These inspired what has become known as the "Valis Trilogy" -- the final three novels of Dick's life that have earned both critical praise and a broad readership (through their recent simultaneous reissuance as Vintage trade editions): Valis (1981), The Divine Invasion (1981), and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982). In all three novels, Dick explores the anguish and entropic emptiness of an earthly realm in which God (or whatever alternative name we give to the divine) remains unknown and perhaps unknowable. But also, in all of these works, Dick offers the hope that divine knowledge and redemption may yet be granted -- even to modern, scuffling souls who have trouble paying their rent and keeping their marriages together. There is a striking thematic resemblance between these novels and the speculations of the Gnostic thinkers of the early centuries of the Christian era. Indeed, in the definitive modern edition of Gnostic scriptures, The Nag Hammadi Library (1988), an "Afterword" singles out Dick (along with Jung, Hermann Hesse, and Harold Bloom) as a preeminent modern interpreter of Gnostic beliefs.

As we have seen, even prior to the "Valis Trilogy," philosophical and spiritual questions had formed the underpinnings of Dick's SF "alternate" worlds and "alien" intelligences. But Dick had harbored a carefully limited view of himself, through the first two decades of his writing career, as one who fervently posed ultimate questions but lacked -- as a matter of personal experience -- any real encounter with a higher source of being. After 2-3-74, this changed to an extent. By his very nature, Dick was not a man to arrive at -- or even to wish to arrive at -- a simple conclusion about any life event, much less as complex and unsettling a series of events as 2-3-74.