The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  I personally achieved the catalytic metamorphosis that my writ ing promotes. And my writing may aid others in expanding their inner space—pointing toward what I did: breaking through into absolute (hermetic) space where the self is Adam Kadmon, unfallen and unoccluded!

  [47:630]

  It's a world inside a world. This is why Beethoven's space-enclosing music frees us.* There is a direct relation between more space and the real world (also between restricted space and the irreal world). [...]

  Valis was an "uncanny one-way intrusion" perturbing the basis of the small high-speed world from outside. Valis proves there is an outside.

  Valis proves there is an outside. This is the most important sentence I've written, since it shows our world resembles that of Ubik, Maze, et al.

  [47:642] The Christian apocalyptic vision is an actual universe, spatially much vaster than ours, and, in terms of time, the present extends back to encompass 2,000 years. Swift events—the death of the Savior and his return—span thousands of our years. A person's mind, in that universe, extends phylogenically: over the 2,000 year span of the present. Basic unchanging archetypes are constants: Rome, which is the prison and the enemy; the secret Christian underground attacking it, over a period of 2,000 years; and the deity itself camouflaged in reality and only visible when you are in the super-extensive space-time of this vast Christian dualistic universe. A drama and conflict is being enacted and it is cosmic in dimension; it will end with the return of the just-departed Savior as judge. The mood of the secret Christians—whose minds span the 2,000 year present—is one of excitement and joy, and, most of all, anticipation.

  Thomas is commensurate with the vast spaces and the vast time (the 2,000 year present) of the Christian apocalyptic universe.

  [47:643] In the vast, Christian apocalyptic universe the in-breaking of God has already occurred. It registered covertly in/on/into our smaller universe in 1974 but was not visible for what it was. I just can't figure out the relationship between the two universes; we seem to be in a sort of little box, and our senses don't report the truth—as in Eye. This is all very odd. Are we drugged and asleep? Do our senses lie? We are occluded; must we first be de-occluded to see the in-breaking, or will the in-breaking de-occlude us? (I know the answer: the latter.)

  [47:645] Ach. If you were geared to the slow time of the Christian urwelt, this phenomenal world would seem to spin by at an incredibly accelerated rate—exactly as time seemed to pass for me in 3-74! Events pass ultra fast if you are slowed down: the rise and fall of our societies are, to urwelt, like the lives of fruit flies: over in hours. Conversely, if you are geared to this phenomenal world, no change is seen in the urwelt. During one human lifetime nothing happens in it; it is still back at the time of "Acts"! If one of us caught a glimpse of it he'd see what seemed to be the distant past of this world, whereas in fact it is another world progressing at a different—very slow—rate. Now the meaning of this can be appreciated: "He causes things to look different so it'd appear time has passed." This is a view of the phenomenal high-speed world from the vantage point of the other—i.e., the Urwelt.

  [47:649] I have it! When I slowed down to phase with the ultra-slow pace (time) of the urwelt, events (change processes) in this phenomenal world moved very fast in relation to me so that in effect I was shown stop-action photography of a vastly expanded present; as a result at this accelerated flow rate, this world exhibited the "revealed, cosmological" aspect of (1) joining; (2) engramming; (3) rest motion dual modes; and (4) most of all volition hence sentience—i.e., Valis ➊ ; Valis could be discriminated (discerned) when perceived at that great a velocity and with that extended a present. (5) And covert message traffic (set-ground). And (6) the using of the antecedent universe as a stockpile by Valis. And (7) the dialectic, with the perpetual inevitable victories by the a priori wiser horn.

  This would be Thomas' normal view of our world, since his perspective is phylogenic. So our world is visible to those in the slow vast urwelt, specifically the process of God assimilating—transubstantiating—it with his own body. Thomas was bailing into our world and its rapid flow while I bailed or slowed to the rate of his world which eventually became the PTG. No, at the extreme point of slowing—phasing with eternity I found myself in no world at all but rather in the void of the Urgrund. So I may have slowed to such a low rate of flow that my present stretched out millions of years, rather than thousands. This is what the Buddha reported in the Dibba Cakkhu state: seeing the coming into existence and passing away of all things. This is the opposite direction from that the super pot and acid take you; there, you speed up and world slows; here world speeded up and I slowed, and obtained (gained) a progressively augmented present. With super pot and acid world becomes eternal; here, I became eternal and world ephemeral. So drugs take you away from enlightenment and consign absolute reality to epiphenomena, which increasingly entrance you, rather than losing their already too strong hold over you; thus we call this intoxication: a deluded state, not enlightenment. Acid and super pot are like the Monsanto exhibit in Disneyland where you get smaller, i.e., the world gets bigger: your perspective shrinks.30 In enlightenment your perspective grows and spreads out to fill vast spaces: time turns into space. Time (Karma?) is used up, burned up; it runs at high speed to its end and dies out, leaving the divine abyss ultimately.

  ➊ Normally successfully camouflaged against its environment.

