> Now Philip K. Dick is right about time, but he's wrong that it's 50 A.D. Actually, there's only one instant, and it's right now, and it's eternity. And it's an instant in which God is posing a question, and that question is basically, 'Do you want to, you know, be one with eternity? Do you want to be in heaven?' And we're all saying, 'No thank you. Not just yet.' And so time is actually just this constant saying 'No' to God's invitation. I mean that's what time is. I mean, and it's no more 50 A.D. than it's two thousand and one. And there's just this one instant, and that's what we're always in."
That's quite different from PKD's hypothesis (one of many he entertained) that the present moment is something like a holographic superimposition on biblical times in ancient Rome.
PKD meant this quite literally, as one possibility of what reality might actually be, not as an opinion on what different philosophies or religions are getting at.
PKD grazed the truth but fell short, and this is alright.
The thing they have in common is that they believe all religions or philosophies are getting at the same thing or have their root in the same thing or experience.. but what that thing is differs from one perennial philosophy to another.
You seem to have cited one such belief -- that there is only one moment -- but I'm not sure what the origin of your belief is. Which version of perennial philosophy are you referring to?
I guess it's from that movie he quoted, "Waking life", here's the script: https://wakinglifemovie.net/transcript/chapter/18/
According to his research and the works he chose to survey, what is it that one might conclude he sees as being "the single, metaphysical truth or origin from which all esoteric and exoteric knowledge and doctrine has grown?"
In it there are versions by: Huxley, Philo of Alexandria, Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, Agostino Steuco, Emerson, Blavatsky, Huston Smith, and a bunch of others.
Take a closer look at what these people believed and you'll see they believed different things (except that, again, they believed that there was a common source or experience that different religions stemmed from or were getting at).
For example, from the article, "the Egyptian god Osiris and the Greek god Dionysus had been equated as Osiris-Dionysus by the historian Herodotus as early as the 5th century BC", while "The mystic Ramakrishna's spiritual ecstasies included experiencing the sameness of Christ, Mohammed and his own Hindu deity". Not really the same, is it?
"Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) believed that Hermes Trismegistos, the supposed author of the Corpus Hermeticum, was a contemporary of Mozes and the teacher of Pythagoras, and the source of both Greek and Jewish-Christian thought."
Again, not the same as the other two.
"Ficino saw his thought as part of a long development of philosophical truth, of ancient pre-Platonic philosophers (including Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Aglaophemus and Pythagoras) who reached their peak in Plato."
So now the peak is supposedly Plato, not Osirus, Christ, Mohammed, or a Hindu diety.
Then there's Steuco who believed "that philosophy works in harmony with religion and should lead to knowledge of God", but that's different from Emerson, who thought "an individual's intuition of truth was taken as the criterion for truth".
Etc, etc, etc...
By the way, in none of the above (or anywhere else in this Wikipedia article) is there any mention of what you said perennial philosophy (and, according to you, PKD) were getting at: that "there is only one moment". Where did you get that?
i’m referring to Buddhism, Sufism, Hinduism, and Esoteric Christianity.
key figures would then be Patanjali, Buddha, Ramana Maharshi, Jesus Christ (Gospel of Thomas), St. Theresa of Avila, The Desert Fathers especially Anthony The Great, Shankaracharya, Rumi, and Hafez.
Patanjali in the non-dual Hindu tradition.
Buddha in the Buddhist tradition.
Jesus (as expressed in the Gospel of Thomas) representing Christianity.
Shankaracharya for advaita vedanta.
Ramana for Self-Enquiry.
Rumi, Hafez for Sufism.
also Somananda for Kashmir Shaivism.
Apologies if there was confusion in terms. It seems we were coming at it from different angles.
Thing about reality being slippery we have a tendency to acknowledge the fact when we're reading the books but then to comfortably return to our regularly scheduled mundane existence the minute the books are closed.
I still haven't been able to reconcile the sheer madness of the world with the workaday banality and obedience I've experienced in this cursed industry.
