Bruce Charlton's Notions

Starting when he was forty-five years old, and continuing from February 1974 for the last eight years of his life; Philip K Dick had many religious experiences; which became the focus of his thinking and writing in his last novels and the philosophical notations and letters than have survived as the Exegesis.

This can be understood as a specific example of one of the many ways that God can work to stimulate a man to orientate towards Jesus Christ (i.e. salvation, after death), and to learn spiritually during this mortal life (i.e. theosis). 

PKD's experiences led to a conviction that he was receiving a mass of vitally important information, and the Exegesis records some of his struggles to understand and "deal with" this deluge of incomprehensible input. 

This involved casting-about widely, reading and talking, following hunches, seeking appropriate and adequate concepts, trying out multiple hypotheses: and writing, writing, writing... 

The "conventional wisdom" is that PKD was engaged in wild speculations, circular or self-contradictory notions; was chasing a will-o-the-wisp - and that, in the end, he failed to reach any valid destination.  

But I suggest that - understood in an ultimate sense - PKD was doing pretty-much what God hoped he would do, and that very likely he did achieve a great deal of what he most needed to achieve at the spiritual level. 

God's intent with some men - perhaps many of us - is to galvanize us to to active spiritual work; orientated-towards God, Jesus Christ, and divine creation - and to learn from this process by trial-and-error. 

The terminus of such a process is not some version of "enlightenment" in this world... of unending bliss without experienced suffering...

Nor is it achieving a settled and complete understanding (which, after all, could only be a grossly simplified model of reality)...

Instead; the terminus aimed-at is our mortal death and that which follows thereafter. 

The divine intent (I infer) is twofold: To point us towards salvation; salvation being that we embrace the gift of resurrection offered by Jesus after our death. 

And further; before our death - during this mortal life to gain spiritual learning; learning that will accumulate to benefit our divine-self-to-come; that is, after salvation. This learning from the experiences of mortal life is theosis - because it results in (eventually, not during mortal life) becoming more God-like in our nature. 

This theosis-learning during mortal life needs to be understood in a spiritual sense, because it is not about memory - and is indeed not affected by the brain, body, decay, disease, death or any material circumstances that follows after the spiritual learning. 

Even if what we have learned is immediately forgotten - in this-world, in a material sense; nonetheless, if it is significant for our eternal resurrected and Heavenly life - it is spiritually retained, potentially for eternity; so long as salvation is embraced in the end.  

My interpretation of Philip K Dick's eight years of changing his mind, trying-out innumerable bizarre notions, following multiple blind-alleys, making many mistakes - as well as having transcendent insights, and (briefly) achieving Christian certainties - can therefore best be understood as a valid and appropriate response to his mysterious, perplexing and God-given experiences from February 1974. 

Some would say that God 'ought' to make Himself clear. That God would not really operate in ways that are confusing or ambiguous. And that Men ought to be aiming at some settled and clear and correct understanding. 

Yet, surely it counts as a major success for God; that from early 1974, PKD uprooted and re-orientated his life; that he worked many hours of most nights at his self-imposed task of understanding his spiritual experiences; that he focused (again and again) on understanding Jesus Christ - His real nature, His goals on earth and in Heaven... 

What seems in this-worldly terms to be just thrashing around in philosophy and theology; at times being plagued by obsessive or even psychotic preoccupations; at times making bad lifestyle choices; afflicted by wide mood swings -- as well as experiencing extreme joy, considerable serenity, performing acts of loving kindness, laced with self-deprecating humour, and much else that is positive...

What seems to be misplaced activity or avoidant behavior according to a pragmatic interpretation; may be, in an ultimate sense, not-far-from being the best possible life attainable by the actual man Philip K Dick; given his innate nature, abilities and limitations. 

That is: a life of spiritual learning (theosis) enriching the final choice of disposition with salvation. 

In the past couple of months I have read/ listened-to a dozen Philip K Dick novels, and most of the Exegesis - his philosophical and spiritual journal written during his last eight years. I haven't enjoyed a fiction writer so much, in such quantity, for several years. Certainly, I appreciate his work more fully this time round than when I read a batch of his novels more than thirty-five years ago (triggered by watching Blade Runner - one of the half-dozen best movies I've ever seen).

Although there are several of his important works still to go (I'm 'simultaneously' reading three of them at present) I think I have by-now achieved a reasonable overview.

In particular; I have noticed that his very best novels are from the 1960s, and before the spiritual revelations that began abruptly in February and March 1974, continued through the rest of his life - and led to his almost daily and extensive work recorded in the Exegesis - which was the attempt to make sense of what was happening to him, and understand the implications.

It seems to me that the novels published after 1974 are mostly interesting and worthwhile (especially VALIS), but they lack the fluency and coherence of Dick's best 1960s novels such as Man in the High Castle, Dr Bloodmoney, Three Stigmata of Palmar Eldrich, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Martian Time Slip and Ubik. In particular, the final two novels - Divine Invasion and Transmigration of Timothy Archer - are not satifying as a whole, and have a certain flatness and lack of empathic characters.

My conclusion is that Exegesis was receiving PKD's best efforts, and the attempts to spin-off novels from it were contrived, over-planned. VALIS is something of an exception, being composed of lightly fictionalised 'excerpts' from Exegesis - however, I did not find the ending satisfying, and I enjoyed the unselfconsciousness and energy of the original, more than the same material when put into fiction.

I feel that VALIS - by means of the literary conceits of its structure - erects a barrier of 'deniability' between the material and the reader. In particular, in all of Dick's last three works, the possibility of a genuine contact with the divine is put into brackets, and the materialist explanations seem to triumph overall. Whereas in the Exegesis, the most high intensity and ecstatic sections are without doubt those when PKD knows (albeit temporarily) that he has had real revelations of the truth.

Dick's mainstream critics and admirers, and most of his social circle, are normal modern Leftists for whom the divine is excluded by assumption; and who therefore necessarily interpret every strange experience as generated by insanity, drug use or over-imaginative wish-fulfilment.

(From what I have seen, so far) Perhaps only his friend, the author Tim Powers (a Roman Catholic) was able and willing to acknowledge that what Dick experienced included genuine divine revelations. And only when this possibility is recognised, can the Exegesis be appreciated as fully as it deserves.

Exegesis - a 2011 edited selection of  Philip K Dick's diary from the last eight years of his life (between 1974 and 1982) - has become a key text for me. Although I had never looked at it until last autumn, Exegesis is one of only three works that I have in threefold: as paper copy, Kindle and audiobook (the others are Hobbit/ Lord of the Rings, and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell).

