In Pursuit of Valis

by Philip K. Dick

  You know, I could if I wanted to make the most dramatic but speculative case, for fictional purposes I guess, reason that I was pulled back through time, back and back, to where it All Went Wrong, which would be where around 100 A.D. I, typifying everyone who went wrong perhaps, became a Christian. “That was a wrong turn,” the Vast Active Living Intelligence System that creates decided. “When those people decided on Christianity. I’ll throw away 2,000 years, go back, have this one—he’ll get it going right; he’s typical—turn to some other religion instead, and have that become dominant. Let’s see ...” A New Start. Second Time Around. Why not? Thus, my sense that my help was corning from an alternate universe.

  I don’t know why I’m speculating along like this, though, because in point of fact I’ve decided, by a process of deduction, who my tutor is. Asklepios, or one of his sons. A Greek physician, whose step mother was the Cumaean sibyl, his father Apollo, at whose shrines ” ... the sick were given wholesome advice in their dreams,” this cult yielding only reluctantly to Christianity. Also Asklepios was according to legend, slain by the Kyklopes, a cyclops. Which would explain my extraordinary dreams: I saw a fusion of his step-mother and him who Asklepios feared most in all the world.

  This also explains why the highest wisdom shown me is that associated with Apollo. His—my tutor’s— father.

  Interestingly, although Apollo is considered to have been a myth, the Cumaean sibyl is thought to have really existed, and Asklepios likewise. The sibyl lived at least a thousand years, migrating to Rome and writing her Sibylline Books. Asklepios, as I say, was slain by a Kyklopes, by order of Zeus. That wasn’t anything Apollo could do about it; Asklepios was bringing a dead person back to life with his healing powers, which Zeus couldn’t tolerate because it interrupted the natural order. Which I guess is ananke again ... which would explain why in his instructing and shaping me Asklepios would emphasize that element in life. He learned all about it. I’m getting the benefit of his unfortunate experience.

  I can see me telling my therapist this. “What’s on your mind, Phil?” she’ll say when I go in, and I’ll say, “Asklepios is my tutor, from out of Pericleian Athens. I’m learning to talk in Attic Greek.” She’ll say, “Oh really?” and I’ll be on my way to the Blissful Groves, but that won’t be after death; that’ll be in the country where it’s quiet and costs $100 a day. And you get all the apple juice you want to drink, along with Thorazine.

  Apollo’s motto at Delphi was “Know thyself,” which forms the basis for all modern psychotherapy and mental health and certainly underlies my getting in touch with myself, as depicted here. The other night when I found myself thinking, during the hypnagogic state, in Greek, I managed to snatch a couple of words out of what I believe to be a syntactic sentence. (At that time I wasn’t positive it was Greek; it remained a problem to check on, today. It was.) I snatched out:

  crypte (—) morphosis

  Those mean something like: latent shape (or hidden or concealed shape)

  Although I don’t have anything more to go on, it would seem to me that I—or my tutor-was musing on this whole situation, and in pithy Greek formalizing it. A latent form is emerging in me, buried perhaps by Apollo himself, when his son Asklepios was killed by the Kyklopes, so that his son’s wisdom and skills, derived from Apollo, would continue on despite Asklepios’ sudden death—remaining latent within the morphology of the Indo-European descendants of Asklepios, perhaps genetically handed down through his sons. (He had two.) Now, when needed, this crypte morphosis is emerging, again active; its external stimulating-triggering source being some aspect of the dreadful civic decline of our society, its falling into ruins. “Within the degenerate molecules, the trash of today, he (PKD) resurrects a power buried for eons.” (S. Lem, about UBIK.)[31] Other gods of the past have at other times returned to life: Wotan in Germany, during the Nazis. Surely Apollo with his balanced wisdom, his clear healing harmony of opposites, his clear-headed self-knowledge and integrity—what better archetype or god, long slumbering, should be roused at this sad time? Of all the ancient buried deities Apollo is needed by us the most; we have seen enough of the politics of unreason, “Thinking with the Blood,” etc.

