Portable Shrines

“We are the beings from the Sirius star system that were communicating with Robert Anton Wilson. We are the grey aliens. We are death. WE EXIST OUTSIDE OF TIME. That’s why it’s difficult for us to communicate with you.”

Yes it’s time for one last installment of  EXTRADIMENSIONAL the continuing series that dares to ask the question “What exactly is on John Gillanders mind?” This time he shares his shamanic journey all the way to the cosmic bacchanale of last october’s Escalator Fest and beyond(way way beyond…)  In the new year John will be taking time off to work on a book but hopefully he will shre some excerpts of the work in progress. More after the jump

“We are the beings from the Sirius star system that were communicating with Robert Anton Wilson. We are the grey aliens. We are death. WE EXIST OUTSIDE OF TIME. That’s why it’s difficult for us to communicate with you.”

You’d think that with my years of haphazardly tinkering with arcane shit like astral projection, communicating with insectile art entities under the influence of psilocybin, and creating a direct line to the cosmic overmind through sigil magick, I’d be ready for something like this – but I mean honestly, how can you be ready for something like this? My first legitimate summoning. My holy guardian angel incarnate right there in my bedroom (and looking smashing I might add).

To set the stage, for some reason weeks prior, while facing the prospect of making more music videos, I became unconsciously consumed with the idea that I needed a new suit, a black one of course. To be fair, I’ve never owned a suit period, so this would be my first. The idea was to turn myself into a character, kind of a parody of rap culture and corporate greed opulence – a way of pointing out that the desires for material wealth and worldly success are satanic at their very core. There would be me, and the satanic version of me, dressed in slick customized finery as Satan would be prone to. I really had no idea how this was going to pan out in a hyper low budget video, but who cared. Maybe there was a part of me that just wanted to lounge around the house in style, or get inappropriately decked out for my next basement show.

I started spending a decent amount of my psychic energy visualizing this character in my mind’s eye, as is my custom. The thing about sigil magick is, that once you’ve turned it on, you can’t turn it off. At least this has been my experience. There are always two worlds layered on top of one another. Consensus reality, and the swirling psychoactive freak show in my head. Congealing this mass of rapidly mutating ideas into solid forms can be addictive. I see both worlds simultaneously, in concert, all the time. How many people do this? Spend half their energy flexing their internal muscles. Most people’s minds eyes have atrophied to the point of languid inefficiency. I couldn’t truly figure out why I was doing this self visualization exercise, or who this mysterious me in the black suit was.

As with most things in magick, I suppose I thought it had to do with confronting my dark side, which in this case involves acknowledging the part of me that desires things like money and success – the part of me that’s in love with all the neon flickering horrors of our brain dead monoculture. The part of me that’s normal. I like to pretend, but then one Monday I find myself at work falling into the grips of a deep and sudden depression – the worst bout I’ve dealt with in quite a while. I clock out and go home unable to shake the jinx. I barely eat anything for dinner and quickly resign myself to bed at an ungodly early hour as a means of escape.

The next thing I know, I’m awakened, and the man in black me character is standing in the room with hypnagogic me clearly conveying the aforementioned message that I’ll again reiterate:

“We are the beings from the Sirius star system that were communicating with Robert Anton Wilson. We are the grey aliens. We are death. WE EXIST OUTSIDE OF TIME. That’s why it’s difficult for us to communicate with you.”

Directly followed by a telepathic communiqué where the structure of the human soul is laid out in a transdimensional psycho-gram. The me that exists outside of time, the me planted in the time stream, and the unified time stream itself, which is its own entity comprised from pieces of us all. The father, the son, and the Holy Spirit. I wake up in utter disbelief, hysterically chuckling to myself throughout the following day – completely bewildered and amused.

The next night he’s standing behind me as I lay on my stomach, peering directly through my soul with the smug countenance of a super hero. He sees what I really am. He is anamnesis. He is………..me. I kind of remember.

A few nights later I have a particularly delicious astral encounter with Death, who appears to me as Hurley from Lost. I’m shown why he couldn’t kill me even if he wanted to. I have shit to do here, the nature of which I’m not entirely comfortable talking about at this juncture, so let’s just say, it’s going to be awesome.

DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I’M TELLING YOU! What’s going on in my world is so detached from typical human experience in western society circa 2010, it’s more than astounding. I’ve done this weird shit to myself, at the advice of others like Carlos Casteneda, Robert Monroe, Robert Anton Wilson, and of course Grant Morrison. I’M NOT EVEN HERE ANYMORE. I summoned my holy guardian angel, and he was a sex god. I’ve gone from the pits of self hatred to being totally gay for me, and all it took was some easy to do black magick rituals. You could be this crazy, no human sacrifice required.

Okay, so I was going to be writing about Escalator Fest here, but there had to be some context to understand my headspace going into that. I tend to get carried away. So, that whole song and dance happened roughly a month before said festival. A week and a half before the show, Emily from Midday Veil gives me the bands new CD which sends shockwaves through my inner core for a couple of reasons. First of all the album art and title, Eyes All Around, explore the exact  multi eyed visionary experience that I’d been contemplating in depth since again contacting it months earlier on my birthday – mainly due to ingesting a fairly mild dose of psilocybin (long story). I’d even started drawing again recently, and the first thing I drew was a multi-eyed demon tree, which was a transposing of my contact experience with the oversoul of a tree I’d climbed in my youth while ‘shrooming with my wife years prior. I saw what that thing truly was. I wouldn’t fuck with it.

Anywho, the other shock came from me putting in the disc and being promptly greeted with the ritualistic chant of “we are you when you are dead” from the aforementioned Ms. Pothast, which immediately jumps me back to my astral abduction encounter years prior, and this most recent spirit conjuring. It was me both times, the first time myriad versions of me, and now me as the man in black – isn’t that what they/I’m trying to tell me? You are an eternal being that exists simultaneously inside and outside of the time stream. You’re living inside of the story, we’re looking in at you and manipulating you like a puppet. All you’re doing down there is making minor, on the fly script revisions. Sorry, it’s kind of shit job, but we’ll make it worth your time for sure. Thanks me, you rule.  Heady stuff for sure. Why is this so hard to for us accept? Isn’t that the good news Jesus was always talking up? We’ve been mind-raped from the jump.

So, again, how does all this psychosis relate to Escalator Fest? Well, the universe seemed to come in line to compel me to eat acid at a public concert for the first time in probably over a decade. Don’t ask me how or why, but I had a dream nearly a year prior that showed me being given LSD at an alternate reality Escalator Fest after party. And then, voila, a small amount of acid magickly introduces itself into my life a few short months before the event. I haven’t found acid in like six years, and wasn’t looking.

I’ll be honest. I was completely on the fence about this one and it was remembering that dream that ultimately forced the issue. The problem with taking psychedelics in public is that they can render me completely incapable of dealing with people. Things like formulating coherent sentences in that state can elude me. Or moreover, what I say would only make sense to someone else who was tripping. When you spout out internal dialogue like: “oh my God, the walls” you want a compatriot to say “I know, right?” I do these things so rarely these days, I typically want a more personal experience. Or moreover, I pretty much want to get laid, but anyway, you had a great time in the dream – you’ll be fine.

After night one of Escalator I was pretty worn down from the drinking. I’d probably taken that a bit far the night before in anticipation of the Blood Red Dancers. That band just makes you want to throw some back. This is what people like Alan Moore talk about when they refer to art as magick. Stimulus –  Response. Maybe not the best choice to headline a psychedelic music festival for that exact reason.

I was somewhat nervous going out to eat with my wife early in the evening. Tripping is so freaking weird that I almost always get somewhat unsettled and uppity before hand. No matter how many times you do it, it’s still overwhelmingly otherworldly. I paced about the living room like a lunatic as I downed a few fresh beers and waited to digest my food and ingest the sugar cube. The first waves of the psychosis started setting in just as my ride showed up, just as planned. A strange and overwhelming calm descended upon my spirit and I found myself surprisingly chatty and coherent despite the sparks of pure imagination dancing about the car.

As I entered the venue, I was skirting between dimensions. Everything about the event is custom designed for the urban tripster, and yet as I made my way into the room, I found I quite literally couldn’t handle the first band, Climax Golden Twins. I tried repeatedly to get right near the stage and was driven out each time. From what someone told me later, they were doing a last minute improv atonal jazz type thing. Whereas on a normal night, I probably would have found it amusing, in this state the constant starting and stopping was too much to handle. Just rock already. And so, for the first time in my life I was relegated to the “chill” room. Alone there, I found myself lost in spacey waves of steady visuals and garage rock drone, as a sexy woman from beyond dispensed exotic tunage for my ears only. I realized that I had no interest whatsoever in drinking or smoking any more pot. The acid was sinking its teeth into my world. That kids table shit was irrelevant. As a matter of fact, I further realized I was incredibly dehydrated from the last night’s festivities. I compulsively drank cup after cup of water for the next several hours. It’s funny how psychedelic drugs’ most logical application it seems, is to help treat drug addiction, but you know, who cares about actually making a dent in the drug war. That’s too productive an expenditure of public funds to question extensively.
On this night, the cosmic spirits stepped in, took control of my body and said: “take it easy jerk off”. Not the first time this message has weaseled its way into my psyche; good point. I’ve been drinking heavily for years, and I swear it’s only been in the last that I’ve started hydrating properly. It takes me forever to finally change my behavior. I have to make the same mistake roughly 300 times before the desire to not fuck up finally sets in. No more weed or booze for a while this evening. Didn’t see that coming. Normally LSD makes me completely immune to alcohol. It just bounces off me like water off the coat of a sea otter. I remember one time years ago, after going to the Columbus Zoo while tripping out of my mind, coming home and downing an entire 18 pack of Bush Light while watching horrible television for lack of anything better to do in the middle of the night. I could see the beer buzz hovering in the right corner of the room, like a luminous continually expanding orb of brain numbing good times.

I just kept imbibing hydration while Edibles took the stage. I liked what they were doing but found that every time he jammed on his distortion pedal and wailed out, my inner substances twinged with overwhelmingly pleasant reverberations. And then they went back to being mellow and I longed. What is it about guitar noise? In some level of reality, there must be a psionic echo chamber of sorts where guitar fuzz reigns eternal, constantly churning waves of feedback fever bliss into the ether. On this night I probably would have dug Dewey (from Edibles) other project,  Eternal Tapestry a bit more, as they specialize in heaping doses of timeless guitar squeal.

Not to say I was disappointed at all, just a little uneasy. Spasmodically agitated; awaiting a breakthrough. I downed four or five more glasses of water and found myself in the hallway waiting for the bathroom for extended periods. The walls writhed with a divine intelligence – separating themselves from their inanimate stature and swirling like a cauldron of incoherent frequencies.

Midday Veil was about to take the stage, so I finally decided a beer was in order. When they kicked into their unique brand of celestial light channeling, reality began to break. I could see myself splintering through the catacombs of time like shockwave images of eternity rippling endlessly through a funhouse mirror. There I was, in existence in a timeless state, myriad versions of me, forever. An eternal being extended psionically –an inhabitant of infinite worlds all ephemeral, and yet simultaneously existent outside of them, all in my true form. Heavy.

The loss of the self can be a frightening disorientation. To write it down on a sheet of paper is one thing. It’s completely another matter to experience this sensation firsthand. How can you put that kind of mindgasm into words? It’s difficult to contextualize while still locked into the subjective micro-consciousness. In eastern philosophy, the concept of past lives is accepted, and in my astral encounters, this has been communicated to me as a reality in no uncertain terms. I’ve lived a hundred lives. I’ve probably been a heterosexual woman, a gay man, a gay woman, a transsexual stock broker from mars, etc. – and yet, getting into the head of the part of me that understands these truths always comes with a level of shock. But tonight, in the midst of the hallucinogenic frenzy and musical reverie, it felt more than supernormal.

I am the warrior that descends into hell to conquer the dragon and the dragon is me. Chaos Magick, at its root core, is honestly just self help bullshit. It’s about controlling your demons. Nobody said life was easy. And there I was, scattered throughout the cerebral multiverse – ingrained into its very fabric as an incalculable constant. I’m not the person playing the video game, I’m the one on the screen having the adventure. This is how you create the limitless space. The billions of suns.

The sensation of transpersonal extension and time/space fragmentation continued throughout Moon Duo’s set. I could swear the dude was staring at me half the time as he dislodged psychic bolts of guitar distortion through my soul. Electric neon shocks of mind vapor sparked from his visage. It was delicious. I talk to my brother after the show and he reports the same sensation, as if the guy (Ripley is his name I believe) was somehow staring through him for half the set, which can only lead to one conclusion: He is an ancient one.

And so the night continues with The Curious Mystery. I was honestly somewhat planning on ditching to catch the brilliant stoner metal trance rock of  Ancestors at the Comet, but the notion felt unbearable. Disengaging from the projected visual onslaught just didn’t jibe with my will, no matter how great the band. I was riding a wave, and I couldn’t just jump ship. It’s like the internal spinning charades in my head – the vivid Technicolor shape-shifting ideascape that no one else can see – now conveniently externalized, for one night only. Too good to leave behind.

The Mystery proceed to roll through a more decidedly rocking set than I’ve seen them lay down in the past. Shana Cleveland certainly is fun to look at in her retro sixties finery. I imagine her drawing a vortex of life energy from the entranced crowd into her womanhood and projecting it skyward through her third eye as a pluming distress beacon to the stars. The heavens rain down an ecstatic afterworld in response.

And when they wrap things up, the time has come for me to disembark. As we dart through the rain soaked streets, I’m still stretched to forever. I can feel the wheels on the road as I crack jokes about anything and everything. So glad I’m not driving. I’m floating along in the passenger seat in auto pilot possession mode. If anything was to be learned from this epic distortion of the senses, it was that I need to step up my game. I’m an idiot. Stagnation is unacceptable. During Midday Veil’s set, a spontaneous message from beyond reverberates through me: “We need to get you over this Satan fixation”. Point taken. I can do better. I can only, always do better.