The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
We are now into the technical details of how the Parousia will be/is be ing accomplished; it resembles one theory: that an inner Christ-consciousness will occur, rather than the reappearance of an anthropomorphic figure, but with a totally new and unexpected and fundamental modus operandi: the fusion of a given extant/living human psyche plus a resurrected psyche (apparently) of a former living person, the right match, trait for trait, I would assume—not on a random basis. This, then, is not reincarnation but a tandem psyche, oddly like what I present in Scanner. It would certainly explain why I couldn’t figure out if I had been invaded by an adventitious psyche (I had been) or if it were a former self intrinsic to me (apparently it was not). Also, this would explain why I could not tell if it was human (it was) or divine, e.g., the Holy Spirit (it was human but the result of the combination with my psyche was essentially supernatural). And this explains why it seemed to be someone from beyond the grave (I think it was), which is why I thought of Jim Pike or Tony Boucher. I guess these are the first fruits, the saints, the first to be resurrected at the End Days. Here again in the dream the motif of the substance eaten reappears, the pink margarine cube with the writing on it, apparently symbolic of the host.
[ . . . ]
The term—the concept—Ditheon is the complete, absolute, total, accurate, definitive, final, ultimate explanation of 2-3-74. This one word conveys it all, and the concept may be unknown in religious and theological history. It is a concept that I would never have reached on my own; I have had over 7 years to work on my exegesis, and never arrived at it. Russ did, vis-à-vis BTA. But one could say, “Maybe Russ is wrong.” He is not.
No, it is not a unitary psyche; it is twain. It is “di.” And because it is “di” it jointly perceives two signals (this explains the “second signal”). Two psyches, two signals—and the parallaxis that permits the set-ground discrimination. Just as bicameral means two, Ditheon means two. And the “on” refers to Ho On.
Why did I never think of it before? Two psyches, two signals. Set and ground which the twin psyches blend together; one sees set, the other sees ground. So it is essential that they do remain “di” or twain (“asunder”); if they merged into one psyche they would no longer perceive/receive two differing signals, no longer be able to do a set-ground feature extraction. This is a totally new kind of mind! Twin push-pull psyches working in tandem. More than set-ground: two worlds (spatiotemporal?) based on a common essence; and the common essence can be perceived as archetypal constants (common to both signals or worlds); what I call “archetypes” or “eide” are those elements common to both signals, perceived by both psyches: what overlaps, is present in both (worlds) and to both psyches. Thus a wholly different kind of world is perceived by this double but mutually differing reception. It requires two parallel psyches working in unison to perform the meta-abstraction.
[91:11] Is it possible that performing the meta-abstraction creates, so to speak, the other psyche, rather than the other psyche existing first and then, because it exists, performing the meta-abstraction? Because this way, this “soul,” is the product of higher reasoning, not the cause. [ . . . ]
The crucial word (which the E. of Phil. employs) is “see,” in regard to, “The child ‘sees’ that not just one horse plus one horse equal two horses, but ‘sees’ that one plus one equal two.” Nonetheless it is a great realization that this coming on of this higher reasoning faculty makes the person “di” and “Theon.” It is another self; it is as if the person now has two souls, and by having two souls he is god-like. It takes a second self, staggered in time vis-à-vis the regular self, to perform this mental operation; it takes both brain hemispheres. A two-souled human is not human. He is god-like; he has become divine and in fact immortal.
This, then, is not a quantitative increase in consciousness, or even a higher consciousness; this is two consciousnesses working in unison while kept clearly divided in two; it is necessary that they remain “asunder.” It is simply impossible not to see this as bilateral hemispheric parity, twin consciousnesses which differ from each other, one contemporary, the other either archaic or seemingly archaic.
It is as if the dream (in conjunction with Russ’ letter which means in conjunction with BTA) tells me that twin opposed human psyches (bilateral hemispheric parity) equal a Ditheon and not a Dianthros. It is, then, as simple as that. All the mystification and mummery have been cleared up. My confusion is due to two elements: (1) The event itself, the meta-abstraction/the other psyche becoming conscious for the first time, so that I found that I had another human personality in my head who was not me; and (2) What we together experienced/perceived/saw as world—a radically transformed world. Which is to say, (1) how the apperception could occur; and (2) what was apperceived. The blending of the two problems baffled me because I did not understand that in fact I had two problems, which, if you think about it, would be normal when any new sensory “mechanism” came on for the first time; taking sight as an example—presuming you had been blind from birth but did not know you were blind—if you suddenly began to see you would be baffled by the fact of seeing, and baffled by what you saw, and these two would blend together as a total confusion issue, this how and this what by means of the how. I think I understand the how and a good deal of the what, although I must admit that I really don’t know what VALIS seen externally would be. This is certainly the greatest mystery of all, and no doubt the most important; as I say in VALIS, “It is the bottom line.”
