A good thing about travelling when you’re old is that time slows down. The daily routines of home, the chores to be done, the familiar rooms and streets and people all blend into a fast flowing stream as the weeks, months and years roll by. We’ve been away for a little over a week now, and in that time we’ve had to learn how to negotiate different modes of transport, to recognise the kiosk where you can buy tram tickets,(so much easier now in Russia, where there’s a woman on the bus going round and collecting money like they used to in London); to say “Good morning” and “Thank you” in German and Finnish, to decipher a new alphabet in Russian, and to account for ourselves to everyone we meet. Who are we? Why are we here? Where do we come from and where are we going? And to Ian, "how old are you? 86? I hope I can still do this when I'm as old as you". All this has stretched our first week into a month or so already. Ian woke up in pain (and afraid he was dying) after our first night in St Petersburg and wanted to give up and fly home. I read him this passage from Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind (see Home Page for Psychedelic Traveller reference)
So perhaps spiritual experience is simply what happens in the space that
opens up in the mind when “all mean egotism vanishes.” Wonders (and
terrors) we’re ordinarily defended against flow into our awareness; the far
ends of the sensory spectrum, which are normally invisible to us, our senses
can suddenly admit. While the ego sleeps, the mind plays, proposing
unexpected patterns of thought and new rays of relation. The gulf between
self and world, that no-man’s-land which in ordinary hours the ego so
vigilantly patrols, closes down, allowing us to feel less separate and more
connected, “part and particle” of some larger entity. Whether we call that
entity Nature, the Mind at Large, or God hardly matters. But it seems to be
in the crucible of that merging that death loses some of its sting.
Whether it was these words, or the short sleep, or my assurance that while we had this lovely room to rest in*, he could sleep for three days, that shifted his mood, it felt as though the crisis was over and the trip would go on. We sat down to breakfast with a French arms dealer (“I sell submarines”) and his girlfriend who worked in PR.
*I want to add a photograph but need to resolve technical problems for this
So perhaps spiritual experience is simply what happens in the space that
opens up in the mind when “all mean egotism vanishes.” Wonders (and
terrors) we’re ordinarily defended against flow into our awareness; the far
ends of the sensory spectrum, which are normally invisible to us, our senses
can suddenly admit. While the ego sleeps, the mind plays, proposing
unexpected patterns of thought and new rays of relation. The gulf between
self and world, that no-man’s-land which in ordinary hours the ego so
vigilantly patrols, closes down, allowing us to feel less separate and more
connected, “part and particle” of some larger entity. Whether we call that
entity Nature, the Mind at Large, or God hardly matters. But it seems to be
in the crucible of that merging that death loses some of its sting.
Whether it was these words, or the short sleep, or my assurance that while we had this lovely room to rest in*, he could sleep for three days, that shifted his mood, it felt as though the crisis was over and the trip would go on. We sat down to breakfast with a French arms dealer (“I sell submarines”) and his girlfriend who worked in PR.
*I want to add a photograph but need to resolve technical problems for this
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