Philip K. Dick

[eachallberg]

I ordered "Flow My Tears the Policeman Said" a couple months ago,and have it sitting around somewhere. I really need to read it. That whole story is so amazing.

Let me know when your done.

That quote from exgesis is really thought provoking.

I think I might be the demented archon who created my illusory world. In fact we all might be such a beast until we wake up to the real world created by the father. I used to think of the chief archon as some being who screwed everything up before hand and I was simply an unfortunate inheritor of the situation but now I think I may be taking the mythology a little too literally. I've been reading some of the writtings of Jakob Boehme and Gurdjieff recently and it helped me come to this conclusion. I'm still not completely certain yet though. I think I need to contemplate the issue some more.

I'll meditate with you.

Maybe the Matrix was truth, and we are all Neo's

Pythagoreanism is not the far fetched. Computers would just be a model of the universe...

Recognize the copper top.

"And Ink realized he was both the Minitaur and Perseus all along."~Miguel Conner

I just started getting into ABG radio.

Very thought provoking!

I am reading the Exegesis of PKD right now and it's crazy what insights you can get for his (crazy?) random letters and thoughts.

Exegesis is PKD's Gospel IMO.


Peace be to you all,
Love.

 

[Ishraqiyun]

I found an interesting article on Phillip K Dick at the New York Times that was linked to on Tom Cheethams blog on Henry Corbin. I don't agree with all of his take on Dick , in fact I think he is little unfair to him, but I thought this part was worth posting. It talks about his view of time which made possible his belief in Plato's idea of anamemnesis or un-forgettting:

The novelty of Dick’s Gnosticism is that the divine is alleged to communicate with us through information. This is a persistent theme in Dick, and he refers to the universe as information and even Christ as information. Such information has a kind of electrostatic life connected to the theory of what he calls orthogonal time. The latter is rich and strange idea of time that is completely at odds with the standard, linear conception, which goes back to Aristotle, as a sequence of now-points extending from the future through the present and into the past. Dick explains orthogonal time as a circle that contains everything rather than a line both of whose ends disappear in infinity. In an arresting image, Dick claims that orthogonal time contains, “Everything which was, just as grooves on an LP contain that part of the music which has already been played; they don’t disappear after the stylus tracks them.”


It is like that seemingly endless final chord in the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” that gathers more and more momentum and musical complexity as it decays. In other words, orthogonal time permits total recall.


In his wilder moments — and, to be honest, they occur pretty often — Dick declares that orthogonal time will make it possible for the golden age to return, namely the time before the Fall and prior to original sin. He also claims that in orthogonal time the future falls back into and fulfills itself in the present. This is doubtless why Dick believed that his fiction was becoming truth, that the future was unfolding in his books. For example, If you think for a second about how the technologies of security in the contemporary world already seem to resemble the 2055 of “Minority Report” more and more each day, maybe Dick has a point. Maybe he was writing the future.

The Legacy of Henry Corbin: A Modern Gnostic
​

 

[Ishraqiyun]

αναμνησις

[SIZE=-1]Transliteration:[/SIZE] [SIZE=-1]anamnesis
[/SIZE] [SIZE=-1]Definition:[/SIZE] [SIZE=-1]Remembering, unforgetting, recollection, insight[/SIZE] [SIZE=-1]
Pronunciation:[/SIZE] [SIZE=-1]ahn-ahm'-neh-sis (hear)[/SIZE] Explanation

• According to Socrates and Plato, the most important forms of knowledge come not from instruction, but by a re-awakening of already existing dormant or latent knowledge. This is called anamnesis (an- = un-, amnesis = forgetting, as in amnesia; ).
• Anamnesis comes in the form of "aha!" experiences -- insights, moments of unusual clarity, peak experiences, etc.
• It involves only certain forms of knowledge: moral (e.g., what is goodness?), existential (e.g., what is the authentic 'me'?), spiritual/metaphysical, and mathematical.
• Truths understood by anamnesis, valuable in themselves, also serve as first principles for reasoning about oneself and ones life. Conclusions based on these truths are more certain and correct than those based on false opinion (see epoche), which is typically distorted by desires and fears.
• Anamnesis, thus, leads to a genuine life, whereas false opinion promotes inauthenticity.
• Anamnesis can be elicited by the practice of dialectic.

 

[gord44]

αναμνησις

[SIZE=-1]Transliteration:[/SIZE] [SIZE=-1]anamnesis
[/SIZE] [SIZE=-1]Definition:[/SIZE] [SIZE=-1]Remembering, unforgetting, recollection, insight[/SIZE] [SIZE=-1]
Pronunciation:[/SIZE] [SIZE=-1]ahn-ahm'-neh-sis (hear)[/SIZE] Explanation

• According to Socrates and Plato, the most important forms of knowledge come not from instruction, but by a re-awakening of already existing dormant or latent knowledge. This is called anamnesis (an- = un-, amnesis = forgetting, as in amnesia; ).
• Anamnesis comes in the form of "aha!" experiences -- insights, moments of unusual clarity, peak experiences, etc.
• It involves only certain forms of knowledge: moral (e.g., what is goodness?), existential (e.g., what is the authentic 'me'?), spiritual/metaphysical, and mathematical.
• Truths understood by anamnesis, valuable in themselves, also serve as first principles for reasoning about oneself and ones life. Conclusions based on these truths are more certain and correct than those based on false opinion (see epoche), which is typically distorted by desires and fears.
• Anamnesis, thus, leads to a genuine life, whereas false opinion promotes inauthenticity.
• Anamnesis can be elicited by the practice of dialectic.

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing!

 

[Babe Ruth]

Since the last post in this thread, a good book was written on Dick's mental and spiritual experience..
The Divine Madness of Philip K Dick. (Kyle Arnold)
Arnold is a clinical psychologist, analyzing Dick's core motives & mental episodes. First & foremost, Dick's 1974 visions. Arnold also spends a lot of pages speculating on/dissecting the home burglary that had a profound effect on Dick.
I thought the chapter on burglary theory ran a little long, but it was overall a good read. Raising interesting questions about the twilights in Dick's life between spiritual enlightenment and drug-induced & other post-traumatic mental suffering, etc