Philip K Dick speech (interpreter edited out) in Metz, France, 1977

i'm going to read this opening sentence i don't know if you might go on all the microphones on marcel you asked if the microphones are wrong and they can hear now [Music] may i tell you how much i appreciate you're asking me to share some of my ideas with you the title of my address is if you find this world bad you should see some of the others i would like to confess that i've been asked to cut about two-thirds of my speech out and deliver as short a speech as possible upon examining my speech

i find that it is very easy to remove two-thirds without doing any injury to it i even considered cutting three-thirds out of it but there was some trouble so i abandoned that idea the subject of this speech [Music] is a topic which has been discovered recently and which may not exist at all i may be talking about something that does not exist therefore i'm free to say everything or nothing i can hardly make an error if there is no such thing as orthogonal time orthogonal or right angle time is the topic of my speech we

are accustomed to supposing that all change takes place along the linear time axis from past to present to future the present is an accrual of the past and is different from it the future will accrue from the present on and be different yet that an orthogonal or right angle time axis could exist a lateral domain in which change takes place process is occurring sideways in reality so to speak this is almost impossible to imagine how would we perceive such lateral changes what would we experience what clues if we are trying to test out this bizarre

theory should we be on the alert for in other words how can change take place outside of linear time at all in any sense to any degree let me present you with the metaphor let us say that there exists this very rich patron of the arts every day on the wall of his living room above his fireplace his servants hang a new picture each day a different masterpiece day after day month after month each day the used one is removed and replaced by a different and new one i shall call this process change along the

linear axis but now let us suppose the servants temporarily running out of new replacement pictures what shall they do in the meantime they can't just leave the present one hanging their employer has decreed the perpetual replacement that is to say changing the pictures is to take place so they neither allow the current one to remain nor do they replace it with a new one instead they do a very clever thing when their employer is not looking the servants cunningly alter the picture already on the wall they paint out a tree here they paint in a

little girl there they add this they obliterate that they make the same painting different and in a sense new but as i'm sure you can see not new in the sense of replacing it the employer enters his living room after dinner seats himself facing the fireplace and contemplates what should be according to his expectations the new picture what does he see it certainly isn't what he saw previously but also it isn't somehow and here we must become very sympathetic with his perhaps somewhat stupid man because we can virtually see his brain circuit striving to understand

his brain circuits are saying yes it is a new picture it is not the same one as yesterday but also it is the same one i think i feel on a very deep intuitive basis i feel that somehow i've seen it before i seem to remember a tree though and there is no tree now perhaps if we extrapolate from this man's perceptual mentational confusion to the theoretical point i was making about lateral change you can get a better idea of what i mean i mean perhaps you can do at least a degree see that although

what i'm talking about may not exist my concept may be fictional it could exist it is not intellectually self-contradictory contemplating this possibility of a lateral arrangement of worlds a plurality of overlapping earth along whose linking axis a person can somehow move can travel in a mysterious way from worst to fair to good to excellent contemplating this in theological terms perhaps we could say that herewith we suddenly decipher the elliptical utterances which christ expressed regarding the kingdom of god specifically where it is located he seems to have given contradictory and puzzling answers but suppose just suppose

for an instant that the cause of the perplexity lay not in any desire on his part to baffle or to hide but in the inadequacy of the question my kingdom is not of this world he is reported to have said the kingdom is within you or possibly it is among you i put before you now the notion which i personally find exciting that he may have had in mind that which i speak of as the lateral axis of overlapping realms which contain among them a spectrum of aspects ranging from the unspeakably malignant to the beautiful

and christ was saying over and over again that there really are many objective realms somehow related and somehow bridgeable by living not dead man and that the most wondrous of these worlds was a just kingdom in which either he himself or god himself or both of them ruled and he did not merely speak of a variety of ways of subjectively viewing one world the kingdom was and is an actual different place at the opposite end of continuum starting with slavery and utter pain it was his mission to teach his disciples the secret of crossing along

this orthogonal path he did not merely report what lay there he taught the method of getting there but tragically the secret was lost the enemy the roman authority crushed it and so we do not have it but perhaps we can refine it since we know that such a secret exists kingdom is ever to be established here on earth or whether it is a place or state we go to after death i'm sure i don't have to tell you that this issue has been a fundamental one and an unresolved one throughout the history of christianity christ

and saint paul both seem to say emphatically that an actual breaking through into time that is specifically what they say a breaking through into time into our world by the host of god will unexpectedly occur thereupon after some exciting drama a thousand-year paradise a rightful kingdom will be established at least for those who have done their homework and shores and generally paid attention have not gone to sleep as one parable puts it we are enjoined repeatedly in the new testament to be vigilant that for the christian it is always day there is always light by

which you can see this event when it comes see this event does that imply that many persons who are somehow asleep or blind or not vigilant they will not see it even though it occurs consider the significance which can be assigned to these notions the kingdom will come here unexpectedly this is always stress the rightful faithful shall see it because for them it is always daytime but for the others what seems expressed here is the paradoxical but enthralling thought that and hear this and ponder the kingdom where it established here would not be visible to

those outside i offer the idea that in more modern terms what is meant that some of us will travel laterally to that better world and some will not they will remain stuck along the lateral axis which means that for them the kingdom did not come not in their all alternative world and yet meantime it did come in hours so it comes and yet it does not come amazing if you've followed my conjectures about the overlapping of these alternate worlds and you sense as i do the possibility that if there are three or four or two

there may be 30 or 3 000 of them and that some of us live in this one others of us in another one others in others and that events on one track cannot be perceived by persons not in that track well let me say what i want to say and be done with it i think i once experienced a tract in which the savior returned but i experienced it just briefly i am not there now i am not sure i ever was certainly i may never be again i grieved for that loss but lost it

is somehow i moved laterally but then fell back and then it was gone a vanish mountain and a stream the sound of bells and all gone now for me entirely gone i and my stories and novels often write about counterfeit worlds semi-real worlds as well as deranged private worlds inhabited often by just one person while meantime the other characters either remain in their own worlds throughout or are somehow drawn into one of the peculiar ones this theme occurs in the corpus of my 27 years of writing at no time did i have a theoretical or

conscious explanation for my preoccupation with these pluriform pseudo worlds but now i think i understand what i was sensing was the manifold of partially actualized realities lying tangent to what evidently is the most actualized one the one which the majority of us by consensus gentium agree on although originally i presumed that the differences between these worlds was caused entirely by the subjectivity of the various human viewpoints it did not take me long to open the question as to whether it might not be more than that that in fact plural realities did exist superimposed onto one

another like so many film transparencies what i still do not grasp however is how one reality out of the many becomes actualized in contradistinction to the others perhaps none does or perhaps again it hangs on an agreement in viewpoint by a sufficiency of people more likely the matrix world the one with the true core of being is determined by the programmer he or it articulates principles so to speak the matrix choice and fuses it with actual substance the core or essence of reality that which receives or attains it and to what degree that is within

the purview of the programmer this selection and reselection is part of general creativity of world building which seems to be it or his task a problem perhaps which he or it is running which is to say in the process of solving as a computer would variables along the linear time axis of our universe thereby generating branched off lateral worlds i have the impression that the metaphor of the chessboard is especially useful in evaluating how this can be done in fact must be across from the programmer reprogrammer sits a counter entity whom joseph campbell calls the

dark counter player god the programmer reprogrammer is not making his moves of improvement against inert matter he is dealing with a cunning opponent let us say that on the game board our universe in space time the dark counter player makes a move he sets up a reality situation of immutable cause and effect but the programmer reprogrammer has already laid down his response it has already happened these moves on his part the printout which we undergo as historic events passes through stages of a dialectical interaction thesis and antithesis as the forces of the two players mingle

evidently some syntheses fall for the dark counter player and yet they do not by virtue of the fact that in advance our great advocate selected variables the alternation of which brings final victory to him in winning each sequence in turn he claims some of us we who participate in the sequence this is why instinctively people pray nibarame domine which decodes to mean extricate me programmer as you achieve one victory after another include me in that triumph move me along the lateral axis so that i am not left out sense as being left out means nothing

nothing other than remaining under the jurisdiction of or falling prey to the malignant power but that malignant power for all its guile has already lost even as it wins or in some way the counter player is blind and so the programmer reprogrammer possesses an advantage i submit to you that such alterations the creation or selection of such so-called alternative presence is continually taking place the very fact that we can conceptually deal with this notion that is entertained as an idea is the first step in discerning such processes themselves but i doubt if we will ever

be able in any real fashion to demonstrate to scientifically prove that such lateral change processes do occur probably all we would have to go on would be vestiges of memory fleeting impressions dreams nebulous intuitions that somehow things have been differed in some way and not and not long ago but now we might reflexively reach for a light switch in the bathroom only to discover that it was always had been in another place entirely we might reach for the air vent in our car where there was no air vent a reflex left over from a previous

present still active at a subcortical level we might dream of people in places we had never seen as vividly as if we had seen them and actually known them but we would not know what to make of this assuming we took time to ponder it at all one very pronounced impression would probably occur to us to many of us again and again and always without explanation the acute absolute sensation that we had done once before what we were just about to do now that we so to speak lived in a particular moment or situation previously

but in what sense could it be called previously since only the present not the past was evidently involved we would have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present deja vu perhaps in precisely the same way hearing the same words saying the same words i submit that these impressions are valid and significant and i will even say this such an impression is a clue that at some past time point a variable was changed reprogrammed as it were and that because of this an alternative world branched off became actualized instead of the prior one and

that in fact in literal fact we are once more living this particular segment of linear time a breaching a tinkering a change has been made but not in our present had been made in our past evidently such an alteration would have a peculiar effect on those persons involved they would so to speak be moved back one square or several squares on the board game which constitutes our reality conceivably this could happen any number of times affecting any number of people as alternative variables were reprogrammed we would have to live out each reprogramming along a subsequent

linear time axis but to the programmer whom we call god to him the results of the programming would be apparent once we are within time and he is not i wish dad lived [Music] we are living in a computer-programmed reality and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed and some alteration in our reality occurs this too might account for the sensation people get of having lived past lives they may well have but not in the past previous wives rather in the present in perhaps an unending repeated and repeated present

like a great clock dial in which grand clock hands sweep out the same circumference forever with all of us carried along unknowingly yet dimly suspecting since the resolution of every encounter of thesis and antithesis between the dark counter player and the divine programmer a new synthesis is struck off and since it is possible that each time this happens a lateral world may be generated and since i can see that each synthesis or resolution is in some degree a victory by the programmer each struck off world in sequence must be an improvement upon not just the

prior one but an improvement upon all the latent or merely possible outcomes it is a better world but in no sense perfect which is to say final it is merely an improved stage within a process what i envision clearly is that the programmer is perpetually using the antecedent universe as a gigantic stockpile for each new synthesis the antecedent universe then possessing the aspect of chaos or anomie in relation to an emerging new cosmos therefore the endless process of sequential struck off alternate worlds emerging and being infused with actualization is negantropic in some ways that we

cannot see what we need at this point is to locate to bring forth as evidence someone who is managed somehow it doesn't matter how to retain memories of a different present latent alternate world impressions different in some significant way from this the one which is at this stage actualized according to my theoretical view it would almost certainly be memories of a worse world than this for it is not reasonable that god the programmer and reprogrammer would substitute a worse world in terms of freedom or beauty or love or order or healthiness by enters any standard

which we know when a mechanic works on your malfunctioning car he does not damage it further when a writer creates the second draft of a novel he does not debase it further but strives to improve it i suppose it could be argued in a strictly theoretical way that god might be evil or insane and would in fact substitute a worse world for a better one but frankly i cannot take that idea seriously let us pass that over so let us ask does any one of us remember in any dim fashion a worse earth circa 1977

than this have our young men seen visions and our old men dream dreams nightmare dreams specifically about a world of enslavement and evil of prisons and jailers and ubiquitous police i have i wrote out these dreams in novel after novel story after story to name two in which this prior ugly present obtained most clearly i cite the man in the high castle and my 1974 novel about the us as a police state called flow my tears the policeman said i'm going to be very candid with you i wrote both novels based on fragmentary residual memories

of such a horrid slave state world or perhaps the term world is the wrong one and i should say united states since in both novels i was writing about my own country i could even tell you what caused me to remember in late february of 1974 i was given sodium pentathol for the extraction of impacted wisdom teeth later that day back home again but still deeply under the influence of the sodium pentathol i had a short acute flash of recovered memory in one instant i caught it all but immediately rejected it rejected it however with

the realization that what i had retrieved in the way of varied memories was authentic then in mid-march a month later the total body of memories intact an entire began to return you are free to believe me or to disbelieve but please take my word on it but i am not joking this is very serious a matter of importance i am sure that at the very least you will agree that for me even to claim this is in itself amazing people claim to remember past lives i claim to remember a different very different present life i

know of no one who has ever made this claim before but i rather suspect that my experience is not unique what perhaps is unique is the fact that i am willing to talk about it if you have followed me this far i would like you to be kind enough to go a little further with me i would like to share with you something i knew that is retrieved along with the blocked off memories in march of 1974 the reprogrammed variables tinkered with back at some earlier date probably in the late 40s in march of 1974

the payoff the results of at least one and possibly more of the reprogrammed variables lying along the linear timeline of our past set in what happened between march and august of 1974 was the result of at least one reprogrammed variable laid down perhaps 30 years before setting into motion a threat of change which culminated in what i am sure you will admit was a spectacularly important and unique historical event the forced removal from office of a president of the united states richard nixon as well as all those associated with him in the alternative world which

i remember the civil rights movement the anti-war movements of the 60s had failed and evidently in the mid 70s nixon was not removed from power that which deposed him if anything indeed existed that it that did oppose him or quit opposing was inadequate therefore one or more factors tending toward that destruction of the entrenched tyrannical power had retroactively to us come to be introduced the scales 30 years later in 19 had been 2 000 years ago at its inception it was regarded as subversive and revolutionary and let me add this appraisal by the police authorities

was correct it took me almost two weeks after the return of my memories of my life in track eight to rid myself of the overpowering impression that all references to christ all sacredl acts had to be veiled in absolute secrecy but historically this fits the pattern of the fascist takeover especially those along nazi lines i also would like to tell you if if you have followed me this far to accept my statement about my other memories under the sodium pentacle which returned that world was a prison it was dreadful we overthrew it just as we

overthrew the nixon tyranny but it was far more cruel incredibly so and there was a great battle and loss of life it was in february of 1974 that my blocked off memories of track a returned and it was in february of 1974 that my novel flow my tears the policeman said was released finally after two two years delay it was almost as if the release of the novel which had been delayed so long meant that in a certain sense it was all right for me to remember that is to remember that the book was not

fiction the book was based on subliminal memories which i had of such a world but perhaps until the book was actually actually released it was better that i did not remember why that would be i do not know but i have the impression that the memories were not to come to the surface until the material had been published very sincerely on the author's part as what he believed to be fiction perhaps had i known i would have been too frightened to write the novel as it was i was very frightened anyway there was something about

the novel that frightened me a great deal or perhaps i would have just shot off my mouth and told everybody and somehow interfered with the effectiveness of that book and such other books of mine as man in the high castle which were also based on residual memories the effectiveness of those novels might have been impaired i do not even claim there was an intended effectiveness perhaps there was none at all but if there was one and i repeat the word if emphatically it was almost certainly to stir subliminal memories in readers back to them life

not a conscious life not an entering consciousness as in my own case but to recall to them on a deep and profound albeit unconscious level what a police tyranny is like and how vital it is now or then at any time along any time track in any world to defeat it in march of 1974 the really crucial moves to depose nixon were beginning in august five months later they proved successful it seems to me that in many ways ideas have a life of their own they appear to seize on people and make use of them

the idea which seized me 27 years ago and never let go of me is this any society in which people meddle in other people's business is not a good society and a state in which the government quote knows more about you than you know about yourself as it is expressed in my novel flow my tears the policeman said is a state which must be overthrown it may be a theocracy a fascist corporate state a reactionary monopolistic capitalism or centralistic socialism that aspect does not matter and i am saying not merely it can happen here meaning

the united states but rather it did happen here in the united states i remember i was one of the secret christians who fought it and at least to some extent helped overthrow it and i am very proud of that proud of myself in time track aid when i use the word christian there i do not mean christians as they are now i mean christians as they were say 2 000 years ago enemies of a powerful empire when i saw star wars this morning i thought to myself deja vu there is unfortunately for me a somber

intimation which accompanies my pride in the work that i did in that alternate earth i think that in that previous world i did not live past march of 1974 [Music] in this track here which i will call track b we fought a much lighter tyranny a far stupider one or perhaps we had assistance the anterior reprogramming of one or more historical variables came to our rescue sometimes i think and this is of course pure speculation a happy fantasy of my soul that because of what we accomplished there or anyhow attempted to and very bravely we

who were directly involved were allowed to live on here past the terminal point which brought us down that other worst world it is a sort of miraculous kindness this gracious gift serves to delineate for us for me at least some aspects of the programming it causes me to comprehend him after a fashion i think we cannot know what he is but we can experience his functioning and so can ask what does he resemble not what is he but rather what is he like first and foremost he controls the objects processes and events in our space-time

world this is for us the primary aspect although intrinsically he may possess aspects of greater magnitude but of less applicability to us i have spoken of myself as a reprogrammed variable and i have spoken of him as the programmer and reprogrammer during a short period of time in march of 1974 at the moment in which i was re-synthesized i was aware perceptually which is to say aware in an external way of his presence at that time i had no idea what i was seeing it resembled nothing that i had ever heard described it resembled plasmic

energy it had colors it moved fast he collected and then dispersed but what it was what he was i am not sure even now except i can tell you that he had simulated normal objects and their processes so as to copy them and in such an artful way as to make himself invisible within them as the vedantist put it he is the fire within the flint the razor within the razor cave later research showed me that in terms of group cultural experience the name brahman has been given to this omnipresent imminent entity one thing i

