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true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

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<strong>true</strong> <strong>hallucinations</strong>.<strong>htm</strong><br />

ecstasy. These had become the compass and the vehicle of our quest: the rose window topologies of the galacterian beehives of the dimethyltryptamine<br />

flash, that nexus of cheap talk and formal mathematics where wishes became horses and everybody got to ride. We were not<br />

unused to the idea of the Other, but we had only glimpsed it in brief flashes and in its manifestation as the lux natura, the spiritual radiance<br />

behind organic nature. We were in that moment the fans of the goddess, not yet her lovers.<br />

Everyone in our small expedition felt, I think, the sense of something opening around us, of the suspension of time, of turning<br />

and turning in a widening green world that was strangely and almost erotically alive, surrounding us for thousands of miles. The jungle as<br />

mind, the world hanging in space as mind—images of order and sentient organization came crowding in on all sides. How small we were,<br />

knowing little, yet fiercely proud of what we knew, and feeling ourselves somehow the representatives of humanity meeting something<br />

strange and Other, something at the edge of human experience since the very beginning. A proud and eerie grandeur seemed mixed with our<br />

enterprise as those first days at La Chorrera went by.<br />

The next day, the first of March, passed uneventfully. Dennis worked on his journal. I collected insects, and Vanessa photographed around the<br />

mission. At evening we were all gathered again at the edge of the knoll where our small lodging stood. In silent communion with each other<br />

and the river, Ev and I sat looking out over the lake.<br />

It was Ev who noticed it first. The lake beneath the chorro was flecked with foam generated by the rush of water through the narrow channel.<br />

The foam floating on the brown water served to mark the currents of the river as it widened into the lake and continued on the other side. It<br />

was at this that Ev exclaimed. After several minutes of watching the water, a change had suddenly stolen over the moving, marbled surface at<br />

the far side of the river. The water there appeared to have stopped. Just that, just simply to have stopped moving. The surface appeared frozen,<br />

yet the near half of the river was seen to continue as before.<br />

Dennis and Vanessa were called out of the hut, and they agreed that the effect was remarkable. I wandered away as they began to speculate on<br />

the causes—the time of day, the light conditions, optical illusions, and all the rest. I seemed to have no heart for these arguments; each time<br />

they broke out, I found myself with some deep, inner assurance that the situation was moving forward just as it should and that everyone was<br />

playing a part and doing it very well.<br />

This mood of calm and insightful resignation was something new to me, perhaps enhanced by the taking of the mushrooms, but it had<br />

developed during the month in Colombia preceding our trek into the jungle. A few weeks earlier, I would have participated in<br />

these sorts of discussions; now I let them take their own course. As I walked, I looked for a place to sit down—Dennis had offered me his<br />

journal entry for that day to read:<br />

March 1,1971<br />

Last night I again triggered the phenomenon after having eaten one mushroom and smoking grass. It was almost identical to the first<br />

experience—a lifting, pulsing wave of vocal buzzing growing loud very quickly and picking up shock energy as it did so. Though I could<br />

have prolonged the sound beyond a brief burst, I did not because of the energy. I am certain that soon it will become possible to trigger the<br />

sound completely without tryptamines or other drugs. It is becoming easier to plug-in on each time, and I feel now that it is accessible at any<br />

time. It is clearly a learned activity that tryptamines can initiate and trigger, but it can happen without tryptamines once it is understood and<br />

mastered. We have thus far been able to establish the existence of peculiar vocal phenomena in two individuals subject to similar experimental<br />

controls. We must now attempt to understand what it is that the phenomenon could be. We must perform experiments with the sound and from<br />

our results develop theories to understand the processes at work. Terence has experimented with these sounds far more than anyone else (and I<br />

am the only other that I know of), and he has discovered some interesting things.<br />

Things such as that the normally invisible syntactical web that holds both language and the world together can condense or change its<br />

ontological status and become visible. Indeed there seems to be a parallel mental dimension in which everything is made of the stuff of visible<br />

language, a kind of universe next door inhabited by elves that sing themselves into existence and invite those who encounter them to do the<br />

same.<br />

The DMT-initiated state, which allows prolonged bursts of this vocal energy, he describes as being one of seeing the levels of sound become<br />

more dense as they finally materialize into small, gnome-like, machine-like creatures made of material like obsidian froth, which pours from<br />

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/All%20Users/Doc...lture/True%20Hallucinations/<strong>true</strong>%20<strong>hallucinations</strong>.<strong>htm</strong> (38 of 106)4/14/2004 10:01:15 PM

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