Cassandra Voices

Author: robcoffey

  • Managing Risk in Psychedelic Assisted Therapy: Lessons from Adventure Sports

    I spent twenty years working as an adventure sports guide.  In my early twenties, I was a whitewater guide on rivers like the Zambezi and White Nile in Africa. In my thirties I worked as a mountain leader, guiding trekking expeditions to Kilimanjaro,  Everest base camp, the Andes and the Himalayas. While it may seem that those working in such fields may be risk-takers, and it may have been true about me in my early twenties, the reality is adventure sports guides are constantly assessing risk, and are in some ways hyper-attuned to risk.

    For the past six years, as a psychotherapist and co-founder of Inwardbound psilocybin retreats in the Netherlands, almost a thousand people have come through our retreat processes. This article explores my perspective on risk from these differing viewpoints. While it may seem that these are very different worlds, I believe there are a lot of similarities between managing risk in adventure sports and in psychedelic assisted therapy.

    My own personal story is one of outward bound to inward bound- at the age of about thirty due to a series life crises (heartbreak, injuries and tragedies I witnessed in the outdoors) I began to look at more inward self-reflective practises such as meditation, yoga and therapy, which slowly and over time, led me to the work I am doing now, not in a planned way, but through the path of my own lived experience.

    As my time working as an outdoor guide was coming to an end, I began to be much more interested in adventure therapy than adventure sports. ‘Being in nature’ rather than ‘doing in nature’. This period coincided with my training as a psychotherapist and moving towards psychedelic assisted therapy.

    Since I was a child, there is something in me that was drawn to exploring the boundaries of my known world, and to going first, more by accident than design, whether that was the first descent of a whitewater river in Iran, or setting up Ireland’s first psychedelic therapy organization. Why that is, I am not sure, but it is in my nature, and I enjoy helping others explore their own personal limitations too and to grow beyond the boundaries of their known world. I do this work with psychedelics motivated by a belief, from my own lived experience and from what I have witnessed, that this work has the potential to relieve human suffering and improve people’s lives.

    On the Nature of Risk

    Life is inherently risky. We make decisions every day to take risks, and few would like to live in a zero risk world. Often, the most significant and rewarding achievements in our lives involve a degree of risk – whether falling in love or starting a business. But today we live in a very risk averse society. In other societies and cultures, through necessity, a higher degree of risk can be seen as acceptable.

    Scouting a rapid on the Blue Nile, Ethiopian highlands 2004.

    It is also true to say that as adventure sports guides or as psychedelic assisted therapists, we have an ethical duty of care to our clients. And so we also must protect ourselves and our clients, especially people who are vulnerable, from taking on too much risk.

    1. Psychedelic-assisted therapy is inherently risky.

    There are certain risks with psychedelic assisted therapy that do not come, or are greatly lessened, in other forms of therapy. These risks include the risk of psychosis or spiritual emergency (kundalini awakening), Hallucination-Persistent Perception Disorder, headaches, nausea, anxiety, dissociation, having a disappointing or underwhelming trip, the increase levels of transference and projection, ontological shock, the altering of metaphysical beliefs or spiritual beliefs, and the risk of being traumatized by a very challenging psychedelic experience. The more serious risks listed here are rare, but they do exist.

    Psychedelic-assisted therapy also has the potential to be, perhaps, more rewarding and beneficial than other forms of therapy. Therefore, we need to create a model of access that minimizes risks and maximizes benefits. We also need to take a critical attitude to what Timmy Davis of Psilocybin Access Rights calls “a hypertrophied risk aversion”.

    We witness this frequently on our retreats, where sometimes people have emotional breakthroughs and  process traumas that have been unprocessed for years or decades,  processing the ‘frozen present ’of trauma as Dr Ivor Browne called it. We often see incredible transformations on our retreats. Physical transformations- literally people looking different afterwards, like a heavy weight had been lifted off them. The stories of transformation and rebirth and redemption. The deep, real, authentic gratitude. Giving voice to those whose voice had been lost or forgotten. An inner change from ” a sense of hopelessness to a sense of hope”, as one of our clients put it on a recent integration call.

    The question, then, is how best to balance the risk/ reward ratio?  If psychedelic assisted has potentially life-changing therapeutic benefits,  what level of risk is ethically tolerable?

    1. We need, as a field, to accept the reality of these risks, not deny them or hide them, and to learn how best to mitigate them.

    There is sometimes a tendency in the ‘psychedelic renaissance’  for proponents of psychedelic assisted therapy to be messianical. It would be more prudent for us to acknowledge and accept the reality of these risks and take steps to mitigate them. We need, as a field, to be more open about talking about adverse experiences. Our job as those working in the field is to define, acknowledge, communicate and mitigate risks as best we can.

    1. The difference between risk and consequences

    Researchers such as Professor David Nutt have demonstrated that psilocybin, for example, has a very low harm score compared to other drugs. While the risks involved in working therapeutically with psychedelics may be low, the consequences may, on rare occasions, be high. It is important to distinguish between the likelihood or probability of a risk occurring, and the consequence or severity of that risk, which may be minor or major.

    Blue Nile, 2004

    In adventure sports environments, risk assessments fall within several broad categories, known as the risk likelihood/ severity matrix. This framework may be helpful for the field of psychedelic assisted therapy when thinking about risk. It is also important to consider potential benefits when talking about risk, and to consider the difference between perceived risk, and actual risk. There is also a clear distinction in risk assessment when making personal decisions, and when leading a group in the outdoors.

    Risk Likelihood/Severity Matrix

    a) The first category is low risk likelihood and low consequences. We could say micro-dosing falls into this category. Teaching novices in an adventure sports environment should fall into this category. In terms of the difference between perceived risk and actual risk, sometimes beginners learning a sport may perceive a high level of risk in a situation where the actual risk is extremely low, learning to climb on an indoor climbing wall, for example. Likewise in psychedelic assisted therapy, sometimes participants can present with increased levels of perceived risk, fear of the unknown. Managing people’s fears, anxieties and expectations is a vital part of guiding in the outdoors, as it is in psychedelic assisted therapy.

    b) The second category is low risk and medium or high consequence. I would put most psychedelic assisted therapy, when done in a carefully controlled set and setting, in this category. Guiding a group on Kilimanjaro would fit into this category. Statistically, Kilimanjaro is a very safe mountain for an almost 6000m peak, but, on rare occasions, the consequences can be high (heart attack or high altitude pulmonary or cerebral edema, which can be fatal).

    Kilimanjaro, 2018.

    c) The third category is high risk likelihood and low consequence. For example, climbing a challenging bouldering problem where the likelihood of falling is very high, but the consequences, falling a few meters on a protective bouldering mat, very low, at most causing a sprained ankle.

    c) And the fourth category is high risk likelihood, high consequence. This last category is usually reserved for people at the peak of their ability taking personal responsibility for their decisions who want to challenge their limits. This last category is unsuitable when guiding a group in an adventure sports environment, unless guiding at a very high end, such as guiding an expedition to K2, and would be unsuitable for psychedelic assisted therapy.

    A version of the risk likelihood/severity matrix.
    1. On the importance of screening

    Careful screening can lessen the likelihood of certain risks occurring. Screening and preparation was also very important in adventure sports, especially when guiding treks to remote high altitude locations, making sure people had the required level of fitness and no major health contraindications. On our psilocybin retreats we have recently been turning away approximately 60% of applicants. While this is necessary and makes sense from a risk management perspective, it is challenging from a business perspective, and also leaves a significant group of people in need of help without a therapeutic pathway. But we do this to reduce the possibility for ourselves, and our clients, from taking on things that we or they cannot handle.

    We work with what we call the ‘walking wounded’, the average human being with their hopes and fears and traumas, not with people in deep psychological distress or who are very unwell. Such individuals may be better off served in a medical model with more specialized care. It is also important for us to be aware of our limitations.

    However, careful screening is not foolproof, as sometimes clients do not disclose, or perhaps are unaware of,  or are in denial about, relevant psychological or medical issues. People sometimes can lie, even to themselves, especially if they are in deep need of help.

    Sometimes participants present on a retreat in a very different psychological mindset they presented with during screening and preparation.  We have found other factors than the usual contraindications to be relevant, such as presenting with an overwhelmed nervous system or in the midst of a major life crisis.

    One of the challenges of working with psychedelics is dealing with the unknowns of the unconscious. By definition, we do not know the contents of our unconscious mind. Despite careful preparation, sometimes people have experiences that they did not expect or were unprepared for.

    It may be that certain substances such as 5 meo DMT or iboga have higher risk profiles than, say, psilocybin. It may also be that certain substances have greater potential benefits for high risk cohorts of people,  such as iboga/ibogaine for severe addiction, and ketamine for suicidality,  which means the risk-benefit equation is different for those substances.

    I believe that the risk of being traumatized by a challenging psychedelic experience can be mitigated by skillful and dedicated integration. I have found that helping people find meaning in their suffering can change what was previously seen as a very negative experience into a positive therapeutic one. One senior therapist in the US  told me that he believed almost anything could be held therapeutically, depending on the capacity of the therapeutic team and the strength of the therapeutic container. While this may be true, it does not take into account just how challenging it can be to hold very difficult therapeutic processes for the therapists and participants involved.

    1. Informed consent

    One part of managing risk is making sure clients are aware of, and give their consent to taking on, the risks involved. One challenge is that it is difficult to fully communicate the changes that may occur as a result of a psychedelic experience to those who have never had a psychedelic experience. Perhaps some form of standardized consent procedure could be worth developing.

    1. We also need to acknowledge that sometimes there will be consequences as a result of those risks, and come up with ways of dealing with those consequences.

    As a field, we need to accept that despite careful screening and preparation, on occasion things may go wrong. The parallels with adventure sport are prescient. In the outdoors, despite careful management of risks, occasionally things go wrong. Over a 20 year period of working as an outdoor guide, especially in the dynamic environment of whitewater rivers, I saw a lot of things go wrong directly and indirectly. This naturally leads to increased risk aversion over time.

    Azores, 2011

    This can perhaps be best illustrated by the following story. I am not a very experienced offshore sailor, but on one occasion, I crewed a catamaran sailing from the Azores to the UK. Halfway across the passage, 1000 km offshore, we hit some heavy weather. I noticed that the skipper,  an incredibly experienced sailor who had circumnavigated the globe several times, including the Cape of Good Hope, was nervous, more nervous than I was as a novice sailor. When I asked him about it he told me that on his first transatlantic crossing, as a relatively novice skipper, he had felt no such fear. I understood why. From his vast experience, he had become more aware of what could go wrong than I was as a relative novice.

    Overtime, you become more aware from lived experience of what can go wrong and the possible consequences. Things do not always go as planned. Often accidents in the outdoors occur, not in high risk situations when people are pushing their limits and very focused, but often in situations where the likelihood of a risk occurring was not particularly high. When you witness and have to deal with the consequences of serious accidents in the outdoors, it changes something in you.

    Northern Norway, 2006.
    1. Consequences I have witnessed in low risk situations

    On two occasions I have witnessed people having experiences that could be described as spiritual emergencies which can look very similar to psychosis. Neither case involved a high dose psychedelic experience. One case occurred after a vipassana meditation retreat on Maui. No psychedelics were involved, but other powerful practices, such as kundalini yoga, were. The second case involved a low dose of psilocybin, not at one of our retreats, but at an indigenous style ceremony.

    In both cases, although the behavior involved was quite bizarre at times (such as talking to trees and persistent shaking and twitching over several days) these people could be held in a supportive and loving environment in nature for several days which was enough to ground them and bring them back to consensus reality.  Sometimes people need more time to come back from ‘between the worlds’ after powerful psychedelic experiences.

    1. My own experience

    In my own lived experience, I recall having persistent hallucinations, double vision, dizziness and vertigo for a week after a Bwiti iboga initiation. The experience was one of the most transformative therapeutic experiences of my life, processing layers of shame I never thought possible. Even at the time, I understood the difficulties were a part of the process. Sometimes the most rewarding things in life are not easy. That said, I was very glad when my eyesight and balance returned to normal!

    It is also important to recognize that these risks are ones we all face, whether in a clinical trial, a legal retreat setting or an indigenous ceremonial setting. The fact of the matter is that any of us working in this field face these same risks. Some of the most difficult and dangerous adverse reactions I have heard about occurred at ayahuasca retreat centers in Peru.

    My point is that extended difficulties after a psychedelic experience could equally easily occur on a clinical trial at Johns Hopkins, Imperial College London, at a legal psychedelic retreat setting,  an underground ceremony, or an indigenous ceremonial setting in the Amazon.  The sooner we collectively acknowledge these risks and potential consequences,  and are able to talk about them openly without shame or fear of judgment, the better. Otherwise, a culture of secrecy, shame, blame and judgment could emerge. What is not in the light, will be in the shadows, as it were. We need to create a culture of self reflection, acknowledging that we can all make mistakes. We need, as a field, to be more open about talking about adverse experiences.

    1. On the power of belief and focus

    When running a large whitewater rapid, we would spend as much time as necessary looking at the line and the risks involved, all of the consequences and potential worst case scenarios. Then a careful assessment would be made, based on all relevant factors including river water level,  skill level, the team and the safety set up involved, on whether to run the rapid, or not.

    Scouting a rapid, Northern Norway, 2006.

    But, and this is the important part, once a decision has been made to run a whitewater rapid, that decision was taken in full commitment, focussing fully in confidence on the desired outcome, with no focus on the worst case scenario. In other words, completely focusing on where you want to go, not where you do not want to go. Focusing on what can go wrong when running a whitewater rapid is an almost certain way to ensure a negative outcome.

    Below Victoria Falls, Zambezi, 2018.

    Perhaps this mindset has some parallels with psychedelic assisted therapy. In the early stages of screening and preparation it is important to address, communicate and acknowledge the risks involved, assessing if it is the right course of action for an individual to embark on.

    Once a decision has been made, in consultation with the participant, that the therapeutic process is suitable for the individual involved, then it is important to move forward with as little doubt as possible, creating the right mindset for a positive outcome. At a recent conference in the Netherlands, “Unveiling the mind: Convergence of Hypnotic and Psychedelic realities”, many speakers emphasized the power of suggestion and belief.

    For this reason, it is important to prime the participants mindset carefully, creating an atmosphere conducive to a positive therapeutic outcome. This can include preparing them in advance for difficult feelings to arise, and emphasizing the normality and purpose of these feelings. Acknowledging that while the process may be challenging, there is a reason for undertaking it. In my experience, once a meaning can be found in suffering, it can allow even the most challenging psychedelic experience to be seen from a positive therapeutic perspective. I often tell my clients that I don’t do this work because I enjoy watching people suffer, but because a light can be found at the end of the tunnel. Sometimes the most challenging psychedelic experience can be the most therapeutic ones.

    It is also important to be mindful that the pressure of making the right decisions can be a heavy responsibility for those working in the field, so creating multidisciplinary spaces for open discussion and supervision is essential.  I am sure I am not the only person in the field who feels this, very deeply at times.This is not something I hear talked about too often, just how challenging this work can be for the therapists involved.

    To conclude, as a field we need to acknowledge the risks and consequences of psychedelic assisted therapy, to agree on how best to communicate, address and mitigate them, to consider what levels of risk are ethically acceptable, to address how to manage consequences, and to consider the possibility of standardized screening and informed consent procedures. In this, we can learn lessons from other fields such as adventure sports.

    This piece was first published in Jules Evans Estatic Integration substack https://www.ecstaticintegration.org/

    Feature Image: An Ethiopian woman crossing a class 6 rapid on the Blue Nile with a new-born baby wrapped in her shawl. A fall here would have meant certain death for both of them.

  • Ivor Browne R.I.P

    It’s hard for those of us who work in the field of psychedelic-assisted therapy to put into words how much of a visionary Dr. Ivor Browne was. He was a pioneer of LSD psychedelic-assisted therapy in San Francisco and London in the 1950s. He also pioneered the therapeutic use of LSD, ketamine and holotropic breathwork in the 1980s in Dublin, when he was the Chief Psychiatrist at the Eastern Health Board, and ​​Professor of Psychiatry at University College Dublin.

    He worked with LSD and ketamine group therapy in St Brendan’s Psychiatric Hospital in Dublin in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Dr. Ivor Browne was a maverick and, I would say, a truly great man, in many ways a man before his time.

    I had the privilege of getting to know him personally when he was running a regular meditation group every Tuesday in the Lantern Centre Dublin City near where I lived. Even though he was in his late eighties or early nineties at the time, his wisdom, compassion and wicked sense of humour radiated when in his presence. Despite showing up every week, I recall that he could never remember my name, due to his great age, failing hearing, and the staggering amount of people he had met over his lifetime; yet he greeted me and all the other participants each week with a beaming smile, like we were long lost friends.

    Browne’s work on trauma

    In his book Ivor Browne, the Psychiatrist: Music and Madness, based on work he had originally published in 1985, he speaks of the concept of trauma stored in the body as ‘the frozen present,’ which involves unprocessed emotions. To help process the unprocessed he referred to the use of altered states of consciousness, cathartic states, music and group therapy.

    This concept received very little attention from the psychiatric profession at the time, and a paper he published in the Irish Journal of Psychiatry, entitled ‘Psychological Trauma, or Unexperienced Experience’ in 1985, received zero citations at the time. This work, nonetheless, paved the way for the subsequent work of Dr. Gabor Mate, Dr. Peter Levine and Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk on trauma, somatic trauma therapy and psychedelic assisted therapy. In the 1980s – in recognition of the importance of his pioneering work – Dr. Stan Grof came to Dublin to collaborate with Dr. Ivor Browne, as did R.D. Laing.

    Thus, decades before later-day pioneers on somatic trauma therapy like Dr. Gabor Mate, Dr. Peter Levine and Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, Browne was speaking of trauma as the ‘frozen present’, using altered states of consciousness to help people process trauma frozen in their bodies, and using group psychotherapy, breath-work, bodywork and music as a means to do this.

    In a 2017 article published in Network Ireland magazine, Browne explains his attitude to trauma :

    Once that shut down (through a traumatic experience) happens, then that experience is frozen. So it is not a case of a threatening memory being repressed, it is that it has never gotten in properly. Once it is frozen it is outside of time, so twenty years later this can activate – some everyday event can trigger it – and you then experience it as if it is happening now. You don’t think about it and remember it – you feel it and experience it. And, of course, at that point you think you are going nuts because you look around and nothing traumatic is happening, yet you experience this traumatic feeling. That is why I called it “the frozen present”, because when it comes, it comes through as the present, not as the past. Eventually when it works its way through and you experience it a few times then it moves into the past.

    He continued:

    The best example is grief. If you have lost someone you have to do a lot of work over time in order to integrate that to allow it to become a memory. Then it becomes less threatening. When my wife died five years ago, the first year was absolute hell, and I couldn’t imagine feeling any joy. The second year was bad, but not quite as bad as the first. Now after five years I am quite contented. I have a different life. By processing the trauma, it has shifted into memory, but this approach is not possible in the current psychiatric model.

    Vocal critic

    Browne was a  vocal critic of the reductionist, purely bio-medical model of psychiatry. An outspoken critic of the mental health discourse, he said: ‘we are living in a society that is driving people mad’, emphasising that

    Psychiatry is a reductionist system that explains everything by the parts……The tragedy of psychiatry is that this is the only way you can think. Because in the psychiatric model you cannot ask how the behaviour or upbringing of a person is affecting their biochemistry – you can only ask how is the biochemistry effecting the person. Psychiatrists don’t take a history, so they don’t understand the problem in the context of the individual’s life.

    What is even more extraordinary is that he did this at a time when Irish society was incredibly conservative and the Catholic Church still held tremendous power. Professor Ivor Browne was censured by the Medical Council over his role in the Father Michael Cleary affair in 1996 after he had spoke out in support of one of his patients, Phyllis Hamilton, who revealed her affair with Fr. Cleary.

    The relationship with the heart

    He also proposed the heart, rather than the head, as being of central importance in mental health, and wellbeing, and that love was essential in the processing of trauma:

    Key to processing trauma is cultivating a relationship that allows it to be processed, and that ultimately involves love, and the deepest traumas we can experience involve a separation from love.. the truth of all this is that the heart is the centre, and if our heart is closed we cannot experience love.. if your heart opens, then you can connect.

    A deeply spiritual man, who became a devotee of an Indian spiritual guru, Browne believed, ‘These are the kind of things that we can talk about through poetry, or through the therapeutic model, but we can’t deal with these concepts through the psychiatric model. At the deepest level, a lot of our problems are spiritual.’

    In Ireland, we sometimes do not celebrate our own. Today we celebrate Dr. Ivor Browne as a truly great man. He was offered a professorship at Harvard University, and I have no doubt if he had taken it he would be much more well known outside of Ireland.

    Instead, he choose a life of service, helping his patients, and reforming the psychiatric services in Ireland, and Greece. Browne also played an important role in the closure of the infamous Leros island psychiatric hospital in Greece, infamous as one of the most brutal psychiatric hospitals in Europe.

    Here is a link to a paper he co-wrote in 1960 with Dr. Joshua Bierer, the pioneer of social psychiatry in the UK, on the therapeutic use of LSD and group psychotherapy.

    Browne also recognised the healing power of psilocybin, and the ancestral Irish use of magic mushrooms, mentioning in a podcast in 2017 that: ‘Magic mushrooms were probably available to the druids, back at that time, so several thousand years later, similar, to the sort of relationship you have (with ayahuasca) in Peru or Brazil.’

    Freud reputedly said that the Irish were the only people impervious to psychoanalysis, and that may be true, certainly in previous generations due to the ancestral trauma that was so prevalent. But Ivor Browne is the closest thing we have to an Irish Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung.

    Thank you Dr. Ivor Browne, from all the people you helped and for your visionary qualities.

  • On the Nature of Evil

    I met Vladimir Putin once. 

    Or, at least, I was in the same room as him, no more than thirty or forty  feet away, for several hours. Not much further than Macron recently in Moscow.

    In August and September 2000, the last time Ireland was lobbying for a seat at the UN Security Council, I was an intern of the Irish diplomatic corps at the United Nations in New York.

    My job was to record the speeches of the Heads of State. I was present for the speeches of the heads of state and government at the Security Council and General Assembly, including Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat, and Fidel Castro.

    I felt, even then, that Putin’s energy was very dark – a psychopath perhaps, devoid of empathy.

    There is no doubt in my mind that this war is morally unjustifiable and wrong, despite the questionable wisdom of expansionist Western foreign policy (from a Russian perspective).

    At the same UN summit in 2000, Tony Blair gave the most incredible speech. I was taken in, hook, line and sinker, by his incredible rhetoric and passion. His forked tongue only became apparent later. How could we be so manipulated?

    A false representative of the light you could say. That which appears to be of the light, but is deceiving.

    Whether by intent, or design, is another question, but nonetheless he is a man with the blood of many on his hands. Of course, he can still argue that the war in Iraq was justified.

    That’s what they alway say, these power-hungry men, as the blood of innocents flows. For the victors, that is how history is written.

    Putin and his long-time confidant Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

    Evil in the World

    There is no doubt in my mind that evil exists. The light exists, the dark exists, and the false light exists. The false light is that which masquerades and deceives: a complex Luciferian archetype.

    We like to believe that we are on the side of good, and the ‘other’ side is evil. The truth is much more complex, and permeable. In a world where we like to define things as black or white, there are many shades of grey.

    Good people can do unspeakable acts of evil, while even evil acts can have positive consequences.

    Anger is sometimes a necessary and appropriate emotion when our boundaries are violated, on a personal or national level. Sometimes, in the face of unprovoked aggression, the only option is to fight back.

    When we are feeling strong emotions, however, we are open to manipulation. Any time I feel a strong emotion of anger or fear due to a situation in my life or through what I see in the media – as I am feeling now – I ask myself, am I being manipulated? If so, by who, and for what end?

    Who will benefit, if due to my anger and dismay at the brutal and morally wrong treatment of Ukrainian civilians, I somehow begin to fear or hate Russia or Russians?

    What if I decide, in my anger, to fan the flames of hatred, anger, and war, rather than douse them? Are we to support the spread of this conflict, rather than hope for peace?

    If there is one thing I have learnt over many years of diving deep into the metaphysics of light and dark it is that there is much that we are unaware of. We are all pawns in a greater game than we are aware of, you could say.

    If it turns out that the game is rigged, and no matter which side seems to come out on top, the house always wins, then the only option is to stop playing the game.

    Hitler’s prophecy speech of 30 January 1939.

    What is the Influence of Evil?

    The genius of evil is that it influences us through our deepest fears and weaknesses. If, for example, your deepest fear is failure, being attacked, overwhelmed or destroyed. Perhaps this is the result of an unsafe and traumatic childhood.

    This could manifest as paranoia, fear, or deepest shame at the loss of personal or national prestige, as is perhaps the case with a ‘strongman’ such as Putin. This is perceived as a threat to your very existence.

    When some external event triggers this terrible internal fear, the very personal and overwhelming nature of this trigger is how evil influences a person. Evil finds our unconscious hidden weaknesses, and exploits them ruthlessly.

    How do we recognise the influence of evil on ourselves? By hating another person, race, or nation, we are acting under the influence of evil.

    This is the genius of evil: it realizes our deepest fears through the prism of our distorted perceptions. It preys on our weaknesses, separates us, divides us, makes us hate instead of love.

    It is rare indeed, for someone to wake up in the morning saying “today I choose to be evil”. There are also those who can be described as pure evil – consciously evil – in the sense of acting with intentional malice, but these people are rare.

    For the most part, evil slides in unseen, unconsciously, through our psychic blind spots. What lengths would you go to, to avoid your deepest fears? To avoid a perceived existential threat to you, your family or nation? This is how ‘normal’ people do the most terrible things. Evil locates our deepest fear and weaknesses, plays on them, magnifies and exploits them.

    Like a computer virus exploiting a line of faulty code, evil exploits the faulty code of the human race. Shame, fear, anger, and trauma are the gateways into the body, poisons, faulty code, through which evil may stem, if allowed.  These are known as the three kleshas or poisons of Mahayana Buddhism: ignorance, attachment and aversion, from which evil arises.

    Projection of the Shadow

    The great psychiatrist Carl Jung elaborated on the projection of the shadow being the greatest moral threat of our age.

    A threat to the very future of humanity, and one the majority of people are utterly unaware of.

    We psychologically project that which is disowned, unbearable and unconscious in ourselves, onto the other, thereby ridding ourselves of the need to make conscious decisions, take responsibility for our actions and integrate our experiences.

    Thus Jung writes in Archaic Man that ‘Projection is one of the commonest psychic phenomena… Everything that is unconscious in ourselves we discover in our neighbour, and we treat him accordingly.’

    He adds in Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934:

    Modern people … are ignorant of what they really are. We have simply forgotten what a human being really is, so we have men like Nietzsche and Freud and Adler, who tell us what we are, quite mercilessly.  We have to discover our shadow. Otherwise we are driven into a world war in order to see what beasts we are.

    If we do not acknowledge and own our shadow, we project our inner darkness onto the unfortunate recipients of our projections, as human beings have been doing for millennia of wars and cycles of destruction.

    Ballads of bravery (1877) part of Arthurian mytholog by Lorenz Frølich.

    Mythology and Psychology

    Invariably, humans fall pretty to some great mythology, whether it is nationalism, tribalism or religious belief, which assures them that their cause is just.

    We are not far removed from the Crusaders in this regard, who believed they were saving Jerusalem from heathens – in the twenty-first century as much as in the twelfth.

    The psychological projection of the shadow is how mostly men are capable of inflicting barbarous acts of evil onto the ‘other’, who has generally already been thoroughly dehumanised and demonised.

    Recently, a former officer of the US Navy Seals Special forces, one of the men who led the hunt for Bin Laden, told me how easy an operation this was to undertake.

    He said that one of his main responsibilities in Afghanistan and Iraq was to keep his men in line, reminding them of the humanity of the enemy. In a warzone, how easy it must be to forget.

    In his book on evil The Lucifer Effect, the psychologist Phillip Zimbardo, who also designed the Stanford Prison experiment, wrote:

    I don’t believe anybody’s inherently evil. I believe we’re inherently good. And until they get put in a bad barrel. And there are a lot of bad barrels. A lot of jobs that we take encourage us to cheat, to lie…. If you’re a prison guard, afraid that prisoners are going to attack you and you have to create a false illusion that you’re domineering, you’re dominating them, you’ll shoot to kill then that’s the image. I believe in the goodness of human nature. And it’s being put into situations that corrupts that.

    Zimbardo defines evil as exercising power to intentionally harm (psychologically), hurt (physically), destroy, or commit crimes against humanity.

    From his psychological analysis of the US soldiers at Abu Ghraib who committed atrocities on the Iraqi POWs, Zimbardo shows that evil is situational.

    Like it or not, we all have the potential to be a Nazi prison camp guard in us, given the right situation and dehumanisation of the enemy.

    The Russian people have perhaps a greater understanding of this than most, given their brutal history and capacity for resilience and suffering. As one of their greatest novelists, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, put it: ‘the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.’

    Sabrina Harman poses for a photo behind naked Iraqi detainees forced to form a human pyramid, while Charles Graner watches.

    The Red Peril 2.0

    How easy it is for us in the West to demonize the Russian threat, the hapless Slavic soldier from the steppes, conscripted as they have been for centuries to die as cannon fodder in a war they did not want.

    This appears to be a reawakened Communist threat. Indeed, the idea of invading hordes from the east is a deep fear ingrained in the West, since the time of Genghis Khan and beyond.

    In recent times it has been the threat of militiant Islam, the Muslim horde overrunning Europe, but our collective Western shadow is now projected elsewhere.

    In some bizarre, surreal joke of history, we are apparently witnessing Chechen fighters, suffering from severe historical amnesia, from a land so terribly brutalized by Putin, take part in the invasion of Ukraine.

    Likewise, and in a perfect mirror of a paranoid Putin – a dinosaur whose thinking is conditioned by bipolar geopolitics of the Cold War and Great Game of the nineteenth century – the West with its expansionist foreign policy represents a threat to the very survival of his beloved Russia.

    Apparently, this existential threat is to be countered at the cost of total war.

    Ukraine and the West believes it is protecting itself from the threat of Russia, as has proved to be the case.

    Putin and his acolytes believe they are protecting Russia from military encirclement as a result of the eastward expansion of NATO since the end of the Cold War. These have become two disastrous self-fulfilling prophecies. Thus both perspectives have turned out to be valid on their own terms.

    It’s history repeating itself, even so far as Putin making the same strategic mistakes as Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1942 in greatly underestimating the vastness of Ukraine and over-extending supply lines.

    Hitler, of course, committed the same folly in reverse in the 1930s, emphasizing the need for Lebensraum, living space, for the German people, who were apparently threatened by the great Slavic hordes to the east.

    Hidden Forces

    What would you do, if you felt as if your nation or family was under an existential threat, and only you had the vast power to stop it?

    Do you think you would commit acts of evil to ‘protect’ yourself, believing this to be for the highest good in the circumstances?

    There are hidden forces at play here. I use the word hidden intentionally, knowing that some will understand what I am trying to say. Those who have ears to hear will hear.

    How else can we make sense of the ritual of bloodletting that so-called rational actors seem to periodically engage in, most clearly perhaps in the massacres of the First World War, when the most ‘civilized’ of nations sacrificed their best and brightest.

    For what? How could humans behave in such a barbaric and irrational way?

    Human beings often operate like actors on a stage, contending with forces greater than we can imagine. These might be described as the anabolic and catabolic forces of nature, involving endless cycles of growth, death, decay and rebirth.

    My first experience with ayahuasca on Maui, Hawaii many years ago, demonstrated this to me very clearly. For whatever reason, I did not fear looking into the darkness. That night I left the safety of the ceremony and went out alone to stare into the unknown of the dark jungle.

    Instead of fearing the dark, I wanted to understand it.

    Nietzsche warned: ‘Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster … for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you,’ but this was not my experience. I found that looking into the abyss gave me a greater understanding of the world.

    Jung, so well versed in ancient knowledge and metaphysics, brought these themes to a psychological level, writing

    The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites—day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail over the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy will defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be (Carl Jung, Approaching the Unconscious).

    The Metaphysics of Light and Dark

    We live in a world characterised by duality – light and dark, good and evil. These are two sides of the same coin; you cannot have one without the other.

    Irrespective of anyone’s spiritual beliefs, you may still find useful insights in spiritual traditions on the nature of evil.

    In the ancient Zoroastrian tradition, it was believed that the universe is a battleground between Good (Ahura Mazda) and Evil (Angra Mainyu). Angra Mainyu is not God’s equal opposite, but the destructive energy that opposes God’s creative energy.

    It is essential for us to remember that this battle is not external to us as humans. It is an internal process in everyone.

    Even in the Bible, Isaiah 45:7 says, ‘I form the light, and create darkness. I make peace, and create calamity. I am Yahweh, who does all these things.’ In other words, according to an Old Testament view, Yahweh (God) is the source of all things, light and dark.

    The Taoist yin yang symbol captures the essence of this most beautifully. The seeds of light grow in the dark, the seeds of dark grow in the light.

    Other metaphysical systems were all too aware of this too – that too much of anything becomes its opposite. The Mediaeval Jewish Kabbalists saw evil as a result of unbalanced force. For example, the benevolent dictator, motivated by the seemingly altruistic aim of protecting his people, can easily become a tyrant. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as the folk wisdom goes.

    In a tremendously complex world bedevilled by unintended consequences, we are often unaware of the full consequences of our actions, yet we are still responsible for them. A classic example is the arming of the Taliban, formerly the mujahideen, by the U.S. in pursuit of its geopolitical ambitions of bringing about the demise of the USSR in Afghanistan the 1980s.

    In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the sacred texts of Hinduism and a treatise on the ethics of war, we are told that Krishna (God) gave humans free will so they would have the volition to choose love, but ‘impelled by material desires, the souls engage in evil deeds and are subjected to others’ evil actions, as per the inexorable law of karma.’

    Comanche Indians Chasing Buffalo with Lances and Bows, by George Catlin.

    Wetiko

    Jungian analyst Paul Levy, in his seminal work on the origins of evil Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil brilliantly describes how humanity is suffering from:

    a spiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind, that is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via a collective psychosis of titanic proportions. This mind-virus—which Native Americans have called “wetiko”—covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness.

    Many traditions speak of a concept similar to that native American idea of wetiko. The Jewish- Christian gnostic mystic tradition, for example, draws on descriptions in the two-thousand-year old writings known as the Dead Sea Scrolls – found in 1945 at Nag Hammadi – of the archons, who have imprisoned the divine spark of human souls in material creation.

    Likewise, the Bible speaks of a ‘counterfeiting spirit’ deceiving humanity. The Tibbetan Buddists speak of humanity trapped in the matrix of samsara, of suffering.

    The essence of evil is that it helps continue the illusion of separation of souls from universal consciousness, from source.

    This is perhaps the deepest symbolic interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve. The fall of matter from spirit, the loss of our connected state of original innocence.

    Evil prevents us from recalling who we truly are. It separates us from each other and from whence we came.

    A destroyed Russian BMP-3 near Mariupol, 7 March.

    What can be done?

    First, on a macro level, the consciousness of the human race must evolve to a point where war is no longer acceptable, for any justification, under any circumstances.

    Otherwise, paranoid, wounded, power hungry men, for it is almost always men who start wars, will inevitably find a justification for their actions.

    As the astrophysicist Carl Sagan said:

    Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

    It will be necessary to make war an absolute taboo and to ostracize those who participate in it. It may take many generations and even millennia for this to occur, but happen it must.

    Peace must be a conscious choice for humanity. As Margaret Mead put it: ‘Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a means of solving conflict?’

    There are some encouraging signs that in this first European war of the social media age, this may be happening – via the compassion and condemnation of the international community.

    But this cannot only apply to wars started by the ‘other’ side, it must apply equally to wars started by or supported by the West in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen. Otherwise, Western hypocrisy and privilege continues.

    For this to happen, a global shift in consciousness is required, if not rogue actors will easily take advantage of a more peaceful world.

    It will also require a much more equitable world, one where justifiable grievances can be addressed and resolved equitably, before violence is resorted to.

    Is it naive to believe such a world is possible? Perhaps, but in a world of nuclear weapons, we surely have no choice but to evolve and ensure our long term survival.

    It will also be necessary to change the current structures of power, so that the concentration of political power no longer allows the egos of weak, wounded men to force wars and mayhem on their people.

    As part of this evolution of human consciousness, some form of collective healing will be required to address the psychological wounds of the human race, the majority of which is traumatized as a result of centuries of war and oppression.

    Otherwise, wounded man-children will continue to play out their traumas and pathologies on a world stage; handing these down to the next generation.

    We would do well to remember the indigenous wisdom that the seven generations to come inherit the traumas of the past seven generations.

    Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961).

    Personal Responsibility

    Secondly, on a micro level, as individuals, we must take personal responsibility for the psychological awareness of our shadows. Becoming aware that we are not always as good as we imagine ourselves to be.

    As Jung put it:

    Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.

    We need to educate people on the need to make conscious what is unconscious, unhealed, unprocessed, unowned in them, before they find someone or something else to project their deepest fears and darkest thoughts on to. This is of the utmost importance for the survival of the human race, and not talked about nearly enough.

    How can we expect peace in the world when we are at war with ourselves? If we want to change the world, we must first change ourselves.

    Our outer world reflects the state of our own inner psyche, individually and collectively. That our currently external reality is in such dire shape reflects the inner collective reality.

