“Although the earliest psychoanalysts saw religion as neurotic, the modern mental health field has stopped pathologising religious beliefs.”
“However, the field has made less progress when it comes to actual religious experiences.”
“When spirituality makes the leap from an abstract belief to a real, live experience, therapists get nervous.”
“Although the visions eventually vanished, Dick remained fascinated by them. So captivated was he that he wrote an 8,000-page commentary he called his Exegesis. As a science-fiction writer, Dick had trained his imagination to explore every possibility, however unlikely. Accordingly, many of his conjectures about the origin of the pink light are bizarre. One of his theories posited that an extraterrestrial being symbiotically attached itself to his brain and telepathically linked him with individuals from various time periods. One of them was a first-century Christian revolutionary named Thomas. It was through Thomas, Dick supposed, that the Roman visions came.”
“Another theory had it that, in an alternate dimension, Dick actually was a Christian revolutionary and the Roman visions were encounters with his other-dimensional alter ego.”
“Or perhaps Rome was a malevolent cosmic entity that resided in a dimension orthogonal to linear time, tyrannising multiple time periods simultaneously. On the other hand, maybe the whole affair was an illusion resulting from KGB experiments with telepathy. As Dick’s journaling continued, his theories proliferated. He conceptualised his visions using ideas from Buddhism, Christian Gnosticism, philosophy, brain science and Jungian theory. He also entertained what he termed the ‘minimum hypothesis’: that it was all a symptom of mental illness. But how would one tell if that were the case?”
“At first glance, it might seem obvious that Dick’s religious episode was the expression of a troubled mind. The truth, however, is not so simple. For there is intriguing evidence that his visions can’t be chalked up to psychosis alone. To be sure, Dick had a history of paranoia caused by amphetamine abuse, but he had stopped using speed well before 1974. More importantly, his judgment seemed to improve during the episode. He took better care of his health and made clever business decisions. At the behest of his guiding spirit Thomas, Dick followed up on back royalties his publisher owed him and increased his income by several thousand dollars. In one incident, a hallucinated voice urged him to seek medical care for his infant son, for what turned out to be a hernia. Not only was Dick’s judgment better, but also, he was happier. He wrote that he felt more fulfilled and relaxed.”
“By definition, mental illness means a diminution of functioning, not an expansion. A helpful illness cannot be considered an illness at all. While a handful of maverick therapists – C G Jung, R D Laing, Stanislav Grof, and a few others – have tried to make room for spiritual experiences in the mental-health field, their success has been limited.”