The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  We will call the first: groove override. Or GO.

  We will call the second: new free merit-deed. Or NFMD.

  If you do GO, but subsequently fail to do NFMD but instead do evil, you will gain new bad karma. All that GO gives you is the freedom to act; it does not guarantee more merit (good karma); that must be done later and separately. So you could get the GO without the NFMD. You could have a new free demerit-deed or NFDD, and as a result you would again fail Ma'at and be sent back yet another time, perhaps forever; you would have lost your chance for release. GO can be done without NFMD but not vice versa. Yet this is not quite so, since the divine forces (Christ, the Buddha) are working to save you. They (apparently) will not grant you the GO situation unless through their omniscience they see NFMD lying ahead along the linear time axis. But I can't say for sure that if there is GO it means they know for sure there will be NFMD in the future; if you do it by free will -- well, I can probably never settle this, but being omniscient they probably know how to grant you GO only if NFMD lies ahead of you based on your own free choice. Put another way, they do not grant you actual freedom unless they know in advance that you will put it to a wise use, so then there is reverse cause and effect, effect (NFMD) operating as cause retroactive in time to GO, to cause GO.

  Wait. I'm saying GO is causally the effect of NFMD. And I'm saying that NFMD can't happen without GO. So it's an up-by-his-bootstrap situation, a self-causing situation—then truly it is ex nihilo (no wonder there was no ideation!). This is a time-travel paradox. Both GO and NFMD are generated within a close [sic] system out of nothing and enter from nowhere; that is, from outside the system. GO is dependent for its existence on NFMD, and NFMD on GO, so which is cause and which is effect? Answer: Each is the cause of the other and the effect of the other. Consider the original groove-tracking situation. How do you get out of it? Answer: You have to be out of it to get out of it; look to the Tao of physics ([Fritjhof] Capra) and the bootstrap theory for the answer; I knew I was dealing with field theory and quanta when I dealt with Valis. Put even more simply, How can you do something you would not do?, which is required for salvation in my system (disregarding the temporal factor the paradox still remains). There would have to be a psychological (mental) death and rebirth as someone different; but where did it come from? Hence "Thomas," who knew not the dog, car, nor cat [i.e. was unfamiliar with basic aspects of Dick's life]. It is possible that the only event that could make this possible would be abasement, suffering and pain and apprehension and tension so great that it would break down the historical self and literally assassinate it. In the absence of when, thereupon, an ex nihilo new self would come onto [sic] existence, like a newly granted second soul. This brings me back to my shamanist analysis of the crucifixion, the Passion of Christ story, as a secret method of overcoming the world (as Jesus put it); viz.: The world overcomes you; you die; a new self is born; it is ipso facto in a GO situation, for, being new, it will not track the old groove; the twin tapes simply won't work, since the outer tape remains but not the inner. The way to destroy synchronization is to destroy the self (you can't very well destroy the world), and the best way to destroy the self is to bilk the world into doing it. But this is a tricky business because you must not physically die; you must be alive to perform the NFMD. The early Christians themselves soon got it wrong and began to leap under Roman chariot wheels, upon which they physically died, making NFMD impossible. That they failed is shown by the fact that they did not rise from the dead in three days; they were never seen again. The field for right action is in this world, not the next.

  I'm going to put forth a very strange idea. I think that if either GO or NFMD is to be considered cause, NFMD -- which comes second in linear time -- is cause, so what is needed is an ability to make time run backward, or, if this is putting it better, to be able, oneself, to move retrograde in time (if this latter is the correct formulation, I or "Thomas," whichever, moved retrograde in time back to 3-74 from the future; which accounts for my experiencing a mind-moving retrograde in time, a mind that fused with or entered mine that came from the future). But this would not be me in this world/life, say, me in 1977 or '78, when I gave to Covenant House [a charitable institution for homeless children]. It would be the me who originally fucked up the Xerox missive and lived to regret it, because only the me on that time track, that groove, would have ever found out what it was and hence could tell me in this time track as the AI [Artificial Intelligence] voice that it was "from an intelligence officer in the Army." It would be the me in the original real world. This is eerie. Presumably he (I) paid for fucking up (fucking up unless there was help would be natural; after all, it was a trap). Is this, then, a paranormal talent involving time on the [order of] Pat Conley's psi talent in Ubik or the girl's in Clans? [Dick's novel Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964).] The ability to change the past? Anyhow, time is involved. Anyhow, "Thomas" is not on this track, in this world, but in that world on that track where the Xerox missive was not handled, where there was no override by "Thomas"; i.e. the original time.

