Explorations: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Explorations: Through the Forest, the River (31 - 50)
introductory
Explorations can be accurately perceived as a response to a set of issues from anthropology: the response is
philosophical and at the same time is an account of an embodiment of these problems as live zones of highly practical
activity (it can be described as a work of philosophy which is also a work of
practical anthropology). The issues are these:
The issue of tales or stories, and of all forms of dreaming.
The issue of small human groups, and of the alliances of
which these groups are composed.
The issue of becomings.
The issue of the use of drugs.
The issue of the body without organs, and of inorganic
beings.
The issue of the role of music and dance in processes of
escaping from ordinary reality.
*
The events which will now be described were all experiences which occurred during a time when I had found a new direction, but had not yet set out to explore it. It was the time between 2000 and 2003: my life had ploughed into the difficult, sometimes deadening force-field of London, and simultaneously there were the preoccupations and exhaustions of earning a living as an A Level philosophy tutor. In a strong sense my life became 'blocked' or 'constricted' toward the end of this time: movement forward became very slow. But it was also the case that there was an element of necessary preparation involved, in that I was learning how to exist within the world of paid-work in London, and in that I was bringing an older project to a conclusion - I was finishing writing a philosophy book. However, when I had found the kind of job I needed, and had finished writing the book, I still did not immediately set out in the direction which had appeared in front of me, and this showed that there was a problem at a deeper level: I needed a jolt, something that would give me the detachment necessary to get a clear view of my situation. None of the experiences to be described provided a perturbation of this kind, or anything like it, but they do throw some light on the circumstances I was confronting, and with the last sequence of events there is a chance that they provided a degree of preparation for the effects of a jolt.
It was some time in the year 2000, and I had gone to sleep in my room in the flat where I was living in Stoke Newington.
I dreamed that I was in a large unfurnished attic room which had two or three pianos in it. They were stand-up pianos, but gave the impression of being extremely old, and one of them had had panels removed so that the mechanism was visible. The room, a long rectangle, had a wooden floor, and a single window, perhaps fifteen feet away, opposite the pianos: it stretched into semi-darkness beyond the part of it which had the pianos, ending in a wall which was perhaps forty feet from the area directly lit by the window.
A very old, white-haired man was playing one of the pianos, somewhat falteringly. Standing near the piano was a slightly younger man, and in the dream I knew that the man who was playing was the owner of the house - the person nominally 'in charge' - and that the younger man was in some sense the 'steward' (this idea - if not the word - was part of the dream, although there was nothing medieval about the setting or the two people - it all seemed contemporary).
The old man was being assisted in playing the piano by the younger one, and the main aspect of the dream was that there was a feeling of something extremely sinister about the relationship between the two of them (but it was if it felt both sinister and bland, as if what I was seeing was the very fabric of ordinary existence). The man at the piano believed he was in charge, whereas it was clear that in a fundamental way he was being controlled by his steward (there was nothing in any way flamboyant about the appearance of the steward: he had a grey, everyday quality - in relation to how he looked he might have been a manager of a business an impoverished area of countryside).
(it should be added of course, speaking in the name of the faculty of lucidity, that the faculty of reason is a main element of what is suggested when this dream is taken up as a lens for seeing the abstract).
The starkness of the dream came from the fact that I could see that all systemic-technical understanding and all musical inspiration were coming directly from the steward, and that the old man was a kind of hollow shell: and the feeling was that the relationship between the two figures was deadly - fatal - for the man playing the piano.
I walked away from this grim scene, and looked out of the window.
The view was of the castle in the centre of Haverfordwest, in Wales - from about half a mile away, and from around the height of the hill on which the castle is located This view was one which could be seen from a house where I used to live as a young child - between the ages of four and six - although the room in the dream was not in any way like the rooms in the house. The angle of the view and the structure of the castle itself seemed the same, but everything else was different. The castle had large banners on it, which were about some kind of exhibition or conference which was taking place, and seemed contemporary in its tonality, rather than something from forty years before (let alone like something from Norman times): it was as if I was in Haverfordwest in the year 2000, and in a different - wider and taller - building that was on the site of the house where I had lived as a child.
The view was to the north (although up until recently - and at the time of the dream - my mental orientation of the town in relation to the compass points had told me that the view was to the west). It was a sunny day, and there was a definite everyday-reality quality to the view: the castle, far from being something 'gothic' or enigmatic, was there in the view as a tourist venture, or the venue for some kind of conference event.
It was then that I became aware that someone was climbing up the side of the building toward me. Initially the person - a very lanky, tall man with a narrow face - was about twenty feet below me, scaling a wall that seemed a hundred feet high, but then very rapidly they had reached the window, which at head-height had a narrow horizontal section which opened outwards and which created a space just wide enough for someone if it was opened. The lanky, gangly figure, had an overall quality which suggested he was not really human: his face was a little too narrow, and there was an intense but 'thin' quality to his affect which somehow suggested he was some either kind of being who had taken a human form. But despite this, I felt sympathy for him, as he attempted to finish his climb, perching precariously on the window-ledge, and reaching for the part of the window which could be opened.
I felt within the dream that my decision was an important one - that it was the kind of decision that should never be taken lightly. I opened the window, and the man came in thorough it.
He instantly expressed his gratitude and relief, although this seemed to involve a form of communication that did not employ words.
And then he said, matter-of-factly, but with a kind of intense emphasis:
"It was hell down there."
I understood that he was referring to some subterranean real-world (energy-world) domain of beings in which he had just been an inhabitant, and from which he had now escaped. The word 'hell' did not communicate its religious metaphysical meaning: instead it had a simple quotidian quality, and meant 'very bad.'
And then immediately I was in a room which seemed to be alongside the one where I had been a moment before, to the right of the window (the half-lit extension of the room with the pianos had been to the left). The tall man was standing in front of me, and to the right, and a little behind him there was a woman. They both had a friendly aspect - they were looking at me warmly - and then a moment later, in place of human beings, I was seeing two amorphous human-height zones of bright magenta or fuschia-pink light. They were two bodies of electric-magenta light (with a kind of waxy/plasma quality), and they were still the same two beings, radiating their specific modalities/characters of friendliness toward me, but in the form not of humans, but of zones of coloured light.
I then woke up, feeling slightly astonished by the sudden transitions in the dream at the end, and by the dream taken as a whole. I also felt (although with no way of acting in response to the feeling) that there was a chance the word dream as it is currently used might not be in any way adequate for describing what had just taken place.
July of 2002 - I was with two friends on the top of an 8000 foot mountain in the Western High Atlas mountains in Morocco. Because of the North African latitude the rocky but flattish terrain of the mountain-top had flowering plants on it (including a small flowering mullein, the same species that grows in Britain), and there were also a few butterflies.It was a sunny day but there was a haze in the sky in the direction of the Sahara, so that the next range of mountains to the south (the Lesser Atlas) was only very faintly visible. We were sitting on the north side of the mountain, with a view toward an 11,000 foot peak called Amendach.
We had all just taken datura, or thornapple - about two thirds of a teaspoon each of ground seeds. I had spotted datura growing on a beach in Holland, on a holiday the year before, had picked the seeds, and had been growing plants on my window sill in Stoke Newington.
It seems right to say that this was a courageous exploratory act (though I absolutely do not recommend it), but the fact that it was courageous does not in fact mean that at this time I had gone in the new direction that had opened up - far from it. Looking back it is clear that, firstly, I needed to be ultra-selective with my time (I had a barely-started project to be working on, in the form of londonunderlondon); that, secondly, I needed to be exploring the abstract through writing fiction; and that, thirdly, and perhaps most important of all - in relation to travelling I had reached a stage where it was particularly important to be travelling on my own, if the only alternative was travelling with a group that as a whole was not sufficiently focused on the Southward unknown (the issue here was immensely subtle and related to only one of the two individuals with whom I was travelling - it was a kind of wavering of affinity for the escape-path leading out of ordinary reality).
Nonetheless it was perhaps true that I was going through a process which needed to take place. As if I needed to become clear about Morocco and simultaneously about an abstract thread which ran through all of my milieu, from the more urbane 'north-London' parts of it to the radical CCRU or post-CCRU individuals - this thread being the work of William Burroughs. I needed to find out about Morocco, and about something that was not Morocco at all, although the works involved evidently had a connection to it.
Around 1999 I had had an unusually geo-oneiric dream. At the start of it I was in a forested mountainous region of West Africa. The people in the area of mountain jungle seemed to have a 'tribal' worldview which was not that of any of the major religions, and the atmosphere in this point in the dream was very festive and positive.
But the dream was like a sketch: it was as much thought and geography as it was a dreaming of events within an oneiric terrain. Even at the beginning the view had a quality of being from the air, although maybe it was from the top of a mountain, though with a terrain beyond the mountain which was more like a map.
Everything was very joyful, and with an atmosphere of lucidity: in the distance a train was coming up the mountain, though it was as if both train and train-line were coming up the mountain at the same time. And then my point-of-view started moving rapidly northwest, and I was traveling alongside cliffs that I knew were the point where the Sahara met the sea, and there was a sense of an exceptionally difficult journey taking place (in the dream I saw greenish water dripping from the cliffs, and I knew that it was poisonous).
And then in the distance I saw the Atlas mountains, and I saw a long bright headland which extended west from them: a sunlit coastal area which in the dream seemed a sublime place, an exceptionally beautiful terrain.
At this point the dream became like something in a story by Burroughs: it was as if I was now in a parallel world, or was far in the past, although I was still in the same terrain, with the Atlas mountains to the north. I knew I had to cross a very wide intervening valley, but there were people in the valley who were extremely dangerous. The boundary of their territory was marked by a cliff-surrounded narrow sea-inlet, which if you looked a hundred feet down had a circular cluster of a dozen extremely tall poles driven into the sea-bed, and coming up out of the water, so that twenty feet of the poles was above the water and the majority of them was below the sea-level. At the top of each one of these poles there was a severed human head.
At the end of the dream I was crawling very slowly along a path, trying to keep my head out of sight - with the aim of getting to the sunlit terrain between the Atlas mountains and the sea.
For me the end of this dream had something wrong about it: the violence of the boundary-marker suggested an imposition of an unhealthy, delirial optic. But overall, the dream seemed to be an act of oneiric thought that was worth exploring. And if something that was unhealthy about Burroughs' optic was at work in the dream, or in any case was a similar delirial element, then this aspect needed to be understood.
The impression I had received in travelling through Morocco (travelling by train to Marrakesh, and then by bus to the mountains) had been of a counterpart terrain in relation to Europe, somewhere which was North Africa but which was also the South Mediterranean, with olive trees, and with a shared history, in that, for instance, there are the remains of Roman villas in Marrakesh. At a deep level it seemed exceptionally similar to places on the northern shore of the mediterranean, but it was a counterpart at the level of state-and-religion. On the train we had had had a long conversation with a very friendly, insightful woman who was an academic at the university in Fez (we talked about travelling, and she said she wanted to go to the Middle Eastern countries, and said she was not that interested in seeing Europe). Later, when we had been hiking through the mountains the Berber people we had met had been welcoming: at one point we played music with a group of men who had come out from a village, and later, in a seasonal pastureland-area called the Tishka plateau, we had played a game of frisbee with some Berber shepherds. On the Tishka plateau we had also been very kindly invited into a herdsman's house to have a goat's milk yogurt drink, at which point we had met the only Berber woman who we had encountered.
The effect of the datura was a subtle semi-trance, with occasional oneiric incursions - shifts to full trance that were momentary, like glimpses.
At one point I was suddenly seeing a path that stretched through scrubby, mediterranean bushes, open areas and occasional small trees. The path went slightly upward across a wide, flattish hilltop. Everything was sunlit, and it felt like Greece thousands of years ago.
Coming toward me along the path was a tall man who had a very specific lightness - a quality of being both a warrior and a dancer, and of being beyond the gravity of religion. Another aspect of him was that he seemed in some sense to be as much female as male, but in a way where the feeling was that he loved women so much that the becoming-woman had become central to him. The impression given was that if he had been encountered thousands of years ago in a wilderness this encounter would have generated stories of the anomalous (although there was no quality at all of him not being human), and the impression was also that the quality of his glance was formidable, in that it felt as if he would instantly perceive all forms of indulgence and affectation. It was just a moment - a glimpse lasting a second.
I walked across the top of the mountain, and sat facing the direction in which we would walk the next day.
This time the glimpse was of something coming up the steep slope of the mountain towards me, although the experience was a dream, rather than an imposition of something onto my perceptual field. The bright sunlight of the previous glimpse had gone: there was a now a slightly fainter, more monochrome quality to what I was seeing: bounding up the mountain toward me was a creature made of bone - a kind of bone-goat, or bone-lion. It had no sinister, or gothic aspect, instead it was abstract - its rib-cage was a spiral, and its head was not a skull, but a delineation of the shape of a head, but in narrow lines made of bone - and simultaneously it looked like something from a surrealist painting.
This creature did not feel at all human, but nor it did feel like some known form of four-legged animal. There was an intense, maybe even witty/challenging quality about the affect, but with an overall aspect of thinness, which had a kind of visual counterpart, in that the creature was made out of lines.
The next day we started our journey out of the mountains, and having crossed the main ridge, we pitched our tents five hundred feet below the top of the pass (a pass which only had a herders' path crossing it).
I dreamed that night that in some way I was at two parties at once, the two parties being in entirely different places that were partly superimposed across each other, as if they were in different dimensions. At one party there was a large room with a table and people sitting round it, but with a quality of there being no windows: and here the atmosphere was of a kind of laughing, urbane insouciance - a laughter which all along disguised a lack of openness. The other party was in a room that seemed to be a bit to one side and further up (although the two rooms were not part of the same building), and this room had light and a feeling of fresh air coming in. There was another table of the same size and with perhaps the same number of people - around ten - sitting around it, but here there was a bright quality to the laughter, and an overall feeling of courage. The people in this room included individuals who had been in CCRU - Anna Greenspan, Nick Land, Mark Fisher.
*
The next event was six months later, at the start of the following January.
I had been on the edge of a relationship with a woman called Kyra. A few days earlier there had been a chance to begin this relationship, and I had deliberately not taken this opportunity. Kyra was a somewhat 'wild,' dispassionately edgy woman with a very high degree of poise and purposefulness - she had a love for intense, charged activity of all kinds, and an iconoclastic flair for doing extremely unconventional things. She was an extraordinary and very intelligent woman, but my feeling was that the way I felt toward her was sexual desire more than it was love. There was a subtle feeling that this relationship was not the right direction - that it would be 'ill-advised.'
I knew I would be seeing Kyra the next day. I went to sleep, and toward the end of the night I had two dreams, one immediately following the other.
In the first of the dreams I was somewhere that I knew was an ancient burial ground in the central part of the Andes in what is now Peru, but somewhere on the eastern side of the main range. The burial ground felt as if it was two or three thousand years old. I had dug up a stone from the ground, and this stone - it was around five inches across - consisted of oil-sheen, rainbow colours on a black background, and I knew in the dream that this stone simultaneously consisted of music.
In the second dream I was at the top of a snow-covered ridge in the Alps, looking steeply down into a precipitous snowy valley, and it was evening twilight. In the foreground a dog - a border collie - was racing up an extremely steep slope toward me, and more than half way down the valley there was a spread-out group of people carrying lights, who together were skiing up the valley, in a way that seemed both very convivial, and very welcoming (the skiing obviously makes no sense - it was like a reversal something I had seen on T.V. - or had read about - where the event involved was a group of friends ending their day by skiing back to the valley in twilight, carrying lights of some kind).
After breakfast I found myself looking from the window of the second-floor kitchen at the area of gardens behind the house. It was a long view to the south, across roofs, ending three miles away with taller buildings in the centre of the city.
The dreams came back to me, and I was left with the feeling that some kind of powerful change was taking place. And I began to think that I had been wrong, and that I should act on the feelings that were taking me toward Kyra.
The relationship with Kyra lasted about four months. At the end of this time I had been slightly detached from the main part of my milieu, but in a very subtle sense - it was as if a kind of barely perceptible fissure or fracture had appeared.
There was something extravagant - and extravagantly sensual - about Kyra which meant that my friends were either jangled by her or drawn towards her in a way where they could be taken off balance, or both. The only friend who was not affected in either of these ways was Mark Fisher. There was a courageous, beyond-conventionality aspect to Kyra which had a distinctly 'goth' aspect (although at a deep level, which was not really connected to clothing-choices), and this was something for which Mark had an affinity.
The three of us went together to the goth club The Slimelight (none of us had been there before) and we all enjoyed this exploration into a relatively obscured cultural zone (it was after this experience that Mark wrote his first K-Punk blog post - about the phenomenon of goth sub-cultures). And there was one other exploration which is worth recounting.
Kyra had grown up in a rural area of India which was a border zone between a southern pocket of Islamic culture (Hyderabad) and an area which she described as having had a 'tribal,' spirit-contacting sub-culture of Hinduism (for whom the goddess Kali was a main figure), and she described how she had been 'tried out' as a medium, and had been told - whatever is to be thought about such an attribution - that she had this ability (Kyra said that her experience had been of letting go into stream of consciousness, and she did not either believe or not believe in relation to what had happened - for her it was just 'one more thing,' something that was possible, but was an unknown). When Kyra told Mark about this he suggested that the three of us should try using 'ouija board' letters around a small circular table in the flat in Stoke Newington (he and other members of CCRU had used a ouija board on one occasion, in Leamington; I had never used one, and it is also the case that I have not used one since). The result of the experience was one curious detail which threw my attention back to Barbara O'Brien's book Operators and Things. Overall, there was a bland impression of someone else's hand moving the glass we were using (though both Kyra and Mark said that this was their impression as well), and there was an equivalently bland, 'unconvincing' feeling about the process of receiving what as far as I remember were 'yes' and 'no' answers to questions (the only question I remember was Kyra asking about whether she should have a child). However, when we asked the name of the entity with whom we were supposedly in contact the letters which were spelled out were R.I.N.K. Rink is the most interesting of the 'Operator' figures in O'Brien's account of her six month episode of schizophrenia: it is Rink who tells her that most human beings do almost no thinking - and are deadened into an overall non-creative state - as a result of having been taken over by what he describes as a 'latticework of habit patterns' (when you scrutinise it the name Rink appearing in this context is just a faintly enigmatic event, and does not assist thought very much in relation to the anomalous - but it certainly functioned to put a spotlight onto Barbara O'Brien's book).
About two months later the relationship with Kyra was over: at depth there was a lack of affinity between us, and this worked itself through. However, in a subtle but emphatic sense it had been a kind of earthquake. Five months afterwards, as a result of having taken yopo (epena) at Harbury Lake (Section 34), I arrived at a certainty that it was necessary in a very radical sense to depart from the way in which my life was arranged at that time, and decided to act. And I feel the ease with which I subsequently stayed with this decision was connected to an awareness that had already been created by the relationship with Kyra: even though there had been a strong thread of indulgence that ran through Kyra's behaviour her dynamism had made me aware that I needed to be more dynamic myself. Mark had already left for Bromley, expressing the view that there was an element of inaction in effect within the post-Warwick milieu in north London. I needed to be working on the audio-essay that would eventually be named londonunderlondon, and I needed to create space in which new projects could emerge: the whole set-up of my life had to be changed.
*
It is five years later - August, 2007. On a temporary basis (while a friend is away for a few months in Germany) I am living in a room in a shared house in Herne Hill.
In different ways over the intervening years I had succeeded in giving myself the 'space' I had needed. Without me realising it (and certainly without it having been planned) the lines of my life have been shifting themselves toward a configuration of lines that will work - a configuration that will allow work to take place. There is a sense in which it has not completely happened yet, but the lines which are still to be effectuated are in place at the level of the virtual-real. In about four months I will go to Argentina, and spend ten weeks on the fringes of the Valdivian-forest area of northwest Patagonia, and this will be a pivot-point - the trip from which I returned with a very radically different orientation (people will tend to accept that when you are in love with someone it substantially changes your perspectives, and in fact it is the same with a place).
Another aspect of 'rounding myself up' (bringing important elements together, and stripping away indulgent behaviour) was a process of following the path of halucinogens and other psychotropic substances to its conclusion. Again, without me knowing this, I had already come to the end of a six-year phase where very occasionally I would take one of the rare halucinogens (once with DMT, once with yopo, three times with datura, once with ayahuasca, and once with salvia). In around four years I would stop a very intermittent, minimal use of other halucinogens, and in 6 years I would also stop an equally minimal use of amphetamines and grass. The path would literally come to an end - and not through some epic process of will-power, or some physical collapse, but through me having learned what I needed to learn in terms of heightened experiences (from this exceptionally risky and non-advisable path) and having seen through the modalities of experience involved to a 'core' element - to something which gave me a decisive distaste or visceral aversion, so that I simply no longer on any level wanted to ingest the substances.
My life at this time had been immensely assisted and strengthened through me having started a relationship with the woman who would be directly involved in me going to Patagonia, and with whom I am still in a relationship now, twelve years later. And this transformation of my life was bringing about a change in a lot of ways: one aspect of this change was that I started to review everything that had happened to me over the preceding fifteen years. I was seeing the high-points because of being on a high-point at that time - because of having the strength to bring back into deliberate awareness the peak experiences that were still in effect within me (there was deliberate attention in terms of the individual remembered experiences, but the overall process was not deliberate - instead it was a joy of reawakening the past that emerged unthinkingly from heightened current circumstances).
And something that I found extremely striking was a nexus of powerful memories from a time that lasted around 6 months, between 1993 and 1994. There were two very different aspects to this, although they were not completely separable. The first was the memory of the exceptionally intense state of joy that I had reached on LSD and speed, in October 1993, during the night after I had had the chance meeting with the woman in Leamington (Sections 2, 4, 5 and 6). The second was the phase during the next few months when I had been on the edge of a relationship with Caitlin (Section 15), and when this relationship - which twice was seemingly close - had never happened. I tended to arrive at these two memories along different paths, one of which took the form of thoughts about drug experiences, and the other of which involved memories of music to which I listened at the time, and the memory of an overall atmosphere of a very intense phase at the start of my time as a postgraduate at Warwick, a time when everything became centred on Leamington, initially because this was where Caitlin was living (it should be said that the tonality of the second memory was not regret but was of an exceptionally evocative atmosphere).
The sheer intensity of the joy and love involved in the experience in October were very extraordinary - it was like seeing an unsuspected pinnacle-mountain towering up into the sky. But the feeling that came with the memory of the months afterwards had a sublime beauty which swept me away: this feeling was much more complex - there was an intense melancholy that was a thread within it, and there was no equivalent high-point of joy, but somehow the love and joy in a diffuse sense went deeper, wider and higher, encompassing the memory of Caitlin, and the memory of the whole place and time.
It was under these circumstances that I decided to 'return' to the element of these experiences which had been involved at their beginning. Being in love had given me the energy to remember the earlier time, and not in the modality of pained yearning, but in a modality that was entirely positive (and in fact it was the first part of the memory that was involved in the decision, because of something that could be done in response to it). Given that I was not yet averse to taking drugs it was clear that there was a potential which needed to be explored - the combination of LSD and speed.
I had begun at around 9pm, by taking speed, and for around three hours my main aim had been to become an unbroken perception of the room around me - which is to say that I had set out to not think, but to be sustained, spheroambient perception. About 1am, when I had taken some LSD about an hour before, I was swept up into thought - into a process of very intense abstract perception:
What I saw was that each one of us is an encounter with the world around us, and simultaneously a depth-world of the virtual-real formations of the world that in the past have been encountered, and that, for understanding what we are, there are three crucial lines or elements, which go beyond contingencies of individual events that have happened and human social worlds which have influenced us.
The first of these was a love, and delight, and fascinated courage in relation to the world, expressing itself as an exploration into wider and deeper spheres of reality, and as a deepening of understanding at all levels, and most specifically at the levels of intent and energy.
The second was the planet, understood as a profoundly unknown, but not unknowable world.
The third was women, perceived as having a greater capacity in relation to the first element - which could also be stated as them having a lower degree of susceptibility to 'gravity' or self-important righteousness.
Off beyond these - but threaded through all of us - there was something grey and deleterious: a grim world of desire for kudos, subjectified moods (including fear, self-importance and anger), and of hypertrophied functionings of a blocked, trapped faculty of reason (with reason understood as a lesser faculty, alongside a faculty of lucidity which generally is only functioning in a very minimal way).
It was clear that it was necessary to detach the grey, deleterious line from the other three. It was also clear that in the fullest sense I was the first line, and that, because of the years-deep depth-world of the virtual real that was part of me, there was a very profound sense in which I was the other two lines as well. I was the planet (in that I was saturated with it, but also in the sense that I was a part of it), and at the level of the virtual-real I was female as well as male.
All of this was a process of outsights arrived at during the previous few years being brought brought together, and of them being brought into sudden sharp focus. I was not surprised - what I was now understanding was what I had already half-perceived.
What surprised me was what happened next. It was as if the sensuality of the spheroambient perception (which by definition was tactile, as well as involving the other senses) was suddenly fully effectuated, but in a process which instantly shifted from perception of the room to perception within an oneiric world. Where previously LSD and speed had given me very intense coloured-geometrical visuals with no wrap-around oneiric world, I was now having an experience which was centrally tactile, and which was oneiric.
It felt as if I had achieved a clear view of what was supposed to be everything, but that all along there had been another direction behind my back - and as if this direction had now called out to me.
The experience was oneiric, but I was wide awake. I was a woman in a room with two other women, and the three of us were dancing to music. It was a full tactile, corporeal hallucination of being a woman, and this experience was more than just sensual in a different form from that of my normal corporeal experience - it was intensely sexual. The subtlety of the oneiric world was that the two women with whom I was dancing were in the same state (a kind of full-body hyper-sensuality), but with a distance running between the three of us which amounted to a joy at being female, but without any overt movement toward a lesbian encounter (the lesbianism was very fundamentally present and in a sense was intrinsic to the experience, but it was way down deep, rather than being expressed directly). After an initial phase of dancing with the women, the two women decided to go down some stairs to another room that was ahead of us but on the next floor down - a room that in some way I knew had no windows, and was lit entirely by artificial light (the initial room was lit by artificial light, but with curtains through which some daylight was arriving: the room ahead and further down was larger, as if it was a large basement room). The two women wanted me to come with them down the stairs, and within the dream I knew that in some sense I would then remain permanently in the form of a woman. I went with the women down the stairs into the next room, feeling a very extraordinary level of bliss - a sort of multi-sense rapture of femininity.
The whole nature of this experience was remarkable because of the hallucinated difference of the corporeal tactile field, But it also very unmistakably had a subtle quality of indulgent concupiscence: of there being something wrong or libidinally 'twisted' within it. The becoming-woman involved was exceptionally wonderful - but this was part of a process of abandon that felt as if it was a letting go in the wrong direction.
I was there in that oneiric world for some time (it was probably around half an hour, in terms of time measured by a clock). And afterwards I was struck by the way in which it both seemed to be the memory of a sexual fantasy, and simultaneously kept giving me a visceral impression that on a deep level the event had been real: and specifically that it had been an encounter with forces that I was seeing in a way that was only very faint and distorted, and was only one of very many equivalent, faint, distorted ways of seeing them. And a curious fact was that the more I saw it as a sexual fantasy the more I was likely to be confronted by the feeling that it had been an objective encounter: it was as if the very idea of ultra-intense sexual fantasies (as an element within the virtual-real) had undergone an ontological change, so that at the very least the nature of such experiences was an open question, rather than them being perceived as unquestionably subjective.
It can be seen that certain features of the experience - the downward angle, and the windowless space lit by artificial light - had been present in other experiences in the series being described. The background, faintly recurring feeling of there having been an objective reality to the LSD/speed encounter was something that seemed to be self-subsistent (it appeared to be emergent from a single memory, as opposed to a comparison across instances), but it was also the case that if I looked at other experiences from the preceding ten years, I was left with an impression of a pattern that made me wonder about what had been taking place. And whatever was to be said about objectivity or subjectivity I was beginning to feel that to the side of transcendental south there was another direction of the dispassionate or desubjectified/impersonal, and that this direction was in some sense colder, and was one in relation to which it might be best to be careful.
*
It was the early afternoon of Saturday 21st June, 2003. It was a warm sunny day, with a few clouds. The term was coming to an end at my college, and the extra energy from the winding down of the academic year was combining with a phase of good summer weather to give a feeling of exhilaration and of possibilities on the immediate horizon. The end of the relationship with Kyra was only two months in the past, but I had to a great extent regained my equanimity.
I was not involved in the different plans for the day of the three friends at the house where I lived. I saw that there was an opportunity - a gap had opened up in front of me, and the June sunlight was a crucial part of this gap.
I decide I will go by train to Epping Forest, and take datura. This will be the third time I have taken it, and I want to try a larger quantity of the substance.
Epping Forest was a good option because of its relative proximity to Stoke Newington, though it was not a place for which I felt a strong affection. There were other woodland areas in the vicinity of London, like Petts Wood, to the southeast, which I found very inspiring, but for some reason, on the five or six occasions I had been to Epping Forest, I had felt it was beautiful but that in some sense the affect of the woodland was somehow a little less heartening - a tiny bit 'sombre' in some way. I felt that this difference was perhaps a bit enigmatic, although I knew it could be because Epping Forest had beeen developed and modified to a large extent, so that it had a lot of wide paths, and possibly had less diversity of plants. However, the forest was a beautiful place, and in the hot summer weather this attribute of the terrain was the only one on which I was focused.
I was not in a hurry because my plan was for the main part of the trip to take place late in the evening and at night - I was hoping it would be a night with stars - when there will be fewer people around. I felt it was an advantage that the night would not last long, and I liked the fact that I was going to do this on the longest day of the year. I put a bottle of water and some food in my bag, along with a small jar containing datura seeds ground to a powder, and then I walked the mile and a half to the station.
I took a train to Chingford, planning to go to the area of forest I knew. The train was quite old, with wooden fittings, and there was a pleasant breeze coming through the windows. There were long sunlit views from the embankments and viaducts that carried the tracks across the Lea valley.
At one of the next stops a friend got onto the train. I had got to know him in the last two years during which I had lived in Leamington, but was out of touch with him. I am pleased to see him, and he seems to feel the same. I tell him I am going for a walk in the forest. It turns out he is living with friends in a house which is somewhere on the opposite side of the forest. He has a car parked at Chingford station and while we are on the train he says he could give me a lift to High Beach, in the centre of the forest (High Beach - or High Beech - is a village, and also the name for the areas of forest around it). I don't know High Beach, but because I have never been very inspired by the zone of the forest north of Chingford, I decide to accept the lift.
My friend dropped me off at a crossroads in the forest which was outside of the village (it was not in sight). It was a friendly goodbye - it had been an enjoyable, unexpected meeting. I waved as the car drove off, and then, looking around me, I decide on the area of forest I wanted to go into, and started walking. I had a feeling of having been swept forward: the speed of the journey could not have been faster if I had planned to meet up with my friend in order to travel the additional distance. It is a feeling of serendipity - which on this occasion is specifically the feeling of having been propelled unexpectedly into the centre of the forest.
The direction I had chosen was one where the forest terrain looked interesting, and it meant that I was facing the sun as I walked (although it was mostly hidden by the canopy of leaves). It was also close to the direction which I would need to take for the return journey.
A warm, sun-suffused affect had been the tonality of the day, and this had been heightened by the journey. It had felt lightheartedly appropriate to have a powerful, anomalous experience on the longest day of the year, while in a forest.
But now the tonality of the day began to change to one which was tinged a little with an awareness of the intensity of what I was about to do. I had walked through an area of open woodland, with occasional thickets of undergrowth, and then the ground had risen a little before levelling off, and in this slightly higher terrain the trees were closer together, and there were quite large expanses of bushes, growing close together. I had arrived without using a path, and I had found a place where there was a fairly large space - perhaps two hundred feet across - of trees and grass, where this space was approximately encircled by thickets.
In the more open area of woodland I had seen that the sky was now hazy, with some quite large clouds. But rain had not been forecast for the night, and the clouds had not looked like stormclouds.
I found a place to sit down. Everything felt good about the circumstances, and so I went ahead. I had measured out the powdered datura seeds at the house - it was three teaspoons of powdered seeds. On the mountain in Morocco I had taken two thirds of a teaspoon of the same seeds, prepared in the same way, and had had an experience which had been relatively mild. I swallowed the powdered seeds, using water to wash them down.
For quite a long time I had a feeling of mild nausea. It began to get dark. And as the datura began to have an effect the nausea became a more pervasive form of discomfort: the nausea was now both a feeling of being perturbed and a feeling that everything was becoming more like fluid, so that I felt as if I was not on solid ground. I knew this was not a good start, and I went for short walks, but I rapidly discovered that even staying within the circle of thickets I would very rapidly become disorientated, because every new view seemed so singular that it was hard to get my bearings. Eventually, starting from the place where I had taken the datura, I chose the direction that I believed to be south, and walked out of the encircling thickets. On the far side there was a slight downward slope.
The ground felt spongy, and I set off running down the slope, with long strides, getting the exhilarating impression of being lighter than normal. Ahead there was an area of trees and thick undergrowth. I went right into this area, working my way through the bushes. I sat down with my back to a tree. I was aware that I was being drawn into a trance state, and I was also aware that since running down the hill the nausea had gone. I had succeeded in crossing the threshold into the full form of the experience in a state where I was not encumbered by a physical discomfort. And the joy that had arrived with running down the slope had stayed with me, clearing away the feeling of being perturbed.
I had a few dream experiences that I could not hold onto as memories. Then one of these experiences came to an end, and in returning from it I did not notice that there had been a change in my awareness of my circumstances.
I believed that I was with a group of friends who were over to my right, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, sitting around a fire, and that we had all taken LSD, I also believed that it was a night when, for some reason, there were lots of parties in the forest. The atmosphere was very festive, and there was a feeling that all of the parties were 'rave' parties, and that everyone was taking drugs. It was the second belief (about it being a night when there were many parties taking place in Epping Forest) that at this point was foremost in my mind, but although the two beliefs formed a crucial - underlying - part of the experience, they were not brought to the point of being closely considered for a wider consistency, and this was because of the experiences that went with them (the localised, immediate consistency was very effective in terms of everything being explained, as with the effects of the datura being explained as the effects of LSD).
I got up and found that there were several people in front of me, setting up for a party. I walked to my left into a narrow clearing, from which the people seemed to be arriving - there was still a little light in the sky. I found that there was a van parked along the side of the glade, with people getting out of it and walking past me to the place that had been chosen for the party. It felt as if they were members of some kind of alternative-culture performance group. A woman was walking from the van: she had an unusually wide, round face, which seemed quite pale. She smiled at me in a very friendly way and continued walking. The width of her face was on the edge of being abnormal, but I didn't give this any thought: her welcoming smile set the tone for what followed, and within the experience it was a main part of an initial process where it became clear that everyone was happy for me to be at the party.
I walked back to the place where I had been sitting down. Facing in the same direction, but standing up, there was a tree behind me, as well as thick undergrowth, which seemed to come round to my right - the direction where I believed my friends were sitting around a fire. In front of me there was an open space, perhaps twenty feet by thirty feet, and this space was now full of people setting up for the party, in the dark. At this point, there was a lightning flash, and I became aware that there was rain coming down, although it did not seem to very heavy. I sat down again, and after a short phase of concern about the rain, the experience became that of a high-intensity party taking place around me, with people sitting down on either side, talking to me, and with a dance area in front, in the small open space, with ten or fifteen people dancing to music.
At one point, fairly early in the experience, I believed I had a glass-topped table in front of me, with objects on it - a lighter, a joint, cigarettes, etc. - but when I looked at it closely I discovered there was nothing but the forest floor (this happened at least twice).
All of the indications are that I wasn't simply asleep, but that instead I was taking in main features of the terrain around me, and moving around in it, while simultaneously experiencing the superimposed dream. A principle of the experience seemed to be that if I looked at anything in a sustained, scrutinising way it would disappear. However, I was not aware of this at the time - and in fact for a long time the fabric of the experience seemed to consist almost entirely of different configurations and circumstances which entailed that I would not look at anything in this way. The figures with whom, within the experience, I was interacting tended to be alongside me; the woman I saw at the beginning did not stop in front of me (none of the people who got out of the van stopped in front of me); the dance-floor area was in darkness, with nothing but a view of the faint outlines of dancing people; and I was continually caught up in different, sometimes slightly perturbing, preoccupied states, which meant that a sustained, scrutinising look was less likely to happen.
I stood up, and although I liked the party, I felt I should go and look for my friends. I had trouble getting through the undergrowth to my right, and decided to go forward to where people were dancing. And then it was as if I went through a change that was partly about deciding to explore the party: I kept feeling concerned about finding my friends, but, as I moved around, part of the experience was of a simple exploration (I became aware that there was much more of the party over to the left), and part of it seemed to consist of moments where I had a knowledge that there was thick undergrowth where I needed to go, so that I had to take another route. For instance, at the beginning of this phase the visual impression was that I would not be able to find a way through to the right, or in front (I don't think I attempted it, to find out) but that I needed to turn left, into the party.
My feeling is that although I had an erroneous set of dream-beliefs, which partly were functioning to normalise the situation (the un-inspected background ideas that it was a night when parties were taking place, and that I was with a group of friends) there was a part of me which in some way knew what was what. At this point what this means is that rather than going off to look for my friends, I responded on the basis that there was an experience to be explored.
The party was in a system of small glades; there was the place where people were dancing, and then there were two or three areas which seemed to extend around the back of it, curving around it, but in a way where the areas were only very minimally connected to each other by gaps in the undergrowth. At this point the tonality of the experience was partly one of trying to solve the labyrinth of the party, with the idea that following the line of the glades would eventually lead me to a place where it was possible to depart in the direction of my friends. But this motivation came and went: some of the time I was behaving as a person does when they are exploring a very large party.
It was at this point that the alterity of the experience reached its highest level, although always in a way where this alterity made a very minimal impact on me at the time. The small openings in the forest curved round to the right from the glade where I had seen the woman with the wide face, so that the second of these additional spaces was on the opposite side of the place where people were dancing. I kept arriving in this space and finding it full of people who I saw as having all adopted a very spectacular mode of fancy-dress. They all had blue faces - it was a chalky blue that was a little deeper than the colour of blue chalk, and was very slightly luminous, in the sense that the colour could be seen in the dark (I didn't give any attention at the time to it being luminous) and I saw these figures as being dressed up as 'aliens' (this was the term that came to my mind at the time) whose clothing seemed to have been partly modelled on Chinese samurai costumes. They were wearing outlandish warrior clothing, which I saw as a form of costume which was supposed to be the clothing of aliens from outer space, and which I saw as looking slightly more reminiscent of Chinese warrior-costumes than anything else. I viewed this as immensely impressive as a form of fancy-dress. It made me smile at how spectacular it was, and at the amount of effort which I felt must have gone into it. As if I was caught going backwards and forwards along a path in a maze, I seemed to arrive around three times at this glade with the blue-faced aliens, and after the first occasion the return to this space gave me the pleasant feeling of 'ah yes, here they are again.'
The other thing that happened during this phase was that I made an attempt to find a way through the undergrowth to the right of where I had originally been sitting, and having failed to get through it I walked back. As I did this there were people following me - as if they had come with me to see what I was doing - and one of these people, a woman, said to me in a light-hearted tone -
"I'm a crocodile"
I took this to be a way of referring to the idea of 'spirit animals.' It seemed to be a statement which was made playfully, but which was not ironic.
Remembering my experience from 1996, I immediately responded -
"I'm a sea-snake." (see section 40)
This seemed to be a satisfactory response, but apart from this I don't remember anything in terms of a continuation of the exchange.
The start of the next phase (which I think overlapped with the previous one) took the form of me returning from walking around the 'loop' of the clearings in the forest and going to the side of the place where people were dancing. I started talking to a woman who I met there, and for a while there was an alternation between me dancing with her, while we talked, and departures where I walked around the party. I don't remember anything about the conversations, but the impression I have is that they took the form of playful, friendly exchanges with nothing anomalous about them. I was attracted to the woman, but there was a slightly 'thin' or not-very-warm quality to her affect.
The 'tone' or atmosphere of the music is all I can remember: this was somewhere along a continuum from techno to psychedelic trance. But, in fact, I don't remember a single moment where I focused on the music.
It can be seen that as well being very unfocused - or continuously re-focused - the overall experience of the 'party' was a somewhat depthless experience. Everything was happening through hallucination, assisted by a background confabulation, but, with the exception of one or two details the 'everything' turns out, on close inspection, to be not very much. There was no intensity of awareness in relation to colour, pattern, sound or tactile sensation, and no focus at all on the trees, the leaves, the sky. (However, it is probably worth pointing out that a certain degree of focus was involved in terms of movement, in that I did not walk into branches or get scratched in undergrowth - indicating an 'avoidance-awareness' of the trees and bushes).
Two or three times I had seen the lights of a car travelling along a road that seemed to be a quarter of a mile away. The direction was the opposite side of the main glade, viewed from my initial vantage.
I saw another car, and heard the engine. At that point I was on my own - in the sense that I was not with the woman with whom I had been talking (I believed within the experience that she was somewhere on the other side of the dance area) - and I was standing looking in the direction of the road.
I started walking toward the road. This was another moment where it feels, looking back on the experience, as if there was a part of me that was navigating with some degree of lucidity. I think that maybe at some point in the walk my idea was that the road could be used to get back to my friends, but this seems more like a subsequent confabulation, than the main motivation. I have the impression that I wanted to get away from the circumstances I had been experiencing, and that the road was chosen as an option both because it would introduce a difference, and because I could re-orientate myself.
Given what had been 'happening,' what took place next is not surprising. On the walk toward the road there were soon people around me who it seemed had also decided to leave. In retrospect there is a moths-around-a-flame affect about the experience (whether this is understood in terms of a phenomenology of specific kinds of hallucination, or whether it is understood in terms of inorganic beings), in particular about its first phase, when the 'party' was set up all around me. But now there was a difference, a simultaneous thinning out and heightening of the experience.
Very soon I was being accompanied by a woman, but not the same woman I had been with before. She was a warmer and more inspiring presence, and I felt a greater liking for her, and attraction toward her. There was a slightly amorous quality to our conversations, and I felt an affection for her as a heartening, courageous companion in the course of what turned out to be a difficult, lengthy walk (altered time consciousness would have played a part in this, but the distance seems not to have been small, and my memory is of a lot of thickets that were hard to get through). However, there was still a quality of thin-ness about her intensity. There was a moment fairly early in the walk where I had the thought that she was definitely a different woman in relation to the one with whom I had been dancing, but that there was something structurally identical about the nature of the encounter, as if this second encounter was in some way the same, while nonetheless being at a slightly higher level of intensity.
Spread out around us there were other people, all of them walking in the same direction, but none of them nearer than perhaps twenty feet: it was as if nine or ten people had decided to walk out of the forest, in a straggling line.
When I reached the road I was the only person there, and my impression was that for some reason everyone had been held up in the forest, and that I should have a look around. To my right, two hundred yards away, there was an area of street lights. I walked towards them, and before long I saw that there was a small roundabout, surrounded by trees, where another road was crossing the one I had walked towards. As I arrived on the edge of the area of streetlights I sat down on the border of the grass verge that was by the forest, about ten feet from the road, in a place where there was a bay of vegetation behind me, a curve of leafy undergrowth - and of leaves of trees - which was around fifteen feet across. I sat down there because there were people from the party who were sitting there, but I sat down facing the road
I believed I was at a kind of roadside after-party, consisting of people who had just walked to the road, and were pausing before going home. I swivelled around - without changing the position in which I was sitting - and I saw that there were nine or ten people there. A man sitting to my left offered me a can of beer, but I thanked him and said I did not want it.
Looking at the people in front of me I was aware that they all seemed animated but poised at the same time. They all seemed to be thin, though in a way that suggested a high level of health, rather than lack of food, and their overall tone was of a sophisticated and anti-conventional playfulness and intelligence. I had the thought again that they were members of some radical-culture performance group.
"Who are you?" I asked, with both laughter and appreciation in my voice. And then I immediately added a second question, perhaps thinking that this one would be easier to answer.
"Where do you come from?"
The semi-circle of people looked back at me. There was silence. It was as if I had asked questions which should not be asked. Or - as if silence for that moment was the necessary response.
I turned away for a moment, and looked toward the empty forest road. When I looked back I saw that, to the right of the space, a woman and a man were performing a fantastically difficult feat of balance. The man was standing up with an arm raised, and the woman, arms and legs outstretched, was balancing on the man's hand, with her belly as the point of contact. The woman's body was in an arc whose central point was her stomach, and I experienced what she was doing as exceptional gracefulness, as well as it being a display of balance. The position also indicated a high level of strength and skill on the part of the man, but its power was in the outstretched shape of the woman: I felt that as a physical 'form' it was exceptionally beautiful.
And then I was just seeing an outline of the two people in the leaves, which were lit up a little by the streetlights. Then, a moment, after this, I was seeing only the leaves.
At this point I remembered that I had taken datura (a substance which substantially effects the sense of sight). And I realised that the experience which had just been taking place was not what I had thought.
Looking toward the road, I started to take stock, and to think about the return journey.
After a minute or two I heard the sound of a vehicle approaching. It was coming from the right, from the direction of the roundabout. It was a police car, and because of the curve of the road its lights swept across me. The car stopped.
I stood up, trying to look as friendly and relaxed as possible.
The policeman in the passenger seat wound down his window, and asked if I was OK.
I said that I was walking to Chingford, and asked the policeman if he could confirm I was walking in the right direction. In a cheerful way the man pointed up the road - the direction in which the car was travelling.
At this point it had seemed alright not to go close to the car, so if my pupils were very dilated (I feel sure they were) this would not have been visible. The policeman seemed to be satisfied by the exchange - he said goodbye, and the car drove off.
I didn't sit down again, but instead I started walking along the road: this was the beginning of a return journey which was simultaneously a process of returning to a more focused state while still experiencing the effects of the datura.
I rapidly discovered, as I walked, that the experience was not over. After walking a few hundred yards I found that I was talking to the woman with whom I had walked through the forest. She was walking alongside me: I could hear her, and I could see her with my peripheral vision. Our discussion was about the fact that I was leaving.
The woman did not want me to go, and it seemed that she wanted to come with me, but for some reason could not. This conversation took place in several instantiations. Each time I turned round to look at her I discovered she was not there, and had a recurrence of the realisation from earlier, and then, before long, the experience would re-assert itself, The sequence within the loop was one which culminated, on each occasion, in the re-discovery that things were not the way they seemed, and it is worth seeing that the part of me which was navigating was resolute about keeping walking, no matter what, as if this other part of me knew that if I paused I would again be pulled further away from a focused state in which I could benefit from the situation. I felt a real affection for the woman, but there was a thin quality about her affect, and I feel that this was part of what made the difference.
At the end of the last instantiation of the conversation, the woman said she could not go any further. I kept walking, expressing the fact that I had to leave. After about twenty feet I could hear the woman talking to me, from behind me and to the right, in the place where she had been - halfway into the centre of the road - when she had stopped walking.
I turned round, not out of hesitation, but to invite her to come with me, and to say goodbye if she would not. The woman had been speaking a second before. And now, when I turned round, I saw that there was no-one there. In front of me there was nothing but the empty road and the forest. Again, there was the realisation. But this time the tonality was different, in that it was not focused on the thought that now I knew what was going on, whereas before I had not. This time, looking at the empty road, there was a feeling of the eerie - a feeling of something happening, and of not knowing what was going on.
*
As I continued walking it became clear that the 'additional' experiences were centred on areas where there was less light, and maintained themselves through voice, peripheral vision and a gaze that was not a concentrated stare. The other thing that became clear was that these experiences were states of dreaming-while-awake, in that they began like falling asleep, so that there was no noticeable transition, and in that what took place was a superimposition into an ongoing waking perception. During this time there were two or three moments where for a moment I was talking, as I walked, with people who I believed had come from the parties in the forest, and who I believed were sitting by the side of the road (I think they were always sitting in groups). But when I realised what was happening - and when, again, there were just shadowy leaves where the people had been - there was a sense both of a direct continuity of visual perception (I had not strayed off the line, by the kerb, on which I was walking, and I did not feel that I had been in danger of being run over) and simultaneously there was the impression of having woken from a dream-terrain which was superimposed on visual and auditory perception. And, as often is the case with dreaming, I had the feeling that - despite the fact that people often talk in their sleep - I might not have been speaking aloud, but that all the voices involved might have been in the virtual-real.
Very little was now taking place before I recognised what was happening: I would be walking towards a tree or bush by the side of the road, and using this as a reference point, it was clear that I had walked only a very short distance between the beginning and the end of the experience, so that only a few seconds could have passed.
None of the experiences of the party-goers or anomalous beings (by this time I think there was a degree of indeterminacy in relation to how they were being seen within the experiences, so that there was a sense of alterity) were walking with me by this time, either in the form of a group or an individual. Or not on the road, at least. At one point - I think this was the last occurence within this phase - I looked down into a small field that was below the level of the road and surrounded by tall trees, and I saw thirty or forty people streaming slowly across the middle of the field, going in the direction in which I was travelling (the nearest part of this area of the field would have been a hundred and fifty feet away). They were roughly in a line, but they were in clusters of people that were walking alongside each other, two or three individuals wide. And then I looked more closely and there was only the field.
When a vehicle came in sight, travelling toward Chingford, I tried to hitch a lift, knowing as I did so that these were the very worst circumstances for asking a driver to stop (darkness, a vehicle travelling at full speed). This is another point where I feel my decision-making was taking place from some other, more poised part of myself: I didn't feel concerned about meeting someone while still experiencing the effects of datura.
It was a truck, and to my surprise it stopped. The driver, a man in his fifties or sixties, told me he wasn't going far, and I said I just needed a lift to Chingford.
I didn't find it in any way hard to hold a friendly conversation, and I was dropped off a few minutes later at Chingford bus station.
There was a night bus parked at the bus station, with a driver in it, who was evidently waiting for the time to set off. It seemed at this point that the return journey was going to be exceptionally straightforward.
I was standing about thirty feet from the front of the bus, in view of the driver, and I took out some coins from my pocket to see if I had enough money for the fare (I didn't have any notes with me). But when I looked at the coins I discovered that any individual coin could look like almost any denomination. I started with one coin which I could not bring into focus, in that at one point it looked like a pound coin, and then it looked very clearly like a two pence, and then a ten pence. I then moved to another coin which I had seen with my peripheral vision as a pound coin, and then to my dismay I saw this come into focus as a different coin. It was clear that the problem was intrinsic, and my tactile sense was not helping me in terms of weight. The second coin became, in turn, a twenty pence piece, and a penny, and at this point I changed my mind about catching the bus. Rather than attempting to work out the denominations by feeling their edges (which I think would not have worked) I decided I had been standing in front of the bus driver peering at my coins for too long, and took the decision to continue on foot.
This failure to catch the bus did not perturb me. I was a bit worried by the length of the walk which was ahead of me, but I was also slightly amused by the Alice in Wonderland experience with the coins.
I walked all the way from Chingford to Stoke Newington, which is around ten miles. Everything that happened during this part of the journey was different - though in disparate ways - from the earlier experiences.
On the edge of Chingford there was a place where young dark-leaved trees (perhaps cypresses) were growing close together on the far side of a wide verge, in the form of tall bushes rather than trees, in that the leaves came down to the ground, hiding the trunks. At one point there was a narrow gap at right angles to the road. It was still dark (there was a small amount of light in the sky to the east), so the space between the trees was in deep shadow. I decided to walk into this space, because I needed to urinate.
I went amongst the trees and walked seven or eight feet. And then I saw that there were two figures standing very close to me on the left. They were about five feet apart. One of them, who was standing closer to the edge of the trees, was shadowy, indistinct, but the other one, who was only three feet away from me, was one of the blue-faced figures from earlier in the experience. This figure was not indistinct, in that the blue was chalky-luminous; and it radiated a striking alterity (the eyes gave me the impression that they were not human eyes). There was no idea at all, within this experience, of the figure being in fancy dress. As I turned I was facing it, and then I immediately went back the way I had come, seeing as I did so that, standing in symmetrical positions on the opposite side, there were two more figures, both of them shadowy, as opposed to having a blue face.
This moment had been a jolt - the point where I had turned and seen the two figures, and had found myself three feet away from the one with the blue face, had been a real shock, and this shock had been prolonged, if not compounded, by discovering that the figures were all around me. The reason why it was not compounded was that I did not believe they were there (though, even on reflection, it was not the case that I entirely did not believe in the existence of what I had seen), so it was the initial moment that had by far the most power to unnerve me. And to this it should be added that the sense of menace in the situation came simply from the proximity and immobility of the beings (an immobility suggestive of poise) as opposed to it coming from any threatening action or any affect of hostility (the affect was neutral, inscrutable).
(It can be seen that a pattern had been broken, or in some sense reversed: in the earlier phases of the experience I had kept finding himself in the middle of a strangeness that I was seeing as to a great extent not strange at all, while entirely believing in it, and the jolt had come at the point of the disappearance. Here the jolt had been at the point of appearance, and it had been both the case that the strangeness was perceived as strange, and that, after the initial second, I had not, to any significant extent, believed it as relating to beings with existence beyond my mind).
I returned to walking. The initial impact of the experience was similar to that of an unexpected, frightening moment in a horror film. But the poised, non-menacing feeling that had come from the four figures meant that, in recollection, the experience primarily involved an impression of an affect such as curiosity, as opposed to aggression. So instead of after-shocks in the form of fear, there was an after-impact in the form of a feeling that it had been a striking, though unnerving experience.
After a while I am on a stretch of road which has fields on either side of it. There is light in the sky, but it is cloudy, so it is still twilight.
Ahead of me, there is a deciduous tree growing alongside the road. About a hundred yards further on there is another, similar tree.
In looking at these trees I see, separately, individuals who are members of my milieu - a man and a woman who are both nominally my friends, but from whom I have come to feel distant. It is a sequential experience, and its specificity is that I am seeing the tree, but am seeing an individual who is in the form of the tree.
I see, very clearly, something that is wrong with the individuals: their strengths - poise, and confidence, and wide domains of knowledge belonging to empirical awareness - have been drawn into effect by control-mind tendencies which on one level take the form of tacit, subtle refusals to engage (complex deflections, silences), and on another level take the form of indulgent behaviours which are having distressing, disfunctional impacts on those around them. Within this milieu they have become grey, superficially sunny, and draining presences.
Everything is about energy, and it is clear that even if the indulgent behaviour is to some extent contingent and temporary (an effect of turbulence caused by a slow closing of a post-Warwick gap in ordinary reality) the main problem remains in the form of them blocking the forward-motion of waking the faculties, for themselves and for others. I don't in the least blame them: but in looking at the trees the situation is clear - I feel the two individuals at the level of intent. What I am seeing is intrinsic, in terms of foreseeable and effectuatable circumstances, and this modality - which is in effect within them - is inimical for me (and also for others around them who are trying to go Forward, such as Mark Fisher). In this moment I know that it is necessary, in a full sense, to move on.
About an hour later I am walking alongside a dual carriageway (I am more than half of the way home). It has just started to rain - it is a shower, rather than a thunderstorm, but the rain feels cold. I discover that I have just been having a dream experience of talking to a woman about the walk; the rain; how tired I am. There is a feeling of the warmth of being in love - a sublime depth of affect. In the dream I am in a relationship with the woman, but when I come out of the dream, I do not know her. But what gives the dream a singular quality is that I am talking to the woman about the walk from within a dream, and within this dream the woman is talking to me while asleep in bed. I know this because of the final exchange as I come round from dreaming-while-awake to full wakefulness. The woman had been laughingly telling me that a bit of rain wouldn't do me any harm and that I had more than enough energy to get home, and I had laughed and responded - "That's easy for you to say, you're at home and in bed!"
It had been an experience which to quite a large extent had been about relationships with people, and in the final moment of it I had reached an awareness of an affect that was at a fundamentally higher level than the thin-affect encounters earlier, as if at the end I had just enough strength to get a view of an aspect of the horizon, having finally walked out of a very extraordinary cave.
*
Janika, the friend who met me at High Barnet station, was going to take me to meet a friend of hers (who I had already met a couple of times) who had some DMT, and was prepared to let me try some of it, that evening, in his house.
I inhaled the full quantity about half an hour later. This time the smoke made me cough, and I did not drink enough water before being swept away into the experience (I think it is possible that a lack of full physical composure affected my ability to hold onto memories).
The first event was that I suddenly had three beings right in front of me who had come to take me somewhere (this was what I knew within the experience about their intention). They were exceptionally "insistent" presences that communicated an urgency (or maybe a necessary speed) by being in front of me and pulsing toward me and back again extremely fast, in a kind of ultra-fast pounding of back-and-forward that was also the statement "come with us."
They were also "cartoon beings" but at a level which had become abstract. The beings were in the form of coloured rectangular shapes that were like shields - they were oriented vertically, and had different colours: one was green and I think another was yellow. There seemed to be an articulation of the shield halfway up, as if the shield was made of two overlapping plates. There was a bright, intelligent "characterfulness" about these beings: each had a personality, but they did not feel at all as if they were human. Two of the beings were female.
I only have two clear memories after this, one located at the end of the experience, and one that is indeterminate in the "span" of what happened. In relation to unclear recollections what I remember is that a vast series of very extraordinary and very positive things happened, and that despite my attempts to hold onto them, they all, with one exception, fell away - were lost to memory.
It had all just been happening: a world of astonishing experiences. And now I was walking - or maybe floating - in a windowless version of the Black Swan Hotel. I was going toward the front of the hotel, the part of the building that faces south. There was a serene atmosphere, an atmosphere of secure, quiet warmth (it felt as if it was in some sense a subterranean place, but at the same time as if there was not really any gravity there - unless you wanted to act as if there was - so the feeling of it being subterranean was counteracted by the feeling of it being in gravity-free space). The quality of the illumination was that of electric light (the way the hotel would be at night). And there was no impression at all that what I was seeing was like a cartoon.
As I was reaching the end of the corridor the experience ended, and I was back in the living room. Only it had not quite ended - I had managed to hold onto a memory from earlier, and under these circumstances to remember can be to re-experience, to re-live the event. I remembered that I had been shown (by the beings within the experience that had just taken place) the depth-level nature of the world in relation to energy, feeling, and intent. And this had been done by means of a kind of "fan-spectrum" coloured diagram, whose lines and colours started out as vertical on the left, and then dropped down - through ninety degrees - to horizontal, on the right. On the left, at the vertical, was love, which I think was a white-violet colour. And on the right, at the horizontal, was control or domination - and this was black. In between there was a graduated world of states of energy, feeling and intent that was on a spectrum between the vertical and the horizontal.
The experience I remembered did not have any other details (I was shown the diagram by it being in front of me - there is no memory of a visible presence of the beings who were showing it to me). But the memory is not at all cartoon-like: which is not just to say that there was a warmth and depth to the colours - the experience at this point was of being within a space, rather than seeing things on a "screen" in front of me. And the place where it happened was a room-like space within a large, sequestered "warmly secure" world (without windows, but also without gravity) - a world belonging to the beings who had "come to get me" at the start of the experience. It should at this point be added that my impression with all of the events that I do not remember was very much that they had all taken place in this world (and it has always felt that there was a total continuity in the transition to the experience of being in the Black Swan Hotel - and that at this point I was still in the place, but was being shown the "fabric" of the place itself, by means of something familiar to me).
The re-living of the experience of seeing the diagram culminated in something new. The beings who had shown it to me now "told" me something (though I don't remember words being used) which had the quality or form of a joke. It was pointed out to me that human beings - and this very much included me - had in front of them all the time the fact that the world really consists of energy, feeling and intent, but that they obdurately, stupidly - and pretentiously - cling to their opinion that the world is a dull, ordinary, "concrete" place.
The joke in the end was very much on me - directed brightly toward me. I laughed, and there was a real joy in the laughter (I felt I had not laughed like that for ten years, or more). I went into the world of the "inorganic beings" coughing, and I came back with the cough transformed into laughter.
However, it remains the case that I was not really overwhelmed - apart from in the moment of laughter - by the insight about the depth-level nature of the world: this was because I already viewed the world in this way (helped initially by Spinoza, and in particular by Deleuze, with his concept of the body without organs). It is pointed out in Castaneda's books that inorganic beings (whether they are consistent phenomenological elements within human awareness, or independent entities living in a neighbouring dimension) have a tendency to tell people what they know already. This seems to be exemplified by my DMT experience, though it is true both that the concise, diagrammatic way in which I was shown the "outsight" was new and impressive, and that through the joke levelled against me I received a powerfully emphasised reminder that I needed to embody my knowledge."
(Hidden Valleys, Zero Books, pp. 160-165)
*
This section and the previous section have together been about the discovery - or appearance-in-my-life - of a second frequency of the impersonal, alongside the frequency of the impersonal that can accurately be described as Love-and-Freedom. This other frequency relates to a direction which is fundamentally too locked to control: it relates to a single wider reality which it can be extremely valuable to encounter, but which taken as a destination is a trap. Whereas the direction of Love-and-Freedom is the direction of the definitive journey - the direction of one wider reality after another.
The first way in which this other direction of the impersonal can be helpful is evidently in overcoming Fear - in overcoming fear of the unknown. The second way in which it can be valuable is through the tendency, in relation to this direction, for important things which you already in some sense know (though you are not in any way systematically acting upon them), to be re-stated in powerful ways, in the sense that the re-statement has a new, more effective mode of expression. And the third valuable potential of this direction-of-encounter is in relation to the journey of libidinal awakening of heterosexual males, a journey which has 'become your love' as its fundamental guiding principle. The nextdoor-to-South direction of the impersonal can help heterosexual males start on this journey, helping them discover the female erotic as it exists within men who love women, but it will not in any way help them complete this journey: the completion is the discovery that in these cases to become-woman is also fundamentally to become-man (this is partly to say that to become female is here to become male-female, which is what men are, at depth), so that the journey is an emphatic return to the starting-point, only further up the spiral. The completion of the initial journey for heterosexual males will not be achieved through encounters with the Deep Hotel: this clarification and focusing of male heterosexuality can only occur through encounters with women in the actual as opposed to the virtual: that is, through being in love with women and and through bonds of affection and friendship, and, most fundamentally, through relationships of these kinds with women who are travellers into the unknown.
* * *
*
The events which will now be described were all experiences which occurred during a time when I had found a new direction, but had not yet set out to explore it. It was the time between 2000 and 2003: my life had ploughed into the difficult, sometimes deadening force-field of London, and simultaneously there were the preoccupations and exhaustions of earning a living as an A Level philosophy tutor. In a strong sense my life became 'blocked' or 'constricted' toward the end of this time: movement forward became very slow. But it was also the case that there was an element of necessary preparation involved, in that I was learning how to exist within the world of paid-work in London, and in that I was bringing an older project to a conclusion - I was finishing writing a philosophy book. However, when I had found the kind of job I needed, and had finished writing the book, I still did not immediately set out in the direction which had appeared in front of me, and this showed that there was a problem at a deeper level: I needed a jolt, something that would give me the detachment necessary to get a clear view of my situation. None of the experiences to be described provided a perturbation of this kind, or anything like it, but they do throw some light on the circumstances I was confronting, and with the last sequence of events there is a chance that they provided a degree of preparation for the effects of a jolt.
It was some time in the year 2000, and I had gone to sleep in my room in the flat where I was living in Stoke Newington.
I dreamed that I was in a large unfurnished attic room which had two or three pianos in it. They were stand-up pianos, but gave the impression of being extremely old, and one of them had had panels removed so that the mechanism was visible. The room, a long rectangle, had a wooden floor, and a single window, perhaps fifteen feet away, opposite the pianos: it stretched into semi-darkness beyond the part of it which had the pianos, ending in a wall which was perhaps forty feet from the area directly lit by the window.
A very old, white-haired man was playing one of the pianos, somewhat falteringly. Standing near the piano was a slightly younger man, and in the dream I knew that the man who was playing was the owner of the house - the person nominally 'in charge' - and that the younger man was in some sense the 'steward' (this idea - if not the word - was part of the dream, although there was nothing medieval about the setting or the two people - it all seemed contemporary).
The old man was being assisted in playing the piano by the younger one, and the main aspect of the dream was that there was a feeling of something extremely sinister about the relationship between the two of them (but it was if it felt both sinister and bland, as if what I was seeing was the very fabric of ordinary existence). The man at the piano believed he was in charge, whereas it was clear that in a fundamental way he was being controlled by his steward (there was nothing in any way flamboyant about the appearance of the steward: he had a grey, everyday quality - in relation to how he looked he might have been a manager of a business an impoverished area of countryside).
(it should be added of course, speaking in the name of the faculty of lucidity, that the faculty of reason is a main element of what is suggested when this dream is taken up as a lens for seeing the abstract).
