by Philip K. Dick
First, before you start to bore you with the kind of thing that usually talks say the writers of science fiction, let me convey official greetings from Disneyland. I consider myself a spokesperson for Disneyland because I live just a few miles away; and as if that were not enough, once I had the honor of being interviewed there by Paris TV.
For several weeks after the interview, I was really sick and confined to bed. I think it was the whirling teacups. Elizabeth Antebi, who was the producer of the film, wanted me turning into one of those giant teacups while discussing the rise of fascism with Norman Spinrad ... an old friend of mine who writes excellent science fiction. We also discussed Watergate, but that we did on the deck of Captain Hook's pirate ship. Toddlers Mickey Mouse hats-those black hats with ears-kept running and turning against us as the cameras whirred, and Elizabeth was unexpected questions. Norman and I worried about the shaking of children, said some extraordinarily stupid things that day. Today, however, I must accept full blame for what they tell you, since none of you has Mickey Mouse hats and trying to climb over me with the idea that I am part of the furniture of a pirate ship.
science fiction writers, I say, do not really know anything. We can not talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful. A few years ago, no college or university would have ever considered invited to speak to one of us. We were mercifully confined to underground magazines, not to impress anyone. Those days, friends would tell me, "but you're writing something serious?" Meaning, "Are you writing anything other than science fiction?". Longed to be accepted, if we were done. Then, suddenly, the academic world noticed us, we were invited to give speeches and appear on juries, and immediately look silly. The problem is this, simply, what does a science fiction writer? What is an authority issue?
reminds me of a headline that appeared in a California newspaper just before he flew there. SCIENTISTS SAY THEY CAN NOT SEEM TO GET THAT HUMANS MICE. Was a research program funded by the state, I guess. Think about that: there is someone in this world who is an authority on the issue of whether or not we can put the mouse shoes, bowler hats, striped shirts, and Dacron pants, and pass for human.
Well, I'll tell you what interests me, what I consider important. I can not say that is an authority on anything, but I can honestly say that certain subjects fascinate me, and I write about them all the time. The two basic topics that fascinate me are "What is reality?" and "What constitutes the authentic human being?". During the twenty-seven years that I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we? What is it that surrounds us, what we call non-self, or the empirical or phenomenal?
In 1951, when I sold my first story, I had no idea that such fundamental issues could be pursued in the field of science fiction. I started doing it unconsciously. My first story was about a dog who imagined that the man who picked up every Friday was stealing away precious food that the family had carefully stored in a secure metal container. Each day, members family drew good food bags matures, went into the metal container, the lid was secured tightly closed, and the container was full, these dreadful-looking creatures came and stole everything but the container.
Finally, in the story, the dog begins to imagine that one day the men who collect the garbage people eat at home, eat your food well. And of course, the dog is wrong about this, we all know they do not eat people. But extrapolation of the dog in a sense it was logical, given the facts before it. The story was about a real dog, watching and trying to get into your head and imagine and saw the world. Certainly, I decided, that dog sees the world quite differently to how I or any human being does. And then I started thinking, maybe every human lives in one world, private, a different world from those who experience and live the rest of humanity. And this led me to wonder if the reality differs from person to person, can we speak of a singular reality, or we should not really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? And the world of a schizophrenic? Perhaps it is as real as ours. Maybe we can not say we are in touch with reality and he did not, but we should say that their reality is so different from ours that can not explaining it, and we can not tell us ours. The problem then is that if subjective worlds are perceived too different, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real disease.
once wrote a story about a man who was wounded and taken to a hospital. When they started to do surgery, they discovered he was an android, not a human, but he did not know. Had to tell the news. Almost immediately, Mr. Garson Poole discovered that his reality consisted of a tape with holes in reel passing reel in his chest. Fascinated, he began to fill some holes and add others. Immediately, his world changed. A flock of ducks flew through the room when poked a new hole in the tape. Finally cut the tape entirely, bringing the world disappeared. However, it also disappeared for the rest of the characters in the story ... it makes no sense if you think about. Unless the other characters were figments of his imagination punched tape. That is what I imagine they were.
was always my hope, to write novels and stories which asked the question "What is reality?" Find an answer someday. This was the hope, too, most of my readers. Years passed. I wrote about thirty novels and a hundred stories, and had not yet been able to find out what was real. One day a high school student in Canada asked me to define what was actually for a job that was writing in philosophy class. Wanted an answer in one sentence. I thought about it and I finally said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, not away." That's all I could think of. That was in 1972. Since then I have not been able to define reality with more clarity.
But the problem is real, not just an intellectual game. Because today we live in a society where the media made spurious realities, governments, large corporations, religious groups, politicians, ... and there are electronic means to deliver these pseudo-worlds durectamente in the minds of those who read it, I see it, hear. Sometimes when I watch my eleven year old daughter watching TV, I wonder what you are teaching. Or the wrong time, consider this: a TV program produced for adults is viewed by young children. Probably half of what is said is misinterpreted by the child. Maybe everything. And the question is, how authentic is the information in any case, even if the child correctly understood? What is the ratio of standard television situation comedy and reality? What about police programs? Cars are continually losing control, crashing and burning. The police is always good and always wins. Do not ignore this, the police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you lose. The message here is, Be passive, and Cooperation. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it, because Officer Baretta is a good man and you have to trust him. Loves you, and you should do the same.
So I wonder what I write, what is real? Because we are constantly bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. No suspicious of their motives, wary of his power. They have a lot of that. It is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. Should know. I do the same. My job is to create universes, as the basis for a novel after another. And I have to build in a way not to fall two days later. Or at least that's what my editors hope. However, I will tell you a secret: I like to build universes that collapse. I like to see deconstructed, and I like to see how the characters in the novels deal with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more thereof. Do not believe-and I am absolutely serious when I say this, "do not assume that the order and stability are always good, in a society or in the universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and birth of new things. Before the new things are born the old must perish. This understanding is dangerous, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar. And that hurts. But the script is part of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die inside. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And authentic human being who matters most, the viable organism, elastic, that can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.
Of course, I say this because I live near Disneyland, and are always adding new rides and destroying old ones. Disneyland is an organism that evolves. For years they had the Lincoln Simulacrum, like Lincoln that was only a temporary form which matter and energy were taken and eventually disappear. The same is true of every one of us, like it or not.
The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are those that never change ... and the Greek philosopher pre-Socratic Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If flaps both views, you get this result: Nothing is real. There is a fascinating next step to this line of thinking: Parmenides could never have existed because he grew old and died and disappeared, which, according to his own philosophy, never existed. And Heraclitus may have been right, do not forget this, so if Heraclitus was right, then Parmenides did exist, and therefore, according to Heraclitus' philosophy, perhaps Parmenides was right, since Parmenides fulfilled the conditions, criteria, by which Heraclitus real judged things.
offer this merely to show that once you start to wonder what is definitely real, you start talking nonsense. Zeno provide that the motion was impossible (well, just figured I had done, what he lacked was what technically is called the "theory of limits"). David Hume, the biggest skeptic of all, once said that following a meeting of skeptics met to proclaim the veracity of skepticism as a philosophy, there was the odd fact that all members of the meeting went through the door instead of the window. I see the sense of what counts Hume, was all talk. The solemn philosophers were not taking seriously what they said.
But I think the question of defining what is real, this is serious, even vital. And that somewhere there is another issue, the definition of authentic humanity. Due to the bombardment of pseudo-reality, humans are rapidly produced, authentic, spurious, as fake as the data pressing on all fronts. My two topics are really one; come together at this point. The human false create false realities. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then the human traffic with other false. It is simply a very long version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr.Toad Wild Ride, you can have them all, but neither is true.
Writing interested me so much for the fakes that I finally got the concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds driven by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass. Suppose that one night we sneak into the park with real birds and replaced the artificial. Imagine the horror that owners feel when they discovered the cruel joke. Birds of truth! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions. Consternation. The park being cunningly transmuted by sinister forces from the unreal to the real. For example say, what if the Matterhorn turned into a genuine snow-covered mountain? What if the entire place, by a miracle of God's power and wisdom, was changed in a moment, with the wink of an eye, into something incorruptible? Would shut down.
In Plato's Timaeus, God created the universe, as does the Christian God, just find it a day. Is in a state of total chaos. God is put to work to transform chaos into order. That idea appeals to me, and I have adapted to my intellectual needs: What if our universe started out as unrealistic, a kind of illusion as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, love and kindness toward us, what was slowly and secretly transmuting into something real?
We would not be aware of this transformation, and we were not aware at first that our world was an illusion. This is technically a Gnostic idea. Gnosticism is a religion which embraced Jews, Christians and pagans for several centuries. I have been accused of holding Gnostic ideas. I guess I do. At some point I would have burned. But some of his ideas intrigue me. Once when I was researching Gnosticism in the Britannica, I came across a mention of a Gnostic codex called The Unreal God and the aspects of his universe does not exist, an idea that reduced me to a desperate laughter. What kind of person would write about something he knows does not exist, and how can something that does not exist have aspects? But then I realized I'd been writing about these issues for twenty years. I guess you could say a lot when you write about a topic that does not exist. A friend of mine once published a book called Snakes of Hawaii. Several libraries wrote him asking for copies. Well, there are no snakes in Hawaii. All pages of his book were blank.
course in science fiction there is no pretense that the worlds described are real. So we call it fiction. The reader is warned in advance that does not believe in what is going to read. Similarly, visitors to Disneyland understand that Mr.Toad not really exist and that the pirates are moved by motors and servo-assisted, relays, and electronic circuits. Thus there is no deception.
And yet the strange thing is, that somehow, in a real way, much of what appears under the title "science fiction" is real. It may not be literally true, I guess. We've never really been invaded by creatures from another solar system, as described in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The producers of that film never intended that to believe it. Does it?
More importantly, if they had tried to say this, would really true?. That is the question, not whether the author or producer believe it, but is it true?. Because, by an accident while chasing a good story, a science fiction writer or a producer or screenwriter could come up with the truth, ... and realize later.
The most basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use words. George Orwell made this clear in his novel 1984. But another way to control the minds of the people is to control their perceptions. If you can see the world as you do, think as you think. Understanding follows perception. How do you see the reality you see? After all, is only one reality among many. The images are a basic constituent, for this is what the power of TV to influence young minds is so brutally vast. Words and images are synchronized. The possibility of total control of the viewer exists, especially in the young. Watching TV is a kind of apprenticeship in the dream. An EEG of a person watching TV shows shows that after half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and becomes a hypnotic state by emitting alpha waves. This is because there is very little eye movement. Moreover, much of the information is graphic, and therefore goes to the right brain instead of being processed by the left, where the conscious personality. Recent experiments indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is received subliminally. Just imagine that we consciously what is there. The bulk of the messages they avoid our attention, literally within hours of watching TV, do not know what we have seen. Our memories are spurious, such as dreams, the voids are filled retrospectively. And counterfeited. We have participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and we have to feed her. Have conspired against us to our own condemnation.
And I say this as a professional fiction writer-producers, writing scripts, and directors who create these worlds of audio / video, do not know how much of it is true. In other words, they are victims of their own product, along with us. Speaking for myself, I do not know how much of what I write is true, or which parts (if any) is true. This is potentially lethal. We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blurring area. And probably not deliberate. In fact, that's part of the problem. You can not legislate an author correctly label their product, like a can of pudding whose ingredients are listed on the label ... can not declare him how much is truth and what part is not when he ignores it.
is an eerie experience to write something in a novel, believing it is pure fiction, and learned later, perhaps years later, it's true. I would give you an example. It's something I do not understand. Podais perhaps give me a theory. I can not.
In 1970 I wrote a novel called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. " One of the characters is a nineteen year old girl named Kathy. Her husband's name is Jack. Kathy appears to work for the criminal underground, but later, as we move into the novel, we discover that is working for the police. Is having an affair with a police inspector. The character is pure fiction. Or at least I think it was.
Anyway, on Christmas Day 1970, I met a girl named Kathy-this was after finishing the novel, it is understood. Was nineteen. Her boyfriend named Jack. I soon learned that Kathy dealing drugs. I spent months trying to make it to traffic stop, the time and again warned that they could catch it. Then one evening as we walked together to a restaurant, Kathy stopped short and said, "I can not enter." Sitting in the restaurant was a police inspector who knew. "I have to tell the truth, "Kathy said," I have a relationship with him. "
Certainly, these coincidences. He might have precognition. mistero But it gets even weirder, the next stage totally baffles me. He has done for four years.
In 1974 the novel was published by Doubleday. One afternoon I was talking to my priest, I am Episcopalian, "and I mentioned was an important scene near the end of the novel in which the character Felix Buckman meets a black guy at a gas station open 24 hours and start talking. As described in the scene more and more detail, my priest became progressively more agitated. At last he said, "this is a scene from the Book of Acts, the Bible! The person who finds the black man on the road is called Philip, like you." Father Rasch was so upset by the resemblance that he could not even locate the scene in the Bible. "Read Acts," he instructed, "and you'll agree. It's the same up on specific details."
I went home and read the scene in Acts. Yes, Father Rasch was right, the scene in my novel again obviously was narrating the scene in Acts ... and had never read Acts, I must admit. But again the puzzle became deeper. In Acts, the high Roman official who arrests and interrogates Saint Paul is named Felix, the same my character name. And my character Felix Buckman is a high-ranking police, in fact, in my novel has the same role as Felix in the Book of Acts, the final authority. There is a conversation in my novel is much like a conversation between Felix and Paul.
Well, I decided to try and see other portraits. The main character in my novel is named Jason. I took an index to the Bible and looked to see if anyone named Jason appeared somewhere in the Bible. I could not remember any. Well, a man named Jason appears once (and only one) in the Bible. It's in the Book of Acts. And like a plague with more matches, in my novel Jason is fleeing from the authorities and takes refuge in the house of a person, and in Acts the man named Jason harbor a fugitive in his house, an exact inversion of the situation in my novel, as if the mysterious Spirit responsible for all this was somehow laughing the whole thing.
Felix, Jason, and the encounter on the road with the black man who is a stranger. In Acts, the disciple Philip baptizes the black man, who then start rejoicing. In my novel, Felix Buckman unknown black man looking for emotional support, because Felix Buckman's sister just died and he is falling apart psychologically. The black man helps the mood of Buckman, and although Buckman does not go away rejoicing, at least his tears have stopped falling. He has been flying home, mourning the death of his sister, and had to be with someone, anyone, even a complete stranger. It is an encounter between two strangers in the way that changes the life of one of them, both in my novel and in Acts. And one final quirk of mysterious spirit: the name Felix is \u200b\u200bthe Latin word for "happy." Which I did not know until I wrote the novel.
A careful study of my novel shows that for reasons I can not even begin to explain there was rewritten several of the basic incidents of a particular book of the Bible, even with the appropriate names. How could explain this? Was four years ago I discovered this. For four years I have tried to devise a theory and have not succeeded. I doubt they ever will.
But the mystery is not over here, as I thought. Two months ago she was walking to the mailbox to send a letter late at night, also to enjoy the view of the Church of Saint Joseph, which is on the opposite side of my apartment building. I saw a man loitering suspiciously around a parked car. It seemed to go to steal the car, or something of him as I returned from the mailbox, the man hid behind a tree. On impulse I walked up to him and asked, "Is something wrong?"
"I have no gasoline," said the man, "and I have no money."
Incredibly, he had never done this before, I took out my wallet, took all her money and gave him the money. Then I hit my hand and asked where I lived, so he could return it later. I returned to my apartment, and then I realized that money would not do any good, because it was not gas stations nearby. So I went back in my car. The man had a can of gasoline in the trunk of the car, and together, we drove my car to a gas station. Soon we were there, two strangers, while the rate of the station filled the can. I suddenly realized that this was the scene of my novel, the novel I had written eight years earlier. The gas station was exactly as I had vimaginado when I wrote the scene, the filling rate, the dazzling white light ... and now I saw something I had not seen before. The stranger who was helping was black.
drove back to his car with gasoline, we shook hands, and then returned to my apartment building. I never saw him again. I could not have returned the money because he had not told which of the many apartments was mine or what my name was. I was terribly shaken by this experience. He had lived literally a scene completely as it had appeared in my novel. Which is to say, having lived a kind of replica of the scene in which Philip Instruments is the black man on the road.
What could explain this?
The answer occurred to me might not be correct, but the only one I have. It's about time. My theory is this: in some important sense, time is not real. Or maybe it is real, but not as we experience or imagine it. His acute certainty, irrepressible (and even I have) that despite the change we see, a specific permanent landscape underlies the world of change, and that this invisible underlying landscape is that of the Bible, specifically, is the period immediately following the death and resurrection of Christ is, in other words, the time period of the Book of Acts.
Parmenides would be proud of me. I looked at a changing world and have declared that under him is the eternal, unchanging, the absolutely real. But how did this happen? If real time is 50 AD, why do we see the 1978 DC? And if we are really living in the Roman Empire, somewhere in Syria, why do we see the United States?
During the Middle Ages came a strange theory, I present now for what it's worth. It is the theory that the Evil-Satan-is the "Monkey God." Creates spurious imitations of creation, the real creation of God, and then interleaved with the real creation. Need help weird theory to explain my experience? Are we to believe that we are confused, misled, this is not 1978, but the 50 ... and Satan has created a fake reality to stunt our faith in Christ's return?
I can imagine being examined by a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist says, "what year is it?" And I say, "50 AD". The psychiatrist blinks and then asks, "And where are you?", And answering, "in Judea." "Where the hell is that?" Asks the psychiatrist. "It's part of the Roman Empire, would have to respond. "Do you know who is the President?" Ask the psychiatrist, and I reply, "The Procurator Felix." "Are you really sure about this?" ask the psychiatrist, while giving a signal to sneak a couple of very large staff. "Yes" answer. "Unless Felix has been demoted and replaced by the Procurator Festus. In other words, St. Paul was held by para-Felix." "Who told you this?" the psychiatrist would break the conversation irritated, and I reply, "The Holy Spirit." And after that would be in a padded room, looking out, and knowing no doubt how I got here.
Everything in that conversation would be true in some sense, although palpably not true in another. I am aware that the date is 1978 and that the president is Jimmy Carter and I live in Santa Ana, California, United States. I even know how to go from my apartment to Disneyland, a fact that does not seem to be able to forget. And surely no Disneyland had the time of St. Paul.
So, if I force myself to be very rational and reasonable and all that good stuff, I must admit that the existence of Disneyland (which I know is real) proves that we are not living in Judea in 50 AD The idea of \u200b\u200bSt. Paul going around in giant teacups while composing Corinthians, while Paris TV films him, yes that can not be. San Pablo never go to Disneyland. Only children, tourists and senior Soviet officials ever go to Disneyland. Saints do not.
But somehow that biblical material caught my unconscious and crept into my novel, and equally true, for some reason in 1978 I relived a scene that was described in 1970. What I mean is this: there is internal evidence in at least one of my novels that another reality, that does not change, exactly as Parmenides and Plato suspected, underlies the visible phenomenal world of change, and somehow, perhaps to our surprise , we through and reach it. Or some mysterious spirit can get in touch with her, if you want to see this permanent other landscape. Time passes, thousands of years pass, but at the moment we see this contemporary world, the world antigo, the world of the Bible, is concealed behind him, still there and still real. Forever.
Should I take a chance and tell the rest of this particular story? I will, having come so far already. My novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was published by Doubleday in February 1974. The week after it was published, I took two wisdom teeth, and gave me pentatol sodium. Later that day I found with severe pain. My wife phoned the dentist and called to a pharmacy. Half an hour later there was a call on my door, the person bringing the package with the medication. Although he was bleeding and sick and weak, I felt the need to respond to the call at the door myself. When I opened the door, I found myself facing a young woman wearing a shiny gold necklace in the center of which was a gleaming gold fish. For some reason I was hypnotized by the goldfish, I forgot my pain and medication, I forgot that the girl was there. I stared at the fish symbol.
"What is that?" I asked. She touched
bright golden fish with her hand and said, "This is a symbol worn by the early Christians." Then I got the package with the medication.
At that moment, while watching the fish sign and heard his words, suddenly experienced what I later understood as history, the Greek word that literally means "loss of forgetfulness." I remembered who he was and where I was. In an instant, in the wink of an eye, everything came back to me. And not only him but could remember. The girl was a secret Christian, and I was. We lived in fear of being caught by the Romans. We had to communicate with cryptic signs. She had just told me everything this was true.
For a short time, however difficult it is to believe or explain, I saw the image of a black contours of hateful Rome prison. But, more importantly, remembered Jesus, who had been with us recently, and had gone temporarily, and return soon. My emotion was joy. We were secretly preparing his welcome back. It would not be much. And the Romans did not know. Thought he was dead, dead forever. That was our great secret, our joyous knowledge. Despite appearances, Christ would return, and our enjoyment and anticipation knew no boundaries.
Not is odd that this strange event, this recovery of a lost memory, occurred only a week after the publication of "Flow My Tears"? What is Flow My Tears which contains the reply of the people and events of the Book of Acts, which is located at the precise moment in time, just after the death and resurrection of Jesus, which had been reminded, through symbol of the goldfish, just what had just happened?
If you were me, and this will have happened, I'm sure you could not leave it alone. Look to find a theory that could account for it. For four years now, I've been trying one theory after another: time circular, frozen time, timeless time, what time is called "sacred" about the "worldly" ... I can not count the theories I've tried. One constant has prevailed, however, through all the theories. There must be some mysterious Holy Spirit which has a precise and intimate relationship with Christ, who can inhabit human minds, to guide and inform, and even express itself through those humans, even without being aware of it.
In writing of Flow My Tears, in 1970, there was an unusual event that I realized at that moment that it was not normal, was not a part of the normal process of writing. I had a dream one night, a dream especially vivid. And then I woke up and found myself under the compulsion-the absolute need-to translate the dream into the text of the novel as we had dreamed. To move the dream correctly, I had to do eleven drafts of the final part of the manuscript, until I was satisfied.
I will now quote the novel, as it appeared the final published form. See if this dream reminds you of something.
field, brown and dry in summer, where she had lived as a child. He rode a horse, and going to his left a squad of horses slowly approaching. On the horses rode men in shining robes, each with a color other, each wearing a helmet peak finish sparkled with sunlight Knights ahead will slow and solemn, and noticed while riding one's face, an ancient marble face, a terribly old man with wavy waterfalls white beard. How strong nose he had. What noble features. So tired, so serious, so far beyond ordinary men. Evidently he was a king. Felix Buckman
let him pass, not spoke to them, or they did to him. Together, all moved into the house from which he had come. A man was locked inside the house, a man alone, Jason Taverner, in the silence and darkness, without windows, for yourself from now until eternity. And then he heard behind him one dreadful shriek. They had killed Taverner, and seeing them go, feeling his alrededos leftovers, knowing what I intended to do with him, Taverner had shrieked.
Felix Buckman felt a complete and utter desolate grief. But sleep would not go back and look back. You could not do anything. Nobody could have stopped the gang of men in colorful robes, they could not be convinced. In any case, was over. Taverner was dead.
This passage probably does not suggest anything in particular you, except a gang that judges and applies the law on anyone either guilty or considered clpable. It is not clear whether Taverner has in fact committed a crime or merely think you've done. I have the impression that he was guilty, but it was a tragedy that had to be killed, a terribly sad tragedy. In the novel, this dream makes Felix Buckman begins to mourn, so look for the black man at the pump 24 hours.
Months after the novel was published, I found the section in the Bible that referred to this dream. It is Daniel, 7:9:
"They stood in place thrones and an elder in years took place. His robe was white as snow and hair of his head like cleanest wool. His throne was flames of fire, and his wheel flares, a fire was flowing river in front of him. Miles served and crowds attending his presence. The court sat, and the book was opened. "
The white-haired old man appears again in Revelation 1:13:
" Vi ... One like the Son of man, with a gown to her then, with a golden sash around his chest. The hair of his head was white as snow-white wool, and his eyes were like flaming fire, his feet gleamed like burnished brass refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing water. "And then 1
: 17:
"When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he put his right hand on me and said, "Fear not. I am the first and last, and I'm living, because I was dead and I am alive forever, and took the keys of death and their domains. Write for so what you saw, which is now, and what will from now on. "
And, as John of Patmos, wrote faithfully what he saw and put it in my novel. And it was true, although at the time did not know what he meant this description:
"... and while traveling noticed the face of one, an ancient marble face, a terribly old man with wavy white beard cascades . How strong nose he had. What noble features. So tired, so serious, so far beyond ordinary men. Evidently he was a king. "
In fact it was a king. It is Christ returned to judge. And this is what he does in my novel, judge the man trapped in darkness. The man locked up in darkness must be the Prince of Evil Force of Darkness. Call it what you want, its time had come. He was tried and convicted. Felix Buckman could complain to the sadness of it, but knew that the verdict could not be disputed. So I rode on, without turning around or looking back, hearing only the shriek of fear and defeat: the cry of evil destroyed.
So
my novel contained material from other parts of the Bible, as well as sections of Acts. Decoded, my novel tells a story quite different from the surface (which need not discuss here). The real story is simply this: the return of Christ, now king rather than suffering servant. Judge rather than victim of an unfair trial. All wrong. The core message of my novel, without my knowing it was a warning to the powerful: you will soon be tried and convicted. Who I was referring specifically? Well, I can not really say, or maybe he'd rather not. I have no certainty, only an intuition. And that's not enough to continue, so I will keep my thoughts. But you could ask what political events took place in this country between February and August 1974. Who was tried and convicted, and fell like a shooting star into ruin and disgrace. The most powerful man in the world. And I regret it now as it was when I dreamed that dream. "That poor man," I once told my wife, with tears in his eyes. "Locked in the dark, playing the piano at night for himself, alone and afraid, knowing what's to come." For the love of God, perdonemosle the end. But what was asked of him and all his men - "The President's Men" as they say, should be done. But it's over, and should be left to see the sunlight again, any creature or person should be locked up forever in the dark with fear. It's not human.
