During February and March of 1974, science fiction writer Philip K. Dick experienced a series of mystical revelations. The source was an entity known as “Zebra,” which revealed that time had stopped back in the mid first-century and that all time since had been an illusion. Guided by Zebra, Dick suddenly began to see reality for what it was - a Roman overlay over what appeared to everyone else to be a normal modern neighborhood. Dick came to describe the visions as 2-3-74 for “February-March 1974.”

The visions soon faded, but Dick spent much of his life trying to make sense of what happened to him, writing a massive 8000-page Exegesis of his visions, proposing various theories about their sources and meanings.

As recounted by Kyle Arnold in his forthcoming The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick, the Exegesis included fragments of Christian theology. On Dick's reading, “Christ’s references to the Kingdom of God refer to an idyllic transformed universe to which the faithful are transported. Those blind to Christian insights, Dick warns, may be doomed to remain trapped within a miserable universe. When the world is reprogrammed, its inhabitants are purged of their painful memories of the prior world and commence their new lives as if no change had occurred.”

He drew on twisted versions of Lutheran theology to link it to his concept of Zebra: “the theology of Martin Luther and the concept of the body of Christ. Luther’s doctrine holds that the ascended body of Christ is ubiquitous, much like Zebra. The smallest stone, the tiniest speck of dirt, all participate in the mystical body of Christ.” This had direct political import: “since the ecosystem is inhabited by the body of Christ, destruction of the ecosystem also destroys Christ. From this perspective, environmental pollution is crucifixion on a grand scale.”

Arnold assesses the many psychological theories that have been offered as explanations for Dick's visions, and finds most of them unconvincing. He thinks that 2-3-74 was “a genuine mystical revelation,” though he adds that it was “symbolic, not literal.” Dick's revelations are not, he argues, as idiosyncratic as they appear but rather are close to “major spiritual and philosophical traditions, such as Gnosticism and Platonism.”

Arnold thinks Dick came into contact with a different level of consciousness: “Dick’s traumatic history prepared him to enter trancelike dissociative states from which he was able to access higher aspects of consciousness, vividly transform his world through the imagination, and experience mystical oneness with other living beings. . . . These psychospiritual abilities helped him achieve classical mystical insights about the deceptiveness of appearances, eternal forms, the interconnectedness of life, good and evil, and the creative process.”