Tempo:
When I was five, one of my mother's sisters, having noticed my penchant for drawing, gave me a set of oil paints and a few small canvasses.
The SMELL of the fresh canvas and paints brought about an instantaneous "peak experience," one among the very many I underwent as a child. I "knew" that I would devote my life to art and painting -- and indeed I mostly have, and the SMELL still is to me one of the most wonderful things ever.
I could create what I wanted on the canvas -- and this brought to the fore an interest in how and why anyone could create anything. And this accounts for the beginning of my life-long interest in the "creative and inventive processes," a topic I have researched and studied more than anything else.
Via paths and circumstances too complex to include here, the topic of creative processes and the topic of psi experiencing came together, rather thunderously, in 1955.
I was then in basic training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and in the base library I set about reading Aldous Huxley's DOORS OF PERCEPTION [1954] which was the rage at the time.
This book is commonly reviewed as triggering the modern controversy on the relationship between drug experience and mysticism, and which is partly true of it.
But it is also much more, and which is directly implied by its title.
This book was the beginning of a watershed for me. For, you see, in spite of my voracious appetite for reading and bookworming study, no one else had ever said it, nor had it dawned on me that perceptions have "doors" -- and that those doors can be OPEN or SHUT.
The SMELL of the fresh canvas and paints brought about an instantaneous "peak experience," one among the very many I underwent as a child. I "knew" that I would devote my life to art and painting -- and indeed I mostly have, and the SMELL still is to me one of the most wonderful things ever.
I could create what I wanted on the canvas -- and this brought to the fore an interest in how and why anyone could create anything. And this accounts for the beginning of my life-long interest in the "creative and inventive processes," a topic I have researched and studied more than anything else.
Via paths and circumstances too complex to include here, the topic of creative processes and the topic of psi experiencing came together, rather thunderously, in 1955.
I was then in basic training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and in the base library I set about reading Aldous Huxley's DOORS OF PERCEPTION [1954] which was the rage at the time.
This book is commonly reviewed as triggering the modern controversy on the relationship between drug experience and mysticism, and which is partly true of it.
But it is also much more, and which is directly implied by its title.
This book was the beginning of a watershed for me. For, you see, in spite of my voracious appetite for reading and bookworming study, no one else had ever said it, nor had it dawned on me that perceptions have "doors" -- and that those doors can be OPEN or SHUT.
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