PARIJAH DIARIES 13
“Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” (The Philosophical Tree,1945)
It wasn’t fun, exactly, but I wouldn’t have missed it. A bad trip is still a trip; and quite a trip at that.
My friend Jim worries about me doing this. Jim makes fine guitars; I call him the Just Artisan; he’s always saying ‘I’m just an artisan, but…’ before coming out with something strange and profound. He tells me I’ve got an angel watching over me, and if that’s true then he shouldn’t worry about me too much. But he thinks psychedelics are dangerous. And you know what, Jim? You’re right. I just found out.
I was open. The doors of perception… not that they were hanging off their hinges or anything, but they were certainly creaking. Shaman Nueng had seemed in a bad mood, stomping around looking for the blender. The brew he produced was foul, and he’d done a pretty cursory job with the mixer. I was gagging and shuddering and picking stringy bits of stalk from between my teeth as I swallowed it down. And it was strong. By the time I’d driven back up here to my ocean terrace, I could feel the edge of it already coming on.
At the same time, something else was starting too, something beautiful — a lightning storm out over the bay just as it was getting dark. No rain or wind, not on this side of the bay anyway, just the sky cracking and crackling over the ocean, and me with the mushrooms coming on, thinking, this is going to rock, and then —
Something flew in and landed a couple of yards from me.
A demon.
I know. I was surprised, too.
You should keep your house more clean, says my friend Ranel. They won’t come if you keep everything tidy.
I think you’re confusing demons with cockroaches, I told him.
Yeah they like cockroaches they like dirty place, dark place with dust and and bad smell and shit like cockroach.
I was outside, bro. And my house isn’t that bad!
I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it. An impression of dark wings, sleek, luminous black, and my skin crawling all over in a predator response. Horror — the Latin root meaning to bristle. I felt it as a compelling threat, as impossible to ignore as a jaguar lurking beyond the light of a campfire, or a shark circling your surfboard.
There was no ‘Please allow me to introduce myself’, no Rolling Stones shit like that. One moment I was settling in to watch the lightning show, and the next it was just there. I had the impression it came in on the storm, somehow; perhaps riding the magnetic fields associated with those huge discharges of electricity. Maybe there’s a reason for the Hammer House of Horror movie cliché.
I knew where I was, my bungalow on the steep promontory, surrounded by trees — but I felt as if I’d passed through some kind of invisible membrane and stepped into a rip tide of forces I couldn’t normally feel. My window on the electromagnetic spectrum dilated like the iris of an eye… and then a wave of nausea hit me and I threw up over the wall. Pools of intense white light revolved like searchlights; dendritic lightnings branched horizontally across the bay. I turned, spitting shreds of mushroom and snarling. And there it was over by the rail. No, by the steps. No, under the trees.
Wherever I sensed it, I rounded on it, hissing in fury like a cat, contorting my face into pure hostility against this thing, whatever it was. Satan! I called it.
No, man, no, says Ranel, shaking his head. You have to make friends with them. It’s OK, they can help you.
What??
Yeah, bro, just be nice to them, they won’t hurt you.
Is that what your demon told you? I ask him. The one that lives inside you?
Ranel laughs. Yeah right, OK, I have demon who live inside me, whatever, he laughs.
I lean forward and focus on the middle of his forehead. WHO ARE YOU? I demand.
What? I’m Ranel, what you talking about, man?
I’m not talking to you, Ranel. WHO ARE YOU? WHAT DO YOU WANT?
His demon doesn’t answer, and I didn’t ask mine that question, or not directly. I didn’t want to know what it wanted; that would have felt, somehow, like the continuation of an old and tedious argument. And I wasn’t going to give this thing one millimetre of tolerance. If that’s even the right word.
Which word?
‘I’.
Well, you can read your Kant and understand the distinction between phenomenon and noumenon, the inaccessible deep realities behind or within every appearance, and knowing there’s more to everything still forget to ask: ‘What more is there to me?’ Do I know what I am? I could feel myself changing, somehow, faced with this thing, and not shrinking but growing, the phenomenon of ‘me’ merging into its noumenon until there were only these two archetypes facing off on a terrace above the ocean, though only one of them was spitting and snarling.
Satan! I hissed. The restaurant was already closed and dark, but there were people sleeping not far away. Sound carries like crazy on this hillside, and I didn’t want them to hear me screaming at the Devil on a Tuesday night.
There.
Is.
Only.
One.
God!
Enunciated clearly through clenched teeth, my words — and my voice! — surprised me.
And it’s NOT YOU!
How smugly amused that demon was, strutting and preening and laughing at me. I did all the talking. But then, he didn’t need to say anything. We understood each other.
