Our understanding of the world, the universe, and human history might be entirely misguided. An increasing number of people believe that an unseen, unknown intelligence or force could be influencing our daily lives—either assisting or hindering us—and potentially stripping away our free will.
Renowned science fiction writer Philip K. Dick had a remarkable talent for revealing alternate realities that may parallel our own. What fueled his profound insights? Who or what was the muse guiding him to envision other worlds? Dick claimed that a supernatural force entered his life, granting him the ability to exist in multiple realities simultaneously.
It was Dick who first proposed the idea that what we call reality is really a computer simulation. As John Lennon wrote in “Strawberry Fields,” “Nothing is real.” The movie franchise, “The Matrix,” is based on Dick’s ideas, though he never received any official credit for his concept from the film’s producers.
Publisher and author Timothy Green Beckley has been experiencing synchronicity since childhood. Read his memoirs of meaningful synchronicities, both happy and sad, and his belief that we are all just prisoners enclosed in the matrix Dick posited.
If we accept the existence of the matrix, does that mean we can also escape it? Can we exert free will in spite of the unknowably complex nature of the machinery that generates our reality? Read “The Matrix Control System of Philip K. Dick and the Paranormal Synchronicities of Timothy Green Beckley” and come to your own understanding.
Philip K. Dick remains one of the most revered writers in the history of the science fiction genre. His books and stories have been translated to the big screen many times, in such mega-hits as “Total Recall,” “Blade Runner,” and “The Adjustment Bureau.” Hipster director Richard Linklater did an animated version of “A Scanner Darkly” in 2006, and, as of this writing in 2017, Amazon is streaming its take on “The Man in the High Castle,” in all of its postwar topsy-turvy glory, as it posits an alternate history in which the Axis powers actually won the Second World War.
Dick is also said to have pioneered the concept behind the hit movie franchise “The Matrix.” Although never officially credited by the filmmakers, it was Dick who first conjectured that what we think of as everyday reality, the reality where you knock on a table and feel it in your knuckles, is not reality at all. Instead, we live in a computer simulation of reality where the unseen puppet masters can bend us to their will at any time. This theory, this concept, has grown in popularity in UFO and paranormal circles, due in large part to statements and research from the likes of Charles Fort (who thought we were like movable pieces on a giant chest board), UFO researcher Dr. Jacques Vallee and seminal paranormal writer John A. Keel.
The programmers/overlords “playfully” make themselves known with moments of synchronicity, with meaningful coincidences that cannot possibly have happened by mere chance. Since our lives in the matrix are all we know, it is difficult to imagine escaping from the predestined existence that has been meted out to us.
GIRDING UP HIS LOINS TO MAKE WAR ON ‘REALITY’
But Timothy Green Beckley doesn’t quite agree with that dismal, hopeless perspective. Beckley believes, as perhaps a prisoner of war might, that it is his duty to at least try to set himself free from the arbitrary control of the program’s designers. If we can imagine freedom from the matrix, does the mere act of imagining make it possible?
Such issues are dealt with, along with many others, in the recently published “The Matrix Control System of Philip K. Dick and the Paranormal Synchronicities of Timothy Green Beckley.” The title is rather long, as is the book itself, at nearly 450 pages. It is well-documented for a book on such an elusive subject and illustrated from cover to cover. Despite its length, it is written in an easy to comprehend, conversational style, with only minor references to more intellectually dense and complex figures, such as Carl Jung, whose concepts on synchronicity even his most ardent students agree can sometimes be difficult to follow.
The new book opens with an introduction by the late Dick’s widow, Tessa Dick.
“Tim Beckley has a firm handle on the nature of the strange incidents,” Tessa writes, “that occurred in the life of my husband, Philip K. Dick. Whereas many writers have chosen the easy way out, offering explanations ranging from epilepsy to drug abuse, Beckley has dug deep into the story of Phil’s life and unearthed evidence that such things really do happen to many people.”
According to Tessa, her late husband often questioned his own sanity, a form of self-doubt, which, for those who experience synchronicity and the paranormal, seems to come with the territory.
“He told stories for a living,” Tessa writes, “and he told stories for fun. He took the little anomalies of our world and spun them into alternative realities. He also warned us of the police state in which we live. The Nazis won World War II, and the Empire never ended. We must wake up and see the world as it is, not as the media present it to us. Behind the propaganda, this world is all about control.”
A LIFE-CHANGING KNOCK ON THE DOOR
The “strange incidents” that Tessa mentions above include one that I write about in the “The Matrix Control System of Philip K. Dick.”
“The visionary mysticism that would come to dominate Philip K. Dick’s final years began in 1974, with a visit from the local drugstore. It is a pivotal moment in Dick’s personal history and has been much written about and analyzed after the fact.”
Dick had recently been to see the dentist about an impacted wisdom tooth. The procedure included a dose of sodium pentothal. Next, a young woman delivered a bottle of Darvon tablets to Dick at his apartment in Fullerton, California. She was wearing a necklace with a pendant of a golden fish, an ancient Christian symbol that had been adopted by the Jesus counterculture movement of the late 1960s.
The fish pendant began to emit a golden ray of light and Dick suddenly experienced what is called “anamnesis,” the recollection of the entire sum of knowledge. It is also called “intellectual intuition,” the direct perception by the mind of a metaphysical reality behind the screens of appearance. Dick had seen the ultimate nature of what he called “true reality.”
In the following days and weeks, Dick would see psychedelic visions with phantasmagorical light shows. He also heard “voices’ and had prophetic dreams. These phenomena would continue until his death eight years later at the age of 53.
