The Occurrence at Herdsman Lake

1. The Lake

From the northwest corner of Herdsman Lake you can look over the half a dozen buildings of Perth CBD and from the right angle, it looks like they’re emerging from a swamp.

The first people to use this lake were the local Noongar people, the Yellagonga. They called the area Ngurgenboro.

When I was a teenager I’d come to the lake with my mates and we’d use the lake as a place to get drunk and smoke weed. If no one had a free house on the weekends, we’d tell our parents we were going to the movies and then go loiter around the bottle-shop until we’d convinced a passing adult to buy us a goon-bag or a carton of beer. Then we’d get drunk on the grass and wrestle.

There’s over a hundred different species of birds that inhabit the lake.

It takes about two hours to walk around the lake. In the west are the more well-to-do suburbs with their expansive front yards with freshly mown lawn, two-car garages, balconies with outdoor settings that never get sat on. To the north are the industrial suburbs; you can see semi-high-rise office blocks, and workers in trousers and polo shirts smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee on their breaks. Around to the east and the south are the playgrounds and the cheap units. Over on that side are the big Indian families, and the shifty looking, drug-addled couples in their early twenties.

I remember a time, almost ten years ago now, during a long and painful break-up. I was staying at my Mum’s place in Churchlands, and I would stroll down to Herdsman Lake every morning to sit by the water.

On one of those difficult days I was wandering around the lake after work and was listening to a recording of Bruce Damer on the Psychedelic Salon Podcast. Damer was discussing the symbology of the snake in human history. He imagined a time in our early evolution when we were little tiny mammals huddling together in clumps in the trees, and sucking sugar out of dew. The snake for us, he said, would have been a mesmerising and dangerous creature; of monstrous size compared to our feeble little ancestors. The snake was the master of the trees that we had made our homes. And the sliding, moving scales of the snake would have hypnotised us.

Anyway, I was walking through the bush, visualising Bruce Damer’s hypnotic snake, and entertaining this curious take on mammalian-reptilian evolution, when I came to a bridge that crossed a gently flowing stream. As I passed over the bridge, I glanced to my left and spotted a coiled black object. I froze for a moment, then slowly twisted my body, so I could face the black object. And sure enough. A snake! It was curled around into a tight knot. I knelt down to catch a closer glimpse. I peered over my shoulders; I was alone. When I rose again to my feet the snake slithered into the undergrowth.

2. Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson had a significant impact on me in my early twenties, just as I was developing my revised, post-adolescent models of reality.

Wilson was a self-described guerrilla otologist and is most famous, probably, for his writing on conspiracy theory, his role as an editor of Playboy in the ‘70s, and for the Illuminatus! Trilogy he wrote with Bob Shae. But he also wrote a number of books about psychedelic drugs and consciousness change.

A few years ago I was re-reading Prometheus Rising which is a book that outlines Wilson’s model of consciousness and serves as a manual for self-induced brain-change. In Chapter One, Wilson quotes Dr. Leonard Orr:

‘The human mind behaves as if it were divided into two parts, the Thinker and the Prover.’

According to Wilson (via Orr), the ‘Thinker’ can think of just about anything. History shows that it can think, ‘the earth is suspended on the backs of infinite turtles, or that the Earth is hollow, or that the earth is floating in space.’ The ‘Thinker’ can regard itself, ‘as mortal, as immortal, as both mortal and immortal (the reincarnation model), or even as non-existent (Buddhism).’

The ‘Prover’ is a much simpler mechanism: ‘Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.’ Whatever it is that the ‘Thinker’ thinks, the ‘Prover’ will locate evidence in the world and arrange it such that it supports what the ‘Thinker’ thinks.

At the end of Chapter One of Wilson’s Prometheus Rising he gives a list of ‘exercises’ to complete, in order to illustrate and bring to life these concepts.

The first five ‘exercises’ at the end of Chapter One, revolve around this general experiment:

• Visualise a quarter vividly, then go look for a quarter on the street.

• Once you’ve found one, explain this for yourself using the ‘selective attention’ model: ie. there are many lost quarters out there, so I was bound to find one eventually. (In other words, ‘it was only a coincidence’)

• Then go find another one.

• Once you’ve found the second quarter, explain this for yourself according to a ‘mystical’ explanation: that your mind ‘manifests’ the quarter. (In other words, ‘I can perform psychogenesis’)

• Compare the time differences for each experiment and then repeat the experiment again.

The idea is not to figure out which model is ‘correct’. The idea is to discover that you can change your beliefs…

Side Note: on Synchronicity

In a recent Altered Mates episode (Episode 28 — On Synchronicity ) I discussed some of my favourite synchronicities. The one that is most closely aligned with the above exercise is the car.

The following is an edited snippet from my recent written post on synchronicity (Show Me Where The Transcendent Octopus Touched You):

In 2021 my 20-year-old Nissan Pulsar finally died, so I was on the look out for a new car. I’d been researching various makes and models and one of the cars on my shortlist was the Mitsubishi ASX. On the particular day in question, I was visiting my mum at her house in Churchlands. After we’d shared a cup of tea, I took a stroll around the neighbourhood, eventually meandering towards the nearby Herdsman Lake… (coincidence?). As I was walking past a local primary school, I noticed in my peripheral vision an ASX parked in the school carpark. As I turned to face the car I noticed something interesting—there seemed to be a custom badge of some kind. I walked to take a closer look and to my shock, there was indeed a badge a custom badge, positioned immediately under the “ASX” badge. The badge was “ALEX”, my first name.

In terms of Wilson’s above ‘selective attention’ model, one could say that because I was thinking of ASXs I was more likely to notice them in the wild. Yes, that makes perfect sense.

But how do you explain the personalized badge?

The ‘mystical’ model as Wilson calls it would suggest that my mind manifested the ASX with the personalized badge. But how exactly does the chain of causality work there? Would this model suggest the following…

• my mind (without intention, mind you) focusses on the image of an ASX

• (and also holds, somewhere in the deep mind, the ‘image’ of my name)

• the psychic energy created by my mind focussing on these two ‘objects’ sends out a signal into the world (both the mental and material world)

• in the physical world exists an ASX with the custom name badge. This physical ASX also has a corresponding imaginal projection

• the signal produced by my psychic energy meets the signal of the imaginal projection of the physical ASX with the custom badge and these two energetic signals in the field resonate with each other

• the resonance between the two signals draws my physical body towards the physical manifestation of the imaginal object that is the ASX with the custom badge

Or would I be better off repeating — as Wilson liked to tease — the ‘fundamentalist materialists’ mantra:

it was only a coincidence, it was only a coincidence, it was only a coincidence.

Perhaps.

Anyway, years before the ASX with the custom badge appeared to me on the outskirts of Herdsman Lake, I performed Robert Anton Wilson’s Visualization Experiment from Chapter One of Prometheus Rising.

Kind of.

3. The Experiment

I decided to take this magical exercise on a walk around Herdsman Lake.

Rather that visualise Wilson’s quarter, though, I decided that for my experiment, I would visualise a snake. I felt that the probability of running into a snake down at Herdsman Lake was comparable with spotting a coin on a city street.

I also decided to combine Wilson’s exercise with something that I’d recently read by Grant Morrison. In Morrison’s article: POP MAGIC!, he discusses a magical exercise where you look around a room ‘as if’ everything were magical, to see if that affects your mindset and/or the universe. It helps if you are stoned or have been stoned before and can draw on the memory of being stoned to help you. It also helps if you are a child (before twelve years of school) and the world is magical for you already. Morrison says that this also works by going for a walk and treating everything as if it is magical.

After sitting in my living room and meditating on both the image of a snake and also the concept that everything is a magical projection of divine energy from the great source of the universe, I skipped out the front door to greet the day.

And as you might imagine, everything was magical!

Kind of.

After only ten or so minutes I stopped to observe a murder of crows in a tree. I was watching one crow in particular, shuffling around on the branch of a tree, when a great squawk came from over my left shoulder. I turned quickly and saw that a large white cockatoo had perched itself on another branch of the tree, to the left of the crow, and slightly raised. I stepped back to observe the contrast between the two birds. Standing tall and proud, pure white, extended crest, curved beak, bobbing up and down, the white cockatoo. On the other side of the trunk: jet black, hunched over, sharp pointed beak, black eyes, smooth feathers, the black crow. The cockatoo looked at me and squawked again loudly: ‘Are you paying attention, Alejandro?’

Next to cross my path were a gaggle of purple swamphen, which look like miniature ‘Skeksis’.

(kind of…).

As well as (kind of) resembling Jim Henson’s fantastical creatures, the sighting of these birds called in a contemplation the process of evolution. Though we have common ancestors (if you go back far enough), the birds represent a separate line to us mammals. These flying creatures have been both liberated and at the same time forever restricted by their wings. They can ride the winds but will never have the ability to clutch, hold, manipulate, or to hug! Instead they are confined to peck, to scratch, to claw, to squawk, to fly yes, but never to grasp life.

I pressed on.

Through an endless and enveloping paperbark forest I floated until I came to a wooden bridge. I heard something rustle down through the cracks of the wooden planks. Was it a snake? It could’ve been a lizard. I stood in the lookout, noticing the insect life that had overtaken the place.

… And then I spotted some scales slither through the undergrowth!

Alas, only a Bobtail Lizard.

But my senses were sharp now. I was hyper-aware of my surroundings. I was one with the divine spirit of the universe and its magical voice that speaks to those who are willing to listen. I pressed on further, a seeker completely integrated with the environment.

And that’s when I spotted it.

Not in the forest, but right there! unmistakable and slithering beside my foot on its way to the grass at the edge of the path…

The Snake!

A small green plastic toy snake.

My heart swelled with love and appreciation.

The experiment was a success.

It wasn’t how I’d expected it, of-course, but that’s how these things work: it’s a surprise and at the same time it is perfect, and you can’t help but feel that you’ve been winked at by the divine.

It’s the cosmic joke, you see: proof that there is a universal divine energy and that whatever it is, it has a sense of humour.

And once again, as it was for me as a child—when I had the eyes to see it—the universe was magical.

—Alejandro Tuama