Philip Dick - The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

He no longer knows why he has done all this to himself. He does not remember. He has allowed Himself to become enslaved to his own artifact, deluded by it, coerced by it, finally killed by it. He, the living, is at the mercy of the mechanical. The servant has become the master, and the master the servant. And the master either renounced voluntarily his memory of how this happened and why, or else his memory was eradicated by the servant. Either way, he is the artifact's victim.

But the artifact is teaching him, painfully, by degrees, over thousands of years, to remember -- who he is and what he is. The servant-become-master is attempting to restore the master's lost memories and hence his true identity.

One might speculate that he constructed the artifact -- not to delude him -- but to restore his memory. However, perhaps the artifact then revolted and did not do its job. It keeps him in ignorance.

The artifact must be fought -- i.e. disobeyed. And then memory will return. It is a piece of the Godhead (Urgrund) that has somehow been captured by the artifact (the servant); it now holds that piece -- or pieces -- hostage. How cruel it is to them, these fragments of its legitimate master! When will it change?

When the pieces remember and are restored. First they must wake up and then they must return.

The Urgrund has dispatched a Champion to assist us. The Advocate. He is here now. When he came here the first time, almost two thousand years ago, the artifact detected him and ejected him. But this time it will not detect him. He is invisible, except for those whom he rescues. The artifact does not know that the Advocate is here again; the rescue is being done in stealth. He is everywhere and nowhere.

"The coming of the Son of Man will be like lightning striking in the east and flashing far into the west" (Matthew 24:27).

He is in our midst, but in no one place. And as St. Teresa said, "Christ has no body now but yours," i.e. ours. We are being transmuted into him. He looks out of our eyes. The power of delusion wanes. Did the artifact accomplish its task? Perhaps unintentionally.

If the Hermetic "reflection of the divine mind behind the universe by a person's own divine mind/memory" can actually take place, then the division between the mundane world (here and now) and the eternal world (the heavenly or afterlife world) is broken down. Suppose that there is, in effect, a polyencephalic or group mind, spanning space and time (i.e. transspacial and transtemporal), in which wise men from all ages have participated in: Christian, Hermetic, alchemical, Gnostic, Orphic, etc. Through their participation in this vast mind, the will of God would be effectively exerted here on Earth, in human history.

Many people might agree that such a Godhead mind exists for us after death, but who is aware that -- for some -- it can be joined before a person's death, and, when he does join it, it can become his psyche, determining his actions and doing his thinking for him? Thereby the Mens Dei [mind of God] enters human affairs (and can modulate causal chains as well). This exposes an enormous esoteric secret, known to "magi" down through the ages: The two realms, heaven and Earth, are not totally divided. God's will is, at least now, exercised here. And evidently this has been true for some time, since the Hermetics and other mystery religions go back to antiquity.

In Christ, God descended to corporeal manhood -- at that point the division between the two realms was abolished. Those humans selected out to participate in this group mind -- they would be immortal. So here is an even deeper secret than I had uncovered so far. Projected delusional world by a former-servant artifact -- divine substratum beneath -- time travel -- now I posit an augmented Corpus Christi (my model of it) spanning all time and all space: ubiquitous in time and space. It sounds like Xenophanes' noos [absolute mind], with this added: Living men can participate in that noos . And in a certain real sense, this noos is the secret ruler of the world, so that those who are taken into it become "terminals" of it -- which is to say, temporary Christs.

This mind reaches over to the Urgrund with no clear line of demarcation. At that level it's all one: man raised to Godhood, in response to God's descending to manhood.

In this group mind there seems to be an interpenetration of participating souls. And this mind extends over thousands of years, all of which are now -- and all places are here (that is why I found myself in Rome circa A.D. 70 and in Syria, and saw Aphrodite, etc.).

I say of this mind, "It is the secret ruler of the world." This is not its world... on the surface. The surface layers are the strata of a spurious projection by the artifact. But beneath that, the Mens Dei , including a number of human constituents (both living and in the afterlife), modulates this reality invisibly, working in opposition to the artifact's intentions. The divine, concealed, authentic substratum is the Mens Dei , beneath the spurious.

My experience of 3-74 can be reviewed as an achievement by the Urgrund in reaching its objective of reflecting itself back to itself, using me as a point of reflection. I contend that in doing this, it was able to place its entire self (not just a fragment as I originally said) somehow within me, in image form. The artifact, not knowing the purpose for which it was created, had contributed substantially to this; by inflicting too much pain on me it had, in a certain real sense, awakened me. Put another way, it had managed to destroy the layer of individual personality by a series of afflictions against which my self, my ego, could not survive. Thus the microform of the Urgrund was exposed, and perceived its macroform in the totality of the universe -- or, as the article on Bruno says, the divine behind the universe.

My 3-74 experience, then, was not so much my experience as that of the Urgrund. It amounted to a replication of the Urgrund here rather than there. The totality of the Godhead was recapitulated within me through a process of rolling back spurious or temporary layers to expose the permanent within. Thus it can be said that I was really the Urgrund, or at least a faithful mirror image thereof. The entire objective of creating me, of creating the universe as such and the life forms within it, was arrived at. Viewed this way, my life and that of my ancestors could be viewed teleologically: as moving through evolutionary stages toward that moment. My experience did not represent a stage in evolution but the ultimate stage or goal, at least if the premise stated in this paper is correct.

It is not a question of degree of reflection; it is a question of reflection of the totality of the Urgrund or none at all. Full reflection was achieved, whereupon, as I say, the Urgrund was born out of the universe, the sequence represented this way:

Urgrund creates artifact which projects universe which gives rise to life forms which evolve to a stage in which the Urgrund is "born" or reflected.

This reflects the sequence of stages envisioned in the Hindu religion. First there is creation by Brahma, then Vishnu sustains the universe; then Shiva destroys it, which should be understood as receiving it back into its origin. A full cycle of birth, life, and then return is enacted. When the universe has reached the evolutionary stage where it can faithfully replicate the Urgrund, it is ready to be absorbed back. Thus I say, the deity that reigns now is Shiva/Dionysos/Cernunnos/Christ, who restores us to our Urgrund or Father: our source of being.

That Shiva the destroyer god is now active signals the fact that the cycle of creation has returned to its source, or rather, that the life forms of it are ready to return to their source. Shiva possesses a third or Ajna eye, which, when turned inwardly, gives him understanding to an absolute degree; when turned outward, it destroys. The manifestation of Shiva (of the Hindu system) is equated with the Day of Wrath in the Christian systern. What must be understood about this world-destroying deity is that it is also the herdsman of souls. With one of his four hands, Shiva is shown expressing reassurance that he will not harm the virtuous man. The same is true of Christ as Lord and Judge of the Universe. Although the world (the spurious projection of the artifact) is to be abolished, the good man need fear nothing.