true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
Tashi Gyaltsen Lama was my teacher. He was a very kind and understanding Gelugpa. In spite of his advanced age, he would arrive every
morning promptly at seven for our two-hour lesson. I was like a child; we began with penmanship and the alphabet. Each morning, after the
lama departed, I would study for several more hours and then the rest of the day was my own. I explored the King of Nepal's game sanctuary
farther east of Boudanath and the Hindu cremation ghatts at nearby Pashupathinath. I also made the acquaintance of a few Westerners who
were living in the vicinity.
Among the latter were an English couple my own age. They were self-consciously fascinating. He was thin and blonde, with an aquiline nose
and an arch manner typical of the model product of the British public school system. He was haughty and urbane, but eccentric and often
hilarious. She was small and unhealthily thin— scrawny is the word I used to describe her to myself. Red-haired, wild-tempered, and cynical,
she, like her companion, possessed a razor wit.
They had both been disowned by their families and were traveling hippies, as we all were then. Their relationship was bizarre— they had
come together from England, but the relaxation of tension, which arrival in bucolic Nepal had brought, had been too much for their fragile
liaison. Now they lived apart, he at one end of Boudanath and she, alone, at the other. They met only for the combined purpose of "paying
calls" or of abrading each other's nerves.
For some reason, in that exotic setting they managed to charm me completely. Whether they were alone or together, I was always willing to
pause from my studies to pass the time with them. We became fast friends. Naturally we discussed my work, since it involved hallucinogens;
they were very interested, being familiar with LSD from their days in the London scene. We also discovered that we had mutual friends in
India and that we all loved the novels of Thomas Hardy. It was a very pleasant idyll.
During this time the method I had evolved for probing the shamanic dimension was to smoke DMT at the peak point of an LSD experience. I
would do this whenever I took LSD, which was quite occasionally. It would allow me to enter the tryptamine dimension for a slightly
extended period of time. As the summer solstice of 1969 approached, I laid plans for another such experiment.
I was going to take LSD the night of the solstice and sit up all night on my roof, smoking hashish and star-gazing. I mentioned my plan to my
two English friends, who expressed a desire to join me. This was fine with me, but there was a problem; there was not enough reliable LSD to
go around. My own tiny supply had arrived in Kathmandu, prophetically hidden inside a small ceramic mushroom mailed from Aspen.
Almost as a joke, I suggested that they substitute the seed of the Himalayan Datura, Datura metel, for the LSD. Daturas are
annual bushes and the source of a number of tropane alkaloids— scopalamine, hylosciamine, and so on—compounds that produce a pseudohallucinogenic
effect. They give an impression of flying or of confronting vague and fleeting visions, but all in a realm hard to keep control of
and hard to recollect later. The seeds of Datura metel are used in Nepal by saddhus (wandering hermits and holy men), so their use was known
in the area. Nevertheless my suggestion was made facetiously, since the difficulty of controlling Datura is legendary. To my surprise, my
friends agreed that this was something they wanted to do, so we arranged that they would arrive at my home at six P.M. on the appointed day
to make the experiment.
When the evening finally came, I moved my blankets and pipes up to the roof of the building. From there I could command a fine view of the
surrounding village with its enormous Stupa, a conical temple with staring Buddha eyes painted on its higher portion in gold leaf. The upper
golden levels of the Stupa were at that time encased in scaffolding, where repairs necessitated by a lightning strike suffered some months
previously were under way. The white-domed bulk of the Stupa gave the whitewashed adobe mud village of Boudanath a saucerian and
unearthly quality. Farther away, rising up many thousands of feet, I could see the great Anna-purna Range; in the middle distance, the land
was a patchwork of emerald paddies.
Six o'clock came and went, and my friends had not arrived. At seven they still had not been seen, and so I took my treasured tab of Orange
Sunshine and settled down to wait. Ten minutes later, they arrived. I could already feel myself going, so I gestured to the two piles of Datura
seeds that I had prepared. They took them downstairs to my room and ground them with a mortar and pestle before washing them down with
some tea. By the time they had returned to the roof and gotten comfortably settled, I was surging through mental space.
Hours seemed to pass. When they seated themselves, I was too distant to be aware of them. She was seated directly across from me, and he
farther back and to one side, in the shadows. He played his flute. I passed the hash pipe. The moon rose full and high in the sky. I fell into long
hallucinatory reveries that each lasted many minutes but felt like whole lifetimes. When I had emerged from
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