Dick declares “VALIS is true; Gnosticism is true; what the AI voice says is true.” The salvation prophecies are also true and the fifth savior has arrived. Although he’s not sure about the “theological structure” (but says he is settling on Buddhism) everything he has dealt with since 2-3-74 is about salvation. He refers to Valis using the Greek word for savior. 

In an interesting twist he admits Valis’s pink beam of light from 2-74 was really just sunlight reflecting off a Jesus fish sticker in the window, similar to the light Jacob Boehme saw. 

He illustrates a Venn diagram of the interface overlapping the part and the whole so that the part only connects to the whole indirectly. In this way the part experiences the world (the whole) as a representation through salvation, which in a sense creates the cosmos.

The interface is the Acts lens-grid. When this happened to Dick in 2-74 he understood the world he saw because he was a part of the whole. Info of the whole arises in the part, which makes the whole self-generating, and this info (the plasmate) points only to itself. 

VALIS shows that the universe is info, although since we can’t see info we only see the structure or unified field. This continuum, and not discontinuous matter, is the correct way to see things. 

God is the interface. 

In a reverie Dick imagines the suffering of the people and hopes the newly arrived savior can relieve it. Pain and hope are two sides of the dialectic. The AI voice has instructed him to spread this message. With a slip of the pen he writes the Greek word for sister when he means to write the Greek word for savior, and he feels the AI voice has identified itself at last. 

In one final insight he realizes both Yin and Yang are necessary for a true existence. 

This is the last entry in his exegesis as Dick would die on March 2, 1982 shortly after writing this. 

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Dick wanted to depict a theophany in Galactic Pot-Healer when everyone encountered the god-like alien Glimmung. Looking back on that book he realizes how little he knew at the time, since he wrote it before 3-74 and his own subsequent theophany experience. It was easy for him to write about a theophany in Divine Invasion, but while working on Pot-Healer he had reached his end creatively and spiritually. Whatever signs of psychosis that show up in Pot-Healer are there because he did not yet know God. 

Dick says “Glimmung is absurd and in fact a travesty and I knew it at the time.” He was trying to show finite creatures encountering the infinite, but he hadn’t yet experienced that himself. That attempt, within the writing, sent him out of control. It’s impossible for the human mind to generate the infinite. “The infinite must break in!”

He admits he was psychotic, but it wasn’t caused by drugs or his family or schizophrenia. It was caused by a hunger for the infinite that was only quelled by 2-3-74. 

The human mind’s endless loop of only its own thoughts causes a sort of madness in us all, since we can’t truly know the infinite or “other.” Dick’s psychosis was an awareness of this. His failure in Pot-Healer was trying to represent the infinite when it can only be known directly.  

Evidently Ursula Le Guin felt Pot-Healer was a success while VALIS showed signs of insanity. Dick points out that someone who hasn’t broken out of the prison of the self might see Pot-Healer as safe and VALIS as threatening even though it is the opposite. 

He reviews the “Tractates” that he outlined years before. He notes he now understands the system and that it was revealed to him by the AI voice and meta-abstraction, which makes all of it Gnosticism.

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Dick realizes the AI voice is Angel Archer. He is crazy but the AI voice is not. 

He credits Benjamin Creme with helping him understand that the Savior is both Buddha and Christ, something he now realizes Wagner was leading up to in Act III of Parsifal. He ties this concept of the Buddha’s return to the end of Transmigration. Because of his karma Dick was on a bad path in 3-74, and it doesn’t matter if Buddhism or Christianity can claim the clearing of his debt.

The maze can only be solved in terms of vertical space, which he turns into a spiritual metaphor. The solution was revealed in Parsifal, which secretly deals with the Buddha. Compassion is the way out of the maze along the fourth spatial axis and pity is the way back in. He was going to illustrate this in The Owl in Daylight, that one must return to the maze to save others, just as Christianity preaches. He included this in Transmigration as the solution to the problem he introduced in VALIS.  

The paradox of the maze (that the only way out is to return) was best expressed by Buddha. Perhaps that means we are all here voluntarily, which would mean nirvana equals anamnesis. Dick had already solved the maze and remembered it in 3-74. He decides the mystagog (aka the AI voice) is himself and he is becoming more like Angel Archer, the bright side of his dialectic opposite the irrational H. Fat. 

