The Knickerbocker Glory of the Human Condition

Long ago, when I was a kid growing up in England, the knickerbocker glory was the icon of supreme ice-cream deliciousness. The only thing that might have surpassed this fame was its legendary expensiveness, which is why I only got one per year, while on holiday, at the seaside. Not so well known, is that the knickerbocker glory is also a very good illustration of the relationship between the human condition and the tripping brain – but first, what is this knickerbocker glory?

 Champagne comes in a champagne flute, brandy comes in a brandy glass, and likewise the knickerbocker glory comes in its own special knickerbocker glory glass – very tall, wide at the top and tapering to narrow at the bottom.  In the bottom portion is poured a brightly coloured fruit syrup, such as strawberry or lime. Above that comes another syrup of contrasting colour, perhaps pineapple or blackcurrent, and on and on up the glass they go in a festival of colours, each syrup forming a discrete and separated layer, like sedimentary rocks. Then as the glass widens come more layers – now of different flavoured ice creams, meringue, and sometimes even cake. At the very top, perching high above the rim of the glass, sits a huge blob of whipped cream, with wafers sticking up, all of it crowned with a maraschino cherry. Genius!

 Here is the modern version of the knickerbocker glory, which to my mind is just a cheap knock-off, so to do it full justice imagine six or seven more layers. The important part though, and the reason this picture is here, is for you to notice how distinct and separated each layer is from the next:   

 (My apologies here, you will have to cut and paste to see these wonderful images, it is beyond my powers to find a way to dump them in to the website.)

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/330873903863728866/

AND:

https://www.theemporiumdirect.co.uk/the-original-knickerbocker-glory-glass-10oz-28cl.html

 And how exactly is this a fitting symbol for life, the universe and the tripping mind? Well, the whipped cream at the top is Me-Central, the ego, taking itself to be the ruler of all below, silly thing. Underneath it come all the other layers of our humanness, each with its own belief system and world view that its neighbours may agree with, disagree with, or know nothing about. These layers may only intrude upon the whipped cream world through inexplicable dark mood, an unexpected irritation or anxiety, a craving, or some unforeseen burst of joy. These moods, and even physical sensations, turn into the night-time narratives we call dreams, and they also show up as the beautiful, weird, scary, and redemptive imagery of our trips.  There are more things in the knickerbocker glory’s heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the whipped cream’s somewhat limited philosophy.

 In the psychedelic experience a straw goes down through all these layers and for a few wonderful or stultifyingly frightening hours the layers have a chance to get to know one another. Layers that are stuck in post-traumatic belief systems – that they are worthless, are in immediate danger right this second, that the world sucks and is against them, etc., – may temporarily dislodge from their automated ruts and receive new information, while in a mystical experience layers holding cramped and painful beliefs are exposed to shafts of light where, by being seen and opened to love, they can get some healing.

 Whether this shaft of light is from some kind of lemony layer inside the knickerbocker glory or if it is pouring in through the window of the restaurant from outside, I would not know, but the light of loving attention is the engine of healing. Do those negative belief systems, cast in the crucible of trauma and with the momentum of many years of habit behind them get dissolved forever in a single afternoon? Surely not. But they do get a “taste” of freedom.

 And then the trip is over, the knickerbocker glory, which has temporarily taken on the action of a lava lamp, returns to normal, and the layers go back to their separated ways. After good trips we wonder how we can hold on to the perspectives and insights that were vouchsafed us, while after a bad trip we would be so happy to just return to our old complacency. It’s the first question, how do I hold onto my fading insights, that I will look at here. To start with, there is the impossible conundrum of, I want to hold on to this glowy feeling and these insights with all my might, but holding on sounds like grasping, and grasping is part of what the insights were telling me not to do. Already I seem to be talking the wrong language to my lower layers.

 This contrasts with the mystical experiences of those who have made it their business to be exposed to divine light – the saints and mystics. Generally speaking, they do not ponder on how to keep a hold on the experience, but more often report on how it cannot be forgotten. Saint Teresa of Avilla put it this way:

 In the orison of union, the soul is fully awake as regards God, but wholly asleep as regards things of this world and in respect of herself. During the short time the union lasts, she is as it were deprived of every feeling, and even if she would, she could not think of any single thing…

 Thus does God, when he raises a soul to union with himself, suspend the natural action of all her faculties. She neither sees, hears, nor understands, so long as she is united with God. But this time is always short, and it seems even shorter than it is. God establishes himself in the interior of this soul in such a way, that when she returns to herself, it is wholly impossible for her to doubt that she has been in God, and God in her. This truth remains so strongly impressed on her that, even though many years should pass without the condition returning, she can neither forget the favour she received, nor doubt of its reality.

 As a nun, meditation (“orison”) was Teresa’s day job as well as her passion, so that by the time the orison of union happened, her knickerbocker glory layers were all lined up, ready to receive the light and have at it with the Godhead. When psychedelic adventurers go knocking on heaven’s door, if the winds are right, we can sometimes get to that same union for a couple of hours, or moments, but after that, even if we are covered in awe and wonderment, our business-as-usual lives, with their stresses and their calls on our attention, reassert. The task then is how to make the experience alive and substantial, not just a picture postcard memory you could share with friends at a dinner party. How do you stay in touch with fairyland after you have lost your supply of pixie dust?

 Most of us can’t go off and live in a monastery, or wouldn’t like the food if we did, but we can create some kind of a “do try this at home” practice that will help keep the dialogue going with the syrupy layers below our whipped cream ego-consciousness. It doesn’t even have to be a religious practice per se, it might be walking in the woods, or gardening, or playing bass, anything that helps you connect with your layers again. For the contemplative, the spiritual practice organizes their being towards having a mystical experience; for the psychedelic traveler, the mystical experience prompts them into a supportive spiritual practice.

 A practice of this type that I have come across is a tweak on a variation of the Buddhist lovingkindness meditation. The lovingkindness meditation is most often a guided meditation where you are invited to open your heart and send feelings of lovingkindness first to yourself, then to the people closest to you, then to neutrals, then to people you don’t care for, then people you really can’t stand, and finally to all sentient beings. A client told me about a variation on this that he was taught while on a meditation retreat. He was instructed to send sentences along the lines of, “May I have peace,” “May I have joy,” “May I be free from suffering,” to himself throughout the day, not necessarily in the orderly fashion of the guided meditation, but just as he was going about his business. It was emphasized for him to not work hard on saying it with feeling, but just to get the words out. That helps take the expectations – and the dashed expectations – out of it.

 This reminded me of some psychedelic journeys where I spent time sending messages like, “I accept you,” “you are loved,” and so forth, down into my lower knickerbocker layers. The plus of being on a drug is that there is a chance you will see your lower layers receiving the messages, and maybe even how they react. Given that, my tweak on the variation of the lovingkindness meditation is that we direct the well-wishing messages not so much towards people outside us or even to ourselves, but to parts of us, those lower layers that can operate with a sometimes scary degree of autonomy. Your whipped cream, forsaking what may usually be a more insular style, can wish the lower layers well, and they seem to like that. With an intra-personal lovingkindness practice you can send kind messages like, “may you be happy,” “may you be at ease,” or “may you be safe,” to any parts of you that popped up during your journey. And maybe the message need not be as formal sounding as the Buddhist ones – it might be, “you poor thing,” or, “it’s okay,” or whatever it is your lower layers would like to hear.

 You can do the same thing with the trip imagery. I worked with someone who had been in an ayahuasca circle where she started out the ceremony stuck in habitual mental loops of self-denigrating and self-condemning thoughts. At one point though, she broke free from that and was able, after the manner of ayahuasca, to turn into a plant. She was not any particular plant, but simply feeling her plantfulness, alive, vibrant and free. Negative self-talk was gone because plants don’t really do self-talk. The solution to her negativity was to be something else. She said to herself at the end of the ceremony, “I want to remember what this is like, so I can know this is possible.”

 As we worked on this afterwards, she re-visualized the plant experience and re-lived some of the plant feelings again. Recalling that strength and vitality, she devised well-wishing messages like, “I am healthy,” “I am strong” and “I am free” that were like booster shots to her parts trapped in painful loops. Having heard it loud and clear during the ceremony, these lower knickerbocker layers now had the chance to remember their epiphany.

 There’s only but so much band width in our conscious heads, and to the degree that we fill it with well-wishing messages, the less space there is for culturally normal self- critical and complainy messages that boil down to a mantra of, “He’s an idiot, she’s an idiot, I’m an idiot too.” We are more machine-like than we would like to admit, and the mechanical replacement of automatic negative thoughts with automatic positive ones can turn garbage in, garbage out into more of lovingkindness in, lovingkindness out. Oddly though, we have to make a continuous deliberate choice to bring in the good stuff. Annoying, eh?

 And now for a word on words. Given that this well-wishing exercise is entirely based on words, we have to wonder why it is that words so often get a bad rap in psychedelic circles. Once we’ve had our ego death and gone “beyond words,” then as the thinking – or the folklore – goes, we shall unite with the One, find wisdom, something like that. And that might be true, but is it a reason for words to always play second fiddle to silence? You can’t describe the flavor of tomato soup to someone who has never tasted it, but by being “beyond description,” it doesn’t mean that canned tomatoes are that much closer to God than we are? Words are the first great human achievement and, as Salman Rushdie noted, our specialness lies in being the only story-telling animal. In fact, it has been noted that in the beginning was the word.

