It's fitting that Justin and Cameron's first in a series of conversations focused primarily on Philip K. Dick's VALIS trilogy begins with the I Ching hexagram of "striking out on one's own on foot" and ends with the hexagram associated with "navieté and youthful folly." But we don't find that out until the end of the episode. First, we enter a conversation about our personal experiences reading Dick's work where we encountered ourselves as characters of and in his texts, just as much as we were and are the books' readers. (When Justin read A Scanner Darkly more than a decade ago, he felt like he was reading his future; when Cameron read VALIS for the first time two months ago, she had the uncanny sense that Dick had written her past into existence.) This takes us into reflections on the prophetic narrative in Western Magick, illness narratives as a particular field and focus within the contemporary academy, and, finally, straight into VALIS itself, which is as much an honest account of what it's like to allow faith and direct experience (knowledge) lead you through experiences of delusion and awakening as it is an epic science-fiction novel. Along the way, we raise questions that Dick asked himself — What is time? What is the difference between conscious and unconscious suffering? Can one really beat fate and be redeemed and/or healed? If you can beat fate, can you speak about the victory? — as well as questions that VALIS helps us articulate, too — What is the relationship between writing and truth? What does it mean to live a good life? What, if anything, does this world know about that? We end with the I Ching reading we promised you at the episode's start, and there's some uncanny imagery happening in it, too. That instruction to set out alone, by foot, leaving one's vehicle behind as an offering? Well, that's exactly what Bishop Timothy Archer does in the third book in the VALIS trilogy. Does this end in folly? Redemption? Both? Our next episode on this trilogy, which also serves as part two to the previous "Who Is My Teacher?" episode, will be out in two weeks' time.
Texts Mentioned
Julie Henderson's The Somatic I Ching
Philip K. Dick's VALIS
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Alan Chapman's and Duncan Barford's WORP FM podcast series
C.G. Jung's The Red Book
C.G. Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Alan Chapman's Advanced Magick for Beginners
Aleister Crowley's The Book of Thoth
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