The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

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  [81:K-230] Gott—it would have killed my soul if I'd written the Blade Runner novelization! Or, worse, not written BTA! Angel Archer is a new, ex nihilo creation, literally out of nothing. There is a great spiritual, artistic, evolutionary, life-mystery in her coming into being.

  [81:K-253] "Soul," then, is metaphor for life and moreover life newly born, and a greater, better life, the like of which showed up nowhere before in my work. That upon finishing BTA I believed that I had risked my literal physical life—and almost lost it—is then logically what I would feel, would of necessity feel, because indeed I did risk my life; I risked my physical life in the service of preserving, augmenting and prolonging my spiritual life. It almost turned out that I literally physically died in the act (work) of giving birth to Angel Archer. Had it killed me I would have been concerned about only one thing: does Angel Archer exist now? As far as I'm concerned she does, and I don't appear to have physically died. But I subordinated my physical well-being for the sake of creating her, to the task of creating her; so well I might view her as my soul! But in viewing Angel Archer as eternal (now that I created her) I had to face the other side of the matter: that I am not. No wonder the most profound feelings and intimations possible flooded over me in the weeks following my completion of that book: it is a book whose story, theme and ideas, even its artistic worth, are all subordinated to Angel Archer as a person, as I wrote Russ recently. In "thermal" terms I as an organism expended my maximum effort at the service of the need to grow. It is in my work that my growth axis exists, and I am well aware of this; I have long been at the disposal of my work, viewing myself as its instrument, not it mine. Yet paradoxically in BTA—at least when viewed in conjunction with Russ' letter and my Ditheon dream—a feedback from it to me, me as a person, occurred, and a major conceptual insight arises in me as a result, an insight totally new to me having to do with (1) what Christ is; and (2) how "achieved," that is, what "brings on" or "causes" Christ or Christogenesis. Yes, that is the word: Christogenesis! Christ is seen in evolutionary terms paralleling or expressing the very evolution that (I believe) my work represents (and which I see in the macrocosm and in Valis). At a certain crucial stage of evolution toward complexification of structure (i.e., negentropy) the mundane passes over—in a quantum leap—into the divine; the man becomes Ditheon, Christ; the macrocosm likewise (à la Teilhard and his Point Omega).

  [81:K-258] I maintain that my corpus—my opus—required her, and required me to be able to create her—perhaps prove I could create her as an artistic problem I consciously and deliberately posed for myself to—here is a remarkable thought!—to justify my work in terms of wholeness, completeness and intactness—which event (act) is analogic to God's justifying and completing me in terms of intactness and wholeness. Thus my creating Angel Archer ex nihilo is my analogic reperformance as a writer in his work of God's act toward me; creating Angel Archer is an act learned from 2-3-74; it is that justification first applied to me, now applied by me to my work. God perfects me; I comprehend this; I then in turn act to complete my work. I take my cue from the Pantocrator, my creator; he as artisan instructs by example me as artisan. He shows me that an ex nihilo "adventitious" psyche can be injected. And, like Thomas, Angel is ex nihilo and in a very real sense adventitious—she came into my work the way Thomas came into me. Thomas is what was missing in me (missing and needed); Angel is what was missing and needed. In both cases wholeness is the goal and in both cases wholeness was the result. One could say that God showed me that beyond logical necessity and organic development/unfolding lies the possibility of the unprecedented ex nihilo new. Like the resurrection it is logically impossible. Had he not done it with/for me, I would not have known that it could be. So in this regard, Angel Archer is indeed the offspring of 2-3-74, of the Ditheon, the justification, but by way of me as a creative artist; then probably I did not merely describe her, when I wrote the book; in writing the book I created her, which answers that question. And then having as a creative artist created her in and for my work I find her "returning to me," so to speak, as my soul. I projected her outward in my work, exhaled her, and then introjected her after I had created and projected her.

  [...] And then by reincorporating her as my soul I fuse myself as a person with myself as artist, i.e., with my work. The schism is healed. I and my work become one. And, curiously, I and my work constitute another push-pull Ditheon! Here again is the dialectic. Here again is growth and change, and a complementary antithesis. I am not Angel Archer; we are separate: we are "di"; and yet we perhaps form one person. I create my character and she in turn creates me, the total, intact, completed, whole me; hence I speak of her correctly as my soul. And I speak of (as, e.g., in my letter to Russ) somehow having created my own soul, an extraordinary idea. She is the spirit of my intactness, of the actuality that is Ditheon. And this suggests that the ultimate essence of Ditheon is ultra-autonomy and rationality and individuality (all characterized by her). Perhaps she is logos: human logos.

