The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
Page 74
Judaism enters, too, since the change in the "groove" which introduces the right new good-karma restores us to Eden, to our phylogenic original unfallen state. It may be a small act on our part that adds the good-karma, a small decision, but this reminds me of the story told of Moses and the lamb that wanted to drink at the stream. (Moses, upon finding that the lamb had laboriously made its way to the stream, said, "Had I known that thou wert thirsty I would have carried thee hence myself," to which a voice from Heaven replied, "Then thou thyself art fit to be the shepherd of Israel.") [...]
In this synthesized occult system the maximum statement is the first: we are dead. Then: we have been made to relive a portion of our former, actual life as a punishment that is also an opportunity; hence this is not hell, because the possibility exists of performing a new act (in what is virtually a closed system) that will change the balance of the scale on which Ma'at weighs us. Also there is a complex picture of anamnesis and reascent, but this is well-known from Plato and other sources.
[...]
You know, in this system (understanding) there is the basis of a teaching of salvation, having to do with the entirely gratuitous good act, done out of unpremeditated and hence spontaneous free will, in contrast to pro grammed works of deterministic duty; there is an obvious Zen quality to it. No formula can be located for the performance of these acts; they would have almost a contrary quality, contrary to your normal way-of-being-in-the-world. They would literally set you apart—off—from yourself, the self that failed to pass Ma'at's scale. They would emanate from the not-you (the normal not-you) from another and different more-real you, as if from another personality locked up within you and alluded to only by these acts. Thus the single personality person becomes reborn; two selves exist, one of which is the old, the programmed, the not-saved. Yes; you would have to act contrary to your own nature; you would get outside yourself. Suddenly I think, This sounds like "Thomas"! Why it would be; "Thomas" did precisely what he/I did not do the first time around—then this verifies my system, for the system posits the need, the absolute need, of a "Thomas" to break heimarmene and hence damnation. Only this not-you act or acts could save you, actions without a history. QED! [...]
Thus there is literally a second birth, and ex nihilo.
Thus from these facts I can correctly ascertain that indeed "Thomas"'s actions were not programmed, not part of the original world and life. They were an ideationless overpowering, as if located only in my motor centers. "Thomas" was not born in my brain but born in my body, e.g., my hands and tongue; he moved and spoke but in my brain there were no ideas or thoughts or intentions; he was intentionless, and yet had absolute purpose. Purpose without intent! Plan without plan! Or rather goal without plan. Truly it was Zen. Yes; indeed it was. So my theory (herewith) demands/predicts salvation by a not-you ideationless self acting at the moment of crisis when the taped world (or track of heimarmene) branches off into the new and free, and upon retrospective analysis we find "Thomas," precisely that. I can now rule out Pigspurt forever.59 It branches off into the new and free precisely because this not-you ideationless act occurs; these are the two sides of the same thing. After that, heimarmene never sets in again; it is broken forever, since you are not reliving your actual life but living your actual—new and free—life; so only during the subsequent new and free period could I perform a free-will act, such as I did, that gained me good-additional-karma and hence salvation (release). So this has to be the sequence: first the not-self not-you ideationless ex nihilo act that abolishes the replay determinism tape, and then (and only then) are you free to perform a new act. The first should have a technical name, and also the second.
We will call the first: groove override. Or GO.
We will call the second: new free merit-deed. Or NFMD.
If you do GO, but subsequently fail to do NFMD but instead do evil you will gain new bad karma. All that GO gives you is the freedom to act; it does not guarantee more merit (good karma); that must be done later and separately. So you could get the GO without the NFMD. You could have a new free demerit-deed, or NFDD, and as a result you would again fail Ma'at and be sent back yet another time, perhaps forever; you would have lost your chance for release. GO can be done without NFMD but not vice versa. Yet this is not quite so, since the divine forces (Christ, the Buddha) are working to save you. They (apparently) will not grant you the GO situation unless through their omniscience they see NFMD lying ahead along the linear time axis. But I can't say for sure that if there is GO it means they know for sure there will be NFMD in the future; if you do it by free will—well, I can probably never settle this, but being omniscient they probably know to grant you GO only if NFMD lies ahead for you based on your own free choice. Put another way, they do not grant you actual freedom unless they know in advance that you will put it to a wise use, so then there is reverse cause-and-effect, effect (NFMD) operating as cause retroactive in time to GO, to cause GO.
