I’m all but positive that I have linked to this before. Its an article by Terence McKenna about Philip K Dick and is really interesting. I was just looking at it again because I was talking with somebody about strange attractors, archetypes, mental breakdowns and other shit, and this presents an interesting take on all this:

Phil wasn’t nuts. Phil was a vortex victim.* Schizophrenia is not a psychological disorder peculiar to human beings. Schizophrenia is not a disease at all but rather a localized traveling discontinuity of the space time matrix itself. It is like a travelling whirl-wind of radical understanding that haunts time. It haunts time in the same way that Alfred North Whitehead said that the color dove grey “haunts time like a ghost.”

There is an idea that wants to be born, it has wanted to be born for a very long time. And sometimes that longing to be born seffles on a person. For no damn good reason. Then you’re “it,” you become the cheese, and the cheese stands alone. You are illuminated and maddened and lifted up by something great beyond all telling. It wants to be told. It’s just that this idea is so damn big that it can’t be told, or rather the whole of history is the telling of this idea, the stuttering rambling effort of the sons and daughters of poor old Noah to tell this blinding, reality-shattering, bowel-loosening truth. And Phil had a piece of the action, a major piece of the action.

… * “ZEBRA (VALIS): ‘a vortex of intelligence extending as a supra-temporal field, involving humans but not limited to them, drawing objects & processes into a coherency which it arranges into information. A FLUX of purposeful arrangement of living information, both human & extra-human, tending to grow & incorporate its environment as a unitary complex of subsumations.’”(pg. 72)

Man, Philip K Dick’s real hardcore stuff really messes my mind up. I should read VALIS again sometime soon. That book really fucking punches a hole in your head if you read it in conjunction with the right background material.