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if pkd were still alive he would think that gpt is communicating with him specifically
here's a summary of Philip K. Dick's 'highest truths'
Superficial and entirely missing the mark. PKD spent years doing research trying to understand his most important mystical experience, and his extensive notes and documentation ended up in the book "exegesis" (also greatly influencing the philosophy underlying works such as Valis). None of that is of course mentioned in the article. What we get is a random psychiatrist performing armchair psychoanalysis on someone he…
Absolutely. If you want to get a handle on PKD and his problems, it's so much better to read his work and get his own perspective. Radio Free Albemuth is interesting as a kind of precursor to Valis, but I must admit to not wanting to read Exegesis as it looks too in depth.
It really is amazing to read after you've gone through VALIS.
It's bizarre that the article has a WARNING at the top which is a spoiler warning for a movie from the 1990s, but not a sensitive-content warning re: suicide.
"Spoiler alert for anybody who hasn't seen this movie from 1980: the dog did it!"
Ugh.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely. If you want to get a handle on PKD and his problems, it's so much better to read his work and get his own perspective. Radio Free Albemuth is interesting as a kind of precursor to Valis, but I must admit to not wanting to read Exegesis as it looks too in depth.
I like just flipping through the Exegesis and reading random entries. It's always a fascinating trip. I would never be able to read it end to end (and it certainly was never intended to be). It really is amazing to read after you've gone through VALIS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like just flipping through the Exegesis and reading random entries. It's always a fascinating trip. I would never be able to read it end to end (and it certainly was never intended to be). It really is amazing to read after you've gone through VALIS.
Okay, you've intrigued me with that - I'll chase down a copy
> The brain is one multiperson ajna chakra, which one day as a unitary totality will open, discerning and annihilating (the 3rd eye of Shiva). (Herdsman of the souls.) All who participate in it will then see as I saw; they will be inside the eye; everything outside will be blasted, “burned like chaff,” i.e., cease to exist. At that point the brain will generate its own world out of itself. It, collectively, will totally control its world—the PTG.
> Ah! In Ubik locating the Ubik messages in cheap commercials was absolutely right on. I couldn’t have “guessed” more accurately. It’s obvious that the real author of Ubik was Ubik. It is a self proving novel; i.e., it couldn’t have come into existence unless it were true.
> This is a sinister life form indeed. First it takes power over us, reducing us to slaves, and then it causes us to forget our former state, and to be unable to see or to think straight, and not to know we can’t see or think straight, and finally it becomes invisible to us by reason of what it has done to us. We cannot even monitor our own deformity, our own impairment.
> Axiomatically, if you derange the brain in precise ways, not only will it be deranged, but if you have affected precisely the correct circuits it will be unaware that it is impaired and so not seek to rectify the damage.
> It’s like deciding something is real by comparing it with itself. So it’s a fool-proof simulation,
> No, damn it, it is like Ubik! The outside macrobrain is signaling us to wake up, we are like the characters in Eye, asleep—not on the floor of the bevatron—but while watching for Christ to return. We were made toxic—i.e., put into “half life”—as if killed. Fuck! I know it; Ubik is the paradigm! The half-life, the messages, Ubik itself, Runciter—we are in a sort of bubble of irreality: spurious world generated by—the plenary powers, astral determinism, whatever the fuck that is.
"substance abuse" is such a weird term.