Philip K. Dick: Paranoid Android or Postmodern

Prophet?

INTRODUCTION:

Philip K. Dick certainly lived in and of strange times and how

could he not; based in California most of his life, he experienced

firsthand the immense social, economic and technological changes

that characterized America in the decades prior to his untimely

death in 1982. Widely regarded as one of the most important

science-fiction writers of the 20th century, Dick's substantial

corpus has grown by leaps and bounds in critical stature and

recognition since his death. However, it is not just Dick's

hauntingly dystopian and metaphysical oeuvre that relentlessly

questioned the nature of reality that have brought Dick such fame;

his own life, especially the unexplained paranormal events that

happened to Dick in the last few years of his life, reads a lot

like one of his own novels and has become a legend in its own

right.These quasi-mystical events are known by the shorthand of 2-

3-74, referring to their origin in February and March of 1974.

Some of the unexplained phenomenon surrounding his life include an

anamnesis of previous lives, a beam of pink-light that imparted

urgent medical information regarding his son Christopher and an AI

voice that he heard inside his head on and off till his death that

provided cryptic words in languages he did not understand and

visionary insights into the very nature of reality that he'd been

questioning throughout his oeuvre; these experiences still divide

Dickian scholars as to their origin: drug-induced hallucinations,

multiple personality disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy or divine

invasion. This event spurred Dick to spend the last eight years of

his life obsessively trying to find an answer for what had

transpired; this quest is evident in his later novels and his

Exegesis, a monumental exercise in self enquiry that yielded

almost two million words, an infinity of solutions to 2-3-74 that

were taken apart and reassembled in light of Dick's voracious

philosophical and theological study on an almost daily basis.

This thesis will focus on Dick's work after 2-3-74: the

novels A Scanner Darkly (1977), VALIS (1981) and The Divine Invasion (1981)

and I will argue that Philip K. Dick's turn away from the failed

promises of the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960's and the

events of 2-3-74 led him back from the brink of despair and helped

shape a new direction in his later works reflected most

prominently in The Divine Invasion. The main thrust of the argument will

focus on how Dick's search for revolutionary change in A Scanner

Darkly and VALIS failed to answer the existential questions of the

meaning of human suffering, death and man's relationship to the

infinitude that surrounds him and that 2-3-74 helped him shift

from searching for these answers in societal change and led him to

envision a change in individual consciousness and the promise of

salvation on an individual level. Dick, like the prophets of old,

was a man deeply troubled by the broken down society that he saw

and was driven to seek the answers to his questions by

constructing a connection to the divine in his work; I will argue

that Divine Invasion is Dick's most hopeful novel, and that it

completes a circle which started with A Scanner Darkly. This search for

transcendence, instead of being seen as the doomed quest of a man

driven to madness by paranormal experiences is in fact a personal

quest that has many parallels with figures as diverse as Leo

Tolstoy and Carl Jung, and is revealed to be a universal quest

that yielded the answers that Dick could not find in his previous

novels.

A Scanner Darkly will provide a lens to critically examine the

society that Dick lived in and I will draw upon the work of

cultural theorists such as Zygmunt Bauman and Daniel Bell in

drawing out the inherent contradictions and problems of modernity.

In A Scanner Darkly the notion of us-vs.-them (in terms of the

Establishment and the counter-culture) is problematized by

characters who operate in both realms, and yet belong nowhere. It

becomes clear by the end of the novel that Dick would agree with

the pessimistic conclusion that salvation by society is no longer

possible and Dick was led to search outside the sphere of

modernity for the questions that plagued him as he saw the social

fabric of society disintegrate in front of him. Modernity's

impulse towards the profaning of the sacred, to borrow Emile

Durkheim's terminology, is one of the main reasons for the feeling

of alienation that Dick went through and his experiences with the

divine entity that he termed VALIS (an acronym for Vast Active

Living Intelligence System) ultimately led him to recover the

sacred, in the sense that it allowed him to engage in a spiritual

search; and this spiritual search was not a lone matter for as an

overview of the New Age Movement will go on to show, the rejection

of the materialistic society that was increasingly seen as the

cause of unhappiness of individuals was a much broader cultural

current following the 60's.

To place Dick's turn towards this spiritual reality in

context, we will go back in time to another place where the social

fabric of an established society was being transformed by the

coming of modernity and where there was a corresponding lack of

religious faith among the rationalistic minded population: the

time of Leo Tolstoy in Tsarist Russia from the 1870's onwards. It

was during this time that Tolstoy penned his bleak and honest A

Confession (1882). By examining Tolstoy's attitude towards a belief

in God I will aim to show that Dick and Tolstoy have a lot in

common in terms of their theological turn after reaching the end

of their belief in rationality and reason; both men stood at the

edge of an abyss from where the only way forward was to turn

towards a spiritual quest that changed their lives; Tolstoy spent

his last decades publishing polemical critiques of the prevailing

social order of Church and state and preaching a turn towards his

humanist conception of Christianity. This analysis will show how

the search for a higher power and the corresponding change in

outlook it brings to those who succeed in achieving their goal is

not limited by geographical or temporal constraints but is instead

an innate part of human nature that has been undertaken by men in

different situations untold times. While the legitimacy or

authenticity of mystical experiences is a theological and

scientific rabbit-hole which cannot be proved one way or the

other, I will also compare Dick's mystical experiences with Carl

Jung's forays into his unconscious, an unparalleled investigation

of his own unconscious that yielded visionary insights for Jung.

Jung's seminal work of active imagination has, just like Dick's The

Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (2011) finally been allowed to see the light of

day in the publication of Liber Novus (2009) or the Red Book of Jung,

and we will be able to establish that notwithstanding the source

or perceived cause of such transcendent visions, they serve a

pragmatic purpose in William James' sense of the word as they

allow greater insight into reality and in the purpose of the

individual in this world. Ultimately both Dick and Carl Jung show

a remarkable congruence in their aim: namely the establishing of a

harmonious relationship to the universe and the possibility of

raising themselves to a higher level of consciousness.

The final part will focus on The Divine Invasion and I will

argue that Divine Invasion completes the evolution of Dick's thinking;

this was the novel where Dick finally learned the lessons from his

previous efforts and paves a new way forward for him. Divine Invasion

suffers from a lack of critical attention, and thus the approach

will be one of close analysis and some of the conclusions drawn

will be looked at in conjunction with Jung's Book of Job (1954), one

of Jung's most passionate investigations into the same questions

that troubled Dick, namely, the meaning of evil and man's

relationship to the divine.

Is there more to life than this?

Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody1

A Scanner Darkly is a portrait of the dark underbelly of the American

dream; the protagonist Bob Arctor is an undercover narcotics

agent, Agent Fred, tasked with infiltrating a group of drug users,

showing the divides in the American society from the ground up.

1 Bob Dylan, 'You Gotta Serve Somebody', 1979 <http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/gotta-serve-somebody> [accessed 12/09/2014]

The individuals here are the underclass of society that are made

to look on at the great consumption from the fringe: 'owning no

credit card for any of the malls, he could only depend on verbal

report as to what the shops were like inside'2 echoes Charles Freck

as he goes out to try and score some slow death; Substance D, the

drug plaguing the entire text, plaguing a country and the lives of

the anonymous individuals caught up in its addictive grip. Charles

Freck goes on to score some tabs and captures the vicious circle

of the drug culture as he ponders: 'happiness, he thought, is

knowing you got some pills' (10, SD). The last vestige of the

counter-culture that lost its charm for Dick was the hope for

revolution, which was inextricably linked to the co-option of

revolution and the transcendent possibilities of drugs into the

endless cycle of consumption and waste. This was the novel that

announced Philip K Dick's break from the counter-culture, where he

pierces the veil of Sex, Drugs and Rock n' roll to reveal dope,

shopping malls and the death of hope.

DOPE:

One of the main pillars of the swinging 60's, the decade of

hedonism and excess, was the belief in liberation through the use

of psychedelic drugs. As someone who spent most of his life in one

2 Philip K Dick, A Scanner Darkly (London.: Gollancz, 2004), p. 6. Hereafter referred to in the main text as SD.

of the cradles of this counter-culture, California, Dick certainly

was no exception to this, and he had a legendary reputation for

indulging in drugs, even though some of the hype has certainly

been a case of fiction over fact. Living in such a place at such a

time also meant that he was well placed to pierce through the veil

of the counter-culture. In his far ranging study of mysticism and

technology Techgnosis (1998), Erik Davis points to the mystical

undercurrent prevalent throughout American history, arguing that

American history is suffused with an esoteric undercurrent giving

rise to what the Gnostic writer Stephan Hoeller has termed

'Hermetic America... an alchemical alembic in which the human soul

could grow and transform with little or no interference from

state, society or religious establishments'.3 For Dick however, by

the 70's this alembic was filled with the pain and sadness of drug

abuse; the author's note at the end of Scanner Darkly hints to the

great toll it took on Dick and those closest to him, listing the

many friends that either passed away of succumbed to various

mental illnesses.

The role of psychedelic or hallucinogenic drugs in

manifesting the precariousness of what humans normally take to be

real was vividly portrayed by Aldous Huxley who argued that under

3 Erik Davis, Techgnosis, (London: Serpent's Tail, 1999), p. 103. Hereafter referred to in the main text as Techgnosis.

our normal social setting, the mind acted as a reducing valve,

'filtering out the chaos of sensations and subconscious processes.

Hallucinogens blow open the valve, letting the “Mind at Large”

gush in with visions, insights and swelling emotions' (148,

Techgnosis). Many people in the 60's equated this revolutionary new

way of perceiving reality with the possibility of a material

change in society; in his 1969 essay, An Essay on Liberation, Herbert

Marcuse equated the desire of 'today's rebels... to see, hear,

feel new things'4 with the expansion of consciousness and

dissolution of everyday perception that the psychedelic revolution

promised. However this enthusiastic stance was not shared by all

in the counter cultural movement, especially 'given their

ultimately technological basis' (148, Techgnosis) as Erik Davis

termed the attempts to manipulate reality through the use of

drugs, pointing to the fact that as a saleable commodity, drugs

too were liable to be absorbed in the economic machine, endlessly

cycled and recycled. There were some such as Alan Watts who

sensed this dynamic and favoured a cautious engagement; one of his

famous aphorisms on the subject was that 'once you get the

message, hang up the phone' (148, Techgnosis) but the bitter

realization that dawned on Dick was that many people did not or

4 Herbert Marcuse, An Essay On Liberation, (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1969), p. 37.

could not hang up the phone. Dick paints the bleak world of the

Substance D addict in stark fashion, without any of the utopianism

that was attributed to drugs in the decade prior. Bob Arctor, the

protagonist of the novel is full of pity for those addicts, whose

'biological life goes on... but the soul, the mind – everything

else is dead. A reflex machine. Like some insect. Repeating doomed

patterns, a single pattern, over and over now' (49, SD), a fate

that befalls Arctor at the end of the novel as well. A character

named Tony Amsterdam is mentioned who saw God on an acid flashback

and then kept repeating the same dosage of vitamins and LSD in a

desperate attempt to experience God again. But 'one day it came

over him... that he was never going to see God again... he was

worse off than if he hadn't seen God' (184, SD). The vision that

so enthralled Tony, what he called the Other Realm, 'was moonlight

and water, always the same. Nothing moved or changed' (184, SD),

which is what the characters in Scanner searched for all these

years: a sense of permanence, the unchanging real beneath the

constant flux of everyday life, but one which could not be

attained through the use of drugs, as Dick was painfully aware.

This disavowal is complete by the start of VALIS, where the

novel starts with the main character Horselover Fat, Philip K

Dick's alter ego, sinking deeper and deeper into madness, courtesy

of being surrounded by friends such as Gloria, who seem to have

all decided to end their lives one way or another. As Fat tries to

talk to her rationally, he 'heard in her rational tone the harp of

nihilism, the twang of the void'.5 Fat bitterly curses Timothy

Leary, guru of the 60's psychedelic revolution: 'Thank you, Tim

Leary, Fat thought. You and your promotion of the joy of expanded

consciousness through dope' (10, VALIS) for he blamed Gloria's

suicide on her excessive drug use. He goes on to state, in

unequivocal terms that ‘this time in America – 1960 to 1970 – and

this place, the Bay Area of Northern California, was totally

fucked. I'm sorry to tell you this, but that's the truth' (12,

VALIS). This statement echoes another outspoken critic of the

counter-culture, Joan Didion, whose diatribe in The White Album (1979)

is a scathing indictment of the values of the counter-culture. The

statement of Fat's that ‘there is no door to God though dope; that

is a lie peddled by the unscrupulous' (20, VALIS) is his final

statement that drugs, and the lifestyle that it came packaged

with, was not the route to the divine. Daniel Bell launches a

withering attack on the hedonism and values of the 60's counter-

culture in his timely and insightful study of modern society, The

Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), casting its many values as a

5 Philip K Dick, VALIS, (London: Gollancz, 2001), p. 10. Hereafter referred to in the main text as VALIS.

'polemical and ideological caricature of a set of codes that had

been trampled long ago'.6 For Bell, this psychedelic revolution was

only one part of the changing cultural landscape, the second being

a new model of capitalism that was geared towards endless

consumption and materialistic hedonism.

Shopping malls:

As Arctor enters McDonaldburger, he wonders about the sameness of

everything surrounding him, and it is remarkable how prescient

Dick was when he based the novel in 1994; Benjamin Barber's

influential article, Jihad Vs. McWorld, which popularized the term

McWorld was published in 1992. In it Barber described the new

order as 'economic and ecological forces that demand integration

and uniformity... pressing nations into one commercially

homogenous global network: one McWorld'.7 As Arctor is walking

around he voices a very similar thought: 'in Southern California

it didn't make any difference anyhow where you went; there was

always the same McDonaldburger place... nothing changed; it just

spread out farther and father in the form of neon ooze' (22, SD).

In his study of the era of late modernity, Modernity and Self Identity

(1991), Anthony Giddens takes issue with the presumption that

6 Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions Of Capitalism, 2nd edn (London: Heinemann, 1979), p. 73. Hereafter referred to in the main text as Bell.

7 Benjamin R. Barber, 'Jihad vs. McWorld', The Atlantic, March 1992 <http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1992/03/jihad-vs-mcworld/303882/> [accessed 12/09/2014].

modernity is an era of fragmentation and dissociation. As he makes

clear, the unifying themes of modernity such as the globalizing

tendencies of mass media and the ever wider spread of large

corporations are just as central to this stage of modernity as the

seemingly fragmentary ones.8 But it would be a mistake to think

that one could escape the tentacles of this plastic world by not

frequenting McDonaldburger; even as Charles Freck sits with

Barris, Arctor's flatmate, in The Three Fiddlers cafe he

'inspected his patty melt, which was melted imitation cheese and

fake ground beef on special organic bread. “What kind of bread is

this?” he asked' (27, SD) showing alarm as to what the bread was

made out of, it being the only thing on the menu which is not

explicitly mentioned as being an imitation or a fake. And it's not

just material goods that are fake; Bob Arctor's double role as

both the narcotics agent Fred and the drug-user Bob that he's

spying on points to how identities themselves are fabricated. 'You

put on a bishop's robe and miter... and people bow and genuflect

and like that, and try to kiss your ring, if not your ass, and

pretty soon you're a bishop... where does the act end?' (20-21,

SD) Bob Arctor thinks to himself as he walks away from the police

station back into his alternate life.9

8 Anthony Giddens, Modernity And Self-Identity, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 27. Hereafter referred to in the main text as Giddens.

9 An interesting analogy to this thought can be seen in the real life of

The self in conditions of late modernity is in a precarious

position: on the one hand it is given the charge to shape its own

destiny, and on the other the overwhelming forces of capitalism,

mass consumerism and consumption seek to shape the individual in

terms of the material goods that he or she possesses. Zygmunt

Bauman theorized that the ‘the gap between human needs and

individual desires is produced by market domination...the market

feeds on the unhappiness it generates' (198, Giddens). Whereas for

Giddens, this reflexive project of the self is one that

individuals participate in willingly because it is an attempt to

keep the existential questions at bay by obtaining external signs

of identity, otherwise there is always 'the looming threat of

personal meaninglessness' (201, Giddens). Day to day life becomes more

calculable and more under control, but this substitution of

control for the morality of one's actions can only be sustained if

the person maintains trust in the 'controlled nature of day-to-day

activities within internally referential systems' (202, Giddens).

Bob Arctor was leading a mindless suburban existence and he

mentions how hitting his head on a kitchen cabinet 'cleared away

another Californian resident a century before Philip K Dick, Joshua Norton who proclaimed himself Norton I: Emperor of the United States in 1859 and whobecame a celebrated eccentric among the citizens of San Francisco, who even allowed him to issue his own currency which was honoured by local shops to pay for the necessities of his life; so there really is no end to the act.Robert Ernest Cowan, 'Norton I: Emperor of the United States and Protector ofMexico (Joshua A. Norton, 1819-1880)', California Historical Society Quarterly, 2 (1923),237-245 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/25177715> [accessed 08/09/2014].

the cobwebs... he hated his wide, his two daughters, his whole

house... the whole fucking place and everyone in it' (48, SD), and

as his trust evaporated, he left that life behind and entered

slowly into this new life, only to find that he had substituted

one internally referential system for another. For Bauman, the

impulse towards modernity called for dismantling, or the

liquefaction of the solidity of premodern modes of life; the aim

of this process was the desire to invent 'lasting solidity, a

solidity which one could trust and rely upon and which would make

the world predictable and therefore manageable'10 but this

solidity, or rather homogeneity was what made Bob leave his old

life behind and entered this strange new life, which is analogous

with the transition from the Eisenhower era of prosperity to the

explosion of the 60's, but as the slow disintegration all around

him testifies, even that change hadn't managed to provide Bob with

what he was looking for. In his self-help book Waking Up (1986),

Charles Tart describes the sort of life Arctor was leading

previously as a result of consensus trance: a 'social construction

of reality we have been hypnotically conditioned to perceive and

maintain since birth' (157, Techgnosis). While Arctor was lucky, in

the sense that the blow to the head cleared the fog, his ultimate

10 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), p. 3. Hereafter referred to in the main text as Bauman.

end as a Substance D addict trapped in another hopeless cycle of

consumption shows how precarious Dick viewed this freedom.

