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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. file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/All%20Users/Doc...lture/True%20Hallucinations/true%20hallucinations.htm (40 of 106)4/14/2004 10:01:15 PM
true hallucinations.htm CHAPTER EIGHT THE OPUS CLARIFIED In which Dennis reveals his strategy for commencing the Great Work. The MORNING OF MARCH 2, 1971, dawned crystalline and hot at La Chorrera. It was the much anticipated day when Ev, Dennis, and I would at last be able to take possession of the house in the forest, which was finally being vacated. This particular morning there was more than the usual amount of excitement associated with our frequent moves. For three days, ever since the glossolalia episode of the twentyseventh, Dennis had been saying that the energy of the phenomenon was so great that we should not go any further unless we had the greater isolation that the forest house provided. Our move began shortly after dawn in order to avoid the heat of the day. The trek to move ourselves and our equipment to the new home involved going through pastures we had not seen since our mushroom experience three days before. The Stropharia seemed to be everywhere. There seemed not to be a cow-pie without its golden flush of perfect mushrooms. I promised myself that as soon as we had squared away the new hut and otherwise settled in, that we should again take the mushroom. However, in all of our recent surge of speculation, our original ethnobotanical intentions, the search for the elusive Oo-koo-he, had not been forgotten. Far from it. Our immediate intent was to use ayahuasca as a MAO-inhibitor and a problem-solving drug, and to brew and take the Banisteriopsis caapi that Ev and I had gotten from Basilio a few days before. As it happened, Ev and I spent the rest of the day following the move clearing the ground around the hut and pulling large tree roots out of the sandy soil. We stacked them in the sun to dry out so they could serve as fuel for the fire we needed to brew up our ayahuasca. We seemed to glory in physical exertion. Energy and light seemed to fill everything. Taking his notebook, Dennis, who had been rather withdrawn and snappish since his experience with inner sound and its mixed reception by us, wandered down the forest trail in the direction of the Witoto village thirteen kilometers away. In the middle of the afternoon he returned, very excited. He had completed writing out the preliminary notes for what became "the experiment at La Chorrera." It is the only written record of his ideas that was actually made at the time, and as such, it is the only piece of written, primary evidence that we have about how we viewed what we were doing as we were doing it. These notes do not of course represent the final form of our theorizing about these matters and are not at all to be taken at face value. Refinement of these ideas has been constant since their creation.* But how complete the vision was and how finely worked its detail! The theory that is represented in my brother's notes remains the operational basis for understanding the effect that was triggered on March fifth at the conclusion of the experiment. His notes were our working blueprint, and they were very effective. They are not, however, for the reader of faint heart, since they read like the words of an alchemical text. Alchemy is a test of the limits of language as much as a test of the limits of matter. Alchemical machinery runs smoothest in the imagination. Magicians will wish to linger over these alchemical mutterings, which I will help decipher in the next [*The scientific basis of our work is elaborately described in The Invisible Landscape. That work represented our considered, composite opinion as of 1975. Since then these ideas have been much revised as the myths and fallacies spun into the fabric of their first conception have been separated out.] chapter. The rest of my readers might wish to skim over them and hurry on with what is, even without the adumbrations of arcane theory, a ripping good story: March 2,1971 Further experiments with the psycho-audible warp phenomenon yesterday raise some interesting new questions and enhance our ongoing file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/All%20Users/Doc...lture/True%20Hallucinations/true%20hallucinations.htm (41 of 106)4/14/2004 10:01:15 PM
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Page 5 and 6: true hallucinations.htm Dennis McKe
Page 7 and 8: true hallucinations.htm PREFACE SOM
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