Just thought I would share this:
WAS PHILIP K. DICK
POSSESSED BY AN ANGEL?
[From the book, UNSOLVED MYSTERIES by Colin Wilson and Damon Wilson
published by Contemporary Books, Chicago-copyright date 1992]
By the time of his death in March 1982, Philip K. Dick had
become perhaps the most respected of modern science-fiction writers.
The reason for this was expressed in an essay on Dick by Brian
Stableford: "He has done more than anyone else to open up metaphysical
questions to science fictional analysis" [In E.F. Bleiler, ed.,
_Science Fiction Writers_ (New York: Scribner), 1982].
He was also, with the possible exception of H.P. Lovecraft,
the most neurotic of major science-fiction writers, obsessed by the
notion that human beings are trapped in a web of unreality. His
persecution mania developed to a point where he could undoubtedly have
been described as a paranoid schizophrenic. Yet, toward the end of
his life, Dick became convinced that he had been "taken over" by a
kind of superalien, who went on to reorganize his life. And although
Lawrence Sutin, in his full-length biography of Dick, _Divine
Invasions_ (1991), casts doubts on some of Dick's claims, the case is
too complex to be dismissed as simple self-delusion.
Philip Kindred Dick was an oversensitive little boy whose
childhood was not designed to make him buoyant and optimistic. His
twin sister died soon after his birth--as a result, he was later
convinced, of his mother's neglect. He was a lonely child; his mother
was cold and, in Sutin's words, "emotionally constrained." She was
often in pain and spent long periods bedridden--she suffered from
Bright's disease. Dick himself suffered from asthma and had eating
and swallowing phobias. He was an introverted child who liked to
retreat into daydreams of cowboys; he resisted all of his father's
attempts to interest him in sports. His parents divorced when he was
five. When he was nine, he and his mother moved to Berkeley,
California, and Dick attended high school there. His relationship
with his mother, who was slim and pretty, had classic Freudian
overtones; when he was a teenager he even had a dream that he was
sleeping with her. He finally left home at nineteen--he claimed his
mother threatened to call the police to stop him--and moved into a
bohemian rooming house populated by gay artists. From the age of
fifteen he had worked in a local TV and record store and so was able
to support himself.
At nineteen Dick was still a virgin who had never even kissed
a girl. Then one of his customers--a short, overweight woman named
Jeanette, who was ten years his senior--remedied the situation in a
storeroom in the basement, and Dick decided to marry her; she was the
first of five wives. When they had been married two months, Jeanette
told him that she had a right to see other men; he dumped her
possessions outside their apartment and changed the locks. His love
life became sporadic and not particularly satisfying; one woman he
fell in love with preferred his partner in the store; another went off
with a lesbian. Another beautiful woman with whom he had an affair
dropped him because he was so socially inept. A nervous
breakdown--accompanied by agoraphobia--led him to leave the University
of California a year later. "I managed to become universally despised
wherever I went," he later told an interviewer. This led him, he
said, to identify with the weak and to make the heroes in his stories
weak.
From an early age Dick was obsessed by pain and misery. He
records that when he was four his father, who had fought on the Marne
in World War I, told him about gas attacks and men with their guts
blown out. And during World War II, when he was still a child, he saw
a newsreel showing a Japanese soldier who had been hit by a
flamethrower and was "burning and running, and burning and running,"
while the audience cheered and laughed. Dick wrote of the incident:
"I was dazed with horror... and I thought _something is terribly
wrong_." And in an autobiographical essay he wrote: "Human and animal
suffering makes me mad; whenever one of my cats dies I curse God and I
mean it; I feel fury at him. I'd like to get him where I could
interrogate him, tell him I think the world is screwed up, that man
didn't sin and fall but was pushed." Forced to kill a rat that had
been caught in a trap in his children's bedroom, he was haunted for
the rest of his life by its screams. As a youngster, Dick had had an
urge to cruelty, but after an incident in his childhood that involved
tormenting a beetle, the urge suddenly vanished and was replaced by a
sense of the oneness of life--what he called satori: "I was never the
same again."
