The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  Then my "extra dimension" is the God body as it really is. And we wound it. It manifests itself substantially to us and for us. But is actually insubstantial, an idea; it gives birth to itself in and as the physical, substantial, phenomenal world for our sakes: but then we injure and destroy and pillage and exploit and misuse it. Did it not will itself to exist in physical, substantial, sensible dimensions we would be unable to apprehend it. Here is where Malebranche fits in: what we see is a representation of something else, but that "something else" is not creation but God himself making himself available to us as a physical body (reality, world); this is an act of will and effort on his part, this self-disclosure to us.➊ And when I saw him in 3-74 I saw him (his body) as it really is. This is a new theology, neo-pantheism and, specifically, eco-theology. Out of his love for us he receives pain. And tears.

  Thus it is not proper to say, "We are occluded"; we see—as reality—what he lovingly makes available of himself to us and for us. My vision of him in 3-74 was due to his own presence in me: self perception by him, a further manifestation: one of degree; and, I think, so that he can communicate with us. Especially the Tagore vision. He must make his real self available to us in order to stop the harm we are doing to him. Literally, God appeals to us for help, for medical attention: we must aid him, now, not vice versa. [...]

  Galina's dream and the Tagore vision are one and the same (and are Valis). This theme of grief, sacrifice, pain, loss, suffering goes back (in my writing) to Tears and this is what Tears is all about. VALIS discloses this—the grieving, sorrowing Godhead. But I now see that this comes from its self sacrifice in "falling" into space, time, causality, multiplicity and substantiality for our sakes: so as to both create us and world for us. And the ambience of its sacrifice, its "fall," is in Dowland's music: pain and love. (Sorrow and love, which is the same love that generates its distress.) When seen, it is perfect beauty. This is how it "looks." Pain and sorrow is what it feels. Perfect love is what it is. So beauty, love, pain, grief, sacrifice—and to emulate this path is the stations of the cross and our imitation of God himself: we do what he has done and become (remember) what he is thereby. Taking the path causes the anamnesis that I experienced in 2-3-74 and this is the true and only real enlightenment. It was known first to Gautama. It is not just Christian; it is also Buddhahood.

  Okay. Now I know at last what the significance, ontologically speaking, of suffering is: it is a re-performance of God's original sacrifice for our sakes. Suffering is the cost of—the price paid for, exacted for—the "creation"—i.e., existence—of reality and of us as plural selves. This has nothing to do with evil, sin, etc., but with divine love and self-sacrifice.

  Tears is a holy book.

  The greatest sorrow of all is abstract sorrow: the pure essence of the Godhead. This is found in Dowland's first music that is abstract—and from him to Beethoven. What this is is cognitive sorrow and is the divine essence itself. It is pure knowing. It is not an emotion; it is awareness of its own essence: two mirrors: sorrow and awareness of sorrow, its own sorrow. We must save the Savior: extricate the Godhead from its self sacrifice. "I lead him back to his throne." He/it/she now appeals to us (for help—this help).

  I have now herein formulated the basis for the new eco-theology.

  ➊ And by doing this he exposes his body to our crimes and misuse; he exposes himself to pain by this disclosure—pain inflicted by us. Under these circumstances he can be hurt.

  [63:D-149] Now, I came to believe a couple of weeks ago that when loaded I upon reading Luke realized that this was not a verbal (informational) description of a world but was that world itself in its verbal/informational mode/state/form. And this is precisely what is said in the "Sepher Yetzirah" notes about idea, word and writing of word, and object being one for God, that for God "idea, word and writing of the word are the thing itself." It cannot be a coincidence that I felt this about Luke, then; I had actually encountered what the Sepher Yetzirah notes declare.36 This is where my concept of the plasmate comes in. (Here, now, in this line of reasoning I close the noose, for the enhanced "infinity" mode was in fact the world of the Bible, specifically "Acts"—the second half of Luke.37) Now, the great intuitive guess on my part was that the plasmate is the blood of the resurrected Christ and that because it is here now (in its verbal/written/information mode) he must be here now (1) the world of "Luke-Acts"—is actually here now (2) this world—sacred story/drama—is a story about Jesus Christ who appears in the story as the principal figure: it is his story. Thus the telling of the story verbally is identical with what the story depicts: if it depicts Jesus Christ then Jesus Christ is present (in the mode/dimensions/attribute of what I call infinity). Thus (I say) Jesus Christ lives in/as/through/by the Gospels. According to my theory, what we take to be objects and processes if seen properly (all attributes/modes perceived) will form into a gestalt that will authenticate itself as the Christ—and this was precisely my experience in 3-74: I refer to Valis. [...]

  We are pervaded by a powerful text that is (as I say in VALIS) alive and is a living thing—not description of thing. Its cardinal purpose is to apply Jesus Christ as the form (gestalt) to which our seeming reality points. (Our seeming reality, in contrast to Scripture, is the description and not the thing described.) To perceive this cosmic form everywhere distributed as how things behave and fit together (that is, what they as information refer to) is to perceive correctly. In VALIS I say that the universe is information, and if you read VALIS carefully you discover that this information is about Christ or rather is Christ writ as large as reality itself. [...]

  Therefore Christ is present in the macrocosm-microcosm correspondence: (1) as all reality; (2) as Scripture wherever it occurs. I utilize the idea expressed, e.g., in Matthew—and which I believe; Paul often refers to this—that all Scripture—that is, the OT or Torah itself—secretly is an account of Christ, and that this secret nature of Hebrew Scripture was only revealed at the time of the first advent. In a certain mysterious way, then, the Torah "encloses" like a shell the knowledge of, the story of, Christ, and therefore is Christ (but God concealed this even from the prophets through which he spoke). Thus there is a secret accord between the two Testaments. This is why Jesus had power over the Law (Torah), not the law (Torah) over him; it is fundamental to Pauline thought that Jesus Christ is master not instrument of the Torah, and this fits with my perception of Jesus that day I read Luke: he possessed unlimited miraculous powers such that reality itself (physical law: the moral law of the Torah and the physical law of the cosmos form a unity, deemed heimarmene by the Gnostics) was under his jurisdiction: it obeyed him as a servant. He revealed himself, even then (before the resurrection), as Pantocrator. Having died and been resurrected he vanishes into the very reality of which he is master, camouflaging himself (as Eliade discusses) and lives on in and as that reality in a certain mysterious way, especially (as Mani taught) in the innocent vegetable kingdom but by no means limited to it.38 (He has a special affinity to it because it suffers without causing suffering; it sacrifices itself to feed the animal and human kingdoms.)

  All this was reported—albeit crudely—in VALIS. World yields up the story (as Eliade puts it) and the story is the life, death, resurrection and then "sinking" into camouflage within world (where he now lives on) of Jesus Christ: world, then, is simultaneously information about Christ (it tells its story) and is Christ by reason—by way—of internal arrangement, especially that of the lowly, the vegetable kingdom. (What I call the "trash stratum," or "debris discarded"; Christ enters world, penetrated it and now is camouflaged as it, dispersed throughout it and becoming steadily stronger.) Pere Teilhard did not realize that his Point Omega is something known to and understood by numerous primitive tribes, as Eliade points out, although to my knowledge Eliade does not note the connection between the murdered deity who returns to life and then teaches man and then sinks (as it were) into a camouflaged state within plants and the like—(i.e., reality itself).*

&
nbsp; It is very clear to me that there is an identity between Jesus Patibilis and Hainuwele: "for by feeding on the plants and animals that sprang from his body, men actually feed on the very substance of the demi-divinity" (i.e., Hainuwele).39 This point regarding the Manichaean Jesus Patibilis escaped me: here is the Eucharist writ large: all men and even all animals feed on him and thus unknowingly re-enact the Eucharist, not in church but out in the world itself!

  Folder 64

  Fall 1981

  [64:E-1] "Luke-Acts" transduced from word mode to object mode but still information: the universe made of information in terms of the internal mutual arrangement of the constituents as a gestalt, pastiche, a collage. Now, the cardinal topic of "Luke-Acts" is Jesus Christ. How (if at all) does he appear in this pastiche/gestalt? He does appear but not in anthropomorphic form; he is camouflaged in and as the total pastiche/gestalt, hence cosmic. As information, this universe as pastiche-gestalt read not in a linear manner but as a gestalt (form) reveals or is or contains him throughout like a steady modulation fed into it, a waveform ubiquitous in the gestalt (now construed as a field). This modulation can best be termed "a perturbation (of the reality field)." He is not it but perturbs it.

