I feel a little cheated in that I have, it turns out, not discovered something new, but even more I feel elated, because Teilhard’s views explain and ratify my experiences and also provide a coherent and sophisticated explanation of them that isn’t nuts, isn’t vague mysticism or romantic pantheism. Here is a meta-life form, unitary and vast and highly intelligent, and in which we humans individually and collectively participate. But it is not limited to our species; it is the entire biosphere/ecosphere itself. And it is evolving more and more rapidly, becoming more and more integrated and structured and internally complex—hence more and more conscious, hence more and more the Point Omega that Teilhard was so concerned with.
So here I have independently confirmed Teilhard’s vast theory . . . and I have only read The Phenomenon of Man recently, so it did not influence me in my experience of 1974; to me at that time “Teilhard de Chardin” was just a name, and an indistinct one at that.
Cordially,
Phil
* * *
September 23, 1981
Mr. Edmund R. Meskys31
Editor
Niekas
RFD 1, Box 63
Center Harbor, N.H. 03226
Dear Ed,
All the people who read my recent novel VALIS know that I have an alter ego named Horselover Fat who experiences divine revelations (or so he thinks; they could be merely hallucinations, as Fat’s friends believe). VALIS ends with Fat searching the world for the new savior who, he has been told by a mysterious voice, is about to be born. He got me to write this letter as a way of telling the world—the readership of Niekas, more precisely—about it. Poor Fat! His madness is complete, now, for he supposes that in his vision he actually saw the new savior.
I asked Fat if he was sure he wanted to talk about this, since he would only be proving the pathology of his condition. He replied, “No, Phil; they’ll think it’s you.” Damn, Fat, for putting me in this double-bind. Okay; your vision, if true, is overwhelmingly important; if spurious, well, what the hell. I will say about it that it has a curiously practical ring; it does not deal with another world but this world, and extreme is its message—extreme in the sense that if true, we are faced with a grave and urgent situation. So let ’er rip, Fat.
The new savior was born in—or now lives in—Ceylon (Sri Lanka). He is dark-skinned and either a Buddhist or Hindu. He works in the rural countryside with an organization or institute practicing high-technology veterinarian medicine, mainly with large animals such as cattle. (Most of the staff are white.) His name is Tagore something; Fat could not catch the last name: it is very long. Although Tagore is the second incarnation of Christ he is taken to be Lord Krishna by the local population. Tagore is burned and crippled; he cannot walk but must be carried. As near as Fat could make out, Tagore has taken upon himself mankind’s sins against the ecosphere. Most of all it is the dumping of toxic wastes into the oceans of the world that shows up on Tagore’s body as serious burns. Tagore’s kerygma, which is the Third Dispensation (following the Mosaic and Christian), is: the ecosphere is holy and must be preserved, protected, venerated and cherished—as a unity: not the life of individual men or individual animals but the ecosphere as a single indivisible unitary whole; a life-chain then is being destroyed, and not just temporarily but for all time. The demonic trinity which Tagore speaks against—and which is wounding and killing him—consists of nuclear wastes, nuclear weapons and nuclear power (reactors); they constitute the enemy which not only may destroy the ecosphere but already, as toxic wastes, are destroying it now. So again Christ acts out his role of vicarious atonement; he takes upon himself man’s sins but these sins are real, not doctrine sins. Tagore teaches that if we destroy the ecosphere much more, Holy Wisdom, the Wisdom of God (represented by Tagore himself), will abandon man to his fate, and that fate is doom.
Tagore teaches that when the ecosphere is burned, God himself is burned, for the Christ has invaded the ecosphere and invisibly assimilated it to himself through transubstantiation—which is the great vision Horselover Fat has in my novel VALIS. Thus Christ and the ecosphere are either one or rapidly becoming one—much as Teilhard de Chardin describes in The Phenomenon of Man. The ecosphere does not evolve into the Cosmic Christ, however; Christ penetrates it, which is exactly what Fat saw and which so amazed him. Thus Christ now speaks out—not just for the salvation of mankind or certain men, “the elect”—but for the ecosphere as a whole, from the snail darter on up. This is a systems concept and was beyond their vocabulary in apostolic times; it has to do with the indivisibility of all life on this planet, as if this planet itself were alive. And Christ is both the soma (body) and psyche (the head) of that collective life. Hence the ultimate statement by Tagore—expressed by his voluntary passion and death—is, He who wounds the ecosphere literally wounds God. Thus a macro-crucifixion is taking place now, in and as our world, but we do not see it; Tagore, the new incarnation in human form of the Logos, tells us this in order to appeal to us to stop. If we continue we will lose God’s Presence and, finally, we will lose our own physical lives. The oceans especially are menaced; Tagore speaks of this most urgently. When each canister of radioactive wastes is dumped into the ocean, a new stigma appears on Tagore’s terribly burned, seared legs. Fat was horrified by the sight of these burns, the legs of the savior drawn up in pain. Fat did not see Tagore’s face, only his tragically burned body, and yet (Fat tells me) there was an ineffable sweetness about Tagore “like music and perfume and colors,” as Fat phrased it to me. Burned as he is, wounded and dying as he is, Tagore nonetheless emits only loving beauty, absolute beauty, not relative beauty. It was a sight that Fat will never forget. I wish I could have shared it, but I had better things to do: watch TV and play electronic computer games. All that good stuff by which we fritter away our lives, while the ecosphere, wounded and in pain and in mortal danger, cries out for our help.
