Mostly, though, what I get is a lot of information, floods of it night after night, on and on, about the religions of the Antique World—from Egypt, India, Persia, Greece and Rome. Jim never loses interest in that stuff, especially the Zoroastrian religion and the Pythagorean mystery cult and the Orphic cults and the Gnostics—on and on. I’m even being given special terms in Greek, such as syntonic I’m told to be that. In harmony with, it means. And the Logos doctrine. All this comes to me in dreams, many dreams, hundreds of dreams, on and on, forever. As soon as I close my eyes information in the form of printed matter, visual matter such as photographs, audio stuff in the form of phonograph records—it all floods over me at a high rate of print-out.
These dreams have pretty well come to determine what I do the next day; they program me or prepare me. Last night I dreamed that I was telling people that J.S. Bach was laughing at me. I imitated J.S. Bach’s laugh for them. They were not amused. Today I find myself putting on a Bach record, rather than Rock. It’s been months, even years since I automatically reached for Bach. Also last night I dreamed that I took the microphone away from Ed McMahon, the announcer on Johnny Carson’s show, because he was drunk. Tonight when Ed McMahon came on I automatically got to my feet and switched the TV off, my desire to watch it gone. This fitted in fine because my Bach record was playing anyhow.
I should mention that I have become completely sophisticated now, having withdrawn all my projections from the world. I am mature and am no longer lachrymose nor sentimental. My spelling is as lousy as ever.
There is no known psychological process which could account for such fundamental changes in my character, in my habits, view of the world (I perceive it totally differently, now), my daily tastes, even the way I margin my typed pages. I have been transformed, but not in any way I ever heard of. At first I thought it to be a typical religious conversion, mostly because I thought about God all the time, wore a consecrated cross and read the Bible. But that evidently is due to Jim’s lifestyle. I also drive differently, much faster, reaching for an airvent on the dashboard that is not there. Evidently I’m used to another car entirely. And when I gave my phone number the last two times I gave it wrong—another number. And to me the weirdest thing of all: at night phone numbers swim up into my mind that I never heard of before. I’m afraid to call them; I don’t know why. Perhaps in some other part of Orange County someone else is giving my phone number as his, drinking wine for the first time in his life and listening to Rock; I don’t know. I can’t figure it out. If so, I have his money. A lot of it. But I got it from my agent, or rather ex-agent, since after 23 years I fired him.[25] To explain the totally different tone and attitude of my letters I told my agent I had my father-in-law, a CPA, working with me. At the time this was to my mind a lie, but looking back I can see a thread of truth in it. Someone was and is working with me on all business matters, making my attitude tough and shrewd and suspicious. I am hard-boiled and I never regret my decisive actions. I can say No whenever I want to. Jim was that way—no sentimentality. He was the shrewdest Bishop I ever knew.
Perhaps he is collaborating in the writing of this right now.
[ . . . . ]
Maybe I, Phil Dick, have just abreacted to a past personality, formed up to the mid-fifties. Lost skills and heartaches that came after that.
Well then we have here a sort of time travel, rather than someone who is dead “coming across” from the Other Side. It is still me, with my old, prior tastes and skills and habits. Mercifully, the sad recent years are gone. Another form of my odd and chronic psychological ailment: amnesia, which my head learned after my dreadful auto accident in 1964.[26]
Come to think of it, it is the memories laid down since 1964 which have dimmed. I recall saying to Tessa that it seemed to me that precisely ten years of memory was gone. That would take it right back to that day in—my god, almost ten years to the day—when I rolled my VW in Oakland on a warm Spring Saturday. Perhaps what happened that day was that from the physical and mental shock an alternative personality was struck off; I did have extraordinary amnesia during the months afterward. So that might make an excellent hypothesis: the trauma of that auto accident started a secondary personality into being, and it remained until mid-March of this year, at which time for reasons unknown it faded out and my original “real” personality returned. That makes sense. More so than any other theory. Also, it was in 1964 that I first encountered Jim Pike [ ... ] No wonder I have Jim interwoven with this restored personality; he was on my mind at the time it was abolished. I’ve just picked up where I left off in 1964.
