The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  Hans Driesch (1867-1941). "My soul and my entelechy are One in the sphere of the Absolute." And it is at the level of the Absolute only that we can speak of "psychophysical interaction." But the Absolute, so understood, transcends all possibilities of our knowing, and it is "an error to take, as did Hegel, the sum of its traces for the Whole." All considerations of normal mental life lead us only to the threshold of the unconscious; it is in dreamlike and certain abnormal cases of mental life that we encounter "the depths of our soul."... My sense of duty indicates the general direction of the suprapersonal development. The ultimate goal, however, remains unknown. From this point of view, history took on its particular meaning for Driesch. Throughout his work Driesch's orientation is intended to be essentially empirical. Any argument concerning the nature of the ultimately Real will therefore have to be hypothetical only. It starts with the affirmation of the "given" as consequent of a conjectural "ground." His guiding principle in the realm of metaphysics amounts to this: The Real that I posit must be so constituted that it implicitly posits all our experiences. If we can conceive and posit such a Real, then all laws of nature, and all true principles and formulas of the sciences, will merge into it, and all our experiences will be "explained" by it. And since our experience is a mixture of wholeness (the organic and the mental realms) and nonwholeness (the material world), Reality itself must be such that I can posit a dualistic foundation of the totality of my experience. In fact, to bridge -- aw fuck. In fact, there is nothing -- not even within the ultimately Real -- to bridge the gap between wholeness and nonwholeness. And this means, for Driesch, that ultimately there is either God and "non-God," or a dualism within God himself. To put it differently, either the theism of the Judeo-Christian tradition or a pantheism of a God continually "making himself" and transcending his own earlier stages is ultimately reconcilable with the facts of experience. Driesch himself found it impossible to decide between these alternatives. He was sure, however, that a materialistic-mechanistic monism would not do (Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 2).

  It would appear that Bohme and T -- I'm at the end of my rope; I can't even type, let alone think. That Bohme and Driesch are talking about the same thing, and that both are process philosophers (or theologians, like Whitehead). Both stress dialectic quality in God; Driesch sees the dialectic working itself out in history. This is almost certainly the dialectic that I saw during my March 1974 revelations, and I am willing to admit that it is certainly possible that the blind, dark counterplayer against which the vitalistic good element worked could be "God's own earlier stages," as Driesch viewed it. One thing I like about Driesch is the fact that at a certain point he simply said, "I don't know." That's where I'm at and have been at for a long time; I just do not know. God created everything; evil exists as part of the everything; therefore God is the source of evil -- that is the logic, and in monotheism there is no escape from this argument. If you posit two (or more) gods, including an evil god, you have the problem of, Where did it come from? But that problem exists for monotheism, too; if there is only one god, where did he come from? Answer: from the same place the two gods of dualism came from. In other words, I see this problem of origin as equally difficult for monotheism to answer as it is for a dualism. We just don't know.

  If we regard evil as simply earlier stages of a god in process, which he is working to overcome -- well, that does fit my own personal revelations, and is syntonic to me. I was shown how the whole thing works but I did not comprehend what I was seeing; they were showing it to Mortimer Snerd. I did have the feeling that I was witnessing a cosmic two-person board game, with our world as the board, and that one side (the winning side) was benign, and the other was neither winning nor was it benign; it was just very powerful, but hindered by the fact that it was blind. The good side possessed absolute wisdom, could therefore absolutely foresee the future, and could lay down moves long in advance of payoffs that the evil, blind, dark counterplayer could not anticipate. It was an encouraging vision. In every trick the good won; it beat the dark antagonist unerringly. What more could I ask from an Ultimate Vision of Absolute Total Reality? What more do I need to know? The score reads: Evil zero; Good infinity. Let me stop there, satisfied; the final tally is explicit.

  "The Tagore Letter" (1981)

  All the people who read my recent novel Valis know that I have an alter ego named Horselover Fat, who experiences divine revelations (or so he thinks; they could be merely hallucinations, as Fat's friends believe). Valis ends with Fat searching the world for the new savior, who, he has been told by a mysterious voice, is about to be born. Well, Fat has had another vision, the one he was waiting for. He got me to write this as a way of telling the world -- the readership of Niekas, more precisely -- about it. Poor Fat! His madness is complete now, for he supposes that in his vision he actually saw the new savior.

