true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
travel tune-up. While in the waiting room, I had read a several-months-old journal of some Canadian education association. In that journal,
which I had not discussed with anyone, was a very short article about teaching-machines and very young children. The "Picture This" scenario
with which the article opened was of a child looking at a figure-eight on a television screen, rolling it on its side, squeezing it together, etc.,
etc. It was a bit of media flotsam that my brother, or something working through my brother, was able to lift right out of my mind weeks after
I had forgotten it. Something was able to refashion and use our memories in whatever absurd way that it wished.
"Now can we call that press conference, Bro?" Dennis inquired again from his hammock swinging hypnotically in the shadows.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LOOKING BACKWARD
In which several miracles are recounted, not the least of which is the appearance of James and Nora Joyce disguised as poultry.
Two MONTHS AFTER ALL of these experiences, around mid-May of 1971, I was moved to try to sum up the particularly bizarre and
possibly physics-compromising incidents that I could then recall. Here is what I wrote at that time—a time when Iwas concerned to refute the
idea that schizophrenia was a magic word explaining all that we had undergone:
May 12,1971
I have almost two months' perspective on the events surrounding our experience at La Chorrera, and I can clearly recognize that both my
brother and I evinced the classic symptoms of the two generally distinguished categories of process schizophrenia. He appeared to manifest
the withdrawn characteristics of essential schizophrenia while my behavior was of a more outward and paranoid sort. Nevertheless, I am
unable to make the assumption that our experiment was therefore "nothing but" two simultaneously occurring cases of schizophrenia. With the
full knowledge that such a position argues that I may still be experiencing residual
symptoms of the illness, I maintain that we were in fact dealing with an objective phenomenon that, though of a highly peculiar nature
inexorably bound up with psychic processes, does have its basis in the molecular ideas we were in the process of investigating. As empirical
evidence of this viewpoint, I mention the following points, which seem to me to set our experience outside the realm of mental illness:
The suddenness with which the symptoms developed following our actual experiment: Within a few minutes after we completed our preplanned
experimental procedures, my brother began to disengage himself from the continuum of shared perceptions and at this same time I
underwent a willing suspension of disbelief and began to experience the cybernetic unit that we had predicted would be a part of the effect we
would cause if we were successful in our attempt to generate a superconducting genetic matrix and harmine bond.
The integrated or dovetail aspect of our shared disassocia-tion: meaning that though both of us were exhibiting the symptoms of types of
schizophrenia, the fantasy, the ideas, and the understanding which we were experiencing was shared. While my brother thought of me as the
shaman messiah in all manifestations, I perceived him as the condensed mind-lens making a return journey across the universe that might have
been one logical outcome of our experiment. Each of us alone would have given the clear appearance of being deluded; however, each of us
seemed to offer elusive proof of the correctness of the other's position. I might add that though no one else could understand my brothers
peculiar mental processes, I believed I could discern depth and an integrated understanding which seemed to be behind them—but at the same
time I understood that his apparent lack of integration was due to the fact that his thinking was moving backward in some fundamental way. In
the same way that a film running in reverse seems to present a spectacle of wild and irrational confusion, yet manages in the end to have
things in their proper places, my brothers ideas and physical movement seemed to me to be simply the exact reverse of logical expectations.
Dennis felt confident that the brain operates on the principle of a hologram. This was an idea originated by Karl Pribram, a
neurophysiologist at Stanford, that was very much in vogue in our circles then. It neatly explains the fact that a large percentage of the
physical brain can be damaged or removed with no impairment of memory, since a portion of a hologram contains all the information
embedded in the larger whole from which it has been taken. Dennis had speculated before our experiment that he might receive a reverse
image of my brain/mind organization for a brief time during the experiment. In listening to his free associations after the reversal, I became
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/All%20Users/Doc...lture/True%20Hallucinations/true%20hallucinations.htm (64 of 106)4/14/2004 10:01:15 PM