true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
sat and Dennis raved. Without his glasses, his eyes were wild, piercing, and unsettling to look into. Since the night of
his shamanic ramble, I had formed the intention not to sleep but to stand watch constantly with him day and night. For the next nine days I
neither slept nor needed sleep. Though I know that such cases are on record, for years afterward I took my lack of a need for sleep for nine
days as the most solid argument for the reality of the forces with which we experimented. Not only did I not need to sleep, but I was
constantly thinking in a rich, calm, image-filled way that made my normal thought process seem a pale and jerkily animated shadow. This
mental power continued throughout the sleepless period and long afterward.
The time that we were moving through seemed made of the reflections of what had preceded it and what was to follow. The first night of my
decision not to sleep, March 6, was passed in deep reverie and a growing amazement that I was actually functioning without any apparent
need of sleep. In the last of the darkness before dawn, at a time I felt matched exactly the time when we performed the experiment two days
before, I heard Dennis stir in his hammock inside the hut. Then I heard him make, low but strong and clear, the same undulating howl that had
catapulted us into a new world forty-eight hours before. Three times it sounded, just as something in my mind assured me that it would.
The last howl was drawn out as before; it rose and fell for perhaps a minute. Then, as it faded away, I again heard the cock's crow drifting
across the whitening air from the mission. Why did things happen with such symmetry, as though a huge, ordered form was trying to surface
in the very organization of the reality around us? Sunrise flamed across the sky and another of those titanic days began. The thing in my mind
stirred to meet the challenges to reason that charged each new moment. All that remains of those times are images and incidents, only
metaphors acting as sustained themes. All was myth-making and image-making, mercurial, meta-leveled, ever-flowing.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD
In which Dennis and I explore the contents of our mutual illusions and illuminations.
The MORNING OF THE SEVENTH, Ev returned with Dave and Vanessa to the river, and for the first time in two days Dennis and I were
alone. The atmosphere was one of calm. I busied myself sorting through and arranging the equipment. Our campsite was again spic and span.
Dennis alternated between calmness and long harangues on a supra-cosmic scale as in The Starmaker of Olaf Stapleton. He imitated,
personified, described, and otherwise invoked immense Gnostic and Manichaean entities that were struggling on a cosmic scale. The ageless
struggle between good and evil was being enacted as a fourth dimensional comic book in the labyrinth of his mind. But he was not without
humor, occasionally moaning out that he felt "like an old Mandaean," then collapsing with laughter at this cleverness.
I sat in my hammock and verbally participated as much as I could in all of this, though it was clear that Dennis had no difficulty in
maintaining the conversation on his own. In fact, he seemed to have hit the main vein of the fountain of sprung verse.
I closed my eyes for a moment and there, fully formed beneath my eyelids, was the first of what I considered to be teachings or messages. It
was a beautiful, recursive geometric form with four "petals." The voice in my mind informed me that this was "the valentine curve."
Obviously the four petals of the curve looked somewhat like a valentine or a bleeding heart. I thought for an instant of the heart-shaped fruit I
had fashioned into a water pipe. No obvious connection... the image slid. I got my notebook and drew the valentine curve, at first crudely,
later much more smoothly. It made me think of Basil Valentine, a fifteenth-century alchemist and author of The Triumphal Chariot of
Antimony. I had read the book, but could remember virtually nothing about it. I thought too of Valentinius, the Alexandrian Gnostic of the
second century, and his doctrine that the material world was the condensed emotion of the errant Sophia, who had selfishly created a universe
without undergoing any union except with herself. The concrescence of the anguish of the Sophia, the lowest of the Archons, into the physical
world was an idea closely related to our own alchemical efforts. The condensation of emotion into matter; that theme was hair-raising. It was
the theme that had brought us to the Amazon. Alchemy was the gnosis of material transformation. Glues seemed everywhere; everything was
webbed together in a magical fabric of meaning and affirmation and mystery.
During that day and the days that followed, thoughts and ideas of all sorts formed in my mind unbidden and would lead inevitably to some
further expansion of the set of themes that we had organized our lives around. One of those themes that was seized upon and amplified, at first
slowly and then more rapidly, radically and inclusively, was the set of ideas and relationships contained in the / Ching, the Chinese oracle.
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