Manna From A Hot Heaven

The theory of human-generated global warming has been a godsend to politicians and corporate big business alike. It seems only yesterday that talk of climate change was considered the domain of fringe environmentalists and anti-capitalists who dared to critique the unlimited benefits of oil- and coal- based modern societies. Then someone turned a switch, and realised there was money to be made here. Another switch was turned, and somebody else saw how climate change had great potential for fear-mongering and mind control. And so we arrive at the current situation.

If modern dominator culture is expert in anything, it is hijacking ideas and movements that arise counter to their own aims, and corrupting them to suit their own purposes. The mainstream of 1960s 'psychedelic culture' is one such example; interestingly, the British counterculture of the 1970s proved less susceptible to being sequestered, and was really beyond the pale, a fact which resulted in the enormous Operation Julie acid bust of 1977. Once we realise that renewable (which is not necessarily 'green') energy developments are not, in the main, about saving Polynesians and polar bears, let alone providing a better world for our grandchildren, but about making money and maintaining power, then everything falls into place. We understand why the number one consequence of global warming fear has been, in the U.K., the proliferation of large-scale wind farms constructed by multinational corporations, rather than local and domestic initiatives for energy production. In dominator cultures, power and money are concentrated into the hands of the few in the typical hierarchical pyramid. And the last thing these people want is for the mass of the population to be empowered in any way and take responsibility. Their role in the grand scheme of things is to watch television and shut up.

It also becomes clear why the emphasis is on greater generation of energy, rather than energy efficiency and decreasing consumption. I cannot imagine the Bilderburg group of highly influential people, meeting earlier this month in Spain, looking favourably on anything that involves decreases in consumption. Continued economic growth is the name of the game - the media screams at us every day that without it we are all doomed - so energy efficiency, with its concomitant fall in consumption and profits, is a very bad thing.

Armed with the fear that the theory of human-generated global warming provokes, the Control System is able to justify all manner of preposterous claims. The esoteric and convoluted scheme of Renewable Obligation Certificates, through which energy companies are effectively subsidised by taxpayers so that they can reap handsome profits from expensive wind energy, is one obvious and obscene example. Carbon, a word that has taken on the mantle of Jungian-style environmental Shadow, can be used as an excuse for higher energy prices and special taxes. The apocalypse that will be upon us if we don't invest heavily in large-scale renewables projects is used to justify ripping apart the countryside of Britain and covering it with monstrous metal-and-plastic turbines. The fear-and-guilt trip is a favourite ploy of the dominators.

Other sinister events surround the topic. There is seeding of the public unconscious with the need for wind farms: notice how frequently, when the phrases 'climate change' and 'global warming' are used on television, a photo of a wind turbine is flashed up at the same time. Former Energy Minister Ed Miliband's infamous comment that opposing a local wind farm is socially unacceptable. Practices that are undemocratic and of dubious legaity used by councils to rubberstamp wind farm proposals. More locally, the display in Inverness Museum that claims wind farms are 'vital to reduce carbon emissions': opinion presented as fact. I objected to the display, receiving a grammatically correct but ultimately anodyne reply. I decided to let the matter go, but am having second thoughts.

All of this is softly softly totalitarianism. I use this long word deliberately, and mean it literally. Politicians and economic bigwigs would have us believe that the debate is over, on wind farms in particular and human-generated global warming in general. More sinister happenings come to mind. When the Chief of the U.K. Meteorological Office appeared on mainstream television a few months back, in the middle of the climate email fiasco, to reassure us that the entire scientific community agrees that this type of climate change is taking place, and that it is without the slightest doubt a great threat, my antennae went into overdrive. Either he is extremely ill-informed, or he is lying through his teeth. Who is holding the gun to his back, I wondered. Watch Peter Taylor's brilliant scientific presentation to cut through the hype, the counterfeit consensus, and vested interests. Go to the 'Our Planet' section on holisticchannel.org.uk He does not doubt that human activity is affecting climate, but believes that its influence is fairly small compared to other factors.

