Archive: Edward James description of taking a ‘trip’ in his hotel room in Mexico; Pavel Tchelitchew – Hide and Seek, including studies for, from a tree on EJ estate
Others: Aldous Huxley – Doors of Perception; Rupert Sheldrake – Entangled Life.
Location: Colworth Down, Rabbit Warren, West Dean Woods, Several Beeches
Melting in.
Melting into yourself.
As I go out today, I’ve been absorbing the ideas on psilocybin from Merlin Sheldrake’s book, from the fungi and the mycorrhizal relationship, or bond, with tree. In nature they bloom into mushrooms. They are a link to expanding consciousness and imagination. On this walk, I’m considering the dissolving of the ego, where you lose the sense of your edges; where it is no longer about defending or building yourself into some thing, it is about melting in to what you already are.
Sheldrake writes about the idea that these type of experiences, enhanced by the psychological properties of some fungi, supported leaps in civilisation from expanded consciousness or states of mind. That the imagination and possibilities have influenced the leaps in which humanity has done things in different ways; but significantly an experience of being one, of being community, of being ‘you’ ‘we are the same’.
Young beech, dilapidated pens, old coppice stools, wide tracks, scented undulating pines that raise.
Edward James was looking to find a higher state of consciousness which is evident, you only need take a look at one of his surrealist artist works to see that. He knew Krishnamurti, went to see a Swami Prabhavananda to learn to meditate, was friends with Aldous Huxley who wrote Doors of Perception on his experiences taking mescaline, an hallucinogenic from cacti. James wrote an essay on his own trip when he took a substance in a hotel apartment in Mexico and as he lay on his back waiting, a divine-like apparition opened up above him but was interrupted by his pet bird squawking in the bathroom.
The trees are painted pink. The trees will be interrupted soon.
There is also graffiti.
The light tunnels and raises in pine.
Dazzling dance of curvy chestnut in a clearing of pine. To pine, to long for.
Coppice hazel like the hands in Tchelitchev’s drawings.
Bang into glockenspiels as the wind picks up.
exercise
lay down on the ground. close your eyes. fall into the earth. let the feelings in your body disperse from the falling like spores releasing. open your eyes. what do you notice? what thoughts, what do you see?
close your eyes.
fall again, into the earth, let yourself fall through your body into the earth, let yourself spill out. fall more. surrender.
open your eyes again.
what do you notice?
draw that.
