—finally, the organism—or this part of it—is in trouble—has its "hand in a steel trap," as KW put it, and is extricating its members, i.e., us. We must have partially fallen out of the organism—or maybe it actually has—like a great animal—been snared by a titanic iron trap! It is in trouble. And is reclaimed, repairing, itself. It is, in the final analysis, a magna-mind as well as a magna-organism, and it is—has been for some time—in trouble. We are the distressed fraction, member, circuit or element, or organ, part or unit.

  Most likely of all, it is a self-repairing AI mind system, and this repair activity (known historically to us as "salvation") has to do with (ah!) reactivating a subsection (i.e., us) which has fallen below the message-transfer level (known to us, as the Essene terms, as "falling into forgetfulness and ignorance"). We are a memory coil, presently inoperative—i.e., malfunctioning: asleep, and, as in a quasi-dream, we are not where [and when?] we think we are (cf. Maze and Ubik). This is the heart of the matter; we are an impaired section of the megamind; we misperceive. That which we see—our reality—does not exist. I am acosmic in viewing this; as in Maze we collectively hallucinate. The megamind is attempting to stimulate us back to being in touch with itself. Which is the "other slice of bread," i.e., back to consciousness of it and ourselves
as parts of it—which will, when successfully achieved, abolish this false world, whereupon it will be instantly replaced by the divine "abyss."

  [50:22] Fuck it. Just double dime words. And so to bed.

  Lest I reify the whole concept into sterile intellectual jargon, let me finish by saying: