POSTED BY: THAD MCKRAKEN APRIL 9, 2015
If you’re familiar with my writing at all, then you’re probably aware that everything in my life is guided by the hidden hand of a synchronous collusion with the unseen. On that front, a couple of weeks ago, I tossed up a new series of art. I was later informed in an intuitive informational download from beyond that the images I conjured forth had to do with a psilocybin encounter that went down on my birthday back in 2010. (I write about this Occult meditational shit on FB all the time, feel free to friend me.) As a matter of fact, I talked about that particular entheogen transmission in my latest book (another one on the way soon). Because of that, I was planning on doing a post about how extravagantly peculiar this all is. However, in going back and reviewing the entire passage, I remembered, oh yeah, wait, that whole ritualistic encounter was partially induced by my unintended exposure to Alex Grey’s art the night before. Hey, and he just so happens to be a fellow contributor in Divine Spark, a book that Graham Hancock compiled and released into the world this week.
Kudos on that front. I just finished my promo copy the other night and it’s an amazing collection of essays by the emerging psychedelic intelligentsia. It should have included something by Duncan Trussell, in my opinion, but other than that, aces all around. I’m sure you’ll be hearing me explore themes from the book in a slew of future posts here because it really is worth tackling in more depth. I’m particularly interested in the similarities between the tales of Ayahuasca Shamanism and my own exploration into the Occult. It all comes from the same source when you get right down to it. Anywho, here’s a link the book again and the back cover with a list of contributors in case you’re curious.
To say it’s an honor to have my work featured alongside the likes of some of these luminaries would be the understatement of the year.
But back to Alex Grey and this particular encounter with the telepathic insectile hive mind. To set this up, I’ll recount what happened. My old band finished an album, and shortly thereafter I stumbled into a bunch of free mushrooms while smoking pot back stage at a Moon Duo show. We were planning on taking them and then ritualistically listening to the album we’d just finished. (You can download the album for free here if you’re curious.) It took months for our schedules to line up for such a calculated inner space excursion. As it turned out, the first date that made sense for everyone just so happened to coincide with my birthday, and we thusly made it so.
Now, the synchronous aspect of all this came about the night before where I ended up at a psych show featuring TreeTarantula (now in this excellent stoner/noise metally band) and Subarachnoid Space (now in this excellent psych/noise metal band). What I didn’t know was that Tool had played across the street at the Key Arena earlier that night. So the whole thing ended up being an unofficial Tool after-party thingamajig. That was the setting leading up to our mushroom experience: the night before I found myself completely unintentionally staring at an entire crowd wearing a wide array of multi-eyed Alex Grey themed Tool Army t-shirts. Then this went down the next afternoon (from my book The Galactic Dialogue: Occult Initiations, which you can pick up following this link super cheap):
“We took the chocolates and watched The Sarah Silverman Show and The Mighty Boosh. By the second episode of the Boosh, we could only kind of feel them starting to kick in a bit. It felt like we’d gotten a mild dose and considered taking more, but I thought this was a good time to play the record and experiment with a bit of low dosage trials. As mentioned, I’ve found this more than somewhat helpful in the past, as it aids in differentiating whether or not it’s more the chemical rush causing the experience or the external stimuli. On this particular occasion, as mentioned, none of us were feeling anything more than mildly tripped out before we threw the disc in. To give a bit of back story, the album we’d just made and the project, Black Science, in general was largely designed, like a lot of my other work with Thanaton as a means to channel discarnate forms of otherworldly sentience. Another way of putting it would be to say it’s the most intentionally psychedelic shit I could come up with.
Fucking with my own head has always been a primary passion, and true to form, the second we hit play the phantasmal images began to bombard my thoughts with a pleasant intensity. Then, about a third through the album it happened. I once again saw the thousand eyed god within. The rapidly mutating imagery then fused into more structured fluctuations. They eyes were all there but in a billion exotic configurations. As the music continued, an internally cosmic wave of bliss floated through my being. God, the shirts from the night before. They’d started all of this with the power of suggestion. They were the trigger, the stimuli that inspired this particular foray into Chapel Supremesus. Alex Grey channeled the forever creatures through his great works. Although our popular psychology will seemingly never acknowledge it, external sensory stimulation and internal chemical manipulation are the very keys, the means to reprogram the underlying infrastructure of the mind. Quasi-objective spiritual experiences can be summoned with deranged sound rituals such as these.
After enjoying the multi-eyed art ride for a few songs, things suddenly kicked themselves up a notch. I was bombarded by visionary imagery of the insect world, spiders in particular. Compound eyes, billions of them—connected in a manner well past my primitive level of comprehension. Things got so odd. There was a supreme beauty in their world that I never would have considered contemplating on my own. We see them as terrifying. Insignificant. Hideous. But it’s what we’re not seeing. The kaleidoscopic thought dancing. The interwoven familial love radiating between them. The sense of community. I felt it all for a brief period as the onslaught of delayed guitar noise reverberated through my soul structure.
Then they kicked it up another notch. All of a sudden the voluminous, extravagant eyes began to morph into images of sea spiders, crabs, crustaceans, and various other underwater dwellers of similar persuasions. So many deviant variations of DNA. While these visions continued, it suddenly clicked in an intuitive way. Oh, I get it. You’re the creative intelligence responsible for a wide manner of sea creatures in addition to insects. I was never giving whatever the fuck it is you are nearly enough credit. There is an understanding now.
Or is there? In the days and weeks to come, the hypnagogic light entities fed me information continuously. I’d wake up, and there’d be these thousand eyed projections floating in the midst of my spirit. We’re all connected. We are what your Bible would refer to as the Holy Spirit. They didn’t say these things specifically. They showed me, at one point in very specific detail. I felt my world and level of contribution. From there it receded in a quick jolt. I was amidst the eyes, they conjoined all of these other plotlines. I was a part of them, but they were for all intents and purposes, intertwined in infinite detail. So much going on that I’d never be privy too, but it was all connected on one level, functioning as a solidified unit like particles in an atom.
So what was it or is it, as if these things could ever truly be understood? The thousand eyed god within, what’s the skinny here? Is it a manifestation of the primordial artist behind the likes of insects, mussels, oysters, and such or a metaphor for our own interconnectivity? Or is it both? Insects do have this hive mind thing going on last time I checked. A metaphor within a metaphor? That’s kind of the way these matters operate and why they infuriate the control set. You don’t have control, the more you come to terms with that, the more effective a specimen you’ll aspire to become. The supermajority of conjunctive information is forever temporarily occluded while in this state. One day all of us will grasp a better understanding as we’re pulled into the light, but until then. All I know is that I’m not the only one who’s seen this thousand eyed hyper-intelligence. Alex Grey’s seen it, Luke Brown’s seen it.”
Now, the most compelling component to Alex Grey’s multi-eyed art, from my perspective, is that I had these thousand-eyed visions under the influence of a high dose of LSD far before I ever saw his visual renderings of such experiences. That’s a tale I covered a few years back in this post. What’s pertinent here is that, as mentioned, I made this series of art and was later informed that it had to do with this very psilocybin encounter in 2010 with the creative intelligence behind these aquatic telepath species. This makes it the second or third time I’ve now unintentionally channeled underlying mystical themes into my art in the last few months. New territory for me, for sure.
I threw the rest of this post in the Living Art page of Imaginal Realms and you can check it out here.
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