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* Dick’s realization that the deity he describes is a projection of his own beliefs leads him to the conclusion that God has manifested Himself in precisely the form he had already accepted and was prepared to believe in. What lines of reasoning insulate Dick from the other obvious conclusion: that what he has described not only takes the form of his projection but is his projection? There seem to be two answers to this question: first, his prior commitment to the existence of the deity; and second, his earlier theory about the deity’s ability to mimic reality in all kinds of ways. A deity that can mimic what we take to be reality becomes, in effect, bulletproof against any objection, for any deviation or change in what (for us) constitutes reality can be explained by the difference between a deity that simply is reality and one that mimics reality.—NKH
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* Despite what we are repeatedly told by the dogmatic debunkers, there is a rich and impressive scientific literature on precognition. Dean Radin of the Institute of Noetic Sciences has been one of the real pioneers here, particularly around what he calls “presentiment,” a kind of Spidey-sense that many people appear to possess that allows them to sense dangers or desires a few seconds into the future—in short, a humble form of Dick’s future modulation. What is perhaps most significant here, and not always recognized, is that the parapsychological literature strongly suggests that most psychical functioning takes place unconsciously (or in dreams), that is, below the radar and range of our conscious selves or functioning egos. We are Two, and our second self is a Super Self.—JJK
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* When W. Y. Evans-Wentz first prepared the Bardo Thödol for its English edition in 1927, he called it The Tibetan Book of the Dead in order, one suspects, to link it to the popular Egyptian Book of the Dead. Dick owned the 1960 edition of the text, which had been reissued with a new introduction by Carl Jung. A funerary text designed to be read at the bedside of the dead, the Bardo Thödol is more accurately called Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State. The intermediate state in question is the bardo, the spectral halls of transformation that lie between the death of the body and the almost inevitable rebirth of one’s mind-stream: most souls are made so variously terrified and lustful by the apparitions that they are inevitably sucked back for another round. For the Buddhist practitioner, release lies in recognizing the emptiness of these projections, which are nothing other than one’s own mind. Dick’s insight here—that the bardo is actually our world—is perfectly in sync with traditional teachings, as the “intermediate state” refers not only to the afterlife but also to sleeping, dreaming, sneezing, and life itself. We are always in a liminal zone. For the Tibetans, an escape of sorts lies in the clear light of nonconceptual mind; Dick’s more wayward light is pink, which is also, in Tibetan iconography, the color of the supreme lotus of the Buddha.—ED
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* Here Dick suggests the radically liberatory possibility that reality, the Tao, the Palm Tree Garden, can break through the present if “you” will “destroy” prior thought formations, including those that separate “you” from the One. Here Dick resonates with Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, who wished only to awaken from the nightmare of history, an awakening later perhaps achieved by Joyce in Finnegans Wake. Readers familiar with Zen, or Korzybski’s notion that “the map is not the territory,” or the “stillness” in which the divine can manifest in Quaker or Vedic traditions, will recognize some of the practices appropriate for a world mediated and constituted by the multiple “objectified” mistakes of language and other previous thought formations. In this sense Valis “comes not to destroy but to fulfill the law” (Mt 5:17) by overturning prior concepts like so many tables in the temple. “For I say unto you, that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 5:20). Righteousness here is anything but self-righteousness. It is instead the humility and practice necessary to silence the mind in order to perceive reality, a “causal field” unmistakably affected by the language by which we model it.—RD
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* Dick’s holograph is notably erratic throughout this folder, pulsing in waves of ecstasy and calm. Given the manic diagramming throughout the folder (a full-page example is included in this volume’s insert), as well as his invocation of Diana and the fairies, this may well represent the “superdope” episode to which Dick refers in a later folder [83:60].—PJ
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* As noted in other annotations, Dick’s line of speculation here is remarkably similar to the vision of the German judge Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911), who imagined that God wanted to change him into a woman and impregnate her with sunbeams so that their offspring could save the world. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) wrote one of his most famous case studies about Schreber in Three Case Histories: Psychoanalytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (1911), basing his diagnosis on Schreber’s detailed memoir Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903). Though the two never met, Freud diagnosed Schreber as a paraphrenic paranoid suffering from—surprise!—repressed homosexual desires. While Dick’s vision here is remarkably similar to Schreber’s, he makes no mention of the judge anywhere in the Exegesis, though Dick could well have encountered the case given his extensive knowledge of psychology.—DG
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* As noted earlier, Mircea Eliade was a well-known and much-read scholar of comparative religion who was at his professional height when Dick read him in the 1970s. Here he is referring to one of Eliade’s major early books, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951), a massive survey of the anthropological literature as it existed around 1950, organized around Eliade’s own glosses and comparative reflections. Eliade focuses especially on the initiatory illness, magical powers, healing function, poetic gifts, and mystical experiences of the shaman and, perhaps most of all, on the shaman’s role as a psychopomp. Eliade also emphasizes the quest for the recovery of sacred time before the “Fall” into history, here understood in the most general sense as linear temporality, finitude, and mortality. This abolishment or transcendence of time, of course, is also a central concern of Dick’s. Hence, I suspect, his deep admiration for Eliade’s work.—JJK
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* Another new mood is here announced in the Exegesis: a tragic dialectics. Dick has come across Coleridge’s understanding of tragedy, which adapts the early ideas of F.W.J. Schelling. Schelling held that the essence of tragedy consists in a collision between the tragic hero, who is free, and fate, which is the limitation of freedom, the realm of necessity. The sublimity of tragedy consists in the demonstration of freedom in the confrontation with that which destroys it. This is what we see, for example, in the tragedy of Oedipus. Tragedy is here linked to the idea of suffering leading to an experience of truth, as when Aeschylus says repeatedly in the Oresteia, “We must suffer, suffer into truth.” These tragic insights might also be linked to Dick’s repeated references to Euripides’ Bacchae, in particular the collision between King Pentheus (bad) and the god Dionysos (good). These also look forward to a closing passage in this collection where Dick describes the Exegesis as a collision between himself and “what oneself has writ.” On this view, the Exegesis might be interpreted as the entirely self-conscious enactment of a tragic dialectics that moves between the poles of suffering and salvation.—SC
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* In this act of perceiving the “ultra-thought,” Dick is very close to another California sage, Franklin Merrell Wolff. Wolff, a Harvard mathematician who gave up a position at Stanford in order to study in India in the 1930s, deduced a series of axioms about human nature that follow from his first axiom: “Consciousness without an object is.” “Consciousness without an object” is consciousness “beholdi
ng” nothing but itself, which is palpably not an object but is experienced as fact. Wolff’s experiences of “recognition” are instructive for comprehending (and therefore experiencing) the invisible landscape of Dick’s epic quest. So too does Dick’s passage here reflect the other aspect of this inner beholding—“reality as knowledge.” Once one has looked within, one contemplates external reality and inner reality as the “same thing.” Astronomer Carl Sagan repeated biologist Julian Huxley’s phrase that “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” Dick’s investigations of the concepts and practices of the noösphere in the Exegesis emerge out of this perception of ourselves as physical manifestations of thought.—RD
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* Like a lot of readers, I consider Dick an idea-man rather than a stylist. Generally he doesn’t write sentences that hold within them whole worlds; rather, his collective work has to be taken together to add up to something—at which point, as in Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, the House of Dick is bigger on the inside than out. But this sentence is one of Dick’s most exquisite and enigmatic and feels full of wisdom, even as I’m not sure what it means no matter how many times I read it. The whiplash words, of course, are “yet accurate.” Given how precisely stated the rest of the sentence feels, I must assume they have been phrased precisely as well—but they also feel not so much in juxtaposition with the rest of the sentence as like a virus of syllables that has invaded the others.—SE
