Interesting signed letter by PKD on his 1974 hallucinations Philip K. Dick

'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' A typed letter signed by Philip K. Dick ('Love, Phil' and with a line of symbols beside his name), two pages, September 10th 1981. A 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 or 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.' etc 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.