    If we do not mend our ways the great ritualistic dance, the great cosmic game of growth, death and rebirth, construction and destruction, with human beings as mere unconscious pawns, will begin again, as it has for many of the past millennia, but this time with the threat of nuclear annihilation.

    Feature Image: Mushroom cloud from the explosion of Castle Romeo in 1954.

  • I Do Not Consent

    I didn’t particularly want to write this article.  I didn’t want to get involved in the whole online social media circus of opinion and rebuttal, triggering and offense. But I feel like I have something to say, and what I have to say is important. So I’ll speak my truth.

    About a month ago, I completely removed my attention from the hysterical world of 24-hour news cycles, social media, the conspiracy theories, the craziness, the arguments and rebuttals, the fear, projection and lashing out. So I stopped watching the news and left Facebook, and very liberating it was too.

    The collective process the world was going through as a result of Covid-19 (Coronavirus) was taking its toll on me. I had never experienced such fear and anger online before. People were literally lashing out, blurting their unprocessed emotions, fear and anger, all over social media, mirroring perhaps, conversations that were occurring in family homes all around the world.

    Instead, I put my energy into the world around me: learning new skills, fishing, growing food, renovating a cottage. Putting my energy and vision into creating a new reality. But something is making me speak out at this time.

    I would like to preface what I am saying by acknowledging that Covid-19 is a real threat that has caused great loss and suffering to many families all around the world.

    The collective hysteria resulting from it, however, is every bit as damaging as the virus itself.

    On the nature of fear

    My background is as an outdoor guide. I spent two decades guiding in remote and sometimes dangerous rivers and mountains on four continents. During that time I became very familiar with the nature of fear. A large part of the psychological aspect of guiding in adventurous environments involves managing people’s fears.

    Solo seakayaking around Ireland, 2014.

    One lesson I learnt beyond any doubt is that fear is contagious. Just like a virus. If one person in a group becomes fearful, it spreads like wildfire throughout the entire group, a legacy of our evolutionary heritage, and the fight or flight mechanism.

    What we have witnessed, in the past few months, is the entire human species in fight, flight or freeze mode. It is collective anxiety on a global scale, amplified by social media and hysterical media coverage.

    Our political leaders, for the most part doing their best and responding to an unprecedented situation, were pressured by a fearful media and hysterical public to do something, anything, and naturally they reacted from a place of fear.

    As anyone with a background in adventure sports will know, good decisions are never, ever made from a place of great fear or hysteria.

    The Indian philosopher Krishnamurti wrote: ‘Fear of any kind breeds illusion … where there is fear there is obviously no freedom … It makes one tell lies, it corrupts one in various ways, it makes the mind empty, shallow.’

    I am not suggesting that our government in Ireland is consciously part of some nefarious plot to undermine democracy. Not intentionally anyway. But democracy has nevertheless been undermined as a result of the hysterical response to Covid-19.

    In the UK, former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption said: ‘This is what a police state is like, it is a state in which a government can issue orders or express preferences with no legal authority and the police will enforce ministers’ wishes’. He has called the lockdown ‘the greatest interference with personal liberty in our history’. When great legal minds are telling us that the rule of law is being undermined, we should listen.

    Our civil liberties and civil rights are not something that we be taken for granted. We forget now that Irish independence and the fight for freedom came at a high cost. ‘The price of liberty is eternal vigilance’, is a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson.

    It does not matter whether you consider yourself to be politically on the left, centre, or the right, the erosion of civil liberties that has occurred in most Western democracies over the last few months is something that should concern you. if the there is one thing the history of the last century has taught us, it is that tyranny can take many forms.

    Image: Daniele Idini (c)

    You may well have great trust in our current government. That is not the point. The point is that future governments may well use the same arguments to repress civil liberties. Consider the possibility of a less benign government with opposing political views to your own coming into power in the future, and using the precedents set at this time to undermine your civil liberties. We do not have to look far back in history to see that such events are very possible. Once a precedent is established, it is an easy path to follow.

    Over two thousand years ago, Plato warned of the dangers of tyranny arising from a fearful and chaotic democracy. The people, when afraid, beg for a strong leader to come to save them. Tyranny can arise, not from a despot seizing power, but through a fearful public demanding protection from an external threat. This threat is real, but is overblown: ‘This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.’

    Many other great political thinkers have expounded on the idea of the tyranny of the masses. The great Irish political theorist Edmund Burke, wrote in a 1790 letter that ‘The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny’.

    John Stuart Mill in his famous essay ‘On Liberty’ (1859) spoke of the need to protect against, ‘the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling … as the majority opinion may not be the correct opinion.’

    We confront a dystopian nightmare of an Orwellian society of constant surveillance, with the government and/or corporations controlling what we can think, what we say, and how we act.

    Militaristic language has become all too commonplace, thereby justifying extreme wartime measures. We talk of ‘front line’ workers. Much as these amazing doctors and nurses are doing a wonderful job and should be commended, there is no ‘front line’.

    This is not a war. You cannot fight a war against a part of Nature. That is like fighting a war against yourself, a mass collective schizophrenia. This is part of the problem with our current rational-materialistic society: in our arrogance we believe ourselves to be somehow separate from Nature. This crisis is showing us clearly that we are not.

    The following liberties have been undermined since the start of the Covid-19 hysteria:

    1. The right to personal liberty and to protest. 

    Article 40.4 of the Irish constitution guarantees a right to liberty, while Article 40.6.1 says you have a right to assemble and to associate freely.

    The right to assemble and to protest is an essential part of any functioning democracy. Remember the mass civil unrest that was occurring in Hong Kong and France before Christmas? This has disappeared without a trace. Are we no longer allowed to march on the streets should the need to protest arise? What is now stopping future governments using the ‘health and safety’ of the public as an excuse to crack down on civil disobedience?

    1. The right to free speech. 

    One of the most important of our human rights, established as early as 1789 in Article XI of the French ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ – ‘The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely’. Article 40.6.1 of the Irish Constitution guarantees a right to express freely  your convictions and opinions .

    However, this right has come under attack in recent months, with censorship becoming very prevalent. Any questioning of the mainstream narrative quickly gets labelled ‘false news’ or a ‘conspiracy’ theory, thereby stifling debate and discussion. Who has the power to decide what is false news? Do you, or do I? Or does some unelected Youtube or Google content executive?

    The mainstream media and social media companies have unprecedented power to manipulate the narrative. Social media and search engine algorithms can effectively control what we read and see, and therefore control the reality we live in. Who decides what we should think, and who holds this absolute and terrifying power?

    I may not agree with what you are saying, but I absolutely respect your right to say it. Otherwise, one day, we may find that right has been taken from us.

    1. The right to privacy.

    Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights states that ‘Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.’

    The seemingly benign concept of using a ‘contact tracing’ app could easily be misused by governments to normalise mass surveillance of citizens at all times, in the interests of public safety. Keeping track at all times of where you go and who you are with, a smartphone becomes like a voluntary ankle tag. With smartphones becoming almost essential to function in society, this mass surveillance is constant.

    One of the very worst tendencies this crisis has brought out in people is of of neighbours spying on one another, settling old grievances by informing. Have people forgotten already how secret police, such as the Stasi in East Germany, controlled populations by encouraging this behaviour?

    The French philosopher Michel Foucault believed that: ‘the power of a goverment is co-extensive with its ability to surveil’,  and wrote about the symbolic prison of the Panopticon, in which prisoners never knew when they were being observed, so were obliged to be on their best behaviour at all times. We are living in a digital panopticon, and giving governments unprecedented powers of surveillence.

    Inside one of the prison buildings at Presidio Modelo, Isla de la Juventud, Cuba.

    Moreover, with cash becoming redundant through this crisis, governments and corporations have acquired an even greater capacity to surveil, and therefore control, our lives. In the U.K., Derbyshire police used drones to film hillwalkers in a remote mountain area, while in California police fined surfers a $1000 for catching waves.

    Is this the kind of society you want to live in?

    1. The right to bodily autonomy and personal sovereignty.

    Are we going to give away our right to bodily autonomy to pharmaceutical companies, and the possibility of a mandatory vaccination programme?

    I am neither pro- nor anti- vaccination, but I believe that people should enjoy an absolute right to decide what is put into their bodies, freedom over their own body. A right to bodily integrity has been recognised by the courts as an unenumerated right, protected by the general guarantee of ‘personal rights’ contained under Article 40 of the Irish constitution.

    There is some disagreement in the scientific community around the safety of vaccines, with billions of dollars having been paid out in compensation by the Vaccine Injury Courts over the past thirty years, but any dissent of the mainstream Big Pharma narrative is brutally suppressed and attacked. In the Middle Ages, heretics were burnt at the stake for daring to question the mainstream version of reality. While they are not burnt at the stake today, anyone who questions the mainstream narrative is attacked, vilified, and discredited

    If anyone thinks these concerns over civil liberties far-fetched, I suggest you look at the situation in China at the moment, where the government has used the crisis to strengthen its grip on power, and to crack down on dissent.

    Dmytro Sidashev / Alamy Stock Photo

    What sort of world do we want to live in post-Covid-19?

    I would easily sacrifice an element of safety for my freedom. I want to live in a world where personal liberty and civil duties are both honoured and respected; where personal sovereignty is not given away to unelected global corporations; where political power remains vested in individuals and communities, and a central State does not have unchecked power to interfere in citizens’ lives. Where policing is by consent, and not by coercion and control. I want young children to be able to run freely in the outdoors without fear, or masks.

