This is, I think, one of the most fascinating stories in modern literature, also creating one of the most fascinating artifacts of modern literature — PKD’s VALIS, in which sci-fi metafiction meets autobiographical mystical experiences, leading (to put it crudely) to something like a “mindfrick” for certain sensitive readers open-minded enough about the nature of reality to genuinely consider it as an authentic and valid mystical experience.
So my question is this: is it possible that PKD’s insights and experiences were authentically revelatory, even though taking place in an obviously psychologically addled mind and certainly not a spiritually and morally perfect human being? The only semi-coherent, postmodern, somewhat schizophrenic and constantly wavering theology of VALIS — that being the whole point, that he’s so awestruck and destroyed by the experience that he can’t create something coherent out of it, only try to find analogues through Gnosticism, Christian theology, Buddhism, Taoism, recourse to theorizing about extraterrestrials, a philosophia perennia that somehow incorporates all of these, and/or even an admission that it was simply a drug-addled nervous breakdown (yet also somehow actually having ESP/seemingly miraculous events as a part of it) — even though a perfect theology or religion cannot be built around it, is this still something like a modern Parousia? or a forerunner to it? or a modern analogue to spiritual events like the Pentecost?
Did Christ choose a particularly creative, thoughtful, yet also obviously rather flawed and imperfect, postmodern sci-fi writer as some channel to announce His coming presence in the world — which, paradoxically, seems something like a panenthestic Gnostic experience more than like something which would adhere to the dogmas of some order like the Roman Catholic Church?
What say you?
Are we living in the Book of Revelation?
I was inspired to make this thread by a strangely relevant passage in an obscure mystical work by Valentin Tomberg, the Estonian-Russian Christian mystic and polyglot scholar who also reputedly wrote the famous “Meditations on the Tarot” — “Anthroposophical Studies of the Apocalypse of St. John”, published posthumously in the 1980s but written and conceived before his death in 1973, hence before VALIS or any of the experiences that inspired it.
In it, reference is made to an etheric advent of Christ, the Second Advent as “etheric” — hence not literal and physical but more as some type of overshadowing of His presence on humanity and hence a corresponding awakening in some of humanity sensitive to it. Here is the relevant passage:
>The etheric Second Advent of Christ is both the great hope and the great test of the present age. It is the great hope because it will exercise an influence which will enable the soul to overcome the influence of the abstract and mechanical. Its influence will appear, for example, when a number of men overcome the abstract in so far as to become capable of being stirred to the depths of the heart by pure thought. And this will not be the emotional relationship of soul to thought — such as existed, for instance, in the Middle Ages — but rather the living activity of thought itself. For its influence will extend even to the life body of man, and the life body re-animated by Christ will give such life to thought as will set it free from abstraction. But, for this freedom to be attained, the conquest of abstract questioning must precede the conquest of abstract knowledge. The abstract questioning, which, without the participation of the whole human being, merely wishes to achieve the comfort of a ‘flawless and incontrovertible system,’ will at first he replaced by a different kind of questioning in which each question leads to a further step of the awakened conscience. There will then be no other questions than such as arise from the moral need of the soul. Then also questioning will deal with the happiness and unhappiness of the soul, but no longer merely for the sake of increasing comfort. As we have said, however, that change in the questioning must precede a change in the sphere of knowledge. There must be a time of tragedy in the questioning — of questions in which all the happiness and unhappiness of the soul are at stake — before the inner miracle can come to pass; and again before it becomes APPARENT, even if it has come to pass. The incapacity and failure of the existing human moral and cognitive forced mistakes be fully experienced before an actual event answers the one great question in which all separate questions are summed up: namely, the WHENCE and the HOW of spiritual life force.
Oh yeah that's essentially what is going to happen is that everyone is going to be forced into realizing we've destroyed ourselves and when we get there it'll become very obvious to everyone what we lost, which means it will become obvious to everyone what it is that we really need/desire and we will seek to attain it. It is also possible that we reach this state not from enduring the calamities but simply from being threatened with their reality; however, it will go as far as it takes. It is up to each person to decide.
>Are we living in the Book of Revelation?
Yeah maybe kinda. I think true prophecies keep being true. Tomberg also talks about the ouroboros as a closed circle, the serpent keeping us trapped in a closed system. All the satanic shit works on the principle of inversion. God will let it happen, then re-vert it, breaking the circle and forming a spiral. Pentecost totally feels like a jailbreak and Jesus is the liberator par excellence. Prophecies continuing to be true in novel contexts follow this principle.
I haven’t wrapped my head around that quote about the etheric Christ but He is real, everliving, personal, nonphysical. I had an experience that took place in the chamber of my heart. Contrary to the quote it was very emotional and “watery.” But I was trying to find Him via that route and not in a super intellectual way.
he predicted the exact birthday of alex jones
Alex Jones watches tyranny porn
This is actually another fascinating analogue — PKD’s conception of the “Black Iron Prison,” something like the unchanging diabolical Platonic form of totalitarianism, secret governments, and conspiracies, which manifested in Christ’s day as Rome persecuting the Christians and (he believed) in PKD’s own day and age as some force which had captured or was working behind the US federal government and responsible for the assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK Jr., Watergate, the Vietnam War, and the crackdown on the counterculture, leftist hippies and anti-war protestors.
Jones might then appear as some other flawed modern prophet fighting against this totalitarianism, the BIP or Black Iron Prison. A John the Baptist calling people to repent, unlikely as that seems, or like St. John of the Apocalypse calling out the synagogue of Satan.
>For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
Ephesians 6:12
The conspiracy worldview is central to PKD’s works, as well as the entire conception of the “reality-shift,” as he pointed out after these experiences — some surprising reality, covering itself up by a hoax or deception, being the truth behind the apparent, manufactured reality we live in. World leaders and the MSM deliberately creating a Baudrillardian hyper-reality in which anyone trying to dissent against it and call out the evil behind it, is preemptively “the brainwashed far-right domestic terror threat.”
Cool
Yeah, I generally disagree with gnosticism but the beast system is well not eternal but very old and very persistent. It’s not the flesh or physical matter. Sermon on the mount talks about it, it’s your mentality and fear of stepping outside of your social self. Good Samaritan is about it but the Sermon really puts it out there plus gets into compartmentalization.
The Spirit always finds ways to bubble through, no matter how much gray sidewalk there is weeds grow through the cracks. Really the everliving God and a friend to all the down and out and stray dogs.
There is an odd contradiction at the heart of all religious traditions which is the issue between being and becoming (“It's impossible for anyone to see anything that really exists unless they become like them. It's not like the person in the world who sees the sun without becoming a sun, and who sees heaven and earth and everything else without becoming them. That's the way it is. But you've seen something of that place, and have become them. You saw the Spirit, you became spirit; you saw Christ, you became Christ; ” Gospel of Philip). I find that Gnostics are correct if you are not a Gnostic. Catholics are correct if you are not a Catholic. Mystics and sufis are correct in a weirder sense, in that their very perspective of the world as assuming the correct role of assuming Christ, which is where the recognize the position as imitator without pure becoming of self-sacrifice via the cross. I think VALIS is PKD’s understanding of how can one understand Gnosticism, that this is a fallen world and there is a redeemer, and yet not say the world is evil. This leads the necessity, if not outright total capitulation, to the idea that there are occult forces which are purely human, i.e. Black-Cube. This is seen most discretely in the concept of hypnosis which is the evilest expression of language, where the sayer says what the other becomes but the sayer stays the same. All manipulation is based on this mono-polarity and the final deceit of the devil: that you can one day become him.
1/3
PKD is on much much deeper territory than we give him credit for. He is looking the evident truth-value of the fallen world and asking about why the fall if there is a redeemer. He isn’t concerned with the problem of evil, but with the problem itself which I think, largely, stems from the fact that he did not view the universe as a mortal instrument. We must remember that we can tell the universe is mortal because the Earth is mortal as well and so are all galaxies. What lies beyond the scope of this plane, the metaphysical cross which is the spherical nature of Satan “And the LORD said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.” Job 1:7. God’s question to Satan mimicks the first and last question asked of Christ “Then Jesus turned, and saw them following, and saith unto them, What seek ye? They said unto him, Rabbi, (which is to say, being interpreted, Master,) where dwellest thou?” John 1:38 and “
And went again into the judgment hall, and saith unto Jesus, Whence art thou? But Jesus gave him no answer.” John 19:9. Not only this, but Satan’s idea of where he is from is through and around which makes a sphere, or the shape of a gravity-bounded planetoid.
2/3
In the final analysis, this is the only answer that God can not truthfully answer for us, because space-time is the precondition to, is where is he. This is then flipped when Adam eats the fruit God can not find him because the very essence of our fallenness is a game of hide and seek. That is, to be where God is is to become God, whereas in our fallenness we are always foreign and distance to God - the very distance to God is our soul tilted to not darkness, but colors, and then rolling in the bed of matter. From McKenna quoting Heraclitus: “The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls.” I have no other way of describing it than a game. A game is played not via its rules, as its rules in its play are always invisible, but its rules come about by everyone becoming members of it, so too is the universe, and as such the very creation of mankind into the space-time game is the permanent state of language which is the final Game. The Final Game is moment where God creates the rules of the game as from outside of Himself - it is never new, yet it is always new, and as such the first Adam was the last and we will be reborn when all things are new.
3/3
>From McKenna quoting Heraclitus: “The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls.” I have no other way of describing it than a game. A game is played not via its rules, as its rules in its play are always invisible, but its rules come about by everyone becoming members of it, so too is the universe, and as such the very creation of mankind into the space-time game is the permanent state of language which is the final Game. The Final Game is moment where God creates the rules of the game as from outside of Himself - it is never new, yet it is always new, and as such the first Adam was the last and we will be reborn when all things are new.
Yes, this is a rather beautiful way of putting it.
You could say that the entire universe was created precisely so that we right now right here at this moment could be discussing Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, and maybe you wouldn’t be wrong. VALIS is the universe speaking to itself, mindfricking itself. The universe is VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System), and this book, figure, conversations, is essentially VALIS holding out its hand to you for you to grasp. And yet it’s not merely a symbol, not merely that “They were only referring to psychological events and processes inside ourselves,” it’s also that Philip K. Dick came to somehow pierce through time and space, feel himself intimately bound up with historical locale of the events described in the New Testament, and the like.
>During the course of our correspondence over the next few years, Phil told me that he had recognized the feminine voice that told him to read Revelation: The Divine Fire as the one that had spoken to him sporadically since his high school days. Eventually, the voice had identified herself as the Ruah, the Hebrew word for Spirit of God, Holy Spirit. She was, according to Phil’s understanding, a “tutelary spirit,” possessed of a “transcendentally rational mind.” The Ruah spoke to him in terse, succinct sentences, and communicated most often when he was falling asleep or waking up. He had to be very quiet and attentive in order to hear the brief messages that she relayed.
I like not having to be bound to something like what the Roman Catholic Church tells us is the only way to come to enlightenment, the monopolized source of mystical experiences and of all genuine sainthood. It’s clearly not something I or anyone can preach to others or make a bizarre modern techno-Gnostic personality cult out of — setting up a shrine of VALIS in one’s room, a relic or icon of Philip K. Dick’s face, perhaps — and yet, strangely enough, it’s still something I believe in and am inspired by!
Philip K. Dick as temporarily becoming a saint.
dude got high off of drugs from a dentist.. but yeah.. Dick is beyond based. how is Divine Invasion and Timothy Archer?
Nitrous oxide is a real psychedelic if you have it coming through a mask. Whippets are nothing compared to a sustained input of no2
What do you see on a sustained input of co2?
Yes saw some shit doing whip its and listening to Caetano Veloso’s first album with Gal Costa before work once, like saudade childhood memories that may or may not have been true on the physical plane but maybe had an astral reality. Good album. Police are also good whip it music.
Have you read Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger: Final Secrets of the Illuminati? He discusses Dick's experiences at length and explores the idea that Dick was a member of the "Illuminati," a group of individuals who had mind-expanding, revelatory contact with an intelligence (or intelligences) existing in the Sirius star system who "communicate wisdom" to humans through the use of "psychic lasers."
What the book is actually about though is not the question of whether the Illuminati are real, but why we ask questions like that, how we answer them, whether those answers are satisfactory, what it means for answers to be satisfactory, and the whole nature of consensus reality. Absolutely one of the best books I've ever read, and one of the only works of serious philosophy I've read that is legitimately funny and entertaining.
I have. I was going to bring up the strange links, including in time (both RAW’s and PKD’s experience happening around 1973/74) but was getting too sleepy and lazy to bring it up and laboriously type out the info. I’m glad, by a synchronicity, someone else did it for me.
This is another authentic synchronicity. The year “1974” coming up in this passage i legitimately just got to in re-reading this book, referring to the mythical figure and reputed alchemist Fulcanelli who supposedly attained some form of life-prolongation and who was supposedly a hub of focus in certain Rosicrucian and Masonic occult circles of the 20th century.
Fixed.
Name of book?
“The People of the Secret” by Ernest Scott.
Nice. Thanks brother.
>At one point, Dick claimed to be in a state of enthousiasmos with valis, where he was informed his infant son was in danger of perishing from an unnamed malady. Routine checkups on the child had shown no trouble or illness; however, Dick insisted that thorough tests be run to ensure his son's health. The doctor eventually complied, despite the fact that there were no apparent symptoms. During the examination doctors discovered an inguinal hernia, which would have killed the child if an operation was not quickly performed. His son survived thanks to the operation, which Dick attributed to the "intervention" of valis.
>Another event was an episode of supposed xenoglossia. Supposedly, Dick's wife transcribed the sounds she heard him speak, and discovered that he was speaking Koine Greek—the common Greek dialect during the Hellenistic years (3rd century BC–4th century AD) and direct "father" of today's modern Greek language—which he had never studied. As Dick was to later discover, Koine Greek was originally used to write the New Testament and the Septuagint. However, this was not the first time Dick had claimed xenoglossia: a decade earlier, Dick insisted he was able to think, speak, and read fluent Latin under the influence of Sandoz LSD-25.
What the FRICK?
Has anyone debunked this?
It’s one of those things which for some reason bizarrely just has never been conclusively disproven or debunked. None of his family, friends, or even ex-wife (who divorced him and hence had reason to have a vendetta against him) came out and said, “He was making it all up.” It’s like some bizarre eruption of some higher order of reality, even perhaps of the Divine, of the miraculous into the apparently mundane life of a modern sci-fi writer.
Yes, his ex-wife says that the events involving their son didn't happen in the order or timeframe that Dick said they did. I think that I read that in either The Divine Madness of Philip K Dick or or the Sutin biography. It's also pretty well known that Dick would tailor his story based on what a given audience wanted to hear.
She's just jealous.
I had a psychosis which reminded me of Dick's visions/overall experiences and I think I was just driving myself crazy. Was, in retrospect, a horrible state of mind which I now recognise as contrary to the great mystical experiences of tradition. Was fun though.
>
So my question is this: is it possible that PKD’s insights and experiences were authentically revelatory, even though taking place in an obviously psychologically addled mind and certainly not a spiritually and morally perfect human being?
>Did Christ choose a particularly creative, thoughtful, yet also obviously rather flawed and imperfect, postmodern sci-fi writer as some channel to announce His coming presence in the world — which, paradoxically, seems something like a panenthestic Gnostic experience more than like something which would adhere to the dogmas of some order like the Roman Catholic Church?
Anon, I... I don't care.
Interestingly enough Tomberg has an interesting passage about this very response in a page right after the passage I posted. In other words, it’s following off the same thread or theme. The point he makes is that, tautologically enough, if you don’t care about “it” (VALIS, Christ, what-you-will), then “it” can’t much care about you either — the understanding and experience only comes when you actually see the futility of your normal way of thought and life and hence feel the piercing need for something higher.
The higher and timeless source of faith, hope, love and comfort can only come when your reliance on your own and traditional offered sources of faith, hope, and comfort are utterly exhausted. Hence, the presence of the Redeemer and Comforter can only fully be felt and understood when you see the need for redemption and cannot find comfort in traditionally offered sources of it. He also quotes some interestingly apposite passages from Steiner on this. I’ll post it all once I find the book.
>Rudolf Steiner spoke more than once of actual individual experiences of future meetings with Him who will re-appear at the etheric Second Advent. He spoke, for example, of the experience of a lonely man sitting in his room in deep grief and helplessness, “not knowing which way to turn.” Then One comes in and speaks to him, and in the place of despair the man receives light, strength, and life. Or, for instance, there is a group of men, all, as it were, “at their wit’s end”. Again, One appears among them and speaks words of comfort and hope.
>All the definite examples of future meetings with the etheric Christ which Rudolf Steiner describes have one thing in common: the men — whether alone or in groups — who experience these meetings are, in every case, “at their wit’s end — not knowing which way to turn”. For the conscious meeting takes place at the moment when the consciousness needs it. And that need is felt when the soul has been prepared by the tremendous pain of questioning — to be AWAKE to the encounter. The soul is ‘awake’ when the whole soul has experienced the questions of a conscience wakened to the super-personal, and this is the condition necessary for knowing “the hour of His coming.” NOT to know the hour of His coming, that is, not to become conscious of the event which concerns the whole of humanity, is, however, not a punishment, but the result of the fact that if a consciousness has no need of the Christ, neither does it have the conscious experience of meeting Him. And no consciousness needs Him when it conscious of no question to which He, as the truth, could be the answer.
[...]
>The calls of the spirit are always pictures of unhappiness accompanied by pregnant silences. In this sense, three such awakening calls are sounded in the world as the comprehensive demands of conscience addressed to all souls. They are the unhappiness of nature, the unhappiness of man and the unhappiness of the spiritual world. What St. Paul meant by the “groaning of all creation” is the call of the spirit to the human soul through nature. For nature is dependent on man; her weak and woe depends on the human race. Man can redeem nature by uniting her once more with the spirit, or he can allow her to fall more deeply into darkness, letting her become a constituent part of the kingdom of Ahriman.
>The “awakening” which Buddha experienced under the bodhi tree when he was actually roused to full Buddha-consciousness resulted from his becoming aware of the unhappiness of humanity. Birth, sickness, old age and death are the lot of all men — stages in the Way of Sorrows of which human life consists. And it is because Buddha was right in his valuation of human life that the Christ event had to take place nineteen centuries ago.
I wasn’t at my absolute lowest but I had to really want it. It’s real. Maybe being that low is sufficient conditions, but humility and/or obedience are the necessary conditions?
Yeah, seek and ye shall find, knock on the door first, etc. God really respects free will. If you want to see jannies here nuke a thread quote Alphonsus Liguori on hell.
>>Did Christ choose a particularly creative, thoughtful, yet also obviously rather flawed and imperfect, postmodern sci-fi writer as some channel to announce
Mayhaps a demon so chose. That is one way to make sense of the matter without dismissing pkd as schizo.
Along similar lines, there is the business of Luther's 'tower experience'...
The fruits of the experience weren’t demonic, however. Dick had cleaned up his drug abuse, going through rehab and therapy for it and by the end of his life actually coming as an anti-drug figure despite the image he has of being of the archetypal New-Age counterculture drug-inspired author (see works like “A Scanner Darkly” (1977), in which he even self-referentially, with quite a high degree of self-awareness, even points out how stereotypical and cliched “Drugs are bad mmmkay?” might sound to younger and more naïve people of the younger generations but is still something they need to hear). He reported, after these experiences, essentially having an inner “voice” or “intuition” which inspired him to make lifestyle and habit changes, including of cutting down on his drinking. And if the anecdote about him being in enthousasmios with VALIS and accurately diagnosing his son’s life-threatening hernia is true, that’s rather fascinating, as well.
>The fruits of the experience weren’t demonic, however.
That's a very fair point. I'm not sure what to make of PKD's experience, tbqf.
>If someone reputedly has a mystical experience, claims to have a mystical experience ... and they don’t adhere to your sect, church, theological dogmatic interpretation of reality — are they instantly to be discarded as heretics or even demonically inspired?
I might note that I didn't intend to discard PKD with my remark, I was just bruiting a possible hypothesis (which really doesn't fit the facts particularly well, as notes).
>Mayhaps a demon so chose. That is one way to make sense of the matter without dismissing pkd as schizo.
This is another interesting debate that can be brought up.
If someone reputedly has a mystical experience, claims to have a mystical experience — and maybe there’s even surrounding circumstances and people close to them in their life who seem to somehow back it up, or at minimum don’t give conclusive proof that it was ALL made up, totally without a grounding in reality — and they don’t adhere to your sect, church, theological dogmatic interpretation of reality — are they instantly to be discarded as heretics or even demonically inspired?
I see that humanity is increasingly coming to view two major different ways to approach religion apart from simple denial or apathy towards it as through atheism or agnosticism — essentially, that you can convert to one sect and it will have the ultimate theological and cultural primacy and every presumed religious experience, body of thought, or theologizing has to be taken in relation to it, weighed as to how authentic or inauthentic, valid or invalid it is — in other words, “from a Roman Catholic perspective...” “from a Muslim perspective...” “from the perspective of Advaita Vedanta...” “from a Buddhist perspective...” “from a Lutheran perspective...” and so forth.
And yet there’s another way becoming more and more interesting and appealing to a subset of humanity — and which, tautologically enough, anyone caught up in this first way of viewing religious truth, has to disparage, view as “falling-away from the tradition,” “demonically inspired,” “heretical”, and the like — and this second way is essentially an inversion of the first way, perhaps something, to use a topological metaphor, that could be compared to “opening up” something. In the first interpretation, you essentially have a unique and central treasure-box, and treasure-box contains all the authentic gold, israeliteels, treasures and absolute wisdom and valid, authentic dogmas and experiences of the chosen timeless tradition — Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or what-you-will. Any box outside and apart from that one chosen treasure-box, is essentially held to be false, spurious, maybe not holding any wisdom in it at all (an apparently empty box, or just a box of junk, like agnosticism or atheism) — or, conversely, even holding spurious treasures, fool's gold, counterfeit money — a demonically inspired teaching or a knowingly-created cult and hoax, something like Pandora's Box as opposed to a genuine treasure-chest, threatening to loose the demons of occultism and heretical mysticism upon the world.
God bless you
Piscean and Aquarian. I’ve been more Piscean last few years, do Catholic devotions, been trying to read more church fathers and mystics. It’s a well traveled and demarcated path so there’s a lot to keep you from error. With some of my other experiences harder to know what’s true or false, plus easier to ego trip maybe. Praying the Rosary *works* as do Sacred Heart devotions. But they don’t appeal to all temperaments maybe.
I could use some dick right now, thanks OP.
uh, I meant-
But the second interpretation more are finding palatable, is that there is really one source of authentic gold and treasure, and various chests can indeed have real gold and israeliteels from this timeless source, even if the designs of the boxes and the ways the gold has been crafted (into the form of bars of gold, or golden coins cut in different ways with different designs and names on them, or even just as lumps of unrefined gold), and the way the israeliteels are cut or refined, may appear to be different from culture to culture, time to time, place to place.
Anyway, even by this second interpretation, you still have to admit chests may have more or less of it, some having less of the treasures — some more or less diluted, more or less profound and powerful, but all essentially drawing their authentic insights, power, and beauty from one same source — and yet others actually being counterfeit and worthless gold (as when people create cults, or simply have mental health issues they take to be authentic mystical experiences), and yet others empty or just filled with junk, as in more atheistic or agnostic schools of thought without any of the real spiritual treasure in them.