  Then did "Thomas" engineer himself out of existence? No; my earlier formulation in this article suggests that "Thomas" is now in the process of reascending to the pleroma [heavenly realm of the Gnostics]. He still exists, because I still hear the AI [Artificial Intelligence hypnogogic] voice (assuming it is "Thomas"; well, it's very complicated, but probably it is "Thomas"). But in any case I'm saying that 3-74 can't be understood except by including as fundamental a reverse cause-and-effect sequence, the effect coming first, the cause probably years afterward. I may (if this formulation holds) someday decide that it represents a paranormal talent on my part and not adventitious intervention. A talent allied to my precog talent: stupendously escalated due to the lethal stress of the Xerox missive situation [a mysterious letter received in March 1974, as to which Dick posed numerous theories]; I may have actually literally caused time to run backward. And everything else hinges on this fact. This would explain why in 3-74 I had information at my disposal -- essential information -- that could not be known until much later. This is the bare bones of a deep phenomenal shift somehow related to quanta, to quantum field mechanics and field activity that is little understood today; this would fit in with the modulating or "warping away from valence" that I saw, so it would render what I call "Valis" as an expression of my own warping of reality in terms of time, space, and causality.

  My God; can I now subsume several phenomena (foreknowing about the Xerox missive coming, "Thomas" and "Thomas" handling it; having information that could not be developed until later; getting out of synch with reality so that I reacted [to] the stimuli before they occurred; and Valis itself) under one basic syndrome? This is scientific method! This is the way the modern rational mind deals with theory formation! And my sense of being in touch with a mind moving retrograde in time. Did I warp time so that it ran backward? And out of this one factor the above (and perhaps other) several phenomena were observed to take place?

  As I said in my UK speech ["Man, Android, and Machine," included herein]: "Maybe we're seeing the universe backward." Also, I tend --

  Oh; and the double superimposition of worlds. Two "tracks," which is to say alternate worlds. Alternate worlds involve time; every SF author knows that.

  Oh my god.

  Yes, and the koine [commonly spoken Greek of era of Christ; Dick believed that he heard words in this language during his hypnogogic experiences]. A time disturbance, caused by me. Alternate worlds, information from the future sucked back to the present; information from the past; and another me. Plus the breakdown of causal synch. Valis -- the modulations; that's causality. Set to zero, as I put it; due TO A CHANGE IN THE PAST.

  All time disturbances. And quantum field like.

  And my future NFMD affecting and effecting the GO. So non-GO (which is to say groove tracking) is just a way of talking about normal time and normal causality.

  Is there anything that happened, starting with the material in "Faith o
f" ["Faith of My Fathers" (1967)] and TMITHC [The Man in the High Castle (1962)] and Penultimate [The Penultimate Truth (1964)] going to now and the AI voice that does not actually some way involve time? Certainly the material in the writing (especially Tears [Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974)]) seems to involve time. I may find out that I have a chronic low-grade precog power that simply went off the scale into a basic qualitative change in 2-3-74 due to the Xerox missive, disjoining me from normal causal temporal reality entirely, both in terms of the past (anamnesis) and the future (moving retrograde in time and precognition). Something on the order of what I described in "World of Talent" ["A World of Talent" (1954)].

  Now let's try this theory. The ability to make time run backward gets you out of your programmed groove ("groove tracking") and renders you free. This ability and only this ability frees you from an otherwise airtight [sic] tyranny that dooms all mankind. All life forms, in fact. Thus this is a stunning and probably new survival talent, an evolutionary new ability that advances the individual up the ladder of homeostasis to a stage where he is a whole other higher organism entirely. It is equal in terms of the evolution of life to the development of the opposable thumb, the eye, the lung, the wing, the large cerebral cortex, standing upright, etc. Upon the perfection (so to speak field operation) of this ability the human has become higher than the angels and all that implies. He is operating in a supratemporal dimension, and this has vast implications for knowledge; for overcoming causality -- if he can affect the past he can modulate the present (what I called "Valis"), and if he can draw information to him from the future he can problem-solve like a crazy thing. This is not just phylogenic memory, as I supposed; it isn't limited to drawing on the distant past. The crucial information related to 3-74 was information drawn from the future. He can set up alternate worlds, so in effect he is trans-world, spans not only time but world tracks.

