Starting things off small, we'll begin with the titles of two of John's side project albums: Ataxia's Automatic Writing and AW II.

Automatic writing according to Wikipedia is:

"Automatic writing, also called psychography, is a claimed psychic ability allowing a person to produce written words without consciously writing. Practitioners engage in automatic writing by holding a writing instrument and allowing alleged spirits to manipulate the practitioner's hand. The instrument may be a standard writing instrument, or it may be one specially designed for automatic writing, such as a planchette or a ouija board."

It can be treated as a form of divination (a way to talk to entities in other dimensions) or alternatively, as a way to access the unconscious (similar to Jung's individuation method 'active imagination').

A famous instance of automatic writing is in Frederick Bligh Bond's book The Gates Of Rememberance (1919). He details working as an archeologist at Glastonbury Abbey, claiming that he used automatic writing to contact dead monks who guided his excavation.

It's a well-known fact that John has been open about his contact with spirits in other dimensions for a long time, but to my knowledge, he has only ever made public the name of one of these entities: Jean.

Jean is namechecked in 'Ratiug' from PBX Funicular Intaglio Zone:

'Jean Nealy views from a place where time is flat She sees a haze that could penetrate more black'

I find it interesting that John gives her the surname Nealy. It sounds almost identical to the word 'nearly' which, in my mind at least, evokes the idea of incorporeality: a state of being without a physical body.

Jean was famously mentioned during a solo show John did in 2001. He details how she inspired the song 'Someone's' from To Record Only Water for Ten Days:

'This song is written to a very good friend of mine named Jean, who is a spirit. She was possessing a person who is a very good friend of mine, who was asleep. And we've talked many times, and she tells me about what it is like in other dimensions, like places you'll go after you die. You're actually there right now; there are places that you go after you die, and you're already there. And you're already living that life simeltanously with this, because they're in a kind of time zone…where they are at every time at once. And we're only at this short period of time. People who are spirits, they live in every time zone at once, because they don't have a sense of time. Consequently they can't write songs, and they can't do drugs, they can't have sex, they can't…do all these things that we do, because we have time. You don't realize that it's time…it's not your flesh, or anything like that. It's time. You're very lucky to have time. You should appreciate it while you have it.'

He also introduced the song live at Paradiso, Amsterdam, February 8, 2001 with:

“This song is dedicated to someone who lives out there (John points with his right arm to the sky) not among us, but she is inside of you, you know, she could be inside of you over here.”

Taking this into account, the lyrics of Someone's and Ratiug (which is the word GUITAR backwards, by the way) make a lot more sense.

The nature of who or what Jean is, is a mystery. It appears that she may never have had a turn in a human body (ie, incarnated), but given how close John seems to be with her, it could be surmised that she acts as a sort of guardian angel to him.

'And I'm so happy And sad 'cause they both Connect me with when I'd never been A body'

-Lyrics to 'Someone's' from To Record Only Water For Ten Days

If there's a topic you want me to cover in a post, or something you're curious about that I may be able to answer related to John's occultism, feel free to pop it in the ask box!