true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
which was at the river landing of La Chorrera, would be the site of my own brush with the Other. Vanessa and Dave took down their
hammocks and quietly moved down the hill to the new "riverside house." Their departure was friendly. They would spend more time in the
water now, Vanessa laughed.
It was the sixth day of our residence at La Chorrera. We had taken the mushrooms three times. We were healthy, relaxed, and delighted with
ourselves for having come so far in such good shape. There were insects and plants to collect and the lake beneath the chorro to swim in. My
new relationship with Ev seemed promising and was well launched by then. We were being lulled by the warm, tropical sun in the depthless
blue sky. Such unconsciousness seems almost the precondition for change. Events were stirring on some deep and unseen level.
That morning, after the departure of our two friends, Dennis, Ev, and I each lay in our own hammock, lost in thought as the heat and insect
shrill built toward midday. My journal entries had ceased, my careful writing now replaced by long flights of reverie, dizzying and beautiful,
the faint traces of the deepening contact with the Other, though I did not then recognize it for that. Another warm night came upon us, and we
slept long and well. When the morning ground fogs had burned away, this new day was revealed to be as pristine and as flawless as the days
always seemed to be in this marvelously beautiful, jungle-isolated settlement. Each day seemed like an alchemical pearl born from the warm
and starry night preceding.
We used that day to explore the extraordinary lake edge in the direction of the chorro. With its abrupt narrowing of the Igara-Parana and
sudden terrible increase of power and speed, the chorro is impressive enough. But the lake into which it empties its waters is no mere catchbasin
for the rapids; it is the site of some ancient geological catastrophe that shattered the basaltic layer deep beneath the earth's surface,
peeling back a great hole and laying thousands of house-sized rock fragments near the cliff, on the northern side of the lake. The mission is
perched on the top of this basaltic knoll and is the highest point in the immediate vicinity.
We followed the river and then made our way along the bluffs leading down to the chorro, until finally, a couple of hundred feet from the
chorro, it was so steep that we could go no further. But at that distance the ground was shuddering with the throbbing reverberations of
millions of tons of water cascading through the rock walls of the chorro. Unusual ground-clinging plants seemed endemic there in that
turbulent atmosphere of mist-whipped sand and thundering noise. The feeling of being so small among such sharply shattered stone and so
close to the energy of the rapids was eerie and somewhat disturbing. I felt considerably relieved as we climbed hand over hand up the bluffs
and made our way back through the meadows and pastures that the mission had cleared over the years with the free labor of its Witoto
parishioners.
Once on level ground and still well within the aura of the chorro, we rested. There, on the point of land overlooking the entire surrounding
area, the mission had long ago established a small
cemetery. Within a rudely fenced, hexagonal area, perhaps two dozen graves, many of them obviously of children, were eroding away. The
shocking red of the lateritic soil was here laid bare. It was a place touched with sad loneliness even on a perfect sunny day. Our respite
finished, we hurried away from the odd combination of emptiness, solitude, and the distant roar of moving water.
Our walk and the exposure to so much sun and stone sent us as if by instinct toward the unbroken green wall of the jungle across the pastures
behind the mission. Broad sandy trails led to the system of Witoto, Bora, and Muinane villages that are the "indigenous component" of
Comasaria Amazonas, the rest being a few missions, police, and unclassifiables—traders mostly—and ourselves.
We wandered down the trail, checked on our home-to-be, and found it still occupied. Returning through the pastures under a spectacular
sunset, we gathered more mushrooms, enough for Ev, Dennis, and I to each take more than we ever had before, perhaps twenty mushrooms
apiece.
It was during that walk through the pasture that I noticed for the first time, or at least mentioned for the first time, that everything was very
beautiful and that I felt so good that I had a strange sense of being in a movie, or somehow larger than life. Even the sky seemed to have a
slight fish-eye lens effect, as though everything were cinematically exaggerated. What was this? Was it a slight distortion of space brought on
by accumulating levels of psilocybin? Psilocybin can induce such perceptual distortions. I felt ten feet high; just a touch of the superhuman, or
a bit like Alice, whose mushroom eating made her alternately tall and small. It was odd, but very pleasing.
Back at the knoll house we kindled a fire and boiled rice for a light supper. Rain was falling intermittently. After dinner, we smoked and
waited a long time, thinking that Vanessa and Dave might visit. Finally it began to drizzle a bit harder, and so we withdrew into the house and
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