All That We See

The gift of an ageless vision of reality

At Night by Marc Chagall

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.

Traditional Nursery Rhyme

PROSPERO: You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And – like the baseless fabric of this vision –
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

Edgar Allan Poe, A Dream Within a Dream

Audio version:

This is the eighth original essay on Fragments of Light, if you can believe it. And I know, my dear readers, that in some ways it has been hard going. Hands up who made it past the second essay on Russia?

In my defence, I might call on Tupac Shakur who sung, “Don’t blame me, I was given this world, I didn’t make it.” Or perhaps I’ll quote the great comedian Bill Hicks who once said: “this is the material that has kept me virtually anonymous for the past 15 years… but I had to have this weird thing about trying to illuminate the collective unconscious and help humanity. Fucking moron.”

Still, the last thing I want is to keep beating madly on the same tinny note, like my eleventh-month-old with her Fisher-Price piano. High time for a change of tune. To madly mix my metaphors, it’s not like you want to go to a restaurant week after week and find only the same 16 ounce slice of nuclear war on the menu, with a side of messianic death cult. After all, the trees are sparkling in Caffe Nero. It must be almost Christmas.

So this time, I want to give you an early present. Something to fit the season. And it is…. A story.

You’re probably giving me one of those polite British smiles that says, “Right. A Christmas story? I think I’ve heard them all. About ten thousand times.” Trust me, this story is different. It’s a gift. In fact, if I could only prove to you that the story was true, as I believe it to be, it would be the greatest gift you’ll ever receive in your life. As good as finding out Santa Claus really was born of someone’s hallucination on red and white fly agaric mushrooms.  

Actually to say it’s a story might be overselling it. It’s just an anecdote. Blissful and brief.

So this anecdote takes place in autumn last year. I had just fallen short of completing a five day solo fast alone on the high plains of Dartmoor. What the hell did I think I was doing? I intend to write more on this practice someday. But the short answer is that I have come to understand that times in the wilderness are one of the best ways for us to connect with the sacred depths of life and their dance with the deepest truths of ourselves.

There was just one problem: it was so cold! So lonely! So very desolate. I had chosen a place on the dun coloured waves of the plain, far past the last steadfast tree. I sat for three days beneath heavy clouds in a circle of stones, retreating to my tent when the rain grew too strong or the wind blew too hard, which it did most of the time. And though I did just for a moment catch the whisper of God (again, a story for another day), most of the time my mind was obsessed only with eating the emergency cashew nuts I had in my pocket and wondering what the holy fuck I was doing with my life.

On the morning of the fourth day, I admitted defeat, scoffed the cashews and stumbled back to my car, pleading with the universe to forgive my lack of staying power. This time, I heard no answer, no forgiveness. Not even a whisper. Like Atlas trying to hold aloft the weight of my shame, I decided I would try to salvage something by travelling to Avebury, the largest stone circle in Britain, and scoffing the other consumable I had in my pocket - a handful of foraged magic mushrooms - before making my chastened way home.

Yet it was not chastened that I would return. Rather, set free.

For those who haven’t been, Avebury is the heart of one of our most extraordinary sacred landscapes, albeit one gashed with roads, fettered with gift shops and subdued by the National Trust’s efforts to tame its ancient wild soul. Like a ghost haunting the crowds of gentle tourists, I swallowed the mushrooms and made my slow way down the great avenue of standing stones towards Silbury hill. I had not got far when my body started to tingle, my jaw came loose and the stones started to sway like the long grass in the breeze. I lay down.

Don’t worry, I know there’s nothing more tedious than hearing about someone else’s psychedelic journey. I’ll spare you another effort to describe in words what words can never describe. The most important thing was that somewhere in my slow-moving sail through a valley of rainbows, my Dad appears. And that was not nothing as, by that point, he had been dead for two years.

Most of you will have never met my Dad. There is so much I could say about him. To give you an idea, I’ve fileted the following words from the eulogy I wrote for his funeral, but they hardly scratch the surface: “He made you feel alive. He could make the weather forecast into the funniest thing you had ever seen. He could make a trip to the newsagent an epic to rival the Iliad. In all my years in the film and TV world, I’ve never met a storyteller that is his match.”

When we meet behind my closed eyes on that hillside, my Dad is laughing, laughing as he always does and always did. I am crying because I miss him, I miss him and I’m glad to see him, so glad. Now we’re both laughing.

“Don’t take everything so fucking seriously,” he says laughing, something he always said but I start laughing too because I know more than ever, at that moment I know, that this is the absolute truth. “The fears and troubles, it’s all ridiculous. Write that in your bloody journal,” he laughs. Everything melts away and then there is joy and then there is laughter and everything melts away. Later, I did indeed write in my journal that I was blessed to fall into absolute truth.

Someone else has come up with a phrase to capture that truth which I found in speaking to my Dad on that grey afternoon: the peace of God that passes all understanding. That peace is what I felt. I irrefutably knew, somewhere deeper than the marrow of my bones, that in the end, all the pain and the suffering, everything that troubles and weighs us so deeply in this life is all no more real than a dream or a game we are playing. And like a dream or a game, when it is over, the pain goes with it too and there is only peace and everything shining.

As anyone who has taken psychedelics knows, when you are in that place, reconnecting with things you know so deeply, it’s impossible to believe you could ever forget them. But then you blink. What is that? Oh, those must be my legs. I’m lying on the grass. The wind’s blowing, sprinkling rain. My skin feels itchy. Like an old suit I’m putting on again. You feel yourself returning and the fears and the worries reassemble and become real again. For we forget, we have to forget. That is a rule of the game.

I close my eyes one more time to say goodbye. I hug my Dad, crying again. I don’t want to go back, can’t I stay? Not for now, he says, along with the others that are with him. Not till the end. Don’t worry, he laughs. We’ll be waiting.

