Border Ranges

Tonight's blog is about where I live and where I don't.  Like when someone asks me what the best food and beverage combination is and I respond with duck and Pinot Noir without thinking about Anderson Valley Boont Ale and microwave popcorn at the Mercury Lounge in Goleta.  Especially after smoking a doobie.  But then again, I have never done that after smoking one but can imagine how great it would be if I had.  Especially if there were a scrawny little skater kid playing a Deerhunter record in the corner.  Preferably one of their EPs, like Flourescent Grey or Rainwater Cassette Exchange.  Cause I need just that many songs to get into it but not more than that since there is other music to be heard.  Like a half bottle - more than a glass but less than a bottle.  So weed n reebs n EPs n corn.  And I had just finished working really hard.  Much harder than I would have ever liked to.  Making me really thirsty.  And really tired.  And making that moment of relaxation unbeatable.  That would be the correct answer.

So when I see a photo of Monument Valley in Utah, I can't help but think of how incredible it would be to go there.  But then again, I realize that I live awfully damn close to a region of the world that is one of the most magical places I have ever been... the Border Ranges between NSW and QLD.  And while I have been there a few times, I sit at home and wonder about places far, far away.  This area, especially the NSW side, is incredibly unheralded.  

So the reason I bring this up is that last weekend I spent most of it at home.  And I played all the Fuckpony songs.  And their album cover has a photo of Monument Valley with a formation very similar to Mt. Lindsey.  And I had emailed out a photo of Monument Valley to my friends earlier in the week.  So that is 3 and 3 is worth a post.

High Places

Highlighted passages from the book I am reading "Moksha" by Aldous Huxley...

Psychotropic substances of plant origin had already been in use for thousands of years in Mexico and as sacramental drugs in religious ceremonies and as magical potions having curative effects.  Only a ritually clean person, one prepared by a period of of prayer and fasting, had the right and qualification to ingest these drugs, and then only in such a purified body as their divine nature could develop, whereas the impure felt themselves going insane or mortally stricken.  Everywhere and at all times, men and women have sought, and duly found, the means of taking a holiday from the reality of their generally dull and often acutely unpleasant existence.  I suddenly realised that, so far as pleasures are concerned, we are no better off than the (ancient) Romans or Egyptians.  The fact is strangely significant, human beings have felt the radical inadequacy of their personal existence, the misery of being their insulated selves and not something else, something wider, something in Wordsworthian phrase, "far more deeply interfused."  So long as we are confined within our insulated selfhood, we remain unaware of the various not-selves with which we are associated - the organic not-self, the subconscious not-self, the collective not-self of the psychic medium in which all our thinking and feeling have their existence, and the immanent and transcendent not-self of the Spirit.  It looks as though the most satisfactory working hypothesis about the human mind must follow, to some extent, the Bergsonian model, in which the brain, with its associated normal self, acts as a utilitarian device for limiting, and making selections from, the enormous possible world of consciousness, and for canalizing experience into biologically profitable channels.  Blake said, "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite and holy."  The fear, as I analyse it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear. This fear is due to the incompatibility between man's egoism and the divine purity, between man's self-aggravated separateness and the infinity of God.  And what takes place in visions may be but a foretaste of what shall come after the moment of death.  The mental climate of our age is not favourable to visionaries.  In the past, experiences of this kind were considered valuable and those who had them were looked up to.  The subject does not remember or invent them: he discovers them.  The visionary experience, whether spontaneous or induced by drugs, hypnosis or any other means, bears a striking resemblance to 'the Other World', as we find it described in the various traditions of religion and folklore.  Precious stones are held to be precious, because the remind human beings of the Other World at the mind's Antipodes.  Flowers are almost as transporting as precious stones.  Good implies bad and so perpetuates dualism.  Love reconciles all the opposites and is the One.

Really digging this album by High Places this morning...