The great value for me has been stimulation: I find Exegesis to be energising and enthusing. Indeed; it helped dig me out from a spell of directionless demotivation  - so I feel gratitude toward it.

A fair bit of it is also very interesting and enlightening; although ultimately I regard most of it as wrong (after all, I live in a minority of one). Nonetheless this does not trouble me in the slightest. Exegesis is such an honest work - so raw and energetic, intelligent and exploratory in its genuine philosophising, that this is all to the good.


Consequently; I have also gone back and re-read the PKD novels that I encountered in the middle 1980s; and read several others (or else listened as audiobooks). One of his novels - Valis - was published in 1978, in the middle of the Exegesis period, and using many of the events and ideas from that book.  Indeed, most PKD fans read Exegesis through the lens of Valis.

Valis is a work of art, rather than a collection of notes - and some find it PKD's best novel. But I find Valis much less valuable than Exegesis, because it strikes me as less honest. The philosophical fireworks are presented through the screen of a skeptical, indeed cynical, narrator - and in a distanced, ironic fashion. Whereas from Exegesis I 'know' that these were of burning and urgent significance, at the time they happened; with Vlais the ideas seem (and are) secondhand.

Likewise the lectures and essays of that period - such as "How to build a universe that doesn't fall apart two days later". In making this speech/ essay for public consumption; PKD distanced himself from the daily (nightly) reality of his thinking; made it fit into a schema - which in real life, it never did.


Therefore, while I fully realise that Exegesis would not appeal at all to most people (indeed, I am surprised anybody except me finds it worth reading!) I regard it as without doubt the best thing of PKD's later years.

This is also because I find that all of PKD's very best novels - by my estimation - to have been published in a brief period of just five years between The Man in the High Castle of 1961 and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in 1966. There were indeed seventeen novels (!) published in these years - but the best I have read (and I haven't read them all) are Dr Bloodmoney, The Three Stigmata of Palmar Eldritch, and The Penultimate Truth.

The earlier novels I have sampled are rather poorly written and did not keep my attention; the later novels are sometimes very good in parts (e.g. Ubik, Maze of death, Flow my tears) but do not satisfy as a whole.


My conclusion is that Dick's central and dominating preoccupation moved from fiction to philosophy as he got older; and the type of unsystematic philosophy he did (or rather lived) was unpublishable at that time; although in more recent years he might well have blogged it - much as I do. As a young man, therefore, PKD thought via stories; as a middle aged man he thought via philosophy.

To make a living, the older PKD repackaged his philosophy into novels, stories, speeches, essays - but these were secondary to the solitaary, self-addressed reflections that are sampled by Exegesis. And when he tried to 'use' these primary notes as source material; the need to be systematic, the need to distance himself from the embarrassing honesty and rawness of the original, the attempt to justify and persuade others... all these requirements got in the way, and diminished the quality; while at the same time creating work that admittedly some fans regard as his best.

Thus Ubik, A Scanner Darkly or Valis are often asserted to be the peak of PKD's achievement - and for some people this presumably is the case. But not for me. I regard these as hybrid works, somewhat contrived and unspontaneous, and never fully successful.

PKD worked best when he worked fast (very fast) - both as a fiction writer (staying awake for several consecutive days of solid typing, using amphetamines); and also as a philosopher: sometimes generating many thousands of words of Exegesis in marathon nocturnal sessions.

Certainly not a healthy life: and not a healthy man - but I am grateful for his achievement.

[18:84] I state: the passage of time since “Acts of the Apostles” is spurious. That is it. That is the premise derived from empirical experience. Whatever our senses tell us means nothing. Circular time, not linear time, is involved. 

If you have ever done any sustained metaphysical thinking - i.e. thinking about the ultimate nature of reality - then you will soon have reached the point of either 'It Just Is', or an infinite regress - infinities of infinities...


I don't think there can be any other terminus of thinking.

If we keep asking why, seeking explanations; it seems we must always reach a point at which we just must accept 'because that's the way things are'. Or, if we cannot or will not accept some kind of 'first cause' that Just Is; then we arrive at some kind of infinite regress along the lines of of :"this, because that, because another, and another, and another - without end...".


What does this mean? Well, for Philip K Dick (at least in some moods) it meant that infinite-regression was how God appeared to us; it was the evidence for God - but not evidence in the form of a conclusive proof; but as a kind of soft, probablistic, practical matter.

Since this problem does not go-away and cannot be eluded, we must either engage in a kind of systematic self-blinding and refusal even to ask the questions (which is the course taken by the modern world) - or else must consciously make an assumption relating to the purpose and meaning of reality (or the lack of purpose and meaning).


The problem does not go away, the assumptions stay 'assumed' - we are always pushed-back onto our own responsibility - or, most often,  our own refusal to take responsibility; our self-chosen enslavement of soul.


On November 17, 1980; Philip K Dick made this exploration in his Exegesis notebooks (1:262) - published 2011. I have lightly edited this for clarity: 


God manifested himself to me as the infinite void; but it was not the abyss; it was the vault of heaven, with blue sky and wisps of white clouds. He was not some foreign God but the God of my fathers. He was loving and kind and he had personality. 

He said, “You suffer a little now in life; it is little compared with the great joys, the bliss that awaits you. Do you think I in my theodicy [i.e. that discourse on the justic of God, relating to goodness and suffering] would allow you to suffer greatly in proportion to your reward?” He made me aware, then, of the bliss that would come; it was infinite and sweet. 


He said, “I am the infinite. I will show you. Where I am, infinity is; where infinity is, there I am. Construct lines of reasoning by which to understand your mystical-religious experience in 1974. I will enter the field against their shifting nature. You think they are logical but they are not; they are infinitely creative.” 

I thought a thought and then an infinite regression of theses and countertheses came into being. God said, “Here I am; here is infinity.” 

I thought another explanation; again an infinite series of thoughts split-off in dialectical antithetical interaction. God said, “Here is infinity; here I am.” 

I thought, then, an infinite number of explanations, in succession, that explained the experiences of 1974; each single one of them yielded up an infinite progression of flipflops, of thesis and antithesis, forever. Each time, God said, “Here is infin- ity. Here, then, I am.” 

I tried for an infinite number of times; each time an infinite regress was set off and each time God said, “Infinity. Hence I am here.” 


Then he said, “Every thought loads to infinity, does it not? Find one that doesn’t.” I tried forever. All led to an infinitude of regress, of the dialectic, of thesis, antithe- sis and new synthesis. Each time, God said, “Here is infinity; here am I. Try again.” 

I tried forever. Always it ended with God saying, “Infinity and myself; I am here.” 

I saw, then, a Hebrew letter with many shafts, and all the shafts led to a common outlet; that outlet or conclusion was infinity. God said, “That is myself. I am infinity. Where infinity is, there am I; where I am, there is infinity. 

