The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick

  So if I force myself to be very rational and reasonable, and all those other good things, I must admit that the existence of Disneyland (which I know is real) proves that we are not living in Judaea in A.D. 50. The idea of St. Paul whirling around in the giant teacups while composing First Corinthians, as Paris TV films him with a telephoto lens—that just can’t be. St. Paul would never go near Disneyland. Only children, tourists, and visiting Soviet high officials ever go to Disneyland. Saints do not.

  But somehow that biblical material snared my unconscious and crept into my novel, and equally true, for some reason in 1978 I relived a scene that I described back in 1970. What I am saying is this: There is internal evidence in at least one of my novels that another reality, an unchanging one, exactly as Parmenides and Plato suspected, underlies the visible phenomenal world of change, and somehow, in some way, perhaps to our surprise, we can cut through to it. Or, rather, a mysterious Spirit can put us in touch with it, if it wishes us to see this permanent other landscape. Time passes, thousands of years pass, but at the same instant that we see this contemporary world, the ancient world, the world of the Bible, is concealed beneath it, still there and still real. Eternally so.

  Shall I go for broke and tell you the rest of this peculiar story? I’ll do so, having gone this far already. My novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was released by Doubleday in February 1974. The week after it was released, I had two impacted wisdom teeth removed, under sodium pentothol. Later that day I found myself in intense pain. My wife phoned the oral surgeon and he phoned a pharmacy. Half an hour later there was a knock at my door: the delivery person from the pharmacy with the pain medication. Although I was bleeding and sick and weak, I felt the need to answer the knock on the door myself. When I opened the door, I found myself facing a young woman—who wore a shimmering gold necklace in the center of which was a gleaming gold fish. For some reason I was hypnotized by the gleaming gold fish; I forgot my pain, forgot the medication, forgot why the girl was there. I just kept staring at the fish sign.

  “What does that mean?” I asked her.

  The girl touched the glimmering golden fish with her hand and said, “This is a sign worn by the early Christians.” She then gave me the package of medication.

  In that instant, as I stared at the gleaming fish sign and heard her words, I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis—a Greek word meaning, literally, “loss of forgetfulness.” I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me. And not only could I remember it but I could see it. The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to communicate with cryptic signs. She had just told me all this, and it was true.

  For a short time, as hard as this is to believe or explain, I saw fading into view the black, prisonlike contours of hateful Rome. But, of much more importance, I remembered Jesus, who had just recently been with us, and had gone temporarily away, and would very soon return. My emotion was one of joy. We were secretly preparing to welcome Him back. It would not be long. And the Romans did not know. They thought He was dead, forever dead. That was our great secret, our joyous knowledge. Despite all appearances, Christ was going to return, and our delight and anticipation were boundless.

  Isn’t it odd that this strange event, this recovery of lost memory, occurred only a week after Flow My Tears was released? And it is Flow My Tears that contains the replication of people and events from the Book of Acts, which is set at the precise moment in time—just after Jesus’ death and resurrection—that I remembered, by means of the golden fish sign, as having just taken place?

  If you were me, and had this happened to you, I’m sure you wouldn’t be able to leave it alone. You would seek a theory that would account for it. For over four years now, I have been trying one theory after another: circular time, frozen time, timeless time, which is called “sacred” as contrasted to “mundane” time… I can’t count the theories I’ve tried out.

  One constant has prevailed, though, throughout all the theories. There must indeed be a mysterious Holy Spirit that has an exact and intimate relation to Christ, that can indwell in human minds, guide and inform them, and even express itself through those humans, even without their awareness.

  In the writing of Flow My Tears, back in 1970, there was one unusual event that I realized at the time was not ordinary, was not a part of the regular writing process. I had a dream one night, an especially vivid dream. And when I awoke I found myself under the compulsion—the absolute necessity—of getting the dream into the text of the novel precisely as I had dreamed it. In getting the dream exactly right, I had to do eleven drafts of the final part of the manuscript, until I was satisfied.

  I will now quote from the novel, as it appeared in the final, published form. See if this dream reminds you of anything.

  The countryside, brown and dry, in summer, where he had lived as a child. He rode a horse, and approaching him on his left a squad of horses nearing slowly. On the horses rode men in shining robes, each a different color; each wore a pointed helmet that sparkled in the sunlight. The slow, solemn knights passed him and as they traveled by he made out the face of one: an ancient marble face, a terribly old man with rippling cascades of white beard. What a strong nose he had. What noble features. So tired, so serious, so far beyond ordinary men. Evidently he was a king.

  Felix Buckman let them pass; he did not speak to them and they said nothing to him. Together, they all moved toward the house from which he had come. A man had sealed himself up inside the house, a man alone, Jason Taverner, in the silence and darkness, without windows, by himself from now on into eternity. Sitting, merely existing, inert. Felix Buckman continued on, out into the open countryside. And then he heard from behind him one dreadful single shriek. They had killed Taverner, and seeing them enter, sensing them in the shadows around him, knowing what they intended to do with him, Taverner had shrieked.

  Within himself Felix Buckman felt absolute and utter desolate grief. But in the dream he did not go back nor look back. There was nothing that could be done. No one could have stopped the posse of varicolored men in robes; they could not have been said no to. Anyhow, it was over. Taverner was dead.

  This passage probably does not suggest any particular thing to you, except a law posse exacting judgment on someone either guilty or considered guilty. It is not clear whether Taverner has in fact committed some crime or is merely believed to have committed some crime. I had the impression that he was guilty, but that it was a tragedy that he had to be killed, a terribly sad tragedy. In the novel, this dream causes Felix Buckman to begin to cry, and therefore he seeks out the black man at the all-night gas station.

  Months after the novel was published, I found the section in the Bible to which this dream refers. It is Daniel, 7:9:

  Thrones were set in place and one ancient in years took his seat. His robe was white as snow and the hair of his head like cleanest wool. Flames of fire were his throne and its wheels blazing fire; a flowing river of fire streamed out before him. Thousands upon thousands served him and myriads upon myriads attended his presence. The court sat, and the books were opened.

  This white-haired old man appears again in Revelation, 1:13:

  I saw… one like a son of man, robed down to his feet, with a golden girdle round his breast. The hair of his head was white as snow-white wool, and his eyes blazed like fire; his feet gleamed like burnished brass refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters.

  And then 1:17:

  When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand upon me and said, “Do not be afraid. I am the first and the last, and I am the living one, for I was dead and now I am alive forever-more, and I hold the keys of Death and Death’s domain. Write down therefore what you have seen, what is now, and what will be hereafter.”

  And, like John of Patmos, I faithfully wrote down what I saw and put it in my
novel. And it was true, although at the time I did not know who was meant by this description:

  He made out the face of one: an ancient marble face, a terribly old man with rippling cascades of white beard. What a strong nose he had. What noble features. So tired, so serious, so far beyond ordinary men. Evidently he was a king.

  Indeed he was a king. He is Christ Himself returned, to pass judgment. And this is what he does in my novel: He passes judgment on the man sealed up in darkness. The man sealed up in darkness must be the Prince of Evil, the Force of Darkness. Call it whatever you wish, its time had come. It was judged and condemned. Felix Buckman could weep at the sadness of it, but he knew that the verdict could not be disputed. And so he rode on, without turning or looking back, hearing only the shriek of fear and defeat: the cry of evil destroyed.

  So my novel contained material from other parts of the Bible, as well as the sections from Acts. Deciphered, my novel tells a quite different story from the surface story (which we need not go into here). The real story is simply this: the return of Christ, now king rather than suffering servant. Judge rather than victim of unfair judgment. Everything is reversed. The core message of my novel, without my knowing it, was a warning to the powerful: You will shortly be judged and condemned. Who, specifically, did it refer to? Well, I can’t really say; or rather would prefer not to say. I have no certain knowledge, only an intuition. And that is not enough to go on, so I will keep my thoughts to myself. But you might ask yourselves what political events took place in this country between February 1974 and August 1974. Ask yourself who was judged and condemned, and fell like a flaming star into ruin and disgrace. The most powerful man in the world. And I feel as sorry for him now as I did when I dreamed that dream. “That poor, poor man,” I once said to my wife, with tears in my eyes. “Shut up in the darkness, playing the piano in the night to himself, alone and afraid, knowing what’s to come.” For God’s sake, let us forgive him, finally. But what was done to him and all his men—“all the President’s men,” as it’s put—had to be done. But it is over, and he should be let out into the sunlight again; no creature, no person, should be shut up in darkness forever, in fear. It is not humane.

  Just about the time that the Supreme Court was ruling that the Nixon tapes had to be turned over to the special prosecutor, I was eating at a Chinese restaurant in Yorba Linda, the town in California where Nixon went to school—where he grew up, worked at a grocery store, where there is a park named after him, and of course the Nixon house, simple clapboard and all that. In my fortune cookie, I got the following fortune:

  DEEDS DONE IN SECRET HAVE A

  WAY OF BECOMING FOUND OUT

  I mailed the slip of paper to the White House, mentioning that the Chinese restaurant was located within a mile of Nixon’s original house, and I said, “I think a mistake has been made; by accident I got Mr. Nixon’s fortune. Does he have mine?” The White House did not answer.

  Well, as I said earlier, an author of a work of supposed fiction might write the truth and not know it. To quote Xenophanes, another pre-Socratic: “Even if a man should chance to speak the most complete truth, yet he himself does not know it; all things are wrapped in appearances” (Fragment 34). And Heraclitus added to this: “The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself” (Fragment 54). W. S. Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan, put it: “Things are seldom as they seem; skim milk masquerades as cream.” The point of all this is that we cannot trust our senses and probably not even our a priori reasoning. As to our senses, I understand that people who have been blind from birth and are suddenly given sight are amazed to discover that objects appear to get smaller and smaller as they get farther away. Logically, there is no reason for this. We, of course, have come to accept this, because we are used to it. We see objects get smaller, but we know that in actuality they remain the same size. So even the common everyday pragmatic person utilizes a certain amount of sophisticated discounting of what his eyes and ears tell him.