Wait. I'm saying GO is causally the effect of NFMD. And
I'm saying that NFMD can't happen without GO. So it's an up by his bootstraps situation, a self-causing situation—then truly it is ex nihilo. (No wonder there was no ideation!) This is a time-travel paradox. Both GO and NFMD are generated within a closed system out of nothing and enter from nowhere; i.e., from outside the system. GO is dependent for its existence on NFMD, and NFMD on GO, so which is cause and which is effect? Answer: each is the cause of the other and the effect of the other. Consider the original groove-tracking situation. How do you get out of it? Answer: you have to be out of it to get out of it; look to The Tao of Physics (Capra) and the bootstrap theory for the answer; I knew I was dealing with field theory and quanta when I dealt with Valis. Put even more simply, How can you do something you would not do? which is required for salvation in my system (disregarding the temporal factor the paradox still remains). There would have to be a psychological (mental) death and rebirth as someone different; but where did it come from? Hence "Thomas," who knew not the dog, car nor cat. It is possible that the only event that could make this possible would be abasement, suffering and pain and apprehension and tension so great that it would break down the historical self and literally assassinate it. In the absence of which, thereupon, an ex nihilo new self would come into existence, like a newly-granted second soul. This brings me back to my shamanist analysis of the crucifixion, the Passion of Christ story, as a secret method of overcoming the world (as Jesus put it); viz: the world overcomes you; you die; a new self is born; it is ipso facto in a GO situation, for, being new, it will not track the old groove; the twin tapes simply won't work since the outer tape remains but not the inner. The way to destroy synchronization is to destroy the self (you can't very well destroy the world), and the best way to destroy the self is to bilk the world into doing it. But this is a tricky business because you must not physically die; you must be alive to perform the NFMD. The early Christians themselves soon got it wrong and began to leap under Roman chariot wheels, upon which they physically died, making NFMD impossible. That they failed is shown by the fact that they did not rise from the dead in three days; they were never seen again. The field for right action is in this world, not the next.
[...]
Now let's try this theory. The ability to make time run backward gets you out of your programmed groove ("groove tracking") and renders you free. This ability and only this ability frees you from an otherwise airtight tyranny that dooms all mankind, all life forms, in fact. Thus this is a stunning and probably new survival talent, an evolutionary new ability that advances the individual up the ladder of homeostasis to a stage where he is a whole other higher organism entirely. It is equal in terms of the evolution of life to the development of the opposable thumb, the eye, the lung, the wing, the large cerebral cortex, standing upright, etc. Upon the perfection (so to speak field operation) of this ability the human has become higher than the angels and all that implies. He is operating in a supratemporal dimension, and this has vast implications
for knowledge; for overcoming causality—if he can affect the past he can modulate the present (what I called "Valis"), and if he can draw information to him from the future he can problem solve like a crazy thing. This is not just phylogenic memory, as I supposed; it isn't limited to drawing on the distant past. The crucial information related to 3-74 was information drawn from the future. He can set up alternate worlds, so in effect he is trans-world, spans not only time but world tracks.
Now, this raises the question as to whether there exists a vast meta-mind (as I conceive Valis to be) who is encouraging the development of this time-disruption faculty in order to evolve the human species further; or, put another way, the human being who has this faculty and makes use of it (for example under vast stress, as I was under in 3-74) is an expression of this meta-mind. I am sure of it. I was not alone in what happened; it was as if angels—divine and partially visible powers—were present. There may be a species mind stretching back into the past and into the future where evolved humans (imaged as the 3-eyed people?) may exist already using this faculty. When you start disrupting time you may be operating in the realm of a supratemporal composite discorporate mind—I think I was; this is what I call Valis. But it seems to me that the intrinsic nature of the sort of talent I'm discussing would cause to come into existence a meta-mind by itself, in that it would hop across expanses of time that lie outside its own lifetime, which would de facto make it a meta-mind; I mean it would be unlocked from the time-span of its physical body. For one thing (here is Jung's intuition function) he would exist (his mind would exist) in alternate worlds, and this alone implies a lot; by affecting the past he would then find himself shifting across laterally (orthogonally) in time ... which would explain my subcortically remembering that it had just been a cool, high and moist climate. So the mind with this talent would in itself become a meta-mind, outside of causality, spanning alternate worlds, able to modify his own present reality by changed actions in the past, thus setting up alternate worlds; he would be the cause and would in turn be affected by himself as cause—again the bootstrap phenomenon. Such a mind could act as cause to its own effect, affecting itself as if from outside like a feedback circuit, and, upon having successfully affected itself, the self as cause would eliminate itself as if it had never existed, which again is the ex nihilo or bootstrap paradox of time travel. Minds or versions of the mind, foci of the mind, would come into existence, influence the mind and upon success render itself never having existed in the first place; but the mind would sense an adventitious other mind operating on it in its behalf. Could it not then become its own AI voice, its own tutelary spirit? It would continually monitor its own status as if in a heuristic process; yes, it would be process, not hypostasis. You would have a mind that itself would evolve the way a species evolves.
It would be itself and not-itself continually.
