The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick Read online

  Of course, the Soviets would anticipate only category disruption, not an influx of a retrograde field. This would be incorrectly conceived of by those affected as an ESP experiment. With the addition, not from Soviet sources, of the presence of the retro-time force, the Holy Spirit or Logos. Implication that retrograde time is forward time which has passed the turning point (passed through infinity, so to speak), has formerly been forward time and possesses the accumulation which Bergson speaks of time as acquiring; then, as it turns the eye, so to speak, and starts back, it is freighted with the accumulated load of knowledge/information which may comprise the Wisdom associated with the Logos: all that wisdom was acquired in its forward tracking. It is information rich. Logically, then, in its retrograde tracking, it would divest itself of its knowledge: teach rather than learn, so that when it arrived at the other end, it would be information poor, even info empty, make the swing, and begin to acquire once more. I think the ongoing time-field momentarily weakened in March; is it possible that was due to a Soviet experiment à la Kozyrev? The time disruption for me was so great, so spectacular, that I can't believe it was due to me, intended for me, aimed at me, etc. It was an historic event in which I merely played an accidental receiving role. My pre-cog ability is an index of my sensitivity to the retrograde field, maybe.

  My subcortical impressions in March would indicate—not that time leaped back—but that it jumped forward about 2,000 years. It had just been circa 180 A.D. What is most distressing is the notion here of phony memories, generated (as under hypnosis) to fill in; they'd be the ones of Fullerton: the conscious continuity. The others—of Rome—would be the real ones, depicting the actuality. The conjunctive ones, of the interval, would be merely to paste over so as to reveal no rent. It's as if time went directly from 10 A.D. to 1974 A.D., with nothing in between but it was pasted in retrospectively, to give verisimilitude.... The significance in all this of my "is the world real?" would be that we continually patch over the ellipses with fake memories in order to give uninterrupted continuity. Hence in me arise certain epistemological doubts, related to and deriving from the above experience-phenomena.

  At this point one could begin to take it, my writing, very seriously, since everything seems to coalesce into something of meaning. The sense of unreality fits in ... the disruption of the ontological categories ... the sacerdotal power buried for aeons ... it is all of a piece, plus the world of Ubik per se, but the meaning is unsuspected, anyhow by me. I.e., I seem to have taken a number of unrelated unusual experiences or themes to write about, but on closer examination, they all group around the time-disruption matter. The others are collateral, such as the false memories, etc.—which, for god's sake, I seem to personally have experienced in my amnesias, several of them. These are indeed based on personal experiences in my life, over ten years. What if prior amnesias were paste-overs over prior disjunctions totally unsuspected? The vivid dreams like of "Mexico" and two more, China and India—space-time periods where I went and returned, no drugging et al. involved, then pasted over. We're talking about jumps forward, jumps back. I was somewhere, during the preview of Fullerton—but I wasn't taken; I disjuncted forward in time, to this time. The novel or movie technique which comes to mind is: splice. The splicing in of a scene, the joining of two scenes with something which had been between eliminated. But this is all less of a breakdown and more like a repair.

  If, however, that experience were regarded as a demonstration of God's power, rather than a natural event, a miracle in fact, what was revealed—Rome circa 180 A.D.—would not be what in some way time jumped back to, or I jumped back to, or anyone came here from, but a demonstration that this world of Fullerton 1974 exists only because He causes it to exist, and if He wishes He can roll it aside to reveal whatever He wants; He can cause any other world He wishes to replace it, on the spot. The meaning is God, although the revelation is of Rome.

  Here: one can turn Fullerton to Rome by: (1) adding, i.e., a layer of enchantment, so that Fullerton became Rome by acquiring something which was lacking. Or (2) Simply altered; I was in Fullerton, then I was in Rome. It was different. Or (3) Something, similar to an enchantment, was removed, and Fullerton became Rome. Of the 3, it was the last which happened; I was still in Fullerton, but layers were stripped, veils of illusion; what remained was much simpler, was Rome, with both good and bad parts. Rome lay underneath. It was always really there, if we could penetrate to that foundation. This is an important realization; the transformation came by the removal of something—what was I guess not real, or not as real. (Was this form-regression, à la Ubik? One would no more expect to find the morphos Rome buried within Fullerton than to find the LaSalle car buried within the rocket ship ... !!!)

  Letter to Claudia Bush, February 16, 1975

  [4:190]

  Dear Claudia,

  Why would God take his Sole Son, whom He loved, and send Him here? Especially in view of the outcome: His Only-Begotten Son was eventually discovered by the authorities and slaughtered in a cruel and humiliating way. After a short interval, of course, as might be expected, His Son returned to life, demonstrating to his small group of friends who He was, and then He left here and returned to His Father. No one has seen Him since.

  The first thing you think of is, Boy, that sure showed bad planning on the part of God. Or, Boy, God sure allowed his Only-Begotten Son to suffer a lot; just how much did God in fact really love His Son, to let that happen? The Christian account doesn't tell us enough to figure it out so it's convincing; there is an enigma here, for those who believe and for those who don't; in the immortal words of Mr. Spock, "It does not compute."