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* Dick’s Christianity is sometimes revolutionary; here it becomes Marxist. This is not quite the leftist Christianity of liberation theology, which was hitting its stride in the ’70s. Dick’s “dialectical materialistic mysticism” instead puts him in line with continental thinkers like Herbert Marcuse and Walter Benjamin, whose visionary angel of history sees what we experience as time and progress as a mounting pile of wreckage (or kipple). Dick also anticipates the contemporary return to Christianity found in continental philosophers like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Central here is the notion of event. Dick elsewhere describes Christ as “an event in the reality field”—a radical rupture in the determined logic of history, and therefore the opportunity for a leap into actual change. For Badiou, our politics should be based in our fidelity to such moments; Dick’s event, 2-3-74, is mystical but no less demanding. Equally relevant here is Dick’s sometimes Žižekian twist on dialectical materialism. Some thinkers fetishize a final Hegelian Whole; though Dick is attracted to such totalizing unity, he also recognizes that there is always a remainder: the little guy, the discarded beer can, the questions left hanging by every theory, whose development into another theory he elsewhere compares to the sprouting of a mustard seed.—ED
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* In the following sections, Dick’s holograph grows larger and increasingly frenetic.—PJ
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* These cosmic flip-flops are not sandals worn to an Orange County beach, but logic gates at the basis of computers, wherein the change of a single bit at a single gate can alter the entire meaning of a message. Dick’s encounter with the Tao, reality as it is, occurs in perhaps equal measure to the planet’s historical transformation into digital information and to his own horror of and fascination with simulation. By conceptualizing VALIS as both the Tao—an ancient model of two-state flux between yin and yang—and DNA—a double helical molecule organized in base pairs according to a triplet code—Dick again integrates the seemingly antithetical traditions of modern science and traditional mysticism even as he “harmonizes” the seeming opposition of life and death into a whole contained by each part.—RD
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* “Suppose . . . time is round,” Dick wrote in A Scanner Darkly, speculating that as explorers once sailed west in order to circle the world to India, we might sail into the future only to shipwreck on the shores of Jesus’s crucifixion two thousand years ago. Of course, the explorers didn’t reach India, they reached America, an altogether different version of the past that came to be called the future. By the same token, we might suppose Dick’s career was round as well; as he wrote his way into the future of A Scanner Darkly, VALIS, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, the mainland of science fiction receding behind him, he saw before him an altered version of his strange novels of the fifties, all the more singular for how they contextualized his cracked vision not in outer space but in the new American suburbia as saturated with madness as its front lawns were with water and fertilizer. Setting aside the cosmic and religious preoccupations of God and infinity, in a purely literary sense Dick’s contemplation of the “infinite” also integrates his literary output, not to mention the vicissitudes of his career, into something coherent; though this might seem banal compared to God and infinity, to Dick such a consideration of literary identity was tantamount to formulating a sense of who he was and why—because a writer doesn’t do, a writer is.—SE
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* This and the next two folders are largely taken up with examinations of the following “G-2 dream,” and thus with various conspiracy theories concerning the Xerox missive, Soviet espionage, psychic weapons, and the like. In this they resemble a good deal of the nine-tenths of the Exegesis that is not represented in our abridged edition. While such paranoid speculations might delight fans of the cold war spy thriller or David Icke, they quickly become monotonous and, as Lawrence Sutin has written, produce “much heat but little light.” Of more interest to the editors have been passages in which Dick struggles with or transforms, rather than succumbs to, the intense paranoia that clearly was one (but only one) of 2-3-74’s effects.—PJ
