Tag: psychedelics

More friends than I can count on eight fingers and two thumbs have asked me recently for advice on how to slow down. As somewhat of an expert in the life of slow-living, I raise my eyebrows and say bro if you know, you know.

This is unhelpful.

But like Columbo nearing the end of a tricky episode, I do have some leads. This is in reference to the type of practices that involve that icky word, the one ending with -ritual, that starts with the old…

GIMME AN S

GIMME A P

GIMME AN I  

The monk on the mountaintop, vibing out.

An evolutionary explanation for depression is that we haven’t caught up with the demands of the 21^st century, the demands this endless stream of connectivity places on us. That we have no ability to switch off. And to switch off, we look at newsfeeds, scroll TikTok, relax into box-sets, still unrealisingly at the behest of a pixelated screen.

The pale blue light.

I have a spiritual practice of sorts. Me and silence fist-bump most days. I’m not levitating at the top of some hill in the Xi’an mountains, but it’s something I’ve been doing for three years, that is some sort of peace outside the maelstrom. A moment you take back just for you.

I told a mate I was writing this, and he was like bruh hit me. Maybe I can fit it into the 13 seconds I have between 08:09:00 and 08:09:13 when I’m not drowning in a morass of Weetabix, two year old’s logic, odd socks and unanswered emails.

This is it, we have no time anymore.

The Victorians had no time, but at least they lived in the present, in the world in front of their eyes, rather than the one the wrong side of a hundred notifications on some high-tech piece of plastic.

The only way out, is in.

Junot Diaz

I’d say this.

The less time we have, the more spiritual practice we need. It is the only real antidote to a brain that has no time to breathe. The spiritual part is the recharge. The 20-40 minutes out of your day that make the rest of it manageable. This would probably sound more convincing coming from Elon Musk than someone who takes navel-gazing to a fine art. But lessons along the way I have learnt. And I have no doubt the things I can recount have made me fundamentally happier, more at peace.

If you want the skinny. Click HERE.

I outline my method.

If you want the meandering story of my path to Zen, with the same information but some deft wordplay thrown in, keep reading.

It begins three years ago with a cold shower.

Much like Mr Shining above, I wasn’t cold showers’ number one fanboy, but I was curious as to why and how incredible it made me feel, how it instantly reduced my need for blow-your-head off ristrettos by 80%. You know when Earth Fire Water Wind and Heart come together to make Captain Planet.

That’s how I felt.

I don’t think I’ve had more than three hot showers in the last three years. No lie. On the phone to my couz one day, he suggested I take these cold shower sacrifices one step further, and try out Wim Hof. Enter the world of breathwork.

He sent a vid through.

Deep breath.

The rest is oxygenated history.

Most days, this is what I get up to. I wake up, sit on the sofa in my dressing gown, hyperventilate for about 17 minutes and then watch my scrotum shrink to prepubescent levels for two minutes. I’ve never felt better.

My fine-looking friend of the billowy linen shirts Raymond aka El Blanco came to stay for a few weeks last year, and got so into my routine we used to sit opposite each other every morning in some E8 ashram, jus vibing out. We’d put this amazing album on in which the spiritual teacher Ram Dass would remind us to get out of our thinking minds, over the top of some lovely melodic eastern music, and go in.

After that much oxygen depravation, even the lilies in my flat would take on an otherworldly nature, I couldn’t stop staring at them. It makes sense. After a large mushroom trip, the trip-sitters often give the subjects a flower to look at, they take it in their hands and stare at it, for up to an hour, enraptured.

The Swiss Chemist Albert Hoffman who discovered LSD and lived til the age of 102, would take tiny quantities of acid and go wandering around his garden in the early morning. In conversations with his friend Stanislav Grof, he said:

I see the hand of God there. If they think this is just the work of atoms, they don’t know what they are talking about.

