Everything is a Rich Man's Trick

A primer for surface worlders.

The Simulation Hypothesis: Full Program

"Are we living in a virtual reality? Is the universe emerging from an information processing system? And if so, could we ever tell? Is it possible to 'hack' the system and change reality?"

Robert Anton Wilson: The Magick of Aleister Crowley

"The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill." - Robert Anton Wilson

Alan Watts: Carl Jung and Variations of the Self

"The Christ-symbol is of the greatest importance for psychology in so far as it is perhaps the most highly developed and differentiated symbol of the self, apart from the figure of the Buddha." - Carl Jung

Thumbnail: Via Carl Jung's "The Red Book"

Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: Is The Universe a Simulation?

What may have started as a science fiction speculation—that perhaps the universe as we know it is a computer simulation—has become a serious line of theoretical and experimental investigation among physicists, astrophysicists, and philosophers.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium, hosts and moderates a panel of experts in a lively discussion about the merits and shortcomings of this provocative and revolutionary idea. The 17th annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate took place at The American Museum of Natural History on April 5, 2016.

2016 Asimov Panelists:

David Chalmers
Professor of philosophy, New York University

Zohreh Davoudi
Theoretical physicist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

James Gates
Theoretical physicist, University of Maryland

Lisa Randall
Theoretical physicist, Harvard University

Max Tegmark
Cosmologist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The late Dr. Isaac Asimov, one of the most prolific and influential authors of our time, was a dear friend and supporter of the American Museum of Natural History.  In his memory, the Hayden Planetarium is honored to host the annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate — generously endowed by relatives, friends, and admirers of Isaac Asimov and his work — bringing the finest minds in the world to the Museum each year to debate pressing questions on the frontier of scientific discovery.  Proceeds from ticket sales of the Isaac Asimov Memorial Debates benefit the scientific and educational programs of the Hayden Planetarium.

One Great Dream of a Single Dreamer

by Paul Levy

The Buddha, which literally means “the awakened one,” said “My form appeared like a dream to sentient beings who are like a dream. I taught them dreamlike teaching to attain dreamlike enlightenment.” When we begin to awaken to the dreamlike nature of reality, we realize we are all characters in each other’s dream. Like reflections in a mirror, we are all interconnected aspects of each other’s being. To recognize the dreamlike nature of our situation is to recognize that we don’t exist as isolated entities separate from the universe, but rather, as relational beings who only exist relative to each other. We are all related, parts of a greater family, the living multifaceted expression of a singular divine being. When we begin to awaken to the dreamlike nature of the universe we realize that the “dream ego,” which is who we’ve been imagining we are is only an un-reflected upon and assumed model of who we are and is not who we really are, but is itself being dreamed by a deeper part of ourselves.

There is a deeper Self which is dreaming us. Like emanations of a meditating Buddha, we are the dream of something deeper, what I call the “deeper, dreaming Self,” which is who we really are. There’s only one deeper, dreaming Self and it is dreaming the whole universe. We are its dream. The deeper, dreaming Self expresses itself through and is not separate from the forms of the dream; we are simultaneously the dreamed and the dreamer. In the words of the German philosopher Schopenhauer, “one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too.” The deeper, dreaming Self is having a dream, and we are it!

Waking up to our identity with the deeper, dreaming Self, we snap out of the self-perpetuating, egoic delusion that we exist in a way in which we simply, in reality, do not. The question then becomes: how do we best serve who we have now discovered ourselves to be? How does the deeper, dreaming Self which is dreaming us want us to dream itself into incarnation? How does the dream itself want to unfold through us?

People who are imagining that if they became lucid in the dream they would become a billionaire, or lose twenty pounds, or something of that nature are still caught in the dream of ego which imagines itself its own master. They are still attached to, animating and monopolizing a deluded identity of being the commander-in-chief, the one in charge, which is the ultimate power trip. Trying to manipulate the dream is a compensation for and expression of the fear of the separate self. In attempting to control the dream, one is still acting out of an assumed reference point where one imagines oneself to be an objectively existing entity whose situation is seemingly binding and problematic and whose agency is apparently separate from the whole.

Both the dreams of our ego and the dream of the deeper, dreaming Self, when invested with our attention, can materialize in, as and through our lives. The difference is that when we dream up our egoic fantasy into reality, it doesn’t ultimately alleviate our suffering, but rather, reinforces it. When we are the vessel for the dream of the deeper, dreaming Self to incarnate, however, we have gotten out of our own way and become an instrument serving the whole. The energetic expression of this realization is compassion, the hallmark of lucidity. The whole universe, which we are a part of and not apart from, heals itself in the process.

Awakening in and embracing the dream, instead of trying to strategize and control the dream, we can get in phase with each other, I imagine, and co-operatively offer ourselves in service to the highest intent of the deeper, dreaming Self, whatever that may be. Our awakening is always a mutual and reciprocally shared co-awakening due to our infinite interconnectedness. Moved by something greater than our imagined self, we become an instrument of something much vaster than our own limited version of ourselves. Recognizing the dreamlike nature is the very act which empowers us to become in-sync lucid dreamers who can change the world. To quote an indigenous elder, one who is fluent in the dreamtime, “There’s a dream dreaming us, and we must get back to that dream, and the vision, the power, and the energies at the disposal of man’s dreaming self will help us to win the battle.”

A young Steve Buscemi in ‘Borders,’ 1989 TV doc about the philosophy of Robert Anton Wilson

via dangerous minds

In 1989 an hour-long movie called Borders about Robert Anton Wilson, author of The Illumnatus! Trilogy and the Cosmic Trigger series, was produced for public TV (WGBH Boston was one of the production companies behind it). The movie, directed by Merrill Aldighieri and Joe Tripician, is a blend of dramatic and documentary elements that also occasionally includes charmingly rudimentary computer graphics.

The first few minutes of Borders is an extended scene involving Ted, who is possibly a scientist named Ted who is doing something to subvert the company he works for—something like that. Whatever it is, his lack of integrity is enough for his girlfriend to leave the weekend house he has lined up for them. Unfortunately, we never find out what Ted’s situation was all about, because we’re never shown a second sequence to flesh out the promising start.

At first blush, the title Borders seems inapt for a documentary about a figure whose intellectual reach is as impressive as Wilson’s, but in short order its true significance becomes clear. As Wilson says, in his life he has passed through many conceptual borders—leaving the Catholic Church for Trotskyism, only to abandon that for agnosticism—and integral to his thinking is the project of detecting, decoding, and resisting the various “borders” that mankind erects for itself to keep up separated.

Early in the program Wilson expands on this idea:

Borders are a basic mammalian territorial imperative. All mammals want a territory, and they claim it by making excretions that make a topological outline, that’s the territory they claim. That’s why your dog pees on every tree when you take him for a walk. That’s the way the dog is marking his territory. Chimpanzees mark their territories with excretions too. The difference between human beings (or domesticated primates) and the other mammals is we mark our territories with ink excretions on paper—land titles, peace treaties, and so on. Every national border in the world marks a place where two gangs of domesticated primates fought until they were exhausted, and then made a territorial mark. That’s how national borders are created. We don’t throw excretions at each other like the chimpanzees, we throw chemicals and bombs and so on, but it’s basically the same mammalian process. The only intelligent way to discuss politics is on all fours.

Borders also includes spy novelist Brian Freemantle and theoretical physicist Michio Kaku as well as ample discussion and footage about the drug war (esp. border control from Mexico) and a topic that has since cooled quite a bit: SDI, also known as Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense program.

Alejandro Jodorowsky Explains How Tarot Cards Can Give You Creative Inspiration

via openculture

The practice of cartomancy, or divination with cards, dates back several hundred years to at least 14th century Europe, perhaps by way of Turkey. But the specific form we know of, the tarot, likely emerged in the 17th century, and the deck we’re all most familiar with—the Rider-Waite Tarot—didn’t appear until 1909. Popular mainly with occultists like Aleister Crowley and Madame Blavatsky in the early 20th century, the tarot exploded into popular culture in the new age 70s with books like Stuart Kaplan’s Tarot Cards for Fun and Fortune Telling, and by way of cult filmmakers like Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Since its relatively recent popularization, “fun” and “fortune telling” have more or less defined most people’s attitude to the tarot, whether they approve or disapprove of either one. But for artists and poets like William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and surrealist director Jodorowsky—whose film narration is perhaps the most poetic in modern cinema—the tarot has always meant something much more mysterious and inspiring. “The tarot,” says Jodorowsky in the short film above, “will teach you how to create a soul.”

After studying the Major and Minor Arcana and the suits, and puzzling over the symbols on each card, Jodorowsky discovered that “all 78 cards could be joined in a mandala, in just one image.” Learning to see the deck thus, “You must not talk about the future. The future is a con. The tarot is a language that talks about the present. If you use it to see the future, you become a conman.” Like other mystical poets, Jodorowsky’s study of the tarot did not lead him to the supernatural but to the creative act.

And like many a poet before him, Jodorowsky explored the journey of the Fool in his 1973 film The Holy Mountain, a “dazzling, rambling, often incoherent satire,” writes Matt Zoller Seitz, that “unfurls like a hallucinogenic daydream.” Jodorowsky’s cinematic dream logic comes not only from his work as a “shamanic psychotherapist.” He also credits the tarot for his psychomagical realism. “For me,” says Jodorowsky in the video at the top, “the tarot was something more serious. It was a deep psychological search.” The result of that search—Jodorowsky’s singular and totally unforgettable body of work—speaks to us of the value of such an undertaking, whatever means one uses to get there.

Or as Jodorowsky says in one of his mystical pronouncements, “If you set your spirit to something, that phenomenon will happen.” If that sounds like magical thinking, that’s exactly what it is. Jodorowsky shows us how to read the tarot as he does, for psychological insight and creative inspiration, in the video above, addressed to a fan named John Bishop. Spanish speakers will have no trouble understanding his presentation, as he quickly slides almost fully into his native language through lack of confidence in his facility with English. (The video belongs to a series on Jodorowsky’s YouTube channel, most of them fully in Spanish without subtitles.) Selecting a translation on YouTube yields rather garbled results.

Nevertheless, for English speakers, the subtitled video at the top offers a surprisingly dense lesson on the Chilean mystic’s interpretation of the tarot’s supposed wisdom as a symbolic system, and a way of telling the present.

Should you wish to know more, you can find it in Jodorowsky’s book The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, and practice on your very own deck of Jodorowsky-designed tarot cards.

Robert Anton Wilson: Free Your Mind

UFO ‘expert’ found ‘vomiting black liquid,’ sent warning to mom before his death

via kfor

A UFO conspiracy theorist was found dead in Poland earlier this year only days after he told his mother to “investigate” if anything happened to him, according to The Telegraph.

Max Spiers, 39, was in Poland in July to discuss conspiracy theories and UFOs when he was found dead inside an apartment, according to The Telegraph. Investigators ruled he died from natural causes.

