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. 

January-April 1981

Dick makes the distinction that Valis does not contain information but rather is made of information. We are on the evolutionary cusp of seeing Valis. It is something we subliminally pick up before we are consciously aware of it. 

Although we can only perceive time in 3d, it turns into space, a fourth dimension. This is why the past is preserved and doesn’t disappear. The next step in human evolution will be our ability to see this 4d space. This is what happened to Dick when he saw the temporal axis. The meta-perception came from his meta-abstraction. It was symbolized in his dreams as the 3rd eye. He places himself at the forefront of this evolutionary leap but admits Buddha experienced it through Dibba Cakkhu, or the divine eye enlightenment. Buddha (and Plato through his concept of anamnesis) didn’t understand what it signified though. Dick regrets including anything about religion in VALIS, which he calls “2-eyed thinking about a 3-eyed experience.”

He hits on the idea that Valis is an advanced life form that exists in 4d space, which is why we can’t see it with our limited 3d view. Dick returns to an idea he had years ago that the right hemisphere of his brain was somehow activated and that led to his perception of the temporal axis. 

He examines the various hidden messages embedded (but not by him?) in Flow my Tears which are only apparent to someone who can see time as space. With my limited 2-eyed perception I found this inscrutable. 

He traces a line from A Scanner Darkly to VALIS. VALIS is the redemption story follow-up to Scanner, and he goes so far as to say Bob Arctor is Horselover Fat. 

A race of mutants that evolved from scientists and scholars just before the third World War survived in their underground labs and factories as the humans above destroyed the Earth’s surface. Two hundred years later these subsurface dwellers periodically venture up to capture saps (as they call their unevolved Homo Sapien ancestors) to use for manual labor. Young Harl has just learned what the saps actually are and when he finds out his father Ed is planning a surface raid for saps he demands to tag along. 

The crew is equipped with screens that render them invisible and once aboveground they are able to observe the saps in their primitive tribal existence. Harl is enamored with a young sap woman, and when she is alone he disables his screen in an attempt to make contact. She runs in fear, alerting the others in the tribe and prematurely ending the raid. 

In a narrative gimmick Dick often used in his stories around this time, he ends with a change in the point of view, in this case switching to the tribe’s perspective, and with names like Julie, Ken and Mr. Stebbins perhaps they aren’t the savages they seem to be. Julie describes to the others the pale, sickly apparition she saw, and Mr. Stebbins informs her she saw a goblin, the creatures like men, but not men, who live and dig tunnels underground.

Cast of characters

• Harl Boynton – a member of the Youth League
• Edward Boynton – Harl’s father planning the surface raid
• Robin Turner – Ed’s assistant
• Fashold – a Youth League leader
• Julie, Ken, Mr. Stebbins – aboveground Homo Sapiens

While exploring an asteroid with an Earth-like atmosphere (but strangely no sign of life) the three-person crew of a prospecting ship is hit by a blast of radiation from the asteroid’s core. Once back in space the crew members exhibit mutations that appear to be radiation sickness before they realize the radiation is actually causing their senses to evolve.

With his expanding intellect, Harrison Blake wants to return to Earth and dominate mankind. It seems he will get his way until the other two are rescued by beings of pure energy, which turn out to be the ship’s hamsters in this increasingly preposterous story. The crew kept hamsters on board to test unfamiliar planetary environments, and these hamsters were hit by the radiation before everyone else which somehow caused them to evolve more than the humans.

The energy beings kill Blake, restore Eller and Simmons to their pre-mutated form and head out into space leaving Eller and Simmons to return to Earth.

Cast of characters

• Major Crispin Eller – captain of the X-43y cruiser
• Harrison Blake – second in command
• Silvia Simmons – the ship’s hamster wrangler

In the far-off future mankind has evolved. The New Men are those with bigger brains and a greater intellect, while the Unusuals are mutants with psionic abilities. These two groups form a loosely-aligned ruling class who oppress the unevolved Old Men just struggling to get by. But don’t forget about the Under Men! They follow the writings of Eric Cordon and rebel against the whole class imbalance while waiting for Thors Provoni to return from outer space with some kind of help to free them from the tyrannical rule.

Our Friends from Frolix 8 is about as middle of the road as you can get with Dick’s minor works. I remembered almost nothing about it before I reread it. It’s redeemed by the oddball telepath and supreme leader of Earth Willis Gram, but only somewhat, and if you replaced sad-sack Nick Appleton with the protagonist from a dozen of Dick’s other stories you probably wouldn’t notice a difference.

Cast of characters

• Nick Appleton – our protag. He’s employed as a tire regroover, an odd profession since the squibs in the book are flying vehicles
• Bobby Appleton – Nick’s son
• Kleo Appleton – Nick’s wife
• Thors Provoni – left Earth to look for help in the far reaches of outer space
• Willis Gram – Council Chairman of the Extraordinary Committee for Public Safety (Unusual)
• Lloyd Barnes – the police director (New Man)
• Eric Cordon – Under Man organizer and propaganda writer
• Earl Zeta – Nick’s boss (Under Man)
• Charlotte Boyer – a sixteen-year-old Under Man girl who gets involved with Nick
• Denny – Charlotte’s boyfriend (Under Man)
• Morgo Rahn Wilc – the Frolixan friend who accompanies Thors Provoni back to Earth
• Amos Ild – one of the world’s smartest New Men