The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  [3:24] Voice: "This is the hour you've waited for."

  Krishna: "I am not here. Neither am I elsewhere."

  [...] I am not here. Maybe it is I who is not real, rather than USA 1974 being not real. It is real, but I am not here. "But I am not here"—what does that mean? Where am I, that is not here? I have been right: our world or worlds is/are simulation. One will serve as well as another, equally convincing and equally not real. But I—must be somewhere. I am just a station in a brain and I never move, and—Lem's paradigm, again. I am fed my world due to selective site-stimulation of the macrobrain. My push-pull psyche-world with its synchronized inner and outer non-causally-connected tapes coordinated by a clock of some kind—what we call time—is a correct model. Site-stimulation by its mind, i.e., Zebra?

  All places and all times are syntonic, and the selection of which space and which time we get derives initially from our psyche; the signal starts there (in the push-pull system). I am positive of it. My mind in the broadest sense initiates my world, although the omni-temporal (and I guess omni-spatial) matrix fires the signal back enhanced, and then my psyche enhances it more and again fires it, projects it, and so on. What, then, is psyche? I say, a station in the macrobrain. After all, I saw the brain and I saw its info traffic, with all the linkings and relinkings, the rapid flux, and we are involved in the processing of this vast rapid traffic. I even saw the plasmatic energy or life of the brain, Zebra, melt a physical, causal sequence—de-substantialize it. Damn it, Zebra by melting it revealed it to never have been there, really there, in the first place—just as Krishna says: "I am not here. Also I am not elsewhere." Substantiality (objective concreteness) has been shown to me (in 3-74) to be illusory; as in Stigmata and Maze, it's hallucination, plural (or group) hallucinatory worlds which emanate from our psychoi in cross synchronization. Belief in world makes world substantial; the "fact" that it is substantial reinforces belief—the closed loop: what I call push-pull. [...]

  The omni-temporal omni-spatial matrix obeys belief (i.e., what psyche projects). It is totally affable, obliging. That is the second secret: the first secret is that psyche initiates world by the initial projection.

  [3:26] So psyche and world are 2 mirrors facing each other:

  enriching capacity at both ends. This is the 3rd secret, this binary, mutual synchronized enriching capacity. Could this be what Paracelsus meant by inner vast reaches of space, mirror and imagination? A (the) world-generating power? That's why the more that black holes are observed the more there are of them: outer space and inner space are the same space. I.e., space is just as much inner (in the psyche) as outer in the world. What world? What psyche? Neither is real. In 2-74 I believe it was really c. A.D. 45 Rome, and so it obligingly soon was.

  [3:28] The Soviets have guessed that Ubik contains a correct cosmology radically different from all accepted ones ... Richard was on the right track with Empedocles. That's the what; next they wanted to know how—how come. I proved to be an idiot savant, much to their disgust. Boy, what I could tell them now! [...]

  Maybe those 4 Marxists were right about Ubik being subversive to capitalist society.80 [...] I am tearing down time, space, causality, world—this would be subversive to capitalism, to the bourgeois mind which is intimately connected with 18th century Anglo-Saxon rationalism (Newton, Locke, Bentham, etc.). I am systematically undermining the philosophers and philosophy on which capitalism is based, and going back to a hermetic, Gnostic neoplatonism. And a vitalism replacing mechanism—I deal a lethal blow to anglo-saxon thought, to its vaunted pragmatism.

  I am not just asking, "What is real?" as I've thought; in, e.g., Ubik I state—give—an alternate cosmology at the heart of what appears to be skeptical inquiry and tearing down. The reason the statement of a (this) alternate cosmology is not recognized even by me is that this particular cosmology is so radically at odds with the rationalistic mechanical "scientific" one that we don't (can't) see it as a cosmology at all!

  [3:33] I am exoterically disseminating a very (normally) esoteric world view!

  ***

  [3:34] Voice: "The head Apollo is about to return." See previous voice note, p. 24: "This is the hour you've waited for." Siddhartha is waking up?

