March 1977

Dick yearns for Zebra to contact him again. He returns to the night of his epic drug bender and decides Erasmus and Dionysus and Zebra are one and the same. Zebra is the rightful king of our world. Maybe if Dick’s experience did happen to others they kept it a secret. 

He reads an article in Time magazine about a book by psychologist Julian Jaynes which suggests that prior to 10,000 B.C. humans didn’t possess a consciousness but instead existed in a sort of schizophrenic state led by voices only they heard. Eventually humans evolved from this bicameral brain (left side for speech, right side for these voices) to the consciousness we know today.

Dick thinks Christ’s unachieved goal on Earth was to help restore that bicamerality. He believes in 3-74 he became temporarily bicameral, and if the gods communicated from our right brain then they are still there subconsciously guiding us. 

He imagines the mind as a computer that can retrieve any information (even that of long dead people?) if it’s given the correct signal. 

March 1977

Dick reads an essay Stanislaw Lem wrote about him and understands he has never been able to see causality the way everyone else does. 

He reads the screenplay for Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and by equating his life to a script realizes 3-74 ridded him of his paranoia. He correctly summarizes this makes him look psychotic. He says he became schizophrenic, which cured him, and he admits his fear that the FBI was after him was a delusion. 

He was a “paranoiac schiz” from 71 to 3-74 and had a full schizophrenic breakdown for a year after 3-74. After this a “toxin” secreted in his brain destroyed his persecutory complex. It appears now that depictions of paranoid worlds (like North by Northwest) are repellant to him. 

Using the Greek concepts of idios kosmos and koinos kosmos Dick wonders if the schizophrenic world is the sane world and the normal world is the crazy one. Maybe during schizophrenia the brain is trying to achieve parity between the two hemispheres by releasing the toxin. Because of the right brain’s dominance though schizophrenia is a failed evolutionary leap. 

His inability to understand causality (linear right-brained thinking) has allowed him to perceive how Zebra is communicating. One of his most important discoveries is that causality actually moves backwards.

February 1977

Dick’s 3-74 experience confirms the philosophy of Hegel so he decides he is a Hegelian.

Dick explores the ideas of pantheism (the universe is a manifestation of God) an panentheism (God pervades and is greater than the universe) and tries to connect these concepts to the noosphere and deus absconditus. 

He finds in the writing of English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead a description that matches and exceeds his own conception of Zebra. He studies the German mathematician and philosopher Leibniz and his theory of monads. These academic sections are beyond my summarizing. 

Dick thinks the Spirit has moved on from biological evolution to the social evolution of man, and he implies that through Zebra he may be the next step in human evolution. He may have triggered everything that happened to him by some sort of defense system in response to his condition in early 1974. He admits Hegel, Whitehead, Leibniz and others could explain some of his experience but again he wonders why him?

He is preparing for the next world and tries to make peace with letting go of this one. Do the monads record each moment in time? Is it possible through memory to restore previous events? 

There may be no practical application to everything he has been studying other than to bring him joy and personal satisfaction. 

January or February 1977

Dick has nicknamed the form-mimicker Zebra. He tries to imagine how it creates its phony world. He is not sure if our world is entirely faked or just a partially viewed reality. He speculates that Zebra is not Brahman after all, that God has an opposing subject (either neutral or antagonistic) and that Zebra is a Creator God building a new Earth. He thinks he was incorporated into Zebra’s world in 3-74.

He returns to the idea of the noosphere. Perhaps this is what Zebra is creating. He believes there is a duality between the creator of the world and this Zebra entity similar to Vishnu and Shiva or the Savior and God.

There is no difference between the builder and the world it is building. Is this recreated world Christ’s forthcoming kingdom? He goes over an earlier idea about how Zebra subliminally programs or guides us in order to free us from the Black Iron Prison. 

The theme of Dick’s writing has always been how reality is hidden from us. He is surprised at how close Ubik came to depicting Zebra in the form of Runciter.