Transcript: Philip K. Dick Speech at Metz, France 1977

The kingdom was and is an actual different place at the opposite end of continua, starting with slavery and utter pain. It was his mission to teach his disciples the secret of crossing along this orthogonal path. He did not merely report what lay there, he taught the method of getting there. But tragically, the secret was lost. The enemy, the Roman authority, crushed it. And so we do not have it. But perhaps we can re-find it, since we know that such a secret exists.

The Kingdom: Here on Earth or After Death?

Kingdom is ever to be established here on earth, or whether it is a place or state we go to after death. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that this issue has been a fundamental one and an unresolved one throughout the history of Christianity.

Christ and St. Paul both seem to say emphatically that an actual breaking through into time, that is specifically what they say, a breaking through into time, into our world, by the hosts of God, will unexpectedly occur. Thereupon after some exciting drama, a thousand year paradise, a rightful kingdom will be established, at least for those who have done their homework and chores and generally paid attention, have not gone to sleep, as one parable puts it.

We are enjoined repeatedly in the New Testament to be vigilant, that for the Christian it is always day, there is always light by which he can see this event when it comes. See this event. Does that imply that many persons who are somehow asleep or blind or not vigilant, they will not see it even though it occurs?

The Kingdom Comes — and Yet Does Not Come

Consider the significance which can be assigned to these notions. The kingdom will come here unexpectedly, this is always stressed, the rightful faithful shall see it because for them it is always daytime, but for the others, what seems expressed here is the paradoxical but enthralling thought that, and hear this and ponder, the kingdom were it established here would not be visible to those outside it.

I offer the idea that in more modern terms what is meant that some of us will travel laterally to that better world and some will not. They will remain stuck along the lateral axis which means that for them the kingdom did not come, not in their alternative world, and yet meantime it did come in ours. So it comes and yet it does not come. Amazing.

If you have followed my conjectures about the overlapping of these alternate worlds and you sense as I do the possibility that if there are three or four or two there may be thirty or three thousand of them, and that some of us live in this one, others of us in another one, others in others, and that events on one track cannot be perceived by persons not in that track, well let me say what I want to say and be done with it.

I think I once experienced a track in which the Savior returned, but I experienced it just briefly. I am not there now, I am not sure I ever was, certainly I may never be again. I grieve for that loss, the loss it is. Somehow I moved laterally, but then fell back, and then it was gone. A vanished mountain and a scream, the sound of bells, and all gone now for me, entirely gone.

Counterfeit Worlds and Pluriform Realities

I in 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 twenty-seven 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 lying tangent to what evidently is the most actualized one, the one which the majority of us by consensus gentium agree on. Although originally I presumed that the differences between these worlds was caused entirely by the subjectivity of the various human viewpoints, it did not take me long to open the question as to whether it might not be more than that, that in fact plural realities did exist superimposed onto one another by so many film transparencies.

What I still do not grasp, however, is how one reality out of the many becomes actualized in contradistinction to the others. Perhaps none does, or perhaps, again, it hangs on an agreement in viewpoint by a sufficiency of people.

The Programmer and the Matrix World

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, a world-building, which seems to be it or his task, a problem, perhaps, which he or it is running, which is to say, in the process of solving, as a computer would, variables along the linear time axis of our universe, thereby generating branched-off lateral worlds.

The Chessboard Metaphor and the Dark Counter-Player

I have the impression that the metaphor of the chessboard is especially useful in evaluating how this can be done, in fact, must be. Across from the programmer-reprogrammer sits a counter-entity, whom Joseph Campbell calls the dark counter-player. God, the programmer-reprogrammer, is not making his moves of improvement against inert matter, he is dealing with a cunning opponent.

Let us say that on the game board, our universe in space-time, the dark counter-player makes a move, he sets up a reality situation of immutable cause and effect. But the programmer-reprogrammer has already laid down his response. It has already happened, these moves on his part. The print-out, which we undergo as historic events, passes through stages of a dialectical interaction, thesis and antithesis, as the forces of the two players mingle.

Evidently, some syntheses fall through the dark counter-player, and yet they do not, by virtue of the fact that in advance our great advocate selected variables, the alternation of which brings final victory to him. In winning each sequence in turn, he claims some of us, we who participate in the sequence.

This is why, instinctively, people pray, Nibirame Domine, which decodes to mean, extricate me, programmer, as you achieve one victory after another. Include me in that triumph.

The Counter-Player and the Reprogrammer

Move me along the lateral axis so that I am not left out. This sense of being left out means nothing other than remaining under the jurisdiction of, or falling prey to, the malignant power. But that malignant power, for all its guile, has already lost even as it wins, for in some way the counter-player is blind, and so the programmer-reprogrammer possesses an advantage.

I submit to you that such alterations, the creation or selection of such so-called alternative presence, is continually taking place. The very fact that we can conceptually deal with this notion, that is, entertain it as an idea, is a first step in discerning such processes themselves. But I doubt if we will ever be able in any real fashion to demonstrate, to scientifically prove that such lateral change processes do occur.

Probably all we would have to go on would be vestiges of memory, fleeting impressions, dreams, nebulous intuitions that somehow things had been different in some way, and not long ago, but now. We might reflexively reach for a light switch in the bathroom only to discover that it was, always had been, in another place entirely. We might reach for the air vent in our car where there was no air vent, a reflex left over from a previous present, still active at a subcortical level. We might dream of people and places we had never seen as vividly as if we had seen them and actually known them. But we would not know what to make of this, assuming we took time to ponder it at all.

Déjà Vu and the Reprogrammed Past

One very pronounced impression would probably occur to us, to many of us, again and again, and always without explanation, the acute, absolute sensation that we had done once before what we were just about to do now, that we, so to speak, lived in a particular moment or situation previously. But in what sense could it be called previously, since only the present, not the past, was evidently involved? We would have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present, déjà vu, perhaps in precisely the same way, hearing the same words, saying the same words.

I submit that these impressions are valid and significant. And I will even say this, such an impression is a clue that at some past time point 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. A breaching, a tinkering, a change had been made, but not in our present, had been made in our past.

Evidently such an alteration would have a peculiar effect on those persons involved. They would, so to speak, be moved back one square or several squares on the board game which constitutes our reality. Conceivably, this could happen any number of times, affecting any number of people, as alternative variables were reprogrammed. We would have to live out each reprogramming along a subsequent linear time axis, but to the programmer, whom we call God, to him the results of the programming would be apparent once. We are within time, and he is not.

The Great Clock and the Unending Present

I wish to have lived. We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in our reality occurs. This too might account for the sensation people get of having lived past lives. They may well have, but not in the past. Previous lives, rather, in the present. In perhaps an unending repeated and repeated present, like a great clock dial, in which grand clock hands sweep out the same circumference forever, with all of us carried along unknowingly, yet dimly suspecting.

A World Improved Through Divine Reprogramming

Since at the resolution of every encounter of thesis and antithesis, between the dark counter-flare and the divine programmer, a new synthesis is struck off, and since it is possible that each time this happens a lateral world may be generated, and since I conceive that each synthesis or resolution is to some degree a victory by the programmer, each struck off world in sequence must be an improvement upon, not just the prior one, but an improvement upon all the latent or merely possible outcomes.

It is a better world, but in no sense perfect, which is to say final. It is merely an improved stage within a process. What I envision clearly is that the programmer is perpetually using the antecedent universe as a gigantic stockpile for each new synthesis, the antecedent universe then possessing the aspect of chaos, or anomie, in relation to an emerging new cosmos. Therefore, the endless process of sequential struck-off alternate worlds, emerging and being infused with actualization, is negentropic in some way that we cannot see.

What we need at this point is to locate, to bring forth as evidence, someone who has managed somehow, it doesn’t matter how, to retain memories of a different present, latent alternate world impressions, different in some significant way from this, the one which is at this stage actualized. According to my theoretical view, it would almost certainly be memories of a worse world than this, for it is not reasonable that God the programmer and reprogrammer would substitute a worse world in terms of freedom, or beauty, or love, or order, or healthiness, by any standard which we know.

