It’s a paradigm-shifting book. Not in a personal or spiritual sense, so much as, in expanding the limits of what a book can put across. It is famously the “auto-biographical” book of Philip K. Dick that documents his growing paranoia/insanity/spiritual revelations?, but these elements are really only the unfamiliar pillars at the base of a temple in a foreign land. And the temple itself I dare not try to put across, but rather I will say, “As an initiate unto the world of VALIS, I have seen both my greatest hopes and deepest fears realized in the mind of another, and the liberation I have found therein, has been as Juliet was the Sun to Romeo. And this is a Sun that will never set.”