It's like, we all just started existing one day. You can trace that back to your parents, to being born, to evolution, to the laws of physics, to the big bang, etc, but that doesn't remove the bizarre fact that we exist and are conscious for some reason but we have no idea why. (Or if the question of "why" even makes any sort of logical sense.) Even the reality we think we perceive is unlikely to be anything like what's actually going on. Isn't that just so weird?
It's been about 5 months now, and I still get hit with these feelings multiple times a day. It's accompanied with a strong feeling of anxiety, so I wish I could go back to the old banality.
(Yes, I've been considering therapy for awhile, but it's difficult to get an appointment with a therapist right now.)
If you're interested in what I did with all that since then, I'd be happy to chat more and share what I've learned, where I'm at, and where I'm headed. Seconded on the cup of virtual coffee, /u/artsyca, although of course I'm perfectly happy not to crash y'all's party.
> and that ultimately reality is terrifyingly absurd
Yep, this is exactly what I felt, and now deal with on a daily basis.
> Waking Life is a 2001 American experimental philosophical adult animated docufiction film written and directed by Richard Linklater. The film explores a wide range of philosophical issues, including the nature of reality, dreams and lucid dreams, consciousness, the meaning of life, free will, and existentialism.[3] It is centered on a young man who wanders through a succession of dream-like realities wherein he encounters a series of individuals who engage in insightful philosophical discussions.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/g2691/movies...
Slacker doesn't take itself nearly as seriously, so is much more successful with its own cast of weird characters.
i fell in love with this piece of art a decade ago.
then there was a five-year period during which I felt the same way about the film myself. i would have agreed with this statement.
but in this past year, attending meditation retreats and interrogating my metaphysics, my perspective shifted once more.
it’s very much been thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
I’ve thought about this stuff for a long time - my grandmother started me, as a child, on the path of “why is that a cat? How do you know you’re not its dream?”, and introduced me to PKD, whose corpus I devoured the first time around while nine or ten.
I’ve seen the human world as absurdist comedy, blindfolded people shuffling around in a circle, for about as long as I can recall. It’s nonsense upon nonsense, forgotten meanings, wilful misinterpretations, and age-old traditions invented yesterday. Our meta-consciousness is senile and gibbering. Etymology provides a wonderful insight into just how screwed up we are - when you see meaning diverge, drift, and even invert across culture and language, you realise just how malleable the world, human reality, is, if you modify the symbol set.
When I first tried LSD in my late teens, it wasn’t so much “whoa, revelation!” as “yup, that looks about right”.
You can learn to live with the colourless pit of infinity hovering in your mind. You can even come to love it. You still need to do the human things, play the human game, but you now have the added perspective of understanding that there exist possibilities outside of the human game, ways of living divested of a lot of the meaningless crap. It can be advantageous, like being able to think in 3D in flatland.
I managed to stick it out as a “regular person” for about 15 years, working in an office, living in an apartment, buying stuff to try to pave over the infinity hole - but it just felt more and more wrong, like play-acting at life rather than living, like I was a sad little third-hand simulacra of a human being. Sad little robot, enter stage left, exit stage right. Didn’t fancy that role.
I live off grid now, and work with my hands, growing food, building structures and infrastructure, transforming my labour into a direct and tangible output - it has been massively helpful, as it lacks the layers and layers of abstraction that civilised life demands, and presents a clear, direct and straightforward reality.
I still sit here and think about it all, still sometimes get caught out by a nihilistic trap, but more generally have just come to appreciate existence and consciousness as the most brilliantly absurd thing possible. What a thing, to seem to be matter that thinks. Marvellous if real, marvellous illusion if not. A marvel, either way.
I'm hoping that with some time and healing I'll get to that place where I can appreciate the absurdity for what it is. I don't think the anxiety I feel is inherent in the realizations themselves, but emerge as a result of my perception of them. It's been hard to deal with that this year though, when there have been so many other anxieties piled on top of that core existential fear.
Unfortunately that ship has sailed for us, there is no going back all the way..
But you should take comfort in that you're not alone.
I have a lot I'd like to share with you, would you be into having a virtual cup of tea or coffee?
