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Well, the difference in Dicks case is that he wasn't on drugs when he had his vision. He'd been clean for a while.
And in any case, his substantial drug abuse was amphetamine, rather than hallucinogen based. Now, he had dosed himself up on mega-quantities of vitamins (after reading an article in Omni, if I remember correctly) - is it possible that the vitamins caused the hallucination? Seems terribly unlikely, given I don't think I've ever heard of anyone having a similar experience...
As for the nature of the event? It was clearly a vision of a pretty substantial fashion. Substantial enough to kill his cat, in any case - which is pretty serious.
There's no real point saying that Dick thought it was contact from "A highly evolved self," or God, or a Russian Spy Sattelite, or the past, or John the Baptist, or Stanislaw Lem - because he pretty much held all of these opinions at one point or another.
However, reading his letters makes it clear that he held these impressions in a very loose fashion - he was happy to consider any of them, but more as models to try and give some meaning to a genuinely transcendent event which could not be approached in any rational fashion.
So, was it a real contact experience? In my opinion, almost certainly. It has the multi-dimensionality that to me is a sign of the real thing. |
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