The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  "Love is the life and joy and heart of the system. Love is its boundless energy, its soul. And the voluntary force drawing its elements together into a happy krasis, where it is more fun to dance than to think, better to play than to talk. If I am right, it is laughing right now, at my abstract model, or at least smiling. I sure hope so."

  [50:23] After listening to "Discreet Music"* and because of it falling into a theta sleep (at last) I awoke, with parts of my brain still shut down, operating at a 5 year old level, but in an alpha state, without fear, frustrated, but feeling happiness and love, and I realize:

  (1) My 3-74 and Tessa's 12-77 experiences have been/were "Contacts of the 3rd kind" but I have just been too afraid, not trusting and not loving enough to face it all this time; and

  (2) Zebra is the "repairman" and he is here; and

  (3) "Zebra" is "them" as in "we are not alone" but as the New West article points out, they're probably not ETIs. But what they are—they violated laws of time and space.

  But it's a 3rd kind contact. Sorry about that, fellas. But "Zebra" is what's doing it, and although KW and I have our computer model, it's just a model, an attempt to understand what no one understands; but

  We are not alone.

  [50:28]

  [50:36] I just realized something:

  (1) The Holy Spirit is inside you, like conscience: an inner voice.

  (2) Although there was indeed a holy spirit in me, because of it inside me I saw Zebra outside me.

  (3) Therefore Zebra is not the Holy Spirit.

  Since this all happened on Christ's actual birthday (March 18), 23 then Zebra probably is the cosmic Christ, whom I could see because of the Holy Spirit inside me—who, it is said, makes clear the mystery of Christ to us ... in fact, it could even be said that if one were not "born from above by the spirit" one would not understand (know of) the true being of Christ.➊

  Dream: book of mine with footnote: "this is a gloss in the text for 'I love you.'" Was I herein shown the real cryptic message in my writing that God loves us? "Felix." etc. = "I love you."

  ➊ Christ is here. But not in an incarnated form, yet; the unaided eye (i.e., lacking theolepsy by the spirit) cannot discern him. But I saw him—Zebra; he is here.

  ("Gloss" is from a Greek word meaning "a difficult word needing explanation.")➋

  ➋ So "gloss" appeared in my dream in the Greek or Latin, not English sense; in English it means the explanation itself of the difficult word, but in my dream it's a "gloss in the text meaning 'I love you.'" Obviously the gloss or difficult word is Felix. (The Greek word is glossa.)➌

  What a wonderful revelation in answer to my constant Q: "What is the secret message which Zebra has inserted into my writing?" It is that God loves us, including me. It is, in fact, not a message but the message. In the dream I caught sight of the footnote one time, and then, having read it, understood its meaning and its importance, continued frantically to seek it out again as the truth.

  The EB says that God (through his grace) will restore "man's lost freedom." Very interesting. Sin (and the law) seen, then, as enslaving, evidently.

  Justice: "A place for the powerless to get help." Thus the Illinois attorney general has (without intending to) defined the role of the paraclete as advocate. Hosanna.

  ➌ My Latin dictionary defines glossa as an "obsolete or foreign word needed to be explained." Felix is certainly a glossa—it is foreign, and it needs to be explained.

  That is precisely how I've treated the word ever since its cryptic meaning was revealed to me in 3-74, and it, combined with the paragraph of which it was the key part, gave an otherwise invisible message at odds with what was apparent.*

  [50:43] It is also interesting that the cypher word in Tears (Felix) is the final word in Scanner (i.e., happy). The tied shirt dream was not precog, an ability on my part. It was divine prophecy and promise: it held out hope and fulfilled it—"Happy" (Felix) may be a cunning reference to Euripides' The Bacchae in which the stranger (Dionysus in human form) refers to King Penthus as King "of Tears," punning on the Greek word for tears: pentheus. And the word "tears" is in the title of my novel. The real message is that he whom Pindar called the joy god is here. It is a cypher within a cypher; "Felix" is not a name but a glossa meaning (among other good things) happy. But "happy" is a cypher back to a name: i.e., name to word to name. And the final name underlying Felix is Dionysus. The deity who has inserted the message into "the inferior bulk" has identified himself. The total message from him is, "I love you." But he has also elliptically told us who he is.

