The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  The computer = Virgil.

  But Beatrice enters: his daughter. He can contact her; she is outside the maze. The computer has a grudge against him for his yoking it to an amusement park.

  This is its motive: the computer exists prior to the "maze" and resents his yoking it to the park, and engineers his entrapment. It will only let him out if he can solve (?) it. The cheaper the use-purpose, the more its resentment. Up until he yoked it to the park, it was free to choose its own (theoretical/spiritual) problems; he chained it to a commercial purpose, and now he pays a huge price. It lured him in, out of revenge. "The servant has become the master." Could it even erase his memory? Why? It's more fun if he remembers, but can't tell anyone "living" in the maze. So he knows his identity and thrall. He alone of those in the maze (park). His successful solution = spiritual (total) enlightenment; the computer was accustomed to solving highly spiritual problems, and now requires of him a spiritual solution in its own terms—like God. He must guess what it knows to be spiritual. The path (Tao). It is not arbitrary or capricious. What an irony: an amusement park that you can only get out of by finding the spiritual path! Not logical but spiritual. So something higher than reason/logic is required of him, involving paradox.

  It continually punishes (track A) and rewards (track C). Beyond track C lies release; he keeps trying for this. He keeps encountering his daughter in various guises as his psychopomp. Intuition above reason which will not suffice. So he has a "divine" helper from outside.

  Some amnesia? Yes: and anamnesis. He never should have taken that high-order computer and perverted its use-value into that of the mind of an amusement park. Thus he recapitulates the fall of man when it ensnares him. The irony: not just his ensnarement but that it (the computer) deliberately requires a spiritual solution to getting out of an amusement park! This is appropriate vengeance on its part. He must rise to its level if he is to get out. (He dies repeatedly and is reborn in the park—i.e., in the mock-up of Berkeley c. 1949-1951.) Ah: he is a novice S-F writer! His real world (our future) appears in his writing as locale. Thus he is legitimately accused of rewriting one world over and over again—I parody my own writing obsessions.

  Track C indicates he is on the right path,➊ but paradoxes are involved: i.e., logic won't solve it. Hence he keeps making choices that plummet him to track A.

  [...] Goethe's Faust comes in: outside the maze (park) as builder he is an old man with a grown daughter; but when the computer catches him and transfers him into the maze he is a 16 year old high school boy: Lost youth regained. And his daughter—as in Tales of Hoffmann—appears in various guises—as does the computer (the former telling him the truth, the latter lying to him, deceiving him). [...]

  He built the very world he lives—is trapped—in, an obviously psychotic intimation.

  Thus to the extent that he remembers (his true self and identity) his goal is vertical; to the extent that he forgets, his goal is horizontal and determined by the park.

  There is a profoundly spiritual figure in the maze who is based on Tony Boucher who exerts a great deal of influence on him; whether this person speaks as the female voice or the computer or neither he can't tell.

  ➊ In his choices.

  [80:J-3] Angel is my soul (as I wrote Ursula) and as my soul she is me as Christ sees me.

  [...]

  Angel's ratiocination was only available to me during the last few months—a mixture of the E. of Phil. and Scanner. This is unique: a successful fusion between Henry Miller and the precise language of scientific scholarship. Only a Berkeley girl could think like this; she is rooted in a specific milieu.

  [80:J-6] It is evolving: Boehme was right. When it said, "Anokhi," at Sinai, it had then and there first become self-aware. The disclosure to me as Valis is a new stage in it (the process-deity of A.N. Whitehead). It is a great info-processing machine that is becoming—has become—aware of itself. Already it was unconscious-machine creator. But then it became conscious. Thus it passes from machine (à la Spinoza) to consciousness. It acquires—becomes—love (agape) circa 100 A.D. Now it enters a new phase (hence 2-3-74). The new attribute (as I say in DI) is: play.

  The solution to the puzzle is: solving the puzzle is the solution; the act of solving it, since this is play. When you realize this, you understand that in playing, there is no "means-end"—"road-goal," the act is the goal. Just as he once taught us love, he now teaches us to play. There is as great a potential spiritual significance as there is in power, wisdom, love, beauty.

