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Author Topic: From the mind of Philo K. Dick: "Zebra and the Phagocytes"  (Read 635 times)

Offline Yeshu

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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).



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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 1978
Dick 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 1978
Dick 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."



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"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.

Offline Yeshu

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The "omniscience" of "prophets" and "know-it-alls"
« Reply #1 on: August 06, 2024, 03:56:42 AM »
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13 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

4 Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,

5 Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;

6 Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;

7 Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

8 Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

9 For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.

10 But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

13 And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.







« Last Edit: August 06, 2024, 04:59:39 AM by Yeshu »

Offline Yeshu

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"a knowledge of God like light that has come forth from fire and blood."
« Reply #2 on: August 06, 2024, 04:01:58 AM »

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But the generation without a king over it says that God chose him from all the aeons. He caused a knowledge of the undefiled one of truth to come to be in him. He said, "Out of a foreign air, from a great aeon, the great illuminator came forth. And he made the generation of those men whom he had chosen for himself shine, so that they could shine upon the whole aeon"

Then the seed, those who will receive his name upon the water and (that) of them all, will fight against the power. And a cloud of darkness will come upon them.

Then the peoples will cry out with a great voice, saying, "Blessed is the soul of those men because they have known God with a knowledge of the truth! They shall live forever, because they have not been corrupted by their desire, along with the angels, nor have they accomplished the works of the powers, but they have stood in his presence in a knowledge of God like light that has come forth from fire and blood.

"But we have done every deed of the powers senselessly. We have boasted in the transgression of all our works. We have cried against the God of truth because all his works [...] is eternal. These are against our spirits. For now we have known that our souls will die the death."

Then a voice came to them, saying "Micheu and Michar and Mnesinous, who are over the holy baptism and the living water, why were you crying out against the living God with lawless voices and tongues without law over them, and souls full of blood and foul deeds? You are full of works that are not of the truth, but your ways are full of joy and rejoicing. Having defiled the water of life, you have drawn it within the will of the powers to whom you have been given to serve them.

"And your thought is not like that of those men whom you persecute [...] desire [...]. Their fruit does not wither. But they will be known up to the great aeons, because the words they have kept, of the God of the aeons, were not committed to the book, nor were they written. But angelic (beings) will bring them, whom all the generations of men will not know. For they will be on a high mountain, upon a rock of truth. Therefore they will be named "The Words of Imperishability and Truth," for those who know the eternal God in wisdom of knowledge and teaching of angels forever, for he knows all things."

These are the revelations which Adam made known to Seth, his son, And his son taught his seed about them. This is the hidden knowledge of Adam, which he gave to Seth, which is the holy baptism of those who know the eternal knowledge through those born of the word and the imperishable illuminators, who came from the holy seed: Yesseus, Mazareus, Yessedekeus, the Living Water.

- Apocalypse of Adam

« Last Edit: August 06, 2024, 05:01:05 AM by Yeshu »

Offline Yeshu

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The Doe of the Dawn - Psalm 22
« Reply #3 on: August 10, 2024, 10:16:17 AM »
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22 My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?

2 O my God, I cry in the day time, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.

3 But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.

4 Our fathers trusted in thee: they trusted, and thou didst deliver them.

5 They cried unto thee, and were delivered: they trusted in thee, and were not confounded.

6 But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people.

7 All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying,

8 He trusted on the Lord that he would deliver him: let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him.

9 But thou art he that took me out of the womb: thou didst make me hope when I was upon my mother's breasts.

10 I was cast upon thee from the womb: thou art my God from my mother's belly.

11 Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help.

12 Many bulls have compassed me: strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round.

13 They gaped upon me with their mouths, as a ravening and a roaring lion.

14 I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels.

15 My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me into the dust of death.

16 For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet.

17 I may tell all my bones: they look and stare upon me.

18 They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.

19 But be not thou far from me, O Lord: O my strength, haste thee to help me.

20 Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog.

21 Save me from the lion's mouth: for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns.

22 I will declare thy name unto my brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee.

23 Ye that fear the Lord, praise him; all ye the seed of Jacob, glorify him; and fear him, all ye the seed of Israel.

24 For he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; neither hath he hid his face from him; but when he cried unto him, he heard.

25 My praise shall be of thee in the great congregation: I will pay my vows before them that fear him.

26 The meek shall eat and be satisfied: they shall praise the Lord that seek him: your heart shall live for ever.

27 All the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the Lord: and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee.

28 For the kingdom is the Lord's: and he is the governor among the nations.

29 All they that be fat upon earth shall eat and worship: all they that go down to the dust shall bow before him: and none can keep alive his own soul.

30 A seed shall serve him; it shall be accounted to the Lord for a generation.

31 They shall come, and shall declare his righteousness unto a people that shall be born, that he hath done this.