"All roads - all explanations for 1974 - lead to an infinity of Yes-No, This or That, On-Off, One- Zero, Yin-Yang, the dialectic, infinity upon infinity; an infinity of infinities. 

"I am everywhere and all roads lead to me; omniae viae ad Deum ducent [all roads lead to God]. Try again. Think of another possible explanation for 1974.” I did; it led to an infinity of regress, of thesis and antithesis and new synthesis. 


"This is not logic,” God said. “Do not think in terms of absolute theories; think instead in terms of probabilities. Watch where the piles heap-up, of the same theory essentially repeating itself. Count the number of punch cards in each pile. Which pile is highest? 

"You can never know for sure what 1974 was. What, then, is statistically most probable? Which is to say, which pile is highest? 

"Here is your clue: every theory leads to an infinity (of regression, of thesis and antithesis and new synthesis). 

"What, then, is the probability that I am the cause of 1974, since, where infinity is, there I am? 


"You doubt; you are the doubt as in: They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly I am the wings. I am the doubter and the doubt [From the poem “Brahma” by Ralph Waldo Emerson]. 

“You are not the doubter; you are the doubt itself. So do not try to know; you cannot know. 

"Guess on the basis of the highest pile of computer punch cards. There is an infinite stack in the heap marked INFINITY, and I have equated infinity with me. What, then, in the chance that it is me? 


"You cannot be positive; you will doubt. But what is your guess?” 

I said, “Probably it is you, since there is an infinity of Infinities forming before me.” 

“There is the answer, the only one you will ever have,” God said.

From Philip K Dick: 

The cyclic repetition which takes place in the Mass governs also the concept of why the Mass is spoken and what it is about. 

Our God died, and was buried (gone), but then He returned. 

So saying, the priest therewith becomes Christ, proving the authenticity, the rightness, of the whole religion and the whole service...

It is as if each time the Mass (or Last Supper, 'in remembrance of Me') was secretly celebrated by the early Christians, they got to unfold their miracle, about Jesus, for their own eyes alone, invisible to the (Roman-secular) world...

I can imagine the impact in the early days of the 'fish' Christians when they gathered in stealth to perform the feast of agape. 

New people who had never known Jesus, could be brought in one by one, and this shown to them. 

Suddenly he would be there! Only not as a mortal but in his Transformed state... 

He would be all through them, the celebrants. "Time would be abnegated". 

Excerpted and edited from 5:127 of Exegesis (2011) by Philip K Dick. 

The above is Philip K Dick's imagined account of the effect of the Mass among the earliest church Christians. 

I find it broadly very plausible as an account of how Men of that era - with the consciousness of that era - would have experienced this ritual-ceremony: i.e. as an overwhelmingly powerful re-living of the events being re-enacted.

If so, it is easy to see how the 'institutional church' emerged and grew among the 'secret Christians' (with their Ichthys symbol of the 'fish' of Christ). 

If then we imagine the Mass in the era of the late Middle Ages, when Men's consciousness had developed further in the direction of self-awareness, individualism, and alienation from the group and the world. 

I think we can intuit that the ceremony of the Mass must, by about 1500, have lost a great deal of its original effect. Because if it had not lost effect, then the Reformation questioning, and then denying, of the Christ-role of the priest, and the presence of Christ in the bread and wine, could not plausibly have been challenged. 

Wind-ahead another half-millennium to this modern era; when Men have become almost wholly cut-off from God, the divine, creation, in denial of the soul - and have become sometimes wholly-materialistic and this-worldly; and we can see that the Mass has lost all objective force.

The Mass no longer overwhelms the celebrants, it no longer imposes the experience of being in another time and place - but the ritual now requires active and purposive engagement from the participants. 

Time is - for most people, most of the time - no longer 'abnegated'; but instead the Mass takes place within the time and concerns of the mainstream secular world. 

Consequently the Mass is felt as no longer separate-from, nor higher-than, worldly church affairs - but has become highly assimilated to mundane attitudes and thinking.

Therefore, it was natural to the consciousness of modern Man that when an alleged global pandemic was reported; even (especially?) Catholics believed that all the churches of the world ought to be closed-down - until such a time as the secular authorities declared it 'safe'. 

This is an example of how a metaphysical assumption of the development of human consciousness through history may help us to understand the changes in Christian perceptions, attitudes, beliefs and practices since the time of Jesus; and may also help us to understand how we might positively respond to such changes. 

From The Exegesis by Philip K Dick - written May 1981; section 79:1-81 (page 737) - The Exegesis was a private journal written in the last eight years of PKD's life (1974-82). Cuts are indicated by ...

Dick is discussing Angel Archer - the first person protagonist in his last novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (TTA), 1982 - who PKD reveals was based-on ULG. He had just finished TTA at the time of this writing, and (in this entry!) regarded it as his best ever work. 

PKD and Ursula Le Guin were both in the class of 1947 at Berkeley High School, California but did not meet until later. They corresponded and had great mutual respect as leading US writers of fantasy and science fiction. ULG had at one time stated publicly that she feared for PKD's sanity. 

**

What I have shown [in TTA] is what the best intellectual mind - as correctly represented by a young Berkeley intellectual woman - can do and cannot do; it can go so far... but it can go no farther - as represented by her rejection of Christ (yes, Christ!) at the end: she walks away. 

This is a penetrating analysis of the intellectual mind: what it can do (a very great deal and what it can't do (make the final leap). And she knows it. 

This is what the "Bishop Archer" book is about about: Angel is a pure aesthetic intellectual, able to go so far but unable to make the final leap to Christ. Thus "Berkeley" (as paradigm of the intellectual, sensitive mind) is both lauded and stigmatized...

Thus one deduces the existence of the divine by its absence: the failure of her final leap (i.e. my meta abstraction)...

Bishop Archer as Bill calls to her but she does not hear. It is not reasonable. Angel fell short, missed the mark, and this is what constitutes sin, this falling short of the mark... What we are sure of is that although Angel came close she did not [make it]; thus I demonstrate the limits of reason. 

What is needed is an orthogonal breakthrough, which I achieved (in 2-3-74 [i.e. February and March, 1974 - which led to writing the Exegesis]). 

Ursula [Le Guin] is the basis of Angel: many virtues but in the end self-limiting.

The mind "knows" in advance what is possible and what is impossible: it is intelligent, rational, educated and tender; but it is not devout. It does not know how to capitulate to the impossible and accept it as real.

 **

Note from BGC: Here PKD diagnoses a very common problem among some of the best 'minds' of the past two centuries; and puts his finger on the reason. 

