October 1978

Dick summarizes everything he believes up to this point about our phony reality / time and how it relates to Ubik, Stigmata, A Maze of Death, A Scanner Darkly and Flow My Tears. He reiterates Zebra = Christ, Christ = God, Thomas = Zebra and he = Thomas, so he = God. The creator can enter his own creation in order to test it. He first sheds his identity, but in order to prevent getting stuck there he plants clues that will wake him and restore his memory so he can escape.

The four deformations are

• Irreal world
• Perceptual occlusion
• Pervasive deterministic enslavement
• Amnesia

The voice tells him “One by one he is drawing us out of this world” and Dick tries to makes sense of what that means. Just like in Ubik and Eye in the Sky we are asleep and something like Ubik is trying to break through and wake us up.

Perhaps the spurious time is actually entropy and the four deformations are caused by the entropic process. The information Zebra generates runs counter to this entropy (is negentropic). The pattern overpowers the chaos, and this pattern, which entered and replicated in Dick in 3-74, is the message.

August 1978 or later

Based on situations in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, A Maze of Death and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Dick tries to decide if hallucination is reality or reality is hallucination. He settles on the latter. He follows that with some circular reasoning about the real becoming fake becoming real. 

I struggle to understand his notes on entropy within the brain, but I think he concludes that because of information degradation the hologram weakened and allowed the Acts material to show up in his book Flow My Tears. Because of entropy the Acts message itself that made it through was degraded.

Dick admits he probably had a schizophrenic episode in 3-74 and the stress and the breakdown of his relationships that led to it began as early as 1970. The psychosis he encountered is gone at the time of writing due to financial security and a new relationship. A bright spot of the whole ordeal was that it put him in touch with Holy Wisdom / St. Sophia which is now part of his soul.

In a third-person passage he recounts what happened to him and the intervention of St. Sophia communicating her message of love, wisdom and harmony.

August 1978

Dick tries to understand the connection between the book of Acts in the Bible and his novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. He sees Flow My Tears as something like an information-based eucharist which can replicate in people. This living information reprograms us and allows us to receive subliminal messages. 

Dick affirms Zebra is the Paraclete and thinks it should be studied scientifically, although he admits that would be futile since it is so advanced and nearly impossible to discern. It communicates through the “brain” network using pop culture artifacts like books and song lyrics. Once someone has Zebra in them they are part of the brain for good, but it can replicate itself in many different ways through “information plasma.”

One bit equals the entire information so once inside someone it will grow to the whole thing. He compares this to Jesus’s parable of the mustard seed. What Dick experienced in 3-74 was the entirety of the information expanding in his mind. Apparently (according to Dick) the authorities tried hard to prevent him from publishing Flow My Tears which proves how powerful it is. 

We are part of this living brain. He realizes the author of Ubik was Ubik itself and that Flow My Tears was the doorway that led to Rome 45 A.D.

The BIP represents entropy. Dick imagines a new big bang which will reset the cycle of the universe and it is all tied together with the Acts information encoded into Flow My Tears.

Entropy equals disorder which means the universe is moving toward disorder. Orthogonal time is moving the other way toward form we just aren’t always aware of it. Dick wonders if one intersecting arc of the Jesus fish represents linear time and the other arc orthogonal time. They intersected in the past (100 A.D.) and are about to meet again. The symbol was designed to show Christ’s First and Second Coming.

In an idea for the novel he is working on called To Scare the Dead his protagonist realizes the two hemispheres of his brain are traveling at right angles to each other in time. All the questions this raises will be answered by the Valisystem entity that has been contacting him.