Who are has actually read and understood this? is it just schizo gibberish?

If you read it and thought it was gibberish you weren’t prepared to read it. The exegesis shohld be an entertaining thought experiment not the bedrock of your life philosophy.

Basically, if it was anything more to you than a very powerful shitpost that explained what PKD himself thought of his work, you’re a pseud

Do you have any knowledge about the hyperreligious experience he had in '74? The entire book is basically him trying to figure out what happened to him, why it seems present in all his works (before the actual event), and how to reconcile with it. He goes back and forth between "I figured it out! X, Y, and Z were right!" then to "how could I have believed that. Am I schiz? Have I done too many drugs?"
The text is a span of about a decade, maybe more. There's some correspondences between him and Ursella K. Le Guin, and a few others. Mostly, ramblings; he does thoroughly dissect his own work, and you get insights into how he outlined the VALIS trilogy, and a lot of theological/philosophical musings.
Tl;dr how will we escape the Black Iron Prison and return to the Palm Island Garden?

No, all I know about him is that he's a sci-fi writer. If you have any articles that can tell me about this religious experience, I'd be thoroughly interested.

I find the philosophy of sci-fi books books to be fascinating, but the futuristic settings always turn me off unfortunately. That's why I never plan on reading/finishing any Dick book, let alone the one in the OP.

youtu.be/RHWeYFdjEQ4

This is a really cool video illustrated by R. Crumb about the experience.
PKD is scifi for people who aren't into scifi. His futuristic settings, etc. are secondary to the concepts he wrestles with. I'd highly recommend 3 Stigmata to start with. Or, the short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale to get and idea of his works.

Yeah so basically you’re being retarded and not eating apples because you tried sour gushers once and it was nasty

If he wants to start with PKD’s short stories there is not better place to start than Minority report, adjustment team, or faith of our fathers.

I'll concede to Minority Report as a good intro

fair

Thanks a lot, friend, I'll check all that out. I'm glad you mentioned him being good for people who don't like sci-fi. I just like settings more grounded in reality

Well I assumed you needed to have read at least a few of his books in order to appreciate (or even understand) the book in the OP. I have tried Dune, Asimov, etc. and couldn't get halfway through a single one of them. It's possible for people to not like certain genres, crazy, I know.

i remember seeing this years ago

No problem. I'm extremely picky when it comes to scifi, so I understand where you're coming from. I think you'll like it.
I love this video; pairs with the experience/content so damn well.

how do I induce this kind of schizophrenic enlightenment?

Well, decades of amphetemine abuse and being heavily sedated by sodium Pentothal seemed to work for him, but you can bypass all that shit just by validating your more phenomenal thoughts rather than dismissing them as imaginative. Works decently for me. I admit that I regularly scare people by accident, but that's to be expected. People don't like when you start talking about Jehovah like he's your loud neighbor offering you blow from the adjacent porch.

bumpadilly

I was told that PKD laid out his recommended reading order in this book, is this true? if so, what page is it in?

That was me, and I don't own the book; tried looking for it on the pdf but got frustrated. Found a note I had written down, though. Might wanna double check.
Scanner, Tears, Stigmata, Maze, Ubik, Androids.

Just watched the video. Pretty crazy but I don't think I'll be reading a 900 pager on something like that any time soon.

Wish there were more videos on this

Yeah, I get that haha. I read it as a personal challenge. Figure, if I could make it through that shit I can make it through anything.

Post it

Based. The best life involves carefully cloaking your power level in Christian memes

haven't read it it but I started believing in God after reading Valis on crack

d-daddy??

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I keep meaning to buy this, but it's always just a little too pricey for me.

On a related note are any of Jonathan Lethem's books worth a read?

>On a related note are any of Jonathan Lethem's books worth a read?
His first couple are pretty good.

