The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  I can't explain why I must believe all these things.

  [62:C-40] If I did not believe all this (which my 9-81 vision expressed) I would today upon seeing the Agent Orange birth defects, hearing about the Soviet micro-toxin T-2 and hearing Sunday night about the blankets infected with smallpox sold to the Indian tribe to wipe them out—I would go crazy. Thus the vision (which came last week) preserved my sanity as of today (9-23-81). It is necessary for me to know that God has acted in the face of these horrors, how he has acted, and what he will do if we continue. So hallucination or divine revelation, I must believe in Tagore and his kingdom. It is my private religion, based on a wide variety of sources. Hebrew (the Day of YHWH), Christian (the vicarious atonement/sacrifice), modern theological-scientific (Teilhard), Buddhism (concern for all life, human and otherwise, equally), Hindu (Krishna as avatar of Vishnu—the sustainer whose 3 giant steps mark his stride, as he comes in aid), Gnosticism (eventually the spark of light that fell into incarnation in physical shell, in this prison world will be extricated and will return to the pleroma). There is nothing in my syncretistic system that is original, and all elements are—for me, for my sanity on this day, the autumnal equinox—essential. No one system would do. Be it YHWH, Christ, Vishnu or Krishna, I must believe he sees and he acts. If I believed that he did not see, or did not care and hence would not act, I could not go on. The vision came in time, which itself—its coming and coming in time—is a micro-instance of God seeing and acting. Going back to the day at the movie newsreel (when I was a kid) in which I saw the Japanese soldier running and burning, continuing to the rat I killed, to the TV footage of the Galapagos turtle, to the use of napalm in Vietnam today, my great spiritual problem has been to find a way I could handle the issue of suffering, human and animal. The 9-81 vision alluded to the burn—and hence injury to her legs—suffered by my sister—that led to her death, so for me it is evident that the ultimate problem confronting me all my life has been the senseless injury to and neglect of my sister. The 9-81 vision dealt with Jane, with the burning Japanese soldier, the rat and turtle, the napalm, with it all: the vision of Tagore and his kingdom is the quintessential summation of my whole life's struggle to come to terms with these matters which are in essence one matter showing up over and over again. Thus my mystical experiences—starting in '63 when I saw the "Palmer Eldritch" visage and the sky and going on to 2-74—2-75 and after—culminate in 9-81 as the payoff of my need and my attempt to forge a satisfactory explanation for what is to me the ultimate issue: not "Ti to on?" as my 10-volume meta-novel might indicate, but, "What is the total context in which the unmerited suffering and death of living creatures can be coherently understood?"

  [62:C-43] It is evident, then, that also involved in this is my own eventual death and my need to come to grips with it—very much the true cause of the colossal mystical breakthrough in 2-74; this 9-81 vision is perhaps, then, the great summation of the acceptance—and also anger—in me regarding that. I am shown the total, absolute panorama into which my own mortality fits, in context. There is no feeble acquiescence to suffering and death in this vision but there is in it a sense of absolute beauty surpassing explanation and expression: it is a given (Christ's nature; or Krishna's; if you will, names do not matter at this stage). All else is predicated on it. It is the ultimate brute datum of the vision; it simply must be accepted without explanation (as some people are content to accept the suffering, which I am not; thus I replace one inscrutable mystery—unmerited suffering—by another—absolute beauty. Not a bad way to end up). The irreducible core of reality is: beauty.

  [62:C-48] Horselover Fat is real only insofar as he is part of me—so stipulated in the letter initially. But later in the letter (as in VALIS) he is treated as a real, independent person. Viz: "Fat saw Tagore but I did not." Fat is not imaginary; someone saw Tagore. The effect resulting is that one sense that Tagore, like Fat, is not imaginary, not a fantasy or hallucination but, like Fat, a way of talking about myself: a further hypostasis of me (like Thomas and Fat). Yet Tagore is Lord Krishna/Christ, i.e., divine, so I now possess or reveal a saintly hypostatic identity, one which speaks for the ecosphere and also takes on the sins against the ecosphere as stigmata: punishing himself for the sins of man. Interestingly, it is in my legs that I feel pain. And my response today regarding T-2 was to punish myself—I destroyed my stash and also destroyed my exegesis, not quite as self-punishment but more as a sacrifice.

  [...]

  Tagore is dying.

  I have sensed for awhile that I am dying. Yet I am not physically ill but I become more and more tired, and where I feel it is in my legs; I feel there is so much to do, to be told in my writing: novels about Christ and Krishna and God.

  [62:C-51] At the time when, you would think, I would be sitting back and enjoying my money and prestige—my successes—I am driven by the vision and it is a spiritual, not merely artistic vision that is injuring me and perhaps—in my efforts first to formulate it (or receive it) and now to promulgate it—may kill me. And what do I as an individual gain? Ursula's reproach yet even more so! I teach the parousia; I teach the sanctity of the ecosphere, I teach that once again we unknowingly crucify our God; and this time he will not be resurrected and return; he—the total spiritual principle of the world—will be driven from the world; and this will doom us spiritually and physically both. And the decision, the power to choose is ours, if we can be made to understand.*

  [62:C-53] Thus the divinization of the ecosphere is tied into human choice and hence has moral and existential significance. It is contingent on human choice; it will either be ratified by us as a species acting collectively or it will be abolished by us as a species acting collectively; in either case we will earn our fate. Good or bad: it will not be imposed on us but will issue from our own acts.

  [62:C-54] This all can be looked at two ways.

  (1) Contemporary concern about preserving the ecosphere is supplied with a spiritual dimension that is both cosmic and absolute.

  (2) Religion and the spiritual—and specifically Christianity with its eschatological doctrines—is brought down to earth—literally—and tied into realistic, practical matters.

  [...]

  Thus there emerges from this a doctrine of the final judgment being more correctly a final choice on our parts between life—spiritual life, a higher life—and death, physical death.

  [62:C-56] Dream: on a bank of TV screens, scenes of a hunt in progress; the victim is a lovely large white bird. I become very angry at the hunt itself and at all the people watching it as a video game/sport. I lash out at them, saying I won't watch, and I say, "Maybe Caesar will put in an appearance." This dream clearly ties in Tagore's Kerygma (about saving the animals) with Rome and hence with the Empire and hence with early Christianity. Now not humans are the victims of the blood sports for the populace but animals. But it is the same cruelty. Oh—"Caesar" was said sardonically, in reference to Reagan! Good Lord! Look, then, what the dream shows, at least about my feelings/perception! About who is the enemy, and who we are. Christianity in its time sanctifies human life (the opposite of which was the Roman games) but now all life—animal life—the ecosphere itself must be sanctified, and this is done through its investiture by Christ. To "see" (understand) the ecosphere as having been penetrated and assimilated by Christ is to see it as holy; thus this 3rd dispensation is indeed the logical extension projected from the previous two.

  [...]

  Christ is a revolutionary. The ultimate revolutionary. And he has magical (technological?) powers. And he is still alive: this explains it all... .

  [62:C-57] Hypnogogic: I mail out the 85 "notices"—the Ed Meskys Xerox image: marathon runners carrying the torch: two of them, picking up the torch and running in different directions; i.e., out of the 85 people, there are at least two of "the right people" whom I've now notified; but notified of what? Could the whole Tagore ecosphere revelation—like the dream in Tears—be cypher for revolution?32

  The r
agtag motley band of believers who wrote me when I published VALIS—I was thinking. Believers, "ragtag motley band." Like 2,000 years ago. There need be no "underground." The event creates it, not it the event.

  [62:C-59] I am/was victimized, so-to-speak, by my own conspiratorial proclivities.

  [62:C-61] Because the ecosphere is an indivisible unity, it either survives as a unitary totality or perishes as a unitary totality. It is an interconnected system. Part of it can't survive while the other part perishes; we've now reached that point, literally, where it is a global matter. And in reference to this, it has one psyche who either stays with us or departs, and if it departs we die because the ecosphere dies.

  [62:C-66] But who is Tagore, then?

  Answer: Tagore.

