Half the worlds species have been wiped out since the 1970s. Just spend a week thinking about that.
Sent from my iPad
Saturday 31 October 2015
Friday 30 October 2015
Is beating someone up through your superior intell
Is beating someone up through your superior intellect any better than beating up someone physically weaker?
I have wondered if using ones intelligence to out argue someone is any better, morally than beating up someone weaker than you. A really smart debater can generally take either side in a given debate and win, whether they believe the point or not is irrelevant. I recall the famous 'Is Religion a Force for Good" debate Tony Blair had with Christopher Hitchens. At the end, having wiped the floor with Blair, Hitchens went on to offer some better arguments for Blairs stance. Now that's a crushing victory. But being able to beat someone in a debate doesn't mean you are necessarily right. Also, it bares the echo of what is wrong with humanism. The most astute off shoot of Darwins 'Origin of Species' was to make it clear man is an animal. The most common misconception of Darwinism is that we are at the peak of some linear path with chimps, Dolphins below us dropping down through dogs to birds to reptiles down to bacteria. That any sophisticated evolutionary path leads to intelligence. The search for life on other planets is of interest until we here misguided humanists assuming what we would call 'intelligent' life is somehow inevitable. In truth a peregrine falcon is superior to us in its own environmental niche. So is a cheeter. So is an eel. What evolution does is result in life forms best suited to their own survival method. A peregrine can fly at 175 miles an hour, the exact top speed is not known but my point is they can a. fly and b. fly very fast. Their area of expertise is just a different one to ours. Dolphins have an intelligence suited to their life cycle. A certain type of intelligence separates us from other animals however it is becoming a bit of an evolutionary dead end. Due to our prizing conscious thought over instinctive thought we reckon we are pretty smart. Yet, as time goes on it is becoming clear, most of our brain activity operates much like any other animal. Our breathing, digestion and countless other processes go unnoticed. If we try carry two full cups of tea from the kitchen to bedroom we can manage it without spilling a drop as long as we don't think about it, try concentrating and we invariably spill some. A cricket fast bowler throws a ball at over a hundred miles an hour. A batsman can only hit the ball by acting instinctively. If batsmen acted consciously, considering the speed, direction and height of the travelling ball they would be bowled out every time. It is becoming clear free will is something of an illusion. For sure, it exists in a sense but largely as a corrective or premeditation system. Herein lies the clear folly of trying to talk addicts out of their behaviour. Herein lies the folly of blaming paedophiles for their desires. We can only blame them for their behaviour. If we are to solve this sickening condition we need to retrain paedophiles as soon as their thoughts become intolerable to society. Studies suggest they can not be cured of the impulse, but they can be taught to control it. The same as the sole cure for addicts. AA have known for a long time that the use of a 'higher power' is needed to overcome their condition. The higher power is the unconscious. The bulk of our make up that isn't acting consciously.
So to return to my first point, bullying someone with your intellect is no more admirable than bullying someone with your fists. Political debate that steers our nations morality is not fought out between who is wrong and who is right. Often a child can see what is right but they cannot construct a language riddle without loopholes. Hence the dominant forces in politics are seldom those pointing the best ways for our species to go forth but are the measure of the most intelligent debaters. This is how nazi politics spread throughout an intelligent nation. It is how or actions to save ourselves from environmental disaster such as global warming can be so futile. Intelligence can often fool its possessor into believing their own errors. Rather than test their ideas by their own intellect they measure themselves against political opponents. Intelligent politicians such as Tony Benn, Enoch Powell and even Ed Milliband may have been able to out think their political opponents in the House of Commons but they were all frequently wrong. I have been in debates where I have been aware I was wrong yet able to force my opponent to concede the argument. Once you have experienced this knowingly it becomes rather similar to overpowering an opponent through boxing, beating them at running or tiddly winks. This is not to argue for unintelligent leaders. During George Bush' presidency it was often used against him that he wasn't very bright. This is true. However it wasn't his stupidity that was at fault, it was his policy. I pointed this out at the time though found intellectuals berating me in the assumption I was arguing for stupid leaders. These criticisms missed the point. Intelligence enables man to trick and deceive. Dogs are fascinating companions because we try trick them. Not only do they look confused when we do but their is a pity in their eyes. Trickery and deceit through intelligence is a simian skill. In groups of chimps we see beta males masturbating openly to the lead females whilst hiding their actions from the alpha males. They shield their erections from the alpha males sight until it withers at which point they will show their flaccidity as if saying, 'what me? Governor. No, I'd never do that, you're the boss'. Our human lives are full of such deceptions in politics, business, academia, any field where the intellect is at play, if not by secretly masturbating to your bosses wife but in other less obvious ways.
The questions science dominate know often fall beyond general understanding. Quantum physics, the Big Bang, particle physics, the universe. We trust scientists on the little we understand but come to the big questions their guesses are little better than ours. The perception that we have learned nearly everything there is to know in the last five hundred years is embarrassingly wrong. The truth is why know very little for sure and a paradigm shift as profound as Galileo, Darwin of Freud is inevitable. Given it took a good two hundred years for ideas Darwin brought to humanities attention to gain public acceptance, ideas that many had described before him. That hypocrates had advanced the same ideas that Freud and later Francis Crick put forward in his 'Astonishing Hypothesis' it seems more than likely that some discredited thinker now has the paradigm shift ready for those open enough to listen. The trouble is entire academic careers are at stake, the credibility of professors are undoubtedly built on misconceptions. To allow the new ideas through generally takes the death of the old order. Peter Russell's primacy of consciousness accommodates the uncomfortable aspects of quantum mechanics which our current model can not adequately do, for example, could easily be right. It is hard to find many holes in his theory. But then it is hard to find a hole in the theory we are just some computer game played by a super race. I doubt it's true but it is hard to disprove as so many things are. Still, we are wrong to take the current scientific consensus as more than our current working model.
It was Paul Gascoignes brain that made him the greatest footballer of my generation. His physique was undertrained, fat even, yet his brain controlled his body in an instinctive manner that out smarted not only his contemporaries who trained to higher fitness levels but also the fitter and academically brighter opponents. Intelligence comes In many shapes and sizes. Power to defeat an opponent comes in a number of competitive arenas. To out think someone less intelligent no more makes you right than battering them in to submission with your fists.
Sent from my iPad
I have wondered if using ones intelligence to out argue someone is any better, morally than beating up someone weaker than you. A really smart debater can generally take either side in a given debate and win, whether they believe the point or not is irrelevant. I recall the famous 'Is Religion a Force for Good" debate Tony Blair had with Christopher Hitchens. At the end, having wiped the floor with Blair, Hitchens went on to offer some better arguments for Blairs stance. Now that's a crushing victory. But being able to beat someone in a debate doesn't mean you are necessarily right. Also, it bares the echo of what is wrong with humanism. The most astute off shoot of Darwins 'Origin of Species' was to make it clear man is an animal. The most common misconception of Darwinism is that we are at the peak of some linear path with chimps, Dolphins below us dropping down through dogs to birds to reptiles down to bacteria. That any sophisticated evolutionary path leads to intelligence. The search for life on other planets is of interest until we here misguided humanists assuming what we would call 'intelligent' life is somehow inevitable. In truth a peregrine falcon is superior to us in its own environmental niche. So is a cheeter. So is an eel. What evolution does is result in life forms best suited to their own survival method. A peregrine can fly at 175 miles an hour, the exact top speed is not known but my point is they can a. fly and b. fly very fast. Their area of expertise is just a different one to ours. Dolphins have an intelligence suited to their life cycle. A certain type of intelligence separates us from other animals however it is becoming a bit of an evolutionary dead end. Due to our prizing conscious thought over instinctive thought we reckon we are pretty smart. Yet, as time goes on it is becoming clear, most of our brain activity operates much like any other animal. Our breathing, digestion and countless other processes go unnoticed. If we try carry two full cups of tea from the kitchen to bedroom we can manage it without spilling a drop as long as we don't think about it, try concentrating and we invariably spill some. A cricket fast bowler throws a ball at over a hundred miles an hour. A batsman can only hit the ball by acting instinctively. If batsmen acted consciously, considering the speed, direction and height of the travelling ball they would be bowled out every time. It is becoming clear free will is something of an illusion. For sure, it exists in a sense but largely as a corrective or premeditation system. Herein lies the clear folly of trying to talk addicts out of their behaviour. Herein lies the folly of blaming paedophiles for their desires. We can only blame them for their behaviour. If we are to solve this sickening condition we need to retrain paedophiles as soon as their thoughts become intolerable to society. Studies suggest they can not be cured of the impulse, but they can be taught to control it. The same as the sole cure for addicts. AA have known for a long time that the use of a 'higher power' is needed to overcome their condition. The higher power is the unconscious. The bulk of our make up that isn't acting consciously.
So to return to my first point, bullying someone with your intellect is no more admirable than bullying someone with your fists. Political debate that steers our nations morality is not fought out between who is wrong and who is right. Often a child can see what is right but they cannot construct a language riddle without loopholes. Hence the dominant forces in politics are seldom those pointing the best ways for our species to go forth but are the measure of the most intelligent debaters. This is how nazi politics spread throughout an intelligent nation. It is how or actions to save ourselves from environmental disaster such as global warming can be so futile. Intelligence can often fool its possessor into believing their own errors. Rather than test their ideas by their own intellect they measure themselves against political opponents. Intelligent politicians such as Tony Benn, Enoch Powell and even Ed Milliband may have been able to out think their political opponents in the House of Commons but they were all frequently wrong. I have been in debates where I have been aware I was wrong yet able to force my opponent to concede the argument. Once you have experienced this knowingly it becomes rather similar to overpowering an opponent through boxing, beating them at running or tiddly winks. This is not to argue for unintelligent leaders. During George Bush' presidency it was often used against him that he wasn't very bright. This is true. However it wasn't his stupidity that was at fault, it was his policy. I pointed this out at the time though found intellectuals berating me in the assumption I was arguing for stupid leaders. These criticisms missed the point. Intelligence enables man to trick and deceive. Dogs are fascinating companions because we try trick them. Not only do they look confused when we do but their is a pity in their eyes. Trickery and deceit through intelligence is a simian skill. In groups of chimps we see beta males masturbating openly to the lead females whilst hiding their actions from the alpha males. They shield their erections from the alpha males sight until it withers at which point they will show their flaccidity as if saying, 'what me? Governor. No, I'd never do that, you're the boss'. Our human lives are full of such deceptions in politics, business, academia, any field where the intellect is at play, if not by secretly masturbating to your bosses wife but in other less obvious ways.
The questions science dominate know often fall beyond general understanding. Quantum physics, the Big Bang, particle physics, the universe. We trust scientists on the little we understand but come to the big questions their guesses are little better than ours. The perception that we have learned nearly everything there is to know in the last five hundred years is embarrassingly wrong. The truth is why know very little for sure and a paradigm shift as profound as Galileo, Darwin of Freud is inevitable. Given it took a good two hundred years for ideas Darwin brought to humanities attention to gain public acceptance, ideas that many had described before him. That hypocrates had advanced the same ideas that Freud and later Francis Crick put forward in his 'Astonishing Hypothesis' it seems more than likely that some discredited thinker now has the paradigm shift ready for those open enough to listen. The trouble is entire academic careers are at stake, the credibility of professors are undoubtedly built on misconceptions. To allow the new ideas through generally takes the death of the old order. Peter Russell's primacy of consciousness accommodates the uncomfortable aspects of quantum mechanics which our current model can not adequately do, for example, could easily be right. It is hard to find many holes in his theory. But then it is hard to find a hole in the theory we are just some computer game played by a super race. I doubt it's true but it is hard to disprove as so many things are. Still, we are wrong to take the current scientific consensus as more than our current working model.
It was Paul Gascoignes brain that made him the greatest footballer of my generation. His physique was undertrained, fat even, yet his brain controlled his body in an instinctive manner that out smarted not only his contemporaries who trained to higher fitness levels but also the fitter and academically brighter opponents. Intelligence comes In many shapes and sizes. Power to defeat an opponent comes in a number of competitive arenas. To out think someone less intelligent no more makes you right than battering them in to submission with your fists.
Sent from my iPad
On the search for the mystical and Retirement
On the search for the mystical and Retirement
Whilst retirement from work, giving up my woodcraft practice, in pursuit of the mystical may sound romantic, heroic and Christlike even, it was a retirement thrust upon me by my deteriorating mental health. I could no longer work due to the fractured condition of my mind. Having experienced the mystical, however, my life was changed completely. Everything I thought I knew may be wrong. Through research it became clear that mystical experiences were rare. Some spend their lives in religious piety and abstinence and never experience one. Others who never look can suddenly find themselves experiencing transcendence. Describing it is like describing falling in love. Beyond words. There is no way to prove it exists but once you have experienced it you know it is true. Being in love was the highest human emotion I had experienced in my life. The mystical changed that. It is the highest state a human can experience as far as I have found and it is as real and unquestionable as love. To have such an experience and dismiss it, to carry on would have been the greatest insult to life and all I hold sacred. I believe there is a biology of the mystical just as there is a biology of love, but I don't think the scientific search for a neural correlate could add anything other than confirm it to be an emotion of organic nature. To say it relates to activity in H2a receptor sites or that cortisone is present in the brain when we feel love adds nothing to our understanding of the experience. Music, art, poetry may offer a better language to try describe our feelings. But having seen the light, and only religious sounding phrases suffice, I could not continue a life pretending it had not happened. The virtue of poverty Jesus Christ espoused I see more as recognition of the insignificance of material wealth. All materialist values from design to houses, cars and technology became rubbish to me. They provide consolation for spiritually empty lives. Litter of life. Distractions. People who know me and readers who have followed my writings dismissing the supernatural may think I have lost my marbles, abandoned all I held true. But this is far from the case. The mystical experience is as real as any other and I still have little respect for organised religion that follows old books written about someone else's mystical experiences, invariably misunderstood as supernatural. What is lacking from the atheist philosophers and thinkers is an accommodation for the spiritual aspect of all our lives. Denying their is a spiritual dimension to ones life is like never having fallen in love, or certainly denying you have. I suppose perhaps some never do fall in love. Just as some never experience the full mystical. But we all experience the lower levels of the mystical experience be it whilst fishing, playing music or walking through the countryside. The state is beyond words but I can try convey some of my findings. Invariably one slips into words of immense baggage; religious, spiritual, seeing the light, mystical, soulful, all sound like observations from without but they are hard to avoid, the words describing someone else lost in dance. Being lost in dance, the abandonment of all self consciousness to music has to be experienced from within. My commitment is whole and not a little scary.
But such self pity is fleeting. No pain, no gain. Poverty has to hurt to provide spiritual cleansing. You can not really experience hunger in theory. The often heard mantra that class differences are like the support of football teams. Aren't we all the same and shouldn't we try understand and love each other? This may be true if you are talking of class as accent and manners. I agree whole heartedly. What I am against is the disparity of wealth. Until you have been homeless and without money you have no clue how it feels. Suggestions that the son of a Lord inheriting some dilapidated country estate, struggling to find funds for it's maintenance is in any way comparable to sleeping rough and looking through bins for food is laughable. The difference is choice. You can choose to sell the estate. It is the fear of loss of social standing, family shame, it is nothing to do with poverty. In the current climate of class war the conservatives have instigated, poverty and minimal use of resources are seen as bad. The mentally ill are held accountable for their suffering. Labour, for all their wrongs seem to apparently be at least offering a fairer alternative once more. Cameron's conservatism being indistinguishable from Brown and Blairs new labour. Whether Corbin politics is electable is yet to be seen but the fear expressed by the conservatives and centre left new labourists appears to reveal a genuine fear it is. At the very least it is healthy to see a conviction politician with ideas for radical change, just as Margaret Thatcher did, despite her unappealing sneering manner, instead of the recent years battle for the centre ground and homogenises of the two main parties. Both Thatcher and Blair advanced an end to the class system alongside sociologists of the day but the huge disparity of wealth seen between the richest and poorest that resulted from both their governments has left as deep a class divide as there has ever been. Opportunities to escape humble roots are now fewer than at any time since the wars. Suggesting we are all in it together as the Etonian cabinet millionaires do is insulting to those on the breadline. One wonders what brand of Christianity can accommodate personal greed and the blaming of the weak for their suffering. These fat politicians can no more enter heaven than a rolls Royce can drive through the eye of a needle. Each fiver spent on unnecessary luxuries is the murder of a child. Never has Christs political teaching been more needed.
Love is the closest thing to mysticism and it is through love that we can gain a foothold on its understanding. To feel part of the group consciousness that the mystical usually entails, we must love each other as equals. To strive for personal betterment, to search out wealth is clearly oppositional to the love of mankind and what is more life in all its many forms. Greed, whether excused by providing for ones children or amassing money to carry out charitable acts is wrong. Your children are no more important than any others. The fight for school places is transferred greed, a belief in the greater importance of your genes. Those who seek power least deserve it, those who seek betterment for their children least deserve it. It is this separation off away from the tribe into nuclear families fighting for their selfish genes that has caused the planets near destruction. Bill Gates may spend his time allotting his charitable donations where he sees fit but this is playing God. To believe he has the right to choose who lives and dies.
The mystical frees one from the status anxiety and professional competitiveness that blighted some of my days before retirement. I was never as bad as many but I now find it quite comical the yearning for professional respect. The hunger for attention of being in exhibitions, magazines, treasured collections, is pure vanity. I grew to despise the moral vacuity of fine furniture making. I enjoyed the zen state, being in flow, in the zone as a kind of meditative state and it was this mystical aspect of making that attracted me to furniture making. I found this most in college. Once projected in to the competitive market place it began to disgust me. The furniture now in vogue has homogenised to such a degree one can not tell a maker from another. The London design scene sees an arts and crafts simplicity of style. So in search of approval and inward looking to the design community are the makers it is as if they have all been given a mathematical question to solve and all come up with the same answer. The arrogant zaniness of the 70s 80s and early 90s has given way to a self consciousness and hunger for acceptance into the elite zeitgeist that the designers involved have abandoned themselves in pursuit of approval. Embarrassing. I see I could have chosen to make furniture as a hobby and in many ways I admire the hobbyist amateur over the careerist maker. The problem there is you can never be very good unless you do it all the time. Having said that many of the designers currently at the forefront are clearly teachers. Their websites show a handful of pieces they have made for competitions and awards between their main teaching jobs and hope that if enough faith and photography is invested, if these few works are shown to the right people, that it will make the work great. It rarely does. I struggle to understand show off makers these days.
Besides, along with finding that head state of being in flow, my main interest was art. At college I was able to make art though I never found sufficiently big a market. Probably due to my work being confused as furniture. Once I left college I made furniture for a living and seldom had time to make art. I was prolific in this and looking at the handful of pieces the part time teachers make it is understandable much of the work was over considered on their part, overly spontaneous on mine. Eventually, finding I had drifted from my aim to make art into making furniture through financial need, the whole idea became pointless. My final pieces were very expensive. The status symbols for a class system I despised. I could no longer continue with any integrity.
We are not here for long. To work until death in a job only done to finance ones holidays and weekends is to waste ones life. As I hit fifty I realised I couldn't risk waiting. I may be dead in twenty years, or too broken to explore this wonderful planet we find ourselves on. Jesus realised this at 33 I believe. Not to suggest I have any magical abilities or believe in life after death as he did. Just that we both gave up our woodwork businesses to follow a more spiritual path. I have great respect for the teachings of Jesus but believe he was just a man. I'm pretty sure he knew this too. And I agree with him on not wasting your life working. The mystical or spiritual renders the material unimportant. Poverty and the minimal consumption of resources is the right path as over consumption destroys this beautiful planet. I'm sure once we've destroyed ourselves and a whole bunch of other species in the process a new era will emerge. I don't think we will rule the earth half as long as the dinosaurs managed. And I share Christs shame in humanity. It is sad that like Socrates he never wrote his own story. I doubt it would have resembled the gospels of those who were trying to use his political and spiritual uprising and poverty cult to build a religion by adding in miracles. Life itself is as miraculous as anything I know. We shouldn't waste it.
Sent from my iPad
Whilst retirement from work, giving up my woodcraft practice, in pursuit of the mystical may sound romantic, heroic and Christlike even, it was a retirement thrust upon me by my deteriorating mental health. I could no longer work due to the fractured condition of my mind. Having experienced the mystical, however, my life was changed completely. Everything I thought I knew may be wrong. Through research it became clear that mystical experiences were rare. Some spend their lives in religious piety and abstinence and never experience one. Others who never look can suddenly find themselves experiencing transcendence. Describing it is like describing falling in love. Beyond words. There is no way to prove it exists but once you have experienced it you know it is true. Being in love was the highest human emotion I had experienced in my life. The mystical changed that. It is the highest state a human can experience as far as I have found and it is as real and unquestionable as love. To have such an experience and dismiss it, to carry on would have been the greatest insult to life and all I hold sacred. I believe there is a biology of the mystical just as there is a biology of love, but I don't think the scientific search for a neural correlate could add anything other than confirm it to be an emotion of organic nature. To say it relates to activity in H2a receptor sites or that cortisone is present in the brain when we feel love adds nothing to our understanding of the experience. Music, art, poetry may offer a better language to try describe our feelings. But having seen the light, and only religious sounding phrases suffice, I could not continue a life pretending it had not happened. The virtue of poverty Jesus Christ espoused I see more as recognition of the insignificance of material wealth. All materialist values from design to houses, cars and technology became rubbish to me. They provide consolation for spiritually empty lives. Litter of life. Distractions. People who know me and readers who have followed my writings dismissing the supernatural may think I have lost my marbles, abandoned all I held true. But this is far from the case. The mystical experience is as real as any other and I still have little respect for organised religion that follows old books written about someone else's mystical experiences, invariably misunderstood as supernatural. What is lacking from the atheist philosophers and thinkers is an accommodation for the spiritual aspect of all our lives. Denying their is a spiritual dimension to ones life is like never having fallen in love, or certainly denying you have. I suppose perhaps some never do fall in love. Just as some never experience the full mystical. But we all experience the lower levels of the mystical experience be it whilst fishing, playing music or walking through the countryside. The state is beyond words but I can try convey some of my findings. Invariably one slips into words of immense baggage; religious, spiritual, seeing the light, mystical, soulful, all sound like observations from without but they are hard to avoid, the words describing someone else lost in dance. Being lost in dance, the abandonment of all self consciousness to music has to be experienced from within. My commitment is whole and not a little scary.
But such self pity is fleeting. No pain, no gain. Poverty has to hurt to provide spiritual cleansing. You can not really experience hunger in theory. The often heard mantra that class differences are like the support of football teams. Aren't we all the same and shouldn't we try understand and love each other? This may be true if you are talking of class as accent and manners. I agree whole heartedly. What I am against is the disparity of wealth. Until you have been homeless and without money you have no clue how it feels. Suggestions that the son of a Lord inheriting some dilapidated country estate, struggling to find funds for it's maintenance is in any way comparable to sleeping rough and looking through bins for food is laughable. The difference is choice. You can choose to sell the estate. It is the fear of loss of social standing, family shame, it is nothing to do with poverty. In the current climate of class war the conservatives have instigated, poverty and minimal use of resources are seen as bad. The mentally ill are held accountable for their suffering. Labour, for all their wrongs seem to apparently be at least offering a fairer alternative once more. Cameron's conservatism being indistinguishable from Brown and Blairs new labour. Whether Corbin politics is electable is yet to be seen but the fear expressed by the conservatives and centre left new labourists appears to reveal a genuine fear it is. At the very least it is healthy to see a conviction politician with ideas for radical change, just as Margaret Thatcher did, despite her unappealing sneering manner, instead of the recent years battle for the centre ground and homogenises of the two main parties. Both Thatcher and Blair advanced an end to the class system alongside sociologists of the day but the huge disparity of wealth seen between the richest and poorest that resulted from both their governments has left as deep a class divide as there has ever been. Opportunities to escape humble roots are now fewer than at any time since the wars. Suggesting we are all in it together as the Etonian cabinet millionaires do is insulting to those on the breadline. One wonders what brand of Christianity can accommodate personal greed and the blaming of the weak for their suffering. These fat politicians can no more enter heaven than a rolls Royce can drive through the eye of a needle. Each fiver spent on unnecessary luxuries is the murder of a child. Never has Christs political teaching been more needed.
Love is the closest thing to mysticism and it is through love that we can gain a foothold on its understanding. To feel part of the group consciousness that the mystical usually entails, we must love each other as equals. To strive for personal betterment, to search out wealth is clearly oppositional to the love of mankind and what is more life in all its many forms. Greed, whether excused by providing for ones children or amassing money to carry out charitable acts is wrong. Your children are no more important than any others. The fight for school places is transferred greed, a belief in the greater importance of your genes. Those who seek power least deserve it, those who seek betterment for their children least deserve it. It is this separation off away from the tribe into nuclear families fighting for their selfish genes that has caused the planets near destruction. Bill Gates may spend his time allotting his charitable donations where he sees fit but this is playing God. To believe he has the right to choose who lives and dies.
The mystical frees one from the status anxiety and professional competitiveness that blighted some of my days before retirement. I was never as bad as many but I now find it quite comical the yearning for professional respect. The hunger for attention of being in exhibitions, magazines, treasured collections, is pure vanity. I grew to despise the moral vacuity of fine furniture making. I enjoyed the zen state, being in flow, in the zone as a kind of meditative state and it was this mystical aspect of making that attracted me to furniture making. I found this most in college. Once projected in to the competitive market place it began to disgust me. The furniture now in vogue has homogenised to such a degree one can not tell a maker from another. The London design scene sees an arts and crafts simplicity of style. So in search of approval and inward looking to the design community are the makers it is as if they have all been given a mathematical question to solve and all come up with the same answer. The arrogant zaniness of the 70s 80s and early 90s has given way to a self consciousness and hunger for acceptance into the elite zeitgeist that the designers involved have abandoned themselves in pursuit of approval. Embarrassing. I see I could have chosen to make furniture as a hobby and in many ways I admire the hobbyist amateur over the careerist maker. The problem there is you can never be very good unless you do it all the time. Having said that many of the designers currently at the forefront are clearly teachers. Their websites show a handful of pieces they have made for competitions and awards between their main teaching jobs and hope that if enough faith and photography is invested, if these few works are shown to the right people, that it will make the work great. It rarely does. I struggle to understand show off makers these days.
Besides, along with finding that head state of being in flow, my main interest was art. At college I was able to make art though I never found sufficiently big a market. Probably due to my work being confused as furniture. Once I left college I made furniture for a living and seldom had time to make art. I was prolific in this and looking at the handful of pieces the part time teachers make it is understandable much of the work was over considered on their part, overly spontaneous on mine. Eventually, finding I had drifted from my aim to make art into making furniture through financial need, the whole idea became pointless. My final pieces were very expensive. The status symbols for a class system I despised. I could no longer continue with any integrity.
We are not here for long. To work until death in a job only done to finance ones holidays and weekends is to waste ones life. As I hit fifty I realised I couldn't risk waiting. I may be dead in twenty years, or too broken to explore this wonderful planet we find ourselves on. Jesus realised this at 33 I believe. Not to suggest I have any magical abilities or believe in life after death as he did. Just that we both gave up our woodwork businesses to follow a more spiritual path. I have great respect for the teachings of Jesus but believe he was just a man. I'm pretty sure he knew this too. And I agree with him on not wasting your life working. The mystical or spiritual renders the material unimportant. Poverty and the minimal consumption of resources is the right path as over consumption destroys this beautiful planet. I'm sure once we've destroyed ourselves and a whole bunch of other species in the process a new era will emerge. I don't think we will rule the earth half as long as the dinosaurs managed. And I share Christs shame in humanity. It is sad that like Socrates he never wrote his own story. I doubt it would have resembled the gospels of those who were trying to use his political and spiritual uprising and poverty cult to build a religion by adding in miracles. Life itself is as miraculous as anything I know. We shouldn't waste it.
Sent from my iPad
Thursday 29 October 2015
Wednesday 28 October 2015
Peter - Chapter six
Peter - Chapter six
Lipton pulled up behind Peters van and saw its driver through the opened rear doors rummaging through a stack of tat, tools and bedding. With a nod Peter invited Lipton and his dogs in to his vehicle where they packed a rucksack with various kit to take up the first hill fort that loomed above them. Cloud meant dark would fall early, blue, grey and bruised, caught in swift high winds that opened briefly revealing the three quarter moon before hiding its illumination. Rain was in the air. It would be a dirty night.
The first of the three hill forts is smaller than its siblings. Covered in thick overgrowth of brambles, hawthorn and nearer the top, gorse. The odd sycamore, no more than thirty or fourty years old are the only trees, large enough to provide coverage but suggesting at some time, during Peter and Liptons childhood, the hill had been bald. Grazed by sheep even. Though few visible workings revealed its past purpose the interest in our nations history had developed greatly since the Second World War, picking up an obsessive momentum by the sixties. Chunks of land that farmers at one time worked clean across now found themselves cordoned off. Burial mounds isolated and barbed wired off. Major hill forts like the two further on were maintained. The final one, Bury Ditches, was developed into a tourist attraction. No cafe or souvenir shops but a car park. Boards set up by the National Trust giving rudimentary details for the curious weekend historian. This first was pretty much unknown as being a hill fort. Only academics or serious amateurs knew it was more than an odd shaped hill. The odd mystic may brave the vicious thorns that protected it but people of that ilk, the Peters and Liptons of the world, active shamanic witches, Druids, pagans, made little use of its power. As both men knew most of these types were hopeful and keen pretenders. Stretching of their belief in the manner of Christian faith. There can't be more than thirty in the whole country who have a clue how to use the mystical experience, even if they were fortunate enough to have one. Their names of this elite but disparate group were mostly known to the two shamans, some of them were personal freinds.
As they made their way up the hill, battling through brambles, Peter pulled an air seal plastic bag from his pocket. Offering Lipton two tabs of 1p-LSD. Britains legal lysergamide. Lipton frowned. Should he take them? What was Peter hoping to summon up?
"What's the crack, Peter?. Is this trip for my benefit?"
"I've been struggling, Lipton. Since we took on Abel my drug use has spiralled back from the recreational to the pursuit of oblivion. If I don't keep out of Stroud I'm going to be back on the gear full time again. I havnt got another rattle in me. Another habit and I really don't think I have the strength to get clean headed again. I'm not ready for that. When I reach seventy or eighty I'll have to pack in these missions, maybe then I'll settle down to a smooth heroin habit to take me on to the grave. My body at least. I don't reckon Skree will even feel it if the flesh goes. LSD once in a while, despite its magical properties, can steer a man clear of the gear. See it for what it is. A trap. A pipe and slippers existence"
"It's the way most go, Pete. My old lady spent her last five years held together with morphine. The home she was in was full of old OAP national health junkies. It's the future for most of us."
"What about yourself? Have you been hitting the skag much?"
"To be honest I've been doing nothing but. Archer said she won't come near me whilst I'm on the gear. It doesn't bother me when I'm out in the countryside. I don't even mind the rattle. Soon as I'm in the town the pull of the brown just takes me over. I don't want to be in touch with my emotions whilst among the crowds. I'd rather be numbed to it all. Sail above it."
" I know where you're coming from, this night ought to kick that shit clean out of your system." nodded Peter. Most people he knew were pretty thick. Most just saw a grey world. Separating himself off with opiates, fuck it, any drug beat talking to the walking dead.
" You mention, Skree. What happened with you?"
" You know, you made arch angel too, didn't you?"
"Jesse reckoned I would but I felt nothing much. I know a part of me slipped off, but I can't say I've felt him looking out for me."
Peter knew he'd hit on it. Lipton would never take his own life through depression. They were both warriors. In many of the street fights they'd had it had been Lipton who knocked out the most. Peter was far braver when it came to engaging with the other worldly. He'd dive straight into other dimensions, take diverse and powerful psychedelics, sacred shamanic ayuashkan recipes of a power that would blow the normal untrained mind. On several occasions when one had needed to enter darker dimensions to overcome a problem, where sanity could be lost, demons find purchase on the soul, it was Peter who was the stronger of the two. Peter who risked soul and mind. But come down to fighting the straight men, battling the shaven, polished shoes, freshly showered beer monsters. When it came to climbing the highest radio towers, that final structure atop londons Shard whilst it was still under construction, it was Lipton, not Peter, or Skree as he had been known prior to the archangel seperation who took the final climb to the very peak and took the photos that appeared in the national press as urban exploration exploded. When battling the elements, when weather could have taken their lives. Out at sea in small water craft. Atop mountains in bivvies, building shelters from the greenery available. Navigation across moorland, through deep woodland, without map or compass, it was Lipton whose strength got them through. There's no way he'd take his life having battled to keep hold of it so many times. No. What he'd been doing when Peter found him in those woods aside that layby. What his plan was when he put his head into that noose and stepped from that log, it wasn't to kill himself. Though he surely was betting the farm on it. He was testing his alter ego. He was seeing if his archangel would intervene. See if the arch Lipton would save his life or not.
"You thick twat!"
"The fuck! Why am I a thick twat?"
"There, you're looking all miserable. Like my stepping in prevented your little trial. As though I'd spoiled your private party. How the fuck do you think I just happened to be driving past that layby at that precise moment. What chances are there of me turning up in the nick of time like batman? Eh? He fucking steered me. He must have. I can't recall any real motive I had to be passing then. Looking back my mind was on auto pilot. Do you expect he'd land on white wings and unhook you? Fucks sake Lipton, don't you know him?"
Lipton looked confused. Like he'd been the butt of some joke.
" I don't know him, to be honest. I expected it would be something that would happen to me, you know, like when we became shamanised. I thought it would be intuitive, how to use it."
It had been far more ephemeral than being shaman for Peter. He chose to tell Lipton how much he knew, what he'd learned so far.
Peter looked at the dogs, playing together, chasing rabbits and squirrels through the undergrowth.
"Do you have a name for him?"
"Well, no, it's me isn't it?" Lipton asked. "Is that why you've reverted to your birth name."
"It seemed the only logical thing to do. At first I thought we'd just gravitate to another state of being. I wasn't with you when Jesse delivered on his promise. I'd left you and driven up north. I did a trip in woodland where I used to walk as a child. My consiousness joined Gaia and all sense of self left me for a while. I made the bridge using lysergics and since then it's how I connect. Skree roams. The essence can be focused or spread out over the whole of the country, across the planet I imagine. I havnt tested out the possibilities fully yet but I know, when I link on through lysergamides, mushrooms even, once I'm one with Skree I can consolidate to a focal point. Anywhere, in the sky, below the sea or lakes, beneath the earth even. When I'm focused, self is more evident. I'm perceptive from a a central spark of consiousness just as we all are from birth though far more aware, able to take in any matter or spirit around. Once I expand, so to speak. If I let go of my hold on focus each particle of me floats out. I can be covering a county, but as it becomes larger any sense of self becomes irrelevant. It isn't that I am no more because I am able to consider, I retain volition, I think therefore I am, but once out of body the further the spread, the lesser the focal self. Once distributed over large enough a space I can forget altogether that I am a human. Entering the archangel can be traumatic as can re entry. By using my old name for the part of me seperated off I am able to call him back, I can summon up the state. I'm unable to refer to Skree most of the time as the state is of no use in the everyday. A catatonic body is vulnerable. Any agent of the grey could take me whilst I am archangel. A copper finding me like this, my body empty of awareness, he'd at least lock me up. Pass me over to the mental health team, or going on past experience, take the opportunity to kill me. I'm learning, just like you. It's not going to be easy. At that site party in Cornwall they found my body out on the main road, naked. I came to in a caravan, shivering with cold. It was fucking disturbing. I had to drink and take Valium to get over the sheer weirdness of it all. I'm getting more used to it now, but to be honest I've only reconnected on a small number of occasions. Each time can be quite traumatic. We need to learn together. It's almost too much. Given a choice I doubt many would explore its possibility, but then most want jobs, houses and TVs. Most pursue numbness of being. This is the polar opposite."
For ten minutes they continued battleing their way to the hill forts summit as Lipton assimilated what Peter had just told him. It did seem unlikely that Peter could just drive past as he tried to hang himself. It could only be his archangel steering him. As the thought settled it returned to him. Notpil, he'd call him, had been looking on. Somewhere stretched out above. Like an owl looking down on the unaware mouse it had seen. He'd pulled peter toward his physical body. His test had worked. Peter could be a soft cunt at times but he'd always been a step ahead on the mystical shite.
As darkness fell so did rain. Heavy and thick and windswept, soaking the urban shamans clothes and stinging their cheek skin to ruddy life.
Sheltering in a cave like hollow to the forts side they found bracken and broke dry wood, gathered silver birch bark. The fire they lit first to cast light for the building structure ahead. It fought to stay alive against the falling rain at first but once burning strongly provided an umbrella of heat that evapourated most raindrops before falling and over came the bolder blobs of h2o. Two stout poles of nearby sycamores made easy meat for Peters wood skills and formed a pair of spiked outriggers, driven into the damp earth. Across this, green pine branches as thick as a mans finger were spread. Bracken woven through this and layers of further bracken formed shingles. Together with the natural incline and their bush craft the shamans had rigged a shelter, suitable for a night at least.
Laying down a tarpaulin groundsheet and there unrolled sleeping bags the dogs soon settled and the five animals sat together, safe from the rain watching the flames. Cooking was out of the question but a four pack of strong lagers and pouches of rolling baccy completed a temporary home of sorts. As cosy as any man could make.
"Stay out here the night and make for Bury Ditches tomorrow, eh" Lipton enthused, now in his element of greenery, woodsmoke and beer.
"There's another hill fort before that. Less well known. Only once saw a man up there. Performing some pagan ritual by the look of it. It's a tricky one to get to the top of but the best of the three to my mind. The three are in line. I f you look out you can see it." And Peter pointed through the dark rainy night. No major towns in the area provided any light pollution to help the eye but they could make out a singular horizon. The black of the land seperated by a line to the dark grey and rain above. The hill fort stood some seven miles away. Taller than the one they now occupied.
"Sound stuff. I'll join you in the acid now if you're still offering, like?" Lipton cheerily asked.
"Fuck yes! About time we got you started working that archangel of yours. Leave him be and he'll slip off, join the global singular consciousness."
"I thought he was me, part of me, any road."
"He is you, but as far as I can make out, with Skree anyway, his ecstasy in the mystical overcomes him and he loses any sense of self. He just relaxes and becomes one with the earth. I reckon that's what happens when we die. I think reaching archangel status might just be the premature slipping off of the soul. Left unattended they just go the way of all souls and like the matter that makes up your body, decays back in to the earth and grows back as something else. Energy never dies. When you finally join the compost I don't think you know a thing about it. Individuality has gone by then, just the same with the mind. But if we work on keeping them focused. Link up periodically to become archangels, they stick around as a focused individual as long as we do. Untended, well Skree does this anyway, they just blend with the one consciousness."
"Sounds like God to me," Lipton quipped.
Though active shamans and the veterans of many first hand religious experiences, both held a deep disdain for the 'religious' who followed a set practice despite no evidence.
" I reckon you're more right than you know. This isn't supernatural, mind. Just because only two dozen of us in these isles understand what the mystical experience is for, well, how to use it anyway, it doesn't make it anymore than a science few understand. Same can be said of quantum mechanics. All technologies look like magic to primitive man. If he needs a name and a metaphor, then why not God?"
" There's more to all this than we will ever know. If we could have been so wrong before Darwin and Galileo, it stands to reason we are equally deluded now. To suggest science is much further on than it was in Newtons day is to take a very homocentric view of time. In the history of earth, a thousand years is a second, less, incomparably less. We are truly honoured to have this gift."
"Humbled to fuck. Just crack the fucking LSD, you cunt. And pass us a beer while you're up."
Peter smiled at Liptons improved spirits. A moody Lipton could put a right damper on a mission.
They sat watching the patterns in the fire, faces forming, sprites and passing demons dissolved in to earthly animals. Dead freinds would flicker making brief contact in the ever changing mesmeric tongues of fire. Beating out quiet rhythms with sticks they formed aural patterns as both shamans sang soothing words of no language, just shamanic spirit guidance, keeping the darker beasts of the night at bay. So many nights they had spent in shamanic ritual no planning or preparation was needed for the two, both long standing and experienced shamans. The dogs now slept in a steaming heap, tired out from the days adventures. The lysregics began to take hold as their mesmeric chants, learned over thousands such nights the two had spent together since discovering the access portals to other dimensions. The rains ceaseless drumming on the improvised shelters' bracken roof helped to build complex sub rhythms in to the earthly shamanic symphony.
I could sense my drumming, my chants and calls, my physical self, somewhere south, across the hills. I'd settled into being and soaked across the matter of the Shropshire hills around church stretton. Notpil joined me as I slipped through rocks and underground springs. The shifting tectonic plates jostled for position as I focused on the twenty first century. Once in Gaia the drift in consiousness from individuation into the particles of matter is not like man drifts into sleep. It is a higher consiousness though less focused. More accurate but less personal. I am the bedrock and soil, I am the damp of the top soil and recall the Brocken down plants and their lives, the lives of each and every insect that forms the soil, the journey from stardust at molecular level to land. My back stretched across the hills, moist with damp short grass, chewed down by sheep who walked across the fields and valleys of my shoulders. Rock clusters where hikers stopped to open flasks and draw out binoculars to look across the land I had become one with. Winds high above these hills were turbulence and waves that were my thoughts and life, so abundant in every pocket of air was my life too. Cloud and water vapour, moisture was my blood. To Notpil I shared and we heard south of us, our physical selves, the meat mass we had arisen from on becoming archangels. They were calling us. Shifting down, undulating along the turbulence, cross cloud and air, we travelled. Time, that most human of constructs, is hard to grasp from within. Their moment became ours and we looked down at the fragile forms below. A stream of heat rose to the sky, dispersing and cooling but instantly detectable as a tickle and blackening of carbon particles, freed from the branches my Peter and Lipton burned. Their shelter glowed out green with life as the five animals huddled under, protected from the rain. Dook, Elbow and Ragland, the three dogs slept. Their dreamscapes of hunting down rabbits and squirrels, swimming in rivers, flowed like streams from their dog minds into our awareness. The two of us, our material selves, calling out in ritual song and chant, drumming and vision focused on their fire. As their awareness of discomforts, their damp clothing and wet boots, their aching limbs and minor physical impairments slipped away and their consiousness of body disappeared through their focus on their rhythms. Linking down we entered. Two archangels sat high up a Shropshire hill fort, starring into flame. The lives of Iron Age villagers still lingered as time slipped away and returned to our perspective. Non linear. As a wave travels down the coastal sea, travelling miles, flowing through the molecules that make up the water, so the particles of matter on the hill felt the waves of time that shape them through the years. Particles forming up in to seeds and trees, living and dieing down and rotting back down in to soil. And animals, people, lives from dust to dust. Each and everyone's story, together, as one. All was present. The archangels were at peace.
