Opening the doors of perception
In April 2025, Neil joined a Numinous Ways retreat in Portugal. In the months since, he has been reflecting deeply on his experience—both during the ceremonies and in the quiet moments of everyday life.
Neil, a numinaut and participant on Numinous Ways retreats, shares a moving reflection on how nature, psychedelics, and deep attention have helped him dissolve the boundaries between self and world.
Drawing on the work of Nan Shepherd and Roger Duncan, Neil explores practices of full-bodied perception—walking, listening, and quieting the mind—as doorways into the living consciousness of the natural world.
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Opening the doors of perception
Christoph asked me to write a blog post about how I am exploring getting in touch with the Numinous. Thank you, Christoph. I have been writing about it in my journal so I would like to share some of this with you.
Roger Duncan’s book ‘Nature in Mind’ discusses the imaginal way to knowledge and his work prompted my curiosity and initiated an attempt to move away from the intellectual, factual description of reality that I was brought up with. I am gaining insight – literally ‘knowledge of the inside’ and exploring how to train my perception to fully embrace the natural world around us in all of its glory. To know reality through my emotional and imaginative response to it, using my whole body and all of its senses, becoming aware of how the world and its movements move me, amplifying the inner feeling of what I am observing.
I have a strong relationship with an author, Nan Shepherd, and a particular book called ‘The Living Mountain’. Nan was a natural mystic who taught herself how to walk into the mountain. She did not travel to the mountain or up the mountain, she visited the mountain and became one with it. She entered the mountain and the mountain came into Nan, and she calls this ‘being in the mountain’. When she walked in the Cairngorms she walked with her whole body open, all of her senses alert and alive in her consciousness, feeding her imagination, feeling the world around her. For example: when a flight of Swifts passed by she would share the feeling of their flight; it made her feel joyous, free and alive as if she had been dancing for a long time.
For me this becomes a metaphor of how I can be one with the spirit of things. Everything has its spirit to share with other living things. Everything in this world that is alive has its own consciousness which it shares with everything that is also conscious. Everything in this universe affects everything else, I cannot consider anything from the world around me without realising that it is connected to everything else that exists. Consciousness of the world comes to me through a field of consciousness that is created by everything that is alive. Underpinning this is the quantum field of energies, quarks , bosons and leptons where nothing is yet manifest but everything is imminent. At our second ceremony in April ‘25 in Portugal, I discovered this field of quantum energy and dissolved into it. Someone – it was not ‘me’ because I was both there and not there, aware of my body lying on the grass but also dissolved into an energy field of orange and pink light, overwhelmed with feelings of awe and joy – we spent the afternoon laughing madly. It all seemed so simple.
So how do I embed this experience? I have always been one with the natural world since I was a child, it was so normal that I’ve never really thought about it. Until I started using psilocybin therapeutically and it took me so deeply into consciousness that I have begun to think about how this happens and what is my relationship with this world around me.
When I was a child, I would leave the house, which was too noisy, too angry, too much for me to cope with and I would stand on the lawn and walk around in our garden and commune with the living things around me. I became one of the birds that were hopping around on the lawn, I became one of the birds that sat on a tree singing, the flocks of birds that flew in the air.. I could feel them and share their experience of the world. The singing and their movement brought me into the fold and I shared the world with them. I have a strong connection with birds and have begun to develop it with all other living things. I sit with our cat in the sun, purring. Even inanimate objects seem to know what they are. If I throw a stone into a pile, I invite it to go and join its mates on the ground. Last night a friend shared a joke with me about a child who picked up a stone and threw it into the pond. It was the best day the stone had experienced for 2 billion years. I could swarm with the ants, sing with the birds (and I still do!) and sway with the trees. I feel that I am nature and not in any way apart from the natural world.
One of my goals for the last retreat in Portugal was to expand this awareness and re-create the experiences of my childhood.
