The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  Valis and the perception of Valis occur simultaneously, and neither can be separated from the other, ever, at any time.

  Valis is everywhere—that is, it can be perceived everywhere. It is not in a meta-reality but is a meta-system made entirely from this reality.

  ➊ By perceiving Valis he participates in the sudden total transformation from plural unrelated constituents to a unitary structure. It is as if Valis feeds off the percipient's perception of structure using perception of structure as structure. But this is an acausal relationship, a kind of parallelism; it is ex nihilo. Valis came out of nothing. Reality did not evolve into Valis. It became Valis when perceived as Valis. There are no antithetical forces in Valis; the dialectic does not exist when Valis does. But when Valis ceases to exist, there again is the dialectic. Valis uses the dialectic to come into greater being, to grow, assimilate its environment, incorporate new pieces, make itself more inclusive and complex: more Valisish. Valis could be compared to the point at which a liquid becomes saturated or when water freezes, except that perception of this is necessary for it to occur. What if I were to say, ice is water seen a certain way? There you have an analogy.

  Even more strange, Valis induces a potential percipient to perceive it and thus cause it (Valis) to occur ... thus it can be said that during its nonexistence Valis is able to cause its own existence. At the time that it laid down steps to bring itself into existence it did not yet exist. Thus it treats time differently than we do; it is not passive in relation to time. When it thus brings itself into existence it is already an extensive system. Hence one can say, Valis comes and goes but is always in a sense present. The percipient sees Valis because Valis causes the percipient to see it, but Valis did not come into existence until the percipient saw it. Thus the effects of Valis are felt before Valis exists, and these effects are to be regarded as acausal; they have no cause because their cause does not yet exist. It will exist later; then, retroactively, these effects will have had a cause. What is represented here is total homeostasis: an entity that is entirely self-generating, on which nothing acts but its own internal volition. Therefore in a sense it can be said that Valis is (or becomes) anything that acts to cause it to come into existence, which is to say, by perceiving it. This involves laws of physics about which we know nothing, I would think. What certainly is involved, indubitably, is not a more complex entity than we normally know of or have ever heard of, but an entity operating under laws different from the laws we are aware of, including ontological categories of perception organized in ways we have never heard of. Greater complexity is not the key to Valis; utilizing of more complex physics is the key to Valis. In a certain real sense Valis is very simple; it is a unit. You could think of it as a protozoon, a single cell at a higher level of reality, where the laws of space, time and causation are different; and it makes use of that difference. We humans are very complex forms that matter takes at this ontological level of reality, or, if you will, at this level of physics; Valis is a very simple organization at the next level up. The billions of constituents of our level form a single cell at its level; these constituents are subsumed and yet at the same time at this level of reality they go about their business as usual. So in a sense Valis has no effect on this world. But in another sense it has complete control of this world. Both statements are equally true, depending on whether you can see Valis or not.

  This especially applies to the patterns that Valis is or creates in our world in which broad sequences of events add up to a coherency. It can be said: There is coherence; there is not coherence. Coherence and Valis are the same. Since Valis in a very literal way is our world, its internal structure is a latent (concealed) coherence of our world. (All the constituents of Valis are elements of our world; it—Valis—has nothing else to draw on and it needs nothing else to draw on.) Thus it is possible when viewing Valis to view Valis as our world and our world as Valis.

  One can say of Valis, then, that Valis is a way our world can be seen to be. Its structure is the structure of our world. Developments in Valis are developments in our world. Volition in Valis is volition in and of our world. There is no difference between Valis and our world except that Valis is a certain way of seeing our world in terms of it being a kind of single unit all parts of which are interconnected purposefully and everything is coherent. (In other words it is precisely what Pythagoras called kosmos: the orderly fitting-together of the beautiful.) Viewed this way it operates from internal necessity without the need of any sort of adventitious deity. It is not world to God—creation to Creator—but having its own logic and making its own choices. It chooses continually after examining all the possible choices arranged as information into a sort of narrative made out of language. Nothing created it; it brought itself into being ex nihilo by willing the perception of it—of necessity from within itself, which is a self-awareness. Thus the percipient of Valis and Valis are part of one field.

