Philip K. Dick's Controversial Speech Analysis

I would like to confess

that I've been asked to cut about two thirds of my speech out

and deliver as short a speech as possible.

You are free to believe me or to disbelieve,

but please take my word on it that I am not joking.

This is very serious, a matter of importance.

This is the recording some believe cost him his life.

In September 1977, the writer Philip K.

Dick spoke to an audience in France.

The expected science fiction, what he said,

instead, revealed too much about reality and drew the attention of the CIA and FBI,

changing his life forever.

The subject of this speech is a topic which has been discovered recently.

A breaching, a tinkering, a change had been made, but not in our present,

had been made in our past.

A variable was changed,

reprogrammed as it were, and that because of this,

an alternative world branched off,

became actualized instead of the prior one, and that in fact, in literal fact,

we are once more living this particular segment of linear time.

He said the CIA and FBI had taken his work years earlier.

That's when you know he may have spoken too much.

In March of 74, the CIA opened my mail. The FBI had a file on me.

I've seen both.

But the cops were watching everything I did, and I was correct.

And I was told the house was being watched,

and that eventually my house would be hit.

My files would be opened, my papers would be taken. And so it came to pass.

When I came home and found my house consisting of nothing but rubble,

ruins, chaos,

broken windows, smashed doorknobs, blown open files.

A few years later, he suddenly dies,

right before the premiere of Blade Runner, June 1982,

the film adaptation of his novel to Android's Dream of Electric Sheep.

Fans said it was strange that the author who had

predicted so many modern themes about AI, identity, and reality,

never got to see the movie that would finally make him widely famous.

What's strange to me is that he was only writing science fiction,

yet the FBI and CIA started watching him.

To me, that means he was touching information never meant for the public.

That's what caught my attention.

So listen carefully to what comes next.

I know attention spans are short, but trust me, this video will give you chills.

We are accustomed to supposing

that all change takes place along the linear time

axis from past to present to future.

The present is an accrual of the past and is different from it.

The future will accrue

from the present on and be different yet.

That an orthogonal or right angled time axis could exist,

a lateral domain in which change takes place,

processes occurring sideways in reality, so to speak,

this is almost impossible to imagine.

How would we perceive such lateral changes? What would we experience?

What clues, if we are trying to test out this bizarre theory,

should we be on the alert for?

In other words, how can change take place outside of linear time at all,

in any sense, to any degree?

Philip tries to make

this strange idea easier to understand with a simple picture.

Imagine a painting on a wall.

Instead of replacing the whole painting, the servants secretly change details on

the same canvas.

They remove a tree,

add a girl, shift small elements.

When the owner looks at it, he sees something new, yet also familiar.

His brain struggles.

It's the same painting, but also not the same.

Dick uses this example to suggest that reality might be altered in subtle ways,

not fully replaced.

Contemplating this possibility of a lateral arrangement of worlds,

a plurality of overlapping Earths along whose linking axis

a person can somehow move, can travel in

a mysterious way from worst to fair to good to excellent,

contemplating this in theological terms,

perhaps we could say that herewith we suddenly decipher the elliptical

utterances which Christ expressed regarding the Kingdom of God, and the fact that

the Kingdom of God is not a single entity specifically where it is located.

He connects his theory of parallel worlds to the words of Jesus.

He points out that Jesus gave answers that seemed contradictory about

the Kingdom of God.

He said, my kingdom is not of this world,

but also, the kingdom is within you, or among you.

Dick suggests these statements weren't meant to confuse,

but to describe something deeper.

Maybe Jesus was speaking about these overlapping realms,

multiple realities that can be reached by living human beings.

Some of them dark, others beautiful, and at the highest level,

the just kingdom of God.

I and my stories and novels often write about counterfeit worlds,

semi real worlds,

as well as deranged private worlds,

inhabited often by just one person,

while meantime the other characters either remain in their own worlds throughout,

or are somehow drawn into one of the peculiar ones.

This theme occurs in the corpus of my 27 years of writing.

At no time did I have a theoretical or conscious explanation for

my preoccupation with these pluriform pseudo worlds, but now I think I understand.

What I was sensing was the manifold of partially actualized realities.

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Sound like you? Not me. In a relationship.

It was in February of 1974 that my blocked off memories of track A returned,

and it was in February of 1974 that my novel,

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said,

was released finally after two years delay.

It was almost as if the release of the novel, which had been delayed so long,

meant that in a certain sense it was alright for me to remember.

That is to remember that the book was not fiction.

The book was based on subliminal memories which I had of such a world.

After connecting his book to subliminal memories,

he went deeper into describing what happened to him in early 1974.

He said it began after dental surgery, when he was recovering at home.

One afternoon, a delivery girl came to his door wearing a necklace with a Christian

fish symbol. As the sunlight reflected off the necklace,

Dick saw a sudden flash of pink light.

From that moment on,

he reported a series of overwhelming visions.

He claimed the pink beam carried information directly into his mind.

Not images he imagined, but structured knowledge.

He suddenly knew that his infant son

had a dangerous undiagnosed medical condition.

When doctors checked, they confirmed it, saving the boy's life.

To Dick, this proved the experience was not fantasy.

In the weeks that followed, the visions intensified.

He said he lived in two overlapping realities,

California in 1974, and ancient Rome in the first century.

At times, he believed he was both himself and a Christian slave living under

Roman rule. He described it as if time had folded,

two tracks of history running at the same time.

And his consciousness could move between them.

Philip also reported receiving vast amounts of information,

entire downloads of philosophy,

theology, and science that felt too complex to invent.

He said it was as if an external intelligence, which he later called VALIS,

Vast Active Living Intelligence System, was transmitting knowledge into his brain.

For him, this explained

why many of his novels already contained themes of false realities,

hidden powers, and overlapping worlds.

He believed those stories were subliminal memories breaking through long before

he consciously understood them.

Plural realities did exist superimposed onto one another by so many

film transparency.

What I still do not grasp,

however, is how one reality out of the many becomes actualized in contradistinction

to the others. More likely, the matrix world,

the one with the true core of being, is determined by the programmer.

He or it articulates,

prints out, so to speak, the matrix choice and fuses it with actual substance.

The core or essence of reality,

that which receives or attains it, and to what degree,

that is within the purview of the programmer.

This selection and reselection

is part of general creativity of world building,

which seems to be it or his task.

As you can see, some people in the audience laughed at what he was saying.

Remember, this was 1977.

Back then, ideas about multiple realities and

hidden programmers sounded completely insane to most people.

Today, talk of simulations,

parallel worlds, or