synchronicity and philip k. dick
Today I bought the last five books of philip k. dick's self-described meta-novel. (See http://www.philipkdick.com/new_ex-thereisanother.html and http://www.philipkdickfans.com/artwork/valis-rising.htm ...I know this isn't a lot to go by, I'd ideally have a copy of "in search of valis: excerpts from the exegesis" but it's out of print, hard to find, and if on the web horrendously expensive. just like paul laffoley's books.)

It's funny cause I got most of them on a random trade-in: I had an old copy of "the dune dictionary" and the guy at pulpfiction books on main said it was worth $75. surprised the hell out of me.. but wait a sec, maybe it's worth even more and I was duped like in 9th gate. regardless, it served its purpose.

Ok, so, I haven't been posting stuff on this but I'll give you a primer: For the last year or so I've become increasingly interested in the books and ideas of phil dick. I guess the seed was planted by the movie waking life, but orthogonal influences include ra wilson, mckenna, and other of his fans that I've been simultaneously reading.

So the short of it is this: I'm experiencing a sequence, or more precisely ensemble, of synchronicities tightly coupled with the phil dick books I've been reading, as well as all the other esoteric/cybershamanic shit I've gotten my hands on. It really comes back to an experience I had in september of 2002, which I'm writing an 'exegesis' on and have been referring to as my '9-6-02' experience. I only afterwards learned that phil dick had had a 'experience' that he wrote an 8000 page 'exegesis' on and that he referred to as his '2-3-74' experience. I didn't use the term exegesis at the time, and I called it my AE or 96 or september 6 experience, but the similarities are uncanny. and this is the tip of the iceberg. the last couple years have been getting plain weird, and since i learned about and have been seeking after and also then have been reading the books in the metanovel, the word-for-word wacked out synchro has reached unprecedented heights.

To give an example (there are MANY, and I am currently scrambling to document as many as I can): I had just bought 'eye in the sky' and 'ubik', and i'm driving down granville st. when...



as robert pollard (singer of guided by voices) says "psychedelic eye" in a song on 'under the bushes under the stars', I
simultaneously glance down and read on the back of 'eye in the sky' the subtitle: 'the psychedelic eye of god'. It happened literally simultaneously, that is, pollard's words were said simultaneously with the words in my head. Shocked at the synchronicity, I glance up and out my window to the right. I see a taxi whose number was, circled on the back bumper, 36. As I read 36, I see just above the taxi the street sign "W. 36th Ave". Another simultaneity. And the thing is, 36 is the hexagram that the i ching gave clayton and I to the question, 'what is our purpose or role/what are we?" (referring to the metaphysical/gnostic/synchro philosophical endeavor we feel we are part of or are creating, since grade 6, when we began perceiving 23 and QAC). And it doesn't stop there. 36, we LATER found out, is the hexagram phil dick received as an answer to the question "is the parousia here?", ie, the second coming of christ. (see http://www.philipkdickfans.com/weirdo/weirdo8.htm) So, this surprises me further, and I next look in front of me at the licence plate of the next car. It's a personalized plate, and it reads "YIP 3". I think in my head "What's YIP 3?" and the next thing I know I'm reading the sign of a church on my left, "Trinity Baptist Church". I think, 3, trinity, weird, and then I realize: Y=Yahweh, god the father in hebrew, I=Iesu, god the son in latin, P=Pneuma, god the holy spirit in greek. They're even in the languages of their successive cultural influencees. Insert WTF here.

Ok, so that was a really weird one, admittedly, more elaborate than most of them, ands also of a slightly different nature. Most of them involve this weird kind of backward book synchro, which I've begun to call Epiphesy. It's where I read a passage of a book only to realize that it is either almost exactly a thought I had just had moments before picking up the book, or includes the name of someone or thing I had just seen, or some similar coincidence. Here's a couple examples of this kind:

-I was using the CS dept's new webmail and noticed that it was powered by software called 'SilkyMail'. Weird name I thought.. that's clay's cat. Then I hop on the bus, open up 'eye in the sky', and a couple pages into it, an as yet unidentified character introduces herself. Up until then she had been called only the blonde barfly, and was jokingly introduced as 'grace' (in reference to the grace of god), and even was about to say her name at one point but got cut off in conversation (a bit earlier in the book). She introduced herself as none other than: 'Silky'.

