I first visited Cape Town in January 2000 1 and by April 2000 I had moved down to start work in Wetton and to live in the city bowl. The last eight years have been a transformative time for me, though its roots lie in the last few months of my time in Pretoria. Cape Town has been the psychedelic years and while the tryptamines have long already worked themselves out of my system my brain has been permanently redirected – outward, to the above and below. I feel like the years in Cape Town have been what finally connected me to the reality of the world around me, to people and to the natural world as a physical phenomenon. And as I’m writing this post I feel overcome by an enormous sense of gratitude towards the city, its location at the foot of Table Mountain, its solitary beaches and forests. I firmly believe that the years 2000 to 2004 couldn’t have happened (as they did) anywhere else.

There have been many important things to me while living in Cape Town, friendships and car crashes, but I’ll pick out four which, in particular, made these years as full as they have been. But first, some music; I’ve written a separate mini-post on the electronic music that I discovered in the first four or so years of my time here.

Natural Reality

Cape Town is overcome by natural beauty; built around a mountain, beaching the Atlantic and Indian oceans, home to the most diverse biome on the planet. The more I travel the more I realise how few other cities in the world can claim anything like the natural surrounds that we have here. And even more important than just the pure beauty of the city surrounds is how accessible it is. While living in Vredehoek the slopes of Table Mountain were no more than a short (but steep) walk from my front door.

It was on those slopes with the mountain’s cubic cliffs behind me and the city and ocean down below that I found more and more evidence of the polar simplicity of nature’s random workings. In my experience nature has no glorious, glowing spirit which softly forms its seasons; instead I’ve experienced it as fundamentally simple, basic in the extreme. Its physical structures are formed through nothing more than mathematically repeating patterns. Water molecules know only collision and expansion from heat, but they crest and tumble into rippling waves and clouds. If a plant loses a limb it simply sprouts more similar limbs as its energy allows. Animals appear more complex and unified, but internally everything from the simplest respiration to the neural complexity of the human brain is nothing more than a continuation of the same primitive mechanism of connection upon connection. But nature has no perfect solutions, it survives by what is barely good enough. It’s growth is constantly heading only towards decay. But it does it on such an enormous scale that the result is whole in a way that is endlessly elegant and robust. It attains its form from the minute interactions of billions of individuals and a rolling tide of trillions of trivial events. The natural reality stacks simplicity upon simplicity to form its weather system, its inhabitants and the buried bones of its dead. And the harder I looked at the natural reality the more I saw of myself, how my senses function. In reaching out my hand to a tree there is the potential for a seamless transition from its tessellating bark, across the cells of my skin, along my veins and neurons, into the logic that floats above my wet brain and out into the software that it produces.

From this evidence I’ve come to be of the firm belief that we have nothing outside of our own senses and brain – no soul and no greater death. Why would reality produce something as detached as a soul when it can produce every miracle that humanity has ever observed from the endless collision of its minute parts? The air that waves patterns through the grasslands in front of me also strike my face and rustle my hair and passes by, sweeping away into the distance – there is nothing more that I could want to understand or to observe beyond that. One day I will exhale and the chemical electricity in my brain will run out – why should I want any magical soul to continue past that moment? Its seems anathema to the beauty of the physical reality.

Through Table Mountain’s slopes and Postberg’s atlantic breeze I have become permanently connected to the soil and the air and I want nothing more than to always feel the rolling wash of the matter that surround us.

God

As far as God and religion is concerned I am by no means a militant atheist-type. I believe that religion can have a very positive influence on people’s lives, providing comfort and a life based on integrity, humility and charity. I come from a religious background and even when I eventually rejected organised religion I remained faithful for many years; developing my own sense of a non-interventionist god and his2 natural order. But my personal experiences have continued to show me only one thing; that god does not exist. It’s not that I do not believe that god exists, it’s that I believe (firmly) that god does not exist. The harder I’ve looked at what my senses are capable of, the clearer it has become to me that the natural reality does not need god nor would it originate a god.
I’ll paraphrase John Lennon when he said that he no longer believed in Nixon or in God, he was no longer looking for a father figure; that he would always continue to make music. And despite not being enamored with John Lennon 3 I agree that once I shook the need for a father figure I was finally free from trying to mash the evident reality into a form in which some remote god was in control. There is no such thing and I’ve never felt better.

