The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

  March 1974: I reached reunion with the Father. Today 5-31-75 I had a dream in which I was a child again back in the ’30s; at an old-fashioned table I sat with other people, and a man gave me a bowl of cereal. I saw that He was the Savior, and I began to cry with ecstatic joy. When I woke up I took a couple hours and managed to reconstruct the meaning of this dream. When I was very small, Christ fed me His Real Presence in the typical host-form: cereal (i.e., bread). I took him into me back then, and, as in the parables of the mustard seed and the leavening, He grew within me. Later on, in adult life, I felt a growing need to nourish other people, especially to feed them (in ’74 we sent $400 for famine relief, for example). That which was given to me grew in me and began to yield fruit, or expression in my giving nourishment; I became by degrees the Man who fed me as a child. Viewed this way, my 3-74 experience is not something dropped on me from outside, due to the “painted in the corner” need-situation I was in, but in fact the pay-off of a lifetime process of growth. It was the culmination of something alive and advancing inside me; in 3-74 I made it or reached it, reunion with the Father, which is to say, Christ as Mediator restored me to the Father (I didn’t achieve it but was brought to it). Thus both Christ and the Father were present: Christ within me, leading me to the Father. This explains the long-term intimations I have had about being moved along toward a pay-off destiny (e.g., the dream in Canada wherein Kathy and everyone else take off their masks, finally, and Kathy says, “Now it all can be explained to you, what it was all about”). I was moving by degrees, step by step, toward the encounter with the dark-haired girl at the door with the gold fish-sign necklace. I assume that when I acted as the Savior and gave an analogous bowl of cereal to someone that I set a simi lar process in motion in him or her, too; thus, Christ delivers us, spreading Himself out through us by means of this “unauthorized” communion with His Real Body. Christ’s role as mediator is now clear to me. A man, such as I, could never on his own find his way back to union with God. Therefore God Himself initiates the reunion, and it is God as Christ who acts to lead a man, myself in this case, along the difficult, long, narrow, confusing path to final redemption; to the right conclusion, which I experienced. A man’s tragic difficulty does not begin as a situation at any given moment in his life; he is born into it: separation from God. Thus Christ begins to lead a man back from the start; intervention began in my life long ago—in fact as many of my dreams showed, in early childhood the groundwork was laid down; He was already active. 3-74 was not the difficulty but the pay-off. The last step before resurrection (finding immortality) was the death in the tomb, which I had experienced during those many sleepless nights. This is what Teilhard de Chardin said; each man as Christ; the entire species working its way along the stations of the cross, which is also what Claudia Hambro says in Confessions when she says she can feel the crown of thorns. “Christ didn’t die for us; he was an example which each of us must follow, and suffer as he did to attain what he attained,” as she puts it to Jack Isidore (paraphrase). No man can die—atone—for your sins. You must atone yourself, following him as model; he is the guide, the mediator, not a sacrifice. Christ was not—repeat not—a sacrifice, but the first immortal man, showing us the path to immortality. How He did it, His steps, is how we must do it individually and collectively. “Now you grieve but later you will rejoice,” He told them.95 What I experienced is precisely the Long Dark Night of the Soul as depicted.96 As I look back, there really is no natural explanation of my prolonged, intense fear; I’d been in worse spots before and not felt that. Now I am sure, looking back, that a supernatural or religious element was at work in me, moving toward fruition. Again, psalm 116. I could feel the coffin around me in the night, and then the darkness of the night was broken through to me from a long way off, the expression of a Vast Mind thinking intentionally toward me, with me in mind. My fear went away, and, 14 months later, has never returned.

