“We are asleep—in a dream state—and mistakenly think we are awake. One of the fundamental aspects of the ontological category of ignorance is ignorance of this very ignorance; he not only does not know, he does not know that he does not know. We are in a kind of prison but do not know it. This BIP (Black Iron Prison, i.e hyperdimensional matrix) is a vast complex life form which protects itself by inducing a negative hallucination of it.

The occlusion is self-perpetuating; it makes us unaware of it. We are supposed to combat it phagocyte-wise, but the very valence of the (BIP) stasis warps us into micro-extensions of itself; this is precisely why it is so dangerous. This is the dread thing it does: extending its android thinking more and more extensively. It exerts a dreadful and subtle power, and more and more people fall into its field (power), by means of which it grows.

This is a sinister life form indeed. First it takes power over us, reducing us to slaves, and then it causes us to forget our former state, and be unable to see or to think straight, and not to know we can’t see or think straight, and finally it becomes invisible to us by reason of what it has done to us. We cannot even monitor our own deformity, our own impairment. Being without psyche of its own it slays the authentic psyches of those creatures locked into it, and replaces them with a spurious microform of its own dead psyche. The very doctrine of combating the ‘hostile world and its power’ has to a large extent been ossified by and put at the service of the Empire. The BIP warps every new effort at freedom into the mold of further tyranny. The Empire is only a phantasm, lingering because we have gone to sleep.

So long as the root of wickedness is hidden, it is strong. But when it is recognized, it is dissolved. When it is revealed, it perishes…. It is powerful because we have not recognized it. The bombardment of pseudorealities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly. The artifact enslaves us, but on the other hand it is attempting to teach us to throw off its enslavement. Compassion’s highest power [embodied higher love] is the only power capable of solving the maze.

The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give. If the final paradox of the maze is that the only way you can escape it is voluntarily to go back in (into it), then maybe we are here voluntarily; we came back in. Anamnesis was the loss of amnesia. You remembered your origins, and they were from beyond the stars.”

– Philip K. Dick