I have read these 37 pages over and I'm amazed and delighted at the direction of my analysis. What an original system—and, more important, a system at last commensurate with the revelations of 3-74. Always before, the exegesis plainly fell short of the experience it served to explain, or tried to explain. But at last, by the aid of the voice I have made bold clean strokes, radical ones, in this B model. After reading it over I can't fault it. Such wild disclosures as those of 3-74 require a wild explanation, not a conventional or customary one.
[2:41] This is the paradox of "where should you most expect to find God?" A: "in the least likely place." I discern in this the following: "in point of fact you therefore cannot find God at all; he must—will—find you, and when and where you least expect it"—i.e., he will take you by surprise, like the still small voice which Elijah heard. Or like Oh Ho the ceramic pot. The Oracle may speak to you from the gutter (whatever "gutter" might mean in this context).
So my writing—itself part of the "gutter" and, as Lem says, "piling trash upon trash"—may serve as the sort of gadfly kind of thing that Socrates considered himself to act as. My writing is a very unlikely place to expect to encounter the holy, the Koinos, the message-processing, Ubik-like ultimate entity.
The two are identical, and I didn't realize it until tonight, in formulating model B I have returned to Ubik and not just the paradigm based on Ubik.
[2:47] Although I often write about the irreal (or hallucinated) world crowding out the real, the facts are exactly opposite: the real has irrupted into the irreal, literally broken through into it, like Ubik and Runciter into the cold-pac world of Ubik.
[2:48] As in my recent dream: in part 1 of the great book, people and events are described, but underneath, Siddhartha sleeps, and now part 2 begins and he awakens. This is what I saw in 3-74; he must have somewhat awakened me, which means awakened in me—even as me.
[2:49] So the introjection is not only sentient, flexible and alive but specifically negentropic. Then, indeed, the Voice is right in speaking of higher (mind) realm versus lower (physical), with the higher having "plenary" powers to make the lower "plastic"—well put!
***
[2:50] During the first part (half) of the cycle Siddhartha sleeps—is dormant—and dream or illusion or simulation or Form II predominates; but in part 2 Siddhartha wakes up, and the upper, real realm of sentience predominates. We have reached the end of part 1 now.
Part 1 Part 2
Illusion real
Sleep wakefulness
Mechanical purposeful
Blind sentient
formless (entropic) beautiful
rule exception
amoral moral
sameness change (growth)
dead living
declining negentropic
body mind
perishing eternal
monotony complexity
chaotic organized
force love
enslavement freedom
motionless dance
noise signal (information)
silence song
dark light
hard pliant
power gentle
repetition newness
origin goal
black color
metal (stable) fixed flux
determinism anti-determinism
closed open
wet (water) dry (air)
cold warm
sad happy
sinking rising
passive active
clock pulsation (rhythm)
***
[2:53] In Form I the system opens and authentic newness pours in from outside so that the psyche encounters—not itself as world—but the divine other rich with a mysterious infinitude of possibilities—and the dialogue between the psyche and this authentic other begins and from there grows into a different sort of information exchange, which is not just a signal from the psyche boosted and enhanced and returned. The given psyche is now no longer essentially alone.
[2:54] The transformation from the inauthentic to the authentic mode requires the sacrificial death of the illusory psyche, a difficult price to pay—difficult to make because for a little time it means the extinction of the person. He must actually go through the experience—not just knowledge—of the irreality of himself and his projected world; he is replaced and his world is replaced by the not-him and not-his-world. (This is depicted in The Tibetan Book of the Dead as the Bardo Thödol trip.) Now, to his surprise, he is not who he is or when/where he is (I should say was). The impossible has happened; he has shed self and world. This is a moment of great fear and sense of dread, to experience the irreality of himself and his world, and to have both go, both slip away. Can he survive without himself and his world? The continuity of identity is lost. New memories arise as if out of nothing. And the new self and world; all out of nothing—ex nihilo; new self, memories, identity and world without a history—a past—behind them: created on the spot—as if he always had been this other person with these other memories in and of this other world. His self monitoring system discerns the impossibility of this and yet must accept it as so. He never really was who he was, or where and when he was. All reality, inner and outer (the push-pull psyche—world closed system) has been canceled and replaced by, sui generis, the new, and the open. The closed sack has become the open sack.
[2:55] "Siddhartha" is the sleeping soul of this calcified section.➊ "St. Sophia" is the soul of the totality: its voice and wisdom. St. Sophia speaks to the sleeping Siddhartha, in order to awaken him and thus lift this calcified section back to growth and flexibility, and of course consciousness. Thus it can be said that at present St. Sophia is outside of (absent from) this section, and will return upon the sleeping Siddhartha's awakening, at which point he will again know. (This section will again know.) Since there has never been a period in human history in which this section has not been calcified—asleep—we have no basis by which to imagine the magnitude of the transformation which is coming. "Siddhartha" is merely hu man, but St. Sophia is equal to the Godhead itself (and could never be said to be asleep). Enlightenment (e.g., the Dibba Cakkhu, anamnesis, the ajna chakra, etc.) is given to Siddhartha by St. Sophia. Siddhartha hears her voice, which is man being called to by God. Finally she wakes him.
