People are strange, when you're a stranger
Like a mysterious key that suddenly fits the lock, my consciousness has opened a strange door that I can never close
Gnosis is a door that you can’t close once you open it. It’s one of those things that you really need to think hard about before you open the door because it’s letting the proverbial genie out of the bottle and no matter what, it changes you in some irreversible way.
Impulsive doesn’t even begin to describe me and this includes matters of spirit and soul. One would think that before I open that door to enlightenment I’d think about it and what it means to me since it’s always a transformative experience but I don’t. I’m just so hungry for adventure that I always dive in head-first, no matter the context. Usually, I’m rewarded for being so bold but right now I’m being bombarded with synchronicities and, lacking the context to piece them together meaningfully, I’m struck with a sensation that I’m unfamiliar with. Suddenly, I have an understanding of the weird vibes that John Keel and Jacques Vallee write about. It’s alien and not terribly pleasant. I don’t regret anything that I’ve done thus far. I’m just experiencing something new and it’s an unfamiliar feeling that I’ve only ever read about.
The Bomb Shelter
Some time last year I wrote a short piece of non-fiction for Liminal Earth about something that happened to me when I was a kid. You can read the full story here.
tl;dr: When I was 10, my friend and I were brought down into a strange place dug out underground in Marblehead, Massachusetts, by a few kids from town and something I can’t explain happened there. When we went back to look for it, we couldn’t find it. It was as if the bomb shelter had disappeared, entirely.
The kids who brought us down there called it The Bomb Shelter and so that’s what we called it.
I exchanged a few emails with Jim Perry from the Euphomet podcast and Jim’s follow-up questions about it got me thinking about the disparate occasions in my life when things were legitimately weird and unsettling and I started to notice a thread that connected them all.
What’s your earliest childhood memory?
Want to hear something crazy? I have a clear memory of being a toddler. I was standing in my crib, holding on to the bars. A person stood in the doorway to my room. Being in the doorway seems like an important detail since liminal spaces play such a large role in these discussions. What remains as clear as day in my memory is their head. They had the head of a bird.
The rest of their body was like a normal dude. They weren’t dressed like a god of Egypt or anything. They wore clothes, like it was casual Friday in Heliopolis.
I’m currently reading The Stargate Conspiracy by Lynn Picknett and it’s a real mind-blower. In the third section of the book, once the connections of US intelligence agencies to ESP and Remote Viewing studies, to theories of ancient Egypt, Mars, and Sirius are made, Picknett starts to poke holes in some of the lore while pointing out the unusual connections in other parts. While discussing the strange life of physicist Saul-Paul Sirag, I came across this passage about an exchange Sirag had with spoon-bender supreme, Uri Geller. It nearly took my breath away.
Uri Geller is kind of a piece of shit. He’s best known today for spreading Covid-19 misinformation and for whatever reason, drawing the ire of James Randi (himself, a real smug buzzkill). Fraud, though he may be, a lot of the spoon-bending buzz comes off like a bit of an op to cast a long, dark shadow over his actions with American intelligence. Spectra is the name of either a race of people, a thinking super-computer, or a space ship, it’s really quite hard to tell, that orbits the Earth, unseen. It watches us. Maybe it guides our evolution.
Maybe this sounds ridiculous to you. Maybe you’re just as paranoid as I am. But The Stargate Conspiracy draws lines connecting seemingly disparate people who, before meeting each other in ways fleeting or significant, each of them had a story about encounters they had with some form of higher intelligence that informed them of a greater purpose and it is almost always characterized as a robot, or a computer, or some sort of electronic intelligence. Physicist, Jack Sarfatti, describes receiving a phone call in the 50’s from something he called The God Phone, informing him of a higher calling and meeting up with others in the future who also received the call. He’s not the only person who received this call. Perennial Codex Astarte favorite, Philip K. Dick got a blast of gnosis directly from an orbiting intelligence that he wrote about in my favorite of his novels, VALIS. There are others, many others. The Mothman Prophecies prominently features tales of Keel’s experiencer friends receiving calls like these.
Have I been visited by this same force? Years ago I wrote about my first brushes with intelligences from Sirius when working through the OTA pathworking meditations. I had this encounter with a bird-headed man at a time in my life that I shouldn’t even remember. Many of these people I’m reading about have similar brushes and often times claim that the source of the voices is the Sirius star. I have another memory from young childhood, a little later on. I am playing with children in my neighborhood. They’re riding bikes. I’m riding a Big Wheel. A neighbor, a kind old man, stands in front of their house and asks us if we would like some lemonade. We’re kids. We don’t know any better and this sounds like the beginning of a story where we all got bad touched, but I assure you, his demeanor was extremely pleasant. We went into his house, a shabby ranch-style home in the poor section of town, but what we found inside is something that I can’t square with reality. It was like the TARDIS, bigger on the inside. The floor was polished marble and the high, vaulted ceiling was held up by tall, white ionic pillars. The ceiling was like the Cistine Chapel and while I no longer remember the details of, it was covered in an elaborate painting.
Years later, in Marblehead, I have this strange encounter that sounds a lot like a UFO abduction. Experiencers commonly report that these experiences with the other side aren’t often one-off events. They’re often taken on many occasions, as though the aliens are keeping tabs on them, watching them.
On another occasion, as a teenager, while walking along some train tracks late at night with two friends, we saw three people emerge from under a train tunnel on the other side of the tracks. This was a bad part of town. It was just a small New Hampshire mill town but this part of town was a housing project with criminal activity at such a degree that it required its own police station. We kept quiet and our heads down but as we passed them, I looked up and over across the tracks and saw myself and my two friends walking in the opposite direction, my duplicate looking looking over at me with the same shocked expression. When we stopped for a smoke under the overpass, one of my friends remarked that he had just seen something fucked up and reported the same thing that I had seen and the three of us proceeded to lose our minds. One note: we were on psilocybin mushrooms at the time but as anyone who has used psychedelics will tell you, that’s not how they work. You don’t hallucinate at that level and you certainly don’t share hallucinations. It does elevate your consciousness to strange dimensions, however.
Was my experience in the bomb shelter a means of copying me and replacing me in another dimension? Was the Marblehead I emerged into from the Shelter the same one I’d left? Had I just crossed paths on the train tracks with a version of me that had gone into the bunker and switched places with me? The mind recoils.
Since I started talking about this with people online and in the real world, as I connect the dots and piece together a series of strange occasions across my lifetime things around the house have gotten strange in the way that John Keel predicts. Just as those experiencers and the people touched by Andrijah Puharich’s “The Nine” in Stargate Conspiracy, I have now received three calls in two days from different numbers. Each one bears an area code in New Hampshire but when I call them back a recording informs me that they’re not in service. Each recording is a little different, though. One of these calls I let go to voicemail and this is what each one of them sounds like.
It’s always that sound, which I at first thought was the sound of someone walking after having pocket dialed me. There’s a rhythm to it, a pattern in the sound. After the second call, it occurred to me that this was just electronic noise but where the hell are they coming from? The sound lasts for however long I let the call go. Each time I get the call I listen, hoping to hear some sort of coherent signal in the noise, but nothing emerges. I’ll have to run it through some kind of oscilloscope or see if there’s some kind of code hidden in the frequency or maybe there’s something to be found in the audio’s binary information. There’s also a quality to it that gives me a feeling of fear. It shouldn’t. There’s nothing inherently scary about it. It’s just a strange sound. But in a lot of these cases, people often report feeling frightened for no apparent reason. There’s something alien about it that evades our ability to comprehend and it makes me uncomfortable while hearing it.
More weirdness as things develop.