Dick is curious about how much of the Biblical parables we truly understand, since the Gospel of Mark says they were designed to confuse everyone except the disciples. He thinks he figured some things out before, but now he has forgotten everything he learned. He compares Christ to Dionysus. 

Gnostics worship the female Sophia and are at odds with the patriarchal Jewish-Christian religion. Based on what he experienced he begrudgingly admits he is a Gnostic, although his is a modified version of Gnosticism. He recounts how his old ego died and he was reborn. He names the archetype which took possession of him in 3-74 the Steersman. 

Dick has a dream involving a Zenith TV set, a dark green cellophane strip and 3 lights. I struggled to understand any of it, but Dick’s interpretation is that we will know Christ when he returns. 

He once again wonders if the Holy Wisdom which visited him was gone for 2000 years before returning or was present all along. 

Dick dreams about a Medieval diptych. On the right side is a painting resembling Michelangelo’s Delphic sibyl above the words ’SHE’ and ’SECRET.’ On the left side is Pinocchio. Below it all are lines from the I Ching indicating masculinity. Dick’s interpretation is that a secret female nature, which he decides is the Hagia Sophia, is behind Christ’s masculine nature pulling the strings. He believes he saw the second incarnation of Christ, a combination of the male and female essences. 

He recalls another dream he had of Aphrodite and wonders if the ’she’ in the first dream is related to, or perhaps is in fact, that Greek goddess of love.

Dick had another mystical experience on June 2, 1975, but unlike 3-74 and 2-75 this one lacked ‘all adventitious percept-system experiences.’ He realizes his 3-74 experience is something that happens all the time. It was just new to him. Since there is no way for him to understand God through his senses he either needs to deny God is at work in the world or deny the evidence of his senses. He decides on the latter. 

Evil isn’t as in control as it appears to be, although it had more power in the past. He envisions the universe as a delicate balance like the one between Yin and Yang. He again wonders why no one else reports an experience like his. 

He writes out a 24-point list about what happened to him ending with ‘my psychological projections are withdrawn.’ He decides even after all this he is not an improved or even necessarily a good person. His health is better and he has more control over his moods, but he is still cranky and domineering. 

He traces everything to a day in 1970 when he had a mental collapse which continued until 3-74 when he began his recovery. In 3-74 he saw an arch-like doorway which must represent death. Through it he glimpsed the Next World. We are not half-dead but half-alive since we haven’t yet found the missing part which lies ahead of us.

Dick has now decided we are in a metal prison, although this prison has tubes drilled in the walls, camouflaged from the prison’s creator, and these tubes allow in signals which are designed to help us. 

He recounts a few different dreams including one where as a child in the ‘30s he received a bowl of cereal from a man who he determines to be the Savior. He thinks he has been working toward a reunion with the Father his whole life. 

Dick relates the teachings of the 13th century German theologian Meister Eckhart (filtered through Jung) to his own life. We all have the form of God encoded inside us which is reconstructed through a signal from God himself. Dick wonders what happens when someone is possessed by the Deity. Was the divinity inside them all along but just forgotten as Neoplatonism and Orphism suggests? He realizes the conflicting messages based on what happened to him. He experienced the anamnesis, but he also believes he received a message from the Savior who told him all of it was something new. 

He feels he is in a holding pattern after trying to decipher what’s been happening to him for the last fourteen months but he takes comfort in the Scriptures. 

For the previous 15 months Dick thought that Paul was the author of “Acts” in the Bible but he finds out that it was actually written by Luke. This new knowledge matches up to recent dreams he has been having. He incorporates Luke into the plot for To Scare the Dead: St. Luke will visit the protagonist and teach him that the Holy Spirit can possess ordinary people. 

Dick compares what happened to him with Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (a book about an alien invasion of Earth) which he just read, although he doesn’t find too many similarities to his experience. Dick rejects a sci-fi interpretation and embraces a theological one. 

He recounts a new experience. Some light entity which he calls The Moth visited him and then the following morning he spoke with Astraea, the Greek (Dick incorrectly calls her Roman) virgin goddess of innocence and justice. She told him they will judge those who destroy the Earth. Afterwards he went in for a scheduled blood pressure reading and found his b.p. was normal. 

He considers folding an older story about a man who remembers the future instead of the past (I believe he is referring to “Recall Mechanism”) into To Scare the Dead.

Dick continues to wonder why he can experience God and others can’t. What happened to him proves that God can communicate directly to people without an intermediary just as the Protestants said. The concept of God has evolved from something external to something internal which will affect future societies. He imagines a kind of ‘godly anarchy’ where laws are unnecessary. 

Any group that had the same experience he did might afterwards search for the cause by thinking back to recent people who have died. For Dick that was Jim Pike. For the early Christians it was Jesus. Others saw this being as Tammuz, Adonis or Osiris. Are all of these mystery religions thinking of the same entity with a different name?

During his experience Dick had the impression he had been viewing the universe ‘backwards’ his entire life. Are we perceiving the universe incorrectly? We’ve been taught since we were children to identify things by name which leads to an overfamiliarity and lazy thinking that could be preventing us from seeing things as they are. What we need to do is somehow look at things with fresh eyes. Dick is beginning to understand he encountered the totality of God and not just a small portion. If this happened to anyone they would obviously find it difficult to explain this overwhelming experience.