Much has been written about the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick's experience centered on February 3, 1974, but little has done it any real justice. To a large extent they have been the impressions of people who occasionally treated him, who saw him as very lost, or very lunatic, or very convinced of one explanation or another of his mystical experiences.

The vulgar story tells how Philip had a wisdom tooth removed and had to use an enormous amount of anesthetic to support it. A young girl knocked on his door to deliver the medication, and he was fascinated by her pendant, a fish pendant, which she told him belonged to the early Christians. He then had a series of visions in which they were both living in Rome in AD 70. and that they were secret Christians, hiding from the empire.

A month later and for almost a year, Philip K. Dick began to see the world in the guise of the Christian apocalypse, the two realities intermingling. PKD - again according to the official story - ended years later unhinged and thinking that a new savior had been born in India.

However, when one approaches to read directly, things change a lot. And you can read him directly, because he wrote a dozen volumes trying to explain to himself what the hell happened to him when reality broke around him and he began to look too much like his novel "Ubik." From these volumes, a shorter edition was made in 2011 (a volume of about a thousand pages), from which one can understand much better what happened to PKD, and how it was not so lost and upset as many thought.

The first thing to clarify is that there is no single PKD explanation for your mystical experiences. It is often thought that he was convinced of very concrete things, of pseudo-Christian views, that he believed the mix between his views of Rome and the world today as totally literal, and so on. And it happens completely the other way around: what the author dedicates himself to during the eight years that remain until his death is to draw hypotheses in a feverish way. It seems that he changes them every day, with an inexhaustible imagination that can only belong to one of the most imaginative science fiction authors of the 20th century. One day his explanation deals with a form of extraterrestrial intelligence capable of living in four dimensions that has penetrated our world, and tomorrow it is that our universe is evolving in such a way that it has given rise to a new form of intelligence, not a creator but a result. the development of our reality. The next day he will take Christian dogmas and adapt them to what he experienced talking about the second coming of Christ, and another day it will be Gnosticism or Eastern ideas.

A remarkable point is that PKD is not here taking a set of ideas previously present in it and trying to adjust its experience to them, as people who are dogmatized do. It does the other way around. You have had an experience that you cannot find a way to explain, an experience for which you have no references, and you use what you know and find out to try to figure out what it is that can refer to your experience from there and help you explain it. Thus, for example, the author's strong Christian background does not condition his explanations but rather serves as a resource that twists until he squeezes out what he wants. On many occasions his interpretation of religious systems becomes so convoluted that the result he obtains has nothing to do with the original set of ideas. If you need the theory to speak to you of ecstasy, you can take the opposite extreme of Christian suffering and conclude that the Dionysian is an initiatory hidden reverse and the true teaching of Christianity: in short, the interesting thing here is that PKD has had such an experience It is strong that it is the ideas of the world that it tries to put at the service of such an experience and not the other way around.

And not only those of the world: also those of his own literary work, which he will often reinterpret - in particular Ubik - as a sign of everything that happened, as his own pre-intuition about what was going to happen.

Only occasionally does he seem to come close to a certain "metavision" in the years after his main experience, although he continues to slide over and over again through one hypothesis after another. And the feverishness of his creative speculation cannot but stand out in his Exegesis. It makes sense: you take one of the most imaginative literary authors of the 20th century, who has spawned an enormous number of film adaptations, and you confront him with an event that undermines his ideas about reality to such an extent that he cannot help but trace. sick guesses over and over again, tireless.

One of the ideas that always struck me about PKD before reading the Exegesis, was that it took literally the idea that 1974 coincided with 70 AD. to such an extent that he thought he was actually living in Rome at that time as well as in our time. All this arises because he has an enormous number of synchronicities in his life in which this one and a book of the Bible (the book of Acts) coincide. This is something that is often overlooked but that one understands as essential when reading the Exegesis: for Philip K. Dick what is decisive is the immense number of synchronicities that overwhelm him, and that at their peak will have to do with the book of Acts of the Bible (a series of things happen to him that coincide with what happens in this book), as well as with another of his books, "Flow my tears, said the policeman." For Philip, when these synchronicities occur, the world comes to life, and from there arise his hypotheses, even more important than the Rome question, about having found an immanent God, or perhaps an extraterrestrial intelligence, or an intradimensional life form that it manifests itself through synchronicities, or many other possibilities that will occur to you.

