The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  If you assume (and you'd be correct to do so) that our minds are energy fields of some kind anyhow, and that we are fundamentally interacting fields rather than discrete particles, then there is no theoretical problem in grasping this interaction between the billions of brainprints emanating and forming and reforming into the patterns of the noosphere. However, if you still hold to the nineteenth-century view of yourself as a brittle organism, much like a machine, made up of parts -- well, you see, then how can you merge with the noosphere? You are a unique, concrete thing. And thingness is what we must get away from in regarding ourselves and in considering life. By more modern views we are overlapping fields, all of us, animals included, plants included. This is the ecosphere, and we are all in it. But what we don't realize is that the billions of discrete and entirely ego-oriented left-hemisphere brains have far less to say about the ultimate disposition of the world than does the collective noospheric. Mind that comprises all our right brains and in which each of us shares. It will decide, and I do not think it impossible that this vast plasmic noosphere, considering that it covers our entire planet in a veil or layer, may interact outward into solar-energy fields and from there into cosmic fields. Each of us, then, partakes of the cosmos -- if he is willing to listen to his dreams. And it is his dreams that will transform him from a mere machine into an authentic human. He will no longer strut about and clank with majestic iron, no longer rule his little kingdom here; he will soar upward, flying like a field of negative ions, like the entity Ubik in my novel of that name: being life and giving life, but never defining himself because no clear-cut name to him -- to us -- can be given.

  As we move up the manifold -- i.e. progress forward in lineal time, or somehow stand still and lineal time progresses forward, whichever model is more correct -- we as many entelechies are continually signaled, given information, and most of all, disinhibited by firings from the universe around us; in this fashion harmony among all parts of the universe is maintained. There is no more grand scheme than this: to be aware that I, as a representative entelechy, must unfold only as these preset signals reach me, and that control as to the when -- the locus in time -- that each signal will come is entirely in the hands of the universe... this is a thrilling comprehension, and makes me aware of the unbreakable tie between me and my environment.

  There is such order in the response between engrammed systems within each of us and the accumulating signals that fire these systems in sequence as to imply that the Agency that laid down the entelechy in the first place, engrammed and then blocked these systems, knew with absolute precision where along the time path the signals would take place that would disinhibit; chance is not involved -- the happiest of accidents is the most astute planning of the universe.

  Sometimes I wonder how we could have imagined that our species was exempt from the instincts that lower species obviously have. What is different about us, however, is that ants, for instance, are disinhibited by the same signal, and the same behavior occurs; it is as if one ant again and again is involved, endlessly. But for us, each is a unique entelechy, and each receives unique sequences of signals -- to which each responds uniquely. Still, this is the language of the universe that the ant hears; we thrill with a common joy.

  I myself have derived much of the material for my writing from dreams. In Flow My Tears, for example, the powerful dream that comes to Felix Buchman near the end, the dream of the wise old man on horseback, that was an actual dream I had at the time of writing the novel. In Martian Time-Slip I've written in so many dream experiences that I can't separate them, now, when I read the novel.

  Ubik was primarily a dream, or series of dreams. In my opinion it contains strong themes of pre-Socratic philosophical views of the world, unfamiliar to me when I wrote it (to name just one, the views of Empedocles). It is possible that the noosphere contained thought patterns in the form of very weak energy until we developed radio transmission; whereupon the energy level of the noosphere went out of bounds and assumed a life of its own. It no longer served as a mere passive repository of human information (the "Seas of Knowledge" that ancient Sumer believed in) but, due to the incredible surge of charge from our electronic signals and the information-rich material therein, we have given it power to cross a vast threshold; we have, so to speak, resurrected what Philo and other ancients have called the Logos. Information has, then, become alive, with a collective mind of its own independent of our brains, if this theory is correct. It does not merely know what we know and remember what once was known, but can construct solutions on its own: It is a titanic AI system. The difference would be between a tape recorder that could "remember" a Beethoven symphony that it "heard," and one that could create new ones, on and on; the library in the sky, having read all the books there are and ever were, is writing its own book, now, and at night we are being read to -- told the exciting tale comprising that Great Work-in-Progress.

