199
Benjamin Creme-a New Age figure who influenced PKD’s thinking in the last months of his life. PKD heard Creme being interviewed on the radio.
200
Hawthorne Abendsen is the author-character who wrote THE GRASSHOPPER LIES HEAVY, the novel-within-a-novel in THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE (1962). PKD had attempted a sequel to HIGH CASTLE in 1964, and remained fascinated with the possibilities of Abendsen as a character into the mid-1970s, as this reference indicates.
201
This stands as PKD typed it.
202
“Dr. HK” is here the proposed name of the fictional protagonist.
203
A Soviet physicist of whose work PKD had read in 1974.
204
See Zagreus in Glossary.
205
Possibly a short form of “Dionysus”, or an invented name for the god as avatar.
206
Possibly short for premature—as in a premature or penultimate avatar (as the paragraph argues).
207
Horselover Fat, the alter ego of fictional character Phil Dick in VALIS (1981), for which this is a draft.
208
This line represents a note by PKD to himself to find (in the EXEGESIS) or fashion a suitably meaningful quote as regarded Fat’s beliefs. The reference to “v.” [vide] “tractate” is, apparently, to the “Tractates Cryptica Scriptura” that forms an “Appendix” to VALIS and contains fifty-two numbered entries summarizing key theories and insights discussed at greater length in the EXEGESIS.
209
The preceding paragraphs appear, in slightly different form, in chapter two of VALIS (1981).
210
This paragraph appears in chapter four of VALIS.
211
Bishop James A. Pike.
212
This paragraph appears in slightl;y different form in VALIS.
213
This character is based on Bishop James A. Pike.
214
This was a job actually held by PKD’s mother, Dorothy Hudner, in the mid-1930s.
215
A branch of U.S. Army intelligence.
216
These are a fictional creation by PKD.
217
Science-fiction writer and friend of PKD.
218
The reference here is to the cosmological structure of the DIVINE COMEDY of Dante.
219
To PKD, the Hebrew word anokhi represented pure consciousness of the divine. The fictional anokhi mushroom would—perhaps—provide such consciousness to one who ingested it.
220
See John W. Allegro, THE SACRED MUSHROOM AND THE CROSS (1968).
221
See R. Gordon Wasson, Carl A. P. Ruck, Albert Hoffman, THE ROAD TO ELEUSIS: UNVEILING THE SECRET OF THE MYSTERIES (1 978). Co-author Hoffman is the Swiss chemist who in 1943 discovered LSD.
222
Drama by Anton Chekhov.
223
See note on page 108.
224
This selection does form a part of the EXEGESIS, but due to the letter format in which it was written, it has also been included in THE SELECTED LETTERS OF PHILIP K. DICK-1974, Underwood-Miller, 1991.
225
On 17 September 1981, PKD experienced a hypnagogic vision of a world savior named Tagore who was living in Sri Lanka. In a 23 September 1981 letter (which was ultimately published in the fanzine Niekas) PKD described Tagore as “burned and crippled” and “dying voluntarily: Tagore has taken upon himself mankind’s sins against the ecosphere.”
226
PKD footnote: “i.e., ‘Thomas’ who so feared the Romans—well, they killed the Baptist, garroted Thomas, which is to say, decapitated him there in his little jail cell! Dio! & it all happened to me at Passover!”
227
See note on page 62 herein.
228
In May 1979, Charles Platt interviewed PKD; the interview is included in Platt’s book DREAM MAKERS: THE UNCOMMON PEOPLE WHO WRITE SCIENCE FICTION (1980). PKD made his own tape of the interview and listened to it afterwards. As this selection indicates, listening to the tape spurred him to intensive self-examination.
229
Circa A.D.
230
Orange County Mental Health—an intake unit facility not far from his Santa Ana, California apartment at which PKD intermittently sought psychotherapy.
231
ws = water-soluble
232
PKD had, since the late 1960s, harbored fear of the IRS. In large measure, this fear stemmed from his signing of the Ramparts Petition. See Glossary. PKD did not file tax returns until the Vietnam War ended. Also, in 1969, due to past tax liabilities, the IRS seized his car.
233
PKD contributed funds to Covenant House, a New York-based shelter for runaway and homeless children.
234
Heinrich Zimmer. See note on page 101.
235
PKD lived at 1126, then a few years later and for six months I lived at 1624.
236
“ZEBRA (VALIS): ‘a vortex of intelligence extending as a supra-temporal field, involving humans but not limited to them, drawing objects & processes into a coherency which it arranges into information. A FLUX of purposeful arrangement of living information, both human & extra-human, tending to grow & incorporate its environment as a unitary complex of subsumations.’ ” (pg . 72)
237
“Okay, fertilization is what takes place: it isn’t a seed such as a plant has, but an egg such as a human woman ovulates, and cosmic spermatika fertilizes it; a zygote is produced.” (pg. 22.)
238
“I am a homoplasmate: Zebra acting in syzygy with a human.” (pg. 79) but also: “Did I do something? Absolutely. But I don’t know what I did, so I don’t know who (so to speak) I am in the drama.” (pg. 42.)
239
“If the Logos is outside time, imprinting, then the Holy Spirit stands at
the right or far or completed end of time, toward which the field-flow moves
(the time flow). It receives time: the negative terminal, so to speak.” (pg. 64.)
240
“It (reality) is a hologram. 1) My augmented sense of space proves it. And 2) the information element; consisting of two parts: set and ground. “All this points to: hologram. Based on two information-rich signals.” (pp. 98-99.)
241
“The Gospels, then, depict a sacred mythic rite outside of time, rather than a historical event. “Note: This whole process can be regarded as a psychological transformation, that of a redemptive psychosis.” (pg. 95.)
242
“Probably the wisest view is to say: the truth—like the Self—is splintered up over thousands of mile and years; bits are found here and there, then and now, and must be recollected; bits appear in the Greek naturalists, in Pythagoras, in Plato, Parmenides, in Heraclitus, Neo-Platonism, Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, Taoism, Mani, orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Orphism, the other mystery religions. Each religion or philosophy or philosopher contains one or more bits, but the total system interweaves it into falsity, so each as a total system must be rejected, and none is to be accepted at the expense of all the others...” (pp. 111-112)
243
(pg. 91.)
244
“MITHC seems to be a subtle, even delicate questioning of, what is real? As if only the 2 books in it, GRASSHOPPER & the I CHING are really the only actual reality. Strange.” (pg. 181.)
245
“Through anamnesis and restoration to the Form realm you have access to several space-time continua based on your universals.” (pg. 102.)
246
“The agent of creation (Logos or Forms, whatever called) is at the same time the abstract structure of creation. Although normally unavailable to our cognition and perception, this structure—and hence theagent ofcreation can be known ...” (pg. 125) Also, ” .. .
t his insubstantial abstract structure is reality properly conceived. But it is not God. Here, multiplicity gives way to unity, to what perhaps can be called a field. The field is self-perturbing; it initiates its own causes internally; it is not acted on from outside”. (pg. 127). Also, “ ‘The agent of creation is its own structure.’ This structure must not be confused with the multiplicity of physical objects in space and time governed by causation; the two are entirely different. (The structure is insubstantial, abstract, unitary and initiates its own causes internally, it is not physical and cannot be perceived by the human percept-system sensibly; it is known intelligibly, by what Plato called Noesis, which involves a certain ultimate high-order meta-abstracting.)” (pg. 128). And finally: “I ... posit ontological primacy to the insubstantial abstract structure, and, moreover, I believe that it fully controls the physical spatiotemporal universe as its basis and cause.” (pg. 129)
247
pg.177
In Pursuit of Valis Page 27