"They've always classed paranoia as a mental illness.  But it isn't!  There's no lack of contact with reality--on the contrary, the paranoid is directly related to reality.  He's a perfect empiricist.  Not cluttered with ethical and moral-cultural inhibitions.  The paranoid sees things as they really are; he's actually the only sane man." —Philip K. Dick, "Null-O," The Philip K. Dick Reader

"My God, if I weren't so well integrated, I'd be out of my mind!" —Philip K. Dick, "Fair Game"

Here's a precursor to Philip K. Dick's "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," about taking vacations as another personality.  From The Problem Club, by Barry Pain.  (Courtesy of Jonathan Caws-Elwitt.)

From Maybe I'm Dead by Joe Klaas.  You may know that Cotard Syndrome or Walking Corpse Syndrome is what psychiatrists call a delusion that one is already dead.  The thrice great Charles Fort had it [see our important post about that], as did the immortal Philip K. Dick.*  Thing is ... if this life actually does turn out to be a purgatorial realm, then those aware of being dead are the only ones not crazy.

*From Dick's Exegesis: "We are dead but don't know it, reliving our former lives but on tape (programmed), in a simulated world controlled by Valis the master entity or reality generator (like Brahman), where we relive in a virtually closed cycle again and again until we manage to add enough new good karma to trigger off divine intervention, which wakes us up and causes us to simultaneously both remember and forget, so that we can begin our reascent back up to our real home. This, then, is purgatorio, the afterlife, and we are under constant scrutiny and judgment, but don't know it, in a perfect simulation of the world we knew and remember -- v. Ubik and Lem's paradigm. We have for a long time been dying brains/souls slipping lower and lower through the realms, but the punishment of reliving this bottom-realm life is also an opportunity to add new good karma and break the vicious cycle of otherwise endless reliving of a portion of our former life. This, then, is the sophia summa of the six esoteric systems -- seven if you count alchemy -- of the entire world. Eight if you count hermeticism. We are dead, don't know it, and mechanically relive our life in a fake world until we get it right. Ma'at has judged us; we are punished, but we can change the balance... but we don't know we are here to do this, let alone know where we are. We must change the 'groove' for the better or just keep coming back, not remembering, not reascending."

"One man’s harbinger is another man’s event."

—Philip K. Dick, Solar Lottery

Mindblowing insights from the afterword to Philip K. Dick's epic Exegesis:

On the reality-distortion induced by reading PKD's works: "PKD's fiction taps into shamanic powers to shape and bend consciouness and the realities that project from it."

For whom was PKD writing his posthumously-published 9,000-page Exegesis?  For those born to read it.  [We were, and we did!]

PKD wrote his Exegesis in a state of ecstasy, literally "beside himself," and the Exegesis embodies the Philip K. Dick who was beside the other one.

Is the Exegesis a massive artifact from an unwritten novel that is trapping a character who lives on Mars?  The afterword suggests that, like a 9,000-page shamanic song of the Upper Amazon, the Exegesis needs to be performed.  "Singing it at about three minutes per page would take over four hundred hours, about ten weeks of a full-time job of the sort that a Philip K. Dick character might be trapped within, working at home from his Martian hovel, reading it aloud while the surveillance tapes whirred."

"What's got to be gotten over is the false idea that an hallucination is a private matter."

"In every event we must, by faith, presume a benign purpose, which, could we see all which is to come, would delight us – we would be especially delighted to see how intrinsically evil events become used as building blocks for noble structures – and are, in fact, essential for the ultimate construction of those fine systems. Nothing is wasted, nothing is futile, nothing is lost. Everything is eventually, when its time has come, is snatched up and incorporated."

Cotard Syndrome or Walking Corpse Syndrome is what psychiatrists call a delusion that one is already dead.  The thrice great Charles Fort had it [see our important post about that], as did the immortal Philip K. Dick.*  Thing is ... if this life actually does turn out to be a purgatorial realm, then those aware of being dead are the only ones not crazy.

"What is my real relationship to time?  I experience the near past, the near future, and the very far past; a lot of my soul or psyche seems to be transtemporal … maybe this is why any given present space time seems somehow unreal or delusional to me. I span across and hence beyond it; always have —and the transtemporal is the eternal, the divine, the immortal spirit. How long have I been here, and how many times? Who or what am I, and how old? Reality outside confronts me as a mystery, and so does my own inner identity. The two are fused. Who am I? When is it? Where am I? This sounds like madness. But when I read the Scriptures I find myself in the world which is to me real, and I understand myself. The Bible is a door."

"The really carefully guarded secret of the priests of all the religions, which they will never voluntarily relinquish to the world, is that priests are not needed, nor what priests know or what initiates do or what the devout believe—practices and sacraments, anything. The truth is that God inhabits without limit; wherever the real is or the actual does, He is it. Special knowledge of how to get in touch with him is that same knowledge which carries the bee home to its hive each night; who sells that knowledge to the bee? If we have no money, if we can't read or be wise, are we abandoned? Does He abandon the lowly insects because they are virtually no more than reflex machines? Just as truth cannot really be suppressed, at least not forever, it neither can be horded. We are taught day and night, as all living entities are: ceaselessly. God did not begin to govern and inform the cosmos when writing and money were invented."

You must put your slippers on

To walk toward the dawn.

"Any system which says, This is a rotten world, wait for the next, give up, do nothing, succumb—that may be the basic Lie and if we participate in believing it and acting (or rather not acting) on it we involve ourselves in the Lie and suffer dreadfully ... which only reinforces that particular Lie.  I imagine that if Sweet Jesus is listening to me He is becoming very angry now, but if He follows his own philisophy He will fold his hands, look tragically toward heaven, and do nothing."

"The paranormal is about paradox, not proof; about meaning, not mechanism; about myth, not math.  Most of all, however, the paranormal is about the 'coincidence' or fundamental unity of mind and matter.  Two of [Philip K.] Dick's favorote scholars captured this truth in two Latin sound bites: the mysterium conjunctionis, or 'mystery of conjunction,' of C. G. Jung and the coincidentia oppositorum, or 'coincidence of opposites,' of Mircea Eliade." —Jeffrey J. Kripal, footnote in Philip K. Dick's Exegesis

"We are going to have to deal with propositions which are simultaneously both true and false; my corollary is that mutually contrary propositions may be equally true."

—Philip K. Dick, Exegesis

What is it I hold, while there is still time?

—Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

The word is disemelevatored.  From Philip K. Dick's spectacular novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  (From which the vastly inferior films were "inspired."  The novel is a masterpiece.)