While it is both tempting and popular to dismiss most forms of mental, spiritual and physical exploration as mere 'escapism', we may often find that in doing so we have got things back to front. If for instance it is said that I have ingested drugs to escape from reality, then you have not understood what drug-taking entails. When I take a psycho-active substance it is not because I wish to remove myself from reality, but because I want to draw myself closer to it so that it may be reborn as something otherwordly and surreal. What is so regularly overlooked however, is that this 'otherworld' is not really a separate world from the one ordinarily experienced but the same world viewed from a different perspective. Indeed, in the same spirit of misunderstanding micro-biologists are often prone to talk of the 'microscopic world' of tripple-horned bedbugs and armour-plated mites - where the fibres of an unassuming rug suddenly transform into the ravines and valleys of an insane cotton landscape. But this microscopic world is not really extraterrestrial to our own, as we well know it is the very same environment magnified by several hundred degrees of enlargement.
Never the less, it is always so much more comforting to talk of 'different worlds' and 'other realms'; psychonaughts take 'trips into space' while less-experienced drug users are written off as 'space-cadets' - as if the rest of the universe was an ethereal la-la land ruled by nonsense and caprice. It is apparently all to easy to forget that outer space is the same space that separates the contents of our room; that the stars which seem so alien and implausible in the night's sky are only our planet's own sun as if viewed from a greater distance. If there is any collective reason for this habit of ours, it may simply be that whatever appears sensible or otherwise 'insane' is really just a matter of relative proximity; a possibility which becomes even more plausible once we consider similar experiences to these. A familiar word like “waving” for instance which might seem reasonable enough from the vantage point of casual conversation, quickly turns into nonsense when we draw our attention closer to it by repeating it over and over. Conversely, when we put considerable distance between ourselves and our habitat by taking a ride in a plane, the mass of alien shapes viewed from above scarcely seems to resemble the house we know down below.
Never the less, it is always so much more comforting to talk of 'different worlds' and 'other realms'; psychonaughts take 'trips into space' while less-experienced drug users are written off as 'space-cadets' - as if the rest of the universe was an ethereal la-la land ruled by nonsense and caprice. It is apparently all to easy to forget that outer space is the same space that separates the contents of our room; that the stars which seem so alien and implausible in the night's sky are only our planet's own sun as if viewed from a greater distance. If there is any collective reason for this habit of ours, it may simply be that whatever appears sensible or otherwise 'insane' is really just a matter of relative proximity; a possibility which becomes even more plausible once we consider similar experiences to these. A familiar word like “waving” for instance which might seem reasonable enough from the vantage point of casual conversation, quickly turns into nonsense when we draw our attention closer to it by repeating it over and over. Conversely, when we put considerable distance between ourselves and our habitat by taking a ride in a plane, the mass of alien shapes viewed from above scarcely seems to resemble the house we know down below.
Intelligent couples have for many centuries, and with great success, capitalised on these peculiar facts of perspective in order to breathe new life into their relationships: While one lover stays at home, the other typically takes a short holiday, and upon returning both lovers come to realise a subtle yet obvious truth that their partner was not the 'ball & chain' they had previously thought; but was in fact the key to the gates of paradise all along. So effective is this brief shift in perspective in allowing us experience the ordinary as the extraordinary, we may even wish there was a similar way of gaining a fresh vantage point on the planet upon which we are permanently rooted. To this science fiction writers and artists have provided us with a disarmingly simple solution – by constructing fantastic aliens landscapes almost like our own but not quite, we may come to indirectly appreciate the full weirdness of our own habitat by extension. An alien race that segregates itself on the basis of earlobe markings might appear far-fetched and bizarre; until we realise that this is almost exactly how we have segregated our own species at various times on earth. A world with two moons seems insane; until we stop to consider why exactly having one moon should be any more sensible than having two.
