golden rectangle, also golden section: Figures associated with the golden ratio or divine mean, a mathematical pattern of relationship that has been recognized since Pythagoras. The golden ratio (an irrational number approximate to 1:618034) occurs when the ratio between the sum of two unequal quantities and the larger quantity is equivalent to the ratio between the larger quantity and the smaller. Geometric plotting of the recursive Fibonacci sequence also produces the golden rectangle, as does the growth of a nautilus shell.
Hartshorne, Charles (1897–2000): American philosopher and theologian who developed the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead into process theology, which emphasizes the relationship between an ever-changing God and a creation in constant development.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1770–1831): German philosopher of dialectical idealism. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit offers readers an epic quest toward self-understanding as the thinker explores the limits and dynamics of rational thought learning to reflect on and comprehend itself. Hegel’s dialectic was influential on Karl Marx, who famously “turned Hegel on his head” with the invention of dialectical materialism.
Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976): German philosopher whose work attempted to overcome what he perceived as the “forgetfulness of being” in the history of philosophy. Heidegger argued that habits of thought inherited from the Greeks induce human beings to focus on “beings” rather than “being”—particular entities rather than that which enables entities to exist at all. Heidegger’s conception of Dasein, or “being-there,” distinguished between the activity of being and a subject or a self—the center of philosophical analysis since René Descartes. Heidegger is the most referenced twentieth-century philosopher in the Exegesis.
heimarmene (Greek): Fate, or the personification of fate; for Dick, also the deluding, entrapping power of spurious everyday reality.
Heraclitus (c. 535–475 B.C.E.): Ancient Greek philosopher from Asia Minor. The most dynamic of the pre-Socratics, Heraclitus comes down to us through a collection of fragments that radiate a vision of reality in which all is change, opposites coincide, and fire is the essential process at the heart of the world flux.
hermetic: An important strand of Western esoteric thought and experience, hermeticism derives from the Corpus hermeticum, a set of texts from late antiquity whose mystical and magical philosophy is perhaps best summarized in the famous dictum from the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus: “As above, so below.”
homeostasis: The stable, balanced condition maintained by a dynamical system regulating its own development through time; usually, a living organism regularly adjusting itself to changing environmental conditions.
homoplasmate: A Dickian neologism describing a human being who has cross-bonded with an influx of living information bestowed or transmitted by a higher source of wisdom. See plasmate.
Ho On, or Oh Ho: The name of a clay pot made for Dick by a friend. In an early hypnagogic vision, Dick heard the pot, which identified itself as “Oh Ho,” speak to him in a brash, irritable tone about spiritual matters. Later, Dick theorized that the name “Oh Ho” might be related to the Greek phrase Ho On, meaning “He Who.” The phrase “ho on” appears in Exodus 3:14, when God identifies himself as “I AM WHO I AM” (in the Greek of the Septuagint, Ego eimi ho on).
hylozoism: The belief or philosophical proposition that material things can be alive, or that life and matter are inseparable.
hypnagogic, or hypnogogic; and hypnopompic: Hallucinations, both visual and auditory, that occur on the boundary of sleep and often feature a significant and sometimes alarming sense of reality. Hypnagogic hallucinations occur while one is falling asleep, hypnopompic hallucinations while one is waking.
hypostasis (Greek): Literally, “beneath-standing” or “underpinning.” A term for the basic reality of a thing in Greek philosophy. Plotinus used it to describe the three principles that underlie phenomenal reality: the One, the noös, and the World Soul, or Logos. The term was also batted around within the ecumenical councils as they tried to clarify the nature of the Trinity.
I Ching: An ancient Chinese text used as a tool for divination. The Book of Changes is based on a binary system of broken (yin) and unbroken (yang) lines; six such lines make up a symbolic hexagram linked to various commentaries. Dick, who owned the original two-volume Bollingen edition of the Wilhelm/Baynes translation, consulted the I Ching frequently and claimed to have used it to resolve turning points in the plot of The Man in the High Castle (1962), which also features an oracular book written using the I Ching.
idios kosmos and koinos kosmos (Greek): Literally, “private world” and “communal world,” respectively. The two phrases come from fragment 89 of Heraclitus: “The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.” In Dick’s scheme, it is often used to contrast an individual’s reality system from collective social reality.
