Quotes from In Pursuit of VALIS Selections From The Exegesis ( 1991 )

For years I've felt I didn't know what I was doing; I had to watch my activities and deduce, like an outsider, what I was up to.

My novels, for example. They are said by readers to depict the same world again and again, a recognisable world. Where is that world?

I seem to be living in my own novels more and more. I can't figure out why. Am I losing touch with reality? Or is reality actually sliding toward a Phil Dickian type of atmosphere? And if the latter, then for god's sake why?

Like an astro-physicist who by studying a Black Hole causes it to change, I seem to alter my environment by thinking about it.

Maybe by writing about it and getting other people to read my writing I change reality by their reading it and expecting it to be like my books. Someone suggested that.

My books are forgeries.

Last night I dreamed that I was telling people that J.S. Bach was laughing at me. I imitated J.S. Bach's laugh for them. They were not amused.

I miss my savior.

Jeez, I've fallen into someone else's novel!

THE THREE STIGMATA, if read properly (i.e. reversed) contains many clues as to the nature of God and to our relationship with him.

(1) There is no visual (sense-organ) evidence of God at work anywhere in the world. (2)I must either deny that God, then, is at work in the world, or I must deny the evidence of my senses.

. . ."I know." (Or I think I know. I hope I know. I hope I don't just have hubris about this. I hope I'm not boasting. If I am I'm sorry.)

. . .what more can you ask out of a transformed person? I know the future and things beyond my senses, but I'll skip that because I am not sure if that counts.

It was all alive. It had personality. It explained everything to me. Now I don't see or understand anything. At that time I could even remember back to my origins. My real origins: the stars.

Reality for me is painful - must be and always will be - but (that) reality is good; all realities are good. God does not err.

Only now, as I become for the first time in my life financially secure, am I becoming sane.

My cosmological concepts are so terrific, so advanced as to be off the scale. I create whole religions and philosophical systems.

Dream: I am Jerry Lewis, a contemptible clown, but admired by millions, esp. in France. In a parking lot I fall, and lie down to die. At once my fans gather from everywhere, and close in around me to protect me, giving military salutes; it is a heroic scene, the dying leader and his loyal troops.

Does that mean we are in something like cold-pac? In some respects we are.

It really does not make sense to say that the universe is irreal unless you have something real to compare it with.

I thought a thought and then an infinite regression of theses and countertheses cam into being.

"Every thought leads to infinity, does it not? Find one that doesn't."

By now it is evident to you that you are going to think up an infinite number of theories, limited only by your lifespan, not limited by your creative imagination.

. . .I could be Dionysus. . .pretending to be Krishna. And I wouldn't know it; part of the game is that I, myself, do not know. So I am God, without realising it. There's a new theory!

If time stops, this is what takes place, these changes. Not frozen-ness, but revelation.

What repels me about Marxism is its mechanistic quality.

Our reality is a hologram because it is a re-creation reconstituted from info by Valis' perfect memory.

The creator can afford to descend into his own creation. He can afford to shed his memories (of his identity) and his supernatural powers. Then he can test his own creation. But he cannot afford to get stuck in it.

Zebra equals Christ. Christ equals God. Thomas equals Zebra. I equal Thomas. (For equals read is.) Thus I equal God.

I assumed that the purpose of my writing is to acquaint us with our situation, that my novels and stories function like the inbreaking messages in UBIK. . .but now I am given to understand that actually my writing is [a] report on the situation here outgoing - meant to leave our irreal world, to break out, not in, and acquaint the actual world (macrobrain) of our plight.

"Jesus Christ" is a code name for this rational phylogenic ultra personality which can only be summoned by the passion and death of the ontogenic irrational self.

To a very large degree memory no longer agrees with reality.

I actually had to develop a love of the disordered and puzzling, viewing reality as a vast riddle to be joyfully tackled, not in fear but with tireless fascination.

Probably the most severe assault delivered in my work is against materialism as such, in my probing into the illusory nature of apparent reality. . .but surely this is a prime assault against the Enemy, against Marxism as one form of it.