The starkness of the dream came from the fact that I could see that all systemic-technical understanding and all musical inspiration were coming directly from the steward, and that the old man was a kind of hollow shell: and the feeling was that the relationship between the two figures was deadly - fatal - for the man playing the piano.
I walked away from this grim scene, and looked out of the window.
The view was of the castle in the centre of Haverfordwest, in Wales - from about half a mile away, and from around the height of the hill on which the castle is located This view was one which could be seen from a house where I used to live as a young child - between the ages of four and six - although the room in the dream was not in any way like the rooms in the house. The angle of the view and the structure of the castle itself seemed the same, but everything else was different. The castle had large banners on it, which were about some kind of exhibition or conference which was taking place, and seemed contemporary in its tonality, rather than something from forty years before (let alone like something from Norman times): it was as if I was in Haverfordwest in the year 2000, and in a different - wider and taller - building that was on the site of the house where I had lived as a child.
The view was to the north (although up until recently - and at the time of the dream - my mental orientation of the town in relation to the compass points had told me that the view was to the west). It was a sunny day, and there was a definite everyday-reality quality to the view: the castle, far from being something 'gothic' or enigmatic, was there in the view as a tourist venture, or the venue for some kind of conference event.
It was then that I became aware that someone was climbing up the side of the building toward me. Initially the person - a very lanky, tall man with a narrow face - was about twenty feet below me, scaling a wall that seemed a hundred feet high, but then very rapidly they had reached the window, which at head-height had a narrow horizontal section which opened outwards and which created a space just wide enough for someone if it was opened. The lanky, gangly figure, had an overall quality which suggested he was not really human: his face was a little too narrow, and there was an intense but 'thin' quality to his affect which somehow suggested he was some either kind of being who had taken a human form. But despite this, I felt sympathy for him, as he attempted to finish his climb, perching precariously on the window-ledge, and reaching for the part of the window which could be opened.
I felt within the dream that my decision was an important one - that it was the kind of decision that should never be taken lightly. I opened the window, and the man came in thorough it.
He instantly expressed his gratitude and relief, although this seemed to involve a form of communication that did not employ words.
And then he said, matter-of-factly, but with a kind of intense emphasis:
"It was hell down there."
I understood that he was referring to some subterranean real-world (energy-world) domain of beings in which he had just been an inhabitant, and from which he had now escaped. The word 'hell' did not communicate its religious metaphysical meaning: instead it had a simple quotidian quality, and meant 'very bad.'
And then immediately I was in a room which seemed to be alongside the one where I had been a moment before, to the right of the window (the half-lit extension of the room with the pianos had been to the left). The tall man was standing in front of me, and to the right, and a little behind him there was a woman. They both had a friendly aspect - they were looking at me warmly - and then a moment later, in place of human beings, I was seeing two amorphous human-height zones of bright magenta or fuschia-pink light. They were two bodies of electric-magenta light (with a kind of waxy/plasma quality), and they were still the same two beings, radiating their specific modalities/characters of friendliness toward me, but in the form not of humans, but of zones of coloured light.
I then woke up, feeling slightly astonished by the sudden transitions in the dream at the end, and by the dream taken as a whole. I also felt (although with no way of acting in response to the feeling) that there was a chance the word dream as it is currently used might not be in any way adequate for describing what had just taken place.
July of 2002 - I was with two friends on the top of an 8000 foot mountain in the Western High Atlas mountains in Morocco. Because of the North African latitude the rocky but flattish terrain of the mountain-top had flowering plants on it (including a small flowering mullein, the same species that grows in Britain), and there were also a few butterflies.It was a sunny day but there was a haze in the sky in the direction of the Sahara, so that the next range of mountains to the south (the Lesser Atlas) was only very faintly visible. We were sitting on the north side of the mountain, with a view toward an 11,000 foot peak called Amendach.
We had all just taken datura, or thornapple - about two thirds of a teaspoon each of ground seeds. I had spotted datura growing on a beach in Holland, on a holiday the year before, had picked the seeds, and had been growing plants on my window sill in Stoke Newington.
It seems right to say that this was a courageous exploratory act (though I absolutely do not recommend it), but the fact that it was courageous does not in fact mean that at this time I had gone in the new direction that had opened up - far from it. Looking back it is clear that, firstly, I needed to be ultra-selective with my time (I had a barely-started project to be working on, in the form of londonunderlondon); that, secondly, I needed to be exploring the abstract through writing fiction; and that, thirdly, and perhaps most important of all - in relation to travelling I had reached a stage where it was particularly important to be travelling on my own, if the only alternative was travelling with a group that as a whole was not sufficiently focused on the Southward unknown (the issue here was immensely subtle and related to only one of the two individuals with whom I was travelling - it was a kind of wavering of affinity for the escape-path leading out of ordinary reality).
Nonetheless it was perhaps true that I was going through a process which needed to take place. As if I needed to become clear about Morocco and simultaneously about an abstract thread which ran through all of my milieu, from the more urbane 'north-London' parts of it to the radical CCRU or post-CCRU individuals - this thread being the work of William Burroughs. I needed to find out about Morocco, and about something that was not Morocco at all, although the works involved evidently had a connection to it.
Around 1999 I had had an unusually geo-oneiric dream. At the start of it I was in a forested mountainous region of West Africa. The people in the area of mountain jungle seemed to have a 'tribal' worldview which was not that of any of the major religions, and the atmosphere in this point in the dream was very festive and positive.
But the dream was like a sketch: it was as much thought and geography as it was a dreaming of events within an oneiric terrain. Even at the beginning the view had a quality of being from the air, although maybe it was from the top of a mountain, though with a terrain beyond the mountain which was more like a map.
Everything was very joyful, and with an atmosphere of lucidity: in the distance a train was coming up the mountain, though it was as if both train and train-line were coming up the mountain at the same time. And then my point-of-view started moving rapidly northwest, and I was traveling alongside cliffs that I knew were the point where the Sahara met the sea, and there was a sense of an exceptionally difficult journey taking place (in the dream I saw greenish water dripping from the cliffs, and I knew that it was poisonous).
And then in the distance I saw the Atlas mountains, and I saw a long bright headland which extended west from them: a sunlit coastal area which in the dream seemed a sublime place, an exceptionally beautiful terrain.
At this point the dream became like something in a story by Burroughs: it was as if I was now in a parallel world, or was far in the past, although I was still in the same terrain, with the Atlas mountains to the north. I knew I had to cross a very wide intervening valley, but there were people in the valley who were extremely dangerous. The boundary of their territory was marked by a cliff-surrounded narrow sea-inlet, which if you looked a hundred feet down had a circular cluster of a dozen extremely tall poles driven into the sea-bed, and coming up out of the water, so that twenty feet of the poles was above the water and the majority of them was below the sea-level. At the top of each one of these poles there was a severed human head.
At the end of the dream I was crawling very slowly along a path, trying to keep my head out of sight - with the aim of getting to the sunlit terrain between the Atlas mountains and the sea.
For me the end of this dream had something wrong about it: the violence of the boundary-marker suggested an imposition of an unhealthy, delirial optic. But overall, the dream seemed to be an act of oneiric thought that was worth exploring. And if something that was unhealthy about Burroughs' optic was at work in the dream, or in any case was a similar delirial element, then this aspect needed to be understood.
The impression I had received in travelling through Morocco (travelling by train to Marrakesh, and then by bus to the mountains) had been of a counterpart terrain in relation to Europe, somewhere which was North Africa but which was also the South Mediterranean, with olive trees, and with a shared history, in that, for instance, there are the remains of Roman villas in Marrakesh. At a deep level it seemed exceptionally similar to places on the northern shore of the mediterranean, but it was a counterpart at the level of state-and-religion. On the train we had had had a long conversation with a very friendly, insightful woman who was an academic at the university in Fez (we talked about travelling, and she said she wanted to go to the Middle Eastern countries, and said she was not that interested in seeing Europe). Later, when we had been hiking through the mountains the Berber people we had met had been welcoming: at one point we played music with a group of men who had come out from a village, and later, in a seasonal pastureland-area called the Tishka plateau, we had played a game of frisbee with some Berber shepherds. On the Tishka plateau we had also been very kindly invited into a herdsman's house to have a goat's milk yogurt drink, at which point we had met the only Berber woman who we had encountered.
The effect of the datura was a subtle semi-trance, with occasional oneiric incursions - shifts to full trance that were momentary, like glimpses.
At one point I was suddenly seeing a path that stretched through scrubby, mediterranean bushes, open areas and occasional small trees. The path went slightly upward across a wide, flattish hilltop. Everything was sunlit, and it felt like Greece thousands of years ago.
Coming toward me along the path was a tall man who had a very specific lightness - a quality of being both a warrior and a dancer, and of being beyond the gravity of religion. Another aspect of him was that he seemed in some sense to be as much female as male, but in a way where the feeling was that he loved women so much that the becoming-woman had become central to him. The impression given was that if he had been encountered thousands of years ago in a wilderness this encounter would have generated stories of the anomalous (although there was no quality at all of him not being human), and the impression was also that the quality of his glance was formidable, in that it felt as if he would instantly perceive all forms of indulgence and affectation. It was just a moment - a glimpse lasting a second.
I walked across the top of the mountain, and sat facing the direction in which we would walk the next day.
This time the glimpse was of something coming up the steep slope of the mountain towards me, although the experience was a dream, rather than an imposition of something onto my perceptual field. The bright sunlight of the previous glimpse had gone: there was a now a slightly fainter, more monochrome quality to what I was seeing: bounding up the mountain toward me was a creature made of bone - a kind of bone-goat, or bone-lion. It had no sinister, or gothic aspect, instead it was abstract - its rib-cage was a spiral, and its head was not a skull, but a delineation of the shape of a head, but in narrow lines made of bone - and simultaneously it looked like something from a surrealist painting.
This creature did not feel at all human, but nor it did feel like some known form of four-legged animal. There was an intense, maybe even witty/challenging quality about the affect, but with an overall aspect of thinness, which had a kind of visual counterpart, in that the creature was made out of lines.
The next day we started our journey out of the mountains, and having crossed the main ridge, we pitched our tents five hundred feet below the top of the pass (a pass which only had a herders' path crossing it).
I dreamed that night that in some way I was at two parties at once, the two parties being in entirely different places that were partly superimposed across each other, as if they were in different dimensions. At one party there was a large room with a table and people sitting round it, but with a quality of there being no windows: and here the atmosphere was of a kind of laughing, urbane insouciance - a laughter which all along disguised a lack of openness. The other party was in a room that seemed to be a bit to one side and further up (although the two rooms were not part of the same building), and this room had light and a feeling of fresh air coming in. There was another table of the same size and with perhaps the same number of people - around ten - sitting around it, but here there was a bright quality to the laughter, and an overall feeling of courage. The people in this room included individuals who had been in CCRU - Anna Greenspan, Nick Land, Mark Fisher.
*
The next event was six months later, at the start of the following January.
I had been on the edge of a relationship with a woman called Kyra. A few days earlier there had been a chance to begin this relationship, and I had deliberately not taken this opportunity. Kyra was a somewhat 'wild,' dispassionately edgy woman with a very high degree of poise and purposefulness - she had a love for intense, charged activity of all kinds, and an iconoclastic flair for doing extremely unconventional things. She was an extraordinary and very intelligent woman, but my feeling was that the way I felt toward her was sexual desire more than it was love. There was a subtle feeling that this relationship was not the right direction - that it would be 'ill-advised.'
I knew I would be seeing Kyra the next day. I went to sleep, and toward the end of the night I had two dreams, one immediately following the other.
In the first of the dreams I was somewhere that I knew was an ancient burial ground in the central part of the Andes in what is now Peru, but somewhere on the eastern side of the main range. The burial ground felt as if it was two or three thousand years old. I had dug up a stone from the ground, and this stone - it was around five inches across - consisted of oil-sheen, rainbow colours on a black background, and I knew in the dream that this stone simultaneously consisted of music.
In the second dream I was at the top of a snow-covered ridge in the Alps, looking steeply down into a precipitous snowy valley, and it was evening twilight. In the foreground a dog - a border collie - was racing up an extremely steep slope toward me, and more than half way down the valley there was a spread-out group of people carrying lights, who together were skiing up the valley, in a way that seemed both very convivial, and very welcoming (the skiing obviously makes no sense - it was like a reversal something I had seen on T.V. - or had read about - where the event involved was a group of friends ending their day by skiing back to the valley in twilight, carrying lights of some kind).
After breakfast I found myself looking from the window of the second-floor kitchen at the area of gardens behind the house. It was a long view to the south, across roofs, ending three miles away with taller buildings in the centre of the city.
The dreams came back to me, and I was left with the feeling that some kind of powerful change was taking place. And I began to think that I had been wrong, and that I should act on the feelings that were taking me toward Kyra.
The relationship with Kyra lasted about four months. At the end of this time I had been slightly detached from the main part of my milieu, but in a very subtle sense - it was as if a kind of barely perceptible fissure or fracture had appeared.
There was something extravagant - and extravagantly sensual - about Kyra which meant that my friends were either jangled by her or drawn towards her in a way where they could be taken off balance, or both. The only friend who was not affected in either of these ways was Mark Fisher. There was a courageous, beyond-conventionality aspect to Kyra which had a distinctly 'goth' aspect (although at a deep level, which was not really connected to clothing-choices), and this was something for which Mark had an affinity.
The three of us went together to the goth club The Slimelight (none of us had been there before) and we all enjoyed this exploration into a relatively obscured cultural zone (it was after this experience that Mark wrote his first K-Punk blog post - about the phenomenon of goth sub-cultures). And there was one other exploration which is worth recounting.
Kyra had grown up in a rural area of India which was a border zone between a southern pocket of Islamic culture (Hyderabad) and an area which she described as having had a 'tribal,' spirit-contacting sub-culture of Hinduism (for whom the goddess Kali was a main figure), and she described how she had been 'tried out' as a medium, and had been told - whatever is to be thought about such an attribution - that she had this ability (Kyra said that her experience had been of letting go into stream of consciousness, and she did not either believe or not believe in relation to what had happened - for her it was just 'one more thing,' something that was possible, but was an unknown). When Kyra told Mark about this he suggested that the three of us should try using 'ouija board' letters around a small circular table in the flat in Stoke Newington (he and other members of CCRU had used a ouija board on one occasion, in Leamington; I had never used one, and it is also the case that I have not used one since). The result of the experience was one curious detail which threw my attention back to Barbara O'Brien's book Operators and Things. Overall, there was a bland impression of someone else's hand moving the glass we were using (though both Kyra and Mark said that this was their impression as well), and there was an equivalently bland, 'unconvincing' feeling about the process of receiving what as far as I remember were 'yes' and 'no' answers to questions (the only question I remember was Kyra asking about whether she should have a child). However, when we asked the name of the entity with whom we were supposedly in contact the letters which were spelled out were R.I.N.K. Rink is the most interesting of the 'Operator' figures in O'Brien's account of her six month episode of schizophrenia: it is Rink who tells her that most human beings do almost no thinking - and are deadened into an overall non-creative state - as a result of having been taken over by what he describes as a 'latticework of habit patterns' (when you scrutinise it the name Rink appearing in this context is just a faintly enigmatic event, and does not assist thought very much in relation to the anomalous - but it certainly functioned to put a spotlight onto Barbara O'Brien's book).
About two months later the relationship with Kyra was over: at depth there was a lack of affinity between us, and this worked itself through. However, in a subtle but emphatic sense it had been a kind of earthquake. Five months afterwards, as a result of having taken yopo (epena) at Harbury Lake (Section 34), I arrived at a certainty that it was necessary in a very radical sense to depart from the way in which my life was arranged at that time, and decided to act. And I feel the ease with which I subsequently stayed with this decision was connected to an awareness that had already been created by the relationship with Kyra: even though there had been a strong thread of indulgence that ran through Kyra's behaviour her dynamism had made me aware that I needed to be more dynamic myself. Mark had already left for Bromley, expressing the view that there was an element of inaction in effect within the post-Warwick milieu in north London. I needed to be working on the audio-essay that would eventually be named londonunderlondon, and I needed to create space in which new projects could emerge: the whole set-up of my life had to be changed.
*
It is five years later - August, 2007. On a temporary basis (while a friend is away for a few months in Germany) I am living in a room in a shared house in Herne Hill.
In different ways over the intervening years I had succeeded in giving myself the 'space' I had needed. Without me realising it (and certainly without it having been planned) the lines of my life have been shifting themselves toward a configuration of lines that will work - a configuration that will allow work to take place. There is a sense in which it has not completely happened yet, but the lines which are still to be effectuated are in place at the level of the virtual-real. In about four months I will go to Argentina, and spend ten weeks on the fringes of the Valdivian-forest area of northwest Patagonia, and this will be a pivot-point - the trip from which I returned with a very radically different orientation (people will tend to accept that when you are in love with someone it substantially changes your perspectives, and in fact it is the same with a place).
Another aspect of 'rounding myself up' (bringing important elements together, and stripping away indulgent behaviour) was a process of following the path of halucinogens and other psychotropic substances to its conclusion. Again, without me knowing this, I had already come to the end of a six-year phase where very occasionally I would take one of the rare halucinogens (once with DMT, once with yopo, three times with datura, once with ayahuasca, and once with salvia). In around four years I would stop a very intermittent, minimal use of other halucinogens, and in 6 years I would also stop an equally minimal use of amphetamines and grass. The path would literally come to an end - and not through some epic process of will-power, or some physical collapse, but through me having learned what I needed to learn in terms of heightened experiences (from this exceptionally risky and non-advisable path) and having seen through the modalities of experience involved to a 'core' element - to something which gave me a decisive distaste or visceral aversion, so that I simply no longer on any level wanted to ingest the substances.
My life at this time had been immensely assisted and strengthened through me having started a relationship with the woman who would be directly involved in me going to Patagonia, and with whom I am still in a relationship now, twelve years later. And this transformation of my life was bringing about a change in a lot of ways: one aspect of this change was that I started to review everything that had happened to me over the preceding fifteen years. I was seeing the high-points because of being on a high-point at that time - because of having the strength to bring back into deliberate awareness the peak experiences that were still in effect within me (there was deliberate attention in terms of the individual remembered experiences, but the overall process was not deliberate - instead it was a joy of reawakening the past that emerged unthinkingly from heightened current circumstances).
And something that I found extremely striking was a nexus of powerful memories from a time that lasted around 6 months, between 1993 and 1994. There were two very different aspects to this, although they were not completely separable. The first was the memory of the exceptionally intense state of joy that I had reached on LSD and speed, in October 1993, during the night after I had had the chance meeting with the woman in Leamington (Sections 2, 4, 5 and 6). The second was the phase during the next few months when I had been on the edge of a relationship with Caitlin (Section 15), and when this relationship - which twice was seemingly close - had never happened. I tended to arrive at these two memories along different paths, one of which took the form of thoughts about drug experiences, and the other of which involved memories of music to which I listened at the time, and the memory of an overall atmosphere of a very intense phase at the start of my time as a postgraduate at Warwick, a time when everything became centred on Leamington, initially because this was where Caitlin was living (it should be said that the tonality of the second memory was not regret but was of an exceptionally evocative atmosphere).
The sheer intensity of the joy and love involved in the experience in October were very extraordinary - it was like seeing an unsuspected pinnacle-mountain towering up into the sky. But the feeling that came with the memory of the months afterwards had a sublime beauty which swept me away: this feeling was much more complex - there was an intense melancholy that was a thread within it, and there was no equivalent high-point of joy, but somehow the love and joy in a diffuse sense went deeper, wider and higher, encompassing the memory of Caitlin, and the memory of the whole place and time.
It was under these circumstances that I decided to 'return' to the element of these experiences which had been involved at their beginning. Being in love had given me the energy to remember the earlier time, and not in the modality of pained yearning, but in a modality that was entirely positive (and in fact it was the first part of the memory that was involved in the decision, because of something that could be done in response to it). Given that I was not yet averse to taking drugs it was clear that there was a potential which needed to be explored - the combination of LSD and speed.
I had begun at around 9pm, by taking speed, and for around three hours my main aim had been to become an unbroken perception of the room around me - which is to say that I had set out to not think, but to be sustained, spheroambient perception. About 1am, when I had taken some LSD about an hour before, I was swept up into thought - into a process of very intense abstract perception:
What I saw was that each one of us is an encounter with the world around us, and simultaneously a depth-world of the virtual-real formations of the world that in the past have been encountered, and that, for understanding what we are, there are three crucial lines or elements, which go beyond contingencies of individual events that have happened and human social worlds which have influenced us.
The first of these was a love, and delight, and fascinated courage in relation to the world, expressing itself as an exploration into wider and deeper spheres of reality, and as a deepening of understanding at all levels, and most specifically at the levels of intent and energy.
The second was the planet, understood as a profoundly unknown, but not unknowable world.
The third was women, perceived as having a greater capacity in relation to the first element - which could also be stated as them having a lower degree of susceptibility to 'gravity' or self-important righteousness.
Off beyond these - but threaded through all of us - there was something grey and deleterious: a grim world of desire for kudos, subjectified moods (including fear, self-importance and anger), and of hypertrophied functionings of a blocked, trapped faculty of reason (with reason understood as a lesser faculty, alongside a faculty of lucidity which generally is only functioning in a very minimal way).
It was clear that it was necessary to detach the grey, deleterious line from the other three. It was also clear that in the fullest sense I was the first line, and that, because of the years-deep depth-world of the virtual real that was part of me, there was a very profound sense in which I was the other two lines as well. I was the planet (in that I was saturated with it, but also in the sense that I was a part of it), and at the level of the virtual-real I was female as well as male.
All of this was a process of outsights arrived at during the previous few years being brought brought together, and of them being brought into sudden sharp focus. I was not surprised - what I was now understanding was what I had already half-perceived.
What surprised me was what happened next. It was as if the sensuality of the spheroambient perception (which by definition was tactile, as well as involving the other senses) was suddenly fully effectuated, but in a process which instantly shifted from perception of the room to perception within an oneiric world. Where previously LSD and speed had given me very intense coloured-geometrical visuals with no wrap-around oneiric world, I was now having an experience which was centrally tactile, and which was oneiric.
It felt as if I had achieved a clear view of what was supposed to be everything, but that all along there had been another direction behind my back - and as if this direction had now called out to me.
The experience was oneiric, but I was wide awake. I was a woman in a room with two other women, and the three of us were dancing to music. It was a full tactile, corporeal hallucination of being a woman, and this experience was more than just sensual in a different form from that of my normal corporeal experience - it was intensely sexual. The subtlety of the oneiric world was that the two women with whom I was dancing were in the same state (a kind of full-body hyper-sensuality), but with a distance running between the three of us which amounted to a joy at being female, but without any overt movement toward a lesbian encounter (the lesbianism was very fundamentally present and in a sense was intrinsic to the experience, but it was way down deep, rather than being expressed directly). After an initial phase of dancing with the women, the two women decided to go down some stairs to another room that was ahead of us but on the next floor down - a room that in some way I knew had no windows, and was lit entirely by artificial light (the initial room was lit by artificial light, but with curtains through which some daylight was arriving: the room ahead and further down was larger, as if it was a large basement room). The two women wanted me to come with them down the stairs, and within the dream I knew that in some sense I would then remain permanently in the form of a woman. I went with the women down the stairs into the next room, feeling a very extraordinary level of bliss - a sort of multi-sense rapture of femininity.
The whole nature of this experience was remarkable because of the hallucinated difference of the corporeal tactile field, But it also very unmistakably had a subtle quality of indulgent concupiscence: of there being something wrong or libidinally 'twisted' within it. The becoming-woman involved was exceptionally wonderful - but this was part of a process of abandon that felt as if it was a letting go in the wrong direction.
I was there in that oneiric world for some time (it was probably around half an hour, in terms of time measured by a clock). And afterwards I was struck by the way in which it both seemed to be the memory of a sexual fantasy, and simultaneously kept giving me a visceral impression that on a deep level the event had been real: and specifically that it had been an encounter with forces that I was seeing in a way that was only very faint and distorted, and was only one of very many equivalent, faint, distorted ways of seeing them. And a curious fact was that the more I saw it as a sexual fantasy the more I was likely to be confronted by the feeling that it had been an objective encounter: it was as if the very idea of ultra-intense sexual fantasies (as an element within the virtual-real) had undergone an ontological change, so that at the very least the nature of such experiences was an open question, rather than them being perceived as unquestionably subjective.
It can be seen that certain features of the experience - the downward angle, and the windowless space lit by artificial light - had been present in other experiences in the series being described. The background, faintly recurring feeling of there having been an objective reality to the LSD/speed encounter was something that seemed to be self-subsistent (it appeared to be emergent from a single memory, as opposed to a comparison across instances), but it was also the case that if I looked at other experiences from the preceding ten years, I was left with an impression of a pattern that made me wonder about what had been taking place. And whatever was to be said about objectivity or subjectivity I was beginning to feel that to the side of transcendental south there was another direction of the dispassionate or desubjectified/impersonal, and that this direction was in some sense colder, and was one in relation to which it might be best to be careful.
*
It was the early afternoon of Saturday 21st June, 2003. It was a warm sunny day, with a few clouds. The term was coming to an end at my college, and the extra energy from the winding down of the academic year was combining with a phase of good summer weather to give a feeling of exhilaration and of possibilities on the immediate horizon. The end of the relationship with Kyra was only two months in the past, but I had to a great extent regained my equanimity.
I was not involved in the different plans for the day of the three friends at the house where I lived. I saw that there was an opportunity - a gap had opened up in front of me, and the June sunlight was a crucial part of this gap.
I decide I will go by train to Epping Forest, and take datura. This will be the third time I have taken it, and I want to try a larger quantity of the substance.
Epping Forest was a good option because of its relative proximity to Stoke Newington, though it was not a place for which I felt a strong affection. There were other woodland areas in the vicinity of London, like Petts Wood, to the southeast, which I found very inspiring, but for some reason, on the five or six occasions I had been to Epping Forest, I had felt it was beautiful but that in some sense the affect of the woodland was somehow a little less heartening - a tiny bit 'sombre' in some way. I felt that this difference was perhaps a bit enigmatic, although I knew it could be because Epping Forest had beeen developed and modified to a large extent, so that it had a lot of wide paths, and possibly had less diversity of plants. However, the forest was a beautiful place, and in the hot summer weather this attribute of the terrain was the only one on which I was focused.
I was not in a hurry because my plan was for the main part of the trip to take place late in the evening and at night - I was hoping it would be a night with stars - when there will be fewer people around. I felt it was an advantage that the night would not last long, and I liked the fact that I was going to do this on the longest day of the year. I put a bottle of water and some food in my bag, along with a small jar containing datura seeds ground to a powder, and then I walked the mile and a half to the station.
I took a train to Chingford, planning to go to the area of forest I knew. The train was quite old, with wooden fittings, and there was a pleasant breeze coming through the windows. There were long sunlit views from the embankments and viaducts that carried the tracks across the Lea valley.
At one of the next stops a friend got onto the train. I had got to know him in the last two years during which I had lived in Leamington, but was out of touch with him. I am pleased to see him, and he seems to feel the same. I tell him I am going for a walk in the forest. It turns out he is living with friends in a house which is somewhere on the opposite side of the forest. He has a car parked at Chingford station and while we are on the train he says he could give me a lift to High Beach, in the centre of the forest (High Beach - or High Beech - is a village, and also the name for the areas of forest around it). I don't know High Beach, but because I have never been very inspired by the zone of the forest north of Chingford, I decide to accept the lift.
My friend dropped me off at a crossroads in the forest which was outside of the village (it was not in sight). It was a friendly goodbye - it had been an enjoyable, unexpected meeting. I waved as the car drove off, and then, looking around me, I decide on the area of forest I wanted to go into, and started walking. I had a feeling of having been swept forward: the speed of the journey could not have been faster if I had planned to meet up with my friend in order to travel the additional distance. It is a feeling of serendipity - which on this occasion is specifically the feeling of having been propelled unexpectedly into the centre of the forest.
The direction I had chosen was one where the forest terrain looked interesting, and it meant that I was facing the sun as I walked (although it was mostly hidden by the canopy of leaves). It was also close to the direction which I would need to take for the return journey.
A warm, sun-suffused affect had been the tonality of the day, and this had been heightened by the journey. It had felt lightheartedly appropriate to have a powerful, anomalous experience on the longest day of the year, while in a forest.
But now the tonality of the day began to change to one which was tinged a little with an awareness of the intensity of what I was about to do. I had walked through an area of open woodland, with occasional thickets of undergrowth, and then the ground had risen a little before levelling off, and in this slightly higher terrain the trees were closer together, and there were quite large expanses of bushes, growing close together. I had arrived without using a path, and I had found a place where there was a fairly large space - perhaps two hundred feet across - of trees and grass, where this space was approximately encircled by thickets.
In the more open area of woodland I had seen that the sky was now hazy, with some quite large clouds. But rain had not been forecast for the night, and the clouds had not looked like stormclouds.
I found a place to sit down. Everything felt good about the circumstances, and so I went ahead. I had measured out the powdered datura seeds at the house - it was three teaspoons of powdered seeds. On the mountain in Morocco I had taken two thirds of a teaspoon of the same seeds, prepared in the same way, and had had an experience which had been relatively mild. I swallowed the powdered seeds, using water to wash them down.
For quite a long time I had a feeling of mild nausea. It began to get dark. And as the datura began to have an effect the nausea became a more pervasive form of discomfort: the nausea was now both a feeling of being perturbed and a feeling that everything was becoming more like fluid, so that I felt as if I was not on solid ground. I knew this was not a good start, and I went for short walks, but I rapidly discovered that even staying within the circle of thickets I would very rapidly become disorientated, because every new view seemed so singular that it was hard to get my bearings. Eventually, starting from the place where I had taken the datura, I chose the direction that I believed to be south, and walked out of the encircling thickets. On the far side there was a slight downward slope.
The ground felt spongy, and I set off running down the slope, with long strides, getting the exhilarating impression of being lighter than normal. Ahead there was an area of trees and thick undergrowth. I went right into this area, working my way through the bushes. I sat down with my back to a tree. I was aware that I was being drawn into a trance state, and I was also aware that since running down the hill the nausea had gone. I had succeeded in crossing the threshold into the full form of the experience in a state where I was not encumbered by a physical discomfort. And the joy that had arrived with running down the slope had stayed with me, clearing away the feeling of being perturbed.
I had a few dream experiences that I could not hold onto as memories. Then one of these experiences came to an end, and in returning from it I did not notice that there had been a change in my awareness of my circumstances.
I believed that I was with a group of friends who were over to my right, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, sitting around a fire, and that we had all taken LSD, I also believed that it was a night when, for some reason, there were lots of parties in the forest. The atmosphere was very festive, and there was a feeling that all of the parties were 'rave' parties, and that everyone was taking drugs. It was the second belief (about it being a night when there were many parties taking place in Epping Forest) that at this point was foremost in my mind, but although the two beliefs formed a crucial - underlying - part of the experience, they were not brought to the point of being closely considered for a wider consistency, and this was because of the experiences that went with them (the localised, immediate consistency was very effective in terms of everything being explained, as with the effects of the datura being explained as the effects of LSD).
I got up and found that there were several people in front of me, setting up for a party. I walked to my left into a narrow clearing, from which the people seemed to be arriving - there was still a little light in the sky. I found that there was a van parked along the side of the glade, with people getting out of it and walking past me to the place that had been chosen for the party. It felt as if they were members of some kind of alternative-culture performance group. A woman was walking from the van: she had an unusually wide, round face, which seemed quite pale. She smiled at me in a very friendly way and continued walking. The width of her face was on the edge of being abnormal, but I didn't give this any thought: her welcoming smile set the tone for what followed, and within the experience it was a main part of an initial process where it became clear that everyone was happy for me to be at the party.
I walked back to the place where I had been sitting down. Facing in the same direction, but standing up, there was a tree behind me, as well as thick undergrowth, which seemed to come round to my right - the direction where I believed my friends were sitting around a fire. In front of me there was an open space, perhaps twenty feet by thirty feet, and this space was now full of people setting up for the party, in the dark. At this point, there was a lightning flash, and I became aware that there was rain coming down, although it did not seem to very heavy. I sat down again, and after a short phase of concern about the rain, the experience became that of a high-intensity party taking place around me, with people sitting down on either side, talking to me, and with a dance area in front, in the small open space, with ten or fifteen people dancing to music.
At one point, fairly early in the experience, I believed I had a glass-topped table in front of me, with objects on it - a lighter, a joint, cigarettes, etc. - but when I looked at it closely I discovered there was nothing but the forest floor (this happened at least twice).
