The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

  In that case, each given system is in itself part of the enslaving snare of delusion; in other words, as soon as I avow one philosopher or system (e.g., Spinoza or Schopenhauer or Kant or Anaxagoras or Parmenides or Gnosticism) I have become again or more ensnared, as I am by this spatiotemporal world itself; it is as if the eidos of Truth is exploded and splintered like all the eide. And all the Selves and Souls. But what else could you expect here in realm #4? Since everything real is here only in discrete bits. Of course this means that I can never come up with the whole, true, complete explanation/answer. I can re-collect and re-collect, do better and better, but never completely make unified the eidos of Truth. Yet, in 3-74 when I meta-abstracted, a great deal of the eidos of Truth was revealed to me; however, alas, I did not understand it then and do not yet.

  Look; I may be on to something here, that in realm #4 it is impossible to re-collect any given eidos including that of a true verbal (informational) picture (analog) of reality; that in fact the true informational analog will be exploded over thousands of miles and thousands of years like all other eide. Such is the situation here in the spatiotemporal realm; this is one of its drawbacks (among many). Fascinating. In that case, no wonder I haven’t been able to match my 2-3-74 experience to any religion or any philosopher, yet many seem in part to apply. The truth is splintered!* This would explain, too, why the sacerdotal power is found in bits in, say, the alley; for the same reason: it is exploded ubiquitously. (In addition to the places I listed above where I’ve found bits of the truth I should add: the Hermetics and the Kabbala and quantum mechanics.)

  Could it be said that every now and then an additional bit is reticulated? So-to-speak revealed? So 2-3-74 could contain one or more elements of the truth that are new?

  In one area the Evangelical Christians are correct: in regard to Bible prophecy. The Bible does contain archetypes that print out over and over again, and are—some of them—applicable to present-day times. (I need only recall “Acts” and the dream material in Tears, the latter specifically being either from Daniel or Revelation.)

  So one great realization is: the map is exploded; the map is splintered. (And, perhaps, the map is not complete; see Hussey on the map paradox, the vicious regression.73)

  [1:86] October 24, 1980

  If the eide are exploded through the spatiotemporal realm, so must be Noös: disintegrated here in realm #4; but if the percipient ascends from realm #4 he may see Noös re-collected, reintegrated and hence unitary, as it actually is. What I am saying is that the eide are not actually exploded; they are exploded in terms of the spatiotemporal realm, if my meaning is clear; since realm #4 is illusory, the explosion, the splintering, is illusory. And if this is true of the eide, the Forms, this also is true of Noös: our false categories of ordering, of arranging time and space, explode and splinter the eide; and they explode and splinter Noös; but this is not really the case. This is why it is correct to say that our realm #4 and its spatiotemporal ordering are irreal. If they were real, then the eide and Noös would in actuality be exploded and splintered; but they are not. To see Noös integrated is not for Noös to reintegrate, but to be seen as it is and always is.

  This was what I saw that I called Valis: Noös reintegrated in terms of my perception of it: re-collected.

  Noös exploded (here in realm #4) is Noös banalized, as in the chapter headings in Ubik: Noös re-collected is as Ubik appears in the heading of the final chapter, no longer banalized, trivialized, debased into rubbish. This banalization is a measure of the Fall of this realm; and again it illustrates what I have remarked on: that things do not appear in this realm #4 as what they really are, that finally Christ will bring about what I call “the great reversal,” whereupon we will no longer see Noös (God) banalized and exploded, but, as if reversed, sacred and a unity: as it really is. Meanwhile, here, with things appearing in reverse to what their essence is, Noös is obscured; veiled.

  October 25, 1980

  But whereas a given eidos is finite in realm #4—it only enters at certain places and certain times, i.e., is printed out at one place and time but not another—Noös is ubiquitous. Therefore if it chooses to so-to-speak drop its mask and reverse appearances in realm #4 (enantiodromia) it is in everything at every time; it is infinite (cf. Xenophanes). Or, put another way, it can be anything or any constellation of things and their processes at any place and any time.

  [1:88] October 25, 1980

  If a gun were put to my head and I had to give one short answer as to what Valis was, I would say, “The Tao, as the Absolute.” And as to what happened in 3-74: the regulation of the Yin and the Yang, i.e., the dialectic, by the Tao; the Tao asserting itself as master of the dialectic that makes up our world-order of flux and strife. (“The Tao is what lets him first the light, then the dark”—this has always stuck in my mind as the basic definition of the Tao.) And this has to do with advanced physics; so Warrick is right about Valis and 3-74. Sentient physics.

  But also: Valis was my splintered self “imploding” back together, the pieces that had exploded over space and time reversing their direction in enantiodromia and re-collecting to form their original unity. Of this I am absolutely certain; but look: this, too, could be an example of an event of higher physics! (This is why time seemed to flow backward; and forward-moving time had exploded my self over thousands of years and miles.)

  This is why I had the distinct and indubitable impression that my own earlier thought-contents were coming back to me in the form of world—e.g., Ubik and “Faith of . . . ,” etc. World was familiar to me as my own earlier mind. I never could explain this until now. It was (I see now) the re-collecting of my own splintered self as if time were running backward, turning an explosion into an implosion. So beyond doubt enantiodromia and other higher laws of physics perceived by the Taoist and Greek naturalists (pre-Socratics) were involved! I see! The normal process of self splintering was reversed. [ . . . ]

  The first space-time thing that returned to me was my most recent book, Tears, and the world (“Acts”) in it where a main part of myself had been exploded to. Then later came Ubik.

  The above paragraph is the most important realization of my six and a half years of exegesis.

  [1:93] October 26, 1980

  Therefore my experience in 2-3-74 now that it has been followed by a successful exegesis—and only in the last two weeks has it become successful—pays off in the way that I perceive ordinary daily reality. I cannot bring back the absolute vision of the morphologically arranged realm that I had in 2-74, the anamnesis; but I now can apprehend this realm from the standpoint of the realm #3 reality; I can see in the epiphenomenal realm the constants shining through . . . and this is the triumph in practice of Platonist metaphysics, its whole point: that you learn to see in the flux realm the constants, literally see them with the educated eye, educated by Plato’s metaphysics of the forms. [ . . . ]

  But the real success of the exegesis is that as I become old, now, and wear out, I feel myself wearing out only as an instance of an eternal soul or form; that nothing is lost, nothing is destroyed; and although I don’t crave immortality I do crave vigor and joy and the running that I associate with my eidos. And I know, too, that all that I have lost in my life is epiphenomenal, people and cats and things, that in reality nothing is lost. So I can face my own aging and mortality with calm and even pleasure, since I am grounded in both a mystical vision of super reality and an intellectual exegesis based on that vision, the totality of which provides me with a philosophy and with an experience with world that is harmonious and wonderful and intellectually satisfying: it is a vision of intactness, of my own self and world. Of everything as a negentropic whole. As regards my writing: it will permanently affect the macrometasomakosmos in the form of reticulation and arborizing—and hence will survive in reality forever, in the underlying structure of the world order.

  [1:94] November 1, 1980

  This is the surd I am left with after completing the metaphysical sys
tem of my exegesis: a surd. There is what the AI voice called “a perturbation in the reality field.” This is Valis; this is the most important part. Originally I spoke of it as a valence away from plumb. Now I think of it as a tugging, like the moon’s effect on Earth’s oceans creating, by tugging, the tides.

  I say, the reality field is not real but the tug is. But what the tug points to—that is, what is doing the tugging—I have no idea. I know of it only by its effects on reality, in setting up an irregularity in reality, in the field, the way reality, the field, behaves. It is being affected from outside—outside reality.

  This surd (something irrational that can’t be explained after everything that is rational has been) may stick with me. So I may wind up with something like quantum mechanics facts. In fact it may be an event in quantum mechanics, like something related to the Tao. I don’t know.

  And this is what I wanted the most to explain. And this tug is right here and now, in the very trash stratum of reality. I have set out in pursuit of ontology, rising from level to level, only to go full circle and come back where I started: pop tunes on the radio, weeds in the alley . . . and the faint flurry of a kind of breath, as if some invisible spirit, perhaps the ruah, is breathing creation into existence ex nihilo. Yes, I am on the rim of reality; level after level each one more ontologically real than the previous, and then—nothingness. The void. Only a faint wind stirring reality, tugging at it. And maybe a glint of color, briefly. And a word or two as set to ground. 6½ years of work: a glint, a rustle in the weeds of the alley; I am confronted by unfathomable mystery, as if I saw cosmogenesis reversed: cosmic resorption, until at last creation ceased to be, and only the spirit moved across the face of the void. And, equally real and equally enigmatic, a small murmuring voice speaking in the night, as if from immeasurable distances away.

  I have found the ultimate source: a rustle of wind in the weeds and faint, distant words by a lovely voice that is neither male nor female. Both bordering on the rim of not being there but being, I am convinced, the truly real; in contrast to the great substantial world order, the galaxies and nebulae, suns and planets, civilizations and deeds.

  I cannot say that I have found moksa, enlightenment. I do not understand what I saw and what happened in 2-3-74. Something helped me. Who? Oddly, although I don’t know who I do know why (since the AI voice told me that). I chased after reality, and how far did I actually get? “Ti to on?” the pre-Socratics asked. Perhaps it is the wrong question.

  An odd thought came to me. I end my exegesis with something—what I call a surd because that is what it is—that can’t be fitted into an otherwise satisfactory system. This one thing is simple. No elaboration of it seems possible, no implications extracted and elaborated. It makes me think of Dante’s semplice lume. And my exploded morphological structure reminds me of Dante’s description of God as the book of the universe whose pages are scattered throughout the universe.

  I beheld leaves within the unfathomed blaze into one volume bound by love, the same

  that the universe holds scattered through its maze.

  Substance and accidents and their modes became

  as if together fused, all in such wise

  that what I speak of is one simple flame.

  November 2, 1980

  About all I can see clearly is that 3-74 was a heroic act that consisted of the overcoming of fate. “We can be heroes for just one day,” to quote Bowie. It all has to do with waking up long enough to perform one action, to make one change, before you sink back down into sleep, before you again forget. [ . . . ]

  What strikes me about this is that it is cosmogenesis in miniature, in the microcosm, because something has come into being ex nihilo. What the person did—the heroic act—he could not do given who he is, given his history, his karma. It is an impossibility. Thus in a real and literal sense a new self has been born in him, since this fact, this deed, could not issue out of field self, the self is splintered throughout time and space. This is as much a miracle as the original cosmogenesis; in a sense it is the original cosmogenesis, and perhaps the ruah is present at it as it was in the beginning.

  So I felt as if another self had taken me over; my actions were “disassociated,” without ideation; and then Thomas came into being in me. Maybe he was new, not a lost part rejoining me but new ex nihilo, the permanent offspring of the heroic deed that broke the power of the world rule existentially. What world lost, self acquired. There is a quantum transfer of essence from world itself, so that the balance between the two shifts critically. Self is acting on world, rather than world on self; it is as if up until then the self was only a product of world, its thing; it was a thing among things, controlled and directed and shaped, as a potter shapes a clay vessel. And all its deeds and all its thoughts have only been world acting and speaking through it, within a closed system of which that self was only a component.

  For one thing, if you view it in science fiction terms, in terms of ideas, S-F has developed vis-à-vis time travel and changing the past: has not this one new deed changed the entire future, the entire future history of the universe? Because the universe is one great field, and to introduce a truly new thing or event into it is to alter it in its entirety. Permanently.

  Since world is now no longer a closed system it is no longer in effect a prison.

  * * *

  [1:121] Is the secret connected with time and the reversal of time? Cosmic resorption? I am right in my writing: reality is a series of Chinese boxes, a box within a box within a box, etc.: but a final point comes when you have Valis, but what or who Valis is I have no idea. The Tao, YHWH, cosmic Christ, Brahman, Shiva, Krishna, or a quantum mechanics phenomenon. Or ruah, the spirit of God breathing creation into existence out of nothing—ex nihilo—you finally wind up with: non-being—that is, not-is-real, and the “is” is only seeming, is not real. You open box after box and ascend the levels of being (esse, substantia, einai) and then you open the last one and it contains—nothing! And yet you’re faced with the mystery or paradox that Ho On (for want of a better term) is actually right here and now, in the very trash at hand, not far away at all—the ultimate paradox in terms of your long search through level after level of being—he is at the initial least real (sic) level. You wind up back where you started, paradoxically. But now you know that this utterly worthless trash level—mere appearance—is somehow also Ho On, whom you seek. “The Buddha is a piece of toilet paper.”74 “The Savior is a crushed beer can in the alley.” Could this be the final great enantiodromia?

  So if you push essence far enough in terms of ascending levels, you find you have gone a full circle, and you wind up encountering ultimate deity cooking and writing pop tunes on the radio and popular novels, and a breath of wind in the weeds in the alley.

  It’s as if the ultimate mystery is that there is no mystery—it’s like what Robert Anton Wilson says in the Cosmic Trigger about being outside the Castle when you think you’re in, and inside when you think you’re out.

  And in a way what is most paradoxical is that I said it all in Ubik years ago! So in a way my exegesis of 2-3-74 says only, “Ubik is true.” All I know today that I didn’t know when I wrote Ubik is that Ubik isn’t fiction. In all of history no system of thought applies as well to 2-3-74 as Ubik, my own earlier novel. When all the metaphysical and theological systems have come and gone there remains this inexplicable surd: a flurry of breath in the weeds in the back alley—a hint of motion and of color. Nameless, defying analysis or systemizing: it is here and now, lowly, at the rim of perception and of being. Who is it? What is it? I don’t know.

  I ask for 30 years, what is real? And in 2-3-74 I got my answer as if the universe—well, as if my question traveled across the whole universe and came back to me in the form of experienced answers . . . and what I wind up with after 6½ years of studying those experienced answers is: a surd. A perturbation in the reality field—an irregularity, a departure from the normal—a tugging or pulling or bending. And that i
s all. Not even the thing, the perturbing body itself; only its effects on “the reality field.” Something out of the ordinary—like I say, a surd.

  So what, then, do I know about the nature of reality? That an irregularity can show up in it that points to—something else. Only a sign.

  Q: “Ti to on?”

  A: Heidegger says, “Why is there something instead of nothing?” To which I ask, “Why does Heidegger think there is something instead of nothing?”

  The tug is real and the “reality field” tugged on isn’t. So that which is genuinely real is pointed to by its effect on the “reality field” (which isn’t real) but what it is that is doing the tugging I have no idea.

  [1:127] The perturbation in the reality field was not by me but by the Tao. Nonetheless I broke my own programming by a heroic act of will. Yes; our spatiotemporal aspects (what we take to be reality) are indeed our own prior thought formations coming back to us. Yes; anamnesis is recognizing them as such: which permits you to break their hold (programming) over you by (on your part) an act of (your) will. Doing something new—introducing one single new change—destroys their ossified nature and starts up real time, it causes a time perturbation, as if time were running backward; this may be due to one forcing the prior thought formations back into the past where they properly belong; it would seem to you, then, as if the future had broken in, moving retrograde in time. This “future breaking in” is: real time! Due to the destroying of the supremacy of the past (prior thought-formations as world). Once these prior thought-formations’ power over you. [ . . . ] You can see (?) (experience) the Tao: true reality as it is without the prior thought formations. You can see the tug by the Tao (matrix containing the eide) on reality-as-a-field.