VALIS stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, a critical piece in Horselover Fat's vision of God. This revelation comes at a turbulent time in Fat's life, shortly after his wife's suicide and the subsequent suicide of multiple girlfriends in the Bay Area of the 1960s.

No one could discern how much was due to drugs. This time in America—1960 to 1970—and this place, the Bay Area of Northern California, was totally fucked.

This is not a plot driven book, but just as a reminder to myself, here it is.

Fat, completely obsessed with his religious experience, sets out to document it in his Exegesis and shares it with a small group of friends, including Philip K. Dick, who turns out to be Fat himself — in a schizophrenic way. Another of Fat's friends Kevin introduces Fat to a film called Valis which contains obvious references to events and prophecies identical to those that in Horselover Fat's revelations. This is intriguing to Fat/Phil, Kevin and their other friend David, and they all seek out the films makers. One of them turns out to be Eric Lampton, who appears to be some superposition of David Bowie and Eric Clapton. Through Eric and his wife, the friends, now calling themselves the Rhipidon Society ("fish cannot carry guns"), meet their daughter. She is a two-year-old girl named Sophia who is the incarnation of the Messiah, as prophesized. She cures Phil's schizophrenic personality split, confirms VALIS' existence and preaches that we should worship humanity, not gods. She dies days later in an unfortunate accident, which Phil forsees in a dream. This shock which eventually brings Fat back into existence and sends him on a global quest to find the next Messiah.

This was not an easy book to get through but I found it theologically intriguing.

Deep references everywhere

VALIS features a wild mishmash of cultural references, from highbrow to lowbrow and back. I was familiar with most, but post-VALIS they will be tinged with a psychotic valence when I revisit them. Time to listen.

• "Tis this that racks my brain, And pours into my breast a thousand pangs, That lash me into madness..." from an aria in Handel's Messiah. "Fat and I used to listen to my Seraphim LP of Richard Lewis singing it"
• “Total Eclipse” from Handel’s “Samson”
• “My favorite Dead album is Workingman’s Dead,” Gloria said at one point.
• "Remind him of the night he and Bob had seen the movie Patton before attending Gloria’s graveside service"
• Fat could not write poetry worth shit, despite his best efforts. He loved Wordsworth’s “Ode,” and wished he could come up with its equal. He never did
• “You see, son, here time becomes space.” Wagner, Parsifal, Act 1 (1882). (Surprisingly, Parsifal seems to have been banned in Nazi Germany)
• (VALIS was also turned into an Opera by MIT Media Lab's Tod Machover, re-produced in 2023)

I loved PKD's linguistic play, for example:

• Take this English instance: GOD IS NO WHERE / GOD IS NOW HERE, which is pretty relevant because of the all-caps, no-spaces style of Carolingian minuscule in the High Middle Ages.
• The main protagonist is Horselover Fat, a schizophrenic persona of PKD. Philip in Greek means "fond of horses"; dick is German for "fat".

On Parsifal and confusion

Dick writes:

Parsifal is one of those corkscrew artifacts of culture in which you get the subjective sense that you’ve learned something from it, something valuable or even priceless; but on closer inspection you suddenly begin to scratch your head and say, “Wait a minute. This makes no sense.” I can see Richard Wagner standing at the gates of heaven. “You have to let me in,” he says. “I wrote Parsifal. It has to do with the Grail, Christ, suffering, pity and healing. Right?” And they answer, “Well, we read it and it makes no sense.” SLAM. Wagner is right and so are they.

VALIS belongs in the same bucket of "corkscrew artifacts of culture". I can see Philip K. Dick standing at the same gates.

Maurice and Fat's parallel versions of religion

Fat's therapist is Maurice, a former IDF paratrooper with bulging muscles. He is hilariously depicted in a series of theological dialogs exhibiting their two very different takes on God. Maurice's straightforward and pragmatic, PKD's esoteric and hand-ringingly intellectual:

Staring at him, Maurice said, “Who made up this stuff? You?”

“Basically,” Fat said, “my doctrine is Valentinian, second century C.E.”

“What’s ‘C.E.’?” “Common Era. The designation replaces A.D. Valentinus’s Gnosticism is the more subtle branch as opposed to the Iranian, which of course was strongly influenced by Zoroastrianism dualism. Valentinus perceived the ontological salvific value of the gnosis, since it reversed the original, primal condition of ignorance, which represents the state of the fall, the impairment of the Godhead which resulted in the botched creation of the phenomenal or material world.

Maurice reminds Fat of the scriptures, but Fat brings in his own Gnostic takes. It's pretty funny.

Let me tell you what it says in Genesis, in case you've forgotten. Then God said, Let us make man in our image and likeness to rule the fish in the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all--”

“Okay,” Fat breaks in, “but that's the creator deity, not the true God.”

“What?” Maurice says.

Fat says, “That's Yaldaboath. Sometimes called Samael, the blind God. He's deranged.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Maurice said.

“Yaldaboath is a monster spawned by Sophia who fell from the Pleroma...”

And my favorite exchange:

“Let me just say one thing,” Fat said.

Irritably, Maurice nodded.

“The creator deity,” Fat said, “may be insane and therefore the universe is insane. What we experience as chaos is actually irrationality. There is a difference.”

He was silent, then. “The universe is what you make of it,” Maurice said. “It’s what you do with it that counts. It’s your responsibility to do something life-promoting with it, not life-destructive.”

“That’s the existential position,” Fat said. “Based on the concept that We are what we do, rather than, We are what we think. It finds its first expression in Goethe’s Faust, Part One, where Faust says, ‘Im Anfang war das Wort.’ He’s quoting the opening of the Fourth Gospel; ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ Faust says, ‘Nein, Im Anfang war die Tat.’ ‘In the beginning was the deed.’ From this, all existentialism comes.” Maurice stared at him as if he were a bug.