  [ . . . . ]

  Footnote. The original display of dazzling graphics which I saw, which inaugurated all this, were characterized by their balance, not what shapes they contained. They were, like much of Kandinsky’s abstract art, modern aesthetic elaborations, in color, of the ancient a priori geometric forms conceived by the Greeks, which even in their time passed over into esthetics by way of Pythagoria,[32] e.g., the Golden Section becoming the Golden Rectangle. Certainly this would indicate that even the start of this contained the hallmark of Apollo: the balance, the harmony—I remember noting that in all the tens of thousands of pictures what was continuous in them was this perfect balance, illustrating a fundamental principle of art. It was that aspect which caught my attention and eye and told me they had great worth. In a sense, since all were rectangles, they were permutations of the Golden Rectangle, which I saw today in its original abstracted, empty form, so calm, so enduring, so restful, reminding me of Apollo’s basic virtue: syntosis. I didn’t even know the word, then; it came to me in sleep. Healing me, as was done 2,600 years ago and never quite ceasing.

  By the way—the town where Asklepios’ sanitarium existed, I read now, is up in the mountains. Probably the climate was and is cool and moist; I read it’s heavily wooded. I’m [I’ll] bet the stars are quite visible, there. It’s the place I yearn for. Out of memory.

  (Mid-July 1974)

  I awoke abruptly to find myself with my Savior, and then entered Fellowship with God (the dreams of the delighting void). Can it be said that this is the rebirth, accomplished by penetration of the Child by the solar spermatikos? Yes, Firebright, brought to life and sustained Greater intelligence for me, better health, longer life, even prosperity. A certain facility with life. But most of all I recall what I saw when I awakened: I saw my God, smiling in the sunlight of day. Once, during the years of the Terrible Separation,[33] I saw Palmer Eldritch in the Sun—I saw God backward, but sure enough, in the daytime sun: at high noon, and knew him to be a god. THE THREE STIGMATA, if read properly (i.e., reversed) contains many clues as to the nature of God and to our relationship with him. I was motivated to flee, then, fearing what I saw, so vast was the breach then. It was definitely a true vision of God, but grown (to my blind sight) terrible; still, it was the beginning of my seeing: that I could see God at all, in the sun, showed that I was not entirely blind, but rather deranged. My 3-74 experiences are an outgrowth of my Palmer Eldritch experience of over ten years earlier. “Faith of Our Fathers” shows this, too; I knew Him to be real ... but only in UBIK does he begin to appear as benign, especially then in MAZE OF DEATH. We were coming back together, as friends in the light-struck meadow or forest ... the summertime to greet.[34]

  (1975)

  One could assume, I guess, that the divine seed is in every one of us, but remains dormant (crypte morphosis); it is never fed, and this feeding comes to the pineal body via sunlight. So there is no implantation.

  I myself, I felt something (Firebright) was implanted. I had visions of Firebright’s heavenly parents. That sounds like more than celestial food. Which do we have, a quickening, an awakening, or an implantation? The parables about the seeds sown ... they don’t make it certain (some sown on barren soil, some on rock, some on good soil, etc.) If one had had a dormant seed all one’s life, and it had never stirred, come to life at all, and then a shaft of firelight from the Sun of Righteousness caused it to come to life for the first time, one might sense an implantation from outside; something which was not oneself. Sasha[35] must feel that way, with her little new unborn kittens inside her. “They came from outside.” But in fact they were fertilized from outside. Okay, fertilization is what takes place: it isn’t a seed such as a plant has, but an egg such as a human woman ovulates, and a cosmic spermatika fertilizes it; a zygote is produced.
Firebright is a combining. Here would be the crucial distinction between Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, which I feel so strongly about: the former is sort of self-fertilizing, parthenogenesis, so to speak, but in Gnosticism you have the idea that the Savior is absolutely necessary, so we have here the idea that something entirely outside one is necessary, it comes along (God’s grace) and if it doesn’t come, then there is no zygote, no Firebright, no seed, no immortality. I always felt Gnosticism was correct over Neoplatonism; viewed this way, it is evident why. The Neoplatonist knows what happened, in a basic way, but he feels he did it by himself: up by his own bootstraps. A personal achievement. I guess this is a failure to know about the “birds and the bees,” as the “Decoded N T”[36] points out. How are babies born? By thinking about it, or by copulating? Let’s be realistic; it takes a union, always true in higher forms, of which we are one. This is why the “Dec N T” can so plainly declare that no meditation, no prayer, no affirmation of belief, is going to do it. It is done to us, not by us. All each of us can do is accept—i.e., receive.

