1974: the year Philip K Dick took the Red Pill (parts one & two)

[C C]

PART ONE: “The empire never ended.” ― Philip K. Dick
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Influence of Carl Jung on PKD
https://pkdreligion.blogspot.com/2011/11...frank.html

EXCERPT: Philip K. Dick had a deep and lifelong interest in Jung, who I'll be arguing was an important source for Dick's notions of religious or esoteric ideas [...] Following Jung's reading of Nietzsche ... Dick conceived of a person's public personality as a "mask," and he followed Jung in imagining the unconscious ... as the repository of the cthonic archetypes, archetypes understood as autonomous personalities that reside in the unconcious. An irruption from the collective unconscious, Jung taught, can wipe out the fragile individual ego. In the depths of the collective the archetypes slumber; if aroused, they can heal or they can destroy. This is the danger of the archetypes...

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The divine fire of Philip K Dick’s religious visions
https://aeon.co/ideas/the-divine-fire-of...us-visions

EXCERPT: The science-fiction writer Philip K Dick [...] was recovering from dental surgery in February 1974, his consciousness was awakened by a mysterious flash of pink light. After the pink flash, he had visions ... He saw scenes of ancient Rome superimposed over his neighbourhood: ‘I looked around and saw Rome! Rome everywhere! Power and force, stone walls, iron bars.’

A local daycare centre appeared to be a Roman prison. To Dick, its children were Christian martyrs to be fed to lions. Pedestrians on the sidewalk seemed to be wearing Roman uniforms. The totalitarian Roman Empire had returned, and Dick felt he was secretly a spiritual warrior doing battle with it...

[...] Although the visions eventually vanished, Dick remained fascinated by them. So captivated was he that he wrote an 8,000-page commentary he called his Exegesis...

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The Black Iron Prison of Philip K. Dick
https://www.philipdick.com/mirror/disser...d-1of2.pdf

David Benjamin: In February and March of 1974, Philip K. Dick communicated directly with God. Or aliens. Or an artificial intelligence satellite. Or his dead twin sister. Or the KGB. Or the CIA/FBI/IMF. Or his own self, contacting him either from the future or from an alternate “present” in a parallel dimension.

Or, and he considered this along with every other possibility, he had simply gone insane, and his otherwise inexplicable experiences could be explained by temporal lobe epilepsy, brain damage due to his past drug use, multiple personality disorder, and/or the onset of acute schizophrenia.

There are some slight variations in the different accounts of Philip K. Dick’s “2-3-74” experience, but all the accounts begin with a pharmacy delivery girl wearing a fish necklace...

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Meditations on a Radiant Fish (excerpt): The fish pendant, on Dick’s account, began to emit a golden ray of light, and Dick suddenly experienced what he called, with a nod to Plato, anamnesis: the recollection or total recall of the entire sum of knowledge. Dick claimed to have access to what philosophers call the faculty of “intellectual intuition”: the direct perception by the mind of a metaphysical reality behind screens of appearance.

Many philosophers since Kant have insisted that such intellectual intuition is available only to human beings in the guise of fraudulent obscurantism, usually as religious or mystical experience, like Emmanuel Swedenborg’s visions of the angelic multitude. This is what Kant called, in a lovely German word, “die Schwärmerei,” a kind of swarming enthusiasm, where the self is literally enthused with the God, o theos.

Brusquely sweeping aside the careful limitations and strictures that Kant placed on the different domains of pure and practical reason, the phenomenal and the noumenal, Dick claimed direct intuition of the ultimate nature of what he called “true reality.” Yet the golden fish episode was just the beginning...

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Philip K Dick discloses the real Matrix in 1977
https://youtu.be/I8zx6PzVdNQ

VIDEO EXCERPT: I in my sto­ries and nov­els some­times write about coun­ter­feit worlds. Semi-real worlds as well as deranged pri­vate worlds, inhab­it­ed often by just one per­son…. At no time did I have a the­o­ret­i­cal or con­scious expla­na­tion for my pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with these plu­ri­form pseu­do-worlds, but now I think I under­stand. ... We are liv­ing in a com­put­er-pro­grammed real­i­ty, and the only clue we have to it is when some vari­able is changed, and some alter­ation in our real­i­ty occurs.

