Dick reads an essay Stanislaw Lem wrote about him and understands he has never been able to see causality the way everyone else does. 

He reads the screenplay for Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and by equating his life to a script realizes 3-74 ridded him of his paranoia. He correctly summarizes this makes him look psychotic. He says he became schizophrenic, which cured him, and he admits his fear that the FBI was after him was a delusion. 

He was a “paranoiac schiz” from 71 to 3-74 and had a full schizophrenic breakdown for a year after 3-74. After this a “toxin” secreted in his brain destroyed his persecutory complex. It appears now that depictions of paranoid worlds (like North by Northwest) are repellant to him. 

Using the Greek concepts of idios kosmos and koinos kosmos Dick wonders if the schizophrenic world is the sane world and the normal world is the crazy one. Maybe during schizophrenia the brain is trying to achieve parity between the two hemispheres by releasing the toxin. Because of the right brain’s dominance though schizophrenia is a failed evolutionary leap. 

His inability to understand causality (linear right-brained thinking) has allowed him to perceive how Zebra is communicating. One of his most important discoveries is that causality actually moves backwards.

The post The Exegesis: Schizophrenia & causality appeared first on the world Dick made.

Everyone has a private world (idios kosmos) which is contrasted by everyone’s shared reality (koinos kosmos). Dick wonders if a tyrannical state, for instance, could manipulate its citizens’ inner world through media and news to such an extent that they create a false universal reality. The world Dick wrote about in Ubik after everyone died was the true koinos kosmos that was revealed after everything else was stripped away, but he didn’t realize at the time that’s what he was getting at. 

He goes on to explain to Edwards how he transduced external electrical fields (I still don’t know what this means exactly) through his vitamin megadosing routine to improve his neural firing and cause the right hemisphere of his brain to ‘come on.’ Through this the true koinos kosmos emerged and he encountered the Immanent Mind.  

The post The Exegesis: Letter to Malcom Edwards, January 29, 1975 appeared first on the world Dick made.