The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick, Pamela Jackson, Jonathan Lethem

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780547549279
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

A glimpse into the mind of the bestselling science fiction author through a collection of his personal, metaphysical, religious, visionary writings.

Based on thousands of pages of typed and handwritten notes, journal entries, letters, and story sketches,  The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is the magnificent and imaginative final work of an author who dedicated his life to questioning the nature of reality and perception, the malleability of space and time, and the relationship between the human and the divine. Edited and introduced by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, this will be the definitive presentation of Dick's brilliant, and epic, final work. 

In  The Exegesis, Dick documents his eight-year attempt to fathom what he called "2-3-74," a postmodern visionary experience of the entire universe "transformed into information." In entries that sometimes ran to hundreds of pages, Dick tried to write his way into the heart of a cosmic mystery that tested his powers of imagination and invention to the limit, adding to, revising, and discarding theory after theory, mixing in dreams and visionary experiences as they occurred, and pulling it all together in three late novels known as the VALIS trilogy. 

In this abridgment, Jackson and Lethem serve as guides, taking the reader through the  Exegesis and establishing connections with moments in Dick's life and work.

The e-book includes a sample chapter from  A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick. 

"A dyspeptic dystopian's mad secret notebooks, imposing order—at least of a kind—on a chaotic world…Fascinating and unsettling."— Kirkus Reviews

Part One

1974–1976

FOLDER 4

[4:1] In Ubik the forward moving force of time (or time-force expressed as an ergic field) has ceased. All changes result from that. Forms regress. The substrate is revealed. Cooling (entropy) is allowed to set in unimpeded. Equilibrium is affected by the vanishing of the forward-moving time force-field. The bare bones, so to speak, of the world, our world, are revealed. We see the Logos addressing the many living entities.^* Assisting and advising them.^† We are now aware of the Atman everywhere. The press of time on everything, having been abolished, reveals many elements underlying our phenomena.

If time stops, this is what takes place, these changes.

Not frozen-ness, but revelation.

There are still the retrograde forces remaining, at work. And also underlying positive forces other than time. The disappearance of the force-field we call time reveals both good and bad things; which is to say, coaching entities (Runciter, who is the Logos), the Atman (Ubik), Ella; it isn’t a static world, but it begins to cool. What is missing is a form of heat: the Aton. The Logos (Runciter) can tell you what to do, but you lack the energy—heat, force—to do it. (I.e., time.)

The Logos is not a retrograde energetic life form, but the Holy Spirit, the Parakletos, is. If the Logos is outside time, imprinting, then the Holy Spirit stands at the right or far or completed end of time, toward which the field-flow moves (the time flow). It receives time: the negative terminal, so to speak. Related to the Logos in terms of embodying word-directives and world-organizing powers, but at a very weak level, it can progressively to a greater degree overcome the time field and flow back against it, into it, impinging and penetrating. It moves in the opposite direction. It is the anti-time. So it is correct to distinguish it from the Logos, which so to speak reaches down into the time flow from outside, from eternity or the real universe. The H.S. is in time, and is moving: retrograde. Like tachyons,¹ its motion is a temporal one; opposite to ours and the normal direction of universal causal motion.

Equilibrium is achieved by the Logos operating in three directions: from behind us as causal—time—pressure, from above, then the final form, the very weak H.S. drawing toward perfection each form. But now equilibrium as we know it is being lost in favor of a growing ratio of retrograde teleology. This implies we are entering, have entered, a unique time: nearing completion of the manifold forms. Last pieces are going into place in the over-all pattern. The task or mode of the H.S. is completing. Not beginning, not renewing or maintaining, but bringing to the end, to the close. An analogy would be the transit of a vehicle from one planet to another; first stage is the gravity of planet of origin; then equilibrium of both planets in terms of their pull; then the growing pull of the destination gravity-field as it gradually takes over and completes the journey. Beginning, middle, end. At last one senses the receiving field engage, and then correct.

When I wrote Ubik I constructed a world (universe) which differed from ours in only one respect: it lacked the driving force forward of time.^* That time in our own actual universe could weaken, or even go entirely away, did not occur to me because at that point I did not conceive time as a force at all (vide the Soviet astro-physicist’s theory²). I thought of it in Kantian terms. As a mode of subjective perception. Now I believe that time, at this point in the expansion of the universe (or for some other reason[s]), has in fact actually begun to weaken, at least in ratio to certain other fields. Therefore, this being true, a measure of the Ubik-experience could be anticipated. I have indeed had that experience, or a measure thereof. That is, time still drives on, but counter forces have surfaced and impinge, laying bare the Ubik landscape—only for a few moments, that is, temporarily. Then time resumes its sovereignty.

What one would expect is two fold: (1) Material (e.g., information, images, weak energy fields, etc.) from the future leaking or bleeding back to us, while we continue on. (2) Abrupt lurches back on our part to recent prior time periods, like a needle on a record being anti-skated back to a prior groove, which it has already played, and then playing on from there as if nothing happened.^* The latter we would not be consciously aware of, although subcortical responses, and perhaps a vague sense of amnesia, dreams, etc., would tell us that something was “wrong.” But the leakage back to us from the future, not by us but to us, that we would be aware of (calling it ESP, etc.), and yet be unable to account for it.

But what is most telling is that in March, at the initial height of the “Holy Other” pouring into me, when I saw the universe as it is, I saw as the active agent, a gold and red illuminated-letter like plasmatic entity from the future, arranging bits and pieces here: arranging what time drove forward. Later I concluded that I had seen the Logos. What is important is that this was perceptual to me, not an intellectual inference or thought about what might exist. It came here from the future. It was/is alive. It had a certain small power or energy, and great wisdom. It was/is holy. It not only was visible around me but evidently this is the same energy which entered me. It was both inside and out. So the Logos, or whatever it was, this plasmatic life form from the future which I saw, satisfies, as near as I can fathom, most of the theoretical criteria above.^†

Also, the official Catholic/Christian theories about the Holy Spirit so depict it: moving backward from the end of time, pouring into people. But if the Holy Spirit can only enter one, is only inside, then what I saw that was gold and red outside, like liquid fire, wasn’t the H.S. but the Logos. I think it’s all the same thing, one found inner, one found outer. What difference does it make? It’s only a semantic quarrel; what’s important is that it comes BACK HERE FROM THE FUTURE, is electrostatic and alive, but a weak field. It must be a form similar to radiation. [. . .]

However, that which caused me to see differently and to be different must be distinguished from what I saw and became. A bioplasmic orgone-like energy entered me or rose up in me and caused changes in me; that is one enormous miracle. . . but the heightened awareness caused me to see a different universe: one which contained the red and gold living threads of activity in the outside world, a world enormously changed, very much like the world of Ubik. But I feel a unity between the force which changed me and the red and gold energy which I saw. From within me, as part of me, it looked out and saw itself.

Letter to Peter Fitting,³ June 28, 1974

[4:6]

Dear Peter,

[. . .] In regards to some of the intellectual, theoretical subjects all of us discussed the day you and your friends were here to visit, I recall in particular my statement to you (which I believe you got on your tape, too) that “the universe is moving backward,” a rather odd statement on the face of it I admit. What I meant by that is something which at the time I could not really express, having had an experience, several in fact, but not having the terms. Now, by having read further, I have some sort of terms, and would like to describe some of my personal experiences using, in a pragmatic way, the concept of tachyons, which are supposed to be particles of cosmic origin (I am quoting Arthur Koestler) which fly faster than light and consequently in a reversed time direction. “They would thus,” Koestler says, “carry information from the future into our present, as light and X rays from distant galaxies carry information from the remote past of the universe into our now and here. In the light of these developments, we can no longer exclude on a priori grounds the theoretical possibility of precognitive phenomena.” And so forth (Harper’s, July 1974).⁴

I had been for several months experimenting with something I read about while doing research on the brain, in particular new discoveries on split-brain phenomena, for my novel A Scanner Darkly; I had come across the fact that the brain can transduce external fields of both high and low frequency providing that the thermal factor is quite low. Also, I had read about which vitamins in megadosages can improve neural firing and produce vastly increased brain efficiency. I began attempting, on the basis of what I knew, to bring on both the hemispheres of my own brain using the recipe for megadoses of the water-soluble vitamins; at the same time I tried again and again to exclude the ordinary external electrical fields that we customarily tune into: man-made fields, which we consider “signal,” and at the same time I tried to directly transduce what we usually think of as “noise,” in particular weak natural electrical fields.

One night I found myself flooded with colored graphics which resembled the nonobjective paintings of Kandinsky and Klee, thousands of them one after the other, so fast as to resemble “flash cut” used in movie work. This went on for eight hours. Each picture was balanced, had excellent harmony and possessed idiomatic style—that of a well-known nonobjective artist. I could not account for what I was seeing (this took place in the dark, and was evidently phosphene activity within my eyes, but the source of the stimulation of the phosphenes was an enigma to me at the time), but I was certain that those tens of thousands of lovely, balanced, quite professional and esthetic harmonious graphics could not be originating within my own mind or brain. I have no facility with graphics, and besides, there were too many of them; even Picasso, whose style predominated for over an hour, never actually painted so many, although he very likely saw that many in his own head.

In later studies about the brain I learned of an inhibiting brain fluid called GABA, which when its effect drops drastically, which is to say when an external stimulus causes disinhibition and firing of a programmed sequence up to then is inhibited, such colored graphics are often experienced. So I concluded that massive—unique in my life, in fact—disinhibition had taken place, although I could not identify the external stimulus, nor comprehend the programmed or engrammed sequences. At the same time (in the days following) I found myself possessed with enormous energy and did a lot of unusual things. This, in fact, is what probably raised my blood pressure so much that my doctor had to hospitalize me. I was constantly active, and in new ways. This tends to confirm the theory of massive disinhibition and unused neural firing along hitherto unusual neural pathways, perhaps an entire hemisphere of the brain held in readiness until then—I did not know for what.

All this may have been induced by the huge doses of water-soluble vitamins I took, gram after gram of vitamin C, for instance. But I doubt it. At the same time as I experienced the release of psychic energy (to use Esther Harding’s phrase, picked up by Jung), I became conscious of pathic language directed at me from all creatures, and finally, as it spread—and this is the point I’m getting at—from the direction of the sky, especially at night. I had a keen intuition that information of some kind was arriving at us all, in fact bombarding us, from sidereal space.

For a time I imagined that an ESP experiment had somehow by accident involved me: the long-range transmission of graphics. I wrote to a lab in Leningrad and told them about my experience, having at the time the feeling that the point of origin of these signals was far distant, and hence in the USSR. Now I believe the point of origin was even farther: I think that I somehow for a short time transduced tachyon bombardment, which comes to us constantly, and which animals utilize to engram them into performing what we call “instinctive actions.” I had been consciously trying to transduce external weak fields, which I know to be possible, and I know that when this is done successfully the brain’s efficiency is increased; however, I had no preconception of what fields I might transduce—except that I felt they would be natural and not man-made—and what information, if any, they might contain. I was hoping only for increased neural efficiency. I got more: actual information about the future, for during the next three months, almost each night, during sleep I was receiving information in the form of print-outs: words and sentences, letters and names and numbers—sometimes whole pages, sometimes in the form of writing paper and holographic writing, sometimes oddly, in the form of a baby’s cereal box on which all sorts of quite meaningful information was written and typed, and finally galley proofs held up for me to read which I was told in my dream “contained prophecies about the future,” and during the last two weeks a huge book, again and again, with page after page of printed lines.

