The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  Both Huxley and Harner treat these core lineages of the Perennial Philosophy as traditions of practice. Initiates at Eleusius had to fast and prepare extensively for their ceremonies; one trains for the insights of these traditions with the intensity and intention of an aging boxer preparing for the fight of his life after a long layoff. The Exegesis offers a reader the sensation of being a unique and individual participant in what Dick, referring to the Roman writer Plotinus's formulation, called "the One." To experience "the One," one must do more than understand these maps of reality; one must in fact intentionally experiment with them oneself and seek to enact what Lethem and Jackson call "mind regarding itself." To achieve this "turnabout in the seat of consciousness" (Lama Govinda) Dick offers a cognitive and spiritual "workout" of epic proportions. Through the practice of writing thousands of pages, PKD was able to periodically dissolve himself into language—what he calls the Logos, the Greek term for both "speech" and "reason." The process reveals an "ecstatic" quality, akin to the union with the divine of Sufi dervishes who dance until they can't remember the difference between themselves and the dance. Core Shamanism, Harner writes, features practices designed to induce this experience of "union with the cosmos" wherein the cosmos itself seems to speak. Harner notes that

  in about 90% of the world, the altered states of consciousness used in shamanism are attained through consciousness-changing tech niques involving a monotonous percussion sound, most typically done with a drum, but also with sticks, rattles, and other instruments. In perhaps 10% of the cultures, shamans use psychedelic drugs to change their state of consciousness.

  Harner himself first learned of the possibility of these experiences in his fieldwork with shamanic intoxicants such as ayahuasca, undertaken in order to understand the worldview of his informants. This may suggest to us how PKD achieved his effects: in addition to "sticks, rattles and other instruments," one can work with the effects of words themselves, whether as a fragment of poetry or as a line of computer code, to shape consciousness and alter our view and experience of reality. In this sense it might be productive to treat the Exegesis as something that needs to be reenacted—simulated—in order to be properly understood. Or treat it as a nearly nine-thousand-page icaro, one of the shamanic songs of the Upper Amazon. Singing it at about three minutes per page would take over four hundred hours, about ten weeks of a full-time job of the sort that a Philip K. Dick character might be trapped within, working at home from his Martian hovel, reading it aloud while the surveillance tapes whirred.

  And while the Exegesis is hardly "monotonous" in the sense intended by Harner, it is astonishingly persistent: each page offers some new variation on the theme of "aha." The theme is: total knowledge is only possible through the paradoxical acceptance of total mystery, an erasure of everything we think we know. Pointing to a mystery integrates PKD thoroughly into this lineage, with the Exegesis his "Stairway to Eleusis" remix of the Perennial Philosophy.

  Following along with him, step by step, insight by insight, just might train us in contemplating our own inner voice as we learn to somehow share a planet on the brink. Twentieth-century British author Evelyn Underhill writes of the long lineage of this "voice" perceived in silence, which recurs through the history of the Perennial Philosophy—through William Blake's experience of the divine as an "intellectual fountain," through French contemplative Lucie-Christine's perception of a synesthetic voice that was at once a "Light, a Drawing, and a Power," through Julian of Norwich who heard and saw the godhead in the "smallest song of the birds." And with the voice comes ecstasy: the literal etymology of "ecstasy" is to become "beside oneself." PKD indeed writes in ecstasy—he is "beside himself" as in the Exegesis he externalizes his experiences into writing and contemplates them, in writing, a mind-regarding-itself. Is this his initiation into the Mysteries? Is it ours?

  Endnotes

  PART ONE

  1. The tachyon is a hypothetical subatomic particle that moves faster than light.

  2. Nikolai Kozyrev; see Glossary.

  3. Peter Fitting, a leftist literary critic. His most important article on Dick, "Ubik: The Deconstruction of Bourgeois SF," appeared in Science Fiction Studies 2, no. 1 (March 1975).

  4. Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) was a Hungarian author on science and the paranormal. The quotation is from his Harper's article "Order from Disorder."