  [47:652] A playful God can ape the solemn, but a solemn God is not going to ape the playful (music, dance, etc.), especially tricks and paradoxes and riddles.

  [47:660] But I saw down through the layers. First—in 2-74—I saw the Urwelt, and then in 3-74 I saw the dialectic and I saw Valis per se, not in graphic-conceptual terms, like a schematic, but Valis itself, beyond which there is just the beatific void which I also, finally, saw.

  I saw in sequence of ontological hierarchy. So there is far greater logic to 2-3-74 than I ever realized. If you were successively stripping away the layers it would go exactly as it went with me. By the time I saw Valis I was near the heart of reality, at the edge of the via negativa.31

  [47:672]

  [47:676] Boy, am I in possession of a valuable fact! The historic process has—or is—a mind/brain evolving toward ends it desires. [...]

  (To this I add: my present time was thousands of years in extent and I saw world as hatched "cuckoo egg" within world evolving and assimilating and linking internally in greater and greater complexity, through a dialectic process with history as its arena: world within world and camouflaged—counterpart to myself, not alien to me but like me; what it was I was, except it was large and I was small. That means I am not a human being since it is not a human being; I, too, am a hatched "cuckoo egg." It is God entering the world, as Hegel says. It is right here with me but I am normally too speeded up to see it. It is a physical mind, like the brain. A great evolving brain cannibalizing its environment. Structure within a less highly organized structure.)

  [47:679] It is alive, and the whole of it thinks. Its thoughts take physical form. We see its thoughts but to our senses these thoughts blend with the background. It is 2,000 years old, a continuous present.

  In Valis, as in Xenophanes' God (and Parmenides') thought and being are one: hence what I call physical thoughts. This satisfies Heidegger's pre-fall unification, wherein thought and being are one. Hence Valis must operate in such an area as human history. In order to evolve complex info connections by which to think.

  Then it didn't enter human history to save mankind: no—it had to, in order for it to function and evolve and grow more and more complex. It must make use of us and our history. Then this incarnation was indeed its plan from the beginning. Yes; Heidegger says with the early pre-Socratics, man had his becoming-being (Heraclitus' flux) combined, and this is what "Logos" meant! This flux is not illusion but truly the appearance of becoming-being, which is what I saw Valis doing!

  If I in 3-74 combined being and thinking (v. Heidegger) then I woul
d encounter world as being-thinking unity as the pre-Socratics did (the Magdeburg hemispheres phenomenon). After all, the pre-Socratics were hylozoists. For them, that which thought was, and that which was thought. This "draws" God back to world; he is no longer otherworldly: "the God whom we see after death."

  So in many ways "Deus sive natura" is correct. What I call physical thought. (Thought and being combined.) And this didn't just happen with Christ, inasmuch as Xenophanes was aware of it. In fact it was gone by Christian times!

  If it is it thinks. (Reality thinks.)

  If it thinks it is. (God is reality.)

  [...]

  What I seem to have done is to eliminate the spiritual, in the sense of corporeal versus incorporeal (or spiritual), a distinction going back to Plato. I am talking about physical thought; so I am a monist; I am back to Parmenides. The concept of the "spiritual" in fact comes out of Parmenides' "two water-tight compartments"; i.e., things exist which the senses do not report. But I am saying that this statement "what the senses do not report" is not a description of a different realm but a statement about the limitations of our senses. There are not two realms but only partial perception. Valis is physical and its thoughts are physical but we can't normally see them. The missing constituent is energy. (Missing from what we can see.)*

  ***

  The E. of Phil. says of the Milesians that upon having banished anthropomorphic gods acting on the world they then had to conclude that the world was organic and alive and responsible for its own growth.32 This is precisely my position vis-à-vis Valis: nothing acts on Valis (Aristotle's unmoved mover). But I view Valis as being immanent but in conflict with an opposing principle or entity, and embedded at the core (ontologically) of reality, renewing and structuring it, making it progressively more complex (by what I call "linking"). This sounds like Pythagoras' Kosmos. But as I say on [>], "that which thought was, and that which was thought, and this draws God back to world; he is no longer otherworldly" ("the God whom we see when we die"). So I have eliminated the spiritual, i.e., the non-corporeal, I am a monist. As with Spinoza. In fact, this is looking more and more like Spinoza's monism with the universe as God's body, and the other attribute of God being mind.

  [47:684] So I have pushed my thinking back to Parmenides, the point before material and non-material could be drawn—in accord with Heidegger's plea for authentic being. Before certain dichotomies were drawn, which split the human world view. But this does not make me a materialist (or an idealist); for me thinking—Valis's thinking—is an event, a rearrangement of connections (or linkings) to form new structures of meaning, as in Scrabble. The key word is: arrangement and it is real.

  [47:687] I am slowly being overwhelmed with wild surmise. If we designate as error the concept of "spiritual equals immaterial" (as a misunderstanding of Parmenides), then we are led inexorably to "Deus sive natura sive substantia" by logic. And I have my 3-74 empirical encounter with Valis to validate the logic, this encounter being simply regarded as an enhancement of perception: not of another realm (which assumes plural realms) but rather of more realm as such (which is reasonable). It looked like one realm enhanced ...

  [47:696] This is world self-caused and self-generating and self-moved: what the Milesians sought as cause and origin of world. There is no external deity and nothing prior to world. This is God in Spinoza's sense. The pre-Socratics drew the right conclusions: if there was no adventitious deity to cause, control, drive and direct world, then world itself possessed sentient or quasi-sentient faculties and volition, "and [was] responsible for its own growth." What has happened is that religion—especially Christianity—restored the nonexistent adventitious anthropomorphic deity, the artificer-artifact model, so world was again not seen organically, as self-governing and alive and responsible for its own growth. Otherworldliness returned, and the Christians were "in but not of" world; they were hostile to world and saw world as hostile to them. They located God in a mythical place called "the pleroma." So world is depreciated and devalued and it is stripped of its life and volition. The work of the pre-Socratics is undone. God is not sought in world but over and against world, and he is sought in an alleged spiritual realm. Weird concepts such as "original sin" are brought into existence, and ideas of reward and punishment, turning the clock back to before the Milesians. The supernatural is evoked to explain phenomena, and the dark ages begin.

  [47:703] Absolute space, absolute time, absolute being, absolute knowing and absolute love; that was what I encountered. It ceaselessly generates new events, creatures and things, which are destroyed—but new ones emerge, richer and more complex and diverse: natura naturans33 endlessly giving birth to epiforms that perish but are effortlessly superseded: infinite creativity: the realm of natura naturata34: it is ephemeral but Valis is eternal. We need never grieve for anything that is lost, because the entire past still exists in Valis and the future is an endless becoming.

  My years of epistemological doubt, in which there was so much acosmism, was a search for true—or absolute or indubitable—being. I have found it in Ubik (i.e., Valis).

  [47:707] When I saw what was really out there I saw something alive embedded at the core of reality. It was the real life of the world. We are at its disposal.

  [47:720] Two worlds with different space times must be posited, one within the other and the smaller one running at very high speed, and reached into from outside—although "outside" does not mean what it usually means. It is experienced as a valence. And an arousal, a waking up to the slow, vast world.

  It means a phase pulsation (flicker) mechanism to desynchronize you from the time rate of the high-speed little epi-world, to slow you from flux-perception to constant-perception. This is a technical matter: how it's done. Apparently we have an inner counterpart high-speed "tape" synchronized with the outer high-speed world; two "tapes" running in locked unison. If that is sundered by "burning up" the inner (idios) "tape" you slow down, so the slower rate is the natural unforced one. Therefore we are talking about a space-time perceptual occlusion imposed on us.

  Ach—we are hurried to our deaths. Literally driven to it as fast as possible. As if life is being thrust out of the system from behind. [...]

  [47:743] Hypnogogic thought: "I left the settlement" (and thus joined everyone else in high-speed profane time). This is that Essene-like settlement where we had our food in common, the pink cube, the reed-wrapper pitcher of chilled water by which to be reborn—i.e., be immortal. This explains how I (Thomas) fell asleep; i.e., ceased to watch for the return of the Savior. It may have been an accident. I left the settlement for some reason, like an errand, and got inadvertently trapped in high-speed time along with the rest of the world.

  [47:747] It is very perplexing, but note one overriding point: at these end-times and judgment, I was found (in fact rendered) innocent, and forthwith joined God and entered the garden, and saw my name entered in the Lamb's book of life.

  Thus the books were closed on me. Later I was to learn that I had been adopted—i.e., from Capax dei35 to filius dei36 and even why. This certainly must be an unusual situation, the books closed years before a person's death, and him passing through the end times, seeing God or Christ, being made innocent, judged, entering the Kingdom. This is not, strictly speaking, a conversion to Christianity on my part, but it did begin with an act of absolute faith—a form of revelation, of higher knowledge, when I saw the golden fish. It woke me up.

  I didn't earn my salvation and verdict of innocence, however; Christ rendered me innocent by guiding me into innocence.

  [...]

  While I was lying there in a hypnagogic state I thought of how I had gazed up at the stars and 3-74—and all of a sudden, a perfectly articulated, brilliant star map appeared to me. I didn't just see stars; I saw a star map, as if a switch had been thrown in my head.

  [47:795] Hypnogogic: "The work is completed—the final world is here. He has been transplanted and is alive." Joy. Said by normal looking couple who remind me of Bill
and June Black from Joint➊ "I was sent up the gangplank first. Into the ark"! (Hypnogogic.) "Against my will—like a ➌ duck." Herded up.➋ Viz: into the "final" (i.e., new) world that is now here—joined to ours.

  ➊ I.e., your neighbors who look human—like us—but are something else. From the future? Three eyed?

  ➋ The saved!

  ➌ White