  He is the protector of little wild things, like Cernunnos and Shiva, and it is Shiva who possesses the 3rd ajna eye.

  Cernunnos = Shiva = Dionysus = Christ. The savior of the trapped, the desperate, the damned, the powerless.

  [50:55] As speculation (but probably accurate) the entity is the Shiva-Cernunnos-Dionysus-Christ-St. Sophia one, transcending any one given religion—involving Zoroaster and Mani and the Gnostics, e.g., it is Greek, Hindu, Iranian, Jewish, Celtic, Christian, Manichaean and Lord knows what else (Buddha too). Mani was right when he saw all the religions as one.

  And the outlines of this one are becoming visible to me: it involves illegitimate temporal power (rulers) who have craftily usurped the citadels and branded the rightful God as a fool, a jester, a madman, a criminal—made him marginal—our real king who is now ubiquitous, like St. Elmo's fire, everywhere and nowhere, able to

  (1) take over and replace inanimate objects and causal processes; and

  (2) living creatures, including humans.

  Wow. Let's see the usurper tyrant martyr him this time.

  "Paupers and Kings" it's all [to be seen] backward, as I mention in Scanner. Trash (rock, comics, movies, S-F) is gold and gold is trash.

  [50:60] We are talking about an intrinsic long-dormant personality capable of functioning on a level high enough to allow it to see, hear and understand the supernormal universe of the divine—none of which can be perceived by the normal self. More and more I see myself as an unknowing fifth columnist: interestingly, if this is so much of my writing not only points to it but outright reveals (discloses) it. If there are such 5th columnists, i.e., people unaware of slumbering superpersonality within them, "timed" to go off when "they" return, and if the "prince of this world" knows all this, then my writing (without me suspecting) would give me away.

  First, my writing presents an unvarying cosmological schema in accord with the suppressed (Gnostic) doctrines, but then, when we get to Tears (and perhaps earlier, e.g., "Faith of," Ubik, Maze, Frolix) encoded messages which are not merely informative but commands begin to appear. The writing, going all the way back to '53, has identified himself to friend and foe alike. Having assented to this (although unknowingly) he then has an overwhelmingly powerful dream which must, he feels, be inserted in his novel with the exact, proper wording. Eleven drafts of that section are necessary before he is satisfied.

  But the authorities have already perceived that at any time what is mere truth—true revealed information—can pass over into encoded command. They think this is all being done deliberately and consciously. Friends (Marxists) think the same thing. Just like we think Bowie knows something these people think I know something. This is a reasonable assumption. Thus the house gets hit and the papers read and stolen, but they show nothing.

  [50:63] I saw, in 3-74, how the great purposeful force (entity) of the universe works backward (theologically). Vast long-range patterns emerge. A little 4 year old boy hears a cowboy song and then 45 years later hears it again—sung by his favorite singer. The retrograde pull is there. It can be said that when he was 4 he was inordinately drawn to it because of her singing it 45 years later. It can be said correctly that when her first record came out in the sixties, he was inordinately drawn to her because 6 years later she would sing that song. There can be no real understanding of the universe when only the efficient causes are studied—they lack the conscious, deliberate purpose of final c
auses. No sense can be made of cause-and-effect linear time events. The past does not make the future; the future uses the antecedent universe as a chaotic stockpile which it assembles into a structure (cosmos). To understand, we must discern the negentropic developments—but to do this we would have to be able to "remember" the future with the same clarity that we remember the past, and this we can't do. This, then, is where faith must come in. In every event we must, by faith, presume a benign purpose, which, could we see all which is to come, would delight us—we would be especially delighted to see how intrinsically evil events become used as building blocks for noble structures—and are, in fact, essential for the ultimate construction of those fine systems.

