World Really Is Cardboard

“1. One Mind there is; but under it two principles contend. 
2. The Mind lets in the light, then the dark, in interaction; so time is generated. At the end Mind awards victory to the light; time ceases and the Mind is complete.
3. He causes things to look different so it would appear time has passed.
4. Matter is plastic in the face of mind.
5. One by one he draws us out of the world.
6. The Empire never ended.
7. The Head Apollo is about to return. St Sophia is going to be born again; she was not acceptable before. The Buddha is in the park. Siddhartha sleeps (but is going to awaken). The time you have waited for has come.
8. The upper realm has plenary [Var. plenipotentiary] powers. 
9. He lived a long time ago, but he is still alive. 
10. Apollonius of Tyana, writing as Hermes Trismegistos, said 'That which is above is that which is below.' By this he meant to tell us that our universe is a hologram, but he lacked the term.
11. The great secret known to Apollonius of Tyana, Paul of Tarsus, Simon Magus, Asklepios, Paracelsus, Boehme and Bruno is that: we are moving backward in time. The universe in fact is contracting into a unitary entity which is completing itself. Decay and disorder are seen by us in reverse, as increasing. These healers learned to move forward in time, which is retrograde to us.
12. The Immortal One was known to the Greeks as Dionysos; to the Jews as Elijah; to the Christians as Jesus. He moves on when each human host dies, and thus is never killed or caught. Hence Jesus on the cross said, 'Eli, Eli, lama Sabachthani,' to which some of those present correctly said, 'The man is calling on Elijah.' Elijah had left him and he died alone.
13. Pascal said, 'All history is one immortal man who continually learns.' This is the Immortal One whom we worship without knowing his name. 'He lived a long time ago, but he is still alive,' and, 'The Head Apollo is about to return.' The name changes.
14. The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three-dimensional and not in space or time. The information fed to us we hypostatize into the phenomenal world…

36. In Summary: thoughts of the brain are experienced by us as arrangements and rearrangements -- change -- in a physical universe; but in fact it is really information and information-processing which we substantialize. We do not merely see its thoughts as objects, but rather as the movement, or, more precisely, the placement of objects: how they become linked to one another. But we cannot read the patterns of arrangement; we cannot extract the information in it -- i.e. it as information, which is what it is. The linking and relinking of objects by the Brain is actually a language, but not a language like ours (since it is addressing itself and not someone or something outside itself).
37. We should be able to hear this information, or rather narrative, as a neutral voice inside us. But something has gone wrong. All creation is a language and nothing but a language, which for some inexplicable reason we can't read outside and can't hear inside. So I say, we have become idiots. Something has happened to our intelligence. My reasoning is this: arrangement of parts of the Brain is language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore we are language. Why, then, do we not know this? We do not even know what we are, let alone what the outer reality is of which we are parts. The origin of the word 'idiot' is the word 'private.' Each of us has become private, and no longer shares the common thought of the Brain, except at a subliminal level. Thus our real life and purpose are conducted below our threshold of consciousness. 
38. From loss and grief the Mind has become deranged. Therefore we, as parts of the universe, the Brain, are partly deranged.
39. Out of itself the Brain has constructed a physician to heal it. This subform of the Macro-Brain is not deranged; it moves through the Brain, as a phagocyte moves through the cardiovascular system of an animal, healing the derangement of the Brain in section after section. We know of its arrival here; we know it as Asklepios for the Greeks and as the Essenes for the Jews; as the Therapeutae for the Egyptians; as Jesus for the Christians.
40. To be 'born again,' or 'born from above,' or 'born of the Spirit,' means to become healed; which is to say restored, restored to sanity…”
~ Phillip K. Dick,  Exegesis - Tractates: Cryptica Scriptura

“The beautiful and imperishable comes into existence due to the suffering of individual perishable creatures who themselves are not beautiful, and must be reshaped to form a template from which the beautiful is printed (forged, extracted, converted). This is the terrible law of the universe. This is the basic law; it is a fact. Also, it is a fact that the suffering of the individual animal is so great that it arouses an ultimate and absolute abhorrence and pity in us when we are confronted by it. This is the essence of tragedy: the collision of two absolutes. Absolute suffering leads to — is the means to — absolute beauty. Neither absolute should be subordinated to the other. But this is not how it is: the suffering is subordinated to the value of the art produced. Thus the essence of horror underlies our realization of the bedrock nature of the universe.”

This passage was written by the American novelist Philip K. Dick in 1980. Taken alone, the handful of lines might seem to be an extract from a lucid and elegant fugue on metaphysics and ontology — an inquiry, in other words, into matters of being and the purposes of consciousness, suffering, and existence itself. This particular passage would not strike anyone versed in philosophical or theological discourse as violently original, apart from an intriguing sequence of metaphorical slippages — printed, forged, extracted, converted — and the almost subliminal conflation of "the universe" with a work of art.

What makes the passage unusual is the context in which it arose and the other kinds of writing that surround it. Despite a tone of conclusiveness, the passage represents a single inkling, passing in the night, among many thousands in the vast compilation of accounts of his own visionary experiences and insights that Dick committed to paper between 1974 and 1982. The topics — apart from suffering, pity, the nature of the universe, and the essence of tragedy — include three-eyed aliens; robots made of DNA; ancient and suppressed Christian cults that in their essential beliefs forecasted the deep truths of Marxist theory; time-travel; radios that continue playing after being unplugged; and the true nature of the universe as revealed in the writings of the ancient philosopher Parmenides, in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, in Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and in Robert Altman's film Three Women.

