The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  [54:K-2] If I am schizophrenic, it is odd that my delusional system is precisely and exactly that of Crème including the enlightened social ethics of —it is very hard to regard his social-economic political program—and mine!—as deranged, goddam it.

  [...]

  So we eject ETIs, mutants, Russians, AMORC,63 time travelers, and wind up with theosophy, which yields up the notion of the World Teacher and the great adepts/masters in the Himalayas, the Madam Blavatsky business64; this has several advantages: (1) it would explain my 2-3-74 experiences as super-normal mental (i.e., telepathic) contact with some kind of enlightened or super-evolved spiritual master, "who are the secret invisible government ruling the world for benign purposes." Outside of some explanation like this, Tears cannot be explained. (Why not? Okay; God may be communicating in cypher in popular novels—that is, the source of the cypher may be God, but there is still the issue of the "to whom." Some kind of spiritual but finite group is absolutely pointed to by Tears.)

  [54:K-4] What I'm sitting here contemplating is, yes, Virginia, there is a secret ruling government of perfected adepts possessing colossal paranormal or supernatural spiritual powers, and I do, write, say, and know as they direct, and that's the name of that tune. However: Let us not forget , which to me is the all-in-all. Fortunately, this turns out to be their all-in-all: the ideology of the Aquarian age.

  [54:K-5] The most profound impression upon reading VALIS is conveyed by the pot—God—water—woman—pitcher—double helix—Christian fish sign as soon as you comprehend this as Aquarian iconography like the Pisces fish sign; it literally dominates the book (beginning as it does at the start of chapter 2 and going virtually to the very end, in the form of the 8 x 10 glossy of the Krater). It is as if this is the key and the code—the cypher—of VALIS.

  [...]

  But of quintessential importance is that my comprehension of philanthropia is extricated from the law—i.e., the distant past—and placed fully in the new age that is just now dawning; that is, I extract it as essence—spirit—of the law and project it—not just into the NT, which is the Kerygma of Jesus, but forward into the new age, what Creme calls "sharing." And responding to the expression of need by others. (This presumes extant inequality: those who possess; those who do not; and the obligation on the former by the latter.) This is not (agape); this has to do with social justice as if the anima of the Torah leapfrogged past Christian to contemporary social justice, which is exactly how I see it! has nothing to do with it; it is the anima of the Torah expressed as deed, as act of sharing (not giving but sharing: dividing equitably, without reference to who aggrandized the possessions); need is everything, to tally overruling possession (ownership). Thus the suicidal otherworldly element of Christianity is bypassed in favor of the humane anima of the Torah ("humanity"). It is rational, not affective. The needy one is entitled to this reapportionment based on need itself; there is a direct link to Aries and Judaism. In connection with modern existentialism, the deed is emphasized, not the motive: what is done, not what is felt. The self abnegation of Christianity is revealed as world negating and in a sense romantic and impractical and in fact irrational! Reason as social justice—fairness—replaces sacrifice as an end in itself (giving up one's life for another); the goal is not that the other lives instead, but that both survive equally. This appeals to reason, whereas Christianity is antirational (as a response to both Judaism and Stoicism). As in my "Galina" dream, the fish gives its life—it suffers and voluntarily sacrifices itself—but in the new age, all live equally. Fairness and equitability replace self-sacrifice. "There must be another way (in which the fish is not caused to suffer)"; this is the essence of it. Thus the Aquarian subsumes both the law (Aries) and Christianity (Pisces). This is not world negating (as Christianity is) and yet not selfish; it draws more on the anima of Torah than it does on Christianity, and if this offends you, sorry. In Judaism, I survive, you die. In Christianity, I die, you survive; in the new age we both live through absolute mutuality. Neither of us subordinates himself—or is subordinated—to/for the other. Collective existence; we both survive. Martyrdom is heroic but unnecessary and also antirational. In the age of Pisces the Fish dies—sacrifice itself—so that man may live. A better way must be found. We will no longer consume Christ; we will emulate his wisdom: the cognitive function—Sophia—returns. This—the cognitive function—by returning abolishes the antirational theme in Christianity which is so pernicious. Yet selfishness is equally excluded ... the Ayn Rand/Heinlein egoism. Neither solution is appropriate now; redistribution of wealth and power is what is needed: social justice, not self-interest or sacrifice.

