I N T E R V I E W

with   W I L L I A M   B O K E L U N D   a.k.a.   S P I R O S  

Part I           March 8 2o1o 

Interviewed by Butterfly 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I met William Bokelund in his cave for an interview. Sure, he's my husband, but I promised myself to be as professional as possible. We popped a bottle of champagne, sat down for a piece of strawberry cake, and, William was wearing my pink butterfly pajama, and we launched into secret areas of this strange boy's mindspaces. 

BUTTERFLY: You have jokingly been described as the strangest boy ever born, you have been touted as the greatest criminal mind of history, you have been labelled genius and madman. How would you yourself describe yourself?

WILLIAM: O, I wouldn't, really. I am slightly bigger than an apple, to start with.

BUTTERFLY: Many people complain about your approach to life, saying that you swing it unnaturally, that you are selfish and that you have self-deified yourself on the wrong grounds. Also, many people say that the books you write are rubbish. What is your response to this kind of attack?

WILLIAM: Well, see, thing is, that, eh, the books are actually about a secret of hyperspace, of the mushroom, and only certain people will be interested. And well, about the self-deification. . . Just because some other people think they live in the 21st century and don't know that they are gods, hell, I'm not going to halt myself from being the god I am.

BUTTERFLY: So what do you expect from your readers?

WILLIAM: O, nothing really, except that as soon as they bump into my books, that they make their life about digging into the secrets contained therein until something stranger than a fairytale begins to happen. The books are actually written in accordance with The Massive Tactic of the Tryptamine Goddess Alliance and should function as a key to wherever you want to go. Also, the books are just very very cute and so one can have a lot of fun with them.

BUTTERFLY: Any advice for your future readers?

WILLIAM: Yes. Get naked, get really really high, lie on the bed and dig into the book. Or something like that. Maybe go to the forest and get really really high and then read the book. Lick some nectar dripping off the world. Or something, but get really really high. And then, do it again. And then again and again until things start getting really really weird and spaced out. I call to my readers to get excessive. From personal experience I know how difficult it can be to truly set oneself free, to fly off, for ones soul to blossom. It takes magic and excessiveness to succeed, in my experience, because the many various chains that bind us to dullness are strong chains. One must be nimble, brave, and one must push hard. As William Burroughs said: Beware the middle way, the way of moderation and common sense, for it lead not to the secret lands. If you already live like that then great, the book should come to you right on time. And ask yourself what do you really want? Because there are no limits to what is possible. And love yourself and be in love with yourself and don't let anyone distract you from clarity and from your belief in the splendour of your own soul. Let the book be inspiration, and don't mistake these bird's hoots for nonsense. Pay attention to details. Something is up with this mushroom, that's for sure.

BUTTERFLY: What made you begin to write?

WILLIAM: I lived in India and Nepal in a raging trip. I found a copy of James Joyce's book Ulysses on the beach and I began to read it. Soon very strange things began to happen from reading that book and I eventually had to conclude that something fishy was going on. Soon I had the urge to start writing my own magical book. It felt as if I had discovered a hidden plot to my reality, a plot my life followed to the point. I saw traces of this plot in Joyce's books, which gave me the feeling of this being something vast and of hyperspacial nature, and I began to work with displaying the hidden plot by writing it as a story. Now, years later, this hidden plot keeps surfacing, the story is getting tighter and tighter, the hidden becomes more and more visible and indeed I have announced that the veil is being lifted. How this relates to other people I am not sure. But this is what my life is about. It might be so, that by hooking up with the mushroom one actually hooks oneself into the web of a hidden story, an event of some sort. Reminds me of what Terence McKenna said about how the mushroom is a door out of history and into the wiring under the board in Eternity. That's how I would choose to explain it as well. The wiring under the board is the hidden plot, the hidden story, what's actually going on.

BUTTERFLY: Can you say anything about the nature of this hidden plot?