Keeping a fire going in the rain requires experience and a supply of dry wood. Throwing more logs on to ensure the blaze was big enough and strong enough to hold off the pouring rain. Assembling a decent supply to last the night without forageing in the dark wet night. As the two Mystics entered the transcendent state the visions in the fire began to alter. From the flickering mind tricks that suggest faces of freinds we are all subject to, the Mystics willed the fleeting suggestions to coalesce. So fast is the patterning of fire most glimpse but a wisp of clarity formed so briefly the visions are discarded as illusion. The skilled shaman in the mystical state can slow time to bring the scene to correct speed and take in the entire occurance, not just a clipped snap shot gathered from its midst.
As little more than ideas, essences of dead freinds of the Mystics trudged aimlessly through the fields below. Martin saw first. Near the summit of the hill fort he saw the light of a fire. Other ghosts, Turps and Richard trudged nearby, unaware of their surroundings. Martin had always been sharp and was swift to draw the connections. All three had been close freinds of Skree/Peter. All had died from heroin overdoses. The archangels had summoned them tonight to send a message to the two flesh and bone shamans. To bring to a close any drug dependence. The light on the hill drew Martin towards the warmth of fire and old freinds on this dirtiest of nights.
Amongst the flashing blades of flame Peter saw Martins smiling face looking back at him. Through the snaps and crackles he could make out words. He glanced at Lipton who too appeared focused on the fire ghost. The leaping shadows the flames cast back in to their shelter and against the dome of rain that light picked out of the darkness. And sat across the fire was Martin, his long term freind. At age eight Martin had been living in the Bahamas. Born in London till his father took a job at a franchise of the casino he worked for and took the family from grey wet England to a sun drenched paradise. Each day was hot, white sand beaches, flawless blue skies and green pure sea. From here the father brought the family to 1970s Leeds. Martin knew no one in this dark city where Rippers stalked the night, street gangs, rain, class barriers. A country where birth dictated life's path for all but a handful. A myth of upward mobility was being spread at the time. But the odd one to travel to a better life through hard work and good fortune were oddities. Industry was collapsing.
They moved on to a suburban estate where, to try integrate their lost son in to the locality his parents organised a party. Martin knew no one well but picked a handful of boys from his year who attended for a trip to the cinema and a tea, or dinner as these outsiders called their evening meal. The boys there couldn't see the thread and it was only Skree Martin bonded with. From age eight till Martins death at thirty one they were closest of freinds.
What drew them together was a hunger for more. Martin hated Leeds. Skree wanted to explore further and their common goal of escape forged their bond. Martin was the quieter of the two and looked up to Skree. They both had their lines beyond which they would go. Though topping their classes in intelligence both quickly grasped any new exciting developements of growing up. Together they discovered magic mushrooms and organised a series of parties amongst their freinds. Through this they both met their first girlfriends. It was through Skree that Martin was to find most of his girlfriends. Though the first steps on his shamanic path, Skree took the sacrament with an earnest manner and prolific use. Martin tripped less often and was as drawn to alcohol, seeing intoxicants on the whole as a route to oblivion. Skree saw alcohol as a drug to muddy the mind. His father was a keen drinker and this put him off till well into his twenties.
Once the parties came to the attention of the school authorities most blame was apportioned to Skree. He was always in trouble, came from a broken home with an alcoholic father and lived wild in a house that seldom had electricity. It suited the mushroom cult to paint him as ring leader and, if truth be known, he was that.
Martins parents who had brought him from paradise to hell were desperate to find a scapegoat to escape the guilt for destroying their sons happiness. They blamed his actions on mixing with the wrong crowd and tried bustle him off to a private school in Wales. Martin once again was to be torn from all he knew. Having opened the psychic door through European native shamanic sacrament, the Liberty cap, he had found a new way to see the world. Finally having found a circle of freinds he was loathe to throw this away.
When his parents dropped him off at leeds train station with a ticket for some dark boarding school in another country he didn't know he was having none of it. He ran away. Hitching round the country, visiting Stonehenge and other sacred sites the young mushroomers were drawn to. The local paper ran a series of stories. "Missing Boy with Drug Problem," ran the headline. The story spoke of the bad influences Martin had fallen in with. The fingers pointed at Skree. He was always in trouble. A little more wouldn't hurt. Besides, Skree would have been quite put out if he wasn't regarded as ring leader.
After three weeks hitching round the country Martins funds ran out and he returned to Leeds. In the local woods where the teenage mushroom enthusiasts had fires and built a shelter from birch poles, bracken fronds and sods of earth where they often camped out on psychedelic missions. Martin made this his base but soon word got out. His girlfriend grassed. Skree ran down to warn Martin but was too late. Police led him away.
He accepted his fate at that Welsh boarding school but their bond remained. By the time Martin graduated Skree was living in a commune in Cornwall so it was a few years before their friendship redeveloped. Martin had taken to prescription benzos, a habit he never lost, and alcohol. Skree was off travelling, they both were. They met up in Portugal on a rocky Atlantic outcropping.
Euphoric in reaquaintance and drunk they climbed as far out as they could into the crashing waves. Skree looked at Martin who he had never seen so joyous.
"We should take care, we could die here," Skree warned Martin.
So lost in happiness he replied, "So what!"
He had a point. This would have been a good death.
Later Skree developed his woodwork, Martin followed. They both began in joinery. Skree moved over to designer making enrolling at Shrewsbury. A year later Martin followed, but to Rycotewood.
They discovered amphetamines together. Skree always knew Martin looked up to him and had always wondered if his use of needles had made the practice ok.
Skree was living in Shropshire when Richard rang to say Martin was on a life support system and most likely would die. He'd got a new job. Instead of having a drink to celebrate he'd overdosed on heroin. A casual user. Stupid to use the needle. Skree said boyhood freind was dead and it never left Skrees head that Martin had followed him. Into girls, cigarettes, mushrooms, amphetamines and finally he'd done heroin, dieing in Richards kitchen.
Guilt poured over Skree as Martin looked over.
"It was my mistake, my choice." Martin freed him.
But at the funeral martins brother had given Skree a right dressing down. Despite Skree being clean. Living in another part of the country. Teaching at college. His family could never accept the damage they had caused Martin. It was easier to blame the bad influences.
Having freed Skree from his guilt, Martins ghost slipped back into the flames and was gone.
The drunken ghost of Turps staggered and fell through the muddy fields below. His greasy blond hair smeared in soil and rain. Through his delirium he saw a light on a nearby hill. A fire. Warmth and company drew the half mad alcohol ghost towards the tripping shamans camps. Skree had looked up to Turps, three years his senior when they met. Never one much for the tripping but alcohol had ripped apart his sanity. He became a derelict. An unpredictable barker at the moon. He'd spent time in Amsterdam before being deported. Returned to Leeds his family took him in but his unwashed body, severe alcoholism and psychosis saw him booted out where he became a face on the homeless begging scene in the city centre. One night, drunk he'd found a bed in St George's crept, a homeless hostel. Here he injected heroin. Never a habitual user his system couldn't cope with a lot. Virtually all heroin overdoses involve alcohol.
They found his body in the morning. He'd made 38. His funeral was attended by a handful of his closest freinds and his families catholic community. Skree and Richard thought they'd gone to the wrong place at first. A sad but predictable death.
From the flames Skree saw his tortured face. Looking to his side, Martins fireside pew had been replaced by this boy who loved the woods. The boy who had introduced him to hawkwind, sold him his first weed, the boy he'd been first arrested by the drug squad with. They'd been sat in a circle at the back of the leeds university concert hall, listening to Rory Gallagher, tripped out on mushrooms. Turps fancied a joint. His trip too strong to roll Skree had took over, turps sprinkled the weed in to the tobacco and three skin bed Skree managed to roll before meaty hands dragged him from behind. At first Skree assumed some freinds were playing an extreme joke but such was the violence it soon became clear this was the drug squad. Thirty year old bullies, brought up in to a Sweeney and Professionals outlook. Cheap Brut or hi karate aftershave. Cheap leather jackets. The knobheads even used the lingo of these TV characters. As they bullied young teenagers for smoking a plant. For enjoying a magic their thick mainstream minds could never grasp. This was Skrees first ever drug bust. Aged fifteen. Strip searched. Sexual assault on a minor. Paedophile power trips that today they would serve proper time for. Time they'd either spend scared on the nonces wing. Or mix with the honest crooks. The thought of how they would have been treated brought a smile to Skree that he shared with the ghost of his dead freind.
Aged 19, Skree and Turps were still associates but Turps alcoholism had rendered him difficult to tolerate. Crows spoke to him, signs of witchcraft stalked him. He never knew who to trust. His catholic upbringing had met the personal truths of psychedelia. Neither beat the other leaving him confused, superstitious, paranoid. At the time Skree was having trouble with an unfaithful girlfriend and not wishing to return home had walked out on to Woodhouse Moor in the dark to sit and think. Turps staggered up. "Skree under a tree," he smiled. Both had a strong pagan link to nature and this meeting was apropropos. They sat and talked. Turps for once was lucid. Untroubled by demons. After some time Skree took turps back to his shared flat, turps being homeless at the time. At most times from his late teens to his death. 38 is not unusual as a lifespan for a rough sleeper.
They drank and Skrees flat mates weren't too pleased with him bringing home this semis psychotic street person. As alcohol took him under turps fell asleep with his head on the stone fireplace. For a while no one noticed in their inebriated condition. Skree saw his freinds brains would burn out if he wasn't moved. Shifting a violent drunk in sleep can be problematic but he managed.
"Thanks for that night, you saved my life."
"Anyone would have."
"But no one else did." Turps replied.
"What happened to you? You were so astute, so clever. How dis you let drink take you?"
Skrees question hung in the air for a while till Turps broke out in laughter. "Doesn't really matter anymore."
Skree thought of the woods near where they grew up. A stooped beech tree turps named the old mans back. And another. A tree Turps had climbed in his youth to carve PT 78. It is still there.
As youths they had set out with an ideology. A belief in the green outdoors. Anti fashion. A belief in the spiritual possibilities of psychedelics and cannabis. A soundtrack of hawkwind, pink floyd, reggae and punk rock. A free festival scene. New Age travellers or bike gangs to aspire to. A deep culture with routes in the London Underground. LSD. Hippy ideals bolstered by the steel of punk. A disregard for money.
Yet so many had fallen. Some succumbed to harder drugs and psychosis. Others, those who were just playing out, weekenders, cut their hair. Took jobs. Abandoned their ideals. Gave in to the man. Weaker characters.
It had been a war. Their generation who chose their path incurred casualties at a rate unseen since the Somme generation. Many New Age travellers died young. Heroin cut like a scythe through their generation. At least turps had stayed true to his ideals.
Those who survived, refused the bribe of the straight world, survived the drugs, the motorcycle deaths. Those like Lipton and Skree, and brothers and sisters who kept the flame had to be strong. But the tests had left a remarkable group. The portal that opened in the sixties, that expanded with fire in the seventies, had spawned great men and women.
As these thoughts ricocheted round Skree and Liptons minds, understanding of their great folly hit home. Heroin had destroyed so much. These ghosts had returned to ensure that the two shamans remained clean. Just as Jesse had demanded.
A turbulence of fractal patterns grew around them. The cries of other dead freinds called out from the snapping flames. Poppy fields spread out before them. Afghanistan. The source of ninety percent of Britains street heroin that had flooded the country. The wars of Russian groups against the mujaheddin. The American and British campaigns against the Taliban. Our soldiers may have invaded and murdered their children but the heroin epidemic had taken the lives of far more of Britains wild children. Both Lipton and Peter could name twenty close freinds who had died from the needle and the poppy. Their childhood circles, their closest brothers and sisters had been taken young. And both the shamans had succumbed to brown, losing decades to the pain killing powder. No more. Tonight had cured all thought of any return to that.
But their visitations were not yet done. As Turps ghost slipped away a rustling in the bushes turned both their heads. A crippled figure stumbled through the undergrowth.
"I saw your fire but it's taken me fucking ages getting up here."
Richard, Skrees closest freind was back. It was his turn to take the log stump seat round the fire. Neither Martin nor Turps had been addicts. Just stupidly took a shot whilst drunk. Richard had spent the last twelve or fifteen years of his life within the arms of morphia.
Having left home at sixteen and soon escaping the inner city misery for Cornwall, Skree had discovered the countryside. But a cottage commune with five men in their late teens and one girl, Skrees girlfriend Sibyl, with little to do, had led to a fractious end. She was of a different make up to the boys but sex drives at that age can be stronger than loyalty.
They'd returned to Leeds and found a flat. Soon the two flats below were taken by freinds and their secret nest became a haven for the ravaged tail end of their younger teen, green psychedelic dreams. Alcohol and speed were slipping in. Jo and Phil took the middle flat, Pig and Feddy the bottom. Soon all other lost souls were round drinking all days. Violence and friction became too much so Skree and Sibyl moved across town to live with Dean. It was here Richard came on to the scene.
He was fourteen or so. The child of hippy parents he'd grown up in a collection of streets that had been squatted throughout the seventies. A child of the Leeds underground. Leeds Free School didn't provide a great education in reading or writing but, living within spitting distance of the city centre and opposite the university, the free school kids were far more street wise than Skrees suburban gang. Perhaps due to an Ian Dury like disability, Richard was never pushed hard. His brother, Julian earned the name frog gob for his good fortune in being schooled in the Pyrenees where a bunch of Leeds alternatives had set up a commune. He became a builder and later a lecturer. Richards sister became a researcher at the university. They were all bright but Richard ran wild along with his fee school buddies. Glue sniffing more than studying. This semi illiteracy proved a greater disability than his physical one. But he knew how to socialise with people of all ages. His father had dealt dope and that alternative lifestyle was in his blood.
Ironically, when I met him he was rebelling against all that. The casual scene saw a division from his parents.
Why he bonded so well with Skree is hard to say. Though growing up in a squat scene his parents and the community around him were largely educated and from middle class backgrounds. Most first generation hippies were. But we clicked and they remained close till his death.
