Now, do we believe in the objective reality of the Black Iron Prison? For some, the question seems easy to answer: there is no place where it actually could exist, for it can only be a mental construct. One may, in fact, use or confuse one for the other. And what is faith? “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” A leap of faith and a leap of insight are like fraternal twins. For it is not the end of faith when its object is plainly true there will always be further that on that might be speculated upon, based on where reason seems to lead. If you wish deeper than what is writ here, faith is required of you, and reason. But what if it were real, what would that mean? What if it is not completely in the eye of the beholder, but has separate existence apart from the observer? How does that affect the world? How would it affect your world? It is a vision of all that is wrong in the world, if you ever do experience it, a merciless mood that makes up the stagnant air, the sensation: “abandon all hope ye who enter here”. Or could they be common hallucinations, like everyone seeing snakes when they take a specific psychoactive drug? It is a vision of darkness, in any case. If you will not allow a spiritual realm to exist, one might imagine it to be something like a place you go in dreams, or nightmares. Or perhaps in another limited sense, it is that archetypical representation of the dark side within human beings in general. Is it real? If we understand reality as a shared experience, then it is real in that limited sense. From the scale that Heaven operates on, it is my understanding that that ruined part of Heaven could easily envelop the whole of the world, whatever those dimensions might be as a noosphere, what I call the Halospace. Even if, as it is written, it too shall one day have an end in the lake of fire. The reminiscence of Eternity is that timelessness one perceives. Called the “ruined part of Heaven”, when Satan was cast from above, the place he and his angels had been residing they tore from greater Heaven and was given to the fallen angels as a separate realm. It is a perverse and twisted place, whose architecture is of pure evil God has virtually no part in it, except for the fact that it originally was part of Heaven. What do we make of Hell? Why is it that the world was supposedly locked behind the structures of it, then? As for it being the “bad place” of the afterworld, Hell wasn’t made by God. How about that? It is a ghost building, a building only visible in a nightmare. If you look closely, too, you will notice that the building is partly in ruins, not a completely concrete object. That was where I was in the ’Prison, that exact place-what Bosch had entitled, “Hell”. I have described this elsewhere, that in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, in the third panel, “Hell”, there is in the far back a large building. Is it then something like an archetype, something hardwired into the human mind, if not brain-maybe the vision of it is hidden in everyone’s mental structure? Eternity seems to be some factor that is intrinsic in it: past, present, and future as one in the architecture, as Dick noted. Was it just a hallucination? If it were purely one person’s imagination, that doesn’t explain why other people saw some version of it, too. But like I said, I had a different tack: I looked out the window and I didn’t recognize anything, like I had been transported to… well, I wasn’t allowed to think it while I was there: I had been transported to Hell. Which makes sense, why he thought of it in that light, for he saw it superimposed on our everyday reality. PKD also said that this was the true nature of the world, that we do not perceive the ’Prison has always had us caged within it. It had a consistent aesthetic, between each time I visited, though I think it may have been that the buildings and such details might have changed between showings. As for my own vision of it, it was nothing like earth of the waking mind ever was, not at all my memory of the place was distinctly of an otherworldly landscape. Dick said that the perfect description is that of a timeforsaken place, blending past, present, and future, buildings cast in wicked black-where the “alien” from the sci-fi movies of that name might call home.
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