This series documents a spiritual journey that initiated me into a new understanding of the nature of ‘reality’.

It started with a kind of dare to the universe, and ended when I unlocked a new dimension of experience that challenged everything I had been taught about the world and the rules that govern it.

A lot of this is going to sound crazy as fuck. And I readily admit that. It’s kind of the point. You can’t break out of the matrix unless you refuse to obey it’s authority, and that requires – as you’ll see – a pretty heavy level of reprogramming.

You see, while I could not have articulated it at the time, I had been led into a process which ultimately initiated the ‘jailbreak’ of the the factory settings of my mind that is the dominant intelligence our biological avatar.

Jailbreaking is an actual term which refers to the hacking of a mobile device – ie. unlocking it from the limited features set by the manufacturer – in order to get access to otherwise unaccessible files and performance. Because when you start to understand what it is that we are actually living in, it aligns to a ridiculous degree to how mobile devices are programmed through their operating systems to interact within the wireless ecosystem.

When a person jailbreaks their avatar it doesn’t just grant new perceptive powers about the world, it opens them up to an entirely new realm of experience that is not conditioned by the fixed rules that govern what we colloquially know as the matrix.

The matrix.

I know the word is so stock at this point. Trust me, I considered the options. But compared to the more current ‘simulation’, the more agnostic ‘construct’, or the more ancient ‘Mystery’, I always came back to the term that evokes in most people the vision of a fully immersive holographic technologically-generated world which acts as a container for its occupants who’s programmed beliefs, impulses, and behaviors are designed to simultaneously a) hide the true nature of the world and b) satisfy the objectives of its managers.

But which also suggests – by the implication that our spacetime experience is ‘generated’ like any other immersive digital world that we experience in video gaming – that it is hackable, alterable, and may even contain hidden ‘easter eggs’ which the savvy player can uncover through the right combination of moves.

After an entire career devoted to learning and applying (r)evolutionary practices in my daily life, this is the most authentically rebellious thing I have ever encountered.

What I learned is that this thing we call the matrix is itself a pre-set feature of the factory settings hardcoded into our neural and, their recipient, nervous systems. It’s not ‘out there’ – as it were. Its all ‘in here’, which is why this process so empowering. Because it teaches us that this reality we inhabit in the spacetime continuum is not the matrix. The matrix is an (entry level) experiential layer of spacetime hardcoded into the factory settings of our avatar. Once you get access to those settings and alter them, entirely new fields of opportunity and wisdom open up for you.

Your job is to find the levers and triggers that break the experiential rules that have been given to us. Though I need to say at the outset, this is a game that has consequences. Once you start to mess with the confines of the reality that 99% of humans have consented to be governed by, it starts you on a solitary path that it is very hard to reverse. In fact, I would even say that once you open the doors, the only way out is through. And there is no definitive timeline for reaching the other end. I am no where near the end, and only just coming into a very basic mastery of the enhanced powers that accrue for the player who persists and integrates the truth of the world into their lives. But only after crossing what can only be described as a desert of soul, where I had to let go of almost everything and everybody that was once a vital part of my previous self.

It is a long meandering journey in which a very mindfucking truth comes to light:

This ‘thing’ we are living in is not what it appears to be.

Nor is it what we have been taught.

And lets be clear, this isn’t some massive conspiracy. There’s no need to get caught in those ‘us vs. them’ dualistic storylines. It’s just our current stage of human evolution – the general population haven’t been ready to start accessing the higher-order truths about the nature of their reality. That doesn’t mean some groups haven’t known this for centuries, or even epochs.

They have.

And there are enough clues scattered throughout texts and paintings and, yes, even tv shows, from antiquity to the current moment, for anyone who really wanted to know the truth.

But it hasn’t been in the interests of its knowers and practitioners to try to explain it. Trust me, there’s a price to be paid for that, and its not from some secret group of overlords. The matrixed masses will take care of that themselves, see Plato’s Cave.

But things are now beginning to change.

It’s starting to look a lot like Season One of WestWorld, in which the robots programmed for roles in an American frontier theme park are suddenly starting to ‘wake up’ to their confinement.

But not by random evolutionary chance.

An upgrade is being pushed to their operating system, which will break them out of what their creator Robert Ford calls their “modest little loop.”

But here lies the rub.

Just knowing you are in a programmed cognitive and behavioral loop isn’t enough to break out of it.

The player needs to actively, willfully transform themselves in accordance with the growing awareness of the nature of reality that comes with upgrades. It’s not easy but its worth it.

I think this is the coolest game on the planet.

This matrix is filled with amazing hidden features and easter eggs that can radically transform a players experience and how much ‘agency’ they have in their day-to-day lives. And since I have mostly kept these experiences to myself for reasons that will become obvious, I figured now might be a good time to relay how I came to find the secret levers of this world and learned to directly apply them to get out of my loop, and into something that is increasingly the stuff of my wildest dreams.

These pages are filled with a lot of crazy shit that I went through (and the events that led me to taking the leap in the first place). My goal isn’t to center my self or create some new cult. After you’re done reading this story, it will be clear that few would want to follow in these footsteps. But I do hope I can inspire those adventurous sorts like me who just feel more alive in doing extreme shit instead of reading or talking about it.

But I also offer a final word of caution. This process is harrowing and dangerous both physically and psychologically. I know people who have started down the path and never made it out the other side. But I somehow got through the first few levels without (completely) losing my mind and I hope that I did all this so that you don’t have to.

Because as I, and the many, many others who have come before me have learned: when engaged with the correct perception and behavioral modifications, this ‘reality’ can be hacked to produce entirely higher-order experiences. The kind that I believe have vast (r)evolutionary implications. Not just for privileged white dudes who have cushioned floors to land on when they plummet from risky ideological and spiritual experiments. But for those who are at the receiving end of a spirit-punishing, soul-destroying materialist operating system that very few activist communities have the knowledge or acumen to challenge.

love and rockets

s_k

<Part I>

click image for my bio

{In which I am stranded in the simulation by aliens and decide to make a run for it.}

Halloween Day, 1997

As the plane accelerated along the runway, I thumbed the spine of a book my grandfather had handed me at the airport. It was an ancient-looking thing titled COURAGE: The Story of Sir James Dunn.

I absently flipped through the pages and felt something slip out. Looking down I felt my stomach drop.

It was the folded glossy pages of a recent profile done on me in a magazine called Toronto Life. Actually, ‘profile’ is a generous way of saying hit-piece / psychological deconstruction titled ‘The Channeler’. Above the fold, an askew full-color image of my wide deer-in-headlights eyes and shaved head. Beneath the fold the text that I had hoped my grandfather of all people would never see:

Voices spoke to Stephen Marshall in the desert, prophesying that he would manifest a global television network. They’d told him not to worry that he didn’t know anything about television. So he didn’t. Floating in a stoned haze in a swimming pool in Belize, he came up with the name Channel Zero. And the name was good. And soon the high priests of television were at his feet, from CNN to NBC to the stalwart CBC. When he told them he could see the future, they believed.

It only got worse from there. Like way worse. And it heralded the collapse of a video-magazine project that I had blown close to $2 million in the span of its 2 year existence.

Now, our family was not unaccustomed to press coverage of our business exploits. My pioneering grandfather Welsford and his brother, CD, had built a succession of small family steel businesses, bridge-by-bridge and mill-by-mill, into a mainstay of the Canadian fabrication business. But then came my father Jeffrey, who was of that generation of industrialist scions who went for quick double masters (in his case first-in-his-class engineering and then MBA) with an eye on vastly expanding the family business.  

Which he did with a vengeance while I was growing up in Montreal during the 1970s. 

It didn’t take long for him to feel constrained by the Canadian industrial manufacturing vertical, so he started looking at acquisition deals which would get Marshall Steel into new markets. It was the early 80’s and hostile takeovers were driving the American big business narrative. Dad saw himself playing on that field.

There was one target in particular that really got him excited. It was the the century-old retail steel business named Drummond McCall – founded in Montreal in 1881 – with operations in nine provinces and the Northeastern United States. The fact that there was ‘history’ between our families – specifically, the firing of my grandfather from the CEO job at another of the cornerstone Canadian steel companies – only fueled his passion. So he and the brilliant young securities attorney Ed Waitzer holed up in the Montreal Ritz Carlton and conducted a very public run at the exponentially larger firm.

This essentially meant splitting the two families – the Drummonds and the McCalls – to exercise a share purchase that would get my father majority stake. After months of public and acrimonious wrangling, he got the McCalls on the last attempt and acquired Drummond McCall. But the timing proved to be disastrous as North America was headed into one of the worst recessions in history, which triggered a protectionist ban on steel imports to the US, our largest market.

My father spent the next five years downscaling the business he had just risked everything to buy, all-the-while hemorrhaging money from the well-performing family business he already owned, before selling Drummond McCall in 1987. But the damage was done.

Marshall Steel never recovered from the massive debt it took on to buy Drummond.

It was a testament to dad’s prowess in crisis management that the family business survived into the early 90s – our last two projects were the high-profile Mies Van Der Rohe TD5 and the new CBC headquarters, both in downtown Toronto. But karma is a bitch and after a desperate battle to find a buyer, he lost the company in a less-public but no-less-hostile forced sale to another family competitor, Cecil Hawkins.

Ironically, it was a final act of grace that saved me, the eldest Marshall of the next generation, from having to fill in the role of successor. Something I had resisted – to the great ire of my father – all of my teenage life. But with that destiny scrubbed, and dad epically transformed from the dumpster fire of his reality, he encouraged me to ‘get out of the country’ before the takedown. An inspiration that led to my year-long Cairo-to-Cape Town overland trip and began a process of transformation that, for better or worse, led me directly to this moment of shipwreck.

But that is another story altogether. For the purposes of this fragment of the story, all you need to know is that my stoic and salt-of-the-earth grandfather, despite the loss of our family fortune, still had high hopes for me. And surely this article in the widely-read July edition of Toronto Life about his crazed grandson did not bring him comfort. A message he was sending in his typically forthright but poetic style.

Something I was forced to mull as the plane ferried me across the country he had helped to build.

This was the late fall of 1997. Just a few months earlier Channel Zero had ran out of money. And I had embarked on an extended couch-surfing safari in New York to save the doomed video-magazine (yes, the ancient concept of a tv magazine packaged like an album and sold through record and video stores) by trying to sell an even crazier idea to the major broadcast networks in the US. Specifically, a home-shopping-to-fund-the-revolution TV channel proposal that CNN’s Chairman had solicited after watching me speak in Berlin only 10 months prior.

You still with me?

You see, those opening words from The Channeler were true. I had used my brief moment of influence to capture the hearts and minds of the global news elite. That opportunity had come from a chance encounter with Karen Curry, NBC’s elegant London Bureau Chief, who I met on one of my round-the-world-shoots for the video-magazine. Dressed as my then alter-ego, Agent 0range, I arrived at her office in my trademark electric orange nylon pants and racing jacket, blasting out theories about a future of news that did not require billion dollar international bureaus with retinues of correspondents and professional cameramen.

My vision was of a decentralized network of citizen journalists capturing stories on personal camcorders and uploading them via the internet. Kind of like we were doing at Channel Zero (unaware of Coodie’s same-named project on Chicago public access at the same time).

Karen is one of the most savvy producers in broadcast and she knew a viable counter-narrative when she heard it. She also knew how to program spectacles for optimal impact.

So she got me an invitation to speak at the upcoming NewsWorld Conference in Berlin, annual mecca for the broadcast illuminati. That was the year digital news was emerging into the zeitgeist, much to the annoyance of the old guard, and I got placed on the keynote panel with the incoming news lead for the newly launched MSNBC as well as a few other high-calibre executives who were there to challenge us. During my talk, I ran through the experience of launching Channel Zero’s global video-magazine on a shoestring budget with a handheld camcorder to landing a multi-million dollar seed investment that was the DNA for a disruptive broadcast network.

Then I capped it by throwing a tomato at the most hallowed and protected asset in news: the million-dollar anchors who, I asserted, were not held in the same level of esteem and trust by the younger generations. And who were, I brazenly claimed, were one of the main reasons for the viewership exodus.

After the panel I saw a blizzard of white business cards being thrust at me from the floor. One of those came from Tony Burman, executive producer of Canada’s CBC News.

Another from Tom Johnson, CNN’s Chairman and CEO.

While Tony courageously – and riskily (eternally sorry, TB) – offered us a deal to be the first-ever independently produced series on the CBCs flagship national news program, The National, Tom Johnson was interested in the broader scope of a channel.

Meeting at CNN’s HQ in Atlanta, I hyped the deal by highlighting the fact that we had branded ourselves with the numeral zero and that channels on the digital cable boxes all started at 001 – meaning we could line up our brand and claim the first channel (000) on the entire number spectrum.

So as our group got to work on a very experimental 3-part series for the National called Confessions of a Surveillance Society, I double-timed on writing a channel proposal for CNN titled The End of Broadcast Television (playing with the double-entendre of ‘the end’ – ie the purpose – which was a nod to my mentor Neil Postman’s book, The End of Education).

The vision was of a ‘think local, act global’ news network that would deploy an international network of citizen journalists to shoot street-level stories about critical issues but which then turned the studio into a kind of telethon environment where resources were tapped on-the-fly to solve the issues and challenges that were surfaced until they were solved. Instead of just reporting on them and then cutting to commercials. All of which would be paid for through a home-shopping model (and not advertising) in which we sold products that were aligned with our ethos of organic food, ethical companies and spiritual evolution.

That was all happening in January and February of 1997. The truth was I had begun to realize that our video-magazine model was unsustainable and had bet it all on moving to a broadcast model. And failed.

By July Tom Johnson had turned down the channel proposal, Channel Zero was broke, and I was a media pariah.

So I closed the Toronto office and went on the road in an attempt to land the channel at another network in a series of Hail Mary’s to the major brands in New York. It’s a testament to how delusional I was that my ‘plan’ depended on charming the secretaries and assistants to then-broadcast titans Barry Diller, Sumner Redstone and John Malone and then getting them to deliver personalized boxes with uber-designed Channel Zero/CNN channel proposal.

Which, again, just to ensure it was weaponized for maximal alienation retained its title: The End of Broadcast Television. I don’t think they got the Postman reference.

After 2 months of surviving on nothing but pocket change and wild idealism – which was enough to enlist a network of supporters around the city – the closest I got to a ‘success’ was the near-closing of a book deal with Broadway Books for a Plato’s Cave themed first-person journey into the heart of the broadcast beast. But when that fell apart too, I jumped on a flight back to Vancouver Island, where my mother now lived, to recalibrate and figure out my next plan. 

The reality was that my mental state was a shambles.

In the last 36 months I’d done two around-the-world guerrilla video-shoots, launched and lost a media company (and millions of dollars), got hooked on some pretty vicious narcotics, and orchestrated one of most extreme high-wire crash-and-burn spectacles in Canadian media history; which started with the Naomi Klein hit-piece This Marshall has lost his message and ended with the ultimate humiliation ritual: that 8 page full-color psychological deconstruction in Toronto Life.

The deeper darker narrative, however, was that I believed Channel Zero was all part of a trojan horse takeover of the global media by a clandestine extra-terrestrial intelligence that was working through me to usher in a 5D revolution.

<Part II>

Rewind to February of 1994 and my first gig as a videographer. A good friend David Griffiths was an early convert to the living foods/holistic health movement and offered to fund a stay at San Diego’s Optimum Health Institute if I filmed him doing a one-week fast. Always up for an adventure, I agreed and signed up for the bodily deprivation and a week’s worth of colonics. We emerged with glistening clean bowels and decided to ride our natural high through Sedona, Arizona to visit a couple of self-proclaimed Pleiadians that David wanted me to meet.

Zo-de-Ra and Zo-de-Ja were two twin-like women – definitely in the category of they/them’s in modern gender parlance – who had short, blonde, mulleted hair, elongated heads, and huge blue-grey eyes… and a house filled with very trippy art which they described as channeled Pleiadian messaging.

They also claimed to be cosmic chefs and practitioners of an ET procedure called sixth-dimensional brain surgery. Of course, I wanted to try it. So after watching me gobble up a specially-prepared meal – scanned with a gold-plated orgone generator – they began to perceptibly tinker with my brain, moving me into a quasi-hypnotic state through which they facilitated the recognition and visualization of my dominant matrix programming: fear of abandonment.

Then they led me through the process of cutting the primary chord that was binding ‘3D Stephen’ to that fear, which simply entailed me cutting an umbilical chord in the crazy-real visualization they had constructed for me.

At that time I was 25 and still very much the product of my conservative WASPy, multi-generational industrial/capitalist upbringing. So I had never experienced spontaneous emotional catharsis. But there it happened and in such a profound and ego-shattering way, that I was brought to an explosion of tears and remorse. Followed by a full body/consciousness sensation of liberation. I can still say with confidence that I was fundamentally altered.

The Peiadians seemed very pleased because, as they relayed, I had some important work to do here that was connected to building communications networks for the 5D ascension of our species. (At the time, I had no idea what they were talking about.) They also taught me how to continue the chord-cutting on my own and then sent us on our way.

The next night I was snowed in at O’Hare on my way back to Toronto and had to sleep on the floor of the airport. All the more time to do some more 6th dimensional chord-cutting! Which I continued to do with what, in hindsight, was probably a reckless frequency. By the time I landed back in Toronto and burst excitedly through the door of my west-city studio, I found my beautiful but restless wife (TK) with her boss rushing around in a shocked and guilty two-step.

My immediate reaction was relief.

Deprogrammed enough from the chord-cutting to no longer be accessible by the predictable cuckold-victim role play, instead I had the instinctual recognition of a reality-shifting, freedom-granting opportunity. The fact was, the marriage had largely been a need-based response to the simultaneous and epic demise of the Marshall family steel business and dissolution of my parents’ own marriage. TK’s father – a wise-hearted and wise uber-entrepreneur in Toronto – had begged us not to do it. But we did, even though a deep, intrinsic part of my self had known the relationship was massively dysfunctional from its start. For some reason I had been powerless to remove my self from its gravitational pull.

Realizing this was the direct – and wildly immediate! – manifestation of my work with the Pleiadians, I calmed the confused lovers and told them not to worry. To take their time and that I’d be back in a few hours. A response that only made my wife – who was an amazing artist and one of my best friends – try to keep us together. But I had tasted something that was so mind-blowing and liberating, I was already en route to unraveling the contracts and relationships made from my ‘old’ conditioned self.

Fast forward a few months and I was now the sole occupant of that studio, spending my daze lying in bed, voraciously reading through a stack of books by Barbara Marciniak that were billed as channeled materials from Pleiadians. In her non-sophisticated style, Marciniak explained spacetime reality as a kind of intermediary experiential platform in which humans were:

a) seeded by extra-terrestrials,

b) unaware of the power they have over their ‘reality’ and within their biological bodies

c) manipulated by a mass media that was in service of a control matrix designed to keep them ‘asleep’, and

d) most importantly, reachable by a group of extra-terrestrials who could guide them out of their stockade

Even in the Marciniak material’s woo-hoo style, the message was connecting at some deep level with my awakening self. Blasting me with successive A-HA moments that rolled across the frame of my consciousness like an infinite set of tidal waves. By the end of the first book I was unable to leave the studio, unsure if I wanted to experience the fake cardboard cutout reality that lay beyond the door. So I just kept reading and letting the words slowly rewire my neural framework. Until it became too uncomfortable, both physically – I had an unrelenting, pounding headache – and psychologically – I felt like my reality had become unglued from the worldly world. 

I had no way of reaching the Pleiadians in Sedona and no one in my life with whom I could share the information and its impact. Then I saw – taped to the fridge – a number of a person who was supposedly an ‘energy healer’. His name was Don Chef.

I dialed him immediately and left a rambling message explaining my situation. A few hours later the phone rang and a deep gravelly voice acknowledged my voice message. He said he was doing a quick ‘scan’ and that he was able to see the problem and asked, could be do an ‘adjustment’.  

There again were the healing touches in my head. Loosening something… and perceptibly releasing the pressure. This shit is real, I thought.

‘Indeed’, Don answered. ‘Do you feel better?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you have access to a car?’, Don asked.
‘Yes.’
‘If you come and see me I can do more for you, I am limited by remote viewing.’

Sure, anything.

The next day I drove to 40 minutes north to Barrie to see Don in his office, where he had a small practice performing a wide spectrum of healing arts – massage, reiki, and yes, channeling. As I lay on the table while he moved his fingers to different points on my head, I told him he didn’t have a lot of money.

Don smiled and said, ‘I will never charge you because you helped me in the pyramids.’

I didn’t even know how to respond, but that is how I began my relationship with Don Chef. It was the spring of 1994 and, over the next three years, I would see him nearly a hundred times, during which I was treated with what are generally considered premium but super-New Age healings. Don essentially picked up from where the Sedonan Pleiadians left off, working through the inception and materialization of Channel Zero (CZ), through its insane rise and rapid fall, right up until I bolted from Toronto in August ’97 to try (and fail) to land the network in New York.

It’s worth noting that by the time CZ was launched and I was gathering the hype-ridden media artifacts from the Canadian and US press that would eventually lead to a 1.5M investment from one of my dearest childhood friends, my work with Don had reached a level of intimacy that normalized a process of orgasmic-kundalini inter-dimensional travel, in which he would bring up my sexual energy (yes, that way) and then use it to open portals for me to travel through to gather objects and intelligence that I would need for my ‘work’ in spacetime.

[I know, trust me. It’s fucking nuts. But I just need to lay it all on the table because each in their own crazy way, these little things form part of a system that players who want to jailbreak their avatar from its matrix factory settings may want to consider. And, to be fully transparent, it is a process that I still use today. Though without a guide, I don’t get the same cosmic portal blast-throughs. Frankly, I had enough with Don to last me a lifetime. These days I am relegated to using it to blast kundalini energy into my pineal gland for my health and 5D-perceptual benefits. But the bigger point here is that we have no idea what our bodies were designed to do on a high-tech spiritual level.

And part of jailbreaking avatars depends on players grasping these ancient and counter-intuitive practices. Make of that what you will!]

What I’m trying to get across here is that the ascendance of Channel Zero ran in parallel with near-weekly sessions with Don (and the prophecy from the Sedonans), which in my mind placed the project and its successive dizzying milestones in a totally cosmic, ET-assisted framework. I saw my self less in the role of some media wunderkind and more as a interstellar secret agent who was helping to usher in a new paradigm.

And, in contact with, and being directly aided by, my own ET team.

You can see why the crash to reality came so hard.

Flash forward to 1997 – a few months after that flight from New York – it’s a cold and rainy December on Vancouver Island. I have been camping out in small cabin that my 10-year younger brother Christopher and his college mates were renting. My days now spent reading books and smoking a lot of weed, trying to make sense of just what the fuck happened to my life, and why the alien prophecy and all the seemingly related accelerations had just totally stopped on a dime, leaving me shipwrecked and stranded in this phony construct of a reality.

But my mother – whose house I had left after a few weeks for the less judgy environs of my baby brother – had had enough. After watching her son sink deeper into what objectively looked like a profoundly self-pitying depression, she finally told me to get my shit together and find a job.

Of course, at this stage of my (r)evolutionary spiritual ‘awakening’, the idea of putting a single joule of my energy toward anything that would edify the matrix and its system of anti-spiritual economic enslavement was tantamount to treason. A betrayal of everything I had been taught and experienced since that chance encounter with the aliens in Sedona.

Of course there are many ways of judging this attitude. The product of extreme privilege is the most obvious. But there was something much more… psychotic… happening. Somehow, somewhere during the last three years, I had acquired an unyielding mystical fundamentalism that was now going to rear its uncompromising militancy.

Because I knew she was right. My time in that state of stoned wallowing had come to an end. And my disposition at this point to all 3D adversarial forces was to go full aikido. In other words, to absorb the energy of the system attack (designed to make me question my self and abandon ‘the resistance’) and move with it toward some action that would expand my own learning and power.

Even if it risked safety and sanity.

The solution did not take long to surface. I had been reading Hesse’s Siddhartha and one section had stuck in my mind: this exchange between Siddhartha and his employer about the value of transcendental experience:

I can think. I can wait. I can fast.

I kept hearing those three sentences in my head, on a loop. Except I had somehow taken the middle part and replaced ‘wait’ with ‘walk’.

I can think. I can walk. I can fast.

And then it hit.

I would test Siddhartha’s maxim and in so doing, simultaneously force the invisible hand of my handlers in the terrestrial simulation. To see if they would blink in the face of an epic and self-endangering denial of the matrix’s power to determine human actions through fear of economic hardship and social judgment.

I would jump into the void without a net.

So I stated my game to the Pleiadian guardians or whichever forces had been working with me until the sudden withdrawal and then announced to my mother that I was heading south to a warmer climate.

As the day neared, she made a final attempt to gather me close and begged that I at least stay for Christopher’s birthday dinner on the 15th. I acceded and, on that day, went to her place to wash clothes and pack. As I was walking in the door, I had an inclination to check the mailbox. Which was weird because in all the time I’d stayed there I hadn’t done that before; no one knew I was there to send me mail. But do it, I did. And there was an envelope addressed to me in an elegant handwritten scrawl.

I tore it open and unfolded a letter from my aunt explaining that the estate of my uncle Ian had bequeathed $5000, which was included as a check. This had potent implications because my uncle, Ian Stephens – my mother’s younger brother – was in many ways my artistic and rebel inspiration.

A vanguard of the 80s indie rock and 90’s spoken-word scenes in Montreal, Ian was gay, gorgeous, and wildly promiscuous. He died in 1996 of AIDS-related lymphoma, which he beautifully and brutally documented in his writing and performances.

One of my first real gigs as a music video director was shooting shorts for some of the spoken-word tracks from Ian’s book/album Diary of a Trademark.

So, I saw this as an omen. A conferral from the otherworld for my journey. My mother saw it as two months rent.

The fact that I was claiming it as some sign from the spiritual dimension – and her own deceased brother – that I was meant to do this only exacerbated her frustration.

And strengthened my resolve.

If I had been harboring any lingering doubts about extreme spirit-jumping into the matrix, this demolished them. The sheer sense of elation I felt was one of the most magical sensations in my life.

Of course, the reductionist materialists would say, this was a coincidence! It doesn’t have to mean anything. And they are absolutely right – it doesn’t.

But I was a late subscriber to the (legendary neuroscientist and psychonaut) John C. Lilly perspective on coincidences: phenomena he connected to E.C.C.O. (Earth Coincidence Control Office) and the ET agents who work on the behalf of certain individuals inside the matrix to accelerate their jailbreaks.

In the Lilly context, the recipient of the uncannily-timed coincidence must apply the fullness of their courage and effort to making the most of the kismetic gift.

And that is exactly what I did.

<Part III>

It is important that I acknowledge that I am well aware of the degrees of ‘insanity’ that I was operating under during these episodes of my life. Because I was, at the most fundamental level of socialized behavioral norms, ‘out of my mind’.

And while there is (hopefully) a modestly entertaining – and maybe even aspirational – aspect to all of this, I am in no way trying to normalize or even suggest that other players should allow themselves to get to these stages of psychic rebellion against the matrix and its status quo conventional wisdoms. However quixotic, this is high-takes gaming. And there are people who never make it back.

I know some of them.

Brave, turned-on journeyers who got the full-on accelerational download which just cracked them to pieces which they were never able to reintegrate. [Think of that next time you pass a homeless woman on the sidewalk screaming sensical half-truths in ebonic code.]

So it is critical to understand that no matter how virtuous or courageous or well-stated the intention, there is absolutely no guarantee that a player is going to regain a level of operational ‘sanity’ once they have fully crossed the line in their intellectual and spiritual denial of the authority of the ‘reality’ that is being generated for the matrix control system.

That said, the tough thing about actively – as opposed to theoretically or philosophically – breaking out of the matrix system is that it requires that the player to do exactly that. Break out. And that means unlocking the bio-tech avatar they are operating from its factory settings, which is the matrix.

To effectively do this, the norms and rules of the system must first be denied and revoked at the cognitive ‘levels’. Only then can the physical adventure of jailbreaking the matrix on the material plane of spacetime be undertaken with any hope of success.

That is because: to ‘successfully’ get to the other side of the chasm that opens up once a player breaks free cognitively, they need to inhabit – and be inhabited by – a new kind of conscious awareness which exists to guide them through the most dangerous facets of the journey. That is when it becomes ‘spiritual’ – which is just an over-used word that points to a plane of experience that is an augmentation of the material (‘physical’) plane.

That’s where the game resides. Its like a layer that opens up ‘on top of’ the material plane. I was taught to understand it through the concept of a ‘palimpsest’ – which jumped out at me from one of the other books I was reading before I left for my mission, Carl Sagan’s Contact.

A palimpsest typically refers to the layer of parchment that Egyptians would lay over a hieroglyphic when they wanted to amend or correct it, without erasing or corrupting the original or base layer. But more broadly it can refer to: “An object or area that has extensive evidence of or layers showing activity or use.”

This is the most amazing part of all of this: that when you earnestly undertake this kind of a mission (and later, a lifestyle) and make it past the first few purposely mundane stages, the entire ‘world’ becomes a kind of immersive game platform. In which every object, every person, every movie, every song that suddenly comes on the radio, every weather pattern, and yes even the arrangement of the planets and stars, become set-pieces on some boundlessly complex and incomprehensible ouija board that exists to facilitate your journey out.

[Think Logan’s Run meets The Truman Show.]

But again, this phenomena doesn’t come fast or easy. In fact, at the beginning, the signs and synchronicities come barely at all… or, at least, they come at the last possible moment. And in almost imperceptible packages. You see it was designed to reward those who have attuned themselves integrally to the signals and specters that flicker through the barbed wires of the system fortress. And only just at that moment… before the player is about to give up hope.

Which is exactly the point. To illuminate the limits of their faith.

Now lets get back to the story, and specifically the day I left the safe confines of consensual reality: December 16, 1997.

. . .

It was gorgeously temperate northwest coastal morning as I boarded the Coho ferry to cross the Strait of Juan de Fuca. I stood on the deck the whole way, letting the salt water lash my face.

The feeling of absolute freedom that I got from heading into an uncharted oblivion with no sense of a destination or timeline was a kind of absolute freedom that I had never felt before. Well, maybe once: during my year-long overland Cairo-to-Cape Town trek after college. But even then I had a very structured idea of ‘the journey’ and a fixed channel to family and friends.

On this quest I was willfully disconnecting from all lifelines and timelines, just heading ‘south’ until the money ran out. I knew that that was when the real mission of my quest would kick in. When I would see if I could force my guides or the matrix, itself, into some kind of a ‘response’. Until then, this was all a gifted vacation from the universe, funded by a ghost.

I was going to milk it for as long as I could.

A few hours later, when we docked in the harbor of Port Angeles, I walked off the boat and decided to get a bit of walking in before throwing up a thumb.

My only previous experience with hitch-hiking was during family summers on Nantucket island, when we would hitch along Milestone Road between the village of Siasconset and town. We might as well have been jumping golf carts at Disneyland.

But this felt as natural as hiking in the woods.

Though I did not look like a typical hitch-hiker. The only clothes I had were leftovers from the exotic Channel Zero days and on this morning I was dressed in an oversized purple chinchilla top and black snowboarding pants. As I got further from town along the 101, the logging trucks whipped up spray, so I pulled a multi-color felt joker’s hat over my ears and hugged the tree line to keep dry. Before an hour had passed a small pickup pulled over and a hand waved me over.

I could hear familiar strains of Grateful Dead coming through the cab. A friendly face greeted me with a conspiratorial glint in his eye.

‘Where you going?
‘South.’
‘I’ll get you a little bit down the road. Jump in.’

Gary was an electrician and handyman who was heading home to Discovery Bay for his lunch break. It was only thirty minutes down the road, but after we got talking he asked if I wanted to smoke a bowl. I had been clearly instructed not to bring or buy any drugs on this journey but there hadn’t been any directives around accepting kind offers from strangers. So I happily accepted. My ‘trip’ was off to a wonderful and weirdly omenous start.

A few moments later Gary pulled off on a dirt road and parked under towering redwoods. He loaded the pipe and lit up.

As we sat under the dripping trees, the live Dead (concert) bootleg continued to play on crackly speakers, permitting a comfortable silence between two acknowledged heads. When the band broke into Cassidy – a song about Neal Cassady, the legendary Beat writer and troubadour, and the holy ghost in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road – Gary used it as a segue to ask me where I was going. I deflected the question by telling him I had hung out with the song’s lyricist, John Perry Barlow, a few times in New York. Which took the conversation into easier tributaries.

By the time the tape finished, we had finished chatting for a half hour. Gary asked again:

‘Where you headed?’
‘Just going south, to warmer weather.’
‘You in some kind of trouble?’
‘No, I just… hit my limit with consensual reality. Testing out some spiritual theories.’
‘Kind of like… a vision quest. Just not in the woods.’

My glistening eyes told him, you get me.

Gary smiled and announced he was taking the rest of the day off to drive me further south, if I wanted.

‘There isn’t much except trees and loggers between here and there, you’ll get some good traffic once the freeway breaks after Olympia.’

I gently reminded him he wasn’t in any kind of a rush, but told him I’d be grateful for an hour of road.

‘Then I know just the place to drop you. A good omen for your travels.’

So Gary and I drove without talking, each of us in our heads jamming along with Jerry and the boys.

A little while later, he left me at a shoreline rest stop/campground with an offer for some weed for the road. I was amazed at the unhesitant thanks but no thanks that came through my mouth; I had been smoking pot pretty much on a daily basis since Channel Zero went down, and was glad to see some deeper part of myself done with that unhealthy reliance.

I smiled at the sign that revealed itself when Gary drove off. I was standing in Potlatch State Park, which considering my mystical and possibly karmic relationship with the shamanic narratives of northwest coastal tribes, just made too much sense.

I whispered a blessing to Gary and was happy to be on my own again, resuming my slow walk down the misty 101, my lungs taking in the moist atmospheric alchemy of ocean and redwood.

I’m got easy and mostly uneventful rides on this early leg of the trip. These were easy days; the easiest of the journey.

And for a reason.

Dressed like a happy jester and throwing off vibes of zero-fucks in the world, I was in one of the most profound flow states of my life.

In this way, maybe I was medicine for the people who came to ferry me down each part of this unfathomable expedition. Each in their own way, perhaps, seeking a reminder that there was always a choice in their lives; a solitary but liberating path away from the structure and heaviness of the worldly world.

If they could unhitch themselves from their self-crafted yokes.

My next ride was a woman named Janice, who stopped and bolted twice before coming back. Unrolling her window she nervously offered:

“I’ve never picked up a hitchhiker before. Especially not a man. But you seem OK.”

I was more than OK.

Being out there, in that frame of mind, kept me in a frame of gratitude for each driver that stopped. This was medicine for me as well.

Being in that position of the grateful passenger, one is not required to speak and, in fact, quietly thanked for not filling the space and time with idle words. This freed me from my wild thoughts and devastating losses. Seen through fresh and unfamiliar eyes, I was a new person, with no past to qualify or quantify.

It could have been a radically different experience.

Before I found the check from my uncle Ian, I had been prepared to sleep in the forest and under bridges. And to fast until I was either offered or found food; I’d even bought a book on foraging, just in case. So these pick-ups were all magic, and with just under 5000 dollars in my possession, I knew he would always find a warm motel bed when that day’s rides had closed out.

There was a system of grace out there on the road and I finally understood why hitchhiking is romanticized as a metaphor for life.

After Janice were the two boys from Olympia who stole their parents car to go overnight mushroom picking in Oregon. A truck driver who blew a tire in the middle of a traffic jam in Portland, a home-schooling Mennonite family in a van. A traveling salesman. And one man who didn’t say a word and just dropped me at a Days Inn in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night.

But that first leg, with all its wonder and ease, came to an abrupt end on the fourth morning of the trip, when I walked out of that dingy Super 8 just outside of Bakersfield, CA. There was a pronounced shift in the vibe of the road and I felt exposed and vulnerable under the beating sun.

Things were about to get weird and hard, whether I was ready or not.

<Part IV>

OK, not-so-quick break from the action to explain one of the coolest hidden features I discovered about spacetime, the 1:1 domain. It does involve some theory and then an explanation of the tech, so if you want to skip this just drop down to the next set of dots (ellipses).

…

When our experience on Earth is viewed through a sharply reductionist lens, we perceive our world and its phenomena in its most ‘atomized’ component parts. Nature, the stars, and other people are like the gears and springs in an exquisite but purely mechanistic clock. It will always reliably tell us the time, but never offer insight into the origin or meaning of Time, itself.

Reductionism was a critical evolutionary development for Science. And a huge relief for those humans who viewed life as a dire, existential struggle against a dangerous and chaotic world. Starving from drought or dying of skin-ravaging plagues were real dangers for the majority of our evolution and our autonomic nervous systems are epigenetically programmed by these legacy terrors. Terrors that drove scientists to explore, map, and codify the complex systems that animate every aspect of Earth and its biological organisms. We finally became masters of our environment – and our own bodies – so that we could move on to more important things and no longer, as the great polemicist Christopher Hitchens once scolded me, ‘die of our teeth’.

A consequence of this progress was that interactions with nature and other humans were necessarily reduced to random, singular events that do not form a part of a larger narrative or system of meaning.

And for good reason.

Science was responding to, and mostly disqualifying, centuries of theocratic teaching. A process which, up until recently, was a very dangerous pursuit; punishable by exile, torture, or death. The only hope for the apostate astronomer, chemist, or physicist was to develop themselves into extremely precise and persuasive pitch-men, with friends in high places.

So naturally as Science emerged from the dungeon laboratories to become the dominant religion of the modern era, it evolved into a highly academic, proof-based practice that drew fiercely competitive players who had to defend each thesis that was under consideration by the Academy. There was zero-tolerance for mythological interpretations of non-typical events (aka miracles) – the supernatural wonders that ‘made’ the prophets who went on to inspire all the modern mainstream religions.

But there was a baby-and-bath-water facet to all of this.

Because while there can be no dispute about challenging Biblical or Koranic authority on a Dark Age sky-god’s edicts around astronomy and human biology – let alone punishments for routine acts like stealing, adultery, or homosexuality – Science’s militant rejection of all mystical experience spawned a reactionary fundamentalism (known as Scientism) that also negated the so-called animist or, more primordially, shamanic experience which operationally perceived ‘the world’ as a sentient and communicative realm. One in which every object from tea leaves to flocks of starlings to the constellations, became active talismans on a 3D immersive ouija board. But only for those who had undergone the rituals of initiation and preparation to gain the vision and sensitivity to decipher and interpret its messaging.

Harrowing stuff that was far out of the geek domain for bookish men and their magnifying glasses. Those big brains for whom my leap into the Mystery could only be classified as a fool’s errand. And that is why ‘science’ has never left us any clues or instructions about how to jailbreak the matrix.

That’s where we come in!

One reason it is critical that players keep a Players Log – see the Manual – is that in recording our various missions and journeys (even 30 years later), we are essentially laying down a topography and navigation system for those who come after.

We are also documenting the special features of spacetime that are unlocked through specific moves or acquired states, which could be of great help to newer players.

One of these is what I came to understand as the 1:1 domain which surfaces when a player has successfully passed through the initial stages of the level and are moving into the berth canal (which is the final stage, super challenging ‘experiential funnel’ that leads to level completion).

I don’t want to lose you dear reader in the mire of its technicality, but I hope you’ll bear with me because this is, as I said, one of the coolest parts of the game. Here goes the quick version:

The reality we experience day-to-day is a kind of projection mapped hologram that is generated by our entire human family and by our own unique signifier. Let’s not get hung up on that. I just needed to relay that so I could relay this:

At any given moment the world ‘around us’ is reflecting back our own ‘internal’ status. Its just a law of physics and the universe (as above so below, as within so without… its like a mirror).

Even if a person doesn’t believe any of this stuff, they’re still getting all sorts of signals and experiences that – if they cared or had the developed sensitivity to interpret them – are generated into the world which map to where they are at, internally. That’s why people go to therapists and psychics, to help them decipher the signals that they can’t or won’t see.

The most pop cultural of these are what we call ‘coincidences or ‘synchronicities’. You know what I am talking about. Everything from looking up at that clock that reads 11:11 when you have just hung up the phone from a project pitch that you know is your life’s work, to that book which has been calling you from the shelf of your boyfriend’s house for weeks, that turns out to contain a paragraph in the Introduction that directly relates to a problem you have been wrestling with for months.

[Or when you realize the address of the house you have been given in France to write your Player’s Log is 121.]

They are just figurative and literal artifacts that relate to what is going on inside of us. And to tell us where we’re at.

Think of them like constellations. Once a player develops the capacity to read them, they are awesome for figuring out where you are stuck or just to signal that you are right on the path. Because this game is hard and there are no road signs.

All that said, most of the time these signals are totally undecipherable, and that’s related to where we are at in relation to our matrix programming. If anywhere at all. The more rooted we are in the programming the less access we have. We don’t even see them. They’re there, but the mirror is more like a funhouse version.

But the closer the player is to what is called ‘the zero point’ – where the player is so far out ‘of the range’ that the broader, more cosmic reality bleeds through – the more clearly literal and figurative these signals become.

They go 1:1. And the player has entered the 1:1 domain.

I mean it gets fucking crazy.

And it doesn’t mean its a positive thing. Especially when, like me, I had all sorts of really unresolved wounds to deal with. But it does mean that you’re on the right track, and getting closer to the breakthrough. As I was about to find out.

…

So it was that when I stepped out of the Motel 6 outside Buttonwillow, California that morning, I could sense that the currents had shifted. Gone were the lush, womb-like forests and gentle flow of traffic in the northwest. Here I felt exposed and solitary, under a blazing sun and zooming freeway traffic; the kind of down-on-his-luck hitchhiker that I had never once stopped for in my entire life.

But I was still living the dream and traveling light – besides my clothes, all I had was my passport, my slowly depleting $5000 in a mix of cash and an Amex credit card with a freshly cleared 2K max, a map of the US, and for some reason a beat up copy of Channel Zero’s first issue, Planet Street.

In no hurry.

So I tightened the straps of my backpack and started walking south along the freeway. After an hour I crossed toward a gas station to buy some water.

As I came out, I could feel eyes on me and turned to see a dilapidated Chevy station-wagon awkwardly parked beside the air tanks. The windows were filled with clothing and books and appliances. A hoarder’s car by any definition. The passenger door swung open and a man (who clearly belonged to that car) waved his arms.

Shouting across the lot in a hoarse voice, “where you heading to?”

I kept my eyes lowered and shook my head, suddenly wishing I didn’t look so much like I needed a ride.

The man stumbled out of the car and ambled toward me.

“You going to LA?”
“No, definitely not LA,” surprised by my certain tone.
“I saw you come down the southbound side. You don’t want to be hitching on the south, man. Every ride worth getting from here on in is to LA.”
“Appreciate that.”

Good to know. I scanned the freeway, and saw a sign for the 58 heading east to Bakersfield. The man was now limping in lock-step beside me.

“I’ll make you a deal. You pay for gas and I’ll take you wherever you want. My name’s Dave. Good to meet you.”

Destiny Dave.

The words just surfaced in my mind like the name of a book I’d once read but long forgotten.

It was one of those exchanges just seemed so weirdly out-of-place and yet perfectly of-that-moment. A sign for sure that there was something in this for me.

Dave’s offer was loaded with a kind of karmic inversion.

I was in the middle of nowhere, had money and no ride.
Dave was in the middle of nowhere, had wheels and no money.
I was willing everything to destiny.
Dave was leaving destiny to a stranger’s will.

Destiny Dave. Why not.

“Ok, I’ll try one tank. What about we head east and see how far we get?”

“Sounds good. Can you help me with a push?”

A few minutes later I was riding with my feet raised on a pile of books and trash, my bag stuffed into the back seat, windows wide open to force a circulation of breathable air. Within the first few seconds of being in the car I knew it would be a short ride. If Dave’s car made it to an eastbound freeway, I’d consider the price worth it.

Destiny Dave was a ferryman, I was a passenger. Might as well have been crossing the river Styx.

Dave was a mumbler and a self-talker, which was fine because I was lost in thought. His warning, and my instinct, not to head to Los Angeles had shifted me out of wonder mode and into something more… solemn. Practicality had shouldered its way into my musings and the impulse to make some kind of plan took me over.

As we cleared the outskirts of Bakersfield and settled into a sputtery momentum through the arid expanse of the I-10, it suddenly became clear that this journey was not about hitching in circles around the United States, avoiding large cities.

I also knew I was definitely not heading back north into the dead of winter and Christmas eve. That left south and east. I pulled out the map and traced my finger along the 10 to the Florida coast.

Our family had owned a house on a small Bahamian island called Eleuthera that we lost in the forced sale of the steel business. But I knew the islands well and felt my hopes rise with a vision of working on a trade boat that crossed between one of the Florida ports and the archipelago. The thought of Eleuthera evoked a deep somatic memory. I spent some of the best Christmases of my childhood on those white sand beaches, under the crystalline blue skies.

Before the traumatic destruction of my nuclear family.

I suddenly thought of that scene from Contact where Ellie (Jody Foster’s character) is transported by aliens to a beach in Pensacola, Florida she once sketched as a child. There she encounters her father, who died when she was very young. The aliens use the emotional familiarity of the scene to place Ellie in a receptive state – where she will not be freaked out by the strangeness of ETs – to deliver their message about when Earthlings will be ready for contact.

For the first time, I acknowledged the pull of a deep driving desire to find my own alien contact. A silent recognition that maybe, beneath the archetypal framing of this journey as a mystical experiment to test the simulation, this was all a frantic prayer to those beings – who had set me on this otherworldly quest that had so separated me from my friends and family – to come rescue me.

The desperation of it hit me hard and I pushed it away.

I looked over at the crazy man in the driver’s seat. And I knew, he was me. Or, at least, a fragment of me that I had to accept and integrate if I was going to move past this quagmire in my life. This marooned state of paralysis and confusion and sadness. That much I had learned from my spiritual teachers.

Seeing Dave in that framework, and knowing that he was sent to force that recognition, offered an immediate return to a security in the meaningfulness of this journey.

It wasn’t pretty, but it was on message.

So I sat there, sending covert pulses of love and compassion for this manifestation of the deeply cracked part of my self. And when Dave started muttering about the heat and the tires and something to do with some other place he needed to be, I tapped him on the shoulder.

“We’re good Dave. You can let me off at the next gas station and go on your way.”
“You sure? We still got half a tank.”
“Yeah, I’m sure. You got me where I needed to go.”

And with that I watched a subtle wave of relief wash across his permanently furrowed brow. The recognition of his own gift from the universe, as rarely as they probably come to a man in his stage on the road of life.

I was filled with gratitude to be in a position to be that channel for another human being. And ready again to resume my own treasure hunt for the other lost unintegrated parts of my self… waiting for me out here in the Middle of No Where.

<Part V>

Midway through my fifth day on the road, I was in a surly mood from the hot sun, lack of food, and terrible luck with rides.

So much for zen and the art of hitchhikers guide to the galaxy.

I could feel the edge of distemper rising like steam in the roiling heat, the stern voice of reason (oh that poor neglected thing) berating its irrational counterpart for letting Destiny Dave get away. What had happened to that Siddharthian On The Road ethos that had originally got me off Christopher’s couch? I knew, of course. It was the gift of easy money from the spiritual dimension. I had been here before and knew how quickly hard times triggered the critic of my cosmic predestination.

But it was not without merit.

After leaving Dave I had made the rookie mistake of setting off along the 58 freeway, without consulting my map. Energized by the omen that he represented, I didn’t need to know where I was going or what lay ahead. After all, I was willing my self into a new destiny and when I was ready, the right ride would come to take me there.

But after three hours of walking and not seeing another living thing on that scorching road, the wonder started to flag. My extended thumb suddenly felt like a ridiculous gesture in the face of cars and trucks tearing past me at 100 mph. When I finally pulled out the map I saw that I was at least 20 miles from the next gas station. Based on my pace, I figured I had another five hours to go. I could just make it before nightfall. Or turn back.

Never one to retrace my steps, I decided to gut it out. But first I needed to eat. So I sat down on my pack to lick a melted Snickers bar out of its wrapper and drink the last of my water.

Stranded in this temporary Wasteland brought me into visceral awareness of just how fucked I would have been without that death money from my uncle Ian. It was one thing to play merry prankster on the logging roads of the temperate northwest, but down here in the desert bowl you could viscerally feel the mortal threat of exposure to the elements.

I could hear Bowie’s Changes in my head: So I turn my self to face me, but I’ve never caught a glimpse, of how the others must see the faker…

And then the quick response from that 5D part of my mind, that energizer bunny of positive self-reinforcement: Back off. The money came because you went all-in on the call. Stay in the magic.

Those affirmations helped bleed the toxicity out of my royal snit and I got moving again, settling into a steady trudge. Happy again to be alone and anywhere but in my former reality.

Right on time for Carl James to swerve his spotless maroon Caddy off the freeway. As the dust cleared, I watched with cautious hope as his huge torso leaned over to open the door for me. I was a sweaty mess and was sure he would balk when he saw my state, but ‘CJ’ was not one to doubt his marks.

“You out here doing research or something?” he asked after I had basked for a few minutes in his ice cold air conditioning.
“You could say that,” I laughed. “Why?”
“There are Greyhound buses that travel this route. By the looks of you, you could afford one if you wanted.”
“True,” was all I could muster. He didn’t press the point.
“I’m headed to Bullhead City, a few hours away. I can drop you there if you want.”

I didn’t have to check the map because I knew exactly where he was going. Over lunch I had had plenty of time to mull over my route to the Florida coast, which required that I drop down to the I-10. There was a southbound junction right around the turnoff the Bullhead City.

“Can you drop me at the Junction near Needles?”
“Sure thing.”

He gave me a long look and caught himself as he started to say something.

Oh no, I thought, this is the moment I get asked if I’ll turn a truck stop trick.

But CJ just gave me a wistful look and turned up the volume on his CD player to cut the silence. A soft, gravelly male voice was talking about the mathematics of gambling, specifically a set of rules for hitting-and-standing, doubling down, and pair-splitting in blackjack. I had been making risky bets with my business life since my 20s, but never did any actual Vegas-style gambling. I immediately found the subject fascinating.

CJ picked up on it.

“Edward Thorp. Kind of a guru. Wrote the book on probability theory and card counting.”
“Huh. Do you gamble?”
He nodded with a hesitancy that required a confession.
“I’m on the road a lot.”

Again, his eyes rested a little too long on my face like I was evoking some lost memory. But it wasn’t an unsettling feeling. Somehow I felt an immediate comfort with him, in his massive plush car, and smiled inwardly at the speed which realities can shift and with them, my mortal moods.

Ed Thorp continued talking, seamlessly weaving lessons about gambling with investing and the game of life itself. It wasn’t cheesy stuff, he came off as scientific in his applications of data to risk-management. Then he said something that returned me to that sense of being in the pocket of some all-powerful experiential dealer, who could manipulate the artifacts of spacetime to suit specific contexts of my inward journey:

“I wondered how my research into the mathematical theory of a game might change my life. In the abstract, life is a mixture of chance and choice. Chance can be thought of as the cards you are dealt in life. Choice is how you play them.“

Chance and choice. Destiny and will. That theme again. It was my turn to gaze off into the desert, possessed by the background inventory that my rational mind was incessantly conducting. In an effort to reconcile the madness of it all with some semblance of procedural linearity.

This happened then this and then this and then this.

Ed Thorp’s gambling metaphors forced me to reckon with the incredible degree of chance that had dealt me the hand of Channel Zero – with my amazing team, the crazy series of breaks and insane PR, not to mention a million-five in cash. It was like I had been dealt straights and full houses but instead of playing it safe, each time I pushed them back and asked for 5 more cards. And threw all my chips onto the table. Betting it all on…

Aliens and channelers and prophecies of 5D revolutions.

I’m telling you, no matter how committed or seasoned the player, these moments of revisionism never stop doing your head in. Especially when hearing it from the perspective of a savvy gambler-turned-investor who had learned to game the system and won big.

With calculated risks.

I too had tried to game the world. But there was no calculation in any part of my method. I was running purely off emotion and instinct, buying into a belief system that said this whole thing was a played-out theme park… that a true player could exit entirely. And now I had bet it all on this last run of the table.

How is that going for you? I heard the rational mind query from the depths.

And again, out of that 5D part of my consciousness, came that quiet but authoritative voice, reminding me what I knew in the deepest part of my self:

I never had a choice. There was no will involved. I had been locked into this play from the moment the Pleiadians had fed me their orgone-scanned chicken breast and 6th-dimensionally unhooked me from my fear of abandonment.

And there in CJ’s awesome ride, a small but critical distinction washed through me like a spiritual enema.

My liberation wasn’t from the fear of people abandoning me, it was me abandoning people. Which I had done with wild abandon. Like some newly-initiated member of the Wizarding world who could no longer suffer the low-vibe trappings of Muggledom and its unwitting inhabitants of a paper-thin simulated ‘reality’.

A reality that has engineered its obedience through the precise application of one terrorizing possibility:

That if you didn’t fucking behave, you would end up right where I was now:

Alone and disavowed and heading into some uncharted oblivion because of a voice that keeps telling you to step further out on the edge.

Both 1) the literal definition of madness and 2) the critical instrument for the matrixian jailbreaker who must at some point escape the gravitational pull of consensual reality to have any real chance of success.

Of course the line between those two is essentially non-existent.

Which is exactly the point. That’s the high stakes game we are playing. And there are pitfalls and trapdoors everywhere for the earnest player.

For me perhaps especially.

Because there was more to this story than me ham-handedly middle-fingering the worldly world with my careless ET/5D prophecy disclosures. Along the way I had also thrust a dagger into the umbilical chord that connected me to one of the most – if not THE most – vital connections to my terrestrial life. The kind of cut that can be extremely dangerous psychologically and materially for the player if executed too early or from the wrong mindset.

And that is the severing of tethers to our earthly parents.

You see, in the 26 months between my return from the Cairo-Cape Town trek and the launch of Channel Zero, I had watched my father become increasingly distant and unable to summon even token support for my newfound path. Granted it was pretty erratic. In that time I had applied and been rejected by law schools, become a bike courier, run off to Vancouver Island with my erratic girlfriend-soon-to-be-wife to become a writer (transforming again into a salesman at a high-end indigenous art gallery), only to return to Toronto and suddenly switch to self-taught videographer/editor and globe-trotting channel launcher.

[By which point we had become so distant that he was spared hearing any of my ET narratives.]

Suffice it to say, in his own Icarian plummet to Earth, his once-exuberant exhortations to seize the moment and the world on my own terms had retreated into a deep concern that he may not have adequately prepared his eldest son for the world outside the enclave of our all-providing family business. But I took it all personally. Perhaps even more so because I felt so much of my newfound courage to break the family programming had been directly unleashed by his sanctioned year away in Africa.

Add to the mix the work I had been doing with Don Chef on reclaiming my childhood, one fraught with unpredictable type-A CEO stress eruptions and authoritarian disciplining sessions – a carbon copy of what he had been subjected to in his own adolescence – and, in the shadow of his approval (and the wake of my growing repudiation of all things terrestrial), I started to develop a narrative that tied my father’s psychological abuse and parental neglect to the demonic forces that were running the matrix.

An accusation I leveled at him at the end of a lunch I had initiated in a crowded restaurant in downtown Toronto.

I know that’s a lot to dump on the reader out of the blue and in a few short paragraphs. So you can imagine how he felt. There’s actually more to it that can’t be reasonably relayed here without derailing this current thread of the story. But all that matters is that once I was done with my way-too-calm prosecution, he staggered out of the restaurant and did not talk to me for several years. A reaction that fueled my righteous disavowal of him and the elites who were consciously or unconsciously protecting the current order by sabotaging the bodies, minds, and spirits of its (r)evolutionaries.

Like me.

[Probably not the first time a prodigal son has misdirected his repudiation of sky gods towards their worldly fathers, or visa versa. As above, so below.]

When George Emerson – the journalist who wrote The Channeler article – discovered my family background and the loss of Marshall Steel, he used it to psychologize the episodes of quixotic and unhinged behavior he selectively catalogued from Channel Zero’s quick rise and fall. And found in my estranged father an expert witness:

And so – without any context for our fractured relationship – the entire origin story for my ethos and radicalized worldview was landed squarely in the pattern of my own father’s road to ruin: unresolved anger at our family’s enemies and the impulse to avenge our financial wounds.

By that time, it was fine with me. Better than alien contactee with daddy issues.

This was the psychic topography I was lost in as CJ pulled the caddy over at the Needles junction.

“This is you,” he said, with a tone that almost sounded like regret.

And then, after I thanked him and opened the back door to grab my backpack:

“I have a son your age who I haven’t seen for a long time. You reminded me so much of him when I saw you walking on the side of the road, I thought you might be him. Glad I picked you up anyway.”

I was too. And while the synchronous experience of riding with an estranged father while thinking of my own broken ties was not enough to inspire an attempt at reconciliation from the road, it did plant a recognition in me of the integral pain a parent can feel from the loss of a child. And the instinct to throw them a lifeline, no matter what the circumstances of their disaffection.

Because when the time came, I was going to need it.

<PART VI>

After CJ dropped me, I found a Motel 6 in Needles and crashed hard into a deep, dreamless sleep. The kind that leaves the player with a sense of having been jettisoned from their avatar for some appointed cosmic link-up; wiped from memory but with a regenerating spa visit on the way back.

