true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
From the view of life as literature Dennis moved on. He reminded me that one of our alchemical analogues for the philosopher's stone, which
we shared in our private code of associations as children, was a certain, small, silver key to a box of inlaid wood with a secret compartment
that had belonged to our grandfather. I reminded him that the key had been lost since our childhood. I said that the ability to produce that key
right then would prove the reality of Dennis's shamanic powers and ability to transcend normal space and time. The conversation took the
form of a question-and-answer session that ended with Dennis demanding that I hold out my hand, and then, slapping his closed hand into my
open one, letting out a loud, ludicrous squawk, and depositing in my palm a small, silver key.
At the time I was thunderstruck. We were hundreds of miles from anywhere. He was practically naked, yet the key before me was
indistinguishable from the key of my childhood memories. Had he saved that key over all those years to produce it now, in the middle of the
Amazon, to completely distort my notion of reality? Or was this only a similar key that Dennis had been carrying when he arrived in South
America, but that I had somehow not noticed until he produced it? This seemed unlikely. He was confined to a room far from our stored
equipment, and it was difficult to conceive of him becoming calm and organized enough to go to the baggage and carefully sort through it to
find the secreted key. And anyway, it was I who had conceived of asking for the key; had he somehow tricked me into asking for the one
object that he had brought with him to deceive me? This matter of the silver key, whether it was the original key or not, has never been
satisfactorily settled. The original box was lost long ago, so the key was never tested. A final ironic note is added to the episode by the fact
that both Dennis and I are fans of the stories of H. P. Lovecraft and so were aware of his story "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," a tale
seething with
many dimensions, strange beings, a cosmic time scale, and reckless, oddball adventurers like ourselves.
After Dennis was moved to the river house, there was no longer any need for my sleepless watch at night. But the lack of a need to sleep
prevailed. I actually looked forward each night to the time when everyone would retire and I would have before me long hours of delicious,
silent thought. Like the fox spirit of the / Ching who wanders eternally among the jeweled, night grasses, I wandered in the pastures and on the
trails around La Chorrera. Sometimes I would sit beneath the AMA-initialed tree for hours, watching vast mandalas of time and space turn and
glisten around me. At times I would walk with long strides, nearly loping, head thrown back, gazing at the every-colored stars. Effortlessly,
the deeper something that shared my mind connected up the constellations for me and showed me the enormous Zodiacal machine of stellar
fate that must have come to the ancients with the same suggestive force.
I immersed myself in millions of images of humankind in all times and places, understanding and yet struggling with the insoluble enigmas of
being and human destiny. It was during those velvet, star-strewn, jungle nights that I felt closest to understanding the tripartite mystery of the
philosopher's stone, the Alien Other, and the human soul. There is something human that transcends the individual and that transcends life and
death as well. It has will, motive, and enormous power. And it is with us now.
I have come to believe that under certain conditions the manipulative power of consciousness moves beyond the body and into the world. The
world then obeys the will of consciousness to the degree that the inertia of pre-existing physical laws can be overcome. This inertia is
overcome by consciousness determining the outcome of the normally random, micro-physical events. Over time the deflection of microevents
from randomness is cumulative so that eventually the effects of such deflections is to shift the course of events in larger physical
systems as well. Apparently, when want-ing wishes to come true, patience is everything.
Is this just a fantasy, a grown man trying to explain to himself how wishes can come true? I don't think so. I have lived it and
know that the greater the amount of time that consciousness has in which to make its effects felt, the greater the possibility becomes that the
desired event will come to pass. It is as though subtle pressure toward a given end accomplishes a series of micro-deviations leading to a nonrandom
and anti-entropic situation—a wish come true. And I confess the desire to make wishes come true was a wind ever blowing at my
back. I remember being so small that my mother could cradle me in her arms, and she would lean over me and whisper the old nursery rhyme,
"If wishes were horses, beggars would ride." I could say it before I could understand it. In fact I am still trying to understand it.
Now it seems to me that this must be how consciousness works within the brain, where matter and energy are in a more unbound and dynamic
state than throughout the rest of nature. It is easy for consciousness to direct the electrical flow in the central nervous system (though we have
no idea how this is done); it is less easy for it to move, not electrons, but the whole atomic system spread far and wide in time and space. This
may explain why it is easy to form a thought, but having one's wishes come true takes longer.
I pondered these things during the long, starry nights at La Chorrera when the very heart of the mystery of being seemed about to give itself to
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