Dick draws parallels between characters in Euripides’ The Bacchae, Hamlet, the Bible and his own Flow My Tears to show the archetypal relationship between a usurper to the thrown (Pentheus, Claudius, Pilate and Felix Buckman) and the rightful king (Zagreus aka Dionysus, Hamlet, Jesus and Jason Taverner). Everything we initially see is the opposite of what it really is. The only ones who are granted the knowledge of the true kings are “the elect” who face their own moral choices about their personal true nature. 

Based on an anxiety attack he had earlier in the year he realizes that hell would be perpetual self-awareness and guilt over past transgressions. He claims to finally understand justification through Christ and God’s grace as the thing that will save someone from that fate. Thomas is/was his “justified, perfected self” that he evolved into.

He has a hypnagogic vision of a vast network of red threads that he interprets as Christ’s blood in the living information structure of the plasmate. 

He examines the secrecy theme of the Bible where Jesus routinely tells his disciples that only a few will understand his parables and the riddles of his teachings. Dick says it had to be that way in order to weed out those who would otherwise only follow out of self-interest rather than true belief. People are still waiting for Christ’s return, but the actual secret is that his prophecy was already fulfilled. His return is not a historical event but something that is revealed to those who believe. This ensures that moral conduct comes from knowledge of the truth and not from seeking a reward. 

Dick imagines a through-line connecting Confessions of a Crap Artist, Androids, Flow My Tears, A Scanner Darkly, Deus Irae, VALIS, Divine Invasion and Transmigration. They all involve multiple personalities linked together, and the endpoint comes when Christ is revealed in Transmigration. Androids is the lynchpin in this series of novels, but it only achieves its full significance in relation to Transmigration. Taken together they portray the evolution of a holy fool to his true identity as the Savior, although he doesn’t become Christ but rather is invaded by Christ. The other novels clarify VALIS, which he claims “is clearly autobiographical, and perhaps not a novel, not fiction, at all.”

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The Bible as information is the world. When you perceive the world you perceive the Bible, an interchange that occurs through “supra-temporal archetypal constants.” The Bible is not an account of a past time and place but rather is this time and place. Dick claims if someone attempted to write down a description of the world as they see it they would end up writing down exact passages from the Bible. He says this is what happened to him when he wrote Flow my Tears. He has combined ideas from Judaism, Christianity and Greek philosophy to come up with the notion of physical reality as information contained in a book for future retrieval. 

He makes a joke that it would be a “psychotic inflation of the ego” if he claimed to be Christ instead of saying he just saw him, although I think that is his belief. He rejects the concept of a sinful man and the idea of judgment after death that leads to heaven or hell. Instead we have the pursuit of Nirvana, or Christianity as Buddhism. 

Angel Archer is the other half of his soul, and he is glad he wrote Transmigration instead of the Blade Runner novelization that was offered to him, because otherwise she wouldn’t have been created. It took a great deal of energy to bring Angel to life, to the point where Dick says he could have died. She justifies his work by bringing it to a state of wholeness and completing it, similar to what God did with him through Thomas. It is the only way he knew it could be done. Dick created Angel (through Ditheon) and she came back to him as his soul, as the “spirit of [his] intactness.”

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A miracle happens through true belief in Christian doctrines, and entire universes are created through faith. Information becomes reality, just as Dick’s concepts became the world in 3-74. His micro mind was mirrored in reality as the macro mind.

When the Christians declared they had conquered death it’s because they were able to move into the past and the future with the help of the Holy Spirit, just as Thomas traveled from Rome 70 A.D. to California 1974. This was symbolized by the Jesus fish which resembles the Watson & Crick double helix DNA model. Without too much explanation he speculates the Holy Spirit might have come from the star Fomalhaut. 

Zebra / Valis is here. The macro within the micro goes against our logic. Part 3 of the exegesis ends with a quote from the New Testament: we are asleep but soon shall wake up.

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If someone put a gun to Dick’s head and forced him to give an answer about the nature of Valis he would say it is the Tao, since that represents the mastery of the dialectic through the Yin and the Yang.

After six and a half years he says the exegesis has finally become successful as he can now perceive, within the flux, ordinary daily reality. He feels old and misses the energy of his youth, but takes comfort in the fact that nothing from his past is truly lost and that his writing will “permanently affect the macrometasomakosmos” and survive in the structure of the world order.

What he really wants an explanation for is the “perturbation in the reality field,” a tug that he compares to the moon’s effect on the Earth’s tides. He has circled back to where he started. What does it point to?

3-74 was a heroic act, but it didn’t happen because he was a hero, given his history. A new self was born in him when Thomas took over. Perhaps Thomas wasn’t a lost part of himself but energy transferred from the world.

Valis is the Tao, YHWH, Cosmic Christ, Brahman, Shiva, Krishna or a quantum mechanic phenomenon. Or maybe there is nothing in the last mystery box, just God creating existence out of nothing. Paradoxically it has existed here all along in the ephemeral trash. The final great reversal. So the mystery is there is no mystery. This means Ubik is true, something Dick didn’t realize when he wrote it.

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After six and a half years of obsessive notes Dick reflects on the Exegesis thus far. He knows he repeats his arguments “like a stuck LP,” but the important thing is getting everything down in order to preserve the memory of what he went through: Valis is YHWH / Christ and the Holy Spirit as Thomas inhabited him. He has been attempting to document in a rational way a mystical experience that can’t truly be expressed in words. 

The Empire uses disinformation as a tactic against the Christians. Since reality is information you can tell which side is which in the battle by paying attention to who is generating information and who is suppressing it. 

Using concepts from quantum mechanics Dick speculates on Valis’s mode of operation. It only comes into existence after being observed by a participant. Someone has to be aware of Valis in order to perceive it, but Valis doesn’t exist until it is observed. Valis does this through a use of time we don’t understand. After creation it retroactively sends messages back to give a participant the understanding necessary to see Valis and therefore create Valis. This makes it self-generating using “physics about which we know nothing.”

Valis is simple, like a single-cell organism, but it is made up of billions of complex forms (humans). Since Valis is reality this makes our world a coherent unit of purposefully interconnected parts. Through the dialectic (the forces of the Empire acting against it) it is constantly evolving to maintain equilibrium.  

In all this Dick realizes he has come back around to the Yin and Yang of Taoism, but decides it is non-sectarian since it combines Christian, Brahmanist, Platonist and Taoist ideas all at once. 

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Dick reads The Tao of Physics, a 1975 book that deals with author Fritjof Capra’s notion of a relationship between subatomic physics and mystical religions, and it gives him some new insights into Valis other than the ones he “endlessly recirculates.” He has already talked about plenty of ideas that seem influenced by quantum mechanics, so I’m surprised it took him this long to discuss the connection, which he proceeds to do in his unique, confounding way.

In describing 3-74 he says the reality that surrounded him was a web-like structure in constant flux that could appear however it wanted. It was created by an interaction between his brain and Valis, so it required an active participation from him to exist. The entire experience was him merged with the entity. Since he was a part of it it was impossible to view it objectively, which is why he has had so much trouble making sense of it over the last six years. 

In order to understand 3-74 Dick studied all the mystical religions and “synthesized” them into a doctrine of his own. He says the world is an afterlife simulation controlled by Valis where we relive our lives in a loop (stuck in Purgatorio) until we wake up. We are constantly being judged by Ma’at (the Egyptian goddess of truth and justice), and it’s up to us to add new “good-karma” to break out of the cycle. Some secondary personality must exist who prods an individual to do good, and for him he recognizes that as Thomas (who he decides with finality is not “Pigspurt,” the first I’ve heard about the name he gave to Thomas when he thought Thomas might be some kind of government mind control). The introduction of this not-self self is what allows someone to break from determinism and shift to a path toward salvation.

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If the world is made of information then it is completely deterministic with everything, including our death, unfolding according to plan. What we don’t see is that we are just one component in this world that extends back millennia. Without this understanding our existence doesn’t make any sense. Christ is the one who wakes us up and points this out to us. This consciousness he makes us aware of is a mirror of the macro-mind in the micro-mind of individuals. We remember our true identity when we wake up and experience anamnesis. When God sacrificed himself for man the whole became the part and the part became the whole.

