Welcome into the vortex........

anarcho-shamanism, mountain spirits; sacred wilderness, sacred sites, sacred everything; psychonautics, entheogens, pushing the envelope of consciousness; dominator culture and undermining its activities; Jung, Hillman, archetypes; Buddhism, multidimensional realities, and the ever-present satori at the centre of the brain; a few cosmic laughs; and much much more....


all delivered from the beautiful Highlands of Scotland!






Thursday 28 April 2016

The Buddhist Inventory

This month marks the fortieth anniversary of my first proper contact with organised Buddhism on a weekend retreat. Also approaching is the ten-year mark of my formal departure from aforementioned organised Buddhism.

In recent months I have been writing, off blog, about the period of my life prior to my engagement with organised Buddhism. This time, involving full-on commune living, 60-hour working weeks sorting and delivering mail in Oxford, free festivals and psychedelics, is one that I hold with great fondness in my mind. I had felt the urge to write about it for some while, but had demurred, as thoughts about hanging on to the past, wasting your short precious human life on things that have been and gone, made rapid orbits around my mind. Then, one day, I decided to drop all this theoretical objection stuff, and just do it. Write, and see what happens, rather than indulging that old bad habit of over-thinking, attempting to chart the voyage and understand the further shore before you've set sail.

One thing to come out of this: despite the confusion and the hard times, the psychedelic commune period in my life is one that I recall vividly, and with a high degree of personal affection and satisfaction. It is the Buddhist full immersion project that manifests as more problematic. Considerable periods of it are little more than a fug and a fog. This is all, on the face of it, a bit strange.

I intend to write a number of pieces based around this theme of immersion in organised Buddhism ('organised Buddhism' seems to be the phrase that I have settled for; why may become clearer in due course), partly for personal benefit, and partly because it throws up issues of more general concern regarding how to live a spiritual or creative or authentic or mystical or whatever life. Personally, I know that there are lessons for my soul to learn - and to me it's important that those lessons are learnt.

The personal Buddhist period divides neatly into three sections of roughly similar length, a little under a decade each. Phase One: full-on immersion, characterised by enthusiasm overall. Phase Two; serious questions come to the fore, and inspiration is increasingly sought elsewhere; Phase Three; steady withdrawal, to the point of official resignation.

The process of leaving was gentle, slow, almost unnoticeable. Involving, as it did, a remoulding of my conscious identity - who am I? - it had to be treated with utmost seriousness. I succeeded in leaving the Buddhist Order fairly free from those feelings of bitterness, anger, and rancour, that sometimes characterise such a change. The majority of my friends with whom I can share openness are from my Buddhist days, though some have, like me, renounced that Buddhist organisation, while others again are still there having come to their own arrangement of how to survive within that particular context.
  

A good way to begin this investigation might be with an inventory. I came across the notion of the inventory in relation to some of Carlos Castaneda's work. In 'Journey to Ixtlan', Don Juan advises Carlos, the eternal fall guy, to 'erase personal history'. This is a topic that I have returned to over the decades many times. What does it mean? And how do you do it? It is not, if I understand properly, a question of literally forgetting everything that ever happened in your life. But it is a matter of personal detachment, if you will; of freeing oneself from the emotional and energetic traces, blocks, left by what you have done in the past. Removing the sense of 'personal' from the equation. Disentangle, de-identify. Do this and energy flows freely.

Castaneda offers no techniques as such, but a number of his followers do. You engage in the recapitulation; you recapitulate your life. Every little bit of it. In order to do this, you first draw up an inventory of your life. Different folk provide variations on the precise details of how to achieve this - but the central idea is to write down all the people you have ever known, and all the events that you recall happening with them. Then, following a specific technique, you recapitulate the lot, not just remembering but, with the aid of the particular practices, actually reliving and thereby becoming free from the tangles, the binds, the complexes constricting your energy.

I have not attempted the recapitulation. It is a gargantuan task, methinks. However, just holding the idea in your mind seems to have a certain effect. I shall, nevertheless, present a brief and partial inventory of 'my life in organised Buddhism'. The good bits and the bad bits. So here goes.....

There were several great boons from this period in my life. Firstly, organised Buddhism provided a safe haven, a supportive environment, at a time when I most needed it. It was 1976, and I hit the beginning of that year inspired and confused in equal measure. The spiritual life was calling loud but not so clear. The commune project I had been involved in was falling apart, and so was I. Following a couple of years of LSD-assisted epiphanies, I felt I needed to steer a steadier course, as more psychedelic multidimensional experiences only served to create more chaos.

There were two great things about Buddhism. In brutal contrast to the belief and ideology-based style of orthodox Christianity, Buddhism adopted an eye-opening suck-it-and-see approach. There was no need to believe in all sorts of random unverifiable stuff; just try it out and see what happens. What a relief! And what happened was that meditation worked. A practical tool, it enabled consciousness transformation. Brilliant. I knew this, not because it said so in any silly book, but because I experienced it directly.

The other longed-for thing that Buddhism provided was apparent clarity. It had all sorts of things you could do, and all kind of maps intended to help you navigate through the muck and mire of conditioned existence. The Eightfold Path, the Threefold Way. The Four Noble truths, the Six Paramitas. It was like spiritual satnav. Sit back, follow the routemap, and bang, there you are, enlightened. It was Apollonian, a boon to this young aspirant who showed symptoms of Dionysian overkill. And nobody else - Hindus of different shapes and sizes, Taoists (you couldn't find them anyway), psycho-this or psycho-that people - had anything to match Buddhism's user-friendly maps and manuals. Just what was needed.

The second great personal boon concerned friendship. Unlike many other Buddhist groups and organisations, the one I was part of was big on friendship. It was viewed as focal to spiritual life. It's funny really. There is a multitude of fellow Buddhists who I worked and lived with over the years. Despite our being apparently kindred spirits, having committed our lives to the same goals, and despite living together, working together, meditating every day together, breathing the same air together. Despite all this, in the majority of cases, once the living or working stopped, it was as if it had all never really happened. We were almost like strangers. In a handful of instances, however, this proved not to be the case, and we have remained excellent friends. The majority of people with whom I can speak openly are acquaintances from my days in Buddhism, though some have, like me, departed the organised Buddhist thing. It has been revealing to observe how things have developed since I took myself off to the outer reaches of the known universe aka Highland Scotland, nearly eleven years ago. While a few of these old Buddhist-based friendships have become attenuated, others have remained, and a few have become stronger. I am exceedingly grateful for these friendships originating in my years as a fully-fledged Buddhist.

Curiously, - and this is the third boon - my days in organised Buddhism also provided a doorway into some of the best in classical western art and culture. 'We are the Buddha boys' was my own simplistic version of reality, wholeheartily rejecting anything ever conjured up west of Baghdad. The head of the Buddhist Order had other ideas, however, pointing to what he considered the best in the arts of the west as helpful in our quest for spiritual betterment. To begin with, I was having nothing to do with it. However, one morning, before setting off on the vans (I was doing a stint in a removals business we had going at the time) the boss of the business sat us all down to listen to the Pastoral Symphony by Beethoven first. You could do that sort of thing those days. I recall the feeling as the melodies began to wash over me; calming and harmonising, not unlike a decent meditation. I also remember my introduction to paintings - self-started this time. I sneaked off one Sunday afternoon to the National Gallery in London to check out the Impressionists. Wandering around the rooms of late-nineteenth century art, I was stopped in my tracks by a painting of Van Gogh's. Entrancing, leading me into its imaginative world. I was soon hooked. After a while, art was providing more sustenance than anything traditional Buddhism could throw at me.

The head of the Order had his own rather proscriptive ideas about 'the arts'. He would be able to tell you at great length why Handel was better and more spiritual than Mozart and Beethoven; and why poetry was the real bees knees, above and beyond the other art forms. Nevertheless, I appreciate his encouragement of enthusiasm for western art, which is a mixed bag, but has served to enrich my life overall.

The last of the Buddhist boons I care to mention is meditation practice. This is not an unqualified thumbs-up. I don't think I had fantastic guidance on this, and I spent long hours on the meditation cushion not making the best use of that time as a result. Nevertheless, I felt - and still feel - pretty much at home with meditation practice. This was particularly so with the Buddha/Bodhisattva visualisation 'sadhana', as it is called, that I received on my official ordination (not as a monk-type person, in case you were wondering/alarmed). This frequently served as a lifeline, a thread, albeit sometimes tenuous, connecting me with the reason I was there in the first place. For this I was mightily grateful.

These are my Buddhist boons. For these I give thanks. That, I feel, is enough for one article. The non-boons will appear shortly......





