The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  [53:G-23] When Jeannie was talking she did not sound like—she was a high-bred Englishwoman of 200–300 years ago, reading aloud from a book of that period. Was, not sounded like.

  [...]

  Analysis:

  Life became narrative in a book.➊ This is to verify: "God is the Book of the universe."

  There was a theophany tonight and it verified the theophany of 3-74.

  ➊ Literally. Being read aloud.

  [53:H-4] God—thoughts—word—word-as-writing—reading aloud of word-as-writing by Holy Wisdom (i.e., God says)—and world is.

  Hence the plasmate (Logos) and "the universe is information." Set-ground. Rest-motion. Collage. Clutch. Linking.

  Not only is the universe actually information (Torah) but it is a book that Holy Wisdom reads aloud, which causes creation, this audible saying.

  I heard on that phone call Holy Wisdom reading our world as a nar rative in a book, and by her doing so, that world came to be. Whatever she reads—pronounces—is. But she reads only what God has written (thought).

  [53:H-6] This is an info retrieval system, in which many narratives are stored together but only activated when the AI voice reads one of them aloud; but in written info form, all of them are latently there. Thus each space-time world contains all the other worlds as info (but unread).

  When a given narrative (continuum: place and time) is read, it is as if God has called it to mind the way we do with memories; therefore it is intelligible to call the encoding as written info memories of all potential worlds. I guess that I am saying it is accruing; it is—the past—all here, and passes over from latent encoded info into world when read by God's intellect, Hagia Sophia ("the narrative" and "neutral voice inside us" that I mentioned in VALIS). [...] Hagia Sophia is to space-time continuum as phonograph is to LP record. So perceiving this encoded info is the first function of the retrieval system, which leads one to believe that Valis's mind was its mind; hence I could see that there was information but not what it said. Apparently she can discriminate a given narrative out of the many. An event does not leave a tracing, as an orchestra playing leaves a trace in a groove or on tape; the info perceives world (the event); that is, the info is ontologically prior and primary; the event (world) is derived from it, not the other way around. If this is not understood (info as giving rise to reality, not reality to info) nothing is understood. The info "stage" is eternal, the reality just a playing, i.e., in time, space, epiphenomenal. (Form to instantiation.)

  [53:H-8] Frankly, I am becoming a bilateral hemispheric parity genius.

  [53:H-21] I just realized. The AI voice replacing Jeannie's voice was like the end of the movie The Elephant Man when he began to die and heard his mother's voice and moved out into the stars.

  [53:H-25] Here the Tagore vision assumes an extraordinary significance: Christ is the biosphere itself, that is, the primordial Garden that man as a species has broken away from and turned against, destroying it and exploiting it. "He who wounds the ecosphere literally wounds God" pertains to the absolute and essential nature of the situation, both historically and dramatically, as well as morally and spiritually. Once Christ is homologized to the biosphere the nature of original sin is clear—and, with it, the nature of the fall into hell, endless horizontal tracking, and occlusion (as well as the meaning and machinery of salvation); thus a coherent and lucid system emerges, and it is this that (oddly, really) is dealt with in Androids: the cruelty toward the spider is paradigmatic of the evil act committed by a debased and in fact soulless pseudo-human creature against God himself, and symbolizes and expresses the total issue. Hence, logically, the figure of Mercer, his ability to restore life, and the empathy factor itself a fortiori. What debased (Androids) man does now against the biosphere is only the final and ultimate act or step that completes the series of falls that began with original sin and the expulsion from the Garden (i.e., true extinct cosmos—note "extinct" as in Androids. The "E" entry in the Guinness animal book).

  [53:H-26] When I reread VALIS recently it was quite clear to me that Valis is YHWH—and what is YHWH if not creator? And what/whom does he create now? Me, maybe; 2-3-74 was my birth into and as a new species. In which case, when I saw the vision of the apes "our friends," I was seeing myself as I am becoming.

  [53:H-27] VALIS states that the universe is information (which we hypostatize as objects and the arrangement of objects). This information is a narrative. We should see it externally and hear it as a neutral voice within us, but do not. This narrative tells of the death of a woman. It is ordered onto the meanest level of reality by the grieving, suffering mind which, being now alone, does not wish to forget her. From grief and loss of her the mind is now irrational. Since we are part of that mind, we, too, are irrational.

