Valis by Philip K. Dick Page B

creator and his screwed-up world separate man from God. That the blind creator sincerely imagines that he is the true God only reveals the extent of his occlusion. This is Gnosticism. In Gnosticism, man belongs with God
against
the world and the creator of the world (both of which are crazy, whether they realize it or not). The answer to Fat's question, "Is the universe irrational, and is it irrational because an irrational mind governs it?" receives this answer, via Dr. Stone: "Yes it is, the universe is irrational; the mind governing it is irrational; but above them lies another God, the true God, and he is
not
irrational; in addition that true God has outwitted the powers of this world, ventured here to help us, and we know him as the Logos," which, according to Fat, is living information.
    Perhaps Fat had discerned a vast mystery, in calling the Logos living information. But perhaps not. Proving things of this sort is difficult. Who do you ask? Fat, fortunately, asked Leon Stone. He might have asked one of the staff, in which case he would still be in North Ward drinking coffee, reading, walking around with Doug.
    Above everything else, outranking every other aspect, object, quality of his encounter, Fat had witnessed a benign power
which had invaded this world.
No other term fitted it:
    
    
    the benign power, whatever it was, had
invaded
this world, like a champion ready to do battle. That terrified him but it also excited his joy because he understood what it meant. Help had come.
    The universe might be irrational, but something rational had broken into it, like a thief in the night breaks into a sleeping household, unexpectedly in terms of place, in terms of time. Fat had seen it -- not because there was anything special about him -- but because it had wanted him to see it.
    Normally it remained camouflaged. Normally when it appeared no one could distinguish it from ground -- set to ground, as Fat correctly expressed it. He had a name for it.
    Zebra. Because it blended. The name for this is mimesis. Another name is mimicry. Certain insects do this; they mimic other things: sometimes other insects -- poisonous ones -- or twigs and the like. Certain biologists and naturalists have speculated that higher forms of mimicry might exist, since lower forms -- which is to say, forms which fool those intended to be fooled but not us -- have been found all over the world.
    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 UTI, or an extra-terrestrial life form (an ETI) 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.
    Entry #33 in Fat's journal (i.e. his exegesis):
    This loneliness, this anguish of the bereaved Mind, is felt by every constituent of the universe. All its constituents are alive. Thus the ancient Greek thinkers were hylozoists.
    A "hylozoist" believes that the universe is alive; it's about the same idea as pan-psychism, that everything is animated. Pan-psychism or hylozoism falls into two belief-classes:

    1)
    
    
    Each object is independently alive.
    2)
    
    
    
    Everything is one unitary entity; the universe is one thing, alive, with one mind.

    Fat had found a land of middle ground. The universe consists of one vast irrational entity
into which
has broken a high-order life form which camouflages itself by a sophisticated mimicry; thereby as long as it