true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
These ancient and fragmentary commentaries on a still more ancient set of sixty-four oracular ideograms, called hexagrams, had long been of
interest to me as part of my general interest in non-causal forms of logic. In fact, I had first learned of the / Ching from reading Jung, who
suggested that the meaningful juxtaposition of a hexagram with a situation in the outer world, the juxtaposition that allows the / Ching to be
used as a fortune-telling device, hinted at a noncausal connection between the inner
mental world and objective exterior reality. Jung named this phenomenon synchronicity.
For several years it had been my habit to throw the / Ching, which consists of manipulating forty-nine stalks of yarrow or in my case bamboo
skewers whose configurations create the hexagrams, at each new and full moon and to record the throws on a slip of paper, which I kept inside
the back cover of my copy of the book. The first day following the experiment the voice inside my head suggested that I get out my record of
the hexagrams that I had thrown. I could hardly then imagine the insights and conclusions to which this simple suggestion would eventually
lead. I went through this record of throws looking for an instance when I had thrown the first of the sixty-four hexagrams; upon finding that, I
returned to the beginning of the list and looked for a record of the second hexagram being thrown, and so on. My list of throws covered three
years and contained about eighty throws and their changes.
After a half-hour of the exercise I determined that, according to my record, I had thrown each of the sixty-four hexagrams at least once in the
three years leading up to that moment. This mildly improbable fact seemed charged with significance to me. The likelihood of occurrence for
each hexagram is not equal, and the odds of getting all the hexagrams in so few throws seemed unusual. It felt to me as if I had a kind of secret
identity that I was in the process of uncovering. It proved that I was somehow a reflection of the microcosm and had been chosen somehow to
be in precisely the situation in which I found myself. Tears came easily at this personal verification of the ordered pattern of life whose
designs I was discovering everywhere. I composed myself and then, at the strong prompting of the inner wave of understanding, I quietly
burned the record of my / Ching throws. It was a very uncharacteristic thing for me to do.
Dennis watched all of this and then delivered himself of one of the many riddles that he was to propound over the next few days. "What can
you do with a hole in a stick that you can't do with a stick in a hole?," he bellowed across the sandy expanse to where I stood by the fire. I
assumed that this answer involved a dig at the cheerful and steamy assumptions of Tantra in favor of the idea that
a pipe was the superior vehicle of inter-dimensional travel and that was what you could do.
An hour or so later and after a long silence that was uncharacteristic of his new condition, Dennis looked up from his meditations and
announced that he had just realized that he could cause any telephone to ring by simply concentrating on an image that he refused to divulge.
He went further than that and claimed that he could make phones ring at anytime in the past during which telephones existed. To demonstrate
this ability he dialed Mother sometime in the fall of 1953. He caught her in the act of listening to Dizzy Dean call a World Series game. And
according to Dennis she refused to believe that he was on the phone, since she could see his three-year-old form asleep in front of her. He told
her he would call back earlier and then spent the rest of the afternoon calling everyone he could think of at various times in the past, carrying
on animated conversations and chortling to himself about the minds he was blowing and the wonders of what he called "Ma Bell." And thus
did the afternoon of March 6 pass.
A reasonable conclusion would have been to suppose that Dennis was toxically schizophrenic and that we should leave the Amazon. What
muddied the water considerably was me. I was comparatively normal except for one thing: I insisted that everything was all right and that
Dennis knew exactly what he was doing.
"It's okay," I attempted to assure the others. "He has done what he set out to do and now people should try to relax until this all plays out."
I felt this way although I knew nothing about how he had performed the experiment or discovered the theory. I knew only that from that dawn
moment when we looked at the mushroom immediately after the experiment something very bizarre had happened to me.
I was in a very strange place. I felt as though I had become myself. My contact with the voice was like that of a student to a teacher. It let me
know things. Beyond any possibility of argument I knew things that I couldn't ordinarily know. Ev had gone through the experiment, but
nothing at all had happened to her. My other friends seemed very distant. They couldn't understand what was happening and preferred to reject
us. Everyone thought that
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