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.

Early 1979

Dick tries to explain his concept of memory. We all have the potential to have a 3-74 experience, but the new memories come too fast, wiping out what we learned, overwritten by the irrationality of Zebra… every nanosecond a new reality cancels out the previous one.

Zebra is toying with us. The dialectic flip-flops. Whatever is true in one second becomes the opposite in the next. We have the ability to influence future events, but we don’t remember this because we don’t have any memory of the previous “frame.”

He believes we are trapped in the bardo as described in the Bardo Thödol / The Tibetan Book of the Dead. This is what Dick depicted as the half-dead state in Ubik. He says that if we remain in this entropic state the irrationality could potentially infect Valis which could “snuff out the cosmos.” Valis is the only thing that can break us out of this deterministic path where the future flows from the past and change it into one where we control the future of our own volition.

Just as in the half-life in Ubik, those trapped in the bardo believe they are still alive, and what they believe is reality is just a projection of their past. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is secretly showing not what happens after death but our present condition. He sees this as a game of sorts that we must outsmart (as he did) in order to break free. 

He again tries to explain how our future is constantly flip-flopping between binary pairs and it is happening so fast we can’t form memories of the past. He speculates it is possible that supercharged energy in the form of an idea could jump many years into the future and suggests that’s what happened with Ubik: his idea of Ubik in 1968 leapt into 1974 and overpowered his reality as Valis.

December 1979

Valis is outsmarting and swallowing up the irrational. Dick throws around the word dialectic a lot in this section referring to contradictory concepts. Valis is self-generating. Dick is not part of it but also it. He says he continually programs himself for self-punishment. Without the pain he would give up and die. 

The dialectic process is self-perpetuating and the exegesis is an example of this back-and-forth. Stasis = death. 

He speculates (seemingly under the influence of drugs) about how the early Christians, under cover of their religious doctrines, were actually a revolutionary political group. They still exist today and use some sort of computer left on Earth by aliens (aka Valis) to beam out an energy field that controls humans and their history. The aliens, which Dick has decided are 3-eyed, want us to think in this binary, dialectic way, what he calls paratruths rather than one unitary truth. He makes a list of these contradictory paratruth pairs about Valis:

• it’s evil / it’s good
• it’s occluding / it’s educating
• it’s alive / it’s a machine
• it’s serious / it’s playful
• it created our reality / it evolved out of our reality
• it’s human / it’s non-human (God or alien)
• it’s objectively real / it’s all in his head

He suspects it is some kind of (tender, loving) ship-board computer but admits he can’t prove that.

Dick says the counterculture was what got the U.S. out of Vietnam and thus prevented World War III. He gives himself some credit for this because of his early stories with anti-war themes (see related). He says he might be the sole Marxist S-F writer, and he is still going strong into the 1970s.

December 1978

Dick begins part 3 of the exegesis with part of a manuscript for VALIS that he will end up reworking into chapter 2 of that book. Horselover Fat has started to keep a journal, aka the exegesis. Dick writing in the first-person voice from VALIS describing Fat in these pages is confusing… layers upon layers.

After the VALIS excerpt Dick touches on his studies of 13th century German theologian Meister Eckhart and the Indian philosopher Adi Sankara (roughly 8th century) whose concepts can explain what happened to him when the barrier between his inner microcosm and outer macrocasm broke down. God inside us is the rational reality which breaks through into the irrational reality outside of us. He proclaims this a new theology.

The 4 Kantian categories of “ordering perceptual experience” (ego, space, time, causality) are arbitrary and wrong, and Dick combines them all into the inner and outer world. His will and Zebra were intertwined… him and not him. He says only the will exists and he states he attained nirvana. This breaking down of time, space and self represents and evolutionary leap forward according to him.

He wants to compare all this to concepts from Christianity but decides it is something new. It is like an expanded Gnosticism. He should preach about it, but realizes that’s what he is doing with the book VALIS. He returns to the idea of retrograde time, which he discussed in depth earlier, and says that is the basis of this new religion: Valis is actually us in the future presenting to ourselves as our God.

After all this he “concludes” once again the entity may be Christ, but he doesn’t know where it came from or how long it’s been here. Seems almost like an ending to a different section after the craziness of the previous pages.

October–November 1978

Dick hears a voice that equates him to St. Sophia, Buddha, Apollo and Siddhartha. He says that Thomas is more than just a secret Christian and instead is actually the savior. He thinks that whatever he experienced might be the Holy Spirit or perhaps the spirit of Elijah. 

No religious system can completely explain his vision. His divine eye was opened, he temporarily became Shiva and all this indicates he is a Buddha. 

He includes fragments and bits of dialogue from the VALIS novel he has started. He has a hypnagogic vision of “the catch” by Willie Mays in the 1954 World Series and compares his own exegetical efforts to the throw Mays made back to the infield. His work, the throw, is over and out of his hands. He calls his explanation of Zebra thus far the Tractates Cryptica Scriptura and he works through some ways it could be incorporated in VALIS. One idea is that the world in the book is an alternate reality where the New Testament doesn’t exist, Jesus is an impostor Messiah and Simon Magus is the founder of the church.

This marks the end of part 2.

October 1978

Zebra destroys the four deformations.

• It abolishes the phony world
• It abolishes the occlusion 
• It frees us from enslavement
• It restores our memory

The Gnostics didn’t have it quite right. It is the living information itself, not the content of the information, that saves us.

Dick counts 21 of his stories that deal with the idea of fake vs real. 

The Logos contains the totality of the macrocosm. Once it replicates in someone (through just a tiny piece as happened with Dick in 2-74) they become one with the whole. Zebra is in Dick and his purpose is to restore this knowledge (gnosis) to the world, which he does through his lowbrow sci fi, just as in Ubik.

He has a dream about Siddhartha (the founder of Buddhism) and believes this means another savior is being born. Dick covers how the savior dynamic is depicted in Stigmata, Ubik, Galactic Pot-Healer and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The VALIS book he is working on will show the process of redemption, although he finds writing it very difficult.

He has a dream about a fish and from that concludes the secret Christian society does exist and he is a part of it. Time has not passed since Rome 45 A.D. It has only been made (by James-James?) to appear that way. Dick understood this in 3-74 when he woke up. His book VALIS (which he calls his maximus opus) will show the restored and redeemed man, but from the perspective of Gnosticism and Buddhism, not Christianity.