  You are to be “meek,” i.e., Yinnish, humble, receptive, but what overpowers you (the father!) is fierce, like Elijah, seeking j’ustice and truth, powerful, definitely Yangish, and the not-you. Just the opposite. Possession by the God (vide Virgil describing Apollo taking over the Sibyl). You may be masculine to other humans, but to Him you are feminine, passive. Now, the Mynaeds of Dionysus did not seem to believe (read know) that a permanent fertilization, acquisition took place, but the Orphics certainly did; here lies a vast distinction! The being-overpowered leaves something forever: a vision of truth, of reality, a rising up to ultratemporal regions, but after the beatific vision, the Firebright Second Birth, what is born, lives on, eternally. Wiat a jump from the mere Dionysian frenzy to Orphism and beyond, to Christianity! What a realization of the value of being possessed!

  This borders on the Sufi: becoming God. One does “become” God while he possesses you, but then he leaves. But—well, it’s like poor Leda. Vide Yeats’ poem. But look at the progeny: Helen of Troy.

  (1975)

  Every time in my life that I’ve heard the spirit it’s been when my normal (linear) thinking had exasperated & exhausted itself—reached its end without results, but each time, results were still absolutely necessary. This alone makes a circumstantial case for locating the spirit, the Inward Light, in the right hemisphere (I suppose). Normal habitual cognitive processes must be tried fully and fail. This would be why under routine & ordinary conditions I don’t hear it and am cut off from it. But this only tells me where it can be localized in terms of brain morphology. As an oppositional other brain, not my own, it still—well, how does it come to think in Attic Greek, and make use of technical terms such as syntonic? My original diagram showed a piece of the macrocosmos within the microcosmos, but that was more a metaphor and poetry. Also, if my right hemisphere can do this, why does it do it only when I am under duress? Why isn’t there bilateral parity? What an improvement that would be. Is it a new organ just starting to come on, as Dr. Bucke[37] believed (i.e., the next step upward in human evolution?) Maybe so.

  (1975)

  Last night (June 2nd[38]) I had a blissful truly mystical experience, which is probably the first one I’ve had in the strict sense, inasmuch as it was a state, an ASC,[39] with vast understanding and comprehension as to how everything fitted together, but lacking any and all adventitious percept-system experiences, as I had in 3-74 and 2-75. However, had I never had any thing else, it alone (last night) would have dignified my life immeasurably. How to record it verbally, though, I don’t know. It linked it all up. That’s a lot.

  As basic realization: my 3-74 experience—the intervention by God in the world-was not an anomaly, except in terms of my experience of it. That is to say, it was a natural, regular event, which I had just never seen before; however, it always goes on, went on, will go on forever. It is the perpetual re-establishment of

  equilibrium and harmony, relating to the Tao and to ma’at.[40]

  Primarily, I began by realizing that along the lines of Parmenides when he denied the testimony of his senses as regards to what is (in actuality, what exists), I realized that:

  (1) There is no visual (sense-organ) evidence of God at work anywhere in the world.

  (2) I must either deny that God, then, is at work in

  the world, or I must deny the evidence of my senses.

  [ . . . . ]

  I must have made myself, or anyhow been, very receptive (Yinnish) to the forces active in the universe at that moment. When hex 36[41] changed to some other good one, I was carried along, I just have, as the Taoists or Zen people, somebody anyhow, says, made myself empty (wu).