      

          

Saturday 23 April 2016

April in..... Cairngorms

It's that time of year again.....





Tuesday 19 April 2016

It's Coming Out Day...


It is 73 years ago today that one of the most famous cycle rides ever undertaken by a human being took place. Famous to those into such things, at any rate. Our Great Cycling Hero worked for Sandoz, the pharmaceutical people, where he had landed the cushy-sounding number of running the ergot project. looking for something that might be useful, like a cure for migraine (hey, they still haven't found one. Anybody with faith in this pharma lark, take a quick reality check). He had been quietly synthesising new substances for eight years (definitely a cushy number). One day in April 1943, a curious whim overcame him. There was something he had synthesised back in 1938 that he felt an inexplicable urge to revisit. It was the 25th compound he had produced in the lysergic series: LSD-25.

He sampled a wee taster on Friday 16th, enough to confirm that it was indeed (horror of horrors) psychoactive. So, on Monday April 19th, 1943, at 4.20 in the afternoon, he took what he believed to be a larger yet still apparently miniscule amount of this new substance. For thirty minutes he noticed no effect. Soon afterwards, however, he was plunged into a state where he was unable to write, so got on his bike to go home. He pedalled off into, as Jay Stevens puts it in his admirable 'Storming Heaven', 'a suddenly anarchic universe.' To quote Stevens once more:'... this wasn't the familiar boulevard that led home, but a street painted by Salvador Dali, a funhouse roller coaster where the buildings yawned and rippled. But what was even stranger was the sense that although his legs were pumping steadily, he wasn't getting anywhere.'

Our Great Hero is one Albert Hofmann. And the rest, as they say, is history. But the day is being commemorated by the Psychedelic Society as 'Coming Out Day'. Psychedelics are a natural element in the history of humankind. Let's speak about them, and the benefits they have conferred personally. So here we go.

I have written elsewhere a little about my own psychedelic history in the 1970s. It formed a turning point in my life, if only to demonstrate clearly the path I was destined already to take. I spent a good 25 years afterwards free from entheogenic materials while I did my level best to practice mindfulness, love, and freedom within the context of organised Buddhism.

It was around 12 years ago that I first revisited psychedelics as a potential aid in following my hopefully spiritual path through life. It was during those short purple years when special mushrooms could be bought openly in Camden Market, London, and elsewhere. I was not overly impressed with the results, an impression that most likely says more about me at the time than the mushrooms. Over the following years, I experimented very occasionally with various other shamanic-type plants: cactus, salvia divinorum, yopo, and ayahuasca. In general, I found these excursions beneficial; not in the dramatically life-changing ways of my youth, maybe. But highly worthwhile nevertheless: for providing a kick when I needed it, for opening doors in the shell of selfhood, and helping me confront what required confronting.

Interestingly, while the plants had some advantages over the synthetic psychedelics, nothing seemed to compare with good old LSD-25 in terms of being a substance of pure consciousness. I retained a curiosity, maybe simply a nostalgia. Then something turned up which, I wondered, might provide an answer. It is the subject of my particular 'coming out' tale for today.

Two years ago, I was not in a very good way. The place I had been working closed its doors, an event which I didn't cry about too much. Nevertheless. My diary of the period captures things pretty well: 'As I walked away from my work, I had the distinct feeling that I was heading into a new and different phase of my life. But what was being ushered in, I had no idea......  It could have been a period of great mountain adventures, fantastic meditation voyages. But it wasn't. Instead, I was beset by energy problems, anxiety. My toes and feet sometimes felt as if energy, sensation, was being pulled out of them........ Something had to give, as I felt more and more stretched psychically......' (It is worth mentioning that my wife had recently undergone surgery for a potentially serious condition, which undoubtedly didn't help).

Around this time my attention was drawn to the fact that two apparently LSD-like substances were out there for simple, above-board purchase: Al-Lad and LSZ. I made the decision to buy some of the latter (Al-Lad appeared to be in short supply at that moment) and to give it a go. As I wrote in aforementioned diary: 'I needed something to assist me to bottom out.'

In short, I was not over-impressed with LSZ on that cold, bright April Saturday in 2014. Its resemblance to LSD seemed pretty, well, limited. One thing was that I felt as though I had consumed a very foreign substance, while LSD always seemed to be welcomed and recognised as a friend by my mind and body. Rather than chilling out, I found myself pacing restlessly around - undoubtedly an amplification of my state of mind at the time. Several hours later, with the peak of the trip gone, I took a walk in the forest nearby. Nature invariably revives ones sense of reality. Back to the diary; 'I sat on the stump of a tree trunk and allowed myself to sink deeper into myself. As I did so, I also allowed myself to utter three words that I found it so hard to say: I need help. I repeated them, louder, telling the trees. I need help. This was a relief and a release. Tears welled up as I began to walk through the early evening. It was a bit of a breakthrough.'

Breakthrough indeed. Me? Self-sufficient, self-reliant, independent, shit-hot king of the castle me......need........ help? Surely not. There remained the question of what kind of help exactly was in order. As pressing as my current state of mind were the chronic migraines and sinus problems that had plagued me for years, and were showing no sign of going away. They seemed, in truth, to be intimately related to the energy, anxiety blah blah blah. I had by now given up on conventional medicine as providing anything effective as a real remedy, having tried and failed umpteen times with prescription substances, some of which seemed far more hazardous than LSZ.

I began to see a homeopath. Fortunately, my choice was a wise one. Between the LSZ trip and my initial homeopathy appointment I succeeded in making things worse by pulling some muscles in my back. I arrived at the therapy centre with a streaming cold and hardly able to get up the stairs to the consulting room. More tears, as I relived my deepest nightmares of being out of control. To cut a long story short, the homeopathy was great: a year on, I was far more able to manage my conditions, which continue to appear from time-to-time, but less seriously.

LSZ wasn't a great substance. It felt very synthetic, and came with what those in-the-know call heavy bodyload. That is to say, it made me feel nauseous and weak, for a good 24 hours after swallowing the blotter. Nevertheless, I have to thank LSZ from the bottom of my heart for initiating a process of recovery in my life which may or may not have happened otherwise. Sometimes it is the aftermath, the practical ramifications, that are most significant, rather than the trip day itself.

It wasn't long before Teresa May was on the case, deciding that psychological breakthroughs are not in the national interest, and LSZ went the way of most psychedelics. It was replaced by 1P-LSD, the new kid on the block, a far friendlier substance, and one which does seem to act like a stripped-down version of LSD itself. It's still around.

So there we have it. My contribution to Psychedelic Coming Out Day. May we all walk our paths through life, discovering its sacred dimensions as we go, with or without the help of psychedelic substances. But let that choice be a free and open matter for the individual.





    

    

      

Sunday 17 April 2016

Shock and Horror in the Vortex

Just a note to say that I have removed the 'Great Places on the Web' list from the blog. This is because some of those Great Places aren't really active any longer. Some other of those Great Places have become a bit less Great in recent times. Probably most importantly, there are loads and loads of Great Places on the web nowadays, and to pick a small number out of the hat is a bit silly. Most people can find stuff themselves easily enough on the internet if they want to, anyway. The blog page looks a bit more spacious now....
 

Wednesday 13 April 2016

I Love Creag Bheag!

Creag Bheag: the name says it all, really. The little rock;  the little crag. Though this fails to explain why Aonach Beag, the little Aonach, adjacent to Ben Nevis, is bigger and higher than its neighbour Aonach Mhor, the big Aonach.

I have a fantasy, or a way to put things. One spring morning, the fantasy goes, I shall awake in my bed to the sound of a loud voice. 'No more of that big mountain stuff' it thunders. 'It's walks in the park from now on for you.'

This voice of fate may or may never turn up. Whichever way, even without the body beginning to fall apart, there is a place for the little hill, the little rock - the little mountain, even, if we can be allowed to speak of such a thing. It's the time of year when big mountains are off the menu. It's the short days of November through to February's end. It's those days when the weather on the high tops is inclement or downright dangerous. It's those 'not too much energy today' days, those 'can't be bothered' days. Those days when, even with perfect fair weather and a long summer's day ahead, you just fancy a little hill, a little  mountain. I hope that, when camping epics to remote hills are simply memories, I shall still be able to visit, climb, savour, Creag Bheag.

Photos: Creag Bheag this February  


Tuesday 5 April 2016

What about the Children?

OK Mr Smart-Arse Pale Green Vortex Man. You've really done it now. Overstepped the limit. I mean, ridiculing those decent, well-intentioned people with their Psychoactives Bill. I ask, how heartless can you be? Isn't it about the children? Don't we need to protect the children?

