Scene from Philip K. Dick’s novel “Maze of Death”. According to him, this is a detailed and 100% accurate description of his most intense LSD trip. During this experience he allegedly started speaking out loud religious phrases in perfect Latin even though he had never studied this language in his entire life (he also claimed that a girl was there and can confirm that it really happened, though I haven’t found any direct retelling of this event from her):
Opening The Book at random she walked toward him, and as she walked she read aloud from The Book. “ ‘Hence it can be said,’ ” she intoned, “ ‘that God-in-history shows several phases: (one) The period of purity before the Form Destroyer was awakened into activity. (two) The period of the Curse, when the power of the Deity was weakest, the power of the Form Destroyer the greatest—this because God had not perceived the Form Destroyer and so was taken by surprise. (three) The birth of God-on-Earth, sign that the period of Absolute Curse and Estrangement from God had ended. (four) The period now—’ ”
She had come almost up to him; he stood unmoving, still holding the gun. She continued to read the sacred text aloud. “ ‘The period now, in which God walks the world, redeeming the suffering now, redeeming all life later through the figure of himself as the Intercessor who—’ ”
“Go back with them,” Thugg told her. “Or I’ll kill you.”
“ ‘Who, it is sure, is still alive, but not in this circle. (five) The next and last period—’ ”
A terrific bang boomed at her eardrums; deafened, she moved a step back and then she felt great pain in her chest; she felt her lungs die from the great, painful shock of it. The scene around her became dull, the light faded and she saw only darkness. Seth Morley, she tried to say, but no sound came out. And yet she heard noise; she heard something huge and far off, chugging violently into the darkness.
She was alone.
Thud, thud, came the noise. Now she saw iridescent color, mixed into a light which traveled like a liquid; it formed buzzsaws and pinwheels and crept upward on each side of her. Directly before her the huge Thing throbbed menacingly; she heard its imperative, angry voice summoning her upward. The urgency of its activity frightened her; it demanded, rather than asked. It was telling her something; she knew what it meant by its enormous pounding. Wham, wham, wham, it went and, terrified, filled with physical pain, she called to it. “Libera me, Domine,” she said. “De morte aeterna, in die illa tremenda.”
It throbbed on and on. And she glided helplessly toward it. Now, on the periphery of her vision, she saw a fantastic spectacle; she saw a great crossbow and on it the Intercessor. The string was pulled back; the Intercessor was placed on it like an arrow; and then, soundlessly, the Intercessor was shot upward, into the smallest of the concentric rings.
“Agnus Dei,” she said, “qui tollis peccata mundi.” She had to look away from the throbbing vortex; she looked down and back . . . and saw, far below her, a vast frozen landscape of snow and boulders. A furious wind blew across it; as she watched, more snow piled up around the rocks. A new period of glaciation, she thought, and found that she had trouble thinking—let alone talking—in English “Lacrymosa dies illa,” she said, gasping with pain; her entire chest seemed to have become a block of suffering. “Qua resurget ex favilla, judicandus homo reus.” It seemed to make the pain less, this need to express herself in Latin—a language which she had never studied and knew nothing about. “Huic ergo parce, Deus!” she said. “Pie Jesu Domine, dona eis requiem.” The throbbing continued on.
A chasm opened before her feet. She began to fall; below her the frozen landscape of the hellworld grew closer. Again she cried out, “Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna!” But still she fell; she had almost reached the hell-world, and nothing meant to lift her up.
Something with immense wings soared up, like a great, metallic dragonfly with spines jutting from its head. It passed her, and a warm wind billowed after it. “Salve me, fons pietatis,” she called to it; she recognized it and felt no surprise at seeing it. The Intercessor, fluttering up from the hellworld, back to the fire of the smaller, inner rings.
Lights, in various colors, bloomed on all sides of her; she saw a red, smoky light burning close and, confused, turned toward it. But something made her pause. The wrong color, she thought to herself. I should be looking for a clear, white light, the proper womb in which to be reborn. She drifted upward, carried by the warm wind of the Intercessor… the smoky red light fell behind and in its place, to her right, she saw a powerful, unflickering, yellow light. As best she could she propelled herself toward that.
