March 1977

Dick reads an essay Stanislaw Lem wrote about him and understands he has never been able to see causality the way everyone else does. 

He reads the screenplay for Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and by equating his life to a script realizes 3-74 ridded him of his paranoia. He correctly summarizes this makes him look psychotic. He says he became schizophrenic, which cured him, and he admits his fear that the FBI was after him was a delusion. 

He was a “paranoiac schiz” from 71 to 3-74 and had a full schizophrenic breakdown for a year after 3-74. After this a “toxin” secreted in his brain destroyed his persecutory complex. It appears now that depictions of paranoid worlds (like North by Northwest) are repellant to him. 

Using the Greek concepts of idios kosmos and koinos kosmos Dick wonders if the schizophrenic world is the sane world and the normal world is the crazy one. Maybe during schizophrenia the brain is trying to achieve parity between the two hemispheres by releasing the toxin. Because of the right brain’s dominance though schizophrenia is a failed evolutionary leap. 

His inability to understand causality (linear right-brained thinking) has allowed him to perceive how Zebra is communicating. One of his most important discoveries is that causality actually moves backwards.

Dick wonders about the timing and specificity of the events that occurred to him in March 1974. He doesn’t doubt it was the Parousia (Christ’s second coming) but he’s not sure if it took place only in his idios kosmos (see the notes on his first letter to Malcom Edwards). He also doesn’t know if the entity was always there and he just saw it when it was revealed to him or if the entity only showed up at precisely the moment when his eyes were opened. Was everything that happened meant only for him or will everyone eventually experience it?

He thinks there might be a novelistic approach to existence where items someone encounters near death could be sprinkled throughout earlier in life (presumably according to the plan of the Logos) in order to give a subjective appearance of meaning and completeness. 

When Dick saw Rome supplant Fullerton in March of 1974 he took on the identity of a member of the Christian sect, identified by the Jesus fish symbol, working in secret. When he woke from this vision he entered into a fellowship with God. This reminds him of the vision he saw in the sky years before that inspired him to write The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. He decides what he saw was actually God, but he just perceived him to be hostile at the time because of his own derangement. 

Dick takes a break from writing Claudia to send a letter to Malcolm Edwards at the beginning of 1975. Edwards reviewed Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said in the December ’74 issue of the British magazine Science Fiction Monthly. In that piece Edwards elucidated some things about the story that Dick had never been able to properly explain. 

Everyone has a private world (idios kosmos) which is contrasted by everyone’s shared reality (koinos kosmos). Dick wonders if a tyrannical state, for instance, could manipulate its citizens’ inner world through media and news to such an extent that they create a false universal reality. The world Dick wrote about in Ubik after everyone died was the true koinos kosmos that was revealed after everything else was stripped away, but he didn’t realize at the time that’s what he was getting at. 

He goes on to explain to Edwards how he transduced external electrical fields (I still don’t know what this means exactly) through his vitamin megadosing routine to improve his neural firing and cause the right hemisphere of his brain to ‘come on.’ Through this the true koinos kosmos emerged and he encountered the Immanent Mind.