Philip K Dick

Phillip K Dick
- reading list
- early weeks
- VALIS
  - Fat had encountered God [V:12]
    - We used to argue that Stephanie could not have existed before the Sixties. Dope had brought her into being, summoned her out of the very ground. She was a coefficient of dope, part of an equation. And yet it was through her that Fat made his way eventually to God. Not through her dope; it had nothing to do with dope. There is no door to God through dope; that is a lie peddled by the unscrupulous. The means by which Stephanie brought Horselover Fat to God was by means of a little clay pot which she threw on her kickwheel, a kickwheel which Fat had helped pay for, as a present on her eighteenth birthday. When he fled to Canada he took the pot with him, wrapped up in shorts, socks and shirts, in his single suitcase.
      It looked like an ordinary pot: squat and light brown, with a small amount of blue glaze as trim. Stephanie was not an expert potter. This pot was one of the first she threw, at least outside of her ceramics class in high school. Naturally, one of her first pots would go to Fat. She and he had a close relationship. When he'd get upset, Stephanie would quiet him down by supercharging him with her hashpipe. The pot was unusual in one way, however. In it slumbered God. He slumbered in the pot for a long time, for almost too long. There is a theory among some religions that God intervenes at the eleventh hour. Maybe that is so; I couldn't say. In Horselover
      11
      Fat's case God waited until three minutes before twelve, and even then what he did was barely enough: barely enough and virtually too late. You can't hold Stephanie responsible for that; she threw the pot, glazed it and fired it as soon as she had the kickwheel. She did her best to help her friend Fat, who, like Gloria before him, was beginning to die. She helped her friend the way Fat had tried to help his friend, only Stephanie did a better job. But that was the difference between her and Fat In a crisis she knew what to do. Fat did not. Therefore Fat is alive today and Gloria is not Fat had a better friend than Gloria had had. Perhaps he would have wanted it the other way around but the option was not his. We do not serve up people to ourselves; the universe does. The universe makes certain decisions and on the basis of those decisions some people live and some people die. This is a harsh law. But every creature yields to it out of necessity. Fat got God, and Gloria Knudson got death. It is unfair and Fat would be the first person to say so. Give him credit for that
      After he had encountered God, Fat developed a love for him which was not normal. It is not what is usually meant in saying that someone "loves God." With Fat it was an actual hunger. And stranger still, he explained to us that God had injured him and still he yearned for him, like a drunk yearns for booze. God, he told us, had fired a beam of pink light directly at him, at his head, his eyes; Fat had been temporarily blinded and his head had ached for days. It was easy, he said, to describe the beam of pink light; it's exactly what you get as a phosphene after-image when a flashbulb has gone off in your face. Fat was spiritually haunted by that color. Sometimes it showed up on a TV screen. He lived for that light, that one particular color.
      However, he could never really find it again. Nothing could generate that color for light but God. In other words, normal light did not contain that color. One time Fat studied a color chart, a chart of the visible spectrum. The color was absent. He had seen a color which no one can see; it lay off the end.
      What comes after light in terms of frequency? Heat? Radio waves? I should know but I don't. Fat told me (I don't know how true this is) that in the solar spectrum what he saw was above seven hundred millimicrons; in terms of
      12
      Fraunhofer Lines, past B in the direction of A. Make of that what you will. I deem it a symptom of Fat's breakdown. People suffering nervous breakdowns often do a lot of research, to find explanations for what they are undergoing. The research, of course, fails.
      It fails as far as we are concerned, but the unhappy fact is that it sometimes provides a spurious rationalization to the disintegrating mind-Like Gloria's "they." I looked up the Fraunhofer Lines one time, and there is no "A." The earliest letter-indication that I could find is B. It goes from G to B, from ultraviolet to infrared. That's it. There is no more. What Fat saw, or thought he saw, was not light.
      After he returned from Canada-after he got God-Fat and I spent a lot of time together, and in the course of our going out at night, a regular event with us, cruising for action, seeing what was happening, we one time were in the process of parking my car when all at once a spot of pink light showed up on my left arm. I knew what it was, although I had never seen such a thing before; someone had turned a laser beam on us.
      "That's a laser," I said to Fat, who had seen it, too, since the spot was moving all around, onto telephone poles and the cement wall of the garage.
      Two teenagers stood at the far end of the street holding a square object between them.
      "They built the goddam thing," I said.
      The kids walked up to us, grinning. They had built it, they told us, from a kit. We told them how impressed we were, and they walked off to spook someone else.
      "That color pink?" I asked Fat.
      He said nothing. But I had the impression that he was not being up front with me. I had the feeling that I had seen his color. Why he would not say so, if such it was, I do not know. Maybe the notion spoiled a more elegant theory. The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.
      [V:11-13]]
  - Fat's wife didn't see the light
  - Plato
    - local file
    - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato
      - Nous (Greek: νοῦς or νόος, IPA: /nuːs/) is a philosophical term for mind or intellect. (Outside of philosophical contexts, it is used in the meaning "common sense" and pronounced /naʊs/.)
      - Plato described it as the immortal, rational part of the soul. It is a godlike kind of thinking in which the truths of conclusions are immediately known without having to understand the preliminary premises.