[91:19] Eventually I will have to deal with the What Seen, specifically VALIS. I’ll bet I never figure it out; it may take centuries of human thought and work after the Ditheon superman (or God) comes into existence. We may be faced with the true ruling (and truly most advanced) life form on this planet, which the mono-psyche human could not apprehend. It is also possible that now we meet our Creator and the entity that has guided and directed and determined and caused our evolution, like the great black slab in 2001. Because it is now absolutely indubitable (in view of this dream and what I wrote in BTA) that another mind, greater than mine, not a human mind, is working on me and, it would seem, directs what I write. And this is not simply wish-fulfillment on my part because this last dream was so heavy that it clobbered me, rather than pleasing me. I sense (1) species evolution: Ditheon to man as man is to animal; and (2) another life form here, which I saw and call VALIS and the plasmate, and it is probably directing all this. After all, when I saw VALIS in 3-74 it was communicating with me, and very likely it is what I call VALIS that put this recent Ditheon dream into my mind. Let people call me crazy; fuck them. This latest dream abolishes any doubt on my part as to the reality—and importance—of all this. I’ll wager everything I’ve got that deliberately directed species-evolution is involved here, I have experienced the evolution, I have had it explained to me, and, perhaps even more important than the Ditheon state itself, I have encountered (I think) the life form that directs this evolution . . . so maybe the What Seen is more important than the What Become. Which is to say, the ultimate value of becoming a Ditheon is that you can now see your creator, the life form living here camouflaged that leads, guides, controls and directs us covertly and benignly.
[91:K-128] The nature of its consciousness is to human consciousness as human consciousness is to machine, viz:
Again: this info life form’s intelligence is to ours as ours is to reflex machine. And this info life form is evolving, growing, subsuming, and has memory. The dialectic is its internal evolution.
Non-living to living—living to “spirit” (that is, info, which is pure knowing).
The Ditheon dream is saying that instead of a human mind crossbonding with the plasmate to produce a homoplasmate, two human minds form the building blocks that compose the plasmate, and this is clear if after reading VALIS you read BTA. Like the first biological life form coming into existence due to the combining of organic but nonliving protein molecules. This is an info life form, a new kind of life form—not biological (I saw it outsi
de of me as well as felt it in me).
[91:K-129] It has no body (soma). It utilizes the principle of organization to structure anything, a whole lot of things—ordinary things—into its “body.” Thus it is “floating.” (This collates with its non-biological nature.) It amounts to a “perturbation in the reality field,” exerting valence or displacement. To it, reality is a series of ideas, not things, since it itself is an idea.
Apparently it requires a minimum of two human minds to create the temporal dis-phasing necessary for the abstract perception of reality. That is, to roll back concrete (substantial) reality to its info basis. Thus this meta-entity doesn’t have to generate info; it finds info already there. It is an info life form swimming in an info sea! And simply concentrates or combines info in a sort of super-concentration, located at what may be two loci, not one. (In order to acquire parallaxis.) After all, the first biological life form used organic protein molecules already there, and simply combined or concentrated or organized them. Since human brains are packets of very concentrated info already, human brains would be the most likely basis as building blocks for this info life form to bring together (and combine). Like organic protein molecules we are already here, floating about unconnected: atomized.
My God, this does sound like Teilhard!
That two human psyches as building blocks might combine—collide?—spontaneously is a possibility. Protein molecules may have done that in the lower Cambrian seas. Klinemin.28 In that case Anokhi— (pure consciousness) may occur as a random event according to laws of probability. One would have to speak then of a thresholding. It does not use us because we are biological life forms but because we are centers of concentrated info. It can use any center of info. Then in a sense the 2-74 meta-abstraction was info in my mind becoming conscious on its own. Since it’s using the info in us and not us as biological organisms, it’s not limited to us, to human minds, but can be (or be where) any info has collected—which explains why I saw it outside me as objects and causal processes. This is so close to Teilhard’s noösphere! For me, convergence and concentration and compression are equally salient terms (i.e., as they are for him). A flashpoint occurs where consciousness (true, pure consciousness) sets in. I speak from experience when I say it is a totally different kind and degree of consciousness from normal human consciousness, and this is what it is, when all the complexities are laundered out.
[91:K-138] It is of supreme significance that this info life form is not limited to human brains but—as I saw—exists outside them, “scrambled” into the sensible world. This shows that rather than human mind having evolved into info life form status, the superior entity seizes on the lower (on us) and makes use of them as a sort of focus point. This, too, agrees with Teilhard, who does not in any way envision Point Omega limited to human minds and their evolution. Being bodiless, the info life form “floats,” as it were. [ . . . ] The human mind could serve as an interface between the info life form and physical reality, a mediating duplex instrument, very much a “groove” to which the info life form is the “music.”
[91:K-149] My God, I am totally fucked up; I saw the footage from Blade Runner tonight and the Sufi Dante three realm theory is correct: when I saw the BIP I was remembering hell; I was not in hell; I was remembering having been, but was now in Purgatorio. The karmic fetters I felt loosen were punishment (thrall) fetters; and I experienced time flowing backward: that was Purgatorio. And then I ascended to Paradiso and heard the bells and saw God (Valis).
[91:K-157] To repeat: the NT is the essential spirit of the OT and can be extracted, which is precisely what Jesus did (“I come not to abolish the law but to fulfill it”)—okay. But the NT, spirit of the Torah (the OT) itself contains stegenographically a supernatural living being—the blood of Christ (“the plasmate”) capable of “interspecies symbiosis” or “cross bonding”—i.e., Ditheon. This is living info that can think and replicate and is Christ—as I saw; it is not info concerning Christ but is Christ, and swarms up the optic conduit to the pineal body to produce a hierogamy (the chemical wedding; more properly Ditheon).* Thus as info it is limitless in its combinations or messages or contents—hence I saw the linking and relinking permu tating through an infinitude of combinations—the universe as info; compare this to the fixed law; compare, too, to the NT itself: now the “message” changes to meet each new situation, regarding—dealing with each situation as unique, hence fluid—hence total time-process and evolution. There are no precedents, no rules; but this is not chaos; it is evolution, hierarchical—and very Zen, like perpetual renewal of the universe where what was true yesterday is not true tomorrow (reticulation, accretions and arborization). The instructions permutate to meet continually permutating reality; therefore the info must be capable of thought. This is as radically different from the NT as the NT is to the OT, and yet “latent” in the NT as the NT is latent (as spirit) in the letter of the OT. Viz: the NT is the secret narrative of the OT, but what is the “secret narrative” of the NT? It perpetually changes by means of recombinant meta-morphemes. Yet as these meta-morphemes combine and recombine you can see that they are made out of the NT. Just as you can see that the NT is made out of the OT, but in both instances there is a vast quantum leap. The info would permutate so fast that it would have to make use of every ephemeral channel of info possible. It would not jell into a canon—it could not. It’s like the stock market ticker tape. Yet it remains NT Scripture—retains it as its constituents. This is the spirit, in contrast to Christ (NT) and to Father (OT) and to Satan (pre-Torah).
[91:K-163] This spontaneous (i.e., self) generation of rearranged Scripture I conjecture never used to happen. This is recombinant Scripture (for one use-purpose, one person, one situation). Either it is self generating (in which case it is a life form, as I declare in VALIS) or its source is on the spot; the results would be the same.
To function, this third age Scripture must be—not just available to the person, as the Bible is available to us now—but must impress itself on the person as instructions, invincible instructions, and not necessarily at a conscious level. [ . . . ]
These may be evolutionary stages in an info organism that operates at variable—and progressively faster rates—as our species evolves; first no law, then fixed law, then conceptual spirit replacing letter and now direct input to us to handle situations uniquely and varying from person to person; it evolves and we evolve. And each stage of it is latent in the preceding stage. I declare, then, formally that in 2-3-74 I saw an evolving information entity which we know as first the Torah (OT) and then the NT (Christ) but it has now entered a third stage for which we possess no term; I call it recombinant meta-morphemes and these are generated on the spot, unique to the person-recipient and the situation, based on the verbal content of Scripture; and that accelerating time is involved in such a way that levels of ontology are involved resembling those that Dante describes, based on Joachim.
[91:K-167] No, there will be no one Scripture (narrative); it will perpetually recombine uniquely for each situation and person, so instead of one narrative there will be an infinitude of narratives; but for each choice situation the recombinant message will be appropriate. No one thing is right or true. The mind that recombines the meta-morphemes is “in” the person, not outside him; it is him, as if he is the author of his own source of information: he seems to inform himself as his own infallible guide. (This is due to the two psyches.)
[91:K-176] Ursula, you—aw, the hell with it. “Unresolvable metaphysical problems”—it’s a good thing you didn’t know Isaac Newton! He “thought about it incessantly,” too; and finally had it. And Scanner will verify to and for the Ditheons of the future that I did know where the solution lay, because it deals with the two brains but operating faultily—and then VALIS follows; now they suddenly function properly. The first written account by a Ditheonic brain! And written as a frankly autobiographical journal.
[ . . . ]
And of course this is Point Omega and Teilhar
d; I verified that good man more than I expected to. How the thread of Christianity runs through this! And the significance of evolution, time and information! What a grand edifice; and what, now, do I say of 2-74 to 2-75? I say Ditheon, a word, perhaps, never used before. But a concept known: two natures, one person. Oh yes; BTA; I must include that, too: the VALIS trilogy. And so to bed.
[91:K-191] Is this a basic mystic/Sufi gnosis-secret having to do with liberation? And ascent to paradise while still alive? I am reminded of yoga breathing techniques, which certainly influence the inner biological clock/rate of neural firing. You seek to slow down so that world becomes heaven; I did the opposite: I speeded up, a sort of anti-yoga experience that put me in hell. Nevertheless, from this I drew a profound conclusion, unpleasant as it—the BIP—was. Although more imprisoned I could still figure it all out—i.e., the meta-abstraction.