WILLIAM: It's vast, so it's mostly only touchable in flight, difficult to pin down into a sentence or two. But what I will say is that, at least for me, what I have concluded is it is love. It's a love story. A very very deep kind of love. At least that's how it is for me and my beloved. Like the dove taking care of her egg, that kind of love. Deep. The love between the gods.

BUTTERFLY: Are you in love?

WILLIAM: Hideously so. Falling deeper and deeper in love by the hour.

BUTTERFLY: With who?

WILLIAM: With the scariest and most shining divine woman I have ever met, and her sister.

BUTTERFLY: You describe yourself sometimes as an explorer of the psilocybin mushroom, and are always very clear about the mushroom being at the core of your life and work. You met the mushroom first time year 2000. What is it about the mushroom that fascinated you upon meeting it, and keeps fascinating you?

WILLIAM: The mushroom is one of the three or four grandest things that have happened to me thus far in life, the other being love, joy and the event of having been born, and a few other of such magnitude. For me there was nothing to ponder. During the first trip I knew I had found what I had been looking for, the alchemical key. You know, this stuff works, this stuff works. And from there it just kept deepening, and still keeps deepening. The vastness of the mystery knows no end. What I soon found was that there are layers to the thing, and as soon as you break through a new layer, it gets deeper and there is more. This to me, right from the start, shone of the possibility of something truly unexpected, something truly stranger than a fairytale. So instead of giving up after a few trips I continued deeper and deeper. I crossed the line, and no I have no regrets. Some people tend to take my work and art and output as a joke or at least with a grain of salt. I couldn't be more serious. Magical worlds and “the secrets of the gods”, secrets of Nature given to the shaman in ecstasy as Terence said, all this is bocked at by modern society because it does not know that it exists. But for us who wake up and search out the mystery, well there it is, with you yourself as a main character.

BUTTERFLY: How did you come into contact with the mushroom at first?

WILLIAM: An old friend of mine came over with a recording of Alien Dreamtime by Terence McKenna, that classic 1993 recording. After having listened to it a few times I decided I just have to try these shrooms, and two weeks later I ordered some off the internet, they were legal in Sweden at that point. And just as Terence said, the mushroom delivered itself to me on the money.

BUTTERFLY: What would you say about the psychedelic community and psychedelics in the present age, and how do you look at yourself within the context?

WILLIAM: O I'm not sure. This is psychedelic age, for sure, and it's here to stay. I have had thoughts of being a voice for the mushroom in the world, and I guess I am to some degree, but to be honest it's just a way too personal thing for me, I'm right in the middle of the adventure and, I'm high up on this enormous wave of the thing, I rather sit in the outskirts of attention and live in my own world with my beloved and with good friends whom with I share the adventure. I think the mushroom has all its advertising threads it needs out there, you know, for the one who searches out the mystery the psychedelics are there right at the edge of the fence. So I've kind of stopped trying to be a voice and instead just live my own life with the psychedelics. My output as art will continue to spread across the planet though and that is my little way of sharing from the vastness and the light of the magical universe I now live in after my 10 years with the shroom. One thing I guess I do like to push is to keep pushing. Taking a few trips is not what I'm talking about. As I mentioned, there are layers to the thing, and so you can't take a few trips of some small amount of shrooms and think that the full splendour of it all will reveal itself to you just like that. Keep going. Things can only be so beautiful and marvellous as you can imagine them to be, and as soon as you start pushing that envelope then what is possible becomes more and more grand. Now, Butterfly, can't you just stand up and bend over a bit so I can give your bum a kiss?

BUTTERFLY: Sure.

(I bent over gently and William kissed my bum, many times.)

BUTTERFLY: You are very secretive in your books. Any reason?

WILLIAM: We care about each other so much. We decided to slightly hide behind a veil. So we're a bit shady. And also, we have plans in action. But we felt that it is important that we share certain things, so we decided to send our books out. But not only that, in fact what we are trying to share in our books can't be displayed directly and in clear language. It is paradox, it is mysterious. We have put it as succinctly as we could.

BUTTERFLY: “We” care about each other? Who?

WILLIAM: Me and my beloved.

BUTTERFLY: So how is it to be absolutely mad and live the life of a psychedelic god?

WILLIAM: O it's amazing, absolutely unbelievable. Luxury like nothing else.

BUTTERFLY: So, William, back to your books and work. What is your latest work's journey going to take us all to see ?

WILLIAM: O dare I even mention it. Decency can scarcely hint at the terrible beauty of this tremendum. You are being contacted. By who? That is not up to me to open my mouth about.

BUTTERFLY: You began, years ago, releasing your books under the name The Rosalixion. Your current release is called The Mushroom Seamstress, which contains The Rosalixion as one of its parts. What do you feel has changed the most from The Rosalixion to now?

WILLIAM: For one thing I have now put the mushroom in its rightful place; on centre stage in bright floodlight. In The Rosalixion I was very sneaky about talking about the shroom, even though the wine of the mushroom licked every word. In the current work I do none of such hiding. Also, my own understanding of and intimacy with the core has grown immensely since the release of The Rosalixon, and that is reflected in the new and current work. Let me tell you a little story. I had one of my first hyperspacial breakthroughs, as it could be called, around summer solstice a few years ago. It was around June 21, or the 21st of the 6th month. I broke through to the wiring under the board in a deeper way than I had ever done, and I stayed there for weeks. It is debatable whether or not I ever came back. Later it struck me as a synchronicity that I in fact live on street number 216, thought that made sense as my breakthrough happened close to or on 21/6. Mildly odd, I thought. Then I found that the Devil's number, 666, well, 6 x 6 x 6 equals 216. That is so characteristic of my wife Sissy Cogan, to play a bit evil like that, sharp and scary. Very cute. Then it struck me that I was 16 years old the first time I took mushrooms, which was year 2000, which again shines of this 216 current. Odd, I thought, very odd. Then it hit me that indeed, the chemical formulae of Psilocin, which is what Psilocybin, the active ingredient of the mushroom, becomes when it enters the human body, is C 12 H 16 N 2 O, which again shines of 216. That's when it started making sense to me. Not too long ago I then found that by calculating the digits of my year of birth, 1983, well, 1 x 9 x 8 x 3 equals 216. And now here we begin to touch upon secret stuff, secrets between me and my beloved. There are many more examples I could give of the 216 current that runs through me and my family's life, but I won't mention them now. You understand the title, The Seamstress. The Goddess weaves for us the marvellous web in our eternal tantric union, as we merge more and more with her impossible consciousness. And you know, this is not synchronicity, the 216 stuff. This is something far vaster than that. This is in fact a glimmering of the hidden plot. In one sense we could consider our new work The Mushroom Seamstress a pearl that we have placed in the dream. The funny thing, and it surprised me immensely to find this, is that one could say that everything is visionary reality. Once I was born as a psychedelic god I saw my entire past in a new light. All events fit, I could see the pattern, I could see the web. You know, that whole version of myself as having been born in Sweden at the end of the 20th century, went to kindergarten, went to school, my name is William, whatever, that whole story just fell away and forth popped a deeper reality, a completely other version of what was going on, a new magic modality of the topology of my life. Obviously alls our stories are different, your story won't be like mine, what me and the girls have attempted with our books is to show how it is for us in the hope that people will recognise it on some level. Personally I also feel I just have to share this with you others, I feel like a little child having just found the yummiest strawberry cake ever and I go “Guys! Guys! There's this huge strawberry cake over here, come here!”. You know. Whatever is going on, and let me be clear saying that I of course do not know exactly what is going on, but whatever it is it's more beautiful and wondrous than anything I have ever encountered, and so of course I feel a deep urge to tell it to you, to share my findings somehow. And they are literally my own findings, for me anyhow. No one has ever come and told this stuff to me, which surprised me for a long time until I understood the depths of the love here. What I have found has come from my deep and long involvement with the mushroom, and a few other psychedelics, and a drive to search the beyonds. And well, this is part of the new work, what has changed since The Rosalixion, a new sense of clarity about it all.

