CHAPTER 14
Messengers
Sometimes the experience of consciousness moves beyond familiar explanation. It becomes so unusual that the mind tries to reject it. Yet some experiences remain too vivid to dismiss. Even now, I do not tell everyone what happened that night. I choose carefully who to share it with.
One night in Brooklyn, at Unruly Collective, one of those moments occurred. It was Christmas. Ruslan came to visit me—he was living elsewhere at the time. I invited him to trip. We took mushrooms. At first, we stayed among the works, looking at the paintings, walking between them, stopping, returning again.
In that state, a painting reveals something else. It opens. As if a new lens is given for perceiving art. Paintings become spatial, extending inward. Entrances begin to appear, as if portals exist within them. I understood that I was looking at layers of my own consciousness, at the structure of my own psyche. Through art, I was studying myself.
A painting is not just a surface with paint. It is an entrance, a door, a direction of attention. It points toward a specific reality. That is why the artist carries responsibility for the worlds they create. Others enter them.
At that time, I had a wooden piece. My friend, the artist Alex Rupert, had carved it and given it to me as a birthday gift. I painted it with neon and metallic colors. It reflected light in all directions, as if breathing. It resembled a cocoon embedded in wood. I spent a long time looking at it. It felt like a transitional object, directing perception exactly where it needed to go.
The room I lived in was covered with energetic lines. They stretched across the walls, intertwined, like tendrils touching perception. The room had its own reputation—many artists were afraid to live there. The rest of Unruly felt calm, but that room carried a different intensity. It suited me.
When the state began to deepen, Ruslan lay down in the living room on a mat, and I went into my room and closed my eyes—not to rest, but to see. The moment I closed them, a clear internal message appeared: “Got you.” Everything collapsed inward and opened at the same time. I was pulled in.
An intense sequence began—a stream of chaotic, highly detailed imagery, sensations, shifting states. Small figures dancing, forms assembling and dissolving, a continuous flow of structure. It lasted about an hour and completely absorbed attention.
Then an image appeared. At first—repulsive. A psychedelic mole. Distorted, aggressive, almost unbearable to look at. It moved through perception, emitting patterns like a broken analog signal. The reaction was immediate—disgust, resistance—but I did not turn away. I accepted it. I said I loved it, but I wanted to go higher.
It felt like a threshold. The lower layer of the experience, the most difficult forms. Resistance there could leave marks. Acceptance opened something.
The image shifted. It became access.
Then other forms appeared—tall figures resembling praying mantises. Insectoid. In that moment, they felt like architects of perception. The space pulsed—light, dark, light, dark. They appeared, dissolved, returned. Not stable forms, but presences moving in and out of visibility.
My body could not move. I was deep inside the state. They did not speak. The information arrived whole, without language. It was immediate, complete. I remember it clearly—not as sentences, but as something that later translated into words.
This is the closest it can be expressed.
A child sees truth, and then that memory becomes sealed, covered by separation. People forget their connection to the whole, forget what they are. Some remember and participate in the unfolding of a larger process of consciousness. Every person matters in this. If I want something, I must write it down and not doubt it. Doubt blocks manifestation. Curiosity opens access. They respond to those who ask. Those who do not seek remain outside that exchange.
There was another realization. Everything around me is directly connected. Not symbolically—directly. I am looking through everything that happens. The room, the house, the situation—all exist within a field of awareness. Everything unfolds along a trajectory. There was a strong sense of structure, of inevitability. And the presence of those beings carried recognition—they knew who I was.
When the experience began to recede, I returned to the body, but not fully. The world remained fluid. Space continued to move. Forms would not settle. I stepped into the corridor and saw that everything was still shifting.
The paintings were no longer images. They were structures of knowledge. Abstraction revealed depth in a way representation could not. Movement, fractal forms, the behavior of paint—these opened perception more directly. It was not depiction. It was manifestation.
Ruslan and I spoke, and it became clear that he had encountered the same structures—the same beings—even though we had been in separate rooms. We went outside, walked around the block, smoking. It was freezing. The city felt different. The ground beneath us—poured asphalt—was someone’s idea made real. The entire city existed as accumulated thought.
A state like that requires integration. The only way to hold it is with people who can meet it at the same depth. Without that, it fragments. I have been fortunate to have people around me who could reflect those experiences back, no matter how strange they sounded.
Each person moves through their own scenario, layered over the larger process of humanity and the planet. That process continues to unfold in real time—through action, perception, thought.
If every participant were to recognize unity at once, the structure would collapse. But it continues. This is difficult to explain directly. It can be described as symbols, archetypes, forms of transmission. But one thing remains clear: consciousness behaves like a system with many levels of intelligence. Thoughts have structure. Ideas exist before language. Communication can occur through image, symbol, presence.
Consciousness is far more complex than it appears. It speaks in many ways.