Hm, it just finally struck me that Dick’s concept of a plasmate is strikingly similar to what people say memes are. There is surprisingly little information available when you query for the two terms together thouh.

Also, from here, this is describing the term VALIS: “An information entelechy residing in the Qumran scrolls of the early Essenes and Gnostics forms a symbiotic ‘Homoplasmate’ with humans who read it.”

I have to figure out how this idea of plasmate (and memes) ties into what I was getting at in my article about archetypes, complexes and sentient information patterns (or entelechies), cause I know it does, and quite directly.

This also is from Dick’s Exegesis:

“As living information, the plasmate travels up the optic nerve of a human to the pineal body. It uses the human brain as a female host in which to replicate itself into its active form. This is an interspecies symbiosis. The Hermetic alchemists knew of it in theory from ancient texts, but could not duplicate it, since they could not locate the dormant, buried plasmate. Bruno suspected that the plasmate had been destroyed by the Empire; for hinting at this he was burned. “The Empire never ended.” —Phillip K. Dick