March 1979

Dick traces the beginning of his 3-74 experience to a “taco stand” trip into “Mexico,” which was an eight-hour vision of several weeks in 1974 that he had while in California in 1971. That’s when Thomas entered his world, crossed the next three years and took him over in 3-74. This was a necessary infusion of psychic energy from a time when Dick was stronger to a time in 3-74 when he was weak. 

He recognizes his life in Orange County as the replacement reality, but he tries to imagine what was there before. He wonders if the changes reach all the way to the White House. Perhaps in the other reality Nixon remained in power. The world of Flow My Tears, which also includes the Nixon tyranny, was overthrown. 

Just before falling asleep he has a hypnagogic vision and is aware that he is not supposed to understand 3-74. Whoever healed him is also scrambling his mind, but now he knows he can’t figure it out and never will.

He ties his beliefs to Communism and theoretical Marxism (he calls it an anti-establishment Christianity anti-theist view). The key is millennialism, which is a belief that a paradise will be established on Earth before a final judgment. Thomas is a Marxist revolutionary, and capitalism is the BIP that enslaves us. Real Christians are communists, a secret hidden from the world.

He envisions the being beyond creation as a woman. She is his sister. Does he exist in her mind or does she exist in his? Which of them is alive? This dialectic is the yin and yang of Tao which he explored in Ubik.  

Our world is the world Mr. Tagomi experiences when he reads a page from a book in The Man in the High Castle. It’s a loop where the smallest thing (a single page inside a work of fiction) becomes the macro. The whole is contained in the part.

He realizes he is dead and doesn’t know it just like the characters in Ubik. Or maybe he’s alive and they are dead. He calls this a breakthrough into pluriform model theory. Truth oscillates, negating itself and then negating itself again, back and forth in a loop. He claims these riddles, where he ponders whether he is alive or dead, show how happy and fulfilled he is.

Early 1979

Dick is the next step in evolution, but he still feels his true identity is being hidden from him either through amnesia or through a “scramble pattern” of millions of conflicting ideas at once. This serves to confuse him. He can’t find the signal in the noise, but that is by design to keep the truth from spreading. 

Again he says he thinks he solved it. Valis is a computer and we might be in a computer program. He suggests there are infinite universes which contain subjective time within the universe that can’t be viewed from outside the universe. These are created by the flip-flopping of the dialectic. We are aware of them but have no memory of them in the next moment of completely different time. The memories we do have are fake memories generated by our current “frame.” If our consciousness opened up we would be aware of the infinite lives we had existed in and know everything. 

He has a vision of his twin sister who died shortly after she was born and sees her dead in a coffin. She is the one who generated the “perturbation in the reality field,” and he compares her to Ella Runciter in Ubik.

Suffering is inseparable from heroism or from any defiant act like creating art. In a bizarre passage he wonders if lowly creatures like rats and cockroaches are our equals and are also capable of this heroism and beauty. 

After reading Samuel Coleridge’s essay on Shakespeare he tries to makes sense of tragedy, which is usually portrayed as limited human understanding clashing with fate. Dick says disproportionate suffering is the essence of tragedy. The basis of all religion is the promise of a proportionate response, although it just comes down to an intuitive guess of what will happen. We expect something that will balance out the evil we observe. In the end fate is proved correct, except fate is not some blind force but rather a higher intelligent will. This would mean that something (Valis?) is mimicking fate. 

Early 1979

Dick tries to explain his concept of memory. We all have the potential to have a 3-74 experience, but the new memories come too fast, wiping out what we learned, overwritten by the irrationality of Zebra… every nanosecond a new reality cancels out the previous one.

Zebra is toying with us. The dialectic flip-flops. Whatever is true in one second becomes the opposite in the next. We have the ability to influence future events, but we don’t remember this because we don’t have any memory of the previous “frame.”

He believes we are trapped in the bardo as described in the Bardo Thödol / The Tibetan Book of the Dead. This is what Dick depicted as the half-dead state in Ubik. He says that if we remain in this entropic state the irrationality could potentially infect Valis which could “snuff out the cosmos.” Valis is the only thing that can break us out of this deterministic path where the future flows from the past and change it into one where we control the future of our own volition.

Just as in the half-life in Ubik, those trapped in the bardo believe they are still alive, and what they believe is reality is just a projection of their past. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is secretly showing not what happens after death but our present condition. He sees this as a game of sorts that we must outsmart (as he did) in order to break free. 

He again tries to explain how our future is constantly flip-flopping between binary pairs and it is happening so fast we can’t form memories of the past. He speculates it is possible that supercharged energy in the form of an idea could jump many years into the future and suggests that’s what happened with Ubik: his idea of Ubik in 1968 leapt into 1974 and overpowered his reality as Valis.

Early 1979

Dick wonders if some of his books (Ubik, Scanner, etc.) “went out from him” and then came back in signal form implying contact with the future.

The BIP (which Dick is now calling the Empire) is a uniformity or stagnation that puts an end to the dialectic. Dick thinks the entity which contacted him responded as Ubik because it doesn’t speak our human language. Instead it returned the signal Dick put out modified as a confirmation he could recognize. He still doesn’t know what it is even though he’s been in a dialog with it for almost five years. He’s not sure if it is Ubik or just appears like Ubik in order to communicate with him. This new realization is disturbing to him since it could mean Ubik itself is just a simulation that is taking a form he can understand. It could be the Holy Spirit, which would mean it is not trying to deceive him but is taking a form he recognizes from a point of grace and love.

This section is fascinating to me because Dick admits all along he may have been trying to make sense of what happened to him by using the sci-fi frameworks he made up. If Zebra is the deity it took the form he expected the deity to take. He doesn’t think any of this though undermines the fact that what he experienced was the deity.

He ties this back to the idea of the self-perpetuating dialectic. Dick put forth Ubik and Zebra responded as Ubik. He believes it assimilated his books, which would make sense since it is living information and his writing is information.

Valis is the real world and Ubik is how it breaks into our irrational simulated world, but then what is this real world and where is it?

December 1979

Valis is outsmarting and swallowing up the irrational. Dick throws around the word dialectic a lot in this section referring to contradictory concepts. Valis is self-generating. Dick is not part of it but also it. He says he continually programs himself for self-punishment. Without the pain he would give up and die. 

The dialectic process is self-perpetuating and the exegesis is an example of this back-and-forth. Stasis = death. 

He speculates (seemingly under the influence of drugs) about how the early Christians, under cover of their religious doctrines, were actually a revolutionary political group. They still exist today and use some sort of computer left on Earth by aliens (aka Valis) to beam out an energy field that controls humans and their history. The aliens, which Dick has decided are 3-eyed, want us to think in this binary, dialectic way, what he calls paratruths rather than one unitary truth. He makes a list of these contradictory paratruth pairs about Valis:

• it’s evil / it’s good
• it’s occluding / it’s educating
• it’s alive / it’s a machine
• it’s serious / it’s playful
• it created our reality / it evolved out of our reality
• it’s human / it’s non-human (God or alien)
• it’s objectively real / it’s all in his head

He suspects it is some kind of (tender, loving) ship-board computer but admits he can’t prove that.

Dick says the counterculture was what got the U.S. out of Vietnam and thus prevented World War III. He gives himself some credit for this because of his early stories with anti-war themes (see related). He says he might be the sole Marxist S-F writer, and he is still going strong into the 1970s.