The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  This can be collated with Julian Jaynes' theory of the Loss of the Voices of the Gods.

  KW points out that our finding info in "random" arrangements—they may not be random in the first place.

  The visual part is in the color discrimination circuits which permit set-ground apperception.

  The auditory part is the "agenbite of inwit"42 and depends upon a suppression (suspension) of sub-vocal thinking—as Burroughs points out, over 10 seconds of inner silence is impossible: inner chatter occurs. There is an inner raving, howling, clamoring bug, which deliberately creates derogatory noise on the line at all times—a jamming, an override.

  We can't receive audio or visual information, it is jammed or cooked. So "St. Sophia" (divine wisdom) must land behind enemy lines—within the prison, and inform us here, located here with us, since its info is not getting through. Each of us has an override in him, and there appears to be an override layer in the atmosphere. They could transmit to me only for a brief interval: then slew the monitor within. But presently another one replaced it. So again I am cut off.

  They are at present diversifying their arrivals, feints within and among which the real landing (2nd advent) will be lost in the confusion of absurd raw data. Which among the fake messages is the real one? "Garbage in, garbage out," in terms of feeding data to our computers. Random and bizarre and ubiquitous.

  But primarily, as John Calvin said, the damage is to our brains, to our faculties. We can't see and we can't hear. Restoration of our lost faculties signifies the end-times, and my faculties, in 3-74, were restored. That this restoration could only be temporary shows why "St. Sophia" must be incarnated here again.

  [29:19] The voice I heard which was not a masculine voice was that of the thinking world soul, which must be understood as feminine. It was the voice of the total entelechy around us.

  She will incarnate here once again.

  So what I colloquized with was not someone or something in the universe—a part of the universe—but its very mind itself. No wonder I saw it (as Zebra) outside me: the physical world is its body! No wonder Zebra could modulate causal processes and mimic natural objects: they are its (her) body and the changes thereof. I saw that body as alive— which is correct.

  So I saw reality correctly—as a vast living body—and I conversed with its mind (psyche?). This identification of St. Sophia with the world soul absolutely accounts for and agrees with what I saw and understood: the vast thinking, living, evolving animal with a rational intelligence. And that mind (Holy Wisdom) can "enter" its own body in microform! No wonder I thought of [it as] Brahman.

  [29:21] (1) The universe is alive, it has a mind, it thinks, it has audible thoughts which (under certain circumstances) we can hear inwardly. The mind is female. Plato says, "Its discourse is always true."

  (2) There are counterfeit interpolations into this living thinking animal (universe) which screw it up, running counter to its evolution as an entelechy. It must detect these spurious interpolations and expose or abolish them for what they are—i.e., get rid of them, get them out of its body. These spurious interpolations are deranged and malicious. In microform the mind travels around in its own body, seeking them out, getting them (with it as bait) to disclose themselves.

  When the mind (St. Sophia) encounters and detects a spurious (i.e., irreal) section, it replaces it with an ontologically real section of itself; by transubstantiation. It has already determined that much of this particular planet is irreal. Hence, it is making "orthogonal time" changes here. From Black Iron Prison world to Palm Tree Garden. We are none the wiser vis-à-vis this salvation, and the substitution of the benign real for the spurious malicious.

  We are back again to the model of construct, repairman and deranged Circuit Board. The messages intended for reception by the Circuit Board are not getting to it; specifically, the voice (thoughts) of the mind of the [total] organism. "The Kingdom of God" represents reintegration into the total entelechy, in which the voice is again audible. To overcome the barrier created by the derangement the microform came here, assessed the situation and was ejected. When it returns it will not merely determine conditions, it will repair. The two missions (advents) have quite different purposes. By the nature of the derangement, the mind had to come here personally to determine the situation. There is a total information block, going both ways.

  [29:23] The Great Mother retreated out of sight behind the figure of Christ, and rules the cosmos invisibly. Yet she disclosed herself to me:

  (1) the Sibyl (visually)

  (2) the female (or non-male) voice

  (3) the "St. Sophia" prophecy itself

  Then a great revelation has been made to me: the female hypostasis of God, which is unknown in and to the whole modern world. It has been thousands of years since she was believed in.

  [29:31] Will Durant says that one of religion's—any religion's—prime functions is "to explain evil, and to find for men some scheme in which they may accept it, if not with good cheer, then with peace of mind—this is the task most religions have attempted to fulfill. Since the real problem of life is not suffering but undeserved suffering ..." etc.

  The usual Christianity does not adequately do this—in fact this is where I think its greatest failure lies: in trying to explain undeserved suffering. But the Hindu explanation—punishment for deeds in a former life, and/or that suffering is illusory—this doesn't satisfy me: not only does the creature suffer, but he is told that it's because of something bad he did but does not remember. This would be an OK explanation if it (karma) could be proved, but it can't.

  What I see the most promise in is my extraordinary perceptual revelation—which I actually saw in '74—that when any creature is humiliated, injured, killed, it is always Christ who is mocked and murdered—the creature becomes Christ or Christ becomes the creature.