  [3:35] Every time I go to sleep now I again see writing. E.g.: "The only living reality we have now is Philip the first." (Like a pope?) This seems to express pessimism, as if the agency, the viaduct, right now is severely limited. To me? A very narrow and small outlet indeed. "Philip the first": perhaps the initial viaduct for the "we" to act through: a meager beginning, but still a beginning. Note the "we," not "I." Ah—"living" reality; i.e., the only present-time outlet in the sense of living (being present) now. Rather than at another time. Also, "have now" could equal "have left" [to "us"]. Or "now" could equal at this time: "only ... now," could mean that others once in use, formerly available, fell through. Or: the now could be contrasted to the future, not the past, in which case "only ... now" equals so far, but it will later improve, they (the "we") could be losing ground or gaining ground; it is impossible to tell, but what can be told is, I think, that whoever "Philip the first" is, they are limited to him at present. Am I meant? "The first" points to this outlet as the start, not a falling off state of a previous, better process of outlet. So "the first" conveys a lot: it ties "only" and "now" not to the past but to the future. Thus "the first" makes sense as meaningful data: a process is beginning, not winding down.

  So the sentence, so short, so laconic, opens up to mean, "we have so far only been able to take over a single piece of reality in this particular time so far: Philip." [...]

  Boy, can I exegete a lot from this sentence!

  [3:38] Re the Bowie film,81 and the little boy on the raft floating toward England; the divine child won't be born, but rather smuggled in, like a cuckoo's egg in a host nest, disguised as a—human? Terrestrial? Evading "Scotland Yard"—i.e., the authorities. Extraterrestrial? No. It has to do with time, and he can mix his world in and out with ours, like with a mixing board. Space and time both. But he is an invader—but God knows from where or when—but another planet. The future? And/or an alternate world?

  I have the strong feeling that the savior of us all is about to be smuggled into our midst unnoticed, to mingle with us as an ordinary human, which he is not. But where or when he comes from I do not know. [...]

  I sense that "Albion" in England is the place where they will enter the divine child into our world. Part 1 of the book—the part in which Siddhartha sleeps—has ended, and we can expect him to awaken. The second half now begins. It is St. Sophia's return: God's wisdom to Earth, for the second time, and this time he or she will be acceptable: will prevail. I am afraid because it is an awesome holy mystery and event, the most important event since the first advent, abolishing counterfeit time and destroying the prison, freeing us and restoring us to what we once were and are supposed to be. I feel the terrible and vast majesty of the divine close at hand. Tremens factus sum—ego et timeo. In die illa libera me, domine. Qui tollis. Peccata mundi. Credo sed timeo.82 Apollo, Buddha, St. Sophia—the whole world will be drawn together by this, the universal divine Savior. He awakens now; he is nearing the shore—like King Arthur, returning from across the sea, to reclaim his rightful throne in the kingdom, on the silent, flat barge, with the sword Azoth.

  Maybe what scares me is knowing that the books are closed or nearly closed—the books upon whose contents we will be given life or death: it's like that night when the cold moonbeam-like white light filled the bedroom and we were as if painted in place, with nowhere to hide. The eye of Shiva is upon us: herdsman and destroyer. Time is ending, literally. Reality will be exposed and all will become known: disclosed openly, and weighed. We can only pray for rescue in this hour; the judge—the great assize—is here: the Pantocrator himself.

  I must remind myself that I saw my name entered in the book of life. All I need is faith and trust. All I need is to know that I have an advocate with the father who will never des
ert me.

  [3:46] My dream last night: Cabin, pills and copy of Planet Stories. Semi-conscious, I attempted to test out whether this dream world, so rich in detail, was generated by my mind. It was not. It didn't respond to my thoughts (e.g., I thought, "critical article on PKD," but none appeared). The contents were not generated by me, but received by me. And the generator was deficient in generating detail beyond a certain point, the simulation fell short. But anyhow it was presented to me, adventitiously. It was as stubborn and unyielding as "actual" reality. Clearly, it emanated from the same source! But either push or pull was missing. Anyhow, here I am again, dreaming about written pages (and which refer to me). The title of the story was: "beyond lies the Wug," an obvious combination of "Wub"83 and "Vug."84 What do "Wub" and "Vug" have in common? Both are alien life forms which enter and take over a human host by an exchange of mental contents (as in "human is") or simply impersonate humans—look like them through illusion-generation. This was an updated issue of Planet Stories, and it was divided into two parts, and was coming apart. The first, "Wub," seemed more hinted at—i.e., indicated: exchange of inner contents, but "Vug" suggests invasion of this planet by an alien life form plural (the Wub was a solo entity).

