52 Gscene
WALL'S WORDS
GAY SOCRATES
On the Road to Nowhere
Ayahuasca Told Me To Shut The F*ck Up!
) It’s almost Christmas so are we all feeling festive and thinking about holidays? We all need a break but in these very confusing times can we or should we? The answer is, quite simply, yes. Despite government warnings about foreign travel, you can go virtually anywhere, as long as you realise that on returning home you may have to isolate and if you can accept that there’s no problem. There will be medical checks before you travel and occasionally when you arrive.
) A few years ago I participated in an ayahuasca ceremony, which involved being together with an intentional ceremonial group over the course of many hours and imbibing an entheogenic concoction of the DMT containing leaves of a very particular shrub and the MAO inhibitor containing roots of a very specific vine.
BY ROGER WHEELER
The LGBTQ+ travel industry is estimated to be worth £1trillion a year, so it’s not surprising there are many companies specialising in holidays for us. They are all making ‘special offers’, just quite how ‘special’ is debateable. Out of Office (www.outofoffice. com) is one of the biggest UKbased LGBTQ+ companies with some very good offers. Frenchbased Gay Sejour (www.gaysejour.com) has some great deals, mainly in France. Cinq&Sept (www.cinqetsept.com), French again, looks extremely good. Of course the US has quite a few gay travel companies including Gay Travel (www.gaytravel.com), an Oregon-based outfit, which is one of the better ones. If sailing is your thing, with or without clothes, you should look at Everything to Sea (www.everythingtosea.com, not safe for work), which is US-based but specialises in the islands of the Far East, very exotic. Dutch company Gay Sail (www.gaysail.com, not safe for work) operates small boating trips mainly in the Adriatic, also offering totally naked trips. Canadian-based Out Adventures (www.outadventures.com) specialise in gay tours of Australia and New Zealand. Closer to home, Further Afield (www.furtherafield. com) is an LGBTQ+-owned agency that specialises in LGBTQ+-owned or LGBTQ+-friendly boutiquestyle self-catering cottages and apartments in the UK and across most of Europe, I have used them and they are extremely good. One of the best LGBTQ+-owned gîte-type restored monasteries is the Domaine de Monteils in southern France, near Montpelier, which has the wow factor. There are some incredible deals on the Maldives, most of the Greek Islands and the Canaries. You can check which country is on or off by visiting www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice. All the usual large companies, such as Booking.com, Expedia, Secret Escapes, are working overtime to get you to part with some money. Basically the Foreign Commonwealth Development Office is advising against all unnecessary travel, you must check your insurance. Staying in the UK is a good plan, and there are some fantastic deals. Never accept the rates you see on websites, always ring the hotel and ask what their best price is, you may be surprised. Gatwick South Terminal is closed until next summer; the railway station is undergoing massive reconstruction. British Airways has moved to Heathrow but easyJet is still there. You shouldn’t be too concerned about your health on board an aircraft as most have installed new air filters and operate all the usual hygiene systems, so you can fly happy and safely. Have a Happy Christmas wherever you are.
BY GAY SOCRATES
Spiritually and psychologically it required an openness to the possibility that this so-called Grandmother Medicine – used over millennia by the indigenous peoples of South and Central America – might offer me some kind of healing communication from the world of plant intelligence. The following day I was a profoundly changed human being! The experience had been a surprisingly physical and pleasurable one. For hours on end my gut, heart and throat areas had undulated in gentle, rhythmical, sub-orgasmic pulsations causing me to chuckle and groan with a gleeful ecstasy. Visually I had been presented with kaleidoscopically morphing fractal imagery of cathedral columns, ornate archways, gargoyles, rainforest branches and lush leafy undergrowth. And while this rollercoaster intensity of sensations was buffeting me I was struck by how long-lived the plant-life has been on our planet, compared with the relatively newcomer mammalian life-form with its less experienced, arrogant, language-based intelligence. I was in awe of this opportunity to commune in a non-linguistic way with an ancient intelligence. An intelligence which had accompanied me throughout my life but to which I had hitherto been blind and deaf. Within a number of spiritual/Faerie communities, there is the oftrepeated axiom: ‘Separation is simply an illusion. In truth we are all one.’ Well, as I was being battered, shaken-and pleasured even by Grandmama, the awareness descended on me that for the vast majority of my life I had focused on firstly learning but then (from my 20s onwards) fastidiously teaching what I’d learned. As a young medic the career mantra back in the ’80s was: ‘See one. Do one. Teach one’. I subsequently became a practitioner and teacher of listening and counselling skills and then a junior doctor trainer and ultimately a senior doctor appraiser. During the course of my profound and extreme ayahuasca encounter, I witnessed myself attempting to register and remember what was happening so I’d be able to pass it all on... And so what was the big message transmission from the world of plant-life? It was this: “If you truly believe that ‘We are all one’ then you can set aside this teaching/preaching fetish you have cultivated over the years. “The extent to which you have the impulse to transmit verbally what you have learned is the extent to which you doubt the reality that is: THE INTERCONNECTIVITY OF ALL OF LIFE. “Know instead that knowing is enough. “Stop all your thinking, talking and teaching. “It’s time for you to FEEL your feelings “And for you to simply BE your joyful self. “That should be enough!” So at the tender age of 60, it’s probably high time for Gay Socrates to shut up and sign off – it’s been a total blast!
