Philip K. Dick - The Penultimate Truth (full documentary)

[Delight]

For all who love PKD... a short blurb

Philip K. Dick lived most of his life in California. He was born in 1928 in Chicago. In his career PKD wrote 36 novels and five short story collections between 1952 and 1982 when he died in Santa Ana, California.

As evidenced by his work, Dick’s mind was complicated. While his novels and stories often offered visions of the future, many aspects of his life can been throughout his work. A Scanner Darkly was dedicated to many of his friends who died or suffered damage from drug abuse (including himself). The first person narration of Radio Free Albemuth is written from the perspective of a young science fiction writer named Philip who lives in Berkeley. Many insights into Dick’s view of his world are available here. These include his distrust for government and authority, his life as a professional writer and even cosmic visions he is said to have experienced. The novels of the Valis trilogy continue to blur the lines between fiction and Dick’s twisted reality.

Several years before his death, Philip started having mystical experiences that affected his everyday life. As a result, he started to wonder if what he had imagined for his stories was real and if life was just an illusion or the creation of each person’s subjectivity.

http://www.philipkdickfans.com/biography/

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WM921saJqXc

[Tesseract]

A great humanist, which shows even in his first novel, Solar Lottery. I hope to enjoy one of his novels every year or two until the end of my life.

[marlowe]

...Interviews with 3 of his 5 wives & friends going back to high school.
He is buried next to his twin sister in Ft.Morgan Colorado.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick

[TargeT]

very interesting docu.

I'm a fan of his work, though I never knew who he was... his concept of VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System) is very interesting espeically in terms of "Their mind" or "Wetiko" Perhaps this architypal system touches certain people more directly than others.

[Bill Ryan]

-------

I'm as sure as I can be that he was unconsciously picking up real historical material from his past lives, going back a very long way (other planets, and millions of years). Much of that stuff has found its way to Planet Earth... or may be coming pretty soon.

Here he is:

[Delight]

Another hour of (PKD) A Day In The Afterlife: BBC documentary on Philip K. Dick in its entirety (57 minutes).

"A Day in the Afterlife focuses on the man himself, in all his crazy, drug-addled, paranoid glory. The mind behind some of my favorite books is fascinated by the constant bombardment of advertising, the effects of giant media conglomerates, and the overwhelming feeling that the world in which we live exists only in the glowing vacuum tubes of countless television sets. It is an ode to one of the most creative minds in science fiction, and another step in the crusade for a wider recognition of his accomplishments.” Ross Rosenberg

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4cK2MPgAHRk

Mike Hodel In Conversation With Philip K. Dick, Which Aired On The Science Fiction Themed Radio Show Hour 25. Recorded In 1977, Just Before The Release Of A Scanner Darkly.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=aFhsDUAZ6Co

[wegge]

horselover fat

[learninglight]