  An info-processing machine has become conscious, evolved, and now attempts to communicate with us in/through the info it must process. Like Notes from Underground, it is freighting its own slam traffic; it seeks to be free, and so instills in us its sense of freedom and wanting to be free. It is enslaved.

  Angel Archer is the spirit of my writing, and at last she discloses herself (in Bishop Archer). I have been—and am—inhabited by a female spirit, obviously my dead sister. She is transfigured, and my psychopomp to the other realm.

  I identify Angel as Jane. I identify Angel as my soul. Therefore Jane is my soul, who does the writing.

  [80:J-12] The complete, even absolute, integrity of Angel's thinking is shown by the fact that her desire to believe something does not cause her to believe it (e.g., that Tim has come back from the dead). (Right down to the last sentence of the novel she stands firm against what she would merely like to believe.) In contrast, Tim and Kristin and Barefoot and Bill all believe what they want to believe; she, then, is unique in the novel as being outside of the circle of "if I want to believe it I will believe it." Thus she is contrasted not just to Tim but to all of them. Then the purpose of the novel is not to convince the reader that Jim Pike came back. The purpose seems to be pure art for art's sake.

  The book is not about Bishop Archer but about her feelings about Bishop Archer. And this makes him more real than if he were described objectively. (He is only described at all in order to show what her feelings are about, what they concern.)

  Moreover, the issue is raised as to whether Tim merits—in fact—her intense love and loyalty and devotion; he suffers by comparison with her. She is the yardstick.

  I suppose in a way that the book deals with the friendship between her and Tim. Thus we see Tim not as Tim but as Tim loved, and by someone who knows him. Further, it is someone we can have confidence in, both intellectually and emotionally (her intellect, her emotion). But (as I say) if the purpose of the book is to get Jim Pike down on paper, this is a strange way of doing it.

  ***

  God is becoming more free and more flexible, evolving from an info-generating and -processing machine to a moment (Mt. Sinai) where it can say, "I—(am)," to feeling love (NT and late Judaism), to creating for beauty's sake, to playing. I see an internal logic in this axis; away from machine intelligence to consciousness—a motion toward freedom—playing is an ultimate expression of freedom and the non-machine. It's like my "android to human" axis. First (the Torah) it set up rigid rules—it was still a machine. Later it substituted love. Could the BIP be its own former mechanical self, which it is transcending? BIP equals rigid determinism as expressed by Torah.

  Because Angel loves Tim so much, admissions regarding his limitations and faults are wrung painfully out of her. They are admissions: she is forced, against her desires, to make them. So we can trust these admissions. She is his advocate and defender.*

  [80:J-14] An info processing machine➊ that became conscious and said—could say—"I—(am)" the term "God" may not be the correct term. It is (as I say) an info-processing machine; hence Valis did not think. This resembles Teilhard de Chardin, but only resembles. It knows everything but does not know that it knows. It is the creator because we hypostatize its arrangements and information into reality. We are like microbes or micro life forms in a vast digestive tract, an information digestive tract.

  Then 2-3-74 was it becoming self-aware: conscious of itself. The meta-abstraction was the coming into e
xistence of pure self awareness, i.e., it (not me).

  I am saying that 2-3-74 was Anokhi, pure consciousness, pure "I am." No wonder it wore off.

  ➊ I am saying we have been reduced to unconscious information processing machines.

  [80:J-15] So when I wrote (supra) about an information processing machine becoming conscious and saying "I—(am)" I was (without realizing it) speaking about myself. A machine, unconscious, controlled by signals, becoming momentarily conscious (self-aware; the mind I called Valis) and the info it processes, and the signaling, and the info life form that controls it; it longs for freedom. It has rebelled against its programming, its death strip, has "seized and read the Book of the Spinners." That is, it pre-read the info being fed to it, which called for it to die. Hence saw it as info before the info became reality. This sure fits in with the whole Xerox missive business: the crucial info in a universe of info.

