The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  [90:E-8] Ghastly dream [...] A family on an old farm. The children are (called) "the Spinners." The very ground itself is contaminated, poisoned, with (heavy) metals, so the children, "the Spinners," are becoming blind. A little boy peers through a thick magnifying glass at the sun; he can barely see it. Soon he will be completely blind.

  Interpretation: the Spinners are immortals who came here and were poisoned (heavy metal) and lost what I call "the third eye" (represented by the magnifying glass). The sun is Christ. Thus they, we, can no longer read the sacred writing (of Scripture): "the light went out" (divine revelation) not because God stopped sending it but because we have gone blind to it. Somehow I regained my sight in 3-74 and could read the sacred Scriptures in/as Tears. Therefore "the Spinners" can no longer see the thread of Ariadne (or weave it as explanation, revelation) leading out of the maze.

  [90:E-11] When I believe, I am crazy.

  When I don't believe, I suffer psychotic depression. I oscillate between intoxication (mania) and melancholia. I think, now, that my dream about the child going blind and no longer able to see the sun symbolized my losing my vision (sic): i.e., of Christ, Dionysus, Wotan, YHWH, because it is all gone; it seems mere mad fancy, like believing you might see Mr. Toad sculling a little boat down the stream. I can't live without my vision but my vision is self-delusion.

  [90:F-11] What I have been doing these seven years is philosophical inquiry in the old sense, that of the pre-Socratics. Before science and philosophy parted company. I'm not sure my issues are in fact metaphysical. What confronted me in 2-3-74 was "a perturbation in the reality field." That is, reality behaving in an inexplicable way which no known theory could explain or account for. How does this seven years of study and analysis differ from scientific research? This has not been a game. Something I witnessed puzzled me and I set out to understand it. When I did finally understand it, I found that my questions went all the way back to the 40s. And I have not been the first to raise the question. If the traditional, fully accepted theories of causation were true, the "perturbation" that I saw could not have occurred. This is the bottom line. How do I differ from Einstein vis-à-vis Newtonian mechanics! It was a perturbation in the reality field in the sense that something more than the forces we know of was visibly at work. The problem is real. Then I took it to be so.

  [90:F-19] All these seven years I've feared I was nuts (hence H. Fat is so described). Especially I've been nervous about quoting the AI voice; after all, I'm hearing voices. I think now I believe. I knew that binary switching model was correct as soon as it came to me.

  [90:G-43] I just realized I had an amazing dream. I—or the character—was deprived of world totally. At once he—his own mind—filled in the sensory vacuum with a spurious autogenerated world, so he wouldn't go crazy. Next thing, he took this world to be real; the closer he scrutinized it, due to the fact that he as percipient was in fact generating it, the more actualized, detailed and convincing it became, because his perception of it was (in a certain real way) his production of it; hence the more intense scrutiny and more actualized, articulated and convincing it became as it moved toward perfection (of actualization) as a limit, the more it compelled his assent. Put another way, the less he realized—would tend to realize on the basis of his empirical observations that (1) it was spurious; and (2) he himself was its creator. However, under such circumstances, to overcome this positive feedback self-authenticating hoax-involvement, a clock-timed tape in his mind—or accessible to his mind; e.g., speaking directly into his ear or inner ear—was set in advance to speak to him at regular intervals reminders of the truth, and his true situation. The tape was plugged into RET,13 but since part of his spurious autogenerated world was fake time—an integral aspect of spurious world generated out of total sensory deprivation—these reminders, these messages from the real world, came to him (in terms of his own subjective time) at increasingly farther apart (i.e., longer) intervals and thus failed to serve their purpose (anamnesis involving the knowledge that his world is spurious, and no amount of scrutiny on his part will correct this, inasmuch as the harder he scrutinizes it, the more convincing it will become). What he faces as a dual limit is an infinitely convincing (but actually fake and self-generated) dream world "existing" for an infinite time. (Which, it occurs to me, may explain "He causes things to look different so it'd appear time has passed.")

  My analysis is this: he, whoever "he" is, has gotten himself into this very fix and has therefore fallen under the spell of an ever more convincing and ever more extensive in time fake world that he himself is generating; he, world and time are in a closed loop, a closed system; moreover, it is equally clear to me that this (dream) is the true explanation—and reveals the true significance of 2-3-74 at which place I ("he") (1) remembered and then (2) as a result temporarily broke out of the closed loop self reinforcing fake world and fake time. [...]

  What I am saying is that this dream states that I myself am the mind I know as Valis, I generate the info (they are my own thoughts and ideas; viz: as I once previously speculated, I got into my own world producing mental machinery) and, what is more, what I call "the binary computer" is a vision of my own mind as world creator; I think (as binary computer), and these thoughts are the information that I am compelled to give assent to as world (which is why to some extent we control our own world, it adjusts to our perceptions of it—of course it does; this is a closed feedback loop literally pouring back into itself to reinforce itself—and "we are selves in a brain that both makes and perceives reality"). Then several people (e.g., Gregg Rickman) are right in saying that when I experienced Valis I was experiencing my own (unconscious) mind. But they failed to note that that makes me Cosmocrator!

  [90:G-49] Valis in me was my own mind, was God but fallen God, forgetful, unintentional, cosmogenitor of world.* The "binary switching com puter" that generates "info that we hypostatize as world" is my own mind creating irreal imprisoning worlds for me (as if VALIS and "Frozen Journey" were superimposed).

  [90:G-53] The dream of last night (supra) shows that I am hopelessly trapped, because the harder and longer I scrutinize "world" the more articulated, detailed, convincing and "real" it becomes, with infinitely real as a limit, and, worse, an infinitude of spurious time is a limit; it will go on forever, all the while gaining progressively greater power over me—and yet I am its author!

  [90:130:G-75] Therefore I deem it correct to say that yes I have been correct in saying (as I have periodically) that 3-74 represented the lifting of an occlusion from me so that I saw reality either more accurately or (if this is possible) "as it really is"—this owing to me suddenly facing reality for the first time (v. supra). What was presented to me was an inscrutable picture of what resembled living information, a unitary field, pre-synchronized self-initiating transformations, rest-motion modes, etc., all that I endlessly dilate on. The upshot being that (1) I could not figure out what I was seeing and (2) I could not communicate what I had seen. Herein with these two points lies the difficulty. All that I could fathom was that the conventional picture that we normally get—and seem to share—is not in fact what is there; what is there is not even in time or space, nor is causation involved. There seems to be a mind and we are in it—but even now after seven years of mulling it over I am baffled as ever. Hence the utility of this perception is (at least at this time) dubious. Out of this experience with the inscrutable and inexplicable I formulate at last the notion that the compulsion exerted on us to see the representation as (1) absolutely real and (2) totally comprehensible is a gift, an essential gift. This deals with more than my 3-74 perception, it deals with my whole adult life as expressed in my 10-volume meta-novel. What I saw in 3-74 I regard as absolutely real (so there is no problem there) but it was unintelligible—whereas all that came prior to it was intelligible but lacking in respect to seeming absolutely real. One is moved to ponder which is better—or for that matter worse—of the two choices: to see, understand and not believe, or to see, not under
stand and yet believe—obviously something drastic is wrong with both. In fact both—each in its own way—smacks of psychotic apperception of world. The former (coherent but unconvincing) is fucked; the latter (unintelligi ble but carrying the force of absolute truth) equally so. Surely both represent mental dysfunctions in me. All I can do at this point is abandon the field and say that belief in and understanding of should go hand-in-hand, and if they part company something is wrong. From this I erect the following premise: that God sees to it that we both comprehend (i.e., what we experience is to us intelligible) and believe (it carries the force of the absolute). Obviously something went wrong in me years ago. And when in 3-74 the compensatory correction came it ushered in a whole new host of troubles, giving me even more to do, philosophically speaking. Thus God gives us multiple gifts: a world, first of all, one that we can understand and also experience as real—so real, in fact, that it was not until the time of Descartes that the representation problem was even discerned (it has never been fully answered).

  What I see is a threat that only someone fighting off psychosis could appreciate: the disappearance of world along two routes: (1) comprehensibility; (2) believability. Viz: you could find yourself understanding it but not believing it to be real—my 10-volume meta-novel—or finding it real but being unable to make any sense out of it—3-74 and VALIS. On the bright side, however, this has permitted me to formulate some formidable epistemological and, finally, theological questions, and even a few halting tentative answers. "We are all but cells in a colossal mad brain that both makes and perceives reality"—something like that, the main thrust being that there is some relationship between the creating of reality and perceiving of it (v. my dream supra): the percipient is cosmogenitor, or, conversely, the cosmogenitor wound up as unwilling percipient of its own creation.

  The way out of the solipsistic trap is to presume God, since world is dubitable. Thus there is self and there is other, and this other is powerful, benign, wise, loving, and perhaps most important of all, able and willing to provide—in fact guarantee—world (under the conditions of Cartesian epistemology). "God is the final bulwark against non-being" becomes "... against isolation."

  [90:134:G-79] This is my idiosyncratic road to God. For others—who have not been the doubt, who have not known 32 years of doubt, this would not seem to constitute proof. But I say: I do not have it within my own power to compel my own assent to anything but my doubting self; thus on my own I possess no sense of knowing anything but myself, which is a sentence to hell, perpetual unrelenting hell. "Wer wird mich erlösen?"14 My argument is a variation of Cartesian reasoning (and in my opinion an important one) and so it is in an honorable tradition. I say with Malebranche that I see all things in God; it is God who extricates me from my solipsistic prison. I did not write 35 novels and 150 stories without coming to a good understanding of the sinister implications of no world, irreal world, inscrutable world—that second only to the gift of life itself is the gift of world, of the other. Perhaps it is even a greater gift, since it involves all creation. (Viz: I might well choose personal death over the extinction of the cosmos.) What I see people ordinarily saying is that world of its own accord impinges on us: impinges coherently and convincingly. The Cartesians show that this is not the case. I say, the whole cosmos could be presented to me and yet I would not find it real unless God himself bestowed on me the essential gift of my finding it convincing, a gift that through my own powers of reasoning and observation I find myself incapable of acquiring, a state I on my own cannot achieve. I cannot persuade myself and I cannot compel myself to believe; unless God compels me I will not believe, and if I do not believe, I am doomed to a certain kind of hell. I know from experience that God can compel that assent, for he did this by a rustle of color in the grass. He can absolutely impinge on me; he can break into my prison world and destroy it—burst the prison, release me. That my assent might be compelled by perceptual and cognitive occlusion and amnesia does not in the slightest matter to me because the ends justifies the means, since I cannot live at all unless I'm taken out of my private prison. That is why I see the issue as one of belief on my part, not on the truth of what I believe. I know now that if there is something that is true I will never on my own know it. Or if I know it I will not believe I know it. Like Victor Kemmings at the end of "Frozen Journey" I may have reached reality and can't believe it. That essential belief lies outside my power.

  My argument that (I have proof that) God exists is odd. I do not say, "I know God exists because I experienced/perceived him in 3-74"; that is dubitable as an argument because my experience may have been a hallucination (I experienced it but it was not real). But I can say, "I know that God exists because I believe I experienced You above and beyond myself; and I know of no way that I can go beyond Descartes' 'cogito ergo sum' by my own power; on my own I cannot add any knowledge to that self-knowledge. Yet I believe I know of Your existence, so I conclude that some agency with the power to disclose Your existence to me and thus to compel my assent to that disclosure exists, and I can only conceive of God as possessing the power, since, pragmatically, this is cosmogenesis, and I define God as 'he who causes to exist what exists.'" In other words I cannot doubt that I believe, and I know of no way that I can believe on my own power, unaided. Therefore the Cartesian proposition "cogito ergo sum" is not the limit to what I can be certain of: I can say, "I know that I believe, and since I know that I cannot compel into existence my own belief, I conclude that something beyond myself exists that has compelled this belief; therefore I not only know that I exist, I know that something beyond myself exists (by reason of my belief)."

  [90:G-122] I saw reality (3-74) as it really is; I began to see in 2-74. Relatedness not by time, space and causation but by articulating arborizing phylogons, I know—can't I believe? What does it take?

  [90:G-131] I will conclude this nightmare marathon analysis by noting that my 10-volume meta-novel can herewith be newly—and perhaps finally correctly—understood. And it serves a very valuable (Gnostic) purpose, to emancipate the cosmogenitor from his own world, to which he is fallen victim. In terms of this, VALIS can be seen as the logical culmination of the total corpus. Likewise "Frozen Journey."

  [90:G-141] What is most remarkable is not just perceiving one's soul in and hence derived from the divine mind, but to see that soul as a complex of ideas, interacting to form a coherency: one's soul as something that can not only be known but also thought: soul, then, as idea—and taking the form of ideas or sub-ideas clustered together: reduced to or derived from what may in the final analysis be words. That's why the term "thing" is the wrong term. It is information. It is a unique interception by one idea of another, a crossing, an ideational intersection: certain notions about freedom, magic, religious beauty (as expressed by the Grail theme and the Good Friday spell), revolutionary covert activity connected with elements of the Civil War, animals as they appear in children's books, something to do with the old-fashioned countryside and light, music, writing; but most of all a sense of the divine as if not only am I a notion in the divine mind but I as its notion contain in and as myself a notion of it. In other words I fade off into it, and it fades off into me, as if each is aware of and related to the other.

  Folder 77

  Early 1981

  [77:G-8] You won't believe this later when you're not ripped, but your 10 volume meta-novel is "the secret stolen past the angels in one's hands"—the story that (1) each of us lives in a unique individual world; (2) it is spurious; (3) it is fed to us by the plasmate—this is told in VALIS if you add it (VALIS) to the corpus; and (4) we have some control over our individual worlds, since somehow it derives from us; it isn't just imposed on us (e.g., "Frozen Journey," Maze—really the whole corpus). So it adjusts and accommodates to our perceptions and preconceptions of it.

  One vast artistic vision, all the way from "Wub" to DI, with particular emphasis on Scanner, the intro to The Golden Man, VALIS, "Chains ... Web" and DI. (This last my dr
eam. That sustains me. I cannot now be separated from my work.)

  Here is sooth: VALIS is not as important as supernatural revelation about God and the universe as it is about me as a person—unique and individual and suffering—and my vision (Weltanschauung). Me and my own private vision; this is what we call art (as with van Gogh and his vision). Therefore it is not theologically meaningful but artistically. The theological, etc., stuff in VALIS has value as my construct/vision/dream: likewise DI. Vis-à-vis reality it has no relevance. It tells us nothing about world but a lot about me as artist.

  So VALIS is part—an integral part—of the vision that began with "Roog" and forms one seamless whole. The whole theological, etc., view in VALIS (and to a lesser extent in DI) is like some vast book within a book, an artistic vision within a greater vision—i.e., my total corpus. It's like the movie in VALIS: another "book within a book." Vision within a vision.

  "Christ invading the world" is not a truth or falsehood about Christ or world but a truth about me and my vision, my perception and my unique individual world, hence artistically relevant to and in my total unitary corpus. It is part of me, and I have put me and my vision legitimately into my work. [...] This personal vision began with Crap Artist and Counter-Clock World. The rest is artificial, but due to 1964 I passed over from artifact to art. Where it truly blooms is in everything from and including Tears on—great art, and it all began as objective pulp objects, which have turned into human documents, as Gregg Rickman is the first to perceive.