Mission of Böhme: Culture Is Not Your Friend

 

The TV series LOST (2004–2010) owes a surprisingly large, though almost never explicitly stated, debt to Jakob Böhme’s mystical theology—especially the core Böhmean ideas that Philip K. Dick obsessed over. The creators (Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse, and especially J.J. Abrams) have never directly name-checked Böhme in interviews, but Lindelof has repeatedly cited Philip K. Dick as one of the biggest influences on the show’s mythology. Once you know PKD’s Böhme obsession, huge chunks of LOST suddenly look like dramatized Böhmean cosmology.Here are the clearest Böhme fingerprints in LOST:1. The Two Brothers / The Bipartite GodBöhme: God contains two eternal principles within Himself — the dark wrath-fire (the “No”) and the light-love (the “Yes”). They are opposing brothers locked in eternal tension, and the cosmos is born from their strife and reconciliation.LOST: Jacob and the Man in Black (later “the Smoke Monster”) are literal brothers in white and black clothing, one representing light/order/protection, the other darkness/chaos/freedom. Their mother tells them they are the latest in an endless cycle of opposites. The entire Island is the arena where this divine dialectic plays out.2. The Island as Ungrund / Primordial SourceBöhme: Before creation is the Ungrund — the formless abyss of pure potentiality and freedom in God. Out of it the opposites arise.LOST: The Heart of the Island — that glowing golden cave with the underground pool — is repeatedly described as “the source,” older than any human, the place “life and death and rebirth” come from. When Desmond uncorks it in season 6, the Island begins to collapse into fire and chaos exactly like Böhme’s wrath-world when the balance is broken.3. Evil as the Necessary “No”Böhme: The dark principle is not a foreign devil; it is inside God and necessary so that love and freedom can be known.LOST: Mother tells the boys, “Every human has the capacity to do what he [MIB] did” — evil is intrinsic. Jacob himself eventually admits that the Man in Black may be right about humanity’s corruption. The show refuses to give you a purely external Satan figure.4. The World as Mirror / InversionBöhme: The fallen world is an inverted mirror-image of true reality; what looks solid is illusion.LOST: The flash-sideways in season 6 is literally a mirrored, inverted afterlife where everything is “backwards” (Christian Shephard’s famous line: “There is no ‘now’ here”). When characters remember their real lives, the mirror rectifies and they awaken — almost exactly PKD/Böhme’s anamnesis.5. The Eternal Cycle of IncarnationBöhme: The cosmic process is an eternal birth of God through opposites; history is a repeating wheel until the restoration (Wiederbringung).LOST: The final shot of the entire series is the same shot that opened it — the eye of Jack opening/closing — implying the whole six seasons may be one loop in an eternal cycle. The Island keeps bringing new “candidates” forever.6. Christ-Figure Born from the TensionBöhme: The Third Principle, the reconciled world, is born when the wrath-fire is transmuted into love-light by Sophia (divine wisdom).LOST: Hurley (compassion) eventually becomes the new Jacob, and Ben (former wrath-figure) becomes his redeemed advisor. Jack’s self-sacrifice in the cave of light is the moment the opposites are briefly reconciled so the world can continue.Lindelof has said in interviews that the final season’s mythology was heavily shaped by wanting to explore “What is the afterlife?” and “What is the nature of good and evil?” — exactly the two questions Böhme spent his life answering in the most unorthodox way possible.So while LOST never puts “Jakob Böhme” on screen, the Island’s entire metaphysical engine — two brothers, light-in-darkness, the glowing source, mirrored realities, eternal return, evil as part of the divine — is basically Böhme’s theosophy run through a Philip K. Dick filter and turned into network television.

Tip: Axis ‘67

Sophia/Zosia

The Great Party

 

“I am a very dangerous person. Again, my very efforts to produce a solution are alarming because they so blatantly fail. My failure is the failure of all mankind (to find a solution or explanation). The fault is not mine.

I can say no more. What I have done may be good, it may be bad. But the reality that I discern is the true reality; thus I am basically analytical, not creative; my writing is simply a creative way of handling analysis. I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a journalist; my novel and story writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation.  Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak.  I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, and, for them, my corpus of writing is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an investigation and presentation, analysis and response and personal history. My audience will always be limited to these people.”

“I am currently of the opinion that (1) there is a connection between original authentic Christianity through Gnosticism to Heidegger; and (2) that 2-3-74 was this particular experience; viz: the inauthentic state that Heidegger describes is the "thrown-ness" into the "fremd" that Gnosticism describes; there follows, then, a series of dire transformations by the

"thrown into the alien world" person trying to cope; I comprehend this as flight and evasion from fate (heimarmene), which is a sense that this alien state/world into which one has been thrown torments now and eventually kills (causes nonbeing, das nicht). 

