Exegesis of Phillip K Dick: Politics, Prophets, Psy-fi from the BIP - pontos fathom podcast episode 11

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Exegesis of Phillip K Dick: Politics, Prophets, Psy-fi from the BIP
pontos fathom podcast episode 11

Welcome to the eleventh episode of the pontos fathom podcast - Politics, Prophets, Psy-fi from the B.I.P. - pontos fathom podcast EP11. In this episode we continue the month long exploration of the Exegesis of Phillip K Dick. This week Politicks or Prophetics in the work of PKD. Sci-fi or Psy-fi in the B.I.P. Thanks for watching and let me know your thoughts in the comments below! 

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Flowing the Tears of a Flesh Android: The Curiously Short Occupancy Of Obiden

welcome back everyone to pontos fathom press this is our pontos fathom podcast it's our fourth week talking about the exegesis of philip k dick podcast number eleven and today we're going to go into the concept of politic versus prophetic right the politics versus the prophetics right so the idea here is philip k dick it's a lot of things to many people but one thing that we find in his exegesis is a sort of wrestling between the berkeley sci-fi author who has a sharp political commentary on social issues you know he's  among the drug addicts among the mentally ill kind of things among the disenfranchised against the man against the machine there's a whole political side of california berkeley philip k dick political you know off off world on mars human society issues you know we'll talk a little bit about freud civilization discontents but then on the other side we have this prophetic side of of dick right so you've got his political side which seems mostly secular in commenting on as technology grows and social structures um give us existential dread for example something like this but you flip to the um prophetic side of dick and this is where he's a psy author and i'm kind of punting on sci-fi here because it's it's very psychological and it's very psychosis and psychotic in some way so this sci-fi prophet dick who comes out in in buckets in the exegesis stripping down reality what's really going on what are these strange functions you know how is it that you know i i was just thinking of walter benjamin i flipped open the book and there in the editor's notes someone else had thought about walking walter bending maybe we just came to the same conclusion this book is like a mad tornado of this sci-fi effect right so and i think no better work tries to encapsulate this  cross chatter between the left and right hemispheres so to speak to use the language from scanner darkly then values okay so let's we'll kind of go into the exegesis a bit we'll go into values a bit maybe we'll start out with a quick reading here i prepared some notes around history so let's kind of talk about history uh in valis and we're talking here where it says uh scanner is a very serious book man presents unredeemed state his ontological condition of ignorance is depicted it's not an aspect of his state opposed to this is an ontological state of knowledge knowing provided by runciter in yubik in ubik scanner focuses on the condition of ignorance dealt with more glibly in ubik and maze it goes on to anatomy of the occlusion it really studies nothing else no cosmology is prevented mainly it strives to show that we are [ __ ] up in a way that preserves our being aware of it needs to point out the one-sided intervention valus was an attempt to show the intervention and the redeemed state but it's proving too difficult to write the the novel must be written and i have redeemed state of 274 275 to base it on but god what a task to depict one that which redeems to the process of redemption three the redeemed restored state of man in contrast to the occluded state as described in scanner so just skipping ahead here you have like the siddhartha part two book i dreamed about restored man the christ man the second adam what a responsibility what a task but a task that must be done so later here he talks about

what makes me think of this furious rate of permutation of the phosphine graphics was the entire re remainder of the karmic tape run what could it have been ignorance can be thought of as forgetting the true self

and he goes on here to talk about

um the idea of here he uh he causes okay so uh voice let's go right here i had a dream and here's here's a voice so no time in fact when i realized in 274 voice this is also why he smashes things the creator james james is meant in both cases to make time seem real but in 274 i discovered time it's not real he causes things to look different so it appear that time has passed this is why rome circa 8045 and usa circa 1974 are syntonic they can be superimposed otherwise there is no possible way and no way upon seeing it to compress it here's the answer a pure time has passed see he's talking counterfeiting eternity trying to duplicate it as an end to itself it's a fraud now here this is what's interesting about this here we have compressed in one paragraph both aspects of uh our topic today we have this one small paragraph saying uh history repeats itself in a way right in a political way right the same ills you know earlier in our last podcast we we referenced fascist usa or soviet totalitarianism right as overlapping politics in a way like all systems go toward a corruption right what we kind of see here is at the one level it's a political talk it's the idea of yeah history of rome is the history of usa but that's not exactly what he's saying he's saying they actually are overlapping now perhaps that's just that um uh schizophrenic axis that we talked about a couple podcasts ago where he talked about the gothic vaulted cathedral of time right where you know you start seeing the layers of things and then suddenly he's able to see parallels in rome and u.s i mean i had a roman professor uh j rufus fears in my classic studies days and he was a great proponent of not something like this he was just saying well history repeats itself and if we look at the fall of the roman empire we can see parallels to uh the 1980s the 1990s you know and where we are today along a similar slippery slope of degradation of of uh quality society right so i i think that that's a very different politics statement than saying the world is a a gnostic black iron prison right so let's kind of go into valis a little bit here and before we jump into valis i just wanted to call out just two kind of terms of of dicks that will pull from the exegesis here one would be the black iron prison or vip dick's term for the prison world of political tyranny and determinism he glimpsed beneath the veneer of orange county in march 1974. he later wrote upon perceiving it that he realized he had been living it and writing about it his whole life it is dualistic cosmologies the bip as opposed to the palm tree garden or the ptg we can go check out the ptg too but i want to instead go to another concept here

yeah we'll look at the ptg ptg is palm tree garden the spiritually redeemed and ontologically genuine world revealed to dick in january february 75 uh when southern california seemed to transform itself into the levant in chapter 18 of diaz ire co-written with roger zelanzi the vision of dr abernathy written by dick alone represents the palm tree garden right so we see um we see that and then the other one i was going to show is just the idea of

valles valles is the acronym coined by dick based on the phrase vast active living intelligent system okay so let's talk about his lsd like approach to the sci-fi by jumping into some some readings from dallas uh first of all i selected recalls out freud here and we'll get to freud in a bit too so dr stone note that they paid dr stone to figure out what they had destroyed insidiously the pain filled them up and split them in half right down the middle the task of the staff and even the other patients was to put the person back together but this could not be done as long as the bullet remained all the lesser therapists did was note the person split into two pieces and begin the job of patching him back into a unity but they failed to find and remove the bullet the fatal bullet fired at the person was the basis of freud's original attack on the psychologically injured person freud understood he had called it a trauma later on everyone got tired of searching for the fatal bullet it took too long too much had to be learned about the patient dr stone had a paranormal talent like his paranormal bach remedies which were a palpable hoax a pretext to listen to the patient rum with a flower dipped in it nothing more but a sharp mind hearing what the patient said dr leon stone turned out to be one of the more important people in horse lover fats's life to get to stone fat had to nearly kill himself physically matching his mental death i wonder where leon stone practices now and then stone gave fat the typescript material from the nag hamadi kotek codex right so this is the nagamani as you guys know is the books that weren't in the new testament or somewhere in the new testament some a big cache of books that were found and dick goes on about this a lot in exegesis yet regarding benign people in microform as god the point should be considered fat had a high regard for god and if the logos was rational and the logos equaled god then god had to be rational and this is why the fourth gospel statement about the identity of the logos is so important uh and maybe we can just jump to that while we're here here's the here's the beginning of the gospel of john in the beginning was the word the word was a logos right and the word was with god and the word was god it was the same with the beginning of god all things were made by him and without him not anything made was not was made in him was life and the life was the light of man and the light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprended it not right there was a man sent from god whose name was john this same the same came from a witness to bear witness of the light that all men thought that he might believe he was not that light but was sent to bear witness to that light that was the true light which lighteth every man and cometh into the world right and this is where jesus comes in for the law was given by moses but grace and truth came from jesus christ right i am the voice of one crying in the wilderness john baptist says make straight the way of the lord as said the prophet isaias right so we jump back to valis

if the logos was rational and the logos equaled god then god had to be rational that's why the fourth gospel statement about the identity of logos is so important

which is to say and the word was god in the new testament jesus said that no one had seen god but him that is jesus christ the logos of the fourth gospel and if to be correct what fat experience was the logos

we shall be like him we shall see what he is really like okay so now let's skip ahead here in valance a bit to later on in the book