Dick's obsession with the problem of cruelty resembled that of
the Russian writer Dostoyevsky, whose Ivan Karamazov confesses that
the cruelty and brutality of the world makes him want to "give God
back his entrance ticket." It is unsurprising, therefore, that Dick's
first science-fiction story, "Beyond Lies the Wub," concerned space
explorers on an alien planet who buy a piglike creature called a wub,
which is delighted to discuss philosophy with them--while their only
desire is to eat it. A later wub story describes how wub fur is used
to bind books because it is self- repairing, though the fur causes the
texts to alter. Thomas Paine's _Age of Reason_ vanishes
completely--an expression of Dick's feeling that it is an absurd form
of hubris for human beings to believe they are rational creatures.
From then on most of Dick's work had a morbid, not to say
paranoid, streak. In "Second Variety," machines get out of hand and
create duplicate humans to trap real people. "The Imposter" is about
a man who finds himself subjected to the nightmarish experience of
being suspected of being a robot bomb; the final twist of the story is
that it turns out to be true. (Dick's early stories were heavily
influenced by the work of the older science-fiction writer, A.E. Van
Vogt who often chooses such themes--e.g., a hero caught in a nightmare
world of apparently insane misunderstandings--although his basic
outlook is optimistic.)
There is a Kafkaesque quality to Dick's work, which often
features individuals beset by endless complications that frustrate all
attempts at purposeful action. Like so many modern writers--notably
Arthur C. Clarke--Dick likes to play with the idea of computers
developing their own intelligence and taking over from human beings.
He is also inclined to experiment with the idea that the word
"reality" is meaningless--that, instead, there are as many "realities"
as there are living creatures and that the notion of "reality" is
therefore purely subjective. This view, of course, leads easily to
solipsism, the belief that you are the only person in the universe.
After all, if the reality around us is "relative" and self-created,
then perhaps other people are illusions we create to defend us from
the recognition of our loneliness.
One of Dick's early novels, _Eye in the Sky (1957),
encapsulates his views about "reality"; a group of people find
themselves in an "alternative reality" where other people's beliefs
can become "reality"; a religious cult imposes its own views on
everyone's mind. They then realize that they are trapped in the
insane reality of one of their own number. When they escape this
illusion, they immediately find themselves entrapped in yet another.
Their return to "reality" is a painful process in which they have to
escape the "individuality reality" of every member of the group. But
in this early work Dick at least believes that a "return to reality"
is possible. His later work becomes more darkly pessimistic, infused
with the underlying conviction that there is no overall "reality,"
only our individual illusions. This could be regarded as a dramatized
version of the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer and possibly
that of Buddha.
In 1963 Dick finally achieved relatively wide recognition with
a novel entitled _Man in the High Castle_, which won the Hugo Award
for best science-fiction novel of the year. It is another
"alternative reality" novel, about a world in which the Allies lost
the Second World War, with the result that America is divided into a
German zone and a Japanese zone. A character named Tagomi has flashes
of an alternative reality in which the Allies won the war, but they
seem absurd. Dick apparently plotted this novel with the aid of the
_I Ching_, the Chinese book of oracles; the result is a certain
arbitrary quality. A later novel, _Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?_, concerns an attempt by "real people" to root out the robots
that are trying to take over the earth and that are virtually
indistinguishable from humans. (It was made into a successful film,
_Blade Runner_.) All of Dick's work seems to express his own
inability to cope with life. He wrote, "For us...there can be no
system. Maybe _all_ systems...are manifestations of paranoia. We
should be content with the meaningless, the contradictory, the
hostile."
Meanwhile, Dick's life lurched from crisis to crisis: nervous
breakdowns, suicide attempts, divorces, novels written at top speed to
stave off debt, paranoid delusions-- at one point he saw a great metal
face, with slots for eyes, looking down at him from the sky. His
sexual relationships were reminiscent of those of the Swedish
playwright Strindberg; again and again it looked as if the lonely,
fear-ridden writer had found peace when some attractive woman thought
that she could give him the security he needed. But his fundamental
instability wrecked every relationship. And his loneliness and
paranoia brought about writer's blocks. His biographer remarks, "If
there is a dominant mood to his novels of the late sixties, it is that
of a dark night of the soul." The novels themselves usually have a
stifling, airless atmosphere that contrasts strongly with the wind of
reality that seems to blow through the best of Tolstoy or Hemingway.
A quarrel he had with the science-fiction writer Harlan
Ellison seems to embody everything that was wrong with Dick. At a
science-fiction conference in Metz, France, Dick bewildered and bored
his audience with a typically rambling speech entitled "If You Find
This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others." Audience members
suspected he was drunk or on drugs. (He was, in fact, addicted to
numerous prescription drugs.) Dick and Ellison had parted company
before because Ellison felt Dick was unreliable and "possibly loony."
