Kindle Notes & Highlights
Childswickham: village upon village of fruitholdings, smallholdings, blinding greenhouses, rich earth, wheelbarrows, hurdles, wickets, glinting cloches, orchards, narrow paths between beanpoles, rusty rolls of wire, stacks of pallets, wooden warehouses, rotavators, crates, raised beds, palings, fences made of doors, unscared crows perched on scarecrows, punnets, hoes, corrugated iron, rudimentary dwellings in vegetable plots, shacks, sheds and roadside stalls selling pears and asparagus according to season, a landscape bright with the red industrial brick houses of market gardeners and with
...more
If you expect to suffer transcendence or expect to find god you are more likely to do so than if you dose yourself without such preconceptions. The drug does not take complete control of the brain. It is susceptible to guidance, it can be nudged in a particular direction both by intellectual preparation and by exterior stimuli – place, people, climate. The effect of the experience can be purely material. That is what Porton scientists would probably have expected, thus would probably have got.
It suffered the indignity of seeing LSD hijacked by DIY animists, headbanded transcendentalists, camper-van mystics, campus shamans, epiphany tourists, vision diggers, the credulous armies of kaftans seeking The Simple Answer to The Big Question. LSD became a shortcut to the states achieved by fasting. And only the credulous ever fasted (or dervish-whirled or flagellated themselves or perched on desert pillars).
A visitor, waiting to see Heath and abandoned by the major-domo who had admitted him, went in search of a toilet. The one he found was ‘like an abattoir’. Its walls and floor were streaked with rivers of blood, not yet dry.
Hmm