  [54:K-27] [...] Angel Archer, as I recently realized, is the AI Voice directly for the first time expressing itself openly, which is why I can write a novel from the standpoint "of someone more rational, more educated, more—," etc., than I. This mystery is solved; I am nuts, but Angel, the AI voice, is not.

  [54:K-32] It is evident that (1) what B Creme says explains everything; and (2) without his help I would have remained stuck, unable to decide who the Savior is and who speaks to me and what 2-3-74 was all about. All three are the Maitreya Buddha and yet it is Christ and all the rest of them, as I theorized in VALIS. Thus in a real sense the question "who?" is meaningless—but in another sense it is not. The answer is of course there in VALIS: there is "one immortal man" who comes again and again as Savior; but (I think) what I have gained most is the realization that 2-3-74 was both Buddha-consciousness and Christ-consciousness; that is, it was awakening (enlightenment) per se.

  The diamond body.

  Ah—in Act III of Parsifal Wagner was already moving toward a perception of the homology between Christ and the Buddha, and that is what I am responding to, and I did from the start (in particular the Good Friday spell which I think reaches a synthesis above any single religious system). When I realize that I was only in high school when I first began to listen to Parsifal, Act III, I see how early and deeply this has held me ... the atonality of the prelude to Act III. It begins there. The anima enters the modern Western world there, precisely.

  The sound of bells. The Buddha.

  And now I realize how BTA ends: Tim comes back deliberately because he has learned that it all has to do with compassion: he is a bodhisattva and this concept—the bodhisattva—has to do with the Buddha. So the resolution of BTA is: Christ/the Buddha homologized as the bodhisattva (v. especially Barefoot's account of the two little Mexican children versus his moksa about the nature of reality; he chose the former over the latter: compassion over wisdom [[>]]). Thus the VALIS trilogy is ultimately resolved on this note: compassion.

  [54:L-1] 5:20 A.M. moksa: the real burning up of my Karma in 3-74 was not (just or mainly) the relaxation of causality ("astral determinism" in which effect preceded cause), but vis-à-vis the Xerox missive: there the central corpus or thrust of my total Karma—regarded as a unitary whole driving me to distraction, illness and death (and perhaps prison)—was short-circuited: this is Karma to an ultimate degree—absolute Karma—and the absolute canceling of it, as expressed by the "messenger" vision. (Here is clearly justification through grace.) Thus my entire karmic burden was nullified in toto: the debt was paid by transfer of grace, viewed either in terms of Buddhism or Christianity: it is the same. This can be expressed two ways. (1) My IOU was bought up, my debt paid for me (justification through grace). (2) The huge stone gates of the fortress or prison—Klingsor's Castle—opened—parted—and in fact vanished; the maze was solved by the pure fool—me.

  [54:L-3] The maze can never be solved in terms of "horizontal" space, only "vertical" space (involving conversion of time into space).* This is ostensibly Celtic, but below that, as it were, lies pan-Indian thought about karma and maya and most of all compassion—expressed in Parsifal as "pity's [i.e., compassion's] highest power"; the significance of Mitleid in the statement in Parsifal is now explained to me: compassion's highest power is the only power capable of solving the maze, and the recogniti
on of "compassion's highest power" is the essence of Buddhism, i.e., the bodhisattva or Buddha-to-be. VALIS, then, is Celtic (Parsifal, the maze) and Indian (Buddhism), by way of Crete (the dream of the plate of spaghetti and the trident and the elevator)—this last representing vertical ascent or descent: the fourth spatial axis is spiritual space: to rise vertically is to ascend to heaven which also signifies spiritual ascent or enlightenment.