*

Around the summer of ’19, my then girlfriend and I, after assessing our options, went and spent a week in a conference centre on Upper St with a slightly creepy guy called Neil. Projected onto a white board the size of a small microwave, he showed us the ropes of Transcendental Meditation. It wasn’t cheap.

Worth every penny.

But the real eye-opener, of sitting there in silence with your thoughts, and a mantra that you keep repeating in your mind’s ear, is that at some point it becomes a complete departure from thought itself. This is the real story. For the first time in my life, I was able to inhabit an unthinking mind. A mind silent and floaty, like a tumbleweed rolling down the middle of a road in the Midwest. Nothing there. And the peace that brought was hard to put in words.

Take my parents, I’m not sure they would have any idea that such a brain-state existed. A state of mind that was totally separate from thought. That just was. Speaking to a friend of mine last month, describing it to her, I could feel her mouth wide-open down the phone. The concept of unthinking flipped her lid.

I think it might be the most relaxing thing I’ve ever experienced, perhaps ever. I still can’t get over it.

If you ask us what is silence? We will answer it is the Great Mystery. The holy silence is God’s voice. If you ask us what are the fruits of silence. We will answer they are self-control, true courage, endurance, patience, dignity, and reverence. Silence is the cornerstone of character.

Native American Wisdom

Is there no way out of the mind, asked Plath. This, is the answer it strikes me. Quieten the mind, open the heart. The spiritual teaching is this. One of the most beautiful half hour documentaries about it all, is below, this is Ram Dass, his story and him approaching the end of life.

I remember one day a few months back, a twelve hour stint of shit-showery that was just savage. My brain was all over the shop. Endless anxiety, an aggressive spin-cycle, what next, what next, one of those days you start last and keep falling behind. I kept thinking I should meditate. But in my state of rush and worry and problem-solving, I told myself the last thing I have time for today is that.

I forced myself. Took myself up to my chair, the weight of ten trucks, sat myself down.

Began, unwillingly.

Within 20 seconds, I’d breathed the largest sigh of relief in living memory, felt a calm wash over me.

Shit.

This, all day, was the only thing I’d needed. And in my busy brain-addled state I’d just ignored it. Relegated it to something superfluous.

Simple as a buddhist monk
In a temple practicing stillness
Real still til you realise its realness

Lupe Fiasco

Meditative practice, spiritual practice, be it arctic showers, breathing deeply, sitting in a chair and thinking about something or other before going back to the mantra, be it a walk in the woods, a two-day fast, a bath staring up at the ceiling, staring into the eyes of a stranger cracking a smile, staring into a child’s eyes and watching the whole Universe stare back at you, I think we could do with being reminded by our older wiser selves, how to be in the world.

To take time out, away from the maelstrom. To reclaim a little tiny piece, even just ten minutes of calm, to sit in it, pat yourself down, say yes, here I am, this is me. I’m alive. Everything is kind of okay. Onward.

I don’t think we realise how much we need this stuff.

*

There is much more to say.

A man walks into a drugstore in Manhattan.

He pays for some snacks. 11 dollars 11 cents. The exact money spills out of his pocket onto the counter. Outside, light patterns flash against the brick of a tenement building. He looks down at his receipt. 11:11:11. He steps out, at that moment a bus stops, on instinct he boards. At a stop a guide-dog barks twice. He gets off. In the middle of nowhere, he sees the eyes of a stranger, on a billboard. Eyes he’s been looking for, for months.

This is a depiction of Jungian synchronicity.

*

 The other morning just before Christmas, I woke and went to the bathroom.

I’d had strange dreams, and felt unusually dopey. Looking in the mirror, something seemed off. Thinking nothing of it, I decided to shave my head. Gazing down at the hairs on my bathroom floor I began to get scared. I hadn’t taken drugs for weeks and yet I felt totally high. Not rushing, just confused trippy high.

