Compare/contrast with this brief write up about PKD's last years (for those who don't know):
But in an instance that could have come from his own fiction – and indeed, would eventually dominate it – a very strange series of events would soon immeasurably reshape his life, becoming the idée fixe of his last decade and giving birth to his best and most mature work.
In the early months of 1974 Dick experienced hallucinations, dreams, synchronicities and Gnostic visions that he collectively referred to as “2-3-74,” shorthand for “February/March 1974.” Dick would spend the rest of his life attempting to unravel the meaning of these events in a thousand-page handwritten manuscript he came to call the Exegesis. Even when his fictional output slowed, he continued to work on the Exegesis every night, analyzing, interpreting and sorting through 2-3-74 as well as his published novels and short stories. Besides its function as mystical exegesis, it also served as a daily diary, a prolonged self-analysis, and a dream journal. Very rarely in the history of literature do we have such an open window into the mind of a writer, penetrating his deepest spiritual and psychological space.
Dick came to believe that an alien intelligence/technology (that could quite possibly also be God) was communicating to him through an interface he called the Vast Active Living Intelligence System, or VALIS. This system took the form of a ship in outer space, delivering highly concentrated doses of information to him through beams of pink light. Dick himself described it as an “invasion” of his consciousness “by a transcendentally rational mind.” He also came to believe that coexisting within himself was a “plasmate.” Dick believed that his plasmate was an early Christian, who, though very much alive in the First Century, was simultaneously interpenetrated into Dick’s body and mind-space. Like many of the protagonists from his own novels, Dick believed in the possibility that he was hallucinating his current life, and was really living in another place and time, in this case the Roman Empire. (This is the origin of the haunted phrase frequently found in his later writing: “The Empire Never Ended.”) He also experienced a series of voices that fed him information, telling him things that he couldn’t possibly know otherwise, including a just-in-time medical diagnosis of his new-born son – whose life was saved by an emergency hernia operation.
Dick was well aware of how insane this all sounded, and he wrote endlessly in his Exegesis about different explanations, and why he finally came to believe in the veracity of his spiritual experiences. One “proof” of his sanity was his claim that crazy people don’t doubt their own sanity. Those who knew him at the time, living in Santa Ana in a modest apartment, considered him eccentric, disheveled, personally unhygienic, intense, gentle, arrogant, emotionally hair-triggered and religiously bizarre, but quite possibly the most brilliant person they knew, and certainly not a delusional schizophrenic. Despite his numerous psychological problems, his friends considered him to be quite “sane.”
Four astonishing novels came out of the whole experience. Radio Free Albemuth was his first attempt to grapple with VALIS through fiction. In the novel, Dick bestows his own 2-3-74 experience onto a Berkeley record store employee named Nicholas Brady. After being exposed to the pink beams of compressed information, Brady turns to his friend for advice and help, a science-fiction novelist named Philip K. Dick. Following clues passed to them by VALIS, the two begin to unravel a conspiracy hatched by a politician named Ferris Freemont, a thinly veiled Richard Nixon. In an attempt to oppose the police state Freemont wishes to impose upon the country, Brady and Dick encode secret messages into the lyrics of pop songs. The novel is colored by the manic and paranoid political atmosphere of California during the Nixon years, and in many ways serves as an elaborate counter-culture response to Watergate. Filled with mystical interpretations of rock music, schizophrenic delusions of alien technology, and biting political satire, Radio Free Albemuth is Dick’s most daring work, and one of his most autobiographical. However, when his publisher returned it with suggestions for a rewrite, Dick made the odd decision to scrap it completely and start over again.
VALIS (1980) was the result, a complete reworking of his 2-3-74 experience. The protagonist who now undergoes Gnostic illumination is Horselover Fat, a schizophrenic twin of sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick. (Philip being Greek for “Horselover;” and Dick being German for “fat,” or “thick.”) The basic themes of Albemuth are intact, but the mood is less playful, more solemnly immersed in Gnostic considerations and theological debate. Although less easily mapped onto his exact 2-3-74 experiences than Albemuth, VALIS is also sharply autobiographical, incorporating Dick’s experiences in mental clinics, his suicide attempts, and the most personal aspects of his spiritual life.
His fiction was drifting more into the labyrinth of Christian Gnosticism, and with The Divine Invasion (1981), he attempted to drive the ideas back into the sheath of science fiction, but with a more refined vision and literary mastery than ever before. In this book, God causes himself to be reborn into the womb of a female astronaut; but trying to smuggle her child back to a hostile earth, she is killed. Mentally damaged from the accident, the young boy has to struggle to remember that he is God, and has been exiled from earth for two thousand years. By befriending a little girl, he manages to restore the spiritual balance of the earth – the girl is non other than the Greek goddess Diana, and not surprisingly, his spiritual twin. Despite the presence of such divine principals, the protagonist of the book is really one Herb Archer, a comfortably Dickian character with passionate obsessions for Mahler and Finnegans Wake. His spiritual growth and reflections form the heart of the work, one of Dick’s most hopeful.
Dick’s final novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (p. 1982), is a thinly veiled account of the last years of Episcopalian Bishop James Pike. A personal friend of Dick’s, Bishop Pike became briefly famous in the 60’s when he claimed to be in psychic contact with his dead son. On a personal voyage to the roots of his own changing faith, the Bishop perished during an ill-prepared hiking expedition in the deserts of the Dead Sea. The novel gave Dick the chance to reflect upon the pain, sadness and religious pleasure of death, perhaps as a form of therapy after a decade of watching several close friends die.
“I am terribly frightened of death,” he writes in this, his final book. “Death has destroyed me. It is not Sri Khrisna, destroyer of all people; it is death, destroyer of my friends. It singled them out and left everyone else undisturbed.”
Shortly after writing these lines, Philip K. Dick died of complications brought about by a series of strokes in 1982. He never lived to see the completion of Blade Runner, the first Hollywood movie based on one of his novels. The romantic legend attached to his death is that it was brought about as a logical ending to his spiritual quest, just as Jim Pike, his friend, died in the desert searching for the origins of Christianity. It is more likely that his death was the logical ending to his years of physical and emotional self-abuse.