When a mechanic works on your malfunctioning car, he does not damage it further. When a writer creates a second draft of a novel, he does not debase it further, but strives to improve it. I suppose it could be argued, in a strictly theoretical way, that God might be evil or insane, and would in fact substitute a worse world for a better one. But frankly, I cannot take that idea seriously. Let us pass that over.

Memories of a Darker World

So let us ask, does any one of us remember, in any dim fashion, a worse earth as it exists in 1977 than this? Have our young men seen visions, and our old men dreamed dreams? Nightmare dreams, specifically, about a world of enslavement and evil, of prisons and jailers, and ubiquitous police?

I have. I wrote out these dreams, in novel after novel, story after story, to name two in which this prior ugly present obtained most clearly. I cite The Man in the High Castle, and my 1974 novel about the U.S. as a police state, called Flow My Tears the Policeman Said.

I am going to be very candid with you. I wrote both novels based on fragmentary residual memories of such a horrid slave state world, or perhaps the term world is the wrong one, and I should say United States, since in both novels I was writing about my own country.

The Sodium Pentothal Revelation

I could even tell you what caused me to remember. In late February of 1974, I was given sodium pentothal for the extraction of impacted wisdom teeth. Later that day, back home again, but still deeply under the influence of the sodium pentothal, I had a short acute flash of recovered memory. In one instant, I caught it all, but immediately rejected it. Rejected it, however, with the realization that what I had retrieved in the way of varied memories was authentic. Then, in mid-March, a month later, the total body of memories, intact and entire, began to return.

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. I am sure that at the very least you will agree that for me even to claim this is in itself amazing. People claim to remember past lives. I claim to remember a different, very different present life. I know of no one who has ever made this claim before, but I rather suspect that my experience is not unique.

The Return of Blocked Memories and Track A

What perhaps is unique is the fact that I am willing to talk about it. If you have followed me this far, I would like you to be kind enough to go a little further with me. I would like to share with you something I knew that is retrieved along with the blocked-off memories.

In March of 1974, the reprogrammed variables tinkered with back at some earlier date, probably in the late 40s. In March of 1974, the payoff, the results, of at least one and possibly more of the reprogrammed variables lying along the linear timeline of our past set in. What happened between March and August of 1974 was the result of at least one reprogrammed variable laid down perhaps 30 years before, setting into motion a thread of change which culminated in what I am sure you will admit was a spectacularly important and unique historical event, the forced removal from office of the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, as well as all those associated with him.

In the alternative world which I remembered, the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movements of the 60s had failed, and evidently, in the mid-70s, Nixon was not removed from power. That which deposed him, if anything indeed existed that did oppose him or could oppose him, was inadequate. Therefore, one or more factors tending toward that destruction of the entrenched tyrannical power had retroactively to us come to be introduced.

The scales, 30 years later, in 19- It had been 2,000 years ago at its inception. It was regarded as subversive and revolutionary, and let me add, this appraisal by the police authorities was correct. It took me almost two weeks after the return of my memories of my life in Track A to rid myself of the overpowering impression that all references to Christ, all sacerdotal acts, had to be veiled in absolute secrecy. But historically, this fits the pattern of a fascist takeover, especially those along Nazi lines.

Track A: A World of Tyranny and Struggle

I also would like to tell you, if you have followed me this far, to accept my statement about my other memories under the sodium pentafol which returned. That world was a prison. It was dreadful. We overthrew it, just as we overthrew the Nixon tyranny, but it was far more cruel, incredibly so, and there was a great battle and loss of life.

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 all right 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.

But perhaps until the book was actually released, it was better that I did not remember. Why that would be I do not know, but I have the impression that the memories were not to come to the surface until the material had been published very sincerely on the author’s part as what he believed to be fiction. Perhaps had I known, I would have been too frightened to write the novel. As it was, I was very frightened anyway. There was something about the novel that frightened me a great deal.

Or perhaps I would have just shot off my mouth and told everybody and somehow interfered with the effectiveness of that book and such other books of mine as Man in the High Castle, which were also based on residual memories. The effectiveness of those novels might have been impaired. I do not even claim there was an intended effectiveness. Perhaps there was none at all. But if there was one, and I repeat the word if emphatically, it was almost certainly to stir subliminal memories in readers back to them live.

