The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  And yet I did not become psychotic. Why not? What happened?

  Very simply, the meta-abstraction was the birth of higher reason in me, specifically and precisely logos. It was noesis, but, more, it was logos itself. And logos—not just as reason, although it is that—but Christ: Christ as the power of the rational principle itself.

  The dialectic that I experienced in 3-74 was between the irrational and the rational, in me, in world, in God. The rational won.

  The issue is properly stated in VALIS, which shows not only a return of control but is an account of victory—in the form of rationality, of logos itself—over madness; I am not only rational, I also depict as open autobiography, this battle in me and this victory. Ursula is both right and wrong. "Phil Dick is moving toward madness" does not apply to VALIS but to Galactic Pot-Healer; already with Tears and then more so in Scanner reality has reentered; I am again in touch with the real. Judging from the dream in Tears, the archetype of the wise old man (the King) saved me, and he is or represents God. So for me, religion and rationality—that is, the divine in the real, the truly real—are one. It is Christ and it is the rational; it is exactly what I say it is in VALIS: the inbreaking of the rational principle, the logos, into the irrational. But I am talking about my own mind, not world.

  VALIS is, then, the return from madness or near-madness, an account of a prior inner struggle and not a symptom of that struggle still going on. By the time I wrote VALIS the battle had been successfully won; and the proof of this is DI and, most of all, BTA in which Angel Archer is (as I've already realized) the rational principle in me, which is logos, that is to say, Christ itself speaking; the victory by the "bright" side in me is total. Thus I was saved by Christ as the inbreaking of the rational principle, logos or reason itself.

  ***

  [54:M-26] Ursula is right to see me—my mind—as threatened by ominous encroaching madness, but VALIS is a lucid postmortem, a deliberate and rational study, of this issue, this battle, and the victory of the rational in me (expressed as Valis, logos or Christ). The one who sees precisely all this—the battle and the victory and even the cause of the ominous issue or problem (a decade of intense suffering and trial)—is John Clute writing in the Post. I came through it and emerged victorious: but just barely.

  [54:M-29] I guess my realization came (last night) when, after reading Pot and realizing that I did become psychotic, I then picked up Scanner and read here and there. The appalling horror of that book! To go into that from psychosis; that is, how terrible a fate awaited me. What saved me was my love for those people: Luckman (Ray Harris), Jerry Fabin (Dennis) and Donna (Kathy), which ties in with Tears and the scene at the all-night gas station.

  Thinking back to when I wrote Pot: I felt so strongly—and correctly— at the time that when it came time, in writing the book, to have the theophany occur (i.e., for Glimmung to show himself) I had nothing to say, nothing to offer because I knew nothing.65 Oh, and how I sensed this lack of knowledge! And now this is precisely what I do know because now I have experienced it (2-3-74).

  In a way I better depict the 3-74 theophany (of Valis) in DI than in VALIS itself. In any case if you superimpose the two novels it is there—precisely what I lacked when I wrote Pot—and knew I lacked, as a human, as a writer; I had no ideas about the theophany at all, and yet by the time I wrote DI it came easily, that which would not and could not come with Pot; thus in writing Pot that exactly was where I reached the end—wore out and died as a writer; scraped the bottom of the barrel and died creatively and spiritually. What misery that was! Paisley shawl, hoop of water, hoop of fire; how wretched it was; how futile.

  Strange that later (1974) I experienced what I had yearned to know so that I could continue the logical, organic growth and forward development of my writing. That was where I wore out: trying to depict a theophany. And that is what I legitimately later on (in the VALIS trilogy) could do. But oh the years of suffering! And yet—if I became psychotic in writing Pot—if Pot shows signs of psychosis, and it does—it is not because I experienced and knew God but precisely because I did not. And thus the Valis books are the opposite, are sane, are grounded in experience and in reality because by then I had experienced God; hence my creative life (not just my spiritual life) resumed; and with it my sanity. Thus in a very real sense my sanity depended on my experiencing God, because my creative life logically demanded it—and as Eugene said, my sanity depends on my writing.

