Friday, November 4, 2011

religion-related PKD Quotes from Selected Letters 1977-1979

again, telepathically spliced from the excellent Project of Palmer Eldritch.


The universe is an idea in the minds of men.

Oddly, I learn from my own novels; they educate me to a higher kind of behaviour.
Zebra regards the biological and historic forces on this planet as malign, and seeks to ameliorate them. It is finally revealed to on of the characters - probably Phil Dick - what this black iron prison world actually is (or would have been).

If there is group validation, it is not hallucination.

…everybody missed the fact that Runciter in UBIK was Christ returned to his "followers" (i.e. his employees) from the dead. These overtones are not to be laid on with a trowel. You understand.

Phil Dick: His faith wanes, so he wanes physically, getting weaker and weaker, but he never compltely loses his faith although he comes close to doing so. At the end his faith is rewarded when Zebra takes him bodily and transforms him into the trash, the weeds, the beercans, the dust, the rocks and soil of the world, invisible but not gone, immortal to the extent that matter in itself is immortal.

I never have doubted that it was a god, the gods, or God. Yet it seemed to be female.

…I think we hear a vastly scaled-down version of this godly command voice in the form of conscience.

…I am positive that the godly command voice informs us in the normal course of dreaming.

I'll bet, I'll bet a lot in fact, that here and there other bicameral persons exist who are not schizophrenic but who have been afraid to discuss their experiences - have indeed not known who in the world to discuss them with.
All I can do, really, is write it all up as fiction.

By 100 A.D. no one could hear the voices of the gods anymore.
I wrote him to say that I had met a good Christian woman and she had gotten me off the bottle. In point of fact she damn near got me on the bottle, but that is another story.

I believe that the ancient Hindu religion of "Tat twam asi", which means "all outside is God and all inside you is God, too" is scientifically correct, if updated into modern concepts such as that of the AI system and the teaching machine.

I am frankly sick of living down here in Plastic Town, where the local deity is a giant mouse.

I promise I won't try to convert you; in any case my religion is not orthodox but really my own; for instance I never go to church, and so to creed Christians I'm a combination of atheist and heretic, if you can imagine that, which I evidently can.

Well, so much for having dangerous visions…

It always truly amazes me to look back and discover how much theological material keeps showing up in my writing. UBIK is the one which astonishes me the most.

Also (and I tell you this with a certain hesitation) the description of "the force" in STAR WARS for unaccountable reasons resembles the entity or force which took me over during my religious experiences in March of 1974.

Also, the character Luke hears the voice of the dead Jedi knight Kenobi, just as, when the plasmatic field which I call VALIS took me over I, too, heard a voice - that of my dead and resurrected leader, Jesus Christ.

I do think George Lucas has done something of sensational importance and value for man in STAR WARS: I honestly believe that the Word and Hand of God guided and informed him, whether Lucas is aware of it or not.
The three Stooges are running the universe…

Something is going on in the mystical, supernatural, ETI, UFO, theological sphere, but darned if I can figure out what it is, despite some personal experiences I've had on my own part.

I believe in the Gnostic dualism, that this world was created by an evil or false deity who is being overthrown by the Wise Mind.

If one person, just one time, could wake up in the sense of willing away the experiential external reality-one time alone would prove what my novels again and again show: that this phenomenal reality is somehow not real.

The first time I took LSD I saw the whole landscape freeze over; nothing but snow and rocks, and it lasted for thousands of years.
As to my acquaintance with computers-I know nothing about them.


Either we're onto something important, or we're just nuts.

Not forgetting is the key to salvation, which is to say, remembering that we are individual humans.

Well, thus goes the brief account of my experience with that which Tesla apparently experienced. It is an ionized, atmospheric, electrical life form able to travel through time and space at will.

I was able to retrieve not only two former lives but a knowledge of my primordial origin from the stars.

We are going to have to begin to deal with entities which can be said to exist and not exist at the same time.

I am enclosing my modernized version of the Gnostic cosmogony/cosmology; it is not really true to the Gnostics, inasmuch as a lot of my own thinking is in it. One thing I'll say for it: it's original. Its main purpose is to account for something which I don't think Christianity can account for adequately: undeserved suffering.

With warm regards,
Phil Dick
Hologramatic universe A

My editor wrote asking where my new book is. I wrote her five letters explaining that when you are writing a book about God you can't make it up.

They just want to make money but I want to write the truth about God's kindness in helping human beings.

As to being aware of reality, I claim there is no such thing as reality. I am what is called an acosmic panentheist, which means that although I admit that God exists I do not admit that the universe exists. I consider it a clever fake.

I know the feeling of being a character in a Phil Dick novel. It happens to me, too.

How can I be sure that anything exists, or is reality something which I am compelled to believe by an entity which can create an imitation of anything? Which is to say, Is reality genuine or somehow spurious? And if it is spurious, who is creating it? Am I creating it myself?

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