Just as the Supreme Court was deciding that the recordings of Nixon were taken to the special prosecutor, was eating at a Chinese restaurant in Yorba Linda, the people of California where Nixon went to school, where he grew up, where he worked in a supermarket where there is a park that bears his name, and of course the Nixon house, simple strips of wood and all that. In my fortune cookie, the paper read:
ACTS DONE IN SECRET HAVE A WAY TO
be ascertained
I mailed the paper to the White House, noting that the Chinese restaurant was located within a radius of one mile over the original home of Nixon, and said, "I think there has been a mistake, by accident I received a cookie fate of Mr. Nixon. Is it mine? ". The White House did not respond.
Well, as I said before, the author of a work of alleged fiction might write the truth without knowing it. To quote Xenophanes, another pre-Socratic, "Even if a man had the opportunity to speak the full truth, he does not know, all things are wrapped in appearances" (fragemento 34). And Heraclitus added to this: "Nature of things is the habit of hiding "(fragment 54). WSGilbert, Gilbert and Sullivan, the proposed well:" Things are seldom what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream. "The important thing is that we can not trust our senses and probably even our a priori reasoning. As to our senses, I understand that people who had been blind since birth and suddenly obtain from view is shocked to discover that objects appear smaller and smaller as moving away. Logically, no reason for this. We, of course, we have learned to accept this because we have become accustomed. We see objects get smaller, but we know actually remain the same size. So even the people in their everyday pragmatic uses a certain extent the process of discarding things which your eyes and ears tell him. Little
that Heraclitus wrote has survived, and what we have is obscure, but Fragment 54 is lucid and important: "The deep structure is master of obvious structure." This means that Heraclitus believed that there was a veil over the real landscape. It might also have suspected that time was somehow not what it seems, because in Fragment 52 he said: "Time is a child playing checkers: a child is the kingdom." This is indeed cryptic. But he also said, in Fragment 18: "If you do not expect, you do not find the unexpected, since it is undiscoverable and no way we can take it." Edward Hussey, in his scholarly book The Presocratics, says
"If Heraclitus is so insistent on the lack of understanding shown by most men, it seems reasonable to offer instruction to penetrate deeper truth. The chatter puzzle suggests that some kind of revelation, beyond human control, is needed ... true wisdom, as has been seen, is closely associated with God, which emphasizes the suggestion that for the advancement of knowledge a man becomes as, or part of, God.
This appointment is not a religious book or theology, it is an analysis of the earliest philosophers by a former philosophy professor at the University of Oxford. Hussey explained that for these early philosophers there was no distinction between philosophy and religion. The first quantum leap in Greek theology was by Xenophanes of Colophon, born in the middle of the sixth century BC. Xenophanes, without resorting to any authority except that of his own mind, says
there a god, certainly not as deadly creatures in flesh or in the thoughts of their minds. The whole of him sees, thinks, listen. Always remains motionless in the same place is not appropriate that it should now move this way, after that another.
This is a subtle and advanced concept of God, evidently without precedent among the Greek thinkers. "The arguments of Parmenides seemed to show that all reality must indeed be a mind," Hussey writes, "or the thought in mind." Specifically about Heraclitus says, "In Heraclitus is difficult to say how far the designs in a divine mind is distinguished from its implementation in the world, or indeed how far God's mind differs from the world." Next hop Anaxagoras has always fascinated me. "Anaxagoras was born a theory of the microstructure of the material that was, to some extent mysterious to human reason. "Anaxagoras believed that everything was determined by the mind. These were not children or primitive thinkers. They were debating serious issues and studied one points of view of another business intuition. It was not until Aristotle that their views were reduced to what can be classified neatly-but wrongly-as primitive. The sum of many pre-Socratic theology and philosophy can be stated as follows: the cosmos is not what it seems, and what is probably the deepest level, is exactly what the human being is in its deepest level, be it mind or soul, is something unitary which lives and thinks, and that only appears to be plural and material. In large part, this view reaches us through the Logos doctrine regarding Christ. The Logos was both that which thought, and the thing I thought: thinker and thought together. The universe, then, is thinker and thought, and because we are part of it, the final analysis, human being and thinkers are thinking these thoughts.
Thus if God thinks about Rome around 50 AD, then Rome around 50 AD is. The universe is not winding watch and God's hand that string. There is a battery-powered clock with God as a battery. Spinoza believed that the universe is the body of God extensive in space. But long before Spinoza-two thousand years earlier, Xenophanes had said, "without effort, he wields all things by the thought of his mind" (Fragment 25)
If anyone have read my novel Ubik, you know that the mysterious body or mind or force called Ubik starts out as a series of cheap and vulgar commercials and winds up saying:
am Ubik. Before the universe was me. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit, they move here, I put there. Marchan as I say, do as I say. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name that nobody knows. I am called Ubik but that's not my name. Am. Always be.
here is obvious who and what Ubik, specifically says that is the word, which is to say, the Logos. In the German translation, was one of the most wonderful lapses regarding the correct understanding that I have ever found, God help us if the man who translated my novel Ubik into German would have had to translate the New Testament Koine Greek into German. He did everything right until he reached the phrase "I am the word." That puzzled him. What can the author mean by that?, Must have asked himself, obviously never encountered the absence of the doctrine of the Logos. So he made the best translation I could. In the edition Germany, the Absolute Entity which made the suns, created the worlds, created the lives and the places they inhabit, says of herself: I'm
trademark (N. of T. English "brand name", name- -la-mark)
Had translated the Gospel of John, I guess I would have gone something like
When all things began, it was the trademark. The brand name dwelt with God, and God was, the brand was.
would seem that not only bring you greetings from Disneyland but from Mortimer Snerd. Such is the fate of an author who had hoped to include theological themes in his writings. "The brand name was then with God at the beginning, and through him all things came to be, not a single thing was created without him. "So there are noble ambitions. We hope God has a sense of humor.
Or should I say, hopefully that the trademark has a sense of humor.
As I told you before, my two concerns in writing, are "What is reality?" and "What constitutes the authentic human being?". They sure as you can see I have not been able to answer the first question. I have a permanent intuition that somehow the world of the Bible were literally real but veiled landscape, never changing, hidden from view, but available to us through revelation. That's all I'm capable of devising, a mixture of mystical experience, reasoning, and faith. I would still say something about the characteristics of authentic human in this quest I had a plausible answer to the other.
The real human is one of us who instinctively knows what you should not do and which in addition will be obstacles to do so. Refuse to do so, even if this brings awesome consequences for her and those she loves. This, to me, is the ultimate heroic feature of normal people say no to the tyrant and calmly take the consequences of resistance. Their deeds may be small, and often unnoticed, without picking up the story. Their names are not remembered, nor human authentic expected these names will be remembered. I see the authenticity of an odd way: not available to accomplish great heroic deeds but in their quiet negative. In essence, can not be forced to be what they are not.
The power of spurious realities that hit us today-these deliberately manufactured lies, "never penetrate to the heart of true human beings. I see kids watching TV, and first I have fear of what they are teaching, then I realize that can not be corrupted or destroyed. Observe, listen, understand, and then, when and where necessary, reject. There is something enormously powerful in a child's ability to resist fraudulent. A child has the clearest, the steadiest hand. Unscrupulous sellers, developers are trying to attract the loyalty of the small people in vain. True, the cereal companies may be able to place large quantities of junk breakfasts; chains burgers and hot dogs may sell endless numbers of unreal fast food to children, but the deep heart beats firmly, or reached or understood. A child of today can detect a lie quicker than the wisest adult two decades ago. When I want to know what is true, ask my kids. Do not ask me, I turn to them.
One day while my son Christopher, who is four years old, was playing in front of me and his mother, the two adults began discussing the figure of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. Christopher turned to us for a moment and said, "I am a fisherman. Pesco fish." I was playing with a metal lantern that someone had given me, and had never used, ... and suddenly I realized that the lantern was shaped like a fish. I wonder what thoughts were being placed in the soul of my little child at the time, and not by grain merchants or dealers of candy. "I am a fisherman, fish fish." Christopher, at four years, had found the symbol that I did not find until it was forty-five years.
Time speeds up, and to what end? Perhaps we were told two thousand years ago. Or maybe it was not long ago, maybe it is a delusion that has been so long. Perhaps it was a week ago, or was today, early. Perhaps time is not only accelerating, perhaps, by the way, is to end.
And if it does, the rides at Disneyland are not coming back to the same thing again. Because when time runs out, the birds and hippos and lions and deer at Disneyland will no longer be simulations, and for the first time a real bird will sing.
Thanks.
Text taken from:
http://www.13t.org/decondicionamiento/forum/leemas.php?p=1799&t=417
Image taken from: http://
www.geocities.com/area51/crater/4909/ucdick.jpg
First, before you start to bore you with the kind of thing that usually talks say the writers of science fiction, let me convey official greetings from Disneyland. I consider myself a spokesperson for Disneyland because I live just a few miles away; and as if that were not enough, once I had the honor of being interviewed there by Paris TV.
For several weeks after the interview, I was really sick and confined to bed. I think it was the whirling teacups. Elizabeth Antebi, who was the producer of the film, wanted me turning into one of those giant teacups while discussing the rise of fascism with Norman Spinrad ... an old friend of mine who writes excellent science fiction. We also discussed Watergate, but that we did on the deck of Captain Hook's pirate ship. Toddlers Mickey Mouse hats-those black hats with ears-kept running and turning against us as the cameras whirred, and Elizabeth was unexpected questions. Norman and I worried about the shaking of children, said some extraordinarily stupid things that day. Today, however, I must accept full blame for what they tell you, since none of you has Mickey Mouse hats and trying to climb over me with the idea that I am part of the furniture of a pirate ship.
science fiction writers, I say, do not really know anything. We can not talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful. A few years ago, no college or university would have ever considered invited to speak to one of us. We were mercifully confined to underground magazines, not to impress anyone. Those days, friends would tell me, "but you're writing something serious?" Meaning, "Are you writing anything other than science fiction?". Longed to be accepted, if we were done. Then, suddenly, the academic world noticed us, we were invited to give speeches and appear on juries, and immediately look silly. The problem is this, simply, what does a science fiction writer? What is an authority issue?
reminds me of a headline that appeared in a California newspaper just before he flew there. SCIENTISTS SAY THEY CAN NOT SEEM TO GET THAT HUMANS MICE. Was a research program funded by the state, I guess. Think about that: there is someone in this world who is an authority on the issue of whether or not we can put the mouse shoes, bowler hats, striped shirts, and Dacron pants, and pass for human.
Well, I'll tell you what interests me, what I consider important. I can not say that is an authority on anything, but I can honestly say that certain subjects fascinate me, and I write about them all the time. The two basic topics that fascinate me are "What is reality?" and "What constitutes the authentic human being?". During the twenty-seven years that I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we? What is it that surrounds us, what we call non-self, or the empirical or phenomenal?
In 1951, when I sold my first story, I had no idea that such fundamental issues could be pursued in the field of science fiction. I started doing it unconsciously. My first story was about a dog who imagined that the man who picked up every Friday was stealing away precious food that the family had carefully stored in a secure metal container. Each day, members family drew good food bags matures, went into the metal container, the lid was secured tightly closed, and the container was full, these dreadful-looking creatures came and stole everything but the container.
Finally, in the story, the dog begins to imagine that one day the men who collect the garbage people eat at home, eat your food well. And of course, the dog is wrong about this, we all know they do not eat people. But extrapolation of the dog in a sense it was logical, given the facts before it. The story was about a real dog, watching and trying to get into your head and imagine and saw the world. Certainly, I decided, that dog sees the world quite differently to how I or any human being does. And then I started thinking, maybe every human lives in one world, private, a different world from those who experience and live the rest of humanity. And this led me to wonder if the reality differs from person to person, can we speak of a singular reality, or we should not really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? And the world of a schizophrenic? Perhaps it is as real as ours. Maybe we can not say we are in touch with reality and he did not, but we should say that their reality is so different from ours that can not explaining it, and we can not tell us ours. The problem then is that if subjective worlds are perceived too different, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real disease.
once wrote a story about a man who was wounded and taken to a hospital. When they started to do surgery, they discovered he was an android, not a human, but he did not know. Had to tell the news. Almost immediately, Mr. Garson Poole discovered that his reality consisted of a tape with holes in reel passing reel in his chest. Fascinated, he began to fill some holes and add others. Immediately, his world changed. A flock of ducks flew through the room when poked a new hole in the tape. Finally cut the tape entirely, bringing the world disappeared. However, it also disappeared for the rest of the characters in the story ... it makes no sense if you think about. Unless the other characters were figments of his imagination punched tape. That is what I imagine they were.
was always my hope, to write novels and stories which asked the question "What is reality?" Find an answer someday. This was the hope, too, most of my readers. Years passed. I wrote about thirty novels and a hundred stories, and had not yet been able to find out what was real. One day a high school student in Canada asked me to define what was actually for a job that was writing in philosophy class. Wanted an answer in one sentence. I thought about it and I finally said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, not away." That's all I could think of. That was in 1972. Since then I have not been able to define reality with more clarity.
But the problem is real, not just an intellectual game. Because today we live in a society where the media made spurious realities, governments, large corporations, religious groups, politicians, ... and there are electronic means to deliver these pseudo-worlds durectamente in the minds of those who read it, I see it, hear. Sometimes when I watch my eleven year old daughter watching TV, I wonder what you are teaching. Or the wrong time, consider this: a TV program produced for adults is viewed by young children. Probably half of what is said is misinterpreted by the child. Maybe everything. And the question is, how authentic is the information in any case, even if the child correctly understood? What is the ratio of standard television situation comedy and reality? What about police programs? Cars are continually losing control, crashing and burning. The police is always good and always wins. Do not ignore this, the police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you lose. The message here is, Be passive, and Cooperation. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it, because Officer Baretta is a good man and you have to trust him. Loves you, and you should do the same.
So I wonder what I write, what is real? Because we are constantly bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. No suspicious of their motives, wary of his power. They have a lot of that. It is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. Should know. I do the same. My job is to create universes, as the basis for a novel after another. And I have to build in a way not to fall two days later. Or at least that's what my editors hope. However, I will tell you a secret: I like to build universes that collapse. I like to see deconstructed, and I like to see how the characters in the novels deal with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more thereof. Do not believe-and I am absolutely serious when I say this, "do not assume that the order and stability are always good, in a society or in the universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and birth of new things. Before the new things are born the old must perish. This understanding is dangerous, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar. And that hurts. But the script is part of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die inside. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And authentic human being who matters most, the viable organism, elastic, that can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.
Of course, I say this because I live near Disneyland, and are always adding new rides and destroying old ones. Disneyland is an organism that evolves. For years they had the Lincoln Simulacrum, like Lincoln that was only a temporary form which matter and energy were taken and eventually disappear. The same is true of every one of us, like it or not.
The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are those that never change ... and the Greek philosopher pre-Socratic Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If flaps both views, you get this result: Nothing is real. There is a fascinating next step to this line of thinking: Parmenides could never have existed because he grew old and died and disappeared, which, according to his own philosophy, never existed. And Heraclitus may have been right, do not forget this, so if Heraclitus was right, then Parmenides did exist, and therefore, according to Heraclitus' philosophy, perhaps Parmenides was right, since Parmenides fulfilled the conditions, criteria, by which Heraclitus real judged things.
offer this merely to show that once you start to wonder what is definitely real, you start talking nonsense. Zeno provide that the motion was impossible (well, just figured I had done, what he lacked was what technically is called the "theory of limits"). David Hume, the biggest skeptic of all, once said that following a meeting of skeptics met to proclaim the veracity of skepticism as a philosophy, there was the odd fact that all members of the meeting went through the door instead of the window. I see the sense of what counts Hume, was all talk. The solemn philosophers were not taking seriously what they said.
But I think the question of defining what is real, this is serious, even vital. And that somewhere there is another issue, the definition of authentic humanity. Due to the bombardment of pseudo-reality, humans are rapidly produced, authentic, spurious, as fake as the data pressing on all fronts. My two topics are really one; come together at this point. The human false create false realities. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then the human traffic with other false. It is simply a very long version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr.Toad Wild Ride, you can have them all, but neither is true.
Writing interested me so much for the fakes that I finally got the concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds driven by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass. Suppose that one night we sneak into the park with real birds and replaced the artificial. Imagine the horror that owners feel when they discovered the cruel joke. Birds of truth! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions. Consternation. The park being cunningly transmuted by sinister forces from the unreal to the real. For example say, what if the Matterhorn turned into a genuine snow-covered mountain? What if the entire place, by a miracle of God's power and wisdom, was changed in a moment, with the wink of an eye, into something incorruptible? Would shut down.
In Plato's Timaeus, God created the universe, as does the Christian God, just find it a day. Is in a state of total chaos. God is put to work to transform chaos into order. That idea appeals to me, and I have adapted to my intellectual needs: What if our universe started out as unrealistic, a kind of illusion as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, love and kindness toward us, what was slowly and secretly transmuting into something real?
