Philip K. Dick: Existentalist

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Over the course of my ten-year relationship with my husband, I learned that he was more an Existentialist than a Gnostic. His core ideas fall more into line with Kierkegaard and Nietszche, Kafka and Schopenhauer, than with the prophets of Nag Hammadi or the neo-Platonists.

Although he adopted some of the trappings of gnosticism, such as the demiurge and the veil of illusion, Philip K. Dick adopted an eclectic body of knowledge while educating himself at the public library. Like Schopenhauer, he came to the conclusion that the universe is not rational, so we cannot gain a rational understanding of its nature, rules and existence. Like Kafka, he saw us as prisoners who never know what crime has been laid against us.

In line with God's assertion to Moses that his name is "I am", Phil began his study of the human existence.

~~ More to come in future posts.
Thank you for reading!
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This entry is also posted on Wordpress:


http://wp.me/pdXyS-1G

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My Life on the Edge of Reality - available for pre-order

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With a little help from my friends and family, I got a month's worth of utility bills paid. Unfortunately, I'm still a month behind, so everything is going to get turned off.

You can help by pre-ordering a copy of my memoir Tessa B. Dick: My Life no the Edge of Reality, which will be available in March.

In this book I tell the story of my life, including my relationship with my husband Philip K. Dick (Bladerunner), as well as the government-sponsored experiment on school children in the 1960s. My brother and I were subjects in that experiment, which was conducted without our parents' knowledge or permission.

If you send me $25 by Paypal, I will send you a signed copy as soon as it is available.

My Paypal addy is tuffy777@gmail.com

Thank you so much!

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We are still living in the Roman Empire

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We are still living in the Roman Empire


Why do high school and college classes in western civilization begin with ancient Greece? (and sometimes ancient Egypt)

Our culture quite clearly has its roots in the tribal cultures of Europe and North America. The U.S. Constitution can be traced back to England's Magna Carta, as well as to the rules of the Iroquois federation. The revolutions in the name of liberty certainly did not have their roots in ancient Greece, where even the great and wise philosopher Socrates obeyed the death sentence that the men of Athens imposed upon him.

The wealthy and powerful elite of the world want us to embrace paganism.

Most of the inhabitants of ancient Greece in its time of glory were descendants of Dan, one of Jacob Israel's twelve sons. They came from different places at different times, most notably from Egypt before the Exodus and from the Holy Land after the Exodus.

The tribe of Dan, according to the Bible, was known for idol worship and for seafaring.

Since they came at different times from different places, they had different names for their pagan gods. They also adopted the local gods that people had been worshiping before they arrived.

So we have a huge Greek pantheon, a group of gods that often give three or four names and histories to the same deity.

The most interesting Greek deities are those that attempt to take the place of Christ as the savior of humanity. Prometheus is said to have created the first man and woman, as well as all the animals. He stole the fire of knowledge from Mount Olympus, and Zeus (Jupiter) punished him by having Hephaestus (Vulcan) chain him to a rock where a giant eagle came every day to eat his liver. Since Prometheus was a god, and therefore immortal, his liver would grow back every day and get eaten again.

Another imitation of Christ is Apollo, the god who wrestled with Python, a wise oracle reminiscent of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and took over the cave where that giant snake used to live. Apollo, the shining one, brought the light of reason to mankind. He also installed his own oracle in the cave, and her prophecies caused many disasters for the wealthy and powerful men who came to her for advice.

We are, in a very real sense, still living in the Roman Empire. Ancient Rome looked to Greek culture for its models, and the Roman Catholic Church is seated in Rome. Perhaps the Church is the enemy of the Roman Empire, but perhaps not. Although I stand up as a Christian believer, I cannot defend the dogma of any established church, Roman or otherwise. Dogma is the enemy of faith, in my opinion.