The Exegesis

PKD began a journal capturing his visionary experiences in 1974, which I would guess served as the basis for many of his works, certainly including VALIS. Interestingly, twenty years after publishing VALIS, fragments of this journal were compiled into his Exegesis. This book may have helped PKD get some of these ideas into the world in a less serious way.

Horselover Fat (aka PKD) experienced divine revelation. Sites of his brain were being selectively stimulated by tight energy beams emanating from far off, perhaps millions of miles away. He was in fact seeing and hearing words, pictures, figures of people, printed pages, in short God and God’s Message, or, as Fat liked to call it, the Logos.

Much of the references found in the Exegesis is well beyond my ken, referencing Gnostic ideas and works such as On the Origin of the World, featuring obscure personae like the fallen archangel Samael, and Pistis Sophia, a figure representing "Wisdom in Faith":

He said, ‘I am god and no other one exists except me.’ But when he said these things, he sinned against all of the immortal (imperishable) ones, and they protected him. Moreover, when Pistis saw the impiety of the chief ruler, she was angry. Without being seen, she said, ‘You err, Samael,’ i.e., ‘the blind god.’ ‘An enlightened, immortal man exists before you. This will appear within your molded bodies. He will trample upon you like potter’s clay, (which) is trampled. And you will go with those who are yours down to your mother, the abyss.’

Horselover Fat's Gnostic speculations remind me of John Dee and the Empire of Angels, and his exegesis closely mirrors Dee's and Kelly's scrying sessions.

An Irrational God?

Since the universe appears to be irrational, and created in God's image, it must be the case that God is irrational:

Fat believed that a streak of the irrational permeated the entire universe, all the way up to God or the Ultimate Mind, which lay behind it. [...] In other words, the universe itself—and the Mind behind it—is insane. Therefore, someone in touch with reality is, by definition, in touch with the insane: infused by the irrational.

When Fat is admitted into a mental asylum, Dr. Stone sees him and understands him and appears versed in the same Gnostic tradition. He guides Fat to seek a higher god, above the veneer of irrationality:

The answer to Fat’s question, “Is the universe irrational, and is it irrational because an irrational mind governs it?” receives this answer, via Dr. Stone: “Yes it is, the universe is irrational; the mind governing it is irrational; but above them lies another God, the true God, and he is not irrational; in addition that true God has outwitted the powers of this world, ventured here to help us, and we know him as the Logos,”

"The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque." — PKD, VALIS

Time and remembering the past and future

PKD continuously explores the subject of the fungibility of time, and whether you can "remember future lives":

Siddhartha, the Buddha, remembered all his past lives; this is why he was given the title of buddha which means “the Enlightened One.” [...] Empedocles, too, like the Buddha and Pythagoras, could remember his past lives. What they did not talk about was their ability to “remember” future lives.

Can you have a collective memory?

Phylogenic memory, memory of the species. Not my own memory, ontogenic memory. “Phylogeny is recapitulated in ontogeny,” as it is put. The individual contains the history of his entire race, back to its origins. Back to ancient Rome, to Minos at Crete, back to the stars.

PKD elaborates on the concept of the abolition of time, described as a "loss of amnesia" with ample references and impressive erudition:

The great mystery of Eleusis, of the Orphies, of the early Christians, of Sarapis, of the Greco-Roman mystery religions, of Hermes Trismegistos, of the Renaissance Hermetic alchemists, of the Rose Cross Brotherhood, of Apollonius of Tyana, of Simon Magus, of Asklepios, of Paracelsus, of Bruno, consists of the abolition of time. The techniques are there. Dante discusses them in the Comedy. It has to do with the loss of amnesia; when forgetfulness is lost, true memory spreads out backward and forward, into the past and into the future, and also, oddly, into alternate universes; it is orthogonal as well as linear.

All of this time business reminds me of the idea of a sacred time in The Sabbath by Heschel.

Multiple entities fill the same niche over time

Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth introduced me to this idea of filling a placeholder, where the organism may die, but another will take its place:

Placeholders in ecosystems: I found powerful the idea that individuals in an ecosystem can be seen as fitting into a placeholder. The organism may die, but its immediate life wasn't that important for the whole system. The individual was playing a role that many had played in the past, and many will play in the future.

Greer provides examples of this niche that is filled by a sequence of organisms. This is echoed by PKD in a little vignette of a playing cat:

Somewhere, Schopenhauer says that the cat which you see playing in the yard is the cat which played three hundred years ago.

PKD speculates wildly that the same soul is transferring through multiple bodies.

We are talking about Christ. He is an extra-terrestrial life form which came to this planet thousands of years ago, and, as living information, passed into the brains of human beings already living here, the native population. We are talking about interspecies symbiosis. Before being Christ he was Elijah. The Jews know all about Elijah and his immortality—and his ability to extend immortality to others by “dividing up his spirit.” The Qumran people knew this. They sought to receive part of Elijah’s spirit. “You see, my son, here time changes into space.”

This can also apply to empires. Dick's refrain "the empire never ended" is a core part of PKD's gnostic worldview and points to the notion that the oppressive power structures of ancient Rome—or “the Empire”—persist throughout time, concealed behind ever-shifting forms of government, technology, and society:

...During the interval in which he had experienced the two-world superimposition, he had seen not only California, USA, of the year 1974 but also ancient Rome, he had discerned within the superimposition a Gestalt shared by both space-time continua, their common element: a Black Iron Prison. This is what the dream referred to as “the Empire.” He knew it because, upon seeing the Black Iron Prison, he had recognized it. Everyone dwelt in it without realizing it. The Black Iron Prison was their world.