true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
CHAPTER TWELVE
IN THE VORTEX
In which we discover that the Universe is stranger than we can suppose, Dennis makes a shamanic journey, and our group is polarized and
divided.
To SPARE VANESSA THE WALK back to the river we decided that she and Dave would stay the night at our hut. Their two hammocks
were hung next to our three. It was crowded, but we dined well that evening, and except for the occasional oblique or incomprehensible
comment from Dennis, the surface of things seemed to have been restored. Vanessa's ankle remained bad, and much attention was directed
toward this difficulty, perhaps due to its palpable nature in contrast to most of what was going on. I still felt utterly changed and made new,
both removed from everyone and content to let events unfold as they would. I was assured by the new thing inside of me that however odd
things appeared all was very, very well.
The last rave of this long, amazing day came after dinner in the firelight. From his hammock Dennis broke the silence to explain that this night
in our dreams we would learn a series of things that would end with us severing our connection to our bodies long before morning. We would
reassemble in our perfected, virtual bodies
on the bridge of a starship that was in geo-synchronous orbit twenty-two thousand miles above the Amazon Basin.
This was the second self-limiting prophecy that had been made since the experiment, the first being that morning's effort to meditate backward
to one's birth. In retrospect I now see that this "eschatological hysteria" was one of the chief ways in which my thinking seemed radically
different. Over the next weeks and years there would be many more of these self-testing prophecies, many scenarios of the possible way the
world might undergo final, total, and complete eschatological transformation. Like Old Testament prophets or Hellenistic alchemists, we felt
that we were caught up in a cosmic drama of fall and redemption.
Four days from the experiment, five, seven, ten, sixteen, twenty-one, forty, sixty-four—all were times awaited with hope and willful
suspension of disbelief and all came and went with the eschaton still all-pervading, yet still very elusive. The idea of a dimension-roving lens
vehicle, once articulated, was never far away. It haunted Dennis's and my waking fantasy, our secret hopes, and our nightly dreams.
Dennis's statement about the awaiting starship was also the first appearance of the UFO image in his thought since the experiment, a theme to
be articulated in a thousand ways in the days that followed. The equation lapis = self = UFO was the operating assumption of Dennis's long
voyage of self-discovery and return. With these images of death-in-sleep and rebirth-inside-a-starship ringing in our minds, we turned in,
thoroughly exhausted.
I stress that the hut was crowded, with hammocks strung from every available beam. It was difficult to move about without jostling one's
neighbors through the tugging and twisting of the many ropes. We must have retired around ten o'clock. I slept soundly until sometime many
hours later, which I took to be after two or so. I rose to take the traditional middle of the night piss that the use of condensed milk induces in
explorers. Sitting up in my hammock, I struggled for matches and lit a candle. In the silent night I heard the inrush of my own exclamation of
amazement. An intense, triple-layered corona of light was shimmering out from the candle flame for a distance of about four feet. A deep,
iridescent blue alternated with an equally pure orange. I was immediately reminded
of the aura of light that surrounds the body of the resurrected Christ in the painting by Matthias Grunewald. I understood that Grunewald must
have seen the same thing that I was seeing now and later incorporated it into his "resurrection."
Simultaneously, as though I was having a yet deeper thought, I somehow intuitively "understood" that the distortion or polarizing of the light
of the flame was an effect caused by the distortion of psychic space-time induced by our experiment and the nearby, ubiquitous presence of
the lapis. This thought was followed by another: Perhaps the temporal and spatial distance from the stone could be gauged by the intensity of
the colors in the aura of light around a simple candle. The distortion of light from a candle might act as a detector of the philosopher's stone. I
recalled Diogenes prospecting for the good with a lantern. Was that what he was doing? I thought of the phrase, "It is better to light one candle
than to curse the darkness," and laughed.
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