16 October, 2026

It is true that if we ever did stop to think about the cosmos we might find it uncomfortable. The sun may grow cold or blow up; the earth may lose its atmosphere and become uninhabitable. Life is a brief, small, and transitory phenomenon in an obscure corner, not at all the sort of thing that one would make a fuss about if one were not personally concerned. But it is monkish and futile, so scientific man will say, to dwell on such cold and unpractical thoughts. Let us get on with the job of fertilizing the desert, melting Arctic ice, and killing each other with perpetually improving technique. Some of our activities will do good, some harm, but all alike will show our power. And so, in this godless universe, we shall become gods. —Bertrand Russell¹

My husband, the philosopher Anand Vaidya, passed away from cancer in October 2024 at the age of forty-eight. Anand was vigorous, energetic and brave, brimming with enthusiasm for his philosophical work, the people around him, and life in general. That he is gone continues to be almost inconceivable.

From an intellectual point of view, I understand perfectly well. But there remains another sensation, deeper than thought, almost ineffable in quality, a sense that his death was wrong, and a mistake has been made. I don’t mean merely that it was unfair. The wrongness I feel is about the nature of reality itself, as if his death has created a rupture in something fundamental to its fabric. I find myself arguing with a stranger in my mind. This is apparently not uncommon in people in my situation. The mind wants to bargain, to make a deal, to plead with the one in charge, whoever or whatever they may be. I’ll change my ways, I say, I’ll be good from now on, I ask for only one thing, that I be allowed to go back in time, make all the right calls and save him. I am aware that in this intense emotional state, one is more susceptible to believing propositions that would previously have been dismissed. Grief is a powerful emotion. But there remains a tension between this knowledge and the sense that reality is not as it seems.

That there is more to reality than meets the eye is a tenet of most religious and spiritual traditions. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the genre of science fiction gained traction and popularity in Europe and North America when Darwin’s 1859 The Origin of Species upended the biblical account of creation. Nature, as is often said, abhors a vacuum. Like religious and mythological stories, science fiction was often set in a world both familiar and marvelous, where time and space could be shaped, our place was among the stars, and we could be immortal. Science fiction, moreover, carried with it a dimension of prophecy. The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick said that science fiction “creates a very strange feeling in a certain kind of person—a feeling that he is reading about reality, but he is disjointed from it only in temporal terms.”²

Anand wrote extensively about the nature of consciousness; he worked on connecting notions of consciousness from classical Indian philosophy to contemporary debates in analytic philosophy. His appreciation of science fiction stemmed primarily from its ability to explore philosophical concepts through story, akin to the thought experiments often employed by philosophers to draw out philosophical intuitions. Just as philosophers have long argued about the nature of consciousness, science fiction writers also hold vastly differing perspectives on the topic. The three science fiction writers I discuss here, Aldous Huxley, Philip K. Dick, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, were very different in style or background. Yet they all ascribed to some version of panpsychism (the notion that consciousness is a fundamental property of all matter), and all claimed personal experience as a pathway to belief.

Many of Philip K. Dick’s stories feature crises of consciousness. Ubik, for example, is about half-dead people communicating through dreams. “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” is about androids with implanted memories. His work appears to have mirrored his own inner life, which was replete with mystical visions, drug-induced hallucinations, and paranoid episodes.

The 19^th-century Russian writer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky is considered a father of space exploration. He also wrote multiple speculative short pieces exploring consciousness as it relates to the nature of reality. He described the universe as a vast, self-developing organism striving toward greater awareness, a view not far from panpsychism. Uniquely among the writers discussed here, Tsiolkovsky linked consciousness explicitly to space colonization. To him, spreading into the cosmos was not only a technical challenge but evolutionary destiny.

Aldous Huxley, best known for Brave New World (1932), became intensely interested in consciousness, an interest he pursued with urgent dedication till his death in 1963, from complications due to cancer.

Mark Twain once observed in a letter to Helen Keller: “substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.”³

Indeed, during my research, I encountered more than one idea that I’d sincerely taken to be as originating from my own thoughts. As Twain suggests, it is likely that previously encountered concepts lay fallow until attention and nurture allowed them to germinate into what felt like independently arrived at conclusions. What began as an essay about Anand’s work on consciousness and science fiction is thus now also interspersed with my own experience. I will also note that, unlike Anand, I am not a philosopher, either by training or profession.

My undergraduate degree is in physics, and I am beginning to believe that perhaps there is something about the nature of consciousness that demands that it stands outside the formal, axiomatic system that is physics. We learned from Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem that mathematics has truths forever beyond proof and from Turing’s Halting Problemthat computation has questions forever beyond decision; both can be solved from a vantage point outside the system. Perhaps this “incompleteness” manifests as the mystery of consciousness, solvable only from a vantage point outside perception.

While many physicists are peripherally interested in understanding the nature of consciousness, the topic has always been of central interest to humanity at large. Many Indian philosophical traditions talked about the nature of consciousness, usually as part of a larger explanatory framework that included answers to questions like what happens when we die and why there is so much suffering in the world. In the modern world, the belief that there is an unseen, hidden truth to the world remains pervasive. Whether it is a theist belief or any number of other spiritual beliefs, there stubbornly remains the sense that the picture of the world presented by modernity is, at best, incomplete. I believe this sense of mystery is fundamentally tied to the mystery of consciousness.

As Huxley wrote in his 1945 work, The Perennial Philosophy, “this willed assent to propositions which are known to be unverifiable occurs in religion, and only in religion, as a characteristic addition to faith as trust, faith in authority and faith in unverified but verifiable propositions” (p. 235).

Huxley was suggesting that religious beliefs must be willed into being, in the full knowledge that they can never be verified. Perhaps the same can be said about belief as to the nature of consciousness.

Anand and philosophical notions of consciousness

In his Outline of Philosophy (1927), Russell said of matter that it had become “a convenient formula for describing where it isn’t.” The currently standard model of cosmology, the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) model,⁴ posits that over 85% of matter is “dark” in that it does not interact electromagnetically with “ordinary” matter, thus making direct observation impossible, and an astonishing 95% of all the “stuff” in the universe (matter plus energy) is likewise dark. However, we can infer this “dark” content exists in the universe because the theory predicts it, based on the theory’s alignment with what we can observe.

An immense inter-disciplinary effort targets David Chalmers’ “hard problem of consciousness”: how does the phenomenological “what it is like” of experiencing red, ocean air, or a curlew’s cry arise from material brains? Anand looked to panpsychism as a solution, positing consciousness as fundamental, not emergent from physical matter. With Western roots in pre-Socratics like Xenophanes and Thales and a modern resurgence in philosophers such as Galen Strawson and Philip Goff, it sidesteps the emergence puzzle. Yet Anand leaned toward Vedāntic illuminationism: consciousness is primary, not derivative: it is not “caused” but is the necessary condition for all things.⁵

Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick’s science fiction is famous for exploring the nature of reality. He explained: “In college I was given Plato to read and thereupon … I came to believe that in a certain sense the empirical world was not truly real, at least not as real as the archetypal realm beyond it … Hence in novel after novel that I write I question the reality of the world that the characters’ percept-systems report. Ultimately I became an acosmic pantheist, led to this point of view by decades of skepticism.”⁶

Pantheism in philosophical parlance is a “monist” theory, in that it posits that only one kind of thing comprises all of reality: a single divine universal consciousness. Many of the Indian schools of philosophy that Anand wrote about are cosmopantheistic, including the Vedānta school (which Huxley wrote extensively about).⁷ Other Indian schools of philosophy are panentheistic, positing that the divine consciousness extends beyond the cosmos of space and time.