  There has to be a premise. I stipulate Tagore as the irreducible premise. Logos? Krishna? Buddha?

  No: Tagore.

  [62:C-68] The strangest thought came to me. If the spiritual principle has penetrated the ecosphere itself and assimilated it, we now can't turn down spiritual life—the spiritual principle—without forfeiting our literal physical lives! This is a whole new condition of the spiritual dimension; it now, so-to-speak, has leverage—decisive leverage.*

  [62:C-69] An odd idea came to me tonight: My Tagore vision and Kerygma seem, upon acute and prolonged examination, to issue from very ancient religious sources both Eastern and Western. The Eastern: pan-Indian (before Buddhism and Hinduism split apart); the Western: quite old Semitic notions of the role pre-fallen man held toward the Garden, when man lived with nature in harmony and was the caretaker of the Garden; thus an idyllic primordial state is sought for: restoration of that state depicted in Western (Near-Eastern) thought but by means of pan-Indian acknowledgement of suffering as the basis of all life, and that the spiritual being suffers for and with the totality of life the solution to which is withdrawal from the world—yet this Eastern view is neatly balanced by an appeal to man to repent of his ways, that man brought suffering into the world and disturbed the primordial harmony ... in fact destroyed it by plundering nature and then attacking it, rather than protecting and guarding it. If man is the cause, man can by changing his ways repair what he has done and restore the original harmony. What is to be done is a Western view; how man will be induced to change his ways and do this is Eastern.

  [62:C-74] Dream/hypnagogic: I have a wound on my leg, a vast vagina like healing wound, like a slit. A voice is saying, "Lesimi." With a start I wake up fully; this is Tagore's wound (and, I realize now, Amfortas' and by extension Christ's, from the spear).

  I have achieved spirituality (the Buddha or Christos state) but by sacrificing myself, physically injuring myself to the point where death is now a real possibility.➊ The spiritual element would not die; it would simply as cend out of this world back to its origin and home. But Tagore, my spiritual self, begs for an end to the inflicting of these burns—which (I repeat) I have taken on voluntarily by identifying myself with all life and the suffering of all creatures. It will not end by my ceasing to take on these stigmata; that is not what Tagore pleads for. Tagore pleads for an end of the crimes against life—not my life but other lives—that result in these voluntarily-assumed burns. Tagore—myself—he is crippled now, and yet he emits "an ineffable beauty, absolute, not relative, loving beauty, like music and perfume and colors." Tagore—my spiritual self—could cease at any time this voluntary taking on of the injuries, but he will not; he will die first; to repeat, it is the injuries that must stop, not his taking on of these injuries.

  Agent Orange and T-2: the day I typed up the Xerox letter. "Wounded and in pain and in mortal peril cries out for our help." The spiritual element in me, making my last appeal.

  ➊ This says it all.

  [62:C-79] I guess you could say that I have a messiah complex, and because of this am led ineluctably to voluntary crucifixion. To what? Achieve what? Protest the sins of the world. As I say supra: not to be saved—I am saved—but to save, and to perfect myself (vide supra). The drive toward the spiritual so strong in me now that I would give up my life in pursuit of it: for I have experienced the spiritual domain and know its joys. This is not anhedonia or masochism; the joys of the spiritual domain—to draw near to Krishna—are beyond all that this world is or has.

  I realized tonight—the ecosphere is my body: "the indivisible unity" is my total psychosomatic (mind-body) being. Animals and all less (sic) than human life are my body; and the humans poisoning the ecosphere—this is my mind ("mind"—"human species") poisoning my body by not recognizing that it must live in harmony with it, that they are parts of one indivisible whole. "If the ecosphere dies" means "if my body dies"—"then we (humans) die" and my mind dies.*

  ***

  [62:C-82–83] But underneath the content of my ideas is the value to me of ideas themselves, of the search (an Orphic idea) and the enjoyment of ideas with emphasis on the abstract, the enjoyment of using the abstracting faculty itself ... which is when I wrote Eureka.

