The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

  [14:63] The awareness of sorrow is the first step in the encountering of God, as is laughter. Both are transmuted into an awesome silence, at the epiphany, as the divine other manifests itself: can be discerned.

  [14:66] Everything is turned around; yin or YHWH bellows and curses and rants; whereas the true Abba, the authentic yang part, is gentle—and its voice is mild and small and reasonable; it does not threaten or rant. This voice seems almost feminine. That which is truly all-powerful (cf. Zen) has no need to threaten or intimidate. This is a “hall of mirrors”—the true creator is mild and gentle and loving; the usurper bellows (“the arrogant one” who does not know there is a father above him/her). Here, again, we are presented with a puzzle and a lesson. Q: “Which is the real creator, the ‘still small voice’ or the booming, threatening one who can curse the land with plagues and blights—i.e., has mekkis?” The coercive or the reasonable-persuasive? “Come, let us reason together.” God the loving father wishes us to discern this along our path of enlightenment—not to worship power but to trust wisdom and love.

  [14:72] In reading Sladek’s parody of me, 50 I get the impression that to me the universe is not to be taken seriously, ➊ but that somehow a handle exists by which to unravel it and make it yield up what it really is—if anything. It may not be anything at all, but I’m trying for handle after handle, poking around, trying everything reversed and backward, like it’s a toy. Layer after layer reveals paradox after paradox, which in themselves I find fascinating. Also, I do seem attracted to trash, as if the clue—the clue—lies there. I’m always ferreting out elliptical points, odd angles. What I write doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. There is fun and religion and psychotic horror strewn about like a bunch of hats. Also, there is a social or sociological drift—rather than toward the hard sciences, the overall impression is childish but interesting. This is not a sophisticated person writing. Everything is equally real, like junk jewels in the alley. A fertile, creative mind seeing constantly shifting sets, the serious made funny, the funny sad, the horrific exactly that: utterly horrific as if it is the touchstone of what is real: horror is real because it can injure. It all is a brave whistling in the dark tunnel—like Stephanie: funny when frightened; scare her and she will tell you a joke—the situation oddly viewed. No wonder I loved her so—she experienced the affinity between not sorrow and humor—but fear and humor.

  I certainly see the randomness in my work, and I also see how this fast shuffle of possibility after possibility might eventually, given enough time, juxtapose and disclose something important automatically overlooked in more orderly thinking. Pataphysique.

  No wonder my stuff is popular in France—the surrealist, the absurd. Also, it is palpably autobiographical—the little business firms and the fatherly owner or world leader.*

  Since nothing, absolutely nothing, is excluded (as not worth being included) I proffer a vast mixed bag—out of it I shake coin-operated doors and God. It’s a fucking circus. I’m like a sharp-eyed crow, spying anything that twinkles and grabbing it up to add to my heap.

  Anyone with my attitude might just stumble onto by sheer chance and luck—in his actual life, which is to say the life of his mind—the authentic camouflaged God, the deus absconditus, by trying odd combinations of things and places, like a high speed (sic) computer processing everything, he might outdazzle even a wary God, might catch him by surprise by poking somewhere unexpectedly. If it is true that the real answers (and authentic absolute vs. the merely seeming) are where we would least expect them. This “try it all” technique might—might—one day succeed by believing what it would never occur to anyone else to believe, really believe—might take at face value as true the most worn out, most worked over and long ago discarded obvious “staring us in the face all the time” as the crux of the mystery. To be able to see the mystery in the obvious—the best-camouflaged ultra-terrestrial life form might one day guess wrong and be flushed briefly out of its concealment (which had always worked before). For one thing, a totally naïve person like this, who would believe anything, might believe in what is really there but conceptually automati cally rejected by more experienced people. The child has faith in what the adult knows can’t be and so could never see, obvious though it might be; i.e., before everyone’s eyes: hidden in plain sight.

  This kind of fascinated, credulous, inventive person might be granted the greatest gift of all: to see the toymaker who has generated—and is with or within—all his toys. That the godhead is a toymaker at all—who could seriously (sic) believe this?

  The key here is pattern and pattern recognition. Such a person is able to pattern (gestalt) and repattern rapidly, evidently experiencing a mercurial world. Out of the very many patterns he might possibly one time hit on correctly perceived and interpreted authentic traces of objects and processes. Mimicking Ultra-T-I, by a rapid flux of linking and relinking percepts and data bits, his gestalting could keep pace with the high velocity (shape-changing) UTI, and this description of it sounds like a joker god: Dionysos, and the humble servant god, Hephestus, the twisted, gnarled old grape vine root. He would literally see it, and its secret life.

  Too dumb to know you don’t look for god in the trash of the gutter (instead of heaven).

  ➊ Probably because I am afraid of it, but nevertheless curious about it—fascinated by it, dangerous as I see it to be.

  [14:84] There is, then, in this system, a kind of “Tao of Taoism” in that it borrows both Eastern and Western cosmogonical and cosmological and religious concepts to account for that which, for example, Christianity alone seems incapable of reasonably explaining.

