PKD

[version]

The-headquarters-of-Mussolinis-Italian-Fascist-Party-1934-small.jpg

[other_life]

reading valis and his exegesis was oddly touching/relevant to my own 2016-2017 experiences. but of course i got distracted and didn't read the rest of the divine invasion trilogy nor his earlier books.
maybe i should revisit the religious stuff with a more critical eye, the idea that zebra is the bip is very unnerving.
but the revelation at the end of the first section of the exegesis that 'haShem is both the Kosmokrator/Demiourgos and the God of LOVE, there's never been anyone but haShem' hit me.

[version]

I loved that Crumb strip on his religious experience with the pink rays too.

https://philipdick.com/resources/mis...rom-weirdo-17/

weirdo1.jpg

[other_life]

really bucking the burroughsian anti-one-god screed atm. embracing jewishness uncritically. i am a mystic dope headed reactionary and none of you are going to stop me

[luka]

Worth a crack.

[luka]

I've come close-ish to God-belief though usually entails thinking I am God or that I have intersected with God-consciousness or that God is a reality function we have to sieze from whoever currently holds it.

[version]

[other_life]

God is a reality function we have to sieze from whoever currently holds it.

very sympathetic to this view and love your posts in this vein.
the control room is always empty when you get there - its never been anybody but you.
to practice Torah we must fully embody Torah. we must mutually remake the blueprint in our image, and our own image on its blueprint.
yosef advises far'oh to "look out for a discerning, wise man, and set him over the land of mitzraim", knowing full well he has to be the guy. that kind of authority is something that must be seized on, not (primarily? necessarily?) in the sense of political will but in the sense of some fucking self-control, self-remaking. somebody has to and nobody else will.
in the five percenter idiom: feed and teach the kids, or nobody else will - show and prove, there are no 'alien gods' or 'mysteries'. universal salvation has fits and starts, its a protracted war* and its ground is quotidian, human life.

*but then, if the control room is empty when you find it, who is the war on? who are the prison operators?

[luka]

No
A self crystallises around
No
A self is a discipline
A refusing

[luka]

Anyway good post. I'll come back to it.

[poetix]

One thing that really struck me back when I went on a big PKD reading binge in my teens was how vitriolic his dislike of (some) women was. He's a bit like D. H. Lawrence in that: some of his most psychically villainous characters are women who are portrayed as total energy vampires, poisonous neurotics, a menace to the well-being of all around them. It's something other than standard or straightforward misogyny (although I think it is misogynistic), because it meshes in a particular way with the paranoiac worldview. That which was supposed to be a source of comfort and nurture in the world has become its opposite, an intensely localised symptom of the wrongness of reality in general.

[luka]

Maybe he met a lot of vampiric women. woops has met a lot like that. One of them gives all her boyfriends cancer. (Woops escaped somehow)

[luka]

I talk to version about this sometimes. The very narrow bandwidth of the benevolent universe

[luka]

That we depend on a very fragile golidilocks state to suStain the impression of a tolerably benign universe

[luka]

And it doesn't take much to throw that off kilter and leave us stranded and afraid in a very different, oppressive, threatening universe. One that, as Mark says, is cheap, flimsy. Leering carnival faces from an Ensor painting.

A night or two on speed or coke and hurl me into those places sometimes for months so I'm not surprised Dick lived there full time.