Philip K. Dick’s Moral Vision

Posted on March 2, 2016 by Reid Mukai

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[Editor’s note: on this 34th anniversary of the death of Philip K. Dick, I’m sharing the 10th and final chapter of Patricia S. Warrick’s bibliographical retrospective “Mind in Motion” (1987). It’s a good reminder of what makes PKD’s work so unique and enduringly relevant.]

This critical study of Dick’s fiction is a work without a concluding chapter – and appropriately so. To summarize his ideas, to categorize his work, to deliver the final word would be to violate Dick’s vision. He saw a universe of infinite possibility, with shapes that constantly transformed themselves – a universe in process. He had not delivered his final word when he died on March 2, 1982, because for him the Word was truly the Living Word, the power that creates and re-creates patterns. Trapped in the stasis of a final statement, the Word would have been defeated by entropy and death.

But if we cannot make a final statement, we can at least note the significance of his opus of fiction for the times in which we live. Great creative personalities often see the essence of an age with a clarity denied to the mass of people. their vision is so vivid that when subsequent events confirm it, humanity, slower at arriving at a realization of its present, hails them as prophetic. I believe that Dick may well be one of those creative personalities whom we hail as visionaries. The claim seems a strange one, considering the literary form in which he worked. Blake, Wordsworth, Yeats – the Romantics with the the elegance of poetic diction make up the visionary company, not writers working in a prose form often regarded as trash. But let us for the moment ignore the form in which he was forced to write and consider instead his vision.

He had a remarkable sense of the cultural transformation taking place in the last half of the twentieth century. He pointed out the cracks in our institutions, our ideologies, and our value systems that would inevitably lead to their collapse. He understood that what had been functional in an industrial age would not work as our culture transformed itself and moved into an Information Age. Such changes often march in with violence. As Dick’s fiction declares again and again, the late twentieth century is a time at war with itself, not with an external enemy. To fight against what one abhors without realizing it lies within is to destroy all. Dick warns us against doing this to ourselves. The cloud of chaos inevitably hangs above the Dickian landscape, a reminder that a like chaos will descend on the real world and envelop us if we continue to make war.

Dick’s fiction calls up our basic cultural assumptions, requires us to reexamine them, and points out the destructive destinations to which they are carrying us. The American Dream may have succeeded as a means of survival in the wilderness of early America; it allowed us to subdue that wilderness and build our holy cities of materialism. But now, the images in Dick’s fiction declare, we live in a new kind of wilderness, a wasteland wilderness, because those cities and the culture that built them are in decay. We need a new American dream to overcome this wasteland. Dick’s ubiquitous wasteland landscape is a moral mirror asking us to journey within and explore the universe of mind and psyche where all the forms that shape the outer world are created. The critical journey of discovery is into the mysterious realm of inner space. Just as Dick’s Fomalhaut Cosmos was a universe created by his imagination, so the universe in which we live is constructed of our ideas about it. To change it we must change our ideas.

Dick’s work makes no new declarations about our time; we knew early in the twentieth century that ours was an Age of Anxiety. But the gift of his powerful mythmaking ability is to give us the stories that help us see both what we are and what we may become as we move into the Space Age. His novel contribution is the bizarre images he creates that so vividly picture our anxieties. Phantasmagoric shapes, the Dickian protagonist calls them, as he muses about the swirl of awesome possibilities sweeping through his mind. They are disorienting images – without clear boundary, inconsistent, contradictory, fragmented, at war with one another. They force us to reconsider our conventional conception of reality. Dick said that “science fiction is uniquely a kind of semi-reality. It is not a statement that ‘this is,’ but a statement, ‘What if this were.’ The difference is crucial in every respect.” Frightening as are some of the futures Dick imagines for mankind, they are not fixed. We are Leo Buleros, we are “choosers,” Dick tells us in the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch; and The Divine Invasion envisions another future than nuclear destruction that we can choose.

We have noted Dick’s wide acquaintance with the classics. But much as Dick loved classical literature, he did not draw on this source in creating his characters. The Dickian fictional world is a world without Titans or Heroes; instead it is a world cut off from the gods. It is filled with little people lacking in power or wisdom, who daily face the dilemma of trying to survive in the face of the inexplicable destructive forces that constantly try to snuff them out. Yet they are not the conventional antiheroes of modern fiction. Perhaps the oxymoron heroic antihero best describes Dick’s protagonist. finally, the Dickian hero acts. He may writhe and struggle to escape, but in the end he accepts the burden of his existential freedom. Daily, he finally learns, he must once again to push the boulder of moral responsibility up the hill of right action. Freedom thus becomes of highest value in Dick’s code. The individual must be free to make moral choices, even though he may often fail to make the right choice. Dick declares again and again, for the individual to be turned into a machine programmed to carry out the decisions of others is “the greatest evil imaginable; the placing on what was a free man who laughed and cried and made mistakes and wandered off into foolishness and play a restriction that limits him, despite what he may imagine or think, to fulfilling an aim outside his own personal – however puny – destiny.”

Our study of Dick’s writings has traced the journey of his restless mind, watching as it grasped an idea, created a metaphor for it in a fictional pattern of antimonies, discarded it for another idea – always spiraling forward albeit often in a wobbling, erratic course. Yet from the beginning one element remains constant in all the fiction – Dick’s faith in the power of empathy. The idea was not well developed or labeled when it first appeared. We see empathy in two of his early short stories as through a glass darkly. He has not yet given it a name. Instead, his characters act it out, and only later does he recognize what his fiction has said. In “Roog” Dick pictures a dog who guards the garbage can of his owners against the garbage men who come to collect it each week. The dog is driven crazy because he cannot offer protection to his owners against these weekly raids. Years later, Dick commented on the story, explaining that he was describing an actual dog owned by a Berkeley neighbor. “I watched the dog suffer, and I understood a little of what was destroying him, and I wanted to speak for him. That’s the whole of it right there. Snooper couldn’t talk. I could. In fact I could write it down, and someone could publish it and many people could read it. Writing fiction has to do with this: becoming the voice for those without voices. It’s not your own voice, you the author; it is all those other voices which normally go unheard.”

“Beyond Lies the Wub,” Dick’s first published story, also dramatizes the concept of empathy. It tells the story of a pig-like alien captured and eventually eaten be a crew of space adventurers despite the fact that the wub possesses human characteristics. Captain Franco and his men lack the ability to see beneath the wub’s appearance. Twenty years later Dick said of the story”:

The idea I wanted to get down on paper had to do with the definition of “human.” The dramatic way I trapped the idea was to present ourselves, the literal humans, and then an alien life form that exhibits the deeper traits that I associate with humanity: not a biped with an enlarged cortex — a forked radish that thinks, to paraphrase the old saying — but an organism that is human in terms of its soul.

I’m sorry if the word “soul” offends you, but I can think of no other term. Certainly, when I wrote the story “Beyond Lies the Wub” back in my youth in politically active Berkeley, I myself would never have thought of the crucial ingredient in the wub being a soul; I was a fireball radical and atheist, and religion was totally foreign to me. However, even in those days (I was about twenty-two years old) I was casting about in an effort to contrast the truly human from what I was later to call the “android or reflex machine” that looks human but is not — the subject of the speech I gave in Vancouver in 1972 [“The Android and the Human,” included herein] — twenty years after “Beyond Lies the Wub” was published. The germ of the idea behind the speech lies in this, my first published story. It has to do with empathy, or, as it was called in earlier times, caritas or agape.

In this story, empathy (on the part of the wub, who looks like a big pig and has the feelings of a man) becomes an actual weapon for survival. Empathy is defined as the ability to put yourself in someone else’s place. The wub does this even better than we ordinarily suppose could be done: Its spiritual capacity is its literal salvation. The wub was my idea of a higher life form; it was then and it is now. On the other hand, Captain Franco (the name is deliberately based on General Franco of Spain, which is my concession in the story to political considerations) looks on other creatures in terms of sheer utility; they are objects to him, and he pays the ultimate price for this total failure of empathy. So I show empathy possessing a survival value; in terms of interspecies competition, empathy gives you the edge. Not a bad idea for a very early story by a very young person!

Two years after writing “The Wub,” Dick again explored the concept in “The Last of the Masters” (1954) and now he named it and actually called it empathy. In the story a young freedom fighter, Silvia, finally encounters the head of the coercive government and discovers he is a robot. She says in horror, “My God, you have no understanding of us. You run all this, and you’re incapable of empathy. You’re nothing but a mechanical computer.”

By the second period of Dick’s fiction when he writes his great novels of the 1960s, empathy is regularly used as the key element defining the authentic human being. the concept is made concrete most vividly in “The Little Black Box,” published in 1964. Dick then incorporates the black empathy box in Do Androids Dream where those like J.R. Isidore who use it regularly gain the strength to climb up through the difficulties of their daily lives. Beyond that, the power of empathy frees the individual from the prison house of his own consciousness and allows him to slip through the mirror forever reflecting back his own image. Once beyond, he sees the world from an alien consciousness to which he gives the same rights and worth as his own awareness. All life, not just his own, becomes sacred.

At first glance, Dick seems to be a contemporary writer who in many ways espouses an old-fashioned moral view that places him in the long tradition of humanistic writers. From the beginning, his writing insists that each individual has a responsibility to act in a moral way, even though that early fiction makes no reference to God. And of course by the end of his career, the novels focus on the major concepts of the Judeo-Christian tradition. While these concepts are never accepted in their entirety – in fact they are almost always revised – they are never denied or negated.

A closer examination of Dick’s moral code, however, shows us that given the complexities of the contemporary world, the values of traditional Christian humanists are too simple to be workable. He develops a code of valor that is much more demanding. Choice is no longer a choice between good and evil, as the moralist in an earlier age would have declared. Today the problem facing each man is that even when he practices empathy and yearns to make the right moral choice, he often finds himself in a moral dilemma where in order to do right he must also do wrong. Again and again the Dickian hero is faced with this tragic choice: to do the right thing he must violate his own moral nature: for example, Tagomi, Glen Runciter, Joseph Adams, Joe Chip, Rick Deckard. The moral road is not an easy one. The critical metaphor for this arduous journey is the upward climb – Wilbur Mercer on the hill, Joe Chip on the stairs.

In an interview near the end of his life Dick once again reinforced his belief that moral values are the ultimate values: “In a sense what I’m saying is that all life is a moral issue. Which is a very Jewish idea. The Hebrew idea about god is that God is found in morality, not in epistemology. That is where the Almighty exists, in the moral area. It isn’t just what I said once, that in Hebrew monotheism ethics devolve directly god. that’s not it. It’s that God and ethics are so interwoven that where you have one you have the other.”

Dick is an iconoclastic literary figure. His fiction refuses to conform to the characteristics of any particular category. Because he uses many of the techniques of science fiction, he is customarily labeled as a writer in that genre. But the strong, often overwhelming, elements of realism in his fiction – novels Martian Time-Slip and Dr. Bloodmoney, for example – make that label somewhat inaccurate. In many ways he seems to fit into the tradition of Absurdist literature, and he readily admitted the influence in his formative stage of Beckett, Genet, and other Absurdist dramatists. The typical Absurd hero inhabits a grotesque world whose structures violate reason and common sense but are nevertheless true. He is constantly frustrated, muddled, or horrified by the inexplicable events that seem to happen only to him and finally lead him in paranoiac panic to decide that Fate is deliberately playing pranks on him. Not the Fall of Man but his pratfalls are the concern of the Absurdist writer. So, too, are pratfalls often Dick’s concerns. Yet in fuller assessment, we find that Dick does not fit neatly into this category because he refuses to give in to the nihilism of the French Absurdists.

Dick on occasion proclaimed himself a writer in the Romantic tradition who was particularly influenced by German Romanticism. He read Goethe and Schiller when he was young, and the works of Beethoven and other German romantic composers were among his favorites. His intuitive mode of creativity and his emotional excesses characterize him as a romantic, as does his rebellion against all institutions that violate individual freedom. “I’m a Sturm and Drang romantic,” he himself declares in one interview.

When we continue to look for Dick’s literary ancestors, we discover that the ones from which he is rooted most directly are the metaphysical poets. Dick claimed them as among his favorite poets and uses quotations from Vaughan and Marvell and Donne in his fiction. For example, he quotes Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV, “Batter my Heart, three person’d God,” in its entirety in Timothy Archer. His four chambered metaphors resemble metaphysical conceits with their concentrated images that involve an element of dramatic contrast, or strain, or of intellectual difficulty. Like Donne, he uses a colloquial style. Both writers are obsessed with the idea of death and treat it again and again in their works. So, too, do both writers blend wit and seriousness, intense feelings and vast erudition.

A discussion of literary influences is not a discussion of the essence of Dick’s fiction because his literary voice is unique. He is an eclectic, choosing and using ideas, techniques, and quotations from the literary tradition as he creates in his own distinctive form. He is a synthesizer but never an imitator. the bibliography accompanying Timothy Archer demonstrates the wide range of literature that yielded material to him: the Bible, works of Aeschylus, Plato, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Vaughan, Goethe, Schiller, Yeats, to name the major writers. In this final novel Dick felt free to reveal his debt to and use of the great literary tradition, a use that he hid under cryptic allusions in most of his science fiction.

Time must be the judge of Dick’s literary worth. If, as some of us suspect it will, Time does declare him one of the major writers of the twentieth century, he will be hailed as the synthesizer of a new literary form yoking realism and the fantastic. The novels to which I have given major attention in this study (with the possible exception of A Scanner Darkly) all succeed in this new form, for which I have chosen the term quantum-reality fiction. Dick’s fiction gives too little emphasis to science to be called true science fiction. It gives too much emphasis to the real world to be called fantasy. It violates common-sense reality too often to be called realistic fiction. He sees with a new vision as he creates imaginary worlds for his reader – a vision that declares all worlds to be fictions, brought into existence by the consciousness of the creator. Man faces the void and keeps it at bay only by the power of his intelligence to create forms.

