"In the first novel, Valis, the protagonist Horselover Fat was obsessed -- and for good reason: His girlfriend had killed herself -- by the problem of evil. He finally came to the conclusion that two gods exist, which is to say a bitheism, each contending against the other. Although Valis Regained draws heavily on the bitheism of the Qumran people, it basically presents another view, not syntonic to Horselover Fat: monotheism, with the notion that evil has no true existence of its own but borrows its existence, or is lent its existence, from the one God. Valis Regained bases its theology on the extraordinary passage in Isaiah 45:6-7 [the capitalization is Dick's own]:
". .. so that men from the rising and the setting sun
may know that there is none but I:
I am the LORD, there is no other;
I make the light, I create darkness,
author alike of prosperity and trouble.
I, the LORD, do all these things."
Had Couliano taken the time to study the first novel in the trilogy -- Valis -- it is possible that his judgment as to the presence of Gnostic ideas in Dick's work would have changed. Nonetheless, the comparison of these two quotations is useful not only as a validation of Dick's knowing use of religious source material but also as a fair warning to all those who would paste a doctrinal label of any sort on Dick's work. Dick's viewpoints were multifold, indeterminate, and changeable; he cannot rightly be described by any "ism."
Observe how Dick, in tracing out the possibilities of this spiritual viewpoint, employs the narrative gifts of a fiction master to create a haunting parable of a fallen and amnesiac god who must wander for centuries through his own creations to win his own redemption:
He [the Creator] no longer knows why he has done all this to himself. He does not remember. He has allowed himself to become enslaved to his own artifact, deluded by it, coerced by it, finally killed by it. He, the living, is at the mercy of the mechanical. The servant has become the master, and the master the servant. And the master either renounced voluntarily his memory of how this happened and why, or else his memory was eradicated by the servant. Either way, he is the artifact's victim.
But the artifact is teaching him, painfully, by degrees, over thousands of years, to remember -- who he is and what he is. The servant-become-master is attempting to restore the master's lost memories and hence his true identity.
One might speculate that he constructed the artifact -- not to delude him -- but to restore his memory. However, perhaps the artifact then revolted and did not do its job. It keeps him in ignorance.
The artifact must be fought; i.e., disobeyed. And then memory will return. It is a piece of the Godhead (Urgrund) which has somehow been captured by the artifact (the servant); it now holds that piece -- or pieces -- hostage. How cruel it is to them, these fragments of its legitimate master! When will it change?
When the pieces remember and are restored. First they must wake up and then they must return.
If all of this seems impossibly speculative to the reader, it may be still more unsettling to realize that there is a direct parallel between the ideas expressed by Dick above and the cosmological theories posed by highly respected quantum physicists such as David Bohm. In The Holographic Universe, Michael Talbot offers a summary of Bohm's viewpoint on the "implicate" and "explicate" orders of the cosmos that is strikingly analogous to the Urgrund/artifact dichotomy posed by Dick:
As we have seen, according to Bohm the apparent separateness of consciousness and matter is an illusion, an artifact that occurs only after both have unfolded into the explicate world of objects and sequential time. If there is no division between mind and matter in the implicate, the ground from which all things spring, then it is not unusual to expect that reality might still be shot through with traces of this deep connectivity. [Fellow physicist F. David] Peat believes that synchronicities are therefore "flaws" in the fabric of reality, momentary fissures that allow us a brief glimpse of the immense and unitary order underlying all of nature... . According to Peat, when we experience a synchronicity, what we are really experiencing "is the human mind operating, for a moment, in its true order and extending throughout society and nature, moving through orders of increasing subtlety, reaching past the source of mind and matter into creativity itself."*
* Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), pp. 79-80.
Dick was hardly an expert in quantum physics theories, though he did read in the field sporadically. As the essay "Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality" attests, he was especially interested in the concept of synchronicity posed by physicist Wolfgang Pauli (who worked in conjunction with C. G. Jung in formulating this theory). But the key parallels between Dick's writings -- both fiction and nonfiction -- and the current insights of quantum physics do not seem, based on the evidence of the Exegesis and other personal writings by Dick, to have been based on reading, but rather on an experiential grappling on Dick's part that proved synchronous, as it were, with the findings of the quantum physicists. For example, in his 1977 speech "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others," included herein -- a speech that predates any widespread public discussion of the quantum physics notion that the known structure of the cosmos may aptly be described by the metaphor of a hologram -- we find Dick asking, based on his experiences of 2-3-74, "Do we collectively dwell in a kind of laser hologram, real creatures in a manufactured quasi-world, a stage set within whose artifacts and creatures a mind moves that is determined to remain unknown?"
Nor is quantum physics the only field in which Dick's speculations find a revelatory context. Consider the concept of "fake fakes," which is put to use in so many of Dick's novels and stories and which is explored persistently in his nonfiction writings as well. Examples included in the present volume may be found in the outline for a proposed (but never completed) novel Joe Protagoras Is Alive and Living on Earth, as well as in the proposal for a script (never written) for the television series Mission: Impossible and in the 1978 speech (likely never delivered) "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later." In essence, a "fake fake" is -- despite its seeming status as a mere contradiction that equates into "genuine" -- a radically new ontological category that takes on significance precisely because it perplexingly mimics (and even threatens to supersede) our "ordinary" or consensual reality. Hence the "fake fake" is no mere SF plot prop -- although Dick certainly employed it to dazzling effect as just such a prop -- but is also a commentary on the inundation of our world by mechanical and computer-generated simulacra.
In the field of art, Marcel Duchamp explored a similar range of ideas with his concept of the "readymade," a found object that Duchamp would ironically designate as a work of art, at times adding his own visual or linguistic touches (in which case the object became a "readymade aided"). In his 1961 essay "Apropos of 'Readymades,'" Duchamp broached paradoxes that serve to elucidate certain aesthetic possibilities of a world in which Dickian "fake fakes" proliferate. Wrote Duchamp:
At another time wanting to expose the basic antimony between art and readymades I imagined a "reciprocal readymade": use a Rembrandt as an ironing board!...
Another aspect of the "readymade" is its lack of uniqueness... the replica of a "readymade" delivering the same message; in fact nearly every one of the "readymades" existing today is not an original in the conventional sense.