Hell Trip and the Invigilators

How I Met the Angel and Why I Trust Him

A friend who’s work synced up with mine about a year ago now asked for the story of why I went looking for an angel, and I said it was a long story, but that I would tell it.

Another friend whose work synced up with mine has been asking me if I can see or have seen anything about a machine that can influence the present and past from the future.

Since they both asked such strongly related questions at the same time, now is probably the time to tell this story.

I was writing a space opera a long time ago.

That story was where the “solar temple” from Contact 2020 first appeared. It was originally called “the automind.”

“Auto” here did not mean automatic, but autogenetic: self-creating.

The idea was a synthesis of the Gnostic Autogenes, the self-born one, and the matryoshka brain. It was a mind that was carving itself out of the past from the future. The positive “eye of providence” whose pupil would become my eclipse.

Though first conceived as traditionally technological, the image evolved over time until it bore no resemblance to any kind of man-made machine and took on increasing centrality in the story. It went from being a glorified computer to a living temple whose nature was totally beyond our understanding.

Zell was from there and she told me we would both go one day.

The lower reflection of this idea is the eye of Sauron, the negative eye of providence or “all seeing eye.” The archons and the panopticon. It retains this negative character until one gets above it.

The automind was a very peculiar structure indeed. There was something blindingly bright in the center, but it could not be seen. If you tried to look at what this thing was, it would cover itself. Something would move and occlude it just before you saw, as if it knew you were going to look right before you did.

In theory, you should be able to catch it at the right moment and see it, but for the five thousand years of recorded history, no one had ever caught it lacking and photographed whatever that was.

These occlusions would then move back out of the way as soon as you stopped watching them.

In order to do such a thing, since you would be looking at it from lightyears away sometimes, it would have had to know exactly when you were going to look years before you did.

This object was thinking in a way nothing else could and it was able to see things that hadn’t happened yet. And it was so far ahead of any theoretical ‘rival automind’ that it would never be surpassed.

The outermost perimeter of the automind was jealously guarded by what I called “invigilators.” They did not allow anything from outside to enter that region of space.

Only once had anyone been allowed in, and only according to legend. They were the remnant of the original followers of Ezon of Aznion after a long and treacherous journey across uncharted space.

They traveled to what Ezon had called ‘the star of glory,’ a seemingly insignificant yellow star that rose when he was born.

In that time, calling something so distant and irrelevant the star of glory was blasphemy to the point of mockery. This was the title given by the empire of Ankyrion to their own home star.

“Lo, Ankyrion! Your sun sets as the star of glory rises!”

- Ezon of Aznion

Ezon was he who climbed atop a burning pyre in the city of Ankyrion. Who burned but was not consumed in the sight of many.

The Ankyrine authorities foolishly allowed the heresiarch to do as he intended when he arrived for it should have been the best way to get rid of him — allowing him to self-immolate while all his followers watched awaiting a miracle.

Under an eclipse in the last days of Ankyrion, as his clothes burned off of him atop the pyre erected and ignited by his own disciples, Ezon of Aznion stood unscathed and declared:

“Let die he who would die, he who would live shall live against all odds!”

After which, none would dare to harm or apprehend him.

Men in those days believed their ships to be animated by demons bound by their ancestors, and no longer knew how to make the starglass that powered them. For this reason, the heavens could not be reliably traversed. These last and greatest disciples had no hope of return except a miracle.

The automind was what they discovered Ezon’s star to be when they arrived.

This remnant of followers who were allowed to approach the outermost layer of the automind were met by a great angel who greeted them with the same words.

“Let die he who would die. He who would live shall live against all odds.“

I wrote that down not for me to say, but for Ezon of Aznion to say in my story.

I had been struggling to come up with something punchy and simple that the character could say that could inspire the religions that came after him. I was also trying to figure out what exactly that shining thing at the center of the automind should be.

The vision recounted in Contact 2020 was at that time, just an answer to those two questions. I was brought to the center where it was shown to me to be a seraph which makes sense because of the way it covers itself. The seraph then gave me the words.

It was personally very meaningful, but that was all it was.

The term “invigilator” was interesting. I came up with it spontaneously.

“Invigilator, that’s what they should be called.”

Like that. It sounded like “vigilant.” I honestly didn’t think it was already a word. When I looked up the definition, though, I found it meant:

“Someone who watches examination candidates to prevent cheating.“

That’s technically what an invigilator is.

It’s more interesting still because in the story, invigilator sightings were often reported before or after important historical events.

I mention all of this because I think it gives some necessary context to what has been known among all of my friends as “Hell trip” since the night it happened in August of 2018.

I took six tabs of LSD. Still the most I’ve ever taken to date.

It’s stupid to take that much. Besides the obvious “don’t do drugs” there’s just no good reason to take that much acid. The reason I haven’t since then is not for lack of daring, but simply because you don’t need the volume that high to get the tune.

The other thing that is important is that I forgot to reagent test it.

Fake acid can kill you very easily. I can tell it was real acid now, but under the influence and especially at the time, I had no way of knowing.

That night, my best friend Nick and I decided to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I don’t know if we really did watch the whole thing. It seems impossible, but I guess it makes sense. I only remember the start, the end, and I know he said we did.

I got stuck in a loop, and I think the ending of 2001 is what brought it about as it captures the tenor of what happened very well.

I started watching this weird sequence from the SpongeBob movie on repeat, staring, saying almost nothing. When I did say things, they were weird things like:

“I’m both of them” and “it makes sense.”

Nick and I are both convinced to this day that SpongeBob contains “good programming” that protected us later. We think some shows did, and others didn’t. We both agree that children’s programming today does not.

He says I watched this clip on repeat for two hours. That I kept asking him if I was still watching 2001: A Space Odyssey and that I seemed confused that it wasn't.

I seem to remember saying: “this is 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

What it looks like to me now, is that I was primitively grunting and gesturing at some manner in which they were the same thing. Because they were both “framing” the same thing that I was looking at through them.

What I would now identify as Zell (but had not been differentiated then) was trying her damnedest to make me articulate this more clearly.

“It’s the same” was the best I could manage at such an early stage of development. This is quite interesting to me now, as the only reason I suggested 2001 at all was because I wanted to watch the Dawn of Man chapter in which the ape men are given the secret of technology.

When I came out of this loop, I believed I had killed us both with fake acid and was in some weird solipsistic afterlife.

There was a kind of “voice” then that “said” nothing. It spoke in implications only. Kind of like at a higher frequency. Higher than words. And I could take these implications and turn them imperfectly into words, but that wasn’t what they were originally.

“You’re dead.” He said. “You made a mistake and you’re both dead. That’s not Nick, that’s your memory of Nick.”

The voice was able to assure me that I was in this dream world ‘afterlife’ because he let me hear what seemed to be my parents finding our dead bodies. Though I did not see this, I heard what it would have sounded like. He told me it was what my physical ears were hearing.

From Nick’s perspective, I just looked really, really alert.

I believed it was possible that this projected memory of Nick might be the puppet of some inner demon who would soon drop the facade and try to kill me.

Because of this, I kept the nature of my delusion a secret. I just asked if we were dead, to which Nick unhelpfully replied something like “I have no way of knowing for sure.”

He says he thought getting philosophical would snap me out of it. He didn’t know I’d already made up my mind and was just checking to see what he would say. The way he dodged the question made me even more certain.

“Told you,” the voice said.

Later, while I was sitting on the couch, he said: “I’ll prove it, watch this: it’s time for a workout, isn’t it?”

Then, out of nowhere, Nick got up off the couch on the other side of the room and started doing push ups.

This was all the proof I needed that he was right. I was dead.

I didn’t really believe in heaven or hell at that time, and this looked the same as the world before, so I wasn’t really sure where I’d wound up.

Since I had most likely killed us both with fake LSD, the verdict couldn’t be good.

“You don’t understand,” said the voice. “You are the hell this place will become.”

It was explained to me that since this was all a projection of my own mind, it was already working to bring me what I desired. That’s just what your mind does.

