August – September 1977

Dick has a dream about a wall of beef, an electronic artifact and religious writing. He interprets this to mean the artifact stands for (1) an electronic construct, the beef stands for (2) nature and the religious writing stands for (3) the Logos. He compares the Logos to the punched computer roll in the chest of the robot Garson Poole in “The Electric Ant” and the ship’s computer in A Maze of Death which creates the false world. He follows this with some circular logic about how the three environments interact. He thinks we exist somewhere between nature and the electronic construct without being aware of it. Also circular is Dick’s tendency to look for clues to what happened to him in his own stories when he is the one who wrote them.

He speculates the Logos is the code that creates the electronic world, and he explains how he thinks it is possible to break through from one level to the next. He think Zebra in level 1 will invade level 3, but level 2 is necessary as an incubator of sorts for 1 to get there. Just as in Ubik he sees information from 1 breaking through into 2 as 2 becomes less real. Eventually 3 will absorb 2, and 3 and 1 will join together.

His vision of Rome in 3-74 was level 1 bleeding through 2 on its way to 3. He sums this up: realm 2 is being woven in to realm 3 which is a replication of realm 1 which is doing the weaving. 

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. 

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.