PKD on DNA, “to experience anamnesis”

“In other words, Zebra was informing me that the immortality achieved by the early authentic Christians was through DNA or gene pool memory, and that what they told outsiders was a “fish sign, representing Christ,” was in fact a drawing of the DNA molecule. Zebra had already made it clear to me that the early Christians, as representatives of Essenes, had managed to conquer time. This is how they did it: one of their members dies, and was later, by means of an external disinhibiting stimulus, retrieved – which is to say, his later incarnation was induced to remember, to experience anamnesis (the loss of amnesia).

Zebra achieved this with me. I was able to remember my life as an Essene of the first century A.D., and the steps taken to eventually insure a resoration of my memory and hence identity. I was able to retrieve not only two former lives but a knowledge of my primordial origin from the stars.”

(p. 149-150, The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick vol. 5)

“Were these truly added perceptual faculties – added to the normal – or were they, instead restored perceptual faculties which had been lost, latent, so to speak, all my life? (…) We are imprisoned by blunted faculties; the very blunting itself makes us unaware that we are deformed. But how this blunting came about, by whose actions and why, I have no theory.”

(p. 153, The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick vol. 5)