Philip K. Dick's Exegesis

"So I ask, in my writing, What is Real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing."- Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick's exegesis, which has never been printed in full, is an 8,000 page rant/revelatory tract that tries to explain, well, how things REALLY are. In it he uses such words as "VALIS"--Vast Active Living Intelligence System--or "Black Iron Prison"--the world of sin and mass confusion--to explain odd allegorical principles which are rendered from the fat of Gnosticism. Despite the strange tone of the exegesis, and all the science-fiction overtones, there does seem to be a winding thread of logic in the fragments I have read: reality is not what it appears to be, there is a way of cutting through the veneer of this "what appears to be," and that humor can be used as a knife.

Before explaining some of the contents of the exegesis, it is probably important to highlight something that troubled Philip K. Dick for most of his life. In one of his last essays, "How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later," Philip K. Dick confessed that he didn't actually believe in Time; or at least not as it is perceived by those of us who follow the clock or the Julian calendar. He said, "My theory is this: in some certain important sense, time is not real. Or perhaps it is real, but not as we experience it to be or imagine it to be." Philip K. Dick actually believed the year in 1978 AD was really 50 AD. In other words, he believed he was living amidst the hustle and bustle of the Roman Empire and not in the world of affordable apartments and precipitous mortgages. Furthermore, he believed 50 AD, the time period talked about in the Book of Acts, was, and is for that matter, the ever-changing/unchanging true reality. He was obviously troubled because he had a hell of a time convincing people of his predicament: how does one ride a chariot and a car at the same time?

(If the year really is 50 AD, or at least in and around that time period, then perhaps we have to reevaluate who is deemed sane and who is deemed insane. If it is 50 AD, then perhaps the dishevelled and ornery street preachers who warn us about an imminent apocalypse aren't actually trying to scare us. Perhaps they are just trying to say, "You are living in an unreal time. We are just trying to pull you back to the right time. Don't worry, Christ is coming!" Perhaps the cataleptics and schizophrenics that inhabit the buses and mutter to themselves in seedy backalleys are trying to do the same. This is just a thought.)

Okay, now it is time to explain the TWO SOURCE COSMOGONY that is explicated in the exegesis or at the end of VALIS (with a lexicon that transcends science fiction slang and biblical rhetoric):

According to Philip K. Dick, "The One was and was-not, combined, and desired to separate the was-not from the was." So after mulling over the issue of eviscerating the was from the was-not, and eviscerating the was-not from the was, the One created a "diploid sac" that enveloped a pair of twins that spun in opposite directions. The One wished for the twins to emerge into "beingness" simultaneously, but the dark twin, or the Yin twin, prematurely separated from the sac. "Therefore it was defective," mused Dick. Eventually the twins came back together to create a unitary whole, but they were still rotating in opposite directions. After this, the One commanded the Two to become the Many by engaging in a conversation. From this, according to the eccentric Dick, came the "hologram-like interface" known as the universe. From here the One hoped the hologramatic universe would serve as a teaching mechanism for the manifold creatures that are perfect representations of the conjoined twins, but the defective twin had other plans. The defective twin instilled the hologram-like interface with pestilence and chaos, byproducts of its own premature birth. In an attempt to rectify the situation, the One sent a micro-form--Jesus Christ--into the hologram-like interface to help facilitate the original plan: the redemption of matter, but seeing as the Yin was deranged, the pestilential and chaotic forces abolished Jesus Christ on the cross. And so started the engine of history...

This is a puzzling allegory, but in the end we get to realize what Philip K. Dick really meant: "The Mind lets in the light, then the dark, in interaction; so time is generated. At the end Mind awards victory to the light; time ceases and the Mind is complete."

The street preacher, the schizophrenic, the cynic, the mennonite, the musician, the painter, the drug addict...we all win!