  5. Dn 10:21, 12:1.

  6. Francis Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding in His Times (1968).

  7. A nineteenth-century Irish peasant contacted by Virginia Tighe under hypnotic past-life regression in 1952; hypnotist Morey Bernstein's account was a best-seller.

  8. (German) Yes, yes, there is a savior.

  9. The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas, a 1942 novel about the crucifixion.

  10. The Exegesis is filled with hundreds of diagrams and doodles by Dick. The placement of the images selected for this edition corresponds to their location (folder, page number) in the original manuscript.

  11. William Durant, Caesar and Christ (1944).

  12. Appolonius of Tyana was a neo-Pythagorean philosopher and orator who lived in Asia Minor around the time of Christ.

  13. Philip Purser, "Even Sheep Can Upset Scientific Detachment," London Daily Telegraph, July 19, 1974.

  14. P. D. Ouspensky (1878–1947) was a Russian esoteric philosopher known for his studies of George Gurdjieff and the fourth dimension.

  15. Jn 3:3–8, a passage that recurs frequently throughout the Exegesis.

  16. "For it was fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, blameless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens" (New Revised Standard Version).

  17. "For it is attested of him, 'You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek'" (New Revised Standard Version).

  18. Acts 3:21.

  19. Ellison is quoting the song "Lost in the Stars" from the musical of the same name.

  20. French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, who commissioned Dick to adapt Ubik into a screenplay in 1974.

  21. Jn 16:33.

  22. 1 Cor 15:51.

  23. 1 Cor 15:52.

  24. Johannes Scotus Eriugena (815–877) was a theologian who revived interest in Neoplatonic thought and the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius.

  25. Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) was an American historian, literary critic, and philosopher of technology.

  26. Mt 13:31–33; Lk 13:18–20.

  27. There is no Epistle of Thomas; it is likely that Dick means the apocryphal Acts of Thomas.

  28. A paraphrase of Jn 12:24.

  29. A paraphrase and interpretation based on Rev 22:13–16.

  30. The opening line of a prayer of uncertain origin, but traditionally attributed to Teresa of Avila (1515–1582).

  31. Malcolm Edwards's review of Flow My Tears appeared in Science Fiction Monthly 1, no. 12 (1974).

  32. From William Wordsworth's "Lucy."

  33. Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) was a controversial German psychologist, a student of Freud, and the originator of the notion of orgone energy.

  34. See Jn 1:14.

  35. The New Yorker's brief interview with Dick appeared in the February 3, 1975, issue.

  36. Angus Taylor was the author of the 1973 pamphlet "Philip K. Dick and the Umbrella of Light," an early critical analysis of Dick's work and its religious concerns.

  37. From the Masnavi by Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207–1273), the great Persian Sufi and poet.

  38. Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) was an Austrian mathematician most famous for his two incompleteness theorems.

  39. Song from the 1974 Jefferson Starship album Dragon Fly.

  40. Mu is Japanese for "not" or "nothing" and is featured in the opening case of the Zen koan collection The Gateless Barrier; wu is its Chinese equivalent.

  41. John Allegro (1923–1988) was a controversial British Dead Sea Scrolls scholar and author of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970), which argues on linguistic evidence
that Christianity began as a psychedelic mushroom (Amanita muscaria) cult.

  42. Possibly Joan Baez.

  43. Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) was an American psychologist famous for his concept of "peak experience" and the notion that humans are driven by a "hierarchy of needs."

  44. A Sufi magazine.

  45. Jn 10:34–36 (New English Bible).

  46. A variation of the fish sign that Dick glimpsed during one of his visionary episodes. Whale's Mouth is also the name of the colonist planet in Dick's 1964 story (and 1966 novel) "The Unteleported Man," republished in an expanded form in 1984 as Lies, Inc.

  47. In a later folder, Dick identifies this substance as STP, aka DOM (2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine), a long-lasting, LSD-like psychoactive.

  48. The protagonist of Ubik (1969); see Glossary.

  49. In his Principles of Psychology (1890), American psychologist William James characterizes the world of sense impressions as "one great blooming, buzzing confusion."

