true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
been preposterous unless there were some seed of operational truth in the bizarre ideas born in that period.
Later that same evening, Ev, Dennis, and I smoked a joint of Santa Marta Gold before turning in. It was a calm, perfectly clear night when we
sat down and began this ritual. Ev commented on the clarity of the night, and we all stared for a moment out into the galaxy. The night was
awash with millions of stars. We smoked in awed silence. Perhaps five minutes went by, each of the three of us lost in our own ideas. The
reverie ended with Dennis's exclamation.
"Look how quickly the air conditions have changed. Now there is a ground fog just springing up."
It was true. For about seventy feet in all directions there was a thick fog, only a few feet deep, hugging the ground. Even as we watched, the
condition thickened and spread outward, becoming finally a general fog over the whole area. We had come from depth-less, clear night sky to
dense fog in a few minutes. I was frankly amazed. Dennis was the first to offer an explanation, with a certainty that seemed as puzzling as the
thing itself:
"It's some kind of barometric instability that our burning joint was able to push over some critical threshold."
"You must be putting me on!" I said. "You're saying that the heat from our joint started water condensing into visible fog right
near us and that that was like a chain-reaction to all of the supersaturated air nearby? You can't be serious!"
"No, no. That's it! And what's more, this is happening for a reason, or rather something, perhaps the mushroom, is using it as an example. It is
a way of showing us that small instabilities in a system can trigger large general fluctuations."
"Hoo-boy."
This rap of Dennis's unsettled me. I could not imagine that his explanation was correct or exactly why he thought it made sense.* It passed
through my mind for the first time that he might be spacing out mentally. I used no psychoanalytical jargon in thinking about it, but I noted a
reaction in myself that included the idea that he might be unfolding into a mythopoetic reality, or as I thought of it then, "going bananas."
By this time the fog was impenetrable, and we all retired for the night, but not before Ev related that in the silence before the appearance of
the fog she had a hallucination. With her eyes closed, she saw a strange, elf-like creature rolling a complicated polyhedron along the ground.
Each facet of this polyhedron seemed, she said, like a window onto another place in time or another world.
"It's the stone!" I breathed. I could almost see her vision of the lapis philosophorum—the glittering goal of centuries of alchemical and
Hermetic speculation glimpsed in the Amazonian night, now seeming a great multi-dimensional jewel, the philosopher's stone, in the keeping
of a telluric gnome. The power of the image was deep and touching. I seemed to feel the spiritual dreams of the old alchemists, the puffers
great and small, who had sought the lapis in the cloudy swirling of their alembics. I could feel the golden chain of adepts reaching back into
the distant Hellenistic past, the Hermetic Opus, a project vaster than empires and centuries; nothing less than the redemption of fallen
humanity through the respiritu-alization of matter. I had never seen or imagined the mystery of the stone thus, but in listening to Ev's
description of what she had seen, an image formed in my mind that to this day remains with
[* Of course, none of us could have known that much of the mathematical research of the decades ahead would explore just such ideas under
the name of chaos theory and dynamics.]
me. It is the image of the philosopher's stone as hyperdimensional jewel-become-UFO—the human soul as starship. It is the universal panacea
at the end of time, all history being the shock wave of this final actualization of the potential in the human psyche. These thoughts, these
reveries, seemed to me then like the stirring of something vast, something dimly sensed that was stretched out over millions of years,
something about the destiny of humankind and the return of the soul to its awesome and hidden source. What was happening to us?
The sense of the peculiar was nearly palpable. Dark oceans of time and space seemed to swell and flow beneath our feet. The image of the
earth hanging in space was everywhere emotionally superimposed on the situation around us. And what was that situation really? I lay in my
hammock, thrilled and uneasy at the edge of sleep, then I fell into deep sleep and deep dreams from which nothing remained in the morning
save the sense of yawning interstellar space.
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