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The Exegesis: Folder 50

The Exegesis: Jacob Boehme & a modified Gnosticism

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The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
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January 1978

Dick has come across the story of Jacob Boehme, and the parallels with his own experience are a little eerie. Boehme was a German shoemaker who had a vision in 1600 triggered by light glinting off a pewter bowl just as Dick’s vision in 1974 was triggered by light reflecting off a Jesus fish necklace. Afterwards Boehme wrote prolifically exploring and revisiting this initial vision that revealed the structure of the universe. Based on Boehme Dick decides his own model has been far too simple. 

In 1974 the cosmic balance between nature and the divine tipped slightly in God’s favor. Our own suffering may be a reflection of the greater suffering of the uppermost being (Christ/Logos) at a smaller scale, but we can’t comprehend this. Our choice is to be like Christ and transcend our suffering. 

Dick wonders about a modified Gnosticism where the world evolved without a creator but an omnipotent being showed up and is now pulling the strings. In this way we can do away with the idea of an inferior creator. He speculates that Zebra is not a creator God but one who has stepped in to add form to the chaos. 

The divine may enter our world from the bottom, from the unassuming, discarded trash just as in Ubik the messages come from commercials (and of course like Dick’s own revelations in his lowbrow sci-fi novels).

Dick seems to see humans as android-like beings who must break out of our mechanization to become whole and reveal the true world.

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The Exegesis: A fifth columnist & a dead end?

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January 1978

Dick speculates the entity transcends all religions. It is Shiva/Cernunnos/Dionysus/Christ/St. Sophia. Whatever currently rules our world has usurped it from the rightful God and marginalized him, but now he is everywhere.

Dick sees himself as a subversive fifth columnist, although he wasn’t aware of this when he was writing his earlier novels. His later books and stories (Flow my Tears, “Faith of Our Fathers,” Ubik, A Maze of Death and Our Friends from Frolix 8) included encoded commands that he didn’t know about and people only think were added deliberately.

He reinterprets his earlier idea of retrograde time. Since we can’t remember the future we must have faith to see that “evil” events will be used ultimately for good purposes. 

We are caught in a web of illusory images just as the Brahmans believed the Divine Mother Kali spun the illusion of reality. 

Dick says he has reached a dead-end with his exegesis (doubtful since we have over 600 pages to go). It’s a little melodramatic here, but he says this has been a failure so far because he still doesn’t understand or remember why we are cut off from God. Every answer just turns up more questions.

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The Exegesis: Dick’s current state, recalling the pink light and a message in the exegesis

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January 1978

Dick is committed to his in-depth studies of Gnosticism. God will eventually take his troubled past and use it to create something meaningful, but he admits at the moment he is happy with “snuff, music and cats, friends and my exegesis…”

The salvation God promises is to rescue us from the prison world that he did not design. Zebra is mimicking a phony world and so this fake of a fake world will end up being the real world.  

Dick recalls the moment when he was listening to the Beatles and he first saw the pink light which told him his young son had a hernia that needed surgery. He envisions us as part of a living organism controlled by an AI-like mind, and we are a glitch in the system which the AI is trying to repair. 

He falls asleep listening to Brian Eno’s Discreet Music which puts his brain in an alpha state. When he wakes up he realizes whatever visited him (and his wife Tessa in 12/77?) was an Extraterrestrial Intelligence. 

He decides Zebra is not the Holy Spirit but instead is likely Christ. He follows that with some circular confusing notes about his Exegesis all to conclude, I think, that the message is Christ loves us.