The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  [47:798] The BIP is Inferno.

  The garden is Paradiso.

  Purgatorio is the normal world we see. It's all irreal. We are being fed it for the purpose of teaching and purifying and testing (in the pragmatic sense) us. We ascend when we learn. Ubik is the correct model.

  I say all this because in 3-74 certain things didn't fit.

  Folder 48

  [48:801] I view it all technologically. This system is too cruel and must be invaded from outside in order to change or abolish it.

  [48:812] Dante's Comedy is the best description of the ascent of the soul probably ever written. He places anamnesis as occurring at the top level of Purgatorio, just before entering Paradiso, which fits my experience. The soul has finally reached the point where reality is restored to it because memory is restored to it.

  [48:813]

  Of the BIP world, nothing good can be said. It is unmitigatedly bad.

  The mid realm is a mixture of bad and good elements.

  The top realm is unmitigatedly good.

  This suggests that the mid-realm is a fusion of two signals, that there are only two pure realms: lower and upper, with the mid-realm compounded of both. Now, upon leaving it, what would you experience? Why, a palpability of two signal sources for the first time; your world which has seemed uniform would turn into set (upper realm) and ground (lower realm). Set would seem divine and you would be fascinated by it; it would shine with beauty. At this point you are freeing yourself from the lower realm, seen as ground—but you can remember when you were located in it and it alone, with no set. Purgatorio is literally pulling apart into its two sources.

  And then you are rewarded (cf. Plotinus) with a vision of the one behind the multiplicity, from which both realms—and hence the mid-realm too—emanate.

  [48:815] This would be individual ascent or descent in one lifetime and would resemble time travel, with rising = the future and sinking = the past, thus heavenly voices would = from the future, and Satanic voices = from the past, just as Paradiso = the future, and Inferno = the past. But not in the linear sense.

  [48:817] As far as how reality in itself is built, it's as if the source (Valis, the One) fires the signal like this:

  [48:823] If I saw God while I was alive, then God is immanent (as Spinoza supposed) and not transcendent; but suppose I'm not in the real world, not alive, but in the afterlife, in which case God can be transcendent and otherworldly because I am on that side of the grave. Not this. And I've worked my way up from Tears or Inferno to Purgatorio and then to the first level of Paradiso, and so could see the infinite one, God.

  What I'm more inclined to think, however, is based on canto 33 of "Paradiso" of the Commedia. Viz: "God is the book of the universe": "the same [volume of leaves] that the universe holds scattered through its maze." This relates God to the universe in a way that isn't contingent. What I did was move along an axis of some kind and encounter one—or perhaps several—of these pages of the book, as if they are very fine layers, resembling the phosphene graphics. I moved through them, along this axis, and the laws (rules) changed; I am speaking of plural coaxial worlds. Actually I am sure that I was moved as a primary condition of my level of ontology (authentic Being, in Heidegger's sense, ushered in by urangst37), moved up crucially, and in fact rather suddenly—it is of extraordinary value to know that this can occur during a lifetime rather than between. It is as if the frequency of these pages became greater the closer (but not spatially!) that you get to the source, the One—this is clearly Neoplatonism.

  [48:828] Dream: all the churches controlled by Satanism, drawing their power from Satan himself. The 2nd coming is here: outside the churches; the true church is forming outside the church. Proof: the giving of massive gifts. "The AI voice will guide you." Homosexuality and black mass within the church. No room in the buildings given the truly Christian to perform services in. Enormous power of Satan, in and as the churches. "They cannot get to you because of the AI voice." Old book about Satan's takeover of the church, the salient sections taken out. Missing.* The 2 gods of Gnosticism; the churches worship the wrong God; i.e., Satan.

  But there is another outside church forming which worships the right God, but has no buildings. It is forming in conjunction with the Second Coming which is here. They—those outside distinguished by their gift giving—massive gifts—have the saving Gnosis. This is a matter of gravity; it is very serious: the head-on confrontation between the followers of the good God and the evil one: Satan.