All of the indications are that I wasn't simply asleep, but that instead I was taking in main features of the terrain around me, and moving around in it, while simultaneously experiencing the superimposed dream. A principle of the experience seemed to be that if I looked at anything in a sustained, scrutinising way it would disappear. However, I was not aware of this at the time - and in fact for a long time the fabric of the experience seemed to consist almost entirely of different configurations and circumstances which entailed that I would not look at anything in this way. The figures with whom, within the experience, I was interacting tended to be alongside me; the woman I saw at the beginning did not stop in front of me (none of the people who got out of the van stopped in front of me); the dance-floor area was in darkness, with nothing but a view of the faint outlines of dancing people; and I was continually caught up in different, sometimes slightly perturbing, preoccupied states, which meant that a sustained, scrutinising look was less likely to happen.
I stood up, and although I liked the party, I felt I should go and look for my friends. I had trouble getting through the undergrowth to my right, and decided to go forward to where people were dancing. And then it was as if I went through a change that was partly about deciding to explore the party: I kept feeling concerned about finding my friends, but, as I moved around, part of the experience was of a simple exploration (I became aware that there was much more of the party over to the left), and part of it seemed to consist of moments where I had a knowledge that there was thick undergrowth where I needed to go, so that I had to take another route. For instance, at the beginning of this phase the visual impression was that I would not be able to find a way through to the right, or in front (I don't think I attempted it, to find out) but that I needed to turn left, into the party.
My feeling is that although I had an erroneous set of dream-beliefs, which partly were functioning to normalise the situation (the un-inspected background ideas that it was a night when parties were taking place, and that I was with a group of friends) there was a part of me which in some way knew what was what. At this point what this means is that rather than going off to look for my friends, I responded on the basis that there was an experience to be explored.
The party was in a system of small glades; there was the place where people were dancing, and then there were two or three areas which seemed to extend around the back of it, curving around it, but in a way where the areas were only very minimally connected to each other by gaps in the undergrowth. At this point the tonality of the experience was partly one of trying to solve the labyrinth of the party, with the idea that following the line of the glades would eventually lead me to a place where it was possible to depart in the direction of my friends. But this motivation came and went: some of the time I was behaving as a person does when they are exploring a very large party.
It was at this point that the alterity of the experience reached its highest level, although always in a way where this alterity made a very minimal impact on me at the time. The small openings in the forest curved round to the right from the glade where I had seen the woman with the wide face, so that the second of these additional spaces was on the opposite side of the place where people were dancing. I kept arriving in this space and finding it full of people who I saw as having all adopted a very spectacular mode of fancy-dress. They all had blue faces - it was a chalky blue that was a little deeper than the colour of blue chalk, and was very slightly luminous, in the sense that the colour could be seen in the dark (I didn't give any attention at the time to it being luminous) and I saw these figures as being dressed up as 'aliens' (this was the term that came to my mind at the time) whose clothing seemed to have been partly modelled on Chinese samurai costumes. They were wearing outlandish warrior clothing, which I saw as a form of costume which was supposed to be the clothing of aliens from outer space, and which I saw as looking slightly more reminiscent of Chinese warrior-costumes than anything else. I viewed this as immensely impressive as a form of fancy-dress. It made me smile at how spectacular it was, and at the amount of effort which I felt must have gone into it. As if I was caught going backwards and forwards along a path in a maze, I seemed to arrive around three times at this glade with the blue-faced aliens, and after the first occasion the return to this space gave me the pleasant feeling of 'ah yes, here they are again.'
The other thing that happened during this phase was that I made an attempt to find a way through the undergrowth to the right of where I had originally been sitting, and having failed to get through it I walked back. As I did this there were people following me - as if they had come with me to see what I was doing - and one of these people, a woman, said to me in a light-hearted tone -
"I'm a crocodile"
I took this to be a way of referring to the idea of 'spirit animals.' It seemed to be a statement which was made playfully, but which was not ironic.
Remembering my experience from 1996, I immediately responded -
"I'm a sea-snake." (see section 40)
This seemed to be a satisfactory response, but apart from this I don't remember anything in terms of a continuation of the exchange.
The start of the next phase (which I think overlapped with the previous one) took the form of me returning from walking around the 'loop' of the clearings in the forest and going to the side of the place where people were dancing. I started talking to a woman who I met there, and for a while there was an alternation between me dancing with her, while we talked, and departures where I walked around the party. I don't remember anything about the conversations, but the impression I have is that they took the form of playful, friendly exchanges with nothing anomalous about them. I was attracted to the woman, but there was a slightly 'thin' or not-very-warm quality to her affect.
The 'tone' or atmosphere of the music is all I can remember: this was somewhere along a continuum from techno to psychedelic trance. But, in fact, I don't remember a single moment where I focused on the music.
It can be seen that as well being very unfocused - or continuously re-focused - the overall experience of the 'party' was a somewhat depthless experience. Everything was happening through hallucination, assisted by a background confabulation, but, with the exception of one or two details the 'everything' turns out, on close inspection, to be not very much. There was no intensity of awareness in relation to colour, pattern, sound or tactile sensation, and no focus at all on the trees, the leaves, the sky. (However, it is probably worth pointing out that a certain degree of focus was involved in terms of movement, in that I did not walk into branches or get scratched in undergrowth - indicating an 'avoidance-awareness' of the trees and bushes).
Two or three times I had seen the lights of a car travelling along a road that seemed to be a quarter of a mile away. The direction was the opposite side of the main glade, viewed from my initial vantage.
I saw another car, and heard the engine. At that point I was on my own - in the sense that I was not with the woman with whom I had been talking (I believed within the experience that she was somewhere on the other side of the dance area) - and I was standing looking in the direction of the road.
I started walking toward the road. This was another moment where it feels, looking back on the experience, as if there was a part of me that was navigating with some degree of lucidity. I think that maybe at some point in the walk my idea was that the road could be used to get back to my friends, but this seems more like a subsequent confabulation, than the main motivation. I have the impression that I wanted to get away from the circumstances I had been experiencing, and that the road was chosen as an option both because it would introduce a difference, and because I could re-orientate myself.
Given what had been 'happening,' what took place next is not surprising. On the walk toward the road there were soon people around me who it seemed had also decided to leave. In retrospect there is a moths-around-a-flame affect about the experience (whether this is understood in terms of a phenomenology of specific kinds of hallucination, or whether it is understood in terms of inorganic beings), in particular about its first phase, when the 'party' was set up all around me. But now there was a difference, a simultaneous thinning out and heightening of the experience.
Very soon I was being accompanied by a woman, but not the same woman I had been with before. She was a warmer and more inspiring presence, and I felt a greater liking for her, and attraction toward her. There was a slightly amorous quality to our conversations, and I felt an affection for her as a heartening, courageous companion in the course of what turned out to be a difficult, lengthy walk (altered time consciousness would have played a part in this, but the distance seems not to have been small, and my memory is of a lot of thickets that were hard to get through). However, there was still a quality of thin-ness about her intensity. There was a moment fairly early in the walk where I had the thought that she was definitely a different woman in relation to the one with whom I had been dancing, but that there was something structurally identical about the nature of the encounter, as if this second encounter was in some way the same, while nonetheless being at a slightly higher level of intensity.
Spread out around us there were other people, all of them walking in the same direction, but none of them nearer than perhaps twenty feet: it was as if nine or ten people had decided to walk out of the forest, in a straggling line.
When I reached the road I was the only person there, and my impression was that for some reason everyone had been held up in the forest, and that I should have a look around. To my right, two hundred yards away, there was an area of street lights. I walked towards them, and before long I saw that there was a small roundabout, surrounded by trees, where another road was crossing the one I had walked towards. As I arrived on the edge of the area of streetlights I sat down on the border of the grass verge that was by the forest, about ten feet from the road, in a place where there was a bay of vegetation behind me, a curve of leafy undergrowth - and of leaves of trees - which was around fifteen feet across. I sat down there because there were people from the party who were sitting there, but I sat down facing the road
I believed I was at a kind of roadside after-party, consisting of people who had just walked to the road, and were pausing before going home. I swivelled around - without changing the position in which I was sitting - and I saw that there were nine or ten people there. A man sitting to my left offered me a can of beer, but I thanked him and said I did not want it.
Looking at the people in front of me I was aware that they all seemed animated but poised at the same time. They all seemed to be thin, though in a way that suggested a high level of health, rather than lack of food, and their overall tone was of a sophisticated and anti-conventional playfulness and intelligence. I had the thought again that they were members of some radical-culture performance group.
"Who are you?" I asked, with both laughter and appreciation in my voice. And then I immediately added a second question, perhaps thinking that this one would be easier to answer.
"Where do you come from?"
The semi-circle of people looked back at me. There was silence. It was as if I had asked questions which should not be asked. Or - as if silence for that moment was the necessary response.
I turned away for a moment, and looked toward the empty forest road. When I looked back I saw that, to the right of the space, a woman and a man were performing a fantastically difficult feat of balance. The man was standing up with an arm raised, and the woman, arms and legs outstretched, was balancing on the man's hand, with her belly as the point of contact. The woman's body was in an arc whose central point was her stomach, and I experienced what she was doing as exceptional gracefulness, as well as it being a display of balance. The position also indicated a high level of strength and skill on the part of the man, but its power was in the outstretched shape of the woman: I felt that as a physical 'form' it was exceptionally beautiful.
And then I was just seeing an outline of the two people in the leaves, which were lit up a little by the streetlights. Then, a moment, after this, I was seeing only the leaves.
At this point I remembered that I had taken datura (a substance which substantially effects the sense of sight). And I realised that the experience which had just been taking place was not what I had thought.
Looking toward the road, I started to take stock, and to think about the return journey.
After a minute or two I heard the sound of a vehicle approaching. It was coming from the right, from the direction of the roundabout. It was a police car, and because of the curve of the road its lights swept across me. The car stopped.
I stood up, trying to look as friendly and relaxed as possible.
The policeman in the passenger seat wound down his window, and asked if I was OK.
I said that I was walking to Chingford, and asked the policeman if he could confirm I was walking in the right direction. In a cheerful way the man pointed up the road - the direction in which the car was travelling.
At this point it had seemed alright not to go close to the car, so if my pupils were very dilated (I feel sure they were) this would not have been visible. The policeman seemed to be satisfied by the exchange - he said goodbye, and the car drove off.
I didn't sit down again, but instead I started walking along the road: this was the beginning of a return journey which was simultaneously a process of returning to a more focused state while still experiencing the effects of the datura.
I rapidly discovered, as I walked, that the experience was not over. After walking a few hundred yards I found that I was talking to the woman with whom I had walked through the forest. She was walking alongside me: I could hear her, and I could see her with my peripheral vision. Our discussion was about the fact that I was leaving.
The woman did not want me to go, and it seemed that she wanted to come with me, but for some reason could not. This conversation took place in several instantiations. Each time I turned round to look at her I discovered she was not there, and had a recurrence of the realisation from earlier, and then, before long, the experience would re-assert itself, The sequence within the loop was one which culminated, on each occasion, in the re-discovery that things were not the way they seemed, and it is worth seeing that the part of me which was navigating was resolute about keeping walking, no matter what, as if this other part of me knew that if I paused I would again be pulled further away from a focused state in which I could benefit from the situation. I felt a real affection for the woman, but there was a thin quality about her affect, and I feel that this was part of what made the difference.
At the end of the last instantiation of the conversation, the woman said she could not go any further. I kept walking, expressing the fact that I had to leave. After about twenty feet I could hear the woman talking to me, from behind me and to the right, in the place where she had been - halfway into the centre of the road - when she had stopped walking.
I turned round, not out of hesitation, but to invite her to come with me, and to say goodbye if she would not. The woman had been speaking a second before. And now, when I turned round, I saw that there was no-one there. In front of me there was nothing but the empty road and the forest. Again, there was the realisation. But this time the tonality was different, in that it was not focused on the thought that now I knew what was going on, whereas before I had not. This time, looking at the empty road, there was a feeling of the eerie - a feeling of something happening, and of not knowing what was going on.
*
As I continued walking it became clear that the 'additional' experiences were centred on areas where there was less light, and maintained themselves through voice, peripheral vision and a gaze that was not a concentrated stare. The other thing that became clear was that these experiences were states of dreaming-while-awake, in that they began like falling asleep, so that there was no noticeable transition, and in that what took place was a superimposition into an ongoing waking perception. During this time there were two or three moments where for a moment I was talking, as I walked, with people who I believed had come from the parties in the forest, and who I believed were sitting by the side of the road (I think they were always sitting in groups). But when I realised what was happening - and when, again, there were just shadowy leaves where the people had been - there was a sense both of a direct continuity of visual perception (I had not strayed off the line, by the kerb, on which I was walking, and I did not feel that I had been in danger of being run over) and simultaneously there was the impression of having woken from a dream-terrain which was superimposed on visual and auditory perception. And, as often is the case with dreaming, I had the feeling that - despite the fact that people often talk in their sleep - I might not have been speaking aloud, but that all the voices involved might have been in the virtual-real.
Very little was now taking place before I recognised what was happening: I would be walking towards a tree or bush by the side of the road, and using this as a reference point, it was clear that I had walked only a very short distance between the beginning and the end of the experience, so that only a few seconds could have passed.
None of the experiences of the party-goers or anomalous beings (by this time I think there was a degree of indeterminacy in relation to how they were being seen within the experiences, so that there was a sense of alterity) were walking with me by this time, either in the form of a group or an individual. Or not on the road, at least. At one point - I think this was the last occurence within this phase - I looked down into a small field that was below the level of the road and surrounded by tall trees, and I saw thirty or forty people streaming slowly across the middle of the field, going in the direction in which I was travelling (the nearest part of this area of the field would have been a hundred and fifty feet away). They were roughly in a line, but they were in clusters of people that were walking alongside each other, two or three individuals wide. And then I looked more closely and there was only the field.
When a vehicle came in sight, travelling toward Chingford, I tried to hitch a lift, knowing as I did so that these were the very worst circumstances for asking a driver to stop (darkness, a vehicle travelling at full speed). This is another point where I feel my decision-making was taking place from some other, more poised part of myself: I didn't feel concerned about meeting someone while still experiencing the effects of datura.
It was a truck, and to my surprise it stopped. The driver, a man in his fifties or sixties, told me he wasn't going far, and I said I just needed a lift to Chingford.
I didn't find it in any way hard to hold a friendly conversation, and I was dropped off a few minutes later at Chingford bus station.
There was a night bus parked at the bus station, with a driver in it, who was evidently waiting for the time to set off. It seemed at this point that the return journey was going to be exceptionally straightforward.
I was standing about thirty feet from the front of the bus, in view of the driver, and I took out some coins from my pocket to see if I had enough money for the fare (I didn't have any notes with me). But when I looked at the coins I discovered that any individual coin could look like almost any denomination. I started with one coin which I could not bring into focus, in that at one point it looked like a pound coin, and then it looked very clearly like a two pence, and then a ten pence. I then moved to another coin which I had seen with my peripheral vision as a pound coin, and then to my dismay I saw this come into focus as a different coin. It was clear that the problem was intrinsic, and my tactile sense was not helping me in terms of weight. The second coin became, in turn, a twenty pence piece, and a penny, and at this point I changed my mind about catching the bus. Rather than attempting to work out the denominations by feeling their edges (which I think would not have worked) I decided I had been standing in front of the bus driver peering at my coins for too long, and took the decision to continue on foot.
This failure to catch the bus did not perturb me. I was a bit worried by the length of the walk which was ahead of me, but I was also slightly amused by the Alice in Wonderland experience with the coins.
I walked all the way from Chingford to Stoke Newington, which is around ten miles. Everything that happened during this part of the journey was different - though in disparate ways - from the earlier experiences.
On the edge of Chingford there was a place where young dark-leaved trees (perhaps cypresses) were growing close together on the far side of a wide verge, in the form of tall bushes rather than trees, in that the leaves came down to the ground, hiding the trunks. At one point there was a narrow gap at right angles to the road. It was still dark (there was a small amount of light in the sky to the east), so the space between the trees was in deep shadow. I decided to walk into this space, because I needed to urinate.
I went amongst the trees and walked seven or eight feet. And then I saw that there were two figures standing very close to me on the left. They were about five feet apart. One of them, who was standing closer to the edge of the trees, was shadowy, indistinct, but the other one, who was only three feet away from me, was one of the blue-faced figures from earlier in the experience. This figure was not indistinct, in that the blue was chalky-luminous; and it radiated a striking alterity (the eyes gave me the impression that they were not human eyes). There was no idea at all, within this experience, of the figure being in fancy dress. As I turned I was facing it, and then I immediately went back the way I had come, seeing as I did so that, standing in symmetrical positions on the opposite side, there were two more figures, both of them shadowy, as opposed to having a blue face.
This moment had been a jolt - the point where I had turned and seen the two figures, and had found myself three feet away from the one with the blue face, had been a real shock, and this shock had been prolonged, if not compounded, by discovering that the figures were all around me. The reason why it was not compounded was that I did not believe they were there (though, even on reflection, it was not the case that I entirely did not believe in the existence of what I had seen), so it was the initial moment that had by far the most power to unnerve me. And to this it should be added that the sense of menace in the situation came simply from the proximity and immobility of the beings (an immobility suggestive of poise) as opposed to it coming from any threatening action or any affect of hostility (the affect was neutral, inscrutable).
(It can be seen that a pattern had been broken, or in some sense reversed: in the earlier phases of the experience I had kept finding himself in the middle of a strangeness that I was seeing as to a great extent not strange at all, while entirely believing in it, and the jolt had come at the point of the disappearance. Here the jolt had been at the point of appearance, and it had been both the case that the strangeness was perceived as strange, and that, after the initial second, I had not, to any significant extent, believed it as relating to beings with existence beyond my mind).
I returned to walking. The initial impact of the experience was similar to that of an unexpected, frightening moment in a horror film. But the poised, non-menacing feeling that had come from the four figures meant that, in recollection, the experience primarily involved an impression of an affect such as curiosity, as opposed to aggression. So instead of after-shocks in the form of fear, there was an after-impact in the form of a feeling that it had been a striking, though unnerving experience.
After a while I am on a stretch of road which has fields on either side of it. There is light in the sky, but it is cloudy, so it is still twilight.
Ahead of me, there is a deciduous tree growing alongside the road. About a hundred yards further on there is another, similar tree.
In looking at these trees I see, separately, individuals who are members of my milieu - a man and a woman who are both nominally my friends, but from whom I have come to feel distant. It is a sequential experience, and its specificity is that I am seeing the tree, but am seeing an individual who is in the form of the tree.
I see, very clearly, something that is wrong with the individuals: their strengths - poise, and confidence, and wide domains of knowledge belonging to empirical awareness - have been drawn into effect by control-mind tendencies which on one level take the form of tacit, subtle refusals to engage (complex deflections, silences), and on another level take the form of indulgent behaviours which are having distressing, disfunctional impacts on those around them. Within this milieu they have become grey, superficially sunny, and draining presences.
Everything is about energy, and it is clear that even if the indulgent behaviour is to some extent contingent and temporary (an effect of turbulence caused by a slow closing of a post-Warwick gap in ordinary reality) the main problem remains in the form of them blocking the forward-motion of waking the faculties, for themselves and for others. I don't in the least blame them: but in looking at the trees the situation is clear - I feel the two individuals at the level of intent. What I am seeing is intrinsic, in terms of foreseeable and effectuatable circumstances, and this modality - which is in effect within them - is inimical for me (and also for others around them who are trying to go Forward, such as Mark Fisher). In this moment I know that it is necessary, in a full sense, to move on.
About an hour later I am walking alongside a dual carriageway (I am more than half of the way home). It has just started to rain - it is a shower, rather than a thunderstorm, but the rain feels cold. I discover that I have just been having a dream experience of talking to a woman about the walk; the rain; how tired I am. There is a feeling of the warmth of being in love - a sublime depth of affect. In the dream I am in a relationship with the woman, but when I come out of the dream, I do not know her. But what gives the dream a singular quality is that I am talking to the woman about the walk from within a dream, and within this dream the woman is talking to me while asleep in bed. I know this because of the final exchange as I come round from dreaming-while-awake to full wakefulness. The woman had been laughingly telling me that a bit of rain wouldn't do me any harm and that I had more than enough energy to get home, and I had laughed and responded - "That's easy for you to say, you're at home and in bed!"
It had been an experience which to quite a large extent had been about relationships with people, and in the final moment of it I had reached an awareness of an affect that was at a fundamentally higher level than the thin-affect encounters earlier, as if at the end I had just enough strength to get a view of an aspect of the horizon, having finally walked out of a very extraordinary cave.
*
Janika, the friend who met me at High Barnet station, was going to take me to meet a friend of hers (who I had already met a couple of times) who had some DMT, and was prepared to let me try some of it, that evening, in his house.
It was November
of 2005. By this time I was moving forward again. I had opened up space in my
life, and a lot of heartening developments had appeared in this space. I had
new friends, along with old friends; londonunderlondon
had just been made, and had been broadcast; and I had arrived at the ideas
which would lead to The Corridor, and which would be the
starting-point that would lead Mark Fisher and myself to On Vanishing Land.
This is from Hidden Valleys:
"I took [the DMT] in two stages. First I inhaled a half-dose, to acclimatise myself - to see where I might be going. Then a short while later I took the full amount.
When I inhaled the half-quantity I was immediately seeing a room which had an opening onto a street in a small town (it was as if part of the back wall was missing, and this gave the view down the length of the street). The walls and floor of the room were covered in small, repeating coloured patterns that looked faintly South American or Central American. There was a brightness about everything, but a kind of pale brightness: everything looked very much as if it was a cartoon.
In front of me was a cartoon-man sitting at a table with an open book on it, whose pages consisted of more patterns, like the ones on the walls, although I think they were more intricate. He was a small, stocky, cartoon figure, wearing a sombrero that came down over the top of his face. Instead of eyes there was a black straight line of his hat across his face (a stylised or "cartoon" line). The man was an extraordinary presence, radiating both a sense of humour, and a kind of fierce, poised intensity. It was through looking at the middle section of the line of his sombrero (and of the space underneath it where his eyes would have been, if they had been visible) that everything happened in the experience, beyond the initial situation.
In looking toward the eyes of this figure what was communicated to me with immense power (and my memory is that this took place without words) was the question - "Are you ready for this?" The question was very heavily emphasised, but in an impersonal, neutral way, as if it was primarily pointing out the intensity of what was about to happen when I took the full amount of DMT. There was no quality either of mockery or concern in relation to my degree of readiness. The only other aspect was a kind of fierce lightness, or brightness: an amusement that felt abstract, rather than directed at me - as if it was about the difference between how people see the world, and how it really is, and about the general phenomenon of unreadiness for the transition from deluded to clear perception.
The other thing that happened as I looked into the black line of the sombrero (and this took place two or three times) was that I would be suddenly seeing something like a large bonfire at night. As if I was in a clearing of a forest on a very dark night, and I was seeing a blazing bonfire a hundred feet away. This gives the feeling of what I saw, but primarily what I was seeing was a bonfire-like blaze of white flames surrounded by blackness (the light was white, rather than orange).
There was a consistency about it all: after this other view (which was momentary) I would be back seeing the room with the man at the table.
The end of the experience was an extraordinary visual "joke," or playful tour de force of perception. A group of cartoon-aliens appeared from either side of my visual field (I think two from each side). They had coloured skin and diversely "mis-shapen" bodies, and they proceeded immediately to use ladders to dismantle the room I had been seeing, as if it could be pulled down in small two-dimensional pieces. As they did this the living room in which I was sitting became visible. It was a kind of joke-performance lasting only a few seconds: having removed everything the cartoon-aliens disappeared to left and right, the way they had come, carrying their ladders, leaving me with an unobstructed view of the living room.
This is from Hidden Valleys:
"I took [the DMT] in two stages. First I inhaled a half-dose, to acclimatise myself - to see where I might be going. Then a short while later I took the full amount.
When I inhaled the half-quantity I was immediately seeing a room which had an opening onto a street in a small town (it was as if part of the back wall was missing, and this gave the view down the length of the street). The walls and floor of the room were covered in small, repeating coloured patterns that looked faintly South American or Central American. There was a brightness about everything, but a kind of pale brightness: everything looked very much as if it was a cartoon.
In front of me was a cartoon-man sitting at a table with an open book on it, whose pages consisted of more patterns, like the ones on the walls, although I think they were more intricate. He was a small, stocky, cartoon figure, wearing a sombrero that came down over the top of his face. Instead of eyes there was a black straight line of his hat across his face (a stylised or "cartoon" line). The man was an extraordinary presence, radiating both a sense of humour, and a kind of fierce, poised intensity. It was through looking at the middle section of the line of his sombrero (and of the space underneath it where his eyes would have been, if they had been visible) that everything happened in the experience, beyond the initial situation.
In looking toward the eyes of this figure what was communicated to me with immense power (and my memory is that this took place without words) was the question - "Are you ready for this?" The question was very heavily emphasised, but in an impersonal, neutral way, as if it was primarily pointing out the intensity of what was about to happen when I took the full amount of DMT. There was no quality either of mockery or concern in relation to my degree of readiness. The only other aspect was a kind of fierce lightness, or brightness: an amusement that felt abstract, rather than directed at me - as if it was about the difference between how people see the world, and how it really is, and about the general phenomenon of unreadiness for the transition from deluded to clear perception.
The other thing that happened as I looked into the black line of the sombrero (and this took place two or three times) was that I would be suddenly seeing something like a large bonfire at night. As if I was in a clearing of a forest on a very dark night, and I was seeing a blazing bonfire a hundred feet away. This gives the feeling of what I saw, but primarily what I was seeing was a bonfire-like blaze of white flames surrounded by blackness (the light was white, rather than orange).
There was a consistency about it all: after this other view (which was momentary) I would be back seeing the room with the man at the table.
The end of the experience was an extraordinary visual "joke," or playful tour de force of perception. A group of cartoon-aliens appeared from either side of my visual field (I think two from each side). They had coloured skin and diversely "mis-shapen" bodies, and they proceeded immediately to use ladders to dismantle the room I had been seeing, as if it could be pulled down in small two-dimensional pieces. As they did this the living room in which I was sitting became visible. It was a kind of joke-performance lasting only a few seconds: having removed everything the cartoon-aliens disappeared to left and right, the way they had come, carrying their ladders, leaving me with an unobstructed view of the living room.
I inhaled the full quantity about half an hour later. This time the smoke made me cough, and I did not drink enough water before being swept away into the experience (I think it is possible that a lack of full physical composure affected my ability to hold onto memories).
The first event was that I suddenly had three beings right in front of me who had come to take me somewhere (this was what I knew within the experience about their intention). They were exceptionally "insistent" presences that communicated an urgency (or maybe a necessary speed) by being in front of me and pulsing toward me and back again extremely fast, in a kind of ultra-fast pounding of back-and-forward that was also the statement "come with us."
They were also "cartoon beings" but at a level which had become abstract. The beings were in the form of coloured rectangular shapes that were like shields - they were oriented vertically, and had different colours: one was green and I think another was yellow. There seemed to be an articulation of the shield halfway up, as if the shield was made of two overlapping plates. There was a bright, intelligent "characterfulness" about these beings: each had a personality, but they did not feel at all as if they were human. Two of the beings were female.
I only have two clear memories after this, one located at the end of the experience, and one that is indeterminate in the "span" of what happened. In relation to unclear recollections what I remember is that a vast series of very extraordinary and very positive things happened, and that despite my attempts to hold onto them, they all, with one exception, fell away - were lost to memory.
It had all just been happening: a world of astonishing experiences. And now I was walking - or maybe floating - in a windowless version of the Black Swan Hotel. I was going toward the front of the hotel, the part of the building that faces south. There was a serene atmosphere, an atmosphere of secure, quiet warmth (it felt as if it was in some sense a subterranean place, but at the same time as if there was not really any gravity there - unless you wanted to act as if there was - so the feeling of it being subterranean was counteracted by the feeling of it being in gravity-free space). The quality of the illumination was that of electric light (the way the hotel would be at night). And there was no impression at all that what I was seeing was like a cartoon.
As I was reaching the end of the corridor the experience ended, and I was back in the living room. Only it had not quite ended - I had managed to hold onto a memory from earlier, and under these circumstances to remember can be to re-experience, to re-live the event. I remembered that I had been shown (by the beings within the experience that had just taken place) the depth-level nature of the world in relation to energy, feeling, and intent. And this had been done by means of a kind of "fan-spectrum" coloured diagram, whose lines and colours started out as vertical on the left, and then dropped down - through ninety degrees - to horizontal, on the right. On the left, at the vertical, was love, which I think was a white-violet colour. And on the right, at the horizontal, was control or domination - and this was black. In between there was a graduated world of states of energy, feeling and intent that was on a spectrum between the vertical and the horizontal.
The experience I remembered did not have any other details (I was shown the diagram by it being in front of me - there is no memory of a visible presence of the beings who were showing it to me). But the memory is not at all cartoon-like: which is not just to say that there was a warmth and depth to the colours - the experience at this point was of being within a space, rather than seeing things on a "screen" in front of me. And the place where it happened was a room-like space within a large, sequestered "warmly secure" world (without windows, but also without gravity) - a world belonging to the beings who had "come to get me" at the start of the experience. It should at this point be added that my impression with all of the events that I do not remember was very much that they had all taken place in this world (and it has always felt that there was a total continuity in the transition to the experience of being in the Black Swan Hotel - and that at this point I was still in the place, but was being shown the "fabric" of the place itself, by means of something familiar to me).
The re-living of the experience of seeing the diagram culminated in something new. The beings who had shown it to me now "told" me something (though I don't remember words being used) which had the quality or form of a joke. It was pointed out to me that human beings - and this very much included me - had in front of them all the time the fact that the world really consists of energy, feeling and intent, but that they obdurately, stupidly - and pretentiously - cling to their opinion that the world is a dull, ordinary, "concrete" place.
The joke in the end was very much on me - directed brightly toward me. I laughed, and there was a real joy in the laughter (I felt I had not laughed like that for ten years, or more). I went into the world of the "inorganic beings" coughing, and I came back with the cough transformed into laughter.
However, it remains the case that I was not really overwhelmed - apart from in the moment of laughter - by the insight about the depth-level nature of the world: this was because I already viewed the world in this way (helped initially by Spinoza, and in particular by Deleuze, with his concept of the body without organs). It is pointed out in Castaneda's books that inorganic beings (whether they are consistent phenomenological elements within human awareness, or independent entities living in a neighbouring dimension) have a tendency to tell people what they know already. This seems to be exemplified by my DMT experience, though it is true both that the concise, diagrammatic way in which I was shown the "outsight" was new and impressive, and that through the joke levelled against me I received a powerfully emphasised reminder that I needed to embody my knowledge."
(Hidden Valleys, Zero Books, pp. 160-165)
*
This section and the previous section have together been about the discovery - or appearance-in-my-life - of a second frequency of the impersonal, alongside the frequency of the impersonal that can accurately be described as Love-and-Freedom. This other frequency relates to a direction which is fundamentally too locked to control: it relates to a single wider reality which it can be extremely valuable to encounter, but which taken as a destination is a trap. Whereas the direction of Love-and-Freedom is the direction of the definitive journey - the direction of one wider reality after another.
The first way in which this other direction of the impersonal can be helpful is evidently in overcoming Fear - in overcoming fear of the unknown. The second way in which it can be valuable is through the tendency, in relation to this direction, for important things which you already in some sense know (though you are not in any way systematically acting upon them), to be re-stated in powerful ways, in the sense that the re-statement has a new, more effective mode of expression. And the third valuable potential of this direction-of-encounter is in relation to the journey of libidinal awakening of heterosexual males, a journey which has 'become your love' as its fundamental guiding principle. The nextdoor-to-South direction of the impersonal can help heterosexual males start on this journey, helping them discover the female erotic as it exists within men who love women, but it will not in any way help them complete this journey: the completion is the discovery that in these cases to become-woman is also fundamentally to become-man (this is partly to say that to become female is here to become male-female, which is what men are, at depth), so that the journey is an emphatic return to the starting-point, only further up the spiral. The completion of the initial journey for heterosexual males will not be achieved through encounters with the Deep Hotel: this clarification and focusing of male heterosexuality can only occur through encounters with women in the actual as opposed to the virtual: that is, through being in love with women and and through bonds of affection and friendship, and, most fundamentally, through relationships of these kinds with women who are travellers into the unknown.
