Valis is Phillip K Dick’s fictional novel based on a real life story, when he had a transcendent experience. He describes how he was transported into a different dimension after encountering a fish sign. A moment of pure information flow gave him knowledge of the past and the future. He had transcended time.
The narrator explains how a theophany is self-disclosure by the divine, in other words, a theophany isn’t something we do; rather, a theophany is something the divine does to us. The intense pink beam of light experienced by the narrator’s persona Horselover Fat was just such a theophany. But how can we tell between a theophany and an illusion?
Fat experiences the divine but it wears off. If only he could have those experiences like a drug, life would be great. Instead, post-revelation, his life became depressing.
Throughout the novel, Horselover Fat (Phillip K. Dick’s fictional character) describes the experience he had. He compares it with what the great religious leaders and mystics have reported throughout the ages. Below are a couple of excerpts that go into more details.
Chapter 8
I did not think I should tell Fat that I thought his encounter with God was in fact an encounter with himself from the far future. Himself so evolved, so changed, that he had become no longer a human being. Fat had remembered back to the stars, and had encountered a being ready to return to the stars, and several selves along the way, several points along the line. All of them are the same person.
Entry #13 in the tractate: Pascal said, “All history is one immortal man who continually learns.” This is the Immortal One whom we worship without knowing his name. “He lived a long time ago but he is still alive,” and, “The Head Apollo is about to return.” The name changes.
On some level Fat guessed the truth; he had encountered his past selves and his future selves — two future selves: an early-on one, the three-eyed people, and then Zebra, who is discorporate. Time somehow got abolished for him, and the recapitulation of selves along the linear time-axis caused the multitude of selves to laminate together into a common entity.
Out of the lamination of selves, Zebra, which is supra- or trans-temporal, came into existence: pure energy, pure living information. Immortal, benign, intelligent and helpful. The essence of the rational human being. In the center of an irrational universe governed by an irrational Mind stands rational man, Horselover Fat being just one example. The in-breaking deity that Fat encountered in 1974 was himself. However, Fat seemed happy to believe that he had met God. After some thought I decided not to tell him my views. After all, I might be wrong.
It all had to do with time. “Time can be overcome,” Mircea Eliade wrote. That’s what it’s all about. The great mystery of Eleusis, of the Orphics, 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.
This is why Elijah could be said correctly to be immortal; he had entered the Upper Realm (as Fat calls it) and is no longer subject to time. Time equals what the ancients called “astral determinism.” The purpose of the mysteries was to free the initiate from astral determinism, which roughly equals fate. About this, Fat wrote in his tractate:
Entry #48. Two realms there are, upper and lower. The upper, derived from hyperuniverse I or Yang, Form I of Parmenides, is sentient and volitional. The lower realm, or Yin, Form II of Parmenides, is mechanical, driven by blind, efficient cause, deterministic and without intelligence, since it emanates from a dead source. In ancient times it was termed “astral determinism.” We are trapped, by and large, in the lower realm, but are through the sacraments, by means of the plasmate, extricated. Until astral determinism is broken, we are not even aware of it, so occluded are we. “The Empire never ended.”
Siddhartha, the Buddha, remembered all his past lives; this is why he was given the title of buddha which means “the Enlightened One.” From him the knowledge of achieving this passed to Greece and shows up in the teachings of Pythagoras, who kept much of this occult, mystical gnosis secret; his pupil Empedocles, however, broke off from the Pythagorean Brotherhood and went public. Empedocles told his friends privately that he was Apollo. He, too, like the Buddha and Pythagoras, could remember his past lives. What they did not talk about was their ability to “remember” future lives.
The three-eyed people who Fat saw represented himself at an enlightened stage of his evolving development through his various lifetimes. In Buddhism it’s called the “super-human divine eye” (dibba-cakkhu), the power to see the passing away and rebirth of beings. Gautama the Buddha (Siddhartha) attained it during his middle watch (ten p.m. to two a.m.). In his first watch (six p.m. to ten p.m.) he gained the knowledge of all — repeat: all — his former existences (pubbeni-vasanussati-nana). I did not tell Fat this, but technically he had become a Buddha. It did not seem to me like a good idea to let him know. After all, if you are a Buddha you should be able to figure it out for yourself.#
It strikes me as an interesting paradox that a Buddha — an enlightened one — would be unable to figure out, even after four-and-a-half years, that he had become enlightened. Fat had become totally bogged down in his enormous exegesis, trying futilely to determine what had happened to him. He resembled more a hit-and-run accident victim than a Buddha.
Chapter 10
It would not be in China, nor in India or Tasmania for that matter, that Horselover Fat would find the fifth Savior. Valis had shown us where to look: a beer can run over by a passing taxi. That was the source of the information and the help.
That in fact was VALIS, Vast Active Living Intelligence System, as Mother Goose had chosen to term it.
We had just saved Fat a lot of money, plus a lot of wasted time and effort, including the bother of obtaining vaccinations and a passport.
A couple of days later the three of us drove up Tustin Avenue and took in the film Valis once more. Watching it carefully I realized that on the surface the movie made no sense whatsoever. Unless you ferreted out the subliminal and marginal clues and assembled them all together you arrived at nothing. But these clues got fired at your head whether you consciously considered them and their meaning or not; you had no choice. The audience was in the same relationship to the film Valis that Fat had had to what he called Zebra: a transducer and a percipient, totally receptive in nature.
Again we found mostly teenagers comprising the audience. They seemed to enjoy what they saw. I wondered how many of them left the theater pondering the inscrutible [sic] mysteries of the film as we did. Maybe none of them. I had a feeling it made no difference.
We could assign Gloria’s death as the cause of Fat’s supposed encounter with God, but we could not consider it the cause of the film Valis. Kevin, upon first seeing the film, had realized this at once. It didn’t matter what the explanation was; what had now been established was that Fat’s March 1974 experience was real.
Okay; it mattered what the explanation was. But at least one thing had been proved: Fat might be clinically crazy but he was locked into reality — a reality of some kind, although certainly not the normal one.
Ancient Rome — apostolic times and early Christians — breaking through into the modern world. And breaking through with a purpose. To unseat Ferris F. Fremount, who was Richard Nixon.
They had achieved their purpose, and had gone back home.
Maybe the Empire had ended after all. Now himself somewhat persuaded, Kevin began to comb through the two apocalyptic books of the Bible for clues. He came across a part of the Book of Daniel which he believed depicted Nixon.
“In the last days of those kingdoms,
When their sin is at its height,
A king shall appear, harsh and grim, a master of stratagem.
His power shall be great, he shall work havoc untold;
He shall work havoc among great nations and upon a holy people.
His mind shall be ever active,
And he shall succeed in his crafty designs;
He shall conjure up great plans.
And, when they least expect it, work havoc on many.
He shall challenge even the Prince of princes
And be broken, but not by human hands.”
Now Kevin had become a Bible scholar, to Fat’s amusement; the cynic had become devout, albeit for a particular purpose.
But on a far more fundamental level Fat felt fear at the turn of events. Perhaps he had always felt reassured to think that his March 1974 encounter with God emanated from mere insanity; viewing it that way he did not necessarily have to take it as real. Now he did. We all did. Something which did not yield up an explanation had happened to Fat, an experience which pointed to a melting of the physical world itself, and to the ontological categories which defined it: space and time.
“Shit, Phil,” he said to me that night. “What if the world doesn’t exist? If it doesn’t, then what does?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and then I said, quoting, “You’re the authority.”
Fat glared at me. “It’s not funny. Some force or entity melted the reality around me as if everything was a hologram! An interference with our hologram!”
“But in your tractate,” I said, “that’s exactly what you stipulate reality is: a two-source hologram.”
“But intellectually thinking it is one thing,” Fat said, “and finding out it’s true is another!”
“There’s no use getting sore at me,” I said.
