Buddhism Part Three – adolescence and psychedelia
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As I passed through adolescence and my curiosity grew, I became more interested in psychology and philosophy. I was given ‘Memories, Dreams and Reflections’ by C G Jung as a present by a good friend. This was Jung’s autobiography. In it I discovered that Jung had explored the religions of the world in his quest for understanding. He ended his life a very spiritual man, and whilst it is not clear what particular religious perspective he favoured, he was clearly very focused on Buddhism for large parts of his life. He wrote the introduction to a number of Buddhist books. In particular, he wrote the foreword to D T Suzuki’s ‘An Introduction to Zen Buddhism’ – this foreword was a thirty page commentary on the book itself. I hunted the book down and read it – understood very little (I was still a teenager) but felt really excited by the power of the aphorism. The idea that a short phrase could cause so much tension in the mind and pull apart existing concepts was amazing. There are many examples of these phrases or koans – perhaps the most famous being:
“Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?”
This phrase resonated with me for years, and versions of it appear in many of my poems, particularly in the collection ‘Zen Words’ (2003).
At this age I was also listening to an increasingly diverse spread of music. Psychedelic music was introducing me to the idea of meditation, as was ambient music. In particular, I explored the music of Gong and Daevid Allen. Beyond the references to drugs and drug-induced altered states, and the obsession with pixies and silly worlds, there was a playfulness of words that drew my attention. It was clear to me that much of the thinking about alternative worlds and altered states borrowed heavily from ideas in Buddhism.
Ambient music was also bringing me closer to the ideas of mindfulness – states of mind where it is possible to shift to different planes of consciousness. Rightly or wrongly, I thought that the route to all of this was probably through exploring Buddhism in more depth.
See the first two parts of this series on Buddhism here: