Philip K. Dick and Philosophy

by D. E. Wittkower

  We can, however, increasingly limit it. According to Spinoza, we can do this by recognizing suffering’s origins and causes. Fat can overcome the mental anguish attached to Gloria’s death by forming a deeper appreciation of its causes, in turn realizing how her death caused his own melancholy. In order to develop a sufficiently rich enough understanding to overcome his sadness, Fat must embrace the metaphysics of the Mind while simultaneously developing a firm grasp of the causal chains leading up to his breakdown. Once he takes it to heart that we must suffer because we’re part of the Mind and that there are external causes of Gloria’s death, Fat can defend himself from the emotionally detrimental effects of misfortune. Understanding the true metaphysics, so Spinoza claims and as Fat should learn, sets us on the path toward self-preservation.

  Spinoza’s suggestion here is really an intellectually-charged version of “developing thick skin.” In order to achieve freedom from emotional torment, we must realize that reality is necessarily cruel and that most misfortunes are out of our control. Resolutely believing this dampens the twinge of our sorrows, allowing us to finally see that “So long as we are not agitated by affects which are contrary to our nature do we possess the power of arranging and connecting the affections of the body according to the order of the intellect” (5p10). The better understanding we have of the origin and nature of suffering, the more we can overcome it and act according to our essence. If Fat can recognize the terrible necessity of suffering and learn to appreciate that causes other than him fully explain Gloria’s death, he can start freeing himself from suffering’s bondage.

  So, yes, Spinoza can save Fat. However, such a path to happiness may simply redefine sanity in an insane world. For each version of monism requires us to ditch beliefs we take as selfevident and valuable. We take ourselves to posses some amount of free will, we tend to believe that some events are contingent, and most of us simply can’t accept that our emotional life is a metaphysical consequence of living within a blob. The implications of Fat’s and Spinoza’s respective monisms just seem crazy. Within the monist world, then, it’s indeed true that “sometimes it is an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”11

  17

  The Gnosis of 2-3-74

  RONALD S. GREEN

  The last major writings of Philip K. Dick, VALIS the most famous among them, contain many points of reflections of Gnostic texts in the Nag Hammadi Library. Those texts describe the formation of the material universe arising as part of a series of accidents, mistakes, and sometimes malicious devices used by an imperfect architect ignorant of the true creator.

  Dick took up this idea of multiple imperfect architects not only in the world of VALIS, but even in the way the narrative unfolds through the mentally-deficient character of Horselover Fat. Fat is usually unaware that he is merely an author surrogate for the true creator, Philip K. Dick, who also appears in the story as a (sometimes) different character.

  The Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi present a kind of religious-metaphysical conspiracy theory which, of course, resonated deeply with an author who had already explored hidden realities featuring gods who were somewhat less-than-divine in works like “Adjustment Team,” “A Present for Pat,” and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

  In February and March 1974, a period he refers to as 2-3-74, Philip K. Dick experienced a series of intense and life-changing visions he sometimes related to Gnosticism. These seem to have started when, while Dick was under the influence of sodium pentathol administered for an impacted tooth, a delivery woman arrived at his door wearing a pendant with a Christian fish emblem. Afterwards Dick placed a fish sticker on a window in his house and, perhaps in relation to the sun shining through it, he saw bright rectangular images he felt contained information from a divine or otherwise extraordinary source.

  For the rest of his life, he continued to come up with new ways of interpreting what had happened and what it meant. The varying accounts of the same “transmissions” became the basis for Radio Free Albemuth and the VALIS trilogy, and are also described and interpreted in his Exegesis. Within each of these books several differing accounts are given, but all assume a transcendental consciousness penetrated his mind through mundane expressions hiding some ultimate truth, and that this consciousness is at least in part beyond human rationality.

  Accordingly, these truths cannot be fully expressed in ordinary terms, but a variety of mythic stories might be used to convey some aspects of them. In this, the VALIS trilogy resembles Gnostic texts, Hindu epics, and other pieces of classical religious literature: Dick’s last writings tell and retell the same stories in a range of contradictory ways.

