The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

  God works through evolution, not to circumvent it.* This, too, would explain my strong intuition that what happened in 3-74 didn’t consist of one desperate event and supernatural solution, but the inevitable outcome of an entire lifetime. All my life I had been moving toward this metamorphosis; the dormant possibility of it lay slumbering in me from birth; cf. my dreams of childhood, where I arrive on a raft avoiding Scotland Yard, climb to the top and then turn out to be a cuckoo egg. This would explain why now I feel that unless I went through everything I went through I couldn’t have gotten there; my metasystem wouldn’t have fired. It was programmed to fire after the proper sequence (of events? of learning? of experience? of trial and failure????? aha!) had passed, and all the changes, or steps or stages, necessary had taken place in me.

  Makes much, much sense.

  Got my right hemisphere to fire. Instinctively knew how to do it: the ortho-molecular vitamins, the manta, etc. Did like the bird in building a nest. Made myself a nest and then lay down to wait, expecting. And it came. The golden fish necklace told me it was time; I began my work, like the worm constructing its cocoon. In order to die, in its original primal lower form, to be remade into a better newer creature! To fly up from the “sea” into the sky!

  I imagine these jumps forward, back to the Cambrian Period, are associated with pain and stress and a great deal of uncertainty and fear. The creature toils alone, under duress, staggers or ventures out into the unknown, to his species anyhow . . . he must exhaust all the possibilities which they still rely on for better or worse; he must try, be urged on by the life force, the élan vital, to break new ground. He suffers, maybe fails. Exhausted, oppressed, but finally the night ends—maybe—in gasping victory. The bright light floods over him from above, signal he’s succeeded! The Jewish-Christian myth which says that we once had these faculties and lost them—devolved—might be true, and it certainly would explain my anamnesis, as well as the view Plato and Empedocles held. However, it is also possible that this myth was instilled in us (never mind how) in order to push us toward this as a goal in the future, whether indeed we had such faculties or not; this might be the only way such an ideal state could be expressed for those earlier cultures. “The Fall” is a sort of ancient way of talking about the next evolutionary stage in terms that make sense to people who have no concept of evolution.

  What I should do, forthwith, is examine my experience and then very carefully the changes it produced in me, in order to fathom what abilities/improvements it would perhaps give us as a species, if we evolve into it as a permanent condition.

  (1) Perceptual acuity. Expressed in terms of the Spirit of Truth, the change makes it possible to not be deceived; one cannot be lied to; one sees into the ontological nature of things, and the falsity of words ceases to operate on him. (“An inability to be shucked.” As I predicated the new kids would be.) I can theorize that this is accomplished by a sort of relief map achieved by the superimposition of data processing by both hemispheres; data are compared and in some fashion the real or true or authentic is distinguished perceptually; maybe what agrees—that is, when both hemispheres agree, reach the same conclusion—then the colors I saw are experienced. It literally looks different, even in print. Like 3-D compared to flat. This is almost an advance in the use of color for a fundamental perceptual purpose, not present employed. If logos is defined as “the meaningful structure of reality,” then this new or enhanced faculty of perception, this new ability to come to an absolutely accurate perception of what is so and what fails to be so, brings one closer to the Logos, which is why I was convinced the logos was involved; it was, that is, I saw it.

  I was instantly rewarded by Nature for my achievement. Certainly each time any creature ventured a jump up the evolutionary ladder he was so rewarded; otherwise why would he ever try again? Instinct would reward him, so as to make it all worthwhile; motivation would be needed, to compensate for the pain and effort and fear. It is absolutely impossible to believe that it could be any other way; if it were, it would fail. On a purely pleasure-pain scale, this may be the more glorious place imaginable for a living creature: to advance a tiny notch up. Thereafter he is motivated to keep trying and trying; what if he felt nothing, or even felt bad when he’d achieved it? How impossible.