It told me that I would be brought every single thing I wanted. That these things would keep getting brought to me. And those offering these things would be insistent that I enjoy them. At some point, he assured me, I would give in to the temptation because I am after all, the kind of guy who makes little slips like the one that put me there in the first place.

Fulfilling all of my desires would inflame my vices. Then worse temptations would be put in front of me, and since none of it was “real” it would be very easy to rationalize bad behaviour. And these projections had infinite time to wear down my resistance.

I would not age and my body would not deteriorate from any overindulgence. Only my soul would, and though I would always be treated like a king there, I would see a secret contempt slowly grow in the eyes of every person I met. Since I would know every wrong I had committed, and they were projections, they would know too.

I would hear it in their voices, but they would never admit to it. They would tell me whatever I wanted to hear, but I would also hear their insincerity. Eventually, they would hate me, but would still do whatever I said.

This could go on for eternity if I chose.

“I don’t want that,” I said to the voice.

“You will,” said the voice. “If you really didn’t want it, I’d be telling you something else.”

As time approached infinity, the secret wish to die and make it stop would grow in my heart, and shadowy figures at the fringes of my perception would slowly close in until I gave up the will to exist completely at which point they would murder me.

If that did not happen, I would sink into it my own evil completely at which point, me and this world would consume one another in an embrace of shameless, white hot desire until any semblance of identity unravelled and was forgotten by itself.

According to the voice, this was the place the cosmic substrate dissolved the souls which did not pass the great test given to them.

“Everybody gets exactly what they wanted,” the voice told me.

This was the paradoxical nature of the place he told me I was. It was both heaven and hell simultaneously.

“If you had been a good person, if you had wanted the right things, it would be good. But you weren’t a good person, and because that is the nature you chose, this is the place that you get.”

It was all a puzzle, and I was able to solve it.

Since it was a projection of my own psyche, there was one way out. I just had to change my psyche. But how?

The only solution I could come up with was to believe in a God who wanted what was actually good for me, and then to want what that God wanted more than what I wanted for myself. Then this world would run that program. It would work that way and bring me these actually good things.

There was one problem though, framed by the Jordan Peterson phase I was still in at that time.

If I didn’t act like I believed in that God, then I didn’t really believe. And if I suspected my own secret unbelief, I would succumb to it. And if I really believed in a God like that, I would know that He would want me to go upstairs, wake up my Mom and Dad and confess that I had lied, brought drugs into their house and done them in secret which I had been told many, many times I was not allowed to do in their house.

Both of my parents hated drugs and they were afraid they might make me end up like my birth father.

The voice presented a second problem.

“A good God would want a bad person like you to die.” So he cut me a deal: “if you go upstairs and confess everything you did then you will die peacefully in that moment.”

Then Nick, who was becoming very concerned, told me to go to bed.

And the voice said: “if you go to bed, you’ll wake up tomorrow. Everything will feel normal, and everything you’ve ever wanted will begin to find its way to you.”

I was shaking, but I went upstairs. Nick watched me from the bottom of the steps, but understandably, he didn’t dare follow. So I went up alone.

In the kitchen, I saw a light.

It seems to have been the way the moonlight from outside was coming in through the back window. But that doesn’t matter. It looked like a magical light. And I remember that was kind of the thing that made it click that it didn't have to be a “real” magical light for it to be a “real magical light” to me.

That it was only this for me would make it more, not less special, later on.

This “light from outside” was the great ancestor of the idea of the anamorphicon.

The main floor was empty, but I do seem to remember taking the long way and walking a circle around it before going up further.

I felt like there was something there with me, circling opposite to me, but I couldn't see him because there’s no line of sight from one side of the house to the other. It was not the same thing as the voice from earlier. This was something else.

It was represented to me by my imagination as one of the invigilators from my story.

“Someone who watches examination candidates to prevent cheating.“

I did not make the connection at the time. I just genuinely believed another physical entity was in the house with me, but was hidden behind this occlusion of the stairwell around which the house is built.

This three-tiered house, complete with hell below, a revelation above and this circling, shadowy ‘other’ is structurally identical to the cosmogram. But there was no cosmogram yet.