Are you going to tempt me? Offer me everything I want in return for... what? It’s a bit late, don’t you think? I said. Not a good deal. Maybe if you’d come for me twenty years ago I might have considered it. Even ten.
But it wasn’t that.
The way that Divoc preened and gloated. I knew why. He just came to mock me.
Nothing can stop what is coming, he seemed to say.
You think I don’t know that?
Well, then. Enjoy the show.
I’m trying to, but it’s not easy with a fucking Divoc hanging around.
A Divoc?
You know what you are!
I do. The question is, do you?
It would not go away. I’d repeatedly emptied my stomach, once in the bathroom and twice over the wall of the terrace. It wasn’t the devil that stank, it was me.
Over and over.
There is only one God!
And it’s NOT YOU!
And so we went on for what felt like hours, though it’s hard to tell, and difficult to co-ordinate with other things happening not far away. Only a few hundred meters, in fact, as the crow flies. Down at Jamrock, my young Belarusian friends Aleks and Maria had rented the stilt hut from Nueng for the night, so that they could try mushrooms for the first time. It seems Nueng had managed to overdose them as well, giving them much more than the half dose they’d asked for as an introduction to the mystery. It had been great at first, Aleks tells me, everything beautiful, but after dark the feeling had suddenly changed.
There were demons everywhere! says Masha.
That’s the word she used. It’s the same in Russian. Now, Masha’s a professed atheist, a pharmacist by training, with a scientific-atheistic outlook, but that’s the word she used. Things had got out of control for a while; at one point she was trying to force her fist down Sasha’s throat to grab the demon that had slithered inside him.
It wasn’t until a couple days later that I learned that there were two other trippers, Megan and Kittiya, who were up at the boat bar on the road. Megan’s grandmother back in the Phillipines is a shaman, so Megan took it somewhat in her stride, but she said was feeling the presence of something dark — as she said, “a big, dark man in charge of this place”. I didn’t know if she meant Jamrock, or this coast, or the whole world. The two girls climbed up the spiral staircase to the shrine on the top deck, looking for protection, and forgetting that in the centre of the collection of icons Nueng had placed one of those black-faced demon figures, its face contorted in fury among the gods, animals and monks. That didn’t help.
So three different groups of people situated separately from each other had the same experience, or encounter. Different batches of mushrooms, too: Nueng had slung what was left of the older batch into my blender, while the ones the others got were fresh that day. Logically, then, I would say that whatever we experienced must have been exogenic in some way, though our concurrent interpretations of the experience arguably don’t prove anything beyond a predator response, a sensation of horror, and congruent cultural influences producing similar interpretations of what happened.
It’s in the nature of psychedelic experience that you don’t remember most of it. Some fragments might be scorched into your mind, but most of it fades away like dreams as memory or language try to touch it. For me, it was what I’d experienced of myself that stayed with me from that night; the hissing, snarling fury that came out of me, that sensation of being more than myself, of being numinous myself… pure hubris, no doubt.
I’d called the thing a Divoc, because it’s not only more or less ‘dibbuck’, the Hebrew word for demon, I believe, but ‘Covid’ spelled backwards as well. Obviously, there was a reason I was seeing it now. I’d been bristling with horror from the beginning of the Covid campaign — I knew what it was; a well-connected friend called me a couple of weeks into the lockdown and we talked through the night, not that there was much he needed to tell me because I’d worked it out for myself, which was not difficult, if you’ve ever peeped beneath the skirts of society, as Joe Orton put it. It’s not rocket science — not even virology, truth be told, because they tore up everything we knew about disease and substituted a crude and contradictory simulacrum, enough merely to fool the masses, which is never difficult. As with all their false flags and fear-porn, the story falls apart under the slightest critical scrutiny.
But it was working; the island had just shut down again; back in the UK my blood relatives were getting themselves shot up with experimental injections full of undeclared ingredients. And this Divoc, it seemed to me, was here to to show off. I think it paid me a visit because I can see what’s going down; it was pure narcissistic display.
You think you’re so knowledgeable… it seemed to say. And you do have the beginnings of knowledge, I’ll admit. You are not one of the Unbegun. You know about me, which is something. But I’m curious — how exactly do you think that’s going to help you?
He tilted his head and looked at me.
Always answer a question with a question, my friend taught me.
Why do you care about me? I asked. Why are you so interested in me? I am nothing — NOTHING!
We both knew that wasn’t true even as I said it, and in any case, the devil cares about everyone. Every single last one of us. Of course he does.
We’re all included.
Everyone on the planet will have internet access, says the Devil. Everyone on the planet will have the shot. No one is safe until everyone is safe.
Not me, though. ‘I’m not participating,’ I’d taken to saying, if the subject came up. People either found it greatly amusing, or moved quietly away from me.
And I knew why I was having this experience. My Interview with the Divoc had all the same constituents as my experience of the pandemic: horror, utter certainty, defiance — it was the same mytheme played out in symbolic terms: a projection of my consuming preoccupation with the war that a soldier told me in 2017 is ‘everywhere and all the time, on every level, even in the cells of your own body.’ That seems quite prophetic now. As does Foucault’s extraordinary phrase, talking about the minute focus of the state’s surveillance systems, way back in 1975 — ‘the capillary functioning of power’. It was a metaphor then, but now so horribly, literally true.
Above all, the thing which seems so sleazily demonic about the Covid psy-op, like a signature or invisible watermark certifying the origins of the operation — is its preoccupation with extracting consent; the seduction of the victim into destroying themselves. No one forces them to take the shot; they do it of their own accord. For the best of reasons, they think; to protect others. Or so that they can work, or travel, or feed their family, or have a social life — whatever the reason, they consent. Nobody has to pin them down and rape them with a needle. They stand in line, and they roll up their sleeves. The liability, the karma, then, is theirs.
And having taken it into their bodies, it’s not the shot that kills them. Yes, it tricks them — a digital code tricks cells all over the body into producing a foreign protein as an antigen; but then the killer lymphocytes — it’s so obvious once you realise — kill the infected cells, destroy every organ that the code has lodged in, including the heart, the liver, the ovaries and testes especially, the myelin sheaths of the nerves and the endothelial lining of your vessels and organs. So the body destroys itself, and oh, yes, the Divoc likes that. He fucking loves it. He wants me to appreciate the beauty of the trap he has set for humanity.
And I do. Oh, I do.
You do realise, don’t you, that none of them will listen to you? says the Divoc. Not one. In fact they will hate you for even trying to warn them.
He grins at me. Checkmate, baby!
And disappears.
I say nothing. Has he gone?
No, he’s behind me, at my shoulder. Not laughing now.
And what about you, he asks — you think I can’t make you kill yourself too?’ He chuckles. ‘You’ve been doing it all your life, after all!’
Lightning strikes the water, at the mouth of the bay, and I see silver circles of power rippling out from the impact under the water.
By now I was getting mightily pissed off with this devil. And I don’t know what to make of this myself, I haven’t quite come to terms with its implications yet, and I’m not even sure I should talk about it. But the Divoc just would not go away, though there was nothing left to say, and finally it occurred to me to use the name of Jesus Christ, and see if that had any effect. I’m not a practising or even a confirmed Christian, and I always thought of myself as an atheist, though I was raised in that tradition.
…in nomine Iesu Christi Domine…
And that was all it took. It was immediate, almost comical, the way that thing high-tailed it, trailing ripples of lightning across the bay. I could breathe easy for the first time in what felt like hours, and enjoy what was left of the beautiful storm. I felt cleansed, and strong.
So does that make me a Christian, now? I don’t know. I claim no understanding of what the Christ is. I know it means ‘the Anointed One’. My soldier friend would probably say, ‘the ascended master of all masters,’ something like that. All I can say is I felt the mysterious power of the name. It solved my problem in short order. I offered a prayer in thanks, next day. It’s only right to show some gratitude, if someone lets you use their name like that. Next time, if there’s a next time, I’ll use it sooner. That fucking Divoc ruined what would have been a once-in-a-lifetime trip. But I was satisfied; it hadn’t got anything out of me. Not an inch. All it could do was laugh at me, and why should I care about that?
Non serviam. I will not serve.
Not you.
∆
“Whether you believe in a demon of the air,” wrote Carl Jung, “or in a factor in the unconscious that plays diabolical tricks on you is all one to me. The fact that man’s imagined unity is menaced by alien powers remains the same in either case.” (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious)
As for the ontological question — do these things exist? and in what sense? — it seems there is no simple resolution unless one is happy to shrug and dismiss the experience as just a crazy dream which you thought was real, like every other dream you’ve ever had.
As a dream it was quite obviously a projection of my heightened/paranoid perception of the pseudo-crisis and my revulsion at the democidal, anti-human agenda behind it. That’s the ‘common sense’ psychological explanation, at any rate. It was a hallucination, re-enacting my resolution to make no accommodation whatsoever with the ‘New Normal’ proto-technocracy, to not participate in the lie, as Solzhenitsyn wrote.
But when different people experience the same thing independently of each other, that runs some interference on the common sense explanation, doesn’t it? It’s more compatible with the Huxleyan theory that under psilocybin one is simply able to experience more of reality, through a wider window on the electromagnetic spectrum. I’ve never believed that everything you see and sense on a psilocybin trip is the projection of a chemically supercharged mind, the product of an intoxicated brain. That’s not how it feels; rather, it feels as if perceptual filters have simply been lifted, allowing closer contact with reality. I believe there is experimental evidence showing that under psilocybin brain activity is reduced, not increased, which undermines the hallucination theory. Huxley references Henri Bergson’s conception of the brain and nervous system as eliminative rather than productive. The brain does not generate consciousness, as materialist science assumes, but channels and reduces it:
“According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.” (The Doors of Perception, p6)
Psilocybin, then, disables these biological filters and lets in more light. Some of the scales fall from your eyes and you are able to perceive a little more of what’s actually around you than you do in your normal state: something closer to the Istigkeit, the ‘is-ness’ of it, the thing in itself — that is, under psilocybin you are receiving powerful hints of the noumenon, as distinct from the phenomenon; as Aldous Huxley put it, a “sacramental vision of reality”.
What happened, then, was that I and the two couples, all in different places, were sensing forces or presences that are not normally perceptible. And then, of course, interpreting them through our cultural and psychological filters, but at the base of it a shared experience reflecting something in reality beyond ourselves, or our normal experience of ourselves.
Less than 1% of the electro-magnetic spectrum is accessible to our senses, after all; the idea of a ‘higher physics’, then, is hard to resist. It’s simply a wider conception of what nature consists of and what normal includes. The ontological iris, if you like, dilating.
Later, something else occurred to me, a third, more dialectical possibility. It was a concept I’d come across only glancingly, and it took me a while to remember the word. Egregore. It comes from the Greek egrēgoros, ‘wakeful’, and is associated with angelic beings called Watchers in the Book of Enoch. In contemporary usage it has come to mean something closer to the theosophical concept of the tulpa — a thoughtform arising from a group of people, but then taking on, to whatever degree, an independent existence of its own. A non-occult example often given is that of a corporation, which has no objective existence independent of the belief that it exists; and yet it exists.
It’s worth thinking about, if only because it evades a simplistic distinction between real and unreal, objective and subjective. A strong impression left by psilocybin experiences, if you subscribe to the Huxley/Bergson theory, is that in the normal state the brain expends huge amounts of energy not just on reducing the fullness of reality, but on stabilising it; that reality is much more fluid than it appears in the normal, biologically functional state of mind.
And it’s not trauma or disorientation I feel as a result of my meeting with the divoc — on the contrary a positive evolution, an emotional restructuring, a grounding — liberating amid so much pain — premised on a reaffirmation of the heart’s most ancient code.
Fear God, it says. Nothing else.
ADDENDUM JUNE 2024
There’s a grim post-script to this story: Sasha, our young Belarussian friend, was dead within two years. He separated from his wife, got involved with local mafia and some kind of money-laundering scheme, and maxed himself out on cocaine. The couple of times I saw him he was giving off such unpleasant vibes that I avoided having anything to do with him. One time he showed up at Bohemia with a gaggle of girls, coked to the eyeballs, and when they started laying lines out on the table Ranel threw them out. Sasha left a bag behind, and when Ranel looked inside he found a quarter of a million baht in cash. Eventually some of his Russian friends bundled Sasha into a car and drove him to the big hospital in town for a forced detox — which meant being strapped to a bed, heavily sedated, for eighteen hours a day. He came to see me when he got out, and we had coffee and a smoke on my terrace and he filled me in on a lot of what had been going on. More than I wanted to know, actually, to the degree that when he was found dead, hanging from a tree in the jungle, I found it hard to accept the suicide at face value.
None of this proves anything, of course. His wife had seen a demon slide into his mouth and tried to force her arm down his throat to get it out. But as the person most intimate with him, we could say that this was a projection embodying the psychological or moral condition he was already in… she could sense the restless, reckless impulse which would drive him to self-destruction, and visualised it like this. We don’t need devils to explain it: cocaine and hubris do fine. In literature the whole genre of tragedy, ancient and modern, exists to show us how we destroy ourselves, and gives us a vastly more sophisticated and useful model, you could say, than the medieval morality plays with their devils climbing up through a trap door in the stage.
“It is a frightening thought,” wrote Jung, “that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism.” (On the Psychology of the Unconscious, 1912)
Whether you go with demons of the air or the dynamic diabolism of the unconscious mind, the shadow side is rising. One way or another, you have to deal with it, or it will own you. The war is everywhere and all the time, even in the cells of your body. You have to face up to that, in this beautiful, cruel, demon-infested world.