Notes from VALIS, by Philip K. Dick

Men and the world are mutually toxic to each other. But God — the true God — has penetrated both (…) and sobers the landscape.

Lurking the true God literally ambushes reality and us as well. God, in very truth, attacks and injures us, in his role as antidote.

The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself.

So the rational, like a seed, lies concealed within the irrational bulk.

‘Salvation’ through gnosis — more properly anamnesis (the loss of amnesia) — although it has individual significance for each of us — a quantum leap of perception, identity, cognition, undestanding, world and self-experience including immortality — it has greater and further importance for the system as a whole, inasmuch as these memories are data needed by it and valuable to it, to its overall functioning.

We did not fall because of a moral error; we fell because of an intellectual error: that of taking the phenomenal world as real.

Immortality, the abolition of time and space, comes only through the Logos or plasmate; only it is immortal.

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 Orphicsm of the early Christians, of Sarapis, of the Greco-Roman…