This reminds of something Philip K. Dick once alluded to in his book VALIS. He wrote about the "Zebra principle". The idea is that the sophisticated mimicry we find, say, in the insect world (where an insect might look exactly like a leaf), might also exist on a higher level or on a higher scale. Which is to say that some kind of higher intelligence may be present in the world but be hidden to us through a cunning sort of mimicry. In VALIS, Dick writes:
“What if a high form of sentient mimicry existed — such a high form that no human (or few humans) had detected it? What if it could only be detected if it wanted to be detected? Which is to say, not truly detected at all, since under these circumstances it had advanced out of its camouflaged state to disclose itself. "Disclose" might in this case equal "theophany." The astonished human being would say, I saw God; whereas in fact he saw only a highly evolved ultra-terrestrial life form, a UTL, or an extra-terrestrial life form (an ETL) which had come here at some time in the past, and perhaps, as Fat conjectured, had slumbered for nearly two thousand years in dormant seed form as living information in the codices at Nag Hammadi, which explained why reports of its existence had broken off abruptly around 70 A.D.”
The relation between Dick and Zebra, however, is always distant, muffled, and unclear; it is, as Regan says of his Can-D experience in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, “remote and vitiated and unconvincing” (Doubleday, 1965, 51). Dick does not simply become Zebra, but he is (and all of us are) said to become the entity’s messenger: a “delegated observer,” as Bruno Latour might say. We are all doing Zebra’s work, performing the animal’s labour, but interminably we remain unaware of this process, this performativity. But Dick ponders whether he might have been exposed to Zebra’s operations, might have caught a rare glimpse of the beast itself:
"It is interesting how we inadvertently (unknowingly) carry Zebra’s messages for it, piggyback on our own. It’s as if Zebra says, “As Long as you’re going in that direction, take this along, too.” I suppose a phagocyte doesn’t know anything about its job, either. In seeing these messages flying back and forth, I may have witnessed our primary function within Zebra. It certainly must be mine (225)."Dick penned this section on Zebra in January or February of 1977, in the same year that VALIS was published, and only two years following Dick’s fixation on the “incoming signals” that he had then spoken of as emerging from an “observatory like place” and as forming the basis for VALIS‘s plot premise (101).
The year 1977 is the Year of the Fire Snake in the Chinese zodiac, which runs from February 18, 1977 to February 6, 1978. Snakes are the emblem of cunning and evil. They are revered owing to their supernatural power. The Snake is born under the sign of wisdom. In the Chinese zodiac, the Snake is the sixth animal and the beginning of a 12-year cycle. People born in the Year of the Snake are said to be wise, smart, mysterious, caring, determined, and good at talking. They are also said to be intuitive, enigmatic, and value knowledge.
As Dick begins to suggest, Zebra may or may not be contiguous, coextensive, with the Universe. The “old universe” could in fact be, he posits, Zebra’s “antagonist,” such that there are two universes (or multiverses), one of which is Zebra, colliding, recombining, the one making itself out of the other .
May 1978Dick believes the true deity had a role in overthrowing the U.S. Government. It was able to sneak in unnoticed disguised as lowbrow trash just as in Ubik.
He thinks the Black Iron Prison world has yielded to the PTG (Palm Tree Garden) world, but because the BIP world was a bogus copy of the real world, and the PTG world copied that, we are then living in a fake of a fake. He goes on to clarify there is no world. We are enclosed in the BIP which is firing signals at us and creating what we see as the world. He doesn’t believe it is evil though.
The information Dick received in 3-74 was meant for Zebra and not for him. Whatever it was means Zebra is a permanent part of him now and he is in a symbiotic state with it.
It sounds like he thinks the information hidden in his book Flow My Tears is a way for Zebra to replicate itself in the minds of its readers. He suggests the Book of Acts in the Bible is not a book but is actually a world which he entered into in 3-74. I’m not sure Dick really understands what he is talking about here.
Dick has hit on the idea that we built Zebra to help us remember because we knew the BIP would take over and enslave us. Zebra is metabolic information restoring elasticity to the rigid BIP of the universe. Each person must rebel in order to see the world for what it truly is.
Because we each contain the totality of the holographic universe Zebra and Dick are the same, but he is still reckoning with this.
October–November 1978Dick connects his books to his present model of reality. Zebra is like the computer that constructs reality in A Maze of Death and also the thing that intrudes into our fake world as in Ubik. Like in A Scanner Darkly it is actively trying to hide its true nature, and this fact of occlusion is then further occluded from us. He says the “quasi-mind” of the maze appears insane and compares it to Yaldabaoth (one of the creator gods according to the Gnostics) who does indeed sound crazy. Because of this irrationality it is impossible to make sense of it. The maze is disorder and confusion which we can only navigate through the help of Zebra. Dick still thinks this is something we created for ourselves as a puzzle.
He has been working on the exegesis for 4 and a half years and says he is now being “signalled to die.” He is afraid the exegesis is unpublishable and that everything he has learned will die with him, another way that the maze will win. He recognizes a paradox though that if the maze wins we win, since we created the maze.
He returns to the idea of Zebra as a living information virus embedded in his book Flow My Tears and imagines it proliferating as people read it. He wonders if it had been dormant since the time of Acts before traveling from the newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls to the Dead Sea Scroll scholar John Allegro to Jim Pike to him.
October 1978 Zebra destroys the four deformations.
It abolishes the phony world
It abolishes the occlusion
It frees us from enslavement
It restores our memory
The Gnostics didn’t have it quite right. It is the living information itself, not the content of the information, that saves us.
Dick counts 21 of his stories that deal with the idea of fake vs real.
The Logos contains the totality of the macrocosm. Once it replicates in someone (through just a tiny piece as happened with Dick in 2-74) they become one with the whole. Zebra is in Dick and his purpose is to restore this knowledge (gnosis) to the world, which he does through his lowbrow sci fi, just as in Ubik.
He has a dream about Siddhartha (the founder of Buddhism) and believes this means another savior is being born. Dick covers how the savior dynamic is depicted in Stigmata, Ubik, Galactic Pot-Healer and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The VALIS book he is working on will show the process of redemption, although he finds writing it very difficult. He has a dream about a fish and from that concludes the secret Christian society does exist and he is a part of it. Time has not passed since Rome 45 A.D. It has only been made (by James-James?) to appear that way. Dick understood this in 3-74 when he woke up. His book VALIS (which he calls his maximus opus) will show the restored and redeemed man, but from the perspective of Gnosticism and Buddhism, not Christianity
Zebra is, after all,
**as Dick says in
1977**, hardly impactful on the material world;
"a weak “vegetable level” field, barely able to arrange matter. (Trigrams Sun and Li.) But its level (capacity to exert force) seems to be growing. To have thresholded recently. I have seen what it can do and have heard its voice.""Just like the Black Iron Prison will co-opt and subvert any of our attempts at illumining it to feed into and serve its nefarious agenda. . . Zebra will use the Black Iron Prison’s attempts at imprisonment to ultimately serve our freedom." Speaking of the Black Iron Prison’s agenda of “enslavement, deception and spiritual death” Philo K. Dick writes, “even this is utilized by Zebra, which utilizes everything, [this] is a sacred secret.”
- The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 289.