Dick credited the pre-Socratic philosophers for his interest in panpsychism. He said: “Like the early Greeks I am a believer in panpsychism. Of all the metaphysical systems in philosophy, I feel the greatest affinity for that of Spinoza, with his dictum, ‘Deus sive substantia sive natura;’ to me this sums up everything (Viz: ‘God i.e. reality i.e. nature.’) … To me the truth was first uttered (in so far as we know) when Xenophanes of Colophon, an Ionian, stated, ‘One God there is… He stays always motionless in the same place … But, effortlessly, he wields all things by the thought of his mind.’”⁸

Xenophanes was a philosopher-poet who lived in the 5^th–6^th centuries BC. His view of God appears to be similar to the Vedic Brahman (the Vedās are estimated to have been formulated around the 15^th century BC though some estimates put it at earlier than the 60^th century BC). The Katha Upanishad, estimated to have written around the 6th century BC, describes Brahman: “one, all-pervading consciousness, which is timeless, unchanging and the only non-illusory thing that was and ever will be.”⁹ Brahman is moreover immanent in all living things as ātman, the individual ego or self. “As the single fire, entering living beings, adapts its appearance to match that of each, so the single Self within every being adapts its appearance to match that of each, yet remains quite distinct.” In the 19^th century, the German Sankritists Theodor Goldstücker and Max Müller pointed out the striking similarity between the pantheism of Spinoza’s Ethics and the Vedāntan concept. Müller writes: “Thus the Brahman, as conceived in the Upanishads and defined by Sankara, is clearly the same as Spinoza’s ‘Substantia.’”¹⁰

Dick describes himself as a “religious anarchist”: “I believe you have a direct relation with the divine or you have no relation with the divine. It has nothing to do with faith or dogmatic creeds. The initiative comes from the divine side. There is nothing you can do. All you can do is live an honest life, be brutally honest with yourself, and hope to become an object of interest with the divine beings.”¹¹

In events he took to calling 2-3-74 (February–March 1974), Dick claims an encounter with a “pink light”, the meaning of which he obsessed about in The Exegesis of Philip K Dick, published posthumously. He began to catch glimpses of ancient Rome interspersed with or superimposed on his present-day environs and came to believe that the world around him was an illusion (the “Black Iron Prison”), created by a malevolent, authoritarian force, which he sometimes personified as the Roman Empire. The antidote and redemption from the Black Iron Prison was an intelligence, perhaps divine, perhaps artificial, that he named VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System).

A common skeptical response attributes his experience to his recent dental work, suggested to be the most parsimonious explanation of the pink light, especially if combined with his chronic use of methamphetamines (the drug is often cited for his voluminous output). A further caveat is his own claim of having been profoundly affected by the death of his infant twin-sister.

Dick wrote the VALIS trilogy based on the experience with the pink light. The protagonist of the first novel in the series is Horselover Fat, who, after the death of his wife, begins to see a pink light and to telepathically communicate with the artificial intelligence “VALIS”: “Already I had heard the AI voice in my head, and others would hear that voice, more and more people. VALIS, as living information, would penetrate the world, replicating in human brains, crossbonding with them and assisting them, guiding them, at a subliminal level, which is to say invisibly.”

As with all Dick’s writing, the novel is shot through with self-deprecating humor that gainsays and second-guesses, ridicules and mocks, his every earnestly proposed thesis. Fat’s friends are certain that the pink light is evidence that Fat has suffered a schizophrenic episode, a psychosis that was sadly catalyzed by the death of Fat’s wife.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), famous as a father of astronautics, also wrote prolifically about what he called “cosmic philosophy”. Like Dick, Tsiolkovsky was a panpsychist. He held a graded view of consciousness that he tied to evolution: the consciousness of atoms in inanimate matter was less evolved than the consciousness in atoms in amoeba, which in turn was less evolved than the consciousness in the atoms of a human body. He believed it was the destiny of humanity to continue to evolve into what he called “radiant” humanity, comprised of cosmic matter in the form of “radiant energy”. His views were strongly influenced by Russian cosmism, a belief system that anchors mankind’s future in the stars, and which is often cited as an influence on the modern transhumanist movement (incidentally, Aldous Huxley’s brother, Julian Huxley, coined the term “transhuman” in a 1957 essay).