      - For Plato it was generally equated with the rational part of the individual soul (to logistikon), although in his Republic it has a special function within this rational part. Plato tended to treat nous as the only immortal part of the soul. In the Timaeus, the title character also calls nous responsible for the creative work of the demiurge or maker who brought rational order to our universe. This craftsman imitated what he perceived in the world of eternal Forms.
    - PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS
      - http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Nonfiction/Philosophy/Pater_Plato/Pater_PlatoC5P5.htm
  - noos / nous [V:16-17]
    - mind
    - local file
    - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nous
    - Overview of usage by ancient Greeks
      - The word nous is somewhat ambiguous, a result of being appropriated by successive philosophers to designate very different concepts.
      - Homer used nous to signify mental activities in general, but in the pre-Socratics it became increasingly identified with knowledge and with reason as opposed to sense perception.
      - Anaxagoras's nous was a mechanical ordering force that formed the world out of an original chaos. It began the development of the cosmos.
      - Plato described it as the immortal, rational part of the soul. It is a godlike kind of thinking in which the truths of conclusions are immediately known without having to understand the preliminary premises.
      - Aristotle asserted that nous was the intellect, as distinguished from sense perception. He divided it into an active and passive nous. The passive is affected by knowledge. The active is an immortal first cause of all subsequent causes in the world.
      - To the Stoics, it was the same as logos. This is the whole cosmic reason. It contains human reason as a part.
      - Plotinus described nous as one of the emanations from divine being.
    - extract from VALIS
      - In the midst of his shattered landscape, which one can trace back to Gloria Knudson's death, Fat imagined God had cured him. Once you notice Pyrrhic victories they seem to abound.
        It reminds me of a girl I once knew who was dying of
        16
        cancer. I visited her in the hospital and did not recognize her; sitting up in her bed she looked like a little old hairless man. From the chemotherapy she had swollen up like a great grape. From the cancer and the therapy she had become virtually blind, nearly deaf, underwent constant seizures, and when I bent close to her to ask her how she felt she answered, when she could understand my question, "I feel that God is healing me." She had been religiously inclined and had planned to go into a religious order. On the metal stand beside her bed she had, or someone had, laid out her rosary. In my opinion a FUCK YOU, GOD sign would have been appropriate; the rosary was not.
        Yet, in all fairness, I have to admit that God-or someone calling himself God, a distinction of mere semantics-had fired precious information at Horselover Fat's head by which their son Christopher's life had been saved. Some people God cures and some he slays. Fat denies that God slays anyone. Fat says, God never harms anyone. Illness, pain and undeserved suffering arise not from God but from elsewhere, to which I say, How did this elsewhere arise? Are there two gods? Or is part of the universe out from under God's control? Fat used to quote Plato. In Plato's cosmology, noös or Mind is persuading ananke or blind necessity-or blind chance, according to some experts-into submission. Noös happened to come along and to its surprise discovered blind chance: chaos, in other words, onto which noös imposes order (although how this "persuading" is done Plato nowhere says). According to Fat, my friend's cancer consisted of disorder not yet persuaded into sentient shape. Noös or God had not yet gotten around to her, to which I said, "Well, when he did get around to her it was too late." Fat had no answer for that, at least in terms of oral rebuttal. Probably he sneaked off and wrote about it in his journal. He stayed up to four a.m. every night scratching away in his journal. I suppose all the secrets of the universe lay in it somewhere amid the rubble.
        We enjoyed baiting Fat into theological disputation because he always got angry, taking the point of view that what we said on the topic mattered-that the topic itself mattered. By now he had become totally whacked out. We enjoyed introducing the discussion by way of some careless comment: "Well, God gave me a ticket on the freeway to-
        17
        day" or something like that. Ensnared, Fat would leap into action. We whiled away the time pleasantly in this fashion, torturing Fat in a benign way. After we left his place we had the added satisfaction of knowing he was writing it all down in the journal. Of course, in the journal his view always prevailed.
        [V:16-17]
  - koine [V:24]
    - common (Greek)
    - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek
      - Koine (Κοινή), Greek for "common", is a term which had been previously applied by ancient scholars to several forms of Greek speech. A school of scholars such as Apollonius Dyscolus and Aelius Herodianus maintained the term Koine to refer to the Proto-Greek language, while others would use it to refer to any vernacular form of Greek speech which differed from the literary language[1]. When Koine gradually became a language of literature, some people distinguished it in two forms: Hellenic (Greek) as the literary post-Classic form, and Koine (common) as the spoken popular form
      - local file
    - extract from VALIS
      - Later, when his religious experiences began, he found himself thinking in a foreign language which he did not understand (he had understood his own Latin in '64). Phonetically, he had written down some of the words, remembered at random. To him they constituted no language at all, and he hesitated to show anyone what he had put on paper. His wife-his later wife Beth-had taken a year of Greek in college and she recognized what Fat had written down, inaccurately, as koine Greek. Or at least Greek of some sort, Attic or koine.