Read VALIS, the background of his experience in VALIS, and his the full text of this speech:

youtube.com/watch?v=VluQdFQPyeI
montalk.net/PKD_speech.htm

Megadosing on b vitamins. There’s a post somewhere on montalk forums of how he was trying to induce the bicameral mind experience. He successfully did it and then was visited by a pink light that beamed 5k years of knowledge into his head

Julian Jaynes the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mindThe audiobook is pretty good, but they removed the part where he talks about the cia

I was going to mention Jaynes; haven't read that one, yet. The theory always interested me, though - obviously Dick took it as literally as one can. Do you think it's worth going through?
I've read the VALIS trilogy, but I don't think I've seen or read the links you posted. I'll have to check those out.

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it doesn't matter what order you read them in

Bumping this question

I don't believe you.

Many huge insights here. Read about quarter of it, and it was totally worth my time.

I read a good chunk of it. Some of it contains interesting insights and curious observations. He also employs a unique terminology that's rather flavorful. Such as "Macrometacosmos" or something like that.

However there are other passages where he is going off on a tangent about God beaming information into his head or being visited by angels etc. Which is interesting on its own just for the details about how a crazy person thinks.

I already answered

>Scanner, Tears, Stigmata, Maze, Ubik, Androids.

For the committed scholar of Dick's writings, the Exegesis also contains detailed literary analysis of his own work. Dick believed that some of his stories were part of an elaborate mythos or enigma sent from Valis (Vast Active Living Intelligence System) , his conception of a panpsychic God. So he has a lot to say about his own stories, which he believed meant that time stopped during the moment of Christ's crucifixion and the Roman empire never ended.

He also proposes an interesting theory of the bidirectionality of time, the idea that time can go backwards as well as forwards. This theory may have some backing from quantum physics. Lots of good nuggets in this book.

can you recommend something? i go on /x/ just to read the schizoposts

Not that I've read either of them and I could be completely wrong in this assumption, but I think this might be read in conjunction with the Dick section in this. At some point I'll find both at a price I find comfortable shelling out for them and see for myself.

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I’ve read a lot of it but it’s not quite a thing you read cover-to-cover, I think (unless you’re a tremendously dedicated PKD scholar). He repeats a lot of things, includes a lot of trivial observations and events .... it’s filled with random letters he sent to people and diary entries ... but it’s actually more engaging, thoughtful, lucid, and beautiful than you’d think from this description.

For anyone with a more universalist stance on religion, mystical experience, and philosophy, it’s definitely worth checking out. There’s few people who can effortlessly hop back and forth between mystical interpretations of Christianity/Gnosticism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Orphism, Taoism, Neoplatonism, Zoroastrianism, etc., in a way actually related to one’s own direct mystical experiences.

Fascinatingly, if you read Whitley Strieber (supposed alien abductee/contactee) in his book “The Secret School” (I believe), he tells a story of being taken back in time in a trance to Ancient Rome and seeing that world somehow superimposed on the modern day (?!!!). This is precisely the same thing PKD claimed in his ‘74 experience.

Overall, if you’re open minded, it can give you a mindfuck experience, something like, “Is this just an insane science-fiction writer, or a mystical experience/God genuinely manifesting Himself/Itself through a sci-fi writer who only appears to be insane because of the mental constraints of modern society?”

The first quarter?

I read bits of it for my bachelor's thesis on Dick entitled Cosmic Transubstantiation. Didn't have the time or energy to really make much use of it though, but it clearly offers insight into the perspective of his novels. Now that I've finished my master's thesis I'm thinking of going back to Dick for my Phd, so I may pick it up. I think it isn't entertaining (like his novels), but probably essential for any comprehensive academic take on Dick.

You sound pretty cool. What's the tl;dr on your thesis?

Great post. I particularly relate to the 'universalist stance' you mention. Sometimes, I feel as though I was chosen not to have a cemented belief system in order to sift through these mystical experiences and various systems to aggregate them into some kind of cohesive network to aid in my own subjective experiences. This sentiment is probably why I relate so much to people like PKD.
>Whitley Strieber (supposed alien abductee/contactee) in his book “The Secret School”
I never heard this, and you have me interested. If his experience really parallels PKD's that closely, I may have to pursue this.
Let me think about that, and I'll try to rec something you may enjoy. Schizoposts are some of my favorite writing of all time. Probably says a lot more about me than the actual posters HA! If you haven't had any experience with Burroughs, I highly recommend him. Naked Lunch is standard text, but the Red Night trilogy is da troof.

God eats and becomes the universe in VALIS (or in Fat's mind). This obviously recalls Christian transubstantiation. Honestly the thesis wasn't particularly coherent. It was lucid and well-reasoned, but more of a circuitous endeavor analyzing the text than a straightforward thesis. I also wrote about how the Black Iron Prison and Dick's perception of Rome actually mirror Hegel's in the Phenomenology. This was four years ago. My master's was still in literature but I wrote about something completely different.

(Cont.)
His actual theology/ontology gets heavily into ideas of panentheism, panpsychism, panzoism — basically, the entire universe is literally God, part of God, within God (although God also has an aspect as a transcendent creator beyond it — something like a soul-body relationship) (panentheism). The entire universe, all matter, has consciousness, awareness to some extent (panpsychism), and, finally, the entire universe forms one living organism (panzoism). This organism is God Himself, who remains crucially hidden from most of his creation, although some mystics, theologians, and religious founders have sensed this and pierced through the veil of appearances, according to PKD. As such, PKD gives his conception of God unique names like VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System) or Zebra (since God is like an organism camouflaging Himself — in this case, the entire universe and everything in it is His camouflage!).

We should be aware of this, aware of our our fundamental unity with God, and have corresponding traits like creativity, humor, compassion, free-will, joyousness, and even extrasensory faculties. But for some reason we’re occluded from this truth, mostly mechanical, mostly on the level of malicious, thoughtless robots or components of an unthinking hive-mind. PKD views this as a precisely opposite force to God: the principle of evil, mechanistic behavior, lack of joy and energy, and authoritarian as opposed to egalitarian systems of thought, politics, religion, etc. This second principle is what he calls the Black Iron Prison, and equates with Satan’s reign. He finds that this principle of authoritarian, mechanistic, and conspiratorial control was most exemplified by Ancient Rome (which Christianity was, in many respects, in conflict with), and that it has continued up to our day in the form of a black-hearted government which (he believes) secretly assassinated figures like Martin Luther King, the Kennedys, etc., and which particularly showed itself through Nixon and the Watergate scandal. He also sees this fascist, police-state tendency in the American government precognitively predicted in works of his like “Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said”, “A Scanner Darkly”, etc.

Pessimistic as this sounds, Dick believes a turn-around is coming where the Black Iron Prison will be overthrown and we will enter a sort of paradise. He saw the exposing of Watergate as part of this divine intervention. This thus makes him fit with some modern Christian eschatological ideologues, although of course in a much more schizo-mysticism way.

I’ve been putting all his ideas as sanely as possible, but of course there’s also other parts like “Aliens from Sirius are telepathically communicating with me in my dreams” (actually oddly similar to Robert Anton Wilson’s experience) or “Roma (Latin for Rome) is amor (Latin for love) spelled backwards, symbolizing how Rome is the corruption and perversion of love”.

It seems hard to have an essay on Dick's more metaphysical works that isn't mainly just upacking the text. I've been tossing around the idea of an essay or two on Valis, and I have to say, you've definitely solidified my desire.

"how a crazy person thinks"

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>schizo gibberish

pkdreligion.blogspot.com/2012/09/robert-anton-wilson-on-meeting-pkd.html

>pencil
disgusting

Nothing more disgusting than a wannabe schizo. Kill yourself, which you probably will, after you fully realize your whole life and especially your personality is an elaborate fraud.

The next time someone tells you about nuomenal information transmission via beams of light, do yourself a favor and actually pay attention.

projection
Seek Love, user.

Almost got into an argument with you about my schizo-credentials

This is how you annotate like a patrician

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Sensei I yield

Fascinating thread, thanks for the effort-posts gentlemen, especially this guy . Saved.

(Also, on the subject of Whitley Strieber, Communion may be the scariest book I've ever read, even if he is a madman.)

bump

Are there any other writers who've had similar spiritual/schizophrenic beliefs and experiences like Phillip K Dick?

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>Which is interesting on its own just for the details about how a crazy person thinks.
Are you ready for the Real Red Pill?

Lay it down, papi