  I must mention lan Watson's article in Science-Fiction Studies on Le Guin's Lathe of Heaven; in his excellent piece he refers to what may be the most significant -- startlingly so -- story SF has yet produced: Fredric Brown's story that appeared in Astounding, "The Waveries." You must read that story; if you do not, you may die without understanding the universe coming into being around you. The Waveries were attracted to Earth by our radio waves; they returned in a facsimile form, so like our transmissions (SOS and so forth, chronologically) that at first we couldn't fathom what was up. Regarding Lathe, Watson says:

  Conceivably George (Orr) dreamt a hostile invasion into a peaceful one; yet the dominant probability is that the aliens are, as they maintain, "of the dream time," that their whole culture revolves around the mode of "reality dreaming itself into being," that they have been attracted to Earth like the Waveries of Fredric Brown's story, only by dream-waves rather than radio waves [pp. 71-72].

  This could be considered scary stuff, this theme in Le Guin's work and mine. What are dreams? Are there these dream-universe entities that have come here from another star (Aldebaran, in Ms. Le Guin's novel)? Are the UFOs that people see holograms projected by their unconscious minds, acting as transformers, acting, too, as transducers of these strange dream-universe creatures?

  For the past year I've had many dreams that seemed -- I stress the word "seemed" -- to indicate that a telepathic communication was in progress somewhere within my head, but after talking with Henry Korman, an associate of Ornstein's, I would imagine that it is merely my right and left hemispheres conferring in a Martin Buber I-and-Thou dialogue. But much of the dream material seemed beyond my personal ability to have created. At one point an attempt was made to get me to write down a complex engineering principle that was shown me in the form of a round motor with twin rotating wheels, opposed in direction, much as yin and yang in Taoism alternate as opposing pairs (and much like Empedocles saw love versus strife, the dialectic interaction of the world). But this was a true engineering device they had there in my dream; they showed me a pencil, they said, "This principle was known in your time." And as I rushed to find a pencil they added: "Known, but buried in a basement and forgotten." There was an elaborate high-torque chain-thrown mechanism that moved camwise between the two rotors, but I never got the hang of it when I woke up. What I did later on grasp, though, was this: Further dreams made it clear that somehow our treatment of seawater by an osmosis process would give us not only pure water but a source of energy as well. However, they had the wrong human when they began giving me that sort of material; I am not trained to understand it. I did purchase over $1,000 worth of reference books to try to figure out what I'd been shown, though. I have learned this: Something to do with a high hysteresis factor, in this twin-rotor system, is converted from a defect to an advantage. No braking mechanism is needed; the two rotors spin constantly at the same velocity, and torque is transferred by a thrown cam chain.

  I give this illustration only to show that either my unconscious has been reading articles on engineering that elude my memory and my co
nscious attention and interest, or there are, shall I say, dream-universe people from, shall I say, Aldebaran or some other star with us. Perhaps joining their noosphere with ours? And offering assistance to a crippled, blighted planet that has been bogged down, like a rat on a weary wheel, in the dead of winter for over two thousand years? If they bring the springtime with them, then whoever they are, I welcome them; like Joe Chip in Ubik, I fear the cold, the weariness; I fear the death of wearing out on endless upward stairs, while someone cruel, or anyhow wearing a cruel mask, watches and offers no aid -- the machine, lacking empathy, watching as mere spectator, the same horror that I know haunts Harlan Ellison. It is perhaps more frightening that the killer himself (in Ubik it was Jory), this figure that sees but gives no assistance, offers no hand. That is the android, to me, and the evil demigod to Harlan; we both shudder at the idea of its existence. What I can tell you about the dream-universe people is that if they do exist, whoever they are, they are not that unsympathetic android; they are human in this deepest of all senses: They have reached out a helping hand to our planet, to our polluted ecosphere, and perhaps even assisted in throwing down the tyranny that gripped the United States, Portugal, Greece, and one day they will throw down the tyranny of the Soviet bloc as well. This is what I think of when I grasp the idea of springtime: the lifting of the iron doors of the prison and the poor prisoners, in Beethoven's Fidelio, let out into the sunlight. Ah, that moment in the opera when they see the sun and feel its warmth. And at last, at the end, the trumpet call of freedom sounds the permanent end of their cruel imprisonment; help, from outside, has arrived.

