Consciousness-Altering Mushrooms – corresponding with Aldous Huxley’s “Doors of Perception”, (1954)
Following a seven-hour trip – July 18, 2024
Avi Goren-Bar
Disclaimer
This article is provided for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute medical, psychological, or therapeutic advice, nor does it recommend or endorse the use of psychedelic substances. The scientific findings referenced here are derived from controlled clinical research conducted by accredited institutions such as Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research and Imperial College London Centre for Psychedelic Research. In these studies, psychedelic compounds are administered within carefully designed therapeutic frameworks that include medical screening, professional psychological support, and structured integration. Outside of regulated research or licensed clinical settings, psychedelic substances may carry significant psychological and physical risks, particularly for individuals with a personal or family history of psychosis, bipolar disorder, or certain medical conditions. Readers are advised not to interpret this article as encouragement for self-experimentation. Jungian Coaching School International does not provide psychedelic-assisted treatment and does not replace medical or mental health care. The perspectives presented here reflect current scientific research on consciousness and psychotherapy and are shared solely to support informed, responsible discussion.
Article
Part 1.
Translating the experience into consciousness through words implies a double agreement: one to give up much of the inherent information that was imprinted in me and on the other hand, to agree to return to life and conduct myself out of recognition of the limitations of being a human being. Following the mushrooms trip I was referred by my Jungian mentor Ruth Netzer to the 1954 Aldous Huxley’s “Doors to Perception”, a book that reached C.G Jung who apparently disqualified the option to dive into unconsciousness by chemical means. However, reading Huxley’s book validated my experience and deepened my comprehension of the experience which I would like to share with the readers. Huxley: “All sorts of cultists and queer fish teach all kinds of techniques for achieving health, contentment, peace of mind; and for many of their heaters many of these techniques are demonstrably effective. But do we see respectable psychologists, philosophers and clergymen boldly descending into those odd and sometimes malodorous wells, at the bottom of which poor Truth is so often condemned to sit? Yet once more the answer is, No” (70) .
Nonetheless, there is a magic gift in knowing that a trace of the Light has infected you and can be translated into mediated verbal communication (between me and myself and others) while another part (whose dimensions and intensity cannot really be gauged in light of the intensity of this experience) remains in the state of merely potential – For me, it exists in the “knowing supremacy” consciousness and is a besieged gift within my existence. In any case, this thing, a journey with the mushrooms leaves me humble, cherished and content with little.
Huxley writes:” to be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by mind at Large – this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual. For the intellectual is by definition the man for whom, in Goethe’s phrase, “the world is essentially fruitful”. He is the man who feels that “what we perceive by the eye is foreign to us as such and need not impress as deeply”. And yet, though himself an intellectual and one of the supreme masters of language, Goethe did not always agree with his own evaluation of the word. “We talk”, he wrote in middle life, “far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window still quietly awaiting its future – all these are momentous signatures. A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am templated to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and her silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of the ancient hills. We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings”. (69)
Many of the insights I was exposed to were found, in my humble opinion, in what Jung calls my collective unconscious. Christopher Bollas refers to such information as “Unthought Known ” and the mushrooms (which in the Bible are referred as “pako’ot”- tubers) expropriate the knowledge unknown and create an “exploder”. However, the way things came to me, the state of accumulation in which they were made accessible, and their body-mental accompaniment, gave me a sense of imprinting and a restart of the soul. The most striking emotional experience I carry with me at the end of the journey is gratitude, humility and gratitude. This corresponds with Huxley: “What wonder then if human beings in their search for the divine have generally preferred to look within! Generally, but not always. In their art normless than in their religion, the Taoists and the Zen Buddhists looked beyond visions to the Void at “the ten thousand things” of objective reality.” (48)
I received confirmation of my understanding of the anatomy of the soul: everything that was done in me was done “from above”, in this sense I was given an explanation and validation of the meaning of the expression “dwelling on high”, exaltation, information and knowledge… I was constantly guided, receptive getting assimilated, and especially present in me the experience of “his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with for-bearing, and I could not stay”. (Jermiah 20,9). There is nothing more precise than that, it was an encounter experience that was stronger than the senses of consciousness, it was a revelation, it was given in a very crystalline and strong way, like electrical currents of intelligence and not like any cognitive learning. Huxley: “What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful. A little of the knowledge belonging to the Mind at Large owes past reducing valve of brain and ego, into the consciousness. It is the knowledge of the intrinsic significance of every existent. For the artist as for the mescaline taker draperies are living hieroglyphs that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being.” (38). “For personas are selves and, in one respect at least, I was now a non-self, simultaneously perceiving and being the Not-self of the things around me.”(40)
The first experience was eating the mushrooms. A small pottery bowl containing tiny mushrooms, fragments of mycelium, some whole with a stem and dome, yellowish beige brown, and among them three unroasted cocoa beans, the quantity seemed quite a bit to me, and the “priestess” (the lady who guided me onto this experience) explained how to nibble like a rabbit, and I found myself, in the light of a candle, in a quiet nirvana, chewing with very slow passion this close-up, gnawing on my tongue. I remember a lot of saliva that surprised me, I enjoyed the pulp, the texture and the cocoa bean supplement were perfect and then the insight came up “you are satisfied before you even ate”, an intelligent solution to emotional eating, and the blessing of food came to me “feed the whole world with goodness”, I ate them not to eat but to host them in my mouth and body and in retrospect they gave me back everything they could and everything I improved. The priestess came in after a while to see if I was done, and I was only half the amount and surprised how I sent her out the door, as if disturbing me in the act of love. I placed the clock outside the room (which the priestess calls “lair”) and from that moment on I had no sense of time. Huxley also relates to the time dimension: “Along with difference to space there went an event more complete indifference to time. “There seems to be plenty of it”, was all I could answer, when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time. Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant” (29)
The very fact of sitting down to write is a tremendous reversal, the opposite of which can be included in the expression: ” I was weary with for-bearing, and I could not stay ” which gives me the thought that the prophets of prophecy from our holy bible ate some hallucinogenic mushrooms. During the journey, I was blown away by the expressions of the Hebrew language, which manage to ingeniously contain encrypted and dense information chips from the experiences I was exposed to. If J. Lacan speaks of language as a reflection of the soul, then it was a kind of a Lacanian journey. In this sense it was a massive revelation of a Kabbalistic state.
Huxley would definitely agree by stating: “Art, religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory – all these have served, in H.G. Well’s phrase, as Doors in the Wall. And for private, for everyday use there have always been chemical intoxicants, all the euphoric that grow on trees, the hallucinogens that ripen in berries or can be squeezed from roots – all, without exception, have been known and systematically used by human beings from time immemorial. And these natural modifiers of consciousness modern science had added its quota of synthetics – chloral, for example, and Benzedrine, the bromides and the barbiturates.” (60)
There were not many psychedelic symbols or images on the journey. As if the mushrooms knew that I was 72 years old and there was no time for foreplay, they acted to the best of my understanding during and after the journey in three stages: submission and devotion, imprinting, and experimenting with the mechanism of ‘translating the imprinted into target points that are relevant to my life today both in the practical sense and in the sense of my existential existence’. In the first phase, my ability to speak or move disappeared and I was completely silent, in my experience it was a way of surrendering in terms of what was done and heard, the loss of speech and paralysis were difficult experiences at the beginning of the journey. Huxley: “When it was over the investigator suggested a walk in the garden I was willing; and though my body seemed to have dissociated itself almost completely from my mind or, to be more accurate, though my awareness of the transfigured outer world was no longer accompanied by an awareness of my physical organism – I found myself able to get up… it was odd, of course, to feel that ”I” was not the same as these arms and legs “outer there”, as this wholly objective trunk and neck and head….All that the conscious ego can do is to formulate wishes, which are then carried out by forces which it controls very little and understands not at all. …In my present state, awareness was not referred to as ego; it was, so to speak, on its own” (53).
It is difficult for me to reconstruct their appearance, or rather the beginning of the act. I remember lying down on the bed, asking to cover myself, later I’ll be cold and ask for blankets and then shed myself from them and enjoy the return of movement to my body and enjoy the movement of the organs, but the genesis involved complete paralysis with the hardening of the muscles, I remember a deep pit of black snakes and burgundy snakes including me, They are healing snakes I have no fear of, they are really just a platform on which I lie. Above there is a construction of long metals like thin electricity poles topped by magical lanterns of crystals made of white, blue, purple and yellow gold glass (love these colors are the colors of the iris flower), I don’t understand what this structure is, but behind it peeks for a moment a female figure in the shape of a bright white giraffe, with a face of human intelligence and big bright and beautiful eyes, Only her long neck appeared to me, a very sublime and feminine creature.
(In retrospect, I think this is the origin of the existence of the monster or dragon in mythologies. If the structure of this divine figure is repeated in the journeys of others across cultures, then it is validating the archetypal mysterious figure of the dragon monster as something that consumes or empowers the hero. Later on I was told by a Jewish religious orthodox friend that the giraffe is a unique animal as it is kosher yet was never consumed a carnivore food) . Another insight, perhaps these huge transforming crystal lamps, such as a joystick and the square structure that will follow, are the neural imprint mechanisms that did the work of implanting the information? I know on the journey itself that she, the magical giraffe, belongs to the healing team, that she is part of a group of feminine energies, like nurses in the hospital, responsible for the whole process. Except for one glimpse, it won’t appear anymore, but I know all along that I’m activated and attuned to their intention, and the intention is unbearable. They are the dominants, and the ones that will later allow me the third phase of translating the intelligent process into verbal associations from my life. From the moment the speech returns to me, I will not cease in a manic fluency to verbalize explanations about what I understand, where I have been taken, the regions of my life, events, people – an album of my life story that echoes the meanings of the ceremony I experienced. Reading my description I guess Huxley would have added: “As a rule, the mescaline taker discovers an inner world as manifestly a datum, as self-evidently “infinite and holy”, as that transfigured outer world which I had seen with my eyes open. From the first, my own case had been different. Mescaline had endowed me temporarily with the power to see things with my eyes shut; but it would not, or at least on this occasion did not, reveal an inscape remotely comparable to my flowers or chair or funnels “out there”. What it had allowed me to perceive inside was not the Dhamma-Body, in image, but my own mind; not Suchness, but a set of symbols – in other words, a homemade substitute for suchness” (47)
I could report the journey on a horizontal or vertical axis, with the horizontal telling the journey through its stages (to the extent that I could organize the experience as a story with a beginning, middle and end), while the vertical cuts through the flesh of the living soul and conjures up episodes on the journey that stand like an experiential nade. The truth is that they operated on both levels simultaneously and the truth that they taught me the quantum consciousness of the union of opposites, In this sense they gave me one of the most important gifts of life, by attacking what I understand and teach from Jung’s teachings, but there was a thunder of laughter as if those who knew me were saying: You teach it, here you go experience it. And the experience of uniting opposites is immensely painful at the very necessity of containing a contradictory dialectic in its being that exists simultaneously, otherwise one does not exist without the other. Being experienced at the same time, they bring anguish of containment. Here, for example, my sexual identity was resolved once and for all, which found expression both in the vision of the amniotic fluid pelvis and in the ritual of urination, which, in fact, through a biological need that was valid by virtue of my being flesh and blood, required my physiological mechanism to re-prepare each time for a sub-journey that created the entire journey. In other words, every time I made a tremendous effort to rise from a supine position, to receive two steady hands from the primordial goddess who sat by my side throughout the journey, And to go misty to pee, and as I peed, I realized that on this journey I exist in two phases at the same time, the biological who belongs to this world, and the psychic who goes through sequences of births and implantations of intelligence and wisdom information in agony, and is a submissive and devotional receptive feminine – Anima. Huxley: “Though the intellect remains unimpaired and though perception is enormously improved, the will suffers a profound changeful the worse…. These better things may be experienced (as I experienced them) “out there”, or “in here”, or in both worlds, the inner and the outer, simultaneously or successively” (33). On the journey I was an androgynous with masculine and feminine potential in the fundamental sense of these two energies. I realized that I was a human figurine whose human DNA was dictated by the genetics of my birth parents, that I was born the son of Yerachmiel and Rachel (for the first time, I will even be asked about the meaning of the strange name of my father, “the mercy of God”, and Rachel, my mother, who was infertile in the Bible, and my mother also had trouble conceiving and had trouble giving birth). But my soul is androgynous and has a choice of how to manifest itself in the current cycle of my life. I realized that with the physical birth there was a soul genetic birth, the pain and labor of the soul birth repeated several times in this fungal journey. Every birth involved immense pain, there was something in the soul that did not want to accept the information of wisdom that was planted in me even though these were wonderful gifts for life, but that the necessity to receive and assimilate involved immense birth pain. I realized that I was implanted with spermic nodules like an intelligent seed that was in a compressed and frozen state, and this transplant was painful, Held my breath and breath and overwhelmed me again and again on the journey. With the measured steps I take with great effort to and from the bathroom to urinate, I reach the journey bed, this deposit of births, and as soon as my body slowly collapses, the fungal energy stabilizes, they grip me, I feel their vitality and tremendous eagerness to continue the work, as if they know what time is allotted, what my abilities are to contain and assimilate, what their role is, and how they implant the information in me. One of the many opposites of the journey was the exhaustion to the point of weakening alongside my mental powers to please, to open, to assimilate and to be, with the understanding that these are rare moments of orgasmic grace. There was no sexuality on the journey but there was also pre-sexuality. I remember a tremendous longing for skin touch, I felt the strong warmth in the front of my stomach as I stood in line in front of S., I greedily licked smooth brown skin, The longing for touch was a terrible thirst. I asked the priestess several times during the journey for water and realized that water is life, a small sip and the forces are returning to you. They did their thing in me both body and soul at the same time. In the body they entered strong (when I say strong I do not mean the strength we know in the human race, they made me strong as it is written in the Bible: “With strength and trembling, daring, moving the thresholds, and strengthening “…), they entered me with archetypal force.
Evidence of the strength of strength is expressed in the first phase of rape, surrender, the encounter with the terrible fear of suffocation, dying and disappearing, and then surrendering, it is better to surrender. Huxley relates to this as well: “In the final stage of ego lessness there is an “obscure knowledge” that all is in all – that All is actually each. This is as near, I take it, as a finite mind can ever come to “perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe”. (33)
Here at the beginning of the journey they did not convey a message, there was no negotiation or explanation. As in Mongolian legends, they came at once, kidnapped me at once on the wild horse and acted on me on the way to the degree of experience. As much as I objected, they broadcast: “In the face of the power of the world, go with the power of the world”. Do not try by force, learn our strength and surrender to the extent of our strength, reduce resistance and reduce occupation, and so I came to the section on assimilation of information, not without moments of involuntary objections that were answered by tremendous force against me. The process of releasing my individual desire (the existence of an Ego and giving up the Ego) and replacing it with accepting receptive energy was repeated from time to time in the first phase. This was, in my opinion, the only time the high priestess said to me: “Surrender, surrender” and from there I faced the great Fear. A terrifying fear, which in retrospect inoculated me as “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil:for thou art with me” (Psalm 23;4),or ” Out of the depth have I cried unto thee, O Lord” (Psalm 130;1).
In relating to fear Huxley writes:“The fear, as I analyze in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than the mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear. The literature of religious experience abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the Mysterium tremendum. In theological language, this fear is due to the intercompability between man; egoism and the divine purity, between man’s self-aggravated separateness and the infinity of God. …an almost identical doctrine is to be found in The Tibetian Book of the Dead, where the departed soul is described as shrinking in the agony from the pure Light of the Void, and even from the lesser, tempered Lights, in order to rush headlong into the comforting darkness of selfhood as a reborn human being, or even as a beast, an unhappy goast, a denizen of hell.” (55)
As a result of this journey, I recovered from fear, there is a constant knowledge that there is a guiding hand, I understood the meaning of the concept of ‘fate’ in mythology, I understood in an experiential sense. The journey freed me from the fear of death that comes from the illusion of control and the experience of losing control, and it is what brought me to understand the meaning of death and life in the fabric of the movement of souls in the world and beyond, which was a great lesson and with it a significant relief. I, who underwent open-heart surgery, whose heart and lungs were outside my body, who rehabilitated myself physically and mentally, learned to treat my life as a loan that can be repaid at any moment by the Creator. By virtue of this realization, I have lived with webs of guilt that have been forced around my soul: Eat right, practice right, don’t get angry, don’t work hard – it’s all in “dont, dont” or alternatively enjoy the moment, thank for what exists, etc. And here is where the great battle against mushrooms and my surrender and devotion to them revealed to me a brief vision that I will try to reconstruct: I remember a white phosphorescent square with golden edges and a watery blue and an unusual glow, I don’t understand the meaning of this symbol, it looks to me like a magical frame or a mirror, a basin, I think I only saw part of the construction (they didn’t want to “show” me at all, they wanted to work and for me to devote myself to them). Huxley mentions the same expereince: “The books, for example, with which my study wall was lined. Like the flowers, they glowed, when I looked at them, with brighter colours, a profound significance.” (28)