We would not be aware of this transformation, and we were not aware at first that our world was an illusion. This is technically a Gnostic idea. Gnosticism is a religion which embraced Jews, Christians and pagans for several centuries. I have been accused of holding Gnostic ideas. I guess I do. At some point I would have burned. But some of his ideas intrigue me. Once when I was researching Gnosticism in the Britannica, I came across a mention of a Gnostic codex called The Unreal God and the aspects of his universe does not exist, an idea that reduced me to a desperate laughter. What kind of person would write about something he knows does not exist, and how can something that does not exist have aspects? But then I realized I'd been writing about these issues for twenty years. I guess you could say a lot when you write about a topic that does not exist. A friend of mine once published a book called Snakes of Hawaii. Several libraries wrote him asking for copies. Well, there are no snakes in Hawaii. All pages of his book were blank.
course in science fiction there is no pretense that the worlds described are real. So we call it fiction. The reader is warned in advance that does not believe in what is going to read. Similarly, visitors to Disneyland understand that Mr.Toad not really exist and that the pirates are moved by motors and servo-assisted, relays, and electronic circuits. Thus there is no deception.
And yet the strange thing is, that somehow, in a real way, much of what appears under the title "science fiction" is real. It may not be literally true, I guess. We've never really been invaded by creatures from another solar system, as described in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The producers of that film never intended that to believe it. Does it?
More importantly, if they had tried to say this, would really true?. That is the question, not whether the author or producer believe it, but is it true?. Because, by an accident while chasing a good story, a science fiction writer or a producer or screenwriter could come up with the truth, ... and realize later.
The most basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use words. George Orwell made this clear in his novel 1984. But another way to control the minds of the people is to control their perceptions. If you can see the world as you do, think as you think. Understanding follows perception. How do you see the reality you see? After all, is only one reality among many. The images are a basic constituent, for this is what the power of TV to influence young minds is so brutally vast. Words and images are synchronized. The possibility of total control of the viewer exists, especially in the young. Watching TV is a kind of apprenticeship in the dream. An EEG of a person watching TV shows shows that after half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and becomes a hypnotic state by emitting alpha waves. This is because there is very little eye movement. Moreover, much of the information is graphic, and therefore goes to the right brain instead of being processed by the left, where the conscious personality. Recent experiments indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is received subliminally. Just imagine that we consciously what is there. The bulk of the messages they avoid our attention, literally within hours of watching TV, do not know what we have seen. Our memories are spurious, such as dreams, the voids are filled retrospectively. And counterfeited. We have participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and we have to feed her. Have conspired against us to our own condemnation.
And I say this as a professional fiction writer-producers, writing scripts, and directors who create these worlds of audio / video, do not know how much of it is true. In other words, they are victims of their own product, along with us. Speaking for myself, I do not know how much of what I write is true, or which parts (if any) is true. This is potentially lethal. We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blurring area. And probably not deliberate. In fact, that's part of the problem. You can not legislate an author correctly label their product, like a can of pudding whose ingredients are listed on the label ... can not declare him how much is truth and what part is not when he ignores it.
is an eerie experience to write something in a novel, believing it is pure fiction, and learned later, perhaps years later, it's true. I would give you an example. It's something I do not understand. Podais perhaps give me a theory. I can not.
In 1970 I wrote a novel called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. " One of the characters is a nineteen year old girl named Kathy. Her husband's name is Jack. Kathy appears to work for the criminal underground, but later, as we move into the novel, we discover that is working for the police. Is having an affair with a police inspector. The character is pure fiction. Or at least I think it was.
Anyway, on Christmas Day 1970, I met a girl named Kathy-this was after finishing the novel, it is understood. Was nineteen. Her boyfriend named Jack. I soon learned that Kathy dealing drugs. I spent months trying to make it to traffic stop, the time and again warned that they could catch it. Then one evening as we walked together to a restaurant, Kathy stopped short and said, "I can not enter." Sitting in the restaurant was a police inspector who knew. "I have to tell the truth, "Kathy said," I have a relationship with him. "
Certainly, these coincidences. He might have precognition. mistero But it gets even weirder, the next stage totally baffles me. He has done for four years.
In 1974 the novel was published by Doubleday. One afternoon I was talking to my priest, I am Episcopalian, "and I mentioned was an important scene near the end of the novel in which the character Felix Buckman meets a black guy at a gas station open 24 hours and start talking. As described in the scene more and more detail, my priest became progressively more agitated. At last he said, "this is a scene from the Book of Acts, the Bible! The person who finds the black man on the road is called Philip, like you." Father Rasch was so upset by the resemblance that he could not even locate the scene in the Bible. "Read Acts," he instructed, "and you'll agree. It's the same up on specific details."
I went home and read the scene in Acts. Yes, Father Rasch was right, the scene in my novel again obviously was narrating the scene in Acts ... and had never read Acts, I must admit. But again the puzzle became deeper. In Acts, the high Roman official who arrests and interrogates Saint Paul is named Felix, the same my character name. And my character Felix Buckman is a high-ranking police, in fact, in my novel has the same role as Felix in the Book of Acts, the final authority. There is a conversation in my novel is much like a conversation between Felix and Paul.
Well, I decided to try and see other portraits. The main character in my novel is named Jason. I took an index to the Bible and looked to see if anyone named Jason appeared somewhere in the Bible. I could not remember any. Well, a man named Jason appears once (and only one) in the Bible. It's in the Book of Acts. And like a plague with more matches, in my novel Jason is fleeing from the authorities and takes refuge in the house of a person, and in Acts the man named Jason harbor a fugitive in his house, an exact inversion of the situation in my novel, as if the mysterious Spirit responsible for all this was somehow laughing the whole thing.
Felix, Jason, and the encounter on the road with the black man who is a stranger. In Acts, the disciple Philip baptizes the black man, who then start rejoicing. In my novel, Felix Buckman unknown black man looking for emotional support, because Felix Buckman's sister just died and he is falling apart psychologically. The black man helps the mood of Buckman, and although Buckman does not go away rejoicing, at least his tears have stopped falling. He has been flying home, mourning the death of his sister, and had to be with someone, anyone, even a complete stranger. It is an encounter between two strangers in the way that changes the life of one of them, both in my novel and in Acts. And one final quirk of mysterious spirit: the name Felix is \u200b\u200bthe Latin word for "happy." Which I did not know until I wrote the novel.
A careful study of my novel shows that for reasons I can not even begin to explain there was rewritten several of the basic incidents of a particular book of the Bible, even with the appropriate names. How could explain this? Was four years ago I discovered this. For four years I have tried to devise a theory and have not succeeded. I doubt they ever will.
But the mystery is not over here, as I thought. Two months ago she was walking to the mailbox to send a letter late at night, also to enjoy the view of the Church of Saint Joseph, which is on the opposite side of my apartment building. I saw a man loitering suspiciously around a parked car. It seemed to go to steal the car, or something of him as I returned from the mailbox, the man hid behind a tree. On impulse I walked up to him and asked, "Is something wrong?"
"I have no gasoline," said the man, "and I have no money."
Incredibly, he had never done this before, I took out my wallet, took all her money and gave him the money. Then I hit my hand and asked where I lived, so he could return it later. I returned to my apartment, and then I realized that money would not do any good, because it was not gas stations nearby. So I went back in my car. The man had a can of gasoline in the trunk of the car, and together, we drove my car to a gas station. Soon we were there, two strangers, while the rate of the station filled the can. I suddenly realized that this was the scene of my novel, the novel I had written eight years earlier. The gas station was exactly as I had vimaginado when I wrote the scene, the filling rate, the dazzling white light ... and now I saw something I had not seen before. The stranger who was helping was black.
drove back to his car with gasoline, we shook hands, and then returned to my apartment building. I never saw him again. I could not have returned the money because he had not told which of the many apartments was mine or what my name was. I was terribly shaken by this experience. He had lived literally a scene completely as it had appeared in my novel. Which is to say, having lived a kind of replica of the scene in which Philip Instruments is the black man on the road.
What could explain this?
The answer occurred to me might not be correct, but the only one I have. It's about time. My theory is this: in some important sense, time is not real. Or maybe it is real, but not as we experience or imagine it. His acute certainty, irrepressible (and even I have) that despite the change we see, a specific permanent landscape underlies the world of change, and that this invisible underlying landscape is that of the Bible, specifically, is the period immediately following the death and resurrection of Christ is, in other words, the time period of the Book of Acts.
Parmenides would be proud of me. I looked at a changing world and have declared that under him is the eternal, unchanging, the absolutely real. But how did this happen? If real time is 50 AD, why do we see the 1978 DC? And if we are really living in the Roman Empire, somewhere in Syria, why do we see the United States?
During the Middle Ages came a strange theory, I present now for what it's worth. It is the theory that the Evil-Satan-is the "Monkey God." Creates spurious imitations of creation, the real creation of God, and then interleaved with the real creation. Need help weird theory to explain my experience? Are we to believe that we are confused, misled, this is not 1978, but the 50 ... and Satan has created a fake reality to stunt our faith in Christ's return?
