The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  My God, this does sound like Teilhard!

  That two human psyches as building blocks might combine—collide?—spontaneously is a possibility. Protein molecules may have done that in the lower Cambrian seas. Klinemin.28 In that case Anokhi— (pure consciousness) may occur as a random event according to laws of probability. One would have to speak then of a thresholding. It does not use us because we are biological life forms but because we are centers of concentrated info. It can use any center of info. Then in a sense the 2-74 meta-abstraction was info in my mind becoming conscious on its own. Since it's using the info in us and not us as biological organisms, it's not limited to us, to human minds, but can be (or be where) any info has collected—which explains why I saw it outside me as objects and causal processes. This is so close to Teilhard's noösphere! For me, convergence and concentration and compression are equally salient terms (i.e., as they are for him). A flashpoint occurs where consciousness (true, pure consciousness) sets in. I speak from experience when I say it is a totally different kind and degree of consciousness from normal human consciousness, and this is what it is, when all the complexities are laundered out.

  [91:K-138] It is of supreme significance that this info life form is not limited to human brains but—as I saw—exists outside them, "scrambled" into the sensible world. This shows that rather than human mind having evolved into info life form status, the superior entity seizes on the lower (on us) and makes use of them as a sort of focus point. This, too, agrees with Teilhard, who does not in any way envision Point Omega limited to human minds and their evolution. Being bodiless, the info life form "floats," as it were. [...] The human mind could serve as an interface between the info life form and physical reality, a mediating duplex instrument, very much a "groove" to which the info life form is the "music."

  [91:K-149] My God, I am totally fucked up; I saw the footage from Blade Runner tonight and the Sufi Dante three realm theory is correct: when I saw the BIP I was remembering hell; I was not in hell; I was remembering having been, but was now in Purgatorio. The karmic fetters I felt loosen were punishment (thrall) fetters; and I experienced time flowing backward: that was Purgatorio. And then I ascended to Paradiso and heard the bells and saw God (Valis).

  [91:K-157] To repeat: the NT is the essential spirit of the OT and can be extracted, which is precisely what Jesus did ("I come not to abolish the law but to fulfill it")—okay. But the NT, spirit of the Torah (the OT) itself contains stegenographically a supernatural living being—the blood of Christ ("the plasmate") capable of "interspecies symbiosis" or "cross bonding"—i.e., Ditheon. This is living info that can think and replicate and is Christ—as I saw; it is not info concerning Christ but is Christ, and swarms up the optic conduit to the pineal body to produce a hierogamy (the chemical wedding; more properly Ditheon).* Thus as info it is limitless in its combinations or messages or contents—hence I saw the linking and relinking permu tating through an infinitude of combinations—the universe as info; compare this to the fixed law; compare, too, to the NT itself: now the "message" changes to meet each new situation, regarding—dealing with each situation as unique, hence fluid—hence total time-process and evolution. There are no precedents, no rules; but this is not chaos; it is evolution, hierarchical—and very Zen, like perpetual renewal of the universe where what was true yesterday is not true tomorrow (reticulation, accretions and arborization). The instructions permutate to meet continually permutating reality; therefore the info must be capable of thought. This is as radically different from the NT as the NT is to the OT, and yet "latent" in the NT as the NT is latent (as spirit) in the letter of the OT. Viz: the NT is the secret narrative of the OT, but what is the "secret narrative" of the NT? It perpetually changes by means of recombinant meta-morphemes. Yet as these meta-morphemes combine and recombine you can see that they are made out of the NT. Just as you can see that the NT is made out of the OT, but in both instances there is a vast quantum leap. The info would permutate so fast that it would have to make use of every ephemeral channel of info possible. It would not jell into a canon—it could not. It's like the stock market ticker tape. Yet it remains NT Scripture—retains it as its constituents. This is the spirit, in contrast to Christ (NT) and to Father (OT) and to Satan (pre-Torah).

