The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  Every time in my life that I've heard the spirit it's been when my normal (linear) thinking had exasperated and exhausted itself—reached its end without results, but each time, results were still absolutely necessary. This alone makes a circumstantial case for locating the spirit, the Inward Light, in the right hemisphere (I suppose). Normal habitual cognitive processes must be tried fully and fail. This would be why under routine and ordinary conditions I don't hear it and am cut off from it. But this only tells me where it can be localized in terms of brain morphology. As an appositional other brain, not my own, it still—well, how does it come to think in Attic Greek, and make use of technical terms such as syntonic? My original diagram showed a piece of the macrocosmos within the microcosmos, but that was more a metaphor and poetry. Also, if my right hemisphere can do this, why does it do it only when I am under duress? Why isn't there bilateral parity? [...] How possibly could a lesser, minor, inferior portion (half) of the total mind be habitually turned outward to the world, and a wiser, older part, devoted to truth, in possession of immeasurable knowledge, holy and calm—how could that part remain suppressed virtually forever? Just from a functional standpoint it's hard to understand, unless its time is coming, as Dr. Bucke thought. This, in addition to, How did it form? How did it form and why isn't it used? It doesn't seem to be a social product, or limited to this time and this space. I wonder if it is a self-system, an ego, at all. It is not another self, even a better one; it is absolute in all that it knows, does and especially in all that it is (its ontology is perfected). I don't really see it in process, in becoming, any more than I see it making mistakes and learning thereby. It has no infancy and no senility. [...]

  This particular "myth," that of the death of Christ, is the only one we have, the only one which survived of all the mystery religions and other cults and religions of the antique world. We're allowed to celebrate that, but that is it. Still, it's all there. Dionysos, Zagreus, Osiris, Adonis. ("JC" is in this case Joseph Campbell, not Jesus Christ supra.) At a certain point Christ is actually present, in the wafer and wine and also He becomes the priest, and we are once more there again; we have found our way back, a concept contained in the religion itself; viz: the dead god who returns to life. The cyclic repetition which takes place in the mass governs also the concept of why the mass is spoken and what it is about. Our god died, and was buried (gone), but then He returned. So saying, the priest therewith becomes Christ, proving the authenticity, the rightness, of the whole religion and the whole service.... It is as if each time the mass (or Last Supper, "in remembrance of Me") was secretly celebrated by the early Christians, they got to unfold their miracle, about Jesus, for their own eyes alone, invisible to the (Roman-secular) world. "Thou didst not see what I saw, Robin," as Oberon puts it.82 I can imagine the impact in the early days of the "Fish" Christians when they gathered in stealth to perform the feast of agape. New people who had never actually known Jesus could be brought in one by one, and this shown to them. Suddenly He would be there, only not as a mortal but in His transformed state (as I experienced Him). He would be all through them, the celebrants. "Time would be abrogated," as Campbell says. This abrogation of time might not be so startling at first, during the actual Roman era; but later on, as in my situation ... suddenly "back" in Rome "again." We are always back there, just as before; nothing has changed. And the Return of the King is always eagerly anticipated as imminent; there is much excitement and fear and activity. [...]

  The strangest idea, though, of all that comes to me is to envision a group of followers who have the authentic holy-possession experience which I had ... and then retrospectively they cast back to try to figure out who it was—exactly the way I did; I decided it was Jim Pike because he was a holy man who I had known who recently died; the early Christians would assume, by the same logic, that it was Jesus. In each case the individuals would trace it back to the first reasonably likely person, real or mythical. In my thinking here I'm reversing what is the customary causal flow writers assume, theirs being that the postmortem experience is manufactured to fulfill the wishes of the followers; i.e., the connective chain works in temporal sequence. My question now, when you consider before Christianity were the other Greek mystery religions and before that Tammuz and Adonis and especially Osiris in Egypt—can we be sure these different religious groups are experiencing different entities—or rather isn't it just the names which differ? And if it is all one entity which holy-possesses all of them, under a variety of names (call it Jim Pike, Jesus or Osiris), then what in actuality is this holy spirit who has distinct human but transfigured personality? (In my case, if not Jim Pike then who?) Maybe a demiurge or mediating spirit which has no copula possibility; i.e., no intrinsic name, such as we have? Maybe—after 14 months all I really know is that I don't know anything except that it happened to me, and what I saw during that short time was real. That's not much to come down from the mountain with, for the edification of my people. Maybe there just is no common language between our space-time universe and the Eternal World, or common concepts; or ours just don't really apply. [...] I can see where it is an enormous task, really beyond our ability, when we (I mean religious leaders, those actually into forming religions and subsects) struggle with such a titanic fiery wind from another universe, a far vaster reality in all respects ... trying to codify it, put it into linguistic categories, trying to figure it out, cope with the enormous paradoxes which effortlessly transcend and defy human reason—priests from the time of the Cro-Magnon through Sumer, Egypt, the Greek mystery religions, on down to Calvin and Luther and Tillich—we're all getting massive headaches and sitting up all night trying and trying to explain to ourselves and to write it down coherently ... the secular world supposes that religion is a fake and a snare and we've got nothing to offer but a lot of flak talk, but in fact the reality behind the words is so far removed from what we can comprehend that our problem is really trying to reduce it and make our kind of sense out of it, and always failing, failing, and never giving up, knowing what it means but never being able to get it right, never, never, always seeing something new or previously unseen, always understanding it better, giving up and then starting over, getting closer and closer; wondering if we were meant to try this. But it's a way of remembering what happened. Of recalling it. The prolonged, arduous work shows that something happened. As they say in modern semantics and philosophy: the word "banana" points to something which we call a banana but isn't, because "banana" is the word, not the thing pointed to. In this case the disparity between words and the thing pointed to are probably the greatest possible. In 14 months I've found that my experience fits every description of personal mystic religious experience and none, every specific religion and none: each system or explanation works as well as any other, but none really is congruent; there is always a part left over, and in the night that small unexplained part or fact grows like the mustard seed or the leaven until it is the whole loaf or landscape by morning. It's as if the experience itself were alive.

