Psychedelic Summer Reading
John, Paul...and Timothy
It’s been a while and I owe an update, if only to share what I’ve been reading. I’ll start with the conventional and move toward the strange, so be advised.
Though I haven’t cracked in a novel yet this season, I thoroughly enjoyed sinking into Ian Leslie’s wonderful John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs. Being only a haphazard Beatles fan, I learned a ton from this psychologically astute telling of the creative partnership and friendship (frenemy-ship?) that drove one of the most wildly innovative musical acts in history, from their humble origins to their formative trial by fire period in Hamburg to their meteoric rise, unbelievable plateau and eventual dissolution.
What I didn’t expect from John & Paul was what an emotional ride it would be. Leslie understands as well as anyone what makes these wounded heroes tick and what eventually set them at odds with one another, and he conveys the story with great pathos. Along the way he does a fair bit of myth-busting, too, dismantling especially the old saw (spun largely by Lennon himself in his voluminous post band-breakup interviews) that he, John, was the tortured genius while Paul wrote pretty but ultimately trifling songs. In truth their collaboration and songwriting dynamic was much richer and stranger than that, and Leslie does justice to the richness and strangeness, both.
I won’t go on about it at more length here, but if you have any interest at all in rock ‘n roll or the 60’s or male friendships, you must read it. For an appetizer, you can start with Leslie’s substack article on why Paul McCartney is still underrated after all these years.
Alright, onto something substantially stranger. Onto Timothy Wyllie.
For context, I’ve been reading Wyllie’s catalogue for a few years, off and on; I had to put his books down at one point because his cosmology draws so heavily on a hard-to-stomach piece of channeled writing called The Urantia Book. Urantia deserves its own detour, so bear with me a moment.
The 2,000-plus page Urantia book, received while sleeping by an otherwise ordinary Chicagoan starting in the early 20th century, is chock full of detailed and painfully dry descriptions of angelic hierarchies and the vast celestial bureaucracy of the multiverse. The bok recounts an alternate history of Earth (a.k.a. Urantia) including, notably, the Luciferian Rebellion, which the book places at around 203,000 years ago. According to this cosmology, our planet was (along with 37 other planets) isolated from the teeming multiverse as a result of the rebellion, and we’re still very much dealing with the consequences.
Being chock full of Local Universes, Michael Sons, Thought Adjusters and Melchizedeks, this Urantia stuff is not easy to chew, let alone swallow. I admit, after I got a hold of a copy of the Urantia Book at one point, that I promptly took it to the local Swap ‘n Shop, which is the part of the dump where people leave stuff for others to pick up. There it sat next to 80’s workout videos and moth-eaten polyester cardigans until someone picked it up for use as a doorstop, presumably. (Forgive me, angelic hierarchies, but seeing as Richard Simmons is likely an incarnate rebel angel himself, perhaps it was a fitting gesture.)
Anyway, it’s rare that I toss a book out altogether, and in this case I did come to regret it. When I visited the online version of the Urantia book not long ago I was surprised to find it had grown on me somewhat. I’ve by no means read through all of it— probably less than 2% — but parts resonate. The heart of the matter is that such a book makes one ask: what if this were true? What if parts of it (anyway) are true? Wouldn’t that make it…worth entertaining?
That principle — of entertaining something as opposed to swallowing it whole — is what I advocated to readers when it comes to my own channelings (see: The Lavender Files), and that’s how I approach reading Timothy Wyllie as well. For that matter, it’s the approach Wyllie himself adopted when dealing with communiqués from discarnate beings, be they ET’s or angels.
Timothy Wyllie was born in the midst of air-raids during WWII and had a fairly conventional English childhood. His mother pulled strings to get him into an upper-crusty boarding school his humble family wouldn’t have been able to afford, and he made it through with about the usual level of English public school trauma (i.e. quite a lot), taking refuge in drawing. He moved to London to train as an architect in London, but only ever practiced the profession briefly. He got into music and psychedelics—a terrifying experience on morning glory seeds in his early 20’s turned his hair dead white—and became involved in a cult (some sort of offshoot of Scientology) called The Process Church of the Final Judgement. I’m less interested in this chapter of his life, so I’ll skim over it here, although it was certainly formative in some ways.
(Side note: I’ve been meaning to write about cults and culture; TLDR version is that cults are everywhere, and when they get big enough we call them culture or else religion. I know of no way of opting out of this spectrum entirely; scientific materialism is itself a massive cult with its own white-coated priests. It is part of the cult’s dogma that this shall not be pointed out. But I digress).