  My dreams in which I’m above looking down God-like at worthy animals—they suggest the above—evolutionary view—may be correct. I.e., God is assisting an animal, an animal species (to grow). And my inner vision of the tall savior with the staff moving among the sheep (and cows, etc.) under the pale light, the steady white light. I knew that the sheep were ourselves: humans. I now understand a mystery of evolution: a creature does not grow an eye; he is provided with an eye, but he must struggle to use it, to get it to begin to work. For him to struggle and achieve this, he must be under enormous stress to need its use; so I must have needed the new faculty or organ, needed what it could do in order to extricate myself, I got it to come on, and it did extricate me.

  But if this was a true metamorphosis, then I probably did not/have not just dropped back to what I was; a change set in, perhaps permanent (the butterfly doesn’t turn back into the worm). Anyhow, it worked well enough and long enough to solve the problem(s) facing it, and if it receded, it did so after the acute need had been solved by it.

  . . . This is all very well, but what of the faint far-off voice, as if at the far other end of a pipe, or at the end of a long tube, at the top of the well, speaking distantly but distinctly, coaching me, informing me, in hypnagogic and hypnopompic states, in dreams, in deep night fatigue while awake, and sometimes in Attic Greek? How does this patient, informing voice fit in? Explain that, Phil.

  Is someone of much higher intelligence, of another species, looking down at us from a distance above, like research scientists looking down at creatures in an artificial maze?

  It still does not compute; I still don’t have it. There is no reason why in leaping up the ladder of evolution one should find himself hearing his thoughts in Attic Greek, or hearing thoughts not even his own in any language. There is still this dialog with the Holy Other, and still the mystery, Why Attic Greek?

  This points so to the past, to the time of Socrates. To his daimon—there, I said it; my daimon, maybe all of them, are his, specifically his, a Greek-speaking (originally) one. Attic Greece is somehow the core, the matrix, for all this—Why? [ . . . ]

  I saw the meaningful structure of reality (the logos), and there was constant change in it (everything around me) because it is alive and possesses activity because it possesses mind. We ask, Why do we experience time (i.e., change)? And the answer is, This living reality is evolving—perfecting itself. We’re within it so I guess we are a subpart of it, also alive and also changing—evolving—toward completion; it is a great entelechy. “I am the breath of my Creator, and as He inhales and exhales, I live” (PKD 1967, in Latin, under LSD).

  The systole, dystole in-out breathing is what we experience perhaps as the interaction of expansion and contraction, which is also what is meant by the oscillations of palintropos harmonie. These two movements could give rise to an objectification into Form One and Two, or the X and Y forces of the ICC,79 or Yin (contraction) and Yang (expansion or inhalation). If indeed we are within a living breathing (in the sense of inhaling, exhaling) creature, no wonder we have such concepts as pneumena, psyche, etc. This could even be related to the cyclic expansions and contractions of the universe; the universe, right now, is inhaling! Or, the expansion is its growth. What we experience are its constant rhythms. We as a species have fallen below the level (threshold) of consciousness; i.e., into “darkness”; it would like to rouse us to consciousness again, and hence has dispatched an incarnation of itself, to nag us, to arouse us to conscious awareness. We, as a portion of it, have fallen asleep somehow. All metaphors addressed to us as to our ignorance, our fallen state, our being in darkness—they all are correct. It flashes signals to us, but we aren’t aware; we respond beneath the thres
hold of awareness, unconsciously. . . .

  Re: To Scare the Dead. A character based on Jim Pike (with quite another name). Based on firsthand knowledge I had of his private life, e.g., with Maren in the Tenderloin, and the kind of man he was. This could be a major, if not the major character; but it would not be he who would have the Experience; that would be had by another, perhaps after this fine bishop person dies (is killed?). Thus, in addition to the whole Essene awakening in the mind theme, we have the theme of the great bishop concerned with civil rights who mysteriously dies suddenly. What occurs to me right off is that the viewpoint character (Nicholas Brady) knows the bishop in the capacity of spying on him for the authorities (due to the bishop’s civil rights stands and associations). Later, after the bishop dies, Brady has the Experience, and it seems to have (or has) something to do with the late bishop. Maybe there is in it information as to foul play (“murder most foul!”) about the bishop’s ostensibly accidental death. Despite the fact that he is a government part time agent, the v-p character would be disturbed; this goes too far. Also, we can have it that the bishop’s son “came back to him in seances,” and there was some talk about maybe the bishop coming back; this is much like the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father, of course. But anyhow it turns out there is no connection with the dead bishop, although that seemed to be a possibility.

