January or February 1977

Dick has nicknamed the form-mimicker Zebra. He tries to imagine how it creates its phony world. He is not sure if our world is entirely faked or just a partially viewed reality. He speculates that Zebra is not Brahman after all, that God has an opposing subject (either neutral or antagonistic) and that Zebra is a Creator God building a new Earth. He thinks he was incorporated into Zebra’s world in 3-74.

He returns to the idea of the noosphere. Perhaps this is what Zebra is creating. He believes there is a duality between the creator of the world and this Zebra entity similar to Vishnu and Shiva or the Savior and God.

There is no difference between the builder and the world it is building. Is this recreated world Christ’s forthcoming kingdom? He goes over an earlier idea about how Zebra subliminally programs or guides us in order to free us from the Black Iron Prison. 

The theme of Dick’s writing has always been how reality is hidden from us. He is surprised at how close Ubik came to depicting Zebra in the form of Runciter. 

Dick met Henry Korman when Tony Hiss interviewed Dick for the New Yorker and brought Henry along. Henry and Dick discussed Sufism and Dr. Robert Ornstein’s work involving the parity between the two hemispheres of the brain. 

In a letter to Henry Dick tells him that he fell asleep after reading a Sufi magazine and had dreams of parallel universes, one in which he was a famous jet setter and another where he lived as a migratory worker in Mexico.

I don’t entirely understand the concept of the noosphere, but it dates back to the 1920s and the writings of Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Soviet geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky. Dick tries to connect the idea of the noosphere (some kind of next phase of the biosphere created by human cognition) to Ubik but he seems to be spitballing about what that connection really is.