June–October 1980
Dick describes a model of God where “the parts are subordinated to the whole, and can be understood only in relation to the whole.” If they could be understood alone that would mean there was no God, because “there would be no subordination of parts to the total design.”
Our past exists in Valis’s memory which operates in much the same way as human memory does.
He declares his work thus far is a new theology which combines:
- Plato’s account of creation in Timaeus
- elements from Zoroastrianism
- the Cosmic Christ
- the meta-biology of Valis
- the AI system of Valis
- “process creation and divinity”
- Pythagoras’ kosmos
- “accretional laydowns from the phenomenal world to the real world”
- Spinoza’s pantheism
This reveals Valis to be a new, previously unknown God, although something similar to YHWH or the Zoroastrian creator deity Ahura Mazda. It’s possible Valis spreads by assimilating its environment. It can change the past because the past is part of its structure. Dick located it because it exists all around us instead of in the afterlife.
Valis unites units of information and is evolving and growing more complex. We are unable to see these meta-units. All we see is what constitutes them. Dick likes this view. He calls the Christ-centered model obsolete and is happy to finally get away from it toward a much more mechanical description of Valis working against entropy and making quantum leaps upward in levels of reality to where we cannot perceive it.
Immediately after abandoning a theological framework Dick goes on to describe Christ as a rebellious part of the Valis machinery that broke away and came to us two thousand years ago to clue us in to the secret of the prison we are trapped in and to heal us.