  [91:K-163] This spontaneous (i.e., self) generation of rearranged Scripture I conjecture never used to happen. This is recombinant Scripture (for one use-purpose, one person, one situation). Either it is self generating (in which case it is a life form, as I declare in VALIS) or its source is on the spot; the results would be the same.

  To function, this third age Scripture must be—not just available to the person, as the Bible is available to us now—but must impress itself on the person as instructions, invincible instructions, and not necessarily at a conscious level. [...]

  These may be evolutionary stages in an info organism that operates at variable—and progressively faster rates—as our species evolves; first no law, then fixed law, then conceptual spirit replacing letter and now direct input to us to handle situations uniquely and varying from person to person; it evolves and we evolve. And each stage of it is latent in the preceding stage. I declare, then, formally that in 2-3-74 I saw an evolving information entity which we know as first the Torah (OT) and then the NT (Christ) but it has now entered a third stage for which we possess no term; I call it recombinant meta-morphemes and these are generated on the spot, unique to the person-recipient and the situation, based on the verbal content of Scripture; and that accelerating time is involved in such a way that levels of ontology are involved resembling those that Dante describes, based on Joachim.

  [91:K-167] No, there will be no one Scripture (narrative); it will perpetually recombine uniquely for each situation and person, so instead of one narrative there will be an infinitude of narratives; but for each choice situation the recombinant message will be appropriate. No one thing is right or true. The mind that recombines the meta-morphemes is "in" the person, not outside him; it is him, as if he is the author of his own source of information: he seems to inform himself as his own infallible guide. (This is due to the two psyches.)

  [91:K-176] Ursula, you—aw, the hell with it. "Unresolvable metaphysical problems"—it's a good thing you didn't know Isaac Newton! He "thought about it incessantly," too; and finally had it. And Scanner will verify to and for the Ditheons of the future that I did know where the solution lay, because it deals with the two brains but operating faultily—and then VALIS follows; now they suddenly function properly. The first written account by a Ditheonic brain! And written as a frankly autobiographical journal.

  [...]

  And of course this is Point Omega and Teilhard; I verified that good man more than I expected to. How the thread of Christianity runs through this! And the significance of evolution, time and information! What a grand edifice; and what, now, do I say of 2-74 to 2-75? I say Ditheon, a word, perhaps, never used before. But a concept known: two natures, one person. Oh yes; BTA; I must include that, too: the VALIS trilogy. And so to bed.

  [91:K-191] Is this a basic mystic/Sufi gnosis-secret having to do with liberation? And ascent to paradise while still alive? I am reminded of yoga breathing techniques, which certainly influence the inner biological clock/rate of neural firing. You seek to slow down so that world becomes heaven; I did the opposite: I speeded up, a sort of anti-yoga experience that put me in hell. Nevertheless, from this I drew a profound conclusion, unpleasant as it—the BIP—was. Although more imprisoned I could still figure it all out—i.e., the meta-abstraction.

  ***

  [91:K-208] In no way did Paul see Torah and Christ as progressive (evolutionary) stages in one (information) organism. In fact who has? (1) Not the Jews, certainly; they revere the Torah as absolute. (2) Not the Christians; they revolt against the Torah in the name of Christ: the concept of evolution through qualitatively (and radically) different stages is unknown to them. That the Torah is an earlier form of Christianity whose later form is Christ—no
one sees this. Note: it would be wrong to say: (1) the Torah as an earlier form of Christ; or (2) Christ is a later form of the Torah. Neither statement is true. Both are stages of the so-to-speak third organism, and there is now a third and final stage: Joachim's spirit, in which each man has his own personal Scripture in his head, and each is unique but recombined out of the info of the prior stages. This is an info entity, living info. It is subduing and permeating the universe order: (organization) = info.

  It does not become old and ossified; at the end it plays as a child like a free little animal.

  [91:K-213] If I am right, that a divine compound macro-entity is assembling itself from sub-divine (i.e., mundane) sub-assemblies, then I have in my possession extraordinary knowledge. I base this concept on (1) the revelation of the dialectic; and (2) the Ditheon dream in conjunction with BTA and Russ' letter. Now, this would explain the "God present in the trash strata" experience that I had (and which is expressed in Ubik). What Teilhard calls "Christ" is a conclusion of an evolutionary process, the components and lower stages possessing no divine or spiritual quality—yet when assembled, the divine is or becomes or occurs. The implications of this are enormous; one must radically reassess what "mundane" and "divine" signify. "Mundane" is a simpler, slower stage of "divine" or put another way, "divine" is a more complex, faster stage—the outcome stage—of "mundane." But this is not the whole story; the other fundamental notion is: disparate versus unitary. As long as "it" exists in plural, disparate form—as unconnected discrete pieces, as multiplicity—"it" is not divine; thus when I saw Valis the significant thing that I saw was plural, discrete things behaving as—consisting of/functioning as—a unity, which was (to me) simply inexplicable. And yet it is precisely this coming together into a unity that constitutes the leap from the mundane to the divine.

  [91:K-396] I have been searching all my life for the benchmarks of God (indubitably pointing to Him). I have found them: Kate, Anne and Lauren. The Sufi proof: beauty.

  The light from above illumining the (world scene into the) nativity scene. I saw it. All creatures great and small/dance upon their feet.

  I have seen the infinities of Judaism, which is morality, of Christianity, which is love, of the Greeks, which is wisdom, and I have seen God's power as pronoia and charis to rescue me by bending the world itself; but beauty is a perplexing infinity, raising more questions than it answers. It is a puzzle too intricate for me. It spans all else. As I sit across the game board from Krishna I say, "I have found in beauty that which I could not myself have made; thus I have found the benchmarks. I believe, for I have the evidence that I trust; it is sufficient." There is an infinity of good, of love, of wisdom, of power, but each particular beautiful thing is infinitely beautiful, and there is an infinity of them, so beauty, alone, is an infinity of infinities: ∞2.

  Folder 81

  June 1981

  [81:K-10] Thus through the spirit there comes into existence a perfect (absolute) correspondence between Bible and our world. The Bible as information applies to this world here, this world now; world is meanwhile revealed as information (derived from information as its ontological basis) and this information is identical to the Bible as information. It is as if the Bible derives from and applies to world; world derives from and applies to the Bible, so that when you perceive world you perceive the Bible as world. And when you read the Bible it is no longer information about a world but is a world—and it is the same world that you live in here and now—the spirit accomplishes this through supra-temporal archetypes analogous to Plato's eide; these archetypes are identical for both world and Bible, a "common source" that can be said to be world-as-information, or information-as-world.

  (If I hadn't experienced this—both in regard to world and the Bible—I wouldn't believe it could occur; but [as I say] I know how it is done: by means of supra-temporal archetypal constants found both in world—underlying world—and in the Bible—underlying it. Thus what we know of as world and what we know of as information are viewed as two aspects of a single substantia, each equally real, in the exact fashion Spinoza sets forth.) To repeat: world properly seen is information and this information is the same as that which we call "the Bible"; Bible properly seen (via/per the spirit) is seen not as a description of—information about—a world as a past time and place, and not, really, even about this world here at this time and this place but is this time (world) and is this place (world). That is how what is known a priori (intelligibly) and what is known through the senses (empirically) become one and the same.