    Image: Daniele Idini (c)

    I do not want to die anytime soon, but if I do, so be it. I have long accepted that one day I will die. I would much rather die a free man from Covid-19 than live in a dystopian surveillance society. What we are seeing is a global collective psychological process, the unconscious and unprocessed fear of death. By facing and accepting our own mortality, this fear dissipates.

    I do not want to live in a sanitised, risk-free, nanny-state surveillance world, where the government knows where I am at all times and controls what I think, what I can say, what I put in my body. I do not consent to this version of reality. I will not be part of it.

    The real front line is about personal power and self-sovereignty. Reclaiming our power from the unelected Silicon Valley AI/tech, media and pharmaceutical executives, who have acquired greater power over every aspect of our lives, with hardly any oversight.

    We need to come terms with the immense power that is accumulating in Google and Facebook to influence, manipulate and control what people think. Even that most Machiavellian of realpolitik bureaucrats Henry Kissinger recently wrote: ‘The Age of Reason originated the thoughts and actions that shaped the contemporary world order. But that order is now in upheaval amid a new, even more sweeping technological revolution whose consequences we have failed to fully reckon with, and whose culmination may be a world relying on machines powered by data and algorithms and ungoverned by ethical or philosophical norms’. He who controls the algorithms controls the world.

    This is not a world I want to create. I do not consent. For sure this crisis has brought out the very best in humanity, with neighbours helping one another, communities coming together, increasing food security and developing a great sense of solidarity. But we cannot, Pollyanna-like, ignore the potential for the slide into a dystopian surveillance society.

    What sort of society do we want our children and grandchildren to inhabit? This is the real front line. We have had a great opportunity for reflection and collective dreaming, for visioning and birthing a new society and new reality. The birthing process of the new world will be messy and painful, as births always are, but the baby will be born.

    We are not powerless. We have the power to rewrite the story and create a beautiful world for future generations. Let us make our collective vision a beautiful one.

    Image: Daniele Idini (c)

  • Not in Our Name – the Fall and Fall of Conor McGregor

    Greater in combat
    Than a person who conquers
    A thousand times a thousand people
    Is the person who conquers himself
    Gautama Buddha, the Dhammapada, (third century B.C.E.)

    There is no opponent
    Who the fuck is Jose Aldo?
    There is no Jose Aldo,
    There is no no-one
    You’re against yourself,
    You’re against yourself.
    Conor McGregor, Interview, (2013)

    Anyone with even a passing interest in combat sports cannot but be aware of the terminal decline of a one-time candidate for the greatest Irish sportsman of all time, Conor McGregor.

    For a time, when he could do no wrong, it seemed like the entire Irish nation was behind McGregor. The pride of a fighting nation. There were a few dissenting voices admittedly, who wisely recognised a crassness and thuggery to his character. A premonition, perhaps, of what was to come. The rest of us were mesmerised by the meteoric rise of the dual-weight UFC champion.

    The Irish sportsman has almost always been a plucky underdog, destined to fail at the highest level.

    Our national rugby team, ranked number one in the world going into the last World Cup, recently imploded with barely a whimper before the might of the All Blacks.

    There have been exceptions, it is true – Padraig Harrington and Brian O’Driscoll, for example – but Irish people seem to bear a psychic wound handed down from a colonial legacy of brutal suppression. As a nation, we don’t believe in ourselves.

    Mould-breaker

    McGregor broke that mould, and for a time, we celebrated him for it. Many of us, myself included, were seduced by the story of a plucky kid from Crumlin who became champion of the world.

    McGregor was the law of attraction in action, and became probably the most recognisable Irishman in the world. His self-belief, audacity and sheer natural athleticism were a sight to behold. He was that most un-Irish of Irish sportsmen, one who backed himself against the very best, and won.

    For a time, everything he touched turned to gold. I vividly remember the high points: getting up at 5am to watch his six-second-demolition of the reigning champion Jose Aldo; he showed what dedication, self-belief and hard work could do. ‘Who the fuck is Jose Aldo?’, he said, ‘You’re against yourself.’  Did he have any idea how prophetic those words were?

    Pantomime Gangster

    It is time to call McGregor out for what he has become: a caricature of a nineteenth-century punch-drunk, stage Irishman. An empty vessel behind which lurks self-destruction and self-loathing. A false hero. A morally bankrupt shell of a man.

    An immutable law of the universe is the higher you rise, the further you have to fall. Just as McGregor’s rise was meteoric, so his fall has been catastrophic. It is like watching a brutal car crash in slow motion.

    The decline of McGregor is not just as a sportsman, but as a man. A would-be role model has been reduced to one whose demons have taken control. He is someone who clearly needs help, not selfies and adulation.

    If you invoke the gods of war, expect to be their victim in the end. In Irish mythology Cú Chulainn is our greatest warrior-hero. Unsurpassed in battle, even he eventually meets his doom when An Morrígan, the Celtic goddess of the battlefield, turns against him, leaving his corpse tied to a standing stone with his own spear driven through his gut. W.B. Yeats evoked the scene in ‘Cuchulain Comforted’, (1939)

    A man that had six mortal wounds, a man
    Violent and famous, strode among the dead;
    Eyes stared out of the branches and were gone.

    Similarly, McGregor invoked the gods of war, who smiled on him for a time, before turning on him.

    Yet McGregor’s fall began slowly, almost imperceptibly. For a long while we, as a nation, looked the other way and ignored the excesses. This seemingly loveable rogue could do no wrong. He said controversial things, ‘but sure that’s grand, he’s Irish.’ With a twinkle in the eye he could get away with it.

    But no more. Now he serves as a warning to our children on what fame and excessive wealth can bring – that empty promise of chronic materialism which is the real sickness of our age.

    First came the money. Ostentatious, crass and tasteless displays of wealth at a time when there are ten thousand homeless in Ireland; McGregor buys an €80,000 Gucci mink coat and brags about it on a social media account which bears painful witness to his slow descent into delusion and madness.

    Gone was the bright-eyed kid from Dublin, whose positive attitude and laughter were contagious.

    The press conferences, which at one time were sharp and witty, steadily grew nastier and more vindictive. The wit and humour of the early years soon dried up.

    We looked away in shame at the racial taunts directed against Flyod Mayweather before that circus of a fight. He may have made one hundred million dollars, but he lost his soul that night. Or maybe he lost it last year when he was brutally demolished, choked out, by Khabib Nurmagomedov, a disciplined martial artist.

    Arrested Development

    And so the glint in McGregor’s eyes grew darker, his face harder, and the fuse shorter. The losses seemed unbearable for him, and his demons came out to play. Surrounded by yes-men, with no one calling him out, there was no bounds to his mis-behaviour.

    Arrests followed for assault, ‘strong arm battery and criminal mischief’; lurid headlines; different cities, new countries, but the same old story.

    Images revealed McGregor on yet another rollover – out of his mind on drink and drugs. The signs of chronic cocaine and alcohol abuse evident for all to see. Then came photos of McGregor mingling with some of Dublin’s most notorious mobsters – men with the blood of many victims on their hands. McGregor had become notorious alright, but not in a good way.

    Recently he was found guilty in a Dublin court of a shameful and unprovoked assault against an older man in a Dublin pub. The CCTV footage catches him red-handed. One can only imagine what happens behind closed doors off camera.

    Worse still are the sexual assault allegations, though of course anyone is innocent until proven guilty, and McGregor deserves the presumption of innocence.

    ‘Never let the truth get in the way of a good story’

    McGregor was a showman, never a real person. A pantomime gangster in a twenty-first-century Punch and Judy show. The story of his notoriety is based on a lie. The hardman attitude, the association with real criminals were contrived to create a false persona.

    As they say in Dublin: ‘Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.’ He was never supposed to start believing his own bullshit.

    Somewhere along the road, the dream became a living nightmare. Now stuck in a circus of his own making, he is the ringmaster who no longer wants to play the role. But with the lions circling, like all doomed heroes, he is in the hands of his inescapable fate.

    What we are also seeing is the moral bankruptcy of UFC itself. There is something rotten in the state of Nevada. What does it say for a sporting code when its greatest heroes, McGregor and John Jones, fall from grace in such spectacular fashion?

    False comparisons have been made between McGregor and Mike Tyson, but Tyson grew up in a real ghetto. His mother was a prostitute and from childhood Tyson had to fight just to survive. Today, Tyson has tamed the monster within and has largely redeemed himself.

    McGregor had choices. He grew up in a functional family in the working class Dublin suburb of Crumlin. The Image McGregor has cultivated of being from the ghetto are designed for his American fans. He took a decision to associate with gangland criminals and thugs, and assumed the role of a pantomime gangster.

    Out of control

    It is clear now that McGregor has been out of control for several years with illusions of invincibility. In a country with more stringent laws than Ireland, he would probably be behind bars already. For his own, and others’, safety that seems like the best place for him.

    Perhaps the demons were always there, and it’s possible that one too many punches to the head have damaged him more deeply than we are aware.

    Maybe the pressure of living a lie in a toxic world of fame and wealth inevitably leads to this. No doubt, living without constraints would test anyone’s character.

    Money can’t buy class, and it certainly doesn’t lead to happiness. It can buy you time though, but however painfully slow, the wheels of Irish justice will turn.

    The Irish state has an embarrassing record of tolerance for the rich and famous breaking the law, and our sexual assault laws, and criminal justice system more generally, are outdated and not fit for purpose. It could be years before any trial occurs, if it ever comes to pass. Money has a way of making these things go away. But even if allegations magically disappear, reputational damage cannot.

    An addict in full self-destruct mode with bottomless pockets owning a whiskey company. What could possibly go wrong? The lunatics have taken over the asylum. Like any addict who has lost the ability to make rational choices, McGregor is trapped in pit of self-pity, self-loathing and resentment.

    In archetypal Irish fashion, McGregor has become a dirty family secret. Since the spiral of his decline began, collectively we have just stopped talking about him. ‘Nothing to see here, move on.’

    But we need to talk about Conor McGregor.

    We need to draw a line.

    This behaviour is not ok.

    Not in our name

    Not in my name. When, and if, McGregor ever walks into the Octagon again, with the Irish flag on his shoulders, he does not do so in the name of the Irish people. The men and women who died in the pursuit of Irish independence would not permit this. He does not represent me or my people. Not in our name.

    What McGregor clearly needs is help, not adoration, and to be held accountable for his actions, before the courts if necessary.

    Not more selfies with the mindless fans who do not seem to care about his behaviour. No more being egged on by the sycophantic thugs who surround him, or by his equally lost family. No more glorifying the shadow side of masculinity. Do we really want teenage boys aspiring to be Conor McGregor? He is the poster-child for a failed version of Irish masculinity.

    The saddest part about McGregor is what he could have been: a role model and inspiration for kids around the world. Instead he is alone in the world, alone with his demons. For all his tens of millions of dollars, I do not envy him.

    We could be heroes

    At this time of tremendous upheaval and change in the world, we desperately need new heroes.

    As Joseph Campbell masterfully put it, a hero is someone ‘who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself’. Not to the false and empty pursuit of money and fame like McGregor. But at least we can thank him for showing us the antithesis of a hero.

    Jungian psychologist Jasbinder Garnermann describes how essential it is to confront the unconscious shadow in the human psyche in order to fight our demons:

    The hero’s obliviousness to his inner nature becomes his fatal flaw … The shadow defeats kings, princes and generals, men who have fought great wars and shown superhuman courage. These are all heroes who have vanquished the external enemy. But, to a man, they have been brought down by the enemy within. And for this battle, humankind is still in training.

    I take no pleasure in writing these words, in seeing the sorry fall of a fellow man. We all have our demons and fallen from grace at some stage in our lives. Conor just had further to fall, and no one to save him from himself.

    Yet there is always hope of redemption, even for those who have descended to the darkest depths, but that would require McGregor to confront his demons – a fight he has shown no stomach for so far.

    No matter how far we fall, each of us has the instinct for transcendence, and the hope of  redemption. Maybe one day he will indeed make amends, and remember his own words:

    I just feel like I can beat myself. I can beat my mind, I believe in myself so much that nothing is going to stop me

    I wish him well: that he can turn things around before he loses everything, if it is not already too late.

  • In the Eye of the Storm

    Breathe. Focus. It’s the biggest rapid I’ve ever run. I’ve spent half an hour scouting and visualising the perfect line. I’m as fit and sharp as I’ll ever be. Still the doubts enter my head. Why am I even doing this? The adrenaline has made me feel nauseous, and I try not think of the consequences.

    Everything has been checked and double-checked.  I splash water on my face and launch my kayak into the river. Two or three strokes and I’m committed. Then it flows. The fear stops. Everything is in fine focus, each stroke in high definition. The thinking mind stops: in its place comes complete presence in the moment. Everything happens in slow motion. I find the perfect line and, at the bottom, elation.

    I’ve been trying to write these words for nearly two years now. It is hard to write when you know what you want to say runs against the current. I’m thirty-nine, and the days when adrenaline and risk ruled my life seem from another lifetime.

    For a decade, pushing my limits on Class 5 whitewater was what I lived for. I spent two seasons as a river guide on the Zambezi river in Africa in the late 90s, at a time when the sport being revolutionised.

    For a decade I chased my dream around the world, pushing my personal limits. I took more than my fair share of risks. I kayaked with many of the best in the world at the time, did exploratory first descents and participated in expeditions to Iran, the Indus in the Himalayas and Blue Nile.

    The line between the best day ever and the worst is a thin one, and is one I came to know only too well.

    That stage of my life ended about ten years ago, and since then I have taken a different path, embracing meditation and yoga, even though the river still calls me.

    II

    You never feel so alive as when you are close to death. Time and again I would hear the same refrain from friends, all around the world, that ‘kayaking makes me feel alive’. It does make you feel alive, that beautiful flow state connection when time stops, the conscious mind is stilled, and you move into an higher state of awareness, totally present in the moment. The river saved me at times when everyday life seemed just too mundane, confusing or painful.

    In twenty-five years of whitewater kayaking I have lost many friends to the river. I would like to say they made worse decisions than I did, but in reality, it probably came down to luck.  Where once I only saw the incredible life-affirming power of adventure, I now see the consequences. You can’t teach wisdom, it only comes from experience, but this is the story of how my perspective on risk has evolved.

    My experiences with death affected me deeply. These are names of friends who died on the river, great life affirming people with so much life to live: Dugald Fox Wilson, the warrior Scot and Zambezi legend, who drowned in his kayak on a raging Futaleufu river in Chile in 2003. Hendri Coetzee, the great African explorer, killed by a crocodile on a tributary of the Congo in 2010. My young friend Shane Murphy who was knocked unconscious and drowned while pushing his limits on one of Ireland’s harder rivers in flood in 2014.

    Dugald Fox Wilson

    The toughest loss of all to bear was of my friend and student Conor, who drowned while in my care in a freak entrapment on an easy stretch of the Soca river in Slovenia in 2015. Despite our very best efforts we could not get him out in time.

    I remember with a sickness in the base of my stomach that worst day of my life. Everything again was in perfect focus and high definition, but this time no elation, only despair. Time slowed down. It was like being in an intense, slow-motion nightmare that I couldn’t wake from. Even now, three years on, the memory is crystal clear, etched into my mind.

    The sun shone that beautiful alpine spring day on our frantic, increasingly desperate, effort to free Conor from the tree. His arm was trapped, and head barely submerged: a foreboding of tragedy as the seconds ticked by, the rational mind knowing it was too late. The hopeless feeling of doing CPR for real. The years of training and experience kicking in, keeping calm. Autopilot. Looking after everyone else. The detached objective voice in my head saying ‘I never thought this would happen to me’.

    The terrible logistics of tragedy. Talking to the local police. The air of suspicion. No one wanting to look you in the eye. The unbearable call to Conor’s parents to tell them he was dead. On a trip I was responsible for. The stunned silence at the end of the line. Hearing the hearts break. Nothing can prepare you for that.

    Then the aftermath. Seeing how trauma affects people in different ways. The fear, anger, anxiety, depression. Looking after everyone but yourself will catch up with you eventually.

    I remember too, as much as I try to forget, the chaos and uncertainty of that grim July day in 2007 as we searched the swollen Sjoa river in Norway for the bodies of two Russian rafters and six survivors strewn over miles of flooded river. Victims of bad decision-making and perhaps a cultural machismo towards death. I remember sharing a beer with them around the campsite the night before, all smiles and everyone feeling so alive.

    Ian Beecroft. Niamh Tompkins. Dee Conroy. Brennan Guth. Chris Wheeler. Colm Johnson. Louise Jull. Juan Antonio de Ugarte. Gary Manwaring. Gavin Winsborrow. These are names of some of the acquaintances or friend’s of friends who have drowned on the river over the last twenty years. I could name many more. Often on rivers I had paddled. More often than not, their fate was down to bad luck rather than poor decisions.

    Their tragic demises shared over a late night phonecall, or email, or a social media posting of devastation and loss. Each of their deaths affected me, even those I had never met. The trauma of their loss is like a nuclear explosion to family, close friends and those who witnessed them drown, but the effects ripple around the world.

    Each name does not tell the nightmare of the recovery of the body – where it was even possible – and the challenge of repatriation from remote corners of the globe.

    III

    Death challenges all your preconceptions. I struggled to get back on the river. I would ask myself: what for? I remembered W.B. Yeats’s poem ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’, about a First World War fighter pilot

    I know that I shall meet my fate,
    somewhere among the clouds above  
    Those that I fight I do not hate
    Those that I guard I do not love…
    A lonely impulse of delight
    Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
    I balanced all, brought all to mind,
    The years to come seemed waste of breath,
    A waste of breath the years behind
    In balance with this life, this death

    I do not subscribe to that fatalistic view of life, but I understand it.

    I now know that there is too much to lose. Sigmund Freud, in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, refers to thanatos, the death instinct, competing with eros, the instinct for survival. Thanatos drives us to destructive and risky behaviour. ‘The goal of all life is death’, he famously said.

    Agree with him or not, many people at the extreme end of the adventure sports spectrum hold a certain fascination with death. Close encounters with mortality can be very life-affirming. Extreme sports can offer an escape from what is mundane or challenging in ‘real’ life

    Dr. Gabor Mate, who has twenty years of experience working with addicts in Vancouver’s downtown Eastside,  defines addiction as ‘any behaviours in which the individual finds temporary relief or pleasure in –  and craves for that reason, despite negative consequences’. For most people, adventure sports offer a positive and life-affirming outlet, which brings joy into their lives. For some, however, the motivations can become unhealthy and self-destructive.

    I can’t help wondering how different the narrative would be if any of my deceased friends had died from alcohol or drugs. That is not so say any of them were addicted to risk or adrenaline. Most were just unlucky. Some were well within their comfort zone. But a few took risk-taking to extremes.