  What I knew therein, when I tried to depict Glimmung, was my own finiteness, and this boundary and sense of boundary withered my soul and killed me; this is not just a creative crisis alone; it was a total crisis of homo sapiens man who knows. I did not know and began to die.

  And at last—in '74—I came back to life as a human because I then did know. And all the humor and wit and sheer inventiveness of Pot only makes the pain greater. For me, psychosis lay in not knowing God. Conversely, sanity came in knowing God.

  Thus Valis made me acutely, suddenly, and for the first time sane.

  [54:M-32] This, precisely, is the psychosis that manifests itself in Pot: the effort by a finite creature to suppose the divine without actual experience of the divine ends in disorder and incoherence and, as I so realized last night, the truly desperate. Glimmung is absurd and in fact a travesty and I knew it at the time; never was anyone ever so aware of the unbridgeable gap between the finite and the infinite. And this is it; this states it: the finite creature attempting to suppose the infinite and, in failing, becoming deranged. Thus I say now, my psychosis, expressed in my writing, did not enter it from outside the writing; it began in and with the writing itself, for it was in the writing that I reached my limit and could not go on.

  [54:M-34] Here, perhaps, is the distinction between "idios kosmos" and "koinos kosmos." The human mind cannot generate out of itself the infinite, in which case "finitum capax infiniti" is not the proper formulation. The infinite must break in! And this lies within the power of the infinite self: the infinite must take the initiative. Thus the VALIS trilogy represents the inbreaking of the infinite into my life, my mind, my soul and my writing.

  [54:M-35] I am saying, then, several things: first, that the finite creature's hunger for the infinite is such that it will drive itself mad in its search; second, I am saying that this is the cause of my psychosis that began to take over and lasted until 2-74; that (third) I was psychotic until 2-74, as I suspected, but now I see why; and last, that the inbreaking of the infinite "sobers the landscape"; that is, the madness is abolished for what I construe as logical reasons. Drugs did not cause my psychosis; Nancy and Isa leaving did not; normal schizophrenia did not; anxiety and danger and suffering (in particular '71) did not; poverty did not. It was generated by (a) a hun ger for the infinite; and (b) the necessary impossibility of the finite creature discovering the infinite: it can only receive the inbreaking of the infinite.

  [54:M-37] This is really what VALIS is all about, thematically. Then I am saying that the condition normal to us generates a sort of normal madness that I have already and for some time studied: it has to do with a recirculating closed loop in which the mind simply monitors its own thoughts forever and so only knows itself, never really knowing the truly other. Then "infinite" and "truly other" signify one and the same thing; the reason I could not imagine infinite deity is the reason I could not imagine the math-color axis in place of our math-music axis. All this, then, is ultimate epistemology, no more, no less. The meta-abstraction amounts to an authentic comprehension about something other than myself, and it may represent, for me, the first time what I have always called "world" was truly world at all rather than a dubious image emanating from my own psyche. [...]

  In any case the conception of Glimmung and the meta-abstraction are antitheses. They are mutually exclusive. The former is nothing more than that which I as finite thing can suppose: the latter is bona fide knowledge of that which is truly other. In becoming psychotic I simply showed the prisonlike nature of self-generated kno
wledge and what it is like for the inquisitive mind to discover that all it knows is itself over and over again. The realization that it is de facto in hell (cf. my supra theory that hell and the atomization of the lowest ring spatiotemporal world are one and the same; conversely, the "part-whole compatibility" solution that is true cosmos stands as remedy to this, for now the atom comprehends itself within a structure transcending it and thus effectively gets out of itself—abolishes its boundary—and this leads at once back to the meta-abstraction and what it accomplishes).

  So here we have my psychosis defined as "the lethal damage done by the inquiring mind" by the fact that—and its awareness of the fact that (the second point is necessary!)—it knows only itself and seemingly is condemned to know only itself forever, itself and nothing more. This is epistemological hell. Knowledge other than self-knowledge is de facto impossible. Here we see the culmination of years of epistemological doubts—doubts about the nature of—even the reality of—world; suddenly a radical shift occurs: it is not world that is dubitable and tenuous but knowledge of world; the Cartesian premise has set in, and, upon doing so, the mind realizes that it is doomed never to know world. This, then, may be what the BIP symbolizes: the prison of the utter atomization of the spatiotemporal world. At this point the mind despairs and psychosis sets in as the mind frantically seeks to formulate "in the dark" an image, a representation, of the infinite. (Which is impossible; as Malebranche showed. The infinite—God—can only be known directly; there is no such thing as a representation of God/the infinite.) For me, decades of epistemological activity have ended not only in failure but in recognition of failure. And since epistemology is the very basis of my creative, spiritual, artistic and professional life, then I am destroyed ... but, the flip side of this is the meta-abstraction, which not only confers sanity but life itself inasmuch as it reverses the death-dealing condition of ignorance—and here precisely is the ontological value assigned to the diametric categories of ignorance and gnosis in Gnosticism!

  [54:M-40] That Ursula should regard my moment of failure as the moment of my greatest success shows me that it is possible for an intelligent, educated adult to enjoy the prison of atomization we are in; after all, if all you ever experience is yourself you are consummately safe, and I think safety is the summum bonum for Ursula. And, conversely, for her VALIS, in which the prison of Pot is successfully burst, is threatening and offensive and suggests to her madness or the imminent threat of madness. But it is Pot that is either insane or threatened by the engulfing tide of insanity: the dismal ocean depicted in the novel itself: the tomb world of absolute decay. Ursula, then, erred twice, not once, but the errors logically interlock: if she saw Pot as sane, she will see VALIS as insane.

  [54:N-15] Dio—Is VALIS ever a complete success! In terms of articulating the mysteries revealed to me by (1) 2-74–2-75 and (2) the AI voice.

  And I was absolutely right to choose Gnosticism primarily and also Buddhism!

  And it's all predicated on my epistemological suspicions going back to the fifties: That somehow our world is fake.

  [54:N-18] Glancing briefly over the "Tractates" I note two interesting things:

  (1) All the statements in it by the AI voice now at last make sense; that is, I understand them.

  (2) Moreover, they fit into one coherent system and it is an extraordinarily important one. And also:

  (3) The system is a revealed one; on my own (employing both a priori reason and empirical observation) I never would have arrived at it. Therefore:

  (4) I think that this is Gnosticism. That is, not only (sic!) the meta-abstraction but also all that the AI voice has said; without its state ments, on the basis of the meta-abstraction alone, I would never have understood. Therefore:

  (5) When I say, "The AI voice is myself, myself as perfected, realized self, outside of the BIP," what I am referring to is specifically and clearly and very movingly the salvador salvandus. Which again tells me that this is indeed Gnosticism. So I am a spark of the Godhead that got captured by the Dark Kingdom; as I say in the "Tractates":

  "We did not fall because we sinned; our error—which caused our fall—was an intellectual one: we took the phenomenal world—i.e., the 4-D world with its defective space and its spurious time—to be real."

  Salvation, then, initiated by the salvador salvandus who outwits the wardens (the archons) and ventures here from the King of Lights, is to remember—our true nature. And this messenger, this salvador salvandus, is of course who and what I saw and experienced as Valis. It is both my own unfallen self, and it is the Gnostic Christ.