Not a conscious life, not an entering consciousness, as in my own case, but to recall to them on a deep and profound, albeit unconscious level, what a fleece tyranny is like and how vital it is, now or then, at any time, along any time track in any world, to defeat it. In March of 1974, the really crucial moves to depose Nixon were beginning. In August, five months later, they proved successful.

It seems to me that in many ways, ideas have a life of their own. They appear to seize on people and make use of them. The idea which seized me 27 years ago and never let go of me is this. Any society in which people meddle in other people’s business is not a good society. And a state in which the government, “knows more about you than you know about yourself,” as it is expressed in my novel, For My Tears, A Policeman Said, is a state which must be overthrown.

It may be a theocracy, a fascist corporate state, or reactionary monopolistic capitalism or centralistic socialism. That aspect does not matter. And I am saying not merely it can happen here, meaning the United States, but rather it did happen here, meaning the United States. I remember, I was one of the secret Christians who fought it and at least to some extent helped overthrow it. And I am very proud of that. Proud of myself in time track A. Time track A.

The Secret Christians and the Alternate Earth

When I use the word Christian there, I do not mean Christians as they are now. I mean Christians as they were, say, 2,000 years ago, enemies of a powerful empire. When I saw Star Wars this morning, I thought to myself, déjà vu.

There is, unfortunately for me, a somber intimation which accompanies my pride in the work that I did in that alternate earth. I think that in that previous world, I did not live past March of 1974. In this track here, which I will call track B, we fought a much lighter tyranny, a far stupider one. Or perhaps we had assistance. The anterior reprogramming of one or more historical variables came to our rescue.

Sometimes I think, and this is of course pure speculation, a happy fantasy of my soul, that because of what we accomplished there, or anyhow attempted to, and very bravely, we who were directly involved were allowed to live on here, past the terminal point which brought us down in that other worse world. It is a sort of miraculous kindness.

Comprehending the Programmer

This gracious gift serves to delineate for us, for me at least, some aspects of the program. It causes me to comprehend him after a fashion. I think we cannot know what he is, but we can experience his functioning, and so can ask, what does he do? What does he resemble, not what is he, but rather what is he like. First and foremost, he controls the objects, processes, and events in our space-time world. This is for us the primary aspect, although intrinsically he may possess aspects of greater magnitude, but of less applicability to us.

I have spoken of myself as a reprogrammed variable, and I have spoken of him as the programmer and reprogram it. During a short period of time, in March of 1974, at the moment in which I was re-synthesized, I was aware perceptually, which is to say aware in an external way of his presence. At that time I had no idea what I was seeing. It resembled nothing that I had ever heard described.

It resembled plasmic energy. It had colors, it moved fast, it collected, and then dispersed. But what it was, what he was, I am not sure even now, except I can tell you that he had simulated normal objects and their processes so as to copy them, and in such an artful way as to make himself invisible within them. As the Vedantists put it, he is the fire within the flint, the razor within the razor case.

A Growing Feeling: The Dark-Haired Stranger

Later research showed me that in terms of group cultural experience, the name Brahman has been given to this omnipresent, imminent entity. One thing I really want you to know, I am aware that the claims I am making, claims of having retrieved buried memories of an ultimate present, and to have perceived the agency responsible for arranging that alternation, these claims can neither be proved, nor can they be even made to sound rational in the usual sense of the word.

It has taken me over three years to reach the point where I am willing to tell anyone but my closest friends about my experience, beginning back at the Vernal Equinox of 1974. One of the reasons motivating me to speak about it publicly at last, to openly make this claim, is a recent encounter I have undergone, which by the way bears a strange resemblance to Hawthorne Abendsen’s experience in my novel The Man in the High Castle with the woman Juliana Frank.

Juliana read Abendsen’s book about a world in which Germany and Japan and Italy, now this is a little difficult if you haven’t read the book, but he wrote a novel in which Germany, Italy, and Japan lost World War II, and he was living in a world in which they had won World War II. Juliana read Abendsen’s book about a world which the Axis lost and she felt she should tell him what she comprehended about the book. In other words, his novel was true.