        The Greek word koine simply means common. By the time of the New Testament, the koine had become the lingua franca of the Middle East, replacing Aramaic which had previously supplanted Akkadian (I know these things because I am a professional writer and it is essential that I possess a scholarly knowledge about languages). The New Testament manuscripts survived in koine Greek, although probably Q, the source of the synoptics, had been written in Aramaic, which is in fact a form of Hebrew. Jesus spoke Aramaic. Thus, when Horselover Fat began to think in koine Greek, he was thinking in the language which St. Luke and St Paul-who were close friends-had used, at least to write with. The koine looks funny when written down because the scribes left no spaces between the words. This can lead to a lot of peculiar translations, since the translator gets to put the spaces wherever he feels is appropriate or in fact wherever he wants. Take this English instance:
        GOD IS NO WHERE
        GOD IS NOW HERE
        Actually, these matters were pointed out to me by Beth, who never took Fat's religious experiences seriously until she saw him write down phonetically several words of the koine, which she knew he had no experience with and could not recognize even as a genuine language.
        [V:24]
  - exegesis / journal first mention & knowing of son's illness [V:14]
    - The term "journal" is mine, not Fat's. His term was "exegesis," a theological term meaning a piece of writing that explains or interprets a portion of scripture. Fat believed that the information fired at him and progressively crammed into his head in successive waves had a holy origin and hence should be regarded as a form of scripture, even if it just applied to his son's undiagnosed right inguinal hernia which had popped the hydrocele and gone down into the scrotal sack. This was the news Fat had for the doctor. The news turned out to be correct, as was confirmed when Fat's ex-wife took Christopher in to be examined. Surgery was scheduled for the next day, which is to say as soon as possible. The surgeon cheerfully informed Fat and his ex-wife that Christopher's life had been in danger for years. He could have died during the night from a strangulated piece of his own gut. It was fortunate, the surgeon said, that they had found out about it. Thus again Gloria's "they," except that in this instance the "they" actually existed.
      The surgery came off a success, and Christopher stopped being such a complaining child. He had been in pain since birth. After that, Fat and his ex-wife took their son to another G.P., one who had eyes.
      One of the paragraphs in Fat's journal impressed me enough to copy it out and include it here. It does not deal with right inguinal hernias but is more general in nature, expressing Fat's growing opinion that the nature of the universe is information. He had begun to believe this because for him the universe-his universe-was indeed fast turning into information. Once God started talking to him he never seemed to stop. I don't think they report that in the Bible.
      [V:14]
    - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exegesis_%28book%29
    - The Exegesis is a journal kept by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, documenting and exploring his religious and visionary experiences. Dick's wealth of knowledge on the subjects of philosophy, religion, and science inform the work throughout.
      Dick started the journal after his visionary experiences in February and March of 1974, which he called "2-3-74." These visions began shortly after Dick had impacted wisdom teeth removed. When a deliveryperson from the pharmacy brought his pain medication, he noticed the ichthys necklace she wore and asked her what it meant. She responded that it was a symbol used by the early Christians, and in that moment Dick's religious experiences began:
      In that instant, as I stared at the gleaming fish sign and heard her words, I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis—a Greek word meaning, literally, "loss of forgetfulness." I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me. And not only could I remember it but I could see it. The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to communicate with cryptic signs. She had just told me all this, and it was true.
      For a short time, as hard as this is to believe or explain, I saw fading into view the black, prisonlike contours of hateful Rome. But, of much more importance, I remembered Jesus, who had just recently been with us, and had gone temporarily away, and would very soon return. My emotion was one of joy. We were secretly preparing to welcome Him back. It would not be long. And the Romans did not know. They thought He was dead, forever dead. That was our great secret, our joyous knowledge. Despite all appearances, Christ was going to return, and our delight and anticipation were boundless.[1]
      In the following weeks, Dick experienced further visions, including a hallucinatory slideshow of abstract patterns and an information-rich beam of pink light. In the Exegesis, he theorized as to the origins and meaning of these experiences, frequently concluding that they were religious in nature. The being that originated the experiences is referred to by several names, including Zebra, God, and the Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS). From 1974 until his death in 1982, Dick wrote the Exegesis by hand in late-night writing sessions, sometimes composing as many as 150 pages in a sitting. In total, it consists of approximately 8,000 pages of notes, only a small portion of which have been published.
  - knowing of his son's illness
    - The cardinal point which Fat had made to us regarding his experience with the pink beam which had injured and blinded him was this: he claimed that instantly-as soon as the beam struck him-he knew things he had never known. He knew, specifically, that his five-year-old son had an undi-
      13
      agnosed birth defect and he knew what that birth defect consisted of, down to the anatomical details. Down, in fact, to the medical specifics to relate to the doctor.
      I wanted to see how he told it to the doctor. How he explained knowing the medical details. His brain had trapped all the information the beam of pink light had nailed him with, but how would he account for it?
