Philip Dick - The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

in Particular Those of Gnosticism and

Christianity (1977)

It is proper to say: We appear to be memory coils (DNA carriers capable of experience) in a computerlike thinking system that, although we have correctly recorded and stored thousands of years of experiential information (knowledge, gnosis), and each of us possesses a somewhat different deposit from all the other life forms, there is a malfunction -- a failure -- of memory retrieval . There lies the trouble in our particular subcircuit. "Salvation" through gnosis -- more properly anamnesis (the loss of amnesia) -- although it has individual significance for each of us -- a quantum leap in perception, identity, cognition, understanding, world- and self-experience, including immortality -- it has further and more truly ultimate importance for the system (structure) as a whole , inasmuch as these memories (data) are needed or valuable to it , and to its overall functioning.

Therefore it is in the process of self-repair, which includes: rebuilding our subcircuit (world) via linear and orthogonal time changes (sequences of events), as well as continual signaling to us both en masse and individually (to us received subliminally by the right brain hemisphere, which gestalts the constituents of the messages into meaningful entities), to stimulate blocked neural (memory) banks within us to fire and hence retrieve what is there.

The adventitious information of gnosis, then, consists of disinhibiting messages (instructions), with the core (main) content actually intrinsic to us -- that is, already there (first observed by Plato, that learning is a form of remembering).

The ancients possessed techniques (sacraments and rituals) used largely in the Greco-Roman mystery religions, including early Christianity, to induce firing and retrieval, mainly with a sense of its restorative (repairing) value to the individuals; the Gnostics, however, and Mani correctly saw the ontological value to what they called the Godhead Itself (i.e. the total entity).

PHILIP K. DICK

K. W. JETER

12/7/77

SANTA ANA, CALIFORNIA

(Note: While such "Enlightened" spiritual leaders as Zoroaster, Mani, Buddha, and Elijah can be regarded as receptors of the entity's total wisdom, Christ seems to have been an actual terminal of this computerlike entity, in which case he did not speak for it but was it. "Was," in this case, standing for "consisted of a microform of it.")

Late 1972 letter found amongst c. 1977 Exegesis papers

I almost became a sincere tool of a conspiracy consisting of myself.

There goes the John Birch Society sincerely trying to save this country from the John Birch Society -- from itself.

Prototype: Pooh and Piglet following the woozle footprints around and around the tree. There are more all the time.

I blew up my own house and forgot I did it. [The reference here is to an episode in November 1971 when Dick's house and files were broken into, possibly with the use of explosives; his list of suspects for this unsolved crime included himself.] But why did I forget I did it? So I'd think I had an actual enemy so I wouldn't have to face the fact that I'm paranoid, i.e. crazy. I blew up my house to convince myself I was sane. Anyone who would go to that much trouble must really be nuts. So as soon as those who thought I was imagining that people were after me saw that my house had been blown up, they realized that I was far more paranoid than they had suspected. Their paranoid suspicions about me are now much greater. Sensing their paranoid suspicions about me, I realize etc.

Why is everything is short supply? Because everyone is hoarding. Why are they hoarding? Because everything is in short supply.

We all wind up isolated, suspicious of each other, each of us trying to figure out what is going on, which means, who is doing it? Who is our enemy? The fact that we can't figure out what's going on overloads our brains, overworks our minds; we wear out fast, get exhausted and confused. And still we can't locate the enemy. Because we are confused we begin to act in an ineffectual way, so our behavior becomes erratic. Others who notice our erratic behavior wonder what we are up to. Actually we are up to nothing, are merely in the process of burning out over the problem of trying to figure out what other people are up to, inasmuch as their various behaviors are becoming more and more perplexing. Each of us assumes everyone else knows what HE is doing. They all assume we know what WE are doing. We don't. They ask us, What are you doing? We can't give a coherent account because we don't know, but our failure to give a coherent account convinces them that we are lying, and the only reason we would lie is because what we are really (doing) ought to be concealed. This confirms their fears and mistrust, and they intensify the interrogation. The false premise is, You must know what you're doing and if you won't tell me, then you must be lying in order to conceal something I wouldn't approve of, which is probably directed at me to hurt me. Each person winds up more and more confused, having wasted his time and exhausted himself interrogating other persons as confused as himself on the false assumption that they know what's going on. Nothing is going on and nobody knows what it is. Nobody is concealing anything except the fact that he does not understand anything anymore and wishes he could go home.

c. 1977

"Actualities are somehow plucked from a greater sea of possibilities that also form part of the truth." This means that the actuality is not true versus possibilities that are false; it just means that the actuality is more true; the possibilities are less true but also true. This involves the principle of emergence, how a thing comes into being. It is a question of degree, not either-or. Possibly the force that selects one possibility and makes it the actuality is the pressure on reality -- this greater sea of possibilities -- of the human mind. It selects out the actuality by assessing it as more probable. Or it is a subtle interaction, a feedback between the sentient mind and this greater sea: Pressure is exerted until one possibility among many becomes growingly distinct, which causes the pressure to select it out to become more firm. The actuality is merely a particular possibility that acquires form and shape and can be discerned. Actualization is a gestalting process, and gestalting takes place primarily in the human mind. The mind exerts a subtle and continual pressure on certain events and things to be, and on others not to be; it shapes reality directly by some field similar to gravitational waves, very weak but always there, and in the end effective. Without the presence of human minds and the pressure they exert there would be no actualization of anything, and only the greater sea of possibilities, of half truths, would exist as a multitude of semiforms, contradicting one another but existing side by side. Without real time or space.

c. 1978

Through anamnesis you can move retrograde in time, go back and burn up or unweave your karma, be born anew to a higher state -- but is this all an interior psychological process? It must be; Tessa [Dick's wife who lived with him during the 2-3-74 experiences] didn't see Rome c. A.D. 70. But I saw Valis outside me modulating reality. Ah; but that was a projection (cf. Jung). Projection explains it, the Magdeburg hemispheres. It was my own mind that I was seeing external to me. I traveled down into the phylogenic (collective) unconscious. God had nothing to do with it. Right?

Then what about the messenger who comes in time and bilks the retribution machine by withholding from it the bill of particulars against you? Is the messenger an archetype of the unconscious? And the AI voice [Artificial Intelligence voice -- Dick's name for the hypnogogic voice he heard frequently in 1974-75 and intermittently thereafter until his death]; that is my anima?