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.