Prague Gnosis - Terence Mckenna Interviews Ram Dass

Great interplay here between masters of their own field - Ram Dass the 'secular guru' broken free of his previous role as a Harvard professor, and Terrence Mckenna who can only be accurately described and properly paid homage to as: 'that mushroom guy'. Enjoy.

 

Rooms and Spaces

Our lives are almost entirely spent inside rooms, and our time outside them spent mostly traveling to and from them. It is surprising therefore, that there has been so little discussion in philosophy on what rooms are and how they might affect us. It is probably only in the science or 'art' of feng shui that we find a genuine attempt to understand the room, alongside a doctrine describing how best to make such a room habitable. While this is no doubt an admirable cause, the feng shui expert, like the astrologer, perhaps over-states the case in having us believe that subtle degrees of distance between immediate or distant objects could bring about the significant changes within us that they propose. Never the less, within the art of feng shui, there is perhaps a 'basic message' or generalised set of rules which it would be foolish to passover. There is for instance, something very practical and sincere in the idea that what and where we place things within our room might have a positive or negative effect on us. Taking for example, the placement of our sofa or bed, it would probably as a rule, be far wiser to have both facing towards our door rather than away from it, so that we do not feel on edge or exposed by the possibility of someone entering while we are 'off our guard'. We may also in arranging our furniture, be just as well advised to take special care in arranging what goes around them, and in this matter feng shui tells us that it is far better to use 'living' plants rather than 'dead' inanimate ornaments. But if this is good advice, it apparently not because plants invite a greater source of 'chi' into our homes than inanimate ornaments, but because we just feel more natural and 'at home' with objects from the natural world placed around us. Similarly, if we are told that opened windows and drawn curtains are preferable to one that aren't, then we have only been reminded of a simple piece of common sense.

In practice however, it is not only the room by itself which has a profound impact on our lives, but the location in which it is situated. To this end the socio-biologist E O Wilson has put forward the convincing argument that the best sort of home is usually one which is highly placed (preferably on a hill), overlooking a forest, with a fresh water-supply in the form of a stream or a lake nearby. Such conditions are apparently so intrinsically appealing to us according to Wilson, that in studies where a person is shown a series of landscape paintings with a house situated within it, the individual will almost always gravitate towards the one which is upon high ground with a neighbouring water-course and forest nearby. When we take into account our not too distant past as pre-civilised beings solely dependent on our natural environment, the reasons for this seems obvious: the elevated ground allows us to see any potential threat on the horizon before it can strike. The water source provides us with a direct source of water which we do not have to travel far to acquire. And the forest; containing many varieties of wild animal, gives us an easily-accessible hunting ground where we can find our food. None of these things are of course strictly necessary in the modern world of technological convenience, but something of our evolutionary-lineage clearly lingers on; and apparently such conditions continue to appeal in spite of ourselves.

The exact location and decorative features of our room are however, only one side of the story. In any discussion about rooms or living spaces it is perhaps equally as important to understand what a room actually is, alongside where it is and what it does. In order to achieve this aim, as with any other object of inquiry, it seems we must first discover its allegorical nature; that is to say, what it 'symbolises'. Initially we might find such a course of inquiry ludicrous: Why waste our time trying to discover what the symbolic nature of a room is when, quite obviously it is something functional – In this case something to keep us warm and sheltered? The reason is that in attempting to find the symbolic nature of anything, we are in fact trying to extract out a further function it might have that has been hidden and obscured, and like anything that is hidden and obscured, there will much more to learn by investigating its nature as opposed to studying only what is apparent and obvious.

In order then to discover the room's 'extra function', much as with any other, it will probably be necessary to cease using it in the way we are used to. In practice, this may be achieved by doing nothing more than siting quietly in our room, and allowing the events around us to unfold - only in this way will the symbolic function of the room be revealed. When we do manage to sit quietly long enough without interfering with the events around us, it should soon become apparent that our room in essence is a stage upon which life itself plays out daily. In as much as any stage has a story to tell, we may also find that ours in particular has one to tell about the essential transience and chaos of existence; teacups, friends, wasps in summer, all are just passing through our habitat in much the same way that they are passing through like. In addition to this, we may also find that the room, if we are willing to reflect, has just as much to reveal about our attitude towards these essentially transient facts of life. If for instance, our room is one in which everything is immaculate and no cushion may be disturbed, it is probably true to say that the erratic and haphazard nature of existence is so distressing to us, we feel the only rational response is to eradicate these facts within our own home. Similarly, if we take the opposing attitude towards our room, and seek to accumulate and hang onto as much clutter as we can; it  is probably not a stretch to imagine that this response extends to our life in general - everything we love we cannot let go, everything that slips through our figures we can never forget.

In our own lives of course, we may feel that we are nowhere close to the extremes of these types of characters, and that as much as these characters resemble human nature, they are more caricatures than actual likenesses. Never the less, the whole point of a caricature is only to exaggerate not only what exist in the subject, but by degree in every man. Thus; the hoarder is the extreme manifestation of the commonplace habit of collecting certain items and putting them either in drawers of cupboards, the germaphobe; the house-proud person operating at the very outer limits of what it means to have 'pride'. Even in our own lives then, we may find that we fit somewhere within this domestic spectrum, and whether through hoarding, collecting, cleaning or sanitising, we have transformed our room from its symbolic function of a stage, to the far less playful symbol of a fortress. Worse still, if we have to some degree or another, conspired to turn our home into a fortress in this way, any advice the feng shui expert, socio-biologist or environmentalist has to give us, will be necessarily useless: We cannot consider 'integrating the organic' into our home when we are so naturally uncomfortable with what the organic entails. We cannot think about moving to live by a forest, hill and a lake when forests hills and lakes are the very things that we distrust. Changes in environment must always be preceded by changes in mind, and if a room is to be altered at all, we must first become at peace or at least accept the reality of the facts contained within it. 

This may all be good and well, but how do we realistically achieve peace of kind? In as much as the facts contained within our room, are identical with the general facts of existence, it seem we can only make peace with what exists in our room by making peace with existence itself. We are no doubt, already aware that a great deal of religion and philosophy and has been written towards this end, and that much of it is very helpful, even if it has not helped us. What we might have overlooked however, is that once the symbolic function of the room is understood; as a stage upon which all the facts of life are revealed, we no longer require religion or philosophy to help us in this respect. As we watch any number of things succumb to age, grow, death and play within our four walls, it should become apparent that the room itself tells us everything we need to know about the fundamentals of existence. Once these facts are finally understood, there is then no question of how we should then come to terms with them, since the answer is that we already do; precisely by living amongst them everyday.