  [54:N-20] I am probably too far into Gnosticism to turn back: the single term "mystagogue" points indubitably to it, and, then, to salvador salvandus. Which in turn fits in with my "bootstrap" view that is a revolutionary reappraisal of what "cause and effect" really signify, that "being saved" means "remembering" (your true identity and true situation and true history)—this at first seems to be Plato's anamnesis but is really Gnostic in the widest sense, knowledge regarded as ontologically primary both in terms of the fallen individual and, more, in terms of cosmic repair. And here, indeed, is the essence of Gnosticism, as H. Jonas says: not that the gnosis saves but, rather, the ontological value and meaning of it, that it is absolutely primary as the real thing, second to nothing. Thus in the final analysis Gnosticism assigns the utmost priority to knowing and thus regards epistemology as equal to the divine; for the Gnostic, epistemological inquiry is in itself—as a search—truly divine, and is the highest basis of and for spiritual life—and this is my view of epistemology a fortiori. To me, nothing is more important.* Thus for me Gnosticism is the inexo rable goal because the premise of Gnosticism is the premise on which my mental life is grounded; so for me to say that "Gnosticism is the solution" is in fact for me to utter a tautology, but it is a meaningful one; it is tautological only in the sense that (upon close inspection) it turns out to be an analytical proposition and not a synthetic one. So for me spiritual, mental life, Gnosticism, epistemology, rationality (in contrast to the irrational) and knowing are all one. And the search is as worthy as the goal; the search is the dynamic life of the mind. It amounts to a procession of mounting growth stages in personal evolution and hence is essential to negentropy, to life itself. To know is to be: not "I think therefore I am" but "I learn therefore I am": there is a difference: learning involves the absorption of negative entropy into oneself from the environment (negentropy expressed as information). And this, maybe, is the heart of the matter. "I write, I learn, I evolve and grow; therefore I am." This, for me, is Gnosticism. Hence this exegesis. It is the very dynamism of my life.

  Folder 57

  February 1982

  [55:O-8]66 I just now glanced over the tractate. In a sense the novel VALIS was a means to get the tractate published—originally I supposed only a private and tiny printing, e.g., by Roy Squires, but because of VALIS it—the tractate—is in mass circulation in the U.S., the U.K., France and possibly Germany. I did it. VALIS is true; Gnosticism is true; what the AI voice says is true; thus I am compelled to believe absolutely and for the first time that, all else proving to be true, the soteriological prophecies must be true, also; so the 5th savior is here: "he has been transplanted and is alive."

  [57:Q-7] Okay. The one billionth fresh start. All of it—2-74–2-75—and what the AI voice has said, and all the revelations and visions—it's all indubitably this: soteriology. That is clear.*

  (1) 2-3-74 per se was soteriological (pronoia and miracle, intervention).

  (2) The "messenger" vision deals with soteriology.

  (3) The "Covenant House" AI statement is soteriological.

  (4) The "pulley" vision is soteriological.

  (5) All the prophecies are soteriological.

  (6) The "parousia and Holy Mother Church" dream is soteriological.

  So whereas the theological structure remains vague (monotheism, or bitheism, Christianity or Judaism or Gnosticism), one thing (as I say) is indubitable:
everything that has happened and that I have been shown, told, every revelation—it's all one vast soteriological engine/program.

  (7) Valis itself is. (Soter).67

  Okay. Then that's it. I can't discern the big picture—God (theology) and the universe (epistemology)—but there is palpable and indubitable (1) individual soteriology directed at me that saved my life, saved me; and (2) general soteriological disclosures involving mankind and Savior.

  So probably the Savior—the 5th Savior—is indeed here. And he will explain the rest.

  [57:Q-10] Because of the reverence for all life that permeates my developing spiritual doctrines, I think I will settle on Buddhism and upon doing that I will assume that the fifth Savior is the Maitreya. Do I not have my Tagore vision?

  [57:Q-14] 2-74: light (sunlight reflected off the golden fish sign).

  3-74 (Valis) light ("beam of pink light" is what I always say, but it was sunlight, as in 2-74, only this time it was the sticker of the fish sign in the living room window.