Spiers apparently sent his mother a “warning” via text message a few days before his death that said:

    “Your boy’s in trouble. If anything happens to me, investigate.”

Spiers lived in the United States for a few years but most recently lived in the UK, according to his mother, Vanessa Bates.

“He was making a name for himself in the world of conspiracy theorists and had been invited to speak at a conference in Poland in July,” Bates told KMTV. “He was staying with a woman who he had not known for long and she told me how she found him dead on the sofa. But I think Max had been digging in some dark places and I fear that somebody wanted him dead.”

According to the report, friends said Spears “vomited a black liquid” when he died.

After waiting at least two months for the result of a post-mortem examination, Bates is now questioning the investigation.

The story has gained a lot of traction online, with some asking police to reopen the investigation. A blogger on Project Camelot, a blog that covers conspiracy theories with a focus on “getting the truth out,” wrote:

    “Both the doctor who examined Max and Police who came to the villa… Left the body behind in spite of the fact that they believed Max had died.  What kind of officials do this?  The entire circumstances are suspicious and I urge everyone to encourage Monica to release the details about what really happened to the public and call for an autopsy.”

A spokesman for the North East Kent coroner’s office told the Sunday Express they were in the “very early” stages of the investigation.

The Taoist View of the Universe - Alan Watts

via Creative by Nature

“Taoists view the universe as the same as, or inseparable from, themselves so that Lao-tzu could say, “Without leaving my house, I know the whole universe.” This implies that the art of life is more like navigation than warfare, for what is important is to understand the winds, the tides, the currents, the seasons, and the principles of growth and decay, so that one’s actions may use them and not fight them.” ~Alan Watts

“At the very roots of Chinese thinking and feeling there lies the principle of polarity, which is not to be confused with the ideas of opposition or conflict. In the metaphors of other cultures, light is at war with darkness, life with death, good with evil, and the positive with the negative, and thus an idealism to cultivate the former and be rid of the latter flourishes throughout much of the world.

To the traditional way of Chinese thinking this is as incomprehensible as an electric current without both positive and negative poles, for polarity is the principle that plus and minus, north and south, are different aspects of one and the same system, and that the disappearance of either one of them would be the disappearance of the system.

People who have been brought up in the aura of Christian and Hebrew aspirations find this frustrating, because it seems to deny any possibility of progress, an ideal which flows from their linear (as distinct from cyclic) view of time and history. Indeed, the whole enterprise of Western technology is “to make the world a better place” – to have pleasure without pain, wealth without poverty, and health without sickness.

But, as is now becoming obvious, our violent efforts to achieve this ideal with such weapons as DDT, penicillin, nuclear energy, automotive transportation, computers, industrial farming, damming, and compelling everyone, by law, to be superficially “good and healthy” are creating more problems than they solve.

We have been interfering with a complex system of relationships which we do not understand, and the more we study its details, the more it eludes us by revealing still more details to study. As we try to comprehend and control the world it runs away – from us. Instead of chafing at this situation, a Taoist would ask what it means. What is that which always retreats when pursued? Answer: yourself.

Idealists (in the moral sense of the word) regard the universe as different and separate from themselves- that is, as a system of external objects which needs to be subjugated. Taoists view the universe as the same as, or inseparable from, themselves so that Lao-tzu could say, “Without leaving my house, I know the whole universe.”

This implies that the art of life is more like navigation than warfare, for what is important is to understand the winds, the tides, the currents, the seasons, and the principles of growth and decay, so that one’s actions may use them and not fight them.

In this sense, the Taoist attitude is not opposed to technology per se. Indeed, the Chuang-tzu writings are full of references to crafts and skills perfected by this very principle of “going with the grain.” The point is therefore that technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

Our overspecialization in conscious attention and linear thinking has led to neglect, or ignore-ance, of the basic principles and rhythms of this process, of which the foremost is polarity.

In Chinese the two poles of cosmic energy are yang (positive) and yin (negative), associated with the masculine and the feminine, the firm and the yielding, the strong and the weak, the light and the dark, the rising and the falling, heaven and earth, and they are even recognized in such everyday matters as cooking as the spicy and the bland.

Thus the art of life is not seen as holding to yang and banishing yin, but as keeping the two in balance, because there cannot be one without the other.

When regarding them as the masculine and the feminine, the reference is not so much to male and female individuals as to characteristics which are dominant in, but not confined to, each of the two sexes. The male individual must not neglect his female component, nor the female her male. Thus Lao-tzu says:

Knowing the male but keeping the female, one becomes a universal stream. Becoming a universal stream, one is not separated from eternal virtue.

The yang and the yin are principles, not men and women, so that there can be no true relationship between the affectedly tough male and the affectedly flimsy female. The key to the relationship between yang and yin is called hsiang sheng, mutual arising or inseparability. As Lao-tzu puts it:

When everyone knows beauty as beautiful,
there is already ugliness;
When everyone knows good as goodness,
there is already evil.

“To be” and “not to be” arise mutually;
Difficult and easy are mutually realized;
Long and short are mutually contrasted;
High and low are mutually posited;
Before and after are in mutual sequence.

They are thus like the different, but inseparable, sides of a coin, the poles of a magnet, or pulse and interval in any vibration. There is never the ultimate possibility that either one will win over the other, for they are more like lovers wrestling than enemies fighting.

It is difficult in our logic to see that being and non-being are mutually generative and mutually supportive, for it is the great and imaginary terror of Western man that nothingness will be the permanent universe. We do not easily grasp the point that the void is creative, and that being comes from non-being as sound from silence and light from space.

Thirty spokes unite at the wheel’s hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut out doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.

This space is not “just nothing” as we commonly use that expression, for I cannot get away from the sense that space and my awareness of the universe are the same, and call to mind the words of the Chan (Zen) Patriarch Hui-neng, writing eleven centuries after Lao-tzu:

The capacity of mind is broad and huge, like the vast sky. Do not sit with a mind fixed on emptiness. If you do you will fall into a neutral kind of emptiness. Emptiness includes the sun, moon, stars, and planets, the great earth, mountains and rivers, all trees and grasses, bad men and good men, bad things and good things, heaven and hell; they are all in the midst of emptiness. The emptiness of human nature is also like this.

Thus the yin-yang principle is that the somethings and the nothings, the ons and the offs, the solids and the spaces, as well as the wakings and the sleepings and the alternations of existing and not existing, are mutually necessary.

Yang and yin are in some ways parallel to the (later) Buddhist view of form and emptiness, of which the Heart Sutra says, “That which is form is just that which is emptiness and that which is emptiness is just that which is form.”

The yin-yang principle is not, therefore, what we would ordinarily call a dualism, but rather an explicit duality expressing an implicit unity.”

~Alan Watts~

Is this "base reality"? Probably not, say some

via boingboing

The Westworld reboot and Elon Musk recently renewed interest in "base reality," the concept that one true reality exists, and everything else, including possibly this reality, is a simulation of some sort. Now some billionaires are funding the search for an escape.

From Plato's Cave to The Matrix, it's often been an intriguing question posed in art and culture, but now there's a movement afoot to research the question scientifically.

Some attribute the recent interest to Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, but the provenance of the term "base reality" can be traced to Norman Spinrad's excellent essay "The Transmogrification of Philip K. Dick," in Science Fiction in the Real World.

 Spinrad was a close friend of Dick's. He wrote in 1990:

    For Phil Dick, consciousness-altering drugs like Chew-Z in PALMER ELDRITCH, mental states like Manfred's autism in MARTIAN TIME SLIP, and ersatz subjective realities as in UBIK or A MAZE OF DEATH or EYE IN THE SKY serve the same function, literarily and metaphysically. Namely to demonstrate that altered mental states however they may be created create altered realities that are as "real" as what we individually think of as "base reality," since each of our individual "base realities," far from being the absolute we like to pretend it is, is itself a unique subjective reality, arising as it does in our own unique biophysical matrix. In this perception lies either the solipsistic madness of total psychic relativity or transcendent wisdom, and the greatness of Dick as a writer, what makes him by far the greatest metaphysical novelist of all time, is that, having opened the door to this ultimate spiritual, perceptual, and metaphysical chaos, he leads us through it to true wisdom along a moral vector.

Bonus video: Musk fielding a question about base reality.

Why Not Believing in Anything is Absolute Freedom

via fractal enlightenment

“You do not believe; you only believe that you believe.” ~ Samuel Coleridge

I’m about to cutoff one of the intellectual giants of human history… Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, you have the floor: “None are more enslaved than those who believe…” Stop right there, Monsieur Goethe! He was about to say “…they are free.” But that’s irrelevant, governing the nature of his premise. It is belief in anything that makes men slaves. Allow me to explain: Belief tends to trap our thoughts into tiny nutshells. It can even trap entire realities into the finite space of a nutshell. These nutshells are filled with snakes eating their own tails. These snakes are never allowed any nourishment (knowledge) from outside the shell, because everything outside the shell is dangerous, poisonous, scary, and unknown. These snakes become suppressed by their own oppression, and they have a tendency to become neurotic “snakes in the head.” In such a state of anxious fear, we’re inclined to maintain the hardness of the shell so as to remain comfortable and secure. When we cling to the nutshell of our belief, we are declaring that our comfort is more important than Truth. Inside the nutshell, we’re more willing to remain comfortable and free of fear than to risk the discomfort of being wrong or facing the fear of the unknown. Even if that comfort means we’re forced to eat our own tail or end up with snakes in our head. Our belief must remain rigid and inflexible, because otherwise all that dangerous, scary unknown knowledge might get inside and mess things up. We must not risk vulnerability. We must maintain our faith. But, as Terrence McKenna said, “If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.” This is the epitome of close mindedness, because our belief closes us off from even considering another person’s belief. It cuts off empathy and harbors apathy.

Even worse, it prevents us from living an examined life. Indeed, belief is the antithesis to an examined life precisely because our beliefs are somehow exempt from examination. When really our beliefs should be the first thing we question. Taking things into consideration, that is to say philosophy, can help us with this. Like Bertrand Russell said, “Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy; Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation.”

Not believing in anything is absolute freedom precisely because neither our intellect nor our imagination are diminished by the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation. Not believing in anything frees us to take everything into consideration. We become logically liberated, scientifically set free, and our rationality is relieved. Healthy skepticism and an intimacy with probability become our shifting bedrock, our foundational quicksand. We’re free to swim in the waters of uncertainty rather than remain chained to the pillars of certainty. When it comes down to it, letting go of belief is allowing ourselves the freedom of being wrong. It’s finally admitting that we are a species that is profoundly fallible and prone to mistakes. It’s understanding, as Kathryn Schulz said, “Whether we wrongly think we can see or wrongly remember what we did on September 11, whether we are mistaken about pantyhose or string theory, what we are ultimately wrong about is always a belief. If we want to understand how we err, we need to look to how we believe.” Indeed. My believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster gets me nowhere, except maybe entertained. Better to simply take it into consideration as a silly belief that some people might have, and then laugh at it. Laugh at myself. Poke holes in my faith. Question why I might believe that “his noodly appendages will save me from my sins.” Or why I insist on wearing a colander for a hat. As with all things, a good sense of humor can set us free.

Taking things into consideration is far superior to believing in things precisely because we are a fallible species. We happen to be a species with a big brain, which gives us a false sense of security that we have discovered answers to complex questions. But when it comes down to it we’re merely big-brained naked apes fumbling and stumbling through a vast cosmos of which we have barely even scratched the surface. Our human understanding of reality is more akin to a Planck-length balancing on a quark, teetering on an electron, wobbling on an atom, wavering on a molecule, which is precariously positioned upon an ice cube on the tip of an iceberg that we can hardly even begin to fathom. And that’s okay.

That is why we must take things into consideration rather than believe in things. Belief is limiting. Taking things into consideration is limitless. Belief is mental slavery. Taking things into consideration is mental liberation. As I wrote in Bertrand Russel’s Ten Commandments of Higher Teaching, “caveat credentis: believer beware. Instead of believing in things, take things into consideration. It is quite simple to alter considerations. But it’s almost impossible to alter beliefs.” This is because of cognitive dissonance. None of us are free from the clutches of this particular mental stressor. Best not to have a belief at all. Best to take things into consideration using probability as a guide. Best to embrace cognitive dissonance, to dive into the unforgiving waters, to relish in its discomfort, to feel the burn of being a fallible, prone-to-mistakes, imperfect, naked ape going through the vain and futile motions of attempting to pigeonhole infinity into finite constructs. We’re bound to come out the other side wielding a mind open to possibility, and a heart burning with a humor of the most high. Like Gerry Spence said, “I’d rather have a mind open by wonder than one closed by belief.” If, as Anaïs Nin said, “We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.” Then my first act of free will shall be not to believe in free will at all, but rather, take it into consideration as a more conducive stance toward attaining truth. I won’t “believe” in Time, because Time only perceptually exists; where actually it does not. But so what? I’ll refuse to “believe” in Truth, instead I will attempt to maintain a strong faith in human fallibility. Sitting on a bench will be the only time that I predicate a benchmark, but even the bench will be subject to questioning. Like Douglas Adams quipped, “I don’t believe it. Prove it to me and I still won’t believe it.” Indeed. Prove me to myself, and I still won’t “believe” it. Because I could be an illusion, even to myself. Although I will take it into consideration over almost anything else because of the laws of probability. After all, I probably do exist. Here’s the thing: We live in a world where beliefs are rampant. Beliefs seemingly keep us grounded. So it’s understandable why we have them. After all, without belief it seems as though we’d all go crazy. But the opposite seems to be more the case. It is belief –especially unquestioned beliefs– that makes people go crazy.

Like Voltaire said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Indeed. It’s because of unquestioned beliefs that people drop bombs on other people. It’s because of unquestioned beliefs that people commit genocide. It’s because of unquestioned beliefs that the KKK is at war with everything not Aryan.

But, as Guy Harrison advised, “Hate the belief, love the believer.” Taking things into consideration, rather than believing in things, sets us free. It opens us up. Not just our minds, but our hearts as well. When we hate the belief but love the believer, we are empathizing with the human condition itself. We’re rising above the pettiness of the lizard brain’s fight-or-flight need for comfort. We’re elevating ourselves to a state of heightened awareness where we are able to utilize our evolved mind and trump our primitive brain. We’re transcending the outdated lower frequencies with updated higher frequencies. Not believing in anything is absolute freedom because we’re able to magically rise above the silliness of it all. We’re able to see how everything is connected to everything else and how attempting to stuff infinity into the finite nutshell of a belief is done in vain. It’s perhaps the vainest act of all. Better not to be vain in the first place. Better to stay where the magic is. Better to remain in a state of constant awe, in love with the moment, bewildered and astonished by the grandeur of the unknown. Better to be like a humorous magician insouciantly daring to pull it all out of a hat. Imagination free. Intellect untethered. Love unmoored. Humor dethroning all kings –be they kings of mind, body, or soul. Unlimited by belief, but limited by cosmic limits –whatever they may be. And Voilà tout! Magic becomes a real possibility.

Catching the Bug of Synchronicity

via awakeninthedream

Synchronicities are those moments of “meaningful coincidence” when the boundary dissolves between the inner and the outer. At the synchronistic moment, just like a dream, our internal, subjective state appears, as if materialized in, as and through the outside world. Touching the heart of our being, synchronicities are moments in time in which there is a fissure in the fabric of what we have taken for reality and there is a bleed through from a higher dimension outside of time. Synchronicities are expressions of the dreamlike nature of reality, as they are moments in time when the timeless, dreamlike nature of the universe shines forth its radiance and openly reveals itself to us, offering us an open doorway to lucidity.

Synchronicity was one of Jung’s most profound yet least understood discoveries, in part because it cannot be appreciated until we personally step into and experience the synchronistic realm for ourselves. Jung’s discovery of synchronicity was in a sense the parallel in the realm of psychology to Einstein’s discovery of the law of relativity in physics. Because it is so radically discontinuous with our conventional notions of the nature of reality, the experience of synchronicity is so literally mind-blowing that Jung contemplated this phenomenon for over twenty years before he published his thinking about it. Jung’s synchronistic universe was a new world view which embraced linear causality while simultaneously transcending it. A synchronistic universe balances and complements the mechanistic world of linear causality with a realm that is outside of space, time and causality. In a synchronicity, two heterogeneous world-systems, the causal and acausal, interlock and interpenetrate each other for a moment in time, which is both an expression of while creating in the field an aspect of our wholeness to manifest. The synchronistic universe is beginning-less in that we are participating in its creation right now, which is why Jung calls it “an act of creation in time.”

To illustrate what he meant by the word synchronicity, Jung brings up an experience he shared with a patient of his. This particular patient was very caught in her head, and the analysis was seemingly going nowhere. She was stuck, trapped in the self-created prison of her own mind. Jung realized there was nothing he could do. In Jung’s words, “I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort in which she had sealed herself.” She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone offered her a golden scarab – a valuable piece of jewelry. At the moment she was telling Jung the dream, there was a tapping on the office window. Jung opened up the window and a scarabaeid beetle, whose gold-green color closely resembles that of a golden scarab, flew into the room. Jung caught the beetle in his hand, handed it to her and said “Here is your scarab.”

The shock of recognition in the synchronistic moment, in which Jung’s patient realized her dream of the previous night was being both literally and symbolically enacted in her waking life, pierced through her resistance and cracked her defensive shell wide open. At the moment of synchronistic transmission, a fundamental shift in perception took place within her which inwardly transformed her and made her receptive in a new way. From that point on, Jung commented, “The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.”

There was no conventional, linear causal link between the patient’s dream and the beetle tapping on the window the next day. But there was clearly an equivalence and meaningful connection between the two co-related events which was not based on linear causality In addition, the patient, as an active, egoic agent in space and time, didn’t cause or create the synchronicity, which was acausal and happened of its own accord. And yet, in some mysterious way, the beetle tapping on the window was intimately related to her.

To quote Jung, “Synchronicity is no more baffling or mysterious than the discontinuities of physics. It is only the ingrained belief in the sovereign power of causality that creates intellectual difficulties and makes it appear unthinkable that causeless events exist or could ever exist. But if they do, then we must regard them as creative acts, as the continuous creation of a pattern that exists from all eternity, repeats itself sporadically, and is not derivable from any known antecedents.” This quote by Jung has an interesting footnote which adds the following, “Continuous creation is to be thought of not only as a series of successive acts of creation, but also as the eternal presence of the one creative act.”

Synchronicities are cystallizations in linear time of a nonlinear, acausal, atemporal process, windows into the realm outside of time and space, a world in which we ourselves are active participants in and of “the one creative act.” Synchronicities are both timeless and temporal, which is to say they are possessed of a double nature with regard to time. Synchronicities can be deeply religious and mystical experiences, expanding our sense of who we imagine we are and transforming our intimate relationship with ourselves.

Synchronicities are expressions of the dreamlike nature of reality – like with Jung’s patient, our night dreams can manifest in our waking life, but also in the sense that, just like with our dreams at night, our inner process is given shape to through the seemingly outer world. In a night dream, the seemingly outer dreamscape is synchronistically reflecting the internal psyche of the dreamer, as the dream is not separate from the inner world but is nothing other than the psyche within apparently externalized. There is an instantaneous correspondence between the inner and outer worlds not because they are two separate dimensions that are communicating faster than the speed of light, but because they are inseparably united as one seamless, already unified, whole continuum.

Being unmediated manifestations of the dreamlike nature of reality, we can interpret synchronicities just like we would interpret a dream. Mythologically speaking, a scarab is an archetypal symbol which represents, as in ancient Egypt, death/rebirth and transformation. Gold symbolically represents the highest value. Being offered a golden scarab in both her night and waking dreams was a form of synchronistic notarization by the archetype, highlighting its arrival on the scene. The synchronicity was an expression of – as well as the doorway through which – Jung’s patient was personally enacting an archetypal process of the renewal of consciousness. The synchronicity bore the stamp of the excited archetype, revealing to her and making real in time that she was actually taking part in a timeless, mythic drama of death and rebirth. Catapulting her out of the limited frame of reference of the conceptual mind, the synchronistic moment helped her access a deeper part of herself, as well as re-connecting her to the universe at large in which she lived.

Synchronicities are both the vehicle through which and an expression of the fact that we are waking up to the dreamlike nature of the universe. Being genuine wake up calls from the awakened part of ourselves, synchronicities are emanations of the part of ourselves that is waking up projected into time.

What I call the “deeper, dreaming Self,” is the part of us that is the dreamer of both our night and waking dreams. Being “nonlocal,” which is to say not bound by the conventional laws of space and time, as well as being multi-dimensional, the deeper, dreaming Self can simultaneously express itself through inner experiences such as inspirations and dreams as well as by attracting events in the seemingly outer world so as to coagulate itself in embodied form.

The deeper, dreaming Self was simultaneously the dreamer of the golden scarab in the patient’s night dream, the inspiration for her to tell Jung the dream in their session, the source of the beetle which was tapping on the window at exactly the right moment, the impulse which animated Jung to open the window, catch the beetle, offer it to his patient and say what he said, as well as the patient’s inner, revelatory experience of transformation which was the result. Being multi-faceted and multi-channeled, the deeper, dreaming Self nonlocally arranged all these dimensions enfolded within the field into a singular psycho-physical experiential gestalt in which the oneness of spirit and matter became visible.

Interestingly, the synchronicity with Jung and his patient was an experience in which Jung himself played an active, participatory role. As the synchronistic moment was irrupting into time, he found himself dreamed up by his patient to pick up and play out a role in her dreaming process. At the moment of synchronicity, Jung went from passively sitting in the audience hearing about her process to being drafted into the act and stepping into a scene in the play of his patient’s mind. Not merely witnessing his patient’s synchronicity, he found himself spontaneously enacting it with her, playing his part and saying his lines perfectly, as if sent by central casting. In offering her the precious jewel of a golden scarab symbolizing death and rebirth, Jung spontaneously found himself being an open instrument for the synchronistic universe to manifest itself through him into materialized form and express itself in our world.

Jung and his patient were reciprocally collaborating in dreaming up their shared synchronistic event together. They became “quantum entangled,” interdependently and inseparably merged in the co-creation of each other’s synchronicity. The synchronicity was not monopolized by Jung’s patient, as it didn’t solely belong just to her. Participating in his patient’s synchronicity, Jung was at the same time just as much having a living experience in and of his own synchronicity. Even though the synchronicity was a reflection of his patient’s inner landscape, it was simultaneously a synchronistic reflection of a deeper process taking place within Jung, too. For Jung to be hearing a patient’s dream of a golden scarab and to have a golden scarab fly into his office was an externalized, synchronistic reflection of the archetypal process of death and rebirth which was happening inside of him. It is noteworthy that a synchronistic event can collectively reflect and be mutually shared by more than one person in both similar and singularly unique ways.

To experience a synchronistic event is to necessarily be changed at our core. No one could have convinced Jung’s patient that her synchronistic experience should be dismissed as a mere coincidence, as she had an inner knowing of its meaningfulness due to how it transformed her. She no longer lived in a dis-enchanted universe.

Synchronicities by their very nature demand our active participation, as they are not something we can just passively watch and remain unaffected by. Imbued with a deeper fragrance of meaning, a synchronistic event is a revelation which contains within it a potency to insinuate itself into our very being and alter us from within. Synchronicities can transform us on a cellular level, as they are crystallizations into and out of the space of consciousness itself that have form-ulated themselves into our dimension as an expression of the part of us that is already awakened. Synchronicities inherent revelatory nature is ultimately offering us the realization that we are playing an active, participatory and hence, co-creative role in the unfoldment of the universe.

Registering the revelation embedded in the synchronistic moment is to necessarily have an expansion of consciousness, as the lens through which we view, interpret and place meaning on the nature of our experience has broadened by and through the very synchronicity itself. Because it is rich in the nutrient of meaning, a synchronistic event affects and deepens our state of awareness and perception, which is another way of saying that synchronicities are expressions of consciousness itself. Just like symbols in a dream, synchronicities do not exist objectively, separate from our own mind.

Synchronistic moments feel like grace, as they induce in us the feeling that we are right where we are supposed to be. Being numinous, synchronicities have a strong feeling component and emotional charge, which is both an expression of while simultaneously flowing into, influencing and altering the surrounding field of consciousness. A manifestation of the field as a whole, synchronicities are a field phenomenon, and to receive their full blessing we need to relate to them as such. Synchronicities are a reflection of the deeper, underlying nonlocal field of consciousness waking up to itself through us. The gift of synchronicity cannot be realized from the point of view which imagines we exist as a separate person who is “other” than the field in which we are arising. Jung and his patient’s shared synchronistic event was a living experience of being connected to something greater than themselves. Synchronicities are acute outbreaks of the archetypal, collective mind-field crystallized into our personal sphere through the third-dimensional medium of time and space.

Synchronicities are glimpses of transcendental unity, what in Latin is called the “unus mundus,” the one world. The unus mundus is the unitary and unifying realm which underlies, pervades and contains all dimensions of our experience. The unus mundus, just like the deeper, dreaming Self, is a psycho-physical reality, a universe beyond time and outside of space in which psyche and matter are inseparably co-joined as interconnected parts of a deeper, unified field. The unus mundus is a world in which we have already woken up. It is a realm beyond duality, beyond the opposites, beyond even the concept of beyond. In the unus mundus, opposites like matter and psyche form the outer and inner aspects of the same transcendental reality. Revealing its designs through events in the outer world as well as the psychic landscape within, the unus mundus is actualizing itself in time as we divine our wholeness through the synchronistic clues encoded within the fabric of experience itself.

Paradoxically, synchronicities are a living, unmediated materialization of our unconscious, while simultaneously being a nonlocalized manifestation of the part of us that’s waking up into a more expanded consciousness. Like a genuine symbol, synchronicities are utterances of the soul, as they contain, are an expression of and unite the opposites. Synchronicities are soul-making in action.

ARCHETYPES

Synchronicities occur when we step out of the personal dimension of our experience and access what is called the archetypal dimension of experience. If we are absorbed in and identified with the person-alistic perspective, we person-alize our experience, imagining we exist as a separate person isolated from the space around us. We thus become entranced into a particularized point of view which develops a seemingly autonomous life of its own and becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop, a true “self” fulfilling prophecy. To become identified with the fixed reference point of the separate self limits our freedom, entraps our creative potency and hinders our compassion. To the extent we recognize the dreamlike nature of our situation, however, we step out of a person-alistic and reductive viewpoint based on linear causality (i.e., the perspective of the illusory skin-encapsulated ego) into a more archetypal perspective in which we find ourselves playing roles in an eternal, mythic and divine drama of incarnation.

The synchronicity with Jung’s patient was revealing something not just about her inner, personal process, but was a revelation of a deep, archetypal process which exists within the collective unconscious itself. The synchronicity was simultaneously revealing a dynamic which is both personal and collective – it is at the moment of being truly deadlocked that a deeper archetypal dynamic within the psyche becomes activated and nonlocally expresses itself synchronistically in and through the canvas of the seemingly outer world, as well as within ourselves. To quote Jung, “The patient with the scarab found herself in an ‘impossible’ situation because the treatment had got stuck and there seemed to be no way out of the impasse…It is this kind of situation that constellates the archetype with the greatest regularity.” What is true individually is also true collectively – when we, as a species, find ourselves in an “impossible” situation with no exit plan, it is this very kind of dilemma which constellates the healing and revelatory archetypal realm to become synchronistically activated.

Though it sounds like a big, fancy word, an “archetype” is something we all experience and know intimately from the inside. Indefinable, an archetype is like a psychological instinct or informational field of influence which patterns our psyche, our experience of the world around us and how we experience ourselves. Jung calls archetypes “typical modes of apprehension.” An archetype is like the underlying grid-line or blue print which in-forms and structures how we perceive, interpret and respond to our experience.

The personal dimension literalizes our experiences, while the archetypal dimension symbolizes, mythologizes and dreams into our experiences with the utmost creative imagination. Archetypes are the image-making factor in the psyche, informing and giving shape to the images in our mind and the dreams of our soul, and as such, they insist on being approached imaginatively.

When an archetype gets activated within us, it nonlocally constellates itself outwardly in the surrounding field. Conversely, when an archetype is activated in the seemingly outer field, it simultaneously constellates and is a synchronistic reflection of the same activated archetype within ourselves. An activated archetype’s magnetic field-of-force orders and organizes the entire field to synchronistically re-arrange itself so as to embody the archetype “in form.” The archetype is thus pure inform-ation. Archetypes nonlocally exert their in-forming influence through the frictionless and super-fluid medium of the collective unconscious itself. The archetypal, synchronistic realm vaporizes illusory boundaries – revealing spirit – and builds bridges which mediate and connect the inner and the outer, the conscious and the unconscious, and dreaming and waking.

Synchronicities occur at times of deep archetypal excitation in the field, which is to say moments of crisis, transition, creative tension and dynamic intensity. The archetype that gets activated by the field precipitates itself into the field as a synchronistic expression of the very field which activated it. Periods of disturbance in our world are both a manifestation of and trigger for a corresponding archetype in the collective unconscious of humanity to draw to itself everything it needs to synchronistically render itself visible in form. Times of distress, both individually and collectively, catalyze a deeper, self-regulating and healing archetypal process to awaken within the human psyche which simultaneously expresses itself throughout the whole universe.

There is a profound and intimate synchronistic correlation between what is happening deep within the collective unconscious of humanity and what is playing out collectively on the world stage. Just like a dream, whatever we are unconscious of gets dreamed up and out-pictured in and as our waking dreamscape. What plays out in one person’s night dream is a reflection of their inner process; similarly what is getting dreamed up by all six and a half billion of us on the world stage is a reflection of a process going on deep inside of the collective unconscious of humanity.

When a formless archetype of the collective unconscious is at the point of becoming conscious and incarnating, it has an energetic charge that will seize people, get them in its grip and compel them to act itself out so as to give shape and form to itself. What we are unconscious of and don’t remember, we act out in the outside world.

Like the underlying, invisible axial system is the skeleton of an emerging crystal, the archetypes of the collective unconscious in-form, pattern and structure our unconscious itself. The inner archetypal dimension is revealing itself by influencing and animating our unconscious, causing us to act out and give shape to the archetypal realm in the world theater. This is happening both individually and collectively on the world stage.

Archetypes can possess individuals or whole nations. Archetypes bedazzle consciousness in such a way that it becomes blind to its own assumed standpoint. When an archetype takes over a person, group or nation, they can be said to be the incarnation or the revelation of the formless, transpersonal archetype in human form, as they synchronistically em-body and mirror back to us this archetypal dynamic which exists deep inside of all of us. When the archetypal realm incarnates, something of the eternal, imperishable dimension synchronistically reveals itself to us as it enters the realm of time and embodiment. Synchronicities are revelations in the nick of time. As our present moment in time indicates, whether we continue to destroy ourselves or wake ourselves up depends upon whether or not we recognize what is synchronistically being revealed to us.

What we don’t remember, we aren’t associated with. Our dis-memberment from our experience and dis-association from a part of ourselves polarizes and empowers our split-off part to project itself outside of ourselves and express itself by acting itself out in the outside world. We will either become possessed by our split-off part and unconsciously act it out in the world, or we will project it out so that we dream up the seemingly outer universe to act it out for us. This is another way of saying that our waking universe is a function of our consciousness, or lack thereof.

When an archetype synchronistically manifests itself in full-bodied form in the outside world, its full blown localized revelation in time is necessarily correlated to – and an unmediated manifestation of – a more fundamental, nonlocal condition which simultaneously exists both outside of time and inside the timeless part of ourselves. An archetype synchronistically revealing itself in the outside world is a reflection that this same condition is in the of being inwardly realized. The outer, synchronistic materialization of the inner, archetypal process is itself the vehicle through which the archetypal process both actualizes itself in space and time and is inwardly realized.

The spirit that animates synchronicities, if we can speak of such immaterial matters, is the same spirit which inspires our dreams at night. This spirit, the aforementioned “unus mundus” or “deeper, dreaming Self,” is dreaming our dreams at night, our life during the day, as well as ourselves. The unus mundus/deeper, dreaming Self arranges situations in our life, both micro and macrocosmically as a way of synchronizing itself, which propels us into greater alignment with the implicate field of open possibility, as we refine and re-find ourselves in each moment anew. To the extent we realize the dreamlike nature of reality, the universe becomes a continually unfolding oracle as we become a revelation to ourselves.

In a synchronicity, the conjunction of two cosmic principles, namely psyche and matter, takes place, and in the process a real exchange of attributes occurs as well. In such situations the psyche behaves as if it were material and matter behaves as if it were an expression of the psyche. Synchronicities are emanations of the sacred marriage in alchemy, where the opposites of spirit and matter reciprocally inform each other as they unite in a timeless embrace.

Instead of orienting ourselves one-sidedly just to the spiritual to the exclusion of matter, or material matters disconnected from spirit, Jung felt that the psychological/spiritual task of our unique time in history is to live and incarnate the realization of the unity of spirit and matter which synchronistic events are revealing to us. Instead of, or in addition to the spirit coming down from the heavens above, spirit’s guidance is emerging and rising up from within matter itself and is waiting to be recognized.

Subjectively, synchronistic phenomena evoke in us the feeling that we are not alone, that there is a silent partner that we share our lives with who is dreaming with us. It is as if there is an autonomous factor deep within us arranging our experiences so as to help us to wake up. Part and parcel of a synchronistic event’s numinosity is its sense of meeting the “wholly other,” whether it be within ourselves or through the medium of the outside world. Paradoxically, through synchronicities we connect with ourselves by becoming introduced to the part of ourselves which is other than who we imagine ourselves to be.

Recognizing the synchronistic matrix which patterns our experience empowers us to be creative, co-operative and active partners in our own awakening process. The more we are open for synchronicities to happen, the more they happen, for synchronicities, just like symbols in a dream, are not separate from the dreamer, which in this case is us. To the extent we recognize the dreamlike nature of our waking universe is the degree to which our life is experienced as synchronistic. Once we become lucid in our waking dream and recognize that we live in a synchronistic universe by our very nature, the universe has no choice but to shape-shift and reflect back our realization by materializing itself synchronistically.

Being initiatory rites of passage, synchronicities empower us to view life synchronistically. Seeing through synchronistic eyes has nothing to do with overlaying a fabricated interpretation upon events to make them appear as if they are synchronistic. Seeing synchronistically simply involves recognizing the underlying synchronistic web which is always weaving itself through our experience. This is analogous to how being inside of a night dream and viewing the dream as if it were a dream would have the instantaneous effect of allowing the dream to more profoundly manifest its dreamlike nature. Changing our perspective within the dream didn’t cause the dream to become a dream; the dream had always been a dream, we just hadn’t recognized it before. Similarly, we live in a synchronistic universe, and by recognizing this, we allow the universe to manifest itself more synchronistically.

Synchronicities are like “cultures” from another dimension which create and enrich culture in ours. Like a bug in the system, synchronicities are cultures which virally propagate themselves through the field of consciousness, which means that synchronistic awareness is contagious. Synchronistic awareness, the consciousness that recognizes the synchronistic nature of the universe and has become lucid in the dream of life, is something we can turn each other onto and catch from one another. Synchronistic awareness is the invocation and revelation of the “eternal presence of the one creative act” in which we are all continually sharing, partaking and participating. Synchronistic awareness activates and reproduces itself in and through the field, as it is self-generating in nature, which is to say it is birthing itself through our consciousness into the world.

Just like Jung, we can help each other catch the “bug” of synchronicity. We can co-operatively cultivate a net-work of allies who creatively collaborate in bringing forth the precious jewel of synchronicity. The archetypal field becomes greatly potentiated for synchronicities when we get “in sync” with other people who are also waking up to the synchronistic universe. A field which is lubricated for stimulating and stabilizing lucidity gets conjured up when we get in phase with each other through the shared, open heart of synchronistic awareness. Co-operatively engaged, synchronistic awareness activates our collective genius and creates true culture in that it effortlessly, endlessly, nonlocally and virally transmits and fractally reiterates itself throughout time and space. Shared synchronistic awareness magnetically draws and attracts the universe into itself, materializing itself in, as and through life itself, creating a revelatory universe in the process.

The Enlightened Madness of Philip K Dick

via awakeninthedream

There is something terribly wrong in our world. The Native American people have a term—wetiko—that can really help us to contextualize and get more of a handle on the ever-unfolding catastrophe playing out all over our planet. As my research deepens, I am continually amazed that so many different spiritual wisdom traditions, as well as creative artists, are each in their own unique ways, pointing out wetiko. Wetiko—which can be likened to a virus of the mind—works through our unconscious blind spots, which is to say that it depends upon our unawareness of its covert operations within our own minds to keep itself in business. There is no one definitive model that fully delineates the elusive workings of wetiko disease, but when all of these unique articulations are seen together, a deeper picture begins to get in focus that can help us to see it. Seeing how wetiko works—both out in the world and within our own minds—is its worst nightmare, for once we see how it is playing us, its gig is up.

Recently, I have been delighted to learn that the science fiction author Philip K. Dick (henceforth PKD) was, in his own completely unique and “Philip K. Dickian” way describing wetiko—the psycho-spiritual disease that afflicts our species—to a T. Considered to be one of the pre-eminent sci-fi writers of his—or any—time, PKD had one of the most unique, creative, unusual and original minds I have ever come across. Way ahead of his time, he was a true visionary and seer, possibly even a prophet. To say that PKD had an unfettered imagination is an understatement of epic proportions—it is hard to imagine an imagination more unrestrained. Continually questioning everything, he was actually a very subtle thinker whose prime concern was the question “What is reality?”

Though mainly a writer of fiction, PKD didn’t consider himself a novelist, but rather, a “fictionalizing philosopher,” by which he meant that his stories—what have been called “his wacky cauldron of science fiction and metaphysics”[1]—were employed as the medium for him to formulate his perceptions. In other words, his fiction was the way he was trying to figure out what was going on in this crazy world of ours, as well as within his own mind. As the boundary dissolved between what was real and what wasn’t, he even wondered whether he had become a character in one of his own novels (in his own words, “I’m a protagonist from one of PKD’s books”). Through his writing, PKD tapped into the shamanic powers of language to shape, bend and alter consciousness, thereby changing our view and experience of reality itself.

From all accounts, it is clear that PKD’s life involved deep suffering; his process included bungled suicide attempts, self-described psychotic episodes, psychiatric hospitalizations and abuse of drugs (he was a “speed writer,” in that most of his writing was fueled by speed—amphetamines). We shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, however, and use these facts to invalidate his insights or dismiss the profundity of his work. Though much of what he wrote came out of whatever extreme state he was in at the moment, he was definitely (in my opinion) plugged into something profound. PKD was a true creative artist who, in wrestling with his demons, left us a testament that can help us illumine our own struggles.

In 1974 Dick had—at least from his point of view—an overwhelming mystical experience, which he spent the rest of his life trying to understand and integrate. He was thrown into a “crisis of revelation,” feeling an inner demand to understand what had been revealed to him. I love that he didn’t have a fixed point of view in his inquiry, but, depending on the day, wondered whether he had become, in his words, a saint or schizophrenic. He continually came up with new theories and viewpoints, depending upon who knows what. There is no psychiatric category yet devised that could do justice to the combination of genius and high weirdness that characterized PKD’s process. It is clear from his philosophical writings, letters and personal journal (his “Exegesis”) that whatever it was he experienced in 1974 radically changed his whole perception of the universe and his—and our—place in it.

PKD confesses in his letters that the world has always seemed “dreamlike” to him. To quote PKD, “The universe could turn into a dream because in point of fact our universe is a dream.”[2] We are asleep—in a dream state—and mistakenly think we are awake. PKD writes in his journal, “We are forgetful cosmocrators [i.e., rulers], trapped in a universe of our own making without our knowing it.”[3] It is as if we are living inside of a dreamlike universe, but in our state of amnesia we have forgotten that we are the dream’s creators—the dreamers of the dream—and hence, have become trapped inside of a world that is our own creation. As PKD points out, “one of the fundamental aspects of the ontological category of ignorance is ignorance of this very ignorance; he not only does not know, he does not know that he does not know.”[4] We ignore—and remain ignorant of—what PKD is pointing at to our own peril.

I imagine that if PKD were here today he would be most pleased to learn that his mind-blowing revelations were helping us to wrap our minds around the over-the-top craziness that is getting acted out in every corner of our world. Not only precisely mapping the covert operations of the destructive aspects of wetiko, PKD offers psycho-activating insights into how to deal with its insidious workings that are novel beyond belief, insights that can therefore add to the ever-growing corpus of studies on wetiko. Like a modern-day shaman, PKD descended into the darkness of the underworld of the unconscious and took on—and into himself—the existential madness that afflicts humanity, and in his creative articulations of his experience, is offering gifts for all the rest of us. For this we should be most grateful.

THE BLACK IRON PRISON

We are trapped in a dream of our own making. PKD writes, “We are in a kind of prison but do not know it.”[5] Becoming aware of our imprisonment, however, is the first, crucial step in becoming free of it. One of the main terms PKD coined to describe wetiko is the “Black Iron Prison” [henceforth BIP]. PKD writes, “The BIP is a vast complex life form (organism) which protects itself by inducing a negative hallucination of it.”[6] By negative hallucination, PKD means that instead of seeing what is not there, we cannot see what is there. In PKD’s words, “The criminal virus controls by occluding (putting us in a sort of half sleep)…. The occlusion is self-perpetuating; it makes us unaware of it.”[7] Being self-perpetuating, this occlusion in our consciousness will not go away of its own accord; it acts as a feedback loop (in PKD’s words, “a positive feedback on itself”) that perpetually self-generates until we manage to break its spell. PKD writes, “the very occlusion itself prevents us from assessing, overcoming or ever being aware of the occlusion.”[8]

An intrinsic challenge to our investigation of wetiko/BIP is that it is incarnating in and through the very psyche which itself is the means of our inquiry. Speaking about the difficulty of seeing wetiko/BIP, PKD writes, “we alter it by perceiving it, since we are not outside it. As our views shift, it shifts. In a sense it is not there at all.”[9] Similar to how an image in a dream doesn’t exist separate from the mind of the dreamer, wetiko/BIP does not objectively exist, independent from the mind that is perceiving it. In our encounter with wetiko, we find ourselves in a situation where we are confronted—practically face-to-face—with the unconscious, both its light and darker halves.

There is another problem with seeing wetiko/BIP. Because it is invisible to most people, seeing it can be an isolating experience. When we see wetiko/BIP, we are, in PKD’s words, “seeing what is there—but no one else does, hence no semantic sign exists to depict the entity and therefore the organism cannot continue an empathic relationship with the members of his society. And this breakdown of empathy is double; they can’t empathize his ‘world,’ and he can’t theirs.”[10] This points to the important role language plays in human life—it is the cardinal instrument through which individual worldviews are linked so that a shared, agreed-upon, and for all intents and purposes common reality is constructed. Hence, creating language and finding the name—be it wetiko, the Black Iron Prison or whatever we call it—is crucial for getting a handle on this elusive mind-virus.

It is as if our species is suffering from a thought-disorder. PKD writes, “There is some kind of ubiquitous thinking dysfunction which goes unnoticed especially by the persons themselves, and this is the horrifying part of it: somehow the self-monitoring circuit in the person is fooled by the very dysfunction it is supposed to monitor.”[11] When we have fallen under the spell of the wetiko virus, we aren’t aware of our affliction; from our point of view we are normal, oftentimes never feeling more ourselves (while the exact opposite is actually true; i.e., we have been taken over by something alien to ourselves). Working through the projective tendencies of the mind, wetiko distracts us by exploiting our unconscious habitual tendency to see the source of our problems outside of ourselves.

Speaking of the BIP, PKD writes, “We are supposed to combat it phagocyte-wise, but the very valence of the (BIP) stasis warps us into micro-extensions of itself; this is precisely why it is so dangerous. This is the dread thing it does: extending its android thinking (uniformity) more and more extensively. It exerts a dreadful and subtle power, and more and more people fall into its field (power), by means of which it grows.”[12] “Android thinking,” i.e., robotic, machine-like group-thinking (with no creativity programmed in), is one of the qualities of a mind taken over by wetiko/BIP. Just as someone bit by a vampire becomes a vampire themselves, if we don’t see how wetiko/BIP works through our unconscious blind spots, it “warps us into micro-extensions of itself” such that we unwittingly become its purveyors, which is how it propagates itself in the field.

Masses are breeding grounds for this nefarious mind virus to flourish. Wetiko/BIP is not just something that afflicts individuals—it is a collective psychosis that can only work the full power of its black magic through groups of people. In his book The Divine Invasion, PKD has one of his characters say, “Sometimes I think this planet is under a spell…. We are asleep or in a trance.” Along similar lines, in his Exegesis, PKD writes, “We got entangled in enchantment, a gingerbread cottage that beguiled us into enslavement and ruin…we are not merely enslaved, we are trapped.”[13] As if living within a mythic or fairy tale-like reality, our species is under a bewitchment—a seeming curse—of massive proportions. Contemplating “the basic condition of life,” PKD writes that each one of us will “be required to violate your own identity…this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life.”[14] This curse that feeds on life is another name for wetiko/BIP. Thankfully, in his writings PKD gives us clues regarding how to break out of this curse.

We can’t break out of the curse, however, without first shedding light on the nature of the darkness we have fallen into that is informing the curse. Giving a precise description of how wetiko/BIP works, PKD writes, “This is a sinister life form indeed. First it takes power over us, reducing us to slaves, and then it causes us to forget our former state, and be unable to see or to think straight, and not to know we can’t see or think straight, and finally it becomes invisible to us by reason of what it has done to us. We cannot even monitor our own deformity, our own impairment.”[15] A complex and seemingly malevolent life form, wetiko/BIP works through the cover of the unconscious, rendering itself invisible to our conscious awareness. It feeds off of and into our unawareness of it.

Further elaborating the BIP, PKD writes, “It can not only affect our percept systems directly but can alter our memories.”[16] We become convinced that our—i.e., “its”—memories are objectively real, therefore feeding into the self-limiting and self-defeating narrative the virus wants us to believe about ourselves. We then tell stories—both to others as well as ourselves—about who we are and what happened to us in the past to make us this way in a manner that reifies us into a solidified identity. In The Divine Invasion, PKD has a character say, “something causes us to see what it wants us to see and remember and think what it wants us to remember and think.” Are these the ravings of a paranoid madman, or insights of someone who is seeing through the illusion, snapping out of the spell and waking up?

PKD writes, “It is as if the immune system has failed to detect an invader, a pathogen (shades of William Burroughs: a criminal virus!). Yes, the human brain has been invaded, and once invaded, is occluded to the invasion and the damage resulting from the invasion; it has now become an instrument for the pathogen: it winds up serving as its slave, and thus the ‘heavy metal speck’ [i.e., the BIP] is replicated (spread through linear and lateral time, and through space).”[17] The mind invaded becomes an unwitting channel for the pathogen to further propagate and spread itself in and through the field.

To quote PKD, “We may not be what we seem even to ourselves.”[18] Wetiko/BIP is a shape-shifting bug; it cloaks itself in and assumes our form, impersonating us such that we then identify with its limited and impoverished version of who we are while we simultaneously dissociate from—and forget—who we actually are. Wetiko/BIP is in competition with us for a share of our own mind; it literally does everything it can to think in our place, sit in our seat and occupy—and possess—our very selves. Speaking of this very situation, PKD writes, “A usurper is on the throne.”[19]

Having no creativity on its own, once wetiko “puts us on,” i.e., fools us into buying into its version of who we are, it can then piggyback onto and plug into our intrinsic creativity, co-opting our creative imagination to serve its malevolent agenda. PKD writes, “Being without psyche of its own it slays the authentic psyches of those creatures locked into it, and replaces them with a spurious microform of its own dead psyche.”[20] Sometimes using the phrase the “Black Iron Prison Police State” (which is mirrored externally in the ever-increasing “police state” of the world), PKD also describes this state as one where the person so afflicted becomes “frozen” (as in trauma), in a “corpse-state” (i.e., spiritually dead).

Wetiko/BIP can be conceived of as a cancer of the psyche that slowly metastasizes, gradually subsuming all of the healthy parts of the psyche into itself to serve its sinister agenda. Speaking of the part of the psyche that has been captured by the BIP, PKD comments, “This section died. It became fossilized, and merely repeats itself. This is scary; it is like mental illness: ‘one day nothing new ever entered his mind—and the last thought just recirculated endlessly.’ Thus death rules here…The BIP is the form of this death, its embodiment—of what is wrong, here.”[21] Like a vampire, wetiko/BIP is—and turns us into—one of the undead; it is death taking on living human form so as to take life. Wetiko/BIP, like a virus, is “dead” matter, it is only in a living creature that viruses acquire a “quasi-life.” When we fall under wetiko’s spell, our life-force and God-given creativity become vampirically drained, as we are bled dry of what really counts.

Commenting on the BIP, PKD continues, “To see it is to see the ailment, the complex which warps all other thoughts to it.”[22] To see the BIP is to begin to heal it; there is no healing it without first seeing it. Once wetiko/BIP entrenches itself within a psyche, however, the personality then becomes one-sided, self-organizing an outer display of coherence around this pathogenic core, which masks the inner dysfunction, making it hard to recognize. In a psychic coup d’état, the wetiko bug can usurp and displace a person—or a group of people—who become its puppet and marionette. To quote PKD, “We’re a fucking goddam “Biosphere” ruled by an entity who—like a hypnotist—can make us not only quack like a duck on cue, but imagine, to boot, that we wanted (decided) to quack.”[23]

PKD comments that when “we begin to see what formerly was concealed to us, or from us, and the shock is great, since we have, all our lives, been trading (doing business) with evil.”[24] This is one of the reasons it is so hard to see wetiko/BIP—there is a counterincentive built into seeing it, as we have to be strong enough to bear the trauma of seeing our own collusion with darkness. If we choose to look away from how the BIP occludes us and become resistant to bringing awareness to the nature of our situation, we are then being unconsciously complicit in our own imprisonment. To quote PKD, “So there was a base collusion between us and the BIP: it was a kind of pact!”[25] He conjectures, “we’re sources of psychic/psychological energy to it: we help power it.”[26]

As if we are in a double-bind with no exit, PKD points out that “the enslaved people cannot be rescued by departing the Empire [the BIP] because the Empire is worldwide.”[27] Existing within the collective unconscious itself, wetiko/BIP/Empire is ubiquitous; being nonlocal it can’t be located within the third-dimensional space-time matrix, and yet, there is no place where it is not. Its very root—as well as the medium through which it operates—is the psyche, which is somehow able to inform, extend itself and give shape to events in our world. To think that the ultimate source of the horrors that are playing out in our world is to be found somewhere other than within the human psyche is to be truly dis-oriented, i.e., looking in the wrong direction.

PKD writes, “The very doctrine of combating the ‘hostile world and its power’ has to a large extent been ossified by and put at the service of the Empire.”[28] In fighting the seeming demonic power of wetiko/BIP/Empire, we are playing its game and have already lost, as it feeds off of polarization. PKD warns that “the BIP warps every new effort at freedom into the mold of further tyranny.”[29] Even our thoughts regarding how to solve the BIP only “fuel” the seeming reality of the BIP. The Empire/BIP/wetiko will subvert every attempt at shedding light on its darkness in such a way as to feed the very darkness we are trying to illumine. And yet, if we don’t fight it, then we have no chance. What are we to do?

PKD opines, “The idea is to break the BIP’s power by revealing more and more about it.”[30] Just as a vampire loses its power in the light of day, wetiko/BIP has no power in the light of conscious awareness. To quote PKD, “The Empire is only a phantasm, lingering because we have gone to sleep.”[31] It is as if the Empire/BIP/wetiko is an after-image that we have mistaken for being real; PKD refers to it as a “deceitful corpse” that apes life. The idea is to shed light on darkness—what good is seeing the light if our vision doesn’t illumine the darkness? The Gnostic text The Gospel of Philip says, “So long as the root of wickedness is hidden, it is strong. But when it is recognized, it is dissolved. When it is revealed, it perishes…. It is powerful because we have not recognized it.” (II, 3, 83.5-30.)

FAKE FAKES

Wetiko/BIP can be likened to an “anti-information” virus—not only does it block the reception of information, but it substitutes false information for the real thing. PKD writes, “the bombardment of pseudorealities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly [in his words ‘spurious humans’].”[32] PKD writes of the BIP, “it has grown vine-like into our information media; it is an information life form.”[33] It is an info life form (composed of and creating living dis-information) that lies to us—PKD compares this to the figure of Satan, who is “the liar.” Wetiko/BIP has co-opted the mainstream, corporatized media to be its propaganda organ, which becomes its instrument for creating—and delivering into our minds—fictitious realities. These institutions have, to quote PKD “an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes.”[34]

PKD was intensely interested in what makes an authentic human being. He continues, “Fake realities will produce fake humans. Or, fake humans will produce fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves.”[35] An authentic human being, on the other hand, to quote PKD, “cannot be compelled to be what they are not.”[36] He elaborates, “The power of spurious realities battering at us today—these deliberately manufactured fakes never penetrate to the heart of true human beings.”[37]

Wetiko/BIP has no creativity on its own, but is a master of imitation—it apes, mimes and impersonates both our world and ourselves, such that, if we identify with its version of the way things are, we have then given ourselves away. Succinctly stating the problem, PKD writes, “The problem is that a mock creation has filtered in, which must be transubstantiated into the real.”[38] Our universe is a collectively shared dream or hallucination that appears real; in PKD’s words, “our reality is a cunning counterfeit, mutually shared.”[39] To imbue our world with an intrinsic, objective reality that exists separate from the mind that is observing it would be, in PKD’s words, “a dreadful intellectual error.”