The majority of these writings, that is to say, are neither familiar nor wholly lucid nor, largely, elegant — nor were they intended, for the most part, for publication. Even when Dick, who was an autodidact if ever there was one, recapitulates some chestnut of philosophical or theological speculation, his own philosophical and theological writings remain unprecedented in their riotous urgency, their metaphorical verve, their self-satirizing charisma, and their lonely intimacy (as well as in their infuriating repetitiveness, stubbornness, insecurity, and elusiveness). They are unprecedented, in other words, because Philip K. Dick is Philip K. Dick, one of the more brilliant and unusual minds to make itself known to the twentieth century even before this (mostly) unpublished trove now comes to light.

Dick came to call this writing his "exegesis." The process of its production was frantic, obsessive, and, it may be fair to say, involuntary. The creation of the Exegesis was an act of human survival in the face of a life-altering crisis both intellectual and emotional: the crisis of revelation. No matter how resistant we may find ourselves to this ancient and unfashionable notion, to approach the exegesis from any angle at all a reader must first accept that the subject is revelation, a revelation that came to the person of Philip K. Dick in February and March of 1974 and subsequently demanded, for the remainder of Dick's days on earth, to be understood. Its pages represent Dick's passionate commitment to explicating the glimpse with which he had been awarded or cursed — not for the sake of his own psyche, nor for the cause of the salvation of humankind, but precisely because those two concerns seemed to him to be one and the same…

Beyond 1974, he endured voices, visions, and prophetic dreams too numerous to list here — all to be enfolded, by the writer, into the cascade of interpretation of those earlier events. A reader will learn how readily and fluently a new revelation transforms Dick's sense of the "core facts" of 2-3-74, which never sit still but adapt to a flux of analysis, paraphrase, and doubt. Illuminating them fully was Dick's subsequent lifework. Why should it be simple for us?...”

~ Pamela Jackson, The Exegesis of PHILIP K. DICK (Copyright © 2011)

"In 1971 he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, because he wanted protection from the FBI (CIA?) agents who were tapping his phone and going through his papers. Shortly afterward, his house was in fact burglarized — which only confirmed his fear that one of his books had inadvertently revealed a government secret. (Dick was also fond of acting more crazy than he was; he enjoyed telling people, for example, that the cat’s litter box was bugged.) Eager to get away from his own life, in 1972 he accepted an invitation to attend a Vancouver sf convention as the guest of honor, and fled carrying nothing but a suitcase, a trenchcoat, and a Bible.

At the convention, Dick’s speech “The Android and the Human,” a summation of “an entire life-time of developing thought,” was well-received; shortly afterward he took an overdose of sedatives in an attempt to kill himself. He recovered, and was taken to a rehab center, where — after twenty years — he finally kicked his amphetamine addiction. Back in California he met and married an eighteen-year-old college student named Tessa, who put up with his wild rages, his agoraphobia, and intermittent physical abuse; with her, he had his third and last child. Now Dick started writing again, about his life among the speed freaks, and the result was A Scanner Darkly (1977), one of the greatest works of 20th century fiction. Set in a barely futuristic suburban LA of 1994, it tells the story of “Fred,” a disillusioned narc who enjoys the company of the addicts with whom he lives as “Bob” — whose own drug intake contributes to a toxic brain psychosis complicated by Fred’s new assignment… to spy on Bob. The book ends with a dramatic dedication to Dick’s many friends who’d been killed or permanently damaged by drug abuse; his own name is on the list. That same year Dick wrote to the Department of Justice, offering his assistance in Nixon’s war on drugs, because “drug-abuse is the greatest problem I know of.” Shortly afterward, United Artists paid Dick $2,000 for the film rights to Electric Sheep; the novel was, of course, eventually made into the shallow action movie Blade Runner.

On February 3rd, 1974, shortly before the publication of Flow My Tears, while Dick was recovering from the sodium pentothal he’d received during oral surgery, the doorbell rang. It was a delivery person, a young woman who happened to be wearing a gold icthus (a groovy ’70s Christian fish symbol) on a chain around her neck. Somehow the sight of the fish, plus his mental state at the time, plus the sodium pentothal, added up to a weeks-long flood of visions (Dick saw the Roman world of the Book of Acts stacked “holographically” atop the present), visual hallucinations (“It appeared — in vivid fire, with shining colors and balanced patterns — and released me from every thrall, inner and outer”), and a constant stream of cryptic messages (like “The Buddha is in the park”), often from the radio. Later, having studied Orphic, Gnostic, Zoroastrian, and Buddhist thought, books on brain chemistry, and the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Dick decided that he’d probably experienced “genetic memories,” or what Plato called anamnesis — the “recollection” of eternal truths. Or something.

After these experiences, as he noted in his Exegesis (a lengthy, handwritten journal devoted to theorizing about the events of “2-3-74”), he realized that the world really was “cardboard, a fake,” and that it was his duty to take on “in battle, as a champion of all human spirits in thrall, every evil, every Iron Imprisoning Thing.” Of course, as with his earlier paranoia about government surveillance, Dick also made fun of his own convictions..."

~ Joshua Glenn, Hermenaut: Philip K. Dick, October 5, 2011