  [64:E-3] Therefore: Christ is hyper information that reduces the information universe to the carrier which he modulates (i.e., perturbs). This brings to mind my "protest art" theory that rogue information has penetrated a prior "official" information system. (This relates to my analysis of Gnosticism as a "weak transmitter"—but this should read "weak interfering signal"; the transmitter may be powerful but very far away.) I conceive of this as a combat between the two information systems, and, if the Gnostics are right, the "weak transmission" that interferes is the true (transmundane) God.

  [64:E-5] The universe was created out of 22 Hebrew letters ("Sepher Yetzirah") but there is a missing 23rd letter; when his 23rd letter is added, all the negative prohibitions of the Torah vanish; severe limitation and justice are replaced by mercy and freedom: this is the third Shemittah and it is the Messianic Age. Christ, then, can be construed—as rogue information system—to be the corrected, completed basis of creation in which 23 Hebrew letters replace the 22 originally employed. He is, then, an added, formerly missing letter, and this addition changes everything, from severe limitation and justice to freedom and mercy; I construe this as nullifying specifically the lex talionis40 which has to do with punishment in connection with breaking the "thou shalt not"—the negative prohibitions in Torah. Since this carries over into physical law (causation, efficient cause), what was a mechanical system ("pitiless," as I call it in DI) would become flexible, able to deal with exceptions: this would require the faculty of judgment, and this is another way of describing Christian justification. [...]

  The 23rd letter is not just added on; the Torah returns to its jumbled matrix state and then reforms anew: differently. My God—if you add the 23rd letter you get a broader, larger, more complex, higher, more sophisticated system. Whole new combinations (of letters) would be generated. New kinds of situations would arise (analogous to my meta-abstraction vis-à-vis normal abstracting).

  The plasmate is this hyper-information (the 23 letter system) feeding into the old rigid, mechanical, limited, fossilized 22 letter system. As the blood of Christ, just as Valis is his cosmic body.

  [64:E-10] It is apparent to me now, suddenly, that Gnosticism is—as Jonas makes clear in his analysis of it in contrast to the Greek-Babylonian view of the Kosmos41—the absolute theoretical key system that both (1) described the entry of the hyper-information into the older, rigid, mechanical system (to combat heimarmene) and (2) that hyper-information (Gnosis) itself: as a theoretical system, Gnosticism is/was what it describes. And it is Faustian and it is (as Jonas says) the basis for modern (post-ancient) man.

  [64:E-11] There is essentially an adversary situation between the two info systems (old vs. hyper) even if this is the 23 letter Torah replacing the older 22 letter Torah. The older system involves and operates by heimarmene; the newer system on a flexible, sentient, more complex, more evolved, etc., etc., basis. These are such radically different worlds that—well, the term "cosmos" cannot contain both: it is cosmos penetrated from outside—hence the Gnostic premise of the transmundane—a necessary premise in understanding the situation: transmundane deity as overruling the creator and his creation. At the very core of this lies, then, Faustian man and the Faustian ideal and Dasein; and this is the topic of Owl!42 And as I wrote ultra supra: it is the heroic (the new, the Gnostic, the Faustian) versus the tragic (the old: "sidereal passivity"). This is an issue of unprecedented importance—and has directly to do with Fate (heimarmene), hence the very basis of what the world order is and how it works, and the newer way of being (Dasein) by man in that order.

  [64:E-12] You take the text (which is linear, sequential and digital) of "Acts" and convert it into a world: objects in their mutual arrangement. ("Acts" is part two of Luke.) What is the basic story of "Luke-Acts"? Jesus Christ. But when you turn it into a world, although the narrative is still there, Jesus Christ cannot be seen (i.e., as an object among objects). The linear, digital text is now a gestalt (Bild) and is read simultaneously but by the right hemisphere. (The linear digital text of course as narrative is read by the left hemisphere.) Where now is Christ, if not an object among objects. He is missing. Then you discover that in a unified total gestalt (pattern) read simultaneously by the right hemisphere analogically Christ is present as the pattern itself: as unified totality. The puzzle is solved. "Luke-Acts" is not a verbal narrative about Christ—i.e., referring to Christ—it is Christ. [...]

  This fits in with the intuition I've had for some time: that the Bible is the real world and appears in our spurious "world" as a putative book the way "Grasshopper" does in TMITHC. If what we possess in the form of a book (info) is actually a world, then what we experience as world is perhaps only info—a book. Everything is backward.

