The essay is in general pretty good and I enjoyed the style of it. It swerved way too far into Christianity for me though. I did enjoy the philosophical questions and takes after managing to swallow the religious rhetoric.
Having precognition-like situations has happened to a lot of people and I'll disagree with other commenters that this makes them close to schizophrenia. That's a strange thing to say IMO; most people I ever talked with had weird dreams with very specific details which they proceeded to see/hear years later randomly, long after they forgot the dream.
Is most of humanity suffering from schizophrenia then? Or maybe time as we have postulated it does not exist indeed? Who knows.
> There is something enormously powerful in a child’s ability to withstand the fraudulent.
I wish that was 100% true. There's a whole generation of kids out there who never even played with material objects save for smartphones / tablets. I dread what's ahead of them after they grow up. But maybe I am a pessimist here; humans have the unique ability to "wing it" whenever push comes to shove. That's something I admire in the human race.
The first mention of Christianity is one in which it is rejected
"In Plato’s Timaeus, God does not create the universe, as does the Christian God; He simply finds it one day. It is in a state of total chaos. God sets to work to transform the chaos into order. That idea appeals to me, and I have adapted it to fit my own intellectual needs: What if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it, slowly and secretly, into something real?"
PKD saw himself as a bit of an edgy gnostic, but in the end he was a lot more orthodox than he thought. His ideas are closer to the gospel of John than the historical gnostics.
He, like many still, have a bit of an idealized image of the gnostics, and overlook those of their ideas that are more alien today.
I am afraid the child's ability to withstand the fraudulent has been evaded by this:
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."
This has been learned and applied by all sorts of actors. It would be well if this power, and the tendency to abuse it, were better known, so that more of us would be on guard. Unfortunately, most people seem all too willing to allow the determined to take control of the language.
Having precognition-like situations has happened to a lot of people and I'll disagree with other commenters that this makes them close to schizophrenia. That's a strange thing to say IMO; most people I ever talked with had weird dreams with very specific details which they proceeded to see/hear years later randomly, long after they forgot the dream.
Is most of humanity suffering from schizophrenia then? Or maybe time as we have postulated it does not exist indeed? Who knows.
> There is something enormously powerful in a child’s ability to withstand the fraudulent.
I wish that was 100% true. There's a whole generation of kids out there who never even played with material objects save for smartphones / tablets. I dread what's ahead of them after they grow up. But maybe I am a pessimist here; humans have the unique ability to "wing it" whenever push comes to shove. That's something I admire in the human race.