Beethoven and VALIS (?)

We respond [like so many parts mounted on a circuit board] according to instructions fired at us [from VALIS ?] . . . The "signals" or events are incorporated into each of us as learning--learning by experience--and they permanently modify our brain tissue, leaving permanent although minute trace-changes in us. This way we store this information combining it and altering it, and we are prepared to transmit it again when instructed, to whoever we're instructed to transmit it to. Each of us is a vast storage drum of taped information which we purposefully modify, each of us differently. Thus, Beethoven produced symphonies which no one else could; the same with Schubert. But the symphonies did not really lie within either of them, rather were fed to each of them . . . in raw bits lacking connectives. What each of those Stations did was to link his selection of bits into gestalts (his idiosyncratic symphonies). He structured them as no other Station could. However, the raw bits were fed to him; in that regard he was receptive or passive. . . . In that he connected them into a new and unique whole he was active and creative. So Beethoven, as your representative station, was a part on a circuit board, linking incoming signals, modifying them, and then transmitting something modified. That everything received by him before (memory) and what he uniquely was (due to experiences throughout his life) went to make up the nature of each output is obvious. Nothing could pass through Beethoven without becoming Beethoven--i.e., colored by him,in a way no one else could. 129-30

DICK ON HIS EXEGESIS

Thinking over my exegesis I see it as a vast, original cosmology, partly philosohical and partly theological. It is my own worldview, in part divinely revealed to me, in part arrived at by careful analysis, ratiocination and so forth. It is an awe-inspiring structure and resembles no other arrived at by anyone I have ever heard of. Continually I have been corrected and instructed by the voice.

I was taken over by a surperior life form. Which was interfering with history. What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to go on day by day? 352

The Rotting Fruit and the Growing Seed

"My outside is just for laughs. My inner self growing, grows wiser every day--wiser and older, surpassing the outer long ago." (This as insight.)

(St. Teresa of Avila: "Christ has no body now but yours, anywhere on the world.") Thus, this was basis for the above realization: also, my body and the jejune self which goes with it--rather than a split between body and spirit or body and soul, inner or outer in the usual physical--mental [sense]--that totality is as the rotting fruit is to the growing seed within; as the fruit rots, the seed within grows; a double motion within the single entity: the outer toward death, the inner toward life. What grows within me grows perhaps a new body as well as a new spirit, and discards both of the outer ones together. 64

PKD's Ubik-Experience

When I wrote Ubik I constructed a world (universe) which differed from ours in only one respect: it lacked the driving force forward of time. That time in our own actual universe could weaken, or even go entirely away, did not occur to me because at that point I did not conceive time as a force at all . . . I thought of it in Kantian terms [time as a mental construct projected onto the world]. As a mode of subjective perception. Now I believe that time, at this point in the expansion of the universe (or for some other reasons), has in fact actually begun to weaken, at least in ratio to certain other fields. Therefore, this being true, a measure of the Ubik-experience could be anticipated. I have indeed had that experience, or a measure thereof. That is, time still drives on, but counter forces have surfaced and impinge, laying bare the Ubik-landscape--only for a few moments, that is, temporarily. Then time resumes its sovereignty. 4-5

A Classical Source from a Living Past

A prominent effect of Dick’s 2-3-74 experiences was the sense that some intelligence was “coming across” to him from outside of his personal existence and was educating him to a specific end. In pages 22-37 of the published Exegesis, Dick searches for a definitive explanation of what this influence is. There are two main themes (among others) in Dick’s probing of this question: first, the idea that someone from his life had passed over to “the other side,” (died) and was tutoring him from beyond the grave (specifically James Pike); the second, the ascribing of his tutoring to a time in the past (classical) and attributing it to a living influence from that time period. --John Lentz


The best way to describe it is to say at night my mind is full of the thoughts, ideas, words and concepts that you’d expect to find in a highly educated Greek-speaking scholar of the 3^rd century A.D., at the latest, living somewhere in the Mediterranean Area of the Roman Empire. 27

After one dream, in which I saw a sibyl who was a Cyclops, I decided after doing research that it was the Cumaean sibyl who had seized hold of me, and not anyone from present times or the “other side.” I got a lot of mileage out of that theory, but then I get a lot out of each theory I hold. 28

But my unconscious for all its obsessions with the theoretical material of that [classical] period is hard-headed and shrewd, and wants everything it comes up with applied in the most practical way. If it shows me the Golden Rectangle it does so in order to calm me with that ultimate esthetically balanced sight; it has a firm therapeutic purpose. There is a utilization of all its abstract material for genuine purposes, for me, by and large. It is a tutor to me as Aristotle was to Alexander, which makes me wonder why it is grooming and shaping me this way, tutoring me in the exact fashion employed by the Greeks. Philosophy for real ends, for final causes, as Aristotle would have put it: for something lying ahead and not as an idle pastime, an end in itself. The ennobling and elevating education is altering me and I would presume that when it is finished I, having become changed, will act upon the improved character which I’ve acquired not on the knowledge direct, as if on enlarged memory banks, but upon the basis of my matured and elevated character. I know this whole process sees ahead because I have caught sight of its clear perception down the web of time, seen with it for a while; it knows what is ahead and acts accordingly. I’m sure it has final purpose in mind, for which this is careful preparation. This recalls to my my notion that the Cumaean sibyl is behind it all; certainly she had or has a clear view of the future, of time; that is what a sibyl is. . . .

