“We live in a Philip K Dick world now.”
Michael Moorcock
I really enjoyed our recent interview with Erik Davis, my favorite Philip K. Dick scholar and all around great guy (I’ve had the honor of hanging out with him in person twice, and can confirm he’s a blast to share drinks and Gnosis with).
The interview included one of the main themes of Aeon Byte: how we live in a Philip K. Dick world, which also means the realization of the Gnostic nightmare. I’ve made my mad case, and Erik does it even better in both our chant and in his new book High Weirdness. I quote part of the book in the drivel introduction to our interview. Now, I’d like to post this content here.
Why I’m a doing this repetition?
Simple: If we don’t wake up, if we don’t at least see what’s hidden in plain sight and website, we will continue drowning in the Gnostic nightmare.
Thusly, here are the excerpts from High Weirdness that argue for our reality in a Philip K. Dick world:
Dick’s vision of VALIS, in particular, reads like an uncanny prophesy of our fraught network consciousness. On the one hand, we have become thoroughly absorbed into an all-consuming, endlessly arborizing, weirdly disincarnating information system. But with the onset of the Internet of Things, and the spread of smartphones, sensors, GPS devices, and augmented reality, the network no longer inhabits a separate “cyberspace.” Instead, it is now invading, reconfiguring, and rewriting physical reality, very much the way Dick describes VALIS using the world of objects to organize and extend itself into our spurious reality.
We find ourselves in a state of profound ambivalence, interpolated into nodes of posthuman network even as we go about our ordinary lives. As Dick writes in the Exegesis:
Our little psyche-world systems are perpetually bombarded with incoming information which we process and, at the right time to the right other stations we transmit in the rightly modified form. All this takes place through us as if we were transistors, diodes, wires condensers and resistors, all none the wiser. Meanwhile our closed private world engages our attention with challenges, pain and delight so that we will not merely subsist as slave components with nothing to do but function…without a world, we would degenerate fatally during the standby periods…Meanwhile we have food, music, books, and friends
Sound familiar? More and more of us sacrifice more and more of our lives on the altar of information processing, as we submit to an increasingly invasive and persuasive network that demands that we respond, link, like, retweet, and magnify our personal social networks. But Dick is also imagining something more subliminal here, more like the way we unknowingly feed the hungry algorithms of the Big Data cloud farms with the invisible bread crumbs of our digital activity. Here Dick approaches the grim declaration of the French philosopher (and PDK exegete) Jean Baudrillard, who wrote, around the time of Dick’s death, that the contemporary subject has now become “only pure screen, a witching center for all the networks of influence.”
Pretty startling, eh? I think Dick would have been amused at today’s digital delirium and transhumanistic orgy — probably one step ahead of the next Archon jihad on humanity’s consciousness. As Chris Knowles said on his blog and this podcast, these are Gnostic times. Erik seems to agree, as I bring in a quote from his book Techgnosis:
Gnostic lore also provides a mythic key for the kind of infomania and conspiratorial thinking that comes to haunt the postwar world, with its terror of nefarious cabals, narcotic technologies, and invisible messengers of deception.
Gnosis is the solution to these Gnostic times, the Gnostic nightmare, a Philip K. Dick world, or whatever you want to call this divine invasion by Archons. And a potent, modern-friendly Gnosis percolated into the world in the early 70s with psychonauts like Dick and continues bubbling today among fringe groups (for better or worse, but always for freedom from the Black Iron Prison). With that said, Erik discusses the evolving concept of Gnostic, from a chapter in High Weirdness dealing with Robert Anton Wilson:
Such edgy awakening, whether we see them as “spiritual” or not, are an important component to the work of emancipation, which is perhaps the supreme value shared across the fissure of the counterculture, motivating radical leftists, hippie seekers, and psychedelic anarchists alike. Paradoxically, however, the goals of emancipation and liberation were often paired at the time with sociological ideas and structural analysis that radically decentered the autonomous individual psyche. Attitudes, motives, dreams and drivers – even the persona experience of reality itself – were, it was argued, shaped or programmed by often pernicious political, institutional, and ideological forces. So who is there to be liberated?
This koan suggest the way to the sociological, cultural, and ideological analysis already lend themselves to a kind of conspiracy thinking. But to truly escape these influences and imprints, if only to turn around and reconstruct society, something more than critique is required. The external struggle, whether collective or anti-authoritarian, needed to be paralleled with the internal work of “raising consciousness” – of becoming, in contemporary terms, “woke.” Gnosis — raising consciousness to peak of world-rending insight — becomes in this context a political gesture, one that both illuminates the dark archons that manipulate reality, and provides a direct experience of that part of the self that seeks – or is – liberation itself. Awakening, here, is not an escape from the wheel, but a vertiginous discernment that goes against the grain.
