Valis 1 - Philip K. Dick

Date: 2022-12-05
| it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane
Chapter: 1


Date: 2022-12-10
| ’s a technique to break down the personality. It’s a fascist
| therapy that makes the person totally outer-directed and dependent
| on the group. Then they can build up a new personality that isn’t
| drug oriented
Chapter: 1


Date: 2022-12-10
| You cannot think about it without becoming part of it By thinking
| about madness, Horselover Fat slipped by degrees into madness
Chapter: 1


Date: 2022-12-11
| His term was ‘exegesis’, a theological term meaning a piece of
| writing that explains or interprets a portion of scripture. Fat
| believed that the information fired at him and progressively
| crammed into his head in successive waves had a holy origin and
| hence should be regarded as a form of scripture, even if it just
| applied to his son’s undiagnosed right inguinal hernia which had
| popped the hydrocele and gone down into the scrotal sack.
Chapter: 2


Date: 2022-12-12
| Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible
| events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of
| what used to be reality. And not only that—as if that weren’t
| enough—but you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations
| in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the
| only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of the
| necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you
| can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the
| familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only
| can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other
| people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where
| it comes from he does not know.
Chapter: 2


Date: 2023-01-15
| In Mircea Eliade’s book Myth and Reality one chapter is titled,
| “Time Can Be Overcome.” It is a basic purpose of mythic ritual
| and sacrament to overcome time
Chapter: 3