uh the next step in the one so he's talking about the one here all right so he's talking about yin yang he's talking about the one parmenides and the one and then the twin the next step in the one's plan was that the two would become the many through the dialectic interaction from that hyper universes are projected a hologram like interface which is the pluriform universe we create we creatures inhabit the two sources were to intermingle equally in maintaining our universe that was the one's purpose in our hologrammatic universe the psyche of hyperverse 1 set in motion this is the origin of entropy undeserved suffering chaos and death as well as the empire the black iron prison in essence the aborting of the proper health and growth of life forms within the hologrammatic universe also the teaching function which grossly impaired since only the signal from the universe i was in formation rich and that from two had become noise wow okay so vallis starts to take horse lover fats into the heart of the matter right we start to see this segmentation right and um and some of this gets into that sci-fi space that i talk about so the idea is on the one hand we can just see the disenfranchisement with empire right the disenchant franchisement with everything is like a spiritual prison we'll say we can see people are kept dumb right people are lied to these are all vip political topics but if we get to that you know we'll almost call it this extreme paranoia case or the enlightened prophetic case of the sci-fi topics which are like the world is not what it seem maybe it's the gnostic maybe it's maybe the book of john is right right maybe this is a gnostic nightmare maybe the very nature of all the material universe is because of these relevatory concepts that he's now trying to explore and redeem and unpack through the exegesis through his writing and this is where dick realizes all of his writing has sort of been about this very deep topic well he's not alone here we had we listened to freud come up briefly let's just talk about freud real quickly uh mainly civilization and discontents but also the future of illusion so in future of illusion there's a paragraph here i wanted to read which i believe kind of gets us right to the thick of this where it's uh

coercion in civilization right one would think that a reordering of human relations should be possible which should remove the sources of dissatisfaction with civilization by renouncing coercion in the suppression of the instincts so that the undisturbed internal discord men might devote themselves to the acquisition of wealth and its enjoyment this would be a golden age right but here we see and as we mentioned freud in the past you know the the um the lacanian concept of lack we talked about in our dystopia where there's a bit of a desire for lack right we miss it's like the the plato's cave missing the chains maybe who knows uh okay guys by the way please leave a comment below i know i'm kind of mono logging here but definitely would like to hear your takes on it if you guys have got some videos i would like to share those out here also want to do this as a live podcast so help me to grow the audience here uh let's share this we'll start the conversation down in the in the chat we can also take it over to patreon and eventually i'd like to do these uh if you guys are up for it as live broadcasts uh get a chat going with uh people interested in similar topics we can post the reading schedule ahead and do some of those things together so looking forward to doing that so anyway back to back to a future of an illusion the psychological fact has a decisive importance for our judgment of human civilization whereas we might find at first that its essence lies in controlling nature for the purpose of acquiring wealth and that the dangers which threaten it could eliminate through the suitable distribution of that wealth among among men it now seems that the emphasis has moved from the material to the mental the decisive question is whether and to what extent it is possible to lessen the burden of the instinctual sacrifices imposed on men to reconcile men to those which must necessarily remain to provide a compassion for them it is impossible to do that without control of the masses by a minority and it is as to dispense with coercion the work of civilization for masses are lazy and unintelligent they have no love for institutional renunciation and they are not to be convinced by argument of its inevitability and so here we kind of get freud talking a bit about how the coercive nature of something say like religion as a society-shaping force is part of that big ongoing cycle you know so let's take it back to dick again so dick talks about uh in his uh discussion here about we were talking about politic versus uh prophetic okay so on the prophetic side it is easy to look at it as the vip agnostic nightmare fallen world definitely we don't understand a lot of that stuff but from a pure politic point of view there is a shameful boom and bust cycle going on with the rise and fall of empires right and that uh those periods of you know it's sort of like the foundation by asimov talks about this and even dude talks about it to some extent right so in dune the civilizations rise and then plunge into these dark ages as a retrenching of the values like the dark ages become a retrenching of values the doomsday of redistribution right one of the side effects of the williams of hastings uh conquering of england was everyone's all the land holders were uprooted right so there's a huge massive distribution a re-evaluation of values i mean these are purely politic in a way uh because they come out of the spoils of war and empires rising and falling but at the same time if you take it on that prophetic view man will keep doing these kinds of things so you have on the one hand the idea of religion as a way to control the masses like freud is sort of mentioning civilization requires some common civilization and and those things will definitely have patterns to them on the other hand what if the whole thing is is a rig what if it's all if it's rigged so again we get to maybe we jump here quickly to just burrows talking in nova express there's i wonder if the writers of the blade runner 2049 used k9 as uh a reference to burroughs nova express nova express came up in our last podcast with with dick talked about in the exegesis dick talks about the nova police was an example of uh burroughs kind of getting it right but i just wanted to read this one quickly it said shift coordinates points canine was in combat with the alien mind screen and magnetic claws feeling for virus punch cards pulling into the vertiginous spins back state of those claws shift coordinate points by town hall square long stop for the red light a boy stood in front of the hot dog stand and blew water from his face pieces of gray vapor drifted back across the wine glass sick dawn whisper of clock hands and brown hair canine move back to the combat area standing now in the chinese use sent the resistance machine jolting clicking ticking through the pinball machine enemy plans burst in the burst of rapid calculation clicking in punch cards of redirected orders crackling shortwave static bleep sounds of thinking metal calling partitions of all nations word falling photo falling break through the grey room pinball lead streets free doorways shift coordinate points no good no bueno hustling myself such wisdom and guts the ticket that exploded posed little time so i'll say good night pieces of gray spanish flu wouldn't photo like the wind in the green neon you at the dog the street blue rain you want a cup of tea with white with rose wallpaper the dog turns so many and so i progress i'm mapping a photo light verse of wounded galaxies at the dog i did the street blue rain the dog turns break through the gray room he was gone away through invisible mourning leaving a million tape recorders of his voice behind fading into the cold spring air pose of a colorless question right so we see we see that uh emergence there of the the sci-fi again right when you slip into that sci-fi mode you can kind of get these resonances there of the politics but again like one of the places that psychology comes in is to give us some framework of how we are to exist in the space of this right so we have religion as one of our tools we have psychology as a tool right i believe back to freud talking about civilization and its discontents and again civilization civilizations discontents we talked about this one before how can civilization which cured so many human problems right be also the source of so many of our modern day anxieties all right and no one better than dick represents a man torn into a prophetic frenzy by his reactions to and observations from those anxieties right so if we jump into this i believe the line of thought which seeks to trace the phenomena of cultural development the part played by a superego promises still further discoveries i hasten to come to a close but there is one question which i can hardly evade if the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the individual if it employs the same methods may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that under the influence of cultural urges some civilizations or some epochs of civilization possibly the whole of mankind have become neurotic an analytic dissection of such neuroses might lead to therapeutic recommendations which could lay claim to great practical interest so wow so here we again he's talking about um the psychosis of civilization well again prophetics isn't a magnostic god creating an insane world separated from sophia with only logos as an external force that comes down to save us isn't that the neurosis that freud's talking about so he just wraps up says the fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction it may be in that time that this respect precisely the precise time deserves special interest men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man they know this and hence comes a large part of their current unrest their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety and now it is to be expected that the others of the two heavenly powers external eros which will make an effort to insert himself in the struggle with his equally immoral adversary but who can foresee with success and what results okay so so again we uh we come back to valles and here we're going to just jump ahead to