There are some, such as Guy Debord who are deeply sceptical

of any positive change in the hegemony of the product. The man who

coined the phrase the society of the spectacle published a slim volume

titled Comments on the Society of the Spectacle in 1988 where he bemoans

'the very continuity of the spectacle... in raising a whole

generation moulded to its laws' (7, Debord).11 One of the many

tactics utilized in this great deception is the eradication of

authentic history to be replaced by the endless distraction of

consumption and a media designed to 'guarantee a kind of eternity

of noisy insignificance' (15, Debord). And here Debord's critique

reaches its lowest ebb, it's most harrowing low-point where he

declares that 'the commodity is beyond criticism' (21, Debord)

because of the inertia in society which has dispensed with any

notion of 'criticism or transformation, reform or revolution' (21,

Debord), making even Debord's vitriolic comments sound

insignificant. As Herbert Marcuse put it, 'liberation is

apparently without a mass basis' (16, Bauman) meaning that in the

affluence and relative security of the post war West, with the

masses looking forward to the growth in economy and sated on an

11 Guy Debord, Comments On The Society Of The Spectacle, (London: Verso, 1990), p. 7. Hereafter referred to in the main text as Debord.

ever increasing consumption of goods, the desire to be liberated

was no longer widespread.

The death of Hope:

If, as Herbert Marcuse claimed, the mass majority did not share

the counter-cultural dreams of liberation, however loosely

defined, then Philip K Dick was squarely in the minority. In an

essay, If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others (1977), Dick

shares a secret regarding the bleakness of his vision and the

importance of staging this quest for liberation in his work. He

asks whether any of the readers have experienced 'nightmare dreams

specifically, about a world of enslavement and evil, of prisons

and jailers and ubiquitous police? I have. I wrote out those

dreams in novel after novel'12; calling attention to a body of work

that had for decades been influenced by his Berkeley era left-wing

politics and a deeply humanistic commitment to individual liberty.

Describing the 60's and 1970's in America as 'a watershed in the

institutionalization of urban fear' (94, Bauman), Sharon Zukin

bemoans the choices that the 'voters and elites' (94, Bauman) made

when instead of redoubling efforts to eliminate inequality and

integrate the disenfranchised masses, they chose instead to buy

protection in the form of greater police presence and by

12 Philip K Dick and Lawrence Sutin, The Shifting Realities Of Philip K. Dick, (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 243. Hereafter referred to in the main text as Sutin.

obliterating the public sphere by surveillance. The world of

Scanner is similarly bleak, the area that Arctor is living in is

prone to break-ins and constant trouble; these nightmare dreams

are the backdrop of Scanner, but here the problem is two-fold: not

only is the System corrupt, but the counter-culture is seen as

suspect, at its worst as just another branch of the System. And

yet, even as far back as 1954, Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society

contented that the System, or the 'procedures, languages and

social conditions generated by the rationality of modern

institutions, bureaucracies and technocratic organisations was

'out of control... this hell-bent technoeconomic Frankenstein was

squeezing the life out of individuals, cultures and the natural

world' (144, Techgnosis). Dick would be the first one to call this a

simplistic proposition; because of the secrecy and paranoia on

both sides one could never be sure who or what the "System" is.

Contrasting the means of governance in the era of liquid modernity

with those of previous times, Bauman writes that 'power... sails

away from the street and the marketplace... their ideal condition

is invisibility' (40, Bauman), so the desire to overthrow the

system leads one to grasp at straws for you're never really sure

who really controls the strings of power. In their critique of

dominant social structures, A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze and

Guattari formulate this ambiguity into a precise question: 'What is a

center or focal point of power'.13 They contend that any attempt to project

'an image of the master or an idea of the State' which controls

everything would result in 'a fictitious and ridiculous

representation' (226, Plateau), and focusing on such a figure rather

than seeing the situation in all its complexity would lead to:

'Fear, then Clarity, then Power, and finally the great Disgust,

the longing to kill and to die, the Passion for abolition' (227,

Plateau). Fear is what binds us to the existing social fabric; the

fear of losing our normal way of being in the world and the

ontological security provided by our place in a social order and

this is the fear that Arctor overcame in deciding to leave his

suburban life behind and yet even though Arctor is able to see

things from both sides, he is ultimately doomed in his attempt to

transcend the clarity and reach any position of power, the power

to change things that matter.

Arctor slowly slips into paranoia when his car mysteriously

breaks down and starts reasoning that the most efficient method of

sabotage is slow; insidious attempts at sabotage made to appear

like accidents that can never be proven because 'the person begins

to assume he's paranoid and has no enemy; he doubts himself'(71,

13 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 224. Hereafter referred to in the main text as Plateau.

SD); he is thankful when he finds out that the police force want

him, in his role as Fred, to place scanners inside his own house

to monitor Arctor, the suspected drug dealer. He is both in power,

as an arm of the police system, and powerless because he no longer

can state which one of his personalities is the real one. Daniel

Bell terms the structural contradictions of our social order 'the

disjunction of realms' (14, Bell) where the individual needs of the

citizen such as the concern for fulfilment of the self and belief

in equality and freedom grate against the technocratic system of

governance and homogeneity of the prevailing order. These tensions

slowly tear Arctor apart, in his double role he becomes a focal

point for this disjunction of realms; as Arctor is psychologically

tested for perceived brain damage from his use of Substance D, he

is told by the medical staff that 'there are as many wrongs as you

can think up, but only one right... it is handed down from Washington.

You either get it or you don't' (88-89, SD) so there really is no

alternative to the prevailing standard; either you measure up to

the standard set or you’re not fit to be part of that society.

Bob's disillusionment grows more and more throughout the text, and

when the medical examiners tell him he might make it yet he

caustically replies: 'Make what? The team? The chick? Make good?

Make do? Make out? Make sense? Make time? Define your terms' (94,

SD), for he is slowly losing the ability to recognize what being

successful and “making it” would even be. Later on, when he is

back at the surveillance base looking at himself, or looking at

Bob Arctor he is surprised by his own actions: 'The guy is nuts,

he thought. He really is' (151, SD) speaking of himself. These

scanners, which are the epitome of police intrusion, cause a

Jekyll-and-Hyde style dissociation within Arctor/Fred that can

never be healed as long as the individual is attempting to

reconcile insurmountable oppositions. In his essay, Reality as

Ideological Construct, Peter Fitting has correctly argued that Dick's use

of Arctor as a cop/drug-addict is an attempt to reconcile, on the

individual level the overall societal opposition between the

counter-culture and the Establishment but Arctor's capitulation

proves, both to the reader and to Dick, that such a reconciliation

is not possible.14

Arctor's slow descent is complete near the end of the

novel, having become a hopeless addict to Substance D and he is

taken in this wretched state to the New Path rehab centre, a chain

of rehab centres that is the inevitable destination for most

Substance D users. Bruce, as Fred/Arctor is now called in his new

14 Peter Fitting, 'Reality as Ideological Construct: A Reading of Five Novels byPhilip K. Dick', Science Fiction Studies, 10 (1983), 219-236 (p. 229) <http://www.jstor.org/stable/4239550> [accessed 08/09/2014] Hereafter referred to in the main text as Fitting.

identity, is transferred to one of the New Path farms and it is at

this point that the novel takes its most startling turn: it is

revealed that Arctor's addiction and subsequent transfer to a New

Path farm was part of the police plan all along, to get a broken

husk into the farms to find out whether New Path was responsible

for the growth and manufacture of Substance D. The novel ends with

the revelation that the people at New Path rehabilitate the users

of Substance D only to then have them work on their secret farms

where they grow the flower, mors ontologica, that Substance D is

synthesized from. Mors ontologica: 'death of the spirit. The

identity. The essential nature' (202, SD). The ending of Scanner

Darkly mourns the passing of an age that for Dick ended in so much

suffering. The death of the spirit is the death of a collective

spirit, a time which initially appeared to offer so much but which

ends full circle with Arctor losing his identity and being given

another new identity; this time he's Bruce. Christopher Palmer

termed Scanner Darkly Dick's 'most politically astute novel'15 because

in this transformation from Arctor to Arctor/Fred to Bruce, Dick

explored the limits of social control and the destruction of

individuals identities in society to its bitterest end; Dick's

15 Christopher Palmer, 'Postmodernism and the Birth of the Author in Philip K. Dick's "Valis"', Science Fiction and Postmodernism, 18 (1991), 330-342 (p. 332) <http://www.jstor.org/stable/4240089> [accessed 08/09/2014]. Hereafter referred to in the main text as Palmer.

vision of revolutionary change faced the same fate as Arctor.

WORLD GONE WRONG or: HOW TO STAY INSANE IN A SANE SOCIETY

'In our modern times, with God on a protracted leave of absence,

the task of designing and servicing order has fallen upon human

beings' (55, Bauman).

While Dick's disenchantment with the 60's led him away from

overtly political novels into more theological quests such as in

VALIS, it would be a mistake to assume that this turn towards

religion is simply the response of a broken down individual living

in chaotic and confusing times. Instead, this turning towards the

search for a higher meaning, both on Dick's part and for the more

spiritually inclined strands of the New Age Movement should be

seen as an inevitable outcome of the failure of the rationality of

modernity to provide answers to the perennial existential

questions regarding life and death. Daniel Bell argues that man

needs religion to fulfil the 'existential need to confront the

finalities of suffering and death' (169, Bell), but here we must

separate and clarify what he means by religion because religion is

a term that has been used in innumerable different contexts. For

our purposes here, the definition of religion that William James,

one of the most influential American philosophers of the 19th and

early 20th century, formulated in his The Varieties of Religious Experience

(1902) is most appropriate: ‘the feelings, acts and experiences of

individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend

themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the

divine’.16 This differentiates what one may call a personal

religion from political and institutional religions in the late

20th century. For Bell, this new religious sensibility would

consist of 'the awareness of a moment of transcendence...a new

conception of the self as a moral agent, freely accepting the past

(rather than just being shaped by it' (170, Bell) and this personal

religion does not consist in following handed down traditions, but

instead is a search to formulate an individual's own conception of

God and morality.

The New Age beckons:

Daniel Bell pointed to the resurgence of religious sensibility in

the era of liquid modernity because as he saw it, the deepest

questions regarding our existence are still as pressing to us as

they have been throughout recorded history and even a culture

which has exhausted itself 'in exploring the mundane will turn, at

some point to the effort to recover the sacred' (xxix, Bell). As

Giddens contends, modernity manages to sequester the experiences

which might disrupt the smooth functioning of society, but when a

16 William James and Martin E Marty, The Varieties Of Religious Experience, (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 31. Hereafter referred to in the main text as James.

man reaches the end of reason and faith in society, then those

questions rise up again and man must turn towards a search for

spiritual reality. If we look at the American society after the

failed promises of the 60's, a large number of the people went in

search for a spiritually enriching life; Dick's spiritual change

in direction was part of a bigger spiritual crisis. The dreams and

aspirations of the 60's did not pan out quite how the counter-

culture had wanted them to and the resulting swapping of

individual preoccupations for the exhausted political ideals of

the 60's has been termed by Paul Heelas as the 'most significant

turn to inner spirituality to have taken place during modernity'.17

Paul Heelas theorised that 'having no hope of improving their

lives in any of the ways that matter, people have convinced

themselves that what matters is psychic self-improvement' (142,

Heelas). This psychic self-improvement coalesced in The New Age

Movement (NAM), a spiritual phenomenon that has been analysed

thoroughly in Paul Heelas's The New Age Movement (1996). Proponents

of NAM 'claim that the New Age is a response to the cultural

uncertainty of our times' which assault the modern human 'because

they have become 'homeless' as a result of the uncertainty of

identity that modernity has brought (3, Heelas). There was great

17 Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 80. Hereafter referred to in the main text as Heelas.

appeal of the New Age to people who were tired of materialism and

turned to the alternatives in search of a more spiritually

enriching life. At the start of VALIS the narrator confesses that

‘the epoch of drug-taking had ended, and everyone had begun

casting about for a new obsession. For us the new obsession… was

theology’ (32, VALIS), tying in with Daniel Bell's foresighted

comment when he foresaw the resurgence of a religious

undercurrent.

The lingua franca of the New Age Movement includes some

core principles: faith in self spirituality, 'with the first

expression on the road being your lives do not work' (18, Heelas);

'You are Gods and Goddesses in exile' (19, Heelas), a belief that

perfection can be attained by moving beyond the socialized

individual to the authentic individual that hides beneath

society's constraints; unmediated individualism, 'I am my own

authority (21, Heelas) which is especially relevant for Dick's

alter-ego Horselover Fat in VALIS who becomes his own authority in

matters of the divine. One spectrum of the New Age thought was the

rejection of the material world in favour of what Dick Anthony

classified as 'authentic spiritual transcendence or realization'

(29, Heelas). To gain an appreciation of what spirituality means,

given as that we are again dealing here with a term that can and

has been used to denote many different things in many different

contexts, we turn to Sudhir Kakar, who provided the following

definition in his work Mad and Divine (2008): 'The spiritual...

incorporates the transformative possibilities of the human psyche:

total love without a trace of hate, selflessness carved out of the

psyche's normal self-centredness'18 and yet this is not a once-and-

for-all transformation, for he identifies that this spirituality

is constantly under threat by the darker forces of the psyche. In

a similar vein, Aldous Huxley formulates his own view of the

spiritual path; he goes on to give greater importance to this

quest for spirituality than any social design or institutional

change in his anthology of spiritual wisdom, The Perennial Philosophy

(1945) and in the rhetorical style of prophets of old, states that

'to those who seek first the Kingdom of God, all the rest will be

added. From those who... seek first all the rest in the

expectation that... the Kingdom of God will be added [later],

everything will be taken away'.19 Before looking at Dick's

spiritual conversion, we will look at the case of Leo Tolstoy

which will highlight the universality of such a personal quest and

this will make it clear that this is not a phenomenon that is

18 Sudhir Kakar, Mad And Divine, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 5.

19 Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1st edn (London: Chatto & Windus, 1947), p. 106. Hereafter referred to in the main text as Huxley.

peculiar to the era of late modernity, or indeed to American

society.

Tolstoy: Is a live dog better than a dead lion?

In her introduction to A Confession and Other Religious Writings (1987), Jane

Kentish provides an introduction for a man who surely needs none;

Tolstoy's literary fame, based on War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina

(1877) has stood the test of time, but it is the later stage of

Tolstoy's life, where he reshaped his mission as one of

'commitment to life rather than withdrawal from it, on

participation rather than passivity, on establishing the kingdom

of God on earth' that interests us.20 It was at this point in his

life that Tolstoy suddenly found himself staring at an abyss which

threatened to engulf him, in such a state that he confessed he

'removed a rope from my room... lest I hang myself from the beam

between the cupboards; and I gave up taking a rifle with me on

hunting trips so as not to be tempted to end my life' (30, Tolstoy)

and all at a stage where his career was blossoming and his family

life was also one of prosperity and harmony. Why did he feel this

way, what was the reason that led him down this path? In his

hallucinatory work The Politics of Experience (1967) R.D. Laing captures

the emptiness that must have beset Tolstoy when he claims that for

20 Leo Tolstoy and Jane Kentish, A Confession And Other Religious Writings, 1st edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 8. Hereafter referred to in the main text as Tolstoy.

those who have a precarious understanding of their own being, even

the acts of artistic creation cannot guide them back from the

brink: 'There are sudden, apparently inexplicable suicides that

must be understood as the dawn of a hope so horrible and harrowing

that it is unendurable'.21

Tolstoy's central dilemma can be formulated in Giddens'

terminology as an 'existential contradiction: we are of the

inanimate world, yet set off against it, as self-conscious beings

aware of our finite character' (49, Giddens). This contradiction

tormented Tolstoy on and off for most of his later life, with some

episodes reaching an unbearable intensity; in the preface to What Is

Art? (1898) a highly moralistic and polemical essay seething with

self-righteous contempt for most art, Richard Peaver quotes from a

letter Tolstoy wrote to his wife in 1869, at age 41: 'At two

o'clock in the morning, a strange anxiety, a fear, a terror such

as I have never before experienced came over me...never have I

known such painful sensations'.22 This terror was the severe

depression that Tolstoy faced, a profound disillusionment which

resulted in him penning A Confession, where he writes that 'it is

only possible to go on living while you are intoxicated with life;

once sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere

21 R. D Laing, The Politics Of Experience And The Bird Of Paradise, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 37. Hereafter referred to in the main text as Laing.

22 Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?, (London: Penguin Books, 1995), p. viii.

trick' (31, Tolstoy). Yet one of the reasons he did not commit

suicide and end this torture for himself was because, as he

stated, 'had I simply understood that life has no meaning I might

have accepted it peacefully...but I could not be calmed by this'

(33, Tolstoy), for he felt that 'life is everything. Reason is the

fruit of life and yet this reason rejects life itself. I felt that

something was not quite right here' (47, Tolstoy).

In his essay Does God Exist, Daniel Rancour-Laferriere has

attempted to account for this conversion of Tolstoy and his mental

anguish in clinical terms by providing Bipolar II Disorder as the

cause of Tolstoy's swings between depression and hypomanic states.

Laferriere thus says: 'there is a direct correlation between

Tolstoy's religious position and his mood or emotional state.

Indeed, the inability to make a firm decision at this point...

depends on the volatility of his emotional state'.23 Such

psychologisms which seek to clinically explain matters of faith

fall terribly short of the mark, because they attack the

individual's beliefs from an empiricist scientific position which

already rejects the notion of God. Indeed, it could be argued that

God caused these states in Tolstoy, in which case even though the

23 Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, 'Does God Exist? A Clinical Study of the ReligiousAttitudes Expressed in Tolstoy's "Confession"', The Slavic and East European Journal, 49 (2005), 445-473 (p. 460) <http://www.jstor.org/stable/20058303> [accessed 8/09/2014]. Hereafter referred to in the main text as Daniel.

clinical diagnosis of Rancour-Laferriere is correct, he has

managed to reverse symptom and cure. He goes so far as to claim

that 'had he [Tolstoy] been less narcissistically oriented...he

might have offered us a real theology' (470, Daniel); whereas the

point being argued here is that Tolstoy's singular and personal

quest shows the need for each individual to find his own path

towards the divine, not in establishing a new theological creed.

As Jane Kentish points out in her introduction, Tolstoy even

disapproved of the colonies that sprang up in his name around

Russia.

The only answer to Tolstoy's questions regarding his finite

existence and death, namely religion, was one which his scientific

and rationalist mind would not let him accept. Even as his reason

made him 'convinced of the impossibility of proving the existence

of a God' (63, Tolstoy) he continued searching for faith because

Tolstoy had reached the end of all that reason could give him, and

the only solace for him consisted solely in re-establishing a

meaningful connection with the infinite. Then one day, after years

of such torment, he came to the realization that 'I live truly

only when I am conscious of Him and seek Him... to know God and to

live are one and the same thing. God is life' (65, Tolstoy). This

was the belief that brought Tolstoy back from the brink of despair

and annihilation, and allowed Tolstoy to go on and continue

expounding his new-found faith in various essays up till his

death. Religion then, in Tolstoy's words is 'the relationship man

establishes between himself and the infinite, never-ending

universe' (142, Tolstoy) and increasingly he came to view his

previous aversion to religion as a result of his own pride in his

intellect. William James portrayed the reformed Tolstoy as

‘implacable to the whole system of official values’ (188, James)

which is another aspect of the religious turn which frees man from

worldly authority and once the pact is entered into with the

divine, the ultimate authority becomes not the family, the state

or Church but rather God himself. The privileging of the

individual's sovereignty in forming his own religion and the fact

that Jane Kentish recognized that Tolstoy's belief 'belong to no

recognizable school of philosophical thought' (11, Tolstoy) are two

aspects of this religious quest that Tolstoy shares with Dick and

the New Age; they can also be deemed the distinguishing marks of

those who embark on a personal and solitary journey towards the

divine.

Modern Day Mystics: Jung and Dick

It has been well established that there can be no objective proof

of God’s existence, objective being used to denote a rational and

scientific proof that sceptics and believers alike can agree on.

One of the most sophisticated arguments for the lack of such a

proof is discussed by Terence Penelhum in Problems of Religious Knowledge

(1971), a philosophical study of knowledge-claims in religious

discourse. This argument runs as follows: ‘a successful proof

coerces acceptance of its conclusion. God, however, does not

coerce his creatures into believing in him, but respects their

freedom. He therefore would not permit successful proofs’.24 This

argument was deconstructed by Penelhum however by pointing out

that human freedom also entails the freedom to believe in the

irrational, so that even a successful proof of God’s existence

would not necessarily lead to a belief in God. Tolstoy came to

accept this position, because he was searching for a practical

religion that would allow him to carry on his life's work without

sinking into despair. Stepping aside the philosophical rabbit hole

of objective proof however, we must note the peculiarity of Philip

K. Dick's turn towards the search for divine transcendence; he not

only spent 8 years reasoning it out in his Exegesis, but in 2-3-74

he directly experienced a mystical connection to something supra-

rational that possessed him to start the Exegesis. As we come to

the question of the authenticity of the mystical experiences that

grant such transcendence, we are again in hotly debated territory

24 Terence Penelhum, Problems Of Religious Knowledge, (London: Macmillan, 1971), p. 45.

but as we've premised the whole discussion on the authenticity of

a first person account, we must grant that even with a lack of

objective proof, Philip K. Dick definitely was visited by something

in 2-3-74. Here, we can compare Dick's visionary experiences with

those of Carl Jung, branded a mystic by many but whose

explorations into the myriad dimensions of the human mind have few

parallels in the 20th century. Jung’s Liber Novus, or “The Red

Book” is a private journal documenting 16 years of self-discovery

and unprecedented experiments into the nature of his own

unconscious. This journal has been recently published in 2009 as

Liber Novus and its discovery has caused great excitement among

Jungian scholars, in much the same way that the publishing of The

Exegesis opened up new vistas for Dickian scholars to dive into.

Kathyrn Harrison, in a review for the New York Times opined that

'“The Red Book” is a singular work, outside of categorization. As

an inquiry into what it means to be human, it transcends the

history of psychoanalysis and underscores Jung’s place among

revolutionary thinkers'.25 Towards the end of 1913, Jung had a

dream in which the mythical figure of Siegfried was killed and in

this, he interpreted his own identification with the myth of the

hero whose will is so strong that he seeks to impress it upon

25 Kathyrn Harrison, 'The Symbologist', New York Times, December 3, 2009 <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/books/review/Harrison-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0> [accessed 12/09/2014].

others.26 He came to the realization that it was time to take the

lid off his unconscious that his scientific work had kept on it,

and through a process that he dubbed “active imagination” he

immersed himself back into an active world of fantasies. Jung's

vivid drawings and revelatory analysis of his own dreams are no

less bizarre and just as mystical as Dick's own 2-3-74

experiences. The reason for comparing Dick's experiences with

Jung's is that while Dick's episodes were involuntary and

represented, to him, a divine entity reaching out to him, Jung's

insights and journal entries were the result of willingly

conducted research and a result of years of experimentation and

rigorous analysis. When compared, both have striking parallels and

render the questioning of the cause of such experiences moot

because Jung has shown that it is not the source of such visions,

but rather what these visions illuminate that is important.

Dick starts off The Exegesis describing the events of 2-3-74

as : 'the “Holy Other” pouring into me, when I saw the universe as

it is... a gold and red illuminated-letter like plasmatic entity

from the future'.27 In VALIS he fictionalizes the experience of the

pink beam of light temporarily blinding Fat and claiming that 'as

26 C. G Jung and Sonu Shamdasani, The Red Book, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009), p. 202. Hereafter referred to in the main text as Jung.

27 Philip K Dick and others, The Exegesis Of Philip K. Dick, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 5. Hereafter referred to in the main text as Exegesis.

soon as the beam struck him – he knew things he had never known'

(23, VALIS) referring explicitly to the undiagnosed birth defect of

his young son Christopher which was revealed to Dick and which

saved the child's life; for months he received information in his

dreams in the forms of written pages, sometimes in languages which

he did not understand (8, Exegesis). Simon Critchley captures the

weirdness perfectly when, in his piece for the New York Times on

Dick while discussing 2-3-74 he stated that 'many very weird

things happened — too many to list here — including a clay pot

that Dick called “Ho On” or “Oh Ho,” which spoke to him about

various deep spiritual issues in a brash and irritable voice'.28

And yet, Dick does not fall into the trap of “seeing is

believing” and his scepticism caused him to reason that VALIS

could be an 'entity in the ionosphere due to growth of radio

signal patterns' or 'an AI bounce-back to us' (97, Exegesis)

displaying an awareness of the explosive growth in media and

telecommunications networks in post-war America and that he could

be acting as a conduit for all the electronic chatter that is part

and parcel of the American experience in the modern age, an

experience that Don Delillo goes on to capture so vividly in White

Noise (1985). He even quotes Jung in the exegesis and remarks that

28 Simon Critchley, 'Philip K. Dick, Sci-Fi Philosopher, Part 1', The Stone, May20, 2012 <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/philip-k-dick-sci-fi-philosopher-part-1/> [accessed 13/09/2014].

'as Jung points out, man is withdrawing his projections from the

outer world' which is why 'we can no longer expect to encounter

the divine... anywhere but within ourself'(55, Exegesis) showing

that he considered psychological explanations for his visions

himself; In VALIS Philip Dick, the narrator certainly considers Fat

crazy at the start and in fact, is always prepared to present

psychological reasons for Fat's condition: the suicide of Gloria,

his wife Beth taking his son and leaving him, even speculating

that it might have been Fat's liberal use of drugs in the 60's

that has pushed him over the edge. But when faced with such

aspects of the experience as the medical information regarding his

son, the narrator Phil has to acknowledge that 'if the voice tells

him something he does not know and could not know, then perhaps we are

dealing with the real thing' (41, VALIS). Among the innumerable

explanations, one thing remained constant, Dick's emphatic

insistence on the authenticity of the experience because as he

writes in Exegesis: 'I did not reason this out; I saw this' (70,

Exegesis).

Over the course of Jung's experiments he developed an inner

guide who acted as his guru and beacon in the depths of his own

unconscious: Philemon. Shamdasani states that 'to Jung, Philemon

represented superior insight, and was like a guru to him' (201,

Jung). Here then, VALIS serves a similar purpose for Fat as

Philemon does for Jung, mainly as a source of elucidation into the

deeper mysteries of existence. In the Psychology of the Unconscious, Jung

stated that 'one without a myth is like one uprooted having no

true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which

concludes within him, or yet with contemporary human society'

(197, Jung) and this spiritual exercise was an attempt to

reconstruct his own link to the collective unconscious. Sonu

Shamdasani, in his introduction to Liber Novus, says that 'the

overall theme of the book is how Jung regains his soul and

overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation...

ultimately achieved through enabling the rebirth of a new image of

God in his soul' (207, Jung). He went on to regard Liber Novus as

Jung's 'descent into Hell... an attempt to shape an individual

cosmology' (202, Jung). There is a scientific distinction between

cosmology and cosmogony, which is the word that Philip K Dick

employed to describe Horselover Fat's quest in writing the

exegesis. The word cosmogony represents an attempt to understand

the origin of the universe whereas cosmology is mainly used to

refer to the scientific study of the structure and evolution of

the universe, so it would be more accurate to state that Jung was

engaged in constructing his cosmogony, which is also Dick's

purpose in VALIS. One particular episode is highlighted in the

Introduction by Shamdasani where Jung describes a confrontation

with his soul which told him that 'the great work begins... you

have been unconscious for a long time. Now you must go to a higher

level of consciousness' and when Jung enquired 'what is my

calling' the answer was given 'the new religion and its

proclamation' (211, Jung).

Now we will look at William James's classification of what

makes an experience mystical. He held the following four

characteristics of mystical experiences to be validating and self-

authenticating: an ineffability that ‘defies expression’; a noetic

quality where ‘states of knowledge…illuminations, revelations’ are

imparted to the receiver; transiency because ‘mystical states

cannot be sustained for long’; passivity as though ‘the mystic

feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as

if he were grasped and held by a superior power’ (380-381, James).

From St. Augustine to Dick, humans throughout the ages have

testified to such transcendent experiences and moments which leave

the beholder in no doubt as to their divine origin, and these

characteristics apply to Dick, and in a lesser degree to Jung even

though he never claimed that he was contacted by the divine. Such

extraordinary experiences are hard to fathom for those who have

not been a witness to them: Richard Hull, translator of Jung's

Collected Works was astounded at seeing Liber Novus in 1961 and wrote

to Aniela Jaffe that 'the only difference between him and a

regular inmate is his astounding capacity to stand off from the

terrifying reality of his visions, to observe and understand what

was happening, and to hammer out of his experience a system of

therapy that works. But for this unique achievement he'd be as mad

as a hatter' (221, Jung); certainly Dick was no stranger to being

considered mad as a hatter himself.