  Every now and then someone comes up to a science fiction writer, smiles a crazy, secret in-the-know smile, and smirks, "I know that what you're writing is true, and it's in code. All you SF writers are receivers for Them." Naturally, I ask who "Them" is. The answer is always the same. "You know. Up there. The space people. They're already here, and they're using your writing. You know it, too."

  I kind of smile and edge off. It keeps happening. Well, I hate to admit it, but it is possible that there is (1) such a thing as telepathy; and (2) that the CETI project's idea that we might communicate with extraterrestrial beings via telepathy is possibly a reasonable idea -- if telepathy exists and if ETIs exist. Otherwise we are trying to communicate with someone who doesn't exist with a system that doesn't work. At least that'll keep a lot of us busy for a long, long time. But I understand now that a Soviet astronomy bunch, evidently headed by the same Dr. Nikolai Kozyrev, who developed the time-as-energy theory I mentioned previously, has reported receiving signals from an ETI within our solar system. If this were true, and our people are saying that the Soviets are just monitoring stale, flat, and unprofitable old signals from our own discarded satellites and other junk ships -- well, suppose these ETI entities or corporate mind are within, say, the great plasma that seems to surround Earth and is involved with solar flares and the like; I refer, of course, to the noosphere. It is ETI and TI at once, and possibly bears a strong resemblance to what Ms. LeGuin has written about in Lathe. And as every SF fan knows, my own works deal with similar themes... thus giving an annoying couple of marks for plausibility to these freaks who are forever lurching up to every SF author and saying, "What you're writing is in code...," etc. In truth, we may be influenced, especially during dream states, by a noosphere that is a product of our own, capable of independent mentation, and involved with ETIs, a mixture of all three and God knows what else. This might not be the Creator, but it would be as close to Infinite Mind as we might get, and close enough. That it is benign is obvious, to recall Maslow's remarks that if nature didn't like us it would have executed us long ago -- here read Infinite Noosphere for nature.

  We humans, the warm-faced and tender, with thoughtful eyes -- we are perhaps the true machines. And those objective constructs, the natural objects around us, and especially the electronic hardware we build, the transmitters and microwave relay stations, the satellites, they may be cloaks for authentic living reality inasmuch as they may participate more fully and in a way obscured to us in the ultimate Mind. Perhaps we see not only a deforming veil, but backward. Perhaps the closest approximation to truth would be to say: "Everything is equally alive, equally free, equally sentient, because everything is not alive or half alive or dead, but rather lived through." Radio signals are boosted by a transmitter; they pass through the various components, modified and augmented, their contours changed, noise eliminated and rejected ... we are extensions, like those metal arms that pick up radioactive objects for scientists. We are gloves that God puts on in order to move things here and there as He wishes. For some reason He prefers to handle reality this way (I will not budge but will defend that pun).

  We are suits of clothing that He creates, puts on and uses, and finally discards. We are suits of armor, too, which gives misleading impression to certain other butterflies within certain other suits of armor. Within the armor is the butterfly, and within the butterfly is -- the signal from another star. In the novel I am writing (that the Dreamer, perhaps, is expressing through me), that star is called Albemuth. I hadn't read Ms. LeGuin's novel Lathe of Heaven when the idea came to me, but the reader of that novel will find there also what I just now meant by our being stations within a vast grid -- and not realizing it.

