Feuerbach, "man is virtually supposed to be the God of God"

"Man is occupied with himself in and through God. God is the means of human existence and happiness. This religious truth, embodied in a cultus, in a sensous form, is the Lord's Supper. In this sacrament man feeds upon God -- the Creator of heaven and earth -- as on material food; by the act of eating and drinking he declares God to be a mere means of life to man. Here man is virtually supposed to be the God of God: hence the Lord's Supper is the highest self-enjoyment of human subjectivity. Even the Protestant -- not indeed in words, but in truth -- transforms God into an external thing, since he subjects Him to himself as an object of sensational enjoyment." Feuerbach, in a footnote to The Essence of Christianity (Part II, Ch. XXV)

Audio and Video of Me Talking PKD

Plotinus and the Problem of Dick's Christianity

Occult Sentinel Podcast #38 - Ted Hand - Entering the World of Philip K. Dick

Occult Sentinel Podcast #44 - Ted Hand - Philip K. Dick and the Western Esoteric Tradition
Occulo

Philip K. Dick and Alchemy for the Association for the Study of Esotericism

Ubik Graffiti in El Cerrito

Thanks to Henri Wintz for the photos.

Kinney on the Exegesis -- comparison to Swedenborg+Artaud

"The Philip K. Dick I've discovered in the Exegesis reminds me of two other unique visionaries: Antonin Artaud and Emmanuel Swedenborg. All three delved into alternate realities with unique results. But Artaud was ultimately deemed mad, institutionalized, and subjected to massive electro-shock therapy. Swedenborg died peacefully, respected (and feared) for his elaborate visions of heaven and hell; and after his death his followers founded a new church centered around his revelations.

"Luckily, Phil didn't have to suffer Artaud's fate, but it remains to be seen whether the Exegesis lends itself to the creation of a new Dickian religion. The possibility is a little grotesque, but stranger things have happened—many of them in PKD's own writings."
PKD Society newsletter #3 (thanks to Frank Hollander for posting this)

Abstract on PKD, Bergson and Paul

I had lunch with James Burton at the conference and talked Exegesis, and enjoyed his talk. His work looks very promising. I couldn't agree more about the emphasis on Bergson and Paul, the political dimension of Dick's religious thought, and the central important of fictionalizing. Look forward to his book on SF and Salvation!

 

Machines Making Gods

Philip K. Dick, Henri Bergson and Saint Paul

1. James Burton
   1. Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths (University of London)

Abstract

This article addresses shared themes in the writing of Saint Paul and the work of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Much recent philosophical interest in Saint Paul focuses on his contemporary significance as a radical political thinker, following Jacob Taubes' influential late work, The Political Theology of Paul. Assessments of Paul's writing in this context (e.g. by Agamben, Badiou, Milbank) highlight the various ways in which he uses fictionalizing, for example in setting up the tension between the present world and a messianic future, in the role he assigns to faith, and in the importance he assigns to the counter-factuality of resurrection. Yet the common thread of fictionalizing running through these themes has not been explicitly discussed. Meanwhile, the supposed `religious turn' in Dick's late writing has often been taken to have less political significance than his earlier science fiction. Considering Paul alongside Philip K. Dick, this article will attempt to bring out this central role of fictionalizing in the religious experiences of both. Like Paul, Dick experienced a visionary encounter with a God-like entity that shaped his interests and writing for the remainder of his life, and developed his own soteriology in response to what he perceived as the continued existence of (the Roman) Empire in modernity. Bringing out the mutual complementarity of Dick and Paul is facilitated by a framework derived from Henri Bergson's Two Sources of Religion, which theorizes the relation between mechanization as a human tendency characterizing both imperialism and industrialization, and fabulation as a human faculty for using fiction for the jointly immanent-transcendent purposes of survival/salvation. In this context, the diverse modes of fictionalizing employed by both Dick and Paul, including their unconsciously produced visions, may be understood as part of an ongoing, continually renewed strategy of revolutionary transformation of both self and world.

Lethem on PKD the conversationalist

"there were very few conversationalists who could fully contend with Dick's full obsessional outpouring of scholarship, imaginative leaps, and bullshit gambits"
www.loa.org/images/pdf/LOA_Lethem_on_PKD_2.pdf

Lethem on Dick's [ag-]Gnosticism

Library of America: Was Dick any more committed to Gnostic beliefs than he was to Taoism or Buddhism or Hinduism?
Lethem: ...no testimony has every persuaded me that his commitment to a given belief system was ever embracing or permanent

www.loa.org/images/pdf/LOA_Lethem_on_PKD_2.pdf