Through this symbol I received great and significant profound information: This life in the universe is a journey that the soul makes within the physical body of the newborn. This is an axiom, and once I surrendered and surrendered, there is no question and no argument. And hence in general every argument in my life is unnecessary, in vain, in every argument there is a non-acceptance of the law of life, a law in which everything is dictated and flows and with the end there is a return to the basics, to the bank of souls and when it happens I will be in the right place, “The Shekinah,” where the souls dwell where I will return when I call upon it, I will be ready and ready to leave when I am sent to another body district. At that moment I realized two things: that with the soul transplant given to my body I also received a toolbox, my talents, that were given to me to develop them. Here came some ingenious insights, the shame disappeared: what I received as a tool as a talent I must develop, instill and through it exist, in my case I must dance, play, draw, , teach, educate and heal – and this I must do, and most importantly, without shame. So it doesn’t matter who loves me and who doesn’t—I do mine with love and humility and gratitude. I realized that there was also no shame in my body, in its shape, in the hair on it, in my voice, in height, in color, this is what I received through the genetic code and it is nothing but the toolbox. From this I also understood that there is nothing to criticize or lower toolboxes and the shape of other people—this is what is given to them, and it is a great blessing, After all, even breathing is a gift. There I also realized that souls like mine are probably sent to “corpse containers”, other “boxes” in galaxies or other worlds that have some kind of body containers, where they operate, operate and fulfill a path that has a beginning and an end.Then suddenly I understood my connection to J. my beloved grandson. There was at that moment a burst of pure crying and divine excitement at the magnitude of my love for this baby. I understood a number of things: that I am a mentor, that our souls are twins, so he is called Goren-Bar and not A. as his father gave birth, that my life will continue as long as this young child-man will need me next to him in his life, where I understood why he resembles me physically and also the significance of our trip together to Thailand, have two whole weeks day and night to be with him. I understood the healing connection I have to my granddaughter L., I understood the mental strength of my granddaughter A., who was born with her own power to lead and operate autonomously in the world, I understood that those who came out of T.’s loins are prevented from me until they want to come to shelter under the vine and fig of my personality, that they have their own lesson to extricate themselves from their mother’s love and that my beloved son in his choice exists alongside his choice, I understood that I have no right or need to influence the lives of my children and grandchildren or people of all kinds, and I am not in the world but to be with those souls who match mine and they will benefit from me and my goodness, this has given me great happiness. That’s where I think the next lesson about true love comes from!. Suddenly I realized that people around me are souls connected to me with unconditional love, an unmeasured love that is not limited to time or relationships. The mushrooms gave me a gift for the rest of my life, to recognize in me true love abilities (maybe my mother’s departure from me when I was five broke that ability and this journey corrected that). I understood the injustice I had done D. when I didn’t understand her true love formula, I understood G. who came into my life to free me from male love and give me choices, and I understood that from above it was decided from the outset that she would not live with me for the rest of my life because I would become a creature pathetic narcissus who is afraid of growing old and this is not why I came into the world. I felt with tremendous strength M’s love for me her father and her desire to be with me as much as possible, I understood my mother’s love and I probably understood that I wanted this correction of being able to love true love as I. loved me and as my dog Yoko loved me, and I understood N’s love for Yoko and I experienced a deep sorrow that I saddened and made difficult when I decided with a cold heart to put Yoko to sleep, whose old age had crumbled her spine.
Part 2.
The information penetrated my body in the loin area and through the testicles. I felt tremendous pressure in my loins which caused me physiologically to urinate a lot. In retrospect, I realized that maybe they had healed my prostate by causing endless urination of drainage every hour. Every time I was planted with information, I found myself crying out: “Ayyyy” as a Hasidic call and blowing the Shofar (Ram’s horn in Jewish ritual), and then I realized the genius power of blowing the Shofar. At some point, a strange ritual began of converting my urine into amniotic fluid and turning it into a hidden magic tube that transfers amniotic fluid from my loin pelvis to H. who is lying in pregnancy watch with an alarmingly low level of amniotic fluid, and to M. my daughter who desires a daughter, I saw my granddaughter fetus and felt immense love for her being an idea that, God willing, would come true.
