true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
the same set of images. Why? Did this circle of alchemical adepts penetrate the mystery to a secret undreamed of by their contemporaries and
competition?
Images flashed before my mind's eye: Nicholas Flamel and his wife, Pemelle, their legendary love affair and their unknown end. Mutus Liber
("the silent book") depicts a couple working at a furnace; it almost looks as though they are drying mushrooms. How sophisticated did
alchemy become before Enlightenment science scattered the adepts and rendered their control language inoperable?
In the pasture each foggy morning, when I demanded of Dennis that he give me the philosopher's stone, it was both pressure upon him to
reformulate his consciousness into a unity and something that served to focus the transference potential that was so intense as to again and
again threaten to engulf us. Not sleeping, being awake constantly, I was both in the world of the developing situation at La Chorrera and also
in the world into which my brother had become psycho-topologically enmeshed—a dimensional vortex beyond which seemed to be eternity,
the land of the dead, all human history, and the UFOs. It was a world whose unseen, cybernetic chroniclers spoke to us telepathically in our
minds and revealed that we and all humanity were in the act of once again becoming able to go between these alien dimensions and our own
to re-establish the es-chatological shamanism lost scores of millennia ago.
At one point I picked up a stick and in the sandy soil of our living area I scratched the shorthand symbol for "and." I called it "the ampersand."
I found its binding fold in one corner of a quaternary
structure to be very satisfying. I began to imagine this symbol as the symbol of the condensation of the alchemical lapis. To me it appeared to
be the natural symbol for a four-dimensional universe somehow bound into a 3-D matrix. I spoke of it as the ampersand for several days, then
I called it "the eschaton." This I imagined as a basic unit of time; the combination and resonance among the set of eschatons in the universe
determined which of the possible worlds allowed by physics would actually undergo the formality of occurring. "The formality of actually
occurring" was a phrase from Whitehead that kept echoing through my thoughts like the refrain of a half-forgotten song. I imagined that at the
end of time all the eschatons would resonate together as a unity and thereby create an ontological transformation of reality—the end of time as
a kind of garden of earthly delights.*
Occasionally I would seem to catch the mechanics of what was happening to us in action. Lines from half-forgotten movies and snippets of
old science fiction, once consumed like popcorn, reappeared in collages of half-understood associations. Punch lines from old jokes and
vaguely remembered dreams spiraled in a slow galaxy of interleaved memories and anticipations. From such experiences I concluded that
whatever was happening, part of it involved all the information that we had ever accumulated, down to the most trivial details. The
overwhelming impression was that something possibly from outer space or from another dimension was contacting us. It was doing so
through the peculiar means of using every thought in our heads to lead us into telepathically induced scenarios of extravagant imaginings, or
deep theoretical understandings, or in-depth
[* These were the first faint stirrings of thoughts that were to lead eventually to the development of my own theory of time described in The
Invisible Landscape. These early intuitions bore no resemblance to the final theory; and it is just as well that they did not, for at that time I
would have been completely unable to understand the theory that I was finally to develop. It took years of reading and self-education to keep
track of the things that the internal voice was saying. Its presence and persistence over the years since La Chorrera has been amazing. That day
at La Chorrera, the voice had a holistic and systems-oriented approach to things that did seem to be slightly of another order—not enough to
be alarming, but enough to repeatedly remind me that the ideas I was producing were coming fully organized from somewhere else, and I was
nothing more than a message decipherer, hard-pressed to keep up with a difficult, incoming code.]
scannings of strange times, places, and worlds. The source of this unearthly contact was the Stropharia cubensis and our experiment.
Our collective intelligence was not compromised, but what was compromised was the ability of reason to give a coherent account of what was
going on, as paradox, coincidence, and general synchronistic strangeness began to increase exponentially. Into the vacuum left by the collapse
of reason rushed a staggering array of exotic intuitions about why things were as they were.
Shortly after breakfast on the morning of the seventh, the third day following the experiment, Dennis announced a new teaching. He said that
one could see any point in time by closing one's eyes, visualizing an eight, turning it on its side so that it approximated the sign for infinity,
and then mentally sliding the two closed rings over each other to form a circle, shrinking the circle to a dot, and thinking the word "please"
and the target point in space-time. Usually I knew not whence these images came to him; however, this time I was amazed. I recalled with
perfect clarity that six weeks before, shortly before I left Vancouver, British Columbia, I had gone to a dentist as part of the standard pre-
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