March 1977

In 1951 Dick began to guess about the nature of reality in his stories and novels. In 3-74 he found his answer: an AI-like entity (aka Zebra/Christ) creates reality which then guides us. Most people don’t ever realize this because they don’t ask the right questions.

The temporal axis of the universe consists of infinite layers, and Dick’s great discovery is how it’s possible to move backward through time down through these layers. Our experience of time is moving upwards, adding layers, but we can retrieve the prior ones. He wonders if Gnostic Christianity triumphed over faith Christianity. He believes man will one day hear God directly again. He follows this up with some sketches that map his timeline journey back to 70 A.D. before returning to an alternate 1974.  

Dick sees his writing as a guide that teaches us to look beyond what we think is reality. He is not sure if what he saw in the past was the only definitive 70 A.D. or just one of many. 

March 1977

Dick yearns for Zebra to contact him again. He returns to the night of his epic drug bender and decides Erasmus and Dionysus and Zebra are one and the same. Zebra is the rightful king of our world. Maybe if Dick’s experience did happen to others they kept it a secret. 

He reads an article in Time magazine about a book by psychologist Julian Jaynes which suggests that prior to 10,000 B.C. humans didn’t possess a consciousness but instead existed in a sort of schizophrenic state led by voices only they heard. Eventually humans evolved from this bicameral brain (left side for speech, right side for these voices) to the consciousness we know today.

Dick thinks Christ’s unachieved goal on Earth was to help restore that bicamerality. He believes in 3-74 he became temporarily bicameral, and if the gods communicated from our right brain then they are still there subconsciously guiding us. 

He imagines the mind as a computer that can retrieve any information (even that of long dead people?) if it’s given the correct signal. 

March 1977

Dick reads an essay Stanislaw Lem wrote about him and understands he has never been able to see causality the way everyone else does. 

He reads the screenplay for Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and by equating his life to a script realizes 3-74 ridded him of his paranoia. He correctly summarizes this makes him look psychotic. He says he became schizophrenic, which cured him, and he admits his fear that the FBI was after him was a delusion. 

He was a “paranoiac schiz” from 71 to 3-74 and had a full schizophrenic breakdown for a year after 3-74. After this a “toxin” secreted in his brain destroyed his persecutory complex. It appears now that depictions of paranoid worlds (like North by Northwest) are repellant to him. 

Using the Greek concepts of idios kosmos and koinos kosmos Dick wonders if the schizophrenic world is the sane world and the normal world is the crazy one. Maybe during schizophrenia the brain is trying to achieve parity between the two hemispheres by releasing the toxin. Because of the right brain’s dominance though schizophrenia is a failed evolutionary leap. 

His inability to understand causality (linear right-brained thinking) has allowed him to perceive how Zebra is communicating. One of his most important discoveries is that causality actually moves backwards.