[82:70] March 3, 1980
I have felt for a couple of days that what I am dealing with now is not the issue of what happened in 3-74 but rather the mechanics of what happened, as if I have found the machine and am simply taking it apart piece by piece now that I finally have my hands on it. A simple explanation: I overran external time, caused it to run backward in relation to myself, and extracted the information from the drastically altered world that I needed. More, I can see that a decade before 3-74 I was subliminally aware of the problem that lay ahead and was already beginning to analyze it, as I am analyzing my response now. Knowing what was coming, and when, my faculty surfaced on cue and assumed motor-center control; it pre-empted my normal conscious personality and without ideation handled the situation that it had long known about. [...] Precognition was only one side of the faculty, the side that operated in advance of the situation. The other side was the rising to conscious control, the abolishing of my normal ego, the taking over of motor and speech centers, the drastic reorganization of perception so that nothing that needed to be known consciously was not known consciously. Knowing subliminally was no longer any good. The moment had arrived. My psyche reversed itself so that what had been latent became actual and what had been in conscious control for forty some years was simply obliterated. I have been expecting this, the faculty said. And now I will handle it. Get out of my way. It did not ask me; it told me. It became me. I was abolished. The faculty had anticipated and analyzed—as it so well shows in The Penultimate Truth—and now its hour had come. I myself, I got to see the universe as it sees it: bloody with information, a constant flow of traffic everywhere as if in a giant brain; in fact, to the faculty, reality is a giant brain whose information content the faculty plunders for its own use, and, having acquired the information, in the right time period, it acts on it, against the universe itself if necessary. This is a survival tool. The workshop in which it was built is the workshop of dying organisms that did not develop such a talent, that could not see or acquire the information or if they did when the moment came to act they could not act on it—they knew what was going to happen and then they knew what was happening but they could not get it together and fight the antagonist off. The final stage, that of seizing motor and speech centers, simply indicates the success of the faculty; its dynamism is found at the heart of the faculty in its unconscious or latent stage where it foreknew and analyzed. My ego, consciousness, went like an obsolete species whose time was over; I made way for the next generator of life which could do battle because it had long ago figured out who was after its neck and why and how and, most of all, what the proper response was. So it is in the nature of the faculty, this faculty, to know when it is needed and to advance to control without negotiation and without explanation. But it let me see the world as it sees it, and what it sees is not what we see. The faculty has power over the outer world such as we cannot imagine, and, I realized even at the time, in 3-74, it has complete power over me—if there is a me anymore, now that the faculty has once come into conscious operation.
[82:105] April 4, 1980
Comments on 1-30-80 piece "Upon Reading The Tao of Physics."
This would confirm the view I advance in my novels, especially my ten-volume meta-novel, that for every person there is a different universe which is the result of a mutual participation between him and the macrocosm, a field that is a syzygy between them.
My recent thoughts, when turned toward Capra's book, make me think that because of the enormous (in fact lethal) stress on me in 3-74 I fed tremendous energy into this joint field (mutual reality produced by the two of me: myself and the macrocosm, the two together being what I call Valis). Thus the percent of material projected from my mind came to be the dominant part of the mutual field. The normal, customary balance was radically altered, due to my expression of intense will. This explains all the material in Valis derived from my mind: Ubik, Tears and now, I discover my childhood images derived from the book Silver Pennies.60
[...]
3-74 just proved that I have been right all along, that you can never know the universe (reality) as it really is because you can't exclude yourself as a participant-observer. But, in all my writing, I never saw the utility of this observer-participant unique subjective individual world; viz: that under certain circumstances you could exert vast will on it, the subjective unique field which comes into existence as an interchange (interface) between you and reality in itself, and warp it to meet critical needs, needs which if not met meant the end of your life, and, if met, meant your literal physical salvation.*
[82:112] A long time ago the AI voice itself defined Valis, and I knew this was the definitive statement because I used it as the opening statement in the dictionary definition in VALIS: "A perturbation in the reality field." I see now, having read Capra, that subatomic field theory is alluded to. And, I believe, the perturbation was caused by me. This sums it all up, then, what the AI voice said; field theory and me as source. Valis has defined itself, and all that remained for me was to identify myself as the source of the perturbation.
Since normally reality is process (in ti
me), when time is stopped, a vast change occurs: things cease to pass away. Then what I call the phylogons are visible as the moving dot present vanishes and is replaced by the slot which exposes reality as accretional layers. The form axis categories are visible, the true basis of reality. Nothing comes into being and noth ing passes away; the present-dot scanning system is gone and the whole "groove" is available for inspection. This is the world the medieval realists spoke of, as did Plato. The phylogons are cross-referenced into the vast structure that Pythagoras knew as kosmos. So what you have is a sort of infinite library, and the person's mind (mine) is the device that searches in the library and retrieves the information it wants. So together I and the library comprise Valis: the search-and-retrieve device which moves aggressively into the library, and the library itself.