March 1978
When the universe encounters ‘counterfeit interpolations’ it repairs and replaces them which result in changes in the timeline, although we aren’t aware of it.
The Great Mother was the one who revealed herself to Dick, a big deal since no one has believed in this female side of God for thousands of years.
Dick tries to understand suffering from a cosmic point of view. He doesn’t think Christianity does a good job explaining undeserved suffering. He thinks it all comes down to the element of chaos in the universe. When the benevolent God sees suffering it substitutes itself to take it on. Through this the memories of the suffering beings are restored and they know their true identity. Because the suffering is undeserved and unavoidable they are forced to search for not just an answer but the answer.
Dick envisions a more mechanical concept of the Noös where St. Sophia is reorganizing the chaos and Christ is sent in to restore broken sections of a “circuit board.” This isn’t a supernatural idea but can and will be explored in a scientific way.
The only way to encounter Christ is to be broken. Is the purpose of religion to merely explain suffering or to avert it?
The collective consciousness fell asleep in 70 A.D. when Christ left. Everything since then is fake time or a dream. Some group sits outside of this phony 1974 California reality and can see things we don’t see. Dick thinks his book Eye in the Sky is the most accurate representation of this.
He lists all of his novels that fit this theme of fake or hallucinatory worlds that hide the real one: Eye in the Sky, Time Out of Joint, The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, A Maze of Death, Flow my Tears, A Scanner Darkly, Clans of the Alphane Moon, The Game-Players of Titan, The Cosmic Puppets.
Dick wonders if the Noös might not be a little insane and deranged in the paradoxes and illusions it creates.