  This fits with my Saturday night experience on the telephone with Jeannie, the AI voice as a woman reading a narrative text, and as she read aloud, the universe—our world—comes into being. Thus I have now experienced what I put forth in VALIS. This goes beyond mysticism and beyond religion.

  AI voice: "mystagogic." Definition: One who initiates into or interprets the mysteries, originally the Eleusian mysteries. This would be the AI voice itself; it is mystagogic; it is my mystagogue, explaining the mysteries to me—the woman reading.

  I not only say (in VALIS) that the universe is information but that this information is a narrative, what the narrative is (tells), why, what effect it has on the mind and hence on us. And then last Saturday night I experi enced it (the woman narrating). And only last night (Thursday) did I realize that what I experienced Saturday night with Jeannie is what I reveal in VALIS as the basis not just of the universe but the absolute beyond the universe: the final layer removed. The mystery revealed. How did I know this about the AI voice and the universe? I only found it out—experienced it—last Saturday: the reading of the narrative that creates the universe: "One of the primordial twins [this woman who died long ago]. She was one half of the divine syzygy. The purpose of the narrative is the recollection of her and of her death. The mind does not wish to forget her. Thus the ratiocination of the brain consists of a permanent record of her existence, and, if read, will be understood this way. All the information processed by the brain—experienced by us as the arrangement and rearrangement of physical objects—is an attempt at this preservation of her; stones and rocks and sticks and amoeba are traces of her. The record of her existence and passing is ordered onto the meanest level of reality by the suffering mind which is now alone."

  I have read the writing—or heard it read—that causes our universe to be. I know what the narrative says. And why. I.e., the purpose of the universe (which is information, a narrative).

  (EB, vol. 12, p. 778-G: "mystery religions") "The initiate was called mystes, the introducing person mystagogos (leader of the mystes)." I woke up this morning with the word "mystagogic" in my mind—I thought it was a nonce-word but it is genuine, and, like all the AI voice's xenoglossy, Greek. Clearly the AI voice is referred to. It is my mystagog and initiates me into the Greater Eleusian mysteries, as she reads aloud the narration in the Book of the Spinners.

  Put another way, the sum total of my experiences (2-3-74) are based on her—the AI voice—acting as my mystagog; what I have experienced is initiation into the greater Eleusian mysteries, and these have to do with Dionysus, and, as Hofmann says, seem to involve an LSD or LSD-like paranormal experience.

  "And when a man died, he was buried in the earth to partake mystically in the cyclic renewal of life. This was the message of Eleusis: out of every grave new life grows—for the initiate [myself] there are 'good hopes' for glorious immortality in the afterlife."

  The LSD-like perception of reality in 2-3-74 has to do with the greater Eleusian mysteries; the AI voice now precisely defined itself and what it has revealed to me: the greater mysteries. They pertain to Christ (authentic Christianity as a mystery religion offering immortality); that is, the vertical ascent by the "pulley," in which we are extricated
from our endless horizontal tracking (lifted along an orthogonal axis whose existence we do not suspect).

  [53:I-1] Now 99 million possibilities are discarded, and Eleusis alone remains. The extrication by the pulley along the vertical axis not only permits the 5-D experience of world (3-74) but, more, involves immortality in the Eleusian Fields from which we otherwise are cut off due to the endless horizontal tracking; viz: if we are doomed to track horizontally forever—i.e., in this world, living over and over again—how are we to get to the Eleusian Fields, the Isles of the Blessed?60 The two are mutually contradictory, mutually exclusive. Clearly, "Isle of the Blessed" and "the Eleusian Fields" are Paradiso and Nirvana.

  Folder 54

  February 1982

  [54:J-2] BTA is a narrative told by St. Sophia herself: the AI voice that I heard that night with Jeannie. Always before it latently wrote my books (e.g., Ubik and Tears) but here it/she writes it openly and directly. For did not she as the Sibyl write about Bishop Pike? Saw—wrote: first she saw, then she wrote; so the narrative exists in advance of events because with the third or ajna eye she sees into the future, foresees the events, and then writes them down in the Sibylline books.

  [54:J-3] Thus the Sibyl both writes a narrative that she reads aloud and is simultaneously, paradoxically bound by it—must read what it says. This accounts for both determinism (the latter) and pronoia (the former) and is "the brain that both makes and perceives (receives back as given) reality." The Sibyl is bound by her own writing! Writing what she herself wrote binds her. This explains not only the basis of reality (her reading aloud the narrative) but who wrote the narrative; and it also explains double predestination.

  Thus my "ex nihilo" paradox shows up: here, there is no cause of world, because the effect loops back and is cause of cause.

  Here enters tragedy, as I now define it: confrontation with what one oneself has written and thus ordained for oneself.

  If tragedy is that ineluctable collision with what oneself has writ, what, then, is 3-74?

  [54:J-4] "His voice will be heard in your mind in your own language, but it will seem to come from the TV." When I was listening to "Strawberry Fields Forever"—the contact with Valis, the news about Chrissy's birth defect. I.e., our media and telepathy combined, inner-outer. So there is no way to tell whether the info arises within you or enters from outside; these distinctions are abolished—as I well know from the "Strawberry Fields" experience. And the whole set-ground "temporal parallaxis" may be intrinsic to me, using phosphene patterning-firing; hence, "I am no longer blind!"

  And the radio shrilling obscenely, like a hypnotic cue for me to wake up. Inner? Outer? Our media cooked and ridden—direct mind-to-mind powers but somehow utilizing external info sources (media, e.g., Tears!) but in conjunction with an inner filter or lens or clutch, etc. This is what Ben Creme said.61 Both media and telepathy combined so as to make the Savior universally intelligible. Seen as Krishna by the Hindus, the fifth Buddha, the Messiah. But he is really Christ. And the kingdom of God is already here, but secretly.

  [54:J-5] VALIS: pot, pitcher of water, vase, Krater, limestone font (poros krater), baptismal font. The symbol grows during the book: initially, at the start of chapter 2, we learn (1) of the pot; and (2) that Fat linked up to God through it: "God slumbered in the pot, the little clay pot." Here already the pot and God are connected. Then later, the theme of the pot shows up vis-à-vis Gnosticism. Later, we learn that the Christians achieved immortality by drinking from a pitcher kept in a cool dark place. But the symbol reaches its height following their seeing the movie; now the pot or pitcher appears and reappears in the film; it is taken from the refrigerator by Linda Lampton, and there is the scene in the film in which the barefoot woman "in the long, old-fashioned dress" fills it at the stream—the nearly dried up creek at which the man is fishing. Hence now: pitcher/pot, water, the fish as Christian fish sign—and even, perhaps, the Fisher King, and the double helix design on the pitcher: the DNA molecule: phylogenic knowledge—linked to the Christians via the Christian fish sign by the juxtaposition of the woman (with the pitcher of water) and the man fishing. But this is not all, when Fat returns from his travels the first time he has the 8 x 10 glossy of the Krater, 2,300 years old; the double helix DNA appears as design but it is pre-Christian and has to do with Hermes and signifies wisdom; it emanates from Asklepios and signifies, as the caduceus, a sacred person (who in VALIS—that is Asklepios—is identified with Elijah and Jesus as the immortal one). And here is where "poros krater" and baptismal font are equated. Thus the pot/pitcher/vase/krater extends from pre-Christian times into Christian times and then into now: this last as Oh Ho, the pot in chapter 2 in which God slumbers and which—the clay pot—being Fat's link to God—this is where Fat's entire corpus of experience with God—the theophany itself—begins, and the source of that theophany. And, as the pot symbol evolves during the book, it not only takes on greater and greater depth, complexity and significance but at a certain point indubitably becomes the Aquarian Age icon/symbol per se, in a context in which the Christian fish symbol is necessarily linked to it through the double helix. The Aquarian symbol has lost its astrological basis and become the equal of the Christian fish symbol: connected with the holy, the sacred, with in fact God himself. It precedes the Christian symbol and seems to follow as well.62 The water that it contains seems to be connected with immortality and sacrament—not just baptism but with the blood of Christ. (Upon looking up Krater in the EB I learn that the Krater specifically was a vessel in which wine—i.e., Christ's blood—was diluted with water.)

