Divine Invasion as "the dialectic that is the inner life of God"

   I just now looked over DIVINE INVASION. As I recently realised about VALIS, the dialectic that is the inner life of God -- as revealed to Boehme & explicated later by Schelling -- & commented on by e.g. Tillich -- is presented as the very bases of the book. In VALIS it is expressed dramatically as world-order in which the irrational confronts the "bright" or rational, designated (properly) Logos. In DI this same dialectic reappears & this time is stated to be the two sides of God (rather than world order; that is, in DI it is now correctly seen to be within God himself!): it is now (in DI) between Emmanuel who is the terrible, destroying "solar heat" warring side -- & Zina who is loving, playful, tender, associated with bells & flowers; & what unifies the two at last (by the way; it is she who takes the lead in restoring memory & hence unification: Emmanuel is the side that has forgotten -- i.e., is impaired; she has not & is not impaired) is play. She plays, & Emmanuel has a secret desire to play.
    So both novels basically deal with the dialectic that I experienced as the nature of Valis & which I construe to be the dynamic inner life of God.
    {…}
    Really, then DI simply continues the fundamental theme of VALIS -- but does not seem to do so -- not unless one perceives this theme & what it is (the dialectic that is the dynamic inner life of God). DI is not so loose a sequel to VALIS as it might seem (by in the shift from Gnosticism, the present, realism, to Kabbala, the future, that which would not and could not come with POT...

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Dick on "the precognitive element" in his novels

That precognitive thing in my novels has really spooked me. It's really there. You can see how I would become aware of it in direct proportion to the number of books I wrote: if there was such a factor, the more I wrote, the more I'd begin to notice this.

from an interview in The Dream Connection p.87

PKD on mescalin insights behind "Flow"

From two different letters around August 1970

"I have just finished the rough draft of a new, long, s-f novel, FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID. {...} I've reworked it and reworked it; I rewrote the final section seven times, plus holographic changes. At one point in the writing I wrote 140 pages in 48 hours. I have high hopes for this. It is the first really new thing I've done since EYE IN THE SKY. The change is due to a change that overtook me from having taken mescalin, a very large dose that completely unhinged me. I had enormous insights behind the drug, all having to do with those whom I loved. Love. Will love.
    
...

    With acid I never had any genuine insights, but on mescalin I was overwhelmed by terribly powerful feelings – emotions, I guess. I felt an overpowering love for other people, and this is what I put into the novel: it studies different kinds of love and at last ends with the appearance of an ultimate kind of love which I had never known of. I am saying, "In answer to the question, ‘What is real?’ the answer is: this kind of overpowering love.["]"

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"SF beginning to be accepted as... serious literature" in a 1967 Heinlein letter

January 23, 1967: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Did I tell you that [Dr.] Jack Williamson is using Stranger as a study text in his class in SF at U of E. New Mexico? Quote: "I'm launching new courses in linguistics and modern grammar and another in the factual literature of science...(in my SF class) and we are now reading Stranger in a Strange Land. I was a little afraid lhat some of my students might not be sufficiently sophisticated for it, but the response so far is good-some class members feel that it is more successful than Huxley's Brave New World, which we have just finished."

Did I mention in some other letter that Stanford now offers a course in SF? Apparently SF is beginning to be accepted as a respectable genre of serious literature. It is a pleasant feeling-but I have to keep reminding myself that seeing my name in print is nothing; it is seeing it on a check that counts. It is still the clown business; the object is to entertain the cash customer-I shall simply have to try harder than ever.

Nietzsche on "systematizers"

I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.

Twilight of the Idols

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