Wednesday, 12 March 2008
Philip K Dick's precognition in Dean Radin's 'Entangled Minds'
A very curious case of coincidence/synchrondipity has just taken place.
I have recently been in contact with American science writer and researcher Dean Radin. I placeca comment on his blogger site (http://deanradin.blogspot.com/) and he responded with interest in both my theories and my website. I am hopeful that at some stage Dean will also take a look at this excellent (thanks to you guys) blog. As I have recently joined the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in which Dean is a senior scientist I am keen to have his involvement.
If you look on Amazon USA you will find that a high percentage of people who buy ITLAD also buy Dean's book Entangled Minds. I now have my own copy and I settled down to read it this morning. I am very much enjoying it and I can highly recommend it to anybody wishing to look into greater detail the implications of quantum physics. However I was stunned to discover that on page 25 Dean discusses our very own Philip K Dick. As I have a whole chapter of my book dedicated to PKD I was keen to read Dean's 'take' on this great man. Dean takes a quote from Dick's autobiographical work "How To Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later". I have not read this because if I had the following quote by Dick would have had pride of place in "The Daemon":
'In 1970 I wrote a novel called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. One of the characters is a nineteen-year-old girl named Kathy. Her husband's name is Jack. Kathy appears to work for the criminal underground, but later, as we read deeper into the novel, we discover that actually she is working for the police. She has a relationship going on with a police inspector. The character is pure fiction. Or at least I thought it was.
Anyhow, on Christmas Day of 1970, I met a girl named Kathy - this was after I had finished the novel, you understand. She was nineteen years old. Her boyfriend was named Jack. I soon learned that Kathy was a drug dealer. I spent months trying to make her give dealing drugs; I kept warning her again and again that she would get caught. Then, one evening as we were entering a restaurant together, Kathy stopped short and said "I can't go in." Seated in the restaurant was a police inspector whom I knew. "I have to tell you the truth," Kathy said. "I have a relationship with him."
Certainly, these are odd coincidences. Perhaps I have precognition.'
Now what is really interesting about this is that in my chapter on PKD in The Daemon I cite many examples of his precognitive abilities (including having a vision about his own death which, as far as I am aware has not been published anywhere else) but none about him using events yet to happen as plot devices. However the book has many examples of other writers who have done this. I argue that there is strong evidence to presume that PKD had TLE and that he had a particularly active Daemon - a Daemon that was to become even more active in March 1974 (three years or so later than these events) when PKD experienced what he called his 'theophany'. Now if CTF is correct then PKD was subliminally aware that the future was, in fact, the past, a past that he had experienced in his previous loop round the Bohmian IMAX. As such he subconsciously (or via direct Daemonic inspiration) wove the 'real' events that he was about to experience into a story.
With TLE being a major topic after Daza Vu's contribution this 'discovery' is particularly significant.
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11 comments:
All of this is fascinating and compelling: The case for your theory stands solid and unshakeable. As I said, in the future - when I have a chance to organize my papers - I would like to do a post On Tennessee Williams (who in my opinion was an eidolon who spent his life being overtaken and creatively guided by his stronger daemon) which would focus on the prescient threads which weave through his short stories and plays, foretelling events in his own life as well as those that would arise from the social waters of America throughout the 1940s and up to the '70s. Also - and I will have to look this up because I have forgotten the exact name of the author - several years ago I read a book by a woman who was an author of mystery novels. This particular book was nonfiction, written about the death of her daughter, and her ensuing work with a psychic. What was remarkable and relates to what you say of P.K. Dick was this: The summer before her daughter was killed, this woman was working on a mystery fiction about a college girl who inadvertently became involved with a criminal and is murdered because she knows too much information. A detective in the novel is named "Green" (or something like it, I will have to check the book) . That fall in real life her own daughter went to college, became inadvertently involved with a criminal, was murdered because of information she had overheard by accident, and the dective on the case was named Det. Green. When she was writing the "fiction" she must have been "remembering" what had happened to her daughter.
I too have posted on Dean's Entangled Minds blog and indeed was quick to point out to Tony some of Dean's research work into precognition (some of which featured on a recent BBC2 "Horizon" TV programme).
Much of the research of Dean Radin towards precognition can certainly be viewed as strong evidential experiments towards Tony's CTF theory and the whole existence of the Daemon.
I'm so glad you posted this story about Dick's experience after writing "Flow My Tears." It comes up in the film "Waking Life," and it's been bugging me for years. I'd been wondering where I could find Dick's version of what happened and read it for myself -- I even wondered whether it was actually true or was just made up for the film. (In the film, Richard Linklater's animated character just says that it comes from "an essay by Philip K. Dick.")
Linklater's character also recounts other details of Dick's story -- I'm not sure whether those details are included in "Entangled Minds" as well, but I'm looking forward to reading it -- as follows:
Apparently, some time after meeting Kathy and learning about her relationship with the policeman, Dick encountered a man who said he'd run out of gas. Dick gave the man some money to buy gas, even though that was something he said he normally wouldn't have done. He also drove the man to a gas station, and when they got there, Dick realized that THAT was also in "Flow My Tears" -- the exact man, the exact gas station, etc.
According to "Waking Life," Dick spoke to a priest about all this and was told he was recounting the Book of Acts, which was written in the year 50 A.D. and which Dick had never read.
Linklater goes on to say that Dick's theory was that we are all actually living in the year 50 A.D., and he had written "Flow My Tears" because he had punctured through the illusory veil of time, and what he had seen there was what was going on in the Book of Acts. Dick was open to the idea of Gnosticism and so went along with the idea that the world was created by a demiurge, and that this demiurge is perhaps trying to make us forget that we are really living in the year 50 A.D., with time and history as we experience them being just a daydream, a distraction.
Linklater then describes one of his own dreams that suggested that it's not so much that we're in 50 A.D., because there is no 50 A.D., or any other year -- there's just this one instant in which we have the opportunity to "wake up," in which we're asked whether we want to be at one with eternity, the universe, etc. Linklater says, "Time is just this constant saying 'No' to that invitation . . . There's just this one instant and that's what we're always in . . . and this is the narrative of everyone's life . . . of moving from the 'no' to the 'yes.'"
Again, I was never sure how much of this was "true," but given that I now realize that much of it comes from an actual autobiographical account written by Philip K. Dick (as quoted in "Entangled Minds"), I'm thinking, well, maybe ALL of it's true! Wow, this is all so ITLADian.
I'm going to have to read Radin's book. I've seen him on TV and in the film "What the Bleep: Down the Rabbit Hole," and I'm a big fan.
Dreamer,
You will find all of this in Philip K Dick's autographical 'fictional'novel VALIS. This describes the events that took place in early March 1974 when PKD experienced what he termed his 'theophany'. Using the American date notation he always refered to this as 2-3-74. If you read VALIS you will find the most effective proof of ITLAD possible; everything I discuss in ITLAD is described by PKD.
Dick did write a lot of this down in his journal. Called EXEGESIS. This is a massive journal that PKD kept detailing the weird events that enfolded around him (in my opinion, brought about by his TLE). To date only short sections of this massive work of hypergraphia (yet another symptom of TLE) have been published.
If you wish to know more about this part of PKD's life a whole chapter of my book (the last one in fact) is an extended essay on how the life of PKD is an absolute classic real-life example of my Daemon-Eidolon Dyad and the theory of CTF.
If you cannot wait until September I would check out Lawrence Sutin's "Divine Invasions - A Life of Philip K Dick" and "I Am Alive And You Are Dead: A Journey Inside the Mind of Philip K Dick" by Emmanuel Carrere. Both are excellent books. Again read these (and VALIS) with your knowledge of ITLAD and it will make your hair stand on end!
The essay by Philip K Dick that Linklater refers to in Waking Life can be read by following this link:
http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm
Is that the essay that he is describing to the sleeping boy at the very end while he's playing on the pinball machine? I love that scene so much it really captures the eiree state we get in our dreams.
Yeah, HurlyBurly, it is indeed the pinball machine scene. I watched it again today to refresh my memory on the Philip K. Dick/Flow My Tears element (the DVD is part of my "must own" collection). I just love it how the boy says something like, "I want to wake up for real" at the end of that scene -- very similar to what Tom Cruise's character says at the end of "Vanilla Sky," i.e., "I don't want to dream any longer" (see Tony's post of 7 March).
And now I'm going to have to go and re-read both VALIS and Flow My Tears, as well as all the autobiographical stuff. This can get very time-consuming! (But then, what could be more important than trying to figure out the secrets of the Universe?) :)
Forgot to say, Thanks so much for that link to "How to Build a Universe," Tony. I've been wanting to find that essay for years, without knowing exactly what reference I was looking for -- and now here it is at last!
Hi Tony,
Did you know your book has been paired with Radin's book on Amazon UK as perfect partners!
Johar,
No I didn't. Thanks for letting me know.
Weird. I only finished reading it last night. Excellent book by the way.
Just ordered it!
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