  For hours last night I had in a blissful trance, sensing the capacity of the universe to rebound, its elasticity. You can’t break it; it will regain its “shape” after any deformity sets in.

  [ . . . . ]

  Having experienced this blissful mystical understanding of it all, everything I’ve been into from 3-74 to now, I am thinking, Perhaps I can infer that the Parousia are [sic] not here in any universal or objective sense; but surely for me, as an individual, the entire sequence of depicted events came—and in the order described. Which causes me to ask, If as Meister Eckhart says, the Kingdom, of God is within the Soul of each person (i.e., an entirely individual, inner event) then is not the entire realm of Parousia, all of it, within the inner individual soul of one person-at-a-time? But if so, then why do not other people report my experience as theirs? Over 2000 years there is no individual report like mine, except perhaps Eckhart? Well, no matter how I cut it I will have trouble explaining some parts.

  It is possible that in some way, or for some reason, I somehow (this is heavy) died but did not die. Vide the photo of me.[42] I passed by degrees across to the other side, and then returned, reborn.

  Let ine assert as a possibility this: that as Teilhard de Chardin says—mankind following Christ as a species along through the stations of the cross—I went through the vicarious experience of the Passion ... or was it vicarious? It was real. That all took place, had to take place, to usher in 3-74, the rebirth. As Hoyt Axton[43] says, “Most people want to fly to heaven; they’re not willing to climb.”

  [ . . . . ]

  There is a great inystery about the Kingdoin of God, as to where it is, and the Parousia in general; it is in you, but also ainong you, and it is invisible but actual. He must mean it is transpersonal. When you participate (yes, that is it); you enter it—did He not use this key word? You enter it; therefore it already exists before you and outside you, which indicates objective existence (contrast, “I entered sadness,” a state of mind). It is real and it is there; one by one we enter it, or we don’t. We cross over and enter, led by our shepherd. In response to the sound (sic) of his voice (sic). A place of safety and peace, where we remain with Him. We find our way to it (recall my vivid experience in 3 or 4-74 in seeing a pylon or archway with a silvery moonlit world beyond, and Greek letters—silence. I could pass through the gate and enter that world beyond; I could see it clearly, first here, then there, now over there, glowing and waiting, open to me. Not in any one spot but glimpsed again and again![)]

  That was no subjective state; that was a perception of something real which others couldn’t see; a set-ground gestalting. I discerned the doorway repeatedly; it was multilocated and authentic. Not omnipresent but multipresent. The Secret Kingdom, hidden.

  A moment of fear touches me; did I then fail to pass through that gate and enter it? I think I passed on through, because after seeing it (that was quite early along) I then had the holy waste & void dreams, or visions, visionary trance experiences, where I was with God; that came later, I’m sure; yes, that was later, after the Carmel dream which ushered it in. So I did enter.

  [ . . . . ]

  When I was little I used to haul out big wooden cartons and boxes to play inside of ... it is as if, through the pylon gate, I found my way back to the peace and
safety of those cartons of my childhood ... God has brought me at last to safety and a realization, at last, of safety, the safety I yearned for and did not have even then (5 years old). Viewed another way perhaps it can be said that I have been brought safety into the fold, after straying all over the landscape. Either way we are talking about the same place. I feel a great peace now, at last, for the first time in my life. This whole period, including 3-74, has been arduous; I had to work hard and hustle after my illumination (374), right on down through the months, these 14 months, writing on this as I am doing, reading and researching and writing and meditating in order to understand. I believe I’ve worn myself out more with this than with any previous writing, any novel or group of novels. I have educated myself regarding my experience. Gone to school over it. What does it add up to (at this point in my knowledge)? I passed through the narrow gate in mid-74, and now I am told that He will come back for the world itself, fairly soon. Thus an individual experience will be made/is being made into a common or group or collective or objective experience by our people in general. As with other questions, the answer to the question, Is it subjective & individual or objective & general is, Both.