October-November 1980
Dick tries to figure out what the trigger was in 2-74 that started his whole experience. The Christian symbology of the Jesus fish necklace was just a clue, but once he had a glimpse of how reality was arranged he “could not halt the involuntary chain of mental hypotheses” which led him to further and further abstractions.
Space and time are not real, no time has passed and the world only exists in God’s memory as the book of “Acts.”
“The secret is to view something ‘from the other side’ and not as it is.” Because everything is backwards God is in the trash (or like Ubik in throwaway commercials) and Satan exists in the cathedrals. It isn’t until the end times when they will assume their rightful shapes. Dick lets us know that he thinks Deus Irae is his worst book (“My worst book, Deus Irae, is my best”) while naming these reversals. In all the random junk and ephemera is where we will find God.
Dick hasn’t been trying to figure out what the TV drama is about for the last six and a half years but rather how the TV set works. Christianity is not the answer but instead content within the system.
It took that initial abstraction set off by the sodium pentothal followed by witnessing the Jesus fish necklace that led to him understanding the hierarchy of realms in reality. One spatiotemporal continuum (USA 1974) is the same thing as another (Rome 45 A.D.). They are two ways of looking at the same thing superimposed. He admits he can’t convince anybody of this and is afraid no one will believe him.
He has been trying to understand what happened to him through the framework of Christianity which doesn’t really fit with everything he now knows, unless he settles for the idea all of it was a miracle performed by God. Instead he accepts that Christianity is his narrative within the Neoplatonist structure.