—Lawrence Sutin
June 1991
Introduction
Wrestling with angels: The Mystical Dillema of Philip K.Dick
In February 1974, Philip K. Dick, author of over forty published books of science fiction marked by the recurring themes of paranoia and shifting reality, had an encounter with God. Things hadn’t been going well for Dick. He had been struggling with writer’s block for the last few years, he was worried that the IRS was going to come down on him for withholding taxes in protest against the Vietnam War, and the hand-to-mouth existence of a pulp writer he’d been living for over 20 years was hanging heavily on his mind. To make matters worse, Dick had just had two impacted wisdom teeth pulled and was in intense pain. Consequently, cosmic revelations were the last thing on Dick’s mind when the door bell rang at his modest apartment in Fullerton, California. His oral surgeon had phoned in a prescription for pain medication to a nearby pharmacy, and Dick was counting the minutes until the delivery person arrived.[1] When he opened his front door he found himself face to face with a young woman wearing a gleaming gold fish necklace.
As Dick recounted it:
For some reason I was hypnotized by the gleaming golden fish; I forgot my pain, forgot the medication, forgot why the girl was there. I just kept staring at the fish sign.
“What does that mean?” I asked her.
The girl touched the glimmering golden fish with her hand and said, “This is a sign worn by the early Christians.” She then gave me the package of medication.
In that instant, as I stared at the gleaming fish sign and heard her words, I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis—a Greek word meaning, literally, “loss of forgetfulness.” I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me. And not only could I remember it but I could see it. The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to communicate in cryptic signs. She had just told me all this, and it was true.[2]
This surprising revelation, fired directly at his head, temporarily blinded him. He experienced an “invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly had become sane.”[3]
Like St. Paul on the road to Damascus, Dick’s experience radically reshaped the rest of his life. The last three novels he wrote before his untimely death in early 1982 (VALIS, THE DIVINE INVASION, and THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER) were all attempts to process this confounding experience—and predictably they leave the reader with more questions than answers.
In March 1974, following the Golden Fish episode, Dick experienced numerous other phenomena, which he interpreted as contacts with a higher wisdom. These included hypnagogic visions, auditions, tutelary dreams, and—perhaps best known—a beam of pink light that imparted striking effects:
It invaded my mind and assumed control of my motor centers and did my acting and thinking for me. I was a spectator to it. It set about healing me physically and my four-year old boy, who had an undiagnosed life-threatening birth defect that no one had been aware of. This mind, whose identity was totally obscure to me, was equipped with tremendous technical knowledge. It had memories dating back over two thousand years, it spoke Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit, there wasn’t anything that it didn’t seem to know.
It immediately set about putting my affairs in order. It fired my agent and my publisher. It remargined my typewriter . . . . My wife was impressed by the fact that, because of the tremendous pressure this mind put on people in my business, I made quite a lot of money very rapidly. We began to get checks for thousands of dollars—money that was owed me, which the mind was conscious existed in New York but had never been coughed up ...
(And perhaps most important of all,)
... it also said it would stay on as my tutelary spirit.[4]
This mind, which Dick came to nickname VALIS (for Vast Active Living Intelligence System), resided in Dick’s consciousness for approximately a year before shifting to more sporadic contact. In March,
1974, less than a month after the initial psychic invasion, Dick was listening to his FM radio one night when hostile messages urging him to die began to pour from the speaker.[5] Shortly thereafter he was treated to an eight-hour all-night vision of thousands of colored graphics resembling “the nonobjective paintings of Kandinsky and Klee”—one image after another in rapid succession.[6] On other nights, Dick’s tutelary spirit—who sometimes seemed to be a second-century Christian named Thomas, and at other times an ancient Greek sibyl or the Holy Spirit itself, as well as the more impersonal
VALIS—would utter short cryptic phrases to Dick as he lay in hypnogogic revery prior to falling asleep. Once he was asleep Dick would often have vivid symbolic dreams which he would later use, along with the cryptic phrases,in developing the philosophical and theological theories that began to preoccupy his time.
Readers of Dick’s fiction first became aware of these preoccupations when his novel VALIS was published in 1981. This semi-fictional novel was built around these experiences and featured a 13-page appendix titled “Tractates Cryptica Scriptura,” which contained polished versions of many of Dick’s epiphanies, as well as a condensed version of Dick’s VALIS-inspired cosmology, presented in a numbered, scriptural vein.[7]
Dick’s main compendium of his theories, epiphanies, and cosmologies was a seemingly endless private journal that he referred to as his Exegesis. After the fish-sign experience, he spent the next seven years writing nightly in this journal, which grew to over two million hand—and typewritten words. In VALIS, Dick ironically said of the journal, “I suppose that all the secrets of the universe lay in it somewhere amid the rubble.”[8] Since Dick’s death in 1982, the Exegesis has been understandably the object of much curiosity among his fans. The present volume, culled from the over 8000 pages that make up the Exegesis, should go along way towards satisfying that curiosity.
The Exegesis is in many ways a marvelous work, an extended expedition through the marshy wetlands of mystical theology and philosophy guided only by the overactive imagination of one of science fiction’s most gifted authors. Yet, because it was not written with publication in mind, the Exegesis dives right into the thick of things with little or no explanation or context. The following is offered in the hope of providing that context.
Dick’s Mysticism
Perhaps the most baffling question facing both Dick and his readers is that of the nature of his February/March 1974 experiences. Revelations from God, or tutelary spirits for that matter, are nothing new under the sun. The Old Testament abounds with them and the New Testament closes with the apocalyptic “Revelation of St. John,” a richly symbolic vision of the end of the world. In Elizabethan times, John Dee, assisted by Edward Kelley, was certain he had conjured up and received messages from angels in a strange language called Enochian. In 1904, Aleister Crowley was contacted by an invisible entity named Aiwass, who dictated to him The Book of the Law, a dramatic announcement of the arrival of a new era—the Aeon of Horus. More recently,the advent of LSD has generated further claims of contact with Higher Intelligence, including Timothy Leary’s “Starseed” messages about the cosmic significance of the fizzled Comet Kohoutek, and John Lilly’s acid and Ketamine-induced contacts with aliens and his stolen glimpses of a nefarious “solid-state conspiracy” operating on a trans-galactic plane.[9]
While these cases of revelation are fascinating, they fall outside the focus of this introduction. Rather, I’d like to draw attention to another twentieth-century religious vision with remarkable parallels to Dick’s, the little-known Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons to the Dead), written down in a three-day period in 1916 by the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung. This pamphlet-length work of scripture-like prose forced itself upon Jung during an extended period of ennui and inner searching. In Jung’s case there were no sci-fi trappings such as pink laser beams, but instead a weekend of restlessness and an ominous a
tmosphere in his home marked by his children having anxious dreams and sighting a ghost.
As Jung recounts it in MEMORIES, DREAMS AND REFLECTIONS:
Around five o’clock in the afternoon on Sunday the front door bell began ringing frantically. It was a bright summer day; the two maids were in the kitchen, from which the open square outside the front door could be seen. Everyone immediately looked to see who was there, but there was no one in sight. I was sitting near the doorbell, and not only heard it but saw it moving. We all simply stared at one another. The atmosphere was thick, believe me! Then I knew that something had to happen. The whole house was filled as if there were a crowd present, crammed full of spirits.They were packed deep right up to the door,and the air was so thick it was scarcely possible to breathe. As for myself, I was all a-quiver with the question: “For God’s sake, what in the world is this?” Then they cried out in chorus,“We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought.” That is the beginning of the Septem Sermones...
