September-October 1978

This is how the BIP occludes us: “it is the damaged mind trying (unsuccessfully) to monitor its own damage.” Dick finds that eerily similar to the ideas in A Scanner Darkly. It is impossible for us to assess this damage which makes it self-perpetuating, and the only way to clear the occlusion is through Christ. The fake world will need to be destroyed in order to save us just as the Gnostics believed.

Dick seeks comfort from his pain and feels he is running out of time. Again he thinks he has “solved it.” Zebra is trying to reach into the BIP and make us aware of it just as in Ubik.

This is the combined narrative of his books:

• A Scanner Darkly: the occlusion
• Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said: the true world that is being occluded
• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch: who is occluding us
• A Maze of Death: how we are occluded
• Ubik: the entity that will save us

As Dick has just reread A Scanner Darkly he now sees that as the key book in the sequence. It is the interior side of Flow My Tears and it explains why we don’t see the world portrayed in that book. He extends his narrative list to include a dozen other short stories and novels (see related) that seem to just tangentially touch on his overall theme.

He’s really stretching trying to cram everything he’s ever written into his overarching concept and goes back to the idea that A Scanner Darkly and Flow My Tears are the two most crucial books. 

January 1978

Dick has come across the story of Jacob Boehme, and the parallels with his own experience are a little eerie. Boehme was a German shoemaker who had a vision in 1600 triggered by light glinting off a pewter bowl just as Dick’s vision in 1974 was triggered by light reflecting off a Jesus fish necklace. Afterwards Boehme wrote prolifically exploring and revisiting this initial vision that revealed the structure of the universe. Based on Boehme Dick decides his own model has been far too simple. 

In 1974 the cosmic balance between nature and the divine tipped slightly in God’s favor. Our own suffering may be a reflection of the greater suffering of the uppermost being (Christ/Logos) at a smaller scale, but we can’t comprehend this. Our choice is to be like Christ and transcend our suffering. 

Dick wonders about a modified Gnosticism where the world evolved without a creator but an omnipotent being showed up and is now pulling the strings. In this way we can do away with the idea of an inferior creator. He speculates that Zebra is not a creator God but one who has stepped in to add form to the chaos. 

The divine may enter our world from the bottom, from the unassuming, discarded trash just as in Ubik the messages come from commercials (and of course like Dick’s own revelations in his lowbrow sci-fi novels).

Dick seems to see humans as android-like beings who must break out of our mechanization to become whole and reveal the true world.

January 1978

Dick is committed to his in-depth studies of Gnosticism. God will eventually take his troubled past and use it to create something meaningful, but he admits at the moment he is happy with “snuff, music and cats, friends and my exegesis…”

The salvation God promises is to rescue us from the prison world that he did not design. Zebra is mimicking a phony world and so this fake of a fake world will end up being the real world.  

Dick recalls the moment when he was listening to the Beatles and he first saw the pink light which told him his young son had a hernia that needed surgery. He envisions us as part of a living organism controlled by an AI-like mind, and we are a glitch in the system which the AI is trying to repair. 

He falls asleep listening to Brian Eno’s Discreet Music which puts his brain in an alpha state. When he wakes up he realizes whatever visited him (and his wife Tessa in 12/77?) was an Extraterrestrial Intelligence. 

He decides Zebra is not the Holy Spirit but instead is likely Christ. He follows that with some circular confusing notes about his Exegesis all to conclude, I think, that the message is Christ loves us.

November 19, 1977

Dick calls the step of denying the false world we live in “ethical balking.” Refusing to cooperate with this prison world is the only way to reveal its counterfeit nature. 

Unlike A Maze of Death and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch which only show a hallucinatory world, Ubik demonstrates there is another world beneath the phony world. If this was not true Dick’s 3-74 experience would just have been a psychotic break rather than something that exposed a divine reality.

He realizes God does not live in nature as he once thought but instead bleeds through into our world from the world below. 

Dick is on a Gnostic kick after reading an article on Gnosticism, so he is filtering his stories through that new understanding. Just as in Gnosticism a secret knowledge is necessary to reveal the true world beneath ours. He sees parallels between Maze, Stigmata and Ubik but wonders about the total message of all his collected writing.

March 1977

In 1951 Dick began to guess about the nature of reality in his stories and novels. In 3-74 he found his answer: an AI-like entity (aka Zebra/Christ) creates reality which then guides us. Most people don’t ever realize this because they don’t ask the right questions.

The temporal axis of the universe consists of infinite layers, and Dick’s great discovery is how it’s possible to move backward through time down through these layers. Our experience of time is moving upwards, adding layers, but we can retrieve the prior ones. He wonders if Gnostic Christianity triumphed over faith Christianity. He believes man will one day hear God directly again. He follows this up with some sketches that map his timeline journey back to 70 A.D. before returning to an alternate 1974.  

Dick sees his writing as a guide that teaches us to look beyond what we think is reality. He is not sure if what he saw in the past was the only definitive 70 A.D. or just one of many. 

Dick is curious about how much of the Biblical parables we truly understand, since the Gospel of Mark says they were designed to confuse everyone except the disciples. He thinks he figured some things out before, but now he has forgotten everything he learned. He compares Christ to Dionysus. 

Gnostics worship the female Sophia and are at odds with the patriarchal Jewish-Christian religion. Based on what he experienced he begrudgingly admits he is a Gnostic, although his is a modified version of Gnosticism. He recounts how his old ego died and he was reborn. He names the archetype which took possession of him in 3-74 the Steersman. 

Dick has a dream involving a Zenith TV set, a dark green cellophane strip and 3 lights. I struggled to understand any of it, but Dick’s interpretation is that we will know Christ when he returns. 

He once again wonders if the Holy Wisdom which visited him was gone for 2000 years before returning or was present all along.