The 30 Minute Rule begins February 12 at 7:00 PM EST. An Initial Bid Must Be Placed By February 12 at 6:00 PM EST To Participate After 6:00 PM EST
TLS signed “Love, Phil,” two pages, 8.5 x 11, September 10, 1981. Lengthy letter to science fiction author Patricia Warrick, in full: "This letter closely follows my ‘Pythagoras’ letter. Pat, I see—in reading over my 9-9-81 ‘Pythagoras’ letter—that what I am saying is that when, in March, 1974 I saw VALIS, call it kosmos of call it Logos, it was a rational structure ordering reality, and it was augmenting its dominion, bringing more and more of the plurality of discrete objects and their causal processes under its dominion; it was unitary, and if something must be sentient to be rational then it was sentient because indeed it was rational. Now, this is certainly a great vision to have experienced, and to regard it as psychotic is absurd, because this is hardly what a psychotic person would experience or in fact does experience. That it was based on an ultra high-order meta-abstraction on my part a month earlier only underscores the point that this was an intellectual event; it had to do with an enhanced, radically enhanced, way of experiencing reality, in which the Kantian ordering categories of space, time and causation were abolished in favor of this meta-abstraction clearly Platonistic. Plato's term for it, I discover, is: Noesis, and he regarded Noesis as the highest kind of knowledge a human can possess (he contrasts it to what he calls Dianoia, which is normal knowledge and abstracting and ratiocination and, when compared with Noesis, is only mere opinion). What a sad state we have arrived at, when a person who recovers the Forms by anamnesis and achieves Noesis is thought to be crazy! Does this not tell us that our civilization has declined and declined in a very specific way: the wisdom of the great thinkers of antiquity has been lost, forgotten, discarded, in favor of the trivialization of modern-day empiricism, which is as you know a severely reductionist philosophy.
Heidegger, as I'm sure I've mentioned, felt that the fall, the ‘darkening,’ began somewhere after Parmenides and before Aristotle; I am inclined to agree. According to my notes, taken within the last few days, the epistemological problems raised by Parmenides were adequately met by Plato with his Forms doctrine, but then that very doctrine was scrapped by Aristotle…and finally in the seventeenth century Descartes once again took up the epistemological issue that Parmenides had raised: ‘How do we gain knowledge of the outside world, which is to say, reality?’ All modern epistemology is in some way derived from—or is a reaction to—Descartes, the most important single thinker following in the Cartesian tradition being Kant. But Plato had already solved the problem! Worse, Descartes offered a spurious dualism; his system is hopeless, marred by his dualism between mind and body, spirit and matter, God and world. Plato's solution is lost. My March, 1974 experience makes no sense in terms of Cartesian epistemology; it would have to be viewed as miraculous, supernatural, occult; yet in terms of Plato's Forms doctrine it is logical, it can be understood rationally, it in fact confirms the Forms doctrine. What I am saying is this: my March, 1974 experience indicates that our entire contemporary (Cartesian) epistemology is faulty; and, further, that Plato's epistemology—how we know reality—is the case. Thus I am flung back to Plato and Parmenides.
So (I am saying) my experience was not religious, not occult, not supernatural; it does not point to God nor to providentia. It points to a fundamental flaw in modern epistemology; world is not what we think it is, and we do not know of its existence in the way we think we do basing our view consciously or unconsciously on Descartes. My March, 1974 experience is to Cartesian epistemology as the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1881 was to Newtonian mechanics; without intending it proved that the prevailing system of thought is fundamentally in error. It has taken me more than seven and a half years to realize that my experience was not religious but was perfectly natural given a totally different epistemology in the sense of what we believe exists and how we believe we experience that which exists. Now, modern quantum physics recognizes that the Cartesian dualism is in error, that such things as unified fields exist, and that the observer and what observes are somehow one. I was able to know the world a priori, and this is because Plato's Forms are everywhere the same, in the mind and in world, like mathematical principles they can be discovered in our own minds, not just outside us like roses and sheep and popsicles. Thus the Forms create one single unified reality embracing observer and observed; these are eternal and omnipresent categories, as is the realization that underneath the empirical fact that one goat plus one goat equals two goats there lies the principle that one plus one equals two, whether it has to do with goats or battleships, and this principle can be discovered a priori in the human mind; he extracts it from experience with reality, but it is in his mind; it does not enter ‘first through the senses, as Locke taught, that arch master of reductionist empiricism!
In March, 1974 I saw or comprehended VALIS outside me, and at the same time I was aware of VALIS in my mind, as if underlying my mind the way it underlay reality. Only the concept of a unified field would account for this. Thus in perceiving reality we are ultimately engaged in self-perception, what I call the ‘two mirrors’ phenomenon. We suddenly see something outside ourself in world that we recognize, and that thing is ourself, the ‘Tat tvam asi’ equation of Brahmanism: ‘That, thou art’; the atman-Brahman identity; what is in you is that which is outside you. Thus (to repeat myself) I say, My unusual experiences in the spring of 1974 amounted to an evolution on my part to a new, higher, and historically evolved way of comprehending reality; it, I believe, will be the way human beings will someday ordinarily view and experience themselves and world. My experience will some day not be construed as unusual and certainly not psychotic. Of course what I saw was disorienting! I was seeing in a radically new way! The only ‘psychotic’ part was the shock to me to discover that world—and myself as well—was/were not what I had always thought. Is it informed opinion to view the confrontation of a rational principle underlying reality—and underlying one's own mind—as a disturbed experience? I treat this in VALIS; I show how absurd it is. The true psychotic does not encounter the hyper-rational; his world, on the contrary, is disintegrating, whereas mine suddenly integrated on the basis of a new, higher, unforeseen meta-abstracted principle, which I call Logos.” Dick adds a line of symbols to the right of his signature. In fine condition, with two tape-repaired tears to the second page. Accompanied by the original mailing envelope.
This item is Pre-Certified by PSA/DNA
Buy a third-party letter of authenticity for
(inquire for price)
*This item has been pre-certified by a trusted third-party authentication service, and by placing a bid on this item, you agree to accept the opinion of this authentication service. If you wish to have an opinion rendered by a different authenticator of your choosing, you must do so prior to your placing of any bid. RR Auction is not responsible for differing opinions submitted 30 days after the date of the sale.