But I didn’t feel in control of my brain, like my perception had jumped somewhere, was refusing to come back. My face in the mirror, the light, my ability to focus. I couldn’t sit with my mood, it scared me, I called my old man in Argentina, began to mumble, he thought I was talking about feeling down, whatever it is that’s on your brain, he said, try to not dwell on it, distract yourself. It was one of those mornings of December after snowfall. I’ll be damned if I was going to stay in my flat and sketch out about losing my mind, I decided to head out.

All around me the colours were startling.

Everything seemed in intense hyper-focus. I wasn’t looking at the sky, a lamppost, the wall of a building. I was seeing colour, shape, form. It was hypnotising and alarming. I looked down at my watch and it said 11:11. In Marks & Spencer by a till I saw the exact same bottle I’d spent ten minutes researching the day before, black with a silver bottle top. Walking down Mare St in the centre of Hackney I just wanted to hide, felt all eyes on me, wondered if I looked different. Glancing to my left on the glass of the Vodafone shop I saw the words.

What the hell was happening.

I crossed London on the tube. It was a horror show. I’d never experienced anything like it. Not panic but an intense overwhelming paranoia. It got too much, I ascended from the depths, walked through Leicester Square, picked up a free copy of the Quran, two Muslim men wanted to talk to me about faith. I want to, I said, I just can’t, not right now. They smiled, no problem. By the afternoon the intensity had worn off somewhat but the feeling lasted for three days.

*

The guy on the bus in New York, what I experienced in December, one of the weirdest weeks of my life, are examples of a phenomenon that Jung called synchronicity. Synchronous events, one of Jung’s favourite and yet most far-out theories, ran in direct opposition to what we call chance. What he observed and went as far as he could to prove, is that serendipitous events, not all but many, have their roots in something far more mysterious.

Something akin to the Universe connecting with us, that patterns and coincidence are happening all around us all the time. That could have a greater inter-connectedness than any we would like to explain away. Jung was labelled as a mystic, derided by many as a fantasist, and yet flying in the face of post-enlightenment rationality, the realm of spirit and the realm of the mystical, the one being shoved in my face on that strangest of weeks in December, was the one demanding I stare down the idea that the world is a far more mysterious place than we might want to concede.

The classic story of synchronicity involves the scarab beetle. Jung is talking with a client, telling him about a dream she’d had involving a piece of jewellery in the shape of a scarab beetle. Jung hears a tapping on the window, opens it, spies a scarab beetle on the window sill. He plucks it out of thin air, ‘here is your scarab’. Overwhelmed by this uncanny link between the material world and her psyche, a hitherto untapped channel of her psychoanalysis opens.

The story is more complicated than that, but that’s the gist.

It is very hard to explain synchronicity. I don’t really understand it. I’m not sure it can be understood. It means literally ‘syn-chronos’, in time. Coincidences that break statistical probability, a conspiracy of improbabilities. Meaningful to you, moving you into an expanded state of awareness. Something like an accessing of core-consciousness.

But what this then means about the state of the world is beyond mysterious. It is something to do with dreams, thinking about someone and them calling, telepathic intuition, prophecy, a deterministic universe, that kind of thing. A bit like the idea of manifesting… my mate Milly asked me in the pub the other night as I spent an hour boring her about it all. I looked quizzical. Kinda, I think. It’s in that realm.

*

The other day in the supermarket I look down at my phone queueing for the checkout.

Numerology. I see repeating numbers all the time. This is a collage of what I saw the week before last. This is not me waiting for this to happen. It is every time I’ve looked down at the time, seen this pattern, and taken a photo. There were four or five I didn’t even snap.

It’s just arithmetic, says Fede my couz, over from Argentina. How many times do you look at your watch an hour, work it out. I’m shit at maths, I say. Part of me doesn’t want to. Doesn’t want to prove that this is just a fantasy. But look there wouldn’t be books written about this bananas theory if there wasn’t something going on. It’s just extremely bizarre.

There are two ways of digesting this stuff.

The Colin Farrell way

Or the Mr Miyagi way

When I told a mate I was writing about the universe communicating with me, she went all Colin Farrell on me, errr sounds pretty woo-woo, she frowned. I would’ve said the same two years ago. I spend my waking life with someone who wholeheartedly can’t handle it, who can’t wait to hammer home these thoughts are a nonsense.

The left-side of my brain.

Those at the coal face of understanding existence, said Ian McGilchrist the neuroscientist, are the Physicists and the Poets. The left hemisphere is problem-solving, logical, survivalist, the right hemisphere is the realm of the artist, the one letting in information from all angles. And both work in tandem with each other. But they are equally important. What was happening to me I think was an overload of right brain, and the left brain, the one doubting myself and worried I was losing my shit, was throwing its toys out of the pram.

Sometimes it gets too much to think about and I have to meditate, sit in an armchair and clear my head of all thought. But it’s very benevolent, it’s not like I’m tapping into some primeval well of the human psyche and making plans for world domination, all I seem to care about is good vibes and the colour of the sky.

The Universe is listening
Be careful what you say in it

Jay Electronica

Stories of synchronous events are everywhere. Anyone who tells me the experiences brought about by psychedelics are merely the brain on drugs, as Dawkins seems to want to insist, are speaking out of their bums. Skepticism is easy. There is nothing easier than to discount something that cannot be proved. Psychedelics, not mushrooms in a field, but I mean in very high-doses, reveal to us a totally new way of seeing.

This is where faith comes in, faith in things outside of the realm of our understanding.

Can it go too far, the deterministic universe thing. The other day I found myself watching Hugo Lloris make a save, and my thought was, well he was meant to do that. Maktub, Thierry once taught me, is Arabic for ‘it is written’. They say it all the time. It is written. But how do you reconcile what just happened in Syria and Turkey. Was that written. And still, their worldview is different. There seems to be no fear in them.

I’m trying fairly unconvincingly to tie all this stuff together.

Perhaps I’m simply choosing to follow signs. Maybe the fact you’re looking for a sign, is the sign you’ve been looking for, said the stencil on the electrical box the other day off Redchurch st.

It’s not what you look at, but what you see.

But is it visionary, or delusional. Or both.

John Frusciante, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers guitarist, said this. The force that created us is expressing itself through our existence. Rick Rubin subscribes completely to this version of events. Dylan described his early albums in an interview. I can’t do that anymore, he says. I could once. Not anymore. Those early songs were almost magically written.

Alan Watts, the philosopher, was in.

I suppose there is a danger, that leaving too much in the hands of the universe, of fate, things can get weird. There is a rational order for a reason. People have tested fate by jumping in front of cars knowing it’s not their time. And it hasn’t worked out very well. We can invent patterns because we want to see them. This is wish-fulfilment. There of course is such a thing as coincidence, said Jung.

But it is more complicated.

The invisible realm is highly populated, thought the Mazatecs of Mexico. They have a much deeper relationship with dreams. With the unconscious. The occult, tarot, the I Ching. The famous Chinese book of divination that obsessed Jung and Terrence McKenna.

The problem is you can over-egg the omelette. Sitting on the terrace one day over Christmas, a beautiful multicoloured fly landed on my arm. And I was like, did that happen for a reason. A bit much I think. But this type of thinking lends itself to the idea that the universe is not just happening to you, but for you. Tug on anything for long enough, said Muir, and you take the entire universe with you.

I’ve had experiences in the last two years, too personal to go into, that have upturned the apple cart. That have punctured the 4^th wall of the world, stuck a finger through the air of some invisible border and made everything ripple. And from there, doors have opened. Overwhelming to the point where now I can’t rule anything out. Never felt more aware of how little we understand everything.

That same strange week in December, the week of the peculiar goings-on, I’d seen a snowman out of my window being built and thought about it a lot. The next day I hear the postbox go. A package from Amazon, I open it.

I was in disbelief. In my very bendy state, the universe had sent me this. An hour later my mother texts from Argentina telling me to bring the copy of the Snowman, a present for little Mary. Oh. Maybe the universe doesn’t have an Amazon account.

