The plant genies
The plant genies donÕt manufacture imagination, nor do they market wonder and beautyÑbut they force us out of context so dramatically and so meditatively that we gawk in amazement at the ubiquitous everyday
wonders that we are culturally disposed to overlook, and they teach us
invaluable lessons about fluidity, relativity, flexibility and paradox. Such
an increase in awareness, if skillfully applied, can lift a disciplined,
adventurous artist permanently out of reach of the faded jaws of mediocrity.
The impact of psychedelics upon my own sensibility was to dissolve a
lot of my culturally-conditioned rigidity. Old barriers, often rooted in
ignorance and superstition, just melted away. I learned that one might
move about freely from one level of existence to another. The borderlines between reality and fantasy, dream and wakefulness, animate and inanimate, even life and death, were no longer quite as fixed. The Asian concept of interpenetration of realities was made physically manifestÑ and this served to massage the stiffness out of my literary aesthetic.
Unbeknownst to most western intellectuals, there happens to be a
fairly thin line between the silly and the profound, between the clear light and the joke; and it seems to me that on that frontier is the single most risky and significant place artists or philosophers can station themselves. IÕm led to suspect that my psychedelic background may have prepared me to straddle that boundary more comfortably than those writers who insist on broaching the luminous can of consciousness with a hammer and chisel, and, especially, those who, spurning the in-CAN-descent altogether, elect to lap their watered-down gruel from the leaky trough of orthodoxy.
Taken From: The Memory Program How to Prevent Memory Loss
and Enhance Memory Power