Another phase that I think connected to the toolbox with which I was sent on the journey of my life has to do with my previous lives that explain to me the Spanish, Greek, Sarsbo-Croatian and Yiddish languages, and suddenly on this journey I found myself speaking these three languages fluently with proper vocabulary and grammar. I understand that for me, learning a language is actually a reconstruction of knowledge from previous lives and “coming home.” In a certain sense I feel Sephardic Greek and Diaspora Jew from Eastern Europe (I am reminded of Mustaki’s poem -) and it is no wonder that with people from these regions I form a warm direct connection (that’s how Steffi, Giana, Stelios, Sandra and others). In the third phase I found myself speaking fluently in all three languages, speaking and my self wondering where this fluency and grammar came from. I understood my strong connection to the soul of L. , my Breslavian hasidic blood mate.
The whole journey was Jewish on many levels, I felt that I was in the world of Sefirot, I understood that I was being “analyzed” in the Binah (wisdom) sphere even though I know nothing about it, I understood that they had received an order that instead of me dying, I would be cloned and I would be an elated person (like a noble gas), since I was doing a good job in our world anyway. And that’s how I was summoned to the mushrooms, through my son Ori, whose relationship is complicated but whose great love connects us. At the stage of realizing the clones and information I spoke with manic fluency, using the priestess as a deposit object of insights. I remember that about halfway through the journey I asked her to stop the background music. I have to say something about the music. I have a bachelor’s degree in musicology and I know the theoretical background of the ancient Greek mathematics and aesthetics and wisdom attributed to music. The journey with mushrooms gave me the understanding that our hearing ability is a divine gift and that music is suggestive and its qualities are healing and there are healing qualities in harmony, rhythm, durations, melodies, repetition, instrumental integration and the human voice healing qualities. I know this because music in my trip allowed a constant flow of the dimension of time, it contained me like an audial substrate, it comforted me and there was a dimension of enriched oxygen in the various sections. At a certain point, I felt that music was forcing a receptive presence on me and I wanted to create for myself the mental substrate within which I would deal with the mushrooms. In retrospect, I think it happened when the psychodelic biological power of mushrooms began to dissipate, and my cognitive creative ability returned to me and I wanted to sing my own music with which came the associations, fluency, and hail of associations that connected to the barrage of insights with which the journey brought me together. Huxley on music: “And now someone produced a phonograph and put a record on the turntable. I listened with pleasure but experienced nothing comparable to my seen apocalypses of flowers or flannel. Would a naturally gifted musician hear the revelations which, for me, had been exclusively visual? It would be interesting to make the experiment. Meanwhile though not transfigured, though retaining its normal quality and intensity, the music contributed not a little to my understanding of what had happened to me and of the wider problems which those happenings had raised. Instrumental music, oddly enough, left me rather cold…a recording of some madrigals by Gesualdo took its place. “These voices”, i said appreciatively, “these voices – they’re a kind of bridge back to the human world”. And the bridge they remained even while singing the most startle chromatic of the mad prince’s compositions”. (51)
Two words about N. the High Priestess: her masculine cheekbones and her good-looking smile met me again and again when I would return from the toilet for the journey, her singing voice in Portuguese gave me unbelievable dance energy (I understood the meaning and origin of Whitehouse’s ‘authentic movement’), twice during the journey during the stage of fear and surrender I glanced at her for help and she from her experience and professionalism looked away from me examining: “And the Lord looked upon him and said, Go in thy might” (Judges 6:14).
On the other hand, when I needed water, a blanket, a toilet, she was there as accurately as possible, her presence let me know that I was in “good hands”, experienced, knowledgeable and loyal.
In such helpless situations a natural person would develop a crazy transference, I was willing to sleep with her, kiss her, live with her, serve her, okay then at least be her friend, and here with my request before I left, when Nir came to take me when I asked her for a hug, she stood frozen, allowing me to hug, not hugging, which sent me the message: I did my job faithfully, hence it is yours.
- Huxley quotations from his book “ Doors of Perception ,Heaven and Hell” (1954) are taken from the Hebrew translation by Olam Books Pub. 2016, Tel Aviv.