  Will Durant (in Our Oriental Heritage) declares that explaining undeserved suffering is the cardinal task of religion. If this be so, Orthodox Christianity is a failure . . . and Taoism, taken alone, is an elitist worldview which accepts reality as it is because it is as it is (in contradistinction, e.g., with Zoroastrianism). What is most firmly rejected in the Hindu reasoning that somehow suffering is only an illusion.

  My system states, “The Godhead is in difficulty. Evil is not the manifestation of an evil deity nor a sign of God’s vengeance, etc., but an analog in the lower or microcosm of the difficulty in the macrocosm or pleroma. The yin aspect has exceeded its proper limits, perhaps as an oscillation of a great supratemporal cycle, and rectification is already in progress.”

  Folder 15

  MAY 1978

  [15:8] The true deity has reasserted itself in the overthrowing of the American government. Perhaps one of the reasons for its victory is that the evil powers did not understand what they were up against, sincerely believing that they had destroyed—not just banished—the light especially since the light re-entered by “trash” routes. They did not recognize it even when confronted by it. That was its intention. Since the evil one posed as the solemn, the dignified, the noble, the true God took on all the despised and rejected and looked-down-on forms. (Cf. the messages in Ubik and the last one, where its cheap and vulgar mask is thrown off to disclose its true nature.) Wind, blowing through the dry weeds . . . tracing a path: the abyss, the sacred void. Silent and invisible, like electricity. “The answer is blowing in the wind.”

  [15:9] What an extraordinary theological thought—answer to the Q: if God exists, why can’t we see him and why does he permit evil? Fact is, evil did him in—temporarily—and banished him.

  [15:12] The PTG world is what the BIP yields to when it is destroyed. It is the goal of the activity of Zebra and in which we are all supposed—are needed—to play vital parts.

  Then (1) originally there was a functioning information-exchange, transfer, projection and reception and acting-on response stage; (2) then the fall, when bogus information entered and resembling true information, was trustingly received and stored and acted on (by us)—a sort of cuckoo’s egg situation—Dokos good enough to fool us. Actual information was driven out, occluded—the bogus information occluded us somehow; then (3) the true Logos, living information, slip
s back in here unnoticed by the [source of the] false interpolated info, in camouflage form. First and 2nd advents.

  So originally the bogus info mimicked the actual successfully enough to fool us, and now we have a situation in which the actual has returned in a form mimicking the bogus. My delight: fake fakes!

  But to reach one of us, the actual information (Logos) has to breach a veritable wall of spurious flack. It must break the hold which the false information as world has on us. We are enslaved to and by the false information (world, counterfeit continuum), and it is a blind deterministic prison of cause and effect, which uses us up, wears us out for its purposes and then throws us away.* To gain the salvific help of Zebra we must first back against the bogus world and partially break its hold—we must bipolarize against it knowing it can and will defeat us. That means that for all intents and purposes, the bogus data (world) form a moral and intellectual puzzle, which each of us must to a certain extent solve (before we can be saved). Here is where pistis comes in, but not a blind pistis except in this sense: we must deny the reality (the intellectual balking) presented to our senses, or balk on moral grounds (indict the world as evil) (and so align ourselves with God—the “ham sandwich” model).

  One of the things I like about this theory is that it implies great salvific worth (ahem) to my writing about counterfeit worlds, especially when I equate their production with evil (cf. 3 Stigmata, etc.). [ . . . ]

  Actually we are not enslaved by a false world, because there is no world there; we are enslaved by a real (and evil) entity which projects data contoured to resemble a world. It is a thing (the BIP). It fires controlling stimuli (signals) at us which we are compelled to respond to in fixed ways (it was this that Zebra broke as deterministic hold over me in 3-74)—e.g., the Bradbury TV program, etc. If we could see this structure as it really is we would see ourselves in the midst of disinhibiting stimuli fired at us so as to link up with internal synchronized up-to-then inhibited circuits. We would see no world, but we would see a vast structure—virtually a big black iron building, totally enclosing us, just firing signals again and again at us. We must serve some purpose to it. But who cares what that is; it is sufficient to know that it isn’t to our advantage, and we need rescue.

  Maybe we’re sources of psychic/psichology energy to it: we help power it. But more likely it is a gestalt, bogus, an imitation of the legitimate universe organism.

  [15:14] Our very mechanisms have been taken advantage of. It was not intended that we discriminate false info from true. There was not supposed to be any false info in the first place. Strange that I, who believe everything I’m told, doubt the entire empirical world and stigmatize it as a product (in the form of spurious data) of evil. It is not an evil world; there is no real world there at all! But there is something there, though: a vast bank of lights and sounds and colors flashing at us from all sides, to which we must react. We are enclosed by it—it is what the ancients called ananke or fate, and it was the power of this that the savior broke.

  [15:25] It is a single mind occupying a number of people critically placed. It replicates hologrammatic micro totalities of itself in each occupied stratum. Thus any part of it is equal to the whole in terms of knowledge content.

  For it, information is energy: its very psychic life energy—until it implants the “special signal” in the “fossil” (e.g., a book published at the exact right time) it is cut off from its makers/senders in the future. Upon this 2-74 signal, contact with it is re-established, since now they know exactly when and where it is. So all that info I got wasn’t meant for me but for it. It was living symbiotically in me—had been for some while, but at a subcarrier level. Hidden and latent as form, but growing and spreading—branching like a grape vine into person after person, objects—mimicking them by transubstantiation.

  [15:27] Supratemporally speaking, there is one adversary thing and one attack on it, threaded through linear time like a nail driven through an onion. By spreading itself “exploded” along the linear time axis the BIP hopes to lose itself in variegated polyforms. Linear time is like an escape route for it, a medium within which and by which it seeks to baffle its adversaries—but since they are supratemporal and transtemporal they are aware of its proliferations (which are illusory as pluralities anyhow: there is really only one of it).

  So Zebra is inserted at crucial times and then acts as a receiver-transducer of what I guess could be called the “Omega” people and “Omega mind.”

  I guess Zebra’s roots in me are permanent—which is fine with me. I can’t think of anything I’d rather have than this permanent bonding to it. I know perfectly well that it is the cosmic Christ we are talking about—something of ineffable beauty.

  [15:28] John 1:1: Living information (the Logos) sent back in time at or before creation, coded to impose certain imprintings on matter, to imprint “DNA” coded drives.

  If no one put the subcarrier information there, then it put itself there, which means it’s alive. If this info is an entity in itself which can modulate itself, then to know this information is to be possessed by it; you are auto matically in a symbiotic state with it. This is a new category of existence. It’s like the ring in The Hobbit—it goes where it wants to go: it can direct its own future. As if we’re radio waves: it modulates us; we’re the carrier signal. It’s as if RF waves become aware that info messages are “using” it, passing through it—like Elton John songs.

  [15:29] Can anti-info have a life of its own? The problem of spurious info. The lie—look at the level it’s raised to. It’s pure death—but where does it originate? Does it have its own “radio station”? Yes—that’s the first thing: I picked up. It yammers at us all the time. We are the battlefield.

  Info is not a description of reality: it is a fiat: “Let there be. . . .” It determines form.

  Our info is partial (occluded) because it is being jammed. Anti-information: the lie (die messages). Eventually you sicken and die of this. “Your ancestors ate manna in the wilderness and they are all dead,” and: “I am the bread of eternal life.”

  When we are used as carriers we don’t know it. Were we brought into existence for this? What is the genesis of all this? Our systems can’t detect spurious information—distinguish it. And this implies that there was a time when there was no spurious information—you can’t counterfeit a dollar until (real) dollars exist.

  We’re contaminated by false info because we have no distinguishing (rejecting) ability.

  Bob Wilson51 says, “There are people who possess secret information.” Wrong. There are people who are possessed by secret information.

  True info is not destroyed; it’s just covered up. So all we need to know is here, intact.

  [15:32] So I don’t need to forever wonder why the “Acts” material is in Tears or how it got there. It is itself—not by living information—it is living information—at least that one page of the dream and the command word “Felix.” The living info entity, having proliferated through me as carrier now does so in the book—with each copy printed it replicates itself.

  I saw the mercury-like drop of Zebra on the page, outlining and illuminating the word “Felix.” In addition to replicating itself in each copy of the book, it can also enter the head of each human who reads it. This is a life form, plasmatic, on a higher order than any other we know. [ . . . ]

  So there is no occult or secret group of authentic Christians to whom the encoded message in Tears is aimed. The living info (“Felix”) replicates in all copies of the book and then in the heads of the readers—any readers: like the host at communion. The entire entity can retrieve itself from this one bit or “cell” in the person.

  [15:34] Suppose the Book of “Acts” is regarded—not as a book made up of words—but a landscape. Let us say that it appears (enters, exists) in our spurious interpolation as a book—this is hard to express. It’s a book (writing) in our world. But our world isn’t real. So the Book of “Acts” is in actuality not really a book at
all; our glimpse of reality is to see it as a book (tractate), one out of literally millions. So in our dream the real world impinges, but only in this fashion, shrunk down to a tractate. In 3-74 I entered that book and (aided by the plasmic life form) correctly experienced it not as a book about a world but the world itself (like “Grasshopper” in TMITHC) and v. Sladek’s parody: books within books: the real world turned into a book, and a book turned into a world. We are totally scripted, after all—rigidly, deterministically programmed (written: our roles engrammed in and onto us all). Which is the book and which the world?

  [15:36] Clearly, we have fallen into the hands of a puppeteer, and it is not God. We act upon a contrived stage. This is why I must never lose sight that Zebra is an invader, secretly here and camouflaged, freeing us from the scripting—a sort of waking up.

  This is one quality of our experience of this spurious interpolation that makes it seem not dreamlike, this script controlling our actions. It goes a long way in creating the semblance of veracity. Our dreams are products of our own heads, our own wishes and desires—but in the interpolation an external will mandates what we will do. We interpret this as an indication of hetero command (not homeo command) and this is a correct view, but we do not carry out the logic which shows what this implies. We labor under and for an alien power; solipsism is voided, but the alternative is not reality but enslavement. All that’s real is mere power.

  To fall under the power of an alien will—that is an odd touchstone by which to locate reality in contrast to dream! It has become our very definition of reality!