  In other novels such overt inconsistencies might make the stories unreadable. But because of the contradictory nature of reality that is assumed in these stories, these seeming contradictions are for Dick supportive of one another, all being imperfect reflections of higher truth, just like the material world itself. In The Divine Invasion, Herb Asher says the early church felt that because the resurrection of Christ was impossible it must have happened. That is to say, when mundane reality completely explains an event it must be wrong. Only when there are seeming contradictions might an assumption be correct. Higher truths are hidden and not explainable in ordinary terms. Likewise in VALIS, when characters continually point out the inconsistencies in the descriptions of his divine visions, Horselover Fat feels this reinforces their validity.

  Dick’s Gnosis about Gnostics

  VALIS can provisionally be called a “novel,” but it is also an autobiography, and a mystical text for those who are able to understand it that way. This multivalent way of writing and reading is in keeping with Gnostic views of the multidimensionality of reality and Gnostic subtexts. Writings in the Nag Hammadi Library interpret and retell stories from the New Testament, Plato, Pythagoras, and others, allegedly based on divine inspiration and revelation on the part of the Gnostic reader and writer. As the name implies, Gnostics interpret the nature of reality by relying on gnosis, which can be defined as intuitive, transcendental insight; or hidden, secret knowledge, immediately certain without evidence or argument. Gnostics believed that they were able to enter into a kind of spiritual communion with these authors and with divine entities, allowing them to faithfully tell the “hidden truth” of the stories of others—even though their retellings were sometimes radical departures from the originals.

  Nag Hammadi is a city in Upper Egypt. In 1945, farmers looking for fertile soil found a sealed earthenware jar on the outskirts of the city. At first they were afraid to open it, thinking it may contain an evil genie. However, feeling it was equally possible that it contained gold, they opened it and found thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices. Unfortunately they used one of these to kindle a fire.

  The remaining books eventually made their way to the hands of museum officials. Since then, scholars have identified more than fifty separate writings within these volumes. They have been dated to around 390 C.E., although they are believed to translate earlier works. Many of these writings have been declared significant works of Gnostics, potentially changing our understanding of the history and ideology of early Christianity.

  In VALIS, Horselover Fat speaks about the importance of the Nag Hammadi texts. For Fat, the texts provide an affirmation of his developing understanding of his personal mental defect and his view that his personal mental problems mirror the larger defect suffered by humankind: namely, that we have forgotten that we ourselves are divine. At the same time, the Nag Hammadi texts validate Dick’s revelation about the solution to this problem: remembering through gnosis. (The Library became widely available in English translation only in 1977, and Dick claimed his vision was not shaped but confirmed by reading the texts.)

  Two writings found side-by-side in Codex II of the Library coincide particularly well with his idea that human suffering and insanity are based in cosmogony; in the way the universe was created and structured. These are The Hypostasis of the Archons (the Re
ality of the Rulers) and an untitled document that has been given the name On the Origin of the World. Both interpret Genesis in ways that affirm various Gnostic beliefs, including the notion that our world was not constructed by the true God. In both writings, as in the VALIS trilogy, the speaker appears to change a number of times so that parts of the narration are retold from different perspectives.

  Both of these Gnostic texts speak of an incorruptible realm also personified as the Incorruptible. From the incorruptible realm, Sophia, the spirit of wisdom, experiments with creating without her male aspect, who is referred to as the father-of-the-entirety. While the incorruptible is described as either filled with or being beautiful light, Sophia’s experiment creates a veil of some type that casts a shadow. Darkness flows from the veil downward in a way both texts describe as like an aborted fetus. This becomes chaos with a bottomless watery abyss. Sophia breathes life into the darkness so a ruler over matter would form. The ruler moves across the face of the waters and Sophia says, “Child, pass through here,” rendered as “yalda baōth” in the Coptic language of these texts. This begins verbal expression and the ruler is called Yaldabaoth (or Yaltabaōth). Having made the ruler over matter, Sophia withdraws her spiritual light from Yaltabaoth and the lower realm. In VALIS, Horselover Fat mentions Yaltabaoth to one of his psychiatrics, who responds, “What the hell are you talking about?”