I’ve explained everything but the preference for beer over wine. I never drank beer. And the business shrewdness; I never was shrewd. And the general health kick, the religious kick, the lack of sentimentality, the resolution, the ability to discern a lie, the intention and determination never to lie, the vastly higher level of effectiveness in all fields, the trimming my beard so expertly—everything is explained but those; also I still have to explain the constant written mate-rial which I see in dreams every night, including Greek and Latin and Sanskrit and god knows what else words I never knew but have to look up. This abreaction to before the auto accident explains some things, but it doesn’t explain others. Could it be that I now am what I would have been had the accident not occurred? As if I’ve shifted over to a sort of alternate world where I grew naturally and normally to this mature and responsible character-formation, not derailed tragically by first the accident, then the involvement with Nancy et al, which of necessity followed? This, then, would be a sort of personal alternate universe. Ananke ... another Greek word flashed up to me in sleep; the compulsion which determines the outcome of even the gods’ lives. There is an ananke for me which decreed that I would become what I am now, and that weird, unfortunate sidetracking cannot abolish it as my destiny.
In which case I am more truly myself now than at any other time since the accident. Which may well be. I am myself—in this, the best of all possible worlds. It’s heredity, so to speak, over environment. The stars and my innate character triumphed.
Which explains why I still can’t spell. It is not in my nature.
Whatever all this is, I brought it on. I had been doing months of research on recent discoveries about brain function, especially the exciting news that we have two hemispheres and use only one, the left one. They say that’s where procedural thoughts such as doing math and thinking inductive and deductive logical processes take place; the other hemisphere, which people in Asia use instead, does simultaneous work, such as gestalting of a picture, intuitive and even ESP functioning. What it comprehends it comprehends in a single pattern and then passes on to the next, without there being a sequential or causal relationship between the apprehended and evaluated matrices, which I guess fly by like the frame freeze pictures on TV in the Heinz 57 Variety ad. I had read that massive doses of certain water soluble vitamins improve neural firing in schizophrenics: better synchronization and so forth. It occurred to me that maybe in a normal purpose [sic; person?] with normal, which is to say average, synchronization, it might cause firing to take place so efficiently that both hemispheres of the brain might come on together. So I found a recipe in a Psychology Today article[27] and I did it. I took what they prescribe schizophrenics.
In terms of my own personal life what happened made history, and I’m sure—off and on, anyhow—that whatever happened then and from then on has to do with my getting what I set out to get: such improved neural firing that both hemispheres came on together, for the first time in my life. It is the contents that puzzle me, not what happened in the biochemical or physiological or even psychological sense. Even allowing for the obvious fact that since my personality must have formed in the left hemisphere alone then whatever happens in the right would be subjectively experienced as the Not-I, our [sic; or?] lying outside of my self system and therefore not me and not my thoughts, I still can’t for instance understand why when I begin to fall asleep my though
ts switch from English to Greek, a language I don’t know.
All my thoughts and experiences, focussing mainly in dreams, seem to constellate around the Hellenistic Period, with accretions one would expect from previous cultures. The best way to describe it is to say at night my mind is full of the thoughts, ideas, words and concepts that you’d expect to find in a highly educated Greek-speaking scholar of the 3rd Century A.D., at the latest, living somewhere in the Mediterranean Area of the Roman Empire. His day time thoughts, I mean. Not what he’d dream while asleep.
Perhaps this is another BRIDEY MURPHY.[28] I’ve brought back to being active a personality “from a former life.” Undoubtedly, from internal evidence it appears to be the past, the archaic past, breaking through. But it’s not chaotic. It’s highly systemized, sort of like the left hemisphere of the Greek-speaking Roman citizen. It seemed to me that the preoccupations of this individual were indeed those of Jim Pike, and thus if you allow all prior steps in this chain of inferential thought to stand, you arrive logically at the final step that Jim Pike broke through to me “from the other side.” But, if you apply Ockham’s Razor, the Principle of Parsimony (the smallest theory to cover the facts) you can deal Jim out and run with the ancient material alone. Except that obviously it’s organized as if by a living, idiosyncratic personality, which I often sense behind it. This personality, glimpsed by me as being a woman, holds up the book to me or mails it to me, etc. She likes me. She wants to guide, educate and help me. Evidently she’s exposing me to all this enlightening and ennobling written material deliberately, to make me into a higher life form, or anyhow a better person. Up until now my higher education has been sadly neglected; she is making up for that, using very effective show—and-tell audio-video teaching techniques. I have the feeling that for every word or photo I consciously catch and remember there are thousands of yards of it poured onto me that I do not consciously remember. They take hold anyhow, as witness my busy intellectual research—homework, if you wish—the next day.