-me and sau were waiting in line for concert tickets and were having a playful conversation about if we would always be able to tell it was the other person, even in a bizarre sci-fi scenario, involving for example, shapeshifters or clones or what have you. We decided we should have a secret codeword that only we knew so we'd know for sure. Right after, I pick up 'Ubik' and begin reading. A page or so into the book and I come across a scene where joe chip is paranoidly questioning vogelsang to determine if it really is him. He asks for specific details of the friend in question (who had allegedly sent vogelsang to pick up chip) and goes on to ask him 'if he had mentioned a secret codeword that he should give [chip] to know that this was really from his friend'.



There's also been an event that is somewhat different from these two kinds, and has been the one that gave me an insight into the mechanism of Epiphesy, based on quantum mechanical ideas (see separate essay to come). it went like this:
I was reading 'a maze of death' and there's a part where the people in the book come upon an alien creature called a tench that can answer hand-written questions submitted to it in the form of hand-written answers that materialize out of a blob of its body, next to the question. Anyway, in the foreword, dick mentions that 'answers to questions put to the tench were derived from the i ching, chinese book of changes'. When I got to that part of the book, and was reading the tench's answers, I didn't seem to recognize the passages.. maybe they weren't from the wilhelm translation that I was familiar with. But anyway, I began browsing an online copy of the wilhelm one, looking for similar text, and found nothing. A funny idea then occured to me: ask the i ching itself which hexagram or grams dick used for this book. I did, and flipping coins, received this answer: Hexagram 56 - the Wanderer. The text under this one still however didn't match that in the book, so I gave up for the time being. I then went and did some homework, and it wasn't until a few hours later when I got in my car and as it was warming up began to read from 'maze of death'. literally two pages in morley notices that while they were busy consulting the tench, the body of their dead companion that they had left on their raft on the shore of the river suddenly went up in flames. it then drifted off the shore and went downstream burning. A sudden realization hits morley: this is a viking funeral ritual that is being reenacted. and the tench is the norse Erda, goddess of the earth who answers the questions of Wotan. And Wotan tried to build Valhalla, and this is what the mysterious 'building' is, that morley and his companions have been seeing. And that Wotan walks among the humans, and can only be distinguished by his having only one eye, just like their mysterious new companion ned turns out to have (one being glass). And that [the punchline] Wotan is known as the Wanderer. At which point my jaw drops.



Anyway I'm planning on writing a bunch more on all this stuff, but it feels good to start getting some of it down in more than scraps of notes.

In the mean time, this might be of a more general interest:

terence mckenna on dick:
http://www.sirbacon.org/dick.htm

erik davis (author of techgnosis) on dick:
http://www.techgnosis.com/pkdnet.html

dick on schizophrenia, synchronicity and the i ching:
"What distinguishes schizophrenic existence from that which the rest of us like to imagine we enjoy is the element of time. The
schizophrenic is having it all now, whether he wants it or not; the whole can of film has descended on him, whereas we watch it progress frame by frame. So for him, causality does not exist. Instead, the acausal connective principle that Wolfgang Pauli called synchronicity is operating in all situations--not merely as only one factor at work, as with us. Like a person under LSD, the schizophrenic is engulfed in an endless now. It's not too much fun.
At this point the I Ching (The Book of Changes) enters, since it works on the basis of synchronicity--and is a device by which
synchronicity can be handled. maybe you prefer the word "coincidence" to Pauli's word. Anyhow, both terms refer to acausal
connectives, or rather events linked in that manner, events occurring outside of time. Not a chain passing from yesterday to today to tomorrow but all taking place now. All chiming away now, like Leibnitz's preset clocks. And yet none having any causal connection with any of the others..."
http://www.geocities.com/pkdlw/schizo.html

and see rebuttal here:
"This essay is certainly interesting, but I don't think that the I Ching is really only for schizophrenics..."
http://synchronicity.group.stumbleupon.com/forum/1171/

robert anton wilson on scott apel on dick:
"If I may offer my own exegesis: Phil's visions are telling us that people who claim to be Christians (and especially the ones who claim to be anti-Communist) are not true Christians at all; the true Christians, or gnostics, have been driven underground and hide below the surface of our civilization, which is a Black Iron Prison to those who have awakened enough to see a bit of what is really going on..."
http://www.impermanentpress.com/pages2/pkd3.html