The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  [...]

  Thus the physical spatiotemporal universe is not information, as I declare in VALIS, but is derived from information; this information is the next hypostasis up, ontologically speaking. It goes: God, Logos (information), spatiotemporal universe, and then back to God as goal of the whole process (Erigena). In March, 1974, by means of my meta-abstraction I so-to-speak rolled back the physical universe to the Uttered Word underlying it, from which it is derived; this is why, finally, the term "word" is in fact an excellent translation of "Logos." It is as if God spoke (or rather thought) a complex idea, and from this living idea (Logos) the universe came into being, was derived.

  This view is a far cry from Burroughs' notion that we have been invaded by an information virus that is making us stupid!

  [56:1]44 November 17, 1981

  A very valuable dream. I enter a large auditorium like a San Francisco concert hall or opera house. There is an audience sitting. A number of men are engaged in discussion, speaking from different places in the house; they are standing. I assume that an impromptu discussion—argument—has broken out; it seems to deal with Jerzy Kosinski; his name is mentioned. (One of the men, perhaps a teacher or the teacher, resembles Bill Wolfson, so this may also be a courtroom.) I join in the discussion and they all frown; it turns out that this is not an impromptu discussion by members of the audience: these are actors and what they say is rehearsed; this is the drama the audience has come to see and hear. I have done something improper. There is some mention of homosexual intellectuals; this seems to be the topic. Seating myself, I speak quietly to a man in the audience; he has white foam, like milk, like the marshmallow glaze on the candied yams I had last Saturday, around his mouth. I ask about the discussion, which I now realize I am not allowed to join in on.

  Analysis: clearly the location is the concert hall years ago in which my agoraphobia/claustrophobia broke out, when Horowitz was playing the Brahms second piano concerto. The friends with me that day were Bay Area intellectual homosexuals.45 The play enacted, the roles taken in semblance of an actual discussion, as in that Berlioz work I saw where the woman grabs the conductor's arm to make him stop conducting—this refers to what Hans Jonas says about the older Greco-Roman-Babylonian closed cosmos, specifically Stoicism in which all you can do is play your role in a drama with as much grace as possible "and you are your own au dience." What I am doing in the dream is—because I do not understand that these are only roles acted out, a formal drama—I have broken the rules; I have spoken out of turn, which means that I have unintentionally rebelled against our status in the cosmos, my own status; they have accepted theirs and only say and do what their scripts call for them to do. Hence their frowns of disapproval when I join in impromptu. This is rebellion, my primordial rebellion, but as I say it is based on a misunderstanding on my part, a failure to comprehend the situation. When the situation is made clear to me I lower my voice; that is, I cease to interfere with the clockwork marionette drama being acted out, but I continue to talk in a somewhat muted voice, privately, to the nearest member of the audience. That is, I cease blatantly to rebel, but I am not entirely still. What I am doing at this point is trying to understand what the drama being enacted is about; I accept the fact that I am a spectator and can't participate; this has to do with my withdrawn status in life that is my current mode. This status is forced on me because I am literally not part of the drama. No role, no lines, nothing has been assigned me except to watch and listen. I can accommodate that only to a point; I have gone from trying to participate to trying to understand; thus I adopt the mode of a scholar and philosopher, but only because I have been edited out of the drama itself. Spontaneously, I would join in—did join in, but was silenced. This dream tells me a lot about my phobias and my rebellion. My rebellion is based on a misunderstanding on my part as to what is allowed and what is not allowed. I had naively thought we were free to say and do anything we wanted; that is, I presumed what I call the "open" or Gnostic or Faustian cosmos. The true situation reduces me to spectator, but this is not my first choice; this is forced on me by the nature of the situation (the closed cosmos in which as in Stoicism people simply act out their assigned roles, say their assigned lines). Yet I continue to speak, although not as part of the drama; I do not interrupt it but I ask about it; I seek to understand. I am barely willing to refrain from entering the drama—which would mean now to break the rules knowingly, whereas when I broke the rules before, I did not understand the situation. In the dream I feel no phobic anxiety at all, which is strange; it shows that the issue is not fear but freedom, the freedom to say and do what I feel like. I have been told what my place is. I accept it, but not entirely. "Homosexual" in the dream signifies something, probably an odious play that is being performed. Not only am I not allowed to participate, I dislike the subject matter: homosexual intellectuals. It is a drama I don't like and I am not allowed to enter it. I have no role at all, in any drama; there is just the one, and it is alien to me (hence the "teacher" looks like my attorney; this is an adversary situation). (I have no under standing of adversary situations, as I've long realized.) The dream has profound Gnostic implications; the whole situation is the Gnostic appraisal of our lives here: assigned roles in an odious drama, that is, a drama inimical to our real natures. It is a vast enactment of something unnatural. Audience and players alike collude in something that should not be. This is not my drama; had I been allowed to participate I would have disrupted it because I would have spoken contrary to the purpose and spirit of the drama, the only drama going on. This is not my world (in the dream I entered the auditorium from the outside, from perhaps a transmundane source, if indeed, as I suppose, this auditorium represents our world, the audience and actors humans living here, acting out their lives as mere roles in a closed cosmos or what they accept as a closed cosmos). I am a disruptive force, an outsider, silenced by disapproval, by mass censure. So I will seek to understand, since I cannot participate. This "seeking to understand" is my exegesis and my decades of epistemological analysis. I am like a visiting sociologist, like Margaret Mead investigating a foreign culture. This is not my home; these are either homosexuals or at the very least they take homosexual intellectuals to be important. I would say that this dream verifies that 2-3-74 was the Gnostic experience. From that moment on I was able to create a role for myself, rather thus my condition of Geworfenheit was reversed, nullified, solved. There are profound overtones of Existentialism here, especially from Gnosticism. The dream presents the paradigm of the Gnostic perception/conception of Dasein, in particular being thrown or cast into an alien world; moreover, the dream shows that my lifelong streak of rebellion is because this is an alien world to me, and, because it is alien, I don't know how to behave; I do not obey the rules and conventions because I do not understand them, since they are alien to me, and the drama was going on before I arrived here (i.e., was born). My rebellion, then, is a confirmation of my Dasein as basically Gnostic; the rebellion stems from Geworfenheit and the Fremd and Unheimlich. I have gone to a lot of trouble to accommodate the situation; I have ceased interrupting the drama by trying to join in—I now understand that it is a drama and that these people are playing roles assigned to them—but I am not entirely silent; my "rebellion" which is not truly rebellion but seems so (since it is disruptive) has turned into scholarly analysis, an attempt on my part to understand this alien situation of which I have only very partial knowledge. I must ask questions if I am going to understand.