  The story of Zagreus, however, sheds light on this, very fascinating light, and it starts then to compute. Zeus sent Zagreus, his Favorite Son, whom He had allowed to sit beside Him on His Heavenly Throne, to Earth in order to hide him. From Hera, according to the myth, but that doesn't seem to me very important; what is important is the motive: Zagreus' father wanted his son to blend, to mingle, to pass, to disappear, to be in appearance just one more child born among millions. Notice how this fits the story about King Herod searching high and low, having the babies executed, etc. See? Now does it begin to make sense? Especially when you recall that one of the Medieval views, discarded, was that this world was either built by an evil god, or anyhow the plan went wrong and this world degenerated, and so a stranger god (that is, a god from somewhere else in the universe, from Outside) came here to fix things up for us and make our world come out right. However, he was found out and killed; this stranger god was the Christ, disguised as a carpenter. It didn't work; the disguise was eventually penetrated and he was arrested, mainly through the paid informer within Christ's circle. There is much quasi-political intrigue here, is there not? It becomes obvious why Jesus spoke of the "Prince of this World" who was His antagonist and who would eventually kill Him, as he did.

  Take both these stories, that of Zeus' motive plus the Medieval account, and you get this: a child is born who is in danger and must be protected by being disguised. Zagreus, while still a baby, was lured with toys by the titans, killed and eaten. Zeus slew the titans with thunderbolts (laser beams?). The titans were our ancestors; put another way, we are their descendents. We are titans. That is the name of our race, compared to His. He is of another race and from another place. Everything he was, everything he represented, was a mirror opposite of what the titan race is and values. Thus, death would absolutely for sure follow if his disguise was penetrated, if the titans (ourselves, our rulers) figured it out, figured out that (1) He was here, as Herod did, and (2) which of all the newborn babies was the outsider, this stranger posing as a titan child.

  If He lived long enough before being discovered, He could and would begin subtly to alter the Plan of this world. He didn't live long, either as Zagreus or as Jesus. Unless one assumes that everything that happened to Jesus was exactly according to God's plan, then it is reasonable to say that He was found out fairly soon, and did not accom
plish nearly as much as was hoped for. In which case there had been some success but a lot of failure. The answer was obviously to make the attempt again at a later date.

  I.e., He would return but the next time: not as a lamb to be slaughtered, but as a King and Judge (which is to say, in strictly Greek terms, as Zeus rather than the baby Zagreus). As a matter of fact, Zagreus came back, too; as Dionysus. Proving that you cannot kill this particular ETL—extraterrestrial life-form. Well, you can kill it, but it is immortal; like the corn, the vine, the grain of wheat, it returns, larger and stronger, more evolved, more complete, more mature, whatever, than before. Death is only its foe as long as it has taken the disguise (or mode) of human form. Having done so, it falls victim automatically to what all humans are prey to. But, when that body, that human body, dies, it itself is released; it has no physical mortal body: it only assumed one for one of the above purposes, either to assist us, or to mingle for its own sake, to be disguised.

  The worst thing (for themselves anyhow) for the titans, our cannibal ancestors, to do, was to devour this life form after they had murdered it; thereupon it entered them and was passed down to their heirs somehow (in the DNA coding?), in a dormant crypte morphosis or sleeping form. It sleeps within each of us, waiting to be reawakened (which is exactly what Plato meant by anamnesis, recollection). That which induces anamnesis in any one of us is the external disinhibiting symbol on which we were engrammed originally, at the time He (Jesus) was here. It is the more elaborate ideogram beneath the fish symbol; but alas, the fish symbol has been obliterated by the symbol of the cross. The anticipated disinhibition is postponed. Each of us has this "second-stage" programming series of systems waiting to be disinhibited by the proper sign, which unconsciously we will recognize (i.e., remember) when and if we ever encounter it. These constitute the entire series of metamotivational systems which Maslow43 has begun to identify. They are real. They are asleep within us, slumbering and waiting.

  I will now quote directly from the new Britannica, vol. 12, p. 783, the macro:

  The theological doctrine of the soul and the myth about its celestial home, its fall, and its redemption were inseparable. The sequence is beautifully told in the "Hymn of the Soul," preserved in the "Acts of Thomas," an apocryphal account of the journeys and death of the apostle in which some episodes were certainly transmitted from pagan mystery texts. The hero of the hymn, who represents the soul of man, is born in the Eastern (the Yonder) Kingdom; immediately after his birth, he is sent by his parents on a pilgrimage into the world with instructions to take a pearl from the mouth of a dragon in the sea. Instead of wearing his heavenly garment, he dresses in earthly clothes, eats earthly food, and forgets his task. Then his parents send a letter to rouse him. As soon as he has read the letter, he awakes and remembers his task, takes the pearl, and begins the homeward journey. On the way, his brother (The Redeemer) comes to accompany him and leads him back home to his father's palace in the east. This myth is a figurative representation of the theological doctrine of the soul's fall and its return to heaven.