  Jung re Meister Eckhart: God is born in the human soul—come forth from it, and the Kingdom of God is the human soul (totality of the unconscious).97 It all happens inside, Eckhart said in 1245 (circa). Libido is withdrawn (projections withdrawn) from outside objects; God ceases to be found in objects, but rather in the unconscious. This withdrawing of all projections is precisely and exactly what happened with me in 3-74. A total reversal. I am on sure ground vis-à-vis Jung, here. God as autonomous entity of the unconscious, i.e., the soul or born out of the soul. Not capa ble of being assimilated into the conscious mind. The Divine Birth—in the soul of a given man! (I understand Eckhart to say that therefore God is dependent on me; that I give birth to him, somehow. Firebright, then? That which is mortal—man—gives birth to that which is immortal: God. First comes man; then comes God, not the other way around. This makes sense. The inferior evolves [so to speak] into the superior, mortal to immortal. Man to God. But, I add, then that God travels, reaches, back through time to before creation, and He creates or gives birth to it. God antedates man, who then antedates God. Systole, diastole. The rhythm of the universe, in time.) It is impossible for me to deny or ignore the fact that I have done what Meister Eckhart describes. Especially as explained by Jung. Jung makes it clear that to experience God inwardly, as Eckhart describes and as I did, is to experience him psychologically, which is modern and sophisticated rather than primitive. This was the new way which Eckhart outlined back in his 13th century period, the idea of god born from man’s soul and in a certain real sense dependent on man (as distinguished from the Godhead). It could be said that I had been primitive before my experience, in that I projected a great deal outwardly; but withdrew all these in 3-74 in a rather short swift interval. God was not introjected by me or incorporated, but rather released. Eckhart also says that when God is born in our soul you cease to experience the (mere) world outside, but that God replaces it; I experienced this, too, finding Him in me, and equally myself in the center of Him. Christ’s description (Me in you and you in Me) is thus fulfilled, which points to what is called “Christ consciousness” or the Kingdom of Heaven, not the Holy Spirit as much.

  Eckhart also speaks of this happening to a man who has misstepped (vertreten, as I recall); God, then, corrects the mis-swing of the man and brings him back to the Tao or Logos. This, then, is the macro/micro/macro schema that I drew, with God as the great macro; then myself the micro; then a fragment of the macro, of god, inside me at the very exact certain specific center (concentric rings). God is at the deepest heart or mind or level inside, and also outside everywhere; He replaces the world, resembling it as if He has transubstantiated—infused Himself—into everything, connecting all things into the One. The macro Godhead would be the Brahmin; the inner “macro” would be the Atman. This Divine birth, though, I believe, is quite different from the Child being born in the mind, which has to do with a new self, with psychic integration; instead of giving birth to a child, one gives birth to what resembles the Wise Old Man (its nearest archetype). The birth, not of the son, but of the Father! That this divine birth took place in me spontaneously, without my knowing about it, trying for it, having any wisdom or knowledge or practicing any tech niques—this is important, showing its unquenchable aspects. What good did it do the Romans to kill people and burn their writing, if this can occur now spontaneously, with no transcultural link of any sort . . . especially if, as in my case, after the event occurs, the transcultural link is generated ad hoc, a priori, noetically, etc.? God lived once; He died, or rather He slept; He slept in us. The human soul is the image of God (Eckhart); out of this image, God is reconstructed, reconstituted, printed back out: the original reborn from its image. (Crypte morphosis, etc.) The sleeping or dormant form within is God Himself, like Ptath in van Vogt’s novel, The Book of Ptath. We are all sleeping avatars of God, with amnesia. The human soul: DNA coding for God!!! But man does not reconstruct God out of this “DNA” coding; God reconstitutes Himself Himself. (Adventitious to the human being whose soul it is.) The man cannot say, “I am God,” or “I have become
/turned into God.” Rather, God flashpointed him to make use of him to become Himself once more, an event in micro, in space-time. The mortal human only anticipates, as a lower life form, the Form to come. [ . . . ]

  I’ve again read the EB article on Mystery Religions; those religions, especially the Orphics, stressed the anamnesis (Plato did, too, and those following him as did Pythagoras).* I ask this, as perhaps the most important question: what is the connection between being possessed by the Deity (which I aver is the same as finding the Kingdom of God), and recollection of one’s former but forgotten divinity, as in Orphism and Neoplatonism? Is it a becoming for the first time, or a return? Is it new or old? Receiving or restoration? This is important because if it is a restoration then we are or anyhow were divine in nature, and lost it or forgot it, and can retrieve or remember it, get it back. Of course, I again wonder, How, if we are divine, did we come to forget that? This is, of course, the concept of the Fall, this fact, if it is a fact; we fell and forgot, having descended into nonbeing which is the same as forgetfulness. Here now I am back to my early conjectures and ponderings, and there seems no end to this, no solution. I know that I experienced anamnesis, which suggests the recollection (neoplatonist) view. As set over against the Christian view . . . although for us now, 2,000 years later, it would now carry the aspect of restored memory—of events 2,000 years ago; i.e., the Savior, Jesus Christ. This is what confuses me. I remember a Savior who told us it was a new experience. I remember his new message—observe the paradox. “In a crypt 2,000 years old I have discovered new news!” [ . . . ]