Look at what Jeter said about me having served, done my duty and now can pass on into the reward waiting for me - he said, even, that they'd applaud me.

. . .I say that reality is irrational and irreal and subject to manipulation by mind - which is a sort of handbook of ideology of control. . .

Although appearing left wing my training is really Fascistic - not "Fascistic" as Marxist rhetoric defines it but as Mussolini defined it. . .Since few living people correctly understand (genuine) fascism, my ideology has never been perjoratively stigmatized by the left. . .I speak of and for the irrational and the anti-rational, a kind of dynamic nihilism. . .Thus my real idol is Hitler. . .

Since nothing, absolutely nothing, is excluded (as not worth being included) I proffer a vast mixed bag - out of it I shake coin-operated doors and God. It's a fucking circus.

I am a mad ex world-generator, now confined. But still periodically mad. I can't die. I am countlessly reborn - metamorphosed. I know the truth about the worlds I have made, that they're not real - I know about dokos, simulations which will pass any test.

There is a war. The police are moralistic, brittle. . .But what can they do about me?. . .and anyhow my writing is all over the world. I've done my job. Undermined the Brittle Moralistic Police.

In my writing I am a destroyer of worlds, not a generator: I show them as forgeries. I unmask them and abolish their hold, their reality. I show them to be bogus, an infinitude of them, like so many skins.

Taking a pop form as "serious" is what you do if it won't go away. It's a clever tactic.

I don't write beautifully. I just write reports about our condition to go to those outside of cold pak. I am an analyzer.

I occupy the position of an O.T. prophet who pits himself against the evil king and reveals God's plan, which God reveals to him. Such prophets were rarely listened to. I've done my best.

My writing is a very unlikely place to expect to encounter the Holy; the Koinos, the Message-processing, Ubik-like ultimate entity.

Year after year, book after book and story, I shed illusion after illusion: self, time, space, causality, world - and finally sought (in 1970) to know what was real.

Premise: things are inside out (but will at the "apocalypse" assume their real shape). Therefore the right place to look for the Almighty is e.g. in the trash in the alley. And for Satan: in vast cathedrals, etc.

God talked to me through a Beatles tune ("Strawberry Fields").

I'm an addict. I'm addicted to infinity.

I may be the start of something promising: an early and incomplete explorer. It may not end with me.

No one book or story is correct and the others incorrect, and no one book or story tells it all.

Damn it. I've overlooked the extraordinary parallel between JOINT and my "It's really 70 AD!" experience.

What is my real relationship to time? I experience the near past, the near future and the very far past; a lot of my soul or psyche seems to be transtemporal. . .maybe this is why any given present space time seems somehow unreal or delusional to me.

I wonder what you get if you sit down starting with "Roog" and read through everything (including such strange stories as "Retreat Syndrome") all the way to SCANNER. If everything interlocks, what is the total message?

Program A must have led to all-out war between US and USSR. The spirit in us prevented first Nixon and then Ford from aiding S. Vietnam. So (if my reasoning is correct) we of the counterculture prevented WWIII.

My God, my life - which is to say my 2-74/3-74 experience - is exactly like the plot of any one of ten of my novels or stories. Even down to fake memories and identity. I'm a protagonist from one of PKD's books.

What's got to be gotten over is the false idea that a hallucination is a private matter.

Briefly, I was Christ. He is not a person but a state of being - and yet somehow also a person.

. . .Palmer Eldritch can spin out his hallucinatory world and time for what seems - just seems - forever. . .

Men and the world are mutually toxic to each other.

I wish I was somewhere else. Disneyland, maybe? The last sane place here?

The Republic is in peril; the Republic has been in peril for several years and is now cut away almost to a shadow of itself. . .I think they are carving it up. . .In the face of this no one notices that virtually everything we believed in is dead.

But the final ultimate purpose of VALIS and DI is not to analyze or report but to predict, as John the Baptist (Elijah) did 2000 years ago: the imminent coming - i.e. return - of the Savior.

This is not an evil world. . .There is a good world under the evil. The evil somehow superimposed over it. . ., and when stripped away, pristine glowing creation is visible.