There are people now who say the revelations gathered on psychedelics are nothing more than comforting delusions. These people tend to be white men calcified in a rational mentality who are accorded expert status because someone equally ignorant paid them to write a book. These men proclaim proudly that their rudimentary explorations in this realm “didn't lead me any closer to a belief in God or cosmic consciousness or anything magical or supernatural.” They view psychedelics, along with everything else in this world, as only relevant to themselves.

It is testament to the continuity of our colonial mindset that the view of these men are accorded authority, rather than the people of the First Nations for whom the use of psychedelics has been a foundational part of culture for millennia.

Those ancient people might tell you that the real world actually lies behind this one, and that what we see here is something like a shadow from that world. Or a dream. We visit the real world every night in our sleep, or through the use of psychedelics, a place where we may access the deepest knowing about ourselves, our communities and the earth.

I believe nothing is more important than this revelation for us right now. The search for this world will be the urgent focus for these Fragments over the coming year.

But no, you cry! Our civilized brains cannot possibly accommodate such a Copernican upending of our notions of reality. Instead, for centuries, the pathfinders of civilization have annihilated the keepers of this wisdom with guns, institutional religion and socially-sanctioned poisons like alcohol. Genocide clears space for our white-coated experts to set foot on the shore of a continent whose shape and size are utterly unknown to us, plant a flag and declare the entire land to be ours. In that way, and so many others, our arrogance births our profound blindness and ignorance.

Thankfully, there are a handful of heretics among us, the preachers shouting in the shadows of the city streets, whom we hurry past, believing to be mad. One I’ve mentioned already is the stand-up comedian Bill Hicks. He finished one of his sets with these words:

“The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly coloured, and it's very loud, and it's fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?"

And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, "Hey, don't worry; don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." And we … kill those people.

"Shut him up! I've got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real." But it doesn't matter, because it's just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love.”

There are other respectable voices, stretching across the ages, who play with the same idea. An ancient Chinese parable, told by the Taoist sage Chang-tzu, describes a man’s dream of being a fluttering butterfly and the butterfly’s dream of life in more ponderous human form. On waking, the man wonders:

Which was truly real and which was the dream – himself as butterfly or himself as a man, waiting for his students to come and drag him out into the light of day? How did he know that what he was experiencing now was not the dream? He almost laughed out loud. Imagine if I shared this with my students, he thought. He slowly rose from his bed and, stretching out his arms above him like the slow unfolding of butterfly wings, went forth into the day.

In his memoires, the pioneering psychoanalyst Carl Jung described a night-time dream in which he came upon a small chapel and, inside, a yogi in lotus position in deep meditation.

When I looked at him more closely. I realised that he had my face. I started in profound fright and awoke with the thought: “Aha, so he is the one who is meditating me. He has a dream and I am it.” I knew that when he awakened, I would no longer be.

Shakespeare put the idea in the mouth of Prospero. My daughter sings it in a nursery rhyme in the bath. Hell, even Beyoncé herself, the goddess incarnate, agrees life is but a dream. Something, somewhere, may be dreaming us into being.

Perhaps this strikes you as frivolous speculation or worse, a notion that can only come from horrific privilege. For sure, it’s easy to spin a lyrical fallacy about life when the worse that your dream contains is waking at 6am for your commute, or waiting for the woman to approve your age at the self-checkout, or washing the ice cream out of your daughter’s dungarees. But how dare I call it a dream when some people starve to death, or die in the night frozen to a concrete pavement, or witness their family wiped out without warning by an airstrike?

This is one of our oldest and most vital questions. One to which I would never imagine having a complete answer. Yet in an essay to come I will explore it.

The intention of these words is not to suggest the dream is a free-for-all. It is not a call for unbridled hedonism. I believe there is a morality that underpins the game, though it’s something different from the crude accounting system of Christianity. Equally, I’m not saying that what we do here doesn’t matter. Quite the opposite.

At heart, this idea relates to our meeting with death, that unbreakable appointment and surely our greatest fear. Imagine for a moment, what impact it might have on your life if, long before you died, you could know that the message of my story was true? If some of the mystery and thereby the fear of death was assuaged. What would you do? Would you stay sitting where you are right now, staring at this screen?

I’ll tell you what this story did for me: in some inscrutable way, it seeded fearlessness in me. Gave me the courage to finally and definitively follow my deepest calling, to turn aside from a career I had worked at all my adult life, just at the moment when I finally attained some of the success and respect for which I had hungered for so long. It helped me to finally walk out towards the wilderness, turning my back on home other than to send postcards from my wanderings in the form of these Fragments.

For once I knew I was living in a dream, suddenly I did stop taking things so fucking seriously, as my Dad said. The burden of life lightened; my strivings ceased to matter so much. I felt empowered to risk everything, face my deepest fears, chase the greatest of visions of the possibilities for my life because, after all, what is the worst that could happen? I know that in the end, all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well, as a mystic once wrote.

This is my last essay of the year. After this, I will go into hibernation to prepare for the year to come. For if this year has been hard, the next will be harder. The far right is resurgent, war is back in fashion, our planet is unravelling and that’s before we’ve even thought of the second coming of Trump. More than ever, we will need to be without fear as we face the dark, waiting in hope for a dawn. 

Yet whatever lies ahead, for now my dear friends, wherever you are, if you are in pain, if you are lonely, if your heart fills with despair at the state of all things, please let me put my arm around you. Take heart from my tale. Listen when I tell you, it’s ok, it is really ok, it is all a dream and we will laugh about it someday when we wake in a place where everything’s shining. Of course this too might only be a dream. But it’s not a bad one to live by.

Merry Christmas – and shanti shanti shanti.