>During February and March 1974, science fictionwriter Philip K. Dick experienced a series of strange
and exhilarating visions. Almost exactly ten years
earlier, Dick had first taken LSD, and his perceptions
while tripping on acid prefigured this later mystical
mid-life crisis. In a 1965 letter to a friend, he enthused
about the "joyous coloration, especially pinks and reds,
very luminous" and the "great insights into myself"
induced by hallucinogenics. A decade later, now
apparently without the aid of illegal drugs, Dick was
again overwhelmed by an intense pink light, and
believed that it was transferring information to him
at blazing download speeds.
"It seized me entirely," he
later explained "lifting me
from the limitations of the
space-time matrix."
>Others might look on thisincident as the incipient
sign of acute mental dis-
order, but Dick had the
exact opposite interpretation.
"I experienced an invasion
of my mind by a transcend-
entally rational mind, as if I
had been insane all my life
and suddenly I had become sane," he later told
science fiction writer Charles Platt. Even more striking
—or ridiculous, depending on your perspective—
Dick was convinced that he had experienced an
extraordinary epiphany, rich with theological
implications. He had encountered God, or something
roughly fitting the description, the deity as data
overload. Dick started scribbling down jumbled notes
and journal entries in an attempt to decipher the
'wisdom' handed on to him, and the resulting
manuscript, which he called the Exegesis, eventually
amounted to some 8,000 pages.
http://www.conceptualfiction.com/valis.html