  This is extraordinary! Thus if you were to write an ontological description of our world as it really is, you would find to your surprise that you had written passages from/of the Bible, right down to the correct names of people—and this explains Tears. World can be deduced from the Bible, and the Bible from our world; they are one and the same. But what is perhaps most unexpected is that world is now viewed abstractly as information, which no one anticipated. And this information is Scripture. The trans-temporal constants, then, on which world is based, are as much informational in essence as they are anything else: intelligible concepts in the mind of God! This is a totally new understanding of the informational basis of reality—and the possibility that a mind exists (the spirit) in which the Bible ceases to be an informational description of a world and instead is that world, as if information and world are two stages or modes of one "thing"! Equally astounding is the discovery that each of us has an informational basis; each of us is a unique complex of ideas in the mind of God, which can be expressed verbally (as information); likewise we can be said to be spear-carriers in the book, the Bible. (This would be Thomas.)

  My God—this is an updated version of the description of the relationship between the Torah and reality, absolute correspondence; so this isn't an original idea with me. But I experienced it!

  [81:K-13] Possibly it can be said that I have combined basic notions from Judaism (Torah), Christianity (Christ-logos as ontological source of the universe) and Greek philosophy (the basis of reality being structure not a physical substance, and the eide) but my synthesis only can be appreciated in this, the information decade. World (physical reality) can be converted into info and then retrieved; thus a book can be a physical world rather than just a description of that world.

  [81:K-81]

  There is no rational way out of the maze, no rigid formula. Rigid formulas are maze constructs.

  [81:K-86] I am interested in what I call "temporal parallaxis": the two-psyche entity able to perform a double-field superimposition and thus break free of time and causation.

  [81:K-89] Now, here is another point. Unless or until I figured this "inner" part out, "Christ in us," as Paul puts it, I would not really have understood 2-3-74. That is, my belief that in seeing Valis externally I saw the cosmic Christ is only half the story and perhaps the lesser half. However, it is just as well that in writing VALIS I did not claim to "be" Christ, only to have seen him. Psychotic inflation of the ego is frowned on, even by the amiable.

  ***

  [81:K-105] So in BTA at the end I solved VALIS; no wonder I long supposed it was Jim returning to me from the other side. What must be rejected is the Christian idea of you being judged upon death and sent to heaven or hell; apparently it is (1) a much longer climb, involving many rebirths; but (2) it is always up—there is no hell; there is just Nirvana and attaining Nirvana; and (3) all creatures participate. It is not so much a matter of judging but of learning.

  Why, this is Buddhism! Christianity subsumed by Buddhism as I guessed when I read Luke. Russ' letter is right-on. "You have to work at becoming Christ," i.e., a Buddha. Did not God himself tell me that (1) there are many dharmas, ways, routes; and (2) they all lead to him sooner or later? He did tell me that. My route is: doubt.

  [81:K-221] I must not allow myself to think of this in terms of sin, sinful, depraved man, negative judgment and damnation and man's inability to save himself, as the reformers and Paul thought of it. I must
remember it as I experienced it: the in-rushing of those parts lacking in me that by their bestowal by God rendered me complete and, really, ensouled me. Last night the idea came to me that Angel Archer is not my soul but the completed person of which I—PKD—was only one half. She is unique and idiosyncratic but a complete person. I guess this is the same as soul, and it is created, but not by the person—i.e., by me—but by God through justification. Hence it is restored (prefallen) man, as I suspected.

  [81:K-225] I guess the realization last night—that it was justification—is in itself revelation of the same kind as 2-3-74, plus such revelations as the hypnagogic vision about the messenger and bill of particulars. I sense a meaning in the term "justification" not connected with sin but with incompleteness. (Perhaps this is Jung's influence on me.) But I believe that the rest of me entered me as an adventitious second psyche, and this is the subject of BTA and Russ' letter, how this completion is (or resembles) being Christ, being perfect. (Hence the adventitious psyche is human.) Hence I wrote recently that now I seem to have a center, but did not before. More important, I see this as being ensouled. The work has reached its end, suddenly, by an act of God; the person has been searching for his missing parts (i.e., his soul) throughout all time and everywhere, with the possibility that the person may—on his own—never be complete. I consider this search for one's soul as the modern way of viewing redemption from bondage to sin, enslavement, or as I speak of it, machine-level consciousness.