The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  [16:72] Even if you believe in man's sinfulness, the doctrine of vicarious atonement makes no sense. The crucifixion story says, "they punish you and they kill even spotless God who couldn't be in any way sinful—and that is wrong." The story proves you don't have to be sinful to get maximum punishment (death). (And humiliation.) (Disgrace.) It shows there is no connection between sin (or imagined sin) and punishment. This is the lesson of Calvary. God himself proved it for our benefit, this absolute lack of connection. The proof was immediately the victim of BIP warpage—right off the bat.

  So the true message has to be smuggled in subversively in code. See, Christ came back and is breaking the BIP—not just its power over us but it itself.

  Hosanna! (Shout of joy.)

  [16:74] I see in the crucifixion story the message "punishment must end." In my schema, revealed to me, punishment is one of the key words, tied to the key word "sin." This whole sin-punishment system is a smokescreen for our enslavement. The solution to the equation sin-punishment (work) is innocence-joy (play). This is what the secret kerygma in Tears reveals, and Scanner goes on to study the issue further.

  Then, by my theory, the last thing we should do is imitate Christ's passion. It was to liberate us from this that he came: to relieve us of the belief that suffering is natural and somehow proves or is tied to "sin."

  As lord of the universe it is his desire and mission to extricate us from—and finally destroy—the Tears world. And a lot of the Tears world is psychological—i.e., a spiritual matter.

  I am very sleepy, so this statement may be already (and frequently) stated, but—could the encoded message in Tears be Zebra's notification to the true secret Christian church that he is here? (Here now, here again.) Not telling them what to do, or promulgating a true narrative (joy, innocence), but announcing his presence? The joy-innocence narrative points to him (Christ/Dionysos). Such a thematic narrative could point nowhere else but to him. In a sense it not only tells us he is here but who he is. So by decoding the message in Tears I learn who Zebra is for sure: Christ/Dionysos.

  In a nutshell, in 3-74 it was punishment which Zebra saved me from—which tends to prove I'm on the right track, in the above pages.

  The voice: "Guilty but not wrong." (What the crucifixion proved.) I.e., the judicial and the moral bipolarized—but in apostasy rejoined with God as Caesar.

  My God—talk about Scanner being right on: the real purpose of Substance D is to create a slave labor force. Take the people who just want to play, give them "poison candy" and they wind up in tin mines. And several reviews have said it's the authorities who are producing it. They are all put to work—with a vengeance. And the Game, which destroys your last shred of self-respect (esteem) and makes you outer-directed and totally dependent on group approval. QED. Frolix 8 to Tears to Scanner.

  The Game: die messages.

  [16:80] The age of guilt giving way to the age of innocence (which I specify as happening) is precisely a return to and restoration of our primordial lost state. Odd, that my system would collate with orthodoxy again and again on a major point.

  [16:82] The conception I have is that God loves man and assists him out of that love. Man cannot demand that love as his due, but he can count on it by faith. He would be completely wrong to think himself excluded from that love (and hence from grace). Man's failings are finite and God's love is infinite.

  I really do have an "adoptionist" sense of one gaining God's approval (support) by certain decisive acts ... which I see as one correctly solving intellectual/moral choice problems—i.e., going one way vs. the alternative, "and gained from heaven a friend." I feel that God takes note and is interested. That, most of all, he understands (what other people can't) and so is sympathetic ("he sees even the fallen sparrow"57).

  In a sense I would even define God that way: "as the sentience in the cosmos which understands."

  But all this is not a way of saying man is a sinner (deficient in merits). What it says is, God's love is for the desperate and the damned, not for the goody-goody, who you see all righteous. All the piety can't make it—God reaches down into the gutter, to people like in Scanner. In a sense the kerygma is: a suspension of punishment (and a restoration of innocence). (The gift of innocence. Love and assistance and rescue is not a judicial matter.)

  In Tears the serious old king's verdict (justice) is death. But Buckman turns grief over death into love; so love triumphs—not over death—but over the judicial verdict of death—and Taverner goes free. Within this sequence, the culmination of the book, the essential miracle of the NT, is disclosed: the holy mystery and victory of love issuing out of grief and turning a sentence of guilty into innocence.

  I simply do not see this as judicial. I see it as—a freeing man of the curse, a releasing him from his enslaved state. The court sat, the books were opened, and what prevailed was a saving, overriding love.

  In a way, the problem is, we can't figure out God's basis of selection. Code ethics did not provide an index. Whim probably isn't the answer; some plan, purpose or pattern is involved, but we're too dumb to discern it.

  It goes back to my concept of him posing us a problem to solve. Naturally we're not to develop a "solution" formula—that would defeat the purpose.

  In a nutshell, my book announces the ushering in of the age of man's (restored) innocence, which is to say, Christ returned. The final kerygma.

  [16:101] [Editor's note: This section begins with a lengthy quotation from Wagner's Parsifal.]

  G: That is the magic of Good Friday, sir.58

  P: Alas, the greatest day of on which everything that blooms, breathes, lives and lives anew should, it seems, but —and .

