* Here Dick suggests the radically liberatory possibility that reality, the Tao, the Palm Tree Garden, can break through the present if “you” will “destroy” prior thought formations, including those that separate “you” from the One. Here Dick resonates with Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, who wished only to awaken from the nightmare of history, an awakening later perhaps achieved by Joyce in Finnegans Wake. Readers familiar with Zen, or Korzybski’s notion that “the map is not the territory,” or the “stillness” in which the divine can manifest in Quaker or Vedic traditions, will recognize some of the practices appropriate for a world mediated and constituted by the multiple “objectified” mistakes of language and other previous thought formations. In this sense Valis “comes not to destroy but to fulfill the law” (Mt 5:17) by overturning prior concepts like so many tables in the temple. “For I say unto you, that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 5:20). Righteousness here is anything but self-righteousness. It is instead the humility and practice necessary to silence the mind in order to perceive reality, a “causal field” unmistakably affected by the language by which we model it.—RD
* Dick’s holograph is notably erratic throughout this folder, pulsing in waves of ecstasy and calm. Given the manic diagramming throughout the folder (a full-page example is included in this volume’s insert), as well as his invocation of Diana and the fairies, this may well represent the “superdope” episode to which Dick refers in a later folder [83:60].—PJ
* As noted in other annotations, Dick’s line of speculation here is remarkably similar to the vision of the German judge Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911), who imagined that God wanted to change him into a woman and impregnate her with sunbeams so that their offspring could save the world. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) wrote one of his most famous case studies about Schreber in Three Case Histories: Psychoanalytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (1911), basing his diagnosis on Schreber’s detailed memoir Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903). Though the two never met, Freud diagnosed Schreber as a paraphrenic paranoid suffering from—surprise!—repressed homosexual desires. While Dick’s vision here is remarkably similar to Schreber’s, he makes no mention of the judge anywhere in the Exegesis, though Dick could well have encountered the case given his extensive knowledge of psychology.—DG
* As noted earlier, Mircea Eliade was a well-known and much-read scholar of comparative religion who was at his professional height when Dick read him in the 1970s. Here he is referring to one of Eliade’s major early books, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951), a massive survey of the anthropological literature as it existed around 1950, organized around Eliade’s own glosses and comparative reflections. Eliade focuses especially on the initiatory illness, magical powers, healing function, poetic gifts, and mystical experiences of the shaman and, perhaps most of all, on the shaman’s role as a psychopomp. Eliade also emphasizes the quest for the recovery of sacred time before the “Fall” into history, here understood in the most general sense as linear temporality, finitude, and mortality. This abolishment or transcendence of time, of course, is also a central concern of Dick’s. Hence, I suspect, his deep admiration for Eliade’s work.—JJK
* Another new mood is here announced in the Exegesis: a tragic dialectics. Dick has come across Coleridge’s understanding of tragedy, which adapts the early ideas of F.W.J. Schelling. Schelling held that the essence of tragedy consists in a collision between the tragic hero, who is free, and fate, which is the limitation of freedom, the realm of necessity. The sublimity of tragedy consists in the demonstration of freedom in the confrontation with that which destroys it. This is what we see, for example, in the tragedy of Oedipus. Tragedy is here linked to the idea of suffering leading to an experience of truth, as when Aeschylus says repeatedly in the Oresteia, “We must suffer, suffer into truth.” These tragic insights might also be linked to Dick’s repeated references to Euripides’ Bacchae, in particular the collision between King Pentheus (bad) and the god Dionysos (good). These also look forward to a closing passage in this collection where Dick describes the Exegesis as a collision between himself and “what oneself has writ.” On this view, the Exegesis might be interpreted as the entirely self-conscious enactment of a tragic dialectics that moves between the poles of suffering and salvation.—SC
* In this act of perceiving the “ultra-thought,” Dick is very close to another California sage, Franklin Merrell Wolff. Wolff, a Harvard mathematician who gave up a position at Stanford in order to study in India in the 1930s, deduced a series of axioms about human nature that follow from his first axiom: “Consciousness without an object is.” “Consciousness without an object” is consciousness “beholding” nothing but itself, which is palpably not an object but is experienced as fact. Wolff’s experiences of “recognition” are instructive for comprehending (and therefore experiencing) the invisible landscape of Dick’s epic quest. So too does Dick’s passage here reflect the other aspect of this inner beholding—“reality as knowledge.” Once one has looked within, one contemplates external reality and inner reality as the “same thing.” Astronomer Carl Sagan repeated biologist Julian Huxley’s phrase that “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” Dick’s investigations of the concepts and practices of the noösphere in the Exegesis emerge out of this perception of ourselves as physical manifestations of thought.—RD
* Like a lot of readers, I consider Dick an idea-man rather than a stylist. Generally he doesn’t write sentences that hold within them whole worlds; rather, his collective work has to be taken together to add up to something—at which point, as in Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, the House of Dick is bigger on the inside than out. But this sentence is one of Dick’s most exquisite and enigmatic and feels full of wisdom, even as I’m not sure what it means no matter how many times I read it. The whiplash words, of course, are “yet accurate.” Given how precisely stated the rest of the sentence feels, I must assume they have been phrased precisely as well—but they also feel not so much in juxtaposition with the rest of the sentence as like a virus of syllables that has invaded the others.—SE
* Dick’s Christianity is sometimes revolutionary; here it becomes Marxist. This is not quite the leftist Christianity of liberation theology, which was hitting its stride in the ’70s. Dick’s “dialectical materialistic mysticism” instead puts him in line with continental thinkers like Herbert Marcuse and Walter Benjamin, whose visionary angel of history sees what we experience as time and progress as a mounting pile of wreckage (or kipple). Dick also anticipates the contemporary return to Christianity found in continental philosophers like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Central here is the notion of event. Dick elsewhere describes Christ as “an event in the reality field”—a radical rupture in the determined logic of history, and therefore the opportunity for a leap into actual change. For Badiou, our politics should be based in our fidelity to such moments; Dick’s event, 2-3-74, is mystical but no less demanding. Equally relevant here is Dick’s sometimes Žižekian twist on dialectical materialism. Some thinkers fetishize a final Hegelian Whole; though Dick is attracted to such totalizing unity, he also recognizes that there is always a remainder: the little guy, the discarded beer can, the questions left hanging by every theory, whose development into another theory he elsewhere compares to the sprouting of a mustard seed.—ED