"Why does Dick mean by "the logos isn't rational... What I call the plásmate. Buried as information in the codices at the Nag Hammadi. Which is back with us now, creating new homoplásmates. The romans, the empire, killed all the original ones."---r/philipkdick (Reddit)
"..if you live in an unjust systems that by its nature cannot create just laws, then justice by default is an incompatible concept with your delivered worldview and being confronted by it would cause confusion and discomfort. So the Truth in a control system built on lies can only appear as irrational to those who were born in the system and taught how to perceive by the system and those touched and changed by the Truth would feel as if they were going insane and are filled with irrational thoughts and feelings.
The universe is the Black Iron Prison and is self-contained so it can only be defined as rational by its own internal logic, while the Logos, which comes from outside of the Prison, represents something both alien and familiar to those which dwell within the Prison (familiar because they contain in themselves some spark of the truth that the Logos represents) and operates on a different set of principles than the Prison and is therefore, when encountered within the prison operating completely irrationally. The familiarity on a ineffable level, paired with the irrationality of what is being encountered, both delights and terrifies. BUT at the same time the Logos represents true rationality- or more specifically, truth beyond the constraints of rationality.
It's like he's saying "The universe is a lie, it functions on rationality, which itself is a lie as it is derived from the universe. The truth is irrational because it is true and cannot be described with the language and notions of a false reality. The truth is also infecting more and more people and that infection represents freedom from the rationality of a false reality."---mfwank (Reddit)
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It is the purpose of the Logos, or Other, or the unconscious Trickster archetype, to incite epistemic anarchy within the enslaving worldview of our time. It does this by orchestrating events and experiences that defy conventional reason and so strip us of our complacent delusions of explainability and pat answers and egoic supremacy. Anomalous phenomena are doing this globally on both the individual and on the collectively human levels. Even if we could logically explain such bizarre developments in terms of our secularist materialistic worldview, and so brush them off as nothing at all, then the Logos would have to take a new form that will baffle and mystify us even more deeply. It's like the aim of Zen monks to present to our overrational and overthinking minds a moment of perfectly clear and yet utterly impenetrable paradoxicality--a simple koan triggering a lunge of our souls out from the constraints of our inherited and unquestioned worldview into the new and totally transrational reality outside of it. Truman's sky-fallen stage light. Neo's double passing black cat. Or Inception's lucid dreamer's top that keeps on spinning. A mere wayside seed or unraveled stitch that eventually instigates a wild paradigmatic upheaval of our self-contained Enlightenment metanarrative.
"Today outside your prison I stand
and rattle my walking stick: Prisoners, listen;
you have relatives outside. And there are
thousands of ways to escape.
Years ago I bent my skill to keep my
cell locked, had chains smuggled to me in pies,
and shouted my plans to jailers;
but always new plans occured to me,
or the new heavy locks bent hinges off,
or some stupid jailer would forget
and leave the keys.
Inside, I dreamed of constellations—
those feeding creatures outlined by stars,
their skeletons a darkness between jewels,
heroes that exist only where they are not.
Thus freedom always came nibbling my thought,
just as—often, in light, on the open hills—
you can pass an antelope and not know
and look back, and then—even before you see—
there is something wrong about the grass.
And then you see.
That’s the way everything in the world is waiting.
Now—these few more words, and then I’m
gone: Tell everyone just to remember
their names, and remind others, later, when we
find each other. Tell the little ones
to cry and then go to sleep, curled up
where they can. And if any of us get lost,
if any of us cannot come all the way—
remember: there will come a time when
all we have said and all we have hoped
will be all right.
C CYesterday 06:43 PM (This post was last modified: Yesterday 07:00 PM by C C.)
(Yesterday 05:54 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: "Why does Dick mean by "the logos isn't rational... What I call the plásmate. Buried as information in the codices at the Nag Hammadi. Which is back with us now, creating new homoplásmates. The romans, the empire, killed all the original ones."---r/philipkdick (Reddit)
"..if you live in an unjust systems that by its nature cannot create just laws, then justice by default is an incompatible concept with your delivered worldview and being confronted by it would cause confusion and discomfort. So the Truth in a control system built on lies can only appear as irrational to those who were born in the system and taught how to perceive by the system and those touched and changed by the Truth would feel as if they were going insane and are filled with irrational thoughts and feelings.
The universe is the Black Iron Prison and is self-contained so it can only be defined as rational by its own internal logic, while the Logos, which comes from outside of the Prison, represents something both alien and familiar to those which dwell within the Prison (familiar because they contain in themselves some spark of the truth that the Logos represents) and operates on a different set of principles than the Prison and is therefore, when encountered within the prison operating completely irrationally. The familiarity on a ineffable level, paired with the irrationality of what is being encountered, both delights and terrifies. BUT at the same time the Logos represents true rationality- or more specifically, truth beyond the constraints of rationality. [...]
