Part One

It's March 1974. The bright sun of early spring floods through the sash window of the bedroom in Jimmy Keys's bedsit in Redland, Bristol. The near-radiant light imparts a sense of sanctity to this humble place, though it fails to extinguish the chill of the morning air. A stiff breeze can be heard playing in the trees outside.

I am perched, post-breakfast, on the edge of the small wooden chair situated next to Jimmy's bed. The streaks of fresh morning sunshine light up the drab-papered walls all around me. Jimmy gets up from his seat on the bed and pulls open the top drawer of his bedside cupboard.

I hitch-hiked in from Oxford the day before, earlier than the rest of the crew, who are due down this evening. Jimmy and I went out to sample the local scrumpy cider, which he was keen for me to try. Rumours abounded regarding this particularly notorious brew: how rats and other assorted animals made their way into the vats fermenting the cider, by accident or design. How the precise alcohol content of these locally-concocted ciders remained a mystery, but the consensus was that the resulting brews rotted teeth, rotted stomachs and intestines, and rotted brains. The cider drinkers of Bristol and Somerset were a breed apart.

Jimmy and I had called in on a range of hostelries, but two pints was plenty, even for my fully-initiated host. We had slept well, and by this morning my head is fresh and clear.

Jimmy rummages around in the drawer before finding what he is after. Sitting down again, he hands something to me. Innocuous enough, I guess. Having said that, it doesn't look too good. A piece of old, off-white blotting paper. Unedifying. I gaze at it in a state of apprehension bordering on absolute terror.

The moment, it seems, has arrived. For years now, the mainstream media has been spewing out scare-and-horror stories about the unique perils of LSD. People jumping out of high-rise flats, going blind through looking straight into the sun; chromosome damage, DNA destroyed; innocent teenagers transformed into little Charlie Mansons, or simply going out of their mind, never to return. 

To say I had been untouched by these stories would be untrue. I had a degree of awareness of how the mainstream was concerned with propaganda and mind control rather than providing objective truth; but little idea of the depths to which this lie-machine would go. And running parallel with the fear and terror were the other voices; voices that I respected and to a degree trusted. Voices such as those of Jimmy. Do it! Go for it! It's the way forward! The only way! You'll be fine..... Thus spoke the advocates of this particular passage of initiation - since passage of initiation was how it was billed, even if implicitly.

I stare at the grubby blotter once more, then put it to my lips. No taste, no smell: nothing. I take a deep breath, pop it in my mouth, give a cursory chew, and swallow. Then we head off to burn a cat.

Part Two

The cat is already dead. It was, until very recently, the beloved companion of Roger, who lives in the flat below, and his girlfriend. Roger, so Jimmy assures me, is a Zen master. With his closely shaven head, slightly piercing eyes, and enormously long drooping moustache, he certainly looks the part. I am not, however, completely won over. Roger's conversation is banal, his demeanour jerky and anxious, characteristics that I consider not at all befitting a Man of Wisdom. My doubts are redoubled when I learn that he is on prescription drugs for depression. It could, of course, all be a cover for a great Buddha Mind, out to confound all preconceived notions of what Zen is. But somehow I doubt it.

The four of us plus feline corpse drive high into the Mendip Hills; a short walk then takes us to an open grassy area surrounded by low tress and bushes. I am dispatched to collect dead wood for the funeral pyre, a task I go about dutifully. By now, however, a strange mood has descended on me. Just doing, just looking. But it all seems empty of meaning. If Roger wants to go about burning the dead cat, that's OK, but it's just one of an infinity of possibilities open to him. No more nor less meaningful or 'valid' than anything else. It's just what we're doing, that's all; just one of the things that people do. End of story.

As we sit solemnly watching the flames extend heavenward, Jimmy turns to Roger and his girlfriend. "He's tripping" he declares helpfully, gesturing vaguely in my direction. They nod silently, almost in unison. No comment, but I seem to detect an air of disapproval - not the last time in the months to come that I feel a quiet censure from sections of the so-called 'alternative'. Or is it all just paranoia?

