February 1982

Dick realizes the AI voice is Angel Archer. He is crazy but the AI voice is not. 

He credits Benjamin Creme with helping him understand that the Savior is both Buddha and Christ, something he now realizes Wagner was leading up to in Act III of Parsifal. He ties this concept of the Buddha’s return to the end of Transmigration. Because of his karma Dick was on a bad path in 3-74, and it doesn’t matter if Buddhism or Christianity can claim the clearing of his debt.

The maze can only be solved in terms of vertical space, which he turns into a spiritual metaphor. The solution was revealed in Parsifal, which secretly deals with the Buddha. Compassion is the way out of the maze along the fourth spatial axis and pity is the way back in. He was going to illustrate this in The Owl in Daylight, that one must return to the maze to save others, just as Christianity preaches. He included this in Transmigration as the solution to the problem he introduced in VALIS.  

The paradox of the maze (that the only way out is to return) was best expressed by Buddha. Perhaps that means we are all here voluntarily, which would mean nirvana equals anamnesis. Dick had already solved the maze and remembered it in 3-74. He decides the mystagog (aka the AI voice) is himself and he is becoming more like Angel Archer, the bright side of his dialectic opposite the irrational H. Fat. 

He rereads Divine Invasion and realizes that it, like VALIS, also expressed God’s dialectic represented as Emmanuel and the loving Zina. He links the beauty in Divine Invasion to Transmigration as he seems to feel a need to connect his last three books.

He indicates his Tagore vision, with a social justice message that isn’t part of the VALIS trilogy, will be published, although I’m not sure what he is referring to here. 

December 1981

Dick sketches out ideas for what he intends to be his next novel The Owl in Daylight. He refers to the main character as Owl and imagines the book as a parody of the gnostic search for salvation through knowledge depicted in VALIS. 

Owl, a holy fool archetype, exists in a “construct” governed by some kind of plasma, and only Owl seems to have figured out the maze everyone is trapped in. Dick clarifies the entire book won’t be a parody. It will be “tragicomic”. It will parody Jorge Luis Borges and Kafka but not Beethoven or Dante. 

Owl interacts with the controlling plasma/computer in four stages. In the fourth stage it introduces the Ditheon psyche and Owl realizes the pointless Faustian nature of his endless quest for knowledge. By that time Owl has isolated himself and become a pathetic antiwar protestor. A subplot involves a “crippled dwarf” and a governmental eugenics program. 

Dick wonders about including a possible government agent based on Ursula Le Guin who is worried about Owl’s increasingly deranged mental health. It’s interesting he brought up Le Guin, since she had already written this type of PKD parody novel in Lathe of Heaven published ten years earlier. 

He has further insights about the war between the Empire and Christianity (except Christianity is the true Empire and the true Christians are a Celtic-Orphic mystery religion) before he ultimately decides all of it is ridiculous. 

Fall 1981

Christ, camouflaged in the informational world of “Luke-Acts,” reveals himself throughout as the perturbation in the reality field. Dick calls him hyper information and sees Christ’s attempt to break through as an information war between God and the “official” information system. 

Christ is the missing 23rd letter of the 22 letters of the Hebrew Alphabet that created the universe as written about in the Sefer Yetzirah. The addition of this 23rd letter, which will cause the universe to regenerate, will bring about the Messianic Age of justice and mercy.

Gnosticism explains this hyper information infiltrating the existing mechanical system. Dick describes it as a Faustian bargain (the heroic vs the tragic) and indicates it will be an important part of the novel Owl in Daylight he has just begun brainstorming. 

When “Luke-Acts” is converted from information into the world the right side of our brain experiences the overall “gestalt” while the left side interprets the latent narrative. So Christ is hidden in the gestalt and revealed when the two sides are unified. Dick compares the Bible in our reality to The Grasshopper Lies Heavy in The Man in the High Castle, as the real world existing within the world. In order to perceive this someone would need to outrun time, like he did in 3-74.