Dick asserts:

“Reality (USA 1974) is hallucination, and can be voided by faith—whereupon the absolute time and place (“ACTS) appears.

“Thus Stigmata [hallucination as reality] and Maze are total opposites,” the first hallucination become real and the second hallucination overlying reality. He goes on to define this in terms of his novella Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep [which became the movie Blade Runner] going on to define his quest as a search for those times when “acts” break through the hallucinogenic overlay of deep reality, unseen by human sheep.

Dick advances deeply into self-examination, describing a 1970 mental breakdown as a “mescaline trip” and declaring, “…which was more likely my first entry into total psychosis—my ego disintegrated, then, and again in 3-74.”

Here Dick actually tries testing the veracity of his visions by an examination of his mental health and various aspects of his life that might have played upon it. He affirms that God placed him in his personal protection through Christ, his faith in Christianity somehow restored through apollonian intervention. He goes on to inform that the divine voices of Saint Sophia and Pallas Athene, the former being the Catholic/Orthodox preservation of the pagan goddess of thought as well as her sister Aphrodite, who, conflated with her thoughtful sister he names as his internal soul.

Dick goes on in pages to pull together strands of Hinduism, paganism and other ancient and Asian metaphysics with his expanded notion of Christianity, that our brains crave and require dialogue and that our physical reality is merely a support system for the process of our information.

Dick assures the reader that there is “someone (or something) else living inside my head, and he’s not from this century.” This person is Thomas, an early Christian who was in Rome in A.D. 45 and who communicates with Dick. Dick is not initially certain if this is a former life or a person in the past in current communication with him, but Thomas helps him through the nature of “Circular Time” and is certain that Christ will return and is one in the same as Athena or Saint Sophia.

Dick does come to a conclusion about Thomas, which I must make the conclusion of my abrupt investigation, as my eyes failed to carry my workload in this endeavor:

“Thomas is not a former life of mine. I did not live once in Rome c. A.D. 45, Thomas is an immortal apostolic Christian, and Rome c A.D. 45 is the real present word…”

Dick explains in a brilliant, rambling way that Thomas and other agents are latent within us and that Thomas was activated “by external disinhibiting stimuli,” helping him go on writing along a different path and to see the world as woven and interpreted for us by our rulers with clarity, as the Lie it is.

Thanks to Tony Cox for the lone of this book.

The Awakening of a Paleface Ethnocist