The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

Since the totality is a hologram, each microbit contains the plan or form of the macro. This plan or form is what is meant by "the Logos."

  [22:18] The novel Maze gives clues to what Zebra is: the computer TENCH, aboard the Persus 9. Zebra is this very "computer," actually lying outside the "polyencephalic fusion" world, speaking from far off to us in here. But it is here, in camouflaged form. Yet, there really is no "here"; we are stationary "back there" as in Ubik, etc. Zebra interrupts the "dream" with its low murmuring voice: a voice not in the dream, a voice from the "awake" world.

  [21:22] Summary: Zebra is the intrusion of the real [world] into the irreal, as in Ubik, and our only contact with the real: the "narrow gate" to the real (i.e., to "God"). As I figured out a long time ago, Zebra is an invader into our [irreal] world, modulating it and us into info carriers, with the ultimate purpose of extricating us from the "lost" condition we have gotten ourselves in, by the means of reversing our condition of ignorance through information (knowledge). The power of this irreal world—or maze—over us is expressed in the concept "astral determinism" or "maya"—the coercive power of delusion; hence I say, our original error was intellectual, not moral. But in a sense we did rebel, by creating this counterfeit "reality" which we then fell victim to, inasmuch as we overestimated our ability to deal with it.

  The above paragraph expresses a cosmogony and cosmology. All that is needed to make it complete is (1) to consider the crossbonding with Zebra which restores us; and (2) the nature of true reality, a macrobrain or noös, the thinking ground of being not included in this irreal world except for its macro form, Zebra, sent here by the macro noös to rescue us.

  [22:24] It is the nature of the maze, which is quasi-alive, to thwart knowledge. Maze and knowledge are antithetical; also maze and reality are antithetical. Out of this I derive: knowledge and reality are interrelated. So we can expect the active deceptivity of the maze to interfere with our ability to know, which means that it will perpetually occlude us in every way possible (v. Scanner). Further, that we are occluded will be a fact occluded off from us, which is the core-insight in Scanner, and why Scanner is so valuable in the presentation of our total actual situation.

  Yaldabaoth is the quasi-mind of the maze, not its creator—since in fact it does not really exist; it is a condition or state we've been put in, not a world or place at all; all it really consists of is info fired by the two info-processing sources. The quasi-mind of the maze is as if insane, senselessly generating and destroying: it is like a wizard generating illusion upon illusion which shift and change constantly (thus giving rise to the spurious impression of the passage of time). It is the plan of the maze to establish and maintain disorder, because out of disorder arises the senseless—a condition which promotes intellectual confusion on our part, which aids in defeating our attempt to understand—which is to say, possess knowledge: the essential thing we must have if we are to triumph over the maze. Thus maze equals disorder or anti-Gnosis. No system of thought derived through our senses or a priori is going to be correct due to the calculated noise or inexplicability generated by the maze—only revealed Gnosis emanating from outside the maze—i.e., by/through Zebra—will be of any use. What is required of us is that we abandon both our reasoning power (as occluded or impaired) and our percept-system results (likewise) and try to hear the "low, murmuring voice" from outside the maze. This requires the ordeal of terror and destruction of our false self, the collapse of hypostatization in the emergency condition of the near-death crisis which causes the firing of GABA-blocked meta-circuits.

  "Outward" explicability and inner occlusion are the twin weapons of the maze: that [process] which makes no sense is fed to that percept and cognitive system which is (unknown to itself) impaired. The result is hopeless confusion, the antithesis of Gnosis. You have a deliberately damaged mind trying hopelessly to make sense out of a reality (and process) which adds up to nothing anyhow: a lethal combination, but quite in keeping with the purpose and nature of the maze and its quasi-mind; this is why we should speak of it as a maze—and a good one! Every hypostasis, intellectual or moral, is doomed to prove a failure; events will defeat it and expose its inaccuracy. Even nihilism and pessimism don't always accurately depict the real situation: calculated runs of moral and intellectual order are introduced to cause us to keep trying to make sense out of what we are compelled to live through. Irony and paradox abound, and a constant calculated frustration of expectation and hope, a purposeful ruin of plans. The maze's quasi-mind acts in a perverse way, but it is not malignant or malicious, just "insane"—which is to say irrational. This is why virtually every system of human thought simultaneously works and does not quite (perfectly) work. Until finally you get into ultimate absurdities, as "the theory alters the reality it describes," as stated in Tears, which, when you uncover this, you are faced with the obvious impossibility of ever correctly formulating a workable world view—without knowing why you can't!

