![[tmbchr]™](/journal/popocculture-blog-logo.jpg){kind=logo}
Things Aren’t What They Seem
I rolled out of bed way too late this morning after a bit of a rough night. I showered, made myself a bagel, gathered up some items for lunch, and stuck them all in my bag and ran up to the bus stop. Missing it by just a couple minutes, I pulled out my loaner copy of Philip K. Dick’s Selections from the Exegesis.
It’s a fascinating read, really heady in some spots. I’m up to the “Theoretical Explanations” section, featuring assorted scraps of Dick’s far out philosophical musings. I stood for about five minutes puzzling my way through Dick’s arcane differentiation of the Logos from the Holy Spirit. In a nutshell, he said that the Logos existed “outside” Time, and impressed itself into Time from Eternity. Whereas, he believed that the Holy Spirit might be the “negative terminal” of Time. That is, the final point towards which Time flows. And that it influences Time by flowing backwards from the Future.
Like I said, it’s some crazy stuff. Into that peculiar headspace breaks an old haggard woman carrying huge shopping bags. She huddles next to me in the bus shelter, to escape the cold wind.
“Hell of a time to throw somebody out of their house, huh?”
I agree and she relates the story to me of how she became homeless at some indeterminate date during the past two months. She had two cats who’d been sent to animal shelters and “sweetie” who got lost somewhere in the shuffle. She knew where the cats were being kept though, she assured me. I guess she’s planning on retrieving them at some point. I hope she does.
She told me about this Seattle newspaper for the homeless called Real Change News. She described it as having the “real news”. I gather that it’s about homeless issues and that homeless people get to sell it to make themselves extra money or something. She also told me about how she has a secret spot somewhere in the city where she hides her belongings, but she of course wouldn’t reveal where that was. Not that I asked though, either.
“When I woke up this morning,” she said, “I prayed that I hadn’t been busted.” She hadn’t. Her stuff was still there. “But somebody did steal my gloves though…”
As she wandered into a description of her membership in some psychiatric group in the city, because she had a suicidal past. “But thank God I didn’t succeed with it,” she said, as she gave herself the sign of the cross and looked upward. I decided I would give her the extra pair of gloves I had with me in my backpack and she hugged me and thanked me.
We talked for a while until our bus came. Getting on it, I went to find myself a seat, and she said to me in a loud voice booming across the full bus:
“Be careful what you believe in and who you trust, because things aren’t what they seem. It took me a long time to learn that.”
I said thanks awkwardly and slumped into my seat, immersing myself back into Philip K. Dick’s obscure rantings on the Holy Spirit and the Logos breaking into Time.
Sometimes Odin, as a beggar, wandered from one country to another, craving charity; sometimes, as a warrior clad in coat of mail, he rode forth to battle for the cause of right; or as a minstrel he sang from door to door, and played sweet music in the halls of the great; or as a huntsman he dashed through brakes and fens, and into dark forests, and climbed steep mountains in search of game; or as a sailor he embarked upon the sea, and sought new scenes in unknown lands. And many times did men folk entertain him unawares.
(From the Curse of Gold)
- Fifth columnists
- Storycon: I’d like to go this
- Pay for play
- Satanists Aren’t Evil!
- On accepting Jesus Christ as Your Personal Lord and Savior
- Prev: Spiritual Bungee Jumping
- Next: The Churian Separatists
March 9th, 2006 at 6:15 pm
Holy shit! That’s amazing Tim.
The other night I was at a club, went outside to smoke and was about to remark to someone on how I am beginning to feel like I am living in a PKD book when someone a few feet away said to the other, “Hey Phil! Hey Phil!”.
I about fell over. I couldn’t even continue talking about what I meant to talk about (living in a PKD book). I just stood there dumbfounded and explained to my friend that I had a lot to process all of a sudden.
March 9th, 2006 at 6:18 pm
nice of you to give that woman your spare gloves…………..her words will ring in your ears for years to come. things aren`t what they seem…….no shit.
March 9th, 2006 at 7:11 pm
The Holy Spirit can work through anyone, at any time. This is a good thing to remember.
March 10th, 2006 at 2:16 am
The Holy Spirit flowing backwards through time from he future as a form of negentropy.. thats a wild idea.. love it
March 10th, 2006 at 8:50 am
Uh… Wow. I–well, I feel a mite embarrassed to post this, but about 6 weeks ago, I had an amazing meditation. I work with a pantheon of deities, and at that time they had numbered 9. (A god and goddess for each direction and the Source of All That Is/Plerorma/Sophia/Star Goddess for the Center.) On this particular day, I felt Odin, Freyja, Persephone and Hades come together in my meditation space. They’ve done this before, emerged together. It had been happening quite frequently–I didn’t get my East Goddess Freyja without getting the other 3. Same with Odin, who was my North God, at least that’s what I had thought at the time.
I asked them about this, and they told me I had been mistaken about my directions, that I’d neglected to include above and below. That O&F were Above and P&H were below, and that I needed to “audition” a God and a Goddess once the other directions shook out now that there were vacancies.
Anyway, I noticed that I now had 13 gods and goddesses, and I also work with 20 critter-guides. In other words I had the makings for my own personalized version of a Mayan Calendar. Today for example is a Persephone Chimera day. Yesterday was an Odin-Dragon day, interestingly enough. (It was also my 3-year anniversary of not having sugar or flour cross my lips intentionally in any significant way.)
So it’s a bit synchronic to me to read your post, Tim. Just thought I’d share that.
March 10th, 2006 at 12:03 pm
This is what I have tried to describe as the ultimate reference point, or the end of time.
From the standpoint of beyond-time, all of history is seen to have been set up for exactly this outcome. All histories terminate in this outcome, apokatastasis. All things which are not their own end or purpose have some other thing as their end or purpose. There is only one thing which is it’s own sufficient purpose, and all other purposes eventually terminate in it.
March 10th, 2006 at 12:15 pm
Twenty-three entities holding your hand, Richard?
What is it going to take to get you to a point where you can be trusted and depended upon to make good decisions on your own?
I’m actually asking that in all sincerity, not trying to be snarky.
March 10th, 2006 at 12:27 pm
hey, that’s pretty neat! do you have the whole calendar system posted somewhere?
weird synchronicity– i was just asked, out of the blue, to provide some comments about the mayan calendar for an article in a florida newspaper. seems the reporter found an old post on my blog about the subject and had a few questions for me.
March 10th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
In regards to the first question asked of me, I don’t take your comment as “snarky”, Avalon. I feel that this is something to balance out–trusting myself, but also understanding that in my conditioning to not trust myself, there are these other voices that I have begun to label “the echo chamber of CAD” (short for “civilization-addiction-domestication”). I have a lot of different ways of looking at my “need” to confer with other deities besides myself, be they alive or pre-/post-/non-carnate, human, rock, electronic, animal, plant, meshugah or was immer sonst. I LIKE being a human do-it-yourself project with input from others, although it gets frustrating sometimes when desires run rampant.
I do have a system for myself of Mayan-Richard correspondences.
Here’s a link to my posting on my *ahem* blog.
http://disappearingchef.blogspot.com/2...6/02/mayan-correspondence-system.html
March 10th, 2006 at 4:48 pm
My dad, very religiuos man that he was, told me as a kid that angels and demons might be walking among us, testing us humans. I’ve since grown up and think of such talk as entertaining but not practical. However, a part of me still thinks about it when I encounter strangers on the street.
Even though I don’t bus around anymore, it still happens. I’m the one guy who people start talking to on the street. I don’t know what it is about me that draws them to me, but when it happens I think first of all “Here we go again” and then I think “Devil or angel?”
The great pulp writer Jim Thompson once said (and I hope my citation isn’t too far off): “There are 23 ways to write a story but only one plot: things are not what they seem.” Thompson’s paranoid noir works resemble PKD in substance, if not in style (it can be argued that Blade Runner the movie is the perfect marriage of Thompson and Dick’s respective styles)
March 10th, 2006 at 5:32 pm
I’ve gotten lots of improimptu street lectures from homeless people (kind of inevitable in the Bay Area), but the really weird one was a man outside of the Hare Krishna temple (my friends went there for dinner sometimes when I was a teen) who accosted me and started screaming I was the devil- he kept pointing at me and yelling “evil eye! devil! Satan!
March 12th, 2006 at 5:03 am
PKD’s VALIS experience intrigues me - I’ve read the few pages from the Exegesis that are up on philipkdick.com (http://www.philipkdick.com/new_exegesis.html) and I find the concepts he’s struggling to express familiar. They match my own hard-won mystical intuitions of Christianity, and the accounts of various saints’ lives I’ve been reading recently: Thomas Merton, Evelyn Underhill’s ‘Mysticism’, Katya Rivas from Bolivia, and an obscure book by a neighbour of mine documenting a channeling experience of ‘Saint Stephen’ in 1970s New Zealand. I suspect Jacob Boehme and Emmanuel Swedenborg of glimpsing similar things. A kind of cosmic vision of just how interconnected things are, and how Love is at the heart of the universe. Also a deep respect for the body, the Earth and the material world despite sensing that it is not the only plane of reality.
It’s weird to me how the religion established in Christ’s name seems to often be the sworn enemy of these kind of teachings.