A friend of mine told me recently that in a relative's class of 25 children, five of them are officially identified as trans. That means 20% of the children are on their way to hormone therapy and gender re-assignment.
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If you like this, come and hear me talk on Huxley's life and ideas, at the Bristol Psychedelic Society on April 3 (tickets here) or the London Psychedelic Society on April 16 (tickets here).
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This weekend gave us an extraordinary rugby story. Not Wales winning the Grand Slam – although well done to them – but what happened when England played Scotland.
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The closest I’ve come to enlightenment was the two minutes when I was lying in a bloody heap on Valsfjell Mountain in Norway. This was back in February 2001. While skiing down a steep slope, I crashed through a fence, flew off a cliff, and landed with a thump, breaking my leg and several vertebrae.
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Last week I came across a small book called The Making of a Counter Culture, written in 1969 by an American historian called Theodore Roszak. I loved it. Roszak was the first to coin the phrase ‘the counterculture’.
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Aldous Huxley thought western societies needed to become more open to ego-transcendence. We need to find ways to be less stuck in our egos, less stuck in consumerism and materialism, and more conscious, loving and open to other beings. We need to wake up to our potential and our power.
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This is about quite a dark subject: the Soviet gulags. I don't recommend reading this essay if you suffer from clinical depression. If you're just somewhat got down by global politics, I do recommend you read this, to realize that things can be a lot worse, and to appreciate what we have going for us.
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A surprise visitor appears after a minute of this interview at Lowlands festival.
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Here's a conversation between me and David Fuller of Rebel Wisdom, about ecstatic experiences, spiritual pride and the trap of feeling special.
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As you may know, I’m researching a book about Aldous Huxley and his friends Alan Watts, Christopher Isherwood and Gerald Heard, and how these four posh Brits moved to California and helped to invent the modern culture of ‘spiritual but not religious’.
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Last week, I watched Free Solo, a documentary about 33-year-old Alex Honnold’s attempt to free climb El Capitan in 2017. It’s a horror film. You watch squirming in your seat, as this likeable young man dangles by his fingertips 2,300 metres off the ground in Yosemite. Even the cameraman can’t watch.
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I finally got around to watching Children of Men this week. It’s a 2006 film by Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron, about a near-future where global civilization has collapsed, Britain has become a fortress against waves of mass migration, and human fertility has abruptly stopped. No child has been born for 20 years, the playgrounds are silent, and people’s hearts have hardened.
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Recently, I’ve noticed several friends and acquaintances – mainly millennials - getting into magick. A 30-year-old successful professional woman who pays to consult a globe-trotting voodoo-priestess about her love life. A 33-year-old musician who's left a humanist community and joined a coven. Stephen Reid, formerly a leader of UK Uncut, who then set up The Psychedelic Society and now runs magick rituals.
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We’re so used to stories of snowflake students having meltdowns over Halloween costumes that it’s refreshing to remind ourselves they really can change the world for the better.
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I was walking to the Extinction Rebellion protest last weekend, and I suddenly started crying.
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Last week, I saw a good talk on somatic experiencing therapy. I’ve heard about it, and in some ways what I heard was quite obvious, but it was good to have it spelled out.
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