"We are damaged minds trying to monitor our own damage. And herein is a tragic paradox: the very occlusion itself prevents us from assessing, overcoming or ever being aware of the occlusion." Thus it is self-perpetuating—which means it will not go away of its own accord; it will act as positive feedback on itself. Christ is the fulcrum, the Archimedean standpoint, from which this occlusion can be properly assessed, and hence aborted. For him to take over a human psyche is to clear it of occlusion, because the person now sees as he sees—which is to say the truth.
[19:24] I saw the word "artist" turn into the word "Christ" today. Before my very eyes. Is Zebra reaching out to me, trying to comfort me? What is wrong with me? What am I grieving over? When Liz held me I was okay. I need so much. I am not finding it. I loved Marie and I want to reach out to her so bad. I ache to hold her and be held by her. I ache so. It is futile—I am giving up. Christ, you know my—pain or sadness, whatever it is. Why can't we just hold each other the way Liz held me? I am starving, I am dying. Like Faust: dust from dust and into dust again. I want so bad; I am starving and dying and yet I can see what I need, I see it, I feel it—I feel, as in Wordsworth's ode86 I am not blocked, I am just reaching into emptiness. I see life, and all I get is dust. Oh God help us, please. I am running out of time and into loss and pain. What I see I can't reach—I can't hold onto. [...]
I think I've solved it. Initial realization: The BIP is a vast complex life form (organism) which protects itself by inducing a negative hallucination of it. Muddled thinking, loss of faculties and perception (as a protective mechanism). It has come here. And because of its defensive devices we are not aware of it (level #1). Next: camouflaged Zebra follows it to destroy it. "Camouflaged"? No: the BIP occludes us so that not only do we not see it, the BIP, we also do not see Zebra (the true benign deity). [...]
Zebra is trying to reach into the BIP, where we are, exactly like Ubik and Ubik's message in Ubik. That is the paradigm: Ubik. Zebra is trying to find—reach—us and make us aware of it—more primarily, it seeks to free us from the BIP, to break the BIP's power over us. This involves a breaking of a determinism invisible to us, extended routinely by the BIP over us. [...]
Zebra seeks to extricate us, but since the BIP generates the negative hallucination itself (and muddles our reason, as depicted in Scanner) we do not know we need rescue.
If Stigmata, Maze, Ubik, Tears and Scanner are real as one ur-narrative, the true picture—the true full picture—begins to take shape; but all must be read: all 5. Scanner is crucial; if left out, we cannot fathom why we can't see the world of Tears!
The matter must be approached through realization of occlusion (Scanner) to the true prison situation (Tears), the result of the spinner of spurious worlds (Stigmata and Maze), and then the salvific entity can be understood and its work appreciated (Ubik), so the logical sequence of presentation is:
(1) Scanner: occlusion
(2) Tears: what is really there which we don't see
(3) Stigmata: who occludes us: its spurious worlds
(4) Maze: how occluded (negative hallucination)
(5) Ubik: the salvific entity and how it works
[19:35] This is a sinister life form indeed. First it takes power over us, reducing us to slaves, and then it causes us to forget our former state, and to be unable to see or to think straight, and not to know we can't see or think straight, and finally it becomes invisible to us by reason of what it has done to us. We cannot even monitor our own deformity, our own impairment.
Even the edifice of the church has been subverted by the BIP and made into an instrument of its occlusion of us.
It is interesting how effectively the impairment works. This is what so fascinated me in 71/72, which I explored in Scanner (which book I now view as the Key Book in the sequence). Axiomatically, if you derange the brain in precise ways, not only will it be deranged, but if you have affected precisely the correct circuits it will be unaware that it is impaired and so not seek to rectify the damage. It is as if the immune system has failed to detect an invader, a pathenogen (shades of William Burroughs: a criminal virus!). Yes, the human brain has been invaded, and once invaded, is occluded to the invasion and the damage resulting from the invasion; it has now become an instrument for the pathenogen: it winds up serving it as its slave, and thus the "heavy metal speck" is replicated (spread through linear and lateral time, and through space). [...]
Scanner as I've said before is the other half of Tears. The inner half. The conditions described in Scanner explain why we don't see the conditions described in Tears, and the conditions described in Tears account for the conditions in Scanner. The various books were written in the wrong order. But they can be read in the right order, or anyhow gestalted (if read, they will be Gestalted).
Correct sequence:
(1) Scanner: Occlusion of our minds, without our being aware of it; loss (forgetfulness) of true identity
(2) Tears: What our world is really always like which the occlusion is deliberately there to keep us from seeing
(3) Stigmata: Who/what deliberately occludes us: the Yaltabaoth Magician evil deity,87 spinner of spurious worlds, creator of illusion and inhabiting, contaminating (unclean) presence in these degraded pseudo worlds
(4) Maze: The negative hallucination MO of the occlusion, and reference to Savior who extricates us from a hopeless trap and pseudo world
(5) Ubik: The salvific entity per se, by name and how its "Pansophiaistic" messages come through the trash layers to aid us. Past available within the present.