  [64:E-20] I suddenly realize what is necessary in order to apperceive Christ: some kind of runaway positive feedback involving paradox (e.g., VALIS is a novel/VALIS is not a novel); the flip-flop into infinity regresses faster and faster until at last the outline (of Christ) emerges; hence the paradoxical nature of the parables: they constitute doorways to the kingdom, rather than being descriptions of it.

  Folder 56

  August–December 1981

  August 18, 1981

  Dear Pat,

  I offer the following idea: that what I call "the plasmate," which is living information, is the third testament of Joachim del Fiore which emerges as the spirit of the two testaments (OT and NT) when they are superimposed; it is the spirit of which they are the "hard rind of the letter."

  Which is to say, the two testaments are alive and are to be regarded as proto-psyches, with the OT a rigid, archaic Psyche A, and the NT a more flexible Psyche B, which when joined give rise to Ditheon Psyche C, which is the plasmate. So I maintain that underneath, the two testaments are living organisms that create recombinant new information by a process of linking and relinking, such as I saw VALIS employing; moreover, this life that I speak of is known to the Jews as Torah (see The Divine Invasion as to the Torah being alive). The living cosmic entity, which existed before creation, and for which creation exists and is justified by, is not confined to the first five books of the Bible but continues on through to the NT. It is self-replicating and sentient; it is a life form, and Joachim figured it out (although of course he could have obtained the concept from Hebrew scholars). Thus when you see a copy of the Bible lying on your coffee table you are looking at a living organism capable of growing, of reproducing, of change; like all biological organisms it must maintain a higher level of internal order than its environment, and it must absorb negative entropy from its environment—and indeed it does this, by subsuming its environment into changing arrangements of information.

  [...]

  So my Type A Psyche is the OT, my Type B Psyche is the NT, and because these two testame
nts function as a single organism in a push-pull dialectic relationship (superimposed) they form one new, higher, third entity which I call Ditheon, a life form so advanced that it is superior to all creation; and yet it itself is not God but is the image of the invisible God. Philo of Alexandria was the first to figure out its existence; he relied on his Jewish sources and on Greek sources (in particular Plato) as well. One could speak of our spatiotemporal world, then, being based on the Bible or even emanat ing from the Bible; the Bible is not a book like other books: it is not a description of this world, it is the source of this world, and this world, at all places and times, conforms covertly to the Bible; that is, strip away the stegenographic covering from the physical world and you will find the world of the Bible—in fact you will find the Bible itself as a verbal text permeating reality and giving rise to it. The Bible is the information that is fed into the space-time universe, as if transduced into substantial reality. Thus the Bible is always the case—what is known in Bible study as typological application. Thus the books of the Bible do not refer to one given specific place and one specific time, but are equally applicable to all places and all times, when the dokos is stripped away from true reality. Joachim was aware of this meta-organism existing "in" the two testaments, and he was aware that it is a world; that is his crucial awareness; this third entity, this spiritual meta-entity created by an accord between the OT and the NT is a spiritual world in which men exist or can exist or will someday exist; it is somehow real and somehow available. It is both an historical epoch (lying in the future) and yet, paradoxically, here now, as is the Kingdom of God that Jesus speaks of. If you doubt the truth of what I am saying, look at the 22nd psalm and think of the crucifixion; you will see that the 22nd psalm, although written centuries before the birth of Jesus, applies to and exists at the time of the crucifixion; it lies outside of space and outside of time entirely, and is true now as well. 43 This is what led me to reiterate obsessively that secretly "we are living at the time and place of 'Acts'"; what I failed to realize is that "the time and place of 'Acts'" does not refer to a specific historical context, a given time and given place, but to an archetypal reality that is the very basis on which our seeming world is built, and this archetypal reality consists—not of a place, not of a time, not of substantial reality—but information. The Bible is not a world reduced to a verbal description; on the contrary: it is the verbal source of world, just as signals from a radio transmitter are the informational source of the voices and music you hear when you turn on your receiver. But (as I say) three "entities" must be envisioned, not two; that is, not just the OT and the NT; as Joachim realized, these two palpable entities combine to form a third and meta-entity that is to the two palpable ones as spirit is to letter. Thus I say, a single coherent life form underlies the written Bible, and it is the source of our universe, and is itself not fixed into a canon, but constantly combines and recombines, forming ever newer messages. It transacts its informational life and business around us everywhere, as it guides, directs and controls the evolution of the universe, which is based on its own evolution as a biological organism.