January 1980

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.

Dick’s biggest fear is that he will fall through the universe, but he trusts YHWH will protect him and keep his 3-74 dreamlike state from happening again. Partially blaming his amphetamine habit he says prior to 3-74 he had been speeding up relative to real time until he used time up completely and passed outside of time. He credits the lithium he was taking with slowing him down, except he came to rest in the upper realm. At that point he was far in the future. Christ entered him, he saw the world as the BIP, and Thomas (who he now says is a future, not past, self) took over.

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.

October – November 1979

“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. 

In 3-74 Dick came to understand that reality could be tweaked through subtle interactions to be anything you want it to be due to the mimicking nature of whatever reality really is. He calls it a push-pull relationship.

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. 

March 1979

Dick traces the beginning of his 3-74 experience to a “taco stand” trip into “Mexico,” which was an eight-hour vision of several weeks in 1974 that he had while in California in 1971. That’s when Thomas entered his world, crossed the next three years and took him over in 3-74. This was a necessary infusion of psychic energy from a time when Dick was stronger to a time in 3-74 when he was weak. 

He recognizes his life in Orange County as the replacement reality, but he tries to imagine what was there before. He wonders if the changes reach all the way to the White House. Perhaps in the other reality Nixon remained in power. The world of Flow My Tears, which also includes the Nixon tyranny, was overthrown. 

Just before falling asleep he has a hypnagogic vision and is aware that he is not supposed to understand 3-74. Whoever healed him is also scrambling his mind, but now he knows he can’t figure it out and never will.

He ties his beliefs to Communism and theoretical Marxism (he calls it an anti-establishment Christianity anti-theist view). The key is millennialism, which is a belief that a paradise will be established on Earth before a final judgment. Thomas is a Marxist revolutionary, and capitalism is the BIP that enslaves us. Real Christians are communists, a secret hidden from the world.

He envisions the being beyond creation as a woman. She is his sister. Does he exist in her mind or does she exist in his? Which of them is alive? This dialectic is the yin and yang of Tao which he explored in Ubik.  

Our world is the world Mr. Tagomi experiences when he reads a page from a book in The Man in the High Castle. It’s a loop where the smallest thing (a single page inside a work of fiction) becomes the macro. The whole is contained in the part.

He realizes he is dead and doesn’t know it just like the characters in Ubik. Or maybe he’s alive and they are dead. He calls this a breakthrough into pluriform model theory. Truth oscillates, negating itself and then negating itself again, back and forth in a loop. He claims these riddles, where he ponders whether he is alive or dead, show how happy and fulfilled he is.

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.