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Memoir, excerpt #2

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I remember very little of second grade. The twelve of us were shoved into a third-grade classroom, and I simply cannot remember the teacher’s name. Each of us second-graders was assigned to a third-grade student who was supposed to help us with our work. My third grader couldn’t be bothered, so I floundered, especially in arithmetic. Moreover, we didn’t get any crayons! I did enjoy using skinny pencils and learning cursive writing, especially when the teacher handed out ball point pens for us to use, once we were acceptably competent writing cursive with our pencils.

But most of the second grade is completely gone from my memory, aside from those “special assemblies” when the graduate students were testing us. Fifteen or twenty students from different grade levels would meet in the auditorium or the cafeteria and take tests. I’m sure that one of those tests was the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). The researchers were two young men in business suits and a woman in a B-line outfit. I did not like the woman, and I remember her yelling at me that I was deliberately giving the wrong answers on the tests. She was right. I did not like the tests and I did not trust those people. I just sat there in silence until one of the men told her that it was enough.

They must have thought that we were psychic because they kept asking us things like, “What’s in John’s pocket?” and “What’s behind the curtain?” and “What’s in a box at the bank downtown?”

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You can pre-order a signed copy from me for $25, to be delivered in March 2011. (I have bills to pay now.)

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Murder Lies available on Amazon Kindle

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Now you can see my latest novel, Murder Lies available on Amazon Kindle for only $2.99.

You don't have to buy a Kindle to read it. Amazon offers a free download for your PC, so you can view all Kindle books.

US link:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004KZOWOQ

UK link (Whispernet):

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004KZOWOQ

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My own experience

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Philip K. Dick experienced mystical visitations throughout his life, beginning in early childhood, although his visions of March 1974 are the best known.

Critics have often wondered why I so easily accepted Phil's experience as valid. Most have put it down to our relationship as husband and wife, assuming that we fell into a folie a deux, a madness shared by two people who reinforced each other's delusions. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I had my own mystical experiences long before I ever met Philip K. Dick.

For the first time, I am writing about those visions in a book-length memoir titled My Life On the Edge of Reality. This book will include anecdotes about my husband that are not included in my memoir Philip K. Dick: Remembering Firebright.

Here's the beginning of it:

Chapter One, Beginning

I’m approaching that age when my memories of early childhood are more clear than my memory of where I set down my coffee cup. Some people tell me that they remember nothing before their junior year in high school, and that astounds me because I remember my infancy. For example, I remember lying in my crib with mittens on my hands. Mom explained that I was seven months old when my older brother, who was in Kindergarten, brought home the chicken pox virus, and she put the mittens on my hands to prevent me from scratching the blisters and getting scars.

I also remember the first time that I walked. Mom said that I was eight months old when I crept on hands and knees across the living-room carpet to the front window and pulled myself up by holding onto the window ledge. I remember looking outside at our lawn, the sidewalk, the street and the Jacksons’ house. The Jacksons had beautiful flower gardens, and Mrs. Jackson showed me how to open the “mouth” of a snapdragon blossom. We always called it the Jacksons’ house, even after they sold it to a young couple with a little girl who was three years younger than I was – she was four years old and I was seven.

From a very early age, I got daily advice from an invisible companion who stood slightly behind my right shoulder and spoke to me. Nobody else could see Michael, and I never told anybody about him. He was my guardian angel. Michael used to tell me, for example, that it was almost six o’clock, so Daddy would be coming home soon. Since I didn’t know how to tell time, I depended upon him to tell time for me. I hopped down from Daddy’s favorite chair, where I had been sitting, so he could sit down and rest as soon as he came in the door. Michael also told me that the monsters could not see me if I hid under the covers when I went to bed.

Chapter Two, Monsters

It is no coincidence that I love to watch horror movies. I have no use for slasher flicks, which depend upon blood and gore to shock the audience. I go for the psychological dramas like Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolf Man. Give me a story in which people fight against their own inner evil – Jekyll and Hyde, for example. The idea of being killed by a monster scares me less than half as much as the idea of becoming a monster, myself.

