I’m reading through In Pursuit of Valis, which features extended selections from Philip K. Dick’s million-word Exegesis on his work and mystical experiences. There is tons of interesting stuff here which I would like to share in tidbits over the coming weeks. In this section, Dick is talking about the presence of God, salvation, what-have-you, and whether it’s necessarily an internal or external process.

Here would be the crucial distinction between Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, which I feel so strongly about: the former is sort of self-fertilizing, parthenogenesis, so to speak, but in Gnosticism you have the idea that the Savior is absolutely necessary. So we have here the idea that something entirely outside one is necessary, it comes along (God’s grace) and if it doesn’t come, then there is no zygote, no Firebright, no seed, no immortality. I always felt Gnosticism was correct over Neoplatonism; viewed this way, it is evident why. The Neoplatonist knows what happened, in a basic way, but he feels he did it by himself: up by his own bootstraps. A personal achievement. I guess this is a failure to know about the “birds and the bees” […] How are babies born? By thinking about it, or by copulating? […] [N]o meditation, no prayer, no affirmation of belief is going to do it. It is done to us, not by us. All each of us can do is accept - ie, receive.

It’s interesting - reading through this book gives you a glimpse into his largely un-edited late-night off the cuff ramblings. In other words his 1970’s equivalent to blog posts. Thinking about him in the context of what all of us are doing makes it all the more interesting. This item in particular is something I could easily see somebody over at the Palm Tree Garden having come up with as a topic of heated debate.