  I asked Fat if he was sure he wanted to talk about this, since he would only be proving the pathology of his condition. He replied, "No, Phil; they'll think it's you." Damn you, Fat, for putting me in this double bind. Okay; your vision, if true, is overwhelmingly important; if spurious, well, what the hell. I will say about it that it has a curiously practical ring; it does not deal with another world but this world, and extreme is its message -- extreme in the sense that if true we are faced with a grave and urgent situation. So let 'er rip, Fat.

  The new savior was born in -- or now lives in -- Ceylon (Sir Lanka). He is dark-skinned and either a Buddhist or Hindu. He works in the rural countryside with an organization or institute practicing high-technology veterinarian medicine, mainly with large animals such as cattle (most of the staff are white). His name is Tagore something; Fat could not catch his last name: It is very long. Although Tagore is the second reincarnation of Christ, he is taken to be Lord Krishna by the local population. Tagore is burned and crippled; he cannot walk but must be carried. As near as Fat could make out, Tagore is dying, but he is dying voluntarily: Tagore has taken upon himself mankind's sins against the ecosphere. Most of all it is the dumping of toxic wastes into the oceans of the world that shows up on Tagore's body as serious burns. Tagore's kerygma [teaching], which is the Third Dispensation (following the Mosaic and Christian), is: The ecosphere is holy and must be preserved, protected, venerated, and cherished -- as a unity: not the life of individual men or individual animals but the ecosphere as a single indivisible unitary whole, a life chain that is being destroyed, and not just temporarily but for all time. The demonic trinity against which Tagore speaks -- and that is wounding and killing him -- consists of nuclear wastes, nuclear weapons, and nuclear power (reactors); they constitute the enemy that not only may destroy the ecosphere but already, as toxic wastes, are destroying it now. So again Christ acts out his role of vicarious atonement; he takes upon himself man's sins. But these sins are real, not doctrine sins. Tagore teaches that if we destroy the ecosphere much more, Holy Wisdom, the Wisdom of God (represented by Tagore himself), will abandon man to his fate, and that fate is doom.

  Tagore teaches that when the ecosphere is burned, God himself is burned, for the Christ has invaded the ecosphere and invisibly assimilated it to himself through transubstantiation -- which is the great vision Horselover Fat has in my novel Valis. Thus Christ and the ecosphere are either one or rapidly becoming one -- much as Teilhard de Chardin describes in The Phenomenon of Man. The ecosphere does not evolve into the Cosmic Christ, however; Christ penetrates it, which is exactly what Fat saw and that so amazed him. Thus Christ now speaks out -- not just for the salvation of mankind or certain men, "the elect" -- but for the ecosphere as a whole, from the snail darter on up. This is a systems concept and was beyond their vocabulary in apostolic times; it has to do with the indivisibility of all life on this planet, as if this planet itself were alive. And Christ is both the soma [the body] and psyche (the head) of that collective life. Hence the ultimate statement by Tagore -- expressed by his voluntary passion and death -- is, He who wounds the ecosphere wounds God, literally. Thus a ma
crocrucifixion is taking place now, in and as our world, but we do not see it; Tagore, the new incarnation in human form of the Logos, tells us this in order to appeal to us to stop. If we continue we will lose God's Presence and, finally, we will lose our own physical lives. The oceans especially are menaced; Tagore speaks of this most urgently. When each canister of radioactive waste is dumped into the ocean, a new stigma appears on Tagore's terribly burned, seared legs. Fat was horrified by the sight of these burns, the legs of the savior drawn up in pain. Fat did not see Tagore's face, only his tragically burned body, and yet (Fat tells me) there was an ineffable sweetness about Tagore "like music and perfume and colors," as Fat phrased it to me. Burned as he is, wounded and dying as he is, Tagore nonetheless emits only loving beauty, absolute beauty, not relative beauty. It was a sight that Fat will never forget. I wish I could have shared it, but I had better things to do: watch TV and play electronic computer games. All that good stuff by which we fritter away our lives, while the ecosphere, wounded and in pain and in mortal danger, cries out for our help.