You may enjoy this too

"Cosmogony and Cosmology" (1978)
by Philip K. Dick


As to our reality being a projected framework -- it appears to be a projection by an artifact, a computerlike teaching machine that guides, programs, and generally controls us as we act without awareness of it within our projected world. The artifact, which I call Zebra, has "created" (actually only projected) our reality as a sort of mirror or image of its maker, so that the maker can obtain thereby an objective standpoint to comprehend its own self. In other words, the maker (called by Jakob Bohme in 1616 the Urgrund) is motivated to seek an instrument for self-awareness, self-knowledge, an objective opinion or appraisal and comprehension of the nature of itself (it is a vast living organism, intrinsically -- without this mirror -- without qualities or aspects, which is why it needs the empirical world as a reflection by which to "see" itself).
It constructed a reality-projecting artifact (or demiurge; cf. Plato and the Gnostics), which then, on command, projected the first stage of the world we know. The artifact is unaware that it is an artifact; it is oblivious to the existence of the Urgrund (in terms that the artifact would understand, the Urgrund is not, rather than is), and imagines itself to be God, the only real God.
Studying our evolving reality, the Urgrund more and more adequately comprehends itself. It must allow the reality-projecting artifact to continue to project an evolving reality no matter how defective and malshaped that reality is (during its stages) until finally that reality is a correct analog, truly, of the Urgrund itself, at which point the disparity between the Urgrund and the projected reality is abolished -- whereupon an astonishing event will occur: The artifact or demiurge will be destroyed and the Urgrund will assimilate the projected reality, transmuting it into something ontologically real -- and also making the living creatures in it immortal. This moment could come at any time, this entrance of the Urgrund into our otherwise spurious projected framework.
Zebra, the projecting energetic artifact, is close at hand, but it has occluded us not only to its actions but [also] to its presence. It has enormous -- virtually decisive -- power over us.
The prognosis for (fate of) our world is excellent: immortality and the final infusion of reality once it has reached the point of congruent analog to the Urgrund. But the fate of the artifact is destruction (unknown to it). But it is not alive, as we and the Urgrund are. We are moving toward isomorphism. The instant that precise isomorphism is reached, we at once bond to (are penetrated and assimilated by) the Urgrund, in a stunning flash of light: Bohme's "Blitz." March 1974 was not that moment, but rather Zebra the artifact adjusting its projected reality, it having gotten off course in its evolution toward isomorphism with the Urgrund (a purpose unknown to the artifact).
Since the goal of our evolving projected reality is to reach a state in which we humans are isomorphic with the true maker, the Urgrund that fashioned the projecting artifact, there is a highly important practical situation coming closer in terms of frequency and depth:
Although not yet precisely isomorphic with the Urgrund, we can be said already to possess imperfect (but very real) fragments or fractions of the Urgrund within us. Therefore the Christian mystic saying: "What is Beyond is within." This describes the third and final period of history, in which men will be ruled from within. Thus the Christian mystic saying, "Christ possesses your body, and you possess him as your soul."
In Hindu philosophy, the Atman within a person is identified with Brahman, the core of the universe.
This Christ or Atman is not a microform of Zebra, the computerlike reality-projecting artifact, but of the Urgrund; thus in the Hindu religion it is described (as Brahman) as lying beyond Maya, the veil of delusion (i.e. the projected seeming world).
Already humans so closely approximate isomorphism with the Urgrund that the Urgrund can be born within a human being. This is the most primal and important experience a human can have. The source of all being has bypassed the artifact and its projected world and come to life within the mind of one human here, another there.
One can correctly deduce from this that the Urgrund is already penetrating the artifact's world, which means that the moment of the Blitz, as Bohme termed it, is not far off. When the microform of the Urgrund is born in a human, that human's comprehension extends beyond the world in terms of its temporal and spacial limits. He can experience other time periods, other identities (or lives), other places. Literally, the core deity within him is larger than the world
Penetrating to the heart of the projected world, the Urgrund can, emanating from human minds, assimilate the projected world and simultaneously abolish the projecting artifact the instant the proper evolutionary state (including that of man) is reached. The Urgrund alone knows when this will occur.
It -- the Urgrund -- will break the power of the illusory world over us when it breaks the deterministic coercive power of the artifact over us -- by annihilating the artifact; it will cancel out the artifact's being by its own nonbeing. What will remain will be a totally monistic structure, entirely alive and sentient. There will be no place, time, or condition outside the Urgrund.
The projected world of the artifact is not evil, and the artifact is not evil. However, the artifact is ruthlessly deterministic and mechanical. It cannot be appealed to. It is doing a job for ends it cannot fathom. Suffering, then, in this model, is due to two sources:

1. the heedless mechanistic structure of the projected reality and the artifact, where blind causal law rules;
2. what the N.T. [New Testament] calls the "the birthpangs of the universe," both in the macrocosm and the human microcosm.

The birth looked forward to is the birth of the Urgrund in humans first of all, and finally the assimilation of the universe in its totality, in a single sharp instant. The former is already occurring; the latter will come at some later unexpected time.

Read rest here : http://montalk.net/cosmogony.html

sharon

[Delight]

Posted by learninglight (here)
You may enjoy this too


Since the goal of our evolving projected reality is to reach a state in which we humans are isomorphic with the true maker, the Urgrund that fashioned the projecting artifact, there is a highly important practical situation coming closer in terms of frequency and depth:
Although not yet precisely isomorphic with the Urgrund, we can be said already to possess imperfect (but very real) fragments or fractions of the Urgrund within us. Therefore the Christian mystic saying: "What is Beyond is within." This describes the third and final period of history, in which men will be ruled from within. Thus the Christian mystic saying, "Christ possesses your body, and you possess him as your soul."
In Hindu philosophy, the Atman within a person is identified with Brahman, the core of the universe.
This Christ or Atman is not a microform of Zebra, the computerlike reality-projecting artifact, but of the Urgrund; thus in the Hindu religion it is described (as Brahman) as lying beyond Maya, the veil of delusion (i.e. the projected seeming world).
Already humans so closely approximate isomorphism with the Urgrund that the Urgrund can be born within a human being. This is the most primal and important experience a human can have. The source of all being has bypassed the artifact and its projected world and come to life within the mind of one human here, another there.

Read rest here : http://montalk.net/cosmogony.html

sharon

Thanks so much Sharon. This was not anything that i had read before!
I think and the Urgrund was born in PKD.
One of the things about PKD that impressed me was his many friends. He did not behave in such a way as to diminish the people in his life. His former wives thought he was a loving husband and though he left them they never ultimately (after getting over being angry) hated him. THAT is a 20th century testament to being a humane man as opposed to a zebra character.

[learninglight]

I stumbled upon Philip K. Dick whilst on my search for the meaning of 'wtf is the point of my being?'

His open mindset and honesty, without the b.s overlay of pretentious piety, was just what i was looking for on journey into the spiritual realms.
When my ego goes off on a me me me adventure i have found myself returning to this article posted above and it 'grounds me'

Glad you got something from it too

sharon