December 1978
Dick begins part 3 of the exegesis with part of a manuscript for VALIS that he will end up reworking into chapter 2 of that book. Horselover Fat has started to keep a journal, aka the exegesis. Dick writing in the first-person voice from VALIS describing Fat in these pages is confusing… layers upon layers.
After the VALIS excerpt Dick touches on his studies of 13th century German theologian Meister Eckhart and the Indian philosopher Adi Sankara (roughly 8th century) whose concepts can explain what happened to him when the barrier between his inner microcosm and outer macrocasm broke down. God inside us is the rational reality which breaks through into the irrational reality outside of us. He proclaims this a new theology.
The 4 Kantian categories of “ordering perceptual experience” (ego, space, time, causality) are arbitrary and wrong, and Dick combines them all into the inner and outer world. His will and Zebra were intertwined… him and not him. He says only the will exists and he states he attained nirvana. This breaking down of time, space and self represents and evolutionary leap forward according to him.
He wants to compare all this to concepts from Christianity but decides it is something new. It is like an expanded Gnosticism. He should preach about it, but realizes that’s what he is doing with the book VALIS. He returns to the idea of retrograde time, which he discussed in depth earlier, and says that is the basis of this new religion: VALIS is actually us in the future presenting to ourselves as our God.
After all this he “concludes” once again the entity may be Christ, but he doesn’t know where it came from or how long it’s been here. Seems almost like an ending to a different section after the craziness of the previous pages.