In a conversation dated November 2, 1974, Dick shared with

Paul Williams some of the most revealing aspects of his

personality and the changes affected in it after 2-3-74. As he

explains, 'I used to believe the universe was basically

hostile...It isn't so much that I blamed it, but I blamed myself',

speaking of the sense of alienation and “homelessness” that the

New Age Movement was a response to. But in light of 2-3-74, he

came to understand that 'the universe is perceptive, but it's

friendly...I just don't feel that I'm different from the universe

anymore'.29 He goes on to elaborate that 'You see a pattern of

events, and if you have no transcendent view, no mystical

view...then the pattern must emanate from people...[they] emanate

29 Paul Williams, Only Apparently Real, (New York: Arbor House, 1986), p. 155. Hereafter referred to in the main text as Williams.

from beyond people...but this requires a view that transcends

social, human life, into a kind of mystical realm' (162, Williams).

For Dick, the solution to the feeling of alienation and spiritual

homelessness was not to convince the individual that there was no

pattern or meaning and that the universe is a random jumble of

atoms without any purpose, a view that is expounded by the most

hard-core scientific materialists; the solution was to view it as

'benign, and that it transcends our individualities...the universe

itself is actually alive, and we're in it as part of it' (163,

Williams). This sense of harmony is similar to the feeling that

Tolstoy expressed when he claimed that God is life, and is one of

the most self-evident truths that 2-3-74 helped Dick achieve

metanoia.

We can now see that one characteristic is constant

throughout all three of these cases: a surrender of previously

held beliefs and an acknowledgement that reason and rationality

alone will not provide an understanding of the questions that

man's finitude on Earth bring forth: Tolstoy had to reach the end

of rationalistic enquiries to find his faith; Jung had to

overthrow the dominance of his own conscious ego in order to find

his soul in his unconscious and Dick had to experience the

harrowing abyss of the world of Scanner Darkly before VALIS provided

him a new lease on life. Those who remain sceptical of such a

moment of transcendence should keep in mind that spiritually

inclined tend to view man, in Huxley's poetic words, as 'a point

where a ray of the primordial Godhead meets one of the

differentiated, creaturely emanations of that same Godhead's

creative energy' (71, Huxley) and while this humble creature might

be unfit to receive illumination, or to have done something to

deserve it, he is 'one of the infinite number of points where

divine Reality is wholly and eternally present' (72, Huxley).

SALVATION IS ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS

And the princess and the prince

Discuss what’s real and what is not

It doesn’t matter inside the Gates of Eden30

By now we have concluded that as far as Dick was concerned 2-3-74

represented a valid mystical experience and one that had a

profound effect on him. In now examining VALIS and The Divine Invasion, we

aim to seek whether this experience opened up Dick's work in new

directions away from the bleakness that threatened to engulf him

by the end of A Scanner Darkly. In Only Apparently Real (1986), Paul

Williams' interviews with Dick reveal a great deal about his

30 Bob Dylan, 'Gates of Eden', 1965 <http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/gates-eden> [accessed 10/09/2014].

creative process and one of the ways that Dick uses his writing

and his characters is to talk to them, by way of writing. He goes on

to explain that if he had a particularly vexing problem he would

pose the problem to one of his characters, throwing himself into

the narrative in the third person and thus find solutions through

his characters that he could not have come up with on his own (68-

69, Williams). The events of 2-3-74 and their integration into his

life and his fiction were undoubtedly the most pressing concerns

that Dick faced in his last years so an analysis of VALIS and The

Divine Invasion will reveal Dick's attempts at solving the dilemma of

the revelation.

VALIS starts off with Philip K. Dick being split into two:

the irrational Fat and the rational science-fiction writer, Dick.

Fat, surrounded by the death of his friends and engulfed in the

melancholy that pervaded the end of Scanner, is on a quest to find

God, a God that would explain to him the suffering that he saw

around him and in society more generally. This theme of the novel

is captured by the character Kevin, a sceptical friend of Fat, in

the shape of his dead cat which had run out in front of a car:

'How do you explain this' (28, VALIS). This issue of death and

sorrow, and the question of why this happened is one which bothers

Fat constantly, for throughout the novel he tries to make sense of

suffering in general, especially what he considers irrational acts

of evil that beset us all around, which are blamed on “The Empire”

which Erik Davis equates with the “disciplinary apparatus” of

power that Michael Foucault blamed for 'enmeshing human subjects

at every turn' (281-282, Techgnosis) which is what Scanner had already

portrayed as too powerful for individuals to destroy. One can then

see that VALIS tries to grapple with the same problem that Dick

already knew were not solvable, and thus Dick is not able to offer

any solution for this suffering in VALIS as well. In conversation

with Paul Williams Dick describes his mission, a mission which

applies to VALIS especially: 'How does one fashion a book of

resistance, a book of truth in an empire of falsehood...how does

one do this right in front of the enemy? (81, Williams) and while

explaining the plot he fails because as he confesses to Paul

Williams, 'I can't do it in advance of writing it' (81, Williams)

but one can see that Dick did not learn from his own work because

VALIS falls in the same trap of trying to enact revolutionary change

in the system that Scanner did.

In VALIS, from a theological perspective, Fat's position is

similar to Tony Amsterdam from Scanner who claimed he saw God: 'For

Fat, finding God... became, ultimately a bummer, a constantly

diminishing supply of joy...Who deals God? Fat knew that the

churches couldn't help' (36, VALIS) and the novel follows Fat's

attempts to explain his theophany and ratify his madness; critics

have noted that VALIS is Dick's most self-consciously

autobiographical work and Fat's search is mirrored in Dick's real

life vis-a-vis The Exegesis. The narrator attests to this

interminable work that Fat was undertaking, saying that 'Fat must

have come up with more theories than there are stars in the

universe' (36, VALIS) but these jumps from theory to theory,

conjecture to conjecture in VALIS have been noted by Christopher

Palmer as self-defeating: 'This impulse to exceed what has

previously been thought, and so to replace it while seeming to

confirm it, operates in several of the "corrobora-tion scenes'

(335, Palmer) and thus it takes away the relevancy of the

proposition, or as Christopher Palmer stated it: 'corroboration

becomes corroboree' (335, Palmer). This is also one of the major

failings of VALIS as a novel, and Dick himself notes in an entry

from Exegesis that 'In a sense the novel VALIS was a means to get the

tractate published' (888, Exegesis) referring to the cosmogenical

appendix that closes VALIS. Peter Fitting has argued, correctly in my

opinion, that the main intention in VALIS seems to be to make the

reader believe in the experience that Fat has and that the

“solutions” such as the girl Sophia being revealed as the saviour

that Fat was searching for were not in themselves the aim of the

novel (231, Fitting). Umberto Rossi labelled VALIS Dick's Confessions

and that the aim is like St. Augustine to 'convert the reader'31

but this attempt is ultimately a failed one because the novel

fails to resolve, for Dick as well as for the reader, the question

that was dragging Fat into madness: the meaning of death and pain

and illness. The suicide of Gloria early on in the novel, another

friend Sherri who's dying of cancer, even Kevin's dead cat are

questions that remain insurmountable for Fat and Dick, as they end

up resplitting after finding out that the child Sophia was killed

in an accident.

For Lejla Kucukalic, VALIS addresses the postmodern

condition, with the self-reflexive nature of the characters, the

intertextuality (she lists more than 200 cultural, historical,

literary and scientific allusions amongst others) and the shifting

sands of reality, but she contends that the novel itself is

'deeply anti-postmodern in its insistence that truth is available

through, and signified by, the interpreted and ordered chaos'32 but

we must note that the novel loses itself in the maze of its own

creation; the novel ends with Fat traversing the globe in search 31 Umberto Rossi, 'The Shunts in the Tale: The Narrative Architecture of Philip

K. Dick's VALIS', Science Fiction Studies, 39 (2012), 243-261 (p. 244) <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/sciefictstud.39.2.0243> [accessed 11/09/2014].

32 Lejla Kucukalic, Philip K. Dick: Canonical Writer of the Digital Age (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 133.

of the saviour, while the narrator, Philip Dick, sits in front of

the television, watching for subliminal messages from VALIS which

might point the way. Of course, one can forgive this desire to

manifest the truth of one's revelations to others; in the

hallucinatory and psychedelic prose piece The Bird of Paradise, R.D.

Laing captures this desire to communicate an experience of such

magnitude, yet which remains incommunicable: 'There is really

nothing more to say when we come back to that beginning of all

beginnings that is nothing at all... and then there is no end to

it, words, words, words...a just still feasible tact,

indiscretions, perhaps forgivable' (156, Laing). Had this been

Dick's last attempt at working 2-3-74 into his work we might have

branded his efforts a failure, but the next novel that he wrote,

The Divine Invasion also dealt with Dick's revelations and presently we

will examine whether it is able to extricate itself from the

problems of VALIS and pave a new way forward for Dick.