  Christ takes the blow. In unusual (extreme?) cases the suffering creature actually experiences Christian anamnesis and "remembers" who he is and how he fits in with the "Passion play." As I did, he actually sees the world stripped down to the eternal acting-out of the Passion play.

  At this point in my exegesis, my only viable line of reasoning left open to me is this supernatural insight. Pinky was Christ because Pinky was mocked, humiliated, kicked and killed. Whether, divining this, he remembered his identity I do not know. But either way the facts are the same; his becoming Christ due to and under those conditions is the archetypal situation.

  But why is suffering necessary at all? Why is the road to deification (transmutation into Christ) achieved in this terrible way? I turn, here, to Plato's Timaeus and his concept of Ananke. The good God does not have complete control of the universe; the universe is part (growingly) cosmos with an irreducible chaos in the midst of it, at every level. All undeserved suffering comes from this purposeless disorder. Unable to compel Ananke to not torment a given organism, the deity does the next best thing: he substitutes himself in a mysterious supernatural way for and with the doomed organism.

  To see or experience the literal real presence of the savior in the doomed sufferer is perhaps to have penetrated to the heart of Christianity. I witnessed it myself; I know by divine revelation. And since Christ can and does become all living creatures (since all suffer undeservedly and die) he, like Brahman, is ubiquitous (immanent) in the universe, moving toward a final disclosure that the universe is only a form which God assumes, and that the ultimate result of this so-to-speak self-inflicted (unknowingly) pain on its sentient parts is to restore to those parts their memories and hence true identities. They awake, remember, know, and rejoin the urgrund. ("Tat Tvam Asi.") So the unfair pressures of an unknowing causal—and casual—universe reawaken the one sleeping mind in its pluriforms. And so it encounters itself, who or what has inflicted undeserved pain or who or what? God as creator or God as Son, and the 3rd member of the trinity, the Holy Spirit, is the agent which effects this "blitz" or catalyst of remembering.

  The jolt to remember lies in the
very quality of the undeserved; puzzled and horrified by this undeservedness, the organism must search for and must find not just an answer but the answer. It becomes the sole key problem, and he knows that the key to everything lies in it. If he can grasp the meaning of this he will possess all meaning.

  I did not work out my "divine substitution" view theoretically—or a priori—; I saw it. Lived it through revelation from the deity. I saw that suffering (undeserved) could not be avoided (again Timaeus), but I also saw the most beautiful and touching mystery of all: the bringing into being by this crushing process the Redeemer Himself.

  If I forget or reject this revelation I will have exhausted all possibilities. I had only one revelation, and only by revelation does the answer come.

  [29:37] But suppose the whole concept of God is jettisoned, and the Noös is regarded as that of the living evolving entelechy which presents itself to us as the universe. This Noös—or psyche—is St. Sophia. It is in process, assimilating disorder and placing it in order—i.e., as part of its structure. It is building itself out of the "stockpile" of the past which I saw, moving through sequential transformations. Christ is a microform of this world soul, come to this part ("Circuit Board") because communication has broken down and this section is operating with counterproductive autonomy—a sort of cancer. Actually, it is a dying part; St. Sophia comes here to restore to its cells (us) the eternal life which is that of the total entelechy.

  Thus, locally, a metastasizing irreality is proliferating which is insane vis-à-vis the totality which St. Sophia as Christ speaks as and for, restoring to us our memories, hence identities and knowledge of purpose, and, finally, non-occluded eternal life.

  [29:38] With St. Sophia we are not dealing with anything extrinsic to the universe; also, in a certain real sense, we are not dealing with the supernatural. If (as Plato et al. believed) the universe is a living animal and it does have a psyche, and in hearing the voice of St. Sophia we are hearing the thoughts of this vast psyche which extends everywhere (as Xenophanes put forth). We are dealing with something which, when the deranged Circuit Board is repaired (and even before!) can and will be the subject of rational, scientific knowledge, not mere (sic) faith or mere (sic) revelation.

  [29:45] Always, the savior is manifested where not expected: "Like a thief in the night."43

  Christ is the God of the broken ("the very desperate," as Luther put it44). One does not fall within his province unless the world breaks you. It is a paradox. To be broken here is to be transformed, to receive new and vastly greater life. Christ seeks in the wreckage for living material to be reshaped; thus he defeats the world as champion of what it casts down and pulverizes.

  [29:46] Maybe Will Durant is wrong about the purpose of religion being that of explaining undeserved suffering; it is not to explain anything, but to free us from a thralldom from which the undeserved suffering emanates: i.e., to intervene and deflect (abort) bad luck, evil fate, etc.—certainly a much higher and more practical purpose than any explaining which leaves what is unchanged. Does it not occur to Durant that his description more accurately fits philosophy than theology? It is the purpose of philosophy to explain and reconcile man to his fate; but God has the power to change (deflect) that fate. God is a higher power, not just a wiser one. What does Durant think the colloquy of prayer is for? Merely for understanding and accepting? [...]

  What may be the case is that some or most religions explain undeserved suffering, and offer spiritual comfort—but the purpose of the mystery religions was to put man in touch with a God who could and would intervene and change the person's life so that the fate-decreed suffering (in particular what I would call nemesis or the cardinal crisis and defeat) was averted. Christianity, I contend, was one of these religions. But I believe that it had this advantage over all the others: Christ could enter a syzygy with the person and absorb the blow vicariously. And so in this way spare him the suffering, as well as the method of deflecting the life-path.

  [29:53] Okay—I'll go so far as to say that A.D. 1974 Calif. is a fraudulent "echosphere" and that in reality it's Rome c. A.D. 70, and that some life form or human group knows this and is free of (not controlled by) this interpolation: they or it know and see what we don't know and see. We are to it or them as the inertials in cold-pac are to Runciter, who is fully alive (i.e., awake). Just because we are compelled to accept this spurious interpolation doesn't mean everyone else is.

  [29:54] Perhaps it isn't just us who sleep, but the cosmic animal in toto. But section by section it is returning to (or achieving finally) consciousness: hence awareness of its true condition. When Christ left, the organism fell asleep. His return is connected (in some way) with it waking up. It was last conscious in 70 A.D.—everything after that is either a dream or a spurious interpolation into a sleeping mind. Fake time (and reality, dokos, the counterfeit, the imitation) replaced the real and just spun itself out like sensory hallucinations during sense-deprivation: generated by low level construct entities ... or even by a kind of hypnoidal automatic process—like stream of association thinking. Then it would be totally entropic, running gradually down—degenerating, but not slowing down in terms of real time; rather, it just discharges itself faster and faster into a vacuum, that of time as receptacle of being.

  [29:56] In some respects Eye is the most accurate of all: great hunks of spurious time (events) are reeled out, whereas only seconds, in RET (real elapsed time) have taken place. If we didn't dream we could not even imagine such a thing, much less believe it.

  The theme of "they're all out of it" appears in:

  (1) Eye: They're unconscious and hallucinating various worlds

  (2) Joint: The world is fake—and the time is mistaken

  (3) TMITHC: It's one of several worlds and not the real one

  (4) Time-Slip: Fake psychotic realities

  (5) Stigmata: Fake malignant realities

  (6) Ubik: They're dead and receiving messages from the real world

  (7) Maze: They're jointly hallucinating a spurious world

  (8) Tears: Several competing worlds exist

  (9) Scanner: The whole futuristic parts could be hallucinations and the protagonist lives in two different mutually exclusive worlds, competing with each other

  Secondarily, false perceptions appear in:

  (10) Clans: Psychotic perceptions that compete

  (11) Game-Players: Levels of illusion for sinister purpose

  (12) Cosmic Puppets: One world underlying another (!)

  So one dozen novels and too many stories to count narrate a message of one world obscuring or replacing another (real) one, spurious memories, and hallucinated (irreal) worlds. The message reads, "Don't believe what you see: it's an enthralling—and destructive—evil snare. Under it is a totally different world, even placed differently along the linear time axis. And your memories are faked to jibe with the fake world [inner and outer congruency]. [...]

  Is it possible that this irrational element gives rise to (as in Time-Slip) spurious sub-worlds lacking true substance? Is it not in the very nature of and essence of irrationality to perceive—read generate—false realities?

  The "spurious interpolations" may be "noise" from a faulty circuit, the artifice of the fucked up, but sincere, part of the universe's psyche.

  This is especially possible in the world as Noös system of Xenophanes. What if the Noös has a few cogs missing—isn't playing with a full deck? In that case it may sporadically create paradoxes, illusions and competing, and inconsistent realities as it reverses itself—a form of disorder. But—this leads to dreadful spinoffs, as in "Faith of." Perhaps the voice of St. Sophia indicates a return to lucidity.

  James-James certainly was deranged, and it certainly was this world he was spinning out.

  Ah! "James-James" symbolizes him being a spoiled little boy—with too many toys. "Time is an infinitely old child playing at draughts." Heraclitus.

  Folder 30

  EARLY 1978

  [30:1]


  [30:11] The real conspiracy goes much deeper than conspiracy buffs (such as Bob Wilson) suspect, although he almost had it in the theory that our universe is a hologram created by the intersection of two hyperuniverses. Fact is, our reality is hologram-like: a spurious satanic interpolation by the artifact constituting a prison which shuts out information that like Runciter's messages would reveal our true situation. It's Klingsor's Castle45: apparently substantial but actually irreal. All the pranks, Marx Brothers gags, joke information, etc., which "they" (VALIS/Zebra) are bombarding us with are for the purpose of unlocking us from the hold this mere hologram-like fake universe has over us. VALIS isn't telling us it's fake; he's showing (demonstrating) it by "melting" it into silly putty tricks. The consensual-validation hold by the phenomenal world over us—the gloomy spell—must be broken. VALIS is making nonsense of our "real" world. He's showing us that we can be compelled to see and give assent to anything.