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  [81:K-262] Now, consider what becomes of the human being failing to achieve (or receive) the Ditheon state, Jung's individuation or integration of the opposites (chemical wedding, mysterium coniunctionis, whatever, "birth in the spirit," anyhow the event in which what was not there before is there now and it acts to complement what was there that in itself was incomplete, so that the result is wholeness or—as I like to call it—justification). The human being recirculates the same ideas (info) over and over again, and, according to the statistical laws regarding entropy, the degree of order in the info irreversibly decreases, disorder increases, and the person mentally and spiritually moves inexorably toward death. Now, Schrödinger contends that a biological organism postpones its death (thermal equilibrium) by maintaining a relatively high level of order by incorporating negative entropy from its environment, and this is precisely the entering of the adventitious psyche; it is either injected or is ingested, offered by the environment or taken from it; in any case what was outside the organism is now inside the organism and incorporated into one total structure with what was already there; i.e., it is assimilated—so-to-speak digested and incorporated, although not without some initial perturbation (defined as disorder). What was already there and what was intaken must ultimately either form a unity or (equally useful, maybe even more useful) a push-pull dialectic of complementary opposites, in which each half corrects the other, monitors the other, acts as a feedback circuit, producing a self-winding autonomous totality; thus the two halves are not identical. (The psyche has not split in two; quite the contrary—I became conscious of the difference when I first researched the meanings of the prefix "di" and saw that it can either mean "double" or "asunder," implying either a joining of two elements or a splitting of one element into halves; these are antithetical notions.) So perhaps "assimilate" is the wrong word; "reach a working relationship with" or "enter into a partnership with," "enter into a syzygy," would be better. [...]

  As a strategy for prolonging its life this is representative of the strategies of organisms by and large, but what I see here is an extraordinarily high degree of incorporation of negentropy from the environment and subsequent incorporation into the organism's own structure. (There is an initial perturbation, defined as disorder.) If all goes well, the organism now possesses a vast increase in its level of complexity, in energy—drastic increase in all the factors by which the capacity for biological survival is measured. Hence it has bought into prolonged vitality, viability and extended life—the issue being exactly that: life versus death. This extraordinary strategy is engaged in by an organism that is approaching death and knows it. It has run out of time. It is vitiated; it has ossified. Its environment has been pressing against its perimeter, threatening to invade and annihilate it. The level of internal organization has been lowering; it—the organism—perceives the ratio of order in it and outside it progressing toward less and less internal order, greater and greater exterior (external) or
der. Now, the concept expressed in the Ditheon dream fits in with Erwin Schrödinger's analysis of how "any living organism delays its decay into thermal equilibrium (death) by its capacity to maintain itself at a fairly high level of orderliness (and hence fairly low level of entropy) by continually absorbing negative entropy from its environment." In fact Schrödinger's analysis tends to support the idea that indeed the second psyche is adventitious in origin, because this is only an unusual example of the fundamental way by which organisms delay death—perhaps the only way they do so—can do so. Then this "transaction" represents a turnaround in what has been going on between the declining (dying) organism and its environment, as if at the last moment the beleaguered organism turned the tables on its environment and converted an invasion into an acquisition.

  Having allowed the invasion to occur it must now assimilate into its structure what it has allowed to come in—or even induced into coming in. This—when studied from this fundamental standpoint—doesn't seem to differ qualitatively from what protozoa do. It is not a basic strategy; it is the basic strategy, the irreducible transaction between a biological organism and its environment, for the purpose of prolonging the life of the organism. Now, what strikes me at this point is that perhaps this transaction can be viewed in terms of information. First, the lowered structural organization of the organism should be regarded as connoting info scarcity or depletion, at least relative to its environment. It (the organism) does not know enough; it experiences this as a heightened strangeness, incomprehensibility and unpredictability on the part of its environment—all of which renders that environment threatening because it is not understood. This could account for many of the fugal tactics by schizophrenics: they retreat from reality because reality is making less and less sense to them. But this in fact is not due to transformations in reality but in the relative information that the schizophrenic has about reality. And as he withdraws he escalates this disparity; by exercising progressively less reality testing he learns less and less; this is a self-defeating tactic, this attempt at disengagement. The solution is for him to advance into reality and so-to-speak capture and incorporate a sizable hunk of it without at the same time losing his own identity, that is, if the incorporated hunk of reality proves to exceed his capacity to assimilate it he is doomed to swift annihilation. In fact what was perceived formerly as an external threat is now literally internal and still a threat. In fact the threat has won out; the battle is over and the organism dies. Viewed this way this massive incorporation of its environment is a desperate last strategy based on the recognition that unless it does this it is certainly doomed; it must be convinced that any alternative means inexorable death. So the massive incorporation is an endgame battle to which it commits itself utterly, knowing the danger in what it is doing but knowing, also, the alternatives: they are dead ends. But now it has two centers: its own self and the "self" that it has incorporated but not assimilated. Its environment is literally inside it, and experienced "from inside," that is, its now incorporated environment is known by its inward face as an "I." Not an it, a sort of potentially lethal movement along Martin Buber's "it-thou" axis: the "it" has become a "thou"—which is good—but the "thou" is inside the organism as a second center or focus of consciousness. The boundary between the organism and its environment is eradicated, which potentially is death for the organism. Death in its true and total form; this is what organisms rightly fear the most. Yet (apparently) it has decided to allow this invasion as a means to incorporate negentropy—which it must continually do—and so the possibility of enhancing its viability—as opposed to being engulfed—is there. How should it proceed? How does it go about dealing with an influx of reality so vast that it constitutes a second center of consciousness?