  The discovery that what I took to be an actual discussion is in fact a drama in which actors play roles could be regarded as a fundamentally Gnostic discovery. There is something rehearsed and unreal going on, a simulation. I think this dream is telling me that my analysis of last night upon rereading Jonas' study of the contrast between the pre-Gnostic worldview and the Gnostic is correct; my situation is Gnostic indeed, hence my worldview—and my problems!—arise from this situation. That my primordial phobias could arise from the Gnostic condition of G
eworfenheit never occurred to me; I guess I could now view my phobias as verification of Gnosticism. Also, this makes clear that 2-3-74 was some kind of rectification of this estranged, alienated, thrown condition, perhaps related to Heidegger's Ur-Angst leading at least to Authentic Sein. So the dream refers back to the last insight that I had while driving on Sunday night: that my status in the 2-3-74, that in fact this is what 2-3-74 was all about. And it was as if the cosmos itself had changed to accommodate me (I suddenly realize); I may have changed, but it seemed as if world changed. ("A perturbation in the reality field" refers to an event in world itself, not in me.) This is impossible; i.e., that world changed to accommodate me so that I was as a result of this radical change no longer a stranger here; it became my world—and my anxiety, which tormented me every day and night, departed. (It has never really returned, except briefly when Doris was in the process of leaving me.) Good Lord! Is this not impossible, that world changed to accommodate me, in order to repair the gulf, the discrepancy, between me and world? Only God—i.e., the Pantocrator—can make such a change! Surely—logic says—it was I who changed. But all of a sudden I fitted in; and I had the distinct impression that world was sentient, animate, unitary, conscious and purposeful; it was immanent deity or something ... anyhow I saw transformations in it, and the AI voice backs this impression up. In any case, world and I became harmonized (harmonie, harmonia) for the first time. So at the very least there was a radical shift in my role, my status in the cosmos, of a sort that did not seem to stem from an internal adjustment in a closed system but seemed, rather, to be the result of something entering from outside—that is, something transmundane. Beyond doubt there were changes made in me: drastic, radical, extraordinary changes; that is certain ... but it did not seem to end there; world itself changed (or at least my experience of world, my Dasein). It was as if the past had been tinkered with so as to cause the present to be different; I was a different person, etc. And my sense that I had either two sets of memories or else altered memories. It is clearly Heidegger's transformation by means of Ur-Angst to Authentic Sein but with cosmic, transcendental, religious overtones—and that precisely is Gnosticism (since Heidegger's categories are derived directly from Gnosticism!).

  [...]

  A final point: the world transformed from the unfamiliar to the familiar—this cannot point to a psychotic break, for in a psychotic break this is all reversed: the familiar becomes the unfamiliar. So much for the "Horselover Fat is insane" theory. In 2-3-74 came comprehension and recognition; there also came the end of—the healing of—the gulf that separated me from world. This is 180 degrees away from psychosis. Viewed psychologically, this is, in fact, a healing; it is repair.

  [...]

  The dream certainly sheds light on the real purpose of my exegesis. My working on it is preceded by a serious—even potentially disastrous—event, one forming the very basis of my life or at least the core problem of my life: expressed in the dream as a drama that I do not even understand as drama, in which I try to involve myself, only to learn that I am disrupting it, intruding on it—I have no role to play in it, and am to simply be a silent spectator—which in fact (in my actual life) I could not do; that is, for whatever reason I could not sit silently watching and listening while other people acted out their lines, played their parts. I wanted to play a part, too. This was denied me. The psychological gravity of this situation arises from its existential gravity; it is truly a grim matter in terms of one's life. Consigned simply to watch and listen while others act and speak? And not even to be able to understand what the drama—i.e., life itself—is about? This is intolerable and it is against this that I rebelled, from the start. This is my story: starting out trying to involve myself as a participant in life, then finding out that there was no role for me in the drama (of life); whereupon I sat down and began to try to figure out what the hell the drama was all about. I gave up trying for a role, an acting part; I settled for an understanding of what was happening. This is the next best thing. It is not ideal but it is at least a way open to me. I would not be rebelling if I tried to comprehend the drama I was witnessing. This would not disrupt it. However, 2-3-74 radically transformed the situation; the drama became comprehensible to me and, moreover, I found that I did have a role to play. But this role is predicated on the drama becoming comprehensible to me. My being able to understand it, due either to my own cognitive powers or simply to the drama itself being, as it were, open, is the absolute prerequisite. At the heart of the matter, at the core of my psychological and existential difficulties—that have plagued me all my life—is the fact that, very simply, I started out misunderstanding what is going on. My god—this is the Gnostic ontological condition of ignorance! Oh my god! Oh god; I am back to Gnosticism; the ontological category of ignorance, which is the basic ontological category, was reversed for me in 2-3-74; ignorance turned into its ontological opposite: knowledge. And because I now knew, I could act. Incomprehensible world became comprehensible world, in a single stroke. This is, then, Gnosticism, for it is only in Gnosticism that the cat egories of ignorance and knowledge possess—are seen to possess—this absolute ontology. Every bad thing stems from ignorance, and restoration consists of a diametric reversal of this condition.

  [...]

  My exegesis, then, is an attempt to understand my own understanding; I was correct in my recent letter to Russ concerning VALIS: in it I am thinking about my own thinking. I possess the Gnosis and am analyzing it, since it is essentially internal to me, now; I possess it and am turning it over and over, scrutinizing it from every angle. The Gnosis, for me, is not in world; it is in my mind. Thus I analyze and study my own thoughts—the quintessential example being the meta-abstraction itself. My mind performed it but I do not really understand this that my mind did, this abstracting, the ultra-sophisticated cognitive act. The problem in a sense lay in my mind (i.e., I was ignorant) and the solution, when it came, occurred in my mind as an act, an event, inasmuch as virtually nothing occurred in world, except, of course, my seeing the Christian fish sign. But that only served to disinhibit what was already in my mind blocked, buried, latent, dormant, slumbering; the fish sign awoke me.

  There is, then, in me—and was from the start—the potential ability to solve the riddle of the drama (i.e., life, the world-order) that I am perceiving. Hence anamnesis was and is everything. I know, but do not know what I know. Hence I resort to the metaphor of the two-mirror runaway positive feedback in which I the observer observe myself (in world as Other), which sets up an endless regress, but it is this very regress that transforms the ontological category of ignorance into its opposite, knowledge. And thus reverses the primordial fall—my own fall and the fall of much more besides.

  The mystery lies in me, then, and not in world; likewise, the solution lies in me and not in world. At my core there is something that is me and yet not me. Thomas is an example. Am I Thomas? Is he me? Hans Jonas says: "It is between this hidden principle of the terrestrial person and its heavenly original that the ultimate recognition and reunion takes place. Thus the function of the garment in our narrative as the celestial form of the invisible because temporarily obscured self is one of the symbolic representations of an extremely widespread and, to the Gnostics, essential doctrine. It is no exaggeration to say that the discovery of this transcendent inner principle in man and the supreme concern about its destiny is the very center of gnostic religion" ([>]).*

  [...]

  Cognitive estrangement; that is the key. And the rectification thereof. This is the goal; this is the mystery. This is Gnosticism as problem posed and resolution offered. The Gnostic assumption is that cognitive estrangement exists until rectified, and that the person is dependent on an outside source to rouse him to awareness of his state and to reverse that state. Upon it being reversed—ontological ignorance transformed into ontological knowledge—that person's status in the cosmos, his existential basis within the cosmos as part to whole, is drastically and radically reversed, tra
nsforming not only his perception of the world-order and his ability to function in it, but also his perception of his own self. In the final analysis it is not world that he now knows and knows correctly; it is his own self. Thus the motto of Apollo finds ecstatic glorification and in fact deification in Gnosticism: "Know thyself."