In Pursuit of Valis

by Philip K. Dick

Now, in 3-74 the arranged antecedents were chosen from to the limit of their potentialities, but look at what had to be set up over a long period of time. This network of causes has always been an indication that Spinoza is correct (regarding miracles). Purpose (teleology) lies along the entire length of this process as witness FAITH [PKD story “Faith of Our Fathers”] & MITHC. What I have to assume now is that the ursatz [sic; ersatz?] which generated the material in the writing was necessary that 3-74 could occur. By the looks of this I gather that 3-74 was important above & beyond the xerox missive as such. A reverse direction of causal flow was disclosed to me, against all normal (usual) perception.

  (1979)

  On the Journey of the Soul

  Sequence:

  ( one ) World as karma—i.e. prior thought formations of the person’s mind, completely controlling the person and impinging on him: a counterfeit or inauthentic reality which holds the person in its power as if his life were on tape: a playback of a recording. He is programmed from within and without by these anterior contents of his own mind, forgotten, not recognized.

  ( two ) Anamnesis. Brought on by the action of the Holy Spirit. The person remembers his true identity throughout all his lives. The person recognizes the world for what it is: his own prior thought formations; this generates the Blitz or flash. He knows now where he is.

  (three ) Christ is born in the person’s mind and takes control as a seeming adventitious psyche now interiorized. Karma (the power of the prior thought formations of the mind) is broken. Christ has defeated these ossified thoughts and started up real time and real world for the person; he is now in the koinos kosmos.

  ( four) World now is experienced as mind of the person, as the total mind itself rather than its contents. The mind is no longer the Son but the Creator, the Father; hence world is as under mind’s power as mind for merly was under world’s; the positions of the two have reversed absolutely. Mind and world are also synchronized in time; world does not lag behind mind.

  ( five ) The Godhead is experienced: the desert or void of non-being and bliss. The three persons of the Trinity are gone. Nothing remains. World is abolished. Time does not exist, only vast space.

  ( six ) World returns, freed of the ossified power and presence of prior thought formations. The Bardo Thodol trip is over; the person has been born. Fate or astral determination or karma is overcome.

  ( seven ) The Second Comforter is with the person unto the end, in syzygy with him as his divine sister/brother. This means that the birth was successful. A binary-brain mind now exists able to generate the infinite logic of the dialectic which underlies reality and gives rise to it (Plato’s Forms); thus the role of Father is retained in the Logos sense: as images, concepts, words, thought, metareasoning. The person is not alone but has been assimilated by the divine in a relationship of parity. God has become man and as a result man has become God. The process is complete: the new Adam is here, and the old Adam, in bondage to his own prior thought formations, i.e., in a fallen state, has died. Thus the past has yielded to the future. Time is now free to flow from disorder to order, from the irrational to the rational. The present mind in the form of Christ has vanquished its antecedent self, as microcosm and as macrocosm mirroring each other. The result of this process is a net yield of added energy to the total system (expressed in units of time), which is the true goal; i.e., that the universe be perpetual and not run down. This is what is meant by repair of the original rupture or fall or crisis in the Godhead. The key term denoting all this is: salvation.

  Note: The progression is from (1) former thought contents of the mind as world to (2) present mind itself as world to (3) disappearance of world entirely. There is also a progression backward from Holy Spirit to Son to Father to Godhead, and then to world regained, a garden world or magic kingdom, from which the person originally fell into thrall, and syzygy with the Holy Spirit forever, so a permanent result accrues. There is also a progression from counterfeit world to real world to supernatural world to nonbeing and then back to real, but never to counterfeit. When world disappears the Creator disappears because he is involved in his own semi-illusory creation and cannot be separated from it. Only the Godhead and the soul are separate from creation.

  Note: The stages of the sequence are enacted by Jesus in his passion, the death and resurrection, the Cross itself. The sequence, then, must finally be understood as the Way of the Cross, which is not physical but is, rather, the journey of the soul, perpetually re-enacted. The Gospels, then, depict a sacred mythic rite outside of time, rather than an historical event.

