* Dick is likely referring to Colossians 1:18–20, which states that “God wanted . . . all things to be reconciled through [Christ] and for him, everything in heaven and everything on earth, when he made peace by his death on the cross.” More specifically, Dick is probably referring to the footnotes in the Jerusalem Bible, a Catholic translation first published in 1966 and containing extensive theological annotations written by a committee of Jesuit scholars. Dick frequently quotes from this version’s footnotes, suggesting that it was his preferred study Bible (though he is also known to have owned an annotated copy of the New Testament in the New English Version). The notes for this passage of Colossians declare that Christ is “head not only of the entire human race, but of the entire created cosmos, so that everything that was involved in the fall is equally involved in the salvation.”—GM
* While the Exegesis is largely concerned with Western philosophy, Western religion, and Western science, Dick was strongly influenced by his (rather typically Californian) encounter with the East. Hinduism gave him a powerful language in which to think about the absolute and the problem of illusion; his embrace of paradox, organic process, and “the lowly” was deeply marked by his reading of Zen and Taoism, and especially his obsessive use of the I Ching—the ancient Chinese book of changes. The I Ching uses a binary system—yin and yang, broken and solid lines, respectively—to express and model the myriad phases of growth and decay. Like many oracles in Dick’s fiction (including The Man in the High Castle, which was partly written using the I Ching), the book’s messages—a mixture of Taoist, Confucian, and shamanic lore—are accessed through the throw of coins or other randomizing techniques. Indeed, with its computer-like code, its relentless oscillation of opposites, and its reliance on synchronicity, the I Ching gave Dick an early experience of an organic and mystical information entity—Valis before the name. Here the two hexagrams depict the “trash dialectic” that so concerned Dick, graphically figured through the loss and return of a single yang line between the two figures. In the Wilhelm/Baynes edition that Dick regularly used, the movement between these two hexagrams is described thus: “When what is above is completely split apart, it returns below.”—ED
* The Invisible Landscape (1975) was Terence and Dennis McKenna’s attempt to theorize the bizarre high-dose psilocybin experiences they underwent in the Colombian Amazon in 1971. As Dick notes, their text shares many concerns with the Exegesis, which should remind us that Dick was hardly alone in his heady speculations. Throughout the 1970s, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, Jack Sarfatti, and many others explored a mode of associative and interdisciplinary theorizing that combined weird science, psychoactive inspiration, occult semiotics, and what can only be called garage philosophy. While sometimes resembling the isolated and obsessional literature of cranks and conspiracy theorists, these speculations also served an underground social function by bringing heads together through a shared language and style. A moment later here, Dick writes, with good reason, that he lived out the process the McKennas described, while Terence later proclaimed, in the afterword to Lawrence Sutin’s 1991 abridgement of the Exegesis: “I Understand Philip K. Dick.” Such mutual resonance also forms the perfect platform for stoned, late-night bull sessions—for friendship, in other words, like the friendships and conversations that fueled Dick’s writing throughout his time in Orange County.—ED
* Between 1947 and 1951, Dick worked for Herb Hollis at University Radio and later at Art Music in Berkeley, jobs that helped him make the difficult transition from awkward teenager to self-sufficient adult. A straitlaced father figure, Hollis served as a kind of mentor for Dick, while his coworkers served as models for Dick’s future characters. Whether with the futuristic ad agency in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the family-run android business in We Can Build You, or the anti-telepathy Prudence Organizations in Ubik, Dick’s fiction constantly recasts his formative years working for Hollis, often focusing on the plight of a small business operation struggling against a more powerful, but less upstanding, competition. In 1977 Dick told interviewer Uwe Anton that “the ultimate surrealism . . . is to [take] somebody that you knew, whose life ambition was to sell the largest television set that the store carried, and put him in a future utopia or dystopia, and pit him against this dystopia.” Dick’s thematic concern for the “little guy,” as opposed to the galactic royalty featured in space opera, was one of the defining features of his work.—DG
* Dick’s higher and lower realms mirror the important distinction he draws in his fiction between man and machine. While machines are predictable, man is not; moreover, the machine is cold and unfeeling, cut off from the plight of those around it. Similarly, in the Exegesis the lower realm is incapable of empathy. Like an android programmed to react in a predetermined way, the spurious world is a deterministic “maze” of unthinking causation that cannot by its nature care about anyone stumbling blindly through its passages. Like the heroes in Dick’s fiction, the true reality of the higher realm is based on its ability to love.—DG
* Here again we meet Dick’s mystical mutants. More importantly, we see the multiple influences that helped shape his zapped imagination of these figures. First, we see a book, Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier’s The Morning of the Magicians (originally Les Matins des Magiciens, 1960), which employed the tropes of mutants, superhumans, even Superman, to advance a countercultural occultism inspired largely by the books of the American Charles Fort. Second, we see the importance of Dick’s auditions, psychical experiences (the “tutelary telepathic link”), and dreams, and their profound influence on his writing life. Also significant here is the fact that the first American edition of The Morning of the Magicians was published by Avon, the same publisher that would later publish an edition of Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth. In short, we see here within Dick’s paperback world a mind-bending feedback mechanism or “loop” of pop culture and altered states of consciousness arcing back on itself through countless acts of reading, dreaming, and writing: a morphing superconsciousness published or “made public” in the only form of our culture that will have it—fantastic literature.—JJK