      Fat later developed a theory that the universe is made out of information. He started keeping a journal-had been, in fact, secretly doing so for some time: the furtive act of a deranged person. His encounter with God was all there on the pages in his-Fat's, not God's-handwriting.
      [V:13-14]
  - exegesis entries
    - #37. Thoughts of the Brain are experienced by us as arrangements and rearrangements-change-in a physical universe; but in fact it is really information and information-processing which we substantialize. We do not merely see its thoughts as objects, but rather as the movement, or, more precisely, the placement of objects: how they become linked to one another. But we cannot read the patterns of arrangement; we cannot extract the information in it-i.e. it as information, which is what it is. The linking and relinking of objects by the Brain is actually a language, but not a language like ours (since it is addressing itself and not someone or something outside itself). [V:15]
    - #36. We should be able to hear this information, or rather narrative, as a neutral voice inside us. But something has gone wrong. All creation is a language and nothing but a language, which for some inexplicable reason we can't read outside and can't hear inside. So I say, we have become idiots. Something has happened to our intelligence. My reasoning is this: arrangement of parts of the Brain is a language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore we are language. Why, then, do we not know this? We do not even know what we are, let alone what the outer reality is of which we are parts. The origin of the word "idiot" is the word "private." Each of us has become private, and no longer shares the common thought of the Brain, except at a subliminal level. Thus our real life and purpose are conducted below our threshold of consciousness. [V:15]
  - Fat's ideas on what happened
    - Over a long period of time (or "Desarts [sic] of vast Eternity," as he would have put it) Fat developed a lot of unusual theories to account for his contact with God, and the information derived therefrom. One in particular struck me as interesting, being different from the others. It amounted to a kind of mental capitulation by Fat to what he was undergoing. This theory held that in actuality he wasn't experiencing anything at all. Sites of his brain were being selectively stimulated by tight energy beams emanating from far off, per-
      15
      haps millions of miles away. These selective brain-site stimulations generated in his head the impression-for him- that he was in fact seeing and hearing words, pictures, figures of people, printed pages, in short God and God's Message, or, as Fat liked to call it, the Logos. But (this particular theory held) he really only imagined he experienced these things. They resembled holograms. What struck me was the oddity of a lunatic discounting his hallucinations in this sophisticated manner; Fat had intellectually dealt himself out of the game of madness while still enjoying its sights and sounds. In effect, he no longer claimed that what he experienced was actually there. Did this indicate he had begun to get better? Hardly. Now he held the view that "they" or God or someone owned a long-range very tight information-rich beam of energy focussed on Fat's head. In this I saw no improvement, but it did represent a change. Fat could now honestly discount his hallucinations, which meant he recognized them as such. But, like Gloria, he now had a "they." It seemed to me a Pyrrhic victory. Fat's life struck me as a litany of exactly that, as, for example, the way he had rescued Gloria.
      The exegesis Fat labored on month after month struck me as a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one-in this case an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the inscrutable. Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that-as if that weren't enough-but you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of the necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.
      [V:15-16]
  - ananke
    - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ananke_%28mythology%29
      - In Greek mythology, Ananke (Greek Ανάγκη) was the personification of destiny, unalterable necessity and fate, depicted as holding a spindle. She was also the mother of the Moirae, who were fathered by Zeus. She was rarely worshipped until the creation of the Orphic mystery religion. In Roman mythology, she was called Necessitas ("necessity").
    - extract from VALIS
      - ananke or blind necessity-or blind chance
      - Yet, in all fairness, I have to admit that God-or someone calling himself God, a distinction of mere semantics-had fired precious information at Horselover Fat's head by which their son Christopher's life had been saved. Some people God cures and some he slays. Fat denies that God slays anyone. Fat says, God never harms anyone. Illness, pain and undeserved suffering arise not from God but from elsewhere, to which I say, How did this elsewhere arise? Are there two gods? Or is part of the universe out from under God's control? Fat used to quote Plato. In Plato's cosmology, noös or Mind is persuading ananke or blind necessity-or blind chance, according to some experts-into submission. Noös happened to come along and to its surprise discovered blind chance: chaos, in other words, onto which noös imposes order (although how this "persuading" is done Plato nowhere says). According to Fat, my friend's cancer consisted of disorder not yet persuaded into sentient shape. Noös or God had not yet gotten around to her, to which I said, "Well, when he did get around to her it was too late." Fat had no answer for that, at least in terms of oral rebuttal. Probably he sneaked off and wrote about it in his journal. He stayed up to four a.m. every night scratching away in his journal. I suppose all the secrets of the universe lay in it somewhere amid the rubble. [V:17]
  - preface of Valis
    - VALIS (acronym of Vast Active Living Intel-
      ligence System, from an American film): A
      perturbation in the reality field in which a
      spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic vortex
      is formed, tending progressively to subsume
