Lawrence Sutin > Quotes

“To comprehend Crowley, one must comprehend what he meant by "Magick"—the "discredited" tradition he swore to "rehabilitate."

Magick, for Crowley, is a way of life that takes in every facet of life. The keys to attainment within the magical tradition lie in the proper training of the human psyche itself—more specifically, in the development of the powers of will and imagination. The training of the will—which Crowley so stressed, thus placing himself squarely within that tradition—is the focusing of one's energy, one's essential being. The imagination provides, as it were, the target for this focus, by its capacity to ardently envision—and hence bring into magical being—possibilities and states beyond those of consensual reality. The will and imagination must work synergistically. For the will, unilluminated by imagination, becomes a barren tool of earthly pursuits. And the imagination, ungoverned by a striving will, lapses into idle dreams and stupor.”
― Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley

“The real inferiority of women to men is shown by their hate of paederasty, which they regard as unfair competition. Men on the other hand rather approve of Sapphism, as saving them trouble & expense.
—Aleister Crowley. 1929-03-09 diary entry.”
― Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley

“To Laver, Crowley insisted upon magic as "something we do to ourselves," a rational use of one's mental capacities: "It is more convenient to assume the objective existence of an Angel who gives us new knowledge than to allege that our invocation has awakened a supernatural power in ourselves.”
― Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley

“... what he [the science fiction writer) wishes to capture on paper is different from writers in other fields.... There is no actual boyhood world once extant but now only a moment, gnawing at him; he is free and glad to write about an infinity of worlds... .
PHILIP K. DICK, 1980”
― Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

“Philip K. Dick is a master of the speculative imagination-the type of imagination that includes but goes beyond psychological, political, and moral explorations to challenge the very cognitive constructs by which we order our lives.”
― Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

“Exegesis labors were yielding remarkable fruit. The quality of the entries varied considerably, of course. But Phil's gift for startling speculation-grant him his initial premises and he would weave of them remarkable worlds-lend select portions of the Exegesis a power akin to that of his best novels. His most persistent starting point was the "two-source cosmogony" discussed in Valis: our apparent but false universe (natura naturata, maya, dokos, Satan) is partially redeemed by its ongoing blending with the genuine source of being (natura naturans, brahman, eidos, God). Together the two sources-set and ground-create a sort of holographic universe that deceives us. Disentangling reality from illusion is the goal of enlightenment, and the essence of enlightenment is Plato's anamnesis (as in 2-3-74): recalling the eternal truths known to our souls prior to our birth in this realm. But enlightenment is a matter of grace. God bestows it at the height of our extremity, in response to our need and readiness to receive the truth. These are Phil's basic themes in the Exegesis. Of”
― Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

“Phil adopted a term first employed by Plato, anamnesis, to describe the experience of recollecting eternal truths, the World of Ideas, within ourselves . . . Phil never settled on a physical cause. What mattered were the "ancient" or "phylogenic" memories. Always, they revealed the Roman world, circa first century A.D. (the period of the Book of Acts and the peak of Gnostic activity) as coexisting with our own modern world. It was as if linear time was illusion and true time was layered: simultaneous realities stacked one upon the other, the interpenetration visible to the opened mind.”
― Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

“women, the break-in. Always something."
In June-July 1977, D. Scott Apel and Kevin Briggs conducted interviews with Phil, which are included in Apel's excellent Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection (1987).”
― Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

“[Dick] had absorbed Hume's argument that we cannot verify causality (that B follows A does not prove that A caused B), Bishop Berkeley's demonstration that physical reality cannot be objectively established (all we have are sensory impressions that seem to be real), and Kant's distinction between noumena (unknowable ultimate reality) and phenomena (a priori categories, such as space and time, imposed upon reality by the workings of the human brain). From Jung he adopted the theory of projection: The contents of our psyches strongly color our perceptions. As a coup de grace, Phil's study of Vedic and Buddhist philosophy led to a fascination with maya: True reality is veiled from unenlightened human consciousness. We create illustory realms in accordance with our fears and desires.”
― Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

“Phil never settled on a name for the new, dual consciousness within him. His most frequently used term was "homoplasmate" - a bonding of a human and an information-rich "plasmate" life form. He further felt that this new wisdom or grace had been "programmed" in him by age four, and that it would save him.”
― Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

“Not bad as a skeptic's schematic of 2-3-74. A standard psychiatric textbook includes the following as behavioral traits of patients suffering from temporal lobe seizures:
Hypergraphia is an obsessional phenomenon manifested by writing extensive notes and diaries. [...] The intense emotions are often labile, so that the patient may exhibit great warmth at one time, whereas, at another time, anger
and irritability may evolve to rage and aggressive behavior. [.] Suspiciousness may extend to paranoia, and a sense of helplessness may lead to passive dependency. ~. . .] Religious beliefs not only are intense, but may also be associated with elaborate theological or cosmological theories. Patients may believe that they have special divine guidance. [. ]”
― Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

“His most persistent starting point was the "two-source cosmogony" discussed in Valis: our apparent but false universe (natura naturata, maya, dokos, Satan) is partially redeemed by its ongoing blending with the genuine source of being (natura naturans, brahman, eidos, God). Together the two sources - set and ground - create a sort of holographic universe that deceives us. Disentangling reality from illusion is the goal of enlightenment, and the essence of enlightenment is Plato's anamnesis (as in 2-3-74): recalling the eternal truths known to our souls prior to our birth in this realm. But enlightenment is a matter of grace. God bestows it at the height of our extremity, in response to our need and readiness to receive the truth. These are Phil's basic themes in the Exegesis. Of course, the variations he fashioned are near infinite.”
― Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

“For those yearning for a diagnosis to slap onto 2-3-74, good news: Temporal lobe epilepsy can induce seizures that are neither disabling nor obvious for purposes of medical diagnosis or the individual's own sense of something amiss. It can't be disproven that Phil may have had such seizures during 2-3-74-or other times throughout his life. And if he did, everything is explained-from the Al Voice to the endless Exegesis. Consider this eerily on-the-money description from a medical study:
Such”
― Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

“I have therefore focused, in the main narrative, on only the best of the stories and on those eleven novels-Eye in the Sky (1957), Time Out of Joint (1959), Confessions of a Crap Artist (w. 1959, p. 1975), The Man in the High
Castle (1962), Martian Time-Slip (1964), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Ubik (1969), Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974), A Scanner Darkly (1977), Valis (1981), and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)-that”
― Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

“Crowley—the universe reflects the self and the self the universe, an infinite chain of myriad changes that the magus alone can encompass. As”
― Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley

“In the case of the SF genre, the basic rule was, is, and always has been: Come up with a startling idea and set it loose in astonishing ways in a future world.”
― Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

“And here we come to the heart of Phil's 2-3-74 experiences. Certitude had he none. Oh yes, one can find numerous passages-in interviews, the novels, and the Exegesis-in which Phil advances a theory with the sound of certitude. But always (and usually quite soon thereafter) he reconsidered and recanted.
Indeterminacy is the central characteristic of 2-3-74.”
― Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

“It's really the striving-the person becomes aware that whatever he is striving for becomes the cost.”
― Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick