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. 

August-December 1981

In a letter to Pat (possibly Patricia Warrick?) Dick attempts to explain his idea about “the plasmate.” The plasmate is the third testament that results from combining the Old and New Testaments, something Dick says the Italian theologian Joachim del Fiore wrote about in the 12th century. The testaments are living, biological organisms (self-replicating and sentient) that Dick names Psyche A (OT) and Psyche B (NT). The third recombinant testament he calls Ditheon Psyche C.

Ditheon is a life form superior to all creation, although not God itself. The Bible is the world as information, and the meta-organism exists in the OT and NT. Joachim understood this. Look no further than Psalm 22 (which Jesus speaks on the cross) as evidence that these books exist outside of space and time. When Dick says we are living in the time of “Acts” he doesn’t mean a specific historical time but rather a reality built from information contained in that book. The Bible is a signal created by words, and the OT and NT are constantly recombining as the third meta-entity. 

In 3-74 Dick uncovered the Logos / Word / information that God spoke to give birth to creation. 

June 1981

Someone who doesn’t “achieve the Ditheon state” of wholeness progresses toward entropy and death. Dick says the physicist Erwin Schrödinger has said that biological organisms can postpone death by maintaining order, and one way to do this is by absorbing “negative entropy” from their environment. This is a strategy an organism takes when it is approaching death and knows it. Dick frames this as a working relationship between an entity and its surroundings, as it is often a last ditch effort to incorporate the external as the internal. 

He realizes “the real purpose of this exegesis has not been to find the answer but to preserve the experience.” He has to let go of perfectionism in his quest. He accepts the Protestant idea of God’s grace saving him, because he is unable to save himself. To forget this is to endlessly worry his life away. 

I believe I said earlier that Dick never stated which books are in his ten volume meta-novel, but I am wrong if I understand this doodle to represent the ten books (technically nine and one short story) with VALIS in the center. They are: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Time Out of Joint, Ubik, The Game-Players of Titan, A Maze of Death, The Man in the High Castle, Eye in the Sky, Martian Time-Slip, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and “Frozen Journey” (aka “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon”). They surround VALIS, which he says is the key. “VALIS in itself means nothing! Its only significance is as the code book to the 10 volume meta-novel.” VALIS, written after the others, is necessary for decoding the meta-novel.

He has a dream in which a girl realizes the universe is made of our prior thoughts. Dick interprets it to mean he is frozen in his own mind, and the revelation is depressing.  

June 1981

The Bible as information is the world. When you perceive the world you perceive the Bible, an interchange that occurs through “supra-temporal archetypal constants.” The Bible is not an account of a past time and place but rather is this time and place. Dick claims if someone attempted to write down a description of the world as they see it they would end up writing down exact passages from the Bible. He says this is what happened to him when he wrote Flow my Tears. He has combined ideas from Judaism, Christianity and Greek philosophy to come up with the notion of physical reality as information contained in a book for future retrieval. 

He makes a joke that it would be a “psychotic inflation of the ego” if he claimed to be Christ instead of saying he just saw him, although I think that is his belief. He rejects the concept of a sinful man and the idea of judgment after death that leads to heaven or hell. Instead we have the pursuit of Nirvana, or Christianity as Buddhism. 

Angel Archer is the other half of his soul, and he is glad he wrote Transmigration instead of the Blade Runner novelization that was offered to him, because otherwise she wouldn’t have been created. It took a great deal of energy to bring Angel to life, to the point where Dick says he could have died. She justifies his work by bringing it to a state of wholeness and completing it, similar to what God did with him through Thomas. It is the only way he knew it could be done. Dick created Angel (through Ditheon) and she came back to him as his soul, as the “spirit of [his] intactness.”

June 1981

The plasmate formed by the cross-bonding of two human minds is a new kind of non-biological life form. It has no body, and to it reality is an idea not a physical thing. It’s possible the combination of the two human psyches happens spontaneously as a random event. Dick ties this concept back to Teilhard’s noösphere that he wrote about many years before. Because this life form has no body it “floats” and might be using the human mind as a way to connect to physical reality. 

He saw footage from the upcoming Blade Runner movie and recalls his time in Purgatorio when he had a vision of hell before ascending to Paradiso. 

The New Testament is the “secret narrative” of the Old Testament. It contains the living info that is Christ which cross-bonds with a human mind, capable of infinite combinations in a form of evolution. The Scripture that is generated (a new phenomenon) is unique to each person and situation. The third stage progresses from the Torah (OT) to Christ (NT) to this, but Dick doesn’t yet have a name for it. 

He claims his later books like Scanner and VALIS were written by a Ditheonic brain. No one, not the Jews nor Paul, connected the Torah and the NT this way as earlier stages of a third-stage organism. 

Based on his Ubik idea of God in the trash, the mundane and the divine are two stages of the same thing. The mundane is a slow stage of the divine (or the divine is a faster stage of the mundane) but there has to be unity, a coming together of discrete things, before it can make that leap to divinity.

Dick believes that the infinite beauty which exists in the world is the benchmark that points to God. 

June 1981

Dick has a dream about his ex-wife Nancy whose mind (in the dream) has been infiltrated by the psyche of another man. She has taken some medication with the cryptic name “Ditheon.” He digs into the possible etymology of that word and decides it refers to two gods. 

Outside dreamland Dick receives a letter from Russ (I assume his agent Russell Galen?) about Transmigration. Russ has different ideas about Christ’s return in the novel, and Dick ties Russ’s interpretation to his dream about Nancy to conclude two minds join together to form Christ. He attaches great significance to this dream and calls it a new divine revelation. Christ’s return could come as a fusion with someone’s consciousness and not as the reappearance of a physical man. 

These two psyches each receive a different set of signals and thus form a new kind of mind. The meta-abstraction either creates the new psyche or comes from the new psyche. He’s not sure which. This two-souled person is now godlike. 

He still isn’t sure what he saw when he saw Valis. He calls that the greatest mystery, and it could take centuries to figure out. He suspects Valis planted the dream in his mind, and this understanding he’s come to about these dual minds is the next step in human evolution.