When Philip K. Dick was an apostle of Jesus
The SciFi novelist saw himself as ‘Thomas’
He is the famously bizarre and ultra-influential Sci-Fi novelist. But Philip K. Dick saw himself as ‘Thomas’, a reincarnated apostle of Jesus.
His memory of an earlier self came back to him, he’d say, on February 20, 1974, when following a dental operation he stood in front of a girl wearing a necklace with a Christian fish, or ichthys symbol, which emanated a beam of pink light—and it entered him.
Well, that’s how he’d tell the story sometimes.
Dick would describe the “pink beam” event in different ways.
He referred to it in a September 1974 letter to Ursula Le Guin telling her of “the spirit which filled me starting in March…”
Or a 1979 interview: “I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane.”
Somehow his consciousness had gained a new layer. That’s how he first experienced it. He called it ‘Zebra’ for awhile. Over time it defined into a personality, ‘Thomas’, associating it with the year 45 A.D., and bringing with it…
