March 1978

Dick is reading Francis Cornford’s book on Plato’s Timaeus dialogue. Plato says the world is a living organism that includes a constant element of chaos that the Noös (Dick’s term) is trying to bring to order. The Judeo-Christian story does not account for this. Dick’s own experience matches Plato’s theories and not the Christian one. 

Dick has depicted this chaos in Ubik (as entropy) and in A Maze of Death. The universe, with this irrational element, is partly insane, and Christ’s return will finally eliminate this disorder and heal the world. 

Dick reads The Ticket That Exploded by William Burroughs and examines the parallels between that story and what happened to him. The virus in Burroughs’ book blocks the reception of information. Dick connects this to his earlier ideas when he was studying Julian Jaynes and the loss of divine voices in the past. Since divine wisdom can’t reach us through normal channels it has to break through somehow which is what briefly happened to him. What Dick saw was the vast living body of the universe.

Spurred on by an essay by Angus Taylor called “Philip K. Dick and the Umbrella of Light” about his work concerning the nature of reality Dick decides he inadvertently uncovered the form of Plato’s Eternal Real World.  The intellectuals though have been saying for centuries Plato’s worldview is pointless to even consider, since his idea of a real world cannot be experienced. Dick takes comfort in the fact that even if he doesn’t convince everyone about this the truth will eventually re-emerge just as it did with him. 

He goes on to speculate about curved orthogonal time which lies at a right angle to the time we perceive. This horizontal time axis is the eternal one in which the Logos exists. Either Dick regressed or Rome came forward on this timeline and was revealed to him.