Divine Invasion or Help is finally on the way:

The Divine Invasion starts off Emmanuel, who we find later is the

physical incarnation of Yahweh, entering school with his uncle

Elias Tate, who is revealed later as the prophet Elijah. Then

there is an analepsis where Herb Asher, the legal father of

Emmanuel, is frozen in cryonic suspension but in the part of his

cycle where 'he was under the impression that he was still

alive'.33 From the very beginning, the ontological plotting of the

novel takes confusing forms because Herb is remembering a previous

part of his life as a lonely exile on the planet CY30-CY30B. The

one thing which confounds Herb at this point is the soupy string

music of Fiddler on the Roof which seeps into his dome and which is

significant later as one of the signs that this reality is not

real. Herb Asher asks an autochthon, androids who inhabit the

planet CY30-CY30B, whether the soupy music, Fiddler on the Roof,

is audible only to Herb. He replies that 'perhaps your mind has

gone, due to isolation... Domers like you suddenly imagine voices

and shapes'(14, DI). Domers are the modern man; in his isolation he

hears voices which point out the ontological uncertainty of the

world and yet when shared with those that can't hear them the

person is considered crazy. Herb spends most of his time listening

to a famous singer, Linda Fox, and daydreaming a fantasy where he

lives with Linda Fox when Yahweh, the name of the local deity of

the planet worshipped by the autochthons appears and asks him to

help his neighbour Rybys and Herb answers 'I don't think you have

the right person' (37, DI) to which Yahweh burns down his control

station, after which he agrees to help her and then the story

33 Philip K Dick, The Divine Invasion, (London: Voyager, 1996), p. 9. Hereafter referred to in the main text as DI.

resembles a retelling of the birth of Jesus where Herb acts as

Joseph and marries Rybys, who is carrying the seed of Yahweh in

her womb, and helps bring her back to Earth.

Then the plot jumps back to Emmanuel who meets a mysterious

older girl Zina at school, whose identity is not revealed till the

end of the novel; Emmanuel's journey to know her real name is

inextricably linked to him remembering his own past, for it is

revealed that the government of Earth controlled by the Christian-

Islamic-Church and the Scientific Legate, Dick's dystopian

versions of religious fundamentalism and communism, engineered the

ship carrying Emmanuel to crash, leaving him with an impaired

memory. In the course of this journey to forget his forgetfulness,

Emmanuel learns from a dying dog that the dog dies as part of

natural law, a law created by him but an unalterable law because

the laws which created the universe are unalterable. 'It was a

good universe in which an ugly dying dog was of more worth than a

classic figure from Ancient Greece because the dog's torment is

real' (84, DI); Emmanuel has a moment of identification with the

dog and sheds tears for the dog, thinking that 'I am the dying dog

and the suffering people' (86, DI). Later, Emmanuel muses about his

own condition and realizes that 'I have fallen. The bright morning

star which fell did not fall alone, it tore down everything else

with it, including me... I am that fallen being now' (135, DI) and

here one can see that the perceived Gnosticism of VALIS, with its

insistence that 'the phenomenal world does not exist' (261, VALIS)

has shifted to a more monistic vision where Emmanuel realizes the

oneness of all creation with himself. Emmanuel declares that there

are two realities: 'The Black Iron Prison' which is analogous with

the Empire from VALIS and the 'Palm Tree Garden', which is Dick's

reinterpretation of the Garden of Eden (135, DI). He is aghast at

the indifference humans show to whether they remain invisibly

locked in the prison or run free in the garden that he has

envisioned and fashioned for humanity and displays great anger;

Zina tries to temper this righteous anger within him and takes

Emmanuel to a land known as The Secret Commonwealth, a name which

reminds one of The Secret Commonwealth, a collection of Celtic fairy

lore composed by Robert Kirk in the 17th century. The land revealed

by Zina is similarly of a fairy like origin; to Emmanuel's

questions about its location she enigmatically replies that 'it is

here' (154, DI). This place is 'where the bells come from. The land

out of which their sounds come' (154, DI) portraying an image of a

realm of beauty and wonder. Once there, Zina admonishes Emmanuel

by telling him that 'all your promises have failed – which is good

because what you have promised them [humans] most is that you will

curse them and afflict them and destroy them' (163, DI) and reveals

that the colour of the cherry blossoms, that pink is her colour;

Zina's world being alluded to as the reality that Dick perceived

in 2-3-74. In her realm, she tries to show Emmanuel that 'the

power of Belial is mere occlusion, hiding the real world' (168,

DI) and an attempt to destroy Belial will only end up destroying

the world. But all of this tranquillity is not enough to make

Emmanuel forget that 'the power of evil is the ceasing of reality,

the ceasing of existence itself' and so he rejects her world for

all its fictionality, it's illusory ways, branding it 'a spell'

(168, DI). Even after Zina's exhortation that 'do you want the

sobriety of war or the intoxication of what you see now' (168, DI)

Emmanuel explains to Zina that 'the quality of realness is more

important than any other quality, because once realness departs,

there is nothing. A dream is nothing' (179, DI) and Emmanuel

elaborates that 'the basis of reality is bleak because... you must

adhere to what is possible: the law of necessity. That is the

underpinning of reality: necessity. Whatever is, is because it

must be; because it can be no other way' (181, DI). This ties in

with Emmanuel's comprehension of the dying dog, but he recognized

the immutable law of the universe that he himself had fashioned

and once fashioned, must be adhered to.

One of the surprising points of DI is the role of Cardinal

Harms, the figurehead of the CIC (Christian-Islamic-Church) who

considers Emmanuel evil and is part of the plot to kill Emmanuel;

speaking of Rybys before he plotted her accident he believes that

'the monster in her womb is Belial' (117, DI). CIC, which is an

embodiment of the oppressive government, is also claiming divine

righteousness and here Cardinal Harms is shown as occluded

himself, rather than as the occluder. This theme is also evidenced

in Dick's essay Man, Android and Machine from 1976 where he confesses

that one of the recurring images in his writing till then had been

of the cold, steel visage of those in power, which he had mistaken

for their face or their underlying reality before coming to

realize: 'What I glimpsed and then wrote about was in fact not a

face; it was a mask over a face...I bought the deception and

fled... From something which, when the need was gone for

concealment, smiled and revealed its harmlessness' (213, Sutin).

This might seem a strange turn for Dick to take after the

insistence in VALIS that 'The Empire never ended' (261, VALIS) but in

Divine Invasion, the primary aim of Dick does not seem to be the

overthrow of the tyranny but rather, to comprehend the existential

questions that had been left unanswered by VALIS.

Dick's own efforts in his quest to peel away the layers of

VALIS are mirrored in Emmanuel as he delves deeper to comprehend

Zina: 'you are Pallas Athena... Holy Wisdom... the Tree of Life;

and you are my companion and friend, my guide. But what are you

actually? Under all the disguises?' (214, DI) Herb, the human

character in the story, and a representation for humanity as a

whole, finds himself in the middle of these divine schemes:

Emmanuel and Zina place a bet on whether Herb will accept the

reality of Linda Fox as a woman over the phantasm of Linda Fox

that was shown to him by Zina and Herb, who had been released out

of cryonic suspension, is suddenly transported into a new life

where he and Rybys are married on Earth. Herb has intimations that

something that tampered with the fabric of reality, and he is

tantalized with the truth, for as Zina kisses Herb in his audio

store he suddenly remembers his past life, or real life: CY30-

CY30B, Rybys being ill, the accident and he becomes aware that

'this world was a simulation and something living and intelligent

and sympathetic wanted him to know' (194, DI). This in breaking of

his other life remains with Herb, but both he and the reader are

left in the dark at this point, an ontologically uncertain point

which is a trademark of Dick. Even after his encounter with the

real Linda Fox Herb still cares for her, Dick's triumph of human

empathy, thus paving the way to Emmanuel winning the bet against

Zina. However, Emmanuel never loses sight of the categorical

imperative of existence: the presence of realness. Emmanuel

concedes that an element of the magical universe that Zina

embodies is needed, after all, in his universe and so declares: 'I

will transmute your world into the real... what the people must

do, however, is remember. They may live in your world but they

must know that a worse one existed and they were forced to live in

it' (211, DI). This exhortation to remember is a frequent refrain

of Dick, sometimes named anamnesis, and again he is stressing that

one must not forget the reality of the Black Iron Prison even once

out of it because forgetfulness will only lead to further

occlusion. Through this union of their worlds Emmanuel comes to

realize that he and Zina are two parts of the fallen Godhead who

have now been united. Once united, they decide to set free all the

animals in the zoo, Dick's analogy for humanity being set free

once the Godhead is fully realized. For Emmanuel, this place is

the beginning of the real battle: 'the animals will be surprised

by their freedom. At first they won't know what to do' (224, DI),

Emmanuel speaks of the task that lay before humans.

In Dick's sophisticated understanding of freedom though,

the flipside of freedom is the freedom of choosing evil over good,

as is shown when the first animal that is set free is Belial, an

analogy not only for Satan but for the evil nature of humanity,

who, gleeful in the conviction of his victory declares that 'I

will contend against you, deity of light. Nothing of your radiance

will shine, now; the light has gone out, or soon will' (229, DI)

which is Dick call towards his age that they are all teetering on

the brink of losing the battle against the occlusion of evil.