BUTTERFLY: (Mumbles.) God your lips look so yummy. May I have a kiss, just a small kiss?

WILLIAM: Mmm. Yummy. Are you yummy-girl? Sure.

(William rises from the chair and places his lips gently on mine. We shut our eyes and melted in bliss.)

BUTTERFLY: So. What is a day in the life of Spiros like at this point?

WILLIAM: A day in my life? Day and night, no difference, but. Hahaha. Here I must get poetic to at all be able to answer. You know, I always hoped there was more to reality than I was told as a kid. Never could I have dreamed anything as marvellous as this. I love telling the story of how my wife greeted me to one of our palaces last year, it was such a grand greeting. I took 6 grams of shroom and, well, as the effect began to kick in I noticed this strange tongue come folding toward me through hyperspace all the way from the beginning of the myths and like from millions of years away. It was an alien jaguar snake lizard lion tongue, and it folded in some impossible way toward me, closer and closer, and when it was just near me it suddenly vanished. I sat like a question mark on the chair, wondering where it went. Then suddenly the tongue appears behind me under the chair and it licks one long slow wet lick between my legs, spreading my pussylips. I moan in orgasmic pleasure as it slides across my clitoris and I drift away into an ocean of wellbeing. I sense a big smile there and Sissy, my wife, says “Hello dear”. It strikes me as odd that she licked my pussy when I don't even have a pussy, I'm male, right, but I didn't dwell too long upon that. Well, that was Sissy's way of saying hello that evening. Hahaha, now that kind of stuff just gets me tingling. A day in the life of Spiros? Well, it's a day of such godly luxury that only the brave ever find such. I mean hey, I am the cute little sweet Satan married to the seven deadly sisters who created me, how much sweeter can life get? And people think being a millionaire is luxury. . .

BUTTERFLY: Those sisters like their little blond barbie boy, I hear. Hmm. What you said about the number 216, how it runs through your life like a central thread, was very interesting. Do you have any other similar examples to tell?

WILLIAM: The 216 current is the easiest one to explain, which is why I often talk about it. Most of the other threads of the hidden plot are more obscure and harder to explain shortly.

BUTTEFLY: If reality comes as a hyperdimensional biological hologram mirrored through and as multi dimensional space time synchronicity, then how does humanity as a species mould and adapt synymous with the aeons of time, philosophy, art, literature, and poetry?

WILLIAM: I rarely think in terms of “the human species as a whole”. To pile together us all under one umbrella seems a bit conceptionally oversimple, to me. I think rather that we all live our own lives, and thus have our own relationships to reality, soul, Nature, and the whole kit and caboodle. It's an interesting question. I often look at my life and Nature as a kind of living cryptogram that is telling me the secrets of the nature of my existence. I am soul and soul only, everything is visionary reality, and me and my beloved are the cosmic paradox folding through itself, yes, like a hyperdimensional holographic unity. Hyperspacial synchronicity naturally arises from this unity. How to enter into harmony with it? Well, follow the thread, follow the clues. Look within, feel, live with the heart. There are no written rules on how to approach things of such magnitude as the trememendum of existence, and my truths might not necessarily be anyone else's truths. For me personally it of course also involves exploring the mushroom and following the guidance of the shroom. So I guess also what I am saying is do your thing, do what it is you want to do. That itself will have positive effects on the whole of humanity. Align yourself with your own purposes in your own relationship to the most-highest. You are the event-horizon of Creation.

BUTTERFLY: A friend asked me recently, and I thought I'd ask you. Why is it that one always wants to get naked when high on the mushroom?

WILLIAM: Hahaha. Interesting. That happens to me a lot too. I mostly always prefer to have my clothes off or perhaps a simple sheet round my waist. Can it be that it feels unnatural with clothes on when one is in such a natural mind-set as one is in when high on the shroom? You know, when the cultural mind-set falls so falls the clothes with it, haha.

BUTTERFLY: Sounds like it, yes. So, you say that you are married to Sissy Cogan and her sister-wife. Isn't it a bit dangerous to look at your symbiotic relationship with the mushroom as her being your wife? I mean, marriages can turn bad, and all. Marriages don't always last.

