the timboucher experience

I just finished my latest Philip K. Dick novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. It was good, but also very different from his other books. It’s the last book he wrote, as far as I understand, although he may have been working on something when he died also. Don’t quote me on that. Anyway, this book is pretty much not sci-fi at all. There are a couple elements, I guess. But I would much more say metaphysics than sci-fi. An theology. Lots of that. It was kind of slow getting into this book for me. Usually I just jump into his books recklessly. But then somewhere toward the middle, I got totally caught up with it and had to read the rest straight through in one sitting. It’s very compelling, I think - the way he writes that is. You just get sort of caught up in the flow. Or I do. This books probably good for hardcore PKD fans, but newbies wouldn’t be into it is my guess, since there’s no robots and stuff.

The book is loosely based on Episcopalian Bishop of California, James A. Pike, who was pretty prominent in the 60’s, working for a lot of civil rights and social justice causes. He was also notably tried for heresy by conservative bishops in the Episcopal Church. Here is a quote from a book he authored called “If this be heresy”:

[The word "heresy"] comes from a greek noun form (hairesis) of a verb in the middle voice (haireisthai) meaning “to take for oneself” — to choose. This concept corresponds aptly to the conviction that there can be no faith without personal decision…

There are… two principle ways people arrive at convictions. If a person’s beliefs, however many or few, are to be really his, he should choose maturely which of the two ways appears the more sound and then apply its methodology to select or form such beliefs. This is his heresy: his choosing for himself. The results of such choosing may also be heresy in the other, more commonplace, sense of the word… Therefore, if both the positive and negative meanings of hairesis are taken into account, every truely believing individual is heretical in the positive sense, whether or not what he has chosen to believe is heretical in the negative sense.

Besides that, his son also committed suicide, and he went on a very public search about contacting his dead son. I think he may have even appeared with mediums on television, and he wrote a book about the experiences called, The other side : an account of my experiences with psychic phenomena, which I’m kind of curious to read. More than that though, there’s a biography about him that I’d like to pick up some time. It’s called A Passionate Pilgrim. There is a good biographical overview about him on the website of the Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco. It concludes with this:

Few other American religious figures have matched Bishop Pike’s lasting influence on contemporary theology and society. For him, the search was more important than the discovery–the question more important than the answer. He envisioned a church free of any divisions, open to deep conversation and theological exploration, and fearless in the pursuit of individual and social justice. Spiritual iconoclast and theological pioneer, he helped to prepare the way for the church in the new millennium.

Evidently, he and PKD were friends, or at least in correspondence with one another as Dick became more and more interested in theology toward the end of his life. Bishop Pike died in the Dead Sea Desert while on a trip researching the origins of Christianity. Time Magazine’s archive has an article about him from 1967, but you have to pay to read anything beyond the first draft (fuckers!).

Some of the stuff that PKD gets into in this book, through the character of Timothy Archer/James Pike:

1. Zadokite Documents: I’m having trouble tracking info on these down online, but they were supposed to be documents found after Nag Hammadi (?) which were possibly from 200-100BC and contained (according to this novel) the essential teachings of Christ centuries before his birth, which would indicate that his teachings were traditional wisdom of a sect, rather than an original message.
2. The Bishop in the book also interprets passages in these documents as referencing a psychedelic mushroom (called anokhi) which this sect may have taken, and this was the origin of the Christian sacrament of the eucharist. This was supposed to give them the Parousia, or divine presence of Christ. This may have been something the real Bishop Pike was into also, because there is a passage I found online from “If this be heresy” where he is talking about much the same thing. Terence McKenna also picks up this idea and runs with it in several books, notably Food of the Gods.
3. He also talks a bit about something called “The Book of the Spinners” which I don’t see referenced anywhere online. Basically, according the description of this sect described in the book, they believed in sort of a Book of Life, or a chronicle of each person’s fate, and the power of Christ was that he could read this book, and show the person how to escape that fate. This is somewhat similar to how PKD talks in the novel previous to this, Divine Invasion about how God the Father constructs the universe, which operates totally mechanically and deterministically. But that Jesus is basically God’s later attempt to “feed mercy into the circuit” so that people are able to escape the harsh mechnical law of fate. It’s almost like God changes his mind at some point and realizes that he’s been too harsh with everybody, and sends Jesus to give people an out.
4. Also, I think that the character of Edgar Barefoot is based on Alan Watts, who also taught from his houseboat on Hinduism and Buddhism and eastern philosophy, and his lectures were broadcast over the radio each week. You can actually download them on KaZaa. They’re really good. I recommend it. Just look up “Alan Watts.” Should come right up.

Anyway, that’s the cooler stuff that he talks about. Hopefully this will give people some more directions to research after reading this book.

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