Philip K Dick discussion

It was recommended that someone cut-and-paste this to start a new thread. So, here it is.

Hello, PKD fans!

I was a sophomore in college when PKD died. I remember seeing the story on the news and I knew who he was and that I liked the little of him that I had read.

Since High School I would keep an eye open at used book stores and snag up his titles when I found them because, I believe, they were mostly out of print. I have fond memories of "Martian Time-Slip" and "Clans of the Alphane Moon" because those where the books I had.

I remember laughing out loud when Lord Running Clam was introduced into the story. Those where my favorites until some time in the 90s. From then on I have regularly read and reread the majority of his novels.

I came to this discussion group because I am looking for a place to dialog about "The Exegesis of Philip K Dick" while I am reading it. It fell into my lap this Christmas. I have read the first 200 pages and would really like to have a place where I can put thoughts to keyboard so that it won't all just sit back there until it eventually fades off as an undifferentiated mass in the back of my mind.

I hope this can be fruitful.

My first contribution. On p. 122 the note says: "A contemplation of God's nature occupies virtually all of Dick's late-period work, but as he grapples with theology, what is startling are not the more far-fetched notions--anyone who has read Dick's earlier work expects these--but the more conventional ones. The God who reveals Himself in Dick's thinking often is very much the familiar humanized Judeo-Christian God." I agree with the editor. I was expecting his speculations to reach further or be more varied from a pretty conventional liberal Christianity that we see running on for pages upon page. I'm not complaining because I like the work of PKD and the Exegesis provides a backdrop for his literature. Also, it is as close as most of us will ever get to having a conversation with the great conversationalist. But, I think it is fair to acknowledge that there is a lot of it and it often is pretty conventional.

I enjoy seeing him explore this experience that he had, and as a reader I get to see how it affects his emotional and imaginative mind, and the way that he probes that experience, as something important, the way that a scientist obsessively works with a phenomenon in the world in an attempt to understand it.

Another thing that I find interesting is that he lived in a personal world that was much more spiritually populated than anything I have experienced or even given thought to as a possibility (I was raised as an evangelical nondenominational First Christian in the Southwest.) I have to admire someone whose spiritual world is so populated. The man should never have been lonely, he could have been possessed by a dead friend, an early Christian, an alien. He considered that his experiences may have been information or messages directly from God. I admired the same thing in St. Augustine when I read "The City of God" and Dante. They both had Angels and Demons and all sorts of other spirits bumping all around them. And those spirits weren't just beings that were described as part of the picture from a long time ago, but not now. To him they mattered and were a part of how things worked and were affecting how things were going to work themselves out. When I think of that it makes me feel like I live in a world that is positively vacant, only the physical world, and animals and the eco-sphere, and people.

His spiritually populated world reminds me of another thing that he discusses at length during the first 120 pages. He says he is a Platonist. He describes the Logos as being not only the Prime Form among the Platonic Forms, but he says the Logos is Jesus in the way it is described in the Gospel of John. He portrays the Logos as having a will and plans for us in the world.

His concept of the Logos sounded more to me like Spinoza's picture of God as the physical Universe, or the Hegelian concept of God realizing himself as the Universe as the history of the Universe unfolds dialectically. But he doesn't mention Spinoza until p. 119, and then only in passing.

I sent my philosophy professor, who is an authority on Plato, (I took a directed reading with him on Plato 30 years ago) an email about this to make certain my memory was correct. Plato described the Forms or Ideas as existing eternally and without consciousness or plans. Objects in the physical world have the characteristics they do to the extent that they successfully participate in the Idea of a given characteristic. People have Character attributes to the extent that their lives participate in the Ideas such as nobility and beauty and justice and courage. We remember the Forms from seeing them before we were born. The act of birth causes us to forget what we know about the Forms but life experiences and discourse will allow us to remember our pre-life vision of the Forms or Ideas. The clearer we remember what was forgotten during the trauma of birth the greater is our ability to take on the personality characteristic of a given remembered Form. The Logos was the greatest, most comprehensive, and elusive of the Forms. My professor confirmed that I was remembering, in a nut-shell, everything correctly.

So, my question is, what should we make of PKDs presentation of the Logos and his characterization of that presentation as Platonism?

Thank you, for this opportunity. I hope that it will be appreciated by some members and that we can have a constructive and fruitful dialog.(less)

I can confidently recommend the following Podcast to anyone prepping to read the "The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick". Use the link to get to the launch page.

http://events.lapl.org/podcasts/Podca...

Outloud
Presented by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles

Presenters: Jonathan Lethem, Pamela Jackson, Laura Leslie

Program Date: 11/14/2011
Program length: 01:15:07

FYI I live in Oklahoma. I don't have any connection to the LA Public Library and do not profit from this recommendation in any way.

The broadcast captures the uncertainty that the Dick Estate and even the book editors have had about what to think of "The Exegesis". The Editor used the phrase "It is what it is." He doesn't present the book as anything like a coherent statement or unified work. Yet, I did get that he thinks it is a worthwhile project to have done because it is an interesting exploration of religious topics and PKD's pink light experience.

I particularly enjoyed comments by PKD's oldest daughter Laura. She expressed the same uncertainty about what to think of the content of "The Exegesis" and hesitation that she and her siblings had about ever releasing it. On the one hand they recognize that "The Exegesis" is a part of the PKD lore and that aficionados are going to want to see it. On the other hand they did not want to feed the flames of talk about PKD being a lunatic. She said there was even talk of concern that a religion might come from the book and she and her siblings did not want to contribute to such an outcome.

She said that she was blessed to have her sister and brother, they provide emotional support for each other. And she said that the only people in the world who know what it is like to be the children of PKD were the children of PKD.

She assured the listeners that her experience of her father was that he genuinely believed he had seen and experienced something unusual during 2-3-74. She did not believe he was making up the experience.

An amusing thing she said was "Why didn't he go see a doctor?" She said it was demonstrative of the size of his ego. She said that if she had had the same experience her assumption would be that there was something wrong with her, not that God was speaking to her.

The voices of the presenters were part of the message. I finished the podcast thinking that the PKD Estate loved their father and want to build a positive legacy for him. However, many life characteristics of the man make that difficult. So, they are groping around finding the best way they can to promote a great writer without, at the same time, suppressing truths about him and his work. And they feel uncomfortable about the project even as they move ahead.

An observation they made is that of the approximately 8,000 pages of raw Exegesis, at first Laura thought they were including about 1 out of 8 pages from the source to the published book. Toward the end of the project she felt it was more like 1 out of 10 pages.

This is all that I have for now about the podcast from the LA Public library about "The Exegesis of Philip K Dick."

I finished reading Part One (One out of Four) of "The Exegesis of Philip K Dick". Part One is 208 pages long.

Brief Summary: PKD believed his 2-3-74 experiences were the latest, not the first, stage of his spiritual evolution. He believed that throughout his life he had been receiving the same ideas, without knowing they were received, and that he was expressing the truths in his novels, again, without knowing they were truths. The thing different about 2-3-74 was that it was an evolution from not knowing he was receiving knowledge from an an active living and intelligent Spirit to experiencing reception in a knowing way through his senses, dreams and psychopompic experiences.

Minimum preparation to read Part One: The more of PKDs novels you have read the better off you will be. He writes about "Ubik" extensively, "The Stigmata of Palmer" and "Valis" some, and other novels here and there. It would be good to have read an encyclopedia article about Christian Gnosticism and to read an article about Platonic philosophy.
-----------------------
For a thorough preparation to enjoy and get more out of "The Exegesis":

I am not intending to stall anyone's interest in reading "The Exegesis" If you are interested in the work of PKD and read the book then you will get something from it. However, "The Exegesis" is always referring to something else. The more you know about the things referred to the more meaningful the book will to you.