  The hell he is talking about is the material world and the arrogant being Yaltabaoth, who, ignorant of his origin and the realm above the veil, declares that he is God and that nothing else exists. Hearing this, Sophia calls him Samael, “the blind god.” Samael appears here as an archon, or ‘ruler’. In the Talmud, Samael is an archangel. Sophia causes the blasphemous words of the ruler to descend away from the incorruptible realm and Yaltabaoth to follow them downward to Tartaros. Tartaros is a pit or abyss that appears in classic Greek mythology, in the book of Job and elsewhere as a place of punishment. It’s typically thought of as being below Earth.

  By virtue of having both male and female characteristics, Yaltabaoth creates other beings that are also androgynous. His offspring become seven separate realms and the rulers of those seven heavens, likely based on the seven visible planets. Sophia arranges the placement of the seven heavens according to the attributes of the rulers and in some way mirroring the arrangement of the invisible, immaterial and incorruptible realm above the veil. These rulers of the lower realms have a soul or life but are not endowed with the divine spirit or light of the father-of-the-entirety.

  It is the will of the father-of-the-entirety to unite everything above and below through light. To begin the process, Sophia looks down and her face is reflected briefly on the surface of the bottomless waters. Seeing the reflection, the rulers become enamored and try to reproduce it. At the same time they are afraid of what they saw, fearing something greater than them exists. As with the visible realm mirroring the invisible, this continues a series of references to reflections and twins that Dick echoes in his writings. In all cases the relationships between the various pairs are confused, ambivalent, and forgotten. Yaltabaoth separates land from the water and shapes a human from the mud, modeled after the reflection of Sophia. The clay figure is a reflection of a reflection of the reality of Sophia that Yaltabaoth has never seen directly. Yaltabaoth breaths soul or life into the mud but it remains wallowing on the ground because it does not have spirit. This weakness pleases the rulers. But Sophia secretly puts her light into the clay, giving it spirit and thereby making him a man. She also gives him a voice and by it he is called Adam.

  Dick’s Twins

  In Gnostic thought, divine or mythic figures like Zoe, Eve, and Norea are viewed as syzygic pairs (necessarily co-existing couples) with other religious figures, such as Adam and Noah. These and other pairings of males and females represent active and passive attributes of the divine. In some Gnostic traditions Sophia or Zoe, embodied in Mary Magdalene, is in syzygy with Jesus. In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, also in the Nag Hammadi Library, Jesus says to Thomas that when he comes to know who he really is he will discover that he is identical to Christ, that he and Jesus are identical twins. The readers of these gospels and VALIS are apparently meant to understand themselves as the twins of Jesus, Thomas, and Dick.

  Dick relates his lifelong obsession with his twin sister, who had died five weeks after their premature births, to syzygy. He thought of her as a missing part of his life he longed to understand. The lost twin is often a motif in his books and also plays out in other pairings, like Zina-Yah and Herb-Linda Fox in The Divine Invasion. Dick told Gregg Rickman, in an interview published as Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament, that the tragic element running through his life is the perpetual re-enactment of the death of his twin. The death of a woman is central to the books of the VALIS trilogy. In Entry 32 of the Exegesis at the end of VALIS, Dick explains the unfolding of the world as a narrative about the death of a woman he describes as half of the divine syzygy.

  Linda Fox is thought by critics to be based on Linda Ronstadt, who is also mentioned in The Divine Invasion. In the paired realities created alternately by Emmanuel and Zina, she is in some sense like the clay model of Eve, not really human until Zina endows her with spirit. The dying woman Rybys is also strangely real and unreal. Although Herb comes in contact with her during cryonic suspension, she gives birth to the savior child. The divine pairing of Emmanuel and Zina is mirrored in the human pairing of Herb and Linda. There is also a pairing of seeming good and evil, and of spiritual and material in the father-of-the-entirety (with male and female aspects represented by Emmanuel and Zina) and the androgynous Belial.