The above quote “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” comes from a Philip K Dick essay; but PKD himself was not happy about that definition - and it is frequently refuted so in his own fiction and the Exegesis. 

It is being refuted on a daily basis in 2020. 

 

To define reality in terms of 'experience' is a pragmatic definition; the idea that reality will bite whoever denies it, and reward whoever honours it. 

But this, in the end (if you pursue it), this principle can be seen to reduce to "reality is whatever is expedient". What 'works' cannot atheoretically be distinguished from 'what is expedient'. Always a causal path must be inferred. 

And Expediency is, substantially, a matter of power. 

 

Furthermore, the assumption is that when reality bites, we will know it is reality. But this is obviously not the case in a world where government, education, major corporations and the mass media are all speaking from the same script. 

When reality is-biting, it may be denied that this is a bite, the pain can be attributed to some other cause; because there are no 'facts' without interpretation. 

Interpretation can deny the factuality of a fact in one direction; or make a lie, or an abstraction, into 'a fact' in the other direction - and people cannot usually tell the difference (nor do they care to try)

 

Power can make almost anything expedient, at least in the short term; for example believing that men and women can change sex. 

This is made true, according to pragmatic definitions, because those who sustain it are rewarded and those who deny it are punished. And that kind of in-your-face reality doesn't go away - at least not in the medium term of years and decades.

And power can - much more easily - make almost anything inexpedient - therefore 'un-true'; even when some-thing is supported by (for example) a century's worth of uncontradicted scientific evidence - such as class or racial differences in 'g' (general intelligence, measured by IQ). 

Many things that happened and are real - real according to science, personal experience and common sense - have been made to go away by the combined efforts of education, government, laws and the mass media.

 

So power can make anything true and anything untrue by PKD's definition - if we define truth according to our practical, everyday experience of things. 

This is because there are no facts without theories - and no theories without assumptions. 

And assumptions can be smuggled into culture, and minds, either by false arguments or by covertly concealing them in political communications, laws and workplace regulations, news stories, TV dramas, movies etc. CS Lewis called this Bulverism, and it happens all the time, deliberately and strategically - at many levels, and with many twists. 

 

Anyway; if reality cannot be defined pragmatically; then what is real reality; how can we define it? 

We first need to assume and acknowledge that reality is really real - we cannot define reality from a place of being agnostic about its existence! The only people who can coherently discuss the nature of reality, are those who acknowledge it is. 

We also need to acknowledge that we inhabit a creation. Only if life overall has a reason, purpose, meaning; can we talk in terms of reality - as a term contrasting with not-reality.

The we have to introduce God into the discussion: God the creator. A personal God (not an abstract deity) has to be the creator, if there is to be a reality that Men can know.

Indeed, for men to know - Men must also share in the same divinity as God the Creator. (Which, for Christians, is a fact.)

In conclusion, PKD was writing for a mixed audience of mostly atheists and 'agnostics' (de facto atheists); and was trying to discuss reality in a way that included this audience. But - as we know from the Exegesis - PKD was a theist (a Christian), and he knew from his personal spiritual experience, that materialism, the denial of God and the spirit, could not discern reality. 

PKD knew that Man relies upon God (a truthful and loving deity, outside of creation) if Man is to know reality - and this is a theme of much of his best work. For instance; In Ubik, Runciter is 'God', outside 'the world; trying to communicate with Man (inside the delusory and hostile world of cryogenic half-life) by means of signs - and providing help to awake to reality with the substance Ubik. 

At his best and deepest - Philip K Dick knew what everybody in 2020 ought to recognise. Without God Man cannot know reality - cannot distinguish reality from demonically-induced delusions, human manipulations, or from wishful-thinking.

And even with God, we still must make the right choices. God-without (the creator) gets us half-way to reality; God-within-us (present because we are children of God) is needed to get us the rest of the way. 

 

Some eight years before he died in 1982, the science fiction writer Philip K Dick had a series of powerful divine revelations with a Christian theme. (These are fictionalised in his novel Valis, 1981.)

I have been reading excerpts from Exegesis - the massive private journal he kept over those last eight years in which he tried to make sense of the events of February and March 1972, and the changes that followed.

PKD's revelation was, I believe, genuine: he really was communicated-with by God. And it made a qualitative difference to his inner self. But the 'fruits' of revelation were extremely mixed, and Dick's life did not improve significantly - he continued with the kind of chaotic, impulsive, self gratifying, self destructive Californian lifestyle of that era - in an extreme version.

To my eye, Dick's personal fate is representative of what went wrong with the 1960s spiritual awakening, except with Dick I am sure that the awakening was genuine (whereas most were fake).

In a nutshell, PKD could not do anything with his awakened life because he remained in thrall to the 1960s ideology of promiscuous sex, mind altering drugs and leftist radicalism.

Trying to lead an awakened Christian life in such a context, without repenting these errors, is impossible.

So PKD had a real experience of divine revelation, and knew this, and never gave up on it; but it never yielded its potential because he constrained the revelation within an unchanged, primary, secular, false socio-political framework.

I am continuing to read-/ listen-through Philip K Dick's journal Exegesis (2011); and continuing to find it just what I need, just now. Indeed, of its kind (a private document of spiritual examination and speculation) I can only compare it with Pascal's Pensees, or Wittgenstein's notebooks.

Especially in its first four years; the Exegesis has the advantage and disadvantage of being genuinely private notations, for personal consumption - whereas Pascal and Wittgenstein were writing with an eye on future publication - this means the Exegesis is honest to the point of being embarrassing (like watching somebody else's dreams).

I am struck by the fact that PKD was (and is) surrounded by non-religious, non-Christians - who have consistently failed to take seriously the Christian revelations of his last eight years (described by author Brian Aldiss as that God and Madness 'got him'); while orthodox Christians are (understandably!) repelled by Dick's record as five-times married, drug abuser and addict, parasuicide and mental patient etc.

Anyway, the outcome is that PKD was working alone, and that his post-mortem admirers and critics explain Exegesis by (essentially) explaining-it-away - or at least never taking his revelatory experiences as qualitatively how Dick himself regarded them. 

In section 22:24 - about 44% through the volume, and in 1978) PKD is speculating on the covert significance of his novel A Maze of Death (1970); which I happened to finish yesterday. Here he uses the word Maze to refer to what we might term the Matrix, or (my term) Virtuality - which is the man-made world of images, ideas, propaganda, officialdom and bureaucracy and (in general) mass/ social media. I've added explanatory links and emphases; my cuts are indicated thus...

**

[22:24] It is the nature of the maze, which is quasi-alive, to thwart knowledge. Maze and knowledge are antithetical; also maze and reality are antithetical. Out of this I derive: knowledge and reality are interrelated. 

So we can expect the active deceptivity of the maze to interfere with our ability to know, which means that it will perpetually occlude us in every way possible... Further, that we are occluded will be a fact occluded off from us...

Yaldabaoth is the quasi-mind of the maze, not its creator—since in fact it does not really exist; it is a condition or state we’ve been put in, not a world or place at all; all it really consists of is info fired by the two info-processing sources. 

The quasi-mind of the maze is as if insane, senselessly generating and destroying: it is like a wizard generating illusion upon illusion which shift and change constantly (thus giving rise to the spurious impression of the passage of time). 

It is the plan of the maze to establish and maintain disorder, because out of disorder arises the senseless—a condition which promotes intellectual confusion on our part, which aids in defeating our attempt to understand—which is to say, possess knowledge: the essential thing we must have if we are to triumph over the maze. Thus maze equals disorder or anti-Gnosis. 

No system of thought derived through our senses or a priori is going to be correct due to the calculated noise or inexplicability generated by the maze—only revealed Gnosis emanating from outside the maze—i.e., by/through Zebra—will be of any use. 

What is required of us is that we abandon both our reasoning power (as occluded or impaired) and our percept-system results (likewise) and try to hear the “low, murmuring voice” from outside the maze. This requires the ordeal of terror and destruction of our false self...

“Outward” explicability and inner occlusion are the twin weapons of the maze: that [process] which makes no sense, is fed to that percept and cognitive system which is (unknown to itself) impaired. 

The result is hopeless confusion, the antithesis of Gnosis. You have a deliberately damaged mind trying hopelessly to make sense out of a reality (and process) which adds up to nothing anyhow: a lethal combination, but quite in keeping with the purpose and nature of the maze and its quasi-mind; this is why we should speak of it as a maze—and a good one! 

Every hypostasis, intellectual or moral, is doomed to prove a failure; events will defeat it and expose its inaccuracy. Even nihilism and pessimism don’t always accurately depict the real situation: calculated runs of moral and intellectual order are introduced to cause us to keep trying to make sense out of what we are compelled to live through. Irony and paradox abound, and a constant calculated frustration of expectation and hope, a purposeful ruin of plans. 

The maze’s quasi-mind acts in a perverse way, but it is not malignant or malicious, just “insane”—which is to say irrational. This is why virtually every system of human thought simultaneously works and does not quite (perfectly) work. 

Until finally you get into ultimate absurdities, as “the theory alters the reality it describes,”... which, when you uncover this, you are faced with the obvious impossibility of ever correctly formulating a workable world view—without knowing why you can’t!

**

This strikes me as a brilliant prefiguring of what has become much more obvious in the past forty years - the public/ media/ bureaucratic 'Matrix' world as we now experience it.

Elsewhere, PKD describes how we brilliantly constructed the Maze so that it would be realer-than-real and could fool us, and then we voluntarily entered the Maze with the hubristic conviction that 'I' am too smart to be fooled by it; then unsurprisingly, once inside we took it for real - and were trapped. Trapped, until or if there is some outside intervention that will take us out from the Maze - i.e. Jesus Christ.    

I would add that the Maze is only half the story; and the other half is that - having reduced the populations of The West to the state of chronic stunned perplexity and angst; the same System that has made the virtuality then offers an arbitrary but mandatory structure of order: international laws, micro-regulations and coercive enforcements; underpinned by methods of onmi-surveillance - leading to the modern form of totalitarianism that we see unfolding on a daily basis.

And that is the mainstream dominant-culture choice: live in permanently confusing chaos, or accept arbitrary tyranny (or some combination of chaos and tyranny - which , indeed, seems to work best).

It was a mainstay of Kevin's bag of verbal tricks that the universe consisted of misery and hostility and would get you in the end. He looked at the universe the way most people regard an unpaid bill; eventually they will force payment. The universe reeled you out, let you flop and thrash and then reeled you in. Kevin waited constantly for this to begin with him, with me, with David and especially with Sherri. 

From Exegesis [1:301] - I have slightly edited this for clarity and emphasis:

The clear concept of the liar... when I looked through my reference books I came across it and recognized it at once when I turned to a passage about Zoroastrianism. The God of Light versus the Master of the Lie. 

There it was. I could not recall ever having known that before. Perhaps I did, but it was no longer a conscious part of me. I realized something I'd never realized before.

I had never thought of it like that before. My enemy, my adversary, the adversary of us all, is the Lie; pierce that and see the truth and the situation alters in a radical and astonishing way. 

 

And from this has come months of new insight for me, as you know. It was, really one of the most important moments in my life. My faith in the Lie, my willingness to participate in it by accepting it as if bound by some kind of implicit oath of loyalty to it, my collusion that disappeared. 

There is no requirement of honor that obliges us to believe a lie, even when told to us by a person we love or have loved. 

 

What this discovery brought about was an unraveling of a long-term slavery to the Lie, to my own lie and to all lies, wherever they came from and for whatever purpose. 

Certainly in our national life; the life of our Republic, we have virtually been destroyed by the Lie; by its powerful signs and miracles, as Paul puts it in Second Thessalonians. 

The peculiar power that people have exercised over me, which I could not comprehend nor cope with, was based on (one) their willingness and capacity to tell the Lie and (two) my willingness and capacity to accept it: a compact between us, in which we jointly and in unison, as if we were one party on one side of the table, admired and nodded in agreement at the goddam thing.

For me it abolished one life, a sad and truncated life, and began an exciting new one. 

 

Needless to say, honesty was valued by the Persians as the first virtue, after piety (which was needed to justify honesty, evidently, since in those days everything had to be assigned to a supernatural cause to make it stick). 

I'm glad to say once released from the power of the Lie I saw passivity, resignation and despair as intended by products of the Lie, and any system of thought or religion which taught those as virtues (Christianity included) as a manifestation of the Lie. 

Any system which says "This is a rotten world, wait for the next, give up, do nothing, succumb" that may be the basic Lie and if we participate in believing it and acting (or rather not acting) on it we involve ourselves in the Lie and suffer dreadfully - which only reinforces that particular Lie.

Edited from the Exegisis by Philip K Dick (published 2011)

I have gradually realised that some of the authors with whom I share the greatest 'fellow feeling' are the aphoristic note-makers. For example: Pascal's Pensees, Novalis's Pollen and Philip K Dick's Exegesis. I have ordered a selection from Coleridge's Notebooks, so we'll see if that can be added to the list...

The main thing about these 'unfinished' works, is that they are the writer actively thinking and talking with himself, as honestly as he is able - and the kind of person who produces this kind of writing is someone who thinks and broods purposively for much of the time.


That is what I recognise and am drawn-to; because I am of this type and have met extremely few people who are like me in this regard.

This activity (ie. spending hours per day brooding and thinking) is the basis of what I would regard as the real and proper activity of Philosophy; and why I called myself 'a philosopher' in my scrappy-memoirs (which are not themselves, however, an example of this notebookish form).


I can remember when I first looked-at Pascal, in a secondhand bookshop in Cheltenham some decade ago. I opened the Penguin paperback, read a few lines; and simply felt: Yes.

I feel the same every time I look at it. In a sense, everything else (content, conclusions etc) is secondary to this affirmative affinity.  


This note-taking thinker is a definite, albeit rare, Type; as much as the scientist, poet or fiction writer - and will be the covert driver of those activities: for instance of the poetry of Novalis, the Fiction of PKD, or my science (which was mostly theoretical).


(I may recognise the type, but don't always feel a personal affinity: Nietzsche and Wittgenstein are instances of this. They are my type, but mostly on a different wavelength.)


And it is why I have found blogging (of the type I do) so congenial; because it is only one step removed from my primary work: those reams of handwritten notes I have generated through writing every day for the past (what?) forty-plus years - yet almost never looked-at a second time. 

In one sense these notebooks are the meditative-laboratory for my published and disseminated writing; in another sense the public work is secondary to the notebooks; which are The Real Thing (despite that nobody ever will see them, nor would they be of any interest).

The clearest example of this 'real thing' can be seen with PKD's Exegesis compared with the novels he published in the final eight years of his life when he was making notes for it. For one who can appreciate the Exegesis (and is reading from a shared primarily-Christian perspective with PKD, which essentially None of his critics and editors are); it can easily be felt that the notes are primary and the novels (such as Valis - which is a fictionalised version of the notes) are derivative and lesser.


I am not saying that journal-type notes are superior works-of-art to poems, novels, essays; because they certainly aren't. Not even close! They will always be a (tiny) minority taste.

And indeed where they are not - as with Pascal - they are usually adopted pretentiously and grossly misunderstood by people whose nature is extraverted and whose content is externally-derived.


Art is a public activity, by intent; and journaling notes are not - or, ought not to be. The purpose is different. In a nutshell; what I value in these works is evidence of another person whose thinking is endogenous. In finished art is is difficult to impossible to tell whether the writer is generating or channelling the material - and it is almost always the latter.

For example, skilled journalists, critics, popular non-fiction writers take-in material, subject it to standardized-processing, then spew it out. The result may be superficially and temporarily impressive - but is deeply and over the long-term, debilitating. Such writing (for instance much 'travel writing' is a kind of trick - parasitic upon the genuine thought of others.

(The same applies to what passes for science nowadays; most of the most-influential of which is written by agencies who employ glibly-articulate quasi-journalistic hacks and PR merchants to do the job.)


To get back to PKD's Exegesis - this brings out another aspect of this kind of work; which is that it is not done to impress others, nor to satisfy the needs of socialization. Dick was, apparently, a bit of a chameleon in his social interactions; with a tendency to say and behave in ways to gratify the company. This meant there was a considerable gulf between the spontaneous incoherence of his notebooks; and the adjusted and filtered versions of these which appeared in everyday conversation.

Indeed, most of us are like this; we adjust what we say to the person we are speaking with. Sociality is primary. Yet when real, hard, honest thinking is being done' the unfiltered original may have an interest and validity - perhaps greater than the (more-or-less) bowdlerised versions of the ideas that we show to other people.

So a journal written to be shown to other people - like those of Thoreau and Emerson - may well make excellent literature - as these do. But such 'public journals' lack the special quality of genuine, personal notes; when the writer's audience is himself.   

Although I have owned a copy of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer for nearly forty years; it was only this weekend that I actually 'read' it - that is, I listened to the audio-book version. I found it very stimulating.

The protagonist is a type that I thoroughly despise in real life: the 'trendy', leftist-radical, media-famous, apostate Christian bishop - indeed the central character was modelled on a real life example of the breed, who was apparently a friend of the author. However, such was the depth and multi-faceted nature of this book that my irritation took a second place behind my fascination at the issues and conflicts.

Although Dick was far more sympathetic to the Tim Archer character than I would have been - seeing him as a great man who did much good and whose quest was genuinely spiritual; overall the portrait is unsparing.

This includes the way that short-termist, hedonic, personal and selfish drives are retrospectively 'validated' by the intelligent and articulate (and legally trained) Archer; who fluently distorts philosophy and Christian theology into justifying whatever he currently wants to do. Also the ways in which the bishop is de facto a parasite upon the church in terms both of his status and also of lifestyle and financially.

Dick was a very smart and cerebral writer - in this respect much like Saul Bellow; there is a wide range of artistic and cultural references, and the engagement is sufficiently deep and sincere that the book comes-across as a genuine exploration (rather than a pretentious display of names). The novel doesn't merely discuss or talk-about, but actually does philosophy.

This is unsurprising given the extraordinary and frenzied nature of PKD's final years - during which he was continually grappling with spiritual and religious issues; reading, thinking, talking and staying-up through the night writing dozens of pages of exploratory philosophy - entirely for his personal reasons (not aimed at publication, although an edited selection of these writings was posthumously made available - in 2011 - as Exegesis).

Overall, this book succeeds in rendering the spiritual quest to know Jesus, to understand and practice Christianity, as a very exciting and supremely important business; a matter that grips and obsesses the characters. And this is surely a consequence of the fact that it was so for PK Dick himself - in late life.

Nobody - least of all Dick - would recommend anybody to emulate Dick's lifestyle and life choices, which were largely disastrous - but this books focus on important things. There is a relentless pursuit of truth, a sustained and repeated attention to primary questions... and these are of greater urgency now than when the book was written, since our culture has drifted so far into shallowness and despair, feeble motivation, brief-attention and gullibility.

Dick's attitude and world is only the start of wisdom for a person (a society) sunk in distraction and intoxication, but that is something we need now more than ever.

An incredibly eerie thought came to me just now after reading over a typed page in which I describe the Black Iron Prison occluding us in such a way that we can't (even) tell we are occluded. 

Philip K Dick, Exegesis - Sept-Oct 1978: Folder 19

**

As I have often said; there is never just one thing wrong when there are chronic and adverse trends, but always also a second thing - which overcomes corrective feedback and makes possible the sustaining of the first fault. 

This is the case with those pervasive, unremitting and accelerating PSYOPS practiced upon Western populations (and - even more so - on the managerial/ intellectual classes of these populations) by officialdom, corporations and the mass media. I means the multiple false and arbitrary claims, and gross self-contradictory incoherences; which, nonetheless, 'must' be believed and supported as objective facts. 