The unconscious apperception of this creates angst (dread). This running to evade nonbeing manifesting itself as fate generates a pressure time, in which - by which — the person is driven more than driving; that is, he both runs and is made to run; he is caused to flee more than volitionally fleeing. Thus there is caused an endless process of becoming that never turns into being itself; there is no true now — he is projected always into a dreaded next; he is not really here and now for him; he must run into the future and yet paradoxically away from the future; both runs toward and away from. Thus he is split. Part of him reaches inauthentically into the future to monitor it for peril — he cannot afford ever to ignore the future since it contains his fate which will kill him — and part of him looks away from the future for the same reason; this split may be the basis of schizophrenia. He must both notify himself of what he sees in the future and obscure what he sees from himself. This is another version of the split. But worst of all is — not that he must involve himself continually in the future out of apprehension, while also avoiding it, fearing to move into it, trying in fact to halt time (since time contains his fate) but he fails to be in the now, which is where reality is, and this is what most inhibits Sein; he has to be eternally becoming because he must extend himself eternally into the not yet. What I see in all this is that his sense that this alien world he has been thrown into will eventually ineluctably annihilate him is correct and he knows it is correct; this is not a delusion, this sense of impending destruction that will take away what little being he has. That time might increase or even complete his being does not occur to him because (and here the Gnostic perception is vital) this is an alien world into which he has been thrown against his will; i.e., he is helpless: he did not decide to be here, and the more he reaches frantically into the future (while simultaneously running from the future) the faster time "flows" (or the faster he moves through it). Thus the moment, the now, escapes him perpetually and he has no life he can call his own. But he must never reveal to himself this fact - about his inevitable future doom — lest he disintegrate utterly; again he is split. So he has no idea what he is doing or why, and he is enigmatic to himself; so he is too and for himself as alien as world is to him; he is as if thrown into an alien self on top of everything else!

As I say, the only solution to this is the Christian solution of what I call total capitulation to this fate and an acknowledgment that it cannot be avoided; it will come and it will destroy him. Thus he ceases running, and lives now not future; but at the moment he does this he knows that this anticipated doom exists — so in the normal course of life this sense of the future becoming the now only occurs — if it occurs at all — when the impending doom ceases to be future and is perceived as now: at which point anticipatory dread becomes logically total fear. However (as Heidegger points out) this apotheosis of dread, this being in-death, carries with it the possibility of Sein.”

Philip K Dick, Early 1981

The Owl In Daylight

“That final last movement for the 13th quartet Beethoven wrote keeps showing up (as it were: i.e., being played) on KPFA, and Owl is invariably terrified by it— he knows not why. 

Golly: I'd even be parodying VALIS in my absurdist treatment of the search — Faustian search - for knowledge (salvation through gnosis, which seems to be my own downfall). Owl feels superior to all the other "people" in the construct because they can’t see — or aren't interested in — the plasma's autograph. Hence the title: The Owl in Daylight - Owl is a fool, but, like Jack Isidore, a holy fool in Christ.  

Obviously I'll be either going Borges one better or parodying him - either will do.

Harvey Pong idiot S-F fan.

The trouble with Owl, the plasma points out, is that in a way he's too clever; he's outsmarting his own maze — which after all was built not to trap or punish him but to teach him and help him problem solve; but. he does is sniff out (1) that it's a forgery (in which I parody my own 10 volume meta-novel!) and (2) that a vast "God like intelligence" lies concealed behind it. 

This is counterproductive — and costing Owl money. So here Owl we have absurdist Faust story which parodies my exegesis and Borg and Gnosticism.”

PKD, 1981

[81:K-316] Out Of Sequence

VALIS is the cypher book to the whole ten volume meta-novel.  And will someday be read as such.

 "Valis" is Gnostic/Mani but secretly Holy Mother Church.  As with God's strategy, the sequence is "out of sequence." 

Viz: the key piece - VALIS - came last. Until it the others did not make sense - i.e., they were taken to have been written as fiction and hence hypothetical.  

VALIS retroactively reinterprets them - shows them in a light that could not be anticipated by an analysis of them — until VALIS came out; typical of the pattern strategy of the wise horn in its dialectical combat-game. 

Here is a big realization, and unexpected: VALIS in itself means nothing.

Its only significance is as the code book to the ten volume meta-novel — and no one has noticed this yet.  

1981