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In KS not so long ago expert nutritionist
Patrick Holford mentioned in passing that such numinous luminaries
as Plato, Aristotle and Pythagoras ingested such things in
their day, so there's a respectable precedent for what follows.
My position vis-a-vis drugs will become
clear but I should say at this point that the visions experienced
by contributors to KS do not necessarily reflect the visions
experienced by the editors, and the story I'm about to relate
is a warning rather than a recommendation.
Not that I've ever met anyone who follows
an example I've set. My own sons don't do as I do, except
when I dribble and bang the table.
A while ago now, friends and I and their
dog, Graham, went up onto Dartmoor - to look for magic mushrooms.
We were looking respectfully, we thought. The plan was to
trust the moor. If the moor wanted us to find magic mushrooms,
well and good. If not, fair enough. Meanwhile we would help
the moor by looking very very hard.
Maybe we looked too hard. Maybe we were
too fixed on what we wanted to find and the effect we wanted
it to have on us. Because we were looking specifically to
enter spiritual spaces. We wanted our psychotropic experience
to be not just psychedelic - i.e. pertaining to a state of
relaxation and pleasure, with heightened perception and increased
mental powers generally - but mystical.
To paraphrase Blake we were looking for
the doors of perception to be made clean so we could see the
world as it really is - infinite.
We sought the sweet synaesthesia of inter-mingled
senses, to see the music, taste the colours, smell the very
shape of things.... to feel the very thought of water sporting
on our skin while we paddled in the internal ocean of golden
ideas that washes on the shore of the humdrum. We wanted to
teleport our imaginations to the surface of the planet Wonder
and to set phasers to 'stunned'. We wanted to know ourselves
as a small essential part of a whole that is held and nourished
by the unlikely umbilical of the universe, and to trace this
theo-illogical thread through the sleepy eye of the unthreatening
needle that sews space and time together to make a divine
duvet cover with infinitely fluctuating tog-rating. We wanted
to get completely off our faces - in a nice mystical way.
But it wasn't to be. We found no magic mushrooms.
Instead we, or Graham, found truffles - the underground edible
fructification of the fungus of the genus Tuber - a delicacy
in any culture. We'd asked the moors for a fungal gift and
we'd been given one. Not the one we expected, but it would
have been churlish to refuse, so we planned our evening around
the truffles.
What we didn't realise is that nature favours
complementary planting. It's almost as if nature has read
a book on biodynamic gardening. Nature likes balance. A harsh
harmony. Soft near hard. Dock leaves near nettles. Antidote,
poison. Effect, counter-effect. We had found the yang to magic
mushrooms' yin. We had found tragic truffles. Yes. You've
probably not heard of them. That's part of the tragedy. In
their own way they're far more powerful than magic mushrooms,
and last far longer. For some, the effects never wear off.
Under the influence of tragic truffles you
experience the universe as expanding, every molecule moving
away from every other molecule at an incalculable speed, and
you know all intimacy is an illusion, all relationships merely
security blankets woven of weeds doomed to biodegrade. You
perceive the world as an abuser-friendly society that rewards
crassness, punishes honesty, confuses novelty with originality
and values homogeneity over imagination. A world where spirituality
is a marketable commodity, where seekers are at best consumers
and at worst cannon fodder in some insane crusade. Finally
you experience yourself as an accidental confusion of reconstituted
space debris put together blindly over blank millennia to
create a semi-conscious being who knows itself to be a brief
spasm of unfulfilled appetite sandwiched between infinite
oblivions - awesome eternities whose chief characteristic
is a loneliness so pure and unrelenting that even though there's
no conscious being to experience it, the mere thought of it
is more than mind can bear....
All of which added up to a real downer on
our evening, especially since we'd been planning to play charades....
However, if I've put you off the psychotropic
ingestion method, as I hope, do'nt be down-hearted. There
are other avenues open to the sincere seeker after spiritual
short-cuts. A few tried-and-testeds are: Miming to Gregorian
chant in a tie-dye poncho; playing Leonard Cohen records backwards;
sharing a sleeping bag with a Kindred Spirit subscriber (an
occasional reader won't do, trust me). And, yes, of course
each of these activities can be dangerous and addictive, but
anything's better than going the long way round....
Matt Harvey
more of matt...
I'm
cross
Curtains...
Matt is a regular contributor to Kindred
Spirit magazine as well as BBC Radio 4, and if you're lucky
can be caught performing live around the country.
Email him: matt.harvey@tesco.net
or visit: www.mattharvey.co.uk
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