The cunning counterfeit of reality, revealed as such when authentic reality breaks through - like the “tip-tip” of the branch blowing against the window in Finnegans Wake during Earwicker’s dream. This “tip-tip” is the clue, and the only clue. In Ubik it is the commercials and messages intruding “from the other side”. Do we experience that? I did in 3-74. So I am forced to conclude that our reality is a cunning counterfeit, mutually shared - and that the wise mind is trying to signal us - to do what? To kick over into anamnesis, discharge of DNA long-term memories. To remember and to wake up are absolutely interchangeable.
Philip K. Dick
Film is normally a temporal process, but Kubrick, uniquely, uses it to enclose space, the most vast volume of space possible. Thus Kubrick literally expanded the hologram for anyone understanding his films, and he was part of a historic movement involving the abrupt evolution of the human being in terms of so-to-speak relative size vis-à-vis his reality. This is the inner firmament of Bruno (or Paracelsus—whichever). Ah! The microcosm is transformed briefly into the macrocosm; and a slight but permanent expansion of the person, the microcosm, occurs: perhaps an altered relationship to the macrocosm, in terms of identity. Kubrick’s films as a means by which the alchemical Verklärung can take place: thus it is directly related to the Hermetics.
Expansion out of the prison: escape from the prison by extension, like an insect expanding out of his exoskeleton during/via his metamorphosis. “The body is the tomb of the soul”—half-life. The BIP as a sort of exoskeleton, hence a kind of rigid (iron) body. This is the “second birth by the spirit.”
This is a radically different way of experiencing the self (microcosm) and reality (macrocosm). Memory and inner space. There is some relationship. Memory involves vastly augmented time which is then converted into space. “A long time ago” becomes a very large spatial volume, with the result that the past still exists—e.g., my seeing the world of “Acts” in 2-74 and finding it latent in Tears. So my seeing the distant past (in 2-74 and experiencing it overtly in 3-74) was due to the conversion of time into space—which I saw as the vastly augmented spaces. But I see now that the two phenomena are actually one.
Therefore the hologram (reality) is in truth one huge volume of space with no time involved, in which all “time periods” are spatial “onion” layers as (again) in Ubik, where the past lies inside (i.e., along a spatial axis) objects and can be retrieved.
Time, then, is actually spatial expansion, layer upon layer. So the hologram is quite large—it is ubique; yes; here is the ur-significance of the word “ubique”: it occupies all space.
By using his films to enclose huge volumes of space for the viewer Kubrick committed the ultimate political act of liberating—expanding—the individual. Likewise, my space phobia is connected with my own rebelliousness! Unable to deal with external space—i.e., unable to rebel—I have turned to inner space, to exploring it, which, too, is a political act; so my writing, involving inner space, is covertly subversive: it teaches secret ways to rebel (mostly by evasion: escape). This is why the whole psychedelic movement of the 60s was a threat to the authorities; this was the area of the subversive threat I posed—my studies of inner space—in fact—my conceptions of inner space differing from person to person is very radical and politically subversive, I now see, even when it didn’t involve drugs. Viewed this way, then, 2-3-74 represents a total political victory by me, in that I broke through into absolute space such as is not even known about following the disappearance of the Hermetics.
Time, then, is actually spatial expansion, layer upon layer. So the hologram is quite large—it is ubique; yes; here is the ur-significance of the word “ubique”: it occupies all space.
By using his films to enclose huge volumes of space for the viewer Kubrick committed the ultimate political act of liberating—expanding—the individual. Likewise, my space phobia is connected with my own rebelliousness! Unable to deal with external space—i.e., unable to rebel—I have turned to inner space, to exploring it, which, too, is a political act; so my writing, involving inner space, is covertly subversive: it teaches secret ways to rebel (mostly by evasion: escape). This is why the whole psychedelic movement of the 60s was a threat to the authorities; this was the area of the subversive threat I posed—my studies of inner space—in fact—my conceptions of inner space differing from person to person is very radical and politically subversive, I now see, even when it didn’t involve drugs. Viewed this way, then, 2-3-74 represents a total political victory by me, in that I broke through into absolute space such as is not even known about following the disappearance of the Hermetics.
2-3-74 can be understood politically if the significance for the nature of the individual in terms of his enclosing space is recognized as basic (e.g., Kubrick’s films). This absolute space involves absolute (i.e., a priori) knowledge and power over time in that time can no longer extinguish the person. This relates to authentic Christianity. Hence there really is something very subversive about Ubik, as well as Eye and Stigmata and Martian Time-Slip.
I personally achieved the catalytic metamorphosis that my writing promotes. And my writing may aid others in expanding their inner space—pointing toward what I did: breaking through into absolute (hermetic) space where the self is Adam Kadmon, unfallen and unoccluded!
It’s a world inside a world. This is why Kubrick’s space-enclosing films free us. There is a direct relation between more space and the real world (also between restricted space and the irreal world).
Valis was an “uncanny one-way intrusion” perturbing the basis of the small high-speed world from outside. Valis proves there is an outside.
Valis proves there is an outside. This is the most important sentence I’ve written, since it shows our world resembles that of Ubik, Maze, et al.
Philip K. Dick