  The other night the thought came to me, “The first of the old prophecies are beginning to take place,” or words to that effect (check supra). If I were to assume that we are entering the Parousia, which could well be, but on an undisclosed time-scale, then I would characterize this interval, from my own actions, feelings and stance, my own intuitions and sense of what is, Parousia or not—this interval seems subjectively to me to be one of firm, even harsh, preparing for combat. I sense no love at this time, no reaching out to forgive or understand or embrace. I sense muffled drums, and a mysterious movement, a coming and going leading to a settling in position, as if places are being taken, sides drawn, positions, stations, occupied, probably for a battle. Maybe Elijah was indeed here.

  Now I am back, in my 14-month study of this, to where I began. Someone was here, rushing powerfully through my life, our lives, our world. Something has begun; it started with that fierce zealous spirit and evidently ended with, “The Buddha is in the Park,” which is to say, “Unto us a child is born.”98 I have a continual feeling that I am on one specific side in this; I have chosen, or have been chosen. The last thoughts which came to me were, “Rest. You’ll be guided when the time comes.” I sense myself waiting. Days pass. Nothing happens. But I am waiting and feeling restless, really waiting in the true sense. Not just passing time. This time-period has a clear quality of being a time of waiting, rather than mere emptiness, as if things had fallen through, evaporated or gone wrong. What lies ahead? I sort of sense myself as a samuri, now. Hard and stern, much less sympathetic or bathetic. My dream recently of carefully returning the bulging purse, bulging with coins, and finding that it belonged to “JeBORG,” and that “BORG” was close . . . she is close by, the figure which has been with me from the start of this: just out of sight. In addition, it is possible that my enormously strong subjective intuition—if not perception—that I personally was drawn into history by the Divine power is equally accurate. Surely this is one way by which that Power operates: seizing upon individuals here and there to perform in concert an action which will have permanent consequences generally, which is to say in the arena of history. As I keep saying, I feel retrospectively that Tears and very likely Frolix 8 were both engineered subliminally, carrying in encoded or stegenographic form material from the Logos or Godhead concerning the Logos or Godhead, as a tiny part of some general historic communications pattern; I think that shortly after Tears was released, for me the subliminal became thresholded into consciousness, and so forth into 3-74. That is, put psychologically, I could not continue to thrust outside of awareness these extraordinary items in my books and in my life, but had to face them without averting my recognition. I was in the midst, as an active participant, of something enormous and frightening and dangerous, but very thrilling; and the direction, as well as instructions, upon which I acted, lay in the area of what people call the “supernatural.” I think under the hidden direction of the Logos I did my part and then had to fight like hell to survive the backlash. But to play a role in history under such a Guidance—what greater joy could there be than to have had that, even if briefly? The greatest pleasure for the greatest reason; it is not the extent or importance of what I did but that I did it under that Guidance and to have been made fully aware of that by the Guidance itself: a gracious act toward me, and probably not necessary; it must have been given from love.

