Philip K. Dick's Exegesis: An Excerpt on Losing Touch With Reality
I'm not the world's biggest Philip K Dick fan: I have enjoyed maybe 5 novels, but started one or two others and found them un-engaging. I don't think he was that great at the short story, either.
I did like the VALIS trilogy, though, with its teasing sense of something important about the universe that might be being revealed if only all these threads could be pulled together. (They never were, really, from what I recall.) I also had read before that Dick had keep lots of notes about his quasi mystical experience that inspired the novels, and called it his Exegesis.
It seems someone has collected all this stuff together and published it, and there is a short extract in the Slate article linked above.
While it would be nice to think that Dick did genuinely have a strange, mystical experience with an other worldly intelligence, and perhaps was getting messages from the dead bishop, the extract still indicates what I decided long ago: no, it's almost certainly just a case of too many drugs.
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