When they met in the bar they engaged in a bitter philosophical debate
that was basically a quarrel. Dick's girlfriend at the time gives a
memorable word-portrait of the encounter:
Phil was very antithetical to Harlan. Harlan is
very cocky, glib, cool, and here is Phil going
clunk clunk clunk. Phil was not a very debonair
or self-assured man. Snuff falling out of his
nose, ninety-two spots on his tie--you know. And
Harlan thought Phil treated people very badly
because he wandered away, got lost, had people
support him rather than be master of his own ship.
Anyway, they got into this huge debate. Phil does
very well in these kinds of situations. Here is
Harlan banging his chest, and Phil was more a
philosopher. Phil was just great--more dynamic
and sexy than I'd ever seen him.
Clearly, Dick _could_ pull himself together and organize his
ideas. Yet, as Ellison realized, he preferred to "have people support
him rather than be master of his own ship."
But on March 2, 1974, Dick experienced a "vision" that
transformed his life. He later told an interviewer, Charles Platt,
"My mental anguish was simply removed from me as if by a divine fiat.
...Some transcendent divine power, which was not evil, but benign,
intervened to restore my mind and heal my body and give me a sense of
the beauty, the joy, the sanity of the world."
In February 1974 Dick was convinced that he was being
persecuted by both American and Soviet authorities; he was also
convinced that he was destined to die the following month.
One night, lying awake and wrestling with "dread and
melancholy," he began to see whirling lights. A week later he again
had visions but this time of "perfectly formed modern abstract
paintings"--hundreds of thousands of them replacing each other at
dazzling speed. Then he experienced the Bardo Thodol journey" (an
after-death journey, as described in the _Tibetan Book of the Dead_)
and found himself face to face with the goddess Aphrodite. After this
he began hearing female voices as he hovered in hypnagogic states on
the edge of sleep. On March 16 "it appeared--in vivid fire, with
shining colors and balanced patterns--and released me from every
thrall, inner and outer." Two days later "it, from inside me, looked
out." In other words, Dick now felt another being inside himself; he
was "possessed." But the entity seemed benevolent: "It seized me
entirely, lifting me from the limitations of the space- time matrix;
it mastered me as, at the same instant, I knew that the world around
me was cardboard, a fake. Through its power I suddenly saw the
universe as it was; through its perception I saw what really existed,
and through its power of no-thought decision, I acted to _free
myself_."
All this sounds like the typical rambling of a psychotic. Yet
what actually took place was by no means entirely in the realm of
fantasy. Dick had a conviction that he would receive a letter that
would kill him. His wife, Tessa, confirms that one morning he
selected a letter from a large batch of mail, handed it to her
unopened, and told her that this was what he had been expecting. In
fact, it was a photocopy of a book review about the decline of
American capitalism, and every negative word, such as _die_,
_decline_, _decay_, and _decomposition_, had been underlined.
Paranoid or not, Dick seemed to have a sixth sense that enabled him to
detect the strange letter unopened.
Now, says Dick, he was taken over by the "intelligence." "On
Thursdays and Saturdays I would think it was God, on Tuesdays and
Wednesdays I would think it was extraterrestrial....It set about
healing me physically, [as well as] my four-year-old boy, who had an
undiagnosed life- threatening birth defect that no one had been aware
of."
The "intelligence," which Dick called Valis (Vast Active
Living Intelligence System), fired information into his brain by means
of pink light beams. It told him that his son, Christopher, suffered
from a potentially fatal inguinal hernia. The Dicks checked with the
doctor and found that the information was correct; the hernia was
remedied by an operation.
Dick told Charles Platt:
This mind was equipped with tremendous technical
knowledge--engineering, medical, cosmological,
philosophical knowledge. It had memories dating
back over two thousand years, it spoke Greek,
Hebrew, Sanskrit, there wasn't anything that
didn't seem to know. It immediately set about
putting my affairs in order. It fired my agent
and my publisher. It remargined my typewriter.
It was very practical; it decided that the
apartment had not been vacuumed recently enough;
it decided that I should stop drinking wine
because of the sediment--it turned out I had an
abundance of uric acid in my system--and it
switched me to beer. It made elementary mis-
takes, such as calling the doge "he" and the cat
"she"-which annoyed my wife; and it kept calling
her "ma'am."