  Part Six. Selections from the Exegesis

  All of the selections are published here for the first time. Two of these selections were given titles by Dick -- a rarity in the Exegesis as a whole.

  "Outline in Abstract Form of a New Model of Reality Updating Historic Models, in Particular Those of Gnosticism and Christianity" (1977) is credited, by Dick, as being the joint work of himself and his friend SF writer K. W. Jeter. Jeter recalls that while the ideas emerged in the course of conversation between them, the writing is by Dick alone.

  The final selection herein -- "The Ultra Hidden (Cryptic) Doctrine: The Secret Meaning of the Great System of Theosophy of the World, Openly Revealed for the First Time" -- is the longest Exegesis entry published to date. It is atypical from most Exegesis entries in possessing an essaylike structure and in having been typed out. Very likely it was intended as a summary of findings, as was "Cosmogony and Cosmology" (1978), included in a previous section. Was Dick serious about the title? In all probability, yes. Was he also satirizing his very efforts at comprehending Truth? Almost certainly.

  The Exegesis is a free-roaming affair -- as a nightly journal devoted to the expression of one's inmost (and ever-changing) thoughts on the largest and most perplexing issues of life would naturally be. Careful selections serve it well, for there is within it much repetition, much fretful worrying over past crisis moments in his life, many futile stabs at insight, and occasional bouts of pettiness and spleen. At its best, however, the flights of the Exegesis through impossibly possible worlds are remarkable.

  From the Exegesis (c. 1975)

  The architect of our world, to help us, came here as our servant, disguised, to toil for us. We have seen him many times but no [one] recognized him; maybe he is ugly in appearance, but with a good heart. Perhaps sometimes when he comes here he has forgotten his own origin, his godly power; he toils for us unaware of his true nature and what he could do to us if he remembered. For one thing, if we realized that this crippled, misshapen thing was our creator, we would be disappointed. Would reject and despise him, but of courtesy to us he hides his identity from us while here.

  One can see from this that that which we kick off to one side of the road, out of the way, which feels the toe of our boot -- that may well be our God, albeit unprotesting, only showing pain in his eyes, that old, old pain that he knows so well. I notice, though, that although we kick him off to one side in pain, we do let him toil for us; we accept that. We accept his work, his offerings, his help; but him we kick away. He could reveal himself, but he would then spoil our illusion of a beautiful god. But he doesn't look evil, like Satan; just homely. Unworthy. Also, although he has vast creative and building power, and judgment, he is not clever. He is not a bright god. Often he is too dumb to know when he's being teased or insulted; it takes physical pain, rather than mere scorn, to register.

  Ugly like this, despised and teased and tormented and finally put to death, he returned shining and transfigured; our Savior, Jesus Christ (before him Ikhnaton, Zoroaster, etc; Hefestus [or Hephaestus]). When He returned we saw Him as he really is -- that is, not by surface appearance. His radiance, his essence, like Light. The God of Light wears a humble and plain shell here (like a metamorphosis of some humble toiling beetle).

  SF novel: Hefestus as VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System].

  The Earth like St. Sofia is an organism, a living one, being built, a Temple that when it is ready the Lord will suddenly come to and dwell in. He Himself is creator: architect. Workmen/artisans/artists: Us and Holy Spirit. Ideal Logos/form: Christ, to be achieved. The model once glimpsed then to be striven for and reached, at which time Architect (Creator), Holy Spirit, and Ideal become One, which includes us within it as bits. Creator: time past. Holy Spirit: time is. Christ: time completed. Holy Spirit guides us toward Him. Force is provided by the Creator at the start. Force/activity/direction to goal.

