September 1981
Knowledge, which comes as a gift from Christ, leads to salvation. Gnosticism understands this, unlike Christianity which misses the point.
Dick claims to have truly figured out Gnosticism. Every human is damaged in a way that splits their psyche, which results in the world appearing like a foreign threat. Rejoining these two parts will heal the self and then also the world. This process is kickstarted when one half of the self recognizes its other familiar half in the unfamiliar world. Meta-abstraction is also necessary, and that can only occur when the two halves (who exist in different spatiotemporal worlds) combine their viewpoints into one. The two halves are alienated, from themselves and the world, and salvation only comes when they are rejoined together. This leads to a new world without space and time.
Dick says VALIS is not a book about Gnosticism, but rather it is literally the Gnostic salvation experience. It isn’t just drawing on Gnosticism to document our condition but is an account of someone transcending it. Dismissing it as the ravings of a madman would mean rejecting or not understanding the supernatural solution to the accepted problem.
Dick exhorts us to face the reality of our death, which is the only way to seize our own fate. This is what he did by writing in VALIS about surviving his 3-74 experience. It was his writing about it that gave him his victory over fate. Christianity is the great human revolution as it illustrates the break between the tragic (fate defeating man) and the heroic (man’s defeat of fate).