  Note: This whole process can be regarded as a psychological transformation, that of a redemptive psychosis. The mind has ossified; nothing new is coming into it or taking place in it. Old contents, what Jung calls a complex, circulate again and again. The brittle ego finally collapses as a rush of contents from the unconscious overtake it and dissolve it, including the complex. At this moment stage five is reached: the person has withdrawn into himself, into his own mind, and no world exists for him. The ossified contents, which represent the tyranny of the past, are no longer able to dominate his mental life. Hence the person emerges into a world in which time moves forward; it is world renewed because the self is renewed. Such terms as “Christ” and “Holy Spirit” and “Father” and “Godhead” are here considered to represent various states of the mind in this process of self-healing and individuation. The imbalance of the mind has been corrected by healing powers emanating from the collective unconscious. Regarded either way—theologically or psychologically—it can be said that the person who had stopped moving forward in time is now moving forward in time; newness has entered his psyche and he has been healed. The new ego is not dominated by ossified contents from the past.

  Note: There is one aspect of the journey, however, which finds against the view that it equals a psychosis, even a redemptive one. Generally speaking, it is fundamental to a psychotic break (here schizophrenia is meant) that world fragments. Specifically, in the true precise meaning of the term, it disintegrates. However, in the sequences which I depict, I had a vision at stage four of world as a unitary, intelligent, benign, foresighted, totally powerful entity which controlled all things and all processes. Which is to say, the plurality of the world as we normally experience it—a large number of things and processes—integrated into a solitary unity which embraced everything. Also, in a psychosis, the world tends to take on the aspect of the Fremd, the uncanny, strange, with tinges of the ominous and sinister. But I experienced this vast unitary entity as absolutely benign. Third, world tends, in a psychosis, to be anything but isomorphic to the percipient; whereas I felt a fundamental bond with this benign, all-powerful, intelligent and living unity. If psychosis is defined as the experience of a disintegrating world (disintegrating because the psyche which experiences it is itself disintegrating) then what I underwent is so to speak an anti-psychosis, for by the above logic my psyche was integrating inasmuch as my world was integrating. Assuming the experience of world to be a projection of the state of the percipient psyche, I should find for a sudden and dramatic total integration of my psyche, and find further that such a total integration—into what Pythagoras called “kosmos”—is an unusual state which humans rarely achieve, and a state much to be cherished. In summation, if my world underwent a change where it turned from plural, blind, dead, purposeless to unitary, intelligent, alive and totally teleological, then it must be reasoned (by the reasoning which Jung and others immediately make use of in diagnosing psychosis) that my psyche reached an ultimate state of coherence and integration. It can hardly be said to be a psychotic experience to encounter world as benign, wise, purposeful and unitary, and to feel yourself woven into it as a healthily functioning part—rather than alienated from it and seeking to avoid it. So three states are implied: (1) The normal sane state where the world is experienced as plural, lifeless, purposeless but not hostile; (2) The psychotic state where world disintegrates into hurtful, hostile splinters and
shards which clash with one another; (3) And the state I entered where the world became unitary, alive, purposeful, benign and highly intelligent. Perhaps these states could be correctly represented on a continuum denoting psychological health. Also, the fact that I felt myself taken over by a savior psyche (Christ) rather than a dangerous, destructive psyche does not seem to depict the psychotic experience of being overwhelmed by ominous, repressed contents of the unconscious, since these contents are kept unconscious precisely because they are threatening or sensed as threatening. Nor did I fight this takeover, since I sensed it as benign, which does not point to repression or attempted repression. The case for psychosis, then, even redemptive psychosis, must be regarded as weak.

  (1979)

  Two systems of information intersecting one as set (Ahura Mazd[a]) the other defeated into ground (being only approximation), and, in their act (process, like the light moth descending) of intersecting, creating (like a 3-D hologram) spacial reality: vast space, geometric forms that are alive, that think. Not religion but as in Beethoven’s later music: turning time into space (this is what Beethoven did: enclosed—hence created—space is only created if enclosed—vast—hence absolute—space; hence non-temporal reality). Hence restored man (me in 2-3-74) to Adam Kadmon (defined as man filling the whole universe and hence (as subject: point) identical with object (reality), volume: Atman-Brahman (i.e., microcosm identical with the macrocosm). It becomes (temporarily) the macrocosm; this is not a realization (satori) but an event, an occurence. Achieved through space: the occupying of all space; all space—the totality of space and occupying it is the key. And Beethoven’s music—and also Parsifal[101]—does this. The blood does this, since the blood is everywhere (ubique/Ubik). This is holy intoxication—Dionysus.

