Pamela Jackson on Frances Yates in the Exegesis

Let's see, Francis Yates. Oh, for a searchable exegesis. I remember that K.W. Jeter lends PKD a copy of The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, which inspires various musings on Hermeticism, Bruno, etc. No detailed discussion of the book, but it joins the mix, probably in 1978.
(from a facebook thread)

Cat as Guru

"I guess I am the first person ever to be peed on by my guru."
Philip K. Dick, July 30, 1974 "Dear Claudia" letter

Excerpt from Dick's 1977 Letter to Julian Jaynes

"What I did not expect, however, was to find myself under the jurisdiction of an ancient god who commanded me first this was and then that, extricating me from a highly stressful situation I had found myself in. No theory of my own (and for three years I have studied and labored to come up with a theory) or by anyone else could account for the exquisitely beautiful voice, the inner voice, which I heard off and on for eleven months. At first I told my wife that "The Elohim" were talking to me. Later, during one of my many hypnogogic dialogs between me and this articulating entity (it also communicated, in dreams, in written form), it infomed me that "Jesus" was a name for Zeus-Zagreus. However, in most dreams early on it appeared in the form of the Sibyl of Apollo, but with a third eye in lateral lens-form, by which she could see and hence know everything. She had seen a dreadful conspiracy in America, she said, and she showed me a group of men wearing Eastern Establishment, very expensive business suits; she was showing me, in fact, the gang we now call "The President's Men." These "conspirators," as she called them, would be removed from power and punished for what they had done. By August this had indeed happened and by then I understood who she was talking about...

Another curious aspect was its memory, to which I had access during the intial three or four days when it originally overwhelmed my left hemisphere. It remembered events between roughly three and two thousand years ago--from the high point of Crete to the time of St. Paul--and then it literally had no memories; there was a two thousand year gap, right up to World War One. It was as if it had been asleep, away or dead for those two thousand years. It readily remembered the Egyptian aspects of Crete-I had in hypnogogic states incredible visions of Greece and Rome, but after that--nothing, until about 1916. This evidently was why it initially addressed me in Greek; it was using the language it was accustomed to use in addressing humans.

I never have doubted that it was a god, the gods, or God. Yet it seemed to be female. Within the first hour of its mastery it noetically disclosed to me an entire cosmology--and then had me read up on it in Plate. I found that same cosmology in Timaeus. It even informed me about ananke, which, as you know, is the factor which noos "persuades" in Timaeus...

Let me finish by giving you a couple of ideas which I've developed about this which did not appear in your book. First of all, I think we hear a vastly scaled-down version of this godly command voice in the form of conscience. And second, I am positive that the godly voice informs us in the normal course of dreaming. Subliminally, it clues us in on what to do and what to avoid during our daylight waking hours--without our suspecting...

Let me say in conclusion that your superb book has now made it possible for me to discuss my 3-1974 experiences openly, without being merely called schizophrenic..."

Neoplatonism

"By the way--our new Britannica defines Neoplatonism as the sum total of all pagan (i.e. non-Christian) Western theological and philosophical thought, rather than a particular doctrine or sect. Wow. It was around the year 500 A.D. that Justinian closed all the schools which taught Neoplatonism; i.e. he forbade its teaching; he outlawed it. Golly; I have brought down Christianity then. I have proved what Ted Sturgeon said in that VENUS PLUS X or whatever he called that Ace book; the Church kicked the asses of those who were right, and sold two thousand years of profitable lies in the place of what I am sure now was not only real and true but what they knew was real and true (vide what became of Erigena). How is the Pope going to take this? As the popes always have; by kicking someone's ass. But in truth, in very truth, this is a shadow universe we see, a reflection in the mirror of another universe behind it, and that other universe can be reached by an individual direct, without the help of any priest or service or communion or even knowing what he is doing (the latter pertains to me, you understand; I was just trying out the massive hits of WS vitamins). God is as close as the wall beside me; is within the wass beside me, concealed by it, as if that wall is a paper mask. Letters Feb. 13, 1975 (p.61)

Radio Free Albemuth has been funded!

Stay tuned for a podcast I'm doing on why it's a great PKD adaptation.

Phildickian Esotericism (playing around with Google Charts)

I haven't figured out how to add text to the intersections. Gnostic and Hermetic is Kabbalah. Neoplatonic and Hermetic is Alchemy. Gnostic and Neoplatonic is Theosophy/Pansophy. In the middle I guess would be Exegesis? Ah the game of correspondence and attribution.

Luhrman on Jaynes

The book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,is one of those gangly, overwritten academic books that is undoubtedly wrong, but wrong in such an interesting way that readers, on finishing it, find that they think about the world quite differently. The book begins, “O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind!” Jaynes was a psychology professor at Princeton, back in the days before psychologists had walled themselves off from literature, when he noticed that the gods in the Homeric epics took the place of the human mind. In the Iliad we do not see Achilles fretting over what to do, or even thinking much. Achilles is a man of action, and in general, he acts as the gods instruct him. When Agamemnon steals his mistress and Achilles seethes with anger, Athena shows up, grabs him by the hair, and holds him back. Jaynes argued that Athena popped up in this way because humans in archaic Greece attributed thought to the gods—that when the ancient kings were buried in those strange beehive Mycenaean tombs, when social worlds were small and preliterate, people did not conceptualize themselves as having inner speech. Jaynes did not think that the role of the gods in the Iliad was a literary trope. He thought that people who did not refer to internal states used their brains differently and—the cognitive functions of speaking and obeying split across their unintegrated hemispheres—actually experienced some thoughts audibly. “Who then were these gods that pushed men about like robots and sang epics through their lips?” Jaynes asked. “They were voices whose speech and direction could be as distinctly heard by the Iliadic heroes as voices are heard by certain epileptic and schizophrenic patients, or just as Joan of Arc heard her voices.”

http://theamericanscholar.org/living-with-voices/#.Ubf-Vec3vpk