  My overwhelming intuition at that time that I was, and had been, playing a small but real role in history, was probably accurate because at that time I had an absolute insight into the way everything linked up and functioned together, which is the mystic insight par excellence. I should assume, though, that my vision of my role is only meaningful in the mystical frame of reference, as contrasted to the everyday in which objects are discrete and there is no total unity. What I had is common to mystical experience, basically. But it was legitimate and real and I should hang onto it (I am). Equally real was my awareness of fighting off an absolutely evil enemy intent on zapping me once and for all—and real, too, the sense that I had lured it to destruction, assisted it in falling into its own snare. All of these perceptions were legitimate and accurate; they were disclosed to me partly to assist me in extricating myself from that danger and partly, I do believe, as a kind of reward to me, inasmuch as I had over the past years lost so much. In effect I had lost virtually all my material possessions, but I had gained my soul, if by soul you mean consciousness of one’s own identity and purpose for living and reason for acting, and the ultimate disposition to which one would go. It became a sensible life in the midst of shambles, fear and chaos. A million chips, bits, fragments and broken pieces lay around on all sides in great heaps, but in the center (as if the Tao itself) I had discovered a disclosed form: my own reality, in the hands of the God who said once, “I will never fail thee; I will never forsake thee.”99 The most beautiful passages of the Scriptures became clear to me and pertained to me and my life, during all this, which in itself is a gift beyond compare. I conversed with the Scriptures, as if I was in colloquy with a friend. Once, opening it at random for comfort, I put my finger on: “Tell him that Elijah is close by!”100 I count Elijah as one of my closest friends; it is good news to know that he is close by. But again, that bespeaks the surfacing of the fulfillment of the first of the ancient prophecies, which is of extraordinary importance, if it is so.

  [5:193] Last night (June 2nd) I had a blissful truly mystical experience, which is probably the first one I’ve had in the strict sense, inasmuch as it was a state, an ASC, with vast understanding and comprehension as to how everything fitted together, but lacking any and all adventitious percept-system experiences, as I had in 3-74 and 2-75. However, had I never had anything else, it alone (last night) would have dignified my life immeasurably. How to record it verbally, though, I don’t know. It linked it all up. That’s a lot.

  A basic realization: my 3-74 experience—the intervention by God in the world—was not an anomaly, except in terms of my experience of it. That is to say, it was a natural, regular event, which I had just never seen before; however, it always goes on, went on, will go on forever. It is the perpetual re-establishment of equilibrium and harmony, relating to the Tao and to ma’at.

  Primarily, I began by realizing that along the lines of Parmenides when he denied the testimony of his senses as regards to what is (in actuality, what exists), I realized that:

  (1) There is no visual
(sense-organ) evidence of God at work anywhere in the world.

  (2) I must either deny that God, then, is at work in the world, or I must deny the evidence of my senses.

  [ . . . ]

  I therefore took the course, last night, of denying the testimony of my senses, and said: God is at work in the world but below the surface; so that evil, although empirically evident, is not actually in control as it appears to be. Further, I realized, a discernment past superficial reality shows evil to be or anyhow at one time in the past (prior to 8-74) to have been in the saddle in a much deeper way than it allowed us to see; in other words, evil masked its own power, the more to control and enslave us. So at first step, a penetration into the heart of reality showed it even more evil, or in the control of evil, than did mere superficial analysis. However, below the ring of iron around us (Rome, as the metaphor goes) I saw that God had breached, penetrated, and in fact made hollow this evil, had turned it into a shell by something transforming it from within, into its opposite . . . which made me recall Taoism, and I think it was Empedocles—one of the pre-Socratics, he or Heraclitus, I suppose, the point being that one of them had argued that any quality contains its opposite within it and will be transformed into it (yin into yang, etc.) if pressed far enough. What this then yielded to in my thinking was the concepts of palintropos and palintonos, the whole “trampoline” structure of reality in which there is balance and equilibrium established as a regular matter of course. [ . . . ]

  This is the real fabric of reality. What I saw was an extreme example, as the long New Yorker 6-part piece on the Constitutional Crisis discloses. There was an extreme action, hence an extreme reaction (the parabola effect). I was there and saw it happen: everything in me and around me started its return journey. The turning point came, and Retreat (to go to the I Ching) transformed—I mean was transformed by the Immanent Mind—into Advance.101 I conceive of this in Taoistic and Greek terms: Tao and Mind together, like a sentient, thinking, loving Tao; which is I think ma’at. 3-74 was indeed a special, even unique occasion, but only in degree (and in that I got to see it, for some reason). (It doesn’t matter why I got to see it; I did and that is that.) Hence my acute feeling that the end of a long roll of film had passed through the projector, there’d been an empty place, and then, aha! a new roll, a very different roll, had been inserted. The parabola effect, carrying me with it.