tag: Sufism

The Exegesis: Letter to Henry Korman, February 2, 1975

The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
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Dick met Henry Korman when Tony Hiss interviewed Dick for the New Yorker and brought Henry along. Henry and Dick discussed Sufism and Dr. Robert Ornstein’s work involving the parity between the two hemispheres of the brain. 

In a letter to Henry Dick tells him that he fell asleep after reading a Sufi magazine and had dreams of parallel universes, one in which he was a famous jet setter and another where he lived as a migratory worker in Mexico.

I don’t entirely understand the concept of the noosphere, but it dates back to the 1920s and the writings of Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Soviet geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky. Dick tries to connect the idea of the noosphere (some kind of next phase of the biosphere created by human cognition) to Ubik but he seems to be spitballing about what that connection really is.