The Acid Diaries by Christopher Gray

Author:Christopher Gray [Gray, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Entheogens
ISBN: 9781594778889
Publisher: Inner Traditions / Bear & Company
Published: 2010-11-15T16:00:00+00:00

26

Tripping on the Heath

FINDING SOMEWHERE TO MEDITATE on the Heath was a lot easier than trying to get my head around such idealist metaphysics, and I spent several afternoons exploring the area between the Vale of Health and Kenwood.

I narrowed the search down to the woods just south of Kenwood House and spent a further afternoon clambering over fences and wading through bracken but still unable to find exactly the right spot. I was getting warm, though, I could feel that; and I was struck by how much the mixed woodland reminded me of my prep school, the rundown Georgian manor in Derbyshire.

Blundering through the bushes, I finally discovered an old beech tree surrounded by a small glade thickly carpeted with leaf mold. Though a fallen and half-rotten tree trunk made the spot invisible, it was not that far from a little-used path, and very occasionally you could hear voices as people passed . . . but instinctively I wanted to be in the woods, and it was the best I could do.

Kenwood woods are all but deserted on weekdays, and so the following Friday morning at noon I put three drops from my little bottle of acid into a wineglass of water and drank it down. I stuck a few things in a daypack, locked the apartment, and headed for the Heath.

I arrived at the clearing well before the drug had time to take effect, spread a shawl at the foot of the beech, and sat down. Blindfold I had dispensed with; I was just going to close my eyes when I felt like it, but I had brought the Walkman and a couple of Josquin CDs.

During the past few days I had picked up The Secret Chief again, and I had memorized part of the seventeenth-century prayer that had been Jacob’s preferred “set” for psychedelic work.

Lord, I know not what I ought to ask of Thee . . .

I am silent; I offer myself in sacrifice;

I yield myself to Thee; I would have no

other desire than to accomplish Thy will.

Teach me to pray.

Pray Thyself in me.

Amen.

As I sat there listening to the Josquin, the trees began to look not just similar, but the very same as the woods around my prep school. From its eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century grandeur, the house and estate had fallen on hard times. During the Second World War it had been requisitioned by the Army as an officers’ training center, and by the time it reopened as a school, the woods weren’t dotted only with ruined Georgian walks and arbors but with scattered Quonset huts. There was a boathouse with a partly caved-in roof and a sinister icehouse dug into the side of a hill. Behind the blazers and school caps we had lived a life straight out of Lord of the Flies, both violent and, in those days before television, much more creative as to the mischief we got up to . . . and I had loved it.

So spellbound was I by

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