true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
received a different answer. The experiment seemed to secure that something was giving answers in my head, but I could not tell if they were
correct or not. I was shaken. When we left the hut I was sure we had failed and that we had to talk over revising our approach. I was even
relieved since the obsessive nature of it all had been a strain. But now as we walked along and I could hear a voice in my head that was
answering, however inanely or inaccurately, any question put to it, I was less sure.
Dennis was oddly preoccupied, yet he assured me that his effort had succeeded and that all over the world the wave of hyper-carbolation was
sweeping through the human race, eliminating the distinction between the individual and the community as everyone discovered themselves
spontaneously pushing off into a telepathic ocean whose name was that of its discoverer: Dennis McKenna.
As I watched my mind and listened to my brother rave, I began to realize that the experiment had indeed unleashed some sort of bizarre effect.
I ask myself now why it was so easy for me to make the leap from assuming that we were having a peculiar localized experience to the idea
that we were key parts of a planet-wide phenomenon? It is an important, unanswered question that speaks volumes about my susceptibility to
inflation and suggestion at that moment. I was quite simply the victim of a cognitive hallucination; that is, rather than a visual experience of
something not actually present, a cognitive hallucination is a total shift of the highest levels of our intellectual relationship to the world. The
psilocybin-induced cognitive hallucination made the impossible and unlikely seem probable and reasonable. I became flooded with ecstasy as
the realization passed over me that we had passed the omega point, that we were now operating in the first few moments of the millennium.
Both of us felt our excitement rising as we became convinced that somehow the world was now radically, fundamentally different.
"So this must be it," Dennis said. "We have not condensed the stone into visible space, but we have generated it in our heads. It does not
immediately appear as a visible vehicle, but first as a teaching—the teaching we are hearing in our heads right now. Later, the words will be
made flesh."
I could only stare at my brother. Who was he and how was he able to know and do these things? I could only wonder.
"Now Mother and possibly lots of dead people will be showing up soon. Jung will doubtless come and, by god, I want to hear what he has to
say." Dennis, saying this, gazed over my shoulder as if craning his neck to see who approached our hammock-hung hut. "Is that Nabokov,
Sunny Jim that nice Joyce boy, or is it that pesky Nick Cusa?"
We embraced each other, laughing. I felt as though I was being led like a little child. For no reason, I had ceased to question; rather, I felt an
urge to see other people and to feel their immersion in the new heaven and the new earth. Dennis agreed I would go to the river and get Dave
and Vanessa and return with them to the forest. Dennis would return to the camp and explain to Ev what was happening.
As I set out toward the river, I seemed to be nearly weightless. I felt reborn, full of energy, and bursting with good health and vitality. Over a
period of a few minutes, I had passed from weary, disgruntled skeptic to ecstatic believer. Looking back on it, I believe that, for me, this was
the critical juncture. Why did I not question Dennis more closely? Was I somehow self-hypnotized? Did the unfamiliar setting, the restricted
diet, the strain and expectations push me into a place where I was unable to resist participation in the world of my brother's bizarre ideation?
Why was I unable to maintain my detached and skeptical viewpoint? In some sense this willing suspension of disbelief is the crux of the matter
—and, I believe, of many a "close encounter" situation.
The Other plays with us and approaches us through the imagination and then a critical juncture is reached. To go beyond this juncture requires
abandonment of old and ingrained habits of thinking and seeing. At that moment the world turns lazily inside out and what was hidden is
revealed: a magical modality, a different mental landscape than one has ever known, and the landscape becomes real. This is the realm of the
cosmic giggle. UFOs, elves, and the teeming pantheons of all religions are the denizens of this previously invisible landscape. One reaches
through to the continents and oceans of the imagination, worlds able to sustain anyone who will but play, and then one lets the play deepen
and deepen until it is a reality that few would even dare to entertain.
As I walked along that perfect morning no such soothingly objective thoughts came to me. Instead I assumed that my body was metabolizing
its way toward the resurrection body, the "soul made visible" of Christian hermeneutics, that we had expected to be part of the success of our
experiment. I did not know what was happening in the world or far away, but I did know that since the moment Dennis had pronounced the
experiment finished, I had felt an expanding and ever-increasing wave of energy and understanding unfold through my being. As I walked
along, what seemed to be a profound realization came over me. The understanding bloomed in my mind that we are all enlightened beings and
that only our inability to see and feel ourselves and others as we really are keeps us from shedding our guilt and experiencing ourselves as
truly enlightened. I have never been a psychedelic bliss bunny, yet there I was suspended somewhere between cliche and archetype.
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