But this is the mystery of synchronicity. The synchronicity was my decision to spend ten minutes the day before seeing a snowman and dwelling on it and being moved by the idea of snowmen. As that package was already winding its way to me in the post.

Who the hell knows.

This is above my brain-power and pay-grade. But to completely disregard what is not provable, to be shackled to the scientific mind, seems to me a poverty of thought. My mother bought two copies by mistake, so I got to keep one. I still have the copy of The Snowman, to remind me of that strange week, and a notion of some mystical world, a dream that lives in me still.

Where does it lead. Who knows. But at times, especially out in the street, it feels eerily like an observer, the universe is there watching me, has a gentle benevolent kind eye trained on Domingo. Trained on all of us, if we cultivate the space to feel its gaze. It enriches my every day.

Will I look back on the last few months in five years as a time of temporary lunacy. Where I thought I’d found the key to the universe’s secrets, and actually my brain was playing tricks on me. Or was it a sort of awakening. I dunno. Part of me thinks I have opened a door that will never close.

Another step on some path to spirituality. My once girlfriend Skye, on the phone recently, listened as I told her I felt I was getting more spiritual by the day, you’ve always been very spiritual silly, she said. So maybe I didn’t know I knew. But was finding out what some part of me already did. All learning is remembering, said an old Greek guy.

All we can get are rare glimpses. Of something grandiose, unexplainable.

I’ll take what Roald said.

Might be one of my favourite things ever.

I made it onto the nation’s airwaves the other day.

I had some things to say that needed saying. In my moment of glory I glossed over coronavirus and the size of Chris Witty’s collar, avoided mention of the Oprah interview and went straight for the jugular. Talked about the most important thing I could think of. Mark (if that’s your real name bro) had called in saying he thought this was LBC’s most boring phone-in ever, and I was having none of it.

Psychedelic substances are the talk of the town.

Micro-dosing tech wizards in California, Ayahuasca ceremonies in East Anglia, psilocybin clinical trials for the treatment of addiction and depression, the psychedelic revolution that was shut down in the 60s has come back for round two. But what exactly are these things. And why do they even exist. For my money, psychedelics pose the most important questions of all, ones we simply have no answer to.

*

Peterson looks deadly seriously at his interviewer:

What we don’t understand about psychedelics is a very thick book. They bend the structure of reality. I have no idea what they do. They could be anything. They are unbelievably strange. What they reveal to me is how little we know about everything, and that’s a terrifying thing.

Something to be investigated further?

With great risk.

A couple shroomz on a hill at sunset, what’s so terrifying about that bruh. In small doses psychedelics can bring on a feeling of calm and connectedness, can amplify colour and sound, can give you hysterics, some profound and beautiful insights, none of which would seem overly terrifying. But you could call this tickling the feet of the sleeping giant. Those most familiar with these substances, the tribes of the Amazon, the Gnostics, the Ancient Egyptians among others, deemed them to be anything but recreational, and to be taken only in very specific circumstances.

The crux of it all, is the size of the dose.

In high doses, psychedelics bring about effects in the brain and changes in consciousness so grandiose and total that they are deemed by their subjects as among the top three most meaningful experiences of their lives. They are experiences that can bring about extreme self-realisation, can heal past trauma and alter the course of lives. But these experiences can also be extremely challenging, and if not taken in the right circumstances are so powerful they can be dangerous. Put simply, the brain does not know what to do with them.

What they put us in touch with is the mystery. Their effect has been described as drawing back the curtain, so we can experience what lies ‘beyond the veil’.

In the famous words of William Blake:

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.

On the walls of caverns from Indonesia to Périgord lying in long forgotten darkness for millennia, prehistoric cave-art show the presence of shamanic transformation, of therianthropic half-men half-beasts, and point to mounting evidence that mankind’s relationship with these substances goes back to the dawn of man itself.