  G: You see, it is not so. They are the repentant of the sinner that drop today with holy dew upon both field and meadow; thus they flourish. Now all the creatures at the Redeemer's gracious sign, and dedicate their prayer to him. Him upon the cross they cannot see: and so they look up to , who feels . Made pure and by the sacrifice of God: now blades and flowers of the meadows perceive that this day no foot of man shall crush them. But just as God with heavenly patience took on him and suffered for him, so man today with pious grace them with gentle tread. For this, all creation then gives thanks—all that blooms and shortly withers—for nature cleansed has gained this day her day of .

  The theme of tears and love and guilt turned into innocence. "Now all the creatures rejoice."

  Tears to love to innocence to joy (felix)—the sequence in Tears and this is the Christian salvific magic (note: love characterizes the new age of the Spirit).

  [16:102] After carefully reading Will Durant's history of the Reformation, I see in all Christian factions a total perversion of the authentic kerygma. I must either assume 2,000 years of apostasy or (as I prefer) a 2,000-year satanic spurious interpolation. I do see in Tears still the true kerygma:

  Out of:

  Wagner presents this as the magic of Good Friday. I do not understand how the transformation occurs, ➊ but in Tears it does: death to grief to tears to love to exculpation (innocence) and, implied, joy. In Tears the magic transformation occurs by reason of the dream, which I have always seen as the in-breaking (into history) of God.

  We are indeed down to essentials, and the kerygma agrees with the prophecy: "St. Sophia will be reborn again ..." etc.

  ➊ It is bought by Christ's blood being shed. Blood = tears, somehow (the Eucharist). "This is my blood (and body)."

  [16:109] Will Durant says, "The history of Christianity is salvation by faith and good works, to faith (Luther) to inner divine illumination (the Quakers)." If there is indeed an evolutionary sequence, then my 3-74 experience is of a modern sort—of recent origin, and not comprehensible to the earlier religious types. I read his entry on Quakers, and their experience is mine. "And the possibility of the Holy Spirit coming from heaven to enlighten and ennoble the individual soul to perceive and feel this inner light, to welcome its guidance, was to the Quaker the essence of religion. If a man followed
that light he needed no preacher or priest, and no church. The light was superior to human reason, even to the Holy Bible itself, for it was the direct voice of God to the soul." Fox wrote: "As I was walking in the fields, the Lord said unto me: 'Thy name is written in the lamb's book of life, which was before the foundation of the world.'" He felt "he was among that minority of men, chosen by God before the creation, to receive his grace and eternal bliss."59 I feel as if I've finally come home.

  Folder 38

  AUGUST 1978

  [38:2]

  ➊ Cosmic Christ outside and around us.

  ➋ Our own selves (psyches).

  ➌ Christ as Holy Spirit within us.

  So it can be said that we are in Christ ➊, and Christ is in us ➌. This is a sacred mystery, how that which is macrocosmic and outside us can also be "smaller" than us and within us. Total reality (the pleroma) is like a titanic hologram of which each tiny bit is a replica of the totality. It is a mirror-like situation. [...]

  Thinking over my exegesis I see it as a vast, original cosmology, partly philosophical and partly theological. It is my own worldview, in part divinely revealed to me, in part arrived at by careful analysis, ratiocination and so forth. It is an awe-inspiring structure and resembles no other arrived at by anyone I have ever heard of. Continually I have been corrected and instructed by the voice.

  [38:4] I was taken over by a superior life form. Which was interfering with history. What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to go on day by day?

  [38:22] I conceive the brain as rapidly growing, evolving and changing—and Rome as inert. Rome is always the same: Rome in USA 1974, in Tears and in c. A.D. 45 is unchanged. What it was it is, and what it is it will be. But in contrast the brain began c. A.D. 45 (time of "Acts") and permutates furiously ... and continually altering its swift messages that pass between and among its physical—distributed—parts, linking those many parts together.

  Rome, the BIP, constantly repeats; like a psychotic human mind, nothing new ever comes into it. So in a real sense it is dead; more precisely it is a reflex system of some kind, recirculating forever one (?) thought (?) warped into an orbitting circle—it has us. But the brain breaks that hold ("Salvation"—which equals growth which equals freedom—negentropic).

  [38:23] Brain is unfolding in our actual historic world. In terms pertaining to us humans the unfolding consists of evolving homeostasis by individuals—Beethoven's contribution to what we conceive of as the person being a good example; the key term is freedom. Critical for this is what I call balking, which is in fact a fighting free of the BIP's reflex arc push-pull inner-outer determinism over us. [...] History, although filled with war, ignorance and travail, can be read, also, in terms of this evolution of individuality. The establishment of America was an important step. Yet the BIP tugs us backward (here and in the USSR both—the Nixon period was a deadly rollback of human evolution, toward a fossil BIP prior form, but the brain burst it). Yes—this is why the brain interfered with recent U.S. history: we were devolving along the axis of evolution which leads forward to greater homeostasis of the individual—i.e., greater self-programming.

