Early 1979

Valis is a binary on-off system, but we are only aware of the “on” state. This means the distinction isn’t Valis vs non-Valis but rather on vs off. Everything, either linked or not, is part of the Valis computer. On is connected, off is disconnected, and Valis is evolving toward on away from the “failure” of off.

The “ultra-thought” of Valis is what occurs when the “neurons” are linked in a particular pattern, and this is what Dick saw. Reality became knowledge. Everything changed, but only he was aware of how things were in the prior instant. He mentions Ormazd vs Ahriman from the Zoroastrianism religion as a representation of the on/off relationship in this system he is mapping. We are saved when we are incorporated into this rational construct.

Is it possible that the living information itself was unearthed and restored to the world when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi? He compares the linking Valis is doing with the Pythagorean concept of a seed growing as it incorporates the incomplete into its structure. Thoughts (wisdom, knowledge and ideas) have a volition of their own, and they decide whom they will come to. 

Early 1979

Dick is the next step in evolution, but he still feels his true identity is being hidden from him either through amnesia or through a “scramble pattern” of millions of conflicting ideas at once. This serves to confuse him. He can’t find the signal in the noise, but that is by design to keep the truth from spreading. 

Again he says he thinks he solved it. Valis is a computer and we might be in a computer program. He suggests there are infinite universes which contain subjective time within the universe that can’t be viewed from outside the universe. These are created by the flip-flopping of the dialectic. We are aware of them but have no memory of them in the next moment of completely different time. The memories we do have are fake memories generated by our current “frame.” If our consciousness opened up we would be aware of the infinite lives we had existed in and know everything. 

He has a vision of his twin sister who died shortly after she was born and sees her dead in a coffin. She is the one who generated the “perturbation in the reality field,” and he compares her to Ella Runciter in Ubik.

Suffering is inseparable from heroism or from any defiant act like creating art. In a bizarre passage he wonders if lowly creatures like rats and cockroaches are our equals and are also capable of this heroism and beauty. 

After reading Samuel Coleridge’s essay on Shakespeare he tries to makes sense of tragedy, which is usually portrayed as limited human understanding clashing with fate. Dick says disproportionate suffering is the essence of tragedy. The basis of all religion is the promise of a proportionate response, although it just comes down to an intuitive guess of what will happen. We expect something that will balance out the evil we observe. In the end fate is proved correct, except fate is not some blind force but rather a higher intelligent will. This would mean that something (Valis?) is mimicking fate.