really want you to know i am aware that the claims i am making claims of having retrieved buried memories of an alternate president and who have perceived the agency responsible for arranging that alternation these claims can neither be proved nor can they be even made to sound rational and the usual sense of the word it has taken me over three years to reach the point where i am willing to tell anyone but my closest friends about my experience beginning back at the vernal equinox of 1974. one of the reasons motivating me to speak about it

publicly at last to openly make this claim is a recent encounter i have undergone which by the way bears a strange resemblance to hawthorne athens experience in my novel the man in the high castle with the woman julianna frank juliana read robinson's book about a world in which germany and japan and italy now this is a little difficult if you haven't read the book but he wrote a novel in which germany italy and japan lost world war ii and he was living in a world in which they had won world war ii juliana read robinson's

book about a world which the axis lost and she felt she should tell him what she comprehended about the book in other words that his novel was true now this final scene in man in the high castle has been the source for a similar scene in my later story faith of our fathers where the girl tania lee shows up and acquaints the protagonist with the actual reality situation which is to say that much of his world is delusional and purposefully so in other words it's a common theme in my writing that a dark-haired girl shows

up at the door of the protagonist and tells him that his world is delusional but there's something false about it now a man in the high castle the situation is ironically reversed the girl that comes to the door tells an author that his book of fiction is true for several years i've had the feeling a growing feeling that one day a woman who would be a complete stranger to me would contact me and tell me that she had some information to impart to me and then she would appear at my door just as juliana appeared

at hawthorne robinson's door and the fourth with in the gravest possible way she would tell me exactly what juliana told abbinson and that is that my book like his was in a certain real literal and physical sense not fiction but the truth well this did finally happen to me i even knew that her hair would be black i had an actual [Music] complete sense of what she would look like and what she would say dora and i am speaking of a woman who had systematically read every single novel of mine which is more than 30

novels as well as many of my stories she did appear she was a total stranger and she did inform me of this fact that some of my fictional works were in a literal sense true now i had posited in 1974 when my memories of this alternate world came back that if these memories were authentic that it was only a matter of time before a contact a cautious guarded probing by someone would occur initiated by a person who read my books and for one reason or another deduced the actual situation i mean knew what the significant

information was which the books and stories carried now this woman knew from my novels and stories which world i had experienced which of the many what she could not determine until i told her was that in february of 1975 i had passed across into a third alternative present third one track c we will call it and this was a garden or park of peace and beauty a world superior to ours rising into existence to her of three rather than two worlds the black iron prison world which had been our intermediate world in which oppression and

war exists but have to a great degree been cast down and then a third alternative world which someday when the correct variables in our past have been reprogrammed will materialize as a superimposition onto this one and within which as we awaken to it we shall suppose that we have always lived there the memory of this intermediate one like that of the black iron prison world eradicated mercifully from our memories the best that i can really do at this point after having had these experiences and written these novels is to play the role of prophet of

ancient prophets in such oracles as the sybil at delphi and to talk of a wonderful garden world much like that which once our ancestors are said to have inhabited in fact i sometimes imagine it should be exactly that same world restored as if a false trajectory of our world will eventually be fully corrected and once more we will be where once many thousands of years ago we lived and were happy during the brief time i walked about in that garden world i had the strong impression that it was our legitimate home which somehow we had

lost the time i spent there was short about six hours of real elapsed time but i remember it well in the novel i wrote with roger zelazny deus erie i describe it toward the end at the point where the curse is lifted from the world by the death it's amazing to me about this park-like world this track c was the non-christian elements forming the basis of it it was not what my christian training had prepared me for at all even when it began to phase out i still saw sky i saw land and dark blue

smooth water and standing by the edge of the water a beautiful nude woman whom i recognized as aphrodite at that point this other better world had diminished to a mere landscape beyond the golden rectangle doorway the outline of the doorway pulsed with laser-like light and it all grew smaller and was at last unless gone from sight the three point three to five doorway devouring itself into nothingness sealing off what laid beyond i have not seen it since but i had the firm impression that this was the next world not of the christians but the arcadey

of the greco-roman world something older and more beautiful than that which my own religion can conjure up as a lure to keep us in a state of dutiful morality and faith what i saw was very old and very lovely sky sea land and a beautiful woman and then nothing for the door had shut and i was closed off back here it was with a bitter sense of loss that i saw it go saw her go really since it all constellated about her akrodyte i discovered you