  Little of what Heraclitus wrote has survived, and what we do have is obscure, but Fragment 54 is lucid and important: “Latent structure is master of obvious structure.” This means that Heraclitus believed that a veil lay over the true landscape. He also may have suspected that time was somehow not what it seemed, because in Fragment 52 he said: “Time is a child at play, playing draughts; a child’s is the kingdom.” This is indeed cryptic. But he also said, in Fragment 18: “If one does not expect it, one will not find out the unexpected; it is not to be tracked down and no path leads us to it.” Edward Hussey, in his scholarly book The Pre-Socratics, says:

  If Heraclitus is to be so insistent on the lack of understanding shown by most men, it would seem only reasonable that he should offer further instructions for penetrating to the truth. The talk of riddle-guessing suggests that some kind of revelation, beyond human control, is necessary…. The true wisdom, as has been seen, is closely associated with God, which suggests further that in advancing wisdom a man becomes like, or a part of, God.

  This quote is not from a religious book or a book on theology; it is an analysis of the earliest philosophers by a Lecturer in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Hussey makes it clear that to these early philosophers there was no distinction between philosophy and religion. The first great quantum leap in Greek theology was by Xenophanes of Colophon, born in the midsixth century B.C. Xenophanes, without resorting to any authority except that of his own mind, says:

  One god there is, in no way like mortal creatures either in bodily form or in the thought of his mind. The whole of him sees, the whole of him thinks, the whole of him hears. He stays always motionless in the same place; it is not fitting that he should move about now this way, now that.

  This is a subtle and advanced concept of God, evidently without precedent among the Greek thinkers. “The arguments of Parmenides seemed to show that all reality must indeed be a mind,” Hussey writes, “or an object of thought in a mind.” Regarding Heraclitus specifically, he says, “In Heraclitus it is difficult to tell how far the designs in God’s mind are distinguished from the execution in the world, or indeed how far God’s mind is distinguished from the world.” The further leap by Anaxagoras has always fascinated me. “Anaxagoras had been driven to a theory of the microstructure of matter that made it, to some extent, mysterious to human reason.” Anaxagoras believed that everything was determined by Mind. These were not childish thinkers, not primitives. They debated serious issues and studied one another’s views with deft insight. It was not until the time of Aristotle that their views got reduced to what we can neatly—but wrongly—classify as crude. The summation of much pre-Socratic theology and philosophy can be stated as follows: The kosmos is not as it appears to be, and what it probably is, at its deepest level, is exactly that which the human being is at his deepest level—call it mind or soul, it is something unitary that lives and thinks, and only appears to be plural and material. Much of this view reaches us through the Logos doctrine regarding Christ. The Logos was both that which thought and the thing that it thought: thinker and thought together. The universe, then, is thinker and thought, and since we are part of it, we as humans are, in the final analysis, thoughts of and thinkers of those thoughts.

  Thus if God thinks about Rome circa A.D. 50, then Rome circa A.D. 50 is. The universe is not a windup clock and God the hand that winds it. The universe is not a battery-powered watch and God the battery. Spinoza believed that the universe is the body of God extensive in space. But long before Spinoza—two thousand years before him—Xenophanes has said, “Effortlessly, he wields all things by the thought of his mind” (Fragment 25).

  If any of you have read my novel Ubik, you know that the mysterious entity or mind or force called Ubik starts out as a series of cheap and vulgar commercials and winds up saying:

  I am Ubik. Before the universe was I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do
as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.

  It is obvious from this who and what Ubik is; it specifically says that it is the word, which is to say, the Logos. In the German translation, there is one of the most wonderful lapses of correct understanding that I have ever come across; God help us if the man who translated my novel Ubik into German were to do a translation from the koine Greek into German of the New Testament. He did all right until he got to the sentence “I am the word.” That puzzled him. What can the author mean by that? he must have asked himself, obviously never having come across the Logos doctrine. So he did as good a job of translation as possible. In the German edition, the Absolute Entity that made the suns, made the worlds, created the lives and the places they inhabit, says of itself:

  I am the brand name.

  Had he translated the Gospel according to St. John, I suppose it would have come out as:

  When all things began, the brand name already was. The brand name dwelt with God, and what God was, the brand name was.

  It would seem that I not only bring you greetings from Disneyland but [also] from Mortimer Snerd. Such is the fate of an author who hoped to include theological themes in his writing. “The brand name, then, was with God at the beginning, and through him all things came to be; no single thing was created without him.” So it goes with noble ambitions. Let’s hope God has a sense of humor.

  Or should I say, Let’s hope the brand name has a sense of humor.

  As I said to you earlier, my two preoccupations in my writing are “What is reality?” and “What is the authentic human?” I’m sure you can see by now that I have not been able to answer the first question. I have an abiding intuition that somehow the world of the Bible is a literally real but veiled landscape, never changing, hidden from our sight, but available to us by revelation. That is all I can come up with—a mixture of mystical experience, reasoning, and faith. I would like to say something about the traits of the authentic human, though; in this quest I have had more plausible answers.