Altered Reality in Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness Essay example --

Altered Reality in Heart of vileness The world of forbiddingness that Marlow finds himself in is directly comparable to what Leary describes of the bardos (stages) that occur during a drug-induced trip or psychedelic experience. The underlying problem of the Second Bardo is that whatsoever and every shapehuman, divine, diabolical, heroic, evil, animal, thingwhich the human brain conjures up or the past life recalls, can present itself to consciousness shapes and forms and sounds whirling by endlessly (48). An example of such presentation is Marlows perception of the jungle as a palpable force that has the power of human gestures. It calls, beckons, lures, etcetera Leary writes that accompanying the moment of ego-loss is the perception of wave-energy flow the individual becomes aw be that he is part of and surrounded by a charged field of energy, which seems to the highest degree electrical...the attempt to control or to rationalize this energy flow... is indicative of ego-act ivity and the frontmost Bardo transcendence is lost (41). Marlow never loses ego-activity so he never reaches transcendence, b arely his ego-activity rationalizes his feeling of the physical awareness of the jungle. He colors the Congo dark instead of light and chooses to reject, not embrace, the force of the jungle so his rationalizations are negative and he thinks the force is evil. The negative, wrathful counterparts to this vision occur if the voyager reacts with dread to the powerful flow of life forms. Such a reaction is referable to the cumulated result of game playing (karma) dominated by anger or stupidity. A nightmarish hell-world may ensue. The visual forms appear like a confusing chaos of cheap, ugly dime-store objects, brassy, vulgar and useless. The ... ... all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we pervert over the threshold of the invisible (Conrad, 113). Works Cited Conrad, Joseph. Heart of ugliness . Editor Robert Kimbrough. new-sprung(prenominal) York Norton, 1988. Cox, C. B. Conrad Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, and Under Western Eyes. London Macmillan Education Ltd., 1987. Guetti, James. Heart of Darkness and the Failure of the Imagination, Sewanee Review LXXIII, No. 3 ( summer 1965), pp. 488-502. Ed. C. B. Cox. Leary, Timothy , Metzner, Ralph, Alpert, Richard The psychoactive Experience A Manual Based on the Tibetan go for of the DeadRuthven, K. K. The Savage God Conrad and Lawrence, Critical Quarterly, x, nos 1& 2 (Spring and Summer 1968), pp. 41-6. Ed. C. B. Cox.Watts, Cedric. A Preface to Conrad. Essex Longman Group UK Limited, 1993.