The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
But there is another and equally necessary reason for my salvation. And it is not a “natural” reason but has to do with grace, hence the God of Moses (the God of the prophet Moses and of Moses Maimonides, YHWH); by voluntarily picking up and reading this particular book two times in two lives I found favor with YHWH and it was he who through his mercy (i.e., grace) caused me in 2-74 to remember—and as soon as I remembered I was instantly lifted up at right angles (vertically) to the way we live horizontally for all eternity and yet only once, until through his grace we are saved.
[53:D-10] My God—this revelation of earlier tonight: it signifies something else I hadn’t realized. This eternal “horizontal tracking and retrack ing” is broken only when and if anamnesis and noesis (the meta-abstraction) occurs, whereupon you are “netted” up along the vertical axis as if by pulley—this is precisely the pan-Indian (Hindu and Buddhist) notion of moksa, liberation from the “weary wheel” of birth, death and rebirth; and in the pan-Indian system restored memory of past lives (or a life) is, as with Plato’s anamnesis, the “access key.” This “vertical” extrication is the whole point of Buddhist and Hindu awakening and hence liberation—and in connection with this realization I suddenly have a partial memory that part of this revelation had to do with Nirvana: myself and Nirvana (and if not this revelation then at any rate a very recent one). What, then, I am saying is that 3-74 may well not only be the doorway to Nirvana but may have been Nirvana itself. The cessation of birth and death: the cycle based on illusion. Free at last.
[53:D-12] The vision of vertical extrication from endless horizontal tracking is highly significant: an orthogonal axis is represented here, a dimension like a spatial 4th, unknown to us. [ . . . ] This is why space and time and causation were so changed for me in 3-74, if not obliterated entirely, and why I saw time as a fourth spatial axis: salvation utilizes one additional dimension or axis. It has the effect of breaking the power of heimarmene by virtue of the fact that it enters at right angles to all known axes. [ . . . ] It may well be, then, that in 3-74 I was not just seeing time as space but was seeing along an additional axis—five instead of four, with time transformed into space thereby. This 5th axis may be necessary if you are to discriminate set from ground and discern Valis.
It is through the 5th axis that the two spatiotemporal continua juxtapose, as if by a “fold,” impossible to our four known axes. And I may find that the meta-abstraction was a conceiving of this 5th axis! [ . . . ]
Well, then, the third eye of discernment opened (Dibba Cakkhu) in 3-74 due to the 2-74 meta-abstraction, and because of this my four dimensional world became five dimensional; and all that I saw arises out of this (e.g., the plasmate, the King Felix cypher, set to ground, Valis camouflaged and here normally invisible to us, etc.).
Biochip symbiote. Mycelia, vine, its branches growing like a circulatory system. “Firebright.” The logos in the human brain.
Ach! Temporal parallaxis is at right angles to the other three spatial axes. Formerly it was experienced only as time; now it is a spatial axis that revealed 4 depths on the same page of print of Tears. The fifth dimension then enters as time (to replace it), but it is another kind of time (apparently); in any case, this fourth spatial axis (“temporal parallaxis”) permits the set-ground discrimination, etc. If I had not seen what I call “temporal parallaxis” I could not imagine it. My God; this is all the case!
In this fifth dimension time, things are “now” if they possess a common constituent; viz: “now” signifies any and all of our fourth dimensional worlds where such a common constituent as, e.g., The Guide to the Perplexed is; this is what the meta-abstraction pertains to: this other kind of time: the illo tempore or dream time, in which one and the same unitary object is at two times and places in terms of how we experience time and place in a four dimensional world; but in a five dimensional world, that golden fish sign was in USA 1974 and Syria A.D. 70 simultaneously; this is how, e.g., the Eucharist works, how through the sacrament “time is overcome”—normal time becomes space—“temporal parallaxis” and a different time, an added (fifth) dimension enters, and the meta-abstraction was a realization on my part of this “coaxiality.” Then the meta-abstraction as an ultra cognitive act did usher it all in, but note! The golden fish sign is (and did serve in that case, 2-74) a sacramental—holy—object (filled with grace). (A vessel for grace; it was not simply old; it was sacred.)
[53:E-1] * There are complex organisms that live in 5-D space-time (i.e., hypertime) and they are not perceptible by/to us, e.g., Valis, the plasmate. We can’t discriminate them. They have contacted me. Their language is color. (Color, math and music form a unity.) This was the phosphene graphic, pure language. They grow through our 4-D world like mycelia, biochip, symbiote. It was Pythagoras they first contacted. Our world to them is like an ocean.
[ . . . ]
My 5-D realm is precisely what Plotinus was speaking of: concentric rings, not a fall in space and time. It is the realm of the sacred, of Act III of Parsifal; hence, “Here, my son, time turns into space.” It is the realm of Kosmos Noetos, hence logos, hence the realm of Christ.
[53:E-3] We are as in an ocean to them, and we are like lower life forms whom they are trying to contact. But they are very different from us. Thus although they are ETIs they are not from another planet, star-system, etc., but are right here (except in a 5-D world; they can see us but we can’t see them).† Plotinus’ concentric rings of emanation explain it. Here there is atomization, causation, etc. There, unity exists. Structure—organization—is pure, which is to say, these beings are in a sense incorporeal, yet in another sense they are not; but here, we see not the total being as a unity but rather discrete physical components that add up to nothing, e.g., Valis. We see at best a perturbation of the reality field. My “surd.” Their language is color-music-number (ratio).
For 60 seconds last night I was in direct two-way contact with them. Upon my figuring out that there is such a thing as “self-authenticating” information, at once I asked for what I call “cypher source verification” and got several, fired very fast, mostly sequences (as are the Fibonacci numbers), as if they had them ready for use at a moment’s notice. Sequence patterns, intervals, etc.; I don’t remember but they were sufficient, I remember that. They were ebullient; they had achieved their objective. They had proven their external-source origin, the information was not originating in my own mind. The two-way exchange followed the classic lines envisioned by our scientists as to how we would send signal and response back and forth with ETIs, that is, other planets. But this is not other planets; it is a 5-D world that is now and here (known to Plotinus as an ontologically higher realm or concentric ring). I guess you would say that these are the “gods” of Egypt, India and Greece.*
[ . . . ]
This is the sacred breaking into the profane, and is certainly illo tempore.
[53:E-5] The color, musical score, math triune info: like an illuminated manuscript from the Medieval period. Ach: I have always said that the plasmate info (e.g., King Felix) looked like an illuminated letter, suggesting that the idea of an illuminated letter was derived from a perception of the plasmate. Color, coded in as an essential integral part. So here, the illuminated letter or word becomes musical annotation (which adds the element of music) and at fixed ratio intervals (math):
But the 4th note doubles back, and what is formed is the long spiral of the Fibonacci numbers. The colors signal the phosphenes of the receiver and so are so-to-speak read backward, i.e., in terms of their phosphene analogs. A pure concept is conveyed using no words; all three axes are nonverbal (music, math ratios, color).
Pythagoras, phosphenes, symbiote, biochip, mycelia, vine, circulatory system.
[53:E-7] The concept I want is: the 5-D world can intersect with our 4-D world without our being aware of it (this intersecting) or the 5-D world itself, even though the 5-D world is in some sense corporeal; this precisely is the coaxiality and precisely what the meta-abstraction pertain
s to. The best example is Tears; it is one thing, a unitary object, but it occupies one “life” here in our 4-D world and tells one story here; in the 5-D world it leads another “life” and tells another story even though the text is the same in both worlds. However, in the 5-D world, because of the 4th spatial axis (which we experience as time), there are multiple, discriminated sequences of text (and not in 2-D but 3-D). This is how one object can be at—seen at—two times and two places and yet remain one object; viz: two “worlds” operate off it using it as a shared or common matrix.
[53:E-8] Will Durant points out that the ascent in Dante’s Commedia resembles Plotinus’ ascent through the successive concentric rings. Absolutely; and I say, the passage over from the 4-D world to the 5-D—which are concentric or coaxial—is the crucial one—this line of thought leading back to my durable conviction that we (in our normal 4-D realm) are in Purgatorio; in which case passage to the 5-D realm is a fortiori a pas sage—truly and literally—from Purgatorio to Paradiso (not als ob but literally); this is what Dante is talking about, what happened to me.
[53:F-5] What I seem to have arrived at finally is a triune structure based on Dante but also related to the Um-, Mit-, and Eigenwelt structure, yet different.
(A) Lowest realm. Individual isolated: atomized (this correlates with Plotinus!). Pre-social, in that no real relatedness exists with other life—other living creatures human and animal both are experienced as objects, as it (reified), not you; hence there is no true Gemeinschaftigheit.54 Instead there is Einsamkeit.55 Other is known on a contingent basis, from outside, poorly, indirectly. This Dasein is what I term the android; this is a machine world, driven by pure blind necessity. It is Inferno.
(B) Middle realm. Empathy/agape enters. The atomization is abolished as a pure state; there arises real knowledge of other; you replace it; world is social. This is clearly the Mitwelt. Something qualitative and radical has happened. A genuine entry of other into the self has occurred: knowledge of world is superior to contingent approximation. Analogy is utilized in which other life is compared in terms of isomorphism to self. The distinction between self and other is only relative, now, not absolute; thus some linked structure exists: self incorporated into systems that are ultra-personal; identity transcends individual identity. Flexibility replaces the fixed, brittle categories of (A): boundary now fluctuates as self moves out, and other enters. [ . . . ]
(C) This is an extraordinary Dasein and is predicated on at least one absolute. Here, part-whole compatibility is complete, originating in a blitz in which the self-world/other dualism is annihilated by (1) absolute knowledge by the former (self) of the latter (world/other). This seems to be based on a cognitive operation by the knowing self in which the self incorporates other as knowledge (information) in such a way that other is transformed into negative entropy engulfed and assimilated and acquired in a single act that both transforms world into information, pure information and only information, but (crucially) information that now belongs to the self and is within self as structure of self derived from world—this both requiring that world be absolutely comprehensible and rendering world comprehensible without qualification, as if self is now in the relationship to world that world was formerly in in relation to self; self and world have changed places and world as information is at the disposal of self as source of the self’s own structure.
[53:G-4] “Frau, sing für unsere Freunde.”56 Apes. Horace/Dimi. Vast green meadow. Physical ritual greeting gestures.
As we can now use phosphenes for the blind (to compensate), they (the 5-D species) who are deaf use phosphene color to compensate for their deafness in order to see music—it is all math anyhow: frequency. Ratio. [ . . . ]
They stimulate our phosphenes artificially, by radiation, so we will see in a compensatory fashion what we cannot actually see because of our visual impairment. They, who are deaf, can see in 5-D; i.e., what we—who are blind—can’t. This is why I said, “I am no longer blind.” They made me sighted by stimulating my phosphenes so I could see them, i.e., what I called Valis. It is valid sense perception but compensation for us, a blind species that depends on hearing.
This explains this sequence: Pythagoras, phosphene, biochip, symbiote, mycelia, vine, circulatory system.
[ . . . ]
Meadow. Ape-like sentient other species. Dante, Mathilde. The Holy. Close Encounters—music and color, but—here is where in actuality it breaks down: they are deaf. It is both Christ (the religious) and another species—from another world in 5-D coaxial with ours. They are spatially here, not from another star system in our universe. Thus they stimulate our brains to see holograms. This is what UFOs are. In my vision (dream) they appeared as ape-like to suggest 2001. And “Frau, sing für unsere Freunde” points to Close Encounters. The Holy: yes, it is Christ (i.e., Valis), but yet it is another species. Dysmorphic to us in another (5-D) realm, right here. They intrude onto/into our 4-D realm as theophanies and hierophanies. They know of the existence of sound scientifically but can’t hear it and didn’t evolve organs to detect it, but they know we did. Their vision is perfect; ours is dim. Here is the dysmorphism expressed.
[ . . . ]
I am not speculating. I am problem-solving trying to understand. Saturday night was real.
* * *
[53:G-8] They are able to hear music by tapping into—patching into—our minds, which is why I said, “Frau, sing für unsere Freunde”; they virtually worship our music, and they yearn from the bottom of their hearts to hear it—as we will, when we know more, for their color language. Math is the common constituent that links our species to theirs, but then it is words, sound, music—the music of the spheres—for us—for them it is thousands of colors (specific numbers on the millimicron scale of the visual spectrum).
Paradiso (in Dante) is their realm: light (more specifically color) and Love. But for them our realm is paradise because of sound (more specifically music). Thus the highest level of Purgatorio (our realm) is characterized by the woman—Mathilde—singing.
The sight of them, as they crossed the meadow toward me, as ape-like clarifies, to me, that I am dealing with a finite species and not God or angels as we employ the terms. Physically they are corporeal and creatural, dysmorphic in part, isomorphic in part. Dio; it is all true. And I have seen them, as in Close Encounters. They brought back my lost “person” Dimi or Horace. He was with them in the “next” world in der Nähe.57
And they are our friends.
I saw those whom I’ve been in contact with; they came toward me, several of them. Emerged out into the open at last—not Adonis-like but ape-like. But that did not matter, I went outside the building, forgetting all else (a lot was going on, the activity of our world), to greet them with physical ritual gestures as with two different tribes . . . but it was two different species. In two quite different worlds. And I now know supreme joy. Freunde—Freude58—Beethoven, Schiller, music.
Not “sing to” our friend, i.e., to communicate, but “sing for”—for their enjoyment: this is our gift.
The phosphenes link our species to theirs. For us, phosphenes—stimulated coherently—permit us truly to see, overcoming our partial blindness. For them, who are deaf, they can see sounds—in particular music.
But the communications bridge is established by the fact that color and music (light and sound) are equally based on math.
Music is something ultimate pertaining to sound. Color pattern is something ultimate you do with light. Ultimately, each serves as the language of that particular species.
They have had to convert to words to communicate with me, i.e., sound; but now they are beginning to convert me to color—their form of communication. Imagine a math/color analog of our Pythagorean math/music! What a different universe—I was in it in 3-74 via a compensatory optic function: phosphene activity (“for the visually impaired”); and reciprocally they can “hear” sounds—e.g., music—by tapping our minds via symbiosis.