(6) Do Androids: A vital theme, that of Mercer88 and his reality through some sort of mystic identification via empathy. The role of animals. The tomb world. The "fakeness" of fakeness: my "2 slit" logic.
(7) "Impostor": Disinhibiting stimulus restoring blocked memory (v. [1])
(8) "Faith of...": God, evil, communism, drugs, hallucinations—a montage of many elements
(9) Every other relevant story and novel, from Joint to "Remember Wholesale," "Electric Ant," "Retreat Syndrome," etc., not listed in (1) through (8).➊
➊ And (10) Eye: Subjective private worlds. And, as in "Faith of... ," an evil deity and communism are discussed. Plural worlds which we generate.
Scanner is the weary final point: our minds are fucked up. It isn't just a case of pseudo worlds. This links with (8), "Faith of...."
All in all, my writing casts doubt on the fact of (even possibility of) knowing actual reality because our minds have been fucked over. Some evidence (e.g., Tears) points to the real situation being prison-like—but Maze and especially Ubik point to a supernatural salvific interventive power, although Stigmata seems to say that an evil magician deity is in control of our worlds and heads.
TMITHC is a fascinating adjunct to all this, i.e., to the Gestalt. Fakes are discussed. Alternate universes exist. Fascism is the topic, and a book is reality, which seems to have some connection with Tears. TMITHC seems to be a subtle, even delicate questioning of, what is real? As if only the 2 books in it, Grasshopper and the I Ching, are really the only actual reality. Strange. So TMITHC must be listed as (11). But now the order of revelation breaks down. And does Martian Time-Slip add anything? Pathological private worlds are presented and the disintegration of world. So (12).
and (13) Galactic Pot-Healer: More about the salvific deity
and (14) Penultimate Truth: Lies and government. Fakes again—always the fakes.
But Tears and Scanner are crucial in a special sense, because the fictional or phantastic element is virtually lacking; they are obviously semi mimetic, especially Scanner which is explicitly stated to have happened, and in a sense not fiction at all. Does this book, then, seem to say, "Maybe portions of the others are literally real, too?" The author does not now pretend to be writing fiction, and Tears fits this category as well.
One critic said that Now Wait for Last Year seemed to depict the Vietnam war. So maybe it, too, adds something. But for sure we have—
(1) Scanner:
Occluded minds, not able to see
(2) Tears: Prison world created by
(3) Stigmata: Evil deity who is opposed by
(7)"Impostor": Fake memory; real ones and true identity restored, v. (1)*
Summary:
Our minds are occluded, deliberately, so that we can't see the prison world we're slaves in, which is created by a powerful magician-like evil deity, who, however, is opposed by a mysterious salvific entity which often takes trash forms, and who will restore our lost real memories. This entity may even be an old wino.
Drugs, communism, and sex and fake plural pathological pseudo worlds are involved, but the pluriform salvific entity, as mysterious as quicksilver, will save us in the end and restore us to true human state. We will then cease to be mere reflex machines. This is the summation of my Kerygma, spread out throughout my works.
Folder 20
OCTOBER 1978
[20:16] I see no sense in this. How can God delude us and also seek to make us lucid,➊ to see properly? Unless there is a schism in the Godhead: my Yang-Yin dual God, God with a bright (benign, Yang) side, and a dark, deluding, destroying, Yin deterministic side. What we must do is split—separate—the antithetical aspects somehow, or else he wars against himself, which is possible. But—
That is an interesting doctrine: God at war with himself. I did see a dialectic. Then the question might be, will one side win, and if so, which side? And—how does this pragmatically differ from dualism? Maybe there is an exhalation-inhalation, a palintropos harmonie: respiration, like I wrote down under LSD.
➊ Well, a very sophisticated theology might be erected on this "I am the doubter and the doubt, and I the hymn the Brahman sings" single underlying Brahman. I can't totally dismiss it; I like paradoxes. He deludes us, and he brings lucidity to us—maybe the two are one and the same: the "secret partnership" = the great mystery above space and time. He occludes us and he brings us lucidity. Very sophisticated. Also very old, historically. The master magician is a form the benign Creator takes; the benign Creator, then, is a form which the master magician takes. Which is real? (Or is that Q meaningful?) Which is the mask in which the real face? Maybe it's a recurrent cycle of occlusion and the occlusion, a pulsation (respiration).
[20:18] [Editor's note: Some of the following will appear, reworked, in Folder 21.] The creator deliberately plants clues in his irreal creation (which he enters, and then suffers deliberate amnesia)—clues which he cunningly knows in time (eventually) will restore his memory (anamnesis) of who he is, and that his creation is irreal and has imprisoned him in it. Thus freeing himself and restoring himself to godhood. Wow! So he has a fail-safe system built in. No chance he won't eventually remember. Makes himself subject to [spurious] space, time and world (and death, pain, loss, decay, etc.), but has these disinhibiting clues or stimuli distributed deliberately, strategically in time and space. So is he himself who sends himself the letter which restores his memory (legend of the Pearl89).