      and incorporate its environment into arrange-
      ments of information. Characterized by quasi-
      consciousness, purpose, intelligence, growth
      and an armillary coherence.
      -Great Soviet Dictionary
      Sixth Edition, 1992
  - VALIS wikipedia page
    - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VALIS
      - Philosophical and cultural references
        Theology and philosophy, especially metaphysical philosophy, play an important role in VALIS, presenting not just Dick's (and/or Horselover Fat's) own views on these subjects but also his interpretation of numerous religions and philosophies of the past. The most prominent religious references are to Valentinian Gnosticism, the Rose Cross Brotherhood, Zoroastrianism and Buddhism, as well as Biblical writings including the Book of Daniel and the New Testament epistles. Many ancient Greek philosophers are discussed, including several Pre-Socratics (Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Empedocles and Parmenides) as well as Plato and Aristotle. More recent thinkers that are mentioned include the philosophers Pascal and Schopenhauer, the Christian mystic Jakob Böhme, the alchemist Paracelsus, the psychologist Carl Jung, and the author and psychologist Robert Anton Wilson. In Wilson's autobiography Cosmic Trigger (released nearly a decade before VALIS), Wilson describes similar musings concerning the 'Sirius Connection', contemplating the idea that alien entities are sending out waves of information that we can tune in on.
        The action of VALIS is set firmly in the American popular culture of its time, with references to the Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa and Linda Ronstadt as well as the fictional rock musicians Eric Lampton and Brent Mini. However, the novel also contains a number of high culture references such as the poets Vaughan, Wordsworth and Goethe, and the classical composers Handel and Wagner. In particular, the novel contains several extended discussions about Wagner's metaphysical opera Parsifal.
  - ichthys
    - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthys
      - Ichthys (Greek: ἰχθύς, capitalized ΙΧΘΥΣ; also transliterated and Latinized as ichthys, icthus, ichthus or ikhthus; ichthus, spelled: Iota Chi Theta Upsilon Sigma), is the Ancient and Classical Greek word for "fish." In English it refers to a symbol consisting of two intersecting arcs, the ends of the right side extending beyond the meeting point so as to resemble the profile of a fish, said to have been used by early Christians as a secret symbol and now known colloquially as the "Jesus fish." Greek ἰχθύς is an acronym (or backronym) of Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, Θεοῦ Υἱός, Σωτήρ "Jesus Christ, God's Son, Saviour."
        Contents
    - <img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f9/Ichthys.svg/180px-Ichthys.svg.png">
  - author surrogate
    - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Author_surrogate
      - As a literary technique, an author surrogate is a character who expresses the ideas, questions, personality and morality of the author. Upon occasion, authors insert themselves under their own name into their works, typically for humorous or surrealistic effect.
  - I Ching
    - There is a line in the I Ching reading, "Always ill but never dies." [V:10]
    - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_ching
      - The I Ching (often spelled as I Jing, Yi Ching, Yi King, or Yi Jing; also called "Book of Changes" or "Classic of Changes") is the oldest of the Chinese classic texts. A symbol system designed to identify order in what seem like chance events, it describes an ancient system of cosmology and philosophy that is at the heart of Chinese cultural beliefs. The philosophy centres on the ideas of the dynamic balance of opposites, the evolution of events as a process, and acceptance of the inevitability of change (see Philosophy, below). In Western cultures, the I Ching is regarded by some as simply a system of divination; many believe it expresses the wisdom and philosophy of ancient China.
        The book consists of a series of symbols, rules for manipulating these symbols, poems, and commentary.
  - logos
    - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos
      - Logos (Greek λόγος) is an important term in philosophy, analytical psychology, rhetoric and religion. It derives from the verb λέγω lego: to say. This is the primary meaning of the word. Secondary meanings such as logic, thought etc. derive from the fact that if one is capable of λέγειν (infinitive) i.e. speech, then intelligence and thought are assumed.
        Its semantic field extends beyond "word" to notions such as "thought, speech, account, meaning, reason, proportion, principle, standard", or "logic". In English, the word is the root of "log" (as in record), of "logic," and of the "-ology" suffix (e.g., geology).
        Heraclitus established the term in Western philosophy as meaning the fundamental order of the cosmos. The sophists used the term to mean discourse, and Aristotle applied the term to argument from reason. After Judaism came under Hellenistic influence, Philo adopted the term into Jewish philosophy. The Gospel of John identifies Jesus as the incarnation of the Logos, through which all things are made. The gospel further identifies the Logos as God (theos), providing scriptural support for the trinity. It is this sense, the Logos as Jesus Christ and God, that is most common in popular culture.
        Psychologist Carl Jung used the term for the masculine principle of rationality.
  - "Philip K. Dick’s Divine Interference." by Erik Davis
    - http://tinyurl.com/2xa3gf
  - gnosticism
    - <img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5d/Simple_crossed_circle.svg/50px-Simple_crossed_circle.svg.png">
    - history of gnosticism
      - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gnosticism
    - early gnosticism
      - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Gnosticism
    - Syrian - Egyptian gnosticism
      - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian-Egyptic_Gnosticism
    - gnosticism in modern times
      - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism_in_modern_times
    - gnostic texts
      - gnostic gospels
        
