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 pay for 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 fast 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 special 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’ – my behaviors and experiential reality – to that fear.

At that time I was 25 and still very much the product of my elite, WASP/patriarchal, 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 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, could be seen as reckless frequency. By the time I landed back in Toronto and burst excitedly through the door of my west-city studio, I found my wife with her boss rushing around in a shocked and guilty two-step.

My immediate reaction was total joy.

Deprogrammed enough from the chord-cutting to longer be accessed by the 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. A deep, intrinsic part of my self had known the relationship was massively dysfunctional from its start, but 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, and a victim of her own familial programming – try to keep us together. But I had tasted something that was so new and liberating, I knew I had to unravel 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 I had suddenly ‘found myself’ in front of at the local bookshop. They were billed as channeled materials from Pleiadians that – in a non-sophisticated style – essentially explained spacetime reality as a kind of intermediary experiential platform which was:

a) engineered,

b) designed to inhibit its occupants’ grasp of its mechanics and origin,

c) alterable based on the individual’s mastery of energy and intention, and

d) permeable by ‘higher’ or extra-terrestrial agents who could exercise interventions on behalf of certain individuals who were here for more than merely existing.

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 that had been given a few months earlier, of a person who was supposedly an ‘energy healer’.  His name was Don Chef.

I left a rambling message, explaining his 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 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 responded. ‘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 a lot 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.

[It is a process that I still use today. Though without a guide, I am relegated to using it to blast kundalini energy into my pineal gland for my health and 5D-perceptual benefits.]

Thus the ascendance of Channel Zero ran in parallel with near-weekly sessions with Don (and the prophecy from the Sedonans), which 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.

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

Flash forward to 1997, a cold and rainy December on Vancouver Island, where I have been camped out for months in small cabin that my 10-year younger brother Christopher and his college mates were renting. My daze now spent reading books and smoking a lot of weed, trying to make sense of just what the fuck happened to my life. But my mother 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 determinist 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 take the energy of the system impulse 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’.

And then it hit.

I would test Siddhartha’s maxim and in so doing, simultaneously force the invisible hand of the sentient terrestrial simulation. To see if it would blink in the face of my denial of (its subdomain) the matrix’s power to determine human actions through fear of economic hardship and social judgment. I was very clear that if I conditioned the ‘psychic territory’ of my mission with the right intention that I would maximalize the potential of the effort.

So I cast my alms and stated my game to the Pleiadian guardians. And then announced to my mother that I was heading south to a warmer climate.

This conversation repeated itself for about an hour before my poor mother grew very agitated. Not the kind of distress that arises from frustration with a stubborn child, but rather that of a parent discovering they may be autistic or bi-polar. The fact that this was happening on the edge of my thirtieth year probably wasn’t any more reassuring, but she had no choice. I had been given the plan and set the departure date for December 14.

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 a psychic hit to check the mailbox. Which was weird because I hadn’t ever 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. 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 otherworld – and her own deceased brother – that I was meant to do this only exacerbated her frustration.

And strengthened my resolve.

If there had been any lingering doubts or compassion for my mother’s anxiety about spirit-jumping into the matrix, this demolished them. The sheer sense of elation I was riding 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 self-selecting individuals inside the simulation to accelerate their learning.

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>