Not bad! Salvador salvandus!
Boy, what this says about my 2-74/2-75 experience! When I saw the clue in 2-74! Look what this theory says I remembered—and who placed the clue in front of me and why!
I think I've solved it. Christ without memory of identity, here in the world. [...]
Thus, as perfectly epitomized in the Ubik commercials, he can exist (be) at any trashy layer—sincerely—he wants to be, in any trashy form. But in the end, he remembers (as witness the "ad" over the final chapter of Ubik).
Purpose? This way he can permeate his creation with the divine at all levels, and sincerely (i.e., without even him knowing, while he's doing it!).
Boy, would this explain what happened when I saw the golden fish, and why.
That colossal rush of memory and understanding, at the time (2-74), followed by 3-74. We are not talking about my being (just) an early Christian; we are talking (ahem) about the divine itself! Holy Spirit, God or Christ—it's all one.
Zebra = Christ. Christ = God. Thomas = Zebra. I = Thomas (for "equals" read "is"). Thus
I = God.
But I've forgotten again. Oh well—I wrote it all down, heh, heh. Knowing I'd again forget.
I was invaded (theolepsy) by Christ, all right. But as I say supra, it was I who remembered (being Thomas or Christ). So, like in "Impostor"—I am—
I love it. It's delightful. It's a dance. Brahman dancing in joy. (Felix.)
[20:20] "Are you God?" I was once asked.
This explains why I have no wish to separate myself from suffering. That is the fucking point of my being here as a person—that, but more so the writing. The writing is to make lucid, to detox people. So I had to go through 1971. To write Scanner which I now view as the summation. I don't want us occluded; I want us happy—and I bipolarize the two. But the main thrust is:
"They (we) have been punished entirely too much for what they (we) did." In other words, it is time now to bring the punishment to an end.
[20:21] Now I have to define a homoplasmate as a plural form in micro of the creator (God) who recovers his lost supernatural faculty of memory and identity as the deity and bonds at once with the living sentient macro.
Macro Micro
Brahman == Atman
My realization then in 2-3-74 is the highest realization that can come to a person, irrespective of his particular religion: tat tvam asi. You are God.
Voice: "Someone in this room is outside of time." But I'm the only one here.
[20:22] The Kerygma (especially Maze and Stigmata): we created a fake world, went into it voluntarily and voluntarily shed our memories, and can't get back out, but would like to. However, foreseeing this, we providentially laid down clues in advance to remind us when the going would get too tough.
Sequence:
(1) Created a fake world.
(2) Entered it.
(3) Forgot our identity.
(4) Suffered. But then:
(5) Came across a deliberately placed clue which I (we) put there to restore memory when things got too rough—or, more profoundly, to set the limiting factor on this journey of calculated self deception and imprisonment so it would have to end finally. (whew—and just in time.)
It's told in Scanner: both parts (Bob and Fred) are himself: i.e., me and the AI voice, the tutelary spirit, I am both. The Koine Greek gave it away back in 1974. I am not-I, as in Scanner.
But my search in this world, in all worlds, is for my sister, my female counterpart whom I have lost—been separated from. Still, she exists, and finally I will be reunited with her. She is very close to me as the AI voice, the singing woman (psychopomp) and the sibyl. And, ultimately, as holy wisdom herself (v. Prv 8: "my darling and delight").
[20:28] The belief that we are plural forms of God voluntarily descended to this prison world, voluntarily losing our memory, identity and supernatural powers (faculties), all of which can be regained through anamnesis (or, sometimes, the mystical conjunction) is one of the most radical religious views known in the West. But it is known. It is regarded as the great blasphemy: replication of the original sin mentioned in "the first book of Adam and Eve"90 and in Genesis. For this pride and aspiration (we are told by orthodoxy) our original fall in exile and punishment, our being taken from our home the garden land and put into the prison, was inflicted on us. "They wish to be equal to—like—us," the Elohim say, and toss us down. Yet I have reason to believe that this, "the great Satanic blasphemy," is true.
[20:36] Voice: "I did call you, Philip." Masculine but gentle voice. (Not the AI voice.) One I've never heard before.
"You are doomed to do what you will do. There is no other possibility. Some will be saved and some will not."
[20:38] I must return to orthodoxy, to a Christology, a Christocentric view; I have been corrected in my views, and by the Savior himself, who spoke to me for the first time. We will not all be saved, whether I like it—approve of it—or not. He selects from among us.
[20:75] Consider what the AI voice has said recen
tly:
"The head Apollo is about to return."
"The time you've waited for has come."
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick Page 54