The universe where Dick’s characters live when they fall out of commonsense reality is built on concepts that are a part of quantum physics. As physicists describe it, quantum reality is evasive and seems forever to hide beyond direct observation. Quantum physicists do not entirely agree about the nature of quantum reality, except in labeling it as bizarre. A contemporary physicist notes, “if we take the claims [of some outspoken physicists] at face value, the stories physicists tell resemble the tales of mystics and madmen… Not ignorance, but the emergence of unexpected knowledge forces on us all new visions of the way things really are.” Quantum theory holds that all elementary events occur at random, governed only by statistical laws. And Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle forbids an accurate knowledge of a quantum particle’s position and momentum. Beyond that, the prevailing quantum theory holds that there is no reality without the act of observation. Dick’s fiction catches the essence of this quantum reality, and he is probably the first writer of fiction to have done so.

In addition to his creation of quantum reality fiction, Dick also deserves recognition for the development of the complex four-chambered metaphor that allows him to picture the dialectical mode of the human mind as it moves in the process of thinking.

Beyond his accomplishments as a writer, Dick merits recognition for his accomplishments as a human. He struggled to live by his code of valor. In the face of great adversity, he survived and created. He was a tortured genius, condemned to live within a brilliant mind that compulsively drove itself to gather up and live out all the anxiety, pain, and torment of our age. Perhaps he needed so to suffer before he could transform our shared experiences into literature. Perhaps he did not choose but worked heroically in the shadow of a mental illness from which he had no escape. He is not the first writer to be so tortured. I recently reread a biography of Virginia Woolf which describes her struggle to write in the face of repeated nervous breakdowns, and I noted how similar Dick’s life was in this respect. He was less fortunate than she; he had no lifetime spouse like Leonard Woolf to shelter him economically and emotionally and to publish his works.

Dick’s life was a quest for meaning, a struggle with the great metaphysical problem of our time – how to reconcile what he knew in his head with what he knew in his heart. He identified himself with his little men, unheroic protagonists who endure in the face of great adversity, going quietly about their work. His work was writing and he, too, went about it quietly, eschewing publicity. Through all the mental and physical illness he never stopped writing for more than a brief time. He never lost faith in the power of literature to create a shared consciousness for the community of men. Looking at our strife-torn world, he said:

The key is this. We must shape a joint dream that differs for and from each of us, but it must harmonize in the sense that it must not exclude and negate from section to section. How this is to be done I can’t of course say; maybe it can’t be done. But… if two people dream the same dream it ceases to be an illusion; the sole prior test that distinguished reality from hallucination was the consensus gentium, that one other or several others saw it, too. This is the idios kosmos, the private dream, contrasted to the shared dream of us all, the koinos kosmos. What is new in our time is that we are begining to see the plastic, trembling quality of the koinos kosmos – which scares us, its insubstantiality – and the more-the-merrier-vapor quality of the hallucination. Like science fiction, a third reality is formed half way between.

In his writing Dick shared with us his private dreams and his nightmares about this new reality in the future toward which we move. He said he was disturbed by those reviewers who found only bitterness and pessimism in his fiction because his mood was one of trust. “Perhaps,” he said, “they are bothered by the fact that what I trust is so very small. They want something vaster. I have news for them; there is nothing vaster.” For Dick all that one could trust was the capacity of the ordinary person to act with courage when courage is required. He explained, “To me the great joy in writing a book is showing some small person, some ordinary person doing something in a moment of great valor, for which he would get nothing and which would be unsung in the real world. the book, then, is the song about his valor.”

Perhaps this book can be regarded at least in part as a song about the valor of Philip K. Dick. For he continued to write over the years, hounded by poverty, often depressed, and ignored by the mainstream literary world where he hoped for recognition. He lived in a sea of emotional disaster, he was often ill, he used drugs, he alienated his friends, he destroyed five marriages… Yet incredibly he wrote well over forty novels and one hundred short stories, and at least eight of those novels, the ones we have examined in detail, seem likely to become classics. He was one of the most courageous of writers, a man who lived by his own code of valor.

Pulling the Cosmic Trigger: The Contact Experiences of Philip K Dick & Robert Anton Wilson

Posted on December 16, 2015 by Reid Mukai

Editor’s note: On this 87th anniversary of the birth of Philip K. Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982), enjoy a deep dive into some of the more paranormal aspects of his life and how they relate to experiences of other visionaries.

By By AK WILKS

Source: Steamshovel Press

This article will look at some of the similarities between the contact experiences of two American writers, Philip K Dick and Robert Anton Wilson. In the 1973-1974 time frame, both would have unusual experiences that they thought could be contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. Or some undefinable something that wanted them to think it was extraterrestrial. And as incredible as it sounds, some of their experiences are confirmed by other people, and include verified transmission of knowledge that it seems they could not have obtained from any human source. We will also look very briefly at some other possibly related contact experiences involving musician and cultural icon John Lennon, researcher into human-dolphin communication and consciousness Dr. John Lilly and the Swiss scientist and inventor of LSD Dr. Albert Hofmann.

NOTE: William Burroughs first told Robert Anton Wilson about the “23 Enigma”. Wilson and Kerry Thornley incorporated it into their ideas and created the related concept of the Discordian Law of Fives (2+3=5). The number 23 and the numbers 2 & 3 & 5 recur at multiple points in this article. In most cases I do not note them but the interested reader may wish to note how many times they recur and if it is more than expected by chance.

PHILIP K DICK

Philip K Dick was a science fiction writer with a prolific output from 1953 to 1981 of 121 short stories and 44 novels. Since his death in l982 he has become even better known. His stories have been made into major films like “Blade Runner”, “A Scanner Darkly,” and “Minority Report”. He has also been acknowledged as a major influence on other films, including “The Matrix”. The recent indie film “Radio Free Albemuth” is an excellent adaptation of Phil’s novel of the same name, dealing with Phil’s fictional version of the true events dealt with in this article.

PKD had themes that recur over and over again throughout his stories – What is real? What is human? How do we know that what we think of as reality is actually real? What defines humanity? Will humans be replaced by machines? PKD also had political themes and religious themes. Though he turned 40 in l968, he identified with the youth counterculture of the l960’s. He was against the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration. He refused to pay federal taxes in protest of the war, and his name appeared in published ads of writers and artists involved in the protest. The federal government confiscated his car for back taxes.

A typical PKD hero was a writer, small businessman, a TV repairman and/or a backyard inventor. He finds his life turned upside down when he discovers that reality is not what it seemed. He wages a fight against vast evil empires of heartless corporations, fascist governments, robots posing as humans, and alien invaders. He is often assisted by a beautiful and intelligent dark haired girl.

Starting in 1971, Phil was no longer just writing about government conspiracies, alternative realities, and struggles against an empire. He started living it. His home was broken in to. Things were damaged, papers were taken, but little of value was stolen. It did not seem like a traditional burglary. Strangely, part of Phil was actually relieved. He thought, “See! I’m not some crazy paranoid. They really are after me.” But he was also horrified and scared of what they would do next. It also validated him however. He must be getting through and having an impact if he was enough of a threat to have this done to him.

His wife Tessa confirms that in 1969 Phil got a phone call from a fan, Dr. Timothy Leary. She wonders if that call was wiretapped by Feds trailing Leary, and if Phil came on their radar screen then, if he had not before. When Leary escaped from Folsom prison, she wonders if Phil got attention because of the Leary connection. Phil claimed that he also talked to John Lennon as part of this same phone call. The connection was probably Rolling Stone writer Paul Williams, who knew PKD well and wrote about him in Rolling Stone magazine, and Williams was with Lennon and Leary in Canada.

President Nixon had called Leary “the most dangerous man in America”, a label he only used for one other person, Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Nixon had authorized a break in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. The FBI, BNDD(DEA) and the CIA were involved in the hunt and recapture of Leary. Did one of those agencies do the break in looking for clues to where Leary was hiding? Nixon was also using the pretext of a marijuana conviction to try to get Lennon deported. The real reason was his anger over Lennon’s support of the anti-war movement, both lyrically and financially.

Aside from the Leary/Lennon connection, Phil had also attracted government attention on his own, as he had in the Ramparts magazine anti-war tax protest. He later found out that letters he had sent to Soviet scientists had been intercepted by the CIA. His books appeared on a list compiled by the government of works that promoted the drug culture. (This was ironic as Phil later became very anti-hard drugs, because he felt they robbed people of their humanity and led to tragic results). In between marriages, Phil opened his home to and hung out with drug users, small time criminals, political radicals, teenage runaways and street people. An Orange County cop told Phil “They don’t need crusaders here.” Phil says he was afraid to ask the cop who or what he thought he was crusading for.

Phil obsessed over who did the break in – the FBI? CIA? KGB? Local police? A right wing group like the Neo-Nazis? A criminal gang? But eventually something else even bigger would come along to obsess over.

In February and March of l974, Phil had amazing contact experiences that changed his life. He would spend the rest of his life trying to figure out what exactly happened, and who or what was responsible. His theories included mental illness at one end, to direct contact with God at the other end. In between were the theories of contact with an alien race, time travelers, an AI (Artificial Intelligence) computer from the future, a government agency or a secret society.

Eventually he came to call what contacted him VALIS, for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Phil would have different ideas on what VALIS was – a satellite beaming information to him from an alien world or just a manifestation of God? He came to think VALIS was a satellite from advanced entities perhaps from the Sirius double star system. One of the missions of VALIS was to fight the Empire,(“The Empire never ended”) the continuation of the Roman Empire in the evil power elites in the East and West, who were secretly connected in their desire to keep their populations enslaved. The second mission of VALIS was to enlighten people with information and knowledge, to spark creativity, invention, art and innovation. This was also partially done through the true hidden and suppressed gospels of Jesus Christ which were revealed to the world in the Gnostic Gospels found at Nag Hammadi in 1945. This information is a living plasmate that comes alive in every person who reads the gospels or who reads about VALIS in the stories of Philip K Dick. The final mission of VALIS was to show Phil that this is a fake world, a “Black Iron Prison”, a “criminal virus” that occludes people from seeing that the world is alive. In fact the world that we see is fake, and we may be living in a computer simulation or a hologram. Now you can see why the creators of “The Matrix” acknowledge PKD as a major influence.

He would write what he called his Exegesis to investigate and explain what he came to call the “2-3-74” experience, meaning February and March of 1974. His Exegesis would grow to over 8,000 pages. Recently a 900 page version was published. Phil increasingly came to favor theological interpretations of VALIS, but at one point, after reading Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “Childhood’s End”, he expressed his experience in Clarke language and classic Sci-Fi terms:

(1)We are not only being watched; we are being controlled, but don’t know it; they remain beyond our threshold of vision.

(2) They work for a higher purpose, one we can’t understand but which fits our concepts of spiritual, moral purposes.

(3) We are instruments, therefore, of an invisible spiritual force which causes us to grow and develop in certain arranged directions.

(4) Some of us are either part of their race or can be elevated to their level, as they work through these individuals.

(5) The probable reason for their concealment is our evil qualities. We cannot be trusted, individually or collectively (man qua beast).

(6) A critical moment has approached or is approaching; this is a unique period in their work, therefore in our use-purpose.

(7) The extent of camouflage and delusion induced in us is extraordinary in amount and degree

Understand that the above formulation was not Phil’s favorite. As I stated he increasingly came to favor a more theological interpretation, bringing in elements from Buddha, Dionysus, and mysticism, but primarily Gnostic Christianity as revealed in the Nag Hammadi scriptures uncovered in 1945. But I like the formulation above because it is clear and concise and perhaps fits best with some of the other experiences we will look at later. Section #5 about concealment deals with a subject Phil talked a lot about, which was the fate of men like Socrates, Christ, Bruno, JFK , MLK and his friend Bishop Jim Pike. Given that history, VALIS must conceal itself most of the time, and rather than announce itself on the lawn of the White House, and be sent to federal prison or worse, it would reveal itself gradually in scattered trash, pulp magazines, rock music songs, comic books, B movies, episodes of “Star Trek”, sci-fi paperbacks and through an imperfect odd California science fiction writer.

In part of the 2-3-74 experience Phil saw a cartoon cat that appeared in the pink light of a rectangle that reflected the “Golden Ratio.” The Golden Ratio of 1.618 occurs throughout nature, and is seen in everything from galaxies to sea shells to flowers to the human face. Phil’s cat had just died and he said the cartoon cat came over to him and put his paw on his shoulder, as if to console him and tell him it will be all right.

In another part of the2- 3-74 experience, Phil said he experienced hundreds of abstract and expressionist art paintings. They were as vivid and colorful and real as anything he had ever seen in his life. He mentioned Kandinsky and Klee as the type of art that he saw.

Then throughout 1974 he experienced strange events, some seemingly “good”, and some seemingly “bad”. Strange synchronicities, “coincidences” that seemed to have underlying connections. If VALIS was a positive moral force aiding Phil and humanity, there were also other dark forces wanting to keep humanity enslaved and blind, and Phil feared these dark forces. He gave his son Christopher an improvised Christening with chocolate milk and a bit of hot dog bun, as a way to protect him from these dark forces.

Phil had multiple marriages and divorces and a documented history of mental illness; and of course, he had a vivid imagination, as seen in his stories. Add in that he had a reputation as a drug user, and it is tempting to write off these interesting but unverifiable experiences as hallucinations, insanity, and/or hoaxes.

It’s true that Phil had mental health issues, but they mostly revolved around depression. In this period, living with his wife Tessa and young son Christopher, he was happy most of the time. Phil did take legal uppers, and he experimented with LSD, but only twice. His reputation as a wild man drug user was exaggerated in the press. One time Phil was eating dinner at a sci-fi convention, and a fan snatched a pill beside his plate and swallowed it. “What’s going to happen to me?” the fan asked. Phil explained, “Well, if you have a sore throat it will feel better.”

First of all, it is doubtful that Phil would have been moved to devote the time and energy of an 8,000 page exegesis if all these events were just hoaxes or misperceptions. Secondly, a few key incidents have been verified either by outside facts and/or his wife at the time, Tessa.

Tessa B. Dick has written her own book called “Remembering Firebright: My Life with Philip K. Dick”. In a few instances she explains how she thinks Phil misconstrued ordinary facts into something fantastic. One senses she is honestly recounting things as best she can remember, and that like Phil, she has struggled over the years to understand these events. But on several key incidents, she largely confirms Phil’s account of events. She says that unusual and unexplainable things did happen.

