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* Dick is most likely referencing Rudolf Otto's comparative study of Meister Eckhart and Sankara, Mysticism East and West: A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of Mysticism (1932). Otto (1869–1937) was a major German scholar of comparative religion who helped introduce the term "the holy" or "the sacred" (das Heilige) into the field, by which he meant, in his Latin phrase, a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, that is, a mystical presence at once terrifying and alluring (an idea that Dick clearly draws on in other parts of the Exegesis). "Master" Eckhart (1260–1327) was a Dominican scholar and preacher whose most radical mystical teachings were condemned shortly before he died. Sankara (eighth–ninth century) was one of the most important expositors of Advaita Vedanta or idealist "nondualism" in medieval India. Stunned by his own paradoxical experience of the inside being outside and the outside being inside, Dick was picking up on the similarities between the two intellectual mystics here, which he could now see and understand precisely through his own experiences.—JJK
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* This compelling but cryptic passage represents Dick's recovery of one of Schopenhauer's key aims: salvation from the world of illusion, and the attainment of intuitive access to what Nietzsche, in his early Schopenhauerian phase, saw as the mysterious and Dionysian unity of being that is the unconscious will, whose blind urgings Dick here identifies with God. If the core of the Exegesis is a blissful recovery of intellectual intuition, of gnosis, then a corresponding Schopenhauerian theme that emerges is that our existence in the phenomenal world is an experience of suffering and pain. Human life is a kind of mistake, a detour on the way to life's goal: death. Indeed, a recurrent feature of the lives of mystics is the experience of dejection and depression, understood as distance from God. Such despair occurs repeatedly in the Exegesis and with greater frequency in the later years, as in [90:69]: "When I believe, I am crazy. When I don't believe, I suffer psychotic depression."—SC
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* We see not unity but an "exploded" chaos. Dick sees a world of suffering, including his own, yet Valis offers reintegration through "entelechy"—the actualization of divine potential akin to the development of an embryo. Shattered, we dwell in an explosion of false categories, divided from the eternal in space and time. Despite this rhetoric of "explosion"—resonant with the 1971 burglary of Dick's Marin County house and the explosion of his fireproof file cabinet, something like the Big Bang of Valis—the divine reality remains to be integrated through a consciousness willing to "go there." Fragments of trash become what Gabriel Mckee calls the "god in the gutter," as the most abject or insignificant phenomenon becomes a "splinter" connected in reality to the One. Here even suffering and evil can be creatively understood as a finger pointing elsewhere—beyond the dispersed consciousness of our splintered selves and toward the collective eternal Noös, a communion of mind that can only be discovered by each of us in our own particularity. This is perhaps a calling in a triple sense: Dick calls—names—the perception of the integrated Noös "Valis," and the articulation of this perception is also, clearly, his calling, his vocation—and perhaps ours.—RD
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* Faced with the problem of how to map time and space when they no longer obey the logics of linearity and extension, Dick turns to more virtual models of infodynamics. Note that in this instance information is viewed as an "aspect" of reality rather than its essence. One of Dick's refrains in his contemplation of 2-3-74 is a line from Wagner's Parsifal: "Here, my son, time turns into space." Here Dick posits a continuity between all time and space through recourse to a higher order of abstraction: the informational aspect of reality. But Dick avoids the usual opposition between "information" and reality.—RD
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* Dick's handwriting changes here, midpage, to a wild, overheated scrawl. Such moments are scattered throughout the Exegesis. Here and in many cases, Dick's rush of ideas seems to reflect the labile intensity of his holograph, as if a distinct shift in consciousness has taken place.—PJ
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* The difference between "is" and "does" underlies a good deal of Dick's theorizing as he navigates between traditional philosophical questions about the essence of things (ontology) and a process paradigm based on genetics, informatics, and cybernetic systems theory. Within this latter paradigm, with its heuristic emphasis on process, experiment, and rules of thumb, philosophical questions about the "true nature" of things just get in the way of exploring the possibilities and problems in any given situation. After all, the skepticism that Dick also favors can always undermine notions of God and Being, but has a tougher time denying the evident fact that, even if you cannot know what the world really is, you still have to deal with it. And dealing with it means that, on some level anyway, your options are open because you have choice. Process leads toward pragmatism—the philosophical equivalent of the handyman who recurs throughout Dick's fiction. In the following folder [6:44], Dick will make this point more explicit. Acknowledging there that truth is plastic—even and especially in a "metaphysical" zone like the bardo—one still faces the most concrete of questions: "I ask, not, 'What is true?' but, 'What modulations shall I imprint on the stuff around me?'"—ED
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† We can detect a new mood in the Exegesis that deepens as Dick's thinking evolves: a dialectical mood. Whether this is conscious or not, Dick seems to be close to Hegel's insight in the Phenomenology of Spirit that the historical process, through which new shapes of Spirit appear and dissolve, is a highway of misery. Crucially, however, the highway does not end in despair, but in the self-consciousness of freedom understood as self-determination. This insight might be linked to Dick's later references to history as an engine of pain and suffering that culminates in the achievement of human freedom, or the closing entry of the Exegesis, on the dialectic of pain and hope.—SC