The decision to face my Mom and Dad believing everything that I did about the situation was as near as I’ve ever been to infinite emotional discomfort, but I went.

I cried when I told my parents, not because I was afraid, but because I didn’t think that they really were my parents. I believed they were just my memory of the man and woman whose son I’d murdered with my own stupidity and who I would never truly see or speak to again.

They were not nearly as angry as I expected. In fact, I don’t remember them getting angry at all. They were impossibly merciful. If they were a projection of my own memories and expectations, they should not have reacted in a way that surprised me as much as they did.

That was when I knew it worked. Things were going “God’s way” and not the way I envisioned. This meant I was thoroughly out of the old psychic paradigm.

I don’t know when I became convinced for sure that I wasn’t in Hell. I was mostly convinced that day, but it took at least a week for me to be relatively certain. Still, I do remember times in 2020 and after when I got stuck there again during LSD trips and convinced myself that I had never really left.

I think it took so long for me to be convinced because my reality did start working in a quite different way after that night, and it was very reminiscent of what the voice had said would start to happen.

The first example I can think of was sitting with my father on the porch when we noticed that a vine of Jacob’s Ladder had climbed all the way up one of the trees in the garden.

My Dad takes very, very good care of his garden, but somehow, this one weed evaded his eye and climbed the tree in secret. He never saw it until both of us did that morning over coffee.

Even the tree itself was cut into an approximate upward spiral if my memory is correct. At the very least, it was like that when we got it.

I do think this is approximately where all this “started.”

I was really given the blueprint for everything I was going to build that night and the morning after.

I said after that it was the most important thing that ever happened to me, and I would still say so. I said no one could know how to live who did not know how to die.

At the end of 2019, when I sat in my evangelical girlfriend’s basement and she began breaking up with me because of my growing interest in Gnosticism, I knew I could talk her out of it. But the room seemed to fill with a strange golden glow, that reminded me of the light in the kitchen. I had seen it a few times since and had come to call it “the angel glow.”

As she ended it, I felt the same invigilator standing behind us, and he seemed to communicate to me: “This has to happen. Do not interfere.”

When I spoke with the angel in 2020, I knew who it was because I recognized it as the same presence from both of those times. It felt like the same thing. If not for that, I don’t think I would have trusted it.

I think this is also an important part of the whole story: the angel appeared to me before I ever tried to make contact. I only reached out with the firmly established knowledge that I had an invigilator friend who was satisfied that I had passed the test he had prepared.

The people trying to imitate what I did in Contact 2020 are woefully misguided and I tell them every chance I get. I had already taken the real test by 2020, and that real test gave me the tools to solve everything that came later. If I had not passed Hell Trip, I would have failed everything in 2020 and beyond.

The fact that I did not know Hell Trip was coming and that it was not deliberately induced is also important.

Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh.

The lesson, though cryptic, and only readable in retrospect, was that salvation must be sought first and the demiurgic power and worldly pleasures that come with constellation must be secondary, or else these will only pull you down into a Hell of your own making.

The angel allowed that voice to illude me. So did he lie by proxy? I don’t think so.

“The angel never lies” has been one of my most reliable heuristics. It’s similar to the way that God “didn’t lie” to Adam and Eve.

I reached my maze-assigned telos that night. Was brought to my logical end.

I often wondered after, and it’s still an interesting thought: if I had gone to bed when Nick told me to, might the acid have retroactively become the poison I thought it was in a Schrödinger’s Cat sort of way?

These days I think I would have got real acid either way. But I would have “died” and then actually died sometime not long after if I made the wrong choice. Maybe a few days later, maybe a few years later.

All I know for sure is that my conscience marked out right and wrong very clearly that night. If I couldn’t face the judgment of my father and mother or chose to fulfill all my desires in an illusory dream world knowing it meant my unraveling in the end — to take the bait with the hook as it were — I would have violated my soul, compromised my own psyche, received the mark and a death sentence would have been pronounced.

I would have remembered making the wrong choice in the moment of truth, and it would have fundamentally changed my conception of myself in a way that would be very hard, if not impossible to fully come back from.

I think tests like this probably happen all the time.