Maybe that’s the best we can do in these Gnostic times, whether you’re qAnon, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, or the secretary tired of being bullied by their alcoholic, crypto-pedo boss:
Discern until you go against the grain.
But we must do something…anything…or else we will never wake up and not even be androids dreaming of electric sheep. We’ll just be trapped in the mindfuck nightmare of a Demiurge resentful at Wisdom’s rescue operation.
Here are some articles and vids on living in a Philip K. Dick world:
What Philip K. Dick’s “2-3-74” Vision Was Not
The Gnosis of Philip K. Dick and CG Jung
An Interview From Beyond the Kenoma with Philip K. Dick and Vance Socci
Philip K. Dick and his Affair with the Aeon Sophia
Philip K. Dick’s Own Definition of Gnosticism
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Talk about getting political! The endless war is one of reciprocal delusion. All Second Order Powers are caught in a cycle of delusion and dominion. In my opinion the only way to stop the circular firing squad is for us to stop pointing fingers at other people and look within, as in, “when I point at you three fingers point back at myself.” Or, “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” Or, “let the one who is without sin among you be the first to cast stones at another.” Moral certitude is worthless without “vertiginous discernment that goes against the grain.” That means we need to have spiritual discernment, and not merely group think, reactionary tantrums, and blind propaganda-driven idiocy. Of course, what I really think is that true change comes through building things upward with love, information, and assistance. The only true escape from this PKD end times world is through stepping off the ouroboros of endless war and getting on with going up. It’s a spiritual battle, not a political one. The end of the world isn’t coming via climate change but redemption. Political battle is ultimately a waste of time if saving the world is your goal.
Saving *which* world?
I’ll explain myself. Alan Watts once predicted that the USA wouldn’t exist a century in the future (he was saying this in the 60s or 70s). And then he clarified that you could interpret USA in two ways: as a political entity, a government, etc., or simply as a particular section of land on Planet Earth, with people, animals, etc. He said that USA could survive as one of those two things in a century, but not as both. His worry was nuclear war, as it was common at the time.
When you talk about the world, are you trying to save the political or the physical map? Because you may need to choose one over the other.
I didn’t claim to be trying to save the world. I was addressing the folks who think political action or digital censorship or wind power is required now or “the world will end in 12 years!”
As far as maps go, since you ask, it seems to me that in order for a cultural entity to survive, it needs identifiable boundaries, members, and a common set of agreed-upon memes and values. It also needs the willingness of its members to identify themselves as members of the same body and to work together for the greater good for all. “Nationalism” is no more heinous to the world than one’s ego is to one’s spirit. Entities are entities, no matter the scale.
p.s. the previous rant was not aimed at you, Miguel. Love you and what you do!
cyd
“Maybe that’s the best we can do in these Gnostic times, whether you’re Anon, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, or the secretary tired of being bullied by their alcoholic, crypto-pedo boss”
The very mechanism of prevention through othering inherently leads to the continuation of this cycle. How can you be so blind? The groups you listed above are as deluded, hateful, and despicable as Team MAGA, or did you forget that many of these Trumspters voted for him because he said things like “I’m going to audit the Federal Reserve” and “I will do an official investigation into the 9/11 attacks?” Of course, he has predictably revealed himself to be yet another instance of good old fashioned sheep-doggin’ but still, how could you not know better by now?
These Soros funded groups you’ve mentioned are meant to hoover up all the extraneous loose end types, libertarians, anarchists, skeptical leftists, old-fashioned racists/sexists, etc., that don’t fit easily into the normal everyday liberal/conservative meatgrinder organs. To channel their general confused upsetness and painfully uninformed “opinions” into harmless chanting, and also to make sure they all get coagulated into the same surveillance database for future crackdown efficiency. Oh, yeah, and most importantly, to rile up their race/sex hatred for 2 obvious reasons: 1. to insure they never ever ever find common cause around money issues with people of another race in their same class, and 2. to ensure that they never catch on to the fact that all that really matters is “where de money go,” economic issues, that is to say, the rich taking all the money and leaving the rest of us with nothing, how much we are getting paid, how to help labor unions, etc. You will not see the observation on here that all of the current revolutionary actions going on in the world that aren’t color revolutions are economic revolutions, not stupid dumbass race revolutions. You won’t even see the observation that the primary objection to mass immigration is its affect on employment, wages, etc., i.e., money–and not some irrelevant crap about IQs or bad behavior or something. Nope. Sheepdoggin’. Good ol’ reliable sheepdoggin’.