One of these is the “Firebright” of the book’s title. Phil said this was a small baseball size sphere of blue light. He said he thought it facilitated communication between him and an alien satellite that was in orbit around the earth. This satellite explained mysteries of the universe to him, sometimes by historical figures he admired (or simulations thereof), like Francis Bacon and Thomas Aquinas. Tessa did not experience that aspect, but she states she did see Firebright, that she and Phil could see it together, and each correctly describe what it was doing. Was it a shared hallucination? Was it a shared reality?

Another incident described by Phil was when his radio kept playing, even after he turned it off and even after he unplugged it. He said the radio was saying messages attacking him. Tessa does confirm the radio kept playing even after being unplugged, and it was not the type that had batteries. She did not hear personal attacks on Phil, but normal pop songs. However, she can’t explain how or why it kept playing. She did note at the time that the neighbor’s apartment was mostly vacant, as if nobody actually lived there, but they had a lot of electronic equipment, so there may be a natural earth-bound explanation for the strange radio incident. She felt then and now that they were spying on someone, be it Phil or someone else. But that would not explain the mystery of “Firebirght”, nor would it explain the following mystery.

Sometime in the late summer of 1974, Phil reported drifting between sleep and waking while listening to the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever,” sung by John Lennon. At the point in the song where it says “Living is easy with eyes closed,” Phil opened his eyes. He cried out to Tessa to “Call the doctor and tell him that Christopher has an inguinal hernia and he could die if it strangulated”. Tessa says Phil looked as if he were in a trance and she confirms what he said, and that he stated the medical terms correctly. She took their 14 month old son Christopher to a doctor, and the doctor confirmed Phil’s diagnosis, and the doctor scheduled and eventually did the potentially life-saving surgery as soon as Christopher was old enough, which was a couple of months later. In the meantime they were instructed to be careful not to let him cry for any prolonged period.

In subsequent conversations with the “normal” Phil, Tessa says he went back to not understanding the medical terms and was mispronouncing them. Who or what intervened and gave Phil the information that saved his son’s life? Was it VALIS?

I was able to recently ask Phil’s last wife Tessa about this incident. She again confirmed most of the elements of Phil’s story as correct. She said the doctor told her that if Christopher had been left to cry throughout the night for an extended period, the hernia could have strangulated and cut off blood flow, causing serious injury or even death. She does not remember the stereo being on, so unless Phil had the small radio on, she wondered if Phil heard “Strawberry Fields Forever” in his dream. I asked her how was Phil able to correctly diagnose the hernia? Was it VALIS, a religious miracle, just really good intuition or simply unexplainable? She stated:

“I have no earthly explanation for how Phil could have known that our son had a hernia. He did not change diapers, and he had little medical knowledge. I knew that something was wrong with our baby, but I had not yet discussed it with Phil.”

Phil felt that it was VALIS, and that it also intervened in his life in other positive ways. He says it prompted him to ask his agent for back royalties on books sold overseas, and he subsequently received substantial checks. He also had a sense of renewed creativity and in addition to the non-fiction Exegesis, the strange events in his life gave inspiration to several excellent novels, including “Radio Free Albemuth”, “VALIS”, “The Divine Invasion”, and others. His income from book sales greatly increased, and his novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” was made into the movie “Blade Runner” (the title came from William Burroughs). He saw parts of the film before it was released and was greatly impressed. He told the makers of the film that it validated his entire career and even his life.

Tragically, he never got to see the entire film and the world got no more PKD stories. He had a series of strokes leading to a heart attack , which caused his death on March 2, 1982. Before he died and when he was in seemingly good health, he may have had a premonition about his death, as he told Tessa, whom he had divorced but was seeing again, “You will remember, and you will tell them”.

ROBERT ANTON WILSON

Robert Anton Wilson was an editor at Playboy magazine — a very good, interesting and well paid job. But he left the magazine in 1971 to pursue his other interests. These interests included sex, drugs, higher states of consciousness, libertarian economics, anarchist politics, Constitutional rights, philosophy, quantum physics, history, psychology and the occult.

Along with Robert Shea he wrote the “Illuminatus!” trilogy, the most complex exposure of the conspiracies running the world and/or satire of such theories. He wrote many successful books, and he approached all topics with his trademark agnosticism and maybe logic. This avoided the traps of dogmatism and guruism. He wrote about serious subjects with a sense of humor, but treated even seemingly crazy ideas seriously.

Within weeks of meeting Timothy Leary in 1964, he and his family saw their first UFO. Timothy Leary, who was kicked out of Harvard for his LSD experiments, would become a good friend, mentor, frequent teacher, major influence, sometime student, co-author, and partner in “thought crime”.

Philip K. Dick met several times with RAW, and they became correspondents. PKD famously said that “Wilson managed to reverse every mental polarity in me, as if I had been pulled through infinity.” PKD mentions RAW in his Exegesis, and RAW mentions PKD in his books. Just as PKD’s fiction seemingly came to life in his contact experiences, RAW’s fiction also escaped from the page into his life.

RAW embarked on a course of what he called “deliberately induced brain change.” From July 23, 1973 until October, 1974, he entered a belief system in which he was (perhaps) receiving telepathic messages from advanced entities on a planet near the double star Sirius.

Were these entities real? To him, at the time, they “seemed real enough”, though “not as real as the IRS”, but “easier to get rid of.”

In keeping with his model agnosticism and desire not to get trapped in any one reality tunnel, RAW undertook a multiple-paths-all-at-once approach to making contact with higher intelligence. He used incantations and rites by Aleister Crowley to invoke the Holy Guardian Angel. Wilson says that if you look at Crowley’s words on the page, they mostly seem like “pretentious rubbish”, but when read out loud, it “vibrates, moans and sings with eerie power.” He also used a hypnosis tape called “Beliefs Unlimited” by Dr. John Lilly, the pioneer in inter-species communication and consciousness research. At first he also used Mescaline and LSD. He later achieved similar results without any drugs. He also tried tantric sex with his wife with the goal of breaking through to new levels of consciousness (and having fun, which RAW always liked to do).

In a dream on July 23, 1973, he got the message “Sirius is very important.” He did not know what it meant. He found out that Sirius was a double star system about 8.6 light years away from Earth. Further research showed him that Sirius (maybe) played an important role in the belief systems of Crowley, the Freemasons, and various occult groups. He then found out that in the ancient Egyptian tradition, the dog star Sirius was celebrated from July 23 to September 8. This was the period when contact between Sirius and Earth was said to be strongest.

He wrote about his experiences in his book “Cosmic Trigger.” You don’t just read this book, you go along on his intellectual, spiritual and physical adventure with him. The topics he writes about start happening in his life. In similar and different ways to what happened to PKD, strange things, unexplained events and seeming “coincidences” linked by underlying synchronicity start to occur.

In this book he mentions Philip K. Dick and his novel “VALIS” based on real events. He notes some of the similarities and differences in their experiences. He also mentions a book by Robert KG Temple called “The Sirius Mystery”.

In reading Temple’s book, he learned that there was evidence (maybe) that Egypt, Sumeria and other ancient civilizations told legends of contact with advanced men who came down from the sky to teach them engineering, science and arts, and that these men came from the Sirius system. He learned that the Dogon tribe in West Africa also had legends of contact with entities from Sirius, and knew that Sirius had a companion star which was not visible to the naked eye. How did they know it existed? Because they really were visited long ago by entities from Sirius who told then about it? Well maybe. But maybe they learned about it from more recent European visitors. But if so why did they claim it was a long standing part of their belief system? What about all the other evidence of “Ancient Astronauts” and many peoples who tell legends of men from the sky, including stories from the Bible?

Wilson quotes this key part by Robert KG Temple from his book “The Sirius Mystery”:

“I would even venture that we may be under observation or surveillance at this very moment, with an extraterrestrial civilization based at the Sirius system, monitoring our development to see when we will be ready ourselves for their contacting us . . .Would they think that (this book) was their cue? If what I propose in this book really is true, then am I pulling a cosmic trigger?”

Most of the experiences Wilson describes are fascinating, but subjective and unverifiable. He himself comes to no definite conclusion about them. But one in particular stands out as unexplainable, and like the incident with Philip K. Dick and his son, it involves a child in danger. On April 26, 1974, Wilson was with a group of self-proclaimed witches in a new version of the Golden Dawn occult group. He had a vision of his son Graham lying on the ground with police walking toward him. He was afraid this indicated that Graham had been in an accident or some kind of trouble.

He invoked a cone of protection around his son and tried to send a message to call him in the morning. The next morning Graham did call and he explained that he and his friends had been illegally sleeping in a field. Police spotted their car, and walked towards them with their flashlights. They were certain they would be seen and then arrested, but amazingly, the cops did not see them and just walked away. This happened a few minutes before midnight, which was the same time that Wilson had his vision of Graham lying in a field with police walking towards him.

Wilson would later have another vision that a member of his family was in danger, and thought again it was Graham. Tragically, it turned out to be his daughter Luna, killed in a violent and senseless robbery. He writes movingly of her life and death. A lifelong opponent of the death penalty, even in his grief and anger, he does not want her killer to die, because he believes more than ever in the value of life over death.

Wilson comes to no final conclusions about his experiences. He suspects that the Holy Guardian Angel and the extraterrestrials from Sirius probably do not exist outside of our imaginations. But even if they are not literally real, RAW thinks that a belief in them was a tool to open up access to a previously untapped area of his brain.

On the other hand, remembering Arthur C. Clarke’s idea that any sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic, RAW wondered “what if Temple’s book was true?” What if PSI powers like ESP and telepathy are true? Stars can last 9 billion years. We are only half way through the life cycle of our star. That means there could be civilizations from Sirius or elsewhere that are one billion years more advanced than us. RAW asks what would be the technological capabilities and PSI powers of a civilization 100 million years, 500 million years, two billion years more advanced than we are now? RAW wonders if they will use psychic powers and/or technologically advanced communication methods to aid our evolution. Which sounds a lot like VALIS.

In his book “The Illuminati Papers”, Wilson quotes Dr. Ronald Bracewell from Stanford and Dr. Frank Drake of Cornell as saying that advanced aliens may have immortality and may be “trying to communicate with us right now.” Dr. Brian O’Leary, a Berkeley PHD and former NASA employee, states that aliens, be they extraterrestrial or inter-dimensional, may be on Earth now and have “technologies of consciousness.” Did an advanced race use “technologies of consciousness” to contact PKD and RAW?

Wilson in “Cosmic Trigger” also noted that the genius Tesla reported getting whole detailed descriptions and blue prints for inventions into his mind from an unknown source and sometimes had conversations with unseen entities. He reported that Dr. Jacques Valle told him that over 100 scientists had similar experiences of transmission of ideas but most are afraid to go public for fear of ridicule. Dr. Jack Sarfatti is one of the few who have gone public.

The discoverer of DNA, Nobel Prize winner Dr. Francis Crick, was a regular user of marijuana and may have first perceived the double helix shape of DNA while on LSD. Dr. Kary Mullis says taking LSD was one of the most important things he ever did and that he would not have won the Nobel prize for perfecting the PCR DNA method if he had not done it. He also had a strange UFO or Mothman Prophecies type encounter with an entity. Steve Jobs said taking LSD was one of the most important things he had done and convinced him that the goal of life was not just to make money but to invent and design things that would go into the stream of history and affect consciousness. Both the DNA and computer internet revolutions owe something to the (VALIS directed?) discovery of LSD Dr. Hofmann which we will examine. Is DMT or LSD a pathway to communication with higher intelligence? Or is it a pathway to open up previously untapped parts of our brain? Maybe. But this is a reason for LSD and other drugs to be legal, so they can be correctly manufactured and taken in safe doses at facilities with medical and psychological professionals. Both RAW and PKD strongly warned people not to take street drugs, they each saw the bad consequences that can result.

JOHN LENNON, DR JOHN LILLY, DR ALBERT HOFMANN

Finally I want to mention very briefly some other experiences that may have some similarities to the PKD and RAW experiences. John Lennon, as part of the Beatles and on his own, was a huge catalyst for the Sixties counter-culture revolution. Not only a force in music and the arts, he affected politics through his support of the anti-war movement and giving money to radical groups. He even gave money to Dr. Timothy Leary when he was on the run. John had a life-long interest in the subject of UFO’s, including subscribing to British journals on the subject. In a period when he separated from Yoko Ono and was living with May Pang, he actually saw a UFO from the balcony of his NY apartment. It was on August 23, 1974. John actually cried out for the UFO to take him. They took pictures but they did not come out. They called all their friends. One of their friends called the police and newspapers and was told others had seen it as well.

May Pang later said that Lennon told her “if the masses started to accept UFO’s, it would profoundly affect their attitudes toward life, politics, everything. It would threaten the status quo.” Pang also said that 1974 was not his first sighting. He told her more than once he suspected he had been abducted as a child and that this experience made him different from other people the rest of his life. Abducted by aliens? “Yes, but John didn’t go into detail about it”. Pang said.

Dr. John Lilly, MD, was a genius who pioneered human – dolphin communication and researched communication among whales and gorillas. He also researched human consciousness with himself as a test subject. He did experiments with LSD, Ketamine and other substances, sometimes in conjunction with an isolation tank he developed. His work with dolphins inspired the film “Day of the Dolphin” and his research on consciousness inspired the film “Altered States”.

Adam Gorightly wrote an article called “John Lilly, Ketamine and the Entities from ECCO”. He describes two incidents that have some similarities to the experiences discussed here. Adam told me he got the information from a book by Lilly called “John Lilly, So Far”. The first incident seems to have taken place in the summer of 1973, the summer of the RAW Sirius experience. Lilly took Ketamine and got into his hot tub. His body could not support itself and he sank under. He was drowning. His friend Phil Halecki had a sudden urge to call him. He called him at that moment. He got John’s wife Toni who said John was fine he was in the hot tub. Phil insisted she get him right now. She did and saw John face down and drowning. She saved him and performed CPR, which she had just learned the day before from a magazine article.

John felt he was saved by the work of what he playfully called the Earth Coincidence Control Office, or ECCO. He first encountered these entities of light and love as a child and given his religious upbringing he thought of them as angels. He came to believe that they arrange “coincidences” on Earth to assist in the growth of knowledge and for the greater good. ECCO sounds very similar to what PKD called VALIS, the Vast Active Living Intelligence System, which he felt intervened in his life to save his son, impart knowledge and fight the Empire. Both ECCO and VALIS also sound similar to the Carl Jung concepts of synchronicity, the collective unconscious and archetypes. They also resonate with what quantum physicist David Bohm called the “implicate order” and Celtic legends call Fairyland.

While ECCO works on the side of aiding humans, an entity Dr. Lilly called Solid State Intelligence (SSI) works to achieve dominance for computers and machines over all biological forms, in particular intelligent mammals like humans, dolphins and whales. Think of the machines in “The Matrix” or the mega computer Skynet in “The Terminator”. Dr. Lilly used computers and technology for good purposes but feared there use for bad purposes, by evil men of the military-industrial corporate state or even self-aware AI computers on their own.

The other incident is said by the book to have happened in the fall of 1974, but as the book is loose with dates and even years, I have reason to think it was probably 1973. John and Toni were on a flight to Los Angeles. Dr. Lilly took Ketamine on the flight and then looked at the Comet Kahoutek and it greatly increased in brightness. He then received a message that said SSI was going to shut down all systems at LAX. He told this to Toni, who disapproved of John’s increasing drug experiments and thought ECCO was nonsense. But minutes later, the pilot announced they could not land at LAX because a plane had crashed into power lines causing a black out. The plane landed safely elsewhere. Terence Kahoutek was not visible to the naked eye in 1974 but it was visible in 1973. There was a plane that hit power lines on November 17, 1973.

John later felt that the message was from ECCO about the dangers of SSI. Had the pilot attempted to land at LAX when the power and lights went out, he might have crashed. Did ECCO/VALIS send Dr. Lilly a warning? As it had sent to his friend when he was drowning? As ECCO/VALIS had sent to PKD and RAW about their sons? Dr. Lilly later got warning messages of nuclear devastation from ECCO in 1974.

Dr. Albert Hofmann was the Swiss chemist who had many great patents and discoveries, but his greatest was discovering LSD. He said that he had planned a career in the humanities or arts but that “Mystical experiences in childhood, in which nature was altered in magical ways” caused him to want to understand the world and he choose chemistry. At the website for the Albert Hofmann Foundation writer John Beresford notes that the first major step in the creation of the atom bomb happened on December 2, 1942, in Chicago. Enrico Fermi as part of the Manhattan Project caused the first nuclear chain reaction.

About 131 or 132 days later Dr. Hofmann had what he called in German a “Vorgefuhl”, which roughly translates as a presentiment, about LSD-25. He actually first discovered that 5 years ago, on November 16, 1938, but he had discarded it on the useless pile, no doubt with hundreds of other failures. Dr. Hofmann would not say if the Vorgefuhl happened when he was asleep or awake. But it was strong enough that it caused him to go back to this formula from 5 years ago, and on April 16, 1943 he (re) discovered LSD – 25, and changed the history of the world. World War II was raging and the stakes got even higher some 132 days before with the Chicago nuclear chain reaction.

Beresford writes:

“One is free to speculate that the “instruction” to re-synthesize LSD came from a spiritual power which intervenes in the affairs of man to restore order when the danger of disorder has become too great. The reckless act of science in Chicago in December, 1942 was remedied in Basel four months later with Albert Hofmann chosen as the instrument to perform the cure.”

What he describes sounds very much like VALIS. Along these lines one should also consider that the first detonation of an atom bomb occurred on July 16, 1945 (7/16=23?) at the Trinity Site at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. About two years later, around June 16, 1947, the “flying saucer” enters American culture with the reality (or myth) of a saucer crash at Roswell, New Mexico, just 114 miles to the east of the Trinity Site at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. On June 21, 1947 the Maury Island UFO is sighted in Puget Sound, Washington. On June 24, 1947 pilot Kenneth Arnold sees nine shining discs near Mt. Rainer in Washington. Others pilots also see them and a man photographs these discs.

Terence McKenna believed that the reality (or myth) of UFO’s were a confounding of the close minded scientific, corporate and government establishments, in the same way that the reality (or myth) of the resurrection of Jesus was a confounding of Greek empiricism and Roman Imperialism. McKenna felt that what he called the “Overmind” of the planet can create UFO’s, miracles and other events when technology and power out run ethics. His “Overmind” also sounds a lot like PKD’s VALIS, except it is probably not extraterrestrial in origin. But then again VALIS may not actually be extraterrestrial either, even if it wanted to appear to be so at times.

Carl Jung felt the massive wave post war UFO sightings indicated “changes in the constellation of psychic dominants, of the archetypes, or “gods” as they used to be called, which bring about, or accompany, long-lasting transformations of the collective psyche.” He compared them to the “signs and wonders” that accompanied the transition from paganism to Christianity. Constantine seeing a cross in the sky and the spinning disc and lights seen at Fatima in 1917 might also fit in here.

This entity, let us call it VALIS, is not necessarily always pro-Christianity, or pro or anti-technology, or UFO. As Dr. Jacques Vallee states it is a cultural thermostat. In the summer the thermostat cools your house, in the winter it warms it. At the time of the brutal Roman Empire the Christian idea of universal love was needed. When Christianity became a Roman Empire of its own, a new confounding was needed. (PKD=”The Empire never ended”) VALIS acted to spur science and technology when needed and to counter it when needed. Dr. Vallee felt these things have been with us a long time but ancient man called them gods from the sky, later man called them angels or demons, the Celts called them fairies.

Jung felt that some UFO’s were real in the sense that they are picked up on radar screens and in some cases can be photographed, and McKenna felt that they were “real” in every sense of the word, though most or all were probably not nuts and bolts craft and most or all were not probably not extraterrestrial in origin. It presents another way to think about unexplained things. These alternative ideas are explored best in “Passport to Magonia” by Dr. Jacques Vallee , “The Mothman Prophecies” and “Our Haunted Planet” by John Keel, “The Archaic Revival” by Terence McKenna and “Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies” by Carl Jung.

We can perhaps tie the presentiment about LSD and the start of the UFO sightings to the end of WWII and the start of the nuclear era. Why did the experiences of PKD, RAW, Lennon and Lilly happen in the 1973/1974 era? Was it related to the Nixon drive for war abroad and a police state at home? Was there a higher danger for nuclear war or other calamity in this time frame? General Alexander Haig, in the waning days of the Nixon regime which ended on August 9, 1974, issued instructions to the military not to follow orders from the President, reportedly out of fears revolving around his drinking and mental state, and concerns he might start a nuclear war or use troops to refuse to cede power if impeached.

Philip K Dick felt VALIS had a political dimension. He had received the message “The Empire never ended”. He took this to mean the Roman Empire continued through Nazi Germany, through totalitarian communism in the East and the military-industrial complex ruling elite in the West. PKD felt The Nixon regime in particular had come to power through the murders of JFK, RFK and MLK, and now posed the threat of outright fascist dictatorship and a police state through the pretext of the War on Drugs and the criminalization of dissent and free thought. PKD thought VALIS helped to defeat Nixon in this crucial 1973/1974 period. In his novels the character President Ferris F Fremont was an even more McCarthyite and fascistic version of Nixon. “The Empire never ended.” That was the message PKD got from VALIS. The true Gnostic Christian rebels helped by VALIS defeated Nixon in August 1974.

Or was the 1973/1974 era also the time for a need for a change in culture and the arts, in ways that we cannot understand or explain? Was there, as Carl Jung would put it, a need for a change in the collective psyche?

CONCLUSION

RAW was excited when Ken Campbell did a stage play in Liverpool of “Illuminatus!” in 1986. In 2014 Ken’s daughter, Daisy Eris Campbell did a stage play of “Cosmic Trigger”. Graphic novelist Alan Moore has often talked about the influence RAW had on him. Moore has also stated that he has read and admired PKD. Moore supported the new play and provided the voice for an off stage character. Moore wrote the magnificent graphic novel “V for Vendetta” which was the basis for the film of the same name. RAW was quite happy when a German youth named Karl Koch adopted the name of his “Illuminatus!” anarchist hero Hagbard Celine as his computer hacker name and became (in)famous.

PKD, through the films “Blade Runner” and “The Matrix” as well as his many novels, stories and non-fiction, influenced modern science fiction, art, film, the Cyberpunk movement and the computer hacker culture. Influenced by PKD, RAW and Moore, the cyberpunks, white knight computer hackers and hacktivists try to turn the technology of the modern corporate police state against itself. The RAW influenced Alan Moore was very pleased when members of autonomous groups like the pro-democracy activists in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, Occupy and Anonymous started using the stylized Guy Fawkes masks used by his hero V from “V for Vendetta” in real life protests. Moore stated that when he wrote “V for Vendetta” he would have thought “wouldn’t it be great if these ideas actually made an impact? So when you start to see that idle fantasy intrude on the regular world…It’s peculiar. It feels like a character I created 30 years ago has somehow escaped from the realm of fiction.”

The change we want will not come from over optimism and simply waiting for God, the New Age , the UFO or LSD or any other one thing alone to rescue us. Nor will it come from over pessimism and thinking the Rockefellers and Bushes and their plutocratic ilk control the world and we are totally helpless to affect change. As RAW said those guys may think they run the world, “but I prefer to think me and my friends run the world”. He believed time would judge whether the power of money or the power of ideas would win in the long run. He felt the power of ideas would. If VALIS or something like it is actually real then it should be studied further, to find ways to connect to it, to enable it (or even just the untapped powerful parts of our brain) to assist us. But in the end it is up to us. Wilson said that any single act of love or hope could be the grain of sand that tips the scales towards utopia, while any single act of cruelty or injustice may be the grain of sand that tips the scales the other way, toward oblivion. It is up to all of us.

As Alan Moore said in 2014 in a promotion for the “Cosmic Trigger” play, “It is time to take the safety off and pull the Cosmic Trigger.”

Is VALIS real? Most seem to quickly write off the experiences of Philip K Dick and Robert Anton Wilson as products of their over active imaginations. Yet parts of their stories are verified by others and resist such easy explanations. Who or what gave Phil the information that probably saved his son Christopher’s life? What caused the accurate vision of Wilson? What caused Dr. Hofmann to ‘remember” a useless formula from years ago, which led to the (re) invention of LSD? Indeed what is the seemingly intelligent force behind evolution, that has taken us from amphibian to ape, from ape to caveman, and from caveman to Einstein, Shakespeare and Beethoven? And from there to what a 1,000 years from now? Philip K Dick said the Vast Active Living Intelligence System exists to 1) Fight the Empire in all its manifestations and 2) Exult, inspire and direct man to higher intelligence, creativity and achievement.

Whatever we are talking about, it seems unlikely it involves entities from across the galaxy – unless such distances can be traveled instantly. And it is not clear why entities light years away would take such an interest in us. So rather than ET’s the evidence is more supportive of Inter Dimensional entities. As some quantum physicists postulate, there may be multiple dimensions coexisting with us here on Earth. They have some capacity to communicate with us. At different times in history we have called these entities Gods, men from the sky, fairies, angels or aliens. They seem to communicate to certain individuals at certain critical times in our history. They may be part of the active intelligent force that has created our planet, the life on it and has directed our evolution.

Consider the words of Nobel Prize winning physicist Max Planck, think about the perfect rotation of our Earth around the sun, and reflect on how closely Planck’s description matches PKD’s concept of a Vast Active Living Intelligence System: “[As a hard headed physicist I tell you that] there is no such thing as matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

Max Planck, The nature of Matter Speech, 1944

AK WILKS AUTHOR BIO

AK Wilks has a BA in Political Philosophy and a Juris Doctor in Law. He has worked as an attorney, researcher and writer. He is also a screenwriter. He is continuing his research into the subjects of PKD, RAW, LSD, HP Lovecraft, Crowley, the UFO enigma, contacts with higher intelligence and related subjects for a book and/or film.

He can be reached at akwilks2002@yahoo.com .

Life in VALIS

Posted on November 13, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Reality Sandwich

VALIS is a 1981 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. The title stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, which in some respects is very close to the living intelligence I discuss in this series of essays.[i] A living intelligence also suggests a non-local field view of reality. The latest findings in the quantum sciences (notably quantum mechanics and biophysics) posit a field-view understanding that is said to underpin the construction of our universe, and hence the nature of our reality.

In the past, various people — mystics, psychologists, and consciousness researchers — have alluded to this intelligence field by a variety of names: cosmic consciousness, superconsciousness, transpersonal consciousness, integral consciousness, etc. All these descriptions share common themes; namely, a heightened sense of intuition and empathy, a feeling of greater connectivity to the world and to people, a sense of ‘inner knowing’ (gnosis), and the realization that humanity exists and evolves within a universe of intelligence and meaning. Forms and intimations of these new consciousness patterns are already emerging in the world, but as yet they have not become a part of our accepted paradigm.

As Dr. Richard Bucke stated in his work Cosmic Consciousness, the early signs of this new evolutionary development have been appearing within humankind for some time:

The simple truth is, that there has lived on the earth, ‘appearing at intervals’, for thousands of years among ordinary men, the first faint beginnings of another race … This new race is in the act of being born from us, and in the near future it will occupy and possess the earth.¹

Such signs — or evolutionary mutations — have included, for example, visionaries, mystics, artists, psychics, and a smattering of young gifted children. I would posit that social and cultural events have occurred throughout world history that have served to seed higher functioning into human consciousness. Such events would have taken the form of artistic movements; scientific innovations; faith movements; cultural/social revolutions; architecture; fraternities; myths and legends; sporting fixtures, and more. All such socio-cultural impacts affect human consciousness in a way that prepares the human mind for periods of development and change. Within these seemingly random occurrences lie the components that act as the ‘technologies’ for developing human consciousness. In recent years we have seen the rapid expansion of our informational flows, and thus human awareness in general.

The increasing manifestation of a collective human consciousness — or rather a collective of minds accessing the living intelligence — is most likely to be in line with certain evolutionary necessities. Preparation has been necessary through a succession of events that form an overall pattern of mutually reinforcing stimuli aimed at raising humanity’s psychic awareness. This includes the expansion of intellect, psychological awareness, social development, humanitarianism, empathy, and creativity. These developments have also served to stimulate human intuition. In other words, there have been moments throughout recent human history that helped prepare the ‘mental soil’ for new patterns of consciousness to slowly seed and grow. According to one well-placed commentator on this subject:

The human being’s organism is producing a new complex of organs in response to such a need. In this age of the transcending of time and space, the complex of organs is concerned with the transcending of time and space. What ordinary people regard as sporadic and occasional bursts of telepathic or prophetic power are…nothing less than the first stirrings of these same organs.²

Similarly, the revered Persian poet Jalalludin Rumi stated,

New organs of perception come into being as a result of necessity/Therefore, O man, increase your necessity, so that you may increase your perception.[ii]

On the whole, socio-cultural and material forces are slow to react to changes in expressions of human consciousness. Yet this is nothing new, as throughout history there have been individuals who, feeling the need for transformational change, have been caught up in social-cultural upheavals. These events and human efforts, according to Gopi Krishna, indicate a stirring of the human evolutionary impulse:

I can safely assert that the progress made by mankind in any direction, from the subhuman level to the present, has been far less due to man’s own efforts than to the activity of the evolutionary forces at work within him. Every incentive to invention, discovery, aesthetics, and the development of improved social and political organizations invariably comes from within, from the depths of his consciousness by the grace of … the superintelligent Evolutionary Force in human beings.³

I would further add that in order for continued human development to occur there are particular periods of human history wherein humanity becomes ready, or in need of, the activation of particular faculties — our evolutionary potentials. During such transitional periods humanity will acquire — or be coerced into developing — new capacities for accessing consciousness (a.k.a. the living intelligence). As in all paradigm shifts, old energies must inevitably give way to the new.

In the years ahead a new wave of young people will be manifesting a consciousness that is simultaneously open to spiritual impulses as well as to the latest in scientific research. A new generation will be growing up with the desire to develop a collective sense of wellbeing, connectedness, empathy and creative vision. What we refer to as the ‘nonlocal’ will to them be the same as integral interconnectedness, and will feel natural and normal. New patterns of thinking and a stronger sense of intuition will also be a sign that greater access to the field of living intelligence is occurring. This access is the same as, in our older language, direct interaction with nonlocal and non-ordinary states of consciousness.

The experience of direct nonlocal consciousness used to be the domain of experienced practitioners (shamans, mystics, psychics) who would have undergone rigorous and lengthy training. Our ‘everyday consciousness’ of the local view of the universe has been until now largely unprepared for the realms of non-ordinary reality. In Western civilization especially, the nonlocal mode of perception (subjective experience) has not been encouraged, or even recognized. As such it has lain dormant, atrophied, and largely left to the province of the esoteric sciences. The myopic, linear, and rational view of reality has resulted in the dominating values of competition, power, ego, and greed. A nonlocal, intuitive sense of reality, however, will be one that embraces the values of Connection ~ Communication ~ Collaboration ~ Consciousness ~ Compassion. It is my view that the new generation(s) of young people in the world will be the first to embody these values in a widespread manner — thus ushering in a new epoch for the development of human consciousness.

Connected to Living Information

It appears that the Earth is now receiving different forms of energetic impacts — especially electromagnetically — which will alter the Earth’s resonant energy signature. As the Earth’s magnetic field is not a static shield, but rather like an oscillating wave, fluctuations in the field are known to affect living systems upon the Earth. Biological bodies, being electrical energy units, are sensitive to external energetic and atmospheric variations, though usually these reactions operate at a subconscious level. Likewise, magnetic variations can have unusual effects on human consciousness. Our sciences are now understanding more and more how human life – our thoughts, emotions, and behavior — are affected directly by fluctuations in Earth’s magnetic field.[iii] As the energetic resonance of the Earth alters over time, this will undoubtedly affect how human DNA calibrates itself as a newborn child enters into the world.

The knowledge that human DNA can be influenced and modulated by frequencies (sound, light, language, and thought) has been utilized by various spiritual traditions over the ages. This can be seen in the variety of exercises that utilize thought focus (prayer), sounds (music, chanting, singing), light (both natural light and produced light, such as in stained glass), and language (specific recitations such as a mantra and zikr). Similarly, various shamanic practices have alluded to the notion that DNA can be accessed through deliberate, conscious intention.⁴DNA appears to function, therefore, not only as a protein builder (the minority function) but also as a medium for the storage, receiving, and communication of information.

If we understand that information is processed by us on a neurobiological level, then we can accept that our nervous systems are channels for information. Since we know that DNA is present throughout our cellular structure, we can be sure that our complete physiology is involved in and related to external energy fields — electromagnetism, gamma bursts, solar rays, as well as consciousness fields.

It appears that part of our human DNA ‘energetic signature’ can be re-calibrated in our lifetime through exercising various techniques, as in a range of meditative practices and associated stimuli (as described above). For many people, these are the exact practices that have guided them through their lives. It may be that in past epochs direct intervention — such as wisdom teachings, mystery schools, and the like — were required in preparing individuals to access the living intelligence as the current environment alone was not sufficient to provide the catalytic trigger.

This situation, I speculate, may now be changing. The young children being born today appear to be already more connected with a form of intuitive intelligence. Contact with one’s own intuitive intelligence is another way of saying a person manifests a degree of gnosis. And true gnosis is a form of transceiving of information; that is, the receiving as well as transmitting of nonlocal information. Such gnosis is likely to be in the form of informational exchange between the human nervous system and living intelligence, which together in-form the body consciousness field. A more coherent connection between a person and the living intelligence field suggests greater potential/capacity for a self-initiated awakening, without the need for external teaching environments. It may be the case that humanity has just been waiting for the establishment of an energetically conducive environment. And that time may now be at hand.

Fields of Resonance

In preceding years the human socio-cultural environment was not conducive to individual development on a large scale. For this reason many wisdom teachings or streams of perennial wisdom had to operate quietly, or as clandestine operations. And yet the human capacity to access consciously the living intelligence field is without doubt an in-born natural ability. Only that for most people this capacity has lain dormant as, like an under-exercised muscle, it was never properly used. As one source recently pointed out — ‘The information you need is encoded in the structural makeup of every single cell in your body. Contact is there.’⁵The same source also noted that:

When you are aware of your totality, the Life-impulse will transmit to you everything that you need to know in any given situation. Its message will always come as your first spontaneous impulse. Be attentive.⁶

We now know that the entire genetic information for a human body is contained in each of the body’s many trillion cells. It may be the case — only speculative at this stage — that accessing the living intelligence also operates through connection/communication with the information that is en-folded in these communicating fields of energy. That is, our human physiology — DNA, cellular structure, nervous system, etc. — acts as a whole, coherent, transceiving apparatus that filters our consciousness from the nonlocal intelligence field. The bodily ‘transceiving apparatus’ resonates with the various energy fields that originate literally under our feet as well as above our heads.

Geologists are developing their understanding of how Earth energies are transmitted both along the surface of the crust as well as within the core of the Earth. Latest research indicates that the Earth’s core behaves more along the lines of a crystalline structure, rather than as the molten mass that many of us imagine. In 1936 it was discovered (by the seismologist Inge Lehmann) that the Earth has a solid inner core distinct from its liquid outer core. This solid inner core was deduced by observing how earthquake-generated seismic waves were being reflected off the boundary of the inner core. Likewise, the outer core was found to be liquid, as earlier suspected. However, more recent observations have shown that the inner core is not completely uniform. Rather, it contains large-scale structures indicated by seismic waves that pass more rapidly through some parts of the inner core than through others. It has even been suggested that the inner solid core is formed from iron crystals. What is known by science is that the inner core, through its dynamo action, plays a significant role in the generation of Earth’s magnetic field. Similarly, the crust of the Earth is known to support a network of energized, or ‘magnetized’ paths — variously called ley lines, Earth grid, pilgrimage routes, etc. It appears that the Earth manifests particular tracks, or routes, of increased energy upon which it is said many ancient temples, ceremonial sites, gatherings, and the like have been based. Indeed, many gatherings and buildings today continue to be based upon certain accepted energized ‘hot spots.’ Quite literally, the energy fields of the Earth pulsate under our very feet. In addition to this, above our heads the Earth’s magnetic field, interacting with solar and cosmic rays, envelopes humanity in a bubble of fluctuating energy.

The latest findings in science tell us that the Earth’s electromagnetic field is a sensitive membrane that responds to solar activity such as sun spot cycles, solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and solar winds. We also know from neuroscience that human brain activity creates small electrical charges. Further, the human heart is now understood to act as a vibrant generator of electromagnetic energy. Collate this with a human nervous system and cellular structure that communicates as a coherent quantum field, then we have intrinsic resonance between human biology and our terrestrial, solar, and cosmic environments. We are literally living amidst a VALIS – Vast Active Living Intelligence System.

This understanding connects us with notions of a nonlocal field of consciousness that has been referred to over the years as the noosphere (Teilhard de Chardin; Vladimir Vernadsky); Overmind (Sri Aurobindo); and the world sensorium (Oliver Reiser). We can also consider this ‘noosphere/overmind’ — a.k.a. living intelligence field — as emerging as a form of planetary consciousness. If this is the case, then humanity may be instrumental in facilitating the emergence of a single planetary organism with a shared living intelligence (i.e., consciousness). A collectively aligned conscious and aware human civilization could become a physical channel for this living intelligence. This suggests that, as a species, we would have arrived at the point where we now needed to interiorize the evolutionary process for further development to occur.

The manifestation of consciousness through humanity appears to be undergoing an increased psychic compression that may serve to synchronize life on this planet. This process, in fact, is nothing ‘esoteric’ as it has been part of human civilization from the first day our ancestors began to worship an external presence. The convergence of human consciousness/thought patterns takes place in ceremonial worship, and is central to human prayer. If we look at the salah practice of formal worship in Islam (it constituting one of the Five Pillars of Sunni Islam), we see that this ritual prayer obliges the worshipper to pray five times a day facing Mecca. These specifically designated times of concentrated states of consciousness create an intense convergence and focused stream of energy across the globe directed toward the geographical location of Mecca. We have many other forms of consciousness convergence (or mental synchronization) upon this planet, throughout a myriad of socio-cultural-religious-spiritual ceremonies, events, gatherings, etc. For example, the ‘Global Consciousness Project’[iv], established by Roger Nelson at Princeton University, has demonstrated how human consciousness becomes collectively coherent and synchronized at moments of global emotional release. In the past, however, heightened synchronization in the human collective consciousness field was induced by external triggers[v]. It is to be speculated whether a change is underway upon this planet that will result in supporting greater coherence in the human consciousness field. If this is the case, we may suspect that this will facilitate a clearer contact between the human transceiving apparatus (the human body) and the nonlocal living intelligence field.

It is my own sense that the coming generation(s) will be among the first to awaken en masse to an era of instinctual gnosis. That is, a generation of instinctively aware young children who inherently feel an intentional connection and communion between their ‘self’ and the living intelligence. This contact will be a young person’s primary contact in their life, providing trustful feelings and instinctual guidance. This, we can hope, will assist in making our epochal and monumental planetary transition less turbulent and more coherent. The 13^th century Persian poet Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī – known in the West simply as Rumi – suggested this intentional coherence when he accurately wrote about the distinction between acquired and instinctual intelligence:

Two Kinds of Intelligence

There are two kinds of intelligence: One acquired,
as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.

With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets.

There is another kind of tablet, one
already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness
in the center of the chest. This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid,
and it doesn’t move from outside to inside
through the conduits of plumbing-learning.

This second knowing is a fountainhead

from within you, moving out.⁷

This ‘second knowing’ which is the ‘fountainhead’ within us corresponds to the source of living intelligence – present within our very cells. Through accessing this contact/communication we are likely to find ourselves actively engaging with a developmental impulse unfolding upon this planet.

Notes

¹Bucke, R. (1972/1901) Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. London: The Olympia Press.

²Shah, I. (1982) The Sufis. London: Octagon, p.54

³Krishna, G. (1993) Higher Consciousness and Kundalini. Ontario, CA: F.I.N.D. Research Trust, p.166

⁴Narby, J. (1999) Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge. London: Phoenix.

⁵Carey, K. (1995/1982) The Starseed Transmissions. New York: HarperCollins, p.47

⁶Carey, K. (1995/1982) The Starseed Transmissions. New York: HarperCollins, p.41

⁷Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī, ‘Two Kinds of Intelligence’, Mathnawi IV:1960-1968 (Trans. Coleman Barks)

[i] See the first part – The Rise of an Intuitive Humanity

[ii] Taken from Rumi’s Masnavi

[iii] See research material at HeartMath Institute – https://www.heartmath.org/research/research-library/

[iv] See http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

[v] Examples include the death of Princess Diana in the UK, and the World Trade Center collapse in the US.

Philip K. Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982)

Posted on December 16, 2014 by Reid Mukai

In honor of the birthday of the venerable author whose writings have inspired and expanded the hearts & minds of countless kindred spirits, I’m sharing a few PKD-related works from the archives. Posted below are a couple of rare interviews with Philip K. Dick shedding light on his work and the bizarre events which greatly affected the latter part of his life followed by a speculative essay on his “2-3-74” experience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGyhT5nVsEU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=af2q_u0Fu8I

2-3-74 and After: A Mystical and Paranormal Overview

By Mark W. Smith

“A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and
systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of
suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself
all poisons, and preserves their quintessence. Unspeakable torment,
where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he
becomes all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great
accursed – and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown!
Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He
attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the
understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what
if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of,
unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the
horizons where the first one has fallen!”

Arthur Rimbaud (May 15,1871)

PKD: Sham or Shaman? In February of 1974 Philip K. Dick was feeling a
lot of personal stress: financial matters involving the I.R.S.,
lingering effects of the break-in of his home and other fears
experienced in 1971, and family matters involving the birth of a new
child. He was also dealing with the effects of an impacted wisdom
tooth. Phil had been administered Sodium Pentothal during surgery and
later was awaiting the delivery of a pain killer. Phil had also been
taking lithium in prescribed doses for some time.

During this time Phil began to receive and experience a series of
dreams, visions and other-worldly experiences that would change his
life and times for ever. He would spend the remaining years of his
life in pursuit of explanations for what had happened. What follows is
a synopsis of possible ideas, borrowed from both western and eastern
thought; past, present and even future.

In speculating on the condition of Phil’s psyche at this point, one
must ponder the combined effects of the stress, pain and drugs. The
vision quest is a ritual practiced for gaining a guardian spirit or
asking for supernatural guidance. These three forces are often
utilized in preparing the mind and spirit for this: stress, in the
form of isolation, fasts, thirsts and physical danger; pain, through
mutilation or self mortification; and drugs, such as hallucinogens. In
the successful vision quest the combination of these preparations will
place the individual in a trance and make him a receptacle for
supernatural forces. The vision quest still lies outside the realm of
tribal shamanism.