Pointing directly at wetiko/BIP, PKD writes that “there is a vast life form here, that has invaded this world and is camouflaged.”[40] He marvels at how it camouflages itself; in PKD’s words, it “simulated normal objects and their processes so as to copy them and in such an artful way as to make himself [the BIP] invisible within them.”[41] Through its mimicry of real phenomenal objects, the BIP, in PKD’s words, “steadily, stealthily replaces them and mimics—assumes their form.”[42] Though PKD’s writings appear “out there,” and can easily sound crazy, paranoid and conspiratorial, it should be pointed out that what he is pointing at is exactly what an apocryphal text of the Bible is referring to when it speaks of a “counterfeiting spirit.”[43]

PKD has articulated wetiko’s/BIP’s counterfeiting ability—and how the universe responds—in a way that only he can. He has realized that the very ground of being itself—PKD refers to it by various names—Christ, God, the Savior, the Urgrund (a German term used by both Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme to describe ultimate reality)—is responding to wetiko/BIP in a very unique and revelatory way. As the BIP mimes reality so as to create a counterfeit of the real thing, the ground of reality, in PKD’s words, “counterfeits the counterfeit.” In PKD’s words, “So originally the bogus info mimicked the actual successfully enough to fool us, and now we have a situation in which the actual has returned in a form mimicking the bogus.”[44]

Wetiko/BIP has created an illusory, fake world, and the ground of being itself, in a radically new ontological category that PKD calls a “fake fake,” has imitated the imitation. Delighted by this new idea, PKD asks the question, “Is a fake fake more fake than just a fake, or null-fake?”[45] In other words, if a fake fake is not more fake than a fake, is it the real thing? PDK’s idea of a fake fake is cognate to the indeterminacy between originals and simulacra that is the hallmark of the world of virtual reality. To quote PKD, “A fake fake = something real. The demiurge [the false God in Gnosticism] unsuccessfully counterfeited the pleroma, and now God/the Savior is mimicking this counterfeit cosmos with a stealthily growing real one.”[46] In other words, God/the ground of being is assimilating our seemingly counterfeit universe into and as itself.

Writing about the Savior, PKD writes that “it doesn’t want its adversary to know it’s here, so it must disguise (randomize) its presence, including by giving out self discrediting information; as if mimicking a hoax.”[47] Just like the BIP tricks us into identifying with its world, the true ground of being tricks the BIP by surreptitiously imitating and becoming it; i.e., taking it on (and into itself). It doesn’t want to let the BIP know it is doing this, which would defeat the purpose of its counter-ploy; the Savior does its mimicry on the sly. PKD comments, “The Urgrund does not advertise to the artifact [i.e., wetiko/BIP] that it is here.”[48] Just as the BIP works through our blind spots, the ground of being works through the BIP’s blind spots. PKD comments, “the artifact is as occluded as to the nature and existence of the Urgrund as we are to the artifact.”[49] Like an underground resistance movement, the Urgrund’s activities, in PKD’s words, “resemble the covert advance of a secret, determined revolution against a powerful tyranny.”[50]

Speaking of Christ as another reference for the ground of being, Dick writes, “Through him the properly functioning (living and growing) total brain replicated itself here in microform (seed-like) thereafter branching out farther and farther like a vine, a viable life form taking up residence within a dead, deranged and rigid one [BIP]. It is the nature of the rigid region to seek to detect and ensnare him, but his discorporate plasmatic nature ensures his escape from the intended imprisonment.”[51] In other words, the spirit can’t be pinned down; in PKD’s words, “He is everywhere and nowhere.”[52]

Describing this deeper process of how the ground of being potentially saves us—and itself—from wetiko/BIP, PKD comments, “a criminal entity [BIP] has been invaded by life giving cells [Christ, God, the Urgrund] which it can’t detect, and so it accepts them into itself, replacing the ‘iron’ ones.”[53] PKD is describing transubstantiation in the flesh. Speaking of the savior, PKD writes, “like a gas (plasma) he begins invisibly to expand and fill up the whole of BIP.”[54]

What I so appreciate about PKD’s vision is that he’s not just describing the life-destroying workings of wetiko/BIP, but he’s also articulating the other half of this process, which is the response from the living intelligence of the universe as a whole. To quote PKD, “The key to everything lies in understanding this mimicking living stuff.”[55] PKD equates this “form-mimicker” with the Deus Absconditus, the dark and hidden God. The idea is that God reveals Itself through its darker half.

This makes me think how the unconscious responds to a one-sided situation in our psychic lives by sending compensatory forms—like symbols in a dream—so as to bring us back into balance. To quote PKD, “If the universe is a brain the BIP is a rigid ossified complex, and Zebra [another of PKD’s names for the savior] is metabolic toxin (living info) designed to melt it out of existence by restoring elasticity to it, which means to cause it to cease recirculating the same thought over and over again.”[56]Seen psychologically, the BIP is a rigidified complex which has developed an autonomy and has gone rogue, seemingly having an independent life and a will of its own that is antithetical to and at odds with our own. In psychological-speak, until this “autonomous complex” (what indigenous people refer to as a “demon”) is dissolved and rejoins the wholeness of the psyche, “the organism,” to quote PKD, “is stuck in its cycle, in cybernetic terms; it won’t kick over—which fits with my idea that we are memory coils which won’t kick over and discharge their contents.”[57] We are like malfunctioning memory coils in a quasi-dream state; in PKD’s words, “we are an impaired section of the megamind.”[58]

These contemplations helped PKD to contextualize, and hopefully integrate his overwhelming spiritual experience of 1974. He writes that his experience is “an achievement by the Urgrund in reaching its objective of reflecting itself back to itself, using me as a point of reflection.”[59] In other words, PKD realized that we are all potentially reflecting mirrors for the divine ground of being to wake up to itself. This is to say that we play a crucial role in the deeper archetypal process of the Incarnation of the deity. PKD writes in his journal, “Perhaps the transformation of and in me in 3-74 [i.e., March, 1974] was when this mimicking ‘plasma’ reached me and replaced me—although I appeared outwardly the same (i.e., my essence changed—a new self replaced the old)…my ‘me’ was covertly replaced by a greater other ‘me’ I’d never seen or known before.”[60] This greater self that replaced PKD’s ego goes by many names: the greater personality, the Self, our true nature, Buddha nature and Christ, to name but a few.

PKD writes, “A human can evolve into Christ if Christ ignites his own self in the human and takes the human over[61]…it is at the moment of when the ultimate blow (of pain, murderous injury, humiliation and death) is struck, it is Christ who is there, replacing the victim and taking the blow himself. This is what happened to me in 3-74.”[62] He continues, “So flight from suffering inexorably involves a flight from life (reality)…. But the secret, mysterious opposite from this is a full facing of suffering—a non-flinching—that can lead to a magic alchemy: suddenly it is you/suddenly it is Christ/so you must equal (be) Christ.”[63] In psychological speak, the “genuine suffering” (to use Jung’s words) that PKD went through enabled him to withdraw his unconscious projections from an outward historical or metaphysical figure and wake up the Christ within himself. In other words, he was able to introject this sacred figure, i.e., realize that Christ (i.e., the Self) lived in him and was not an external figure separate and different from himself.[64]

DREAMLIKE COSMOLOGY

According to PKD’s cosmology, it is as if God the creator has allowed himself to become captured, enslaved by and hostage to his own creation. PKD writes, “He, the living, is at the mercy of the mechanical. The servant has become the master, and the master the servant.”[65] PKD’s words have a particular ring of truth in this technological age of ours, where many people think that one of the greatest dangers that faces humanity is that AI (artificial intelligence) can potentially enslave its human creators. PKD continues, “But the artifact is teaching him, painfully, by degrees, over thousands of years, to remember—who he is and what he is. The servant-become-master is attempting to restore the master’s lost memories and hence his true identity.”[66]

PKD’s contemplations shed light on what might be the hidden purpose of the emergence of wetiko/BIP in our world. PKD comments, “The artifact enslaves us, but on the other hand it is attempting to teach us to throw off its enslavement.”[67] Wetiko/BIP tests us so as to make sure that we will make optimal use of our divine endowment. As PKD points out, the fundamental dialectic at work is liberation vs. enslavement. Here’s what I wrote in Dispelling Wetiko, “Wetiko literally demands that we step into our power and become resistant to its oppression such that we discover how to step out of bondage and become free, or else!”[68] In a sense wetiko/BIP is the guardian of the threshold of our evolution.

PKD has created a parable in which a fallen and amnesiac God has fallen prey to Its own creation and is in need of redemption. Lest we think that PKD’s cosmological imaginings are the ravings of a madman, it should be pointed out that his theories are fully resonant with those found in the profound wisdom traditions of alchemy, Gnosticism, Kabbalah and Christianity. Evoking “Christ as the salvator salvandus,” PKD writes of “the savior who must be saved and who is in a certain real sense identical with those he saves.”[69]

In PKD’s words, “The creator can afford to descend into his own creation. He can afford to shed his memories (of his identity) and his supernatural powers…. The creator deliberately plants clues in his irreal creation—clues which he cunningly knows in time (eventually) will restore his memory (anamnesis) of who he is…. So he has a fail-safe system built in. No chance he won’t eventually remember. Makes himself subject to spurious space, time and world (and death, pain, loss, decay, etc.), but has these disinhibiting clues or stimuli distributed deliberately strategically in time and space. So it is he himself who sends himself the letter which restores his memory (Legend of the Pearl). No fool he!”[70]

It is as if we, or more accurately, our true identity as the Self (which is whole and connected with the whole) plants alarm clocks in the waking dream—what PKD calls “a perturbation in the reality field”—that are set to go off at just the right time, acting as a catalyst to wake us up. In PKD’s words, “The megamind is attempting to stimulate us back to being in touch with itself.”[71] Once these clues—which can be conceived of as a higher dimension of our being signaling to us—are deciphered, we can discover, as PKD suggests, that we’ve composed them ourselves. What PKD calls “disinhibiting clues” (what he also calls “Logos triggering agents,” and what I call “lucidity stimulators”) are like keys that open up the lock encasing our minds so that we can remember who we are and our life’s mission, i.e., what we are here to do. PKD writes, “Zebra is trying to find—reach—us and make us aware of it—more primarily, it seeks to free us from the BIP, to break the BIP’s power over us.”[72]

Our classical, materialist mechanistic worldview is, as PKD rightfully points out, “shabby and cracking apart and fading away.”[73] PKD writes that there is a “universe lying behind ours, concealed within—yes, actually concealed within ours!”[74] The universe we see simultaneously conceals and reveals the universe lying behind ours. It is PKD’s opinion that in order to construct a new worldview to replace the one that is cracking apart, we need to see—to re-cognize—the universe concealed within ours. “The world is not merely counterfeit,” PKD writes, “there is more: it is counterfeit, but under it lies another world, and it is this other world, this Logos world, which filters or breaks through.”[75] He continues, “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 directly, without the help of any priest.”[76] This other universe—a universe that we are not separate from and is not separate from our consciousness—doesn’t need an external mediator to be accessed, but can be reached through direct experience.

