![[tmbchr]™](/journal/popocculture-blog-logo.jpg){kind=logo}
L. Ron Hubbard vs. Philip K. Dick
Who do you think would win in a fight: L. Ron Hubbard or Philip K. Dick? The reason I ask is because there are a lot of similarities between the two men - at least on the surface. Both men were first and foremost pulp science-fiction writers. Both men were very much driven by religious and spiritual matters, and both seemed to have done a massive amount of research into how the mind and religion really work.
Beyond just that, it would appear that in some sense both men at some point began actually living what could only be described as real-life sci-fi. Philip K. Dick experienced something mystical 1974, which he explained in many ways, including a gnostic cosmology and an alien satellite beaming him information. I’ve not found a solid report of Hubbard having a similarly pivotal mystical communication. But I’ve seen evidence to suggest that he was involved in occult works with Jack Parsons (inspired by Aleister Crowley, although Scientology claims he was sent by the government to break up a black magic ring). I’ve been studying the teachings and techniques of Hubbard, and the further into it I get, the less I think he was just a clever con-man. He seems to have really done his homework as far as systematically putting together a mish-mash of metaphysical teachings and techniques which really do have some effect on people.
Reserving judgement about the moral character of either man or the validity of his spiritual experience, what differences do we find between the two of them?
In my experience, Dick’s work draws upon a relentless spirit of questioning. His characters enter a weird experience, and dismantle it down to another level, only to have it all switched around on them. The novels usually end in a state of total unravelling of reality. No conclusion is reached, and in a sense, you’re able to celebrate the freedom of that state. Even after his mystical experience, Dick never seemed to believe that he had finally found all the answers. If anything, it seems to have opened up more questions and more uncertainty.
Philip K. Dick also never tried to establish a Church of VALIS. He never created a system of initiation and ritual mind modification to make people into certified “Secret Grey Robed Christians”. Which is for the best in my opinion. The other thing I like about Dick’s work was that he both believed it and didn’t believe it. He inundated himself with interpretations, and presented his work in the format of fiction, and you can take it or leave it as you want. Hubbard, on the other hand, crafted a veritable empire, both financially and hierarchically. He hid his experience and teachings behind walls of money and privilege, and instituted a policy to legally neutralize anybody who threatened any of it.
It’s hard for me to know what made each man choose the path he did. It’s also hard for me to know which one would win in a fight. I would say Dick because he looks tougher with that beard. But I would say Hubbard because he would fight dirty. In any event, I definitely know whose side I’d jump in on in a fight. Is there even any question?
- Prev: Changing Images of Man
- Next: Zombie Dogs
June 27th, 2005 at 7:58 pm
I think L Ron would go down like a bitch. Too many prescription painkillers. Never had any hard living experience.
Phil was toughened up on eating horsemeat and got those amphetamine relfexes.
June 27th, 2005 at 7:58 pm
Why have them fight at all?
Let them serve as their own examples.
June 27th, 2005 at 11:34 pm
uh, i think they already HAD the fight
and from where i sit, it dont look like PK needs any help . . .
as for McKenna, his exponential-novelty teleo-theory looks a lot less like “theory” with each passing day
this is excerpted from an essay on the connections between Dick, McKenna, “VALIS” and autistics:
“Homeoplasmates” was the word Dick used to describe the liberative and semi-divine “agents” of VALIS. He suggested that when Rome razed Jerusalem’s Second Temple in 70 B.C.E., time itself ceased.
The “homeoplasmates” escaping execution dove underground, resurfacing in 1945
Through Qumran and other methods, Dick claimed that the homeoplasmates kickstarted time again, as living water fell from the scroll-jars of Nag Hammadi.
P.K. Dick’s “God” — like our throwaway psychos and autistic “retards” — hides amongst the detritus and banalities of life, and, as Dick writes, mimics “sticks and trees and beer cans in gutters,” presuming “to be trash discarded, debris no longer needed.” Not surprisingly, the wisest alchemists also called the Philosopher’s Stone “the commonest of things, available in every street and marketplace.”
Not coincidentally, the late Terence McKenna – a Walking Novelty who was actually *early* — was the West’s chief explicator of synchronic teleology, the notion that not all events are “determined” by replicable cause and effect, as in the scientific method, but rather are pulled, or attracted, by a numinous Cause located in the future, magnetizing the past to its ultimate Source.
In the afterword to Philip Dick’s neo-gnostic compilation, In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis, McKenna relates how one fateful day in 1971, the yammering wound of the Logos passed from himself to Dick — even as McKenna’s natal brother, Dennis, was facing down the void in Amazonia:
“Unknown to me, a struggling, overweight SF writer, an idol of mine since my teens, discovered the next day that his house had been broken into, his privacy violated by the Other . . . the torch had been passed, in a weird way the most intense phase of my episode of illumination/delusion ended right where Phil’s began.
“This raises some questions:
“Can we refer to a delusional system as a folie a’ deux, if the deux participants have never met and are practically speaking, unaware of each others’ existence?
“Does the delusion of one visionary ecstatic validate the delusion of another? How many deluded, or illuminated ecstatics does it take to make a reality? PKD proved that it only takes one. But two is better.”
Indeed, two *is* better — it spreads out the paranoia!
And the blame!
And a bunch is better than two!
McKenna raves on:
“Phil wasn’t nuts. Phil was a vortex victim. Schizophrenia is not a psychological disorder peculiar to human beings. Schizophrenia is not a disease at all but rather a localized traveling discontinuity of the space-time matrix itself. . . [T]here is an idea that wants to be born, it has wanted to be born for a very long time. And sometimes that longing to be born settles on a person. For no damn good reason. Then you’re “it,” you become the cheese, and the cheese stands alone. You are illuminated and maddened and lifted up by something great beyond all telling. It wants to be told. It’s just that this idea is so damn big that it can’t be told, or rather the whole of history is the telling of this idea, the stuttering rambling effort of the sons and daughters of poor old Noah to tell this blinding, reality-shattering, bowel-loosening truth. And Phil had a piece of the action, a major piece of the action.”
As McKenna put it: “Being is a solid state matrix and psychosis is the redemptive process ne plus ultra.”
or
“Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will reign over all.”
(2, Gospel of Thomas, Scholars’ Translation)
June 28th, 2005 at 3:28 am
are you related to Jello Biafra?
Dick wins.
June 28th, 2005 at 3:44 am
That’s a weird question.
June 28th, 2005 at 12:11 pm
If Ron’s concepts were so great his followers wouldn’t have to mail rattlesnakes to people who try to leave his system
Tom Cruise did a good job in Minority Report though
June 28th, 2005 at 3:12 pm
ron`s concepts served his life`s purpose……..the rattlesnakes were an artifact of the corporitisation of any emerging new religion. the catholics used to burn people to death for the same reason.
tom did do a good job in minority report. interesting convergence.