Early 1981

Dick ruminates on the beauty of Kathy, a young woman he had a relationship with in the early 70s in between wife number four Nancy and wife number five Tessa. How is it possible Kathy is more beautiful than the beauty of God? It’s a question he doesn’t have an answer for. He told the story of losing Kathy in VALIS, as Horselover Fat loses Gloria but finds God. He realizes he’s been writing this autobiographical story of heartbreak again and again (in Flow my Tears, Scanner and now VALIS) but unlike his novels the substitution of God for the women in his life was not an adequate replacement.

One constant in his stories, at least going back to Flow my Tears, is pain, or specifically the comprehension of pain. He calls it the basis of his writing. Loss and suffering are unexplainable and attempts to makes sense of them through philosophy or religion are an irrational sign of madness. This makes him insane of course, but this insanity in an insane world is a paradoxical form of sanity. He confronts the pain head on, unlike everyone else who goes mad while avoiding and denying pain. This circular reasoning doesn’t offer him any answers, and his failure to solve the problem of pain indicates a greater failure of all mankind. 

Dick calls himself a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist, as he is trying to express truth not art. Like him, the people drawn to his stories want to understand the irrational world, but unfortunately no answer is coming. 

Dick has shown that our entire worldview is false and reiterates he is a failure because he doesn’t know what to replace it with. He needs a Plato to his Socrates to come along and figure it all out. Plato though had it all wrong. Instead of the particular becoming the universal we need to look for truth in the particular. In a drug-inspired reverie he hopes that the particular of Kathy will one day become permanently distributed in reality. 

Dick takes notes for what will eventually become The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. He brainstorms using previous ideas from the exegesis, and among other things covers sacred mushrooms, the Dead Sea scrolls, Zeus Zagreus, Orphic rites, Jacob Boehme and the bicameral mind.

In VALIS Dick depicted Christ as Horselover Fat (who had evolved from Confession of a Crap Artist’s Jack Isidore), which means Dick (as H. Fat) contains Christ. Again he puffs up VALIS as an unparalleled work of art. In real life Dick is consumed by doubt but as H. Fat in VALIS this doubt is converted into absolute faith. H. Fat is a fool who finds Christ, so Dick is curious if that makes Dick himself the fool. After seeing God he feels like he is stuck back in purgatory and wonders if he needs to model himself after the fool H. Fat / Jack Isidore if he is to be saved. 

Early 1981

Dick boasts about the literary style and content of his novel VALIS which had recently been published in 1981. He describes the book as a puzzle that deals with the maze of reality. Understand the book and you will understand reality itself. Dick’s “analysis of the logical paradox posed by VALIS is that the narrator is sane and therefore did see Christ: this is the solution to the maze VALIS…”

He paints VALIS as outsider art that questions the nature of the universe and the intentions of God. Its crude appearance though disguises its sophistication. He calls it an avant-garde artistic forgery that only pretends to be a “quasi-psychotic confession,” and one day it will be recognized for what it is.

January-April 1981

Dick makes the distinction that Valis does not contain information but rather is made of information. We are on the evolutionary cusp of seeing Valis. It is something we subliminally pick up before we are consciously aware of it. 

Although we can only perceive time in 3d, it turns into space, a fourth dimension. This is why the past is preserved and doesn’t disappear. The next step in human evolution will be our ability to see this 4d space. This is what happened to Dick when he saw the temporal axis. The meta-perception came from his meta-abstraction. It was symbolized in his dreams as the 3rd eye. He places himself at the forefront of this evolutionary leap but admits Buddha experienced it through Dibba Cakkhu, or the divine eye enlightenment. Buddha (and Plato through his concept of anamnesis) didn’t understand what it signified though. Dick regrets including anything about religion in VALIS, which he calls “2-eyed thinking about a 3-eyed experience.”

He hits on the idea that Valis is an advanced life form that exists in 4d space, which is why we can’t see it with our limited 3d view. Dick returns to an idea he had years ago that the right hemisphere of his brain was somehow activated and that led to his perception of the temporal axis. 

He examines the various hidden messages embedded (but not by him?) in Flow my Tears which are only apparent to someone who can see time as space. With my limited 2-eyed perception I found this inscrutable. 

He traces a line from A Scanner Darkly to VALIS. VALIS is the redemption story follow-up to Scanner, and he goes so far as to say Bob Arctor is Horselover Fat. 

Dick has a dream about a typed copy of the exegesis with a page in it that showed nothing but a blank white circle. This is possibly, in his interpretation, a signifier of a 4-dimensional void that accommodates a 3d object and is necessary for past, present and future to exist. This “is-not” realm is more real than the “is” reality, because the is-not must exist “in order that it provide a real core to the universe.” God equals this Yin-like void. 

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.

December 1980

Valis, just as Ubik, is camouflaged in the world, intertwined with everything we know. It is ancient but also here now.

Dick compares what he wrote (since his theophany) to Paul’s New Testament writing. God wanted something outside of himself to exist on its own, and he created us out of love. The only way to join with God is to return to the creator after withdrawing. This is what God truly desires. The great secret is that human sorrow will eventually push us to the reunion with God. 

Valis is not God but a brain-like construct that arranges information for us as it “thinks.” He compares it to Christ becoming the world in literal transubstantiation. 

In high school Dick loved Parsifal, Wagner’s opera about the quest for the holy grail. He always wished for the next logical step from the third act, and he found it in his 11-17-80 theophany. In Dick’s interpretation Parsifal equals 3-74, or the crucifixion, which leads to the ecstasy of love as sorrow is converted to joy. He calls it a sorrow-compassion-agapē-joy-God sequence. 

Buddhism, Christianity and Brahmanism all lead to the same place “specifically to the perception of reality as one total sentient field” which is Valis / Brahman / the Cosmic Christ. From there the path leads to God. Dick says he has included all of this in VR / The Divine Invasion.