June 1981

Someone who doesn’t “achieve the Ditheon state” of wholeness progresses toward entropy and death. Dick says the physicist Erwin Schrödinger has said that biological organisms can postpone death by maintaining order, and one way to do this is by absorbing “negative entropy” from their environment. This is a strategy an organism takes when it is approaching death and knows it. Dick frames this as a working relationship between an entity and its surroundings, as it is often a last ditch effort to incorporate the external as the internal. 

He realizes “the real purpose of this exegesis has not been to find the answer but to preserve the experience.” He has to let go of perfectionism in his quest. He accepts the Protestant idea of God’s grace saving him, because he is unable to save himself. To forget this is to endlessly worry his life away. 

I believe I said earlier that Dick never stated which books are in his ten volume meta-novel, but I am wrong if I understand this doodle to represent the ten books (technically nine and one short story) with VALIS in the center. They are: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Time Out of Joint, Ubik, The Game-Players of Titan, A Maze of Death, The Man in the High Castle, Eye in the Sky, Martian Time-Slip, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and “Frozen Journey” (aka “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon”). They surround VALIS, which he says is the key. “VALIS in itself means nothing! Its only significance is as the code book to the 10 volume meta-novel.” VALIS, written after the others, is necessary for decoding the meta-novel.

He has a dream in which a girl realizes the universe is made of our prior thoughts. Dick interprets it to mean he is frozen in his own mind, and the revelation is depressing.  

June 1981

The Bible as information is the world. When you perceive the world you perceive the Bible, an interchange that occurs through “supra-temporal archetypal constants.” The Bible is not an account of a past time and place but rather is this time and place. Dick claims if someone attempted to write down a description of the world as they see it they would end up writing down exact passages from the Bible. He says this is what happened to him when he wrote Flow my Tears. He has combined ideas from Judaism, Christianity and Greek philosophy to come up with the notion of physical reality as information contained in a book for future retrieval. 

He makes a joke that it would be a “psychotic inflation of the ego” if he claimed to be Christ instead of saying he just saw him, although I think that is his belief. He rejects the concept of a sinful man and the idea of judgment after death that leads to heaven or hell. Instead we have the pursuit of Nirvana, or Christianity as Buddhism. 

Angel Archer is the other half of his soul, and he is glad he wrote Transmigration instead of the Blade Runner novelization that was offered to him, because otherwise she wouldn’t have been created. It took a great deal of energy to bring Angel to life, to the point where Dick says he could have died. She justifies his work by bringing it to a state of wholeness and completing it, similar to what God did with him through Thomas. It is the only way he knew it could be done. Dick created Angel (through Ditheon) and she came back to him as his soul, as the “spirit of [his] intactness.”