Sometimes the idea for a book is better than the finished product

Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century – Marina Warner (2008)

            As an artist, I have always been interested in the way we humans perceive the world around us.  Most people take it for granted that what they see, hear, touch, etc. is corporeally real.  They assume that our brains are just receptacles, containers for the input our senses provide.  This is a very limited view of our minds.  Every single one of us is living in a world that exists solely in our minds, filtered by our personal experiences, beliefs, and prejudices.  Where some people see images in clouds, others never bother to look at all.  Our human culture, literature, and especially religion, has been reading into the visions of the mind since before we have record of it.  Marina Warner explores the many different ways that humans have tried to visualize the ephemeral.

            One thing that Ms. Warner does so well is to combine what appears to be a shit-ton of research and information into a concise accounting.  Each chapter describes human’s explorations into the meaning of ephemeral visions, such as clouds, shadows, fata morgana, mirror images, etc., from ancient times to the modern day.   This makes the book a very valuable resource from which to find other material that further explores the topics at hand.

            There is one big problem though.  I read such books to encounter new analysis and new insights into these subjects, as I am already well-versed with all these topics through my own personal research and reading.  This book does not have such analysis or thought.  After a few chapters it begins to read like a thesis by a graduate student, one that contains too many examples and too little substance.  Too many examples are cited with no context, just to pad out some of the thin chapters.  That is a shame.  I think a wonderful book could be written using this material, if it was more carefully edited and if it included more original insight.

(This book can be purchased here: https://www.amazon.com/Phantasmagoria-Visions-Metaphors-Twenty-first-Century/dp/0199299943 )

Philip K. Dick, a Mystic for our Modern Times.

The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick – Philip K. Dick (2011)

As a life-long science fiction reader, and avid follower of the nuttier, “fringe” sci-fi writers, I would hear the name of Philip K. Dick (PKD) spoken of in reverential tones.  He had died in 1982, soon after my family moved to the USA from Puerto Rico, and did not actually penetrate the mainstream culture until years later.  Because of that I did not get around to reading any of his works until I was in college, in the early 90’s.  At that time I had the good fortune of knowing other freaks who liked freaky books, and I began my dive into the world of Philip K. Dick.

It was easy to see why so many people idolized his work.  It was deeply inventive, highly cynical, and overflowing with insights and questions about topics which the standard sci-fi fare never bothered to analyze. PKD explored ideas about consciousness, what makes a person real, what makes thoughts real, what is the difference between thought and reality, and what can we truly know about the world around us when we have to filter it all through a very imperfect instrument (the human brain).  This was perfect for the Gen-X nihilists that found in PKD a sort of cultural prophet.  Here was a writer asking very deep and esoteric questions about the human experience without relying on the standard answers otherwise provided by religion, politics, and society at large.  He was a weirdo’s weirdo.  If Kurt Vonnegut was the caustic, depressed but funny grandfather of Gen X, then PKD was its warped, wasted, ranting uncle, disrupting all family gatherings with his inability to go along with the bullshit.

In-between February and March of 1974, PKD experienced a neurological/spiritual/pharmacological event that changed the course of his life from then until his death 8 years later. In one of the simpler re-tellings of this story, PKD went to his front door to answer a knock, encountered what would be described now as a “goth” girl standing there delivering something.  He fixated on her “Jesus fish” necklace and when he asked about it, she touched it and at that moment a pink laser light filled his whole sensory world.  This “light” spoke to PKD, shared inconceivably vast amounts of data in the forms of a sickeningly fast sequence of images flashed into his brain, and in every single respect scrambled him up pretty bad.  This experience, and several other similar ones that continued for the next 2 months or so, became the sole focus of his internal life until his death.

For a human being wired to instantly analyze and explore any new idea that came into his head, this event proved to be too much.  In the course of the next 8 years, PKD would repeatedly and exhaustively explore the event, the “knowledge” that was imbued in him, and the changes that this event brought to his mind in every way that a man like PKD could think of.  He analyzes it in letters to friends.  He discusses it from every possible angle.  He finds an answer, that answer is then negated, and another answer is found, eventually leading him to what is a maze of metaphysical thought.  PKD would sleep very little as he stayed up night after night, ingesting massive amounts of amphetamines in an attempt to stay awake and process what he experienced.  This led to over 8,000 mostly hand-written pages exploring the event of 2-3-1974.  (PKD always named the event 2-3-1974 as it happened between Feb-Mar of that year)

The human mind can explore a subject so deeply, that it becomes hard to tell if what is being thought is of any use.  It can quickly devolve into vicious logic circles.  For example, at one point PKD thinks that what happened must have been the “soul” of a former friend, a Reverend Pike, who came back to impart knowledge to PKD.  This is explored for possible correlations until PKD realizes that even though Reverend Pike knew Latin (some of the messages “beamed” into PKD were in Latin, a language that PKD never knew), he never knew ancient Greek, and some of the “messages” PKD received were in ancient Coptic Greek.  This led him to thinking that perhaps he had somehow connected with a re-incarnated Greek deity who had also happened to have incarnated as his friend Rev. Pike.  It goes on and on.  PKD, no matter how he turns the problem around in his head, cannot come to a satisfactory answer.