In Part One PKD describes himself as a Platonist and writes about The Logos quite a bit. Like with reading PKD's novels, the more you read of Plato the better off you will be. Specifically concepts from "The Republic", "The Theaetetus", "The Symposium", and "The Timaeus" are all mentioned.

The same is true about Gnostic Christianity, the more you know the better off you will be. Though, I really think an overview is all that is needed. Remember, as an adult PKD was self-educated. We know that reading from "The Encyclopedia Britannica" and "The Encyclopedia of Philosophy" (Edited by Paul Edwards in 8 volumes)were the backbone of his self-education. It may be that everything he knew about some of the subjects he wrote about came from those sources. I often get the impression that reading articles on any given topic from them is all a person will ever need as background for understanding what PKD discusses in "The Exegesis."

Read at least one biography of PKD. It helps to know something going in. PKD is writing for himself in "The Exegesis" so he doesn't necessarily explain the context of what he is writing about. An excellent choice is Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick by Lawrence Sutin.

This is a good place to stop. In my next post I plan to write more extensive thematic summary of Part One of "The Exegesis"

Primary things PKD discusses in Part I of his Exegesis: a) who possessed him during his 2-3-74 event. b) His Platonism and the 2-3-74 event. 3) Orthogonal time.

The Exegesis opens with several letters to friends in which he discusses his 2-3-74 experience. He believes two things about the experience. One is that the event is merely the latest evolution in his spiritual evolution. The information he received during the event was a repeat of knowledge given to him that he thought was from his imagination and were what his novels were about. Thus, All of his books contained the wisdom of 2-3-74. Second, he believed that he was possessed by a spirit guide. He speculates on who the entity was that might have been communicating with him.

The first possibility is the Holy Spirit. PKD claims the Holy Spirit guides or draws things into the future. He jumps around a lot on this. I discussed his Platonism and the belief that the Logos is Jesus Christ and also the Holy spirit in my first post, so I won't go over that again.

Another possibility is a female version of Jesus Christ named Sophia. In Gnostic Christianity they believed there was a secret "True" Christianity. The believer must be inducted into the true faith through training in rituals and secrets that mainstream Christianity do not know about. These secrets were not supposed to be written down. The True Christianity must be passed from believer to believer over time. PKD believed that the female Jesus Christ inducted him during the 2-3-74 event and so PKD had the gnostic secrets. The most dangerous secret, he believed, was that Jesus Christ was female. Another of the secrets was that the world we see is an illusion.

Another possibility was that it was his old friend Jim Pike who had died fairly recently. Jim Pike was the Arch-Bishop of California. He was knowledgeable about theology, and Koine Greek, and Latin. PKD thought perhaps his old friend had possessed him and the knowledge of these things that PKD suddenly knew came from that union. PKD claimed his personality changed that he became astute in business, started actually making money, drank beer instead of wine, but was still a terrible speller. (he actually says that.)

Also, it could have been an underground Christian named Thomas who was living in Roman in 70 AD. PKD claimed that he would be in town and the buildings would fade and he would see, in its place, Rome from 70 AD. He would see a remorseless state as described in his novel "Flow My Tears". He called what he saw "The Black Iron Prison"(BIP). Sometimes our world would fade away and he would see an ancient garden just within sight that had palm trees and flowing fountains. He called this "The Palm Tree Garden" (PTG). He reasoned that real time is 70 AD and the Gnostic Christan Thomas was possessing him which was the reason he passed on the Gnostic secrets and knew Koine and Latin. Our world is an illusion while BIP and PTG are the realities.

Finally, he states that he should stop waffling around. It has to be the Universal Spirit of Jesus Christ. PKD spends Part I, 208 of our published pages mulling these possibilities around. Don't forget, these are only the pages that are published. Who knows what has not been included.

Unfortunately, the thing I found to be most interesting is discussed very little--Orthogonal time. If the time we know as real time where linear and horizontal then Orthogonal time for the same physical objects and events would run perpendicular to our time. He described it that if the song that is heard from the track of a record when played by a needle were an event in linear time then Orthogonal time would be the currently unplayed music recorded in the rest of the groves of the record.

