October-November 1980
It took a heroic act of will for Dick to break out of his programming even though it was the Tao that caused the perturbation in the reality field that let him know something wasn’t right. Dick’s effort to make a change caused the future to flow into the past, what he calls “real time.”
He concludes Valis is the Cosmic Christ who isn’t physically real but only exists as the tug of the perturbation. He only knows this after rejecting all other possibilities during his studies over the last six and a half years.
He compares the tug to a breath in the weeds or a magnet’s effect on iron fillings, a barely detectable weak field. This small attraction though can cascade until it causes a big change. He now believes it came into existence out of nothing.
The self-awareness achieved at the end makes the suffering endured during the journey worth it.
He wonders if he’s had it wrong all along. Instead of Valis camouflaged as the world perhaps Valis is the world which it purposefully assimilated in “dialectical combat” piece by piece to make up its body. Dick makes it clear he doesn’t mean an anthropomorphic human body but something that encompasses the universe.
He connects Valis to the macrometasomakosmos and realizes they are one and the same. He’s surprised he didn’t understand this before. This confirms Valis as the Cosmic Christ. We can’t see it since its structure is created out of the ordinary world around us.