Meanwhile, groups such as the John Muir Trust and Mountaineering Council of Scotland, who have fought tirelessly to protect wild places in Britain from the juggernaut of wind farm industrialisation are, I suspect, facing a dilemma. Invaluable though it has been, their work has borne modest fruit, as evidenced by the continued building of these Shrines to Mammon among hills, moorland and mountains. Unlike the 'developers', these groups have kept painstakingly to correct procedure, and spoken eloquently with the voice of reason. Unfortunately, this approach has little impact on a process that is fuelled by far darker forces. Will they become more militant? In a sense, the situation requires meeting head-on, confronting on its own terms somehow. A recent letter in one of the main hillwalking magazines called for direct action; last weekend, a demonstration was held against a wind farm in the Lammermuir Hills, south-east Scotland. More people are waking up to the con that is upon them. What effect this awakening will have remains to be seen. Maybe it's time to invoke the aid of the nature spirits, for their own good and for ours........

Confrontation

Modern texts often refer to it by the estate names of Fisherfield and Letterewe. I prefer the traditional and far more evocative appelation of 'the Great Wilderness'. On his pioneering 16th-century map, Timothy Pont simply scrawled 'Extreme Wilderness' over the area, and for long afterwards its contours and outlines remained mysteries to human civilisation. I once met a man at a bus stop on the Wilderness's perimeter. He had just traversed the region. Sunburnt and in mud-caked boots, he was a bag of nerves, as if he had encountered ghosts and aliens on the hills, a culture shock more severe than a week in southern India. It's that kind of place ......

I get off a bus on the rising arc of a lonely country road. Three cars are parked in a lay-by, and I cast a wistful eye in their direction as I take my short, sharp leave of the comforts and knowns of the human world. I have visited the Great Wilderness before, but never through this, its eastern portal. Dark evening clouds hang stubbornly over the hilltops; the loch is still and sombre as I tread the silent path along its shores. Soon the eeriness of this long, dark Scottish summer's eve begins to press in on me. A sound in the heather makes me jump; it's only a crow. Black outlines of crags and precipices in the heart of the Wilderness ahead catch my eye, and I momentarily wonder why I am here at all. I could, instead, be eating dinner at home, with convivial company and a glass of wine, before retiring to the sofa and the latest alternative culture podcast.

As well as tranquility and peace, the joyful release of tensions, the bliss of the separate self dissolving into infinity, the path of self-knowledge seems to involve confrontation, fear, being up against it. To go beyond the confines of normal egohood and consensus reality is scary stuff. What lies on the other side of the door? And what ego willingly relinquishes its control and power to a wider reality? Tantric Buddhists seek out this confrontation with the limits in cremation grounds at midnight, and by invoking wrathful deities. It's there is shamanism: 'A person who wishes to understand something about shamanism must first of all experience their own death. This is an arduous task! ...... The person who has not already died once as a human being cannot understand anything about shamanism.' (Christian Ratsch et al, Shamanism and Tantra in the Himalayas). In the arts: 'You scared yourself with music, I scared myself with paint, I drew 550 different shoes today, it almost made me faint' (Lou Reed and John Cale on Andy Warhol). And in serious entheogenics: 'DMT sometimes inspires fear - this marks the experience as existentially authentic ..... A touch of terror gives the stamp of validity to the experience because it means "This is real." (Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival).

At 9 p.m., with the sombre twilight full upon me, I take a sharp turn right around the prow of a hill and enter a broad but deep strath (a Scottish river valley). People have been here before - there is a reasonable hillpath - but I feel that I have stumbled into a secret, hidden fairytale land. Small groups of deer peer down at me from the hillside. Some run away, while others just gaze, still, silent, and curious. Suddenly, a blue spectre appears out of the gloom of the valley below me. I eventually make out a man. He is considerably older than me, extremely suntanned, wearing a striking blue rain jacket, and is walking rather slowly. It will be midnight before he reaches the roadside, but he is unconcerned: the skies of northern Scotland won't get completely dark at all on this June night.

More deer retreat from the water's edge as I head towards a level spot near a stream flowing into the loch. Beginning to erect my simple tent for the night, I notice a larger herd, thirty or more, grazing on the hillside a mere two hundred yards away. By the time I have pitched my shelter and look up, they have melted into the hillside and the night.

Here, for this short time, the rules of the game are changed; I am no longer king of the castle. Me and the rest of creation are on level terms, and it is a strange, unsettling feeling. I have my mobile phone, but here there is no signal. I have a tent against the rain, and a sleeping bag to ward off the cold. The deer have a coat to keep out both damp and cold, however, and it doesn't rustle noisily in the wind like my tent, keeping me awake. My ego wants to recoil, to retreat into the rigid shell of its own superiority, but a basic sense of justice and honesty inside me fights the tendency. I breathe out, relax, and allow the natural democracy of the valley to take me over.

I try to sleep, but the unfamiliar rhythms of this secret place make it difficult. The never-ending twilight penetrates the thin film that is my tent. And in truth the valley is full of noises at one hour before midnight. High-pitched sounds of a waterfall in one direction, constant gurgles from the stream in another; a cuckoo singing insistently into the deep twilight; all manner of other creaks, sighs, and rustlings. I go outside to see. Nothing, in this dimension at least.

A battalion of midges greets me when I emerge the following morning, and the dark clouds of yesterday continue to hang ominously over the tops and ridges of the mountains. I ascend a strange stairway of smooth, angled rocks towards the weird world of the summits. At one point I see a solitary deer below, standing quietly on the rocky pavement. What moves her to be there, alone and watching?

I continue upwards, and the silence of the mountain fog envelops me. Strange presences announce themselves in the gloom, elusive shapeshifters. I climb over two mountain summits with these ghostly gods for company. Then, en route to the third and final peak, the clouds dissolve into nothingness, and the world around me is transformed, radiant and bejewelled. Light plays on the surface of lochans sunk deep into the earth's crust, and every contour of distant crags and hillsides stands in sharp outline. Confrontation passes, consciousness expands to far horizons, a thin skin separates this wide place from infinity.......

The Curse of Descartes

Most of us love a bogeyman - or, in these politically correct times, a bogey person. On the crudest level, this is somebody we can blame for everything that we consider to be bad in the world. More subtly, the bogey is not exactly the source of all evil, but a shadow figure nevertheless, who constellates an approach, a stage in history maybe, a weltanschauung.

For a lot of people here in Scotland, where the collective memory is long and unforgiving, a major bogey remains Superdominatrix and Oppressor of all north of the Border, Maggie Thatcher. While her dark spectre continues to hover over the banks of the Clyde and clank through the blackened corridors of Edinburgh Castle at the stroke of midnight, there is no chance of David Cameron and his buddies capturing more than a handful of Scottish votes. A complete exorcism is in order, still waiting to be performed.

For maverick disciple of Carl Jung and founder of archetypal psychology James Hillman, the bogeyman comes in the form of 17th century philosopher-mathematician Rene Descartes, along with his less famous contemporary Marin Mersenne. And with good reason. I have already written about how the Cartesian view divides the world into living subjects, complete with human egos, and the rest of the universe, dead and 'out there'. Wielding his trusty sword of mathematics, Descartes also conclusively proved that animals have no soul; imagine the status ascribed to plants, rocks and the like. Inutterably dead, pure lifelessness. Humans do possess soul and psyche, but in the true spirit of the mechanistic worldview, this needs to be located physically. Descartes finally and triumphantly concluded that the soul resides in the pineal gland.

It will not be lost on the reader that these findings of one of the fathers of modern rationalism are totally mad. But the demented ramblings of Descartes are very much in accord with the great project of secular, rational, single-waveband humanism that has moulded most of what we know as modern western civilisation. They have won the day.

Another emanation of Cartesian folly concerns the quest to discover what is truly 'real'. Following his mathematical approach, our bogeyman's conclusion was that it is my thoughts that show me to be conclusively 'me'. In contrast, sense experience especially is not to be trusted as proof - of anything, really. Remember this, when you next take a walk in the park, and see the last of the spring blossom fall to the ground, feel the wind on your skin, hear the birds as they go about their springtime business. In terms of reality, this is all highly suspect and dodgy stuff indeed.

