In 1938 L. Ron Hubbard went to a dentist. He was just a pulp writer at the time, who worked so fast that he used butcher paper to type on, which he then cut up and sent to his editors. The dentist put him under. Hubbard felt himself dying – “far from a pleasant feeling” – and got introduced to some secret knowledge, forbidden for those who hadn’t died yet. He woke up and said “I was dead, wasn’t I?”.
He let the knowledge stew for some days and then wrote a book called “Excalibur”. It supposedly contained the wisdom that he had been accidentally given to him. This was strong stuff. Six people who had read it lost their mind, he said. That’s also the reason nobody would publish it – one publisher was handed the manuscript by a reader, who then jumped out of the window. He was however able to whittle down the contained wisdom to one concept, one word even.
In 1974 Philip K. Dick had a wisdom tooth removed. The pain was severe. His wife called the pharmacy, who sent down a girl to deliver some painkillers. Dick greeted her at the door and was struck by her necklace, a fish. He asked her what the necklace meant and she replied that it was an early Christian symbol. The image of the necklace – or maybe just the light reflected – burnt itself into Dick’s mind.This was the first of a number of religious experiences that he would have over the next years.
He wrestled with the epiphanies, that only seemed to show him more things that were hidden. He would go into his garage and work it out. He would read everything and wrote everything. He’d follow threads of history, philosophy, art. He was almost convinced he’d found the answer and then dismiss it all again. In the end there were many thousand pages. The work came to be called “Exegesis”.
Hubbard said the thing he learned was that there is only one concept, really: surviving. Dick never even attempted to reduce the complexity of his visions and meditations to a slogan. Not to do it for him but the sheer will to understand something, anything, everything he displays is astounding.
In 1997 William S. Burroughs wrote his last journal entry: “Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is.” He died the next day. (Ginsberg had died some months earlier. Kerouac died in 1969, 18 years after he wrote “On the Road”, typing on a continuous scroll.) 27 years earlier he had denounced Scientology, of which he had been a member in the 60s. 19 years earlier – 46 years before his death – he had shot his wife, playing “Wilhelm Tell” at a party in Mexico City. That was the deciding moment of his life. Nobody knows if dentists were present.