This is material emanating from a wise viewpoint which I never possessed. 30-31

So my “unconscious,” which I’ve claimed this tutor to be, has available to it “my entire memory,” except everything pertaining to events and concepts that arose after 100 A.D. That is an extraordinarily great restriction. Obviously, that is not in any sense that we know the term “my unconscious,” laid down in my lifetime; it knows words, concepts, that I never knew—and doesn’t know the commonplace elements of the last 2,000 years. Its location is far back in time. . . .

I remember that when this first hit me, in the first couple of weeks, I was absolutely convinced that I was living in Rome, sometime after Christ appeared but before Christianity became legal. Back in the furtive Fish Sign days. Secret baptism and that stuff. I was sure of it. Rome, evil Rome and Caesar’s minions, were everywhere around me. So were the fast-moving hidden agents of God, always on the go, like the Logos as it creates things. I was a Christian but I had to hide it. Or they’d get me. It made me very uncomfortable to belong to a persecuted sect like that, a small minority of fanatics. . . .

I’ve decided, by a process of deduction, who my tutor is. Asklepios, or one of his sons. A Greek physician, whose step-mother was the Cumaean sibyl, his father Apollo, at whose shrines “ . . . the sick were given wholesome advice in their dreams,” this cult yielding only reluctantly to Christianity. Also Asklepios was according to legend, slain by the Kyklopes, a Cyclops. Which would explain my extraordinary dream: I saw a fusion of his step-mother and him who Asklepios feared most in all the world. . . . Apollo. His—my tutor’s—father. 33-34

James Pike from the "Other Side"

A prominent effect of Dick’s 2-3-74 experiences was the sense that some intelligence was “coming across” to him from outside of his personal existence and was educating him to a specific end. In pages 22-37 of the published Exegesis, Dick searches for a definitive explanation of what this influence is. There are two main themes (among others) in Dick’s probing of this question: first, the idea that someone from his life had passed over to “the other side,” (died) and was tutoring him from beyond the grave (specifically James Pike); the second, the ascribing of his tutoring to a time in the past (classical) and attributing it to a living influence from that time period. --John Lentz

Jim Pike is alive and well on the Other Side, but that doesn’t mean we are all dead or that our world is unreal [as in Ubik]. However, he does seem to be alive and as mentally enthusiastic and busy as ever. I should know; it’s all going on inside me, and comes streaming out of me each morning as I—he—or maybe us both—as I get up and begin my day. I read all the books that he would be reading if he were here and not me. . . .

There have been more changes in me and more changes in my life due to that [2-3-74] than in all the years before. I refer to the period starting in mid-March (it’s now mid-July) when the process began. Now I am not the same person. People say I look different. I have lost weight. Also I have made a lot of money doing the things Jim tells me to do, more money than ever before in a short period, doing things I’ve never done, nor would imagine doing.

Mostly, though, what I get is a lot of information, floods of it night after night, on and on, about the religions of the Antique World—from Egypt, India, Persia, Greece and Rome. Jim never loses interest in that stuff, . . .  23-24

I have been transformed, but not in any way I ever heard of. At first I thought it to be a typical religious conversion, mostly because I thought about God all the time, wore a consecrated cross and read the Bible. But that evidently is due to Jim’s lifestyle. 24

Undoubtedly, from internal evidence it appears to be the past, the archaic past, breaking through. But it’s not chaotic. It’s highly systemized, sort of like the left hemisphere of the Greek-speaking Roman citizen. It seemed to me that the preoccupations of this individual were indeed those of Jim Pike, and thus if you allow all the prior steps in this chain of inferential thought to stand, you arrive logically at the final step that Jim Pike broke through to me “from the other side.” But, if you apply Occam’s Razor, the Principle of Parsimony (the smallest theory to cover the facts), you can deal Jim out and run with the ancient material alone. 27-28

Now, this really does not rule out Jim Pike as my Athenian or Hellenistic Tutor; Jim had, I’m certain, that kind of classical education . . . Also, Jim was—is—shrewd; he’d apply, did apply in his life, all this classical education. He is the only person I ever knew, in fact, with such a background. If Jim were to become my tutor this I really think, all this that I’m being taught, that my attention is being drawn to, would be precisely what he would get me involved with. 32