imported_supernaturalist

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  • in reply to: rare questing tape #2588

    Darn, looks like I missed it already!

    Michael

    in reply to: Black alchemist cassette tape ANY INTEREST ? #2571

    Hello Zach, thanks for getting back.

    Re getting the word out there…

    For my own purely selfish reasons, when you do put it on eBay please post to this thread again. I could be interested myself and this is likely the best way I’ll hear about it!

    If you’re on Facebook you could try posting a message to Andrew Collins’ wall; I’m not on it myself so don’t know if you can do that, but there will be plenty of people reading it that may well be interested.

    What is the minimum price you’d be willing to see it go for? I’ve bought from eBay but never sold anything, but I understand that you can put a reserve price on an item so if no-one bids enough you don’t sell.

    As for what price you can expect, I’ve no idea I’m afraid.

    Keep in touch.

    Michael

    in reply to: Black alchemist cassette tape ANY INTEREST ? #2569

    Hi Zach,

    I’m afraid I missed this when you posted it. If you’re still there, do you still have the tape or did you auction it. If you still have it, what quality is the tape in?

    Michael

    in reply to: Major Website Re-vamp Planned #2568

    Just trying something…I changed my name (not my username) to Michael I – is this what displays on my new posts now?

    Edit – apparantly not! Feel free to delete this post if you like Simon.

    in reply to: Major Website Re-vamp Planned #2567

    Happy New Year!

    The forums do look much better. I’m trying them out right now!

    The Questing Books section is also looking pretty good. The only problem with it is that the search function doesn’t seem to be working too well – I tried searching on ‘jack gale’, ‘gale’ and ‘Gale’ in the Questing category and it still didn’t find his book, which you can see in the straightforward catalog view. But that’s maybe not so important unless the volume of books starts ramping up. I might even put some info in the review sections – chapter headings and that sort of info.

    Cheers,

    Michael

    in reply to: Artefact for sale #2562

    HernesSon said:
    It’s really something that should be of interest for the questing community and really needs to be preserved for all to see. If Mr “C” has strong objections I won’t copy circulate it which was the concern awhile back, but I can’t see why not, with the anniversary of the green stone story and all?
     
    If that’s the Green Stone documentary that I’ve seen then Mr C didn’t have anything to do with that one.  It was done by Phillips, Keatman, et al, but without any involvement from Andy Collins.  To avoid breaking copyright laws you’d need to get permission from Phillips and Keatman I expect, maybe others.
     
    Michael

    in reply to: Psychic Questing Weekender 2009 #2559

    Hello Baruc,
    I went and had a great time, and yes the weather was fantastic.  The first day was Andy talking about what you can achieve through psychic questing referring to his own work.  The second day was about the practical side of you go about it.
    So on the first day was the 30th Anniversary Green Stone presentation, as it is 30 years this October since the original Green Stone quest.  This was followed by two further presentations about how more recently Andy has been going back to some of the threads of the 1979 quest and discovering a mass of interesting stuff.  The afternoon was taken up by talks about questing in Egypt relating to the discovery of the Giza caves.  All really interesting.  Too much to go into here I’m afraid.
    The second day had advice that I believe recaptitulated some of the material from last year’s Weekender as well as the artificact retrieval fun and games.  I have to admit to doing exceptionally badly at this! Having initially got a strong image of a stone and a clear idea of which quadrant of Avebury it was located in, I managed to find ‘my’ stone.  However, it turned out that I was in the wrong quadrant.  I also got completeley wrong the nature of the artifact – I kept getting the impression of something like a ice-cream stick with different colours on each side, whereas it was a small bronze horse thing.  Oh well.  All of us who got the wrong quadrant did get a second chance to locate the correct stone in the right quadrant.  While standing I heard a metallic clink from somewhere behind me.  Alas, when it came to facing the stone I thought it was from I was somewhat out.  Obviously need to work on my latent psychic thingumy!
    The weekend ended with a walk up Waden Hill, overlooking Silbury Hill.  A meditation was done there, but I had to leave before the med.  However, I went away with a golden glow.
    Michael

    in reply to: Lost Writings of John the Evangelist #2535

    I was listening to an Aeon Byte podcast (http://www.thegodabovegod.com/ late yesterday. The guest was April De Conick, professor of Biblical Studies at Rice University, talking about the Gospel of John. She also thinks that Lazarus is the beloved disciple, for the reasons outlined in your article. Thought you’d like to know!

