true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
everyone else was crazy. In fact, relative to their normal behavior everyone did behave very oddly.
The main thing the unseen teacher said was, "Do not worry. Do not worry, because there is something that you have to get straight about.
Your brother will recover. Your companions will take care of him. Do not worry, but listen. You have to get this down." Within hours after
the experiment this started impinging on me— something that I must figure out.
This morning, the seventh, Dennis seemed to me to be more down to earth, but to such a slight degree that it was a matter of opinion whether
he had made any improvement at all. I noticed with interest that while he seemed disoriented and his ideation was structurally as wild and
woolly as ever, in content there had been a definite sort of improvement. On the day before, he had seemed to be spread over so vast an
amount of time and space that there was little to be identified out of the cosmic churning that he was undergoing. On that day, to find even our
own galaxy in his mind had been impossible. On the second day, he awoke within the galaxy and his visions and fantasies remained within it.
Had that been the only instance of his telescoping back into himself, it would not have been worth noting, but the fact was that each step of his
return to a normal state of mind was accomplished this way. The day after he reached the confines of the galaxy, he entered the solar system,
condensing through its planets over several days until he identified only with Earth. Coalescing and condensing through the ecology of his
home world, he came to think of himself as all humanity and was able to vividly relive all of its history. Later still, he became the embodiment
of all the members of our vast and peculiar Irish family stretching back till before Judges had given us Numbers or Leviticus committed
Deuteronomy, as James Joyce put it. They were of all kinds and he played them all: hard-rock miners, a seventeenth-century cleric sweating
beneath a burden of lust, bombastic patriarchs and thin-faced women one generation, and women with shoulders like field hands and tongues
like hedgeclippers the next. After a good bit of lolling around in those environs he was finally resolved down into our immediate family and
progressed from there to confront and resolve the question of whether he was Dennis or Terence. Finally and thankfully, he came to rest with
the realization
that he was Dennis, returned from the edge of the universe of mind, restored and reborn, a shaman in the fullest sense of the word.
But that reintegration and recovery was still twenty days in the future as we walked to the pasture the morning of March 7, just as we had on
the morning after the experiment. We walked to the top of a small rise on which grew a young tree. Ama, the Witoto word for "brother," had
become one of the many new forms of address that Dennis had created for me. Now as we walked along, we kept our eyes open for
mushrooms, as had become our habit even though all thought of eating mushrooms was behind us now.
Dennis strode ahead of me and made his way to the tree. Bending down and parting the grasses at the base of the tree, he pointed to the letters
AMA carved in the bark. It was a carving at least several years old. The incident was confusing. How had Dennis known the carving was there
and what did it mean anyhow? He answered my questions by sweeping his hand toward the dawn horizon and announcing that this was the
planet Venus, or the archetypal world of Venus, I have no idea which. These assertions that flew completely in the face of reason were very
hard to take and enkindled in me brief stabs of despair for his state of mind, though most of the time I was able to convince myself that he was
improving and returning from the unseen worlds that were so vivid to him that he could see nothing else.
I tried directing the developing fantasy of my brother—I used the idea that the re-creation of the scattered self was as an alchemical act with
immense personal and historical significance. Each morning for several days after the fifth of March we would walk to the pasture and I
would demand of him "the stone." Neither of us perceived these goings on through anything like the light of normal consciousness. The world
seemed filled with a near-bending wonder and power that assured me that all things were possible and that the course of things in the light of
this was moving in the right direction.
"Be amazed at nothing; you are to receive the kingship of the father," spoke the quiet voice from hyperspace. "The Mystery of the wellspring
and the datepalm will unfold."
I watched my own understanding of the connections between what we were doing and classical alchemy move by vast intuitive
leaps to implicate Gerhard Dorn, Robert Fludd, and Count Michael Maier, names associated with the finest literary flowering of the
alchemical mind. And equally associated with a view of man and nature that had perished with the rise of modern chemistry.
Yet I was haunted by their alchemical imagery. The thirty-sixth emblem of Maier's Atlanta Fugiens is a wonderful visual pun that connects the
cube of Stropharia cubensis with the UFO, the hyper-object seen in the sky. It was an image that was constantly before me through those
times. John Dee, with his angel-haunted skrying stone and the occult geometry of his cryptic opus The Hieroglyphic Monad, is mixed up in
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