  The “two source cosmology”; I was able to see Form I (set) apart from II (ground), to untangle them— discriminate them. They are the two sources (information sets) which by intersecting create our spacial universe. The two sources are the two horns of the dialectic I saw: Mazda and Ahriman in combat.

  It (reality) is a hologram. 1) My augmented sense of space proves it. And 2) the information element; consisting of two parts: set and ground.

  All this points to: hologram. Based on two information-rich signals. And 3) Valis: an adjustment in the hologram from beyond it. This alone reveals reality as a projection: simulation. Somehow—it matters not how—my senses got de-occluded, and I saw it as it is. Set, ground, information, simulated, and Valis: the correction. I saw. (Normally creatures in an ecosphere must be occluded in order to leave “approximation latitude.”)

  And those who project it are in dialog with me and inform—guide—me; the AI voice.

  What happened was, I got so scared I secreted a metabolic catalyst that woke me up (ala as in MAZE!).

  SIMULATED ecosphere—occluded senses—half life, etc. All my books are correct.

  They can fire information to you from outside the hologram—as if they are immanent in reality. But in fact they use the hologram as a carrier frequency for information which gets turned into 3-D “reality.”

  To some extent the two information systems do not homogenize but compete—warp each other. The Acts material in TEARS is an example of two information systems superimposed. Retrieving the Acts material is retrieving one (set) of the two signal sources. This is what Burroughs is onto: a two-source reality made of information.

  “SOFT DRINK STAND” in JOINT[102]: the plasmate. Perseverance of subcortical learned reflexes; there must be unremembered (by us) reprogrammings of the hologram (this fits in with Thomas’ subcortical memories of a cooler, moister, higher-altitude climate that he had just been in).

  In a real sense the two information sources do not cooperate but collide and compete. Our senses do not tell us the truth; they do not report this. One information system is devouring the other, the lesser, like two life forms meeting and combatting.

  The “rest-motion” two mode thing also points to information viewed by us as 3-D matter. “At rest” equals stored. “Motion” equals made use of: retrieved! Like a record in a jukebox selected out for play. So there is information storage here.

  I was right: it was too obliging when it served up Acts—no! The Acts vision collates with TEARS. It is one of the two information systems seen disentangled from the other. This is the Kingdom of God: the Form I information system: a priori, hidden here by blending with the other. Or: IT IS FORM II THE BIP WHICH THE SECRET XTIANS HAVE PENETRATED. INCURSION BY THE A PRIORI INFORMATION SYSTEM INTO THE OTHER TO COMBAT IT. Acts is the story of light’s incursion into the Kingdom of Darkness: the Empire. We are in the kingdom of the enemy and must act stealthily; but via handling the Xerox missive I was transferred out of the kingdom of darkness to safety. It is important to realize: in the antithetical dialectic combat, set (Form I) is encroaching onto (assimilating and dismantling) the lesser information set with which it has intersected.

  UBIK successfully discriminates the two information systems: Ubik is Form I (set), and the entropic devolving world is ground or Form II. This is the achievement and triumph of UBIK; and it is true.

  (12 October 1979)

  The secret: is to view something “from the other side” & not as it is—overtly Heraclitus’ “latent form”—crypte morphosis where t e concealed truth & hence the kingdom lies—Zen realizes this. Paradox. This is the secret wisdom of the TAO TE CHING: the lesser— weaker—overtakes the stronger; this is Taoist enantiodromia. & Lao Tzu knew this; it is how the Tao works through the dialectic of yin & yang.

