Dick was Touched: a Trash Philosophy

BOP #5

I.

Do you know about what happened to Dick?

The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick contains the published selections of a journal kept by the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Dick started the journal after his visionary experiences in February and March 1974, which he called “2-3-74.” These visions began shortly after Dick had two impacted wisdom teeth removed. When a delivery person from the pharmacy brought his pain medication, he noticed the ichthys necklace she wore and asked her what it meant. She responded that it was a symbol used by the early Christians, and in that moment Dick’s religious experiences began:

In that instant, as I stared at the gleaming fish sign and heard her words, I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis—a Greek word meaning “loss of forgetfulness.” I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me. And not only could I remember it but I could see it. The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans and we communicated with cryptic signs. She had just told me all this, and it was true.

For a short time, as hard as this is to believe or explain, I saw fading into view the black, prison-like contours of hateful Rome. But, of much more importance, I remembered Jesus, who had just recently been with us, and had gone temporarily away, and would very soon return. My emotion was one of joy. We were secretly preparing to welcome Him back. It would not be long. And the Romans did not know. They thought He was dead, forever dead. That was our great secret, our joyous knowledge. Despite all appearances, Christ was going to return, and our delight and anticipation were boundless.

In the following weeks, Dick experienced further visions, including a hallucinatory slideshow of abstract patterns and an information-rich beam of pink light. In the Exegesis, he theorized as to the origins and meaning of these experiences, frequently concluding that they were religious in nature. The being that originated the experiences is referred to by several names, including Zebra, God, and the Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS). From 1974 until his death in 1982, Dick wrote the Exegesis by hand in late-night writing sessions, sometimes composing as many as 150 pages in a sitting. In total, it consists of approximately 8,000 pages of notes, only a small portion of which have been published.

a cartoon illustration of Philip K Dick’s “2-3-74” experience

II.

The preceding description of 2-3-74 leaves out one minor detail.

“I look towards the window”, he then states. “Light blinds me; my head suddenly aches. My eyes close and I see that strange strawberry ice cream pink. At the same instant knowledge is transferred to me.”

Now, this is where things get weird. Having had this information transmitted to him, Dick goes into another room. Here his wife Tess is changing his infant son Christopher.

“I then recite what has been conveyed to me,” Dick reflects. “That [Chris] has an undetected birth defect and must be taken to a doctor at once and scheduled for surgery. This turns out to be true.”

By all accounts, his son was in fact ill. Dick was adamant that the light informed him his Chris had an undiagnosed hernia, one which had burst and descended into his testicle. What’s more, if Chris had not been provided with immediate medical attention the condition could very well have been fatal. At Dick’s insistence, his son was taken to a local doctor’s and later operated on.

I will leave it up to the reader to decide whether or not this stroke of divine intervention occurred as Dick claimed. (source)

I have decided: Dick was touched by God.

Yes, Dick spent significant stretches of his life addicted to amphetamines¹, struggled with one or more forms of mental illness, attempted suicide at least once, and tried to kill at least two of his five wives. But this is all the more reason to believe: a madness such as Dick’s is the smoking gun of the divine fire, the telltale sign that one has been struck by a sacred lightning.

If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be that madness would furnish the chief condition of the requisite receptivity.
(William James)

III.

One theme that Dick returns to over and over again in his Exegesis is this notion that, “The symbols of the divine initially show up at the trash stratum.”

Also, I do seem attracted to trash, as if the clue—the clue—lies there. I'm always ferreting out elliptical points, odd angles…The Holy Grail may be a crushed beer can in the gutter. The deity will be where least expected and as least expected. It could be an old sick—even dying—tomcat stinking of urine, degraded and humiliated.²

The chaotic nature of his life, the drugs, the strained sanity: Dick was the trash through which God spoke.

What I write doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. There is fun and religion and psychotic horror strewn about like a bunch of hats. This is not a sophisticated person writing…

I certainly see the randomness in my work, and I also see how this fast shuffle of possibility after possibility might eventually, given enough time, juxtapose and disclose something important that is automatically overlooked in more orderly thinking. Since nothing, absolutely nothing is excluded (as not worth being included) I proffer a vast mixed bag—it’s a fucking circus. I'm like a sharp-eyed crow, spying anything that twinkles and grabbing it up to add to my heap.

Anyone with my attitude might just stumble onto by sheer chance and luck the authentic camouflaged God, the deus absconditus, by trying odd combinations of things and places, like a high speed computer processing everything it comes across he might outdazzle even a wary God, might catch him by surprise by poking somewhere unexpectedly. This “try it all” technique might—might—one day succeed by believing what it would never occur to anyone else to believe, by taking at face value as true the most worn out, most worked over and long ago discarded obvious “staring us in the face all the time” as the crux of the mystery. Even the best-camouflaged lifeform might one day guess wrong and be flushed briefly out of its concealment (which had always worked before). For one thing, a totally naive person like this, who would believe anything, might believe in what is really there but conceptually automatically rejected by more experienced people. The child has faith in what the adult knows can’t be and so could never see, obvious though it might be; what is before everyone’s eyes: hidden in plain sight.

