This condensed history of philosophical influences tells only part of the story of Dick's development as a writer. There are, to be sure, a good number of philosophical and spiritual perspectives that mattered greatly to Dick but are not listed above. But a more basic factor was the difficult childhood Dick endured, which included the early divorce of his parents, frequent Depression era cross-country moves with his financially strapped and emotionally distant mother, and bouts of vertigo and agoraphobia that interfered with Dick's schooling and friendships and caused his mother to have him examined by at least two psychiatrists. One of these psychiatrists speculated that Dick might be suffering from schizophrenia -- a diagnostic possibility that severely frightened the boy and would haunt the grown man all his life.
Throughout Dick's speculations, there is the underlying sense of a dark pain and of shattering experiences that had left him grappling for his place in the shared world (koinos kosmos, in the Greek of Heraclitus, a thinker whom Dick greatly admired) and struggling to evade the madness of solitary delusion (idios kosmos, private world; from idios comes the English "idiot" -- one who is cut off from that which is happening around him). Though fear lurked strongly within him, Dick insisted on staring madness in the face and asking if it, too, could lay claim to a kind of knowledge. Thus, in "Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality," a 1964 essay included herein, Dick argued that what is called schizophrenic or psychotic "hallucination" may be, in many cases, the result of extremely broad and sensitive perceptions that most "sane" persons learn to screen out of their consciousness. The Kantian a priori categories of space and time are examples of such screens; Kant claimed that these were necessary for the mental ordering of phenomenal reality, which would otherwise remain a hopeless perceptual chaos to human minds. In his essay, Dick theorized that, to the extent that our mental and sensory awareness happens to extend beyond these socially ratified screens, any one of us may become subject to "hallucinations" -- which are, in essence, unshared realities. While it is possible that "mystical" insights may ensue, there is a greater likelihood -- and a fearfully tragic one it is -- that we may find ourselves in a hell realm of utter mental isolation:
In the light of this, the idea of hallucinating takes on a very different character; hallucinations, whether induced by psychosis, hypnosis, drugs, toxins, etc., may be merely quantitatively different from what we see, not qualitatively so. In other words, too much is emanating from the neurological apparatus of the organism, over and beyond the structural, organizing necessity... . No-name entities or aspects begin to appear, and since the person does not know what they are -- that is, what they're called or what they mean -- he cannot communicate with other persons about them. This breakdown of verbal communication is the fatal index that somewhere along the line the person is experiencing reality in a way too altered to fit into his own prior worldview and too radical to allow empathic linkage with other persons.
There is an interesting parallel between Dick's emphasis here on a societally based definition of hallucinations -- as perceptions unshared by others -- and the insight offered by the eminent anthropologist Edward T. Hall in his Beyond Culture: "Perceptual aberrations are not restricted to psychoses but can also be situational in character, particularly in instances of great stress, excitation, or drug influences."* Instances, that is, in which, in Dick's words, "too much is emanating from the neurological apparatus of the organism."
* Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1976, 1981), p. 229.
In his 1965 essay "Schizophrenia and the Book of Changes" (also included), Dick sought to give the fearful and isolated perceptions of the schizophrenic an analytical coherence that might extend beyond the purely personal to a new viewpoint on human experience:
What distinguishes schizophrenic existence from that which the rest of us like to imagine we enjoy is the element of time. The schizophrenic is having it all now, whether he wants it or not; the whole can of film has descended on him, whereas we watch it progress frame by frame. So for him, causality does not exist. Instead, the a-causal connective principle which [quantum physicist] Wolfgang Pauli called Syncronicity is operating in all situations -- not merely as one factor at work, as with us. Like a person under LSD, the schizophrenic is engulfed in an endless now. It's not too much fun.
Dick described himself, in this essay, as "schizoid effective" -- a "pre-schizophrenic personality." This fearful dancing on the high wire of self-diagnostics is a recurrent element in Dick's essays and journals. Two opposite possibilities set the boundaries: the fear that he might be insane ("psychotic" and "schizophrenic" were his most common terms), and the possibility that he might, through an encompassing intellectual understanding (anamnesis, the recollection of the archetypal realm of Ideas of Plato), win spiritual redemption -- freedom from his crippling fears, and a haven from the deluded and sorrowful world.
There was, for Dick, a certain sense in which his own writings might alleviate some of the sorrow -- for his readers and for himself -- by at least openly acknowledging the doubts and questions that existence posed for those who had eyes to see. As he wrote in one Exegesis entry:
I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, &, for them, my corpus of writing is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history.*
* Philip K. Dick, In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis, ed. Lawrence Sutin (Novato, Calif./Lancaster, Pa.: Underwood-Miller, 1991), p. 161.
One aspect of that "personal history" that has continued to intrigue his readers is the bizarre and powerful series of dreams, visions, and voices that flooded Dick's consciousness in February and March 1974 (or "2-3-74," Dick's shorthand for that period) and stood for him as the central -- and, ultimately, inexplicable -- event of his life. These inspired what has become known as the "Valis Trilogy" -- the final three novels of Dick's life that have earned both critical praise and a broad readership (through their recent simultaneous reissuance as Vintage trade editions): Valis (1981), The Divine Invasion (1981), and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982). In all three novels, Dick explores the anguish and entropic emptiness of an earthly realm in which God (or whatever alternative name we give to the divine) remains unknown and perhaps unknowable. But also, in all of these works, Dick offers the hope that divine knowledge and redemption may yet be granted -- even to modern, scuffling souls who have trouble paying their rent and keeping their marriages together. There is a striking thematic resemblance between these novels and the speculations of the Gnostic thinkers of the early centuries of the Christian era. Indeed, in the definitive modern edition of Gnostic scriptures, The Nag Hammadi Library (1988), an "Afterword" singles out Dick (along with Jung, Hermann Hesse, and Harold Bloom) as a preeminent modern interpreter of Gnostic beliefs.