>For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.
(Acts 7:28)
So, by this second interpretation (which of course many traditional religionists, including nominal Christians, usually inevitably view with some form of suspicion, denial, the need to single out the heretic and blasphemer and condemn them) — and which many may take to be “anti-Christian” or “non-Christian,” even if, as we see here in the case of Philip K. Dick, we see a profound study and meditation on Christian scriptures, an absorption of their insights, and a deeper love and reverence for Christ, and an intimately personal relationship with Christianity and stories and teachings to be found in the Old and New Testaments — anyway, by this second way of approaching religious truth, it’s not necessarily unnecessarily and outrageously surprising, nor something to immediately be “condemned” and viewed with suspicion that someone like PKD had these experiences. Rather, it is that he, essentially, for some moments, “turned himself inside out” (so to speak) and came to a profound experiential understanding of this God in which we all live and move and have our being, which included, in his case, a profounder understanding of and drawing towards the life and teachings of Christ and looking to Him for an explanation of the experiences he had and as a source of solace, consolation, guidance.
Damn was replying to this and phone slipped and my fat finger obliterated it. This slides into “sun worship” in Ezekiel 8 imho. Maybe it’s just me but I feel like there are all these gnostic dodges to deny Jesus’ death on the cross and resurrection but that you really need both and they aren’t just archetypes but are absolute facts that are axiomatic to everything. Like if you don’t sign up for that you might go all sorts of places but you don’t get to walk that strait and narrow path.
It’s interesting to note that scholars and critics have compared the thought and works of figures like Rudolf Steiner and Valentin Tomberg (some of whose teachings and insights bear some relevance to PKD’s experiences) to Gnosticism, even though they were living, writing and thinking before the translation and popularization of the famous discovery of the Gnostic tractates at Nag Hammadi in the 1970s, first making them available to the West through the first publication of Robinson’s translations of them in 1977 (although they were first actually disctovered as texts in 1945), an event which Dick made so much of.
In thinkers Steiner and Tomberg, you don’t see a denial of Christianity or an anti-Christianity. Christ, His life, His teachings, His sayings, His divinity and centrality, are all referred to so casually, taken as givens. And yet the worldview in both is also strangely something like what could be called an omni-central one — the center being everywhere. Christ, being the center, essentially is potentially to be found, latent as an experience and a source of inspiration, everywhere, timelessly throughout history and even in different cultures — the cosmic Christ, the Christ as archetype or symbol (yet also not denying His actual, literal, physical, basic historical personhood and divinity) — hence, Tomberg casually refers to how something like the Buddha’s insight into the nature of impermanence and suffering inherent in human life, can casually be linked to Christ — not in a crude historical way (“Buddhism inspired Christianity” “Christianity is superior to Buddhism,” or vice versa, or some variation thereof), but rather that Christ and the true core of Christianity, being timeless, can legitimately be brought up in relation to something like the Buddha’s life and thought, differences in time and space being nought — you can validly inquire or interpret, how the transcendent, eternal, timeless presence and insights of Christ may have overshadowed the Buddha, how Siddhartha Gautama and his life and teachings can be taken in relation to the divine personhood of Christ without necessarily having any apparent tie to the physical personhood and manifestation of Him.
Beautiful posts. May I ask, have you been visited by it? Have you had things revealed? I only ask because my concerns couldn't have been further from all of this until just a few weeks back. For almost ten days I hardly ate and slept only one or two hours at night and one hour during the day. During this time I was walking side by side with it, and it walked me through all of this, where we come from, what we are, why we are here, and where we are going, and that the end is already here. I have my own thoughts, but I'm curious as to yours, as to how we maintain a close relationship to 'it'?
Not OP. I’ve seen “macro” views where I’ve seen the forest of life instead of the living trees, if that makes sense. This is like a big form of “it” for me.
I’ve embraced Jesus inside the chamber of my heart, not a Lord Jesus but the Jesus of purest love who wants you to be able to say Abba Father *with* Him. Like His salvation invites us to be divine with Him and He really loves us and wants us to make it. I was totally sober and it’s happened more than once so I believe that one the most and it’s mattered more to me than any dream or vision or knowledge.
Yes agree end is already here. I do bibliomancy and have been told as much. No preps will help you, just pray for everyone.
Mostly wanted to respond to this post… gotta go to sleep. Thanks for trading puzzle pieces and hope to see you all around the Throne.
Paradoxically enough, from everywhere and nowhere. In my own specific historical case, strangely enough, it came about from an interest in religion, religious teachings, mystical experiences,
including particularly the fabled unitive experience or the unio mystica, and ecstatic, intuitive ways-of-knowing, as well as of the idea that one could somehow or some-way become “enlightened” since being a young man in middle school.
This led me to eventually read up on various world traditions and religions like Greek philosophy, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam/Sufism, Judaism/Hasidism and the Kabbalah, and Hinduism, as well as various esoteric authors and modern day mystics, throughout high-school and early university. This actually led to a meeting with a person (the details and specifics of which I can’t really divulge, lurid and exotic and thrilling as this all may really sound) who convinced me that what I had read and thought about and already felt and intuited existed, really was It, really existed and was taught about and pointed to by various figures throughout history — really was miraculous, divine, and the source of all authentic guidance, insight, and miraculous occurrences.
Essentially, I was given to understand that he could not function as my physical, personal “guru,” “guide,” or cult-leader — a physical human being whose physical shoulder I could eternally rely on, forever fall back on for wise words of guidance and encouragement in neglect of my own thinking, researching, contemplating, and acting. He pointed out that this has always been a tendency throughout history and continues until today — those more advanced in the divine and timeless knowledge, can easily become “the Central Messianic Figure to Rely On” at the expense of the actual teachings and wisdom they were pointing to, at the expense of your own self-reliance, self-responsibility, and enlightenment.
And yet, in a strange way, in the divine and cosmic scheme, they are all necessary, necessarily necessary — that they create religions, that people worship them exclusively, and even today that people join and create cults.
I was essentially also given a massive recommended bibliography of books that he had read and which had helped guide him in his own life (some of which I had already read and profited much from), but, again, not as a something to make a “cult” out of, a dogmatic bibliography which “everyone must read to become enlightened,” but also, paradoxically enough, as great, inspiring, and necessary to read.
>and that the end is already here
This is a sad aspect of the whole thing. When PKD talked about the Black Iron Prison, he was more right than he knew. He wasn’t even alive to witness Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum.
In the book, he talks about seeing a figure — Gloria Knudson, I believe it is, I haven’t read the book for years — as just a damaged machine. A cynical, embittered, drug-addicted woman-machine who eventually commits suicide. This is the pathos of it — VALIS is there, he experienced it, but how can it (or Horselover Fat/Philip K. Dick) save a damaged, malfunctioning machine? A machine which strays from VALIS cannot of itself be demechanized — it can’t have salvation forced upon it — also an insight of Gurdjieff. It couldn’t even save PKD from his anguish, it could only give him a more spiritual form of it with a greater philosophical and theological probing for answers.
This is why figures like RAW are rather fun to read but it’s a bit sad looking back how optimistic they were that technological advancements, the modern de-isolation of cultures (i.e. that we have more access to traditions like those to be found in Eastern philosophies and religions), and the revolution of the postmodern worldview manifesting throughout the arts, philosophy, culture at large, would lead to us becoming more humane, enlightened, open-minded, creative, and all that.
Everyone will read some shallow popularizer of Zen like Alan Watts and instantly attain satori, having at their own comfort what people in the East spent years and decades disciplinedly searching for, devoting their whole lives to. The Aquarian conspiracy, or something-like-that. This is the optimistic view.
But, as PKD clearly saw, and as the Book of Revelations and prophecies in the New Testament warn — and as Guenon named “the reign of quantity” and likened to Hindu teachings about the Kali Yuga — it’s not quite that cheerily optimistic. In Tomberg’s own phraseology, it’s that the sub-natural and the sub-human — the dehumanizing, mechanistic, materialistic worldview — is itself, tautologically, dehumanizing humanity, leading to a more “advanced” system of slavery, dehumanization, and death while claiming to be the most enlightened, tolerant, advanced fruit of human civilization ever conceived of.
What's shallow about Watts? I wouldn't call Watts shallow so much as rudimentary and introductory. If I wanted to excite and introduce Eastern ideas to a total layman I wouldn't dump something like Gurdjieff or Krishnamurti onto them. I can understand the distain for later Watts lectures, but earlier essays like Supreme Identity I consider fundamental reading for everyone.
Nothing particularly, it was just a stupid aside, I actually haven’t read much by him. That’s actually my mistake in referring to a figure I haven’t actually read much by and just wanted to put down, for which I apologize. Watts aside, I wanted more to refer to some New Age idea that we’ll all easily read haikus and koans, create some clever syncretic theology, take LSD, use neurofeedback machines, take a weekend course on yoga, go meet Krishnamurti at Ojai, etc. etc. and become enlightened. And yet ironically, we like to make fun of these things, but there’s nothing necessarily bad about them (or Krishnamurti, for that matter), either, if employed respectfully and thoughtfully.
Obviously, the hippies, the counterculture, the “New Age” didn’t create the massive enlightenment and inspiration they thought they were riding on the wave of and spreading to humanity. They just became co-opted, turned into a cheap thing for money and fame, and then set itself up as a new idol for humanity of disparage and make fun of. And yet, if you put aside the idea of “New Age (TM),” you can see that we very are possibly — for a small group of intelligentsia — possibly entering into something like a more open-minded, flexible era of new possibilities, having many cultures and traditions to learn from which before were much harder to have access to.
We have this massive new possibility but as someone like Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche pointed out, coming from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, this easily turns into “spiritual materialism.” Normal materialism is appropriating and accumulating material possessions, a car, a nice big house, the great job, money, etc., as an extension of oneself, thinking it will make oneself happier to have all these. Spiritual materialism, as he astutely pointed out, is doing the same thing with spiritual teachings — accumulating a repertoire of exotic techniques, terminology, meetings with famous gurus and teachers, etc., in a practically identical way with just as shallow a mindset. And yet this doesn’t mean all these sources of wisdom are necessarily wrong or shallow, either. It’s also what Guenon pointed out so extensively as the reign of quantity.
in a way, the modern world is the easiest time ever to be anything you want to be.
However easy is not the same as best, and in many ways it can easily be said to be worse than ever before because of the lack of sincerity and genuineness in practice whether it be politics or spirituality or something else
>it can’t have salvation forced upon it
This struck me to my core
>It couldn’t even save PKD from his anguish, it could only give him a more spiritual form of it with a greater philosophical and theological probing for answers.
And this struck even deeper still. Spot on, I'd say. Still catching up but what a fulfilling Sunday morning read. My sincere thanks, OP, for your time and your thoughts.
>whether you have had any experiences of your own similar to PKD?
>May I ask, have you been visited by it? Have you had things revealed?
I don’t want to dodge these questions, since that feels too cheap, and I don’t want to give a clever cop-out either, but neither do I want to glorify myself. But the answer is yes. By definition — I’m not trying to be overly clever — everyone is already experiencing and living in Philip K. Dick’s world. Experiencing VALIS. It’s just that we’re usually not awake to it.
But if you’re asking about phenomenal light-show aspects of it and even things like synchronicities and miracles — yes, things like these definitely have and do happen (although not as spectacularly as in PKD’s case where a pink beam of light was beamed into my forehead and images of Ancient Rome flashed before my inner eye etc.) I’m not unique in this respect. Many have experienced them. Things like these are self-verifying. VALIS itself might give out synchronicities and miracles as pathways to itself. If you authentically seek VALIS, VALIS seeks you. I sound like a New Age kook sometimes, don’t I?
There’s a reason we crucified Christ. Go to your close friends and family and tell them, “I’m VALIS.” They’ll look at you like you’re insane, or like you grew a third eye in your forehead (and not in a good sense, like that you’re a fully enlightened yogi who opened up your ajna chakra, but like you’re some type of biologically mutated freak). This is why blending-in is a rather important skill to learn.
You can take many modern cult-leaders and self-proclaimed “gurus,” as essentially people who went massively wrong by deciding precisely not to blend-in and to make public whatever lower insights and experiences they had. This then turns into a massively flawed sociological phenomenon — the phenomenon of cult-making, cult-leading — with all the attendant flaws upon it. The real way, to speak in really vague, New-Age-seeming ways, flourishes in privacy and humility. When PKD experienced this, it wasn’t something he forced, it was like some spontaneous eruption and outcome of his entire life and seeking and thinking and feeling and searching — he was a rather astute and scholarly person, remember, which is not always apparent to the outsider.
I know what you mean, I too had experiences with similar things myself.
All in all, anyone has the potential to be a murderer, an enlightened being, an immortal, all of them at once and beyond.
Humans stand between the finite and the infinite as finite time and being but with infinite potential.
This potential interpretation and theological outlook goes beyond something like a merely shallow and smugly self-superior ecumenism — something like, “Other traditions, cultures, and teachings MAY indeed have some authentic revelations in them and inspiration from God and Christ, but they are essentially only to be seen as extensions of our own timeless and central teachings and only valid today inasmuch as we can convert them to our own, greater religion. Any too-great and expansive inclusivism which goes that these different founders of religions and their teachings can be fully reconciled or some from a same source, are simply shallow, heretical, reductionistic and preemptively wrong.”
In something like the official modern dogmas and practices of Roman Catholicism you can see this understanding — “Let’s not instantly discount every other culture and religion, let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater — they’re all souls, they’re all loved by Christ, Christ died for them all just as He died for us, He died for everyone equally — we can learn from them, respectfully study their cultures and teachings, foster inter-religious and ecumenical dialogue, but ultimately as missionaries, functioning as missionaries, the point being simply to become acquainted enough with their cultures and teachings so that we can make a bridge for them to come meet us where the truth really resides, debunk and disparage what in their traditions and teachings are inauthentic and imperfect, and try to point out that Christ is the source of all that is good and true in any of their insights, the answer to all the dilemmas and paradoxes and questions of their theologies.”
In figures like PKD, Steiner, and Tomberg, however, we don’t quite see this. It’s rather, quite simply and literally, that we can simply take it that Christ (in His timeless and eternal aspect) was within and around and inspiring the Buddha, you can casually go back and forth and bring up Christian dogma and teachings as it can be applied to Buddhism, and vice versa, that the Buddha, the Buddhic consciousness or understanding, was there for Christ, you can casually bring up Buddhist dogma and teachings as it applies to Christian teachings and thereby put it in that light also.
Bro you write a lotttttt of frickin words
I really like wacky schizo stuff but unfortunately I just can't get into it because I know it's all bs by people who just want it to be true. How do I fix this? Will a lobotomy make me able to authentically play along?
It is absolutely uncanny how similar your story is to mine. Mine wasn't an actual person but was something more like what literally felt like a supermachine that was activated in my head that ran for 10 days with a 5 day peak. I have always had an interest in the Buddhism, Psychoanalysis, philosophy, creative process, and so on, but it was always almost superficial, but these few days tied them together into a tight knot, and showed Christ as the image gravity-center of it all, exactly as you'd mentioned, and revelation being the glue, so to speak.
With all respect for your priviledge to decline, would you be interested in sharing a few of the titles on that list?
Sorry. What happened is I was tremendously sleepy and wondering if it was a good idea to have put out what I did — which was actually not allegorical, a clever allegory or self-referential
meta-trick. It was actually an event that happened. But it can be misconstrued. As
points out it can’t be achieved through intellect alone but a honed intellect can be a massively helpful boon for coming to approach it. I might go to the archives, re-find the deleted posts, polish it up and post it.
>Swami Yogeshwaranand Saraswati’s “The Science of Soul”
>Swami Yogeshwaranand Saraswati’s “The Science of Divinity”
>Swami Yogeshwaranand Saraswati’s “The Essential Colorlessness of the Absolute”
>Sri Aurobindo’s “Integral Yoga”
>Geoffrey A. Barborka’s “The Divine Plan”
>Meher Baba’s “God Speaks”
>Hakim Bey’s “The Temporary Autonomous Zone”
>Hakim Bey’s “Immediatism”
>Rudolf Steiner’s “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment”
>Rudolf Steiner’s “The Riddles of Philosophy”
>Valentin Tomberg’s “Anthroposophical Studies of the Apocalypse of St. John”
>Sri Swami Yukteswar’s “The Holy Science”
>PD Ouspensky’s “In Search of the Miraculous”
>Robert Anton Wilson’s “Prometheus Rising”
>Robert Anton Wilson’s “The New Inquisition”
>Nicholas Roerich’s “Hierarchy”
>Nicholas Roerich’s “Agni Yoga”
>Ernest Scott’s “The People of the Secret”
>Charles Leadbeater’s “The Masters and the Path”
>HBM Dervish’s “Journeys with a Sufi Master”
>Omar Michael Burke’s “Among the Dervishes”
>Idries Shah’s collected works, with an especial notice of and emphasis on “Learning How to Learn,” “Knowing How to Know,” and “The Commanding Self”
>Walter Truett Anderson’s “Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be”
>The Dao de Jing
>The Bhagavad Gita
>Charles Luk’s 3-volume Ch’an and Zen Teachings
>K. Narayana Swami Aiyar’s translation of “Thirty Minor Upanishads” to read the Tejabindopanishad in it particularly
Yogi Bhikshu’s “Karma Yoga”
>Swami Sivananda’s “Practice of Karma Yoga”
>Walter Scott’s “Hermetica: the Ancient Greek and Latin Writings Which Contain Religious or Philosophic Teachings Ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus”
>“The Six Enneads” by Plotinus
>The Divine Pymander of Hermès Trismegistus
>“Nagarjuna’s Philosophy” by K. Venkata Ramanan
>“The Buddhist Teaching of Totality” by Garma C. C. Chang
I don't know why that anon deleted his post, but I don't think you can reach Enlightenment by reading a bunch of books alone. It's missing the forest for the trees.
>So my question is this: is it possible that PKD’s insights and experiences were authentically revelatory, even though taking place in an obviously psychologically addled mind and certainly not a spiritually and morally perfect human being?
Yeah totally. It’s legit to ask if they are demonic given that drug use can open you up to it and he could speak in languages he wasn’t supposed to know.
Tomberg also talks about a false Holy Spirit in the letter on the World in MotT.
I’ve had “visions,” occasional weed use would bring them out. It’s hard to know how true or real they are. The post about how he changed his life and cleaned up is a really good point.
more like feel up my dick
They did include massive selections of literature and readings in and around essentially all the major religions and mystical paths of human history — Islamic Sufism, Buddhism and its various sects (Mahayana, the Hua Yen school, Zen, Vajrayana), Hinduism (from Advaita Vedanta to Kashmir Shaivism to Samkhya), including particularly the sage Nisargadatta Maharaj of the Inchagari Sampradaya tradition (including in its lineage teachers of the Navnath Sampradaya tradition and of Lingayat Shaivism) and his famous spiritual classic, “I Am That” (1973), as well as the modern Hindu sage and philosopher Sri Aurobindo, Judeo-Christianity, Hasidism, and the Cabbala (such as through Martin Buber’s “Tales of the Hasidim”), Taoism, and the like.
As well as even, strangely enough, tribal shamanic traditions, and modern esotericists each linked their own way to the founding of various mystical schools and even apparent “cults” — Gurdjieff/Ouspensky and the Fourth Way, figures like Tomberg and Steiner around the movement of Anthroposophy, figures like Blavatsky, Leadbeater, and Besant around the movement of Theosophy, Crowley and Grant around Thelema, Rajneesh and his vainglorious catastrophe of a hedonistic sex-cult centered around personality-worship of him (yet not without some insights drawn from his deep study of various world traditions and teachings), and, apparently paradoxically enough, also including the works of J. Krishnamurti as the apparent anti-Theosophical and anti-traditional “World Teacher” (yet, again, not offered and recommended as a blind adherence to Krishnamurti or any of these figures, sects, and traditions here brought up).
And yet, bizarrely enough, extremely traditional and revered works like the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita were also included. Furthermore, an understanding of the history and the major thinkers and schools of Western philosophy, from the Presocratics to Plato to Neoplatonism to the modern schools of existentialism and phenomenology through thinkers like Husserl and Heidegger, were also recommended and included, as well as an overview of this entire tradition of Western philosophy through something like Karl Jaspers’s “The Great Philosophers” to put it further in perspective.
The recommended bibliography was so massive I legitimately am still getting through it and imagine it will be many years before I’m even close to being finished with it. The need for for holistic form of thinking, as well as of getting beyond the crude view that it’s “something like a massive puzzle to put together and if I just get all the puzzle-pieces in place I will find it,” was also pointed out.
>Nisargadatta
well worth reading
Thank you so much. I was worried when you deleted your post last night that I had spooked you into thinking better of revealing your personal biographical experiences.
I am at work now and I will catch up with your others posts late this evening. You are a wonderful writer and a generous soul.
One of the most important things that I saw, was that Christianity is the most developed religous image. Advaita, the Tao, etc can all be pretty well equated with the Holy Spirit, and many of the practices can be tied to the Logos of the son, but the relationship between the father and the son, so far as I can see, lays out a temporal historical dimension to mysticism. It is not enough to gain temporary illumination. But the illumination, or mystical experience, is subsequently detailed, and brought into physical material, logical being through explication, through Logos. When the experience of illumination is exhausted, we seek again communion with 'it'.
This process works on the individual level as well as the world-historical.
It showed me that everytime we hit deep sleep we are uploading what is needed by the supercomputer, and it is giving us what we need to continue groping forward.
It is by this process of mysticism-elaboration-rinse-repeat, that the arbitrary, the idiosyncratic, or the demonic as others in this thread are calling it, are flushed from the tradition we promulgate. Thus, that which contains the 'truth' is that which propagates through time. Though we never have access to truth itself, can never ourselves sort the wheat from the chaff, even in mystical communion. But rather, we must have the humility to concede that all truth will be propagated in this world packaged in arbitrary idiosyncratic vessels.
The Created 'becomes' the Creator by Creating.
>But the illumination, or mystical experience, is subsequently detailed, and brought into physical material, logical being through explication, through Logos. When the experience of illumination is exhausted, we seek again communion with 'it'.
>This process works on the individual level as well as the world-historical.
>It showed me that everytime we hit deep sleep we are uploading what is needed by the supercomputer, and it is giving us what we need to continue groping forward.
>It is by this process of mysticism-elaboration-rinse-repeat, that the arbitrary, the idiosyncratic, or the demonic as others in this thread are calling it, are flushed from the tradition we promulgate. Thus, that which contains the 'truth' is that which propagates through time. Though we never have access to truth itself, can never ourselves sort the wheat from the chaff, even in mystical communion. But rather, we must have the humility to concede that all truth will be propagated in this world packaged in arbitrary idiosyncratic vessels.
Yep. This is legitimately a cognitive scientific description (in different terminology) of the learning process, of what actually goes on in the human being when we learn new things or have a worldview-shift or paradigm-shift — the previous, less expansive worldview or model-of-reality, receives new, more inclusive and compelling information, then deconstructs and restructures itself on a higher, wider, more inclusive level including the new things learned in a new, more fully expansive model-of-reality.
And learning can only happen in a self that genuinely desires it and has the need for it — if it is already firmly stuck in its own conclusive model-of-reality, then any offered source of guidance or information outside its limited worldview will be automatically denied, and ignored. It can be compared to blindness.
Learning is theoretically endless. The learning cycle can theoretically endlessly repeat. This seems to be the great challenge we’ve faced throughout human history — pointers to, manifestations of phenomena and wisdom from a timeless and spaceless realm, become solidified into time-and-space-bound cults and dogmas which people ironically use to cut off access to the same divinity they claim to be trying to reach, help and guide others to. This was also referred to by Christ as the tendency of the Pharisees (which, by a psychological reading of the Gospels, can also apply to a tendency to be found in ourselves and timelessly repeated throughout human societies at large):
>But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.
Matthew 23:13
Edwin Bernbaum’s “The Way to Shambhala: A Search for the Mythical Kingdom Beyond the Himalayas”
Chögyam Trungpa’s collected works of bringing the Vajrayana Tibetan Buddhist system of human development to the West
The list then gets into a lot of Western philosophy, modern cognitive science, and even business and the field of management consulting.
G.S. Kirk’s and J. E. Raven’s “The Presocratic Philosophers”
Karl Jaspers’s “The Great Philosophers” series
“The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn
“The Ethics of Ambiguity” by Simone de Beauvoir
“Introduction to the New Existentialism” by Colin Wilson
“The Philosophy of Existence” by Gabriel Marcel
“Being and Nothingness” by Jean-Paul Sartre
“The Last Word” by Thomas Nagel
“The Invented Reality: How Do We Know What We Believe We Know? (Contributions to Constructivism)” by Paul Watzlawick
“The Social Construction of Reality” by Berger and Luckmann
“Philosophy of Existence” by Karl Jaspers
“Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences” by David E. Polkinghorne
“Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity” by Richard Rorty
“Essay on the Freedom of the Will” by Arthur Schopenhauer
“Critique of Pure Reason” by Immanuel Kant
“Phenomenology of Spirit” by G. W. F. Hegel
“Science of Logic” by G. W. F. Hegel
“The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An edition of the fragments with translation and commentary” by Charles H. Kahn
“The View from Nowhere” by Thomas Nagel
“Elbow Room: the Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting” by Daniel C. Dennett
“The Mind’s New Science” by Howard Gardner
“New Ways of Ontology” by Nicolai Hartmann
“Being and Time” by Martin Heidegger
“The Basic Problems of Phenomenology” by Martin Heidegger
“Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning)” by Martin Heidegger
“Pathmarks: Texts in German Philosophy” by Martin Heidegger
“History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena” by Martin Heidegger
“The Concept of Time” by Martin Heidegger
“The Basic Problems of Phenomenology” by Martin Heidegger
“Kant and the Problem of Modern Metaphysics” by Martin Heidegger
“Parmenides” by Martin Heidegger
“Ontology: the Hermeneutics of Facticity” by Martin Heidegger
“The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus” by Martin Heidegger
“What Is Called Thinking?” by Martin Heidegger
“Discourse on Thinking” by Martin Heidegger
“Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit” by Martin Heidegger
“Heraclitus Seminar” by Heidegger and Fink
“Logical Investigations (Vols. I and II)” by Edmund Husserl
“Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy” by Edmund Husserl
“Experience and Judgment” by Edmund Husserl
“Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology” by Edmund Husserl
This isn’t even all of it. Many of the others would be surprisingly “down-to-earth,” not at all seeming like they have to do with religion or philosophy or esotericism — in fact, the works around business, psychology, and cognitive science mentioned. I might go back and list them all later when I have more energy even though I doubt it will be much good because few would really be interested much in it or care. Although it still might be of interest to some people, so I’ll probably get them and list them eventually.
I also left out:
Sir John George Woodroffe’s “The World as Power”
“Ideas” by Edmund Husserl
“Mind and Cognition: An Anthology” edited by William G. Lycan
And yet these were also included with some of the most fabulously “kooky,” “New Age” stuff, as well as Eastern philosophies and traditions. I didn’t even include the parts about what you call call esoteric anthroposophy, having to do with the various gradations or levels of the human being, and to be found in a somewhat diluted form, with hogwash thrown in, yet still helpfully systematized, in modern Theosophical literature.
A.E. Powell: The Etheric Body
A.E. Powell: The Astral Body
A.E. Powell: The Mental Body
A.E. Powell: The Causal Body
A.E. Powell: The Solar System
Once I drink some coffee and have some more energy I might get back to this thread and continue giving out some of my kookiness to other people.
Someone into Guenon might notice a glimpse of similar ideas, cosmology, and what you could anthroposophy in works of his like “Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta” as well as “The Multiple States of Being.” Taking a cue from Indian traditions like Vedanta, which includes a division of the potential human states of consciousness into four major ones — waking, dreaming sleep, deep sleep, and turiya (the fourth state of what-could-be-called pure awareness, transcending-yet-including the other three), also sometimes called turiya samadhi.
These are also linked to different bodies or “sheaths” (koshas) which the human being has and which mainly function in and through these different states of consciousness.
There’s the physical body (the annamayakosha or “food” sheath, made up out of the matter of and requiring food for its subsistence, the physical body).
Then there’s the pranamaya kosha (energy sheath, energetic desires and subtle conceptions).
There’s then the manomaya kosha or mind-sheath, of manas. This is conceived of as the lower mind, lower mental faculties and which also can be tied to emotions. It’s the mind of imagination, daydreaming, and dreams, as when you “think” of things or conceive in your mind, imagine some situation or person or plan you want to carry out. For instance, “think” of a tasty juicy hamburger — this is a faculty of your mind, that it can “think” of something like that and even bring up corresponding sensations of hunger and memories of that taste. You can also “think” of images and memories of people, objects, and situations you know and have experienced, as well as the corresponding emotions they bring up in you, but it’s all still a comparatively lower form of “thinking” than the purer thinking of Heidegger, Heraclitus, or Plato about timeless, abstract concepts and ideas.
Then there’s the vijnanamayakosha, the “discernment” or “knowledge” sheath. This is pure intellect, the intellectual faculty, corresponding to this higher, purer form of thought I just mentioned.
Apparently finally, there’s the anandamaya kosha or bliss sheath. Swami Saraswati also gets deep into these divisions in his “Science of Soul” and “Science of Divinity.”
The physical body corresponds to waking consciousness, what could be called the subtle energetic body/lower mind corresponds to the dreaming state, and the intellectual body, the intellect, corresponds to the state of deep sleep.
In other words, while awake, your consciousness is manifesting throughout the physical body. While dreaming, your consciousness is manifesting through a subtle dreaming-vehicle. While in deep sleep, your consciousness is manifesting through what could be called and is called the causal body in Vedanta.
As you can obviously see, since (this model-of-reality goes) we are essentially composed of all these layers all at once, they are not strictly tied to those levels of consciousness. In other words, the faculties of the subtle body can manifest in our waking state as well, throughout our physical body and the physical organ of the brain — daydreaming, imagining, forming images in one’s head, having the psyche and emotions we do — otherwise we would just be automatons with only a physical body and its sensations and reactions.
The faculty of pure abstract intellect of the causal body SOMETIMES manifests in our waking life, as when we deliberately read and think about abstract philosophical and theological concepts. In most people, however, it is relatively inert.
Interestingly enough, this may be why, for us, the state of deep sleep is only thought of as just “blank” or a “void.” The causal intellect is essentially inert and empty for most people.
This is also condensed into three bodies, the sthula sarira (gross body), subtle body (linga sarira), and causal body (karana sarira) in Vedanta.
PKD’s glorious “2001: A Space Odyssey” style experiences may have been something like the genuine spontaneous eruption of God, or of the state of turiya samadhi, or of the Atman (which, by the classical traditional conception of Advaita Vedanta, is one with Brahman) into his waking consciousness, which hence rather spectacularly pierced through the veils of time, space, matter, and individuality. Of this, Ouspensky, recounting the esotericist Gurdjieff’s teachings in “In Search of the Miraculous,” gives this rather interesting and applicable tidbit about Gurdjieff’s own anthroposophical division of the human being:
>The higher thinking center ... is still further removed from us, still less accessible. Connection with it is possible only through the higher emotional center. It is only from descriptions of mystical experiences, ecstatic states, and so on, that we know cases of such connections. These states can occur on the basis of religious emotions, or, for short moments, through particular narcotics; or in certain pathological states such as epileptic fits or accidental traumatic injuries to the brain, in which cases it is difficult to say which is the cause and which is the effect; that is, whether the pathological state results from the connection or is its cause.
>If we could connect the centers of our ordinary consciousness with the higher thinking center deliberately and at will, it would be of no use to us whatever in our present state. In most cases where accidental contact with the higher thinking center takes place a man becomes unconscious. The mind refuses to take in the flood of thoughts, emotions, and ideas which suddenly burst into it. And instead of a vivid thought, or a vivid emotion, there results, on the contrary, a complete blank, a state of unconsciousness. The memory retains only the first moment when the flood rushed in on the mind and the last moment when the flood was receding and consciousness returned. But even these moments are so full of unusual shades and colors that there is nothing with which to compare them among the ordinary sensations of life. This is mainly all that remains from so-called ‘mystical’ and ‘ecstatic’ experiences, which represent a temporary connection with a higher center. Only very seldom does it happen that a mind which has been better prepared succeeds in grasping and remembering something of what was felt and understood at the moment of ecstasy. But even in these cases the thinking, the moving, and the emotional centers remember and transmit everything in their own way ... transmit in worldly three-dimensional forms things which pass completely beyond the limits of worldly measurements; in this way, they entirely distort every trace of what remains in the memory of these unusual experiences. Our ordinary centers, in transmitting the impressions of the higher centers, may be compared to a blind man speaking of colors, or to a deaf man speaking of music.
Fascinatingly enough, you also have the trikaya doctrine of Buddhist teachings, with the nirmanakaya (transformation-body or physical body), sambhogakaya (desire-body or subtle body), and dharmakaya (truth-body).
In Plato’s Timaeus, fascinatingly enough — going now to Ancient Greek philosophy, cosmology and esotericism, which maybe you can’t imagine could be anymore different from Indian philosophy — you see the idea that the demiurge, the divine creator of the universe, in creating the universe as a living and intelligent whole, “put intelligence in soul and soul in body.” The soul is held to be distinguished from the intelligence, and the world is held to be comprised of its own body, its own soul, and its own intelligence.
The “intelligence” is in the “soul” and the soul in the “body”. Body, soul, and then intelligence.
This essentially correlates to the tripartite division of the being in Vedanta.
In the Christian scriptures, you also see a distinguishment between the spirit, soul, and body.
>Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
1 Thessalonians 5:23
This corresponds to the soma (fleshly body), psyche (inner nature, lower mental, emotional, sensual and passionate nature of man), and pneuma (higher intellectual spirit) of the ancient Greeks.
In Biblical Hebrew terminology, there’s the physical body, then there’s nephesh (נֶ֫פֶשׁ), which is variously translated as “soul” or “life” and correlates to sentience, animals also held to have nephesh. In Genesis 2:7, Adam “became a living nephesh”.
But, above and beyond these — what distinguishes the human being from the mere animal — is ruah (רוח), which can also be translated as wind, spirit, or breath. Hence, God breathes the spirit or breath of life into Adam, the higher immortal soul. The very phrase, “the Holy Spirit,” is, in Hebrew, ruah ha-kodesh.
Animals have a psyche or nephesh — the emotional and lower mental nature. They even dream. But they don’t have what distinguishes humanity from animals, which is the true mind or higher intellectual spirit, the ruah.