  Cornford96 points out that in Timaeus Plato detected a quality or element of the irrational in the world soul. Hab'acht!97 Here is warning to us enough, regarding our hypotheses.

  [22:28] In reading over the above, point (1), that we overestimated our ability to cope with our own creation, the maze, is in the final analysis, an inability to cope with the quasi-mind of the maze. We as gods sired the insane wizard well-depicted by the Gnostics as Yaldabaoth, and found ourselves pitted against it—it, which we had programmed to deceive, to promote anti-eidos and defeat knowledge. I guess we imagined it would be an interesting intellectual challenge: could it defeat knowledge faster than we could fabricate knowledge? The contours of a vast puzzle-game become evident, here, with exciting intellectual implications: it resembles a board game, the ultimate board game! However, as intellectually stimulating as the theory might be—however thrilling the prospect of the contest between "us who know" (i.e., minds) and "that which defeats being known" (i.e., the world-maze with its quasi-mind), in practice we immediately and totally succumbed. If a principle were dredged up it would be:

  Mind, confronted by the impossible-to-know, loses, however great its capacity, efforts and resources. (In our hubris we denied the truth of this.)

  So God must rescue us. Hence Zebra.

  If the purpose of this exegesis is to develop an overview in which my 3-74 experience (and by extension the kerygma of my writing) makes sense, I may (due to Pat Warrick's help) have succeeded. What I could most seek (hope for) would be a cosmogony and cosmology in which Zebra was not just possible but necessary. This has required me to reach for Gnostic acosmism, cybernetics, info theory and, most of all, to exegete the 3-74 revelation (Gnosis) itself as the court of last appeal (i.e., the AI voice and what it has told me). It has also required a lot of hard reading (including my own writing) and disciplined thought. I wind up with the notion of an irreal maze world which we created and then got caught in, and are being extricated from by God through a reverse of the primordial ontological ignorance—i.e., by equally ontological knowledge—revealed knowledge, and the revealer, Zebra, which amounts to an invasion by God—an ultimate and revealed noös—into this calculatedly inexplicable irreal world which half-consciously thwarts the hopes and expectations of all life by the introduction of the anti-expected. The only constant and true constituent is in fact not a constituent of this world but, as depicted in Ubik, enters one way from outside, the vortex dei.

  The fact that after 4½ years of strenuous exegete, whereupon I have reached these conclusions (not to mention 27 years of published writing) I now find myself being signalled to die—which effectively makes it impossible for me to put this Gnosis in a form which I can publish—is a condition which can be deduced from my exegesis itself and shows I'm on the right intellectual path, but to no avail. I am not extricated by my exegesis but by Zebra (Christ) back in 2-3-74. The exegesis would have provided the basis for a broad, explicated formulation to sow broadcast, but of course this can never come about; these insights will die with me. All I have is a three-
feet-high stack of chicken scratchings of no use to anyone else, as KW tirelessly points out. To heap the burning coals of anti-meaning on me, I also have a lot of money for the only time in my life, but with no use to which I can or care to put it. My personal attack—war—against anti-meaning (by means of my mind) has gone the way of our collective primordial defeat at the hands—I should say quasi-mind—of the maze; I merely recapitulate the ancient original, losing my mind in this exquisitely sophisticated board game which we so cunningly devised for our delectation. This past time is once more the death of one of us—but this time I am, entirely through Christ, extricated—taken out of the maze: "one by one he is drawing us out of this world." I did not win; Christ won me for his own, so vis-à-vis me alone the maze has always won. I have earnestly sacrificed myself for nothing and I did not realize this, naturally, until it was too late to retreat back out intact. Omnia viae ad mortis ducent.98

  In a sense my 4½ years of exegete can be regarded as a further successful stratagem by the maze, in opposition to the Gnosis crossbonded onto me in 3-74 which at that time gave me life—I gave up that life via my compulsion to relentlessly exegete. But I see one further irony—one which amuses me (my only exit from this trap): here is additional proof of the quality (success) of our original craftsmanship, so this final (?) victory of the maze over me, despite Zebra (Christ) is in a paradoxical way my victory as a creative artist. (The maze regarded as our work of art.) After all, the maze is a product of our minds. If the maze wins, our minds win (are proven). If, upon entering the maze, we out-think it, again our minds win. Ambiguity is involved in either outcome (this may be the puzzling dialectic revealed to me in 3-74). In fact, maybe in (during, in conjunction with) my 27 years of writing I outwitted the maze—as witness the 3 Bantam novels. Tears and Scanner, speaking about me personally, I won in pitting myself intellectually against the maze; I figured its nature out—in which case 3-74 was the jackpot payoff reward, the revelation you get for so doing.

  This puts a somewhat different light on Zebra. What I'm saying here is that the game is so constructed that you wander around in the maze interminably (in fake time) until you figure it out, and then as a culmination of the intellectual, deciphering process you get told, "Yes you are right (about the world), and now you get to leave." Which means that the ontological, saving Gnosis comes to you if you pick up on certain clues here and there and arrive at the acosmism—the Kerygma expressed in Eye, the 3 Bantam novels, Tears and Scanner, etc.—and then the "masks are removed" and the truth revealed—but it is a truth you already at least partially figured out.

  I didn't think of this. What if the conditions of the game are these? Extrication comes only as a result of—or after—self-intellectual correct for mulation? Then—Zebra is built into the maze as the link back up to the outside (cf. Ubik), to the real world. I literally found my way out of the maze—

  So there is a way out!

  [22:37] Hypnagogic: ascending stairs: Doris first, then me, ascending.

  Voice: "We're two of the main people on it": i.e., the ascending stairs.

  The way. (Out of here.)

  Doris has too many things to do here. So she turns back (to descend) but I don't—I go on. Up.

  Hypnogogic: Doris and me with the 3-eyes (thing, entity??) on the escalator.

  Then Dorothy and Lynn, etc., at SFO facing a down- or de-escalator, all dressed up: feeling of horror—thought: "a mortuary is a way of saying goodbye to a hospice."

  Thought: it's obvious that the stairs and the escalator and de-escalator represent death. It must be that I'm going to die soon.

  [22:39] The plasmatic life form must be regarded as a replicatory organism—as I witness it replicating through the printed word (information).

  Yes, as information it replicates, enters more than one percipient (human) through the optic nerve. I saw this: in every printed copy of Tears—to everyone who read it, which means thousands.

  This (supra) is very important, because it is not speculation but something I actually saw, and much marveled at, as well I might! In the host human it acquires a covert influence, as it did in me over a period of decades before it took overt control in 3-74—and was identifiable to me as a former apostolic secret Christian, a former human and actual disciple of Christ himself. Heaven knows how many humans this my apostolic disciple has by now proliferated into as hosts—which I never considered before! If it couldn't divide, the number of homoplasmates at any one given time would be no more than the original number! But I know that it multiplied through me, using me as a booster and broadcaster—i.e., a transmitter (through Tears—the copies thereof).

  Viewed this way, the "riding" of the info in Tears (or as the info!) by Zebra was a witnessing by me, actually, of the miracle, the reality, of transubstantiation! [...]

  A very eerie idea just came to me. Suppose it's been dormant for many centuries—maybe dormant between the time of "Acts" and recently. Suppose, like an anthrax virus, it was literally buried, sealed up in a scroll or codex, in a jar, in a cave—it is, after all, a life form. In "Thomas" there was no memory between 1914 "Acts"—a hiatus. Suppose it returned recently? And began to replicate, thus bringing about the end of the age of iron (the BIP). It's possible.

  Robert Bly says Jesus was an Essene.99 Suppose it "rode" or was info in the Qumran Cave V Scrolls, went from John Allegro100 to Jim Pike to me? I did have dreams about Jim and his mother—as my mother, and the Sibyl did mention Jim; I even thought "Thomas" (the noös or life form which took me over) was Jim (for a while). Maybe it had been Jim, had made him into a homoplasmate. I did dream about Allegro's book. Strange. But if it is living info, isn't this possible? Wow. What a story. And the Essenes, including Christ, knew the scrolls would be found at the end of the age of iron (the two would pragmatically amount to the same thing).

