Dick continues his comparison of our world to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Just before entering Paradiso memory is restored. The mid-realm (Purgatorio) is a combination of signals from the irredeemably bad BIP and the entirely good top realm. Moving into the upper realm is akin to time travel, encountering Satanic voices from Inferno and angelic voices from the future. 

If he saw God while he was alive then Spinoza’s monism model is correct, but it’s also possible Dick is in the afterlife, which would mean a transcendent God. Based on the Paradiso canto “God is the book of the universe” he thinks of his experience as moving through a book where the pages are the layers of phosphene graphics he’s talked about before.

He has a dream that Satan has taken over the church and Christians are worshiping the wrong God. The true church, those with the full knowledge, exist apart from this evil which has been kept secret.

Dick wonders if he saw Valis because the analytical left hemisphere of his brain took over from his dominant intuitive side. This is how St. Sophia manifested herself, analyzing reality. He calls it a psychosis, his unconscious invaded although by a rational being. He decides this would explain the AI voice since the speech center is located in the left brain. This woman (who is also Sibyl, Athena, Diana and the Fairy Queen whoever that is) is a part of him, in syzygy with Valis, but he wishes she would take over and run things.

He has a hypnagogic vision that YHWH is the one who has been instilling knowledge in him. The AI voice tells him it’s the same being that contacted Elijah. The significance here is the name YHWH, aka “I am who I am,” God’s personal name. Could it be that the Christianity doctrine of the trinity is Satanic and blasphemous since it leads away from true monotheism? Perhaps Satan already won when the temple fell in 70 A.D. (with the aftermath revealed in Flow My Tears) but now YHWH is returning. 

Early 1979

Signal decay will occur without feedback. Valis fed three of Dick’s books back to him which strengthened the signal and kept everything moving forward. Dick says a female advisor is breaking into his closed system as this feedback input. He illustrates time as a spiral where more input is required the further we get from the center.

Who is the woman who has been whispering to him? He wonders if it is St. Sophia, his daughter and the granddaughter of Valis. Was he impregnated by the Holy Spirit? He has a vision of the girl, who he thinks is the Savior, in a pink nightgown and slippers. He realizes the girl must be Thomas born again after gestating in the womb of Dick’s brain.

Dick imagines a maze controlled by a Lon Chaney-looking madman he calls Mr. Looney Tunes, and of course we are trapped in this maze… the editors suggest Dick may have been on drugs when he wrote this.

He calls the girl Diana. She also appeared to him as Aphrodite and the Sibyl when he needed her most in 1974. He has a major insight and is initiated into one of the greatest mysteries in the history of religion: the true (but secret) Christ of Christianity is female.

October–November 1978

Dick hears a voice that equates him to St. Sophia, Buddha, Apollo and Siddhartha. He says that Thomas is more than just a secret Christian and instead is actually the savior. He thinks that whatever he experienced might be the Holy Spirit or perhaps the spirit of Elijah. 

No religious system can completely explain his vision. His divine eye was opened, he temporarily became Shiva and all this indicates he is a Buddha. 

He includes fragments and bits of dialogue from the VALIS novel he has started. He has a hypnagogic vision of “the catch” by Willie Mays in the 1954 World Series and compares his own exegetical efforts to the throw Mays made back to the infield. His work, the throw, is over and out of his hands. He calls his explanation of Zebra thus far the Tractates Cryptica Scriptura and he works through some ways it could be incorporated in VALIS. One idea is that the world in the book is an alternate reality where the New Testament doesn’t exist, Jesus is an impostor Messiah and Simon Magus is the founder of the church.

This marks the end of part 2.

August 1978 or later

Based on situations in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, A Maze of Death and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Dick tries to decide if hallucination is reality or reality is hallucination. He settles on the latter. He follows that with some circular reasoning about the real becoming fake becoming real. 

I struggle to understand his notes on entropy within the brain, but I think he concludes that because of information degradation the hologram weakened and allowed the Acts material to show up in his book Flow My Tears. Because of entropy the Acts message itself that made it through was degraded.

Dick admits he probably had a schizophrenic episode in 3-74 and the stress and the breakdown of his relationships that led to it began as early as 1970. The psychosis he encountered is gone at the time of writing due to financial security and a new relationship. A bright spot of the whole ordeal was that it put him in touch with Holy Wisdom / St. Sophia which is now part of his soul.

In a third-person passage he recounts what happened to him and the intervention of St. Sophia communicating her message of love, wisdom and harmony.

March 1978

When the universe encounters ‘counterfeit interpolations’ it repairs and replaces them which result in changes in the timeline, although we aren’t aware of it.

The Great Mother was the one who revealed herself to Dick, a big deal since no one has believed in this female side of God for thousands of years.

Dick tries to understand suffering from a cosmic point of view. He doesn’t think Christianity does a good job explaining undeserved suffering. He thinks it all comes down to the element of chaos in the universe. When the benevolent God sees suffering it substitutes itself to take it on. Through this the memories of the suffering beings are restored and they know their true identity. Because the suffering is undeserved and unavoidable they are forced to search for not just an answer but the answer.

Dick envisions a more mechanical concept of the Noös where St. Sophia is reorganizing the chaos and Christ is sent in to restore broken sections of a “circuit board.” This isn’t a supernatural idea but can and will be explored in a scientific way. 

The only way to encounter Christ is to be broken. Is the purpose of religion to merely explain suffering or to avert it?

The collective consciousness fell asleep in 70 A.D. when Christ left. Everything since then is fake time or a dream. Some group sits outside of this phony 1974 California reality and can see things we don’t see. Dick thinks his book Eye in the Sky is the most accurate representation of this. 

He lists all of his novels that fit this theme of fake or hallucinatory worlds that hide the real one: Eye in the Sky, Time Out of Joint, The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, A Maze of Death, Flow my Tears, A Scanner Darkly, Clans of the Alphane Moon, The Game-Players of Titan, The Cosmic Puppets. 

Dick wonders if the Noös might not be a little insane and deranged in the paradoxes and illusions it creates.

Dick is curious about how much of the Biblical parables we truly understand, since the Gospel of Mark says they were designed to confuse everyone except the disciples. He thinks he figured some things out before, but now he has forgotten everything he learned. He compares Christ to Dionysus. 

Gnostics worship the female Sophia and are at odds with the patriarchal Jewish-Christian religion. Based on what he experienced he begrudgingly admits he is a Gnostic, although his is a modified version of Gnosticism. He recounts how his old ego died and he was reborn. He names the archetype which took possession of him in 3-74 the Steersman. 

Dick has a dream involving a Zenith TV set, a dark green cellophane strip and 3 lights. I struggled to understand any of it, but Dick’s interpretation is that we will know Christ when he returns. 

He once again wonders if the Holy Wisdom which visited him was gone for 2000 years before returning or was present all along.