What is at work here is a two-fold strategy of occluding, blocking, human thinking. The actual processes of thinking are being damaged, and also this damage prevents people from recognizing that their thinking is being-damaged. 

We find that Modern Man cannot, apparently, apply universal common sense to social situations; fails to recognize and learn-from repeated personal experiences; is unable/ unwilling to infer evil intention from many-fold evil actions; and gets 'blocked' by panic and incomprehension when confronted by even a two-step logical chain ("because of A and B, then C") . 

This is what happens - here-and-now; but why is it possible for the masses to be thus manipulated? And why did it not happen in the past and in all other societies?

Again the answer is twofold (at least twofold): One factor is the presence of the Mass Media and its innate addictive nature and addictive properties. 

The second, which permits this and prevents feedback - is the mass 'apostasy' of Western Man: that vast tidal trend of the abandonment of Christianity, the soul, life-after-death, the world of spirit etc; and adoption of the ideology of materialism/ positivism/ scientism/ leftism with its pseudo-morality of hedonic utilitarianism. 

Thus, on the one hand, we have unprecedented powers of mind-control; while on the other we have the unprecedented vulnerability of self-maimed minds that deny their own purpose, meaning and significance.  

In the end; we have a world of Men who have rendered themselves helplessly confused and blocked from basic understanding; actively embracing further interventions that increase their own mental helplessness and occlusion; all to the point of destroying Mens' capacity to recognize their own situation. 

The System is the Black Iron Prison - so it will not help its encaged mass victims; and the B.I.P. extends to include the churches, academia, education, arts... and all other potential mainstream sources of spiritual guidance.  

The answer is clear, simple, and within the grasp of a child; but for exactly that reason it is unacceptable to Modern Man. 

The bad news is that each Man can only help himself because no external help is to be had; the good news is that any and every Man is capable of helping himself: of initiating a sequence of events leading to his own escape from the mental toils of the BIP.

It's all a matter of what he most wants. 

With most of the mainstream Christian churches increasingly corrupted into the active support of evil; and most of them effectively closed anyway - the prospect for Christians is one of a solo spirituality. And this is something which has very seldom been seen before: Christians are in uncharted territory. 

Many people already (before 2020) found that church Christianity was insipid - even despite the potentially powerful effects of group reinforcement, singing and music, ritual and symbolism, architecture and tradition. Subtract these, and the prospect of a lifetime of solitary Christian practice may sound very unattractive - likely to be feak and weeble. 

Certainly, I personally feel a need for my experience of faith to be intense and powerful; and when this cannot be assisted by external stimuli; this situation naturally points towards the near necessity for direct and personal spiritual experience. 

This may be a reason behind my fascination with Philip K Dick's Exegesis - not in any specific way, but as an example of how intense and powerful Christian spiriual experience can be for a modern Man - one who was surrounded by a typical modern social environment that was mostly uninterested, actively-misleading or atheistically hostile. 

On the one hand, it is a snare for Christians to seek intense and powerful spiritual experience for its own sake, as a psychological 'trip'; on the other hand, many Christians are very obviously - by various methods, some metaphysical, some dogmatic, some psychological - actively blocking the possibility of themselves having intense and powerful spiritual experiences. 

In a context where institutional "Christianity" is either corrupt, absent - or both! - this self-blocking would seem to be a guarantee of too weak, too insipid, too feeble a faith to endure the current and future trials.  

As I have previous said, from reading the Fourth Gospel as well as the core sense of Christianity, I do not believe that Jesus Christ promised a Second Coming. On the contrary, I believe Jesus fully achieved everything he incarnated to achieve in a cosmological sense - in terms of changing reality; and that since ascension His role is to guide all who ask for His help, by the Holy Ghost. 

But a familiar worldly-Messianic project of redemption of this sinful and suffering mortal life, of Jesus returning to take-up kingship of a New and Purified this-world, seems to have been introduced into Christianity at an early stage - and continues. 

For such redemption to happen, this-world would need to be remade, in such a way that all that is evil and of-sin - including death - would be removed, purified, transformed; and only Good remain. 

This might be envisaged to happen all-at-once at the second coming; but there have always (I think) been some who saw this happening gradually, incrementally, a bit at a time. 

I first understood this in listening to lectures by Stanley Messenger in which he expounded the ideas of Rudolf Steiner. In this explanation, the spilled blood of the crucified Christ entered the substance of the Being that is planet earth; and initiated a process of transformation that could be explained in terms of alchemy and homoeopathy; and would lead eventually to the total redemption of earth and everything the dwells here. In the end (as I understand it) there would be a complete integration of all, into full accord with divine purposes. 

I have also come across what seems to me a variation of this basic idea in Philip K Dick's Exegesis; where he is discussing Jacob Bohme and AN Whitehead. PKD's version is that this reality began as dominated by chaos and continues as entropy. God began creation in this context; and there has since been a process by which creation gradually overtook chaos; in which negentropy incrementally overwhelms entropy... Until either at or by the Second Coming, the process is completed and all that is evil, destructive - all suffering and pain - is transformed into Goodness and Happiness. 

My above summaries are themselves of secondary sources, thus unreliable as to detail - but I offer them as the kind of thing that would need to happen if this mortal world were to be saved, redeemed, made into Heaven on Earth. In other worlds, all that is evil, all destructive change, all death - would need to be transformed into harmony with divine creation. 

And this transformation is regarded as something that will happen. It is not a matter of choice, but of processes acting-irresistibly-upon Beings. Evil and Sin are eliminated by being made good. 

Now - I regard this as both impossible - because evil cannot be made Good; and undesirable to Christians - because salvation must be chosen.  

More fundamentally; I do not believe that this is what will happen! I think it is a mistake to suppose that Jesus said he would make Heaven on earth, or by processes incrementally to transform mortal to immortal life. 

The real situation is much simpler; which is that evil and sin will not because cannot be eliminated in this world and mortal life; which is why we must die and be resurrected to enter the state of only-Goodness: we must be born again.  

Those, and only those, who choose resurrection (and allow/ embrace the necessary transformative changes to themselves) will be added to Heaven, will join Heavenly life - leaving-behind their sins and all evil; and from thence, living only by love. 

This mortal realm with its sins and evil will be left-behind; as a place for those who choose to hold to their sins and evil, and those who choose not to live wholly by love. 

Such must happen; in order that Heaven be possible; and it must happen because eternal Beings must dwell somewhere.

And if Beings do not want to dwell in Heaven, then they will remain in some part or variant of the mixed-world of this-world of mortality - where entropy and creation contend. 

