Philip K. Dick Meets The Overmind

McKenna feels close to the SF writer and cyber-shaman Philip K. Dick, drawing analogies between his encounter with an 'insect-like intelligence' during an anthropological safari to the Amazon Basin in 1971, and Dick's startling encounter with a Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS) three years later. Both were according to McKenna, "encounters with the Overmind, which is the humanly knowable portion of the intelligent Other. Jacques Vallee called the category of experience that Dick and I had 'the Cosmic Giggle,' which is a randomly roving zone of synchronicity and statistical anomaly. Should you be caught up in it, it will turn reality on its head. It is objective and subjective, simultaneously 'really there' and yet somehow is sustained by imagination and expectation; the umbilicus of our ontology, the place where we see that the world came from something very different from what it now appears to be."

Drawing upon the Gnostic mysticism that influenced Dick and fellow SF writer Arthur C. Clarke, he explained further that "these archetypes offer a strong hint that we do not know jack **** about the nature of reality or our own minds. This humbling insight is step one along any path of knowledge. All knowledge begins with an admission of ignorance.

"They literally exist in the same way that all other experience literally exists. These experiences are not in a special category, they are as real as anything else we are accustomed to think of as "real", the difference is that they are rare and not sanctioned or affirmed by social and cultural values in which we may find ourselves embedded.

"Philip K. Dick was the man of the Cybernetic Age, certainly he had a keen appreciation of the problem of epistemological balkanization. Reality seems to be breaking down into cults: the cult of Science, the cult of Extra-Terrestrial Intervention, the cult of Christianity, the cult of Imperialism. Once you are inside the cult it provides all the definitions you need, provided you don't go outside the definitions provided by the cult. Some institutions like science claim a kind of freedom from this infection, which is really just an artefact of our thinking at this point.

"When pushed, I feel that you can only really trust your own experience, and carefully analyze what comes down to feelings and mathematical premises. Information coming in from the outside in the form of stories, evidence, testimonies are incredibly suspect, even on very simple matters."

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