The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

  Also the dream of the pitcher of cool water and the wrapped cube (i.e., cake) of food; they are mentioned in 1 Kings re Elijah; they kept him alive.47 Provided by God. This would seem virtually to cinch it.

  [48:897] It is as if the NT presents us with clues to the solution of a puzzle, the puzzle of what to do to be saved. It’s there but in cryptic form, offered again and again. We’re presented with the test or problem and we either solve it or we do not, and God (YHWH) is the judge. There is no other way in through the gate. It’s both hard to solve and easy. It’s a riddle that we do not take seriously. That’s the key. We’re told the riddle and we’re told that our salvation depends on it, but we don’t take it seriously. Again, it’s the low murmuring voice. The crux situation is going to show up where and when and in a form that we don’t suspect.

  [48:901] So Yahweh touches you initially (be you man—e.g., Asher—or God—Belial—) in such a way as to startle you. Rouse you, you have been asleep without knowing it. And presumably dreaming—you are not actually conscious. Yet you don’t realize it. The touching is not pleasant; it rasps. This is the deity, this rasp. The touch can’t be worked into the dream—vide Ubik—“from outside” (the dream).

  It can’t be worked into the dream because it is from outside the dream.

  [48:902] “The rasp can’t be worked in.” Consider dreaming. A sound in the real world occurs; the mind (yours) tries to work it in, to continue the dream; if it can’t (your own mind!) the dream is aborted and you wake up. But the mind—yours—tries to prolong the dream. So the rasp is dysyntonic. Then perhaps some (?) stuff from beyond is worked in syntonically, and you don’t wake. The rasp is intentionally dysyntonic. Another mind (Valis) is signaling you: “Wacht auf”!48 This is half-life; not after death but before (true) birth, full complete birth; hence “born again” or “from above”—the upper realm!

  * * *

  [48:907] The BIP and PTG must be sine wave pulsation:

  Our dream world auto-produced. Risk. Shrinking from risk—hence retracting from knowing. Unity of opposites, BIP and PTG. High stakes. To try for PTG you risk BIP. Could go either way. Retreat from epistemological risk. Too dangerous. Heaven and hell; Purgatorio as compromise for the faint hearted. Not so much war as gamble. Like turning up the next card. Eagles: “It could be heaven, it could be hell.” That’s it. Strive for PTG, drop to BIP. They both are real and—yes: VALIS Regained is correct. Final 7th battle outcome will retroactively decide; roll back through time. VR is correct; Valis got through to me.

  [ . . . ]

  Absolute faith in YHWH is required. Here is where primal angst enters: awareness (v. VR) comes in, awareness of what losing would mean (BIP). Worse—no Sein—nothing! No you and no world. Cosmic death. Heidegger is correct. The risk. The universe could turn into a dream because in point of fact our universe is a dream. If you abandon it, what will cut in to replace it? The BIP! Which is also the PTG.

  [48:920] The turning point for me came when I saw 3 Women; then I understood, and soon saw the sacred tetragrammaton: received the crucial identifying revelation (in confirmation). When I saw 3 Women I knew, and at the deepest level; I was terror-stricken: either I believed in YHWH or there was das Nichts. Not the salvation of my individual soul and/or immortality was at stake but what I call “the existence of existence.” I—in 3-74—was given an example of the role of Valis working at a level deeper than that of saving one man (me) or all men; rather, the guarantor of substantia as such: all substantia as a single totality. This is power beyond any that I could ever (without the 3-74 demonstration) have imagined. Even the existence (Sein) of evil was at stake; without YHWH there wouldn’t even be evil. Or chaos. Or pain. Or loss. I would not be I, and world would not be world. This has led me back to the kind of comprehension that must have gripped the early Hebrews, the essence of Moses’ vision gained from the theophany at Mt. Sinai.

  The deepest level of reality is YHWH. This is what is meant by “creator.” It is not precisely artificer to artifact, and it is not precisely pantheism. It was reading Heidegger that caused me to understand it. My years of acosmism has been a search for YHWH who had to exist if world really existed, rather than only seemed to exist (dokos or dream: auto-generated by each percipient: viz: idios kosmos only, just a lot of them). I had construed the problem correctly. But only upon 3 Women did I fully appreciate the problem—did it really wash over me and leave me terrorized, whereupon the solution came.

  Spinoza was a crucial help to me. This view (“Deus sive substantia sive natura”) does not lead to the Platonic body-soul dualism but leads back to world-affirmation, to immediate deity. God and nature are inexorably inter-involved. The problem is that a mock creation has filtered in, which must be transubstantiated into the real, e.g., YHWH.

  My god—I seem to have become profoundly anti-Platonist! (cf. Beyond the Tragic Vision re Plato49). As if correcting the error Plato made vis-à-vis Parmenides (i.e., when I wrote: “Parmenides did not say there were 2 realms, a priori and empirical; he said there were 2 ways of viewing one reality, one right way—a priori—and one false—empirical. Plato misunderstood this and assigned some reality to the empirical as if it were a partial realm, rather than a way of knowing, a partial way, not realm”).

  And the other basic error in Western philosophy (held by, e.g., Pythagoras and the Orphics), corrected by Plotinus, was the error that the journey of the soul was spatial: first down from the cylum past the planets and then back up again (an error held, again, by Plato!). In this ontological view of the journey, rather than spatial, Plotinus anticipates Heidegger. The upper realm is spatially here, not there. I should know; I entered it, in 3-74. And if here, it can be entered in this life, not just after death!

  [ . . . ]

  The journey is not past the planets but more like a Bardo Thödol trip through levels of ascending ontology to YHWH, the urgrund.

  So Plato (and to some degree Aristotle with his “sublunar” and “supralunar” realms) made 2 fundamental inter-related errors which affected Christianity, but not ancient pre-Hellenistic Judaism. For the ancient Israelites, God was in nature firmly; he was in fact “a God of nature,” as the EB points out. The Megiddo Mission is absolutely right about the Hellenistic origin of the body-soul dualism—it is Orphic-Pythagorean-Platonic.

  [48:926] Two points:

  (1) My seeing Hebrew letters permutate until “Olive Holt” (presumably) cypher was printed out on the far wall.50 This is not necessarily Kabbala. It could be Torah.

  (2) Torah is both oral and written. It is the blueprint for creation and contains the answer for every problem every person will ever have. God studies the Torah and cannot act contrary to it. This implies a living information organism—what I called the “plasmate.” In Tears King Felix was Torah. “God created Torah before he created the universe.” It regulates everything.

  We are dealing with an information processing entity which (1) has power to control reality; (2) which is present in (with?) reality; I mean, it is here (immanent?). Or: what we call reality is our way of viewing this information. The information is more real than any other substantia. It is like digital signal to recorded music or video image; what we call “the universe” is a read-out of Torah as info signal. It is “projected” into substantia. It can be stored. It “tracks.”

  Valis the “machine” that turns the info (Torah) into substantia (reality). The receptacle. The system into which the info (Torah) is fed.

  [48:927] Torah would remain—does remain—info until it enters the system (Valis). Torah controls the system, like stress on a web. But what lies behind Torah (info)? Is the info self-creating and (hence) alive? I think so.

  YHWH turns info (Torah) into reality. Thus YHWH creates reality out of Torah (info). Without YHWH it (Torah) would remain info.

  So ultimately revelation about reality would be to render it back into Torah: to see the Torah in it. (The info basis of reality.)

  Then Valis was feeding Torah into reality
(in 3-74), which defined reality (“modulated” it).

  “Torah served as YHWH’s blueprint for creation and contained the eternal divine formula for the world’s future workings and thus the answers to all problems for all times and all people. God himself is depicted as studying the Torah, for even he cannot make decisions concerning the world that contradict it.”51

  [48:928] If I were to guess, I’d guess that reality is a storage mode for the information. Reality isn’t problem-solving; Torah is. I don’t think reality is to Torah as performance of symphony is to score; I think reality is a container for the information. If God is intelligence—the info is trapped in reality. Suspended, in infinite complexity. Tape or LP or chip is material. Info is poured into reality and can be extracted back out: retrieved. Trans actions take place, information processing transactions. The info is here. It entered and leaves. The key use of reality is memory, which means impression (what I call modulation). A record.

  [48:934] Sin isn’t an issue. The interbreeding of Holy Wisdom with the human race is the issue.

  [48:935] YHWH’s prime role: to keep reality from becoming dreamlike.

  For me in 3-74 it became dreamlike.

  [ . . . ]

  This is the ultimate fear: falling through the universe. This is what YHWH protects us against. It shows absolute trust of me by him to let me see how it really is.

  But the falling through the universe is not as it might seem a withdrawal of YHWH; on the contrary it leads to YHWH. YHWH hasn’t vanished; the universe has. YHWH is there in its place. It’s like an all or nothing bet. If the universe goes, will anything remain, and if so, will it be more or will it be less than the universe?

  [48:945] The situation was a desperate one; I was consuming time faster and faster, which bears out my recent insight that I had been speeding up in relation to real time until finally I used up all time totally and passed outside of time! The lithium was certainly a factor in the conversion from motion to rest. It stopped me suddenly, and reality stabilized into the realm of forms, the upper realm. There must have been profound catecholamine changes. It was as if I had been hyperventilating for years progressively faster and faster; my inner biological clock was speeding up, ahead of outer events, heading toward biological exhaustion and hence death. But just before death occurred, there was intervention—yet I actually passed on along the “tape” into my postmortem existence. Accidental yoga. Burning. Kundalini fire, ajna eye. I burned up my karma.

  In fact I evolved millions of years into the future, to man’s future morphology. I entered the occult esoteric early Christian technique-process. Christ either entered me, or, more likely, I became him. Literally millions of years of biological clock time shot by; I evolved far into the future: became my own remote descendent, and so saw the world as far in the past (in relation to me!). The world lagged 1,000s of years behind me. Hence I saw it as ancient and a prison. At the same time a future—not past—self took over (Thomas). World was past; I was future. If I had abreacted, world would have seemed fremd in the sense of moving ahead of me. I had been moving faster and faster for decades due to the amphetamines. Without them my biological clock synthesized the missing noradrenaline and speeded up even faster. Finally only supratemporal constants were perceptible to me. (The phosphenes.) Brain metabolism was altering more and more—off balance, toward speeding up. I remembered 2,000 years ago as if it was yesterday. I moved faster and faster through time, so in relation to me time slowed down and finally froze into the upper (Platonic) realm: a correct hypostatizing of reality on my part, with no change; time converted into space.

  [48:949] The whole point of my life was the meeting with Jesus in 3-74:

  [48:962] Renewal is the key word; under the script (law) the world runs down—loses its virility and elasticity. Christ will decide where to insert correction and the nature of the correction: what and who.

  If a person is corrected he will be renewed (born from above—born a second time): new energy is introduced and released, negentropy, etc. This makes sense, all right. It is the whole point. To add ergic power to a declining closed system—ergic power from outside (as of ex nihilo). Hence the person is healed and invigorated as never before; not just restored to what he once was, but, rather, entirely fresh power is added from outside him.

  All the information formations that I saw in 3-74 point to an info basis of reality. I was aware of that at the time: I saw the plasmate as a primary constituent. I see now that our reality is based on a script which precedes it (i.e., reality) in ontology and in time, and also that there is a being here (camouflaged) who can pre-empt this primal script—presumably by generating and introducing totally new information which then realigns (modulates) reality. The message is changed, and so reality changes.

  [48:974] All my acosmic novels deal with the topic of VR: putting your foot through reality—e.g., through the ground, the ground sinking away, as if you’ve stepped into an old septic tank, as in my dream: “almighty power who rules earth and sky / and variegated orders in confusion lie.” I am dealing with the issue of Heidegger, but not “why is there something rather than nothing?” but “is there something rather than nothing?” YHWH is the solution, and the only one, to the problem or issue I’ve raised over and over again in my books. I never considered it a solved issue; I never took the universe for granted.

  [48:982] The total deterministic system (“elemental powers”) is that which Spinoza equates with God; obviously, as a Jew, deriving his conception of it from the Torah (which fits my analysis perfectly). This is why he says even God must act as he does and in no other way; God is as determined as a falling stone—which I think is a mechanistic-oriented absurdity of the Newtonian period in human thought—the “pool balls” universe; efficient cause is all, even in regard to God.

  The problem with this view is the fact of entropy, which Spinoza knew nothing about. Such a system—even if fed Torah to program it—would run down/ossify, since nothing new could come into it. The cosmic Christ adds what specifically would be needed—i.e., to renew the system at carefully selected times and places in wise ways (hence rebirth is the key word). Flexibility and ad hoc newness, instilled into the system, and as a result doesn’t run down.

  [48:985] The way it determines you requires that it get into your mind. You see, in the normal course of your life, a particular sign. Valis causes some aspect of the sign to register in your memory as a template. Subsequently this template is elaborated and reinforced by later exposures to its components and related material. Finally the completed template causes you to respond to a crucial situation in a particular way. Valis utilizes the principles of linking, the clutch mechanism, repetition and elaboration, and working backward from the later crucial situation. It causes permanent printing to occur on your mind that later acts as cueing.

  The reason I know this is that I was plugged into Valis’ mind for a time on a—for me—conscious basis, and experienced my own engramming as described above. Is Valis, then, a revisionist agency, amending prior programming that, if left alone, will lead to the person’s eventual destruction? Or is Valis the prime programmer?

  [48:986] Reality was amended by amending the instructions fed it. So it was not amended directly; its received signal was overridden. This is what I saw that I called Valis: the resetting of reality. This is why I came to the conclusion that I had not seen God but the will of God. Interestingly, what came into being (therefore) did not follow from what had come before; i.e., causality was overruled, and there was what I called “pretextual” causality. Things and processes seemed alive because sentient purpose rather than efficient mechanical law was modulating them. I was seeing the results: of something coming between the law and reality, a softness, a melting, a flexibility so that reality was responsive to me as a “you” not an “it.” The modulations had to do with me—they were designed with me in mind, like a sympathetic response. Like a watchful organism or field embracing a number of objects and processes. Here is wh
ere Spinoza’s view causes him of necessity to deny miracle, since he only conceives of efficient creation and cannot fathom how an override could be the will of God since the original efficient process is in itself the will of God. But a reading of Paul (and an understanding of the mystery religions and of pronoia) clears this up. Also—especially—an understanding of karma. In the amending, the future does not arise from the past but only seems to. This is something like teleology and I have long mistaken it for teleology. Actually, it is a substitution of something else for cause and effect, the past determining the future. What there is here is something on the order of new creation, a renewing ex nihilo. There is a mind lodged in the system now, rather than at the start. The creator has entered his own epiphenomenon and vivifies it on the spot. But he vivifies it in a specific, not capricious, way—he cuts the karmic cord. He sets the causal (i.e., karmic) counters at zero. The karmic past has no longer any power. It is annulled.

  [48:989] Possibility: my normal personality is fugal. Under extreme pressure the fugal personality retreated as far as possible—this personality took over in 1970 when I took the mescaline. It was psychotic and fugal = psychotic. Then a non-fugal self (“Thomas”) took over in 2-3-74 when the fugal one could retreat no further; i.e., sufficient pressure made me sane because I could retreat no farther. The key term is: coming to grips with; i.e., facing reality, not evading it. In 2-3-74 my problems could no longer be evaded; hence the epiphany of Thomas. Fugue, as a way (device for) of handling reality, broke down. (Heidegger’s inauthentic way of Being.) The fugal personality was always high. Auto-intoxicated—evasive. Or rather, intoxicated by the amphetamines and then going into up-down cyclothymia, neither phase being related to reality. Both phases were turned inward. The hawk and the Mater Dolorosa. Driven mad by (1) Nancy leaving; and (2) drugs; and (3) endogenous psychosis. Thomas, not having been conscious in decades or ever before, saw reality without coagulated hypos tases: i.e., lucidly. So what he saw (Valis, the plasmate) was the way reality really is (set-ground). A self that formed in my unconscious, I guess. Collective unconscious. Valis is real; the blood (plasmate) is real too. I can trust what Thomas saw; an adult brain with a newborn baby’s perceptions.