The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

The upsilon became a palm tree. The pink part was the phosphene after-image of the fish sticker.)

  So fish sign both times: in 2-74 (the meta-abstraction); and 3-74, Valis, the info about Chrissy.

  In 2-74 there was no pink light as such. But sunlight. Fish sign and light.

  Like Boehme. And Mr. Tagomi.*

  [57:Q-17] I am interested in only one thing: instead of society molding me, I mold it: (1) in my writing; (2) in what I do with the money; (3) in interviews; (4) in the movie—which links back to my writing, i.e., Androids. Vast thematic doctrines are emerging: agape, compassion, care of the weak by the strong, the imminent coming of God as Savior; that is, the kingship of God. This is what the whole opus adds up to: anticipation of the coming kingship of God.

  [57:Q-24] The total Kosmos is somehow "in" each part, which is a diagram I drew years ago:

  Now I see how this works. The Hermetics were indeed onto this, and the Taoist alchemists, and Leibniz (because of his involvement in Rosicrucianism).

  Interface half in the part (person), half in the whole (world), and thus modulates each to the other: advocate for the person in terms of what he does (acting toward the whole) and how he experiences world (the whole acting on him). In this case the part is not directly engaged with the whole but indirectly, and this is what I felt to be the case when Jeannie was on the phone. This fits Malebranche's model. It is related (as a model) to Cartesian epistemology having to do with world experienced as representation. This would seem to imply that what Kant calls "the transcendent self"—which maintains the ontological ordering categories—has been seized and occupied (by what we call the Holy Spirit, the Maitreya, Christ). This would de facto create cosmos. It would be total soteriological victory: it would possess the parts and create out of them the whole; thus individual salvation and restoration of the cosmos become one and the same thing and pertain directly to my 2-74 meta-abstraction (an instance of it).

  This gives a very precise account of what salvation and restoration consist of and also how it is done; and, moreover, it is (not "resembles" but is) 2-74.

  And this interface would be precisely the "Acts"-Tears—i.e., Apocalypse—lens-grid. So: QED. This is why when I saw world transformed—2-74 itself—although it was radically changed, it was absolutely comprehensible, and this is the whole point; world as it had been was enigmatic and in fact Fremd; world changed was both comprehensible and familiar: it was "my" world. Hence I say part-whole compatibility. But could this be a purely cognitive act and if so is it s (noesis)? [...] Because it looks to me that this is a purely cognitive act, it does create part-whole compatibility which leads via the "two mirror self-correcting sequence of ever more precise approximations"—a positive runaway!—to part-whole isomorphism, whereupon info of the whole arises parallel and acausally in the part: self-generating info as the basis of structure—negentropy—itself, by which the whole maintains itself as kosmos in the true sense: unified by affinity, not coercion or violence. The "universal language" is of course heard directly in (side) the mind of the person; this is the crucial index of part-whole isomorphism expressed in terms of info—info pertaining to the structure and not to anything outside it; thus the info pertains to itself; it is not only self-generating, it is the "thing" that it describes. This is precisely what The Book of Creation notes say: "With man, word and thought refer to object, but with God, thought, word, writing of word and thing are one and the same."68 And this is of course the plasmate! It is info, but it as info does not pertain to—point to—anything other than itself; thus King Felix does not point to the Savior; it is the info-stage of the life form "Savior" itself, just as St. Luke is the info stage of the world (the world of "Luke-Acts").

  I'm hot on the trail right now—since nothing exists outside of cosmos by definition, all info in it pertains to itself and permeates it and is self-causing. And identical throughout all loci. Then the info is eternally and ubiquitously retrieved and retrievable—as in Ubik.

  [...]

  AI voice and plasmate: one and the same. "Info metabolism."

  My God, the plasmate does crossbond with the human and replicate. But it's not an info life form; it's the metabolism of the whole (i.e., the true kosmos; this is how it can be kosmos). The plasmate is not in reality; no: reality is info. There's a crucial difference. This is why the mutual arrangement of objects is info or language.➊ Dynamically, in terms of activity, things are info—changing info. "The whole of him thinks," as Xenophanes said.