[C C]

PART TWO: The Black Iron Prison
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Quotations from The Divine Invasion, by Philip K. Dick:

"You admit, then, that your world is not real? That it is a forgery?" Zina hesitated. "It branched off at crucial points, due to our interference with the past. Call it magic if you want, or call it technology."
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"The Ape of God," Elias said [imitator of God]. "A medieval theory about the Devil. That he apes God's legitimate creation with spurious interpolations of his own. That's really an exceedingly sophisticated idea, epistemologically speaking. Does it mean that parts of the world are spurious? Or that sometimes the whole world is spurious? Or that there are plural worlds, of which one is real, and the others are not? Is there essentially one matrix world from which people derive differing perceptions? So that the world you see is not the world I see?"
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“Sometimes I think this planet is under a spell," Elias said. "We are asleep or in a trance, and something causes us to see what it wants us to see and remember and think what it wants us to remember and think. Which means we're whatever it wants us to be. Which in turn means that we have no genuine existence. We're at the mercy of some kind of whim.”
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“I don't think anyone creates a fake universe," Herb said, "since it isn't there."

"But you're saying something is causing us to see a universe that doesn't exist. Who is this someone?"

He said, "Satan."

Cocking his head, Elias eyed him.

"It's a way of seeing the real world," Herb said. "An occluded way. A dreamlike way. A hypnotized, asleep way. The nature of world undergoes a perceptual change; actually it is the perceptions that change, not the world. The change is in us."

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David Benjamin: [...] A few pages into the opening chapter of Valis, Philip K.Dick revealed that Horselover Fat, the focal character of Valis, and Phil Dick, the novel’s narrator and author, are one and the same. He made no attempt to disguise his life in his fiction, and both frightened and delighted his fans with the publication of the largely autobiographical Valis in 1981. He had described his mystical experiences in letters to his close friends, but for most of his readers, Valis served as an introduction to 2-3-74...

[...] Dick himself supplied the explanation, that the “landscape of California, USA, 1974” was an illusion, and that mankind was stuck in the oppressive Roman regime without realizing it. This particular description of the illusory and deceptive layering of reality Dick named the “Black Iron Prison”:

During the interval in which he had experienced the two-world superimposition, he had seen not only Benjamin California, USA, of the year 1974 but also ancient Rome, he had discerned within the superimposition a Gestalt shared by both space-time continua, their common element: a Black Iron Prison.

This is what the dream referred to as “the Empire.” [...] Everyone dwelt in it without realizing it. The Black Iron Prison was their world. Who had built the prison--and why--he could not say. But he could discern one good thing: the prison lay under attack...

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The Valis allegory explained
https://allegoryexplained.com/valis/

INTRO: The title “Valis” stands for “Vast Active Living Intelligence System,” and it is a gnostic vision of God. The story is set in California during the 1970s and features the character of Horselover Fat, who is a representation of the author himself. The novel is an allegory, framed as science-fiction, and tells the tale of a spiritual and psychological quest.

"Valis" is a theology that attempts to find common ground among the world’s religions by exploring the nature of God and the universe. The book explores themes such as the nature of reality, the nature of consciousness, and the nature of divinity. It delves into the complexities of religion and its manifestations in the real world.

The novel has been highly praised for its originality, depth, and complexity. It has been described as a mystical masterpiece by some critics. The book has been the subject of much analysis and interpretation, and it is considered to be one of the most important works of science fiction in the 20th century...

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David Benjamin: My coverage of [PDK's] 2-3-74 [event] is far from exhaustive, but it should serve to prepare the reader for my forthcoming look at the Valis trilogy and the theme of the Black Iron Prison, which will henceforth be the focal point of my study.

After I detail Dick’s use of the theme in his final three novels, I will progress through his preceding forty-one science fiction and mainstream novels in the order in which they were written, tracing the presence and the development of the Black Iron Prison in each work.

I hope to show, by the end of my study, that the roots of the Black Iron Prison were present from the beginning of Dick’s career, even if the theme did not make an explicit appearance until his Valis trilogy...

[Magical Realist]

At the time of my overdosing on diet pills, one night I found myself fascinated by Herodotus's descriptions of ancient Babylon. It was an exciting and highly romanticized fantasy to be sure, incorporating elements like a vast swimming pool/lake where people swam and rode on boats, the tower where the sacral virgin waited to have sex with the descending deity, and ofcourse the lush many-tiered Gardens themselves, fed with water from the streams of the Euphrates by a huge complex wheel and trough system. I had this powerful longing to be there and avail myself of its many wonders. I actually dreamed about it that night, furthering my imagined escapades in this exotic world. I think drugs and/or mental illness can trigger a latent cosmogenesis activity in the psyche such that we organically spawn worlds beyond the hum drum one we are seeking escape from. Perhaps Dick's ancient Rome was just such a creative flight of fancy.