  I came across this account yesterday or the day before; as soon as I read it I knew I had found the key which put together just about everything I've been thinking, learning and experiencing, as I'm sure you'll agree (do you?). There is little more that I can say, especially considering the beauty of this text.*

  How does it strike you? What I find personally fascinating is that I have been absolutely positive since last April or so that my entire experience was somehow triggered off (the experience I now would deem that of anamnesis in Plato's sense) by the dark-haired stranger girl who came to my door in late February 1974 wearing the gold fish sign in necklace form, the sign of which fascinated me so that I could not take my eyes off it, or off her. I had been expecting her most of my life: those black eyes, that black hair, and, around her neck, that gleaming gold chain of links culminating in the fish. I still remember saying to her, as if in a daze, "What is that you are wearing?" And the girl, touching it and saying, "It's a sign that the early Christians used. My husband gave it to me." And then she was gone, and as I'm sure I told you, when a month or so later I went by the pharmacy which had sent her out with the medication for me, they had no idea who she was, what her name was, or where she had gone, but she was gone, forever. They just smiled. Can you see how close this is to the "Hymn of the Soul"? Perhaps this was purely an accidental disinhibiting. Perhaps not. But it did cause anamneses in me, and as I'm sure you realize I did not know, had never heard of, such matters within the human heart, or mind, or history. I think one day perhaps soon someone certainly, and not by accident, will display to us our collective disinhibiting sign, and anamnesis will occur for us all, for us, anyhow, who it's intended for. What do you say, dear?

  Letter to Henry Korman, February 2, 1975

  [4:214]

  Dear Henry,

  The way the "universe" works is it's a lot of very thin laminated layers, and God can take any given one of the layers and just let it expand in every direction to form an entire universe on its own, so there are universes after universes. It's as easy for him to do this as for you or me to breathe in and out. What catches his eye—the handle of each universe—seems to be the arrangement of colors. Each is a color slide, unmounted.

  Hello.

  I was looking through The Real World44 last night and then I had (I am truly not joking; this is one reason why I'm writing you, because it is unique, what happened to me), I was in another universe where I exercised all my options regarding becoming famous. I flew all around the world and was always famous and with important people. It was wonderful. I was in London and Sydney and Rome. This was so real that when I awoke, at midnight or so, I was horrified that I had not in fact exercised my options. For instance I cancelled my trip to London due next month. I won't be going. Things like that where I stayed home. I lay in bed and thought, Jeez, if I hadn't stayed home next month, and so forth, I'd be as famous as I was in that universe God just now showed me. I'd always be touching down in a foreign capital in a wide-bodied DC-10. I missed out by staying home. Henry, it wasn't a dream; it was the universe I missed out on.

  Then I fell asleep, and this is where The Real World comes in for sure, issue No. 3. The 3 shots on [>]/[>] by Harry Callahan which I know are of Mexican border type towns. Henry, I have been in Mexico in dreams. Fullerton is next to a Mexican barrio and when I dreamed it back in 1971 before ever coming down here, I had all the details right. When I got down here in 1972 and was walking around I saw where I had dreamed about, and smelled the air. I said to my girlfriend as of then, "Linda! I dreamed this building you're showing me!"

  "Life unlived," Linda said, and smiled.

  She meant I had dreamed ahead of time. Well, last night after I fell back asleep I dreamed (sic, as we say) another dream, and in this other universe I hadn't exercised any of my options. I wasn't married; I wasn't living where I am; I was evidently a migratory worker south of the border. I deduce this from recalling the endless exact precise obviously real details of the town I lived in. I can tell you the color of the old train that went through (green). Sometimes very big trucks rumbled through; we liked to watch them, and also there were a few modern stores which we couldn't go in, but we could admire the fronts of them. In this dream I strolled around but also I had to help a lot. The mode was one of weight; old people and women in general were dragging heavy old cloth used suitcases with other people's initials on them, secondhand suitcase in which they had all the possessions they owned. One time at a main intersection some cops in riot uniforms fired tear gas cartridges in a high arc over our heads, and we backed away; the cops waved us back so we wouldn't be hurt. We usually only moved fast when the cops told us to, but it was for our own good, except later when I was illegally north of the border. Earlier, everyone yearned to live up north, in La Palma or Fullerton, places like that. When I did get up north, one time we all were sitting at a wooden table outside eating lunch and all at once the cops said we had to mo
ve on. They were different cops; they would have hurt us, and everyone silently headed away from there. I was in Santa Barbara, California, and I knew the cops feared Mexicans because of an actual uprising. We went indoors into a wooden hotel to stay out of sight, to be safe.

  Henry, what I realized when I woke up (or rather, returned to this, Middle Universe) is that first I saw, or was in, the highest flight into the air universe possible for me, given my abilities; the mode was soaring, weightlessness, fame, mobility, wealth, respect, being recognized, well-dressed, going everywhere into strange places which were big cities. The second was like when in real life for the month I was at the drug rehab residence place in Canada, very much like Synanon here in the U.S., after my suicide attempt in Vancouver, B.C. Poor and unknown, limited to one spot (in the "dream" it was obviously a small border town in Mexico), the buildings were old and shabby, they were peeling, the people were poor and badly-dressed and owned very little; this was at the other side of the universe which I do actually live in. But Henry—