The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  Thus the question "Where is the kingdom of God" gets an answer derived from ultra-modern views of the observer-participant universe, in which it's all treated as a field, a unified field.

  We are not talking about a different way of being-in-the-world or even a better way; we're talking about the lifting for the first time in human history of a massive perceptual/conceptual occlusion having to do with the ontological structuring factor we call causality (or astral determinism). This has never happened before. I mean, just think what it would mean vis-à-vis our way of perceiving/understanding world if we ceased to utilize space or time as a Kantian ordering/structuring category? And in fact when the utilization of causation ceases, our sense of time is drastically altered (time sharply diminishes), and our sense of space is drastically altered (as I figure it, time is converted into space, so we get a great diminution in the time factor and a great augmentation in the spatial factor); but, most of all, introduced as a totally new factor is an apperception of the flicker pulsation in which the system (reality) switches on and off, as well as the binary forking decision-making; the totality of all this is that very simply our occlusion lifts and we are in another world entirely, a world I identify with the Garden. And this really could not have happened before this decade, what with computers, new theories about information, modern physics, etc. It is just now beginning to happen. And no one—no one!—has seen the involvement of Pauline Christian mysticism, that in fact this is the payoff ingredient. And this would explain why for over seven years I have alternated between believing Christ has returned and believing that I had evolved some kind of ultra-modern worldview connected with physics and epistemology, etc.

  Okay; I have one final thing to say and herewith I rest my case, trium phantly. My binary forking, which I have already said is an indeterminate element entering what always before was conceived of as causality (under various names, such as astral determinism): what is this if not the "two slit" phenomenon familiar in subatomic physics, which is the very essence of the indeterminate factor in reality!* It is known to us scientifically only on a subatomic level. Yet I say (I think I say) I have perceived this as the very basis of reality per se, the reality process of change, of flux, of all cause and effect at all levels, micro and macro. What I have been calling "binary forking choosing" is simply the "two slit indeterminate phenomenon" but at a larger level, and it is a level that embraces all change. I am saying, some kind of mentational volitional sentient mind or mindoid entity—perhaps that of the total system itself—has some kind of steering or governing involvement as to which of the two slits is the selected one at each of these forkings. This may be linked to Pauli's synchronicity; it is acausal but ubiquitous and genuine and important. Here we turn to A.N. Whitehead's definition of process deity "as a principle of selection of the good in the world order."

  [90:19] Premise: Christ consciousness produces a worldview (Dasein) so radically different from what we normally experience that it is almost impossible to communicate it. Absolute space, a vast diminution and weakening of time (time qualitatively transformed) and no causality, as well as reality experienced as a unified self-governing field (it initiates all its own changes acausally in synchronization); moreover this field makes use of—or operates by means of—a binary off-on switching involving an indeterminate element so that it is perpetually disjunctive; thus it does not flow through time at all but always is. Also it either is based on or generates quantitative binary information in a cumulative fashion; i.e., it develops in one direction and one only. As a total field it ceaselessly makes off-on choices at each forking or junction; thus it is free (again, indeterminacy is involved at its basic level of operation). The receptacle in which it exists is space, not time. When it pulse-phases to its off position it ceases to exist; when it comes back to its on position it is slightly different. (I feel like someone trying to interpret the Sistine Chapel ceiling to a blind man.) Thus in a certain real sense it abolishes and then re-creates itself at a very rapid rate, a sort of flicker. Each time it re-creates itself it is different, hence in a real sense new. I somewhat hesitate to add this, but since with Christ consciousness there is no clear demarcation between the observer and the reality field he participates in, world is in a certain real and palpable sense affected by his involvement with it and perception of it; thus he is conscious of perturbing the reality field in the very act of participating in it; world, then, loses its reified, stubborn quality (associated with rigid determinism, cause and effect) and responds to him not as an It but as what Buber called a Thou. Within this one total schema involving the observer and his world together, it becomes impossible to distinguish Christ in him and Christ in world; there is only one total reality: himself, Christ, world.

  [90:31] What I have achieved during these past seven years is to deepen and augment my mental ability to conceive of and comprehend what in 3-74 I perceived, and, ultimately, this is an apprehension, a comprehension, of God, of the divine nature and being. [...] "A total system that perpetually chooses through a binary process of rejection that is cumulative" is my way of envisioning what I experienced; it is my model which I am able, first, to summon up, and then, finally, to contemplate. Thus through it and in it I have God in me, as a mental construct of my own devising; but it is a devising derived from and rooted in experience; it is not imaginary: it is an interpretation of what I construe to be the case. It is reality incorporated into me, reality at the highest level at which I am able to understand it. Here my ability to understand reaches its limit. This all has been a vast effort. I am not concerned with traditional definitions of God, attributions and doctrines and creeds and dogmas; I am concerned with the conception I have arduously arrived at based on experience. My conception does justice to my experience, it is the best I can do.* It turns an otherwise in comprehensible encounter into a coherent image or model. This has been my task. Whether it is "true" or not depends on what you mean by true. It does justice to my experience; in that sense it is true. What if the experience itself is not true? To me that question is unintelligible; it is my experience: it belongs to me, is a part of me, and by construing a model adequate to it I make it a permanent part of me, not something that escapes. If my model works, if it is an adequate representation, I can by means of it convert it back into something like the original experience, so it is an encoding, an informational analog of that experience (to the degree that I have been successful).* I am a device on which God renders an impression, hopefully a permanent impression; it will be permanent if—and to the degree that—I function correctly. It is not a doctrine or even a theory that I am fabricating; it is an impression, a change in me as to what I am. I have become not the same, due to what happened, and this has been a task, an act stretching over years on my part. I want to be different because of what I saw; I want to be changed as much as possible (without, of course, falsifying what happened). The last thing I want out of that experience is to be the same as I was prior to it. And I can only change insofar as I comprehend that experience; and I can only comprehend it (as I say) by actively building an inner, adequate, appropriate model (of what happened). So this is not a passive rendering. This is an artistic, spiritual, conceptual task involving years of work. My conception grows; it is not static. As it grows I change. This is what I want: to thus and thereby be changed. This is what I have devoted myself to; this is my purpose for existing; it is what I want to do—like the binary choosing of the system my work on my model is cumulative. I choose; I discard; I perpetually arborize and reticulate: I build. I am very happy. I sense and grasp and perceive the no-yes dialectic that continually results in higher syntheses (which is what Jacob Boehme understood); I understand God in process, God perpetually choosing and re jecting: "not this but rather that," so that he surpasses himself in an act at each new stage. ("Nicht diese töne; sondern ... ,"12 as Beethoven wrote; the foundation of creation is to choose, to reject, to choose again: Boehme's dialectic ceaselessly at work, blinking off-on-off-on.) Dio: c
reating begins with an unvoiced no, not a yes. "Not that; (but rather) this." A rejection of the is in favor of a better alternative (that is as much constructed as chosen—perhaps more so!). The essence of creativity is to reject what follows inevitably, because that is an entropic cause and effect splitting, a disintegration; in place of this the creator built something new that does not follow. And he bases what he constructs, he derives his conception from, in response to and in rejection of what is. So in artistic endeavor there is something of the ex nihilo: something somehow engendered out of nothing.

  [90:25] And this is what I discovered from 2-74 to 2-75; the Garden is located here, as if on another frequency. [...]

  [90:26] Christ and causation are, then, at war; here is another form, perhaps the ultimate form, of the dialectic; the wise horn is Yang; the wise horn is better; the wise horn is selected; the wise horn is, in essence, Christ himself penetrating the mechanism. But have I not said, isn't it very possible that nothing has changed but our perception? Reality per se, in itself, is constant; only our experience of it changes. So all we need to do to get back into the Garden is to perceive the Garden. Yet we are incapable of doing this. In what sense, if any, can Christ be distinguished from our perception of reality-as-it-is? There is a dreadful circularity here; if we could experience the Garden we would be saved, but in fact we can't experience it so we are not saved. Something from outside must enter to remove the occlusion and this is Christ.

  It resembles what Heraclitus said about the necessity of discerning true reality by a process something like guessing a riddle or translating from a foreign language into one's own; that although men have the capacity to do so, they do not. This week I was, that one afternoon, back in the world of space; I don't know how I did it ... and then I was back here under the power of tyrannical, destructive time once more. And I don't know how that happened either. Someone must teach us how to do this or else do it for us. I who know about the Kingdom, who knows it is right here—even I can't find my way (back) to it. Yet my "binary" model of the universe apparently calls for it, specifies its existence. It must be, it must truly be, that Christ does not in fact penetrate—invade—the workings of the universe but, rather, invades our perception of the workings of the universe, the in ner representation that the Cartesians showed we experience as world; this (as I said before) is Christ as Christ consciousness: the occlusion is not lifted from the world—it was never in world—but from us: it is in us. In my recent dream the spinner, the little boy, went blind; the sun itself did not go out; it was still shining but he could not see it. He "lost his vision." This says it all. Even with a thick magnifying glass he could no longer see the sun, shining as it still was.

  [90:6A] I can't help believing that the brief return of that Other World last week, that other way of being-in-world that I associate with 2-74 to 2-75, what I call the Palm Tree Garden, or as I now term it, the spatial realm, is connected with this being Easter week (or it was; today is Easter Sunday, so it was last week). That entire week is holy to the Christian; it begins with Palm Sunday which reperforms Jesus's entry into Jerusalem. And I had just about time—literally exactly at that time—worked out—upon rereading "Chains ... Web" an extraordinary analysis of the Christian solution to hostile world expressed as fate: the cessation of evasion and flight, the entry into a purely spatial realm of the absolute now, which I connect with Heidegger's authentic being (Sein), a totally different Dasein that frees the person; and from this I worked my revolutionary model of the binary switching system that I now conceive reality to be. [...]

  At the time that I found myself back in the purely spatial realm, I supposed that it was because I had upped my dosage of Sinequan, but that is absolutely not likely. Let us consider the exact circumstances. It was Tuesday, the day the space shuttle returned. The night before, Monday night, something strange happened to me; I burned out. I could not think in complete sentences; I'd begin a sentence of thought and it would end in the middle. It was as if I'd used up all my thoughts, as if there are only a finite number and I had come to the last one; there literally were no more left in me. I had to go to bed early—which was fine, because then Tuesday I was able readily to arise early to watch the shuttle's safe return. Now, this absolutely total exhaustion of thoughts in me somehow seems to me related to the phosphene graphics trip; the common factor is the using up of time, a running out of time—i.e., process. I had, as in 1974, come to the end in some real and perhaps even ontological sense; mentally I had in fact died. Yet the next day I found myself in the magic spatial world of total freedom, a world of infinite extension. What I am saying is that this year, 1981, I relived, although to a lesser degree, the series of experiences of 1974—relived them during holy week (from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday). It was during this period that my stupendous conception of the binary switching system came to me. I remember that I had said to Jeanette at Brentwood that—O Dio—"I have lost my artistic vision"—the dream about the child, the spinner, going blind! This represented spiritual death, and a logic to Christ's passion and crucifixion! And then rebirth occurred. And again, as in 1974 (this is really incredible, simply incredible) I got a terrifying letter that caused me to phone the FBI. So here are the themes of holy week: suffering (exhaustion) and death, and then rebirth; "rebirth" expressed for me in the form of the return of my vision—and not just return but resurrection in the sense that I was able to complete it, which I felt I had never before been able to do. [...] I relived—reperformed—the passion, death and resurrection, then, without intending to or even realizing that is indeed what was happening.

  Several aspects point to this as genuine. (1) The mental and spiritual exhaustion I experienced on Monday night was unique; I remember telling Doris that I had only undergone something like it due to drug abuse. It was, then, qualitatively different from mere fatigue, even enormous fatigue. It ended in a clear and evident death. (2) The Spinner dream which anticipated this very event, the "loss of vision" by the Spinner (i.e., Spinner as writer; he can no longer narrate). (3) The murderous letter. (4) The brief period on Tuesday in the spatial realm that I had only a little while before (a few days) figured out was essentially connected with Christianity. (5) The sudden, unexpected and unprecedented completion of my artistic vision on Wednesday night, the night of the day the letter came; this, too, was not a quantitative event; it was ontologically different from anything I had ever experienced before (like the dying of my vision Monday night); and: it was based on revelation of the forking and the tentative zero firing, a sleep revelation. So I suffered and died, but after I died I was resurrected in terms of my world—the spatial world—and in terms of my vision: my binary switching model of the universe, which I have later recognized as a model of the restored universe, restored by Christ; and I even identify this Dasein, this worldview, as "Christ consciousness"!

  [90:13A] This is a very different view of deity than has ever been put forth before (except perhaps by Jacob Boehme). For example, do these zero branchings add up to long chains of provisional realities, realities—perhaps even whole worlds or versions of worlds—subject to later retroactive annulment? And if so, do we encounter them, which is to say, do we live in them but then forget it, our memory being canceled out along with the worlds themselves? I conceive of the system switching on, off, on, off, the "off" consisting of what I call the zero phase of the binary flicker; I also say that it is during these off or 0 phases that the system does its thinking. What else goes on at the same time, if anything? Is there a sort of parity counter world to our own, perhaps invested with some kind of semi-reality that holds up only so long as the system takes to make up its mind and decide? Oddly, interestingly, this all seems to correspond with the doubts and premises of my ten-volume meta-novel: "Realities are subject to cancellation without notice" and, moreover, were not truly real in the first place (examples of this in my writing are legion). More interesting to me, however, is the existential aspect to this, which means deity and how deity acts, that i
n fact deity in this model is conceived in terms of its choosing, rejecting, choosing again, and if this choosing is its essence, then we have a whole new idea of the einai of God: an existential idea: it is what it does, and what it does is perpetually choose (Whitehead's principle of selection of the good in the world-process).

  [90:16A] In fact now it is possible to assert a single premise generating all my various preoccupations with what is real, what isn't, etc., my entire body of epistemological doubts: I know that there really is such a thing as tentative or provisional reality, and it can be canceled in such a way that in a certain sense it never was there in the first place.