The legacy of the Cartesian faith in mathematics as the means to probe and express reality, along with its concomitant suspicion of the validity of 'quality', can be seen in the mindset and mindspeak of our modern politicians, economists, and the rest. One such manifestation is the tendency to answer almost any given question in the language of that low-level form of maths, statistics. In the UK, members of the former Labour Government were especially prone to this particular form of sorcery. Policy and progress were expressed almost exclusively in percentage increases or decreases, numerical targets, specific dates, and so on. This IS reality as viewed through the lens of single-waveband scientific materialism. Which suits politicians and the like perfectly well since, contrary to the consensual view, figures and statistics do not demonstrate a single, objective, incontrovertible reality, but can be manipulated to prove and justify just about anything. To quote Mark Twain, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.

A sickening example of the soul-strangling effects of the post-Cartesian statistical view of the world emerged shortly before the recent election, when I took a cursory look at the various parties' policies on 'the environment'. These in the main turned out to be percentage figures for reductions in carbon emissions by particular dates. Nothing about love, care, respect, kinship, enjoyment even. Trees, rocks, birds, dolphins, all abstracted into figures; the Soul of the World reduced to percentage points on a piece of paper. Which, once more, suits the dominators just fine, as they can continue their own power agenda sanctioned by the god of the day, statistics. In truth, the only political parties to demonstrate any sense of 'environment' as directly experienced (ie outside the Cartesian box of hell) were UKIP (discourage windfarms) and the BNP (undergrounding for power transmission cables through areas of natural beauty). Does this mean that the anarcho-shamanism of Pale Green Vortex will be metamorphosing into shamanic far-rightism? Probably not. But it does demonstrate the infernal vision, the poverty of soul and imagination, that informs mainstream politics in general. Children of Descartes, born into sickness and the nexus of non-reality, we salute you.

Dominators everywhere

Dominators, dominator styles, dominator complexes: Pale Green Vortex is littered with references to these phenomena. But who and what are they?

I first came across talk of dominator culture in Terence McKenna's classic 'Food of the Gods'. He in turn had borrowed the expression from Riane Eisler's 'The Chalice and the Blade'. I finally got round to reading it....

The story goes something like this: Once upon a time, quite a long time ago, in the Mediterranean and Near East regions normally considered the cradle of western civilisation, people lived quite differently. Settled agricultural societies, at peace with one another, lived side by side. These Neolithic peoples worshipped the Great Goddess, and developed steadily their social organisations and technological prowess. Furthermore, to quote Eisler, 'Equality between the sexes - and among all people - was the general norm in the Neolithic.' This was not matriarchal society, but partnership society.

All began to change around 4200 BCE. Waves of invaders from the north and east came in on horseback. Warrior types, and with warlike male gods, slowly they subjugated the Old European groups. 'Now everywhere the men with the greatest power to destroy - the physically strongest, most insensitive, most brutal - rise to the top, as everywhere the social structure becomes more hierarchic and authoritarian' (chapter four - Dark Order out of Chaos). The day of the dominator is upon us. And the shape of western 'civilisation' has been largely determined by dominator mentality ever since.

A most important lesson from 'The Chalice and the Blade' is that there is no inevitability about the ways human societies go about things. Viciousness and dominator-style competitiveness, manifesting in power-based hierarchical forms of social organisation, is not hard-wired into our make-up, as the dominators and their one-eyed scientific apologists would have us believe. 'Warfare and patriarchy arrived with the appearance of dominator values' (Food of the Gods, intro). There is indeed a choice, but most humans are not even aware of it.

'The most important book since Darwin's "Origin of Species"', Ashley Montagu proclaims on the front cover of my copy of 'The Chalice and the Blade'. Well, it depends on who gets to read it. This is not the kind of book that official dominator channels are going to promote. Education in general, and history in particular, are most effective forms of social control. Imagine it: history lesson for the ten-year olds. 'OK kids, today we're looking at some of our ancestors. Well, unlike us, they lived happily side by side. They co-operated on many issues, didn't need armies or nuclear weapons, could go out on the streets at night, and bullying probably was unheard of. Now things are different, and you've got me.' How do you explain the supposed superiority of modern dominator-style 'progress' from that basis? You can't. Give that to the kids and the revolution will soon be upon us.

So the modern dominators had better keep quiet about the Neolithic partnership societies; they represent the death-knell of much of our modern way of life. Also best to keep under wraps what happened in the various outbursts of goddess-partnership vitality that have occasionally punched a hole in the skin of dominator culture: the witch burnings, the counter culture of the late 1960s and 1970s come readily to mind. As Terence Mckenna says: 'Dominator culture has shown a remarkable ability to redesign itself....'(Food of the Gods, chapter five). It has also cunningly developed the means to eliminate other possibilities from the arena of popular human consciousness. Brainwashing through selection and censoring of what is proferred as 'the truth'.

As it is, should we dare to look outside the dominators' box, 'The Chalice and the Blade', with its story of partnership societies, provides a myth from which to live. Not a utopia, nor a lost Garden of Eden that provokes mere nostalgia, but a vision of real possibilities, a myth to lead us on - and back to Gaia.

The Daimon's Blessing

'Know thyself' has been the maxim meted out to me by the daimon - at birth, at conception, in a previous lifetime, or in a dimension outside the consensual time- space continuum, I have no idea. Whatever, it lies outside the categories of choice, and is something over which I have little control. As examined by James Hillman in 'The Soul's Code', the daimon's calling appears to have shaped my life more than anything more conventional psychologies can come up with.

Much orthodox psychology circles round the so-called nature/nurture debate. On the nurture side, developmental psychology looks at a person from the viewpoint of the various influences on this life: parental relationships and early experiences are particularly scrutinised - familiar therapy territory. On the nature side, it's all genes, DNA, braincell chemistry: you're hard-wired and that's that. Archetypal psychologist James Hillman, however, proposes a third option, demonstrated by his 'acorn theory'. Just as the mature oak tree is already contained in the acorn, so is our personal destiny already present whan we are just little humans. Our 'calling' is to bring to maturity the particular shape, colour, flavour, of our own unique and individual acorn. And it is the daimon that facilitates the process, and with whom we must remain in contact in order to bring our life to fruition.

So the notions of daimon and acorn appear to describe (rather than explain) what has unfolded over the years of my life more satisfactorily than anything else I have come across. But to follow the daimon's calling of 'knowing myself' has involved abandoning the narrower confines of 'self' as enshrined in conventional ego psychology. To speak in Jungian terms, it has necessitated firstly a descent beyond ego into personal unconscious (including encounter with the Shadow), then entry into the collective unconscious (anima and archetypes). Still further, it has meant contact with what Jung tentatively refers to as the psychoid, and what Hillman approaches in his work on 'the soul of the world', where our connectedness with absolutely everything is brought into focus. Paradoxically, knowing yourself leads to the realisation that you are not a separate entity at all, but are intimately related to everything else. And for this leap into identity with the animal, plant and conventionally inanimate worlds, it may be necessary to leave behind Jung and his disciples, and take as guides and mentors those traditions that have not lost contact with these dimensions of reality in the first place - I am speaking primarily of so-called 'primitive' and shamanic cultures.

Attending to the call of the daimon has also led me back, into history, prehistory and beyond, in the search for origins. 'Who am I? Where do I come from?' I was on this track during my late teens when, in the quest for the origins of human nature, I read 'African Genesis' and 'The Territorial Imperative' by Robert Ardrey. In these tomes, Ardrey explores the 'killer ape' theory, stating that our australopithecine ancestors out on the East African plains evolved through cunning and learning how to kill, the implication being that violence is part of our inheritance and viciousness an ineradicable aspect of our nature.

I recall Ardrey devoting a good portion of his writings to baboon troops, which are strictly hierarchical, highly territorial, and not very kind and tolerant places to be. The lesson was not lost on me, and got me into a good deal of family trouble. I once told my father that he was acting out of a sense of head-of-family dominance. This was intended as a matter-of-fact statement, but my father took it as an accusation (probably sensing his own head-of-family dominance being challenged by a rebellious young buck), and never fully forgave me, I suspect.

As time has passed, I have come to view this search for our true nature through the discovery of our origins as a chimera. There is no starting point to our being human that defines us; nature contains an infinite number of possibilities, and we will most likely find there what our biases lead us to (as in the case of Ardrey). As an example, we can look at some of our closest non-human relatives. Chimpanzees are capable of considerable empathy and compassion, yet their lives are structured quite hierarchically, and they can be quite vicious. The chimp's closest relative the bonobo (sometimes called the pygmy chimp) is very different, however. Bonobo society functions in a far more co-operative way, with a polymorphous sexuality and generally more laid-back approach to life (the bonobo has been called the hippie ape). So a look into the past and at our non-human relatives can provide a sense of wonder and of endless possibilities. But as for finding a definitive moment that points to who we essentially are as human beings, this is a search doomed to failure.

