I had quit my job to rekindle the fire which had smoldered for two years in an absence of free time. Raindrops made a strange face at the window. I was free again.

It was decided. A trip to the stone circles of North East Scotland. I packed for a two-week retreat in Aberdeenshire. I wanted to investigate a style of monument peculiar to the lower lying territories of the Grampian Mountain range. I was sure the time would be well spent, somehow. I later discovered that in order to be sensitised to the nature of things, time must be destroyed so that everything expresses meaning in the instant. This happens more naturally when you can stand free of worry.

I was glad I had been possessed with the urge to visit “the Grand Momma” Old Keig en route from the airport as it proceeded to snow for two days, making my retreat authentic. As I stood by the recumbent stone at Old Keig, situated on a terrace with far views to the mountains, it seemed obvious why people chose this spot. The circle felt small in comparison with the view. This was all about marking the spot in which to observe the landscape; the world; the cosmos; reality; time itself. I was gloriously alone. I had to decide whether my days would be spent sightseeing or meditating upon a single recumbent. These big horizons seemed important.

I was certain that the stone circles marked a turning point in mankind’s evolution; the point when the land would become ours; when in the minds of many, the affairs and needs of men were the dominant reality; when the meaning inherent in the universe played second fiddle. I started to think about the relationship between the two “flanking” upright stones and the formidable “recumbent” lodged between them. Surfaces are even, unnaturally flat and smooth; some stones were shaped as sharp as teeth. Others more like whales. Was the arrangement supposed to be seen as a wall or doorway, or a row of teeth? It looked so iconic. I had read that most recumbents were aligned with the South so that the moon rose over the stone between the flankers. Was the moon important? Or was it merely a way to represent the passing of time?

A few days later, I saw what appeared to be a wall behind some old oaks, except it was not a wall. There was no mortar, no gaps between the stones. Just one continuous smooth surface, higher than a person but shaped like a pebble, to confuse the senses and alter perception. The people knew that this thing that could not be named was a portal and that its tentacles reached into the Other World wherein all reality and truth was to be found in this altered state of perception. This truth could not be told; only experienced. Maybe this was why all religion used altered perception; otherwise how could people’s attention be held on the divine?

A jet thundered above the hills as I ate my sandwich, rearing up vertically into the dark blue heavens just as abominable UFOs had done in my dreams, a symbol of our terrifying exploitation of natural energies. At that moment a plot came to me which, it would turn out, require another six-year hiatus to become this second chapter in this story.

In the Neolithic (roughly 5,000 years ago), a spell was cast before the God of the North, that would break the bond between Man and Nature so that Man could develop his civilisation in isolation to the rest of creation, harnessing the planet’s resources while stepping out of its confines. Set in the dim aftermath of a cataclysmic event referred to as the “Panic”, the protagonist Kirk Tough has a vision of the dark magic which took place millennia ago and senses that time can be reversed to this very moment of separation. A series of connections between past and present lead him to conclude that the dimensions of space and time are at any moment part of a collapsible waveform emanating from everything at once.

30th February 2017, 18:00. Notes from Kirk Tough's Grampian Revelations. "I sit in front of the Holiest Temple of them all, now swallowed up into the earth, silent and eerie. Waters spring from either side of here, and like a serpent's tongue, join and begin their bubbling descent toward the valley. I meditate, open my eyes and see the icy blue Other World, where every pebble, every spec in the infinite cosmos is divine. The vision disappears but I am certain - all matter, all life, all energy, has in its fabric the divine that we cannot see, lest our minds be blown from astonishment.”

Kirk can tell when he is on the right track following a vision. The journey skips forward, and another location is revealed. Kirk is visited by a spirit voice known as Loch Kinold. Kirk believes Loch can help him find the place where the spell was cast that split man from nature, and help him reverse the spell. The story is told from the first person. Occasionally, the voice of Loch narrates. Kirk must travel in order to find the portal. He visits places that he intuitively believes will lead him there.

I figured that the meaning of the stone circles would reveal the next notable turn in the plot, whether it was writing as Kirk Tough or myself. I somehow felt our lives would run in parallel anyway, or even merge.

That night, I dreamt of a stone circle. It sat at the top of a barren, conical hill below a heavy grey sky. There was no language to describe the scene at the time. I could not speak, nor did I know any words, and time ceased to exist. At that moment, the reality of the silent moment was stirred in me, a moment of pure meaning. But being human, a word suddenly came from my subconscious, which perfectly described this state. It had barely formed when it vanished from my memory, leaving no trace whatsoever. One thing did stick though – the subtext of the dream was “STOP TRYING”.

The “Panic” was a very brief anomaly in human evolution. While tribalism and groupthink remained the most popular means of surviving almost any threat, it was the Self – the soul, the subject, the person – that finally gave way to panic, collapsing under the accumulated weight of Identity, which turned out to be an illusion. 5.5 seconds. That’s how long the Panic had lasted. Roughly the same time in which it had eventually been possible for some people to run 100 meters. Those people tried to run from the Panic. But without knowing, they were just running on the spot. After that everything went quiet and voices dropped into whispers.

During the Panic, all identities vanished as if by the removal of a critical piece of operating code. Some people did not panic and some found unexpected relief. Buddhists noticed their awakened state. People who had been asleep or under sedation during the initial shockwave awoke to 5.5 seconds of universal reality, existential crisis, and then silence.

It should also be said that animal and plant life – along with many other forms of sentience which had not become so reliant on their own taxonomies of identity, were unaffected. Interestingly, several significant AIs and even an air traffic control system, developed critical instabilities. We will return to the Panic later in this story.

On my return home from Scotland, flying back into London I could see how the machinery of progress had condensed everything; space, time, energy, even meaning. The city’s purpose and existence were the same thing, form and function expressed. Endlessly forming from the constant movement, each light going somewhere, doing something amidst the fibres, neurons and clusters. A super-brain created from the fusion of curiosity and chaos. I was overwhelmed by the contrast to the previous two weeks.

The city confirmed my fundamental insight from the retreat. That meaning is intrinsic in reality; the same thing. Does meaning need a conscious mind to perceive it, or does it exist in its own right? Does the city exist outside of my mind? Does the city carry meaning? You could say that a meaning is simply a purpose, a function. A thing happening. We make connections with some of these happenings in our own neural networks but most of the time we attend to the things we have learnt to attend to.

The neural network of man’s externalised mind is imprinted on the modern landscape like a dark, soulless, tarmac covered supercomputer. The mind of nature now exists at the margins or our awareness, labelled, mapped, measured, tapped, drilled, channeled through. It is still there, because man’s supercomputer mind can never replace nature’s mind, but nature’s mind can be forgotten to man. This is the purpose of the stone circle, to remind man of the mind of nature.

Returning to his mission, Kirk Tough knew that somewhere in the internalised neural network of consciousness is a program that can escape from its operating system and exist in perfect black and white infinity. The program would be found in consciousness itself and would reverse man’s ongoing separation from nature by offering the perspective of complete reality from which it is impossible to return with the illusion of a separate ego-self. Had Kirk conducted an early attempt to free this program from consciousness, which led to the Panic?

8th August 2013, 18:00. Notes from Kirk Tough's diary. “I have discovered that there are two principles governing our connection to the universe and they are entangled. The first principle is attention and the second is identification. Our attention is both the process and the source of our experience of the universe and our free will. Identification is the creation of meaning from information, and is an extension of free will. This gives us our capacity to attach abstract reasoning, at the heart of our evolutionary advantage, to everything we perceive, even the very idea of ourselves and everything we do, in the quest for success and affirmation.

I am about to set in motion a process which I hope will bring back into harmony these two principles, with which we are so entangled”

31st October 2013, 21:00. Notes from Kirk Tough's Diary. “The fundamental ingredient of magic is belief. The history of our species’ advance and ascendance over all others has been one of belief. Self-belief. Belief in fate, destiny, justice, the Divine, in stories, feats of industry, sacrifice, love. In magic; the magic that makes everything possible – existence. Using the power of belief to materialise reality I am calling on all those visions that have hereto manifested before me to reveal how to stop identification”.

Phil Lynott’s familiar face looked at me and I hoped that somewhere he might be happy to have been given the part of Kirk, a Vagabond of the Western World. I suspected that Lynott, a respected songwriter and poet in his time, would also comment on any problems with the storyline. I chuckled at the conceit. I wondered who might turn up to play the part of Loch. “…Oh I meant I’ll play the part of Loch” Phil interrupted. “...Oh just fucking merge them, there were too many fucking characters anyway” he continued. Was Phil stoned? “All the prejudice is true!” Phil replied.

It had been six years since the revelations of the Aberdeenshire stone circles and I needed another break from working. I was excited by the thought of continuing the story of man’s --- anyway I won’t go on as you’ve heard it before. I took what turned out to be a year off. Instead of Northern Scotland, I would find old, magical sanctuaries closer to home. Something bothered me though. Was I trying to write a graphic fiction, an auto-fiction, or a non-fiction? In truth none of these categories mattered. I picked up Kirk Tough’s diary and opened the pages to find some short texts and poems written over a ten day period ten years ago. They appeared to be descriptions of the spiritual realm, or direct spiritual guidance.  

As I started to read, Kirk Tough began to speak once more, but this time he took on the assured, west country-accented tones of Jaz Coleman, the Killing Joke frontman, composer and practitioner of the occult. 

09 December 2013, 10:00. Notes from Kirk Tough’s diaries. 

“The easy way to see the truth is to open yourself up to it. Try being present with the whole of your mind, feeling energies that flow into and out of your heart. Just be as open as your body will allow. Force Magma! It's one energy, one presence when you really let yourself feel it: immense and overpowering. As your heart accepts this one energy, along with its own energies, your chest, the centre of your body, feels enormous pressure, effort of some kind. Your source of reality, choice, emotion and your capacity for free will, these are also felt in your heart, even if you don’t accept them. NOT BORING!!!” 

I noticed that the last words were written in different handwriting. 

“Access to the spiritual realm will require the death of your ego!” said the voice of Kirk Tough in a manner that suggested he was “BORED TO FUCK!” Phil continued. 

As I read the diary entry I was aware that I'm constantly rejecting authenticity in my heart as a result of being tethered to my identity. I am also fearful of the pressure in my chest that Kirk describes. I am just as I am, but I have de-sanctified reality. My memories are material and have become dark matter in the universe. Everyone has the same non-existence in dark matter. Dark matter is dead experience. It increases when the pure experience dries up, leaving memories. Dark matter desanctifies reality. If I could practice being present with the whole of my mind maybe I could experience this one energy; the ‘Force Magma’.  

I was then reminded of an experience in Iceland. I sat watching waves and ripples lapping at the shore of a glacial lake. The continuous motion conveyed to me the untouched expanse of time that is sensed beyond the flat surface of the water. This hyperreal moment appeared as a luminous mirror surface reflecting or emanating some kind of transcendent presence, encompassing everything. Keeping my gaze very still, my field of vision filled with ripples of this transcendent presence until consciousness itself was perceived as ripples in the structure of the universe. It suddenly occurred to me that “time” is transcendent reality being received on the mirror surface of attention. With this perspective arose the sense of receiving reality for exactly what it was; not wanting or needing it to be different. I had unknowingly experienced the death of the ego.   

10 December 2013, 17:00. Notes from Kirk Tough’s diaries. 

“There is essentially one immensely huge thing happening all the time. To reduce things to a false dichotomy, we are tuned into the domain of differences rather than absolutes – even if we acknowledge universalities and commonalities amongst all the differences, we rarely relate to the totality in which all differences exist. The totality of everything, if it could be reduced to a name, might be called ‘the Universe’, ‘Reality’ or ‘Creation’. But it is impossible to name that which encompasses everything, as there is no differentiated subject, no background or foreground. 

I shuddered at the possibility that attention may itself be universal, and that it was the universal quality of attention that Kirk Tough was tapping into in his attempt to free humanity from the grip of identification.

I frequented a number of excellent and secluded locations over the following year and discovered that trees had the ability to connect my consciousness to the mind of nature; the penetrating atmosphere of this planet’s biosphere, a planet which is floating somewhere in the utterly enormous galaxy beyond which exists the real version of the human concept of a universe. Each time I let myself drift from controlling consciousness into receiving consciousness a strange thing happened. I had a feeling of knowing only one thing: reality is the entire experience of the universe; waves of immensely unfathomable proportions, complexity and seriousness crossing a one-dimensional totality. It felt like the quality of attention that I’d developed when looking at the ripples in the lake. No subject. No background or foreground. Just the dynamic energies that encompass everything, being received where I stood. Keeping eyes still by necessity, so as not to be distracted by the infinitude of differences. 

11 December 2013, 17:00. Notes from Kirk Tough’s diaries.

“The earliest humans looked at their reflections in the water and identified “me”. They looked up at the rest of creation and identified “not me”; establishing a dichotomy that some call Duality. By creating circular monuments, they were acknowledging, and perhaps communing with the truth of existence; establishing the universal attention that some call Nonduality. The circle is used in almost all religions and philosophies to represent the nature of truth, for as a symbol it represents the totality which is beyond form, beyond separation and unity, neither including nor excluding anything, and both including and excluding everything.” 

12 December 2013, 17:00. Notes from Kirk Tough’s diaries. 

“The natural world is irreducible presence, allowing experience.  

Turn towards the Unknowing. 

As you are touched by the vertical, it reveals that time is actually depth. 

Time is irreducible reality manifesting as changes,  

Filling negative emptiness through necessity of truth, nothing special 

To do except increase your sensitivity to the depth of changes.” 

13 December 2013, 17:00. Notes from Kirk Tough’s diaries. 

“The truest act of freewill is letting awareness be touched by depth. 

What could be more sacred than consciousness?  

Possession is 9/10 of the law, so whose property is reality? 

If we say that every second of reality is sacred 

Then the one has become the two 

Because second two is different from second one 

So does the one change? 

Do not get attached to identities, or you will dazzle with the Devil. 

The absolute Truth is beyond being the Truth of any Thing 

And the absolute Truth emanates Reality, which generates depth. 

What does truth mean to me? 

Is it an aspiration or is it tangible; real? 

There is nothing to believe when you see everything. 

Everything is the one becoming two and the two becoming one.  

Similarity and difference, splitting and joining. 

The vibrations of the difference and the similarity are irreducible.” 

14 December 2013, 17:00. Notes from Kirk Tough’s diaries. 

“The Overmind is where all souls come eventually, freed from ownership. 
The consciousness is the dimension where this hyperspatial plenum is found. 
Not my consciousness, for only when I see that even that is not mine, but is It, can it be understood. 

Be a daredevil today and feel the mystery of the consciousness and be aware of consciousness while it is seen clearly as not mine. 
Let go of my consciousness until it becomes the consciousness. 
Whose property is reality anyway?” 

15 December 2013, 17:00. Notes from Kirk Tough’s diaries. 

“Tune into consciousness.  

We're all in a single consciousness. 

You can feel unity with everyone and everything if you let yourself feel the vibe. 

It’s heart work and it’s no sombre ceremony for there is no intention.  

Just simple awareness of the feeling of immediate free will and openness.” 

16 December 2013. Notes from Kirk Tough’s diaries. 

“The frequencies of truth 
are sacramental visions of reality as Huxley called them. 

That which is powerful 

Needs power. 

