"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. George Orwell made this clear in his novel 1984. But another way to control the minds of people is to control their perceptions. If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception." --Philip K. Dick
He put his observations to work, and well, as certainly in my case, his teleology, his epistemology, his entire weltanschauung was deeply contagious. The more of his corpus you read the more the underlying themes stick, and his themes are like catnip for the nihilistic and incredulous.
Baudrillard certainly “got” Dick, as his essays provide a beautifully formalised encapsulation of the primary ideas that motivated Dick, and did so by reading his stories.
Good literature doesn’t have to have a compelling plot, or beautiful literary style, or evocative descriptive prose, or any particular form or mechanism - it just has to do one thing: change you, the reader.
Ursula K. Le Guin also pointed this out, at least in her book "The Dispossessed". For example: "This is my brush" vs "This is the brush that I use" regarding -- in part -- the concept of ownership [be it personal or communal].
That idea (words shaping thought) is near the top of my list of "stupid things that smart people believe and repeat".
Think about the history of words with a negative connotation that people try to replace, and how the new euphemism acquires the previous negativity.
dang doesn't like it when people say correlation is not causation, but dammit, the fallacy is everywhere! Changes in language accompany changes in thought, but it's not causal.
I mentioned an author using a fictional society's phrasing to influence that society's thought process on ownership. It was relevant to what I was commenting to.
Please do share more about this "stupid idea" regarding "words shape thought"; as you say, I seem smart enough to share and repeat something stupid so I must be able to understand you further.
The problem is that often you hear things like "Tribal people X have no word for 'lying' in their language" as if that meant that they couldn't understand the concept. But of course they do, even if they call it "not telling the truth". Similarly, people like to point out words in languages like German that are compound words, and as amusing as things like "Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän" (Danube steamship company captain) are to English speakers, it isn't as if we can't understand the concept. There just is no evidence that people of different languages think differently.
Yeah, I agree. A lot of this "weird thing about culture X" is nonsense. It works especially well for people who haven't experienced many different cultures.
> There just is no evidence that people of different languages think differently.
Languages are used to express ideas. We have debates on this very website about the expressiveness of languages, how expressiveness of language enables (in)efficiency, and which languages are best for a given task.
The expression of a thought influences and, in some cases, limits the kinds of thoughts that can be expressed. This is evident when you see things like someone "writing Java in perl".
I've been writing perl in VBA. It seems to me that this, or your example, demonstrate the opposite of language controlling thought. People have thoughts that are very different from the norm in the language they are using, and they find a way to express them. In fact, I've been recently trying to express my usual programming concepts in a language that's far more of a straitjacket than VBA.
Meanings evolve and often doesn’t follow the literal words used. “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” for example has seen it’s meaning dramatically shift over time. Basically as soon as a phrase has a well known meaning, that meaning can begin to drift.
An author can define a fictional society's language and thought processes any way they please. I read The Dispossessed over 20 years ago and can't recall the quote you meant. If it wasn't about the nature of real reality, but about the relationship of the author to a constructed world, then referring to it was inconsistent with my expectation of relevance, and I did misunderstand.
The only clarification I can think of for my response is to reiterate that the context I was assuming was the belief that controlling language allows one to control thoughts of real people. My reaction isn't that it should or shouldn't, just that it obviously doesn't.
Maybe "control" would be a better word than "shape", after further contemplation. I agree that words shape thought, because in general, actions shape thought. But nobody can control thought by controlling language. It's futile. Unless you are privileged to be designing the universe.
"that the context I was assuming was the belief that controlling language allows one to control thoughts of real people. My reaction isn't that it should or shouldn't, just that it obviously doesn't."
Is the government subjecting people to enhanced interrogation or torture?
Are they placing them in detention or prison?
Are people undocumented immigrants or illegals?
Is someone a <respectful term> or "just a <derrogatory term>"?
Is someone a freedom fighter, a terrorist, or a traitor?
To the Nazis, were Jewish people human or subhuman?
Can a given historical event be called a genocide?
To me it's pretty clear the words used to describe people and their actions influences how these people and actions are viewed and understood.
This is one reason why propaganda is so effective, and why violence often follows the dehumanization of certain groups of people, in which word choice tends to play an important role.
I don't believe that some thoughts are impossible for users of certain words, but do believe their thoughts are influenced by the words they use and hear used all around them, and some thoughts are less likely in such people.
For instance, in Nazis who truly believed that Jewish people were subhuman, empathetic thoughts towards Jewish people were less likely.
Also, I don't agree that attempts at control have failed. I think they have often succeeded.
This is confusing me greatly for a fairly brief comment.
- "Thoughts are not influenced by words" would be a silly claim, and I disavow it.
- I am disoriented by your throwing out "some thoughts are impossible for users of certain words", not knowing who and where you think that was claimed. That's not the only way one could try to control thoughts with words. The method people seem to try a lot is to eliminate words to prevent thoughts, which seems like kind of the opposite.
- On what basis do you presume you have good insight into the psychology of Nazis? I mean really, that's awfully glib.
- Your last two sentences don't seem mutually exclusive, but having them together seems to imply they should be, which means I don't know what you are trying to say. Can you give an example of successful control at any rate?
It was referenced back up at the top. And 1984 has been part of my mental landscape for maybe a quarter century, so my opinion that reality is different has been calcified gradually over time.
Yes, his. Calling torture enhanced interrogation helped people to accept torturing for years. The in group continues accepting it and continues torturing.
Nazi were quite successful in turning Germany the way they wanted, in making soldiers hate and in making them comit atrocities. That was succesfull language manipulation. They lost war for unrelated reasons.
It's a cliche! If it was successful thought control, then we couldn't have a discussion about it. Nobody would know what you were referring to.
In the end, people will get old, and forget history, and die off, and the feedback loop will go around and around and what people believe will evolve. But nobody will have successfully controlled what people think.
I totally agree that everybody is trying to influence everyone else's thoughts through language. That's what words are for. Nobody could reasonably disagree with that, and I never intended to.
> If it was successful thought control, then we couldn't have a discussion about it. Nobody would know what you were referring to.
I wonder if you believe that this kind of absolute, unsubtle thought control is what Ursula Le Guin was talking about with the brush example, or what the parent post was talking about. Or even what Orwell was talking about.
To me it seems that's what the discussion boils down to. I agree that words cannot 'control' thoughts fully, but I also agree that Ursula Le Guin didn't argue this at all but rather that the /way/ we use words has an effect on how we think about these concepts, and as such can be used for manipulation. There are plenty of studies that show that saying the same thing in different wording can drastically change how people feel about these things.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is really popular in the full 'thought-control' kind of way, and I do believe that that is not well supported.
There's been some doubt created about what Le Guin was talking about. I don't have the context handy.
What Orwell was talking about, what he thought or feared possible, I disagree with, and, well, you can compare our society to 1984. There is a tremendous amount of propaganda, and it has an effect, but don't you agree that as warped as the mental space we collectively inhabit may be, that it's not under control of a specific entity? Even in, say, the Soviet Union, it wasn't under control. Maybe some day when totalitarians can program brains...
> but don't you agree that as warped as the mental space we collectively inhabit may be, that it's not under control of a specific entity?
Yes, I agree that the case of a single entity being able to use words to place thoughts directly in minds like a TV version of hypnosis or etch them out of minds as if with electroshock therapy is not an accurate description of... anything.
It's not what anyone means when they talk about words shaping thought, an idea which you disparaged so vituperatively - which would be understandable if anyone meant by it what you seem to be implying they mean. They can mean a number of things, whether it's a coach or leader influencing the attitudes of their followers, a person seeking to direct their own train of thought, a movement using language to dehumanize a minority group, an advertiser affecting how the public views a product, or a propagandist or politician attempting to move the Overton Window. Or many other things, more or less subtle.
No, successful control does not mean you will never ever get out of power nor it means forever secrecy. It means you achieve what you wanted. Enhanced interrogation is sll going on.
And in nazi example, successful controll of how Jews are seen does not imply that foreign non-Jewish armies will never beat you. That would be ridiculous standard.
