My Romance With Illusion

by Harrison Kim

part 1

During the summer of 1974, after he turned 19, my friend Ogden Mieswich disappeared into the White Goat Wilderness of the Canadian Rockies. He hiked back to his haunted valley, to communicate with the half-human half-feline creature that attacked him there. Why would anyone go back? “It’s a beautiful place,” Ogden said. “The creature was protecting its home. I have to show it I’m not the dangerous one.”

In the nineteen seventies, the zeitgeist altered, from the idea that the world could be changed politically to the notion of individual enlightenment through spiritual questing. One of the metaphysical ideas at the time was out-of-body experience, in which an astral form rises from the physical.

In the astral world, space and time don’t exist. The soul encased in the astral can then travel anywhere, instantly. The soul advances to higher and higher planes on its travels, until it finally reaches nirvana. Ogden and I both tried to practice astral travel. After he disappeared, I searched for him using this method.

Last time I talked in the physical form with my friend was at the forest-fire watchtower north of Nordegg. That’s where I ripped up his photo.

“You didn’t have to do that.” He stared at the pieces.

“You told me you didn’t want any pictures of yourself.”

“I didn’t say rip it up.”

“Well, you said you don’t like your image. So you should be happy I destroyed it.”

Ogden looked away. “In the end, I can’t get along with anyone,” he said. “Not even you.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” I said. “I think we get along well.”

“Look what just happened.” He stopped saying anything for a while, then spoke of the creature he had met in the wilderness. He talked softly, like I wasn’t even there. “I need to tell someone,” he said.

He told me the thing watched him with relentless green eyes, like a cat. Ogden felt those eyes the moment he entered the valley for the first time, about a month before our visit at the tower. The creature tried to communicate, even when it went on the attack. “Was it in a ghost form, or a true physical entity?” I asked.

Ogden stared away again, over the black spruce below us. “It had telepathy,” he said. “It warned me it didn’t like humans. I tried to send back the message that I was different, that I meant it no harm.”

One problem with astral projection is that when you are out of your physical body, a bad entity may invade it. This entity can prevent the astral body from returning or create havoc when the soul does come back. Out-of-body travel gurus like Lobsang Rampa said this is known today as mental illness. Rampa thought that we all astral travel at night. We remember where we travelled through our dreams. And sometimes there are nightmares. Sometimes a bad entity gets in, and sometimes it will not leave.

Ogden had few human friends. Dogs ran up to him, all wagging tails and long friendly tongues. Ogden’s pointer dog, Chief, followed him everywhere. Ogden described Chief as a four-legged spirit, a guardian and old soul.

Chief stayed on alert those two nights he and his master spent in the haunted valley. “I could feel the cat entity watching me,” Ogden related. “I could feel not just its looking, but its message: ‘Leave me alone, but don’t leave me.’ I was there to be by myself, but the creature was waiting.”

Ogden told me how the half-beast pounced near midnight, when he was leaning forward toward the campfire. “That’s how I got these long scar scratches on my shoulders and back.” He showed me, speaking softly. “Chief saved me. She drove it away. White Goat Wilderness was her territory. I should not have ignored that. In a way, she wanted me to stay. She wished that I were more like her, maybe, but still...” He paused. “She wanted to keep her place in the world.”

I told Ogden my theory that perhaps that creature was not physical, but a wild entity in waiting. And when it pounced, it was trying to get into his body. Part of me believed the whole astral sphere was hallucination and that the creature Ogden encountered had been formed in his own imagination. When a person is out in the bush alone, he can think up a lot of things.

The other part, the out-of-the-box part of my own mind, believed Ogden had become possessed. He carried the creature within him. When I talked with him at the fire watch station, he kept staring off into the distance. All he talked about was his White Goat wilderness experience.

Ogden had protruding front teeth, thick goggle glasses, a collarbone jutting out too far, and a head and neck attached to it at an angle. He looked like his head wasn’t on straight. He was only about four foot eight. His skull was visible beneath the skin, an ivory sheen under bright lights. All these were symptoms of a rare bone disease. Physically, Ogden appeared very different, yet his mind was no more altered than the rest of us living through the wild experimental years of the early seventies... until he hiked into that valley.

We all have images we present to the world. Now, they’re all over social media. Millions of images. No one’s self-conscious. Everyone presents their best look online. Ogden said he never kept any images of himself, no photos, anywhere. I took his photo in secret, revealed it at the tower.

I took it in order to say: “I want to remember you. It doesn’t matter what you look like.”

“Animals don’t judge,” Ogden used to say. “I feel better with them than with people.” He spoke passionately. “The creatures are disappearing because of our encroachment. The grizzly, the caribou, the wolf. In so-called civilization everyone gawks at me. They’re always asking questions like: ‘Were you born that way?’ and either opening doors for me and pretending not to look or running in the other direction.”

I told Ogden that in the astral body appearance doesn’t matter. We’re all the same in our soul form.

“Does that also mean our minds become identical?” he asked.

“No,” I said, though his question seemed pertinent. I quoted from Lobsang Rampa: “‘We’re always going to be unique in our minds.’ “But,” I said, grinning at my friend, “what does Lobsang know? He’s dead.”

In July 1974, I travelled north to Grande Cache to visit my friend. His sister Gloria told me Ogden had found a summer job at a forestry fire watchtower. “Just at the edge of White Goat,” she said. “He talked a lot about you.”

“What did he say?”

“How you helped him get through that first year of college down south. Giving him money to help him through. Academic support. Interesting discussions. Both of you trying to find your way in life. He said you were a pushy friend, though. You have a temper.”

“Yes, I guess I do.”

Gloria shook her head. “After all the teasing and the funny looks, he wanted to be alone. It’s not you, though. He’s been that way his whole life.”

I looked at her. “I wasn’t that bad. He took things too seriously.” I wanted to say, “Why couldn’t he accept his own image?” I wanted to explain my theory that hiding is worse than showing yourself, that identity is formed by connecting with others. If you hide, you disappear, like pieces of photo scattered on the wind.

Yet what if your image, your look itself, makes you an outcast?

We all want more than we see. More than we experience. This world isn’t enough. I tried to see the world as Ogden did, with all eyes focused on him. People saying, “What a weird-looking dude,” and “That guy looks freaky.” I could understand how he might want to leave for a better place.

I should’ve simply put the photo back in my packsack or given it to him. After he disappeared, I lost my memory images of him for a time. I concentrated on recalling his face as I practiced an astral travel search, my wistful act to find him.

For me, the most difficult thing about out-of-body experience is the fear. If we think there’s a secret world behind this one and that we’re all living an illusion, then anything, any nightmare, is possible. I lay on my back at night using Lobsang Rampa’s method of soul release. “Rest there and imagine yourself hovering above,” Rampa preached. “Look down on your physical body. Hold that frame.” I tried hard to make it work.

After Ogden went missing, his family and other members of the community hiked into the mountains to search for him. In those days, there weren’t rescue groups, and the government didn’t do extensive investigations unless a body was found. The searchers, some of whom were mountain guides, discovered nothing. They kept at it for several months, until the winter.

LSD. A shortcut to the spiritual. I looked at the blotter in my hand. I’d never taken the stuff before. Marijuana made me a bit paranoid, so I was avoiding that. I hoped acid could take me into the astral world, where I could look down on myself, see the image others viewed. Then, I would take off for the secret valley and find Ogden Mieswich. I placed the dose under my tongue and waited for the paper to dissolve.

Proceed to part 2...