  Still, this is what it seems to be: saint possession; i.e., psychic possession by a dead saint. However, it turns out that Brady has experienced that which the bishop had all his life wanted to achieve and failed to. Brady is in contact with the Holy Spirit. (Now, we have to give a reason. The only one that would work would be, the bishop was murdered; the republic is in danger. You can’t murder a bishop without God getting angry and telling people; you can’t keep it hushed up.) (Psalm 116: “The death of his servant is precious to the Lord God.”) The final denouement is this: the bishop, messing around with the Qumran Scrolls, had planned to receive into the right hemisphere of his brain the mind of a specific Essene of 2,000 years ago; this is why the bishop was hanging around the Qumran Wadi. However, his death aborted this plan. So the ancient Essene personage came to life in someone close to the bishop instead. The value of this resurrection to the bishop and to the modern world would be that the last, secret ar cane truths about Jesus would be restored (vide the ICC). I can go into the business about the Qumran men being possessed by Elijah, etc.

  I think the “Hamlet’s father crying murder most foul” should turn out to be another false lead, since it isn’t the bishop back at all. This goes with that false occult idea, namely that it is the bishop’s ghost from the “other side,” telling him how he was done in. The truth turns out to be much more exciting (in my opinion), but we can get a lot of mileage out of this.

  To shore up the plot: Brady inherits (why?) a lot of the Bishop’s correspondence . . . oh sure, in his capacity for the government; he is poring over it doing intelligence work (even though the bishop is dead, there may be something useful about the activity of others). Brady has told the widow that he wants the notes “to type them up” or some similar pretext. (This sounds like The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward,80 in a way. Anyhow, the explanation is more djinn and bottle-like.)

  More suspense could be obtained, maybe, if Brady, by the time the Experience comes, has severed all the connections with the bishop’s circle; he’s now operating the recording firm, as depicted. The bishop is part of his life he’s put entirely behind him.

  I still want to retain the gold fish necklace which disinhibits him. But now when he sees the girl who is wearing it, actual memories from this life are stirred up . . . where has he seen such before? (It had to do with the bishop.)

  [5:127] Reading all this religious literature I can see now that for everyone, God is simply the explanation of how the universe got here—i.e., how it came into being; someone had to create it, the First Cause Uncaused which “set it spinning.” Viewed this way (also, God called into existence as a concept this way, simply to explain how the universe came into being) there would be no reason to suppose Him to be here. For one thing, the absolute substantiality of this world is taken for granted. But all my life I’ve felt it is not, that something truly real lies behind it; thus over my entire adult life I have prepared myself to encounter an immanent God emerging from within this world.

  Viewed this way it is evident that without realizing it, I have always been seeking God within or behind the walls and objects, the surfaces of this world. My whole conception of the world—reality—is radically different from that of other people. This is why for as long as I’ve known about a Paraclete I expected him to somehow show up here, as a person—as a seemingly ordinary piece of this world, looking like other actually ordinary pieces. This is my first realization of the connection between my years of radical epistemology and my experience of 3-74 et al. I kept looking beneath. I sensed that the ordinary concealed the extraordinary, and that the latter perhaps was alive, had volition, was more powerful than men (although I often supposed it to be malign); I sensed it camouflaging ordinary reality—a crucial point! (Is not the Real Presence camouflaged as ordinary bread and wine during communion?) Hence, I postulated it long before (decades before) I experienced it. The assumptions of other people perhaps preclude this authentic experience. As we know in science, our preconceptions determine the outcome. “God’s in his heaven; all’s right with the world.” So they do not strive to see (as Castaneda would put it). It is obvious, too, that for me the entire world and every thing in it has the potentiality for being transubstantiated, had I ever thought of it. Also, I long ago conceived of each person living in his own world or idios kosmos, so I can conceive without difficulty of the Kingdom of God having come for some genuinely, but still being invisible—not yet manifested to them—to others.

  I therefore need never ask, Why did God go away? Or, When will He return? When will the Kingdom come? I have no reason to believe He ever went away. But we did fall away from perception of (communication with) Him, the great dialog, which must be based, for obvious reasons, on a perceptual and cognitive awareness that He is actually present.

  So what I’ve done (supra) is change the question from, How come I could experience God? to the question, How come other people can’t? Which new version assumes my experience to be natural (however rare). What blocks or prevents others perhaps in their Worldview or presuppositions? Answer: plenty. As Joseph Campbell says about the Occident: “Only the dead see God.” Lem may have noted and meant this when he spoke of me “finding in the gutter among the degenerate molecules a sacerdotal power buried for aeons.” (Finding, I mean, in the trash of the gutter.) I trained my telescope (when the chance came, via the Holy Spirit) down at the gutter instead of to the stars—with outstanding results. Still, an extraordinarily important change from the status quo is indicated by the message, “Saint Sophia is going to be born again.” God may be here, may never have left, but His wisdom, I would guess from this, will mount and prevail in the future. The schism between us and him—the fall—will be ironed out. Perhaps the awareness, the experience, the dialog which I’ve had will become common to men. (Will my books have helped?) (Ubik, I guess, especially.) Back to Parmenides and the All behind the many (in St. Thomas, Jesus says, “I am the All”81). The Logos, spinner of tomorrow, is most active in biological evolution, creating new organs of perception. [ . . . ]

  I believe something really evil was loose in the world, and we stood up to it here and there and defeated it. I have no idea who or what it was, no clear conception of it or what it wanted. Or why me. Perhaps what I did was shake off a lifetime of contamination and conditioning and preprogramming to this world. That in effect I confuted or renounced it and my allegiance to the forces in it and hence to it. What isn’t clear is whether I shook off something primarily in the past which had held me, or else something building ahead, to come. It is, as the Protestant reformers knew, primarily a fight against the great tyrannical system or systems of the past
, for the purpose of freeing men’s minds, for the future of life. [ . . . ] Perhaps the reappearance of this spirit, working for the freedom to know and to think, signals the beginning of another major historical age like that of the Reformation; perhaps it comes forth when there is a historical necessity. So we may be seeing the beginning of the breaking down of the bullshit establishments here and in the USSR—like I said in my Vancouver speech and especially as I saw or discerned in 3-74, the arising of a new ability to tell when you are being snowed; and since big governments etc. reign by bullshit, perhaps this is a grand new era for mankind, of which I was/am a part. Endowed with the sudden, new capacity to see through lies—so equipped by the Spirit himself. And at the same time placing an extraordinary value on truth in oneself; never to lie and never to let anyone lie to you; a new value system with this first. If the Protestant could be said to be a new historical type emerging from an older authoritarian one, then perhaps an equally important new one is emerging now—not just inner directed (Protestants were that) but—what I was in 3- and 4-74; there is no name, yet. Not inner-, not outer-, but truly new. My subjective experiences and feelings, in abruptly lifting up to this new type, must be parallel to those of the first Protestants, in form and quality, as their new concepts, that of inner truth rather than handed-down-from-the-top truth flooded over them and they became a new kind of men. [ . . . ]

  My experience certainly indicates that the basic Protestant idea that God speaks directly to man through the Holy Spirit is correct (in contrast to the handed-down-by-the-priest idea), and in particular the Friends would seem to be correct, as regards their concept of the Inward Light and the Seed. The evolution of religion from God Above to God With Us to God Within Us is obvious, but what I see too is the social-historical meaning, inasmuch as it certainly is going to basically affect future societies, this internalization of God (as we withdraw our projections, perhaps). Every man will carry a bit of God inside him, like a walkie-talkie (and much much more). He will be conscious of this, both in himself and by empathy and analogy in others. Surely, if all goes well, less will be handed down to the people progressively more and more; and the people will take their destinies in their own hands. (But that is only if unobstructed; yet, that should be their fight: if God is within each man, then the enemy of man is any top-heavy system claiming a monopoly on truth and dispensing it downward.) Why eventually will laws be necessary at all? I foresee a godly anarchy. No authority here on earth will have to tell any man what to do, or even educate him; the Logos will do that—link him up. A truly egalitarian society should result. [ . . . ]