He shone brightly in his late teens and early twenties. Dealing hash and speed made him centre of attention. He pulled girls but never felt secure. He saw his disability far more than anyone else. He took to drink and for his last two decades always had a can of brew on the go. This and the speed made him a little bitter. When heroin hit he took to it like a duck to water. He dealt this too. After a couple of overdose deaths at his house straighter freinds moved away. He became darker, perhaps with a guilt.
It wasn't long after Martin died round his house that he was busted and jailed for three years, serving eighteen months. He never recovered from this. He dropped deeper in to heroin use and alcohol. He fell in love with a girl who used him badly. He had various accidents or attacks orchestrated by her and her freinds. No ammount of talking to him would make him turn away from her.
He was found dead in his flat surrounded by urine filled cans, full of special brew, heroin and methadone. His death could have been an accident or suicide.
Skree loved Richard. Hated witnessing his decline. Went mad and reckless in his own drug use after his death. Richards had been his haven. Whenever life got too much, whatever state he was in he could turn up at Richards without warning and find sanctuary. His death affected him more than any bar his mothers.
From across the fire Richard just stared at Skree. Not speaking but conveying every unspoken word, every discussion they never had. If it hadn't been for Richard, Skree would never have done heroin. Richard set him free.
Liptons head was bowed. What trip he had endured Peter knew not. He had his own lost brothers. Their ghosts were different but equally close freinds. The details may be different but the essence of the trip was the same. It was time to wake up. If not for themselves then for the lost. It was their duty to carry on. Life had been treated with a casual disregard. This most precious of gifts. This sole chance. The one shot had been thrown away by so many. Why they had survived whilst others fell was down to a degree of luck. Yet there must have been a certain caution. A little self preservation. Perhaps the fortune of strong constitutions. But largely luck. They would never risk it all again. They were done. Little needed saying. They both knew.
Lipton through the last of the logs on the fire. The colours were fading. They both cracked a beer and stared at the fire for another hour considering their loss. Saying goodbye to opiates is like waving off a lover on a departing train, knowing you will not meet again. They shared a smoke before sorting out their sleeping bags amongst the dogs. Angels drifted off in to the night as the boys nestled down amongst the dogs and drifted off to sleep with their private thoughts. Their den was moist but cosy. The body heat of three dogs and two men and a fire stoked up to last till morning.
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Lipton pulled up behind Peters van and saw its driver through the opened rear doors rummaging through a stack of tat, tools and bedding. With a nod Peter invited Lipton and his dogs in to his vehicle where they packed a rucksack with various kit to take up the first hill fort that loomed above them. Cloud meant dark would fall early, blue, grey and bruised, caught in swift high winds that opened briefly revealing the three quarter moon before hiding its illumination. Rain was in the air. It would be a dirty night.
The first of the three hill forts is smaller than its siblings. Covered in thick overgrowth of brambles, hawthorn and nearer the top, gorse. The odd sycamore, no more than thirty or fourty years old are the only trees, large enough to provide coverage but suggesting at some time, during Peter and Liptons childhood, the hill had been bald. Grazed by sheep even. Though few visible workings revealed its past purpose the interest in our nations history had developed greatly since the Second World War, picking up an obsessive momentum by the sixties. Chunks of land that farmers at one time worked clean across now found themselves cordoned off. Burial mounds isolated and barbed wired off. Major hill forts like the two further on were maintained. The final one, Bury Ditches, was developed into a tourist attraction. No cafe or souvenir shops but a car park. Boards set up by the National Trust giving rudimentary details for the curious weekend historian. This first was pretty much unknown as being a hill fort. Only academics or serious amateurs knew it was more than an odd shaped hill. The odd mystic may brave the vicious thorns that protected it but people of that ilk, the Peters and Liptons of the world, active shamanic witches, Druids, pagans, made little use of its power. As both men knew most of these types were hopeful and keen pretenders. Stretching of their belief in the manner of Christian faith. There can't be more than thirty in the whole country who have a clue how to use the mystical experience, even if they were fortunate enough to have one. Their names of this elite but disparate group were mostly known to the two shamans, some of them were personal freinds.
As they made their way up the hill, battling through brambles, Peter pulled an air seal plastic bag from his pocket. Offering Lipton two tabs of 1p-LSD. Britains legal lysergamide. Lipton frowned. Should he take them? What was Peter hoping to summon up?
"What's the crack, Peter?. Is this trip for my benefit?"
"I've been struggling, Lipton. Since we took on Abel my drug use has spiralled back from the recreational to the pursuit of oblivion. If I don't keep out of Stroud I'm going to be back on the gear full time again. I havnt got another rattle in me. Another habit and I really don't think I have the strength to get clean headed again. I'm not ready for that. When I reach seventy or eighty I'll have to pack in these missions, maybe then I'll settle down to a smooth heroin habit to take me on to the grave. My body at least. I don't reckon Skree will even feel it if the flesh goes. LSD once in a while, despite its magical properties, can steer a man clear of the gear. See it for what it is. A trap. A pipe and slippers existence"
"It's the way most go, Pete. My old lady spent her last five years held together with morphine. The home she was in was full of old OAP national health junkies. It's the future for most of us."
"What about yourself? Have you been hitting the skag much?"
"To be honest I've been doing nothing but. Archer said she won't come near me whilst I'm on the gear. It doesn't bother me when I'm out in the countryside. I don't even mind the rattle. Soon as I'm in the town the pull of the brown just takes me over. I don't want to be in touch with my emotions whilst among the crowds. I'd rather be numbed to it all. Sail above it."
" I know where you're coming from, this night ought to kick that shit clean out of your system." nodded Peter. Most people he knew were pretty thick. Most just saw a grey world. Separating himself off with opiates, fuck it, any drug beat talking to the walking dead.
" You mention, Skree. What happened with you?"
" You know, you made arch angel too, didn't you?"
"Jesse reckoned I would but I felt nothing much. I know a part of me slipped off, but I can't say I've felt him looking out for me."
Peter knew he'd hit on it. Lipton would never take his own life through depression. They were both warriors. In many of the street fights they'd had it had been Lipton who knocked out the most. Peter was far braver when it came to engaging with the other worldly. He'd dive straight into other dimensions, take diverse and powerful psychedelics, sacred shamanic ayuashkan recipes of a power that would blow the normal untrained mind. On several occasions when one had needed to enter darker dimensions to overcome a problem, where sanity could be lost, demons find purchase on the soul, it was Peter who was the stronger of the two. Peter who risked soul and mind. But come down to fighting the straight men, battling the shaven, polished shoes, freshly showered beer monsters. When it came to climbing the highest radio towers, that final structure atop londons Shard whilst it was still under construction, it was Lipton, not Peter, or Skree as he had been known prior to the archangel seperation who took the final climb to the very peak and took the photos that appeared in the national press as urban exploration exploded. When battling the elements, when weather could have taken their lives. Out at sea in small water craft. Atop mountains in bivvies, building shelters from the greenery available. Navigation across moorland, through deep woodland, without map or compass, it was Lipton whose strength got them through. There's no way he'd take his life having battled to keep hold of it so many times. No. What he'd been doing when Peter found him in those woods aside that layby. What his plan was when he put his head into that noose and stepped from that log, it wasn't to kill himself. Though he surely was betting the farm on it. He was testing his alter ego. He was seeing if his archangel would intervene. See if the arch Lipton would save his life or not.
"You thick twat!"
"The fuck! Why am I a thick twat?"
"There, you're looking all miserable. Like my stepping in prevented your little trial. As though I'd spoiled your private party. How the fuck do you think I just happened to be driving past that layby at that precise moment. What chances are there of me turning up in the nick of time like batman? Eh? He fucking steered me. He must have. I can't recall any real motive I had to be passing then. Looking back my mind was on auto pilot. Do you expect he'd land on white wings and unhook you? Fucks sake Lipton, don't you know him?"
Lipton looked confused. Like he'd been the butt of some joke.
" I don't know him, to be honest. I expected it would be something that would happen to me, you know, like when we became shamanised. I thought it would be intuitive, how to use it."
It had been far more ephemeral than being shaman for Peter. He chose to tell Lipton how much he knew, what he'd learned so far.
Peter looked at the dogs, playing together, chasing rabbits and squirrels through the undergrowth.
"Do you have a name for him?"
"Well, no, it's me isn't it?" Lipton asked. "Is that why you've reverted to your birth name."
"It seemed the only logical thing to do. At first I thought we'd just gravitate to another state of being. I wasn't with you when Jesse delivered on his promise. I'd left you and driven up north. I did a trip in woodland where I used to walk as a child. My consiousness joined Gaia and all sense of self left me for a while. I made the bridge using lysergics and since then it's how I connect. Skree roams. The essence can be focused or spread out over the whole of the country, across the planet I imagine. I havnt tested out the possibilities fully yet but I know, when I link on through lysergamides, mushrooms even, once I'm one with Skree I can consolidate to a focal point. Anywhere, in the sky, below the sea or lakes, beneath the earth even. When I'm focused, self is more evident. I'm perceptive from a a central spark of consiousness just as we all are from birth though far more aware, able to take in any matter or spirit around. Once I expand, so to speak. If I let go of my hold on focus each particle of me floats out. I can be covering a county, but as it becomes larger any sense of self becomes irrelevant. It isn't that I am no more because I am able to consider, I retain volition, I think therefore I am, but once out of body the further the spread, the lesser the focal self. Once distributed over large enough a space I can forget altogether that I am a human. Entering the archangel can be traumatic as can re entry. By using my old name for the part of me seperated off I am able to call him back, I can summon up the state. I'm unable to refer to Skree most of the time as the state is of no use in the everyday. A catatonic body is vulnerable. Any agent of the grey could take me whilst I am archangel. A copper finding me like this, my body empty of awareness, he'd at least lock me up. Pass me over to the mental health team, or going on past experience, take the opportunity to kill me. I'm learning, just like you. It's not going to be easy. At that site party in Cornwall they found my body out on the main road, naked. I came to in a caravan, shivering with cold. It was fucking disturbing. I had to drink and take Valium to get over the sheer weirdness of it all. I'm getting more used to it now, but to be honest I've only reconnected on a small number of occasions. Each time can be quite traumatic. We need to learn together. It's almost too much. Given a choice I doubt many would explore its possibility, but then most want jobs, houses and TVs. Most pursue numbness of being. This is the polar opposite."
For ten minutes they continued battleing their way to the hill forts summit as Lipton assimilated what Peter had just told him. It did seem unlikely that Peter could just drive past as he tried to hang himself. It could only be his archangel steering him. As the thought settled it returned to him. Notpil, he'd call him, had been looking on. Somewhere stretched out above. Like an owl looking down on the unaware mouse it had seen. He'd pulled peter toward his physical body. His test had worked. Peter could be a soft cunt at times but he'd always been a step ahead on the mystical shite.
As darkness fell so did rain. Heavy and thick and windswept, soaking the urban shamans clothes and stinging their cheek skin to ruddy life.
Sheltering in a cave like hollow to the forts side they found bracken and broke dry wood, gathered silver birch bark. The fire they lit first to cast light for the building structure ahead. It fought to stay alive against the falling rain at first but once burning strongly provided an umbrella of heat that evapourated most raindrops before falling and over came the bolder blobs of h2o. Two stout poles of nearby sycamores made easy meat for Peters wood skills and formed a pair of spiked outriggers, driven into the damp earth. Across this, green pine branches as thick as a mans finger were spread. Bracken woven through this and layers of further bracken formed shingles. Together with the natural incline and their bush craft the shamans had rigged a shelter, suitable for a night at least.
Laying down a tarpaulin groundsheet and there unrolled sleeping bags the dogs soon settled and the five animals sat together, safe from the rain watching the flames. Cooking was out of the question but a four pack of strong lagers and pouches of rolling baccy completed a temporary home of sorts. As cosy as any man could make.
"Stay out here the night and make for Bury Ditches tomorrow, eh" Lipton enthused, now in his element of greenery, woodsmoke and beer.
"There's another hill fort before that. Less well known. Only once saw a man up there. Performing some pagan ritual by the look of it. It's a tricky one to get to the top of but the best of the three to my mind. The three are in line. I f you look out you can see it." And Peter pointed through the dark rainy night. No major towns in the area provided any light pollution to help the eye but they could make out a singular horizon. The black of the land seperated by a line to the dark grey and rain above. The hill fort stood some seven miles away. Taller than the one they now occupied.
"Sound stuff. I'll join you in the acid now if you're still offering, like?" Lipton cheerily asked.
"Fuck yes! About time we got you started working that archangel of yours. Leave him be and he'll slip off, join the global singular consciousness."
"I thought he was me, part of me, any road."
"He is you, but as far as I can make out, with Skree anyway, his ecstasy in the mystical overcomes him and he loses any sense of self. He just relaxes and becomes one with the earth. I reckon that's what happens when we die. I think reaching archangel status might just be the premature slipping off of the soul. Left unattended they just go the way of all souls and like the matter that makes up your body, decays back in to the earth and grows back as something else. Energy never dies. When you finally join the compost I don't think you know a thing about it. Individuality has gone by then, just the same with the mind. But if we work on keeping them focused. Link up periodically to become archangels, they stick around as a focused individual as long as we do. Untended, well Skree does this anyway, they just blend with the one consciousness."
"Sounds like God to me," Lipton quipped.
Though active shamans and the veterans of many first hand religious experiences, both held a deep disdain for the 'religious' who followed a set practice despite no evidence.
" I reckon you're more right than you know. This isn't supernatural, mind. Just because only two dozen of us in these isles understand what the mystical experience is for, well, how to use it anyway, it doesn't make it anymore than a science few understand. Same can be said of quantum mechanics. All technologies look like magic to primitive man. If he needs a name and a metaphor, then why not God?"
" There's more to all this than we will ever know. If we could have been so wrong before Darwin and Galileo, it stands to reason we are equally deluded now. To suggest science is much further on than it was in Newtons day is to take a very homocentric view of time. In the history of earth, a thousand years is a second, less, incomparably less. We are truly honoured to have this gift."
"Humbled to fuck. Just crack the fucking LSD, you cunt. And pass us a beer while you're up."
Peter smiled at Liptons improved spirits. A moody Lipton could put a right damper on a mission.
