P: A Pagan Experience

A Pagan Experience
By Benjamin Hadden

The six of us stood silent. Captivated by the most beautiful thing we'd
ever seen. Rupert, Brenden, Simon, Sarah, Tony and myself. It feels
like God is upon us. Rising up over the hill and opening those great
big eyes, bringing colour and majesty to the countryside. It's a
twenty-four hour world now, but this is the Godly hour, what I've been
waiting for, between four and five on a midsummer morning with the
blood red sky dancing off the strata. I'm as high as a bird. Gliding
across the wind fuelled by pills and acid.

Music is playing in some distant glade of green, with laser-lights and
twinkling candles such is the nature of the festival. Chemicals keep us
up in some sort of Pagan ritual of celebration, or is it excess, a
brief interlude to our office jobs and cashier stations and 'have a
nice days'. Well, this is the perfect day. New experiences; the acid
moving the clouds into shapes of wonder, elephants, palaces, trees, the
face of my university tutor. Of course, they aren't moving at all, it's
a windless sky, and I'm just experiencing my first psychedelic trip.
Euphoric, mesmeric, enchanting and totally unreal, it all being in my
head.

The sunrise was though, we all caught it, the six of us. Three of them
were strangers to me 48 hours ago, but a trip is a trip and it does
special things, creates special bonds. I wish I could get this without
the aid of drugs but I can't, and nor can anybody else in the world.
Because in the sane world we've created the insane notion that we are
Gods, instead of being part of God. It is my politics and the taking of
drugs that have made myself and the rest of the group, realize this.
That's why we do it, to get at the truth of ourselves.

The tents on the hillside house a number of similar minded people (I
hope), so why can't we make those necessary changes that can save the
world from self-destruction. Or have we all just accepted that it's a
futile task: that the Borg will get us in the end. God I've been
watching too much Star Trek. No matter how much you shout, they still
believe that beauty and truth is wrapped in a twenty-pound note that
can buy you all the happiness you want. And they wonder why they are
still unhappy and unsatisfied.

"Money makes the world go round"
No it doesn't, the sun's gravitational pull does that and don't kid
yourself that it doesn't. And who's to say there isn't some other
inhabited planet somewhere with life forms of wit and imagination, it's
a big universe after all and we know so very little.

I just worry that with how far we've all come, from cavemen, to
farmers, to warriors and to businessmen that it's been a step to far,
and its too late to break down the monstrous structure of life we've
created. Consuming without guilt, with a murderous hunger for more
houses, more possessions, more empty objects to rule our lives and in
the process providing more waste to fuck up the o-zone layer and the
earth's crust. Generations will miss out on the things that make it
worthwhile: rolling around on the grass naked, feeling the wetness of
the morning dew as it washes your body, making love, smoking skunk,
drinking wine, building spaceships, playing football, talking about
sex, politics and philosophy, closing your eyes and seeing the picture
of your partner in your head that stays with you as you pass into
gentle sleep, making plans, creating art, watching trees, plants,
animals and human beings grow. Everything that is beautiful and
calming, or inspiring, or passionate and all of it just lovely.
Watching the sunset and staying up to music, to the drummer beating the
rhythms of your heart and leading you on an emotional and physical
journey filled with the buzz of simply being alive and knowing indeed
that the present is a present from some unknown source (probably
science), and then nearly falling asleep alongside your friends on the
side of hill with ancient stones signifying a historic past knowledge
of peoples who really knew what to worship and what to serve, guardians
of the earth not masters of it, and then just as you are about to close
your eyes and fall into a haze of blissful peace, an even greater peace
comes along. Someone shouts, "it's coming, the sun is coming". Sleep is
now something in the distant future, because this is what you came for,
a new day. A freshness, heralded by the singing sounds of nature, as we
wake-up to some form of rebirth and our slumbers become a new life. The
sun rises and the world is, for me, momentarily perfect.

Elsewhere, millions are waking up worrying about how much money or
power they will make or lose today. They'll curse the sun for being to
hot or to cold. Who are the fools here?