  VALIS is a very valuable book. Even though it doesn't explain why the universe is info it does say that it is (the why is: by being info it maintains its negentropy-level, i.e., its structure, expressed—as always—as/by info. It is true kosmos so it must maintain negentropic structure—hence info—throughout; if it ceases to, it ceases to be true kosmos and unity is lost in favor of atomized plurality. It is unitary precisely because it is info). So since we can't see the info we can see the structure, so we see plurality; when I saw Valis I saw unity, structure, hence info; what I was ulti mately seeing was kosmos (as field, as opposed to the atomists' discontinuous matter, which is anti-cosmos). This is both Plato and Pythagoras and totally Greek. It was lost (became "extinct") after Parmenides—hence the fall. So the statement by the AI voice, "Extinct true kosmos and it still there," is crucial.

  In a sense, to see kosmos—i.e., unity—you must see arrangement syntactically, as I noted ultra supra. The linguistic connectives, not "causal" connectives.

  But by this analysis, the AI voice's statements about the Savior must be veridical, since the statement (info) is the reality it pertains to; it is oxymoronic to speak of the possibility of this kind of info as "false"!

  ➊ My "groove to music" leap.

  [57:Q-33] With the return of the Eleatic continuum reality—instead of the discontinuous matter one—we will again be able to see God, literally; and this is the point of my exegesis. And I know that the continuum one is true—and the discontinuous matter one is not—because the AI voice said, "A perturbation in the reality field." [...]

  When I was very little I used to see and experience space as real, palpable, "thick." It scared and oppressed me, because I did not understand how motion was possible. I used to squeeze it (as, e.g., when I was sick in the bathroom). It took effort to bring my finger and thumb together. And it was artificial and difficult for me to render space into void.

  So my continuum view was natural to me and had to be trained out of me, or else I saw that things did not in fact move (change) but "only look different"—i.e., no time had passed, in other words, I experience God and eternity, but had to learn to experience world and time instead, because everyone (else) said, "That's what's there." I had no words for what I saw (God), nor did I understand it. Or even like it.

  But it was the correct way of seeing, but I knew not what it was, and it oppressed me.

  [57:Q-34] It is the interface that is God, in Malebranche's system. God is not "in" the writing exactly, although the writing is Scripture (Torah). God is here already. Between. This is what happened with Luke that time, and with Tears when I saw the two word cypher, and with Jeannie. In a sense, then, this is not incarnation of all, but also it is: it is the universal language, as at Pentecost. To understand how it works you must know Malebranche. This of course is also how the "Acts" lens-grid worked, producing part whole compatibility and restoring true cosmos. I've solved 2-3-74, including the two word cypher.

  [57:Q-36] Hypnopompic: pronunciation mark in dictionary: (based on the three S's: service, etc.) "For pain. For hope." "He is out there somewhere."

  I see a synthesis higher than anything I have ever seen before: the spirit—the finest parts—of Marxism, Christianity, Buddhism—and yet it is above all this; and out of me it draws the most noble drives and aspirations, the mystical and the urgently practical combined. It is as if the dialectic has achieved new heights, like nothing I have ever seen before. And he gives voice to and codifies the best in me, that up to now was inchoate. I
never knew myself before now; my own nature was to me obscure. Everything in me at last takes shape. I utterly repudiate the policies of the regime but I turn—not inward—but to something so beautiful that I could not have imagined it. "For pain, for hope"; that says it all. This is a fortiori the two dialectical antitheses of the new synthesis! Pain (the suffering of people) and my caring (agape) about their suffering, and the hope that Maitreya brings forth a radical transformation in our and their lives. This synthesis—pain and hope—is above tragedy and is absolute beauty; it is grounded in human pain and the need to relieve that pain, and the hope—and conviction—that it can be relieved through the Maitreya and his program. The terrible side is pain, the salvific side is hope; out of these two comes action and the will to act, to change the world. Pain and hope are the two mutually exclusive primary realities that unify and become the ultimate, new synthesis for our age; we must feel both to experience this new synthesis that is serving, simplicity, and sharing; pain without hope is miserable, but hope without pain is empty and futile.