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* Dick and his twin sister Jane were born six weeks prematurely. Dick’s mother was unable to produce enough milk, and Jane died of malnutrition a little over a month after her birth. Culturally speaking, it may be the most significant instance of such trauma since Elvis Aron was haunted by Jesse Garon. The single strangest scene in all Dick’s work comes in Dr. Bloodmoney when a young girl who has ongoing conversations with an imaginary friend is finally taken by her mother to a doctor, who discovers that living in the girl’s side is a twin brother the size of a rabbit. Might they be considered conjoined, in that they share a body and brain? If they share a body and brain, do they share the memory that Dick now struggles for tens of thousands of words in the Exegesis to disown? If they share memory, do they share a soul—a possibility that potentially undermines Dick’s attempt in the Exegesis to divide soul from memory? In any case, they have shared everything except birth, which Phil shared with Jane and the resulting duality of which is so obvious that it hardly bears mentioning, expressed in Presley’s case by the division between heaven (gospel) and hell (rock-and-roll) and in Dick’s by his literal sense of living two lives at the same time or, more precisely, in two times that coincide.—SE
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* Metaphysical paradoxes abound in these sections: first the comments on the reintegration of the divine and trash, and then this equation of defeat and victory. The latter image, illustrating multiple reversals, is the more complex: Christianity defeated the Empire with the conversion of Constantine and the adoption of Christianity as the Roman state religion, but the Empire won by reversing the early church’s anti-authoritarianism. Then the church covertly won by its preservation of a hidden minority of true, rebellious Christians. Furthermore, the image of the sliced-up fish echoes the early church father Tertullian’s statement that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” In both the “divine trash” comments and this eviscerated fish image, there is a sense of reality being the opposite of appearance: God is to be found, not in glory, but in abasement; the martyr’s subjection to death is actually a great victory for life.—GM
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* This is exactly the kind of sophistication we need, desp
erately need, from our religious visionaries. No more stupid literalisms, which no one but the unthinking can believe anyway, but an unblinking recognition that whatever is coming through is, well, coming through. Put a bit less unclearly, what Dick is doing here is recognizing that (a) yes, something profound is indeed coming through, but (b) it is coming through the filters of his own socialized and encultured brain, personality, and upbringing. Dick is our teacher here. It is in this way that we can come to understand, finally, that extreme religious experiences are true and false at the same time, and that, sometimes at least, it is only in the symbolic modes of myth and metaphor that the deepest truths can appear at all. This, by the way, is precisely what Mircea Eliade intended with his language of hierophanies (a term that Dick used often)—that is, real appearances of the sacred through the contexts and conditions of the local culture and personality. We have two teachers here, then: Philip K. Dick and Mircea Eliade.—JJK
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* These wonderful passages on Beethoven almost make one wish Dick had been a music critic, and if one senses more authority on behalf of classical than pop, well, who needed another rock writer in 1979? Why not someone to make a case for the modern relevance of Beethoven, Bach, Mahler, and Schubert? Among other music he mentions in the Exegesis we find Eno (Discreet Music), the Beatles (“Strawberry Fields Forever,” through which God speaks to him), David Bowie (more the cinematic Bowie than the musical one), Neil Young (though he doesn’t know it’s Young, referring to a cover version by a band called Prelude), and Paul McCartney, on whose first solo album he blames a “psychotic journey,” surely the only time McCartney has been credited with such a thing.—SE
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* Nineteenth-century writer Thomas Carlyle, writing of his own Valis-like experience in his semi-autobiographical Sartor Resartus, asks, “How paint to the sensual eye . . . what passes in the Holy-of-Holies of Man’s Soul; in what words, known to these profane times, speak even afar-off of the unspeakable?” Exhausting the quest to describe the extraordinary unity of what is, we can focus our awareness on ordinary reality and explore not only the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” but the unmistakable actuality of the unity of our subjective experience. In focusing on the unity of self, we glimpse the unity of reality. For Dick, this discovery is the occasion for the world flipping inside out, “reverting.” His Palm Tree Garden is akin to the Kingdom of Heaven in the Gospel of Luke—a way of training the mind to perceive both the eternal and the particular aspects of experience, both external reality and internal subjection. Search for this inner kingdom continuously, and we no longer see simply “through a glass darkly,” but instead perceive the immanent and eternal order of the cosmos as the unity of within and without. This possibility shifts the burden of Dick’s inquiry—and it shifts often, as if dancing—to an inquiry, not into the nature of Valis and the “essence” of all things, but into the realm of this space and time.—RD