![]() Watts describes a clear historical line from the I Ching through Taoism to Zen Buddhism. Which brings me to Alan Watts’ classic The Way of Zen (1957). ![]() You need something unexpected, spontaneous. In the occult approach, following a fixed, deterministic set of rules or logical analysis ultimately cannot reveal hidden truth. Dick’s message is that to reach inner truth, invoking chance, unpredictability, disturbance from deterministic logic isn’t just a nice idea: it is necessary.įor me, this necessity of invoking chance to reveal what is real is the core meaning of High Castle. In fact, almost all the book’s characters, trapped in their illusory world, use random consultation of the I Ching to uncover the hidden truths about their world. In a nicely meta-postmodern touch, some biographers assert that Dick actually used I Ching in the same way, to write The Man in the High Castle. He follows the ancient fortune-telling method of throwing yarrow stalks, selecting, based on the random pattern formed by the fallen sticks, mysterious portents from the I Ching, which form Grasshopper’s message about the real nature of the High Castle world. With the help of the I Ching, the mystical Taoist ‘book of changes’, Abendsen uses chance to divine Grasshopper’s plot and details. This occult real real world is revealed in book-within-the-book The grasshopper lies heavy, ostensibly written by the titular ‘man in the high castle’, Howard Abendsen. Or did they? In fact most of the novel’s protagonists suspect the world they see is not real: there is another ‘occult’ reality, one in which the Axis powers lost the war. The first is Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), a classic story of an ‘alternative world’ in which the Allies lost the Second World War. I regularly turn to two particular books when I need reminding how luck can sometimes reveal wiser ways to live. Breaking apart the fortune cookie reveals, in a shower of crumbs, next month’s sales figures. A random page in the Bible delivers a message from God. ![]() Turning up the next Tarot card produces mysterious clues about your future. The occult tradition is full of chance as a route to revelation. Others follow rather more chemically-activated routes, courtesy of that bloke down the pub selling packets of doubtful powder.īut if neither ghosts nor hallucinogens are your thing, another way to go beyond the rational and logical is to invoke chance. Some people lay claim to direct channels to the mystery realm-in the form of ghosts, familiars, spells and invocations. But if measurements, observations and rational deductions won’t reveal such ‘hidden’ layers of reality, how can we uncover them? Most enthusiasts of the occult and strange would agree that all is not quite as it seems: the world we see around us isn’t the whole story.
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