  If I were going to pick one tantalizing aspect I can't account for, and would give an arm and a leg to do so, it is that when my experience began I had the acute impression, absolutely real and unshakable, that I had been seeing the universe backward all my life, or somehow inside-out, which is also the same as backward—reversed, going in the "wrong way," which means that I had suddenly begun to see it not just going in the opposite direction, but correctly, at last. It wasn't just time alone going in reverse; it was like instead of being inside a sphere-like universe, I was now outside on the skin. Inside was outside, the future was controlling the past, the smallest least valuable objects assumed tremendous importance, there was solemn and vital information in near-silence. And then I read in the Gospel of Thomas where Christ says something like, "The Kingdom will come when the outer is the inner, the bigger the smaller, the man the woman," etc., except he says, "the image the image," as if that is the one constant.83 Maybe it's a Jungian psychological reversal of all funct
ions and aspects of the psyche, the not-I becoming the I, etc. But—"random" juxtapositions of writing produced meaningful—God-sent, in fact—information. "The stone rejected by the builder,"84 maybe, whatever that means. The meaningless became meaningful, especially in arrangement; and the ultimate, found in much mystical writing: the void and God were found together, as if God, when at last experienced, turned out to be nothing, which is like what Erigina used to say: Literally, God is not. Maybe we have our entire set-ground system wrong85; every feature we extract through isolated scrutiny (as important) is really background, and vice versa.

  But you can't overcome this by switching your focus to what you'd considered background before; it is in the self-creating (deciding on) of set that the error lies. We select (or are trained to select) set. Maybe this is primarily a basic shift in the visual system whereby the whole set-ground discrimination ends and a new or different kind of sight obtains. No attempt is made at any level in the eye-brain mechanism to extract features; ground and set are allowed to blend, and then reality itself, without our making a preconceived programmed trained habitual effort, is allowed to swim around until certain facets or linking regularities in it intrinsically, not projected by us or sought for, not discriminated by our brains but actually there, register as ultra-real. These might be regarded as patterns, I guess. Some thread of recognition might call them to our attention, some forgotten memory; we recognize a friend. Like a creature with compound eyes, maybe we trace movement as such. Or utilize parallaxes and extract only that which has true depth; or rely on color formations. The last, color, could act to inscribe far-ranging patterns around us hitherto unsuspected, being partly in what was set and partly in what was ground.

  How about a 3-dimensional moving color forming messages of construction and comfort?

  From a total relaxation (a giving up) of the automatization of perception, the "model of the universe" each of us builds—through weariness or despair or fear; it breaks down to reveal the koinos kosmos beneath, which to our surprise is like the Magic Garden. My contribution to Deikman's study of this is, We like to be able to recognize everything. To know (label) what it is. Our early textbooks teach us to do this (horse, cow, cat, mother). Once we have identified everything, then reality has passed away and we're in a world of the familiar, stuck there because we wanted it that way (it's frightening not to know where you are and what things are around you, when you're little). It's a form of scientific-magic; it depotentiates the menacing and the hostile by abolishing the unknown. The word (category, a sort of ersatz logos) replaces reality, as in Time Out of Joint; it's perceptual stereotyping. Lazy vision. The trouble is, sitting here for instance, I do know what each object is. I know its name. I know its purpose, what it does, etc. I can't unknow that this is a typewriter, this here my light, this over here the air conditioner. How am I going to get back—regress—to the Magic Kingdom ("Be as little children"86). Well, switch from my left to right hemisphere, maybe. There are close-scrutiny techniques, of the visual mantra type (stare at one object for weeks). This at most, though, might provide methods or techniques for seeing what is there, beyond the semi-verbal model; there is still, upon having seen, the problem of conveying and comprehending it. I think we as a species really have "fallen," in that we are very cut off, from ma'at, from justice and order (and the voice of conscience telling us what is justice, what promotes order, what is truth); as Heraclitus said, we are stumbling around asleep, unable to see the logos (that which ma'at through Ptath has built).

