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I had a prolonged, traumatic birth, as a terrible winter storm raged outside. I eventually arrived on the leap day of 1984, with a scar on one cheek from the doctor's forceps.
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When I was a couple of years old, the neighbour boy knocked me unconscious with a lead pipe. He was pretending to play baseball. The stitches left a scar on my forehead over my third eye.
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When I was six or seven, I saw a flashing electric blue rectangle descend from the night sky. It was outside my window and behind some trees, but nothing about it looked like anything I'd seen before or since. I thought it over, and couldn't see any good coming from discussing it with the adults. The experience was never integrated, only occluded by being ignored.
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When I was twelve or thirteen I began to develop a neurotic melancholia. My brother was gone from the house, and my parents' marriage had started the slow and quiet march to dissolution. I had gleaned from my social studies classes that my nation had no identity of its own, and it was increasingly clear that my education was a boring waste of my talents. I had every opportunity to develop the bad cognitive habits and bodily environment for a pernicious and persistent depression. These behavioural and biochemical ruts can be overcome, and the thought of quitting made a friendly gadfly, but any mental illness leaves a mark that never fully leaves.
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I went to Trent University to learn how to be academically critical of my society. The unheralded Semitic cynicism of the theorists on offer neglected the constructive responsibilities of philosophy. We only destroyed. It was understood but never justified that an egalitarian communist utopia would fill the resultant void.
I could only do well in philosophy and cultural studies by keeping them strictly delineated and compartmentalised in my mind. Cultural studies selected from every discipline, but its critique was beholden only to pissy projection.
~~~
When I returned from Ontario in disgrace and confusion, and without Honours, my feeling of affinity for the moustache man and his project had become so acute that I took myself to have my head checked. The NS Hospital was no help. They deemed me sane. This would be a valuable tether in the years to come.
~~~
Cannabis had made the existential ache endurable, so it had been no great leap to obey the cultural script and proceed to other psychoactive substances--only to discover how at-home they made me feel. I learned the warp and woof of tryptamines and phenethylamines, of illumination and The Void. On a summer off from school, down by the brook, on a bottle of cough syrup, some mushrooms, and a beer, I became aware of a consciousness greater than myself. In the morning, I cast Him out as only chemical.
~~~
When those chemicals no longer had as much to teach me, I moved on to the hard stuff: exopolitics, the New Age, and conspiracy theory.
I had exhausted my education; there were still too many missing pieces in my understanding before I would be able to make psychological and philosophical sense of those classes.
I had exhausted entheogens; absent a proper initiation by a carrier of a wisdom tradition (or the time, security, stability, and supplies to rigourously develop my own tradition) neo-shamanism seemed to be a pie-eyed dead end, in terms of obtaining reliable and consistent information.
Cultural studies had at least made me cognizant of our capacity for self-delusion, and of the cultural mediation of reality. Psychedelics had made me aware of dimensions normally unseen. With the hope that my philosophy classes in logic and reasoning were still working for me, it seemed the right time to cross my Rubicon--and try to learn profound things from the scary, dangerous, and untrustworthy Internet. After all, those disreputable drugs hadn't been so bad!
I made vast strides into the unknown over a very short period. In a flurry of cheap documentaries and questionable interviews, I caught up with ten years of paranormal, spiritual, conspiratorial, and batshit insane conversation. Much of it was remarkable, most was incredible, and all of it was far beyond the pale of polite conversation. I began to get comfortable with a constant consciousness of the limits of other people's realities.
There were certainly a lot of well-spoken people convinced of nefarious plots and epic cosmic battles. They referenced the same undocumented fancies, and it was easy to get swept up in excitement over the imminent disclosure of alien life, and our imminent ascension into fluffy rainbows. It was a strange time.
~~~
My pseudo-shamanic forays had finally begun to yield fruit. My mystical readings had begun to cohere and come alive. I was beginning to experience synchronicities.
I would hold conversations with an ethereal DJ. It selected the songs in my extensive playlist that would answer with uncanny insight the question I was pondering. First, the astonishment at such magic. Second, the slow recognition of its ubiquity.