Nazi succesfull framed Jews as evil and Jews got exterminated. They succesfully framed slavs as inferior and succesfully framed themselves as needing more living space which led to expansive war and population displacement.
That foreign armies conguered them does not imply that messaging aimed at Germans was not succesfull.
It's not just that they were conquered, but then they were defined as uniquely evil for all time, but then the struggle to maintain that and include or exclude others as similar never ends. Godwin's law wouldn't be a thing if anyone controlled language even in this specific area. People wouldn't to this day casually compare people and groups to Nazis if there was such a thing as controlling people through language.
Given your statement that "enhanced interrogation" is still going on, that means from my framing that calling it torture failed to stop it, hence attempts to control it through language failed. You're saying that language allows it to happen, but I would say the correct framing is that doing it and the desire of people to rationalize it allows it to happen. The euphemism being an effect rather than a cause.
Today enhanced interrogation just means torture to me. Which quickly happens to any such phrase, they may start as spin but quickly turn into a euphemism and eventually gain all the negative connotations as the original.
> To me it's pretty clear the words used to describe people and their actions influences how these people and actions are viewed and understood.
It can have unintended consequences, however. For me, hearing the phrase “undocumented immigrants” just irritates me and actually distracts me from the point the utterer is trying to make. It's like a word pretzel designed to get around saying “illegal”.
It's not a simple cause effect relationship, but if you want a real world example of how words can shape thought and have real effects on the world, look up "death tax" Vs "succession tax".
If you liked this, I highly recommend reading his book VALIS. It's psuedo autobiographical, and deals with the odd "visions" and "revelations" PKD experienced later in his life. He was likely suffering from some sort of mental illness, but to close the discussion there ignores the lessons PKD himself taught us in his earlier works. Reality is weird and slippery, and we don't really know what's going on.
In my humble opinion, PKD was grazing what the perennial philosophy offers to be the Truth of existence. To quote Waking Life:
> Now Philip K. Dick is right about time, but he's wrong that it's 50 A.D. Actually, there's only one instant, and it's right now, and it's eternity. And it's an instant in which God is posing a question, and that question is basically, 'Do you want to, you know, be one with eternity? Do you want to be in heaven?' And we're all saying, 'No thank you. Not just yet.' And so time is actually just this constant saying 'No' to God's invitation. I mean that's what time is. I mean, and it's no more 50 A.D. than it's two thousand and one. And there's just this one instant, and that's what we're always in."
Perennial philosophy is the view that all philosophies or religions are getting at the same thing, or have the same root.
That's quite different from PKD's hypothesis (one of many he entertained) that the present moment is something like a holographic superimposition on biblical times in ancient Rome.
PKD meant this quite literally, as one possibility of what reality might actually be, not as an opinion on what different philosophies or religions are getting at.
PKD posited 50AD. The perennial philosophy posits there is only one moment. Hence, the quote included in my comment. The quote explains the connection.
PKD grazed the truth but fell short, and this is alright.
Ironically, there are actually many different perennial philosophies, each of which believe different things.
The thing they have in common is that they believe all religions or philosophies are getting at the same thing or have their root in the same thing or experience.. but what that thing is differs from one perennial philosophy to another.
You seem to have cited one such belief -- that there is only one moment -- but I'm not sure what the origin of your belief is. Which version of perennial philosophy are you referring to?
I'll meet you on your terms. Let's look at Huxley.
According to his research and the works he chose to survey, what is it that one might conclude he sees as being "the single, metaphysical truth or origin from which all esoteric and exoteric knowledge and doctrine has grown?"
Just take a look at the Wikipedia article you linked to.
In it there are versions by: Huxley, Philo of Alexandria, Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, Agostino Steuco, Emerson, Blavatsky, Huston Smith, and a bunch of others.
Take a closer look at what these people believed and you'll see they believed different things (except that, again, they believed that there was a common source or experience that different religions stemmed from or were getting at).
For example, from the article, "the Egyptian god Osiris and the Greek god Dionysus had been equated as Osiris-Dionysus by the historian Herodotus as early as the 5th century BC", while "The mystic Ramakrishna's spiritual ecstasies included experiencing the sameness of Christ, Mohammed and his own Hindu deity". Not really the same, is it?
"Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) believed that Hermes Trismegistos, the supposed author of the Corpus Hermeticum, was a contemporary of Mozes and the teacher of Pythagoras, and the source of both Greek and Jewish-Christian thought."
Again, not the same as the other two.
"Ficino saw his thought as part of a long development of philosophical truth, of ancient pre-Platonic philosophers (including Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Aglaophemus and Pythagoras) who reached their peak in Plato."
So now the peak is supposedly Plato, not Osirus, Christ, Mohammed, or a Hindu diety.
Then there's Steuco who believed "that philosophy works in harmony with religion and should lead to knowledge of God", but that's different from Emerson, who thought "an individual's intuition of truth was taken as the criterion for truth".
Etc, etc, etc...
By the way, in none of the above (or anywhere else in this Wikipedia article) is there any mention of what you said perennial philosophy (and, according to you, PKD) were getting at: that "there is only one moment". Where did you get that?
Perhaps a better umbrella for what I am referring to would be non-dualism.
i’m referring to Buddhism, Sufism, Hinduism, and Esoteric Christianity.
key figures would then be Patanjali, Buddha, Ramana Maharshi, Jesus Christ (Gospel of Thomas), St. Theresa of Avila, The Desert Fathers especially Anthony The Great, Shankaracharya, Rumi, and Hafez.
Patanjali in the non-dual Hindu tradition.
Buddha in the Buddhist tradition.
Jesus (as expressed in the Gospel of Thomas) representing Christianity.
Shankaracharya for advaita vedanta.
Ramana for Self-Enquiry.
Rumi, Hafez for Sufism.
also Somananda for Kashmir Shaivism.
Apologies if there was confusion in terms. It seems we were coming at it from different angles.
You know, I'd have to suggest "Intergalactic Pot Healer" as a soft introduction into the whole scene.
Thing about reality being slippery we have a tendency to acknowledge the fact when we're reading the books but then to comfortably return to our regularly scheduled mundane existence the minute the books are closed.
I still haven't been able to reconcile the sheer madness of the world with the workaday banality and obedience I've experienced in this cursed industry.
I had some bad drug trips earlier this year, and one of the things that's stuck with me is the realization of how bizarre our reality and existence is. It manifests as an existential dread, where I realize that we're all walking around in a world we don't understand, where most people don't seem to be questioning that fact.
It's like, we all just started existing one day. You can trace that back to your parents, to being born, to evolution, to the laws of physics, to the big bang, etc, but that doesn't remove the bizarre fact that we exist and are conscious for some reason but we have no idea why. (Or if the question of "why" even makes any sort of logical sense.) Even the reality we think we perceive is unlikely to be anything like what's actually going on. Isn't that just so weird?
It's been about 5 months now, and I still get hit with these feelings multiple times a day. It's accompanied with a strong feeling of anxiety, so I wish I could go back to the old banality.
(Yes, I've been considering therapy for awhile, but it's difficult to get an appointment with a therapist right now.)
I've been through some very similar stuff. It was two years after "I" was blown to pieces before I had really integrated these strong pangs of anxiety, memories that I was nothing at all and that ultimately reality is terrifyingly absurd. It's been a long process of learning that these pangs are important learning experiences, that they are fuel for compassion for others, that curiosity and awareness transform them into something else... etc. etc. down the rabbithole of self-care for the unwilling mystic.
If you're interested in what I did with all that since then, I'd be happy to chat more and share what I've learned, where I'm at, and where I'm headed. Seconded on the cup of virtual coffee, /u/artsyca, although of course I'm perfectly happy not to crash y'all's party.
May I recommend a movie directed by Linklater called Waking Life.
> Waking Life is a 2001 American experimental philosophical adult animated docufiction film written and directed by Richard Linklater. The film explores a wide range of philosophical issues, including the nature of reality, dreams and lucid dreams, consciousness, the meaning of life, free will, and existentialism.[3] It is centered on a young man who wanders through a succession of dream-like realities wherein he encounters a series of individuals who engage in insightful philosophical discussions.
I'd recommend Linklater's Slacker over Waking Life... I liked the former way, way more than the latter. Waking Life did have some amateur philosophizing in it, and maybe had some PKD influence to it, but at best it was PKD-lite.. I found it more annoying than anything, due to the endless stream of characters in it that sound like they're trying to be incredibly profound, but they're really not.
Slacker doesn't take itself nearly as seriously, so is much more successful with its own cast of weird characters.
I’ve thought about this stuff for a long time - my grandmother started me, as a child, on the path of “why is that a cat? How do you know you’re not its dream?”, and introduced me to PKD, whose corpus I devoured the first time around while nine or ten.
I’ve seen the human world as absurdist comedy, blindfolded people shuffling around in a circle, for about as long as I can recall. It’s nonsense upon nonsense, forgotten meanings, wilful misinterpretations, and age-old traditions invented yesterday. Our meta-consciousness is senile and gibbering. Etymology provides a wonderful insight into just how screwed up we are - when you see meaning diverge, drift, and even invert across culture and language, you realise just how malleable the world, human reality, is, if you modify the symbol set.
When I first tried LSD in my late teens, it wasn’t so much “whoa, revelation!” as “yup, that looks about right”.
You can learn to live with the colourless pit of infinity hovering in your mind. You can even come to love it. You still need to do the human things, play the human game, but you now have the added perspective of understanding that there exist possibilities outside of the human game, ways of living divested of a lot of the meaningless crap. It can be advantageous, like being able to think in 3D in flatland.
I managed to stick it out as a “regular person” for about 15 years, working in an office, living in an apartment, buying stuff to try to pave over the infinity hole - but it just felt more and more wrong, like play-acting at life rather than living, like I was a sad little third-hand simulacra of a human being. Sad little robot, enter stage left, exit stage right. Didn’t fancy that role.
I live off grid now, and work with my hands, growing food, building structures and infrastructure, transforming my labour into a direct and tangible output - it has been massively helpful, as it lacks the layers and layers of abstraction that civilised life demands, and presents a clear, direct and straightforward reality.
I still sit here and think about it all, still sometimes get caught out by a nihilistic trap, but more generally have just come to appreciate existence and consciousness as the most brilliantly absurd thing possible. What a thing, to seem to be matter that thinks. Marvellous if real, marvellous illusion if not. A marvel, either way.
Great post, thank you. In a way I do feel like it threw me unwittingly into philosophy. A lot of what I felt seemed like it came right out of Sartre's writings -- who I had never even heard of before last year.
I'm hoping that with some time and healing I'll get to that place where I can appreciate the absurdity for what it is. I don't think the anxiety I feel is inherent in the realizations themselves, but emerge as a result of my perception of them. It's been hard to deal with that this year though, when there have been so many other anxieties piled on top of that core existential fear.
When this all happened, that quote was one of the exact ones that I felt described it perfectly! The existential dread felt like my mind beginning to correlate its contents and it was terrifying.
I'd love to discuss it more. Where can I get in touch?
Thanks, you're right. I've found some comfort in stoicism, which is definitely closely related to the serenity prayer. I also realize part of it will just take time for healing and integration.
sorry you are having a hard time. contrary to what one might believe you should be able to get an appointment with a therapist - remotely though - it should actually be easier now since a lot of people don’t like not_in_person therapy.
as a meta: i recommend the book “the power of now”. it sounds like pseudo selfhelp bullshit but at least for me it clicked beautifully - and it can be a really good initiation/transition to something more established like buddhism.
Yes, some kind of de-conditioning and "seeing the world with fresh eyes" has often been attributed to the psychedelic experience.
I'd take it all with a grain of sand, however. Just because what one experiences on psychedelics might seem "more real than real" doesn't mean it actually is. Some have described psychedelics as superplacebos.. people can be very suggestible in such states, and are prone to believing what they want to believe.
Absolutely agreed. I don't feel like I actually learned anything new or anything that I didn't already believe. The only secret about the universe I uncovered was that it's a complete mystery and we don't have any idea what's going on. Which is something I already believed, but the belief is different from confronting the void itself.
And even that realization isn't something that intrinsically should be connected to anxiety, except that the drug also induced a panic state in me, so now my brain associates those thoughts with fear and danger. Slowly working on reprogramming that.
Galactic Pot Healer. It's fantastic. Odd and certainly not a masterpiece, but still some of Dick's best writing. It's one of his instances of mythology creation; it's closer to a fantasy than sci-fi.
Apparently it was one of Dick's least favourite novels. As I recall, he wrote the book in just one week while under the influence of amphetamines, and later had no recollection of having written it, and he more or less disowned it.
hahahaha. breaking news: pkd claimed that all his books are basically an expression of what he “sees” in alternate universes. so he saw himself more like a transmitter than a source. in his exegesis he goes back and reinterprets all his work through the valis filter. it’s nuts but beautiful in a poetic manner.
as for the pot healer? i think the book is dope and it’s up there in my top10.
if we’re into this, Valis, The Divine Invasion, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, A Maze Of Death, and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch are all facets of the same diamomd.
IMHO, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is by far the best PKD book.
I'd add Ubik to this as well, and would personally rate it higher than the Three Stigmata. For me, Ubik is PKD's greatest and most accessible book.
1st rank - Ubik, The Three Stigmata, A Martian Time Slip, Faith of Our Fathers
2nd rank - (The Divine Invasion or The Galactic Pot Healer ... don't remember which now... it's been a long time), A Maze of Death
3rd rank - VALIS, Eye in the Sky
Honorable mention: the middle of Lies, Inc -- it has a weak start and ending, but the middle is up there with the best PKD has ever written.
I found The Transmigration of Timothy Archer to be pretty boring, but I didn't make it all the way through, and some PKD books (like Lies, Inc) start dull and turn great, so I might give it another go sometime.. but the impression I got when first reading it was that this was a book written around the time PKD was starting to transition to writing more "serious literature" (aka not scifi), and to me PKD is just much stronger at writing scifi, particularly of the really mind-bending, bad acid trip kind, and he just wasn't cut out to write "serious literature"... so yeah, right now I'd pass on The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.
I'm also kind of sick of his obsession with his pink light mystical experience.. I wish he'd just gotten over it already and moved on to something else. Writing about it once was more than enough.
+1 for Ubik. It's really the quintessential example of his reality bending core theme. Everytime you think you've got a handle on what's happening, he pulls the rug out from under you, all the way to the end. Some of his other books try to do the same thing, but tie things up too nicely (like Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said).
I took two tries to get into Transmigration of Timothy Archer. What got me through the second time was finding out that it was a fictionalized portrait of a real and fascinating person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Pike
I also just liked reading Dick's descriptions of the Bay Area.
When I see these stories of mine, written over three decades, I think of the Lucky Dog Pet Store. There's a good reason for that. It has to do with an aspect of not just my life, but the lives of many freelance writers. It's called poverty [........] So anyhow, there I am at the Lucky Dog Pet Store on San Pablo Avenue, In Berkley, California, in the Fifties, buying a pound of ground horsemeat.
Philip K. Dick in the introduction to the Golden Man, 1980
I've been in (EDIT: the Berkeley house on that page)! There's a little plaque inside. It is just a house, though. I didn't experience any onset of hebephrenia.
the fact that it’s based on Bishop Pike is indeed one hook. This is where I have first learned about John Allegro and his wild theories on Christianity. These theory fascinate me to this day.
Don’t know if you ever read any of his non-SF stuff, but it’s worth a pop - Confessions of a Crap Artist and Mary and the Giant stand out as the most interesting to me. Both follow the same vein as his SF work, insofar as he takes a reasonable premise (mid-century America in this case), strips it to its symbols, and then parades them in front of you as a banal pastiche which improbably anneals into tantalising insight of the mindsets, wants and desires of the characters, who are transparent avatars of their culture. Mary, for instance, could almost be a piece of paper with “MARY” printed on it, but through that empty vessel one understands the thingness of the characters’ perceptions.