Belial's freedom has consequences for all humans and he brings

back the sense of unreality for Herb when he is going to meet

Linda Fox in California because 'suddenly... soupy string music

filled his car...I'm in cryonic suspension' he exclaims (233, DI) and

this intrusion into his life confuses him, because he is convinced

that Yahweh has triumphed over Belial. This echoes Dick's

struggles with his own understanding of reality; the continued

presence of evil, as exemplified in the police who stop Herb Asher

on the way to his dream life with Linda Fox. Herb argues with the

cop regarding his situation; and after telling the cop to 'leave

us all alone. You do not know whom you serve' (243, DI), is allowed

to free by the cop who is both alarmed and impressed by Herb's

wild eyed ravings regarding the final battle between Yahweh and

Belial. Finally enroute to Linda Fox again, Herb picks up Belial,

who fools him by his goat-like appearance. Belial takes control

over Herb Asher's vehicle and increasingly his mind, causing his

image of Linda Fox 'to undergo a dismal transformation' (256, DI)

and this power of evil to show all of creation in a negative light

'is a form of unreality' (256, DI), or the returning of Herb's own

worst thoughts about the world; as Belial telepathically informs

him, 'you wanted to wake up. Now you are awake' (257, DI). Herb is

forced to arrive at Linda Fox's house but he remains conscious of

the presence of Evil and fights against it even as he is

powerless, and this conscious effort on his part to choose good

over evil becomes the undoing of Belial for Linda Fox touches

Belial at which point he dies instantly, revealing that Linda Fox

is Herb's 'Advocate, the Beside-Helper' (261, DI) who tells Herb

that this was a personal devil for Herb in many ways, and that she

is his divine advocate; 'the battle is waged for each soul

individually... salvation is on a one by one basis' (263, DI).

Emmanuel appears to Herb at the end, explaining that his salvation

lay in him choosing his good spirit and in rejecting the false

world that Belial showed him, in him being conscious of his

situation he has managed to turn his fantasy life from the start

of the novel into his reality. This is the triumph of Emmanuel

over Belial, for he breathes life into all creation while Belial

can only strip reality of its goodness.

There are many parallels between Divine Invasion and Jung's

Answer To Job (1954), one of Jung's last and most personal of works

which also sought to understand the meaning of evil by critically

examining the biblical book of Job and seeking an explanation for

the suffering that God puts Job through. In his provocative

analysis, he comes to the conclusion that Job's righteousness in

the face of such suffering caused God to reunite with 'a friend

and playmate from the beginning of the world' and this was Sophia,

or wisdom.34 Sophia was also the name of the little girl in VALIS and

Zina is again another incarnation of Sophia, the holy wisdom that

provides the balance to God's anger. Later on, Jung reveals that

the heavenly advocate that Christ promised would 'assist them by

word and deed and remain with them forever' (113, Job), which

corresponds to Linda Fox in DI, is the Holy Ghost, the third aspect

of the trinity and one which signifies for both Jung and Dick that

man is united with divinity by the presence of a part of him with

each human. This heralded for Jung a shift in humanity's role, for

now 'he is raised... to the position of a man-god' (114, Job). For

Jung this transformation in our role stood for 'the goal of the

total man, for the realization of his wholeness and individuality'

(161, Job) and it is a grave responsibility. Humans can no longer

remain listless or claim ignorance of their situation as Herb

34 C. G Jung, Answer To Job, (London: Routledge & Paul, 1954), p. 45. Hereafter referred to in the main text as Job.

Asher did at the start of novel, for a part of God is within each

man. According to Jung, man 'must know something of God's

nature... if he is to understand himself and thereby achieve

gnosis of the Divine' (164, Job). There are many who claim that

Dick's later work is Gnostic in the sense that he considers the

material world as evil or senseless, but the union of Zina with

Emmanuel in the novel and Emmanuel's identification with all

creation, even Belial, is the element which separates Dick from

Gnosticism. Divine Invasion represents Dick's triumph in reconciling

both the irrational and the rational, something which VALIS had

failed to do and manages to provide him an answer for that dying

dog's pain, which is the pain of all living beings. Herb's fantasy

life and real life ultimately become one through this divine

invasion; and in The Divine Invasion Dick finally manages to depict

what his last entry in the tractes in VALIS had pointed to:

'underneath all the names there is only one Immortal Man; and we are

that man' (271, VALIS).

Conclusion

Bob Arctor was destroyed in his attempts to reconcile the

contradictions in society all around him; his was a yearning that

was not fulfilled by the suburban life he left behind, the

governmental machinery that he was a reluctant part of ultimately

revealed itself as orchestrating Arctor's descent into addiction

and madness and even the counter-culture, which had initially

seemed to herald a new dawn of human consciousness had been

revealed as a sham. The despondency of it all was captured in the

words of Charles Freck when he visited Arctor's house and noticed

how the passing of time had taken away all the gleam from their

dreams: 'It used to be mellow here... everybody kicking back and

turning on, grooving to acid rock...how can days and happenings

and moments so good become so quickly ugly, and for no reason, for

no real reason?' (101, SD) and eventually commits suicide. Peter

Fitting terms Scanner 'Dick's bleakest novel; there is no solution

at the end, no appeal to either the metaphysical or the practical'

(230, Fitting) and he is right; for Dick there was no practical

solution left in his hopes for revolution. The Empire never ended,

but it was due to the fact that, as Bauman notes, 'the time of

systemic revolutions has passed...because there are no buildings

where the control desks of the system are lodged and which could

be stormed and captured by the revolutionaries' (5, Bauman).

The mission that Dick described to Paul Williams was one

that Dick felt strongly about, so much so that even after

declaring that 'Scanner is my true Paradise Lost' (678, Exegesis), he

still tried to envision a great revolution in VALIS that would

remove the occlusion from society and herald a new age. To quote

from The Dialectics of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer were bitter

that those 'seekers of the union between truth, beauty and

justice, those 'outsiders of history'... set greater store by the

idea and the individual' as opposed to a pragmatic or practical

solution to societal issues. According to Adorno, 'the price of

survival is practical involvement, the transformation of ideas

into domination' (43, Bauman), but considering the fate of Bob

Arctor at the hands of the forces of domination, Dick foresaw that

the sacrifice of individuals for the sake of the greater good

never considered the pain and anguish of the individuals trapped

in these schemes. Dick was deeply sympathetic to the pain of

living creatures; Emmanuel cried over a dying dog and equated the

pain of the lowly creature with the pain of the divine itself; for

such a man the sacrifice of his deepest held belief in freedom and

happiness was not worth the carnage that it brought upon the

innocent. Near the end of Divine Invasion when Belial is set free,

Emmanuel mourned most of all for the weak: 'I pity the small

creatures the most..who have done the least harm. They above all

do not deserve this' (232, DI) making it clear where Dick's

allegiances lie.

For Daniel Bell, 'the real problem of modernity is the

problem of belief' (28, Bell) and we have seen that this problem of

belief is not localized to American society in the wake of the

60's; it is the same crisis that beset Tolstoy in the latter part

of the 19th century and like Dick, Tolstoy too had to give up his

faith in rationalism and progress and recognize a divine reality

which would help him realize answers to the existential questions

of life, suffering and death which are bracketed out by a dogmatic

belief in scientific or societal improvement by secular means. In

the society that Dick inhabited, this spiritual malaise was much

more pronounced, and while Daniel Bell might sound pessimistic

when he bemoans that 'what is there left in the past to destroy,

and who has the hope for a future to come' (29, Bell), he reaffirms

that the return to an appreciation and understanding of religion

is precisely what 'holds one to reality' (29, Bell). This thread

back to the past however cannot be constructed or engineered for

Daniel Bell; It is the outcome of 'experiences which give one a

tragic sense of life... lived on the knife-edge of finitude and

freedom' (30, Bell). Dick's journey through A Scanner Darkly and VALIS

always show us characters who are living on that very knife-edge,

and the positive note that Divine Invasion ended on, and it is the only

one of the three novels that ends on an ontologically certain and

positive note, could not have been reached by Dick had he not seen

the flip-side of such positivity in A Scanner Darkly and VALIS.

For Dick, 2-3-74 represented a miracle of divine invasion

that was authentic and self-evidently transcendental, but by

comparing him to Carl Jung's exploratory leaps into his own

unconscious and the mystical experiences he experienced, we can

conclude that following William James's pragmatic approach, it is

not the origin of such experiences that confirm their validity but

the outcomes and changes it brings in those who receive such

transcendence. Carl Jung himself stated that 'of all those who

ever consulted me who were in the second half of life, no one was

ever cured who did not achieve a spiritual outlook on life' (Jung,

p. 334). Dick frequently coalesced his thoughts into concluding

that 2-3-74 was the harbinger of a new age of evolution, when

mankind can shed its dogmatic beliefs and the divine in each

individual can be recognized. This view of evolution as escaping

the fleshy coils of biology and instead being driven by our

conscious efforts was shared by such eminent biologists of the

20th century as Julian Huxley, brother of Aldous Huxley who

concluded that: 'as far as the mechanism of evolution ceases to be

blind and automatic and becomes conscious... it becomes possible

to introduce faith, courage, love of truth, goodness – in a word

moral purpose- into evolution. It becomes possible, but the

possibility has been and is often unrealized' (317, Techgnosis).

This awakening of consciousness is what Emmanuel asked for when he

joined his world with Zina's; he asked humans to remember that

they previously existed in a blind and automatic universe, but by

embracing the ideas of goodness and truth, they will be able to

share in the new world that Emmanuel brings into existence for

them.

In the conclusion to Liquid Modernity, Zygmunt Bauman stated

that 'the cause of the autonomous society may profit together with

the cause of the autonomous individual; they can only win or lose

together' (212, Bauman). Dick's turn towards individual salvation

in Divine Invasion should not be seen as a defeat; instead it was a

recognition that one must liberate oneself from occlusion before

wanting to see the same change in society. As becomes clear, Divine

Invasion is a re-affirmation of the belief that Dick held dear

throughout his life, namely the autonomy of the individual in

escaping his fate and forging a unique connection with the divine

and Divine Invasion is thus a summation of Dick's great spiritual

quest.

:

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