  First of all, it must deal with the startling discovery that what it has ingested—but not assimilated—is, like itself, conscious and even coherent. It and its acquisition—or invader—are roughly isomorphic. (Hence the adventitious psyche is perceived as human, a crucial point.) (Crucial, because if human it is not Fremd; it is "other" yet familiar in kind. Presumably, too, it is finite, since humans are finite.) Next, it is discovered that this adventitious psyche is bewildered, as if plucked from its own familiar environment and deposited in a strange time and place; thus it is at a disadvantage. It does not know how it got here—nor does it know the local customs or even the language, all of which creates the impression that it did not intend to invade, does not understand the situation and means no harm. Its motivation is the same as the host organisms: to survive. [...]

  Was it just last Friday night that I stumbled at last onto the realization of justification (page K-220)? (This is Sunday night.) And felt such pain—because the exegesis is over. And I knew it. And, as I wrote, the real purpose of this exegesis has not been to find the answer but to preserve the experience.

  [81:K-310] There is something I must face and face fully and honestly. The messenger vision—that was (first of all) not a dream but a vision (although perhaps hypnopompic). What I must face is that it sums up and expresses absolutely, precisely and perfectly what I discovered recently to be the very essence of Protestantism: the doctrine of unmerited justification by (Christ's) surrogate act (death). The complexities of this specifically Protestant doctrine (which is, as I say, not a belief of Protestantism but its very basis) are wonderfully clarified by that vision. Now, I see myself falling back on what the reformers (following Paul) called "legalism"; this is when you obsessively and neurotically calculate and recalculate whether or not you have observed every regulation and piled up enough merit by your own efforts—and of course you never have and never will. There always remains a bill of particulars. And you know it. There is always something left undone or done imperfectly. Or something done wrong. It never ends. There is endless nagging worry and a sense of being imperfect; your conscience will always accuse you! Interjected authority transformed into awareness of guilt, which is to say falling short—the literal meaning of "sin."

  What I must—simply must—realize is that it has been supernaturally revealed to me that Paul's basic idea of justification through God's unmerited grace (divine favor and mercy) upon which Protestantism is based is true. As I sit here at this moment I realize that I will always fall short however hard I try to do right; I cannot on my own save myself and am doomed; and yet I am saved by the "messenger" with the spotless sheet of paper that he presents to the retributive machinery in place of the bill of particulars drawn up against me during my lifetime. This bill is accurate. [...] If I forget this I am doomed to worry my life away neurotically, feeling endlessly unworthy and a failure, deprecating myself, indicting and impugning myself, reproaching myself—as Satan does in the heavenly court; my conscience endlessly accuses me and nothing I on my own can do will satisfy it. Have I forgotten 2-74? And have I also forgotten the "messenger" vision? All this was done for me that I would be saved—saved in a sense from myself as accuser. I find myself cursed with a sense of unworthiness. I am not a proud and stubborn person; I am ashamed. Christ died to give me new life and to justify me and all this has been supernaturally revealed to me. Yet I find myself doing it again, accusing myself for falling short. This is not a small matter; I live with this daily. Every new day stimulates my endless sense of unworthiness. That night when I realized in a flash that 2-3-74 was sudden justification and my awareness of it—have I forgotten that already, that understanding? 2-3-74 (as proved, e.g., by the "messenger" vision) was the miracle of Christianity at work on my behalf. As Bill Sarill said, I am in a state of grace; I have no reason to think I have fallen out of it.

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  [81:K-316]

  VALIS is the cypher book—code book—to the whole 10 volume meta-novel. And will someday be read as such. And "Valis" is Gnostic/Mani but secretly Holy Mother Church. [...] As with God's strategy, the sequence is "out of sequence." Viz: the key piece—VALIS—came last. Until it the others did not make sense—i.e., they were taken to have been written as fict
ion and hence hypothetical. VALIS retroactively reinterprets them—shows them in a light that could not be anticipated by an analysis of them—until VALIS came out; typical of the pattern strategy of the wise horn in its dialectical combat-game. Here is a big realization, and unexpected: VALIS in itself means nothing! Its only significance is as the code book to the 10 volume meta-novel—and no one has noticed this yet, even Gregg Rickman.

  [81:K-317] The diagram on the previous page—and what I say there—explains why VALIS resembles Ubik and Ubik. This is how the gnosis is smuggled past the angels ("the secret stolen, through the angels, in one's hands"), and into this prison: it is not transmitted in the proper—meaningful—sequence but is correctly assembled here to spell out the message. The final—and essential—piece was VALIS. It alters the meaning of all the previous books and stories. The message is not in VALIS, the message is not in the 10 volume meta-novel. It is in the latter reinterpreted by the former. Look what it reinterprets the squib opening the final chapter of Ubik into!

  [81:K-334] For the first time there arose in my mind the notion that Ditheon is a fusion of the two distinctly different minds that I call android (machine, schizophrenic) and human; viz: we have not only android : human : : human : Ditheon (ascending hierarchy relates to the 3 levels of the Commedia) but: