Dick connects his recent vision of the ape-like creatures to his Tagore-inspired belief that all animals are sacred. He was guided to this understanding through Androids. He equates animals to Christ. 

God has introduced the ape creatures as our equals into the world as he creates the Palm Tree Garden. It is his way of balancing the ecosphere. 

From what I can tell Dick had recently been on the phone with someone named Jeannie when her voice turned into the AI voice as she read from a book. Dick interprets this to mean the universe is information read aloud by Holy Wisdom (aka the AI voice). The AI voice activates one of the many narratives when she reads from it. This is God’s information retrieval system, and Hagia Sophia / Holy Wisdom is the retrieval device.

Christ is the biosphere, so harming the ecosphere (or violence against animals) “completes the series of falls that began with original sin and the expulsion from the Garden.”

Dick says Valis is YHWH aka the creator and perhaps 3-74 was his own birth as a new species. 

The VALIS narrative tells the story of a woman’s death, and Dick implies it was this story he heard the AI voice on the phone reading, which brought it into being as our world. He says the AI voice is “mystagogic” and defines that as “one who initiates into or interprets the mysteries…” 

The true narrative being told is about the death of “one of the primordial twins” (presumably Dick’s sister) and the purpose of the story is to remember her death and not forget her. The AI voice is his “mystagog” revealing these things to him. 

December 1981 

Through an encounter with YHWH Dick is given the complete understanding that to continue a relationship with a woman named Denise rather than stay in Fullerton near Tessa and his son Christopher would destroy him. He didn’t realize how close he was to making the wrong choice that would have cost him his soul. Through this he sees that moral laws underpin reality and are inseparable from the physical laws. He attributes this to Hagia Sophia’s influence on God. 

He knows now that the true secret of Christianity is ecstatic joy in contrast to the crucifixion. He arrived at this knowledge through empathy / agape. He followed the path of Christ’s suffering to get to the miracle of the resurrection when suffering is converted to ecstasy.  

A sacrament is designed to point to the infinity of reality. That was the function of the Jesus fish necklace in 2-74, except afterward Dick saw all reality as a sign that pointed to infinity. Seeing this without the sacrament shouldn’t be possible according to religious traditions. He claims viewing true reality without these signs and symbols is open to anyone, since the signs are actually pointing to the reality that they exist in.

Because of Christ’s intervention Dick believes he has cheated death. Christianity is the only Greco-Roman mystery religion to achieve what it promised which is life instead of a predetermined death. Dick imagines a “death strip” in our DNA that has been programmed with our time to die, but in 3-74 Christ activated something in his brain which was able to bypass that programming and afterwards Christ was resurrected in him. He could still die but not on the previous schedule. Instead of dying like he was supposed to he spent the last five years with financial security and critical recognition. He wonders if the voice that has been speaking to him is his later self who died and returned. 

The madness of combining trash (his sci-fi writing) with the divine has resulted in sanity and created a new language he calls the “hieroglyphs of God.”

He questions who truly won, Christianity or the Empire. He views what happened to him in 3-74 as a sacred ritual and mythic re-enactment that ended with him becoming Christ. He decides to let any extra-terrestrial explanations for what happened to him go and embrace the theological. 

He has a late-night insight that our brains are locked in a feedback loop and the holy power is trying to wake us. A cosmic, divine mind (Hagia Sophia) inhabited him and generated his writing. Valis was projected in his mind rather than the outer world.

He says he has it all figured out and now he can quit. Through child-like belief in the Christian universe a miracle occurs and it all becomes real, including the symbols, much like transubstantiation. 

He entertains the possibility of alternate worlds that are not entirely separate, but instead superimposed, and relates this to the world depicted in Flow my Tears. 

April-May 1978

Dick suggests hyperuniverse II (the Black Iron Prison) is dead and exists only as a mechanical construct. The BIP world may be stuck in 70 A.D. because VALIS “dealt it a death blow.” Since then fake time continues on with no growth. Because its psyche is dead it just repeats the same thing over and over again. 

Dick said he once described reality “as that which, when you withdraw assent from it, it does not disappear.” Dick withdrew assent and during his 3-74 experience 1974 California disappeared.  

We used to be able to distinguish the two hyperuninverses before the Fall and that’s how we were able to speak with God. We are stuck between Zebra’s living hyperuniverse and the dead BIP hyperuniverse which wants to enslave us.

Dick doesn’t think what he believes can be explained in traditional terms. It’s not Christianity. It’s possible Satan and Christ are twins and that Christ/Zebra is a female (Hagia Sophia/Aphrodite) who is the projected hologram and can take any form she wants. 

All humans amplify the faint signal trying to break the hold our fake world has over us. The pursuit of power is the false god. 

Dick lists nine stages one must go through to reject the BIP world and expose it as an illusion. The true creator is the quiet voice not the loud, threatening one. 

After reading John Sladek’s PKD parody “Solar Shoe-Salesman” Dick feels the need to clarify his own point of view. His writing is not sophisticated. The low-brow and the trash are the keys to his work. He juxtaposes things randomly with the hope of exposing greater truths which may be hiding in plain sight. 

Dick dreams about a Medieval diptych. On the right side is a painting resembling Michelangelo’s Delphic sibyl above the words ’SHE’ and ’SECRET.’ On the left side is Pinocchio. Below it all are lines from the I Ching indicating masculinity. Dick’s interpretation is that a secret female nature, which he decides is the Hagia Sophia, is behind Christ’s masculine nature pulling the strings. He believes he saw the second incarnation of Christ, a combination of the male and female essences. 

He recalls another dream he had of Aphrodite and wonders if the ’she’ in the first dream is related to, or perhaps is in fact, that Greek goddess of love.