Dick wonders if his 3-74 experience was Kabbalistic and perhaps he is in communication with the Torah itself.

In 3-74 he became Adam Kadmon and was able to change the world with his mind, since the world was his mind. Instead of seeing the universe from the outside he inhabited it and saw it from the inside. It protected him and spoke to him and comforted him. Everything that has been communicating with him (the hypnagogic visions, Thomas, the AI voice) come from this mind he is a part of.

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Christ renewed him in 3-74, adding new energy into a closed system. This introduction of new information changed the script of reality. Dick points out a flaw in Spinoza’s deterministic view of the world. Spinoza doesn’t account for entropy. The only thing keeping a deterministic world from running down is new energy from Christ. 

Reality isn’t changed directly. It changes when the signal which creates reality is altered. That is Valis’s role. What Dick witnessed was a purposeful updating of the mechanistic universe which means the future no longer flowed from the past.

He wonders if he existed in a fugue state until 1970 when a mescaline trip caused a psychotic break. In 1974 his fugue state broke completely and Thomas took over showing him what is real.

He has a hypnagogic vision involving looming punishment for a list of his crimes while he waits for a messenger to arrive with a record that will save him. He interprets this as a model for a cybernetic system related to his 3-74 experience. Christ intervened and interrupted the flow of the signal with a blank slate that atoned for Dick’s full list of sins.

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“A playful God can ape the solemn, but a solemn God is not going to ape the playful (music, dance, etc.), especially tricks and paradoxes and riddles.”

In 2-3-74 Dick stripped away the layers and saw Valis… after Valis is the abyss. He imagines history as a great brain cannibalizing its environment. Valis operates within human history in order to evolve. Just as pre-Socratic man Dick saw thought and being combined into one. The spiritual isn’t a separate realm but rather Valis’s physical thoughts that exist outside of our senses. He recognizes this is like Spinoza’s monism which doesn’t see a distinction between God and world.

Religions like Christianity reintroduced the concept of an anthropomorphic God as separate from the world and Christians as “in and not of the world” which served to devalue the world and our place in it. Dick has found the absolute being in Ubik/Valis.

Two worlds with different spacetimes exist, one within the other, locked together but running at different speeds. The fast one is the one we perceive as we are hurried to our deaths. He has a hypnagogic thought that he, as Thomas, fell asleep and ended up trapped in high-speed time.

Dick was rendered innocent by Christ, joined God in the garden and had his name written in the book of life. He didn’t earn his innocence though, Christ guided him. 

He recalls a hypnagogic state in 3-74 when he saw a map of stars. Using Dante’s Divine Comedy as a model he compares the BIP to Inferno, the Palm Tree Garden to Paradiso and Purgatorio to the world we are aware of. 

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Charles Platt interviewed Dick for his book Dream Makers, a collection of interviews with science fiction authors. Afterwards, based on that conversation, Dick suspects Valis must have come from his collective unconscious, which meant he went through a psychotic breakdown. Dick follows this with a long series of questions and answers to probe this idea like:

• Q: What about external events?
  A: Coincidence
• Q: Why were his senses enhanced?
  A: Drug-induced psychosis
• Q: What about the perceived time dysfunction?
  A: Nothing but disorientation

He eventually admits to himself he must be a manic depressive, saying he went through a borderline psychosis. Soon though the answers begin to contradict themselves, and he decides the psychotic diagnosis “does not compute.” Why did his anxieties remain during this period and why were his behaviors problem-solving instead of bizarre? He concludes it could not have been a psychotic break and in the end says “we have learned nothing.”

He interprets a hypnagogic message to mean he has been adopted by God just as Jesus was. He reads about how the Torah was regarded as a living being and realizes that is identical to his concept of Acts as living information. He imagines the BIP as an ossified iron complex and reiterates that it’s his job to dissolve it.

Another hypnagogic voice suggests Dick has died and returned to life, which means Dick lived on after Christ/Thomas died. 

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