Thank goodness some of PKD’s loyal fans and editors got around to working on those 8,000+ pages.  The Exegesis contains around 900 pages and it is hard to imagine how much more recursive and self-referential the other 7,100 pages must be like.  PKD was a man who loved to learn for learning’s sake, and because of this his head was as full as any library.  He brought all of his prior studies and reading to bear in his attempt to explore the events of 2-3-1974.  A simpler man may have latched on to the first somewhat satisfactory answer and lived the rest of their life thinking an alien from Sirius came to visit him, or that he had somehow tapped into what esoteric mystics have described as the “Book of Life,” which contains all the information that the universe has ever, and will ever create.  Not PKD.  Every conclusion he arrives at can be turned on its head, since it is just his own assumption.  This makes for a very engrossing, frustrating, yet intellectually arousing philosophical work. It was never meant to be published or shared.  It was a personal exploration into his own mind.

Not many people have the ability or the temerity to fully explore the truly life-altering events of their life.  Most of us just move on, trying to forget the strange stuff, and shuddering when the memory comes back at odd times.  Others change their entire lives and blindly follow what they feel is the true interpretation of what happened to them without questioning any deeper.  Philip K. Dick was willing to exhaust himself to understand his own experience.  That takes a lot of guts and a maniacal devotion to truth, even knowing that the final Truth will never be reached.  This is a kick-ass book, and I recommend it to anyone who has read PKD’s works and wants a deep glimpse into the mind behind them.  It is not an easy read.  It is not a clear and logical read.  It is however, one of the very few mystical explorations we have into a metaphysical event from a thinker of our modern times.  In time, I could see this Exegesis being codified and worked into a visionary treatise, much like the Prophets of the Old Testament.  It may all have been a hallucination brought on by a stroke, a vision brought on by too many drugs, or a genuine inter-dimensional communication, but the fact that it happened, and PKD chose not to ignore it, is amazing indeed.

(This book can be downloaded (VERY large file) in PDF form here: Exegesis of Philip K. Dick )

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )

I give thanks to all the Myths for Joseph Campbell

The Mythic Image – Joseph Campbell (1974)

            Joseph Campbell is one of the seminal figures in comparative mythology and the study of human belief systems.  He helped create the field and wrote some of the most engaging and readable books about these topics.  In The Mythic Image, Joseph Campbell draws upon his life of learning to explore the commonalities and sources of over 5,000 years of mythology.

            This book is so dense, so full of ideas and thought-provoking insights, that it is impossible to summarize.  Mr. Campbell tackles all the major themes of human myth and explores the relationships which organized religion’s theologians carefully avoid mentioning.  Myth is a human construct created to help us make sense of the world around us, because so much of it is mysterious and seemingly far from the scope of our daily human lives.

            The great thing about this book is that it focuses on images and their meanings.  The book is full of great illustrations which help the reader to understand the themes explored.  Amazing stuff.  The visual image as a guide to myth is far older than the written word.  Symbols of all types are explained with great care, and this information allowed me to tie up many loose ends that float around in my brain.

So many things floating in my brain...

            Mythology arises through shared experience.  We are all born, live, and then we die.  Out myths and symbols help guide us through life to our resting place in death.  These can be very important things, but they tend to be overlooked in our current consumerist society.  Joseph Campbell is a great teacher and never hesitates to include seeming opposites, for they all come from the human experience.  This is a great book!

Carl Jung was a bad-ass of the highest caliber.

Man and His Symbols – Carl Jung (1968)

Carl Jung was a genius who explored the human psyche in ways that we are still dealing with and trying to process today.  However, he rarely wrote for anything other than scholastic and scientific journals, which means that the average person really cannot get a full grasp of his ideas except through the writings of others, who cannot help but distort them a bit.  His one-time co-worker and eventual intellectual nemesis, Sigmund Freud, is much more well-known and his ideas are more widely disseminated, even though most of his ideas have been discredited for decades.  People still think Freud is the authority on the mind and consciousness.

            Carl Jung’s ideas and work are so dense, so full of meaning and information about how humans think and dream and live, that it is a shame he is now known more widely.  This book, which he wrote on the urging of his assistants to write something that spoke directly to an interested lay-person, explains how and why he developed his ideas about symbols, dreams, archetypes and more.

How many symbols can you spot?

            Often humorous and full of personal anecdotes which directly relate to what he is describing, this book was finished just before his death in 1961.  For someone who is interested in how humans think, why we think the things we do, why we have so many universal mind experiences, this book is excellent!  It is packed with illustrations, footnotes, and asides, each one helping to illustrate the points Dr. Jung is making.  It really feels like he is talking directly to the reader.

The insights into Jungian psychology have helped me connect dreams, thoughts and experience with past readings.  It is like getting a tour of our mental underground!  Very cool stuff.
( To read a chapter from this book titled The Function of Dreams in .pdf format click here: http://peyser.sewanee.edu/Sites/276%20Pseudopsychology/readings%20provided/Quiz%202/Jung%20Function%20of%20dreams&.pdf )