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnostic_Gospels
      - nag hammadi library / scrolls
        
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nag_Hammadi_library
      - codex tchacos
        
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Tchacos
      - bruce codex
        
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Codex
      - gnosticism in the new testament
        
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism_and_the_New_Testament
    - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism
      - Gnosticism (from Greek gnōsis, knowledge) refers to a diverse, syncretistic religious movement consisting of various belief systems generally united in the teaching that humans are divine souls trapped in a material world created by an imperfect spirit, the demiurge, who is frequently identified with the Abrahamic God. The demiurge may be depicted as an embodiment of evil, or in other instances as merely imperfect and as benevolent as its inadequacy permits. This demiurge exists alongside another remote and unknowable supreme being that embodies good. In order to free oneself from the inferior material world, one needs gnosis, or esoteric spiritual knowledge available only to a learned elite. Jesus of Nazareth is identified by some (though not all) Gnostic sects as an embodiment of the supreme being who became incarnate to bring gnosis to the Earth.
        Gnosticism was popular in the Mediterranean and middle eastern regions in the first centuries CE, but it was suppressed[1] as a dualistic heresy in areas controlled by the Roman Empire when Christianity became its official religion in the fourth century. Conversion to Islam greatly reduced the remaining number of Gnostics throughout the middle ages, though a few isolated communities continue to exist to the present. Gnostic ideas became influential in the philosophies of various esoteric mystical movements of the late 19th and 20th centuries in Europe and North America, including some that explicitly identify themselves as revivals or even continuations of earlier gnostic groups.
    - Gnosticism (from Greek gnōsis, knowledge) refers to a diverse, syncretistic religious movement consisting of various belief systems generally united in the teaching that humans are divine souls trapped in a material world created by an imperfect spirit, the demiurge, who is frequently identified with the Abrahamic God. The demiurge may be depicted as an embodiment of evil, or in other instances as merely imperfect and as benevolent as its inadequacy permits. This demiurge exists alongside another remote and unknowable supreme being that embodies good. In order to free oneself from the inferior material world, one needs gnosis, or esoteric spiritual knowledge available only to a learned elite. Jesus of Nazareth is identified by some (though not all) Gnostic sects as an embodiment of the supreme being who became incarnate to bring gnosis to the Earth.
      Gnosticism was popular in the Mediterranean and middle eastern regions in the first centuries CE, but it was suppressed[1] as a dualistic heresy in areas controlled by the Roman Empire when Christianity became its official religion in the fourth century. Conversion to Islam greatly reduced the remaining number of Gnostics throughout the middle ages, though a few isolated communities continue to exist to the present. Gnostic ideas became influential in the philosophies of various esoteric mystical movements of the late 19th and 20th centuries in Europe and North America, including some that explicitly identify themselves as revivals or even continuations of earlier gnostic groups.
  - Philip K. Dick's Divine Interference - by Erik Davis
    - http://tinyurl.com/2xa3gf
  - Radio Free Albemuth
    - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Albemuth
    - A posthumously published novel by Philip K. Dick, written in 1976, Radio Free Albemuth (originally titled VALISystem A) was his first attempt to deal in fiction with his experiences of early 1974. When the publishers, Bantam, requested extensive rewrites he canned the project, reworking some of the material into his subsequent Valis trilogy. When Arbor House acquired the rights in 1985 they published an edition under the current title (the original was too close to VALIS, already published by then), prepared from the corrected typescript given by PKD to his friend Tim Powers.
  - simulated reality
    - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality
    - Simulated reality is the idea that reality could be simulated — often computer-simulated — to a degree indistinguishable from 'true' reality. It could contain conscious minds which may or may not know that they are living inside a simulation. In its strongest form, the "Simulation hypothesis" claims we actually are living in such a simulation.
      This is different from the current, technologically achievable concept of virtual reality. Virtual reality is easily distinguished from the experience of 'true' reality; participants are never in doubt about the nature of what they experience. Simulated reality, by contrast, would be hard or impossible to distinguish from 'true' reality.
      The idea of a simulated reality raises several questions:
      * Is it possible, even in principle, to tell whether we are in a simulated reality?
      * Is there any difference between a simulated reality and a 'real' one?
      * How should we behave if we knew that we were living in a simulated reality?
  - The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by R. Crumb
    - http://www.philipkdickfans.com/weirdo/weirdo1.htm
    - http://www.philipkdickfans.com/weirdo/weirdo1.jpg
  - week 5
    - http://www.maybelogic.net/pkd/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=216&Itemid=29
  - podcast 4 notes (Erik)
    - visionary
      - traditional - shamans
      - have visions
    - PKD comparable to William Blake
    - historical texts - transhistorical mode
      - Jewish Merkabah mysticism
        
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkabah
      - Jewish mysticism
        
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_mysticism
      - some of the prophets seem to have their experiences in transhistorical modes
    - Terrence McKenna
    - RAW
      - The Cosmic Trigger
      - The Illuminatus Trilogy
    - Kamentutek
      - Stasi transmissions
    - PKD tries to interpret the visions in Valis
      - different models
        
        some materialistic
        
        some philosophic
      - the conclusion is that there's no conclusion
      - when we read the book, we try to identify with the characters
        
        which characters
        
        how would our lives change if we adopted one of the theories

Submitted by kathy on Mon, 2007-10-22 06:10

Tags:

Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS) - reading notes

I'm having to look up almost every second word to decipher VALIS, the book for the next few week's PKD course. so, some reading notes & research below ...

VALIS - by Philip K Dick

preface of the book
VALIS (acronym of Vast Active Living Intel-
       ligence System, from an American film): A
       perturbation in the reality field in which a
       spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic vortex
       is formed, tending progressively to subsume
       and incorporate its environment into arrange-
       ments of information. Characterized by quasi-
       consciousness, purpose, intelligence, growth
       and an armillary coherence.
                                          -Great Soviet Dictionary
                                              Sixth Edition, 1992

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VALIS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Author_surrogate

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos

There is a line in the I Ching reading, "Always ill but never dies." (pg 10)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos

"Philip K. Dick’s Divine Interference." by Erik Davis
http://tinyurl.com/2xa3gf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Albemuth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality

The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by R. Crumb
http://www.philipkdickfans.com/weirdo/weirdo1.htm

PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS
http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Nonfiction/Philosophy/Pater_Plato/Pate...

nous, or noos (Greek philosophy)
http://www.britannica.com/eb/topic-420882/nous

Adherents.com: Religious Groups in Literature
http://www.adherents.com/lit/Na/Na_367.html
Platonism California: Oakland 1971 Dick, Philip K. Valis. New York: Bantam (1981); pg. 17.

"Yet, in all fairness, I have to admit that God--or someone calling himself God, a distinction of mere semantics--had fired precious information at Horselover Fat's head by which their son Christopher's life had been saved. Some people God cures and some he slays. Fat denies that God slays anyone. Fat says, God never harms anyone. Illness, pain and undeserved suffering arise not from God but from elsewhere, to which I say, How did this elsewhere arise? Are there two gods? Or is part of the universe out from under God's control? Fat used to quote Plato. In Plato's cosmology, noos or Mind is persuading ananke or blind necessity--or blind chance, according to some experts--into submission. Noos happened to come along and to its surprise discovered blind chance: chaos, in other words, onto which noos imposes order (although how this 'persuading' is done Plato nowhere says.) " [Also pg. 32, 220.]

week 5 VALIS
http://www.maybelogic.net/pkd/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=...

---

Philip K. Dick's Divine Interference - by Erik Davis (originally posted on nettime)
http://www.maybelogic.net/pkd/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=...

In the excepts of the Exegesis reworked into the "Tractates Crytptica Scriptura" that close the novel VALIS, Dick expresses the MIT computer scientist Edward Fredkin's view that the universe is composed of information. The world we experience is a hologram, "a hypostasis of information" that we, as nodes in the true Mind, process. "We hypostasize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of information. This is the language we have lost the ability to read."[4] With this Adamic code scrambled, both ourselves and the world as we know it are "occluded," cut off from the brimming "Matrix" of cosmic information. Instead, we are under the sway of the "Black Iron Prison," Dick's terms for the demiurgic worldly forces of political tyranny and oppressive social control. Rome is the eternal paragon of this "Empire," whose archetypal lineaments the feverish Dick recognized in the Nixon administration.

Submitted by kathy on Fri, 2007-10-19 07:46

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Philip K Dick - further reading on the net

I've been learning heaps at the Philip K Dick course taught by Erik Davis. I've done a few web searches and as well as a few of the links posted by Erik & other classmates, I've started making a list. many of them are on the Total Dick Head blog which has heaps of great info & links to follow up on. the discussions have been great. I've been learning about some different religions and belief systems (eg Gnosticism)

We've been reading The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch so far so a lot of the links below relate to that. this week we're watching Blade Runner (one of my favourite films). I'll try add some links as I come across them.

(not in any particular order & some aren't strictly PKD)

Philip K Dick

The Crazy Wisdom of Philip K. Dick with Erik Davis, an online course at Maybe Logic Academy
Sept 17 - Nov 11 2007

http://www.maybelogic.org/erikcrs.htm

" Once a purely cult figure, Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) is now widely recognized as a pulp visionary of the highest order. This course will approach his work not as science fiction but as crazy wisdom. We'll explore how his texts seem designed to illuminate our posthuman problems and our most ancient philosophical questions — and to then scramble those insights with a cheap ray gun. We will read two of Dick's major novels, both chosen for their heavy gnostic themes. We will discuss drugs and archons and machines that break down, including, possibly, yourself. We will also explore the two greatest examples of the many PKD movies to date — further evidence that Dick's spirit will only continue to permeate the culture at large. "

Notes from the course and bibliographies for further research will be listed in this section

Submitted by AliaK on Sat, 2007-09-22 06:48

Tags:

The Crazy Wisdom of Philip K. Dick - online course

I'm starting an online course tomorrow called " The Crazy Wisdom of Philip K. Dick". I'm not sure how I'm going to go, but I enjoy his books so it'll be interesting to find out more. the lecturer is Erk Davis who's well known for his studies on the author. I've just logged into the course page and read the intro and it sounds really interesting. I have a feeling I'm going to need to take it twice!

there's another one by Douglas Rushkoff which sounds interesting also - he sent the note about his course via his blog mail list, so that's how I came across the PKD one. there's others by R.U. Sirius of Mondo 2000 fame which I wouldn't mind checking out also. some of the others on the site seem a bit out there! but it's interesting to find out about things I don't know much about.

I have these books back home, but I'm going to have to find new versions here - I can't read hebrew and most of the book titles are in hebrew so I can't even tell if the book's in the stores here! time for amazon I think. we have to read a couple of books and watch Bladerunner (one of my favs) & A Scanner Darkly (saw this in sydney when I was home last)

the course site is http://www.maybelogic.org/ and the forum lives at http://www.maybelogic.net/

(the promo blurb from the site in case anyone else is interested)
http://www.maybelogic.net/

" Once a purely cult figure, Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) is now widely recognized as a pulp visionary of the highest order. This course will approach his work not as science fiction but as crazy wisdom. We’ll explore how his texts seem designed to illuminate our posthuman problems and our most ancient philosophical questions — and to then scramble those insights with a cheap ray gun. We will read two of Dick’s major novels, both chosen for their heavy gnostic themes. We will discuss drugs and archons and machines that break down, including, possibly, yourself. We will also explore the two greatest examples of the many PKD movies to date — further evidence that Dick’s spirit will only continue to permeate the culture at large. "

Submitted by kathy on Mon, 2007-09-17 04:56