iUniverse author John C. Woodcock’s insights on writing: Part 9

In the previous post from iUniverse author John C. Woodcock, we were exploring a new form of consciousness that effected the works of sci-fi great, Philip K. Dick and how that compares to John’s thinking and writing form for his new book UR-image. Let John explain:-

“For thousands of years we have slowly stabilized a form of consciousness that has a structure of order/disorder. Consciousness is order and outside, beyond the boundary is disorder, chaos, evil, etc. Consciousness at first had to be periodically consumed by disorder and then renewed. It could not, for many generations, be relied upon to last forever. The dark irrational powers were a constant threat to the order of daylight consciousness and had to be held at bay by ritual acts of warding off. They also periodically had to be given their day—a day ritualized, for example, by the ancient Saturnalia or the Celtic Day of the Dead.

Over time our daylight consciousness became stabilized enough for these rituals to lose their power and necessity. Today they have degenerated into Halloween, etc. They have no psychological value. So now, we live in a stable world of rationality which is occasionally threatened by events evaluated as irrational (emotions, visions, delusions, the psychoses, etc.), all of which are dealt with primarily by medications, thus “warded off” (literalized by psychotic patients being put in the “back wards”). The content of irrational outbursts (or more accurately, inbursts) are not listened to or trusted in any way by the “healing profession”. ^[1]

With this context we can more easily gain access to Dick’s discovery. He shows us that if we take madness seriously and in a sustained way; if we take it on its own terms, as it presents itself to us, then the fundamental polarity that has driven our Western culture for thousands of years, giving rise, finally to our modern structure of consciousness—the rational-irrational polarity—reverses itself!

Astounding!”

Dick outlines this reversal in his cosmogony:

“The single most striking realization that Fat had come to was his concept of the universe as irrational and governed by an irrational mind, the creator deity. If the universe were taken to be rational, not irrational, then something breaking into it might seem irrational, since it would not belong. But Fat, having reversed everything, saw the rational breaking into the irrational. The immortal plasmate had invaded our world and the plasmate was totally rational, whereas our world is not.”

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