    IV

    As someone who has worked for 15 years in outdoor education I am very familiar with the personal growth and development that comes from people testing their limits in nature. Crossing the threshold and leaving your comfort zone should be encouraged. The psychological urge for the hero’s (or heroine’s) journey to explore the limits of the known world is as old as mythology itself, as Joseph Campbell pointed out in his Hero of a Thousand Faces.

    Andy Phillips and Benji Hjort on the Teigdalen in Norway, 2005

    Finding your edge is a challenging process often accompanied by fear and anxiety. There is often no edge without an element of fear. In my experience the greater the fear before a new challenge, the greater the learning and reward on the other side.

    The ability to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy fear is of vital importance for anyone involved in adventure sports. Since Galloway came up with the concept in ‘Inner Skiing’ back in the 1970s, sports psychologists have distinguished between healthy legitimate fear that protects us from bodily harm, and unhealthy imagined fear that is really holding us back. In reality the line between the two can sometimes be blurred.

    The paradox is that extreme risk-taking, while often vilified in a modern risk-averse society, is also glorified. In the age of the GoPro hero who earns a living by social media presence, risk-taking is taken to further and further extremes. The current generation of adventure sports athletes have taken both skill levels, and risk-taking, to new levels.

    Each new generation attempts to build on and surpass the achievements of those that came before. The problem is that social status among young kayakers is often based on how hard you can go on the river. Is it possible to separate personal development through adventure, from ego based or unhealthy decision-making?

    Norway, 2005

    Yvon Chouinard, the founder of  the outdoor clothing brand Patagonia, who was influenced by Zen philosophy, had this to say about the upper echelon of adventure sports: ‘I’ve always thought of myself as an 80 per center. I like to throw myself passionately into a sport or activity until I reach about an 80 percent proficiency level. To go beyond that requires an obsession that doesn’t appeal to me’.

    The problem for the current generation is that, in the pursuit of new challenges, they embrace more and more risk. I discussed this recently with my old kayaking friend Steve Rogers in British Columbia. In our early twenties Steve and I worked as kayak guides on the Coruh river in Eastern Turkey. In that wild and free time we took many risks we were lucky to get away with.

    Since then Steve has been a fixture on the British Columbia kayak scene, as well as being for a time the official photographer for Whistler/ Blackcombe ski resort. This has given him a unique vantage, in that not only had he known many generations of the world’s best kayakers, he also personally knew some of the world’s top extreme sports athletes in skiing, climbing and base jumping. All is not as well as it seems in the world of elite extreme sports.

    British Columbia, 2004

    Steve’s take on risk is interesting. Our generation of whitewater kayakers, he said, still had plenty of new rivers to explore. For that reason, it attracted a certain rebellious and free-spirited type, who were interested in exploring rivers in remote locations. We were the last pioneers on many rivers in the early years of the new millennium, before the advent of mass hydro projects and Google maps lessened the opportunities to explore the unknown.

    My own first descents in Iran and northern Norway remain peak life experiences. The feeling of literally paddling into the unknown is something I’ll never forget. Taking risks triggers dopamine release. It feels good. Really good.

    For the current generation, there are fewer and fewer unrun challenges. So instead of seeking the geographical unknown they mostly push the boundaries by going more and more extreme. The new challenge is to run a river at its highest level, or faster than ever before. This, of course, hugely increases the risk.

    I certainly admire their skill: doing multiple laps of formidable whitewater runs in record times on former test pieces like the Stikine, the minus Rapids on the Zambezi, or the Rondu gorges of the Indus, are awesome technical, physical and mental feats.

    My generation ran those rivers too, sometimes at huge flows. But the difference now is the frequency. Those were once in a lifetime experiences for the kayakers involved. Now these river get run at record flows, more often and faster than ever before.

    Social media plays a part too. We generally see highly talented athletes, at the peak of their powers having a good day, making very dangerous things look easy. Less often do we see the crashes and near misses.

    Both Steve and I felt lucky to have gone through our peak years of crazy before the arrival of the GoPro camera and social media. As young men and women we all need to test ourselves as a rite of passage. In the past, manhood was proved by courage in the hunt or on the battlefield. What are our modern day rites of passage?

    A pioneer of adventure education in the UK, Colin Mortlock, has long championed the personal growth inherent in the adventure experience:

    ‘Thirty years of experience with adventure in the outdoors has convinced me, that not only is there an instinct for adventure in the human race, but that failure to provide a suitable outlet for this instinct in the younger generation, has made a marked contribution to the sickness of western living’.

    He identifies the potential lessons when things go wrong, saying ‘the misadventure experience can be a most valuable teacher. Nature teaches in a much more powerful way than a human teacher.’ However, he balances this with the argument that the goal of adventure is not fame or glory, but self-awareness and humility.

    V

    As a recently graduated psychotherapist I have witnessed the mental health challenges from depression to PTSD among adventure sports athletes, as they readjust to a less extreme life. It was only when a caring, wide-eyed Canadian girl asked me, after I had tried to surf a notoriously dangerous Mexican beach break at night after way too much mescal: ‘do you have post-traumatic stress disorder’, that I realised I too might have a problem.

    My own transition out of kayaking was difficult. It had been my life and identity for over a decade. I still kayak frequently, and sometimes challenge myself, but now I enjoy much more just being on the water with my friends, or simply being in nature. A few years ago I solo circumnavigated Ireland by seakayak, an experience that held its fair share of hazards, as anyone familiar with the power of the north Atlantic will attest. But as I grow older an egotistic desire for status and recognition has been displaced.

    That is not to say it has disappeared, for the ego is a many-headed hydra. You think you have chopped it off, then it re-appears in another form. But the difference is that I now kayak for myself. I don’t have anything to prove to myself, or anyone else. I have a few photos and a video from my Irish voyage, for myself, not for social media. It was the best trip of my life.

    Solo seakayaking around Ireland, 2014

    If you push your limits for long enough, you’ll eventually find them. I encountered mine in 2007 on an ill-advised descent of Amot Gorge on the Sjoa river in Norway in raging flood. I came within seconds of blacking out and drowning. The river was way too high, too much water compressed into too narrow a gap with nowhere to go but back on itself.

    Only luck saved me that day, a roll of the dice, a surge of the river and I too would have joined my friends who died on the river. But I lived. The experience humbled me.

    The river taught me everything I know. Eventually even the hard lessons of humility and respect.

    Much as I’d like to say otherwise the fact I am still here, and some of my friends are not, is down to luck. I’d say if they are honest with themselves most of my generation who pushed their limits in adventure sports would say the same. We all had times when we lost control. Whitewater is surprisingly forgiving, until one day it’s not.

    VI

    It is much harder to see the beauty in the everyday. To seek for what great minds of East and West call the middle way, a path of moderation avoiding extremes. Aristotle called this the ‘golden mean’, and Buddha the ‘middle way’. The tale of Icarus who flew too close to the sun reminds us of the perils of excessive risk-taking.

    Our culture rewards being the best, the first, the greatest. People are often conditioned to measure their self-worth against what they achieve, rather than finding an intrinsic value in being themselves. In the testosterone-heavy-environment of my early twenties on the Zambezi, status came from skill levels and courage. I have learnt since then that it is better, and wiser, to value a person for who they are and how they treat others.

    Who cares how good a kayaker/ surfer/skier you are if in your personal life you leave a trail of destruction behind you? After my river years, I ended up living on Maui, Hawaii, the world centre of big wave surfing. My friends there who had firsthand experience with the Mavericks and Peahi scene told me of the dysfunctional personal lives of some of the big wave surfers. On the flat days many turned to drugs to fill the void. I heard the same story when I was in Puerto Escondido in Mexico. The struggles of legendary surfers like Andy Irons and Darryl Virostko with drug addiction are tragic and well-documented.

    Taoist philosophy places a major emphasis on balance and the harmony of yin and yang elements: if you push too hard be prepared for the response. Karma, very simply, means the same thing. Every action has its consequences. Often, people take risks for the sake of short term exhilaration without acknowledging long-term consequences. The consequence of dying young, no matter how gloriously you have lived, is a lifetime of heartbreak for the relatives and friends you leave behind.

    Writing this, I am conflicted. Part of me remembers how good it felt to be that free, to take those risks and feel immortal. I returned to the Zambezi last summer for the first time in 16 years, and running Rapid 9 again still felt like one of the peak experiences of my life.

    Hitting the diagonal on high water Rapid 9, Zambezi, 2017

    I still feel the draw of the river. But I’m older and wiser now: I know the trauma of losing loved ones. I do not regret for a minute the risks I took. But I now realise that the path to genuine happiness lies in balance and harmony, not extremes. That most wise of ancient books, the Tao Te Ching states the ‘sage casts off extremes’, likewise  Aristotle counted ‘him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self’.

    So take risks, explore your limits, learn about yourself by overcoming fear. Be aware, however, that it is not being the best, or going the hardest, that defines you as a human being. Sometimes it is better to walk away. Life is beautiful and very much worth living. A shot of adrenaline is not worth the price of a life.

    Flow state can be found in the everyday, in being present in the moment. The closing words I leave to my friend Hendri Coetzee, the African river warrior, who took more risks than most, and for a time seemed invincible. Before his last, ill-fated expedition to the Congo, the one he would not return from, he sent me an email in which he said it would be his last major expedition. He looked forward to exploring other aspects of his life having ‘finally realized that my search for adventure was a search for the Stillness that I found in the eye of the storm’. That realisation of stillness comes to us all eventually, for some it is just too late.

     

     

    …………………………………………………………………….

     

    A film made by the author of  kayaking adventures around the world 1999-2001

    https://vimeo.com/170783201