Turn On the Lights: Staying Organized in Altered States When Things Go Sideways
Twenty-nine people were crowded onto the rubber-matted workout floor of the St. David Bowie EntheoGym in Portland. Eighteen sat around the edge of the dance floor, the rest stood along the back wall. Twenty-nine. More than double the size of any group I’d worked with before.
It was early evening in late July, and the day had been brutally hot. The warehouse that housed the gym had absorbed the heat and was still holding it. Even before anything began, people were already warm, shifting their weight, fanning themselves with folded programs.
I was dressed as Pa Dammit, the cleric character I used when leading these sessions: Dr. Martens, black Dickies, a Roman clerical shirt with a blue LED dog collar glowing at the throat. At the top of three stairs rising from the workout floor to a lofted kitchen and living space stood a microphone on a stand. Around it were footswitches wired to lights, fog, strobe, and a bubble machine. This was the control point from which I’d be running what I called The Discotheque at the End of the Universe, a ritual structured like a class rather than a performance.
At the mic, I welcomed everyone and laid out the rules of engagement. Nothing metaphysical, just practical boundaries. Then I led them through a simple warm-up. I asked everyone to make the familiar heavy-metal horns gesture—index and pinky extended, middle and ring fingers tucked under the thumb—and on the count of three, shout a single unprintable phrase together.
We did it three times. People laughed. A small but unmistakable charge ran through the room.
That was enough. It was time to begin.
I killed the house lights. The only illumination now came from the two large screens flanking the stage area. From my laptop, I started the pre-rendered video sequence for the Discotheque. Once it began, it would run on its own. I returned to the microphone and guided the group through the opening section, which used familiar ritual language to establish orientation and containment rather than belief.
The next phase unfolded over three songs of slow, lilting chamber pop, paired with custom visuals that mixed animation, religious iconography, and pop-culture debris. The goal wasn’t emotional catharsis. It was pacing. The room settled into a shared rhythm.
For me, this marked the first gate. I stepped backstage to change into the costume of the character who would lead the next phase: Dr. Shonda Freude. Shonda—a fictional PhD in Western Popular Culture Studies and Jung Institute dropout—wore knee-high white vinyl go-go boots, a white mini-dress, white opera gloves, a blunt white wig, and white sunglasses. A glowing plastic red heart hung at her chest. Over everything, a cape of lights, and over that, a blue hooded cloak.
When I returned to the side of the stage, the first song was almost over. I took a breath and centered myself. By this point my consciousness was significantly altered, intentionally so. But the task ahead was not surrender, but organization. I would be singing, dancing, speaking, and tracking the room while holding an active imaginative frame and maintaining situational awareness.
This was not improvisation. It was a demonstration of a capacity I had been training for years: staying relaxed, oriented, and responsive under cognitive and sensory load.
As the second song began—Jeremy Enigk’s “Explain”—I walked onstage and took my place behind the microphone. I sang along, matching pitch as closely as I could. The aim was technical as much as symbolic. I was mapping what I heard onto the felt sense of my own vocal apparatus, trying to collapse the distance between the recorded voice and my own. This exercise, which I called singpassana, was one of several ways I’d learned to work directly with attention and embodiment inside altered perception.
The third song ramped up the iconography. I stepped on a footswitch; the fog machine hissed. To this point, my stage had been dark, and I was mostly in shadow. Now I triggered a white light situated directly behind me. What the crowd saw: a feminine figure in silhouette, spangled with lights like tiny stars, the edges of her blue cloak glowing, white light streaming through clouds. Face shrouded in shadow, but a vivid glowing red heart on her chest.
The song was called “Mother of Love.” It was heartbreakingly lovely, delicate at the start, soaring at the finish. It set up what was to follow: a recitation of the ancient Gnostic prayer The Thunder, Perfect Mind, which I would deliver in character as the Goddess Sophia.
“TURN ON THE LIGHTS!” someone shouted.
“TURN ON THE LIGHTS!”
What the—? I went to my offstage desk and killed the video. Someone had already found the wall switches and flipped on the lights over the workout floor.
One of the participants had lost consciousness and slid halfway out of her chair. People gathered around her, checking her pulse. Was she breathing? Yes. Someone patted her cheek. No response. What had happened? Was she on anything? No one knew.
A glass of water was requested. I went to the kitchen, filled one, and brought it down to the small cluster attending her. Why wasn’t she waking up? Should we give it another minute, or call an ambulance?
I went back up to my stage area. There were competent adults handling the immediate situation. And I, too, had a situation to handle.
Once it became clear that the woman was not in danger and people were helping her outside to get some air, dark thoughts fluttered around my head like bats. I was a middle-aged man, in drag, the ritual container for my altered consciousness suddenly suspended. I felt exposed, ridiculous, humiliated, furious—and everything was amplified by the substance in my system.
But I also knew what to do. It was what I’d been learning over the course of dozens and dozens of ritual performances, and increasingly in my everyday life. When things went sideways, I asked myself a simple question: In this moment of crisis, who do you want to be?
The answer came back immediately. I wanted to be the guy who engages difficulty with a light-hearted, can-do attitude.
For ten minutes, I focused on that. When the woman was brought back inside, she was alert and embarrassed but fine. The heat had been too much for her.
I shook my head and smiled. I’d been afforded another opportunity to demonstrate what I’d come to call visionary virtuosity.
Using my strength and conditioning coach’s voice of command, I called the room to order. I reminded everyone that fifteen minutes earlier we had created a sacred space together. That space still existed; we only had to find our way back to it.
I asked for the lights to be turned off again. I led the crowd through a deep-breathing exercise. Then I restarted the ceremony from just before the third song of the invocation.
From there, things went off without a hitch. It was an intense night.
Being onstage is stressful for all but the most seasoned professionals. It intensifies self-consciousness.
People often use psychedelics to escape that condition. They can produce a temporary release from self-consciousness, sometimes even a dissolution of identity, what’s referred to as “ego-death.”
But that depends on passivity. There is another, active way to work with these substances. The model is the traditional shaman. This approach doesn’t aim at reducing self-consciousness, but at increasing Self-awareness. It depends on placing trust in the Source of Being, however one conceptualizes it.
After that near-disastrous ritual, I realized that by performing in an altered state, this was exactly what I’d been training for: the ability to enter that kind of Self-awareness under any circumstances, even the intense stress of public performance.
Who knew where that might lead?