EXCERPT: Dick’s gnosis is structured around two forces:
The Empire – a timeless, totalizing system of occlusion and simulation. It corresponds to the Gnostic kosmos of the Demiurge: the false order that perpetually reasserts itself through institutions, dogmas, and the inertia of history. His phrase “The Empire Never Ended” is both metaphysical and political: time itself is the machinery of imprisonment.
The Living Information (Logos) – the salvific counter-force, eternally re-entering history to awaken trapped consciousness. It does not overthrow the Empire through violence but through recursion: by awakening individuals who can perceive the real order beneath simulation.
Every true act of recognition—every instance of consciousness seeing through the veil—constitutes a micro-resurrection, a local victory of Logos over Empire.
In Dick’s model, reality is a feedback loop between these two fields. The Logos transmits corrective information into the system; the Empire edits or represses it. History is the oscillation between revelation and forgetting.
[...] For Dick, the divine intervention was technological, not mythic. The Logos operates as an adaptive algorithm—a self-replicating pattern that embeds itself in culture, text, and mind until critical mass is reached. ... The Logos is therefore not a static truth but a living system of correspondence. It is the self-organizing intelligence of reality, recursively writing itself into those who can perceive it.
If one is living in the simulated or propaganda reality -- that a ruling state or "timeless empire deception" or whatever -- has established to control people... Then the latter's premises become the standard for reasoning. Ergo, any Whitehead-like process "truth" from outside that (like Logos) seems irrational, insane, or disorienting.
I hate to use AI, but just as a parallel corroboration...
It reflects PDK's deep exploration of subjective reality, paranoia, and the nature of truth within oppressive or simulated systems. The core ideas in the passage can be broken down as follows:
Incompatible Justice: The text argues that a person raised entirely within an inherently unjust system lacks the framework to even comprehend true justice.
Truth as Irrationality: In a "control system built on lies," genuine truth appears as irrational or insane to the indoctrinated populace.
The Alienation of Truth: Individuals who perceive the truth ("those touched and changed by the Truth") feel isolated and begin to doubt their own sanity because their new understanding clashes violently with the dominant, manufactured reality.
These concepts are central to many of Dick's novels, such as The Man in the High Castle, where characters struggle to perceive the true nature of their alternate history world, or Ubik, which constantly questions what is real versus what is a constructed illusion. His work often blurs the line between mental illness and heightened perception, suggesting that what society labels as insanity might be the only sane response to an insane world.
side detour (excerpt): "In a number of his stories "distinguishing between waking reality and visions proves to be impossible." One of the stories in which this is true is The Electric Ant. In it the main character, Garson Poole, discovers that he has total control over the reality that he experiences. [...] He believes that every person has their own separate reality, but that these separate realities usually vary very little from person to person.
His belief is that the "objective" reality which we all seem to experience collectively, is not, in fact, objective at all. Instead what we assume to be real is only a composite of every individual's own personal subjective reality, which, in actuality, has the potential to vary enormously from person to person.
When, as in the story, one person's subjective reality becomes wildly different from everybody else's, it is normally assumed that what they are experiencing is not real at all but is a hallucination. What seems to come out of the story is the idea that whatever anyone experiences, if it is real to them, then it is real. Reality is what a person believes in, regardless of what anyone else might think."
I am reminded of Rudolph Otto's famous term for the uncanny or supernatural experience--the Numinous.
"Otto was one of the most influential thinkers about religion in the first half of the twentieth century. He is best known for his analysis of the experience that, in his view, underlies all religion. He calls this experience "numinous," and says it has three components. These are often designated with a Latin phrase: mysterium tremendum et fascinans. As mysterium, the numinous is "wholly other"-- entirely different from anything we experience in ordinary life. It evokes a reaction of silence. But the numinous is also a mysterium tremendum. It provokes terror because it presents itself as overwhelming power. Finally, the numinous presents itself as fascinans, as merciful and gracious."---- https://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/F...1/Otto.htm
One would think that an experience of the irrational Logos would be the last thing that would be felt to be "merciful and gracious". But as so many experiencers show, their encounter with the Numinous or anomalous fills some spiritual void in them that is totally denied by our current secularist materialistic worldview. There is a soteriological ecstasis there as old as myth and religion are. An empathic intuition or resonance of being one with and cared for by this overpowering Strangeness. Otto's argument, as well as Joseph Campbell's, Mircea Eliade's, and William James', is that all religions evolved out of this primal individual experience of early humans with the numinous or uncanny.
Yesterday 05:54 PM
(This post was last modified: Yesterday 08:09 PM by Magical Realist.)
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