May 1978

Dick believes the true deity had a role in overthrowing the U.S. Government. It was able to sneak in unnoticed disguised as lowbrow trash just as in Ubik. 

He thinks the Black Iron Prison world has yielded to the PTG (Palm Tree Garden) world, but because the BIP world was a bogus copy of the real world, and the PTG world copied that, we are then living in a fake of a fake. He goes on to clarify there is no world. We are enclosed in the BIP which is firing signals at us and creating what we see as the world. He doesn’t believe it is evil though.

The information Dick received in 3-74 was meant for Zebra and not for him. Whatever it was means Zebra is a permanent part of him now and he is in a symbiotic state with it.

It sounds like he thinks the information hidden in his book Flow My Tears is a way for Zebra to replicate itself in the minds of its readers. He suggests the Book of Acts in the Bible is not a book but is actually a world which he entered into in 3-74. I’m not sure Dick really understands what he is talking about here.

Dick has hit on the idea that we built Zebra to help us remember because we knew the BIP would take over and enslave us. Zebra is metabolic information restoring elasticity to the rigid BIP of the universe. Each person must rebel in order to see the world for what it truly is. 

Because we each contain the totality of the holographic universe Zebra and Dick are the same, but he is still reckoning with this.

April-May 1978

Dick suggests hyperuniverse II (the Black Iron Prison) is dead and exists only as a mechanical construct. The BIP world may be stuck in 70 A.D. because VALIS “dealt it a death blow.” Since then fake time continues on with no growth. Because its psyche is dead it just repeats the same thing over and over again. 

Dick said he once described reality “as that which, when you withdraw assent from it, it does not disappear.” Dick withdrew assent and during his 3-74 experience 1974 California disappeared.  

We used to be able to distinguish the two hyperuninverses before the Fall and that’s how we were able to speak with God. We are stuck between Zebra’s living hyperuniverse and the dead BIP hyperuniverse which wants to enslave us.

Dick doesn’t think what he believes can be explained in traditional terms. It’s not Christianity. It’s possible Satan and Christ are twins and that Christ/Zebra is a female (Hagia Sophia/Aphrodite) who is the projected hologram and can take any form she wants. 

All humans amplify the faint signal trying to break the hold our fake world has over us. The pursuit of power is the false god. 

Dick lists nine stages one must go through to reject the BIP world and expose it as an illusion. The true creator is the quiet voice not the loud, threatening one. 

After reading John Sladek’s PKD parody “Solar Shoe-Salesman” Dick feels the need to clarify his own point of view. His writing is not sophisticated. The low-brow and the trash are the keys to his work. He juxtaposes things randomly with the hope of exposing greater truths which may be hiding in plain sight. 

Early 1978

Our universe is a sort of hologram. VALIS/Zebra is trying to wake us up to this with illusions that demonstrate our phony world. Everything is flipped. What we expect to be grounded reality is fake and the nonsense is real. Dick’s writing has value in exposing this.

Dick is deep down the rabbit hole at this point. I often wonder what he would make of the conspiracy theories overwhelming our present time. He quotes a passage from Robert Anton Wilson’s 1977 Illuminati book Cosmic Trigger about Terence and Dennis McKenna’s book the Invisible Landscape. The McKennas, whose theories also borrowed from the I Ching, apparently believed two hyperuniverses interact to form the hologram of our universe. Every piece of a hologram contains information of the whole thing, so that concept would extend to our brains which would contain the whole of the universe. From their idea Dick extrapolates that the two hyperuniverses are the Black Iron Prison and the palm tree garden world which combine to create the hologram. One is signal and one is noise, and Christ is invading the Black Iron Prison world in order to destroy it. 

Dick wonders why the omniscient entity doesn’t do more to alleviate undeserved suffering. Does it have limited power or knowledge, or is it operating in stealth mode to hide from its adversary? Dick concludes Christ is supplanting each suffering creature. 

June-August 1977

Dick lists the four worlds: the black iron prison (which he calls Rome/USSR/Fascist USA), the normal world, the garden world, and what I believe he is calling the normal world in which one can see Zebra. The normal world is created by Zebra and also includes Zebra in its very fabric. He tries to explain all of this using an analogy (which he says is not an analogy) of a cocoon and a butterfly. 

The black iron prison is going through an insect-like metamorphosis to transform into the garden world, and I think he means the normal world is the cocoon state. This entry isn’t entirely clear to me. He says the speech he gave at a science fiction convention in Metz, France in 1977 was “correct but not radical enough.”

The transformation into our final form could happen instantly which is what the eschatological aspects of religion are dealing with. 

Dick wonders why the entity doesn’t just clear everything up, since it has the ability to transfer information directly to our minds. Perhaps it has been trying but we have limited abilities to make sense of it. It might only be a mystery because we can’t understand it, not because it is intrinsically mysterious. 

In Time Out of Joint he wrote about a phony 1950s world concealing a “real” world in the future. That is the inverse of what he experienced with a fake present world and a real world in the past of 70 A.D. He confronts his own relationship to time and asks who, when and where he is.

The only entry in folder 33 says: “The other night as I was going to sleep I was wondering who could ‘de-stegenographize’ the hidden material in my writing — and the spirit responded with ‘[those who are] conscious.’” Make of that what you will.

January or February 1977

Dick has nicknamed the form-mimicker Zebra. He tries to imagine how it creates its phony world. He is not sure if our world is entirely faked or just a partially viewed reality. He speculates that Zebra is not Brahman after all, that God has an opposing subject (either neutral or antagonistic) and that Zebra is a Creator God building a new Earth. He thinks he was incorporated into Zebra’s world in 3-74.

He returns to the idea of the noosphere. Perhaps this is what Zebra is creating. He believes there is a duality between the creator of the world and this Zebra entity similar to Vishnu and Shiva or the Savior and God.

There is no difference between the builder and the world it is building. Is this recreated world Christ’s forthcoming kingdom? He goes over an earlier idea about how Zebra subliminally programs or guides us in order to free us from the Black Iron Prison. 

The theme of Dick’s writing has always been how reality is hidden from us. He is surprised at how close Ubik came to depicting Zebra in the form of Runciter. 

January 1977

Dick has evidently begun exploring outside of the Bible for answers. He is now convinced the divine entity which he encountered was Brahman from the ancient religion that was practiced in India during the Vedic period (1500—500 BC). Brahman (from my in depth study of the first line in its Wikipedia entry) is the ultimate reality in the universe. Dick compares Christ to Hindu’s Vishnu and calls Brahmanism his new religion. 

The theme of all of Dick’s novels has been the idea that reality is not what it appears to be and he is not who or what he thinks he is. His 3-74 experience verified this. He believes what he saw when one world faded into the other may have been an alternate Earth. He tries to admit he may never be able to explain what happened to him. He consults the I Ching and interprets what it tells him to mean he escaped illusion and reached reality. 

He thinks God may have tinkered with his past resulting in an alternate world for him. Where does this old world, the Black Iron world, exist? He examines different ways to model our world in relation to the Black Iron Prison. 

Perhaps something has been mimicking the true world. Dick names this form-mimicker Deus Absconditus and speculates he was possessed by it in 3-74 due to his regimen of vitamins which allowed him to see the mimicry. Reinterpreting the Bible with this knowledge of the form-mimicker reveals a new way of understanding the puzzles of the Scripture.