2-3-74 and After: A Mystical and Paranormal Overview

Mark W. Smith

"A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessence. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed - and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!"

Arthur Rimbaud (May 15,1871)

PKD: Sham or Shaman? In February of 1974 Philip K. Dick was feeling a lot of personal stress: financial matters involving the I.R.S., lingering effects of the break-in of his home and other fears experienced in 1971, and family matters involving the birth of a new child. He was also dealing with the effects of an impacted wisdom tooth. Phil had been administered Sodium Pentothal during surgery and later was awaiting the delivery of a pain killer. Phil had also been taking lithium in prescribed doses for some time.

During this time Phil began to receive and experience a series of dreams, visions and other-worldly experiences that would change his life and times for ever. He would spend the remaining years of his life in pursuit of explanations for what had happened. What follows is a synopsis of possible ideas, borrowed from both western and eastern thought; past, present and even future.

In speculating on the condition of Phil's psyche at this point, one must ponder the combined effects of the stress, pain and drugs. The vision quest is a ritual practiced for gaining a guardian spirit or asking for supernatural guidance. These three forces are often utilized in preparing the mind and spirit for this: stress, in the form of isolation, fasts, thirsts and physical danger; pain, through mutilation or self mortification; and drugs, such as hallucinogens. In the successful vision quest the combination of these preparations will place the individual in a trance and make him a receptacle for supernatural forces. The vision quest still lies outside the realm of tribal shamanism.

Shamanism itself exists within the social structure of the tribe and is the practice of entering an altered state of consciousness and traversing non-physical realities in order to heal sickness, both physical, emotional, and spiritual; or to tell of the future and of things to pass, or to contact the dead, etc. The shamans are not priests, but are often more like mystics, and as such are separated from the main function of the society by their intense experiences. Siberian shamans go down to the underworld of the ancestral spirits to gain their knowledge. This belief system has had parallels in other cultures as well; in yoga tradition, the Manomya and Akashaloka siddhis provide access to other dimensions of the universe. In Iranian mysticism, Hurgalya, the celestial earth, is accessible for spiritual travel.

Within the shamanic traditions it is a long-held belief that of the three chief methods of obtaining shamanic powers (1) family transmission, (2) spontaneous vocation, and (3) people who become shamans of their own free will, the self-made shaman is the least powerful.

Mircea Eliade in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy says, "However selected, a shaman is not recognized as such until after he has received two kinds of teaching: (1) ecstatic (dreams, trances, etc.) and (2) traditional (shamanic techniques, names and functions of spirits, mythology and genealogy of the clan, secret languages, etc.)."

Looking at Phil's experience through a shamanistic viewpoint, we can say that it was spontaneous, and upon receiving the "call" he had a series of dreams, trances, visions, etc. Then he spent the next eight years trying to learn the traditions of his people, their mythology, the names and functions of their spirits, and so on.

For the most part he was on his own in his attempts to relate the experiences to the traditions of his people, due to the spiritual poverty that existed around him, and one wonders what would have been made of his experiences if he had been born or lived in a culture of rich shamanistic traditions.

The Symbolism of the First Encounter. Phil states that on February 20, 1974 he was visited by a beautiful girl who was delivering his prescription (Darvon), and noticed a gold necklace that she was wearing. He was suddenly stuck by the experience of "anamnesis", which was first employed by Plato as the recollection or remembrance of Eternal Truth. Asking her what it was, she informed him that the amulet had a fish inscribed on it, and that the fish was a sign used by the early Christians. She then departed.

Phil felt that the events that were to follow began that day and were triggered by his looking at this golden fish amulet. The word "amulet" comes from the French "amulet", which in turn comes from the Latin "amuletum" and means "for defense". Amulets have been common since ancient times, can be made out of virtually anything, and are believed to be imbued with magical or supernatural power.

Symbols as well have always been felt to retain magical powers. They function as translators of the human condition into meta-universal terms and reveal the connection between the microcosm and the macrocosm. W.B.Yeats once stated, "I cannot now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers whether they are used consciously by the master of magic or half unconsciously by their successors, the poet, the musician, and the artist." (In Yeat's Golden Dawn).

Gold itself has long been associated with the sun, the force which brings light, form and order out of chaos and darkness. The fish inscribed in the gold represented Christ to the early Christians because the Greek word "ichthys", meaning "fish", was an acronym for "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior". Also, fish live in water and water has long symbolized the unconscious mind. Water has also been used as a symbol of life.

One must speculate as to the effects of these combined events on Phil's mind on that fateful February day in 1974. Phil's interest in early Christianity, and his friendship with James A. Pike, the Episcopal Bishop of California, dating back to the mid-sixties, has been well-documented in several of his novels. Could this combination of circumstances culminate in the results that were to follow?

The Vatic PKD. Phil felt that he was transported to the world of Acts (fifth book of the Christian Bible's New Testament) and he felt that it was his real time and place. He felt that he was a person called Simon Magus, a first century Gnostic. He was also to name this ancient personage Thomas, a first-century Christian or "Firebright", described as an entity of spiritual wisdom. He never was able to decide on a name for this personage or the nature of its origin.