From the Amazonian Tribes who knew inexplicably to combine a leaf with a vine from 150,000 plant species in order to make the Ayahuasca brew and when asked how, they replied simply ‘the plants told us’. To the Bwiti people from Gabon who ingest the Iboga root and use it to contact the dead. To the Vedic texts from ancient India and their talk of Soma, a drink made from the Amanita Muscaria mushroom, to the Mayans and their veneration of psilocybin and the mushroom stones carved in their honour.

In Ancient Greece, Eleusis was known as the light of the ancient world. ‘Athens has given nothing to the world more excellent or divine than the Eleusinian mysteries’, wrote Cicero. Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, they all went down into the great subterranean hall, the Telestrion, to drink from a brew called the Kykeon, and reported experiences that transformed their lives and removed their fear of death.

Used the world over by different cultures throughout time, pyschedelics are now known to have been responsible for the birth of religions and profound leaps in cultural evolution. Some posit the Book of Revelation is an account of one long psilocybin trip. There is even mention of mushrooms in the Bible . I dug it out and found in Exodus 16:12 a description of man-na.

In the morning ye shall be filled with bread; and ye shall know that I am The Lord your God. And when the dew that lay was gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground. And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another, it is man-na: for they wist not it was. And Moses said unto them, this is the bread which the Lord hath given you to eat.

*

They are a tool, said the shaman, when I asked him what the hell it all meant. But what does it mean, I kept saying. The previous evening I’d drunk Ayahuasca for the first time and was sitting in a cabin in a wood in Holland with questions teeming inside me that I wanted answers to.

They are an endless library, he said. On thousands of journeys, every time a different book is presented to me. Sometimes I am shown the womb, sometimes an electron moving around a proton, sometimes the outer reaches of the universe, sometimes the dark corners of my past. They are a tool to help us live better.

But his explanation didn’t cut it. This wasn’t answering my question. The world made enough sense as it was, without these mysterious plants or fungi hanging around positing enormous question-marks about the make-up of everything. Why did they exist at all. A tool? If you want to get to an island and you’re not Michael Phelps, odds on you’re going to need a boat to get there. But this didn’t tell me what the hell the island was doing there. According to him these things enabled us to garner learning to help us orient ourselves in the world. Fine, but where did this learning come from. What on earth was this place.

Was it even on earth at all.

The neurochemistry is in.

Psychedelics light up something in the brain called the Default Mode Network. When this is switched on, multiple brain regions are able to interact with each other simultaneously. Brain scans show that most of our neural activity is expended in containment rather than letting things run free. Aldous Huxley called the brain a ‘reducing valve’ and psychedelics ‘gratuitous graces’ provided by nature to allow us to bypass it, in order to see what our brains prevent us from seeing in our normal waking lives.

But it’s still the brain though, barks a defiant Dawkins, when asked what psychedelics reveal about the nature of consciousness.

Fifteen years of DMT research would suggest otherwise. Rick Strassman a psychiatric professor at the University of New Mexico administered dimethyltryptamine to volunteers in clinical trials over a fifteen year period and grew so uncomfortable with his findings he brought the trials to a close. The volunteers all reported the same experience. Being shot out of their bodies like a rocket into worlds of such intense detail that words fall short of describing them, where they encountered entities, some of whom were happy they had been found.

This has given rise to the idea that, contrary to what Dawkins believes, consciousness might reside outside our brains, and that we are more like receivers tuning into a radio frequency. ‘We have absolutely no proof consciousness is generated in the brain: this is the great lesson of psychedelics,’ wrote the Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Grof. What if these medicines allow us to access dimensions we are normally unable to reach, tuning us into new frequencies, permitting us to see beyond the veil of our bandwidth.

Rather than being aware of their hallucinating brain, the DMT subjects reported their experiences to be ‘more real than reality itself’. Their accounts were mystifyingly similar, as if they were all journeying to the same place. But Strassman grew disenchanted with his inability to prove scientifically what these accounts seemed to be revealing, and in the end could only conclude he was in the presence of what he called a spiritual phenomenon.

Whatever room these substances swing a creaking door open to, there is no assurance the human brain can deal with what lurks therein. Maybe evolution has kept the door locked for a reason. In a letter to a friend on the subject of mescaline, Carl Jung warned of Goethe’s poem Der Zauberlehrling the sorcerer’s apprentice, who knew how to summon the ghosts but not how to get rid of them. What one has seen, one cannot then unsee. Jung insisted on being on our guard against ‘wisdom we have not earned’.

This is why Peterson spoke of great risk, and why psychedelics must come with a warning. There is no knowing what resides in the dark corners of the world, what forces are at play there, and what exposure to these things might do to a mind unprepared for it. The interviewer furrows his brow…

Maybe a way to get in touch with the dark side?

Yes… or for the dark side to get in touch with you.

But native cultures saw them as sacred medicines for good reason.

Imagine your mind is a snow-covered hill, wrote a Dutch scientist, and your thoughts are sleds moving down the hillside. The older you get the deeper the grooves in the snow become, until you reach a point where all your thoughts end up following these pre-set grooves all the way down. Psychedelics are a fresh dump of powder. All of a sudden the sleds are able to run free, to move where they want, this way and that, finding all sorts of new ways down, just as the mind can think in new ways denied to it for years, sometimes a whole lifetime.

My experience with Ayahuasca showed me myself in a way I had never seen. I was shown myself walking into a pub, and from a corner incognito I sat and studied myself interacting with people. This was how others saw me, I realised, as I was, rather than through the lens of my relentless self-criticism. I was curious, engaged, quick to laugh, vulnerable, I was alright, I thought. I’m alright.

I often forget that vision and version of myself, floundering in the muck of bad days and regret when I am no friend to myself, but somewhere in me is the understanding that what I saw was the truth, and I must hold onto it. To not forget what was shown to me and to uphold it as an antidote in the unforgiving hours of muted afternoons. If I look hard enough the idol within me is still flickering.

The shaman was right after all. The question I was asking, what does it all mean, had no answer. Once back from these journeys of the mind, the only reality we inhabit is the shared reality in front of our faces, and the learning and self-knowledge can be put into practice only right here, right now. In this way, they can only be tools.

And still the question remains. Why should plants have this kind of intelligence, why should they contain messenger molecules capable of interacting with the human brain to cause such extreme life changing journeys of thought and perception. Could the earth know we are in danger and be trying to get a message to us, the problematic apes, to say wake up.

The modern day shamans of the Amazon believe our world has severed its connection to spirit. That despite our intelligence and civilisation, we are missing out on ancient signals from the earth, messages from the natural world that we are no longer picking up, as if the earth is speaking to us. What if, in the 10,000 years of history and culture and the dawn of modern man, our connection to spirit has been cut. And our unhappiness, our neurosis, our sickness, have moved in to take its place. This might explain the residue left over, why we now sit with our spiritual yearnings and our nostalgia for a paradise lost.

Could the answer lie in a return to the past, to the Shamanic traditions of the Amazon that have been preserved by the jungle itself, ready for us to find again this lost way of seeing, and recover once more our connection to spirit, to the divine inside us.

The Swiss Chemist Albert Hoffman who discovered LSD and lived til the age of 102, would take tiny quantities of acid and go wandering around his garden in the early morning. In conversations with his friend Stanislav Grof, he said:

I see the hand of God there. If they think this is just the work of atoms, they don’t know what they are talking about.

If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. These substances, whatever they are, bring about a sense of connection to the universe far beyond the narrow band of our consciousness. Allowing us to peer deeply into ourselves, demanding our humility to acknowledge how little we understand, beckoning to us to reach with arms outstretched to touch the transcendent, as we behold the miracle and mystery of all things.

For three years I’ve more or less worked on how to calm my brain.

Seems to work.

This is my methodology.

