[skhm]

Flow My Tears is incredible and also in https://urbigenous.net/library/how_to_build.html PKD's anecdote about a pivotal scene happening in is own life has always fascinated me.

Objectively, I know this was a coincidence (like the events that lead to PKD's belief in VALIS) - but it's fun to wander down thoughtways where perhaps just as complexity emerges from well-patterned subatomic lattices, so might that patterning emerge at higher levels of emergence - geodes that look similar, parallel evolution, and then at a level humans can recognise (as coincidence or synchronicity), and maybe at other higher and equally unrecognisable levels, in a dance between fractal cosmoi.

But then one has to live in the world, and do science, and pay rent, and one isn't meant to dwell in such powerful memetic rooms for long.

[skhm]

On holding these conflicting beliefs:

"I can just picture myself being examined by a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist says, “What year is it?” And I reply, “A.D. 50.” The psychiatrist blinks and then asks, “And where are you?” I reply, “In Judaea.” “Where the heck is that?” the psychiatrist asks. “It’s part of the Roman Empire,” I would have to answer. “Do you know who is President?” the psychiatrist would ask, and I would answer, “The Procurator Felix.” “You’re pretty sure about this?” the psychiatrist would ask, meanwhile giving a covert signal to two very large psych techs. “Yep,” I’d replay. “Unless Felix has stepped down and had been replaced by the Procurator Festus. You see, Saint Paul was held by Felix for —” “Who told you all this?” the psychiatrist would break in, irritably, and I would reply, “The Holy Spirit.” And after that I’d be in the rubber room, inside gazing out, and knowing exactly how come I was there. Everything in that conversation would be true, in a sense, although palpably not true in another. I know perfectly well that the date is 1978 and that Jimmy Carter is President and that I live in Santa Ana, California, in the United States. I even know how to get from my apartment to Disneyland, a fact I can’t seem to forget. And surely no Disneyland existed back at the time of Saint Paul.

So, if I force myself to be very rational and reasonable, and all those other good things, I must admit that the existence of Disneyland (which I know is real) proves that we are not living in Judaea in A.D. 50. The idea of Saint Paul whirling around in the giant teacups while composing First Corinthians, as Paris TV films him with a telephoto lens — that just can’t be. Saint Paul would never go near Disneyland. Only children, tourists, and visiting Soviet high officials ever go to Disneyland. Saints do not."