His conception of the universe (at least for now) is a cube. We are all inside this cube and the patterns are fed to us. He uses Beethoven as an example of how signals are passed to humans for us to uniquely modify to produce an output. Another way to look at life is as a barrel that we roll up a hill until we eventually reach God… not the clearest metaphor here.

Dick ends the letter by briefly recounting what happened to him in 1974.

March 16, 1974: The entity appeared to him.

March 18, 1974: The entity looked out from inside him and denied the reality of the world.

March 20, 1974: The entity took over, showing him what was real.

March 20 until late July, 1974: The entity showed him how to defeat the world’s tyrannies. 

August 1974 and on: The entity (aka Elijah/the Holy Spirit/Dionysus/Zagreus) gradually went away leaving him mentally healed.  

The post The Exegesis: Letter to Claudia Bush, March 21, 1975 appeared first on the world Dick made.

He tells Claudia we spend our whole lives seeing time in its secondary axis instead of the real axis which is orthogonal. He toys with the idea that orthogonal time is cyclical and not retrograde like he previously thought. Our linear time is probably warped (which makes sense based on what Einstein told us about spacetime) and so time will eventually loop back around just like an object in orbit around a star. 

Time doesn’t really move but rather we move along time, from signal to signal, based on the plan of the Logos. 

The post The Exegesis: Letter to Claudia Bush, February 26, 1975 appeared first on the world Dick made.

In a postscript he says he ‘commanded the entity to show itself’ to him the previous night. In a hypnagogic state he saw a dead man dressed in a fawn skin on the floor. He is convinced this is Dionysus (who is related to Zagreus in Greek mythology) and in the morning he finds confirmation, in his mind at least, when he comes across something about the followers of Dionysus wearing fawn skins. 

He attaches notes for his next novel which combines ideas from Valisystem A (which would go on to become Radio Free Ablemuth and later VALIS) and the previously mentioned To Scare the Dead. The protagonist is influenced by a telepathic signal from space to overthrow a government tyranny. In the remainder of his notes Dick brainstorms on the notion of retrograde time and how it can be worked into his story.

The post The Exegesis: Letter to Claudia Bush, February 25, 1975 appeared first on the world Dick made.

Dick goes on to talk about the “Hymn of the Soul” in the “Acts of Thomas.” In that parable a man retrieves a pearl from the mouth of a dragon before returning home. Dick relates that story to his experience with the girl with the Jesus fish necklace, although the comparison is kind of slippery to me. He says he tried to track down the delivery girl a month after she visited him, but the pharmacy had no idea who she was.

The post The Exegesis: Letter to Claudia Bush, February 16, 1975 appeared first on the world Dick made.

The novel’s working title is To Scare the Dead. The sketch for the plot involves an LA man in the record business who is disinhibited by a girl with a Jesus fish necklace and suddenly has the spirit of a 2nd century A.D. Essene in his head. The man reads about Christ’s return in Revelation and later has his house ransacked and his file cabinet blown open by the government. I wonder where Dick is getting these ideas from.

Dick goes on to talk more about cubic time and the possibly retrograde horizontal time axis. Dick speculates he may have had false memories about his life in California implanted after being hypnotized (by who?), and wonders if whatever happened to him in March could have been due to Soviet experiments led by the astrophysicist Nikolai Kozyrev. 

The post The Exegesis: Letter to Claudia Bush, February 16, 1975 appeared first on the world Dick made.

He returns to the idea of the right hemisphere of the brain acting as a transducer. We won’t fully make sense of how we exist in this hologram network until we have achieved better communication between the right and left brain. 

The post The Exegesis: Letter to Claudia Bush, February 14, 1975 appeared first on the world Dick made.

He goes on to speculate about curved orthogonal time which lies at a right angle to the time we perceive. This horizontal time axis is the eternal one in which the Logos exists. Either Dick regressed or Rome came forward on this timeline and was revealed to him. 

The post The Exegesis: Letter to Claudia Bush, February 13, 1975 appeared first on the world Dick made.

In a postscript he pitches an idea of time in which time itself enters a person all at once as energy and we retain this in our heads as a potential which is slowly revealed. He uses this theory to explain déjà vu as we are glimpsing in advance what is already in our mind. 

The Immanent Mind which has been slumbering for two thousand years is now waking up.

The post The Exegesis: Letter to Claudia Bush, November 30, 1974 appeared first on the world Dick made.

Dick connects Ubik, the force itself, with the immanent mind he mentioned in his last letter. All of us have bits of this universal mind which can be sparked by an external catalyst such as Christ. 

I’m curious what Claudia Bush thinks as she receives letter after letter from Dick repeating variations of the same thing again and again. 

The post The Exegesis: Letter to Claudia Bush, November 29, 1974 appeared first on the world Dick made.

Whatever is visiting him has gone by many names in the past: Apollo, the Holy Spirit, Elijah and what Virgil called the “Immanent Mind” in the Aeneid. Dick is convinced the Immortals made a promise to return thousands of years ago and they are finally keeping that promise. 

The post The Exegesis: Letter to Claudia Bush, November 26, 1974 appeared first on the world Dick made.