Individuality

Finally, all paths in the last eight years have led me in only one direction, towards individuality. The harder I’ve looked at reality, at the world I live in, at my ego and delusions, ambitions and irrational fears, I’ve always ended up in the same place – my own identity. But becoming aware of my identity – how it was formed and how it changes – has somehow been no more than a gentle reflection. I started cultivating memories. That’s all it was, I started taking note of how time passed, thinking chronologically and wanting to look back. As I’ve heard and read; happiness is the ability to feel all emotions, and maturity is the experience of sorrow.
I’m sure that I’ve always had a strong individualist streak and I went through periods where I felt the need to illustrate my individualism through wild haircuts and hand-scrawled t-shirts. But I’m overjoyed to say that I no longer need those props. And I feel like, more than just due to growing older, it has been these years that let me recognise my individuality – to claim it. I no longer need eyeliner – I’m forever changed. I’m older and calmer – more confident and accepting. I’ve finally become confirmed in who I am and what I believe. I continue to want to simplify how I describe what I see while developing my ability to perceive the massive, accelerating complexity of our world. And Cape Town’s silver trees have given me the examples and evidence that led me here.

Nothing lasts… nothing lasts. Everything is changing into something else. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing is wrong. Everything is on track. William Blake said nothing is lost and I believe that we all move on.
T. McKenna

I will never forget the buzzing September sound of the bees among the pincushions on the slopes of Table Mountain and the hum of the city below.

And so, good night sweet Cape Town – I will never be the same and I will always come back.

I just caught the end of the ecstasy[2] arrival/departure in the run-up to the millennium which meant that I was never around for the summer of love when people still believed that that grubby little pill handed from person to person was going to change the world. By that time the world had experienced the thrills and the bellyaches.

But let’s not forget those early days. Here’s Alexander Shulgin from Pihkal:

As the material came on I felt that I was being enveloped, and my attention had to be directed to it. I became quite fearful, and my face felt cold and ashen. I felt that I wanted to go back, but I knew there was no turning back. Then the fear started to leave me, and I could try taking little baby steps, like taking first steps after being reborn. The woodpile is so beautiful, about all the joy and beauty that I can stand. I am afraid to turn around and face the mountains, for fear they will overpower me. But I did look, and I am astounded. Everyone must get to experience a profound state like this. I feel totally peaceful. I have lived all my life to get here, and I feel I have come home. I am complete.

And so it was, the promise of an end to suffering, the short-lived realisation of that promise[3] and the bellyache on the drive home to reality.

Thrills

As Bob tells the story, he recently decided to open the promising door again and took ecstasy for the first time in several years. He did so on his own as he felt unsure of what his reaction to it would be.
We talked a little about his apprehension at taking the drug again as he had had some bad experiences towards the end of his time in that group of friends with it. As he tells it, he wanted to know how much of it was him and how much the drug.

The problem, of course, with all drugs is that their effect is temporary and there is always a price to pay for that temporary effect. In the case of some drugs that price might be steep[4] but acceptable. This is part of Bob’s story. We considered psychedelics[5]; these certainly are no free lunch, but somehow the ending of the psychedelic state seems to go with a type of acceptance that it wouldn’t stay forever, but that it wasn’t lost. There would remain in the back of your mind the recognition that the psychedelic state exists, that it is natural[6] and was part, and would remain part of you.

However, it seemed to Bob that ecstasy was somehow different. No less powerful, no less astonishing in its empirical and subjective effect – but somehow less real[7]. And this is what he found; the use of ecstasy requires the drugee to suspend their disbelief. It required that he ignore the simple truth that his experience was overwhelmingly artificial – induced.
So how is this different from a psychedelic, dissociative, amphetimenic[8] or other induced experience? It turns out that the answer is simple: because it is the only drug state in which the core of its effect is that you truly believe that it is real; more real and true than your normal state[9].
This is why you’ll hear ecstatitians saying things like ‘Why don’t we always relate to each other like we do now? We should from now on’. Sound a little naive? A little suspended from disbelief? Sure.

And so Bob found the problem with ecstasy; it requires its participants to suspend their disbelief and as we mature and develop our rational independent thought[10] this becomes unviable.

So what about Bob’s experience then? Well, as he describes it it seems that once he accepted the fact that none of it was true he had fun running around and being silly. Later he had a nap and then a shower.
However, he did say that he would never be able to do it with other people again since the believers’ exclamations of eternity and joy could not overcome his aging disbelief.
And I suppose that this is why MDMA isn’t a viable long term relationship – what little of that state it lets you bring back with you is somehow overwhelmed by the desire to not let go of it. And isn’t that the value of maturing? Learning to let go, to remember how things were but aren’t anymore.

[1] Having both breached new decades in the last few years.
[2] Let’s not be coy and call it MDMA/MDA or MD*A
[3] Most often accompanied by thumping music
[4] Reports on amphetamines are particularly scary
[5] i.e. LSD, psilocybin, 2CB et al
[6] i.e. very much part of the natural world
[7] Which, of course, it is not
[8] Is that even a word?
[9] And it might well be more real, less filtered etc. but what it is not is permanent
[10] Those of us that do