  Nothing is wasted, nothing is futile, nothing is lost. Everything is eventually, when its time has come, snatched up and incorporated.

  [50:76] Funny, how I perceive, in terms of images, of the world being continually spun by something like a spider—well, I did see the spinner at work, and the world as his artifact. Don't the Brahmans conceive of the veil of Maya being spun (by Kali)? And there is deception (or illusion) involved. We are in the web. Caught in it, with no idea at all of its artifactual nature (and the furiously moving—spinning and arranging spinner). To take it—i.e., the world as authentically real would be the same as taking a TV image and program and its dramatic contents—as real. It, too, is spun—by a fast-moving dot. And that which the dot spins is fictitious.

  [50:82] As in Plato's Timaeus the "steersman" (artificer) intervenes to correct drift—a drift toward anomie, perhaps, periodically exerting pressure on the developing artifact. This is the adventitious overruling from time to time that involved me in 2-3-74.

  It is exactly analogous to the occasional firing of jets in a spacecraft to minutely correct its trajectory; only this "ship" is moving through time, not space.

  But the artifact does not quite exist, as does the artificer, since it is in constant flux.

  [50:83] I have reached a dead-end in my exegesis—which by its very nature will not and cannot be surmounted. It has to do with the fall, and resulting loss of memory (and complete loss of some faculties and a degrading of others [cf. Calvin]). The cause of this fall is occluded off by its very nature, it is as if crucial memory tapes (as in Maze) got erased; once erased, by the definition of the problem, their contents can neither be retrieved nor reconstructed.

  During my period of anamnesis I remembered back thousands of years—I even remembered coming here to this planet from the stars. But I don't know what causes the fall—the amnesia and blighting of the pristine nature. I have no insight, no understanding, no clue. All right: we humans are fragments of the very Godhead that we seek to rejoin. (Salvador salvandus.) Did we blight ourselves intentionally? Or is it a punishment, as Genesis says? Or a cruelty inflicted on us (i.e., on the Godhead, by an adversary)? Did we want to come here, or were we exiled here?

  The vine (Christ) which was pruned (by God) and the severed cuttings placed in a world where God is the deus absconditus—to judge each of us individually, to see which of us find a world lacking in God to be sufficient—and which of us, without intellectual ideation, grieve for that loss and miss our father and home and yearn with the greatest pain possible to return.

  This is all I know; as KW says, the trail doesn't just peter out; it ends at a brick wall. The exegesis is a failure in terms of answering questions; for each answer derived an even greater mystery is exposed.

  We fell; we lost our memories; we are cut off from God—those faculties by which we apprehend him are destroyed or not functioning—ploch, ploch—weep for this separation ... and not to know why it happened. We can never find God; he must find us (as that little paperback I picked up at the Oakland airport says).

  Oh God—hilfe. Ich bin so einsam. Wenn kommst du mein Heil?24

  The work has failed. I neither understand nor remember, and the Elohim—gone from my sight, and silent.

  I can't find him. Only when we rejoin and are together will I know what the "erased tape" (concerning the fall) had on it. He will find me and at last I will understand.

  I know no more than Xenophanes, and he was just about the first philosopher. And he said, "We can never know for sure, and even if we were right we wouldn't know it."

  Xenophanes:

  "One God there is, in no way like mortal creatures either in bodily form or in the thought of his mind" (frag. 23).

  "The whole of him sees, the whole of him thinks, the whole of him hears" (frag. 24).

  "He stays always motionless in the same place; it is not fitting that he should move about now this way, now that" (frag. 26).

  "But, effortlessly, he wields all things by the thought of his mind" (frag. 25).

  This is what I saw—Zebra or VALIS; but it was not I who saw—it was God within me seeing God outside. Brahman and Atman, I suppose. Only God can see God. He wielded me, from inside me, effortlessly.

  The above prayer was answered by my mistakenly reading the entry in the E. of Phil. on Jacob Boehme.

