S
Sciborg_S_Patel
“We are pluriforms of God voluntarily descended to this prison world, voluntarily losing our memory, identity, and supernatural powers (faculties), all of which can be regained through anamnesis.”
-P.K.Dick
“From Ikhnaton [pharaoh who initiated monotheism] this knowledge passed to Moses, and from Moses to Elijah, the Immortal Man, who became Christ. But underneath all the names there is only one Immortal Man; and we are that man.”
-P.K.Dick
=-=-=
'There is a very good reason for this chameleon-like nature of Dick’s self-interpretations, I would suggest, and that reason boils down to the fact that Dick understood himself to be a kind of gnostic comparativist, that is, he saw the deepest truth of things as being available to us in the history of religions, but also as “splintered up over thousands of miles and years.” There are sparks and bits, for example, in Neoplatonism, Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, Taoism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Orphism, and so on, but no single system taken alone is true, hence “none is to be accepted at the expense of all the others.” Rather, like the Soul or the Self, the truth must be recollected from its dispersal in history and culture. “This is my task,” Dick declares.
Having admitted all of that, it is also true that Dick was profoundly drawn to systems of thought that he himself identified as both “Christian” and “gnostic.” Dick understood Gnosticism to be an accessible, “already accomplished” truth that was best reflected in a set of early Christian communities and texts that saw the world of matter as corrupt or even evil and that understood the biblical creator-god to be a kind of dumb demiurge or lower creator god. As we have already had many occasions to note, the true gnostic Godhead, who was entirely beyond this material world, could be reached not through the violent and finally ignorant beliefs and rituals of the orthodox churches, but through a personal gnosis, that is, a mystical experience that revealed to one the ultimately illusory nature of the material, social, and religious worlds and the essential divinity of the soul-spark. In other word—Valis.
This is a dangerous truth. Hence the simplest summary of Dick’s gnosis is probably Sutin’s potent observation that one of the most common and consistent features of the Exegesis is the author’s sense of himself as “a frightened ‘knower’ of a secret” (DIS 117). He certainly believed that the only sure way to knowledge and salvation was “disobedience”—disobedience, that is, to the ruler of this world of civility and church. This sense of fear and forbidden knowledge, of course, was already encoded in his science fiction before he came around to a conscious gnostic worldview. Science fiction, for Dick, was a kind of natural Gnosticism without revelation, which we might frame for our own purposes in its simplest terms as a refusal to yield to the social reality in which one happens to find oneself...
...In the pink light of Valis, he also came to see that many of his earlier sci-fi novels, and especially Ubik, encoded the later revelation. He came to see that these earlier novels were, in effect, messages from the future.26 They thus “have a strange ring of (revealed) truth about them.” This leads him to ask a question. Is “something writing through us?" '
-Jeffrey J. Kripal. “Mutants and Mystics : Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal
-P.K.Dick
“From Ikhnaton [pharaoh who initiated monotheism] this knowledge passed to Moses, and from Moses to Elijah, the Immortal Man, who became Christ. But underneath all the names there is only one Immortal Man; and we are that man.”
-P.K.Dick
=-=-=
'There is a very good reason for this chameleon-like nature of Dick’s self-interpretations, I would suggest, and that reason boils down to the fact that Dick understood himself to be a kind of gnostic comparativist, that is, he saw the deepest truth of things as being available to us in the history of religions, but also as “splintered up over thousands of miles and years.” There are sparks and bits, for example, in Neoplatonism, Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, Taoism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Orphism, and so on, but no single system taken alone is true, hence “none is to be accepted at the expense of all the others.” Rather, like the Soul or the Self, the truth must be recollected from its dispersal in history and culture. “This is my task,” Dick declares.
Having admitted all of that, it is also true that Dick was profoundly drawn to systems of thought that he himself identified as both “Christian” and “gnostic.” Dick understood Gnosticism to be an accessible, “already accomplished” truth that was best reflected in a set of early Christian communities and texts that saw the world of matter as corrupt or even evil and that understood the biblical creator-god to be a kind of dumb demiurge or lower creator god. As we have already had many occasions to note, the true gnostic Godhead, who was entirely beyond this material world, could be reached not through the violent and finally ignorant beliefs and rituals of the orthodox churches, but through a personal gnosis, that is, a mystical experience that revealed to one the ultimately illusory nature of the material, social, and religious worlds and the essential divinity of the soul-spark. In other word—Valis.
This is a dangerous truth. Hence the simplest summary of Dick’s gnosis is probably Sutin’s potent observation that one of the most common and consistent features of the Exegesis is the author’s sense of himself as “a frightened ‘knower’ of a secret” (DIS 117). He certainly believed that the only sure way to knowledge and salvation was “disobedience”—disobedience, that is, to the ruler of this world of civility and church. This sense of fear and forbidden knowledge, of course, was already encoded in his science fiction before he came around to a conscious gnostic worldview. Science fiction, for Dick, was a kind of natural Gnosticism without revelation, which we might frame for our own purposes in its simplest terms as a refusal to yield to the social reality in which one happens to find oneself...
...In the pink light of Valis, he also came to see that many of his earlier sci-fi novels, and especially Ubik, encoded the later revelation. He came to see that these earlier novels were, in effect, messages from the future.26 They thus “have a strange ring of (revealed) truth about them.” This leads him to ask a question. Is “something writing through us?" '
-Jeffrey J. Kripal. “Mutants and Mystics : Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal