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This is the second in a three-part series.

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Part 2: Future Gnostic

In the previous post, we looked at the consequences and possible philosophic import of the events of February and March of 1974 (also known as 2-3-74) in the life and work of Philip K. Dick, a period in which a dose of sodium pentathol, a light-emitting fish pendant and decades of fiction writing and quasi-philosophic activity came together in revelation that led to Dick’s 8,000-page “Exegesis.”

So, what is the nature of the true reality that Dick claims to have intuited during psychedelic visions of 2-3-74? Does it unwind into mere structureless ranting and raving or does it suggest some tradition of thought or belief? I would argue the latter. This is where things admittedly get a little weirder in an already weird universe, so hold on tight.

Dick posited that orthogonal time contains, ‘Everything which was, just as grooves on an LP contain that part of the music which has already been played.’

In the very first lines of “Exegesis” Dick writes, “We see the Logos addressing the many living entities.” Logos is an important concept that litters the pages of “Exegesis.” It is a word with a wide variety of meaning in ancient Greek, one of which is indeed “word.” It can also mean speech, reason (in Latin, ratio) or giving an account of something. For Heraclitus, to whom Dick frequently refers, logos is the universal law that governs the cosmos of which most human beings are somnolently ignorant. Dick certainly has this latter meaning in mind, but — most important — logos refers to the opening of John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the word” (logos), where the word becomes flesh in the person of Christ.



But the core of Dick’s vision is not quite Christian in the traditional sense; it is Gnostical: it is the mystical intellection, at its highest moment a fusion with a transmundane or alien God who is identified with logos and who can communicate with human beings in the form of a ray of light or, in Dick’s case, hallucinatory visions.

Leif Parsons

There is a tension throughout “Exegesis” between a monistic view of the cosmos (where there is just one substance in the universe, which can be seen in Dick’s references to Spinoza’s idea as God as nature, Whitehead’s idea of reality as process and Hegel’s dialectic where “the true is the whole”) and a dualistic or Gnostical view of the cosmos, with two cosmic forces in conflict, one malevolent and the other benevolent. The way I read Dick, the latter view wins out. This means that the visible, phenomenal world is fallen and indeed a kind of prison cell, cage or cave.

Christianity, lest it be forgotten, is a metaphysical monism where it is the obligation of every Christian to love every aspect of creation – even the foulest and smelliest – because it is the work of God. Evil is nothing substantial because if it were it would have to be caused by God, who is by definition good. Against this, Gnosticism declares a radical dualism between the false God who created this world – who is usually called the “demiurge” – and the true God who is unknown and alien to this world. But for the Gnostic, evil is substantial and its evidence is the world. There is a story of a radical Gnostic who used to wash himself in his own saliva in order to have as little contact as possible with creation. Gnosticism is the worship of an alien God by those alienated from the world.

The novelty of Dick’s Gnosticism is that the divine is alleged to communicate with us through information. This is a persistent theme in Dick, and he refers to the universe as information and even Christ as information. Such information has a kind of electrostatic life connected to the theory of what he calls orthogonal time. The latter is rich and strange idea of time that is completely at odds with the standard, linear conception, which goes back to Aristotle, as a sequence of now-points extending from the future through the present and into the past. Dick explains orthogonal time as a circle that contains everything rather than a line both of whose ends disappear in infinity. In an arresting image, Dick claims that orthogonal time contains, “Everything which was, just as grooves on an LP contain that part of the music which has already been played; they don’t disappear after the stylus tracks them.”

It is like that seemingly endless final chord in the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” that gathers more and more momentum and musical complexity as it decays. In other words, orthogonal time permits total recall.

Courtesy of Laura Leslie, Christopher Dick and Isa Hackett

In his wilder moments — and, to be honest, they occur pretty often — Dick declares that orthogonal time will make it possible for the golden age to return, namely the time before the Fall and prior to original sin. He also claims that in orthogonal time the future falls back into and fulfills itself in the present. This is doubtless why Dick believed that his fiction was becoming truth, that the future was unfolding in his books. For example, If you think for a second about how the technologies of security in the contemporary world already seem to resemble the 2055 of “Minority Report” more and more each day, maybe Dick has a point. Maybe he was writing the future.

Toward the end of “Exegesis,” Dick begins to borrow and quote liberally from “The Gnostic Religion” by Hans Jonas, a wonderful book that first appeared in English in 1958. It is not difficult to see why Jonas’s book spoke to Dick somewhat like the aforementioned clay pot. Jonas shows the force and persistence — both historical and conceptual — of the idea of enlightenment by the ray of divine light, the mystical gnosis theou (knowledge of God, a Gnostic doctrine), the direct beholding of the divine reality. The core of Gnosticism is this direct contact with the divine, which itself divinizes the soul and allows it to see the vile world for what it is: nothing. At the core of Gnosticism, for Jonas, is an experience of nihilism, namely that the phenomenal world is nothing and the true world is nothing to be seen phenomenally but requires the divine illumination that is reserved for the few, for the secretive elect.

Dick’s “Exegesis” is a peculiarly powerful and poignant restatement of a Gnostical worldview. Right or wrong — and, to be clear, I am not a Gnostic — Gnosticism still represents, in my view, a powerful temptation that needs to be understood before being criticized. Dick writes, and one can find passages like this all over “Exegesis”:

“So there is a secret within a secret. The Empire is a secret (its existence and its power; that it rules) and secondly the secret illegal Christians pitted against it. So the discovery of the secret illegal Christians instantly causes one to grasp that, if they exist illegally, something evil that is stronger is in power, right here!”

This is a succinct and revealing statement of the politics of Dick’s Gnosticism. The logic here is close to forms of mystical heresy from the various gnostic sects of the early Christian period, like the Valentinians and the Manicheans, through to the Cathars and the much-feared “Heresy of the Free Spirit” that some historians have claimed was like an invisible empire across Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries.

Related More From The Stone Read previous contributions to this series.

The core of the heresy consists in the denial of original sin: sin does not lie within us but within the world, which is not the creation of the true God but of the malevolent demiurge, whom St. Paul calls in one quasi-gnostical moment “the God of this world.” Therefore, we must see through the evil illusion of this world to the true world of the alien God. The phenomenal world is the creation of a bad God and governed over by those agents of the demiurge that the gnostics called the “archons,” the rulers or governors, those whom Dick ominously calls “Empire.” Today we might call them major corporations.

When we learn to identify the true worldly source of sin, the gnostics instruct, then we can begin the process of unifying with the divine by divorcing ourselves from the phenomenal world. At the end of this process, we become divine ourselves and can throw off the rule of the evil empire that governs the world. This link between mystical experience and political insurgency is constantly suggested throughout “Exegesis.” This is the idea that we are slaves to Empire, and the world is a prison from which we need to free ourselves, what the gnostics called “the puny cell of the creator God.” It is what Dick calls the BIP, the Black Iron Prison, which is opposed to the spiritual redemption of the PTG, the Palm Tree Garden.

Note the emphasis on secrecy. The first secret is that the world is governed by malevolent imperial or governmental elites that form together a kind of a covert coven. The world itself is a college of corporations linked together by money and serving only the interests of their business leaders and shareholders. The second secret — “a secret within a secret” — belongs to those few who have swallowed the red pill, torn through the veil of Maya. In other words, they’ve seen the “matrix” — a pop culture allusion that may lead us to some surprising, even alarming, contemporary implications of the gnostical worldview, if you will follow us along to the next part.

Next, Part 3: “Adventures in the Dream Factory.”



Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. He is the author of many books, most recently, “Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology,” and is the moderator of this series.