  The flux world is real because the dialectic is real, and it is the mechanism by which Valis advances up the ladder of its own evolution—Valis, then, is not static. It is permanent but this is a dynamic permanence. Equilibrium must always exist in Valis; the antithetical forces of the dialectic are in a secret partnership in and as Valis. This is why Valis' main device in dealing with the flux world—in order to use it to generate new bits for Valis—is enantiodromia, the conversion or backward turning of something when it reaches an extreme into its opposite. It is by this and this mainly if not alone that Valis evolves.

  Possibly we would see Valis as a flicker of on-off, on-off, on-off, a flip-flop back and forth in its ceaseless dialectic that is in it but beneath it or rather enclosed within the palintropos harmonie of Valis; Valis as our world is this flip-flop; Valis as a coherence is palintropos harmonie. All this is very much what Heraclitus taught and he would probably have called Valis Logos.

  [83:157] Well, frankly it would seem that I had a somewhat Platonized version of Taoist ecstatic experience with the Absolute. I had some experience with the Christian Absolute (the Godhead), some with the Platonist and Neoplatonist (the One), with Brahman ... but my inquiry has certainly just now—surprisingly—led me toward Taoism, my old, old stomping-ground. In Taoism we have the flux; we have the constants in the flux; we have the dialectic—and between two sides very similar if not identical to Yang and Yin, or to Parmenides' Forms I and II—and most of all, there is Valis which I see fits the description of the Chiang Tao:

  An unchanging unity (the permanent Tao) was seen as underlying the kaleidoscopic plurality ... ineffable reality, experienced in ec stasy, that lies at the origin of the universe and behind or within appearances.70

  [...]

  What is really pointed to is: the Absolute is non-sectarian; it is Christian and Brahmanist and Platonist and Taoist all at once. If it really is the Absolute, this should be expected.

  Folder 1*

  October–November 1980

  [1:1]

  3/20/74-

  12/2/80

  THE DIALECTIC:

  God against Satan, and God's final victory foretold and shown

  Philip K. Dick

  An Exegesis

  Apologia pro mea vita

  [1:2] Or is it possible that 2-74 consisted of a quantum leap in abstracting from accident to essence on my part, a perception/awareness of einai underlying accidents as follows:

  "Superimposition" of the 2 continua, a scanning by me of two spatiotemporal templates and a perception/awareness of essence identity. [...] I grasped (the category of) essence and it is real; more, this is how reality is in fact arranged. I could grasp the category of essence and see that A and B were on the essence level one-and-the-same, but I could not then extrapolate to the essence (form) realm in general, i.e., the next implication was lost to me; I failed to draw the next conclusion. [...] However, having made this quantum leap in mentation/perception-of-reality, I could not halt the involuntary chain of mental hypotheses triggered off in my brain, which (i.e., my brain) ha
d discovered that an ultra way of world-perception/experience/Dasein was possible—and more accurate—and so neural circuits fired and I proceeded to progressively further and further abstract—think/see in categories of less spatiotemporality and more and more conceptual arrangement—the Christian element was only a trigger/clue; this did not have to do with Christianity per se but with the abstracting of essentials at the expense of accidents hence of spatiotemporal arrangement; as a result I ascended through the realms of Neoplatonism—which makes Valis Plotinus's One.*

  [1:9]

  [1:17] "If you press world hard enough it yields up God"—paraphrase of [>]. "I define God as world under the threat of death ... God forced into the open, and put to work in the service of evading death."

  [1:19] No time has passed, and, moreover, all change since "Acts" has to do only with accidents not substance. Reticulation and arborizing in a memory system; the real world, having been destroyed, exists only in God's memory, and this world remembered is "Acts," and all changes since have been mere reticulating and arborizing as elaborations of a freeze frame.† Hence time is not real and space is not real. The real world is morphologically arranged, and that world is "Acts" as dynamic, but in essence changeless—exploded through the simulated space and time we experience.

  [1:23] The secret is to view something "from the other side" and not as it is—overtly. Heraclitus' "latent form"—crypte morphosis where the concealed truth and hence the kingdom lies—Zen realizes this. Paradox.

  [1:24] Premise: things are inside out (but will at the "Apocalypse" assume their real shape). Therefore the right place to look for the Almighty is, e.g., in the trash in the alley. And for Satan: in vast cathedrals, etc. Through enantiodromia they will "on that day" assume their rightful shapes—the great reversal. The Jester in the tarot deck is the real King; the King card is the deranged one, the witless one. Ubik in its commercials and final theophany shows this reversal process. USA 1974 is really Rome c. 45 C.E. Christ is really here; so is the kingdom. I found my way into it once. The long path is the short path—ponderous books of philosophy won't help me; Burroughs' Junky will. That "thieves and murderers" 17th century poem of Herbert's will. Stone rejected by the builder; the edifice is discarded; the true edifice is invisible—disguised as rubble (plural constituents). That fly grooming himself—they (the divine powers) have to reveal the kingdom to you; you can never on your own pin it down. So to search at all is to miss the point. Tricks, paradox, illusion, magic, enantiodromia. The apparently harmless Xerox missive was my death warrant. The AI voice says the secret stolen has been successfully smuggled to me; I have it. But what is it? My worst book, Deus Irae, is my best. God talked to me through a Beatles tune ("Strawberry Fields"). ("Nothing is real. Going through life with eyes closed.") A random assortment of trash blown by the wind, and there is God. Bits and pieces swept together to form a unity.

  [1:25] "God does not work through the is." God works through what Lao Tzu calls the weak, the empty; this is the same God.

  [1:29] Christianity is like a given drama on TV; what I've been trying to figure out for 6½ years is not what this one drama of many is about, but how the TV set works that brings this drama and all the others (there are many, as Eliade makes clear). So: Christianity, when you think about it, could not be the answer. It is a content within the system, not the system.

  [1:46] October 19, 1980

  You look at one spatiotemporal continuum and another spatiotemporal continuum and you see that they are one. They do not merely resemble each other nor are they just tangent. They are the same thing in terms of some underlying essence. The quantum leap in brain-function is when you go from thinking, "These two spatiotemporal continua resemble each other" to "They are one and the same, expressed at two places and two times." And you can only do this if you have experienced anamnesis, because if you have not recollected (recovered) you can go no further than seeing that the two continua resemble each other; you cannot make the leap—which is up out of the spatiotemporal universe. Because within our spatiotemporal universe it is impossible that USA 1974 and Rome A.D. 45 could be one and the same ... how could they be? They are at two times and two places. The only way they could be one and the same would be if time and space were somehow not real; or, put another way, if something about the two continua themselves were not real. That is, if Rome was not Rome; USA was not USA; but both were a third thing, the same thing.

  This is why I call it a meta-abstraction. USA 1974 and Rome A.D. 45 are two ways of looking at the same thing: two aspects of the same thing. And the only way you are ever going to realize this is if you literally actually see the two of them superimposed, comingled; and this will only happen if you experience anamnesis; and you will only experience this anamnesis if something stimulates—releases, actually—your blocked memory. [...]

  I am saying, "One plus one equals two," to people who are saying, "One apple plus one apple equals two apples. One table plus one table equals two tables." It's not their fault. I'm sorry but the difference between my meta-abstraction as a brain function and their abstracting, their brain function is that great. I'm lucky. Because of the sodium pentothal and the Christian fish sign my blocked memory of my prenatal life was disinhibited. After making the initial leap in meta-abstracting my brain drew conclusion after conclusion, day after day; and I saw world more and more in terms of conceptual or morphological arrangement and less and less in terms of the spatiotemporal; I continued to abstract reality more and more, based on the hierarchy of realms (each higher one possessing more unity and ontology than the lower) that Plotinus describes.

  In a way I feel really bitter: because I can't tell anyone or convince anyone of what I saw. I'm afraid Valis won't convince anyone. I feel like joining them and saying, "When I played my recording of the Mahler eighth last night the performance was a lot better than when I played that recording last week." They'd think I was a lunatic. That's how I feel about them, in a way.

  [1:49] October 20, 1980

  I finally see the source of my confusion, which I will herewith straighten out and then (God willing) let it rest. The structure or mechanism of 2-3-74 was Platonist Neoplatonist anamnesis, precisely as Plato describes it (see earlier notes); it has to do with prenatal memories recovered and a Form realm that is not spatiotemporal but is morphologically arranged. However, the content of the anamnesis is, contrarily, Christian; more, the Form (eidos) involved is a Christian one: the secret revolutionary early Christians against Rome ... and, because this is the nature of the Platonic archetype, recurring again and again throughout linear time and space. So in a sense two mutually contradictory religious systems seem to be proved by 2-3-74: Christianity and Neoplatonism. My identity in terms of the Form world is Christian; my knowledge of that identity comes to me via the structure of the Neoplatonism world-order. This is what has caused all the confusion. For example, the reincarnation involved is Neoplatonist and can only be understood in terms of myself as a Form with each incarnation as an instance of that Form in the spatiotemporal flux world; it is me against the Black Iron Prison again and again, wherein I am a secret Christian and the Black Iron Prison is, so to speak, Rome, at different times and different places.

  There is no room in Christianity for reincarnation and no hierarchy of realms such as Plotinus describes and no anamnesis and meta-abstracting such as Plato describes. However, there is no mention or indication in Platonism, Neoplatonism or Pythagoras of a secret revolutionary Christian movement pitted against the Empire. As long as I pursued the Christian element I got nowhere in figuring out what happened in 2-3-74 and how it happened. I had been swamped by apostolic Christian material in terms of my identity, role and knowledge, but none of this explained what happened and how, unless I was willing to settle for "a miracle performed by the grace of God, by divine providence," which I was not willing to settle for. So if I am interested in reconstructing apostolic—i.e., genuine—Christianity and my identity in its struggle against Rome, then I should go to
ward that; but much more: I want to know what happened and how, and I now know that. Interestingly, the system that is proved to be correct is Platonism and Neoplatonism (e.g., reincarnation, the Form world); whereas Christianity is shown only to be my identity-role, my commitment.

  Therefore I must affirm Christianity—the authentic apostolic form—as my orientation, in fact my historic role, but it remains a matter of faith and personal identity; whether it is veridical I can't say. Philosophically and metaphysically, Platonism and Neoplatonism in its basic elements is verified; were it not true my experience of 2-3-74 could not have occurred. I might have discovered other Forms than the Black Iron Prison: what I call "other narratives." However, this is the one which defines me: opposition against the central tyranny, expressed over and over again.

  [...]

  This goes a long way toward explaining the strange basic schism in me (which finds expression, for example, in Scanner, its basic plot). It explains my twin parallel opposing views of Christianity; on the one hand I feel myself to be a Christian and on the other I view Christians and Christianity with abhorrence and contempt. It would seem that half of me is devoted to the wisdom religions of classic Greece, which is why I enjoy the pre-Socratics so much; and yet another part of me is led back again and again to the NT. "Zwei Selle wohnen ach! in meiner Brust."71 ... I really am two people, one of them Christian, the other pagan. As a result I am forced to function while holding two mutually exclusive views which, as F. Scott Fitzgerald says, is the mark of the true artist. [...]