Is This Water Part 2: The Last Temptation of Water

"Christianity is secretly a religion of ecstasy, and that was my turning point"

Philip K. Dick

I feel confident now that my 2-3-74 experience is not reactionary but is carrying me into the future—a vast quantum leap from political action to one colossal meta-view of reality that embraces the political and the spiritual, the scientific and the religious: what for me personally may be the quintessential summation of my entire life of inquiry and worldview; for me and for mankind a new age is opening in which the holy, expected from the top, so to speak, returns at the bottom, at the trash stratum of the alley, humble and noble, beautiful and suffering and alive and conscious, personified in and by my Tagore vision.

If indeed it is the triumph of Christianity to dignify the lowly, here now is a whole new leap along that axis: the lowly snail darter becomes identified with suffering ubiquitous Christ and by being assimilated to him is glorified as if nature itself—and the electronic environment of info and signals and message traffic—is able to perish and be resurrected as and with the cosmic Christ (Jesus Patibilis) of Pierre Teilhard. Thus Christ extends even beyond the reality of the organic to bits of newspaper and song lyrics and random pages of popular print: one vast entity that evolves and thinks and has both personality and consciousness. It perfects itself and includes us all, subsuming and incorporating progressively more and more of its environment into arrangements of information—which is to say negative entropy: this is, in fact, a runaway positive feedback loop of greater and greater complexity and organization.

I have plumbed the true secret core of authentic Christianity—i.e., in 2-3-74. Hidden within the passion, the crucifixion, is its mirror opposite: ecstasis: joy, i.e., Dionysus, and this is what broke over me in 2-3-74: not just theoretical knowledge (Gnosis) but the Christian ecstatic experience.  Hence when I read Luke I recognize Jesus as a miracle worker, a guru, a magician. He is the God of change.

Agape is a road along which one travels in imitation of Christ, to penetrate to the core—deepest ontological layer—of suffering (his passion and crucifixion), and there, if you follow that road—and that road only—you arrive at the secret: the Resurrection—which is the miraculous conversion of suffering into ecstasy, which is uniquely the Christian miracle; this is how Christianity and Christianity alone solves the problem of suffering. This solution is not a philosophical, intellectual understanding (e.g., why there is suffering) but an event: the dramatic conversion of suffering, not into mere stoic apathy, the mere lack of suffering, but into its affective and ontological bipolar opposite: ecstasy—and here, precisely, Dionysus-Zagreus enters; Jesus “is” Dionysus-Zagreus as a solution to suffering; this is not just ecstasy but, more, ecstasy as the conversion of suffering. (This conversion is not found in the Dionysian-Orphic system; ecstasy is sought for its own sake.)
There is, then, no exultation in suffering per se, here; suffering, as in Buddhism, is to be solved; thus Jesus addresses the same problem that Buddhism and Stoicism address, but solves it quite differently. If Buddhas can be called victors, certainly, then, the Christian (who goes all the way to the end of the road of agape) is even more a victor, for he is not merely liberated from suffering—he experiences ecstasy.

The LSD-like perception of reality in 2-3-74 has to do with the greater Eleusian mysteries; the AI voice now precisely defined itself and what it has revealed to me: the greater mysteries. They pertain to Christ (authentic Christianity as a mystery religion offering immortality); that is, the vertical ascent by the “pulley,” in which we are extricated from our endless horizontal tracking (lifted along an orthogonal axis whose existence we do not suspect).

The maze can never be solved in terms of “horizontal” space, only “vertical” space (involving conversion of time into space).  This is ostensibly Celtic, but below that, as it were, lies pan-Indian thought about karma and maya and most of all compassion—expressed in Parsifal as “pity’s [i.e., compassion’s] highest power”; the significance of Mitleid in the statement in Parsifal is now explained to me: compassion’s highest power is the only power capable of solving the maze, and the recognition of “compassion’s highest power” is the essence of Buddhism, i.e., the bodhisattva or Buddha-to-be. VALIS, then, is Celtic (Parsifal, the maze) and Indian (Buddhism), by way of Crete (the dream of the plate of spaghetti and the trident and the elevator)—this last representing vertical ascent or descent: the fourth spatial axis is spiritual space: to rise vertically is to ascend to heaven which also signifies spiritual ascent or enlightenment.

The “here, my son, time turns into space” in Parsifal refers to (1) the maze; and (2) is a solution to the maze. It all comes together in Parsifal, which secretly deals with bodhisattva: Mitleid, hence the Buddha. And karma and Maya. What was precisely not solved in VALIS (“pity’s highest power”) is at last solved at the end—as the end—of BTA: compassion as the bodhisattva or Buddha to be: viz: one attains Nirvana—release from the maze via the pulley—due to compassion—i.e., Mitleid, which solves the horizontal maze. Pity is the fourth spatial axis. This can be expressed best by: the way back into the maze—what the bodhisattva chooses (to do)—is, paradoxically, the way—the only way—out of the maze.

And my point is: this was to be the theme of Owl in which he is trapped in the maze and only escapes, actually, rather than seemingly, when he decides voluntarily to return (to resubject himself to the power of the maze) for the sake of these others, still in it. That is, you can never leave alone; to leave you must elect to take the others out; thus Christ said, “Greater love hath no man than that he give up his life for his friend”; this is the cryptic utterance of the soul’s solution to the maze, and is the essence of Christianity.  Christianity, then, is a system of solution to the maze. Had I written Owl I would have expressed this solution which I had already formulated on a supra-conscious level.

It is almost all there in VALIS but the specific, crucial solution itself (VALIS states the problem) is at the end of BTA, so the problem is in VALIS and the solution to the problem (as I recently realized) is held back till BTA and then only at the end.

Philip K. Dick, Exegesis 1981-82