  c. 1976

  The victory of Christ (as Lord of the Cosmos) over astral (planetary) determinism is better expressed, for us today, by saying, It is the coming into being of a thinking cosmos replacing a merely deterministic, causal, unthinking mechanism of fate or blind chance. Thus the characteristics of this new "body" or organism would be that, if perceived by one of us, it would seem to be a living creature of cosmic size, wisdom, scope, and power, infiltrating the natural (i.e. deterministic) order of nature. This, when I saw Valis or Zebra, is precisely what I saw. Therefore it is evident i that the process of transubstantiation of the deterministic "astral" mechanism into a living body or entity is far progressed. What I saw, then, was none other than the cosmic Christ. Beneath their unchanged outward appearances, natural processes (i.e. causal processes) are to some extent, a decisive extent, purposeful, conscious, and benign, and organized to fulfill a coherent plan. The palpable revelation of this is the supreme revelation. For instance, it intervened decisively in human history in 3-74 on. 'All that remains is for the second incarnation to occur; i.e. the veil to ; drop, God's Wisdom to appear openly here, that all may be aware of it and acknowledge it. Perhaps what I saw was a preview, and eventually everyone will see as I saw, and what I saw, in 3-74.

  He will not merely rule the universe; he will also be the universe.

  What I saw, then, was an apocalypse (disclosure) of the invisible Parousia, the Presence that is now here. At this point, an apocalypse is still needed, because the Parousia is still hidden.

  The role in my life of the whole CP, Soviet thing was that it was, for me, the "astral" of deterministic power, which Christ broke by his intervention.

  Could it be said that in 3-74 Christ interfered with the generic coding that had programmed me to die at that time? That this (genetic coding) is a modern term for at least one aspect of (astral) determinism? My gene-pool (DNA) memory fired -- opened up; I know that. And I am reasonably sure I was programmed, at least internally, to die (of cardiovascular problems). There also may have been external deterministic death-dealing factors that he aborted as well. This is a modern model for what the ancients called "sublunar" or "planetary" or "astral" influences. This would explain my retrieval of long-term (gene pool) memory; the whole system either opened up or was opened up. My sense that it (the Xerox letter) had happened before shows the karmalike quality of such genetic programming. The technical theological term for this is God's grace. But to appreciate the value of God's grace, this entire deterministic structure must be properly understood, and its magnitude -- and power over us -- comprehended. It is a vast, nearly all-encompassing system from which few are extricated during this lifetime.

  The part of my March 18, 1974 experience that precisely delineates it as having been of Christ, as compared to God or to the Holy Spirit, was (1) that it took place at the vernal equinox, and (2) most of all, the sound of the "Easter" or Magic bells, which are specifically identified with Christ.

  It was induced by the Holy Spirit, and did show the Kingdom of God,
with the presence of God. But the honeycombed corpus that I found myself within -- that was Corpus Christi, the mystical body of which Christ is the head, and we of the congregation the parts. This is also Hagia Sophia and also the King (who is coming to rule). Hence I thought the other day, "I am part of the King." Vide Collosians 1:13 or whatever that citation is [1:13-14], Christ as maker and lord of (Pantokrator) the universe. Hence I felt joy when I realized I'd seen transubstantiation of the objects (of the alley) around me; I was on the right track: Christ's invisible (normally) body. Hence the dream of the Mandarin old Chinese king, wise but lacking power. This contrasts Christ versus God; the dream was to clarify this distinction (vide doctrine of the Trinity). That was not an image of God, who would have power, but rather an image of the wise, powerless king, who is Christ.

  Nonetheless, I think Spinoza is correct in his concept of God as immanent, that the universe is alive, that God possesses the attribute of physical extension, that mind, matter, and energy are three attributes or modes of His Being... there is no problem for me because I am a Trinitarian. It is only more precise to say that I found myself within, as a part of, the mystical body of Christ, rather than of God. Also, we know from Scripture that there is such a mystical body (Collosians, supra). No radical theology would be required, only this knowledge. No wonder it seems senseless to me when someone says, "Christ was a man, like ourselves." Also, no wonder I am attracted to Pere Teilhard de Chardin's concept of the "plasmatic" Christ (Corpus Christi).