Philip K Dick suggestions

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
"the archives! they've been hijacked! the temporal stream's distorting! the Archvisit's missing, some believe he's fled to the moon of eldor! launch the star squadron, they may be our only way to end this carnage!"
 

luka

Well-known member
You can't get to the final boss without playing through the preceding levels. There's no hacking the Mysteries. There's no cheat codes.
 

version

Well-known member
You mean this?

On February 20, 1974, while recovering from the effects of sodium pentothal administered for the extraction of an impacted wisdom tooth, Dick received a home delivery of Darvon from a young woman. When he opened the door, he was struck by the beauty of the dark-haired girl and was especially drawn to her golden necklace. He asked her about its curious fish-shaped design. "This is a sign used by the early Christians," she said, and then left. Dick called the symbol the "vesicle pisces". This name seems to have been based on his conflation of two related symbols, the Christian ichthys symbol (two intersecting arcs delineating a fish in profile) which the woman was wearing, and the vesica piscis.

Dick recounted that as the sun glinted off the gold pendant, the reflection caused the generation of a "pink beam" of light that mesmerized him. He came to believe the beam imparted wisdom and clairvoyance, and also believed it to be intelligent. On one occasion, Dick was startled by a separate recurrence of the pink beam. It imparted the information to him that his infant son was ill. The Dicks rushed the child to the hospital, where his suspicion was confirmed by professional diagnosis.

After the woman's departure, Dick began experiencing strange hallucinations. Although initially attributing them to side effects from medication, he considered this explanation implausible after weeks of continued hallucinations. "I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane," Dick told Charles Platt.

Throughout February and March 1974, Dick experienced a series of hallucinations, which he referred to as "2-3-74", shorthand for February–March 1974. Aside from the "pink beam", Dick described the initial hallucinations as geometric patterns, and, occasionally, brief pictures of Jesus and ancient Rome. As the hallucinations increased in duration and frequency, Dick claimed he began to live two parallel lives, one as himself, "Philip K. Dick", and one as "Thomas", a Christian persecuted by Romans in the first century AD. He referred to the "transcendentally rational mind" as "Zebra", "God" and "VALIS". Dick wrote about the experiences, first in the semi-autobiographical novel Radio Free Albemuth and then in VALIS, The Divine Invasion and the unfinished The Owl in Daylight (the VALIS trilogy).

In 1974, Dick wrote a letter to the FBI, accusing various people, including University of California, San Diego professor Fredric Jameson, of being foreign agents of Warsaw Pact powers. He also wrote that Stanisław Lem was probably a false name used by a composite committee operating on orders of the Communist party to gain control over public opinion.

At one point, Dick felt that he had been taken over by the spirit of the prophet Elijah. He believed that an episode in his novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was a detailed retelling of a biblical story from the Book of Acts, which he had never read. Dick documented and discussed his experiences and faith in a private journal he called his "exegesis", portions of which were later published as The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. The last novel Dick wrote was The Transmigration of Timothy Archer; it was published shortly after his death in 1982.
 

luka

Well-known member
Herb Asher speculates that Joyce's ability in the Wake to seemingly predict the technology of the future, like "talktapes" and television, indicates that Joyce was somehow tapped into a type of "cosmic consciousness." Researchers William Klaus and Will Morgan have pointed out that later on in the novel Dick does exactly the same thing.

At school, Emmanuel is given an "information slate" by Zina. Emmanuel is assured that this is not the usual slate containing "common microcircuitry," owned by "every young person," and linked up to Big Noodle. His particular information slate is in direct connection to VALIS. These information slates are clearly the tablets and iPads of today. Was the cosmic consciousness that both Joyce and Dick evidently plugged into also VALIS? Or could it more suitably be called ALP? Or are these two the same?

Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle's to be.

https://groupnameforgrapejuice.blogspot.com/search?q=Dick
 

luka

Well-known member
One of his more central and persistent theories, published in the "Tractate" section of Valis, was that the recovered texts of the Essene Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic Nag Hamadi writings, both unearthed in the mid-1940s, contained living information that was just in mid-1970s, as these texts were being translated and published, beginning to become reanimated. This living information, which Dick called a plasmate, has the ability to cross-bond with human individuals. These individuals would become homoplasmates -- a symbiosis of the human being and living information from an alien world.

https://groupnameforgrapejuice.blogspot.com/search?q=Dick

The process of transubstantiation shows a way out of the Matrix. But how does it occur? Does it happen suddenly, like the disappearance of Klingsor's castle, or it is a more gradual transformation? Where are the signs of the plasmate to be found? Where can we stalk, or let ourselves be stalked by, the Zebra? Dick answers in the Exegesis that it can be found potentially anywhere -- even, almost especially, in the most mundane, the most banal, productions of pop culture.

...it (Zebra) can enter anything, animate or inanimate; in the
latter it takes volitional control of causal processes—mimesis, mimicry,
camouflage.

It assembles itself intact in a human brain from a collage taken from song
lyrics, ads, novels, TV, movies—any and all info media, verbal and graphic.
Once begun, it governs the person into seeking out the missing parts of the pattern (i.e., it).
 
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luka

Well-known member
Certainly Dick contemplated all of these questions. In the Exegesis he explains that the 1960 book by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians, conjectures that hidden superhuman "mutants" among us would use popular media in order to communicate with each other. In the relevant passage, The Morning of the Magicians reads:

One of the heroes in Van Vogt's In Pursuit of the Slans discovers the existence of other mutants by reading the newspapers and deciphering apparently inoffensive articles. A similar network of communication in our own Press and literature, etc., is quite conceivable. The New York Herald Tribune published on 15th March, 1958, an analysis from its London correspondent of a series of advertisements appearing in the Personal column of The Times. These messages had attracted the attention of professional cryptographers and the police in various countries, because they obviously had a hidden meaning. But this meaning was never deciphered. There are, no doubt, other still less decipherable means of communication. Who knows but that some fourth-rate novel, or some technical textbook, or some apparently obscure philosophical work is not a secret vehicle for complex studies and messages addressed to higher intelligences, as different from our own as we are from the great apes.

Dick's novels are certainly not fourth-rate, but could these "mutants" be using Dick, like Bowie, as a vehicle to convey information? Dick's own speculation, though, went well beyond Pauwels and Bergier. There may certainly be mutants like Thomas Newton with time-bending and other superpowers who hold positions of vast power on Earth, but Dick envisioned a much grander conspiracy. God Himself, the True God, has invaded this fallen world. In this, Dick comes very close to Blake and Joyce.

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