That which wields enormous power 

Needs enormous power! 

You've got to notice the differences 

Before you notice the similarities 

And the oneness. If such exists! 

Knowing me knowing you 
So we say so we do 
It's just reality.” 

17 December 2013. Notes from Kirk Tough’s diaries. 

“The choice between thinking and doing 
Between questioning and receiving 

Takes less than five seconds 

But our heart is well guarded 

And our mind is constantly rejecting authenticity 
In favour of egoic self-oriented thoughts. 
It's embarrassing but we really should accept it. 
Comprehension is smiling and non-egoic. 

You won't get anything out of life 

If you don't give good vibes out. 

Your capacity to love  

somehow determines your destiny. 

Apologies for going retro but Dale Winton is God! 

Chasm kerzamme! 

The overmind!” 

18 December 2013. Notes from Kirk Tough’s diaries. This appears to be the final note written in the diary.  

 “Being humble means recognising there is no need to acquire knowledge. Animals acquire knowledge but live without self-consciously identifying with it, as we do.” 

19 December 2023. 

With the revelations of Kirk Tough’s diaries now over, I feel empty, alone. Last night I dreamt, in that half dream of confused meanings, that I was selling everything, and what was finally left to sell was the content of my mind. I wondered what the quality or content of that actually was. I felt the same emptiness I had felt in the dream of the stone circle on the hilltop. It was a similar sensation to perceiving the ripples on the lake, the universal attention. I realised that what I do not try to imagine is taken care of and recommunicated to the greater unconscious while I instinctively feel some truth. Once I grasp an idea or image, I take control and can only perceive what my mind can generate itself, rather than the greater unconscious. 

How to leave the ego? Try this experiment – I don’t know if it will work or not.

Sit with eyes closed. Make the following intention to yourself – ‘I explore consciousness. I let go of everything’. At any moment where you feel you are taking control make the intention ‘not that!’ or ‘that’s not it!’. The words are not important. There are no other instructions.

If you make it magic, it is magic. Oh sorry, am I now interfering with the experiment by giving suggestions?  

21 December 2023. 

The experiences, though immutable in the absolute, all conveyed one gigantic hidden truth – that consciousness is everywhere all the time, and the medium in which it exists and all other frequencies of vibrational energy exist, is not to be related to as one relates to a fact - static and upright - but as one relates to the moment: the truth is that universal awareness can never be labelled as that would make it static and therefore monotonous, and this cannot be true since monotony is always subjective.  

22 December 2023, 17:00. 

From here we can experience the overmind – the space of deep reflections between those energies that buzz here and now and the certitude of what we call ‘the past’ which was here a moment ago, when it filled the universe as surely as ‘now’. Not a static place but a form of collective identity. The faces and voices you know well. The characters of your life, the memories, the archetypes encountered, even the one in the mirror. The overmind is not a place but a relationship with and within, and everyone has their own portal. The overmind replaces the ego after the ego dies.

23 December 2023, 17:00. 

The nature of the overmind, along with the nature of reality and the mind of nature, interested me greatly. But so did using it.

Instantly, the Kevin Parker Foundation came into my mind. A free consciousness archive - a deep and distant part of the overmind, available to anyone with no registration, no personal data, no cookies and no paid promotion. The identity of its founder? A horn-rimmed everyman. A nobody. Previously the fictional frontman of an electronic music outfit I belonged to in the 1990s. 

24 December 2023, 17:00.

Dear reader, is it possible that you may entertain that the truth is the immensity of everything going on everywhere right now including in people’s heads including yours and also in the mildly itchy arse of a Siberian Arctic Fox a thousand miles from a cellphone signal along with every cell in the natural world, and every quantum particle and wave vibration in the endless horizons of the cosmos? 

Reader, I offer you these words to find your portal. As surely as these words were written, I say my ego has no place here. The energy you need is the energy you feel. Also please remember, it’s not that, and finally remember, there is no further guidance. 

Kevin Parker