    Michael

    in reply to: Major Website Re-vamp Planned #2518

    I’d quite like to see a separate section for articles, distinct from the announcements on the front page and distinct from forum posts. New additions can still be highlighted on the front page of course, but it would be nice to easily find certain content long after it was posted. For example, Simon’s article about Lazarus must have been posted on the front page about the time the site went live, but no-one is likely to see it now as it has dropped off the bottom. Similarly, if someone posts an article in the forums, then with the passage of time it will just get buried. Unless you already knew about them, you wouldn’t even know to search for them, whereas a separate ‘Articles’ section could be easily browsed by any newcomer or old-timer. Maybe reviews could go in there as well. Articles could also have a link to a forum thread where any discussions on that article could be gathered; at the moment you can post a comment on an article, but it’s not the best way to conduct a discussion and the forums are better for that anyway.

    I’ll continue to give the topic some thought while I’m away at the Faery Ball in Penzance!

    Michael

    in reply to: Psychic Questing Weekender 2009 #2517

    Yay! This time it doesn’t clash with anything so I’m up for it.

    Michael

    in reply to: PQ Weekender #2510

    Thanks Paulo, that was an interesting read. Anyone else like to say anything?

    Michael

    in reply to: PQ Weekender #2507

    The PQ weekender sounds really great and I would go, but I have a prior engagement on the Saturday.

    Perhaps anyone going could give a brief outline of what you got up to when you get back?

    Michael

    I only started reading VALIS today. After only a few pages you can already see how PKD has fictionalised his own 2/3 74 experience.

    Simon wrote:
    What would that “reality manipulation” look like to someone observing it in the past (rather our past, their present)?

    Good question! I guess they would have an experience of ‘high-strangeness’. Maybe they would end up with a disconcerting feeling that things aren’t right. Maybe some would still have odd memories, flashbacks or dreams of the world before the change, as PKD says he thinks he had. Maybe some who we think are mad are merely remembering a world that no longer exists.

    Perhaps some psychic information relates to these ‘lost worlds’ rather than the new world coming into being?

    [...continued from previous post...]
    You will recall that I pointed out that after Police General Buckman slipped over into a better world he underwent an inner change appropriate to the qualities of the better world, the more just, the more loving, the warmer world in which the tyranny of the police apparatus was already beginning to fade away as would a dream upon the awakening of the dreamer. In March 1974, when I regained my buried memories (a process called in Greek anamnesis, which literally means the loss of forgetfulness rather than merely remembering) — upon those memories reentering consciousness I, like General Buckman, underwent a personality change. Like his, it was fundamental but at the same time subtle. It was me but yet it was not me. I noticed it mostly in small ways: things I should have remembered but did not; things I did remember (ah, what things!) but should not have. Evidently this had been my personality in what I call Track A. You may be interested in one aspect of my restored memories that strikes me as most astonishing. In the previous alternate present, in Track A, Christianity was illegal, as it had been two thousand years ago at its inception. It was regarded as subversive and revolutionary — and, let me add, this appraisal by the police authorities was correct. It took me almost two weeks, after the return of my memories of my life in Track A, to rid myself of the overpowering impression that all references to Christ, all sacerdotal acts, had to be veiled in absolute secrecy. But historically this fits the pattern of a fascist takeover, especially those along Nazi lines. They did so regard Christianity. And, had they attained a victory in the war, this surely would have been their policy in that portion of the United States that they controlled. For example, Jehovah’s Witnesses, under the Nazis, were gassed in the concentration camps along with the Jews and Gypsies; they were placed right up at the top of the list. And, in that other modern totalitarian state, for the same reason it is banned and its members persecuted; I mean, of course, the USSR. The three great tyrannical states in history that have murdered their domestic Christian populations — Rome, the Third Reich, and the USSR — are, from an objective standpoint, three manifestations of a single matrix. Your own personal beliefs about religion are not an issue here; what is an issue is a historic fact, and therefore I ask you to ponder objectively what the overwhelming fear I felt regarding Christian rites and protestations of faith signifies about the Track A society abruptly remembered. It is a decisive clue about Track A. It tells us how radically different it was. I would like you, if you have gone this far, to accept my statements about my other memories that, under the sodium Pentothal, returned; it was a prison. It was dreadful; we overthrew it, just as we overthrew the Nixon tyranny, but it was far more cruel, incredibly so, and there was a great battle and loss of life. And, please, let me add one other fact, maybe objectively unimportant but to me interesting nonetheless. It was in February 1974 that my blocked-off memories of Track A returned, and it was in February 1974 that Flow My Tears was finally, after two years’ delay, published. It was almost as if the release of the novel, which had been delayed so long, meant that in a certain sense it was all right for me to remember. But until then it was better that I did not. Why that would be I do not know, but I have the impression that the memories were not to come to the surface until the material had been published very sincerely on the author’s part as what he believed to be fiction. Perhaps, had I known, I would have been too frightened to write the novel. Or perhaps I would have shot my mouth off and somehow interfered with the effectiveness of these several books — whatever effectiveness that might be or was. I do not even claim there was an intended effectiveness; perhaps there was none at all. But if there was one — and I repeat the word “if” emphatically — it was almost certainly to stir subliminal memories in readers back to dim life — not a conscious life, not an entering consciousness as in my own case, but to recall to them on a deep and profound, albeit unconscious level, what a police tyranny is like, and how vital it is, now or then, at any time, along any track, to defeat it. In March 1974 the really crucial moves to depose Nixon were beginning. In August, five months later, they proved successful, although these reprogrammings, this intervention in our present, may have been designed more to affect a future continuum rather than our own. As I said at the beginning, ideas seem to have a life of their own; they appear to seize on people and make use of them. The idea that seized me twenty-seven years ago and never let go is this: Any society in which people meddle in other people’s business is not a good society, and a state in which the government “knows more about you than you know about yourself,” as it is expressed in Flow My Tears, is a state that must be overthrown. It may be a theocracy, a fascist corporate state, or reactionary monopolistic capitalism or centralistic socialism — that aspect does not matter. And I am saying not merely, “It can happen here,” meaning the United States, but rather, “It did happen here. I remember. I was one of the secret Christians who fought it and to at least some extent helped overthrow it.” And I am very proud of that: proud of myself in time Track A. But there is, unfortunately, a somber intimation that accompanies my pride as to my work there. I think that in that previous world I did not live past March 1974. I fell victim to a police trap, a net or mesh. However, in this one, which I will call Track B, I had better luck. But we fought here in this track a much lighter tyranny, a far stupider one. Or, perhaps, we had assistance: The anterior reprogramming of one or more historic variables came to our rescue. Sometimes I think (and this is, of course, pure speculation, a happy fantasy of my soul) that because of what we accomplished there — or anyhow attempted to, and very bravely — we who were directly involved were allowed to live on here, past the terminal point that brought us down in that other, worse world. It is a sort of miraculous kindness.

    This gracious gift serves to delineate for us — for me at least — some aspects of the Programmer. It causes me to comprehend him after a fashion. I think we cannot know what he is, but we can experience this functioning and so can ask, “What does he resemble?” Not “What is he?” but rather “What is he like?”

    First and foremost, he controls the objects, processes, and events in our space-time world. This is, for us, the primary aspect, although intrinsically he may possess aspects of vaster magnitude but of less applicability to us. I have spoken of myself as a reprogrammed variable, and I have spoken of him as the Programmer and Reprogrammer. During a short period of time in March 1974, at the moment in which I was resynthesized, I was aware perceptually — which is to say aware in an external way — of his presence. At that time I had no idea what I was seeing? [sic; this question mark appears, in context, to be a typo]. It resembled plasmic energy. It had colors. It moved fast, collecting and dispersing. But what it was, what he was — I am not sure even now, except I can tell you that he had simulated normal objects and their processes so as to copy them and in such an artful way as to make himself invisible within them. As the Vedantists put it, he was the fire within the flint, the razor within the razor case. Later research showed me that in terms of group cultural experience, the name Brahman has been given to this omnipresent immanent entity. I quote a fragment of an American poem ["Brahma"] by Emerson; it conveys what I experienced:

    They reckon ill who leave me out;
    When me they fly I am the wings.
    I am the doubter and the doubt,
    And I the hymn the Brahman sings.

    By this I mean that during that short period — a matter of hours or perhaps a day — I was aware of nothing that was not the Programmer. All the things in our pluriform world were segments or subsections of him. Some were at rest but many moved, and did so like portions of a breathing organism that inhaled, exhaled, grew, changed, evolved toward some final state that by its absolute wisdom it had chosen for itself. I mean to say, I experienced it as self-creating, dependent on nothing outside it because very simply there was nothing outside it.

    As I saw this I felt keenly that through all the years of my life I had been literally blind; I remember saying over and over to my wife, “I’ve regained my sight! I can see again!” It seemed to me that up until that moment I had been merely guessing as to the nature of the reality around me. I understood that I had not acquired a new faculty of perception but had, rather, regained an old one. For a day or so I saw as we once all had, thousands of years ago. But how had we come to lose sight, this superior eye? The morphology must still be present in us, not only latent; otherwise I could not have reacquired it even briefly. This puzzles me yet. How was it that for forty-six years I did not truly see but only guessed at the nature of the world, and then briefly did see, but soon after, lost that sight and became semiblind again? The interval in which I actually saw was, evidently, the interval in which the Programmer was reworking me. He had moved forward as palpably sentient and alive, as set to ground; he had disclosed himself. Thus it is said that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are revealed religions. Our God is the deus absconditus: the hidden god. But why? Why is it necessary that we be deceived regarding the nature of our reality? Why has he cloaked himself as a plurality of unrelated objects and his movements as a plurality of chance processes? All the changes, all the permutations of reality that we see are expressions of the purposeful growing and unfolding of this single entelechy; it is a plant, a flower, an opening rose. It is a humming hive of bees. It is music, a kind of singing. Obviously I saw the Programmer as he really is, as he really behaves, only because he had seized on me to reshape me, so I say, “I know why I saw him,” but I cannot say, “I know why I do not see him now, nor why anyone else does not.” Do we collectively dwell in a kind of laser hologram, real creatures in a manufactured quasi-world, a stage set within whose artifacts and creatures a mind moves that is determined to remain unknown?

    A newspaper article about this speech could well be titled: AUTHOR CLAIMS TO HAVE SEEN GOD BUT CAN’T GIVE ACCOUNT OF WHAT HE SAW.

    If I consider the term by which I designate him — the Programmer and Reprogrammer — perhaps I can extract from that a partial answer. I call him what I call him because that was what I witnessed him doing: He had previously programmed the lives here but now was altering one or more crucial factors — this in the service of completing a structure or plan. I reason along these lines: A human scientist who operates a computer does not bias nor warp, does not prejudice, the outcome of his calculations. A human ethnologist does not allow himself to contaminate his own findings by participating in the culture he studies. Which is to say, in certain kinds of endeavors it is essential that the observer remain occluded off from that which he observes. There is nothing malign in this, no sinister deception. It is merely necessary. If indeed we are, collectively, being moved along desired paths toward a desired outcome, the entity that sets us in motion along those lines, that entity which not only desires the particular outcome but that wills that outcome — he must not enter into it palpably or the outcome will be aborted. What, then, we must turn our attention to is — not the Programmer — but the events programmed. Concealed though the former is, the latter will confront us; we are involved in it — in fact, we are instruments by which it is accomplished.

    There is no doubt in my mind as to the larger, historic purpose of the reprogramming that paid off so spectacularly and gloriously in 1974. Currently I am writing a novel about it; the novel is called V.A.L.I.S., the letters standing for “VAST ACTIVE LIVING INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM.” In the novel a government researcher who is very gifted but a little crazy formulates a hypothesis that declares that, located somewhere in our world, there exists a mimicking organism of high intelligence; it so successfully mimics natural objects and processes that humans are routinely unaware of it. When, due to chance or exceptional circumstances, a human does perceive it, he simply calls it “God” and lets it go at that. In my novel, however, the government researcher is determined to treat this vast, intelligent, mimicking entity the way a scientist would treat anything under scrutiny. His problem is, however, that by his own hypothesis he cannot detect the entity — certainly a frustrating experience for him.

    But also in my novel I write about another person, unknown to this government researcher; that person has been having unusual experiences for which he has no theory. He has in fact been encountering Valis, who is in the process of reprogramming him. The two characters possess between them the whole truth: the correct but untestable hypothesis by one, the unexplained experiences by the other. And it is this other man, this nonscientific person, whom I identify with, because he, like me — he is beginning to retrieve blocked-off memories of another world, memories he cannot account for. But he has no theory. None at all.

    In the novel I myself appear as a character, under my own name. I am a science fiction writer who has accepted a large advance payment for a yet unwritten novel and who must now come up with that novel before a deadline. I, in the book — I know both these men, Houston Paige, the government researcher with the theory, and Nicholas Brady, who is undergoing the unfathomable experiences. I begin to make use of material from both. My purpose is merely that of meeting my contractual deadline. But, as I continue to write about Houston Paige’s theory and Nicholas Brady’s experiences, I begin to see that everything fits together. I, in the novel, hold both key and lock, and no one else does.

    You can see, I am sure, that it is inevitable, in my novel Valis, that eventually Houston Paige and Nicholas Brady meet. But this meeting has an odd effect on Houston Paige, he with the theory. Paige undergoes a total psychotic breakdown as a result of getting confirmation of his theory. He could imagine it but he cannot believe it. In his head his ingenious theory is dissociated from reality. And this is an intuition which I feel: that many of us believe in Valis or God or Brahman or the Programmer, but if we ever actually encountered it we could simply not handle it. It would be like a child driven mad by Christmas. He could sustain hoping and waiting, he could pray, he could wish, he could suppose and imagine and even believe; but the actual manifestation — that is too much for our small circuits. And yet the child grows up and there is the man. And those circuits — they grow, too. But to remember a different, discarded world? And to perceive the great planning mind that achieved that abolition, that unthreading of evil?

    One thing I really want you to know: I am aware that the claims I am making — claims of having retrieved buried memories of an alternate present and to have perceived the agency responsible for arranging that alteration — these claims can neither be proved nor can they even be made to sound rational in the usual sense of the word. It has taken me over three years to reach the point where I am willing to tell anyone but my closest friends about my experience beginning back at the vernal equinox of 1974. One of the reasons motivating me to speak about it publicly at last, to openly make this claim, is a recent encounter I have undergone, which, by the way, bears a resemblance to Hawthorne Abendsen’s experience in The Man in the High Castle with the woman Juliana Frink. Juliana read Abendsen’s book about a world in which Germany and Japan and Italy lost World War II and felt she should tell him what she comprehended about the book. This final scene in The Man in the High Castle has, I think, been the source for a similar scene in my later story “Faith of Our Fathers,” where the girl Tanya Lee shows up and acquaints the protagonist with the actual reality situation — which is to say, that much of his world is delusional, and purposefully so. For several years I have had the feeling, a growing feeling, that one day a woman, who would be a complete stranger to me, would contact me, tell me that she had some information to impart to me, would then appear at my door, just as Juliana appeared at Abendsen’s door, and would forthwith in the gravest possible way tell me exactly what Juliana told Abendsen — that my book, like his, was in a certain real, literal, and physical sense not fiction but the truth. Precisely that has recently happened to me. I am speaking of a woman who systematically read each and every novel of mine, more than thirty of them, as well as many of my stories. And she did appear; and she was a total stranger; and she did inform me of this fact. At first she was curious to find out if I myself knew, or if not that, whether I suspected it. The probing between us, the cautious questioning, lasted three weeks. She did not inform me suddenly or immediately, but rather gradually, watching carefully each step of the way, each step along the path of communication and understanding, to see my reaction. It was a solemn matter, really, for her to drive four hundred miles to visit an author whose many books she had read, books of fiction, of the author’s imagination, to tell him that there are superimposed worlds in which we live, not one world only, and that she had ascertained that the author in some way was involved with at least one of these worlds, one canceled out at some past time, rewoven and replaced, and — most of all — does the author consciously know this? It was a tense but joyful moment when she reached the point where she could speak candidly; that point did not arrive in our encounter until she was certain that I could handle it. But I had, three years earlier, posited theoretically that if my retrieved memories were authentic, it was only a matter of time before a contact, a cautious, guarded probing by someone would occur, initiated by a person who had read my books and for one reason or another deduced the actual situation — I mean, knew what the significant information was that the books and stories carried. She knew, from my novels and stories, which world I had experienced, which of the many; what she could not determine until I told her was that, in February 1975, I had passed across into a third alternate present — Track C, we shall call it — and this one was a garden or park of peace and beauty, a world superior to ours, rising into existence. I could then speak to her of three rather than two worlds: the black iron prison world that had been; our intermediate world in which oppression and war exist but have to a great degree been cast down; and then a third alternate world that someday, when the correct variables in our past have been reprogrammed, will materialize as a superimposition onto this one. . . and within which, as we awaken to it, we shall suppose we had always lived there, the memory of this intermediate one, like that of the black iron prison world, eradicated mercifully from our memories.

    There may be other persons like this woman who have deduced from evidence internal to my writing, as well as from their own vestigial memories, that the landscape I portray as fictional is or was somehow literally real, and that if a grimmer reality could have once occupied the space that our world occupies, it stands to reason that the process of reweaving need not end here; this is not the best of all possible worlds, just as it is not the worst. This woman told me nothing that I did not already know, except that by independently arriving at the same conclusion she gave me the courage to speak out, to tell this but at the same time knowing as I do so that in no way — none that I know of, at least — can this presentation be verified. The best I can do, rather than that, is to play the role of prophet, of ancient prophets and such oracles as the sibyl at Delphi, and to talk of a wonderful garden world, much like that which once our ancestors are said to have inhabited — in fact, I sometimes imagine it to be exactly that same world restored, as if a false trajectory of our world will eventually be fully corrected and once more we will be where once, many thousands of years ago, we lived and were happy. During the brief time I walked about in it I had the strong impression that it was our legitimate home that somehow we had lost. The time I spent there was short — about six hours of real elapsed time. But I remember it well. In the novel I wrote with Roger Zelazny, Deus Irae, I describe it toward the end, at the point where the curse is lifted from the world by the death and transfiguration of the God of Wrath. What was most amazing to me about this parklike world, this Track C, was the non-Christian elements forming the basis of it; it was not what my Christian training had prepared me for at all. Even when it began to phase out I still saw sky; I saw land and dark blue smooth water, and standing by the edge of the water a beautiful nude woman whom I recognized as Aphrodite. At that point this other better world had diminished to a mere landscape beyond a Golden Rectangle doorway; the outline of the doorway pulsed with laserlike light and it all grew smaller and was at last alas gone from sight, the 3:5 doorway devouring itself into nothingness, sealing off what lay beyond. I have not seen it since, but I had the firm impression that this was the next world — not of the Christians — but the Arcady of the Greco-Roman pagan world, something older and more beautiful than that which my own religion can conjure up as a lure to keep us in a state of dutiful morality and faith. What I saw was very old and very lovely. Sky, sea, land, and the beautiful woman, and then nothing, for the door had shut and I was closed off back here. It was with a bitter sense of loss that I saw it go — saw her go, really, since it all constellated about her. Aphrodite, I discovered when I looked in my Britannica to see what I could learn about her, was not only the goddess of erotic love and aesthetic beauty but also the embodiment of the generative force of life itself; nor was she originally Greek: In the beginning she had been a Semitic deity, later taken over by the Greeks, who knew a good thing when they saw it. During those treasured hours what I saw in her was a loveliness that our own religion, Christianity, at least by comparison, lacks: an incredible symmetry, the palintonos harmonie that Heraclitus wrote of: the perfect tension and balance of forces within the strung lyre that bowed by its stretched strings but that appears perfectly at rest, perfectly at peace. Yet, the strung lyre is a balanced dynamism, immobile only because the tensions within it are in absolute proportion. This is the quality of the Greek formulation of beauty: perfection that is dynamic within yet at apparent rest without. Against this palintonos harmonie the universe plays out the other aesthetic principle incorporated in the Grecian lyre: the palintropos harmonie, which is the back-and-forth oscillation of the strings as they are played. I did not see her like this, and perhaps this, the continual oscillation back and forth, is the deeper, greater rhythm of the universe things coming into existence and then passing away; change rather than a static durability. But for a little while I had seen perfect peace, perfect rest, a past we have lost but a past returning to us as if by means of a long-term oscillation, to be available as our future, in which all lost things shall be restored.

    There is a fascinating passage in the Old Testament in which God says, “For I am fashioning a new heaven and a new earth, and the memory of the former things will not enter the mind nor come up into the heart.” When I read this I think to myself: I believe I know a great secret. When the work of restoration is completed, we will not even remember the tyrannies, the cruel barbarisms of the Earth we inhabited; “not entering the mind” means we will mercifully forget, and “not coming up into the heart” means that the vast body of pain and grief and loss and disappointment within us will be expunged as if it had never been. I believe that process is taking place now, has always been taking place now. And, mercifully, we are already being permitted to forget that which formerly was. And perhaps in my novels and stories I have done wrong to urge you to remember.

    SANTA ANA, 1977
    CALIFORNIA, U.S.A.

    Excerpt from:
    The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick
    Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings
    by Philip K. Dick
    Edited and with an Introduction by Lawrence Sutin
    Copyright 1995 – First Vintage Books Edition
    ISBN 0-679-42644-2

    in reply to: Introducing – Philp K. Dick #2498

    What most interested me was PKD’s suggestion that the the past can be changed and indeed has already been changed and will continue to be changed, which I think is what AC suggested in his Morphian article. It made me think that psychic-questing could possibly be (a) a witness to reality being altered, (b) a reality-altering agent, (c) an interplay between the two.

    Thinking about an artifact (especially one which has appeared as an apport) and its history, perhaps the artifact and its history only get called into being as a result of the quest (option (b) above), or as a result of something else acting on a fluid reality which the quest has been witness to (option (a) above). In option (c) perhaps the initial psychic information is the signal that reality is under revision, but the revision will only hypostasise if the questors act appropriately on the information.

    As an possible example of option (c), perhaps the reason that the Green Stone had to be found by 31 Oct 1979 was because the period from mid Oct ’79 (when the first channellings about the Green Stone were produced) to 31 Oct ’79 was the available window in which the stone and its history could be inserted into our universe, for whatever reason.

    The importance of artifact retrieval is something that has sometimes been discussed. In the scenario outlined above the artifact is the sign that the change has taken place, anchoring it in reality so-to-speak.

    This wouldn’t be to say that all psychic quests involve these sort of shifts of course. The Black Alchemist quest seems different, though the Black Alchemist himself appears to have been involved in some reality-fixing of his own.

    All this may be ’round objects’! But the bizarre nature of some psychic-quests led me a while ago to thinking that ‘reality’ is not as stable as one would like to think.

    I’ll see if I can post that article, probably in the General Discussion area.

    Simon wrote:
    Apologies for taking slightly over two months to reply – unconscionably rude and inexcusable, I’m afraid. It’s just been that sort of life recently

    I know what you mean. I’ve been actively shedding responsibilities recently so I can focus on what is important to me. It’s good to ‘see’ you again.

    Michael

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