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* Here Dick identifies his thinking with the Marxist idea that history is a dialectic that will culminate in communist revolution. In part, Dick is attempting to engage the leftist literary critics whose interest in his work in the 1970s both pleased and unnerved him. At the same time, Dick's thinking already employs dualistic motifs that cast history as a dialectical conflict between the forces of Empire and those who struggle for freedom—what is described elsewhere in the Exegesis as the struggle between God and Satan. We should also note Dick's frequent identification of true Christianity as revolutionary and Christ as a revolutionary figure. In this way, Dick retrieves the historical link that has often bound together rebellious quasi-gnostic movements, like the Cathars or the Heresy of the Free Spirit, with forms of insurgent political populism and indeed communism. Giordano Bruno, one of the other "heretics" to whom Dick is attracted, also professed a charismatic yet hermetic pantheism that has long been linked to forms of radical anti-Church insurgency. That is why, in many small Italian towns, a statue of Bruno, often erected by the local Communist Party, stands facing the principal Catholic church.—SC
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* What an odd, and incredibly paranoid, idea. And a popular one. We see something similar with the black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). We see an even closer version of this extraterrestrial mind-control computer in John A. Keel's The Eighth Tower (1975), a book that Dick easily could have read. The "eighth tower" is Keel's mythical way of referring to the machinelike origin-beacon of something he calls the superspectrum, an electromagnetic spectrum of physical and metaphysical energies that produces all the occult and paranormal phenomena found in folklore and the history of religions—from the angels and demons of medieval lore to the Big Foot and UFOs of today. For Keel, this same technology also produces the "devil theories" of history, that is, the religious revelations that claim to be final truths when in fact they are no such thing. The result is endless wars.
Unless we can stop being fooled by the signals of this superspectrum, violence and absurdity will continue. Keel is obviously performing a kind of thought experiment here of the most radical sort. So was Dick.—JJK
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* Just as the Exegesis responds to Dick's calling, so readers of the Exegesis may be called on to investigate Dick's claims, to test them through what B. Alan Wallace dubs "contemplative science." This means that, along with Dick, we must be wary of treating our investigations as anything more than models of reality. The "Son" discussed elsewhere by Dick is born out of the "immaculate conception" of thought—the removal or emptying of previous thought formations. This path of contemplative science can be hard going—Dick asks us to consider the idea that our sense of historical ground does not exist, where nothing important has changed since ancient Rome. Humans suffer, are exploited by large-scale institutions, grow old, become ever more confused, and die. Buddhism describes this as Samsara, the "wheel of dharma." Nietzsche's Zarathustra describes the repetition driving history as the most terrifying thought—the thought of eternal return—but Dick suggests that it is through practices of contemplation and exegesis that the real horror—the false perception of linear time—is overcome. This is not the Rapture predicted by fundamentalist Christianity, but the corrected perception of our nature as both human and eternal.—RD
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* Dick's realization that the deity he describes is a projection of his own beliefs leads him to the conclusion that God has manifested Himself in precisely the form he had already accepted and was prepared to believe in. What lines of reasoning insulate Dick from the other obvious conclusion: that what he has described not only takes the form of his projection but is his projection? There seem to be two answers to this question: first, his prior commitment to the existence of the deity; and second, his earlier theory about the deity's ability to mimic reality in all kinds of ways. A deity that can mimic what we take to be reality becomes, in effect, bulletproof against any objection, for any deviation or change in what (for us) constitutes reality can be explained by the difference between a deity that simply is reality and one that mimics reality.—NKH
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* Despite what we are repeatedly told by the dogmatic debunkers, there is a rich and impressive scientific literature on precognition. Dean Radin of the Institute of Noetic Sciences has been one of the real pioneers here, particularly around what he calls "presentiment," a kind of Spidey-sense that many people appear to possess that allows them to sense dangers or desires a few seconds into the future—in short, a humble form of Dick's future modulation. What is perhaps most significant here, and not always recognized, is that the parapsychological literature strongly suggests that most psychical functioning takes place unconsciously (or in dreams), that is, below the radar and range of our conscious selves or functioning egos. We are Two, and our second self is a Super Self.—JJK
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* When W. Y. Evans-Wentz first prepared the Bardo Thödol for its English edition in 1927, he called it The Tibetan Book of the Dead in order, one suspects, to link it to the popular Egyptian Book of the Dead. Dick owned the 1960 edition of the text, which had been reissued with a new introduction by Carl Jung. A funerary text designed to be read at the bedside of the dead, the Bardo Thödol is more accurately called Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State. The intermediate state in question is the bardo, the spectral halls of transformation that lie between the death of the body and the almost inevitable rebirth of one's mind-stream: most souls are made so variously terrified and lustful by the apparitions that they are inevitably sucked back for another round. For the Buddhist practitioner, release lies in recognizing the emptiness of these projections, which are nothing other than one's own mind. Dick's insight here—that the bardo is actually our world—is perfectly in sync with traditional teachings, as the "intermediate state" refers not only to the afterlife but also to sleeping, dreaming, sneezing, and life itself. We are always in a liminal zone. For the Tibetans, an escape of sorts lies in the clear light of nonconceptual mind; Dick's more wayward light is pink, which is also, in Tibetan iconography, the color of the supreme lotus of the Buddha.—ED