There are a number of tricks which I use to aid this process. When I’m walking I walk quietly. I don’t mean without making noise, I mean without the internal babble that we carry around inside our mind. To quieten the mind is essential in order to sense the world in all of its manifestations. Walking becomes meditation. It has to be deliberate at first, I decide to go and do walking, but the natural quietness comes to me through the breath. To let go of my thoughts, just to let them pass like the waves of the sea, and to focus on the breath as I walk and breathe deep into the belly, to let my diaphragm do all the work, to breathe in the cold air which I can feel as it comes in at the nostrils and warms as it enters my body and reaches the fire in the belly, so the air that leaves is warmer. It comes in through my chest space through the heart space into the belly and gives my heart air. As the mind becomes quiet the heart can open.
I may lean against a tree for a few moments and close my eyes. With eyes closed, the other senses come awake. Again this is a deliberate exercise that I consciously intend but after a few moments it becomes a habit. My body enjoys it so much it becomes natural to do this.
First I spend five minutes with eyes shut, hearing the world. The world changes, becomes deeper and more nuanced and the joy of listening is that you can hear things that you cannot see. Then I might change to being aware of the odours around me. Another change of consciousness as aromas fill me.
The other senses become stronger after sight lets go. After few moments I become aware of the feel of my body leaning against the tree, the air brushing softly against my skin, the clothing I wear, the shoes I have on – and usually take off to release my feet from their constriction – standing barefoot, even walking barefoot (if the surface is not too sharp and spiky) can bring the tactile sense into consciousness so strongly that it supersedes all the other senses. My body gains an imprint of the world and if I walk barefoot I can know the world through the soles of the feet; an awareness of texture, temperature, shape, direction.
This morning, sitting in the forest practising total awareness, it began to spit with rain and as the drops hit me and the tree beside me hints of synesthesia came into consciousness; I could hear and feel and taste those drops as they hit me; the bird song became shrill and citrus; the warmth of the sun on the side of my face was honey on the tongue.
The world comes alive as I become aware with my whole body. I call this ‘loosening the tyranny of sight’. My body begins to take in the world around me and share in its consciousness. For me, on a good day, the result can be an opening of the doors of perception similar to the change that is made by the DMT molecules as they perfuse the brain and reduce the hold of the default mode network. My ego withdraws a little and in this state of a reduced sense of self I find it so much easier to become one with the living things around me. I can become exalted and laugh with the joy of being fully present. This doesn’t happen every day, many factors can get in the way including the busy life that we need and the internal babble. If I spend several days in a natural environment away from the busy human world, I become really quiet, respond inside my bodymind to the world that I perceive and get hints, sometimes strong hints of that place where we are all one.
After a few days in the natural world, I often find myself writing prose or poetry which comes from my shared experience with the world around me, a kind of kinaesthetic learning of the consciousness of things. Nan Shepherd calls this ‘ walking the flesh transparent’.
Whilst walking at a local nature reserve and camping on the beach for three days I developed a strong relationship with the sea. I asked the sea what it had to say to me.
Sea speaks of Eternity
I am the sea and will always be
I am urging I am surging I am swilling I am thrilling I am the fish I am the whale I am the life of the shark the life of the scale the life of the human the life of you all I am cold I am warm I am salty sometimes fresh I am health I am mood I am vital I am blood I give you life I give you food I give you rain I give you wind I give you calm I give you storm I give you everything since the day you were born from me you were formed from me you were torn
I am I am
You see the sea but hear me taste me smell me feel me let me come into your body and be your blood and be salt in you the life in you I am the oldest I came from space ice comets melting when Earth was new
I am I am
I am snow I am ice and I float knowing I am alien yet without me there would be no growing I am plant I am animal I am fungus I am bacteria I am the heart of everything and I hear you and you hear me in that tidal rush you hear me breathing as I come to your shore and leave you dancing for ever more I am life I am death I feed your soul I am your breath
I am I am
I am the sea and will always be
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