Valis by Philip K. Dick

enlightened,
    
    
    immortal man exists before you. This will appear within your molded bodies. He will trample upon you like
    
    
    potter's clay, (which) is trampled. And you will
    
    
    go
    
    
    with those who are yours down to your mother, the
    
    
    abyss.'"

    At once, Fat understood what he had read. Samael was the creator deity and he imagined that he was the only god, as stated in Genesis. However, he was blind, which is to say, occluded. "Occluded" was Fat's salient term. It embraced all other terms: insane, mad, irrational, whacked out, fucked up, fried, psychotic. In his blindness (state of irrationality; i.e. cut off from reality), he did not realize that
    --
    What did the typescript say? Feverishly, he searched over it, at which Dr. Stone thereupon patted him on the arm and told him he could keep the typescript; Stone had Xeroxed it several times over.
    An enlightened, immortal man existed before the creator deity, and that enlightened, immortal man would appear within the human race which Samael was going to create. And that enlightened, immortal man who had existed
before
the creator deity would trample upon the fucked-up blind deluded creator like potter's clay.
    Hence Fat's encounter with God -- the true God -- had come through the little pot Oh Ho which Stephanie had thrown for him on her kickwheel.
    "Then I'm right about Nag Hammadi," he said to Dr. Stone.
    "You would know," Dr. Stone said, and then he said something that no one had ever said to Fat before. "You're the authority," Dr. Stone said.
    Fat realized that Stone had restored his -- Fat's -- spiritual life. Stone had saved him; he was a master psychiatrist. Everything which Stone had said and done
vis-à-vis
Fat had a therapeutic basis, a therapeutic thrust. Whether the content of Stone's information was correct was not important; his purpose from the beginning had been to restore Fat's faith in himself, which had vanished when Beth left -- which had vanished, actually, when he had failed to save Gloria's life years ago.
    Dr. Stone wasn't insane; Stone was a healer. He held down the right job. Probably he healed many people and in many ways. He adapted his therapy to the individual, not the individual to the therapy.
    I'll be goddamned, Fat thought.
    In that simple sentence, "You're the authority," Stone had given Fat back his soul.
    The soul which Gloria, with her hideous malignant psychological death-game, had taken away.
    They -- note the "they" -- paid Dr. Stone to figure out what had destroyed the patient entering the ward. In each case a bullet had been fired at him, somewhere, at some time, in his life. The bullet entered him and the pain began to spread out. Insidiously, the pain filled him up until he split in half, right down the middle. The task of the staff, and even of the other patients, was to put the person back together but this could not be done so long as the bullet remained. All that lesser therapists did was note the person split into two pieces and begin the job of patching him back into a unity; but they failed to find and remove the bullet. The fatal bullet fired at the person was the basis of Freud's original attack on the psychologically injured person; Freud had understood: he called it a trauma. Later on, everyone got tired of searching for the fatal bullet; it took too long. Too much had to be learned about the patient. Dr. Stone had a paranormal talent, like his paranormal Bach remedies which were a palpable hoax, a pretext to listen to the patient. Rum with a flower dipped in it -- nothing more, but a sharp mind hearing what the patient said.
    Dr. Leon Stone turned out to be one of the most important people in Horselover Fat's life. To get to Stone, Fat had had to nearly kill himself physically, matching his mental death. Is this what they mean about God's mysterious ways? How else could Fat have linked up with Leon Stone? Only some dismal act on the order of a suicide attempt, a truly lethal attempt, would have achieved