true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
I felt beatific, yet I couldn't believe what seemed to be happening. The walk to Dave and Vanessa's place took about ten or fifteen minutes. By
now it was about 7:00 A.M. The sun was well up in the sky and it was a beautiful day. As I walked across the pasture I would stop and say,
"Dennis," and the response would be instantaneous, just like thought. It confused me. I kept stopping and asking questions. Sitting down on
the grass. "Is it all right? What is it? I don't know. Is it safe? I can't understand what this means."
I walked on toward the river. As I walked, I did some experiments. I said "Terence. Terence." It was very much like talking to myself. Then I
said "Dennis," and the thing was instantly there, ready to do business. Then I said "McKenna, McKenna," and it was still there. I realized that
I couldn't reach it with my first name, but I could reach it with my last name. I felt simultaneously enlightened and bewildered, I could not
understand what was going on.
I was pondering these sorts of things when I arrived at the riverside house of Vanessa and Dave. They were still asleep in their hammocks, but
crowded around the door, even this early in the morning, was a group of wide-eyed Witoto children. As I pushed my way through them, my
gaze fell on each and I thought: "You are enlightened, and you ... and you ..."
My arrival was the first event of the day for Dave and Vanessa. I told them that we had succeeded and that the fruit of our success
was not a condensed hyper-object, but a teaching. I asked them to dress and come with me. While they were gathering their hammocks, they
told me that during the darkest part of the night Dave had awakened hysterical, in a state not unlike the condition induced in him by the
electrical storm the evening before. They had been very agitated and could only attribute this to what we had been doing.
I was interested in all of this but seemed to hear it as from a long distance. I wanted to return to the forest and see what would unfold there. In
my mind I was recalling something Dennis had said a few minutes before in the pasture. He had said that the demarcation between day and
night, the dawn line, was now making a twenty-four hour sweep around the world, a sweep that began at the dawn moment when the
experiment at La Chorrera was finished. Throughout the world, traffic and factories were coming to a halt. People were leaving their homes
and schools to stare into the sky, realizing that someone, somewhere, had broken through, that it was not a day like any other day. Dave and
Vanessa followed me back to the forest. Vanessa's ankle had made little improvement overnight and they grumbled a good part of the way.
When we had gone slightly past the place where Dennis and I had parted, we came upon something that could not be fit into any set of
expectations. This was Dennis's ruana, a short blanket worn by South American peasants, and his shirt discarded in the middle of the path.
Next came a pair of pants and then further on two sweat socks. And, though I was to learn this only later, his glasses and his boots had also
been hurled away. We followed this trail of cast-off garments back to the hut in the forest. There we found Ev and Dennis, both naked and
sitting on the floor of the hut, discussing and doing the "ask Dennis" meditation.
With the instruction that you could not receive a proper initiation unless you were naked, Dennis insisted that we take off our clothes. Vanessa
peeled and Dave and I followed. Even their skepticism seemed to have been put aside. The presence of the mushroom was palpable and it
seemed to be saying, "Take off your clothes. Throw everything away. Everything is breaking. All objects are no good to you now. Throw
everything away. You do not need it any more."
We all looked at each other, glossy pubic hair and secret genitals now resplendent in the sunshine. I rolled a joint and we sat in a circle and
smoked. We told Dave and Vanessa about the teaching and they tried it—with varying degrees of success. Dave seemed to think it worked,
skeptical Vanessa was not so sure. I was not surprised at this result since a voice in the head is a very slippery and subjective thing. If one has
it, there is no doubt; if one does not have it, it seems a very murky matter.
Everyone was very amiable, except that Dennis was showing a tendency to talk right through other people's comments as though they were
not present. It seemed as if he were on a different time-track from the rest of us, since he really seemed unable to realize when someone else
was talking.
We thought that it was logical to untie our hammocks from the house, to take them and nothing else, and to go naked into the jungle. We
would tie the hammocks in a tree and get in. Then we would explore the mode, because clearly you could do more than ask questions. The
door was standing open. Experiment alone would show what one could do. Once we had moved, I asked the thing in my head what should be
done and received instructions that we should visualize our lives starting from the present, and then move back through our entire life,
encountering and setting things right with every sentient creature that we had ever wronged. When we reached the end of this process, we
would leave our bodies and somehow enter into the dimension of absolute freedom, which now seemed so near. I conceived of this as though
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