  This is the final battle between God and Satan. Those who worshipped the true God were forced out of the church. It is not merely that the establishment church lacks the true gnosis; no—it worships Satan and draws its power, a very great power, directly from Satan.

  My having money is because God (the true God) is now heaping riches on his faithful, which they will give away, thus showing—revealing—their true nature: as his faithful.

  Satan has given PSI powers to the evil church, as warned about in the NT.

  I am in a maze, surrounded by the power of Satan and his church (we all are), but the AI voice will lead me out. This is why I have the AI voice.

  The pages in the old book dealing with the Satanic take-over and rites of the establishment church were deliberately torn out—to keep the matter secret.

  [48:832] I have long thought of myself as a female host—perhaps for interspecies symbiosis. But now I see it exactly; I see who I was host for and why it was necessary and what it signifies in terms of world history: the final battle (which certainly was going on back in '74).

  [48:834] Hypnagogic: When I saw Valis, reality was breaking down (to what it really consisted of), and not an invasion of reality.

  This is "breaking down" in the sense of breaking down an engine or model of something to see what it's made out of.

  This is de-Gestalting: analysis and not right hemisphere. A surprising realization. Could that mean that my left hemisphere came in? Suddenly. Well, the Rorschach test that Claire Thompson gave me showed that my dominant function was intuition, which is Gestalting, which is right hemisphere: to repeat: dominant, and to the greatest extent she'd ever seen. So my left hemisphere thinking function cut in: analysis. Well, then, it would be as if a child seeing the world for the first time could reason about it with an adult's thinking capacity. And it's connected to the unconscious and the archetypes. So in dreams its ratiocination appears as writing, and now (and formerly) it is heard as the AI voice. Then it analyzed the Xerox missive situation subliminally. It broke that down, too. And in hypnagogic state, I transliminate its thinking. Hence my anima is the spirit of reason (St. Sophia). She is not moody but incisive of course: the Sibyl. My anima as ancient wise woman. The ajna eye analyzes: breaks down the situation: sees shrewdly into it.

  So in apprehending reality she sees into it and deconstructs it with ruthless concentrated analysis: and discerns Valis hidden by camouflage; she extracts Valis out of total reality, rather than Gestalting all reality into one; Valis is separated from the rest of reality, pitilessly. There is Valis and not-Valis. Valis is contrasted to its environment.➊

  Then 3-74 was a psychosis: an invasion by the unconscious of the fragile consciousness and an overwhelming of it; but the rational faculty was in the unconscious! The judging, analytic, thinking faculty.

  This explains why I felt myself to be female.

  She was surprised to see Valis, but she had logically figured out that it must exist—i.e., Ubik.

  ➊ And this explains her seeing the set-ground discrimination, the plasmate; it is an analytical function, not synthetic. The written pages are digital thinking, not analogic. And the speech center is normally in the left brain, so she speaks (the AI voice). No wonder I had the impression that I was hooked up to a computer!

  [48:836] If (as it would appear) she is my anima, then I am backed up by powerful forces: a composite of the Sibyl, Athena, and St. Sophia and Diana (and the Fairy Queen).

  So she detects a highly intell
igent macro life form camouflaged in our reality, and she and it exchange information. And she sees its "blood" which are messages; then Valis is the dominant life form and she the true (phylogenic) human! Not me as ontogenic epiphenomenon.

  [...]

  She is in syzygy with Valis, not with me—no. She is daughter to it. "His first creation: his darling and delight"!38

  Well, I am very happy to think of the woman (Sibyl, AI Voice) as part of myself. (Recognize it as a hallucination from my unconscious: my anima, and not emanating adventitiously.) I gain by this introjection of what I've previously been projecting because I live and respect—in fact venerate if not outright worship—her. If she is a part of me, I can take more pride in what I am. I just wish I could hear her more often; in fact take me over again. I would prefer it if she were running things, since she is so shrewd.

  Could she have "been" Valis via an observer-participant-universe situation, as a sort of inner-outer field? Did she "warp from plumb"? And did the info about Chrissy come from her "projected"? The border between me and not-me had dissolved in an oceanic mystical-psychotic-psychotomimetic state. But (in my opinion) this was the correct way to experience myself and world, as a sentient volitional field.

  [48:839] Hypnagogic: repeat of "and [he] is alive" heard, and this seen on page: YHWH—small letters in intertwined luminous gold and red, like the plasmate, and raised—like a glowing scarab. Synchronized with the word "he."

  Then the God who is instilling knowledge directly in me is none less than YHWH. And it is he who "is alive"—the Living God who must work outside the Churches and restores the Lost (deliberately destroyed by Satan) worship; he deals directly with those such as me. He is in-breaking.

  The AI voice: The still, small voice that Elijah heard.

  The tetragrammaton shone like a polished precious jewel and metals and pure color and fluid light interwoven like strands.

  [48:842] I know that St. Sophia, the Buddha, Siddhartha and Apollo have been mentioned. So the stamp of the divine has been there from almost the start. And yet to see the tetragrammaton and have it connected (synchronized) with the audio "he" in "he is alive" seems different and unique to me, and a matter of a higher—the highest—order. I guess to me the fact is that none of these other names allude to God in the sense that YHWH does. It is as if the others are attributes or cultural (i.e., man-made) hypostases, and YHWH is YHWH; viz: there is no God but God, i.e., the God who "is what he is," the tetragrammaton. The others are names humans give to God; YHWH is the name by which God referred to himself when he conversed with Moses; it tells who he is. It is (v. the EB) his personal name and means "He brings into existence what is."

  [48:846] Am I to assume that Christianity as it has developed has led us away from true monotheism—just as the Jews say? That Christ is—the trinity is a false (even Satanic?) doctrine? To worship Christ is blasphemy? The Gnostics had it totally backward? Jesus is a revelator of the nature of God, and high priest and holy wisdom. But there is God (YHWH) vs. Satan (v. Zoroaster and Qumran!!).

  What if the fall of the temple and Masada was Armageddon, and Satan ➊ won? And ruled ever since 70 A.D. (Tears), but now YHWH is returning?

  ➊ I.e., the "Sons of Darkness." So the 1st advent was a failure: "She was not acceptable before." But we're told that Christ (i.e., the Sons of Light) triumphed. But they didn't; the Essenes perished at Masada. And this is what Tears reveals; and this was my 2-74 vision of the BIP world and Christians—the true Christians—illegal. Satan won in 70 A.D. And real creation stopped. But now YHWH counterattacks and re-enters this, the domain of darkness. For new battle.

  [48:847]

  Satan pretends YHWH won; YHWH will cause to exist what Satan pretends (i.e., occludes us into believing) exists. It is a sort of trick played on Satan, but in deadly earnest: to make Satan's "falsework" (pretense) real. A wise strategy.

  God turns the lie ("God won") into the truth, and Satan is surprised; he didn't foresee this. Thus those most duped are most right, paradoxically; YHWH takes advantage of the irony and ambiguity to cause to be what seems to be; this is his fundamental power/nature. Thus salvation—not just of the individual but of creation—depends on being a guileless fool. "Id non est; atque credo."39

  I don't know if the supra is right. YHWH revealed the truth—the actual Tears world—to me, so obviously it is the divine strategy to reveal this, the real situation. I think that it's just so awful that I'm flinching. So forget the above. The fact is, this is a prison. Satan won in 70 A.D. and the Essenes are dead; but YHWH is instilling them in some of us in the present; this, too, is true, and revealed, and good.

  [...]

  The battle is going on, but Satan is at the center—of government, of church. Still, YHWH has the crucial advantage of a priori foresight. It was revealed to me that ultimately he wins every hand. This was my primary vision: the dialectic and how it works. The OT is harsh, but it accords with the facts: we are in literal slavery, and must be taken out of it, as the Jews were delivered from Egypt.

  [48:850] (1) The double worlds superimposition and two selves in me: like Altman's 3 Women.40 (2) And then (later) I see Valis.