Then it began to flow out of me, and in the course of three evenings the thing was written.As soon as I took up the pen, the whole ghostly assemblage evaporated. The room quieted and the atmosphere cleared. The haunting was over.[10]
When privately published by Jung, the Seven .Sermons were pseudonymously credited as “written by Basilides in Alexandria, the City where the East toucheth the West.”[11] Basilides was a Christian Gnostic of the second century, and in crediting Basilides with the booklet’s authorship Jung was underscoring the gnostic nature of the Seven Sermons. As the reader will soon discover, Dick also looked to the early Gnostics for guidance and inspiration in explicating his mystical experiences.
“Gnosis” is a Greek word for “knowledge,” and usually refers to a spiritual knowledge or intuitive inner knowing, in contrast to the prevalent rational, intellectual knowledge. Prior to their denunciation as heretics,and virtual elimination by the orthodox Christians in the third and fourth centuries, the early Christian Gnostics represented a vital pluralistic strain in the burgeoning young religion. In the multiplicity of influences which various Gnostics incorporated into their own systems (including influences from the ancient mystery schools, Hermeticism, Persian religions, and the Far East), the relay valuable spiritual and psychological insights which have been largely lost to the West. However the discovery of the cache of ancient Coptic scrolls known as the Nag Hammadi Library, in Upper Egypt in 1945, has recently changed all that with a treasure trove of direct sources of Gnostic scriptures.
Gnosticism emphasized the preeminence of an individual experience of the divine over mere belief in dogmas about the divine passed down from theologians or church authorities. The struggle for this experience (or gnosis),which ultimately involves a kind of “letting go,” is often characterized by Gnostics as a struggle to penetrate behind the world of appearances to a greater spiritual reality underneath. Dick believed that the pink beam granted him this “loss of forgetfulness” and he spent the following eight years trying to develop a coherent exposition of the new reality in which he lived. Jung’s Seven Sermons similarly formed the emotional and philosophical anchor for all of Jung’s subsequent psychological work.Dick and Jung both came to see in the Gnostic scriptures evidence of world views similar to those brought forth in their own respective trance-visions.
Psychosis As Shamanic Initiation
However, there is another less flattering interpretation of their experiences which deserves examination, which Phil Dick himself considered, and that is the glaring fact that—especially in Dick’s case—the episodes bear more than a strong resemblance to the onset of acute schizophrenia. In his book on schizophrenia and religious experience, THE EXPLORATION OF THE INNER WORLD,psychologist Anton Boisen describes the case history of a patient, Albert W., whose psychosis was marked by phenomena strikingly similar to Dick’s.
Albert W.’s disturbance began with the idea that something strange was going on. Hefelt himself in possession of a power that he did not have before and he began to have a ‘flood of mental pictures as though an album within were unfolding itself.’ Then came the dark woman in a vision, whom he took to be supernatural ...
The second step which we observed in the development of Albert’s psychosis was an acute sense of peril. He thought he was going to die. Then he saw things in a new light and he thought the ‘dawn of creation’ had come.He was living in a different world. Then it came to him that he had lived before this present life and that he was a much more important person than he had ever dreamed. In a previous existence he had been Jonah. He had also been Christ. Most of the time he had been St. Augustine. It came to him that there was a great ‘I and You contest’ going on, a struggle for supremacy on the part of certain groups,though in relation to this struggle it was not clear where he stood.[12]
Like Albert W., Dick sensed that he was in the middle of a titanic battle, in this case one that could be characterized as between the Lord of Light and the Master of the Lie. Dick researched the historical precedents for this dualistic world view in Zoroastrian and Gnostic cosmologies, hypothesizing at one point that possibly Ahura Mazda was dictating his revelations to him.[13] Dick was well aware of the ironic fact that in the final stages of his syphilitic madness, Nietzsche similarly came to believe that Zarathustra (Zoroaster) was speaking through him,and Dick even joked: “I had planned to call my next book,THUS SPOKE ZOROASTER, but I guess I had better not.”[14]
In his discussion of Albert W., Boisen notes the parallels between his patient and George Fox, the visionary founder of the Quakers, and ultimately concludes that“there is no line of demarcation between valid religious experiences and the abnormal conditions and phenomena which to the alienist are evidences of insanity.” For Boisen, what ultimately distinguishes madness from mysticism is the direction the affected individual’s life takes.For the insane, the experience leads to further disintegration; for the mystic, it leads to unification and healing.[15]
Julian Silverman of the National Institute of Mental Health makes a similar observation in his discussion of the parallels between shamans and acute schizophrenics.Personal crises of damaged self-image mark the onset of both the Shaman’s initiation and the schizophrenic’s psychosis.