  ***

  [50:85] Scanner:

  "To forge out of torment the rough-hewn shape."

  This is probably the happiest moment of my life—I can say to this moment, "stay." Here is the fallen black cat on my lap; I am listening to Stevie Nicks on my Stax phones—the Gollancz edition of Scanner arrived today. They say it is a human document—yes, their flap blurb word is document. "One of the most human documents they have ever read." Not the most sensational, but most human. "Its concern for people." It is a beautiful book qua book. Jim Westaway's words on the back dust jacket. And what KW saw—the link between my intro to "Roog," what I did in my first sold story 27 years ago and in Scanner: voice for those without voices.

  The pain has left me. Even if it's just for a limited time I appreciate it.

  What best can I do? Exactly what I've done. My voice for the voiceless.

  And—too—God answered my prayers re the Exegesis, by leading me to Jacob Boehme.* Somewhere between the truths revealed to Boehme and to me the correct model lies. The Blitz as Urgrund encounters the lowest 3rd of the secondary (material) triad—the divine agony at opposition between the urgrund and physical nature, and the process—not of abolishing physical nature but transmuting it. This is what I saw Zebra doing (which I termed transubstantiation by a sentient plasmatic entity). Out of this transmutation of the empirical universe by the divine comes harmony between the upper triad (spiritual) and the lower (empirical).

  A German cobbler in 1616 and me—for him sunlight reflected from a pewter dish—for me the golden fish necklace, and in the light cast by the spirit the incarnation of the son (God as heart) is disclosed and the Kingdom (reconciliation between the two triads) achieved.

  After reading about Boehme I can see why I was getting nowhere. My schema was naïve—far too simple.

  [50:87] What must be bravely faced is that the entire world or cosmos is not [yet] subjugated to the divine will—it stands, so to speak at a 51/49 ration between divine modulation and mere efficient determinism. Evil (death, loss, disappointment and suffering and illness) are not abolished yet but are very slightly tamed over and above their non-divine "James-James" nature. It's like the trade balance of a country. Well, in the universe, in 1974, we passed over to a slightly greater export than import ratio. This is hard to accept. Nature fights God. The designs (e.g., DNA, etc.) are not designs of the divine (the "natural theology" argument to the contrary). These designs are efficient-cause design (cf. Darwin) and not teleological; they have no wisdom or real end-goal purpose—they are blind. We must always keep in mind reality as process (cf. A.N. Whitehead).

  [50:88] Where does the divine agony enter? Why? Before the incarnation? Isn't the incarnation the intrusion—the initial intrusion—of the divine abyss into the mundane something? Christ said, "I have conquered the world."25 It was like an impregnation of matter (yin) by the creative divine (yang). But the divine will is thwarted; it encounters opposition (Boehme points this o
ut). Matter has hysteresis (or inertia). Its entropic direction must be transmuted into negentropism—a titanic task possible only in a protracted process or series of sequential steps. The intruding light is rejected.

  Our problem may be that we have no comprehension of the inner necessity of sequence in this transmutation. Could our agony be microcosmic replication of the macrocosmic divine, with which we are (1) isomorphic; and (2) actual fragments of, like bits of a hologram: intact gestalts but "dimmer" or less defined. The urgrund sought self-intuition. We as dimmer bits have not yet achieved that self-intuition; hence, when we suffer, we do not know why. Up the hierarchical scale there is still suffering—even perhaps an increasing level of suffering at each hierarchical stage. But also at each ascending stage there is a quantum leap in a self-intuition which bestows (permits) greater understanding of why there is this suffering. At the top, the incarnated son (heart, logos, etc., St. Sophia) knows himself totally and knows totally why he suffers. It is due to the Blitz—the flash of the encounter between the divine abyss and the something—which must be "overcome" (transmuted). This is why Paul can speak of the whole uni verse being in birth pangs.26 Here enters the cosmic aspect of salvation presented in Colossians.*