* Here Dick confronts one of the fundamental debates in the philosophy of mysticism. On the one hand, some modern thinkers assert that mystical experience—here rendered in the language of the human potential movement as Maslow’s “peak experiences”—enables us to transcend conceptual thought and to directly glimpse reality as it is. In contrast, more skeptical voices insist that mystical experience is, like everything else, a construction; our groks are mediated by cultural expectations, conceptual filters (including linguistic signs), and the peculiarities imposed by the structures of human consciousness. Here Dick embraces this latter Kantian argument, but pushes it in the direction of more traditional claims of revelation. Peak experiences are not real in themselves, but neither are they simply projections or hiccups of the individual mind. Like everything else, experiences are signs. But through meta-abstraction, we can intuit them as a special kind of sign: an “ultra-real” (or hyper-real) sign that points, not back to our own language or neural hardwiring, but to an ineffable ground that eludes both words and “things.”—ED
* When Dick claims that The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is his best novel, in and of itself the statement is meaningless because every writer wants to believe this about his most recent work. So it’s profoundly satisfying, in no small part because the book will prove to be his last novel as well, that one can make as compelling a case for Transmigration as for The Man in the High Castle or Ubik or A Scanner Darkly. Paradoxically, for all its theology and philosophical aspirations, and for all the visionary craziness of Dick’s work as a whole, Transmigration becomes a contender for his masterpiece even as it’s the most earthbound of his books. The reason is clear. Though Dick is fascinated at the outset with Bishop Timothy Archer, Angel Archer takes over. Over and over Dick argues that Angel is just a creation of style, which is why in a nutshell authors shouldn’t waste two seconds trying to understand their own books. Elsewhere he lets out the real secret and the Exegesis’s bombshelclass="underline" that Angel is his twin sister Jane. Smart, sardonic, and unsentimental, strong and compassionate and unflaggingly honest, surrounded by death and suicide, she is Dick’s greatest character, pursuing salvation and reliving its revelations, and concluding, “You will remember the ground again.”—SE
* This is an impossibly rich passage in which the theme of eucharistic transubstantiation (the blood of Christ) is linked to Valis (the plasmate), a kind of human-divine hybridization (the interspecies symbiosis and cross-bonding), and the dual-brain Double God (Ditheon), all of which are in turn linked to the registers of sexual union (the hierogamy or “sacred marriage”) and, in true Phil Dickian style, the act of reading. Through these different registers Dick presents the hermeneutical acts of reading and interpreting the New Testament as an esoteric process of mystical union and erotic divinization.—JJK
* The radical interconnection Dick perceived between himself and the cosmos extended to the natural world—what I have elsewhere called the “ecodelic” insight that we are not separable from the biosphere in which we live. In this sense, 2-3-74 enabled Dick to look beyond the illusion of our separation from each other and the biosphere. This revelation was anything but comfortable. Ordinary consciousness is essentially predicated on this separation; when it becomes palpably false, ecstasy and panic can follow in equal measure. Even as Dick was beginning to experience a modicum of financial success, his insight into our interconnection had much greater impact on him than his growing income, so much so that he feared for his health.—RD
* Here Dick extends his ecodelic insight to the population of the planet, whose spiritual and ecological destinies have now become one. This “leverage,” however, must be recognized and experienced if it is to have any effect. The years since Dick penned this line have been a mixture of recognition and denial. Is it still possible to tune in to Valis’s ecodelic frequency? Might we receive the Valis transmission today?—RD
* The mind-body split here allows the formulation of two seemingly distinct entities (mind on the one hand, body on the other) to be worked into an analogy of humans as mind, ecosphere as body. Thus the poisoning of the ecosphere becomes the mind poisoning the body, without which it too will perish. Dick realizes, on the contrary, that mind and body are an indivisible whole. It therefore follows that the poisoning of the ecosphere means that it is his body being wounded by the activity of other humans, a conclusion consistent with his view of himself as an avatar or surrogate of Christ. The connections here are implicit rather than explicit, but they help to explain why he sees the “investiture by Christ” as the crucial element in seeing the ecosystem as sacred.—NKH
* This notion of reversing signs and reading backward comes remarkably close to the position of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), a German philosopher who helped found the modern study of religion by pioneering its central theory of projection, that is, the notion that all statements about the deity or the transcendent are in fact statements about human nature and its needs, wishes, and fears. In his The Essence of Christianity (1841), Feuerbach performs reversals and backward readings very similar to those Dick calls on here, reading, for example, the biblical notions that “God created man in his own image” as “man created God in his own image,” or “God is love” as “love is God,” and so on. Whereas the later Feuerbach was certainly an atheist and a materialist, it is not so clear that the early Feuerbach was. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that Feuerbach can be read as a modern Gnostic thinker who sought to reverse and reduce orthodox claims back to their original base in human nature, which he, paradoxically, considered to be infinite and divine. So the divine projection is “reduced” to its projector, who is secretly divine.—JJK
* There is no way to overestimate or repeat enough this exegetical fact: for Dick, writing and reading are the privileged modes of the mystical life. Writing and reading are his spiritual practices. His is a mysticism of language, of Logos, of the text-as-transmission, of the S-F novel as coded Gnostic scripture. The words on the page, on his late pages at least, are not just words. They are linguistic transforms of his own experience of Valis. They are mercurial, shimmering revelations. They are alive. And—weirdest of all—they can be “transplanted” into other human beings, that is, into you and me via the mystical event of reading. Here, in this most stunning of Dick’s notions, the cheap S-F novel becomes a Gnostic gospel, words become viral, reading a kind of mutation, and the reader a sort of symbiote.—JJK