I can imagine being examined by a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist says, "what year is it?" And I say, "50 AD". The psychiatrist blinks and then asks, "And where are you?", And answering, "in Judea." "Where the hell is that?" Asks the psychiatrist. "It's part of the Roman Empire, would have to respond. "Do you know who is the President?" Ask the psychiatrist, and I reply, "The Procurator Felix." "Are you really sure about this?" ask the psychiatrist, while giving a signal to sneak a couple of very large staff. "Yes" answer. "Unless Felix has been demoted and replaced by the Procurator Festus. In other words, St. Paul was held by para-Felix." "Who told you this?" the psychiatrist would break the conversation irritated, and I reply, "The Holy Spirit." And after that would be in a padded room, looking out, and knowing no doubt how I got here.
Everything in that conversation would be true in some sense, although palpably not true in another. I am aware that the date is 1978 and that the president is Jimmy Carter and I live in Santa Ana, California, United States. I even know how to go from my apartment to Disneyland, a fact that does not seem to be able to forget. And surely no Disneyland had the time of St. Paul.
So, if I force myself to be very rational and reasonable and all that good stuff, I must admit that the existence of Disneyland (which I know is real) proves that we are not living in Judea in 50 AD The idea of \u200b\u200bSt. Paul going around in giant teacups while composing Corinthians, while Paris TV films him, yes that can not be. San Pablo never go to Disneyland. Only children, tourists and senior Soviet officials ever go to Disneyland. Saints do not.
But somehow that biblical material caught my unconscious and crept into my novel, and equally true, for some reason in 1978 I relived a scene that was described in 1970. What I mean is this: there is internal evidence in at least one of my novels that another reality, that does not change, exactly as Parmenides and Plato suspected, underlies the visible phenomenal world of change, and somehow, perhaps to our surprise , we through and reach it. Or some mysterious spirit can get in touch with her, if you want to see this permanent other landscape. Time passes, thousands of years pass, but at the moment we see this contemporary world, the world antigo, the world of the Bible, is concealed behind him, still there and still real. Forever.
Should I take a chance and tell the rest of this particular story? I will, having come so far already. My novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was published by Doubleday in February 1974. The week after it was published, I took two wisdom teeth, and gave me pentatol sodium. Later that day I found with severe pain. My wife phoned the dentist and called to a pharmacy. Half an hour later there was a call on my door, the person bringing the package with the medication. Although he was bleeding and sick and weak, I felt the need to respond to the call at the door myself. When I opened the door, I found myself facing a young woman wearing a shiny gold necklace in the center of which was a gleaming gold fish. For some reason I was hypnotized by the goldfish, I forgot my pain and medication, I forgot that the girl was there. I stared at the fish symbol.
"What is that?" I asked. She touched
bright golden fish with her hand and said, "This is a symbol worn by the early Christians." Then I got the package with the medication.
At that moment, while watching the fish sign and heard his words, suddenly experienced what I later understood as history, the Greek word that literally means "loss of forgetfulness." I remembered who he was and where I was. In an instant, in the wink of an eye, everything came back to me. And not only him but could remember. The girl was a secret Christian, and I was. We lived in fear of being caught by the Romans. We had to communicate with cryptic signs. She had just told me everything this was true.
For a short time, however difficult it is to believe or explain, I saw the image of a black contours of hateful Rome prison. But, more importantly, remembered Jesus, who had been with us recently, and had gone temporarily, and return soon. My emotion was joy. We were secretly preparing his welcome back. It would not be much. And the Romans did not know. Thought he was dead, dead forever. That was our great secret, our joyous knowledge. Despite appearances, Christ would return, and our enjoyment and anticipation knew no boundaries.
Not is odd that this strange event, this recovery of a lost memory, occurred only a week after the publication of "Flow My Tears"? What is Flow My Tears which contains the reply of the people and events of the Book of Acts, which is located at the precise moment in time, just after the death and resurrection of Jesus, which had been reminded, through symbol of the goldfish, just what had just happened?
If you were me, and this will have happened, I'm sure you could not leave it alone. Look to find a theory that could account for it. For four years now, I've been trying one theory after another: time circular, frozen time, timeless time, what time is called "sacred" about the "worldly" ... I can not count the theories I've tried. One constant has prevailed, however, through all the theories. There must be some mysterious Holy Spirit which has a precise and intimate relationship with Christ, who can inhabit human minds, to guide and inform, and even express itself through those humans, even without being aware of it.
In writing of Flow My Tears, in 1970, there was an unusual event that I realized at that moment that it was not normal, was not a part of the normal process of writing. I had a dream one night, a dream especially vivid. And then I woke up and found myself under the compulsion-the absolute need-to translate the dream into the text of the novel as we had dreamed. To move the dream correctly, I had to do eleven drafts of the final part of the manuscript, until I was satisfied.
I will now quote the novel, as it appeared the final published form. See if this dream reminds you of something.
field, brown and dry in summer, where she had lived as a child. He rode a horse, and going to his left a squad of horses slowly approaching. On the horses rode men in shining robes, each with a color other, each wearing a helmet peak finish sparkled with sunlight Knights ahead will slow and solemn, and noticed while riding one's face, an ancient marble face, a terribly old man with wavy waterfalls white beard. How strong nose he had. What noble features. So tired, so serious, so far beyond ordinary men. Evidently he was a king. Felix Buckman
let him pass, not spoke to them, or they did to him. Together, all moved into the house from which he had come. A man was locked inside the house, a man alone, Jason Taverner, in the silence and darkness, without windows, for yourself from now until eternity. And then he heard behind him one dreadful shriek. They had killed Taverner, and seeing them go, feeling his alrededos leftovers, knowing what I intended to do with him, Taverner had shrieked.
Felix Buckman felt a complete and utter desolate grief. But sleep would not go back and look back. You could not do anything. Nobody could have stopped the gang of men in colorful robes, they could not be convinced. In any case, was over. Taverner was dead.
This passage probably does not suggest anything in particular you, except a gang that judges and applies the law on anyone either guilty or considered clpable. It is not clear whether Taverner has in fact committed a crime or merely think you've done. I have the impression that he was guilty, but it was a tragedy that had to be killed, a terribly sad tragedy. In the novel, this dream makes Felix Buckman begins to mourn, so look for the black man at the pump 24 hours.
Months after the novel was published, I found the section in the Bible that referred to this dream. It is Daniel, 7:9:
"They stood in place thrones and an elder in years took place. His robe was white as snow and hair of his head like cleanest wool. His throne was flames of fire, and his wheel flares, a fire was flowing river in front of him. Miles served and crowds attending his presence. The court sat, and the book was opened. "
The white-haired old man appears again in Revelation 1:13:
" Vi ... One like the Son of man, with a gown to her then, with a golden sash around his chest. The hair of his head was white as snow-white wool, and his eyes were like flaming fire, his feet gleamed like burnished brass refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing water. "And then 1
: 17:
"When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he put his right hand on me and said, "Fear not. I am the first and last, and I'm living, because I was dead and I am alive forever, and took the keys of death and their domains. Write for so what you saw, which is now, and what will from now on. "
And, as John of Patmos, wrote faithfully what he saw and put it in my novel. And it was true, although at the time did not know what he meant this description:
"... and while traveling noticed the face of one, an ancient marble face, a terribly old man with wavy white beard cascades . How strong nose he had. What noble features. So tired, so serious, so far beyond ordinary men. Evidently he was a king. "
In fact it was a king. It is Christ returned to judge. And this is what he does in my novel, judge the man trapped in darkness. The man locked up in darkness must be the Prince of Evil Force of Darkness. Call it what you want, its time had come. He was tried and convicted. Felix Buckman could complain to the sadness of it, but knew that the verdict could not be disputed. So I rode on, without turning around or looking back, hearing only the shriek of fear and defeat: the cry of evil destroyed.
So
my novel contained material from other parts of the Bible, as well as sections of Acts. Decoded, my novel tells a story quite different from the surface (which need not discuss here). The real story is simply this: the return of Christ, now king rather than suffering servant. Judge rather than victim of an unfair trial. All wrong. The core message of my novel, without my knowing it was a warning to the powerful: you will soon be tried and convicted. Who I was referring specifically? Well, I can not really say, or maybe he'd rather not. I have no certainty, only an intuition. And that's not enough to continue, so I will keep my thoughts. But you could ask what political events took place in this country between February and August 1974. Who was tried and convicted, and fell like a shooting star into ruin and disgrace. The most powerful man in the world. And I regret it now as it was when I dreamed that dream. "That poor man," I once told my wife, with tears in his eyes. "Locked in the dark, playing the piano at night for himself, alone and afraid, knowing what's to come." For the love of God, perdonemosle the end. But what was asked of him and all his men - "The President's Men" as they say, should be done. But it's over, and should be left to see the sunlight again, any creature or person should be locked up forever in the dark with fear. It's not human.