What follows then is the eruption into the field of attention of a flood of archaic imagery
... Ideas surge through with peculiar vividness as though from an outside source. The fact that they are entirely different from anything previously experienced lends support to the assumption that they have come from the realm of the supernatural. One feels oneself to be dwelling among the mysterious and the uncanny. Ideas of world catastrophe, of cosmic importance and of mission abound. Words,thoughts and dreams [author’s emphasis] can easily be seen to reside in external objects.[16]
Significantly, the mental and emotional changes that the shaman undergoes in answering “the call” to his profession and surviving his journey into chaos are valued by his community; nearly identical changes experienced by those deemed mad in modern civilization are considered invalid and become sources of shame.
During his post pink beam period (from 1974 until his death eight years later) Dick—ever the science fiction author—entertained any number of explanations for his transformation at the hands of VALIS. “This rational mind was not human. It was more like an artificial intelligence. On Thursdays and Saturdays I would think it was God, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays I would think it was extraterrestrial, sometimes I would think it was the Soviet Union Academy of Sciences trying out their psychotronic microwave telepathic transmitter. ”[17]
In his Exegesis, Dick methodically explored each explanation, finding flaws in his own logic, toying with and then abandoning pet theories only to revive them later on. However, over time certain assumptions came to the fore and tended to hang on for long stretches. One such hypothesis was the theory put forth in the “Tractates Cryptica Scriptura” in his novel VALIS:
The universe is information and we are stationa
ry in it, not three-dimensional and not in space and time. The information fed to us we hypostatize into the phenomenal world.... Real time ceased in 70 C.E. with the fall of the temple at Jerusalem. It began again in 1974 C.E. The intervening period was a perfect spurious interpolation aping the creation of the Mind....[18]
The “Tractates” posit “The Immortal One” (i.e. Christ, Sophia, Buddha, et al.) returning now to dismantle “The Black Iron Prison” (the evil and spurious reign of the [Roman] Empire that has held history in its grip since 70 C.E.). The Immortal One is a plasmate, a form of energy, of living information.
The plasmate can crossbond with a human, creating what I call a homoplasmate. This annexes the mortal human permanently to the plasmate. We know this as the “birth from above” or “birth from the Spirit.” It was initiated by Christ, but the Empire destroyed all the homoplasmates before they could replicate. . . . In dormant seed form, the plasmate slumbered in the buried library of codices at Chenoboskion (Nag Hammadi) until 1945 C.E.[19]
With the gnostic codices unearthed and read, the plasmate is now seeking out new human hosts to crossbond with. This is what Dick speculated might have happened to him——he was one of an increasing number of hosts for the return of the Holy Spirit.
This explanation is so utterly fantastic that one can hardly take it seriously. If one reads further, one discovers that Dick associates the end of the “Empire” with Nixon’s resignation from office, surely an instance of the banal being inflated into cosmic significance. And ultimately, of course, Dick wasn’t fully convinced of even this scenario’s validity. He presented it to the world couched in an ambiguous science-fiction novel.
It is precisely this mix of grand metaphysical speculation and over the top SF wackiness that makes Dick’s Exegesis so unique. Leave it to Dick, in the midst of straight-faced theorizing about God, Maya, and a fallen universe, to characterize existence as a triune “ham sandwich,” or to posit that his science fiction novels preceding the onset of psychic invasions were crafted by God, with Dick’s unconscious cooperation, to be profound revelations of the true nature of existence!
In Pursuit of Valis Page 2
