The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  (10) What I called "Zebra" are direct electric impulses between parts of the brain, normally invisible to us. The brain was firing directly at me electrically, rather than through messages (e.g., the Golden Fish Sign). It overrode me, for defensive purposes.

  (11) The brain can be regarded as an entity (unitary) within our species, and not detected, even by its own "cells."

  (12) It may very well provide immortality by incorporating "dead" humans such as Thomas. They are incorporated while alive and remain.

  (13) It remembers back thousands of years, to it coming here from the stars.

  (14) It was known to the early Christians as the "Paraclete," called by Christ "more important than I am." (cf. "John": "it is to your advantage that I go ...," etc.)60

  (15) By this I deduce that Christ was its initial form here, giving way to the "Floating Crap Game" discorporate form it has now, which is more satisfactory.

  (16) Through this form it can govern at least parts—crucial parts—of our world; i.e., direct our affairs (history).

  (17) So for what it's worth, He is here with us, but as St. Teresa of Avila said, "Christ now has no body but yours."61 How true!

  (18) More precisely, we are not controlled by the brain; we are the brain. It as Noös (energy) has organized us into its brain, its physical analog, to deal with this world.

  (19) The adversary of the brain, something which repeats itself; i.e., is static and not growing. The adversary is heavy, inert, and warps thought (and so actions) in dead circles around it. The brain is in dialectic interaction with it, freeing minds from its tug.

  (20) Those minds warped into dead circular thinking imagine their thoughts still progress in a straight line. But in fact nothing new ever occurs to them. They therefore represent a reversion to fossil forms.

  (21) Unfortunately, these people have been woven by the "magnet" into the power centers of mankind; this has long been so. They rule by lies and coercion.

  (22) The brain constantly dismantles the world and grows by incorporating more and more parts—functionally—into itself. Eventually there will be nothing but it. The time-span, in our terms, is quite long—thousands of years.

  (23) The book of "Acts" describes the first manifesting of the brain, at Pentecost.62 Thus "Acts" is the only written account of the brain's existence, and so is unique and important. It so to speak is a verbal analog of the innermost core of the brain. Outside of "Acts," there is no verbal (or rather written) analog to the brain, though oral tradition may obtain in secret.➊

  (24) It is possible that an unbroken chain of true Christians is linked through time back to "Acts" knowing about and experiencing the brain consciously. To prove their existence is impossible.

  (25) To finish the thought of item 13, the brain is not native to this planet (or world). It is an invader, and camouflages itself through mimicry and mimesis. It can not only affect our percept systems directly but can alter our memories.

  (26) It is benign: mankind's tutelary spirit freeing us from the warping tug of the "magnet." Without it, our species would congeal in terms of growth. All progress in human history (at least for the last 2,000 years) is due to it.

  (27) The "magnet" came into existence slightly before the brain came here. So evidently it too is an invader, but a criminal one.

  (28) Perhaps the brain pursued it. Using another set of terms, the "magnet" can be regarded as a sickness or virus, and the brain as a doctor or healing agent.

  (29) Because of its warping tug, the magnet has stopped real time in our world at about 2,000 years ago. Perhaps it occludes us to this frozen temporality by projecting a delusionary world that appears contemporary.

  (30) Both the magnet and the brain, then, are transtemporal constants, since the moment of the brain's arrival (the time of "Acts").

  (31) In the crucifixion, the brain as Christ sacrificed itself in order to promote new life for us. By turning itself into the distributed brain it became camouflaged at the time of "Acts" (following the resurrection).

  (32) It bears some relation to our creator. This is why it cares so much about us and our enslaved condition. (For example, the magnet transmits "die messages" at us, which the brain, where necessary, overrides.)

  (33) In connection with these "die messages" it is part of the magnet's system of lies to declare man sinful, guilty, and deserved of punishment. The brain has the authority directly from our creator to countermand all this with joy. Innocence as a verdict (acquittal) and freedom.

  (34) The brain incorporates objects and their processes as well as humans; thus it is building an actual cosmos within a damaged cosmos.

  (35) The brain has a mandate for a plenary overruling of all powers, in this world, thus it advances in a set of historic stages in an unfolding plan. This world constitutes a lower realm for it; it emanates from an upper realm, which, like it, is totally sentient. Through participation in the brain we are joined to this upper realm. Therefore the brain can be regarded as an intermediary between our world and the upper from which it comes, and in whose nature it participates.

  (36) The warped slaves of the magnet who by and large control positions of power in this world (by virtue of the magnet) do not view the cells of the brain as benign and viable, but rather as (1) unpredictable; (2) revolutionary; (3) dangerous; (4) strange; (5) immoral and "uncontrolled"; (6) different; (7) hostile to "stability." By which is meant conformity to the magnet's tug. They may even be viewed as invaders, responsive to an invisible source—which they are. They have become "not of this world, in it but not of it."

  (37) The growing extent of the brain's victory over the magnet is obscured from us by the delusionary world the magnet generates to occlude us. Much of the magnet's power, then, is itself an illusion.

