snagamat:

Okay, so when I said Dick doesn’t care about his books as individual works of literature but views them more as pieces to the ideas he’s working through? You know, way back before all the hedgehog and fox and Demolished Man posts? These are the kinds of ideas I was talking about:

Below lay the tomb world, the immutable cause-and-effect world of the demonic. At median extended the layer of the human, but at any instant a man could plunge—descend as if sinking—into the hell-layer beneath. Or: he could ascend to the ethereal world above, which constituted the third of the trinary layers. Always, in his middle level of the human, a man risked the sinking. And yet the possibility of ascent lay before him; any aspect or sequence of reality could become either, at any instant. Hell and heaven, not after death but now! Depression, all mental illness, was the sinking. And the other…how was it achieved?

Through empathy. Grasping another, not from outside but from the inner.