Philip Dick - The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

That heart beats on now, more strongly than ever, although it was admittedly badly engulfed; but the cancer that had crawled through it -- that cancer is gone. That black growth that shunned light, shunned truth, and destroyed anyone who told the truth -- it shows what can flourish during the long winter of the human race. But that winter began to end in the vernal equinox of 1974.

Sometimes I think that the Dreamer began to press against the tyranny as he, the Dreamer, woke us; here in the United States he woke us to our condition, our awful peril.

One of the best novels, and most important to an understanding of the nature of our world, is Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven , in which the dream universe is articulated in such a striking and compelling way that I hesitate to add any further explanation to it; it requires none. I do not think that either of us had read about Charles Tart's study of dreams when we wrote our several novels, but I have now, and I have read some of Robert E. Ornstein, he being the "brain revolution" person north of where I live, at Stanford University. From Ornstein's work it would appear that there is a possibility that we have two entirely separate brains, rather than one brain divided into two bilaterally equal hemispheres, that, in fact, whereas we have a body we have two minds (I refer to you the article by Joseph E. Bogen "The Other Side of the Brain: An Appositional Mind," published in Ornstein's collection The Nature of Human Consciousness ). Bogen demonstrates that every now and then a researcher began to scent the possibility that we have two brains, two minds, but that only with modern brain-mapping techniques and related studies has it been possible to demonstrate this. For example, in 1763 Jerome Gaub wrote: "... I hope that you will believe Pythagoras and Plato, the wisest of the ancient philosophers, who, according to Cicero, divided the mind into two parts, one partaking of reason and the other devoid of it." Bogen's article contains concepts so fascinating as to cause me to wonder why we never realized that our "unconscious" is not an unconscious at all but another consciousness, with which we have a tenuous relationship. It is this other mind or consciousness that dreams us at night -- we are its audience as it binds us in its storytelling; we are little children spellbound... which is why Lathe of Heaven may represent one of the basic great books of our civilization, especially since Ursula Le Guin, I'm sure, arrived at her formulation without knowledge of Ornstein's work and Bogen's extraordinary theory. What is involved here is that one brain receives exactly the same input as the other, through the various sense channels, but processes the information differently; each brain works its own unique way (the left is like a digital computer; the right much like an analogue computer, working by comparing patterns). Processing the identical information, each may arrive at a totally different result whereupon, since our personality is constructed in our left brain, if the right brain finds something vital that we to its left remain unaware of, it must communicate during sleep, during the dream; hence the Dreamer who communicates to us so urgently in the night is located neurologically, evidently, in our right brain, which is the not-I. But more than that (for instance, is the right brain as Bergson thought perhaps a transducer or transformer for ultrasensory informational input beyond the purview of the left?) we can't say as yet. I think, though, that the spell of dokos is woven by our right brain's plural; we as a species are prone to reside entirely within one hemisphere only, leaving the other to do what it must to protect the world. Keep in mind that this protectiveness is bilateral, an exchange between the world and each of us: Each of us is a treasure, to be cherished and preserved, but so is the world and the hidden seeds in it, slumbering. The other hidden seeds. Thus, through the veil-spinning of Kali, the right hemisphere of each of us, we are kept ignorant of what we must be ignorant of now. But that time is ending; that winter is melting, along with its terrors, its tyrannies, and snow.

The best description of this dokos -veil formation that I've read yet appears in an article in Science Fiction Studies , March 1975, by Frederick Jameson, in "After Armageddon: Character Systems in Dr. Bloodmoney ," which is an obscure novel of mine. I quote: "Every reader of Dick is familiar with this nightmarish uncertainty, this reality fluctuation, sometimes accounted for by drugs,* and sometimes by schizophrenia, and sometimes by new SF powers, in which the psychic world as it were goes outside, and reappears in the form of simulacra or of some photographically cunning reproduction of the external" (p. 32).

*I hope Jameson means drugs in the writing and schizophrenia in the writing, not in me, but I'll let that pass.

You can see from Jameson's description that we are talking about something very like Maya here, but also something very like a hologram. I have the distinct feeling that Carl Jung was correct about our unconsciousnesses, that they form a single entity, or as he called it, "collective unconscious." In that case, this collective brain entity, consisting of literally billions of "stations," which transmit and receive, would form a vast network of communication and information, much like Teilhard's concept of the noosphere. This is the noosphere, as real as the ionosphere or the biosphere; it is a layer in our earth's atmosphere composed of holographic and informational projections in a unified and continually processed Gestalt, the sources of which are our manifold right brains. This constitutes a vast Mind, immanent within us, of such power and wisdom as to seem, to us, equal to the Creator. This was Bergson's view of God, anyhow.

It is interesting how deeply troubled the brilliant Greek philosophers were by activities of the gods; they could see the activities and (or so they thought) the gods themselves, but as Xenophanes put it: "Even if a man should chance to speak the most complete truth, yet he himself does not know it; all things are wrapped in appearances " [emphasis by Dick].

This notion came to the pre-Socratics by virtue of their seeing the many but knowing a priori that what they saw could not be real, since only the One existed.

"If God is all things, then appearances are certainly deceptive; and, though observation of the kosmos may yield generalizations and speculations about God's plans, true knowledge of them could only be had by a direct contact with God's mind." (I am quoting Edward Hussey in his marvelous book The Pre-Socratics , p. 35.) And he goes on to give two fragments of Heraclitus: "The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself" (Fragment 123). "Latent structure is master of obvious structure" (Fragment 54).

I wish to remind you that the ancient Greeks and Hebrews did not conceive of God or God's Mind as above the universe, but within it: immanent Mind or immanent God, with the visible universe the body of God, so that God was to universe as psyche is to soma. But they also conjectured that perhaps God was not the great psyche but noos , a different sort of mind; in which case the universe was not his body but God Himself. The space-time universe houses but is not a part of God; what is God is the vast grid field or energy field alone.

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.