The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by R. Crumb

>“I’ve heard that there are colors that are too bright for our eyes to see,”

I don't know about brightness, but psychedelic drugs routinely cause visuals of colors that are too saturated for the eyes to see. This is because the responsivity spectra of the eye's cone cells have a lot of overlap, especially between the red and the green types. See: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cones_SMJ2_E.svg

Psychedelic drugs affect the nervous system directly, so they can trigger one color channel without triggering the others. Presumably religious experiences can do the same thing.

You can approximate this effect without drugs by tiring out the overlapping channels before viewing the one you're interested in. Fill your screen with pure cyan (#00FFFF), and set up another tab full of pure red (#FF0000). Turn your display brightness up and switch off the room lights. Stare at the cyan screen for several minutes, and then immediately switch to the red screen. I suspect this color is close to what Dick and West saw.

I think this sort of "divine light" experience happens to a lot of people. In the Burmese school of Buddhism started by Mahasi Sayadaw, there is a stage of insight called the "Arising and Passing Away" that teachers identify when their students report phenomena like this. If you go to a Buddhist internet community like dharmaoverground.org, you will find a lot of people reporting and discussing this sort of thing.

Although I no longer consider myself Buddhist, I don't know what to make of it.

Maybe PKD didn't travel backwards in time to the era of Jesus but forwards in time to the era of Yeezus...

Perhaps it was rather sideways.

VALIS

good connection! Personally, I'm expecting Kanye to go mothership funky and embrace his alien origin.

You are kind of a prat to put those 2 in the same light honestly.

Were you diagnosed?

Do you have neurological issues? (or suffer from risk factors? such as high blood pressure, overweight, diabetes, sedentarity) I wonder if that could be related (because of PKD's eventual tragic death by stroke). As far as my tiny medical knowledge goes schizophrenia hallucinations usually auditory in nature and not very explicit. There's also the question of the effect of the drug supposedly taken during his dentist procedure ( a compound which seems to have brain effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_thiopental#Side_effects ).

Of course he was probably in general risk for delusional thinking given his job to constantly devise bizarre plots questioning every aspect of reality. But it does make me curious whether he suffered from a neurological condition, or just a psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia.

Hope you're doing well, mental disorders are scary :(

You should check out Valis, the book PKD wrote as part of his attempt to deal with his experience.

He was very much aware he was likely going insane.

It was anything but sly. He occasionally writes "I, I mean, Horselover Fat..." and never once concretely states that he and Fat weren't the same person.

Valis was part of Dick's attempt to interpret and come to terms with that experience

> I am Horselover Fat, and I am writing this in the third person to gain much- needed objectivity.

If you've just read that collection, you have a lot of the most mind-bending PKD stories left. Try one of his novels. I'd recommend A Scanner Darkly and Man in the High Castle as two of the more accessible ones (the latter is much less sci fi - it's more alternative history).

His short stories are very variable in quality - a lot of his early stories makes you feel trapped in a 50's idea of a post-nuclear holocaust world because he repeats that setting endlessly as he churned out stories to pay the bills (but there are great gems there too), so the more curated antologies are good starting points. Pick up some more and you'll probably also recognize the plot of any number of movies you may have seen (direct adaptions from his short stories includes Paycheck - in your antology I think - Total Recall, Screamers, Adjustment Bureau, Minority Report and more), where a single idea from his stories was dense enough for a movie.