Anyway, after a decade with the Process in England, Bahamas, the Yucatán and New York City, Wyllie eventually extricated himself from the clutches of the cult leader, one Mary Ann, who (suffice it to say) was not who she purported to be. By this time it was the early-mid 1970’s.
By way of making a new start, Wyllie started a business in Manhattan selling a color slide storage system that his mother had invented. He ran himself ragged at this and, one day, he had a near death experience (NDE) while lying in the bath. During this episode he was told by angelic beings that he had accomplished what he came to do and that he could choose whether to return to his body and life, or to die and move on. He decided to return, of course, which is where things get interesting.
The NDE seemed to kickstart a run of synchronicity which was to lead Wyllie into some extraordinary terrain, including the exploration of non-human and spiritual intelligences: first dolphins, then extraterrestrials, and finally angels. By the early 80’s he began writing about these encounters in what became a trilogy: first The DETA Factor: Dolphins, ET’s and Angels, then Adventures Among Spiritual Intelligences, followed by Return of the Rebel Angels.
Devoting himself fully to exploring and writing about these realms, he co-authored a how-to book on making contact with one’s angels, called Ask Your Angels. Somewhere along the way he published an inside account of the Process church, which I haven’t read, and a stand-alone, hand-illustrated, channeled work on the nature of the Eden serpent called The Helianx Proposition, which I haven’t yet gotten a hold of (but which certainly looks like a trip). Then came a late-in-life series written from the perpsective of one of Wyllie’s companion angels, Georgia.
These are the books of Wyllie that I started with, though in retrospect this was definitely jumping in the deep end. The series, which begins with Confessions of a Rebel Angel, certainly has its quirks, e.g. Georgia’s way of referring to Wyllie as Mein Host (an inside joke). Thankfully both Georgia and Wyllie have a sense of humor.
The books are basically one long account of the origins and evolution of the human story on Earth, along with the story of the angels, the rebellion and its complex aftermath. This ambitious narrative is interspersed with Georgia’s accounts of Wyllie’s unusual life, from childhood to the present (although Wyllie died before the final volumes could be completed).
Obviously the material is about as out there as it gets and not everyone’s cup of tea, to put it mildly. But a couple things separate Wyllie’s books from the general mass of alternate history, accounts of Atlantis, and general New Age lit.
The first thing is that the books put forward a self-consistent meta-narrative, based on the Urantia cosmology (although Wyllie extends and updates the Urantia material in ways that apparently challenge Urantia purists, who don’t necessarily follow him in believing the Luciferian Rebellion has been adjudicated). The appeal of such a frame is that the narrative has a take on just about everything: how and why Ancient Egypt developed as it did, the nature of the religious impulse and the reasons it has taken the forms that it has, the reasons the Dogon people of Mali talk so much about the star Sirius, the general human proclivity for war and the ways in which humans have been manipulated and weaponized by spiritual entities with their own agendas…the point is, all sorts of topics are put into a context here, and one that—if one is willing to entertain its premises—is coherent. The appeal, in a word, is that the account puts virtually all of social, cultural and military history into consistent context and makes sense of the human story.
I don’t know of many other books or systems of thought that even attempt to do this, and none that do so in as compelling a way. That leaves aside the question of whether much of it is true. I’ve found it worth entertaining.
The second thing that separates Wyllie’s books from their cousins is that, whether written on his own or in collaboration with Georgia, they’re better-written and more entertaining than they have any right to be. They’re full of outrageous characters, memorable stories and a good deal of wisdom. They’re written with the courage of Wyllie’s convictions and they have the ring of truth in that it’s clear Wyllie was grappling honestly with his extraordinary experiences and is not trying to sell anyone anything.
Their lasting legacy is that they invite the reader to confront more of those “what if?” questions.
What if most of what we know about human history and origins is either inaccurate, or but a tiny sliver of the truth?
What if angels are real entities? (Though many of us don’t need any special convincing on that score).
What if the Luciferian Rebellion was a factual event, and if it was indeed finally “adjudicated” by higher beings such that the quarantine on Earth was lifted within living memory? What if the teeming multiverse is once again reaching out its generally kind and benevolent, if not always uncomplicated, tendrils, and getting mixed up with terrestrial affairs at this rather delicate time for the planet?
What if rebel angels are taking on mortal incarnations as part of their redemption for their part in the rebellion?
However unlikely these things might seem, if they’re true, they change everything. For me, that’s why they bear consideration. And they do say truth is stranger than fiction.
If anyone wants to get in on an esoteric book club, you know where to find me.
What are you reading these days?