His wife, Tessa, told Dick's biographer, Lawrence Sutin, that
she had no doubt of the genuineness of these "mystical" experiences.
But she herself also had reason to believe that there was some basis
for her husband's paranoia. Dick though that the radio was
transmitting programs in which a popular singer called him names, told
him he was worthless, and advised him to die. This sounds like a
typical schizophrenic delusion. But Tessa herself verified that the
radio would go on at two in the morning and play music (she did not
hear the voice); the odd thing was that the radio was unplugged.
Dick goes on:
My wife was impressed by the fact that, because
of the tremendous pressure this mind put on
people in my business, I made quite a lot of
money very rapidly. We began to get checks for
thousands of dollars--money that was owed me,
which the mind was conscious existed in New
York but had never been coughed up. And it got
me to the doctor who confirmed its diagnoses of
the various ailments I had....it did everything
but paper the walls of the apartment. It also
said it would stay on as my tutelary spirit. I
had to look up "tutelary" to see what it meant.
Sutin verifies that Dick galvanized his agent--the one he had
fired for a time--into pursuing back royalties from Ace Books and that
the agent was able to send him a check for $3,000.
Tessa also confirmed that Dick normally refused to go to the
doctor but that the "spirit" insisted and that the doctor immediately
had Dick check into a hospital for treatment of high blood pressure.
He came out physically much improved. His wife wrote, "It made Phil
more fun to be with. Every day brought an adventure." And his
experiences culminated in this insight: "This is not an evil
world....There is a good world under the evil. The evil is somehow
superimposed over it...and when stripped away, pristine, glowing
creation is visible."
Dick's life began to improve. He had always been poor. In
1974 he made $19,000, and in the following year, $35,000. As his
reputation increased, so did demands for interviews, and an increasing
number of his novels were translated into foreign languages. Several
books were optioned by Hollywood, and one of them, as mentioned
earlier, became a classic movie, _Blade Runner_. When Dick died--of a
stroke and heart failure--in 1982, he had achieved cult status among
thousands of science-fiction fans and had become something of a
legend.
How far can we accept Dick's own estimate of his "possession"
experience? His biographer, Lawrence Sutin, is obviously ambivalent
about the subject. Yet the title of his book, _Divine Invasions_,
indicates that he feels the experience to be the most important in
Dick's life. His ambivalence is understandable. Dick sounds like a
paranoid schizophrenic, and paranoid schizophrenics have "visions."
Yet there is enough factual evidence to suggest that Dick may not have
been suffering from delusions after all.
The problem, of course, is that a rational human being finds
it practically impossible to believe in "possession"-- except as a
psychiatric label. Chapter 26 in this book argues that such an
attitude may not be as reasonable as it sounds. It depends upon the
assumption that disembodied "spirits" cannot exist, and while no one
will agree that this is a perfectly sensible *assumption* for a
rational and practical human being, we cannot assume that it is *true*
for that reason. And if we are willing even to admit the logical
possibility of spirits, then we have also admitted the logical
possibility of "possession."
An American psychiatrist, Wilson Van Dusen, found himself in
this position, simply as a result of his work with mental patients at
Mendocino State Hospital in California. In a book entitle _The
Natural Depth in Man_ (1972), Van Dusen defined madness as "a turning
in on one's self that makes one a constricted uselessness that misses
one's highest potentials." In other words, madness is a *limitation*
of our natural potential--which inevitably raises the question: What
*is* our natural potential? Van Dusen's conclusion was that all human
beings have the potential to undergo "mystical" experiences, in which
consciousness seems to expand far beyond its normal limitations, and
that therefore, in a certain sense, we are all "mad."
He went on to describe how he managed to establish contact
with one of his patient's hallucinations. The girl had a phantom
lover, and "just for the heck of it," Van Dusen asked her to "report
faithfully what [the lover] said and did." Van Dusen was thus able to
hold "conversations" with the hallucination, using the patient as a
go-between. He then found, to his surprise, that he was able to give
psychological tests to his patients *and* to their hallucinations,
separately. He next made a startling and disturbing discovery: the
hallucinations were sicker than the patients. That should have been
quite impossible, since the hallucinations *were* the patients. Yet
"what was revealed of the hallucinations looked remarkably like
ancient accounts of spirit possession." There could be no doubt in
Van Dusen's mind that the hallucinations behaved like real people, and
really replied to his remarks; for example, the patient's eyes would
sometimes flash sideways as Van Dusen was talking and the
hallucination interposed some remark.
