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* This dream spawned the fractured fairy tale The Divine Invasion (1981), a broken novel leaking visionary gems. One of these is the “holoscope,” a layered, three-dimensional holographic Bible, pulsing with red and gold, that can reveal fresh messages depending on the reader’s interactive angle of view. In some ways a model for the Exegesis itself, the holoscope is also drawn from the Exegesis, or at least from the hypnagogic vision Dick records a few pages after this apocalyptic dream, on [48:839]: a luminous red-and-gold tetragrammaton (YHWH), resembling the plasmate, that pulses along to the repeated phrase “And he is alive.” Less groovy is this second coming dream, which drips with the satanic panic and homophobia popular among the more rabid of America’s fringe Christians. Dick sometimes shared in this deeply unfortunate strain of the Christian imagination: a tendency to demonize made possible in part by the concept of a conspiratorial Satan. Elsewhere in these late folders, Dick pines for the return of the “rightful king” who will be recognized only by the “elect”; in March 1981, he records a dream in which “God (Valis)” is finally in total control and “the separation of the sheep from the goats has begun.”—ED
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* The work of Martin Heidegger becomes progressively more important to Dick as the Exegesis unfolds. Dick has a sense of Heidegger’s question of Being and its link to the question of time through Dasein, which is Heidegger’s term of art for the human being and the key concern of Being and Time (1927). Dick shows an understanding of some of the key concepts in Being and Time, especially thrown-ness (Geworfenheit), anxiety (Angst), and uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit). Dick also references the concept of authenticity, the condition for which is Heidegger’s notion of being-toward-death, a crucial element as well in the existential psychology that influenced Dick. Dick shows some sense of what is at stake for Heidegger in the recovery of Parmenides’ fragment “It is the same thing to think and to be,” with its suggestion of the sameness or unity of noein and einai, thinking and being. Yet, Dick’s reading of Heidegger is singular, to say the least. Here Dick wants to identify Heidegger’s concern with Being with God in the form of the Hebraic YHWH, which is something that would have alarmed Heidegger, as he was prone to a certain deafness regarding the Judaic God. Elsewhere, Dick identifies Sein with the universe and states that in creating the universe the godhead was forced into sin. Through his reading of Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion, Dick also persistently connects Heidegger’s thinking to the radical stances of early Christianity and Gnosticism.—SC
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* Dick refers to Luther specifically here, but he’s speaking more broadly of a number of Christological theories that propose that Christ’s crucifixion constituted the punishment deserved for all of the sins of the world. In Dick’s formulation, it is not a question of Christ suffering a necessary penalty, but rather of his disrupting the very machinery by which the punishment of sin operates. Christ tricks the system, not by substituting himself in the place of the individual sinner, but by convincing the system that no wrongdoing has occurred that merits punishment. It is a substitution, not of one being in place of another, but of misinformation in place of accurate data. The reason for the substitution is mercy: Christ’s realization that the justice meted out by the system is not just.—GM
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* Dick’s opposition to the concept of determinism is here carried to its most extreme: opposition to the very idea of natural law. Dick places the moral value of the individual (the means) above the selfish genes that drive the organism to reproduce (the end): the being itself is greater than its programmed purpose. Dick refuses to accept a mechanistic or deterministic explanation of life; to do so in his view is to ignore the actual experience of living. If a mechanistic principle underlies human life, he suggests, then it is a fetter to be burst.—GM
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* This passage displays an odd eerie resemblance to Plato’s description in the Phaedrus (at 247c) of how the immortals travel up and outside in order to stand on the backside of the heavens, which is imagined as a revolving sphere from which they can contemplate what lies beyond, that is, what exists outside the sphere. Here, perhaps, we find Dick walking on the balloon of the cosmos. Dick, of course, saw all sorts of profound connections and similarities between his own experience of Valis and ancient writers like Plato and Plotinus. Here is another.—JJK
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* The idea of God as a constantly evolving dialectic is perhaps Dick’s most intriguing theological proposition, and here he gives a possible origin for this self-conflicted deity: the question of means versus ends. The top-level good (an orderly and harmonious cosmos) requires a base-level evil (the suffering of individual beings). The paradox of the greatest good requiring the greatest evil and the corresponding split in the godhead constitutes a major advance from a more simplistic dualism. Put into the matrix of Christianity, this God in crisis becomes the Father (the original creator of reality and author of the Law) and the Son (the redeemer whose mercy fulfills and abrogates that Law). The notion of a dialectically evolving God also resonates strongly with the ideas of other twentieth-century theologians, most notably Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (whom Dick mentions frequently) and process theologians like Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne (who appear later in the Exegesis).—GM