David, our Catholic friend, and his teeny-bopper underage girlfriend Jan went to see Valis, on our recommendation. David came out of it pleased. He saw the hand of God squeezing the world like an orange.
“Yeah, well we’re in the juice,” Fat said.
“But that’s the way it should be,” David said.
“You’re willing to dispense with the whole world as a real thing, then,” Fat said.
“Whatever God believes in is real,” David said.
Kevin, irked, said, “Can he create a person so gullible that hell believe nothing exists? Because if nothing exists, what is meant by the word ‘nothing’? How is one ‘nothing’ which exists defined in comparison to another ‘nothing’ which doesn’t exist?”
We, as usual, had gotten caught in the crossfire between David and Kevin, but under altered circumstances.
“What exists,” David said, “is God and the Will of God.”
“I hope I’m in his will,” Kevin said. “I hope he left me more than one dollar.”
“All creatures are in his will,” David said, not batting an eye; he never let Kevin get to him.
Concern had now, by gradual increments, overcome our little group. We were no longer friends comforting and propping up a deranged member; we were collectively in deep trouble. A total reversal had in fact taken place: instead of mollifying Fat we now had to turn to him for advice. Fat was our link with that entity, VALIS or Zebra, which appeared to have power over all of us, if the Mother Goose film were to be believed.
“Not only does it fire information to us but when it wants to it can take control. It can override us.”
That expressed it perfectly. At any moment a beam of pink light could strike us, blind us, and when we regained our sight (if we ever did) we could know everything or nothing and be in Brazil four thousand years ago; space and time, for VALIS, meant nothing.
A common worry unified all of us, the fear that we knew or had figured out too much. We knew that apostolic Christians armed with stunningly sophisticated technology had broken through the space-time barrier into our world, and, with the aid of a vast information-processing instrument had basically deflected human history. The species of creature which stumbles onto such knowledge may not show up too well on the longevity tables.
Most ominous of all, we knew — or suspected — that the original apostolic Christians who had known Christ, who had been alive to receive the direct oral teachings before the Romans wiped those teachings out, were immortal. They had acquired immortality through the plasmate which Fat had discussed in his tractate. Although the original apostolic Christians had been murdered, the plasmate had gone into hiding at Nag Hammadi and was again loose in our world, and as angry as a motherfucker, if you’ll excuse the expression. It thirsted for vengence. And apparently it had begun to score that vengence, against the modern-day manifestation of the Empire, the imperial United States Presidency.
I hoped the plasmate considered us its friends. I hoped it didn’t think we were snitches.
“Where do we hide,” Kevin said, “when an immortal plasmate which knows everything and is consuming the world by transubstantiation is looking for you?”
“It’s a good thing Sherri isn’t alive to hear about all this,” Fat said, surprising us. “I mean, it would shake her faith.”
We all laughed. Faith shaken by the discovery that the entity believed in actually existed — the paradox of piety. Sherri’s theology had congealed; there would have been no room in it for the growth, the expansion and evolution, necessary to encompass our revelations. No wonder Fat and she weren’t able to live together.
The question was, How did we go about making contact with Eric Lampton and Linda Lampton and the composer of Synchronicity Music, Mini? Obviously through me and my friendship — if that’s what it was — with Jamison.
“It’s up to you, Phil,” Kevin said. “Get off the pot and onto the stick. Call Jamison and tell him — whatever. You’re full of it; you’ll think of something. Say you’ve written a hot-property screenplay and you want Lampton to read it.”
“Call it Zebra,”Fat said.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll call it Zebra or Horse’s Ass or anything you want. You know, of course, that this is going to shoot down my professional probity.”
“What probity?” Kevin said, characteristically. “Your probity is like Fat’s. It never got off the ground in the first place.”
“What you have to do,” Fat said, “is show knowledge of the gnosis disclosed to me by Zebra over and above, which is to say beyond, what appears in Valis. That will intrigue him. I’ll write down a few statements I’ve received directly from Zebra.”