Late last night while researching Metatron other theophanies, I came across a page entitled “The Last Theophany of Philip K. Dick“. Turns out it is part of his vast unpublished Exegesis on his mystical experience of 1974. Up till this point, the whole thing has never been published (as far as I know). It’s some 8,000 pages long, and is supposed to be an unorganized largely hand-written archival nightmare. A mere fifty-two items from the Exegesis were appended to the end of his novel VALIS, and can be accessed here under the name Tractates Cryptica Scriptura.

The Last Theophany link above seems to be part of a second set of excerpts which was released at some point. I’m not sure of the original source on this, but it may be Lawrence Sutin - Dick’s biographer. Some of these excerpts can be accessed at this Geocities site. Also from this source comes Dick’s Ten Major Principles of the Gnostic Revelation - worth checking out.

In any event, I really like a couple passages out of that Last Theophany section. I’ll only quote them in part though (God is the speaker in this quote):

He said, “I am the infinite. I will show you. Where I am, infinity is; where infinity is, there I am. Construct lines of reasoning by which to understand your experience in 1974. I will enter the field against their shifting nature. You think they are logical but they are not; they are infinitely creative.”

Dick then talks about how he begins thinking about various things, and various possibilities and explanations for what happened to him, and an “infinite regression [of] theses and countertheses came into being.” He does this over and over, shifting to new theories and new explanations for his experience.

I tried for an infinite number of times; each time an infinite regress was set off and each time God said, “Infinity. Hence I am here.” Then he said, “Every thought leads to infinity, does it not? Find one that doesn’t.” I tried forever.

He and God then engage in a sort of game where Dick guesses various explanations to try to get at the heart of what’s really happening.

“I said, “I will find a thought, an explanation, a theory, that does not set off an infinite regress.” And, as soon as I said that, an infinite regress was set off. God said “Over a period of six and a half years you have developed theory after theory to explain 2-3-74. Each night when you go to bed you think, “At last I found it. I tried out theory after theory until now, finally, I have the right one.’ And then the next morning you wake up and said, “There is one fact not explained by that theory. I will have to think up another theory.’ And so you do. By now it is evident to you that you are going to think up an infinite number of theories, limited only by your lifespan, not limited by your creative imagination. Each theory gives rise to a subsequent theory, inevitably.”

God soon after adds:

And your theories are infinite, so I am there. Without realizing it, the very infinitude of your theories pointed to the solution; they pointed to me and none but me.

This is such an excellent summation of Dick’s work - especially his later work - that I’m really surprised I’ve not come across it before this. It also pretty much encapsulates a concept I’ve been following for a while, that the knowledge of god (gnosis), when it “breaks into” our reality (or manifests as a theophany) is not a rational/reasonable thing. It rather explodes logical considerations, and “enter[s] the field against their shifting nature.”

The other aspect of this I like so much is that it doesn’t devalue the quest, the endless theorizing after the divine. It doesn’t say “don’t use your rational mind.” It instead seems to suggest that we fully engage it - turbo-charge it even, that even therein lies a pathway to infinity and the divine.