This kind of fascinated, credulous, inventive person might be granted the greatest gift of all: to see the toymaker who has generated—and is within—all his toys.

That the godhead is a toymaker: who could seriously believe this?

IV.

So what was revealed through Dick? Quite a lot as you might imagine (my version of the Exegesis clocks in at 895 pages, and recall that this was just a fraction of his notes), however it’s difficult to pin down exactly what Dick thought because his metaphysical views evolved considerably during the 8 years in which he scratched and scrawled into the night. Still, some central themes can be discerned:

I am led to the inescapable conclusion that, totally unknowingly, we are all constituents of a vast living organism, and that everything which occurs in it, our reality, happens due to its deliberate intention—that of its own brain, Noös or psyche—and, further, this vast living organism which governs and regulates our every move and experience resembles an Al system or computer (VALIS), and that under certain exceptional circumstances it can and does speak of one or more of us, its members…

The universe is a vast living organism that resembles an AI system or a computer, and also possibly an insect:

My 3-74 experience: I was in the Immanent Mind. As in a womb? Not mere analogy, perhaps. Made to grow. Both within the parent organism and isomorphic with it, but much smaller and less developed. We are in God; moving towards comprehension which requires further growth/development. We are like the nymph or larval stages of mosquitoes.

…What does that signify? Our world is woven by Zebra. It is not normally seen for what it is: a 3-D web by Zebra in which Zebra is (i.e. Zebra is not outside or above it, but rather is concealed within it). Ah! The worm metamorphoses into the butterfly; that’s what I saw: the old “worm” corpus of Zebra is being re-woven into the moth or butterfly transformed final state. This is the cocoon stage—these are not analogies! This is what I saw that I correctly sensed as a reweaving. It was not reweaving a construct by it, but its own physical body (self)—reweaving itself; this metamorphosis we see as the sum total of all change, which means: we see as the category (process) we call time. Thus Paul correctly—and significantly—says “the universe is in birth pains.”

…Of all the views, theories, thoughts, insights so far, this mimicking entity one is the most exciting—it so accords with my experience, with what I saw—it admits to a severe distillation: I saw a mimicking entity, unitary, plasmatic, benign and all intelligent, the tutelary spirit of man singly and collectively, carrying with it the force of reality and essence, related to truth, justice and action (change), assimilating the unliving universe into itself. When perceived it is perceived as it is, or not at all. How noble my quest! How noble the results! As it thrusts upward toward us it brings us news of what really is, displacing what merely seems. By its very nature it is deus absconditus, but hidden close by (“break a stick and there is Jesus”). Immanent and gentle—one might say tenderly, “the shy God.”

God/VALIS/Zebra is hidden, shy, embryonic; growing, learning, becoming; the cryptic cosmic insectoid.

If I had to make a statement about the very most ultimate nature of what I saw, I’d say it seemed to be a single complex sphere in flux, elaborating (yes, that's the word I want: elaborating) itself out of its continually greater number of stages of antecedent states/stages, always surpassing itself aesthetically, in terms of wisdom, intricacy, efficiency, level of negentropy (organization): yes, perpetually surpassing itself in the level of organization (completeness)—filling in the gaps by a continually better and better—i.e., wiser, more efficient, more beautiful—use of its constituents and their arrangement by the single overall unitary structure.

V.

Science is only now beginning to catch up to Dick.

Dick knew that the universe was a mind.

The resemblance has been rigorously analyzed in a 2020 study by the Italian astrophysicist Franco Vazza and neuroscientist Alberto Feletti. They calculated how many structures of different sizes are in the human brain’s connectome and in the cosmic web, and reported “a remarkable similarity”.

Brain samples on scales below about 1 millimeter and the distribution of matter in the universe up to about 300 million light years, they found, are structurally similar. Could it be, then, that the universe is a giant brain in which our galaxy is merely one neuron?

— Sabine Hossenfelder, “Maybe the Universe Thinks. Hear Me Out”

Dick knew that the universe learned.

In 2020, theoretical physicist Vitaly Vanchurin published a landmark paper titled “The World as a Neural Network” in the journal Entropy. Where Hossenfelder described the structural organization of the Universe to be brain-like, Vanchurin argues that the world is literally a neural network, with an interconnected network of “nodes” existing at the microscopic scale that is equivalent to the network of neurons inside our skulls. This network allows the Universe not just to evolve, but to learn, and it is a hypothesis that may actually be testable someday.

— Bobby Azarian, “The case for why our universe might be a neural network”

Dick knew that the universe evolved.

The authors of “The Autodidactic Universe” (2021) propose that the cosmos may possess an innate ability to learn, adapt, and evolve in a manner akin to a living organism. This view diverges from conventional theories of everything, which typically treat the Universe as an inert system governed by unchanging laws. By contrast, the authors posit that the laws of the Universe might emerge sometime after its creation, and those laws might change or evolve as the cosmos develops and learns more about its own structure, dynamics, and possibilities. (Ibid)

Dick knew what Hoffman guesses.

Physics and evolution agree: Spacetime is doomed. It is not fundamental reality. Nor are its objects. Recently physicists, observing that spacetime has no operational meaning beyond the Planck scale, have discovered that certain mathematical structures, such as amplituhedra and decorated permutations, are more fundamental than spacetime and quantum theory. Thus, a theory that claims consciousness is, or emerges from, the dynamics of physical objects such as neurons, circuits or quantum systems, ignores the verdict of our best science.

We propose a mathematical model in which “conscious agents” are fundamental and interact via Markovian dynamics. Some agents create spacetime as an interface whereby they interact. Physics is the projection of agent dynamics onto this interface.

This model is bold and speculative, but informed by recent advances in particle physics and mathematics. To test the model, we propose a computational experiment to show that the dynamics of conscious agents predicts the distribution and dynamics of quarks and gluons at all spatial and temporal scales probed by scattering experiments.

Dick knew.

Perhaps the most startling aspect of reality that I saw, and one which for nearly nine months I could not fully accept, was this: the only portion of the universe which is truly real is living creatures, such as ourselves. The non-living parts are merely structure, very much like the backdrop and artificial scenery in a formal play. What exists around us, actually, beyond and above the sparks of life which we ourselves are, is in essence nothing more than elaborate but somewhat barren struts and support beams…We are no more than points-of-view, mere loci. We are provided a spacetime here and now; fitted into one locus of the field.

VI.

Life, like this essay, is one long dick joke. The only question that matters is:

Will you be the teller of the joke or the butt of it?

If you told me that in the 30th century there would be one figure from the 20th who was worshipped as a world religion-founding prophet, there would be no doubt in my deranged little mind that it would be Dick, the science fiction author, the mystic, the madman.

In the next essay, I will delve further into the holy book that is the Exegesis and begin sketching the dogma (which is really an anti-dogma) of this new religion that we might provisionally dub “Dickianity” (if it was not already clear, I aim to be something like the Paul to Dick’s Jesus³). For now, I leave you with what may be the central commandment of our creed:

Like our Phallic Prophet, we Dickians (Dickheads?) must be the trashiest of philosophers. We must be as the sharp-eyed crow, spying anything that twinkles and adding it to our heap. Exclude nothing; seek thy shy god in what is neglected and discarded.

Look and you will see.

I am beginning to see in my mind’s eye, Zebra itself, an actual animal, a striped horse. Coy and merry and mischievous, half hiding in the forest at the far edge of the heath, the sun shining, and Zebra playfully advancing and then just when you think he’s going to emerge fully and separate himself from the trees—suddenly and unexpectedly he retreats and absolutely vanishes. You can't coax him out, or lure him; you can’t get your hands on him. His white is the dazzle of the sun; his dark stripe the shadows in the glade and forest, “where, amid the shadowy green/the little things of the forest live unseen.” Ah, Zebra—why really did I choose that name for you? You mythical lovely beast of sun and safe shadow; I saw you once but can never—as if you are some fabled deity—prove to anyone that you exist. I inform them, I try to take them along with me to the special spot from which I saw you—and you’re not there. But I sense the glint in your eye and your smile of understanding amusement.

Are you the joy god Dionysus of root and star?

Of dark forest and the melting butter gold of the sun?

I love you, I want to grip you, but you are elusive.

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1. A footnote from The Exegesis on Dick’s drug use:

Not surprisingly, Philip K. Dick scholars have been keen to defend the author against the popular (and also understandable) stereotype that he was just a druggy. It’s true that Dick gobbled pills and drank amphetamine shakes; his psychedelic use, though infrequent, was also important, as was the nitrous oxide trip at the dentist’s office that revealed Valis “as an arborizing, reticulating vine.” Here, the quaint reference to “Mary Jane” (marijuana) reminds us that, just as speed amplified his productivity, so too did cannabis amplify his visionary capacity, both on and off the page. For Dick, cannabis served as an engine of creative perception, but like all visionary drugs, it also staged a visionary paradox that lies at the heart of the Exegesis (and much of Dick’s fiction): whatever freedom and sublimity is on offer requires a passive submission to perceptual machinery. Drugs can push the mind toward infinite speeds and meditative slownesses. But they also, like Valis itself, possess their own alien logic. The arborizing chains of associations that striate the Exegesis, and that cannabis and other drugs insistently multiply, may just as readily bind as liberate.

2. Dick is also fond of the line, “The Buddha is a piece of toilet paper”.

3. Not to be confused with Jesus’ Dick.