1. BREATHWORK

The starter-pack is this video by Wim Hof.

You can put this on and follow it quite basically.

3×30 breaths and then 3x breath holds, takes 8 minutes or so.

Relax to tha deepest.

Once I found that I could do that quite easily, I then moved onto this brey. Takes double the time, and taxes your lungs five times more, but once you can handle it, it’s incredible. He sells it with a possible secretion of DMT, the spirit molecule, which I’ve yet to be convinced of.

Does leave me feeling amazing though.

While I do it I stick on the beginning of this album by East Forest and Ram Dass. The first three tracks usually cover the breathwork in its entirety, it’s a marvel and puts you in a headspace that’s on the money.

Once you’re done with that.

2. SHOWER

Boiler goes off, even in the dead of winter.

Two minutes. I had to work up to it. My mate Jules’s babymoma calls it the monkey shower, cos all she does is hear him bouncing up and down in the cold doing his best chimp impression.

It kills you.

But that’s the point.

The feeling after is other-worldly.

It can shake you out of any mood. Caffeine ceases to have any effect on you, it just becomes something smooth to be seen enjoying in the early morning as the mist swirls in the dawn-early light.

This is called the WIM HOF method.

I’ve been doing it for three years and any day I don’t I’m worse off.

*

3. MEDITATION

There are many different ways to meditate.

You could sit on a sofa and think about your ex.

Personally I spring for TM.

Transcendental Meditation.

It is a mantra-based meditation, which means you repeat a two-syllable mantra which can be given to you by a teacher, over the course of twenty minutes. It encourages you to go off onto journeys of thought, and as soon as you are aware you are thinking you merely go back to the mantra. It’s phenomenally simple and easy to adopt. David Lynch the Twin Peaks guy, is obsessed with it.

This video is a beautiful explanation of why we need it.

I did a course on it a few years back, with a slightly dodgy guy called Neil from Tufnell Park.

I’d say if you can, do a course, best money you’ll ever spend. The practice encourages you to do 2x blocks of twenty minutes every day, once in the morning as soon as you wake up, and then once in the afternoon. I only really ever do one.

This is the guy who popularised it in the West, Maharishi.

And this is good, a short introduction to it all.

The 20 minutes will more or less elapse like this:

i) Sit in the chair, close your eyes, repeat the mantra in your mind’s ear.

ii) Your mind will drift. Start thinking about Spurs (insert other nonsense).

iii) Realise you’re thinking about Spurs. Go back to the mantra.

iv) Start thinking about what you might have for dinner.

v) Realise you’re thinking about dinner. Go back to the mantra.

vii) Start thinking of the time your mother busted you with some sordid stash of something when you were twelve, die inside a little. Realise you’re not on the mantra.

viii) Go back to the mantra.

ix) Continue in this vein until 20m has elapsed.

x) 3 minute wind-down, eyes-closed, no longer on the mantra, but sat in the chair.

xi) Here, during the wind-down, the magic happens. Your mind clears of all thought, and for three minutes you inhabit a state of peace that is totally unfamiliar to anyone who has never meditated.

xii) Rest repeat. Try to find that state of peace all over again.

xiii) Eventually that state of peace will start appearing throughout the twenty minutes.

TM taught me something I never really thought possible. That I could exist in a place of unthought, where I have zero, like zero, thoughts going through my brain. Just silence, quiet, and stillness.

Simple as a buddhist monk
In a temple practicing stillness
Real still til you realise its realness

Lupe Fiasco

And the thing that makes the biggest difference, now, when bad days do their best to drown me, is the knowledge, through practice, that at any time, I can access that place of unthought. And dwell in it. As if no bad thought can touch me. I have power over my mind. Take a breath. Look at the sky. Feel grateful for the miracle. It won’t last forever.

It’s not unlike a super-power.

*

I’m no guru, but these three things over the last years have helped my peace of mind unending amounts.

I think I’d be a different person without doing this stuff as close to everyday as I can. No doubt.