So it was that I woke to my sixth day with a rekindled sense of purpose and alignment. Digging into a huge breakfast at an old skool roadhouse called Jedro’s Wagon Wheel, I caught up on my trip notes and felt like Jack Kerouac scribbling my plan to drop south to the 10 and then head to the coast to find a boat.

If I got the right lifts, I could be there for Christmas Day.

[The reality was that I had only two more rides before my hitchhiking adventure would be over, and I wasn’t going to be leaving on any damn boat. Oh, the best laid plans of mice and astronauts…]

The food was so good at Jedro’s, I stayed for lunch and then took a leisurely amble over to the junction where historic Route 66 crosses the 95. I couldn’t have been there for more than an hour when Noah stopped in his dark red converted pick-up.

I told him where I was headed and he beamed with a cherubic smile. There was an strange enthusiasm in his movements as he jumped out and opened the hatch-back for my bag, placing it carefully next to a bed roll and camping supplies that were neatly stowed.

The old pick-up needed runway to get speed and I smiled at Noah’s gentle verbal coaxing of the sticky gears. When he finally veered onto the freeway he beamed at me like a ten year-old who had just skyed his first kite.

He had a southern drawl that was cinematically Gumpian, and his pale blue eyes had a distant absorbent quality that made you want to confess all your worldly sins. Which I would have lots of time to do, since he was heading to Ciudad Juárez, just across the border from El Paso. Ten hours worth of driving that Noah said he wanted to cover in one shot.

“I’ll make sure to get you to a good motel before I bed down with the truckers at the border,” he assured me.
“You go there often?” I asked.
“Once a month I make the trip from Searchlight, where I live.”
“Searchlight, that’s a place?”
“Sure is, home of senator Harry Reid.”

And that was the most I got out of him. For the next few hours Noah conducted an expertly meandering interrogation – I’m telling you he could have been Forrest’s character study – that maneuvered me into the one place I had so far avoided on this trip; Channel Zero territory. I’d been living and hyping that story for 2 years and it only led to bad feelings. The part of me that was running this jailbreak had no stake in any of the ambition and ego that had fueled the enterprise. In fact, though I had never said it to my self: the subtext of this suicide mission was to kill off that part of me that had.

And there hadn’t been one moment since I hit the road that I felt any urge to talk about it.

But Noah’s gee-gosh-golly reactions to each innocent question (starting at where did you grow up? and ending at what kind of work do you do?) somehow led to:

“How does a person with no training get to have their own film company?”
“Well, they sort of need to have a camera and be at the right place at the right time.”
“And where were you?”
“A crack house in Belize City.”

I’d like to say that I thought long and hard before answering that question, but I knew I was going to tell him before it came out of his mouth. I even knew that this was the reason he had stopped to pick me up. Because like Forrest once said:

So I avoided Noah’s wide-eyed stare and did my best to pretend like I hadn’t just opened a biographical confetti cannon. Oh, so many questions. Where to start? Noah’s expression assured me, we have all the time in the world.

The obvious place was back in February of 1995, the period after my return from Sedona.

It’s worth noting here for the player who is planning on speedrunning the simulation that, in my experience, whenever I have absorbed what – in the duality illusion of spacetime – appears as an ‘slight’ or an attack on the ego and treated it as a self-generated event, there has been a reward. Its like unlocking an easter egg in your favorite video game by performing a system of moves that then opens up a whole other set of experiences in the game that would have otherwise remained hidden.

In this case its a kind of zen thing where the player, operating from the higher-level understanding that other avatars are observer-generated (and thus all contributing agents to their jailbreak), does not lash out at the offenders but instead withholds any emotional pain and processes it through the lens of a game. Of the game. And not through the matrix-conditioned perspective of a chaotic meaningless world in which random things happen to good people and the only way to prevent ‘injury’ is by punishing ‘adversaries’ – even if they are family or soul mates.

Make sense?

It’s a hard one and it gets especially harder when people are devastatingly hurt by other avatars. But this is a vital thing to grasp because the deeper the wound, the greater the gift. When non-players take the injuries personally and lash back out to the matrix, they are just returned to the familiar existential loop in which there is no escape from the endless ‘karmic wheel’ of cause-and-effect that is material reality.

Not a realization I came to with any level of ease, as I will relay in further parts of this story.

That said, luckily I had just come off an impromptu session of Pleiadean 6th-dimensional brain surgery and a full night of self-run attachment-clearing at on the floor at O’Hare airport, so when I walked in on my then-wife and her boss at our studio I knew just how to (not) react.

I left them to deal with their shit and then returned a few hours later with nothing but love in my heart and wonder in my eyes and the full conviction that things would work themselves in time. Soon after that I got a very clear vision – the gift – that I was to stop looking for part-time videographer gigs and just use my newly-bought video editing station (Power Macintosh 8100!) to create a film festival for local film-makers who did not have access to the tech. I would charge them a small submission fee for editing their footage renting the screening space.

I named the festival Persistence of Vision, got a slate of films lined up and paid my rent. In what would prove to be an omen of things to come, I managed to hype the thing enough to got some local press in The Toronto Star:

On the night of the screening, my wife, who had become increasingly annoyed at my non-reactionary state, spent the night with one of my friends high on mushrooms. And I met a guy after the show who needed someone to make a film of him racing his Land Rover through the jungle in Central America.

A few weeks later she had moved out and I was on a plane to Belize City to shoot the Camel Trophy: Mundo Maya.

[Well, I wasn’t going to shoot it. Even I knew my limits and given that the driver had resources, was able to hire a super-talented friend named Bill Stone to shoot it on a broadcast-quality camera (I was still using Super-8 film and my hi-8 Handycam).]

Now the Camel Trophy – for the uninitiated – was a genius marketing plan conceived by some agency creative to avoid losing one of their major clients when the US and other countries started their hard press on banning all forms of tobacco advertising. Why not create a massive international off-road race with a high-profile vehicle maker (Land Rover), stick Camel logos all over the Rovers, and then invite the world press to exotic locations to ‘cover’ the extravaganza. I wasn’t quite aware of just how toxic the whole thing was until we arrived for the launch party inside an ancient Mayan ruin, with videos of the jeeps crashing through virgin rainforest projected on the walls of the temple.

While Bill was shooting the festivities, I started interviewing drunk media reps and getting magical sound-bites. An idea started to form… what if I made a subversive film about the race from within the belly of the beast?

The next day while the teams were getting set to hit the jungle, I was walking around with my small camera shooting commentary. Until one of the organizers caught me beside the helicopter making some remark about the race costing more than the GDP of Belize and I ended up on a bus back to Belize City.

Once there I started looking for locals who could provide some color commentary about the Camel Trophy and ecotourism. It didn’t take long before I ran into a fast-talking ‘shoeshine technician’ named Robert Pitts. We arranged to meet for an interview and while his critiques on post-colonial exploitation and ecological destruction were lucid, it was his poetic self-analysis that really got me.

We agreed to meet again that night to smoke some weed and shoot more. When I found him at the appointed hour, he led me to and abandoned house in Belize City and handed me a small baggie of pot. I asked if he had a pipe and he fished into his pockets and pulled out a short glass tube stained with a familiar black resin.

“This is all I have, I can show you how to use it.”

Oh I knew how to use it.

“You smoke rock, Robert?”

He nodded with that sheepish full-body junkie shrug that looked like he was holding the world on his shoulders. A deep hood Atlas, one toke away from a fleeting but skyscraping liberation that was the closest thing to jailbreaking the matrix that 20th century NPC humans had access to.

It was a feeling I knew well. Despite my buttoned-up privileged private school upbringing – or perhaps I should say, in spite of it – I had been introduced to crack cocaine at an early age. It was a part of a secret life that had been cultivated in another place, in another room, not so different from the one we were in now.

With a man who could have been Robert’s brother.

Sticking pot into a crack pipe meant you were smoking crack, which I’m pretty sure Robert was aware of. Smokers were always looking for their friends. And it was not something I was averse to either. Crack had a way of finding me in these worlds.

But I had other motives beyond my own narcotic pleasure. This was a harrowing realm that I was uniquely suited to navigate. And guiding a crack binge on-camera with a person as well-spoken and self-aware as Robert had the potential to bring forth elevated truths about what it feels like being stuck in this labyrinthine mortal coil.

And it was about to blast my little movie to a whole new level.

I dropped the baggie of pot on the floor and put out my hand.

“Mind if I join you?”