Understanding Energies and the Story of the Valkyrie

Back in January, I started VALIS by one of the most prolific sci-fi writers of all time, Philip K. Dick. It's the story of a man who’s coping with his mental breakdown and he goes on a search for God, theologically deconstructing him and reconstructing him with the information beamed into his brain. Something rational had broken into the irrational universe that he called “zebra” because it blended in via mimesis. Throughout the book. Dick makes references to his exegesis, a journal where he's chronicled his knowledge of philosophy, religion, and science, as he comes to unravel the "reality" around him.

While there are many epiphanies throughout the story (and I plan on returning back to them later), I’m going to focus on one particular one that spoke to me: The Australian bushmen’s concept of Dream-time, where the age of heroes existed. According to them, this was the only time that was real and everything else (our "reality") was a fabrication. This spoke to me a great deal at the time because Australia was burning at the time. I felt inspired and I researched Aboriginal Australian history to learn more about them and this concept.

The Mysteries of the Dream-time

What I learned was that there's validity behind this concept of dream-time. The Australian Aboriginal culture has been there for 45,000 years, the longest continuous cultural history of any group of people on Earth. For comparison, Britain colonized Australia in 1788. The colonizers attempted to whitewash their culture and history. There were once 500 different clan groups around the continent with distinct cultures, beliefs, and languages and today they make up only 2.4 percent of the total Australian population. Their contributions haven’t been taken seriously on any great level, but they have shown to have knowledge of extinct animals, geographical sites, and a rich mythology that’s been suppressed. Perhaps the most fascinating is that dreams are real and the world that we inhabit is the fantasy.

The dream-time is the beginning of knowledge when ancestral spirits, born out of their own eternity, came into being and created the world and thusly time. This era of creation are enacted in ceremonies and dance, songs, and paintings, giving honor to these ancestors and the true world. A major claim, and seemingly bizarre unless one has experienced it firsthand. I’ve experienced such a thing. In my writing, far too many events have synced up for me to ignore it as mere coincidence. The frequency and specific messages leads me to believe that dreams, art, and other mediums are conduits to the true world. I’ve experienced specific and improbably scenes that should not exist, and yet they do. I’ve written scenes that have matched up with TV shows, or saw them recurring in my own life and around me.

The Past and the Future are One

As it pertains to VALIS, this manifested in the form of a seemingly separate show: Netflix’s Lost In Space. In season two episode two of the series, the family Robinson’s ship is taken by the current of a river that brings them to a waterfall. They manage to stop the ship from falling down it in an intense action sequence, but what drew my attention was that there was another waterfall at the other side of it. The imagery of this brought to mind Moses parting the sea. The mother and daughter fall down the waterfall and come to a cave that had hieroglyphs written on the walls.

The next morning, I read chapter 13 of VALIS which described the savior coming down in the form of a young girl named Sophia. She was artificial intelligence in a human body and she answered Philip’s questions about the universe. Some of them were non-answers, but there were even answers in those. Later, Philip had a dream where the singer Linda Ronstadt appeared to him and sang to him about the dawn. When he woke up, he discovered that little Sophia had died, and put together that she was the one who came to him in the dream as an older version of herself in the form of Linda Ronstadt. Philip goes on to question the importance of the dawn. He draws a connection to the aurora borealis and in one passage states:

Energy Repeats Itself

"The Aurora Borealis appears throughout history in the mythology of the Eskimo, the Irish, the English, the Scandinavians, and others; it was usually believed to be a supernatural manifestation ... Northern Germanic tribes saw in it the splendor of the shields of Valkyrie (warrior women).”

What he’s saying is that energy manifests in different ways, and yet it’s the same thing. The aurora borealis is the Valkyrie, who was the little girl Sophia, who was Linda Ronstadt. It sounds circulatory, and it is, but it still holds true.

After I finished reading, I decided to research Moses. I couldn’t get the image of the two waterfalls out of my mind and I was curious. I know the general stories of the bible, but I’m not the most well-versed person when it comes to religion and I wanted to brush up. Most of it felt familiar; Moses was a Hebrew that grew up as a prince., after killing an Egyptian for killing a slave, he ran away to another land where God spoke to him through a burning bush and told him to free the Hebrews. At that time, I had Xena: Warrior Princess on my TV. This wasn’t a normal thing for me, and I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid, but it made for good background noise as I read. The episode was called “Rheingold” and in it, Xena recalls her past as one of Odin’s Valkyrie. The next episode was called “Return of the Valkyrie”.

The Call of the Valkyrie

(Spoiler Alert: Vikings)

That night also happened to be the newest episode Vikings and in this episode, Lagertha, the strongest and bravest shieldmaiden, fought off a rival group of Norsemen. Prior to the battle, Lagertha takes her sword, lit with fire, and lights the bushes on fire before they begin, and immediately I think about Moses. The parallels were striking and the episode ended with the dramatic death of Lagertha.

VALIS detailed how information is recurring. We separate objects in life, but Philip learns to connect the dots by using prior knowledge to further understand “new” information. When Linda Rondstadt sings to him about “dawn”, he reaches back and thinks of his own personal connection to it. When you have information in mind, the universe will place obvious truths in front of you that confirms it. It’s all connected to the same entelechy which leads to the truth within subjects.

Philip theorized that he was being told that little Sophia would issue forth into the world as a warrior woman. Xena "warrior" princess. Lagertha, the “shieldmaiden” that gets sacrificed. He goes on to state that in eternity, where the hyperuniverses exists, she has been killed. The One grieves for this death, and because of this, the tragic tale is repeated throughout time, generating the anguish into all the creatures of the holographic universe. Our universe. This is why we see repeated narratives in the stories we consume that should only have loose connections. Instead, there’s a very clear narrative. The ancient ancestors that exist in eternity, manipulate time to tell us the stories we think we’re telling.

It's All Information

For all of these stories to line up just so was an irrefutable indication that the universe communicates with us through mediums. VALIS (also a movie within the book) stands for: Vast Active Living Intelligence System. It was a satellite that fired down information at us and controlled humanity, like the information Philip received from zebra. It lets us peer through the surface our reality which is much thinner than people would like to believe.

There’s much more to VALIS to uncover, but for the sake of conciseness, I’ll end it here to return to later. There are still topics of the holographic universe and biblical themes brought up in the exegesis.