  Now, this raises the question as to whether there exists a vast meta-mind (as I conceive Valis to be) who is encouraging the development of this time-disruption faculty in order to evolve the human species further; or, put another way, the human being who has this faculty and makes use of it (for example, under vast stress, as I was under in 3-74) is an expression of this meta-mind. I am sure of it. I was not alone in what happened; it was as if angels -- divine and partially visible -- powers were present. There may be a species mind stretching back into the past and into the future where evolved humans (imaged as the three-eyed people?) may exist already using this faculty. When you start disrupting time you may be operating in the realm of a supratemporal composite discorporate mind -- I think I was; this is what I call Valis. But it seems to me that the intrinsic nature of the sort of talent I'm discussing would cause to come in existence a meta-mind by itself, in that it would hop across expanses of time that lie outside its own lifetime, which would de facto make it a meta-mind; I mean it would be unlocked from the time span of its physical body. For one thing (here is Jung's intuition function) he would exist (his mind would exist) in alternate worlds, and this alone implies a lot; by affecting the past he would then find himself shifting across laterally (orthogonally) in time... which would explain my subcortically remembering that it had just been cool, high, and moist a climate. So the mind with this talent would in itself become a meta-mind, outside of causality, spanning alternate worlds, able to modify his own present reality by changed actions in the past, thus setting up alternate worlds; he would be the cause and would in turn be affected by himself as cause -- again the bootstrap phenomenon. Such a mind could act as cause to its own effect, affecting itself as if from outside like a feedback circuit, and, upon having successfully affected itself, the self as cause would eliminate itself as if it had never existed, which again is the ex nihilo or bootstrap paradox of time travel. Minds or versions of the mind, foci of the mind, would come into existence, influence the mind, and upon success render itself never having existed in the first place; but the mind would sense an adventitious other mind operating on itself in its behalf. Could it not then become its own AI voice, its own tutelary spirit? It would continually monitor its own status as if in a heuristic process; yes, it would be process, not hypostasis. You would have a mind that itself would evolve the way a species evolves.

  It would be itself and not itself continually. It could correct a faulty solution to a problem after the faulty solution had been applied, a sort of "smart typewriter" erase circuit, again a heuristic process where it gets to apply the best solution it has; the solution proves faulty; the mind repeats the situation -- runs it by again -- with a different solution made better by knowledge derived from the faulty solution (i.e. the solution failed but it yielded knowledge as to what should have been done). It applies a solution. The solution is defective, but knowledge is derived. The mind then goes back in time and applies solution B based on solution A plus the knowledge derived from solution A (despite its failure). Solution B works, so the mind continues on in linear time.

  For its B solution (which works), the mind draws on the vestigial A solution (which did not work); so underlying the B solution is the phantorn record of the A solution. Sequentially, the mind was surprised by the problem and employed the A solution but now it has gone back and overridden the A solution with knowledge based on this initial failure. So on some level the mind knows of the A solution and hence perforce is bicameral. The part of the mind that employed the A solution and that possesses the knowledge derived from the A solution (and knowledge that the A solution did not work) informs the conscious part that is employing the amended solution; so the mind has its own self for a guide, speaking out of a ghostly realm where what is is also what is not. The mind is split but not split, since both parts are working for a common goal. Rather, it is chambered. So the ratiocination for the B solution simply isn't there because in place of ratiocination there is certitude without sequential logical reasoning. No analytical steps are employed. The mind when it comes to employ the B solution does not have to think. The thinking took place in a realm or track that has been abolished; when that realm was erased the thinking was erased with it, leaving only the motor and speech centers active. The mind, when it employs the B solution, is its own machine, its own slave instrument, acting out a solution that was not the primary one.

  Put another way, during solution A the mind was cause and so had to think, but when it returned to reedit and employ solution B it was the effect of solution A and the knowledge belatedly acquired in connection with solution A. Put a third way, suppose a normal person wishes to know what is in the Book of Acts. He must locate a copy and read it. But this meta-mind simply knows the contents of the Book of Acts (if he is to know it at all). How does it know it? Because he found that he had written it, and thus read it. Then he checked with a copy of the Book of Acts to corroborate that it is indeed the Book of Acts. But when and where and how did it originally enter his mind? There is no answer to that; it is ex nihilo: without cause. There is only effect, because the causal element has been erased. The meta-mind in its finished stage is dependent upon the meta-mind in its initial staging, which it knows nothing directly about, but only indirectly, the way characters in a Beckett work deduce the existence of other people.

  If he finds Acts or material based on pre-Socratic thinkers in his novels he must assume that his own primary heuristic scanning device read and absorbed knowledge of these matters in the usual way, but that this track has been erased, although it leaves its marks on the extant meta-mind. By what he knows that he shouldn't know (so to speak) he can make certain deductions about the original scanning, the original normal intake of information. He did not take in more information than any other person but he can apply it retroactively and there is his advantage.

  Then essentially this theory about time disruption replaces the theory I put forward earlier here, that we are dead and don't know it; what I seem to be saying is that heimarmene or determinism depends on causality and that in turn depends on time, and an ability to disrupt tim
e amounts to an ability to gain power over causality itself -- the result of which is the abolition of the twin-tape synch system that makes of us little more than DNA robots. We are not dead but we are as if dead; we are enslaved, and in a prison. The ability to disrupt time -- i.e. to make it run backward -- brings freedom of a sort that no living creature on Earth has ever had before. And I think that this is the cryptic doctrine that is the basis of my title here: The great esoteric systems are systems in which this human ability is cultivated and brought to bear. Certainly this is true in Gnosticism, in Buddhism -- and if Buddhism then probably in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. There is no way a human can perceive that he is twin-tape programmed until he begins to break that programming, because the mechanism of determinism and occlusion is so good that until the person disrupts it he can't even tell that it is there.

  But the power to disrupt time discloses the deterministic system as somehow unreal, a fiction. How can it have power and be a fiction? Its power depends on the ignorance it produces, the occlusion and (perceptual and in terms of memory) being only one element. Basically, the person is enslaved because he cannot detect the machine that enslaves him; it deprives him of crucial information. There is a constant flow of information traffic around him and he can't see it, literally. Yet the information programs him. It seems to be the purpose of this machine to maintain structure (cosmos) but at the expense of the welfare and lives of the individual life forms involved.

  My subcortical memories of a higher, cooler, moister climate indicate that really major erasure and reinscription can take place; the time-disrupting faculty can be very powerful. Again, it was not done by me but by myself, who lived through to the end of my life, died, and returned to an earlier stage of my life, but now under taped conditions. Yet the taped conditions are a combination of servitude and opportunity, the latter if properly handled, the former if botched. Whether it will be endless repetition of prison or whether it will be, instead, self-liberation depends on what I call the NFMD: the new free merit-deed that tilts the scales under the altered conditions achieved by the GO situation. I cannot really abandon this theological concept in the service of upholding an explanation that relies on a belief in the paranormal powers of the individual involved. There is a cosmic dimension, and one of deity. The person has failed his first time around and is sent back. He is as ignorant the second time as the first... or is he? Doesn't his own bicameral voice whisper to him to liberate himself by an act of kindness, of kindness unmerited by the recipient? There is a phantom of solution A that did not work. Has the person really learned nothing? Then again he is destroyed by the instruments that destroyed him originally. This is unlikely. Surely there is a high probability that he will employ his time-disturbing power to save himself. This is how evolution is achieved: by making use of latent powers, making them actual. The B solution is a feedback system that monitors the failure of A with the absolute wisdom of hindsight; knowledge that was crucial but contingent is now a priori and it is there, but buried in the person in the form of his original self grown old and then dead and then restored without memory: like Parsifal or Siegfried he does not know his own identity and must be told -- only it is he himself, not Kundry or the Forest Bird who tell him. He is his own sibyl; he is in fact his own anima, watching over him as psychopomp, hence now changed in sex to female, in accordance with Zoroaster's observations about one's spirit of religion.