  But it is not the intellect that characterizes Tagore; he is far beyond that. Nor is it love nor beauty, although both are there. It is sweetness, an ineffable sweetness related to love, related to beauty, but perhaps more to perfume, music and colors, as I say in my letter. This is a spirituality that cannot otherwise be categorized and it is this that tells me that his spirituality is absolute, for it transcends love and beauty, the two ultimate ontological categories of God. This is not God: this is a man, a given, individual man; this is not a deity (although he is also—but secondarily—deity), this is the perfection of a man such as we are, this is not the "wholly other" toward which one moves in delight and rapture: this is he—as man—who moves toward the wholly other—this is what we as humans can become at best, the transfiguration of the natural to its ultimate without ceasing to be natural, a created thing, not creator.

  [62:C-85] Who and what is Tagore? He is Tagore (a particular, not [a] God). But I know now: he is either Buddha, the Buddha, or a Buddha (awakened or enlightened one), and this is very seriously considered in VALIS as one of the possibilities; e.g., "the Buddha is in the Park." This is not mysticism or metaphysics or theology or philosophy; those have come to me and I enjoyed them, but they pass away and Tagore remains. And his concern is for life, the ecosphere, not a concern for speculations and flights of fancy. Compassion, the way of Buddha, the noblest way of all.

  Rejoice!

  Everything so far has been a head-trip, a system of thought, ideas, abstractions, speculations, beliefs. But Tagore is a man, a real and actual man. Even (which I doubt) if he is me, why, he is still a man, for I am a man.

  [62:C-86] Tremendous breakthrough insight 5:15 A.M. The whole Christian magic of 2-74 on worked because I believed in it; but it worked—not because Christianity is true—in contrast to other systems/religions which are false but because Sankara and the Buddhists are right: it is a conjurer's trick; it is magic; and what this points to (the fact that my total belief on that day in 2-74 when I saw the Christian fish sign caused everything that followed to occur) is illusion; as I say: magic, conjurer's tricks. Viz: Christianity to magic to conjurer's tricks to illusion. And what does illusion point to? The truth of Buddhism and Sankara; pan-Indian thought about the il lusory nature of "reality"; i.e., maya, not as a veil but as a so-to-speak plastic mist that obliges.

  [62:C-87] In the face of this, spiritual perfection depends on enlightenment that there is a grand illusion, inner and outer; and, finally, the kind of compassion for all the living creatures caught in the "weary wheel" of illusion's karma and rebirth, etc.

  [...] E.g., the Ƴ turning into a palm tree doesn't verify Christianity; it verifies the conjurer's trick and this is pan-Indian thought. So from 2-74 to 2-75 I was in the grip of maya. But: because "reality" (sic) obligingly altered to accommodate my belief (especially my seeing Rome A.D. 70 and Syria!) I had without realizing it verified not Christianity but maya as a doctrine. I was totally under the spell of illusion but, paradoxically, this very ill
usion (I mean the transformations in it!) held the clue to the real solution. I have not been radical enough; I have thought in terms of either something (reality) vs. nothing (illusion) but maya is not just hallucination; something is there (as Sankara pointed out), but it is able to assume any guise it wishes. (Sankara's example: the magician can cause you to take a rope to be a snake, but there is a rope there; something is there, but not a snake, but also not nothing.) Maya is halfway between hallucination (nothing) and reality (something that is what it seems to be); and this is why it resembles Ubik.

  [62:C-99] I don't know what's the matter with me—the "no-nukes" topic is the topic of protest and the new counter culture now, as the Vietnam war was in the 60's and 70's; the Tagore dream places me squarely in the middle of the new, current bipolarized battle—right where I ought to be. And this is what the Silkwood pamphlet must have made me realize, for it tied the nuclear issue in with all that I had to deal with and combat in the 60's/70's; all of a sudden it all came together as a single whole.33 Now the authorities are harassing and trying to silence the foes of nuclear power and weapons and waste-disposal. Perhaps my unconscious knew this; yet—for my coming to see this being part of the revelation of the savior himself—not just a dream about radioactive waste being dumped in the ocean, but about Tagore—this unites my spiritual vision (i.e., VALIS) and my political vision into one.