WILLIAM: I know what you mean, but the thing is that our union is on many levels. Sissy is a divine loving and caring mother to me as well as my lover and partner and best friend. As I mentioned earlier, love like the dove taking care of her egg. It's deep, like a mother's love for her child or like the love between Isis and Osiris. When I first discovered the depths of this kind of love I felt it as a kind of biological connection, as well. Made me feel like the first man, like an Adam anthropos, with all the cosmos within me. I can feel the bird in me, the snake and lizard and the insect, the human, the Greco-Egyptian god, and the alien. The reverence for life that comes with that. . .

BUTTERFLY: Ah, ah, yes, yes. Can you tell about Sissy and her sister? Who are they, what are they like, etc.?

WILLIAM: I'd prefer to leave that to The Mushroom Seamstress to show, for now.

BUTTERFLY: Sure. Ah, so many questions. We could talk for hours more.

WILLIAM: Indeed.

BUTTERFLY: So what are your plans for the near future?

WILLIAM: O I'm not sure, keep celebrating between suns and enjoy the rising spring, it's spring time soon, and keep following the thread. The plan that me and the girls devised many years ago and high up in a corner of hyperspace seems to have worked, and so now comes a next phase in our plan. Our plan partly involved overlapping my regular 3D 4D existence with the mushroom hyperspace, and it indeed seems we succeeded, they now overlap each other in one tantalisingly perfect match. I'm excited. The hidden plot keeps surfacing and according to our calculations we are right on schedule. As Terence said, the flying saucer waits warmly humming at the end, it is the perfected human mind. As far as I can tell we heading straight toward it at lightning speed. Me and the girls' plan is to merge ourselves with the impossible consciousness of the Seamstress and become a totally new kind of being. Or put in other words, to merge with the psychedelic totality, and as Terence put it, “become dimension-roving Bodhisatvas”. To come into completion as the wondrous bending ending, a new beginning. I expect nothing short of miracles. Lots to say about it, lots to say, I guess simply put I'm just going to continue following the thread.

BUTTERFLY: Out of the labyrinth.

WILLIAM: The dreamadoory.

BUTTERFLY: Dreamydeary.

WILLIAM: My plans for the near future? To let my dreams run free and keep exploring. And just swoon with the girls in our lovely Plomari.

BUTTERFLY: What do you have to say about the mushroom being so at the outskirts of attention in the modern western world?

WILLIAM: Well it amazes me how so many people think the mushroom is some kind of drug. To dismiss it as a drug is to totally miss-appreciate and misunderstand the whole thing. I hate to say it but it's true, stupid and tasteless people aren't interested in psychedelics because they can't figure out what the point of it is. The mind-sets characteristic of modern western civilisation are extremely tasteless and can not appreciate the intimate relationship with the divine that the mushroom makes possible, I mean, it even fails to get the hint, to see that first glimpse of the beauty possible. The fog of dullness is so thick that people easily fail to see through it, you know.

BUTTERFLY: And yet there it is, this little fungi, growing peacefully on the pastures, waiting to be embraced. . .

WILLIAM: Yes, there it it. And let us also note that all good stuff is at the far outskirts of western attention because all good stuff has sense enough to stay out of that circus.

BUTTERFLY: It's been a pleasure talking to you Spiros, and I am sure that a lot of people will find this interview very enlightening and interesting. If you don't mind I think we should do this again some time soon, I am sure that within weeks you will have lots of new things to say.

WILLIAM: It's been a pleasure, Butt. Yes, let's do it again soonly. I always learn a lot myself from talking about it all and I do think it's important that we talk about this stuff. We need more info from the deep caverns and from the Garden.

BUTTERFLY: Yes we do, yes we do. Anything you would like to say as last words for this time?

WILLIAM: So much to talk about, let us leave it for next time.

BUTTERFLY: Okay then. Bye for this time, Spiros.

WILLIAM: Bye for now.

 

 

Part II of this interview is here