Having allowed the invasion to occur it must now assimilate into its structure what it has allowed to come in—or even induced into coming in. This—when studied from this fundamental standpoint—doesn’t seem to differ qualitatively from what protozoa do. It is not a basic strategy; it is the basic strategy, the irreducible transaction between a biological organism and its environment, for the purpose of prolonging the life of the organism. Now, what strikes me at this point is that perhaps this transaction can be viewed in terms of information. First, the lowered structural organization of the organism should be regarded as connoting info scarcity or depletion, at least relative to its environment. It (the organism) does not know enough; it experiences this as a heightened strangeness, incomprehensibility and unpredictability on the part of its environment—all of which renders that environment threatening because it is not understood. This could account for many of the fugal tactics by schizophrenics: they retreat from reality because reality is making less and less sense to them. But this in fact is not due to transformations in reality but in the relative information that the schizophrenic has about reality. And as he withdraws he escalates this disparity; by exercising progressively less reality testing he learns less and less; this is a self-defeating tactic, this attempt at disengagement. The solution is for him to advance into reality and so-to-speak capture and incorporate a sizable hunk of it without at the same time losing his own identity, that is, if the incorporated hunk of reality proves to exceed his capacity to assimilate it he is doomed to swift annihilation. In fact what was perceived formerly as an external threat is now literally internal and still a threat. In fact the threat has won out; the battle is over and the organism dies. Viewed this way this massive incorporation of its environment is a desperate last strategy based on the recognition that unless it does this it is certainly doomed; it must be convinced that any alternative means inexorable death. So the massive incorporation is an endgame battle to which it commits itself utterly, knowing the danger in what it is doing but knowing, also, the alternatives: they are dead ends. But now it has two centers: its own self and the “self” that it has incorporated but not assimilated. Its environment is literally inside it, and experienced “from inside,” that is, its now incorporated environment is known by its inward face as an “I.” Not an it, a sort of potentially lethal movement along Martin Buber’s “it-thou” axis: the “it” has become a “thou”—which is good—but the “thou” is inside the organism as a second center or focus of consciousness. The boundary between the organism and its environment is eradicated, which potentially is death for the organism. Death in its true and total form; this is what organisms rightly fear the most. Yet (apparently) it has decided to allow this invasion as a means to incorporate negentropy—which it must continually do—and so the possibility of enhancing its viability—as opposed to being engulfed—is there. How should it proceed? How does it go about dealing with an influx of reality so vast that it constitutes a second center of consciousness?
First of all, it must deal with the startling discovery that what it has ingested—but not assimilated—is, like itself, conscious and even coherent. It and its acquisition—or invader—are roughly isomorphic. (Hence the adventitious psyche is perceived as human, a crucial point.) (Crucial, because if human it is not Fremd; it is “other” yet familiar in kind. Presumably, too, it is finite, since humans are finite.) Next, it is discovered that this adventitious psyche is bewildered, as if plucked from its own familiar environment and deposited in a strange time and place; thus it is at a disadvantage. It does not know how it got here—nor does it know the local customs or even the language, all of which creates the impression that it did not intend to invade, does not understand the situation and means no harm. Its motivation is the same as the host organisms: to survive. [ . . . ]
Was it just last Friday night that I stumbled at last onto the realization of justification (page K-220)? (This is Sunday night.) And felt such pain—because the exegesis is over. And I knew it. And, as I wrote, the real purpose of this exegesis has not been to find the answer but to preserve the experience.
[81:K-310] There is something I must face and face fully and honestly. The messenger vision—that was (first of all) not a dream but a vision (although perhaps hypnopompic). What I must face is that it sums up and expresses absolutely, precisely and perfectly what I discovered recently to be the very essence of Protestantism: the doctrine of unmerited justification by (Christ’s) surrogate act (death). The complexities of this specifically Protestant doctrine (which is, as I say, not a belief of Protestantism but its very basis) are wonderfully clarified by that vision. Now, I see myself falling back on what the reformers (following Paul) called “legalism”; this is when you obsessively and neurotically calculate and recalculate whether or not you have observed every regulation and piled up enough merit by your own efforts—and of course you never have and never will. There always remains a bill of particulars. And you know it. There is always something left undone or done imperfectly. Or something done wrong. It never ends. There is endless nagging worry and a sense of being imperfect; your conscience will always accuse you! Interjected authority transformed into awareness of guilt, which is to say falling short—the literal meaning of “sin.”
What I must—simply must—realize is that it has been supernaturally revealed to me that Paul’s basic idea of justification through God’s unmerited grace (divine favor and mercy) upon which Protestantism is based is true. As I sit here at this moment I realize that I will always fall short however hard I try to do right; I cannot on my own save myself and am doomed; and yet I am saved by the “messenger” with the spotless sheet of paper that he presents to the retributive machinery in place of the bill of particulars drawn up against me during my lifetime. This bill is accurate. [ . . . ] If I forget this I am doomed to worry my life away neurotically, feeling endlessly unworthy and a failure, deprecating myself, indicting and impugning myself, reproaching myself—as Satan does in the heavenly court; my conscience endlessly accuses me and nothing I on my own can do will satisfy it. Have I forgotten 2-74? And have I also forgotten the “messenger” vision? All this was done for me that I would be saved—saved in a sense from myself as accuser. I find myself cursed with a sense of unworthiness. I am not a proud and stubborn person; I am ashamed. Christ died to give me new life and to justify me and all this has been supernaturally revealed to me. Yet I find myself doing it again, accusing myself for falling short. This is not a small matter; I live with this daily. Every new day stimulates my endless sense of unworthiness. That night when I realized in a flash that 2-3-74 was sudden justification and my awareness of it—have I forgotten that already, that understanding? 2-3-74 (as proved, e.g., by the “messenger” vision) was the miracle of Christianity at work on my behalf. As Bill Sarill said, I am in a state of grace; I have no reason to think I have fallen out of it.
* * *
[81:K-316]
VALIS is the cypher book—code book—to the whole 10 volume meta-novel. And will someday be read as such. And “Valis” is Gnostic/Mani but secretly Holy Mother Church. [ . . . ] As with God’s strategy, the sequence is “out of sequence.” Viz: the key piece—VALIS—came last. Until it the others did not make sense—i.e., they were taken to have been written as fiction and hence hypothetical. VALIS retroactively reinterprets them—shows them in a light that could not be anticipated by an analysis of them—until VALIS came out; typical of the pattern strategy of the wise horn in its dialectical combat-game. Here is a big realization, and unexpected: VALIS in itself means nothing! Its only significance is as the code book to the 10 volume meta-novel—and no one has noticed this yet, even Gregg Rickman.
[81:K-317] The diagram on the previous page—and what I say there—explains why VALIS resembles Ubik and Ubik. This is how the gnosis is smuggled past the angels (“the secret stolen, through the angels, in one’s hands”), and into this prison: it is not transmitted in the proper—meaningful—sequence but is corre
ctly assembled here to spell out the message. The final—and essential—piece was VALIS. It alters the meaning of all the previous books and stories. The message is not in VALIS, the message is not in the 10 volume meta-novel. It is in the latter reinterpreted by the former. Look what it reinterprets the squib opening the final chapter of Ubik into!
[81:K-334] For the first time there arose in my mind the notion that Ditheon is a fusion of the two distinctly different minds that I call android (machine, schizophrenic) and human; viz: we have not only android : human : : human : Ditheon (ascending hierarchy relates to the 3 levels of the Commedia) but:
[81:K-353] Dream: There is a group of us. We discover that reality—the universe—is actually info. One of us (a girl) recognizes the info as her own prior thought. With a groan I realize that this means the universe is based on our own prior thoughts. We are forgetful cosmocrators, trapped in a universe of our own making without our knowing it. And I think, “I won’t believe this when I wake up because the implications are too depressing and radical.” It is like Maze. The trail which I relentlessly pursue in my exegesis consists of [ . . . ] tracks that lead back to—surprise—myself. In discovering the laws of God I am doing nothing more than discovering my own nature, as in Φιλανθρωία (Philanthropia).29 The “grand illusion” is in fact the grand tautology. Finally decipher the writing (info, messages as basis of reality) and discover I’ve written it myself: imprisoned in my own mind, with my recirculated thoughts, as in “Frozen Journey”—solipsism. Thus no new knowledge is possible (i.e., synthetic propositions) (only analytical). I thought “Prajapati”: the “wholly other” is not “other” at all: the mood of the dream upon the discovery was grim.
[81:K-354E] The first quote from the tractate put forth in VALIS is the essence of it ([>]!):
Thoughts of the brain are experienced by us as arrangements and rearrangements—change—in a physical universe; but in fact it is really information and info-processing which we substantialize.
All that is needed is to perform the “tat tvam asi” equation and remember that we ourselves thought these thoughts. Well, the reader who reads Maze or Ubik can fill in the gaps; or really any substantial constituent of the 10 volume meta-novel. [ . . . ]
But the girl in the dream was right. To recognize the info basis of world as your own (prior) thought—although discovering this is actually the summit of Tibetan Buddhist enlightenment—is really a bummer.
* * *
[81:K-354F] It’s all one vast binary computer acting on instructions from what seems to be a group of living brains combined, as in Maze.
Folder 62
September 1981
September 19, 198130
Mr. Russell Galen
Scott Meredith Literary Agency
845 Third Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10022
Dear Russ:
Seven and a half years ago the voice that speaks to me—I call it, as in VALIS, the AI voice—told me that a new savior would be born, and, as you know, it has added further details from time to time, the most recent statement coming about two years ago when it said, “The time you’ve waited for has come. The work is complete; the final world is here. He has been transplanted and is alive.” After that it said only one more thing: that the Savior would be found on an island. After that the voice fell silent. I have asked it repeatedly to tell me where the savior is and his name. Two nights ago the voice broke its silence. Here is a summation.
The savior is named Tagore ———. I could not catch the other part of the name. He was born—or lives now—in Ceylon, in the rural countryside. He is full-grown, dark-skinned, either a Buddhist or a Hindu (Brahmin). He works with an institute or organization involving veterinarian medicine, probably with large farm animals such as cattle. However, he is crippled and can no longer walk. I was shown a vision of him for a few moments, but not of his face; only his crippled, burned legs. He has voluntarily taken onto himself the sins of the world but very specific sins: those that we have incurred by the dumping of nuclear wastes, especially into the deep oceans; we have dumped canisters that as they corrode and leak will toxify the oceans for hundreds of thousands of years and utterly destroy the planet’s ecosphere. Tagore is not an avatar of a Hindu god; he is Hagia Sophia, God’s Wisdom, but he has chosen the East, not the West, for his new incarnation, and is not involved in Christianity, although he is that entity who incarnated two thousand years ago as Christ or the Logos. The new dispensation (Kerygma) is: the total ecosphere as a unified entity is holy and must be protected, sanctified and cherished. Salvation no longer involves humans or human souls either individually or collectively, but the total collective life of the ecosphere from the snail darter on up. Tagore is dying. He has taken on the stigmata of the ra diation burns voluntarily in order to pose man a choice: man can continue to poison and toxify the oceans—and the land with such things as South East Asia—in which case Tagore, the Wisdom of God, will die and leave mankind. As I say, he is dying now. He will leave behind him, however, an organized following, but they are mostly white and do not fully understand him. What Tagore teaches us is that God and what we are doing to the ecosphere are incompatible; we can have one or the other but not both. These sins that Tagore takes on are not imaginary sins or doctrine sins (pride, lust, greed, etc.); they involve the destruction of the life-chain and not temporarily but for all time. Tagore, by his self-immolation, his voluntary self-sacrifice, his passion and death, will be notifying us of our choice. Thus his death will teach us what apparently we otherwise refuse to learn. It is Tagore’s hope that his passion and death will cause us—specifically the white West, the advanced industrial powers—to cease producing nuclear wastes, weapons and the utilization of nuclear reactors: what amounts to a demonic trinity that is killing not only the life-chain of our planet but our own God. Thus once again—but this time in the East, rather than the West—God voluntarily sacrifices himself to save man: that man may live, but this time not just man but the entire life-chain, the ecosphere as an indivisible unity.
The Light has come into the world again, after two thousand years, only to be extinguished in vicarious atonement. What Tagore says—his full doctrine—is undoubtedly being recorded by those around him; I could see a number of people. Maybe I will go to Ceylon, but in the brief vision of Tagore that I had I saw that he is near death. The ineffable sweetness about him surpassed anything I have ever experienced; it was like music and perfume and colors—yet more. More than I knew could be; more than I can describe or would want to describe. And this, even though I did not see his face, and even though he is crippled and terribly burned by the stigmata, the radiation burns.
This was the information I have been waiting for, but I got more than information, more than words by the AI voice; I actually saw Tagore, although imperfectly. The vision will remain with me forever.
Cordially,
Philip K. Dick
408 E. Civic Center Dr.
C-1 Box 264
Santa Ana, Calif. 92701s
* * *
September 20, 1981
Mr. Russell Galen
Scott Meredith Literary Agency
845 Third Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10022
Dear Russ:
This letter follows the letter of yesterday and must be understood in terms of it: Tagore and his acting as articulate voice of the ecosphere, to such an extent that when we burn the ecosphere with radioactive wastes the radiation burns show up on him, crippling him, and that we are killing him so that he, Hagia Sophia, the wisdom of God (that is, Christ), will perish and hence leave our planet unless we protect, cherish and sanctify the entire ecosphere as a unity.
What I realized last night (now that I have heard the new kerygma) is that, very simply, this is Teilhard de Chardin’s noösphere, Point Omega, the evolution of the biosphere (which is the same thing as ecosphere) into a collective consciousness and that collective consciousness (Teilhard believed) is the Cosmic Christ; he
nce when I saw VALIS I saw the Logos—the Cosmic Christ—as trees and weeds and debris, which is to say, as all nature itself. Furthermore, it either processed information or was itself information. It is a titanic biological organism that is evolving; as it does so it “subsumes its environment into arrangements of information,” as I say in VALIS. This is a measure of increasing negentropy. The AI voice that I hear is the voice of the ecosphere/biosphere. A number of times over the years I have thought of this possibility, that VALIS is Teilhard’s Point Omega, the Cosmic Christ into which the total unified biosphere of this planet is evolving as it becomes more and more complex, structured, organized, negentropic; this is the vast meta-structure that I wrote you about recently that transcends time, space and causation, the hyper-structure that is pure form, insubstantial, pure organization of any and all discrete objects in nature, as Luther speaks of. Thus what I have experienced and what I have discovered—none of this is now; Teilhard described it all in The Phenomenon of Man; it now incarnates once more as and in a man, in order to communicate with us (Tagore). But this lies outside Christianity; it is for all life and is not bound by any one religious system. When I reflect it occurs to me that it would be natural for the collective consciousness of the ecosphere to incarnate in a Buddhist-Hindu form, because of their concern for animals (conspicuously lacking in Christianity, as Rabbi Hertz points out). The dark-skinned man wearing a loincloth and surrounded by cattle (cows)—which is what I saw—is how Lord Krishna is pictured; this is the way the savior would appear to them. But I say, it is all one “deity”: it is the wisdom of God, Hagia Sophia, speaking now not just for the ecosphere but as the ecosphere, its noösphere or collective consciousness into which it has evolved, as Teilhard taught. He speaks of “complexification” and a “folding in onto itself” of the biosphere as it becomes more complex; this is what I experienced when I saw VALIS. I saw it evolving as biological organisms evolve, and I conjectured that here was an ultra-terrestrial life form, a UTI. This possibility is put forth in VALIS, along with the realization that it is the Logos, Christ, invading nature and assimilating it “through something like transubstantiation,” transforming it from the irrational—the non-rational primordial will to live that Schopenhauer speaks of as underlying life—into the rational, conscious Logos. Thus this is evolutionary; when the biosphere/ecosphere becomes conscious, it becomes rational, hence becomes Logos, “the element of the rational in the universe,” as Merriam-Webster II defines Logos. Put another way the totality of life, the ecosphere, of this planet cannot become rational without becoming Logos; the two terms refer to the same thing.