† We can detect a new mood in the Exegesis that deepens as Dick’s thinking evolves: a dialectical mood. Whether this is conscious or not, Dick seems to be close to Hegel’s insight in the Phenomenology of Spirit that the historical process, through which new shapes of Spirit appear and dissolve, is a highway of misery. Crucially, however, the highway does not end in despair, but in the self-consciousness of freedom understood as self-determination. This insight might be linked to Dick’s later references to history as an engine of pain and suffering that culminates in the achievement of human freedom, or the closing entry of the Exegesis, on the dialectic of pain and hope.—SC
* Here Dick identifies his thinking with the Marxist idea that history is a dialectic that will culminate in communist revolution. In part, Dick is attempting to engage the leftist literary critics whose interest in his work in the 1970s both pleased and unnerved him. At the same time, Dick’s thinking already employs dualistic motifs that cast history as a dialectical conflict between the forces of Empire and those who struggle for freedom—what is described elsewhere in the Exegesis as the struggle between God and Satan. We should also note Dick’s frequent identification of true Christianity as revolutionary and Christ as a revolutionary figure. In this way, Dick retrieves the historical link that has often bound together rebellious quasi-gnostic movements, like the Cathars or the Heresy of the Free Spirit, with forms of insurgent political populism and indeed communism. Giordano Bruno, one of the other “heretics” to whom Dick is attracted, also professed a charismatic yet hermetic pantheism that has long been linked to forms of radical anti-Church insurgency. That is why, in many small Italian towns, a statue of Bruno, often erected by the local Communist Party, stands facing the principal Catholic church.—SC
* What an odd, and incredibly paranoid, idea. And a popular one. We see something similar with the black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). We see an even closer version of this extraterrestrial mind-control computer in John A. Keel’s The Eighth Tower (1975), a book that Dick easily could have read. The “eighth tower” is Keel’s mythical way of referring to the machinelike origin-beacon of something he calls the superspectrum, an electromagnetic spectrum of physical and metaphysical energies that produces all the occult and paranormal phenomena found in folklore and the history of religions—from the angels and demons of medieval lore to the Big Foot and UFOs of today. For Keel, this same technology also produces the “devil theories” of history, that is, the religious revelations that claim to be final truths when in fact they are no such thing. The result is endless wars. Unless we can stop being fooled by the signals of this superspectrum, violence and absurdity will continue. Keel is obviously performing a kind of thought experiment here of the most radical sort. So was Dick.—JJK
* Just as the Exegesis responds to Dick’s calling, so readers of the Exegesis may be called on to investigate Dick’s claims, to test them through what B. Alan Wallace dubs “contemplative science.” This means that, along with Dick, we must be wary of treating our investigations as anything more than models of reality. The “Son” discussed elsewhere by Dick is born out of the “immaculate conception” of thought—the removal or emptying of previous thought formations. This path of contemplative science can be hard going—Dick asks us to consider the idea that our sense of historical ground does not exist, where nothing important has changed since ancient Rome. Humans suffer, are exploited by large-scale institutions, grow old, become ever more confused, and die. Buddhism describes this as Samsara, the “wheel of dharma.” Nietzsche’s Zarathustra describes the repetition driving history as the most terrifying thought—the thought of eternal return—but Dick suggests that it is through practices of contemplation and exegesis that the real horror—the false perception of linear time—is overcome. This is not the Rapture predicted by fundamentalist Christianity, but the corrected perception of our nature as both human and eternal.—RD
* Dick’s realization that the deity he describes is a projection of his own beliefs leads him to the conclusion that God has manifested Himself in precisely the form he had already accepted and was prepared to believe in. What lines of reasoning insulate Dick from the other obvious conclusion: that what he has described not only takes the form of his projection but is his projection? There seem to be two answers to this question: first, his prior commitment to the existence of the deity; and second, his earlier theory about the deity’s ability to mimic reality in all kinds of ways. A deity that can mimic what we take to be reality becomes, in effect, bulletproof against any objection, for any deviation or change in what (for us) constitutes reality can be explained by the difference between a deity that simply is reality and one that mimics reality.—NKH
* Despite what we are repeatedly told by the dogmatic debunkers, there is a rich and impressive scientific literature on precognition. Dean Radin of the Institute of Noetic Sciences has been one of the real pioneers here, particularly around what he calls “presentiment,” a kind of Spidey-sense that many people appear to possess that allows them to sense dangers or desires a few seconds into the future—in short, a humble form of Dick’s future modulation. What is perhaps most significant here, and not always recognized, is that the parapsychological literature strongly suggests that most psychical functioning takes place unconsciously (or in dreams), that is, below the radar and range of our conscious selves or functioning egos. We are Two, and our second self is a Super Self.—JJK
* When W. Y. Evans-Wentz first prepared the Bardo Thödol for its English edition in 1927, he called it The Tibetan Book of the Dead in order, one suspects, to link it to the popular Egyptian Book of the Dead. Dick owned the 1960 edition of the text, which had been reissued with a new introduction by Carl Jung. A funerary text designed to be read at the bedside of the dead, the Bardo Thödol is more accurately called Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State. The intermediate state in question is the bardo, the spectral halls of transformation that lie between the death of the body and the almost inevitable rebirth of one’s mind-stream: most souls are made so variously terrified and lustful by the apparitions that they are inevitably sucked back for another round. For the Buddhist practitioner, release lies in recognizing the emptiness of these projections, which are nothing other than one’s own mind. Dick’s insight here—that the bardo is actually our world—is perfectly in sync with traditional teachings, as the “intermediate state” refers not only to the afterlife but also to sleeping, dreaming, sneezing, and life itself. We are always in a liminal zone. For the Tibetans, an escape of sorts lies in the clear light of nonconceptual mind; Dick’s more wayward light is pink, which is also, in Tibetan iconography, the color of the supreme lotus of the Buddha.—ED