  50. Arthur Deikman was a psychologist who wrote about "deautomized" perception in Charles Tart's landmark collection Altered States of Consciousness (1969).

  51. In "The Song of the Happy Shepherd."

  52. Dick explains one of these early childhood references in a February 27, 1975, letter to Claudia Bush not included here: "I knew about the Fish sign, too, the Savior: I called him 'Tunny,' from a del Monte billboard for some canned food. We had to travel under the Oakland Estuary in the Alameda Tube, and I saw the tube like a can; at the end we emerged in the sunlight and I saw the billboard with 'Tunny' on it. I loved ol' Tunny, the great fish...."

  53. 1 Thes 5:2.

  54. Avicenna (980–1037) was an Arabic philosopher and physician who sought to reconcile Islamic doctrine with rational philosophy; he held that God exists above time.

  55. 1 Cor 15:51–52.

  56. The following is prefaced by a handwritten dedication and epigraph: "A Light struck meadow for Tony Hiss & the Real World. Hark! Each tree its silence breaks—Nicholas Brady, 1692."

  57. (Latin) I am seized with fear and trembling until the trial is at hand and the wrath to come: when the heavens and earth shall be shaken. (From the Libera Me of the Requiem Mass of the Roman Catholic Church.)

  58. In his 1967 story "Faith of Our Fathers," Dick attributes this quatrain to the thirteenth-century Arabian poet Baha' al-din Zuhair; he most likely came across the poem, unattributed, in E. P. Mathers's translation of the Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night.

  59. (Latin) Death and nature will marvel. (From the Dies Irae of the Requiem Mass.)

  60. See note 46, page 100.

  61. A set of logic problems thought to have been devised by Zeno of Elea (490–430 B.C.) to support Parmenides' belief that change and motion are illusions.

  62. Characters in Wagner's Parsifal.

  63. See Glossary.

  64. Pulkovo was the Russian observatory where Nikolai Kozyrev carried out some of his research.

  65. William James (1842–1910) was the American psychologist and philosopher who wrote the landmark book The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).

  66. (German) Christ lay in the bonds of death. (Bach's Cantata BWV 4, Christ lag in Todes Banden.)

  67. Two hemispheres of metal designed by German scientist Otto von Guericke in 1650 to demonstrate the air pump; used by Indologist Heinrich Zimmer in The King and the Corpse (1956) to compare the relationship of inner and outer worlds.

  68. This term originates with the International Community of Christ (ICC), which teaches that the sun's light carries coded information. This and other terms in this entry are taken from The Decoded New Testament (1974) by Gene Savoy, head bishop of the ICC.

  69. "Trust Your Body Rhythms," Psychology Today (April 1975).

  70. Two of the eight trigrams, corresponding to Earth and Lake, respectively, that form the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching.

  71. The Catholic Agitator is the newspaper published by the Los Angeles Worker Community, a politically progressive, service-oriented group founded in 1970.

  72. The Aeneid, Book IV.

  73. "Leda and the Swan."

  74. 1 Kgs 17:17–18:40.

  75. Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) was an author and religious scholar who popularized a Jungian interpretation of world mythology in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) and other books.

  76. Polish mathematician Herman Minkowski (1864–1909) argued that the universe is an absolute, four-dimensional structure in which past, present, and future coexist.

  77. Rollo May (1909–1994) was an American existential psychologist whose edited anthology Existence included material by Ludwig Binswanger, the source for Dick's notion of the "tomb world."

  78. A small apocalyptic Protestant sect focused on Elijah, founded in the late eighteenth century in Rochester, New York.

  79. International Community of Christ (see note 68, page 148).

  80. A posthumously published H. P. Lovecraft novella whose hero is possessed by a deceased ancestor.

  81. The Gospel of Thomas, saying 77.

  82. Most likely a reference to Oberon's line in A Midsummer Night's Dream, act IV, scene 1: "Welcome, good Robin./See'st thou this sweet sight?"

  83. Saying 22: "When you make the two one, and when you make the inside as the outside, and the outside as the inside, and the upper side as the lower; and when you make the male and the female into a single one, that the male be not male and the female female; when you make eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then shall you enter [the kingdom]."

  84. Ps 118:22; Mt 21:42; Mk 12:10; Lk 20:17; Acts 4:11; 1 Pet 2:7.

  85. Most likely a reference to the figure-ground relationship in Gestalt perception theory; its ambivalence is demonstrated in the famous young woman–old hag image.

  86. Mt 18:3; Mk 10:14.

  87. Gospel of Thomas, saying 77.

  88. 1 Kgs 19:12.

  89. From Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard."

  90. A telepathic Ganymedean slime mold in Dick's novel Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964); he argues that caritas is the highest human value.

  91. The 1975 supernatural film The Reincarnation of Peter Proud.

  92. Mutual Broadcasting System, an American radio network.

  93. See note 76, page 158.

  94. (German) Wake up. (The phrase is drawn from Bach's Cantata BWV 140, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme; Dick's original title for the novel The Crack in Space (1966) was "Cantata 140.")

  95. Jn 16:20.

  96. The Dark Night of the Soul is a devotional treatise by St. John of the Cross (1542–1591).

  97. Jung discusses Eckhart extensively in Psychological Types ([1921] 1971).

  98. Is 9:6.

  99. Dt 31:6; Heb 13:5.

  100. 1 Kgs 18:8.

  101. I Ching hexagram 33 (Tun) changing into 53 (Chien).

  102. I Ching hexagram Ming I, the ominous "Darkening of the Light."

  103. 1 Cor 15:51.

  104. Heinrich Zimmer (1890–1943), an Indologist and friend of Jung whose work emphasized the transformative power of mythological symbols; see note 67, page 147.

  105. John Weir Perry (1914–1988) was a Jungian psychotherapist who argued that the reorganization of the self sometimes requires psychosis, which should therefore not be pathologized.

  106. Sociologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939) developed the notion of "participation mystique" to describe the "mystical" fusion with objects; the concept was also used by Jung.

  107. 1 Cor 15:35–56.

  108. The Creative (heaven); one of eight I Ching trigrams.

  109. Jehovah's Witnesses.

  110. Dickian plural of krasis (Greek). See Glossary.

  111. This snippet view of philosopher and Christian writer Sûren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) is from the Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on "Existentialism."

  112. A paraphrase of Mk 3:21.


  113. "Dionysus in America" is a 1975 essay on the American counterculture by literary critic Eric Mottram, collected in Blood on the Nash Ambassador (1989).

  114. Jesus curses a fig tree and causes it to wither in Mt 21:18–21 and Mk 11:12–21.

  115. Simon Magus, or Simon the Magician, a figure from the apostolic period who appears in Acts 8:9–24 and is traditionally associated with Christian heresy.

  116. The Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, an American Rosicrucian Order established in 1915 in San Jose, California, whose advertisements appeared in many popular magazines in the 1960s and 1970s.

  PART TWO

  1. See Glossary.

  2. See note 3, page 6.

  3. See note 36, page 73.

  4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Brahma."

  5. "Greater Than Gods," Astounding Science Fiction (July 1939).

  6. See note 87, page 173.

  7. See note 37, page 76.

  8. (German) What have I seen?

  9. Col 1:13.

  10. These represent Wind and Fire, respectively.

  11. (German) Father! Help! Oh my!

  12. See note 105, page 194.

  13. See annotation, page 52.

  14. (Latin) Horse of god, who takes away the bad luck of the world, my friend—save me, lord. (An original prayer based on the Gloria from the Latin liturgy.)

  15. (German) Brothers! The king comes!

  16. Protagonist of Ubik (1966); see Ubik in Glossary.

  17. In 1977, Dick gave a famously consternating speech at a science-fiction convention in Metz, France, later published under the title "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others."

  18. Heraclitus, fragment 93.

  19. An allusion to the Golden Section; see Glossary.

  20. See http://www.philipkdick.com/covers/scanner.jpg.