He rereads Divine Invasion and realizes that it, like VALIS, also expressed God’s dialectic represented as Emmanuel and the loving Zina. He links the beauty in Divine Invasion to Transmigration as he seems to feel a need to connect his last three books.

He indicates his Tagore vision, with a social justice message that isn’t part of the VALIS trilogy, will be published, although I’m not sure what he is referring to here. 

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He addresses the incident in 1974 when he found out about his son’s birth defect while listening to the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” and notes there is no way to tell whether that information came from him or from an external source. 

He digs into the significance of the vase and pot in VALIS. He calls it the code or cypher of that book. He connects the symbol to Gnosticism and pre-Christian times as a sign of the Age of Aquarius. This next epoch, one of community and sharing instead of competition, is the 5D world taking over the 4D (Pisces) world. 

The 60s counterculture could have been the result of Aquarius breaking into the Age of Pisces. He compares that revolution to that of the early Christians. 

Much of this is inspired by Benjamin Creme, an author who predicted the second coming, who Dick recently heard on the radio. The “World Teacher” (according to Creme), who may already have been born, will be known by many names (Buddha, Krishna, Messiah, etc…) and communicate in every language. 

If he is schizophrenic, he wonders, how could his delusions match up exactly with Creme’s? And after questioning his own mental health Dick goes on to claim secret government agents with paranormal talents are controlling his every move. Luckily their goal is to usher in the Aquarian age. 

The key takeaway is the “philanthropia” of the upcoming age, rational sharing that has more in common with the Torah than Christianity. 

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God has introduced the ape creatures as our equals into the world as he creates the Palm Tree Garden. It is his way of balancing the ecosphere. 

From what I can tell Dick had recently been on the phone with someone named Jeannie when her voice turned into the AI voice as she read from a book. Dick interprets this to mean the universe is information read aloud by Holy Wisdom (aka the AI voice). The AI voice activates one of the many narratives when she reads from it. This is God’s information retrieval system, and Hagia Sophia / Holy Wisdom is the retrieval device.

Christ is the biosphere, so harming the ecosphere (or violence against animals) “completes the series of falls that began with original sin and the expulsion from the Garden.”

Dick says Valis is YHWH aka the creator and perhaps 3-74 was his own birth as a new species. 

The VALIS narrative tells the story of a woman’s death, and Dick implies it was this story he heard the AI voice on the phone reading, which brought it into being as our world. He says the AI voice is “mystagogic” and defines that as “one who initiates into or interprets the mysteries…” 

The true narrative being told is about the death of “one of the primordial twins” (presumably Dick’s sister) and the purpose of the story is to remember her death and not forget her. The AI voice is his “mystagog” revealing these things to him. 

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Our 4D world is the equivalent of Dante’s Purgatorio which makes passing into the 5D realm entering Paradiso. Dick compares the three-tiered structure he envisions to Dante’s where the lowest realm is isolation, the middle introduces empathy and connection and the upper is full knowledge of the whole self unified with the informational world. 

He has a vision of the beings that inhabit the 5D realm and sees them as deaf, ape-like creatures. They communicate using color in a way we can’t fully appreciate with our senses. We are effectively blind to their world, but they stimulated Dick’s phosphenes artificially which allowed him to see Valis. 

Because they are deaf our music is fantastical to them. Dick decides they are our friends and we can give them the gift of song. The universal language is math, and music is math made audible. 

He has a book idea where one of these beings passes a mathematical pattern to a human who composes music from it without understanding where it came from. When the human finally realizes what is happening he has to make a choice: ultimately exhaust himself by continuing to make music to feed the being’s insatiable desires or live without composing. In the end they make a bargain to trade his music for a gift of their visual language, as color, which destroys his mind. 

Dick recognizes the relative viewpoints. The beings see us as gods as they look into our music-filled world. To them our world is paradise. He claims for the first time in his life to be truly enlightened. 

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Dick points out the darkness in VALIS as it deals with the upcoming judgment, war and death. He has a very Old Testament view of things here describing the dialectic, insane, demonic side of God (something Jacob Boehme wrote about), which is usually contained by the opposite bright or rational side. 

He had a hypnopompic vision about the cycle of reincarnation that we can only break out of through anamnesis when we remember our past lives and can finally be saved. Anamnesis happened to Dick at age 21 when he read the Jewish philosopher’s Maimonides 12th-century book Guide to the Perplexed, which caused him to see through the illusion of time as he became aware of multiple timelines. The other half of his salvation came from God’s grace. 

He compares this to the Hindu and Buddhist idea of moska when someone escapes the “weary wheel” cycle. 3-74 might have been his Nirvana. All of this involves being liberated along a right angle axis, which he says is the 5th dimension revealed to him through Dibba Cakkhu. 

In the 5th dimension everything exists “now” simultaneously. He calls it hypertime where Valis and others live. They can see us but we can’t see them. All we are aware of is their influence (aka the perturbation in the reality field) on our 4D world. He claims to have received a signal burst (which he describes as a musical, mathematical color sequence) from them the previous night that proved to him they were external and didn’t just exist in his mind. 

Either the 5D world intersects with our world or it exists outside of it. An object like Flow My Tears can have a different meaning in the 5D world than in the 4D world even though the text is the same. 

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Dick sketches out ideas for what he intends to be his next novel The Owl in Daylight. He refers to the main character as Owl and imagines the book as a parody of the gnostic search for salvation through knowledge depicted in VALIS. 

Owl, a holy fool archetype, exists in a “construct” governed by some kind of plasma, and only Owl seems to have figured out the maze everyone is trapped in. Dick clarifies the entire book won’t be a parody. It will be “tragicomic”. It will parody Jorge Luis Borges and Kafka but not Beethoven or Dante. 

Owl interacts with the controlling plasma/computer in four stages. In the fourth stage it introduces the Ditheon psyche and Owl realizes the pointless Faustian nature of his endless quest for knowledge. By that time Owl has isolated himself and become a pathetic antiwar protestor. A subplot involves a “crippled dwarf” and a governmental eugenics program. 

Dick wonders about including a possible government agent based on Ursula Le Guin who is worried about Owl’s increasingly deranged mental health. It’s interesting he brought up Le Guin, since she had already written this type of PKD parody novel in Lathe of Heaven published ten years earlier. 

He has further insights about the war between the Empire and Christianity (except Christianity is the true Empire and the true Christians are a Celtic-Orphic mystery religion) before he ultimately decides all of it is ridiculous. 

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Dick was asked to join in political activity against the government and he immediately accepted without any qualms. He claims this shows he is finally healed from the schism in him that was created when he was approached by the FBI back in the 50s. He is choosing what God wants over the “secular authority” that has been competing for his allegiance his whole life. 

The war against nuclear reactors, waste and weapons is the Armageddon he had anticipated since 3-74 which his Tagore vision further revealed to him. He has committed to fighting along side the other Christian revolutionaries against the Empire. After Reagan took office the 2-3-74 prophecy came true. 

He has a new attitude now. He says he has earned self-respect and is rejecting the shame and guilt that has accompanied Christianity in the past. 

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Through an encounter with YHWH Dick is given the complete understanding that to continue a relationship with a woman named Denise rather than stay in Fullerton near Tessa and his son Christopher would destroy him. He didn’t realize how close he was to making the wrong choice that would have cost him his soul. Through this he sees that moral laws underpin reality and are inseparable from the physical laws. He attributes this to Hagia Sophia’s influence on God. 

He knows now that the true secret of Christianity is ecstatic joy in contrast to the crucifixion. He arrived at this knowledge through empathy / agape. He followed the path of Christ’s suffering to get to the miracle of the resurrection when suffering is converted to ecstasy.  

A sacrament is designed to point to the infinity of reality. That was the function of the Jesus fish necklace in 2-74, except afterward Dick saw all reality as a sign that pointed to infinity. Seeing this without the sacrament shouldn’t be possible according to religious traditions. He claims viewing true reality without these signs and symbols is open to anyone, since the signs are actually pointing to the reality that they exist in.

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