Spontaneous Retrocognition (a.k.a. postcognition) is a phenomenon in which an individual is able to "see" into the past. Occurring in the form of an hallucination or vision, the present surroundings are replaced by a scene from the past. Psychic Archeology is the ability to use psychic skills to aid in the field of archeology. Canadian archeologist J. Norman Emerson has used the talents of psychic George McMullen, who reports that he sees movie-like images of the past as he comes into contact with artifacts. He also states that he is assisted in this process by beings of light. Although this is more akin to psychometry, the ability to gain information from objects of the past by handling them, it is explained that the information is conveyed by vibrations embedded within an object by the emotions or actions of the past. Although I don't think Phil ever claimed to have touched the golden fish, if the vibrations were of enough intensity and/or he was sensitive enough or open enough, I feel an impression may have been felt, even without the his physically touching the amulet.

Spontaneous past-life recall is a phenomenon where an individual experiences the remembrance of a previously lived life. There are many documented cases of spontaneous past-life recall, one of the earliest being of a young Japanese boy born in 1815. Religious mysticism of the east acknowledges the existence of past-life recall and claims that through the practice of yoga meditation one can access all the details of one's past lives. This is tied to the central belief in reincarnation, the return of the soul to a new physical form after the death of the previous one.

PKD the Possessed. Revelations from divine, semi-divine, or other spirits and entities have been reported for thousands of years. Most Holy books, including the Christian Bible, have been founded on this premise. In 1904 Aleister Crowley, self-made magician and occultist, and his wife Rose Kelly received communications from an entity who identified himself as "Aiwass", the Egyptian god Horus' messenger, and penned "Liber Legis", also called "The Book of the Law". It became one of his most important works, and a standard in modern occult teachings. For three years beginning in 1954, Andrija Puharich observed and recorded a young man who, while in a spontaneous trance, would write and speak in the ancient language of Egypt. This has been detailed in his book, The Sacred Mushroom. In the 1930's in England, a woman spoke ancient Egyptian in a trance over a period of six years, which has been detailed in the book, Ancient Egypt Speaks by Hulme & Woods. Phil claimed to receive messages in sanskrit and koine Greek, two ancient languages of which he had no previous knowledge.

Spirit possession is the taking over of one's mind, body or soul by an external force such as a deity, spirit, demon, entity or a separate personality. Although not strictly accepted by Christianity as a whole, many of the world's religious beliefs (e.g. Voudon and many eastern religions) do accept it. Yet even within Christianity there are sanctified rituals for exorcism, (the Rituale Romanum, dating back to 1614) and acceptance of possession by the Holy Spirit.

The term "channeling" has gained in popularity over the last decade or so, and is a form of communication with "non-worldly entities". In its most basic form it has existed in most cultures throughout history, and in these cultures it has gone though periods of acceptance and rejection.

James Joyce used the term "epiphany", meaning "the manifestation of the divine or supra-personal". Rainer Maria Rilke said that he received signals from "cosmic space" for twenty-one days and during that time produced a fascinating body of written work, some of the world's best poetry.

Joan of Arc, a peasant girl of France, having heard the voices of "Saints" urging her to help Charles VII regain the throne, led a large army into battle in 1429, and in that same year, victorious in battle, crowned Charles at Reims.

Phil also considered the possibility that his late friend Bishop James Pike (d. 1969), was the source of his experiences. He pondered the idea that his psyche was merging with Pike's in an attempt to make contact with him from the "other side". During the early to mid-1960's Phil and Pike had become friends, spending many hours involved in theological speculation. They also spent much time, after Pike's son, Jim, committed suicide in February of 1966, discussing Pike's efforts to contact his son. Phil acknowledges Pike in the front of his book The Maze of Death as providing him with a "wealth of theological material for my inspection, none of which I was previously acquainted with." He disappeared in the Judean desert while on a quest for the historical Jesus, and was never seen again.

PKD the Dreamer. People claim that it is through dreams, intuitive flashes, and visions that they experience spontaneous past-life recall, and researchers look for the sudden acquisition of knowledge or information by the individual that cannot be explained by other means. Australian aborigines receive their knowledge about spiritual matters, as well as practical information about how to survive in an extremely hostile environment, through dreaming. They call it the "dreamtime".

When looking at the series of events that happened to Phil we must ask ourselves how they relate to each other. Which ones were primary events, and which ones were secondary events or even tertiary events resulting from the previous ones. As Lawrence Sutin, author of Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick states, "Phil was a living psychic caldron" at this point. I feel that the many dreams experienced by Phil during this time period must be thought of in these terms.

In the following weeks Phil was to have a series of nightmares, which frightened him further; they contained huge flying reptiles. In one of these dreams he describes that he was a young child in a prehistoric tribe and as these dragons came near he transformed into his pet saber-tooth tiger and began to posture in defiance, but he found himself in a cage without means of escape. Upon being aroused from her sleep by "... the sound of a large reptile hissing," his wife, Tessa, found "... Phil lying there, still asleep, hissing. Afraid to touch him, I called out his name. I was getting more scared with every second that passed. I sensed that it was not Phil who was hissing, but some mindless beast that had taken over his body."

Dragons have been used as symbols of the life force in many cultures for thousands of years, the essence of nature, an underlying invisible force. The flying dragon is an inner symbol of dark unconscious forces which must be transformed into creative forces. In alchemy, the mystical art of transforming consciousness, the dragon was a symbol of Mercury manifested as passion and concupiscence, which must undergo extraction and transformation, before becoming a peacemaker, a mediator between warring elements, and a producer of unity.

Alchemy was (and still is) an art studied by practitioners of the western esoteric tradition which has its roots in Greco-Egyptian esoteric teachings. As stated above, Phil was now a "living psychic caldron," and he wished to bring himself to a rolling boil. (For more on alchemy, see Appendix 2.)

Behind the Pink Door. Regarding some information concerning the use of massive doses of water-soluble vitamins that were suggested to improve the neural firing and the communication between the two hemispheres of the brain, Phil discovered an article in the April 1974 issue of Psychology Today that told about a case where a doctor had treated a schizophrenic patient with a combination of water-soluble vitamins. Phil copied down the "recipe" and began his own treatment, experimenting further with dosage and vitamin ratios. Phil states in his notes that, "both hemispheres [of the brain] came together, for the first time in my life."

He also began burning, day and night, white votive candles before a shrine he'd assembled in his bedroom. This shrine also contained a small wooden saint figure from the Philippines. He and his wife purchased a sticker with the Christian fish symbol on it and placed it in their living room window. As Phil watched the sticker with the afternoon sun streaming though it, he reported seeing pink rectangular shapes, phosphene images it seemed, prefiguring what was to come.

In mid-March Phil reports that he was into his fifth night without sleep when he experienced a barrage of frightening vortices of light. These came to him in rapid-fire repetition; he felt his own thoughts accelerating.

They seemed to be phosphene graphics that resembled modern abstract paintings, such as by the artists Kandinsky and Klee. He felt that hundreds of thousands of them were being downloaded into his mind. Phil began to feel that he was the recipient of a vast amount of encoded information. He felt that there was no way that he could have been the author of this information, as the quantity was too vast. These "transmissions" were to continue daily for the next week.

Terence McKenna has also reported that tryptamine-induced ecstasy sometimes triggers a kind of synesthesia in which syntactical structures (spoken language) become visible and language is transmuted from a thing heard to a thing seen; the syntax becomes unambiguously visible.

Phil goes on to tell us that the first stage of his visions at this time was to undergo the Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book of the Dead) journey at the end of which he met Aphrodite, Goddess of Divine Love. He reports little understanding of the meaning of any of this at the time.

Aphrodite was only one of the many encounters Phil would have with a divine female aspect who spoke to him while he was in a series of hypnogogic states. The name given to this voice by Phil was the A.I. (artificial intelligence) Voice, but he always assigned female qualities to it. He called it many things: Artemis and Diana, Athena and Minerva, Saint Sophia and his twin sister Jane, with all of whom he felt he was in telepathic communication at times. (His twin sister Jane had died a little over a month after birth. For more on the divine female aspect, see Appendix 3.)

Dick and Jane. Philip Kindred Dick and his dizygotic (fraternal) -twin sister Jane Charlotte were born six weeks premature, on December 16, 1928 at home. Lawrence Sutin reports that, "Phil was born at noon, twenty minutes ahead of his sister... They were frail things. Phil weighed four and one-quarter pounds and squealed loudly. Jane, a mere three and one-half pounds, was quieter and darker..." Jane was not to live; she died January 26, 1929, a little over a month old. Although too young to have conscious memory of his sister, she remained the central event in Phil's psychic life.

Lawrence Sutin writes in his biography, Divine Invasions, "This 'twinning' motif found expression in a number of Phil's stories and novels, notably Dr. Bloodmoney (1965), Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974), A Scanner Darkly (1977), VALIS (1981), and The Divine Invasion (1981)."

He goes on to quote from Phil's "Exegesis", from an entry written near the end of his life:

She [Jane] fights for my life & I for hers, eternally. My sister is everything to me. I am damned always to be separated from her/& with her, in oscillation. Very fast.

Both: I have her in me, and often outside me, but I have lost her; 2 realities at once yin/yang.

Sutin continues, "Two realities, out of which, as from rich loam, the multiverses of the stories, the novels, and the "Exegesis" blossomed. But always the loss of Jane hovered in Phil's soul." (For more concerning the subject of twins, see Appendix 4.)

A Counter-Intelligence Victim? For the next week or so Phil perceived that he would receive a letter that would kill him. This knowledge had been conveyed to him in a dream. On March 20th that day arrived, and the letter came in the form of a xeroxed sheet of paper from the left-wing New York newspaper The Daily World, which contained two book reports. Phil felt that this letter was somehow connected to a two-week period of amnesia he had suffered in 1972 while living in Canada. He suspected that he had been "programmed" but didn't know to do what or for whom. He feared that the trigger for this programming had been the letter, but that it somehow failed.

Phil thought something was taking control of him to direct his actions in response to the xeroxed letter. He speculated that it was Thomas; although now he felt that instead of a first-century Christian Thomas was a thought-control implant, implanted by the US Army intelligence. His name for this was "Pigspurt," which fear caused him to call the FBI and his local police department stating, "I am a machine," and then requesting to be locked up. No known action was taken by the authorities.

He thought that maybe he had been the involuntary recipient of an ESP experiment. He even wrote to Leningrad in the then Soviet Union asking if they had been involved in any experiments exploring long-distance ESP transmissions. He received no reply.

Phil was to gain control of himself shortly after this, although he continued to believe that he must continue to placate the authorities. He made a series of contacts to the FBI over the next seven months. (As a sidebar: Phil was to learn in 1975, through the Freedom of Information Act, that a letter he had sent in 1958 had been intercepted by the CIA. See Appendix 5 for more on government mind-control experiments.)