  Hope. That is the key for me in all this, in terms of my oscillation between doubt, faith, conviction, credulity, paranoia, fear, suspicion. Hope generated by the pain of the life of the planet. Hope that the new dispensation is authentic.

  I do not now act out of guilt or conscience or duty or sense of obligation or the Torah (law), but because my loving (Maitri) teacher who smiled down at me tells—instructs—me to. This is the highest truth of all: he, my tutelary spirit and mystagogue, Maitreya, is the AI voice—I hear and have long heard his voice. The AI voice is the Maitreya, and what he as my tutelary spirit and teacher tells me is dharma: the path/way/Tao. It is the path because it accords with truth; hence it is rational; thus I saw Maitreya break into our universe, he is the rational, it is the irrational; the two ages: he slept and now awakens. It is Sila, the voice of the universe and it is born among us. Creme is wrong; it is God; it is YHWH, and this is my secret. And yet he is Christ to the Christians, Krishna to the Hindus, etc. This is the most extraordinary miracle ever heard of, and it is real: it is no "psychotronic" trick!

  [57:Q-41] In a single vast stroke my teacher— Sorer!➊ My sister.69 Oh JHWH—my sister. I meant to write Savior. Transformed all my characterological faults into virtue; this is the last in ultimate abolition of my karma.

  Sister. He (who?) comes to me as my sister who died. What does this mean? The ultimate restoration of what was lost.* "For I am building a new heaven and new earth...."

  ➊ The AI voice itself took me over—as in 3-74—and wrote "sister." Thus it identified itself at last; it told me who it is. And this is the Maitreya, who is to you what means most.

  [57:S-5] I had an extraordinary insight in the middle of the night:

  What I realized is: true existence requires experience of both Yang . Yin: I saw them as two rings, a bright one of light (Yang) and a darker one of Yin. But the latter still real and necessary. The above diagram is expressed dramatically and in macroform in VALIS. I experienced it as the dialectic. What was expressed last night in my vision of the dark—or darker— ring—or circle—of Yin is that, as Ted Sturgeon speaks of, you voluntarily incarnate (e.g., as I did in 1928 as PKD) to deliberately experience Yin: creatoreal, irrational existence here (as bodhisattva) in order to know and to be Yin. The Yang side is the bright unfallen side and in salvador salvandus, one's other—and rational—self, who enters in order to rescue the Yin or limited or darkened, incarnated self. This is why the inbreaking of the Yang side (2-3-74) is anamnesis: recovered memory of one's own lost true self. This is also an extricating yourself from the maze by first being outside the maze—i.e., having solved it. Otherwise, fruitless horizontal tracking goes on forever; once (voluntarily) incarnated you are stuck there (here) forever. So I am a unitary whole now, with one part as a direct antecedent from the upper realm (Thomas) and one (PKD) from the lower realm.

  Editor's note: The Exegesis ends on page S-6.*

  Afterword: A Stairway to Eleusis: PKD, Perennial Philosopher

  BY RICHARD DOYLE

  CASTING PHILIP K. DICK as a prophet of the information planet is of necessity an entirely retroactive story. Yet it is a fiction that emerges, like many of Dick's novels about simulation, as profoundly true. Dick read Marshall McLuhan and Teilhard de Chardin, his fellow Prophets of the Digital Age; they likely never heard of him. Yet what smacks of downright prophecy in PKD is not limited to the content of his fiction; it extends to the feeling of reality-distortion induced by reading his work. PKD's fiction taps into shamanic powers to shape and bend consciousness and the realities that project from it. This same feeling, of being directly addressed by a bard, a storyteller, and a deeply suffering and profoundly honest human being across space and time, is one the Exegesis has for us in spades. Dick teaches us what it can feel like to be in an infoquake, like those the twenty-first century provides in such abundance. He offers us thought experiments for "plugging into a galactic information network." To paraphrase Dick's contemporary Hunter S. Thompson, the going gets very weird indeed.

  When you begin reading the Exegesis, you undertake a quest with no shortcuts or cheat codes. The Exegesis is almost nine thousand pages long. "Almost nine thousand pages" makes the verb "read" tremble and giggle. The question is: to whom is PKD writing this? An easy answer would be: himself. On one level, this is a perfectly sound answer: writing the Exegesis was Dick's epic quest for self-knowledge. Writing it, he was also rewriting himself and, just possibly, finding out who he was and what had happened to him.

  But on another level—the one that may visit you between one line of this volume and another—it is equally unmistakable that Dick was writing to us. Not as a collective of future readers who would guarantee his immortality. Dick's success has come mostly after his death, and if you read his treatment of immortality and life extension in novels such as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch or Ubik, you will see that Dick viewed such efforts as at best absurd and at worst the essence of darkness itself. Besides, when PKD believes in Eternity—and periodically he very much does—he hardly needs any of us to achieve it, for the Exegesis suggests again and again that the path to Eternity can be found through, well, exegesis.

  In his ongoing practice of writerly contemplation, Dick discovers, again and again, the unity of all things, the level that integrates all of the fragments of our chaotic drama (what Dick, pointing to India, calls "maya"), and reveals our unique role in it. So too can we, perhaps through contagion, experience the same: the preposterous feeling that one gets when reading the Exegesis is that he is writing to each of us, uniquely and specifically. You were born to read the Exegesis, or at least some of it. This, he says, is the Mystery: "What I have experienced is initiation into the greater Eleusian mysteries, and these have to do with Dionysus ... The AI voice now precisely defined itself and what it has revealed to me: the greater mysteries" (folder 53).

  What are the Eleusian Mysteries? These took place in an annual ceremony in ancient Greece that dramatized the return of life each spring through the myths of Demeter and Persephone. Participants were sworn to secrecy, with violations punishable by death, but the Roman writer and politician Cicero wrote that the greatest achievement of ancient Athens was those "Mysteries by which we are formed and moulded from a rude and savage state of humanity; and, indeed, in the Mysteries we perceive the real principles of life, and learn not only to live happily, but to die with a fairer hope" (Dudley Wright, The Eleusinian Mysteries and Rites, 1919).

  Why might initiates "die with a fairer hope"? The highest achievement of the Mysteries was for a participant to experience épopteia, or "contemplation." Contemplation derives etymologically from "the act of looking at," and what might be perceived is the true nature of the self in the context of Eternity. Dionysus, of course, is the god of drunkenness and vegetation and is frequently invoked by writers seeking to break the grip of our ordinary perception of fragmentation and chaos such that we might perceive "the real principles of life."
In the Exegesis we become intoxicated by a massive flow of language. In fact, while the sheer quantity of text produced for the Exegesis makes it comparable only to Ibn Arabi's fifteen-thousand-page modern edition of al-Futûhât al-makkiyya (Meccan Openings), Dick's arguments, diagrams, summaries, breakthroughs, and premature conclusions all put him, along with Arabi (a Muslim whose visions included Jesus and Moses) and the Mysteries, squarely within what Aldous Huxley called "the Perennial Philosophy": the "contemplative" traditions at the core of all world religions. Samuel Taylor Coleridge—whose "Kubla Khan" was, like VALIS, influenced by the mystic traditions of both West and East—describes this as "the criterion of a true philosophy; namely, that it would at once explain and collect the fragments of truth scattered through systems apparently the most incongruous." If the computer age "smithereens" us in the transformation of our planet into the digital "bits" of information, Dick's unique remix of the Perennial Philosophy teaches us how he at least periodically found what Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem call an "inkling" of unity.

  In other words, while the Exegesis is certainly a quantitative curiosity in the archives of our planet's extant philosophy and literature, the content and character of his quest are oddly traditional, and astonishingly effective. Dick's writing during this period is an act of courageous and absurd synthesis of the diverse and sundry traditions that make up Huxley's Perennial Philosophy as well as anthropologist Michael Harner's notion of "Core Shamanism": the global techniques of diverse religions and cultures that focus on dissolving the ordinary self such that we might get a glimpse of reality. Dick, writing through the psychedelic sixties and seventies and into the early eighties, seems to have discovered a way to alter our consciousness entirely through language, remixing the old esoteric traditions of alchemy, shamanism, contemplation, and prayer in his wacky cauldron of science fiction and metaphysics.