The encounter with Ariel continued to disturb and stimulate me for many weeks. It was not that the bizarre results of his experiment with himself had deeply affected me, but that it had served to remind me of all my previous explorations of the inner landscapes of my own psyche. Finding the triggering point for a re-examination of these was proving extremely difficult for me, and structuring them into some assimilable form even more so. To hold the totality of their images within the fragmentary and isolating focus of one's consciousness is an irredeemable task. For, having attempted to describe and explain them for other people and close friends who have embarked upon the experiment, I fall headlong into the traps formed by my own intellect and my tendency to intellectualise. This was driven home to me forcefully by my attempts to continue my narrative by recounting the history of one of my strongest friendships, but this relationship has proved to be so difficult to convey a flavour of that I have had to abandon that task.

John and I began working together on the manuscript of our three-year-long series of dialogues and mutual promptings, and during our analytical sessions it became obvious that the images we wished to explore could not yield their meaning through an intellectual approach, nor through a conventional descriptive narrative. He put on the tape recorder to document and play back my reading of the story of our times together and after three hours of tangential discourse and the hard and difficult work of listening to each other, we sat back and went over our conversation once more. We became passive parties to our own active and over-conscious interaction. It was the salutary shock that I had been waiting for.

During my reading I had become increasingly uncomfortable and unhappy about what I was trying to do. Writing about someone close to you and with whom you have achieved a rapport is a sensitive and potentially destructive task. That is why I had brought the manuscript to John for his approval, comments and contribution. Yet for all our shared interests in the occult and in the exploration of the psyche, I left feeling that the exercise was an irrelevant one.