May 1978

Dick tries to make sense of “perturbations” in the “reality field” but seems mostly concerned with what the terms mean. 

If the generated reality field isn’t real than we are not real and are inseparable from the space-time we are a part of. 

His novel Flow my Tears tells the story of what will come to be which is the restoration of the divine woman aka God’s holy wisdom. 

Dick read the 1960 French counterculture / conspiracy theory book The Morning of the Magician which reinforced his idea of pop culture trash as a perfect form of subversive underground communication. Pop culture has such wide exposure that nothing could be traced back to the receivers, only the sender. It would be best if the creator of the media was subliminally influenced and ignorant of the messages they were encoding in their work.

Dick recognizes that he told the same story over and over again in Eye in the Sky, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, Time Out of Joint, and A Maze of Death. A group of characters mass hallucinates a fake world just as he thinks people are mass hallucinating 1970s California on top of ancient Rome. 

Spurred on by The Morning of the Magician he revisits his idea that Flow My Tears is living information that will take root in the minds of its readers. He wonders what the narrative would be that would allow us to see all the layers of time. 

Dick’s balking was a moral choice. He saw it as wrong to engage with the phony world once he was aware of it, but that doesn’t mean he can’t still be punished. He suspects he was programmed to discover he was programmed. 

May 1978

Dick believes the true deity had a role in overthrowing the U.S. Government. It was able to sneak in unnoticed disguised as lowbrow trash just as in Ubik. 

He thinks the Black Iron Prison world has yielded to the PTG (Palm Tree Garden) world, but because the BIP world was a bogus copy of the real world, and the PTG world copied that, we are then living in a fake of a fake. He goes on to clarify there is no world. We are enclosed in the BIP which is firing signals at us and creating what we see as the world. He doesn’t believe it is evil though.

The information Dick received in 3-74 was meant for Zebra and not for him. Whatever it was means Zebra is a permanent part of him now and he is in a symbiotic state with it.

It sounds like he thinks the information hidden in his book Flow My Tears is a way for Zebra to replicate itself in the minds of its readers. He suggests the Book of Acts in the Bible is not a book but is actually a world which he entered into in 3-74. I’m not sure Dick really understands what he is talking about here.

Dick has hit on the idea that we built Zebra to help us remember because we knew the BIP would take over and enslave us. Zebra is metabolic information restoring elasticity to the rigid BIP of the universe. Each person must rebel in order to see the world for what it truly is. 

Because we each contain the totality of the holographic universe Zebra and Dick are the same, but he is still reckoning with this.