Tsiolkovsky claimed to have twice communicated with beings who took the form of radiant energy and revealed to him that they were an ancient alien species, whose aim it was to help humans evolve to perfect happiness. “A personal test forced me to pay attention to the statement of others who had witnessed the same phenomena. … I myself have witnessed such phenomena twice in my life, and therefore I cannot deny them. … On this basis I admit that some part of this kind of phenomena is not an illusion, but a real proof of the presence in the cosmos of unknown intelligent forces, of some beings arranged differently from us, at least of incomparably thinner matter.”¹² As with Dick, there are suggestions of alterations of brain chemistry, in Tsiolkovsky’s case from an attempt to cope with grief: Tsiolkovsky lost his hearing at nine, his mother died at thirteen, and later in life, two of his adult children committed suicide.

Tsiolkovsky argues that it is logical to assume the kind of creatures who “manifest themselves by acts of kindness” exist, as surely the progression of evolution must be towards the elimination of all suffering: “This is understandable, because the reason and benefit of all beings of the cosmos and of all time is that there should be nothing imperfect, no suffering.”¹³

As to why these aliens aren’t more forthcoming to the masses, he suggests that it is because our civilization is not yet ready: “Time must pass until the average level of humankind’s development is sufficient for nonearthly dwellers to visit us … We – brothers – kill one another, wage wars, treat animals cruelly. How will we treat the creatures who are quite alien to us? What if we consider them rivals in owning the Earth and destroy ourselves in a one-sided fight? They cannot wish such a fight and death.”¹⁴

Tsiolkovsky believed that there was a will to the universe, which minimized for suffering and maximized for qualities like intelligence. For him, this would necessarily require the destruction of “imperfect” beings. In that, he is a man of his time, reflecting the views held by a large proportion of European intelligentsia. After Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species, Darwin’s cousin (and formidable intellect of his own standing) Sir Francis Galton coined the term “eugenics”, from the Greek eugenes “good in stock” or “good in birth”, for the promotion of traits, like intelligence, that enhance evolutionary fitness. Tsiolkovsky added that evolution cannot be only optimizing for fitness, but must also be doing so for happiness. Given Tsiolkovsky’s interest in minimizing suffering, it seems unlikely he would have supported the forced eugenics programs of WW2, but he died in 1935 and was not witness to them.

For Tsiolkovsky, the purpose of evolution was to push life towards greater intelligence, greater happiness, and the ascension of mankind to the stars.¹⁵ And so it was to rocketry that he devoted himself, famously deriving the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, even now the most important in rocketry. Notably, many rocket scientists of his time concurred in seeing the mission of space travel as existential for humanity, and as paving the way to unravel the mysteries of the universe.

Aldous Huxley

For Aldous Huxley, who founded several Vedānta Societies in California and infused his writings with Vedāntic themes, there was a “perennial philosophy” that reveals a common truth across many religious traditions: the divine reality is within each person, accessible through self-knowledge. Like Tsiolkovsky, Huxley believed that aligning with this divine truth through mystical practice could liberate individuals from suffering.

As he writes in his 1960 work What Vedānta Means to Me: “For those of us who are not congenitally the members of any organized church, who have found that humanism and blue-domeism are not enough, who are not content to remain in the darkness of spiritual ignorance, the squalor of vice or that other squalor of mere respectability, the minimum working hypothesis would seem to be about as follows: That there is a Godhead or Ground, which is the unmanifested principle of all manifestation. That the Ground is transcendent and immanent. That it is possible for human beings to love, know and, from virtually, to become actually identified with the Ground. That to achieve this unitive knowledge, to realize this supreme identity, is the final end and purpose of human existence. That there is a Law or Dharma, which must be obeyed, a Tao or Way, which must be followed, if men are to achieve their final end.”

Of the three writers discussed here, it would likely be Huxley whose views Anand would most strongly align with. However, Anand favored the qualified non-dualistic view of the 11^th-century Indian philosopher Rāmānuja, who argued that the same self cannot be both subject and object, over the strict monist interpretation as advanced by the father of Vedānta, the 7^th-century philosopher Shankara. Anand writes, “Although it is controversial whether the Sanskrit terms Brahman and ātman can always be interpreted to mean God and the individual self, it is fair to say that Rāmānuja and Śaṅkara disagree about the relation between Brahman (God) and ātman (the individual self).”¹⁶

Works like The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956) document Huxley’s experiences of the drug mescaline with disciplined precision, describing how ordinary objects – chairs, flowers, his own trousers – became radiant with significance. And like Tsiolkovsky, Huxley suffered profound early losses, including the death of his mother when he was 14, a prolonged period of near-blindness from the age of 17, and the suicide of his brother Noel when Aldous was 20.

In The Perennial Philosophy, Huxley suggests that many of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions claim an esoteric truth about the fundamental nature of reality: that it cannot be grasped except under certain conditions of mental and moral clarity.¹⁷ He explains with an analogy from astronomy:

With the unaided eye a small, faint smudge can be detected in the constellation of Orion, and doubtless an imposing cosmological theory could be based upon the observation of this smudge. But no amount of such theorizing, however ingenious, could ever tell us as much about the galactic and extra-galactic nebulae as can direct acquaintance by means of a good telescope, camera and spectroscope. Analogously, no amount of theorizing about such hints as may be darkly glimpsed within the ordinary, unregenerate experience of the manifold world can tell us as much about divine Reality as can be directly apprehended by a mind in a state of detachment, charity and humility.¹⁸

Huxley directed much of his philosophical and literary firepower to argue against dogmatic belief: “What is the easiest way for a skeptic to achieve faith? The question was answered three hundred years ago by Pascal. The unbeliever must act “as though he believed, take holy water, have masses said, etc. This will naturally cause you to believe and will besot you.” (Cela vous abetira—literally, will make you stupid.)”

Like Tsiolkovsky, he didn’t believe humanity was ready: “People love their egos and don’t wish to mortify them, don’t wish to see why they shouldn’t ‘express their personalities’ and ‘have a good time.’ They get their good times; but also and inevitably they get wars and syphilis and revolution and alcoholism, tyranny …”

Still, he concluded in an essay for the Vedānta Society of Southern California, with which he was closely associated: “Of all the worn, smudged, dog-eared words in our vocabulary, “love” is surely the grubbiest, smelliest, slimiest. Bawled from a million pulpits, lasciviously crooned through hundreds of millions of loudspeakers, it has become an outrage to good taste and decent feeling, an obscenity which one hesitates to pronounce. And yet it has to be pronounced; for, after all Love is the last word.”¹⁹

Conclusion

What unites Huxley, Dick, and Tsiolkovsky is that each claimed direct personal experience of the extraordinary. The conservative view is that Dick’s and Tsiolkovsky’s visions are simply neurochemistry at work, the effects of drugs or grief or any number of other explainable causes. Phenomenologists might say that the even if this view is true, the visions are still important as data points about human experience. The boldest claim would be to claim VALIS as AI/divine, and Tsiolkovsky’s aliens and Huxley’s Mind-at-Large as real.

I mentioned the stranger in my head earlier. To be clear, the phenomenon is not a vision as with Tsiolkovsky and Dick; there are no lights nor sounds. I used to call it, as likely a million others do, “talking-to-myself”. Its usual role is to serve as interlocutor for matters inconsequentially trivial, like which variety of stone fruit to procure at the grocery store. The phenomenon itself hasn’t changed, only I am now less dismissive of its nature. There is another phenomenon that I am also less perfunctory about. When I am out in what is commonly referred to as “nature”, there are times when the smallest of things, a breeze, the shifting sunlight, the shaking leaves overhead, a scent of pine, the white manes of ocean waves, fill me with an almost unbearable sense of wonder and awe. This ability of nature to move is not unique to me; it has been much written about by poets and philosophers. Carl Jung might have described it as a confrontation with what he called the “world soul”. More recently, however, I have also felt sometimes the prosaic world tilt toward strangeness, as if a carapace had thinned and reality was pressing closer than usual.

A few months ago, I had a dream where a woman I don’t know implied that Anand did not wish me to continue looking for him. Her words did not have the intended effect, and I awoke feeling even more anxious that (1) he needed my help and (2) there was no way for me to provide it. Anand had an endearingly odd habit: when he was happy, he would sometimes cry out a word or phrase that had tickled his brain in a unique-to-him way. It was a verbal tic, and one that I was happy to hear, because it only occurred when he was comfortable and happy. When he was in his hospital bed, I told him how I felt about the tics, and in response, he kindly tried to tic for me. He tried, he really did, but he was far too sick and gave up. A few weeks after I dreamed the stranger, he came to me in a dream and did what he couldn’t do when he was in the hospital. He happily tic-ed for me.

I offer these experiences not in the service of any metaphysics, but as testimony. I will not pretend they did not happen, nor will I pretend to be immune to the explanations. My brain is as prone as any other to consolations under grief or tricks of chemistry. Still, I increasingly understand why Huxley, Dick and Tsiolkovsky insisted so stubbornly that consciousness might be more than an evolutionary trick for survival and why Anand was insistent that first-person experience must be taken seriously as a clue about the structure of reality.

Anand was proud of his publications in The Philosophers’ Magazine. Manju Menon thanks the TPM team for carrying this tribute to him. More of her writing can be found at www.manjulamenon.com.

1. Russell, The Impact of Science on Society (Simon & Schuster, 1953), p. 15. ↩︎
2. G. Cain and D. Longo, “Philip K. Dick: confessions of a SF artist” (interview), Denver Clarion, October 23, 1980, https://philipdick.com/literary-criticism/interviews/philip-k-dick-confessions-of-a-sf-artist/. ↩︎
3. Mark Twain’s letters (Harper & Brothers, 1917), vol. 2, p. 731. ↩︎
4. Planck Collaboration, “Planck 2018 results,” Astronomy & Astrophysics, 641, A6, p. 15, https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201833910. ↩︎
5. A. J. Vaidya, “A new debate on consciousness: bringing classical and modern Vedānta into dialogue with contemporary analytic panpsychism”, in A. Maharaj (ed.), The Bloomsbury research handbook of Vedānta (Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 397–416, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350068275.ch-014. ↩︎
6. F. C. Bertrand, “Philip K. Dick on philosophy: a brief interview,” January 1980, https://philipdick.com/literary-criticism/frank-views-archive/philip-k-dick-on-philosophy-a-brief-interview/. ↩︎
7. A. J. Vaidya, “Analytic panpsychism and the metaphysics of Rāmānuja’s Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta,” The Monist, 105(2), 156–170, https://doi.org/10.1093/monist/onab028. ↩︎
8. Bertrand, “Philip K. Dick on philosophy: a brief interview.” ↩︎
9. A. Vaidya and M. Menon, “How classical Indian philosophy helps us understand the self,” Aeon, April 10, 2025, https://aeon.co/essays/how-classical-indian-philosophy-helps-us-understand-the-self. ↩︎
10. F. M. Müller, Three lectures on the Vedanta philosophy (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1904), p. 123. ↩︎
11. Cain and Longo, “Philip K. Dick: confessions of a SF artist.” ↩︎
12. Tsiolkovsky, “The will of the universe” [1928], https://www.tsiolkovsky.org/en/the-cosmic-philosophy/the-will-of-the-universe/. ↩︎
13. Tsiolkovsky, “The will of the universe.” ↩︎
14. Tsiolkovsky, “Planets are inhabited by living creatures” (1933), https://www.tsiolkovsky.org/en/the-cosmic-philosophy/planets-are-inhabited-by-living-creatures/. ↩︎
15. Tsiolkovsky, “The cosmic philosophy” (1935), https://www.tsiolkovsky.org/en/the-cosmic-philosophy/the-cosmic-philosophy/. ↩︎
16. A. J. Vaidya, “Two conceptions of the relation between the self and God: the debate between Śaṅkara and Rāmānuja,” in R. S. Silvestre, A. C. Herbert and B. P. Göcke (eds.), Vaiṣṇava concepts of God: philosophical perspectives (Routledge, 2023), pp. 101–115. ↩︎
17. Huxley, The perennial philosophy (Harper & Brothers, 1945), p. viii. ↩︎
18. Huxley, The perennial philosophy, p. xi. ↩︎
19. Huxley, “Knowledge and understanding – Part 3,” Vedanta and the West (1956), https://vedanta.org/2002/articles/knowledge-and-understanding-part-3/. ↩︎