  (38) Let me explain why I depict the brain as a "Floating Crap Game." It does not organize the same cells constantly, but perpetually as a process releases certain cells at each instant and incorporates others. So a given cell (human) can at one time be part of the brain (and not know it) and be outside it at another. The psyche of the brain, of course, is a constant. So the Qs: "Who is part of the brain?" and "Where is the brain?" are meaningless. Thus there is no way the brain can be destroyed, let alone discerned. A cell of it, for instance, has no knowledge of other cells, or of what will be caused by the psyche to do—or why, when it will be utilized, when dropped out, etc. This is a very superior life form; like Ubik it is everywhere but not in any one spot; it uses human media of communication—it cannot be detected or destroyed, and since we are living in spurious time generated by the magnet anyhow, the brain can proceed as slowly as it wishes to achieve its goals. When the goals are accomplished it will obliterate the prolonged spurious time and reveal the world of "Acts" to us as our real world. In a very real sense the brain and its psyche have never left the time and place of "Acts," but via the total psyche of it are both anchored there, pitted against the magnet in its clear form: imperial Rome.

  (39) If we could see a speeded-up file of world history of the last 2,000 years—run by us in say 5 minutes—we'd see an oscillation (palintropos) of blow and counter blow between the brain and the magnet. We would see millions of humans organized into the brain and millions of humans taken over by the tug of the magnet, warped into a forever dead orbit—like the Persus 9 in Maze. Circling a dead sun eternally. The brain would appear as a patch or blob of light; the magnet black: Yang and Yin. The landscape would remain constant: that of "Acts." We would see the light (i.e., the brain) pulsate, as if breathing. With each cycle of respiration it as an organism would show visible growth. The black magnet stays fixed, since it is dead. If we could see ahead into the future we would finally see a killer blow delivered by the growing pulsating brain to the magnet, and the palintropos dialectic would end. Only the brain, incorporating every living human (as well as the physically dead) would exist. Even the landscape would disappear. Just a sheet of white light would extend everywhere. It would be as if the brain had reached critic
al mass and detonated. The magnet is well aware of the direction of this process; it has reason to regard the brain as "dangerous," "foreign" ("Fremd"), etc.; i.e., as an invader. The brain is its pursuer, and it has caught up with it.*

  ➊ "Acts" is a verbal analog of the brain, of the innermost core of the brain, outside of "Acts" there is no written analog of the brain. Thus "Acts" is the only written account of the brain's existence; it describes the first [and only public] manifestation of the brain.

  Whatever theory I come up with re 3-74, "Acts" must be involved—necessary by iron-clad logic. Well, "Acts" says, "Brain." It says a lot else, but it has been called "the Gospel of the spirit," i.e., of the brain. After that the brain totally camouflaged itself (having gotten its transfer from Noös to the interface between it and the physical world underway?). I.e., the de scent of the Holy Spirit onto the disciples marked the start of the brain. It was [mere] spirit no longer. It had control over us (sic). After that no real record exists of whom it spread to. (Fortunately.) Its distribution had begun.

  "Acts" as brain print.

  "Acts" material in Tears pointing to the presence (activity) of the brain. Stamp of the origin? Of authenticity—i.e., "official"?

  "Acts" material in Tears as brain print. Proved by 2-74 and 3-74 and the St. Sophia prophecy; i.e., its presence proved (to me).

  "Acts" material in Tears—and hence Tears itself—as self-replication or propagation of the brain; i.e., the brain retrievable from each copy(!) of Tears. Each reader as involuntary host.

  Tears as miraculous sacrament like the eucharist. A way of entering people and—v. Stigmata and Palmer Eldritch's drug replicates him in each user (host or "womb").

  Words as alive, like I saw "Felix" to be: the printed word carrying a charge of the red and gold plasmic [electrical, neural] energy. Just in that one place in the novel, next to "King." It (the organism) can reproduce through—as—information. (But only certain information—i.e., "Acts.")

  Burroughs posits an information virus (or "virus" [like]). (Not so, KW says.)

  If that plasmic energy is alive, and it is (or it carries) information, then we have living information. Logos? Information plasma which enters through the optic nerve primarily—or auditorily. Signals that control our brains, open GABA blocked circuits. Like pressing keys on a typewriter.

  Once having entered the person's brain via the optic nerve it now modulates brain functioning so that the person subliminally transduces messages (including instructions) and hence is a "cell" in the brain, responding to sentient override—lifted out of the blind forces of the Yin realm, his actions integrated with that of all others like him. It's like a beehive, a colony entity, and is immortal, replenishing and shedding continually. Member-units (v. Schopenhauer on the fruit flies63).

  The reader of Tears reads the dream (he's been absorbing "Acts" without knowing it—the verbal analog of the brain) which subconsciously is familiar and remembered; this sets him up, and as soon, then, as he sees "Felix" the plasma travels down his optic nerve as an electric pulse and it's done, it can now replicate into the total microform of the brain, as the reader reads on getting the rest of the "Acts" material (especially the agape, which is the salient property of the Paraclete [Brain]). The opposites in him (the reader) are reconciled; he accepts his own shadow (in Jung's term). There may be no palpable or immediate effect, but the entity which I call the brain is inside him and growing. He will be coordinated with the others, overridden, etc.

  Also, he has subliminally received the Kerygma, the new one: Christus Rex. He has been told the good news hidden for all the preceding generations. On a conscious level he doesn't know. The deconstruction (flip-flop) of Tears is love—the final word of the novel.

  [38:55] Whatever the Bible may say, the Paraclete (and clearly Zebra is the Paraclete: the proof is [1] the "Acts" material, and [2] the Christian anamnesis)—is a life form, far higher than we are, but real, the possible object of strict empirical knowledge. I believe it is actual and a fit topic for scientific inquiry. However, its camouflage is so successful and its sentience so far above ours that trying to investigate it (against its will) is a waste of time (by definition; viz: posit a life form far higher than us and utilizing camouflage and ad hoc there is no way you can discern it).

  But it is not just an inscrutable "miraculous mysterious being"; I saw it using methods—albeit beyond the power of the mechanistic physics which control us. (Lower realm powers.) For example (and this is the main thrust of my theory) it uses an interface to link it to the physical (history) world, a real aggregate of humans, processes and objects which it organizes into the actual entity I call "the Brain." To travel, it "rides" tangible, physical books, song lyrics, etc. This shows that the sacraments are real and not just customs or rites.

  And it's composed of real energy: some sort of electricity in a plasmic state, info-rich and alive and sentient. It has to (or desires to) follow certain procedures to replicate—to accomplish any of its goals, such as historic intervention and modulation. It does not just wish for the changes to occur, and they do; it needs to dragoon specific people at specific places and times to do specific things. This thought carries me back to my point: some act on my part future to 3-74 was necessary (or so it seems) if the historical intervention were to come at all. And thus it overrode me and saved my hide.

  [38:59] This forces me to reconsider the "discarding and annexing" process by the brain in favor of a proliferation theory: once you receive a bit of Zebra into you, you are in the brain (i.e., for good). So the "cloud of fruitflies" model breaks down in favor of the model of a growing brain which acquires but does not simultaneously discard. Yet it is a "swarm."

  That it could replicate itself, in humans (i.e., via), as a verbal plasma—it looked, on the page of Tears like a section of chromosomes under an electron microscope; what I saw was its "seed" or "germ" constituent. [...]

  No—rather, evidently Zebra had replicated itself in me at some earlier date; in writing Tears I was under its jurisdiction. This could have occurred when I took communion, or, as a child, read something that was "information plasma" like the bit in my own book. Amazing how this resembles the replication of Palmer Eldritch through eating Chew-Z.

  [38:61] What is hard for us to grasp is how a single bit (like "Felix/King" in Tears) can replicate the entire body of information, just as an entire human can be reconstructed from a single cell. So all the transmitter has to do is get that living-info bit into you, and then it grows. Christ discusses this as the grains of wheat falling on various kinds of soil. The mustard seed, too, and the pearl of great price—many parables relate this concept. "The Kingdom of God" is the state created by the successful growing of the living-info bit, and successful incorporation into the brain, of the person.

  This is "Firebright" or the "microcomputer," this nucleus of living info. It creates a bicameral mind (the inward light or voice—which I call the "AI" voice). The original bicameral mind must have been silenced by the scrambler, revolting BIP. This voice circumvents the scrambler. That's what it's all about, this circumvention. The transmitter figured out a way to slip stuff in. One bit, and the totality is duked. [...]

  This description totally agrees with "John" vis-à-vis what the Paraclete does (and knows). "A bit of living information from which grows the entire corpus of knowledge" and "coordination to the divine psyche" (of Christ) is an orthodox formulation; only the terminology has been updated. [...]

  As I now conceive it (to recap), the initial living-info bit must grow to the totality for the "blitz" to occur: the quantum leap inside the person's head, such as I began to experience in 2-74, which is a thresholding into consciousness: the coming to life of the Christ psyche in microform, like a hologram bit. "Us in Christ and Christ in us" (v. supra). The person is no longer an individual driven by subrational forces, but part of the "Swarm of Bees" brain. [...]*

  What I saw in 3-74—and remember in 2-74—was the real world: the landscape of "Acts" now "red
uced" to its [mere] verbal analog: a book (and in Tears). This book is the authentic actual world, obscured by the fake one. Only the true Christians know this, and they only know it by virtue of the transmitter's living, salvific info growing into totality inside them.

  Whew. Heavy—complex.

  It occurs to me to cite the many and near-lethal (to me) attempts by the authorities to get hold of the ms of Tears—i.e., to keep it from being published, as proof of my contention about the BIP and its suppression and scrambling of the truth. Tears does not just tell the true story covertly; as I say, it actually contains a bit of Zebra, alive and info-rich, ready to enter people and begin to grow, to free (and inform) them. This is how anamnesis occurs—this growth into totality from the bit. As Christ frequently pointed out, in many instances the process fails. (There is such a powerful adversary yammering out a ceaseless stream of lies, and maintaining an irreal world, etc.)