They sat watching the patterns in the fire, faces forming, sprites and passing demons dissolved in to earthly animals. Dead freinds would flicker making brief contact in the ever changing mesmeric tongues of fire. Beating out quiet rhythms with sticks they formed aural patterns as both shamans sang soothing words of no language, just shamanic spirit guidance, keeping the darker beasts of the night at bay. So many nights they had spent in shamanic ritual no planning or preparation was needed for the two, both long standing and experienced shamans. The dogs now slept in a steaming heap, tired out from the days adventures. The lysregics began to take hold as their mesmeric chants, learned over thousands such nights the two had spent together since discovering the access portals to other dimensions. The rains ceaseless drumming on the improvised shelters' bracken roof helped to build complex sub rhythms in to the earthly shamanic symphony.
I could sense my drumming, my chants and calls, my physical self, somewhere south, across the hills. I'd settled into being and soaked across the matter of the Shropshire hills around church stretton. Notpil joined me as I slipped through rocks and underground springs. The shifting tectonic plates jostled for position as I focused on the twenty first century. Once in Gaia the drift in consiousness from individuation into the particles of matter is not like man drifts into sleep. It is a higher consiousness though less focused. More accurate but less personal. I am the bedrock and soil, I am the damp of the top soil and recall the Brocken down plants and their lives, the lives of each and every insect that forms the soil, the journey from stardust at molecular level to land. My back stretched across the hills, moist with damp short grass, chewed down by sheep who walked across the fields and valleys of my shoulders. Rock clusters where hikers stopped to open flasks and draw out binoculars to look across the land I had become one with. Winds high above these hills were turbulence and waves that were my thoughts and life, so abundant in every pocket of air was my life too. Cloud and water vapour, moisture was my blood. To Notpil I shared and we heard south of us, our physical selves, the meat mass we had arisen from on becoming archangels. They were calling us. Shifting down, undulating along the turbulence, cross cloud and air, we travelled. Time, that most human of constructs, is hard to grasp from within. Their moment became ours and we looked down at the fragile forms below. A stream of heat rose to the sky, dispersing and cooling but instantly detectable as a tickle and blackening of carbon particles, freed from the branches my Peter and Lipton burned. Their shelter glowed out green with life as the five animals huddled under, protected from the rain. Dook, Elbow and Ragland, the three dogs slept. Their dreamscapes of hunting down rabbits and squirrels, swimming in rivers, flowed like streams from their dog minds into our awareness. The two of us, our material selves, calling out in ritual song and chant, drumming and vision focused on their fire. As their awareness of discomforts, their damp clothing and wet boots, their aching limbs and minor physical impairments slipped away and their consiousness of body disappeared through their focus on their rhythms. Linking down we entered. Two archangels sat high up a Shropshire hill fort, starring into flame. The lives of Iron Age villagers still lingered as time slipped away and returned to our perspective. Non linear. As a wave travels down the coastal sea, travelling miles, flowing through the molecules that make up the water, so the particles of matter on the hill felt the waves of time that shape them through the years. Particles forming up in to seeds and trees, living and dieing down and rotting back down in to soil. And animals, people, lives from dust to dust. Each and everyone's story, together, as one. All was present. The archangels were at peace.
Keeping a fire going in the rain requires experience and a supply of dry wood. Throwing more logs on to ensure the blaze was big enough and strong enough to hold off the pouring rain. Assembling a decent supply to last the night without forageing in the dark wet night. As the two Mystics entered the transcendent state the visions in the fire began to alter. From the flickering mind tricks that suggest faces of freinds we are all subject to, the Mystics willed the fleeting suggestions to coalesce. So fast is the patterning of fire most glimpse but a wisp of clarity formed so briefly the visions are discarded as illusion. The skilled shaman in the mystical state can slow time to bring the scene to correct speed and take in the entire occurance, not just a clipped snap shot gathered from its midst.
As little more than ideas, essences of dead freinds of the Mystics trudged aimlessly through the fields below. Martin saw first. Near the summit of the hill fort he saw the light of a fire. Other ghosts, Turps and Richard trudged nearby, unaware of their surroundings. Martin had always been sharp and was swift to draw the connections. All three had been close freinds of Skree/Peter. All had died from heroin overdoses. The archangels had summoned them tonight to send a message to the two flesh and bone shamans. To bring to a close any drug dependence. The light on the hill drew Martin towards the warmth of fire and old freinds on this dirtiest of nights.
Amongst the flashing blades of flame Peter saw Martins smiling face looking back at him. Through the snaps and crackles he could make out words. He glanced at Lipton who too appeared focused on the fire ghost. The leaping shadows the flames cast back in to their shelter and against the dome of rain that light picked out of the darkness. And sat across the fire was Martin, his long term freind. At age eight Martin had been living in the Bahamas. Born in London till his father took a job at a franchise of the casino he worked for and took the family from grey wet England to a sun drenched paradise. Each day was hot, white sand beaches, flawless blue skies and green pure sea. From here the father brought the family to 1970s Leeds. Martin knew no one in this dark city where Rippers stalked the night, street gangs, rain, class barriers. A country where birth dictated life's path for all but a handful. A myth of upward mobility was being spread at the time. But the odd one to travel to a better life through hard work and good fortune were oddities. Industry was collapsing.
They moved on to a suburban estate where, to try integrate their lost son in to the locality his parents organised a party. Martin knew no one well but picked a handful of boys from his year who attended for a trip to the cinema and a tea, or dinner as these outsiders called their evening meal. The boys there couldn't see the thread and it was only Skree Martin bonded with. From age eight till Martins death at thirty one they were closest of freinds.
What drew them together was a hunger for more. Martin hated Leeds. Skree wanted to explore further and their common goal of escape forged their bond. Martin was the quieter of the two and looked up to Skree. They both had their lines beyond which they would go. Though topping their classes in intelligence both quickly grasped any new exciting developements of growing up. Together they discovered magic mushrooms and organised a series of parties amongst their freinds. Through this they both met their first girlfriends. It was through Skree that Martin was to find most of his girlfriends. Though the first steps on his shamanic path, Skree took the sacrament with an earnest manner and prolific use. Martin tripped less often and was as drawn to alcohol, seeing intoxicants on the whole as a route to oblivion. Skree saw alcohol as a drug to muddy the mind. His father was a keen drinker and this put him off till well into his twenties.
Once the parties came to the attention of the school authorities most blame was apportioned to Skree. He was always in trouble, came from a broken home with an alcoholic father and lived wild in a house that seldom had electricity. It suited the mushroom cult to paint him as ring leader and, if truth be known, he was that.
Martins parents who had brought him from paradise to hell were desperate to find a scapegoat to escape the guilt for destroying their sons happiness. They blamed his actions on mixing with the wrong crowd and tried bustle him off to a private school in Wales. Martin once again was to be torn from all he knew. Having opened the psychic door through European native shamanic sacrament, the Liberty cap, he had found a new way to see the world. Finally having found a circle of freinds he was loathe to throw this away.
When his parents dropped him off at leeds train station with a ticket for some dark boarding school in another country he didn't know he was having none of it. He ran away. Hitching round the country, visiting Stonehenge and other sacred sites the young mushroomers were drawn to. The local paper ran a series of stories. "Missing Boy with Drug Problem," ran the headline. The story spoke of the bad influences Martin had fallen in with. The fingers pointed at Skree. He was always in trouble. A little more wouldn't hurt. Besides, Skree would have been quite put out if he wasn't regarded as ring leader.
After three weeks hitching round the country Martins funds ran out and he returned to Leeds. In the local woods where the teenage mushroom enthusiasts had fires and built a shelter from birch poles, bracken fronds and sods of earth where they often camped out on psychedelic missions. Martin made this his base but soon word got out. His girlfriend grassed. Skree ran down to warn Martin but was too late. Police led him away.
He accepted his fate at that Welsh boarding school but their bond remained. By the time Martin graduated Skree was living in a commune in Cornwall so it was a few years before their friendship redeveloped. Martin had taken to prescription benzos, a habit he never lost, and alcohol. Skree was off travelling, they both were. They met up in Portugal on a rocky Atlantic outcropping.
Euphoric in reaquaintance and drunk they climbed as far out as they could into the crashing waves. Skree looked at Martin who he had never seen so joyous.
"We should take care, we could die here," Skree warned Martin.
So lost in happiness he replied, "So what!"
He had a point. This would have been a good death.
Later Skree developed his woodwork, Martin followed. They both began in joinery. Skree moved over to designer making enrolling at Shrewsbury. A year later Martin followed, but to Rycotewood.
They discovered amphetamines together. Skree always knew Martin looked up to him and had always wondered if his use of needles had made the practice ok.
Skree was living in Shropshire when Richard rang to say Martin was on a life support system and most likely would die. He'd got a new job. Instead of having a drink to celebrate he'd overdosed on heroin. A casual user. Stupid to use the needle. Skree said boyhood freind was dead and it never left Skrees head that Martin had followed him. Into girls, cigarettes, mushrooms, amphetamines and finally he'd done heroin, dieing in Richards kitchen.
Guilt poured over Skree as Martin looked over.
"It was my mistake, my choice." Martin freed him.
But at the funeral martins brother had given Skree a right dressing down. Despite Skree being clean. Living in another part of the country. Teaching at college. His family could never accept the damage they had caused Martin. It was easier to blame the bad influences.
Having freed Skree from his guilt, Martins ghost slipped back into the flames and was gone.
The drunken ghost of Turps staggered and fell through the muddy fields below. His greasy blond hair smeared in soil and rain. Through his delirium he saw a light on a nearby hill. A fire. Warmth and company drew the half mad alcohol ghost towards the tripping shamans camps. Skree had looked up to Turps, three years his senior when they met. Never one much for the tripping but alcohol had ripped apart his sanity. He became a derelict. An unpredictable barker at the moon. He'd spent time in Amsterdam before being deported. Returned to Leeds his family took him in but his unwashed body, severe alcoholism and psychosis saw him booted out where he became a face on the homeless begging scene in the city centre. One night, drunk he'd found a bed in St George's crept, a homeless hostel. Here he injected heroin. Never a habitual user his system couldn't cope with a lot. Virtually all heroin overdoses involve alcohol.
They found his body in the morning. He'd made 38. His funeral was attended by a handful of his closest freinds and his families catholic community. Skree and Richard thought they'd gone to the wrong place at first. A sad but predictable death.
From the flames Skree saw his tortured face. Looking to his side, Martins fireside pew had been replaced by this boy who loved the woods. The boy who had introduced him to hawkwind, sold him his first weed, the boy he'd been first arrested by the drug squad with. They'd been sat in a circle at the back of the leeds university concert hall, listening to Rory Gallagher, tripped out on mushrooms. Turps fancied a joint. His trip too strong to roll Skree had took over, turps sprinkled the weed in to the tobacco and three skin bed Skree managed to roll before meaty hands dragged him from behind. At first Skree assumed some freinds were playing an extreme joke but such was the violence it soon became clear this was the drug squad. Thirty year old bullies, brought up in to a Sweeney and Professionals outlook. Cheap Brut or hi karate aftershave. Cheap leather jackets. The knobheads even used the lingo of these TV characters. As they bullied young teenagers for smoking a plant. For enjoying a magic their thick mainstream minds could never grasp. This was Skrees first ever drug bust. Aged fifteen. Strip searched. Sexual assault on a minor. Paedophile power trips that today they would serve proper time for. Time they'd either spend scared on the nonces wing. Or mix with the honest crooks. The thought of how they would have been treated brought a smile to Skree that he shared with the ghost of his dead freind.
Aged 19, Skree and Turps were still associates but Turps alcoholism had rendered him difficult to tolerate. Crows spoke to him, signs of witchcraft stalked him. He never knew who to trust. His catholic upbringing had met the personal truths of psychedelia. Neither beat the other leaving him confused, superstitious, paranoid. At the time Skree was having trouble with an unfaithful girlfriend and not wishing to return home had walked out on to Woodhouse Moor in the dark to sit and think. Turps staggered up. "Skree under a tree," he smiled. Both had a strong pagan link to nature and this meeting was apropropos. They sat and talked. Turps for once was lucid. Untroubled by demons. After some time Skree took turps back to his shared flat, turps being homeless at the time. At most times from his late teens to his death. 38 is not unusual as a lifespan for a rough sleeper.
They drank and Skrees flat mates weren't too pleased with him bringing home this semis psychotic street person. As alcohol took him under turps fell asleep with his head on the stone fireplace. For a while no one noticed in their inebriated condition. Skree saw his freinds brains would burn out if he wasn't moved. Shifting a violent drunk in sleep can be problematic but he managed.
"Thanks for that night, you saved my life."
"Anyone would have."
"But no one else did." Turps replied.
"What happened to you? You were so astute, so clever. How dis you let drink take you?"
Skrees question hung in the air for a while till Turps broke out in laughter. "Doesn't really matter anymore."
Skree thought of the woods near where they grew up. A stooped beech tree turps named the old mans back. And another. A tree Turps had climbed in his youth to carve PT 78. It is still there.
As youths they had set out with an ideology. A belief in the green outdoors. Anti fashion. A belief in the spiritual possibilities of psychedelics and cannabis. A soundtrack of hawkwind, pink floyd, reggae and punk rock. A free festival scene. New Age travellers or bike gangs to aspire to. A deep culture with routes in the London Underground. LSD. Hippy ideals bolstered by the steel of punk. A disregard for money.
Yet so many had fallen. Some succumbed to harder drugs and psychosis. Others, those who were just playing out, weekenders, cut their hair. Took jobs. Abandoned their ideals. Gave in to the man. Weaker characters.
It had been a war. Their generation who chose their path incurred casualties at a rate unseen since the Somme generation. Many New Age travellers died young. Heroin cut like a scythe through their generation. At least turps had stayed true to his ideals.
Those who survived, refused the bribe of the straight world, survived the drugs, the motorcycle deaths. Those like Lipton and Skree, and brothers and sisters who kept the flame had to be strong. But the tests had left a remarkable group. The portal that opened in the sixties, that expanded with fire in the seventies, had spawned great men and women.
As these thoughts ricocheted round Skree and Liptons minds, understanding of their great folly hit home. Heroin had destroyed so much. These ghosts had returned to ensure that the two shamans remained clean. Just as Jesse had demanded.
A turbulence of fractal patterns grew around them. The cries of other dead freinds called out from the snapping flames. Poppy fields spread out before them. Afghanistan. The source of ninety percent of Britains street heroin that had flooded the country. The wars of Russian groups against the mujaheddin. The American and British campaigns against the Taliban. Our soldiers may have invaded and murdered their children but the heroin epidemic had taken the lives of far more of Britains wild children. Both Lipton and Peter could name twenty close freinds who had died from the needle and the poppy. Their childhood circles, their closest brothers and sisters had been taken young. And both the shamans had succumbed to brown, losing decades to the pain killing powder. No more. Tonight had cured all thought of any return to that.
But their visitations were not yet done. As Turps ghost slipped away a rustling in the bushes turned both their heads. A crippled figure stumbled through the undergrowth.
"I saw your fire but it's taken me fucking ages getting up here."
Richard, Skrees closest freind was back. It was his turn to take the log stump seat round the fire. Neither Martin nor Turps had been addicts. Just stupidly took a shot whilst drunk. Richard had spent the last twelve or fifteen years of his life within the arms of morphia.
Having left home at sixteen and soon escaping the inner city misery for Cornwall, Skree had discovered the countryside. But a cottage commune with five men in their late teens and one girl, Skrees girlfriend Sibyl, with little to do, had led to a fractious end. She was of a different make up to the boys but sex drives at that age can be stronger than loyalty.
They'd returned to Leeds and found a flat. Soon the two flats below were taken by freinds and their secret nest became a haven for the ravaged tail end of their younger teen, green psychedelic dreams. Alcohol and speed were slipping in. Jo and Phil took the middle flat, Pig and Feddy the bottom. Soon all other lost souls were round drinking all days. Violence and friction became too much so Skree and Sibyl moved across town to live with Dean. It was here Richard came on to the scene.
He was fourteen or so. The child of hippy parents he'd grown up in a collection of streets that had been squatted throughout the seventies. A child of the Leeds underground. Leeds Free School didn't provide a great education in reading or writing but, living within spitting distance of the city centre and opposite the university, the free school kids were far more street wise than Skrees suburban gang. Perhaps due to an Ian Dury like disability, Richard was never pushed hard. His brother, Julian earned the name frog gob for his good fortune in being schooled in the Pyrenees where a bunch of Leeds alternatives had set up a commune. He became a builder and later a lecturer. Richards sister became a researcher at the university. They were all bright but Richard ran wild along with his fee school buddies. Glue sniffing more than studying. This semi illiteracy proved a greater disability than his physical one. But he knew how to socialise with people of all ages. His father had dealt dope and that alternative lifestyle was in his blood.
Ironically, when I met him he was rebelling against all that. The casual scene saw a division from his parents.
Why he bonded so well with Skree is hard to say. Though growing up in a squat scene his parents and the community around him were largely educated and from middle class backgrounds. Most first generation hippies were. But we clicked and they remained close till his death.
He shone brightly in his late teens and early twenties. Dealing hash and speed made him centre of attention. He pulled girls but never felt secure. He saw his disability far more than anyone else. He took to drink and for his last two decades always had a can of brew on the go. This and the speed made him a little bitter. When heroin hit he took to it like a duck to water. He dealt this too. After a couple of overdose deaths at his house straighter freinds moved away. He became darker, perhaps with a guilt.
It wasn't long after Martin died round his house that he was busted and jailed for three years, serving eighteen months. He never recovered from this. He dropped deeper in to heroin use and alcohol. He fell in love with a girl who used him badly. He had various accidents or attacks orchestrated by her and her freinds. No ammount of talking to him would make him turn away from her.
He was found dead in his flat surrounded by urine filled cans, full of special brew, heroin and methadone. His death could have been an accident or suicide.
Skree loved Richard. Hated witnessing his decline. Went mad and reckless in his own drug use after his death. Richards had been his haven. Whenever life got too much, whatever state he was in he could turn up at Richards without warning and find sanctuary. His death affected him more than any bar his mothers.
From across the fire Richard just stared at Skree. Not speaking but conveying every unspoken word, every discussion they never had. If it hadn't been for Richard, Skree would never have done heroin. Richard set him free.
Liptons head was bowed. What trip he had endured Peter knew not. He had his own lost brothers. Their ghosts were different but equally close freinds. The details may be different but the essence of the trip was the same. It was time to wake up. If not for themselves then for the lost. It was their duty to carry on. Life had been treated with a casual disregard. This most precious of gifts. This sole chance. The one shot had been thrown away by so many. Why they had survived whilst others fell was down to a degree of luck. Yet there must have been a certain caution. A little self preservation. Perhaps the fortune of strong constitutions. But largely luck. They would never risk it all again. They were done. Little needed saying. They both knew.
Lipton through the last of the logs on the fire. The colours were fading. They both cracked a beer and stared at the fire for another hour considering their loss. Saying goodbye to opiates is like waving off a lover on a departing train, knowing you will not meet again. They shared a smoke before sorting out their sleeping bags amongst the dogs. Angels drifted off in to the night as the boys nestled down amongst the dogs and drifted off to sleep with their private thoughts. Their den was moist but cosy. The body heat of three dogs and two men and a fire stoked up to last till morning.
Sent from my iPad
Friday 23 October 2015
Peter - Chapter Five
Peter - Chapter Five
The two old freinds set off. They both knew Skree had been up in the Shropshire area, checking out the styper stones, the hill forts of which there were hundreds in the area and other ancient sites. Peter felt, though he'd kept it from Lipton , that if they could find Skree, Lipton would lift his spirits in deference to the adventures they had shared. Both had been keen drug users of a broad pharmacopeia but as a man ages, the body can no longer hold out. The pattern had been throughout their lives, little to no damage from the psychedelics of their teens, amphetamines had seen a rise in violence with the parallel alcohol use and several amphetamine psychosis cases spend a month sectioned though these usually returned not permanently damaged. When heroin came in a nihilism spread and all three surviving brothers had a good dozen close freinds die from over dose. Motor cycle deaths were also common during the 16 to 26 year bracket, taking roughly half as many as heroin. None of them had used bikes much during this period of learning their boundaries nor heroin where so many overdoses occurred due to lack of know how. Motorbikes and heroin. For sure the heroin left dead loved ones but motorcycle deaths were equally selfish leaving other spin off deaths and terrible messes for the emergency services.
Once heroin boundaries were established, overdoses became rare and the educated addicts lived as long as any other from there background. A later wave developed from those who had been unclean with needle use as hepatitis c and liver damage, often from those who drank too. These people began to die in their fifties to mid sixties. Yet a good half survived pretty much unscathed through heroin use.
The playing with hard drugs is dangerous. Some get through, many don't. They provide sensation and sparkle up otherwise pointless lives. They stifle any creativity. Their advocates seldom use the sacramental psychedelics of the shamanic explorer. Still, it is up to each man and woman to choose their own path. Homosexuality is not only frowned on by religious people who are left behind current thinking with their superstitions. Quite why another has the right to dictate what one does to ones own body is becoming a hard argument to support. Assisted dieing garners 80% of public support yet parliament ran the bill and failed to match what the people want. This trend of politicians belief in knowing better than common man heald back gay sex laws. It now holds back drug legislation. Despite Portugal legalising all drugs and seeing the deaths halve and use drop dramatically.
They drove in convoy toward Shropshire. Peter led though kept a close eye on liptons van fearing he may steer away. He still hadn't explained his suicide attempt. For sure he'd given a cover story but peter recognised this for the lie it was.
The Shaman can develope skills beyond the reach of others. My journeys into other dimensions had culminated into submergence into the collective Earth consiousness. Whilst losing individuality my body remained stumbling through woodland whilst my mind became one with all immediate matter. First staring at the ground I found myself spreading amongst the soil, the broken down vegetation, amongst the beetles, worms, wood lice and countless smaller life forms. At will focus could be applied to individual particles of stone, individual cells of decaying twigs, ultimately down to molecular particles. Relax of focus and whatever I had dissolved into spread to join roots, branches, trees and the entire woodland. A small river took over my attention and I flowed and washed down over submerged rocks, my sense of touch could feel all the river felt. Not following h2o particles but writhing with the turbulence as I caressed stream bed rocks and fallen branches, spiralling in to eddies, cool and oxegenated my presence was in the wave forms and rivulets that tickled fish; the banks, my containment felt gentle as a bob sleigh run. Focusing above I joined sky to feel clouds tickling my sides as I looked down on the woods and no particular association to the body of Skree still walking, no closer to me then any tree, rock or puddle. I had no self. Just a shared participation in a greater Gaya consiousness. This transcendence left me the choice. To remain free and immaterial, able to be all from wind to stream to soil particle. And here I remained. I delivered what had been my body to Peter, some part of what had been myself. As a shaman I had been able to enter other dimensions, finally I had transcended the self, the physical, the individuation I was born with. This individuation I passed on to Peter, and wished him well. He knew nothing of my separation off. My disembodiment could travel as the wind. Time became no longer the yardstick of sequential cause and effect I had known prior to transcendence. Now all events were ever present, only my focus could bring a moment to the surface, just as a man felled a tree in Finland at the same moment a woman washed her clothes in The Gambia, so my birth, Peters birth, my death, peters death, all that came before and all that would follow his brief window of life, eternity was now a constant, my awareness free to journey.
Such change can not be accepted as the shackles of all prior understanding was built on pillars now gradually dissolving. The transition from individual to global consiousness, like a bottle of ink poured into the sea required experience. The giving up of ego, the loss of self, so crucial to human being, takes seasons to fully lose. This half state, of reflection to self would linger while I learned to not be I but to disperse into the all. Half consious of others, spirits, souls, on this same transition, some like myself, newly dislodged, others but shadows of self awareness, drifting into the all. The single consiousness. I will use my transition to watch Peter. Curiosity at where my other would go and a protective love, the guardian angel I could be. Jesses gift.
The Archangel flew over church stretton, the styler stones.
Driving across the Gloucestershire border, across to Herefordshire then belting up the A49 to Shropshire Peter kept a vigilant eye on his mirrors. Clearly Lipton was in a right state. He might pull off down some sneaky back road. Escape his freind to finish what he had begun. The two men hadn't discussed liptons suicide attempt any further. Suicide is madness. To ask a person why misses the point. For sure, there were always reasons but these invariably made little sense to an outsider. What got Peter was that in many ways he was the more emotional of the two. The artist to Liptons technician. Peter designed the missions, Lipton plotted the paths, fixed the engines, oiled the gears. Even at their lowest Peter had seldom had to buck up Liptons spirit. And as for bravery, Lipton was way ahead. On the night they'd tackled the under structure of Clifton Suspension Bridge Peter had nearly frozen as they shimmied out onto the support structure. It was only through Liptons fearlessness in disentangling Peters safety ropes that had tangled him up that they'd escaped unharmed. Peter had taken the lead but once halfway across the curved steel under frame main spar had somehow got his ropes knotted on some out jutting fixture unseen underneath. Fearful of heights Peter found himself unable to reposition himself to look at what snagged him. Looking down caused him a dizzying sickness. Lipton, like a fearless squirrel hung himself below the steel and worked dextrously to undo the tangle. Yet something had arisen to make him seek to take his own life. Peter was mildly offended his brother in so many schemes of death defying adventure had spun some bullshit about having his benefits cut off. Lipton had survived as a street beggar, a homeless hustler on the streets of several cities, from London to Aberdeen, from Worcester to Brighton. Lipton had gone feral in the wilds of Scotland with little more than a fishing line, a knife and a flint, living on rabbits, fish, squirrels and wild fruits and berries. He'd lived this way for months in Wales also. Indeed this was how he chose to rattle. An idea of such raw fearlessness it baffled Peter. But it was up to him to keep his reasons to himself. Peter would try his best to bring out the warrior in Lipton. Together there was little they feared. They'd climbed structures others would never consider. Tunnelled miles underground. Battled with gangs of street piss heads. And all these things had brought them close. So why wouldn't Lipton trust peter with his suicide solution? Since splitting from Skree, Peters life hadn't been so fucking good either yet he wasn't bailing out to leave Lipton alone to fight the grey. Had it meant nothing to Lipton? The search for Jesse? Meeting the archangel Gabriel? Meeting Jesse his mrs and boys? Murdering Abel? Had all that been for nought? To swing from a tree? As with most freinds and family of the suicider, Peter felt more angered than anything.
These thoughts spiralled around Peters mind as they pulled into craven Arms. This drab market town now had a visitor centre, a futile attempt to pull tourists from passing cars that took a swift trip from ludlows timber framed buildings and new gastronomic emergence, up to Shrewsbury, once the country's capital city and still dripping in history. Craven Arms, for the tourist is to be driven through. It's abattoir and farmers auction, it's functional hardware and farmers suppliers and basic supermarket offered little but confusion to the outsider. Insular and grey. Yet hidden behind the town is more secret history than most tourists can imagine. The trilogy of hill forts awaited the boys approach.
Parking up their vans, Peter and Lipton walked together towards the supermarket to buy food and booze. They'd be out in the sticks for three nights. One for each hill fort before their next chance to stock up at Clun. As the two left the supermarket a news stand caught Liptons eye. The local paper, the Shropshire Star. Headline, 'Youth Suicides link.' Slipping a copy under his jacket, they walked to the vans.
"See you at the foot of the first hill fort. You've got your bearings?"
"Aye, sorted," Lipton replied but the article heald his attention and before following Peters Mercedes he read the local news.
'The recent spate of teenager suicides that has brought misery to local towns appear to be connected. This epidemic has now taken the lives of fifteen young people with everything to live for. Police have found details in the diaries of the deceased that form a pattern but are unprepared at this stage to make any further statements. Detective inspector David Drummond said, " there appears to be a link between the young deaths as all were connected as freinds who attended the same parties and most went to two local schools. As yet we can not give further details though we can say that all the deceased left notes on what they were thinking. If anyone knows more about this dangerous subculture we would be grateful if they could please come forward. I promise all who do complete anonymity. No one is in trouble, we just need to get to the bottom of this to prevent any further tragedies." Reports of teenage parties held over the summer are believed to be connected though Drummond could not confirm this.'
Lipton put the Shropshire star on the passenger seat and stared out from his van cab, looking up to the hills where he and Peter were headed. 'Here too,' he quietly said to himself as he sparked up his engine and drove off following the back of Peters van as it turned off the main drag and off into a country lane.