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* Here Dick suggests the radically liberatory possibility that reality, the Tao, the Palm Tree Garden, can break through the present if "you" will "destroy" prior thought formations, including those that separate "you" from the One. Here Dick resonates with Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, who wished only to awaken from the nightmare of history, an awakening later perhaps achieved by Joyce in Finnegans Wake. Readers familiar with Zen, or Korzybski's notion that "the map is not the territory," or the "stillness" in which the divine can manifest in Quaker or Vedic traditions, will recognize some of the practices appropriate for a world mediated and constituted by the multiple "objectified" mistakes of language and other previous thought formations. In this sense Valis "comes not to destroy but to fulfill the law" (Mt 5:17) by overturning prior concepts like so many tables in the temple. "For I say unto you, that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven" (Mt 5:20). Righteousness here is anything but self-righteousness. It is instead the humility and practice necessary to silence the mind in order to perceive reality, a "causal field" unmistakably affected by the language by which we model it.—RD
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* Dick's holograph is notably erratic throughout this folder, pulsing in waves of ecstasy and calm. Given the manic diagramming throughout the folder (a full-page example is included in this volume's insert), as well as his invocation of Diana and the fairies, this may well represent the "superdope" episode to which Dick refers in a later folder [83:60].—PJ
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* As noted in other annotations, Dick's line of speculation here is remarkably similar to the vision of the German judge Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911), who imagined that God wanted to change him into a woman and impregnate her with sunbeams so that their offspring could save the world. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) wrote one of his most famous case studies about Schreber in Three Case Histories: Psychoanalytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (1911), basing his diagnosis on Schreber's detailed memoir Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903). Though the two never met, Freud diagnosed Schreber as a paraphrenic paranoid suffering from—surprise!—repressed homosexual desires. While Dick's vision here is remarkably similar to Schreber's, he makes no mention of the judge anywhere in the Exegesis, though Dick could well have encountered the case given his extensive knowledge of psychology.—DG
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* As noted earlier, Mircea Eliade was a well-known and much-read scholar of comparative religion who was at his professional height when Dick read him in the 1970s. Here he is referring to one of Eliade's major early books, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951), a massive survey of the anthropological literature as it existed around 1950, organized around Eliade's own glosses and comparative reflections. Eliade focuses especially on the initiatory illness, magical powers, healing function, poetic gifts, and mystical experiences of the shaman and, perhaps most of all, on the shaman's role as a psychopomp. Eliade also emphasizes the quest for the recovery of sacred time before the "Fall" into history, here understood in the most general sense as linear temporality, finitude, and mortality. This abolishment or transcendence of time, of course, is also a central concern of Dick's. Hence, I suspect, his deep admiration for Eliade's work.—JJK
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* Another new mood is here announced in the Exegesis: a tragic dialectics. Dick has come across Coleridge's understanding of tragedy, which adapts the early ideas of F.W.J. Schelling. Schelling held that the essence of tragedy consists in a collision between the tragic hero, who is free, and fa
te, which is the limitation of freedom, the realm of necessity. The sublimity of tragedy consists in the demonstration of freedom in the confrontation with that which destroys it. This is what we see, for example, in the tragedy of Oedipus. Tragedy is here linked to the idea of suffering leading to an experience of truth, as when Aeschylus says repeatedly in the Oresteia, "We must suffer, suffer into truth." These tragic insights might also be linked to Dick's repeated references to Euripides' Bacchae, in particular the collision between King Pentheus (bad) and the god Dionysos (good). These also look forward to a closing passage in this collection where Dick describes the Exegesis as a collision between himself and "what oneself has writ." On this view, the Exegesis might be interpreted as the entirely self-conscious enactment of a tragic dialectics that moves between the poles of suffering and salvation.—SC
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* In this act of perceiving the "ultra-thought," Dick is very close to another California sage, Franklin Merrell Wolff. Wolff, a Harvard mathematician who gave up a position at Stanford in order to study in India in the 1930s, deduced a series of axioms about human nature that follow from his first axiom: "Consciousness without an object is." "Consciousness without an object" is consciousness "beholding" nothing but itself, which is palpably not an object but is experienced as fact. Wolff's experiences of "recognition" are instructive for comprehending (and therefore experiencing) the invisible landscape of Dick's epic quest. So too does Dick's passage here reflect the other aspect of this inner beholding—"reality as knowledge." Once one has looked within, one contemplates external reality and inner reality as the "same thing." Astronomer Carl Sagan repeated biologist Julian Huxley's phrase that "we are a way for the cosmos to know itself." Dick's investigations of the concepts and practices of the noösphere in the Exegesis emerge out of this perception of ourselves as physical manifestations of thought.—RD
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick Page 126