Tag: Phillip K. Dick

Possessed by Demons or Become Your Own?

~ cafebedouin

It is of course famously difficult to say exactly what happens in [Philip K Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch], because the essential question that the major characters have is always: What is actually happening? But at least one major potential timeline, perhaps the most likely timeline, tells a story like this: Palmer Eldritch is a titan of capitalism, in many respects the Jeff Bezos of this world, and he travels to Proxima Centauri on a quest that is ambiguous in character but certainly involves financial motives. Eldritch discovers on Proxima Centauri a substance that the sentient beings of that solar system use in their religious rituals — a substance he thinks he can manufacture and sell and thereby win a victory over the currently dominant corporation called PP Layouts. But on his return from the Proxima system he is — well, perhaps the word is possessed by a sentient creature from some other part of the galaxy. And this creature is at least for a time interested in distributing its consciousness, through the mediation of Palmer Eldritch and the substance he has discovered, into the consciousness of human beings…

…Of course, this is not the only possible explanation of what is happening in the book. It is certainly possible that there is no alien being possessing Palmer Eldritch; rather, Eldritch himself has, through a combination of economic leverage and biotechnology, assumed equivalent powers. That is, it may be possible for surveillance capitalism to generate its own demons. Whether this is a better or worse fate than the one I previously described I leave as an exercise for the reader.”

-Alan Jacobs, “It’s Palmer Eldritch’s world, we’re just living in it.” ayjay.org. April 8, 2021.

Given the choice between being possessed by demons from some other culture or possessed by demons generated from one’s own, both are bad options, and your answer is probably determined by how much novelty you prefer. I think the more interesting question is whether you’d rather be possessed by a demon or become one yourself. Neitzsche hits on the point:

““Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”

― Friedrich W. Nietzsche

Most people can’t imagine being (or that they are) a monster. So, this choice is really about one’s self-concept. Are you good? Then, you may be more willing to be possessed, so you aren’t responsible for acting like a monster. But, choosing to be a monster? The first casualty is conscience, and then the body count goes up from there. Still, it’s probably true most people, even good people, would rather be predator than prey. This fact probably explains a lot about the human condition.

The Dream Within The Dream

~ cafebedouin

“This is the idea that we are slaves to Empire, and the world is a prison from which we need to free ourselves, what the gnostics called ‘the puny cell of the creator God.’ It is what Dick calls the BIP, the Black Iron Prison, which is opposed to the spiritual redemption of the PTG, the Palm Tree Garden.

Note the emphasis on secrecy. The first secret is that the world is governed by malevolent imperial or governmental elites that form together a kind of a covert coven. The world itself is a college of corporations linked together by money and serving only the interests of their business leaders and shareholders. The second secret — ‘a secret within a secret’ — belongs to those few who have swallowed the red pill, torn through the veil of Maya.”

Simon Critchley, “Philip K. Dick, Sci-Fi Philosopher, Part 2.” The New York Times, May 21, 2012.

I’ve been re-reading Chagdud Tulku’s book, Gates of Buddhist Practice after watching the A Deeper Dive interviews with Bill and Susan Morgan. There are interesting connections between the two.

Bill and Susan talk about how modern life creates a tension, a bombardment of sensory stimulus that can take a long time for us to get free of its influence. Our environment encourages us to cultivate an analytical understanding of our world, to optimize our behaviors to “get things done”. Even when we are engaged in an activity like meditation, it is difficult to focus our attention and our being because our standard is one of doing and thinking.

This ties into another idea I’ve been seeing recently, of the dichotomy between like-minded and like-hearted. The Morgans talk about the importance of integrating body, heart and mind in their practice, and it reminded me of an article that talked about how the Dalai Lama chooses his physician. The first criteria, above medical knowledge and capability, is whether the doctor had a good heart.

This matches with recent research describing the two criteria that people look for when judging others: warmth (heart) and competence (mind). When we focus on the heart, our attention is directed inward, where the world is the stage in which our Being expresses itself.

One metaphor Chugdud uses is windows and mirrors. A worldly person’s experience of the world is like looking through a window. They have sense experience and they judge it in accordance to whether they like it or not. A spiritual person, on the other hand, uses sense experience as a mirror. The world is a reflection of our own minds, and if we look closely, we will discover that there is nothing there that we have not created. Human beings are story tellers, and the stories we tell create both the world and the person experiencing the world.

Chugdud writes:

“In actuality, all experience-whether the suffering of samsara or the bliss of nirvana-is as insubstantial as our dreams. All of it is unreal, untrue. It is an unceasing, luminous, magnificent, and illusionary display.

Our life from birth to death resembles one long dream, and each dream we have at night is the dream within a dream.”

Chagdud Tulku, Gates of Buddhist Practice. Junction City, Calif.: Padma Publishing, 2001.

The dream within a dream comment reminded me of Phillip K. Dick’s (PKD) ideas around The Black Iron Prison, The Palm Tree Garden, ‘a secret within a secret’, and so forth. Consider this talk, Radio Free Valis: Tuning In To the Involution with Philip K. Dick:

“So, in a way what Dick does with his books, from my point of view anyway, is [he] turns the telescope around, out from looking out at external reality and the astronomical magnitudes without, which are no doubt beautiful and amazing, and to be explored, but turns it around, so that we can, along with him, explore the astronomical and galactic magnitudes of our within.”

Instead of a mirror, he is using the metaphor of a telescope. A telescope rather than a microscope because it emphasizes the fact that if we leave behind the constraints of sense experience and open ourselves up to the landscape of imagination that our consciousness can transcend even the limits of our universe, as ideas such as the multiverse and infinite worlds illustrate.

If we spend some time imagining our infinite selves across infinite universes, what then are we to make of our consciousness in this universe? With such an encompassing view, does this me matter beyond the fact of existing and trying to grasp the enormity of all that there is and to be grateful for the opportunity to experience it?

Am not I, too, a fiction, a sliver of a sliver, that has no more relationship to the Truth than fairy tales or Tolkien’s Middle Earth? Unmoored in this fashion, what then are we to do with our lives?

Buddhism suggests that the only worthy use of our lives is using this moment to transcend ourselves, our illusions, and our stories. They are the Black Iron Prison that keep us chained to lesser versions of ourselves.