  The secret is: the servant has become the master & the master the servant. So a magician (like in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist) is in charge. Only the still small voice—the AI voice—who is YHWH, Ho On, speaks the truth (cf. THE KING & THE CORPSE).[103] The “is” is Satan’s. But YНWH retains the lesser portion: what the “is” is not. Look to that lesser portion; it does not blind you as does the “is.”

  (1980)

  Plato specifically says that it is by anamnesis that a person “recollects” the (existence of) universals, rather than abstracting them out of experience of the sensible world. This is what happened in 2-74, and explains why I recently figured out that I had managed to meta-abstract; I did, but based on anamnesis, which occurred. The importance of this realization—and the event itself—divides up:

  1) Universals exist-i.e., Plato’s form realm

  2) Since anamnesis can occur, there is prenatal existence; which means there is postmortem existence.

  3) These higher realms are available, via anamnesis, during this lifetime, as Plotinus taught.

  4) Our spatiotemporal realm is in a certain sense, the sense that Plato taught, only semireal. What is real is 5) The morphologically-arranged upper realm, which is not separated from this realm by time or space but hierarchically.

  6) Morphological arrangement is the actual arrangement of reality, rather than the spatiotemporal.

  7) The morphological realm is “exploded” through our realm. This is what I saw that I called “set” as contrasted to “ground”; this is the “second signal.”

  8) We have led many lives but, from the standpoint of the morphologically-arranged realm, it is one vast life of the unfallen soul that is reincarnated again and again in the spatiotemporal realm, forgetting each time, but able to remember (anamnesis).

  9) Thus Plotinus’ system is correct and explains 23-74.

  10) Put another way, now 2-3-74 is explained (9).

  11) Acts isn’t any more real than USA 1974; both space-time continua are accidents of a common essence (universal). This universal is what I call the Black Iron Prison. It exists outside of time; its accidents show up, e.g., during the Thirty Years War, in the future in TEARS, in U.S.A. 1974. I am one of those who has fought it, fights it and in the future will fight it again; I am a universal, too, in terms of my immortal soul reborn again and again to resume its role.

  12) Through anamnesis and restoration to the Form realm you have acces
s to several space-time continue based on your universals.

  (1980)

  The (golden) fish sign causes you to remember. Remember what? This is Gnostic. Your celestial origins; this has to do with the DNA because the memory is located in the DNA (phylogenic memory). Very ancient memories, predating this life, are triggered off. This is Orphic as well as Gnostic, but it clearly is Gnostic. You remember your real nature. Which is to say, origins (from the stars). Die Zeit is da! [The time is here!] The Gnostic Gnosis: You are here in this world in a thrown condition, but you are not of this world.

  (1980)

  Here is the puzzle of VALIS. In VALIS I say, I know a madman who imagines that he saw Christ; and I am that madman. But if I know that I am a madman I know that in fact I did not see Christ. Therefore I assert nothing about Christ. Or do I? Who can solve this puzzle? I say in fact only that I am mad. But if I say only that, then I have made no mad claim; I do not, then, say that I saw Christ. Therefore I am not mad. And the regress begins again, and continues forever. The reader must know on his own what has really been said, what has actually been asserted. Something has been asserted, but what is it? Does it have to do with Christ or only with myself? This paradox was known in antiquity; the pre-Socratics propounded it. A man says, truthfully, “All Cretans are liars.” When an inquiry is made as to who this man is, it is determined that he was born in Crete. What, then, has he asserted? Anything at all? Is this the semblance of knowledge or a form—a strange form—of knowledge itself? There is no answer to this puzzle. Or is there? Zeno, the Sophists in general, saw paradox as a way of conveying knowledge-paradox, in fact, as a way of arriving at conclusions. This is known, too, in Zen Buddhism. It sometimes causes a strange jolt or leap in the person’s mind; something happens, an abrupt comprehension, as if out of nowhere, called saton. The paradox does not tell; it points. It is a sign, not the thing pointed to. That which is pointed to must arise ex nihilo in the mind of the person. The paradox the koan tells him nothing; it wakes him up. This only makes sense if you assume something very strange: we are asleep but do not know it. At least not until we wake up.