[ . . . ]
What is really pointed to is: the Absolute is non-sectarian; it is Christian and Brahmanist and Platonist and Taoist all at once. If it really is the Absolute, this should be expected.
Folder 1*
October–November 1980
[1:1]
3/20/74−12/2/80
THE DIALECTIC:
God against Satan, and God’s final victory foretold and shown
Philip K. Dick
An Exegesis
Apologia pro mea vita
[1:2] Or is it possible that 2-74 consisted of a quantum leap in abstracting from accident to essence on my part, a perception/awareness of einai underlying accidents as follows:
“Superimposition” of the 2 continua, a scanning by me of two spatiotemporal templates and a perception/awareness of essence identity. [ . . . ] I grasped (the category of) essence and it is real; more, this is how reality is in fact arranged. I could grasp the category of essence and see that A and B were on the essence level one-and-the-same, but I could not then extrapolate to the essence (form) realm in general, i.e., the next implication was lost to me; I failed to draw the next conclusion. [ . . . ] However, having made this quantum leap in mentation/perception-of-reality, I could not halt the involuntary chain of mental hypotheses triggered off in my brain, which (i.e., my brain) had discovered that an ultra way of world-perception/experience/Dasein was possible—and more accurate—and so neural circuits fired and I proceeded to progressively further and further abstract—think/see in categories of less spatiotemporality and more and more conceptual arrangement—the Christian element was only a trigger/clue; this did not have to do with Christianity per se but with the abstracting of essentials at the expense of accidents hence of spatiotemporal arrangement; as a result I ascended through the realms of Neoplatonism—which makes Valis Plotinus’s One.*
[1:9]
[1:17] “If you press world hard enough it yields up God”—paraphrase of [>]. “I define God as world under the threat of death . . . God forced into the open, and put to work in the service of evading death.”
[1:19] No time has passed, and, moreover, all change since “Acts” has to do only with accidents not substance. Reticulation and arborizing in a memory system; the real world, having been destroyed, exists only in God’s memory, and this world remembered is “Acts,” and all changes since have been mere reticulating and arborizing as elaborations of a freeze frame.† Hence time is not real and space is not real. The real world is morphologically arranged, and that world is “Acts” as dynamic, but in essence changeless—exploded through the simulated space and time we experience.
[1:23] The secret is to view something “from the other side” and not as it is—overtly. Heraclitus’ “latent form”—crypte morphosis where the concealed truth and hence the kingdom lies—Zen realizes this. Paradox.
[1:24] Premise: things are inside out (but will at the “Apocalypse” assume their real shape). Therefore the right place to look for the Almighty is, e.g., in the trash in the alley. And for Satan: in vast cathedrals, etc. Through enantiodromia they will “on that day” assume their rightful shapes—the great reversal. The Jester in the tarot deck is the real King; the King card is the deranged one, the witless one. Ubik in its commercials and final theophany shows this reversal process. USA 1974 is really Rome c. 45 C.E. Christ is really here; so is the kingdom. I found my way into it once. The long path is the short path—ponderous books of philosophy won’t help me; Burroughs’ Junky will. That “thieves and murderers” 17th century poem of Herbert’s will. Stone rejected by the builder; the edifice is discarded; the true edifice is invisible—disguised as rubble (plural constituents). That fly grooming himself—they (the divine powers) have to reveal the kingdom to you; you can never on your own pin it down. So to search at all is to miss the point. Tricks, paradox, illusion, magic, enantiodromia. The apparently harmless Xerox missive was my death warrant. The AI voice says the secret stolen has been successfully smuggled to me; I have it. But what is it? My worst book, Deus Irae, is my best. God talked to me through a Beatles tune (“Strawberry Fields”). (“Nothing is real. Going through life with eyes closed.”) A random assortment of trash blown by the wind, and there is God. Bits and pieces swept together to form a unity.
[1:25] “God does not work through the is.” God works through what Lao Tzu calls the weak, the empty; this is the same God.
[1:29] Christianity is like a given drama on TV; what I’ve been trying to figure out for 6½ years is not what this one drama of many is about, but how the TV set works that brings this drama and all the others (there are many, as Eliade makes clear). So: Christianity, when you think about it, could not be the answer. It is a content within the system, not the system.
[1:46] October 19, 1980
You look at one spatiotemporal continuum and another spatiotemporal continuum and you see that they are one. They do not merely resemble each other nor are they just tangent. They are the same thing in terms of some underlying essence. The quantum leap in brain-function is when you go from thinking, “These two spatiotemporal continua resemble each other” to “They are one and the same, expressed at two places and two times.” And you can only do this if you have experienced anamnesis, because if you have not recollected (recovered) you can go no further than seeing that the two continua resemble each other; you cannot make the leap—which is up out of the spatiotemporal universe. Because within our spatiotemporal universe it is impossible that USA 1974 and Rome A.D. 45 could be one and the same . . . how could they be? They are at two times and two places. The only way they could be one and the same would be if time and space were somehow not real; or, put another way, if something about the two continua themselves were not real. That is, if Rome was not Rome; USA was not USA; but both were a third thing, the same thing.
This is why I call it a meta-abstraction. USA 1974 and Rome A.D. 45 are two ways of looking at the same thing: two aspects of the same thing. And the only way you are ever going to realize this is if you literally actually see the two of them superimposed, comingled; and this will only happen if you experience anamnesis; and you will only experience this anamnesis if something stimulates—releases, actually—your blocked memory. [ . . . ]
I am saying, “One plus one equals two,” to people who are saying, “One apple plus one apple equals two apples. One table plus one table equals two tables.” It’s not their fault. I’m sorry but the difference between my meta-abstraction as a brain function and their abstracting, their brain function is that great. I’m lucky. Because of the sodium pentothal and the Christian fish sign my blocked memory of my prenatal life was disinhibited. After making the initial leap in meta-abstracting my brain drew conclusion after conclusion, day after day; and I saw world more and more in terms of conceptual or morphological arrangement and less and less in terms of the spatiotemporal; I continued to abstract reality more and more, based on the hierarchy of realms (each higher one possessing more unity and ontology than the lower) that Plotinus describes.
In a way I feel really bitter: because I can’t tell anyone or convince anyone of what I saw. I’m afraid Valis won’t convince anyone. I feel like joining them and saying, “When I played my recording of the Mahler eighth last night the performance was a lot better than when I played that recording last week.” They’d think I was a lunatic. That’s how I feel about them, in a way.
[1:49] October 20, 1980
I finally see the source of my confusion, which I will herewith straighten out and then (God willing) let it rest. The structure or mechanism of 2-3-74 was Platonist Neoplatonist anamnesis, precisely as Plato describes it (see earlier notes); it has to do with prenatal memories recovered and a Form realm that is not spatiotemporal but is morphologically arranged. However, the content of the anamnesis is, contrarily, Christian; more, the Form (eidos) involved is a Christian one: the secret revolutionary early Christians against Rome . . . and, because this is the nature of the Platonic archetype, recurring aga
in and again throughout linear time and space. So in a sense two mutually contradictory religious systems seem to be proved by 2-3-74: Christianity and Neoplatonism. My identity in terms of the Form world is Christian; my knowledge of that identity comes to me via the structure of the Neoplatonism world-order. This is what has caused all the confusion. For example, the reincarnation involved is Neoplatonist and can only be understood in terms of myself as a Form with each incarnation as an instance of that Form in the spatiotemporal flux world; it is me against the Black Iron Prison again and again, wherein I am a secret Christian and the Black Iron Prison is, so to speak, Rome, at different times and different places.
There is no room in Christianity for reincarnation and no hierarchy of realms such as Plotinus describes and no anamnesis and meta-abstracting such as Plato describes. However, there is no mention or indication in Platonism, Neoplatonism or Pythagoras of a secret revolutionary Christian movement pitted against the Empire. As long as I pursued the Christian element I got nowhere in figuring out what happened in 2-3-74 and how it happened. I had been swamped by apostolic Christian material in terms of my identity, role and knowledge, but none of this explained what happened and how, unless I was willing to settle for “a miracle performed by the grace of God, by divine providence,” which I was not willing to settle for. So if I am interested in reconstructing apostolic—i.e., genuine—Christianity and my identity in its struggle against Rome, then I should go toward that; but much more: I want to know what happened and how, and I now know that. Interestingly, the system that is proved to be correct is Platonism and Neoplatonism (e.g., reincarnation, the Form world); whereas Christianity is shown only to be my identity-role, my commitment.
Therefore I must affirm Christianity—the authentic apostolic form—as my orientation, in fact my historic role, but it remains a matter of faith and personal identity; whether it is veridical I can’t say. Philosophically and metaphysically, Platonism and Neoplatonism in its basic elements is verified; were it not true my experience of 2-3-74 could not have occurred. I might have discovered other Forms than the Black Iron Prison: what I call “other narratives.” However, this is the one which defines me: opposition against the central tyranny, expressed over and over again.
[ . . . ]
This goes a long way toward explaining the strange basic schism in me (which finds expression, for example, in Scanner, its basic plot). It explains my twin parallel opposing views of Christianity; on the one hand I feel myself to be a Christian and on the other I view Christians and Christianity with abhorrence and contempt. It would seem that half of me is devoted to the wisdom religions of classic Greece, which is why I enjoy the pre-Socratics so much; and yet another part of me is led back again and again to the NT. “Zwei Selle wohnen ach! in meiner Brust.”71 . . . I really am two people, one of them Christian, the other pagan. As a result I am forced to function while holding two mutually exclusive views which, as F. Scott Fitzgerald says, is the mark of the true artist. [ . . . ]
I must go on being a Christian, acting out the role of genuine revolutionary apostolic Christian, as a strategy: in order to overthrow the Black Iron Prison which I detest. But that is what Christianity is for me: a strategy. I know—all the time that I am a secret, authentic, revolutionary Christian—that it is Platonism and Neoplatonism that’s objectively true. But the Platonist and Neoplatonist has no revolutionary drive; he will not change society, the world, to bring on the Kingdom; therefore I must live as if (als ob) Christianity—genuine Christianity—were true. Strange.
[1:61] October 21, 1980
The strangest most eerie thought just struck me. If USA 1974 and Rome A.D. 45 are two spatiotemporal aspects of a common essence they as aspects if superimposed would clash, not blend—this despite the common essence; I don’t know why I know this but I do. But if it’s really Rome A.D. 45 then they would blend, because the percipient would see that USA 1974 is Rome A.D. 45. What I have been calling a superimposition is more like a metamorphosis. A certain building is a building in Syria in the first century A.D. Reality is seen under the aspect of Rome A.D. 45, the Holy Land. As if reverting. I noticed palm trees and sand, the warm wind, the relaxing people . . . like a scene in ancient Syria.
* * *
[1:69]
I think that just now by linking Plato’s anamnesis and Form world with Dionysus and the greater mysteries, and the Christian Eucharist to Dionysus and the greater mysteries—which links Christian Eucharist to Plato’s anamnesis and Form world—which renders the spatiotemporal world irreal, thus abolishing the power of “astral determinism” over you, which is the basic task of religion because then the splintered soul implodes and again is divine and immortal and knows it—
I succeeded!
[1:72] October 22, 1980
As of late last night my emotions (affective self) moved into synch with my intellect (as engaged in this exegesis), and the result was that I surveyed a world-picture of such bleakness that it was for a time beyond my capacity to bear. I saw and understood suffering, not just intellectually, not just emotionally, but fully, with complete comprehension. Today I have thought about it, and the only attitude that can or should be brought to bear is a stoic one, in fact a heroic one, a facing of this bleakness unflinchingly, with no attempt to flee from it as a vision or existentially, as a way of being in the world. It is a view of the weary wheel of Buddhism; it is the Buddha’s view of absolute suffering and the need not to be reborn, to get off the wheel. [ . . . ]
Each creature is born, suffers, dies, is again born, forever and ever, because the world soul—there is just one soul, and it has fragmented into billions of bits—made the primordial and primary mistake of taking the spatiotemporal realm as real, thus plunging itself into enslavement and multiplicity. For a few there is a way out: discovery that the spatiotemporal world is not real, an ascent back up into unity and freedom, but only for a few bits (sparks) is this possible; the enormous mass of fragments will remain caught forever, unless some final great savior comes here and frees us en masse. I hope this will happen but I doubt it. Every fly with a missing leg, every cat beleaguered by fleas, every human fearing economic want—the endless wheel turns for all of us and it turns forever, in this irreal time we have fallen victim to.
“The saying that is uttered in secret rites, to the effect that we men are in a sort of prison, and that one ought not to loose himself from it nor yet to run away, seems to me something great and not easy to see through; but this at least I think is well said, that it is the gods who care for us, and we men are one of the possessions of the gods.”72 So says Plato referring to the Pythagoreans. Everything is contained here: the vision and the stance, and, finally, what may be the only solace that can be held out, that the gods care for us because we are their possessions. This paragraph will have to do if I am to be saved from the vision I have seen, and it is meant to save; it is Plato’s great mind coming to bear on the situation, with full knowledge of the reality of the situation, the Greek equipoise that Apollo exemplified; that Attic calm to which I must return, or I am destroyed.
Premise: the primordial Fall was caused by our—by us, not our ancestors—making the error of taking the spatiotemporal realm to be real.
(1)In 2-74 I saw that the spatiotemporal realm was not real.
(2)Therefore I reversed the original Fall—which is doing much more than remembering—by anamnesis—the reality of the Form world, the universals. What I realized last night is that I as a soul splintered up in fragments through space and time, literally exploded through space and time, in incarnation after incarnation, my unity shattered. This is the “weary wheel” of the Orphics. This realization is terrible. Because even though I reversed the effects of the Fall for myself, I can see the dreadful condition of the others of us, born again and again (but this is temporal talk; it is irreal. Splintered is the correct term). [ . . . ]
Now the results of not recognizing Tat tvam asi seem actually sinister, since you literally are other life for
ms, other humans and other creatures; you as primordial soul are splintered, exploded, over thousands of years and thousands of miles. Tat tvam asi is not a luxury for the languid philosopher or the special mystic; it is essential in the reversal of a primordial fall (our taking the spatiotemporal realm as real).
[ . . . ]
Recollection as re-collection: calling one’s splintered, scattered parts in, to a center. The primordial explosion reversed as a calling back together, a sort of teleological implosion, as if time were running backward.
[1:83] Rats. I’m rediscovering things that I already knew; that are, in fact, the basis of my system. I am too tired; I must quit for a time and rest.
[1:84] Probably the wisest view is to say: the truth—like the Self—is splintered up over thousands of miles and years; bits are found here and there, then and now, and must be re-collected; bits appear in the Greek naturalists, in Pythagoras, Plato, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Neoplatonism, Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, Taoism, Mani, orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Orphism, the other mystery religions. Each religion or philosophy or philosopher contains one or more bits, but the total system interweaves it into falsity, so each as a total system must be rejected, and none is to be accepted at the expense of all the others (e.g., “I am a Christian” or “I follow Mani”). This alone, in itself, is a fascinating thought: here in our spatiotemporal world we have the truth but it is splintered—exploded like the eide—over thousands of years and thousands of miles and (as I say) must be recollected, as the Self or Soul or eidos must be. This is my task.