I-It and I-Thou relationship: Terms, taken from Martin Buber’s I and Thou (1923), describing two forms of relationship. In the first, the individual treats the world and other individuals as objects with use value; in the second, the individual enters true relationship with the world and other individuals as other subjects rather than objects. Buber conceives the latter form of relationship as the model of God’s interaction with the world.
Isidore, Jack: Protagonist of Dick’s novel Confessions of a Crap Artist (written around 1960; published 1975). Isidore engages in relentless amateur scientific inquiry, not unlike Dick’s practice in the Exegesis.
James-James: Evil or deranged demiurgic figure that Dick encountered in a dream in 1974 or 1975; described in chapter 18 of Radio Free Albemuth (1985).
Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202). Theologian and mystic from Sicily. His concept of the three ages of history, which posits an imminent “Age of the Holy Spirit” when God will communicate directly with humanity without the mediation of the clergy, helped fuel a number of millenarian, utopian, and radical ideas and movements, including Marxism.
Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804): German philosopher whose transcendental idealism sought to integrate knowledge based on experience (empiricism) with knowledge based on reason (for example, mathematics). Kant called for and in many ways achieved a “Copernican revolution” in philosophy by placing the modes of human perception at the center of inquiry; for Kant the structures of the human mind order the sense data of experience, limiting our ability to apprehend the Ding an sich, the thing-in-itself.
kerygma (Greek): Preaching or pronouncement, especially of the message of Christ contained in the New Testament.
King Felix: A two-word “cypher” that Dick discovered in the text of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). On page 218 of the Doubleday hardcover, in the section describing Felix Buckman’s visionary dream, the words king and Felix appear vertically juxtaposed between two lines of text. Dick became convinced that this happenstance phrase had a secret meaning and would be read and recognized by people or forces unknown. “Felix” is Latin for “fortunate” or “happy.”
Kozyrev, Nikolai, NK, or Dr. NK (1908–1983): Russian astrophysicist who carried out research at the Pulkovo Observatory. His 1967 article “Possibility of Experimental Study of the Properties of Time” theorizes that time is a force with active causal properties.
Krasis (Greek): Blending or mixture; used by the pre-Socratic philosophers Empedocles and Anaxagoras in their accounts of the creation of the material world.
Lem, Stanislaw (1921–2006): Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy, and satire. Contributed “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans” to Science Fiction Studies in 1975, an article that praised Dick and especially Ubik (1968). The two corresponded, and Lem worked on a Polish translation of Ubik.
Liebniz, Gottfried (1646–1716): A German mathematician and philosopher who contributed significantly to the development of mechanical calculators, infinitesimal calculus, and binary mathematics (whose anticipation in the I Ching he recognized). His no
tion of the monad was important to Dick.
Logos (Greek): Word, account, reason. Heraclitus used the word in the sense of order; in Christianity, an important tradition derives from the Gospel of John, in whose first lines Christ is identified as the Logos, the eternal “Word” or “Reason” of the cosmos through whom God created the universe.
ma’at: Ancient Egyptian concept of truth, balance, and law; also personified as a goddess.
macrometasomakosmos, also MMSK: Dick’s term for the ultimate, genuine structure of reality; a cognate for the Platonic world of ideas. In terms of its Greek roots, this neologism breaks down into Great-Ultimate-Body-of-the-Cosmos.
Maitreya (Sanskrit): The future Buddha foretold in Buddhist eschatology. In the late nineteenth century, the Theosophists began using the term to describe a coming World Teacher, and the term appears in a variety of New Age movements.
Malebranche, Nicolas (1638–1715): French philosopher and natural scientist who synthesized Cartesian philosophy with Augustinian thought. Malebranche held that we see external objects by means of ideas in God’s mind; he also embraced the doctrine of occasionalism, which holds that God is the only real cause of all action.
Mani (c. 216–276 C.E.): The prophet and founder of Manichaeism, a syncretistic religion that combined Zoroastrian and Gnostic ideas and became one of the most dominant religions in the world between the third and seventh centuries. Sharply dualistic, Manichaeism held that the material world is a realm of darkness from which spiritual light must be extracted through ritual and practice.
Marxism: Political philosophy and social movement based on the writings of German political economist Karl Marx (1818–1883). Anticipating the intensification of capitalism’s internal contradictions, and calling for a revolutionary awareness among the working classes, Marx prophesied the end of the capitalist world order and the emergence of a classless society.
maya (Sanskrit): Illusion, especially the illusion of the phenomenal world; sometimes also considered an aspect of the Divine Mother.
Maze: A dark Gnostic fable also inspired by the Bardo Thödol, A Maze of Death (1970) tells the story of fourteen colonists who emigrate to the planet Delmak-0, only to be murdered, one by one. It emerges that the colonists are immersed in a computer simulation they are running to distract themselves from despair as their failed spaceship orbits a dead star. Delmak-0’s digitally programmed religion represents Dick’s most developed theological systematizing prior to 2-3-74, and it closes with arguably the most explicit theophany in any Dick novel.
Mitleid (German): Compassion, pity.
Mitwelt (German): The immediate environment. One of the three terms for world used by the existentialist psychologist Ludwig Binswanger. See Umwelt and Eigenwelt.
MMSK: See macrometasomakosmos.
moksa (Sanskrit): Ultimate release, liberation.
monad: The philosopher Leibniz described the things in the world as independent but interconnected entities—which he called “monads”—operating according to a pre-established divine harmony.
mystery religions, or mystery cults: Religious cults in the ancient Greco-Roman world whose members engaged in esoteric rituals, often involving the ritual and ecstatic reenactment of a mythical narrative. The most influential and long-lived of these rites were the Eleusinian Mysteries in Greece.
Nag Hammadi: Egyptian town near the site of the 1945 discovery of thirteen ancient leather-bound codices hidden in a sealed jar. Dating from the second century, these Coptic manuscripts probably belonged to the library of a Gnostic Christian community. One of the most notable Nag Hammadi texts is the only complete copy of the Gospel of Thomas, an important source for Dick’s religious reflections.
negentropic: Bringing order to a disordered or entropic system.
noös, or nous (Greek): Mind, reason, divine or human. Associated words are noetic (adjective; “of the mind”) and noein (verb; “to think or realize”).
noösphere: Geophysicist Vladimir Vernadsky argued that, along with the biosphere, lithosphere, and atmosphere, the earth has acquired a mental or psychic “sphere”: a noösphere created through thought and focused attention. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin popularized the concept of noösphere in his treatment of “Point Omega.”
NT and OT: New Testament and Old Testament.
ontogon: A neologism meaning an individual being or object, as contrasted to an ideal or Platonic form. See phylogon. Dick coins the terms from phylogeny and ontogony, used in evolutionary theory and depth psychology to describe the relationship between individual and species life.
ontology: The philosophy of being; ontologists ask questions about the nature and function of reality itself and about what it means for things to exist.
Ornstein, Robert (1942–): American psychologist, author of The Psychology of Consciousness (1972). His views on the brain’s hemispheres and their differing roles in consciousness were brought to mainstream attention when he was covered by Time magazine in 1974.
Orphics: An ancient Greek and Hellenic mystery cult devoted to the poet Orpheus, as well as Dionysus in the form of Zagreus; Orphic myths and rituals were particularly concerned with death and resurrection.
orthogonal time: Moving perpendicularly to the conventional and spurious sense of linear time, orthogonal time is, for Dick, time in its genuine mode. In a 1975 essay, “Man, Android, and Machine,” Dick describes orthogonal time as containing within a simultaneous plane “everything which was, just as grooves on an LP contain that part of the music which has already been played; they don’t disappear after the stylus tracks them.”
Owl: Dick’s unfinished final novel, The Owl in Daylight.
palintropos harmonie, or palintonos harmonie: A term used in Heraclitus’s fragment 51, which compares the mutual adjustment and harmony of variant things and processes to the relationship of bow and lyre. Variant sources supply palintropos (backward-turning) or palintonos (backward-stretching) as the first word. Dick uses the term in both its variants in the Exegesis.
Palm Tree Garden, or PTG: The spiritually redeemed and ontologically genuine world, revealed to Dick in January-February 1975, when southern California seemed to transform into the Levant. In chapter 18 of Deus Irae (1976, co-written with Roger Zelazny), the vision of Dr. Abernathy—written by Dick alone—represents the Palm Tree Garden.
Palmer Eldritch: Industrial magnate who unleashes psychedelic havoc in Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) after he returns from the Proxima system as a drug-dealing demiurge. Eldritch’s “three stigmata” are based on the vision of a “vast visage of perfect evil” that Dick saw in the skies over Marin County in 1963, which also induced in him a spell of regular Episcopalian worship at a local church.
panentheism: A metaphysical and religious doctrine holding that God (theos) is both transcendent and immanent, both beyond all and yet “in all” (pan-en-). This teaching is sometimes portrayed through the image of the cosmos as God’s body, God’s relationship to the universe being roughly analogous to the mind’s relationship to the body—again, both “in” and “beyond” at the same time.
pantheism: A metaphysical and religious doctrine that holds that God is identified with everything in the world and that everything in the world is God. This is in striking contrast to traditional theism, which holds that God transcends ordinary reality.
Pantocrator (Greek): “Almighty,” a name of God that accents his omnipotence.
Paracelsus (1493–1541): A Swiss Renaissance hermeticist, alchemist, and physician with the remarkable full name of Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. Through empirical experiments and innovative occult theories, Paracelsus broke the reigning orthodox concepts of disease, explored botanical remedies, and pioneered the use of minerals and chemicals in medicine.
Paraclete, sometimes Parakletos (Greek): Literally, advocate or helper; in Christianity, the Holy Spirit.
Parmenides (c. early fifth century B.C.E.): Pre-Socratic philosopher and founder of
the Eleatic school. In his poem On Nature, he describes reality as a mixture of two forms: the truth of the One and the mere appearance of the world of multiplicity, about which we can hold only opinion. As one of the first philosophers to consider the abstract principle of Being, he is considered a founder of metaphysics.
parousia (Greek): Presence, advent; in Christianity, the term generally refers to the Second Coming of Christ.
Parsifal: A three-act opera by Richard Wagner (1813–1883), based on the epic Germanic poem Parzival, about the titular knight’s quest for the Holy Grail. In Wagner’s story, which is also influenced by legends of the Buddha, Parsifal embodies a “holy fool” who helps initiate the powerful act of redemption that closes the opera.
Philo of Alexandria (20 B.C.E.–50 C.E.): A Hellenistic Jew who used a variety of Greek philosophical concepts to interpret and defend the Jewish scriptures. His writings were particularly important to the early Church fathers, who were probably influenced by his association of Logos with the governing plan of creation and the “word of God” that bears the Lord’s message in the Hebrew Bible.
phylogon: A neologism referring to a general principle or archetype, as contrasted to an individual object or being; roughly analogous to Plato’s forms. See ontogon.
Pike, James (1913–1969): American Episcopalian bishop, writer, and friend of Dick’s. Pike, who questioned traditional doctrines such as the Trinity and the virginity of Mary, was accused of heresy and resigned his Cali fornia post in 1966. His son Jim committed suicide the same year, and Pike held’séances, one of which was attended by Dick and Nancy Hackett, in an attempt to contact his son’s spirit. Pike died in the Israeli desert while researching the Essenes and the historical Jesus. Dick fictionalized the last years of his life in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982).