The flux world is real because the dialectic is real, and it is the mechanism by which Valis advances up the ladder of its own evolution—Valis, then, is not static. It is permanent but this is a dynamic permanence. Equilibrium must always exist in Valis; the antithetical forces of the dialectic are in a secret partnership in and as Valis. This is why Valis’ main device in dealing with the flux world—in order to use it to generate new bits for Valis—is enantiodromia, the conversion or backward turning of something when it reaches an extreme into its opposite. It is by this and this mainly if not alone that Valis evolves.
Possibly we would see Valis as a flicker of on-off, on-off, on-off, a flip-flop back and forth in its ceaseless dialectic that is in it but beneath it or rather enclosed within the palintropos harmonie of Valis; Valis as our world is this flip-flop; Valis as a coherence is palintropos harmonie. All this is very much what Heraclitus taught and he would probably have called Valis Logos.
[83:157] Well, frankly it would seem that I had a somewhat Platonized version of Taoist ecstatic experience with the Absolute. I had some experience with the Christian Absolute (the Godhead), some with the Platonist and Neoplatonist (the One), with Brahman . . . but my inquiry has certainly just now—surprisingly—led me toward Taoism, my old, old stomping-ground. In Taoism we have the flux; we have the constants in the flux; we have the dialectic—and between two sides very similar if not identical to Yang and Yin, or to Parmenides’ Forms I and II—and most of all, there is Valis which I see fits the description of the Chiang Tao:
An unchanging unity (the permanent Tao) was seen as underlying the kaleidoscopic plurality . . . ineffable reality, experienced in ec stasy, that lies at the origin of the universe and behind or within appearances.70
[ . . . ]
What is really pointed to is: the Absolute is non-sectarian; it is Christian and Brahmanist and Platonist and Taoist all at once. If it really is the Absolute, this should be expected.
Folder 1*
[1:1]
3/20/74−12/2/80
THE DIALECTIC:
God against Satan, and God’s final victory foretold and shown
Philip K. Dick
An Exegesis
Apologia pro mea vita
[1:2] Or is it possible that 2-74 consisted of a quantum leap in abstracting from accident to essence on my part, a perception/awareness of einai underlying accidents as follows:
“Superimposition” of the 2 continua, a scanning by me of two spatiotemporal templates and a perception/awareness of essence identity. [ . . . ] I grasped (the category of) essence and it is real; more, this is how reality is in fact arranged. I could grasp the category of essence and see that A and B were on the essence level one-and-the-same, but I could not then extrapolate to the essence (form) realm in general, i.e., the next implication was lost to me; I failed to draw the next conclusion. [ . . . ] However, having made this quantum leap in mentation/perception-of-reality, I could not halt the involuntary chain of mental hypotheses triggered off in my brain, which (i.e., my brain) had discovered that an ultra way of world-perception/experience/Dasein was possible—and more accurate—and so neural circuits fired and I proceeded to progressively further and further abstract—think/see in categories of less spatiotemporality and more and more conceptual arrangement—the Christian element was only a trigger/clue; this did not have to do with Christianity per se but with the abstracting of essentials at the expense of accidents hence of spatiotemporal arrangement; as a result I ascended through the realms of Neoplatonism—which makes Valis Plotinus’s One.*
[1:9]
[1:17] “If you press world hard enough it yields up God”—paraphrase of [>]. “I define God as world under the threat of death . . . God forced into the open, and put to work in the service of evading death.”
[1:19] No time has passed, and, moreover, all change since “Acts” has to do only with accidents not substance. Reticulation and arborizing in a memory system; the real world, having been destroyed, exists only in God’s memory, and this world remembered is “Acts,” and all changes since have been mere reticulating and arborizing as elaborations of a freeze frame.† Hence time is not real and space is not real. The real world is morphologically arranged, and that world is “Acts” as dynamic, but in essence changeless—exploded through the simulated space and time we experience.
[1:23] The secret is to view something “from the other side” and not as it is—overtly. Heraclitus’ “latent form”—crypte morphosis where the concealed truth and hence the kingdom lies—Zen realizes this. Paradox.
[1:24] Premise: things are inside out (but will at the “Apocalypse” assume their real shape). Therefore the right place to look for the Almighty is, e.g., in the trash in the alley. And for Satan: in vast cathedrals, etc. Through enantiodromia they will “on that day” assume their rightful shapes—the great reversal. The Jester in the tarot deck is the real King; the King card is the deranged one, the witless one. Ubik in its commercials and final theophany shows this reversal process. USA 1974 is really Rome c. 45 C.E. Christ is really here; so is the kingdom. I found my way into it once. The long path is the short path—ponderous books of philosophy won’t help me; Burroughs’ Junky will. That “thieves and murderers” 17th century poem of Herbert’s will. Stone rejected by the builder; the edifice is discarded; the true edifice is invisible—disguised as rubble (plural constituents). That fly grooming himself—they (the divine powers) have to reveal the kingdom to you; you can never on your own pin it down. So to search at all is to miss the point. Tricks, paradox, illusion, magic, enantiodromia. The apparently harmless Xerox missive was my death warrant. The AI voice says the secret stolen has been successfully smuggled to me; I have it. But what is it? My worst book, Deus Irae, is my best. God talked to me through a Beatles tune (“Strawberry Fields”). (“Nothing is real. Going through life with eyes closed.”) A random assortment of trash blown by the wind, and there is God. Bits and pieces swept together to form a unity.
[1:25] “God does not work through the is.” God works through what Lao Tzu calls the weak, the empty; this is the same God.