Dick calls the step of denying the false world we live in “ethical balking.” Refusing to cooperate with this prison world is the only way to reveal its counterfeit nature. 

Unlike A Maze of Death and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch which only show a hallucinatory world, Ubik demonstrates there is another world beneath the phony world. If this was not true Dick’s 3-74 experience would just have been a psychotic break rather than something that exposed a divine reality.

He realizes God does not live in nature as he once thought but instead bleeds through into our world from the world below. 

Dick is on a Gnostic kick after reading an article on Gnosticism, so he is filtering his stories through that new understanding. Just as in Gnosticism a secret knowledge is necessary to reveal the true world beneath ours. He sees parallels between Maze, Stigmata and Ubik but wonders about the total message of all his collected writing.

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