Chasing experiences..

Disclaimer: Bits and pieces of what I am going to write and assumptions I make below are heavily influenced by the philosophies, theories or wisdom of the people living or dead.

                   As the long Christmas weekend set in, my mind scampered restlessly in search of a retreat far from the routine and glitz of city life. Facebook walls had already started screaming of people flying to a variety of destinations, engaging in myriad activities for that another experience in their lives. Experiences which they wish to be bigger and better than the previous ones, experiences spread across the physical and mental planes of existence and feasible to fit in the finite boundaries of their perception,  nevertheless, experiences which are short and fleeting as they know subconsciously. Finally, I found a place and a mixed bag of people to accompany me. The place held promise to fulfill all our objectives. Kodaikanal, popularly known as a honeymoon destination, is also famous of late for "magic mushrooms" (Shrooms) which grow on its high altitude hills.  These Shrooms apparently make people hallucinative, introspective and spiritual according to the experiences of people who consumed them. My company is a couple of excessively alcoholic and chain-smoking friends who display a carefree and wanton consumeristic attitude towards every other aspect of life. Having become a bit placid to the highs of alcohol and having experimented with a few psychedelic drugs of late, they now wanted to try Shrooms. Another is a teetotaler and submissively indifferent old friend of mine who just seemed anxious to add another event, whatever it may be, to his bucket list. I, on the other hand, having had a dose of spiritual preachings recently, was particularly drawn towards mountains hoping to awaken an apparently hidden consciousness and getting an inch closer to the ultimate truth in their serenity and seclusion. 

                                               

                   With a gentle push on the accelerator and high hopes of the days to come, we kicked off in the late hours of Friday. After six hours of pop, rock, metal, bollywood, tea breaks, flash lights, cigarettes and chit chat, we were at the feet of the mountain ranges. A couple of my recent treks on the hills around Bangalore have brought down the surprises that mountains got in their store for me. However, as we rode up on the circuitous roads of the mountains during the dawn, watching the full moon play hide and seek behind the tall trees from the comfort of the back seat, while the cold breezes smeared the face and the woofers slickly relayed the beats to the ears, was mesmerizing enough. About 500 kms from the origin and 2.1 kms height from the sea level, we reached our destination and without any delay we crashed in a hotel room.

                    What was supposed to be a tryst with the nature seemed to turn out like a meet and greet affair for me as we overslept and we just had one evening in our hands. After a short tour around the town it was dark already, and I was left to choose between the company of chilling cold outside the hotel room and soon-to-be trippy friends inside the room. At first, I resisted the idea of having Shrooms, having read about the bizarre experiences of a few people and being aware of my own inability to handle new substances. But, it was hard to believe something that looked so organic and so small and insignificant as goat droppings, could mess with ones mind.  A few minutes after my friends consumed it, I took a leap of faith and I started nibbling at it.

                      Our hotel is perched on one of the high points in the hilly terrain of the town and thick clouds of mist frequently passed by our windows. The backdoor of our room opened to a dark, open-top lobby surrounded by thick, tall forest trees. After an hour of sanity in the mind, and a cloud of fear and excitement surrounding it, the demon of the Shrooms pierced into my mind. As I stepped into the backyard and looked at a thick pine tree surrounded by mist in the darkness of the night, the visual in my mind appeared more vivid than real. The image was terrifying and absorbed all my cognitive senses at once, dazzling my eyes with rainbow like colors. That is it, I realized what hit me and could sense how the next few hours were going to be - it was totally bad. Any dark space that I stared at for more than 5 seconds, conjured spooky images and tried to pull the light of my mind into an abyss,  sending chills down my spine. I tried to be in senses, focusing on the reality around and bobbing my head to the music faraway in the background.  Like a person holding onto a rope to stick to the trail in a dark and dense forest, I held onto the beat with a lot of determination and bobbed my head relentlessly. On the contrary, one of my friends was going through an absolutely thrilling experience. He had fallen in love with the nature. He said that the same pine tree shrouded in the mist was trying to tell him something intimate. He went closer and closer to the trees and gazed at them for minutes without batting his eyelids. He spoke to us with a certain seriousness about the deep rooted connection between trees and humans, as we inhale and exhale the same air and as a human body is just a gathering of the organic mass of trees and earth. Such sensitivity! After a while he said he felt a strange sensation of an another strong sense within him, something which he cannot recognize, wanting to come out forcibly. It kind of knocked me out. Things I never expected to be uttered by him, things that can only be found in spiritual parlance. The other guy was conspicuously silent for too long, which was not him at all.  As this psychedelic drama continued, like the photographer instinct which makes one to take out the camera just at the sight of anything beautiful, irrespective of the experiential value associated with it, the blogger instinct in me woke up and kept recording the entire experience. Our non-alcoholic friend was sound asleep by now, whereas we struggled to sleep that night unable to contain our relentless and unsettling imaginations.

                          I woke up sane the next morning, but the whole experience only managed to open up a Pandora's box of questions for me. Was the whole trip of the Shrooms a figment of unruly imagination of the mind, or did it manage to expand the boundaries of perception beyond the normally perceivable? I was not sure about it, but I was fairly sure about one thing. Be it for a 5 year old kid fully engrossed in his Christmas toys, in a night club, oblivious to the loud music, an assortment of drinks, food and people shouting and dancing in high spirits or be it for a celebrity who has taken to drugs and is in depression despite the following  of millions of  people, a lavish lifestyle and riches that can last for lifetime, the more things one identifies with physically and mentally, the grander the experiences of life one will need to be joyful in life. As long as one leaves the choice of these identifications to the whims and fancies of the same faculties, and not to a deeper and wiser consciousness, life will be a trap of an endless chase of experiences. This chase might be worth living for, but it is not the full worth of life. Thinking about this elusive consciousness and looking at the pine trees wishfully for the secrets they held, I descended the mountains.