  So from Jim the plasmate-form of an Essene entered me (in the late sixties?) and lived subliminally until 2-74 when I/we saw the golden fish sign, and that triggered the plasmate Essene Christian—I experienced his memory—yes. This fits several of my dreams (the pink "margarine cubes," etc.)—and then gradually my ego barrier to him crumbled until he took over in 3-74. This would be hard to believe and seem merely "exorcist-ish" or occultish except: I saw how the plasmate can "ride" or better yet be certain crucial info (words-logos).

  I have always said if there is an answer to "why me?" the answer is: Jim Pike, somehow.

  When I wrote Ubik I already knew Jim. And in it, living info is the topic.

  [22:45] This fits in with two AI revelations: (1) "the life form can't be killed because it moves me," and (2) I'm not to reveal I'm actually (secretly) an apostolic Christian.

  [22:46] Voice: "[Using Tears] he sent out one signal." (That he was [now] here.) Thought: one signal would be enough to tell them that he was here. He equals St. Sophia, Buddha, Apollo, Siddhartha; "they" are not like him; he is unique. They have been waiting for him.

  "Thomas" is more than an apostolic secret Christian; he is he whom they have waited for. He is the savior, who slumbered 1,900 years, perhaps in a jar at Qumran.

  I have a confirm on this: "and through all this time,➊ Siddhartha slept." I.e., underground. Even he didn't know when ("the day") they'd find him, but he knew they eventually would. We eventually would.

  One piece of evidence for this theory is the dream in which I saw Diane101 in her khaki skirt. And the car stuck in the sand and rocks. So "Thomas" is Jim and yet isn't.

  My 2-3-74 experience is certainly of the Holy Spirit—but, strangely, also of a specific, particular apostolic human, for whom there was no intervening time. And I know it can contract itself into info which is a verbal analog of itself, and so proliferate (and escape—and escape detection). "And all the while, [underneath,] Siddhartha slept."

  Another possibility is that it is the spirit of Elijah. But maybe Elijah was—or had in him, he being a homoplasmate—the Holy Spirit.

  And in the late sixties and early seventies he was loose
again in the world, after 1,900 years of "sleeping." It is a spirit, but it works through laws ("higher technology"!). Its hosts, in apostolic times, were killed, and only in its contracted verbal analog form did it survive, but buried, with no further host to enter—until the scrolls were discovered in the mid 20th century.

  And Rome absorbed—and destroyed—Christianity. "The empire never ended." In Tears—I mean using Tears—he sent out one signal. Obviously a notification to the true secret Christians that he's here. So the girl shows up with the golden fish sign. As soon as Tears is published and read. And the plasmate as signal received. The sign broke the barrier put up by my ego, and "Thomas" surfaced. He remembered—his Godhood! (Qua Zebra.)

  ➊ The first half of the book: an entire age (millennia), I hadn't thought of taking this sentence literally.

  [22:51] What I saw was a deliberate dualism, which by its dialectic nature generated an endless procession of change, so that even the dark power was useful for the perpetuation of this process; and I saw this process as a building toward completion of a gestalt or structure, with piece after piece fitted in, the antecedent universe always serving as a chaotic stockpile; thus the factor of cosmos continually grew in proportion to anomie. This was wondrous indeed, everything was pressed into the growth of this organism or artifact, whichever it was. To see this was to experience a revelation of the highest possible order, since all reality—including the mind driving it—was disclosed; in the final analysis it was assembling itself, by a retrograde motion in time! A reaching backward into its prior self, so that ultimately everything would be filled into its predesignated place and no anomie would remain. The rate change was very rapid, so I guess I saw a broad section of it in terms of time, perhaps millennia except for the antecedent stockpile there was nothing which was not it, and the antecedent stockpile was totally available. There were only two modes of being for any given "piece"; (1) passive, which is to say, not yet incorporated; (2) active, which is to say, when plucked into motion; i.e., incorporated. Once incor porated, the given piece never returned to the passive mode, because all parts of the structure are alive or in some sense animated by an immanent force, mind or energy.