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. 

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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.

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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He writes out a 24-point list about what happened to him ending with ‘my psychological projections are withdrawn.’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.

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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. 

The post The Exegesis: A metal prison and the teachings of Meister Eckhart appeared first on the world Dick made.

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.

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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.

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Instead of thinking about the past generating the future we could imagine the future pushing the present into the past. The past is a trick our minds play as we try to arrange events into a linear order. Another way to look at the future is something that already exists which displaces the present. 

Dick spends some time speculating on why the entity communicated to him in Greek. If God has the ability to speak to people why was he the only one chosen? He realizes the absurdity of assuming he is that special. He has a theory that all of this could be the next step in human evolution, but that doesn’t explain the voice speaking in Greek.

He wraps this up with some notes about the story he is working on called To Scare the Dead which is beginning to resemble his final novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. 

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He mentions Doris Sauter for the first time. She was the inspiration for Sherri in VALIS and Rybus Rommey in “Chains of Air, Web of Aether” and The Divine Invasion.

Dick is nurturing ‘Firebright’ within himself, but eventually it will grow enough to take over and begin nurturing him. Perhaps humans exist primarily to nurture this solar spermatika. Dick isn’t sure if the information that reached him was inside him all along ready to be triggered or if it arrived with the ‘seed.’ If someone is possessed by God do they become God? He was possessed for a period of several weeks, but that was over a year ago and Firebright remained behind with him.

Dick thinks humans may exist in a loosely interconnected colony like bees. He eventually decides he proved the Miracle of Transubstantiation. I’m trying to make sense of this but it’s bouncing all over the place. He ends these notes by teasing that he should replace ‘God’ and ‘immanent God’ in everything he’s written thus far in the Exegesis with the correct word ‘Christ.’

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He thinks there might be a novelistic approach to existence where items someone encounters near death could be sprinkled throughout earlier in life (presumably according to the plan of the Logos) in order to give a subjective appearance of meaning and completeness. 

When Dick saw Rome supplant Fullerton in March of 1974 he took on the identity of a member of the Christian sect, identified by the Jesus fish symbol, working in secret. When he woke from this vision he entered into a fellowship with God. This reminds him of the vision he saw in the sky years before that inspired him to write The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. He decides what he saw was actually God, but he just perceived him to be hostile at the time because of his own derangement. 

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When European explorers first visited tribes in the 1600s they noticed religious beliefs strikingly similar to Christianity even though those cultures had never encountered it before. Dick calls this the “Logos Effect.” Something must be universally providing these salvation ideas to every race. 

Dick revisits the time theory of Dr. NK (aka Nikolai Kozyrev), the Soviet astrophysicist first mentioned in a letter to Claudia Bush on February 16, 1975. Dr. NK’s time theory resembles the ideas in Ubik so much that Dick says this is an example of the “Logos Effect” since he wrote Ubik in 1968, the same year Dr. NK’s theories were published in English. 

Another possibility though is that he was telepathically contacted by the Soviets at that time. Did it work? He wonders if it failed since he developed a dislike for the Soviets. Maybe his ideas for Ubik came from a combination of both the “Logos Effect” and Soviet telepathic communication. 

Dr. NK’s theory involves the ability of information to be transferred to people via time. In a sense Dr. NK rediscovered what the Logos was already doing. 

After a digression about a dream involving an entity named James-James Dick speculates about time splitting and reality realigning according to the plan of the Logos. 

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