October–November 1978

Dick hears a voice that equates him to St. Sophia, Buddha, Apollo and Siddhartha. He says that Thomas is more than just a secret Christian and instead is actually the savior. He thinks that whatever he experienced might be the Holy Spirit or perhaps the spirit of Elijah. 

No religious system can completely explain his vision. His divine eye was opened, he temporarily became Shiva and all this indicates he is a Buddha. 

He includes fragments and bits of dialogue from the VALIS novel he has started. He has a hypnagogic vision of “the catch” by Willie Mays in the 1954 World Series and compares his own exegetical efforts to the throw Mays made back to the infield. His work, the throw, is over and out of his hands. He calls his explanation of Zebra thus far the Tractates Cryptica Scriptura and he works through some ways it could be incorporated in VALIS. One idea is that the world in the book is an alternate reality where the New Testament doesn’t exist, Jesus is an impostor Messiah and Simon Magus is the founder of the church.

This marks the end of part 2.

October–November 1978

Dick connects his books to his present model of reality. Zebra is like the computer that constructs reality in A Maze of Death and also the thing that intrudes into our fake world as in Ubik. Like in A Scanner Darkly it is actively trying to hide its true nature, and this fact of occlusion is then further occluded from us. He says the “quasi-mind” of the maze appears insane and compares it to Yaldabaoth (one of the creator gods according to the Gnostics) who does indeed sound crazy. Because of this irrationality it is impossible to make sense of it. The maze is disorder and confusion which we can only navigate through the help of Zebra. Dick still thinks this is something we created for ourselves as a puzzle.

He has been working on the exegesis for 4 and a half years and says he is now being “signalled to die.” He is afraid the exegesis is unpublishable and that everything he has learned will die with him, another way that the maze will win. He recognizes a paradox though that if the maze wins we win, since we created the maze. 

He returns to the idea of Zebra as a living information virus embedded in his book Flow My Tears and imagines it proliferating as people read it. He wonders if it had been dormant since the time of Acts before traveling from the newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls to the Dead Sea Scroll scholar John Allegro to Jim Pike to him.

October–November 1978

Dick compares us to fruit or crops which are growing and ripening until the moment we are mature and are able to see the true reality. This only happens to a select few, something the Biblical parables tried to express through the same metaphors. Are we being tested on our ability to see beyond the fake reality? Did Dick pass this test through his writing?

Through enough skepticism and belief, Dibba Cakkhu, one of the six higher psychic powers of Buddhism, can be achieved. I suspect Buddhists might say it takes more work than that, but this is the opening of the divine eye, what Dick calls the 3rd eye. Dick summarizes much of what he has said before about the living information which “impregnates” us and brings us to life. Whatever it is that is in control of the world, technology or not, has to be called God. That makes Dick a prophet like Elijah.

Dick explains the concept of original sin except he uses the word “occlusion” instead of sin and Zebra instead of Christ. He admits though that this belief system is orthodoxy and seems disappointed in his conclusion.

His attempts to figure a way out of this situation is depicted in his books as an intellectual maze. Is Zebra outside of the maze trying to help us, did we create Zebra to guide us, or is Zebra the living maze itself? Dick thinks he may have escaped due to his intellect, and he returns to the idea (illustrated in A Maze of Death) that we constructed our reality and left ourselves clues in order to avoid being trapped there.

He names five of his seemingly random earlier stories (see related) and says they show the idea of Zebra existing apart from a phony world, although it sounds like retconning to me.

October 1978

Dick examines an epistemological argument about whether there is an actual external universe or just a universe in our mind that would be indistinguishable from an external one. He relates this to Brahman who is making us think we experience the world. What we perceive as evil is actually just the interests of the macrobrain which don’t necessarily align with our own. It has to be this way though otherwise existence would cease.

He wonders if the world and Zebra are two modes of the same thing: Zebra is awake and the world is asleep. Zebra has been in the world all along, playing dead, camouflaged until it wakes up. 

Dick embraces his love of Christ and his anticipation of the return of the rightful king. 

He reiterates that no time has passed since the time of Thomas. Someone has just made it appear that way. He thinks perhaps there is an objective reality. When it appears to change our brains perceive this as the passing of time, but he can’t figure out who is responsible for tricking our brains this way.

October 1978

Zebra destroys the four deformations.

• It abolishes the phony world
• It abolishes the occlusion 
• It frees us from enslavement
• It restores our memory

The Gnostics didn’t have it quite right. It is the living information itself, not the content of the information, that saves us.

Dick counts 21 of his stories that deal with the idea of fake vs real. 

The Logos contains the totality of the macrocosm. Once it replicates in someone (through just a tiny piece as happened with Dick in 2-74) they become one with the whole. Zebra is in Dick and his purpose is to restore this knowledge (gnosis) to the world, which he does through his lowbrow sci fi, just as in Ubik.

He has a dream about Siddhartha (the founder of Buddhism) and believes this means another savior is being born. Dick covers how the savior dynamic is depicted in Stigmata, Ubik, Galactic Pot-Healer and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The VALIS book he is working on will show the process of redemption, although he finds writing it very difficult.

He has a dream about a fish and from that concludes the secret Christian society does exist and he is a part of it. Time has not passed since Rome 45 A.D. It has only been made (by James-James?) to appear that way. Dick understood this in 3-74 when he woke up. His book VALIS (which he calls his maximus opus) will show the restored and redeemed man, but from the perspective of Gnosticism and Buddhism, not Christianity. 

October 1978

Dick summarizes everything he believes up to this point about our phony reality / time and how it relates to Ubik, Stigmata, A Maze of Death, A Scanner Darkly and Flow My Tears. He reiterates Zebra = Christ, Christ = God, Thomas = Zebra and he = Thomas, so he = God. The creator can enter his own creation in order to test it. He first sheds his identity, but in order to prevent getting stuck there he plants clues that will wake him and restore his memory so he can escape.

The four deformations are

• Irreal world
• Perceptual occlusion
• Pervasive deterministic enslavement
• Amnesia

The voice tells him “One by one he is drawing us out of this world” and Dick tries to makes sense of what that means. Just like in Ubik and Eye in the Sky we are asleep and something like Ubik is trying to break through and wake us up.

Perhaps the spurious time is actually entropy and the four deformations are caused by the entropic process. The information Zebra generates runs counter to this entropy (is negentropic). The pattern overpowers the chaos, and this pattern, which entered and replicated in Dick in 3-74, is the message.