Shamanism itself exists within the social structure of the tribe and
is the practice of entering an altered state of consciousness and
traversing non-physical realities in order to heal sickness, both
physical, emotional, and spiritual; or to tell of the future and of
things to pass, or to contact the dead, etc. The shamans are not
priests, but are often more like mystics, and as such are separated
from the main function of the society by their intense experiences.
Siberian shamans go down to the underworld of the ancestral spirits to
gain their knowledge. This belief system has had parallels in other
cultures as well; in yoga tradition, the Manomya and Akashaloka
siddhis provide access to other dimensions of the universe. In Iranian
mysticism, Hurgalya, the celestial earth, is accessible for spiritual
travel.

Within the shamanic traditions it is a long-held belief that of the
three chief methods of obtaining shamanic powers (1) family
transmission, (2) spontaneous vocation, and (3) people who become
shamans of their own free will, the self-made shaman is the least
powerful.

Mircea Eliade in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy says,
“However selected, a shaman is not recognized as such until after he
has received two kinds of teaching: (1) ecstatic (dreams, trances,
etc.) and (2) traditional (shamanic techniques, names and functions of
spirits, mythology and genealogy of the clan, secret languages,
etc.).”

Looking at Phil’s experience through a shamanistic viewpoint, we can
say that it was spontaneous, and upon receiving the “call” he had a
series of dreams, trances, visions, etc. Then he spent the next eight
years trying to learn the traditions of his people, their mythology,
the names and functions of their spirits, and so on.

For the most part he was on his own in his attempts to relate the
experiences to the traditions of his people, due to the spiritual
poverty that existed around him, and one wonders what would have been
made of his experiences if he had been born or lived in a culture of
rich shamanistic traditions.

The Symbolism of the First Encounter. Phil states that on February 20,
1974 he was visited by a beautiful girl who was delivering his
prescription (Darvon), and noticed a gold necklace that she was
wearing. He was suddenly stuck by the experience of “anamnesis”, which
was first employed by Plato as the recollection or remembrance of
Eternal Truth. Asking her what it was, she informed him that the
amulet had a fish inscribed on it, and that the fish was a sign used
by the early Christians. She then departed.

Phil felt that the events that were to follow began that day and were
triggered by his looking at this golden fish amulet. The word “amulet”
comes from the French “amulet”, which in turn comes from the Latin
“amuletum” and means “for defense”. Amulets have been common since
ancient times, can be made out of virtually anything, and are believed
to be imbued with magical or supernatural power.

Symbols as well have always been felt to retain magical powers. They
function as translators of the human condition into meta-universal
terms and reveal the connection between the microcosm and the
macrocosm. W.B.Yeats once stated, “I cannot now think symbols less
than the greatest of all powers whether they are used consciously by
the master of magic or half unconsciously by their successors, the
poet, the musician, and the artist.” (In Yeat’s Golden Dawn).

Gold itself has long been associated with the sun, the force which
brings light, form and order out of chaos and darkness. The fish
inscribed in the gold represented Christ to the early Christians
because the Greek word “ichthys”, meaning “fish”, was an acronym for
“Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior”. Also, fish live in water and water
has long symbolized the unconscious mind. Water has also been used as
a symbol of life.

One must speculate as to the effects of these combined events on
Phil’s mind on that fateful February day in 1974. Phil’s interest in
early Christianity, and his friendship with James A. Pike, the
Episcopal Bishop of California, dating back to the mid-sixties, has
been well-documented in several of his novels. Could this combination
of circumstances culminate in the results that were to follow?

The Vatic PKD. Phil felt that he was transported to the world of Acts
(fifth book of the Christian Bible’s New Testament) and he felt that
it was his real time and place. He felt that he was a person called
Simon Magus, a first century Gnostic. He was also to name this ancient
personage Thomas, a first-century Christian or “Firebright”, described
as an entity of spiritual wisdom. He never was able to decide on a
name for this personage or the nature of its origin.

Spontaneous Retrocognition (a.k.a. postcognition) is a phenomenon in
which an individual is able to “see” into the past. Occurring in the
form of an hallucination or vision, the present surroundings are
replaced by a scene from the past. Psychic Archeology is the ability
to use psychic skills to aid in the field of archeology. Canadian
archeologist J. Norman Emerson has used the talents of psychic George
McMullen, who reports that he sees movie-like images of the past as he
comes into contact with artifacts. He also states that he is assisted
in this process by beings of light. Although this is more akin to
psychometry, the ability to gain information from objects of the past
by handling them, it is explained that the information is conveyed by
vibrations embedded within an object by the emotions or actions of the
past. Although I don’t think Phil ever claimed to have touched the
golden fish, if the vibrations were of enough intensity and/or he was
sensitive enough or open enough, I feel an impression may have been
felt, even without the his physically touching the amulet.

Spontaneous past-life recall is a phenomenon where an individual
experiences the remembrance of a previously lived life. There are many
documented cases of spontaneous past-life recall, one of the earliest
being of a young Japanese boy born in 1815. Religious mysticism of the
east acknowledges the existence of past-life recall and claims that
through the practice of yoga meditation one can access all the details
of one’s past lives. This is tied to the central belief in
reincarnation, the return of the soul to a new physical form after the
death of the previous one.

PKD the Possessed. Revelations from divine, semi-divine, or other
spirits and entities have been reported for thousands of years. Most
Holy books, including the Christian Bible, have been founded on this
premise. In 1904 Aleister Crowley, self-made magician and occultist,
and his wife Rose Kelly received communications from an entity who
identified himself as “Aiwass”, the Egyptian god Horus’ messenger, and
penned “Liber Legis”, also called “The Book of the Law”. It became one
of his most important works, and a standard in modern occult
teachings. For three years beginning in 1954, Andrija Puharich
observed and recorded a young man who, while in a spontaneous trance,
would write and speak in the ancient language of Egypt. This has been
detailed in his book, The Sacred Mushroom. In the 1930’s in England, a
woman spoke ancient Egyptian in a trance over a period of six years,
which has been detailed in the book, Ancient Egypt Speaks by Hulme &
Woods. Phil claimed to receive messages in sanskrit and koine Greek,
two ancient languages of which he had no previous knowledge.

Spirit possession is the taking over of one’s mind, body or soul by an
external force such as a deity, spirit, demon, entity or a separate
personality. Although not strictly accepted by Christianity as a
whole, many of the world’s religious beliefs (e.g. Voudon and many
eastern religions) do accept it. Yet even within Christianity there
are sanctified rituals for exorcism, (the Rituale Romanum, dating back
to 1614) and acceptance of possession by the Holy Spirit.

The term “channeling” has gained in popularity over the last decade or
so, and is a form of communication with “non-worldly entities”. In its
most basic form it has existed in most cultures throughout history,
and in these cultures it has gone though periods of acceptance and
rejection.

James Joyce used the term “epiphany”, meaning “the manifestation of
the divine or supra-personal”. Rainer Maria Rilke said that he
received signals from “cosmic space” for twenty-one days and during
that time produced a fascinating body of written work, some of the
world’s best poetry.

Joan of Arc, a peasant girl of France, having heard the voices of
“Saints” urging her to help Charles VII regain the throne, led a large
army into battle in 1429, and in that same year, victorious in battle,
crowned Charles at Reims.

Phil also considered the possibility that his late friend Bishop James
Pike (d. 1969), was the source of his experiences. He pondered the
idea that his psyche was merging with Pike’s in an attempt to make
contact with him from the “other side”. During the early to mid-1960’s
Phil and Pike had become friends, spending many hours involved in
theological speculation. They also spent much time, after Pike’s son,
Jim, committed suicide in February of 1966, discussing Pike’s efforts
to contact his son. Phil acknowledges Pike in the front of his book
The Maze of Death as providing him with a “wealth of theological
material for my inspection, none of which I was previously acquainted
with.” He disappeared in the Judean desert while on a quest for the
historical Jesus, and was never seen again.

PKD the Dreamer. People claim that it is through dreams, intuitive
flashes, and visions that they experience spontaneous past-life
recall, and researchers look for the sudden acquisition of knowledge
or information by the individual that cannot be explained by other
means. Australian aborigines receive their knowledge about spiritual
matters, as well as practical information about how to survive in an
extremely hostile environment, through dreaming. They call it the
“dreamtime”.

When looking at the series of events that happened to Phil we must ask
ourselves how they relate to each other. Which ones were primary
events, and which ones were secondary events or even tertiary events
resulting from the previous ones. As Lawrence Sutin, author of Divine
Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick states, “Phil was a living psychic
caldron” at this point. I feel that the many dreams experienced by
Phil during this time period must be thought of in these terms.

In the following weeks Phil was to have a series of nightmares, which
frightened him further; they contained huge flying reptiles. In one of
these dreams he describes that he was a young child in a prehistoric
tribe and as these dragons came near he transformed into his pet
saber-tooth tiger and began to posture in defiance, but he found
himself in a cage without means of escape. Upon being aroused from her
sleep by “… the sound of a large reptile hissing,” his wife, Tessa,
found “… Phil lying there, still asleep, hissing. Afraid to touch
him, I called out his name. I was getting more scared with every
second that passed. I sensed that it was not Phil who was hissing, but
some mindless beast that had taken over his body.”

Dragons have been used as symbols of the life force in many cultures
for thousands of years, the essence of nature, an underlying invisible
force. The flying dragon is an inner symbol of dark unconscious forces
which must be transformed into creative forces. In alchemy, the
mystical art of transforming consciousness, the dragon was a symbol of
Mercury manifested as passion and concupiscence, which must undergo
extraction and transformation, before becoming a peacemaker, a
mediator between warring elements, and a producer of unity.

Alchemy was (and still is) an art studied by practitioners of the
western esoteric tradition which has its roots in Greco-Egyptian
esoteric teachings. As stated above, Phil was now a “living psychic
caldron,” and he wished to bring himself to a rolling boil. (For more
on alchemy, see Appendix 2.)

Behind the Pink Door. Regarding some information concerning the use of
massive doses of water-soluble vitamins that were suggested to improve
the neural firing and the communication between the two hemispheres of
the brain, Phil discovered an article in the April 1974 issue of
Psychology Today that told about a case where a doctor had treated a
schizophrenic patient with a combination of water-soluble vitamins.
Phil copied down the “recipe” and began his own treatment,
experimenting further with dosage and vitamin ratios. Phil states in
his notes that, “both hemispheres [of the brain] came together, for
the first time in my life.”

He also began burning, day and night, white votive candles before a
shrine he’d assembled in his bedroom. This shrine also contained a
small wooden saint figure from the Philippines. He and his wife
purchased a sticker with the Christian fish symbol on it and placed it
in their living room window. As Phil watched the sticker with the
afternoon sun streaming though it, he reported seeing pink rectangular
shapes, phosphene images it seemed, prefiguring what was to come.

In mid-March Phil reports that he was into his fifth night without
sleep when he experienced a barrage of frightening vortices of light.
These came to him in rapid-fire repetition; he felt his own thoughts
accelerating.

They seemed to be phosphene graphics that resembled modern abstract
paintings, such as by the artists Kandinsky and Klee. He felt that
hundreds of thousands of them were being downloaded into his mind.
Phil began to feel that he was the recipient of a vast amount of
encoded information. He felt that there was no way that he could have
been the author of this information, as the quantity was too vast.
These “transmissions” were to continue daily for the next week.

Terence McKenna has also reported that tryptamine-induced ecstasy
sometimes triggers a kind of synesthesia in which syntactical
structures (spoken language) become visible and language is transmuted
from a thing heard to a thing seen; the syntax becomes unambiguously
visible.

Phil goes on to tell us that the first stage of his visions at this
time was to undergo the Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book of the Dead)
journey at the end of which he met Aphrodite, Goddess of Divine Love.
He reports little understanding of the meaning of any of this at the
time.

Aphrodite was only one of the many encounters Phil would have with a
divine female aspect who spoke to him while he was in a series of
hypnogogic states. The name given to this voice by Phil was the A.I.
(artificial intelligence) Voice, but he always assigned female
qualities to it. He called it many things: Artemis and Diana, Athena
and Minerva, Saint Sophia and his twin sister Jane, with all of whom
he felt he was in telepathic communication at times. (His twin sister
Jane had died a little over a month after birth. For more on the
divine female aspect, see Appendix 3.)

Dick and Jane. Philip Kindred Dick and his dizygotic (fraternal) -twin
sister Jane Charlotte were born six weeks premature, on December 16,
1928 at home. Lawrence Sutin reports that, “Phil was born at noon,
twenty minutes ahead of his sister… They were frail things. Phil
weighed four and one-quarter pounds and squealed loudly. Jane, a mere
three and one-half pounds, was quieter and darker…” Jane was not to
live; she died January 26, 1929, a little over a month old. Although
too young to have conscious memory of his sister, she remained the
central event in Phil’s psychic life.

Lawrence Sutin writes in his biography, Divine Invasions, “This
‘twinning’ motif found expression in a number of Phil’s stories and
novels, notably Dr. Bloodmoney (1965), Flow My Tears, The Policeman
Said (1974), A Scanner Darkly (1977), VALIS (1981), and The Divine
Invasion (1981).”

He goes on to quote from Phil’s “Exegesis”, from an entry written near
the end of his life:

She [Jane] fights for my life & I for hers, eternally. My sister is
everything to me. I am damned always to be separated from her/& with
her, in oscillation. Very fast.

Both: I have her in me, and often outside me, but I have lost her; 2
realities at once yin/yang.

Sutin continues, “Two realities, out of which, as from rich loam, the
multiverses of the stories, the novels, and the “Exegesis” blossomed.
But always the loss of Jane hovered in Phil’s soul.” (For more
concerning the subject of twins, see Appendix 4.)

A Counter-Intelligence Victim? For the next week or so Phil perceived
that he would receive a letter that would kill him. This knowledge had
been conveyed to him in a dream. On March 20th that day arrived, and
the letter came in the form of a xeroxed sheet of paper from the
left-wing New York newspaper The Daily World, which contained two book
reports. Phil felt that this letter was somehow connected to a
two-week period of amnesia he had suffered in 1972 while living in
Canada. He suspected that he had been “programmed” but didn’t know to
do what or for whom. He feared that the trigger for this programming
had been the letter, but that it somehow failed.

Phil thought something was taking control of him to direct his actions
in response to the xeroxed letter. He speculated that it was Thomas;
although now he felt that instead of a first-century Christian Thomas
was a thought-control implant, implanted by the US Army intelligence.
His name for this was “Pigspurt,” which fear caused him to call the
FBI and his local police department stating, “I am a machine,” and
then requesting to be locked up. No known action was taken by the
authorities.

He thought that maybe he had been the involuntary recipient of an ESP
experiment. He even wrote to Leningrad in the then Soviet Union asking
if they had been involved in any experiments exploring long-distance
ESP transmissions. He received no reply.

Phil was to gain control of himself shortly after this, although he
continued to believe that he must continue to placate the authorities.
He made a series of contacts to the FBI over the next seven months.
(As a sidebar: Phil was to learn in 1975, through the Freedom of
Information Act, that a letter he had sent in 1958 had been
intercepted by the CIA. See Appendix 5 for more on government
mind-control experiments.)

The radio began to abuse Phil with obscenities and death commands.
Even when the radio was unplugged the abuse continued, waking him and
his wife in the middle of the night. The radio was plugged back in,
“because it was easier to sleep with the music on,” remembered his
wife Tessa, in an interview with J.B. Reynolds.

Phil’s visions continued. He began to see what he termed “the golden
rectangle”. This “door” was marked with letters from the Greek
alphabet and he repeatedly saw this door projected onto any natural
formation that resembled it. At one time he even saw his pet cat Pinky
emerging outward from through the door. The cat had taken on a larger
and more ferocious appearance, although the cat was old and in poor
health. Looking beyond the door Phil saw a “static landscape,
nocturnal, a quiet black sea, sky, the edge of an island, and
surprisingly, the unmoving figure of a nude woman standing on the sand
by the edge of the water. I recognized her; it was Aphrodite.”

Pinky the Cat. As time progressed more strange occurrences invaded
Phil’s life. He began to feel that the pets in his life seemed more
intelligent and were trying to communicate with him.

Animal psi (Anpsi) is the ability of animals to make use of the same
ESP faculties that humans are said to possess. It is suggested that
this human-to-animal communication is nurtured by the love of their
human guardians; if this be true, than Phil’s cat Pinky must surely
have been a candidate, as Phil had a deep emotional bond with his
beloved cat. It even seems synchronicitous that the beam of light
which provided Phil with his experience and knowledge was pink and his
cat’s name was “Pinky”.

Later in the fall Phil stated that while he and his wife were lying in
bed, he saw a “pale white light” enter and fill the room. He saw Pinky
the cat floating, inert and exposed. Becoming frightened, he began to
think that Death had entered the room and that he was going to die. He
began praying in Latin for almost half an hour.

After the episode ended he stated to his wife that he’d known it was
Death and thought it had come for him. He also explained that within
the next four days Death would strike.

Later that night he reports a dream in which he heard a loud gunshot
fired at him; he was OK but a woman next to him had been injured and
was dying. He ran for help.

Three days later Pinky died, and on the night he died Phil was in the
bathroom and felt a hand on his shoulder; turning to see who was
there, he saw no one. He felt it was the touch of his good friend
pausing to say good-bye upon his departure.

The Mystical PKD. Prior to this Phil had injured himself during the
summer and had undergone corrective surgery. In this weakened state
Phil says that he was again hit by the pink beam of light, which
informed him of a potentially fatal inguinal hernia that his son
Christopher had. This information was confirmed by a physician and the
necessary surgery was performed later that day.

Aldous Huxley gave a series of seven lectures at MIT in the fall of
1960 on the subject of the visionary experience and discussed the
nature of these experiences. Although he stated that every visionary
experience is unique, as every human being is unique, there are
similarities. He went on to say that the highest common factor in all
the experiences, is the experience of light. He classified the aspect
even further, speaking of “undifferentiated light” and “light in
differentiated form”. The former was described as an enormous blast of
light, disembodied in any form – just a great flood of light. When the
pink beam hit Phil, he described it as blinding, like a flashbulb
going off in his face. The latter was described by Huxley as the
experience of light embodied in shapes, in personages, and in
landscapes. Huxley went on to explain that “the experience will often
begin with a vision of what may be called living geometries,
geometrical forms brilliantly lighted, continuously changing. These
may modulate into some kind of metrical objects such as carpets,
mosaics and so on. There may then be tremendous visions of
landscapes… And then there are sometimes visions of figures, strange
faces.” When William Blake saw them, he called them seraphim and
cherubim. This description of the visionary experience also dovetails
with Phil’s.

Both Evelyn Underhill, author of the classic general introduction to
the study of mysticism, Mysticism, and Huxley agree that central to
the classic mystical experience is, in Huxley’s words, “that
experience which transcends the subject-object relationship, which
produces a sense of solidarity between the experiencer and the
universe, which gives the experiencer a sense of the basic
All-Rightness of the universe…”

In The Luminous Vision: Six Medieval Mystics and their Teachings, Anne
Bancroft, in her introduction, states, “The true mystic, then, is one
who is freed from feelings of oppression and insecurity which arise
when we regard the world as alien to us and ourselves as being
directed by it from without.” This fundamental part of the visionary
experience seems clearly to have not been a part of Phil’s
experiences, and although there are many important similarities
between his experiences and the mystic state there are also many
differences.

Again Phil pondered where the information came from and who was
communicating with him. He described it as the ability to read and
understand secret messages that were embedded within the inferior bulk
of the total amount of the transmissions. He began looking toward the
heavens.

Interstellar Telepathy, Sirius, and the Illuminati. Many people have
claimed to have received messages via interstellar telepathy.
Saul-Paul Sirag, a physicist, has said that over a hundred scientists
in the United States have had this experience, but are reluctant to
admit it publicly, for obvious reasons. Buckminster Fuller, renowned
scientific philosopher, has stated that he sometimes thinks that he
has received messages from interstellar telepaths. Dr. John Lilly,
psychoanalyst, neuro-anatomist, cyberneticist, mathematician, and
pioneering dolphin researcher, has made allusions to contact during
the early seventies from interstellar entities he terms the “Cosmic
Coincidence Control Center”. Alan Vaughn, a well-known occultist and
editor of Psychic magazine, also had the impression of being contacted
from the star Sirius in January 1973.

During July and August 1973, Timothy Leary, the scientific clinical
psychologist and arch-heretic fired from Harvard, received what he
termed the “Starseed Transmissions”; the messages came in nineteen
bursts and were seldom in recognizable English. Leary theorizes that
“Higher Intelligence” is a two-step process: first DNA is seeded on a
planet to take root and grow; second, when the life form(s) grow and
show signs of maturity, transmissions (via interstellar ESP) are sent
to the fledgling intelligence to facilitate its growth and eventual
return to the stars. Leary feels that interstellar ESP has been going
on all through the ages, and that each culture interprets the
messages, from where and from whom they come, in relationship to their
own cultural beliefs (e.g. angels, spirits, goddesses, UFOs, demons,
fairies, weird people, the Virgin Mary, etc.).

Robert A. Wilson, novelist, poet, lecturer, stand-up comic, futurist,
and psychologist, feels he was contacted from July 1973 to October
1974 by some form of interstellar telepathy. He has since then written
several books which make connections between occult practices of
various Rosicrucian luminaries and communications from interstellar
entities.

In his book Cosmic Trigger he states, “[George Hunt] Williamson, an
early 1950s contactee, claims to have met some flying saucerites from
Sirius. He prints vast huge chunks of their language… and I found
that a few of the words were almost identical with some words in the
“angelic” language used by Dr. John Dee, Aleister Crowley and other
magi of the Illuminati tradition… Williamson also informs us that
the Sirians have been with earth for ‘several thousand years’ and that
their allies here use as insignia the Eye of Horus – the origin of the
Illuminati eye-in-triangle design.” (For more on the Illuminati, see
Appendix 2.)

Wilson goes on to find similarities in the various “transmissions”,
stating, “It seems clear that the Starseed Transmissions acquired a
rather heavy Timothy Leary flavor in passing through the Leary nervous
system, just as The Book of the Law took on an undeniably Crowleyan
aroma in passing through Aleister’s neurons, but the underlying
message is hauntingly similar.” Wilson met with Phil several times,
and they corresponded for awhile. Wilson felt that Phil’s experiences
were strangely resonant with his, stating, “The parallels with my own
experience are numerous – but so are the differences. If the same
source was beaming ideas to both Phil and me, the messages got our
individual flavors mixed into them as we decoded the signals.”

Phil’s transmissions did take on a distinctly phildickian slant as
they passed through his nervous system, yet I wonder what a synthesis
of the various separate transmissions would bring about.

When considering “from whom” or “from where” these transmissions came,
Wilson gives three possible ways to think about it in his book, Masks
of the Illuminati. “ONE: it is a metaphor that signifies, roughly,
learning to receive communications from your own unconscious mind,
without the usual distortion. TWO: it’s not that simple at all; [the
higher intelligence] speaks to you through your own conscious mind,
but it is literally a separate being… THREE: yes it is a metaphor,
after all, but for something so far out of our ordinary consciousness
that it matters not a rap whether you think of it in terms of the
first answer or in terms of the second answer; it transcends them
both…”.

Phil associated the source of the information with the nearby star
Sirius, as did Wilson, Crowley and Leary. Wilson ponders whether or
not Sirius and Earth have achieved some kind of cosmic link, and he
has researched a host of interesting references concerning this. He
has found references to this mysterious star throughout occult history
dating from the ancient Egyptians up to the present day, and whether
you trace backward from the present, or forward from the past, you
“… continually collide with the mysterious and enigmatic history of
Freemasonry.”

Phil also explored the idea that his experiences could be understood
and explained within this tradition. He had even answered an add in
the back of a pulp magazine for membership in the Ancient and Mystical
Order Rosea Crucis, (AMORC). (For more on Freemasonry and AMORC, see
Appendix 2.)

Phil himself seemed impressed with Wilson’s ideas: “Wilson managed to
reverse every mental polarity in me, as if I had been pulled through
infinity. I was astonished and delighted.”

All in all, it seems to me, the early to mid-seventies were a very
busy time for “alien” transmissions, as Phil was not alone in his
experience.

Cryptozoology. Communication from “extradimensional entities” has been
posed by several leading researchers in the field. George Creighton
suggests in Timothy Good’s book, Alien Contact, “… that some aliens
are interdimensional beings indigenous to the planet Earth, who may
have existed with us for thousands of years.” Researcher John Keel
uses the term “ultraterrestrials”.

Phil himself pondered the possibility of this. In his book VALIS he
wrote the following: “The name for this is mimesis. Another name is
mimicry. Certain insects do this; they mimic other things: sometimes
other insects – poisonous ones – or twigs and the like. Certain
biologists and naturalists have speculated that higher forms of
mimicry might exist since lower forms… have been found all over the
world.

“What if a high form of sentient mimicry existed – such a high form
that no human (or few humans) had detected it? What if it could only
be detected if it wanted to be detected? Which is to say, not truly
detected at all, since under these circumstances it has advanced out
of its camouflaged state to disclose itself. ‘Disclose’ might in this
case equal ‘theophany’. The astonished human being would say, I saw
God; whereas in fact he saw only a highly evolved ultra-terrestrial
life form, a UTI, or an extra-terrestrial life form (an ETI) which has
come here at some time in the past…”

Mystical Alien Biological Crypto-Intelligence. Phil also termed this
new, dual consciousness within him “homoplasmate” and defined it as a
combination of human (Phil) and plasmate (an information-rich life
form). He felt this plasmate had been sleeping for the last two
thousand years in a dormant seed form as living information in the
codices found at Nag Hammadi. In his book, The Transmigration of
Timothy Archer, he discusses the word “anokhi”, found in some Zadokite
documents that were unearthed with the Qumran scrolls. He goes on to
discuss its meaning, and then to involve hallucinogenic mushrooms
along the same line of thought explored in the late John Allegro’s
book The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross.

I will mention here that Terence McKenna has put forth the theory that
the stropharia cubensis (psilocybin) mushroom is an alien intelligence
that did not evolve on Earth. He outlines his beliefs and ideas in
several books: The Archaic Revival, Food of the Gods: The Search for
the Original Tree of Knowledge, and True Hallucinations, which are
worth the read for anyone wishing to pursue this line of thought
further. I feel he has put together a non-sectarian version of the
central concepts explored by Phil and Allegro in this area.

Gnostic Christianity. Phil was to have one last key vision in January
and February of 1975, that of the Palm Tree Garden and the Black Iron
Prison. In this vision, the Palm Tree Garden was contrasted to the
Black Iron Prison, signifying two opposing ways of being in the world.

It is one of the central ideas in gnostic belief that the word we live
in is an illusion created to enslave us and cut us off from our divine
birthright. Phil called what we normally call reality a “cardboard
cutout fake” and termed it the “Black Iron Prison”; his vision of our
true reality he termed the “Palm Tree Garden”. Lawrence Sutin’s
biography quotes some correspondence Phil wrote in 1975: ” This is not
an evil world, as Mani [founder of Manicheanism, which equates matter
with evil] supposed. There is a good world under the evil. The evil is
somehow superimposed over it (Maya), and when stripped away, pristine
glowing creation is visible.”

Phil’s whole experience with the events of 2-74 to 2-75 became
associated with ideas surrounding the vision of the Palm Tree Garden
and the Black Iron Prison. He spent the next eight years of his life
writing in his journal, working with these events; it grew to over one
million hand-written words, and if time and life had permitted it
continue to grow as we speak.

Phil seemed to lean towards a gnostic Christian structure to give form
to the information and the experiences he received. Jay Kinney in his
article “The Mysterious Revelations of Philip K. Dick” found
similarities between Dick’s vision and another twentieth-century
vision. C.G. Jung wrote a small booklet entitled Septem Sermones ad
Mortuos (Seven Sermons to the Dead) which he had received in a
three-day period in 1916; he gave authorship credit to “Bestialities”,
a gnostic Christian of the second century. Kinney also went on to say
that, “Dick and Jung both came to see in the surviving fragments of
early gnostic scriptures, such as those found in 1945 at Nag Hammadi,
Egypt, evidence of world views similar to those put forth in their own
respective trance-visions.” Yet one must remember gnostic concepts
were just one avenue of thought, among many Phil mapped out.

I have purposely not tried to delve to far into Phil’s own mystical
and philosophical views, as time and space prevent it, but have
attempted to give a simple sketch of the various elements that were
involved with his experiences, and also provide a few references for
anyone wishing to further explore these elements.

For those who may be interested in Phil’s own thoughts and ideas,
Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament” by Gregg Rickman is a 230-page,
edited transcription of interviews with Dick from 1981 and 1982; a
good place to begin, as are Phil’s own novels.

Appendix 1: Bibliography and Acknowledgements.

All of the personal and bibliographic knowledge mentioned in this
article concerning Philip K. Dick’s life was gained from Divine
Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick” by Lawrence Sutin. (Harmony
Books, a division of Crown Publishers, Inc., 1989.)

For insight to Philip K. Dick’s thoughts and ideas on the subject
matter see the following:

(1) “The Mysterious Revelations of Philip K. Dick,” Jay Kinney, in
Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions, #1 (Fall/Winter
1985-1986).

(2) Deus Irae, Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny. Dell Books, 1976.

(3) The Divine Invasion, Philip K. Dick. Pocket Books, 1981.

(4) A Maze of Death, Philip K. Dick. Daw Books, 1970.

(5) Radio Free Albemuth, Philip K. Dick. Avon Books, 1985.

(6) VALIS, Philip K. Dick. Bantam Books, 1981.

Other Sources:

(1) The Agency: The Rise and Fall of the CIA, John Ranelagh. Cambridge
Publishing Ltd., 1986.

(2) Alien Contact, Timothy Good. William Morrow and Company, 1991.

(3) The Archaic Revival, Terence McKenna. HarperSanFrancisco
Publishers, 1993.

(4) CIA: The “Honorable” Company, Brian Freemantle. The Rainbird
Publishing Group, 1983.

(5) The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic, Israel Regardie. Falcon
Press, 1984.

(6) Cosmic Trigger, Robert Anton Wilson. Falcon Press, 1977.

(7) Dictionary of Symbols, Tom Chetwynd. The Aquarian Press, 1982.

(8) Ego and Archetype, Edward F. Edinger. R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co,
1972.

(9) Encyclopedia of Mystical and Paranormal Experience, R.E. Guiley.
HarperCollins Publishers, 1991.

(10) Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge,
Terence McKenna. Bantam Books, 1992.

(11) The Luminous Vision: Six Medieval Mystics and their Teachings,
Anne Bancroft. Unwin Paperbacks, 1989.

(12) Masks of the Illuminati, Robert Anton Wilson. Dell Publishing,
1981.

(13) Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience,
Aldous Huxley. (M. Horowitz and C. Palmer, ed.) Stonehill Publishing
Company, 1977.

(14) Mysticism, Evelyn Underhill. Dutton Paperbacks, 1961.

(15) The Sacred Mushroom, Andrija Puharich. Doubleday & Company, 1959.

(16) The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross, John M. Allegro. Paperbacks,
1970.

(17) Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Mircea Eliade.
Princeton University Press, 1964.

(18) True Hallucinations, Terence McKenna. HarperCollins Publishers,
1993.

(19) Twins, by Peter Watson. Hutchinson & Co., 1981.

(20) The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Barbara Walker.
Harper & Row Publishers, 1983.

Appendix 2: The Western Esoteric Tradition.

The Englishman John Dee was a mathematician, philosopher, and the
adviser to Queen Elizabeth I. An exceptional student who attended the
University of Cambridge at age fifteen, he’s said to have studied a
full eighteen hours a day. Upon graduation he developed a large
following as a travelling lecturer. Returning to England he developed
a friendship with Queen Elizabeth I, and was awarded a royal position
as the warden of Christ’s College in Manchester. He gathered many
ancient texts and tomes that had been lost when the Roman Catholic
Church and Monasteries were sacked after the Reformation. His own
personal library of 4000+ books was said to be the largest of its kind
in Europe.

Starting in 1582, and for the next seven years, John Dee and a partner
named Edward Kelly were to receive messages from a series of angels.
On March 9, 1582, Kelly received a vision of the angel Uriel. On March
14 was another visitation, this time from the angel Michael. For the
next several years they received detailed information about a
mysterious language now called “Enochian”. It combined the kabbalah,
tarot, astrology, and geomancy into one single psychological field.
Israel Regardie stated, “In short, the method works: it unlocks the
secret doors of the mind as no other published system has ever done.”
(In The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic.)

Dr. Francis Years, historian, feels that John Dee was a prime mover in
the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, and outlines this in two books, The World
Stage and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment.

This leads us into the strange and murky world of the Rosicrucians, an
occult order that is both historical and mythological. This tradition
is a blending of Islamic, Christian, and Jewish mysticism, and has its
roots in ideas that were formulated and developed by the ancient
religions of Egypt and Greece; each religious mysticism
cross-fertilizing with the others and creating a mysticism and a large
body of information and experience that is uniquely Western.

Appendix 3: The Divine Female Aspect.

The anima, the female shadow figure that exists within a man’s psyche,
was an idea developed by C.G. Jung. He felt that each person had
qualities of both sexes, which allows for the full range of emotional
expression. In his book, Dictionary of Symbols, Tom Chetwynd explains
that the anima is the source of receptiveness and sensitivity, and of
the patience required to nurture the seeds of future development. The
anima is the source that enables one to experience the imagery of
one’s own unconscious. Jung felt that the anima was first projected
onto the mother, but as the individual develops it will be projected
onto others, to give it shape and bring understanding.

Often described as the “Goddess of Love”, Aphrodite was much more than
simply that. She was a trinity (Virgin, Mother, Crone). She was the
ancestral mother of the Romans, having given birth to Aeneas, their
founding father. The Christians converted her temple on Cyprus into a
sanctuary of the Virgin Mary, but even today, within this temple, Mary
is hailed as “Panaghia Aphroditessa” (All-Holy Aphrodite). Aphrodite
ruled birth, life, love, death, time, and fate, and reconciled man to
all of them through sensual and sexual mysticism.

Artemis or Diana was an Amazonian moon-goddess. She was both nurturer
and huntress, bringing forth and nurturing all living things, yet she
was also the killer of the very creatures she brought forth. Again a
trinity is evoked: lunar virgin, mother of all creatures, destroyer.
Gnostic Christians called their wisdom-goddess Sophia and frequently
identified her with Diana.

Athena was the mother goddess of Athens; the Greeks claimed she was
born fullgrown from Zeus’ head, after he swallowed her mother Metis
(female wisdom). Minerva was the Roman Goddess of wisdom, war, and the
lunar calendar; she was the Roman form of Athena.

Sophia was the Gnostic Great Mother, the spirit of female wisdom.
Sophia was God’s female soul, source of all His power. Barbara Walker,
in her book The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, states
that, “Early Gnostic Christians held that, like Krishna and Shiva, or
Dionysus and Zeus, Christ and God merged together with Sophia as an
androgyne: ‘The Son of Man agreed with Sophia, his consort, and
revealed Himself in a great light as bisexual. His male nature was
called the savior, the begetter of all things, but his female, Sophia,
Mother of all.'”

Gnostic Christian Creation Myth. “Sophia was born from the primordial
female power Sige [silence]. Sophia gave birth to a male spirit,
Christ, and a female spirit, Achamoth [Chokmah]. The latter gave birth
to the elements and the terrestrial world, then brought forth a new
god named Ialdabaoth, Son of Darkness, along with five planetary
spirits later regarded as emanations of Jehovah: Iao, Sabaoth, Adonai,
Eloi, and Uraeus.

“These spirits produced archangels, angels and finally men. Ialdabaoth
or Jehovah forbade man to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, but
his mother Achamoth sent her own spirit to earth in the form of a
serpent Ophis to teach man to disobey the jealous god. The serpent was
also Christ, who taught Adam to eat of the tree of knowledge despite
god’s prohibition.

“Sophia sent Christ again to earth in the shape of her own totemic
dove, to enter the man Jesus at his baptism in the Jordan. After Jesus
died Christ left his body and returned to heaven. Sophia gave him a
body of ether, and placed him in heaven to help collect souls. Some
said Jesus became Sophia’s spouse and his glory depended on this
sacred marriage; for he was only one of the Aeons, a minor spirit, the
‘common fruit’ of the Pleroma.” (From The Woman’s Encyclopedia of
Myths and Secrets, p.951.)

Sophia has also been identified as Jesus’ mother, as she was the Light
that descended to earth and entered the body of Mary to conceive him.
Sophia has also been described as the “mind” of God much the same as
Metis was to Zeus. Sophia also appears in the Jewish mystical
tradition of the Kabbalah as the Shekhina of God.

Appendix 4: Twinning.

The word “twin” comes from the ancient German word, “twina” or
“twine”, and means “two together”.

Types of twins: The birth of twins can happen in one of two ways. If
the ovaries release two eggs and they are fertilized, they will grow
into two independent fetuses, each with its own placenta. These twins
are called fraternal or dizygotic twins, “dizygotic” (DZ) from the
Greek “di” meaning “two” and “zygotos” meaning “yoked” or “egg”.
Identical twins come from a single egg, which divides into two
separate individuals after fertilization. These twins are called
monozygotic (MZ), “mono” coming from the Greek meaning “single”.

There are an estimated 100 million twins in the world, and about one
third of these are MZ (3.5 per 1000 live births). The connection
between MZ twins appears statistically to be greater than the bond
which exists between DZ twins, but there have been examples of DZs who
have held extraordinary interdependence upon each other.

Twin Studies: Studies have shown that the similarities found in twins
fall into three areas: first, there are the anecdotal coincidences
such as the similarities in names, clothing choices, dressing styles,
choices of authors and books and colors; second, there are the
psychological and/or behavioral similarities like the same dreams and
fears, job preferences and sports interests; third, the psychiatric
similarities of depression, alcoholism, violence, and other mental
health characteristics.

Peter Watson in his book Twins states, “The most intriguing is that
twinhood, especially identical twinhood, faces us with people who,
though separate individuals biologically, psychologically are not.”
Watson also explains, “They may compete in the womb for nourishment or
may even ‘jockey’ for position, one draining the blood away from the
other. In all these cases the twins may show the effects at birth:
although they are ‘identical, one at first looks quite different,
bigger, healthier, more advanced than the other. Another accident that
can happen is that one growing twin fetus ‘absorbs’ the other. Cases
like this are discovered only much later when, as an adult, an
individual has an operation… and the surgeon finds a fetus mummified
inside the body. It should have been a twin – but lost the race very
early on.”

Appendix 5: The CIA and Mind Control.

Since 1960, seven research centers have been established to research
parapsychology and thought transference. In his book CIA: The
“Honorable” Company Brian Freemantle states, “I.M. Kogan, chairman of
the Bioinformational Section of the Moscow Board of the Popov Society,
is carrying out experiments on distanced mental suggestion, long-range
intercity telepathy, and awakening a subject from a
hypnotically-induced sleep, by ‘beamed’ suggestion.

“L.L. Vasiliev, at Leningrad Institute for Brain Research, is
attempting long-range telepathy and long-distance hypnosis, to put
people to sleep…

“Other Soviet research is into tapping the electrical field known to
be emitted by the human brain, both to ‘read’ the thoughts and to
control them.”

The CIA has also been interested in parapsychology and has developed
projects in remote viewing, telekinesis, and telepathy, as well as
others.

Mind Control research was established by the US government in the late
forties and early fifties, involving both the CIA and US Army
Intelligence.

The Freedom of Information Act reveals that projects like MKULTRA,
MKDELTA, MKSEARCH, MKNAOMI, MKACTION, PANDORA, BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE,
as well as others, were developed with the sole purpose of researching
and experimenting with various means of mind and thought control, and
their use of unknowing civilian subjects is well-documented.

In 1953, under coordination by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a number of
programs were overseen. Project Chatter (which had begun in 1947)
attempted to identify and develop “truth drugs”. MKNAOMI (1952)
developed and tested biological chemical weapons. MKDELTA (1952)
oversaw operational use of MKULTRA materials overseas.

In total 149 MKULTRA subprojects, all investigating behavioral
modification, toxins and drugs, were established. MKULTRA, Subproject
142 was developed to experiment with electrical brain stimulation.
Subproject 94 utilized miniaturized stimulating electrode implants for
the purpose of remote directional control of selected species.

The Allen Memorial Institute, the psychiatric section of McGill
University in Montreal was used for experiments in what Dr. Ewin
Cameron termed “psychic driving”. Dr. Cameron headed the project, and
was a man of high esteem in the psychiatry profession. In 1953 he was
President of the American Psychiatric Association and later was
appointed the first President of the World Psychiatric Association.
The experiments were in “depatterning”, the wiping completely clean
the mind of the individual using electroshocks and prolonged drug use.

This CIA-inspired program was to try to erase a person’s mind, then
having done so, “repattern” it. Other projects were established in the
Boston Psychopathic Hospital, the University of Illinois Medical
School, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Rochester, and
the Mount Sinai Hospital and Columbia University in New York.

In searching for a chemical that would produce a non-toxic aberrant
mental state, the CIA modified the tail pipe of a car and drove around
New York (80 miles or so) emitting a gas to test its effects on the
passersby. This was named Operation BIG CITY. They also travelled the
New York subway system with vaporized LSD to see if it would affect
people in enclosed places.

In 1964 a new project was developed called MKSEARCH. Into this new
program seven of the most successful MKULTRA projects were
transferred. This involved testing unknowing army personal as well as
the inmates of federal institutions and mental defectives in a
Washington hospital.

MKSEARCH ended in 1972, but running parallel to that program was
another drug testing program called OFTEN which continued to operate.

A Church Committee investigation in 1975 ended with the following
statement: “These programs resulted in substantial violations of the
rights of individuals within the United States.”

These projects have all been discontinued, but as the Freedom of
Information Act cannot as yet touch secret documents from the late
seventies and forward one is left again to speculate as to whether or
not similar yet more technologically advanced projects continue, or
whether or not the knowledge of such will ever see the light of day.

There is even speculation by Martin Cannon that the recent uncovering
of the prolific amount of UFO abductions are but a cover story and
popular explanation for work being done by the CIA and/or Army
Intelligence.

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Tag Archives: Valis

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