December 1981

Dick sketches out ideas for what he intends to be his next novel The Owl in Daylight. He refers to the main character as Owl and imagines the book as a parody of the gnostic search for salvation through knowledge depicted in VALIS. 

Owl, a holy fool archetype, exists in a “construct” governed by some kind of plasma, and only Owl seems to have figured out the maze everyone is trapped in. Dick clarifies the entire book won’t be a parody. It will be “tragicomic”. It will parody Jorge Luis Borges and Kafka but not Beethoven or Dante. 

Owl interacts with the controlling plasma/computer in four stages. In the fourth stage it introduces the Ditheon psyche and Owl realizes the pointless Faustian nature of his endless quest for knowledge. By that time Owl has isolated himself and become a pathetic antiwar protestor. A subplot involves a “crippled dwarf” and a governmental eugenics program. 

Dick wonders about including a possible government agent based on Ursula Le Guin who is worried about Owl’s increasingly deranged mental health. It’s interesting he brought up Le Guin, since she had already written this type of PKD parody novel in Lathe of Heaven published ten years earlier. 

He has further insights about the war between the Empire and Christianity (except Christianity is the true Empire and the true Christians are a Celtic-Orphic mystery religion) before he ultimately decides all of it is ridiculous. 

Early 1981

The universe created the macromind, not the other way around as Dick previously thought. Valis at some point evolved from the physical universe, and according to Dick this point seems to be when his meta-abstraction generated it right before he perceived it. This makes Valis the “perturbation in the reality field.”

He claims to have been cut off from God for fifteen seconds the previous night, which was a period of absolute agony and despair. He points out the various modes of progression he has gone through: 

1. Nonbeing 
2. Being
3. Consciousness

1. Eternity
2. Change
3. Knowledge

1. Timeless – space
2. Time
3. Memory

…etc, which all point to God.

He connects 3-74 to Beethoven’s music which enclosed space and converted space and time into space-time, the being inside the nonbeing, which we could then perceive. 

Living creatures with a will create reality in order to survive, which makes them God. Their will comes back to them as the world. The world defeats the creature, so the creature must then overcome its will through Christ by renouncing the self. This can only occur through joy and agape, not through self-denial and repression. The Buddha understood this, but the solution is not nonattachment. Instead someone must give away what is valuable while still maintaining its value. This process is still in progress in Dick’s own life. 

Dick claims to have seen the Ch’ang Tao and witnessed its self-sufficient dialectic changes. Because of all of this (3-74, Valis, his exegesis, seeing the Tao) his anxiety is gone and he understands his role in society as an artist / thinker. Everything exists as God. Nothing is truly lost and the people he loves are recovered when he recovers God. 

October – November 1979

In 3-74 Dick was restored as Adam Kadmon, one of the first entities who came into being in the Kabbalah, a man filling the entire universe, subject = object and microcosm = macrocosm. Dick compares the spatial reality created by the two systems of intersecting information to the music, and similar non-temporal reality, Beethoven created. He relates the expansive music to Paracelsus’s inner firmament, and Beethoven’s music is another trigger for the transfiguration that will free us from the BIP.

Memory is converted into a spatial volume, which is what he experienced as the world of Acts in 3-74. The hologram (reality) is created from this space, not time, so what we have is layer upon layer of the past.

Beethoven’s music was politically subversive because it expanded the mind of the individual. Dick’s writing is politically subversive because he explores the inner space, much like the psychedelic movement of the 1960s. He hopes his writing can help others expand their inner space and break through into absolute space, just as Adam Kadmon. Beethoven’s music can free us and show us there is a world outside, a lot like the one portrayed in Ubik and A Maze of Death.

He says the Christian universe is its own universe, a compressed, 2000-year span that starts with the death of Christ and ends with his return. In trying to understand the connection between that universe and ours he hits on relativity where the events of that universe viewed here (or by him in 3-74) would fly by in a blur. More importantly, in 3-74, when he slowed down and was in phase with that Christian world, our world “sped up.” And in that moment he was able to discern Valis, no longer camouflaged in its environment. When this happened to him his present “stretched out millions of years.” He says this is the opposite of drug intoxication where you get smaller and the world gets bigger, and instead in this enlightenment you grow to fill up time and space.