Now this final scene in Man in the High Castle has been the source for a similar scene in my later story Faith of Our Fathers, where the girl Tanya Lee shows up and acquaints the protagonist with the actual reality situation, which is to say that much of his world is delusional and purposefully so. In other words, it’s a common theme in my writing that a dark haired girl shows up at the door of the protagonist and tells him that his world is delusional, that there’s something false about it.

Now in Man in the High Castle the situation is ironically reversed. The girl that comes to the door tells an author that his book of fiction is true. For several years I’ve had the feeling, a growing feeling, that one day a woman who would be a complete stranger to me would contact me and tell me that she had some information to impart to me, and then she would appear at my door just as Juliana appeared at Hawthorne Abendsen’s door, and forthwith in the gravest possible way she would tell me exactly what Juliana told Abendsen, and that is that my book, like his, was in a certain real, literal, and physical sense not fiction but the truth.

The Contact: Fiction Confirmed as Truth

Well, this did finally happen to me. I even knew that her hair would be black. I had an actual complete sense of what she would look like and what she would say. And I’m speaking of a woman who had systematically read every single novel of mine, which is more than 30 novels, as well as many of my stories, she did appear, she was a total stranger, and she did inform me of this fact that some of my fictional works were in a literal sense true.

Now I had posited in 1974, when my memories of this alternate world came back, that if these memories were authentic, that it was only a matter of time before a contact, a cautious guarded probing by someone would occur, initiated by a person who had read my book, then for one reason or another deduced the actual situation. I mean knew what the significant information was which the books and stories parrot.

Now this woman knew from my novels and stories which world I had experienced, which of the many. What she could not determine until I told her was that in February of 1975 I had passed across into a third alternative present, a third one, track C we will call it, and this was a garden or park of peace and beauty, a world superior to ours, rising into existence.

A Third World Beyond the Black Iron Prison

To her of three rather than two worlds, the black iron prison world which had been, our intermediate world in which oppression and war exist but have to a great degree been cast down, and then a third alternative world which someday, when the correct variables in our past have been reprogrammed, will materialize as a super imposition onto this one, and within which, as we awaken to it, we shall suppose that we had always lived there, the memory of this intermediate one, like that of the black iron prison world, eradicated mercifully from our memories.

The best that I can really do at this point, after having had these experiences and written these novels, is to play the role of prophet, of ancient prophets and such oracles as the Sybil at Delphi, and to talk of a wonderful garden world, much like that which once our ancestors are said to have inhabited.

In fact, I sometimes imagine it to be exactly that same world restored, as if a false trajectory of our world will eventually be fully corrected, and once more we will be where once many thousands of years ago we lived and were happy.

The Garden World: A Vision of Paradise Remembered

During the brief time I walk about in that garden world, I had the strong impression that it was a legitimate home which somehow we had lost. The time I spent there was short, about six hours of really lapsed time, but I remember it well. In the novel I wrote with Roger Zelazny, Deus Iri, I describe it toward the end, at the point where the curse is lifted from the world by the death.

It felt amazing to me about this parf-like world, this trapped sea, was the non-christian elements forming the basis of it. It was not what my Christian training had prepared me for at all.

Even when it began to phase out, I still saw sky, I saw land and dark blue smooth water, and standing by the edge of the water, a beautiful nude woman whom I recognized as Aphrodite. At that point, this other better world had diminished to a mere landscape beyond a golden rectangle doorway. The outline of the doorway pulped with a laser-like light, and it all grew smaller, and was at last gone from sight. The three-to-five doorway devouring itself into nothingness, sealing off what lay beyond.

Aphrodite and the Closing Door

I have not seen it since, but I had the firm impression that this was the next world, not of the Christians, but the arcady of the Greco-Roman world, something older and more beautiful than that which my own religion could conjure up as a lure to keep us in a state of dutiful morality and faith.

What I saw was very old and very lovely. Sky, sea, land, and a beautiful woman, and then nothing for the door had shut, and I was closed off back here. It was with a bitter sense of loss that I saw it go, saw her go really, since it all consolated about her. Aphrodite, I discovered when I…

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