Just as the Supreme Court was deciding that the recordings of Nixon were taken to the special prosecutor, was eating at a Chinese restaurant in Yorba Linda, the people of California where Nixon went to school, where he grew up, where he worked in a supermarket where there is a park that bears his name, and of course the Nixon house, simple strips of wood and all that. In my fortune cookie, the paper read:
ACTS DONE IN SECRET HAVE A WAY TO
be ascertained
I mailed the paper to the White House, noting that the Chinese restaurant was located within a radius of one mile over the original home of Nixon, and said, "I think there has been a mistake, by accident I received a cookie fate of Mr. Nixon. Is it mine? ". The White House did not respond.
Well, as I said before, the author of a work of alleged fiction might write the truth without knowing it. To quote Xenophanes, another pre-Socratic, "Even if a man had the opportunity to speak the full truth, he does not know, all things are wrapped in appearances" (fragemento 34). And Heraclitus added to this: "Nature of things is the habit of hiding "(fragment 54). WSGilbert, Gilbert and Sullivan, the proposed well:" Things are seldom what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream. "The important thing is that we can not trust our senses and probably even our a priori reasoning. As to our senses, I understand that people who had been blind since birth and suddenly obtain from view is shocked to discover that objects appear smaller and smaller as moving away. Logically, no reason for this. We, of course, we have learned to accept this because we have become accustomed. We see objects get smaller, but we know actually remain the same size. So even the people in their everyday pragmatic uses a certain extent the process of discarding things which your eyes and ears tell him. Little
that Heraclitus wrote has survived, and what we have is obscure, but Fragment 54 is lucid and important: "The deep structure is master of obvious structure." This means that Heraclitus believed that there was a veil over the real landscape. It might also have suspected that time was somehow not what it seems, because in Fragment 52 he said: "Time is a child playing checkers: a child is the kingdom." This is indeed cryptic. But he also said, in Fragment 18: "If you do not expect, you do not find the unexpected, since it is undiscoverable and no way we can take it." Edward Hussey, in his scholarly book The Presocratics, says
"If Heraclitus is so insistent on the lack of understanding shown by most men, it seems reasonable to offer instruction to penetrate deeper truth. The chatter puzzle suggests that some kind of revelation, beyond human control, is needed ... true wisdom, as has been seen, is closely associated with God, which emphasizes the suggestion that for the advancement of knowledge a man becomes as, or part of, God.
This appointment is not a religious book or theology, it is an analysis of the earliest philosophers by a former philosophy professor at the University of Oxford. Hussey explained that for these early philosophers there was no distinction between philosophy and religion. The first quantum leap in Greek theology was by Xenophanes of Colophon, born in the middle of the sixth century BC. Xenophanes, without resorting to any authority except that of his own mind, says
there a god, certainly not as deadly creatures in flesh or in the thoughts of their minds. The whole of him sees, thinks, listen. Always remains motionless in the same place is not appropriate that it should now move this way, after that another.
This is a subtle and advanced concept of God, evidently without precedent among the Greek thinkers. "The arguments of Parmenides seemed to show that all reality must indeed be a mind," Hussey writes, "or the thought in mind." Specifically about Heraclitus says, "In Heraclitus is difficult to say how far the designs in a divine mind is distinguished from its implementation in the world, or indeed how far God's mind differs from the world." Next hop Anaxagoras has always fascinated me. "Anaxagoras was born a theory of the microstructure of the material that was, to some extent mysterious to human reason. "Anaxagoras believed that everything was determined by the mind. These were not children or primitive thinkers. They were debating serious issues and studied one points of view of another business intuition. It was not until Aristotle that their views were reduced to what can be classified neatly-but wrongly-as primitive. The sum of many pre-Socratic theology and philosophy can be stated as follows: the cosmos is not what it seems, and what is probably the deepest level, is exactly what the human being is in its deepest level, be it mind or soul, is something unitary which lives and thinks, and that only appears to be plural and material. In large part, this view reaches us through the Logos doctrine regarding Christ. The Logos was both that which thought, and the thing I thought: thinker and thought together. The universe, then, is thinker and thought, and because we are part of it, the final analysis, human being and thinkers are thinking these thoughts.
Thus if God thinks about Rome around 50 AD, then Rome around 50 AD is. The universe is not winding watch and God's hand that string. There is a battery-powered clock with God as a battery. Spinoza believed that the universe is the body of God extensive in space. But long before Spinoza-two thousand years earlier, Xenophanes had said, "without effort, he wields all things by the thought of his mind" (Fragment 25)
If anyone have read my novel Ubik, you know that the mysterious body or mind or force called Ubik starts out as a series of cheap and vulgar commercials and winds up saying:
am Ubik. Before the universe was me. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit, they move here, I put there. Marchan as I say, do as I say. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name that nobody knows. I am called Ubik but that's not my name. Am. Always be.
here is obvious who and what Ubik, specifically says that is the word, which is to say, the Logos. In the German translation, was one of the most wonderful lapses regarding the correct understanding that I have ever found, God help us if the man who translated my novel Ubik into German would have had to translate the New Testament Koine Greek into German. He did everything right until he reached the phrase "I am the word." That puzzled him. What can the author mean by that?, Must have asked himself, obviously never encountered the absence of the doctrine of the Logos. So he made the best translation I could. In the edition Germany, the Absolute Entity which made the suns, created the worlds, created the lives and the places they inhabit, says of herself: I'm
trademark (N. of T. English "brand name", name- -la-mark)
Had translated the Gospel of John, I guess I would have gone something like
When all things began, it was the trademark. The brand name dwelt with God, and God was, the brand was.
would seem that not only bring you greetings from Disneyland but from Mortimer Snerd. Such is the fate of an author who had hoped to include theological themes in his writings. "The brand name was then with God at the beginning, and through him all things came to be, not a single thing was created without him. "So there are noble ambitions. We hope God has a sense of humor.
Or should I say, hopefully that the trademark has a sense of humor.
As I told you before, my two concerns in writing, are "What is reality?" and "What constitutes the authentic human being?". They sure as you can see I have not been able to answer the first question. I have a permanent intuition that somehow the world of the Bible were literally real but veiled landscape, never changing, hidden from view, but available to us through revelation. That's all I'm capable of devising, a mixture of mystical experience, reasoning, and faith. I would still say something about the characteristics of authentic human in this quest I had a plausible answer to the other.
The real human is one of us who instinctively knows what you should not do and which in addition will be obstacles to do so. Refuse to do so, even if this brings awesome consequences for her and those she loves. This, to me, is the ultimate heroic feature of normal people say no to the tyrant and calmly take the consequences of resistance. Their deeds may be small, and often unnoticed, without picking up the story. Their names are not remembered, nor human authentic expected these names will be remembered. I see the authenticity of an odd way: not available to accomplish great heroic deeds but in their quiet negative. In essence, can not be forced to be what they are not.
The power of spurious realities that hit us today-these deliberately manufactured lies, "never penetrate to the heart of true human beings. I see kids watching TV, and first I have fear of what they are teaching, then I realize that can not be corrupted or destroyed. Observe, listen, understand, and then, when and where necessary, reject. There is something enormously powerful in a child's ability to resist fraudulent. A child has the clearest, the steadiest hand. Unscrupulous sellers, developers are trying to attract the loyalty of the small people in vain. True, the cereal companies may be able to place large quantities of junk breakfasts; chains burgers and hot dogs may sell endless numbers of unreal fast food to children, but the deep heart beats firmly, or reached or understood. A child of today can detect a lie quicker than the wisest adult two decades ago. When I want to know what is true, ask my kids. Do not ask me, I turn to them.
One day while my son Christopher, who is four years old, was playing in front of me and his mother, the two adults began discussing the figure of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. Christopher turned to us for a moment and said, "I am a fisherman. Pesco fish." I was playing with a metal lantern that someone had given me, and had never used, ... and suddenly I realized that the lantern was shaped like a fish. I wonder what thoughts were being placed in the soul of my little child at the time, and not by grain merchants or dealers of candy. "I am a fisherman, fish fish." Christopher, at four years, had found the symbol that I did not find until it was forty-five years.
Time speeds up, and to what end? Perhaps we were told two thousand years ago. Or maybe it was not long ago, maybe it is a delusion that has been so long. Perhaps it was a week ago, or was today, early. Perhaps time is not only accelerating, perhaps, by the way, is to end.
And if it does, the rides at Disneyland are not coming back to the same thing again. Because when time runs out, the birds and hippos and lions and deer at Disneyland will no longer be simulations, and for the first time a real bird will sing.
Thanks.
Text taken from:
http://www.13t.org/decondicionamiento/forum/leemas.php?p=1799&t=417
Image taken from: http://
www.geocities.com/area51/crater/4909/ucdick.jpg
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