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The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by R. Crumb
- palad1n 9y agoI'm Thomas. http://warinheaven.net http://warinheaven.net
- phjesusthatguy3 9y agoI stumbled across PKD in a Borders; I bought a collection of his short stories with "The Short Happy Life Of The Brown Oxford" on the cover. I had never seen this before, so thank you for that. These two weirdos were practically made for each other.
- vidarh 9y agoIf you've just read that collection, you have a lot of the most mind-bending PKD stories left. Try one of his novels. I'd recommend A Scanner Darkly and Man in the High Castle as two of the more accessible ones (the latter is much less sci fi - it's more alternative history). His short stories are very variable in quality - a lot of his early stories makes you feel trapped in a 50's idea of a post-nuclear holocaust world because he repeats that setting endlessly as he churned out stories to pay the bills (but there are great gems there too), so the more curated antologies are good starting points. Pick up some more and you'll probably also recognize the plot of any number of movies you may have seen (direct adaptions from his short stories includes Paycheck - in your antology I think - Total Recall, Screamers, Adjustment Bureau, Minority Report and more), where a single idea from his stories was dense enough for a movie.
- harbie 9y agoInterestingly enough, Kanye West had a nearly identical religious experience and breakdown, down to witnessing a divine pink beam. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/philip-k-dick-was-a-sci-fi-prophet-did-he-predict-the-unraveling-of-kanye-west/2017/10/11/e7366ffe-ad78-11e7-be94-fabb0f1e9ffb_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/philip-k-dick...
- wavefunction 9y agoMaybe PKD didn't travel backwards in time to the era of Jesus but forwards in time to the era of Yeezus... Perhaps it was rather sideways. VALIS
- pixelperfect 9y agoI think this sort of "divine light" experience happens to a lot of people. In the Burmese school of Buddhism started by Mahasi Sayadaw, there is a stage of insight called the "Arising and Passing Away" that teachers identify when their students report phenomena like this. If you go to a Buddhist internet community like dharmaoverground.org, you will find a lot of people reporting and discussing this sort of thing. Although I no longer consider myself Buddhist, I don't know what to make of it.
- vpribish 9y agogood connection! Personally, I'm expecting Kanye to go mothership funky and embrace his alien origin.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nugi 9y agoYou are kind of a prat to put those 2 in the same light honestly.
- mrob 9y ago>“I’ve heard that there are colors that are too bright for our eyes to see,” I don't know about brightness, but psychedelic drugs routinely cause visuals of colors that are too saturated for the eyes to see. This is because the responsivity spectra of the eye's cone cells have a lot of overlap, especially between the red and the green types. See: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cones_SMJ2_E.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cones_SMJ2_E.svg Psychedelic drugs affect the nervous system directly, so they can trigger one color channel without triggering the others. Presumably religious experiences can do the same thing. You can approximate this effect without drugs by tiring out the overlapping channels before viewing the one you're interested in. Fill your screen with pure cyan (#00FFFF), and set up another tab full of pure red (#FF0000). Turn your display brightness up and switch off the room lights. Stare at the cyan screen for several minutes, and then immediately switch to the red screen. I suspect this color is close to what Dick and West saw.
- jschwartzi 9y agoI think this is a passage from Valis. Was Dick being slyly autobiographical in that book?
- harbie 9y agoIt was anything but sly. He occasionally writes "I, I mean, Horselover Fat..." and never once concretely states that he and Fat weren't the same person. Valis was part of Dick's attempt to interpret and come to terms with that experience
- apocalypstyx 9y agoPhilip --> derived from the Greek Philippos, meaning: lover of horses. Dick --> German for fat.
- xkcd-sucks 9y ago> I am Horselover Fat, and I am writing this in the third person to gain much- needed objectivity.