  In his essay “Cosmogony and Cosmology,” written in 1978, three years before VALIS, Dick describes time and creation as the simultaneous movement of two events respectively related to these pairings. Humanity is moving toward reincorporation with the incorruptible and materiality is moving toward dissolution in the immaterial. Linda Fox explains how this plays out on the microcosmic level of humanity, saying that every man has an Advocate, a beside-helper, as well as an Accuser. While there is syzygic pairing in human and divine male and female spirituality, there is also human and divine pairing of spirituality and materiality. In other macro- and microcosmic pairings there is VALIS the movie in VALIS the book, Radio Free Albemuth in VALIS, and VALIS in The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

  Results of the Primordial Rape

  The Gnostic texts say that, in order to keep a watch on him, the rulers put Adam in a garden and cause him to fall into a deep sleep. The stories differ here. The Hypostasis of the Archons says the rulers take the spirit from Adam’s side and model a female likeness. On the Origin of the World does not say the rulers formed the female. Instead, Sophia sends a luminous female companion who breathes spirit into Adam. Seeing this, the rulers cause him to fall into a deep sleep. The woman is identified as Zoe, daughter of Sophia. When Adam awakens, Yaltabaoth lies by saying he created the female from Adam’s side. In both versions the rulers lust for the spiritual woman, who laughs at their foolish belief that they can overpower her. She secretly creates out of clay another mirrored replica of herself as a replacement. The real luminous woman enters a tree that thereby becomes the Tree of Knowledge (gnosis). Afterwards, Yaltabaoth tells the man and woman they can eat from any tree in the garden except for the Tree of Knowledge, and that the fruits of that tree will kill them. Yaltabaoth doesn’t know why he says this, but in fact the father-of-the-entirety causes him to do so in order to draw attention to the tree, so the man and woman will want to eat its fruit.

  The replacement woman, Eve, has a soul, which is life, but no spirit. Still believing it is Zoe, the rulers descend on her and “defile her in every way.” The real spiritual woman sees that they only defile themselves with a clay dummy, the primordial blow-up doll. After the primeval rape, the rulers are happy thinking they have now controlled and diminished the light of the woman—perhaps Deckard’s unconscious motive as well, in his se
xual aggression in Blade Runner. The rulers believe they have also corrupted the potential strength of future humanity, Zoe’s progeny, by interbreeding with her.

  Then a divine instructor of humanity comes into the garden. On the Origin of the World says the instructor is born from a drop of light Sophia drips into the water. The instructor tells Adam and Eve that Yaltabaoth lied about the forbidden tree; that eating from it would not kill them but give them gnosis. Adam and Eve eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge and their eyes are opened to the reality of their real circumstance. They see they are bodily-bound spirits separated from the incorruptible by the confines of matter. Their perception that they are naked is the realization that they are “naked” of unity with spirituality, primordial unity with Sophia and the father-of-the-entirety.

  Yaltabaoth sees they are behaving oddly. Discovering they have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, he is angered because he’s afraid they have seen his deception. He especially fears the inevitability that this gnosis will eventually lead to his demise. To delay this, he expels them from the garden. The other rulers place a spinning, flaming sword around the tree so no one may eat from it again. (Apparently they cannot simply destroy it.) Yaltobaoth also gives humankind a number of burdens so that we will not realize our spiritual potential. He makes people work to fill up their time, gives us pain in childbirth, and other problems to worry about. Yaltabaoth also lies by telling Adam and Eve that the instructor was “the beast” who had now been punished for its dishonesty. In fact the rulers had only cursed the instructor, and were powerless to do anything else. As in Dick’s trilogy, it’s difficult to discern who is telling the truth in all of this. Gnosis, transcendental insight, would be the key to understanding.