On March 4, 1971, Terence and Dennis McKenna conducted their experiment at La Chorrera, in which they experienced contact with an apparent extraterrestrial higher-dimensional logos, by ingesting a psychotropic concoction as part of an idiosyncratic ritual, a harbinger of ever escalating high weirdness.

Between July and August of 1973, Timothy Leary conducted a group telepathy experiment while incarcerated at Folsom Prison, resulting in supposed contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence from the future, delivering a message which Leary then transmitted under the name “StarSeed”.

On July 23, 1973, Robert Anton Wilson began experiencing contact with a higher intelligence from the Sirius star system which continued until around October 1974.

In 1974, John Lilly came to believe in a network of cosmic entities, and that he had achieved contact with the local representatives: E.C.C.O. (Earth Coincidence Control Office)

On February 20, 1974, Philip K. Dick experienced a transference of cosmic information from a Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS), which continued throughout February and March of ’74.

And that’s just off the top of my head!
WTF was going on in the early 70’s??

To hazard a guess, these were all exceptionally bright people enveloped in a countercultural zeitgeist of sci-fi psychedelia, living in a world where Woodstock just landed on the moon, and Spaceship Earth was undeniably on the verge of something HUGE. So when their imaginations became exposed to extreme circumstances, by hook or crook, they envisioned new kinds of gods, networked cosmic intelligences. (Basically anticipating the internet?)

Worth noting that these experiences all went on to inspire very influential books and systems of thought. To whatever extent these were actually pathological breaks from reality, they have functioned in our culture as successful visionary revelations.

Though in this there is most certainly a survivor’s bias at play. For every Robert Anton Wilson, who carefully navigated the destabilizing consequences of psychotomimetic experiences, and extracted useful and entertaining life lessons along the way, how many less fortunate souls maybe got less admirable results?

COSMIC TRIGGER WARNING: Self Harm

On March 26, 1997, the bodies of 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult were discovered in a house just outside of San Diego, having participated in a ritual mass suicide, orchestrated as part of an extraterrestrial/metaphysical belief system, in which they hoped to board a spaceship trailing the Comet Hale–Bopp.

Okay, so that may feel a bit out of left field, let’s step back a sec…

In March of 1972, Marshall Applewhite & Bonnie Nettles met and pursued a spiritual quest that eventually resulted in apparent contact with an extraterrestrial divine intelligence that bestowed upon them a mission to fulfill biblical prophesy by dying, being resurrected, and ascending bodily to a literal, physical heaven, on an actual spacecraft.

In 1974, the “cult of cults”, what would eventually become known as Heaven’s Gate, was formed.

This timeline places “The UFO Two” firmly in the High Weirdness cluster of the early 70’s.

So I guess pretty obviously I recently watched the Heaven’s Gate documentary on HBO, and before even catching on about the funky 70’s stuff, noticed a weirdly familiar vibe in the archival footage, which felt like a southern preacher’s imitation of Timothy Leary’s guru schtick.

Or even one of those especially weird, self-transforming-machine-elf workshop events Terence McKenna would put on, except at the end of the UFO cult show these cats took off with half of the audience to go live in the woods!

The Two apparently ran an alternative spiritual bookshop in the early 70’s, so maybe were familiar with some of the psychedelic literature of the time. Their visionary experience is hypothesized as resulting from an LSD trip, so there may be more than coincidence at play here.

They referred to “beliefs” as “programming” which seems like it could have been taken directly from John Lilly’s work. They also seemed to have a general sense of the concept of reality tunnels, or more specifically that people viewed the world according to their programming. Which I suppose shouldn’t be much of a surprise, since cults depend on deconstructing existing belief systems. So if they say your concept of self and reality is illusory, it has the ring of truth, but then can use that as a wedge to instill far grander delusions.

Sort of like if you watch a Charles Manson interview, and half the time he’s doing a folksy Alan Watts routine, which attempts to disarm you for the more direct sociopathic manipulation.

In “Everything is Under Control” RAW reports that Applewhite and Nettles, then going by the names “Bo” and “Peep” walked out of a lecture he was giving in Houston in 1978. At the time they were identified as “leaders of a typical UFO contact cult.”

Terence McKenna also reported early familiarity with The Two:
“I couldn’t believe the way in which the media portrayed the Heaven’s Gate people as very careful thinkers, very reasonable people — I mean, I heard about this thing in 1975. Somebody said, ‘Hey, there are these two people who are running around who say that they’re off a spacecraft. You wanna go see?’ [extremely irked voice] ‘NO!'”

There’s home video footage of members in the 90’s driving home after holding a public meeting, wherein their message got pretty decisively rejected by those in attendance, and they are clowning on a particularly critical dude deemed too dumb to receive their truth, they mock him as a “bonehead,” much to their own delight.

Generally speaking, it is pretty difficult to see the irrationality of our own unexamined assumptions, by proxy, I glimpsed the bars of a Black Iron Prison.

I suspect the sheer magnitude of the infamy generated by the media circus that surrounded the discovery of the mass suicide presented itself as a fulfillment of prophesy to many of the ex-members who were left behind. Several of whom took their own lives in belated attempts to join in on the space rapture.

Perhaps the most haunting aspect of the documentary is the running commentary from a left behind lapsed member who remains convinced he fucked up and missed out on spiritual ascension.

On April 22, 1997, one month after the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide, Timothy Leary’s ashes were launched into space on a Pegasus rocket.

“We are sending a comet to your solar system as a sign that the time has come to look to the stars.”

An excerpt from Timothy Leary’s StarSeed Transmission, which in hindsight, makes the 1997 appearance of Hale–Bopp Comet a very strange dot to connect amongst the stars, but the better view might be a bit more Earthbound.

As someone who spends quite a bit of time in mental and digital ideaspaces, I can sometimes accidentally fall into the error of treating my body like a vehicle that carries my mind around. Not as a conscious ideology, like the Heaven’s Gate cult, but just as a consequence of having an introverted personality w/ an interest in computers and art, esp during quarantine. (This was written in the Summer of 2021.)

What’s the opposite of alienation? Reconciliation?

So my take away from all this is a reminder to return to my body more often, and maybe not just pour coffee into myself in front of a screen until somehow productivity starts to happen!

RAW’s take away was basically that they would have remained harmless weirdos, except the fallout from the Waco massacre pushed them over the edge, which the doc also touches on.

The documentary takes a sympathetic view, depicting the members as basically regular people who were just kind of unlucky.

Terence McKenna, as noted earlier, was much more sick of this type of shit, having been around the paranormal block maybe a few too many times, and thought we shouldn’t be shy about calling out harmful nonsense, with the caveat being we should also notice how much of our culture is comprised of equally absurd notions.

(Also, I kind of like how TM refuses to break kayfabe and acknowledge that his whole thing is having the wildest nonsense around!)
 
The balkanization of epistemology continues unabated, and ultimately these are just fragments of an unknowable big picture, so it goes!

A Skeleton Key to THE DRAGON’S GIFT

While I was waiting in a super long line to get a sketch from John Romita Jr. a nice old man struck up a convo with me about comics. He asked me about my favorite characters and stories, which at the time were Spider-Man all the way. So we talked extensively about all things web-headed while the line slowly moved forward. Eventually he would shake my hand and wish me well, then he walked behind the table and sat down to start a signing session. Wait, what? Lo and behold that whole time I was talking to Jazzy Johnny himself! John Romita Sr., what a nice guy :)))

So now it’s time to get my sketch from JRJR and I requested a drawing of Wolverine, which he sketched out first in rapid pencil lines, creating a faint image of Wolverine chomping on a cigar.

As he’s drawing he keeps yelling things across the aisle.

He then switches over to a marker to ink his Wolverine sketch while his yelling across the aisle becomes more frequent and much louder. Then I notice an absolutely unmistakable voice is screaming back! It turns out I’m stuck in the middle of a shouting match between JRJR & Mr. T!

I can’t really tell if they’re joking or not! JRJR is cracking up the whole time, so probably? Maybe? IDK!

JRJR is yelling to Mr. T that actually he is the one who is a fool, contrary to popular belief, and that JRJR, in fact, pities Mr. T.
A dubious claim to be sure!

I walked away with my super awesome Wolverine sketch and not sure what to make of anything anymore :)))

Additional contextual support for THE DRAGON’S GIFT

1.) IMAGE SUCKS

My neighbor was a super big time comic book collector. One of those guys that would buy 3-5 copies of EVERYTHING that came out on a weekly basis, and boasted a comic collection of hundreds of thousands of issues, with complete collections of numerous big name titles. He also had a subscription to the Comic Buyers Guide, which in those days was printed like a newspaper and delivered bi-weekly through the mail. After he was finished with it he’d pass it along to me, and I loved it!

To a 12 year old it felt like I was getting a real look behind the curtain at the workings of the industry. Probably mostly it was advertisements and public relations, mixed in with some genuine heartfelt fandom. In any case, I loved it, esp Peter David’s “But I digress…” column.

CBG was, generally speaking, not particularly crazy about Image Comics.

Back in those days the creation of Image was defined in much different terms than it is today. These days the creation of Image is rightfully celebrated as a revolutionary victory for creators’ rights. But that wasn’t the discussion I was hearing back then, so far as I knew, Image was about writers vs. artists & style vs. substance.

The Image stance, from what I understood, was that the art was more important than the story, which I very much disagreed with! And my experience of those early Image books was, sure it looks cool, but the stories are so dumb.

At Comicfest ’93 Peter David & Todd McFarlane participated in “The Great Debate” which I didn’t attend, but assumed was in regards to this disharmony between writers and artists.

Though actually the debate was about whether Image had been treated fairly by the media.

The fact that I had no clue at the time that Image had anything to do with creators’ rights suggests maybe they were not treated fairly after all.

Maybe I was being fed bad info from a comics media with a vested interest in maintaining corporate hegemony?

Or maybe I was a kid who misread the situation?

Or maybe there actually was a genuine antagonism between some artists and some writers in the industry, which the creation of Image exacerbated?

Most likely a heady mixture of all of the above and then some!

So basically, when I said “Image sucks” I thought I was saying that I valued substance over style, but it turns out not to have been so simple :)))

2.) MY HAT

In the comic I am sporting an Atlanta Braves baseball cap, which by itself is pretty unremarkable, but at the con itself caused quite a commotion, because this event happened to coincide with the Philadelphia Phillies playing against the Atlanta Braves in the 1993 NLCS.

I came by my Braves fandom somewhat honestly, with a step brother from Georgia, and my Dad’s cable service only coming with 10 channels, 1 of them being TBS. The Braves were on TV every goddamn day and I was lured in by their winning ways. Also, at school, it was considered pretty dorky to root for the home team, and it was much preferred to have your own team.

Wearing a Braves cap at that time & place was considered treason, probably especially with the ’93 Phils being so super cool & beloved that their legend has only grown in the decades that have followed.

The Phillies would go on to beat the Braves 4 games to 2 and advance to the World Series. So the last laugh was def on me!

3.) The Comics

The original Savage Dragon mini-series, at that point in time, was pretty damn expensive. All 3 issues were def wall books at Comicmania, my local comic book shop.  All told Larsen’s gift probably cost him at least $25, which seemed like a fortune to a 12 year old in 1993.

Also, now that I think about it, this experience almost certainly led directly to this one.

Take another candy-colored head trip through koan-fusing adaptations of psychedelic memes, both ancient & modern, in this magically curated comix collection!

Come explore the outer reaches of inner space! #FINDTHEOTHERS :)))