The radio began to abuse Phil with obscenities and death commands. Even when the radio was unplugged the abuse continued, waking him and his wife in the middle of the night. The radio was plugged back in, "because it was easier to sleep with the music on," remembered his wife Tessa, in an interview with J.B. Reynolds.

Phil's visions continued. He began to see what he termed "the golden rectangle". This "door" was marked with letters from the Greek alphabet and he repeatedly saw this door projected onto any natural formation that resembled it. At one time he even saw his pet cat Pinky emerging outward from through the door. The cat had taken on a larger and more ferocious appearance, although the cat was old and in poor health. Looking beyond the door Phil saw a "static landscape, nocturnal, a quiet black sea, sky, the edge of an island, and surprisingly, the unmoving figure of a nude woman standing on the sand by the edge of the water. I recognized her; it was Aphrodite."

Pinky the Cat. As time progressed more strange occurrences invaded Phil's life. He began to feel that the pets in his life seemed more intelligent and were trying to communicate with him.

Animal psi (Anpsi) is the ability of animals to make use of the same ESP faculties that humans are said to possess. It is suggested that this human-to-animal communication is nurtured by the love of their human guardians; if this be true, than Phil's cat Pinky must surely have been a candidate, as Phil had a deep emotional bond with his beloved cat. It even seems synchronicitous that the beam of light which provided Phil with his experience and knowledge was pink and his cat's name was "Pinky".

Later in the fall Phil stated that while he and his wife were lying in bed, he saw a "pale white light" enter and fill the room. He saw Pinky the cat floating, inert and exposed. Becoming frightened, he began to think that Death had entered the room and that he was going to die. He began praying in Latin for almost half an hour.

After the episode ended he stated to his wife that he'd known it was Death and thought it had come for him. He also explained that within the next four days Death would strike.

Later that night he reports a dream in which he heard a loud gunshot fired at him; he was OK but a woman next to him had been injured and was dying. He ran for help.

Three days later Pinky died, and on the night he died Phil was in the bathroom and felt a hand on his shoulder; turning to see who was there, he saw no one. He felt it was the touch of his good friend pausing to say good-bye upon his departure.

The Mystical PKD. Prior to this Phil had injured himself during the summer and had undergone corrective surgery. In this weakened state Phil says that he was again hit by the pink beam of light, which informed him of a potentially fatal inguinal hernia that his son Christopher had. This information was confirmed by a physician and the necessary surgery was performed later that day.

Aldous Huxley gave a series of seven lectures at MIT in the fall of 1960 on the subject of the visionary experience and discussed the nature of these experiences. Although he stated that every visionary experience is unique, as every human being is unique, there are similarities. He went on to say that the highest common factor in all the experiences, is the experience of light. He classified the aspect even further, speaking of "undifferentiated light" and "light in differentiated form". The former was described as an enormous blast of light, disembodied in any form - just a great flood of light. When the pink beam hit Phil, he described it as blinding, like a flashbulb going off in his face. The latter was described by Huxley as the experience of light embodied in shapes, in personages, and in landscapes. Huxley went on to explain that "the experience will often begin with a vision of what may be called living geometries, geometrical forms brilliantly lighted, continuously changing. These may modulate into some kind of metrical objects such as carpets, mosaics and so on. There may then be tremendous visions of landscapes... And then there are sometimes visions of figures, strange faces." When William Blake saw them, he called them seraphim and cherubim. This description of the visionary experience also dovetails with Phil's.

Both Evelyn Underhill, author of the classic general introduction to the study of mysticism, Mysticism, and Huxley agree that central to the classic mystical experience is, in Huxley's words, "that experience which transcends the subject-object relationship, which produces a sense of solidarity between the experiencer and the universe, which gives the experiencer a sense of the basic All-Rightness of the universe..."

In The Luminous Vision: Six Medieval Mystics and their Teachings, Anne Bancroft, in her introduction, states, "The true mystic, then, is one who is freed from feelings of oppression and insecurity which arise when we regard the world as alien to us and ourselves as being directed by it from without." This fundamental part of the visionary experience seems clearly to have not been a part of Phil's experiences, and although there are many important similarities between his experiences and the mystic state there are also many differences.

Again Phil pondered where the information came from and who was communicating with him. He described it as the ability to read and understand secret messages that were embedded within the inferior bulk of the total amount of the transmissions. He began looking toward the heavens.

Interstellar Telepathy, Sirius, and the Illuminati. Many people have claimed to have received messages via interstellar telepathy. Saul-Paul Sirag, a physicist, has said that over a hundred scientists in the United States have had this experience, but are reluctant to admit it publicly, for obvious reasons. Buckminster Fuller, renowned scientific philosopher, has stated that he sometimes thinks that he has received messages from interstellar telepaths. Dr. John Lilly, psychoanalyst, neuro-anatomist, cyberneticist, mathematician, and pioneering dolphin researcher, has made allusions to contact during the early seventies from interstellar entities he terms the "Cosmic Coincidence Control Center". Alan Vaughn, a well-known occultist and editor of Psychic magazine, also had the impression of being contacted from the star Sirius in January 1973.

During July and August 1973, Timothy Leary, the scientific clinical psychologist and arch-heretic fired from Harvard, received what he termed the "Starseed Transmissions"; the messages came in nineteen bursts and were seldom in recognizable English. Leary theorizes that "Higher Intelligence" is a two-step process: first DNA is seeded on a planet to take root and grow; second, when the life form(s) grow and show signs of maturity, transmissions (via interstellar ESP) are sent to the fledgling intelligence to facilitate its growth and eventual return to the stars. Leary feels that interstellar ESP has been going on all through the ages, and that each culture interprets the messages, from where and from whom they come, in relationship to their own cultural beliefs (e.g. angels, spirits, goddesses, UFOs, demons, fairies, weird people, the Virgin Mary, etc.).

Robert A. Wilson, novelist, poet, lecturer, stand-up comic, futurist, and psychologist, feels he was contacted from July 1973 to October 1974 by some form of interstellar telepathy. He has since then written several books which make connections between occult practices of various Rosicrucian luminaries and communications from interstellar entities.

In his book Cosmic Trigger he states, "[George Hunt] Williamson, an early 1950s contactee, claims to have met some flying saucerites from Sirius. He prints vast huge chunks of their language... and I found that a few of the words were almost identical with some words in the "angelic" language used by Dr. John Dee, Aleister Crowley and other magi of the Illuminati tradition... Williamson also informs us that the Sirians have been with earth for 'several thousand years' and that their allies here use as insignia the Eye of Horus - the origin of the Illuminati eye-in-triangle design." (For more on the Illuminati, see Appendix 2.)

Wilson goes on to find similarities in the various "transmissions", stating, "It seems clear that the Starseed Transmissions acquired a rather heavy Timothy Leary flavor in passing through the Leary nervous system, just as The Book of the Law took on an undeniably Crowleyan aroma in passing through Aleister's neurons, but the underlying message is hauntingly similar." Wilson met with Phil several times, and they corresponded for awhile. Wilson felt that Phil's experiences were strangely resonant with his, stating, "The parallels with my own experience are numerous - but so are the differences. If the same source was beaming ideas to both Phil and me, the messages got our individual flavors mixed into them as we decoded the signals."

Phil's transmissions did take on a distinctly phildickian slant as they passed through his nervous system, yet I wonder what a synthesis of the various separate transmissions would bring about.

When considering "from whom" or "from where" these transmissions came, Wilson gives three possible ways to think about it in his book, Masks of the Illuminati. "ONE: it is a metaphor that signifies, roughly, learning to receive communications from your own unconscious mind, without the usual distortion. TWO: it's not that simple at all; [the higher intelligence] speaks to you through your own conscious mind, but it is literally a separate being... THREE: yes it is a metaphor, after all, but for something so far out of our ordinary consciousness that it matters not a rap whether you think of it in terms of the first answer or in terms of the second answer; it transcends them both...".

Phil associated the source of the information with the nearby star Sirius, as did Wilson, Crowley and Leary. Wilson ponders whether or not Sirius and Earth have achieved some kind of cosmic link, and he has researched a host of interesting references concerning this. He has found references to this mysterious star throughout occult history dating from the ancient Egyptians up to the present day, and whether you trace backward from the present, or forward from the past, you "... continually collide with the mysterious and enigmatic history of Freemasonry."

Phil also explored the idea that his experiences could be understood and explained within this tradition. He had even answered an add in the back of a pulp magazine for membership in the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosea Crucis, (AMORC). (For more on Freemasonry and AMORC, see Appendix 2.)

Phil himself seemed impressed with Wilson's ideas: "Wilson managed to reverse every mental polarity in me, as if I had been pulled through infinity. I was astonished and delighted."

All in all, it seems to me, the early to mid-seventies were a very busy time for "alien" transmissions, as Phil was not alone in his experience.

Cryptozoology. Communication from "extradimensional entities" has been posed by several leading researchers in the field. George Creighton suggests in Timothy Good's book, Alien Contact, "... that some aliens are interdimensional beings indigenous to the planet Earth, who may have existed with us for thousands of years." Researcher John Keel uses the term "ultraterrestrials".

Phil himself pondered the possibility of this. In his book VALIS he wrote the following: "The name for this is mimesis. Another name is mimicry. Certain insects do this; they mimic other things: sometimes other insects - poisonous ones - or twigs and the like. Certain biologists and naturalists have speculated that higher forms of mimicry might exist since lower forms... have been found all over the world.

"What if a high form of sentient mimicry existed - such a high form that no human (or few humans) had detected it? What if it could only be detected if it wanted to be detected? Which is to say, not truly detected at all, since under these circumstances it has advanced out of its camouflaged state to disclose itself. 'Disclose' might in this case equal 'theophany'. The astonished human being would say, I saw God; whereas in fact he saw only a highly evolved ultra-terrestrial life form, a UTI, or an extra-terrestrial life form (an ETI) which has come here at some time in the past..."

Mystical Alien Biological Crypto-Intelligence. Phil also termed this new, dual consciousness within him "homoplasmate" and defined it as a combination of human (Phil) and plasmate (an information-rich life form). He felt this plasmate had been sleeping for the last two thousand years in a dormant seed form as living information in the codices found at Nag Hammadi. In his book, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, he discusses the word "anokhi", found in some Zadokite documents that were unearthed with the Qumran scrolls. He goes on to discuss its meaning, and then to involve hallucinogenic mushrooms along the same line of thought explored in the late John Allegro's book The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross.

I will mention here that Terence McKenna has put forth the theory that the stropharia cubensis (psilocybin) mushroom is an alien intelligence that did not evolve on Earth. He outlines his beliefs and ideas in several books: The Archaic Revival, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, and True Hallucinations, which are worth the read for anyone wishing to pursue this line of thought further. I feel he has put together a non-sectarian version of the central concepts explored by Phil and Allegro in this area.

Gnostic Christianity. Phil was to have one last key vision in January and February of 1975, that of the Palm Tree Garden and the Black Iron Prison. In this vision, the Palm Tree Garden was contrasted to the Black Iron Prison, signifying two opposing ways of being in the world.

It is one of the central ideas in gnostic belief that the word we live in is an illusion created to enslave us and cut us off from our divine birthright. Phil called what we normally call reality a "cardboard cutout fake" and termed it the "Black Iron Prison"; his vision of our true reality he termed the "Palm Tree Garden". Lawrence Sutin's biography quotes some correspondence Phil wrote in 1975: " This is not an evil world, as Mani [founder of Manicheanism, which equates matter with evil] supposed. There is a good world under the evil. The evil is somehow superimposed over it (Maya), and when stripped away, pristine glowing creation is visible."

Phil's whole experience with the events of 2-74 to 2-75 became associated with ideas surrounding the vision of the Palm Tree Garden and the Black Iron Prison. He spent the next eight years of his life writing in his journal, working with these events; it grew to over one million hand-written words, and if time and life had permitted it continue to grow as we speak.

Phil seemed to lean towards a gnostic Christian structure to give form to the information and the experiences he received. Jay Kinney in his article "The Mysterious Revelations of Philip K. Dick" found similarities between Dick's vision and another twentieth-century vision. C.G. Jung wrote a small booklet entitled Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons to the Dead) which he had received in a three-day period in 1916; he gave authorship credit to "Bestialities", a gnostic Christian of the second century. Kinney also went on to say that, "Dick and Jung both came to see in the surviving fragments of early gnostic scriptures, such as those found in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, evidence of world views similar to those put forth in their own respective trance-visions." Yet one must remember gnostic concepts were just one avenue of thought, among many Phil mapped out.

I have purposely not tried to delve to far into Phil's own mystical and philosophical views, as time and space prevent it, but have attempted to give a simple sketch of the various elements that were involved with his experiences, and also provide a few references for anyone wishing to further explore these elements.

For those who may be interested in Phil's own thoughts and ideas, Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament" by Gregg Rickman is a 230-page, edited transcription of interviews with Dick from 1981 and 1982; a good place to begin, as are Phil's own novels.

Appendix 1: Bibliography and Acknowledgements.

All of the personal and bibliographic knowledge mentioned in this article concerning Philip K. Dick's life was gained from Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick" by Lawrence Sutin. (Harmony Books, a division of Crown Publishers, Inc., 1989.)

For insight to Philip K. Dick's thoughts and ideas on the subject matter see the following:

(1) "The Mysterious Revelations of Philip K. Dick," Jay Kinney, in Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions, #1 (Fall/Winter 1985-1986).

(2) Deus Irae, Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny. Dell Books, 1976.

(3) The Divine Invasion, Philip K. Dick. Pocket Books, 1981.

(4) A Maze of Death, Philip K. Dick. Daw Books, 1970.

(5) Radio Free Albemuth, Philip K. Dick. Avon Books, 1985.

(6) VALIS, Philip K. Dick. Bantam Books, 1981.

Other Sources:

(1) The Agency: The Rise and Fall of the CIA, John Ranelagh. Cambridge Publishing Ltd., 1986.

(2) Alien Contact, Timothy Good. William Morrow and Company, 1991.

(3) The Archaic Revival, Terence McKenna. HarperSanFrancisco Publishers, 1993.

(4) CIA: The "Honorable" Company, Brian Freemantle. The Rainbird Publishing Group, 1983.

(5) The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic, Israel Regardie. Falcon Press, 1984.

(6) Cosmic Trigger, Robert Anton Wilson. Falcon Press, 1977.

(7) Dictionary of Symbols, Tom Chetwynd. The Aquarian Press, 1982.

(8) Ego and Archetype, Edward F. Edinger. R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co, 1972.

(9) Encyclopedia of Mystical and Paranormal Experience, R.E. Guiley. HarperCollins Publishers, 1991.

(10) Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, Terence McKenna. Bantam Books, 1992.

(11) The Luminous Vision: Six Medieval Mystics and their Teachings, Anne Bancroft. Unwin Paperbacks, 1989.

(12) Masks of the Illuminati, Robert Anton Wilson. Dell Publishing, 1981.

(13) Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience, Aldous Huxley. (M. Horowitz and C. Palmer, ed.) Stonehill Publishing Company, 1977.

(14) Mysticism, Evelyn Underhill. Dutton Paperbacks, 1961.

(15) The Sacred Mushroom, Andrija Puharich. Doubleday & Company, 1959.

(16) The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross, John M. Allegro. Paperbacks, 1970.

(17) Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Mircea Eliade. Princeton University Press, 1964.

(18) True Hallucinations, Terence McKenna. HarperCollins Publishers, 1993.

(19) Twins, by Peter Watson. Hutchinson & Co., 1981.

