GALACTIC POT-HEALER shows the very real possibility of encroaching madness. The archetypes are out of control. Water—the ocean itself—which is to say the unconscious, is hostile & rises to engulf. The book is desperate & frightened, & coming apart, dream-like, cut off more & more from reality. Flight, disorganization: the way has almost run out. Those elements dealt with in earlier novels—ominous elements—now escape my control & take over. What Brunner* said, "That one got out of control" is correct & has vast psychological significance. & yet I did not become psychotic. Why not? What happened?
Very simply the meta-abstraction was the birth of higher reason in me. Specifically & precisely Logos. It was noesis, but, more, it was Logos itself. & Logos—not just as reason, although it is that—but Christ: Christ is the power of the rational principle itself.
The Dialectic that I experienced in 3-74 was between the irrational & the rational, in me, in world, in God. The rational won.
The issue is properly stated in VALIS, which shows not only a return of control but is an account of victory—in the form of rationality, of Logos itself—over madness; I am not only rational, I also depict as open, autobiography, this battle in me & this victory. Ursula is both right & wrong. "Phil Dick is moving toward madness"* does not apply to VALIS but to GALACTIC POT-HEALER; already with TEARS & then more so in SCANNER reality has re-entered; I am again in touch with the real.
VALIS, is, then, the return from madness or near-madness, an account of a prior inner struggle & not a symptom of that struggle still going on.
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