WAS PHILIP K. DICK POSSESSED BY AN ANGEL?

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http://www.armory.com/~mortoj/magick/newfiles/philipkdick.html

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From phineas@anarky.tch.org Thu Sep 9 01:29:05 1993

~Newsgroups: alt.alien.visitors

~Subject: Was Philip K. Dick Possessed By An Angel?

~Date: 7 Sep 93 01:35:19 GMT

I'm posting this to several newsgroups. I recently came across a chapter in a book by one of my favorite authors which is about another one of my favorite authors. Since I had transcribed it to send it to a couple of friends of mine, I thought I'd post a copy of it here. Any comments anyone has on this are welcome.

--Phineas Narco

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".

[Transcribed by Phineas Narco on 9/7/93]

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