This is the core of her experience, and it is important in that it brings her closer to other Initiation stories such as the one made by Robert Anton Wilson in his Cosmic Hammer I. It is also here that we can see the essential characteristics of the PKD experience ( first going through hell, the encounter with the sublime once crossed, the permanence of what has been found as a guide) that we are talking about an authentic experience of Initiation.

It is also an experience with many aspects, and we should not dismiss his conjectures as psychotic ramblings when he considers on the one hand the Rome in which he is a hidden Christian and the present moment. Certainly there are times when he takes that resemblance very literally, but he also perceives that the various explanations by which he tries to assimilate what happened do not fit him and that involve Rome still standing (the empire never ended) and some other ideas. As he advances in his Exegesis, at various moments the literality fades and he begins to consider the idea of ​​a time outside of time, of archetypes present in a timeless and eternal time that can manifest themselves in different moments and places but that respond to a very determined basic scheme.

This idea is similar to the Egyptian concept of timelessness in which the myths of their gods develop, an eternal place to which they constantly try to bring reality back when they perform the rites in which they represent the legends of the gods.

"Valis is a penetration of the spirit into the physical." It is about the world coming to life, about a particular disposition of events such that what acts "was pure placement of things and not things placed"; That this placement coincided exceptionally strongly with the content of the Book of Acts is important to the author, but not the central core of the experience. What was essential was reality coming to life through the way she combined what happened to her to communicate with him. "Things and processes seemed alive because they were modulated by a conscious purpose rather than an effective mechanical law."

This "thing that enters" into the real is for PKD also God as the Void, as the starting point from which all narrative derivations about reality start, such as those that he carries out throughout Exegesis.

At times he even has a certain magical intuition about this new mode of behavior that he finds in reality: “All you have to do is believe that the pattern 'x' exists, and if 'x' is potentially possible, it will happen to the real. This requires a tug-of-war relationship between person and reality. The person cannot put his will in that a blue phoenix appears out of nowhere; the person must enter into a progressive intricate dialogue in which there is feedback between him and reality ”.

PKD often comes to think that he has reached some conclusion, or that a new derivation of his ideas or his visions is final, but we can always find him discarding it a few days later. This conclusion is definitive! he seems to yell at us often, only to soon find that he had gotten ahead of him with his enthusiasm.

As the end of Philip K. Dick's life approaches, we also find a very important clue in his notes, which explains the meaning of Exegesis.

Personally, after having read a large part of your notes, I was wondering, I understand that you want to explain it to you, but don't you want to return? Don't you want to find yourself again that which triggered the synchronicities, that broke your mind with that intensity?

But that is exactly the meaning of Philip K. Dick's Exegesis as it slips over and over into narratives about the world and about what happened to it. The author acknowledges that what he intends by turning his feverish imagination around and around is not to explain anything, but to make it happen again: deliberately doing what he did while surrounded by synchronicities, changing his narrative about the world, with the difference that back then "the spark was put by the messenger, and now I don't have it." That is to say, in his experience (in his Initiation, in his Dangerous Chapel), his mind in cognitive terror, he launched himself to give explanations of the world, to draw different ideas, to travel through different worlds in the mind. Once everything was finished, PKD thought that if he did the same thing on purpose, obsessively writing for years different explanations about that event, he could arrive at the same place that he managed to get then. “I was looking to regain, recapture, the Liberator. I do not pretend to obtain Gnosis and liberation, but to re-obtain it; I had it and I lost it! "

As a last note, it is important to clarify a little about his vision about a new messiah, a certain Tagore, which he has in September 1981. In the vision this messiah takes on his body the sores that are made to the environment and has a strong ecological component (rather an ecology proper to PKD), but it is important to note that once again Philip manages not to fall into a literal interpretation, despite what may have been said about him in more superficial analyzes. In a passage, PKD ends up interpreting that Tagore symbolizes him, and that the vision is a warning about how abandoned his body has due to his excess of zeal dedicating himself to Exegesis. It is even a warning, according to the author himself, that if he continues like this he will die. A detail that is particularly shocking, considering that the author died in March 1982.