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* There is a rich and sophisticated literature drawing parallels between quantum physics and various forms of mystical experience. Most trace this literature back to the appearance of Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics in 1975, the book to which Dick is alluding in this passage. Capra gave these parallels real cultural traction via his eloquent writing, his own revelatory altered states of consciousness and energy, and, perhaps most of all, his ingenious illustrations demonstrating the complementarity of mind and matter. Having said that, it must also be observed that the physics/mysticism complementarity has a much longer history. The American anomalous writer Charles Fort, for example, was already naming the “teleporting” (a word that he coined) behavior of subatomic quanta a matter of “witchcraft” in the early 1930s. The pioneering quantum theorist Niels Bohr was so impressed with the similarities between the double nature of light (at once particle and wave) and Chinese Taoism that he chose the yin-yang symbol for his coat of arms. And the physicist Wolfgang Pauli engaged in a quarter-century correspondence with C.G. Jung in order to pursue a similar both-and vision of physics and psychology—a friendship, moreover, that produced one of the most productive parapsychological notions of all time: “synchronicity.” All of this is wrapped up in Dick’s “I knew. . . .”—JJK
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* This is the mystical, even paranormal, flip side of the postmodern insight. In a world in which almost everything is constructed, plastic, and malleable, what (or who) is doing all of this constructing and shaping? Here Dick takes a cue from anthropology (the “participant-observer” in the field), Kantian philosophy (“you can never know the universe as it really is”), and literary studies (the hermeneutic fusion of interpreter and interpreted) in order to suggest that such a both-and situation points to vast potentials and powers. The real question, of course, is what constitutes those “certain circumstances” under which these potential powers might manifest. Dick’s own certain circumstances had a name: “Valis.”—JJK
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* Despite his idea that this is a new revelation, Dick is close here to Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the Omega Point, whereby the material world evolves toward spiritual communion. While Teilhard writes of the increasing “complexity” of evolution, Dick here writes of “negentropy,” a concept first developed by Erwin Schrödinger to describe the effort of living systems to create order to offset their production of entropy. While thermodynamics compels all closed systems to di
ssipate exergy (useful energy), living systems seem to increase order in the course of development; in Schrödinger’s terminology, they “feed” upon negentropy. Significantly, Schrödinger turned to the Vedic concept of Brahman or Self to make sense of an important local instance of negentropy—his own consciousness. Dick’s treatment of reality as a “very advanced game of Go” also anticipates the cellular automata models of physicist Stephen Wolfram, though the model goes back at least to John von Neumann’s 1947 discussion of “self reproducing automata,” a concept that would later help manifest Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—RD
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* Joachim of Fiore, a twelfth-century theologian, was the most influential apocalyptic thinker of the medieval period. He believed the world was on the verge of a golden age in which all men would be monks in direct communion with God. This third age would be governed by the Holy Spirit, replacing the earlier ages of the strict Father and the intermediary Son. Though Joachim himself does not seem to have considered himself a revolutionary—indeed, he only wrote his ideas down at the urging of the pope—his followers in later centuries were often sharply anticlerical, and some were antinomians and anarchists. It’s easy to see how his idea of a procession of ages leading from subjugation to absolute freedom could have revolutionary applications. Though he does mention “religious anarchists,” Dick here doesn’t focus on rebellion so much as the flow of divine information and the source of religious authority: the third age means the loss of all intermediaries between the individual human being and God.—GM
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* Latin for “in that time,” that is, mythical or sacred time, as in the stock phrases “in the beginning” or “once upon a time.” Mircea Eliade used the expression to refer to traditional religious attempts to escape or annul “profane time” (understood here as linear temporality or what we now call “history”) and return to the “sacred time” referenced in myth and reenacted in religious ritual. Always capable of being “remembered” and so reactualized (hence Dick’s constant invocation of anamnesis) within the narratives of myth and the actions of ritual (like the Eucharist), sacred time is essentially no-time or beyond time. We might say, then, that what Eliade imagined in his comparative theorizing Dick seems to have realized in his experience of Valis. But this may be much too simple, as Eliade once noted that his own dissertation researches and early experiments with yoga taught him “the reality of experiences that cause us to ‘step out of time’ and ‘out of space’ ” (Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude Henri-Rocquet, 1982). In short, there was also an experiential subtext to Eliade’s theorizing. He was not simply speculating. He was also confessing. And it was this experiential, essentially mystical subtext that I think Dick was intuiting, illo tempore, as it were, in his repeated embrace of Eliade.—JJK
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* This folder is over three hundred pages long and combines handwritten notes, beginning with number 498, and typed, dated pieces. Dick grouped these into sections marked I through XVIII, a Roman numbering system that continues for several more folders. Because of the complexities introduced, we have opted to use sheet numbers beginning with 1. This folder begins with a conceptual breakthrough about “meta abstraction” and peaks with a theophany on November 17, 1980, which appears at [1:262] below. At the close of that extensive entry, Dick writes the resounding word “END”—which is immediately followed up with a footnote and more discourse. At some point after this theophany, Dick also composed the title page that begins this folder, whose original is unfortunately missing.—PJ
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* This “involuntary chain of mental events” is crucial because it captures the way in which Valis is simultaneously something that Dick experienced in the freedom of his own consciousness and something that seemed to happen to him. And what happened to him, here at least, was One thing. Plotinus’s “One” is consonant with that other philosopher of the Perennial Philosophy, Sankara, who referred to reality as “one without a second.” In other words, despite appearances, everything we perceive in the world, including ourselves, has the attribute of unity. This is both a message—“Monistic Newsflash: Tomatoes, Tomahtoes, It’s All One!”—and a feeling: the self becomes an attribute of something immeasurably larger than itself. This insight is at once immensely obvious and notoriously ineffable: one either perceives the unity of all things or not, and Dick very much has. The experiences of “aha” that pepper the Exegesis are moments of immense creativity as well as insights into the inner realms.—RD
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† The terms reticulation and arborizing explain the meshed and often baroque nature of reality, which is, pace the Talking Heads’ David Byrne, the “same as it ever was.” Apparently destroyed by its transformation into “bits” of information, the collective remains whole as “God’s memory,” another level of abstract topology that integrates the apparently chaotic multiplicity of the world through an infolding, outfolding, and branching of reality that resembles physicist David Bohm’s notion of the “implicate order” out of which all of reality emerges. Focusing our attention on this reticulation, as Dick does, affects reality itself via the noösphere: “As regards my writing: it will permanently affect the macrometasomakosmos in the form of reticulation and arborizing—and hence will survive in reality forever, in the underlying structure of the world order.”—RD
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* Just as the manifestation of Valis is one of organizations, patterns of meaning, neural networks, and the collapse of temporal and spatial boundaries—that is, just as Valis is a revelation of hyperconnections—so too now works the radiated mind of Dick himself. Dick has in effect become a super-comparativist, and so he is able to draw connections and organize disparate patterns of information, like Valis, through huge stretches of space and time. And why not? Paradoxically, Valis works through history and yet exists, as a hyperdimensional presence, outside the box of history. This “abolishing of time” is especially evident in the history of religions and, more precisely, comparative mystical literature, to whose patterns and similarities Dick is powerfully drawn. In this particular passage, the double-edged sword of the comparative imagination is evident: bits of truth can indeed be found everywhere, but the full truth is nowhere to be found; religious systems are both true (as approximations or reflections) and false (as final and complete answers) at the same time. Today a much simpler form of this double-notion is crystallized in the oft-heard quip “I am spiritual, but not religious.” Such a position is often demeaned as fuzzy, as narcissistic, as “New Agey.” In fact, it constitutes a quiet, but radical, rejection of religion in all its dogmatic and dangerous forms.—JJK
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* Among the many exotic and ominous diagnoses that may be proposed by those inclined to put Dick’s visions into a medical or neurological framework, one simple and relatively benign description hides everywhere in plain sight. “Micropsia” is the name for a powerful hallucinatory episode common among children, rare in adults, in which the body is experienced as a vast, inert form over which a shrunken-to-pinpoint consciousness roves, as a Lilliputian roves over Gulliver. The sense of detachment from the physical universe, and of vast reorientations of scale, has a cosmic, trippy quality. Except when it’s a symptom of something dire, micropsia is harmless; it can be terrifying, but also enthralling. I suffered it myself, came to cherish it, and felt bereft when the episodes ended. I’ve subsequently been fascinated by how many different writers I care for—Julio Cortázar, J.G. Ballard, William Blake, Christina Stead, and certainly Dick (and Swift)—seem at some point to be attempting to gloss the micropsia sensation in imagery or metaphor.—JL
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* The following description of Dick’s November 17, 1980, “theophany” is arguably the single most important entry in the entire Exeg
esis: it offers a fully developed interpretation of Dick’s mode of theoretical exploration, expressed in some of the most beautiful prose he ever wrote. In the face of despair at the interminability of his theological exploration, Dick meets a vision of a God at play: this entire theological exercise is presented as a game between omnipotent deity and created being. Moreover, the infinitude of Dick’s theories itself becomes proof that God is the beginning and end of his experiences. In light of the ideas presented in the theophany itself, Dick’s conclusions at the end of the entry—that 2-3-74 was caused by Satan and that the Exegesis is therefore a diabolical “hell-chore”—are surprising. Perhaps we can read these remarks not as Dick’s final conclusion, but rather the development of another theory about 2-3-74, and thus the beginning of another infinitely tall pile of computer punch cards.—GM