Sent from my iPad
The two old freinds set off. They both knew Skree had been up in the Shropshire area, checking out the styper stones, the hill forts of which there were hundreds in the area and other ancient sites. Peter felt, though he'd kept it from Lipton , that if they could find Skree, Lipton would lift his spirits in deference to the adventures they had shared. Both had been keen drug users of a broad pharmacopeia but as a man ages, the body can no longer hold out. The pattern had been throughout their lives, little to no damage from the psychedelics of their teens, amphetamines had seen a rise in violence with the parallel alcohol use and several amphetamine psychosis cases spend a month sectioned though these usually returned not permanently damaged. When heroin came in a nihilism spread and all three surviving brothers had a good dozen close freinds die from over dose. Motor cycle deaths were also common during the 16 to 26 year bracket, taking roughly half as many as heroin. None of them had used bikes much during this period of learning their boundaries nor heroin where so many overdoses occurred due to lack of know how. Motorbikes and heroin. For sure the heroin left dead loved ones but motorcycle deaths were equally selfish leaving other spin off deaths and terrible messes for the emergency services.
Once heroin boundaries were established, overdoses became rare and the educated addicts lived as long as any other from there background. A later wave developed from those who had been unclean with needle use as hepatitis c and liver damage, often from those who drank too. These people began to die in their fifties to mid sixties. Yet a good half survived pretty much unscathed through heroin use.
The playing with hard drugs is dangerous. Some get through, many don't. They provide sensation and sparkle up otherwise pointless lives. They stifle any creativity. Their advocates seldom use the sacramental psychedelics of the shamanic explorer. Still, it is up to each man and woman to choose their own path. Homosexuality is not only frowned on by religious people who are left behind current thinking with their superstitions. Quite why another has the right to dictate what one does to ones own body is becoming a hard argument to support. Assisted dieing garners 80% of public support yet parliament ran the bill and failed to match what the people want. This trend of politicians belief in knowing better than common man heald back gay sex laws. It now holds back drug legislation. Despite Portugal legalising all drugs and seeing the deaths halve and use drop dramatically.
They drove in convoy toward Shropshire. Peter led though kept a close eye on liptons van fearing he may steer away. He still hadn't explained his suicide attempt. For sure he'd given a cover story but peter recognised this for the lie it was.
The Shaman can develope skills beyond the reach of others. My journeys into other dimensions had culminated into submergence into the collective Earth consiousness. Whilst losing individuality my body remained stumbling through woodland whilst my mind became one with all immediate matter. First staring at the ground I found myself spreading amongst the soil, the broken down vegetation, amongst the beetles, worms, wood lice and countless smaller life forms. At will focus could be applied to individual particles of stone, individual cells of decaying twigs, ultimately down to molecular particles. Relax of focus and whatever I had dissolved into spread to join roots, branches, trees and the entire woodland. A small river took over my attention and I flowed and washed down over submerged rocks, my sense of touch could feel all the river felt. Not following h2o particles but writhing with the turbulence as I caressed stream bed rocks and fallen branches, spiralling in to eddies, cool and oxegenated my presence was in the wave forms and rivulets that tickled fish; the banks, my containment felt gentle as a bob sleigh run. Focusing above I joined sky to feel clouds tickling my sides as I looked down on the woods and no particular association to the body of Skree still walking, no closer to me then any tree, rock or puddle. I had no self. Just a shared participation in a greater Gaya consiousness. This transcendence left me the choice. To remain free and immaterial, able to be all from wind to stream to soil particle. And here I remained. I delivered what had been my body to Peter, some part of what had been myself. As a shaman I had been able to enter other dimensions, finally I had transcended the self, the physical, the individuation I was born with. This individuation I passed on to Peter, and wished him well. He knew nothing of my separation off. My disembodiment could travel as the wind. Time became no longer the yardstick of sequential cause and effect I had known prior to transcendence. Now all events were ever present, only my focus could bring a moment to the surface, just as a man felled a tree in Finland at the same moment a woman washed her clothes in The Gambia, so my birth, Peters birth, my death, peters death, all that came before and all that would follow his brief window of life, eternity was now a constant, my awareness free to journey.
Such change can not be accepted as the shackles of all prior understanding was built on pillars now gradually dissolving. The transition from individual to global consiousness, like a bottle of ink poured into the sea required experience. The giving up of ego, the loss of self, so crucial to human being, takes seasons to fully lose. This half state, of reflection to self would linger while I learned to not be I but to disperse into the all. Half consious of others, spirits, souls, on this same transition, some like myself, newly dislodged, others but shadows of self awareness, drifting into the all. The single consiousness. I will use my transition to watch Peter. Curiosity at where my other would go and a protective love, the guardian angel I could be. Jesses gift.
The Archangel flew over church stretton, the styler stones.
Driving across the Gloucestershire border, across to Herefordshire then belting up the A49 to Shropshire Peter kept a vigilant eye on his mirrors. Clearly Lipton was in a right state. He might pull off down some sneaky back road. Escape his freind to finish what he had begun. The two men hadn't discussed liptons suicide attempt any further. Suicide is madness. To ask a person why misses the point. For sure, there were always reasons but these invariably made little sense to an outsider. What got Peter was that in many ways he was the more emotional of the two. The artist to Liptons technician. Peter designed the missions, Lipton plotted the paths, fixed the engines, oiled the gears. Even at their lowest Peter had seldom had to buck up Liptons spirit. And as for bravery, Lipton was way ahead. On the night they'd tackled the under structure of Clifton Suspension Bridge Peter had nearly frozen as they shimmied out onto the support structure. It was only through Liptons fearlessness in disentangling Peters safety ropes that had tangled him up that they'd escaped unharmed. Peter had taken the lead but once halfway across the curved steel under frame main spar had somehow got his ropes knotted on some out jutting fixture unseen underneath. Fearful of heights Peter found himself unable to reposition himself to look at what snagged him. Looking down caused him a dizzying sickness. Lipton, like a fearless squirrel hung himself below the steel and worked dextrously to undo the tangle. Yet something had arisen to make him seek to take his own life. Peter was mildly offended his brother in so many schemes of death defying adventure had spun some bullshit about having his benefits cut off. Lipton had survived as a street beggar, a homeless hustler on the streets of several cities, from London to Aberdeen, from Worcester to Brighton. Lipton had gone feral in the wilds of Scotland with little more than a fishing line, a knife and a flint, living on rabbits, fish, squirrels and wild fruits and berries. He'd lived this way for months in Wales also. Indeed this was how he chose to rattle. An idea of such raw fearlessness it baffled Peter. But it was up to him to keep his reasons to himself. Peter would try his best to bring out the warrior in Lipton. Together there was little they feared. They'd climbed structures others would never consider. Tunnelled miles underground. Battled with gangs of street piss heads. And all these things had brought them close. So why wouldn't Lipton trust peter with his suicide solution? Since splitting from Skree, Peters life hadn't been so fucking good either yet he wasn't bailing out to leave Lipton alone to fight the grey. Had it meant nothing to Lipton? The search for Jesse? Meeting the archangel Gabriel? Meeting Jesse his mrs and boys? Murdering Abel? Had all that been for nought? To swing from a tree? As with most freinds and family of the suicider, Peter felt more angered than anything.
These thoughts spiralled around Peters mind as they pulled into craven Arms. This drab market town now had a visitor centre, a futile attempt to pull tourists from passing cars that took a swift trip from ludlows timber framed buildings and new gastronomic emergence, up to Shrewsbury, once the country's capital city and still dripping in history. Craven Arms, for the tourist is to be driven through. It's abattoir and farmers auction, it's functional hardware and farmers suppliers and basic supermarket offered little but confusion to the outsider. Insular and grey. Yet hidden behind the town is more secret history than most tourists can imagine. The trilogy of hill forts awaited the boys approach.
Parking up their vans, Peter and Lipton walked together towards the supermarket to buy food and booze. They'd be out in the sticks for three nights. One for each hill fort before their next chance to stock up at Clun. As the two left the supermarket a news stand caught Liptons eye. The local paper, the Shropshire Star. Headline, 'Youth Suicides link.' Slipping a copy under his jacket, they walked to the vans.
"See you at the foot of the first hill fort. You've got your bearings?"
"Aye, sorted," Lipton replied but the article heald his attention and before following Peters Mercedes he read the local news.
'The recent spate of teenager suicides that has brought misery to local towns appear to be connected. This epidemic has now taken the lives of fifteen young people with everything to live for. Police have found details in the diaries of the deceased that form a pattern but are unprepared at this stage to make any further statements. Detective inspector David Drummond said, " there appears to be a link between the young deaths as all were connected as freinds who attended the same parties and most went to two local schools. As yet we can not give further details though we can say that all the deceased left notes on what they were thinking. If anyone knows more about this dangerous subculture we would be grateful if they could please come forward. I promise all who do complete anonymity. No one is in trouble, we just need to get to the bottom of this to prevent any further tragedies." Reports of teenage parties held over the summer are believed to be connected though Drummond could not confirm this.'
Lipton put the Shropshire star on the passenger seat and stared out from his van cab, looking up to the hills where he and Peter were headed. 'Here too,' he quietly said to himself as he sparked up his engine and drove off following the back of Peters van as it turned off the main drag and off into a country lane.
Sent from my iPad
Wednesday 21 October 2015
Tuesday 20 October 2015
The Quest
The Quest
The question of whether there is a personal interventionist God. One who listens to and answers prayers, is, to me, clearly answered in the negative. I can't recall a time when I ever believed despite praying with my mother as a young child. Born again atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens stand out as they have the zeal of revelation or anger at having been duped. A lifelong atheist like myself would consider writing a book on the God delusion as a waste of time. There are bigger questions.
How the universe came about, why are we here? Etc are as beyond the reach of contemporary science as they are beyond religion. A commitment to reason and a degree of condescension to the idea of faith and the supernatural are, to me, a moral good. Clearly being reasonable, positioning reason above superstition, is a moral good. Being closed to reason and the better argument is a character flaw however virtually no one, on any subject, from politics, philosophy to religion, is sufficiently secure in their self to accept the better argument over their own. This is true of scientists as much as the religious however much they may claim otherwise. It is human to decide upon a theory and find evidence to support it whilst dismissing evidence against. This is common to the working of all human minds bar the very select. Faith in a people's God given right is the basis of territorial wars such as the Zionist versus Palestinian conflict. It isn't of much use to say land is yours because a god others don't believe in gave it to you. Such debates ought to take place under secular agreement.
More interesting questions are; is consciousness an emergent property of the brain? This seems all but proven by the effects drugs, brain damage and Alzheimer's have on us. Yet we are no where close to understanding how matter can think never mind David Chalmers big question of consciousness. For most of the twentieth century neuroscience touched only on cognition and computation. Emotions were deemed far too slippery to try understand. More recently we are finding neurochemistry with correlates to love, joy, anger etc. There will no doubt develop a biology of emotion.
What interests me now is the first hand mystical experience and what it means. Sometimes referred to as pure consciousness and if the two are the same. These states exist as evidently as does love. Just as falling in love has a biological neural correlate, so, in all likelihood does the mystical experience. But neurobiology has little to offer in the understanding of love. This is the job of poets, artists, musicians. Science has its limits. But why do they occur? What is their purpose? Why do some never experience them despite, in some cases, devoting their lives in their pursuit. And why can they occur out of the blue to an ardent atheist, a scientist, a Christian, a Moslem, an agnostic, a dentist or a bricklayer who seeks them not in the least? Why are the features that are common to the mystical experience usually similar? One can argue love has an evolutionary purpose in reproduction and protection of family and tribe. But the mystical, the highest human experience that most never enjoy, what evolutionary purpose can that be said to have?
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The question of whether there is a personal interventionist God. One who listens to and answers prayers, is, to me, clearly answered in the negative. I can't recall a time when I ever believed despite praying with my mother as a young child. Born again atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens stand out as they have the zeal of revelation or anger at having been duped. A lifelong atheist like myself would consider writing a book on the God delusion as a waste of time. There are bigger questions.
How the universe came about, why are we here? Etc are as beyond the reach of contemporary science as they are beyond religion. A commitment to reason and a degree of condescension to the idea of faith and the supernatural are, to me, a moral good. Clearly being reasonable, positioning reason above superstition, is a moral good. Being closed to reason and the better argument is a character flaw however virtually no one, on any subject, from politics, philosophy to religion, is sufficiently secure in their self to accept the better argument over their own. This is true of scientists as much as the religious however much they may claim otherwise. It is human to decide upon a theory and find evidence to support it whilst dismissing evidence against. This is common to the working of all human minds bar the very select. Faith in a people's God given right is the basis of territorial wars such as the Zionist versus Palestinian conflict. It isn't of much use to say land is yours because a god others don't believe in gave it to you. Such debates ought to take place under secular agreement.
More interesting questions are; is consciousness an emergent property of the brain? This seems all but proven by the effects drugs, brain damage and Alzheimer's have on us. Yet we are no where close to understanding how matter can think never mind David Chalmers big question of consciousness. For most of the twentieth century neuroscience touched only on cognition and computation. Emotions were deemed far too slippery to try understand. More recently we are finding neurochemistry with correlates to love, joy, anger etc. There will no doubt develop a biology of emotion.
What interests me now is the first hand mystical experience and what it means. Sometimes referred to as pure consciousness and if the two are the same. These states exist as evidently as does love. Just as falling in love has a biological neural correlate, so, in all likelihood does the mystical experience. But neurobiology has little to offer in the understanding of love. This is the job of poets, artists, musicians. Science has its limits. But why do they occur? What is their purpose? Why do some never experience them despite, in some cases, devoting their lives in their pursuit. And why can they occur out of the blue to an ardent atheist, a scientist, a Christian, a Moslem, an agnostic, a dentist or a bricklayer who seeks them not in the least? Why are the features that are common to the mystical experience usually similar? One can argue love has an evolutionary purpose in reproduction and protection of family and tribe. But the mystical, the highest human experience that most never enjoy, what evolutionary purpose can that be said to have?
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Sunday 18 October 2015
The Mystical Experience Registry: What is Mysticism and the Mystical Experience?
>>> Good Einstein quote that sums up the mystical experience. Having experienced the mystical, my remaining time will be committed to returning to the mystical state, finding ways to recreate it and attempting to understand what it means. I don't believe in an interventionist God but I have entered the collective consciousness more than once. It exists. Perhaps this is what some people refer to as God. It can not be shared or explained but if experienced, you will never question its existence again. As to what it means, I am as unsure as I ever have been. It appears that we are part of something far greater, that self is an illusion.
http://www.bodysoulandspirit.net/mystical_experiences/learn/define.shtml
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http://www.bodysoulandspirit.net/mystical_experiences/learn/define.shtml
Sent from my iPad
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