The pain in her chest seemed to have lessened; in fact her entire body felt vague. Thank you, she thought, for easing the discomfort; I appreciate that. I have seen it, she said to herself; I have seen the Intercessor and through it I have a chance of surviving. Lead me, she thought. Take me to the proper color of light. To the right new birth.
The clear, white light appeared. She yearned toward it, and something helped propel her. Are you angry at me? she thought, meaning the enormous presence that throbbed. She could still hear the throbbing, but it was no longer meant for her; it would throb on throughout eternity because it was beyond time, outside of time, never having been in time. And—there was no space present, either; everything appeared two-dimensional and squeezed together, like robust but crude figures drawn by a child or by some primitive man. Bright colorful figures, but absolutely flat. . . and touching.
“Mors stupebit et natura,” she said aloud. “Cum resurget creatura, judicanti responsura.” Again the throbbing lessened. It has forgiven me, she said to herself. It is letting the Intercessor carry me to the right light.
Toward the clear, white light she floated, still uttering from time to time pious Latin phrases. The pain in her chest had gone now entirely and she felt no weight; her body had ceased to consume both time and space.
Wheee, she thought. This is marvelous.
Throb, throb, went the Central Presence, but no longer for her; it throbbed for others, now.
The Day of the Final Audit had come for her—had come and now had passed. She had been judged and the judgment was favorable. She experienced utter, absolute joy. And continued, like a moth among novas, to flutter upward toward the proper light.
From a 1979 interview:
I only know of one time where I really took acid. That was Sandoz acid, a giant horse capsule that I got from the University of California, and a friend and I split it. And I don’t know, there must’ve been a whole milligram of it there. It was a gigantic thing, you know, we bought it for five dollars and took it home and we looked at it for a while—looked at it, we were all gonna split it up—and took that, and it was the greatest thing, I’ll tell you.
I went straight to Hell, is what happened. I found myself, you know, the landscape froze over, and there were huge boulders, and there was a deep thrumming, and it was the Day of Wrath, and God was judging me as a sinner, and this lasted for thousands of years and didn’t get any better. It just got worse and worse, and I was in terrible pain, I felt terrible physical pain, and all I could talk was in Latin. Most embarrassing, ‘cause the girl I was with thought I was doing it to annoy her, and I kept saying Libera me domine in die illa. You know, and Agnus dei qui tollis peccata mundi […] and especially, Tremens factus sum ego et timeo—timeo meaning “I’m afraid”—and I said Libera me, domine! Whining like some poor dog that’s been left out in the rain all night. Finally, the girl with me said “Oh, barf” and walked out of the room in disgust.
Two more references:
Yes, friends, you, too, can suffer forever; simply take 150 mg [sic] of LSD—and enjoy! If not satisfied, simply mail in—but enough. Because after two thousand years under LSD, participating in the Day of Judgment, one probably will be rather apathetic to asking for one’s five dollars back.
(source)
And:
I perceived Him as a pulsing, furious, throbbing mass of vengeance-seeking authority, demanding an audit (like a sort of metaphysical IRS agent). Fortunately I was able to utter the right words [the “Libera me, Domine” quoted above], and hence got through it. I also saw Christ rise to heaven from the cross, and that was very interesting, too (the cross took the form of a crossbow, with Christ as the arrow; the crossbow launched him at terrific velocity—it happened very fast, once he had been placed in position).
(same as above)
Brief Analysis: Philip K. Dick extensively explored the literary theme of simulationism. This theme posits that the reality that we experience is an illusion; it is not what it originally seemed to be. The fakeness of reality includes not only one’s perception of the world, but also one’s beliefs about oneself. Indeed, it is a narrative staple of a good PKD story for the character to turn out to have been a robot, secret agent, alien, and/or a computer program all along. Oftentimes the fundamental plot twists are layered, multifaceted, recursive, and ultimately undecidable thanks to the presence of contradictory versions of events and narrative ambiguity.