  The message is:

  This planet has been invaded by a benign super wise alien life form which exchanges mental contents and then uses the human soma as a host. (The Wub was wise and benign.) And there was material in the book (or magazine) not by me but about me.

  So maybe my matrix immortal self isn't human, but another life form from "elsewhere" ("albemuth"). Thomas is not a human being—nor will be the Savior; they were smuggled in like cuckoo's eggs—they are wise and benign, like Wubs. But nonetheless they have replaced human (lesser) mental contents with themselves.

  [3:48] I'm surprised that I haven't always recognized the raft dream as a clue to invasion from outside—and one invader is me (starting as an infant).

  Thomas indeed came from the stars originally (he must have first "wubized" in c. A.D. 45 Rome, as a secret Christian).

  Voice: "We will recant (?) progressively in time." (Recant means retract or recall.)

  (Means "revoke" which means "call back to mind, to memory, to restore, to bring back to use, operation. To recover.")

  [3:50] Inner space (of Paracelsus) is perhaps the key as to how the immortal man can be transtemporal and transpersonal. This places world inside us—did I not, in 3-74, when I regained my true vision, say I'd been seeing the universe backward? Perhaps I meant inside out—yes, I felt we were on the outside, like the skin or surface of the balloon, and the actual world was inside, with us outside. We are not at the center of the world looking up and around, but outside looking in.

  [3:51] What is real is neither world nor psyche but rather the brain and its info traffic, which traffic we as stations of the brain faithfully process. Certainly then, world should be enjoyed as much as possible rather than being rejected; it is a present given to us so that we can find goals (ends) for ourselves and not view ourselves just as means (functions) of the macro entity!

  [3:52] Anamnesis is nothing less than realizing what and where you really are: you perceive the brain and its traffic, you hear the voice of its noös, and you understand the irreality of psyche, world, causality and time. This is quite different from remembering, say, just a former life. What the macrocosm is, what one is and what one's place and task in it are—this is what anamnesis as enlightenment is all about: it boils down to a way by which plurality is experienced as the one, and the person experiences his isomorphism with it and enters into dialogue with it, his micro mind and its MacroMind, his purpose and its purpose, now understood as identical. Since it cannot die he cannot die; since it cannot fail he cannot fail.

  [3:53] "This is the hour you've waited for." And "the head Apollo is about to return." The fourth eclogue of Virgil which I came across years ago and have forgotten:

  At last the final time announced by the Sibyl will arrive:

  The procession of ages turns to its origin.

  The Virgin returns and Saturn reigns as before;

  A new race from heaven on high descends.

  Goddess of birth, smile on the newborn baby,

  In whose time the iron prison will fall to ruin

  And the Golden race arises everywhere.

  Apollo, the rightful King, is restored!

  [3:55] "Recant" in time; i.e., revoke something already done (something which happened—in their past, or emanating from an alternate world). This shows they can change the past!

  [3:56] The invisible unending victory of Christ is the greatest secret—and joyous mystery—of all. It is not well understood. There are no books on it and no authorities on it. But there it is: Christ against Caesar, the latent inner versus the obvious outer. This is the underlying tale told down through 2,000 years and yet never told at all. He is here and not here, gone and not gone. In defeat he wins. He picks up the dying straggler. He supports that which is failing and brings to ruin that which can defeat anything.

  "Latent form is the master of obvious form."

  Which will you bet on?

  [3:67] This kind of experience and wisdom goes back all the way to Pythagoras, to the Orphics, and to Dionysus himself. It is the great core wisdom of all mankind, including the Dibba Cakkhu enlightenment of Siddhartha the Buddha. I can say I am a Buddhist or even the Buddha, that in Brahmanist terms I have an avatar in me; I am an Orphic, a Neopla tonist, a Christian, a hermetic—all these statements are true; and also I have to some extent formulated my own system (as Bruno did). I have seen God but it was not God; it was more (and I have a cybernetics-biological model). I am with Boehme perhaps most of all—and with his teacher, Paracelsus, most of all.

  And even with Heraclitus in his maxim that "latent form is the master of obvious form"85 in my inner-outer, upper-lower Christ versus Caesar system, and with Empedocles in his dialectic, and with Xenophanes in his concept of God, or noös, and especially with Parmenides in his Forms I and II, of which Form II (lower, outer, obvious) is not really real. Thus, as with the Gnostics, I am acosmic, but with Spinoza in his monism—and a little Taoistic, too.

  [3:74] Man as magic micro mirror of the macrocosm, reflects (and hence contains) the map (or logos) of the macrocosm replicated in miniature (cf. Bruno and Hussey on Heraclitus). He contains the cosmos by containing this map or plan or logos of it; that's how it works! And since the cosmos is alive and thinks the map is alive and thinks.

  [3:80] This explicates a motive as to why we ourselves would blind ourselves to the true situation, the world of the BIP, the Empire, "Acts." We wish to escape in a technologically-highly-sophisticated fugue-system. But the BIP saw an advantage to it in our fugue: if we denied (forgot) its existence and entered a reassuring simulated reality, we would not act to attack it and destroy it, as the authentic early Christians do. So there was a base collusion between us and the BIP: it was a kind of pact! We wanted (as in Maze) to escape from the situation, rather than solve it (i.e., overthrow the BIP). [...]

  So Joint, Eye, Stigmata, Ubik, Maze, and Tears are progressive parts of one unfolding true narrative, in which the genuine hermetic macro-micro cosmology is put forth, the spurious world discerned for what it is, and in Maze and especially Tears the true state of things put forth—to jog our memories. Six novels interlocked, along with a number of stories. We are not to be allowed our fugue (sleep and hallucinated worlds), because, due to the BIP from which we fled, this fugue over the past 5,000 years turned lethal; the BIP grew and grew with our now-unwitting collusion. [...]

  Freedom, then, and the courage to take a stand against the BIP, are totally interwoven. We lost our freedom: exchanged it for an hallucinated world in which we could ignore—and even serve—the BIP instead of recognizing it, because if we recognized it, we would have to fight it (and suffer at its hands) or face our own evil—the voluntary serving of it by us.

  Folder 19

  SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 1978

>   [19:1] An incredibly eerie thought came to me just now after reading over a typed page in which I describe the BIP occluding us in such a way that we can't (even) tell we are occluded; "it is the damaged mind trying (unsuccessfully) to monitor its own damage." What piece of writing does this sound like that I've published? Scanner, of course.

  It is a terrifying discovery that the fucked-up ratiocination in Scanner (including the loss of memory of true self, but not limited to that) is the occlusion which the BIP exerts over us—our fate, and subsequent (1) total loss of some faculties; and (2) deformation of others. My rereading of Scanner yesterday was providential.

  [19:2] We are in a "Palmer Eldritch no-real-elapsed-time-passage" spurious world, which is why for us the Kingdom hasn't come. In the final analysis, salvation will require the destruction of this fake world qua world, to free us en masse. The Gnostics are right. But the world we see isn't real (v. Stigmata). All that will really be destroyed is a delusion over us, a malign power over us. We are in thrall to this spurious world, as book after book, story after story of mine put forth. I have done my job, and it is in essence the Gnosis of Gnosticism.

  [19:5] It is almost as if in Scanner the Ur-personality which is and was not occluded was able to monitor the conscious occluded one, from a detached standpoint. From having been intoxicated for 1½ years I know that the occlusion resembles an intoxication, perfectly recorded in Scanner including the identity confusion (amnesia regarding the original personality). A sort of forgetting is chronicled in Scanner. It is an epitome of the occluding process; but I see that what is involved is only a matter of degree. For me to stigmatize my own processes as occluded I need a point of reference. I am now to what they are/I was in Scanner as 3-74 is to now. I.e., 3-74:now::now:Scanner.