The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick. Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings by Philip K. Dick

Hallucination, mental illness, drug experiences of “expanded consciousness” are menacing to the organism because of the social results. It is obvious, then, what role language plays in human life: It is the cardinal instrument by which the individual worldviews are linked so that a shared, for all intents and purposes common reality is constructed. What is actually subjective becomes objective — agreed on. So, viewed this way, sociologically and anthropologically, it does not matter where the hallucinations originate or even whether they are accurate — but unique and hence unshared — perceptions of “higher levels of reality unglimpsed ordinarily,” even by the person himself.

Real or unreal, originating within the percept system or received validly by the percept system because, say, of some chemical agent not normally present and active in the brain’s metabolism, the unshared world that we call “hallucinatory” is destructive: Alienation, isolation, a sense of everything being strange, of things altering and bending — all this is the logical result, until the individual, formerly a part of human culture, becomes an organic “windowless monad” [a description utilized by Leibnitz]. It does not matter that his reasoning faculties are unimpaired; it does not matter whether or not he feels “adequate emotion,” those being the two classic criteria by which schizophrenia was diagnosed. Actually it seems to be that neither is impaired; faced with the sense data presented him, the individual does as well with it as we do with ours, and the same goes for his emotional life — he may display moods and feelings that to us can’t be accounted for. But we are not perceiving what he is; the emotions are almost certainly appropriate in relation to what he perceives, i.e. experiences.

My own feeling, especially in view of the very recent laboratory findings that some connection exists between schizophrenia and subsecretions of the adrenal gland, is this: “The sane man does not know that everything is possible.” In other words, the mentally ill person at one time or another knew too much. And, as a result, so to speak, his head shut down. A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, but gadzooks — what about too much knowledge? Death, as a factor of reality, perhaps should not be known about at all, or, if that’s impossible, then as little as one can manage. James Stephens, in his poem “The Whisperer” (from Insurrections, Dublin, 1912), informs us of something I distinctly am not glad to know, but now I know it, and I guess one finds it out sooner or later. Ironically, it is that God Himself feels this:

I fashion you,

and then for weal or woe,

By business through,

I care not how ye go,

Or struggle, win or lose, nor do

I want to know.

One doesn’t have to depend on hallucinations; one can unhinge oneself by many other roads.

“Schizophrenia & The Book of Changes” (1965)

In many species of life forms, such as the grazing animals, a newborn individual is more or less thrust out into the koinos kosmos (the shared world) immediately. For a lamb or a pony, the idios kosmos (the personal world) ceases when the first light hits his eyes — but a human child, at birth, still has years of a kind of semireal existence ahead of him: semireal in the sense that until he is fifteen or sixteen years old he is able to some degree to remain not thoroughly born, not entirely on his own; fragments of the idios kosmos remain, and not all or even very much of the koinos kosmos has been forced onto him as yet. The full burden of the koinos kosmos does not weigh until what is delightfully referred to as “psychosexual maturity” strikes, which means those lovely days during high school epitomized by asking that cute girl in the row ahead of you if she’d like to go get a soda after school, and she saying “NO.” That’s it. The koinos kosmos has set in. Prepare, young man, for a long winter. Much more — and worse — lie ahead.

The preschizophrenic personality is generally called “schizoid effective” [sic; likely “affective” intended], which means that as an adolescent he still hopes that he won’t have to ask the cute chick (or boy) in the next row for a date. Speaking in terms of my own schizoid-effective experience, one gazes at her for a year or so, mentally detailing all possible outcomes; the good ones go under the rubric “daydreams,” the bad ones under “phobia.” This bipolar internal war goes on endlessly; meanwhile the actual girl has no idea you’re alive (and guess why: You’re not). If the phobias win out (suppose I ask her and she says, “With you?” etc.), then the schizoid-effective kid physically bolts from the classroom with agoraphobia, which gradually widens into true schizophrenic avoidance of all human contact, or withdraws into phantasy, becomes, so to speak, his own Abe Merritt [a popular SF writer of the 1920s and 1930s] — or, if things go further wrong, his own H. P. Lovecraft. In any case, the girl is forgotten and the leap to psychosexual maturity never takes place, which wouldn’t be bad in itself because really there are other things in life besides pretty girls (or so I’m told, anyhow). But it’s the implication that’s so ominous. What has happened will repeat itself again and again, wherever the kid runs head on into the koinos kosmos. And these are the years (fifteen years old to twenty-two) when he can no longer keep from running into it on almost every occasion. (Phone the dentist, Charley, and make an appointment to get that cavity patched,” etc.) The idios kosmos is leaking away; he is gradually being thrust out of the postwomb womb. Biological aging is taking place, and he can’t hold it back. His efforts to do so, if they continue, will later be called “an attempt to retreat from adult responsibility and reality,” and if he is later diagnosed as schizophrenic, it will be said that he has “escaped from the real world into a phantasy one.” This, while almost true, is just not quite correct. Because reality has an attribute that, if you’ll ponder on it, you’ll realize is the attribute that causes us to so designate it as reality: It can’t be escaped. As a matter of fact, during his preschizophrenic life, during the schizoid-effective period, he has been somewhat doing this; he is now no longer able to. The deadly appearance, around nineteen, of schizophrenia, is not a retreat from reality, but on the contrary: the breaking out of reality all around him; its presence, not its absence from his vicinity. The lifelong fight to avoid it has ended in failure; he is engulfed in it. Gak!

What distinguishes schizophrenic existence from that which the rest of us like to imagine we enjoy is the element of time. The schizophrenic is having it all now, whether he wants it or not; the whole can of film has descended on him, whereas we watch it progress frame by frame. So for him, causality does not exist. Instead, the acausal connective principle that Wolfgang Pauli called synchronicity is operating in all situations — not merely as only one factor at work, as with us. Like a person under LSD, the schizophrenic is engulfed in an endless now. It’s not too much fun.

At this point the I Ching (The Book of Changes) enters, since it works on the basis of synchronicity — and is a device by which synchronicity can be handled. Maybe you prefer the word “coincidence” to Pauli’s word. Anyhow, both terms refer to acausal connectives, or rather events linked in that manner, events occurring outside of time. Not a chain passing from yesterday to today to tomorrow but all taking place now. All chiming away now, like Leibnitz’s preset clocks. And yet none having any causal connection with any of the others.

That events can take place outside of time is a discovery that strikes me as dismal. My first reaction was, “Good God, I was right; when you’re at the dentist it does last forever.” I’ll let the mystics dilate on, more favorable possibilities, such as eternal bliss. Anyhow, LSD has made this discovery available to everyone, and hence subject to consensual validation, hence within the realm of knowledge, hence a scientific fact (or just plain fact, if you prefer). Anybody can get into this state now, not just the schizophrenic. Yes, friends, you, too, can suffer forever; simply take 150 mg of LSD — and enjoy! If not satisfied, simply mail in — but enough. Because after two thousand years under LSD, participating in the Day of Judgment, one probably will be rather apathetic to asking for one’s five dollars back.

But at least one has now learned what life is like during the catatonic schizophrenic state, and one does return from LSD within a short time period as computed within the koinos kosmos (roughly ten hours), however much longer it is in the idios kosmos (to rather understate the matter). For the catatonic schizophrenic the duration of this state is not only forever idios kosmoswise but also, unless lucky, koinos kosmoswise. To put it in zen terms, under LSD you experience eternity for only a short period (or, as Planet Stories used to phrase it, “Such-and-such,” he screamed under his breath). So, within a nontime interval, all manner of elaborate and peculiar events can take place; whole epics can unfold in the fashion of the recent movie Ben Hur. (If you’d prefer to undergo the experience of LSD without taking it, imagine sitting through Ben Hur twenty times without the midpoint intermission. Got it? Keep it.)

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