The Empire Never Ended is a maxim used often by Philip K Dick, especially in his novel Valis (1978), but also throughout the philosophical journal the Exegesis (2011).

The Black Iron Prison (BIP) was PKD's term for the manipulative, modern, totalitarian System based on bureaucracy and propaganda.


What I personally derive from this is that The Roman Empire was an institutional structure, a System, that has continued to this day. But, while continuous in The West; The Empire has changed considerably - especially in response to the breaking-in of Christianity; which was profoundly at odds with The Empire.

My summary understanding of what happened (not that of PKD) is as follows: Jesus Christ and his posthumous followers were a transformative force acting upon The Empire. Initially there was no 'church' but Jesus's followers worked like a family, based on loving personal relationships and without any abstract institutional structure.

The first stage in assimilating Christianity was to create an institutional church which could take its place among the other institutions of The Empire (the Emperor and his bureaucracy, the Military, the state religion etc). But such was the spiritual power of Christianity, that its church rapidly grew to take-over the Empire as its primary system.

Over the centuries, however, The Empire first assimilated then dominated Christianity - in multiple ways; until from the 19th century The Empire began to eliminate Christianty from the public realm altogether - first with the Communist and Socialist totalitarian Systems, then with the whole of the  world.

At this point - where Christianity became almost-wholly corrupt, of fully assimilated at the institutional level - The Empire became The Black Iron Prison - an atheist totalitarian and global bureaucracy.

Just this year of 2020; the process came to near completion, with Christian churches closed and suspending core activities across the whole world.

The Black Iron Prison has won.


Edited from Exegesis 19:34-5:

The BIP is a vast complex life form which protects itself by inducing a negative hallucination of it: muddled thinking, loss of faculties and perception (as a protective mechanism).  It has come here and because of its defensive devices we are not aware of it.

This BIP a sinister life form indeed... 

1. First it takes power over us, reducing us to slaves.
2. Then it causes us to forget our former state
3 And to be unable to see or think straight so that the BIP becomes invisible to us, by reason of what it has done to us.
4. But we don't even know that we cannot think straight. 
5. We cannot even monitor our own deformity, our own impairment. 

Even the edifice of the church has been subverted by the BIP and made into an instrument of its occlusion of us. Ii is interesting how effectively the impairment works. If you derange the brain in precise ways, not only will it be damaged, but it will be unaware that it is impaired and will not seek to rectify the damage. 


My note: At this point the BIP has become a single, global, exclusive and self-perpetuating system - based on the positive feedback of mutual reinforcement.

There is a primary concealment of the BIP controllers by using human puppets; true motives are hidden by a labile-rotating and incoherent pseudo-morality (e.g. healthism, environmentalism, antiracism, sexual revolution etc...) to mask the true selfish and exploitative nature of The System.

All autonomous institutions or groups are destroyed or assimilated - including the primary, natural and spontaneous human groupings of marriage and family, neighbourhood and nation.  

The defences of the system are manyfold and are underpinned by a false metaphysical monopoly; such that all 'evidence' (itself heavily controlled, and overwhelming in volume) is seen to conform to the rigid cultural assumption that excludes God/ Spirit/ Objective values; and the whole BIP functions on the exclusive assumption that this is a materialistic, positivistic, meaningless and purposeless world - in which autonomous life and consciousness are essentially epiphenomenal illusions.

Further interventions (justified by the metaphysics and pseudo-morality) themselves also impair thinking and suppress motivation. The BIP deploys addiction, and dependence (on distraction; stimulation, sedation, hallucination) from mass media, entertainments and actual drugs.

As a relief, and to rationalise suppression, the BIP adds intoxication (pharmacological and social - eg riots).

Most recently, there is the general strategy of imposed social isolation such that individuals are single units within the official System; by means of 'untouchable'-style social-distancing, prison-style lock-down, face-concealment, driving all of 'life' into the remote, demotivating abstractions of online communications and interaction. 

In the closing section of Acts of the Apostles, from chapter 21, there is a rather absurdly-detailed story; a complex and confusing rigmarole of events that begin with Paul being mobbed by Jews at the Temple in Jerusalem, and ends with him being tried, and released! by the Romans in Rome. 

The author of Acts (who was with Paul, throughout) is apparently trying to explain how it was that Paul - and by extension the early Christians - were Not destroyed, and the faith eradicated; despite that the Empire and the Jews both wanted this, and held all the worldly power. 

Philip K Dick wrote an astonishingly insightful meditation on this theme -  in his Exegesis notes from 1980. Dick considered that this episode of Acts was, in a this-worldly sense, an opposite narrative to the crucifixion. 

Whereas Jesus was mobbed, captured, interrogated, tried and executed - Paul went through the same stages...  yet was released!

The release of so dangerous a man as Paul, seems a remarkable thing; given that it was in the interests of both Romans and Jews that Paul either be killed and eliminated, or at least imprisoned and absolutely prevented from continuing his work of evangelism. 

At one level, we can see the hand of divine providence at work in the many and varied encounters of Paul; yet in another sense the worldly odds were stacked against him - and in fact he suffered beatings, chaining, imprisonment and many other tribulations - that were more than sufficient to silence a lesser man. 

Divine providence was 'not enough' to protect Paul from the many and terrible persecutions that Man's free will could inflict; how, then, could this same providence secure Paul's liberation? 

We could therefore ask more specifically how it was that divine providence was able to navigate a path through such apparently overwhelming and irresistible hazards leading to Paul's release in Rome. How was it that "the prisoner slides through the fingers of the Empire" (as PKD said).   

And this same question is again, Now, urgently relevant for Christian survival in a totalitarian global System which dwarfs the Romans in size and power; and holds and enforces an ideology of value-inversion that is far more existentially hostile to Christianity than the pagan Roman Empire ever was.  

(By contrast; the Roman's hostility to Christianity was mostly merely expedient - they disliked any group that tended to cause trouble for the Empire.)

The answer is that there is not one single answer; but that The System is, in actuality, very limited in what it can do - and is continually, and increasingly, sabotaging itself. 

And this applies with particular strength to an incoherent, self-hating and self-destroying Empire - such as the Global Establishment in 2022. 

As PKD wrote:

The Empire has lost the ability to state its case; it cannot close the trap. The later history of this archetype will be that the Empire will lose even more power; eventually it will not even be able to arrest its victim, let alone crucify him.

What matters in such circumstances is Not a detailed understanding of how the Empire works, nor any detailed strategy of how to elude its grasp; but strong faith underpinned by the courage that comes from hope of resurrection. Given that, and when an outcome is necessary or desirable to divine providence - God will find a way to accomplish the 'impossible'.