I tried reading Confessions of a Crap Artist, but had the exact same reaction as I did to The Transmigration of Timothy Archer... boredom. Couldn't finish it. I just didn't think it was good. I couldn't see what you saw in it. Someday maybe I'll give it another chance.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the basis for Blade Runner, is really a fantastic novel too. It has been overshadowed by the film, but it’s prediction that organic life would become a status symbol as it was destroyed replaced by Capitalist simulacra seems especially relevant today. I think about it all the time when I see Instagram influencers with hobby farms or children playing Pokémon during our ongoing mass extinctions.
if we’re ranking stuff, Ubik is definitely in the top 3. I was strictly talking about the 2 3 74 phase and all the works that came from that. In a pure PKD fashion the Three Stigmata was written way before that.
it depends. It captures really well the experience of a bad trip (spoiler alert: I don’t think that anything that happens after Leo meets Palmer actually happens and it’s just Leo tripping hard)
Interestingly, his books describe very psychedelic type experiences, but he apparently didn't do psychedelics much. There's a reference to him trying LSD once and hating it. His drug of choice seemed to be amphetamines.
Ultimately it's impossible to diagnose post mortem what exactly was going on in his head.
Just because PKD said he hated LSD doesn't mean it didn't influence his writing. The peaks of many of his best works seem like bad acid trips, though the paranoia that can come from heavy amphetamine and other drug abuse could certainly have had an influence as well.
Anyway, I'm not sure how trustworthy PKD's accounts of his own drug use are.
PKD wrote a lot of great books really quickly by relying on amphetamines, heavily. This had a major contribution to the far out mental state he was in towards the end of his life, and it's actually quite sad.
I say this as a huge PKD fan. Ubik and A Scanner Darkly both had a profound impact on me.
Lots of people have written very trippy things without having done psychedelics at all.
Here’s something I was just learning about in a podcast recently — 2000 years old abd similar to the kind writing that pkd was doing after his breakdown.
While I agree that very strange and possibly "psychedelic" things can be written without using psychedelics or other means of attaining altered states of consciousness, particularly if one is mentally ill, I'm not convinced the 2000 year old works the article you link to discusses weren't themselves influenced by access to some altered state of consciousness, perhaps through psychedelics.
Psychedelics and other means of altering consciousness have been used throughout human (and possibly even pre-human) history. In reference to the link you cited, there has been evidence that cannabis, which can have psychedelic effects at high doses, was used in ritual contexts in biblical times in ancient Israel. Here is a recent article discussing some new evidence of this:
> He was likely suffering from some sort of mental illness
Science Fiction really is a mental illness.
You suspend disbelief, you invent an alternate reality in your mind, and then you walk around in it accepting both the possible and the preposterous in equal measure.
But what a wonderful illness to experience, because someday it might infect others and we might have spaceships or cybertrucks or watch c-beams glitter in the dark near the tannhauser gate.
The more I meditate (13 years now), and the more 1/5/6 seem to be yes/no/yes. It is congruent with many meditators exerience and teaching, which of course could be influencing this conclusion, not to mention it's not measurable nor objective.
I'm not sure 2/3 are something we can ever answer.
And that spawns many interesting questions about the physical characteristics of cousciousness. Does it start and end? It is present spacially? If you don't need thought, do you need the brain to be conscious? Do you need neurons? Can something without it be conscious? Is there only one form of consciouness? Is it persistent? Is it a whole? It is homogenous? Is it something in itself, or an emerging phenomena? Does it have a support, or is it a support in itself?
Unfortunatly, people tend to immediatly reach for spiritual, religious or mystical answers to those.
what do you make of the confessions of sages? respectfully: perhaps, do you prefer to stick to what can be understood from direct experience?
i personally can’t help but wonder how it is that many sages in different times and places seem to arrive at corroboratory confessions of what they’ve experienced as the ground of being.
I mean, I appreciate talking about the roots of ideas but everything is just an iteration on old ideas and these new iterations mean something to the people and cultures that iterate on them. To say that he said it in a way "digestible to western audiences" is basically to compliment him and say "he spoke in a way that meant something to a new generation of people with new experiences"
