VALIS

by Philip K. Dick

“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:

off, Fat said irritably, “Sherri, why don’t you cut out all the sections of the Bible you agree with and paste them together? And not have to deal with the rest.”

Hes

“Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away.”

Reality

anhedonic (which means being unable or unwilling to enjoy pleasure).

“Yaldaboath is a monster spawned by Sophia who fell from the Pleroma,” Fat said. “He imagines he’s the only god but he’s wrong. There’s something the matter with him; he can’t see. He creates our world but because he’s blind he botches the job. The real God sees down from far above and in his pity sets to work to save us. Fragments of light from the Pleroma are—”

“So everything lingers but a moment, and hastens on to death. The plant and the insect die at the end of summer, the brute and the man after a few years: death reaps unweariedly. Yet notwithstanding this, nay, as if this were not so at all, everything is always there and in its place, just as if everything were imperishable . . . This is temporal immortality. In consequence of this, notwithstanding thousands of years of death and decay, nothing has been lost, not an atom of the matter, still less anything of the inner being, that exhibits itself as nature. Therefore every moment we can cheerfully cry, ‘In spite of time, death and decay, we are still all together!’” (Schopenhauer.)