  "Also, the climate seemed wrong; the air was too dry and too hot: not the right altitude and not the right humidity. Fat had the subjective impression that a moment ago he'd been living in the high, cool, moist (sic!) region of the world" ([>]). Thus the Age of Aquarius breaks into the Piscean age of the Palm Tree Garden, which is dry, even arid, and hot. A new age (epoch) with new and different "laws" now inbreaks, a different world, and it is the 5-D world (that I experienced in 3-74) replacing the 4-D world. And with this new epoch comes the sharing instead of the acquiring competitively, as Benjamin Creme points out; and this precisely is the basis of my entire ethics—in absolute diametric contradistinction to Pisces. Philo's (philanthropia) becomes expressed as voluntary sharing of all that one has; when one does not give (as in giving alms) as an end in itself (viz: aid to the needy), the sharing is the end. (The difference is subtle but crucial.) There is a communal sense (Gemeinschaft); the distinction between you and others vanishes. (As when I not only had Mary's teeth fixed, but found myself thinking, "The main thing is, her teeth are okay"—that struck me at the time as an involuntary and hence authentic articulation of my whole ethics. I have no sense at all of keeping things for myself.)

  [54:J-11] Thinking about Hair—could the outbreak of the counterculture in the 60s have been the intrusion of the Age of Aquarius into the older Age of Pisces for the first time? In which case the Sibyl speaking regarding Nixon, the conspirators, their overthrow ("brought to justice") represents the first invasion by the new age (of Aquarius) into the older age—invasion in revolutionary form, with totally new values! In which case, my intuition of intervention into history, U.S. history (hence world history), is correct, as far as it goes, but much more—a whole—the whole—new epoch is represented, and it is in this new epoch represented by the counterculture that I am politically and ideologically involved!

  Then we are not literally apostolic (i.e., early, authentic) Christians; we are analogous to the early Christians in their revolutionary relationship to the previous age. [...] I did not understand this until Benjamin Crème explained it on Sunday night. All this time—from 2-74 on—I have confused literal apostolic Christians with the transtemporal archetype that pertains equally to the literal early Christians of the time of "Acts" and their equal counterparts c. 1960–1975, hence the compatibility of "Acts" A.D. 70 and California, USA 1974. The "early Christians" that I saw in 2-3-74 were ourselves versus
the regime.

  [54:J-14] But what is pointed to here is that we will not find "the secret apostolic authentic Christian underground" because (1) in one sense it does not exist, not literally; but (2) we are ourselves that group, when seen outside of time, ushering in the third age.

  [54:K-1] There is no doubt that the broad social program foreseen and espoused by Creme is the same as mine . That is settled. Now, several claims are made. (1) The Fifth Buddha is the Second Advent. (2) He is legally "in a large town in a modern country"; one can infer that he was not born there for it is said "he has a visa and a passport," so he merely resides there. He has been on "TV and radio once," speaks weekly (on weekends) to hundreds of followers. He was born July 19, 1977. (3) This spring—within a few months—he will declare himself as the Christ ("The Day of Declaration"), at which point he will be a "familiar face on the TV screen" and will appear on "a worldwide satellite media hookup." (4) He will speak; the Dutch will hear him in Dutch; the French in French, the English in English, etc. The voice will occur directly in the person's mind by telepathy; it is explicit: by telepathy. This will provide that he is the Christ. He is omniscient and omnipresent; he will "overshadow the world, dropping into the zone of silence in the mind [directly]." Curious: he is omnipresent yet incarnate; I have wrestled with this problem. The answer would seem to be the pan-Indian avatar concept. The views, doctrines, and aspirations that he expresses "are already in us; he articulates what we already feel; we say, upon hearing him, 'This is my man'; Buddha to the Buddhists, Krishna to the Hindus, the Messiah to the Jews, whatever to the Muslims, Christ to us," etc. (Very recently the AI voice told me this.)