(20) The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Barbara Walker. Harper & Row Publishers, 1983.

Appendix 2: The Western Esoteric Tradition.

The Englishman John Dee was a mathematician, philosopher, and the adviser to Queen Elizabeth I. An exceptional student who attended the University of Cambridge at age fifteen, he's said to have studied a full eighteen hours a day. Upon graduation he developed a large following as a travelling lecturer. Returning to England he developed a friendship with Queen Elizabeth I, and was awarded a royal position as the warden of Christ's College in Manchester. He gathered many ancient texts and tomes that had been lost when the Roman Catholic Church and Monasteries were sacked after the Reformation. His own personal library of 4000+ books was said to be the largest of its kind in Europe.

Starting in 1582, and for the next seven years, John Dee and a partner named Edward Kelly were to receive messages from a series of angels. On March 9, 1582, Kelly received a vision of the angel Uriel. On March 14 was another visitation, this time from the angel Michael. For the next several years they received detailed information about a mysterious language now called "Enochian". It combined the kabbalah, tarot, astrology, and geomancy into one single psychological field. Israel Regardie stated, "In short, the method works: it unlocks the secret doors of the mind as no other published system has ever done." (In The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic.)

Dr. Francis Years, historian, feels that John Dee was a prime mover in the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, and outlines this in two books, The World Stage and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment.

This leads us into the strange and murky world of the Rosicrucians, an occult order that is both historical and mythological. This tradition is a blending of Islamic, Christian, and Jewish mysticism, and has its roots in ideas that were formulated and developed by the ancient religions of Egypt and Greece; each religious mysticism cross-fertilizing with the others and creating a mysticism and a large body of information and experience that is uniquely Western.

Appendix 3: The Divine Female Aspect.

The anima, the female shadow figure that exists within a man's psyche, was an idea developed by C.G. Jung. He felt that each person had qualities of both sexes, which allows for the full range of emotional expression. In his book, Dictionary of Symbols, Tom Chetwynd explains that the anima is the source of receptiveness and sensitivity, and of the patience required to nurture the seeds of future development. The anima is the source that enables one to experience the imagery of one's own unconscious. Jung felt that the anima was first projected onto the mother, but as the individual develops it will be projected onto others, to give it shape and bring understanding.

Often described as the "Goddess of Love", Aphrodite was much more than simply that. She was a trinity (Virgin, Mother, Crone). She was the ancestral mother of the Romans, having given birth to Aeneas, their founding father. The Christians converted her temple on Cyprus into a sanctuary of the Virgin Mary, but even today, within this temple, Mary is hailed as "Panaghia Aphroditessa" (All-Holy Aphrodite). Aphrodite ruled birth, life, love, death, time, and fate, and reconciled man to all of them through sensual and sexual mysticism.

Artemis or Diana was an Amazonian moon-goddess. She was both nurturer and huntress, bringing forth and nurturing all living things, yet she was also the killer of the very creatures she brought forth. Again a trinity is evoked: lunar virgin, mother of all creatures, destroyer. Gnostic Christians called their wisdom-goddess Sophia and frequently identified her with Diana.

Athena was the mother goddess of Athens; the Greeks claimed she was born fullgrown from Zeus' head, after he swallowed her mother Metis (female wisdom). Minerva was the Roman Goddess of wisdom, war, and the lunar calendar; she was the Roman form of Athena.

Sophia was the Gnostic Great Mother, the spirit of female wisdom. Sophia was God's female soul, source of all His power. Barbara Walker, in her book The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, states that, "Early Gnostic Christians held that, like Krishna and Shiva, or Dionysus and Zeus, Christ and God merged together with Sophia as an androgyne: 'The Son of Man agreed with Sophia, his consort, and revealed Himself in a great light as bisexual. His male nature was called the savior, the begetter of all things, but his female, Sophia, Mother of all.'"

Gnostic Christian Creation Myth. "Sophia was born from the primordial female power Sige [silence]. Sophia gave birth to a male spirit, Christ, and a female spirit, Achamoth [Chokmah]. The latter gave birth to the elements and the terrestrial world, then brought forth a new god named Ialdabaoth, Son of Darkness, along with five planetary spirits later regarded as emanations of Jehovah: Iao, Sabaoth, Adonai, Eloi, and Uraeus.

"These spirits produced archangels, angels and finally men. Ialdabaoth or Jehovah forbade man to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, but his mother Achamoth sent her own spirit to earth in the form of a serpent Ophis to teach man to disobey the jealous god. The serpent was also Christ, who taught Adam to eat of the tree of knowledge despite god's prohibition.

"Sophia sent Christ again to earth in the shape of her own totemic dove, to enter the man Jesus at his baptism in the Jordan. After Jesus died Christ left his body and returned to heaven. Sophia gave him a body of ether, and placed him in heaven to help collect souls. Some said Jesus became Sophia's spouse and his glory depended on this sacred marriage; for he was only one of the Aeons, a minor spirit, the 'common fruit' of the Pleroma." (From The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, p.951.)

Sophia has also been identified as Jesus' mother, as she was the Light that descended to earth and entered the body of Mary to conceive him. Sophia has also been described as the "mind" of God much the same as Metis was to Zeus. Sophia also appears in the Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah as the Shekhina of God.

Appendix 4: Twinning.