 Part of the bad press about words is that we have used them so much to dumb down reality, with our bad habit of over-analyzing and over-thinking. We have used intellectual verbiage and the language of bureaucratic instructions to divorce us from ourselves and build the great chasm that has instinct and imagination on one side and our less-than-thrilling daily realities on the other. On the biological scale it’s us who made all the layers in the knickerbocker glory, and on the cultural scale it’s us who arranged it so they would stop talking to one another. The power of a word is more than its labeling capacities; it is poetry, incantation, magic spells, and love charms to ourselves that reawaken the conversation with the lost and forbidden parts of who we are. Words are the magic carpet that flows between us and the invisible realms.

 “I am a shining tear of the sun” said the ancient Welsh bard Amergin as he first planted his foot on Irish soil, apparently with less than friendly intentions. This was part of a longer incantation, where he named the many things he could shape-shift into, until you start to wonder if there is anything he couldn’t do – which I suppose was the point. In this one line of the poem he is human, he is water, he is fire; and not only that, he also, lives in the sky and yet is close enough to run down a cheek. It takes a very essential self to be all those things, and this is what I was pondering for an hour or several with the help of some mushroom friends one afternoon, when, before things got away from me and became a bit too ineffable, I tried to convey this freedom to some of my more fearful and uptight layers. Poetry was helping me do my internal well-wishing. Here is the whole poem:

 I am a stag of seven tines

I am a wide flood on a plain

I am a wind across the sea

I am a shining tear of the sun

I am a birdsong in the wood

I am a hawk on a cliff

I am fair among flowers

I am a god who sets the head afire with smoke

I am the point of a lance in battle

I am a salmon in the pool

I am a hill of poetry

I am a wild boar of valour

I am the roar of the ocean

I am a wave of the sea

Who but I knows the secrets of the unhewn stone?

I am the queen of every hive

I am the fire on every hill

I am a word of science

I am the ox of seven combats

I am the ninth wave of eternal return

I am the grave of every vain hope

Who is it that throws light into the meeting of the mountains?

Who is it that announces the ages of the Moon?

Who teaches the place where the Sunset falls?

Who is the god who fashions the enchantments of the wind?

Who but I am both the tree and the lightning that strikes the tree?

So, no confidence issues with this guy.

 It was after that client told me about the variation of the lovingkindness practice that I tried my tweak for myself, and for a few days I spent time sending nice messages to some of my less enlightened lower layers, until I woke one morning with the words, “Now it is possible to eat the spring” in my head. Not yet awake enough to misconstrue its meaning, I got it that something down in my lower layers appreciated my kind messaging, and it was reporting back to me that a new spring-like energy had shown up, and it was possible to digest that energy, like a food.

 True, you and I are not Saint Teresa or Amergin, brimming with supernatural powers, and our first notes-to-self can be modest ones like “you’re okay,” or “may I be safe,” or borrowed words, or anything else you may wish to say. Essentially, we can speak to ourselves in ways we would like to be spoken to, and go outside of, as Greta Thunberg might put it, the usual blah, blah, blah of the habitual, self-critical mind-loops. We can re-member the psychedelic experience of wholeness by re-minding ourselves about it with our well-wishing messages. Then it comes down to hope and trust that our inner knickerbocker glory layers will respond. Very often, it’s when those layers find conscious expression that they feel genuinely satisfied. 

 Why is it that today the popular psychedelic conversation is so dominated by what is happening in the most recent research somewhere in the world or how the government is permitting a next step in clinical trials? Where is the conversation about poets, artists, dancers and philosophers? We merry pranksters will get nowhere if we kick the poets off the bus. In 1819 one of those poets, Percy Byshe Shelley, started a conversation with the wind that has not yet reached its conclusion. That wind is still blowing through our trips and ceremonies, even if our business-as-usual consciousness does not feel its force:

 If I were a dead leaf thou mightiest bear;

If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even

I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,

As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed

Scarce seem’d a vision; I would ne’er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

 To be lifted by this wind we must contrive to be as light as the leaf, wave, and cloud. That will surely involve dropping our looping thoughts, our downer self-criticism and bureaucratic naming. We must be ready to wander over Heaven without taking on travel insurance. Shelley’s leaves belong to Autumn, cold, and death, but where are they blowing to? His final words in the conversation are, “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” Why don’t we eat it?