Alright, so let’s try and tie a few threads together here…
There’s three threads that I want to work with, but at least two of them are compound threads. I will list them.
1 - Rudy Rucker’s recent book, “The Lifebox, The Seashell And The Soul”
2 - Myths, Rites, Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader (certain contents of which to be discussed…)
3 - Philip K Dick (always a compound subject)
Rucker and Dick have some things in common.
Both are or were science fiction writers and both have been influential not only on science fiction novels and movies and concepts but - perhaps in subtler ways - on the global culture as a whole.
Philip Dick was singled out by the extremely picky Polish writer Stanislaw Lem as one of the only worthwhile American science fiction writers of his time. Lem wrote about this on multiple occasions and at great length. Lem’s other writing includes the amazing “Solaris” (skip all the movie versions, read the damn book) and also volumes of criticism of non-existent fiction. Got that? Lem wrote and published critiques of books which had not actually been written. Among other things. Lem died in 2006. So it goes.
Rudy Rucker has won the Philip K Dick award for science fiction, twice. Both times it was for books in his excellent “Ware” series. The awards were for “Software” and “Wetware.” The other two are “Freeware” and “Realware,” which were my favorites of the bunch the last time I checked. I am due to re-read “Realware,” the only one of the four which I do not own. Nonetheless I suggest a) reading the four in the order in which he wrote them and b) they are probably the best possible introduction to Rudy Rucker’s science fiction writing.
Rucker writes other things than science fiction. He wrote a very dense book called “Infinity And The Mind” which is AMAZING but very hard to plow through. (Not helped by the fact that my copy was falling apart in my hands as I read. It has been reissued, but I am short on cash and long on things I want to read…) “Infinity And The Mind” deals, among other things, with set theory and with Kurt Godel. Rucker also wrote a much friendlier book called “The Fourth Dimension” which is a bit hard to come by these days, and that is tragic. “The Fourth Dimension” is probably the best place to start with Rucker’s nonfiction writing. His blog is also entertaining.
“The Fourth Dimension” is about exactly that, in terms not so much of time as a fourth dimension but of a fourth spatial dimension. He provides you with instructions and diagrams as to where this dimension might be found and how to build things in it and what might live there and what to do about that. This should be required reading for every human. If you’ve read Edwin Abbot’s “Flatland” you should be well primed for this one. If not, well, whatever.
Rucker’s fiction only deals perfunctorily with multiple dimensions and/or realities. Weird animals come out of them and drag helpless humans back away with them, but there is no heavily profound exploration of the concepts in his fiction (possibly excepting the “Ware” series). That is fine. Read his nonfiction for that. The fiction is good for other things.
Philip Dick’s fiction (including the works which inspired Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Paycheck, Minority Report, etc) not only deals with multiple realities (not so much dimensions as such), it largely takes place in them. This is not always apparent to the characters. In fact, it is clear after you study PKD a bit that it is not always clear to the writer himself where the action is taking place, in his books or even in his life.
The revelations of Philip K Dick are best explored in his own work in the novel called “VALIS.” This is not an easy read. It hurts. A lot of PKD hurts, but especially VALIS. Tread carefully. If you would rather just read about PKD’s ideas, there is plenty about that on the web. Here are some places to look:
1 - How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later
2 - One of Lem’s articles
3 - Official Website: philipkdick.com
4 - PKD interview from Rolling Stone magazine, save this for last, includes PKD’s theory that the gov’t was after him because he’d accidentally written about some secret truth or technology in one of his novels, and the accompanying illustration is awesome
and finally
R Crumb weighs in on PKD.
A pictorial history of Philip Dick’s visions and dementia. Unsettling.
In short, though, Philip Dick came to believe that the world-as-we-know-it was being influenced if not controlled by evil other-dimensional characters masquerading as a democratic government in order to keep us enslaved, blind to the truth, so that we would not overthrow them… Something like that. It is hard to explain. PKD considered this problem to have originated in the time of the Roman Empire, which he asserted had in fact never ended.
It could be said with some truth that the Matrix series, created quite some time after PKD’s death, owes him a lot.
So Rucker and Dick are both dealing with multi-planal reality, shall we say, in fiction and in non-fiction of various kinds. In Dick’s case there is also some quasi-religious content, wherein those-of-us-who-know are at times represented by Roman-era secret Christian cultists.
