FRIENDS!!!
Hey there, I know you’ve all been waiting anxiously for my thoughts on 2018s difficult reading assignment—The Exegesis of Philip K Dick. I started reading on roughly 5-1-18 and quickly realized I would only be able to read 10 pages at a time, then process those 10 pages like a clunky old univactogenarian before proceeding to the next.
So here we are a year later (roughly) and I still have 200 pages of notes, acknowledgments, curators’ bios & such to read. But I’ve digested the pulpy center of what is understood to be The Exegesis.
Now I won’t regurgitate the contents of The Exegesis in some ‘splainy theoretical way. How goddamn boring would that be?? I’ll try to make it a little personal.
Some important things I got from The Exegesis are: that space is a big still life set in plasmatic suspense until the force of time comes spiraling through—removing one set from the stage of the present and yanking the future’s scenery onstage in the process, & on & on & on.
That time didn’t begin at 0 o’clock in the middle of space & move outward in a linear way to where we are now.
“Time” was a stage set—a beginning scene— that can be pinpointed to roughly Mar 18 70 AD. And from there time arced back & forth (past to future) until it created a spiral that encompassed an eternity of moments around 3/18/70 AD.
That we, as objects in space are moved by time. That time, like a screw or drill moves forward & backward on the x(or y) axis [I believe you can graph it either way I’ll try drawing it a few more times…]
Most of us humans are VISUAL/SPACE oriented.
Some people like PKD, and perhaps myself & some of you music/poetry types —are AUDIO/TIME oriented.
[Can people be VISUAL/TIME oriented or AUDIO/SPACE oriented? That’s a good thing to think about.]
There came a point in The Exegesis where PD hit upon a third & fourth axis that he perceived as false or artificial intelligent copies of “reality’ (basically what can be graphed on the space/time axis). So there was an erstaz time axis and and ersatz space axis being created by human thought, and adding eternally to the diameter/scope of reality/kosmos.
The infinite human thoughts interwoven & accrued around time and space = the expansion of the universe aka infinity aka God
All right…here I am ‘splaining, but I wanted to at least get to some of the what-was-it-about nuggets. In the end all this clarity around human thought mimicking time & space and accruing into an eternal self-balancing spiral known as Infinity or God, was a spiritual awakening for PKD.
The whole thing began in 1974 with his sudden “perception of time” via the fish necklace (this was The actual Exegesis). He spent the next(& last) 8 years of his life examining & getting to the bottom of this transcendental experience—how did it happen, what is time, what is space, what is all this false activity & noise that passes for reality, why am I suddenly perceiving everything differently, why was I chosen to see what others seem to be missing, and then bam…the visit from God explaining it all (on 11-17-80).
He continued to develop his theories & perceptions about all this through his fiction until he died in 1982. (He even came to see his work as non fiction or at least parable at the end.)
What seemed amazing to me was there was a clairvoyant aspect to all of PKDs mental gymnastics. His vision of “information as substance” seems not just like precognition of The Internet (& social networking in particular) but also how all this accrued information might change us on a microcosmic level to more compassionate, aware people.
Also his descriptions of time boring through space (as a tornado underwater would) keeping all of life in a constant state of plate-spun motion (aka alive) was very familiar to me via my Tarot studies. PKD was definitely interested in many (all) schools of thought, philosophies, religions and even dabbled in things like i Ching ( he had a friend who would do this for him occasionally). He mentioned kabbalah in context w/ his Jewish studies, but he made no firsthand mention of Tarot. Yet I felt like I was reading the work of someone who was well versed in tarot/golden dawn the whole time.
Without any preaching or moral innuendo, this work forged a union between science & religion—a union I’ve never been totally comfortable with until now.
*******The Personal Part****************
So you all remember when I did my Adventures in Spirituality (summer ’17). Long story short, there were some (silly-seeming) issues in my life for which I felt the need for some higher guidance.
I took you on a lint-filled journey through all my places of worship—which weren’t many. It started w/ me discovering my own psychic gifts at 13 and diverted to a frenetic guilt-ridden Xtian experiment, then ended w/ a healthy embrace of the nature-based, free-will religions like Wicca.
At 21, when I was initiated into a wiccan coven after studying w/ the group for a year, I felt I’d earned the equivalent of my Bachelor’s in Spirituality and abandoned all active practice to pursue my PhD in EVERYTHING ELSE.
I felt like I’d done Spirituality. Solved it. Was forever & eternally a gifted little witch.
One thing I got out of my AinS series was how wrong I was doing spirituality! All of it, including my doubt-ridden attempts at Xtianity. Boy, no wonder I failed at being a Xtian. I had no concept of “faith.” Xtianity certainly never was & still isn’t the religion for me, but I absolutely get what I was doing wrong.
Then I told you about the Psychic Safari, my pre & post 9/11 experience w/ automatic writing & mediumship. It was an exciting time, a heavy time, a scary time, and I was doing wrong things then too! I was an undisciplined channel, and I had “angels & soldiers crying around me” with no boundaries. I fancied myself to be “gifted” & “chosen” but had no idea what to do w/ these gifts, or the information I was receiving. I often didn’t realize it was “information” until it was too late.
Basically, if I was gifted, the gifts were wasted on me ; )) I got a lot of interesting writing out of it. A lot of history writ from behind the scenes, perhaps.
After the psychic safari, I began to wonder what use the spirit world was to this world. What business did I have listening in on spirit sounds if I was just going to file them away in a drawer, then brag about it on the internet years later? I decided to focus on living in the real world; writing real poetry & stories; just getting swept up in life again; drinking (a lot) again…
….then when I was able to quit drinking w/out (summoning) any aid from the spirit world, that verified for me that I didn’t really need anything from that world anymore.
I could be demon-free w/out the gods!!! Ah hahahahah I was so brilliant at Spirituality I didn’t need to practice at all!
And then came the hardest spiritual lesson of all — and this one I didn’t mention in the AinS — to realize that just because you are not summoning aid from the spirit world doesn’t mean you aren’t receiving it.
When the spirit world abandons you to walk alone on earth, you know it. It feels a lot like being abandoned by all your family & friends, except 1100x worse.
It’s a complete loss of hope, and it’s as close to “losing one’s own mind” as I care to get.
I was able to reconnect to the spirit world, after about a year of abandonment. But I no longer had the same relationship to the spirit world that I did before . The spirit world is quite hard on me & expects a lot. In fact, it gives me mini abandonments occasionally. I think it’s been trying to get my attention for a long time. And finally I listened. In the summer of 2017, I committed to understanding what I needed to understand.
It was my abandonment by the spirit world that made me want to read about PKDs discovery of the spirit world through his Exegesis. I wanted to read someone else’s belly button lint for a change, and PKD didn’t disappoint : ))
Actually his dogged insistence on understanding his own “unquantifiable perceptions” made me feel like such a lazy unmystical lint gatherer! I felt very emotionally connected to his theories & descriptions of time. [I felt like I understood a lot of what he was seeing & thinking, but I will stick to writing Vogon poetry about (to) it.]
One thing I think I’ve never mentioned in all my lint about the Psychic Safari is that I had my own EXEGESIS. An exegesis is like a long moment of clarity that causes everything in the world to make sense. On a profound spirit, molecular & kosmic level!
Well, my Exegesis scared me more than anything (of course). And then it got swept away in the big tsunami that was the Psychic Safari.
It happened somewhere in the summer of 2001 — the exact date eludes me because it happened sometime around midnight, when dates are temporarily fuzzy. But I can localize it around July 10 or 11, 2001.
I won’t describe it in great detail because it would make me sound like a lunatic. But i can tell you that at the moment it happened I was deep into an automatic writing session & my brain was purring like a microwave. I was listening to some cool music our friend had brought over from the middle east.
Then basically I lifted my head and i was in a different world, seeing a brief vision I would come to recognize in a couple of weeks, then watching time stretch out before me, not in any neon hallucinogenic way, but in a very structured detailed way. Basically time was ahead of me & my molecules & all the molecules in the room around me were trying to catch up. I felt like I was being sucked out of my body or pulled like taffy. The thing that scared me most was I could see my cat on the bed kind of “pixelating” and I was afraid she would die. So I shook my head & it was over.
I was back in my room & I was comforted to see David Letterman chattering mutely on the tv. But then I wanted to go back there — wherever that was! What was that? can I do it again? For the next 8 weeks I tried to repeat that experience. I tried writing, drinking, shaking my head back & forth till i was dizzy, hanging upside down on my bed…nothing worked… it was a once in a lifetime experience…
…and why did I not obsess on that one moment & all it revealed to me, like PKD obsessed over his one moment until he could describe God?
I like to think it was because I got swept away in the psychic currents of 9/11. [And there were a lot of psychic currents around that event. I was not the only one by far.] But I know it’s because I wasn’t smart enough to know what questions to ask. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, so I didn’t know I was supposed to look for more.
To me, it was more than enough to talk to spirits about what was happening on Earth. I didn’t need to know what was happening to make those conversations possible : ))
But now I have an even better understanding of that than I expected. Holy crap, this has gotten long. I just don’t know how to be brief about this stuff. I always say I want to write more serious, essay style blogs, but who has time to read all this shit??
I apologize if any of this sounds preachy—it’s not supposed to. I go on & on about it because I’m enthused about it, not because I am telling you how to be spiritual.
I have to wrestle really hard with my mind to make it work lately (meaning the past 5 years, since experiencing spiritual abandonment). But I’ve become quite the heavyweight champion , through my current spiritual practices (which really amount to focusing/meditative practices). And breathing. Singing. Oxygen is important. Exchanging lung fumes is good for mental health!
Returning to studying the mystic arts — intuition & mediumship — has been a good path for my old age. It gives me something to live for as I die.
I wouldn’t label PKD a “mystical” dude, nor would he I think, but his theories about the accrual of time from human thoughts & writings is as close to a perfect description of the afterlife (after time) as I have ever encountered.
THE END
(for now. I may write more about it. I’ll definitely write more Vogon poems about it. And I’ll draw some better time screws : )))