I call this other, higher-dimensional world that underlies and is concealed within ours (borrowing a term from physics) the “nonlocal field,” which is a field that contains, pervades and expresses itself through our third-dimensional world (while at the same time not being constrained by the third-dimensional laws of space and time). The nonlocal field connects us with everything. When the nonlocal field, or in PKD’s words, the “Logos world” breaks through consensus reality and reveals itself are when we experience synchronicities—what physicist F. David Peat calls “‘flaws’ in the fabric of reality.” Synchronistic phenomena are, in Peat’s words “momentary fissures that allow us a brief glimpse of the immense and unitary order underlying all of nature.”

Just like the BIP/artifact/Empire/wetiko will co-opt and subvert any of our attempts at illumining it to feed into and serve its nefarious agenda, God/Christ/Zebra/Urgrund/Savior will use the BIP/artifact/Empire/wetiko’s attempts at imprisonment to ultimately serve our freedom. Speaking of the artifact’s agenda of “enslavement, deception and spiritual death” PKD writes, “even this is utilized by the Urgrund, which utilizes everything, [this] is a sacred secret.”[77] PKD points out that one way of expressing the fundamental dialectic is information vs. anti-information (remember: wetiko is an anti-information virus). To quote PKD, “The Empire, which by suppressing information is therefore in a sense the anti-Christ, is put to work as half of the dialectic; Christ uses everything (as was revealed to me): in its very act of suppressing information, the Empire aids in the building of the soma of the Cosmic Christ (which the Empire does not realize).”[78] This is to say that the Cosmic Christ is, in essence, generated by its antithesis (the anti-Christ).

This brings to mind Goethe’s masterpiece Faust, in which Faust asks Mephistopheles (who represents the devil) who he is, and Mephistopheles replies that he is the “part of that force which would do evil, yet forever works the good.” It is a Kabbalistic idea that, though at cross purposes to the good at its core, evil is the very condition and foundation of the highest good’s very realization.

BODHISATTVIC MADNESS

A collective psychosis, wetiko is a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul that pervades the collective unconscious of humanity. To quote PKD, “The only question is, which kind of madness will we choose?…. We are, then, all mad, but I, uniquely, choose to go mad while facing pain, not mad while denying pain.”[79] PKD is delineating two different ways of facing the pain of reality; in his writings he makes it clear that his (“non-flinching”) way of facing pain isn’t necessarily better, it just “hurts more.” PKD writes, “In a very real sense the pain we feel as living creatures is the pain of waking up…the pressure of this pain motivates us to seek an answer; which is to say, motivates us toward greater and greater consciousness.”[80] PKD is professing a point of view that can help us to recontextualize what seems to be meaningless suffering; one of the things that’s hardest for human beings to bear are experiences bereft of meaning. “The artifact,” PKD explains, speaking of and from his own experience, “by inflicting too much pain on me it had, in a certain real sense, awakened me.”[81]

In his novel Valis, PKD writes, “It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.” PKD writes, “My insanity, facing an insane world, is, paradoxically, a facing of reality, and this is sane; I refuse to close my eyes and ears.”[82] Paradoxically, PKD’s form of insanity is the most sane response of all. PKD wonders, “Perhaps if you know you are insane you are not insane.”[83] He elaborates, “The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than a razor’s edge, sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom.”[84]

Never one to shy away from the tough questions, PKD asks, “So, then, in what sense am I insane? I am insane in that I continue to face the truth without the ability to come up with a workable answer…. I really do not know anything in terms of the solution; I can only state the problem. No other thinker has ever stated a problem and so miserably failed to solve it in human histories; human thought is, basically, problem-solving, not problem stating.”[85]

I personally don’t think PKD is giving himself enough credit. For in fact, it is clear in his writings that he did come up with a “workable answer,” one that is universal and is common to all wisdom traditions. PKD likened our existential situation to being in a maze, what he refers to as “one colossal and absolute Chinese finger trap.” The harder we try to get out, the more trapped we become; this is to say that we are not able to find our way out through ordinary means. Seemingly alive and sentient, the maze has a peculiar nature of shifting as we become aware of it. It is as if it is aware of—and responds to—our awareness of it.

One only escapes from the maze, to quote PKD, “when he decides voluntarily to return (to resubject himself to the power of the maze) for the sake of these others, still in it. That is, you can never leave alone, to leave you must elect to take the others out…the ultimate paradox of the maze, its quintessential ingenuity of construction, is that the only real way out is a voluntary way back in (into it and its power), which is the path of the bodhisattva.”[86] We would only voluntarily return to help others if we recognized that they are not separate from ourselves, which is to realize that we are all interdependent and interconnected—which is the very realization that simultaneously enlivens compassion and dissolves wetiko.

PKD writes, “when you think you are out of the maze—i.e., saved—you are in fact still in it.”[87] This brings to mind the insight that if we think we are free of wetiko and it is only “others” that are afflicted with it, this very perspective is, paradoxically, a symptom of having fallen under the spell of wetiko. To quote PKD, “If there is to be happiness it must come in a voluntary relinquishing of self in exchange for aware participation in the destiny of the total one.”[88]

In a very real sense, PKD did find the solution to humanity’s existential dilemma. He writes, “compassion’s highest power is the only power capable of solving the maze.”[89] As PKD points out, “The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give.”[90] In other words, the true measure of who we are is how much we are able to love.

PKD concludes, “If the final paradox of the maze is that the only way you can escape it is voluntarily to go back in (into it), then maybe we are here voluntarily; we came back in.”[91] In other words, perhaps we have chosen to incarnate at this very moment in time, i.e., our voluntary return to the maze has already happened (evidenced by the simple fact of our incarnation), which is to say that we have already solved the maze and simply have to recognize this fact. This is true anamnesis—a loss of forgetfulness—which is a remembering, a recollection of our dissociated members, as we re-member our rightful place as part of a greater whole, connected with all that is. “Anamnesis,” to quote PKD from a 1976 interview, “was the loss of amnesia. You remembered your origins, and they were from beyond the stars.”[92]

[1] A phrase used by Richard Doyle to describe PKD’s writings, from the Afterword to PKD’s Exegesis, p. 899.

[2] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 553.

[3] Ibid., 778.

[4] Herron, Don, The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick: 1980-1982 (Nevada City, California: Underwood Books, 2009), p. 267.

[5] Ibid., 96.

[6] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 404.

[7] Ibid., 294.

[8] Ibid., 403.

[9] Ibid., 517.

[10] Sutin, Lawrence, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 173.

[11] Herron, Don, The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick: 1980-1982 (Nevada City, California: Underwood Books, 2009), p. 146.

[12] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 473.

[13] Sutin, Lawrence, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 310.

[14] From Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

[15] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 405.

[16] Ibid., 357.

[17] Ibid., 405.

[18] Sutin, Lawrence, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 310.

[19] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 828.

[20] Ibid., 319.

[21] Ibid., 391.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid., 291.

[24] Ibid., 178.

[25] Ibid., 402.

[26] Ibid., 328.

[27] Ibid., 608.

[28] Ibid., 473.

[29] Ibid., 346.

[30] Ibid., 323.

[31] Ibid., 414.

[32] Ibid., 263.

[33] Ibid., 596.

[34] Sutin, Lawrence, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 262.

[35] Ibid., 263-4.

[36] Ibid., 279.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 554.

[39] Ibid., 289.

[40] Ibid., 596.

[41] Sutin, Lawrence, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 251.

[42] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 222.

[43] Referred to as the antimimon pneuma in the Apocryphon of John (Apoc. John III, 36:17),

[44] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 327.

[45] Ibid., 419.

[46] Ibid., 277.

[47] Ibid., 316.

[48] Sutin, Lawrence, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 308.

[49] Ibid., 285.

[50] Ibid., 309.

[51] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 391.

[52] Sutin, Lawrence, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 295.

[53] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 332.

[54] Ibid., 315.

[55] Ibid., 222.

[56] Ibid., 332.

[57] Ibid., 414.

[58] Ibid., 278.

[59] Sutin, Lawrence, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 296.

[60] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 222.

[61] Ibid., 290.

[62] Ibid., 294.

[63] Ibid., 317.

[64] This brings to mind the quote from the Bible, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” (Galatians: 2:20).

[65] Sutin, Lawrence, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. xxiii.

[66] Ibid., 294.

[67] Ibid., 291.

[68] Levy, Paul, Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2013), pp. 261-2.

[69] Herron, Don, The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick: 1980-1982 (Nevada City, California: Underwood Books, 2009), p. 79.

[70] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 413.

[71] Ibid., 278.

[72] Ibid., 404.

[73] Ibid., 75.

[74] Ibid.

[75] Ibid., 272.

[76] Ibid., 76.

[77] Sutin, Lawrence, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 289.

[78] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 612.

[79] Ibid., 692.

[80] Sutin, Lawrence, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), pp. 309-310.

[81] Ibid., 296.

[82] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 692.

[83] From The Man in the High Castle, https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/4764.Philip_K_Dick?page=4

[84] From Valis, https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/4764.Philip_K_Dick?page=2

[85] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), pp. 692-3.

[86] Ibid., 877-878.

[87] Ibid., 878.

[88] Ibid., 296.

[89] Ibid., 877.

[90] https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/4764.Philip_K_Dick?page=1

[91] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), pp. 878.

[92] DePrez, Daniel, An Interview with Philip K. Dick, Science Fiction Review, No. 19, Vol. 5, no. 3, August (1976).

A pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, Paul Levy is a wounded healer in private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality. He is the author of Awakened by Darkness: When Evil Becomes Your Father (Awaken in the Dream Publishing, 2015), Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil (North Atlantic Books, 2013) and The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis (Authorhouse, 2006). He is the founder of the “Awakening in the Dream Community” in Portland, Oregon. An artist, he is deeply steeped in the work of C. G. Jung, and has been a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for over thirty years. He is the coordinator for the Portland PadmaSambhava Buddhist Center. Please visit Paul’s website www.awakeninthedream.com. You can contact Paul at paul@awakeninthedream.com; he looks forward to your reflections.