Cordially,
Philip K. Dick
[62:C-34] Let me ask: Did Jesus’ crucifixion possess the efficacy or the news of it? And does Tagore’s passion and death in themselves possess efficacy or the news of it? I don’t know. And what would the efficacy be? Surely it lies in awakening us to what we are doing so that we cease (the nuclear waste dumping). Then it is the news, the kerygma. The ecosphere cries out in pain!
[ . . . ]
The ecosphere is Christ. This is what we must learn: when we wound the ecosphere we literally wound him; hence the cautionary significance of my vision of Valis, the Corpus Christi in/as nature. We must acquire this vision so that we will grasp why the ecosphere is holy. (Because it is Christ.) (Put another way: “Christ” signifies the total unitary life-system of this planet as an indivisible living entity.)
[62:C-38] This explains my vision of Pinky’s death as the death of the savior, and my extrapolation that when each living creature dies, it is Christ dying. I said, “Christ dies for them.” Yes, true, but now I view it differently; the crucifixion is re-enacted billions of times over and over again in and as the creatures in the ecosphere die, for Christ is the ecosphere.
[ . . . ]
For me personally to keep my sanity in the face of world suffering, I must believe: (1) that it is always and only Christ who suffers, throughout the ecosphere as each creature large and small; (2) that he suffers voluntarily; (3) that his essence of sweetness and perfect spiritual and physical beauty is in no way destroyed or impaired whatever the torment, whatever damage is done to him: his true essence cannot be debased or impaired; (4) that these truths do not make it any more right or in any sense okay because it is only and always Christ who suffers over and over again, but that in fact (5) this makes it worse, and (6) God will not allow this to go on but (7) will withdraw his spirit from the world in punishment of us unless we stop.
I can’t explain why I must believe all these things.
[62:C-40] If I did not believe all this (which my 9-81 vision expressed) I would today upon seeing the Agent Orange birth defects, hearing about
the Soviet micro-toxin T-2 and hearing Sunday night about the blankets infected with smallpox sold to the Indian tribe to wipe them out—I would go crazy. Thus the vision (which came last week) preserved my sanity as of today (9-23-81). It is necessary for me to know that God has acted in the face of these horrors, how he has acted, and what he will do if we continue. So hallucination or divine revelation, I must believe in Tagore and his kingdom. It is my private religion, based on a wide variety of sources. Hebrew (the Day of YHWH), Christian (the vicarious atonement/sacrifice), modern theological-scientific (Teilhard), Buddhism (concern for all life, human and otherwise, equally), Hindu (Krishna as avatar of Vishnu—the sustainer whose 3 giant steps mark his stride, as he comes in aid), Gnosticism (eventually the spark of light that fell into incarnation in physical shell, in this prison world will be extricated and will return to the pleroma). There is nothing in my syncretistic system that is original, and all elements are—for me, for my sanity on this day, the autumnal equinox—essential. No one system would do. Be it YHWH, Christ, Vishnu or Krishna, I must believe he sees and he acts. If I believed that he did not see, or did not care and hence would not act, I could not go on. The vision came in time, which itself—its coming and coming in time—is a micro-instance of God seeing and acting. Going back to the day at the movie newsreel (when I was a kid) in which I saw the Japanese soldier running and burning, continuing to the rat I killed, to the TV footage of the Galapagos turtle, to the use of napalm in Vietnam today, my great spiritual problem has been to find a way I could handle the issue of suffering, human and animal. The 9-81 vision alluded to the burn—and hence injury to her legs—suffered by my sister—that led to her death, so for me it is evident that the ultimate problem confronting me all my life has been the senseless injury to and neglect of my sister. The 9-81 vision dealt with Jane, with the burning Japanese soldier, the rat and turtle, the napalm, with it all: the vision of Tagore and his kingdom is the quintessential summation of my whole life’s struggle to come to terms with these matters which are in essence one matter showing up over and over again. Thus my mystical experiences—starting in ’63 when I saw the “Palmer Eldritch” visage and the sky and going on to 2-74—2-75 and after—culminate in 9-81 as the payoff of my need and my attempt to forge a satisfactory explanation for what is to me the ultimate issue: not “Ti to on?” as my 10-volume meta-novel might indicate, but, “What is the total context in which the unmerited suffering and death of living creatures can be coherently understood?”
[62:C-43] It is evident, then, that also involved in this is my own eventual death and my need to come to grips with it—very much the true cause of the colossal mystical breakthrough in 2-74; this 9-81 vision is perhaps, then, the great summation of the acceptance—and also anger—in me regarding that. I am shown the total, absolute panorama into which my own mortality fits, in context. There is no feeble acquiescence to suffering and death in this vision but there is in it a sense of absolute beauty surpassing explanation and expression: it is a given (Christ’s nature; or Krishna’s; if you will, names do not matter at this stage). All else is predicated on it. It is the ultimate brute datum of the vision; it simply must be accepted without explanation (as some people are content to accept the suffering, which I am not; thus I replace one inscrutable mystery—unmerited suffering—by another—absolute beauty. Not a bad way to end up). The irreducible core of reality is: beauty.
[62:C-48] Horselover Fat is real only insofar as he is part of me—so stipulated in the letter initially. But later in the letter (as in VALIS) he is treated as a real, independent person. Viz: “Fat saw Tagore but I did not.” Fat is not imaginary; someone saw Tagore. The effect resulting is that one sense that Tagore, like Fat, is not imaginary, not a fantasy or hallucination but, like Fat, a way of talking about myself: a further hypostasis of me (like Thomas and Fat). Yet Tagore is Lord Krishna/Christ, i.e., divine, so I now possess or reveal a saintly hypostatic identity, one which speaks for the ecosphere and also takes on the sins against the ecosphere as stigmata: punishing himself for the sins of man. Interestingly, it is in my legs that I feel pain. And my response today regarding T-2 was to punish myself—I destroyed my stash and also destroyed my exegesis, not quite as self-punishment but more as a sacrifice.
[ . . . ]
Tagore is dying.
I have sensed for awhile that I am dying. Yet I am not physically ill but I become more and more tired, and where I feel it is in my legs; I feel there is so much to do, to be told in my writing: novels about Christ and Krishna and God.
[62:C-51] At the time when, you would think, I would be sitting back and enjoying my money and prestige—my successes—I am driven by the vision and it is a spiritual, not merely artistic vision that is injuring me and perhaps—in my efforts first to formulate it (or receive it) and now to promulgate it—may kill me. And what do I as an individual gain? Ursula’s reproach yet even more so! I teach the parousia; I teach the sanctity of the ecosphere, I teach that once again we unknowingly crucify our God; and this time he will not be resurrected and return; he—the total spiritual principle of the world—will be driven from the world; and this will doom us spiritually and physically both. And the decision, the power to choose is ours, if we can be made to understand.*
[62:C-53] Thus the divinization of the ecosphere is tied into human choice and hence has moral and existential significance. It is contingent on human choice; it will either be ratified by us as a species acting collectively or it will be abolished by us as a species acting collectively; in either case we will earn our fate. Good or bad: it will not be imposed on us but will issue from our own acts.
[62:C-54] This all can be looked at two ways.
(1) Contemporary concern about preserving the ecosphere is supplied with a spiritual dimension that is both cosmic and absolute.
(2) Religion and the spiritual—and specifically Christianity with its eschatological doctrines—is brought down to earth—literally—and tied into realistic, practical matters.
[ . . . ]
Thus there emerges from this a doctrine of the final judgment being more correctly a final choice on our parts between life—spiritual life, a higher life—and death, physical death.
[62:C-56] Dream: on a bank of TV screens, scenes of a hunt in progress; the victim is a lovely large white bird. I become very angry at the hunt itself and at all the people watching it as a video game/sport. I lash out at them, saying I won’t watch, and I say, “Maybe Caesar will put in an appearance.” This dream clearly ties in Tagore’s Kerygma (about saving the animals) with Rome and hence with the Empire and hence with early Christianity. Now not humans are the victims of the blood sports for the populace but animals. But it is the same cruelty. Oh—“Caesar” was said sardonically, in reference to Reagan! Good Lord! Look, then, what the dream shows, at least about my feelings/perception! About who is the enemy, and who we are. Christianity in its time sanctifies human life (the opposite of which was the Roman games) but now all life—animal life—the ecosphere itself must be sanctified, and this is done through its investiture by Christ. To “see” (understand) the ecosphere as having been penetrated and assimilated by Christ is to see it as holy; thus this 3rd dispensation is indeed the logical extension projected from the previous two.