Probably the most fascinating inquiries to have come out of the psychedelic renaissance is in regards to the nature of consciousness itself — who and what our ideas really are. It’s the query that Feilding has been asking, she tells me, since her earliest childhood at Beckley Park. Her father, who she “adored utterly” and describes as a “violent tempered, very eccentric particular person, charming and mercurial”, was a painter who by no means made any cash. “It was a humorous upbringing, very cultured, very educated. My father’s mother and father had been bosom pals of William and Henry James. Aldous Huxley really got here right here, when he was a scholar, and sat speaking with my grandmother all night time.” The creator and thinker — who wrote the dystopian traditional Courageous New World, to which our podcast owes its title — based mostly his first novel, Crome Yellow, at Beckley. “In order that they had been form of mental, however we by no means had cash for heating or scorching water or any of these regular luxuries. My father adored magnificence, so any cash he might lay his arms on, he’d purchase lovely issues.” A ardour for Buddhism started throughout that spartan childhood, she explains, and at 16 grew to become the rationale that she determined to go away college with £25 to her title and journey to Sri Lanka to search out her godfather, Bertie Moore, who was residing as a Buddhist monk. “I by no means did discover him,” she says. “Though I received so far as Syria and lived with Bedouin chieftains for some time.”