I'd love to discuss it more. Where can I get in touch?
Dude let's have a nice warm beverage and compare war stories
The "serenity prayer" is worth keeping in mind; surrender is a powerful tool.
as a meta: i recommend the book “the power of now”. it sounds like pseudo selfhelp bullshit but at least for me it clicked beautifully - and it can be a really good initiation/transition to something more established like buddhism.
I'd take it all with a grain of sand, however. Just because what one experiences on psychedelics might seem "more real than real" doesn't mean it actually is. Some have described psychedelics as superplacebos.. people can be very suggestible in such states, and are prone to believing what they want to believe.
And even that realization isn't something that intrinsically should be connected to anxiety, except that the drug also induced a panic state in me, so now my brain associates those thoughts with fear and danger. Slowly working on reprogramming that.
Apparently it was one of Dick's least favourite novels. As I recall, he wrote the book in just one week while under the influence of amphetamines, and later had no recollection of having written it, and he more or less disowned it.
as for the pot healer? i think the book is dope and it’s up there in my top10.
IMHO, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is by far the best PKD book.
1st rank - Ubik, The Three Stigmata, A Martian Time Slip, Faith of Our Fathers
2nd rank - (The Divine Invasion or The Galactic Pot Healer ... don't remember which now... it's been a long time), A Maze of Death
3rd rank - VALIS, Eye in the Sky
Honorable mention: the middle of Lies, Inc -- it has a weak start and ending, but the middle is up there with the best PKD has ever written.
I found The Transmigration of Timothy Archer to be pretty boring, but I didn't make it all the way through, and some PKD books (like Lies, Inc) start dull and turn great, so I might give it another go sometime.. but the impression I got when first reading it was that this was a book written around the time PKD was starting to transition to writing more "serious literature" (aka not scifi), and to me PKD is just much stronger at writing scifi, particularly of the really mind-bending, bad acid trip kind, and he just wasn't cut out to write "serious literature"... so yeah, right now I'd pass on The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.
I'm also kind of sick of his obsession with his pink light mystical experience.. I wish he'd just gotten over it already and moved on to something else. Writing about it once was more than enough.
I also just liked reading Dick's descriptions of the Bay Area.
https://pkdickbooks.com/pkdworld.html
When I see these stories of mine, written over three decades, I think of the Lucky Dog Pet Store. There's a good reason for that. It has to do with an aspect of not just my life, but the lives of many freelance writers. It's called poverty [........] So anyhow, there I am at the Lucky Dog Pet Store on San Pablo Avenue, In Berkley, California, in the Fifties, buying a pound of ground horsemeat.
Philip K. Dick in the introduction to the Golden Man, 1980
Lucky Dog, alas, is closed.
Philip Purser-Hallard: "The drugs did work": https://www.theguardian.com/film/2006/aug/12/sciencefictionf...
Ultimately it's impossible to diagnose post mortem what exactly was going on in his head.
Anyway, I'm not sure how trustworthy PKD's accounts of his own drug use are.
But yes, it's hard to trust what he said about his drug use.
I say this as a huge PKD fan. Ubik and A Scanner Darkly both had a profound impact on me.
Here’s something I was just learning about in a podcast recently — 2000 years old abd similar to the kind writing that pkd was doing after his breakdown.
https://biblehub.com/library/clement/the_stromata_or_miscell...
Psychedelics and other means of altering consciousness have been used throughout human (and possibly even pre-human) history. In reference to the link you cited, there has been evidence that cannabis, which can have psychedelic effects at high doses, was used in ritual contexts in biblical times in ancient Israel. Here is a recent article discussing some new evidence of this:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/28/world/tel-arad-shrine-israel-...
Science Fiction really is a mental illness.
You suspend disbelief, you invent an alternate reality in your mind, and then you walk around in it accepting both the possible and the preposterous in equal measure.
But what a wonderful illness to experience, because someday it might infect others and we might have spaceships or cybertrucks or watch c-beams glitter in the dark near the tannhauser gate.