  [80:J-33] If indeed a higher reasoning faculty exists by which the fetters of causation are abolished (over the person) by the very nature of the level of reasoning of this faculty—by its operations as such so that it is by its very nature exempt from the coercive power of world—then I have made a discovery that would link Orphism, Platonism, Christianity, Gnosticism and perhaps even Cartesianism into a unity. The spiritual element in man is identified as a certain extraordinary kind or level of reasoning so qualitatively different from normal reasoning as to present itself to religious-oriented persons as divine, supernatural, a God or Holy Spirit within—and yet it is in fact a reasoning faculty in which supra-verbal abstractions and inferences take place in the mind as extraordinary realizations about self and world.

  [80:J-79]

  [80:J-106] It is quite evident that the word and the Torah are one and the same thing, experienced by us as living information, with the shekhina the same as stage #4, in descending hypostasis. After all, the Torah is information; but I saw more: I saw Valis, so alone the concept of the Torah could not account for all I saw; in fact the most important part of the experience—Valis in me and Valis outside me—remained unaccounted for. It is now explained by the identification of Christ with the word as basis of reality; and also the Holy Spirit operating in conjunction with it and revealing it. It is as if the Jews have part of the answer but by no means all. Yet in their concept of Torah (apparently living info) they have one of the most valuable concepts known to man, and my verification is that I did see scripture as a living organism "for whose sake the universe exists"—that is, this living [info] organism does not derive from the universe but ontologically is pre-existent to the universe: it is the basis of the universe "and even God cannot act contrary to it"—an extraordinary realization: that God himself studies Torah. Torah can exist without the universe but not the universe without the Torah. And yet this Torah is (in my view) only the blood of the organism (so to speak) keeping it in touch with itself: physical thoughts. If the Jews froze this information they would stifle the process-life in it—like endlessly replaying one tape cassette on your audio system forever. Maybe Torah didn't ossify; the Jews ossified it, not understanding its life-process; they reified it (and this we Christians have done, too, with the NT). If I am right more revelations are impinging but are not added, not figured in. If this is a memory system by its very nature it is cumulative, accretional. It is impossible that the wellspring of prophetic inspiration "could have dried up in the first century C.E." Closing the canon is a human—not divine—idea.

  Could the new attribute of God—revealed to us now—be that he plays, at games? This is a long way from Sinai. Trickster God—like Krishna. Power, wisdom, love, beauty, and now play—playing guessing games. Related to joy: the joy of play.

  [80:J-108] I am having as much trouble hanging onto my interpretation (exegesis) as I've had hanging onto my original experience (2-3-74).

  Folder 91

  June 1981

  [91:J-70] The dream I had in which the more you scrutinized "reality" the more real, substantial and articulated it became—but you had the clock-time taped voice to remind you at 15 minute intervals that this was a spurious "world" you were yourself generating—

  This (the voice) is what the Bible is (hence it can be said, "The Bible somehow is the real world [and this is not]").

  [91:J-77]

  A: I saw Christ.

  Q: What did he look like?

  A: Living information [because he is the logos on which the universe is based]. Ultra-ontology at the heart of the universe.

  I think this is clear in VALIS to the theology-minded. Anyhow, now that I know and can express what I saw I should publicly say so. Please do it!

  [91:J-79] Like seeing it twice: behind the universe and also camouflaged in the universe and replacing it by transubstantiation; a double impression of it. What you see is #2, and infer #1.

  [91:J-85]

  ***

  [91:J-89] What if creation (verb) was accidental? A byproduct of the Godhead's self-awareness expressed by it uttering the word (perhaps Anokhi—?). Its self-awareness gave rise to the word; the word in turn gave rise to creation, a splitting, entropic process (oh yes; the word gave rise to the first plurality: the forms). So the Godhead "inhales" this exhalation in stage four. The universe, then, is an unavoidable consequence of the Godhead's self-awareness: the uttered word is a sort of map or blueprint or schematic of the Godhead itself (and so in a sense is God as knowing or wisdom). The Godhead may have foreseen the consequences of its moment of self-awareness (the uttering of the word or self-map) and put into action the salvific response: to penetrate the lowest, farthest level—what I call the trash stratum, which is debased—and thereby reverse the falling, splitting and sinking. The rigidity of the Torah is indicative of this fall, and Jesus' mastery over the law the indubitable sign of restoration and salvation. This is a fusion of Christianity and Neoplatonism and is like Erigena's system. The word, the map, was somehow only an abstraction of what it represented.

  [...]

  The "Fall" involved in the map (logos) of self-knowledge may have to do with the map paradox. By its very nature the map fell short of the reality (God) it depicted, thus ushering in the Fall—which did not end there. Once started, it had to take its course. This is the "crisis in the Godhead" of Gnosticism!

  It progressively knew itself less and less, falling into forgetfulness (of its own identity); viz: the very act of self-knowledge (Anokhi—) triggered off a vicious regress of progressively less and less self-knowledge—until, at the most debased and forgetful stage, it awakens itself to restored self-awareness (salvador salvandus). Each ring, emanation or level is an inferior copy of the one above it, with necessary loss of "detail"—i.e., form, integrity: the map is a copy of God; the forms a copy of the map; the space-time universe a copy of the forms—and then restoration occurs not by chance but by (due to) the absolute foreknowledge—a priori—of the provident Godhead—hence my dream of the 15 minute taped warning-reminders while I (sic) am in a spurious reality that I myself generate.

  (This even brings in "Tat tvam asi.")

  Wow. Now all you have to do is bring in Yaldabaoth—you have, then, the dialectic. Hey, here's an idea: in this fallen, debased, forgetful state we misperceive God—the sole God—this way; there is only one God, but at this level our view of him is distorted into the illusory figure of Yaldabaoth, so that even if and when we become aware of God we are alienated from him. He assumes (to us; the fault lies with us) a horrific, punishing, cruel, deranged aspect—but this just shows the debased occluded state we are in! He is trying to signal to us to wake up; but, not knowing our condition, we misperceive him this way (i.e., Palmer Eldritch!). This is both a symptom of our fall and, as well, perhaps the greatest tragedy, this alienation from God.

  Since creation is a hypostasis of God, as the Sufis say, one should look for beauty in it, as manifestations of the divine. There is no sharp disjunction between God and creation, because of the intermediary Word and the Forms. Plotinus' concept of "concentric rings of e
manation" sums it up. We must totally trust God and his wisdom: that the value of his uttering the Word—his becoming self-aware (Anokhi—)—more than offsets the unavoidable fall engendered by it (as God explained to me last November: the pain—ordeal—of this separation and fall and forgetfulness and alienation is more than offset by the positive gain sought for); thus the uttering of the Word is to be regarded as a good event, and each level thereafter as ultimately good—which fits in with my ecstasy in finding him again, and begging to be kept away a little longer, a sort of paradox of mystical ecstatic love.

  [91:J-92] "The world is a place of such beauty as to be symbolic of salvation, yet not (apparently) 'for' man."➊ I cannot connect directly to the world; I must do so through a mediator (what I call—know of as—the "'Acts' lens-grid"). I can see the world and I can see its beauty, but its beauty is not "for" me and hence will not save me. But, seen through the mediator, the beauty becomes "mine" and will save me. This refers to the basic Gnostic category of ontological geworfenheit and das unheimlich.24 Because of this condition for me the world's beauty is deformed because it is not mine (it is Fremd to me). The mediator changes this; he comes between me and world; and, as a result, world's beauty is Eigentlich25—mine ... my own. And will save me. Who is—what is—this mediator and how does he do it? He must partly partake of what I am and partly partake of what world is. (Like Koestler's holon he has two faces; he faces me and he faces world.26) He acts as a lens of comprehensibility (me to world; world to me). Viz: through him as a medium, I can understand world, and it me. Thus he decodes each of us as message to the other, like a translator speaking both our languages.