December 12, 1981

People might assume it would be a victory for Dick to have one of his books made into a movie, but instead he calls it “the greatest defeat.” He doesn’t think Android’s themes survived in Blade Runner and goes so far as to say his work had been twisted into “fascist power fantasies.” The true victory comes from any renewed interest in the novel.

He has a revelation that the Godhead has inhabited the animal kingdom, which is an extension of the Tagore vision. He sees this as the true message, something he included in Androids but didn’t understand at the time. As the novel is rereleased in conjunction with Blade Runner this message will find its widest audience. 

He feels he can finally relax as he has done his job in spreading the word. Again he is glad he turned down the offer to write a novelization of the movie. The Tagore aspect of Androids conflicts with what he calls the “Heinlein power fantasies” of Blade Runner, and he is proud he didn’t sell out by suppressing the original book.

August–December 1981

Dick tries to outline how someone can become aware of a thing that is already familiar to them and make the leap from cognitive estrangement to “cognitive affinity.” It is difficult for him to explain the concepts though when space and time don’t exist, which means there isn’t really a “before” individual who would have already understood it.

He wonders if post-Newtonian physics might lead to us viewing reality as a unified field, exactly what he saw in 3-74. I think he is suggesting the atomists (presumably Newton and the other pioneers of physics) promoted a view of the world that prevented us from perceiving the continuum of the Noös. The quantum mechanical understanding of physics allows us to see the world correctly as a unified whole.

He believes the biosphere has been penetrated by the Logos and is alive to the point where it should be able to speak. Perhaps that is the source of the AI voice, and that could mean the AI voice is Tagore.

The biosphere/noosphere is trying to communicate, but we can’t make sense of it because of our limited perception. We have to learn to see what is surrounding us. The exegesis was not a waste of time, Dick decides, because it led to him figuring all this out. 

Fall 1981

Reality is an offering to us by God who created the world through his own suffering and death. The world exists as it is only for us, yet we don’t take care of it. It is an effort for God to represent himself to us this way, and that means he is vulnerable to pain inflicted by us. Through his vision of Tagore Dick understands this as a plea for help from God to stop our senseless destruction of the environment. It is now our job to save the Savior. 

Our suffering mirrors God’s suffering and the sacrifice of his creation. Dick calls all this cognitive sorrow and sees it represented in the music of the English Renaissance composer John Dowland. 

Dick takes ideas from the Sefer Yetzirah, a book on Jewish mysticism about the creation of the universe, and applies them to the book of Luke in the New Testament. He says Luke (and the followup Acts written by the same author) is not a description of a world but the world itself in informational form. Because Luke tells the story of Jesus that means Jesus (aka Christ/Valis) is present in our current infinite reality. 

The Old Testament is also an account of Christ, although this was not revealed until his arrival in the events of the NT. This is why Jesus claimed power over the law of the Torah. After his death he returned to the reality he created, hidden in our world. 

Because Jesus is the world, every time we eat plants and animals we re-enact the Eucharist without realizing it. 

September 1981

Dick realizes our spiritual lives are intertwined with the ecosphere, so rejecting the spiritual aspect of our existence means giving up on our physical lives. 

His vision of Tagore is based on a combination of Eastern and Western thought, beginning with the Western concept of man’s fall from the Garden of Eden and a need to return to that state, but with the Eastern solution of acknowledging suffering (which was caused by man in the Western view) and withdrawing from the world in order to repair it. 

He has a dream/hypnagogic vision of a stigmata on his own leg that represents Tagore’s wound. He identifies with Tagore who can only get relief from the self-inflicted pain when the injuries to the ecosphere have stopped. 

Dick admits he has a messiah complex and sees himself as one with the ecosphere. It is his body and mind which are being poisoned by humans who are not living in harmony with it. He understands that Tagore is a man, not a deity. Tagore is either the Buddha or a Buddha, and he represents the ideal we should all be striving toward.

In a “tremendous breakthrough” Dick realizes that his 2-74 experience was a “conjurer’s trick.” Because Dick believed in Christianity he attached the significance to the Jesus fish necklace, which led to the cascade of other events. It was all an illusion that pointed to the Buddhist truth about the nature of reality. For the following year he interpreted things through the lens of Christianity without seeing what was really there. 

With his vision of Tagore he seems to have anticipated the “no-nukes” protests going on in the 80s, turning his spiritual belief into a political one. 

September 1981

Dick summarizes what he stated in his letters. The ecosphere is Christ, which makes it holy and something we must protect. Christ suffers every time any creature in the ecosphere dies, and Christ will withdraw from the world if we don’t stop harming the planet. Dick’s vision of the savior is the only thing keeping him from going crazy when he hears about atrocities like Agent Orange and Soviet micro-toxins. He calls his belief his own private religion based on aspects of Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Gnosticism and modern science. 3-74 and his 9-81 vision are helping him accept his own eventual death and the context of his small part in the overall picture. 

He implies that Tagore, like Horselover Fat, may be another of his identities. He senses, like Tagore, that he is dying, somewhat eerily I would say, since he will die less than six months later. He finally has succeeded in his career, and instead of enjoying the money and recognition he is consumed with spreading the message of his vision. Collectively we are all responsible for protecting the ecosphere, and Dick sees it as a choice between spiritual life and physical death. 

He has a dream where he watches, on television, a white bird hunted for sport. He interprets the dream to mean all life needs to be sanctified and protected as part of the ecosphere. It is an interconnected system. If one part dies the rest cannot survive.

Dick says he had a hypnagogic vision where he mailed out Xeroxed copies of his Ed Meskys letter to 85 other people, and he imagines that could inspire a revolution. 

Trying to envision Tagore as someone or something else (Logos, Krishna, Buddha) misses the point. Tagore is Tagore.

September 1981

Dick writes three letters in September of 1981 attempting to explain his visions involving the savior. The first two are to his literary agent Russell Galen. He tells Russ that years ago the AI voice informed him a savior would be born, and two nights ago the voice filled him in on more details. The savior’s name is Tagore, he lives or was born on an island (modern day Sri Lanka south of India) and is either a Buddhist or a Hindu. 

This savior is crippled and burned by radiation, stigmata that are a result of taking on the sins of the world, which are represented by the nuclear waste we have been dumping in the oceans. Tagore’s message is that we must protect the ecosphere. If we don’t protect the planet then Tagore (Haiga Sophia / Christ) will die.

The ecosphere is the collective consciousness of Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, which is also the Cosmic Christ / Valis. It has become man in order to communicate with us. He ends the letter to Russ by saying he has “independently confirmed Teilhard’s vast theory.”

Dick’s third letter is to Edmund Meskys, editor of the sci-fi fanzine Niekas. Under the guise that it is his alter ego Horselover Fat who had the vision of the savior he tells Meskys what he has recently learned about Tagore and the message to protect the planet’s environment and the noosphere.