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opinion
Short-circuiting
spirituality and other scribblings
Observations about meditation and drugs, fiction and mythology,
the electoral film-style ad campaign of Britain’s New Labour,
and US president Bush’s conservative and dangerous backlash.
By
Victor Paul Borg
Shortcuts to spirituality
My shaman pointed to the large solitary cloud that drifted across
the vast blue sky. The cloud had a rectangular shape, a small head
and a crooked beak, like a bird of prey’s head in profile.
My shaman mused, ‘The bird Goddess is still alive.’
The apparition – the shape of the cloud – might have been
pure coincidence, or perhaps it was by design; after all, we sat
amid the circle of stones in Stonehenge, England’s most famous
Neolithic sight, and you never know the cosmic energies at play.
I said, ‘If you had to have a joint, it would certainly help
the imagination.’
‘I don’t need drugs to stimulate my imagination,’
she said. ‘I achieve lasting highs in meditation.’
My shaman wanted to convince me that drugs are only a shortcut to
spirituality; inadequate, artificial, producing a flash of blinding
light that quickly extinguishes. She maintained that people do drugs
to find spiritual bearings, but like any shortcut, drugs accord
us only false spirituality. She wanted to drum in me her point that
you can only achieve a lasting state of heightened awareness from
the laborious process of meditation. My view is that while meditation
is effective in triggering the beatific vision, informing our sense
of beauty and stimulating the imagination, drugs can be a substitute,
not better but not worse either. On the other hand, I feel jaded
with the culture of drugs. I am disappointed of meeting people who
are open, lovely, sexy, adventurous, and whimsically opinionated
while on Ecstasy but when the chemical cloud clears, they relapse
to their fearful, tight-lipped selves, their minds messy.
Once you open your intellect to new possibilities and new realities
informed by psychedelic drug experiences, how futilely lazy is the
intellect that relapses to its slack alertness and perception? Experience,
however, has showed me that most people’s drug trips are only
a temporary suspension of sober reality. ‘An absence from reality,’
someone I met when she was on Ecstasy put it. In this sense, like
any spiritual and intellectual short-circuit, drugs produce flashes
and sparks…but afterwards, the acrid smell of something burning.
Still, I wonder, if it’s not drugs, what has fertilised my
emotional aliveness?
My shaman became fanciful, now comparing the clouds with galloping
horses, pointing out the yellow fields of rape seed on the horizon,
and on the bus counting how many front gardens had gnomes in them.
She recounted her out-of-body experiences.
‘I only know of out-of-body experiences on Ketamine,’
I reported.
The air was silky and warm, and the Salisbury Plain stretched before
us in undulating humps. The meadows of buttercups were a dazzling
yellow, and up-close you could see that the tiny flowers were glazed
with a reflective and glistening waxy substance. A couple of skylarks
fluttered on the wing, tirelessly uttering their protracted tzri-tzri-tzri.
Perhaps they were marking their territory or regaling their mate,
but my shaman said, ‘Those birds really feel the joyous energy
of Stonehenge… they won’t stop singing!’
Reality
check
When London’s Time Out magazine asked the American writer
Paul Theraux if his primary writer’s calling is travel or
fiction, considering he churns out equal quantities of both, he
said: ‘Everything is fiction. Travel writing is fiction.
Biography is fiction.’
Life is fiction. We create our memories. We imagine our stories.
We script our futures. We trace an autobiography of the self.
Story telling, and writing, is a rearrangement of experience,
and experience in this sense is the creation of mythology, both
personal and collective. Many psychotherapists believe that victims
of extreme violence can only heal through a process called ‘first-person
story telling’. By being cajoled to recount their suffering
on first-person terms to a circle of compassionate listeners,
these patients concoct their stories – in exaggeration, in
dramatic wit, their recollection coloured unrecognisably by the
imagination – that become collective myths by nature of witness
in public testimonials. That’s how much of history is made.
Fiction, and all writing, is no so much a snapshot of reality
as the illusion of reality. Stories are archetypal mythologies,
the reason why biblio-therapists in the UK have been assigning
novels as part of a programme of therapy to heal psychological
ailments. Let’s say you are depressed and you read a book
about someone who triumphed his or her depression and, in the
suspension of one’s reality that is a prerequisite condition
to reading and believing, that person’s myth becomes your
myth, so you transport yourself to another reality. In that substitute
reality your depression is no longer part of the new mythology
that informs your world.
New
Labour’s blockbuster ads
In its bid for re-election in the general elections of June 7,
the UK’s New Labour may have gone out on a limb with their
advertising campaign adopting the style and form of film ads.
The exaggerated tone of the ads and their misleading nature (posing
as film ads) could backfire, but New Labour afforded the risk
because their runaway lead means their victory next week is a
done deal.
‘The Return of the Repossessed,’ one ad blazes across
large roadside billboards, showing tousled Conservative leader
William Hague and Shadow Chancellor Michael Portillo under a high-rise
building smouldering in fire, parts of it crumbling, while combat
helicopters buzz around it. ‘Starring Michael Portillo as
Mr Boon and William Hague as Mr Bust,’ the ad continues,
while the small print message asserts that ‘No home is safe
from spiralling Tory interest rates. Don't go back.’ Another
ad says in bold, red type, ‘The Tories Present: Economic
Disaster II’ and shows the bewildered faces of Hague and
Portillo, along with their credits for the imagined film, warning
us: ‘Coming to a home, hospital, school and business near
you.’ In the TV version of the latter, in what is presumably
the climax of Economic Disaster II, the camera zooms on a young
girl who gets jostled in the crowd and her teddy bear is trampled
in the stampede of people running away from the approaching mass
of dark clouds darkening the day. Then a sombre voice booms, ‘Remember
Black Wednesday?’ (referring to the stock market collapse
under the Tories) before proceeding to rap out a succession of
statistics on the number of houses repossessed, the increasing
numbers of unemployed and the businesses that went bust in 1991.
When I spotted the Economic Disaster II billboard on my way to
the train station I thought it might be an interesting film to
watch, and was duped into reading the whole ad. I would never
have given the ad a second glance if I had seen that it is a piece
of political propaganda. But the ad made me smile. It’s intelligently
self-mocking in its exaggeration, and although I doubt whether
it would work in a place like Malta or America, for example (where
it would be seen trivially belittling in bad taste) the ad works
here because it titillates the British highly-developed sense
of humour, sarcasm, and irony.
Bushed
and Europe’s chance
In just four months, the US president George W Bush has shown
the world he is too insular to have as a patriarch. This Texan
whizzkid with a cowboy mentality and puritan baggage is proving
to be the ideal candidate for the conservative backlash he’s
unleashing. First, he irresponsibly killed the Kyoto agreement
on combating climate change, then he opened up large tracts of
forests to logging, now he plans to hand over one of the world’s
last wilderness areas in Alaska to oil companies, and on the world
stage, Bush’s America has become a sulking bully. His missile
shield – the Son of Star Wars – has made America a menace
to the world, likely to trigger another arms race, besides setting
the mood of an America that is contemptibly domineering.
The real problem with Bush is not so much his cynicism in creating
imaginary enemies to pump money into a faltering arms industry,
but the way he’s turned his back to the New Economy to prop
up the economy of old; the arms and logging industries, big oil,
the manufacturing industry in general, and his view that to avert
a recession one has to build 13,000 power stations. He’s
taking America back by thirty years, but worry not – he is
one-term president and an anachronism.
Bush’s tenure in the White House might be the tickle Europe
needs to unite and stop fawning America. Indeed, Bush’s vacuous
presence is Europe’s rare opportunity to find its voice in
the world.
Victor Paul Borg is a freelance writer based
in London and can be contacted at vctor@borg.tf.
His column appears here weekly.
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