The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mind Isn’t In Here; It’s Out There

One of the greatest conceits of the species Homo Sapiens is that each member of that species thinks independently. That is to say, every individual has a Mind which is unique and which defines the existence of a separate and distinct person.

This is of course nonsense, as any advertising executive or religious preacher or populist politician knows very well. And the error of this presumption is what Dick’s rambling, aphoristic Exegesis demonstrates so relentlessly. Mind certainly exists, but it is, as the psychologist Carl Jung suggested, a collective phenomenon. Mind is ‘out there’ not ‘’in here.’

This collectivity is something we participate in, not something that we contribute to. The distinction is crucial because Mind exists not inside our heads or other part of our bodies, but somewhere external to ourselves. This species-mind incorporates us into itself. We can neither control it nor understand it. In former times this species-mind was commonly referred to as God. Christianity uses the term Logos, the Word, which has existed eternally, as the creative force that drives our world.*

The writer of the Gospel of John used the term Logos metaphorically to refer to Christ before he became a human being. The metaphor is entirely apt. In fact it is unlikely that he could have found a better one. As human beings, we exist within language. We are trapped within it. We are totally dependent upon it to sustain us. And as semioticians have noted, it is not possible to determine when our language capability began. It is effectively eternal.

In Dick’s work, the Logos is never far away and it is a running theme throughout Exegesis and in most of his fiction. In his novel Ubik, for example, the Logos, the voice of God, addresses all living creatures. The voice gives all their prospective reason for being. And for Homo Sapiens it also provides Reason, the ability to understand prospective reasoning. In Ubik, the Logos as the end-point of all existence ‘leaks back’ in time becoming a force that doesn’t just attract but also drives the world toward its true destiny.

Dick knows that the Logos must never be confused with the language that we speak. This is what makes him a mystic. The Word can never be captured in words. The Logos is the source of our species-wordiness. It promotes the ever-increasing use of language as a sort of glorification of itself. But the words are necessarily incomplete, and consequently senseless. More words must be produced as therapy for the already failed words. The Logos is unremitting in its pressure.

As human beings, we cannot escape the Logos. We try constantly to do so by analysing it, explaining it, even begging it for guidance. None of this is effective since they all involve the very thing in which we are imprisoned, the gift of the Logos - language. The Logos demands not attention or adoration but submission, that is to say, the giving up of the struggle to escape. This means recognising that the gift of language is simply that, a gift. It is not, as we are prone to believe, a representation much less a replacement for reality. The Logos is reality and will not tolerate presumption on its turf.

Dick’s revelations about the Logos are not mere repetitions of previous mystics. They are... well, revelatory, an unhiding of the way things are. Arguably his greatest theological insight is that the Logos, in addition to being a guide and comforter and the essence of our being, is also a tormentor. It gives expressiveness to us only to reveal how little expression we have and how trivial it is. It tortures those to whom it is closest, humiliating them by forcing them to employ language that is inadequate. It teases constantly that the ‘next time’ we write or speak will bring us closer to itself. Of course it never does. For the Logos, this is a mode of play. So Dick respected, perhaps even loved, the Logos. But he never worshipped it. Dick was not a religious man in any sense other than that he recognised the importance of what lay beyond language.

By any definition, and for whatever reasons of genetics, psychological experience or 60’s pharmacology. Dick had spiritual revelations in the mid- 1970’s which he described quite matter-of-factly and cogently to his friends and used effectively and with considerable artistry in his novels. These experiences are, I think, correctly compared with those of Teresa of Avila and other great medieval mystics. And his descriptions of being ‘taken over’ by these experiences conform precisely to the conditions of true theological understanding of religion as laid out by, for example, Karl Barth during the 20th century.

Mystics from at least Isaiah onwards are never appreciated fully in their own time. This is largely due to their intimate relationship with the Logos, a relationship which is revealed in their hyper-attachment and simultaneous hyper-disrespect for the words of human language. And so it has been with Dick who was largely rejected as a great writer until he was dead. Like all mystics, Dick uses words in order to distort them, to show, among other things that they are not reality. Science fiction, therefore, is a natural genre in which to express our complicated dependence on that entity that exists neither objectively on its own, nor subjectively as entirely separated from us, but inter-subjectively, that is ‘God among us,’ another name for Mind.

*AKA Virgil’s universal immanent mind, the Greek god Apollo, the Platonic Nous, the Zoroastrian Mazda, the Judaic Shekinah, the Hindu Brahmin and Dick’s own Ubik among so many others

Postscript: I find it eerie as well as interesting that in my news feed I discovered this article about cosmic particles detected in Antarctica suspiciously like the tachyons that Dick thought gave him his visions: https://apple.news/AP500ID96RjeOqVdYB...

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