* The idea of God as a constantly evolving dialectic is perhaps Dick’s most intriguing theological proposition, and here he gives a possible origin for this self-conflicted deity: the question of means versus ends. The top-level good (an orderly and harmonious cosmos) requires a base-level evil (the suffering of individual beings). The paradox of the greatest good requiring the greatest evil and the corresponding split in the godhead constitutes a major advance from a more simplistic dualism. Put into the matrix of Christianity, this God in crisis becomes the Father (the original creator of reality and author of the Law) and the Son (the redeemer whose mercy fulfills and abrogates that Law). The notion of a dialectically evolving God also resonates strongly with the ideas of other twentieth-century theologians, most notably Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (whom Dick mentions frequently) and process theologians like Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne (who appear later in the Exegesis).—GM
* There is a rich and sophisticated literature drawing parallels between quantum physics and various forms of mystical experience. Most trace this literature back to the appearance of Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics in 1975, the book to which Dick is alluding in this passage. Capra gave these parallels real cultural traction via his eloquent writing, his own revelatory altered states of consciousness and energy, and, perhaps most of all, his ingenious illustrations demonstrating the complementarity of mind and matter. Having said that, it must also be observed that the physics/mysticism complementarity has a much longer history. The American anomalous writer Charles Fort, for example, was already naming the “teleporting” (a word that he coined) behavior of subatomic quanta a matter of “witchcraft” in the early 1930s. The pioneering quantum theorist Niels Bohr was so impressed with the similarities between the double nature of light (at once particle and wave) and Chinese Taoism that he chose the yin-yang symbol for his coat of arms. And the physicist Wolfgang Pauli engaged in a quarter-century correspondence with C.G. Jung in order to pursue a similar both-and vision of physics and psychology—a friendship, moreover, that produced one of the most productive parapsychological notions of all time: “synchronicity.” All of this is wrapped up in Dick’s “I knew. . . .”—JJK
* This is the mystical, even paranormal, flip side of the postmodern insight. In a world in which almost everything is constructed, plastic, and malleable, what (or who) is doing all of this constructing and shaping? Here Dick takes a cue from anthropology (the “participant-observer” in the field), Kantian philosophy (“you can never know the universe as it really is”), and literary studies (the hermeneutic fusion of interpreter and interpreted) in order to suggest that such a both-and situation points to vast potentials and powers. The real question, of course, is what constitutes those “certain circumstances” under which these potential powers might manifest. Dick’s own certain circumstances had a name: “Valis.”—JJK
* Despite his idea that this is a new revelation, Dick is close here to Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the Omega Point, whereby the material world evolves toward spiritual communion. While Teilhard writes of the increasing “complexity” of evolution, Dick here writes of “negentropy,” a concept first developed by Erwin Schrödinger to describe the effort of living systems to create order to offset their production of entropy. While thermodynamics compels all closed systems to dissipate exergy (useful energy), living systems seem to increase order in the course of development; in Schrödinger’s terminology, they “feed” upon negentropy. Significantly, Schrödinger turned to the Vedic concept of Brahman or Self to make sense of an important local instance of negentropy—his own consciousness. Dick’s treatment of reality as a “very advanced game of Go” also anticipates the cellular automata models of physicist Stephen Wolfram, though the model goes back at least to John von Neumann’s 1947 discussion of “self reproducing automata,” a concept that would later help manifest Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—RD
* Joachim of Fiore, a twelfth-century theologian, was the most influential apocalyptic thinker of the medieval period. He believed the world was on the verge of a golden age in which all men would be monks in direct communion with God. This third age would be governed by the Holy Spirit, replacing the earlier ages of the strict Father and the intermediary Son. Though Joachim himself does not seem to have considered himself a revolutionary—indeed, he only wrote his ideas down at the urging of the pope—his followers in later centuries were often sharply anticlerical, and some were antinomians and anarchists. It’s easy to see how his idea of a procession of ages leading from subjugation to absolute freedom could have revolutionary applications. Though he does mention “religious anarchists,” Dick here doesn’t focus on rebellion so much as the flow of divine information and the source of religious authority: the third age means the loss of all intermediaries between the individual human being and God.—GM
* Latin for “in that time,” that is, mythical or sacred time, as in the stock phrases “in the beginning” or “once upon a time.” Mircea Eliade used the expression to refer to traditional religious attempts to escape or annul “profane time” (understood here as linear temporality or what we now call “history”) and return to the “sacred time” referenced in myth and reenacted in religious ritual. Always capable of being “remembered” and so reactualized (hence Dick’s constant invocation of anamnesis) within the narratives of myth and the actions of ritual (like the Eucharist), sacred time is essentially no-time or beyond time. We might say, then, that what Eliade imagined in his comparative theorizing Dick seems to have realized in his experience of Valis. But this may be much too simple, as Eliade once noted that his own dissertation researches and early experiments with yoga taught him “the reality of experiences that cause us to ‘step out of time’ and ‘out of space’ ” (Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude Henri-Rocquet, 1982). In short, there was also an experiential subtext to Eliade’s theorizing. He was not simply speculating. He was also confessing. And it was this experiential, essentially mystical subtext that I think Dick was intuiting, illo tempore, as it were, in his repeated embrace of Eliade.—JJK
* This folder is over three hundred pages long and combines handwritten notes, beginning with number 498, and typed, dated pieces. Dick grouped these into sections marked I through XVIII, a Roman numbering system that continues for several more folders. Because of the complexities introduced, we have opted to use sheet numbers beginning with 1. This folder begins with a conceptual breakthrough about “meta abstraction” and peaks with a theophany on November 17, 1980, which appears at [1:262] below. At the close of that extensive entry, Dick writes the resounding word “END”—which is immediately followed up with a footnote and more discourse. At some point after this theophany, Dick also composed the title page that begins this folder, whose original is unfortunately missing.—PJ