In later studies about the brain I learned of an inhibiting brain fluid called GABA, which when its effect drops drastically, which is to say when an external stimulus causes disinhibition and firing of a programmed sequence up to then is inhibited, such colored graphics are often experienced. So I concluded that massive—unique in my life, in fact—disinhibition had taken place, although I could not identify the external stimulus, nor comprehend the programmed or engrammed sequences. At the same time (in the days following) I found myself possessed with enormous energy and did a lot of unusual things. This, in fact, is what probably raised my blood pressure so much that my doctor had to hospitalize me. I was constantly active, and in new ways. This tends to confirm the theory of massive disinhibition and unused neural firing along hitherto unusual neural pathways, perhaps an entire hemisphere of the brain held in readiness until then—I did not know for what.
All this may have been induced by the huge doses of water-soluble vitamins I took, gram after gram of vitamin C, for instance. But I doubt it. At the same time as I experienced the release of psychic energy (to use Esther Harding’s phrase, picked up by Jung), I became conscious of pathic language directed at me from all creatures, and finally, as it spread—and this is the point I’m getting at—from the direction of the sky, especially at night. I had a keen intuition that information of some kind was arriving at us all, in fact bombarding us, from sidereal space.
For a time I imagined that an ESP experiment had somehow by accident involved me: the long-range transmission of graphics. I wrote to a lab in Leningrad and told them about my experience, having at the time the feeling that the point of origin of these signals was far distant, and hence in the USSR. Now I believe the point of origin was even farther: I think that I somehow for a short time transduced tachyon bombardment, which comes to us constantly, and which animals utilize to engram them into performing what we call “instinctive actions.” I had been consciously trying to transduce external weak fields, which I know to be possible, and I know that when this is done successfully the brain’s efficiency is increased; however, I had no preconception of what fields I might transduce—except that I felt they would be natural and not man-made—and what information, if any, they might contain. I was hoping only for increased neural efficiency. I got more: actual information about the future, for during the next three months, almost each night, during sleep I was receiving information in the form of print-outs: words and sentences, letters and names and numbers—sometimes whole pages, sometimes in the form of writing paper and holographic writing, sometimes oddly, in the form of a baby’s cereal box on which all sorts of quite meaningful information was written and typed, and finally galley proofs held up for me to read which I was told in my dream “contained prophecies about the future,” and during the last two weeks a huge book, again and again, with page after page of printed lines.
Without the tachyon theory I would lack any kind of scientific formulation, and would have to declare that “God has shown me the sacred tablets in which the future is written” and so forth, as did our forefathers, back on the deserts of Israel under the sky as they tended their sleeping flocks. Koestler also points out that according to modern theory the universe is moving from chaos to form; therefore tachyon bombardment would contain information which expressed a greater degree of Gestalt than similar information about the present; it would, thus at this time continuum, seem more living, more animated by a conscious spirit, to us giving rise to the concept of God. This would definitely give rise to the idea of purpose, in particular purpose lying in the future. Thus we now have a scientific method of considering the notion of teleology, I think, which is why I am writing you now, to express this, my own sense of final causes, as we discussed that day.
Much of this printed-out information arriving in dreams has had a teaching, shaping and directing quality; it tends to inform and guide me, and make me aware of what I should do. It literally educates me, and I’m sure each small creature, each bug and plant and animal and fish, has the same sense of it. I’ve watched my cat, now, as he sits out on the sundeck at night; he is beyond doubt considering the sidereal world above him and not moving objects below—when he comes in the house an hour or two later he seems modified, as if he has been taught during that period and knows it. I think this happens to us all but I managed consciously to transduce above the threshold of awareness, which is unusual but not unique, and became aware of this constant natural and normal process which shapes all life from the future, as Koestler describes. It is often described as the “Divine Plan,” or better yet “Continual Creation.” Any such terms will do, but I regard it for my own purposes as a continual informational print-out from the future which directs us all, not in the coercive sense that the past does, but experienced—and rightly so—as volition. As so to speak, free will. This term sounds right to me each morning when I wake up and reflect on the pages of print I’ve seen during the night; I am not forced to do what the information brings to my attention; I am free to consider it, digest and understand it, and, with its assistance, act on it.*
For well over two months I was convinced that the Holy Spirit, which is to say God, was directing me, and in a sense this is true; it is a matter of semantics: at one time these would have been the only terms we had available to us; we would have talked about a divine vision and so forth. What I think now is that more modern terms can be better applied; the future is more coherent than the present, more animate and purposeful, and in a real sense, wiser. It knows more, and some of this knowledge gets transmitted back to us by what seems to be a purely natural phenomenon. We are being talked to, by a very informed Entity: that of all creation as it lies ahead of us in time.
Cordially,
Philip K. Dick
P.S. In terms of Ubik (not the novel but the force described in my novel) perhaps I was coherence which the universe is moving toward and which bombards us backward, so to speak, with information about itself, thus giving us a certain awareness of itself. I would think that for purely fictional purposes the description given and the name given in the novel would be more rather than less accurate vis-à-vis the tachyon theory, which is connected with the theory that the universe is moving from chaos to form. Ubik talks to us from the future, from the end state to which everything is moving; thus Ubik is not here—which is to say now—but will be, and what we get is information about and from Ubik, as we receive TV or radio signals from transmitters located in other spaces in this time continuum.
I see no objection to interpreting the meaning of the force Ubik this way. Nor in interpreting the purpose of the novel Ubik by saying that in it I was trying in a dim and unconscious way to express a series of experiences I had had most of my life of a directing, shaping and assisting—and informing—force, much wiser than us which we in no way could perceive directly; where it was or what it was called I did not know; I knew it only by its effects: in Kant’s terms, it is (or as I understand now will be) a Thing-in-Itself.
Thus I would express the purpose of the novel—my purpose, anyhow—to be a fictional statement containing a presentation of this directing presence which I arbitrarily chose the name “Ubik” for. That Ubik (or more accurately the future total Gestalt of purpose and Meaning) may well have written the book through me is possible, but only in the sense that all creatures from grasshoppers on up, in particular small creatures such as grasshoppers, are “written through,” by what we call instinct, rather than “writing” their lives. However, I do think one could say this; rather than having it read: Ubik, by Philip K. Dick, one could put it this way: