This article is excerpted from The Psilocybin Solution: The Role of Sacred Mushrooms in the Quest for

Meaning, recently released by Inner Traditions.

For most people, Philip K. Dick (hereafter known as PKD) is

best known through films like Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and

A Scanner Darkly, which were all based on his writings. Classic movies like The

Matrix and Vanilla Sky also owe a great debt to PKD's work. What is not so well

known is that PKD was a bit of a latter-day mystic, a man who spent the last

decade or so of his life struggling to come to terms with a series of visionary

experiences (not related to psychedelics) that befell him in the early 1970s.

In these experiences, PKD felt as if some vast cosmic intelligence was

communicating with him, as if a deity was slipping him secret information. Such

was the impact of these theophanies that he chose to incorporate their thematic

content into a number of novels as well as an eight-thousand-page exegesis. To

the consternation of his peers, PKD began to be not a little obsessed with

ideas of "divine invasion" and the like, his last books testifying to his

escalating interest in theology and theistic philosophy (interestingly, his

last novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, partly concerns the search

for a sacred mushroom).

Since his death it has been speculated that PKD suffered

from what is known as temporal lobe epilepsy — a brain disorder that can lead to

hallucinatory experiences — and that this explains his mystical encounters.

However, leaving aside the contentiousness of this claim, it does not deal with

the burning issue of immediate mystical experience. To label an experience in

order to explain it away is to avoid the very real nature of the mystical

experience, however it should arise. In fact, as Huxley noted in The Doors of

Perception, we should not be surprised if there is always unusual neuronal

activity concurrent with a mystical experience, for, as we have seen, modified

neuronal firing patterns are related to expanded forms of consciousness.

Altered forms of awareness demand altered brain processes, and such a change in

brain state can be achieved in many different ways, whether through psilocybin

mushrooms, endogenous DMT, yoga, meditation, fasting, or spontaneous epileptic

disturbances. Mystical experience is therefore not to be conveniently disposed

of with a diagnostic label.

Even before his visionary experiences, PKD had long fought

to discover the true nature of reality. It was his pet fascination. In a talk

he delivered in the late 1970s, he admitted that for all the years he had

thought about the question "what is reality?" he had gotten no further than

concluding that reality was that which remained even if you stopped believing

in it. Admittedly a thin definition, it is nonetheless indicative that the true

nature of reality is not so easily pinned down.

PKD juggled with countless explanations for his mystical

experiences. Some involved a Judeo-Christian God, others involved the Logos

outlined in some of the Gnostic gospels (these are the "alternative" gospels

dug up at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945), while others even opted for an advanced

extraterrestrial intelligence. Whatever the case, PKD was certain that he had

been "contacted" by some form of advanced transcendental

intelligence-cum-Other.

One of his more enduring theories concerned VALIS, which is

an acronym for "vast active living intelligence system," a notion that accords

well with our intelligent Other. In the semiautobiographical novel of the same

name, VALIS is a hidden entity of immense power and sentience that is in the

process of infiltrating our reality by establishing communication with certain

individuals. These disclosures are experienced as theophany. For our purposes,

the key point is that VALIS is essentially outside of our dimension, but able

to penetrate our world. The question arises as to the feasibility that a

superior intelligence exists in another dimension with the capacity to move

across into ours. This is one of our fanciful options concerning the Other.

To more fully understand what PKD was suggesting, consider

the plot of his acclaimed novel Ubik. In this story, the main characters are

seriously blown up in an explosion at the start of the story and then placed in

a kind of collective suspended animation machine that keeps a portion of their

brain processes functioning. In this way the characters enjoy what PKD calls a "half-life."

What is more, the collective nature of their half-lives ensures that they

experience a simulated reality, a reality so real that the half-lifers fail to

realize that they are no longer in the real world. In other words, they don't

realize that they are actually wired up in the half-life unit of the Beloved

Brethren Moratorium. Indeed, they falsely believe that they survived the

explosion with just a few scratches (you can now see why The Matrix is a

decidedly Philipdickish movie).

Our interest grows when we see what happens when someone

outside of their simulated reality system attempts to communicate with them

(using the standard electrode headphones of course). At one stage in the tale,

the protagonist, Joe Chip, who is unaware that he now exists inside a simulated

reality, is contacted by someone from the "outside." This communication is

experienced by Chip as an eerie sequence of synchronistic events in his

simulated world. For instance, he begins finding significant messages

everywhere — scrawled upon washroom mirrors and turning up on matchbook labels

and in bits of consumer junk. Personal messages even begin interrupting TV

shows (this idea was borrowed to good effect in the Emmy-award winning BBC

sci-fi drama series Life on Mars). In short, the communicator has invaded

Chip's world in such a way that the communication gets distributed across

different media, turning up in the most unlikely of places rather than

manifesting as a big booming voice coming out of the sky.

I think it is this cunning idea, which PKD used on many

fictional occasions, that captures his views on the nature of VALIS. VALIS was

an "outside" intelligence able to penetrate our world, revealing itself through

mystical experience and through the unlikely juxtaposition of meaningfully

related events. Can we possibly utilize this notion and map it onto our idea of

the Other?

If we were to do this, then it would be tantamount to

suggesting that the "programmer" of the Universal Computation is able to "jump

into" the program, reaching in as it were to influence the state transition of

the computation. Or perhaps this transcendental influence can only be felt in

the psyche, in which case all theophanies would represent the manifestation of

the Other as it penetrates our reality.

But what does it mean to be outside the system, outside the

Universal Computation process? Can there really be an outside? It is possible

to imagine that in the future we will be able to create a kind of simulated

universe or an elaborate virtual-reality world that we can enter for years, if

not a lifetime. And yet despite the fact that there will indeed be an outside

to a simulated reality, we cannot say with certainty that there is also an

outside to our present reality. If we do entertain the notion of a dimension

outside of our world, we run up against the old infinite regress pit of

despair, for surely the "outsides" could be continued indefinitely. In other

words, if the intelligent Other exists outside our (simulated) reality, then what

lies outside the Other's dimension?

It is these dilemmas, which would appear to be

insurmountable, that lead me to think that the solution to the Other cannot be

found by appealing to a supernatural "outside the system" option. Indeed, we

have already seen that the Other appears to represent a creative process

conveyed by the mind whereby information organizes itself and takes on lifelike

properties. The Other, therefore, is surely more likely to be found firmly

entwined within the Universe along with ourselves (even if only as a mysterious

potential expressed under certain circumstances). If we once more restrict

ourselves to this one Universe, then at least our theoretical model will be

somewhat constrained and more amenable to a single holistic explanation. This

does not deny the existence of PKD's VALIS; rather, it locates VALIS within our

reality. Somewhere.

Teaser image by nikisublime, courtesy of Creative Commons license.