Simon Powell - The Psilocybin Solution

If you still don’t see the strangeness to reality, then locate some pictures of galaxies and supernovas, study them closely, and then step into a packed train during rush hour. Do you not detect a curious twist to reality here? Is it not a trifle telling that the Universe should have yielded such organismic arrangements of information, that it should have engineered us sentient, bipedal, hominid creatures, who patter busily around the surface of a rock circling a star? Above you lie billions of miles of space and billions of suns. So too below you and all around you. In fact, some estimates suggest that we are surrounded by 125 billion galaxies, which means there are more stars in the heavens than grains of sand on the Earth. We are literally a suspended anomaly within a twinkling, starry mystery whose solution remains suspended. And yet it apparently all sprang out of nothing and for no good reason!

Given the astonishingly fictional quality of existence, I feel totally justified in outlining the possible nature of an inferred creative intelligence in more detail. In the last analysis, it makes just as much sense to do this than it does to enthuse upon the null hypothesis, which asserts that all this “astonishingness” is without reason. Indeed, it is arguably nuts to suggest that all and everything exists for no rhyme or reason. One even suspects that this kind of mindless interpretation of life and consciousness stems from an ego-obsessed psyche that is only prepared to describe our own abilities in terms of high intelligence. Hence, the tiresome popular sentiment that we are very smart and purposeful while the rest of Nature is very dumb and pointless.

Back to the chase. The aforementioned three options concerning the nature of a higher intelligence (or Other, as we can also call it) have been explored in one way or another by the well known sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick, who used fiction as an unbounded medium in which to put across some decidedly mystical ideas about what he believed to be the true nature of reality. By looking at some fictional scenarios that he created, we shall be able to more clearly divine the feasibility of at least one of the options open to us.

For most people, Philip K. Dick (hereafter known as PKD) is best known through films like Blade Runner , Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly, which were all based on his writings. Classic movies like The Matrix and Vanilla Sky also owe a great debt to PKD’s work. What is not so well known is that PKD was a bit of a latter-day mystic, a man who spent the last decade or so of his life struggling to come to terms with a series of visionary experiences (not related to psychedelics) that befell him in the early 1970s. In these experiences, PKD felt as if some vast cosmic intelligence was communicating with him, as if a deity was slipping him secret information. Such was the impact of these theophanies that he chose to incorporate their thematic content into a number of novels as well as an eight-thousand-page exegesis. To the consternation of his peers, PKD began to be not a little obsessed with ideas of “divine invasion” and the like, his last books testifying to his escalating interest in theology and theistic philosophy (interestingly, his last novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, partly concerns the search for a sacred mushroom).

Since his death it has been speculated that PKD suffered from what is known as temporal lobe epilepsy—a brain disorder that can lead to hallucinatory experiences—and that this explains his mystical encounters. However, leaving aside the contentiousness of this claim, it does not deal with the burning issue of immediate mystical experience. To label an experience in order to explain it away is to avoid the very real nature of the mystical experience, however it should arise. In fact, as Huxley noted in The Doors of Perception, we should not be surprised if there is always unusual neuronal activity concurrent with a mystical experience, for, as we have seen, modified neuronal firing patterns are related to expanded forms of consciousness. Altered forms of awareness demand altered brain processes, and such a change in brain state can be achieved in many different ways, whether through psilocybin mushrooms, endogenous DMT, yoga, meditation, fasting, or spontaneous epileptic disturbances. Mystical experience is therefore not to be conveniently disposed of with a diagnostic label.

Even before his visionary experiences, PKD had long fought to discover the true nature of reality. It was his pet fascination. In a talk he delivered in the late 1970s, he admitted that for all the years he had thought about the question “what is reality?” he had gotten no further than concluding that reality was that which remained even if you stopped believing in it. Admittedly a thin definition, it is nonetheless indicative that the true nature of reality is not so easily pinned down.

PKD juggled with countless explanations for his mystical experiences. Some involved a Judeo-Christian God, others involved the Logos outlined in some of the Gnostic gospels (these are the “alternative” gospels dug up at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945), while others even opted for an advanced extraterrestrial intelligence. Whatever the case, PKD was certain that he had been “contacted” by some form of advanced transcendental intelligence-cum-Other.

One of his more enduring theories concerned VALIS, which is an acronym for “vast active living intelligence system,” a notion that accords well with our intelligent Other. In the semiautobiographical novel of the same name, VALIS is a hidden entity of immense power and sentience that is in the process of infiltrating our reality by establishing communication with certain individuals. These disclosures are experienced as theophany. For our purposes, the key point is that VALIS is essentially outside of our dimension, but able to penetrate our world. The question arises as to the feasibility that a superior intelligence exists in another dimension with the capacity to move across into ours. This is one of our fanciful options concerning the Other.

To more fully understand what PKD was suggesting, consider the plot of his acclaimed novel Ubik . In this story, the main characters are seriously blown up in an explosion at the start of the story and then placed in a kind of collective suspended animation machine that keeps a portion of their brain processes functioning. In this way the characters enjoy what PKD calls a “half-life.” What is more, the collective nature of their half-lives ensures that they experience a simulated reality, a reality so real that the half-lifers fail to realize that they are no longer in the real world. In other words, they don’t realize that they are actually wired up in the half-life unit of the Beloved Brethren Moratorium. Indeed, they falsely believe that they survived the explosion with just a few scratches (you can now see why The Matrix is a decidedly Philipdickish movie).

Our interest grows when we see what happens when someone outside of their simulated reality system attempts to communicate with them (using the standard electrode headphones of course). At one stage in the tale, the protagonist, Joe Chip, who is unaware that he now exists inside a simulated reality, is contacted by someone from the “outside.” This communication is experienced by Chip as an eerie sequence of synchronistic events in his simulated world. For instance, he begins finding significant messages everywhere—scrawled upon washroom mirrors and turning up on matchbook labels and in bits of consumer junk. Personal messages even begin interrupting TV shows (this idea was borrowed to good effect in the Emmy-award winning BBC sci-fi drama series Life on Mars ). In short, the communicator has invaded Chip’s world in such a way that the communication gets distributed across different media, turning up in the most unlikely of places rather than manifesting as a big booming voice coming out of the sky.