  [54:L-5] Dio. The "here, my son, time turns into space" in Parsifal refers to (1) the maze; and (2) is a solution to the maze. It all comes together in Parsifal, which secretly deals with bodhisattva: Mitleid, hence the Buddha. And karma and Maya. What was precisely not solved in VALIS ("pity's highest power") is at last solved at the end—as the end—of BTA: compassion as the bodhisattva or Buddha to be: viz: one attains Nirvana—release from the maze via the pulley—due to compassion—i.e., Mitleid, which solves the horizontal maze. Pity is the fourth spatial axis. This can be expressed best by: the way back into the maze—what the bodhisattva chooses (to do)—is, paradoxically, the way—the only way—out of the maze.

  And my point is: this was to be the theme of Owl in which he is trapped in the maze and only escapes, actually, rather than seemingly, when he decides voluntarily to return (to resubject himself to the power of the maze) for the sake of these others, still in it. That is, you can never leave alone; to leave you must elect to take the others out; thus Christ said, "Greater love hath no man than that he give up his life for his friend"; this is the cryptic utterance of the soul's solution to the maze, and is the essence of Christianity. Christianity, then, is a system of solution to the maze. Had I written Owl I would have expressed this solution which I had already formulated on a supra-conscious level.

  It is almost all there in VALIS but the specific, crucial solution itself (VALIS states the problem) is at the end of BTA, so the problem is in VALIS and the solution to the problem (as I recently realized) is held back till BTA and then only at the end.

  [54:L-7] So perhaps the truest statement in VALIS is by Lampton when he says that the purpose of Valis is to fire subliminal info/instructions to you as to how to get out of the maze. Deconstructed, this pertains to all the avatars, Christ included. But Gautama most especially in the bodhisattva concept regarding compassion specifically expressed as: voluntarily returning to the maze; that is, the ultimate paradox of the maze, its quintessential ingenuity of construction, is that the only real way out is a voluntary way back in (into it and its power), which is the path of the bodhisattva. The maze, then, is one colossal and absolute Chinese finger trap.

  [54:L-9] Dio—this means that (as I intended to say in Owl) when you think you are out of the maze—i.e., saved—you are in fact still in it. You only actually get out when you seem to be out, think you are out, and voluntarily decide to return! You have to get outside of the maze to get outside of the maze; hence I say that both the maze (the occlusion) and the solution to the maze are self-winding. So in a sense there is no solution once you are in the maze. In a sense the solution is (1) impossible; and (2) acausal.

  And everything is there, but only when all 3 volumes are read.

  If the final paradox of the maze is that the only way you can escape it is voluntarily to go back in (into it), then maybe we are here voluntarily; we came back in. Hence release—to nirvana—consists of: anamnesis. We who are here—or at least, some of us—were once in it before (in my case as Thomas), but we—or I—came back in and am here now. Thus my voluntary return to the maze has already happened, and 2-3-74 was true release. And hence for these reasons came in the form of restored memory—the loss of forgetfulness. Then I did not solve the maze this time; I had already solved the maze by voluntarily coming back in as PKD—and I remembered in 2-74. Thus my salvation was assured not by what I did in this lifetime but by this lifetime as such.

  [54:M-1] So there are two equally correct ways to view the maze:

  (1) it leads out (to Paradiso/nirvana)

  (2) it leads in (to the Grail)

  In case (1) your mystagogue is in the upper realm—i.e., heaven; he has already obtained nirvana himself but returns as a bodhisattva to aid those such as you.

  In case (2) Christ's blood in the Grail speaks to you in dreams; it calls you to it and explains the way.

  [...]

  Total moksa: the mystagogue not only is yourself (out of the maze) but has to be yourself, logically. This is salvador salvandus. It is also my realization that I am becoming Angel Archer who has foreknowledge. But as I move through life, more and more of her foreknowledge becomes hindsight and hence my knowledge; upon my death, Angel and I will be one.

  I cannot retrieve the reasoning that led me to my moksa that not only is the AI voice myself out of the maze but is me necessarily; it has to do with (1) voluntarily returning to the maze in order to be—get—outside the maze; that is, the Chinese finger trap quality of the maze is overcome. And (2) this is how a self-causing (acausal) escape from a self-winding situation not only can occur but must occur; you must be able to do this—advise yourself in the maze from outside the maze—or a fortiori you will never get out. Hence anamnesis. Hence the AI voice. Hence salvador salvandus. Hence I become progressively more and more Angel Archer (the "bright" side of the dialectic: the rational) and less and less H. Fat, the irrational side.

  [54:M-3] VALIS—especially the ending of BTA—is close, but it will take Owl really to nail it down, where he gets out of the maze, voluntarily goes back in—and finds out that his later act of going back in caused his former (prior) release. And if he does not go back in voluntarily, that former, prior release will not—will not have occurred. This explains why my later act vis-à-vis Covenant House changed my former, prior destiny/karma. For under the aspect of eternity, cause-and-effect can, does, and in fact must work this way. So the giving to Covenant House causing a previous event to change (i.e., 2-3-74) is paradigmatic of the closed loop continuum and perturbation of continuum that is built into the two self-winding situations of damnation (lost in the maze forever, i.e., horizontal tracking endlessly) and salvation (the vertical axis or pulley).

  [54:M-8] I just now looked over DI. As I recently realized about VALIS, the dialectic that is the inner life of God—as revealed to Boehme and explicated later by Schelling—and commented on by, e.g., Tillich—is presented as the very basis of the book. In VALIS it is expressed dramatically as world-order in which the irrational confronts the "bright" or rational, designated (properly) logos. In DI this same dialectic reappears and this time is stated to be the two sides of God (rather than world order; that is, in DI it is now correctly seen to be within God himself!): It is now (in DI) between Emmanuel who is the terrible, destroying "solar heat" warring side—and Zina who is loving, playful, tender, associated with bells and flowers; and what unifies the two at last (by the way, it is she who takes the lead in restoring memory and hence unification; Emmanuel is the side that has forgotten—i.e., is impaired; she has not and is not impaired) is play. She plays, and Emmanuel has a secret desire to play.

  So both novels basically deal with the dialectic that I experienced as the nature of Valis and which I construe to be the dynamic inner life of God. If you superimpose both books, then, you get this equation:

  Really, then, DI simply continues the fundamental theme of VALIS—but does not seem to do so—not unless one perceives this theme and what it is (the dialectic that is the dynamic inner life of God). DI is not so loose a sequel to VALIS as it might seem (by, e.g., the shift from Gnosticism, the present, realism, to Kabbala, the future, fantasy).

  [54:M-11] An incredible beauty lies over DI; it is simply wonderful—love and dance and color. I have revealed the beauty of God—ah! And thus: I am of the Sufis!

  DI is at its absolute basis Sufi—and this passes right over to BTA—this is what links DI to BTA. So the dialectic hence YHWH links VALIS to DI, but beauty—Sufism—links DI to BTA. So there is internal order to all three books:

  (1) God.

  (2) Beau
ty. And when the beauty shows up in BTA is especially in connection with Dante in his vision of God: light and color.

  The pink rose. Pink. Valis.

  [54:M-12] The Tagore vision, it being published, will release the marathon runners—start them out with the Godspell, the good news—because it— in contrast to the VALIS trilogy—contains the social justice part which has to do with the "we all survive together as a planet or we all die together," which is the Age of Aquarius doctrine of the Maitreya. The essence of the third dispensation is thus unity and indivisibility of the life of the planet, and, as I say, it is not found in the trilogy.

  [54:M-24] Galactic Pot-Healer shows the very real possibility of encroaching madness. The archetypes are out of control. Water—the ocean itself —which is to say the unconscious, is hostile and rises to engulf. The book is desperate and frightened, and coming apart, dreamlike, cut off more and more from reality. Flight, disorganization: the way has almost run out. Those elements dealt with in earlier novels—ominous elements —now escape my control and take over. What Brunner said, "That one got out of control," is correct and has vast psychological significance.