After the 1974 experience with the pendant and his sudden awakening, Dick dedicated the rest of his life to understanding what it all meant. Dick wrote a lengthy, 8,000 page analysis of the events called “Exegesis,” what he called “an attempt to understand my own understanding.”
That understanding would lead Dick to practice a form of Christianity called Gnosticism, which New York Times columnist Simon Critchley, in writing about Dick’s conversion, called “the worship of an alien God by those alienated from the world.”
Dick believed that he, along with the rest of us, were all living simultaneously in the present day as well as the time of the first Christians in Rome. The political and economic structure of our modern world is really the BIP, or Black Iron Prison, which is opposed to the spiritual redemption offered by the PTG, or Palm Tree Garden. This is again a belief heavily influenced by the Gnostics, many of whom held that the physical, material world is really the creation of the God of Evil and that we await salvation from an “alien” God, a true “extraterrestrial,” not bound up in the wickedness and oppression on our planet’s surface.
At one point, Dick’s voices and visions drove him to attempt suicide and he was placed in a mental hospital.
“When I believe, I am crazy,” he wrote. “When I don’t believe, I suffer psychotic depression.”
But elsewhere Dick says more optimistically, “I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane.”
There is, of course, the tritely familiar expression that there is a fine line between genius and insanity. Philosophers have also argued that there is a fine line between madness and genuine religious experience. Could Dick’s “alien God” truly free us from the Matrix? Did Dick mark a path to freedom that we might one day follow?
THE STRANGE UPS AND DOWNS OF SYNCHRONICITY
The second part of the new book’s title is “The Paranormal Synchronicities of Timothy Green Beckley,” which Beckley’s chapters deliver on big time.
As a memoirist of meaningful coincidence, Beckley has few, if any equals. His experiences with synchronicity began in his childhood and continue to the present day. His life is saturated with moments that he believes force him to acknowledge the invisible maker of all things in the matrix.
Sometimes the stories are lighthearted, like the time Beckley was working for a porn magazine to make ends meet and got the idea to hold a contest in which the prize was a porn star’s panties. Of the two hundred or so entries received, the winner turned out to be a New York City cab driver. The cabbie visited the magazine’s office in Times Square and was photographed receiving his prize, after which the hack left for home with his newfound treasure.
“Never figured I would have the opportunity to run into him again,” Beckley writes. “Why would I?”
Four years later, Beckley was out roaming the city rather late at night when he heard a horn honk and a yellow vehicle pulled over to the curb in front of him. It was a taxi, driven by the same man who had won the star’s panties.
“With a beaming smile,” Beckley writes, “he points to the rearview mirror and there, hanging where all his out-of-town passengers can see, are the porn star’s most intimate apparel. She was really touched when I told her about my meeting up with the lucky grand prize winner. I guess you can say that some synchronicities are more personal than others. Sometimes the matrix does share an intimate – or intimidating – moment with us all.”
SYNCHRONIZED WITH TRAGEDY
Perhaps one of the “intimidating” moments of Beckley’s experiences with the matrix would involve Philip K. Dick and an Episcopal clergyman named Bishop James Pike. In 1966, Pike performed the wedding ceremony for Dick and his fourth wife, Nancy Herbert.
Pike was himself an anomaly. He was under fire from the church for what were considered at the time to be “radical” views, like the ordination of women to the priesthood, racial desegregation and the acceptance of LGBT people within the mainline churches. Pike also had controversial opinions on the Virgin Birth, the Second Coming of Jesus and other basic church doctrines.
A few months before the bishop officiated at Dick’s wedding, Pike’s son committed suicide. The young man had been residing in a single room in a hotel off Broadway in midtown Manhattan. He had been depressed, using drugs, and just couldn’t take it anymore.
A friend of Beckley’s, a woman named Sandra, whose family lived in an apartment next door to young Pike’s, said the condition of the room had been “messy” in the aftermath of Pike’s use of a handgun to take his own life.
“But I didn’t realize,” Beckley said, “until I spoke to Sandra recently, that I had slept in the very room where the tragic event had taken place.”
The room had eventually been merged with the apartment rented by Sandra’s family and Beckley had stayed there many times. But no one had ever told him about the history of Room 429.
There is a lot more to the story Beckley has to tell about Dick, Pike and Pike’s son, events that would come to involve a well-known spiritualist and medium named the Reverend Arthur Ford as well as Diamond Jim Brady, the dapper man-about-town of the early 20th century. One should read the new book for the full story, as Beckley recounts a chain of events that is both amazing and nightmarish but which cannot be briefly summed up in the space allotted for this article.
TRANSCENDING THE MATRIX
“The Matrix Control System of Philip K. Dick and the Paranormal Synchronicities of Timothy Green Beckley” also offers contributions from an excellent cast of paranormal writers and researchers, to include Tim Swartz, Brad Steiger, Nick Redfern, Diane Tessman, Valerie D’Orazio, Brent Raynes, Cynthia Cirile, Hercules Invictus and Joseph Green.
The various authors discuss their own experiences with synchronicity as well as provide an overview of some of the “real-world” factors that support Dick’s concept that our reality has been preprogrammed by computer “designers” we can barely conceive of as existing, let alone claim to understand.
Our existence means something. It is important to us, even if we live in a mechanized contrivance that is to some extent basically indifferent to our struggles and hardships. Perhaps, by coming to understand what synchronicity really is, we will be taking that first step to a truly free form of consciousness that transcends the matrix entirely. Timothy Green Beckley, for one, certainly hopes so.
By Sean Casteel, source: Spectral Vision