➊ This section died. It became fossilized, and merely repeats itself. This is scary; it is like mental illness: "one day nothing new ever entered his mind—and the last thought just recirculated endlessly." Thus death rules here, which explains Paul's "mystery" in 1 Corinthians.76 The BIP is the form of this death, its embodiment—of what is wrong, here. To see it is to see the ailment, the complex which warps all other thoughts to it: the imperial levelling.
[2:61] Christ was and is the life of the totality expressed in its true form as sentient information (older term: wisdom or logos). His appearance here marks the entry of the anima of the total noös into this separated off ossified region. Physically killed here he then dispersed (distributed) himself according to plan as organizing principle (pure knowing) invisibly throughout this region without the hostile particle ("heavy metal speck") being able to trap or contain him: he became a trans-spatial, -temporal, -identity entity, discorporate or poly-corporate, as the need arose. Through him the properly functioning (living and growing) total brain replicated itself here in microform (seed-like) thereafter branching out farther and farther like a vine, a viable life form taking up residence within a dead, deranged and rigid one. It is the nature of the rigid region to seek to detect and ensnare him, but his discorporate plasmatic nature ensures his escape from the intended imprisoning. Thus he is an elusive wild animal ubiquitous and yet nowhere in this ailing locality—wild not in the sense of feral but in the sense of natural and free: roaming and appearing and disappearing. He manifests himself where least expected: sometimes as information, sometimes incarnated. As information he is as alive as when incarnated. As vox dei77 (St. Sophia) he seeks to awaken the unconscious soul of this reg
ion, which has sunk into forgetful sleep; we know this entity as Siddhartha, who when he at last awakes (is awakened) will assume his rightful rule of this region and restore it and us to conscious functioning. Christ is divine Savior (God) and Siddhartha primal man who (in this region) is disjoined from his creator—who searches for him to reawaken him. In a sense Christ (holy wisdom) and Siddhartha are brothers. But the one brother (Siddhartha) has forgotten and is unconscious even of himself; the divine syzygy of the isomorphic twins is shattered by this sleep of the one. Thus Christ constantly calls to his human brother, to rouse him to remembrance, of himself and his task. Siddhartha lies underneath the landscape and Christ roams across (above) the landscape, in ceaseless search.
[2:65] Without knowing it, during the years I wrote, my thinking and writing was a long journey toward enlightenment. I first saw the illusory nature of space when I was in high school. In the late 40s I saw that causality was an illusion. Later, during my 27 years of published writing, I saw the mere hallucinatory nature of world, and also of self (and memories). Year after year, book after book and story, I shed illusion after illusion: self, time, space, causality, world—and finally sought (in 1970) to know what was real. Four years later, at my darkest moment of dread and trembling, my ego crumbling away, I was granted Dibba Cakkhu—and, although I did not realize it at the time, I became a Buddha ("the Buddha is in the Park"). All illusion dissolved away like a soap bubble and I saw reality at last—and, in the 4½ years since, have at last comprehended it intellectually—i.e., what I saw and knew and experienced (my exegesis). We are talking here about a lifetime of work and insight: from my initial satori when, as a child, I was tormenting the beetle. It began in that moment, 40 years ago.
[2:77] The AI voice is the voice of the brain/noös/living information which we have gotten cut off from by the sinking of this region of the brain into sub-sentience and hence illusory (simulated) world—where her voice is blotted out by the noise deliberately generated by the BIP (heavy metal particle).
Voice: The reason I have my agoraphobia is because of the way I died, in a cage in a Roman Coliseum. I was strangled.
[2:80] If I had not regained this lost wisdom by losing forgetfulness (Maya) I would doubt if there were any literal truth to the thing. (When I contemplate my system as such, I say, "it's fanciful.") But I did see the golden fish and hear the words—and I did lose forgetfulness. And when that happened, I not only remembered (e.g., a past life) but saw my world as simulated, and then experienced progressively eight layers of ever greater reality. Really, all I fail to explain is how come we have fallen into forgetfulness (especially of this primal wisdom—and lost some faculties entirely, and partially lost others). My experience—and system—is neither new nor limited to the West. It was known to the ancients all over the world. Why is it as it is? Must we earn wisdom? Why is memory (and memory of wisdom) not natural? [...]
How can we be blighted when we have done nothing?
[2:83] The macrocosm (universe)—microcosm (man) theory leads to the interesting idea that any given human mind contains latently within it the entire structure or soul of the totality, but in miniature; so all knowledge can be retrieved out of one person's mind through mirror-like "magic recollection." (Bruno) Jung sees this as the collective unconscious: the repository of the phylogenic history of the person. Ontogeny contains phylogeny. This looks very much like my "onion" model in Ubik but in Ubik is the macrocosm whose phylogeny is recapitulated latently. This takes us back from Freud to Empedocles: Freud invokes the contending forces of love and strife of Empedocles, pointing out their similarity to Eros and destructiveness, the two primal elements of his bio-psychical theory. These instincts, which present the delusive appearance of forces striving after change in progress, actually impel the organism toward the reinstatement of earlier, more stable states, ultimately to inorganic existence. The originally biological principle that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny has received very wide psychological extension and psychoanalysis; most recently Carl Jung has identified his doctrine of the collective unconscious with that of "the microcosm containing the archetypes of all ideas." [...]78
If the macrocosm-microcosm view is correct, the universe's phylogeny is recapitulated in man's (any given man's) ontogeny—and thus 3-74 is explained (phylogeny in terms of ideas or knowledge).
[2:85] In Ubik the universe (not the organism, e.g., a man) is "impelled toward the reinstatement of an earlier, more stable state" (my form axis is real: it is a regression along the phylogenic recapitulation latent in its ontogeny—like Freud says about us humans). I may be the first person to perceive in (or consign to) the macrocosm this phylogenic recapitulation (and regression due to Thanatos or strife or destructiveness—v. Empedocles and Freud).
Folder 3
SEPTEMBER 1978
[3:2]
(1) The form-axis regressions in Ubik could only occur if the universe were the hylozoic animal which the macro-microcosmos schools believed it to be. ("Phylogeny contained in ontogeny.")
(2) A major reason for their believing the macrocosm to be an animal (analog of the human, the microcosm) was to believe—maintain—that, like a man who has a soul, the universe has a soul or logos; because
(3) if it does, the human micro soul can link up with its analog, the world soul (logos).
(4) Precisely this world soul or logos appears in Ubik as the entity/force Ubik.
[3:8] Will Durant on Bruno:
Space, time and motion are relative ... since the universe is infinite, and there cannot be two infinities, the infinite God and the infinite universe must be one ... there is no prime mover, there is motion or energy inherent in every part of the whole. "God is not an external intelligence ... it is more worthy for him to be the internal principle of motion, which is his own nature, his own soul." Nature is the outside of the divine mind; however, this mind is not in a "heaven above," but in every particle of reality.
The world is composed of minute monads, indivisible units of force, of life, of inchoate mind. Each particle has its own individuality, has a mind of its own, and yet its freedom is not liberation from law but behavior according to its inherent law and character. There is a principle of progress and evolution in nature in the sense that every part strives for development.
There are opposites in nature, contrary forces, contradictions; but in the operation of the whole cosmos—in the "will of God"—all contraries coincide and disappear ... behind the bewildering, fascinating variety of nature is the yet more marvelous unity, wherein all parts appear as organs of one organism. "It is unity that enchants me." Hence the knowledge of the supreme unity is the goal of science and philosophy, and the healing medicine of the mind.79
And the fuckers burned him. [...]
Clearly, Bruno is my main man, and could of all people explain 2-74/3-74: these experiences of mine make sense [best or only] within his hermetic hylozoic cosmology.
In summary: within these past four days I have cracked the case; I now know what formerly I only believed or merely hoped, suspected—it is all as I supposed. From the start I was always really right—informed by 2-74/3-74 itself. In my 49th year, September 7, 1978, I know complete fulfillment. Amen.
[3:10] Ubik is constructed around a now-discarded hylozoic Macro-Microcosm cosmology which has been replaced by Newton's mechanistic model; the Ubik one, although I didn't realize it, is an animistic biological model which I did not know ever even existed: it lasted from Empedocles to Bruno. It also is Gnostic.
[3:20] Okay. I have no doubt that the sort of space I experienced in the "Alto Carmel" dream and the Voice dreams is Paracelsus' inner firmament. Thomas brought it with him, along with the huge open books. That was the mind of Paracelsus, and it was infinitely older and wiser than mine—and it embraced vast vistas, in terms of its "philosopher's stone" comprehension of the mysteries of the universe. It acted as a micro-mirror of the macrocosm. This is what generates the vast inner space: one man's little mind becomes this magic
mirror of the macrocosm. According to my push-pull psyche-world model, this is readily susceptible to explanation: world is locked into the given psyche anyhow. They aren't:
It's a delusion to believe that space is out there in the first place. [...]
This sense of mine that space is inner and not outer may explain my difficulty (block or phobia) about moving through space. When I am anxious my spatial (space-binding) sense retracts, becomes impoverished—I experience it externally because my space is primarily a subjective reality. [...]
Each microbit of the total macro organism recapitulates the totality, is a micro-form of it and can mirror it back, being isomorphic with it; in doing so, the human microcosm retrieves the entire wisdom (gnosis) of the MacroMind and experiences the vast spatial reality of the totality within itself, as a mirror. Thus mirror, space and memory and wisdom are the keys to completeness by the human; through them he experiences his iso morphism with the macrocosm and its mind. He can enter into dialogue with it: his mind and its thinking back and forth. In this process, the MacroMind contracts itself (as man expands himself); it becomes a human figure, seen and heard by me as a woman, but perhaps it takes other forms to other people; in any case as man the microform becomes the macroform, it contracts to become micro—thus they wind up equal, in harmonie, as, so to speak, equals, hand-in-hand, man and his God.
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick Page 52