As the new year approached, I made a resolution to undertake an experiment. It required a leap of faith. I decided to take up the provisional acceptance of a series of dubious claims.
If it was true that all existence is the fragmented consciousness of the One, all awareness must be made of the same stuff. If we're all reaching higher levels of consciousness on our climb back to wholeness, there are probably intermediary conglomerations of awareness of which we can be a part. If we're all connected through our common Source, it should be a simple matter to contact other intelligences by means of the very intelligence which seeks to make such a contact.
I resolved that in 2009 I would see a UFO.
~~~
I didn't step outside without looking up. I didn't look up without asking to see. Everywhere I went, everything I did, I held the thought in my mind that I wanted to make contact, I wanted to witness, I wanted to experience. I asked in earnestness and humility. I projected friendly compassion and curiosity. I wanted to see a flying saucer and I meant it.
~~~
On the night in February when I signed for an apartment with my girlfriend, I walked to my warehouse night shift down a darkened road. I was distracted from my feeling of relief and anticipation by a bright light in the sky straight ahead.
Before I had time to think about it, the word "angelic" popped into my mind. This word wasn't really in my vocabulary, so it surprised me enough that I immediately took a closer look at the light. It was too large and bright to be a planet, but it wasn't in motion except for a slight waver. Something about the luminous shimmer convinced me that it was suitably angelic, and in a moment I found myself asking it in my head if it was a UFO.
The light gently winked at me in a seeming affirmation.
A pregnant pause; one-two-three. A mugging double take wouldn't have been out of order. That really happened, didn't it? Another slow blink, after the same measure as the last question. The light hovered still, now resolutely unblinking.
I tried to command it, telling it to do it again. Instead, the light shrunk to the size of a faint star, and suddenly began moving to the right. It quickly expanded to a large black shape with lights on it that passed almost overhead. It was just enough like a plane that I could believe I had been fooled, and I spent the rest of the night laughing at the ambiguity of the sighting.
On further consideration, I couldn't remember a sound from an aircraft that came very close, nor a green light on the starboard side that faced me.
~~~
About a month after that first sighting, in a time of alienated despair, the floodgates were opened. After noticing a series of strange aerial things one night, I saw a nearby flying object instantly reverse on its course without turning around--and there was no going back.
Over the course of 2009, forever to be remembered as That Year, I saw multiple daytime discs, luminous saucers, and glowing orbs, as well as countless suspicious lights that were surely almost all conventional. Often enough, the more striking appearances seemed to interact with me and my expectations. I found them to be playful, but also seemingly compassionate, sometimes responding to my emotional need to see them at a certain time or place, sometimes performing a novelty when I asked nicely.
It culminated in a pink saucer shrouded in mist going past my apartment window one afternoon like it was going for a Sunday drive. This time our requisite exchange of recognition manifested as the orange-pink light of the object brightening responsively, and then the trail of vapour behind it got correspondingly longer. Somehow this simple physical logic was too much. Weird phantasms passing over populated areas are fine, but if they behave like they're real? I had seen enough.
It was around this time that I was becoming preoccupied with my soul's mission, and beginning to suspect that my favourite singer-songwriter might be an evil sorcerer. I had to grudgingly admit that it might be a good time to pause and reflect.
I reflected in retreat for years, exploiting the goodwill of friends and family to survive, struggling not to succumb to this new madness I didn't understand, or an old sadness I knew all too well. I went back over everything; every experience, but also every fact and argument that led me there, and every one that followed from it. I adopted more nuanced perspectives on secrets and mysteries. I became more sure of some things and less sure of others. Mostly I languished.
~~~
There is still no idiom sufficient to take account of reality. Not science, not religion, not the left or right, not the high or straight. Mostly there is insular confusion. A vast spinning cosmos surrounds us, and we're too ridiculous to assume our inherent dignity and face that universe.
I have fled from my experiences even as I struggle to understand them. The truth is that I have to let them be. I don't understand everything, and I have to let that be. Most people are ignorant dumbasses without a shred of passion or curiosity, and I have to let that be. There's too much to learn and teach and explore and discover to be held back by not knowing the destination, or not getting everyone to take the journey.
