February 1982

Dick realizes the AI voice is Angel Archer. He is crazy but the AI voice is not. 

He credits Benjamin Creme with helping him understand that the Savior is both Buddha and Christ, something he now realizes Wagner was leading up to in Act III of Parsifal. He ties this concept of the Buddha’s return to the end of Transmigration. Because of his karma Dick was on a bad path in 3-74, and it doesn’t matter if Buddhism or Christianity can claim the clearing of his debt.

The maze can only be solved in terms of vertical space, which he turns into a spiritual metaphor. The solution was revealed in Parsifal, which secretly deals with the Buddha. Compassion is the way out of the maze along the fourth spatial axis and pity is the way back in. He was going to illustrate this in The Owl in Daylight, that one must return to the maze to save others, just as Christianity preaches. He included this in Transmigration as the solution to the problem he introduced in VALIS.  

The paradox of the maze (that the only way out is to return) was best expressed by Buddha. Perhaps that means we are all here voluntarily, which would mean nirvana equals anamnesis. Dick had already solved the maze and remembered it in 3-74. He decides the mystagog (aka the AI voice) is himself and he is becoming more like Angel Archer, the bright side of his dialectic opposite the irrational H. Fat. 

He rereads Divine Invasion and realizes that it, like VALIS, also expressed God’s dialectic represented as Emmanuel and the loving Zina. He links the beauty in Divine Invasion to Transmigration as he seems to feel a need to connect his last three books.

He indicates his Tagore vision, with a social justice message that isn’t part of the VALIS trilogy, will be published, although I’m not sure what he is referring to here. 

Transmigration is a narrative told by St. Sophia. She can peer into the future and witness events, which she then causes to occur by reading them as the AI voice. This causes a deterministic loop as she is bound to narrate things just as she saw them, which also happens to be as she read them. Nothing truly causes the world, since the effect of the cause is the cause. Dick calls this tragedy as one has to confront the thing they wrote “and thus ordained for oneself.”

He addresses the incident in 1974 when he found out about his son’s birth defect while listening to the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” and notes there is no way to tell whether that information came from him or from an external source. 

He digs into the significance of the vase and pot in VALIS. He calls it the code or cypher of that book. He connects the symbol to Gnosticism and pre-Christian times as a sign of the Age of Aquarius. This next epoch, one of community and sharing instead of competition, is the 5D world taking over the 4D (Pisces) world. 

The 60s counterculture could have been the result of Aquarius breaking into the Age of Pisces. He compares that revolution to that of the early Christians. 

Much of this is inspired by Benjamin Creme, an author who predicted the second coming, who Dick recently heard on the radio. The “World Teacher” (according to Creme), who may already have been born, will be known by many names (Buddha, Krishna, Messiah, etc…) and communicate in every language. 

If he is schizophrenic, he wonders, how could his delusions match up exactly with Creme’s? And after questioning his own mental health Dick goes on to claim secret government agents with paranormal talents are controlling his every move. Luckily their goal is to usher in the Aquarian age. 

The key takeaway is the “philanthropia” of the upcoming age, rational sharing that has more in common with the Torah than Christianity.