Well, it's true that our young people do sometimes need to be protected. Under normal circumstances, we have things called laws specifically designed for purpose. You know, age-related. They exist for a range of topics where it's best that young people are specially considered. Alcohol, sex, tobacco, driving cars, for example. 'Drugs', though, that awful word in our weird society, are to be treated differently. We shall prevent young people making mistakes with psychoactives by criminalising psychoactives. It's the same logic as banning motor vehicles because a small number of under-age people drive around and come to no good. Or criminalising sex as a result of some under-agers getting it on.

There is a very sneaky, disingenuous aspect to the publicity driving the Psychoactive Substances Bill. A deliberate misleading of the public - at least that section of the public that doesn't check up on things for themselves. 'Legal highs' are demonised through the use of statistics purportedly showing many folk - especially young folk - dropping dead as a result of taking them. The figure of 97 for 2012 has been frequently bandied around. The thing is this, though - it does not actually refer to 'legal highs' at all. It refers to NPS, New/Novel Psychoactive Substances. NPS is a far wider designation, including many substances that are pretty new kids on the block, but that have nevertheless already been banned. The deliberate conflation of the two terms is intended to mislead, and is shameful but true. Thus, of those 97 fatalities in 2012, 23 were the result of PMA/PMMA, a 'false ecstasy' illegal since the 1970s. Another 37 concerned mephedrone and similar (discussed in the early days of PGV in 'Plant food, anyone?'), which was banned in 2012. Though NPS, these were all already 'illegal highs' so not at all relevant in consideration of the new Bill. How many people actually died as a result of properly legal highs? According to Professor David Nutt, probably somewhere between ten and zero.

It should be borne constantly in mind that the main effrontery of the Psychoactive Substances Bill is that it is an attack on consciousness; as Casey Hardison reminded us years ago, the 'War on Drugs' is not a war on drugs, but a war on consciousness. This Bill is the logical conclusion of that way of thinking. 'We have decided, and decided precisely, what states of mind you are permitted, and which ones you are not.' It is Orwellian in a way that none of the dark characters inhabiting the pages of 1984 could have dreamt up. In the same way that you don't need to be homosexual to support gay rights, or don't have to be a female to understand equal pay for women, you do not need to be a consumer of any psychoactive substances, legal or illegal, to realise the totalitarian nature of this piece of (hopefully unworkeable) legislation, and to object to it as a full-frontal attack on the most basic of human freedoms.

In truth, this Bill has been promoted largely by a group of hardcore ideologues, who have the nerve to think they can decide what other adult people do with their private lives. I do not like this 'left-wing, right-wing' designation of people; having said that, our psychoactive totalitarians are often embodiments of all that is despicable about 'right-wing' mentality. They have their own very precise view of how people should live, behave, think, feel, 'mentalise'. At weekends, they would have all the young people doing embroidery (the girls) or practicing reef knots (the boys). The older people will bake cakes (the women) or build garden sheds (the men). In the evening, they will all sit down together in front of the television for Jonathan Ross and Masterchef. If you want to do this with your life, go ahead. But let others get on with their lives as well.

As for they children, well they do sometimes need a helping hand. 'Education' is a word bandied about by the anti-psychoactives people; and education does indeed sometimes come in useful. Not, however, the 'education' proposed by these people, which is really propaganda in disguise. Going around schools preaching about the evils of drugs will indeed cause panic in the A and E departments across the country, as millions of young people need urgent treatment for a surfeit of laughter. Drug education needs to come from people who have 'been there' and can distinguish between more positive and more destructive ways to go. But hey, they can't easily do that, because the legal regime makes that problematic. Back to square one......

Plenty of decent stuff has appeared in recent days on this topic. Here's one.....

anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/the-psychoactive-substances-bill-is.html

And don't forget the two cardinal principles of drug prohibition:

1. The more draconian the measures, the more control is passed to the truly criminal underworld, to the people who are properly unscrupulous.

2. The more draconian the measures, the more unpredictable, the more varied in purity, the substances being offered to and purchased by people young and old. And, as a result, the greater the risk and number of casualties. As mentioned before on this blog, there is blood on the hands of the Home Office, the Home Secretary, and everybody else behind this ridiculous and dangerous drug regime.

Image: law-abiding citizens. From the Guardian.




 

Friday 1 April 2016