After one dream, in which I saw a sibyl who was a cyclops, I decided after doing research that it was the Cumaean sibyl who had seized hold of me, and not anyone from present times or the “other side.” I got a lot of mileage out of that theory, but then I get a lot out of each theory I hold.
[ . . . . ]
My conscious memory—my conscious vocabulary-is only the tip of the iceberg. And yet it seems highly strictured [sic; structured?]; obsessed, in fact, by the theological disputations and dogmas and highly abstract and abstruse concepts and theories of Rome. As Robert Graves once said, “Theological dispute was the disease of that age,” meaning that every one in the streets was obsessed by it and had to talk about it endlessly—as my unconscious does. My unconscious is fixated in the Roman period, and that strikes me as strange. How did it get there in the first place? And being there, why does it remain?
Once I myself was conscious[ly], deliberately interested in that period; I was in my early twenties, and read about it a lot, at the expense of being a rounded person. But my unconscious for all its obsessions with the theoretical material of that period is hard-headed and shrewd, and wants everything it comes up with applied in the most practical way. If it shows me the Golden Rectangle[29] it does so in order to calm me with that ultimate esthetically balanced sight; it has a firm therapeutic purpose. There is a utilization of all its abstract material for genuine purposes, for me, by and large. It is a tutor to me as Aristotle was to Alexander, which makes me wonder why it is grooming and shaping me this way, tutoring me in the exact fashion employed by the Greeks. Philosophy for real ends, for final causes, as Aristotle would have put it: for something lying ahead and not as an idle pastime, an end in itself. The ennobling and elevating education is altering me and I would presume that when it is finished I, having become changed (to resort to the Ablative Absolute), will act upon the improved character which I’ve acquired—not on the knowledge direct, as if on enlarged memory banks, but upon the basis of my matured and elevated character. I know this whole process sees ahead because I have caught sight of its clear perception down the web of time, seen with it for a while; it knows what is ahead and acts accordingly. I’m sure it has a final purpose in mind, for which this is careful preparation. This recalls to me my notion that the Cumaean sibyl is behind it all; certainly she had or has a clear view of the future, of time; that is what a sibyl is.
Following basic Greek thought it is improving my mind and body together, as a unity. Health is equated—correctly so—with vigor and the capacity to act. All its concepts, its viewpoint, are Greek. Symmetry, balance, harmony. I sense Apollo in this, which is consistent, since the Cumaean sibyl was his oracle. Moderation, reasonability and balance are Apollo’s virtues, the clear-headed, the rational. Syntosis, or whatever. Pythagorian harmoniousness. A reconciling of all impulses and tendencies within, then turning to the outer world once that is achieved and becoming syntonic with it as well. I’m getting a classical education. Greek, a little Latin, knowledge of Sanskrit, theology and philosophy and the Ionian Greeks various views of the cosmos. Very unusual to get this here in Southern California. All very sane and steady. The most worthy, the highest virtues and values in the history of our civilization.
How did they happen to arise within me? For instance, it pointed out that my ananke—the compulsion or fate lying ahead of me—is a darkening, a gathering gloom, which is a good description of my underlying melancholia. Against which I pit my learned syntonos. Cultivation against innate predispositions: a basis struggle in life, and well elucidated by my unconscious. How did it know these two terms and [how] was [it] able to define them for me? I didn’t know. I never knew. This is material emanating from a wise viewpoint which I never possessed. This was not me, although it is becoming me; or rather, to be more accurate, it is shaping me so that I am becoming it. Meeting its standards, its ideals. Which are Apollonian Greece’s, from over 2 thousand years ago: from its Golden Age. Our Golden Age.
Now, this really does not rule out Jim Pike as my Athenian or Hellenistic tutor. Jim had, I’m certain, that kind of classical education. Greek, Latin, Roman theology and so forth. The disputations of St. Paul, St. John, the Logos Doctrine, what Augustine knew. Also, Jim was-is-shrewd; he’d apply, did apply in his life, all this classical education. He is the only person I ever knew, in fact, with such a background. If Jim were to become my tutor this I really think, all this that I’m being taught, that my attention is being drawn to, would be precisely what he would get me involved with. The reading list I’m getting is the one he would give. This is Jim’s mind I’m getting, not so much his personality. Its directed—expertly directed— contents. It has me drink beer instead of wine because beer is more healthy for me and I should drink a little something to relax me; there’s an example. That’s directed tutoring. This is not an inert computer, whose keyboard I myself punch according to my own whim and volition.
The one odd dream that I had, in which I picked up the most distant, the smallest, weakest signal— from a star, star-information, sidereal . . . what I heard seemed to resemble, as an analog, an AI System, not a computer, and female in tone. Reasonable and female. This was a small system, though; it knew almost nothing, not even where it was (the “Portuguese States of America,” it decided, when I suggested it look around for something written to read from, like the address on an envelope). This was a subsystem and not my tutor, but its response told me that nowhere in our world would I find the sending entity which had begun impinging on me in the form of highly abstract and highly balanced (liked the Golden Rectangle) graphics back in March. Not so much what it told me in a positive sense—where it was—but by ruling out where it is not: that helped. It isn’t here, which means here in time, space, dimension, any of the coordinates.
The past, then. Or the future. Another star. An alternate world. “The other side.” They’re all “the other side” in some way. For instance, it made me aware of God from the very start, but never of Christ; I dedu
ce from this that it is non-Christian and probably pre-Christian. Actually I can’t catch in it any influences since the Greek Logos Doctrine. Which could be Iranian. India to Iran to Greece and then possibly (but not necessarily) to Rome. One night I had a short bitter dream in which I cried out in despair, “Ich hab’ kein’ Retter,” I have no Savior. Then in fear at having said that I added “Ja, ja, es gibt ein Retter,” [Yes, yes, a Savior is given] but it was too late; the whole Ground of Being, everything around me, dwindled away and was gone; I floundered in the void, suffering. I think this was an awareness that for all its value, this new worldview being dominant in me and taking over from the old one would deprive me, perhaps forever, of Jesus Christ. I guess this is true. It’s a dreadful loss, but I can’t stop it; what can the pupil do in the hands of such a tutor? Unfortunately, though, a tutor who—well, lived before Christ and hence could not have known of Him? But Jim knew of Christ. Perhaps then I have worked the logical steps, deducing and deducing, to prove that my tutor existed before the time of Christ, or if a bit later did not know of, or if knowing did not accept. Time and knowledge have been rolled back, for better or worse. Mostly it is better ... except in this one conspicuous regard. I miss my Savior.
So my “unconscious,” which I’ve claimed this tutor to be, has available to it “my entire memory,” except everything pertaining to events and concepts that arose after 100 A.D. That is an extraordinarily great restriction. Obviously, that is not in any sense that we know the term “my unconscious,” laid down in my lifetime; it knows words, concepts, that I never knew—and doesn’t know the commonplace elements of the last 2,000 years. Its location is far back in time. And another climate; I keep sensing—and craving—a moist, cool, high-altitude environment, where I can watch the stars.
I remember that when this first hit me, in the first couple of weeks, I was absolutely convinced that I was living in Rome, some time after Christ appeared but before Christianity became legal. Back in the furtive Fish Sign days. Secret baptism and that stuff. I was sure of it. Rome, evil Rome and Caesar’s minions, were everywhere around me. So were the fast-moving hidden agents of God, always on the Go, like the Logos as it creates things. I was a Christian but I had to hide it. Or they’d get me. It made me very uncomfortable to belong to a persecuted sect like that, a small minority of fanatics. I was afraid I’d blurt out my beliefs and be thrown to the lions. That is one reason my blood pressure got so high. I was waiting to be hit by Caesar’s spies, and also I anticipated the Second Coming or something good like that. Maybe the Day of Judgment. I was more excited than afraid, sure in my father, certain of my Savior. The Last Supper was real, actual and close by me. Maybe this is a clue. I’m still in that time period, but I’ve fallen under the wise and prudent guidance of an educated Greek-high class in other words—tutor. Brought in from the provinces where the ignorant scurry about, to be educated in cultivated urban life. I think I read all this in the novel THE ROBE[30] x years ago. Jeez, I’ve fallen into someone else’s novel!
In Pursuit of Valis Page 4