  What is the relationship between (1) and (2)? It would seem as if (2) is actually what is there, and not what we see that is included in (1). I.e., (1) raises a question that is answered by (2). Conversely, the purpose of (2) is shown us by (1). Upon seeing (1) and not (2), we would be left in the frightening dream "world" of 3 Women with the possibility that nothing could replace something, or, worse, that it is this way now—a dream, with no substance behind it. This was the fear that 3 Women left me with. But I must remember that later on I saw Valis is not a dream, but which explains the dream, i.e., (1).

  It can be argued that there is a terrible risk to decompose world because if it is the only "thing that is the case," you will be left with nonbeing; but in point of fact I wound up with Valis—so it was a net gain and not a loss (of reality). There was more reality "behind" world than in world qua world. Nonetheless it is terrifying to realize that something provides world and that on its own it has no substance (substantia). Either (1) or (2) alone would pose an unfathomable mystery. But together they form a coherence—and yet it is a startling and mysterious coherence that few people have ever encountered: the dissolving of the world (of multiplicity) to be replaced by another world of multiplicity, and then a sentient volitional unity underlying everything as mind revealed. And it not only thought world—it also thought me—which is really startling.

  [48:852] So my writing—and thinking—have been a search for God; but in the end, when the crisis came—in Heidegger's sense of me being aware of my own death, of my own non-being—it was YHWH who found me, not me him.*

  At all costs the world must be real; it must not betray its epiphenomenality except under certain exceptional circumstances, such as 2-3-74, since the consequences can be lethal (since they involve [1] non-being and [2] the revealing of non-being). Thus such a crisis engages the percipient in death, and, if all goes well, resurrection; but only the most extreme circumstances would call it forth; it is, in my opinion, the ultimate move by God, since in allowing world to dissolve (display non being) he replaces it with himself (pellucid theophany). Both self and world disappear for a moment. The seriousness of this can't be overstated—and the possible benefit (in terms of outcome experience of being by the creatorial percipient). It is like the bichlorides: "a very poisonous poison for you"; but if used in a "measured dose" a medicine that cures madness; viz: the drugged intoxication of our earthly state. But it can kill, if misapplied.

  [48:857]

  [48:859] Then Stigmata and "Faith" tell the true story! Worship of Belial as YHWH—in YHWH's place. My analysis of the visage in the sky in 1963 was correct. Belial ruled this world in a YHWH costume; the real YHWH is Ubik, pushed to the periphery of trashy TV commercials!

  My God: it is specifically stipulated that Ubik is the—not a—reality support!

  [48:861] "St.
Sophia is going to be born again; she was not acceptable before." I.e., the first advent was a failure—I have to face that. Crucifixion was not the intended goal. There is no original sin and hence no vicarious atonement. Paul made it all up to explain why Jesus "succeeded," whereas the light went out and a false (Satanic) church arose based on the cross not the fish.

  [48:865] Their experiences (including world) in Ubik can't be explained except by their being dead and not knowing it; through these phenomena they deduce the truth: their true—vs. apparent or imagined—state. My experiences in 2-3-74 were like those in Ubik. (And this was before I read the Commedia.) Therefore I am dead. YHWH is rescuing us by breaking into our umwelt. What I must keep in mind is that I wrote Ubik upon reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead in which our true situation is laid out: the Great Secret.

  Being dead, we can rise or sink. If we rise we can reach the one (Valis, Ubik, YHWH, the semplice lume41) (cf. Plotinus). What happens in Ubik is that Ubik at last throws off its multiple (multiplicity) disguises and reveals itself as the one which is everywhere in countless disguises. It can be found anywhere but in profane ("trash") disguises; i.e., camouflaged. It pervades the reality that it has "created" (or is). It is not separate from that reality, like artificer and artifact. But it is absconditus: hidden by means of taking countless disguises. Only if it chooses to reveal itself (theophany) can it as sentient, volitional unity be detected. This is certainly very much like Brahman.