This would be why I felt I was receiving from a hidden (occult) brotherhood, represented by armed knights... the knights of the grail, so to speak. And the content of my experience: I was shown specifically the Christian brotherhood toppling Rome, now. The siege of us prisoners being lifted by the body of armored knights on horseback at the outer walls. The "mystical body of Christ" of which we are parts and he is the head -- this would be a sort of midway concept of the source, standing between pure mystical perception of immanent God (a la Spinoza) and a strictly human wisdom (gnostic, AMORC, Roman Catholic, etc.) brotherhood. The head is divine (theos), the members are of the human congregation. Its presence is actually here (now), in and on our world, in our society, making changes (the rock torn not by human hands and hurled at the statue, as in Daniel). (And I did hear, hypnogogically, "I am part of the King.")
Palmer -- crossed palm trees. Palm trees are a Christian symbol of the Holy Land; what I saw in 2-75, then, is a vision of the Holy Land. I did not go (journey) to it; it came to me. I was already seeing a palm tree (like the Afrika Korps palm tree emblem) in the FISH sign, months before. The palmer sign, perhaps. In hoc signo, etc. [In hoc signo vinces: In this sign we conquer.] Again, we have here symbols specifically of Christianity, rather than of God per se (as distinguished from). Also, a building in the Holy Land, with Romanesque arches. Memory of the Sacred Other, from its "former life"? A building where the White Brotherhood (etc.) met? The significance of my seeing this might be: My search is over. I had reached my destination, the end of my journey. (And, very soon after, the voice of St. Sophia dimmed away entirely from my mind. The one full year, from vernal equinox to vernal equinox, had evidently ended.) It all must be regarded as a searching for and a finding of (vide the quest represented in my various novels).
c. 1976
I Am a Living Animal, Tied to a Dying Soul.
-- PKD
1. The Greeks considered reality veiled (by dokos [Greek: deception], e.g. Parmenides).
2. The Hindus consider reality veiled (by Maya, which we generate ourselves, but which also Kali spins) (cf. Heinrich Zimmer [noted Indologist]).
3. Calvin considered us blinded, that once we could see what is really there, but were punished (this dovetails a little with Empedocles and with Castaneda, with shamanism in general, and hence with the mystery religions, e.g., Dionysos).
4. Augustine considered the City of God mingled with the City of Earth so as to make them indistinguishable to us now; but at the Parousia, they will be separated (to our senses).
5. Zoroaster believed as 4. Good (Ahriman and Ahura-Mazda, the light and dark blended; but at the Final Day, the two portions would be visibly separate).
All are dealing with the problem of phenomenology of accident versus essence: Kant's Ding-an-sich [thing in itself]. "This crumbling pageant."
6. I once saw appearance, then briefly (five days) assimilated the objects of perception (noetically) and then returned to ordinary perception of appearance, the "reflection" of reality (Plato, Paul, etc.). My experience proves that all views that we see only "a reflection from the bottom of a polished metal pan" are correct, FOR WHATEVER REASON, the latter being in doubt only. I did not see; then I saw; then I did not see again (exactly as Paul says). Why the first? Why the second? Why the return of the first? Teilhard's view of an evolutionary step forward? Or anamnesis, restoration of lost faculties (Calvin)? Or coiled, cyclic time? Moebius strip time?
Is change (Dionysos, metamorphosis) real? Heraclitus/Christ Teilhard
Or: Is unchange (Apollo, the healers) real? Parmenides, Jahweh
Is the search itself the goal (as is said)?
My Gollancz speech ["Man, Android, and Machine" (1976), included in this volume] is insane but true. And I knew more then, noetically; what I've read since bears it out. The madman speaks the moral of the piece.
If we deceive ourselves, why? If someone/something else deceives us, then why and also who? Wacht auf! [Wake up!] Brahmin (it, not he). It dreams, and now wakes, or it was awake, and now falls asleep; I think it is waking. The universe-organism of the Greek philosophers: It wakes and sees. Cells, forming a Great Brain. Bees in a hive. Rising now to consciousness. Of what? Itself? There are no answers, only mysteries (not questions but mysteries: secrets. Sacred secrets, not disclosed to us. But not by whom? Well, when I woke, those five days, change was reaclass="underline" a process. Cosmogenesis (Teilhard). Toward. Omega.
Outline in Abstract Form of a New Model
of Reality Updating Historic Models,
in Particular Those of Gnosticism and
Christianity (1977)
It is proper to say: We appear to be memory coils (DNA carriers capable of experience) in a computerlike thinking system that, although we have correctly recorded and stored thousands of years of experiential information (knowledge, gnosis), and each of us possesses a somewhat different deposit from all the other life forms, there is a malfunction -- a failure -- of memory retrieval. There lies the trouble in our particular subcircuit. "Salvation" through gnosis -- more properly anamnesis (the loss of amnesia) -- although it has individual significance for each of us -- a quantum leap in perception, identity, cognition, understanding, world- and self-experience, including immortality -- it has further and more truly ultimate importance for the system (structure) as a whole, inasmuch as these memories (data) are needed or valuable to it, and to its overall functioning.
Therefore it is in the process of self-repair, which includes: rebuilding our subcircuit (world) via linear and orthogonal time changes (sequences of events), as well as continual signaling to us both en masse and individually (to us received subliminally by the right brain hemisphere, which gestalts the constituents of the messages into meaningful entities), to stimulate blocked neural (memory) banks within us to fire and hence retrieve what is there.