The Great Satanic Blasphemy *** bad kitty ***

I found this interesting and wanted to share it.

The following excerpt is taken from "Everything is Under Control" by Robert Anton Wilson

"The Great Satanic Blasphemy" is an essay by Phillip K. Dick, America's weirdest science-fiction writer. After 1973, Dick almost stopped writing science-fiction because he became too busy living in it, but he wrote thousands of pages of essays on his experiences in "orthogonal time" and other alterd states, and "The Great Satanic Blasphemy" ranks high among them, and among Cosmic Conspiracy theories in general.

This essay holds that we (you and me, all of us) are "pluri-forms" of God and thus gods ourselves: divine emanations "descended to this prison world, voluntarily losing our memory, identity and supernatural powers" but still capable of regaining them. This notion that "we shall be as gods," Dick acknowledges, is condemned as the Original Sin by orthodox Christian theology - the "sin of pride" for which we fell. Dick denies that we sinned or fell: We came here voluntarily to redeem this "prison world" and reunite it with the Divine.

The "prison world", also called the Black Iron Prison in some of Dick's fiction, represents all that we consider reality. It is not real at all, and doesn't exist in any sense; it is an enormous fake maintained by "the master magician, lord of the dark realm who poses as the creator."

The unreal world, or prison world, has no justice or sense of logic in it; hence, those who believe it is the only world either become atheists or embrace some kind of metaphysics that accepts the dark lord as the creator despite the horrors of the (alleged) creation. True religion begins when we begin to remember our starry heritage and lord of the light, of whom we are pluriforms, and then we can begin our true misison here, bringing light into the darkness, sanity into the irrational, justice into the chaotic, reality to the unreal.

Dick recognizes that something very similar to this model or narrative appears in Gnosticism and Taoism; it also appears in Aleister Crowley; and Christian critics of New Age ideas indeed consider it a Great Satanic Blasphemy. Basically, the quesiton such models raise is: Can we worship the God of this world, or must we posit a better world somewhere to find a God worthy of worship?

I won't necessarily agree with this but I always find it interesting to hear what others believe.