The word "twin" comes from the ancient German word, "twina" or "twine", and means "two together".

Types of twins: The birth of twins can happen in one of two ways. If the ovaries release two eggs and they are fertilized, they will grow into two independent fetuses, each with its own placenta. These twins are called fraternal or dizygotic twins, "dizygotic" (DZ) from the Greek "di" meaning "two" and "zygotos" meaning "yoked" or "egg". Identical twins come from a single egg, which divides into two separate individuals after fertilization. These twins are called monozygotic (MZ), "mono" coming from the Greek meaning "single".

There are an estimated 100 million twins in the world, and about one third of these are MZ (3.5 per 1000 live births). The connection between MZ twins appears statistically to be greater than the bond which exists between DZ twins, but there have been examples of DZs who have held extraordinary interdependence upon each other.

Twin Studies: Studies have shown that the similarities found in twins fall into three areas: first, there are the anecdotal coincidences such as the similarities in names, clothing choices, dressing styles, choices of authors and books and colors; second, there are the psychological and/or behavioral similarities like the same dreams and fears, job preferences and sports interests; third, the psychiatric similarities of depression, alcoholism, violence, and other mental health characteristics.

Peter Watson in his book Twins states, "The most intriguing is that twinhood, especially identical twinhood, faces us with people who, though separate individuals biologically, psychologically are not." Watson also explains, "They may compete in the womb for nourishment or may even 'jockey' for position, one draining the blood away from the other. In all these cases the twins may show the effects at birth: although they are 'identical, one at first looks quite different, bigger, healthier, more advanced than the other. Another accident that can happen is that one growing twin fetus 'absorbs' the other. Cases like this are discovered only much later when, as an adult, an individual has an operation... and the surgeon finds a fetus mummified inside the body. It should have been a twin - but lost the race very early on."

Appendix 5: The CIA and Mind Control.

Since 1960, seven research centers have been established to research parapsychology and thought transference. In his book CIA: The "Honorable" Company Brian Freemantle states, "I.M. Kogan, chairman of the Bioinformational Section of the Moscow Board of the Popov Society, is carrying out experiments on distanced mental suggestion, long-range intercity telepathy, and awakening a subject from a hypnotically-induced sleep, by 'beamed' suggestion.

"L.L. Vasiliev, at Leningrad Institute for Brain Research, is attempting long-range telepathy and long-distance hypnosis, to put people to sleep...

"Other Soviet research is into tapping the electrical field known to be emitted by the human brain, both to 'read' the thoughts and to control them."

The CIA has also been interested in parapsychology and has developed projects in remote viewing, telekinesis, and telepathy, as well as others.

Mind Control research was established by the US government in the late forties and early fifties, involving both the CIA and US Army Intelligence.

The Freedom of Information Act reveals that projects like MKULTRA, MKDELTA, MKSEARCH, MKNAOMI, MKACTION, PANDORA, BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, as well as others, were developed with the sole purpose of researching and experimenting with various means of mind and thought control, and their use of unknowing civilian subjects is well-documented.

In 1953, under coordination by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a number of programs were overseen. Project Chatter (which had begun in 1947) attempted to identify and develop "truth drugs". MKNAOMI (1952) developed and tested biological chemical weapons. MKDELTA (1952) oversaw operational use of MKULTRA materials overseas.

In total 149 MKULTRA subprojects, all investigating behavioral modification, toxins and drugs, were established. MKULTRA, Subproject 142 was developed to experiment with electrical brain stimulation. Subproject 94 utilized miniaturized stimulating electrode implants for the purpose of remote directional control of selected species.

The Allen Memorial Institute, the psychiatric section of McGill University in Montreal was used for experiments in what Dr. Ewin Cameron termed "psychic driving". Dr. Cameron headed the project, and was a man of high esteem in the psychiatry profession. In 1953 he was President of the American Psychiatric Association and later was appointed the first President of the World Psychiatric Association. The experiments were in "depatterning", the wiping completely clean the mind of the individual using electroshocks and prolonged drug use.

This CIA-inspired program was to try to erase a person's mind, then having done so, "repattern" it. Other projects were established in the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, the University of Illinois Medical School, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Rochester, and the Mount Sinai Hospital and Columbia University in New York.

In searching for a chemical that would produce a non-toxic aberrant mental state, the CIA modified the tail pipe of a car and drove around New York (80 miles or so) emitting a gas to test its effects on the passersby. This was named Operation BIG CITY. They also travelled the New York subway system with vaporized LSD to see if it would affect people in enclosed places.

In 1964 a new project was developed called MKSEARCH. Into this new program seven of the most successful MKULTRA projects were transferred. This involved testing unknowing army personal as well as the inmates of federal institutions and mental defectives in a Washington hospital.

MKSEARCH ended in 1972, but running parallel to that program was another drug testing program called OFTEN which continued to operate.

A Church Committee investigation in 1975 ended with the following statement: "These programs resulted in substantial violations of the rights of individuals within the United States."

These projects have all been discontinued, but as the Freedom of Information Act cannot as yet touch secret documents from the late seventies and forward one is left again to speculate as to whether or not similar yet more technologically advanced projects continue, or whether or not the knowledge of such will ever see the light of day.

There is even speculation by Martin Cannon that the recent uncovering of the prolific amount of UFO abductions are but a cover story and popular explanation for work being done by the CIA and/or Army Intelligence.