This would be why I felt I was receiving from a hidden (occult) brotherhood, represented by armed knights… the knights of the grail, so to speak. And the content of my experience: I was shown specifically the Christian brotherhood toppling Rome, now. The siege of us prisoners being lifted by the body of armored knights on horseback at the outer walls. The “mystical body of Christ” of which we are parts and he is the head—this would be a sort of midway concept of the source, standing between pure mystical perception of immanent God (a la Spinoza) and a strictly human wisdom (gnostic, AMORC, Roman Catholic, etc.) brotherhood. The head is divine (theos), the members are of the human congregation. Its presence is actually here (now), in and on our world, in our society, making changes (the rock torn not by human hands and hurled at the statue, as in Daniel). (And I did hear, hypnogogically, “I am part of the King.”)
Palmer—crossed palm trees. Palm trees are a Christian symbol of the Holy Land; what I saw in 2-75, then, is a vision of the Holy Land. I did not go (journey) to it; it came to me. I was already seeing a palm tree (like the Afrika Korps palm tree emblem) in the FISH sign, months before. The palmer sign, perhaps. In hoc signo, etc. [In hoc signo vinces: In this sign we conquer.] Again, we have here symbols specifically of Christianity, rather than of God per se (as distinguished from). Also, a building in the Holy Land, with Romanesque arches. Memory of the Sacred Other, from its “former life”? A building where the White Brotherhood (etc.) met? The significance of my seeing this might be: My search is over. I had reached my destination, the end of my journey. (And, very soon after, the voice of St. Sophia dimmed away entirely from my mind. The one full year, from vernal equinox to vernal equinox, had evidently ended.) It all must be regarded as a searching for and a finding of (vide the quest represented in my various novels).
c. 1976
I Am a Living Animal, Tied to a Dying Soul.
—PKD
1. The Greeks considered reality veiled (by dokos [Greek: deception], e.g. Parmenides).
2. The Hindus consider reality veiled (by Maya, which we generate ourselves, but which also Kali spins) (cf. Heinrich Zimmer [noted Indologist]).
3. Calvin considered us blinded, that once we could see what is really there, but were punished (this dovetails a little with Empedocles and with Castaneda, with shamanism in general, and hence with the mystery religions, e.g., Dionysos).
4. Augustine considered the City of God mingled with the City of Earth so as to make them indistinguishable to us now; but at the Parousia, they will be separated (to our senses).
5. Zoroaster believed as 4. Good (Ahriman and Ahura-Mazda, the light and dark blended; but at the Final Day, the two portions would be visibly separate).
All are dealing with the problem of phenomenology of accident versus essence: Kant’s Ding-an-sich [thing in itself]. “This crumbling pageant.”
6. I once saw appearance, then briefly (five days) assimilated the objects of perception (noetically) and then returned to ordinary perception of appearance, the “reflection” of reality (Plato, Paul, etc.). My experience proves that all views that we see only “a reflection from the bottom of a polished metal pan” are correct, FOR WHATEVER REASON, the latter being in doubt only. I did not see; then I saw; then I did not see again (exactly as Paul says). Why the first? Why the second? Why the return of the first? Teilhard’s view of an evolutionary step forward? Or anamnesis, restoration of lost faculties (Calvin)? Or coiled, cyclic time? Moebius strip time?
Is change (Dionysos, metamorphosis) real? Heraclitus/Christ Teilhard
Or: Is unchange (Apollo, the healers) real? Parmenides, Jahweh
Is the search itself the goal (as is said)?
My Gollancz speech [“Man, Android, and Machine” (1976), included in this volume] is insane but true. And I knew more then, noetically; what I’ve read since bears it out. The madman speaks the moral of the piece.
If we deceive ourselves, why? If someone/something else deceives us, then why and also who? Wacht auf! [Wake up!] Brahmin (it, not he). It dreams, and now wakes, or it was awake, and now falls asleep; I think it is waking. The universe-organism of the Greek philosophers: It wakes and sees. Cells, forming a Great Brain. Bees in a hive. Rising now to consciousness. Of what? Itself? There are no answers, only mysteries (not questions but mysteries: secrets. Sacred secrets, not disclosed to us. But not by whom? Well, when I woke, those five days, change was real: a process. Cosmogenesis (Teilhard). Toward. Omega.
Outline in Abstract Form of a New Model
of Reality Updating Historic Models,
in Particular Those of Gnosticism and
Christianity (1977)
IT is proper to say: We appear to be memory coils (DNA carriers capable of experience) in a computerlike thinking system that, although we have correctly recorded and stored thousands of years of experiential information (knowledge, gnosis), and each of us possesses a somewhat different deposit from all the other life forms, there is a malfunction—a failure—of memory retrieval. There lies the trouble in our particular subcircuit. “Salvation” through gnosis—more properly anamnesis (the loss of amnesia)—although it has individual significance for each of us—a quantum leap in perception, identity, cognition, understanding, world- and self-experience, including immortality—it has further and more truly ultimate importance for the system (structure) as a whole, inasmuch as these memories (data) are needed or valuable to it, and to its overall functioning.