Without the tachyon theory I would lack any kind of scientific formulation, and would have to declare that “God has shown me the sacred tablets in which the future is written” and so forth, as did our forefathers, back on the deserts of Israel under the sky as they tended their sleeping flocks. Koestler also points out that according to modern theory the universe is moving from chaos to form; therefore tachyon bombardment would contain information which expressed a greater degree of Gestalt than similar information about the present; it would, thus at this time continuum, seem more living, more animated by a conscious spirit, to us giving rise to the concept of God. This would definitely give rise to the idea of purpose, in particular purpose lying in the future. Thus we now have a scientific method of considering the notion of teleology, I think, which is why I am writing you now, to express this, my own sense of final causes, as we discussed that day.

Much of this printed-out information arriving in dreams has had a teaching, shaping and directing quality; it tends to inform and guide me, and make me aware of what I should do. It literally educates me, and I’m sure each small creature, each bug and plant and animal and fish, has the same sense of it. I’ve watched my cat, now, as he sits out on the sundeck at night; he is beyond doubt considering the sidereal world above him and not moving objects below—when he comes in the house an hour or two later he seems modified, as if he has been taught during that period and knows it. I think this happens to us all but I managed consciously to transduce above the threshold of awareness, which is unusual but not unique, and became aware of this constant natural and normal process which shapes all life from the future, as Koestler describes. It is often described as the “Divine Plan,” or better yet “Continual Creation.” Any such terms will do, but I regard it for my own purposes as a continual informational print-out from the future which directs us all, not in the coercive sense that the past does, but experienced—and rightly so—as volition. As so to speak, free will. This term sounds right to me each morning when I wake up and reflect on the pages of print I’ve seen during the night; I am not forced to do what the information brings to my attention; I am free to consider it, digest and understand it, and, with its assistance, act on it.^*

For well over two months I was convinced that the Holy Spirit, which is to say God, was directing me, and in a sense this is true; it is a matter of semantics: at one time these would have been the only terms we had available to us; we would have talked about a divine vision and so forth. What I think now is that more modern terms can be better applied; the future is more coherent than the present, more animate and purposeful, and in a real sense, wiser. It knows more, and some of this knowledge gets transmitted back to us by what seems to be a purely natural phenomenon. We are being talked to, by a very informed Entity: that of all creation as it lies ahead of us in time.

Cordially,

Philip K. Dick

P.S. In terms of Ubik (not the novel but the force described in my novel) perhaps I was coherence which the universe is moving toward and which bombards us backward, so to speak, with information about itself, thus giving us a certain awareness of itself. I would think that for purely fictional purposes the description given and the name given in the novel would be more rather than less accurate vis-à-vis the tachyon theory, which is connected with the theory that the universe is moving from chaos to form. Ubik talks to us from the future, from the end state to which everything is moving; thus Ubik is not here—which is to say now—but will be, and what we get is information about and from Ubik, as we receive TV or radio signals from transmitters located in other spaces in this time continuum.

I see no objection to interpreting the meaning of the force Ubik this way. Nor in interpreting the purpose of the novel Ubik by saying that in it I was trying in a dim and unconscious way to express a series of experiences I had had most of my life of a directing, shaping and assisting—and informing—force, much wiser than us which we in no way could perceive directly; where it was or what it was called I did not know; I knew it only by its effects: in Kant’s terms, it is (or as I understand now will be) a Thing-in-Itself.

Thus I would express the purpose of the novel—my purpose, anyhow—to be a fictional statement containing a presentation of this directing presence which I arbitrarily chose the name “Ubik” for. That Ubik (or more accurately the future total Gestalt of purpose and Meaning) may ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• Editors’ Note
• Acknowledgments
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Afterword: A Stairway to Eleusis: PKD, Perennial Philosopher
• Endnotes
• Glossary
• About the Editors and Annotators
• Names Index
• Works Index
• Sample from PHILIP K. DICK’S ELECTRIC DREAMS
• Buy the Book
• Read More from Philip K. Dick
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH
• Footnotes