The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  cybernetic: Term coined by Norbert Wiener for the science of communication and control in human and machine systems; earlier coined by the French scientist André-Marie Ampère to denote "political science." Wiener drew the term from the ancient Greek term kybernetes, for "steersman" or the "art of steering."

  Dasein (German): Martin Heidegger's term for being, especially human being.

  Deus Absconditus (Latin): Hidden God. The term comes from Isaiah 45:15 in the Vulgate.

  Deus sive substantia sive natura (Latin): A dictum of Spinoza on the unity of God and nature; in an interview, Dick translated this concept as "God, i.e., reality, i.e., nature."

  dibba cakkhu (Pali): The divine eye, one of the six features of higher or enlightened knowing described in the Pali Buddhist canon.

  Dionysus, also Dionysos: The Greek god of wine, vegetation, and ritual ecstasy. His death and resurrection were important in a number of mystery religions.

  Ditheon: A neologism Dick develops in later Exegesis entries to describe the life form that results from the union of two minds within a single body. Similar to homoplasmate.

  dokos (Greek): Deception, lack of true perception. Dick employs this term as a cognate for maya.

  Eckhart, Meister (1260–1327): A Dominican scholar and preacher whose radical mystical teachings, which stressed the immediate presence of God in the individual soul, were condemned by Pope John XXII shortly before he died.

  eidos, eidola, sometimes misspelled edola (Greek): Ultimate form or idea. In Platonic philosophy, the forms constitute the world of ideas, which in turn are the source of all being.

  Eigenwelt (German): The inner realm. One of the three types of world described by the existentialist psychologist Ludwig Binswanger; see Mitwelt and Umwelt.

  einai (Greek): From the Aristotelian phrase to ti en einai (roughly, "the what-it-was-to-be"): the eternal essence of a thing.

  Eleusinian Mysteries: The most important of the ancient mystery religions, these secret initiation ceremonies were held annually in ancient Greece for over a millennium. "The Hymn to Demeter" is the only existing textual source for the rites, which centered on the story of Persephone's abduction into the Underworld. In The Road to Eleusis (1978), Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl Ruck advance the theory that psychedelic substances were used to produce the transformative effects of the rites.

  Empedocles (c. 490–430 B.C.E.): Pre-Socratic philosopher and naturalist. Empedocles theorized that change in the universe is the result of the interaction between the forces of love and strife. The last philosopher to write his work in verse, Empedocles has been described by some scholars as a shaman as much as a philosopher.

  enantiodromia (Greek): Sudden transformation into an opposite form or tendency. The term was used by Heraclitus, but Dick was probably exposed to it through his reading of C.G. Jung, who employs the term to describe the psyche's tendency to overcome deep-seated resistance, es pecially to the unconscious, by shifting (seemingly suddenly) to the opposite pole of an attitude, belief, or emotion. Dick also sometimes uses the term flip-flop.

  Encyclopedia Britannica, EB, or Brit 3: In late 1974, Dick purchased a set of the newly released fifteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, also known as the Britannica 3. The encyclopedia is divided into three sections: the one-volume Propedia (a general outline of all human knowledge), the twelve-volume Micropedia (containing brief reference entries), and the seventeen-volume Macropedia (containing in-depth articles on important subjects).

  Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or E. of Phil.: Edited by Paul Edwards and still admired today, this is a major reference work for the Exegesis. According to VALIS, Dick was using the eight-volume work published in 1967 by Macmillan rather than the four-volume 1972 reprint.

  engram: The biophysical imprint of events on memory. An important word in Dianetics, where it refers to the "recordings" stored in the reactive mind, the term is generally used in the Exegesis to denote the latent patterns that predispose the mind to respond to the trigger events that produce anamnesis. In VALIS (1981), Dick uses engram to describe a ritual in which Thomas prepares to "reconstitute himself after his physical death."

  entelechy: A term in Aristotelian thought meaning fully developed or actualized. In his use of the term, Dick also reflects the work of German philosopher Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch, who used entelechy to indicate a life force distinct from the physical body.

  epistemology: The philosophy of knowledge, dealing with what knowledge is, how it is acquired, and how we know what we know. Sometimes contrasted with ontology, which philosophically studies the nature of being and the existence of things.

  Erasmus (1466–1536): Dutch Catholic priest, theologian, Renaissance humanist, and satirist. Perhaps best known for his essay The Praise of Folly (1509), which mocks the superstitious errors and absurdities derived from Catholic doctrine and practice.

  Essenes: A Jewish sect, active from roughly the second century B.C.E. to the end of the first century C.E., that held messianic and apocalyptic beliefs and engaged in ascetic practices. It is generally believed that the Dead Sea Scrolls were the library of a community of Essenes; John the Baptist was likely to have been influenced by them. See Qumran Scrolls.

  ETI: Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.

  Firebright: One of Dick's terms for ultimate, living wisdom; see plasmate.

  Fremd (German, English): Strange (adjective) or stranger (noun); both rarely used.

  "Frozen Journey": Original name for the story "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" (1980).

  GABA fluid: Gamma aminobutyric acid, an endogenous inhibitory neurotransmitter in the human nervous system. Some studies show that increased levels may reduce the mental decline associated with aging.

  Galápagos turtle: In a 1981 interview with Gregg Rickman, Dick describes a nature documentary he viewed in the 1960s in which a female Galápagos turtle crawled the wrong direction after laying her eggs in the sand and began to die from exposure while still moving her limbs. That night Dick heard a voice tell him that the turtle believed that she had made it back to the ocean, adding, "And she shall see the sea." It was one of Dick's few experiences with the "AI Voice" previous to 2-3-74. A supposed Reuters news item about the death of an old Galápagos turtle provides the epigraph for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968).

  Gestalt: A German term describing an entity's holistic essence or form. Gestalt psychology attempts to characterize how our minds and brains select whole forms from a background of possible partial perceptions; this relationship is characterized as "figure" and "ground," which Dick generally recasts as "set" and "ground."

  Gnosis, Gnostic (Greek): Knowledge. The term Gnostic, which is controversial among scholars, describes a wide range of religious sects of the ancient world. Broadly speaking, these sects believed in a strong dualism of matter and spirit, often holding that the material world was a prison or trap for the soul associated with an inferior creator, or demiurge. The attainment of secret knowledge (gnosis) was proscribed as the means of salvation. The Nag Hammadi library was an important group of Gnostic texts discovered in 1945.

  golden fish: On February 20, 1974, a young woman working for a local pharmacy delivered a bottle of prescription Darvon tablets to Dick's apartment in Fullerton, California. She was wearing a necklace with a golden fish pendant, an ancient Christian symbol that had been resurrected by the countercultural "Jesus movement" in the late 1960s. According to Dick, the sight of the emblem triggered the events of 2-3-74; he connected the design with other figures, including DNA's double helix and the human eye.

  golden rectangle, also golden section: Figures associated with the golden ratio or divine mean, a mathematical pattern of relationship that has been recognized since Pythagoras. The golden ratio (an irrational number approximate to 1:618034) occurs when the ratio between the sum of two unequal quantities and the larger quantity is equivalent to the ratio between the larger quantity and the smaller. Geometric plotting of the recursive Fibonacci sequence
also produces the golden rectangle, as does the growth of a nautilus shell.

  Hartshorne, Charles (1897–2000): American philosopher and theologian who developed the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead into process theology, which emphasizes the relationship between an ever-changing God and a creation in constant development.

  Hegel, G.W.F. (1770–1831): German philosopher of dialectical idealism. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit offers readers an epic quest toward self-understanding as the thinker explores the limits and dynamics of rational thought learning to reflect on and comprehend itself. Hegel's dialectic was influential on Karl Marx, who famously "turned Hegel on his head" with the invention of dialectical materialism.

  Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976): German philosopher whose work attempted to overcome what he perceived as the "forgetfulness of being" in the history of philosophy. Heidegger argued that habits of thought inherited from the Greeks induce human beings to focus on "beings" rather than "being"—particular entities rather than that which enables entities to exist at all. Heidegger's conception of Dasein, or "being-there," distinguished between the activity of being and a subject or a self—the center of philosophical analysis since René Descartes. Heidegger is the most referenced twentieth-century philosopher in the Exegesis.

  heimarmene (Greek): Fate, or the personification of fate; for Dick, also the deluding, entrapping power of spurious everyday reality.

  Heraclitus (c. 535–475 B.C.E.): Ancient Greek philosopher from Asia Minor. The most dynamic of the pre-Socratics, Heraclitus comes down to us through a collection of fragments that radiate a vision of reality in which all is change, opposites coincide, and fire is the essential process at the heart of the world flux.

  hermetic: An important strand of Western esoteric thought and experience, hermeticism derives from the Corpus hermeticum, a set of texts from late antiquity whose mystical and magical philosophy is perhaps best summarized in the famous dictum from the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus: "As above, so below."

  homeostasis: The stable, balanced condition maintained by a dynamical system regulating its own development through time; usually, a living organism regularly adjusting itself to changing environmental conditions.

  homoplasmate: A Dickian neologism describing a human being who has cross-bonded with an influx of living information bestowed or transmitted by a higher source of wisdom. See plasmate.

  Ho On, or Oh Ho: The name of a clay pot made for Dick by a friend. In an early hypnagogic vision, Dick heard the pot, which identified itself as "Oh Ho," speak to him in a brash, irritable tone about spiritual matters. Later, Dick theorized that the name "Oh Ho" might be related to the Greek phrase Ho On, meaning "He Who." The phrase "ho on" appears in Exodus 3:14, when God identifies himself as "I AM WHO I AM" (in the Greek of the Septuagint, Ego eimi ho on).

  hylozoism: The belief or philosophical proposition that material things can be alive, or that life and matter are inseparable.

  hypnagogic, or hypnogogic; and hypnopompic: Hallucinations, both visual and auditory, that occur on the boundary of sleep and often feature a significant and sometimes alarming sense of reality. Hypnagogic hallucinations occur while one is falling asleep, hypnopompic hallucinations while one is waking.

  hypostasis (Greek): Literally, "beneath-standing" or "underpinning." A term for the basic reality of a thing in Greek philosophy. Plotinus used it to describe the three principles that underlie phenomenal reality: the One, the noös, and the World Soul, or Logos. The term was also batted around within the ecumenical councils as they tried to clarify the nature of the Trinity.

  I Ching: An ancient Chinese text used as a tool for divination. The Book of Changes is based on a binary system of broken (yin) and unbroken (yang) lines; six such lines make up a symbolic hexagram linked to various commentaries. Dick, who owned the original two-volume Bollingen edition of the Wilhelm/Baynes translation, consulted the I Ching frequently and claimed to have used it to resolve turning points in the plot of The Man in the High Castle (1962), which also features an oracular book written using the I Ching.

  idios kosmos and koinos kosmos (Greek): Literally, "private world" and "communal world," respectively. The two phrases come from fragment 89 of Heraclitus: "The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own." In Dick's scheme, it is often used to contrast an individual's reality system from collective social reality.

  I-It and I-Thou relationship: Terms, taken from Martin Buber's I and Thou (1923), describing two forms of relationship. In the first, the individual treats the world and other individuals as objects with use value; in the second, the individual enters true relationship with the world and other individuals as other subjects rather than objects. Buber conceives the latter form of relationship as the model of God's interaction with the world.

  Isidore, Jack: Protagonist of Dick's novel Confessions of a Crap Artist (written around 1960; published 1975). Isidore engages in relentless amateur scientific inquiry, not unlike Dick's practice in the Exegesis.

  James-James: Evil or deranged demiurgic figure that Dick encountered in a dream in 1974 or 1975; described in chapter 18 of Radio Free Albemuth (1985).

  Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202). Theologian and mystic from Sicily. His concept of the three ages of history, which posits an imminent "Age of the Holy Spirit" when God will communicate directly with humanity without the mediation of the clergy, helped fuel a number of millenarian, utopian, and radical ideas and movements, including Marxism.

  Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804): German philosopher whose transcendental idealism sought to integrate knowledge based on experience (empiricism) with knowledge based on reason (for example, mathematics). Kant called for and in many ways achieved a "Copernican revolution" in philosophy by placing the modes of human perception at the center of inquiry; for Kant the structures of the human mind order the sense data of experience, limiting our ability to apprehend the Ding an sich, the thing-in-itself.

  kerygma (Greek): Preaching or pronouncement, especially of the message of Christ contained in the New Testament.

  King Felix: A two-word "cypher" that Dick discovered in the text of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). On page 218 of the Doubleday hardcover, in the section describing Felix Buckman's visionary dream, the words king and Felix appear vertically juxtaposed between two lines of text. Dick became convinced that this happenstance phrase had a secret meaning and would be read and recognized by people or forces unknown. "Felix" is Latin for "fortunate" or "happy."

  Kozyrev, Nikolai, NK, or Dr. NK (1908–1983): Russian astrophysicist who carried out research at the Pulkovo Observatory. His 1967 article "Possibility of Experimental Study of the Properties of Time" theorizes that time is a force with active causal properties.

  Krasis (Greek): Blending or mixture; used by the pre-Socratic philosophers Empedocles and Anaxagoras in their accounts of the creation of the material world.

  Lem, Stanislaw (1921–2006): Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy, and satire. Contributed "Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans" to Science Fiction Studies in 1975, an article that praised Dick and especially Ubik (1968). The two corresponded, and Lem worked on a Polish translation of Ubik.

  Liebniz, Gottfried (1646–1716): A German mathematician and philosopher who contributed significantly to the development of mechanical calculators, infinitesimal calculus, and binary mathematics (whose anticipation in the I Ching he recognized). His notion of the monad was important to Dick.

  Logos (Greek): Word, account, reason. Heraclitus used the word in the sense of order; in Christianity, an important tradition derives from the Gospel of John, in whose first lines Christ is identified as the Logos, the eternal "Word" or "Reason" of the cosmos through whom God created the universe.

  ma'at: Ancient Egyptian concept of truth, balance, and law; also personified as a goddess.

  macrometasomakosmos, also MMSK: Dick's term for the ultimate, genuine structure of reality; a cognate for
the Platonic world of ideas. In terms of its Greek roots, this neologism breaks down into Great-Ultimate-Body-of-the-Cosmos.

  Maitreya (Sanskrit): The future Buddha foretold in Buddhist eschatology. In the late nineteenth century, the Theosophists began using the term to describe a coming World Teacher, and the term appears in a variety of New Age movements.

  Malebranche, Nicolas (1638–1715): French philosopher and natural scientist who synthesized Cartesian philosophy with Augustinian thought. Malebranche held that we see external objects by means of ideas in God's mind; he also embraced the doctrine of occasionalism, which holds that God is the only real cause of all action.

  Mani (c. 216–276 C.E.): The prophet and founder of Manichaeism, a syncretistic religion that combined Zoroastrian and Gnostic ideas and became one of the most dominant religions in the world between the third and seventh centuries. Sharply dualistic, Manichaeism held that the material world is a realm of darkness from which spiritual light must be extracted through ritual and practice.

  Marxism: Political philosophy and social movement based on the writings of German political economist Karl Marx (1818–1883). Anticipating the intensification of capitalism's internal contradictions, and calling for a revolutionary awareness among the working classes, Marx prophesied the end of the capitalist world order and the emergence of a classless society.

  maya (Sanskrit): Illusion, especially the illusion of the phenomenal world; sometimes also considered an aspect of the Divine Mother.

  Maze: A dark Gnostic fable also inspired by the Bardo Thödol, A Maze of Death (1970) tells the story of fourteen colonists who emigrate to the planet Delmak-0, only to be murdered, one by one. It emerges that the colonists are immersed in a computer simulation they are running to distract themselves from despair as their failed spaceship orbits a dead star. Delmak-0's digitally programmed religion represents Dick's most developed theological systematizing prior to 2-3-74, and it closes with arguably the most explicit theophany in any Dick novel.