One for the Road column: Change comes from within

The child on the merry-go-round, the drunk at the bar, the hippie on the trip, the monk in the cave…

Whatever you might say about the depth, value and merit of their respective pursuits, these four are all trying to do the same thing: Change their world from the inside-out.

All people are born conscious beings – which is simply to say, everyone has a first-hand experience of what it is like to be themselves.

But just how different can these experiences be? Well, if you’ve ever spoken with a drunk hippie in a cave right after he stepped off a merry-go-round, then you already know the answer…

I remember once reading a book called ‘The Moral Landscape’, in which the author wrote beautifully about the peaks and valleys that rise and fall across the infinite expanse of human experience.

It was paradoxically both far out and resoundingly commonsensical.

It was all about grounding morality in well-being, with a kind of horses-for-courses, live-and-let-live underpinning.

It was about finding a way of acting, thinking and being that makes you the most happy, resilient, useful version of yourself.

Anyway, no need to rewrite the book, as the man says, but I’d recommend reading it.

Conversations around moral philosophy can get tediously technical and abstruse, but this book makes for 322 pages of very accessible, easily followed and engaging prose.

So, where was I? Oh aye, I was just about to make the point that we, as a species, are obsessed with perturbing our perceptions, distorting our senses and altering their consciousness.

For example, I remember how as teenagers my friends and I would get together and watch videos that promised to ‘get you high’.

Usually this would involve three or four of us sitting in a living room and staring hard as some geometric patterns that would repeat over and over again on the screen.

The videos claimed to be able to use different colours and formations of psychedelic shapes to induce experiences that mimicked the effects of different mind-alerting drugs.

I remember how during one such viewing we were all huddled around the TV, when suddenly we heard the front door open, triggering the lad whose house we were in to spring from his seat and change the channel, just in the nick of time.

I was never as relieved – I would have hated to see the look of horror on his ma’s face had she opened the door and found four 13-year-olds sitting on her sofa watching heroin.

Another example that illustrates this desperate human desire to disrupt our inner world was recently given to me by my granda.

When he was a cub, gas was mainlined into houses, some of which was used for lighting.

Apparently, he had a neighbour who used to remove the bulb, partially-unscrew the mechanism that controlled the gasflow, put the mouth of a half-filled jar of milk around the valve, and allow the toxic fumes to pour into the container.

“What’d he do then?” I asked naively.

“Put his hand over the top of the jar, shake it, then throw it back into him,” replied my granda, laughing heartily. “Ye wanna have seen that for a sight.”

Then another fella was telling me that his da remembers people drinking what was known as red biddy, which is a mixture of cheap wine and methylated spirits.

When once asked by a curious enquirer what the effects were like, the connoisseur replied, “The first thing I always notice is that the clock on the wall starts ticking wile loud.”

Those who have heard the Christy Moore song ‘Missing You’ will probably be familiar with his less comical characterisation of the same solution, when he sings ‘So I just drink red biddy for a permanent high, I laugh a lot less and I’ll cry till I die’.

Anyway, I thought this was all mad, then I remembered seeing boys in Belfast drinking bottles of Covonia cough syrup at house parties, which one fella pitched to me as ‘a cheap bang and a great way to offset the smoking’.

And I passed, by the way, in case you were wondering.

I’m more of a Benylin man.