“Understanding that boundary-shattering experience became fundamental to what I was doing, and I began to lose myself, to blur the limits between what was real and what was conceivable.
What happened to me can be interpreted in any number of ways. To some, it’s sure to read as just one more trip story with no relevance to the material world. Occultists of a certain persuasion will recognize the knowledge and conversation of the holy guardian angel. My experience comfortably fit the profile for alien abduction reports, angelic contact, and temporal lobe epilepsy. None of these “explanations” for what I saw, coming as they did from a lower-resolution, flatter universe, could truly do my experience justice. Where higher dimensions are implicated, it’s wise to remember the story of the blind men and the elephant and assume that all attempts to frame Kathmandu in 3-D terms are in some way absolutely true. But if it makes it easier to deal with, feel free to assume I hallucinated the whole thing and went completely, gloriously, and very lucratively mad.
I stopped piling up rationalizations and instead dealt with what could be proven about this event, which was its undeniably positive effect on my life. Kathmandu fundamentally reprogrammed me and left me with a certainty stronger than faith that everything, even that which was sad and painful, was happening exactly the way it was supposed to.
All will be well, all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.
Years of living in a materialistic culture and of outwardly giving in to a kind of culturally enforced pessimism have left me with a more twenty-first-century, grounded view of that day in the Vajra.
Let’s say there’s a developmental level of human consciousness that was once almost mythical—Jesus, Buddha, and Allah experienced it—but which is now more freely available to a much larger percentage of the general human population, thanks to the easy bookstore and online availability of “magical” recipes and formulas, and of consciousness-altering methods.
Children of five are developmentally unable to see perspective, while children of seven can. Twelfth-century artists were unable to render vanishing points on two dimensions, while fifteenth-century painters had mastered the trick to create convincing simulations of reality. Do civilizations follow the same growth and decline curve as human organisms with the same holographic imprint reiterating through all scales?
I can see how the sudden shock of accessing a natural holistic five-dimensional perspective might strike an unprepared human nervous system as contact with an alien intelligence; a “higher”-order entelechy. As far as the brain is concerned, that’s exactly what it is. New neural pathways are being seared into the cortex by the demands of this way of seeing. I think the rational mind tries to make sense of its new perspective—as a child makes sense of the inner voice of dawning self-awareness by theorizing an imaginary playmate—by framing it in images of the alien, the uncanny, or the demonic. The fact that some people who’ve had this wake-up call report having seen aliens, while others saw Jesus, or the Devil or dead relatives, fairies or angels, suggests that the details are culturally determined.
What’s important about this experience is not whether there are “real” aliens from a fifth-dimension heaven where everything is great and we’re all friends. There may well be, but I have no real proof. Much of what I went through even makes sense within the current framework of string theory, with its talk of enclosed infinite vaults, its hyperdimensional panoramas of baby universes budding in hyperspace. The aliens are the least of it.
My Kathmandu vision of planet Earth’s singular living form, that cosmic only child whose brain cells we are, on the other hand, requires no belief in the supernatural. Simply add the time dimension to your contemplation of life, look backward down your own history and family tree, all the way to the original mother cell three and a half billion years over your shoulder from here, and tell me if you can find one single join, or a seam, or any break.
This for me was bigger than any ultradimensional or quasi-religious afterlife, which I wouldn’t be able to confirm until I died and either woke up back among the blobs or didn’t. I couldn’t deny that I was a tiny, short-lived temporary cell in something very, very big and very old. I even saw how that brute connection to every living thing might explain away the “supernatural” mysteries of things like telepathy or reincarnation as simple, direct connections between distant branches of the same majestic tree, like the tingle in your toe that sends a message to your brain, which launches your hand to scratch the itch.
I was deep inside my own story, further than I could have imagined. My sister covered my bedroom wardrobe with a collage of comics pages so that every time I faced my reflection, I appeared as one more panel in a tarot spread of scattered pages and images, part human, part fiction, a Gnostic superhero in PVC, shades, and shaved head.
As for drugs, I sampled various psychedelic compounds in the waning years of the nineties, hoping to re-create the Kathmandu connection. I was willing to write off the whole thing as some very enjoyable drug trip, but I never found a substance capable of reproducing that place, and I eventually gave up.
I was left with a stubborn conviction that when I died, my consciousness would start awake there, with the same shock of the utterly familiar, the same thrill-ride buzz of a job well done.
The initial shock of all this was replaced by a period of voices in the head, uncanny synchronicities, signs and dreams and remarkable new insights. I was haunted, inspired, possessed. I could lie on my bed, intone a homemade spell or evocation, and be transported to a convincing wraparound representation of a higher-conscious vibration where an infinite circle of golden Buddha beings solemnly overlook a white abyss into which the entire universe is funneling like water down a drain. It was even better than an issue of Warlock.
Each and every experience, even the ego-destroying blind terrors, went into the work, enriching The Invisibles and JLA a thousandfold. It was proof of the old saying “Where there’s muck, there’s brass.” In an imagination economy, where ideas, trademarks, and intellectual properties held incalculable value, the coruscating quarry face of the interior world was the place to be. There was gold in them thar ghost mines.
I even tried to consider Kathmandu in terms of the fashionable idea that temporal lobe seizures could trigger authentic “religious” experiences. This sounded even better than 5-D angels. If science had identified a purely physical brain trigger for holistic god consciousness, would it not be in our own best interests to start pressing this button immediately and as often as we can? What would happen to the murderers and rapists in our prisons if we could stimulate a temporal lobe god-contact experience that caused them to empathize with everything in the universe? If electrical spasms in the temporal lobe are indeed capable of such remarkable world-transforming effects, let’s see them become more than just another stick with which to beat an absent God to death. Push the button!
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