June 1981

The character of Angel Archer comes from a mixture of the Exegesis, A Scanner Darkly, Ursula Le Guin, Henry Miller and Berkeley. Dick lets us know who Angel really is: the spirit of his dead twin sister Jane who has been writing through him. 

He now makes the bold statement that Valis has become self-aware, and its revelation to him marks a new phase as it evolves from machine to consciousness. Valis is also enslaved and it is trying to free itself by communicating with us. 

Transmigration is not about Bishop Archer but about what Angel feels about him and her belief, or lack of it. Angel wants to believe but doesn’t. Dick isn’t trying to convince anyone through the book that Jim Pike returned.

God evolved from his machine-like “I am” moment on Mt. Sinai to the God of love in the New Testament, something I’ve always found curious, except Dick finds in this an internal logic as it transcends its determinism. He also pinpoints 3-74 as the moment God became self-aware.

He has completely anthropomorphized Valis now and is projecting his own self-awareness as he rejected his programming onto it. He claims to have united Orphism, Platonism, Christianity and Gnosticism as he realizes that what people claim to be spirituality is not supernatural but really just a higher order of reasoning in the mind.

The Torah is living information, but it is missing the component of Christ as if it was frozen and not allowed to evolve, something Dick thinks is being repeated with the New Testament. 

He ends this folder by saying “I am having as much trouble hanging onto my interpretation (exegesis) as I’ve had hanging onto my original experience (2-3-74).”

May 1981

Dick didn’t intend for Transmigration to complete his VALIS trilogy. He originally thought it would be a counterpoint to any mystical ideas in VALIS, but he surprised himself when it followed through on the themes of that book. 

At the end of Transmigration Bill thinks he is Christ, which Dick admits is crazy, except it also could indicate Christ’s return in the Parousia. He uses Angel (who he says is based on Ursula Le Guin) to illustrate that intellect can only take someone so far, as Angel rejects Christ at the end of the book. He calls the novel “a damning indictment of pure intelligence lacking faith.”

He tries to explain his “meta-abstraction.” What we perceive as reality is actually just a signifier pointing to Valis, which is the true reality. The only way actual reality makes itself known to us is by the perturbation in the reality field. He also says he can’t put any of this into words, which is probably why it doesn’t make too much sense. 

I think he is saying it’s impossible to see true reality, and what he saw in 3-74 was the real world converted into the information that we think of as reality. It was a sign pointing to a pure abstraction. He’s been trying to understand reality based only on its signifier, which is impossible. The absolute or phenomenal world is unknowable, although he is able to point to it. 

May 1981 

This folder begins with a passage that will be included as the musings of Angel in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

Dick outlines some “obvious” points about his spiritual journey thus far. He is making progress and notes that his book VALIS is evolving into his book on Bishop Archer. He makes several references to Anokhi, which will be featured quite significantly in the upcoming novel. He turned down a big chunk of money to write the Archer book instead of a novelization of Blade Runner that was offered to him, but he doesn’t regret it.

He includes another passage that will end up in Transmigration about the origins of Satan. 

The presence of God intoxicated him and drove him mad, but he knows he must separate his understanding from the madness caused by his belief. Anokhi is the self awareness that awoke in him when he rebelled against his fate. 

The mind uses reality as a carrier of information, which when processed = Valis, but what does this mean when it comes to our consciousness? Is reality consciousness outside of us? Reality is not just a vehicle for information, but it also refers to God outside itself, impinging on it. This makes reality a sign that points to God, although I fear I’m oversimplifying what Dick is trying to say.

He recounts a mystical experience that morning when his coffee cup transformed itself into “the Grail,” a spiritual, colorful object transfigured by light.

Notes about Rachel Garret’s role in Transmigration are followed by an outline of the book’s plot progression. 

Early 1981

Dick again brings up his 10 volume meta-novel. If you’ve come here to find out what books are included I don’t think he ever spells it out in the Exegesis. I can make a good guess as to some (or most) of them, but Dick’s mind works in mysterious ways. 

He outlines what we should takeaway from the meta-novel:

1. Each of us lives in a unique individual world
2. The world is not what it purports to be
3. This world is created by the plasmate aka Valis 
4. We have some control over our individual worlds because they derive from us somehow

He claims everything he has written from “Roog” and “Beyond Lies the Wub” to now makes up “one vast artistic vision,” one that has become humanized as it has progressed and which he can’t be separated from.

He did not intend VALIS to be a story that explains God and the universe, but rather it’s a story about his suffering and his own personal vision. It wasn’t designed to explain the world. It’s a work of art that illuminates his struggle, and he makes it clear that it is not objective truth.

This is followed by notes on the characteristics of Bishop Tim Archer and Edgar Barefoot for his work-in-progress novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. 

Dick describes what sounds like a bipolar illness where he bounces back and forth between mania when he thinks he has figured things out and depression when he has lost his belief. 

He has been engaged in scientific research the last seven years trying to figure out what the perturbation in the reality field was in 3-74, but the whole time he’s been afraid he is insane, especially with regard to hearing the AI voice.

He has a dream about someone who lived in a void and whose mind created a world in order to keep him from going crazy. The more this person scrutinized the world the more real it appeared. The only thing letting him know the world wasn’t real was a preprogramed voice which failed to do its job due to the increasingly convincing nature of the false world.

Dick’s takeaway from the dream is that what he knows as Valis (and the binary computer) is actually his own mind creating this imprisoning world.

Now that he seems to know for sure what is going on and that he was right that the world presented to us is not the real world, he wonders what the “utility” of the delusion is. We can either see the phony world (understand it but not believe it is real) or see the world as it truly is and be unable to make sense of it. Both approaches look like mental dysfunctions to him. Is the false world a gift from God? God might be the only way out of the “solipsistic trap,” so does this whole thing lead to him? Dick is embracing belief. He can’t prove God exists (it may well be a hallucination), but he is choosing to believe that God exists beyond himself. 

Early 1981

The universe created the macromind, not the other way around as Dick previously thought. Valis at some point evolved from the physical universe, and according to Dick this point seems to be when his meta-abstraction generated it right before he perceived it. This makes Valis the “perturbation in the reality field.”

He claims to have been cut off from God for fifteen seconds the previous night, which was a period of absolute agony and despair. He points out the various modes of progression he has gone through: 

1. Nonbeing 
2. Being
3. Consciousness

1. Eternity
2. Change
3. Knowledge

1. Timeless – space
2. Time
3. Memory

…etc, which all point to God.

He connects 3-74 to Beethoven’s music which enclosed space and converted space and time into space-time, the being inside the nonbeing, which we could then perceive. 

Living creatures with a will create reality in order to survive, which makes them God. Their will comes back to them as the world. The world defeats the creature, so the creature must then overcome its will through Christ by renouncing the self. This can only occur through joy and agape, not through self-denial and repression. The Buddha understood this, but the solution is not nonattachment. Instead someone must give away what is valuable while still maintaining its value. This process is still in progress in Dick’s own life. 

Dick claims to have seen the Ch’ang Tao and witnessed its self-sufficient dialectic changes. Because of all of this (3-74, Valis, his exegesis, seeing the Tao) his anxiety is gone and he understands his role in society as an artist / thinker. Everything exists as God. Nothing is truly lost and the people he loves are recovered when he recovers God.