a small passage near the end

on our nature it is proper to say we appear to be the memory coils dna carriers capable of experience in a computer-like thinking system which although we have correctly recorded and stored thousands of years of experiential information and each of us possesses somewhat different deposits from all the other life forms there is a malfunction a failure of memory retrieval there lies the trouble of our particular sub-circuit salvation through gnosis or more properly amnesis the loss of amnesia although it has individual significance for each of us a quantum leap in perception identity cognition understanding world and self-experience including immortality it has the greater and further importance for the system as a whole in as much as the memories are data needed by and valuable by it to its over all functioning therefore it is the process of self-repair which includes rebuilding our sub-circuit via linear and orthogonal time changes the external information or gnosis then consists of disinhibiting instructions with the core content actually intrinsic to us that is already there first absorbed by plato vs the learning is a form of remembering the learning is form of remembering the primordial source of all our religions lies with the ancestors of the dogon tribe who got their cosmogony and cosmology directly from the three-eyed invaders who visited long ago the three-eyed invaders are mute and death telepaths they could not breathe our atmosphere but the elongated misshapen skull of vikkanatan

and emanated from a planet in the star system sirius although they had no hands they had instead pincer claws as a crab they were great builders and they convertedly influenced our history toward a fruitful end well this here sounds very much so like a lovecraftian a lovecraftian call almost to speak

and i believe here we have let me just check out the image from last week's uh i want to show a very interesting image i think we showed it last week and suddenly there's a synchronicity here that i think we should exploit the image of this three-eyed invader uh we shared it last week you guys can check the old video go back and check the video i don't have it handy here but but it was a a dream of a tree-like thing with three eyes one two three eyes and yeah so it's definitely strange right so so again wrapping everything up we have valas what do you guys think what's the part of dick that's a political thinker and what's the part of dick that's a gnostic thinker and are they mutually exclusive i mean is it is it possible to see him as both would love to hear your comments below and really interested in continuing the dialogue we will come back to dick's questions next month i want to do a tour through the thinking of rudolph steiner so we'll lean more on uh that uh prophetic side of things uh and i and i definitely think that that would be really interesting to everyone i'm going to end here just with a final call out to the syzygy and to atman and brahma so uh he says here so i am vales i am not vales right i experienced vowelless it entered my own brain it became a universe an external universe the cell


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