Interestingly enough, what could be called hylozoism — the idea that the entire manifest universe is itself a living, divine, intelligent organism created by the demiurge after Itself as a model, modeled after Itself — is to be found in Plato’s Timaeus, and is the same thing Philip K. Dick claimed to have experienced. He momentarily came to view the entire universe as itself a living, ensouled, divine organism which was communicating to him in that moment — VALIS, or Vast Active Living Intelligence System. The parallel to the Ancient Greek philosophical conception of hylozoism (the universe as a living, intelligent, ensouled organism), as well as the idea of panpsychism, was, again, something PKD explicitly noted and brought up. He felt as if he had come in contact with the World-Mind or the World-Soul.
In the Gurdjieff’s teachings, again, you find this, with very similar terminology.
>According to an ancient teaching, traces of which may be found in many systems, old and new, a man who has attained the full development possible for man, a man in the full sense of the word, consists of four bodies. These four bodies are composed of substances which gradually become finer and finer, mutually interpenetrate one another, and form four independent organisms, standing in a definite relationship to one another but capable of independent action.
>These four bodies are defined in different teachings in various ways.
>G. drew a diagram, reproduced in Figure 1, and said:
>The first is the physical body, in Christian terminology the 'carnal' body; the second, in Christian terminology, is the 'natural' body; the third is the 'spiritual' body; and the fourth, in the terminology of esoteric Christianity, is the 'divine' body. In theosophical terminology the first is the 'physical' body, the second is the 'astral,' the third is the 'mental,' and the fourth the 'causal.'
>In the terminology of certain Eastern teachings the first body is the 'carriage' (body), the second body is the 'horse' (feelings, desires), the third the 'driver' (mind), and the fourth the 'master' (I, consciousness, will).
>In this connection certain teachings compare man to a house of four rooms. Man lives in one room, the smallest and poorest of all, and until he is told of it, he does not suspect the existence of the other rooms which are full of treasures. When he does learn of this he begins to seek the keys of these rooms and especially of the fourth, the most important, room. And when a man has found his way into this room he really becomes the master of his house, for only then does the house belong to him wholly and forever.
>The fourth room gives man immortality and all religious teachings strive to show the way to it. There are a great many ways, some shorter and some longer, some harder and some easier, but all, without exception, lead or strive to lead in one direction, that is, to immortality.
Of this, it’s interesting to actually bring up some more descriptions of PKD’s actual experiences themselves:
>Just after closing the door and heading back inside, Dick would claim that he had been staggered by a sudden, extremely brilliant pink light that washed over everything, at the same time implanting a stream of strange images into his mind, including geometric patterns, images of places long past, odd paintings, philosophical ideas, and even what he described as blueprints for advanced machines. Over the next several months these visions would come in bursts and waves, and he became ever more convinced that they were being beamed into his head by outside forces. Dick himself would say of this, “I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane."
>As the outlandish visions continued, he began to find that often as he went about his daily business he would see his surroundings with what appeared to be images of ancient Rome superimposed over them, and this would sometimes be incredibly vivid, complete with Roman centurions walking about and scenes from the past playing out over the mundane of his normal reality.
It’s also interesting to note that Gurdjieff conceptualizes this as the “coating of higher being-bodies,” something like the actual formation and development in us of new, more fully developed and conscious vehicles in us through what he calls “self-remembering” as a pathway to reaching what he calls objective consciousness. The insight he has is that this is a legitimate day-by-day, moment-by-moment process of honing and purifying the physical, emotional, and intellectual vehicles of the human being so that they can fully reflect and manifest the higher state of being from which they derive. As he notes, negativity and mechanicality in the lower “centers” or vehicles are what cut off access to the “higher centers.”
Hence, the method given of “self-remembering” is essentially a more distilled formulation of the very concept of “meditation” or “samadhi,” which is not prescribed as something only to be done in a rigid posture of sitting in the lotus-position, but of bringing what could be called this “inseeing” throughout as much of one’s life as one can — while waking, sleeping, while thinking, while having the sensations that we do, while eating, while having various emotional reactions. It’s something like a Zen-like discipline. In Zen, it’s noted that after the enlightenment-experience, one has to deliberately practice it, become settled in the understanding of it “while eating, sleeping, walking, going about one’s ordinary life” — permanently — not just in some specially devoted time for it like sitting in the lotus position and carrying out the practice of something like shikantaza. It’s ubiquitous, like Ubik.
Thank you as well and you’re welcome.
I tend to think that if his experience had any importance it would have produced something of worth. I'm not aware of any useful ideas or knowledge or even some kind of exceptional aesthetic beauty arising from it.
best thread we've seen here in quite a while. love you anon, thanks for the genuinely interesting observations.
For some modern mystics and esotericists, religion has been conceived of as traces of and guides given for the spiritual evolution of humanity and even something like the development of new internal, spiritual organs and faculties which necessarily lead to new ways of thinking, feeling, and knowing which can even seem “miraculous” or “supernatural.”
>Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.
John 14:12
Sri Aurobindo wrote of this as the “Integral Yoga” and even referred to it as “the triple perfection” — the bringing down of the Atman into to fully manifest through and perfect the lower vehicles of the mental body, subtle body, and physical body, as per Hindu teachings and terminology. This is essentially a massive cosmic scheme and divine play (lila-Shakti) of divine involution and evolution — first the manifestation and creation of the universe and its inhabitants, and then the subsequent divinization of matter. He held that the purpose of the creation of nature and humanity was hence to give rise to the supramental human being, and therefore also wrote of yoga, the timeless integral yoga (coming from a word literally meaning “yoking together” or “union”) as personally going through the Supramental Ascent and the subsequent Supramental Descent, in which the Supermind, the source of the experience of enlightenment attained, comes down and perfects the lower vehicles. Hence, it could be called the supramentalization of humanity.
From this timeless interpretation, it seems entirely possible PKD momentarily experienced something like the supramental ascent, but the issue he found was in the supramental DESCENT — trying to integrate what he had experienced into his waking daily life, his normal thoughts, emotions, and actions, when he felt an irreconcilable division between the two and even the frightening sense that he was simply going insane. By Gurdjieff’s analysis, it was that the lower emotional and lower thinking centers were not yet fully perfected, honed, disciplined and trained enough to be able to fully live out and understand these higher understands and experiences. Hence why you see something like a gloriously inspired logorrhea in his VALIS and Exegesis (“Was this an extraterrestrial satellite beaming a supernatural pink light into my brain? Christ? The Maitreya Buddha?”)
From the Jesuit Catholic tradition, we find the modern heterodox priest, theologian, and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who — totally independently, using Christian terminology, ideas, and teachings — came to what he admitted was an eerily similar cosmology to Aurobindo’s, in his trying to reconcile Catholic teachings with Darwin’s theory of evolution. He conceived of the Omega Point as a source outside of time and space, which is itself the source of time and space, and embodied by Christ as the Logos. What materialistic scientists simply take as “merely natural, mechanical forces of evolution,” was, for de Chardin (and others on his wavelength) actually the evolution of all of creation towards the Omega Point, the drawing of all things by Christ into Himself. He views the biological evolutionary processes of the planet as comprising what could be called the biosphere (itself a manifestation of Logos), and the creation and evolution of humanity as introducing the noosphere, the cognitive layer of existence. As evolution progresses, the noosphere becomes more and more coherent, unified, and enlightened, subjugating and subordinating to itself the biosphere as part of the self-conscious evolution towards the Omega Point.
This is, again, all rather similar to what PKD saw, felt, and experienced.
The fascinating apparent precognition of PKD’s experience may not necessarily have been spurious, demonically derived, or what-you-will. In both ancient and modern formulations of religious teachings, you can see this basic contrast between the material, the lower, the earthly, the time-and-space-bound, with the supernatural, the spiritual, coming from the timeless and spaceless; hence, limitations of time and space are nothing for it.
Hence, it’s not surprising that, two thousand years ago, St. John the Divine sees and prefigures events and trends taking shape two thousand years later, and communes with Christ, who proclaims Himself the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, standing outside of time and space; and, recently, that Philip K. Dick, in his mystical experiences, comes to see himself as a Christian from two thousand years ago in Rome, feeling that he had found a great secret — that the Messiah was here — but also one that caused him fear, having to hide the great knowledge and teachings from the Roman authorities.
For Gurdjieff, it is conceptualized as a struggle against the mechanical and a movement from the mechanical to the non-mechanical, the authentically spiritual, which necessarily includes a transmutation and spiritualization of the lower vehicles. PKD also noted the tie to this as a sort of “jail-break,” a transcendence of the mechanism, the merely mechanistic, materialistic, deterministic reality which only seems to be a vale of tears and sorrow.
He had, so to speak, momentarily become “derobotized.”
Very glad someone saw Chardin and PKD as interwoven as well
Chardin postulated that consciousness itself is expanding and expanding to the point of unity at the Omega point.
But when we look at history doesn't it seem as if it hasn't been an expansion of consciousness per se at each fulcrum point, but instead an object? And more specifically, a book?
The Vedas, Homer, the works of Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle, the Tragedies, the compilation of the Holy Bible, Copernicus' On the Revolutions, the works of Darwin, and so on.
Animal evolution is bottle necked by genetic material. Human oral transmission is limited not just by mneomic capacity, but by lineage. If an oral lineage dies out, so too do the tales. Of the eight parts of the Trojan War cycle, six are lost to time.
It is only by virtue of Homer that we know of the other two, the Illiad and the Odyssey. Through the promulgation of the documents the tradition is 'immortalized' or frozen in time.
Part of the reason the Holy Bible can boast such credibility is the thematic, allegoric, and metaphorical links in a pan-historical narrative, spanning many civilizations, across many thousands - perhaps tens of thousands - of years, as documented by many many authors.
The imaginative rupture that took place with such violence in the first century AD would never have happened if Judaism had been an oral culture.
While the technological singularity is typically imagined to be a computer, it might be easier to imagine it as some sort of hyper-object (the Bible has in fact been described as a hyper-linked text). A computer after all (it still seems?) a binary object, made up of 1s and 0s.
The venn-diagram concept of metaphor, whereby the invisible (Platonic) qualities of two objects is implicated by association, as utilized in an ever-complicating text with an established chronological canon, aims to bring the 1 closer to the 0 by explicating (by metaphorical implication) the space between the two.
Then a hyper-document would eventually rival or even surpass the complexity of an individual mind, could even (conceivably) rival the complexity of an entire civilization. This would be the ultimate LOGOS, ie: the individuation of the self, ie: the disentanglement of the unique from historicity, ie: the father and the son.
If we take the Father-Son-Holy Spirit trinity to be, as I see it, a 'recipe' for ultimate consciousness, then the only thing that hpyer-object would be missing would be the Holy Spirit, the communion with it's own teleological destiny ...
A useful answer to this dilemma is to essentially take Philip K. Dick, or even myself, as your guru or God. You can take Philip K. Dick’s VALIS (or even this very thread) as the ultimate sacred scriptures and revealed theological text.
This inevitably leads to the question: “What type of stupid God posts on IQfy’s IQfy?” or even, “What type of stupid God gets divorced five times, addicted to amphetamine, has a nervous breakdown and has to go to rehab, then writes this book, ‘VALIS,’ which is so obviously timebound, societally and psychologically limited, and obviously only could have been written by this very unqiue type of person — a 20th-century science-fiction writer with mental health issues?
What type of stupid ‘God’ is this?”
You can also read Borges’s Ficciones, in which is included a story referring to a map so intricate and lifelike that it actually is an exactly-sized model, on a 1-to-1 scale, of the very geographical totality and locality it is attempting to replicate and mirror.
> ...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
—Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
It is inevitable that in Christ’s own day, people were saying and thinking: “What type of stupid ‘God’ would decide to come down and manifest in just this stupid person and cult-leader, Yesuah ben Yosef, of whom I’ve even heard it said that he drinks wine and sups with prostitutes and politicians? A man who tells us to be perfect, and gives all these moral guidelines and teachings about love and compassion obviously impossible to actually carry out, as if he is actually implying he himself is some perfect guide and teacher to prescribe these teachings to us?”
You can then further hypothesize about modern reactions to PKD and his VALIS, essentially going, “Who is this profoundly flawed person to tell us he had some monetary mystical experience in which he came to see Christ within himself and timelessly manifesting throughout all the universe,’ or something like that?”
Tomberg, coming from Anthroposophical ideas inspired by Steiner, in his analysis of the Book of Revelation, points out this contrast between what he calls the sub-natural and the sub-human (the mechanical processes of nature, as well as the capacity for the merely abstract scientific thought we as humans have, which can “reduce” all matter, life, and the universe to simply mechanical, natural processes) with the “memory within” of the seven spirits of God and the “memory of nature” symbolized by the seven stars. Christ, in the Book of Revelation, is portrayed as one who “has the seven spirits of God” and “the seven stars.” In other words, a fusion of internal and the external — nature in its divine, cosmic, external aspect, as symbolized by the stars, and the internal spiritual nature of the “seven spirits of God.”
>And unto the angel of the church in Sardis write; These things saith he that hath the seven Spirits of God, and the seven stars; I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead. Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die: for I have not found thy works perfect before God.
Revelation 3:1-2
Esoterically, the admonition is to unregenerate man himself — it has a “name,” an outer form and personality, a repute that it is “living,” even though, spiritually, it is actually dead or asleep. Hence, man is admonished to “be watchful,” to awaken, and to “strengthen the things that remain which are ready to die: for I have not found thy works perfect before God.”
As Tomberg puts it:
>The “works”; that is, the sum-total of the created culture-values, are — as seen from within (“before God”) — definitely “not perfect” (ou pepleromena). That is, they are EMPTY of divine life. In these circumstances, therefore, the first commandment is, on the one hand: “Be wakeful”, and, on the other: “Strengthen the things that remain, which are ready to die”. Dying and keeping awake are to balance each other. The more the one process is in evidence, the more so must the other be also.
[...]
>Man has to awaken in himself his true nature by a “change of heart” (metanoesis) or “repentance”. ... It is the awakening of a higher inner activity in opposition to the forces of death inside and outside man ... The “remembering” and “hearing” of what has been “received” is followed by the injunction to “hold it fast”: that is, to make it a lasting possession of the ordinary consciousness.
>Thus, the admonition of the Letter to the Angel of the Church in Sardis contains the quintessence of the spiritual method of the epoch of the consciousness soul: “Remember therefore (mnemomeue) how thou hast received and heard, and hold fast and repent (metanoesen).” (Rev. III:3)
Fascinatingly enough — “fascinating” is a word I keep repeating, because this really is all very fascinating — the emphasis on “remembering,” “memory,” is identical to thoughts PKD came to have about the whole thing. PKD saw that he wasn’t “discovering something new outside of himself,” but remembering something he had already known and, so to speak, had forgotten.
It is anamnesis, a word he actually used in VALIS and his Exegesis to refer to the experience (and also a phrase used in Christian liturgy: “Do this in memory of me”): remembrance, recollection — literally and etymologically, meaning the lifting, clearing away or negation (also going back, repeating, or re-, the prefix ana-) of amnesia, remembering what was forgotten. Spiritually speaking, we are like amnesiacs — and, in this experience, PKD felt like his spiritual amnesia was cleared away.
In Plato’s Meno and Phaedo, the idea of all learning as simply anamnesis, or remembering what we have forgotten — finding knowledge which was already latent in us — is also given.
In PKD’s words in his Exegesis:
>The creator can afford to descend into his own creation. He can afford to shed his memories (of his identity) and his supernatural powers…. The creator deliberately plants clues in his irreal creation—clues which he cunningly knows in time (eventually) will restore his memory (anamnesis) of who he is…. So he has a fail-safe system built in. No chance he won’t eventually remember. Makes himself subject to spurious space, time and world (and death, pain, loss, decay, etc.), but has these disinhibiting clues or stimuli distributed deliberately strategically in time and space. So it is he himself who sends himself the letter which restores his memory (Legend of the Pearl). No fool he!”[70]
By this analysis, as apparently diverse figures as Nisargadatta Maharaj, Ramana Maharshi, and Philip K. Dick in his later life are all simply different manifestations of this ongoing spiritual evolution of humanity. What to the outsider looks like a “regression” or a “failure” — PKD not being able to create a coherent theology but rather more like some gloriously chaotic, compelling pastiche in VALIS and his Exegesis to describe his experiences — might, from an internal and spiritual point of view, be actually proof of an internal progression and evolution impossible for many to understand.
As Tomberg points out, it is beyond the:
>abstract questioning, which, without the participation of the whole human being, merely wishes to achieve the comfort of a ‘flawless and incontrovertible system.’
It is a phenomenological and existential re-orientation, as opposed to the mere founding or discovering of some new, flawless, complete “system” outside of oneself to adhere to and worship.
In Ouspensky’s “In Search of the Miraculous,” we find this (again, an independently quite similar passage to Tomberg’s Anthroposophical analysis of the Book of Revelation):
>There is nothing new in the idea of sleep. People have been told almost since the creation of the world that they are asleep and that they must awaken. How many times is this said in the Gospels, for instance? ‘Awake,’ ‘watch,’ ‘sleep not.’ Christ’s disciples even slept when he was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane for the last time. It is all there. But do men understand it? Men take it simply as a form of speech, as an expression, as a metaphor. They completely fail to understand that it must be taken literally. And again it is easy to understand why. In order to understand this literally it is necessary to awaken a little, or at least to try to awaken. I tell you seriously that I have been asked several times why nothing has been said about sleep in the Gospels. Although it is there spoken of on almost every page. This simply shows that people read the Gospels in sleep.
Maurice Nicoll, a student of Ouspensky’s who also was a neurologist and psychiatrist who once worked as a close disciple and friend of Jung, has this about the phrase “metanoia,” often translated as repentance, used in the New Testament and referred to above by Tomberg, in his work “The Mark”
>The word translated throughout the New Testament as repentance is in the Greek meta-noia which means change of mind . . . The particle meta indicates transference, or transformation, or beyondness. The other part of this word— -noia—is from the Greek word nous, which means mind. The word metanoia therefore has to do with transformation of the mind. (The Mark, 92–93)
It’s interesting that PKD, throughout his life, was so fascinated by Jung and also turns to Jung as a way to describe and integrate his experiences into his waking consciousness. Jung is held to have suspiciously regarded Gurdjieff and Ouspensky as “cult-leaders,” but by something like both of their student’s Maurice Nicoll’s approach, Jung’s investigation of timeless archetypes endlessly repeating themselves throughout various human cultures and religions, of the psychological and spiritual integration of the human being, as well as of his conception of a collective consciousness (strangely similar to Chardin’s noosphere, the Ancient Greek world-soul or world-mind, Aurobindo’s Supermind), appear simply to have been Jung’s own way of holistically synthesizing insights he had come to from a deep study of the many, many cultural, historical, and religious relics of people finding within themselves the higher emotional and higher thinking centers of Gurdjieff, and translating them into symbols, storylines, and archetypes for us.
I'm wondering if you're familiar with any of the current cognitive science research being done on the experience of 'flow'?
Not of the specifics, necessarily, but it’s interesting to note that various sages and mystics have essentially claimed to have come to something like a permanent flow-state in themselves.
See Nisargadatta:
Along with the knowledge ‘I am’ appears space and the world. When the knowledge ‘I am’ departs the world is liquidated.
Appearance and disappearance, birth and death these are qualities of ‘I am’, they do not belong to you, the Absolute.
Catch hold of the knowledge ‘I am’ in meditation and the realization will occur that ‘I’, the Absolute, am not the quality ‘I am’.
Do nothing but stay in the knowledge ‘I am’, the ‘moolmaya’ or primary illusion, and then it will release its stranglehold on you and get lost.
Establish yourself firmly in the ‘I am’ and reject all that does not go with it.
Forget all about physical disciplines in this connection and just be with the knowledge ‘I am’. When you are established in the ‘I am’ there are no thoughts or words.
Get stabilized in the primary concept ‘I am’ in order to lose it and be free from all concepts. In understanding the unreality of ‘I am’ you are totally free from it.
Apply your mind, go back in time and try to recollect the moment when for the first time it dawned on you that ‘you are’ or ‘I am’. This nascent ‘I am’ is without words or non-verbal. By meditating on the knowledge ‘I am’ it gradually settles doom at its source and disappears, then you are the Absolute.
Catch hold of the ‘I am’ and all obstacles will evaporate, you will be beyond the realm of body-mind.
Interestingly, in questions and answers with Nisargadatta about his state-of-being, what his general living and experiencing was life, Nisargadatta was so much as saying that his life was like continuous flow-state without unnecessary suffering, mental and emotional anguish. If some issue happened, he either just tried to correct it or live with it if it was inescapable (the Stoic insight). If some seeming injustice came to him, he just saw it as “a manifestation of some old, forgotten karma, when I had also been similarly unjust to someone else.” His teaching was even conceptualized as “nisarga yoga,” not just after his name but because it means “natural yoga.”
Q: Is your world full of things and people as is mine?
M: No, it is full of myself.
Q: But do you see and hear as we do?
M: Yes, l appear to hear and see and talk and act, but to me it just happens, as to you digestion or perspiration happens. The body-mind machine looks after it, but leaves me out of it. Just as you do not need to worry about growing hair, so I need not worry about words and actions. They just happen and leave me unconcerned, for in my world nothing ever goes wrong.
Yes, and that is why I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on the possibility of Western civilization or science itself being a sort of dreamlike headlong hurdle towards the Omega point Chardin described, the vehicle for mass-liberation, in the sense of electrical stimulation, neurofeedback, or some other modality.
I saw us as already having been IN the noosphere since the agricultural revoltion, when mankind opted out of natural sexual selection, when mankind ceased to put his seed in woman, and instead chose to plant his seed in the cosmos.
Things like electrical stimulation of the brain and neurofeedback devices and practices can only be secondary, perhaps useful tools for playing with one’s state of consciousness, but, by nature, can’t actually do the central thing of YOU yourself. As noted by PKD in his ecstatic experiences and throughout VALIS, you (the immaterial subject) are not just an object or a machine. It can use or perceive objects or machines for its own enjoyment or purposes but the fundamental insight or path has to be found for oneself, tautologically enough. In other words, figures from thousands of years ago didn’t need machines to point this out to them, and today, even — as in the very concept of the BIP, Black Iron Prison — the increasing technologization of the world and fall into scientism is itself dehumanizing humanity.
The greatest science is what Swami Sri Yukteswar calls the holy science, that of yoga. All other sciences are subordinate to it. However, I don’t think that it’s that we have to discard modern technology and whatever actual benefits and insights it can give us — or to artificially pretend that we’re not modern Westernized industrialized people, and only talk in archaic terminology from the KJV Bible, or Hindu Sanskrit terminology, and so on, as if pretending to be more old-fashioned than we really are will really make us “authentic” — only, rather, to make sure that that modern technology and the dehumanizing reductionistic materialistic worldview doesn’t enslave us. Guenon on quantity and quality is applicable here — there’s a modern conception in “New Age” circles where spirituality, things of the spirit, can be turned into a matter of quantity — like accumulating practices, texts, teachings and techniques which will lead you to enlightenment, somehow artificially spiritualize you. Rather, the point is that certain of these texts and teachings ARE THEMSELVES the thing, the main thing, their own centrality, and have the timeless spiritual qualities in them as opposed to merely being modern New Age snake oil.
As Gurdjieff noted, you can’t unconsciously become more conscious. I doubt we could make a machine that could do our living, thinking, and spiritual development for us — otherwise we turn into something like the World Economic Forum’s/BIP’s ideal transhumanist neuro-implanted slave. So no matter what technological developments we make that might alter the human brain, you could only consciously develop yourself consciously, to put it tautologically enough — what Gurdjieff calls “self-remembering.” Exotic practices, “shocks” to the human nervous system, could be employed as secondary techniques and helps for this, but only if you already have what could be called the “primary yoga” down. Something like this seems to be taught in Tantric traditions, where the seductions of life aren’t just there to be discarded, ascetically fled from, but can be transmuted.
By nature, what is infinite and eternal cannot ever be fully encapsulated, caught up in the dogmatic boundaries of any time-and-society-bound sect or cult. Neither PKD nor Guenon “own” it, but they may have glimpsed and can show you the way to it.
Someone might ask what the whole purpose of bringing up the teachings of the multiple bodies of states of being was in relation to PKD. By a yogic analysis, it’s simply that you could say PKD was trying to use the wrong faculty to understand and elaborate on his experiences — a faculty too low, lower than the source from which it had actually come. He was using the discursive intellectualizing faculty (the vijnanamaya kosha or karana sarira, causal body, causal intellect, higher intellectual spirit) to describe and bind in words what came from a source beyond it, to try to get the “final” and “complete” explanation of the experience, which by nature is impossible to achieve. So he’s reduced to going, “Can the Rosicrucians explain what I experienced? The Gnostic Christians? The Buddhists? [etc.]”
And yet, the intellect is great and necessary for us to use and have as human beings. We can use it to create and enjoy works of art, philosophy, literature and theology, endlessly refining themselves towards ever more refined cultural, literary, philosophical, theological and scientific achievements.
Again, as by John 14:12, it’s noted that in the future those who believe in Christ will not just partake in and experience things like the miraculous occurrences described in the Gospels and New Testament — they will do even GREATER things, “even greater works than these.”
>Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.
John 14:12
There’s also the parable of the Mustard Seed — it starts as something seemingly small, irrelevant, pitiable or contemptible, disregarded like the stone the builders cast aside — but grows into something tremendously vast and all-encompassing.
>He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.”
Matthew 13:31-32
It’s something like Christ transubstantiating and transmuting entire universe, all of humanity, into Himself — an alchemical transmutation which takes place naturally, organically, spiritually, like the growth of a tree out of a seed as opposed to the forced winning out of some dogma. Philip K. Dick experiences it here — even with outer miraculous events confirming its veracity — another one there, someone else there, and so forth.
This is a profoundly clunky and scatterbrained thread but I hope people got something out of it. Philosophy, theology, our approaches and attitudes to religion are mutating — some fear it as “a sign of the End Times,” “a reversion to a primitive stage of religion, a blasphemous New Age spirituality,” but maybe what seems like this, is, in fact, Christianity taking on a newer, more ultimate form through the modern de-isolation of various cultures and the existentialist, phenomenological, relativistic, and postmodern revolutions of modern thought, which we all, consciously or unconsciously, whether we know it or not, are influenced by.
Well, I spent a lot of time and effort on this thread — way too much, maybe — wasted the whole day on it. Yet, I don’t regret it, because I actually haven’t browsed and posted on here in great depth and detail for a very long time, and I sense people probably got something out of it. I’m going to probably abandon this thread and the Internet in general for at least the rest of the day now — the very experience of actually looking at a screen for hours legitimately feels somewhat unhealthy — and get back to my own life, my own experience of VALIS, and enjoying this weekend off work.
This was fantastic and a great read friend! Thank you for sharing
>Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.
Luke 17:21
I don't know what any of this shit means.
I just like his fun sci fi stories.
It’s the simplest thing in the world. It’s about Philip K. Dick having an experience of what Robert Anton Wilson calls the nonlocal quantum circuit, transcending his mechanism, reaching the state in which, as Fariduddin Attar writes in his “The Conference of the Birds”:
>There in the Simorgh’s radiant face they saw
>Themselves, the Simorgh of the world — with awe
>They gazed, and dared at last to comprehend
>They were the Simorgh and the journey’s end.
>They see the Simorgh — at themselves they stare,
>And see a second Simorgh standing there;
>They look at both and see the two are one,
>That this is that, that this, the goal is won.
It’s about metaprogramming the programmer. It’s about piercing through the veil of time and space, experiencing a shamanic death and rebirth, a plunge into the spirit world and then a return with good tidings to this material world, good tidings about the potential freedom we can attain from what the Ancient Greeks conceptualized as Ananke — force, constraint, necessity, fate in the deterministic, dreary, mechanistic sense — the endless round of samsara, the wheel of death and rebirth and suffering — it’s about the meeting with Shiva as Kala-Bhairava, the one who has gone beyond time (from Kal, time, and Bhairava, one-who-has-gone-beyond). It’s about receiving kundalini shaktipat from VALIS, the Vast Active Living Intelligence System. It’s about the Tantric transmutation of the shit, disease, decay, boredom, illness, misunderstanding and nastiness of the world and normal day-to-day life into the very nectar of enlightenment. It’s about a cosmic shamanism which no longer cares about being seen as heretical, kooky, or blasphemous. It’s about no longer caring about finding the final cult, belief, or tradition to convert to, but rather simply of finding the technique (tantra) which actually works for you in the moment. It’s about the omni-salvific force of the Salvator Mundi.
It’s about VALIS. It’s about the Alpha and Omega. It’s about the neurological and spiritual evolution of humanity. It’s about the Omega Point. It’s about the Supermind. It’s about the 8-circuit model of consciousness. It’s about a meeting with Maitreya Buddha, the supreme Zen Master, with Zebra, who hides as our apparent surroundings. It’s about synchronicities. It’s about the structure of scientific revolutions. It’s about everything and nothing. It’s essentially the simplest thing in the world.
>To know means to know all. Not to know all means not to know. In order to know all, it is only necessary to know a little. But, in order to know this little, it is first necessary to know pretty much.
G. I. Gurdjieff
I've read PKD and some RAW. But I never understood any of the schizo shit. Prometheus Rising was frustrating.
Absolutely beautiful well thought written prose on PKD and many other topics, I commend you good sir and ask whether you have had any experiences of your own similar to PKD?
>monkey goes crazy
>monkey is smarter than most so he thinks about going crazy
>monkey realizes all mysticism is "going crazy"
>monkey realizes all religions started with a "prophet" going crazy
>realize we are ripe for a new global cosmic religion
>realize PKD is a prophet of the new age along with Timothy leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Terrence McKenna
>etc.
The point rather is there’s a ineffable, indescribable presence or source — which can be endlessly pointed out in a variety of ways and even given titillating names — which even allows the monkeys to even exist in the first place, to have these experiences, dilemmas, struggles, and conflicts.
It’s VALIS.
It’s not just about going crazy. Many would point out the biggest issue in the whole thing is that PKD went crazy over it. If he simply took the experience as an inspiration instead of a way to go crazy, that would’ve been much better. And yet, we still got the book VALIS out of it, so that’s good.
>”I saw God,” Fat states, and Kevin and I and Sherri state, “No, you just saw something like God, exactly like God.” And having spoke, we do not stay to hear the answer, like jesting Pilate, upon his asking, “What is truth?”
– Philip K. Dick, VALIS
In other words, the supreme miracle is that the monkeys have consciousness, intelligence, exist in the first place, as well as they can perceive that their consciousness is moving through different levels or layers — a waking state, a dreaming state, and a state of dreamless deep sleep, as well as states being relatively more or less “conscious, “intelligent,” or “self-aware” (an insight from Gurdjieff). PKD claims he experiences some state outside of and beyond a normal waking state, a hallucinatory dreaming state (or even something analogous to this while abusing drugs), or a state of dreamless deep sleep.
As figures like Nicoll and Tomberg would point out, authentic “repentance” — a morally-laden translation of the actual Greek word used in the New Testament, metanoia, which means a transformation of or going beyond nous, the mind — is not to be mistaken for going “below” the level of conscious, intelligent awareness through some type of sleeping state, a psychosis, or a drug state. It is more like super-wakefulness or meta-wakefulness. Hence why Christ literally admonished people to “watch,” to keep awake.
In the modern reign of quantity (to use Guenon’s phraseology), this is the only thing we can analogize ecstatic and mystical experiences to — mental illness. A neurochemical malfunction. Hence, if someone starts claiming, “I came to feel I was in contact with some transcendentally rational mind which was far more intelligent, conscious, and truly alive than I was, and which even showed me miracles and gave me an ecstatic state of consciousness in communion with it” — the Dennett-style neuroscientists can’t give this any validity, because they’re using their own immaterial intelligence which is manifesting throughout and enlivening the physical organ of their brain, to deny that this “intelligence” or “consciousness” even exists as something beyond simply being an epiphenomenon of the deterministic, merely material, biochemical reactions of the human brain.
it always seemed to me that VALIS was just a creative exercise in crafting a workable theology around concepts that were novel and relevant to PKDs life (sci-fi, psychedelics, counter-culture etc.) just like Jesus did with his "I am the great Shepard" bullshit, only PKD was less mystical and more analytical, Manson already beat him to that one.
thanks for the thread folks
Absolutely fantastic thread, and it's miraculous it's been up this long. Thank you, OP, for the effort.
Thank you.
PKD on his influences.
>I dropped out of college very early and began to write, pursuing my interest in philosophy on my own. My main sources were poets, not philosophers: Yeats and Wordsworth and the seventeenth century English metaphysical poets, Goethe, and then overt philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibnitz and Plotinus -- the last influencing me greatly. Early on I read Alfred North Whitehead and Bergson and became well-grounded in process philosophy. I did take a basic survey course in philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, but was asked to leave when I inquired as to the pragmatic value of Platonism. The Pre-Socratics always fascinated me, in particular Pythagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus and Empedocles. I still view God as Xenophanes viewed him. Gradually my interest in philosophy passed over into an interest in theology. Like the early Greeks I am a believer in panpsychism. Of all the metaphysical systems in philosophy I feel the greatest affinity for that of Spinoza, with his dictum, "Deus sive substantia sive natura;" to me this sums up everything (Viz: "God i.e. reality i.e. nature.") After flirting with bitheism for years I've settled down to monotheism; I regard even Christianity and later Judaism as heavily dualistic and hence unacceptable. To me the truth was first uttered (in so far as we know) when Xenophanes of Colophon, an Ionian, stated, "One God there is in no way like mortal creatures either in bodily form or in the thought of his mind. The whole of him sees, the whole of him thinks, the whole of him hears. He stays always motionless in the same place; it is not fitting that he should move about now this way, now that. But, effortlessly, he wields all things by the thought of his mind." My interest in Pythogaras came from reading Wordsworth's "Ode," and from there I passed on to neo-Platonism and to the Pre-Socratics.
https://faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Parallel%20Universes/Texts/Philip%20K_%20Dick%20on%20Philosophy%20A%20Brief%20Interview.htm
When Socrates claims to have a daimon, some type of internal voice and presence inspiring him, we and academics and scholars can overlook it. But if someone today has or claims to experience the same thing, we get rather worried.
If PKD was living and experiencing the same things a few thousand years ago in a different cultural and religious milieu and conditioning, we might have known him as some early great Neoplatonic philosopher or even some early Christian theologian, saint, or mystic. He could’ve been another historical sage and figure on the lines of a Plotinus, or a Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the 5th-6th Christian theologian and Neoplatonic philosopher who is still respectfully studied today by modern doctors of theology. Since he’s existing and writing today, we get the work VALIS, and a somewhat lesser degree of respect for it.