More than almost any other author, PKD indeed explored to a great depth the implications of indirect realism about perception (e.g. in many of his stories the main character discovers that she/he never perceives the world in an unmediated fashion). That the world we perceive is a simulated reality is to be expected in the works of this author; whether this simulation is created by one’s brains or a large cosmic computer is the deeper question that PKD tends to posit again and again and often leaves in fully unresolved terms.
The LSD trip above recounted is interesting in this context. PKD’s trip illustrates just how insidious the reality transformation caused by psychedelics can be, to the point that they can make you doubt fundamental implicit background assumptions you’ve constructed your life around. While PKD remained skeptical of the cosmic significance of most of his life experiences, he seems to have given a very high degree of metaphysical credence to specific intensely emotional events in his life, including the above LSD trip. Perhaps PKD didn’t know at the time that LSD does not merely make you experience weird qualia, but that it also intensifies its emotional power. Psychedelics are interesting in part because they are remarkably effective means to increase the energy of one’s consciousness (via increasing the amplitude of connectome-specific harmonic waves). People describe them as experience intensifiers. Thus, positive, negative, and mixed emotions can be felt in much greater depth. According to our work, this process is related to symmetry and harmony. On psychedelics the pseudo-time arrow of experience elongates and spatial representations cohere on symmetrical shapes (such as wallpaper groups for 2D texture repetition or 3D hyperbolic manifolds on high doses of DMT). The increased level of energy leads to entropic disintegration, and ultimately to neural annealing, a process which is experienced as intensely emotional and full of meaning. Interestingly, PKD’s trip report showcases all of these features in one way or another.
For instance, the thumping/throbbing described is first experienced as intensely unpleasant and only at the end is described as blissful. The existence of this thumping can be accounted for by a process of neural annealing; its initial unpleasantness is the result of the dissonance between the core metronome (“Central Presence”) and the rest of the experience; the final bliss is the result of successful annealing and the high levels of consonance that ensue. The increased subjective time reported can be explained by changes to the pseudo-time arrow, including the eternal-seeming nature of the Central Presence. And so on.
In so far as we choose to reduce spirituality to valence (rather than the other way around) we will expect to find that intense life-altering spiritual experiences will all bear the signatures of high/low valence. That is, it is not that spirituality is emotionally intense. Rather, emotional intensity underlies spirituality. PKD’s account displays this in a very explicit way. The thumping of the Central Presence could certainly have theological significance, but it is not specifically predicted by any kind of formal theology. On the other hand, if the Symmetry Theory of Valence is correct, such thumping (and associated intense emotions) are expected to be found in typical intensely blissful/hellish states. That said, due to the Tyranny of the Intentional Object such intensely valenced states will appear to be reflections of inherently good/bad situations or entities. The emotion comes first. The illusion of grasping the “fundamentally good/bad essence of a being” comes second, as an after-the-fact ideation. Alas, thanks to implicit direct realism about perception, most people fail to attribute the intense emotional character of these experiences to things as impersonal as neural annealing, and instead interpret what happened in terms of metaphysical happenings like meeting God or experiencing telepathy.
The fact that intense emotions masquerade as insight into the fundamental nature of other beings is perhaps one of the most deceptive aspects of the world simulations created by our brains. After all, nothing is good or bad, but the encephalization of phenomenal valence via afferent neural connections from our limbic system’s hedonic hot spots makes it so. While Philip K. Dick managed to be skeptical and cautious about the way he made sense of reality, it is clear that he still somehow took at face value the representational content of intense emotions. Thus, he was still under the spell of a fundamental illusion, and hence at the mercy of gripping mystical visions. In future, however, PKD-like authors imbued with a 21st century science of consciousness shall go even deeper, and explore simulationism in light of, not only indirect realism about perception, but also of the Tyranny of the Intentional Object, egocentric bias, personal identity, and other evolutionarily adaptive shenanigans of our perception.
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