  Parmenides' notion of the All and how it must be, contrasted to what we experience: he described it as radially symmetric, which I understand as being the same everywhere. If this is so, then theoretically one could comprehend the structure of the whole upon any authentic encounter with it (perception of it), no matter how small the segment, sector, in time and space. This recalls to me my "three lives" dream in which I was first in an alternate world where I was famous and flew everywhere, and then very poor in a Mexican or Italian town, and in the dream the fan-shape triune sections were extended to show that no matter where or how you took a core sample or segment or fragment, from it the extremes on each side could advance out fan-blade like, with a Tao always created in the center. Each partial life was generated into a state of triune completeness (too little; just right [balanced]; too much). I sensed/watched the slimmest sample expand into what, in terms of universal constants, was an entire world; I don't think you could cut it too small to exclude that spontaneous process of total regeneration of World. That means that the All is immediately palpable ("break a stick and there am I; and I am the All"87), if viewed at all; I mean, if it is seen it is not seen partially, in an impaired way (as we always see reality). This is the opposite of the blind men with the elephant situation. Now, the implications of this if as I believe God is an immanent God are enormous—in fact, this might account for what I experienced, because given immanence, then when you encounter Him in the alley you have encountered him completely, just as much so as if you met Him in heaven, in the caelum. It is not like a portion of god (analogous to a hand or arm of one of us). Like Kozyrev's theory of time, the whole "thing" is projected from a single point. At any point where He is, He is totally and to the extent that He can be known He can be totally known. One does not experience a portion of God. This makes clear how His immanence works. How He can be everywhere but not necessarily everything.

  I wonder what's in my other dreams of equal value in exegesis.

  Anyhow, regarding this projection-from-every-point-of-the-complete All, then any glimpse of it (as I say) would be an encounter with its totality, and would by definition not be partial and therefore probably more than could be comprehended. No matter how gently filtered or muted, or revealed in progressive degrees of emergent clarity, by the time the encounter was over, the mortal creature would be amazed. Later, he would find himself trying to depict an infinitude in ordinary words; which is to say, he would find that which he experienced to be inexhaustible. Probably he would keep trying, and wonder why. (I.e., why even if it lasted only a little while he can't completely describe it or explain it.) He would forever be trying to fully explicate (or explain at all) what he saw along the gutter here and there which shone, saw in a time-period of 3 minutes one day and is greater than the universe. Put another way, it seems reasonable that if after 14 months of unending exegesis, reading, studying, pondering, etc., one has still failed to even begin to account for what one saw in those 3 minutes—when in fact more remains to explain and understand than ever—then there is reason to believe the vision authentic. The fact that one can't say (explain or account for) may reveal more than if one could. That it would be the complete deity, even when scaled down to a micropoint, would explain the striking account of Elijah finally encountering God in the "still small voice"88 and not in larger more spectacular forms. Also, the ancient Hebrew priests declaring that the voice of God is like the cooing of doves. By the same token therefore I might be correct in supposing that the faint, distant, mild, composed voice I have heard is that of God Himself and not that of a demiurge, it not being necessary for Him to employ such just to scale Himself down. Some of the foolishness of doctrines diminishing the Trinity can be exposed by understanding this; obviously each Person or Member can be equal to God, although in a very real sense less (Christ was equal to God but God was greater than He; ordinary language doesn't apply here). What is meaningful is to understand that all of God is reconstructible from a single "bit" or expression or manifestation. I would think that in this fashion the omniscience of God is explained; how under these circumstances could there be signal loss or contamination?

  [5:157] I just discovered that for 15 months I've labored in error as to who wrote "Acts." I had the idea it was Paul, undoubtedly because it deals with Paul. However, it was written by Luke, who also may have written "Romans." I am sitting here slowly perceiving the importance of this. First off, the stunning manifestation of theological material in Tears is vir
tually all (all except for the dream) from "Acts." But the main point is that Luke was "the beloved physician," as Paul calls him, and a highly literate Greek writer. Also, in one recent dream, my attention was called to a large section of the Bible which when I looked up the page numbers was Luke's Gospel from the Sermon on the Mount of Christ at the Mount of Transfiguration. Also, my vision of the man as saint or angel informing me was of a Greek: he wore a toga and greaves. He carried a huge clasped book, which he held with both arms, affectionately. This wasn't Paul. A Greek physician and evangelist; one of the gospelists. The EB says that Luke was a darn good theologian and that he was into Christian prophecy. He was no mere chronicler of events. I've been looking over "Acts." It certainly is fluent. And he was a close friend of Paul; this fits my early dream in which my friend "Paul" is holding up a book of prophecy, now obviously sections of the Bible (specifically the New Testament).

  If only I'd said plaintively to Father Rasch: "This man is a literate Greek, he's a physician and has something to do with 'Acts.'" On the spot, it'd have been put together then and there. You cannot get any more precise than that. A class with one member: St. Luke.