- kr4 9y agoDeducing the existence of soul through reasoning and reflection, on the mind and states of consciousness: https://www.swami-krishnananda.org/brdup/brhad_IV-03.html https://www.swami-krishnananda.org/brdup/brhad_IV-03.html
- kyo3 9y agoThis is a favorite topic of a favorite author of mine. If you want more information: https://wuu.bi/the-religious-experience-of-philip-k-dick/ https://wuu.bi/the-religious-experience-of-philip-k-dick/
- locrelite 9y agoBeen there. I refer to it as "losing my fucking mind" but each to his own.
- harbie 9y agoYou should check out Valis, the book PKD wrote as part of his attempt to deal with his experience. He was very much aware he was likely going insane.
- darkmighty 9y agoWere you diagnosed? Do you have neurological issues? (or suffer from risk factors? such as high blood pressure, overweight, diabetes, sedentarity) I wonder if that could be related (because of PKD's eventual tragic death by stroke). As far as my tiny medical knowledge goes schizophrenia hallucinations usually auditory in nature and not very explicit. There's also the question of the effect of the drug supposedly taken during his dentist procedure ( a compound which seems to have brain effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_thiopental#Side_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_thiopental#Side_effects ). Of course he was probably in general risk for delusional thinking given his job to constantly devise bizarre plots questioning every aspect of reality. But it does make me curious whether he suffered from a neurological condition, or just a psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia. Hope you're doing well, mental disorders are scary :(
- locrelite 9y agoDiagnosed, strapped to a gurney, and popped in the system for a couple of months. It was almost two decades ago, I'm fine. But having seen and thought most of the things people describe in these experiences, I find post facto attempts to elevate them (usually based on a few coincidences) wishful thinking.
- peterwwillis 9y agoChristian mythology is so boring once you realize what came before it. All the good stories in the Bible are basically Zoroastrian, Egyptian, Greek, Jewish, and other stories mashed up with historical fact (and historical fiction) and a good dose of PR and random rules that make no sense. When people have these big religious experiences I just think, if you're going to believe in Gods and messiahs and all that, why not one that's actually old that all your stories come from anyway? It's like having a religious experience where you're reliving the life of a Viking farmer who's secretly still praying to the Old Gods and at risk of getting killed if they don't convert to Christianity. See how stupid it sounds when Odin is the big guy in charge?
- grzm 9y agoSeems like a variant of "I knew them before they were cool."
- juliend2 9y agoCould you please elaborate on those sources (Zoroastrian, Egyptian, etc)? I'm genuinely curious.
- grzm 9y agoFor starters, Wikipedia has an article on comparing the Christ story with other mythologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_in_comparative_mythology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_in_comparative_mythology
- mmyyyy 9y agoFrom the page: A number of parallels have been drawn between the Christian views of Jesus and other religious or mythical domains.[1][3] However, Eddy and Boyd state that there is no evidence of a historical influence by the pagan myths such as dying and rising gods on the authors of the New Testament.[3][4] Paula Fredriksen states that no serious scholarly work places Jesus outside the backdrop of 1st century Palestinian Judaism.[5] Scholars have debated a number of broad issues related to the parallels drawn between Jesus and other myths, e.g. the very existence of the category dying-and-rising god was debated throughout the 20th century, some modern scholars questioning the soundness of the category.[3][6] At the end of the 20th century the overall scholarly consensus had emerged against the soundness of the reasoning used to suggest the category.[6] Tryggve Mettinger (who supports the category) states that there is a scholarly consensus that the category is inappropriate from a historical perspective.[7] Scholars such as Kurt Rudolph have stated the reasoning used for the construction of the category has been defective.[6] Scholars such as Samuel Sandmel, professor of Bible and Hellenistic Literature at Hebrew Union College, view conclusions drawn from the simple observations of similarity as less than valid.[1]Sandmel called the extravagance in hunting for similarities "parallelomania" – a phenomenon in which a scholar first presupposes the existence of a similarity and then "proceeds to describe source and derivation as if implying a literary connection flowing in an inevitable or predetermined direction", thus exaggerating the importance of trifling resemblances.[1][4]