VALIS

by Philip K. Dick

What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

There is no door to God through dope; that is a lie peddled by the unscrupulous.

God, he told us, had fired a beam of pink light directly at him, at his head, his eyes; Fat had been temporarily blinded and his head had ached for days.

The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.

In no way, shape or form did Kevin represent a viable alternative to mental illness. His cynical grin had about it the grin of death; he grinned like a triumphant skull. Kevin lived to defeat life.

Being crazy and getting caught at it, out in the open, turns out to be a way to wind up in jail.

So now he had learned something else about being crazy: not only does it get you locked up, but it costs you a lot of money.

In summary (as Fat would say), the modern-day masochist does not enjoy pain; he simply can’t stand being helpless.

We are not individuals. We are stations in a single Mind. We are supposed to remain separate from one another at all times.

Thomas even remembered a self before that: one which had come to this planet from the stars.

We are talking about Christ. He is an extra-terrestrial life form which came to this planet thousands of years ago, and, as living information, passed into the brains of human beings already living here, the native population. We are talking about interspecies symbiosis.

“VALIS is a construct,” Mini said. “An artifact. It’s anchored here on Earth, literally anchored. But since space and time don’t exist for it, VALIS can be anywhere and any time it wishes to. It’s something they built to program us at birth; normally it fires extremely short bursts of information at babies, engramming instructions to them which will bleed across from their right hemispheres at clock-time intervals during their full lifetimes, at the appropriate situational contexts.”