Patients often told stories of how they had come to "meet"
their hallucinations: "One woman was just working in her garden and a
kindly man started talking to her when no one else was around. One
alcoholic heard voices coming up a hotel light well. Another man saw
a spaceship land and green men getting out." (This experience is
worth bearing in mind, when one considers so-called contactees of
flying saucers; if Van Dusen is correct, these may not always be
hallucinations.) "it takes a while for the patient to figure out that
he is having private experiences that are consequently not shared by
others."
There was evidence that the "hallucinations" were not entirely
subjective and unreal. One of the patients was a woman who had
"murdered a rather useless husband." The Virgin Mary had come to her
in the hospital and advised her to drive to the southern part of the
state and stand trial for murder. The Virgin told her there would be
an earthquake on the day she left for the south and another on the day
she arrived. In fact, both earthquakes took place on cue.
Van Dusen soon noted that there seemed to be two types of
hallucinations, which he termed "higher order" and "lower order." The
lower order were stupider than the patient. They would lie, cheat,
deceive, and threaten. They might repeat the same word over and over
again for days on end; they might tell the patient he was useless and
stupid and that they were going to kill him. They behaved, says Van
Dusen, like "drunken bums in a bar."
The "higher order," on the other hand, were more intelligent
and talented than the patient, and far from attacking him, they
respected his freedom. They were "helpers." In one case, Van Dusen
was introduced by his patient--a "not very gifted gas fitter"--to a
"beautiful lady" who referred to herself as the Emanation of the
Feminine Aspect of the Divine and who seemed to have an incredible
knowledge of religious symbols: "When I or the patient said something
very right, she would come over to us and hand us her panties." One
day Van Dusen went home and spent the evening studying Greek myths.
The next day he asked the "hallucination" about some of the obscurer
parts. "She not only understood the myth, she saw into its human
implications better than I did. When asked, she playfully wrote the
Greek alphabet all over the place. The patient couldn't even
recognize the letters, but he could copy hers for me." As the gas
fitter was leaving the room, he turned to Van Dusen and asked him to
give him a clue as to what the conversation had been about.
The detail of handing over the panties makes it sound as if,
whatever Van Dusen thought, this hallucination was conjured up by the
gas fitter--who admitted that he had made "immoral" proposals to the
woman and had been rejected. Yet her description of herself as the
"Emanation of the Feminine Aspect of the Divine" offers an important
clue. She was describing herself as the archetypal symbolic woman,
Goethe's "eternal womanly." For a male, the incredible essence of the
female is that she is willing to give herself; the handing over of her
panties may be regarded as a singularly apt symbol for this essence.
Van Dusen was fascinated to discover that the Swedish mystic
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) had described the lower and higher
orders with considerable accuracy. They were, according to
Swedenborg, "spirits," and the lower order were earthbound spirits who
were driven by malice or boredom. These tended to outnumber the
higher spirits by about four to one. Like Kardec (see chapter 26),
Swedenborg commented that spirits could only "invade" people with whom
they had some affinity--which probably explained why the low spirits
outnumbered the high ones. Swedenborg referred to "high spirits" as
angels and said that their purposes was to help; low spirits might be
regarded as devils, yet their function was often--in spite of
themselves--a helpful one, for they pointed out the patient's sins and
shortcomings.
Could Swedenborg have been mad? asks Van Dusen, and replies
that there is no evidence no evidence for it whatever. What *is* odd
is that his high and low spirits are not confined to Christian mental
homes; they transcend cultural barriers and can be found just as
frequently among Muslim or Hindu lunatics.
Van Dusen reaches the interesting conclusion that "the
spiritual world is much as Swedenborg described it, and is the
unconscious".
If he is correct, and the "spirit world" lies *inside* us--as
another remarkable mystic, Rudolf Steiner, asserted-- then we can
begin to see why mental patients might experience hallucinations.
They might have "opened" themselves to their own depths, to the
curious denizens of those regions.
When Philip K. Dick's strange experiences are considered in
the light of these comments, it becomes clear that it is impossible to
dismiss him as a paranoid schizophrenic. We must at least be willing
to leave open the possibility that he was aware--as expressed in the
title of Wilson Van Dusen's second book--of "the presence of other
worlds". |