Therefore it is in the process of self-repair, which includes: rebuilding our subcircuit (world) via linear and orthogonal time changes (sequences of events), as well as continual signaling to us both en masse and individually (to us received subliminally by the right brain hemisphere, which gestalts the constituents of the messages into meaningful entities), to stimulate blocked neural (memory) banks within us to fire and hence retrieve what is there.
The adventitious information of gnosis, then, consists of disinhibiting messages (instructions), with the core (main) content actually intrinsic to us—that is, already there (first observed by Plato, that learning is a form of remembering).
The ancients possessed techniques (sacraments and rituals) used largely in the Greco-Roman mystery religions, including early Christianity, to induce firing and retrieval, mainly with a sense of its restorative (repairing) value to the individuals; the Gnostics, however, and Mani correctly saw the ontological value to what they called the Godhead Itself (i.e. the total entity).
PHILIP K. DICK
K. W. JETER
12/7/77
SANTA ANA, CALIFORNIA
(Note: While such “Enlightened” spiritual leaders as Zoroaster, Mani, Buddha, and Elijah can be regarded as receptors of the entity’s total wisdom, Christ seems to have been an actual terminal of this computerlike entity, in which case he did not speak for it but was it. “Was,” in this case, standing for “consisted of a microform of it.”)
Late 1972 letter found amongst c. 1977 Exegesis papers
I ALMOST became a sincere tool of a conspiracy consisting of myself.
There goes the John Birch Society sincerely trying to save this country from the John Birch Society—from itself.
Prototype: Pooh and Piglet following the woozle footprints around and around the tree. There are more all the time.
I blew up my own house and forgot I did it. [The reference here is to an episode in November 1971 when Dick’s house and files were broken into, possibly with the use of explosives; his list of suspects for this unsolved crime included himself.] But why did I forget I did it? So I’d think I had an actual enemy so I wouldn’t have to face the fact that I’m paranoid, i.e. crazy. I blew up my house to convince myself I was sane. Anyone who would go to that much trouble must really be nuts. So as soon as those who thought I was imagining that people were after me saw that my house had been blown up, they realized that I was far more paranoid than they had suspected. Their paranoid suspicions about me are now much greater. Sensing their paranoid suspicions about me, I realize
etc.
Why is everything is short supply? Because everyone is hoarding. Why are they hoarding? Because everything is in short supply.
We all wind up isolated, suspicious of each other, each of us trying to figure out what is going on, which means, who is doing it? Who is our enemy? The fact that we can’t figure out what’s going on overloads our brains, overworks our minds; we wear out fast, get exhausted and confused. And still we can’t locate the enemy. Because we are confused we begin to act in an ineffectual way, so our behavior becomes erratic. Others who notice our erratic behavior wonder what we are up to. Actually we are up to nothing, are merely in the process of burning out over the problem of trying to figure out what other people are up to, inasmuch as their various behaviors are becoming more and more perplexing. Each of us assumes everyone else knows what HE is doing. They all assume we know what WE are doing. We don’t. They ask us, What are you doing? We can’t give a coherent account because we don’t know, but our failure to give a coherent account convinces them that we are lying, and the only reason we would lie is because what we are really (doing) ought to be concealed. This confirms their fears and mistrust, and they intensify the interrogation. The false premise is, You must know what you’re doing and if you won’t tell me, then you must be lying in order to conceal something I wouldn’t approve of, which is probably directed at me to hurt me. Each person winds up more and more confused, having wasted his time and exhausted himself interrogating other persons as confused as himself on the false assumption that they know what’s going on. Nothing is going on and nobody knows what it is. Nobody is concealing anything except the fact that he does not understand anything anymore and wishes he could go home.
c. 1977
“ACTUALITIES are somehow plucked from a greater sea of possibilities that also form part of the truth.” This means that the actuality is not true versus possibilities that are false; it just means that the actuality is more true; the possibilities are less true but also true. This involves the principle of emergence, how a thing comes into being. It is a question of degree, not either-or. Possibly the force that selects one possibility and makes it the actuality is the pressure on reality—this greater sea of possibilities—of the human mind. It selects out the actuality by assessing it as more probable. Or it is a subtle interaction, a feedback between the sentient mind and this greater sea: Pressure is exerted until one possibility among many becomes growingly distinct, which causes the pressure to select it out to become more firm. The actuality is merely a particular possibility that acquires form and shape and can be discerned. Actualization is a gestalting process, and gestalting takes place primarily in the human mind. The mind exerts a subtle and continual pressure on certain events and things to be, and on others not to be; it shapes reality directly by some field similar to gravitational waves, very weak but always there, and in the end effective. Without the presence of human minds and the pressure they exert there would be no actualization of anything, and only the greater sea of possibilities, of half truths, would exist as a multitude of semiforms, contradicting one another but existing side by side. Without real time or space.
