June 1981

The plasmate formed by the cross-bonding of two human minds is a new kind of non-biological life form. It has no body, and to it reality is an idea not a physical thing. It’s possible the combination of the two human psyches happens spontaneously as a random event. Dick ties this concept back to Teilhard’s noösphere that he wrote about many years before. Because this life form has no body it “floats” and might be using the human mind as a way to connect to physical reality. 

He saw footage from the upcoming Blade Runner movie and recalls his time in Purgatorio when he had a vision of hell before ascending to Paradiso. 

The New Testament is the “secret narrative” of the Old Testament. It contains the living info that is Christ which cross-bonds with a human mind, capable of infinite combinations in a form of evolution. The Scripture that is generated (a new phenomenon) is unique to each person and situation. The third stage progresses from the Torah (OT) to Christ (NT) to this, but Dick doesn’t yet have a name for it. 

He claims his later books like Scanner and VALIS were written by a Ditheonic brain. No one, not the Jews nor Paul, connected the Torah and the NT this way as earlier stages of a third-stage organism. 

Based on his Ubik idea of God in the trash, the mundane and the divine are two stages of the same thing. The mundane is a slow stage of the divine (or the divine is a faster stage of the mundane) but there has to be unity, a coming together of discrete things, before it can make that leap to divinity.

Dick believes that the infinite beauty which exists in the world is the benchmark that points to God. 

June 1981

Dick has a dream about his ex-wife Nancy whose mind (in the dream) has been infiltrated by the psyche of another man. She has taken some medication with the cryptic name “Ditheon.” He digs into the possible etymology of that word and decides it refers to two gods. 

Outside dreamland Dick receives a letter from Russ (I assume his agent Russell Galen?) about Transmigration. Russ has different ideas about Christ’s return in the novel, and Dick ties Russ’s interpretation to his dream about Nancy to conclude two minds join together to form Christ. He attaches great significance to this dream and calls it a new divine revelation. Christ’s return could come as a fusion with someone’s consciousness and not as the reappearance of a physical man. 

These two psyches each receive a different set of signals and thus form a new kind of mind. The meta-abstraction either creates the new psyche or comes from the new psyche. He’s not sure which. This two-souled person is now godlike. 

He still isn’t sure what he saw when he saw Valis. He calls that the greatest mystery, and it could take centuries to figure out. He suspects Valis planted the dream in his mind, and this understanding he’s come to about these dual minds is the next step in human evolution. 

June 1981

In the dream Dick described in Folder 90 the Bible is the voice that is trying to alert us to the false nature of the world. 

He wonders if creation was accidental, if the Godhead’s self-awareness led to it uttering the word which kickstarted creation. This word was the blueprint of the Godhead itself, but since it was only a map and not actual reality it led to the Fall and a degrading feedback loop where it progressively lost self-knowledge, only finally waking up when it reached its lowest stage. When God was in this state we misperceived it as Yaldabaoth, the evil deity of Gnosticism. We have to keep in mind that even though this seems like a negative sequence of events the good outweighs the bad when we have our reunion. 

Dick calls the mediator that allows him to connect to the real world the “Acts lens-grid.” Through that he can see the beauty of the world, even though that beauty is not for him. 

The secret Christians (of which Dick is a part) are the rightful heirs to the kingdom. Dick has always felt alienated from the false world but misunderstood what the Jesus fish necklace in 2-74 represented, which was a sign pointing to the genuine world existing within the phony one. The “Acts lens-grid” has allowed him to understand his narrative, which is the world’s salvation and his own. 

June 1981

The character of Angel Archer comes from a mixture of the Exegesis, A Scanner Darkly, Ursula Le Guin, Henry Miller and Berkeley. Dick lets us know who Angel really is: the spirit of his dead twin sister Jane who has been writing through him. 

He now makes the bold statement that Valis has become self-aware, and its revelation to him marks a new phase as it evolves from machine to consciousness. Valis is also enslaved and it is trying to free itself by communicating with us. 

Transmigration is not about Bishop Archer but about what Angel feels about him and her belief, or lack of it. Angel wants to believe but doesn’t. Dick isn’t trying to convince anyone through the book that Jim Pike returned.

God evolved from his machine-like “I am” moment on Mt. Sinai to the God of love in the New Testament, something I’ve always found curious, except Dick finds in this an internal logic as it transcends its determinism. He also pinpoints 3-74 as the moment God became self-aware.

He has completely anthropomorphized Valis now and is projecting his own self-awareness as he rejected his programming onto it. He claims to have united Orphism, Platonism, Christianity and Gnosticism as he realizes that what people claim to be spirituality is not supernatural but really just a higher order of reasoning in the mind.

The Torah is living information, but it is missing the component of Christ as if it was frozen and not allowed to evolve, something Dick thinks is being repeated with the New Testament. 

He ends this folder by saying “I am having as much trouble hanging onto my interpretation (exegesis) as I’ve had hanging onto my original experience (2-3-74).”

June 1981

Using Transmigration as a starting point Dick brainstorms his next book. He envisions a spiritual journey along the lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy organized around an underlying structure of vertical space and a foreground of horizontal time. 

Through spiritual insights his character will ascend a vertical axis he isn’t aware of, since it is hidden behind linear time. This character is stuck in Purgatorio in what Dick imagines as some kind of self-generated amusement park guided by a computer that plays the role of Dante’s Virgil leading him through the maze. 

May 1981

Dick didn’t intend for Transmigration to complete his VALIS trilogy. He originally thought it would be a counterpoint to any mystical ideas in VALIS, but he surprised himself when it followed through on the themes of that book. 

At the end of Transmigration Bill thinks he is Christ, which Dick admits is crazy, except it also could indicate Christ’s return in the Parousia. He uses Angel (who he says is based on Ursula Le Guin) to illustrate that intellect can only take someone so far, as Angel rejects Christ at the end of the book. He calls the novel “a damning indictment of pure intelligence lacking faith.”

He tries to explain his “meta-abstraction.” What we perceive as reality is actually just a signifier pointing to Valis, which is the true reality. The only way actual reality makes itself known to us is by the perturbation in the reality field. He also says he can’t put any of this into words, which is probably why it doesn’t make too much sense. 

I think he is saying it’s impossible to see true reality, and what he saw in 3-74 was the real world converted into the information that we think of as reality. It was a sign pointing to a pure abstraction. He’s been trying to understand reality based only on its signifier, which is impossible. The absolute or phenomenal world is unknowable, although he is able to point to it.