The World We Knew As Children

And so it goes that all good things come to an end. Three days in the most gorgeous natural landscapes with more love, beauty, community, and good vibes than I ever could have asked for, and surrounded by some of the soundest people on earth. Utopia - life as life should be. A bunch of lil human beans in their most natural, expressive, and childlike forms dancing around, huddling together over campfires, singing songs and playing drums and making art. It became unbearable sometimes, how cute it all was to behold, every second of these unforgettably beautiful days.

In a place like this, it’s apparent how beautiful — and how alike — we all truly are. When we are given a free space in which to express our true selves without judgment, to engage in fun and creative activities, to decorate ourselves in colourful adornments, and to act like the wondrous and loving children that we really are inside — well, that’s exactly what happens. It brings out the very best of us all. Free of the bonds of normal society, of nine to fives and billboard advertisements and authority and deadlines and social stigmas, we reveal ourselves to be exactly who are, who we want to be. And we all love one another for it. Because who we are are the most fun, innocent, and loving little children, full of wonder and generosity and music and beauty. When the human imagination is let loose, it does some truly amazing things.

And it makes me wonder if a real life like this is possible for us all, every day of every year. Living off the land, trading amongst one another, gathering and loving as tight-knit communities of lovers and artists and musicians and creators of our own world, of our own culture. As Terence McKenna put it, “we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanising values that are handed down as control icons. […] [But] the culmination of man’s effort in time will be the perfection and the release of the human soul. And it’s not that we are ‘doing’ it. It’s that a natural law that we are still unaware of is inexorably unfolding.”

Truth is, we don’t have to behave like machines. We don’t have to drill ourselves into working routines that wear us away to the bone, only to numb and dumb ourselves with alcohol and coffee and cigarettes every week. (It’s no wonder those are the only legal “drugs,” and the mind-expanding ones are stigmatised and criminalised to oblivion.) We don’t have to diminish our infinite divinity and creativity into being mere cogs in the machine that is society; we don’t have to fetishise consumer mania, to submit to institutions and tax collection schemes and megalomaniac companies that use and disempower us.

We can empower ourselves by deconditioning ourselves from the culturally-engineered values of money, interpersonal competition, isolation, and soulless, instant gratification; from the imprisonment of social class and structure, of social expectations and stigmas, of celebrity worship and reality-television politics, of cultural diversion and degrees and soul-sucking jobs and useless pensions. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behaviour. Because if you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan. And the plan of culture is to suck the productivity out of you until you die, while keeping you docile and disempowered enough to believe that this is “just the way things are.”

Outside of these tiny, constricted frameworks, entire realms of possibility abound. Deep inside, we feel ourselves to be beings of infinite imagination, of divine consciousness and feeling and possibility and love. We are more than capable of creating our own culture rather than consuming those of a sterile, dying world. We are more than capable of expressing the fullness of our love and compassion, of recognising the oneness within us all and treating one another like brothers and sisters, of cooperating together to create new and beautiful things. We are more than capable of extending our feelings of genuine human love and connection with not just our closest friends, but with everybody in the world.

What made Quest Festival so beautiful was the warm energy and loving vibes that coloured the atmosphere, the deep connections, engaging in creative workshops and activities and letting out our inner children, and most importantly, being among like-minded free spirits amidst nature and beautiful scenery. We don’t need fancy equipment or amounts of money to do this - the essential ingredients are already with us.

Please join me in sharing the love, in being ever patient and compassionate with our brothers and sisters (including animals), and in doing things that bring us together as who we truly are. In expressing your creativity and inner child and innate vulnerabilities and letting completely loose. In abolishing the stigmas and pressures that imprison us, in accepting and loving one another for who we are, in offering spaces free of judgment for all. Then watch the beauty that unfolds.

You may think you have enemies, but the truth is, as Benny Lewis puts it, everyone just wants validation, love, security, enjoyment and hopes for a better future. The way they verbalise this and work towards it is where things branch off, but we all have the same basic desires. You can relate to everyone in the world if you look past the superficial things that separate you.

With genuine love, humans are, at one with the universe, the most beautiful little children in the world. In the end, love is all that matters, all that will have mattered. And as a gang of British hippies once put it — it is all you need. Namasté.