It is the effort to fit all of the facts of his experiences into a single closed system that drives Dick’s entire philosophical exercise. Though the mysticism of 2-3-74 might seem to push Philip K. Dick beyond the edges of the cool, rational field of science fiction, his religious thought is in fact deeply rooted in the genre he called home. It is a speculative theology from a writer of speculative fiction, a theology that pushes beyond the boundaries of what has been imagined before. The Exegesis was the analytical laboratory in which he played with the facts of his experience. In this sense, Dick’s writing melds science fiction and religion into a unique form of spirituality, a rational mysticism that refuses to let religious questions find a creedal resolution. The core of his writing was truth—but a truth that is, and must remain, speculative. All facts in the Exegesis are contingent, and all conclusions inconclusive.
This inconclusiveness itself came to be grist for Dick’s theological mill, most notably on November 17, 1980, when he had another profound experience. He imagined that God manifested to him—not the contingent maybe-God of 2-3-74, but the unitary, absolute deity, the creator of every cosmos, “the God of my fathers.” God challenged Dick to think up as many lines of reasoning as he could to explain his experiences, and each explanation led to an infinity of sub-theories: and, God said, “where infinity is, there I am.” God lay hidden, not in any one theory, but in their infinite multitude.
The process of writing and thinking about 2-3-74 was itself a religious experience, an ongoing revelation. What Dick called the “11-17-80 theophany” made the inconclusiveness of the Exegesis into its own divinity. The parameters of his spirituality’s object shifted constantly, indefinable by definition.
The point of 11-17-80 was that there can be no last work, that it is in the endless pondering of reality’s meaning that its meaning is to be found. Just over a year before his death, Dick commented on his theologizing in a letter: “As to my exegesis, I wrote THE END on it,” he says—“and then kept right on writing.”
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