The Informational Sacrament


In his Tractates Cryptica Scriptura, Philip K. Dick equated the Holy Spirit with information:

I term the Immortal One a plasmate, because it is a form of energy; it is living information. It replicates itself—not through information or in information—but as information.

He talks also about the “birth from above” in which the plasmate crossbonds with and annexes the human. In his own life, he seems to have experienced this spontaneously in 1974, and spent the rest of his life trying to explain it. Modern gnostics and other seekers inspired by him probably spend a lot of time wondering just how in the hell he got where he did. How did he manage to call down a spontaneous baptism by the Logos, the living information? And how can any of us do the same (assuming of course, this is a good thing)?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially in relation to all the new people who have started all these wonderful new blogs lately, and about my own work in general. I feel like, in some way, doing what we’re doing is a sort of sacrament, an informational sacrament. Maybe one path to the Word is through words. Maybe in order to be touched by the Living Information, we must make information live. We must pump life into it to get life out of it. How long any of us chooses to continue this path is a personal matter. For some it may be transitional, a means of rearranging the signs and symbols of your life into a new and better framework and then moving on. For others the constant rearrangement becomes the path. Dick wrote:

We hypostatize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outward once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing.

Maybe this is a little bit like the Catholic sacrament of Confirmation. Where you choose a new name, the name of a saint, the example of whose life is supposed to guide you to god. This re-arrangement of information, the renaming, is what grants you full membership status in the church. I would hesitate to say that what any of us are doing is a church, but I think the parallels are elegant in a certain way. The question for me now seems to be how hard do you have to work to turn words in Word? In my experience it seems to happen little by little. Tiny breakthroughs. Pieces fall away, others slide into place. You can’t be scared to smash the whole thing down and start over either. Because you’ll hit walls constantly. Put up by yourself or others. Intentionally or not. Use questions to explode them or float you over to the other side safely. The informational sacrament.


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This entry was written by enjoying autumn, posted on July 8, 2005 at 12:56 am.

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3 Comments

  1. Fell
    Posted July 8, 2005 at 2:53 am | Permalink

    I really wish I remember who posted this. It’s a quote I took down from about 12–16 months ago from OccultForums.com, but I’ve unfortunately lost the original poster’s name. All respect to him, wherever he may be.

    I find this to be fairly pertinent to the idea of information and this post:

    Some of this may seem familiar, some of it may not… but all of it will require your undivided attention… and not just any kind of undivided attention… but the kind that carries you away from the World: the kind that displaces you.

    I will begin with a few questions, such as these:

    What would you say if I suggested to you the notion that the only Universal Reality you can know and experience doesn’t resemble anything even remotely close to what you would normally think of when you hear the term “Reality,” but rather something more along the lines of Chaos… and that the only ordered reality you will ever know and experience depends entirely upon the boundary of perception that gives rise to your “uniqueness” as an individual?

    And if I drew your attention to those countless moments in which you lost yourself for the love of some Art, would you recognize the Chaos of which I speak? would you recognize the reality outside of your own?

    In this thread, I intend to reveal the politics of reality, the politics of perception, of knowledge and experience. I will uncover that frightening, absurd, unavoidable five letter word “Chaos”…

    …and I will do something with it….

    First, I would like to remind you that, right now, you sit at a computer. I would like to remind you that a street runs nearby, that it runs through a town or a city, and that it runs toward (or away from) some place you like to visit. I would like to remind you that the street doesn’t stop there: it keeps going. And along that street, outside the place where you sit and read, a landscape expands outward to the horizon (or maybe some other place you also forgot about while reading these words).

    I would like to remind you that, right now, you sit at a computer. I would like to remind you that these words “are” words. And I would like to remind you that you needed a reminder… for, as you continue reading these words, you can’t help but succumb to the Chaos: you can’t help but grow closer to the End of the World as you (yes, you) know it and experience it.

    As you read on, the Order around you, your Order, dissipates. You forget about the street outside, about the places you like to visit, the landscape dwindling off into some realm you never see, the computer where you sit and read… so I keep reminding you because you will forget. (You can’t help not to.)

    Reading breeds Chaos.

    Reading implodes consciousness to a single point, such as the book in your lap, the text on the screen, or the billboard that catches your eye… every time… without fail.

    Reading makes you forget about the Reality you created in “order” to imbue the world around you with Order. Reading disorders your Order. Reading creates a NEW universe–one that contains only two things: YOU and the TEXT. Everything else “is” beside the POINT. Everything else “becomes” Chaos… (especially that nearby street).

    But, one thing remains constant while you read these words:

    The potential for order increases.

    As you read, you reduce (you sublimate) that nearby street into the Chaos from whence it came: you increase the potential for that street to RE-order into something completely different.

    And when you RE-order that street (if you choose to do so by some sort of “magical” means), the dissipated potential (the “entropy”) will reach a maximum:

    The NEW will replace the OLD.

    So, go now. Read. And when you reach the End of the World as you know it, give it NEW order…

    …give it RE-order.

  2. davee
    Posted July 8, 2005 at 3:35 pm | Permalink

    the tantric traditions in tibet often talk about the wisdom inherent in all experience or phenomenon. to be able to see clearly that wisdom is to be enlightened on the tantric path. so when the strong emotion of anger occurs, if one can see it’s intrinsic wisdom in the energy (without the conceptual story line) then we don’t have to bit into the story line and the anger can pass without causing us any problem. but we usually don’t see the subtle wisdom, we are just driven by it into our usual habitual way of acting it out. or something like that. i still habitually act everything out so i’m talking theory here really…

  3. ranger
    Posted July 8, 2005 at 11:28 pm | Permalink

    tim boucher wrote:
    “Doing what we’re doing is a sort of sacrament, an informational sacrament. Maybe one path to the Word is through words. Maybe in order to be touched by the Living Information, we must make information live. We must pump life into it to get life out of it. How long any of us chooses to continue this path is a personal matter. For some it may be transitional, a means of rearranging the signs and symbols of your life into a new and better framework and then moving on. For others the constant rearrangement becomes the path.”

    interesting. my sense is that conscious (and yes, unconscious) manipulation of words can create movement towards progressive levels of understanding and even, changes in being. interconnected streams of tranformational, living symbols, if you will.

    and the practice of arranging and re-arranging can be a form of sacred practice - well, manipulation of almost any available media could amount to sacred practice, but arrangement of word symbols has high potential for enabling cognitive synthesis.

    some would say that particular information(s) are holy in and of themselves. if that is so, then my feeling is that that type of holiness is operative primarily in specific, localized applications .. that is, as delivered as words that can connect with a particular locality or constituency.

    the negative application of such a manipulative process could be labelled propaganda, disinformation: potentially, an anti-sacrament (can disinfo be a sacrament?)

    on most days, i would prefer to think of this process in terms of laboratory - mixing ingredients to see what explodes .. or creates new compounds, to be used in further experiments. in the lab, conducting the experiment can become, in itself, a sacrament - regardless of results.

    in the information age, the manipulation of word symbols can amount to our own particular form of alchemy: self-sustaining, interactive, viral word play. a potentially beneficent informational organism.

    there’s something else going on here, also, and it has to do with individual (and possibly even group) intent. some of the “new bloggers” are relatively fearless, in terms of crossing traditional category boundaries: from politics to parapolitics to aesthetics to information technology to art to poetry to the occult to religious practice and back again. but beyond that, there’s intent (need?) get to the bottom of things, relate things … and to shed light on _all_ related topics along the way. there’s a sincere exploration of integration of possibilities .. and this is done with a degree of discipline in the use of available faculties (i.e., reason, creativity, and compassion).

    the preceding description is all pretty much abstract bullshit. words.

    but it does attempt to point to one type of intelligent manipulation of the tools of the information age: a particular use of wordcraft providing us what we need (food). a living interface of information and the human psyche.

    i would consider this particular use of the blogosphere a sacrament … whatever the life span of particular phenomena related to such might be. experiments come and go.

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