I’m going to have to revise my idea of bite-sized chunks… I think I can probably only handle a few pages at a time. If any of this sounds remotely interesting you should read it on your own, since these notes are just a way to keep it straight in my own mind as best I can. I’m not a scholar, so I apologize in advance if I get this all wrong.
The editors kept some of Paul Williams’s system of folder organization for the pages and pages of material. Dick has adopted the possibility that he was inspired by something to write his stories. In a section labeled ‘Folder 4’ Dick muses about the Logos and how it connects to his novel Ubik. We get a glimpse at the gnosticism (which to overly simplify it is the idea of spiritual knowledge as a path to God) which underpins what he thinks has been happening to him.
The Logos is the Word of God (as in “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” in chapter 1 of the Gospel of John) and is a separate entity from the Holy Spirit. The Logos exists outside of time unlike the Holy Spirit which exists in time but moves in an opposite direction to the time we perceive.
Dick believes the plasmatic entity that visited him in March of ’74 was the Logos traveling back in time from the future. That seems to contradict the distinction he made between the Logos and the Holy Spirit earlier, but then he says ‘What difference does it make? It’s only a semantic quarrel.’ These pages are a dense beginning where he connects all of this loosely to the non-time world in Ubik where Runciter serves in the role of the Logos. I’m not sure what I’ve gotten myself into…