January 1982
Dick points out the darkness in VALIS as it deals with the upcoming judgment, war and death. He has a very Old Testament view of things here describing the dialectic, insane, demonic side of God (something Jacob Boehme wrote about), which is usually contained by the opposite bright or rational side.
He had a hypnopompic vision about the cycle of reincarnation that we can only break out of through anamnesis when we remember our past lives and can finally be saved. Anamnesis happened to Dick at age 21 when he read the Jewish philosopher’s Maimonides 12th-century book Guide to the Perplexed, which caused him to see through the illusion of time as he became aware of multiple timelines. The other half of his salvation came from God’s grace.
He compares this to the Hindu and Buddhist idea of moska when someone escapes the “weary wheel” cycle. 3-74 might have been his Nirvana. All of this involves being liberated along a right angle axis, which he says is the 5th dimension revealed to him through Dibba Cakkhu.
In the 5th dimension everything exists “now” simultaneously. He calls it hypertime where Valis and others live. They can see us but we can’t see them. All we are aware of is their influence (aka the perturbation in the reality field) on our 4D world. He claims to have received a signal burst (which he describes as a musical, mathematical color sequence) from them the previous night that proved to him they were external and didn’t just exist in his mind.
Either the 5D world intersects with our world or it exists outside of it. An object like Flow My Tears can have a different meaning in the 5D world than in the 4D world even though the text is the same.