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i prefer the term 'human.'

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Middleman said:
I'm a Satanic Christian... or is it Christian Satanist?



Propaganda:

Because of its cryptic language, and because of its extensive psychological subtext, I have decided to provide an annotated version of Philip K Dick's Ten Principles of the Gnostic Revelation, in order to clarify some of the more confusing parts.

Dick has a proclivity for using fiction to explain his theological and philosophical ideas. In this sense, he falls smack in line with the Classical Gnostics, who turned to myth to examine truths that were difficult to examine with conventional scriptural literature. The following ten principles, though labeled principles of 'the gnostic revelation', are actually particular to the Classical Gnostics and their derivative traditions, rather than being representative of gnosticism as a whole (which includes Kabbalah, Sufism, Hermeticism, and others).

1. The creator of this world is demented.

Read: The creator of this PERCEPTUAL world is demented.

A theme that runs throughout all of Dick's works is that the Universe is largely what we make of it perceptually, since our major apparatus for interpreting it, the mind, has such a strong influence on our conception of reality. This does not mean that what you believe will manifest as objective truth, but instead that what you believe will shape your reality for your perception.

In a Jungian sense, the Demiurge (Dick's 'creator') is the ego and its projections, not a literal creator of the world. The being reported in the Old Testament scriptures, who the Classical Gnostics accused of representing the Demiurge, are not God, but the Israelites' conception of Him, tainted by their collective cultural ego's projections. If Jung's interpretation were to be applied to Dick's, it can be seen how the "creator" of this perceptual world is the psyche, and the god (Demiurge) that people mistake for the True God is actually a projection of the ego.

It is no wonder that different cultures' "Gods" represent their cultural inclinations. It is also noteworthy that all monotheistic cultures claim to be the one and only chosen people of God!

2. The world is not as it appears, in order to hide the evil in it, a delusive veil obscuring it and the deranged deity.

Dick further elaborates on his theme of perception. The veil he describes is the ego (in Jungian terms), which erects an elaborate mental matrix for navigating physical existence. By erecting this perceptual matrix, the ego is able to navigate the physical world, but confuses the perceptual matrix with objective reality.

This veil is referred to as maya in Hinduism, and denotes the illusion of a purely physical and mental existence that is brought about by immersion in the material world.

3. There is another, better realm of God, and all our efforts are to be directed toward
a. returning there
b. bringing it here

To the best of my knowledge the "better realm" refers to the spiritual realm, or the realm of Platonic ideals. Though this could be interpreted physically, which might mean striving to achieve some sort of worldly utopian society, Dick's work shows that he has always been suspicious of utopian idealism. In this case, the above principle is most likely another perceptual riddle. I think it likely that the "better realm of God" that Dick refers to is a spiritual realm that is established in the human being.

4. Our actual lives stretch thousands of years back, and we can be made to remember our origin in the stars.

Dick theorized that human spirits are constantly incarnated across the expanse of history. It would be wrong to say that Dick believes in reincarnation, and more accurate to say that he did not believe that the nature of time was objectively linear, and that multiple human existences overlap. Seeing time as an abstraction of perception rather than a literal dimension, Dick felt that his multiple lives were simultaneous, and through his experience of anamnesis, the loss of forgetting, was able to live his multiple lives as if they were overlapping presently.

5. Each of us has a divine counterpart unfallen who can reach a hand down to us to awaken us. This other personality is the authentic waking self; the one we have now is asleep and minor. We are in fact asleep, and in the hands of a dangerous magician disguised as a good god, the deranged creator deity. The bleakness, the evil and pain in this world, the fact that it is a deterministic prison controlled by the demented creator causes us willingly to split with the reality principle early in life, and so to speak willingly fall asleep in delusion.

Jung referred to this counterpart as "Self," self with a capital 'S.' This counterpart was to Jung an essential discovery of spiritual selfhood, as opposed to the psychic selfhood endowed by the ego. Many Gnostics speak of an unfallen divine twin that guides the earth-bound human soul in the same way that Dick's "divine counterpart" informs and acts to save the "waking self."

The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel described a similar concept in his abysmally long work, The Phenomenology of Spirit. Dick's divine counterpart resembles Hegel's "Unchangeable" self, or a Platonic ideal of what the self can become. Dick's "waking self," or the ego, is Hegel's "Changeable" self, or the physical and mental present reality that strives to emulate the Unchangeable.

6. You can pass from the delusional prison world into the peaceful kingdom if the True Good God places you under His grace and allows you to see reality through His eyes.

Read: Dispelling the veil cast by the perceptions of the mind/ego restored to the human spirit what Dick believed was referred to as the Kingdom of Heaven or Reign of God in the New Testament.

7. Christ gave, rather than received, revelation; he taught his followers how to enter the kingdom while still alive, where other mystery religions only bring about amnesis: knowledge of it at the "other time" in "the other realm," not here. He causes it to come here, and is the living agency to the Sole Good God (i.e. the Logos).

Christ taught knowledge of the pneuma, or the part of the soul that we share with God. By becoming conscious of this divine spark within us, we are able to truly begin an effort to achieve Imitatio Christi, imitation of Christ. This is the ressurection of the dead in gnostic terminology: the metamorphosis from the world of the dualistic and illusion-bound psyche into the world of holism and pneuma. (For a great treatment of gnostic reason & logic, check out William Keifert's webpage on Christian Gnosticism).

8. Probably the real, secret Christian church still exists, long underground, with the living Corpus Christi as its head or ruler, the members absorbed into it. Through participation in it they probably have vast, seemingly magical powers.

This is truly my favorite principle, probably because it shows off Dick's science-fictionalized eccentricity the most, which I find remarkably endearing. It is also the most theoretical principle, the result of inspired musing more than the examination psychological or theological data, which Dick admits to with his use of the words "probably" and "seemingly." If such an organization really exists, email me, for the love of God.

9. The division into "two times" (good and evil) and "two realms" (good and evil) will abruptly end with victory for the good time here, as the presently invisible kingdom separates and becomes visible. We cannot know the date.

Again, this principle elaborates on Dick's theme of perceptual disallusionment. Upon achieving acknowledgement of the Kingdom of God within every human soul, the problems that plague the world as the result of dualist logic ("us vs them" conflicts, for instance) will eventually fade away and disappear.

(See William Keifert's page for an extensive examination of dualist logic vs. gnostic logic)

10. During this time period we are on the sifting bridge being judged according to which power we give allegiance to, the deranged creator demiurge of this world or the One Good God and his kingdom, whom we know through Christ.

Ego or spirit, folks? Dick is pointing out that humanity has a choice between the ego-projected "Demiurge" of cash and wars or the True Transcendent God of Christ.

I have often wondered about our current time in history. Since the time of Christ, somebody somewhere has always demanded that "now" was Judgement Day, so such claims have to be taken with a grain of salt (IE a philosophical razor). In line with Dick and the Gnostics, I hold that judgement day is already nigh, always has been, and that the change required of us is a spiritual and perceptual one, not one of this physical world. But is this the whole picture anymore? Our world is plagued by a population numbering higher than anything seen in history, and our technology has effectively become the means to either save us or eradicate us wholesale. It may be so that for the first time in history, our physical worldly well-being and our individual spiritual well-being go hand in hand. Can we escape destruction without a radical change in mentality?

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b0red5tiff said:
can't then all christians be called humanists?

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CaptainH13 said:
Theistic satanist are a fucking joke. They are no different than Christians.

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