‘Whether a psychedelic experience helps unfreeze the springs of human creativity I do not know, but as far as literary work is concerned 1970 was a more productive year for me than any other since my original departure from India in 1964. I also took up painting and colour photography…..

‘My reasons for taking up colour photography and painting were not, at first, aesthetic. They were practical. In the case of colour photography, all I wanted to do was to take a few pictures of Yale that would give friends in England some idea of what the place looked like. Terry's Yashica-Mat was still lying in a drawer, unused since his death, so that when I returned to the States after the Easter retreat I took it with me. The results were so much better than I expected that my interest was aroused and I felt encouraged to explore the medium for its own sake. Painting, or rather colour-drawing, I took up at the summer retreat.... A few days after the retreat we left for a fortnight's holiday in Cornwall… we devoted a good deal of time to working on our colour drawings, besides doing a certain amount of colour photography.’

Sangharakshita, 1970 – A Retrospect, (CW23), pp.469-470