We go back to his Platonism. There is the Ideal realm of the Forms. For a thing in our world to have qualities of the forms they must participate in them. The events of our world is linear time and the forms exist in Orthogonal time.

He describes the two times like this: you have a plank with one end on the ground and the other end propped against the back of a truck and you roll a barrel up the plank into the truck. He said the event of rolling the barrel up the plank is like linear time. The rolling that occurs inside the barrel is orthogonal time. He said that the fact that life is a struggle is an indicator that it is like rolling up the plank.

Without going nuts with a point by point treatment of the pages of Part one I think the description above captures what is in the first 208 pages of "The Exegesis."

Here is a thought I had yesterday. You might like "The Exegesis of Philip K Dick" if you like "Ulysses" by James Joyce. They are both essentially internal monologues of a central character. They are both way too long, but each will have its fans.

A couple of days ago I finished reading Part two of "The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick". I am doing this on the sly now because my wife, upon my request, hid my copy until I finish a French course that I am running out of time on. I am reading a library copy when it comes to me until now. I have finished part two. I can wait until I finish the French course to look at it again.

So, here it goes. Dick's method of understanding his 2-3-74 event does not change. He covers the same ground over and over again. I was mistaken about the real date. He believed it was 45 A.D. Not 70 A.D. As I said earlier.

The tools he has to work with are his native intelligence and what he has read from the 1967 "Encyclopedia of Philosophy" and the "Encyclopedia Britannica". It gave me quite a bit of confirmation when he says it part two. Something like, 'I just read about Spinoza and Hegel. I didn't know about them before I read about them in the "Encyclopedia of Philosophy" but Spinoza was right and I am a Hegelian.' He wrote something like that, which is what I said about him in my previous entry.

Dick does not stay still. In part two He focuses a lot of attention on saying that reality is like his novel "Maze of Death" He concludes that the fake reality we experience is generated by a giant computer. He believes there is the Black Iron Prison and the Palm Tree Garden realities. What he calls BIP is a reality we must break out of by realizing that it is not real.

Dick spends time developing the idea of what he calls Zebra. Zebra is the invisible entity that generates the world and time we see. He believes at different times that Zebra is Jesus Christ, the early Christan Thomas, Jim Pike, an alien, a computer intelligence and sometimes even himself.

Toward the end of part two Dick returns again and again to the idea that he placed himself in the Black Iron Prison so that he could escape from it. One possibility for why he would imprison himself in a false reality is spiritual growth. He knew the reality he imprisoned himself in would become so real to him that he would forget that it was not reality. For that reason he sent himself his novels with themes about the world not being real in order to remind himself of the prison nature of our world and time so that he can escape.

As part two moves on he repeatedly lists what he believes are the most revelatory of his novels at exposing the non reality of our world. High up there is "Maze of Death" and "Scanner Darkly". He comes to associate his situation with that of officer Arctor, who does not know that he is investigating himself.

During the last page of Part 2 he seems to really be reaching. He claims he is writing some things because they are true. He claims that because real time is A.D. 45 Saul of the New Testament has not been converted to Christianity and become Paul. Instead he is successfully prosecuting the Christians and Philip K. Dick is an early Christian named Thomas who behaves in secret because Christianity is illegal.

By the way, Dick links the actions of the Nixon administration to the BIP nature of the real time in which Christianity is illegal. A throw away comment he ends the section with is that Beethoven is a political figure not a musician.

As you can see, I will have not problem putting this away while I complete a French course during the next few months.

he's right about BIP - it's all around us right now - it's called the Corporate War game (for profit and control).

:)

END THE GAME, free the humanzzz.

Mike wrote: "he's right about BIP - it's all around us right now - it's called the Corporate War game (for profit and control).

:)

END THE GAME, free the humanzzz."

Absolutely.