In this way all great science fiction, much like all great intoxicants and forms of art, draws our attention back to the fundamental presence of reality by the simple device of rearranging or altering its basic and incidental elements. A tree on psilocybin is far more a tree than the one encountered sober, since the psychedelic tree of exaggerated proportions has forced you to recognise that there was a tree there at all. A cubist painting of a head is far more of a head than the one on your shoulders, since the startling effect of viewing one from every angle at once has made you consider the full multiplicity of what a head entails. It is of course reasonable to assume that not everyone will be bowled over by cubism or impressed by the polychromatic visions of an acid trip, but the point here isn't to say how wonderful activities such as these are, only that such activities when we are fully absorbed with them are really a form of 'engagement' rather than 'escapism'. It is perhaps both unfortunate and unfair in this respect that the individual who is far happier reading a book than going out socialising with their friends, is so often written off as a “daydreamer” refusing to live in “the real world”. Although it may be true that such a person has to an extent withdrawn themselves from social reality, a short departure from social reality does not equate to a complete break from reality itself. However given that for most people 'social reality' is the only consistent reality they have ever known, it may become all too convenient to assume that they have.
While such a dogmatic point of view may be understandable in as much we might see how a person could have reached it, this does not of course make it a reasonable view to hold by extension: Even if we could somehow show that reality had any special relationship with familiarity as opposed to unfamiliarity, we would still be placed in the worrying situation of explaining why our familiar and stable world should so readily crumble into a la-la land of irrational nonsense when placed under the r x-ray or microscope. In reconciling ourselves with such facts, we might just have to accept that everything that is familiar from a certain perspective is also unfamiliar and that everything that is familiar can be made to look unfamiliar, that is to say; 'real or imaginary'. As a last resort we could perhaps argue that the real difference between the fantastic and otherworldly and the concrete and real is that reality, unlike fantasy, can always be counted upon to obey regular and consistent laws. But even the madman who harbours paranoid delusions of whole governments and nation states conspiring against him can show consistency in his flawed logic and a method to his madness, and so it will always prove impossible to be certain that we aren’t doing the same thing.
To get involved in philosophical debates over the difference between 'appearance' and 'reality' however is perhaps besides the point here. Rightness and wrongness do not in themselves tell us anything about how much we have lived or how well. In experiencing anything it seems the primary dilemma we face is not in discovering how true or false it is, but in how willing we are are to experience its nature; real or otherwise. From the stand-point of 'living' rather than being 'right' then, we might say the only real test of experience is how weird or alternatively how mundane it has always appeared to us - If it has always manifested itself before us as something strange and unfamiliar we might say we have known it very well, while if it has been no more than the 'run of the mill' than we probably have not bothered to get to know it at all.
Although the idea that we know something far better when we encounter it as something unfamiliar may strike us as counter-intuitive and contrary, it will hopefully be clear by now that it is only by attempting to find the esoteric in the conventional that we can ever be said to have achieved the true intimacy of knowing something through its carefully held secrets. The drug-user or science fiction enthusiast in this sense is not an 'escapee' who has taken reality for his prison, but an individual who wishes to explore his habitat in the proper sense of uncovering all its hidden passages and concealed oddities. It is really the person who insists on looking at life 'straight-forwardly' who withdraws themselves from experience, since to approach life head-on is to miss all the action going on around the sides. If we have any inclination to know life in the full and complete sense, it seems unavoidably clear that we must take all vantage points and perspectives into account. In doing so it is of course possible that we will be accused of 'escaping' the very thing we are trying to gain access to, but if so; so what? All the better for the person who misunderstands us when they finally become enlightened to our secret – that we were really engaging with it all along.
Although the idea that we know something far better when we encounter it as something unfamiliar may strike us as counter-intuitive and contrary, it will hopefully be clear by now that it is only by attempting to find the esoteric in the conventional that we can ever be said to have achieved the true intimacy of knowing something through its carefully held secrets. The drug-user or science fiction enthusiast in this sense is not an 'escapee' who has taken reality for his prison, but an individual who wishes to explore his habitat in the proper sense of uncovering all its hidden passages and concealed oddities. It is really the person who insists on looking at life 'straight-forwardly' who withdraws themselves from experience, since to approach life head-on is to miss all the action going on around the sides. If we have any inclination to know life in the full and complete sense, it seems unavoidably clear that we must take all vantage points and perspectives into account. In doing so it is of course possible that we will be accused of 'escaping' the very thing we are trying to gain access to, but if so; so what? All the better for the person who misunderstands us when they finally become enlightened to our secret – that we were really engaging with it all along.
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