That’s a good jumping point to Mircea Eliade, a Romanian historian with an emphasis on religious experience. “Myths, Rites, Symbols” is a sort of compendium or digest of elements of his various publications, meant to get the gist of his thoughts across in one tidy volume… Another dense read, I gotta say, but worthwhile. If you like this sort of thing. Which I guess I do.
Points from this book which seem germane at the moment:
All religions or mythos include a cosmogonic myth, which is a story about where the universe came from. Generally speaking, this takes place in a time prior to or outside of time as we know it. The doings of gods and goddesses take place above the sky, below the ground, alongside of us but not typically sharing the same plane of being or experience. Stories of travel between our world and theirs are common.
Myths of the origins of things, or of the doings of divine beings, take place in a sacred time which is outside of our own. Engaging in rites, rituals, religious activities or ceremonies, involves a return to or an access of that sacred time, thus a recharging of of our own being or spiritual energy. (“Us” being a loosely applied term in this case as most of “us” probably don’t have much in the way of this kind of experience in our lives, a major problem with modern culture in my opinion. There are things that come close… But that’s a whole other discussion.)
One thing that distinguishes Christianity in particular from virtually all other bodies of religious thought is that the sacred time which is accessed is actually a part of our historical time. It is the time of Jesus’ physical existence on earth. It is measurable, locatable, identifiable, describable, knowable in a number of basic ways. This is nearly unique among mythos.
I guess you could, if so inclined, take that as a vote for Christ. I don’t take it that way, though I have no more problem with or affinity for him than I do for Buddha or Mohammed or Shiva or Quetzlcoatl or Neptune or Sun Ra. They all get the job done, and I am thankful for it, whoever is at the wheel.
To me it’s just an interesting fact, especially when you fit it together with two elements from Rudy Rucker and PKD.
As mentioned earlier, PKD believed that the separation of properly-experienced-reality and artificially-induced-hallucination dated to sometime around the Roman empire, and included a secret Christian cult which sought to overthrow the evil powers that be. So that’s sorta fun to look at next to Christianity’s unique historicity. The sacred time which is accessed in a Christian rite is closely related to the time in our actual history at which, according to PKD, the major wool was pulled over the eyes of civilization.
And then there is Rucker’s recent book, “The Lifebox, The Seashell And The Soul.” He suggests a number of amazing things in this book, which is mainly devoted to exploring the idea that reality might or might not be usefully viewed as a quantum computation… Hard to explain. Read it yourself.
One of his ideas has to do with parallel worlds, parallel realities, an idea best understood in popular fiction and popular physics as the idea that at any point of multiple possibilities, the universe (or maybe everything) splits. All possibilities are realized. Maybe you choose which one you experience, maybe not.
Rucker’s twist on this is that, no, the universe maybe doesn’t split every time you make a decision. Maybe instead there is a whole pile of parallel timelines, each one different, maybe beginning with a simple one (the One), moving into something a bit more complex (yin and yang? the valley of the archetypes? the ten thousand things?) and eventually reaching the level of gnarl. Gnarl is exemplified by most of what we see around us: the behavior of tree branches blowing in the wind, the patterns on a seashell, wood grain, eddies in flowing water, clouds, fingerprints, really everything natural if you look close enough.
Somewhere in that pile of increasingly gnarly worlds lies our own path of existence.
It occurred to me while reading Eliade that the sacred times, the dream times, the before-time times, those might lie in various of Rucker’s parallel time-schemes. Hints and flashes - such as the one that hit Philip Dick in the forehead in a beam of pink light sometime in the early 1970s - might occasionally get through to us, or from us to them, whoever they might be, and thusly might arise many aspects of mythology and/or religion.
If anything, in this case, the uniqueness of Christianity’s historicity might be a part of the problem, if you think there is one… Sort of a time-ism, accompanying the body of Christian belief, a sense that our plane of time is in some way superior to others.
While PKD may or may not have received genuine transmissions, it is clear that he had many other problems as well. The transmissions were likely garbled. But that does not mean they are without use. Terrence McKenna had a lot to say on the subject of PKD in relation to McKenna’s own transmission-receptor experiences. Among many other points of convergence, PKD and McKenna both had significant experiences involving the I Ching. In addition, many other folks have felt an affinity or resonance with PKD’s ideas, experiences and/or visions.
If you fit all this stuff together, though, the best you can really get is the sense that there might be a bigger picture. There is very little to indicate what the picture might be of.