Sometimes when I look into a mirror, I see my face begin to change, somewhat like the Wolf Man. I hate mirrors and avoid looking at them. Occasionally when I have stayed in someone else’s house and had to get up in the night, I have been startled by what I thought was a burglar, only to discover that it was my own reflection in a mirror.

I watch horror movies as an adult in order to dispel the fear that haunted my childhood years.

The little orange stucco tract house on the corner of Westwood and Ocean in Culver City, California, was home to a menagerie of monsters. I remember the cockroaches that used to swarm out of the storm drain at night, but I was not afraid of them. The creaking and groaning of the pine-paneled walls terrified me. My older and smarter brother Steve later told me that we had an infestation of roof rats, but Mom never told me about the rats because she didn’t want to frighten me. I would have been less afraid if I had known about the rats, instead of being left to imagine all sorts of goblins inside the walls of my bedroom. Mom was always lying or withholding information, with the excuse that she did not want to frighten me. For example, I wanted to know how the speakers on our hi-fi worked, so I asked her if they were electrical. Mom said no, to avoid scaring me, even though she knew that they were electrical.

What frightened me the most was that my two brothers and two cousins, all of whom were boys and older than I was, used to turn on the TV and start watching a monster movie. One by one, they would leave the room, until I was sitting there all by myself, watching Godzilla or the Wasp Woman, or some other horror feature. I stayed glued to the chair, unable to leave until I saw the monster die. If I didn’t see the monster die on the television screen, it would remain alive in my mind. The one that frightened me the most was the Mummy. To this day, when I choose a sleeping bag, I never get a mummy bag.

One early morning I woke up to see a Martian metal robot on my bedroom floor. That is what Steve’s silver nylon sleeping bag looked like in the dim light of pre-dawn. Worse, Rick’s brown cotton mummy bag was also there beside the killer robot, two monsters lying where my brothers had tossed them when they came home from a camping trip. I stayed as still as possible, not daring to move lest I draw the attention of the mummy and the killer robot, until the morning light finally burst in and they became ordinary sleeping bags again.

I’m sure that my near-sightedness and the dim light had a great deal to do with what I saw that morning. My imagination did the rest.

In 1961 Mom took us to the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History to see the King Tut exhibit. Egypt had released very few actual King Tut artifacts, but they did display a real mummy in a glass case, and I remember seeing one of Tut’s golden sandals. In spite of the monster movies, that exhibit did not frighten me. I wasn’t afraid of real, tangible things. I was afraid of the things that go bump in the night.

I know now that the specters that I see in the dark are symptoms of astigmatism, a condition in which the shape of the eyeball is flattened, so light will bounce around inside the eye and cause the person to see points of light in the darkness after turning off the lights. I used to talk about “brown clouds”, in an attempt to describe what I saw. It was like looking at a pot of boiling soup. And the high-pitched tones that I used to hear inside my ears were symptoms of tinnitus, a condition affecting the inner ear that can be caused by infection or by excess ear wax or fluid drainage.

Chapter Three, Death and near-death

I can explain most of the strange experiences of my childhood by referring to my poor eyesight, plus the roof rats.

However, I can offer no mundane explanation for Michael’s presence. He told me that Great Grandma was in Heaven. Mom’s paternal grandmother, Mary Ann Evans, died of colon cancer in 1958, when I was four years old. She was in her seventies. Mom told me that Grandma’s tumor was benign, so as not to frighten me. Gee, thanks, Mom! Not! Mom seemed to think that it was more important to avoid scaring me than it was for me to know my family’s true history, medical and otherwise.

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I'm holding a pre-sale of signed copies of this book. If you are interested, please email me at tuffy777@gmail.com

Thank you so much!

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PKD Robot Head Rebuilt

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The PKD robot head was stolen a few years ago, or perhaps lost, hen it failed to turn up after an airline flight.

Now it has been rebuilt.  However, it does not sound anything like Phil.  That definitely is not Phil's voice.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=3153

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