Back in the car and back to the city. As we pass through villages en route, I notice dramatic transformations. The former solid, stone-and-brick houses have all gone. In their place stand old, rickety, tumbledown dwelling places, the likes of which normally belong in children's fairy stories. Gone, too, are the people, the human beings. They have been replaced by gnome-like, goblinesque figures, hurrying about their daily business. All are wearing masks over their faces, yet their inner being is immediately transparent to my transformed sense of vision. I look straight into them, and right through them.

It is a rather dark, sinister world that we are passing through, reminiscent of the nastier bits of Alice in Wonderland. I begin to awake to the realisation that this alternative view of life, this parallel universe of sorts, is not far away at all - a mere scruffy blotter is all it takes. And it seeps through unbeknownst to most people, in myths, legends, fairy stories; it's all around us, if only we care to look.

Part Three 

On our return to Jimmy's flat, we discover that our commune colleagues have turned up. There is a buzz to the place, with people chatting, laughing, beginning to cook dinner, listening to rock music issuing from Jimmy's impressive sound system. Only Lisa, who has come up from South Wales, is quiet. She sits on the floor next to me in her ubiquitous blue-black dufflecoat, gazing into nowhere in particular. Her aura, normally tinged with melancholy, now takes on the tone of profound reflective nostalgia and mournfulness. I find a tranquil, underplayed beauty living deep inside her, turned against itself. No-one else seems to notice.

The raw rock music of Free continues to blast from the speakers, and I amuse myself watching Gandhi, centrepiece of a huge poster on the living room wall, jiving in time to the rhythm of the sounds. What a mover the old Indian is, I think to myself, barely able to contain the hilarious explosions of energy bursting inside me.

After a while I turn my gaze towards the animated scene in the kitchen, where Jimmy and Liberty are chatting away while preparing dinner. Jimmy has put on weight recently, and now his slightly protruding belly expands obscenely in front of him. Then, before my very eyes, his ears lengthen backwards, and his head comprehensively transforms into that of a donkey. Call it a hallucination if you want, but it's as real as anything I've ever seen. I don't like this at all - Jimmy is a great guy, and doesn't deserve this grotesque transformation. Shaking my head vigorously and blinking hard, I turn back quickly to Gandhi as he twists the night away.

Part Four

The following morning we all bundle into Jimmy's car and head off to Glastonbury Tor. It's weird. For the past twenty four hours I've inhabited a uniquely different world, disconnected from anything I have ever known before. But nobody seems to clock it. No-one asks me about the goblins, the tumbledown houses, how I'm getting on. It's life-as-normal out there, as if nothing's happened, nothing's untoward. Am I behaving, to all appearances, as I usually do? Or are they afraid to ask?

It's a mournful procession that files slowly up the hillside towards the fabled tor. We have the place more-or-less to ourselves, and sit quietly at the summit. Gazing out over the now misty Somerset Plains, I sense that the grey-green monochrome overlay on the landscape mirrors precisely my inner world. Not depressed exactly, but deflated, reduced, levelled out. A realisation begins to trickle down. The world as I have assumed it to be has been thoroughly shattered. 'The world' has consisted of ideas and ideals; of thoughts, of beliefs about reality. For a precious and devastating few hours I have been presented instead with life as it actually is, direct, outside of mentality, beyond the screens and commentaries that habitually accompany experience. It has been the Zen 'Suchness' or 'Thusness', but without very much transcendental bliss.

Every single moment of my life until now has come with comment, judgement, evaluation of some description. And it was all just ripped away. I was experiencing reality itself, and not an idea of reality. Until yesterday I didn't even recognise the distinction existed. Most people never do. I am left with everything, and with nothing. It was liberating and shattering, in equal measure.

The LSD trip was weird, foreign, alien. Yet simultaneously, it was all so familiar. As if I already knew - had known all my life - but had somehow forgotten. I felt no fear. I had entered a different world, but had paradoxically also come home. Come home, to where I belong.

Project Commune has been based on the understanding that real change cannot be effected primarily by political, outer, means. It starts with the individual. If you wish to transform society, you need to get your own life together. What I am learning, however, is that this personal transformation involves far more than social organisation and lifestyle. A far deeper layer of the onion exists, which is where the real gold is to be found. It's the true inner journey, the consciousness trip; this trumps all others. And at this moment, even before it's properly started, the raison d'etre of the commune is threatening to unravel before my very eyes.