c. 1978
THROUGH anamnesis you can move retrograde in time, go back and burn up or unweave your karma, be born anew to a higher state—but is this all an interior psychological process? It must be; Tessa [Dick’s wife who lived with him during the 2-3-74 experiences] didn’t see Rome c. A.D. 70. But I saw Valis outside me modulating reality. Ah; but that was a projection (cf. Jung). Projection explains it, the Magdeburg hemispheres. It was my own mind that I was seeing external to me. I traveled down into the phylogenic (collective) unconscious. God had nothing to do with it. Right?
Then what about the messenger who comes in time and bilks the retribution machine by withholding from it the bill of particulars against you? Is the messenger an archetype of the unconscious? And the AI voice [Artificial Intelligence voice—Dick’s name for the hypnogogic voice he heard frequently in 1974-75 and intermittently thereafter until his death]; that is my anima?
c. 1978
I HAVE it; I advance the following bold theory. Out of the dialectical antithetical interaction between the Empire and its enemy, Valis is created, Valis as kosmos. The war provides the stockpile of parts—ever newer and different—that Valis fits into place to form its own soma [body]. Valis is the result and purpose of this contention; the contention so to speak generates wreckage—chaos—and this is Valis’s raw material, which it must have, have access to, if it is to complete itself, if it is to continue to grow.
This fits in with Empedocles’ theory that combat is the basis of reality, that antithetical combat is necessary for reality to exist (i.e. for there to be einai).
Thus Valis comes into existence in the midst of this battle, not as an accident, a by-product, but as the ultimate purpose; the battle is the means and Valis the end. So one kind of reality—dialectical war—gives rise to a perfect structure in equilibrium, a harmonious fitting together of the beautiful. I saw Valis here. Valis arises from the ceaseless dialectic that was revealed to me. I might say that the dialectic is one form of universe and Valis another; and in our ontogenic world we see neither. So history is the means and Valis the goal—at least for Valis; it may prey off this combat! The combat may not have come into existence for this purpose. Valis uses the combative dialectic for its own purposes. Wow.
Then Valis is the goal of history. Sacred (phylogenic) history: history revealed, as in Judaism.
What is Valis, then? Why, it is the Cosmic Christ, Point Omega. I have seen what Teilhard de Chardin wrote about, although I had never read any of his writing. I am sure that this is what Valis is; my reading of Paul’s letters had already half convinced me. But this clinches it. The goal of history… and the agent active in this process is the Paraclete, working backward from the end of time, entering into good men to make them saints and prophets.
c. 1978
THE Gnostic Christians of the second century believed that only a special revelation of knowledge rather than faith could save a person. The contents of this revelation could not be received empirically or derived a priori. They considered this special gnosis so valuable that it must be kept secret. Here are the ten major principles of the gnostic revelation:
The creator of this world is demented.
The world is not as it appears, in order to hide the evil in it, a delusive veil obscuring it and the deranged deity.
There is another, better realm of God, and all our efforts are to be directed toward returning there
bringing it here.
Our actual lives stretch thousands of years back, and we can be made to remember our origin in the stars.
Each of us has a divine counterpart unfallen who can reach a hand down to us to awaken us. This other personality is the authentic waking self; the one we have now is asleep and minor. We are in fact asleep, and in the hands of a dangerous magician disguised as a good god, the deranged creator deity. The bleakness, the evil and pain in this world, the fact that it is a deterministic prison controlled by a demented creator causes us willingly to split with the reality principle early in life, and so to speak willingly fall asleep in delusion.
You can pass from the delusional prison world into the peaceful kingdom if the True Good God places you under His grace and allows you to see reality through His eyes.
Christ gave, rather than received, revelation; he taught his followers how to enter the kingdom while still alive, where other mystery religions only bring about anamnesis: knowledge of it at the “other time” in “the other realm,” not here. He causes it to come here, and is the living agency of the Sole Good God (i.e. the Logos).
Probably the real, secret Christian church still exists, long underground, with the living Corpus Christi as its head or ruler, the members absorbed into it. Through participation in it they probably have vast, seemingly magical powers.
The division into “two times” (good and evil) and “two realms” (go
od and evil) will abruptly end with victory for the good time here, as the presently invisible kingdom separates and becomes visible. We cannot know the date.
During this time period we are on the sifting bridge being judged according to which power we give allegiance to, the deranged creator demiurge of this world or the One Good God and his kingdom, whom we know through Christ.
To know these ten principles of gnostic Christianity is to court disaster.
c. 1978