  Thus the brain sponsored the "leaderless revolution" against the Vietnam war. Perhaps the first successful totally leaderless revolution in human history. This is what was important, this evolution/revolution. The brain incited this advance in consciousness and awareness. Just to examine what was overthrown is to miss the point. I am—have been—missing the point. It was how it was overthrown. I was shown the divine power overthrowing (represented by the Sibyl). No amount of lies or force, fear or threat, could halt the collective consciousness: the manifestation of this moral collective Noös was one of the most important stages in all the millennia of human history. It was a physical expression (map) of the brain. I'm not theorizing. I know. The brain operated through me, e.g., at a conscious level. The establishment, with all its financial and industrial power, was opposed by a mind. The mind coordinated its parts, this is a miracle!

  Then the 60s and 70s represents a quantum leap by the brain. In a sense, it actually came forward into actualization (the open: visible: if to me, then to others—it must be so; I can't be unique; that runs contrary to common sense). (Well, I didn't put the code in Tears to read it myself.)

  The authorities did not understand—at all guess—what confronted them. They had inaccurate, very inaccurate, intimations of a coordinating "group." They must have succeeded in discerning a pattern (of coordination); i.e., the results but not the cause (source). They saw revolution; they saw the anti-establishment counterculture articulations (voices) and plotted correctly a synchronization, but could not account for it, despite the efforts of the police. Who were the leaders of this revolution? They had killed all the leaders, and it made no difference: the psyche or psychoi of the leaders lived on—literally. Impossible! (For instance, in 3-74 and on I toyed with the idea, for really quite a while, that it was Jim Pike who had "come across" to me! It was like him!)

  Timeo. What are we dealing with? I'd hate to have tried to kill it, like "they" tried. Who have we read about who was murdered—and invisibly came back, ➊ resurrected and—ubique.

  Then it was Ubik that—

  ➊ The brain contains the saintly dead! (e.g., Jim)

  [38:24] The voice: "Plenary override exists." Not knowing what "plenary" meant I looked it up. "Absolute, complete, perfect."

  [38:26] In its moving about (discorporate in one sense) the brain is like a giant floating crap game.

  If it's like a floating crap game, this vast brain must be an organizing principle. A system of linking. This fits in with the disassembling and re-assembling into a new structure. I was taken into a thinking system ... how, if at all, does this system exist independently from the constituents which it links together? The same question has long been debated about the relationship between a human mind and its brain! Can the mind exist independently from the brain?

  This model (brain-mind) is a good one for my understanding of 3-74. I keep hypostatizing Zebra as God or Noös, and now as brain. But we are the [physical] brain [components]. The plasmatic entity I saw which I called Zebra must have been the analog for the electrical discharges constantly moving through neural fibers—i.e., throughout the brain itself. Those electrical impulses are the life of the brain: its activity. So my brain, made up of millions of cells, in billions of [electrical] combinations, became one station (cell) in (of) a larger brain, linked to other "cells" (persons), some dead, some living, some yet to be, with Christ as the total mind (psyche). As an aggregate we comprised [the mystical, cosmic] Christ!

  [38:29] I reason, now: if info can be transmitted to me, I must have some function; memory storage? No—I suppose it's my writing. This certainly explains the "Acts"—and cypher—material in Tears; good example of my function. I can transmit that way—in my writing. It's forever whipping messages back and forth, like any brain; that's how it maintains its existence as a unitary entity.

  So seeing all the messages tells me more of the story. It fits the brain-model. Written and auditory messages are its thoughts!

  The word "Felix" juxtaposed with "King" is a perfect example—not of code, really—but a message evident (available) only to parts of it. (Set-ground discrimination is involved, which its conscious parts must possess.) All that's needed is the ajna chakra working.

  Boy, have I gotten close to figuring it out! How large do you suppose the brain is? Does it extend beyond the planet? It could. Yes, and much of our reality (world) is spurious; i.e., directly imposed on our percept systems by the brain—I'm taking a wild guess. Not just by the BIP but by the brain.

  [38:31] What are we/am I? The brain overthrew "the conspirators"—I know that. So it opposed the conspirators who murdered the civil rights leaders. That is an evil bunch. On these points there can be no doubt. The sides in this are very obscure. I'll never be able to put it together.

  [38:41]

  (1) The brain is an organizing principl
e.

  (2) It constantly assembles and distributes visual and audible messages.

  (3) These messages are the prime instrument of its organizing.

  (4) We are only subliminally aware of these messages; they are "latent."

  (5) Via the messages the brain coordinates us sentiently, draws us into itself, and frees us from the blind determinism, i.e., we are subsumed by it; it is sentient; therefore we are guided by sentience, not cause and effect or chance.

  (6) We are totally unaware on a conscious level of all this (e.g., [5]). But this explains why I wrote what's in Ubik. I was describing the brain's messages, and, what is more, discerning behind them, the brain, which I called Ubik.

  (7) Ubik is true.

  (8) So, too, then, probably is Tears and Maze and 3 Stigmata. The brain cued me.

  (9) It is probably rare for the psyche of the brain to actually surface in a cell (an individual human) as it did with me in 3-74, but to protect its frontiers it must now and then "epiphanize." Especially when problem-solving is required beyond the capacity of the "cell" unit.