true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
from taking ayahuasca, this violet fluid comes out of your body; it also forms on the surface of the skin, like sweat. The Jivaro do much of
their magic with this peculiar stuff. These matters are extremely secret. Informants insist that the shamans spread the stuff out on the ground in
front of them, and that one can look at this material and see other times and other places. According to their reports, the nature of this fluid is
completely outside of ordinary experience: it is made out of space/time or mind, or it is pure hallucination objectively expressed but always
keeping itself within the confines of a liquid.
Harner's work among the Jivaro did not stand alone. Since the beginnings of ethnographic reporting out of the Amazon there have been
rumors and unconfirmed reports of magical excrement and
magically empowered psychophysical objects generated out of the human body using hallucinogens and song. I recalled the alchemical
observation that the secret is hidden in feces.
"Matter that is hyperdimensional and therefore translinguistic? Is that what you mean?" I asked Dennis.
"Yes. Whatever that means, but something like that, I suppose. Gad! Why not? I mean it's pretty nuts, but it's also the symbol system we
brought with us running into the shamanic magic that we came here looking for. 'This is what you shipped for, man, to chase the White Whale
over all sides of ocean and both sides of earth till he spout black blood and roll fin out.' Isn't that your rap?"
The resort to Melvillian rhetoric was unexpected and not like him. Where did he get this stuff? "Yes, I suppose."
"But here is the thing; if there is something weird going on, then we should observe it and see what it is and try to reduce it to some coherent
framework. Granted we don't know what it is that we are dealing with, but on the other hand, we know that we came here to investigate
shamanic magic generally, so now we have to go to work on this effect, or whatever it is, and just hope that we know what we are doing and
have enough data to crack it. We are too isolated to do anything else, and to ignore it might be to squander a golden opportunity."
"Yes, you're right," I said. "So here we are, very much on the brink of deep water. We are having something like beginner's luck, you know,
finding the 'Other' so accessible. The mushroom is doing this, or the mushroom and the ayahuasca smoking—it is hard to be sure. So many
variables. There is a lot of synchronistic activity as well."
"Right. I feel on the brink of something tremendous. We must just observe our active fantasy closely and try to ride herd on what is
developing. The good old Jungian method, that's all."
"Yes," I said, "ideally all of this could be distilled down to the point where some sort of test of the validity of the effect could somehow be set
up."
I recalled that there is an instance in The Teachings of Don Juan where the Peyote entity, Mescalito, holds up his hand, and in its palm Carlos
Castaneda sees a past incident in his life.
If this phenomenon has any empirical validity, perhaps what happens is that a very thin film of this projection-sensitive transdi-mensional goo
is present. And when you look at it, it is like perfect feedback. It is a mirror—not of your physical reflection but of who you are. All this lays
in the realm of speculation, of course. Does this stuff exist? Or is it just hallucination? Who can believe in a thing like that?
Dennis felt strongly that it was connected with sound. One could either stabilize the stuff or cause it to appear by doing something with one's
voice. It was a strange, slippery idea because one could extrapolate it infinitely, since whatever it was, it was made of the very stuff of
imagination itself. If one shaped this stuff in three dimensions, it could be anything, yet this violet ectoplasmic mental liquid must only exist in
the fourth dimension. It seemed possible to suppose that one might pierce the other dimension and have this fluid come boiling out. Flubber
for eggheads. Mental silly putty. He talked a lot about it. I was ecstatic; I thought his ideas were wonderful. I felt it was yet another idea from
the tryptamine ocean that had floated up into our nets. The question was: What could we do with it?
Recalling it now, having learned so much in the intervening twenty years, it is hard to be sure just what we did believe at La Chorrera, just
what level of sophistication we did achieve. Our mood was one of lightness and delight, the several mushroom experiences in that remote and
beautiful place leading us to a gently swelling euphoria. It was a very happy time. We were excited with the prospect of actually grappling
under near perfect conditions with "the Secret," as we called it then, meaning the spectrum of effects encountered in tryptamine-induced
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/All%20Users/Doc...lture/True%20Hallucinations/true%20hallucinations.htm (37 of 106)4/14/2004 10:01:15 PM