The Exegesis: A third-stage organism

The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
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June 1981

The plasmate formed by the cross-bonding of two human minds is a new kind of non-biological life form. It has no body, and to it reality is an idea not a physical thing. It’s possible the combination of the two human psyches happens spontaneously as a random event. Dick ties this concept back to Teilhard’s noösphere that he wrote about many years before. Because this life form has no body it “floats” and might be using the human mind as a way to connect to physical reality. 

He saw footage from the upcoming Blade Runner movie and recalls his time in Purgatorio when he had a vision of hell before ascending to Paradiso. 

The New Testament is the “secret narrative” of the Old Testament. It contains the living info that is Christ which cross-bonds with a human mind, capable of infinite combinations in a form of evolution. The Scripture that is generated (a new phenomenon) is unique to each person and situation. The third stage progresses from the Torah (OT) to Christ (NT) to this, but Dick doesn’t yet have a name for it. 

He claims his later books like Scanner and VALIS were written by a Ditheonic brain. No one, not the Jews nor Paul, connected the Torah and the NT this way as earlier stages of a third-stage organism. 

Based on his Ubik idea of God in the trash, the mundane and the divine are two stages of the same thing. The mundane is a slow stage of the divine (or the divine is a faster stage of the mundane) but there has to be unity, a coming together of discrete things, before it can make that leap to divinity.

Dick believes that the infinite beauty which exists in the world is the benchmark that points to God.