[4:68]

Phillip K. Dick is illuminated and nagged by ancient strands of consciousness which he firmly believes come to hum from out of the ancient world by way of the field exterior to Time. His sleeping life seems to have become a shadowy discussion with the father of Hellenic medicine Asklepios, who was deified and other even lesser human entities who haunt him like Asklepios’ advisory panel. His obsession is focused on the Dead Sea Scrolls, as illuminated in text by Will Durant. For this reason, I will be using Will and Ariel Durant’s The Lessons of History as part of this investigation, as Dick and I share the life work of these two scholars of philosophy and history as our base lens into the past, in other words, a humanistic liberal filter for considering the reflected past.

The Essenes who authored these texts and related esoteric philosophies and illuminating faiths of late antiquity fairly obsess Dick. He considers that perhaps buried scrolls were idea “time bombs” planted to be discovered in post-Roman times and bring down the World Order, which would be the Western World as we know it. Appolonius of Tyana [died A.D. 98] is such a gnostic figure as appeals to Dick’s sense of internally alienated illumination. His opinion that the secret undercurrent of gnostic dissent against Rome that “favorably informed and educated and directed and influenced society from A.D. 2 on,” was brought to him across and from outside of Time by an ascendant consciousness, was attendant with danger, that the enforcers of the World Order would be hunting those who might be chosen to preserve the hidden truth.

Dick was paranoid, and this paranoia is extended to his pen pals, who he feared for, believing that a religious friend of his, Jim Pike, might have been done away with for the possession of such. As a bonus the dreamer was blessed with “my anima, the sibyl” singing along with a choir in the wake of a dream about the Goddess Aurora:

“You must put your slippers on

To walk toward the dawn”