Gentle shamanic training

I have come to a not-very famous mountain, which goes by the name of A'Chralaig. It's actually the highest mountain hereabouts, but not greatly frequented; most people visit once only. The reason is directly in front of me: a 600 metre-high (almost 2000 feet) uniformly steep wall of pathless, flattened yellow grass, peat, heather, and large stones. I know that at the top there is a ridge - I've been here before, one of the few -, but to get there means climbing this great south wall of A'Chralaig.

Herein lies the test. Conventional wisdom would have it that this is a relentless slog, devoid of joy and destined to erode your very will to live. Animistic shamanic consciousness knows different, though - 'knows', note, not 'believes'. Everything is holy, as the poet said. Every stone, every tuft of flattened yellow grass, brims with significance. The training consists of learning to experience this, in every situation and at every moment. Tell a piece of heather that it is somehow less significant because it happens to hang out on the uniform slopes of A'Chralaig rather than on a much-photographed hillside above Balmoral, and it will quiver with confusion. Just so.

I start to climb. The sun is shining, the wind is blowing in hard from the west, and the sky a ceiling of hazy blue. In order to encourage shamanic consciousness, various strategies are in place: 1/ Don't go too fast. Excess speed belies a sense of 'get this out of the way as quickly as possible.' 2/ Forget the goal. 'I'm here to get to the top of a mountain' is false thinking. Every moment is to be savoured. 3/ Don't look at the map. The hills are free of cloud, and I know where I am going. Frequent map gazing is all about seeing how far you've gone, how much height you've gained, how much torture still to go. Irrelevant distractions from the task at hand.

For reasons mysterious, I appear to be fairly fit. I climb steadily into the more rarified dimensions of mountain wildness. After a while, I'm stopping more frequently for short rests, but I take this as a natural part of the process.

There is still plenty of climbing to do once the ridge is attained, but it almost seems effortless. The spirits of the mountain tops are different, as I've written about before. Huge snowfields still cover the upper slopes, and the bizarrely huge cairn on the summit of A'Chralaig is half-buried. I continue kicking my way along the snowy ridge, then look back towards the summit reaching into the sky like a great spire. The graceful, white, serpentine curve of the ridge provokes a deep sense of, well, I don't know what. 'F*****g brilliant planet!' I yell spontaneously into the ethereal atmosphere.

The REAL test is coming off the mountain. Six hours on the hoof, beginning to feel weary and jagged round the edges: impeccable awareness is not easy to maintain. Incredibly, I stumble upon a path-of-sorts tumbling down the slopes, but it seems to follow a particularly steep section of the hillside. The outside of one knee begins to give trouble: mild iliotibial band syndrome. It's not the first time. I had it two years ago, when descending one of the most isolated mountains in Scotland, six hours' walk from the nearest road (eight hours with iliotibial band...). A rhythm is soon established, however: descend for a short distance, exclaim 'ouch' loudly, wiggle and extend knee, then repeat process. Maybe it's some god or spirit speaking:'Slow down, slow down. Tune into the everpresent satori, expand into interconnectedness.' Who knows?

A shaft of sunlight cuts across a hillside, briefly lights up the loch below, and is gone....

Anyone for Plant Food?

Plant food, anyone? If so, you're too late. Alan Johnson, UK Home Secretary and world-renowned expert on such matters, has declared mephedrone a Class B drug, as from last Friday. The evening before the ban came into operation, the hills around Inverness were aglow with bonfires, as the local kids burnt their stocks before the midnight hour arrived and they turned into horrible little criminals.

More than two minutes with most of the mainstream media on mephedrone and you feel as if you've taken an overdose of contaminated barbiturates. Misinformation, lies and callous propaganda from politicians and their colluding buddies on TV and in the papers (the Guardian is apparently an exception on this one). To find out more, you need to look elsewhere. For general education, Erowid ('Education, education, education' was the mantra of phase one Tony Blair; shame he didn't put Erowid on the national curriculum), and for news the relevant portals on Drugs Forum, are good starting points.

The problem with mephedrone is that it is a new kid on the block, so nobody knows anything about its long-term effects (unlike substances such as MDMA and LSD, which were pretty fully researched before the politicians sagely put an end to all that nonsense). As with other substances of mind-alteration, from caffeine to crack cocaine, mephedrone has its enthusiasts and its detractors. One media lie is that it has killed twenty-something people in the UK. It has been implicated in that many deaths, but only one of these has actually been proven. My reading and the occasional anecdotal report suggest that this is a pretty dodgy substance; on the other hand, it must have something going for it, since so many nightclubbers have clearly taken to it.

If people have indeed died as a result of taking mephedrone, one thing is clear to me: the blood is on the hands of the politicians! It is they who have blindly and cynically persisted with their stupid drug policies, which prevent proper research and education, let alone open discussion, denying availability of lesser risk substances and driving the supply of drugs (apart from alcohol and tobacco) into the hands of criminal mafia. Any parents suspecting their kid has died from taking mephedrone should take the government to court.

Underlying what I am saying, and what most of our politicians are too bigoted and cowardly to get into their thick skulls is this: KIDS WANNA GET HIGH! Older folk too, but young people appear to have a particular propensity for this type of activity. And this wish ain't gonna go away anytime soon. So, far better to get it into the open, regulate it responsibly, take it out of the hands of criminals and minimise the harm. As it is, the Conservative Party is boasting it's going to be 'even tougher on drugs' than Labour, a policy that's frightening and going to cost even more innocent lives. Bizarrely, in the run-up to this year's non-event of fake democracy, the only person who seems to be suggesting anything honest about drugs is Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP. OK, so we'll all be voting for them now....

Unfortunately, a lot of older people remain part of this sorry state of affairs. It is sad that, by the time they reach 36, most adults have forgotten their own all-night clubbing, dope-smoking, pill-popping late teens, as if it never happened. Selective amnesia: does it confer evolutionary advantages (better ask alternative culture favourite Richard Dawkins...)? For the record, I hate the word 'high', but what is wrong with wanting to 'get high', so long as you're not messing yourself up big-time? Adults do a great disservice to younger people by patronising them about drugs, and marginalising them in the process. Altering consciousness appears to be one of the most basic of human drives (actually, it's not just humans; gorillas in west Africa, for example, have been reported munching hallucinogenic plants and running around madly.....). Most cultures throughout history have had substances and other means of influencing what goes on in the mind. Not to mention our psychedelic prehistory; see 'Supernatural' by Graham Hancock for starters. Meditation, fasting, chanting, drumming, standing upside down for long periods of time; sleep deprivation, flotation tanks, high altitudes; smoking, snorting and eating plants. There are loads of ways people have gone about it, and still do.

Meanwhile, around the time the mephedrone frenzy was peaking, two local teenagers died at the bottom of the road I walk to work. Their car smashed through a wall on the corner and into an architect's grounds. It was a poignant sight, to see the flowers and football shirts arrayed outside as I walked past. Strangely, such occurrences fail to create the same clamour: killer cars should be made illegal. Which leads to the main point, sort of: everything has an agenda. Sometimes secret, normally unspoken. Maybe collusive, maybe unconscious. But mind alteration isn't part of the dominators' agenda, while turn-of-the-button, no-need-to-walk-beyond-the-driveway convenience is. It's as simple and as difficult as that. Keep those antennae tuned into 'secret agenda channel'. There's always something worth listening to there.

P.S. Good news for river toads everywhere; the charges against Bouncing Bear Botanicals have been dismissed. Not surprising, since they were all completely false anyway. Slightly ominously, the police have stated that they are continuing their investigations. Which sounds a bit like 'OK buddie, we didn't get you on that one, but we're gonna get you on SOMETHING.' Nice people.

In the pale green vortex parallel podcast, it's time for some music from that unwitting princess of the magical muse, Natasha Khan, aka Bat For Lashes. Her fantastic cover of the Cure's 'A Forest'.