  Consider this Meditation of Rumi, a Sufi saying [translated] by Idries Shah, who is a favorite among modern Sufis: "The worker is hidden in the workshop."

  Since it is evident that more than anyone else Dr. Ornstein has pioneered the way to discover the new worldview, which involves a bilateral brain parity unsuspected since the time of Pythagoras and Plato, I recently summoned my courage and wrote him. Fans now and then write me, their hands shaking nervously; my entire typewriter shook nervously as I wrote to Dr. Ornstein. Here is the text of my letter, which I place here as a final note to explain how I have transcended the categories of reality-versus-illusion by his help, and thus brought into clear sight an end to twenty years' study and effort on my part. I quote:

  Dear Dr. Ornstein:

  Recently I met Mr. Henry Korman and Mr. Tony Hiss (Tony had come to interview me for The New Yorker). I got into a marvelous discussion with Henry about Sufism and I mentioned my admiration, bordering on fanatic enthusiasm, for your pioneer work with bilateral brain hemispheric parity. Thus I, having learned that they know you, am summoning my courage to write you and ask, What has become of me, since experimenting with bringing on my right hemisphere (I did it mainly by the orthomolecular formula vitamins, plus a good deal of concentrated meditation)?

  By this I mean to say, Dr. Ornstein, ten months ago this took place, and for ten months I have been a different person. But what to me is most extraordinary (I am writing a book about it, but in the form of fiction, a novel called To Scare the Dead) is that -- well, let me give the premise as I placed it into the novel:

  Nicholas Brady, an ordinary American citizen with contemporary worldly values and drives (money and power and prestige), suddenly has inside him a winking into life of an entity that has slumbered for two thousand years. This entity is an Essene, who died knowing that he would be given the promised resurrection; he knew it because he and other Qumran individuals had in their possession secret formulae and medications and scientific practices to ensure it. So suddenly our protagonist, Nicholas Brady, finds that there are two of him: his old self, at his secular job and goals, and this Essene from the Qumran wadi back circa A.D. 45, a holy man with holy values and utter antagonism to the secular physical world, which he sees as the "City of Iron." The Qumran mind takes over and directs Brady in a complicated series of acts until it becomes evident that others such as this Qumran man are coming back to life here and there in the world.

  Studying the Bible, along with this Qumran personality, Brady finds that the New Testament is in cipher. The Qumran personality can read it. "Jesus" is really Zagreus-Zeus, taking two forms, one mild, the other utterly powerful, on which his followers can draw when in need
.

  The Qumran personality, who, for fictional purposes, I call Thomas, gradually informs Brady that these are the Parousia, the Final Days. And to be prepared; Thomas will prepare him by reminding him of his own divinity -- anamnesis, Thomas calls it. Thomas develops a special parity relationship with Brady, but evolves as a source of teaching for the incredibly ignorant Brady the entity known as Erasmus, who is in fact a station in the noosphere, which is now so fully charged around Earth that if you are aware of it you can consciously, rather than unconsciously, draw from it; these are the "Seas of Knowledge" that were known in ancient times and upon which the Sibyl at Delphi drew. But this is a cover, because Brady realizes that in point of fact, the Qumran men had as their god not the mythical Jesus but the actual Zagreus, and by doing research, Brady soon learns that Zagreus was a form of Dionysos. Christianity is a latter form of the worship of Dionysos, refined through the strange and lovely figure of Orpheus. Orpheus, like Jesus, is real only in the sense that Dionysos is becoming socialized; born here as a child of another race, not a human one but a visiting race, Zagreus has had to learn by degrees to modify his "madness," which is now kept to a low ebb. Basically, he is with us to reconstruct us as expressions of him, and the MO of this is our being possessed by him -- which the early Christians sought for, and hid from the hated Romans. Dionysos-Zagreus-Orpheus-Jesus was always pitted against the City of Iron, be it Rome or Washington, DC; he is the god of springtime, of new life, of small and helpless creatures, he is the god of mirth and frenzy, and of sitting here day after day working on this novel.